Evolution's End

by Steven Spellman

  Marcus was a man of letters. He enjoyed gathering information and he enjoyed finding a way of putting that information into gear so that it could exist as more than words on a page or truth in a mind. He had only a precious few hours to spend at home during the day and he normally spent those hours pouring over research material. His rows and rows of books didn’t lend him the comfort they usually did, now. Books helped Marcus to think, but all he could think about now were the pleas for help that existed only in his mind. He didn’t need to think; he needed to do. He needed something with which to occupy his hands so that he didn’t give his mind the opportunity to torment him. But what could he do? Everything that he loved, everything that kept him sane for the last twenty-five years had been destroyed in the blast.

  He continued to pace the floor of his home like a prisoner. Four days passed when he decided that he would return to ground zero even if it drove him insane. He felt as if he was going insane now inside his own home where he had only himself to talk to. On the morning of the fifth day, Marcus showered and dressed himself. He hadn’t bathed, he hadn’t eaten much of anything, he hadn’t slept more than a couple hours at a time since the tragedy. The grit from the explosion still coated his skin. The hot water and the harsh soap he used to scrub away that gave him his first sense of relief since the explosion. It felt like he’d scoured away the fatigue of the last five days. Almost. Guilt threatened to steal away any relief he might feel. What about the families of the fellow teachers that he’d seen with his own eyes were dead? What about Bill the Accountant; he’d watched him as he was buried alive beneath the rubble. What about the many others who’d lost sons, daughters, dear friends and colleagues just as he had? Who was he that he should experience any type of relief when so many others could not?

  He steadied himself at his front door. He swallowed hard and reached for the knob; it felt as if he were about to step out of house for the first time in decades. When he swung the door open, there was a woman standing there. Her hand dropped as if she had just been about to knock on the door. Marcus recognized her immediately as the woman whose pleas turned his dreams into nightmares and his every waking moment into a struggle. The woman wasn’t screaming, “Please, don’t leave me!” now. Now, she was composed and collected and, much to Marcus’ surprise, quite beautiful. She wore a billowing black skirt that was lined at the bottom with blue frills, and a matching black blouse with blue frills at the shoulders and waist. The blouse exposed a considerable amount of the woman’s golden brown cleavage. The skirt did not conceal the contrast of the woman’s seductively narrow waist against the bulge of her well-rounded hips. Marcus couldn’t stop his eyes from tracing the woman’s winding contours.

  He looked her over quickly and cleared his throat. He looked the woman in her eyes.. “Uh … hello, ma’am.” He said. He felt as if he needed to say something, anything, or his eyes would drift back down to the bulge of the woman’s breasts against her blouse, or the press of her thighs against the skirt. He thought he saw the flash of a small smile up her lips.

  “Hello, Mr. Willoughby.” The woman answered. Her voice was soft, melodic, far from the shrill scream he remembered. There was a particularly feminine quality to her voice that made Marcus feel as if his eyes were wondering into dangerous territory once again.

  “You can call me Marcus, Mrs. … ?”

  “Ms.” The woman answered “And you can call me Denna.” She lowered her eyes and smiled. Marcus could see the blush upon her cheeks. He thought that it was a beautiful sight.

  “Well, Ms. … Denna, how can I help you?”

  “Right.” Denna said, as if she had almost forgotten what had brought her to Mr. Willoughby’s doorstep. “I came because I wanted to thank you for what you did.” Marcus knew what Denna was talking about but he didn’t think that his small act of courtesy merited this kind of gratitude. He had only held her for a few tense moments, only so she could calm down, and then he had gently helped her down onto the grass … where he had left her. Her pleas had made him feel like he had abandoned her. Obviously, she hadn’t felt that way. But Marcus could sense that there was something else. He waited, but Denna didn’t speak. She stared into his eyes until it began to make him nervous.

  “Um …” he said, as he turned to glance into his living room “would you like to come in and talk.” The thought immediately crossed his mind that that might not be such a good idea. Hadn’t he spent the last four days struggling to work up the nerve to leave his home? But then, pacing the floor endlessly, worrying himself into an early grave wasn’t the same as being here with Denna. No, with those long silky brown legs of hers, it wasn’t the same thing at all. She looked past him into his living room. The expression upon her face suggested that she did want to come in and talk, but instead she said, “Actually, I was wondering if you’d come down to Town Hall with me. They’re having a meeting there right now about the attack on your building and I thought maybe … you could come and sit with me.” She added quickly, “I don’t usually go to town hall meetings. Ever since my husband died it’s just been easier to not know what’s going on out there.” She gestured beyond Science City. “But now the bad things aren’t just out there. They’re happening right where we live … I guess there’s no hiding from it anymore.

  Marcus knew that there had never been any hiding from what had happened to the planet, but now was not the time to mention it. “Look,” Denna continued “I just wanted to tell you I appreciate what you did and I’d really appreciate it if you came to Town Hall with me.”

  “So, drag an old grizzly professor in there with you for moral support, huh?” Marcus asked, desperate to break the awkward tension he felt.

  Denna smiled and Marcus was certain he had never seen a more dazzling smile. Her lips sparkled with a sheen like the freshly risen sun across a placid lake. Her wide smile displayed two rows of teeth that were as white as freshly cleaned sheep’s wool. They were dazzling. “Well, I wouldn’t exactly call you grizzly, but something along those lines.”

  Marcus smiled. It suddenly difficult not to smile. It felt good to smile. Marcus had been doing nothing but grimacing and frowning for the last five days. He stepped beyond the threshold of his front door and pulled the door shut behind him. “I think I will go to Town Hall with you, Denna. It’s certainly better than what I’ve been doing.” He said as he and Denna walked together down the steps of his porch.

  “And what have you been doing?” Denna asked.

  “Nothing. Absolutely nothing, and that’s the problem.”

  “Well, I’m glad I could help.” She answered. She flashed that fabulous smile again.

  “So am I.” Marcus said and meant it. He allowed himself to enjoy the sound of this beautiful young woman’s surprisingly soft voice, no matter if it were the right time for that kind of thing or not.

  CHAPTER 3

  The first thing that Marcus noticed when he walked into the Town Hall building was the gruesome images of burned and mutilated victim across the huge projection screen that hung high above head on the opposite side of the room. Body after torn, crushed, and burned body flashed across the screen, and then, pictures of The Willoughby Building as a half of a building after the explosion, and then as a smoldering pile of rubble after its collapse. The images appeared life-size upon the huge projection screen. Marcus felt almost as if the tragedy were happening all over again. He felt nauseated. He fought down the unpleasant sensation when he noticed that below the hanging projection screen there was a sea of heads all facing the harrowing images. Town Hall was packed. Marcus had never seen this many people here. The room was filled from wall to wall with folding wooden chairs and there was a person in every chair. Dozens of people were crowding the two narrow walkways that cut through the chairs on either side of the room.

  There was not enough space for anyone to stretch an arm without hitting someone else. Marcus and Denna remained near the door; there wasn’t room for them to move further into the building. Images continu
ed to flash across the projection screen. Images of the Willoughby Building when it was still in-tact. The camera panned to the right to show the rest of the campus, the small botanical garden, the greenhouse before the truck had made wreckage of it. Images of the Library flashed across the projection screen, the towering Human Resource Building, the massive Lab Works Building. There were other buildings in the distance. Many of the buildings had been gutted and were now being used as warehouses to manufacture goods and services for Science City. Some of the buildings were being used as living quarters. The sprawling campus was the heart of city and everything Science City needed to survive flowed out from it.

  Images from the outskirts of Science City flashed upon the screen. The images could’ve been from any major city from a hundred years ago. Perhaps not any major city, but only the top three most densely populated metropolises; Science City crammed over four million people into a space that wasn’t large enough for one million people. The only ones who had breathing room were the fortunate few that lived in the campuses in the middle of the city and to live there you had to spend more time either in research or in experimentation than anywhere else. Everyone knew that the campuses were where the doctors lived, and the scientists, and the top engineers, and maybe a few mathematicians, the greatest minds mankind had left.

  Marcus had lived nearly his entire life in the campuses and he had never visited the outskirts of the city beyond it. The images on the projection were very different from the sights that Marcus was used to. Marcus rented a simple one story, two bedroom ranch style home. There were many ranch style homes beyond the campuses that were similar to his but every one of these homes had at least a fifteen people living in them. The homes had been built for a families consisting of two adults and one child but the majority of the homes housed twenty to thirty adults. It was the reality of the city beyond the campuses and it was a reality that never became less shocking as far as Marcus was concerned. But there was more than squalor and harshly limited resources to be seen upon the projection screen.

  The images transitioned into aerial shots that looked more like a scene from a sci-fi film. The houses and other buildings were packed so closely together that it was nearly impossible to see the narrow slithers of brown dusty and narrower concrete paths that separated them. The highways were heavily littered with trash that wafted in the flow of traffic like scum churning free from the bottom of an ocean of vehicles. Not nearly everyone owned a vehicle. Cars were a luxury. Gas was an bigger luxury. There was a limit to how much fuel the city could store safely and the rovers didn’t always bring back enough ore from the cursed Earth to process more. The rovers were brought back a steady decline in raw materials these days.

  Aerial shots of different sectors of the city flashed across the projection screen. The architecture of the buildings was different but the congestion that clogged the narrow trash-saturated highways were the same. So was the fact that the homes stood so close together that a renter could have a conversation with a neighbor through their living room windows without ever raising a voice. That’s how it was all over the city, traffic congestion and too many people crammed into homes that were themselves crammed together into inadequate makeshift housing plots.

  “This is the reason we do what we do here at the campuses.” A tall, wiry man jabbed at the huge projection screen with a long wooden pointer. The man’s head was completely bald on the top and only a loose ring of thin wisps of grey hair remained on the sides. The man wore prescription glasses that looked as if they were too large for his meatless face. Professor Edelstein. Most of the people in the campuses knew who Professor Edelstein was but it was easy to tell that he was a professor to anyone who’d ever heard him speak. No one had ever seen him in public without a tie (he was wearing a blue and white striped tie now) and with over six feet of height, a balding head that shone on the top in any light, huge prescription glasses, and a semi-constant dour expression that bunched his fleshless cheeks into small tight lines, his appearance made it easy to peg him as a professor. Professor Edelstein enjoyed his job. He saw himself as a figurative lord of an ancient manor who preceded with dignity and influence over his subjects.

  “These poor people wouldn’t survive without the work that goes on here at the campuses.” Professor Edelstein jabbed at the projection screen again with his long wooden pointer as if he could beat that knowledge into the masses of people that lived in Science City simply by effort. “They would have no hope for the future without the work that went on inside the Willoughby Building …” he let that sink in for a moment. “The greatest minds the world has to offer live right here in the campuses. Our work here is a service to all mankind.” Someone in the crowd huffed.

  The grimace that normally contorted Professor Edelstein’s face deepened but he continued, “We provide that service to mankind.” He turned back to the projector screen where more images were flashing—images of hospitals where moaning and dying patients in wheelchairs and in hospital beds crowded the hallways so densely that it was impossible for any doctor or nurse to squeeze through. The rooms were crowded as well. Even if a doctor or nurse could reach a patient there might not be enough space between them and ten other patients to set up an IV. Men and woman who desperately needed simple surgeries died from lack of space to perform those surgeries. Images of bloated, discolored, bleeding, and broken patients pleading for help upon soiled worn hospital linen, or slumping in chairs where they were held upright by the bodies of the patients on either side of them.

  A few people in the Town Hall building groaned at the sight of what the healthcare system in Science City looked like. The images were disheartening, nauseating, more gruesome than the traffic congestion and closely cramped houses. There were only three hospitals in the entire city and the projection screen showed unflinching images from each of them. Everyone in the Town Hall building watched with eyes riveted to the screen as image after colorful image of the blood stumps that were left behind from broken and severed limbs, the lolling tongues of people who had died in their chairs but were held upright by the crush of other dying patients, and always blood, so much blood, everywhere, flashed one after another like a never-ending stream of scenes from a nightmare. The only hope most of these people had was to die a quick and painless death. And Professor Edelstein talked about hope!

  “Robotic bodies are the only way to prevent suffering like this from ever happening again.” He stretched his wooden pointer out across the heads of his audience. “We are the path of the future. We stand upon the cusp of a new birth for mankind.” Professor Edelstein began to pace the floor slowly back and forth as he tapped the palm of his left hand with the end of the pointer. Anyone who’d ever attended one of the professor’s lectures knew what that meant; he was debating with himself about what fantastic ream of knowledge he would share so with his underlings. “And just as with the new birth, there’s going to be blood. There’s going to be pain.” He tapped the edge of the pointer more firmly into his palm. “There’s going to be losses.” Many of the faces in the audience followed Professor’s Edelstein’s every move; watching the professor pace the floor of the stage was better than watching the images that flashed across the projection screen. Finally, the screen went black.

  “But no matter the losses, we must forge forward. We cannot lag behind. Not now. Mankind will not survive another decade upon this cursed Earth without the work that we do here.” He slapped his left hand with the pointer hard enough that the smack of it reverberated through the tiny microphone that was fastened to the collar of his shirt and out through the building’s sound system like the crack of a whip. If anyone in Town Hall had been asleep, they were awake now. He smacked his palm a second time. “Now, there are those who want to sabotage our progress here. These people claim that they’re fighting for freedom but I ask you, does what you just saw look like freedom to you?” He didn’t wait for an answer. He stopped pacing. “Science is the only thing that can bring us freedom now. These so-cal
led Freedom Movement people want to take us backward, not forward. They’re too narrowminded to see that the world can never go back to the way it was. The air and water are toxic. We haven’t seen two consecutive days of temperatures below a hundred degrees in over thirty years. Human flesh and blood cannot survive the cursed Earth much longer … “Professor Edelstein pursed his razor thin lips and nodded his head quickly as if it were simply an established reality that should be readily accepted. “We must learn to trade these frail diseased bodies for Titedelstein …”

  Denna leaned over and asked softly, “What’s Titedelstein?”

  Marcus whispered back, “It’s a titanium allow. We use it for prosthetic limb and joint replacements as well as for our robotic replacement research.”

  “Robotic replacement?”

  “I’ll explain later.” He raised a finger to his lips that they should both quite down; everyone knew that Professor Edelstein did not take kindly to people talking while he shared from his great store of knowledge, whether it be in a classroom or a packed Town Hall building. The professor’s eyes immediately snapped to the place where Denna and Marcus stood. “Is there someone back there who would like to add something to this conversation, because it sounds like there’s someone here who believes that he or she is better qualified than I am to elucidate upon the complex idiosyncrasies of Science City.” The crush of people that surrounded Marcus and Denna began to slowly part like the Red Sea to escape the professor’s gaze. When the professor noticed Marcus the professor smiled. It was startling to see. Professor Edelstein was a deathly serious man; he hardly ever smiled. To see him smile now was like watching a smile crease the face of a stone gargoyle.