Evolution's End

by Steven Spellman

  Marcus had come to the campuses from the outskirts just like Denna but that had been a very long time ago, back when he was just a young promising handyman who was known as one of the few people who could fix the rusted out of date HVAC units that broke down so often all across the city. He’d fixed cars and repaired electronics at a time when machines that people relied on to survive routinely left them high and dry. And hot. When word reached the campuses about this handyman with the silver thumb they recruited him and like anyone else lucky enough to make it into the campuses, he never looked back. From his teenage years when he had first come to the campuses and learned that it was possible to build new, better suited Titedelstein bodies for people and that they could be repaired nearly as easily as a smashed transistor radio it became his life. For Marcus’ entire adult life, work had been his wife. Work had been his children. Work had been everything he could hope to live for and the only thing worth dying for. It never seemed so great a sacrifice as it did right now.

  Marcus moved onto other things to discuss with Denna. She didn’t seem to want to talk much about her late husband or her life before the campuses and Marcus didn’t press. He talked about the glorious future he hoped for Titedelstein until he felt his head began to throb from the boom of his own voice. When he glanced up at the analog clock hanging on Denna’s wall he gasped. Nearly three hours had passed. He looked over at his shirt and sure enough it was as dry as a fresh towel. Time just seemed to fly when Denna was around. He leapt to his feet so abruptly that he startled her. “What’s wrong!” she yelped, confused.

  Marcus sighed heavily as he snatched his shirt and tie from the hanger and struggled to put them on as quickly as possible. “I’m late for work … again.” He shook his head “I’ve never been late for work in …” he moved his lips silently, and then his eyes bulged “in over thirty years!”

  Denna’s eyes bulged as well. Thirty years? This guy was faithful if nothing else. ‘Good’, Denna thought to herself. She stood to her feet and reached for the buttons of his shirt.

  Marcus scurried even harder to get his tie back around his neck. “I thank you Denna but I’m good. I need to get out of here and to work right now.”

  “I think you can afford five more minutes to get yourself together, Marcus.” Marcus glanced up at her and then quickly back down at the ugly lopsided excuse for a knot he had tied in his tie. Denna grabbed both of Marcus’ hands with her own. He was tempted to get upset immediately—he did need to get to work right away after all—but the warm, soft pressure of Denna’s grip had an oddly calming effect. For that single moment his work didn’t seem so important. Then Denna began to unbutton Marcus’ shirt and that’s when he noticed that he had buttoned the entire row completely askew. One side of the shirt hung down at the collar and the hem a full two inches lower than the other side. It would’ve been instantly noticeable to anyone that wasn’t Professor Marcus Willoughby. Denna had the shirt buttoned up properly and was working to fix the knot of his tie with deceptive quickness. Her brown fingers moved deftly up his torso and across the front of his neck and like magic his shirt and tie were both in working order.

  She took two large steps backwards and looked him over. She nodded her head, “All right, that’s better. We can’t have an esteemed professor running around looking like he just got out of bed, can we?”

  Marcus looked down at himself and saw that he did indeed look better. By the look of it Denna was better at tying a double Windsor knot than he was. He wondered how that was possible since it was highly unlikely that her late husband had ever worn a suit that wasn’t a biohazard suit. He didn’t ponder it for long. He took Denna’s hands in his own, “Thank you, again. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate everything you’ve done … you’ve reminded me how nice it is to have a woman’s touch.”

  “Glad I could help.” Denna answered and Marcus walked to the door. He reached for the knob, looked down at his shirt one more time and opened it the door. Instead of leaving he remained upon the threshold. “Denna?”

  “Yes.” She answered softly.

  “Is there any chance that you would be interested in having breakfast with me tomorrow morning?” he didn’t turn around.

  “I’d love to!” Denna answered a little too loudly. Then, more normally, “It would be a pleasure.”

  “Great!” Marcus said and stepped out of the door. “I’ll be looking forward to it.” And he was gone, walking in long strides through the hallway that was now hotter than ever.

  “So will I …” Denna whispered once she was sure he was beyond earshot.

  CHAPTER 8

  The next morning Marcus climbed out of bed earlier than usual and struggled to iron his clothes without leaving any burn marks. He had better success than the previous morning. But this morning he wasn’t ironing a thick suit. This morning he ironed a simple pair of beige slacks and a white t-shirt. Marcus always wore a suit to work but after passing out from heat exhaustion in Denna’s apartment building, he decided that just this one time he could afford a change. He dressed and left before the sunrise. The air was relatively cool, considering what the temperatures usually were, and Marcus had a certain happy spring in his step, minus the nervous tension from before. His plan to ask Denna to breakfast had begun in disaster but it had ended in triumph. In the middle though, she had seen him at his most vulnerable and nursed him back to health. More than health, to the happiest he had been in a very long time. It had not been his most illustrious moment but it had relieved him of the burden of having to maintain an illustrious image.

  He didn’t have to work to appear upstanding or try to regale her with his intelligence or prove to her that what he lacked in youth he made up for in hard won wisdom. It was like holding in his gut to impress someone who’d already seen him sleeping nude with slobber dripping slowly from the corners of his mouth. He found that he liked the freedom of it, especially since this fabulously beautiful young woman had seen his aged, out of shape body partially unclothed and had still accepted his invite to breakfast. He felt like the luckiest man in all the cursed Earth. When he arrived at the restaurant he noticed Denna through the window sitting at the same table where they had sat the last time. He waved enthusiastically to her but he was a little disappointed. Just a little; he had hoped to arrive before she had so he could watch her walk in. Those blemish-less legs of hers were magnificent. She looked outstanding as always but today she wore a t-shirt that looked as it had seen better days and a pair of shorts that fit as though they weren’t quite her size.

  She didn’t stand when she saw him but she did look as if she were glad he had arrived. Her face lit up instantly. “You’re here early.” She said. Marcus was so happy to see her that he bent down and hugged her instead of shaking the hand that she offered. It was a bold move and he was glad when she didn’t resist the embrace.

  “I could say the same about you.” He answered as he sat in his seat.

  “This is the best part of the day. You can see the world before all the chaos starts …” Denna gazed silently out the large window into the darkness and Marcus wondered what could be going on behind those gorgeous eyes. After a long moment, she turned back to him quickly as if she only just remembered that he was there. “It can be really beautiful.”

  “I’m not usually out and about this early in the morning but I can see your point.” Marcus answered as he turned toward the window to gaze out into the darkness as well. There were a few figures milling about in the distance but they were just vague outlines in the early morning shroud of shadow.

  “I’m used to it.” she said “I was up before the sun every day when Morgan was alive …”

  “Wasn’t your husband’s first name, Stanley?” Marcus asked.

  “Yes, but everyone called him Morgan, so I called him Morgan …” Denna frowned and cleared her throat; it seemed suddenly as if she didn’t want to talk about her late husband anymore. “The point is I guess I became an early morning person when he was alive.”
She cleared her throat again, “But that was another time …” she glanced around the restaurant. An older woman sat in a far corner nursing what looked like a cup of hot tea but besides her there was no one else in the tiny restaurant. “I’m more interested in hearing all about you.”

  Marcus thought for a moment. “Well, I’ve told you just about everything there is to know about me. My work is my life and there’s not terribly much else to my life besides it. Besides, we should probably order something to eat before we get into the boring stuff.”

  Denna batted her eyelashes. “Sounds good.” But when the waiter came Marcus ordered only a bowl of oatmeal. Breakfast had never been his favorite meal and besides that he thought that anything heavier than oatmeal on his stomach this early in the morning might inspire gastric distress and he had already embarrassed himself plenty with this woman for one lifetime. Denna, however ordered a full meal. Bacon, eggs, link sausages, pancakes, and grits. Marcus was surprised. She hadn’t shown quite this fondness for laboratory synthesized food the last time. Perhaps she was hungrier this time. It didn’t matter. If Marcus had only come here to watch her eat it would’ve been enough. Her presence was enough no matter how it came.

  She finished half her plate before she spoke again. “I still want to hear all about your morning. I can promise you it will be more exciting than my morning, no matter what it is.”

  Only a few tablespoons worth of oatmeal remained in Marcus’ bowl. He pushed it aside gently. “All right … I’ll enter the auditorium where I teach and all the students will greet me enthusiastically enough but most of them will be dreading a pop exam. I do that four times a year and they make up seventy percent of their grade, and I make sure they’re not easy.”

  Denna continued eating but her eyes remained riveted upon Marcus. “What I’m teaching them is of the upmost importance and I intend that my students know what they’re doing when they graduate from my class. For the next three hours, I show them complicated diagrams and we discuss complicated theorems and schematics. Then, after the midmorning break we’ll probably rehash some of the latest breakthroughs we’ve been seeing with Titedelstein. I like to remind my students where we’re headed with all these complicated formulas …

  “Where are they headed?” Denna asked after a swallow.

  Marcus leaned forward. “It’s really exciting. We’re close to making a full Titedelstein shell. It’s a robot right now but once we learn to develop the right medium maybe we can transfer a person’s consciousness into it.”

  Marcus looked more excited than ever. Denna did not. She looked horrified. “You mean you’re trying to put a person inside this thing!”

  “Yes and no. We’re not trying to stuff a person’s body into a robotic shell but we are very close to transferring what makes up a person, their thoughts, their memories, their proclivities, perhaps their souls, into a robotic body.”

  Denna didn’t look appeased. “How?”

  “Do you want the long answer or the shorthand?”

  Denna glanced out the window. The first faint rays of an impending sunrise were just breaking over the horizon. “The shorter version, probably. You don’t want to be late for work again.”

  Marcus glanced out the window as well and shook his head. “You’re right. I think I’ve been late for work enough for one lifetime.”

  Denna chuckled softly. She muttered something that Marcus couldn’t hear.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “No, it’s nothing. I was just saying you sound like Morgan did before he passed. He never liked being late for work.”

  “He sounds like he was a good man.”

  Denna only grunted noncommittedly. “Just remember, like you told me, the first time you were late it saved your life and the next time you were late …”

  “You probably saved my life and I ended up getting a date with a beautiful woman.”

  Denna lifted a napkin to her face and smiled broadly behind it. “So, how can you put someone’s memories in a robot.”

  “Not just memories, new thoughts. Everything that makes a person who they are. We cut away a thin layer of the brain stem and something called the corpus callosum. Memory, thought, cognition, all the executive functions, as well as the involuntary ones pass through either the brain stem or the corpus callosum. Your brain stores everything you do or have done. We just needed to discover how to decode the storage. We’ve discovered a way, and now we just have to find a medium to store the slices so a robot body can ‘read’ the stored information. I think we’re close …” Marcus looked out the window and saw that the sun was rising in earnest now. “Unfortunately, like I said, I need to be going but I genuinely enjoyed our breakfast, Denna.”

  “I did too.” Denna smiled as Marcus stood to leave. She smiled more brightly when he placed the money for their meals neatly on the table. She stood to hug him this time. “I hope you have a great day.” She called after him as he walked quickly out of the door and towards his new underground building. He could feel that he would have a great day, especially now.

  CHAPTER 9

  Marcus had forgotten to ask Denna if she would have breakfast with him for another morning. He wished he’d had. But he got up unusually early for yet another morning anyway, dressed, and walked past the restaurant. He hoped she might be there but there was no reason to expect that she would be. Most likely she was back in her overheated apartment building doing what he should be doing; sleeping soundly until a more appropriate hour. It didn’t really matter. His morning would not be wasted. There was always more work to be done, more papers to be graded, more research to labor over, more experiments … Especially in this new building with its added space and recent renovations there were any number of things that Marcus could do with an early morning. He thought about the building as he walked along through the darkness.

  The kids didn’t complain about the lack of windows like he had expected. The entire student body was somber, no doubt still reeling from what had happened, the explosion, the destruction, the carnage. The kids were all stunned and Marcus could relate. His time with Denna was the only thing that kept him from being pulled back into a sense of helplessness and despair. David McDonald had always been one of Marcus’ most boisterous students. He had joked that it had taken a terrorist attack to get the students better research equipment but no one had laughed. It was a nervous attempt at levity and it flopped badly. David McDonald didn’t hazard another joke after that and none of the other kids made any attempt to lighten the mood. A few of the kids had lost parents and some of them had lost dear friends and no one was ready to laugh about any of it so soon. Marcus knew that David had only been trying to make a bad situation a little better. He hoped his students would be able to laugh again soon, if ever. Meanwhile, he passed the restaurant window. The light in the restaurant was dim but with the blackness outside it was easy to see that no one was inside except the same old woman in the same far corner nursing what looked like another cup of steaming hot tea. Denna was nowhere to be found.

  Marcus thought to stop into the restaurant quickly and get a better look. Maybe Denna was in the bathroom or eating at a different table that he couldn’t see. He decided against it. She wasn’t in there, not in the bathroom, not eating at a different table. Why would she be? Marcus kept walking towards his building and turned back one last time to glance at the window. And there she was! He could see the radiant smile upon her face but even if he hadn’t seen that he would’ve saw her frantic waving. The morning was instantly more hopeful for Marcus as he struggled not to walk too quickly back to the restaurant’s front door. “I’d hoped you would be here this morning.” He greeted Denna once he was inside.

  “And here I am.” She said as she stood to embrace him. She wore the same pair of shorts but a different shirt that was just as worn as the previous morning’s. Marcus sat down at the table and didn’t ask why she was there. He didn’t want to ruin the magic of her being there and she didn’t offer any explanation. They both
sat silently for a moment.

  “Would you like to have breakfast?” Marcus asked.

  “Yes, I’d like that.” Denna answered with real feeling nearly before the words were out of his mouth. She looked away, took a deep breath and then turned back, “What I mean is, I would like to have breakfast with you but I’m a little short on cash right now.”

  It wasn’t surprising. Nearly everyone in Science City was perpetually ‘short on cash’ and in the campuses anyone who lived in a worker building wasn’t likely to be wealthy, especially the nonworking widow of a man who had been a low level laborer. “That’s no problem.” Marcus answered, and it wasn’t a problem. He didn’t mind paying for Denna’s food. He didn’t mind it at all. “Order whatever you want.”

  And Denna did order whatever she wanted, which was apparently the same meal of bacon, eggs, link sausages, pancakes, and grits. When she finished the meal her plate was as clean as if it had been run through a dishwasher. She looked on at it as if she wished the food would reappear so she could enjoy it a second time. “Would you like some more?” Marcus asked.

  Denna lifted her head and looked into his eyes, “You wouldn’t mind?”

  “Of course not. I don’t know where you’re putting it all; you must have the metabolism of a rabbit, but please order whatever you want.” He didn’t add, ‘Again’. Denna ordered the same thing but this time she ordered it to go. Marcus watched and began to wonder if perhaps she were saving the meal as her lunch or perhaps her dinner. Was food so scarce in her apartment? That wouldn't have surprised him either. Laboratory synthesized food was plenteous but it still cost money and not everything was as resistant to spoilage in this ridiculously constant heat as the lettuce. That meant paying more money unless you planned to live off heads of lettuce indefinitely. Or unless you had more money to spend on variety. That was nothing that suggested that Denna had that money. Marcus had never thought of Denna like that. He’d only seen her a young beautiful woman who brought a brightness to his life that he desperately needed. He hadn’t taken time to see her as possibly a woman who was fighting for dear life when no one was looking.