Absolution

by Peter Smith

  The buildings slipped behind her and the buggy slowed as she neared where West Gate City Boulevard and, ironically enough, Patterson street intersected. The streets stood out in stark contrast to their surroundings, marking the beginning of the monument she was constructing. The light whine of the electric motors diminished even further as the sound of the tires crunching bits and pieces of loose gravel on the roadway became distinguishable.

  The cart came to a complete stop, and she pulled herself out, several hundred meters from her destination, but it was important to her she make this walk every single day.

  The wind blew through the Coliseum Complex, whipping through the damaged and dilapidated buildings. They were the only ones for thousands of meters in either direction.

  Much of this side of the I-40 had already been cleared of buildings and signs of human habitation. The deconstruction and reclamation was now taking place on the southern side of the freeway. She continued down the street, nothing but the sound of her footfalls reverberating back at her.

  There was a small contingent of worker drones in the main building of the complex, but other than that there were few signs of her empire’s presence here. Other than structural additions meant to shore up failing parts of the building support structures, they had been left mostly the way they had been found.

  A woman cried and Maria closed her eyes, her steps slowing. Dozens of others joined in, men, women and children weeping or begging for help. She stopped in the same spot each time she came here; absorbing their pleas for help, the prayers to a God that wouldn’t answer and the attempts by parents to sooth frightened children even though they themselves were unsure of what was to come next.

  Maria opened her eyes and looked into the face of a middle-aged man as he looked down at his little girl, his hand reaching for her and then stopping. Their faces turned toward her, looking not at her, but through her and toward the direction she had come.

  Maria stepped through the man and his daughter as she continued on her way toward the buildings. She broke the beams of light from the holographic projector in the pedestal to her left, disrupting the image.

  The audio-visual elements were the only non safety additions to the complex. She wanted this path to become a monument to the atrocities of her father, as a reminder of the human cost his ambitions had created. As she continued her journey to the main building she walked through dozens of other projections and audio recordings, all taken from the devices that her drones had found scattered around this place and that had been unearthed from within.

  Thousands of video and audio feeds, many of them badly corrupted by exposure to the elements, had to be painstakingly recovered and stitched together by her AI assistants. Each frame from every camera providing the reference material necessary for the creation of the holographic displays.

  As she neared the ramp that would take her up through one of the two main buildings the final video for the outside madness activated. She stood and watched as people desperately pushed against a fence that separated them from the assumed safety inside the main complex. Bullets flew through her and toward an enemy that could not be seen.

  A heavy machine gun opened fire, drowning out nearly all noise. The bullets were aimed over the crowd, which was frantically pushing against the entrances to the gate. Some so desperate to escape their fates, they scaled the fence itself. The only sound that managed to the make its way through the noise of gunfire was that of the screams of people about to die.

  A dart of light left the position of the defenders, rapidly moving out of her point of view. A man before her grabbed the woman beside him and forced her body behind his, shielding her from an explosion that occurred out of view. They, and everyone around them, were blown to the ground. She watched as small pieces of metal impacted the front of the man and puffs of blood sprayed into the air as he fell to the ground.

  For a moment there was nothing, no sound and hardly any movement, and then the wails of the wounded began. A trickle at first, then swelling into a chorus of cries for help. The man and the woman stood, joined by two other men, one bleeding badly from the shoulder where he must have caught a piece of shrapnel. The four of them looked into the direction of the explosion. They ran through her; the woman helping the two wounded men out of the frame.

  Seconds later the gunfire began again and then she observed what they were shooting at. Early model version of her family drones entered the frame of view. Only for a second or two before they were ripped to shreds by the weapons fire. Then more and more made it into view, getting further with every second.

  The man operating the heavy machine gun swung the barrel back and forth, frantically keeping the wave of machines at bay, the tip of the weapon beginning to glow in the daylight. He did this until a jagged piece of metal was hurled into him like a spear from some point behind her. It ripped his body from its position behind the gun and sent him to the ground.

  And then the wall of metal fell upon the helpless. Bullets impacted impotently against ceramic armor. Weapons were ripped from hands as easily as children were from their parents. The drones spared no one that fell into their grasp. Skulls were crushed and spinal cords severed as the machines methodically took to their task of murdering those outside the complex.

  In every instance, those drones not needed on the front line would take a moment to collect a bone marrow sample from the hip of each of the dead. The harvested DNA was scanned, its unique code saved and then transmitted once the machine had a strong enough data connection to the tens of thousands of dark servers her father had operating during “The Fall”. Once the drone received confirmation that the DNA sequence had been properly received, it incinerated its small sample of tissue to make room for more.

  And there would be more. The video ended with the machines methodically making their way into the main complex from each side. She walked with them into the arena past thousands of marble posts that came up to her knees, each one noting the name of a person who was killed and the exact location they died. There were far more holographic projectors in the arena itself. Hidden in the walls, the holographic projectors presented chaos around her as people frantically tried to escape the inevitable. The drones were advancing through the building from every single direction simultaneously.

  Men and women tried to fight, sometimes with guns but mostly with whatever was convenient or even their bare hands and feet. Sporadically they would overwhelm one of the machines, coalescing around it while the robot was killing another. But those victories were fleeting and ultimately irrelevant. Those that destroyed one drone found themselves the victim of another. The machines felt no exhaustion, no pain or distraction, and not for one second, any pity. Moisture splashed against her cheeks as she watched parents struggle in vain to fight off the machines, to die in front of their children who themselves were killed moments later.

  She continued her path to the center of the field where a young black girl stood, screaming in fear as her mother was pinned to the ground. The older woman reached for her, screaming for her to run. The young girl, no older than twelve, held a phone in her hand. It dangled from her fingers, catching the entire event as it unfolded. With a twist of her mother’s neck, the snap seemed to break the girl's grip on the device and it fell to the artificial turf of the football field. Shock faded, and the girl spun and ran with all that she was worth, right into the waiting arms of a drone. Her death was fast and painless.

  Maria lowered herself to her knees before the young girl who’s eyes stared up at the ceiling of the arena. Her beautiful locks of hair swayed in the slight breeze caused by the building’s ventilation system. The first time Maria had experienced this moment she had screamed at the image of the drone that took the teen’s life. She had cursed its existence and even located it within her inventory. She had found it quickly, old but still operable, working at one of her shipyards. In a fit of misplaced rage she had ordered it ripped to pieces by the other machines of that facility.

 
; But it did nothing to assuage the guilt that she felt. Every single time she came here, every single day, she experienced the young girl’s death and the pain she felt at watching her mother die. But even more so, she felt absolute sorrow at not yet having recovered their remains. That and she now knew for a fact that her father had killed David’s, adding to the thousands at this place she already knew about.

  Across the entire continent she was discovering places of worship, schools and other major venues. Each one a site where thousands had fled to, seeking shelter from the chaos that her father had wrought upon the world and instead finding nothing but pain and horror.

  The recording ended and a list of names was projected in the center of the field, rising from the grass and ascending to the top of the ceiling. Each one was a person that was murdered here.

  She stood and looked around the dimly lit space. Much of the illumination coming from the damaged sections of the ceiling where daylight was streaming through, bathing certain sections of the bleachers and field. When she first came here, the area where games would have been played had been covered in mud and other detritus.

  Fifteen years of storms and the natural ebb and flow of wind carrying dust with it had concealed much of the massacre that had taken place here. When she had first arrived, she had refused to accept the truth of this place when it was first presented to her by her father-in-law and Sean.

  She had refused to acknowledge who her father truly was. But that time was long past and she had spent the last four years visiting this tomb, where her world and thousands of others had been shattered, trying to put it back together for those that had died.

  It had taken a year to find this place, to piece together the details of her forced march through the forest and what she had seen when she was walking through the town outside. She had found so many other houses of horror during her search. Each one was a reminder of how far her father had slipped into evil. When she had found this place, she had made it her mission to make up for what he had done, to lessen it somehow and give peace to all those he had murdered here.

  The guilt and agony she felt from his actions was so intense that she would have spent her entire life excavating his victims, providing them with an appropriate resting place. To dedicate her life to that cause would be to sacrifice her empire and leave the world in the hands of men and women who had agreed with her father’s desire to wipe out humanity. But where he had made his choice in the effort to better mankind, albeit in a twisted way, they had made the decision to better themselves.

  She could not condemn the future to the hands of such monsters. So here she was, in Greensboro, a site of a massacre that was repeated countless times across North and South America. She could not make up for everything, but she had to make up for one small sliver of what her father had done and give those that survived and those yet to come the ability to process his atrocities.

  She hadn’t worked up the courage to share with David what she was doing; she had gone so far as to shut Sean out of the project. She couldn’t risk that he might slip and let his father know. She needed for the memorial to be perfect; she owed the man that much. Until she had found the remains of David’s wife and child within this tomb, she would wait to tell them.

  The only person who knew where she was at these times was her mother and that had been necessary to get her to agree to watch Alex nearly every day at the same time. Her mother loved and supported her, but she made it perfectly clear she was his grandmother, not his mother, and had no intention of going backward with her personal time and freedom.

  That was the reasoning she gave, at least, for restricting the time she was willing to give. Maria suspected it was because that she didn’t think Maria should do this work to begin with. It had never been her choice to end the world and murder billions. Her mother had made it perfectly clear that none of this should have been on her shoulders.

  Maria stood, and walked over to a table with trays of hand-held digging and cleaning tools. Empty boxes sat beside the table, each one to be used for the remains she collected today. There wasn’t much of the arena floor that hadn’t been cleared yet.

  Only about ten percent remained for her to go through. At her current pace of unearthing the victims she had projected she’d finish here within another two months and then be able to move onto the bleachers, that should take only another year given that most of the remains had been washed to this lower part of the stadium since “The Fall”.

  She’d have to budget a few weeks to install all the memorial pillars, placing them exactly where she found the remains of each person or where the AI showed her they died in this vast space. That was always a priority in the placement, though not every death had been captured by recording devices. She couldn’t always know where they had been murdered. She did her best though, that was all that she could offer even though she knew that it was far short of what was necessary.

  She carried her tray of excavation equipment with her to the grid square she had scheduled to work today, stepping over the red line that the drones have sprayed and into the box. It was all she had allowed the machines to do, image the space and mark it off for her to work more efficiently. Only she could touch the remains directly. A Patterson had ordered the deaths of these people and a Patterson should be the one to help them find peace. It also felt wrong to have her drones recover the remains since it was machines like them that had ended these lives.

  She worked diligently for hours, her body covered in mud not long after starting. She separated out the material, placing everything that wasn’t human remains into containers meant to be processed in the RU.

  Those that held bones or possessions of people were placed in containers to be stored and properly buried at another point. She would scan the bones, teeth and bits of flesh that had survived the scavengers, weathering and variety of bugs and microbes. She could then identify whom the remains belonged to and organize them as necessary.

  She hadn’t been able to locate very many complete sets; the scavengers had eaten well after the fall of civilization. Many of the remains she found through the complex had been gnawed and badly scratched. Often she would find bones from one person spread throughout the building.

  As she catalogued each piece, using the DNA from it to connect it to its owner, she placed them in separate bins which were then collected by her drones. It was a necessary sacrifice, there was no possible way she could run the empire, excavate the dead and sort all of their bones on her own. She had reasoned it away by creating a room in the RU that would use robotic arms to sort and store. All the drones would do was transport. It still ate at her that the human form machines were anywhere near the dead.

  Slowly she removed mud and leaves from around where her scans showed was a human skull. Likely female, given that the eye sockets were far more pronounced. She wouldn’t know for sure until she had removed it and inspected it herself. She used a metal trowel to work the soil around the skull free, breaking up its hold on the bone. It took time and patience, neither of which Maria ever had in great supply. But with this task her focus was laser like and she paid the respect it was due. After nearly an hour she had removed enough of the earth around the skull to gently lift it from its resting place. She took a toothbrush and removed caked on soil until satisfied with its cleanliness and placed it into the box.

  This ritual continued for several more hours until her stomach rumbled at her. She would have ignored it, had on many occasions, but she couldn’t let this duty prevent her from seeing to her others. Besides, her mother was likely already contemplating the best way to punish her for leaving her watching Alex for so long. She smirked, her mother was like a moth to the flame. She loved her grandson, of that Maria was certain, but she also enjoyed her independence and had no intention of returning to the life she had when Maria was young.

  She stood, her knees popping as she did and her lower back protesting. She needed to work out more, but between this act of penance and the demands of
the globe, she rarely had the time she needed to get a good exercise session in. She bent over and picked up the box of remains she had been working on, pain creeping through the muscles of her lower back as she did, “With the legs” she muttered to herself.

  She took it to the table where she placed it. Drones would come in, only a few, after she had left and would replace her tools and carry the bones of the deceased to be catalogued and stored at the RU. For now, she needed to get back home in time to make lunch for Alex, if mother hadn’t already done so.

  She also needed to check in with Toby to find out how his investigation of the ocean based launch platform had gone. While she operated on radio silence for these excursions of hers, it was possible that Toby or anyone else could break through her communications hold if they thought it was necessary. That no one had, not even her automated alert systems helped her to relax some as she walked out of the facility. The world was still spinning; the apocalypse had not arrived while she had been away from the wheel. Perhaps it would be possible in a few decades for her to release her control of the empire and let mankind guide itself. She needed the break.

  The walk back to the buggy was faster this time, the sun high in the sky and causing her to break out into a light sweat. That and the humidity of the area caused her shirt and shorts to cling to her in all the wrong places. Fortunately, this was the only discomfort she was experiencing. As she left, there were no new images presented for her to see. She could have enabled the projectors to provide additional footage for people to observe as they left the site of this atrocity. That would have been too much, though.

  People needed the opportunity to reflect on what they had just experienced. She also needed the chance to get her mind focused back on the needs of the empire. She used the time it took to make it back to the RU to clear her head and place her guilt back in the box she forced it to live in, where it would only come out when she was here or dreaming. She had a family to think about, a living family, and the stakes at play were of life and death. She couldn’t allow herself the luxury of being distracted once she left this place. So the trip back provided as much of an emotional opportunity as the trip to the excavation did.