Ethos

by Aaron Dworkin

  The difference was that Malcolm was in power. His mistake was not just his own; it had had consequences for the populace that loved him for his charm and his determination.

  And this was what was bothering Malcolm most. He was driven by righteousness, and he had caused harm. His ethos was, indeed, thrown into profound jeopardy by this fact.

  There was a knock on the old-fashioned, twenty-first-century office door.

  “Chancellor Malcolm?” A voice called. It was Councilor Floyd.

  Malcolm merely grunted by way of admitting Councilor Floyd into the room. A moment later, Floyd appeared, his ruddy, fresh face tight with worry rivaling that of his chancellor’s.

  Floyd stood just inside the door and said softly, “Dr. Xe has returned at your request.”

  Only an hour had gone by since the High Court had passed judgment. Malcolm and David had managed to slip away in the tumult and excitement of the gathered Flint citizens, who, immediately after the verdict was pronounced, completely changed allegiance and descended in droves on Chancellor Kinnion to congratulate him.

  Malcolm had immediately taken sanctuary in his office—and had ordered Councilor Floyd to summon Dr. Xe by radiacomm.

  Councilor Floyd now brought her into the room, then slipped out, closing the door discreetly behind him.

  Dr. Xe, who had witnessed the verdict, had intuited why Malcolm wanted to speak with her. Before Malcolm could even greet her, she slipped the wand-like immortality measuring device from her coat.

  Malcolm wasted no words. He rose from his desk, crossed the room in two strides and held out his arm to Dr. Xe. David repressed the urge to stop Malcolm. He had already witnessed his son injured once in the not-distant past, and his ethos of loving and supporting Malcolm now demanded that he do it again.

  Dr. Xe nodded to show that she had understood Malcolm’s silent command. She drew her blade and cleanly swiped it across Malcolm’s forearm. A six-inch gash appeared in his flesh, darkening his skin with blood.

  Dr. Xe quickly applied her instrument and began to watch as it read the signs of Malcolm’s cellular regeneration.

  It became rapidly apparent that something different was happening than what David had witnessed in City Hall, when Kinnion and his councilors were tested. First, and most apparently, this was taking way too long. For the Detroiters, the test was over in a matter of mere moments. Their wounds vanished in perhaps ten or twelve seconds.

  David watched, heartsick, as thirty seconds passed. Then a full minute. Then two.

  Malcolm’s face was tight with pain, and his wound seeped blood steadily.

  It was healing. But it was not healing at anything close to the rate of Kinnion’s wound.

  Finally, after more than three minutes, Dr. Xe said quietly, “The healing is complete.”

  David stepped closer.

  Along the length of Malcolm’s forearm was a pink, raised scar of knitted flesh. It traveled cruelly and painfully over his otherwise pristine skin.

  David looked at Dr. Xe questioningly. She read aloud the figures on the measuring instrument.

  “Healing accuracy is at 64.11 percent,” she said, her professional, impassive voice not quite managing to conceal her dismay. “And rate . . . twenty-three thousand cells per second.”

  Malcolm was silent, waiting for her to explain.

  “These numbers are far below the expected range for immortality,” Dr. Xe said, her warm but concerned eyes gazing sadly up at Malcolm. “It’s clear from this, Chancellor, that the proceedings this afternoon have badly compromised your ethos.”

  Malcolm’s expression darkened, but he managed to hold Dr. Xe’s gaze.

  “You have not fallen,” Dr. Xe said quickly. “We would see evidence of rapid cellular degeneration if that were the case. But your immortality is decidedly in jeopardy.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Malcolm said.

  There was no reason to stand on ceremony. Dr. Xe gave him one curt nod and began to leave the room. At the door, she paused.

  “I know this goes without saying,” she murmured, “but I want to assure you that I will speak of this to no one.”

  “Thank you,” Malcolm said again. But already he was no longer paying attention to her. As she closed the door softly behind her, Malcolm began to put on his jacket and riffle quickly through the drawers of his desk.

  “What’s going on?” David asked. He had more questions than his mind could sort into any coherent order. “I don’t understand. If your immortality is compromised, why haven’t you become one of the Fallen? Is your life in danger now?”

  Malcolm answered distractedly. “I broke my ethos, but not knowingly. As long as I believed I was acting righteously, then I was in alignment with my ethos. As soon as I learned from the High Court’s decision that I had in fact violated my ethos, my physiology caught up to what my brain understood. So, my immortality is weakening.”

  “But you won’t fall?” David repeated his question, urgently.

  “No. I didn’t violate my ethos knowingly. But I must repair it now. Quickly. Or I will become Bereft—forever.”

  Malcolm had already grabbed a leather bag and filled it with half-randomly chosen supplies from here and there in the room—a blanket, a canteen, some fruit and crackers from a bowl kept stocked for official visitors. Now, he finally paused in his frenetic movement and put a hand on David’s shoulder.

  “Will you take over leadership of the city in my absence?”

  “Where are you going?” David asked, his eyes widening with concern.

  “Will you lead the city?” Malcolm asked again, his intense gaze boring into his father.

  “Of course,” David said. “You know you can always count on me. Where are you going?”

  “I must go now, and I must go alone,” Malcolm said cryptically. “I must recommit to my ethos.”

  “But for how long—”

  Before David could say anything further, Malcolm had left the room, the heavy oak door clicking shut behind him with a resounding finality.

  David stood helplessly in the center of the office for a moment, and then, quite suddenly, the door reopened.

  It was Nev.

  She looked flushed, as if she had run to the office.

  “You’re here,” she murmured. “I thought I’d find you here.”

  “Nev,” David said, distractedly. He was usually overjoyed each time she appeared in a room, but right now, in the wake of his son’s sudden and mysterious departure, he was too disturbed and fearful to focus.

  “I’m glad you’re alone,” Nev pressed on, not noticing David’s distraction, or perhaps not caring. “I have to tell you something.”

  “I—listen, Nev,” David stammered, “something’s just happened. This isn’t really a good time—”

  “I’m in love with you.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me,” she replied quickly, a flicker of her signature impatience passing across her brow.

  For a moment, the two of them stood there, staring at each other.

  Finally, David breathed, “I love you too.” He strode quickly across the room, took her in his arms, and kissed her.

  When they finally broke free, breathlessly, a few moments later, Nev said, “I knew in Detroit. The way you saved Malcolm. I had to tell you.”

  Just as quickly as the joy and yearning had welled up in David, it came crashing back to earth.

  “Nev, I’m so sorry, but you have to go.”

  She looked at him quizzically.

  “I’ve just been made Interim Chancellor of Flint,” David said.

  “What? Where is Chancellor Malcolm? Is he all right?” “He’s all right,” David said, “but he had to leave Flint. And I have to lead in his place. Flint needs me now, and I can’t be seen . . .” He faltered. “The Immortal Council won’t trust me if . . .” Again, words failed him. “I’m sorry, Nev, but you’re—“

  “I’m Bereft,” she cut in sharply.

  David was still holdi
ng Nev tightly, his arms encircling her waist. She pushed back from him, and stood looking at him defiantly, her dark eyes shining.

  Then she turned, and was gone.

  he glider that Malcolm was driving shuddered suddenly and began to lose momentum. The whisper-quiet purr of its engine had gone completely silent.

  “No,” Malcolm muttered out loud. He slammed the palm of his hand against the navigation console, then pressed his index finger against the touchscreen repeatedly, trying to override the self-driving function and accelerate manually.

  The glider did not respond. A digital gauge on the console was blinking red.

  The vehicle had, quite simply, run out of fuel.

  It had come to a quiet halt in the knee-high grass roughly one hundred and fifty miles outside of Flint’s city wall. Malcolm sat at the navigation console for a moment, stunned. He had been driving for about an hour and a half.

  How could he have been so thoughtless? In his rush to get out of the city before any of the Immortal Councilors discovered his compromised immortality, he had neglected to check the fuel gauge on the first Council-owned glider he had jumped into in the parking deck below City Hall. It must have had barely an eighth of a tank of hydrofuel, a water-based fuel that ran the glider’s combination hydrogen-fuel-cell and solar-powered engine. Without hydrogen-generated power, it would take the vehicle several full days of sunlight to store up enough electricity to run.

  And what was Malcolm supposed to do in the meantime?

  He leaned his forehead miserably against the console. For a brief moment, he considered uttering the safe word that would take him home to the twenty-first century. He imagined sitting with his mother in her den, wrapped in oversize sweats and nursing a mug of black coffee. They would joke about the latest exploits of the Wilder twins down the street, who were constantly getting into hijinks over girls. They would pore over the Michigan State course catalogue and hatch plans for his first semester. He would willingly do anything mundane and twenty-first-century, as long as he could avoid the crushing weight of being responsible for not only his own ethos, but also the hopes and expectations of an entire city of people.

  And the crushing weight of having disappointed them.

  Malcolm’s chest tightened. Every time he thought of the trials again, he wasn’t sure whether he felt more despair or anger or incredulity. He had come to power in Flint based on his unwavering courage in countering the Detroit threat. From his first visit through the VR portal to the twenty-sixth century, before he even found his ethos or rose to prominence as the Chancellor of Flint, everyone—Immortals and Bereft alike—had warned him of the dangers presented by Detroit. And all had agreed, too, that a decisive victory over Detroit would be the equivalent of eradicating evil in the world. It would lead to the first real and lasting global peace the world had ever known.

  How quickly the Immortal Council and the citizens of Flint had released this long-held conception of Detroit after the trial! How completely they had flip-flopped in their allegiance! Was Malcolm supposed to just jump on board with a new ideology that ran exactly contrary to the whole basis of his administration?

  He knew the answer was yes. There was no countering the evidence presented in the second trial. Malcolm had been wrong, plain and simple.

  He sat up again, lifting his head from the console and staring at the forest growth that sprang up on either side of the glider. He was ready to give in. He’d just go home for a little while.

  Malcolm took a breath to utter the safe word, and just as he did, a flurry of motion caught his eye through the dome of the glider. Had he just seen a face watching him through the dense foliage a few yards off?

  He looked again. Nothing. Only shadow.

  Malcolm heaved a sigh. Now he was seeing things.

  But the momentary distraction had been enough to shake him from his funk. Now that he harbored doubts about his ethos, his immortality was steadily weakening. He couldn’t afford to waste any time hiding out at home; he had to repair his ethos as quickly as possible. He still didn’t quite understand exactly how time bent and shifted on either side of the VR portal, but he didn’t want to risk wasting minutes, much less hours, in the twenty-first century while his ethos was compromised. He had to get right with himself as soon as possible.

  Malcolm released a small catch on the inside of the glider wing, and it sprang open by a compressed-air mechanism. He stepped out of the vehicle into the tall grass and late-afternoon warmth. The shadows of the trees around him were beginning to lengthen. But no matter—he would proceed on foot.

  He had no idea, of course, what exactly he was looking for. He knew only that he needed to be alone to think, to try to understand what had gone wrong to allow him to so badly misjudge the Detroit Immortals, and to hope against hope that in finding this understanding, he might rediscover the peace of mind and strength of purpose that underlay his physiological immortality.

  Malcolm started walking. He had perhaps another three hours before darkness enclosed this wooded, unpopulated stretch of land northwest of Flint; he would just walk until he couldn’t see where he was going, and then he would lie down and rest. He was far enough north that he knew he had cleared the last of the official Immortal outposts, and he didn’t expect to run into any of the outlaw bands that chose to live on their own outside the cities. These small groups of Immortals usually didn’t wander this far northward. Malcolm figured he could spend the night outside without much risk.

  Just as he was telling himself this, he heard a rustling in the trees to his right. He sprang backward into a defensive crouch as a large bird came bursting out of the foliage and rose, cawing, into the sky. It was not quite a pterodactyl, but most certainly larger than the average songbird, with a long beak and webbed wings. It was clearly one of the many species that had devolved into a strange hybrid of contemporary and Jurassic genetics after the Great Genetic War.

  Malcolm had to smile to himself. The bird’s sudden appearance was actually a comfort. It was a reminder that he need not fear any larger wild predators out here—they had all gone extinct in the decades of biological chaos that followed the Great Genetic War. This area was now a kind of new Eden, populated mostly with birds, abundant fresh water fish in its many lakes and rivers, and the occasional small mammal that had managed to resist infection from one of the strains of the rogue virus that had killed off larger species of animals and drastically altered humanity.

  Malcolm let himself slip dreamlike into his musings as he paced along, listening half-distractedly to the forest sounds around him. For the most part, he felt embarrassed. All of the Flint Immortal Councilors and hundreds of citizens had witnessed the trial of the Warped Immortals. They had seen Malcolm’s hypocrisy exposed. He had made no secret of his ethos of righteous battle—in fact, touting it was what had earned him the chancellor’s seat. And now, publicly, his claim to righteousness had been exposed as misguided.

  Malcolm stuffed both hands in the pockets of his trousers and huddled forward as he walked. The evening air was growing steadily cooler, even for a summer night, reminding Malcolm just how far north he was.

  After hours of brooding and trudging, the shadows of the trees around Malcolm grew so long that he could no longer quite make out the grass underfoot. It was getting cold, and Malcolm couldn’t see where he was going anyway. He found a reasonably sheltered hollow between the roots of an ancient and broad-trunked pine and curled up gratefully with the blanket he had grabbed during his mad dash from his office. He fell into a light, fitful sleep.

  Malcolm walked nearly fifteen miles the following day, stopping only once at midday when he came upon a wide, swift-running stream. He fashioned a makeshift fishing rod from a branch and some line he’d brought in his leather bag. Pulling off his shoes and rolling his pants to just below the knee, Malcolm waded out into the clear, cold water and managed within a half hour to catch a large trout using an earthworm as bait. He silently thanked his lucky stars that David and Lila had
insisted he finish all of his scouting badges in early adolescence, and then he clambered back onto the bank to clean and gut the fish and cook it over a small fire.

  Just as Malcolm was finishing his well-earned feast, he heard the popping of a fallen branch somewhere behind him. He whirled around, instantly springing to his feet and drawing his curved knife from its hilt.

  Then he waited in silence, barely breathing.

  He saw no motion in the trees, heard no further sound but the usual stirrings of the leaves above him and the occasional cry of birds.

  After nearly ten minutes locked in frozen anticipation, Malcolm gingerly replaced his knife, buried the ashes of his fire and the bones of the trout, covered over any remaining evidence of his presence with pine needles, and walked on.

  That night, he slept with his back against a fallen tree trunk, his knife at the ready in his fist.

  In the morning, Malcolm awoke enormously hungry. He had long since eaten all of the fruit and crackers he’d brought from Flint, and while the trout had been filling, it had been almost eighteen hours since he’d caught it. He wondered for a moment if he should try his luck at catching a squirrel—but given that he had only his knife and his bare hands, he quickly gave this up as futile.

  He had no other option but to keep walking forward and to hope he chanced upon another source of fresh fish. He knew from the readings of his still-functioning radiacomm that he was headed northwest, away from Flint. He had gone at least one hundred and fifty miles in the glider before it ran out of fuel, and so he calculated that he would come upon the eastern shore of Lake Michigan within another day’s hike. He might even come upon one of Michigan’s many smaller lakes before then, but since he wasn’t certain of his precise location, he didn’t venture to hope for this.

  By the middle of the day, when the sun was highest in the sky, Malcolm’s head was pounding from the relentlessness of its rays. Michigan could be brutal in the late summer, when it was cold at night but still stiflingly hot and humid in the afternoon. And to make matters worse, Malcolm had made his hasty exit from Flint dressed in the same statesman’s attire he had worn to the trial. His gleaming black leather shoes were imposing in City Hall, but they were hardly ideal for a days-long trek through the wilderness.