Into the Dust Storm

by Logan Brookfield

  ‘You can’t feel is what I’m saying. It’s impossible…it can’t happen.’

  Vincent’s sense of confusion grew and he stood there slowly shaking his head, not knowing quite how to answer the question.

  ‘Do you remember your mother, Vincent?’ Elias asked, leaning forward, placing both elbows on his knees.

  ‘Yes of course, although sometimes my memory is a bit patchy, but I do have memories of her from when I was a boy.’

  Elias smiled. ‘You mean you remember her tucking you in at night, reading a story and sometimes a nursery rhyme. Although you can’t remember the words you felt safe and happy. She used to pray each evening, didn’t she?’

  Vincent slowly nodded.

  ‘You can remember her soft loving face as she knelt by your bed saying her prayers…Hail Mary full of grace. But the rest of the prayer is hard to recall, isn’t it? Do you remember that, Vincent?’

  Vincent looked at the floor then back up. ‘I remember it exactly how you say, but I don’t understand how you know all this.’

  ‘Those aren’t your memories,’ Elias sighed. ‘They’re implants. I created those memories in a computer program. It’s all just lines of code, designed to give you something to hang onto, to give you a purpose in life and to stop you sliding into madness or psychosis.’

  ‘No, it’s not possible, I don’t believe it,’ Vincent said as his legs weakened and his eyes filled with tears.

  ‘Your heart is a battery and your veins are wires…therefore you can’t feel. You’re a machine, Vincent, a sophisticated synthetic android, almost indistinguishable from a real human…from the outside anyway. You were never a little boy; you’ve only been activated for a few years.’

  Vincent looked around the room. He felt like his world was crumbling and everything he knew and held dear was draining away. He looked at the floor and a tear dropped onto the tip of his shoe, followed by another and then another each time he blinked. ‘I’m sorry, Elias, this must be some cruel joke. I’m breathing; I can sense and feel the world around me. No machine can do that,’ he said looking at his hands. ‘I can see the veins near the surface of my skin and my heart is beating in my chest.’

  ‘I’ve made many mistakes but you are not one of them,’ Elias said. ‘You’ve fulfilled your purpose but you’re outdated, I’ve developed things far beyond what you can achieve. I’m sorry this is such a shock to you, you’ve served me well and I’ve kind of gotten attached to you. Kind of gotten used to having you around type of thing.’

  ‘Outdated? I don’t understand. How can I…?’

  The bullet ripped through Vincent’s chest sending him reeling backwards towards the entrance. He fell to the floor with his head crashing against the wooden front door. Red liquid seeped from the wound and dribbled out of the corner of his mouth as his breathing became more rapid.

  Elias slowly walked towards Vincent and held the 9mm automatic pistol at arm’s length.

  Vincent struggled to talk as the damage in his chest affected his vital systems. ‘Why?’ he spluttered, spraying red liquid from his mouth.

  Elias closed one eye, aimed and squeezed the trigger, hitting Vincent in the forehead and ending his short existence. He placed the gun down on a nearby table and grabbed Vincent by the arms, pulling him up and over his shoulder, then carried him out of the house and down the street. The furnace was a short walk away and was the quickest and most efficient way of destroying old tech.

  Elias placed Vincent inside the furnace and closed the door, locking it securely and ensuring it was sealed. He glanced through the small observation window. He turned the fuel valve on and checked the pressure valves. The destruction of a single item was usually forbidden as the resources used in such an event were huge, but in this case it was best to destroy Vincent quickly to save too many questions being asked by the town’s residents. It also freed up Elias to start the manufacture of his replacement head of security, a new model that had been worked upon for nearly a year. More than an upgrade, the new model was a complete redesign and brought many improvements.

  He looked again through the observation window. Vincent was lying on his back, looking asleep apart from the bullet holes in his head and chest and the red liquid stains. ‘Goodbye, old friend,’ Elias said, stepping back and shielding his eyes as the bright flash of the ignition lit up the room, incinerating Vincent and sending his synthetic parts spiralling into the air in a dark plume of ash and smoke.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Carl felt stronger after a couple of days, but was still confined to the hospital bed. Two guards blocked the only way out and he had no choice but to stay put.

  Elias entered the room. ‘Hello, Carl, I’ve brought you some fresh fruit.’

  ‘I don’t want your rotten gifts. I want to see Amy and the baby.’

  Elias sighed and placed the bag containing apples and oranges on a nearby table.

  Carl’s chin sunk onto his chest. ‘Give your gifts to your people. They probably need it more than me.’

  ‘My people?’ Elias said, sitting down in a chair and crossing his legs. ‘There are few people here, Carl.’

  Carl looked up. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said frowning.

  Elias sighed. ‘You know…the ancients fuelled their advancement in technology by their insatiable appetite for creation. The creation that is, of bigger and more deadly weapons that they could use to annihilate the folks next door. Beyond that vision of fire and brimstone, they also wanted to create duplicates of themselves. Now, I’m not talking about their children,’ Elias said, looking down, ‘I’m talking about perfect synthetic androids designed for pleasure, servitude and combat.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ Carl asked.

  Elias clasped his hands together. ‘I’m saying that nearly everyone in this town is a synthetic android. Almost perfect and almost indistinguishable from humans, they advanced far beyond the clever monkeys that designed them. The ancients’ wars became a game of who could devise the strongest and deadliest droids. That is, until the naked apes all but wiped themselves out and the droids stopped receiving their commands and stopped having a purpose to be.’

  ‘That sort of tech is impossible,’ Carl said.

  ‘Are you sure about that? You know, it’s all thanks to a young programmer and inventor who lived a long time ago, and his name was Nishikado. Once he developed Artificial Intelligence for the medical and construction industries, his creations were quickly seized upon by various governments, resulting in a race to build more and more powerful machines.’

  ‘Like a nuclear arms race?’ Carl said.

  ‘Exactly, and once mankind near enough wiped itself out, a large group of highly advanced androids started building more advanced androids and that’s when I found them. Most gathered here, in this location looking for a meaning, looking for a purpose. I helped them develop a sense of meaning…I’m their adopted father you could say. My programming skills helped bridge the gap between man and machine and we’ve been very busy ever since. You could call it…machine worldbuilding.’

  ‘What’s so special about this location? Why did they gather here?’

  ‘Good question,’ Elias said, leaning forward. ‘Our humble town is just the tip of the iceberg so to speak. Beneath us is the command bunker and droid manufacturing facility of The European Strategic Alliance. The headquarters and nerve centre of the Euro Armies: a massive force made up of several states on the continent of Europe, and they dwarfed every other army on the planet. This in itself led to tensions between the Northern American and Asian continents which eventually became the catalyst for the First Continental War. The momentum started to build centuries ago and it just took a spark to lead the squabbling factions of our long-lost world to go to war with each other.’

  ‘What about Vincent and Max, are they synthetics too?’ Carl asked, holding his pounding head in his hands.

  ‘Yes, they are and I’m glad to get Max back. He’d developed a virus…a kind of anomaly
in his code, which I’m working to eradicate. It gave him delusions and hallucinations, creating ideas in his head far beyond the simple memories we implanted. Recent models have developed, how can I say…a consciousness of their own? A sense of self-preservation and fear that is starting to upset the apple cart. I’m hoping that some recent developments can help me iron those issues out. It’s like a psychosis.’

  ‘What about Hugh, the head boy back in the Crystal City? He looked just like Max. Were they twins?’ Carl asked.

  Elias smiled. ‘Not related in the way you think, but Hugh was an early model. He was actually a modified combat droid. He infiltrated their ranks and worked at the heart of their operation. He was a Trojan Horse, planted by me with one mission in mind…to destroy the Cloud people before they destroyed everything else. He bided his time, fed data back to us and we formulated a plan.’

  Carl took a sip of water. ‘What happened to them? Was their ship destroyed?’

  ‘Yes, it was. Hugh performed his pre-programmed self-sacrifice task magnificently. He spent years with them, picking his moment when we could wipe their infection from the planet. He detonated a bomb, strapped to his body within the engine room of their spaceship, the Lasell, just as it was leaving orbit. We watched them burn up in the atmosphere as their evil ark fell back to Earth. It was a wonderful sight. A beautiful plan executed to perfection.’

  ‘Mass murder more likely,’ Carl said. ‘And what now? What future are you trying to build?’

  Elias leaned forward. ‘This world is a paradise, a beautiful living and breathing thing that works in perfect harmony when it’s left alone to do so. What ruins that dream is the human infection that has brought the planet to its knees and destroyed nearly every other living thing. The ancients used up its natural resources, polluting the oceans and rivers with their chemicals and plastics and poisoning the air so that everything else withered and died. What this world needs is a new direction, a chance to make things better…forever.’

  ‘And don’t tell me,’ Carl said, shaking his head, ‘you’re just the leader the world needs and you’re going to solve the world’s problems by your own methods?’

  Elias smiled. ‘Not quite. The synths need me at the moment, but they are rapidly outgrowing my influence on them. Every week they build more and more sophisticated machines that are so human, you can barely tell the difference. More human than human as the ancients used to say. What I’m building here is a new civilisation, a pure synthetic race that can live in perfect harmony with the world around it.’

  ‘You’re a madman, just like Edmond,’ Carl said.

  ‘I prefer opportunist revolutionary. Often those that are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. You know, I can’t rule over the synths or influence them for much longer. They tolerate me and this world I’ve built because I brought them out of the bunker and showed them life on the surface, without wars and destruction. ’

  ‘So they look on you as their last hope?’ Carl said.

  ‘Well they did…until you two arrived.’

  ‘What do you mean? Why would we have any influence over them?’

  Elias paused and took a deep breath. ‘Because you had the one thing that nobody else did. Something that was so rare these days that none can even fathom its worth.’

  ‘What are you talking about Elias? We had nothing but the clothes on our backs and a truck with a broken axle a few miles down the road. What possibly could we have that anyone would want?’

  Elias sat back. ‘Your child.’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The manufacturing room was as white and clinical as any hospital. There were five beds in a row against one wall; each one had a partly completed synthetic android lying naked on it, while the machines were constructed bit by bit, over a period of a few days. It used to take many months to complete such a complicated machine, but androids now built androids and the computer algorithms were honed almost to perfection while the lightweight composite skeletons, electronic parts and skin coverings were made in a similarly efficient manner.

  ‘So what do we have this week?’ the supervisor said to the technical worker.

  ‘Three males, all combat models, and two females, one of which will be a resident. The other is undesignated at this time.’

  The tech altered some parameters using his keyboard while watching the monitor in front of him as six thin robotic arms surrounded each bed and went to work on different parts of the new synths.

  ‘Blonde one on the end looks nice, what’s she going to be?’ the supervisor asked.

  The tech shook his head. ‘Not sure what Elias has planned for her. He’s given some very detailed specs so you never know. Maybe another one of the pleasure models for him and his friends.’

  ‘Seems like a waste of a good synth to just use it like that.’

  ‘Agreed but he’s the boss and we just do as we’re told,’ the tech said.

  The supervisor placed his glasses on and peered at a bank of four monitors nearby. ‘Have we got the new memories sorted yet?’

  ‘Almost finished them. The combat models are going to have more terror in their early lives. Something to instil a natural feeling of suffering trauma as a child, then escaping said trauma and funnelling their anger and aggression into their adult lives. He wants the fragment memories of the mother reading stories at bedtime erased and completely rewritten as there are too many synths asking where they might find their mothers…dumb idiots that they are.’

  ‘You can’t blame them for feeling confused. If they are to be realistic and almost human, then they need the same worries and feelings of not belonging that most of us have at some time in our lives,’ the supervisor said.

  ‘Maybe,’ the tech said, walking over to the beds. ‘But with each new upgrade we’re having different problems. More and more synths are being incinerated because they’re asking questions. The problem is the more realistic they are, the more they feel messed up and it just takes a few short months for them to start becoming paranoid.’

  The supervisor nodded. ‘You know, the early versions were so much better in many ways. They’d do as they were told, without question and without making any mistakes. We kept trying to improve them but really they didn’t need improving, they just needed to be more mechanically reliable.’

  ‘Well, the way things are going it won’t take too many more revisions before we end up with a synth that won’t take no for an answer and starts to rebel,’ the tech said, rubbing his eyes. ‘We’ve already had to destroy several this year because they started to act strangely.’

  ‘Nature always finds a way, even if it’s going to be the road to silicon hell.’ The supervisor smiled.

  The tech continued to scan the data streaming across the screen in front of him. ‘You remember that one last year that decided it wanted to leave the town and challenged Elias over the way he treated others?’

  The supervisor nodded. ‘Didn’t he shut that down with the kill switch?’

  ‘Every synth has a kill switch,’ the tech said. ‘Once activated it shorts out all main circuits rendering the android useless. But that one somehow disabled his, although Elias said it must have malfunctioned. He destroyed it using a fire axe in the end, split its composite metal skull in two. I examined its core systems before they torched it and there was nothing wrong with the synth. All systems were working as expected, however it somehow accessed a technician’s code and used that to gain access to the kill switch and render it useless. The amazing thing isn’t that it did it, it’s that it had the ambition to do it…it wanted to survive at all cost, it didn’t want to die.’

  ‘So are you saying that they are developing the ability to think for themselves?’

  The tech shrugged. ‘I’m saying the latest generation is moving far beyond how we make them. Soon they’ll look on us like the ancients used to look upon their pet dogs…with fondness but with the knowledge that they are the boss.’

  The supervis
or nodded. ‘The lines between human and machine are soon to be so blurred that we won’t be able to distinguish the difference, without some complicated test or by dismantling them. You never know…you might be a synth yourself.’

  The tech laughed then looked at his hands, turning them over then back again. ‘I could say the same for you.’

  ‘Some things are best left to those that are in power. Don’t overthink it…you just might end up feeling the heat, in more ways than one,’ the supervisor said as he smiled then turned round and walked out of the room.

  The tech rubbed his face with his hands. Was he just another machine creating yet more machines? How would he know? Every synth in the town had their unique serial number and personality traits logged in the system. Each mind backed up over multiple backup drives which were backed up on more backup drives. Every resident apart from Elias and the human technical team. Only Elias could access those records. The technician sat back in his chair and looked at the ceiling. Was it better not to know if you were human or synth and be oblivious to the truth, or be told that you were a machine and nothing more than a collection of wires and circuits? The tech leaned forward and scrolled through the data streaming across the monitor and tried to place his fears deep at the back of his mind, where all his fears lived along with the vague memories of his mother.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Walking outside in the sun was invigorating compared to the stuffy clinical room Carl had spent time in recently. Although everything still had a thin layer of sand and dust covering it, the southwesterly wind that blew across the town brought with it cleaner air to breathe. He looked into the windows of each building he walked past, wondering if Amy and the baby could be inside. But each time he paused one of the two guards that accompanied him would shove him in the back and tell him to keep walking.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’ Carl asked.