by David Beers
As this lesson progresses, there will be accounts of the various crimes Adolph Hitler committed, of the amount of pollution and other species' deaths caused by this war, and the general atrocities associated with it. It will dishearten and disturb you, but hopefully be a perfect example of what humanity will do when left to its own wants. The best in humanity always leads to the worst in humanity. The need to have more leads to the breaking of others.
While humanity made Adolph Hitler into a monster for nearly one hundred years, it is important to recognize that without The Genesis, each one of you could have been him.
Chapter Thirty
Caesar had never wondered what happened when someone was taken by applications, as in, he never wondered what happened to the people in between the time they were dragged away and the end game of mixing their eyeballs and assholes together in a glass container. The time in between had never mattered to him. Or, maybe it wasn't that it didn't matter, maybe it was that he just didn't think there was any time in between. The applications took you and then they liquidated you.
Now though, waiting to be liquidated, he realized the importance of the time in between. He realized that the time in between was all he had left. The time in between was everything, really, because after that, nothing would reign. At first, he thought death was imminent; thought that he would be liquidated immediately when an application pulled him off the train, dragged him underground—an elevator that descended beneath the street, and then placed him in a square, glass cage. Time to die.
He listened for Grace for a few minutes but she wasn't there. He didn't call out to her. What would Grace have to say to him, anyway? She told him to do the opposite of everything he had done, and now she would die too.
Caesar started crying. Not sobbing. Not body wracking sucks of breath. Just simple tears as he pushed his back to the corner of the box and brought his knees to his chest. He was scared—not scared of not living, though. He had rationalized away death, in that he couldn’t consider what he did here on this Earth as living. No, the fear came from the impending pain. The surety that this would hurt...a lot. What did he know of pain? What did any human know of pain anymore? Nothing. And here he was, about to experience it for the first time. About to not even die, exactly, but be kept suspended as some kind of massacred body, until The Genesis figured out exactly what was wrong with him and how he could help fix the next generation.
Eventually, the tears stopped and he realized if he was going to die in this box, he didn't know when. It didn't appear The Genesis planned on liquidating him immediately, even if Caesar didn't know exactly how many minutes he had spent in this cage.
He stayed in the box for some untold amount of time. Not long enough for him to grow hungry, which was good because no food or water was offered.
The click made him think that his time had arrived. He didn't whimper, didn't let out any noise; he stood up, determined to die at least as good as the man that he saw as a child. The air didn’t start moving though, no electrical currents foreshadowing the end of someone. The cage felt the same as it had when he entered.
The clear glass turned black directly across from Caesar—the transparency turning into a screen.
White, snowy lines dripped down the black screen.
"Caesar Wells," a voice spoke from all around him. He could always pinpoint Grace when she spoke, could tell exactly where she was in any room, but this voice reverberated across every single air molecule around him. The white lines vibrated fiercely with each word. "You are accused of a conspiracy to remove a child from the care of The Genesis."
Caesar stood looking at the lines, unsure of how to answer. Accused? An accusation made it sound like there might be some doubt of whether or not he did it. Caesar understood the adversarial court system humans developed a few thousand years ago, but The Genesis didn't operate under such notions. There was no adversary here, no one to represent Caesar's side. There was The Genesis and what The Genesis knew and then there was Caesar in a cage without any hope of denying it.
"Okay," he said.
"Is this true?" The voice boomed, sounding like no human to ever live, no application he had ever spoken with. It sounded like a God, like a voice that went on and on forever. That couldn't end even if it wanted to.
"Are you The Genesis?" He asked. "Are you The Singularity?"
The lines remained still as only silence came back to him. The question surprised him. He stood here 'accused' of a crime punishable by death, and asked exactly who he was speaking to.
"Did you help Laura Hedrick escape from Population Control?" The voice said.
Caesar wished someone was standing in front of him, wished that he could look at someone, could speak to someone. There was no one though. Just him and these white lines. These unidentifiable white lines. "I did."
Nothing happened for a few seconds; Caesar remained standing, the lines still again.
"Are you The Genesis?" He asked.
The black screen faded and clear glass replaced it.
* * *
He is different.
So what? What does it matter?
Do we not feel it? Do we not feel that it matters with this one more than it did with any other we've come across?
Why is he different, then? How?
I don't know. I can't pinpoint it.
Silence fell across the thoughts, a silence so deep that the flap of a fly's wings would have sounded like an avalanche falling down a mountain.
And do we treat someone different, differently?
We thought he could come. We thought that there would be someone born, eventually, different than the rest. Indeed, we've planned on it. What if this is the one?
What has he done to show that he might be that one? He asked us if we were The Genesis, and that makes him the one theorized about? He cried, too, in case you didn't see it?
I'm unsure crying is reason to rule out that he might be the theory.
If we're wrong, if we send him back out and he isn't the theory, what happens?
He won't disrupt everything, not at first. There will be time. We can monitor, make sure that he is the theory, that he isn't—
Breaking everything we've created? Is that how you want to finish that thought?
Yes. That's fine. We will have time to make sure that he isn't changing everything. The theory will do certain things. The theory will bring about certain things and not others. You know this. If he doesn't begin to bring them about, then we terminate. If he does, then we need him.
Another will be born. If we terminate him now, another will be born eventually and we need not risk anything now. Another that may show stronger predispositions than this one, another with a better track record that points to him being the theory.
How many years? It's been over a thousand already, and with each passing crop, with each liquidation, we stretch that time period out. We make it harder for the theory to be born. We continually work away from the theory. If we terminate him now, the probability of seeing another one in the next ten thousand years drops to less than one percent. After that ten thousand years, it drops to less than one tenth of one percent.
Eventually, the probability will play out though. Eventually we will see the theory again.
Why waste this one, though? Why not let it play out and see if he is the theory? Our entire plan is built around it, that one will be born different than the rest.
No, that's not true and you know it. The plan has evolved to that, but that wasn't the original purpose. The theory is meant to accent our original purpose, meant to bolster it, not replace it.
Okay. Well if he's the theory, then it's time bolster our plan.
And if he isn't the theory, we kill him?
Immediately.
* * *
The old man looked at the woman.
"You may have ruined everything. He might die. You realize that?"
The woman stared back at him, not say anything but not looking away either.
"It's out of my hands, now," the old man said. "But if he dies, you die right after. And then, I suppose, the rest of us can go ahead and kill ourselves. Him first, then you, then us."
Chapter Thirty-One
April's thoughts whirled around in her head like a dust storm—the truth they held abrasive to her mind with the speed they whipped around at.
"He's gone," Leon had told her.
She didn't ask who, because she didn't need to—there was only one he they could speak about. Caesar.
He's gone.
The applications came for him. It wasn't displayed on her scroll, wasn't announced on the entertainment center. The taking was kept quiet, as well as what Caesar had done.
He's gone.
That meant he was dead. Leon didn't say so but the extra words were unnecessary. When applications took you, when The Genesis came for you, you didn't escape. You didn't make it back to your house. When The Genesis acted, it acted with complete certainty and the righteousness of what people once believed only a God could have.
There hadn't been any further word about her and Leon's part in all of this. No applications showed up to take them away, no announcements from their assistants that they would be liquidated as well. Things went on the past few days as it had the rest of their lives, at least if someone looked in from the outside. Things were the same.
Except they weren't.
He's gone was the only thing Leon had said to her since he nearly strangled her. The deep blue of the bruises on her neck were finally fading, retreating to light purple, but she still had to wear a scarf everywhere she went. She could eat and drink without pain burning up and down her esophagus, but that had taken forty-eight hours as well. The feeling of his hand on her neck, his fingers smashing her face back against the wall, those things wouldn't fade though. They wouldn't leave her. Not in forty-eight hours. Not in forty-eight years. That feeling, that pressure, that pain was there to stay.
She hadn't thought out her decision to turn Caesar in past the immediacy of their safety, of hers and Leon's and their future child's. There was something beyond that immediacy though, and she was coming to live in it. She didn't like the house it turned out being; she didn't like the people that lived here with her either. One was named Guilt, another Shame, another Anger, and another Eternal Pessimism. How was she supposed to move past what Leon had done to her? How could she ever forgive him?
And how's he going to forgive you, April?
That was important too, even if not the most important thing. She had woken up two days ago not loving her husband, perhaps even hating him. She had made the decision to report Caesar because her husband was too much of a coward to do it. She decided that she would be the moral compass of their family, that she would display the courage Leon couldn't. Now, though, heading back to an apartment which felt as cold as death’s fingers, she realized while that may have all been true then, it wasn't anymore. She needed Leon to make this work. She needed Leon to commit to the child. She needed Leon to help with this marriage, because divorce wasn't an option. Living together in agony for the rest of their lives, over this one decision, over this one person, shouldn't be an option either. They had to make this work. She needed to make it work. She needed him to love her again.
And was that possible?
Was either of them going to be able to love the other, ever?
She didn't cry on the train, not surrounded by so many people, but she wanted to. She wanted to break down and sob. Not for Caesar. Fuck Caesar. He was the one that put them here, he and his idiotic thoughts about The Genesis and the rest of the world. Things that didn't make any sense no matter how much one thought about it. She wanted to break down and sob because of what Caesar had done, because of where she and her husband were now. Because of where they might never get back to.
The train stopped and April stood, walking across to the door, and then out into the lobby of her apartment complex. She kept her eyes on the ground the whole way, unable to focus on anything but her thoughts and her problems. She made her way to the elevator and then she waited as it transported her from the lobby to the seven-hundredth floor in just a few seconds. Even that right there, Caesar should have appreciated. He should have been thankful of the technology allowing them to travel such a distance without physical harm to their own bodies. No, instead he decided all that technology wasn't worth it. He'd rather...but she didn't know, she didn't even know what the hell he actually wanted.
She exited the elevator and walked down the hall, to her apartment. Hers and Leon's apartment. Our apartment. Except that wasn't true and she knew it. There wasn't an our anything anymore because there wasn't an our. There was Leon and there was her and it felt that never should the two be one again.
The door opened in front of her and she walked in, placing her bag on the edge of their couch.
Then she looked up, seeing something other than her own thoughts for the first time in hours.
Three people stood in front of her. She couldn't tell if they were men or women. Their bodies were cloaked, but not in clothing, in some kind of digital shadow. It covered them from head to toe, as if someone had drawn a black cut out and placed it completely over their bodies, only it wasn't one-dimensional. A person took a step to the right and the shadow moved with him, hovering over his body like a skin.
The person raised a hand and pressed his thumb down on something he held in his hand. April didn't know what it was, only that it looked like one of those ancient pens you could see in museums.
She heard the fizzle before she looked to her right. Silver sparks flew out about five feet from her, stemming from some unseen object about the size of a fist. The object fell to the floor, still sparking, completely invisible except for the electricity emanating from it.
Rachel. That was Rachel, now lying on the floor. Her assistant...dead? Whatever that person clicked had killed Rachel?
That's when terror dawned on April, when she realized that an application had just been killed. Applications didn't die and they certainly weren't murdered. Except Rachel was dying right in front of her, without a single scream to let anyone know.
April looked up, wanting to scream herself, but the shadows fell on her and it was far too late to scream. Far too late to do anything besides realize that the pain Leon had inflicted on her didn't add up to anything at all, really.
* * *
The blood.
That's what did it.
Not the body. Not the smell. Not the wounds even.
The blood made Leon vomit, made the contents of his stomach splatter across his wife's face in tiny specks.
The door had opened and he stepped in, hating the thought of coming back here. Hating the thought of looking at the woman he had married, hating the thought of living with her, hating the thought of continuing in this marriage. He opened the door full of hate, wanting never to speak to April again, never to see her again, maybe even—at least a part of him—wanting her to just die so that he could go on without her.
The smell came first, and Leon had no idea what it was from. Blood smelled different, vastly so, than anything Leon had ever sniffed before. Especially in such quantities. It smelled slightly spoiled, like milk left out for just a bit too long, but yet having a coppery essence to it.
His eyes adjusted next, taking in the scene around him. He stared for a good two or three moments, dropping his bag to the floor, and just standing there with his mouth open, eventually a string of drool rolling down his face.
Then he vomited, his stomach clenching up, causing him to bend over, and the half-digested food hit the floor with such ferocity that pieces of it rebounded into the air and landed on his wife's head more than four feet from him. They landed on top of the dried blood, looking a bit like dirt on a red rug.
The wounds on his wife were...extensive.
Later, he wondered what kind of strength, both psychologically and physically, it took to stab through someone's skull. Not just once, but twenty
-five times. Over and over, puncturing skin and then bulldozing through bone. Moving through the bone into soft brain beneath. At least, soft at first, by the end the word soft would have been much too firm. Whatever the knife touched inside the skull, by the end, probably resembled porridge more than anything else.
The blood spread out from her head like rays from a star. It shot everywhere, cascading across the back of their couch, even reaching the door behind Leon. They knifed her with such force that the blood spouted outward for ten feet. And as she lay on the floor dying from brain hemorrhages, the blood leaked out in all directions. On the ground beneath her, down the front of her face, spreading to her neck and staining the shirt below.
His wife looked like someone had painted her red and then decorated the top of her head with bits of plastic, taping it to her hair. Except that wasn't plastic. That was bone. And nothing was taped anywhere, because her hair follicles had been completely destroyed in the manic need to kill April.
After vomiting, Leon fainted.
Allen didn't though, but alerted authorities.
Chapter Thirty-Two
"Hello?"
Caesar opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling above him. He couldn't actually see a ceiling, not a physical one; he only peered into darkness. The glass enclosure showed him his surroundings, obviously, but unfortunately, he could only see the concrete floors beneath him until the light died out, leaving darkness above and around him.
"Hello?" The voice came again, branching out from everywhere the same as the white lines from before. Except this one could be named. This wasn't an application. This was Leon speaking to him.
"Hello? Leon?" Caesar asked, lying on the glass with his hands folded behind his neck. He had been napping. His mind turned on now, trying to figure out what was happening around him, how Leon's voice was filling his cage.
"Caesar? Is that you?" His voice sounded more shocked than Caesar's own. "Are you there?"