by David Beers
His brother collapsed, all the muscle that had brought him this far giving out, and Caesar watched as everything turned to liquid. As the firmness of his flesh bled away, leaving nothing but those white striped eyeballs staring up at him, still vibrating with the words that Cato would never be able to say again.
* * *
The pillow beneath Caesar's head was wet.
He woke with tears still leaking from his eyes.
Caesar rolled over on the bed and looked up at the ceiling. His brother's eyes from the dream looked back at him from the ceiling. Except Caesar knew now that he wasn't lucky enough for that, that those weren't his brother's eyes but were just a poor replication of a poor dream. That his brother wouldn't try to kill him and that meant that Caesar had to kill himself. He'd cried in his dream, but not from fear of those eyes. He cried because his brother hadn't been able to do it, that his brother died before murdering him.
He stood from the bed and straightened the comforter back to its original place.
Caesar was done here. He wouldn't have to dream of those eyes anymore and he wouldn't have to look at how neat his brother had been.
He walked into the hallway and went to his parent's room.
Caesar knew where he would go here. His father had a safe beneath his nightstand and Caesar would take whatever it held on his jump. His mother wasn't allowed access to it, and neither was Cato, but five years ago, Sam programmed Caesar into it.
"If something happens to me, open this up and give the things out as you see fit. Your mother won't be in any shape to mess with it and I don't want her bothered with thinking about some of the stuff in there. You're the eldest so you deal with it and save your mother the grief."
Caesar had never gone to the safe, never really thought about it after that first and only talk. Never asked his father if he actually remembered to program everything in. For all he knew, the safe might not open, and then Caesar would need to carry the whole thing with him, unopened, to the window as he chucked himself through it.
He knelt down so that he faced the scroll standing straight at the bottom opening of the nightstand. He stared at the scroll as it did its work, judging his corneas, making sure that whoever looked at it had the authority to move it.
Ready for transport, it read across the glass tablet. Caesar reached in and grabbed it, then lay it flat on the bed.
"Open," he said.
The scroll opened up, the tablet that looked like a single piece of glass folded outward, dividing up into four sections and then flapping open, and from each of those four pieces, four more grew, and then once more, until the tablet that had been maybe eight inches by six inches was now a full two feet in both directions. The objects that his father placed into the safe over the past few decades grew out from the glass, pushing upward in much the same way the vat containing Laura had a day and a half ago.
A piece of paper sat in the middle of the safe with handwriting on it. Not printed paper, but his father's actual handwriting. Caesar didn't know if he'd ever seen his Dad's handwriting before. Or his mother's for that matter. Truly, he didn't remember the last time he had scribbled something down onto a piece of paper. There wasn't any need for it, at all. But here was his father's handwriting on a sheet of paper and out of everything to put in a safe, why that? There were other things around it; his original wedding band, not the one his mother bought him on their twentieth anniversary but the faded gold that he bought for some ridiculously cheap amount years before. A bullet lay next to the paper, but his father had shown him that before. The only bullet that Caesar had ever seen, a relic of the past but one that his father paid a decent sum for. Other things, all of them valuable in some way or another, but the piece of paper lay in the foremost spot.
Caesar reached for it, looking at the lines across it, remembering why they were there. It kept the page ordered, kept the writer from going haywire and slanting his or her words across the page. Once machines were introduced, those lines weren't needed, because a machine could print from left to write without ever slanting one way or the other. Caesar lifted the paper to his face and started to read.
* * *
Caesar,
This letter is for you and you alone. Don't give it to your mother or your brother. They may or may not know what's in it, but if they do, we never spoke about it. I don't think you'd open this safe unless something happened to me, and if it has, then I suppose that's too bad, isn't it?
Anyways, I'm alive while I'm writing it so things are good now and that's what matters. The present. The past has already been lived and the future may not be lived, so why worry about it?
I have a pretty strong feeling you're going to get yourself into some trouble in the future. I don't know when and I don't know how, but I do know that The Genesis messed up pretty bad when they let you out of Population Control. I found it humorous when you ended up going to work for the same entity that allowed such a smart kid to walk out and meet his two new parents for the first time. Humorous, but scary too, because I knew that if you did your job as well as you were capable of doing it, that a lot fewer kids would slip through. No other Caesar's would be allowed out into the world, not as long as you were over the process.
Grace knows. No doubt about it. I'm not sure she knows that I know, and I'm certainly not going to bring it up to her. That's a smart application, and why she's keeping you quiet, I don't know, but I'm thankful for it. If you're reading this, you should be thankful for her too. She could have had you liquidated any day over your entire life, and she chose not to. She knows if you're discovered, that means she's dead too. So treat her well, Caesar. Treat her like a friend, because that's what she is.
I'm getting off topic here. I suppose if I was a writer by nature, The Genesis would have put me in some kind of journalistic job endeavor. The public should thank its lucky stars that never happened. Now, back to the business at hand. You're going to get yourself in trouble one day. The longer I watch you, the more I see it's true. The older you get, the more you're seeing how little sense this world makes. I won't pretend to think that I'm as intelligent as you, because I'm not, but if The Genesis looked closely enough, it might think me Unnecessary. Even so, the world makes sense to me. I'm happy with my place in it. I'm happy with your mother, and you, and Cato, and I don't want to live any other way.
That's not going to be true for you. Living that way isn't going to be enough for you, Caesar. You want more but you're coming to realize there will never be anything more. You're coming to realize that the entirety of this mess is to ensure that people don't want more, because once they do, there's no limit to what they'll try to get. I think that's what is going to happen to you. I think you're going to keep wondering why things have to be this way until you decide that they don't have to be that way for you anymore and that's where the trouble is going to start.
I'd like to think Grace will be able to keep it from growing, but I know that's not true.
I'm writing this letter instead of naming it outright because I want the trouble to hold off as long as possible. I want you to live your life as long as you can. What else is a father supposed to want for his son?
If the day comes, though, where living your life is of secondary importance to whatever else you have in mind, then that's where this letter should help. As I look at this paper, I'm thinking about what I would do if I were you. Not in your shoes, but you. Because right now, I would behave entirely different, I'd tuck my tail and sleep next to your mom every night. But if I were you, then what? What would I want of myself?
No one disobeys The Genesis, son. That's what it has ingrained in us since nearly the very beginning. It has taught us that to do so is death and the only way to everlasting life is through belief in its wishes. If you disobey it, you're dead. I'm not going to sugarcoat this letter and make it seem like there is some soft landing for what you're going to end up doing. There isn't. So, I suppose, if you're going to disobey The Genesis, then go all the way. I don't k
now what that looks like, but don't stop with just one little gesture. Don't do something that might cause a little splash but be forgotten as soon as you're dead. If you've got to do something, which I think you will, then create a tsunami. Do whatever it takes, Caesar. If you feel the world needs to be changed, then change it. In the end, you'll die either way. So, the day you decide you can't stand this world anymore, that you can't stand living under The Genesis' rules, and that you have to break them to keep your sanity, break them all. Break everything you can before it breaks you.
All my love,
Dad
* * *
Caesar stared at the letter, looking at the last four words over and over again. His eyesight blurred with more tears, but this time he reached up to wipe them away, to clear them because he wanted to see the letter. When had his father written this? How long ago? He hadn't dated it, but it had to be at least five years before, at least since he knew that Caesar would be the one to open the safe in the event something happened to his father.
Caesar had showed up and told him what he planned to do. Told him that he planned to let the little girl go, and his father said do whatever it takes to sleep at night. His father had blessed it, but then died because of it. So what did the blessing really matter? Nothing at all in the end, because Caesar felt certain his father would have taken it back if he knew he would die next to his wife and youngest son. Sam wouldn't have told Caesar to sleep soundly at night if he had known how it would affect everything they loved.
That belief filled Caesar the past day and a half. The belief that his father said to do it but would have given a much different recommendation if he knew how everything ended.
But this letter, it said something different. It said that his father knew what was coming, knew that Caesar would show up one day asking questions that he shouldn't be asking. Knew that he would want advice, and his father knew long ago that his advice would be the same advice he ended up giving. Go forth and be Caesar. That's what his father told him. Don't change who you are because you can't help it, you can't shove this shit down so there's no sense in trying.
Break everything.
What had he broken so far? His own family. A little girl. That was it.
Break everything.
And what was he about to break? The window out there in the living room? And then maybe the concrete a thousand feet below? His own skull? That's not what his father had meant. That's not what the letter meant.
Break everything.
"Are you going to listen to him?"
Caesar turned around so fast that his feet twisted together and he fell on the floor, landing on his ass. His eyes flashed to the door and his hands started moving, pushing him backwards, trying to get away from whoever startled him. His back hit the nightstand and it rattled, threatening to fall over completely. He reached forward and snatched his father's letter that he'd dropped when he fell.
The old man stood in the doorway. A shadow to his right. Caesar didn't know any other way to describe the person next to the old man, although it clearly wasn't a shadow. Someone stood cloaked in complete blackness, not moving, and the cloak's digital interface shimmering.
The old man didn't wear glasses this time. His paneled eye staring out of his partly metal skull.
"Who are you?" Caesar asked, his heart thumping against the inside of his chest.
"I'm the person who has come to take you, Caesar. It's time to decide whether you want to listen to your father or whether you'd rather die. I'm the person that can make either happen."
The shadow moved forward. Caesar tried to make it to his feet, but it was too late for that.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Caesar opened his eyes, feeling like he had slept for a decade, maybe more, and as he looked around, he couldn't remember falling asleep. Where had he been?
Where was he now?
He rolled over on his side and stared off the side of a bed. The edge of the room was ten feet away and a window sat just above the bed on the wall behind him. He didn't feel nervous, didn't feel scared, though he thought he ought to. Was it the sleep? Was that the reason he wasn't freaking out, because he honestly couldn't remember where he was or how he arrived here.
Caesar looked at the wall for a few minutes and then sat up on the bed. His feet were bare and he placed them on the floor, finding the cold concrete. The floors weren't heated; had he ever been to a place without that amenity? He tried putting some pressure on his legs, but the second he did, weakness surged out of his muscles.
"So no standing up," he said to himself.
A door was to his left, closed, and not a normal door. Something he had seen out of a book, one of those with the locks on a handle, and that you needed to pull to open, having no sensor to determine when and which human was before it. He knew if he tried to make it over there right now, he'd collapse, so he just kind of stared at the door, feeling a bit like a cow chewing cud.
Where had he been before this? If he could remember that, maybe he could figure out where this was.
He rubbed his hands down the front of his pants and felt the tiny hitch from the paper in his pocket. He reached in quickly, having no idea what was inside but hoping it might hint at something. As his hand fell on the paper, he remembered though, and all his movement slowed. He still pulled it out, but stopped hurrying, because it was the third time he had seen the assignment. He unfolded it anyway, looking at the name across the top: Cato Wells.
Transportation Department.
He had been collecting his family's things. He had been collecting them so that he could jump out a window and fall a few thousand feet to the ground below. He would end up being liquidated after all.
Caesar placed the paper beside him on the bed.
The old man with a mechanical eye had showed up. The old man and a shadow had taken him. He didn't know how and he didn't know why, but it happened, for sure. They kidnapped him—another word nearly removed from the English language.
Caesar looked up at the window. He could only see the sky from where he sat, but wouldn't it be a treat for the old man to come into this room and see the window smashed open, for the old man to rush over to it and look below and see Caesar's broken and bleeding body at the bottom, looking more like road kill than a human. Caesar could do it too. He could hoist himself up to the window and then just sort of lean forward. The glass would crack first, then shatter, and then he would free-fall all the way to the bottom. Why not?
He placed his hand on the wall next to the bed, and with the care of the elderly, stood up, bracing himself almost fully against the wall. He walked the few feet over the course of perhaps two minutes, his legs feeling like they might collapse at any second, leaving him on his ass and only looking up at the window that he planned on using as an accessory to suicide. That old man could go to hell—when he came in here, whatever nefarious purpose he'd been plotting this whole time would go there with him.
Caesar looked out the window.
He could fall out of it, but the only thing that would break might be the bush below, and probably not even that.
The fall looked to be about three feet.
The building he inhabited was flat. One-story. Buildings like this didn't exist any longer. It didn't make sense for them too. You built up, it was the only way to make sure cities didn't sprawl out across the land, the only way to make sure that seventy-five percent of the world was inhabitable by beasts rather than man. Caesar reached forward, pushed up on the window, and to his surprise, it gave way and lifted. He stuck his head out the window and looked up, to make sure that he wasn't just on the bottom floor of the building—but no, he could see the roof ten feet above him.
What is this?
He looked out, for the first time, at the land around him.
He saw...nothing. In any direction. Just sand and sun everywhere, and as his mind recognized what he was looking at, he felt the heat. Stifling, hundred plus degree heat. He felt it pushing into his lungs, seem
ing like it might suffocate him. Cities didn't have heat like this because cities had central air.
"Feels different, doesn't it?"
Caesar tried to turn quickly, but his legs threatened at the hint of fast movement, and so he could only turn his head. The old man stood at the door. No sunglasses. No long jacket. No hat. He looked frail for the first time, standing in the door. He wore shorts, a t-shirt, and sandals. Like he was getting ready for a day at the pool. Except for the eye that stared out at Caesar, the eye that didn't blink and the dull metal surrounding it.
"It takes some time getting used to the heat. Especially since you haven't ever felt it," he said, looking past Caesar and out the window.
Caesar looked at the bed and shuffled back to it, holding the wall the whole time. He couldn't talk intelligently if all he thought about was falling over.
"The sedative should wear off pretty quickly. We had to make sure you didn’t wake on the way out here, for obvious reasons."
"Where is out here?" Caesar asked.
"That's the obvious reason. You can't know that."
Caesar looked into the old man's eyes, one green, one black. Crow’s feet on one side and not on the other. "Why am I here?"
"Well. That depends on how you look at it, I suppose." The old man took a step back and looked down the hallway. "Bring it in."
A kid, maybe fifteen years old, pushed in a wheel chair—a relic of a thing. Something that existed before even The Singularity. Tape held pieces together and Caesar could see where new screws and bolts were added to the frame, which looked like it would collapse if he sat in it.
"Get on. You won't be able to walk where we're going."
The kid parked the chair next to him. Caesar looked at the boy for a second, but the boy didn't take the time to look back. He simply walked from the room, his job apparently done.
"Come on. There's a lot to do and this comes first."
What other choice was there? Caesar climbed into the chair and let the old man push him out of the room.
* * *