by David Beers
There were ten people like Jerry. Nine others plus himself, all of them part of this experiment.
Three died before eighteen.
Two died during the facial reconstruction, leaving five. The Genesis could deal with a fifty percent success rate, if these five worked.
The experiment of Jerry, I suppose, could be looked at as a success in some ways. It allowed The Genesis eighteen years of learning the human psyche in a way that it couldn't know otherwise. Really, it led to the next iteration, to the murder of the poor and rich, the subjugated and the elite. It led to what we have now. The mistake came in that The Genesis didn't understand what the human brain was capable of. On Jerry's twentieth year, his brain finally gained access to the chip. The Genesis created a one-way path, where information could only be pulled out of Jerry's head, not the other way around. Eventually though, his brain rewired itself. Everyone still alive in the experiment had this happen, gaining access to that chip—which granted them a sort of hyper-intelligence. An awareness that the vast majority of humanity couldn't hope to possess.
And in that moment, The Genesis decided the remaining five had to die. That intelligence, that awareness, coupled with humanity's evolutionary drive to push forward would result in a much quicker destruction of the world. Four were killed.
Jerry escaped. He escaped and hid. A cyborg of sorts cast out from both societies, from The Genesis and humanity. The chip allowed him to perform surgeries on himself, to replace his heart with a machine, and then another machine when the first gave out. I'm not sure what percentage of him is actually flesh and blood anymore, but at over a thousand years old, I doubt it's much.
Sixty or so years ago, Jerry found The Eight. They might have waited forever if not for Jerry; they might have waited out of fear of losing, from fear of their tiny kingdom carved out in the wilderness being decimated. They might have waited so long that they missed Caesar had Jerry not showed up. When he found The Eight and understood what they thought, what they felt, he realized he'd found what he was willing to die for. What he had done all of those grotesque surgeries for, replacing organs with machines. A thousand years was a long time to wait and he was done with it. He felt the person they needed, the one that could begin what The Eight had spoken about for the past two hundred years would be born soon. He saw into the future—not in any mystical sense—but he calculated out the probability of someone with the attributes they needed being born, and saw the decreasing chances with each passing year. As The Genesis evolved, humanity lost its chance to.
Jerry says there was talk of killing him. It had nothing do with his body composition; Many felt he wanted too much. Many felt he was inviting too much risk, tired of living himself, he was willing to risk everyone's death.
He began his search anyway.
For thirty years, Jerry searched. He found ways to look at the tests The Genesis administered to the crops. He found ways to monitor what happened to the crops as they went out into the world. Always looking for patterns, for outliers, for those that might be doing something a bit different.
There were numerous possibles. All of them looked at closely and then passed over. Jerry could explain any number of reasons why they wouldn't work, but it all came down to one thing, really. The strength to carry it out. The strength to go the distance, to make it to The Genesis and then do whatever necessary to kill it. The rest of The Eight lacked it, and as far as himself? The moment The Genesis located him, that chip in his brain would self-destruct.
The irony of Jerry's search, for thirty years, was that he almost missed Caesar. Had he missed him, Jerry might have died still searching. Had he missed him, humanity would have gone on forever just as they are now, cattle bred for a specific purpose. To live. To stay inside their fences. Nothing else.
Jerry found Caesar through Grace.
If anything should get credit for humanity's liberation, Grace has to be a contender.
It was the way she hid Caesar that alerted Jerry to it. It didn't alert The Genesis because The Genesis wasn't looking for the same thing as Jerry. The Genesis constantly hunted for the Unnecessary. That's very different than hunting for a savior. The Genesis trusts applications to deliver up the Unnecessary. It trusts the processes in place. It trusts the Unnecessary to give themselves up, sooner or later, which most of the time they do. Grace, though—bless her—was different. She was special.
Perhaps humans and applications, humans and The Genesis, are very similar. Perhaps we're all just made up of data. DNA. Memories. Beliefs. It's all just data that we process and store. Humans store this data inside themselves. Sometimes they make copies, writing down their thoughts, but the vast majority of that data is stored in their minds. Applications don't have that luxury. They're connected, all the time. Their mind is The Genesis. Their storage shed is The Genesis.
Grace had to change that to save Caesar.
She had to build another place to store her data, because there wasn't really any 'her' to put it inside. I don't know how long she searched; I don't know when either. Sometime after the girl she liquidated, and sometime before Caesar. She was planning, preparing for the possibility of the next child deemed Unnecessary. She wouldn't put it on herself. Wouldn't be the cause of that child's death. So she needed somewhere to store her data, her thoughts, her life—at least the pieces she didn't want to send back to The Genesis. She planned to partition herself, some of it going to The Genesis, the dangerous pieces going somewhere else. All of it accessible to her when she needed it, but both sides blocked off from the other. That was the hope.
She found what she was looking for inside a military bunker. Thousands of them lie beneath the Earth, all of them unused. Neither humans nor The Genesis have any need for them anymore. Grace, though, had a need. She found them, hacking into their mainframes that were still connected by ancient pathways to the net. She built logic and protocols into these pathways. Years and years she spent fortifying them. Preparing for a day that might not come. Preparing for the possibility that the little girl she killed would come back to her in another form.
When she received Caesar, there wasn't any other work that needed to be done. There was only the decision whether to partition or not, and partition she did.
I can't say Caesar is different than anyone to ever live. He would say he's not. Jerry would say he is. Grace would say she loved him. Caesar's ability to still his mind made it so that The Genesis couldn't find him, but it made it so Jerry couldn't find him either. He showed nothing outside to reveal himself as Unnecessary or savior. Besides his rise through population control, there wasn't a single thing special about Caesar. He was average. Right up until he started talking crazy.
Jerry knew of him before that though, of course. When Caesar was twenty-five years old, Jerry found the military site Grace used. Accidentally. This whole thing, all of it is a string of luck that leads us right to The Genesis in the end. A string of luck that leads us to the end, really. Jerry wanted to find somewhere safer to house The Named. The Eight became The Named as Jerry built up the troops. He always believed he would find the person he was looking for, and he wanted to be ready when he did. So he took in those he found while searching.
Jerry wanted the world to know, when it was time, who did this. He wanted the world to either fear or cheer the group he assembled, but more importantly, he wanted them to know someone was fighting. Someone had said enough. Someone wanted change. Humans were an unnamed mass, the same as ants in a hill. Thus, The Named. For the first time in over a thousand years, The Named.
Jerry went underground, searching for these bunkers. All of Grace's defenses were set up against an internal threat through the systems connected by wires. She didn't expect someone to walk in the doors, hammering through the locks and stirring up the dust that had settled across the ancient, ancient equipment. But that's what Jerry and his band of four explorers did. They found Grace. They found her information and they tapped in, externally, so that she couldn't know.
&nb
sp; He found Caesar there, in that old computer, every bit of information he could ever want about the young man. He found his hero, the one that would lead Jerry's group, the one that might lead humanity if they wished it.
Let me take a second and comment on that.
Jerry did not care, in the slightest, if humanity wanted The Genesis or didn't want The Genesis. Jerry, and The Eight before him, made their own decision as to whether or not The Singularity should exist. Humanity would go along, one way or the other. If they stood by The Genesis, then that would be dealt with. If they fought for Jerry, all the better. Jerry's single-minded goal was The Genesis's destruction. That was it. Nothing else mattered. Once The Genesis was gone, then humanity could be free to set their own destiny, but Jerry, The Eight, The Named, would not allow them to delegate that choice to another entity.
He found Caesar at twenty-five, and at thirty-three, the time had come to make a decision.
Chapter Forty-Three
"You were going to get yourself killed. That was as clear as anything. Something inside your head, I don't want to say flipped on, but perhaps finally filled up. Grace couldn't stop you."
Caesar's back rested against the chair. He still hadn't glanced at Paige, but now he wasn't thinking about her. He was thinking about the past eight years of his life. He was thinking about someone watching him every single second. Not even The Genesis kept those kinds of tabs on people. The Genesis just waited on humans to slip up, eventually, if they were Unnecessary. This old man, though, this group—they watched. They studied him. All the way to this point.
"We saw the tests of the newest crop, saw who you would need to liquidate, and we intervened. We created an account for Paige, created a last name and identification numbers. Created a life for her and assigned the girl to her. I needed to see what you would do, Caesar. I needed to see if you would die for this girl."
"Then why come to me on the train?"
"Because I wanted to frighten you. I wanted everything in your life telling you not to do it. The person I need, that we need, is going to have to look at the most powerful entity ever created and then, somehow, kill it. If you had listened to me on the train, had decided not to save the girl, I would have let you die. Eventually you would have said something too outrageous for April and she would turn you in and that would be the end." The old man stopped talking and turned slightly like he was going to say something to Paige, but then faced Caesar again. "The plan was to remove you as soon as you did it. For Paige to take you and bring you here the same day. And if I'm being honest here, she messed up. That's exactly what she should have done, but she didn't. Go ahead and ask your question, though. Ask what you're thinking."
"The little girl didn't need to die," Caesar said. "Laura didn't need to."
"That's what Paige thought too. That's why you almost died. That's why your parents died. The plan was to extract you but Paige tried to get the girl out. Tried to get her to us. She should have left the girl at a train stop and allowed The Genesis to run its course with her."
Caesar looked up at Paige. Her eyes were dry and hard, but a sadness rested in them. A sadness that said, Fuck you. You don't know anything.
"She almost got you and herself killed doing so. The applications got the girl and...the hell with it." Jerry turned around to Paige. "Show him."
Paige still looked Caesar in the eyes. She didn't glance down at Jerry, didn't question him at all. She turned around to the wall and lifted up the back of her shirt.
Stitches ran from the bottom left of her hip, across her kidney, to the top right of her shoulder blade. Long, black stitches that were pulled deep onto either sides of the slash, of what would turn into a scar that she could never hide, that would never fade. Red flesh outlined the entire wound, but it didn't appear infected or inflamed. The pain though, the pain to stand up, to lay down, to move—every time she did anything with her body, that skin stretched. That wound rubbed against the meat beneath. The bones.
She pulled her shirt down and turned around, finding his eyes again. Fuck you. You don't know anything.
"We've got her as drugged up as we can now, hoping infection doesn't come, but she nearly bled out. She nearly died, all for that colorblind girl." Jerry turned back around to find Caesar. "If The Genesis had killed you, I would have killed Paige myself."
The room went silent and Caesar looked at the table in front of him. He'd listened for an hour, maybe more. He heard the story, heard his own piece in it. Knew what this old man, this cyborg, wanted from him. Now he knew that this old man would kill those he trusted most for a person he just met.
"My whole life has been spent searching for you. The past eight years, I've watched you, learning everything I could. I've studied you the way a scientist would an entity from another planet. I wanted to know everything about you. I wanted to know whether you were the one I needed. You are, Caesar. All the rest of us, myself included, we're fodder. We could all die tomorrow, and if you lived, there'd be a chance. We can't go back. This wasn't what we wanted, but we can't change what happened."
"Why did The Genesis kill them? Why not just end me?"
"The Genesis is worried about me. It knows what I've been doing. It knows what those before me have done. We're nothing to it, just a necessary part of the process of correcting humanity. We are the few errors it makes and it feels when the time comes, if we ever decide to revolt, it will kill us swiftly. I suppose it thought you were a chance to get to me—because I'm the one that's growing The Named."
Jerry stood up. "It doesn't know you like I do. You're what I've waited for even when I didn't know I was waiting for it. A thousand years I hid, having to cut my body up to keep from dying, wanting vengeance for what was done to me, wanting vengeance for what was done to all of us. You're the culmination of three hundred years of thought, Caesar. You've got to make the choice, though. You've got to decide to come with us, to lead us. You're parents aren't coming back and neither is that little girl. Hate us, hate me, if you want. Hate me until this thing is over, and if I live through it, kill me. Just help me see it through." He turned his head slightly over his shoulder and looked at Paige for a second. She turned from the room and left, closing the door behind her.
"You have a choice. I don't know if I've left much of one for you, but it's there. You can join us or you can leave. If you leave, I don’t know what you’ll do or what will happen to you. If you come with me, then we go to the end. The end is whether you die or it dies. Nothing ends until one of those things happen."
Jerry smiled and looked at the ground, shaking his head. "Unfortunately, Leon doesn't get a choice. You made the choice for him when you decided he lives. He's stuck here. I don't know what the hell he's going to do. The average IQ here is around one-fifty and he's sitting right at one hundred, but we'll find work for him. It won't be what he's used to, but it's better than the alternative. Paige went to get him now. Talk to him. I'll return in a few hours. I'll need your decision then."
Chapter Forty-Four
"They're not letting me leave, are they?"
Caesar shook his head.
"That's what I thought," Leon said. He walked over to the window, staring out at the desert before him. "Jerry said there are tunnels for miles underneath this place. An old military base."
He listened but Caesar said nothing.
"I know the choice they put to you."
Caesar still didn't talk but what did Leon want him to say? Leon knew he wasn't leaving this place. He knew now that he threw his previous life away the moment he told April. The only thing left to chance after that act was whether Caesar would kill him.
"I'm unsure whether to thank you or not. We both lost our families, and in the end I guess I'll wear that guilt, but that doesn't make my wife's death any easier to handle. It doesn't make me want to keep on living. I could probably ask Jerry to kill me; I doubt it would give him much grief to do it, but I'm too much of a pussy for that."
The desert was a grim place. Leo
n didn't know that until the past few days. Life was hard to come by in the desert, hard to sustain, hard to create. Life came easy in the cities. Sustainable, happy, easy life. April's death, this entrapment, all of it had made his own life a desert. One where the heat beat down on him and ricocheted from the sand below, where shade was nonexistent, and water a luxury. He would keep going though. What other choice did he have? Caesar didn't want him dead and he wasn't going to kill himself; that left only life.
"What are you here for?" Leon asked. "They wouldn't tell me anything about you, only that you got to decide if I lived."
"You won't believe it," Caesar said.
Leon didn't think Caesar was looking at him, thought he was most likely staring at the table. The levity that usually existed between them was gone. Maybe dead, maybe hiding, but gone for now.
"Well, why don't you just tell me because there's not much else to talk about."
"That old machine—"
"Jerry," Leon said without thinking.
"Yeah, Jerry. Basically, everyone here is smarter than anyone else on Earth. He gathered them. Found them, the ones The Genesis couldn't find or kill, and brought them here. He was looking for me he says. I don't know everything, but he thinks I'm to lead them."
"Against?"
"The Genesis."
Leon turned around and looked at the back of Caesar's head. "To do what?"
"Kill it."
Leon laughed. He laughed and then the entire room grew as silent as the desert outside, without even the wind to stir things. "Well, you're wrong. I do believe you, at least I believe that's what Jerry wants. He's an idiot though. I don't care how smart any of these people are here; he's a goddamn idiot if that's his plan."
"You're kind of tied to it now," Caesar said.
"And I'm a goddamn idiot for getting myself in this situation."
Caesar laughed and Leon couldn't help but smile at the sound. It hadn't changed in twenty years, his laugh.