by David Beers
"You believe him?”
"I don't know what to believe," Caesar said. "The things he did, I know all of that is true. I know that he killed your wife, he killed her assistant, and that in the end, my parents and the little girl, all their deaths rest with him too. He did it for a reason, whether or not the reason is crazy. I don't know whether I can lead anyone or what his plan is for killing The Genesis, but there's nothing back home for me."
Leon turned back around and after a while asked, "What are you going to do?"
"What should I do?" Caesar asked.
"How do I know, man? I'm holding on because I don't have a choice. Jerry hasn't really given me one. If I was at home, sitting in my chair, I'd probably go back and forth to work and wallow around in depression for the next fifty years. Maybe I'd find another wife or maybe I'd be deemed Unnecessary. I only know what I'm doing now because I don't have a choice."
Neither said anything for a few seconds.
"I guess I'd ask you what you're feeling, and I'd base it off that," Leon said. He had felt anger when April relayed what she did. He felt murderous. Now, though, a week later, he felt nothing outside of a sadness that permeated every single cell in his body. The sadness felt like it would never lift, that his cells would never give up their hold on it. Living in this bunker or in a high rise back home, what did it matter? He had maybe another sixty years to live and then he would die. That's what he felt like doing. Waiting on death.
"I didn't do anything to anyone. I took one girl and I tried to keep her from dying,” Caesar answered. “I asked a few questions about why Cato should be so happy with being told where he would work his entire life. For that everyone I know is dead. For that, I have nothing left. You tell me if that seems like a just punishment." Caesar looked up at Leon, his eyes full of tears.
Leon didn't know the meaning of just. Intellectually, yes, but practically? Just was The Genesis. Just consisted of the things The Genesis gave humanity and the things it took away. Outside of that, how were humans supposed to decide such a thing? How was he?
"I don't know, Caesar. I've never known the answer to those things."
Caesar shook his head and turned back to the table. "It's not. It can't be. If there was justice, any semblance of it, I would be dead. Not them. They did nothing. They were Necessary. I'm the Unnecessary one. I'm here though, and they're not."
He stopped talking so long that Leon thought he wouldn't continue again. He turned around and stared out the window. He'd be happy with this for now, as happy as he could be, sharing this room with Caesar and staring out the window.
"Someone dies for this," Caesar said. "Someone is going to die."
* * *
Jerry didn't return like he said. A proxy came and took both Caesar and Leon out of the room. They walked down stairs and then through halls and halls and halls and finally came to a closed door that looked the same as every other door they had passed.
The proxy opened it and Caesar walked in, Leon behind him.
Jerry sat at a table, a book opened in front of him. Paige wasn't in the room, but there were others, people that Caesar had never seen. He didn't look at any of their faces. Just at Jerry.
The old man closed the book and looked up.
"I suppose I should meet the people I'm going to lead," Caesar said.
Chapter Forty-Five
The Life of Caesar Wells
By Leon Bastille
Why did Caesar choose the path he did?
A lot of this book is going to be the hows and the whats, but I think it's important to understand the whys as well. Caesar may or may not change the entire world, that's unwritten as of yet, but he chose a path that he didn't have to. He went down it knowing that death waited at the end, knowing that there wasn't any way he would survive.
I'm not sure I'd call it honor or character or anything so noble. A lot of people died because of his choice. A lot of people he loved. A lot more are going to die as well, people he doesn't know and can't know, but people none-the-less. Maybe it's the way this is going to end that is making me look at him differently. Maybe it's because I see what's going to happen and I don't like it. Or maybe it's because Caesar Wells isn't a saint. He's not some mythical figure to be worshiped. Maybe he's just a man like the rest of us, and he has faults that plague him the same as all the rest of us.
I don't know. I followed him. Others did too. So maybe if he's got a lot of blood on his hands, then we do as well. Maybe all of us who went down this journey are to blame for what has happened and what happens next; we could have seen it, if we had looked.
We didn't. We followed Caesar.
To be continued in The Singularity: Traitor...
The Singularity:
Traitor
by David Beers
Copyright © 2015 by David Beers
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Chapter One
“Who’s going to replace him?” A blonde haired woman asked inside the Population Control Board Room. She sat toward the end of the long, wooden table. She could have been as young as mid-forties or as old as mid-sixties, but with how serious her faced looked, mid-sixties seemed more probable. Eleven other people sat at the table and most of them looked down at their scrolls as she asked the question.
They didn’t have an answer.
It was their job to have one, but how were they supposed to make a decision like this? Caesar Wells had been easy, so easy that most people in this room thought that they might not have to make another choice regarding who ran Quadrant One’s Population Control Program for the rest of their careers. The man was young and should have lived a long, long life. The man was good at his job, too, so there wasn’t supposed to be any need to remove him. No, Caesar Wells should have been in place for a long time and the hardest decision anyone in this room should have made was whatever courses of action Caesar brought before them. No more would be expected.
Until now.
Because Caesar Wells went missing. Went missing six months ago, to be exact, and the people at this table put off the decision of who replaced him in every single one of those months. They met once a month and each month they tabled the succession discussion until the next. They couldn’t do that anymore, though, and they knew it. The Genesis wanted an answer from them, expected an answer from them. They couldn’t continue to shy away from this responsibility no matter how much they wanted to. No one sitting around the table wanted to be Unnecessary, and the only way they kept being Necessary was to make this decision. Who would replace Caesar Wells at the head of the ship? That’s what the blonde-haired woman wanted to know and what no one wanted to answer.
“I’m serious. If we leave here today without an answer for it, the composition of the people sitting around this table might look a lot different the next time we show up. We picked Caesar Wells and he was a great pick, so we can do the same thing again. There’s no reason to think we can’t, to be this scared of doing it.”
A man at the other end of the table looked up from his scroll. “You know we lucked out with Caesar. We didn’t so much pick him as he picked the job for himself and we went along because there wasn’t a single other candidate worthy of the position.”
“Fine,” the woman answered. “Maybe you’re right. Does that change what we have to do now, though? You all got the same message I did this past week. What did it say again?” She looked down at her scroll and blinked through a few pages until she got to the message she wanted. “There it is.’Your decision regarding the vacant job position should be made during the next meeting’. I’m sure the sender of the message was the same for all of us, right?”
The woman looked around the room, trying to find so
meone that would meet her eyes. A few people weren’t actively avoiding her, but most were staring down at the table in front of them, or out of a window, their eyes saying they were deep inside their own heads.
“Look,” the woman said. “Let’s just throw some candidates up on the wall and see what we think, okay?”
People nodded, either looking at her or at their scrolls, fine with the suggestion. Some movement, no matter how tiny the steps, was better than nothing. They knew that. The whole group knew that ignoring the message could make for a lot of vacant positions at this table, and occupied vats in another facility.
The wall at the end of the room closest to the blonde woman came to life, showing a face matched with biographical information to the right.
The blonde woman let out a small gasp. A man at the other end of the table pushed his chair back, standing up as he did, trying to move away from the face on the wall. None of them had ever seen something like it before. None of them had ever thought a face like that possible. It wasn’t...human.
An eye stared out at the group of people, the ones here to choose Caesar Well’s replacement. An eye that wasn’t colored with the blue or green or brown that one would expect, but with a thousand tiny black cameras, looking like the eye of a bug rather than a human. Skin didn’t surround that eye either, but a dull metal, which eventually gave way to flesh. It looked like the flesh had tried to grow up over the metal, wanting to cover the entire face as it was meant to do, but couldn’t. The face on the wall was an old man, or at least half of it was, and the other half was a machine, a grotesque thing not of a human’s womb or The Genesis. A half-breed, something that shouldn’t exist.
“What is that?” Someone said.
The blonde woman didn’t look for who spoke; she couldn’t take her own eyes away from the picture.
The half-breed’s mouth opened, which shouldn’t have been possible. This was a static picture, something from a database, something taken from the past—it couldn’t move because there wasn’t really an ‘it’ at all. And still, the man’s mouth opened slowly, revealing yellow teeth. He started to laugh, a raspy sound that made the blonde woman think about a broom sweeping over an old, wooden floor. The laugh started low, and over the course of ten seconds, grew across the speakers in the ceiling of the room, reaching a height that began to hurt everyone’s ears.
“TURN IT OFF! TURN IT OFF, DAMN IT!” Someone shouted.
The blonde woman broke from her trance of staring at the face that shouldn’t be moving, but was, his mouth going up and down as he chuckled that raspy laugh into the room. Her fingers started flying over her scroll, trying to remove the face, trying to get some semblance of normalcy back into this place.
And then the laughter stopped. The face didn’t disappear, but a deep silence fell across the room, as if they all sat in a forgotten pit, where not even bugs scurried through the dirt.
And then, in a voice that they all knew, that they all had heard time and time again in this very room, a voice that couldn’t have been anyone else but Caesar Wells: “Time to die.”
The fire came from beneath, came from the floor, and those that were scared of making a choice were briefly scared of the heat and force coming from below them, and then they were scared no more.
* * *
The Genesis’ Official Release
Twelve people died forty-eight hours ago in a freak accident, in which old wiring underneath the floors of a building frayed and a fire started. The twelve dead served the people of Quadrant Two unwaveringly for years. The Genesis offers its deepest condolences to the victim’s families.
There are rumors that this was a planned act of terrorism, that some group created this explosion and killed these people. That is categorically false, and the appendix accompanying this release will show the blueprints of the destroyed building, as well as the wiring plans that caused this tremendous accident. It is important that we all remember accidents can happen, regardless of whether humanity is in charge, or The Genesis, and also important to realize that we’ve had no other accidents resembling this in the past thousand years. An evaluation of the wiring team has already started, to see where there are weaknesses in our process and to discover what mistakes were made and by whom.
The report should be finished by noon next Friday and available for the public at the same time.
Chapter Two
Caesar looked at The Genesis’ release.
His scroll showed the same thing that the rest of Earth’s citizens would be getting this morning, the only difference was he had to hack in to get it, rather than having it pushed to him. Nothing else was pushed to this scroll, not now, nor ever again. Anything he wanted that regular citizens received daily, he had to perform some digital acrobatics to read.
This was good, this press release. The Genesis didn’t lie, not unless it absolutely couldn’t help from doing so. In all the books Caesar had read, he rarely saw a time when The Genesis wasn’t completely honest with humanity. Perhaps sometimes it hinted at something that might not be true, but this? No, it never did this. It never sent out a completely false release. Saying something it knew not to be true, something that was demonstrably false with any kind of rudimentary investigation. For the first time, maybe ever, The Genesis was lying to humanity.
Caesar pushed the scroll away and stood up from the table inside his room. The soup he grabbed this morning sat at the corner of the table, a spoon inside the bowl, but barely touched. Forty-eight hours ago he hadn’t been able to eat for a very different reason than this morning. Now, he was excited. Then, he’d been horrified.
Forty-eight hours ago he sat in a room with nine people and watched twelve other people sit around a long wooden table that he once knew well. He watched twelve people that he once thought of, if not as friends, then certainly professional acquaintances. Twelve people he reported to for years, twelve people who had listened to his guidance and allowed him to hold the title that his friends and family respected so much. He watched them all stare at Jerry’s twisted face and then watched as they exploded. He watched as fire erupted from the bomb packs his group had intricately placed underneath the floor, watched as their faces morphed from surprise into pain, and then as fire scorched their bodies and explosions blew off their limbs. He watched people he once knew die in an inferno of pain.
He hadn’t eaten for two days prior to that and the soup in front of him now was the first thing he’d attempted since the explosion.
It sickened him to watch those people die, but he knew it had to be done. They were cowards, all of them—Jerry was right about that—unable to even make a choice of who would replace him. More, none of them cared in the slightest about him. They cared about what he could do for them, the fact that he had allowed their lives to move along so peacefully without ever really having to worry about the crops that grew up under their purview. Did any of them mourn his disappearance? Did any of them mourn his parent’s death? No. Of course not. None of them cared in the slightest about what had happened to Caesar; he was gone and their life would be harder because of it.
That wasn’t why they had to die, though—was it?
That’s just you rationalizing what you did. You stole their lives from them and you didn’t do it because they didn’t care about you as a person; you did it to incite a panic. You did it to let the world know you’re coming.
And now, you’re a murderer.
He looked at the bowl of soup, steam rising up in distorted waves.
A murderer. That was a new word. One that he had used to describe The Genesis. One that he had even used to describe Jerry, both aloud and in his own head. Himself, though? No. He hadn’t been a murderer. Not ever. Wasn’t possible. Except now, it described him too. He had planned out in intricate detail how those bombs would explode, when they would explode, and knew the amount of heat each one would generate, knew that no one would survive inside that room. He did it all knowing that at the end twelve people would be dead.
&
nbsp; And he knew a lot more people would die before this ended.
He remembered the past six months, but not exactly in chronological order. Everything moved so fast that his mind categorized it all by things he needed to know and then things that he could remember if he wanted to but held no dominance in his life. Six months of learning about everyone inside The Named, all one hundred and thirty people. Learning their history. Learning about Jerry, about Manny, even about Paige. Six months culminating in the murder of twelve people, and now here he was, two days later, unable to eat.
Except he didn’t feel guilty about it. Different, yes, but not guilty. He felt like things were about to start moving, and fast. The Genesis put out that statement to help avoid panics, but it wouldn’t work. The Genesis didn’t allow faulty wiring and the citizenry wouldn’t believe it, not fully, not everyone. Something happened in that building and people knew it. Even more, after The Named finished what was happening today, they would know who made it happen, too.
“Caesar, you up?”
Jerry’s voice spoke from the intercom, filling Caesar’s room.
Caesar walked to the wall, missing the conveniences The Genesis had provided him with—the ability to respond to things like this without having to move. “Yeah, I’m up,” he said, pressing the intercom button.
“Come down to my room. I want to ask you something.”
Caesar heard the click as Jerry turned his side of the conversation off; Jerry wasn’t happy, that was clear even over the intercom. He’d probably seen The Genesis’ release, but they both knew that was coming. This was about something else. What would make the old man sound like that?
Caesar picked up the bowl of soup and dropped it off in the communal kitchen before making his way to Jerry’s quarters.
* * *
“Come in,” Jerry said from the other side of the door.
Caesar twisted the doorknob and opened it, walking inside and closing it quietly behind him. He didn’t come into Jerry’s room much. Maybe three times in the past six months? And that was usually to get something from him, something that Jerry wanted him to look at or read. He’d never come here to talk. When they spoke it was in the ‘war room’, a name Jerry created for their conference room, or on long walks out in the desert. This part of Jerry’s life was the most private part of the man, kept away from anyone in The Named. Not by any written rules, just...well, Jerry didn’t invite anyone in here.