by David Beers
In the end, Jerry thought The Genesis would use everything it had at its disposal to stop him. In the end, Jerry thought Caesar might have to destroy a large portion of the human race if he was to stop The Genesis.
And that was why Caesar didn’t mind waiting. He didn’t mind Jerry plotting everything out for a long, long time. Caesar was fine with dying, invited it really, but he didn’t know if he had what it took to kill a man while looking him in the eye.
“You will,” Jerry had said.
“And what makes you think that? I’m sitting here telling you I don’t think I can.”
“I watched you for a long time, Caesar. I watched you before you really even knew who you were. I watched you when you were a child. I watched you while I was watching others, watching many of the people that live here, that will serve under you. You’re the only one I’ve met that can do it. You don’t have to believe it now, just know that I do. You’ll do what is necessary when the time comes.”
Caesar thought his trust might have been misplaced. He thought the old man, the cyborg, might have made a mistake. He couldn’t tell Jerry no, though. He couldn’t tell him he was wrong, because the man had made his mind up. Jerry had made his decision on this rebellion long ago, Caesar was just filling his role.
He watched a rattlesnake slither across the sand, its tanned skin nearly blending in completely with the dust surrounding it.
That’s what Jerry wanted him to be. That snake rolling across the sand, single-minded on probably one thing during this entire day. Finding food. Food, that’s what Jerry wanted him to focus on. Finding prey and killing it. The rattlesnake had no problem with that. Even now, Caesar could look into the thing’s eyes and see no emotion. No fear. No love. Nothing but the reptilian brain that told it to feed and survive. Feed. Survive. When Caesar showed up six months ago, he thought he might be able to be that person. He thought he could be what Jerry needed, what he wanted, but he thought that because his entire family was ripped from him. Literally melted before his very eyes. Now though, six months later, did he feel the same?
“What are you out here for?” Grace asked.
He knew she was there. Always there, always listening. He resented it before, but now...
Now she wasn’t assigned to him by The Genesis. Now he assigned her. Now he brought her here, and still she chose to stay close to him. She could have followed anyone in this place, and with over a hundred people, she had plenty to choose from. She could have followed no one. She could have left completely and gone out into the world, lived anywhere she wanted outside of The Genesis’ grasp. Seen Earth in ways that no human or application ever would. She hadn’t though, at least not yet. So far she stayed with him, just as she had in their previous life.
“Wondering if I can be that snake over there, I suppose,” he answered.
“You think you can?”
She didn’t have to ask what he meant; Caesar understood that she knew him as well as he knew himself.
“No,” he said.
She didn’t say anything at first and they watched the snake slither into a hole it found in the ground, perhaps sensing a rodent down inside.
“I think you can. I think Jerry’s right. I don’t think it’ll be that hard of a transformation, really.”
“You think that highly of me, huh?” He asked.
“You sacrificed me for your thoughts easily enough. I think you can do it for others, too.”
Before Caesar could say anything, he heard the door open back at the bunker.
“Hey!” Someone shouted. “Jerry wants you, Caesar!”
He turned around and looked at the teenager standing in the doorway. His name was Pat.
Caesar didn’t say anything else to Grace. Instead he walked to the bunker to see what the old man wanted.
* * *
Caesar watched Paige walking down the hallway. They were going to get to the door at just about the same time unless he slowed or sped up, which he was wont to do. Things had been slightly worse than awkward between the two of them over the past few months. His anger at her subsided fairly easily; he understood why she did what she did, and understood now better than ever what it cost her. What it still might cost: her very life. And still, knowing that he had slept with her, had almost sacrificed himself for her happiness, for someone that didn’t really even exist—he couldn’t push past it. Couldn’t try to get to know the Paige that actually lived here. She didn’t seem to want him to either. Out of all the people he studied with, that he designed with, she was never one of them. Jerry kept them away from each other and Caesar hadn’t asked for that, so he could only assume she had.
He turned the knob on the door and opened it for her.
“Thanks,” she said, walking into the room before him.
It looked like Jerry was calling everyone, not just him, because he saw Leon turn into the hallway. Caesar let the door close and waited on his friend. Leon was invited to things because Caesar asked that he be. Jerry would have been more than happy to leave him mopping floors and cleaning dishes, maybe a little cooking every now and then, but Caesar wasn’t. Plus, everything Jerry said in their meetings, Caesar had to relay back to Leon, and that was a pain. So now, on anything important, Jerry acquiesced and let Leon come.
“What’s this about?” Leon asked as he neared Caesar.
“Don’t know. Pat just yelled at me to show up. Who told you?”
“Manny,” Leon said. “Hopefully he’s come up with some kind of plan.” Leon passed Caesar and pulled on the door, ready to walk in.
“Hopefully,” Caesar said quietly, following.
Paige had already taken her seat at the table—it was a flimsy thing, nothing like King Arthur and his knights that Caesar read about. It looked more like something you would use for a picnic seven hundred years ago, its age the same as most of the things inside this place, and held together by spare parts, tape, and a lot of care from its owners. Paige sat to Jerry’s left and Manny to his right, the same as they always did, in the center of the table. Leon and Caesar found their seats. Most of the people called for these types of things were here: Tim, Keke, Alex, Ryan, and Rebecca. The Eight. There were a lot of people in this bunker, but these were the eight that mattered the most, the eight that kept up the traditions, the original thoughts of the first. Ryan and Rebecca were the oldest, edging into their sixties. The rest ranged from mid-thirties to just below sixty, with Paige the youngest. The table once held just these eight, and before them, a different group of eight, but always that number. Leon and Caesar made it ten; two new chairs had to be pulled to the table for them.
“Thank you all for coming down here,” Jerry said once Caesar finally sat. “It’s a bit short notice, I know, but I wanted to give you the information as soon as I had it.”
A few people nodded and a few people said things like, “No problem.” Caesar remained quiet and watched the old man, the person who had become his mentor.
“We know what we have to do now, the first step on a long map. It took a good bit of time to even find these steps, and that’s one of the reasons we’ve waited so long since finding Caesar.” Jerry nodded in his direction. “I’m going to explain to you all what I’ve found out and then my suggestions for what we do. Then I want to hear what everyone thinks, okay?”
More nodding.
“The Genesis has made an application for nearly everything. What we once thought was a singular intelligence has morphed into an almost decentralized intelligence. There are applications like Grace, who I’m sure is buzzing around here somewhere, but there are also applications that act more as deposit boxes. The Genesis uses these things like a safe, it deposits information in them that it doesn’t want to keep, that might be too cumbersome for it. It’s hard to imagine the amount of information it must store, and some of these applications are nothing more than storage units, to keep from weighing down the central intelligence. There are literally applications that know only the culinary tastes of seventeenth cen
tury France.”
Someone laughed at the table, but Caesar didn’t look away from Jerry. It was coming. What they had to do. Jerry was explaining the background but what Caesar should do came next.
“Not all of the information housed in these applications is trivial, though. Some is quite important, and the applications created are well protected and well equipped to protect themselves. We’re looking for a specific one, one that holds information that relates to the centrality of The Genesis. We all know that The Genesis can live anywhere, can live in the air around us if it needs to, but that’s not the most efficient way for it to continue progressing. Spreading out like that causes lapses in communication, just in the simple time it takes for molecules to speak to one another. There is a central location that The Genesis lives at. This location, along with a near infinite number of other locations important to The Genesis is kept in one application. If we capture it and download what it knows, then we’ll know where to go. We’ll know where The Genesis lives.”
Jerry paused and looked around the table. No one spoke.
“There’s one person in the entire world that might be able to tell us where this application is. That’s how important it is. The person is named Gary Pierre and he works in Quadrant Three. His job is unique, and he might be the only human in the world allowed to live when he clearly doesn’t meet specifications. He’s autistic, has a near paralyzing fear of speaking to anyone, of being around anyone, of doing anything that is not completely solitary. The Genesis uses him specifically because of this; it uses him to process applications that it generates and to create their physical form. To take the code it spits out and build it into something that can traverse the world.”
“Why doesn’t The Genesis do it? Or use another application? Why use a human?”
Everyone at the table looked at Leon. Caesar wanted to smile, would have, if his brain wasn’t already leaping to the conclusion of Jerry’s talk. The answer to Leon’s question was obvious to everyone else at the table, which is why no one asked it but him, but Leon couldn’t help it, and didn’t care either. That was the funny part. Surrounded by a table of brains, Leon couldn’t care less about asking a question that everyone already knew the answer to.
Jerry stared at him for a second, his mechanical right eye not showing any of the emotion that his left one did. Jerry fought this war for Leon, but he didn’t like him sitting at this table.
“Compartmentalization. All applications are connected back to it, all of them, except perhaps Grace. That doesn’t mean that every application has the knowledge The Genesis has though, only that The Genesis has the application’s knowledge. If it were to allow another application to do the job that this man currently does, there’s a possibility of cross-pollination, of other applications finding out more than they need to. If The Genesis does the job itself, it’s wasting resources. This man, because of his mental problems, will never tell a soul. He will never ask for another job. The monotony of it attracts him and he’ll keep at it until he dies.”
Leon leaned back in his chair, nodding. “Makes sense,” he said, and Caesar finally smiled, covering his mouth with his hand.
“Glad we could fix that little problem for you. Now,” Jerry looked around at the others, “I propose that Caesar and I go find this man and we discover what he knows. He may know where the application is—it’s called The Tourist—he may not, but he’s our best chance. We leave tomorrow. It will take us a week to travel there and when we find him, we’ll figure out what to do next.”
Silence spread across the table as he stopped speaking, everyone digesting the words. Their leader and the man who was supposed to lead them, both going, the rest of the eight left here alone.
“Why you?” Manny asked. “That’s too dangerous, Jerry. Caesar can go alone or someone else can go with him, but why would you go?”
Jerry turned and looked at his second in command. “I’ll be fine. He’s going to need guidance and there’s no one better to give it to him than me.”
“And what if The Genesis figures out you’re there? It’ll zap you the moment it knows,” Manny responded.
“I’ve gone into cities before, Manny. I went in to get you, didn’t I?”
“That’s different. It wasn’t alerted to you then. You just killed a group of its highest ranked people; it’s looking now.”
“Who would go instead?” Jerry asked.
“Me. Paige. Any one of us.”
Jerry looked away from Manny. “What do you guys think?”
“You should go with him,” Paige said, but not looking at Jerry, staring at Caesar instead.
“I’m with Manny,” someone else said. Caesar didn’t know who because he couldn’t look away from Paige. She didn’t avert her gaze even as other people spoke, giving their opinion on the proposal. Her eyes weren’t hard, not like normal, but they weren’t soft either. They questioned, somehow asking something of him, something that he couldn’t make out. But she asked anyway, and maybe in that question, there was sadness too.
“Can we take a vote?” Manny asked, pulling Caesar from his gaze.
“No,” Jerry said. “Not this time. The Genesis won’t find me because it has no idea we know about Pierre. There are things I’m capable of that no one else in this room is, either, and you all know it. There’s a protection factor as well.”
Caesar watched as Manny turned his eyes on him. “What do you think? Do we send him with you?”
Caesar looked around the table, everyone’s eyes on him now for perhaps the first time since he arrived. Jerry had made his pitch, had done his best to say that it would be the two of them, but no matter how much he wanted to go, it would come down to a vote if that’s what The Eight wanted. There was no dictatorship here. He couldn’t make decrees. Caesar though, he would be the swaying factor. Did he take their leader, the one who created all of this, and risk both of them dying at the same time?
“Yeah,” he said. “We’ll be okay.”
Chapter Six
The time for truth was almost upon them, and Jerry knew it. No one else did, of course, but then it wasn’t their job to know. They trusted that Jerry had picked the right person, despite Manny’s words this morning, and they were going to go along with that choice. It was Jerry’s job to make sure, though.
The ends justify the means. An ancient philosopher once said those words, and Jerry didn’t think a truer thought had ever floated through another person’s mind. He had known for some time what would have to happen, he just didn’t know how he could make it happen. Jerry had witnessed Caesar sacrifice himself for his beliefs, but he hadn’t witnessed him sacrifice someone else. Sacrificing oneself was important; it showed a level of dedication that most people wouldn’t match, but Jerry didn’t want Caesar doing that. He needed Caesar to be there at the end.
He still wasn’t one hundred percent sure how he was going to put Caesar in the right situation, but he knew the autistic wasn’t going to live through this. One way or the other, Caesar would have to kill during this trip.
Chapter Seven
The Life of Caesar Wells
By Leon Bastille
Caesar didn’t know what he was doing when he said those words. How could he? Jerry’s faith blinded Caesar to everything else. Jerry’s faith that Caesar would march them right to The Genesis’ doorstep and then kick in the door. The rest were supposed to believe in him too. That was what Jerry built in that bunker, a group of people searching for a savior, searching for someone who would do what the rest of them could not. Except, he hadn’t. Not quite. Or rather, he built a group of people searching for a savior, but perhaps not the one he brought them.
When Caesar made that comment, he sealed a lot of fates. A lot of people died because of that.
And what else could he have said? Allow someone else to come with him? Jerry was the only person at that table who had any idea what this task would take, and the reason he didn’t lead them all the way himself was because, at some point, The G
enesis would locate him if he pushed far enough, and the entire operation died as soon as that happened. No, Caesar knew he needed Jerry there. And Jerry knew it too. Jerry had to see if Caesar would do what was necessary when the time came and this was the opportunity. Jerry had his beliefs, but he still needed proof. For himself and for the others.
So Caesar told the group that Jerry should go. That they would be okay. Because Caesar needed Jerry.
Others needed Jerry too. That’s what he didn’t understand, I suppose. Others needed him just as much as Caesar, and in many ways, more so.
I look back at these things now and I go back to what I thought. Fuck, Manny. I remember thinking that distinctly, for challenging Jerry, and in doing that challenging Caesar’s importance. I was so incredibly dense, so caught up in my own ego, so focused on the mistreatment I was subjected to. What mattered was Caesar and I, everything else filled in the gaps. I should have spoken up—even if it would have done little—should have said something to keep Jerry from going, to let Manny go, or anyone else for that matter.
But that’s just wishful thinking, I suppose. Wishful thinking that isn’t logical. If Jerry hadn’t gone, there would be no Caesar, not as the world knows him today. There would have been my friend, I suppose, but then we would have never stood a chance. That’s the paradox. If Jerry stayed, then people lived—a lot of them. If he stayed though, nothing changed. Ever. Maybe it still doesn’t, but we had a chance, goddamnit. Caesar gave us a chance even if he ends up throwing it all. All this time on my hands now, just waiting for word of the end, and I have nothing else to do but sit here and think about the what-ifs. So many of them.