by David Beers
Manny was done with him. He was done with all of it.
Of course, he hadn’t told any of them that, because he didn’t know what his own plans were just yet. The past few days felt like living in a fog so dense that he couldn’t see his own hand if he held it six inches from his face. He was blind, only able to think about Brandi, to think about the smiles that his son had just started making. His son had dreamed—even at a few months old, his son was able to dream, and Dustin smiled at whatever he saw in those dreams, smiled and Manny had looked down at him in awe. No more. No more having his wife wrap her arms around him and kiss his lips. No more any of that because they were both dead. Their bodies were probably just about skeletons at this point, maybe even less than that if the coyotes ripped apart their bones when fighting over the scraps. Brandi was now coyote excrement.
And that.
Wasn’t.
Acceptable.
Caesar still lived. If anything, Caesar had grown in power, now dictating what happened to The Eight.
There is no more Eight, Manny. Remember, you got them all killed.
Fine. Fine. Fine. No more Eight, but Caesar still dictated to those that remained. This false prophet. This impostor. How many years had they all searched for someone to lead them against The Genesis and this is what they found? Jerry had to be in on it. He had to have infiltrated the entire Named in order to set this up so that Caesar would lead them straight to destruction. It didn’t matter. Not really. Manny was fine with all of them dying now. He just wanted one thing. He wanted to watch Caesar die. He didn’t care when and he didn’t care how, but he wanted to see it. Caesar was the real reason Manny’s wife and son were dead. If Caesar hadn’t been here, then there would have been no reason for Manny to leave in the first place, to go out and search for The Genesis.
How could he watch Caesar die? That was the question that plagued Manny now. How could he be there when The Genesis finally stopped this man’s heart from beating?
Chapter Twenty-Seven
She sat on his makeshift bed when he turned the corner to his small hole in this cave.
He stopped, not moving forward anymore, but just looking down at Paige.
“Hey,” she said and a swarm of butterflies suddenly found their way into Caesar’s stomach.
“Hey,” he said back.
“You didn’t lock your door.” Paige smiled.
“The locks haven’t been working as of late,” Caesar answered.
They looked at each other, neither saying anything. Why was she here? Why had she chosen his small cot to sit on? Why hadn’t she stood?
“You really think this is the best way?” She asked finally.
“It’s the only way. There’s nothing else we can do. We can’t wait here and even if we find somewhere else quickly, someone leaked our information. Someone will leak it again. It couldn’t have found us any other way. The odds are just too small.”
“You know all of the odds now, don’t you?” She didn’t look to the scar on the side of his head, where the hair had not covered it completely yet.
“Most of them,” he said.
“Do you think you’re ready?”
The same question she had asked Jerry, but now she was asking him. No one else at that pow-wow had asked it. They either accepted his readiness or accepted that Jerry said he was ready, but none questioned him. Fear or awe or simple shock of the past couple weeks, but at least one of those reasons kept them from saying anything to him about it. Jerry hadn’t asked either, not before the meeting or during it. And really, Caesar hadn’t asked himself. He knew he had to go now and that meant it didn’t matter if he was ready. It didn’t matter if he wanted to. He was here and the only one able to do it, so he had to go.
“Does it matter if I am?” He asked.
Paige’s smile returned, but it was a sad one. “I like to think it does.”
“What does it mean, then, to be ready?”
“A couple of things I guess. Are you capable enough to do what is needed when you get there? Do you understand the plan well enough to succeed? And, are you mentally prepared to die, if you don’t succeed?” She didn’t smile as she finished.
“I’m ready to die,” he said.
“And the rest?”
Dying was easy. Dying was what he’d wanted to do since Jerry found him in his parents’ apartment, preparing to throw himself from their sky-rise window, before that even—when Paige first found him ready to step out in front of a train. He didn’t have a problem with that at all, in fact, a large part of him still wanted it. He had a chip in his head and metal for muscles, but so what? What else did he have? Leon? A group of people cowed by an experience that made them almost as complacent as the sheep they were supposed to liberate? A cave and a group of people mourning for their lost? He had nothing. A purpose, that was it. The purpose of trying to kill that which killed him, killed the parts of him that mattered. Killed the parts of him that would have allowed Gary Pierre to live.
And the rest?
“I don’t know. How can I?”
“You’ve seen Jerry move, I suppose. He’s survived a long time. Can you do what he does?”
Caesar smiled, not cockily, but in the same sad fashion Paige had. “Jerry moves slow compared to me, but that’s not what you’re really meaning in those questions is it?”
“No,” she shook her head. “Do you know what you’re doing, is what I mean?”
“No,” he said. He didn’t have any clue as to what he was doing. He had a brain now that could calculate the weather six days out and muscles that moved him with a strength he was just beginning to understand, but none of that meant he was ready. None of it meant he had the slightest idea about what he was doing when he left this place. He knew where to go, and he thought he knew what to do if he found The Tourist, but nothing else. Nothing about what waited for him. Nothing about how to proceed when he finished.
“Then why are you going?” Paige asked.
“Who else is there? What other choice do I have?” For some reason he felt tears at the corner of his eyes. He didn’t know they were coming, and didn’t understand why they were there, haunting him like a ghost. “I’m all there is. Jerry can’t go. You can’t go. I’m the only person who has a chance of surviving.”
“It scares you?” She could see the tears, had to be able to see them.
“Because I’ll probably fail. Someone’s leaking and if they leak this, then that’s the end of it all. If I fail, everyone in here dies, and I can’t even tell you all of their names, Paige. I’m going to get people killed that I don’t even know.”
Paige stood up from the bed and walked over to him, standing closer than she had in months. “So what?”
He didn’t say anything, didn’t move at all.
“We all die and so what? What’s changed? The sun comes up and it goes down and The Genesis lives on. You try and that’s all you can do. The outcome...it doesn’t matter. Not to me. You’re going out there while the rest of us sit here and wait. You’re doing something that all of us had the option to do, almost every single one of us was presented with putting a chip in our heads and we all said no. You’ve gone further than any human ever, already. So stop worrying about it. If even the smartest in humanity won’t save themselves, then don’t put that on your shoulders.”
This was the woman he had met all those months ago. This was the woman that he had sat and had a drink with in a bar. This was the woman that he died for, to make her happy.
For a little while, Caesar stopped thinking. About The Genesis. About Pierre. About Jerry.
He leaned in and kissed her and the rest of the world disappeared.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The Life of Caesar Wells
By Leon Bastille
I suppose I need to dedicate a chapter of this book to writing about what Caesar became. I don’t mean in the end, that’s a whole different subject that we’ll get to soon enough. I mean after the chip. After the computer
was inserted into his brain.
I remember looking at him lying on the operating table, his head open, a scalpel in Jerry’s hand as if this was some kind of twenty-first century hospital. A lot of blood surrounded him but none of us worried about that. Jerry said it was normal, and I didn’t know whether or not it was, so I just believed him. I worried about what Jerry said I should worry about and that was whether Caesar’s brain would take the chip.
“Have you ever done this before?” I asked.
Jerry looked up at me as if I was a bug not worth being stepped on. No one else in the room asked. I don’t know if anyone else had even thought to ask. It seemed like an obvious question to me.
“No.” And that was it. He went back to looking at the brain before him. It’s a weird sight, your friend’s face looking somewhat normal and then watching the top of his head peeling back.
Jerry knew what he was doing and yet he didn’t. How could he, if he had never done it before? He knew theoretically, and I suppose, for someone like Jerry, that’s all you need. It worked. Caesar’s brain took it, the chip wiring infinitely small metal synapses into the tissue surrounding it. And then, a few days later, the man that woke up was different than the one that had gone to sleep.
It’s hard to explain the changes, all of them, and I’m not just talking about the chip. The man I knew a year before that chip laughed and joked and tried to get laid. He was a pleasure to be around. He made my life happier, he and my wife. And in the next year the happiness in Caesar died. Not all at once, but slowly, like someone bleeding it out of him. True, a lot left at once when he watched his parents melt, but it was draining before that too. And it continued to drain after. It’s still continuing to drain, I think, although he’s almost empty. He doesn’t have much happiness left to give.
When he woke up, I think he understood that better than when he went under. The chip allowed him a lot of cognitive functions that none of us will ever possess, that even Jerry doesn’t possess. I’ve watched him have whole conversations with Jerry without ever opening his mouth. I’ve seen him kill things that should have been unkillable, things that should have lived forever—they died at his hands. The chip, as well as the other surgeries, made all of that possible. But that was only part of what changed when he woke up. Before, I think he held some hope. Not a lot, but something. A part of him that thought when he killed The Genesis, he would have some satisfaction, that when he destroyed it and avenged his parents, he might find some of that lost happiness. Maybe even some forgiveness for what he did to the autistic. When he woke up from under the knife, I think that hope was missing. I don’t know if it was the chip that made him see things differently, or if it was waking up to find out over half the group you were supposed to lead had burned alive, but that hope of happiness left.
Caesar awoke determined but hopeless in that he might find happiness somewhere.
He wouldn’t find it in The Genesis’ death, nor in his own. The determination was from somewhere else, some other piece of him. Not the chip. That increased his capabilities, but didn’t change his values. I know he killed Pierre before the chip, but after, he would have killed me if I stood in his way. The only people that could have tried to stop him and not end up murdered were already dead. His parents. Cato. The rest of us...
Did he care for us?
I can’t say no to that. That wouldn’t be fair to him. He cared. He still cares, even now. Hell, he fell in love with Paige again, and no one can deny that. No, Caesar cared deeply for those around him, only, he cared more about killing The Genesis than he did us. Everyone could be sacrificed for that. And he did it without any hope of finding happiness in the end. I don’t understand that and I’ve thought for a long time about it. How does one kill those he loves for a goal that he knows will bring him no real satisfaction?
That’s what I want you to understand here. That when Caesar woke up, The Genesis was going to meet him one way or the other. The Genesis would meet him and The Genesis would at least have to deal with a threat to its extinction. Caesar saw no other way to live his life after the chip was put in; he saw no other purpose to living at all. Not Paige. Not myself. Not Jerry. Not Grace. We were important but peripheral. When he opened his eyes after the surgery, they never strayed from the end game for him. They never strayed from The Genesis.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Leon’s eyes watched his feet as he turned the corner, intent on two things: not tripping over the rocks that jutted up sporadically from the bottom of the cave and telling Caesar what he had just found out.
So when he turned the slight corner to Caesar’s dwelling, he nearly walked on the two of them lying across the floor. Leon had been walking fast, trying to just get there, to just let Caesar know. He hadn’t once expected to find anyone but Caesar lying underneath those sheets.
But, there were two people, without a doubt, and Paige’s blonde hair spilled out over the top of the sheet even if Leon couldn’t see her face. He looked at the two of them, Caesar’s arm wrapped around her, both of their skin bare from what he could tell.
Well, there’s that, I guess, he thought. It was surprising, but didn’t really matter. They both needed to hear it and this was just going to save someone a trip. They got laid and he didn’t have to run anywhere else. Everyone wins.
“Yo, Caesar, get up,” Leon said, nudging Caesar’s back with his foot. “Get up, quick.”
Caesar rolled over, his eyes opening but not having to look around for a single second. He was focused automatically, his face and eyes already knowing who was talking and where they were talking from. Paige moved slower, but rolled over too, lazily trying to cover her chest from being exposed, before realizing someone was standing next to them and then more aggressively hiding herself.
“What is it?” Caesar asked. Leon knew that chip was already making calculations, probably judging some hormones or something in Leon’s own body to make some kind of prediction about what was wrong before it even left his mouth.
“Jerry’s gone.”
Caesar still looked at him but didn’t say anything. His eyes were focused but Leon knew what he was doing, reaching out to either Jerry or Grace or both, trying to see where he went.
“Grace is gone too, but I can’t see her. Either of them, they shut themselves down to me,” he said after a second.
“A few of the others know, but that’s it. They said not to tell anyone besides you.”
Caesar nodded, sitting up but being careful not to pull the sheets from Paige’s body. “No one knows where?”
“No. We woke up and he was gone.”
“Grace must be with him,” Caesar said. “She’s not here.”
“What are you going to do?” Leon asked.
Caesar shook his head and looked down at the ground. “Wait until they get back, I suppose. Jerry and I can’t both leave at the same time, not right now, not until we’re better protected.” He sighed. “Goddamnit.”
The room was quiet for a few seconds.
“So you guys are back to being friends?” Leon asked, finally.
“Shut up,” Paige said, smiling and draping a hand across Caesar’s leg.
* * *
Manny doubted he would go back, ever. First, he didn’t think there would be any reason to after he did this; The Genesis would finish what it started, and second, if it didn’t, anyone in The Named that saw his face again would murder him immediately. No, he was done there with those people. He didn’t know what came next necessarily, only that he wasn’t going back to The Named. That was forsaken. That was done.
Jerry had left Manny’s wife and child there.
That’s what Manny couldn’t stop thinking about as he trekked out of the cave and started back toward Allencine. Wearing a shroud wrapped around his head to decrease the sun exposure, he thought a lot about it. About how Jerry, his mentor, his friend, his leader, had left Brandi and Dustin’s bodies lying in the sun. Lying there unmarked, unless one considered a bird eating them
a marking. Jerry could have brought them with him, could have dragged all the bodies somewhere safe, or at least given them a proper burial. He hadn’t though. He used an excuse that The Genesis would return, or that they couldn’t go back because it was too dangerous, or some other such bullshit. Jerry left everyone there, and in doing that, he left Brandi and Dustin.
He needed to pay for that. By the time Manny walked out of the compound to head to the cave, there wasn’t much left of anyone else to drag. Certainly no possible way to identify anyone, not even as male or female given the scavenging animals’ voracious appetites.
So Jerry needed a bit of punishment too, and Manny would see if he could throw that in the deal.
Manny wasn’t going to reinvent the wheel. He arrived in the city and went to the same place he had synced last time, to the library.
He stuck his hand in the contraption, feeling a bit happy for the first time in a good while. This felt good. It hadn’t felt good last time he stuck his hand in the device; it felt like he was betraying those he cared about. He didn’t care anymore though. Those people had betrayed him. They left his wife and child there; they let them die. And now they followed the man who made it all possible. Caesar-Fucking-Wells. Manny didn’t owe them anything anymore.
But that wasn’t entirely true.
He owed Caesar quite a lot and he owed Jerry a little bit, too. That’s what he decided. That’s why he was here, wasn’t it?
He felt the rods move up his arm, making contact with his mind, and then felt them stop just like last time.
You’ve come back, Manuel Lendoiro. Did you like what we did out there at your little home? I hope no one you cared about was injured.
The good feelings about this died like a cut rose, wilting and fading. This thing, this Genesis or whatever it was, wasn’t his friend. It didn’t care about him or anything he felt. He hated Caesar, but this thing here was just as evil as him. This thing was as corrupt as anything to ever exist.