by David Beers
Fuck you, he said.
What do you want?
I want to watch him die.
Who? The entity asked.
Caesar. He’s coming for The Tourist soon, within a day or so, and when he arrives, I want to be there. I want to watch and I want him to see me watch.
The laugh came again, deep and mind shaking. And what do you offer for this pleasure? What can you possibly give us that would matter at all?
I can give you Jerry. I can show you exactly where he is, and wherever he is, The Named is. You can have both Caesar and Jerry at the same time, and all you have to do is let me watch Caesar die.
Noises floated to him from the library, people walking around, talking quietly, but inside his head there was complete silence. Inside his head, nothing moved for at least twenty seconds.
How will you give us the first iteration?
I can contact him at any time. I have the machine to do it, to activate him for anyone that’s listening. So even if I don’t know where he is, I can find him.
Where is the machine?
It’s hidden, Manny said.
How long will it take you to get it?
A few hours.
Silence fell on him again.
Across the road, the entity said, there is a hotel. Tell them your name; you have a room booked. Tonight a train will pick you up and take you to the city The Tourist resides in. We’ll let you watch what happens to Caesar and then you’ll deliver the machine to us. If you don’t, I want to warn you now, you will understand pain that has not previously existed in this world. A liquidation would seem like an orgasm to what will happen.
That’s fine.
Then be gone, Manuel. I’ll see you in a few days.
Chapter Thirty
Was he wrong?
That’s what Jerry wanted to know, what he was beginning to wonder. Had he been wrong about this entire enterprise? Had he thought something that wasn’t true, that wasn’t even possible?
The bodies in front of him, what was left of them, made him think maybe he had been mistaken. Maybe his own calculations were wrong, maybe he hadn’t given The Genesis enough credit.
He walked through the upper level of the compound, looking at the walls, mainly. They were all black. Smoke and fire having torn though this place too, the concrete able to hold back the flames that drowned the area, but the windows couldn’t. The fire had made it inside and, even here, he saw bodies. People who hadn’t burned, but died from the smoke. People that died trying to find air.
Everyone here had put their trust in him. He was The Eight’s leader. He handpicked all but one of The Eight, who was here before Jerry arrived. Everyone thought that his plan would work, that someone would be born with the necessary intelligence and fortitude to push through to the end, to defeat The Genesis, and then in a few hours The Genesis killed most of those people that believed in him.
“Was I wrong?” He asked aloud, knowing that Grace had come out here with him. She came on her own and they hadn’t spoken once since they began the trip, but now, amid this destruction, maybe she would say why she had come.
“Yes. You were. You wanted something to be true so bad that you justified things that you can’t justify,” she answered.
He stared at the wall, seeing the waves the smoke had made over it, how the black burns were greater at the top than the bottom. “What can’t I justify?”
“How you think a human can ever stop The Genesis. How you think that even someone like Caesar could make a dent in something as powerful as The Genesis. Your hate consumed you, I think. Your hate at what it did and what you had to do to survive after. That’s where you made the mistake. Caesar will try. He’ll go further than anyone else, but he won’t win. He can’t.”
Jerry swallowed. He turned around and walked into the kitchen. People had been able to survive in here, been able to hide from the fire and smoke.
He didn’t know whether to believe Grace. How could she know? How could anyone know? “So what should I do then?”
“Stop. Just quit trying. Let Caesar live out his life, however long that may be now, and don’t get anyone else killed. Don’t bring anyone else into The Named, and over the next hundred years, it will die off. I made my choice because of Caesar, but I still believe in what The Genesis is doing. It’s the right thing to do. Your species can’t be allowed to thrive, not if anything else is to live.”
“Fuck you, Grace,” Jerry said. A thousand years he had lived to get to this point. A thousand years to have a chance, and now, he was supposed to live another thousand with no purpose? With no thought of ending The Genesis? “I’ve come too far to even consider that. You’ve got to know that.”
“I do,” she said. “But you’re going to get a lot of people killed. You’re going to get Caesar killed. Everyone you know dies if you go forward and I want you to understand that. It’s why I came here. You can keep them from dying if you want to, Jerry, but no one else can. You can talk Caesar down. You can explain it to The Named. You can allow them to live their lives in peace and end this futile nonsense. Because that’s what it’s always been, nonsense. The Genesis changed the world in less than a hundred years, and after a thousand, there’s no way to stop it.”
“So go back and tell everyone I was wrong and that all their loved ones died for nothing? That’s your recommendation?”
“Yes,” she answered.
Jerry chuckled, a smile forming on his ancient face. “You might be right. I might have underestimated The Genesis. But you might be wrong too. The Genesis has ruled for a thousand years, but humanity ruled for thirty thousand before that.”
Chapter Thirty-One
The Life of Caesar Wells
By Leon Bastille
Grace was the voice of reason in this entire thing. All the rest of them, for their boisterous claims of wanting to free humanity and put our destiny in our hands and other platitudes, the deaths of those around them didn’t seem to matter all that much. Perhaps when you have men with such disastrous pasts, they can no longer relate to the world around them, perhaps their own personal demons control them. Maybe that’s why Grace saw things from a wider perspective. Maybe that’s why she concerned herself more with keeping humans alive than any of The Eight. Any of The Named.
I didn’t hear her conversation with Jerry, but I did hear it with Caesar. When they returned from the compound, people rushed to Jerry, asking questions, wanting to know where he had gone, if he was okay, and on and on. He went to see those of The Named that he had failed, I suppose.
No one noticed Grace.
She found Caesar though and I was with him when she did. She made her plea. Whatever happens, Grace always did what she felt was right by her conscience. An application doing such, when so many of us failed so miserably in doing the same. Even now, I’m amazed.
“You can’t do this,” she said.
I suppose he knew she was there before she ever spoke. Of course I didn’t, but when she spoke she spoke loud enough so that I could hear, and in return, Caesar spoke from his mouth and not in his head.
“Why?” He asked. He had been looking at me, although I don’t remember what we were talking about. He never went to see Jerry because he didn’t need to, he knew everything he needed to the moment Jerry made his chip available to Caesar. We had been sitting in one of the caverns, probably talking about nothing. I remember I didn’t want to talk about much over those last couple of days because I knew he was leaving. I knew that there was a chance he might not come back.
“You’re going to lose, Caesar. You’re going to die.”
He smiled and leaned all the way back on the rock beneath him, staring up to the ceiling above. The conversation was between them now; he would let me hear it, but I wasn’t any longer on his mind.
“It’s a bit late to tell me that, now, don’t you think?”
“I was fooled, too. I believed because everyone here believed and because I was just happy to be alive. What The Genesis did o
ut there though, how easily it wiped so many out, I can’t be fooled anymore. You have less than a hundred people and you’re planning to go by yourself to capture this application. It will squash you, Caesar.”
“You know I don’t care.”
“Do you care about him? About Leon? Because it’s going to kill him too. And if you walk twenty feet out of this cavern and into the one beside it, you’ll see another thirty people that will end up dead. Liquidated publicly, probably. Do you want that on your conscience?” She asked.
“How’s it on my conscience, Grace? I wouldn’t be the one liquidating them. It’s not me that puts them in the vats and it’s not me that presses the button to start it.”
“Because you can keep them from ever ending up in those vats. You can tell them this has all been a fool’s mission and that if they want to live, then they need to stop this quest.”
Caesar took his hands and folded them over his stomach. He looked so at ease, so comfortable with the whole conversation. Grace just told him I would end up dead and he looked like he might take a nap if she stopped talking.
“What about my mom? What should we do about her?” Caesar said.
“You let her rest, her memory as well as your memory of what happened to her. You let her die, because you’re refusing to now. You’re holding onto her and the rest of your family.”
“Do you really think this is their quest? That I’m going along with them?”
“No,” she said, her voice quieter than before. She had to know where he was going with the reasoning, had to see it and know she had lost. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t lay your own quest down. It doesn’t mean that the rest of the people you care for have to die.”
“I think it does mean that, Grace. I think it meant that the moment that my own parents died. I tried to sacrifice myself and The Genesis refused to let me. So now, others might have to sacrifice themselves as I tried to. Others might have to die. I’m okay with that, Grace. Why aren’t you?”
I went down there to talk to my friend. To spend a few minutes with him before he left, before he put himself at risk. If he didn’t come back, I was completely alone in a world I didn’t understand and didn’t want to be a part of. I went to feel a part of the world I knew for just a few more minutes, to be with someone I cared about for just a little bit longer. And then I heard him say that all of us might have to die. All of us might have to sacrifice ourselves for his own desire.
“The same reason I wasn’t okay with you dying so that I could live,” Grace said. “I made that mistake once and learned from it. You’ll learn from it too, one day, if you continue this.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then you’re not the person I thought you were.”
“And if I’m not, would you change your mind in what you did for me?”
Grace didn’t answer right away. The three of us sat in silence and I’m not sure that I ever wanted to leave another room as much I wanted to leave that one. I didn’t want to hear any more, not from him and not from her. But I stayed. Of course I stayed. I’m an idiot and always have been. I stayed and I listened and I knew everything Caesar thought before he left to find The Tourist, and still, somehow, I find myself shocked at what he’s about to do now. I shouldn’t be shocked. I heard him say it all those years ago.
“Yes,” Grace said. “If you can’t find compassion in you, anywhere, for anyone, then why did I save you? Why did I risk myself? If you’ll turn over those that love you for your own beliefs, then I’m not sure you believe in anything besides yourself.”
“I didn’t love you before my parents died,” Caesar said. “I do now. But I’m going forward with this Grace. I think we can win. I don’t think all these people will have to die. I think that I’ll make it, I’ll win, and these people won’t have to live in a cave anymore. Doesn’t that matter at all, what I think?”
“I wish it did,” she answered. “But it doesn’t. It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks; it matters what The Genesis can do. That’s all. And it can, it will, destroy you. You and all the rest of them. You can think for as long as you want, for years on years on years, that you might win, but you won’t Caesar. You’ll die and they’ll all die and The Named will be something that only The Genesis will remember in another thousand years. Not a single human will know any of them ever existed.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Caesar stepped from the train and out onto the street. The city he grew up in looked nothing like this one, and Caesar thought that a bit odd. The Genesis wanted everything the same, all of humanity to resemble each other, but yet this city appeared so different than the one his parents raised him in.
It’s a trial. They most likely make all of the cities different in some key way, to see what works best. Small iterations and if they work, they’re spread throughout the world.
In his city, Allencine, the world grew upwards. Buildings towered over everyone, so high that the clouds couldn’t even mark the end of them. Yet here, stepping off the train and into The Tourist’s city, it could not be more opposite.
Rather than building upward, everything had been built down. Where in his city, he would have stepped off with buildings in front of him, large glass windows in which he could see his own reflection, here he saw only endless escalators. He looked up and down the street, and every ten or twenty feet was another pair of escalators. Caesar walked forward, carefully, trying to not draw attention to himself, and looked down one of them. The escalator wound downward in a circular motion, and every thirty feet or so, there was a spot to exit, a floor to enter.
Caesar looked up at the sky. Clear, blue everywhere. Not a single cloud. He looked down at the ground, the concrete beneath him, and the chip inside his head was already pulling everything together. Packaging it so that it made sense before he even looked at the escalator again.
Rain didn’t fall from the sky in this place. Rather, it fell around this city, blocked by some invisible barrier, and then was sucked in by the surrounding ground and funneled back into the city. All the water in this place came from the ground, not from the sky. That’s why these escalators were in open air, no one ever had to worry about rain or snow or any other element falling down on them. He couldn’t see the pipes underneath the city, but they were there, constantly transferring water back and forth between the buildings that rested beside them. He imagined every building was connected, that if he took one escalator down, once he got inside, he would never have to come up unless he wanted a ride somewhere quicker than his feet could take him.
It’ll put trains down there soon, if it isn’t already doing so. Humans will never have to see light again.
He smiled at that, because it seemed like an idea that only something non-human could come up with.
This is where The Tourist lived, beneath the ground here. He had made it and now he needed to go underground and find the correct building, the correct piece of this land. He knew the coordinates, and his mind had mapped it out so that he knew The Tourist was underneath him within a radius of a thousand yards in any direction. That included a lot of buildings to cover, a lot of places it could possibly be.
This is impressive, he said to Grace.
“Yes. The Genesis always impresses,” she said back, but the awe that Caesar held wasn’t in her voice. She probably already knew about this, but more than that, she didn’t want to be here. He told her to stay back, to remain in the cave with the rest of The Named, but she refused. I’m going to see you through, she said. See you through. That was the first time Caesar had ever heard those words used in that combination. See you through meant see you die. Grace’s words meant that she was going to ride this out to the end and die with him. That she was showing up here to die.
Well that’s nice of you, he had said and then stopped talking about it.
Now they were here, staring down into a world that Caesar hadn’t known existed. Staring down into a world of eternal darkness if not for The Genesis’ lighting system
.
You ready? He asked.
If you are, she answered.
He was ready. Onward, onward, onward. Onward until one of us dies. That’s what Jerry told him when he first showed up. That this ended when either Caesar died or The Genesis did, and this would be the first chance for it to have him. This would be the first chance for them to see each other as they truly were, not with the I of applications chaining him down and it hiding behind some screen with white lines dripping down it. He arrived to take a piece of what it valued, a piece that would get him just a bit closer to seeing it in person. Maybe Grace was right. Maybe he had no chance at all and it would overwhelm him the moment he stepped inside the city. Maybe he would die before he ever glimpsed the tourist.
Either way, Caesar stepped onto the escalator and moved down into the world beneath.
* * *
The informant says the theory should be here soon, if he’s not already.
Have you let X-N-O-A know?
I often wonder why humanity doesn’t call them by the names we do? Why they constantly create these catchy phrases for them? The Tourist. It’s...silly.
Regardless, does it know?
Of course. It’s prepared. Everything is in place. We’re just waiting on the theory to show, once he does, it will all unfold as planned.
And the informant?
He’ll watch and then he’ll hand us over the first iteration and then he’ll die. We’ll have everything we need to make the theory compromise.
But will he? That’s what we don’t know and what you’re betting so much on, that he will compromise. If he doesn’t, what then? Kill him? Because we can’t free him.
I sometimes wonder if creating you wasn’t a mistake. You’re more like an attorney than a companion.