by David Beers
Times like this made Theo glad he hadn't married. He could come home and fall asleep right on his couch without taking off his clothes and would never hear a word from someone else about it.
Theo didn't know exactly what they were doing in the building. Or rather, he knew what they were doing, but not the purpose behind it. He had trained himself for years not to worry about purposes; purposes were for other people and he was a hired hand. It didn't matter where they sent him to do electrical work, there would be a purpose in each building, but understanding that wasn't his purpose. His purpose was to do what he was told.
Years of training and yet this job made him wonder a bit. Because he had never done something like it before, and they were doing it in the most complex way possible. It easily added on an extra two hours for each floor they moved through.
Theo wasn't going to ask Mock though. Not that application, not under any circumstances. He was going to keep showing up to work and keep coming home to collapse on this couch for as long as it took to finish this job, then he would hopefully be done with that Mock thing. It looked beyond creepy, though Theo didn't show it, would never show it. All those pieces twisting and turning inside while it stood there talking to Theo as if everything in the world was hunky-dorey.
Theo fell asleep, his brain finally telling him he had thought enough about the building and the application running his job.
Chapter Sixteen
The Life of Caesar Wells
by Leon Bastille
I think the days must have begun slowing down for Caesar. I think the first days after Paige woke up were beautiful to him, but in the end, they couldn't fit the person he'd become. So the days slowed down and he started wondering what came next, wondering how he justified his existence if he wasn't trying to kill The Genesis.
Paige, Grace, myself and Jerry gathered around him. Candles burnt bright, giving the cavern a glow, but also a ghastly look. Caesar asked us to come, but not Keke and Tim. I think for Caesar, those two were inside The Named, but other than that they no longer mattered. What happened at the compound seemed to destroy any kind of hardness about them, any kind of dedication. They lived in the cave, and they helped as much as anyone else when it came to the day to day operations, but strategy? Caesar had cast them out.
I think Paige would have been cast out too, if Caesar wasn't in love with her. It wasn't the attack on the compound that did it for her; I think it was her nearly dying. I think it was Caesar risking his life for her, not to kill The Genesis, but to cure her. I think, after that, she wanted Caesar more than she wanted The Genesis' end.
"What do we do?" He asked the four of us.
Ah, I forgot. There was someone else. Bradley, the application he brought back to cure Paige. Caesar didn't kill it; instead, Caesar performed his own surgery on it—or him, whatever—and made sure that Bradley couldn't communicate back to The Genesis. He put a few other kinks inside it, so that if it moved too far away from the cave, the machine body it used would simply die, falling to the sand where he would wait forever. I asked him why he saved Bradley. His answer? He saved Paige. As always, though, that wasn't the complete truth.
"We wait six months," Jerry said, standing up from his chair and starting to pace.
"You could try mass suicide," Bradley said from up in the air. He hovered above us, listening in. He loved mocking us.
"Six months is too long," Caesar answered. "In six months, everything could change."
"You're the one that came back, Caesar. When you did that, you gave up whatever other chances we had to get to it. I don't know what we do next if we don't wait." Jerry went back and forth across the cavern, his sandaled feet landing softly on the rock.
"Why not just wait, Caesar? Why not just wait and see if your mind changes at all on any of this?" I asked.
He’s the only one with any brains in this whole operation," Bradley said. "You should listen to him. Or me. The mass suicide thing is sure to send a message."
"We'll all be dead in six months," Caesar said. "That's the only thing I feel certain about. The Genesis saw what I did in there, it saw what the chip in my head can do, what it’s evolving into. It's going to find me and it's going to kill everyone close to me if I can't get to it first. There has to be something else." He ignored me. He heard me because he heard everything, but he wasn't listening. I threw my thought out there like someone throws a pebble into the lake, knowing that I would never see it again.
Jerry leaned against the wall, putting his arm against the rock and his head against his arm. "We've got to leave this place. It'll be able to harvest Manny's memories and when it does, it'll come here."
"Vegas?" Paige asked.
"Yeah. We've got to start moving everyone as soon as possible. Within a week, but preferably sooner. Only as long as it takes to make sure everyone is completely ready, and anyone sick or injured are able to be moved.
"That doesn't answer my question," Caesar said. I don't know if he saw what I saw, that Jerry was thinking about his people, about The Named, and how he could keep them safe. That Jerry, the one who basically created Caesar, was leaning against a wall and wondering how he would move everyone from this dangerous spot. Caesar, though, he went back to The Genesis. How do we kill it? How could he get to it? How? How? How? Everyone else in the cavern was a backdrop for his purpose.
"I'm out of ideas, Caesar," Jerry said. "It'll take time. It took us six months last time. It's going to take just as long this time, to follow any leads and see if they work."
"We don't have the goddamn time," Caesar said. "You want to get these people to Vegas, fine, but they'll all be dead as soon as you get there. We have to fucking find this thing, Jerry."
Grace sighed from across the room. She was against a wall, out of the semi-circle that Paige, Caesar, and I formed, and across the cavern from Jerry. Caesar and Paige turned around to look in her direction.
"There's another way. A way that might give you more insight," she said.
"What are you talking about?" Caesar asked.
"I didn't want to tell you. I still don't. But what does it matter now? You're right. If you don't try something, all these people are going to die." She stopped talking for a few seconds, and I imagine she was thinking. Wondering if she should tell us what she knew.
"What is it, Grace?" Caesar asked, having stood up as if he was talking to a person he could look at. The edge in his voice was gone. Did he sound like he had been betrayed? Hurt? I think so. I think realizing that Grace kept something from him cut him in some way.
"You can connect digitally, Caesar. When you sync, now, you have the ability to enter the digital space that The Genesis operates in. At least as many applications live inside it as outside of it, making sure communications travel correctly, monitoring for abnormalities. I don't know exactly what you will find, but there's a lot inside it."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because your family is in there, Caesar. Cato. Your Mom. Your Dad. They're all inside, along with every other person who ever lived. Their entire personality profiles live somewhere in that digital world, kept like a memory, so that The Genesis never forgets what has come before. If you go in there, you're going to meet them. You're going to meet them and you're going to have to tell them what you've done."
Chapter Seventeen
It took Caesar a day to get back to Allencine, the city of his birth. Grace said nothing as he packed, her being the one that gave him the idea to do this. Leon asked him not to go. Paige asked him why.
"I don't have a choice."
"Then The Genesis controls you," she replied.
"You know it's different."
"How?" She asked, sitting on his cot.
"Because I'm putting this on myself. I don't have a choice because if I don't do this, you're going to be dead in the next six months."
He picked up the same dusty bag that he'd been carrying since he started this business. He told her that, but was it the real reason or was he try
ing to leave without a fight? Partly, he was telling the truth. But it wasn't the only reason. Sure he wanted Paige and the rest of The Named to have a chance of survival, but, he wanted The Genesis. He wanted to see his family again. He wanted to speak to his father, despite what Grace said. He wanted to tell Sam what he'd done, and hear his thoughts. There were a lot of reasons driving this and they didn't all tie back to Paige.
"That's a nice sentiment," she said. "Even if it's nonsense."
In the end, he left. It didn't matter what anyone said, he was going to sync and he was going to see his parents. He would find out whatever information he could inside that digital world. Jerry would take care of The Named; Caesar wasn't recruited for that.
He rode the elevator up and up and up. Somehow he had forgotten what this felt like, to ascend to the highest levels of the world, to push past even mountains. He had spent his whole life riding this very elevator, and yet, it seemed like a foreign world to him.
Caesar was inside his parents' apartment complex, riding the elevator to their old home. To his old home. New people inhabited it now, but they wouldn't be there. They would be at work and Caesar was going to see what the place looked like. He was going to see what they had done to his parents' home and then he would sync.
He stepped out of the elevator and walked down the hallway, thinking about the night he showed up and told his father about his plans. He remembered Grace telling him how stupid he was, how stupid this was. That he needed to go home and stop all of this madness, but he'd gone to the door anyway, and his father said that he needed to do what would let him sleep at night. Then his father melted down to nothing but liquid flesh. Now, Caesar walked down the hallway to see his father again, except Grace was silent and his father dead.
Caesar made it to the door, and it looked exactly the same as it had when he grew up here. Had he thought it might change? Thought they might have replaced it? No. It was the same door that he had walked through thousands of times. He searched the mechanisms inside the door, finding the levers and gears to twist with his mind, and then moved them appropriately, opening the door as if he had passed a retina scan.
No applications inside? He asked Grace.
"None that I can see."
Caesar walked in.
The smell of the place struck him first. He didn't know it, not until that moment, but his parents held a distinctive smell. The apartment had once smelled of them, and somehow, it smelled sweet, nostalgically so. Their smell was gone; this place was different, even the air moving through it.
The furniture was different too. Things that his father would have never bought now littered the living room. Caesar walked through, taking in everything, letting the chip in his head record every little bit so that he could look at it all again later. He had once lived here. His family had once lived here, and they were all wiped away, completely gone from anyone's memory besides his own. Lives that came and went at the whim of The Genesis. What was this place now, if not haunted? Haunted by Caesar's memories, bringing back the dead with every room he passed. Bringing back pictures of his parents laughing, of his brother playing video games. Ghosts lived, and they lived in this place because Caesar brought them with him.
I don't want to do this, Caesar told Grace. Standing in his parents' old apartment, it was the first time that he didn't want to go forward. Because the ghosts didn't really live here; it was only his imagination, but they did live inside the sync. They would be there and wouldn't be controlled by his imagination, but by The Genesis, or what The Genesis knew of his family. The ghosts would be very real very soon.
"What do you want from me?" Grace asked. "You know where I stand. You don't need my permission to turn around."
But he didn't want her permission. He was telling her because he had to tell someone. He wasn't changing anything though, wasn't going to alter what came next. Not for her or anyone else.
He found his parents' sync in their bedroom, except it wasn't theirs anymore.
Caesar looked at the sync for a few seconds, then he raised his hand and placed it inside, ready to find what he could.
* * *
While Caesar synced, Manny watched.
Not Caesar, but a woman. She sat across the park from him, probably five hundred yards away or more, but he saw her perfectly. The chip inside him lit up everything. That's what it felt like, more than anything else, like a giant spotlight shining down on his entire world. His mind. Reality outside of himself. Other people's motivations and actions. All of it illuminated in a way that he hadn't known before.
The woman was lit up now, and he saw something she didn't want him to see. She had come to watch him, he felt somewhat sure of that. Come to watch him because she knew, somehow, that his child was dead and hers wasn't. She was watching him because it gave her some kind of sick pleasure to do it, to take in his misery and contrast it to the happiness that the child on her lap gave her. The child was Dustin's age, a boy too. She knew. Somehow she knew and so she came here to get off on that knowledge, while he sat in this park thinking about Caesar Wells and what he planned to do to him. Manny wouldn't have even noticed her if he hadn't taken a break from his plotting, but when he did, he saw her over there grinning. Like a jackal.
That wasn't fair, that she could sit over there happy, knowing how messed up he was, knowing the depression that filled him. Sitting there having a good time, at his expense too, because his sadness lifted her joy higher.
He didn't have to take it anymore, though, did he? He worked for The Genesis now and despite how much that might disgust him at a base level, like Jerry used to say, the ends justify the means. He worked for The Genesis because he was going to avenge his wife and son by doing so. And now, this woman wanted to stick her nose into his misery. Well, he could fix that. He could fix it just fine and maybe sweeten his life a bit too.
Because why should she have that child?
He was Dustin's age.
He even looked a little like Dustin.
So if she wanted to come to this park and mock him, what made her suitable to raise that child? Nothing. And what in this park would stop him from taking that child and making it his? What would stop him from naming it Dustin and raising it like he should have been able to raise his actual son? Not a goddamn thing.
Manny stood up from the bench. The plan to hurt Caesar was almost complete. Or, at the least, Manny was a good way into it. There were a few issues to be...ironed out, but he had a good start. He could take a break. There was time for that. He could take a break to have a little talk with the woman across the park. He could take a break to collect a son, that was for sure.
* * *
You see what he's doing?
Is that rhetorical?
No, I'm honestly curious if you're paying attention to any of this.
I love when you patronize me. It makes me realize that I didn't basically create the entire world from my own vision, but then, somehow when you stop talking, I remember that I did.
He killed that woman. He’s losing his mind, not even realizing that she wasn’t a parent. That no one is a parent until a child turns eight. She was a caregiver and out on a routine socialization trip. He took the child thinking it was hers and not ours. The maniac now has a child and there's a missing person as well.
You know that old cliché: you're missing the forest for the trees? It describes you perfectly. You're missing that it's exactly what we want to happen.
We want someone that can't control basic human emotions? We want someone that is becoming a delusional paranoid? Except becoming might not be the right word; he is a delusional paranoid. We want missing people?
Yes to all three. We didn't want a dog on a leash. We wanted a rabid dog cut loose from its chain. We want it to hurt and hurt and hurt everything it comes in contact with. The missing woman? That's simple. We place that on The Named's shoulders and let Mock use it to its advantage. It's all exactly how we want it.
And if he stops listening to us? If
he goes after the theory?
Sometimes I wonder if I didn't make a mistake creating you, like miss a formula somewhere and when you were supposed to be infinitely intelligent, you turned into a retard. We kill him, you dunce. The chip in his brain explodes and that ends him before he ever touches the theory.
And what of the theory? Where is he? He's not out there in that cave anymore. We have no idea where he's at and you know it.
Goodness. You act like we didn't subdue an entire world. Billions of creatures bent to our will, and this one man is missing for a few hours, and you act like the whole plan has come to ruin. I seriously might need to stop speaking with you, because your insanity could be catching.
Keep making jokes. We're in control of nothing right now. We've tried to set up a plan with too many moving pieces. Too many things that we can't control, and you're acting like we can. Keep on prancing around thinking everything is going to work out fine, and when it doesn't, I'll be here to remind you of this conversation.
Chapter Eighteen
Manny saw almost immediately that he could do whatever he wanted. When he gave that woman what she deserved, by killing her and stealing her baby (his baby), a release came out the very next day that incriminated The Named as the perpetrators. So, Manny could kill without consequence. That was good. That allowed a lot of flexibility in what he planned on doing.
His baby sat on his lap in the very same park where he had picked him up. He cried a lot last night, but Manny knew how to handle it. This wasn't his first child after all. He didn't know the baby's original name, but he would grow up with his new name: Dustin.
The child slept in a stroller in front of Manny, while Manny looked out onto the world. Things were starting to feel good, somewhat anyway. He had his plan fully formulated and soon enough he would wreak havoc on those that hurt him. Everyone but Caesar, that's what he had to remember. He didn't want to get too crazy with this and end up hurting Caesar, because he had a pretty strong suspicion if that happened, Manny would end up dead. He had a reason to live now, Dustin. Before, he didn't. Before he would have probably just killed Caesar the moment he saw him, rather than waiting on The Genesis to do it. Now though? No, he couldn't live that reckless, because he had a child depending on him.