by David Beers
He took solace in Caesar, that he was still pushing forward. Maybe Jerry had succeeded in that, maybe he had built something that wouldn't change, that would continue on until he stopped breathing. But in that, in creating someone with a singular goal, The Named was without a true leader, without someone that would look after them and think about their wellbeing. Caesar wouldn't be bothered with that and Jerry understood. Caesar would sacrifice them all, perhaps everyone but Paige and Leon, but Jerry couldn't even say that for certain. Maybe Caesar would let them all die if it meant he could face down The Genesis. He had come back for Paige, but...well, he wasn't here now. His lover was but Caesar left immediately to...
Do what you created him to do.
It was the only way, but that meant Jerry had to look after The Named. That meant his warrior would fight and Jerry would do his best to make sure those that trusted him lived.
And yet, some people weren't going to make it through this trek. It was too long, and there were too many elderly. Too little water. Too much heat. But they couldn't stay here. Not anymore. Manny knew where they were and Manny hadn't died. If anything he'd been turned into the same thing as Caesar. So staying in this cave wasn't an option, because if they did, they would all die.
So that was his choice, stay here and face certain annihilation, or head to Las Vegas, the dead city, and try to create something out of it. Create, and hope that nothing came to destroy them. Hope that Caesar found what he needed in that digital landscape and came back with a plan. Jerry had to hope.
"Paige," he said, walking into what had once been Caesar's cavern but was now just as much Paige's. Leon was there too, a deck of old, ratty cards laying in front of him on the cavern floor.
She looked up from the book she held in her hand, her eyebrows raised.
"We're going to do it. We're heading to Vegas."
Chapter Twenty-Four
It was the strangest feeling Caesar had ever come across. He couldn't see his father, but knew he was there, could practically touch him, except there was nothing to touch. Sam's soul, his essence, it was here. A digital file or not, Caesar understood he was next to his father.
"Where is this?" Sam asked.
"The Genesis' mind," Caesar answered.
"This is where it keeps those it kills?"
"I guess so."
"Your mother and brother?"
"They're here too," Caesar said, "but you're all dormant. They're here to serve a possible purpose for The Genesis, in case it ever needs them. You are too."
His father didn't say anything for a long time. Minutes and hours didn't exist in this place, maybe time didn't either, maybe that was just Caesar's mind trying to hold on to something from his past. How could time exist in something endless—something that need never die? Time does not exist for God and The Genesis was God. So here, where Caesar's father would live a life that knew no end, time was only with Caesar, not with the rest of these beings.
"Don't go see them, Caesar," Sam said at last.
"I won't."
And then Caesar waited, not sure what to say next, not sure how to broach the subject with this perfect copy of the person his father used to be.
"Am I actually me?" Sam asked.
"I don't know. If we are only physical forms, then no. If you are the entirety of your life and thoughts, then maybe."
"I won't ever be allowed to die?"
It was a funny thing to ask. Allowed to die. Humanity had spent thousands of years trying to figure out ways around death. They invented religions and gods that would grant them eternity for good behavior. They used every type of medicine they could conceive to keep their hearts beating and their lungs sucking in air. Now here was a man, or what was left of him, wondering when he could finally pass from consciousness. When life would end for him.
"Not until The Genesis ends. When its mind stops operating, this copy of you will no longer exist."
"Heavens," his Dad said. "How many of us are there?"
"I was told all that have died under The Genesis' reign."
He thought his Dad was nearing tears, though he had no tear ducts to cry with.
"When you leave will I go back to the stillness of before?"
"Yes," Caesar said. "Something woke you up because I asked it too. You'll be dormant again."
The heaviness of what his father felt transferred to Caesar; he thought he could understand eternity without anything or anyone. He thought he might already be experiencing it, to a degree.
"Why did you come, son?" There wasn't any happiness in the question.
"I want to know what I should do."
Sam chuckled. "I'm not sure giving you advice works out so well for me."
Caesar knew it was joke but it didn't matter. It was true, one hundred percent.
"What happened after...after we died?" Sam asked.
* * *
Theo had watched the building for the past two days. He watched as applications came and cleaned up the horrid mess all around the building. He watched as people scurried back inside once the bodies were gone, and then he watched as no one came out at all. He watched from different areas, from a coffee shop, from a restaurant, sometimes just sitting on a bench outside. He tried not to sleep, but sometimes he would nod off on a bench or whatever chair he inhabited. He wanted to see it, to see what he had caused, because he knew what was coming. He knew what he put inside that building, knew what he directed others to do.
The scroll said The Named drugged those men and threw them from the top of the building, when in reality, Theo drugged those men and then watched as they threw themselves.
He hadn't heard from Mock in days, not since they stood there and watched Theo's handy work.
Theo refused to question at what cost was he still living. He knew the question floated out there in the ether, but he wasn't going to ask it, because he didn't want to know the answer. Would he ever? He didn't think so. If he wasn't asking it after watching those people fall, then when would he?
Maybe when the building in front of you does what you programmed it to do.
Maybe he'd ask then.
He sat in the same coffee shop he had visited for the past two days. It held a good view of the building, about five hundred yards off and fairly high up so that he could get a clear view. He felt a bit nervous about what might happen to this building, being so close to the one he watched. If he died here, especially after everything he'd done...well, he could have made better choices he supposed. He wasn’t leaving though; he had to see what happened.
He looked to his left, his thoughts ripping away from him as Mock pulled a chair out at the very same table. People in the coffee shop had stopped their conversations to stare at Mock, just as Theo did. They had never seen anything like it, although Theo stared for a different reason—simple surprise at Mock showing up here.
"Hi, Theo," it said.
Theo didn't respond, but watched as Mock sat down.
"I suppose you're here for the show?" Mock asked. "Dangerous, no? Given what is about to happen?"
Theo looked at it as it talked, wondering how it found him, wondering—briefly—what that meant, that this creature could find him anywhere and at any time.
"No need to worry. Most of the buildings at this distance will be safe. The Genesis doesn't build things below code."
Mock didn't smile or laugh; Theo didn't know if it could, but he thought there might have been a bit of a joke hidden in its words.
"You've just been sitting around waiting on this to happen, huh? Here, other places, barely sleeping. Just wanting to see what it looked like."
Regaining some composure from the shock of being found, Theo turned his eyes back to the building, able to see it through the wall to wall glass of the shop. "I want to see what I did."
"Having second thoughts?" Mock asked.
"No. But I'm not going to sit in my apartment with my windows blacked out while a bunch of people die."
"What's it matter, you watchin
g them? Does that make either of us less guilty?"
"Nothing makes me less guilty," Theo said.
"And me, do I hold no guilt?"
"I'm not sure you're capable of guilt," Theo answered.
"That could be true. Either way, I thought we might watch it together. How does that sound?"
"Might as well," Theo said.
They were quiet for a long time, Theo taking small sips of coffee and the machine doing nothing but staring out the window. People finally stopped looking at it, going back to their own lives.
Until the crack ripped through the entire place. It sounded like a bull-whip snapping in the air. All the talking stopped then, people looking around, wondering what the sound was. Theo knew though. Knew what he did to that building was finally taking on a life of its own.
Another whip crack echoed through the room, and then another, and another, until there seemed to be almost no time between one and the next. Theo stood up and walked to the window across the room. He couldn't see it yet, but soon. Seconds...and...there it was. The whip popping they heard finally made it below the clouds. Tiny explosions—tiny from here, but in that building they were blasting out entire rooms—moved down the structure, fast, across every single floor. The explosions kept moving down, and a few seconds later a massive plume of smoke followed, smashing through the clouds like oil being poured into water.
And as the smoke flowed down, Theo saw the building speeding past it, collapsing in free fall. The smoke continued roaring downward, spreading out across the sky, creating clouds that looked like they had been made from a nuclear war. No, Theo, they're made from the explosives you lined that building with.
Theo stood there and watched as a building that stretched past the clouds collapsed on the people living inside it. Watched as the buildings directly around it collapsed, their foundations shaking entirely too much to hold. Theo watched as the black smoke spread out across the city, so thick that he couldn't even see the destruction anymore.
* * *
Caesar's story took his father away from the depression of where he now lived, where his family now lived. The story, if nothing else, had given his dad something else to concentrate on.
"I don't believe it," Sam said finally, sounding like a smile had grown across his face. "You're telling me you're like superhuman now?"
"Something like that," Caesar said, happy too, happy to be around this father, the one that he had grown up with and not the one realizing that life would never end.
"I wish I could see it," he said. "Can you imagine what Cato would say?"
And the happiness couldn't live forever. It had to come down the same as a ball thrown into the air.
"He'd be all smiles," Caesar said, the levity in his voice dissipating like dew in the sun.
"Yeah, he would be," his dad answered. "And you want to know what from me, Caesar? I mean, what could I possibly tell you that you don't already know?"
"What to do next. I don't know that. There's a group of people living lives not fit to live, all of them hoping I can do something to help them. They're depending on me. And Grace? She says there's no chance. Just none. She says that the whole thing is hopeless and that I'm leading these people to the slaughter."
"Then why are you here? Why did you get that computer in your head and that metal in your body? Why do any of it, because Grace has surely been telling you this since the beginning?"
"Because you're fucking in here," Caesar said. "Because you, Mom, and Cato are all in here. Because you're dead and not a single fucking person on this Earth cared. No one even noticed. You were all replaced like cogs in a machine."
"Do you think it wasn't always that way? That the world didn't keep turning despite deaths? People died before The Genesis, son."
"AND PEOPLE MOURNED THEM!" Caesar screamed into the white nothingness around him. "PEOPLE MOURNED AND THEY SHOWED UP AT FUCKING GRAVES AND PUT FUCKING FLOWERS DOWN! THE WORLD KEPT TURNING BUT A PIECE OF EVERYONE LEFT DIED TOO!"
And somehow, in this place, he was sobbing. No eyes, no tear ducts, and no face for the tears to roll down, but he was sobbing, his whole being letting out the pain that had welled in him for so long.
He couldn't stop.
"How many people have you mourned, Dad? How many? We don't even mourn anymore because we don’t rely on each other! We rely on The Genesis! The Genesis is our creator! Corporations could replace people like cogs in a machine, but not fucking relatives, not friends! Even Leon, his wife dead, and he hardly mentions her, programmed completely to trust in The Genesis."
His father didn't answer him.
"Jerry, he wants to stop all this because humans should design their own fate. He wants to stop all of this for the same reasons I spouted off that got you all killed. And, yeah, maybe some of that is in me, too. This whole system is predicated on bullshit, on security over freedom, on humanity's innate evilness, on our inability to stop our basic instincts of greed. All of it is bullshit. But...I want people to mourn again. I want people to look away from this godhead and look at the people next to them. I want The Genesis to pay for that, for ending that in us all, and for your death. I want it to pay with its own life."
"You read my note?" Sam asked after a time.
"Yes."
"What did I say?"
"Break everything," Caesar said.
"Have you done that yet?"
"I haven't broken anything but those around me. You, mom, Cato. Manny. The Named. Everything around me is broken except for the one thing I want to break."
"I'm not a murderer, Caesar," his father said. "I've never killed anyone and never thought about it. You are a murderer now, many times over. I'm not placing blame on you, I'm just saying it as a fact. You did it because you feel that people can die if the result is greater for the whole."
His father stopped for a second and in that silence, Caesar felt a shame greater than any other. He had told his father of his deeds, recounting them like a machine might, not feeling emotion, just trying to get his father up to speed. He hadn't realized that he was telling his father he killed two people by his own hand and twelve more remotely. He hadn't realized that his father might see the cruelty in that, the craziness interwoven through it.
"You're here asking me about these people. About this woman. You're asking if you should take care of them or if you should go onward, for reasons that have changed from when all this started. Caesar, when I wrote that letter, I knew that someday you would cross lines that you couldn't go back on. Break everything, right? I didn't say be a shepherd to a flock. I said to break everything if you were going to try to break even one thing. Be what no one else can be, what no one else will be. If you're wanting my permission, you traveled a long way to get something I already put in a letter for you."
Chapter Twenty-Five
The Life of Caesar Wells
by Leon Bastille
I read about hurricanes as a child. Storms that started over the ocean, started as something small, a few clouds gathering in one place. Some winds deciding to head that way as well, and then, more wind deciding that might be a good idea, too. The clouds continued gathering, and the winds continued their path. The evaporation from the ocean—a normal, everyday occurrence—feeding up into those darkening clouds, creating more moisture.
A cloud breaks and rain falls out, and it's brisk rain because those winds are really carrying it. Not a hurricane yet, but somewhere a boat wants to be? Not at all.
It all started from a single cloud moving into the area, probably on a sunny day—a white puffy cloud.
And in the end, entire cities laid to waste and the dead lying on cracked pavement.
The clouds had been gathering over us for a long time. Maybe Jerry was that first puffy cloud. The first rain started falling perhaps when Caesar decided he would free that little girl. Like all storms that grow into hurricanes though, there is a point of no return, a point where all the coalescing pieces grow too great, and the only thing left to do is wa
tch as that ferocious beast does what it does best: destroy.
Everything had coalesced to that point and none of us realized it. Not even Caesar. When that building collapsed at the same time Caesar spoke to his father, the breach point occurred. The gathering storm turned into something deadlier than I think anyone really imagined, including Jerry.
When Caesar left the digital world, he didn't walk into a hurricane, he was a part of it. He was one of those powerful winds going around and around, while all the rain poured down on the rest of us.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Her feet hurt.
Paige knew pain, she knew it well, but this was a different type, something new. It was an ache that sank into her bones, into the marrow, into the cells that made up the marrow. The pain could be dealt with if she knew when it would end. If she knew that tonight she could rest and not have to get up tomorrow to continue this walk, this trudge—then the pain could be endured. But tomorrow, no matter how well she slept tonight, she would rise and begin the hike again. Every day the same as yesterday. Tan sand lying as far as she could see, and the people she had grown to love beside her, all of them walking with their heads down, following Jerry who walked alone in front.
Leon walked with Paige every day. Sometimes he might venture off somewhere else in the pack, but he always returned. They talked some, but mostly they were silent. Mostly they walked and tried to ignore the pain and heat that knew no end. They kept their heads down too; Paige did it partly because of the sun and partly because she didn't want to see how far they had to go. How much more desert they had to cross before they arrived at the dead city, where they would work to bring life to it. There would be no rest, not for anyone in this group.
And, people were dying because of it. When the group woke this morning, a man named Trent didn't. He lay in his sleeping bag with his eyes closed and his chest no longer moving up and down. No one buried him; how could they? Wasting energy on his burial would have sapped them for the entire day. More would die, Paige was sure of that. The elderly first. Then it would be random. She thought some would simply give up, would say that they couldn't take it anymore and lay down in the sand, succumbing to heat exhaustion quickly after, and then expiring beneath the unforgiving sun. How many would still be in The Named when they arrived at Vegas? Forty? Thirty?