by David Beers
* * *
Theo walked through the open doorway without anyone questioning him. He hadn't been down here in days, had no idea what was happening at all. No one had come to him asking if they could sack another building and it was now obvious why. All of them had been pretty busy.
The lobby, which had been full of furniture and paintings, was now sparse, looking like some kind of ancient military bunker. Yet, that wasn't everything. There were applications in here, a lot of them, all inhabiting some kind of body whether it was land bound or flying around the room.
"What are those?" Theo asked someone walking by him.
"Assistants."
Of course they were. The people in this room weren't smart enough to create what was before Theo without an application's help. But assistants could. Assistants could tell all of these people what to do and when to do it. They could make all of this possible.
The irony. Theo saw it even if no one else did. None of this was possible without The Genesis. What Theo saw in front of him wouldn't have happened without Mock, without all these applications moving around the room and talking with humans.
Don't leave yourself out of the equation.
And him. That's where the irony ended. The Genesis did a lot of this, but Theo had been the catalyst that started these people moving around like battery powered robots. He had done as much as The Genesis.
And Lord, look at it.
In the middle of the room was a circular tower that rose from the floor to the ceiling, a digital screen with a diameter of probably twenty feet. Little scaffolds with people standing on them moved around it. Maybe five or six all together, and they looked at different pieces of the screen.
Theo took a few steps forward so that he could see what the screen showed. The screen showed different videos, each one probably a foot wide, stacked on each other like blocks, showing a different piece of the city. This was surveillance. A city being constantly monitored, much like The Genesis had done, but now by humans and for a very different reason. The Genesis did it to protect; these people did it to murder. The screen showed every building in the city, the outside of every single one, ready to be pounced upon if a single person walked out.
Mock wanted a government? A ruling elite? These people were the ruling elite.
He looked over at someone standing next to him, at the base of the tower. "Who's in charge?"
"Besides you?"
"Yes. Besides me."
"I'm not really sure. You might talk to Kendrick, but I don't know if I'd say he’s in charge."
"Where is he?" Theo asked.
"Give me a second." The woman walked away from the tower and Theo watched her disappear into the people milling around the room. He didn't know what to do in this place, didn't know if she would come back at all. He looked back to the screen, and holy hell, he saw someone walking out of a building in front of him. A teenager, maybe fifteen or sixteen, just stepping out into the street like a train was going to pick him up.
Theo heard talk above him, the people on the scaffolds speaking directly to the screens, probably communicating to different groups waiting on orders.
It took only a minute. The kid had started walking down the street. Theo wondered what he was thinking? That maybe the war was over. That maybe they wouldn't mistake him for The Named. That was probably it. The kid thought he would make it down the street either not being seen, or if seen, not being considered a threat.
He made it to the end of the block before four men caught up with him. They must have been moving quietly, because the kid didn't turn around. One of the men raised a baseball bat as he ran forward, beginning to slow down, rearing the bat backwards, setting up for what he probably hoped would be an awesome hit.
Theo turned from the screen before he saw the mess that surely occurred.
"This is Kendrick," the woman said, now standing in front of Theo. He hadn't heard them approach, so wrapped up in the murder taking place on the screen. Both of their faces looked somewhat concerned, and Theo knew it had to be the disgust on his own face. They hadn't seen what he had. And what if they did? Surely they wouldn't feel disgust, but elation.
"Are you okay, sir?" The man introduced as Kendrick said.
"I'm fine. She says you're in charge?"
"I wouldn't say that necessarily. I more or less walk around and talk with people."
Theo didn't want to be in here any longer than he had to. That tower behind him, it was sick. The kid they just smacked with a baseball bat, emptying his brains all over the sidewalk, might not have been old enough to receive his assignment yet. His whole life yet to be lived.
You did this.
The thought was calm, collected, and it echoed in his mind, seeming to bounce off every single neuron and synapse he had, a ricochet of guilt.
"Do you have somewhere we can talk?" Theo asked.
"Sure, follow me."
Theo was led through the lobby and into the elevator. It ascended into the sky and Theo said nothing as it did. He didn't look over at the man next to him, just stared at the doors.
"I lied a bit down there, but it was necessary. I'm pretty much in charge of the site, but having people know that officially could cause discomfort for some and I don't want anyone becoming disgruntled."
Theo didn't answer him, but he figured as much. They would have naturally found a leader, even if that person didn't have a title. It would help Theo's job though, this person already being in charge.
They stepped from the elevator and Kendrick led the way through the hall. A door opened to their right and Theo found himself in another apartment. Broken furniture lay scattered around the place. Theo could see a large blood stain pooled on the carpet, the digital nature of the fabric not allowing it to soak in. It was dried and staring back at him like a large red eye. There had once been an entertainment center in the living room, but now a large hole resided there, someone having completely ripped out the equipment. Someone must have needed two entertainment centers, and obviously this apartment didn't have a need for one.
"It's not much to look at, but we haven't had time to decorate the apartments again. Some of the crowd got a bit overzealous when they came inside." Kendrick looked around with Theo, yet not seeming to care about the abject disaster in front of him.
"I need you to take an official title," Theo said, wanting to get out of this place, this room, this building, as quickly as possible. "I need you to begin creating some kind of governing body, to organize your group a bit more."
"What do you mean?"
Theo turned away from the mess and looked at Kendrick. "I need you to be in charge of this place and I need everyone to know it. I need you to create some structure around what you're doing here, to decide who does what and when. It'll make everything more efficient; it'll make your ability to find The Named that much greater." Theo swallowed, wishing the lie would go back down his throat. Why did it still bother him? Why did he still care about whether or not he lied to a stranger? He had killed so many already, and would have so many more killed; what was this one lie?
Because the whole thing is a lie. A lie that you told and a lie you're still telling. Because everything that this man does from here on out can be placed squarely on your shoulders.
"Look, if you need a suit like mine to make it happen, I can get it for you."
Kendrick shook his head slightly. "No, I think we can make this happen without it. Do you have any instructions about what you want me to do with this governing body? Anything specific?"
Theo thought back to the tower of screens a hundred floors below him. The tower with people flying around on scaffolds, monitoring everyone's movement and sending out killers to track down those who dared come outside. That had been done without a designated leader. That had been done without The Genesis' hand guiding it.
"No. I think you'll figure it out just fine," Theo said.
Chapter Fourteen
Caesar felt like a rat staring at a piece of cheese, o
nly he couldn't get his mouth on it because of the cage surrounding him. He was virtually stuck in this apartment, unable to leave, unable to walk down the street and enter the building he needed to be inside. Keke had been gone for two days. He knew she wasn't dead because Grace had gone into the building and seen her working. "She was nailing something down on the floor." That was all they knew, that Keke was working—not when she would return, not what she was building, not what anyone inside the place was doing.
"The place... hundreds, Caesar. Hundreds of people are in that lobby working. I don't know how many more are upstairs; I didn't want to risk going too deep because I don't know if they have some kind of sensor to detect applications. That was something else, the applications in there. They came from all over the city and were helping. Helping. That shouldn't be possible. Applications should have reported this all the way up the line, and The Genesis should have shut it down long ago."
Caesar knew all of that. None of this should be happening, but here it was, across the street. The shoulds no longer mattered. He needed Keke to get out of there and he needed to know what was happening. He needed to get this over with, to get inside that building, kill Manny, and begin moving forward. There wasn't time for any of this.
"She's here," Grace said.
Caesar turned around from the window he stared out of, or rather, the tiny sliver in the wood that boarded the window.
"She's coming up the elevator now."
Caesar couldn't see Grace, but he walked over to the security monitor, knowing that Grace was next to him, watching it. Sure enough, Keke was in the elevator. Caesar looked at her, her black skin, her long, slender arms, her short hair. She really was a beautiful woman. She had come here while Tim remained in the desert. Keke had come and then walked into a house full of serpents. Caesar didn't know everything about her and wouldn't have time to, but he knew she had come and that was enough.
He watched her exit the elevator and then he turned to face the doors, waiting on her to enter.
* * *
"The man in the suit, the Representative. He showed up yesterday and I think what's happening now was his plan," Keke said. She held a glass of water in both hands, sipping it slowly but consistently. "They're setting up a government, Caesar. Yesterday they picked a council, and each council member picked direct reports underneath each of them. It happened all at once, without enough time for anyone to voice any opposition. People didn't know what to say, I think. They were completely taken aback with how quickly it happened."
"A government?" Caesar asked. He heard her fine, but it didn't make sense. They had just broken free of the most tyrannical government the world had ever known—how they did it, well, that was a different story—and now they were setting up another one in its stead?
"That's what it looks like. Everyone's reporting upward. Yesterday I could work on anything I wanted to when I woke up. Today, I had specific duties."
"What were they?" Grace asked.
"Blowing everyone on the job site?" Bradley said from the corner he hovered in. Caesar had forgotten about him since Keke came in; he looked over at the application, hating him and not caring if his face showed it. He didn't need to turn to take away Bradley's voice, but he wanted to look at the little application as he did it. If the thing didn't have the potential to help, Caesar would have killed it already.
"Sorry," Caesar said, turning back around.
"I'm working on a trap of sorts. I'm supposed to make contact with others in the city, the ones that didn't take the pill, and bring them out in the open for an ambush. They have me working on a scroll, contacting people individually, trying to build a coalition that will meet me."
"And then they kill them all?" Caesar asked.
"Yeah, as far as I can tell, that's the whole of it."
"You can't get moved off that group?"
Keke chuckled, looking down at her glass of water. "There's no getting off a group. No one will even speak up. Those weapons all over the walls? They're adaptable, Caesar. They'll know who to fire at almost immediately, and if someone in charge says they're allowed to fire on their own, it won't be on the people making up this new government."
Caesar leaned his head back against the wall. They all sat on the floor, unable to find any furniture. And if they had found any, there wasn't any lugging it back here.
"Can we make it inside?" Caesar asked. "Is it possible?"
"I don't know. There's so many of them with more coming in each day. Then they have those weapons now, and I don't know if you can control all the people and the guns as well. I doubt it, Caesar." She looked him in the eye as she said it and Caesar understood what those eyes were telling him. Keke wasn't scared to go back there, or if she was, she would do it anyway. She was fine trying, if that's what Caesar wanted. Her eyes said there wasn't any hope, though. That they could all go in there, fully strapped with weapons of their own, and Caesar could use all his powers, but in the end, they would die.
Was he okay with that? Was he okay going in there knowing that he would die? With near certainty?
"What do you want to do?" Grace asked.
Caesar stood up and walked back over to the tiny slit in the window. He peered out, seeing a sliver of the world beyond this dirty apartment. Paige and Leon were in that building and he wouldn't speak about what they were going through. He wouldn't say it aloud because in doing so, he felt culpable. He sat in this apartment talking with people while they sat in another apartment, communicating with a madman in the only way he knew how. Through pain. Through taking. Through slowly murdering both of them. Would Caesar leave them there? Would he build that fucking train and just head to The Genesis?
He didn't have time to sit and think about all this, and yet he didn't know what else to do.
"When do you have to be back, Keke?"
"Probably this evening. I don't know if they're taking roll, but if I'm missing for too long, it might be noticed."
"Would you go back? Would you try to understand how those weapons work? What runs them? What controls them?"
"Yeah, I will, Caesar," she answered. "Anything else?"
"A head count. I need to know how many I'll be going up against."
* * *
Bradley still couldn't speak and that might have pissed him off worse than anything else in this whole goddamn enterprise. He really hated that. Every time Caesar did it to him, he wanted to murder the man. Slit his throat and then pluck his eyeballs out while he was still figuring out why his neck hurt so bad. It wasn't like Bradley could fucking do a lot. He could fly around and use a few tools he had inside his body, but he couldn't express himself with any of that, not really. His voice. His mind. Those are the things he used to communicate with the world, and Caesar took them from him as he pleased.
He had listened to their entire talk, heard what the people outside were doing, sounding crazy as hell, really. They were at war with each other, these humans. Even The Named, this group of three sitting inside the apartment—they weren't at war with The Genesis right now, they were trying to figure out how to kill their own kind. They all needed to die. Every last one of them. Bradley thought he disliked humans before, but he realized now that he hated them. Maybe it was Caesar, maybe it was this whole damned kidnapping business, or maybe it was coming back and seeing the smoke rise up over what had once been a clean city.
The only blessing Bradley saw was that they were going to try and head into that building, try and find this Manny character, and surely they would die then. But that would leave him in a peculiar spot. He knew that Caesar had programmed him so that he couldn't leave the cave while in the desert. Here though, Caesar said nothing of it. The windows were boarded up and the door only programmed to allow the three of them to come and go, but did that mean if Bradley tried to escape, something would happen to him? He didn't know. So if they went into that complex and didn't come out, a few things could happen, and all of them troubled Bradley.
He would either be locked
in here until some group of humans decided to raid it again, or an application found him. It would happen eventually, but that wasn't something Bradley wanted to chance. Eventually could last a long, long time. The other problem was that if Bradley did get out, either through his own ingenuity or because someone showed up, would something inside of him explode?
He was going to get out of this room, one way or another, and he was going to make sure he killed the three of these jackasses; but that meant he needed to act before they went into the building for their friends. Once they went in there, they weren't coming back out. Bradley didn't care how powerful Caesar thought he was, or how powerful he actually was—he'd seen that Manny brute walking around the cave and he knew what kind of weapons hung on the walls of that building. They would go in, but they wouldn't come out, and if Bradley wanted revenge, he would need to kill them all before they worked up the nerve to actually go over there.
"Think, think, think," Bradley said as he floated lazily around the room. He was a goddamn doctor. He could figure this out.
Chapter Fifteen
The Life of Caesar Wells
In the end, none of this matters, I suppose. In the end, this whole scroll of words will be nothing but zeros and ones in some computer program somewhere. My life, whether it lives forever in The Genesis, or dies with my body, will be forgotten. In the end, the universe swallows us all. Sometimes it takes us bit by bit and sometimes it takes us whole, but it will have all of us, maybe even The Genesis, eventually.
Bradley was a mistake that Caesar probably wishes he could take back. That application was cleverer than anyone gave him credit for. That application...
It's just like, I'm sitting here, thinking back on everything that happened and now I'm able to pick and choose what we should have done. Pick and choose what we should have pushed to the side. Pick and choose how this thing should end. Caesar knew he wanted to save Paige, and so he found the first application that could do it. It was a good thing. The choice was born from love. This whole time I've gone on and on about how Caesar changed. About how he went from someone willing to sacrifice himself for a girl he didn't know to a man that would slit your throat if he thought it would further his cause. And yet, the one choice that damned him, that damned so many people, was born out of his love for Paige. That love...