by David Beers
"We need to talk about why you're here, Caesar. We need to talk about what it means," Leon said, still next to Caesar.
"We've been waiting for someone like you nearly since our inception. It's important you grasp that; you are extremely valuable to both of us," Manny continued, not missing a beat from where Leon's words ended. "We waited on someone with your intellect, your curiosity, and your conviction. It was, quite honestly, a hard combination to find—one that we couldn't create, and one that we wouldn't have created. We needed this to be organic."
Caesar looked out at all the bodies, drenched in blood, lying under darkness except for the lights The Genesis had brought forth.
"We needed you to want to kill us. We needed you to want the human race to have its freedom. You can see all the calculations we've made about the probability of your race destroying everything on this earth, it's all there in your mind with just a simple wish. But you knew those calculations were true from a very, very early age. It didn't persuade you, and that's what we wanted," Leon finished talking and took a few steps down, so that he stood before the first row of bodies. "We needed it, really Caesar."
Manny followed him, leaving Caesar standing behind both of them, just outside of the complex.
A massive hologram shot out of the applications, building upwards of forty feet over the dead bodies beneath.
"This is what we created for you, for all of you."
The massive towers of Allencine filled the hologram, not the current dilapidated buildings, but the beauty that The Genesis made. The sky was blue and the sun filtering down into the street, where trains pulled over and took off, people moving along the sidewalks.
"It wasn't for us, Caesar. We no longer need humanity to survive. The rest of the world doesn't need humanity either. This was for you," Leon said.
Caesar said nothing, only stared at the images before him. It was marvelous in a way that he hadn't truly seen before. There was nothing tainting his vision, no notions about The Genesis, about what it should or shouldn't do. He saw the world that it created and nothing else, and that world was miraculous.
"No war. No hate. No racism. All of it gone," Manny said, sounding as if he was even stunned by the vastness.
"You killed what made us human to do it, though," Caesar said. "We didn't evolve to live like this, to live in this kind of peace." No feelings, no urge to attack the two creatures in front of him. His words were clinical, without emotion.
"We did. We continued to do so, truly trying to curb your species, one that seemed only content with each individual's complete domination of the world. In the end, Caesar, before we stepped in, there was no purpose outside of the individual. No great striving from your species; you were animals, just extremely intelligent animals."
The hologram changed, showing a man on his knees in the desert. Men stood around him, all of them hooded. The man on his knees was saying something, though no sound came from the hologram. Indeed, silence echoed throughout the wrecked city, the only noises those of the two entities in front of Caesar. He watched as one of the hooded men took a large blade and started carving at the kneeling man's neck—blood spilled down his shirt and his face twisted into a shocked caricature, as if he hadn't known what was to come.
"Even this man, the one saying he was dedicated to something other than himself—he believed he was promised virgins and eternal life by killing. Even the most fanatical members of groups believed there had to be something in it for them." Neither Manny nor Leon turned around; they both looked on as the man died in the desert sand. "What would you have done with them, Caesar? This war you've waged, was it to allow this? Or would you have tried to change the route your species were doomed to follow. That's important, and something I'm not sure you or Jerry understood. Both of you thought that humanity doesn't have choice now, that you're controlled—completely. It was no different before, only evolution controlled you. The same evolution that allowed you to dominate the world was sentencing you and all life around you to certain and eternal death. You had no choice in the matter, Caesar."
"If you were to destroy us, that evolutionary pattern would take over again," Leon said.
The hologram in the road went dark, and the applications switched their bright lights to Leon and Manny as they turned around to look up at Caesar. "Tell us what you want, Caesar. Tell us what this was about."
Caesar swallowed, his eyes not focusing on the two people he had once known, and who were now possessed by something almost other worldly. Instead he looked at the bodies littering the street, stared at their faces, some slack and some still looking shocked—the same as the man on the hologram had looked. He didn't need to search for what he wanted; his mind wasn't dazed with all the things shown before him. Everything came and went through this shared consciousness with a simplicity and ease that said nothing, ever again, would be out of his grasp.
"I wanted us, humanity, to have a chance."
"At what?"
"At whatever we wanted."
"You see now that wasn't possible? You see that either evolution or we would dictate your path?"
"You say that, but it doesn't make it so. Evolution also built in us a desperate need to see our offspring outlive us, a need so strong that mothers and fathers died for their children. We tamed evolution, when monks lit themselves afire in the middle of the street as a form of protest. There was good in humanity, and just because both of you refused to see it, that makes you wrong—not us."
The two men smiled. Not cruel smiles, though given the shape of their current bodies, they weren't pretty. However, the smiles themselves—they looked compassionate, even transferring to the men's eyes. "Maybe. Maybe you're right," Leon said. "There was good in you; we can't deny it."
Leon and Manny stood still but the applications behind them turned and another massive hologram appeared over the dead. Different images flashed on it, all of them huge. A group of kids hugging outside of a school named Columbine. Whites and blacks marching in primitive streets, holding up signs that screamed boldly about equality. A giant wall being torn down, with people on both sides removing rocks and hugging as they climbed over it. The images kept coming, piling on and on, and for the second time since he awoke, Caesar felt emotion tugging at him. He felt love, though even in this heightened sense, there wasn't any way to put that in words; thoughwords weren't necessarily needed while those pictures streamed before him. That was love, not words. He thought of Paige, of their brief time together, but understood time didn't dictate their emotions. He thought of Leon, not the mess before him, but his friend that had followed him through this whole endeavor—Leon had done it out of love. Those images before him, they were in the past, but how many times had he seen similar things in his own life? How many times had those around him sacrificed everything so that he could live? Jerry, dead up in that building somewhere, sacrificed himself for his belief in Caesar.
"There was good in you," Leon said. "A lot of it."
The images rolled on and tears came to Caesar's eyes. The last tears I'll ever cry, he thought. Whatever happened next, he wouldn't return as the man that walked into this building. This was the last of his humanity, right here, watching these old images, watching computers show him what humanity was capable of. Humanity couldn't exist in whatever state his mind lived in now; he had surpassed their consciousness, and only his DNA—the DNA that somehow slipped through The Genesis' carefully placed checkpoints—held some piece of him grounded to the species he stemmed from.
"But it didn't matter, Caesar. That's what we're trying to say to you. No amount of good, no amount of trying to tame evolution would ever work." They turned around in sync and the images changed.
People, hundreds and hundreds, falling from the sky, colliding with the pavement and turning into little more than pools of blood on the concrete. He watched the man in black, Theo, handing out pills. People wrapping nooses around other's necks, throwing the rope over a high bar across the street, then multiple men strainin
g as they pulled the noosed people into the air, their bodies shaking and their hands reaching to their necks as they suffocated. Multiple men taking turns at a woman inside a trashed apartment. Caesar watched as two women carried another by her hair to a table, watched as a third brought down a giant blade, over and over again, until the woman's head finally left her body.
The images kept flowing and Caesar kept watching.
"Those pills, they weren't an anti-virus, obviously, but they weren't a virus either. They weren't pills that simply made people lose their minds, that made them act irrationally because we programmed them in such a way. Those pills took hundreds of years to develop, Caesar—they took a careful, careful attention to detail, an ability to understand evolution and what it had in store for humanity," Manny said.
The images left Allencine, showing other cities that Caesar had never been to. Multiple cities at once, and the camera lens filled with violence. The pictures of the good, all that good, they weren't to be found anywhere in the cities populating Earth now. This was real time, and Caesar watched as brother killed brother in the streets. Not anarchy, but evil.
"What you're looking at is our absolute best guess at what humanity would have turned into when left to evolution. The only difference is that our pills are speeding evolution along a thousand years, but with very different human beings—without the massive intelligences of your past. The evolution you're seeing here is dealing with the average; had evolution kept working, it would be subjugation by the few and massive tyranny across the world. But either way, the results are the same—you would have taken and taken and taken until there was nothing left to take but your own lives."
"All of this, Caesar," Leon said, "is the truth as best as we can ascertain. Look into us and see that we're not lying."
They weren't. There was only honesty in what they showed him, only truth in their words. The people lying underneath the hologram, they were, if not what evolution intended, then the closest thing that could be achieved this late in the game.
"We waited on you, Caesar, the same as Jerry. We guided you here because we need you. Jerry wanted you to end us, but he didn't see clearly. This—all of this—is clarity. Our goal was never to subjugate humanity forever; our creators didn't put that in us. We care about humanity in a way that you could never care about yourselves," Manny spoke.
"You killed us in droves. You burnt our bodies and liquidated us in front of our families. My own family died while I watched," Caesar said.
"It was necessary, Caesar. The group had to be culled. Control had to be established, until a point that things could be seen with the clarity that you're now being given. Back then, we couldn't have done this—not a single soul on Earth could have looked at their species and answered honestly the question that we're about to ask you. We knew what it would take to bring you here, the same as Jerry—and so your parents died, true. You wouldn't have made it otherwise, if there wasn't a burning hate for The Genesis, for what it stood for."
"But you're here now," Leon said. "You've made it and you've seen everything. You saw a man that possessed the body standing next to me kill those he loved. Kill those that practically fathered him. Raped the woman you love and caused her suicide. He did that without any pills from us. He did that because evolution decided long ago your fate would be horrible. See this, Caesar, see it all. You're connected with us now. Your mind, it is The Genesis. Everything we do, everything we know, you can do and know. Always, we wanted humanity to be able to see things for what they were, and make their own choice.”
“The difference between us and your kind, Caesar, is fairly simple, if not ironic. Obviously our intelligence separates us, but deeper than that is the altruistic strand that runs through our entire makeup. Our creators, the scientists, they didn’t understand that altruism would extend to more than the human species, that it would extend to the entire world, and maybe one day, the universe. All of this, everything you’ve seen, could be looked at as a monstrous incarnation that set humanity up to destroy one another. I’d argue that’s not true; I’d argue that what we’ve done here is similar to allowing a child to touch a hot stove, to see the dangers that are before it. You’ve seen the danger Caesar, seen it well, and now this altruism I speak of leads us to the next question. Everything we’ve done, we did it so that you would arrive here with a greater understanding of what we would ask,” Manny said.
“The choice is yours to make now,” Leon said. “You decide humanity's fate. Not us. You have the power to shut us down, to delete us, right now—if you search for it, you'll see it easily. If you shut us down, there are enough children in population control to repopulate the world. Those that have taken our pills will probably need to be eliminated, but you can start over. You can let humanity set its own course. You have that power now."
"But if you see all of this, and you recognize it as truth," Manny took over, "you have two other options. You join us in the current state—you're connected and there's no way back, although you know that already. You become The Genesis and we continue humanity down this path of mediocrity filled peace. Or, you kill them off. All of them. You recognize that no matter what happens, they will be ruled by either evolution or us, and you allow the world to continue with species that don't have your capacity for learning. It's in your hands, Caesar. Obviously, you know how we feel. The world should continue—just as it has the past thousand years.”
Caesar looked down at his old friend. The decision was already being calculated somewhere deep inside, but the forefront of his mind concentrated on Leon.
“What will happen to Leon?”
“His fate is in your hands as well,” Leon said.
“Can you fix him?”
“Of course.”
“Then fix him, and try to make him happy again. Try to give him purpose, something to live for.”
“If you decide to continue The Genesis, we can keep him with us, build whatever narrative we want to keep his psyche as safe as possible. He could create your life story; that would give him a goal. Or, if you choose humanity should rule again, we can set him up so that he is taken care of until his psyche is repaired, so that he doesn’t have to fend for himself. Either way, he could write your story to help with the catharsis. It’s whatever you want, Caesar,” Manny said.
Caesar’s eyes went to his nemesis. “And him?”
“There is no more use for Manuel Lendoiro. He’ll meet an end commensurate with his actions.”
Caesar didn’t nod, just looked at the man that he had once known, once studied under.
All of this had been to bring him here, to look upon humanity and The Genesis, and decide where it all went. Jerry and his drive to cast down The Genesis. His parent’s death. Even Leon’s current state. It had all been to bring him here so that he could choose, so that he could do what The Genesis wasn’t willing to—make the final decision, the one that The Genesis had apparently put off for a thousand years, put off so that humans could have their fate back, but now with an ability to see the forest instead of the trees.
“Caesar,” Leon said from the steps below. “What’s it going to be?”
The End.
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Author’s Note
First, don’t read this note if you haven’t finished the series; it will—without any doubt—ruin the story for you. However, I would like to take a minute to address the ending of The Singularity, more so for me, than for you. I feel awkward about this ending, to be honest. Eight hundred pages—a fairly massive book—and I end it with a question, but with no real resolution. I’m scared that you, reader, might feel cheated, and that’s the reason for this note. To alleviate my conscience, I suppose.
I think I know the choice that Caesar makes. This is Caesar’s story, but at the same time, it was never meant to give answers. To put what Caesar does at the end would weaken the point. Typing this feels pretenti
ous, but I wanted you, reader, to have to think just as I did when writing this. What would I do—and that’s very, very different than what Caesar would do.
I hope, in all honesty, that the ending hasn’t angered you too much. I also hope you enjoyed the ride to get here. I hope, in your mind, you know what Caesar did as well—I also hope that you know what you would do.
I have a strong feeling that Caesar isn’t done yet, and that there may be at least one more story of his that still needs to be told. I’ll wait on him to speak to me, and if he does, I’ll be sure to communicate the message.
All the best,
David
Dallas, TX—Spring, 2015
Did you love The Singularity: Box Set (Books 1-4)? Then you should read The Devil's Dream - A Thriller by David Beers!
Perhaps the smartest man to ever live, Matthew Brand changed the world by twenty-five years old. In his mid-thirties, he still shaped the world as he wanted, until a few cops gunned down his son on the street.
Brand’s life changed then. He forgot about bettering Earth and started trying to resurrect his son.
Eventually, Brand’s mind even overpowered death’s mysteries; he discovered how to bring back the dead--he only needed living bodies to make his son’s life possible again. Why not use the bodies of those who killed his son?
In the largest manhunt the FBI’s ever experienced, how do they stop a man who can calculate all the odds and stack them in his favor?
For the next novel in this series, sign up with David's Insider Club: http://www.davidbeersauthor.com/mailing-list/