Anyway, it’s this chatter between lobes that makes for better decisions. It’s this chatter that, in fact, accounts for sentience. We’ve been trying to reproduce it in our AI, but keep failing.
Troy plucks the closed forceps from Cadaver Seventeen’s postcentoral gyrus. There’s this mucky sound. “A human would go insane trapped inside a metal can,” he says. “Especially if it can’t talk or hear or feel someone’s touch. I’m telling you, we should stick with AI.”
“He’s got a point,” Kris says. Kris was born paraplegic, so she knows what’s she’s talking about. She built her own legs, grafting her neurons to limber plastic encasings, which is why she got chosen for this position out of ten thousand applicants, even though she’s only twenty-one years old.
“Guys,” I say. “Unless we figure something out, nobody’s going to survive down in those shelters. Who’s got a better idea?” They get quiet after that. I don’t hear any better ideas.
Just then, a keycard beeps and the airtight door hisses open. General Howard Macun charges in. He’s the head of Space Defense, and the highest ranking official at Offutt who isn’t in Nine by now. There’s this gash over his forehead. It’s a straight line from temple to temple, as if made by a factory machine.
Macun comes straight for me. I realize that my coat is wet with brain spatter. So is everyone else’s. We must look like a collection of butchers.
He seems about to grab and shake me. Then, somehow remembering himself, he stops short and salutes. I’m civilian SCS, but from the looks of things, he’s lost his wits. He’s not the first. I play along, saluting back.
“Status, Captain?” he asks as he swipes the blood from his eyes. It’s falling fast enough to soak his clothes and pool by his feet, leaving a trail from the door.
I click my Keds for him. “Sir! We’re close. But I wonder, how are the other cybernetics teams progressing? I’d like to suggest we move our work and our families to Shelter Nine and join forces with the cybernetics team over there. This is no time for proprietary research.”
Macun scratches his scalp and comes back with a glistening red finger. He seems surprised by it. Then he looks down at the blood trail, and seems surprised by that, too.
“What happened to you, sir?” I ask. “Is there rioting out there?”
“Are these human brains?” Macun asks.
“They are. General Camper signed the warrants to open cryo-freeze.”
Macun grits his teeth in disgust.
“Sir,” I say, as calmly as I know how. I’m channeling my husband, on whose tongue butter doesn’t melt. “You must see—the shelters need aboveground caretakers. Satellites won’t work after impact—there won’t be any kind of remote control drones. It’s got to be something that can engage independently from us. How else will the human race survive?”
“We’re going back to AI as soon as we have more time,” Marc chimes in. “Long term versus short term, you know?”
“What happened to you, sir?” I ask.
“It was just a dream,” Macun mumbles.
“Is Nine compromised, or did that injury happen up here? Did you do it to yourself, sir?” I ask.
Macun finally notices that I’m talking. He notices the blood again, the brains again, and his eyes go wide.
“Who cut your head?” I ask.
Macun’s feet go pigeon-toed. His knees begin to bounce. “Shelter Nine! Why, we had to bomb Shelter Nine!” he says in giggling sing-song.
“You must be confused, General. Shelter Nine is the only shelter within five hundred miles. It would be a senseless place to bomb. You’d be obliterating the population of the entire Midwest,” I say. “Can I pour you a shot of bourbon and we can talk about all this?”
“They didn’t listen. The President didn’t listen. Korea didn’t listen. Shelter Nine didn’t listen. Do you know how to listen?” Macun asks.
I don’t have time to answer. Macun’s arms and legs twitch in a hysterical scarecrow’s dance. He grabs me by the bloody coat, shoving me back over a swivel chair. My ankle hits something metal with a crack!
Macun keeps going. He finds Troy’s forceps and chucks them. They land upright in Kris’ dead left leg.
“Hey!” I cry.
He flips a steel gurney, on which we’ve set three good brains. Splat! they go. He flips the next table—four more brains. Gentle Jim Landers gets him by the waist. Crazed, strong, and military trained, Macun lifts Jim up, knees him in the groin, breaks free, and flips the third table.
The last viable brains go splat. Formaldehyde sprays. All is lost.
General Howard Macun grins.
“I should kill you,” I mumble, and I don’t even realize I’ve said it.
Panting, smiling, blood dripping from his crown and down his brow into his eyes like sweat, he scuttles his compact, muscular body across the brain-riddled floor. Slides around. Does a gory kind of victory dance. The brains turn to pulp.
“Please hand me your AFB-Connect, General,” I say.
Panting, Macun peers out from the corners of his bloody eyes.
“General Macun? I’d like you to leave now,” I say. “We’ll be informing Shelter Nine and the US government of your treasonous actions.”
Macun’s wide-eyed, lunatic expression glazes. I get the feeling his crazy’s not gone, just resting.
“Get the hell out,” I say.
“Of course,” he says at last. His voice is normal. This could be a year ago, his Christmas invocation at the Chapel, where he told us that courage would see us through these trying times.
“Good. See you at Nine for your court-martial,” I say.
“No. I don’t think you will.” Macun opens his AFB-Connect, and starts typing as he follows his blood trail toward the door. Then he looks back, his expression oddly somber. “They’re all dead. Don’t take it too hard. It’s for the best.”
I don’t know it, but I’m chasing him down the hall. The air raid sirens sound again. A newly downed plane, or a nuke, or another all-out war.
Aaaaroooaaah! Aaaaroooaaah! Aaaaroooaaah!
“General, I demand an explanation!”
He looks back with this bewildered expression. For just a second, I get the feeling he’s remembering the role he used to play: A house on General’s Row, six grandkids, a drunk wife, papers piled high on his desk from heads of state that all required his careful eye. But then the bewilderment is gone. He’s not that guy anymore.
“Sir. What have you done? We have families headed for Shelter Nine.”
General Macun wipes the blood from his temples, and salutes. “They’re dead. You’re dismissed,” he says.
It’s Troy Miller who chucks the skull hammer. A nerd his whole life, he probably never expected it to bullseye into the center of Macun’s forehead. The tough bastard stands for at least a minute, hemorrhaging even more blood, before he falls.
Aaaaroooaaah! Aaaaroooaaah! Aaaaroooaaah!
• • • •
The rest of them don’t want to touch General Macun’s body because they’re squeamish. I’m just afraid he’s not really dead. “We need his AFB-Connect,” I say.
The old Strat Com looks like a 1950s public school. The equipment is state of the art, but the building is post-war junky, from the fluorescent lights to the one-dollar Wonderbread baloney sandwiches at the contract employees’ cafeteria. We’re standing in a tiled hall, our voices echoing.
Marc bends down, gracefully arranging his moccasins so that Macun’s blood river runs between his bulky legs. “I smell whiskey.”
“Drunk jerk,” Jim says. He’s outside the circle we’ve made, leaning against the hall. His balls must still hurt. “I’m not going to jail for this.”
“There is no jail anymore,” Kris answers. “And what if Nine’s gone? What are we supposed to do with a caretaker when there’s nothing to take care of? We don’t even have any more brains!”
I squat next to Marc. Brown foam bubbles from Macun’s lips.
Seeing this f
oam, Lee announces, “I’m so fucking done.”
I use my foot as a fulcrum to turn Macun over. Marc helps. The steel skull hammer clangs, reverberating inside Macun’s forebrain. An AFB-Connect, about the size of a deck of cards, falls from his clenched hand, skidding in blood. Marc uses his lab coat to pick it up and wipe it clean.
“What’s on your mind?” I ask Troy while Marc prods the port. I do this because Troy is openly weeping.
“I killed a guy,” he says.
“Yeah. But he deserved it.”
Troy presses his face against the tiled wall to hide his tears. “I heard you say it!—that we should kill him. This is a military installation. You’re my superior. You gave an order. You made me!”
I consider patting the guy’s back but he’s such a cold fish I can’t imagine he’ll appreciate it. “I’m fine with the blame. We needed his AFB.”
“You don’t understand. I killed him for you.”
“I’m glad you did it, okay? Thanks. Much appreciated. Now, do you want to keep trying for a caretaker or do you need to get out of here?”
“Home is gone,” he says. “I never had a home. Only you. You’ve been my boss six years. That’s family, too. I bet you never even thought of me that way, did you . . . ? My mom died. Not from this. I didn’t kill her. She died when I was little. She choked and it was just me with her. We were eating pineapple. I was making her laugh and something got stuck. I was too little to call the police. I just sat with her the whole time. I bruised her, trying to wake her up. Like, boxing, you know? I boxed her. She was beat-up by the time my dad came home from work. So he always said it was me that did it. I killed her. He never believed she choked. Did you know that about me?”
“Okay,” I say, finally patting his back. “You’re okay.”
He kind of melts under my touch, like it’s the thing he’s been waiting for. “It’s over. That was a long time ago.”
I’m expecting the others to say something, or at least be paying attention, but they’re all down their own, personal rabbit holes. It occurs to me that we’ve all gone mad and are hiding it as best we can.
“I can’t crack this,” Marc calls, holding the stained AFB-Connect. “It’s a five-digit passcode.”
I’m shrugging. Sweating. The air-raid sirens aren’t sounding, but it feels like that inside of me. Maybe I’m going to die right now, from fear and shock and guilt and just plain stress.
“Try one-two-three-four-five,” says Kris. “Also, two-five-two-five-two. They’re the most common.”
“We’re in so much trouble,” says Jim. “I really don’t want to go to jail.”
“This is jail,” Lee says. “Even if we survive impact and the heat, we’re trapped underground forever.”
“I tried all the usual codes. What do I look like, a rube?” Marc asks.
Lee takes the AFB-Connect from Marc. Punches some numbers. The interface unlocks. “Impact date,” he says: 1-14-31. He hands it back to Marc and starts walking down the hall, into the dark.
Kris chases after him. They’ve been having an affair for a few weeks now. It’s faux-love. Fear-love. I feel sorry for Lee’s wife and kids, who deserve better.
“Where are you going?” I call.
“I meant it. I’m done!” Lee shouts over his shoulder. He and Kris keep going until they’re just shadows. After a while, they go dark.
I let myself watch them an extra second, as a kind of farewell.
Then I turn to Marc, who’s scrolling. “Okay, here’s the history. Macun ordered explosives detonated into Shelter Nine about twenty minutes ago.”
“Did they detonate?”
“I think so. Nine went dark after that.”
“Holy God,” I say. My knees buckle. Troy is back from the wall, holding me up by the shoulder. I’m surprised he’s got the wherewithal.
“Why blow up Nine?” Troy asks.
Marc types. “I can’t see. It looks like a couple of other shelters got hit, too. There’s a chance our people are still waiting at Crook Road.”
“Order the Bluebird to reconnoiter there. Tell it to take them here instead of Nine,” I say. “Maybe we can make this place work as our shelter.”
“Assuming this Connect’s intranet signal is strong enough for the Bluebird’s driver to get the message,” Jim says.
“Don’t be such a Dorothy Downer,” Marc tells him as he grabs another hot dog from his back pocket, then drops it when he sees he’s smeared it with blood. “This is going to be so much better. No generals to cramp our style. It’s like in Dawn of the Dead when they live in the shopping mall.”
“You’re making jokes because you can’t admit that we’re all going to die,” Jim says.
We all stand there. General Macun’s body keeps spurting foam and blood. He’s a fucking pod person or something.
“Let’s go deeper,” I say. “Maybe we’ll live.”
• • • •
Strat Com was built seventy years ago and can withstand a hydrogen bomb. It fell out of use once uranium and terrorism outpaced The Cold War. But it’s a good bunker from which to face an asteroid hit. The ground floor is sealed with six feet of cement. I’ve never had enough clearance, but I’ve heard that the tunnels go a mile down. To disorient visitors, none of the elevators go down more than a few flights at a time, and the halls are shaped like interconnected conch shells. With enough supplies, we might be able to make it work.
We use Macun’s AFB to navigate. It’s got a map. Robotics is easy—the same room as cybernetics, two floors beneath the cement boundary. We take the equipment we think we’ll need. Then we press 6 on the elevator and hope we find surgical. My ears pop. For the first time in a long while, gravity feels right again. The air gets dense and wet.
“I could live with this,” Marc says. “If Jenny takes me back.”
“You gave your only Ticket to your ex-girlfriend. I don’t know if that’s love, but it’s definitely something,” I say.
The elevator pings. We stagger out. Troy licks his finger and lets it dry in the air to test humidity. I keep picturing him as a toddler, sitting on his dead mom’s lap.
The doors open to winding cinderblock halls and doors without windows. This is as far as the AFB map reads. It’s past Macun’s clearance. We go left because I’m a lefty. Marc takes notes like sprinkling bread crumbs, so we can find our way back.
“It’s cold. This is so stupid. We’re all going to die,” Jim says. “At least if we were above we could watch it happen.”
“When we’re actually dying, are you going to brag that you were right? I’m just curious,” Marc says.
“Shut up,” I tell them.
The ceiling lights hum on half-power. It’s darker than I’m used to, especially after the Aurora Borealis. I’m blinking and feeling my way with my hands.
We find another elevator. Beckon it. This one goes down to 14.
At the very bottom, a chatter along with the click-clack of hard shoes slows us down.
“People?” Marc asks.
We find around thirty settlers squatting in the cafeteria. They’ve made their own shelter, stocked with giant boxes from Wal-Mart, gallon-sized liters of gasoline stolen from the AFB gas stations, and scores of ivy and palm plants, which strikes me as brilliant—they’ll scrub the air. I walk into the room like I’m supposed to be there. Nobody raises a gun, which I take as a good sign. My guess is, they’re the families of cleaning staff and enlisted.
“Do you know where the executive hospital’s at?” I ask a young woman who’s texting on a phone that can’t possibly get reception. She shrugs. The phone’s screen is dark.
Two young soldiers approach. They’re privates, in their twenties, both fresh-faced. They’ve emptied several sleeves of beef jerky and neatly arranged the plastic into a rubber-banded circular wad. “We can show you, ma’am!”
I smile, like it’s the old world. “Great. I’m fixing to see if we can’t build a nice robot for when we need work done Above. That okay
by you soldiers?”
They not only point out the hospital, but bust down Operating Room One’s door for us, and carry our robotics equipment inside.
“Like us to stand guard, ma’am?” they ask.
“Of course I would!” I say, and they do just that.
When we get to a good stopping point, I head out to my usual post. It’s dark now. Two hours until impact. Gravity’s light. I imagine Aporia’s twins across the world. Aporia Minor would be low on the horizon, just a half-moon invisible against the daylight sun. Aporia Major would seem huge by comparison, her rocky moons streaming around her like crumbs.
I place the call to Jay, but it doesn’t connect.
It occurs to me that even if we survive, we’ll evolve differently in the dark, without fresh air. I ought to give up this notion of a caretaker, who’ll turn the lights back on and usher us through our dark ages. We ought to meet our fate out in the open, with our children in our arms.
My tenth—or who knows, twentieth?—call goes through. It’s a small miracle, and I decide it’s a sign from God. I’m Midwestern, so I believe in all that. The Holy Trinity, transubstantiation, the virgin birth. Why not?
“Hey,” I say. “I love you. I hope you get this and come find me at Strat Com.” Then I’m looking at the phone, even though the connection’s still live. I ought to be saying all the right, last things, but I can’t bring myself to surrender.
“I’m going to do something desperate,” I say. “But it’s for you. And me. And the boys. No. that’s not true. It’s because I don’t know what else to do.”
• • • •
“Volunteers?” I ask. It’s a bad joke. I’m back in surgical. News has traveled that there’s an operational shelter with open doors. The settlement has grown to about one hundred. My team’s been sent by someone in charge to save them. Inside the operating room, it’s just Jim, Marc, and Troy, who’s been readying the metal casings, and me.
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