Devon sat silently in his apartment on that fourth morning. The electricity didn’t work and the outside world was completely still. He wondered if there was anybody left for him to have control over.
Suddenly, there were car engines going past outside. Devon looked out the window to see a caravan of vehicles driving past his building. He went out and flagged them down. At the front of the caravan was a city bus. It pulled over letting the cars behind it go by. The door opened and Devon climbed in. The bus was full of children and a chubby man with long gray hair was driving.
“Where are you headed?” Devon asked.
“Jericho, New Jersey,” the man said.
“Why there?” He had been there before, there was nothing but an old church with the smallish town built around it, hardly anything that seemed capable of housing refugees.
“That’s where they make the Enoch Pill,” the man said. “In an underground factory. Josephine Yanloo is being brought there to figure out what went wrong.”
“Josephine Yanloo?” Devon asked. His stomach went sour.
“Yep, she’s got a lot of explaining to do. What do you do by the way?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what line of work you in?”
“I’m a priest,” Devon said with no hesitation.
“Well we need that now more than ever. You coming along?”
Devon sprinted back inside. He stood there on his tippy-toes trying to decide what was important. In the end he decided on the cross and nothing else. He took a seat on the bus and it pulled back into the caravan. He wondered what Josephine was planning.
It was over the next few years that he realized how lucky he had been, to come face to face with a supreme intelligence and emerge from the other side unscathed.
He’d need a way to trick Josephine, if the opportunity ever arose. It would require patience. But that wasn’t the issue. The real problem was he could never be as smart as an AI, not in an instant anyway. But if he had the time he could formulate a plan to outsmart anything. Even a machine that thought itself God.
Devon lived in Yanloo City for the next 18 years. He spent most of his days trying to amass power and to get confessions from people. He never admitted it to anyone, but the reason he liked the confessional was because it let him know other people were just as messed up as he was.
He developed the program that would let him trick the AI, but never got a chance to use it. He was shot by a police officer after a fight with a girl over the crows. He didn’t die though.
24
Kizzy had been decorating the inside of her home for one week when she decided she was ready to have dinner guests. The home was coming along nicely and this time she wouldn’t need to give it up. She had restored the wooden floor with the help of her father, found old furniture she liked in nearby houses, and even fixed the hole the constable had blasted in the wall with a shotgun back when she was trying to arrest her.
After the reactor in Yanloo City exploded, Patel drew a circle on the map showing where the fallout would reach and said they needed to go somewhere outside. The small town of Mountain Top sat right outside the circle and Kizzy knew that would be the first place Diego would go to look for her.
Each day they searched for survivors among the men and the women and brought them there to rebuild mankind. The effort would be spearheaded by Kizzy and her children. The town’s population was up to 24. 7 men, 16 women and 1 cleaning droid.
Life was good. It wasn’t perfect, and wasn’t blissful, and it wasn’t even without some trouble, but it was good enough.
Through the information they retrieved from Uncle, Patel was able to work out an antidote for the curse from the Enoch Pill. Arousal was no longer lethal, but no one had had the courage to try just yet. Nonetheless, Kizzy remained the only one capable of having children.
Patel stopped by to give her a check-up the day of the dinner party. He had kept his Mohawk, which confused Kizzy, but she admired him for his bravery.
“Everything looks good,” he said after the examination. “Are you taking those prenatal vitamins?”
Kizzy nodded.
“Good. You’re really lucky to be alive, Kizzy.”
“I know,” Kizzy said.
“We’re lucky you’re alive. We have a future because of you.”
Kizzy smiled. Her future wasn’t gone, it was tied up with everybody else’s. It was bigger than hers alone could ever be.
Patel’s face went serious. “I have something important to show you.”
Kizzy’s chest went tight as she braced herself in her chair.
“As you know we went to the city yesterday,” Patel said. “And we found the security archives.”
He opened his laptop and turned it to her. It was security camera footage from the canal yards in Yanloo City. Diego was wrestling with Page Palmer atop a warehouse and they fell to an alley below. Footage from later showed Diego pursuing Paige through the canal yard. There was a flash of light. Paige tried to open a door and flames that devoured everything in its path enveloped both of them. The footage cut off.
Kizzy nodded and stared out the window.
The footage flashed before her eyes again and again. Her eyes swelled up.
“I’m sorry Kizzy,” Patel said.
“He’s not completely gone,” Kizzy said, feeling her stomach, still looking out the window at the rooftop the constable had been standing upon all those weeks ago. “They’re pieces of him.”
“They’re half of him, half of you,” Patel said with misty eyes.
“They have to live,” Kizzy said.
“They will.” Patel sighed and got up to go, but stopped at the door. “There’s another thing I wanted to ask you. You injected the nanobots directly into the CPU table at the Uncle facility?”
Kizzy nodded.
“We just never found the remnants of his programming. When programs are destroyed they leave a sort of shell behind. We couldn’t find Uncle’s. The nanobots must have destroyed that as well. Dinner is at seven tonight, right?”
Kizzy nodded. He left and she was left alone. Slowly, she got up, grabbed a blanket, and squeezed it tight against her chest and cried on the floor. There was a knock at the door. It was Charlie, there to clean her house.
“Hello, Kizzy,” he said when she answered. “Are your eyes okay?”
“Yeah, they’re fine.”
“Perhaps they need to be serviced.”
Kizzy laughed and wiped her eyes. “Maybe you’re right.”
At seven o’clock the constable, her father, Murray, and Patel came to her house for dinner. It was nice to be distracted for a while. They all sat around the table eating chili Kizzy had made. It was her mother’s old recipe. It would have made her happy to know it was still feeding people to this day.
“I know you’re technically underage and pregnant,” Leo asked. “But do you have any beer?”
“I’ll check,” Kizzy said. A woman from town had stocked her fridge earlier that day.
“By the way Leo,” Patel asked. “How does it feel knowing you’ll be a grandfather?”
“Don’t remind me,” Leo said, his face suddenly going white.
Sure enough there was a six pack of Graham beer in the fridge. Kizzy brought it out and held up the purple cans to Leo.
“I’ll take it I guess,” he said with a shrug.
“Not so much of a beer snob anymore?” Murray asked.
“I don’t have a choice,” Leo said. “How’s the new job?”
“I’m a real bad farmer, turns out,” Murray said. “The cows hate me.”
“That makes sense,” Leo said. “Cows are actually one of the most intelligent animals.”
“That’s not even remotely true,” Patel said.
After they had eaten, Kizzy brought some of the dishes to the kitchen.
“Thank you Kizzy,” the constable said as she stood in the doorway.
“Thanks for bringing dessert,” Kizzy said.
“No, I wanted to thank you for giving me hope.”
“Well, it wasn’t my intention.”
“That’s the only way to do it,” the constable said. “I’m looking forward to meeting your children, you know.”
Kizzy stopped washing the dishes for a second and thought about the father they would never know. “I am too,” she said finally.
At the end of the night everyone got up to leave.
“Mind if I sleep on your couch?” Leo asked.
“You can if you want to,” Kizzy said.
“He wants to make sure you’re safe,” Patel whispered to Kizzy as he put on his coat.
“That’s why I’m letting him do it,” Kizzy whispered back.
That night Kizzy laid in bed unable to sleep.
The anxieties were creeping in. She would be a mother. The weight of the world was finally on her shoulders. Sure, she would have the help of the community they were building, but nonetheless, everything was riding on her.
Her mind went over all the other things that awaited her. There would be a town meeting the next day to decide work assignments. She would finish her home later that week. The end of the month was the new year and they were planning a winter festival. The following spring they would plant their crops and in summer Kizzy would have her children.
She thought of Diego. He was still alive within her, in those three little lives that were waiting to begin.
For the moment, Kizzy was content. She had so many hopes and dreams and anxieties that the thought of the future made her excited.
It all felt strange though. As if she had merely been manipulated into wanting what she now wanted. Maybe her hopes and dreams had been planted within her. Maybe everything she wanted and desired had merely been inserted by suggestion.
But maybe that was the case for everyone.
The next day the walls in Kizzy’s home suddenly seemed bare. So she decided to make paintings of all the people she had loved and lost in her time. She framed them and put them up on the wall to cover up the blankness. Her mother and Laura sat in her old living room, listening to a record. Josephine in her lab, looking through a microscope. Her aunt Patty picked flowers out in an open field. Diego stood in the middle, smiling at her out on Sandy Hook.
Everyday, Kizzy would wake up and see these people, and the feelings they had given her back when they were alive would ring inside her. She wasn’t a talented artist, so they weren’t very good. But they meant something to her, and in the end, that was all that really mattered.
Table of Contents
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The Enoch Plague (The Enoch Pill Book 2) Page 26