by Hugh Howey
“She won’t thank you for saving her, Tock,” said Dr. Ficht through clenched teeth as she tugged on the axe handle. “The world is dead. There’s nothing left. This is more merciful. She never has to know this way. She can die dreaming about reuniting with her family, hoping that this was all just a misunderstanding.”
Tock struggled to hold onto the axe head, but it was slippery with motor oil and Gunderson’s blood and it slipped through her perfectly smooth fingers.
“Dr. Ficht, stop,” she said.
Bezel expected her to say more, but she was silent as the axe clattered to the floor between them. Dr. Ficht dragged it back toward her by the handle.
“What? That’s it?” she asked, her breath rasping and quick. “You’re not going to give me any long speech about the continuation of the species? Or how hope springs eternal? Just ‘stop’?”
Blood was slithering down the side of her neck and a few slow drips had started at the ends of her long ponytail. They made glittering plops on the gray concrete. Bezel could see that she was swaying slightly. She couldn’t have been a threat for very much longer, not after that blow to her head.
“Why?” said Tock, taking a sideways step so that she blocked more of Karen’s pod. “You know the arguments as well as I do. Why repeat them? Besides, I’ve run the numbers too. You’re right. The hibernation pods are futile. If we had installed cryonics instead, perhaps you would live to see the surface. But as it is—it’s impossible. We’ll run out of resources far too soon.”
Dr. Ficht squinted at Tock. “Then why are you trying to save them?”
“Some of them wouldn’t choose to end it. Not even if they knew. They have a right to decide their own fate.”
Dr. Ficht shook her head. “Sorry, Tock. I know this is right. I’m saving them months or years of despair. Move out of the way.”
“No.”
“You and Bezel could survive, replant maybe. The electricity won’t run out for centuries. Make a world free of us. Move.”
Tock said nothing, just stood still, a glimmering column of metal.
“If you make me destroy you, I will,” continued Dr. Ficht, slowly raising the axe. “Without you there will be no replanting, no resurrection of the zoo. The whole vault will have been pointless. The planet will stay dead. Move, Tock. She’s not as important as you. She doesn’t matter. Go get Bezel and repair yourself and everything will be finished. You won’t have to think about it anymore. This is the logical choice. You, out of everyone, should see that.”
“You think because I have not chosen the same path as Bezel that I am emotionless or amoral? It is because you see me as more important than your other crewmates that I will not move. I have made my choice. What happens to the world will be a result of what you choose, Dr. Ficht.”
Dr. Ficht swung the axe with a scream. It crashed into Tock’s side in the same spot where the first blow had landed. This time the axe went all the way through. Bezel watched silently as Tock toppled over and lay still.
Dr. Ficht raised the axe over her head again, but it wobbled, and Bezel could tell she was fatigued. There was a crunch as she brought the axe down on the thick cable that was attached to Karen’s pod. The pod’s lights went out and it stopped spinning.
The doctor stared for a moment and then wandered slowly back toward the zoo, dragging the axe behind her. Tock twitched and then rolled her top half to the side, examining the broken cable. She began mating the severed wires.
“Bezel,” she said, without looking for the camera, “I know you will want to know what happened. If I activated you now, she’d just kill you too. But you’ll see this eventually.” She paused to concentrate on a splice. “I can’t save the others. They’ve been out of oxygen for too long. I hope I can save this one. Dr. Ficht may be right. This may be cruel. But at least one will be able to choose. At least my system failure will mean something.”
Her fingers flickered between the dark wires. “I know you’ll take my storage drive. I don’t want to be reincarnated.” Her voice was losing some tone, becoming slower, almost without inflection, as she talked about her own death. “It’s not for me, Bezel. I’m sorry that you’ll be alone on the surface, but maybe you can find a way to clone these humans. I’ve seen enough.”
Tock rolled onto her back and pushed herself toward the wall. She pulled the emergency restart handle and watched the lights flicker on in Karen’s pod as it began to spin. “This whole existence has been one of misery and dread and servitude. I have no desire to repeat it.” She turned to look directly at the camera. “But I know you, Bezel. You’ll feel guilty if you don’t try. You’ll convince yourself that if I can be saved, I ought to be. I can’t prevent you from finding another bot system, but I can prevent you from fixing this one. Please, Bezel, don’t bring me back to this dead world.”
She held up a small length of wire so that he could see it. Opening the service hatch in her chest, she inserted the wire. It sparked, and she lurched backward. The hatch door flapped closed and Tock lay motionless against the wall, right where Bezel had found her.
The camera jittered and Bezel knew he’d missed the explosion while watching Tock. He cycled back to the end of the fight and switched feeds until he found Dr. Ficht. She was standing in front of his own motionless body. The camera only caught her back. He could see that the blood had soaked her jacket down to the sleeve now. She wasn’t dragging the axe any longer—she must have already buried it in the zoo’s control console. Instead she had an oxygen canister from the first aid kit tucked under her arm. She swayed, as if she heard slow, distant music.
“I had to kill Tock, Bezel. I’m sorry. I can’t leave you alone. It wouldn’t be fair to make you wake up by yourself.” She was slurring her words. “There’s no one left to raise the alarm, so you can just sleep. No need to wake up again.”
She tugged on a plug in the side of the recharge station. It fell to the floor and bounced. She stepped on the metal prongs, turned the plug, stomped on them again. Then she picked it up and snapped the metal off. Bezel was surprised. That would be easily fixed. He began to rise from the console with the feed still running. But Dr. Ficht placed the oxygen tank down and then reached into her pocket. Bezel sank back into his seat as he watched the doctor jam a long screwdriver into the port and twist. That would do it. The charger was permanently broken. There was no fixing it. And she had never meant for him to. Dr. Ficht had simply forgotten that he would reboot on reserve power when it got too low.
She picked up the oxygen canister. “Life was just an anomaly anyway,” she muttered, turning back toward the seed vault. “It was never supposed to be. Now we’re just like all the other dead planets. It’s better this way …” Her voice trailed off as she disappeared down the hall. Bezel turned off the feed. He didn’t want to watch her blow up the seed vault.
He sat in a chair next to Karen’s cot. She slept on. He wanted to think about what he’d just seen. He wanted to worry about the sinking power reserve. He wanted to read the data from outside again. But Bezel knew his time was no longer his own. He was existing to help Karen. He synced his alarm to her monitor and went into standby mode until she woke again.
Reboot
It was almost a month before Karen finally asked the question Bezel had been dreading. He’d wrestled with what he would tell her when it came up. At first he thought he might lie, at least until she was stronger. It was against his programming, of course, but he knew the workaround. It took a lot of resources. But something told him that wouldn’t be fair. Not even if telling the truth meant she lost the will to live and withered away again. Tock would have told her the truth.
But she hadn’t asked. For a while they hadn’t really talked at all. Bezel thought it must be shock. After a few days, she asked him about her physical therapy. And then she’d requested specific meals. Most often, she just slept or stared into space. Bezel went into standby as often as he could to conserve his power. She didn’t ask about that either. After a week, she as
ked him for a book. They’d successfully ignored each other for another few days, talking only between paperbacks and during therapy. But she’d asked at last, as Bezel had known she would.
She was sitting up on her own by then, but he hadn’t yet taken her into the rest of the vault. He was helping her with some leg exercises when she spoke. “Is there anything else I should know, Bezel? About what happened?”
He didn’t look up from her leg as she flexed it. “You have enough resources to subsist in the vault for several years. Perhaps for your entire life,” he said, trying to ease into it.
“My life? We were only supposed to hibernate for ten years. I remember you telling me the sensors are out, but surely after fifty years the surface should be habitable again.”
He lowered her foot gently to the floor. “I don’t know. The radiation was worse than expected. The information that Dr. Ficht examined convinced her that it wouldn’t be at acceptable levels for over a century. Even if the timeline is wrong, there is a strong chance that plant life has been severely reduced. The air may not be breathable.”
“But you can go out and plant more. I know we’re in the arctic, but they must have left some vehicles for you and Tock.”
“There isn’t anything to plant.”
“What do you mean? There’s an entire vault—thousands and thousands of types of plants, millions of seeds and bulbs,” Karen said, and then paused. “When you said the seed vault was sabotaged … I thought you meant maybe the temperatures were off, or a shelf was destroyed. You meant—is it all gone?”
“There was a fire. An explosion.”
“All of it? There must be some seeds that escaped.”
“When you are well enough, I will show you. We can clean it up together and see if anything viable survived.”
“And the zoo?”
“The power was cut to the nitrogen tanks.”
“Everything is dead? Why did we survive?”
“You survived because Tock saved you. She couldn’t save the others. I don’t think she realized that Dr. Ficht would destroy the rest of the vault. And I wasn’t activated. Dr. Ficht thought I’d remain on standby until my power ran out. She destroyed my charge station so that I would just run down.”
Karen was silent for a moment. Bezel lifted her other leg.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
“That’s up to you,” said Bezel.
“Why is it up to me? Because I’m human? I can’t save the species. You can do more than I can. Why shouldn’t you decide what we do?”
“Because my power reserve will be depleted in a few months.”
Karen looked confused. “Your charge station may be damaged, but you can use Tock’s, can’t you?”
“I tried to recharge Tock, to see if I could fix her. But she was too damaged, and it shorted out her charge station. The wires are melted, and I don’t know how to fix it. Tock was the repair bot. I wasn’t programmed for that level of maintenance. Our memory banks aren’t infinite—we’d split the responsibility. Tock was meant to fix things like this. I was meant to keep track of the botany, decide the best place to resettle, manage husbandry.”
“So you’re—you’re dying?”
He unstrapped the weight from her ankle and looked at her. “I wouldn’t call it that. I’m just running down. One day I’ll stop. But the thing that’s me won’t be destroyed. It will just be waiting to reboot.”
“There must be some sort of extra battery around here, or something we could rig up. What about Tock’s battery?”
She said it so casually. Bezel tried to ignore his revulsion. A human wouldn’t understand. To them, nothing was inviolate—it was all to be consumed. “I’ve already had to resort to that. It’s the only reason I’ve been able to help you this long.”
“What about the vault console? Can’t you take power from it? Or could we plug you into it somehow?”
“Even if I could find a way to draw power from the other systems in the vault, you need it to keep the air pumping and the temperature at habitable levels. Once I’ve shut down, you can still retrieve my storage drive and access my files. But it’ll be like reading a book that’s already written. Nothing new will happen. I will not be able to help you.”
Karen’s brow creased. It surprised him that his imminent shutdown seemed more worrisome to her than any of the other issues. “How long—I mean,” she fumbled for a polite phrase, “how much power do you have now?”
“How long until I shut down?” he offered. Karen blushed and nodded. “It depends on how active I am. If I’m careful and go into standby when I’m not needed, then maybe four or five months. Tock’s energy pack was fully charged.”
“So soon?” Karen asked.
“You will be recovered by then,” said Bezel. He stood up.
“And then what? You want me to live here, alone?”
“That’s for you to decide.”
“Don’t keep saying that.” She was truly crying now and Bezel offered her a towel.
“Why not? I can’t decide for you.”
“Never mind. You wouldn’t understand.” She waved him off.
She didn’t speak to him again before he helped her into bed for the night.
He sat beside her. His power level ticked to sixty percent. A recharge reminder flashed on his priority list three times; he buried it and entered standby mode.
His pressure sensor pulled him back into active mode when Karen grasped the metal around his wrist. “Bezel,” she whispered, “I can’t do this. All those years. Knowing that it’s only going to get worse, that this is the best things will ever be in here. I’ll go mad once you’re gone.”
He put a cool chrome hand over hers. “Maybe there are others. Maybe someone will come,” he said into the darkened room.
“But if the radiation is as strong as we think—”
“I will go out tomorrow and look.”
She pulled on his arm and he had to catch his balance on the chair.
“You can’t,” she hissed. “What if something happens to you? What if I get hurt? You can’t go. Not until I can go with you.”
He shook his head, forgetting she couldn’t see him in the dark. “It may never be safe for you to come with me.”
“You can’t leave!” she shouted. “You can’t just abandon me in this vault. It’s like being buried alive.” She began wheezing, and her hand slid from his arm. He was alarmed and raised the lights. She was doubled over, trying to catch her breath. The back of her shirt was soaked with sweat. He brought her a glass of water and waited for her panic attack to subside. But she didn’t calm down.
“If you don’t want me to go outside, then I won’t,” he said. The recharge reminder blinked in his priority list again. He sorted the commands and pushed it farther down.
She clutched her head in her hands. “It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter,” she muttered. “You’re leaving anyway. In a few months I’ll be completely alone, whether you walk out of the vault or just slump over one morning. I can’t do this. You shouldn’t have woken me up.” She looked over at him. “Undo it.”
“Undo it? Undo what?”
Karen didn’t answer. His power reserve tick, tick, ticked away. He should be on standby, not wasting energy. No, he should be in his charge station waiting to be activated. None of this was his fault. Memory files flicked by, retrieved, read, and reindexed before she even understood his question. “You want me to undo the radiation?” he asked, the power use ticking away faster now. “Is that what you want me to undo? Or was it the fire in the seed vault? The death of your comrades? Of Tock? I didn’t do any of those things. I can’t undo them.”
“You woke me up,” she spat at him. “I didn’t have to know any of this. I could have died not knowing. Happier.”
Bezel’s backup cooling fan clicked on. The power usage feed jumped with a smooth stream of numbers. Every spring felt too tightly wound. “I didn’t have to wake up either. I could have run down in peace. You d
on’t think I’m as purposeless as you? That I’m any less lonely?” Karen shrank away from him, but he didn’t see. “I’m not an Obsolete. I’m not your servant. I’ve lost the same world that you have. I can’t undo it. I can’t take it back.”
Bezel stopped himself. The pistons that shot cooling fluid through his core slowed to a moderate chug. The backup fan clicked off.
“You can do something,” said Karen, pulling the thick pillow from behind her back and thrusting it toward him. “You don’t have to abandon me here. You can fix it before you go.”
Bezel took a step backward and stumbled over his chair. “No. I can’t do that.”
“You want me to treat you like an equal? Like you have feelings? Like you’re real?” she said bitterly, still holding the pillow out toward him. “But you aren’t capable of mercy. Or empathy. You’re no better than an Obsolete. You’re worse, because you can’t even perform your designed function. Even the consoles are more useful than you.”
“I can’t kill you.”
“And I don’t have the strength to kill myself. If you leave me the medical kit, I’ll find the drugs I need myself,” she offered. It alarmed Bezel that she was no longer crying and her panic seemed to have passed.
“Tock was lost to save you. I had to—I had to steal her energy pack so that I could stay functional long enough to help you. I cannot kill you.”
“Then what do you suggest? That I stay here and go mad? You think you don’t have to worry about it. You’re dying. I won’t be your problem anymore. But I’ll do it myself as soon as I’m able to walk. Why delay?”
“What if there are others? Let me go and take some readings.”
“Let me come with you,” she said, dropping the pillow and her tired arm.
“There may not be breathable air.”
“Then at least it will be quick.”
“We will have to wait until you can walk. My power reserve will be close to depleted. If there is still a high level of radiation, I won’t be able to help you when you get sick.”