The Hauntings of Playing God (The Great De-Evolution)

by Chris Dietzel

  But the stream of people eventually slowed until it was a trickle, and then, only drops. A single man or woman might appear on the horizon, struggling to make the final mile of their journey on the broken roads. Eventually, even the single new stranger stopped appearing. After that, nature went about its business, making each person a little older every day, sporadically taking someone due to a heart attack or pneumonia.

  Not just in her settlement, but in all of them. In addition to the e-mails she wrote to Daniel in Los Angeles, she used to exchange notes with caretakers in New Orleans, Houston, and San Diego. There was a lovely woman working at the San Diego settlement, a West Coast reflection of herself, that Morgan could share all of her sorrows with. This woman, Alaida, had grown up with the same kind of life as Morgan. A life of knowing what it was like to be the only normal child in a room full of children who couldn’t talk; years of knowing a different kind of childhood had once been possible but no longer was. This bond united them.

  But then, one morning, Alaida’s next e-mail wasn’t waiting for her. An entire day went by without a message, but Morgan tried to pass this off as the growing responsibilities of a caretaker in the final settlements. She knew how busy she and Elaine were as more caretakers passed away, so she could sympathize with Alaida’s tardiness. But no message came the next day either, or the day after that. Alaida had either taken sick and was spending her last days being cared for herself, as she had cared for so many others, or she was already dead. That was the last contact she had with the San Diego settlement. Six months later, Daniel told her that the woman he stayed in contact with from there also stopped e-mailing him, and he assumed the entire settlement was finally gone.

  The same thing happened to her friend in Houston. They exchanged messages about what their respective settlements were like, about how the new faces appearing from the north seemed to have finally subsided, and then one day that man also went quiet.

  They all did, eventually.

  Everyone Morgan has ever known has passed away. With Daniel’s death, the Los Angeles settlement is void of human life now, too. She alone is the final person in the world able to form words, capable of articulating her fingers. She alone continues the human lifeline for another day.

  This realization does not bewilder her. If anything, she is oddly numb to the fact that she is all that remains. Maybe because she has had a lifetime of endings to prepare for this. Maybe because she is so overwhelmed with her current responsibilities. There is nothing she can do about being the last person other than continue caring for the remaining Blocks in the gymnasium with her. Knowing she is powerless to bring Elaine or Daniel back, helpless in her ability to create new life, allows her to focus on the task of providing for those who cannot provide for themselves.

  Their care—the idea that convinces her that what she has had to do to Justin and Alokin and the others is the right thing. As long as she can give these remaining Blocks the best care she is capable of offering, everything else can be forgiven. She forces the thought into her mind, keeps it trapped there, believes it.

  In a way, her life is easier with only limited time to contemplate her actions. Hobbling as quickly as she can from bed to bed allows few moments for reflection on the missing row of Blocks in quadrant 3. But it also gives her little time to think of all the things she has lost during her lifetime and little time to assess all the things she has given up to care for others instead of herself. She has lost everything except the actuality of her life. Even her virtue has been lost; she is a murderer.

  Her parents are gone. But they would be gone anyway, she tells herself. Everyone’s parents have to pass away eventually. However, any other family she could have had is also gone without ever having existed. The man she might have married decided to stay, many decades earlier, when she left with her parents to head south. It hadn’t seemed like that big of a deal at the time because Morgan was convinced that if they were meant to be together, life would find a way to reunite them.

  Instead, they never spoke again. She thought about calling him or sending an e-mail, but as time went by, she began to question if she hadn’t loved him more than he had loved her. Why else wouldn’t he contact her? It didn’t cross her mind until weeks later that he might have been waiting for the same sign from her. Only then did she realize that she could have made her own fortune instead of relying on the world to determine it for her.

  By the time she did call, a year later, there was no answer at his house. Nor did he reply to her e-mail. She used to wonder if he ever got her messages and simply ignored them, spurned by the belief that he must have loved her more than she had loved him, or if he had left her similar messages and wondered why she never replied to them. For a long time after that she tried to picture where he might have spent the remainder of his life, if he lived his final years in a group community, or if he liked being by himself in the forgotten lands that had been abandoned by mankind.

  Whereas she is able to create a name and personality and life story for each of her Blocks, she was not able to agree on what might have happened to the young man she loved many decades earlier. He may have only lived another couple of years, or he may have lived to be a hundred. He may have had a completely different sense of humor by the time he passed away; those fifty years in between the last time they saw each other is a long time for someone to change from the person she once knew. It’s possible that neither of them would be able to make the other smile anymore. Decades later, she may not even have recognized the man she once loved. That is why she avoids thinking about how he may have died or where he may have spent the remainder of his life. Although she does not try to put together a story for his final years, the one thing she does allow herself is the hope and belief that he thought about her in his last days the way she thinks fondly of him now.

  In addition to preventing her from romantic love, the Great De-evolution ensured that any chance she might have had at having children also fell by the wayside. This, at least, is okay with her, though. Growing up during the Great De-evolution, she didn’t have the chance to see parents taking their sons and daughters to little league games or to picnics, so it never seemed important to have those same experiences. The charm of having a life growing within her own belly seemed odd because the life she saw all around her was quiet and needed to be cared for. Any appeal at the thought of changing diapers and having someone be dependent on you seemed like an unnecessary burden when she saw Blocks all around her that needed the same thing.

  It’s not just family, however, that has disappeared from her life. It’s also the mundane things, the things she never used to think about. There is no excitement over a new song, movie, book, or TV show, nothing that can take her away, even for five minutes, to another world. The final years of television had nothing but re-runs. It’s not fun to turn on a TV when all you see are things that originally aired thirty years earlier.

  There aren’t even new meals to experiment with on the food processor anymore. At her age, she has had a chance to go through every meal from 001-African Peanut Soup, to meal 999-Ziti. And she has tried every variation for each meal. African Peanut Soup with extra garlic. African Peanut Soup with no chili powder. Ziti with only mozzarella cheese. Ziti with only ricotta cheese. Ziti with only Parmesan cheese. Ziti with all three cheeses. You name it and she has tried it.

  With no one else to talk to, she tells her Blocks about the plates of food she makes and then imagines their responses.

  “Spaghetti with vodka sauce is pretty gross,” she tells the Block who used to be a gardener.

  “Why are you telling me? All I get to have is the shit that comes out of this nutrient bag.”

  The gardener was never very good with people. He was happy when everyone started migrating south because it meant he had entire parks that could be turned into flowerbeds, entire golf courses that could be turned into rose-colored artwork.

  It’s a shame his family forced him to come down to Miami with them. He has n
ever smiled since then.

  She tells a Block who used to be a lifeguard how cream of crab soup is superior to Maryland crab soup.

  “Variety is the spice of life,” the Block says. “Just make sure you wait thirty minutes before you go swimming. You don’t want to get cramps.”

  The only people her lifeguard ever had to save from drowning were Blocks who had been left too close to the shore during low tide and were forgotten about by absent-minded family members when the tide started to rise again.

  From his peaceful face come the words, “Did I ever tell you about the time I saw dolphins in the water, thought they were sharks, and caused a massive panic?”

  She looks at the giant clock on the wall. Even with six of the Blocks gone, she is having trouble keeping the pace she needs.

  “I’m sorry. I need to keep moving.”

  “I understand,” he says. “Stay safe.”

  15

  Making her way through the rows of Blocks, she finds herself thinking things like, I can’t believe I ever managed to do this back when there were four entire quadrants; fifty-eight is still too many.

  The first day after an entire row was sacrificed, she was able to finish by midnight. But the next day it was already twenty minutes later before she completed her tasks. Two more days and she was back to one o’clock again.

  I’m too old for this. I’ll never be able to keep up with all these people.

  The thought is still there when she reaches Jeremy, her train conductor. She is only in row 3 of quadrant 2 but is already an hour behind schedule if she wants to be done by midnight.

  I do this so everyone else can live, she thinks, her fingers already twisting Jeremy’s feed line away from his nutrient bag.

  With a click, it disconnects. She lets it fall to the ground. The Block in front of her doesn’t reach to reattach the nutrient bag’s line. His thick eyebrows don’t rise in alarm. He can do nothing but remain staring at her—not at her exactly, but at where she happens to be standing—until she moves along with the rest of her chores and he is staring at the place she used to be. When she comes back the next day, his lifeless eyes will still be fixed on that same spot. That is his life.

  She once warned Elaine against personalizing the people in front of them: “You’re going to convert this body into a make-believe friend, and one day they’re going to die. Isn’t it better just to leave them how they are so we aren’t as attached when they pass away?”

  But her friend had laughed this concern away. “They’re already people. We’re just giving them memories of a better life than the one they actually had.” And then, frowning, “Now stop trying to ruin my game by taking it too seriously.”

  Jeremy, Elaine had said, was a train conductor until trains became obsolete. There was a brief time, after the migrations started, in which trains were thought to be the savior of the overburdened. It was much easier to load a train with thousands of Blocks and transport them south than it was to load an endless caravan of buses.

  The idea did not last long.

  Jeremy’s life was never the same after the derailment. A train going from Montreal to Boston twisted itself into a fiery ball. Motionless bodies, only a few of which managed to survive, lay scattered about an apple orchard. With the living not being able to yell for help or raise a hand when a call for survivors was made, responders had to walk up to each body and check for a pulse. It took people longer to check for survivors than it had taken to load the train in the first place. In the end, two thousand Blocks, along with the hundred people charged with their care, were dead, their bodies scattered over the distance of a mile.

  Someone had inspected the entire line from Montreal to Boston and reported that it was safe. So how did the train derail? Was it sabotaged? Had the inspector simply missed a crack in the iron rails?

  Another derailment occurred between Edmonton and Calgary. It was easy enough to get out and change a flat tire if you were driving south and hit a bad stretch of road. The same luxury was not given to the trains; a single problem with the tracks was enough for the entire train to go up in flames. Some said the tracks were being intentionally damaged so the living cargo would have no chance of making the trip safely. Although there was no evidence to support this, no one trusted the tracks after that.

  There were people who proposed that the trains crawl along the track while a man walked ahead of it. If the man inspecting the rails noticed a problem, he would signal the train to stop. The journey wouldn’t be fast, but unlimited cargo could be transferred with less hassle. This was only attempted once, on the route between Minneapolis and Milwaukee. Somewhere along the way, the man walking ahead of the train was eaten by wolves. No one else was willing to attempt the hike after that.

  Everyone else who wanted to migrate south had to use the roads. Giant caravans of buses and minivans appeared on the highways. Train stations around the country were filled with engines and cabooses, each rusting and becoming a home for various species of birds and vermin. All across the country, trains were left in random places on the tracks as if the last conductors had simply disappeared into the wilderness and left the hundred train cars to fend for themselves. Jeremy, Morgan’s conductor, had known how to do one thing—get a train from one point to another. After the trains stopped, he had nothing left.

  “It’ll be okay,” she says, putting a hand on Jeremy’s forehead. A final gesture of humanity for the man who grew up collecting toy trains, and who, upon seeing one in person for the first time, knew there was nothing else he would rather do with his life.

  Jeremy does not focus on what is going to happen to him. All he is capable of is loving his trains: “Do you have any idea what it’s like to take hundreds of tons of steel across the country, through mountains, under bridges, across rivers?”

  This is exactly the moment she had feared when she told Elaine their game might not be a good idea. She has no idea what Jeremy’s parents actually named him. His real name, assuming he had one, disappeared when he was left at the gym’s front door. His name, his occupation, even his words, are all thanks to Elaine.

  And now Morgan is the one who has to put an end to those memories and experiences. Whether they are real or not does not matter. They are ending all the same. It seems to her that a made-up life should not cause sadness when it’s over, especially not compared to the very real lives and memories she shared with Elaine. It does, though. To her, this body in front of her really was a train conductor at one time.

  In this moment, she is all too aware of being the last normal human on the face of the earth. Her body offers reminders that she has far surpassed even the most generous life expectancy. These realizations force her to live with the manufactured personalities and histories around her. Only they are here to join her in her final days.

  It’s obvious that this game makes it even more difficult when she has to sacrifice the good of one for the health of the many, but she cannot help it. Without a bond to keep her thinking each person is an ally in what they are all going through together, she would go crazy. Or she would be like George and simply walk away from the group home one day. But at the same time it destroys her a little when she must do what she does next…

  She leaves Jeremy there, the nutrient bag no longer connected to his arm.

  “It’ll be okay,” she says again, this time away from where Jeremy would be able to hear her.

  Life is fragile. When he was younger, Jeremy might have lasted a week without having his nutrient bag refilled. Now, his pulse weakens after only three hours. She walks by his bed again once she is done caring for everyone in quadrant 4. When she touches his wrist, she doesn’t bother trying to feel a pulse against her fingertips. Her hands have long since succumbed to the trials of old age. Instead, she wants to judge his body temperature. Already, his body is colder than the others. Death is creeping over him.

  In the morning, he is even colder. His heart is no longer beating.

  She cannot let the body rest a
mongst the living. Everything she does is guided by the Golden Rule; she would not want to spend the day next to a dead body, so she does not force those in her care, even the voiceless, to suffer through it.

  The forklift comes to life. Jeremy’s bed, his body still on it, is carried over to the incinerator.

  16

  It rains all day and all night. At least this time there are no winds, only rain. But the amount of water dropped on top of the group home seems endless.

  She was taught in science class that the world has some things that vary wildly based on outside elements: the amount of plant life determines how much oxygen there is, there is a finite amount of gold and silver, the number of mosquitoes fluctuates based on the severity of the previous winter. But for other things, such as energy and water, there is always the same amount. The same quantity of water always exists, just in different forms. A glacier turns to water, the water evaporates but the clouds refill. But if this is true, where is all of this rain coming from?

  She still smiles at the thought of her mother walking in on her one evening, after listening to her science teacher talk about how water changes from glaciers to ocean water to rain water and so on in an endless cycle. Morgan had been standing at the bathroom sink with the water running even though she wasn’t washing her hands.

  “What are you doing?” her mother had asked, her hands on her hips, the pose of an adult ready to put a stop to whatever youthful shenanigans may be going on.