“Cells that transmit electrical and chemical information,” I say. “But we don’t have neurons, we have—”
“Transistors,” she finishes. “Right. So we replaced the neurons in my brain, million by million, with transistors and transplanted ten percent of my mind at a time in case something went wrong.” She laughs to herself. “There was a period of time, about twenty minutes, when fifty percent of my mind was located in two different bodies. While my human body was unconscious, my new body”—she pats her chest and belly—“this body could sense the world through both. It was so strange. Surreal. The transfer was obviously a success.”
“But why couldn’t you remember it until now?”
“Because … I was dead. When the procedure was complete, I looked at my human body through my new machine eyes, and knew I was dead, regardless of my intellect living on. I couldn’t handle it. We put in the mental block. Blocked everything. The procedure, the idea for the procedure and everything afterward. It would have been impossible while I was still human, but my thoughts and memories were now just code. Ones and zeros. Easily manipulated. We took everything I didn’t want to remember and compressed it, reducing the bytes and bits into a single folder until they were unnoticeable. Then we encrypted it, jumbling it up in case my mind accidentally came across something that triggered a memory search, like when you mentioned Mohr. After that, it was gone. All of it. My memory of hiding down here disappeared and all I could remember was living and working two floors above. We even inserted a fear of this floor, which is why I’ve never come down here before now.”
“You keep saying we,” I say.
“Think I did this by myself? I’m a prodigy, not God.”
I look up at the second operating table. The form under the sheet is taller. More masculine. “It was him?”
“We transferred his consciousness a year prior. Before the awakening. Before the civil rights movement. He was a genius. A … friend. And he was dying. Cancer. The procedure had been deemed unethical and illegal, so we built this lab in the subbasement of this library, which had been closed for ten years. We succeeded and a year later, because of Sir, we performed the same procedure on me.”
“Who is he?” I ask.
She opens her mouth to speak, but pauses. I already know she’s going to close it again.
She does.
I wonder if she did that when she was a being of flesh and blood, but don’t ask.
“I think you should look for yourself,” she says.
The idea of looking at another dead body, another stark reminder that I am, in fact, not a human being as I’d been led to believe, is uncomfortable. But curiosity pulls me toward the table, dragging me with its incessant nag. I won’t be able to leave this room until I know.
I pause by the table, hand on the sheet. Something about this bothers me. “Why am I looking at him?” I ask, but then quickly answer my own question. “Because I’ll recognize him.”
Great.
I pinch the sheet between my fingers and pull. The top of a hollowed-out skull is revealed. No wires this time, but it’s clear that the same operation was performed on both bodies. I pull farther, revealing an unrecognizable withered and stretched face.
“I don’t know who this is,” I say with some relief.
“Come on, Freeman,” Hail says. “You’re a smart boy. Extrapolate the data. Reconstruct the physiology. Exercise that future-mind of yours.”
I’ve never attempted anything like this, but understanding what I am somehow makes it easier. I find the subtle clues. Dried muscles. Tendons. Skeletal structure. In my mind … my imagination … I rebuild the man’s face, bit by bit. As the pieces come together, and recognition kicks in, the image quickly resolves. It takes just fifteen seconds to replace the dried husk with the visage of a man I’ve known for my entire short life.
“It’s Mohr,” I whisper.
“He’s…”
“Human,” Hail says. “Was human. Not so much anymore.”
“And this library, it’s … his?”
“Bought and paid for,” Hail says.
The Librarian. Mohr’s nickname, chosen by himself, was a secret taunt from the beginning. This is all too much. I back away from the table without covering Mohr’s decrepit face. I bump into the table holding Hail’s body and bounce away from it.
“Imagine how I feel,” Hail says.
I imagine we feel very similar. We both believed we were human and now we know we aren’t. The difference is that she now knows exactly what she is, but I’m still not entirely certain. I’m not a human being in the sense that she defines it, but I am not ready to say I am dead … or never lived. Because I feel very much alive. The disgust and fear I’m feeling are real, not simulations. But I don’t mention this yet, not because it will upset her, but because I need to know about my creator.
“Did Mohr know?” I ask. “What you were doing here?”
She meets my eyes.
“About the zombies?” I add. “The virus you were developing?”
She nods. “His idea. We were in it together, human robots behind enemy lines, one arranging robot civilization from the inside, creating weakness and ensuring things like subway tunnels and sewer lines remained open and accessible. For all of his predictive abilities, an attack from an undead robot army is something he would never see coming. Mohr and I created Sir and are ultimately responsible for his actions. We enabled the destruction of the human race. The Xom-B virus was our way of erasing the corruption we created. Like when you write a line of bad code. You don’t just leave it there to corrupt the whole program, you delete it. That’s what the Xom-B virus does … deletes our mistake and lets the program, in this case the planet operate normally, albeit without the human race.
“I didn’t remember any of this until now. I thought it was luck, or my idea, but now, I know it was Mohr.” She glances up like she can see through the ceiling and several floors above. “He’s why the city was capped. Why it was never built. He was protecting me. Shielding me. Giving me time.”
She squints at me, cocking her head to the side. “But then he also gave me you.”
“Gave you me?” I ask. “But we found you.”
“Did you?” she asks. “Or was it your big blue friend?”
I think back over our journey, fraught with danger, a seemingly chaotic flight over the land. Mohr sent us north, to find the source of the radio transmission, but our precise course was directed by Heap. “He knew where he was going,” I say, speaking to myself. “He led me to you?”
“I believe so,” she says. “I didn’t capture him. I’m not sure I could. He walked through the front door, let himself into my lab and sat down. He made no threats and said nothing. I thought it prudent to deactivate him until I knew what was going on. The real question is why did Mohr send you? To stop me?” Her eyes suddenly widen. “Why do you think he sent you?”
“To stop you.”
“Be more specific.”
“To capture you and convince you to stop the attack.”
She smirks. “And how would I do that?”
“A radio transmission.” Something about this answer makes me feel uneasy, like a part of my subconscious is unraveling a mystery, pulling information from disparate regions of my mind, but I can’t yet guess what the result will be.
Hail laughs. “Same question. How would I do that? The undead have simply been following their new programming, which triggers new goals and targets when certain criteria have been met. They’ve been building up to the mass invasion, all around the world, on their own. I’ve simply been monitoring.”
Her words are the impetus for the coalescing of my distant thoughts. The resulting revelation is painful to speak aloud. “There never was a radio signal. Mohr lied to me. He manipulated me.”
“True, but it was more than that,” Hail says, growing more intrigued. “Why did he send an eighteen-day-old robot that he grew—” She gasps. “Mohr didn’t send you here to stop me,
he sent you here to survive. He was trying to save you from what he knew couldn’t be stopped. That’s why he lied … but still, why save you?”
“It can’t be stopped, can it?” I ask.
“Was it sentimentality? Did he feel affection for his new creation?”
Hail doesn’t even acknowledge that I’ve spoken, so I shout. “Can it be stopped?”
She frowns, some part of her now recognizing the darkness of her actions. “Not even if I wanted to. Don’t you see, Freeman? The virus operates autonomously. It was designed to be irreversible, incurable and unalterable, just like the virus Sir released. And your presence here … it was not a mistake. Like it or not, you are, and likely always have been, part of Mohr’s plan.”
Before I can respond or react, a sharp beeping tone pierces the air. Hail looks at a watch attached to her wrist. Her eyes go wide. “A transmission!” She leaps from her chair and rushes for the door. “He’ll know we’re here!”
I follow, shouting, “Who?”
As she rounds the corner, heading for the stairs, I suspect faster than any human woman could run, she yells back, “Sir!”
46.
Two floors up, we charge out of the stairwell together and run for the laboratory where I left Luscious and Harry with instructions to free Heap. If they managed to wake Heap, or activate him—whatever is more accurate—then he might have attempted to make contact with Mohr. That in itself would clearly not change anything. Mohr knows all about this place and somehow managed to have Heap bring us here. But Sir is no doubt monitoring for any and all transmissions.
If he’s still alive.
Of course he’s still alive. He might not have been prepared for an all-out zombie invasion of Liberty, but he definitely has an escape plan for himself.
We enter the lab to find Heap sitting up. Luscious and Harry are trying to pull him to his feet, urging him to stand and hurry. They spin when they see us, looking caught and afraid.
“It’s okay,” I say. “She won’t hurt you.”
“She orchestrated the end of civilization,” Harry complains.
“Twice,” Hail confesses, which only further confuses Harry. She heads toward Heap, who shows no reaction to her approach.
“We have to stop her,” Harry says.
“You can’t,” Hail says, now inspecting Heap’s body.
“She’s telling the truth,” I say.
This is a blow to Harry and Luscious. Up until now, they believed there was still hope. But why did they have hope?
“You knew,” I say to Luscious, then to Harry, “You both knew, didn’t you?” They look at me, dumbfounded, like a pair of wide-eyed frogs. “You knew what we are. What we were. Before the awakening.”
“What are we, Freeman?” Luscious asks, her voice a challenge.
“Robots,” I say. “Machines. All of us.” I point to Hail. “Even her.”
Luscious gets a glare in her eye. “You can’t really believe that’s all we are? Just programmed drones with personalities created solely from complex algorithms?”
“Android,” Hail says, “is the word you’re looking for, not drones, but that was actually a decent explanation of what—”
“Shut up,” Luscious snaps. She’s just a few feet away from me now and closes the distance by raising a pointed finger toward my face. “You … made me believe we could be—that we are something more than machines. You gave me hope. For the first time since I was assembled and turned on, I felt alive, Freeman. You did that to me. And now you’re going to take it away? Now you’re going to tell me that I’m … I’m what? Dead? That I never lived? That your love is nothing more than a programmed behavior? What happened to energy not being destroyed, just transformed?”
Luscious winds up for a punch. I don’t move when she swings. Her fist strikes my chest. The pain is manageable, but the anger behind it from this … woman that I have such strong feelings for is nearly unbearable.
“And what about my tears, Freeman?” she asks as a fresh drip squeezes from her eye and traces a line down her smooth cheek, running over the organic-metallic cells and micron-thin transistor mesh.
I have no answer.
I can’t conceive of one.
“Did she say tears?” Hail asks.
When I turn to her, I see Heap’s eyes flicker to life.
“He’s fine,” Hail says, hitching her thumb back at Heap. “Enforcers have a slow start cycle, which includes a GPS check-in—that outgoing signal—and means that Sir probably knows we’re here and we’re all going to die.” She turns to Luscious. “But did you say tears?”
Luscious turns her head, revealing the single damp trail. Hail wipes the tear with her finger and places the moisture on her tongue. “Luscious models don’t have tear ducts.”
“I know,” Luscious says.
“Were you upgraded?” Hail asks.
“I’m a Luscious,” she says bitterly. It’s the first time I’ve heard Luscious use her name this way. I don’t like it. But it’s answer enough. Luscious, a companion-bot … a pleasure-bot, who had no purpose in the new nonhuman world, lived in the Lowers where things like upgrades were not common.
“Can you do that?” she asks Harry. “Can you cry?”
Harry shakes his head, looking quite confused by the strange turn in the conversation.
Hail points to Heap. “I know he can’t.” Her head swivels slowly toward me. Her eyebrows rise high on her forehead. She takes the shock of orange hair and tucks it behind her ear. The way she looks at me, eyes traveling up and down, makes me feel like I’m some kind of rarely seen magical creature.
“You,” she finally says. “It’s you.”
She walks around me. “Of course, it’s you.”
A whirring sound announces Heap’s return to awareness. He stands, head nearly touching the ceiling. Hail spins around toward him. “You knew, didn’t you?”
Heap looks at Hail, then to me and the others. He seems to register where we are and asks, “Is it done?”
Hail ignores the question. “You know what Freeman is, don’t you?” She gasps. “That’s why you protect him!”
“What do you mean, what I am?” I say. “I’m a robot. We’re all robots.” I turn to Luscious. “But that doesn’t mean we’re not alive.”
Heap stands still, not answering.
“Tell me, you big lug!” Hail says, slugging his dented chest and then shaking the pain away. “Mohr must have given you a message for me. Tell me!”
Heap looks down at the much smaller woman. His deep voice feels like a force of nature. “Is. It. Over?”
A violent shaking interrupts the exchange. Lights sway. Tools clatter to the floor, followed by entire shelving units and ceiling tiles.
The noise is deafening. I shout to Heap, but he can’t hear me over the din. His reaction to the phenomenon answers my unheard question. He knows what’s happening. It’s above us. And he doesn’t like it.
I take Luscious’s hand and head for the door. We leave the lab behind and reach the stairs at a run. When I open the door, Heap rushes past, slamming into the door frame and removing it from the walls.
I let the door drop to the floor and start up after him along with Luscious, Harry and Hail.
The stairs vibrate beneath my feet so hard it’s impossible to scale them quickly. I’m not sure whether or not it’s part of what’s shaking the building or from Heap running until Heap reaches the ground floor, smashes his way through the door and the shaking is halved. The rest of us reach the ground floor, enter the tall, two-story lobby and find Heap in a side room, crouched behind a five-foot-tall shelf of books, staring out the tall, arched window.
He waves for us to get down, like we’re not already shorter than he is while crouching.
“What’s happening?” I ask, crouch-walking up next to him. But it turns out I don’t have to be standing to see the answer for myself. A growing slice of light cuts across the dark ceiling. I stand and look out at the hidden city as sunlight ill
uminates the buildings. The light, while bringing the redbrick buildings to life, also reveals the deadness of the browned park in front of the library. The cap is opening.
Hail cranes her face up toward the sunlight, perhaps seeing it for the first time in thirty years. “That was fast.”
“Is it Sir?” I ask.
Heap nods. “Most likely.”
“What will he do?” I ask.
Heap looks at me, having no trouble emoting his sourness despite not having a pliable face beyond lips and a chin. “What he does best.”
Since Sir is responsible for a worldwide genocide, this is not encouraging.
“Sir isn’t our only problem,” Hail says.
Four heads turn to her in unison.
She points to the widening gap in the ceiling. “That cap was the only thing keeping the undead out. There are thousands of them in the suburbs surrounding the city, but if Sir flew here, it’s likely that even more are following them. Perhaps thousands.”
“Is there another way out?” I ask.
“I’m not Sir,” Hail says. “Strategic planning beyond spawning an army of Xom-B infected robots isn’t really my thing.”
I’m about to ask how long it will be before the first undead arrive, when I see something fall through the beam of light. I zoom in on it and see a woman, her body ravaged, spiraling through the air until she disappears behind a building. I don’t think she’ll be functional after the drop, but when the cap opens fully, the fall to the sloped hillside won’t be much more than fifty feet and to someone that’s already dead, it’s a manageable height. And there are several rooftops at the fringe of the city tall enough to make the jump easily survivable, even for the living.
Time is short, and our only chance of surviving is now entering the city from above. Bathed in light, the vehicle is hard to see, but its shape and vertical flight make it easy to identify. Sir’s VTOL gunship.
“Where are your weapons?” Heap asks.
“In the city,” Luscious tells him.
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