Wesley bent down slowly and pulled the knife free once more. He stood up and grasped the handle before testing the door.
Unlocked.
He pushed the door open. It creaked loudly, filling him with a deep sense of foreboding.
Swallowing, Wesley stepped inside the house. He blinked; sunlight hit his eyes through upper level windows. The home included artificial lights as well, keeping the open floor plan well-illuminated. The large gathering space on this floor included a few sofas and chairs, and Wesley’s eyes snapped to them. The furniture looked somehow out of place, and when he glanced at the wooden floorboards, he saw deep gouges and scrapes, as if the furniture had been moved quickly and with little control.
As if there’d been a fight, a struggle. Was the General hurt?
He glanced around the rest of the setting and spotted the recently patched small holes in the wall behind the most obviously moved sofa.
The patches covered holes similar in size to a bullet.
He gripped the knife more tightly, felt his heart racing and the cold sweat drip down his back. He fought to control the pace of his breathing. He had to stay calm. The General was in trouble. He needed to help the man.
A cold chill of dread creeped down his spine at the unmistakable sound of a gun hammer being cocked.
“Halt, stranger!” The voice gave no hint of evil or nerves. It was unnaturally high pitched, almost forced. “Who are you? Why are you here?”
Was this the voice of the General’s assailant? The voice seemed at odds with someone able to set a successful ambush on an experienced soldier.
“I repeat: who are you? Why are you here? I require answers to my questions!” Despite the speaker’s efforts, the tone was anything but commanding. Wesley felt more amusement than fear, unable to ascribe to it any meaningful threat.
He felt like laughing.
Instead, he opted to comply with the requests. “My name is Wesley Cardinal. I work for a man named General Micah Jamison. A major calamity took place on the mainland, leaving it unsafe for human habitation. I moved to a boat I maintained and docked in the river south of the Lakeplex, floating into the great lake with the intent of locating an island, where I hoped to be safe until the end of this calamity. I spotted the General traveling in this direction, and managed to follow, hoping to join up and work together for our mutual survival.”
His confession was met with utter silence.
Wesley felt his nerves return once more. An immediate attack would be better; the waiting was far worse. He wished he could see the speaker and assess his ability to remove and disable the weapon aimed at his head.
He wasn’t sure he knew how to do that. Given the surprising talents he’d discovered in the past day, though, he wouldn’t doubt that he could.
He tried to work through potential next steps. Turn and face his assailant, make them see the humanity in his eyes, trigger in them some basic decency and mercy? Would personalizing his death make the attacker more or less likely to fire the killing shot? Should he make a run for it, diving behind the sofa as a temporary shelter against the bullets, before making a run for—
“You have been confirmed as a friend of the General’s.” The squeaky voice sounded the same now as it had before. “You are therefore granted free rein to move around the house and island, and may use the food, clothing, and other provisions here as needed.”
Wesley blinked. What? “I… you mean I’m safe? You’re not going to kill me?”
“Friends of the General are given free rein to move around the house and island, and are free to utilize the food, clothing, and other provisions stored here as needed. They are not to be harmed.”
Wesley frowned. Something wasn’t right here. The words were too… scripted. He decided to risk turning around and face the speaker. He stared in surprise.
The speaker was a robot. Its oddly rectangular body rested upon narrow lower appendages terminating in sets of wheels used for mobility. A smaller square head sat atop the body. Deep green lights delineated the eyes. He wondered if the robot had a moving mouth.
The General had a robot guarding his island home.
This day kept getting stranger and stranger.
“Um.” He felt stupid. How, exactly, did one talk to a robot? And was the robot a friend? “Um… hello. Where is the General? Do you know? I’d like to speak with him, to make sure he’s okay, and—”
The robot’s eyes brightened, and a rectangular glowing block of light illuminated on the bottom of its “face” as it replied with that unnaturally high, squeaky voice. “The General is no longer on the island, Wesley Cardinal. May I offer you something to eat or drink?”
Wesley blinked. “What? No. I’m not hun… Wait. He’s gone? Where else could he go?”
“I do not know the answer, Wesley Cardinal. The General chooses the data points he will share with me. His current location is not one of those data points. May I offer you something to eat or drink, Wesley Cardinal?”
“But…” Wesley paused. The General might be here, having given orders that he wasn’t to be disturbed. Or, as the robot claimed, he’d left. He doubted the machine would offer any additional clarity. And it wasn’t like he could threaten the hunk of metal with his knife. “So… do you have a name?”
“The woman named Sheila Clarke called me Whiskey. The General had not previously given me a human name, and gave me permission to use the appellation in future human conversations.”
Wesley felt his face turn pale. Sheila Clarke was here? Was she the owner of the second set of footprints? He supposed that made sense; she’d been Jamison’s favorite for quite some time. A few people hinted at the possibility of a deeper relationship, but Wesley had never considered those rumors anything more than pure supposition. But if he’d been asked the last person he’d want around at the end of the world, Sheila’s name would certainly make the short list. “Is Sheila here?”
“No, Wesley Cardinal. Sheila Clarke departed with the General. May I interest you in food or a beverage?”
So Sheila was gone as well? He wondered if he’d found a loophole in identifying the General’s new locale, assuming—and facts supported this idea—that he and Sheila had left the island together. “Do you know where she is?” He paused. “Whiskey.”
“Is that a drink order, Wesley Cardinal?”
“No, no, I was just using your name, so—”
“I understand, Wesley Cardinal. Sheila Clarke departed with the General and I do not have information regarding their intended destination or current location.”
He considered that information. Well, he’d tracked the General once already. “How did they leave the island?”
“I do not know, Wesley Cardinal. The General sent me a brief communication letting me know that both of them were departing. I was then instructed to operate under the appropriate security protocols pending further instruction from him or Sheila Clarke.”
Wesley sighed. It figured. If Jamison had given Sheila the ability to order his robot servant around, he was now in a position where he could be at the mercy of a woman who hated him. He fully believed she’d order Whiskey the robot to consider Wesley an enemy, overriding his current status as a Friend of the General. In that scenario, Whiskey the cheerful robot might riddle him with bullets rather than offer him a drink. Speaking of which… “On second thought, I think I will take that drink now, Whiskey.”
“Of course, Wesley Cardinal. What would you like?”
“Well…” He couldn’t think of a specific drink at the moment. “Something… strong. The last few days have been challenging.”
“I understand, Wesley Cardinal.” The robot rolled to a small table covered with various bottles, extracted a glass and ice, and poured various liquids. Wesley found it fascinating to watch a machine move with such independence and dexterity. Had the General built the machine? He couldn’t see how anyone else had, but hadn’t known the General harbored such a deep interest in mechanical technologies.
Whiskey rolled over to him and presented the glass. “Your drink, Wesley Cardinal.”
“Thank you, Whiskey.” Wesley took a large gulp, swallowed, and then gasped. The liquid burned his throat going down. “Wow, that’s really strong.”
“It is called bourbon, Wesley Cardinal. It is similar to whiskey.”
“Good choice.” He swirled the brown liquid, watching it move and slide down the sides of the glass as he thought. “You told me that I am a friend and as such I get free rein to move around the house and the island.”
“That is correct, friend Wesley.”
“What if I wasn’t a friend? And how do you know who friends and non-friends are?”
Whiskey paused a moment before responding. “The General has a list of people involved in the Phoenix project, and those who actively support their goals and aims, Wesley Cardinal. Any on that list are enemies, and those not on the list are to be considered friends.”
He felt a bit of a chill and took another sip of the drink. “What do you do to enemies?”
“We follow our orders, Wesley Cardinal.”
“Which are… what, exactly?”
“Enemies are to be executed immediately, Wesley Cardinal.”
Ouch. “But friends are okay.”
“Correct, Wesley Cardinal. Friends are to be given free rein to the house and island and have full use of the food, clothing, and provisions here.”
“That’s good to know,” a new voice said. “Because we’re in need of help, and we’re most certainly no friends of the Phoenix project.”
—15—
SHEILA CLARKE
HER MIND STAGGERED at the words. This woman before her, this projected holographic illusion of a woman dead for a thousand years, the creator of the robot she knew as Micah Jamison… this woman was family. A long lost relative in the annals of time, a relational memory gone with all the calamities befalling humanity in the intervening centuries.
She sank to her knees, sat on her feet, and buried her hands in her face, crying.
It wasn’t just a case of her world being an illusion as grand as the people speaking before her. It was feeling a deepening relationship to a past she’d thought little more than myth, learning that both the best and worst of those tales were true, and finding in it a memory worth retaining.
She let herself weep for a moment, for an emotion she couldn’t even describe, then dried her eyes on her sleeve and stood up, staring at the woman called Ashley Farmer. She glanced at the robot, an amused curl forming on her lip. “So, what you’re saying is that we’re almost brother and sister?”
Micah looked startled. “Well… the actual creation processes were rather different, and there were a few generations between you and Ashley, so I’m not sure that—”
Sheila laughed. “Metaphorically speaking, Micah. Not literally.”
“Oh.” He offered a faint chuckle. “Cousins, perhaps?”
“We’ll go with cousins, then.”
She moved back toward Ashley, reaching out as if to touch her face. The woman made no movement in response to that touch, a further reminder that, real though she might have been, in this simulation she was little more than an illusion based in fact. She watched Ashley’s mannerisms, how she scratched the side of her finger with her thumb or splayed and closed her fingers on the table as she listened to others, mannerisms Sheila knew all too well in her own life. And like her, Ashley’s intense focus and purpose at the time of this meeting related to the stopping of the immortal women and men striving to make the world a better place for only a select few.
She swallowed. Micah told her that Ashley would die in that fight, only a few weeks after the meeting they now witnessed. It spoke to the fragility of life, when one who could not age could still see life extinguished in an instant.
Sheila took a step back and looked at the table more carefully, realizing the sensory limitations of the memory’s owner. She only now realized that those on the opposite side of the table from the man had no bodies below the level of the table, and that there was nothing below the table at all, a darkness as thorough as what she’d experienced when she’d first entered this strange room.
She returned her focus to Ashley, watching as the woman began speaking, and a thought demanded her attention. “Micah?”
“Yes?”
“Do the memories include sound? Can I… hear her talk?”
She didn’t turn to look at him, but his deep voice resonated. “Computer? Audio.”
Done.
The vacuum-like quiet shattered, replaced by the thrum of climate control systems, shoes tapping and brushing against the floor, fingers drumming across the massive wooden table. And a voice. A woman’s voice. Sheila watched as Ashley’s mouth moved, heard Ashley’s actual voice, speaking about the complexity of her task. She’d infiltrate a place called “Aliomenti Headquarters” and would install a software program on the enemy’s computer system that would deprive the enemy of their source of power. She watched the faces of the others, saw the genuine respect that those faces showed toward Ashley, heard murmurs of agreement and nods of understanding. Ashley spoke of the danger, of the precautions she’d take, primarily to ensure that she succeeded in her infiltration efforts, knowing that those efforts might expose her to capture… or worse.
She watched the faces around the table take on a more somber air. All of them knew the risks Ashley would face. Sheila had no doubt they’d all face similar risks; something about the respect each person showed the others told her that they’d never consent to putting all risk on one person… unless that person was them.
Ashley took on that risk because she loved these people. She wanted what was best for herself, for them, for Micah… and for the great-to-the-who-knew-how-many granddaughter named Sheila she’d never meet.
She took a deep breath. “Computer, you can turn off the sound now.”
The voices went silent.
She watched Ashley speak a moment longer, drawing strength from this encounter. She glanced over at Micah, noting that he’d been watching her the entire time. He’d seen this scene before, probably recorded it into his unfailing memory banks. But Micah watched her, likely deriving some behavioral pattern he could use in his sterile computer brain in response to some future sensory input as he performed a situational analysis.
Yet for all the machine-like behavior he’d shown, and would show, she could see the evolution. A machine would scoff at the impracticality of maintaining that photograph of his creator. Micah was more human than he thought. And his decision to bring her here, to let her see her connection to the past and the role her ancestor played… it wasn’t practical. It took up valuable time. He’d done it anyway.
He’d done it because he cared about her.
She swallowed, touched by that evolution in him, toward being human.
She knew more about herself, the past, and the present than before, had seen the curtain pulled back and the real world behind it. She knew more, but one question remained. “Micah, if I could have told you to stop everything, and you would be required to obey… why didn’t you tell me sooner? Why didn’t you tell me before the activation of the Ravagers? The instant you’d met me, even?” She didn’t ask her question as an accusation this time, as she’d done before. Now, she wanted her own sense of guilt assuaged, needed to understand how it was that her power to stop the obliteration of friends and colleagues and her entire city wasn’t somehow her fault.
To her surprise, his initial response to her quite serious question was… a bemused smile. She frowned; her question was no joke, and certainly no laughing matter. He chuckled. “You answered that question earlier, Sheila, and I asked you to remember the sentiment.”
Sheila frowned. “I did?”
He nodded. “If one week ago I’d told you that a cabal of the world’s most powerful and influential citizens was poised to unleash a swarm of self-replicating, nearly invisible robots to destroy all of civilization and kill everyone
they didn’t like, that I was a centuries-old robot who knew how to stop them, and that the only thing preventing me from doing so was an order from you because you’re the last living descendant of the woman who built me before the Golden Ages and I couldn’t otherwise act… tell me, Sheila, what you might have thought or done?”
She cringed as the memory of her earlier comment resurfaced. “It really does sound crazy, doesn’t it? Even now, even after experiencing all I’ve been through, it still sounds crazy. Worse than those conspiracy theories that lunatic Wesley Cardinal always babbled about.”
Micah’s face fell, a deep sadness in his eyes. “And yet nearly every one of those crazy conspiracy theories he spoke of was true, Sheila.”
Even as she realized the truth of Micah’s words, Sheila marveled at the expressive ability of his face, incredulous at the difference between him—so human-like he’d fooled women and men as to his true nature for centuries—and Whiskey. How brilliant had Ashley Farmer been to create this marvel?
“Wesley’s story is tragic. Several years ago, he wasn’t the man you know, consumed with madness, speaking to voices only he could hear… attacking his coworkers in front of his colleagues and superiors.” He winced, as did Sheila, remembering the shock of Wesley’s assault. “Wesley was the most brilliant scientist in the world.” He nodded at his creator as he spoke. “Perhaps the greatest since Ashley herself. The Phoenix Group knew this, of course. They needed his help. They’d arrived at their decision to create the machines, but they reached several technical impasses. They couldn’t figure out how to get replication to work at that microscopically small scale. And they couldn’t figure out how to make the machines avoid some items and destroy others. They were stumped. They needed Wesley.”
That stunned her. “Wesley was a scientist? But… he’s crazy. How can he be a scientist?”
“Many believe there is a high correlation between madness and creative or scientific genius, Sheila.” Again, the faint smile, letting her know he’d attempted a joke. She returned the expression. “He wasn’t crazy back then. But Phoenix had problems when it came to Wesley. First, he was a devout pacifist; he hated anything that could do violence. And while he eventually trained with weapons for his own defense, the idea that he’d be building a weapon of mass destruction… he would have turned them down. He would have chosen death over helping them, refusing to let them use his mind for their evil ends.”
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