“And time,” Hazel continued, “has not repaired relations between the Outlanders and the Mainlanders. Frankly, I see the point of the Mainlanders, though. I see how the Outlanders are…their culture. It’s strange. It’s very different. The two groups don’t coexist well together.”
“Maybe someday,” Des said.
“I don’t know.”
She went on to tell him about her father and his sickness. About how she couldn’t get the medicine. Des felt truly angry about this as she told him. But then the topic of these new robots came up, and Des had some questions of his own.
“When I was captured, I asked for you. Nolan came instead.”
“What happened when you asked for me?”
“They ignored me,” he answered. “Then Nolan later told me that to ask any of the robot guards about you would be pointless because information about you wasn’t stored in their archived memory. And I figured that information about me wasn’t stored either, considering none of them recognized me.”
“Yeah,” she said. “They programmed those things with Soul, but gave them access to limited information. They don’t know about me any more than they know about the guy next door. They won’t know anything about you except that you’re an unmarked robot, which in itself will raise some eyebrows.”
“It seems to me the government wouldn’t want the robots to think for themselves,” Des said. “Especially if they started seeing the inequality that you’ve been telling me about.”
“They want the robots programmed with Soul because it gives them emotional intelligence. They can read situations better and determine what to do based on the circumstances they are dealing with. But since they are given so little information, they are kept from branching out and truly deciding what is right and wrong. They essentially get the perfect robot: one who more than likely won’t question orders, but can make determinations based in sound emotional and logical thinking.”
“But how do they keep them from learning? What’s to keep them from feeling sympathy for what they see every day?”
Hazel smiled, though it was with an upturned eyebrow that said you’re not going to believe this… “Updates,” she said.
“What?”
“Every day, each robot is scheduled to go in for an update, even though that’s not what it really is. Essentially, it’s a memory wipe that brings them back to their core knowledge—the laws of the land, how to enforce those laws, who their superiors are, their names, etcetera, etcetera.”
“Wow,” Des said in disbelief.
“Nolan told me about it. It’s barbaric,” she said. “They hijacked my program, ignored the fact that it gives life to a subject, and now they treat the robots like their personal security slaves. All in the name of keeping peace and justice.” She held up a finger. “And, by the way, these peacekeepers are only so concentrated and forceful in the Southern Zone of the Mainland. Nowhere else will you find this level of enforcement.”
“So, the government is oppressing two groups instead of just one.”
“That’s right. And I’ll tell you one thing, that stupid speech Morris gave just before detonating a nuclear bomb was nothing more than rhetoric to make it sound like he cares anything about true unification.”
Des looked at the floor, the sudden mention of the blast bringing his recent anger to the forefront of his thoughts, though he knew he had to compose himself. Hazel didn’t know what had happened beneath that cloud of flames.
“About that,” Des said, still staring at the floor. “I saw the explosion.” He eyes went up to meet hers.
She sat, unmoving. “What?”
“I saw it. The blast was close to me. Nearly killed me.”
He proceeded to tell her everything, from the moment he went into the cave to the moment when he came out only to find that all those who he had grown attached to were suddenly destroyed by heat and radiation.
Hazel stared at Des like she wasn’t sure if she could believe him. “Des, I’m…I’m shocked. I don’t even know what to say.”
“They were my friends. Now they are gone. Some of them were burned so badly they were unrecognizable. Others just died in the dirt. Most of them are still out there, rotting under the sun day-by-day. I don’t imagine beasts will claim their bodies. I don’t think anything organic could get within a hundred miles of that place with its poisonous air.”
“I’m so sorry, Des.”
“It’s not for you to be sorry,” he said. “But I have to know if I can trust Nolan.”
“I can’t really say one way or the other,” she answered. “Why?”
“Because he’s going to help me figure out whose idea it was. And whoever it was is going to pay for it.”
11
Nolan had his own office with untraceable access to the network. This allowed him to look in on files without anyone questioning why he was looking at them. Much of his time was spent rummaging through classified meeting notes, searching for information he might have missed during the meetings. Most of it was uninteresting.
But this wasn’t one of those nights where he was simply browsing through files. He was on a mission. Des had really unnerved him with his appearance and declaration that the bomb had wiped out an entire village of people. The implications to Des’ claims were devastating. What was worse, no matter how much he racked his brain, Nolan couldn’t come up with a good enough reason to see why Des would be lying. What would the robot have to gain from telling a story like that?
He sat in front of the computer and opened the program that showed him maps of the known area. Slowly and carefully he typed in the coordinates that Des had given him. The screen showed an area that was hilly, perhaps even mountainous, so his claims of being in a cave when the explosion happened were not unreasonable. Nolan then opened a document of the planned detonation site. This was the site they had sent drones to and found that there were little to no life forms nearby. Some plant life, maybe, but that was all. And these coordinates didn’t line up with Des’ coordinates. These were different by several hundred miles.
This is good news, Nolan thought to himself. But he wasn’t done yet. There was another file—one that would show the truth. This was the mission completion form, documented by the computer that initiated the launch sequence of the missile in the first place. That meant, if the missile came from here, then there was no way it could fabricate the coordinates because it only showed what data had been inputted.
Nolan opened the document, scanning all the way to the bottom until he saw the coordinates of the blast zone.
His stomach dropped and he thought he might vomit.
He looked at Des’ numbers and at the numbers on the mission completion form over and over. He must have checked at least thirty times before leaning back in his chair and rubbing his fingers through his hair.
“No, no, no, no, no, no…”
He looked at the forms again and again, each time it confirmed his deepest fears. The numbers were identical. Des wasn’t lying. The coordinates matched Des’ location. The Mainlanders had unknowingly murdered an entire group of people. He started to pick up the phone at his desk to ring Lester, but he set the receiver down quickly.
He couldn’t tell him. Not yet.
He scanned the mission completion form again. Then another realization hit him like a truck. In the log, just before the missile launched, there had been a change. The coordinates! The coordinates had changed! Someone or something had changed it not a full minute before launch. And it had somehow gone unnoticed.
But who could have done this? Why?
Nolan shook his head slowly as he contemplated the meaning.
Someone had killed those people on purpose.
12
At some point during the night, Hazel had fallen asleep and Des had been content to allow her to rest. He thought she had seemed deeply concerned about the bomb, but then came the quick realization that she was powerless to help Des in any way. She couldn’t even get the proper medication for her fat
her, much less help Des figure out who was responsible for the bomb.
“The president, Des,” Hazel had said, “or presidents, are always responsible.”
“Then they should pay.”
“So, that’s your plan? To make them pay?”
That part of the conversation had ended quickly, and for some reason he felt guilty for bringing it up to Hazel in the first place. She seemed horrified by the story, but at the same time, there was nothing to be done about it. Maybe in the past she could have helped—she’d had a direct line into everything that was happening with the military. She could have gotten him into the network so he could do some of his own investigating. But now, she was too preoccupied with tending to her father. His health was failing and she was powerless to do anything about it.
Hazel seemed to think that if anything could be done about the situation with the bomb, Nolan was the person to talk to, but even then she wasn’t so sure. Her lack of faith in the government was so apparent that Des wondered if he had made a mistake by coming back to Mainland at all. It seemed that there was no particular person to blame, rather all of them were to blame. He couldn’t very well take down the entire government. And that’s not what he wanted either. They just needed to know what they did. Everyone needed to know what they did.
Des hated waiting. He hated wondering what Nolan might be up to and what he may or may not have uncovered. More than that, he hated relying on someone else for a job he wanted to do himself.
Hazel and Des passed the time during the next day by taking turns asking questions and giving answers. Hazel wanted to know what he’d been doing for the last five years and why he had been gone for so long.
He told her that there was no good answer to that question, nor was it simple. It was unpleasant telling her how bleak the outside world was and how sparse the population seemed. Once upon a time, the Mainland government had hidden the fact that there were other survivors in different parts of the world, but it wasn’t a difficult secret to keep. Most people who Des had come across were weak and on the brink of starvation. Pointing them to Mainland wouldn’t have helped, because by the time he did find others, they were hundreds of miles away and the journey would have claimed their lives. Besides, he never felt good about sending people to a place where there was more turmoil and hardship. And what if they were to get to Mainland and were turned away?
There was little help to give in the outside world. Des remarked to Hazel that despite how bad things were within the Southern Zone, their problems were small compared to those out in the wilderness. At least here they had some food and water. At least people here had shelter.
Hazel’s response was a good one: if the Mainland stopped oppressing people and tried to build itself into a truly great city, it could help those stuck out in the wilderness.
“That’s why this fight is so important,” she said. “We have to better ourselves to better the world. And we can’t better the world with the people we have in power.”
Des agreed with her. If Mainland were a beacon of hope rather than a place with endless conflict, he may have sent people toward the city. He may have even led his village here.
It pained him to think of his past conversations with Bernard, the village leader. The man had asked Des about where he’d come from. More than once he had suggested that Des take them there, but Des had refused to entertain the idea. He didn’t want to get them involved in something potentially deadly.
The choice to ignore Bernard’s request had recently become an unrelenting source of regret.
“It’s probably good that you left,” Hazel said. “I think Bracken might have tried to label you a danger to society. They might have killed you. To some you were a hero. To others you were a menace.”
“A menace?”
“A lot of people fought against you, Des. Nolan’s video exposing the truth about the government secrets didn’t make everything better. It allowed the Outlanders in. It shook up the presidential office. But people didn’t turn against Morris like we thought they would.”
“But his power was weakened.”
“It looked that way at first,” Hazel said. “But the week you left, I was fired, they sectioned off the city in zones, and General Bracken commanded the creation of robot soldiers.”
“General Bracken?”
“With the stroke of a pen, Morris put Bracken in charge of Mainland’s defense. People don’t know it, but Bracken has a lot of power at his fingertips. He had originally ordered only 500 robots. But that 500 turned into 1,000. The 1,000 grew and grew—made cheaply to keep down costs. They became the new military and police force.”
“But what about the rest of the military?”
“Bracken decommissioned most of them,” she answered. “There’s hardly a human military force at all. They don’t need them. Of course, Bracken keeps his little force of 200 elite soldiers for his own personal use.”
Des’ brow furrowed. He didn’t like the sound of this at all. “And the robots are essentially brainwashed.”
Hazel nodded. “For all we know, their archives tell them that General Bracken is the greatest human in existence—that there is no one else to follow.”
“Do you think that is what they are told to believe?” Des asked.
“I don’t know. I wouldn’t doubt it.”
Des stared at the ground. When he’d left five years ago, he knew the Mainlanders had a lot to work through. He knew it wouldn’t be an easy road, but he never suspected things would have gone downhill so quickly.
“Of course I feel like this is all my fault,” Hazel said.
“You can’t think that.”
“But I do.”
“Bracken was looking to make robots before you worked with the government.”
“Yeah, but the robots wouldn’t have worked as well without Soul,” she said. “They might actually have been something we could overcome. Now, I’m not so sure.”
The day dragged on and Des wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do. While Hazel checked on her father, he tried to make conversation with Gizmo, but the robot didn’t want to have anything to do with him, saying something about finding it boring to talk to robots.
“But you are one,” Des reminded him. But the little robot just rolled away in sadness.
Des later found himself staring out the window at the street, wondering what the people were doing who walked up and down the sidewalks. They were Outlanders, no doubt. Everything from their clothes to the expressions on their faces displayed that fact boldly and without fear. But these people didn’t live without fear. He could sense it from Hazel. He sensed it even in the robots. There was a tension among the people that was growing with each passing moment. He wondered if war was upon them and none of them knew it yet.
“Des!”
The voice came from the spare room on the other side of the house where Hazel’s father lay in bed. When Des got to the room, Hazel had two fingers on her father’s wrist as she counted his heartbeat.
She looked up at Des and shook her head. “He’s got a fever,” she told him. “I’ve never seen him this ill.”
Des didn’t have to touch the man to notice his temperature was hovering around 104 degrees.
“He needs a doctor.”
Hazel swallowed. “I don’t think you understand how bad things are around here. It’s not easy to get a doctor.”
“But it’s an emergency.”
“Welcome to the Southern Zone,” she said grimly.
John let out a groan as he rested the back of his arm on his forehead. Des wasn’t sure the man was fully conscious, but he could tell he was in pain.
“You mean they won’t see you even with a deathly ill person?”
“Not without permission.”
Des’ fingers clenched into fists, and he walked to the living room and looked out the window. The light was fading, and so was John’s life.
“What are you doing?” Hazel called out. She stood in the doorway of her f
ather’s bedroom.
“What medicine does your father need?”
She told him.
Des nodded.
“Why?”
“I’m going to get it.”
“You can’t do that, Des. They’ll kill you.”
“It will be dark in the next thirty minutes,” he said. “We need to try and keep his fever down until then. It’s no good for me to steal the medicine if everyone in the city can see me.”
Des knew Hazel thought he was crazy because she told him so about four times before he left the house. She didn’t, however, try to stop him. She didn’t even suggest a different way of going about it. She and Des both knew that if John was going to get his medicine in the time he needed it, Des was going to have to steal it.
The world had turned away from the sun, and the sun was replaced by tiny dots of light in the sky. Des was at an advantage because there was no moon out tonight. Hazel had insisted that he take one of her father’s overcoats to make him more difficult to see, specifically a black one that happened to be both too big for Des and too small. It was baggy at the shoulders, chest, and waist, but too short at his arms. The hood from the coat shielded his face well, so if no one decided to take notice of a six and a half foot tall man with metal arms and legs, he would be doing just fine.
Walking through a long alley, he couldn’t help but wonder if he would do better without the coat considering he would be able to move more freely. But he ultimately decided to keep it on. Though he was safe from the lights in this part of the zone, the closer he got to the druggist the more light there would be. Any glint from the metal on his body was to be avoided.
He moved through the night quickly like a scurrying mouse, but as silent as a shadow. Even his metal feet felt light as he jogged across the broken concrete. Soft landings with each step kept the echoes close to himself. As he went, he wasn’t sure the coat would make his appearance any less suspicious: tall man, running through alleys, holding his oversized coat close to him. He looked like a thief.
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