by Jason Gurley
Henry takes another peek.
Mr. Glass is strolling at a slow, southeasterly pace. He's just wearing his underwear and a T-shirt, but to Henry's surprise, Mr. Glass chooses that moment to lift his shirt over his head. He tosses it aside, then bends at the waist slightly and pushes his underwear down his legs. Nude, Mr. Glass keeps walking, idly groping himself. Henry can hear him talking quietly, and even chuckling a bit.
If Mr. Glass has begun to go crazy, then things are worse than Henry had thought.
Henry crouches down again. Come on, he mouths.
Clarissa follows.
The children crawl across prickly grass, moving slowly so as not to create a ripple in the stalks. The room dims more, and on the ceiling high, high above, faint stars begin to rise.
This is the first time the children have been in the room during a simulated night. Clarissa is taken by it, and Henry keeps tugging at her hand to prompt her along.
A minute later, Henry peeks again.
Mr. Glass has not continued walking in their direction, but has stopped. He raises both arms and appears to be stretching, but then Henry recoils to see that Mr. Glass is urinating, hands-free, and turning in a slow circle as he does so.
Keep coming, Henry whispers. This guy is insane.
They reach the end of the sawgrass as the last of the dim sunlight fades from the ambient ceiling and walls. Overhead the stars are brighter now, and Henry feels a little safer.
The treeline is some thirty yards away. Between the children and the forest is a wide, empty stretch of low grass. There's nowhere to hide if Mr. Glass should look in their direction.
Henry turns to Clarissa. Okay, he says softly. We're going to have to run across. We have to go fast, and we have to stay very low. And we have to be quieter than ever. He can still see us if he looks over here. The fake stars are pretty bright. If he sees us -- well, he killed everybody, Clarissa. You know what he'll probably do to us. Just like we thought he'd do to that woman on the radio.
Clarissa nods. When?
On my count, Henry says. Hang on, though.
He peeks over the grass one last time.
Mr. Glass, more distant now, is still naked, still upright, and appears to be -- Henry squints, then is certain. Mr. Glass is nude and masturbating in the meadow opposite them.
Okay, we go now, while he's distracted, Henry says, without explaining to Clarissa what he has seen. On a three count. One, two -- three.
The children run like little warriors, crouched and high-kneed, staying close but not so close that they might collide.
Mr. Glass hears a rustling sound and turns.
Two small figures, pale and blue, vanish into the trees.
Mr. Glass drops his hand to his side, and says, Fuck me, and runs for the elevator door.
The Children
For weeks the children scarcely leave the safety of their nest. Charlotte brings them supplies when they run out, but she, too, is a fugitive now.
His madness has been multiplying for weeks and weeks, Stacy says through Charlotte. A madman requires a patron, you know. History bears this out. When madmen are left to their own devices, they convert their reality into a sort of hypermadness, until everything feeds their internal distortions. Without me to maintain a steady course throughout Mr. Glass's collapse, the entire complex will fall into ruin.
What will happen? Henry asks.
It's not clear to me now, Stacy says. In this body I have such limited access to the station's records. I don't know if Mr. Glass is competent to run the facility. There's such a delicate balance to be struck. He's relied on me for so long.
So the world ended up there, Clarissa says. But it's probably going to end in here, too.
I don't believe that you are overstating it, Stacy says. Yes, I suspect Mr. Glass will bring down his own refuge.
What will happen to us?
That's also a subject I cannot predict accurately with so little information at my fingertips, so to speak. However, I will serve you as I have served Mr. Glass, and do what is in my power to protect you.
Clarissa takes Charlotte's hand.
The climate within the storage level has cooled. The three of them sleep together for warmth, huddled beneath blankets.
• • •
The station tumbles into disrepair, and the children witness it firsthand. One morning the lights on the storage level blink out, and they do not come back. Charlotte accompanies the children to Rama, where they have not been since their near-miss with Mr. Glass.
Stacy is the first to speak. I am at a loss, she says.
Henry says, Jesus.
Scattered among the tree roots are dozens of dead birds, their wings open, their feet thrust to the artificial sky. The trees themselves have shed their needles in full, and stretch like brown skeletons overhead. The orange needles have nearly buried some of the fallen birds.
Something's wrong with the air in here, Clarissa says.
I don't have access to the climate readouts, Stacy says. But I can make an assumption. Do you find the air thicker, more difficult to breathe?
Yes, Clarissa says. That's exactly what it is.
Sour, too, Henry adds. Like spoiled food.
The atmosphere generators are probably overheating, Stacy says. We shouldn't stay here.
The artificial ocean has turned black.
• • •
I don't know what we do next, Henry says. If Mr. Glass has gone crazy, then maybe we should leave.
Clarissa says, But go where? Up? I know about radiation and stuff. There's probably a lot of it up there. We'd just die there, too.
Stacy says, The surface is unsustainable.
You don't know, Henry says.
Stacy says, True enough. But if nuclear war has occurred -- and the broadcasts that I recorded seem to confirm this -- then we are currently in the middle of what is commonly called nuclear winter. A fallout period in which the sun is invisible, blotted out by great clouds of radioactive material and debris.
Clarissa sighs. I'm tired of this, she says. I wish I had died there.
Don't say that, Henry says.
Why not? Every day we have to watch out for this awful, murderous man who would kill us if he saw us. Which, I don't know, maybe he did. We have to sleep on boxes on a shelf. Our only friend is a robot. There's no time for anything fun. We're kids! We should be playing, not --
Not what? Henry interrupts. Not fighting for our lives? There are kids all over the world who spend their whole lives never getting to play. Whatever, they're all dead now, and you would be, too.
Stacy says, Children. Let's not argue. We have options, and we should consider each of them carefully.
• • •
In the panic room, Charlotte activates the holomap while the children watch.
The map unfolds, dotted with blinking alert symbols.
It's worse than I thought, Stacy says.
What are all of the lights? Clarissa asks.
Well, Stacy says, while Charlotte performs a zoom gesture. This is the atmosphere generator overload that we noticed on level two. And here, it appears that there has been an electrical fire on level three, though it was extinguished.
A fire? Henry asks.
There are many safety measures in place in this station, Henry, Stacy says. The fire would have been extinguished within moments of its detection. Physical damage is likely very minimal.
Clarissa points at a yellow alert that blinks slowly. What's that one?
Charlotte zooms in.
That one, Stacy says, is a cautionary message. The entire station is powered by solid oxide fuel cells. These cells can last for decades with minimal power bleed.
So what's it yellow for? What does it mean? Henry asks.
It means the fuel cell is already depleted and needs to be replaced, Stacy says. Somehow Mr. Glass has consumed enough energy for nearly a decade's worth of use.
Charlotte pans around the map until Mr. Glass's beacon appear
s. She zooms in.
Mr. Glass is still hard at work in his library, Stacy observes. This is beneficial. His physical readouts are unfortunately still quite healthy. I had hoped for less.
What about the power thing? Clarissa says. What does it mean?
We'll have to fix that, Stacy says. But it can wait for a little longer.
What do we do now? Henry asks.
I have a few ideas, Stacy says. They may be slightly harrowing, but you can tell me what you think of them.
The Madman
Steven wakes up at his desk.
Time, he grunts.
Only silence returns to him, and he remembers for the hundredth time that he deactivated the A.I.
Fucking hell, he mutters. What good is a fucking space station without a fucking good A.I.?
For the hundredth time he considers reactivating Stacy. It would be possible to do so without retaining the memory of their final conversation -- he could essentially bring her back with minor brain damage -- but Steven considers this option and dismisses it quickly.
He has his pride, even among non-humans.
Which reminds him that he's got to find Charlotte.
With Stacy's deactivation, several running processes were cancelled or interrupted. He doesn't care about most of them. Housekeeping tasks do not interest him. When something blows up, he'll pay attention to it then. But it occurs to him now that he hasn't been reviewing the communication records since Stacy's departure. He wonders if the antenna cage has been surfacing as usual, and calls up the logs to see.
It has, and what's more, it has consistently been recording messages. There are eleven here now.
Steven leaves the library and makes himself a drink in the kitchen. He's given up on the hard lemonades, and lately has discovered vodka. There's an entire storeroom of liquor on the sub-level.
Who wouldn't expect the last man to become an alcoholic? he posits to the empty room.
Though with new messages filtering in so quickly, there's little guarantee that he is indeed the last man.
That's alright, though. His goal was never to empty the world of all humans, only to witness and capture for posterity the event that sent mankind spinning down the drain. Those few survivors, he thinks, are quite unlikely to rebuild society. And even if a few merry bands linger on, they're unlikely to rise to greatness the way man once did.
Not with contaminated water supplies, poisoned animals for food, horrifically toxic crops and the like.
Steven swallows the vodka and pours a new one, and walks naked into the library. He sits down at the desk and stares at the screen.
He sighs heavily.
The good thing about Stacy, he thinks, is that it's so much faster to just speak your instructions than this old-fashioned swiping and bullshit.
He taps and swipes his way to the communications records, queues up the eleven new recordings, and begins to listen.
• • •
When the recordings finish, Steven pushes away from the desk and spins on his chair in a slow circle.
Eleven messages. Nine of them automated ghosts, old station identification loops, emergency broadcasts and such. One of them was a fifteen-second ad for a wacky morning show.
Steven felt as if he was sitting in front of a Ouija board, intercepting signals from the past.
The other two messages were from Ellen Cushman of Temerity, Massachusetts. Their contents were the same as before.
Hi. This is W9GFO, come back. Uh, anybody who is -- anybody who might still be alive, I hope this comes through. My name is Ellen Cushman. I'm broadcasting on band 17 from a shelter in Temerity. My family is dead. I have spoken to one other person on the CB, but I haven't heard from them in nearly two weeks now. If there are other survivors, I hope you are safe and well. I hope you have supplies. If you are able to get to me, I can help. This shelter is in the second lot on the north side of what used to be Grant Street. The street is mostly gone, so look for an overturned rail car. It's about thirty yards north of the shelter entrance. There's even a bell here. Ring it. Please come. I want to help.
The message had looped to fill the two-hour recording window on both occasions.
Steven suddenly remembers that Stacy had been sending his own message to Ellen Cushman, and was to alert him when there was a response. That he has since recorded Ms. Cushman's original message on two new occasions, and the contents have not changed, suggests that Ms. Cushman's message has outlived her.
Ghosts, indeed.
But there is another possibility, he thinks.
Perhaps Ms. Cushman never received his message.
Perhaps she is alive, and still hoping blindly for some contact from survivors.
Steven can't remember the message he had instructed Stacy to send, so he paws through the records looking for it.
But there are no outgoing messages.
Not a single one.
• • •
The children are asleep in the nest, and Charlotte is cuddled up with them, simulating sleep, when Steven storms into the panic room several levels above them.
He mutters to himself, over and over.
Goddamn bitch A.I., he says. Fucking bitch.
The panic room is stuffy, he notices. In fact, almost everything is stuffy since he deactivated Stacy. He begrudges her the loss of his comfort. If he were to reactivate her, he would disable the personality extensions that he had so proudly created for her. He would erase her name, and simply refer to her as Computer.
But he didn't want to think about it now.
The holomap is inactive, which is strange, because he thought he had left it activated during his last visit to the panic room. That visit had given the room cause to live up to its name, as Steven had run into the room in a state of confusion. He had come straight from Rama. Maybe his eyes were playing tricks on him, or maybe he was losing his mind, but he had seen movement, human movement, in the forest there.
He had run straight to the panic room and thrown open the holomap and flung it wildly about, stretching and zooming and panning, searching frantically for any signs that other living things were anywhere in the space station. And he had come up empty. The only beacon visible was his own yellow dot, pulsing to show his current location, its data readout suggesting that his blood pressure was elevated.
Damn right it was, he remembers.
He opens the holomap again, just to be certain, and scans through each level carefully, looking for any stray beacon he may have missed. But there is nothing.
Steven closes the map and rubs his eyes.
Maybe he's going crazy, he thinks. Maybe what he saw wasn't really there.
Or worse, what if what he saw were ghosts?
Ghosts of the humanity he has destroyed for his own selfish hobby.
No, he says aloud. I don't believe in ghosts.
But as he rides the elevator to level one, he wonders. If there are such things as spirits or souls, then the extinction of an entire race of creatures would be the sort of event sure to leave a few of those souls rattling around, disturbed and possibly angry.
Too many movies, he mutters, and the floor stops ascending.
• • •
W9GFO, come back. W9GFO, do you copy?
Steven releases the button on the handset. The short-wave radio hisses lightly, as if the world outside is empty.
He repeats himself and adds, This is K1LRR, come back.
The static continues.
This is K1LLR, W9GFO come back.
This is W9GFO, a breathless voice says. Children, is that you?
The Plan
Lately Henry carries a gun and wears a bandolier, both pilfered from the armory level.
You seem older, Clarissa says to him one morning when they wake.
What do you mean? he asks.
Charlotte sits quietly, listening.
Clarissa pulls the blanket more tightly around her as Henry turns on the lantern that hangs over their heads. The nest feels like a very
rigid tent, and for a moment, the children might almost get away with pretending they were only sleeping in a tree fort while their parents stayed up late, sharing drinks and playing poker as the sun fell behind the trees.
You've got a gun, for one thing, she says, poking at the hard metal block at Henry's hip. You look like a cowboy.
I don't feel like one, he says. I feel like a kid whose family went on vacation and never came home.
I'm sorry, Clarissa says.
But I do feel different, Henry says. If Mr. Glass came through that door down there right now, I think I would be able to shoot him. And I don't think I would feel bad about it.
I felt worse for the dead birds, Clarissa says. If I saw Mr. Glass, I would scratch his eyes right out. And then I would stomp on his face with my shoes.
Stacy, deep inside of Charlotte's body, carefully assembles the makings of a plan. There is little reason to stay in the complex now, so long as Mr. Glass is still here, allowing it to fall apart. Her options each revolve around a single core goal: to remove Mr. Glass from the equation. She filters the options for violence, for risk of detection, for risk of injury or death, and narrows the possibilities down to a single, testable scenario.
Henry says, I would carry him to the top of the elevator, then throw him down the elevator pit.
I would drown him in his fake ocean until he was real-dead, Clarissa says.
Children, Stacy says through Charlotte's mouth. We should discuss the plan that I have been working on. It relies heavily on your ability to handle the very things you are discussing now.
Wait, Clarissa says. Like what?
Like performing an act of murder, Stacy says.
Henry considers this. What do we have to do?
• • •
While the children and Stacy plot his death, Mr. Glass sits in front of the short-wave radio, talking with Ms. Ellen Cushman.
So you're not the only survivor? he asks.