Prime

by Nate Kenyon

  "That's not what you told me when I arrived. I understood I was to terminate the problem by any means necessary. And let's be honest here, Crowther. You weren't exactly up front about telling me what I was up against."

  "You don't bring a sledgehammer to repair a pocket watch."

  "That's no pocket watch in there."

  Crowther walked over to the vat. His hands caressed the glass, and when he spoke his voice was soft and lonely. “He's been injured by your recklessness,” Crowther said. “The server explosion has damaged his interface. I don't know when he'll recover."

  "It was him or me, and I'll choose me every time."

  "Will Bellow,” Crowther said. “You're either incredibly brave, or too stupid to care. A true legend in your own mind. But as good as you were, you lived in the physical world. We always knew that someone would come along who lived on the other side of that bridge; he just came along sooner than anyone might have expected."

  "He's never seen anything outside the net."

  "Why should he? There's no need."

  "It was you in Mexico City,” Bellow said. The tingling in his limbs was almost gone, and he found himself able to walk again. “You were the manager then and you were responsible for what happened to me, weren't you? You wiped that memory, but it's coming back."

  "Impossible!"

  "Then you did a lousy job. Or maybe it was that microwave bath your man just gave me. Because all of a sudden I remember your face.” Bellow took a shaky step closer. “Was it all a setup, even back then? Or did you only realize what you had after I was inside?"

  "You give me far too much credit."

  "I don't think so. You'd heard of me, knew what I could do. You wanted to see it firsthand. Maybe you wanted to convince me to come work for you full time and help you bring in new business. But something went wrong."

  "You fell in love,” Crowther said. He did not take his eyes off the creature behind the glass. “Wreaks havoc with the alpha waves. Men lose focus. It's different when you love a machine, when you love the process of building something, of unraveling a mystery, solving a puzzle. That's called drive."

  "But I wasn't interested in that anymore, was I? I wanted Kara. So I was no longer useful to you, and when I got lost inside you didn't bother pulling me out. But you saw another opportunity a short time later, something extraordinary, a quantum leap in evolution. And he was right there at your fingertips, waiting for you to pluck him up."

  The manager kept tracing lines along the vat, caressing it with his fingers, following the path of the circle etched in glass.

  "So you assembled a top secret group of the most respected experts you knew. Then you recruited the New London board, a bunch of the best figureheads money could buy, to act as cover for you. And then you took my infant son away from Kara, my flesh and blood, a boy who at a few days old was much more than I ever could have been, and you and your group used him to build this place."

  "All this ‘I,’ and ‘me,’ and ‘my,'” Crowther said. “You're a clone, Bellow. The real you doesn't exist anymore."

  "I'm real enough,” Bellow said. He fought against the anger seething just below the surface, the almost unbearable urge to rip Crowther limb from limb. “So is the recording I've made of what just happened. A direct feed through my corneal implants to a flash chip, then routed through wash servers to a secure location protected by a friend of mine. Chin-Hae, maybe you've heard of him? Any harm comes to me or him, it goes straight to the Network—and just in case you're buying them off too, he'll set it to broadcast itself through the web to anyone with a holovid installed."

  "Nice try, but my guards are very thorough. I'm quite certain Chin-Hae's dead by now. I got the news myself shortly after your unfortunate bloodbath."

  "He would be, except before I left his place I hacked into your security network and planted that information to keep your guards off our backs. Then I helped Chin-Hae and his men get through a back door. He had a nice little emergency escape route already planned through the sewer network. You'd be impressed."

  The manager's hands grew still against the glass.

  "No,” he said. “We're still in control of the situation. We made a mistake thinking you were the answer to our problem, that's all. We'll kill you again and that will be the end of it."

  "I don't think so.” Bellow walked over to him, ignoring the clicks of the guards’ guns as they armed themselves. He took the holodeck from the man's pocket and downloaded a short clip.

  As they watched it, the manager's face grew red, then white.

  "A clip like that would kill your little plan to baptize the world's population into the Church of Transformations,” Bellow said. “It would open a few too many eyes, wouldn't it? The truth is a bitch when you deal in lies. Were you planning to unveil him to the world when the time was right, when the Church's manifesto and Gutenberg's untimely passing had whipped everyone into a proper frenzy? Present him as the first to Transform, some kind of god, so his followers would bow to your every whim in the hopes of Transforming themselves—and New London would get even richer in the process?"

  "The Church serves an important need. People want to believe."

  "They do if you brainwash them well enough. Is there even a Michael Gutenberg at all, or did you make him up too?"

  "The idea of Transforming is a real one,” Crowther said. “Humans moving to the Second Stage of evolution, becoming one with the machine. That's all that matters. That, and what's inside this incubating chamber: living proof. If you release that clip, everything will be destroyed. They won't let any of us live. Our society is very carefully balanced right now. People are happy to exist in ignorance of the truth. This would throw them into chaos."

  "Maybe. Or maybe people would wake up and start living their own lives again.” Bellow stood next to Crowther at the glass, staring in at the pale thing floating limply through murky fluid. “You forgot one simple thing in all of this,” Bellow said. “You forgot that for all his talent, he's still a human being. He's unpredictable and he's ruled by instinct, self-preservation, and curiosity. All normal little boy things. He was going to get away from you sooner or later and rebel against your control."

  "I loved him like my own son,” Crowther whispered. “Prime. He didn't mean to hurt anyone."

  And you kept him locked up in a vat inside a prison tower and turned him into a slave, Bellow thought. Some love.

  His heart was heavy with the feeling of loss, of Kara, of the life he thought he'd lived, of responsibility for this thing that had come from him, that had once been human and now was something else entirely.

  "Here's what's going to happen,” he said. “You'll resign from New London and separate yourself from the company after you give me safe passage out of this place. I'll disappear and the recording will go with me. New London Industries can remain with new leadership in place and no one will be the wiser. But first you're going to put Prime in a shielded, closed system where he can't do any more harm—if he recovers from this. Only I will have access."

  "And if I don't agree?"

  "MSN and Chin-Hae will broadcast the evidence of murder and your role in it. The world will know the truth about the Church of Transformations and what you've done. You'd go to jail, but I suspect that before that ever happened, you'd disappear. If New London gets shut down, billions of dollars will be lost. There are still a couple of members of your secret group alive, aren't there? They won't be happy. And the board probably doesn't even know the details of what's happened here. They don't know about Prime. They think my hiring's legit, and all this time you were hoping that after I contained him, or he killed me in the process, you could make me the fall guy and pull the wool over everyone's eyes."

  Crowther did not speak. A tear trickled from one eye and a muscle jumped under the skin of his cheek.

  He pounded on the glass just once, but the boy inside did not stir.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  -15-

  When Be
llow arrived at the warehouse incubating room, he was not altogether surprised to find it empty. Everything was gone: the clones and the vats that had held them, the genetic equipment, even the large titanium freezers and lab tables. The space echoed as he walked, and he was acutely aware of the emptiness inside that mirrored what he had found there.

  New London had moved quickly, even for them. He'd come to destroy the copies of himself and Kara, and now that this last chance at closure had been taken from him he was at a loss as to what to do next. Another version of himself might be walking around out there somewhere, but he found it impossible to care. All purpose and direction were gone. His rage had burned hot and bright and then winked out, and he was left with nothing but a hollow, slowly fading sadness, like the pain of a phantom limb.

  The human race was evolving, and part of that evolution involved the meshing of man and machine, mind with code. The being Bellow had met inside had been able to do more than speak in broken dialect; it had been able to directly interact, to have intimate conversations with machines. Think the code and it would happen.

  In some ways, it really was as the Church of Transformations had predicted—if such a Church had ever existed and wasn't simply a complex marketing ploy by a corporation powerful and arrogant enough to pull it off. But that sort of ability alone would not lead to a higher plane of human existence. It wasn't enough to have Godlike powers. People also had to possess the knowledge and humanity to go along with them. Pull back the curtain, and he was just a boy. A boy who needed to learn control and right from wrong, just like anyone else.

  —

  Bellow took the staircase into the basement room and climbed back down the ladder into the sewers. He followed the same path he had when trailing the clones and encountered no one until he reached the small room with the steel door.

  The old switching station lay empty, discarded personal belongings scattered across cubicles and walkways as if the people who had lived here had left in a hurry. He walked through the echoing empty space full of the ghosts of men. A quick search showed that the New London security force had abandoned the scene, convinced that anyone who had been there had fled through the tunnels that led out beyond the far wall.

  Bellow stood in the middle of the central walkway and stared at the old stone ceiling soaring above him. He listened to the silence and imagined the world without human life. Traffic would cease, flying machines would sit and rust, and silence would drop across the empty cities. Slowly, the animals would return: first the bugs, then vermin; then, following them in, the birds, the larger predators, cats and dogs left to fend for themselves. Perhaps eventually even a coyote or deer, driven by hunger, would venture down from the last of the protected animal sanctuaries and into the city. Plant life would begin to grow in the cracks and abandoned lots, thin and weak at first and then stronger, pushing concrete and steel aside, covering glass and stone with green vines. Eventually the wind and the rain would wear down even the strongest buildings, erasing any trace of humankind's existence. And then there would exist only a natural way of things, no right or wrong, nothing hidden or lonely, and the chokehold that men held on the world would ease and float away forever.

  Standing in the empty, echoing chamber, it was almost possible to believe such a thing.

  They had removed the bodies from Chin-Hae's control room, but the blood remained. Bellow stood in the doorway and looked over what had been left behind.

  He could still smell the guns. There was a single clear handprint in the pool of blood where Kara's body had been.

  Against the wall to the left was Chin-Hae's caterpillar and cocoon sculpture, which had survived the shooting more or less intact. Bellow closed the door behind him for privacy in case any of the guards returned, although he doubted they would. He pulled a knot of yellow cocoon wires aside to reveal a small panel. Under a hinged lid was a button. He pressed it, and the sculpture unhinged from the wall, swinging outward and revealing a hidden, recessed door.

  Bellow pressed his thumb to the lock, and it released with a soft sigh and swung open. Inside was a small, magnetically shielded chamber.

  Chin-Hae blinked into the light. When he spotted Bellow, his face relaxed and he smiled. “We meet again,” he said. “I was beginning to worry you wouldn't come. They didn't suspect a thing?"

  "Worked like a charm,” Bellow said. “At first they thought you were dead, and then all those people running from the switching station must have confused them plenty. They're probably chasing you halfway across the city by now."

  The man named Charlie had been sitting on the floor behind Chin-Hae's chair, and he stood up and stretched, still clutching a directed energy weapon. “Thanks, man,” he said. “We owe you one."

  "Just keep that goddamned thing away from me,” Bellow said. “I had a bad experience earlier."

  "No problem."

  Chin-Hae wheeled himself out of the small hiding place, an equipment closet altered for this particular purpose. “Tell me what happened,” he said.

  Bellow told him about his experience inside, and about Prime, and then what he had done with the recording. Chin-Hae nodded. “And you think Crowther will do what you ask?"

  "I don't think he has a choice."

  Chin-Hae smiled and closed his eyes. “This being,” he said, “your son. He is really that powerful?"

  "I don't think there's any limit to what he could do, if given enough time and some sense of responsibility."

  "A pity, in some ways, you had to shut him down. He might have done more for our antisprawl effort than anything else, if he'd kept killing people. The threat of death tends to wake everyone up to the truth.” Chin-Hae opened his eyes. “We've been dealt a terrible blow, Will. Our people are scattered to the wind. I will have to leave this place and go on the run again, and I'm older and less able to travel now. New London will get stronger, despite this setback. I'm afraid we're all rushing toward a great precipice, a point at which our planet will no longer be able to sustain itself, and like lemmings we will all tumble over the edge, one by one."

  "I've been thinking about that,” Bellow said. “With the right effort, Prime might prove to be an asset to you."

  "Are you suggesting,” Chin-Hae said, “that the great bug hunter has had a change of heart? Here, let me do something for you."

  He wheeled himself around the debris in the room and found something in a drawer of his desk. “You still have gaps in your memory, correct? I think I can help you.” He held up a waveform reader. “I can hack into the network files and use this to give most of them back to you, if you like."

  "I thought you hated to use those things."

  "For you, I will tolerate it."

  —

  Bellow's memories came flooding back in a great gathering rush of sight and sound. It was almost like experiencing them all over again. His job just before Mexico City had been with a pornographic imaging company on the outskirts of Daas Ban. They wanted someone to go inside and find out why a certain popular sim star was refusing to service her most frequent clients. It was only through blind luck that he stumbled upon the answer: an archaic bit of code was causing her to refuse any client she believed had contracted a venereal disease.

  During that time he met Kara, or a clone of her, anyway, and against his better judgment they fell in love. Before he went inside for the last time, she told him she was pregnant.

  Maybe that was why he missed a step. Or maybe he just lost his edge. Or maybe Crowther set him up. Whatever the reason, he was hired by a Mexico City conglomerate to solve a problem with a worm that was targeting the futures market for soybean oil and ended up floating endlessly inside, his mind burned to a crisp by a self-defense mechanism the worm had deployed.

  The recovery process might have been real. He didn't really know the truth about whether he was an original or a clone complete with bits of implanted memory, and he didn't really know if it mattered anymore.

  He felt real, and that was enough for him.


  When it was over, he removed the waveform reader and found Chin-Hae and Charlie watching him intently. “That was interesting,” Bellow said.

  Chin-Hae hesitated. “This process—I can also take some of them away. If some memories, of some people and experiences, are too painful—you understand?"

  Bellow hesitated for a moment. The idea of having Kara erased from his consciousness was tempting, if only for the potential absence of pain. But he shook his head.

  "Some things are important to remember,” he said.

  He was halfway to the door of the switching chamber when he heard a shout. He turned to see Chin-Hae weaving his way through the debris on the floor in his motorized chair, the gears whining as if protesting what they were being asked to do.

  Chin-Hae carried something in his lap. When he reached Bellow, he held up an object draped in a soft Korean silk. “I thought you might like to keep her,” he said. “I'll be on the move for a while, and it will be difficult to take care of her. She might be useful to you."

  Bellow took the cage by its handle and slipped the silk to one side. The canary cocked its head and peered at him with beady black eyes, and then hopped a step or two closer on its perch.

  "She wants a seed,” Chin-Hae said. “I left a packet in the little drawer underneath for you."

  "I'll take good care of her,” Bellow said. “And when we see each other again, you can have her back."

  When he reached the door to the chamber and looked over his shoulder, Chin-Hae was still sitting there motionless, watching them leave.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  -16-

  Bellow made his way back to the surface. His legs felt heavy and weak, his mind cluttered with a thousand thoughts, and all he wanted was to fall into his bed and sleep like the dead.

  The streets were unusually quiet, and nobody bothered him as he trudged through the steady, warm rain. When he reached his hotel cubicle, he sensed something was wrong. There was nothing obvious outside in the hallway, just an unseen presence, perhaps a scent, that caught his attention.