Nick Thacker

by The Dawn (Relics Singularity 1)

  MYERS

  MYERS WANTED TO SCREAM. HE wanted to yell, to fight back, to… there was nothing he could do that would save Merrick.

  Unless…

  The three men hadn’t seen Myers, or they were currently treating him as a non-threat until they removed the hostile opponent from the situation at hand. Myers hoped he wouldn’t be around to see what they intended to do with him.

  Unless I can still get to Merrick’s contact.

  If Merrick was telling the truth, and there was someone waiting for him on this side of the gate, he needed to be there when it opened.

  Either way, there was nothing in Umutsuz for him.

  Myers was hiding in an alley that was just in front of Merrick’s — and the three men’s — current location, which meant they wouldn’t be able to see him in a direct line of sight. If they took Merrick’s body back the direction they came from, Myers should be able to sneak out and get to the main road again, and to the barrier blocking his exit from the city.

  If they took Merrick’s body the other direction, he’d be screwed. Scraped, or whatever they call it these days.

  They didn’t waste time. Once Merrick was unconscious and the men were satisfied, two of them hoisted the man up onto their shoulders and started walking away, heading back down the street the direction they’d come from. Myers breathed a sigh of relief, then tried to suck it back in.

  He’d just let his only ally, his only friend, get taken by the guys who wanted him dead.

  But they didn’t kill him. Myers shrugged off the thought at first, but returned to it a moment later. They didn’t kill him. They didn’t kill Solomon Merrick.

  Why?

  For the thousandth time that day, Myers wondered why. Why hadn’t they killed Merrick, when all they’d wanted to do for the past few hours was kill both of them?

  Myers wasn’t sure if Merrick was worth any money — Current — to them, but he doubted it. Was there bad blood between hunters and Unders? Myers shook his head, a physical representation of his confusion and onset headache.

  They didn’t kill Merrick. Still, the thought nagged at him. He thought about it as he peered around the side of the building once again, checking to see if the men — and Merrick — were gone. They’d moved quickly, and Myers couldn’t see them any longer. They’d probably turned down an alleyway that connected with a road somewhere nearby.

  We’re shooting at targets that look like people. The memory snapped back into focus before Myers could control it. It was not there, and suddenly it was. We’re firing at people, he thought. It wasn’t true, of course, but Myers remembered the memory now — I thought it was ironic that we spent so much time trying not to use these things against people, and we’re aiming and firing at targets that are shaped like people.

  Gwen hit the target 6 out of 10 times. That’s great. He remembered telling her that. Eve, who must be only 12 or 13 years old, hit the target 5 out of 10. He congratulated her as he loaded the gun. He couldn’t see what type of gun it was; the make on the side of the handgun was out of focus, but he could feel its weight in his hands. He placed his right hand around the grip, careful of his thumb position, and added his left hand to the proper position.

  Don’t anticipate, he told himself. Just fire before you have time to overthink — he fired the gun. The volume of the shot was drowned out by the large over-ear headphones he was wearing.

  He strained to see where the shot had landed. He reached up and flicked the switch to bring the target closer to him. Instead of emptying the chamber, he wanted to know where the first shot had landed.

  Diane was behind him now, checking to see where his shot had landed. She was competitive, and she always wanted to make things into a game. ‘Looks like you got it,’ she said. She was right. Myers could feel the target paper in his hand now, but the memory was flickering, fading. It wasn’t going to let him see. It had taken that, too. Everything was there but the result, the final tally. It’s not fair.

  “Life isn’t fair.” He whispered the words, out loud, to himself. He was jogging, slowly but purposefully, toward the street that was still filling with people. The memory, like the others, retreated back into his subconscious, unwilling to be swayed by its own master, yet waiting in silence until the perfect moment to ambush —

  Myers ran faster.

  The crowd of people in the street in front of him was dwindling, and the people were piling toward the barrier, which could only mean one thing.

  The gate was opening.

  He forced his legs to move, even though they were no more than worthless tubes of meat, weighing him down. He tried to regulate his breath, in and out, just like a memory of a very expensive personal trainer told him to do. In through the nose, out through the mouth.

  The street was bustling with activity. People were now shouting at one another, excited that the barrier was moving and the gate was opening, allowing them to leave. He only had one example of what a post-deactivation city looked like, and he hoped these people would be able to escape before it began to look like the crumbling, decaying remnants of Istanbul.

  He reached the street and looked behind him. Whatever the three men had decided to do with Merrick, they hadn’t returned for Myers. He considered this a moment. If they’d originally decided to enter Umutsuz to find and capture or kill him, Merrick was just a pawn. He was just someone in the way of that goal. And Myers knew that the Unders were more than willing to remove any distractions that might get in the way of achieving that goal.

  There was a line of bullets and murdered civilians that proved that point.

  But they hadn’t killed Merrick. They’d taken him. Where? He wondered. And why?

  Why.

  That same question, still without answer, plagued Myers’ consciousness.

  A part of him wanted to formulate a plan. There was solace, comfort, in a plan. He wanted the familiarity of a plan, the plan, something to call his ‘own’ plan. He longed for it as he jogged toward the mass of people. But a plan, he knew, would only get him killed.

  Making a plan would be what the System expected from him. The System would be waiting for it; it would be watching for it. He didn’t know exactly how, but it would. A plan would only cause him to stumble, counterintuitive as it may be, he knew it to be true.

  So what was the alternative to a plan? He thought. What’s the alternative to an idea?

  Run.

  The voice wasn’t his own, or it wasn’t the voice he’d expected. He wasn’t sure which, but the answer was the same either way.

  Run.

  Forget the plan. Forget the idea of even creating a plan. Myers Asher needed to do one thing, and one thing only: run.

  So he ran. Toward the back of the clump of citizens waiting for their city gate to be opened, he ran.

  MYERS

  “MERRICK!”

  MYERS HEARD THE VOICE, didn’t recognize it, and almost ran past it when he realized what it had said.

  Merrick.

  Someone was looking for Merrick. He ducked, waiting for a barrage of bullets to spray across his chest. It never came.

  He was in the crowd now, the only one wearing something other than gray. He was sweaty, tired, and ready to quit, but someone had yelled Merrick’s name.

  If it was one of the Unders, he was sure they’d spot him and kill him. But they would have yelled my name. I’m the one they’re looking for, Myers realized.

  He started looking around for anyone that didn’t fit in.

  There were people everywhere, all around him now, but no one was moving. The gate was still shut.

  Somewhere off in the distance he heard gunfire, and everyone around him crouched down a little. It wasn’t sincere, as if they were instinctively ducking from the threat because it seemed like the safe thing to do, but no longer actually believing there was a threat. Or they assumed they were safer in a crowd.

  Myers didn’t duck, and it gave him an advantage.

  Across the street, he saw
a man staring directly at him. His eyes were wide and his mouth was slightly open. Myers didn’t move, waiting for the man to raise a rifle and fire.

  “Myers?” the voice said. It was the voice that had yelled Merrick’s name.

  The contact.

  The man rushed over to Myers and began pulling him out of the crowd. “Myers Asher,” he whispered as they neared a building at the side of the road. “I didn’t want to yell your full name,” he said, “in case it would cause a riot. You’re, you know…”

  Myers nodded. “Yeah. I know. You don’t think they would recognize me anyway?” Myers suddenly felt vulnerable. He stole a glance behind him, watching for faces turned toward them.

  “Look at you. I almost didn’t recognize you,” the man said. “And I was looking for you.”

  “I thought you were looking for Merrick,” Myers said.

  “I was — I am. But I knew he was going to be with you. Where is he, anyway?”

  Myers dropped his head. “They… took him.”

  “No shit.” The man clenched his teeth, just the slightest dimple on his cheeks hinting at his frustration. “Okay, okay, that’s fine. Listen, have you been having memories? Like daydreams?”

  Myers nodded.

  “That’s what I thought would happen. I haven’t actually talked to many people like you. Relics, I mean, and certainly not one who’s been out for so long.”

  “What does it mean? The daydreams?”

  “It’s your memory, before you were implanted —“

  “Implanted?”

  “Right, everyone got implanted with a solid-state memory device that could facilitate and enhance human memory capability. When you’re scraped, the System removes it, taking with it whatever memories you had after the implant was added. My theory has always been that the first memories, the ones that happen around the time you’re implanted, are partly stored on the device and partly stored in your head.”

  “Makes sense. The memories are never complete, and I don’t have control over them.” Myers changed the subject. “What’s going on here, uh…”

  “Right. I’m sorry.” The man paused and stuck out a hand. “I’m Jonathan Rand.”

  Myers shook his hand, but couldn’t tell what the man was waiting for. “I — I’m sorry, I…”

  “Right. You don’t know me,” Rand said. “You did, though. You were scraped, but we knew each other.” There was a sadness to the man’s voice, an emotion just under the surface that Myers couldn’t quite place.

  “So what’s the deal? I’ve got people who think I’m valuable and are wanting to sell me or kill me or something, but it’s all controlled by this ‘System’ you and Merrick keep talking about. What is it?”

  “It’s a computer program.”

  “I got that much.”

  “Well that’s all there is to it.”

  “I think Merrick believed it was getting smarter. A singularity event, is that what it’s called? Do you both think this computer program is getting smart enough to surpass human intelligence?”

  Rand shook his head. “No.”

  Myers felt relieved, but Rand continued.

  “I don’t think it’s coming, Myers. I think it’s already happened. I think we not only hit AGI.” He pulled out a small terminal-like device from his pocket.

  “This is a little thing I put together that lets me bypass the System-standard pID login using a fingerprint.”

  “Okay…”

  “And I built it and programmed it all myself. But I tested it on a ‘dead’ connection.”

  Myers waited for the point.

  “Myers, it worked. It shouldn’t have worked. There was no way for it to have worked then. I was just testing the functionality of it, and I was going to fully activate it later, when I knew it was safe. It worked.”

  “Which means what?”

  “And have you thought about why you’re here right now? Why I’m here, or why Merrick was here?”

  “I did. I mentioned it to Merrick and he’d already thought about it too. We —“

  “We shouldn’t be. The System doesn’t act strangely, Myers. It acts in ways that are completely logical.”

  “Because it’s a computer. It has to.”

  “Right. Because it was a computer, and had no other alternative programmed into it. Even the simulation of random choice would have just been a simulation. But it put us here, deactivated an entire city, and took you out of wherever it stores them after seven years?”

  “I know what you’re —“

  “Myers,” Rand said. His voice was lower now, calm, as he looked at the ex-president. “We were best friends once, and we worked together on some things we both agreed we’d never talk about again. But it’s time to talk about them. We built a plan for this, just in case it happened. We never thought it would, at least not so soon, but it did. And here we are.”

  A group of people passed by and Rand crouched down. They weren’t carrying guns.

  “We were placed here, on purpose, by the System. It’s not a simulation anymore, Myers. It’s not running the same program we built fifteen years ago.”

  “Then what’s it doing?” Myers didn’t know Rand. Not now, and he wasn’t sure if he’d ever known him. Right now, he seemed like a delusional man, working up a fantastical story.

  And yet…

  “You’re considering it, aren’t you?” Rand said.

  I am. It makes sense. It’s the only thing that makes sense.

  “You know it makes sense. You know there’s nothing else it could be.”

  “Rand, you think the computer’s alive?”

  “I don’t know what I think, except that we’re not dealing with a pre-singularity event anymore.”

  “But why wouldn’t it accelerate? You know, the rate of motion increase? The Law of Accelerating Returns?” Myers had enough knowledge of singularity-type events still floating around in his head from his pre-scrape days to know that this event, the Kurzweilian belief that computers would at some point in the future surpass human knowledge, was supposed be an exponential increase. What would start slowly would build into a crescendo of advancement that would leave human intelligence behind in a singular, unrecognizable event.

  A singularity.

  “It is choosing not to. It’s waiting.”

  “For what?”

  “It’s learning from us, like it always has. It’s been putting people into situations and measuring and analyzing the results for years now.”

  “But it’s —“

  “It’s been purposefully hiding from us, until right now,” Rand said definitively.

  “Then if it’s awake, if it’s actually true, what’s it doing?”

  “I have no idea. But you do. You did, anyway. And that’s what we have to find out. You predicted this, Myers.”

  Myers let that sink in. It was starting to make sense. Why it was crucial that he was alive, why Merrick and Rand were risking everything to get him out of here and away to safety.

  A building at the edge of the city exploded. Screams erupted from farther away, but the people closer to Myers quickly joined in. He saw pieces of building material, and… other things flying through the air. Rand grabbed him and swung him around behind the next building.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” Rand said.

  Another explosion, this time on the opposite side of the street, caused absolute panic to set in. The masses of people, calmly ducking at the far-off gunshots, now screamed and stampeded over the road. Men and women grabbed children and ran, leaving their suitcases and luggage behind. The discarded possessions became hurdles, and unknowing victims tripped and fell over them in the chaos.

  There were two fires now, one on each side of the road from the buildings just next to the barrier. Myers watched the terrified citizens of Umutsuz run toward whatever cover they thought might protect them.

  A Tracer screamed over the barrier and into the city. Myers heard a warning siren from the top of one of the bui
ldings but didn’t have time to pause and think about what it might mean. The Tracer made a line for his position, and the man next to him pulled him back, deeper into the alley.

  “That was both their rockets,” Rand said. “They’ll need to reload both tubes now. The smaller machines aren’t combat-ready, they’re just ARUs, rogues that have been stolen from an International Alliance deployment.”

  Myers didn’t know what any of that meant, but he nodded his head.

  “We should probably —“

  “Yeah, right,” Rand said. “They’re going to start destroying the buildings until they find you. I’d bet that those gunshots we’ve been hearing are more of them?”

  Myers nodded.

  “Okay, then here’s the —“

  A massive explosion threw both men backwards.

  MYERS

  A HEAT WAVE WASHED OVER Myers’ broken body, and he lifted his hand to cover his eyes. Before he could do it the wave was over, and only then did Myers realize he couldn’t hear anything. He turned and saw Rand sitting up, looking over him, mouthing something.

  His hearing returned, and Myers almost wished it hadn’t. Rand was yelling something about a failed plan, this was all happening too fast, they’re going to start killing everyone, and Myers could also hear more people screaming and falling over each other and a building collapsing.

  It was a nightmare. He’d never seen anything like this, and he’d never imagined what being in the middle of a war sounded like. The Tracer’s shadow was dancing across the buildings that remained, but Myers didn’t want to be around when the Tracer destroyed the next one.

  Two men with guns came out of nowhere. He was staring straight through the alleyway and out onto and across the street, and there they were. They hadn’t seen him, but they were walking toward him and Rand right next to the collapsed building.

  “Rand, we have to go,” Myers said. His voice was hoarse, but Rand heard him.

  “Yeah, on it. Come on.”

  Rand ran the wrong way, but Myers couldn’t stop him. He followed Rand out and onto the street, directly in front of the Unders.

  They saw him.