The Final Evolution

by Jeff Somers

  I forced the hot, acrid air into myself, took it in deep, and closed my eyes, seeking the imaginary glass shield I’d used to keep the voices at bay. I forced calm into myself like caulk, pushing the rage and fear aside, filling myself with beige numbness. Patience, I thought. It was the lesson Canny had taught me. For years he’d been teaching me. Patience. Wait for your moment and don’t move until it comes.

  Orel took a stiff, unnatural step toward me, his hands skeletal, all the fake skin burned away, leaving the impervious alloy bones beneath.

  I relaxed my grip on the gun. I had use of my arm; he didn’t have me wrapped up tight. Hard enough to keep his body upright and moving while he did other things, hard to multitask when you’d just been blown up and were on fire. Kev Gatz had had a lifetime to get to know his Push and hadn’t figured it out beforied; Orel had had just a few years.

  I stayed limp. Anger bubbled over the edges of my imposed calm.

  “I hope you enjoy the fucking graveyard, motherfucker,” I rasped. I had to shout or twitch, so I shouted. “You got your Monk body. You got it without anyone pulling your strings, and you got your fucking God Augment. You get to sit on this rock forever now, playing with our bones. Well fucking played. You are a fucking genius.”

  Silently, the burning Monk stepped toward me, like it was dragging itself behind itself, the heavy alloys of the Monk chassis reluctant. The pressure on me increased, pushing me into the hot wall, crushing, making it almost impossible to breathe. A yellow pulse started filling my vision in time with my off-kilter heartbeat.

  He took another step; he was only about eight or nine feet away. Able to just bend my elbow, I brought the gun up in one quick, jerking motion and squeezed the trigger once.

  He had to choose which Push to keep up—he wasn’t experienced with it to begin with, and now had the strain of operating his entire physical being with his mind and using it on me. Instinct made him dive to one side, landing on the bubbling floor awkwardly; the invisible log disappeared from my chest. I dropped to the floor, staggering once and then launching myself forward, sprinting, my dislocated arm flopping at my side. I had to keep moving, keep coming at him and not let him concentrate.

  The smoke made it hard to see, my eyes stinging and blurring, but the flaming outline of Orel as he rolled on the floor was clear enough, and I pushed myself at him, giving it everything I had. Jumping for it, I sailed down and landed on his back, fire leaping up around me for a second and then snuffing out. I leaned forward and snaked my arm around his neck, my gun still clutched loosely in my buzzing hand.

  He tried to snatch me away with his telekinesis, my legs snapping up into the air, pain shooting through my body, but I hung onto him, my arm feeling weak and sore. I hung on with everything I had as he whipped me this way and that, trying to peel me off. When my arm felt tired and loose, sweat dripping from my face, I thought, Shit, he’s going to beat me. He’s going to shake me loose and throw me against the fucking walls until I’m dead, and I hated him. I realized, suddenly, that I’d never really hated anything before. I’d despised people, I’d killed people, but I’d never hated anyone until this exact moment, standing in the ruined guts of Chengara with a thing responsible for every bad moment of the past few years.

  I pushed my legs down around his sides and squeezed while I loosed my arm a little, enough to get some play as I tried to angle the gun in toward his face, into his mechanical jaw.

  He suddenly went limp. A second later, we both shot into the air and slammed into the charred wall, me pinned between it and the Monk, then bouncing off, spinning around, and slamming into the opposite side. Something stabbed into my shoulder, then sliced down toward the middle of my back—

  “Motherfucker!”

  —as we were scraped away and spun so I was upside down, then smashed down onto e floor. Wet pain soaked into my clothes. I shut my eyes and pictured Remy on the soldier’s back, hanging on no matter what and certain, certain I was about to free us, to take him off that truck and save him. Fucking certain.

  With a grunt I moved my arm and jammed the gun’s barrel into the hollow where his cheek had once been, now burned away to the bare gray skeleton. The angle was hard to judge, but I immediately knew there was a chance I’d shoot myself as well if the bullet passed through. I hesitated. I thought of Grisha. I heard him: Your winning or losing determines whether the entire human race withers on the vine. I must be sure you understand that you must take him alive.

  I pictured Mickey’s face on the hover, leaving me behind in this exact spot. Mickey always had a deal. Mickey always had connections, always had a plan, a fallback position. I thought of Remy. I thought of him watching me turn and put a gun on him. The cold, numb feeling from my arm seemed to spread rapidly, pumped through my body by my stuttering heart, settling in and removing all the fire, the pain, and leaving behind just an empty certainty.

  I thought,

  Avery Cates, Destroyer of Worlds

  and pulled the trigger.

  EPILOGUE

  I STARED AT THE HEAD. THE HEAD STARED BACK.

  My steps echoed off the buildings as I walked down the cobblestone streets, twisting this way and that, barely wide enough for two people—if there was anyone else around—to pass. The buildings on each side were three or four stories high and cut off the sun, making everything dark and chilled, and there were occasional tin roofs stretched between the sides, cutting you off from the sky completely.

  Toledo was deserted.

  It was in good shape, though. It didn’t look like the city had taken any bombings or serious tank actions during the civil war. None of the blocks I’d walked past had sported empty lots filled with rubble, and the streets weren’t chewed up and churned into muddy pits. Mainly what I noticed was the lack of bodies; Toledo looked neat as a pin, as if everyone had just packed up their necessities and bugged out one evening, walking slowly and chatting, remarking on the weather.

  I paused under another one of those simple roofs stretching a few feet over me. Vines grew on it, twisting under and around themselves, creating a canopy of green with purplish flowers. I stared at it. My back ached, tight and swollen, and my shoulders throbbed under my rough shirt. I stared at the canopy for a long time, swaying there on my feet, thinking about nothing. It had been months, but I was still not used to the absence of my HUD; there wasn’t even the flickering shadow of it that I’d lived with from time to time. It appeared to be permanently shut down.

  Blinking, I looked around. The silence was an anesthetic. I could close my eyes and there was nothing but wind and my own breathing. I’d been walking. Sometimes there were towns or camps with people in them, but mostly it had been open air, abandoned settlements, and silence. Sometimes I just closed my eyes and walked blindly for a while, opening them later with a faint sense of excitement to see where I’d ended up, if I was still alive.

  Some of the camps and towns still tried to convince me to stay, to pay me off, to make me their sheriff. It was amazing. People never gave up, even when they’d been given up on.

  Blinking, I turned and examined the building to my left; they were all connected, attached, like one huge sinuous building stretching the entire length of the street. A wooden sign hung by one short chain, the other side broken so the sign was on an angle. I turned my head slowly until it looked right-side up to me and read it: LA ABADÍA. The doors were thrust inward, the tiled floor barely visible for a few feet before being swallowed by darkness, but I could make out the edge of an old wooden bar. I always investigated bars. It was a policy.

  There were a few overturned stools and tables inside, but otherwise it looked neat and orderly. It smelled dry and dusty. The ceiling was low and reminded me a little of the basement of Diocletian’s palace, thick stone columns and rough stone walls. The floor was wood, much abused but still in decent shape.

  I set the shredder against the wall and unslung my pack, relief sweeping through my muscles for a second, replaced immediately by a buzzing, hu
mming ache that settled in like it knew my muscles well and liked it there. Dropping the pack on the floor, I adjusted my hip holsters and walked slowly around the bar, keeping my eyes open and turning around steadily as I went. I didn’t know why I bothered, except that old habits were good habits.

  The floor behind the bar was covered in broken glass that crunched under my boots as I walked its length. The shelves behind and under the bar were bare except for a couple of huge mechanical rat traps with the skeletal remains of their victims still clenched inside. Someone had already been through here looking for booze. Mixed in with the shattered glass were a dozen or so credit dongles, all useless now that the cops had gone into hibernation without Marin’s codes. I kicked at them a little, studying the floor. I kept at it, walking back toward the center of the bar, and sure enough located the telltale outline of a trapdoor. Pushing glass aside with my boot, I cleared the area until I could see the thin outline of the door’s edges.

  I dropped to my knees and felt gingerly around the edges, trying to avoid tiny shards of glass in my fingertips. I found the well-hidden indentation that allowed me to get three fingers under the lip and lift the trap up, revealing a dim, shallow pit in which a stack of paper yen, a pile of credit dongles, and two gleaming bottles of… something sat like a present from the cosmos for my years of service.

  I took one of the bottles and held it up. No label, a vaguely cloudy amber color. Could be booze, I thought. Could be rat poison. I took the bottle back around the bar and sat down next to my pack and set the bottle between my spread legs as I undid the straps. I pulled out Mara’s head, eyes still open, still gleaming with artistically rendered life. I set the head gently on a nearby wooden chair so she was staring at me, and then picked up the bottle.

  “What do you think?” I asked the head.

  Mara kept her opinions to herself. I knew it was Orel in there, a copy of him, but Mara’s not-quite-pretty face made it impossible to imagine the hateful old spider, so I thought of it as Mara.

  You’ve finally gone crackers, Marin whispered. That’s what I think.

  No one’s talking to you, I thought, dismissing him as I twisted the cap off the bottle. I sniffed the contents—sweet and sharp, definitely alcoholic—and tipped the bottle up for a swallow. It was surprisingly good, light and fruity with a distinct bite I enjoyed, the familiar burn of booze. I took a healthy swig and paused for a breath before taking another, a pleasant warmth blooming immediately in my middle.

  Setting the bottle on the floor, I winced a little as a sharp tearing sensation rippled up my back. I stuffed one hand into a coat pocket and pulled out the sheaf of folded paper I’d been marking my progress on. There was no power for handhelds, no signals in the air anyway, and no hard-copy maps anywhere I’d been able to find. So you wandered. I’d found Toledo using ancient signs still planted here and there, and some luck. I scanned through the lists of street names I’d already walked through, taking sips from the bottle, and finally wrote Calle de Nunez de Arce on the bottom of the list.

  I stuffed the papers back into my pocket and stared around the empty room. The light was failing, and I thought I might see if there was a good defensible room somewhere in here, just stay where I was for the night. Plenty to burn. If there was booze hidden away, there might be food, too. And Toledo was, as far as I’d been able to tell, about as deserted as any place in the world. And there were plenty of deserted places.

  After a few more minutes I stood up and took the bottle on a tour. The place had a crazy layout, small rooms linked by narrow hallways, all still furnished with the peculiar wooden chairs and tables, most still in place. Everything looked ready for business, like the vampires were coming later on in the evening to have a few cocktails. I found a winding, darkened set of stairs heading upward and it led me to a larger second floor, more or less one open space with two large windows on the back end, the orange sun streaming in hot and dry. It felt empty, although there were some boxes and some gray sacks piled here and there: a storeroom. As I entered, a platoon of large black rats scrambled out of the way, and I made a mental note to reclaim a few traps to set up around me as I slept.

  Between the two huge windows a man sat spread-eagled, his hands flat on the floor on either side of him.

  He was tall, had oriental features, and wore a nicely cut black suit and overcoat, black gloves, and the shiniest black shoes I’d ever seen. His trousers had ridden up to reveal black socks and an inch of his tan calves. He stared straight ahead, his head tilted back slightly and resting against the sill of the window.

  Setting the bottle down, I unsnapped the holster on my left hip and rested my hand on the butt of the gun as I walked over to the windows. I stopped directly in front of him and studied him for a moment; he looked perfect, fresh and supple, and my underbrain kept screaming to pull the gun and shoot the avatar before he gave up this game and leaped for me.

  I forced myself to take my hand from the gun and knelt in front of it. I glanced down at the floor; the cop had placed his gun and badge there between his legs. I picked up the beautiful leather wallet containing his badge and flipped it open. The silvery template inside was dim and lifeless, the hologram’s battery juice dried up. Captain Emil Yodsuwan. I flipped the badge shut and dropped it back at his feet. He’d seen it coming, the shutdown, and he’d found a place of relative privacy to wait for someone to recrank the servers and wake the cops up.

  I picked up the gun, a nice chrome-plated auto, pre–civil war. Full clip. I slipped it into my pocket and set about going through his pockets. I found a credit dongle and dead handheld, a spare clip for the gun, and a battered old data cube. I held the cube between my thumb and forefinger for a moment, studying it, and then pushed it into my inside pocket. There was no way to read it, but it might be fun to try.

  Satisfied, I turned and walked back down to the front bar, reclaiming the bottle as I passed it. Everything was exactly as I’d left it, only darker. I’d have to break up a table and chairs soon to get a fire going if I was going to avoid having to work in the pitch black the night had become everywhere, but instead of getting to work I slid down to the floor again, stiff back complaining, and sat in front of the head. I stared at Mara for a moment, thinking, but there was nothing to say to her.

  A sudden noise made me twist halfway into a kneeling position, hands flying to my holsters. I stayed that way for a few jumpy, irregular heartbeats, sweat breaking out cold and slimy on my face, and then sagged back down to the floor. There was no one there.

  I stared at the head. The head stared back. I thought of Grisha, who I’d found half buried in dry, loose sand a half mile or more out in the desert, his hands curled into claws, beetles roaming over his body. I thought of Marko, who I’d never found any sign of. I liked to think he’d crawled away, made his escape, but I couldn’t know that. I thought of them all, in turn.

  I could hear nothing except the wind pushing its way through the vines on the canopy, and the light was failing fast. I stared at the head and the head stared back and I felt a familiar weary heaviness inside. I shut my eyes and thought grimly, There will never be anyone there.

  APPENDIX

  Superstes per Scientia

  Confidential Memorandum

  To: Baklanov, G, DIC

  Fr: McKie, Andrew, ADM

  cc: none

  RE: Zadravec Diary

  Dear Grisha,

  As you know I have been depressed of late at our lack of progress. I know you understand the serousness of our situation, but you and I may be the only ones in the directing committees who do; I won’t sling mud in writing but I find myself more and more frustrated at the attitude of those who oppose your efforts to salvage what can be salvaged of this disastrous world.

  Grisha, my little professor, where are you? Your absence is terrifying. I know you well enough to know you do not waste time, but I am selfish enough to wish you here. I send this to you hoping it finds you, somewhere, that our courier teams are still intact and f
unctioning.

  It is like I can feel the world constricting around me. Every day, fewer of us left. Noise on the line where there used to be voices.

  As per your instruction of two weeks ago, we secured and explored the small settlements near Split that you marked. We found no one alive in any of them, though all showed signs of recent habitation. We searched thoroughly and took away several items of possible interest that will be cataloged and digitized according to our usual protocols. One item, however, was of significant interest and I am reproducing portions of it within this memorandum in the hope that it finds its way to you. I suspect you will garner great intellectual pleasure from its contents, if I know you, and it may shed some light on your current mission.

  The item is a diary, a journal. It is unusual in that it is written by hand, in ink, and not simply a recording or other digital artifact. It is written in an old script; we had to dig through the archives to find a study of it. To think that someone has been passing this down for decades, perhaps a century—I am unclear when we’re agreed that the practice of handwriting like this died out. But I am digressing.

  You know I love my digression, my little professor.

  I will not reproduce the diary in its entirety here. Much of it is extremely prosaic in nature, and some was impossible to decipher, as it appears to have been written when the author—whose first name is unknown—was extremely inebriated. I trust, however, that you will find the chosen excerpts instructive, if perhaps depressing. But then how can one be depressed in this world. Depression was decades ago, burned away. Now we just observe, and note, and sleep dreamlessly, waiting.