Appleseed

by Matt Bell

  Not that it’ll be exactly him who comes back.

  The rung backs up the mind; the Loom reboots the body. The remainder is a combinatory self, minds stacked one atop the other; each C has a body reprinted as closely as possible to the one before, but often a lack of biomass necessitates certain replacements, polymer and plastinate extrusions filling in the gaps. The Loom rarely reverses these permutations, no matter how it’s refueled: once a body part has been replaced with an inorganic substitute, every future C will bear the same replacement. Sometimes the replacement is an improvement, some part made less susceptible to injury, but each is also a diminishment of the real. If a polymer hoof can’t be as easily injured, it’s also less sensate, less aware of the surfaces the creature navigates. In recent years more drastic modifications have forced C to have to relearn how to walk or to perform other simple motor functions, like the one cycle when his left leg was made ever so slightly shorter, its bones lightened and augmented with inflexible plastic.

  Among the remainder are those who believe that whoever became C must once have been a better being, fierce of claw and tooth, fleet of hoof, crowned with deadly turns of horn. Now he is only a creature imitating itself, a shadow of a better self unremembered by even the oldest among the remainder. But it doesn’t matter, not to C-432. Like many of his most successful predecessors, he is rarely introspective, barely curious. He does not wonder, only survives.

  And now even that must come to an end.

  C steers the bubblecraft at maximum speed, zooming back to the stable shelf where the behemoth crawler has always been crashed, its gray steel hull inset with outcroppings of pipes and sensor arrays, its flat roof covered with solar panels he has to constantly sweep clear of snow and other debris. Outfitted with eight sets of triangular tread-wheels, the crawler is nonetheless stuck, its hull listing several degrees atop two sets of treads broken against an obstruction some long-ago pilot missed from the squat polygonal command cockpit extending from the crawler’s uppermost floor, a room C-432 has always avoided. This C has always been uninterested in the warrens of dilapidated machinery and well-scavenged halls, where surely everything valuable was long ago cast into the recycler. For the two years of his cycle, it’s been the Ice that has demanded his attention, the Ice and the wreck of the Below, the buried past from which he’s spent this entire life trying to extract his next.

  Back inside, he makes the staggering passage from the bubblecraft to the hangar exit, then through the labyrinth of barely lit hallways to the recycling chamber waiting before the Loom. There he kicks the tarp inside the recycler’s cylindrical tube, dumping its contents before throwing the plastic back outside. Wheezing for breath, his vision pulsing, he stumbles against the recycler’s far wall, crumpling awkwardly among the splintered black roots; he smells bark and dirt and soil, the rust of his blood mixing with old-world decay, ancient lignin thawed and awoken. Woozy with shock, he folds his legs, pulls his hooves inside the crowded recycler. As long as the blood falls inside the recycler it’s not lost: the blood soaks the wood, the blood circles the drain, the blood is due to be his blood again soon enough.

  So much is missing, so much is lost; C has so much doubt about how the Loom might react, but he gives the necessary voice command anyway, the one that sets the recycler humming to life. The glass door slides shut and latches. A moment later a corded steel tentacle snakes out of the module’s ceiling to slide its interface needle into the port at the base of his neck: the needle turns and locks into the rung, implanted deep inside the port; the tentacle pulls, the rung sliding from his spine with a long smooth rip only C-432 hears.

  The remainder lives in the rung; after its removal, the voices vanish.

  Now, as his life ends, C-432 for the first time hears no voice but his own, a senseless howling he barely recognizes. The only living creature on the surface of the Ice, he has never before been alone; what comes next he suffers without company or comfort. Micropores open in the recycler’s ceiling, a hiss fills the air as the pores shower him with a hot pink liquid: viscous, acidic, melting; the pain is excruciating, unbearable, new. He turns his face away, his nerves screaming: one horn melts, then the other; fur sloughs off his face, then the face follows the fur. He squeezes his eyes shut, but the protection is temporary: his eyelid dissolves, then the eye. The peculiar feeling of the skull opening not with a blow but by dissolution, then the first acid droplets hitting the brain, burning bright holes through his perception. The body dies slow, but without the brain conscious agony ceases. One leg judders the floor involuntarily, the blood flowing from the injured arm sizzles when it drips into the pooling pink liquid, steaming fluorescence streaked brown with the mud of his melting body.

  Dying, he lies amid the melting black roots of a tree whose species he thinks he’s never seen alive: while his nose lasts, he smells the sweet scent of scorched applewood, barely recognized by the only part of the mind predating the rung’s installation.

  No one observes C-432’s final agonies. His life ends, and it’s possible to believe that before this torture it already had, perhaps in the moment when the rung was snaked free of its port. To believe this is to believe that what C is, what he really is, is not this melting flesh but the amalgamation of selves backed up in the rung, rebooted when the next body comes online.

  But surely there is something alive in the recycler tube, surely there is someone: a creature suffering; a living being dying alone, coming apart in a shower of hot pink acid rain.

  Chapman

  Chapman and Nathaniel are given to industriousness, they work most days from dawn to dusk; but then come days of waiting out weather, days of needing ground to thaw or floodwaters to recede, days of hunting and gathering instead of plowing and planting. The morning after the year’s first nursery is finished, silent Nathaniel stalks into the underbrush, rifle in hand, leaving Chapman behind, sitting idly atop a fresh-cut stump. When a robin flutters from its tree, he studies the curve of its beak, how perfectly built it is for all the robin has to do, digging grubs and worms and caterpillars, plucking berries from blooming bushes, building a nest to attract a mate. Its locomotion is a highly evolved efficiency, nothing lost or wasted because loss and waste is the road of deprivation, despair, death; there is risk in being a robin but not recklessness.

  The robin digs another grub from the dirt, sucking its meal back with a jerking gulp. After it’s fed it becomes more curious, cocking its head at Chapman’s strangeness. The faun offers his hand, palm up, fingers loose, his shoulder steady, his elbow level but relaxed; the robin leaps into the air at this invitation, its wings aflutter as it lands in his palm. It walks a circle around his hand, only momentarily intrigued by his mossy smell, then crouches upon its twiggy legs, ready to fly off—but before it can escape, Chapman closes his fingers, surprising himself with how easily he catches the robin in the cage of his fist. “When I’m done,” he whispers, feeling the robin’s breast thumping inside his grip, its heart bold behind its splinter of breastbone, “there’ll still be trees for you to nest in, but all will be only the trees I permit.” As soon as he says it, he gags, his mouth filling with the acrid taste of bile; the robin squawks with agitation and Chapman lets it go, the bird flying panicking into the trees.

  Afterward, he burns with embarrassed shame: Why had he said what he did? Was it something he believed or something he’d been taught? His brother fancies himself a conqueror, a man subduing the blank horror of the wilderness, but Chapman wants to believe there are other options, at least for him. Agitated, he departs the nursery for the dewy morning woods, where he restlessly searches out signs of other birds, a sparrow, a blue jay, a wild turkey, each seeking its particular seed or berry, claiming its share of the bugs chittering beneath wet rocks or fallen logs. It’s difficult to distinguish the individual from the type, and the lower the creature, the more challenging the want for true encounter: not everything hooved is Chapman’s cousin, but in the eyes of a deer he’s spied a canny intelligence absent in
the eyes of the jackrabbit or the grouse, the furtive stare of a lizard. Is it a matter of sentience or a matter of scale? Who is to say what the lizard sees, what a bullfrog contemplates?

  Beneath the canopy of pine and oak and maple there is moss everywhere, softly striving mats of it climbing the scarred trunks of the oldest trees, colonizing boulders smoothed and discarded by glaciers impossible to imagine among all this greenery, the moss on the move generation after generation, a mindless and relentless life-form. This overripe abundance all around, the forest gagging itself upon a bright profusion of right living: flowers blooming, chicks crying out, infant rabbits in the brambles, and ducklings on every pond; bones everywhere, eggshells and carapaces, last year’s antlers bleached white amid fallen leaves, loosed entrails covered in the white castings of maggots. The older the forest, the more the soil smells of death and rot, rankest fertility: in one narrow bramble-choked ravine Chapman can’t take a step without crushing a beetle beneath his hooves, but the beetle quickly becomes food for something else, life sprouting out of life. Nearby a fallen oak exposes a ball of roots taller than any man, the roots clutching broken rocks in their woody grip. A tree takes what it needs and sequesters it into wood; death alone will not make it release its catch, only rot and dissolution; but even before a tree dies it cedes some part of its life to the termites scrawling trails beneath its bark, to the birds nesting in its heights. How quickly a nest tumbled to the ground is savaged by weasels, leaving behind some hen squawking after her loss: predation but without malice, opportunity the forest’s only guiding morality. Do these birds remember their broken eggs? Certainly they’re not distraught forever. Surely there is no loss so final a creature will not try again to gain.

  Is nothing sacred or is everything? Nathaniel says he hates to feel the deep purposelessness he sees in nonhuman life, the utter lack of any higher calling, but alone in these woods Chapman imagines himself just as uncharged and nameless as any beast, freed from the human here where there’s no other creature who cares what he calls himself, where there is no creature who calls itself anything: a muskrat scurrying home is something a man could name, but to the muskrat, the faun watching it go is simply a shape moving in the shadows, a darkness stretching across a dappling. For a time the faun takes pleasure in this shared anonymity, allowing himself to join the unexceptional state of being all around him, breathing in the scatter and the spoor, tracking the ceaselessness of scale in the fungal, the vegetal, the animal sprawl. Once this entire world was bare rock and deep water and underground fire spouting choking gouts of unbreathable gas; now it’s a creeping, crawling body made of many bodies, each unexceptional amid the endless motion of the world, life all around, life unbroken from the forest floor to the tops of the trees, life leaving bare not one square inch of earth. Nothing the faun sees or hears or smells is for him, but he can take from it whatever he needs: here nothing is denied, everything is permitted except waste.

  Far from camp, but not as far as he’d thought, the sound of a musket blast pulls him back to himself, renames him Chapman. The gunshot is too close, reverberating through the nearby trees; Chapman hides, afraid. A moment later a moose appears, crashing through the brush, staggered by a skillful shot, a clean kill in the making, and then Nathaniel appears too, running after his bullet, lifting his knees high to clear the brush between him and his target. The bullet has broken the moose’s ribs, its lead expanding to tear through one lung and then the other; Chapman watches the stumbling moose’s face contort, its lips made flags of flesh, dripping ropy saliva; falling heavily, its last lowing sounds are unmistakably distressed.

  Chapman remains crouched in the shadows throughout the grisly exhibition that follows. He looks on in horror as Nathaniel dresses the kill with his knife, the moose’s fading heat radiating upward, its blood spilling wherever Nathaniel slices the skin to expose the solid ribs, the heavy guts: the four bulging stomachs, a hundred feet of intestines, kidneys the size of a man’s head. Already the moose’s wildness is gone, already what pale spirit it possessed in life has escaped; from his hiding place Chapman sickens at the metallic tang, the moose’s body expelling so much hot blood, its many iron-rich organs soon left steaming in the open air.

  For Chapman to reveal himself now would only embarrass Nathaniel, who has always done his best to shield his brother from this task, but now that he’s seen it he will never forget how Nathaniel looked cutting this hooved creature into its component parts, piling viscera away from the butchered meat, separating what he desires from what he’ll share with the Territory’s scavengers, refuse that includes the monstrous antlered head, its eyes open and stupidly staring, its black tongue hanging from its dumb lips; most of all he will remember how, as Nathaniel worked on, he absently began to whistle, happy and proud of his kill so expertly butchered and disassembled, at the taken life of this moose piled into parts atop a blood-soaked tarpaulin, the moose made meat until it’s a moose no more.

  John

  How many others roaming the emptied lands west of the Mississippi must’ve felt the same persistent nag John thinks now, driving east: Where have all the people gone? But there are fewer people everywhere now, years after the Secession and the Sacrifice, after the unquenchable malaria outbreaks and the rising sea levels made much of the Eastern Seaboard uninhabitable—and no matter what the emergency was, always Eury Mirov appeared on every screen, offering slogan after slogan, each one a promise John had heard too many times before. Once Earthtrust had promised John a life he’d thought he’d wanted too, years ago, back when the company was an unremarkable midwestern start-up, just Eury and John and a handful of others paid entirely in then worthless stock options.

  The work and Eury, for so long he’d thought he’d wanted them both.

  John’s grandfather had owned a small farm in Ohio, plowing his acres with a simple tractor, raising pigs and goats and chickens alongside a rotation of corn and wheat. This was land their family had improved for over two hundred years, right beside the farm where Eury had grown up, their two families close, the two kids childhood friends. John’s father had expanded his holdings until he owned a swath of prime Ohio farmland covered in monoculture corn and soybeans, genetically modified crops stretching the soil’s limits until every year a more resilient engineered seed was needed, plus more expensive fertilizers, ever more complex machinery.

  The year John joined Earthtrust, the family farm was failing, its profitability declining as the weather warmed, as the rains stopped or else never ended, every spring a flood and every summer a drought, as tornado season started lasting all year. The first time John told Eury he was quitting was after all his family’s land had been sold except for the original homestead, adjacent to the one her great-great-ancestor had bought in the 1850s; when John returned it was to live there alone, his parents dead of cancer and heart disease, of bankruptcy and heartbreak.

  At Earthtrust, he’d wanted to make the world a better place, to help undo the damage other corporations had done. Earthtrust would be different, Eury had promised. Earthtrust’s plants and animals—its “plant and animal products,” as the brochures had read—weren’t much like the crops and livestock John’s grandfather had raised, and John was as responsible as anyone else for what they’d become. He’d helped design vast superorchards of genetically modified apple trees, then developed a series of synthetic nanobees to pollinate them; others invented strains of brown-leafed corn hardy enough to survive six-month droughts, their stalks growing imperceptibly slowly, producing kernels edible only to the cows Earthtrust bred to eat them. When John went home to his family farm, he’d planted only heirloom seeds taken from the company’s archives, all acquired from the seed banks of hopeful organizations who’d helped Earthtrust in its early days, before it was obvious what the company would become.

  For two years, the farm had grown, if not exactly flourished, John managing to get a beekeeping operation running in the apple orchard, a boon even at the height of the final colony collapse; d
uring the second year, there’d been a promising explosion of earthworms and maggots, the soil turning and churning one more time—but then came a yearlong drought, exacerbated by the highest temperatures ever recorded in the Midwest. By the end he’d had to watch his soil blow away, all the earth his family had tilled gone, the farmland in Ohio and the other midwestern states turning to gray dust, cracked clay, bared rock. John had stood on the porch of his father’s farmhouse, staring into a rust-orange sunset sky made newly beautiful by light refracted through rolling dust and windblown pollution, watching the dry topsoil lifting into the air in ragged strips, carrying with it the brittle bodies of dead earthworms, squirming maggots who’d never learn to fly.

  The Rice Wars, the Corn Wars, the Soy Wars: How many lives were lost worldwide in the years of crop failures that followed that summer? Before they ended, Earthtrust owned John’s family’s land, then the entire county, then most of the state, Eury paying prices pretending the land was still farmable, that it wasn’t besieged by dust storms and churning clod-twisters.

  No one could afford to stay. No one could afford to say no to Eury Mirov.

  Afterward she alone owned what had been, for more than two centuries, his family’s and hers, and John had gone back to Earthtrust, desperate again for Eury’s promises.

  Driving faster now, John remembers: A job for every man and woman who wants a job, Eury had said, an Earthtrust machine for every job you don’t want.

  But also someone else’s voice, a rebuttal from a book: A man with a machine and inadequate culture is a pestilence. Who wrote that? It’s been years since John’s read a book, years since he’s done much of anything but drive and look, stop and fight. Two doctoral degrees, a career at Earthtrust, all of it in the past. He’d once thought of himself as intelligent, learned, sophisticated enough. Now what was he? A man reduced, a man made small. All the technology that had been put in the place of human dignity, replacing the natural with the artificial: Whose ideas lay beneath them? What was the culture from which his own inventions had sprung?