Appleseed

by Matt Bell

  E-5

  I know you.

  I remember. I remember you and I remember me. I remember us.

  I remember us as children, chasing each other through the apple orchard between our parents’ farms, the trees in both our backyards, a friendly border: not mine and not yours. Ours.

  This is one of my first memories. It is and isn’t mine.

  In it, you are you, but am I me?

  Not exactly. Eury Mirov is me. But I’m not her, not right now. But if you call me by her name, I’ll answer.

  You say there must be others like me, but how do I know? You tell me today’s date, the year, but for me it’s two years ago, it is another season entirely. I went to sleep in the winter and I woke up in summer. Or so you tell me, since inside this facility it could be any day, any year, any season.

  In the first memory I have of us, it’s autumn, the air crisp and cool, the apples heavy on the trees. They were never delicious, those apples: pocked with worm holes, squishy or gritty. But you and I ate them anyway, because the orchard was our space, the apples ours, the one place on both our family farms where no one cared what we did. The golden light, the sound of your laughter, the cries of birds in the trees, the crackling of leaves, the far-off voices of adults finally calling us back home, taking us away from each other.

  We grew up, we went to college, we founded this company. We started this together, and then you quit, left me to do what needed to be done. I fought while you fled, into exile and retreat; you never sent word but I saw you in security footage and drone captures, I watched everything you destroyed burn while I stayed here alone, building a better future.

  Most of my memories, all of which are only hers, have nothing to do with you. It’s only from your vantage point that you’ve seen my life revolving around yours, how my choices serve the story you’re telling. The most human error, you once judged this, even as you couldn’t escape it: to see other life only as it relates to you. The man putting himself at the center of the living world as he once believed Earth the center of the universe, when in truth the universe cares nothing for this one blue bauble of a world, when in truth the life blanketing the earth most often barely notices the human man, except to flee his endless appetites, his unceasing destruction.

  A Eury thought, that one, not quite a me thought, this me that right now isn’t Eury.

  If you asked, I could tell you some of the other memories I hold. Of years of worry and struggle, of building this company, of fighting its fights. Of years of preparing for the shocks I saw coming, shocks many saw coming but few took seriously enough to act as boldly as would be required. I could tell you how when the time came Earthtrust was ready because I was ready. How when the Secession began, Earthtrust fought to control the peace that followed. When we forcibly emptied the Sacrifice Zone, it wasn’t only to save human lives, but to be able to save enough life to supply the future we were making.

  Right now, I feel nothing about any of this. I am—detached? These memories are here so I can perform her, but they’re not really me. Two years have gone by, you say, two years you know and I don’t. But even so, I remember what comes after the Sacrifice: Pinatubo. Orpheus.

  If this is my Tower, the Tower I dreamed up years ago, as you say it is—then it’s time.

  I’m strong enough to walk, but I think you’ll have to tell me where to walk. I’ll tell you anything you want, but you have to ask. Whatever I did to myself to make me this way, it’s made me slow to act, slow to speak.

  But if you tell me what to do, I’ll do it.

  I know I’ve been made to trust a handful of people. The captain of my bodyguard. A handful of senior advisors. Drivers, pilots, household staff. Other people I haven’t met yet, handlers nevertheless imprinted upon me.

  And you. Of course you.

  John Worth. I know you. I trust you. I always have.

  Why are you here, John? And what do we do now?

  John

  The broadcast begins at dawn, local Ohio time. Every telescreen in the Farm is on a linked circuit, every telescreen in every VAC worldwide is synced to the same, so Eury Mirov can broadcast to her Volunteers any time she wants: now all those screens all over the world turn on at once, their single remote access code a simple enough thing to hack. It’s possible, in the broadcast’s earliest moments, to believe this is more corporate propaganda, with the same fields of corn, the same orchards, the same grazing cattle, familiar from so many Earthtrust videos. But this is old footage, of the world long before Earthtrust, before the unceasing droughts, before the endless fires, before the new antibiotic-resistant infections, before the rise of acidified seas and the spinning mobs of tornados and hurricanes. Before the soil died and dried up, before every city street required a mask, before the rolling mass extinctions became the total annihilation of the natural world.

  This is the world that was stolen.

  What follows is one story of how it was lost, about who cost us what, about what they intend to do with what remains. It is a story told in excerpts of Earthtrust documents, in passages from secret government memos now read to narrate bulldozers piling up an acre of dead trees or knocking down century-old family homes, in footage of soldiers pulling families from houses in Arizona and New Mexico, Colorado and Utah, so many men and women and children forced at gunpoint into trucks, onto trains. Soundless video of armored soldiers advancing through burning streets follows, the gunfire and destruction accompanied only by the narrator’s voice, vaguely feminine, utterly calm, as she reads Earthtrust orders to evacuate the cities and to level the towns. The narrator’s voice reads Eury Mirov’s words: public speeches given, transcripts of secret presentations to the federal government, the negotiations to sell the West to Earthtrust to form the Sacrifice Zone. Militarized corporate-speak. A clip plays of a Phoenix suburb, concrete and stucco, pinkly beige homes with clay tile roofs, with black-clad soldiers in filter masks pulling heat-burst bodies out of house after house, piling them into quadcopter cargo lifters; a series of jump cuts offers flashes of automated trucks filled with people killed by exposure, starvation, abandonment, their bodies Earthtrust property, carted away to the refineries now appearing on-screen, the biomass recycling plants built in secret in the newly barren West.

  It’s shaky handheld footage, acquired at great risk. The inside of one of the plants, at first indistinguishable from any other refinery, then a concrete room where hazmat-suited workers shovel body parts into a roiling pink sludge, the skin and hair and bones melting fast, seeping toward a drain in the middle of the room. A series of still photos of similar scenes, other remains: human, animal, vegetal. Eury’s words, read in the narrator’s drawl: “recycling,” she says, “reclamation,” she utters over a close-up of a drain, swirling with steaming pink liquid.

  “The world to come,” she says, “can only be built from the world that was. The past irretrievable. The future the good world, the promised world. This is a story we can tell.

  “But first,” the narrator says, slowing down, enunciating Eury’s words as the screen goes black, “but first we have to be willing to sacrifice the present.”

  On-screen, the countdown to Pinatubo reappears. Four hours until the world we made together ends, before a world of Eury Mirov’s design begins.

  As the broadcast concludes, Volunteers spill out of their homes, confused and angry in the morning light, refusing their work assignments, overwhelming the neighborhood avenues, blocking the passage of the trams and other Earthtrust vehicles. Voices rise to yell incoherent slogans as throughout the Farm crowds gather, masses whose anger hasn’t yet been given direction. Other Volunteers are only afraid, wanting to be left alone, to not have the life they’d found disrupted, the gathering demonstrators a frightening reminder of the Secession and the Sacrifice.

  In one neighborhood close to the Tower, a ponytailed woman climbs atop a trapped tram car. Cupping her hands, she calls the other Volunteers to listen, while in other neighborhoods, many women, many men, many
individuals are doing the same. Saying, Listen. Saying, Let me tell you what’s next. Saying, These fuckers do not get to decide the future for us. Pushing their way through the crowd, Cal and Julie and Noor watch these leaders emerge. How cheered they are to see them, to learn they’re not the only ones resisting, that what they do in the last hours before Pinatubo launches will not be done alone.

  Exiting the commotion outside, the three women rush into the opened armory among a troop of frantic plainclothes security officers still dressed in standard neighborhood garb, their infiltration simpler than it should be thanks to the surveillance state’s reliance on technology instead of people. Noor’s hacked pebbles spoof the credentials they need as they shoulder past the others, Cal and Julie not waiting for confirmation as they file inside. Once admitted, they move with unfeigned confidence, following the officers to racks of flak vests and smart-visored helmets, loaded assault rifles snapped into wall mounts. The three women suit up fast, hurrying to be anonymous behind the face shields of the helmets, Julie rushing to help Noor with her confusion of straps and buckles and snaps.

  Cal and Julie grin despite the danger, knocking each other on the shoulder pads with gauntleted fists. It’s been years since they went into battle together, longer since they felt righteous about the war they were about to fight.

  Cal shoulders the reassuring weight of her rifle, checking the tactical scope, the light mounted under the barrel. The women leave the armory in lockstep, blending in alongside the soldiers already dropping every pretense of civil service, their military-grade riot gear and heavy weapons readied to suppress the Volunteers they’d previously promised to protect. But Cal knows every police force protects power first, that property is always prioritized over people, that the plans of the powerful are always paid for by the violence they’re willing to inflict upon their citizens.

  And these Volunteers are no one’s citizens. Eury Mirov has seen to that.

  Far above the trouble below, John and E-5 take the short elevator ride to the fiftieth floor, not speaking, E-5 dressed in the same monochromatic outfit in which John last saw Eury, including the pair of gloves she’d worn to press her prop button, plus a printed replica of the hip-length garment from when she’d shown him the museum of lasts, its high white collar now hiding the black metal port at the base of E-5’s neck. Dressed for the part, she is and isn’t Eury. She has Eury’s face, Eury’s body, Eury’s voice, but not Eury’s ambitions, not Eury’s sense of control: E-5 is more accommodating than Eury ever was, even in her lightest moods.

  Was? Is? John struggles with verbs, tense, personhood. What is she to him, this clone he’s printed: a person or an object, a weapon or a tool? Maybe a better question is: What would she have been to Eury? In the night, E-5 followed John from room to room, from the apartment to the lab and back again, rarely speaking unless prompted, eagerly waiting for commands. He asked her to move aside and she did, immediately. He asked if she needed anything and she told him exactly what she wanted: a quantity of food, a certain amount of water, to use the bathroom. Eury had clearly programmed E to be trusting, pliant, capable of taking directions, with a minimum of agency. For what purpose? Why would Eury want a lesser clone of herself? John doesn’t know, isn’t sure it matters, as long as her biometrics are the same.

  The real Eury has compromised John his entire life, has made him a danger to everyone else. He has fled her, fought her, returned to her. Now all John needs of E-5 are her fingerprints. All he needs are her eyes opened to the retinal scanner. All he needs is a drop of blood, her genetic combination, the final key to reaching the Pinatubo launch chamber at the needle’s pinnacle, accessible only through Eury’s penthouse.

  Before they left, John printed himself new clothes too: black pants, black shirt, black boots, a jacket with too many pockets, the uniform of someone wanting to be no one. A pacifist still, or so he tells himself, he takes no weapons. Out west, bombing dams and bridges and destroying fence lines and fuel depots, the goal was the removal of infrastructure or industry, never injuring people. In the Sacrifice Zone, it was possible to be as careful as you wanted, ensuring structures were uninhabited and bridges unoccupied, to know that blowing dams over dry rivers wouldn’t flood anyone’s home.

  What they’re doing now will not be so clean. Whatever they choose—whatever they do or don’t do, whatever they cause or allow others to do—inevitably people will be hurt.

  The elevator lifts John and E-5 ever closer to the levers of power, to the imagined red switch that sets off an apocalypse or else stops it. There, there’ll no longer be any way to stay neutral. Whatever he does or doesn’t do, John has made himself complicit in the what next.

  So be it. He has one more printed tool, stored in one of his jacket’s cargo pockets: a jet injector with a single pebble in its chamber, another perfect spoof of Eury’s own. Seconds before the elevator doors open, he smiles at E, takes her hand with his. With the other, he places the injector against the space between her thumb and forefinger. She balks, tries to pull her hand away, but he offers a reassuring lie.

  “Don’t move,” he says, “and this won’t hurt.”

  He pulls the trigger, fires the pebble into her flesh. Born without enough agency to protect herself from harm, E-5 nonetheless cries out, surprised by the first pain of her brand-new life.

  Eury Mirov promised to keep the Volunteers safe, but here are her soldiers, marching against them with riot shields raised, with assault rifles and tear gas at the ready. At the direction of the ponytailed woman, the gathered Volunteers link arms, chaining their bodies across the tramway as Earthtrust security exits the barracks, armored and armed. The Volunteers are from Ohio, from Indiana and Illinois and Michigan, from Missouri and Wyoming and Louisiana, from California and Texas and anywhere else the collapse reached; they are former Americans, stripped of their citizenship, made a community of refugees inside their own borders, today ready to resist as one people, united in deciding that they will not let these soldiers pass.

  “Stand together!” the ponytailed woman yells, leaning recklessly into her words, her straining body supported by the Volunteers beside her. “Whatever happens, we all stand together.”

  The armored soldiers stop ten meters away from the human chain, not advancing but not backing down. Hundreds of Volunteers, breathing hard in the hot streets; fifty soldiers, standing across from their swelling ranks, a standoff that can’t last. More Volunteers arrive, thickening the human barrier, but there are no more soldiers coming, not here, not right now. And then there are three fewer, as Cal and Julie and Noor peel away from the rear of their ranks to make for the Tower instead. They’re less than halfway there when the fighting begins with the telltale hiss of tear gas canisters, then hundreds of rising voices screaming in agony and anger and the muted crash of bodies throwing themselves against riot shields, before the first bursts of gunfire ring out. There are more Volunteers than there are soldiers, but the only weapons the Volunteers have are their bodies, their numbers, their resistance. The battle might yet turn in their favor, but however it ends it begins with their blood.

  “Just keeping walking,” Cal says, her voice hard, her pace quickening. She can help the Volunteers or she can complete her mission, but she can’t do both. After years of waiting and weighing every option, now every second there is another unexpected choice. A moment later she reaches the Tower doors, then steps into the southwest lobby’s blast of cool air-conditioned air, the waiting quiet it promises. The lobby is locked down, but the door’s scanners glow green as the women’s spoofed pebbles pass inspection; a dozen armored soldiers are stationed inside, the usual reception area staff dispersed. As soon as the three women clear the pebble scanner, a soldier in a captain’s stripes holds up a gauntleted hand, stepping forward to block the route to the elevator.

  “No one else is going up the Tower, soldier,” he says, his square jaw and twice-broken nose all that’s visible from under his helmet’s visor. The world outside is tense, but this s
oldier is calm, ready. “Director’s orders,” he adds, pointing his index finger toward the ceiling, toward Eury Mirov’s office far above them. “Where are you supposed to be stationed?”

  “The security nexus,” Cal says, trying to suppress her awe at the lobby’s spotlit timber columns, massive supports carved from supertrees John invented, trees cut down when their technology was deemed obsolete by the scientists who took his place. “We’re part of the third shift rotation. As soon as we saw the trouble start, we suited up and came to help.”

  The captain shakes his head. “That’s not protocol and you know it. You should have stayed in your neighborhood, helped secure the situation there. Who’s your commanding officer? I’ll let him know you’re on your way.”

  Julie hefts her rifle, taking a few steps to place herself in a row with Cal, close but not so close they can be taken together. She says, “We’re already here, though. Might as well lend a hand.”

  How fast could she turn the rifle from target to target? Faster than a dozen shooters? Maybe, maybe not. Noor bumps nervously against Julie, her body too close; Julie reaches back to gently nudge her away, only to find Noor’s fist clenching and unclenching, rapidly activating her pebble.

  Noor has given John plenty of gifts, hacks and shortcuts; now here comes one he made just for her.

  “You’re not getting in the elevator,” the captain says, “without direct orders from above.”

  “Five more seconds,” Noor says, her voice calm, her gaze fixed.

  “Five seconds until what?” The captain jerks his rifle to a firing position, the move bringing the other soldiers to attention. They take aim, some of them stepping sideways in a flanking maneuver, surrounding the women. “Maybe you three should stand down.”