Appleseed

by Matt Bell

  The weakened blast doors buckle inward, armored Earthtrust soldiers breaching the torn seam in a rush; by the time Eury sees the bomb in Cal’s hand, there’s no time to warn her charging soldiers. She squeezes her fist, and the keening song fills her head, radiating outward from the port implanted in her neck; she transfers out of the launch chamber and into the flickering in-between, momentarily floating as she’s beamed rung to rung, landing first a dozen meters away, back in the body left behind the charging soldiers, their commander barking orders as the bomb explodes, bursting the high windows, sending a storm of shrapnel blasting through Eury’s office.

  Eury whips her cloak around her, feels the worst of the shrapnel slide around its shielding shape. Even so, she’s cut in a dozen places, although nowhere critical. She wipes blood from her face, sends the wetness splatting to the floor with a flick of her hand.

  It doesn’t matter how hurt she is, as long as this body doesn’t die while she’s inside it.

  “I want him alive,” Eury commands, her fury rising. “I want him scanned.”

  She clenches her fist, sees that once again there are only four lights there, E-5 having been obliterated in the blast. If John’s dead, he’s dead. But if he lives, she needs to know what it is he did to Pinatubo, how he planned to steal her triumph from her. Did his plan succeed? All she knows is that the nanoswarms continue to rise from this Tower exactly as planned, and presumably from all the others. She turns on her heel, already walking away when she hears John’s screams rise above the din inside her shattered office. Her bodyguards follow her to the reactivated elevator, ready to escort this body wherever she wants it next, to keep it safe for her eventual return.

  A moment later, Eury flickers to Brussels, where there are allies to calm; then back to Syracuse, where the American president must be kept in his place. Hours later, when the situation’s stabilized, Eury leaves her Syracuse-based bodyguards and staff behind, flickering to the genetic repository built inside Yucca Mountain, a facility once too close to Las Vegas for any Nevada senator to allow in the nuclear material the facility was built to store. Her office there is much like the Farm’s bombed penthouse, only this time built a thousand meters deep instead of a thousand meters high.

  Eury walks the empty halls of her facility, halls that won’t be empty long. Decades ago, nuclear waste tankers had been scheduled to arrive here, their radioactive cargo meant to be sequestered under the earth for ten thousand years. Now other tankers will come, bearing all the biomass scraped and extracted and refined in the Western Sacrifice Zone.

  In the Yucca Mountain Loom, Eury requests a blueprint from Ohio, one that isn’t yet ready. While she waits for the transmission to arrive, she prints herself a new wolf, another Ghost exactly like the last. Afterward, the animal sits beside her, panting gently. She reaches out, scratches it behind the ears, the wolf pushing its head against Eury’s hand, greedy for more.

  Eury smiles. It’ll take some time before the wolf truly becomes her Ghost again, but Eury has nothing but time. Not unlimited time, not endless time. But more time than most, more time than anyone else has.

  Later, in the mountain facility’s secret heart, Eury approaches a glass tube the height of a man, filled with viscous pink recycling fluid, a substance that dissolves everything it touches, everything except what floats in this particular vessel. A series of microphones circle the tube’s circumference, set flush against the glass to record the voice captured inside the roiling acid.

  Eury steps close, puts her hand against the glass—warm to the touch, heated by the liquid within—and peers into the pink.

  At first she sees nothing except the swirling churn of the liquid, but just as she’s about to give up, a shape bangs against the tube’s wall, bobbing in the sludge.

  Eury starts. A stream of bubbles churns upward through the dense pink, the source changing depth in the liquid without again coming near the glass.

  The bubbles are evidence of an unheard voice breathing. A voice speaking. A voice singing. The microphones are always recording, but the room remains quiet except for the static hum of the equipment, all the noise inside the tube muted by the singer’s soundproof prison.

  Eury relaxes, ever so slightly—and then the singing thing presses up against the glass.

  In Eury’s penthouse, the explosion uproots John’s legs even as it throws the rest of him free, screaming as everything below the knees vanishes in a burst of viscera. Cal’s body disappears in the same instant, ripped from his arms by the blast: he’d accidentally gotten her killed, now she’d nearly done the same to him. Sudden blood loss and traumatic shock ensure he loses consciousness almost before what’s left of him hits the burning floor; when he wakes, it’s to discover the limits of the only salvation Eury can offer.

  In the final moments of this life, as John’s dying body is laid inside the recycler tube, he learns that the Loom’s scanning process is crudely medieval, despite its technological marvels. Unavoidably destructive, the recycler’s scanner is what killed the last bison, the last wolf, the last of every species collected by Earthtrust at Eury’s command, the method of the promised resurrection also the final tool of mass extinction.

  The pink sludge falls from the ceiling of the recycler chamber, the liquid brightly coating what remains of John, his nerves blazing hot then burning out, every inch of him acid-drenched, melting fast, inside and out. He tries to scream, but his face is already coming apart; his mouth fills with the sludge, he drowns as he dissolves.

  Eury Mirov, the one John had known since childhood, has been dead for two years.

  Eury is already dead, but now Eury might also never die. Hours later, beneath Yucca Mountain, she looks down at John lying loomsick and legless in his hospital bed, recovering in a brightly lit ward Eury imagines will one day be filled with freshly printed human beings, new Volunteers ready to reclaim a planet. She rests a cool hand on John’s burning forehead, touches his stubbled cheek, feels the scratch of the same five o’clock shadow he was wearing when he died. He’s sleeping, dreaming, battered by the torturous process of being born again, printed alive. She runs her fingers across the rough skin capping his knees, the best she could do on short notice. Always there is so much waste, so much unnecessary brutality and pain, she thinks, looking down at her new wolf, sitting patiently at her feet, panting happily, expectantly.

  Eury smiles, proud as ever of her Loom: at a glance, there really is no telling this wolf from the last one.

  Despite his missing legs, this John’s not so different either.

  Eury kneels, takes the wolf’s face in her hands, the wolf becoming deliriously happy at her touch, exactly as Eury designed it to be. She says, “What are we going to do now, Ghost? What kind of body will our next John want, to wear in the world to come?”

  C-433

  The first figure lopes ahead of the other: a green blur on four legs, it zigzags across the earth, pressing its glowing nose to the snow. C’s weary brain sets to work studying it, dredging up the map room words, the binder pages he memorized: Canis lupus, he thinks after a moment, although he knows that’s not quite right, that the binder had read gray wolf instead.

  The second figure is easier to name. The second figure, C knows, is a woman. Her face is uncovered except for a swirl of long dark hair; her blazing eyes are intensely brighter than any other part of her, brighter even than her pale green skin glowing the same color as her thin gown, an article of clothing that would be insufficient for the freezing weather if it were real cloth, if the skin beneath it were real skin.

  C shivers, gooseflesh growing wherever it can still grow. “Ghosts,” he says, remembering the word ghost only as it escapes his mouth: the ghost of a woman not dressed for the freezing temperatures, drifting through the blowing snow; the ghost of a wolf leading her toward the bubble, hovering where it stalled before the one functional machine-gun nest.

  C thrusts his body forward, the hoof leading the trunk, the flesh dragging the tree. At the glass
, he unfolds his paw against the bubble’s steamy curve, watches his breath fogging the surface. The woman and the wolf keep coming, her steps leaving no footprints, although the blowing snowfall behind her eddies in her wake. As she approaches, O becomes agitated too, his voice setting C’s skin to new achings: his teeth chatter, his bark quavers, the flowers shut their petals as the beetles scurry for cover.

  The ghost-woman pauses, cocking her head in surprise at C’s appearance, then lifts up on her toes—only now does he notice she’s barefoot—before floating into the air, rising until she’s level with him, their faces barely separated by the glass. With one pale hand, she reaches out to where his shaking paw rests, placing her human hand opposite his furred fingers.

  “You’re here,” she says, but C barely hears her, enraptured as he is with her face, the first other face he thinks he’s seen. Below her floating feet, the ghost-wolf barks, while O’s voice screeches on, moaning between the usual dirge and the rarer sustaining hymn C heard during the night among the monoliths, when the melody set the beetles to flying.

  “You’re here,” she repeats, “and you brought him too.”

  The ghost shakes her head, snow falling uninterrupted through her body except where some flake hits an obstruction invisible to C but hot enough to sizzle the precipitation, transforming the snowflake to a puff of steam. Tens of thousands of nanomachines, he sees, a hive mind swarm making a body for a digitized consciousness. How deeply buried is the remainder that offers this explanation, how long ago were the memories made that enable the guess? Certainly nothing like this swarm ever existed in the crawler.

  “Who are you?” C asks, his rusty voice echoing inside the bubble. “How do you know who I am?” Him too. “And O? How do you know O?”

  “Is that what you call him?” the ghost asks, surprise flashing briefly across her face. “O, then. And you are?”

  “C,” he wheezes. “My name is C.”

  The ghost-swarm floats closer, her body curling to match the bubble’s curve; she makes herself a parenthesis of a person, a wraith pressed against photovoltaic glass. “I no longer have only one name,” she says. “But you, C, can call me E.”

  C starts and jerks away, overreacting, he thinks, recoiling backward into the wail of O’s grief, stumbling to the bubble’s floor with a wooden, fleshy thunk. He hears the wood snapping around him, he fears he’ll fall unconscious but does not. He pushes himself upright, first to his good knee, then back onto the support of his tree side, cracked and bleeding sap and shedding flaking bark. By the time he rises, E is already floating into the bubble, the craft’s door having opened without C’s giving the command, her shifting, swarming visage beautiful and terrible, her beauty equally as terrible as O’s voice.

  With her swarm so close C can hear its buzzing, E says, “I can’t believe you’re here. I waited so long for you to return, but I never expected you to come back like this.” But she’s not only looking at his woody growth, at the many beetles covering his branches. She’s also tilting her head, listening to O’s insane voice, its mad song of unbearable grief.

  When E smiles, it’s the kindest sight C-433 has ever seen. She waves a hand, summoning the craft’s console into solidity, then blinks through a silent series of commands. The console’s surface swims, brings up previously undiscovered configurations of controls, data screens, and haptic buttons. E reaches out a hand, its dim green glow brightening and solidifying as the rest of her body wanes, the ghost-swarm adjusting its composition to give her gesture corporeality, physical heft. She presses a button on the console, she says the word pause, the same word etched on the button.

  Immediately, O stops singing.

  This is how the final remainder of this O dies, a death long delayed, denied even longer than C’s.

  E, hesitating, then pressing stop.

  E, stopping herself, almost.

  E, with sudden finality, pressing delete.

  The wind shifts, the snow slows. Now Black Mountain appears, its entrance not far past the machine-gun nests: a massive black steel door set in a rock face blasted flat, large enough to launch the crawlers once meant to remake the world. The door rises slowly, lifting with a groan of rusting gears and falling dirt to reveal an unlit void within, a cracked blacktop road descending into the facility’s underbelly. Piloting the barely recharged bubble, C follows E’s ghost-swarm inside, her incorporeal wolf bounding alongside the floating woman. The white sky vanishes as the craft crosses over the threshold into the dark maw of the earth, the outside light falling off until all he can see is E’s green glow drifting in the bubble’s lamp beam, insufficient to illuminate the deep dark of the tunnel.

  “This way,” says E, gesturing C onward. “A little farther in and we can close the gate.”

  Only after the door is fully shut does C see the other figures waiting for him inside the tunnel: a half-dozen humanoids climb the road’s slope, their bent bodies half his height, their steps shuffling. The creatures hunch toward the edges of the bubble’s lamp beam, where they shield their faces with pale forearms, exposing bleach-white skin covered in silvery fur. They whine, unsure before the brightness, until E says, “C, shut off your light. It’s hurting their eyes.”

  Once only the rows of dim roadside lights remain, the creatures come on more steadily, eyes glittering milkily, naked bodies roped with muscle, powerful arms ending in surprisingly slender hands. The creatures are humanoid but surely not human. Anything but that. Surely this cannot be what being human means.

  “What are they?” C asks, broadcasting his voice through the bubble’s glass.

  The ghost-swarm explains, her voice matter of fact, slightly bored: dwarves bioengineered by E, derived from humans but heavily modified for increased physical strength and resilience, diminished intelligence and agency. Genderless, sterile, printed without reproductive organs, each given an allergy to sunlight: if they ever left the Mountain, they’d go into anaphylactic shock in minutes.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” E says, answering a question C hasn’t asked. “Whatever’s next won’t come from them. They’re only my hands, the many bodies I need to maintain the Mountain’s machinery, to protect the equipment we’ll need to reseed the earth.” She speaks in the language of the map room binders, of the life he’d abandoned atop the Ice. E’s body dims, her face solidifies and brightens as she turns toward him. She gestures toward the bubble, her motion trailing green tracers. “Are you ready to leave that thing behind? You won’t need it anymore, where we’re going.”

  C gasps, struggles to draw enough breath to speak. “Where are you taking me?”

  “Home,” E says. “You’ve been gone a long time.”

  The fleshy dwarves crowd the bubble, one of the creatures dragging a dingy yellow sledge, his shoulders harnessed to its traces. Despite their reduced stature, the dwarves easily lift C’s ungainly woody body, ferrying his dense shape out of the bubble, his tree half having long outgrown his flesh’s capacity to carry it: in the bubble, he slept his last few nights leaning against the trunk of his left leg. Now, supine on the sledge, the tree’s engorged weight further burdens his already struggling lungs.

  E communicates with the dwarves by clicks and whistles, barked monosyllabic commands. C tries to complain about the painful way they’ve strapped him down, but one look into the dwarves’ blank moony eyes is enough to stop his struggling. The dwarf in the traces rolls its shoulders and stamps its feet, just toeless slabs of thick muscle. When it stamps again, C shudders, the slightest hint of ancient memory washing over him: not of stamping beneath a mountain, but atop one, in the moment before beginning a descent not into the endless dark but into a blossoming morning, into endless unbroken abundance.

  A false memory, he knows, because in it the sky had been blue, an obvious error of his exhausted mind.

  The dwarves take turns dragging the sledge through the dark, bouncing it over the undermountain road’s split concrete. The two ghost-swarms flank the sledge, one on each side, thei
r shapes sometimes drifting over and around C: a cloud that is a woman, a cloud that is a wolf, a cloud that could, he thinks, take many other shapes, if she wanted. He feels a beetle crawl across his lips and shudders, then closes his good eye. For a time the quiet stays quiet and the dark gets darker as they progress toward the truer entrance into Black Mountain, an elevator large enough for a revolving stretch of rail bearing a squat two-car tram: one car for passengers, one for cargo.

  E floats across the platform, clicking out orders; the dwarves lift C as a team, creature and tree and sledge all loaded onto the flatbed car in a crashing heap. Strapped down twice—once to the sledge, once to the tramcar—C will be able to see only what his free eye can spy passing the tram’s right side. “We’re ready,” E says, then issues a series of voiceless clicks. The dwarves pile into the passenger car, jostling each other’s rude bodies for space, or else hanging off the edge of the tram. One of the dwarves sets the elevator in motion, all its controls physical, the tram’s console bleeping as the elevator begins its creaking descent, rust flaking off exposed cables and machinery.

  E floats downward alongside C, keeping her insubstantial feet above the surface of the falling platform, the wolf prowling beside her, occasionally barking or growling at the unperturbed dwarves. How long is it before they arrive at the bottom of the shaft? How far do they have left to go once the tram leaves the elevator platform, its electric motor powering it quickly along rickety steel rails, through looping systems of claustrophobic tunnels? It’s impossible for C to judge. E’s floating voice narrates the tram’s movements as they enter a cavernous hangar housing a dozen crawlers, plus empty docking bays for the other dozen already sent to the surface. Dual fuel lines snake into the bowels of every waiting crawler, one for gasoline and one for biomass: the Mountain’s biomass tanks, E explains, lie even farther below, down in the deepest of the deep.