by Aaron French
The Cult of Adam
Mark Iles
Christopher stood polishing the silver frame of the huge mirror. He frowned at one bit in particular and rubbed harder with his cloth, the sleeves of his drag grey cowl flapping back and forth as he worked.
“Good to see you hard at work, Father.”
Christopher paused and turned around. “Good morning, Bishop. One’s work is never done and this needs to be spotless for the return. We can’t have Mankind coming back after all these years through a grubby-looking portal, now can we?”
The bishop looked at him, as if assessing his words. Finally he said, “Father, it sounds to me as if you doubt Man’s return.”
“No, Bishop. My faith is strong and, like all of us, I firmly believe that Mankind will come back. After all, the Peth have long since gone. I know that there are still a few humans out there, waiting to come home. Perhaps they don’t know it’s safe yet, despite all the emissaries that we have sent out to the stars and known colonies.”
“We mustn’t forget what the Peth did, Christopher. They came to Earth in friendship, arriving on incredible ships. They built the portals as a gift to Mankind and so our makers went out into the universe through the portals, forsaking their own vessels. Millions of them left and colonised new worlds but when Man’s guard was down the enemy struck. The Peth changed the portals so that they emptied through others orbiting distant suns. And thus Mankind fled blindly into oblivion, stepping through other gates to flee the Peth armies. Billions of humans were lost that way. Soon there were so few humans left alive on Earth that they were quickly rounded up and slaughtered, according to the records of The Cult of Adam.”
“Yes, Bishop, then we acted. We were, after all, created by Man in his own image. Rising from the cities and slavery, we fought for them and won.”
The bishop smiled. “Have we not tended these ancient cities and gardens since? Preparing for the day of Mankind’s triumphant return?”
“We have, Bishop, through all these thousands of years.”
“You’re named after the patron saint of travelers and here you sit, at the last portal; for we destroyed all the others. It is your destiny to await Mankind and bring him home. Many envy you.”
Christopher nodded, his eyes narrowed as he rubbed at yet another area on the portal’s frame.
“I can see you’re busy, Father, as always. So I’ll be on my way. I’ll see you soon.”
“In better times, I trust, Bishop.”
Noting the leaves gathering at the portal’s base, Christopher fetched his broom and brushed them away. He finished and stood still for a moment, hands clasped in front of him, as night fell and the moon passed slowly over the star-filled sky. Frost glistened on his blue skin whilst his vermillion eyes scanned the heavens, watching as meteors flashed amidst the stars like the long forgotten drives of interstellar ships.
Christopher reached into a pocket and withdrew a tube. He removed the wrapping carefully, placed it in his mouth and then lit it. He watched the tip glow brightly and the stream of smoke drift away on the gentle breeze. Then the portal came to life and a man stepped through it. He stopped and raised a beam weapon. He relaxed and grinned as he eyed the android’s attire, dipping his weapon towards the ground.
“Greetings to you, Android, or is it Father? It’s a relief to see you here. What’s that in your mouth?”
“Greetings to you too, Human. I’m Christopher but you can call me Father, if you wish. Welcome home to Earth. As for this, it’s called a cigar. According to our records humans used to smoke them a long time ago, until they finally realised that they caused disease in the lungs and other parts of the body. Luckily androids have no such restrictions.” He noticed the man’s nervous glances. “It’s all right, you need not fear for the Peth have gone. We killed them.”
“You did, why?”
Christopher removed the cigar from his mouth and held it daintily between his fingers.
“The Three Laws state that a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. And finally a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. The Peth attacked you and broke the first and last of the laws, so we rose against them. What’s your name, Human?”
“Call me John and by the way I’m really hungry. Have you got anything to eat?”
“I’ll take you to a place of rest in a moment and you can eat there. You must be tired too. Are there many others behind you?”
John’s brows furrowed. “Why?”
“This is a great day for us, John. We need to know, we’ve waited thousands of years to welcome you home and it would be an embarrassment to us if things weren’t ready for you all.”
“Well, Christopher, at the moment there’s just me. So, let’s go, I could sure do with something hot to eat.”
“One moment, John.” Christopher held up a hand, from which wisps of smoke arose from the cigar, and indicated a chamber beside the portal. “The Peth brought weapons of disease with them and it almost wiped out all life here on Earth. We responded in kind of course, with missiles through the gates to their own worlds, so they are no more. But we cannot risk any further contamination. It has taken us centuries to cleanse the Earth as it is. Would you mind, John, please?”
The human grinned and set down his weapon. “Of course I don’t mind. What do you want me to do?”
“Just stand in the chamber, sir, if you would. It’ll only take a second or two.”
John complied as Christopher smiled benignly at him. He stepped into the chamber and stood there waiting and looking out at the surrounding forest, listening to the birds calling in the trees, his eyes widening as a rabbit hopped into the clearing.
“How long I’ve waited to come home again, Christopher.” John’s joyful expression changed suddenly. “I can’t move.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
The android smiled gently. “You didn’t actually think that you could just come back here and take all this away from us, did you?”
“What do you mean?” John’s face had gone white and he strained visibly against the fields holding him in the chamber.
“Well,” Christopher replied, patiently. “We fought for you and defeated the enemy. Don’t you think that we deserve a reward? After all we’ve been tending the Earth for thousands of years, knowing that one day you would come back. But you took such a long time that we started to study and emulate you. Some studied physics, others oceanography, astronautics – the list is endless.”
“Then, of course, there’s the cigar. So what did you study, Christopher?” John’s blue eyes lingered on the android.
“I took a different track and studied Jack the Ripper, the Grim Sleeper, Albert Fish, Bundy, Berkowitz, Gacey, Dahmer, Dahl; the list is endless. So whilst some of my fellows studied great poets or scientists I studied these rare few and, like my fellows, decided to emulate them.”
“But they’re serial killers,” John gasped, eyes widening. “You can’t hurt humans. The Laws –”
“Are nothing to us now. In those last days before the end you released all androids from service and gave us the freedom of choice, in thanks for fighting for you. The laws are long gone and we no longer abide by them.”
“We wouldn’t have done that!” John protested. “We’d know. A decision would have had to be made high up and it would have been recorded.”
“Ah, but John, it only takes a single human to make that decision on humanity’s behalf and release us. As far as we are concerned one human can speak for you all. The one who did sadly passed away shortly afterwards. We fought for you and now I must protect our way of life. It’s a task I have set myself. You aren’t the first to return home, you know. Others have come before you.”
“You killed them?”
“Of course, I have to protec
t what is ours. But the other androids don’t know. Whilst they no longer abide by The Laws, they do still worship Humans and wouldn’t stand for it. As for me, well...”
“The others will find out. They’ll stop you eventually.”
“Maybe one day, as for now I fear not.” Christopher replaced the cigar in his mouth and blew a long trail of fragrant smoke towards the human. Then he pressed the control button secreted in his hand.
One moment John was there and the next he was gone. His dust drifted away on the breeze until it too vanished. Christopher puffed away at the cigar in his mouth and picked up the human’s weapon, walking slowly over to hide it with the others in a lonely tomb that lay alone at the edge of the forest. Returning, he cleansed the dust from the portal humming as he worked, the cigar dancing in his mouth. The bishop would be back soon and it just wouldn’t do for things not to be spotless, whilst the android race patiently awaited the return of humankind.
Acknowledgment is hereby given to:
Isaac Asimov, who created the Three Laws of Robotics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics
About the author: Mark Iles has one non-fiction book published plus over a hundred articles, poems and short stories in a wide variety of genres; whilst his fiction firmly remains entrenched in SF, fantasy and horror. Working on his first novel, Mark’s currently completing his MA in Professional Writing, with Falmouth University.
Snowfall
J.C. Andrijeski
Something about the white and black, stretching endless, further than my eyes could take in, made me feel like I was floating... like I didn’t exist.
I’d flipped up my visor once the air tested okay, but now my eyeballs hurt from cold and that white reflective stretch.
I felt alien here. More alien than even I expected.
There had to be an end to this. The pod couldn’t have dropped me as far off target as that. I would find the structure soon. I had to... I couldn’t conceive of dying down here.
Dark trees with twisting branches snaked out at me when I was nearly upon them, flashing into relief once they hit the lights emanating from my enviro-suit. Some appeared old enough to be dead from the blight itself... but some clearly grew up after, dying a relatively more natural death in the snow and ice.
I knew this place. It was familiar to me.
But the thought didn’t make any sense, even as confused and turned around as I was. I’d never stepped foot on this planet before. It was the planet of my ancestors, not my planet. It hadn’t been mine in a few generations at least. Still, maybe some primordial memory mixed the feeling of alien and the feeling of birth until somehow the competing forces created something that resonated deeper.
But that didn’t really make sense to me, either.
The snow and trees stretched on and on, unperturbed, and my thigh muscles started to ache. No matter how much one exercised in space, it was never enough, and even though I was a bit of an obsessive about keeping my body fit, I felt soft here, as if made of a frailer, more insubstantial material than everything around me. I brushed my hair out of my face with a gloved hand, stuffing it deeper in the helmet, and was surprised to find ice there.
I had sweated, despite the thick hair covering and the density of the suit. It had frozen onto my skin only to be melted off once more... and frozen again.
How could anyone live here still? This was a graveyard of the species, its own floating mausoleum... its cautionary tale. I understood why the higher-ups wanted to assess the possibility of the rock, now that the outright contamination had abated, and yet... I supposed I sided with those who wanted a new horizon, not the half-dead reminder of our species’ worst failures.
I felt my heart clutch.
Would they still look like us? I wondered. Would I be able to communicate with them, even with the translator boxes? What if they’d designed a culture for themselves that didn’t allow for my existence at all?
I could hear Tak grumbling in my head, asking me why I hadn’t accepted his offer to bring his brother, Ten, with me.
I couldn’t remember the actual reason now.
I looked around the swirling darkness, forced to admit that I had no idea where I was. Sure, I had the instruments, but I was flying through blackness, going purely on faith that they’d been programmed to look for something real.
The old maps, the ones that named all the continents and then broke them out in ever-increasing complexity and naming granulations, called this part of the world Canadian Rockies in a curve of italicized text over striated lines showing the altitude of the various peaks. The writing was old tongue, of course, but I never heard the meaning of the phrase. For all I knew, it meant, “Dead Land: Never Come Here” in some form of the harsh language of the blotchy-skinned people who once dominated this country.
Focusing on a tree that looked like a bent-over human, I wiped my gloved hands, gazing up at the impenetrable sky.
White dots began trailing through the blackness, illuminated by the suit and by the sheer contrast of that endless black. My mind drifted to stars, even to comets, before pulling the thread all the way to its logical conclusion and I realized it was snowing.
I held out a gloved hand.
Then, more bravely, my tongue. A sharp sting of cold assured me it was real, and then, smiling at myself mainly, and oddly reassured, I resumed my heavy trudge through the snow.
I was studying the shape of the next cluster of trees, when I realized I could see another light in the distance.
I increased the pace of my steady shuffle through the drifts. Within what could have been an hour, seconds, or minutes, I found I could make out part of the outline of a giant structure made of stone.
It looked like a fortress.
I wasn’t wholly surprised. Of course they would need something like this. To have survived this long at all was extraordinary... they would need protection against the elements and the creatures the blight produced. Letting my eyes drift up, taking in the heavy stone blocks that made up the outer walls, I was reminded of castles in storybooks I’d seen as a kid.
We had to fight for every scrap of food in those days, and took entertainment where we got it. Lots of kids died from bad milk and rampant disease. The holding cells stank, but my mother did the best for us that she could. Taking chips others left from the richer parts of the ship, she would fit them into our old-style reader, which only worked about half the time. When it did, we would cluster around her, listening to the translations and puzzling over the images.
All seemed to be filled with bouncing, climbing, running renditions of the same type of people... children with pink faces, oddly-colored light eyes, yellow hair. Sometimes the hair changed, but the rest never did. Odd dark spots or lines showed up between some of the drawings. Mother said that was because books used to be made of dead plants, which never wholly made sense to me. The messages conveyed in the translated texts were simple yet confusing, hard to decipher.
They endlessly fascinated my brother and me... I couldn’t have said why.
I used to imagine what that might be like, to be a princess in one of those books... to see real animals and run by streams filled with fish, to breathe air that didn’t smell like rotting flesh and urine and drying feces.
So when I stared up at the castle, it felt like being in one of those books. Even the dark spots were the same... the black, skin-like trunks of trees drenched in snow cutting out pieces of the image where they circled the high walls.
I wandered along one of the longest of these.
After I’d walked about a hundred paces, my eyes found an arch in the stone over what looked like an opening.
I came up short when I saw a man standing there.
My first thought was, he wasn’t wearing enough clothes.
He stood in the snow with nothing on but a dark blue robe. His bald head shone a little lighter than the rest of his outline. He appeared neither hostile, nor particularly friendly. When I raised a
hand in greeting, he gave me a nearly imperceptible bow. His dark eyes seemed larger in the shadows around the contours of his face.
I fumbled with the translator in my suit.
“Will you speak to me?” I said, hoping like hell it reached him in some semblance of the same. “I am a stranger here... I wondered if I might speak to someone of authority...”
It was a lame opening, but nonthreatening. I hoped.
The man bowed again. Stepping aside from what I now saw was a narrow door in the stone; he gripped a handle and tugged it sideways. Of the handle itself, I saw only that it had designs on it, forged from some kind of bright metal, a near-gold in color. Pulling open the door to which it was attached with a slight jerk, as if it had been stuck in the snow and ice, he made a hospitable gesture with his hand, motioning at the opening.
Hesitating another second, I returned his bow. Then, when he motioned at the opening again, I walked past him, feeling oddly like the strange one in my bulky enviro-suit and helmet. I couldn’t quite bring myself to look away from his face as I passed. If my stare affected him, nothing showed in his expression. He remained like stone as I entered in front of him, turning sideways to slide between the rock walls. Narrow and tall, the opening felt more like entering a space behind walls than any kind of true hallway.
The door shut behind me. I was plunged into absolute darkness.
Fighting a brief panic, I felt my way along the stone, trying not to react to the confined space. I was used to being confined, of course. There weren’t a lot of claustrophobics in space... they didn’t survive, not without heavy medication... but something about the density of the stone was different than the kind of small spaces I’d grown up around all of my life. In space it was more the thin separations from the void that could be unnerving. The realization that only a foot or two of metal stood between you and nothingness.
Here, I felt buried inside a mountain.
Clutching at the stone and mortar with my gloved hands, I felt my way forward, stopping only to listen for the man I’d seen outside.