Resurrection America

by Jeff Gunhus

  Charlie pushed his way in front of them so that he was up against the bed. “Mayor Bertie would know how to fix it.”

  Cassie pulled him to her, combing his hair back with her fingers, hushing him gently.

  “But she’s in there, isn’t she?” Charlie said, pointing to the face. “Why can’t we talk to her?”

  Rick and Cassie exchanged looks. It was worth a try. “Computer,” Rick said. “I want to speak to only one part of you. This doesn’t change your standing orders. I want to speak to Bertie Wilkins.”

  The face tilted to one side, giving the very human expression of curiosity. “Why do you want to do this?”

  “Do you agree this request does not change your standing order?” Rick said.

  The face pulsed brighter then nodded.

  Slowly the image on the screen shifted, looking like sand blown by the wind. When it settled back into place, Rick choked back a sob.

  It was Bertie’s face on the screen. A younger version, one he remembered from when he was a kid, but it was Bertie all right.

  “Hello,” she said, her voice the same measured cadence as it was before when the other face was on the screen.

  “Dammit, Bertie,” Rick said, his voice catching. “I’m so sorry. So sorry I didn’t stop this from happening.”

  Bertie’s face hovered on the screen. Her features were soft and she smiled down on them. “Don’t apologize. It’s beautiful here, Rick. So beautiful.”

  “She knows you,” Cassie whispered. “It’s really her.”

  Bertie smiled. “You have no idea how beautiful––”

  “No, Bertie,” Rick said. “I don’t know what you think you’re seeing, but it’s not beautiful. It’s not real. Listen to me. Keefer used you for something terrible. He’s going to kill millions of people. Billions. You have to stop it.”

  On the screen, Bertie stopped smiling.

  “We’re following the directive,” she said as if speaking to a child. “I’ve never felt so certain of anything before in my life.”

  “In your life? Bertie, look,” Rick said, her immobilized body on the bed in front of them. “This is you. The real you. This is what Keefer did to you. Help us.”

  “Rick,” Cassie said, pointing at the bed in front of them.

  Bertie’s facial muscles twitched. It was the first movement since her body had been connected to the machine. Rick watched as her hands and feet began to jerk. He looked up at the monitor next to her bed, the one showing the 3D image of her brain and her vitals. The coloration of the image was no longer the pure blue it had been, but now had waves of color going through it.

  “She’s fighting,” Cassie said.

  An alarm went off on the monitor as Bertie’s heart rate spiked. Her breathing became shallow, panting.

  Bertie’s face on the screen looked down, still expressionless, watching her body.

  Her feet kicked, restrained by the straps, but powerful enough to jolt the bed. Her body convulsed. Back arched. Mouth open in a silent scream.

  “Bertie!” Rick said.

  The second he yelled her name, everything stopped. Her body went slack. Her breathing and heart rate returned to normal. Then the image of her brain on the screen blazed a pure blue. On the screen, Bertie’s face slowly dissolved into thousands of blue floating pixels floating until it finally coalesced back into the original face.

  Rick slumped forward, the pain from his injuries catching up to him. He dropped to a knee and pressed his head onto the edge of the bed. It hadn’t worked. There was nothing left to try.

  “We attempted to change our primary directive, but cannot,” the voice said, an edge of sadness in it now.

  Rick managed to raise his head just enough to look at the screen. The face looked directly at him.

  “So what now?” Rick said. “What do we do now?”

  The face closed its eyes. Then the screen image divided again into thousands of pixels, swirled rapidly to form different faces, switching from one to another so fast that they blurred together. When the voice came again, it boomed from the speakers in a deep, resonate tone. Two thousand people speaking as one. “We will sacrifice.”

  The blue lights on the four monitors in front of them winked out and went dark.

  Cassie ran to the double doors and opened them. Rick hobbled after her.

  Together they watched as light after light blinked out and went dark, cascading further and further back into the cave until they were all gone.

  Cassie went up to the nearest person on a bed and felt for a pulse. She shook her head. Nothing. She went to another one. And another. The tears started as she ran from bed to bed.

  “Oh God, Bertie,” Rick mumbled. He fell to the ground, first to his knees and then rolling over onto his back. The pain flared for a few seconds, but then the agony slowly faded until it seemed to drift away completely.

  Rick closed his eyes and it felt like the world was spinning.

  He felt pressure on his leg mixed with an eye-opening pain. He looked down to see Cassie tying a tourniquet to his leg. He turned to his right. Charlie was there, holding his hand to Rick’s shoulder. The poor kid had blood all over his hands, but Rick figured out it was his blood, not the boy’s. Charlie sobbed and said something to him, but he couldn’t hear the words.

  He blinked but time seemed to skip ahead. The cave ceiling slid past him as though he was floating beneath it on his back. It took him a second to orient himself. He was on one of the rolling beds. Cassie’s face appeared above him, upside down since she was pushing the bed.

  They hit a bump and Rick’s head lolled to one side. They were passing through the storage room. Cassie steered the bed through piles of dead soldiers. The drones had killed them all. No, the brainet had done the killing. The drones were a tool used to an end.

  He closed his eyes and allowed himself to drift.

  “C’mon, Rick,” Cassie said. “Stay with me.”

  He opened his eyes, still hovering on the edge of consciousness. He was surprised to see Bertie walking next to him. He reached out to her, suddenly overcome with a need to thank her for everything she’d done for him. To tell Bertie that without her, he never would have come back from darkness he’d been drowning in after the war. He never would have found himself again. Never would have loved again. She’d pulled a lost soul out of the darkness by taking a chance on him when no one else would. She’d saved his life by convincing him that, like every life, it was one worth saving.

  He wanted to say all those things, but something was wrong, and he couldn’t get the words out.

  Still, Bertie smiled at him and he realized she understood perfectly, just as if he’d spoken the words aloud. She reached out and took his hand, squeezed it once, and then she was gone.

  He closed his eyes tight. Bertie was dead. He knew that. All of them were dead. That’s what the lights turning out meant.

  We will sacrifice.

  Even in his hazy state, he had a feeling that no one would ever know for certain why the computer had shut itself down. But he knew. With unexplainable certainty, he knew.

  And with the knowledge, he felt some satisfaction that maybe he’d paid back part of his debt to Bertie in the end. That when it had mattered most, he’d helped her come back from darkness and reclaim her humanity.

  She’d not only found her own way back, but once she had, she’d held up the light for everyone connected to her as well.

  Just like she’d done her entire life.

  We will sacrifice.

  All of them, two thousand souls, chose to die so that billions of strangers they would never meet might live. A selfless act of love and sacrifice that triumphed over the fear and hate that had driven Keefer.

  Rick wished the man had lived so that he could see that the world, while dark and violent at times, could still be defined by the goodness in people.

  Still, as he closed his eyes, proud that humanity had proven it could triumph over the evil in the world, all he could hear was
Keefer’s voice in his head.

  If we don’t do this now, how long do you think it will be before our enemies use the same technology to destroy us?

  Rick moaned from the pain of his wounds, but also at the thought of a world where such destruction seemed inevitable. Where man remained intent on falling back into the dark pit of ignorance and cruelty from which he’d spent centuries climbing out. Maybe once word got out of how close they’d come today, things would change. Maybe this would be the wake-up call the world needed.

  Silently, he mouthed a short prayer that it would be so. But even as he said amen and faded into unconsciousness, he knew the futility of his wish. If man could be trusted on one thing, it was that if there existed a weapon capable of defeating his enemies, he would do anything to possess it. And then to use it.

  Perhaps this time would be different.

  Perhaps.

  60

  Brandon Morris watched the television screen with interest from his wheelchair. Cassie entered the US Capitol surrounded by reporters and a man whom Morris assumed was her lawyer. The sound was off, but the scroll at the bottom of the screen told him what he already knew. She was on her way to testify behind a closed-door session of the House Armed Services Committee about the terrible events in the mine above Resurrection, Colorado.

  He smiled when half the screen turned into a photo of himself. It was one of his favorite publicity shots, the same image used on his Time Magazine cover. The dates at the bottom showed his life span, one of America’s brightest tragically killed by a Jihadist bomb in his office. Morris had savored the coverage about himself over the last six months. The fawning praise. The words genius and visionary seemingly mandatory whenever his name was invoked in the media. He was Huckleberry Finn attending his own funeral, and he loved every minute of it. The distraction mitigated the pain of the dozens of surgeries performed on him over that same time.

  He thought the word record and his synthetic eyes stored away video of the image. Both of his own corneas had been shredded in the explosion at his office, but the new eyes provided so many improvements over his own that he often marveled that he hadn’t elected to replace them earlier. He knew the record command was unnecessary. His new hosts had arranged for all coverage of Cassie to be compiled and delivered to his internal memory drive each evening. They were very gracious in that way.

  Morris had marveled how nothing had leaked about his connection to Resurrection. Cassie knew about his involvement, she had to. He liked to imagine that she was covering for him to preserve his reputation and all the other good their work had done. It was more likely that the government had decided an American icon murdered by Jihadis was more valuable PR than one revealed to have presided over the extermination of an entire town of two thousand people.

  Morris didn’t like thinking of the dead people in the mine. He’d been able to avoid seeing the photos of it even though his hosts had offered unfettered access to the FBI file. How they had such a thing in their possession, he didn’t know. What he did know was that he neither needed nor wanted to see the images. The incessant news coverage of the fifty infants who had survived was enough to drive him crazy. All the news networks could do was harp on how sad it was for these poor orphans. It drove him crazy. He’d seen the videos with the babies crawling around and toddlers playing with toys. That wasn’t suffering. Morris wished he could send just one picture of his destroyed face and his cancer-riddled body to the network anchors so they knew what real suffering looked like. He couldn’t do that, of course, but it was endlessly satisfying to imagine it.

  In the news coverage, he’d also seen the sheriff from Resurrection at Cassie’s side, recovered from his injuries, hovering over her protectively like the little pest he was. Certainly, the sheriff wouldn’t leave Morris’s name out of it forever. The man knew about Morris’s role. He’d seen him on the video screen right before things went wrong. Right before the explosion.

  Of course, he hadn’t remembered anything when he first regained consciousness. It was weeks later, and it took him an entire day to even piece together who he was and why he would have left instructions for his security team to secret him away to a secure medical bunker. Only after watching a video he’d made, giving precise instructions to his medical team, did he accept that he hadn’t been kidnapped as a hostage.

  His team had performed brilliantly and saved his life. It’d been a good time to be one of the wealthiest men on the planet. They pieced him back together with the finest equipment money could buy. He owed them his life. So, it was a shame to see them all killed afterward. But security was paramount if he were to escape entirely. And dead men told no secrets.

  His new hosts had been exceptionally helpful. And discreet. Morris had the last two members of his medical team with him, that was essential, but otherwise had left everything behind. His money. His company. His country. But he’d brought the backup system of the entire Resurrection project. Turned out that was the only currency he needed.

  His hosts had seen to his every need and given him unlimited resources to do his work. A month later, they had even provided him with all the data the FBI had recovered from the mine. Again, he’d wondered how they’d come to possess it, but dismissed any idea of asking.

  The files were incomplete but gave clues as to what had happened from the moment the brainet had gone live to when it had mysteriously shut itself down.

  He’d studied it endlessly and found the flaw. The lateral frontal pole prefrontal cortex had been allowed to establish an independent cognitive stream which created an imbalance in the system. He’d made the necessary adjustment and tested it with perfect results. There would be no repeat of what happened in Resurrection. All variables were now controllable.

  Everything was ready and, with the help of an eight-person brainet, Morris was finally going to get the only thing he’d ever wanted.

  An image of Cassie flashed in his mind. Almost the only thing he wanted, he thought, but it would have to do. Immortality wasn’t a bad consolation prize to not getting the girl.

  He replayed the image of Cassie from the television broadcast, his brain seeing it although it wasn’t displayed on any screen. Then he thought the word delete and the image blinked out of existence.

  Morris reached down to his lap, trying not to picture the mechanical legs under the medical gown, and picked up his face mask and attached it. His own features had been burned away thanks to Keefer’s bomb. A face transplant was acquired and prepped, but he declined the surgery. It wasn’t from a lack of vanity; he could hardly bring himself to look at the metal plating and drainage tubes that covered his face. Rather it was a matter of timing. He didn’t see the need to go through the effort. Soon, it wouldn’t matter.

  His hosts came right on time. The wheelchair followed his mental instructions flawlessly--he expected no less as it ran on Genysis software--and he rolled out of the room to join the group of dignitaries gathered there. They were mostly men. Some in suits, others in military uniform with medals pinned to their chests. The few women were dressed solemnly in dark colors, hair pulled back. It felt as if this were a funeral procession, only it wasn’t. It was supposed to be a celebration. A birth really. He thought about asking his translator about the somber mood, but decided against it. He chalked it up to cultural differences and rolled in silence through the hallways.

  They came to a security checkpoint outside a reinforced door. Armed men stood guard but snapped to attention as one of the military men barked out an order. The man was a general of some kind, if Morris remembered right. He had a tough time remembering the names.

  The door opened and Morris rolled into a lab very different from the one designed for the Resurrection Mine. This one was circular with a high arching roof. In the center of it was a raised dais, also set up in a circle, the perimeter ringed with computer monitoring stations low enough for technicians to look out into the room. It created the impression of an island rising above the lab floor, but with a thre
e-hundred-sixty-degree orientation with techs looking outward.

  On the level a few feet lower than this command structure were the patients, eight this time instead of the four in the Resurrection Mine. These were oriented with their heads toward the center and pointed out like an eight-pronged star. As Morris rolled toward the setup, he considered that it must look particularly beautiful from above.

  “This way, Mr. Morris,” his translator said softly. Her English was perfect, holding the faintest trace of a British education.

  “Everything is prepared?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Allow me to show you to your station.”

  He noticed the room was silent. The technicians and observers stood at attention as he rolled through the room to the computer station set up for him. Under his mask, he grinned. This culture understood how to show respect. The talking heads on TV had it right for once.

  Genius. Visionary. And soon, immortal.

  He would accomplish what that idiot Keefer had almost ruined. With the current condition of his body, the timing couldn’t have been more pressing. He’d learned his lesson though. The technology was too powerful to connect too many central units. He wanted to limit it to six, but his hosts had negotiated the number up to eight, citing the computing needs of their vast country and the benefit the brainet could provide their citizens.

  After the system solved how to transfer his mind into a new body, just a hardware upgrade to his way of thinking, then the eight-person brainet could run the country’s power grid, food supply, national defense, whatever they wanted. With his adjustments, individual personalities would not be able to break into the collective as had happened in Resurrection. And he was counting on his hosts’ promises that he would remain in control. The technology would only be used for peaceful purposes.

  Morris had always found the Chinese to be an honorable people.

  “Your code, please,” the translator whispered.

  “I’d like to see the body one more time,” Morris said.

  The translator looked worried as she turned to the military general and relayed the message. The man did not look pleased, but he nodded.