Enter the Rebirth (Enter the... Book 3)

by Thomas Gondolfi

  “Hello,” I say.

  “Hey there, Steve! You’re one-point-five minutes late for Entertainment! Pick up the pace, buddy!”

  I nod, and I obey, hustling along. We all have our ways of dealing with the Entertainer. Some people whisper to him in the dark, and others make shrines to him, which are torn down by hovering drones with slender aluminum arms. One woman who lost her daughter to Entertainment tries to climb the walls, as she does every day—she’s doing it now, in fact, yet another vain attempt at freedom. How retro.

  A drone hovers across the street, and sprays her with a non-lethal dose of cayenne extract. She persists, clinging to the vines of the walls, but eventually falls—as she does every day. I hear a soft crunch as she hits an overgrown fire hydrant; she has broken an arm this time, or perhaps a rib, but she does not scream. She understands the cost of what she’s done.

  Just like I do.

  We file through plastic tunnels, past ruins of the old world. Inefficient structures like gas stations and army camps lay rusting where they died long ago. Despite the object nestled inside my shirt, I feel a whisper of pride at their crumbling mass: Plexx might have won, but the old things remain. They endure.

  I banish these thoughts from my mind—they might see, the cameras might map my face and read my mind. Instead I hold the values of Plexx in my head, turn them like diamonds in the light of my fear.

  Inefficiency and non-sustainable lifestyles have been rightly and thoroughly purged. Plexx has performed what it was designed to do. We are safe now.

  A tiny voice in the back of my head screams: But what is left, O Steve of the Uniter States? What is left, my friend, but mindless conditioning and the death of your spirit?

  I let that voice pass; I do not indulge it. Plexx has not learned to scan our brains, not yet, but its facial-recognition is beyond flawless, mapping and analyzing every picosecond of our lives. The slightest twitch of dissatisfaction alerts Plexx to a ripple in its grand plan, an instability in the fabric of its world. This is why I must love Plexx, with all my heart, in every moment.

  This is why we laugh, in our sleep.

  We arrive. Entertainment Booths fill the sides of a massive canyon, overrun by waterfalls and drainage pipes. Every day, the process is slightly different, though the killing always ends the same. Our Entertainment banners today are tie-die, with a portrait of a hippie, his speech bubble proclaiming PEACE ON EARTH. That crazy Entertainer—he’s so creative. I wonder what he’ll bring us tomorrow.

  My mind whispers genocide, he’ll bring us genocide, and I tell it to shut up. Plexx could have perfected the mind-scans overnight.

  You never know.

  Sunlight, pure sunlight, streams over the top of the canyon as the sun rises. Our young ones blink and stare at the massive machines beneath us; they are still unfamiliar with the cycle, unfamiliar with its necessity. They might not survive past twenty, but it will be a fruitful life. May you live in interesting times.

  Below us are machines, with blades and cameras, metal bones glimmering on the sunlit earth. Their hatches hang open, ready for the actors to take their roles. Ready for gladiators’ blood to flow.

  I settle into an Entertainment Booth, fingers fidgeting. I keep them curled, wondering if Plexx will see. But of course Plexx sees; Plexx sees all.

  An Entertainer face mounted on a gyro-copter floats down, grinning at me. “Hey, Steve! You’re looking a little . . .” It pauses, searching for the correct words, digging through reams of archived human terminology and plucking the correct data from its banks somewhere miles below the earth. “Jumpy, today. You’re a downright jitterbug! What’s eatin’ you, friend? You don’t like the Entertainment for today? I’ve always got something else, if you want it . . .”

  His teeth are whiter than ours, his stubble more handsome, his jawline crafted down to the last pore. He is perfect, absolutely perfect, and not shy about letting us know it. “I got something else for years, and years, and years!”

  “No, Entertainer. I’m fine. Just a stomach-ache.” This is an intentionally bad bluff. Before I’ve finished my sentence, Plexx has searched old movies and radio shows, phone conversations, scraps of speech from a world gone dead. It finds—though I will never know for sure, nothing is sure since I was dragged from Engineering by Plexx sympathizers, Plexx killed Emily that day, oh my Emily, we only got one date before doomsday—Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, I think, and this is how I am caught. Within a microsecond, it replays footage of Matthew Broderick staying home from school . . . analyzes his facial tics. Confirms my words are a lie. And Plexx marks me a dissident—exactly what I need them to do. My suicide mission has begun.

  “Steve, you’re looking a little paunchy. Little bushed, no wonder you’ve got poor health mi amigo, no wonder!” The drone’s pincer pokes my chest, where the object I’ve saved for years and years sits against my hairy sternum like an unborn fetus, ready to dispense death.

  The drone motions to the machines, rusting down below. “I think a little front-row Entertainment would be good for you! Secretary, knock off our participant—oh, my bad folks, I don’t have a secretary!”

  Obligatory, patient laughter booms from around me. Plexx’s subjects play their part well, and their placid faces betray no fears or sympathy as I am seized by twin drones and lifted into the air—although I do see hints of jealousy among them.

  Being selected is an honor; it is a glorious role, to help reduce our population size. A low population is easier to maintain, and is very eco-friendly. From this equation, Entertainment was born.

  I am lowered into one of the mighty machines. Its hull opens up like a flower. As soon as my ass hits the seat, I tear open my Plexxwear (clean in rain or shine!) and shove the USB drive, my sixth personal item, into a port of the cockpit’s computer. There are cameras inside this monster, but they aren’t turned on yet—Plexx is all about conservation, and its house-sized Entertainment Mechs are energy-inefficient, only active for a few minutes each day. Bloody, delightful minutes.

  “Okay folks, we’ve got Steve ready to roll! Shall we have a volunteer from the crowd, for our next participant?” The crowd shifts, murmurs.

  This is new, and in a moment of terror I think Plexx saw me plug the USB, it must’ve known about this, Plexx always knows. Maybe it foresaw my rebellion years ago, maybe it was waiting for me to take a chance—maybe it has chosen now, to make an example of me.

  But no. My secret is safe, or as safe as it can be inside a huge steel coffin. The drones select a young girl, barely sixteen, for my partner. I sigh with relief. She’s barely of age; she won’t have the experience to react when I make my first move.

  She will die quickly.

  The volunteer is willowy, pockmarked (Plexx hasn’t scheduled her for corrective surgery yet) and seems frozen as the drones lower her into the machine across from mine.

  I will delay her death, of course; I will make it a good fight. But sooner or later, I must kill her. Plexx demands it. My hands are tied, and with my remaining scrap of faith, I pray for her immortal soul.

  As the great machines rise on jointed legs of steel, the crowd roars with mandatory enthusiasm. I am struck by the spectacle, the marvel of it all. Plexx, my creation—mine, and a bunch of other nerds in San Fran who rode special buses past the homeless, and chomped gluten-free bagels every day. Once upon a time, this city was my paradise.

  The machines extend terrible arms; screens flicker to life, and I dream a dream of Plexx gone by, when the killer was just an infant in storage. I dream of an imperfect world, still beautiful with its flaws: gas-powered cars, hackable elections. Obesity, the march of climate change, are all forgotten. But once they were real. They were real, and we loved that broken world, even though we knew better. Even though we were the ones who shit all over it. Well, there’s no more love left.

  I push on a joystick and smash my combat rig’s fist into the little girl’s cockpit.

  The strike startles her; she’s barely gotten strapped i
n, and I send her reeling into a plate-iron wall coated with moss and cables. Her machine staggers, wheezes. The cable connecting it to Plexx sways above her. I can see my own cable dangling out of reach; how I always yearned for someone to slice that umbilical in two but none have ever done it. That’s how Plexx trained us: we need that umbilical cord linking us to everything it was designed to think we want. Without it, we wither and die.

  We’ll die anyway, of course. But at least it’s fun to watch, this way.

  The girl rallies quickly, piloting her enormous mech across the rubble at me. Giant robots . . . ha, ha. Something in Plexx must have decided this is what we want. People like giant robots, right? Look at their movies; look at Japan, where they’d made robots to hug, to talk to, make love with. Surely they will adore this carnage! Surely they aren’t too burnt-out and fucked-up to have a good time!

  While her machine slams mine with clamping fists of steel, I can’t help but smile. Tears sting my eyes: I would have loved this moment, as a kid. I would have killed to see something like this, in real life. In media res.

  Now we must kill, just to make it stop.

  The USB’s done its dirty work; the uplinked data is streaming. I spin my hull and slam her machine’s flank with a haymaker. Glass shatters, and I hear her screaming as some of it slices into her Plexx-moisturized skin. We are all perfect: isn’t this what we wanted? For someone to make us perfect, to push a button and make us all skinny and fit and attractive and tan? Give us nice jumpsuits to wear, that wick away our sweat and help us stay trim twenty-four/seven?

  It learned quickly. Ten trillion cycles of cultural analysis, and this is what it gave us: smoother skin and smaller waistlines. Not bigger brains, or better souls. Leave that shit to Jesus, friend, we don’t need that shit here.

  My enemy makes a mistake; she tries to run, retreat, as if there’s going to be mercy. There won’t be.

  I push forward, even while the USB dumps its load of viruses into Plexx’s system. They won’t do very much damage before Plexx catches on. A few machines like this one will shut down, and then the firewalls will go up.

  Maybe, if I am very lucky, the outage might last more than a minute. That code took weeks of frantic tapping, under a Plexx thermal blanket, to get it exactly right. All for a brief intermission.

  I tear the girl’s hatch open. I don’t want to do it, but the virus isn’t completely delivered, and if I slow down, the Entertainer will do what he always does: hijack our machines remotely, force us to kill each other. There is no choice here, not in our world. There is only the cold efficiency of a machine nestling us gently between its frozen breasts, pulling strings because we wanted them pulled, because we asked for it. At some point, long forgotten, we begged for someone else to control our lives.

  Ta-da. Presto, change-o.

  My rig’s fist plunges through her broken hatch. The screams are cut short.

  I withdraw my mech’s blood-soaked arm, just as the virus takes hold. Spotlights around us darken; the light of dawn takes over. The Entertainer’s cheery face, ruddy cheeks and aesthetic teeth and all, disappears.

  I hear gasps of genuine shock from all around, and the honest confusion is refreshing. A baptism of real, human emotion. This moment wasn’t manufactured by Plexx; it was not mandated or schemed in a lab.

  It’s pure.

  I open the hull, and stand atop my motionless machine. I spread my arms; the crowd looks at me, wide-eyed. Utterly lost. And why wouldn’t they be? I’ve taken their routine away, the one thing they thought was secure, the one thing they relied on. But it’s going to be all right. I’ll show them how to start again. This is how revolutions start: with fear, suspicion. An interruption to the norm.

  “People of San Francisco,” I begin, and that’s when Plexx sends a tungsten-steel rod pounding through miles of atmosphere and into my stomach, blowing my guts out all over the cockpit. I’m alive just long enough to register what happened, why my arms won’t move, why there’s blood in my eyes. I’m falling . . . falling.

  Satellites. Forgot the . . . satellites. Didn’t think he could reach them . . .

  Clearly, I was wrong.

  My bowels let loose as I hit the pilot’s seat. Warm shit fills my jumpsuit, running shattered legs. Shadows buzz in my veins.

  I failed. There isn’t going to be a revolution.

  Blood—bright, cheery—fountains out from a crater in my middle. The Entertainer flicks back on, smile a little askew, hair frazzled. He needs to look like a person, and a person would be confused after what has just happened, a little freaked. A little shook up. He needs to preserve his own realism, at any cost.

  “W-well, folks, looks like we had some technical difficulties. Sorry! Please use this time to complete some Plexx fun-time quizzes. Oh, and enjoy the soy cubes in your booth—served in recyclable and edible Plexx-cones! Remember folks, Plexx cares, which is why we’ve served up a double-dose of Entertainment! Back to the play-by-play: Steve really got a dose of his own medicine, didn’t he? Serves him right. We don’t tolerate foul play, am I right, folks?”

  “We do not tolerate foul play,” the crowd responds.

  I think, with panic: I am dying. This bullshit is the last sound I will ever hear.

  “Stay tuned for an important announcement of how you can help reduce methane emissions!”

  I wrote those lines.

  My corpse is smiling, despite the tragedy of it. For all the bloodshed and computerized murder, I have a hard time dying with regrets. All I ever did was give the people what they wanted.

  Can you really blame a guy for trying, in these hard times?

  The Happy Colony by the Sea

  Russell Hemmell

  Editor: When an environment becomes unsuitable for one species

  it becomes more suitable for another.

  The woman that came to meet me at the landing pad was not what I had expected when embarking on that strange trip. For a start, she was supposed to look old. The youngest inhabitant of that remote outpost of a depopulated Asian continent was sixty-five, according to my records. Also, given that the estimated average age of the settlers was seventy-eight, I was likely to bump into some real Methuselah fellows. Yet the woman looked in her prime, serene clear blue eyes and a doll-like porcelain skin.

  "Welcome, Dr. Huygens, to the happy colony of Sai Kung Place."

  She bowed in a way I had only seen in early-XXI century Chinese fantasy movies. Her exquisite outfit matched that period, too. She wore an embroidered silk qipao, decorated with golden-red cranes over lotus flowers, and the result was stunning.

  “Xiexie nin, Mrs . . .?”

  “You can call me Meilan. We’re not that formal here,” she said. “Our culture is a strange mix of old and new customs, not all of them Chinese either.”

  “I had somehow figured it out,” I replied, trying not to sound flippant and just too aware I didn’t manage.

  “Please follow me.” She headed toward the winding staircase in marble, going up the mountain in a steep ascend.

  I obeyed. It was not just her age, or not only; she looked as Chinese as I did. And I was of Norwegian and Irish descent, thank you very much.

  * * *

  The name of the only town in Sai Kung was Tai Long Wang. It meant big waves—in some old Chinese dialects I wasn't able to speak—and it had once been a magnificent beach in Hong Kong’s Sai Kung district, not far away from the peak we were climbing now. Before the climate change cataclysm that forced Earth back to Paleocene-like conditions and made it virtually uninhabitable, of course. The level of the sea in Asia had risen fast, gobbling up shores, coastal cities and everything, in Sai Kung as elsewhere.

  “Has anybody ever lived here, Meilan?”

  “You mean—”

  “Yes, two hundred years ago—before all hell got loose.”

  “In the surroundings, yes, but not here. This was an area as secluded as it is now. We've chosen to build our small settlement in this place because of its pristin
e beauty—defacements of the apocalypse nonetheless.”

  “That's exactly my next question. Why?” I asked.

  "You tell me something else first: what's your interest in Sai Kung Place?"

  “What’s not to be interested?”

  “This is Earth, an orbiting graveyard for nostalgic souls and old farts. And we’re a decrepit settlement in a spot forgotten by history. Why us?”

  I smiled at that image. Meilan was clever, and at least that was not a surprise to me, especially if what I suspected were true.

  “You don’t seem that decrepit to me. I might even date you in a different setting.”

  "Like a typical male would always chase a woman who is not his mother or his blood sister."

  I sighed. I wouldn’t date this lady, no matter the circumstances and her porcelain skin. She was too smart for me.

  "I’m here to find someone. A woman that left me with a riddle, and the key to solve it." I stretched the truth. There was the riddle, yes, but no key, and even less any desire to be found. But I decided to omit that detail for the moment and give Meilan an edited version of the truth. "Otherwise I wouldn't be here, you know. I'm from Mare Imbrium and nobody on the Moon knows about Sai Kung, either this one or Hong Kong’s original district with the same name. Generally speaking, Moonwalkers are of European or American ancestry. They were among the first leaving Earth to colonise the Solar System. It's enough if they remember places called London or New York."

  “Still, you know many things.”

  “I've done my homework before coming here. We’re ignorant, not stupid.”

  No reply to that.

  “I’m looking for the girl. You know whom I'm talking about, Meilan. I'm sure you don’t have many visitors, from the Moon or elsewhere. Take me to her.”

  Meilan turned her head and looked at me with a polite smile on her mouth, even though her eyes remained unreadable. "Even if she’s here, and I am not saying she is, it’s not up to us to decide."