Unnatural

by Anthony DiGiovanni

CHAPTER 5

  “I’m sorry, Uriah,” said Jane as she typed orders into the car’s autopilot to go to Aberdeen. “I had to do it, or else he would’ve made you kill yourself. And me.”

  “What exactly happened back there?” Uriah rubbed his neck. Stitches – he hadn’t had those in a long time.

  “I’d reached Goodsprings not long before you woke up. I guess Livingston knew where I was, too, because he put a fire behind me and along I-15. Got around it, but that slowed me down a bunch.”

  “Why’d you come?”

  “To see if any of that Autopia stuff was left over.” Jane looked away. “I guess I figured, you know, if I couldn’t find Marshall, then the next-best thing is a simulation of him.”

  Like how Marshall figured the next-best thing to a real woman was you? He buried the thought as soon as it surfaced. “Wait a minute. How’d ya know the Mindscape was a simulator before you saw what Livingston did?”

  “He … he told me. Back when I first met him.”

  “And you didn’t think to tell me this?”

  “But Livingston said those things were dangerous if used by someone without proper setup. I didn’t want you to go hurting yourself, because you seemed so desperate.”

  Uriah smirked. “Like you?”

  “That’s different.” Now she faced him. “You could at least have something else to live for, but Marshall’s everything to me.”

  He focused visually on the surroundings they drove by, mostly just desert. Being indebted to people always made things more awkward than they needed to be. “I owe you, Jane. It almost feels like you’re serving me just like a non-emotional robot.”

  “Give yourself some credit,” she said as the sun peeked out from behind a vast cloud. “You stalled Livingston enough for me to send an alert to a medical bot, for one thing. When your life’s on the line, a couple minutes can change a lot. Plus, you were right about that guy. If I were in your situation, I’d probably be dead.”

  Well, aren’t I just the next MacGyver! He rolled his eyes at Jane’s attempt to boost his ego. Where’s my medal for killing my virtual friends? “So did you overhear our conversation? That how you knew what Livingston was doing?”

  “Pretty much. I would’ve stopped things sooner, but I only became really suspicious when he made you his slave.”

  Uriah’s eyes followed a cloud that looked vaguely like a bird, trying to distract himself from the torment. “Forgive me for this, Jane, but did Marshall ever do something like that to you? Did he ever decide your free will was more trouble than it was worth?”

  “I only did what was demanded by my programming. If I do that now, how can you say I’ve ever really had ‘free will’?”

  The last thing he wanted now was an open philosophical can of worms, but he asked, “Then why did you save me, twice?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Marshall made me that way.”

  “You said he didn’t want you to make friends.”

  “Right.”

  “Dunno about you, but I wouldn’t save anyone else’s skin if the only thing I cared about was pleasing one person.” He was telling the truth, because he’d been in such a position. Uriah knew he would slay ten thousand Isaac Livingstons for Pat, and was he so different from that man in Jane’s eyes? Maybe he could say he earned Jane’s salvation, in a sense. Maybe she saved him for the same reason any human saves another person – she found him worth saving, because he was the only person who looked at her like a person.

  All of which was speculation, for she had no answer.

  Uriah looked out the back window. He was aware that he couldn’t see Pat’s body, abandoned outside the Mag-Lev station, from here. He’d decided it was pointless to hold onto the delusion that he could revive her. Still, immense was his sorrow for her, whose last thoughts about her boyfriend were likely something along the lines of, Oh God, he’s gonna do it. He really is gonna kill him in cold blood. I don’t want anyone to die for me!

  What was scarier still was that, for a second, he’d believed she was alive after all. He had believed every other lie that went along with Livingston’s story of virtual reality and a world without the Housekeeping. It was a world he wanted back, if only for her. But he could never have it.

  “Jane, have you ever wanted to do something for your own heart’s sake? Ever had a dream?”

  Stupid question, read her face. “Never. Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for Marshall. Isn’t that what love is about?”

  “Maybe it is. There’s such a thing as too much love, though.” He looked at her with more sincerity than he had probably shown to most humans. “Did you let your love stop you from acting like a friend to someone besides Marshall? As in me?”

  Jane fired him a scowl as she folded her arms. “Look, I don’t know why I’m doing this, but if you think it’s for any reason other than that I think it’s what Marshall would have me do, you’re just wrong. It’s the same as with humans. You are what you are because evolution favored your genes, even if you might not know the Darwinian explanation for every gene you have.”

  Seeing Uriah’s expression, she added, “Don’t look so impressed. Marshall was a naturalist, so he’s told me about the sorts of questions creationists bother him with. He can put it better than me, though.” She cast her gaze down, evidently ashamed of saying something insightful. Uriah winced.

  “So what’s your dream, Uriah?” she said when he didn’t speak. “You can’t help the animals now, and the woman you loved more than anyone else is dead.”

  He thought about this. It was a harder question than it sounded. Dance on the grave of every sick tool he’d hated days ago? Get a good night’s sleep for once and wake up to a rich man’s breakfast? Indulge his fantasies with Jane? Like he could bring himself to that low.

  “Well, back before the worker robots put me out of a job, I didn’t exactly have high expectations for myself. Life was still pretty difficult, and I just sort of lived through the characters in books I read as a kid. As a young adult, even. But even though I knew I could never have it, there was a life I dreamed of for so many years.” He scratched his neck while inspecting the dashboard with extreme interest. “Promise ya won’t laugh when you hear it?”

  “Unless it’s actually funny instead of just silly, I think you can trust me there.”

  “The life I wanted was an endless one.” He looked off into the arid distance. “I wanted to find out how to live forever.”

  She didn’t laugh. “That’s understandable. I was expecting something a lot more out there.”

  Actually, there were many things Uriah wanted to do as an immortal person, not all of which he’d be comfortable sharing with Jane. He was baffled by most other people’s willingness to resign themselves to such a short existence with which to pursue their deepest desires. Even a Libertas could stretch a human lifespan only so far, as physical aging was a thing of the past for them, but not mental deterioration. It was borderline suicidal. “You don’t find that, I dunno, far-fetched?”

  “I could live forever, in theory.”

  Not that that would be heaven for her without Marshall, but she probably didn’t want to return to that talking point.

  “Uriah, there’s something else I should tell you about what happened back at Goodsprings. Something Livingston said before you could hear him.” She said this in that dead-serious voice that says, I want to get out of a hundred-foot proximity to you because you’re gonna want to bludgeon someone severely when you hear this. “He said you were the one who killed all those people.”

  “What in the name of all that is unholy are you talking about?”

  “I’m just telling you what I heard! He called you ‘our little genocidal fella who shot more than he thought.’”

  “He’s batshit in the membrane.” Was he? Uriah thought back to the night he’d shot Livingston. All the strange deaths had started as soon as he’d fired, b
ut how could an electromagnetic gun cause every other human to drop dead?

  “I don’t know how sane he might be, but I wonder why he was so calm back there. He has to have loved someone he lost that night.”

  “Let’s just get to Aberdeen ASAP. Mass murderer or not, I’m on the hit list of a guy who can control whatever robot he wants.” He turned to Jane again. “Just be thankful he hasn’t decided to do the same to you, which I guess I should be curious about, but that’s very low on my priorities.” He could say the same about why Livingston gave him a synthetic leg, as well as a taste of would-be boozer’s paradise in a machine from an impeccably repaired saloon.

  They reached 542 Stanley Way by quarter to nine. Nearby, Night Runner and Road Rage were still dead. Still eerily resistant to putrefaction, as well, but Uriah was too preoccupied with what he expected to see in Livingston’s basement to give this anomaly much attention. What did he expect to behold? It was impossible for him to imagine what a bio-bomb of the sort necessary to cause the Housekeeping would look like. Abstract evidence of his guilt was the only thing he could anticipate.

  There was nothing about the house that reeked of dark secrets. No creaks greeted Uriah and Jane as they broke in, no convenient lack of a light switch at the top of the stairs to the cellar. Once illuminated, the stairway revealed a cruel anticlimax. The bio-bomb was presumably, if one were to judge by an EM gun’s ability to affect only what was in its line of fire, a decent yet unassuming washing machine. Livingston’s corpse and the offending gun were gone.

  “Told ya he was out of his mind, Jane. There’s my alibi.” As soon as he said this, Uriah doubted it, for something at the foot of the stairs caught his eye. Jane followed him down. The object was an EM reflector of the same sort as the police bot’s, only this one was positioned at such an angle that pulses would bounce off it almost perpendicularly.

  They inspected the rest of the basement to the right, following an imaginary line to a hemispherical device on the floor. A reflected blast would have landed right inside a small hole on the machine. Peering inside, Uriah saw only a centimeter of depth to the hole, although it led to a thin tunnel on the left.

  It was hardly conclusive proof, but the ease with which some stray pulses of his shot could have reached the inside of this unfamiliar device worried him. Anything could be inside Pandora’s half-sphere, and Uriah was too terrified of throwing away his chance at immortality to give into curiosity. That had almost killed him at the Bio-Bazaar.

  “So what’ll you do now?” asked Jane. “I can’t imagine a good starting point of a search for immortality.”

  “I know.” He turned away from the basement and didn’t look back. “I never really planned to break the system I was in, just to work with it in a way that hardly felt like there was a system at all. She made that possible then, so maybe she can now.”

  Uriah heard a police siren.