All fascinating. And in another time and place Malik might have simply reveled in observing and taking mental notes and formulating hypotheses. . . . Malik had always been one of the smart kids, the ones who barely bothered to crack a textbook because school was just that easy. He’d imagined a future life working at MIT or CERN or NASA. A future of intellectual adventure, of searching for answers.
On many occasions those happy daydreams had included Shade, working beside him, or perhaps teaching at a university, the two of them with a neat little home in a nice neighborhood. Maybe kids. Sure, why not? Any child borne by Shade would be brilliant and beautiful. And as to their moral and ethical upbringing, well, Malik figured he’d better take a hand in that.
And none of those fantasies mattered anymore. All of that was dead. Dead and buried.
Malik was trapped in a life where his only escape from mental invasion by the Watchers was to de-morph back to a body that would die within an hour in agony. That was his reality.
His reality also included having seen a morphed Shade lying on the steel floor of a helicopter so mangled that he had needed no extra dimensions to see her bones and arteries and intestines. She had looked like a crab run over by a truck. He had begged her to de-morph. How many times? A hundred? With tears streaming down his face, he had begged her, and he had to his shame prayed—yes, prayed—to the Watchers.
Don’t let her die. Without her I have nothing.
The Watchers had merely watched. Malik had sensed no pity, no concern, just curiosity. Like they were scientists peering down through a microscope at amoebas.
Malik was, had always been, a controlled person. He was not hasty or careless. He monitored his own mind and thoughts the way he would monitor any other complex computer, calibrating his mental speed, guarding against false data. He felt emotion, strong emotion at times, but that had been all the more reason to control himself.
But a rage had been building within him, and to Malik that rage felt like a fire he could not fully extinguish but which he had to contain lest it burn him up inside as surely as fire had burned his body. Each time he felt the Watchers, he raged and told himself sternly that he should accept. Each time he’d witnessed some new horror he had felt like someone had thrown gasoline on that fire, and he was the fire department, limiting, containing.
Then he had nearly been burned again and had, for the first time in his life, panicked. Panicked! Screaming, flailing, unreasoning panic.
And then had found himself on his knees on the steel deck of a helicopter, begging for Shade’s life. And almost miraculously, she had done it. With the last of the dying light in her mind she had found the way to escape death.
This time.
Now Malik floated in n-dimensional space with Francis’s hand in his. The scientist within Malik still observed, but he observed through the wild flames of his own fury.
“Come out and talk to me!” he raged, his words becoming multicolored swirls that floated away like the smoke of a cigarette.
He searched for and soon found the flat, blank, featureless circle he believed to be a connection to the Watchers. He impatiently fought off the slug-like defenses and moved closer to the circle, which receded with each forward step and yet drew slowly, slowly nearer, as though it took ten of his steps to equal one.
“Talk to me, you cowards!”
The circle of nothingness grew larger, fractionally at first, almost imperceptibly, then it grew faster, expanding until he at last reached out a hand toward it, a burned hand, his true hand.
And suddenly he was no longer in the weird vortex of disconnected bits of his 3-D world. He stood now in a space that was white, nothing but white above and below and to every side. Like he’d been dropped into a bucket of white paint, or a box of cotton balls.
He glanced down and with relief saw that Francis was still there, still holding his hand.
“Come out and talk to me!” Malik cried, and this time his words were not vapor but just sound, flat, dying quickly without echo or resonance.
“Impressive,” a voice said. A human voice. A human voice with something familiar about it.
A distant dot of color appeared on the white nothingness, a human shape it seemed, but far away, though its voice was close and intimate in Malik’s ears.
“Who are you? What are you?” Malik demanded.
“No one thought it possible, but I suspected you might just be able to manage it . . . Malik.”
Malik was not surprised that the distant creature knew his name, but hearing it aloud in this place was disturbing.
“Are you still okay?” Malik asked Francis.
Her eyes were wide, her face pale. She stood beside him on one good leg, a rigid cast holding her broken bones in place. “Yes,” she whispered.
“Do you see that . . . person? Are you hearing him speak?”
“Yes,” she acknowledged.
So at least if this was some hallucination it was one they were both experiencing. Malik began moving toward the distant creature, but like the gray circle, the creature seemed to recede almost—almost—as fast as Malik advanced.
“What is it you want, Malik?”
“I want you to stop torturing me and the people I love. Do you have any idea the horror you’ve caused?”
The figure seemed to nod; he was still too far distant for Malik to be sure. When he spoke, his voice was so close he might almost have been whispering into Malik’s ear. “Strictly speaking, I did not cause any of this. Though, yes, I admit to guilt. I admit to hubris. But I have done nothing that you would not do, Malik.”
“I know my universe is a simulation,” Malik said. “And you are its creator.”
This time the head shake was near enough that Malik could be sure of it. The creature definitely had the shape of a man, a fit man of perhaps middle age. A black man, Malik thought, though what did such distinctions mean when dealing with aliens?
“Twice, just twice has any creature within the sim become aware enough to escape the simulation. You, Malik, are the second. The first was an impressive little boy named Pete Ellison. You’ve heard the name.”
Malik nodded, curiosity distracting him from simple anger. “Little Pete. Of the FAYZ?”
“Yes. Of course he was an unusual boy, too young and too limited in his comprehension to be able to explain what he felt. But now: you. And you, Malik, are quite capable of understanding.”
“Am I supposed to be flattered?”
“His voice . . . ,” Francis whispered. Her hand was sweaty in Malik’s grip.
“I am simply describing reality,” the creature said. “You and Francis have done the impossible. And I am left to wonder about intentions.”
“My intentions?” Malik asked.
“No, the intentions of your creator.”
“Are you not . . . you admitted guilt!”
“And I am guilty, but not of creating you, Malik, or the world you inhabit. You see, computational power has made astounding leaps, but still no computer, still less any number of programmers, can create a simulation as complete, as intricately detailed as the one you inhabit.”
“Then how . . .”
“No human programmer, I should have said. But an advanced AI, a powerful artificial intelligence? An AI fed a dataset extracted from living, human brains? An AI tasked with inventing a complete alternate reality using the memories of . . . of volunteers?”
The distance between them now closed more rapidly. The figure was a man. A black man in middle age, bald, still fit but with the hard-to-define caution in movement of a mature man.
“Yes, volunteers. We have learned to digitize most of the contents of the human brain. We copied those memories, Malik, and fed them to my AI. Yes, my AI, because although I did not create the sim, I did create the sim’s creator.”
“Your AI is a monster!” Malik cried, stabbing an accusing finger.
Malik could see the man’s features now. The mouth. The nose. The heavy-lidded, sleepy-looking e
yes.
Chills swept across Malik’s flesh, and a new dread, a new and terrible dread hovered just at the edge of his understanding.
“Yes, it is,” the man agreed. “It has created a savage, brutal world full of unpredictability. It has rewritten the assumptions of physics to make its own physics. It’s a monster, yes, but a brilliant one.”
The man actually sounded proud, which just fed Malik’s rekindling anger. “How dare you be proud of this? The pain you’ve caused, the horror—what kind of creature are you?”
“The human kind, Malik. The very human kind. But a human from your own future. My time, in my universe, is twenty-six years ahead of your perceived time.”
Now Malik stopped moving, but the creature advanced, walking on two normal legs, two normal human arms by his side. Speaking in a voice . . .
. . . the voice.
“Do you wonder whose memories were harvested to program my AI, Malik?”
Malik took a step back.
Francis, in a pleading voice, said, “Malik . . .”
“No,” Malik said.
“You’re beginning to understand, Malik. You don’t want to understand, but already your mind knows.”
“No,” Malik said, a faint whimper.
“The memories we harvested are those belonging to a woman named Dr. Shade Darby. . . .”
“No, no . . .”
“And ours, Malik. Yours and mine. I created the AI, and I thought: who better to provide the foundational images and ideas . . . I had an obligation, I thought, to use my own memories.”
Malik wanted to turn and run away but felt his legs would not obey his commands, felt that they might buckle at any moment. He had stopped breathing. His heart thudded in his chest.
Now the man, not alien, but man, stood an arm’s length away. And Malik saw.
“Yes, Malik. I am Dr. Malik Tenerife, of MIT. I am you.”
CHAPTER 42
To Be or Not to Be
“THERE IS NO escape,” Malik said bleakly.
They sat in the control room, a platter of fruits and snacks untouched in the center of the table. Armo had dragged a sofa into the room, and he lay spread out there with Cruz perched on one of the sofa’s arms. The others all sat around the table.
Dekka frowned and said, “Hold up a minute there, Malik. You’re saying all of this, the FAYZ and this new reality, all of this, really is a simulation?”
Malik nodded.
“And the one who created it . . . is you?”
“Me. Yes. A future me, a me twenty-six years from now, from our now. Yes, terribly smart Malik, doing terribly smart things in the future. Playing around in a lab. Coming up with a never-before-seen use of an AI to create a sim.”
“Well, get back over there and tell future you to cut it out!” Armo said.
Malik shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that. AIs aren’t computers; you can’t reprogram them. He . . . future me . . . cannot change anything about this reality. He can only watch. He and his grad students and scientists around the world, they are the Watchers.”
“What the hell do you mean he can’t change it?” Simone said. “He made it!”
Shade said, “No, Simone, he’s right. We can create AIs, we can feed them sets of data, but what they do with that data, the processes inside—”
“This is insane!” Cruz interrupted, jumping to her feet. “We’re in hell and the god who made us can’t save us?”
Malik said nothing, just looked down at the dusty, unused carpet of their “command center.”
“He can do something,” Francis said quietly.
“What?” Astrid snapped, shooting a suspicious look at Malik.
“He can . . .” Francis turned pleading eyes to Malik.
Malik, sounding like he was straining for every word, said, “He can turn us off.”
Every eye was on Malik. Dekka felt a wave of panic inside herself and reminded herself sternly that she was supposed to set a good example, supposed to be the leader, but what she felt was suffocation, like all the air had been sucked from the room.
“Tell us,” Dekka said.
Malik looked up, his face glistening with tears. “He cannot alter our world. He can only pull the plug. We would cease to exist.”
“That’s our choice?” Cruz asked, almost sobbing the question. “We can go on living in hell? Us and everyone? Or we can die? That’s the choice?”
“Yes,” Malik said. “I told him . . . told myself . . . that I could not make that decision alone. I know the way back now. I can give him our answer.”
“What is our answer?” Cruz asked, looking to Dekka.
“Edilio said on big stuff we vote,” Dekka said. “There’s nothing bigger than this.”
They found paper and pencils.
They found an empty wastebasket.
“It’s 11:26 p.m.,” Dekka said. “We should think, and we should talk to each other, and for me at least, I will pray. At midnight we vote.”
From the Purple Moleskine
WE ARE VOTING. It’s taking a while; we aren’t exactly voting on class president. We’re voting on existence. On life.
Shade and Malik are in each other’s arms, whispering into each other’s ears. Dekka, Simone, Francis, and Edilio sit together, murmuring in low voices, their eyes cast down. Sam and Astrid are silent, side by side in their chairs, reaching across the gap between them to hold hands. I sense that they’ve made up their minds.
Armo is beside me. He’s said nothing and I almost imagine that Armo, of all people, is leaving the decision to me.
The choice is brutal. To live in this universe as freaks, superpowered people under constant threat. To live with Malik never able to experience a single moment of privacy alone in his head. To live knowing that we are not alone in this world; each of the planet’s seven billion people are as alive and as aware as we are. To live knowing that with that choice we keep alive Rockborn monsters, horrors like Vector, some already wreaking havoc, some yet to reveal themselves.
We know that the Ranch will not be the end of governments trying to use the rock for their own ends. We know that if we vote for existence, we condemn billions to unimaginable sadness, and loss, and pain.
But they don’t get a vote, those billions. We have to vote for them.
I see Sam and Astrid stand up and walk together to the little wastebasket we’re using as our life-and-death sorting hat. Each folds and drops their vote. The paper strikes an almost musical note as it lands.
Armo squeezes my hand gently.
We have decided that the vote must be unanimous. No one is trying to persuade anyone else. Those who are talking are questioning, not dictating. No one knows the right answer.
Armo turns a sad smile to me and asks, “So?”
I don’t know the right answer. There is no hope that the horror will end. None.
Armo’s hand encloses mine.
I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what’s right.
I don’t know.
And yet, I vote.
Author’s Note
Dear Readers:
I wrote this three-book spin-off of the Gone series out of self-indulgence. I wanted to create my own superhero universe. I wanted to see if I could find original approaches to the idea of superpowerful individuals. It was a challenge, and I’ll leave the judgment as to my degree of success or failure to you.
Though I tried to be completely original, even someone with my limited knowledge of comics recognizes that the Monster, Villain, and Hero trilogy owes a nod, at the very least, to Marvel’s X-Men. But there are other influences incorporated as well. Gone readers will instantly feel at home, but there’s a fair bit of Animorphs DNA in this trilogy as well. And the famous Victorian-era book by Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland. Published in 1888, and still blowing minds today.
You will have noticed that I didn’t give this story a pat conclusion, and that’s deliberate. Katherine (my wife and frequent coauthor, K. A. Applegate) and I were
among the earliest authors to encounter fan fiction via the internet. We’ve embraced it from the start. And some part of me hopes that fanfic writers will carry this story forward. Don’t ask me what happens to these characters next, because I don’t know. Will Dekka find love, perhaps with Simone? Will Cruz and Armo? How will Sam and Astrid do in this terrifying extension of earlier trauma? Maybe you have some ideas. I built the sandbox; if you want to bring your pails and shovels and play in it, cool. It’s one of the best things about writing for young people: you are my collaborators in imagination. If I leave blanks it’s because I know you’ll fill them.
Is our universe just a simulation? Maybe. So what? Does it make it easier to imagine a sim created by God as opposed to one created by some future artificial intelligence? Is there a difference?
Reality is what we can see, what we can measure, what we can verify through experimentation. And maybe in the future we will develop a test to discover whether we occupy the only universe, or just one among many. But our subjective reality, our fears and our hates and our loves, while not scientifically measurable, are genuine and cannot just be dismissed. We have no ability to treat the world as anything other than real. Maybe the brick wall is a sim, but if you try to walk through it you’ll still get a bloody nose, and it will still hurt. And sim or not, a broken heart still aches.
Whether we occupy the only universe or one of many, whether we evolved or were invented by a supernatural being, or are just the creation of other creatures who’ve evolved a bit further than we have, we still have to behave as well as we are able. In this universe or in any other, I stand with Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote:
There’s only one rule that I know of, babies: God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.
How great would it be to live in a universe, real or simulated, where that rule was obeyed?
As ever, I am deeply grateful to my readers, who have been very kind to me and embraced my worlds. Thank you for so much. You make it all fun.
Hero Page 31