by Kaleb Schad
Ben huddled behind Tyler, clinging to the pouches on his belt as they stepped off of the elevator. The gravel roof crunched.
“Three girls,” Malcolm Staern called. He set down his bag and began walking towards Tyler and the boy.
The helicopter sensed the dead pilot and cycled down its rotors.
“That’s how many daughters he had. He was a good pilot.”
“Suddenly we care?”
Disgusted, Staern shook his head. “Trust me when I tell you, this is not going to go the way you think it is.”
He looked different in person than in the newscasts. He was smaller with a brave, smooth scalp, bright with clipped hair buoying it on the sides and back. He walked with a steady confidence, as if no matter where he was going, he set the schedule, set the route. There wasn’t any fear that Tyler could sense. There wasn’t an acknowledgement that his life had already ended. He must know. Why wasn’t he afraid?
“Tyler Samson. As I live and breathe.”
“Not for long.”
“We’ll see. Even so, I am glad you’re here. The Twitcher That Walked. We never did figure out how you survived Liberty Heights or what happened in that tower. How did that go so wrong?”
“Give me the key,” Ben screamed. He moved out from behind Tyler.
“Benjamin,” Staern said. He smiled at the boy. “Son, it is good to have you home.”
“Don’t call him ‘son,’” Tyler said.
“I don’t suppose I can convince you to come back to us, Ben?”
Tyler’s watch beeped. Three minutes. “Give him the key.”
“He’s been controlling you, you know,” Staern said to Tyler. “All of this. None of it has been your own will or idea. We built a pheromone simplex into the Cull that would allow him to convince people to take him in, keep passing him from one unit to the next to help spread the steg. You’ve been gumped this entire time.”
“Not Tyler,” the boy said. “It doesn’t work on him.”
That firmness within Tyler—that something the boy had filled him with in the stairwell—it shifted, not seismically, but enough to open a gap. Smeared edges of confidence started slipping and Tyler wondered if it might be true. Had the boy played Tyler this entire time? Made him dance? He thought about those moments the kid had wailed impotently: in the jeep begging Tyler to turn around, in the hospital when he asked Tyler to kill Sara. He remembered the light-headedness, the lost time on his watch. Was the boy telling the truth? What Tyler had thought were symptoms of his JACKK wearing down, could they have been symptoms of it fighting off this simplex thing?
“Interesting. That’ll make things harder,” Staern said. “Maybe you’ve already discovered this, Ben, but I find it difficult to know if someone is doing what I ask because they want to or because they are compelled to.”
Tyler understood, but he could tell the boy was confused.
“You didn’t think I wouldn’t take that power for myself, did you,” Staern said. “I’m convinced this simplex is more important than your steganography.”
“Enough,” Tyler said. “The overclock key.” His gun was getting heavy. His gun! His body was giving up on him, although who could blame it? But time was short. The boy had the recombinant. Get him the overclock key and the kid would be able to live free. Run. Disappear into the city and use this pheromone whatever to convince people to take care of him—something Tyler could have used when he was the boy’s age. How would his own life have turned out if he’d had just one person offer him a bed, a nutrient sac, even a smile when he was running the streets at Ben’s age? Well, the boy would have that. He’d make them offer it. And if the boy had, in fact, forced Tyler on this whole mission through some chemical persuasion and none of this had been Tyler’s idea…well, then his life would end the same way it had been lived…as a tool.
“The overclock key? But it’s useless,” Stern said. “You cut out the transponder. We couldn’t activate it if we wanted.”
Tyler wanted to laugh. The kid hadn’t been in any danger since they’d cut off his arm? He could have run any time after that. No need for the recombinant. No need to be here on this roof now.
But Tyler had a need, didn’t he? Hustle the kid along and then finish what he came here for.
“Alright, kid,” Tyler said. “Time for you to—”
“Good,” the kid said. He fitted the recombinant to his left arm’s IV port. Before either Tyler or Staern could react, the boy had pulled the trigger.
Both men shouted, “No!”
Tyler’s watch beeped. -00:00:02:00.
When he had dreamed about this moment, Tyler had thought, after everything, when only minutes remained, that the world would make more sense. That by now he would be forcing it to make sense. He was the one with the gun, after all. He had the target, the man responsible for so much of his miserable life at the sharp end of the barrel and, surprise, surprise, the boy-weapon he’d planned to blow up in the act no longer needed to die. In fact, Tyler found himself desperate to keep the boy-weapon from blowing up at all. It had seemed he might be able to do two meaningful things with his final minutes: save a child and kill a monster. Now, with the recombinant ambling through the kid’s arteries, gleefully tripping poisonous genetic markers left and right, Tyler’s world was as upside-fucked as ever.
“Why?” Pathetic, but the best he could do.
“You were right, Mr. Tyler,” the boy said. “People are awful.” He gulped a shuddering breath, then knelt on the gravel rooftop. He looked at his amputated arm and said, “Everybody hurts each other. I’ve never met anyone nice. Not you. Not Ms. Sara. Not the doctors who made Eric sick and wouldn’t let him see his mom and dad. Not the food vendor. Not even the man I gave food to. Do you know what he said when I handed it to him? ‘Fuck off.’ Well, I am, and everyone else is too. We’re all going to fuck off and die. Starting in the High Lanes. You were right, Mr. Tyler.”
“Shoot him,” Malcolm said. There was the fear. Cutting.
“You were free.”
“I was never going to be free.” The boy looked at Tyler and there was a swallowing void behind the boy’s eyes where something akin to hope used to be. It wasn’t hopelessness that had replaced it. It was worse. Apathy.
“Kill him,” Staern said. Tyler felt light headed. “If he leaves here, we’ll never find him. He’ll go from family to family hiding and nobody will ever betray him or know why they’re helping him and then they’ll die and their neighbors will die and their neighbors’ neighbors.”
Tyler had to lower his gun from pointing at Staern, it was too heavy.
“High Laners, Tyler. Everything good. Everything we’ve built and saved. Dead.”
“Stop it,” the boy said.
For a second, the sounds of traffic and wind muted and Tyler couldn’t keep his eye open, then the dizziness passed.
“He’ll be killing High Laners. Do you realize what will happen? Do you recognize the edge our nation sits on? How the resource gap has driven us to this edge? High Laners are the only people keeping civilization alive, Tyler. Engineers and doctors. Innovators. Everything good.”
“Stop using the simplex on him,” the boy said to Staern.
Was that what was happening? He wanted to slap his face, try to wake from this fog, but he couldn’t find the strength.
“Good,” Tyler said. “That’s what you call this? What you built the boy to do? The Cullings?”
“This is what you wanted, Mr. Tyler,” the boy said. “You’ve been right all along.”
“This is bigger than you or the boy now. Bigger than some stupid revolution,” Staern said. “What we do—what I and the boy…and you—we balance the scales. Everywhere around you there is good that needs to be protected. You’ve seen it your whole life.”
“I’ve seen murder.”
“From people like you, Mr. Staern,” Ben said.
“You’ve seen necessary suffering to save the greater good. But you’ve also seen joy, Tyler, you’ve onl
y blinded yourself to it. Passing through the city you probably saw families coming home from work. They do that to care for each other…out of joy.”
“A Skimmer would kill for a job.”
“And they’d be miserable with one. Half of the High Laners dread their mornings, but that’s their sacrifice. Out of love. For their families. This nation. For the last hope of civilization.”
“How about a Skimmer, you fuck? They give their lives.”
“Some. Yes. Few, but some. Every Culling needs fewer sacrifices. We are so close, Tyler. And what do they get in trade? A life of joy unlike anything I will ever experience. Not just numbness, but true bone-marrow joy.”
“They get loneliness.” Tyler saw himself, seven and half naked, stealing from his neighbor, Jackson Wallace’s nutrient portions because his mother had ignored him during her last relapse. He thought of the fear of loneliness. The fear of weakness after fleeing Big S1m the first time. What he’d been forced to trade to predators of all kinds in order to stay alive.
“If you let this boy leave here, he will kill everyone near him. We’ll never be able to find and stop him. He’s already infecting you and me.”
Tyler could feel both of them staring at him, their chemical will crashing against him. His watch beeped again. One minute. Time was moving too fast. They were triggering his JACKK.
“They’ve used you just like they used me, Mr. Tyler,” the boy said. “They made you do things you hated.”
“Tyler,” Staern’s voice dropped to almost a whisper. “Tyler, in any life, we will only ever be given one chance to do the most important thing we can for someone else. This is yours. Please. I’m begging you. Stop Ben. Don’t let him ruin all of those lives. Tens of millions. Men, women. Children. Don’t let him burn the LCP into ashes. Please, Tyler.”
Tyler thought about the woman buying olives at the train station, the vet tech at the farm and her little boy. He thought about the boy walking along the river with his father. Hand in hand. Where were they now? Eating dinner together? With a sister, maybe? Getting pajamas on for bedtime. The kinds of things he played at in syncasts as a child. Was Tyler going to let this boy kill all of them? Sure, maybe not directly with his own steganography, but if what Staern said was true, they would sure as shit die in the aftermath as the High Lanes collapsed. Or they’d wish they had when the Midlands broke through.
“He made you a JACKK,” Ben said. “Killed you in six years.”
Tyler’s watch beeped again. Thirty seconds.
“Killed,” Staern looked at the boy. “We saved this man’s life. Killed him in six years? We gave him six years he wouldn’t have had out on the street. All alone. A Skimmer. What did you weigh when you signed with us? Sixty kilos? He was weeks from dying.”
Could he do both? Could Tyler shoot the boy and still get Malcolm? Maybe throw him off the roof? He raised the gun to waist level, bobbing it between the kid and Staern. Even that was painful. He couldn’t take a step, much less chase Staern across the landing pad.
Was he honestly going to kill this kid? But how could he honestly let him go? Tears stung his eye. He wanted to scream. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Simple revenge. That’s all he’d wanted. One fucking thing that was only his. How the fuck did he let the kid get under his skin like this? How did he let the boy become something more than a weapon?
He had to admit that Staern was right, though. The world wasn’t the shit-hole Tyler had always said it was. Those first years running with the Lithiums, with Mickey and Pillsbury and Grubs, hell, even Crupps, the shit they’d pulled, laughs they’d had, that was real. The way Big S1m held his daughter. That was real.
What was the kid supposed to do, though? One thing he could have done, Tyler raged, was not inject the fucking recombinant. God dammit! Maybe that’s what life is, a series of consequences for choices. After all, nobody forced Tyler to join the Red Lithiums. Nobody forced him to get JACKK’d. Maybe the boy needed to suffer his own consequence now. Tyler couldn’t let this kid leave here, killing. A killer. The boy had made his choice. He’d left Tyler none.
“This is what Ben will destroy. Even Skimmers love each other. You are only here because your mother gave up two years of being under so she could care for you until you could be ported. Love. For you, Tyler. A sacrifice she was willing to make for a greater good.”
“Mr. Tyler,” the boy whispered, “he killed her. He killed your mom.”
The belly of that lie sliced open and out of it tumbled a truth Tyler couldn’t hide from any longer. All of this, the murderous child, the dead revolutionaries, the man begging for his life, his dead mother, all of it was Tyler’s fault. At no point in his last twenty-seven years had he even once considered another person as anything more than a tool, a path to get what he wanted. And where had that path brought him?
His fault. All of it. Most especially her death. Hers.
He felt the weight of his gun, the weight of the single shot left.
His watch beeped. Fifteen seconds.
“Ben,” Tyler said. A name. At the end, a son deserved to be named. He stared at Malcolm Staern as he said, “I lied to you. My mom didn’t get Culled when I was a kid. It happened two years ago. In Liberty Heights. And it wasn’t me hiding in the oven. It was her.”
He turned to the boy.
“I was the Cull.”
Through the blood roaring in his head, the gunshots in his temples, Tyler could hear sirens approaching, could smell the Veil-filtered air, glassy and cool. The wind chilled his fevered sweat.
“Your mother…” Staern let the words fail.
“Just remember this one thing,” Tyler said. “In life, you can’t call back a bullet.”
And then, for the first time ever, Tyler did something for another person out of a feeling almost akin to love.
He shot Malcolm Staern.
The boy stood over him. He didn’t remember falling. His vision was pinwheeling. The boy helped him to lean up against a ventilation pipe so he was facing the elevator.
“My right pocket,” Tyler whispered.
Ben pulled out Eddie Fars’s credit chip.
“And this.” Tyler unlatched his watch, his fingers fat and stupid at the clasp.
Ben took the watch and buckled it around his own wrist. “Thank you,” he said.
“You’re on your own now.”
“I know.”
“You’ll always be alone.” Tyler couldn’t stem the tears. “I don’t think we were meant to be alone.”
“I’ll never be alone. Until I am. When it’s over.”
Tyler tried to nod, but once his head fell forward he couldn’t lift it again. He slumped sideways and lay there. He could see the back of Ben walking towards the elevator and he listened to the sirens in the city below and he felt the piercing gravel in his cheek, the lazy grind of the bullet against his ribs with his last breaths. He heard his watch’s alarm go off, the boy in the elevator looking at him, waiting for the doors to close.
Tyler Lyle Samson, six years, three months and two days after becoming a JACKK for the LCP military, let out a final sigh.
The elevator exited the building at a private entrance. Privacy. All of that money and power and Mr. Staern used it to make sure he could be alone. Ben walked out onto the street under SLS tower and chose a random direction to start walking. Most of the towers here were for companies, Ben knew, but some of the storefronts had residences above them.
LCP police screamed down the street toward Staern Tower. Ben began running and turned at the next intersection. He was looking behind him and didn’t see the man holding two overloaded nylon bags, trying to use his thumb sensor to unlock his store’s front door. Ben collided into the man’s backside.
“Easy, son,” the man said. His voice sounded like Mr. Tyler’s, deep and dry, but warmer. Kinder. “Lots of commotion tonight,” he said.
Ben said he was sorry for bumping into the man. He met the man’s eyes and tried to smile.
“You
look terrible,” the man said.
“I could use help,” Ben admitted. “I don’t know anyone around here.”
The man smiled at him, then grimaced. He put one of the bags down and rubbed at his chest.
“Come on in,” he said. He took Ben’s hand and walked with him toward the door. “I’m not feeling too great myself suddenly. Let’s get away from this ruckus and I’ll get you cleaned up. I know lots of people around here.”
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