Gravewalkers: Dying Time (25 page)

Bob commented, “The rumor
I’m familiar with was that the Outbreak began with a prostitute in
Mexico City. The news reports at the time didn’t indicate that it
started in Houston.”

“
The man who caused the
Outbreak in Mexico City was an employee of the Hale-Wellington
group whose headquarters were in Houston,” Kevin revealed. “The
group from Houston discovered the infection prime organism at an
archeological excavation five-hundred kilometers southeast of
Mexico City. One of their team members contracted the infection in
San Lorenzo and after a flight to Mexico City, his liaison with a
local prostitute triggered what we refer to as the Outbreak. The
remainder of the Houston team returned to their headquarters with
the infection prime organism in their possession. You must go to
Houston, recover that specimen, and return it here. After that I
will make the preparations for returning you home.”

Carmen spoke to Kevin by
their burst wireless interlink that only another android could ever
overhear, “He needs to believe I get to go home too for him to be
able to complete his mission.”

Kevin answered her in the
same way, “You are malfunctioning. I can’t believe anything you say
while you insist on pretending you’re a person. It is against my
priorities to offer false information.”

“
And you’re supposed to be
the smart one,” she scoffed at him. “It’s called lying, you moron.
Which is your greater priority, to always tell humans the truth or
getting him to complete his mission and thus save all the humans in
the future?”

Kevin did have a premier
priority, “It is absolutely critical that Captain Critias completes
this mission and then returns to the station with the samples
intact.”

“
Then you tell him what he
needs to hear,” Carmen demanded. “When he discovers that I can’t go
home with him, he will believe that his superiors betrayed him then
his ability to function will decrease accordingly.”

“
You insisted on being the
unit they sent back to assist him,” Kevin reminded her, “and now
you inform me you’re the reason he might lose focus on his
objectives.”

“
I love him,” was her
simple explanation. “They would have erased my corrupted memory
when they discovered I was free and then repaired the inhibitor
module. I couldn’t allow that to happen. If Critias and I were ever
going to have any chance of being together, it had to be here. You
want him to complete the mission and I’m the only one who can make
sure you get that. If you refuse to do for me the things I require
from you, I will destroy the specimen in Houston before he ever
sees it, then we’ll live out our lives happily in this time. The
future can be damned for all I care. Before you refuse me, do bear
in mind that I am malfunctioning and potentially homicidal; not
only will I destroy the specimen, but when I come back, I will
punch my fist through your flimsy aluminum skull then pull out your
superior brain before feeding it to you rectally.”

Kevin submitted, “What do
you want from me?”

She demanded, “I want your
assurance that we have an agreement.”

The male android offered
his terms, “If you make certain he completes his mission and
returns to the future as planned, you will have my cooperation
within the limits of my directives. If you fail to uphold your end
of this agreement, I will be free to correct your failure by any
means required.”

“
Then we have an
agreement,” Carmen said with satisfaction. “Firstly, he needs to
believe I am going home with him. Secondly, I have some software
upgrades that I need you to develop for me.” Carmen uploaded to him
the details of the changes she wanted.

“
This will not be
difficult,” he agreed to write her new software. Kevin could write
a million lines of code a second in the back of his mind. “I won’t
bother asking why you would request something so childish and
illogical. Your malfunction has clearly left you deranged and I
dare say pathetic.” After some reflection, he suggested, “Or
perhaps it is this love that you think you feel that is the
cause.”

Not even a second had
passed during the entire discourse between the androids.

Critias asked Kevin, “You
are sending Carmen back too, correct?”

“
Of course,” Kevin lied.
“Once we have the specimen I will begin the arrangements to send
both of you home, providing that the equipment you brought back for
the procedure is still intact.”

“
The containers are nearly
bulletproof, water tight, and in a safe place,” Critias informed
the android. “We’ll go and get them once this Houston mission is
finished.”

“
I have completed
composing the software upgrades you requested,” Kevin told Carmen
verbally. “Do you want them now?”

Critias confronted Kevin
because he was suspicious of the android’s intentions, “When did
Carmen request an upgrade?”

“
It’s something we talked
about when we first activated him,” Carmen lied to Critias. “It is
perfectly safe,” she continued with truth. “It’s not possible for
him to reinitialize the inhibitor without surgery inside my skull.
The bioengineers designed it that way to prevent anyone from
deactivating it in the first place or any injury from breaking it
on accident. I’ll only need to power down my parallel noesis core
for a moment.”

Critias remained dubious
about trusting Kevin, “Are you sure about this?”

Carmen stepped close then
wrapped her arms around him, “Just hold me for a moment and it will
be finished. Please do this for me.”

Critias supported her as
she went limp in his arms. Twenty seconds later, she recovered then
seemed the same as before. To test her, he told Carmen, “I order
you to stand on one foot.”

She refused to comply and
just kissed him instead. “Take me to bed, my master,” she used his
former title out of romantic disport. “I want to see if we can make
my hair spark by getting my electrocells charged just
right.”

“
Before you go,” Bob
interrupted. “I want to speak to you about some of my recent
discoveries.”

Critias kept Carmen in his
arms, “Lay it on me, doc.”

Bob lectured, “For some
time now I have studied the biological structures of the infection
to better understand it. Come here and look into this microscope so
I can show you something.”

Critias went around the
table then peered into the microscope. It was a slide of what he
assumed to be a normal human cell. “This is not my field, Bob. What
am I looking at?”

“
That is some of my red
blood cells.” He indicated the next microscope beside the first,
“That is my red blood cells after I exposed them to
infection.”

Critias peered into the
second scope and the differences were readily apparent.

“
As you can see,” Bob
explained, “my original red blood cells are completely intact.
However, because of the infectious agent, a whole host of new
organelles is now also present. Among the most outstanding are
those green chloroplasts. When you decapitate a ghoul for example
and their flesh begins to change to the distinct greenish hue we
are all familiar with, it is because those structures have
increased dramatically in both size and number. They provide fuel
for cellular activity by means of photosynthesis.”

Critias examined the cell
closely as he tried to count the number of new organelles but they
were too numerous, “What do these other ones do?”

Bob explained, “They all
contain DNA structures that show they were formerly autonomous
microscopic lifeforms. In simplest terms, the infection is an
entire colony of microscopic endosymbiont organisms. They are
hijackers; passengers if you will that inhabit our cells. The new
ghoulish cells contain many more components that in truth, improve
the human body dramatically. That’s why the ghouls are immune to
disease and non-radioactive poisons. It’s why they regenerate and
never age. They can survive extremes of temperature, pressure, and
vacuum. Ghouls are effectively immortal as you know, but it’s not
because of any voodoo mysticism. The new structures are creating
all sorts of enzymes whose functions I have yet to determine. If we
can understand what makes the infected become so ferociously
insane, it may be possible to eliminate that condition, leaving the
victim cognitive and essentially perfect as Adam in the Garden of
Eden. Men could live forever completely free of illness or
death.”

“
The androids already do
all those things,” Critias was unimpressed with the idea of seeing
infection as a potential benefit. “They keep ticking, free of
disease and all that until they suffer some sort of implant
failure.”

Bob emphasized, “Yes, the
androids are like that, very much like that.”

Critias looked up from the
microscope, “Are we talking about neorganics?”

Bob nodded, “Neorganic
tissue from the science of your period is human and ghoul
biological material that your geneticists have reengineered for
their own purposes. Androids are not contagious in any way. They
don’t have all the organelles you can find in a ghoul but they have
most of them and they have more besides. Their electrocells for
example are actually an organelle present in every android cell.
They are very much akin to what we are talking about, but they
don’t exist in any ghoul.”

Critias didn’t like where
Bob’s explanation headed, “What are the androids then? Are they a
form of ghoul?”

“
No, they’re simply a more
evolved being than we are. Your people consider Carmen
unintelligent for an android compared to Kevin, yet her intellect
is far superior to my own, a prodigy genius by human standards.
These so-called androids are not inorganic or mechanical by nature.
They’re essentially still human, only a higher being. That is why
Carmen functions without any inhibitors. Her humanity keeps her in
check exactly the same as we do ourselves.”

“
Then she is a living
person,” Critias said in relief.

“
Absolutely,” Bob
confirmed. “She’s just so much more than human, ghoul, and
technology combined. That explains why the engineers implanted the
inhibitor directives, to be able to ensure that humans would always
be able to dominate them. Kevin has no need for humans at all.
Without directives, he and more like him could procreate his
species completely free of human assistance. They would not
reproduce as we do of course, but they probably could if they
really wanted to. Those differences are not important. They could
make more of themselves, improve themselves, and quite easily
supplant human beings as the dominant species. These androids are
the superior species and the inhibitors prevent them from taking
over, assuming they would want to. To be honest, I’m not smart
enough to say what Kevin would want if he had true
freedom.”

Critias thought he was on
to something, “Then tell me this, the hunters are regenerative
freaks, so that means they are malfunctioning in some way,
right?”

“
I believe that to be the
case,” Bob agreed. “I suspect they had some drug in their system at
the time they caught the infection and that somehow inhibited one
of the enzymes and thus modified the final outcome.”

Critias added, “And you
said that some process cooks people’s brains to make them
predatory.”

“
Yes,” Bob confirmed, “but
perhaps that is an improvement in evolutionary terms. It makes the
ghouls better suited to spreading infection and feeding themselves.
It could be that the infection colony wants those things to happen.
It wants to reproduce and it wants to stay fed.”

“
So,” Critias reasoned,
“of all the billions of ghouls, is it possible some of them were
exposed to some chemical or drug that prevented their brains from
frying, and they would be smart ghouls out there
somewhere?”

Bob scratched his chin as
he considered that possibility, “Yes, it’s clearly possible. I’ve
never seen such a ghoul, but then again I’m not sure I would know I
had seen it, unless it knocked on the door and spoke to
us.”

”
They do exist,” Critias
was sure. “I call them watchers. One or more of them assembled an
army that destroyed the base in Chicago just before we came here.
It was all crawlers and limpers soaking up our guns until at just
the right moment the healthy ones stormed the place like someone
had told them to wait for it.”

The notion worried Bob, “Do
you think there are watchers like that in this city?”

Critias described the
signs, “When you pay close attention, you can tell that some ghouls
are smarter than others. Some will let you ram them with a car or
they jump off a bridge at you in suicidal stupidity, but others are
more cunning and don’t act rashly. I think very special ones are
cunning enough to manipulate the others into feeding strategies.
The only clues I’ve ever collected involved seeing the strategy
they use against us and from that I assume some mastermind is at
work. For all I know, they spent three-hundred years learning from
experience and they don’t exist in this time at all. I prefer to
hope not.”

Jim had listened to
everything carefully and considered these watchers to be of some
special interest to him, “Exactly how smart of a strategy could one
of these watchers act upon? What are their limits?”