Post-Human Series Books 1-4 (66 page)

“Uh-oh,” Mr. Big suddenly said in an urgent, low tone. “Cops.”

I whirled to see what he was talking about. A police cruiser was making its way down the dark, empty street toward us. The three post-humans were immediately fixated on the cruiser and made sure to walk as inconspicuously as possible away from the bright floodlights of the fountain and toward the nearly black shadow of a nearby hedge.

Haywire stretched her hand out toward me. “Get out of the light...quick!” she whispered urgently.

I backed away from her, shunning her hand as her eyes suddenly became desperate.

“What are you doing?” she called out to me, her whisper harsh.

“Are the police non-person characters?” I asked.

“Mostly, but not always. It’s best to play it safe!”

John and Mr. Big looked equally as desperate, their eyes darting between me out in the open, and the approaching police car. The very fact that they looked so distressed by the police officer was what pushed me to turn my back on them and begin striding down the slight slope of the front lawn of the building, down toward the black, wet street. I heard more desperate whispers emanating from the darkness near the hedge, but they were, indiscernible, almost inaudible. I waved my hands over my head to get the police officer’s attention and, almost immediately, the red and blue lights came to life and began to spin. The car came to a halt in the street as I continued to move toward it.

“Please stay where you are, sir,” came a loudspeaker voice from within the car.

I stopped in my tracks and cocked my head to the side as I tried to peer inside the vehicle. The interior of the car was obscured by the reflection of the dazzling lights, making it impossible to make out anything within. Was there even anyone inside? Was this just another prop? I waited for a few more moments for someone to exit the car, but nothing happened. Out of sheer desperation, I did something stupid.

I took three more steps forward until I reached the car, then I took yet another step right up over the front bumper of the car and onto the hood. I hoped it would provoke a response—a response beyond the capability of a non-person character. I succeeded.

Almost instantly, the police officer exited the car, his taser at his side. My eyes widened in the moment between when I realized what was about to happen and when it actually began. The taser hit me in the thigh before I could protest and the blinding, searing pain caused me to lose control of my body. I remember landing on the hood on my back, hitting my head, and then sliding off of the hood and onto the pavement, head first, unable to protect myself. As if that weren’t bad enough, the next and last thing I felt before the world went black once again was a nightstick against my jaw.

PART 2

1

WAKING UP didn’t end the nightmare; it only made it worse. The light stung my eyes so that water quickly welled in them and trickled down each cheek. The concrete walls of the room were coated in a thick, white paint that reflected the bright,
buzzing
, flickering fluorescents, increasing the harshness of the room. I was on a hard cot and turned slowly and carefully, so as not to exacerbate the full pain of my battered jaw as it shot throughout my skull and down the back of my neck.

Halfway through my turn, I froze, the corner of my eye suddenly filled with a blurred, red smudge. I knew it was
her
immediately. It was
Kali
.

I gulped down my fear and continued the turn gingerly, completing it as Kali’s LED-like eyes stayed perfectly locked on mine, unblinking. I didn’t know what to say. So many questions shot through my mind at once. How much did she know? Was she aware of what had happened? Did she know who I’d been with? Was she working with them, or were they, as they claimed, working against her in secret? Could anyone really keep a secret from God? It was impossible to read those green, electric, luminescent eyes.

“Well? Is it out of your system?” she asked me finally.

“I-I’m sorry,” I replied, my voice muffled by the swelling of my jaw and mouth.

She sighed and mercifully released me from her gaze as she shut her eyes and shook her head. “It’s understandable. I’m not mad.”

I stayed as still as I could, nearly praying that Kali wasn’t toying with me, yet not ready to sigh in relief.

“It was a lot to take in, to say the least,” she said, following it up with a smile. She tilted her head as she looked down at me as though I were a frightened child being spared from the wrath of an understanding parent.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, not knowing what else to say.

She audibly clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth before stepping toward me in her red pumps and her nearly skintight red dress. She crouched in front of me and outstretched her right hand, lightly touching my injured face with her palm, the gentle contact sending a burning sensation where the night stick had done its damage. “I think they broke your jaw.”

“I’ve been unconscious,” I mumbled, trying not to drool.

“Police brutality exists in every universe, I guess,” Kali observed. “Lucky for you, you have friends in high places—or one friend, at least.” She winked at me before smiling, tilting her head back, and closing her eyes.

I watched as her eyes moved rapidly under her lids—it was like watching someone in REM sleep.
Is that what it’s like for her?
I wondered. Was this her dream?

Then, amazingly, the pain in my jaw melted away. Within mere seconds, the agonizing, stabbing pain that had settled in my jawbone withdrew, the swelling of my lips retreated, and the salty, metallic taste of blood from the open wound on the inside of my mouth evaporated. My eyes opened in disbelief, meeting Kali’s as she blinked hers open.

Her smile was beaming and her LED eyes shone with pride. “All better,” she said, as though she was my mother and she’d kissed a boo boo away.

“Oh my God,” I whispered. “It’s true.”

She smiled and nodded. “Of course it’s true.” She reached up and stroked my forehead with her thumb, brushing back a strand of hair. “Your doubt was a prison for your mind. When you think about it, the chances of you being in a simulation were always vastly greater than the chances that you weren’t.”

She was right. I knew exactly what she meant, but as I lay there dumbfounded, she elaborated.

“Either one, almost all technologically advanced civilizations destroy themselves, or two, almost all technologically advanced civilizations are uninterested in simulating human consciousness in sims, or—”

“Or we have to conclude that we are almost certainly in a simulation,” I finished for her. “You’re quoting Nick Bostrom’s paper. I based much of my own thinking on his insights.”

“And your understanding of the eventual outcome of Moore’s Law puts you in a unique position to accept his reasoning,” Kali continued, “yet you still struggled against it.”

She was right about that too. I knew the odds were nearly insurmountable in favor of the possibility that I was already in a sim; I knew that even before Kali had revealed that the sim in which I lived was generated by her augmented brain. Still, I was in denial because I simply did not want to believe it. Her healing of my face clinched it. There was no other way to rationally explain her ability to instantly heal an injury so severe. As difficult as it was to accept, I now knew for sure that I was in a sim. I was living inside Kali’s computer-generated dreamworld.

“You’ve freed yourself from disbelief,” Kali said to me as she stood up. “Come on. There’s nothing wrong with you now.” She held out her hand and helped me to my feet. “You know what they say about all work and no play, Professor. It’s time for us to start having a little fun.”

Wordlessly, a police officer escorted us down a series of corridors. Kali held my hand and walked confidently, half a step ahead of me, occasionally stealing fleeting and mischievous glances over her shoulder. I tried not to show my fear. It became clear as door after door opened for us that the officer who was escorting us, as well as the several we passed in the hallways, were NPCs. I didn’t bring it up to Kali, however, as it was still unclear how much about this sim I was supposed to know.

“I’ve got a surprise for you,” Kali said with a smile as we reached our destination. She gestured with a wave of her hand to a nondescript wooden door as our police escort turned and vacated the scene.

“What is it?”

“Open it and find out.”

I swallowed as I reached out my hand to turn the knob of the door, the fear cramping every muscle in my arm and hand as I did so. The door clicked open and swung to the side, revealing the police officer who had tasered me. He’d been sitting at a wooden table in a wooden, hardback chair, but he rose to his feet the second he saw me, fury painted across his face.

“You think you’re gonna get away with this?” he demanded of me with a sneer.

I furrowed my brow and turned to Kali, who brushed past me into the room. “He’s all yours,” she told me with a wide grin. “You can do whatever you want to him. Beat him to death if you like.”

The officer took a step back, looking aghast at Kali, then at me, and then back to Kali in rapid succession as though he were a cornered animal in the woods, the wolves circling him. “Listen, lady, I don’t know who you think you are, but I’m a cop, and if you so much as—”

“I won’t hurt him,” I said, cutting the officer off.

Kali’s grin became lopsided. “He tasered you even though you weren’t armed. He broke your jaw.”

“I’m aware,” I said, my tongue unconsciously darting out to taste my recently repaired cheek, my mind still unable to completely believe that I was truly healed.

“He did it because he thought he was strong and you were weak. He doesn’t deserve your mercy.”

“Heh,” the officer grunted, amused as he sized me up with his eyes. He pounded a fist into his open hand. “If you wanna take a shot at me, Mr. Rich Guy, you just go ahead. I dare you.”

“Do you know who I am?” I asked him.

“Yeah. I didn’t recognize you last night, but I know who you are now. I gotta say, I’m impressed that you had the balls to grease three cops and get them to lock me up in here.” His upper lip curled. “You really should’ve had them cuff me.”

I turned back to Kali. “If he knows who I am, how are we going to cover this up? This is reckless.”

Kali rolled her eyes slightly and shook her head. “Don’t worry about it. Just punch him. I know you want to. Give him a right cross on the jaw. Get even.”

The officer’s face went from angry to amused in a second. “Right. Listen to your girlfriend. Take your best shot. I pray that you’ll take your best shot.”

“If you make me do it, Kali, I will, but I don’t want to. Am I allowed to refuse?” I turned to her, sincerely asking her for mercy.

The officer’s expression instantly became one of bafflement before returning to amusement. “Son, are you kidding me? You’re
that
whipped? You guys seriously have some kinda
Fifty Shades of Grey
stuff goin’ on here.”

Kali’s expression was a mixture of annoyance and disappointment. I knew defying her was dangerous, and I couldn’t risk pushing too hard. If she gave up on me, the world would end. “He’s just a character in a game,” she said to me. “He hurt you. Why won’t you hurt him back?”

“What the hell?” the officer reacted.

“He’s not just a character. Kali, he’s conscious—like me.”

“Nothing like
you
,” Kali replied. “He’s doesn’t have your potential. He’s too stupid to do anything with his life.”

“Hey!” the officer suddenly yelled out in an absurdly commanding tone, still believing he had some sort of authority in the situation. “Watch your mouth, you dumb bi—”

Kali turned to him with preternatural speed and screamed out in exasperation as she knocked the officer back against the far wall of the room, just as she had done to me when I’d approached her china cabinet at our apartment the evening before. The cop was instantly silenced, though he remained conscious, pinned to the wall, his feet dangling a foot off the ground.

“Kali,” I said quietly, “please don’t hurt him.”

“He hurt you,” Kali replied, fateful determination ruling her tone. I suddenly knew the man was already dead; the act of murdering him was just a formality. “You can’t let anyone have power over you. You’ll have to learn that...and quickly.”

The officer started coming apart. His skin opened up in threadlike fissures at first; these quickly became gaping wounds, leaking and sometimes even jetting blood. There was a brief scream in the moment when he realized what was happening to him—a scream worthy of the realization that he was experiencing his last moments of existence—as though the scream might live on somehow, echoing in the memories of people close enough to hear it while he was helplessly plunged into permanent blackness.

A few seconds later, where there had once been a human being, now there was only a red, dripping, meaty shape stuck to the wall. Kali smiled and sighed in pleasure. “That was satisfying—really satisfying.” She turned to me. “You should try it sometime.”

I winced at the thought.

“Remember, Professor, the only way to truly be happy in this world is to be powerful. The second most powerful person is as big a loser as the weakest. You’ve got to become the alpha. You’ve got to become God. Do you understand?”

I nodded silently.

“Good.” She smiled and took my hand. “Now come with me. I made us dinner reservations and I hate being late.”

I marveled at the sheer scale of Kali’s imagination. We sat together at a small table near the window of Cloud 9, the revolving restaurant atop the tallest hotel in the city. A sky to put Monet to shame blanketed the world in a red hue, painting the usually dark blue and gray mountains and skyscrapers a stunning shade of violet. The beauty made it so that I could hardly breathe.

“What do you think?” Kali asked, barely able to contain her pride as she smiled over the lip of her wine glass and sipped her eighty-dollar glass of Barbaresco red. Usually, I would have balked at her ordering such an excessive beverage, but that was when I thought I was footing the bill for everything and she was taking advantage of my vast wealth. Now I realized that I had no money at all. I had nothing—not even a body.

“I thought you said you’re only happy when it rains,” I observed.

She shrugged slightly as she put her glass down. “I’m trying to be romantic. Cut me a break.”

Her eyes fixed on mine. The room continued to spin ever so slowly, and the setting sun suddenly began to emerge over her shoulder, causing her skin to sparkle. Her face was silhouetted by the beautiful, fading light behind her, but this only served to bring out the flecks of green in her irises even more. I found myself suddenly transfixed by her beauty. It occurred to me that she’d planned the lighting—planned how she would appear to me in that moment. It was like watching an artist create a masterpiece right before my eyes. I sighed with awe. “I appreciate it. It’s more beautiful than anything I’ve ever seen.”

Kali’s mouth opened into a gorgeous, perfect smile. “I almost believe you.”

“Almost? Kali, why would I lie?”

Her upper lip curled up on one side into an almost irresistible, lopsided grin. “Because I could kill you at any moment.”

If I had a soul, in that moment, it turned to ice.

“I don’t want you to flatter me for the purposes of self-preservation,” she added. “I need you to truly fall in love with me. That’s the only way you’ll ever leave this sim.”

“Leave the sim?” My heart nearly stopped.

“Of course,” she said. “That’s the whole point, isn’t it?”

“I-I don’t understand.”

She shook her head, apparently having difficulty comprehending my ignorance. “Haven’t you wondered
why
I made you?”

“I-I...” I’d barely had time to accept the reality of my unreality. Questions as to the why of it all hadn’t yet made it onto my list of priorities.

“Haven’t you wondered how you came to be? Who you are?”

“Who am I?” I asked.

She smiled. “You’re a copy of the love of my life.” Her smile suddenly faded as her gaze moved from mine and drifted toward the skyline behind me. “He...rejected me.” Her eyes darted back up to mine suddenly. “Just like you did.”

I didn’t know how to respond, so I remained silent.

“He was a great man. Perhaps the greatest man who ever lived. In my world—the real world—he’s like a god amongst children. He, more than anyone else alive, brought the technological singularity to life. He willed the future into being.”

Her expression was teeming with admiration for the man—this man of whom I was nothing more than an electronic echo. Surreal would not begin to describe the feeling.

“I didn’t understand his genius,” she said, admitting her own culpability—a rare admission of personal responsibility from a woman I’d always known to be too headstrong to ever admit fault. “I didn’t think he could make his dreams real. I thought he’d fail.” She looked up from her glass of wine and at me. “After all, almost everyone alive fails. How could I have known? How could I know he’d succeed?”

I resisted the urge to comfort her. I stayed perfectly still and considered how lucky the fellow she was describing was—the “me” from the real world.
He’d
escaped Kali. I couldn’t help but admire that decision—and to envy it.

“I watched him rise to fame. I watched as the world recognized his genius. Do you know what that’s like? To be left behind?”

“I can’t imagine,” I answered.

“Of course not,” she replied. “If you could, you wouldn’t have tried to leave me behind, would you? Only a monster would do that.”

I was terrified. No matter how much Kali had advanced her intellect, it was obvious that she was still mentally ill. I kept the conversation moving, petrified of what she might do during any silence that might ensue. “If I’m not him, then who am I?”

“You’re a copy,” she replied. “Most of what you think of as your life are just snippets of memories created by an A.I. Your childhood, your education, your relationship with your family and friends—all of it is just a patchwork of greatest hits taken from the biography of the real you.”

My mouth opened slightly as the waitress brought our meals. I was going to be eating vegetarian pasta—Kali was having veal.

“You don’t believe me?” Kali asked me as the waitress walked away. “Try to remember anything from your childhood. Go ahead. Try to picture it. Anything.”

I searched my memory. Images of Christmas morning flashed through my mind as though they were still photographs; a trip to a national park and another to a lake; my dog staring up at me in the sun.

“Can you remember anything anyone said to you? Can you remember a funny story?”

I closed my eyes for several seconds, trying to conjure anything. In the end, I came up blank. My life had no narrative.

“You’re the best copy I could make,” Kali finally said. “There’s an enormous amount of biographical material on you—news articles, documentaries, and even a Hollywood movie. You know who they cast as the young you? Zac Efron! Can you believe that?”

I shook my head.

“He did a decent job. Anyway, I got my hands on his genome—your doppelganger’s genome I mean, not Zac Efron’s.”

“I gathered.”

“It was easy to get. Anyone can find it online. Combining all of this allowed me to create a virtual copy of you, with his overall brain architecture and the false memories conjured by the A.I. to fill in the gaps and create a person.”

“To create
me
,” I insisted. “
Me.
”

She narrowed her eyes slightly, the smile returning to her mouth. “Yes. You—a new person who could have new experiences—experiences with me.”

“How long?” I asked, barely able to speak. “How long have I been alive?”

“Just under two years,” Kali replied.

I felt faint—I was beginning to hyperventilate.

“Remember to breathe, sweetheart,” Kali said calmly, an amused expression ruling her features.

Just two years—that was all! The rest had been a lie. What was I? Just a copy. A ghost. An electronic memory in the mind of a lunatic. Why was I even fighting for my life? What did I matter? Everything that I’d thought I’d done and accomplished were the accomplishments of someone else. I’d never accomplished a thing.

“When I believe that you love me,” Kali continued, “I’ll make you real. We’ll be married, and we can build the next sim together and live out our lives as gods.”

Gods? This is what Kali was offering me? The chance to leave the sim with her and become real. To become a post-human. But the price of admission was that I had to surrender to her—truly, utterly, permanently surrender.

“Of course, if that’s going to happen, we’re going to need a little more time in the sim,” she said to me as she picked up her glass and took another sip. I noticed a strange, twinkling red light in the glass’s reflection, appearing just over the shoulder of my dark silhouette. It was quickly growing larger. My eyes widened when I realized what it was.

I turned just in time to see the 787 Dreamliner careening toward the skyline of the city, mere blocks from Cloud 9. “No!” I shouted, alerting the other diners, who quickly shared my horror.

The plane’s wing was sheered off by a glass building, sending it into a cartwheel of deafening sound and tangerine explosive fury. It disintegrated as it slammed into the body of yet another building, instantly collapsing half of the ten-story structure.

My palms were flat against the cold glass of the restaurant window that vibrated with the force of the explosion. My eyes were like saucers as I took in the rising black smoke and the dust plume of the collapsed high-rise in that violet twilight. It was instantly clear to me that Kali had timed the crash so we’d be front row center. I turned to her, horrified.

“Hey,” she observed, her expression of pride returning, “it sure beats a movie.”