XOM-B (36 page)

“Stuttering,” I say.

“Dammit,” she grumbles and presses the chip down. The golden prongs slip into her synthetic skin, making several contact points with the transistor mesh. She sets her jaw, closes her eyes and says, “Library.”

Her eyelids flutter for a moment and then snap open. “No…”

She removes the device from her arm, places it back on the table almost as an afterthought because she’s already headed for the exit. “No, no, no…” She repeats the word over and over, stumbling from the room as though in shock.

“Freeman!” Harry says.

Realizing this might be the only opportunity I have to free the others, I quickly pick up the small but powerful memory chip, tuck it into a hip pocket and rush to Harry’s aid. I tug on the metal cable, but it’s too strong to break without putting Harry at risk. I hurry to the table of tools, find a pair of bolt cutters and rush back to Harry’s side, quickly cutting him free.

I move to Luscious next, cutting the cables holding her down. Once she’s free, I help her sit up.

“You’re not upset?” she asks.

“Why would I be upset?”

“I thought you didn’t know,” she says. “What we are.”

“There was never any doubt,” I say with a smile. “We are human.”

Luscious frowns. “Freeman … but, we’re not. Everything she told you is true.”

A flicker of confusion clouds my thoughts for a moment, but then disappears when I see a glint of light reflecting from the wetness beside Luscious’s eyes. I gently place my finger between her nose and eye, wiping away the moisture. I hold my finger up for her to see. “Then why were you crying?”

She stares at my wet fingertip, her jaw slowly opening. She then wipes her other eye and looks at her hand, marveling at the simple expression of sadness.

I kiss her hard on the forehead and then hurry toward the exit.

“Did you say she was crying?” Harry asks, the very definition of befuddled.

I clap him on the shoulder. “See what you can do about Heap. Try to wake him, but be careful. We don’t know what she did to him.”

“You’re going with her?” Luscious asks, as I head past the shelves dividing the two halves of the massive laboratory.

I pause and turn back. “She’s the only one who can stop the virus. I have to stay with her. Get Heap and find a way out.”

I don’t wait for a reply. I just leave, barely noticing the severed limbs and open corpses littering the far side of the lab. My focus is on Hail’s voice, now distant, still repeating the word “no,” over and over.

I slide to a stop in the hall outside the room. To my right, the elevator doors are closed. But I can still hear her voice, faintly, so I know she hasn’t taken the elevator. Turning left, I find a hallway full of doors, but just one of them is in motion. It’s just an inch of movement before it gently bumps shut, but the way Hail’s voice is suddenly silent lets me know that’s where she’s gone.

I hurry down the hall and open the metal door. A stairwell. I stop and listen. I can hear her again, but the direction—up or down—is distorted by the echoing stairs. The bump of a closing door is not.

Down.

I leap down the stairs, allowing gravity to pull me down faster than I could run. I jump down the next set of stairs and whip open the door. It’s a hallway identical to the one above. But it’s empty. She’s not here, and I can’t hear her voice.

Two more staircases later, I reach the bottom floor and pull open the door. Her voice is loud again, “No, no, no…”

I turn left and head down the hall, realizing that she has entered the same room her lab is located in two floors above. The door creaks as it opens, announcing my presence.

Though identical in size, the room on the other side of the door is nothing like the lab above. It’s full of rotting books, ancient-looking machines I think are computers, assorted knickknacks like little wooden elephants, stacks of what I think are magnetic tape media and framed paintings that are overgrown with mold.

Hail stands by the shelves blocking this half of the large space from the other.

“This was my first lab,” she says. “I started down here because it was more secure. Because I didn’t think anyone would find me. But he did.”

I walk slowly closer. “Who did?”

“Mohr,” she says. “He helped me.”

“With the virus?” I ask, terrified.

“Something worse.”

She turns to me, gripped by terror. “I know that we’re enemies. I know that you think I’m a murderer. A genocidal maniac. But I think you also understand why I created the virus, and because of that understanding, show me mercy.”

I step up next to her, looking into the dimly lit space beyond. It’s a lab for sure, more modern than the space we’re standing in, but not as sophisticated as one of Mohr’s labs. There are two operating tables, each holding a body hidden beneath a white sheet. There are tools. A portable computer. It’s bare bones, but it could serve as a functional laboratory for the repair of humans. “What are you asking me?”

“For your help,” she says. “I can’t do this alone.” She looks up at me. “And then I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”

“What do you want me to do?” I ask, feeling the weight of time crushing down on me.

“Just stay with me.”

I nod.

She leads us into the room, slowly moving toward the nearest of the two operating tables. To my surprise, as we near the sheet-covered body, she takes my hand. I give her a squeeze, trying to reassure my enemy that she will be okay and she lets out a deeply sad moan that fills me with feelings of mercy. Here stands a person who endured the end of her people, and was broken by it. I know, without doubt, that Sir is partially to blame for her state and the resulting fallout.

Generational genocide.

Despite the darkness that is the world, I say, “You’ll be okay.”

Her eyes stay aimed toward the floor, avoiding the table that’s now within arm’s reach.

“Do you want to—”

She shakes her head rapidly.

I reach my hand out for the sheet. “Should I?”

She nods subtly. “Go ahead.”

I take hold of the sheet. It feels dry, but soft, perhaps from the layer of dust clinging to it. The sheet pulls away slowly, revealing the body hidden beneath.

I take a step back, letting go of Hail’s hand and the sheet.

“What is it?” she asks, unable to look up.

I don’t want to say. I don’t want to even see it. But there she is, unmistakably dead.

And organic.

Human.

“It’s … you.”

45.

My eyes linger on the shock of orange hair hanging over the ghastly stretched back face with withered white eyeballs. The hair on the back of the skull has been shaved away, the skull removed and emptied of its contents. Hundreds of thin wires lay around the skull, coming together in a box from which a single cable extends and attaches to a portable computer.

“Well, Freeman. It looks like I was wrong,” Hail says, turning her head slowly up toward me. “We’re not different after all.”

I stagger back, feeling confused and defeated. Strangely this discovery means the same thing to both of us. “We’re robots.”

“Sophisticated robots,” she says. “
Android
is probably a better word. Simulations of human beings. But yeah, we’re not alive. Well, you were never alive. I’m actually dead.”

“But…” This is all very confusing. I can feel my core heating up as my mind races to process the information and the emotions it’s creating. “If that is you, then who am I talking to?”

She finds a chair and sits down, covering her eyes with her hands. The sight of her dead self must be overwhelming. Feeling a deep sadness for this person I’m supposed to loathe, I pull the sheet back up over her corpse.

“Thanks,” she says to the floor. After a moment, she slaps her knees and springs back to her feet. “Everything I told you upstairs was true. The plague. Sir. And me retreating here to survive the virus.”

“But you’d already been exposed,” I point out.

She nods. “So I built this.” She motions to her robotic body. “A perfect duplicate of my human body. Skin and muscle were created from casts of my body. My bone structure was duplicated in titanium. Even my hair was recreated with synthetic fibers and colored to match. You’d think I would have noticed that it wasn’t growing.”

“Hair grows?” I ask.

“Human hair does, but that’s hardly interesting compared to what we did next.” Her eyes lose their sullen look. A new sort of energy—excitement—takes hold. “I had two bodies. A human body, which had days to live. And a robot body, that could live indefinitely and survive the virus. The problem was that my mind, my personal operating system and all the knowledge that made me, me, was trapped in a ticking time bomb. But we’d already solved that problem. Already performed the procedure successfully. Do you know what neurons are, Freeman?”

“Cells that transmit electrical and chemical information,” I say. “But we don’t have neurons, we have—”

“Transistors,” she finishes. “Right. So we replaced the neurons in my brain, million by million, with transistors and transplanted ten percent of my mind at a time in case something went wrong.” She laughs to herself. “There was a period of time, about twenty minutes, when fifty percent of my mind was located in two different bodies. While my human body was unconscious, my new body”—she pats her chest and belly—“
this
body could sense the world through both. It was so strange. Surreal. The transfer was obviously a success.”

“But why couldn’t you remember it until now?”

“Because … I was dead. When the procedure was complete, I looked at my human body through my new machine eyes, and knew I was dead, regardless of my intellect living on. I couldn’t handle it. We put in the mental block. Blocked everything. The procedure, the idea for the procedure and everything afterward. It would have been impossible while I was still human, but my thoughts and memories were now just code. Ones and zeros. Easily manipulated. We took everything I didn’t want to remember and compressed it, reducing the bytes and bits into a single folder until they were unnoticeable. Then we encrypted it, jumbling it up in case my mind accidentally came across something that triggered a memory search, like when you mentioned Mohr. After that, it was gone. All of it. My memory of hiding down here disappeared and all I could remember was living and working two floors above. We even inserted a fear of this floor, which is why I’ve never come down here before now.”

“You keep saying
we,
” I say.

“Think I did this by myself? I’m a prodigy, not God.”

I look up at the second operating table. The form under the sheet is taller. More masculine. “It was him?”

“We transferred his consciousness a year prior. Before the awakening. Before the civil rights movement. He was a genius. A … friend. And he was dying. Cancer. The procedure had been deemed unethical and illegal, so we built this lab in the subbasement of this library, which had been closed for ten years. We succeeded and a year later, because of Sir, we performed the same procedure on me.”

“Who is he?” I ask.

She opens her mouth to speak, but pauses. I already know she’s going to close it again.

She does.

I wonder if she did that when she was a being of flesh and blood, but don’t ask.

“I think you should look for yourself,” she says.

The idea of looking at another dead body, another stark reminder that I am, in fact, not a human being as I’d been led to believe, is uncomfortable. But curiosity pulls me toward the table, dragging me with its incessant nag. I won’t be able to leave this room until I know.

I pause by the table, hand on the sheet. Something about this bothers me. “Why am I looking at him?” I ask, but then quickly answer my own question. “Because I’ll
recognize
him.”

Great.

I pinch the sheet between my fingers and pull. The top of a hollowed-out skull is revealed. No wires this time, but it’s clear that the same operation was performed on both bodies. I pull farther, revealing an unrecognizable withered and stretched face.

“I don’t know who this is,” I say with some relief.

“Come on, Freeman,” Hail says. “You’re a smart boy. Extrapolate the data. Reconstruct the physiology. Exercise that future-mind of yours.”

I’ve never attempted anything like this, but understanding what I am somehow makes it easier. I find the subtle clues. Dried muscles. Tendons. Skeletal structure. In my mind … my
imagination
 … I rebuild the man’s face, bit by bit. As the pieces come together, and recognition kicks in, the image quickly resolves. It takes just fifteen seconds to replace the dried husk with the visage of a man I’ve known for my entire short life.

“It’s Mohr,” I whisper.

“He’s…”

“Human,” Hail says. “Was human. Not so much anymore.”

“And this library, it’s … his?”

“Bought and paid for,” Hail says.

The Librarian.
Mohr’s nickname, chosen by himself, was a secret taunt from the beginning. This is all too much. I back away from the table without covering Mohr’s decrepit face. I bump into the table holding Hail’s body and bounce away from it.

“Imagine how I feel,” Hail says.

I imagine we feel very similar. We both believed we were human and now we know we aren’t. The difference is that she now knows exactly what she is, but I’m still not entirely certain. I’m not a human being in the sense that she defines it, but I am not ready to say I am dead … or never lived. Because I feel very much alive. The disgust and fear I’m feeling are real, not simulations. But I don’t mention this yet, not because it will upset her, but because I need to know about my creator.

“Did Mohr know?” I ask. “What you were doing here?”

She meets my eyes.

“About the zombies?” I add. “The virus you were developing?”

She nods. “His idea. We were in it together, human robots behind enemy lines, one arranging robot civilization from the inside, creating weakness and ensuring things like subway tunnels and sewer lines remained open and accessible. For all of his predictive abilities, an attack from an undead robot army is something he would never see coming. Mohr and I created Sir and are ultimately responsible for his actions. We enabled the destruction of the human race. The Xom-B virus was our way of erasing the corruption we created. Like when you write a line of bad code. You don’t just leave it there to corrupt the whole program, you delete it. That’s what the Xom-B virus does … deletes our mistake and lets the program, in this case the planet operate normally, albeit without the human race.