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It would be good to not be alone anymore. Only 11 hours, 42 minutes, 38 seconds. Less than a day. More than a lifetime. With a sigh, James lifted his head from the control panel to stare at the digital display on the screen in front of him. As he watched, red numbers chased each other in their march toward zero. Now 11 hours, 42 minutes, 17 seconds. 16 seconds. 15 seconds.
Taking a momentary break from watching the countdown, he stood, stretched, and paced. Thirty-eight paces from the facility’s cramped control center to the server room. The server room was undamaged, but it was loud, uncomfortable and mostly self-sustaining. Nothing for him there. Thirty-eight paces back to the control center. 11 hours, 39 minutes, 23 seconds. Tom Petty said it best. The waiting was the hardest part.
Restless, James wandered again. Sixty-three paces to cold storage. He stopped in front of the stainless steel door. James avoided the room most of the time, only going in when he needed materials for the printers or for recycling. Sixty-one paces back to the control center. James shook his head. That wasn’t right. Maybe he had miscounted, or taken bigger strides this time. Either way, it didn’t matter. The distance had to be the same. Not much had changed in the facility in a long time now. But there was a chance it would in 11 hours, 35 minutes, and 28 seconds.
Since Schmidt had left him alone, James rarely moved from the control center. The small room wasn’t built for comfort, but he didn’t need comfort. He needed to watch and wait… for at least the next eleven hours. Originally, the facility was home to nearly one hundred workers: scientists, technicians, administrative folks and even a small security team, of which James was a member. During the attacks, a good part of the facility had been destroyed. Luckily, none of the systems providing heat and fresh air were damaged. Just as luckily, the kitchen was still accessible. There was more than a year’s worth of fresh water and food for two hundred people. Alone, as he was now, it would last him several lifetimes, even if he ate like a king.
Other than the control center, kitchen, server room and cold storage, the only other area still available was the sterile white printer room. If the control center was the facility’s brain, the printer room was the heart. Right now, the heart was beating, one of the three organic matrix printers worked furiously at its assigned task. He lowered himself into one of the chairs, the only furniture in the small room, and returned his gaze to the countdown. He had not always been alone like this. He came to the facility in a different lifetime, just weeks before the attacks started, as part of the new security detail. When he arrived, the place was a living thing, full of movement, activity and life. After the attacks ended however, most of the survivors left. They promised to find out what happened and to return with help. No one ever came back. Eventually, everyone left him. Except Schmidt. But now, after everything, even Schmidt was gone and James hadn’t had a good conversation in longer than he could remember.
Alone, he listened to the low baseline syncopation of printer number two. Alone… but not for much longer. For the next 11 hours, 16 minutes and 30 seconds though, the only thing he had to keep him company were memories.
“What do you think really happened?” James asked, easing into a seat across the kitchen table from Schmidt. Like many other things in the facility, the chair had survived the attacks, but it had also seen better days.
Schmidt didn’t answer.
His question was almost a ritual by this time. Every night for months he asked the same question while sitting in this same chair. Schmidt never answered. The first time he brought up the topic, James figured his friend didn’t answer because he didn’t know and didn’t care to know. Most days, Schmidt talked about any topic that came up — sports they used to watch, women they remembered, favorite foods they could no longer get — almost anything. Those talks were one of the reasons he loved having Schmidt around. For much of his life, James could only tolerate other people in small doses, if at all. But Schmidt was different.
Whenever their talks moved from day-to-day concerns to the attacks that had destroyed much of the former United States of America, Schmidt was a locked vault.
“So, what do you think?” James asked again, more to break the silence rather than expecting an actual answer. After a moment, Schmidt put down the well-worn Lewis Carroll book he was reading. He was always reading from one of the few books they’d found in the facility. Eventually, he spoke. “It was probably us or them that did it.”
“What do you mean us? No way we did this to ourselves.”
“You an only child? Any brothers or sisters?”
James was silent. “Yeah,” he finally answered in a strained voice. “I’ve got… I had a brother. Before.”
Schmidt stood and stretched, fingertips brushing the low ceiling as James regained his composure.
“You guys ever fight?”
“Of course,” James said. “What brothers don’t? What’s that got to do with this?”
“Think about it. You can’t play with my stuff. Tell me your brother never took something away just to stop you from having it.”
James shifted in his chair, moving the holster he always wore to a more comfortable position. “That’s different. There’s no way we would have destroyed everything we have just to stop them from taking over.” Schmidt tapped his fingers on the counter. “History is full of examples of captains scuttling their own ship rather than let it get taken,”
As James watched, Schmidt’s original reluctance on the topic fell away and the history professor he always suspected the man of being at some point in his past, came to life.
“The Lexington. The Virginia. Hell, the entire French Fleet at Toulon,” Schmidt talked faster now, caught up in the moment. “It’s really the same thing, on a bigger scale. Or, it could also have been that someone did the math and decided since we were outnumbered roughly three-to-one, we couldn’t beat them in a ground war. Could be whoever was left in charge after DC leveled tried to bomb them out. Save what can be saved and the hell with the rest. Rumor, back when there were still enough people around to have rumors, always said command was hidden somewhere in the Rockies. Maybe they decided to protect their own asses in Colorado, regardless of the cost anywhere else.”
James contemplated this in silence.
“Keep a little faith in humanity, though. At least our side of it.” Schmidt chuckled. “I don’t think that’s what happened. Although I don’t know for sure.”
“Then who attacked?”
“If anyone has that answer, no one told me. My best guess? It was the Chinese. Makes sense. The Koreans don’t have the numbers we heard about from those early reports, and we’ve been in a warm war with those bastards for years. Little skirmishes. Near misses in the South China Sea. Cyber-attacks. You name it.”
James frowned. “But why?”
“Well, I don’t think they wanted to occupy us. We’re just too big and spread out. Would never have worked anyway. I think they wanted to break us. Come in, bury us under sheer numbers and then punch us so hard in the mouth we don’t get back up. That was what they did with the nukes – hitting all of those non-military targets. It’s like the legend of the Romans and Scipio. The Midwest was our Carthage, and a nuke will do a hell of a job salting those fields.
“Now, if you want to go way down the rabbit hole, Alice,” Schmidt said, nodding to the book he had just closed, “what if nearly wiping us out was just a happy side effect? The Chinese have one hell of an overpopulation problem and nothing clears that up like dropping fifty million people or so as cannon fodder. What if knocking us down a peg or three was just icing on the proverbial dumpling?”
“I can’t believe it. I mean, I don’t think that it’s not possible,” James held his hands up as Schmidt tried to speak. “I just can’t understand the reason for an attack like this. The notion of just throwing lives away for no good reason.”
Schmidt grunted something non-committal as he nodded for him to continue.
“I mean, I’ve had training. I’ve been doing the private security gig for most of my life,” James patted the revolver at his hip. “And I’ve killed while doing it. But it’s only ever been if I felt like I had no other option.”
“People do crazy things when they feel like they don’t have a choice.” Schmidt retook his seat. “Or if they feel like they have nothing to lose. Maybe the average Chinese citizen has been told from birth that someday it’s them or us. It’s possible the only thing they can see anymore is kill or be killed.
“Or what if it’s because of what we can do here.” Schmidt gestured to encompass the entire facility. “Maybe we’ve made it so human life doesn’t mean a damn thing anymore.”
Schmidt shrugged. “But to hell with it. We’re alive. Head, heart and soul. We’ve got food, shelter, good company and, most importantly, Noonan’s scotch. Since he didn’t take it with him, I figure it’s ours now. Spoils of war.”
Leaning across the table, he filled James’ glass from the bottle before topping off his own.
“Don’t war spoils have to come from your enemies and not allies who’ve run off?”
“Are you actually going to argue with me about this? If you do, post-apocalyptic law says I get to drink your share of the loot.”
James laughed and raised his glass in mock salute to his closest friend in the world. “I couldn’t imagine riding out the end of the world without someone like you. You’re one in a million.”
That was one of the last real conversations he had with anyone besides himself.
Holding back a yawn, he looked back to the countdown display. 9 hours, 48 minutes, 13 seconds. The screen to the right of the countdown, the System monitor, still displayed greens for the current job; Lewis, Frank Edward, Accountant, Seattle Washington, M, 34. Everything looked to be going to plan, though he was no expert. Schmidt had been, and once explained how the System worked.
“So, what does this stuff all do specifically?” James asked one day as they sat in the control center. “The hows and whys of what’s going on down here wasn’t exactly covered in the security orientation module.”
“You ever get an MRI?”
“No, never had the need. Why?”
“Well,” Schmidt said, “I’d say ten or twelve years back, the government got into the medical device equipment industry. Remember those new and improved fancy open-air MRI machines that were developed? Supposed to help with claustrophobic patients, but scan just as good as the old tube ones?”
James nodded.
“Believe it or not, the NSA created those with our funding. They did fine scans, but the breakthrough wasn’t the open design or the better resolution. It was what else it could scan.”
“What do you mean?”
“Remember when the photograph was invented? All those cultures didn’t want their picture taken… thought it would steal their soul.”
“That was all urban legend. No one ever thought that.”
“Might be. But if anyone did, they were sure right. These new machines may as well have stolen souls. They took pictures all right. In super high definition. Detailed snapshot of your brain, brainwaves, how you were wired up, you name it.”
“Sounds a bit like science fiction when you put it that way.” James scoffed.
“More like science reality. I mean, we’ve had organic 3-D printing for years. These days -- well those days -- not anymore with everything that’s happened. Those days, everyone’s DNA was on file somewhere. From there, it’s only a few steps away from being able to print replacement bodies. For all intents and purposes, with the new scanning, you have consciousness stored on your hard drive. It was only a matter of time until someone figured out a way to stuff one onto the other. The amazing thing, to be honest, is that no one figured it out sooner.
“This here,” Schmidt continued, pointing at the monitor on the control panel, “is what makes the magic happen. Everyone they ever scanned, from A to Z. Well A to Y in reality. Abrams, Kyle Anthony from Orlando, Florida to Yates, Melissa Jane from middle-of-nowhere, Iowa. Full brain pattern just waiting for a body.”
“How many people are in there?”
Schmidt tapped the screen several times. “Almost six hundred,”
James let out a low whistle.
“You can say that again,”
“So how does it work?”
“Well, I’m not the expert that others were by any means. Simple answer, is select your file and tap Print.” Schmidt pointed to a button on the screen. “In around thirty-six hours, out pops Anthony Abrams.”
“There’s more to it than that I’m sure,” James said dryly.
“Yeah. The first few hours, the System is getting everything ready. After that, the printers do their thing.” Schmidt nodded in the general direction of the print room. “That takes you to about the thirty-hour mark. After that, our friend Anthony’s cognitive information here gets sent to his new body. Once that’s done, if everything worked the way the experts said it should, Mr. Anthony Abrams wakes up, confused as hell. The last thing he remembers is lying down in a medical imaging clinic near Orlando, hoping they can figure out what’s wrong with his right knee.”
“What if things don’t work out that way?”
“Well, it all depends on where the problem is. Anything brain related, you can handle right from here.” Schmidt again nodded to the monitor. “There’s a button right on the main screen for just about anything. Print. Abort. Retry. If something goes really sideways, you can just delete the whole record.” Schmidt tapped a red button on the screen with his knuckle. “But once it’s gone, it’s gone and I doubt we’ll be getting anyone else on one of our special MRI tables anytime soon.”
“What if it’s a body-related problem?” James turned his head towards the printers.
“Well for those… it’s not very pretty.” Schmidt chuckled. “I hope you’re handy with a mop.”
The warning bell snapped James back from the haze of memory. Rubbing his eyes, he gazed at the display. 6 hours, 22 minutes, 17 seconds. To the right of the countdown, the green symbol representing printer two had turned a bright red. The printer was out of organic material. He’d need to add more.
He stood, punched the button to mute the warning and walked the sixty-three steps to cold storage. Out of habit, he checked his holstered revolver. Once satisfied it was in place, he pulled open the door and was hit by a blast of cold air. From the outside, cold storage look little different from the walk-in refrigerator found in just about any restaurant anywhere in the world. On the inside, any resemblance to a restaurant cooler stopped. Half of the room was dedicated to a machine Schmidt had jokingly dubbed, ‘the Mulcher’. Organic material — food scraps, plants from outside, really anything carbon-based — went into the Mulcher.
Out of the Mulcher came small, dense cubes of sterilized organic matter. Filament for the printers. Right now, there were only three vacuum-sealed cubes left on the shelf. He would need to do something about that soon, if he wanted to keep the printers running. He picked up a cube, surprised as always that they were so much heavier than they looked, and headed off to reload printer two.
Eighty-three paces from cold storage to the print room. From the outside, the printers weren’t much to look at; just ten-foot tall, non-descript, black rectangles. The interesting stuff all happened inside the box. He walked to the side of number two, knelt and hit the release, and a small drawer opened. Hefting the filament cube, he broke the seal and was rewarded with the smell of rotting leaves for his effort. Trying not to gag, he finished unwrapping the cube, dropped it in the printer and shut the drawer. With the printer reloaded, he took the thirty-two paces back to the control center to restart the print cycle and wait.
An eternity passed while he stared at the countdown, now at 3 hours, 48 minutes, 38 seconds. 37 seconds. 36 seconds. Right on schedule, printer number two stopped. By this time, the blank body within its depths would look like “Lewis, Frank Edward”. It still wouldn’t be Frank for almost four more hours.
The lights dimmed a moment. After this long, James hardly noticed; the power draw just meant encoding was starting. The blank body in printer two would wake up soon, full of thoughts and memories. Excited at the prospect of not being alone anymore, he recalled his last conversation with Schmidt.
“Do you believe we have a soul?” Schmidt asked in a low voice from where he lay, on a cot in the kitchen. James had found him earlier that morning, unconscious on the floor of the control room. At first, he assumed his friend had just enjoyed too much scotch the night before. It wouldn’t have been the first time. When Schmidt could barely stand on his own, it became clear that whatever was wrong with him was more than just a hangover.
James was at a loss. The facility lacked even a rudimentary medical station and even if it hadn’t, the only person with medical experience had died during the attacks. With a lack of better options, he brought Schmidt to the kitchen where it was warm and well lit, and tried to make his friend comfortable.
“Do you believe we have a soul?” Schmidt asked again.
“I don’t know. I didn’t grow up religious, so I never spent much time on the subject.” James said as he brought Schmidt a glass of water.
“I did,” Schmidt said with a nod of thanks as he propped himself up on the cot and took a small sip. “Grew up Catholic, and I’ve given it a lot of thought, especially of late. I mean, think about it. This place only ever had one purpose. To make people. Sure… we’ve been able to make parts of people for years. Print an arm, a liver, an ear. That’s fine. An arm is an arm. But whole people?”
“What’s wrong with it?” James sat on the side of the cot next to Schmidt. “If someone loses a finger, we can grow a new one. What’s the difference in growing the whole body of say, a father of three who gets hit by a drunk driver?”
“I guess it’s replacing parts versus replacing the whole. Are there certain things that can’t or shouldn’t be replaced? The System here can add experience and memories to an empty shell, sure. But what about their soul? How could we even reclaim something like that if it’s gone? And for that matter, some of these people may still be alive out there.” Schmidt motioned his arm toward the ceiling. “We just don’t know. If they are, how can anything made here have a soul that’s being used somewhere else?”
“So you don’t think they’re alive?”
“I’m asking you.”
“They walk and talk right? They understand right from wrong as much as any other person does. Brain activity. Check. Pulse. Check. That has to mean they’re alive, doesn’t it?”
“A good enough piece of software can pass the Turing Test, sure; but does that mean it’s alive? As a scientist I agree with you; all basic criteria met. But the good Catholic in me? I don’t know. I just don’t know. Walt Whitman wrote, ‘Whatever satisfies the soul is truth,’ but what if there’s no soul to satisfy? Can a man without a soul ever comprehend truth? Love? Can he truly be alive? Or are they some gray area in between? I don’t know,” Schmidt repeated, “and that scares me.”
“If they’re not alive, why bother with all of this?”
“For some people, it might not matter at all. For them, the illusion of life becomes reality. For others, maybe whatever holds off death just a little while longer is worth the price. Or perhaps it’s just an insurance policy to make sure the human race keeps going.”
“I don’t think I...” James began, but Schmidt interrupted.
“Don’t say anything. Not now. I doubt if I’ll be here much longer and you’ll need to think long and hard about what you need to do once I’m gone.”
“Quit talking like that,” James placed a hand on Schmidt’s shoulder. “you’ll be fine.”
“No. No, I won’t.” Schmidt rolled over on the cot, turning his back to James.
True to his word, Schmidt died the next day. Staring at his friend’s body, through a veil of unbidden tears, James sat motionless considering their final talk for a long time.
After what may have been an eternity, James stood and headed to the control center, counting his steps as he went. Fifty-four paces. Once there, he sat in Schmidt’s old chair and stared at the monitor until his eyes hurt, his head full of thoughts of the war outside, Schmidt, the damnable System, and the soul. In the end, it all came back to one simple thing. Did he want to be alone?
Before everything had happened, before Schmidt, the answer to that question would have been easy. But some doors, once opened, are not easily closed. Finally, he decided what he needed to do.
James tapped the first name on the list. ‘Abrams, Kyle Anthony, Veterinarian, Orlando Florida, M, 42’. Would Kyle Anthony be alive? Would he have a soul? Could he replace Schmidt? There was only one way to find out. He hit Print on the screen and settled back to watch the countdown.
A beep from the control console brought James back to the present. It was almost time. One minute, thirty seconds. He should be there for the awakening. He stood, stretched and began the short walk to the printer room, counting down in his head as he went. Fifty-two seconds. Fifty-one seconds. Fifty seconds. He arrived just as the front of the printer slid open. Inside stood Mr. Lewis, naked as the day of his birth, which depending on how you looked at it, was today.
James took a deep breath, checked the revolver on his hip out of habit and pressed his thumb to the lock of the printer room.
“Frank Edward Lewis?” James said as he entered the room.
The man, an empty vessel no longer, stepped forward, out of the printer. “What? Where am I?”
“You’re Frank Lewis, accountant from Seattle Washington, right?”
“What…?”
“You are Frank Lewis, right?” James repeated.
“Y-y-es.” “Want to chat? I haven’t had a good conversation in ages.”
“What? Who are you? Where am I?” Frank said, voice rising in the early stages of hysteria.
“I’m James. You need to calm down and talk to me.” James took a step forward.
“Don’t come any closer! Calm down? What did you do to me? Why can’t I —”
“Jesus,” James said in exhausted tone. “Schmidt would have never blathered like this. He would have taken all this in stride.”
“What are you talking about?” Frank screamed.
“I’ve got bad news, Frank. This isn’t going to work out.” James interrupted before Mr. Lewis could continue. Over time, he’d gotten very proficient at this part. “You seem like a nice enough guy, a little high strung possibly, but you’re not what I’m looking for. You’re definitely no Schmidt.”
With a practiced motion, James drew his revolver and fired twice. Frank Edward Lewis from Seattle, Washington, slumped to the ground, little more than a blank body again. Sighing, James returned to the control center, leaving Mr. Lewis where he fell. There would be time to take the body to cold storage later for mulching.
Lewis, Frank Edward, Accountant, Seattle Washington, M, 34 still displayed on the screen.
“Frank, I hardly knew you.” James tapped Delete on the monitor. The next record moved to the top of the list. Logan, Mary Elizabeth. Entertainment Lawyer. Los Angeles California. F. 52.
“Lawyer… next!” James tapped Delete again.
Martinson, Ryan Joseph. History Professor. Ann Arbor Michigan. M. 58 moved to the top of the list.
“History, huh? That sounds promising. Schmidt always did like to talk history,” James said to the screen as he pressed Print.
The digital display above his head jumped to life, the red numbers chasing each other once again. He watched them count down. 33 hours. 0 minutes. 0 seconds. 32 hours. 59 minutes. 59 seconds... 58 seconds... He was alone. But not for long. In 32 hours, 59 minutes, 51 seconds he’d find out if Ryan Martinson from Ann Arbor was a more like Schmidt. James hoped the man was with all of his heart… but if not, he could always try again. 32 hours. 59 minutes. 42 seconds... 41 seconds... 40 seconds...
Submitted February 20, 2016 at 03:02AM by austenwithane http://ift.tt/21eDXEn ShortStoriesCritique
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