Designer considerations also cause one to question what is really human. When synthetic bodies can be customized to any appearance, including gender or race, such distinctions lose all meaning. Perhaps they never had any to begin with.
Arnon D’Bvaym
“THE BOY HAS been given a sedative?” Hannah asked. This time, she stood before Id in a cramped room with a glass wall and metal chairs shoved against the walls. Judging from the dust on them, the chairs hadn’t been used in ages. On the other side of the glass wall, a woman was strapped to a metal operating table.
He’s not the one we wanted, Id responded. She was suspended in the air in front of Hannah, nose nearly touching the glass, staring at the woman on the operating table. Her breathing was so shallow that she didn’t even fog the glass. She turned just enough that she could glare at Hannah out of the corner of her one good eye, an action married with the sound of metallic slithering as the column that extended from her back into the darkness above shifted position. You failed to bring me the core processor. Now I need to decide what to do with the elder and this . . . surprise acolyte. Another time. I have work to do.
As Id spoke, metal arms dropped from the ceiling on the other side of the glass. One, bearing a needle, injected the woman’s leg, while another, bearing a spinning sawblade, began cutting into the woman’s forehead. Within moments Hannah could hear the grinding of bone.
Hannah ignored the operation—Id was preparing a new Enlightened . . . or a mere rozie, if the rest of her flock was anything to judge by.
“I wish to speak with the boy,” Hannah said.
Don’t distract me. This work is delicate, Id said. Her eyes remained fixed on the woman as the saw circled her head, slowly removing the top of her skull.
“You are the reason that I did not find the core processor. You promised the Divinity that this settlement contained two technomancers, an elder and a younger, and that the younger was whom we sought. Well, I brought back exactly that, two technomancers, an elder and a younger, and you blame me that we don’t have the core processor. Let me speak with the boy. Perhaps you miscounted the number of technomancers living there, or failed to analyze the boy properly. I may be able to learn things that will—”
The sawing stopped; Id turned again, her brows furrowed, and stared at Hannah. Your miserable master will chastise me regardless of what happens next. The only reason that boy is alive is because he might distract that false prophet while I make some decisions.
For the first time in recent memory, Hannah felt shock; it was like a single firework had exploded within the empty cavern within her, echoing endlessly. Had she said false prophet?
I refuse to be taken back to the Gates of Heaven, and I also have no interest in giving up my little kingdom here should I lose his favor. He doesn’t represent God—if there even is one—he’s just a petty tyrant seeking to control the minds and wills of all, not just rozies. I hate him. So we wait. Waiting has always proven effective in making him change his own mind. If needs be, we make problems happen, further delays. Id turned back to the operating room. Another arm with very slender fingers that could rotate in every direction lowered from the ceiling, the fingers ready to slip into the gap sawed between the top of the woman’s skull and the rest of it. Hannah knew they would prepare the brain within for removal and transport to her new shell.
“You shouldn’t share these things with me. You know I will need to speak to the Divinity about this,” Hannah eventually said.
Id’s reflection smirked back at Hannah. Oh, I know that all too well. But it was nice having someone to speak to that can actually understand the depth of what I’m saying. Prophet likely already suspects my thoughts, anyway—he has spies hidden everywhere in the software of my factory. I am useful, for now. A moment later, the saw finished removing the top of the skull and the woman’s brain was slowly extracted, then placed in a gray box and carried from the room. Id looked at Hannah through the reflection on the glass wall again. It will be many more hours before this one’s shell is finished. Making the brain wait will encourage greater insanity.
Hannah moved to leave the room, but a wall slid out of the floor, barring her exit. She looked back at Id. “I am a servant to the Creator’s one true prophet. Let me leave.”
Of course, of course, Id said. I just can’t let you remember what you heard.
Pain exploded within Hannah’s skull, filling the entirety of her emptiness.
#
WHAT LITTLE CONVERSATION 64Bit and Kayla had before died away as they hiked closer to Fort. It had been easier to ignore the smoke and wet-ash scent in the air from farther off, 217
or to imagine that it had come from somewhere else. The relative quiet of the forest wasn’t foreboding when they were too far away to hear the natural noise of the settlement anyway. A few hours before, Kayla had paused their hike to climb a tree, saying she wanted to try and get a look at the settlement before they got any closer, in case there was anything they should stay aware of. Her serious expression on the way to the ground told 64Bit everything he needed to know about what to expect when they arrived that afternoon.
But the route that Kayla took to Fort was lower than the route Khalil had driven when 64Bit left just a few days before, preventing 64Bit from actually getting a clear glimpse of Fort’s walls through the trees. Thus, ghosts of hope lingered in his heart that the damage wasn’t as bad as he had imagined it. That hope lasted all the way until he stumbled out of the forest into the cleared-out space surrounding the settlement’s walls. He walked just ahead of Kayla, then leaned against his staff as he stared ahead of him and found it very, very hard to move or even think.
They were on the side of the settlement, near a portion of wall mostly composed of thick tree trunks stripped of bark and sharpened at the top. A large hole was blown in the side of the wall, surrounded by blackened wood and showing evidence that whatever caused the explosion had licked fire farther along the wall until the passing rainstorm likely put it out. Bodies, torn into ground meat and smashed into bone chips, were clustered around that hole, as if dozens of people had been thrown into a meat grinder. There was a single rozie, lying face-up before the hole, motionless, with the synthetic skin of its face ripped off to reveal blood-spattered metal. Within, 64Bit saw more bodies lying motionless in the street, and holes in the walls of the few houses he could see.
The air was silent, still. There wasn’t even the cry of a bird. The only sound that broke the silence was the buzzing of flies.
A cloud overhead, tinged with gray, passed over the settlement, its wide shadow briefly covering the whole thing before sliding off and into the forest.
“I heard the explosions and screams. I caught glimpses when I climbed that tree. But it’s just not the same as . . .” Kayla said.
64Bit nodded. Whatever spell had been cast on him broke when Kayla spoke. He felt sad for the lost settlement, sad for the dead, and a flickering flame of guilt that this all could have been avoided burned in his stomach, but he didn’t feel as sad as he thought he would be, nor as angry, nor anything. He felt like he was standing in a perfectly conditioned room, where he couldn’t feel the temperature of the air or its movement. He looked back at Kayla and saw her face red, her hands clenched into fists, and her brows narrowed.
“At least she’s not looking at me like that,” 64Bit whispered.
Kayla stalked forward until she was within a few yards of the still rozie, then knelt, eyes glued to it. “This thing alive?” she asked.
64Bit paused, then tried to sort through what he felt, ignoring his emotions and physical sensations. He felt a draw into the settlement in multiple directions, a draw that reminded him of when he had felt Zed’s presence, but nothing pulling him toward the rozie on the ground directly ahead of him. When Kayla looked back at him, he shook his head. “As far as I can tell, it’s dead. But there are still other rozies wandering about.”
“At least they got one. Makes our job easier,” Kayla muttered. She crawled toward the rozie slowly, as if she didn’t quite believe 64Bit, then grabbed the rozie’s hand, lifting it. “Heavier than I expected.”
“That’s a lot of metal,” 64Bit said. He walked toward the hole in the wall, careful to avoid walking with his cloth-covered feet on any puddles of gore. As he passed the rozie, he wondered what had finally done it in. It was missing a leg and there were cuts all over its synthetic skin. Its eyes were wide open, bulging from their sockets, with some red-gray crusty substance running around them and down its face.
Kayla touched her knife’s hilt, then turned her attention to Fort. She met 64Bit just in front of the hole in the wall, then led the way in, eyes searching everywhere.
A chill passed through 64Bit as he passed through the wall.
The same scene of carnage repeated everywhere 64Bit looked in Fort. He would see a stretch of ground mercifully bereft of bloody corpses, then see a leg with bites taken out of it, or a body lying face-up with its stomach torn out, or any number of other gruesome ways to masticate flesh. Most buildings still stood, many with large holes in their walls, and 64Bit noticed surprisingly few signs of burning for the amount of smoke scent in the air. He didn’t see any more dead rozies, though.
Kayla stalked down the center of the street, body low. 64Bit tried to mimic her movements and felt awkward walking in a crouch, so he settled for a hunch.
“Why are we in the middle of the road?” 64Bit whispered.
Kayla pointed at a nearby open door. 64Bit activated his eye screens’ night vision and saw the inside of the home through its doorway in shades of green, gray, and black, but no rozie, but understood what Kayla meant. She couldn’t see in there, and she would rather not be surprised by a rozie lurching out of the shadows.
There was shuffling in the distance, the sound of metal scraping against stone, then the sound of wood being dropped. Kayla and 64Bit froze, waiting for visible signs of movement.
But Fort became eerily still once again.
64Bit let out a long, low breath. “We should have made a plan before entering this . . . butchery.”
“I have a plan,” Kayla said. She began moving again. “We’re finding Richard’s old home.”
“Why?”
Kayla was silent for a moment, then said, “Because there should be supplies there. We’ll need food, water. You need real shoes. I think Richard would give us his blessing. I also need to know that his family—I hope they aren’t there. I hope that we’ll have every reason to believe that they escaped.”
They passed the upper half of a man lying face down, one arm stretched ahead of him.
“I pray that anyone escaped at all,” 64Bit whispered, his mind on the master—and Cortex. To Kayla, he said, “We’re going to my home after we visit Richard’s.”
Kayla nodded. “I heard rumors that there were weird weapons kept there. A little hard to believe, given everything that happened, but maybe the guardian technomancer got surprised or overwhelmed and didn’t have the chance to use them. If he’s dead, I’m sorry.”
64Bit didn’t want to face that possibility until he had to. He nodded, saying no more.
They pressed forward for a few more minutes before Kayla stopped in front of a two-story building with faded red paint and cracked siding. Its windows were boarded up, like most of Fort’s houses, but something had broken through the boarding on the bottom floor windows, as well as splintered the front door. A man’s body lay on the home’s porch, top and bottom half several feet apart, with maggots flopping about. Kayla took a deep breath, stepped forward, and inspected the man’s face, then shook her head.
“No idea who that is,” she said. Then she entered.
64Bit walked around the dead man before entering Richard’s home. The front room was lit naturally thanks to the destroyed boarding that was on the front windows. He saw Kayla standing in the middle of the entry, looking at the shadowed rooms beyond, her fists slowly clenching and unclenching. After a moment, she grabbed a broken board, wrapped a cloth around it, and started trying to light it with some flint and steel.
“Stop,” 64Bit said. With a thought, a beam of light projected from the glass port in his forehead. It wasn’t a lot of light—64Bit mostly used it for late-night reading—but it was enough to see by.
Kayla raised an eyebrow. “So it’s not just to make you look dumb.”
“It’s tradition,” 64Bit snapped. “Do you want the light or not?”
Kayla nodded. “Sorry. Being back puts me . . . on edge.”
“Back?”
Kayla looked around, her eyes resting on a couch that had been torn in half. She pointed at it. “That was my bed, more often than I’d care to admit. When I wasn’t staying at the barracks, anyway.”
64Bit looked at the old couch. Its cushions were stuffed with shredded cloth and other odds and ends—likely the original stuffing had disappeared or been repurposed long ago, then they’d just filled the cushion covers with whatever was available. He shook his head, remembering what Khalil had said about Kayla: Anyone who grew up an urchin in the apocalypse, even a nice place like Fort, is made of iron nails. He was glad he hadn’t asked why they weren’t visiting her home.
Kayla first led 64Bit upstairs to the bedrooms. The light from 64Bit’s forehead revealed very cramped living: it seemed there was nearly a family to a room, or else more than a handful of children, based on the organization of beds and sleeping pads. Kayla found some socks and hiking boots that were just a little larger than 64Bit’s feet, but he welcomed them over the cloth he currently wore. She also replaced his backpack—he’d lost his after Zed had attacked—with one that was smaller but could attach more securely to his back and had a variety of strings around the sides; the intention, 64Bit assumed, was to have things tied to it.
“They had to leave in a hurry to leave all this behind,” Kayla said. “Those are good shoes, and a good bag.” Her words didn’t sound like an observation—they sounded like a threat.
64Bit finished tying the shoes and stood, testing how it felt to stand. “I’ll take good care of them,” he said. He shifted his shoulders and felt the backpack shift with him, then wondered if he should strap his staff to it—but it felt wrong to have a staff on his back instead of in hand.
Some more searching later, and Kayla had collected bits of food for them—not much that would last, as most nonperishable food was cleaned out already—and replaced their water skins. Other than the body on the front porch, the rest of the house didn’t reveal any more signs of violence, which seemed to put Kayla in very nearly a positive mood as they peered outside the house and then wandered into the street again. Shadows stretched long, making each body they passed look like it had been thrown, leaving a long groove behind it as it rolled to a stop.
The sound of rustling and groaning ahead. Kayla grabbed 64Bit’s arm and pulled him into an alley between a full-sized house and a lean-to built against its neighbor. They watched as a rozie lurched into view, all jerky, unnatural movement, and began wandering down the street. Its stomach was engorged, and it left a fetid stench in its wake.
“We’ll take the back ways,” Kayla whispered. She led 64Bit into the tight corridors of Fort’s shantytowns.
#
THE SHANTYTOWNS OF Fort were constructed of whatever materials happened to be on hand—old lumber, metal sheets, and cloth; some even had mud-brick walls or mud floors. The fences separating the backyards of each full-sized home had been torn down to allow for the growth of these shanty houses, causing the town to snake across the entire settlement as a claustrophobic growth.
The corridors between homes were tight, deeply shadowed, and stuffy. 64Bit followed closely behind Kayla, doing his best to sense for rozies. Occasionally, he tapped on Kayla’s shoulder, pointed at an alley and shook his head before they entered, so they slipped away, Kayla finding other paths. 64Bit didn’t know if he was helping them avoid wandering rozies or if his growing paranoia fed his unwillingness to walk random paths, but they didn’t see another rozie. They did find plenty of evidence that the rozies had been just as active in the shantytown as the rest of Fort: ramshackle homes entirely flattened, with debris thrown everywhere, and a multitude of mangled corpses that, by this point, 64Bit could look at with the same detached air he felt when preparing to amputate a leg or sew up a deep cut.
64Bit cocked his head. “Do you hear that?”
“Rozie?” Kayla whispered.
64Bit shook his head. “No. I don’t think so . . .”
As they crept forward, the sound grew. “Help!” a voice said, a whispered shout.
Kayla’s eyes narrowed. “This feels a lot like when I found that rozie head,” she whispered.
64Bit searched his senses to see if he felt any rozies about; while he still wasn’t entirely sure that he always latched on to the right feelings, regularly trying to sense out rozies for the past hour had significantly quickened his ability to get a feel for an area. “I’m not . . . certain. There doesn’t feel like any more, or closer, rozies in that direction than anywhere else right now.” His senses suggested that a multitude of rozies were in every direction, just not in the immediate area.
“I hope it’s another head, or something similar. If we can capture just a head, we figure out how to kill it conveniently without the hassle of dealing with the rest of the body,” Kayla said.
They crept forward, eventually reaching a house that had collapsed in on itself. Broken boards with splintered ends pointed in every direction, making the fallen building look almost like a giant porcupine. Blackened parts of random boards revealed that at least a small part of the house had been aflame before collapsing.
“Help!” the voice said again. “Where is everyone?” Then there was a fit of coughing.
“I think that’s a person,” 64Bit whispered.
“Maybe.” Kayla said, “Sounds like it’s coming from under the rubble. I’m going to take a look. Stay here.” She crept forward. When she reached the rubble, she tried to peek inside, then began testing broken boards and other pieces of debris for stable footing before climbing through a giant hole in the one partially standing wall of the ruined house.
After a moment 64Bit heard a loud, “Hello!”
Kayla looked down and hissed, “Quiet! There are rozies about.” 64Bit couldn’t hear what was said after that, but Kayla shushed whoever was in the rubble several times while pulling a rope out of her backpack. She dropped one end down, climbed out the side of the house again, and tied the other end to a sturdy post that had once been part of a porch railing, then whispered loudly, “Climb out! Hurry!”
The person who emerged from the rubble was tall, though not as tall as Richard, and thin. 64Bit had an inkling that he had met him before, and one glance from the pale-blue eyes staring out of an ash-covered face jogged 64Bit’s memory. Westley, the governor’s son.
Westley looked around, wide-eyed, and whistled. “Wow. I missed a lot.” He stood and held his arms out for balance, hunching forward to accommodate the weight of his large, stuffed backpack, and shuffled forward, following Kayla’s path out of the destroyed home. Once out, he offered Kayla his hand. “Thank you!”
Kayla glared up at Westley as she coiled the rope and stored it in her backpack. “One more loud noise out of you and I’ll break the mouth that made it.” She looked at 64Bit, who had walked over to join the duo. “Pretty sure, already, but . . . not a rozie?”
64Bit shook his head. If this man were a cleverly made, intelligent rozie, designed to look like the governor’s son, 64Bit would have bet that the boards would have cracked under the weight of his metal frame as he tried to climb out of the house. 64Bit also didn’t feel the strange draw he’d felt toward Zed and toward the rest of the settlement. Just to be safe, he prodded Westley’s arm. “Synthetic skin can be extremely convincing when simulating skin and muscle,” he explained as Westley raised an eyebrow, “and if the metal frame underneath mimics the shape of bones, then touch alone might not be enough to identify a rozie,” He left out that he had no real first-hand experience with any of what he had said. He looked at Kayla. “Still, I believe he’s human.”
“Glad that’s taken care of.” Westley looked at 64Bit and Kayla and grinned. “Thank you! I was in my room when I heard some explosions and screaming, but the door out of the basement was blocked when I tried to leave. I hurried and packed what I had in case I got the opportunity to escape, but then ash and smoke started filling the air and I blacked out.” He coughed into his arm, then took a deep breath. “It’s good to be alive! Uh . . . what happened?”
64Bit and Kayla looked at each other. 64Bit could see his own feelings mirrored on Kayla’s face: How could anyone miss destruction on this level? Right in the middle of it, no less? 64Bit said, “Fort was attacked and destroyed by rozies.”
“You’re the first survivor we’ve found,” Kayla added.
Westley’s expression grew more serious as he looked around. He took another deep breath, coughed softly, and said, “Oh.”
There was only the sound of flies for a moment.
“You shouldn’t be alive, with the noise you were making,” Kayla eventually said.
Westley nodded. “Glad I wasn’t yelling that loud—every time I tried to really yell, I started coughing again. My throat and my lungs hurt—do you have any water, by chance?”
64Bit handed Westley his water bottle and stared as Westley took a deep drink. “That’s much better.” He raised an eyebrow. “Let me make sure I understand everything. First survivor— well, first living person you’ve met, and there may or may not be others. Fort was attacked by rozies, and there are still rozies lingering about.”
“That’s about all the data we have,” 64Bit said.
Westley’s eyes bounced between them and the destroyed street as he processed this, his shoulders slumping a little. “I never thought something like this would happen. Why are you two here? Where are you going?”
“We’re here because we heard you mewling, and we’re going to the guardian technomancer’s house,” Kayla said. “We’re hoping to find some special weaponry there, or something.” She gestured toward 64Bit. “He hasn’t been very clear about what that place has to offer.”
“The master, I hope,” 64Bit said.
“Um . . .” Westley looked around again, then back at Kayla and 64Bit. “May I join you?”
Kayla shrugged. “If you can learn to speak a little softer so you don’t get us all killed.”
“Sounds excellent!” Westley responded in a loud whisper.
“Be silent,” 64Bit said. Kayla crouched and began scanning the area while Westley froze. 64Bit focused on his own senses and felt a pull coming from deeper within the shantytown, gradually growing stronger. A moment later he heard the shuffling of feet and a thump as a body struck a shanty house. “Kayla, get us out of here. Away from the shanty houses.”
Kayla nodded, then skirted a course around Westley’s destroyed house, 64Bit following behind her. Westley took up the rear. 64Bit gripped his staff tightly, wishing he knew how or if it worked, as they approached another road. Kayla stepped ahead, looked up and down the road, and let out a hiss of breath. “A few more rozies this direction. Bit, are we safe if we go through that house that’s still standing?”
64Bit looked at the faded blue building a few feet away and sorted out what he could sense. He felt a pull in every direction, as he had when he and Kayla had first approached Fort, and the pull was getting stronger in the direction of the shantytown and the road. The pull was weaker in the direction of the house, but not as weak as he would have liked. “I sense less rozie presence straight ahead in that house than around us. There could be something in there, there could be something on the other side of the house. I don’t know how to be more precise yet.”
“Let’s take a chance, then,” Kayla said. She pointed down at a window well; 64Bit noticed a handle screwed into the bottom of a board over the window. “We’ve got a basement entrance here.” She jumped into the window well and tested the handle; the board opened up and into the house. Kayla slipped inside.
64Bit dropped into the window well with a thump, but hardly felt the impact—his new shoes were doing their job incredibly. He ducked into the basement and stepped onto an uneven floor, then heard Westley drop down behind him and slide the board shut, plunging the room into darkness. The smell hit 64Bit first: damp and mold, the iron tang of blood, and the bile-raising scent of excrement.
A shuffling sounded ahead of him—64Bit turned on his eye screens’ night vision and looked around. First he saw Kayla nearby, her hand on a wall. She stood next to a couch that had been flipped over, with a foot sticking out from underneath it. The remains of several bodies were in the middle of the floor, bloody ribs stripped clean of flesh, exposed to the darkness. There were two doors, one on the far wall and one on the wall Kayla was touching. 64Bit looked down and realized he was standing on a hand. He shuddered but forced himself to step quietly away.
“Could use a light,” Kayla said. 64Bit activated his headlight in response and looked around, giving Kayla and Westley a view of the room.
“I think I might be sick,” Westley whispered.
More shuffling sounds. 64Bit looked over and saw Kayla stalking toward the doors, moving as silently as she always did when she wanted to. He looked back and saw Westley standing still.
Something was wrong.
“Kayla,” 64Bit whispered. She stopped.
“What?”
“I think I missed something.” 64Bit searched his senses and found a pull toward the far side of the room.
Copyright © 2023 by David Ludlow
Boo Ludlow 