Genesis: A science-fiction short story. Page 3

  “Lee Walters, you are under arrest,” begins one of the peace officers, by rote, as they lead him away. “You are not required to say anything, but anything that you do say…”

  Caroline has almost dropped her grocery bags; she tightens her grip as she recovers from the scene. All around her, men and women together, are staring as the man is led away.

  “Another one?” asks a man beside her. She looks at him; he is in his mid-30s, and his face has run pale. “I don’t know why they run. Do you think they actually think they can get away?”

  “Maybe some do,” says Caroline, studying the man closely. He shakes his head, runs a hand through his hair nervously.

  “I don’t think any of them do,” he says, mostly to himself, as he backs away into the store.

  Sylvia Rider goes home in a daze; she barely remembers the contents of the day, only that it happened. She immediately calls Caroline, but she gets no response; she leaves a voice mail, but knows that it will not be listened to. Caroline never listens to her voice mails; it’s driven Sylvia insane since they were teenagers.

  It is 4:00 PM; her children will not be home from school for another hour. On other days, this brief hour was Sylvia’s personal time. She would relax while preparing a meal, or sit down and read a book. Now she paces her living room, wondering about her next course of action.

  Shaking, Sylvia dials a number that she remembers by heart. She stares at it, without dialing. She wonders if there really are any right answers; if there is a right solution or if she’s just grasping for any solution that she can live with. Frustrated with herself and her own lack of resolve, she turns off the screen of her phone and screams, screams as loud as she can.

  Lee Walters leans his head against the cold metal of the van. His hands are still taped behind him and the bench he is sitting on is surprisingly comfortable. To his left and his right are peace officers young enough to be his sons; in front of him, a man older than himself has just finished reading his rights.

  “Does this seem fair at all to you?” asks Lee. “How old are you? 50? 60? I’m younger than you!”

  “Sir, I must ask you to remain calm,” says one of the younger men beside him. The man looks nervous, more nervous than Lee feels; he can see that the young man’s eyes are red-rimmed.

  “Didn’t expect to run someone down with a hangover, did you?” asks Lee. “Feel sick? A little motion sick? Feel like throwing up, do you?”

  The young man’s eyes dart away, and he takes off his helmet. Lee can see that the young man is sweating heavily; not entirely from the chase, and definitely not from the cool air of the van. The young man glares at him out of the corner of his eyes, and then looks downwards.

  “You had ample time to seek judgment in the court of appeals,” says the man in front of him, who is clearly in charge. Lee focuses his eyes on the man’s silver, gleaming badge, which reads “Sergeant Ernest Masterson.”

  “No one has ever won in the court of appeals,” states Lee.

  “The court of appeals is the appropriate venue for any of your concerns,” says Sgt. Masterson, ignoring Lee’s comment. The van passes by a bump, and Lee feels his stomach leap into his throat and then back downwards. He is already calculating the scenarios in his head.

  If he could somehow get the submission tape off—which he knows that he cannot—he could, he thinks, overpower at least the two younger men. But he doesn’t believe he could overpower all three. And then there is the issue of jumping out of a potentially moving van.

  Lee knows that it’s futile, but thinking these scenarios through gives him a moment of hope, however brief.

  The van eventually pulls to a stop. The sergeant is the first one out; the two young men pull Lee out at either side of him. Lee looks up at the ominous gray building, which is surrounded by a 14-foot tall metal fence, with barbed wire on the top and concrete curb at the bottom.

  Lee is led in through the gate, between two twin guard towers. In the courtyard, fenced in, he can see men and women, in various ages, dressed in gray. They are waiting.

  “Do I have any choice?” asks Sylvia, her hands on Caroline’s. They are sitting on opposing sides of Caroline’s empty kitchen table; Caroline hasn’t, she thinks, eaten on the table even once since she moved in. In Caroline’s living room, Sylvia’s two daughters are quietly watching a movie. Caroline reflects that her apartment seems much warmer, now.

  “You have a choice,” says Caroline, squeezing Sylvia’s hands. “Things can change. They can.”

  “Do you really think so?” asks Sylvia. She sighs, and sat back. “Caroline, I haven’t told you everything. I’m—it’s really hard for me right now. With the medical bills, and the… I’m not sure. I’m just not.”

  “I know,” confides Caroline. “But you don’t have to wait that long. In a few more years, I’ll be able to help you with anything. You and the girls.”

  “Caroline, I can’t rely on you to always save me,” says Sylvia, with a soft smile. “I think… I really think I need to do this.”

  “Did you call?” asks Caroline, softly.

  “Not yet,” says Sylvia, with a sigh. “I haven’t called, not yet. I tried. I needed you.”

  “Okay, we’ll call together,” says Caroline.

  Lee Walters’s number is up. He knows this, in both literal and figurative sense. He looks at the laser tattoo on his arm; his certification ran out on March 2nd, almost a month prior. Since then he has been running, running, running. He has barely stopped to breathe.

  He’s only 43 years old and he doesn’t feel as though it’s his time to go. He thinks of all the things that he had planned on doing, if only he had enough time. But things had happened; life had happened. Minor emergencies snowballed into grand disasters and he was never able to take that vacation he wanted or to learn a new skill or trade.

  In his youth, he had taken it in stride; it hadn’t seemed to matter. He had torn through his 20s and even 30s with the same cocky self-assurance that most had. But even then, women would look at his wrist and then look away. There would be sad eyes and pity. No one wanted to build a life with a man who was living on borrowed time.

  Eventually, yes, the bitterness had come to him; he could admit that, now, standing on the precipice as he was. There had been a dark edge to everything he did and he knew that it was what had eventually driven both family and friends away. Yet he wouldn’t, couldn’t, apologize for it. The only thing he could think now, the sound reverberating in his mind and heart, was that this was not his fault.

  Fifty years ago, everyone had been certified, based on genetics, physical health, mental health and countless other algorithms. It was a necessity, they said. The new reproductive reality made it impossible to control the population otherwise, and strength was more important than ever. Scientists were racing to ensure the future of mankind, they said.

  There simply weren’t the resources for everyone. Not with the entire world in jeopardy.

  And, at the time, they said it was possible that the expiration of a certification would never mean anything at all. It was purely theoretical, they said. Something that would only be enforced in a state of emergency. It would be ignored until the danger level was raised—and when the danger level was raised, only those who had been expired the longest would be considered.

  All of these things had been said, but Lee wondered if they had ever actually been true.

  Lee’s bad heart and his family’s strong tendencies towards depression and anxiety had given him one of the briefest certifications he had ever seen: 43. At the time, the scale only went down to 40. This had not done wonders for either his depression or his anxiety.

  Until seven years ago, when the first certifications expired, Lee had secretly harbored the hope that nothing would happen at all. Those who had gone before him seemed more perplexed than afraid; they had never seriously thought about the eventuality that they would expire.

  They checked themselves in, calmly, at the registered stations and
waited for instructions; surely, they must have thought, there would be instructions. Surely it couldn’t really be as it seemed.

  And, until a year ago, Lee had always secretly harbored the thought that this could not really occur to him. He believed that something would occur that would dramatically shift the paradigm of the world; he hoped, beyond hope, that something would change.

  But it didn’t.

  The officers bring Lee into the check-in and containment area; he is genetically scanned and he is dressed in gray. He is given something—a shot of something—and he immediately feels a calming sensation, filling him up from within. He recognizes that he is being gently sedated.

  “Just lie back,” says the faceless doctor; he is clad all in white, with a tight blue mask obscuring his features. All Sylvia Rider can see is his light blue eyes; she tries to focus on them, tries to imagine herself staring into a sky. “You’ll be fine.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Sylvia repeats, quietly. She looks around the room and searches until she finds Caroline’s face. Caroline smiles in encouragement, and grabs onto her hand, holding it fiercely.

  It was, Sylvia thinks to herself, all that she could possibly do. She tries to assure herself that this was the best choice; that this was better than the alternative, by far. She knows that it is, but it still feels wrong; she knows that it could have been so much simpler, so much easier, if life were different; if things were different.

  “It will be okay,” Caroline reassures her, leaning in next to her head. “I’ve done this three times, remember?”

  Not like this, thinks Sylvia, though she does not say it. She knows that Caroline knows this; Caroline is only trying to be supportive. She’s trying to be helpful.

  Sylvia knows that Caroline disagrees with this, but Caroline is too tactful and too loyal to say anything. Sylvia cannot imagine the alternative; she cannot imagine giving birth to a child who she knows will go before she does. She has imagined it, so many times—too many times.

  Caroline knows this, but all Caroline can think of is the two girls that they left at the sitter; she thinks of Sylvia’s medical issues, and the risk involved. Caroline thinks this, but she doesn’t say it. She only holds Sylvia’s hand.

  “I want you to count back from 10,” says a nurse, behind them; Sylvia has not met this woman. She has not met anyone here, though she must now trust them with her life. That was part of the rules, part of the procedure. It must be anonymous, or it could not exist at all.

  “10…. 9… 7…,” Sylvia counts back, as requested, as she stares into the doctor’s bright blue eyes. She feels herself falling away, falling into infinity.

  Lee Walters is led into a small, fenced in courtyard with others who have expired recently. They look at him, with fog-filled eyes, but they do not react. There is a small, concrete bench in a corner; Lee sits in it, and rests his back against the brick of the wall. He thinks to himself that perhaps this wasn’t as bad as it seemed.

  Lee cannot know this, but the chemicals coursing through his veins are the same chemicals that are released naturally by the body just moments before death. Alongside the sedation, it gives him the pleasant feeling that everything is right in the world; that everything is just fine.

  He cannot recall why he was so frightened, why he was so scared. He thinks now that this is his place, that this was what was always intended to happen. He smiles faintly, remembering a few of the good times that he shared; his first family dog, his first date and the first time his father had spoken to him as though he was a man.

  After a few moments—or perhaps hours, or perhaps days—Lee sees one of the people in the courtyard fall to the ground. They do not get back up. Lee reflects that he should tend to them, that he should try to help them, but his legs and arms feel too heavy to move. He stares at them numbly as they seize on the ground, unable to react. Eventually, they are taken away.

  Lee stares up at the sky, which has turned dark, and reflects that he doesn’t remember when it turned dark or whether it had actually been brighter before. The stars are almost impenetrable; like a wide net across the sky. The finds himself tracing his vision from one to the other, one to the other, in turn. He loses himself within the darkness.

  In the slow burning morning light, Lee notices that he is almost alone now. He doesn’t know where the others have gone, or when, though in the darkest parts of his recollection he does remember something happening, though he cannot determine what. The sun is brighter now, and hotter now, but the discomfort is distant; as though occurring to another body, over a huge course of space and time.

  After a few moments—or perhaps hours, or perhaps days—Lee himself falls, tumbling from the concrete bench and landing with his back on the smooth concrete ground.

  He sees above him the bright blue sky.

  Caroline Young smiles at the picture before her as she rocks the small bundle in her arms; Maggie is holding up a small, digital pad drawing, done in bright, primary colors.

  “This is me,” says Maggie, pointing to a figure as she holds it proudly upwards. “And this is Kate. And this is you. And this is Ashley!”

  The last tiny little stick figure is Caroline’s new and last son, who she holds now, tightly in her arms. It will be some time before Ashley can actually stand like that, but Caroline’s smile widens at his inclusion. She already knows that Kate and Maggie will be the perfect big sisters.

  In the parlor, Kate is playing a game with lights that Caroline herself can’t quite understand. It connects through the Internet; Kate is playing with some of her new friends from school. From the sounds, it seems as though Kate is winning.

  “You forgot someone,” says Caroline, rocking Ashley, slowly. “You forgot your mommy.”

  Maggie frowns, and looks at the picture. She looks at it, and then looks up at Caroline, a perplexed expression crossing her face.

  “You’re my mommy,” says Maggie, confused. Caroline’s heart drops, and she kneels before Kate, looking into her eyes.

  “Of course I am,” says Caroline. “But I’m not your only mommy. You had another mommy too, don’t you remember?”

  A look into Maggie eyes confirms what Caroline knew and feared; Maggie doesn’t remember. It’s not surprising; it’s been three years. Maggie was only a toddler, then, and she’s only five years old now.

  “It’s lovely,” says Caroline, blinking out tears that she feels suddenly appear in her eyes. “It’s lovely, you should show it to Kate, too.”

  Maggie expression bounces up from puzzlement back to happiness; the swift change of emotion that only a child can experience. She bounds away, happily, as Caroline sits down on the kitchen floor and leans herself up against the cabinets, just out of view. There, she cries, as quietly as she can.

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  It was called Aquion; one of those meaningless old-world brand names that could be anything from prescription laxatives to bottled water. Nestled within the murky comfort of an immense and hollow man-made infrastructure, positioned off the thin, jagged edge of the Antarctic, sat a thousand voluminous metal spiders, dark tendrils sliding down into the oily depths.

  It wasn’t the power source itself that important: it was what it powered and what it represented. The Aquion network was what powered the domes. What had begun as a network of cloistered scientific labs had become mankind’s only shelter against the fickle wrath of nature. And within these domes was something of even greater power: the res stations.

  The aged and the damaged; they crossed exquisite plastic marble floors to be accepted by the hauntingly youthful and attractively androgynous lab technicians, all dressed in white; the color of science. Patients were then—after a brief insurance and identification check—guided to an empty pod wherein they would become renewed.

  Skin, fat, muscle and
bone; all of this would be removed in the res. The machine took everything but the neural networks, the stuff of the soul—as much as we could presume.

  An entirely new body, an entirely new being, would be layered upon these shuddering, twisted wires of biology. The finest molecular technology coated and rebuilt them, layer by layer, straight from an original scan usually taken on their 21st birthday.

  They were created completely anew, not a wrinkle or a fat cell out of place... assuming they took the recommended precautions before their scan. It was all covered in the readme doc issued to every citizen’s anno once they reached adulthood.

  I tied my long, now gray hair back, and dressed myself in the papery robe ubiquitous to all medical facilities. It rustled against my skin.

  I was one of the original sixteen scientists who had been originally tasked with, and had ultimately completed, the res project. We were scientists in the labs long before the deep freeze. The generators were our predecessor’s invention and the only thing that had kept humanity alive after the war. To prove ourselves to our metaphorical parents, we had created life after death.

  We may, in retrospect, have slightly overreached.

  There were only four of us left alive from the original experiments: myself, Sara, Jake and Cheli. Though we randomly attached others, our core group ultimately remained the same, stuck through time.

  Originally, our group had been composed primarily of men. But with immortality, one’s greatest enemy became statistics. Men were more likely to die by accident than women, and women were more likely to die from old age.

  In theory.

  I was at my fourth stage, and preparing to molt. I sat on the ridiculously cold table, and it felt like the first time again. You never quite got past that unsettling, desperate feeling of dread.