Archived Parts: One, Two, Three, Four,Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeen, Eighteen, Nineteen , Twenty, Twenty-One, Twenty-Two, Twenty-Three, Twenty-Four
Part Twenty-Five
They didn't feel the impact of Benjamin jumping aboard so much as the additional drag his weight added to the supply car. Ernest glanced at Martha's body in its silver shroud. He was glad it was here with him, and not in back with Benjamin. Ernest felt sorry for the retired op, but that didn't mean he expected Benjamin to suddenly develop a sense of decency. Not when it had been trained out of him for the past twenty years.
Ernest fit himself against the wall of the dumpster and drew his legs up to his chest. He flinched when Elizabeth touched him on the shoulder, startling him. "That was brave, what you did. I could never have…" she looked at the far wall—the wall that was once a lid, which still flapped slightly when a breeze rocked the railroad car—and she shuddered. "If I was the one who had to fix it, we would have waited until morning and done it standing still."
"It needed to be done."
"Not that I'm surprised, after the way you handled yourself at Reclaim." She laughed. It sounded edgy, and maybe a bit forced, but still genuine. "I still remember the first time I saw you, covered in dust and blood, hollering at those big testosterone-filled security ops twice your size."
Ernest drew his knees up tighter and pressed his forehead against them. He hadn't really thought much about what he did in Reclaim. The experience had been a lot like hanging out of the moving railroad car—there'd been no other choice. And while Ernest normally would have felt like a hero having her say something like that, at the moment he was more worried that Abraham might twist it into something else. That he'd think Ernest had put her up to it, perhaps, all to hide his supposed allegiance to the Deaconate.
He felt Will's weight press against his opposite side as Will settled in for the ride and slid an arm around his shoulders. Ernest's programming had worked. The nanites stayed in synch and railroad glided smoothly, save for the occasional stutter, which Audrey determined, after consulting with the peephole she'd cut, was the result of debris on the tracks interrupting the propulsion.
Ernest expected Abraham to verify that for himself, but Abraham said nothing. In fact, he didn't even move. While Ernest had been avoiding his eyes the whole trip, he'd fallen asleep wedged between a crate and Martha's body.
Will rested his head on Ernest's shoulder. His hair tickled. Ernest smoothed it down and it sprang back up again. He whispered to Will, "I think we did the right thing, bringing Benjamin."
Will answered by giving his knee a squeeze.
Ernest wondered if he'd explained well enough. After all, he hadn't had someone to talk to his whole life like Will had, a real person and not an AI with a limited number of pre-programmed responses. "Even when I told Benjamin to go away, I just said it because I was afraid of what Abraham would thin—"
Will took Ernest by the jaw, turned his head, and silenced him with a kiss. Will tasted like static, like air filled with ozone after an electrical storm. He lingered over Ernest's mouth, tasting one lip, then the other, and drew back only after Ernest's whole mouth felt tender and tingly.
Will pressed his forehead to Ernest's and whispered, "I know. It was written all over your face."
Ernest sighed and resettled himself against Will, and even though he would have thought it impossible with the swaying of the railroad car as it was rocked by the wind, and the sight of the grass rushing by whenever the lid flapped open, he slept.
**
"Wake up! Wake up! You need to come look!"
Ernest's muscles were stiff all over, and his neck joints felt as if they needed lubrication. His eyes were gummy with byproducts his nanites would have disposed of, if he had a shunt. Although Will was knuckling his eyes as well, and he still had his shunt. Something to shunt into, then.
Audrey tugged at one of Ernest's tattered sleeves. Her hair was no longer floating with static. "We're so far into the forest that we can't see the city anymore."
Also, they were no longer moving. Ernest was grateful for that.
He crawled from the railroad car. The forest was filled with sound, louder things like bird and insect song, and subtler sounds like the rustle of breeze through leaves. Elizabeth was seated on a tree that had fallen. Unfortunately, it had landed horizontally across the railroad tracks.
"Eat," Abraham said, and Ernest flinched because he hadn't heard Abraham's approach. "Then help me spread the solar panels out in the spots where the most sun is coming through. We'll have the big lugs get to work clearing the tracks."
Once Abraham was out of range, Will slipped an arm around Ernest's shoulders and said, "I suppose I'm dreaming if try to imagine the two of you getting along."
"He doesn't trust me."
"You can't earn someone's trust overnight. He hasn't known you as long as I have." Will handed Ernest a protein bar. "Do you want me to chew it for—"
"I can do it."
"Okay. Be careful not to bite your tongue."
That idea made Ernest's stomach lurch as if he were watching the ground rush by from the moving railroad car. It was a hideous thing, this eating, but it was a task that needed to be done if Ernest wished to survive. Raised voices carried from the front of the railroad car as the other retirees struggled with their breakfasts as well. Benjamin was convinced they should be able to dissolve the bar in water and force it into his shunt, and Elizabeth told him the compositions were too different—and to stop being a wuss and just eat it.
Will, who'd been trained to cater to other people's psyches rather than their bodies (like Elizabeth), made a game of eating to distract Ernest from the unpleasantness. A bite for me, a bite for you. Let's see who can chew it up first. Of course, Will was more efficient, but that charismatic smile was enough to distract Ernest while he forced the protein down his own throat.
Once the heinous duty of eating was followed by the not-quite-as-unpleasant ritual of drinking, Ernest dutifully reported to Abraham to help with the solar panels. Abraham climbed atop the sideways dumpster and began pulling the panels so Ernest could place them in sunlight. Ernest stood beside the dumpster, held his arms up to take the first panel from Abraham, and gave it a small tug when Abraham didn't immediately release it.
Ernest was puzzled. He tugged again. Only when he sought Abraham's eyes did the other C754 release the panel. "What's wrong with you?" Abraham said, once he had Ernest's attention.
"Nothing that I know of, without a diagnostic. My arm is healing—"
Abraham shoved another panel toward Ernest, who needed to juggle the first panel to the ground to avoid dropping it. Abraham said, "Not physically. Why are you avoiding me? I probably offended you somehow."
A flurry of emotions roiled around inside Ernest. Anxiety, fear, and probably every shade of meaning in between. "No. You didn't."
"The woman I love is dead. So pardon me if I'm not Mr. Congeniality."
"Okay."
Abraham flung another panel to Ernest. Ernest winced as he caught it. "Maybe I haven't thrown you a big 'welcome' party, but it's good you're here. You would add value to the group even if you weren't able to program nanites…I think you make Will happy. And maybe you did let the shunt suck some life out of you, but that empty-headed Matthew he was romancing let it drain him completely dry—and then he marched right up to the Deaconate and turned his own POD in."
Ernest thought about the bent, withered retiree who'd changed his mind at the last moment and fled to the coffee shop—and led the security ops there, too. Even if Ernest hadn't been convinced to stop shunting in—and he almost hadn't—he never would never have led the ops back to Will. He'd watched enough old-time feeds to know better. "Is empty-headed an idiom?"
"Obviously. It means stupid." Abraham climbed down and brushed his hands off on the legs of his trousers, then considered Ernest with a hard, analytical gaze. "What's most unsettling is that you're a C754, though I suppose you can't help it."
"Why is that a problem?" Ernest knew what made him uneasy about interacting with a clone—that he found himself continually comparing everything Abraham said and did with what he would have done, how he would look, what he would say. Or not. But he understood that identical genetic makeup didn't make their hopes, fears and dreams the same.
Abraham scowled. "The idea that despite your I.Q, in thirty years you never once questioned the Deaconate—not until Will had his hands down your pants. I look at you, and I see how easily it could've been me—and that thought terrifies me."
Ernest made himself scarce once the solar panels were set out. It sounded as if the group working on clearing the tracks was having nowhere near as serious and disturbing a conversation as he'd just had, and he was eager to have something to distract him from trying to analyze and re-analyze the pained look on Abraham's face.
"If you let me do the cutting," Elizabeth was saying, "then you can work on putting that AI back together."
Audrey said, "His name is Charlie—and this is my best laser, so be careful."
"I'm trained to use lasers on people. I think I can manage cutting into a tree."
Ernest rounded the dense underbrush and saw the tree lying across the tracks had a large divot carved out of it. Elizabeth ran Audrey's handheld laser over a section and a wisp of smoke curled from the incision. Then Will jammed a prybar into the cut and began peeling away a section of the tree. Meanwhile, Elizabeth moved to the opposite track and repeated the procedure with Benjamin.
Freed from manual labor, Audrey moved a few meters from the track. She straddled the broad trunk and began tinkering with a bundle of components bristling with wires, held together with a bit of twine she'd fashioned from twisted protein bar wrappers.
Ernest approached her. "That's Charlie?"
"Sure is. He's just taking a little nap. I still need to adapt the charger to these cells. And the sensor pad's offline, so it's probably for the best that he's powered down. I don't want him to wake up blind and deaf."
Ernest imagined coming out of slumber without eyes or ears.
"You look a little pale," Audrey said. "Did you get enough to eat?"
"I miss having an AI to…consult with."
Audrey stopped twisting wires together, cocked her head, and gave Ernest a searching look. "You understand me better than those guys. A lot better. They think everything that's not flesh and blood is totally inanimate. But how are organs and cells so different from components and nanites?"
Ernest shook his head.
"If they'd ever modded their AIs like we did, maybe they'd understand."
Ernest watched Audrey's fingers play over the dozens of filament-thin wires, locate a matching pair, and twist them together. He was relieved she didn't mention that he hadn't modified L0U15E nearly enough—since the AI betrayed him to the Deaconate more readily than Benjamin had, without a trace of regret. And what had her reward been? Reclaim. At least the Deacons had offered Benjamin his youth.
"Even so," Audrey whispered, "everyone else isn't used to gathering all their data with their own sensory input." She pointed to her eye for emphasis. "They want a computer, even one that's off the W3. So I can get away with putting Charlie back together instead of hauling water. Which they'd probably have you doing right now if there was any water nearby."
Ernest glanced over at the group cutting through the tree. "If there's no water nearby, why are they all wet?"
"Perspiration. Sweat."
"Are they ill?"
"No—they're in biological overdrive. I know, it weirded me the first time I saw it, too. But Will says it's good for you. Old time people used to sweat on purpose to build up their muscles."
Ernest watched his companions work. Mostly he watched Will, who had removed his shirt and was laboring at shredding a hole through the tree trunk with sweat gleaming on the hard curve of his shoulder, trickling down the gentle valley between his pectoral muscles. Seeing Will in the context of the forest rather than the coffee shop made him seem primal and wild, and that idea brought back the initial thrill of realizing that Will was a homo sapien—even though it turned out they probably all were—and with that, the memory of Will's tongue sliding into Ernest's mouth for the first time.
Ernest felt a flutter of arousal and excused himself from Audrey, not that she really noticed him leaving, to go sit by himself—within view of Will. Need was a strange thing. Ernest had always felt hunger in his arm, but now that he had no shunt, it seemed his stomach had something to do with the sensation. And the need for companionship had never stirred Ernest's groin. Maybe organs and cells were just biological equivalents to components and nanites, but their workings seemed infinitely more complex.
Hacking through the tree was a lengthy process. Ernest assisted Abraham in the reinstallation of the solar cells once they were charged, but thankfully, Abraham had no more thoughts with which to disturb Ernest. None that he opted to share, at any rate.
"Someone should scout ahead a kilometer or two before we go again," Benjamin said once they were nearly through the trunk. "It would be more efficient to know before we power up if something else is blocking the tracks."
"And I suppose you would like to be that scout," Abraham suggested. "Maybe with Audrey to accompany you." Someone small…with an easily snapped neck. Abraham didn't say as much, not with words, but his expression conveyed plenty. Or maybe Ernest was getting better at reading the cant of an eyebrow, the subtle twist of a mouth.
Benjamin wiped sweat from his brow and answered as if he hadn't noticed the implication. And maybe he hadn't. "Not me. I need to rest."
"I'll go," Will said. He hauled Ernest up by his dominant arm. "We'll both go. In case there's any debris we need to move."
They set off along the side of the tracks, jogged along a few hundred yards, rounded a curve, and were completely enveloped by undergrowth and tree canopy. The tracks continued, unobstructed save for grass, which didn't seem to interfere with the magnetic propulsion like trees and branches did. Another gentle curve, and it felt like the others were as far away as the city. "Why did Abraham roll his eyes?" Ernest asked, tugging at Will to slow him down.
Will pulled Ernest against him and bumped their hips together as they ran. "Because he knows me too well."
That explained absolutely nothing…though at least it reassured Ernest it hadn't been a slight against him, maybe a suggestion that he was too weak to move a tree limb. He pulled Will's arm again. "How long do you plan to run? I'm not accustomed to—"
Will stopped suddenly and spun Ernest into a kiss. His lips were salty and his probing tongue was hot and slick, and the stirring Ernest had noticed earlier deepened into a full-on surge.
"There's no way I'll be able to run now."
Will grabbed Ernest by the shoulders and backed him against a tree. A cloud of small brown birds erupted from the branches in a flurry of startled chirping. "Do you know how distracting it was to see you looking at me like that?"
"Like what?"
"Like you couldn't wait to do this." Will grabbed the hand of Ernest's uninjured arm and shoved it between his thighs so it cupped his whole groin.
Ernest wasn't sure that look had been his actual intention. And yet the press, even through the trousers, of Will's big cock shifting made Ernest yield to Will's superior knowledge of the subtle nuance of facial expressions.
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