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, Twenty-Five, Twenty-Six
Part Twenty-Seven
"We can't stop here," Elizabeth said. "The air doesn't smell healthy."
Although she was the closest thing they had to a health monitor, everyone was too apprehensive, excited or just plain baffled to listen. They jostled one another to look out the holes in the front of the car and see for themselves. Ernest did hear her--and he was concerned--but he too stunned to make sense of what they'd found.
"Wonderful," Abraham said. "We've been traveling in a circle."
Will countered, "I think we would have noticed if we were going in a circle."
"Obviously. I mean a large circle--an arc so wide we couldn't perceive the curvature."
Audrey said, "What reason would old-time people have to lay out these metal tracks and travel in a really big circle just to get to the other end of the city? Especially if they could go straight through? That doesn't make any sense."
"Maybe it was a game," Elizabeth suggested. "Like camping."
Ernest wouldn't put it past homo sapiens to think of truly bizarre ways to squander their resources, and could extrapolate how distance might impair their perceptions, but he was fairly certain the route they had been following was made of large runs of straight track and a few gentle S-curves. Not a circle. He stepped back from the hole in the fiberglass and pushed open the side of the railroad car so Will could see.
"The air..." Elizabeth said.
"It smells better outside," Audrey said, "not worse. Besides, it wasn't as if the railroad was airtight. We'd all be suffocated by now."
"It's not the air," Abraham said, his voice bleak. "It's Martha. She's decomposing."
"We need to stay put," Will said. "We have to demagnetize her, now." He turned to Abraham. "You said you found a way, right?"
"Hold on." Audrey fumbled a mass of circuitry and wires from her tool belt. "Charlie was in on that whole plan. Let's make sure he can speak for himself." She stroked a thin filament free from a bundle of wires and coaxed it into a slot so small Ernest couldn't see it until the wire disappeared inside. "Okay, babe. You're on."
A tinny voice crackled from a speaker that was bound to the circuitry with strips of torn fabric. "Silence is golden--I know you're wild about idioms, Aud, but I'll have to disagree with that one. It's good to be back. So...why'd we stop?"
"We're just outside the city again."
"We don't know it's the same city," Will said. "In my old books, there was more than one."
Elizabeth gasped as if she'd seen someone put a finger in their mouth.
"Paper books," Abraham said. "Relics. Of course it's the same city. All the historic cities crumbled to the ground centuries ago."
"I know how much the two of you love to argue," Charlie said, "but in terms of probability, another city is entirely possible. If you'd hook me up to some sensors and let me run a few scans, I could settle your little tiff. And then we could build the degaussing coil."
Abraham rolled his eyes, then said to Will, "Fine. Give me a leg up. I'll disconnect the sensor array from the roof."
Ernest checked his peephole again. There it was, decayed facades of brick and concrete, and maybe even metal. He wasn't sure it if was more disturbing to view it through the hole and see only a few, or to crane his neck around the side of the railroad car and see the whole geometric landscape sprawling impossibly far in either direction.
As he pictured the city, his city, in his mind's eye, he recalled how it had looked to him as he and Will skirted the edge of the city limits on their initial forays toward the wilderness. The city they'd escaped didn't look like the one before them. It was edged by trees, and the tallest buildings were in the center. This city was markedly different. The landscape to either side of it was barren and low, and the land dipped down as if the weight of the old structures had caused the earth itself to sag.
If anything, Ernest thought, he should be able to pick out the Deaconate. He'd seen the schematics--he'd seen the building itself. But nothing in the broken cityscape matched the Deaconate's profile.
"Here's what we're going to need," Charlie said. "Ten meters of eighteen-gauge copper wire and a fully charged solar panel."
"We've got the solar panels," Audrey said. "We've been grabbing them every chance we had for the past five years. I just need to charge them. But I can't get you that much copper without disassembling a propulsion unit."
Abraham crawled down from the ceiling of the railroad car, swung his legs inside, and dropped to the floor with a disconnected sensor dangling from one hand, its filaments as fine as cobwebs. "Since you're all convinced this is some mythical second city, why don't you go see if there are old communication wires you can scavenge? There were miles of them in cities everywhere, once upon a time. Right, Charlie?"
"Right-o."
"Do that," Benjamin said, his words sharp and sudden, unaccustomed as he was to the nuances of discussion and debate. He seemed to have even startled himself by barking out the order, so he explained, "It would be faster to tear the cables out of the ground than to take the propulsion apart and then put it back together."
"I'm not going down there," Elizabeth said. "My bones are brittle now. I'd probably fall and fracture my hip."
"Not all of us." Benjamin's eyes darted side to side, bright in the papery folds of his skin, as he accessed his biologically stored data for the way in which one of his old commanders would have done it. "Only risk some. Maybe two."
Audrey, who'd been tinkering with a few wires on Charlie's casing, looked up suddenly. "What do you mean, risk? Are you sure you're using that word correctly? It means thinking about whether to do something dangerous or not."
"I know what it means," Benjamin said icily.
Will said, "Elizabeth is right, the footing can be dangerous. And there might be wild animals living there."
"Or people," Ernest said, before he realized he'd spoken.
The railroad car went utterly silent.
After a long, uncomfortable pause, Audrey said, "What people?"
"Any people. People from our city who decided to follow the railroad track to see where it might lead them. Security ops who are posted here to make sure no one tries to leave."
"No ops without a grid," Benjamin cut in. "They're no good off-grid."
"Okay, fine, maybe not security ops. But homo sapiens could be living in the--"
Abraham cut Ernest off this time. "Unbelievable. Did you explain anything at all to him, Will? Or was your tongue too busy poking around in his mouth to speak?"
Will mumbled, "I thought you understood about the homo sapiens."
"Fine." Ernest gave an exasperated sigh. "Yes. I know. There is no homo consummatis. We're all a bunch of chimpanzees. But what if some of us monkeys realized the Deaconate's been lying--about our life spans, about demagnetizing us, about everything--and these people did it three, four, five generations ago? And what if they settled right here, where the ops would never find them because they couldn't stand to be parted from their precious games that long?"
The pause that followed Ernest's outburst was exponentially heavier than the previous awkward lull. Ernest couldn't recall if he'd said as many words all at once, well...ever. Had anyone there even been able to follow the meaning?
Abraham dusted his hands together as if he was getting ready to engage in manual labor. He smiled, and said, "Point taken. Two of us should go. Someone who can tell the difference between a copper wire and a fiberglass castoff, and someone else who can handle themselves in a fight."
Audrey stood, eyes gleaming, and opened her mouth to speak. She didn't get the chance. "Not you," Abraham said. "We can't afford to lose you. You're the only mod here. Ernest can take Charlie to scan for the copper; he's good with AIs."
"Are you crazy?" Will said. "I'm not going to let him go marching off into--"
"You're going, too. You'll watch his back. We have one charged Taser, so use it wisely. And keep your eyes on potential ambush points...you've got the rest of your life to gaze limpidly at Ernest."
Presuming there really were no off-grid ops lurking in the strange city, anyway. Ernest glanced at Martha's shroud, then looked quickly away, hoping Abraham hadn't seen where he'd just looked.
Elizabeth checked the clearcoat on Ernest's shunt arm and said it was healing well, while Audrey fastened Charlie's sensor array over Ernest's chest. "If you want Charlie to see something, you've got to turn toward it." She cast a longing look toward the city, but didn't seem inclined to contradict Abraham's decision. "Whatever you do, don't lose my best friend. I've backed up his data, but it would take me dozens of hours to build a new rig."
Ernest glanced toward Martha's shroud again before he could stop himself. That was all it took to resurrect an AI? A string of data and a new bundle of wires and chips? Will wasn't kidding when he insisted L0U15E wasn't a person. If Ernest had known enough to back up her data, he would never have needed to go on without her.
"I know you don't like to censor yourself," Audrey said, and Ernest realized she was talking to the bundle of circuitry on his hip rather than him, "but you can't say anything unless Ernest prompts you. This is dangerous, for real."
"And here I thought it was all an elaborate simulation," Charlie's voice said from the cracked speaker.
"Hold on," Ernest said. "Maybe you can tune him to my audio interface. Will won't be able to hear him, but--"
"You have an interface? Where?" Audrey brushed Ernest's hair aside. "Is it an implant?"
Ernest would never have been able to afford an elective implant, not on his salary. Even the removable unit had cost him a huge chunk of his life savings. "No, it's just...it's small. I hardly know it's there."
Audrey let out a low whistle when she spotted the piece. "That's quite an antique."
"If it's too old...."
"Did I say I couldn't tune into its frequency?"
"You most certainly did not," Charlie piped in.
"That's right. Lucky for you, I know my spare parts."
Will gathered supplies--water, protein bars, a blanket folded into a tight little cube--and Ernest wondered how long, exactly, it would take them to find copper wire. He supposed he'd expected to march down the hill, poke through a couple of buildings and come back with the raw materials for a degaussing coil. But what if it wasn't that easy? The city was huge, and suddenly daunting. Since Will claimed to be able to read his face so easily, he did his best to look as if he wasn't in the least intimidated.
Audrey, crouching beside Ernest to tinker with the computer on his hip, looked up. "Okay, Charlie, it's showtime."
"Ernest? Check, check, check." Charlie's voice was in his ear, rich and nuanced and very humanistic in contrast to the way it had sounded coming out of the tiny, cracked speaker.
"Yes," Ernest said. "I hear you."
"How's the sound?" Audrey asked.
"Clear."
She glanced in Abraham's direction to make sure he wasn't listening, then leaned in close to Ernest and said, "I know you're just supposed to look for the wire and come right back, but if you happen to find more audio parts wherever you are...grab 'em. And if not, think about what I can barter you for that earpiece. I don't want Charlie to sound like a portable game announcer for the rest of my life."
At the thought of Audrey spending her entire life with Charlie, Ernest felt a deep pang of loss for L0U15E. He hoped his face didn't show it. "I'll look."
"Everything ready?" Will shouldered the pack, winked at Ernest, and said, "Let's go."
Walking was more difficult in the grass than it had been alongside the railroad tracks. The grasses obscured rocks and divots, and Ernest needed to focus on his footing so intently that he was startled when Will finally spoke. "You take it pretty well when Abraham makes those digs at you. I appreciate that. He's jealous--obviously--but not for the reasons you might think."
It had never occurred to Ernest that Abraham was jealous. He turned his foot on a rock, staggered, and kept going.
"We were never lovers or anything. But we've always been close, really close. We bunked side by side at the natal center and our cells were across from one another in the training facility. And when he discovered that he actually felt better when he avoided shunting in, I was the one he told."
"If you weren't lovers, why would he be jealous?"
Will fell into step so close with Ernest that their thighs brushed when they walked, and Will's pack nudged Ernest in the rump. Will leaned in and whispered into Ernest's hair, "Because now you'll be the first one to hear my secrets."
Ernest had never considered Will to be generous with his secrets; Will hadn't lived so long in the city by failing to be discreet. "Were you jealous of Martha?"
"Once, I guess. But she was such an amazing girl...not for long." Will hefted his pack high on his shoulder so he could run his palm across Ernest's back for a moment before the pack slid down and he needed to hike it up again. "She was as good a friend to me as he is. When I think about how badly I miss her, and then I think about Abe, and how much worse it's got to be for him without her...." He trailed off and shook his head.
"If you need to spend time with him, I won't be...um...jealous." Ernest tried on what he knew of the emotion, of seeing Audrey babbling to Charlie, for instance, and knowing L0U15E was well and truly gone, and he suspected he may indeed experience jealousy if he observed how close Will and Abraham were--though he didn't have to admit it. "You can tell him secrets. I won't mind."
"Watch it," Charlie said in Ernest's ear. "You're laying it on a little thick." Ernest snapped his gaze to the bundle of circuits on his hip. How could he possibly have forgotten the AI was there? "Your chest is covered in sensors. Your pulse sped and your galvanic skin response fluctuated--and then you started to overcompensate. If you really must lie, the trick is subtlety."
Footing was tricky enough that, hopefully, Will hadn't noticed. Even focused on his feet, Will tripped. He righted himself, then turned to look at the hidden thing that had almost brought him down. He almost kept going--almost--but then turned and looked again. He went down on one knee and brushed the grass aside. "Look at the shape of this rock."
"Don't just look with your head," Charlie said. "Angle your body towards it. I want to see, too."
Ernest squatted beside Will so the sensors pointed at the rock. "Marble, granite," Ernest repeated, as Charlie muttered an analysis in his ear. "A naturally occurring aggregate, but minerals not normally found in this area. And definitely altered in some way."
Will fingered a corner of the marble. It was precisely ninety degrees. "They liked their right angles so much they felt the need to alter even the rocks?"
"Maybe it was part of a building, once." Ernest paused as Charlie fed him directions. "Flip it over. Charlie says there might be an indication of what its purpose might have been on the other side."
Will worked his fingers underneath the marble slab and strained. "Heavy," he said. The tendons in his neck stood out. Ernest watched the lowering sunlight play over Will's musculature, casting amber shadows. He imagined running his fingertips over the hard curve of muscle on Will's shoulder. And maybe nuzzling it with his cheek. Inhaling that scent that was Will, and only Will.
"You've got it bad for that one," Charlie said.
Ernest wasn't entirely sure what that meant, but he could sense from Charlie's tone that he might not want to discuss it directly in front of Will. "Can I help?" he asked Will, instead.
"Something gave way...I think I got it."
"Too bad," Charlie went on. "I thought you'd be a good match for Audrey if you ever got bored with him."
Bored? Ernest gave a small, derisive laugh, hardly more than a breath, before he could stop himself. Will was so busy straining at his rock he didn't seem to notice, but Charlie picked up the reply. Audrey really had done a stellar job with his programming.
Will strained, and gasped, and lifted with all his might, and finally the earth released the stone. He flipped it over, and the blackness beneath it teemed with movement. Ernest and Will bent close to look.
Charlie said, "You might want to avoid the centipedes--I so miss having a viewscreen to demonstrate my point--the chitinous ones with all the legs. Their bites are mildly venomous."
Ernest picked up a stick and flicked one of the creatures away from Will's boot.
"What are we looking for?" Will asked. "Those are all biological, right?"
Ernest reached across the wiggling carpet of life forms and brushed a moist clod of dirt from the face of the stone. "There. Characters of some sort."
"Programming?"
"I don't think you can program a stone." Ernest brushed more soil away. It clung to his fingers, dark and wet. "But I'm unfamiliar with the letterforms."
"It's a monument," Charlie said. "A name, a set of dates. This is known as a headstone."
"It's called a headstone," Ernest told Will.
Charlie added, "It marks the ground where a corpse was interred."
Ernest leapt to his feet, took several quick steps back, then faltered on a deep divot and danced a few steps to the side. Will saw his alarm and backed away rapidly. "What?"
"There's a homo sapien body buried under it. A totally magnetized body."
"It wouldn't be much of a body at this point," Charlie said, his voice maddeningly calm and tinged with dry amusement. "Even if it was laid to rest in a lined casket, everything's probably decomposed to soil at this advanced stage."
Ernest looked down at his darkened fingertips, dismayed, and brushed them vigorously against his trousers. The thought of being there--trapped, somehow aware, while one's body converted itself to soil over the course of centuries--disturbed Ernest to the point where he felt woozy, like blood loss without the bleeding.
"What's got you so worked up?" Charlie asked.
"Just pay attention to where we're going. Where's the copper?"
"Testy, testy. Do your part, then. Turn your upper body so I can have a look." Ernest did so. "No, nothing in range. You'll need to get closer to the buildings."
"Come on," Ernest told Will. "I want to have some daylight left for the search."
Will shifted his bag to his opposite shoulder so he could walk close at Ernest's side. "It's been talking to you this whole time, hasn't it? Audrey's AI."
"Why do you ask?" Ernest forced himself to stop thinking about the corpse dirt and relax into a grin--and it wasn't so difficult to smile when he was looking at Will's shrewd eyes. "Jealous?"
Will laughed out loud and brushed his fingertips along Ernest's knuckles as they walked. "Sometimes I think I was better off when you were fresh out of the POD. Before you knew how devastating you are."
Based on Will's tone of voice, Ernest decided to take that remark as a compliment. He smiled to himself and forged ahead.
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