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Part Twenty-Nine
Ernest paused to consider Charlie's urgent command to evacuate. "What is it?" Will said.
It didn't occur to Ernest to lie, exactly. Though he did use a tone much less urgent than the AI. "Radiation. Charlie just picked it up. He only has enough processing speed to perform a few scans at a time, and he was busy looking for copper."
Will turned toward a gap in the wall and held out a hand. "Come on, let's get out of here."
"Wait a minute…." Ernest recalled a datastream he'd cleaned up a couple of years ago that had something to do with radiation levels. "Two point two sieverts isn't immediately fatal."
Charlie said, "This is not negotiable."
"How much exposure have we had? Twenty minutes? Thirty? How much difference would another few minutes make, if it means the difference between building the degaussing coil or leaving Martha trapped like that…forever?"
Will brushed plaster dust from his forearms as if he could wipe away the radioactive contamination, too. "I knew her better than you did. She wouldn't want us to do something this risky."
"You can go back. We don't know how far the radiation extends—maybe all the way back to the railroad tracks. Tell them to get ready to go."
Will threw his hands up in exasperation. "Look, I'm not leaving you—so let's get this over with." He grasped a board fragment and began to dig beneath the counter. "There was copper back here, right? That's what you were heading for when the ceiling fell in."
"This is a terrible idea," Charlie said.
Ernest began pulling the larger hunks of debris out of the way. Handling the crumbled plaster dust brought back memories of the mounds of drifting ash in the Deaconate's basement, ash that had once been people, burned alive—and visions of gray ash coating everything overlaid his current perceptions like a pair of programs running concurrently. He reminded himself the building was not made of people—though the pale plaster arms did nothing to dispel the strange, yet pervasive, idea.
"You're sick already," Charlie said. "Your galvanic skin response—"
"It's nothing to do with the radiation," Ernest said, and with an effort, he put the images of the Diaconate from his mind and focused on locating the telltale tuft of bundled copper data cables protruding from the rubble.
Dust pinged against rubble as Will dug frantically, and then, suddenly, he stilled and the noises stopped. "No. Oh, no."
"What?" Ernest and Charlie asked simultaneously.
Will reached into the shifting pile of grit and dust, pulled out a handful of debris, and waved it at the sensors on Ernest's chest. "Is this what you've got us digging for? Is it?"
"I don't understand…." Ernest said.
"Abort the task," Charlie told Ernest. "The copper is not in the form of a cable."
Ernest wasn't quite sure how to relay that information to Will, but he didn't need to. Will could read his face, after all. "We can't build a coil out of pennies," Will said, and threw the scraps of metal and plaster to the floor, disgusted. His expression softened slightly when he locked eyes with Ernest rather than scowling at Charlie's sensors. "It's an old unit of currency. The counter, the mannequins, the money…this was a shop. But whatever they sold has been nothing but dust for centuries." He took up Ernest's hand and held it to his chest, knuckles against fabric, clenching it tight. "We should go."
It was one thing to expose himself, Ernest decided, but another to cause Will to linger in the radiation. "All right. Two minutes." He crawled to the top of a pile of broken cinderblock and mannequin arms, then he aimed the sensors on his chest at one corner of the room, and began turning in a final sweep. "Please tell me this hasn't been for nothing," he whispered to Charlie.
"Listen to Will if you won't listen to me. It's not worth the…stop. There. By the doorframe, to the right, there's a run of telecom wire. The floor's not safe. Stay close to the wall."
"I found something," Ernest told Will. "But stay where you are. I weigh less."
Charlie murmured a constant stream of coordinates in Ernest's earpiece. "Forward eight centimeters, left fourteen centimeters, forward thirty centimeters…."
"It's probably more useless coins," Will said. "Forget it. We've got to go."
Ernest was about to reassure Will that Charlie had said wire specifically, and not copper and zinc, but he was busy scanning the floor and placing his feet just so, according to Charlie's directions—and trying to ignore the horrible groaning and sifting sounds the floor was making.
He reached the wall, finally, and felt along the chalky plaster. "No," Charlie said. "Not there—it's hugging the doorframe. Yes, that's right, Ernest. Exactly where your fingers are."
Ernest pulled a wooden fragment pierced by a galvanized nail from the rubble and began to dig into the plaster. It was slow going—the wall was in better repair here—but beneath it, thankfully, so was the wire. "I found some," he called over his shoulder to Will. His voice was shaking.
Will said nothing. Wind whistled through a long-empty windowframe. The building moaned and settled. And finally, Will spoke. "Damn it."
Ernst glanced at him briefly, enough to see he was making his way carefully away from the counter, towards a wall. Ernest focused on his task, exposing the wire a few centimeters at a time. "It's the correct gauge," he asked Charlie, "right?"
"I'd have you halfway back to the railroad by now if it weren't."
And then Will's hand was on his shoulder, squeezing in encouragement. Will hadn't listened to Ernest's orders to stay put any more than Ernest would have heeded Charlie's. "Where is it," Will asked him, "around the door?"
Ernest nodded and kept working.
Will pulled a screwdriver from his tool belt and began hacking away a wide swath of plaster from the other side of the doorway. Seeing him cutting through the old wall with such vigor made Ernest redouble his effort, and soon they had a sizeable length of wire to show for their work. Will gave a final tug, tearing perhaps an extra meter of copper from the wall before the wire snapped, then said, "Okay, Ernest. Have that know-it-all POD-mind set a course for the quickest way out of here."
***
Ernest lay, staring up at the night sky, with his head in Will's lap. Will stroked his brow, and said, "What do you suppose people did to decontaminate themselves from radiation poisoning before there were shunts?"
Ernest supposed it was likely they died. He'd certainly felt like his own death was near once the vomiting started. Elizabeth accessed what medical databases they possessed and determined the vomiting was normal, considering the exposure Ernest had encountered.
Of course, Will had endured the very same exposure…but Will still had a shunt. A dose of nanites was all it took to relieve his radiation poisoning.
"The mortality rate is favorable, even without decontamination," Elizabeth had told him in her most sincere attempt at being comforting as she swabbed him down with wipes to decontaminate his skin. "Your hair might fall out. But if you do survive, it should eventually grow back."
Audrey had suggested introducing the nanites through Ernest's thumb chip. That would indeed have worked, albeit much more slowly than the shunt port—but Elizabeth explained that the nanites were too large to pass through the urine, so they would have had no way to evacuate Ernest's system once they completed their task.
And so there was nothing more they could do than decontaminate Ernest, and wait.
Will continued the rhythmic stroking of Ernest's hair, which was still wet from the washing Elizabeth had given it with their drinking water. Ernest wondered if Will was loosening his hair's roots within their follicles, speeding his imminent baldness, or if the creeping effects of the radiation were still some days off.
He shifted. His new clothing felt stiff and ill-fitting, but at least it wasn't radioactive. He'd needed to roll up the legs of the new trousers to keep from tripping on them. Not that it mattered when all he felt capable of doing was lying down to rest his pounding head.
The lattice of branches Ernest stared through looked much the same as the trees near the radioactive city, though according to Charlie, radiation levels here, nearly fifty kilometers away, were safe. The current obstruction that had stopped the railroad was not a fallen tree, but an old mudslide, with weedy grass growing upon the buried tracks.
"Once Abraham builds the coil…what happens next? He demagnetizes Martha," how to put it delicately? "And then what?"
"I'm not really sure. We never planned for anything like this. Once we realized this whole thing about thirty being the end of our lives was a pack of lies….I guess we thought we were immortal."
Immortal. The word had a lovely ring to it. Ernest turned it over in his mind, and imagined himself existing—if not in his current body, which was weak and disfigured, and which still occasionally heaved with the urge to vomit—then in spirit, at least.
Grass rustled as someone approached, but Ernest's eyelids felt too heavy to open. He recognized Abraham's voice. "Let him sleep, Will. Elizabeth can sit with him. I don't like this spot; it's too exposed. We need your help clearing the tracks."
Will's body tensed. He hesitated. "Go," Ernest whispered, without opening his eyes. "Clear the tracks for me. I want to ride the railroad."
Sleep was welcome. It wasn't the profound, shunted sleep Ernest would have experienced a mere month ago, tucked safely upright in his POD. It wasn't even the helpless, fragmented, dream-riddled horizontal sleep that claimed him each night on the railroad. Instead, sleep was fitful and distorted, and the dreams it brought were tedious, frustrating milieus in which Ernest struggled to fix a datastream he couldn't even parse.
"Ernest?"
Louise. Ernest smiled in his sleep.
"Ernest?"
No, not Louise—because Louise would simply have changed his shunt mixture if she'd wanted to wake him, not shaken him by the shoulder. He opened his eyes. It was dark, save for the light of a nearby LED that lit the silhouette of Audrey's fuchsia hair bright pink against the murky, blue-gray night. Ernest almost reassured her that he was still alive, but at the last moment, changed his response to, "I'm awake."
"Do you feel any better now that you've slept? I've never seen anyone hurling like that. That's not really an idiom, more of a slang, but don't you think it's a good one? Hurling?"
Ernest's abdominal muscles ached with the memory. "Yes. It's pretty accurate." He wedged an elbow under himself, levered up and found the flask of water Will had left beside him. The thought of putting anything else in his stomach brought back, if not the illness itself, the memory of feeling queasy. But Ernest's mouth was so dry, he was so acutely thirsty, that he was totally willing to risk another round of hurling. Once he tipped the water back and attempted a small sip, his thirst overtook him, and he ended up gulping down the entire flask.
He still felt nauseated from drinking—but not to the degree he would have a few hours before. "Sorry. I don't think there will be any more hurling to see."
"Oh, that's not why I woke you." Audrey took Ernest by his dominant arm and helped him to sit up. "The degaussing coil is finished. Will said you'd want to be there when we demagnetize Martha."
Ernest decided he must have been asleep a very long time. The buried railroad tracks were nearly uncovered, and the way would shortly be clear to travel on. Will worked at chopping earth with a sharp-edged POD fragment while Benjamin hauled the chunks of sod aside. A few yards away, on a flat stretch of grass, Martha's body lay upon its silver blanket, unwrapped. It looked bloated and mottled, though not quite as bad as Ernest's clear-coated arm. Abraham knelt on one side of her, Elizabeth on the other.
Audrey led Ernest closer, and he saw there was one more in attendance on Martha: Charlie. His processor, bundled with the electronic device Ernest had discovered at the ancient, radiation-contaminated shop, sat on the ground beside Abraham. The front of the device was a liquid crystal display that was currently cycling through a series of patterns like a black and gray kaleidoscope. Charlie's voice, small but still audible, piped through a speaker opening on the front of the device's casing.
"Here's another option. Build a cairn. That's a pile of rocks to cover the body and prevent predation."
Abraham shook his head wearily. "That sounds even worse than burying her." His gaze was fixed on a small data screen in his lap. Ernest had assumed he was simply reading, but then noticed the scanner beside him, loosely hooked to the data screen in a trailing chaos of wires, which seemed to be Audrey's signature style. Abraham's fingers keyed nearly as quickly as Ernest's might have, though what he was programming, it was impossible to determine without seeing the screen.
"It would be dry," Charlie said, in defense of his cairn idea. "And you could take some aesthetic license in the arrangement of the stones."
Abraham rolled his eyes. Ernest barely caught himself before he asked his long-gone AI to help him research the subtler meanings in the expression. "No holes in the ground, no fires, and no cairns." He keyed even faster for a short burst, and then sat back on his heels, satisfied. "I've reprogrammed a batch of nanites to decompose her body instead."
Nanites? Ernest was intrigued. "I could check those over," he said, and the rusty sound of his own voice startled him. "If you want me to."
Abraham's expression shifted—unreadable, something with twisted up eyebrows and tightly clamped lips—and he stared at Ernest for a long, agonizing moment. Finally, once Ernest had prepared himself for a horrible tirade, Abraham said, "Yes. You know the most about nanotechnology programming. Have a look."
Ernest took the viewscreen and scanner from Abraham, doing his best not to glance down at Martha's face. He couldn't help but look, though, and while it was only a glimpse, it was enough to see that her features were puffy, and her expression, if there were any thought behind it, would have been dismayed.
Ernest took the scanner far enough away that he could no longer see Martha's face, and tried not to think about it. A mind, however, was not exactly like a piece of circuitry. It couldn't be erased so simply.
He checked through the nanites' routines. Their program wasn't written exactly as he might have done it himself, but it would certainly do the job—even to the point of making them shut themselves down once the fuel of Martha's cells was digested, and decomposing their structures until they dispersed as harmless molecules of hydrogen and carbon. "Yes," Ernest said. "It's good."
Abraham nodded curtly, and picked up the degaussing coil. It was a simple tool, really, only a coiled copper wire with a small solar battery hooked to the end. "You'll tell me when the magnetic charge is gone," he prompted Charlie. His voice was thick.
"Of course."
He began at Martha's feet, holding the coil just above her body, running it carefully up one leg, then the other.
The grass rustled beside Ernest as Will crouched beside him and put an arm around his shoulders. Benjamin stood to one side, feet planted, arms crossed over his chest.
"That's fine," Charlie said. "Keep going."
Abraham ran the coil over her hips and abdomen, her chest and each of her arms. And finally, very carefully, he swept it in a circular motion around her face.
Elizabeth tilted her head as if to determine whether Martha's body looked different without her soul in it. Ernest found himself doing the same.
How was it, he wondered, that something so significant could be so difficult to process with his own senses? Facial expressions and idioms. Radiation. A soul.
Charlie's voice broke the heavy silence. "Very good." His tone was gentle, even nurturing. "It's done; she's free."
Abraham continued to stare down at Martha's body, which lay there as still as one of the mannequins. The radiation poisoning made Ernest dizzy, and he held himself very still as he wondered if it would be all right for him to lie down again, or if it would somehow be interpreted as a lack of respect, when finally Abraham said, "I'd like to move it off the blanket before I start the nanites. Put it directly on the ground. I think she would have liked that. She was always fascinated by the edges of the city."
"I will assist," Benjamin said. His loud, clipped voice startled everybody. He'd trained all his life to speak like that, and had no other inflection to use. "You," he pointed at Abraham, then stopped to consider what he wished to say. Then he swept his arm in an arc to include everyone. "You think I'm still an Op. But this thing that happened…" he pointed at Martha's corpse. "I didn't do it. Not me."
"We know," Abraham said dryly. But Ernest wondered, did they all, really? Or was Benjamin sensing what they all, on some level, still thought of him?
Abraham took Martha's body by the shoulders while Benjamin hefted her legs, and they lifted it up while Elizabeth pulled the blanket out from beneath it. The smell was strong, and disturbing.
They set the body directly on the grass, and Abraham placed her arms neatly at her sides. He smoothed her hair, and gave her cheek a final caress. If she'd been vertical, Ernest thought, and not so discolored, she might have looked like she was just sleeping.
Abraham swiped a syringe over the transfer port of his handheld to program the nanites, then turned Martha's shunt arm so the shunt faced him. He considered her face for another long moment, then introduced the nanites to her shunt.
If Abraham's nanites functioned as they were meant to, Ernest realized, it would be a much more compassionate ending than the infernos of Reclaim. Not only that, but even he, without his shunt, would be able to utilize the technology. Theoretically, both the nanites and his body would simply disperse. It was difficult to imagine, but in theory, it seemed to be possible.
Ernest didn't have long to wait. The change, initially subtle, cascaded rapidly once they perceived it. Martha's mottled, ruddy, decaying flesh went silvery and lustrous, like the shell of a brand new POD. For a single moment, her corpse was beautiful.
And then her features softened. The silver of her newly converted skin dulled. The tips of her hair stirred and broke off, carried away like ash on the wind. Slowly, at first, she began to erode, but the process soon sped as the nanites replicated themselves exponentially, one billion becoming two, four, sixteen and so on.
Less than a second after her features began to sag, the surface tension broke, and everything that was once flesh, hair, muscle and bone collapsed, like piles of sand. And soon those sandy granules decomposed farther still, until they became powder—and the powder broke down even more, until it was smoke.
And then Martha was truly gone.
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