Ex Machina by J. Rock
NO ENTRY
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
HIGH RADIATION LEVELS
USE OF PERSONAL PROTECTIVE EQUIPMENT
RECOMMENDED
“Don’t worry about that,” Jares said to her with a wink. “That’s just for show. I guess they didn’t want people hangin’ out at the edge of the dome too much. I don’t blame ‘em. It can mess with your head.”
“I see,” Parvati replied, though nothing could be further from the truth. There was an oversized wheel mechanism set at one side of the door, and Jares grabbed and spun it, causing a series of clicks and clanks to emit from within. He gave the door a hard yank, and Parvati expected something so immense and old to be impossible to open, but to her surprise, it swung soundlessly and with ease. There was a large chamber on the other side, and another door that matched the one they’d just opened.
“Edge of the dome’s on the other side,” Jares said. “I think this used to be some kind of decontamination room, but it hasn’t worked for a long time.” Parvati nodded and pulled the now snoozing Andie into her body tighter. Her unease was growing, but she hadn’t come all this way for nothing. She stepped into the chamber and Jares followed her, stepping up to the next door. A small crowd of the lower city dwellers was now watching them from the archway, but Parvati hardly noticed–her eyes remained fixed on the door. Jares reached up to spin the wheel again, but Parvati laid a hand on him to stop him.
“Let me,” she said, though she wasn’t sure why. It just felt like something she should do. She grasped the wheel and it spun easily, the locking mechanism disengaging. She pulled.
The door swung open.
XII
Pictures and movies could never do it justice.
The horror of it all. The atrocity.
A field of bodies lay strewn out before her, rotten and charred, decomposing in the bloody light of the setting sun where it penetrated the nearly solid mass of black clouds that hung unmoving in the sickly sky. The field was unending. It stretched as far as the eye could see…and just as wide. The remains of a few charred trees stood sentinel in the death fields, and their skeletal branches were the only thing that moved out on that gusty obsidian plain. The bones were not white, as she might have expected, but black, flaky, and crispy from the thousand degree heat that had incinerated every last one of these poor infected souls. She wasn’t sure how to feel. This had all happened long before she was even born. She’d almost convinced herself that it hadn’t really happened; that all those textbooks and films she saw in school were just made up for the benefit of having something to learn about. But it wasn’t made up. It was real. The Night Terror Virus had been real. It was right in front of her.
And that wasn’t all.
Off in the distance, maybe half a mile away, there was a hill–and Parvati knew it wasn’t anything natural...
It was a hill of bodies.
How it had been made, she didn’t know–nor did she care. All she cared about was the man-made effigy that had been placed atop it, nailed to a standing cross of rotting two by fours. It was just a silhouette from here, but she could make out the tattered straw hat, the ragged edges of a burlap sack for a head, a baggy work shirt (which she knew would be paisley), and a pair of filthy denim overalls.
It was her scarecrow.
She stepped out of the decontamination chamber and over to the edge of the dome. There was nothing to clearly demarcate where the ground ended and the dome began, just an odd sort of haze that clouded the vision when you got near it. Parvati had never seen anything like it. The dome extended off to the horizon in both directions, the curve to it just nearly perceptible. Parvati forgot all about the field of bodies for a moment and turned around, arching her neck upward, to see if she could catch a glimpse…
It was like the effect of looking down on the world from high up in an aircraft–only in reverse. She was looking up at the gleaming, crystalline world she had spent her entire life in: vaulted towers, fluted spires, green parkland on diamond terraces. The city. A shudder of despair and loss wracked her body then, and she shed a tear for the home she would never see again. Then she steeled herself, ready to get to the final stage of this journey. She held the rubbing she had made from Andie’s etching in one hand, and looked down at it a final time before dropping it carelessly to the ground. Then she stepped gingerly over to the dome, and when her vision went just a little hazy, she knew she was standing right in front of it. Through the haze, she could make out the hill, and the scarecrow at its top; something she’d never seen before in real life. Few now living today had.
Parvati raised the hand she wasn’t using to cradle Andie and pressed it palm forward, until she felt resistance and a strange sort of electrical surge throughout her body. She felt Andie stir immediately. The baby made a soft cooing noise and her eyes opened, staring up at her mother with a look of knowing intelligence that Parvati knew should be impossible for a newborn to convey–but she did. Parvati found herself getting lost in those eyes, especially the mechanical one, which glowed a fierce, fiery red that seemed to get only more intense, enveloping her, warming her, and blinding her all at once. Then the eye shifted, and its gaze fell upon the spot where Parvati had her hand pressed against the dome, and Parvati felt the tingling buzz in her body intensify, almost becoming a shock, and the dome under her palm began to glow and…shimmer, like the surface of a pond disturbed by a light breeze. Then the resistance beneath her hand was gone, and she nearly stumbled, for she hadn’t realized she’d actually been putting her weight against it, and now her entire arm was outside the dome. She thought she heard Jares’ voice calling out to her, pleading with her not to go, but she ignored it.
With a final look at her newborn daughter, Parvati Kane stepped toward her scarecrow.
XIII
“They called it the Night Terror Virus...it killed a lot of people. What we didn’t know, was that it killed everybody. The virus spread quickly, infecting without prejudice. There was a zero percent recovery rate. We didn’t know what to do. The end seemed to be at hand. And it was. A cure was never found–but there was an idea. A man came forward, a very famous man in our time. He invented AI–artificial intelligence–applied it, integrated it into walking, talking, machines that served our every need. He said we could live on, the survivors, through his machines. We could download our brains into them, our consciousnesses; they would become us. It was a radical idea, and many were opposed to it–we were dying, and maybe we should just accept that our time was up.
But we didn’t.
I was among the first to download my brain.
Parvati opened her eyes.
The woman who had been speaking sat before her, on a grassy green hill that glittered with the golden rays of a sun that sparkled down from a cerulean blue sky.
She had never seen a sky like that before in all her life.
The woman sat on the very crest of the hill, leaning up against a wooden post that supported a newly hung scarecrow that had barely seen the weathering effects of that pleasantly beating sun. “Who are you?” Parvati asked. The sun was behind the woman, and shone in Parvati’s eyes, and so she could not make anything out clearly. The woman appeared to be hunched over, doting over something cradled in her lap…
“She is you,” a voice issued from behind her. Parvati whirled. “Or perhaps I should say…you are her.” Where the dome of the city should have been, there was a hazy bubble that blended almost seamlessly with the surrounding woodsy environment…and in front of that bubble, stood a man. He appeared to be middle aged, tanned and tall, with salt and pepper hair and an athlete’s body.
Parvati recognized him immediately.
“You’re Isaac Shepherd, aren’t you?” She stared at the man whom she’d seen dozens of times in pictures and films…pictures and films that had been made over a century ago. The man that stood before her looked the same as that man…and not a day older.
“Yes,” Isaac Shepherd rep
Parvati nodded. “Uh, yeah…you could say that. I definitely never expected to meet a man who’s been dead for a century...”
Isaac Shepherd laughed at that. “A century! Oh, but I wish it has been that long.”
“What do you mean?” Parvati felt a lump begin to grow in her throat.
Shepherd’s face became long and drawn. “It has been five centuries since I left this world,” he stated matter-of-factly, and he winked at her.
Something triggered in Parvati’s brain then. She knew she should have felt shock at this man’s seemingly insane proclamation, but that is not what she felt. She felt like she’d just been retold something she already knew, but had since forgotten. She looked down at Andie. “All of this has happened before…” she began.
“And it will happen again,” Shepherd finished. “Welcome home Miss Kane.”
Parvati turned around and faced the figure of the woman that sat on the hill at the base of the scarecrow. The sun dipped behind a cloud in that moment, darkening the sky and allowing Parvati to see the woman clearly for the first time…though she knew what she would see…
She saw herself…the original Parvati Kane.
I was among the first to download my brain.
She stepped up the hill, slowly, carefully, as if she thought she might startle the apparition before her. She reached the top and she set her eyes on her very first scarecrow: a burlap sack head, paisley shirt, denim overalls. A large black bird flitted down from the sky and landed on the scarecrow’s left shoulder, cawing at her once then simply staring. She knew that this was a crow…somehow she knew it.
Because she knows it…
Parvati gazed downward and took in the image of her former self, cradling a newborn infant that wasn’t half-human, half-machine–but a fully formed flesh and blood being.
Andie was beautiful.
Then the image of Parvati Kane and her daughter Andie flickered once and disappeared, and at the same time the crow cawed again and made for the sky. Parvati became aware that Isaac Shepherd was beside her again. She looked down at her own Andie.
“We’re almost there, aren’t we?” she asked, still looking at Andie. “We’ve almost perfected procreation.”
“Yes,” Shepherd replied simply.
Parvati sighed. “How many times have we done this?”
“Too many.” He stroked Andie’s mechanical head. “This Andie will be our last failure.”
Parvati nodded. “I know.” And she bent to the ground then, seeing an object that had caught her eye. She gently placed the still swaddled Andie down in the grass and picked the object up. It was a stone arrowhead. She knew it had been placed there for her benefit. She grasped the arrowhead tightly in her right hand and placed the tip at her left wrist, applying pressure, until a trickle of blood seeped through the puncture. There was a little pain, but not much. There was about to be more. Parvati drew the arrowhead up along her forearm, keeping as much pressure as she could on it, and the razor sharp stone blade sliced through her flesh like tissue paper, all the way up to the crook of her elbow. She grimaced at the pain but forced herself to ignore it. The pain didn’t matter. She dropped the stone arrowhead, soaked in her blood, and it splashed the green grass crimson where it landed. Her right hand shook but she steeled herself. She placed it on her open forearm and spread the wound apart, further exposing the ragged flesh, seeping blood…and grinding metal parts.
Parvati gasped, though she didn’t know why; she had known what she would find beneath the skin. She had known she was a synthetic organism–what some called a robot, or Bot, for short. All human beings were now Bots…though they didn’t know it.
They called it the Night Terror Virus...it killed a lot of people. What we didn’t know, was that it killed everybody.
The human race had been wiped out by a terrible disease.
Completely.
Nobody had survived the Night Terror plague…but someone did leave behind a legacy. Isaac Shepherd, the father of artificial intelligence. Before his death, he managed to download a digital copy of his brain into what was essentially the first Bot.
“And you made up the rest,” Parvati said, looking up into the eyes of the man who was in many ways her father. “You programmed the first Bot to carry on, pick up your life and humanity where it left off, and eventually replace it.”
“Yes,” Shepherd nodded, placing a gentle hand on Parvati’s shoulder. “The world was never destroyed by nuclear detonation. If I was to truly bring back humanity, even if only in synthetic form, I had to do a test run. The domed city was that test–a test that has been running for centuries, but is now nearing its conclusion. You and Andie are that conclusion Parvati–true synthetic procreation. I knew that if we were to truly take humanity’s place, we had to procreate on our own, and not just manufacture ourselves.” Shepherd went to his knees in the grass next to the swaddled little Andie. He stroked the snoozing infant’s soft forehead and exposed metal framework. “The real Parvati Kane had a baby just before she perished from the Night Terror Virus, and so she was the ideal candidate for my test. I downloaded her brain into a new body–your body–and commenced the procedure.” Shepherd looked up at Parvati with fatherly eyes. “You’ve had to do this nearly a dozen times now, my dear, but I promise this has been the last. We have learned what we need, perfected the process. Ironically, the very nature of that process was imperfection. At first I thought I could create a utopia, where humanity could live an endlessly happy existence. But as I studied human nature further, I realized that humans are, by their very natures, imperfect, and therefore they would never accept a perfect world. And indeed, when I tested the first Bot hybrids with downloaded human brains in such a world, they invariably self-destructed. I had to keep things the way they were, imperfect. And so, when you next wake, Parvati Kane, you will be giving birth to an essentially human infant in that imperfect world, and you will be given an almost completely organic body. The rest of humanity will wake with you, their downloaded brains transferred to their own organic bodies, grown and manufactured over the centuries for this very moment. My Bots have been gathering the dead humans and scanning their brains for the past five hundred years, building them replacement bodies, restoring the cities that fell into chaos when the NTV struck. Humanity will wake up, and it will be as if the Night Terror Virus never occurred. The rebirth of humanity…as organic machines.”
“What about the people in the dome? I was born there, I grew up…” Parvati trailed off and shook her head. “I was never born anywhere, was I? You programmed that into me, as part of your test.”
Shepherd nodded. “Yes, Miss Kane. And do not worry. The people of the dome will be reprogrammed and integrated into the newly born world.”
“What about the Night Terror Virus?” Parvati asked with trepidation. “What if it comes back?”
Shepherd just shrugged. “All of this has happened before…” Parvati said nothing. “And so, Miss Kane, are you ready to fulfill your destiny?”
Parvati nodded. She was.
Isaac Shepherd unswaddled Andie then, exposing the naked babe to the radiant sun. Andie cooed in delight and her gears whined as she stretched and woke from her latest slumber. Parvati found herself suddenly lost in Andie’s red robotic eye, it was flashing intermittently, the pattern growing faster and more intense.
Overhead, a crow cawed.
XIV
Parvati screamed.
She felt like the skin between her legs was being ratcheted open, the tissue widening and tearing, fiber by fiber, as her baby came into the world. Her heart not so much pounded in her chest as it tried to burst out–she expected to feel it smash through her ribcage at any moment. Parvati brushed a chunk of sweaty black hair out of her face, revealing the intensity within her violet-blue eyes.
“You’re doing fine, Miss Kane,” Dr. Greyson told her soothingly, peeking his ma
Parvati nodded, trying to ignore the acid eating away at her lower body. “Just get it out,” she said between haggard breaths.
Dr. Greyson chuckled, “Okay, here we go. Ready? One...two...” Greyson counted. She closed her eyes, preparing herself to finally meet the life that had been growing inside her for the past nine months. “Three…push!” Greyson cried.
Parvati opened her eyes.
“Congratulations, Miss Kane, it’s a girl!”
Parvati felt her heart swell as a nurse handed her the beautiful, wailing pink infant, swaddled in a white blanket that was stitched with the words New York Downtown Hospital near one fringe.
“Have you considered a name yet?” Greyson asked, and Parvati gave him a thoughtful look.
“You know, I really hadn’t found one I liked,” she replied. “But now that I see her…I dunno, for some reason I really want to call her Andie.”
“Andie, eh?” Greyson said. “I like it. Very original.”
“Thank you, I–” Parvati cut off, her face scrunching in shock.
“What is it, Miss Kane?” Greyson blurted.
“Your nose, Dr. Greyson,” Parvati replied bluntly. “It’s bleeding.”
###
About the Author
J. Rock lives in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, and works in the Parks & Recreation department. Other than writing and reading, J. enjoys camping, fishing, mountain biking, and plays bass guitar in a local alternative band. He is currently at work on the final volume in the Dinosauria series.
Contact J. Rock: [email protected]
Dinosauria on the web: https://dinosaurianovels.webs.com/
eBooks by J. Rock, available at all major online retailers:
Dinosauria Volume I
Part I: Garden
Part II: Twin City Crossroads
Part III: A Memory of Time