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  "Okay. Give me a little bit and come when I call. There won't be much time after."

  * * *

  The old man sat down next to Caesar, his jacket much larger than the man's skinny frame demanded. Caesar didn't look over at him; he stared out the window, watching the sky fly by but not paying any attention to that either. The train was full, as it always was—The Genesis was too efficient to run empty trains—and so someone would have ended up sitting next to him, whether that be an old man or a young woman.

  "You got our message?" The man asked, his voice sounding like time had not touched it as it had the rest of his body.

  Caesar didn't hear him at first, so inside his own head that very little could break through. He was going to die later today and for a girl that he didn't know, for a woman he barely knew and would never know again. He was going to die and what he died for wouldn't make a bit of difference for anyone ever. The girl and her mother would surely be found and liquidated the same as Caesar. Yet, he wasn't considering any other option. His mind was made up.

  "Caesar, did you get our message?" The man asked again, and Caesar finally looked over, hearing his name.

  "Excuse me?" He asked.

  "Our message. We sent it over last night. Did you get it?" The old man sounded like he was asking for a piece of gum, something so nonchalant as to barely need to ask—only doing it out of politeness.

  "What are you talking about?" Caesar said, but knowing. He only received one message: We know and now the man was talking of us, rather than his message.

  "You did, and we should talk about it now, before your stop."

  Caesar looked at the man more carefully. He wore a hat and sunglasses, his gray hair hanging long against the sides of his face, and a beard growing down his neck and up his cheeks. The jacket he wore covered his arms completely and the pants his legs. Caesar could see a bit of his face and the man's hands, but that was it.

  "Who are you?"

  "I'm a friend, Caesar. Maybe the only one you have in this world." The man repositioned himself to face Caesar. "What you're about to do is a mistake. There are ways to do this, but not the way you're going to. You will die for it—"

  Caesar looked around, sure that the people around him were listening, were staring at him, were wondering what this crazy old man was talking about. If so, no one looked at him.

  "—and you need not die right now."

  "I literally have no idea what you're going on about, sir."

  "Get off at the next stop," Grace said in his ear, speaking up for the first time in hours. "Get out of here."

  Caesar looked up at the wall, seeing where the train was in its current path, how long before it stopped again. Five minutes.

  "Stop worrying," the man said. "These people around us, they're all mine. You could stand up, naked, and dance around the train, and no one would look up. Go ahead, try something."

  He looked at the woman across from him. She read something on her scroll, but didn't look up at him or the old man next to him.

  "Scream something at her. Just try it."

  It seemed too strange to be possible. Yet, people should be hearing this man right; he wasn't whispering, wasn't talking low, and the things he said were far too odd for people not to notice. But no one looked. No one said a word.

  "Caesar, no. Don't do what he's saying. Get off this train and get away from him."

  He was already dead. And when you're already dead, what did it matter what you did?

  Caesar sucked in a huge breath, filling up his lungs completely, and then—"HEY!" He screamed from deep inside himself, his vocal chords roaring across the entire train.

  The woman's eyes flicked to the bottom of the scroll and the words rolled upwards. Caesar looked around, but no one moved in the slightest.

  "You see. We're safe to talk here. Only you have an assistant whispering in your ear. We are all free."

  Caesar looked back at the nearly hidden man. "What do you want?"

  "I want you to let this child die. I want you to kill her. I want you to keep on living. You're more important than this child or this woman, even if you don't know it yet. It's too soon for you to do something like this."

  "Who are you? Don't tell me a friend; tell me who you are."

  "I'm a person who was presented with a very similar path a long time ago," the old man said. "I'm a result of my choices. That's all. Just as you will be. If you choose to save this girl, you're going to die. You'll never get the chance to be as old as I am. You'll never get the chance to figure out what the end game of all your thoughts are."

  "I'm not going to kill her," Caesar said. He stood up, looking the length of the train. Everyone seemed to be in their own world, not hearing or seeing anything around them.

  "Then you're going to kill yourself," the man said.

  "How do you know all this? How do you know what's happening to me?"

  "The Genesis had a purpose for me once, a long time ago, but I decided I didn't like its purpose. So I changed it. Now, I suppose it's to know what you're doing."

  Caesar turned around and faced the man. He looked small, frail, like at least a century old. Caesar could barely see any piece of him; his disguise covered the vast majority of his body. He was hidden from the world. "You're not answering any of my questions," Caesar said.

  "I've only come to answer one question, the one that you've asked everyone but me: what should you do?"

  "I don't care what you think. I don't know anything about you. I don't want to know you or the people on this train."

  The old man looked to his right. A young boy sat on the train, not old enough for his feet to touch the floor. "What should he do?" The man asked.

  The boy didn't look up from the video on his scroll. "Kill the child, ignore the woman. His chances of life past forty appreciate greatly with those actions. Without them, he'll be dead before he's thirty-four with a ninety-nine percent probability."

  The old man turned his head slightly to the left, looking at the woman next to the boy—a mother, most likely. "Why does he want to continue living?" The man asked.

  The woman shouldn't have known he was even talking to her, but she answered all the same. "His purpose is bigger than that girl. If he dies, he'll never realize his purpose."

  "Enough with the games," Caesar whispered, still standing. "I don't need to watch you run through a script with these people. Do you really think any of this will change my mind? I'm ready to die for this, and a bus ride full of crazy people isn't going to change that. We don't have purposes. None of us. Not outside of what The Genesis wants, as you just told me. I'm done with that and I'm done murdering children. I don't know you and I don't want to know you. Keep away from me, from now on—you got that?"

  The train drew to a stop and the doors opened next to Caesar. He didn't step forward but kept staring at the old man, waiting for a response, an acknowledgment that he heard and understood what Caesar said.

  The old man's right hand reached to his face and removed the sunglasses. Caesar stared as the man revealed his eyes. One was the natural brown, surrounded by wrinkled flesh. Not a kind eye, but still human. The other...

  Hundreds of tiny panels sat inside his skull, sat on a round orb that was circular like an eye, but in no other way resembled the round body part on the other side of his face. The tiny panels made up the entirety of the orb, looking like a fly's eye, except every bit of it mechanical and not organic. And his skull, at least the right side, the side surrounding that paneled eye—skin peeled around the eye, revealing cold, gray metal staring back at Caesar.

  Whatever this person was, he wasn't human.

  "Time to get off," the old man said.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  "Hi," the little girl said.

  Laura. Her name's Laura.

  Laura Hedrick, daughter of a single mother, and soon to be the first fugitive in maybe five hundred years. Caesar had the young girl brought to him, brought to his office. No one asked any que
stions, because what questions did you ask the director? If he wanted to see a child, then he could see a child. No one under him had any idea of his orders, didn't know if they came directly from The Genesis or the council that looked over the entirety of population control. No one under him had any inkling that he could be acting out of his field of authority. Ceasar Wells wasn't The Genesis, per se, but he was the closest thing to it that anyone working inside Population Control would ever come across.

  The old man's eye came back to him, a flash across his mind, but he pushed it away. He didn't have time to dwell on it, didn't know what it meant, and in reality—it didn't matter at all. Caesar was going to do this and then he was going to die, and whatever he saw on that train would go on living its non-human life, but without Caesar. The here and now mattered; Laura mattered.

  "Hi," Caesar said.

  The girl was a pretty little thing. Her hair long and brown; her face thin; her neck long. She was only six years old, but if she didn't grow up to be a beautiful woman, a lot of things must have gone wrong. And probably, Caesar was the first step in those many wrong things.

  Paige was on her way here. Her work day nearly over, Caesar had called and told her to come. He didn't know if she was ready or not, but they were out of time. Alone with Laura in the room, he wondered if he might even be able to get away with it. He wasn't completely sure, but it might be possible. This had never been attempted before. No one had ever simply taken someone from a crop, taken them and released them before their time, without any orders. No one had ever disobeyed a liquidation order. And since no one had done it, were there even processes to stop it? Processes to notice it? Processes to track these two down once they left? Caesar didn't know but he was doing something new here, and that novelty gave him an advantage. Not a large one, but maybe enough of one.

  "What's your name?" The girl asked.

  "Caesar."

  They sat looking at each other quietly. Caesar didn't know what to say, didn't have any idea how to talk to someone this young—and really, did anyone? No one had contact with children of this age anymore, not outside of the applications and people that were their immediate caregivers. He knew their IQ points but not what that translated to in terms of communication skills, in terms of day to day activities. He was as lost sitting here with this little girl as he was with the man on the bus. Both enigmas that he didn't understand.

  "Mr. Wells, you have a visitor."

  Paige was not to give anyone her name, for obvious reasons, though all of it would be tracked fairly easily through their systems. An application somewhere may know she arrived, but it most likely wouldn't make the connection with the little girl that Caesar had pulled. Applications were intelligent, but not The Genesis, not created with the all sweeping knowledge, and they had to communicate what they saw upward. That would take time. There were too many bits of knowledge, too much going on all around, all the time, for one single application to look into these two seemingly random facts. Right now, at least.

  That's what he hoped anyway.

  Maybe The Genesis already knew.

  "Send them up," Caesar said into the room.

  "Who's here?" Laura asked.

  "A friend. Someone that wants to meet you."

  Both of them found that somewhat comfortable silence again. Caesar waited, knowing what he would tell Paige but not knowing what he would do once he said it. He didn't know what came next here. He didn't know if applications would march in immediately, or if a vat would appear around him somehow and the liquidation process would begin right here, right now. The little boy on the train said he had a ninety-nine percent probability of not making it to his next birthday. Said it as if he had been The Genesis himself.

  None of them knew. None of them could possibly know, whoever the hell they were. They hadn't done this, nor had they seen anyone do it before them. So how could they know what was possible? They didn't. Whoever they were, they didn't matter here. Not now. He could get this girl out and maybe he could keep it quiet. Maybe, no one would know, ever. Maybe the world would keep turning the way it did now and Caesar could keep turning with it.

  The door opened to Caesar's right and Paige walked in.

  She stopped, staring at the little girl in front of her, not glancing at Caesar even once.

  No tears came to her eyes and no words to her mouth. She only stood still, as if held in a trance by the child in front of her.

  "This is Laura," Caesar said, standing up from his chair. Laura remained seated, staring at the new woman.

  "Hi," she said.

  "Hi," Paige answered, her voice shaky.

  "If you want to do this," Caesar said, "this is our only chance. If we take her from this room, there's no coming back. There's no redo on this."

  Paige nodded slightly, but didn't pull herself away from Laura.

  "Do you want to do this? Are you sure?"

  Paige nodded again.

  Caesar moved to his desk, grabbing two small scrolls. He walked them over to Paige. "These are programmed to get you to the edge of the city. From there, I packed them with enough currency to get you vehicles to go out into the wilderness. Then, Paige, you'll be on your own."

  On your own.

  It was a phrase he didn't think he had understood until just now. He spent all day working on those scrolls, programming them so they would work perfectly, so that they would operate whenever she needed to use them. He hadn't thought past the end of the city though, hadn't thought past the wilderness. That's what society referred to as anything not urbanized, anything given back to the Earth. It was all wilderness, and in it—well, he didn't know. He'd been out to it once and never again. That's where he was sending this woman. And she would be on her own, for the first time in her life. Since they were born, every human had someone by their side. Either other children or caregivers. You couldn't escape humanity, couldn't have solitude outside of your own apartment. You couldn't be on your own. For the first time, Caesar saw someone who would be on her own, outside of the realm of humanity...alone. Paige would have this little girl, but no one else. How could she possibly survive? Caesar had a better chance, staying here, facing the consequences of his actions.

  "You can turn back, Paige. You don't have to do this," he said.

  She shook her head. That was the only sign she gave that she heard anything. Was she thinking this through—was she seeing the end result as he was? Probably not. Caesar learned to get along with the world because he had no choice, but no one's intelligence rivaled his own, so they couldn't possibly see as far out as he could. The only reason he hadn't seen this sooner was because of the strangeness of the idea; he'd never thought about the possibilities because the actions had not occurred to him before a few hours ago. How could she possibly understand what would happen at the end of all this?

  "How are you going to make it?" Caesar asked.

  "We will," she answered.

  The little girl said nothing, as enraptured with her mother as her mother with her.

  "Where do you go after the city? What do you do then?" Caesar wasn't considering himself at all. Despite the brief hopes he felt in this room over the past few minutes, he had resigned himself to death. She didn't have to die, though. She could keep living. If they did this, everyone in the room died. If they stole this girl out of here, this Laura, then they all died. If they let her die (killed her, Caesar), then the rest of them lived.

  "We'll figure out something," Paige said.

  "What if you don't?"

  "Then she won't die here, alone."

  Caesar looked at the scrolls in his hand. Maybe that was enough. Maybe that the girl died next to someone who loved her could be enough.

  "Here," he said, pushing the scrolls forward. "It's time to go."

  Paige walked forward and offered her hand to Laura. The girl took it and stood up from the chair. They both walked back to Caesar.

  "Thank you," Paige said, looking at him for the first time. Fear lived in her eyes, an
d maybe that wasn't all Caesar saw there, but that fear overwhelmed anything else he may have seen.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The Life of Caesar Wells

  By Leon Bastille

  I'm filling in background here; I realize that. I just don't know what you may know in the future. Again, it all rests on the decisions facing Caesar, but you could know everything, or you could know nothing. So, I want to be safe and act like you know nothing of the past. Until Caesar, I knew what The Genesis told us—and to be fair, it was relatively accurate. Still, it's best to have an accounting up front.

  The Singularity was an idea of a grand intelligence, one that could encompass all at once. The Singularity became The Genesis. We established that earlier. What I want to explore in this chapter is what happened when The Genesis realized it couldn't do everything, that it was impossible for even one intelligence to guide the entire world with the strength it needed. Even with a near infinite ability to learn at an increasing pace, the amount of information was too much. The human brain must discard something like ninety-three percent of the information it takes in daily. Imagine trying to take in every human and piece of wildlife in the world, perhaps even the bacteria that lives beneath the Earth's surface—how could The Genesis possibly separate the important information from the mundane? How could it create a system to accurately process and decide it all at once? Maybe it could have; I don't want to take anything away from The Genesis. It is easily the most powerful piece of creation in the history of the universe—jealousy would probably cripple God himself. The process might not have been as efficient, however, and if nothing else, The Genesis craves efficiency. Efficiency and harmony.

  Instead of a system in which The Genesis saw everything at once, somehow making instantaneous decisions across the globe, it took a page from humanity's playbook. A corporation has lines of communication that go up and down, delivering messages and following orders. Humans cannot possibly be everywhere at once, cannot possibly accomplish everything for everyone at all times. So they use others to do what they cannot do. Why would The Genesis not have adopted this? So it did. Thus, applications were born. Again, that's just a human word for an entity that is as self-aware as any human. The applications are connected directly to The Genesis, at an intimate level. Caesar has explained it to me, and since I'm not Caesar, I'll probably do a poor job of explaining it to you.