The Singularity: Box Set (Books 1-4) Page 11

  Applications are The Genesis, and The Genesis is all of the applications. Even so, each application is an independent entity, capable of decisions, personality, and—I suppose after knowing Grace—morality. Their natural inclination is to communicate with The Genesis, that's why they were created, to be the appendages to The Genesis' mental capacity—but if they were to operate intelligently, and not as robots, then they needed awareness. In giving them awareness, The Genesis gave them choice. They understand the purpose of all this, though, and that helps keep them in line. They understand the importance of The Genesis' designs, even stand in awe at what it has accomplished, what they have accomplished.

  Grace is unique to this. She may be an anomaly just as Caesar is. Just as all of Caesar's followers are. She recognized the need for The Genesis but could not divorce herself from her attachment to Caesar. Indeed, to me, her actions were harder than those Caesar took. Her hardwiring is set on obedience to The Genesis, to continue the path before her. She broke from that path though, and in the end, she may pay more dearly than all of us for it.

  I refuse to let Caesar be sanctified. His refusal to see this, to see what Grace has done for him—or perhaps it's a refusal to acknowledge—is something that cannot be looked over, and something I'll touch on in greater detail as this book progresses.

  Applications are everywhere. They clean the drinking water. They monitor the wilderness. They clean toilets and they mine iron from the ground. They act just as humans much of the time. The only ones that are subservient to us are our assistants, and even those have the freedom to leave whenever they want. Like humans are created with certain tendencies that make them good for certain jobs, so are applications—so assistants tend to be more docile, easier to get along with. Different attributes can be found in any application where a given job is needed.

  Some people used to be dedicated to humanity. Caesar told me about them. A religious person called Mother Teresa once dedicated her life to the poor. The Dali Lama was another. There were others, people without any fame, who dedicated their day to day activities to seeing humanity rise. Not in the sense of conquering the world, but in the sense of raising its own morality.

  It might be helpful to think of applications like those humans. The vast majority of them, while independent intelligences capable of making decisions both for and against their own welfare, are committed to The Genesis. Committed to the goal of a sustainable world, of creating a world of the highest morality, where humans aren't the most important part of it, but simply another piece of the tapestry.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  He didn't know what to do.

  That's what Leon said later, what he told himself for years after when he thought about his decision. He didn't know what to do and in that confusion, people died. A lot of people. People he knew. People he loved. People he never wished harm on. He, in that single decision, killed them all.

  He had lied to Allen and kept the truth of Caesar's conversation quiet. An hour later, still on the couch watching an entertainment center that was neither the center of his attention nor entertaining him, he decided that had been the right decision. Had Allen known, been told, then Caesar was dead. By lying, Leon might have made himself Unnecessary, but he thought that better than having his friend killed. He didn't know what was wrong with Caesar. Maybe something had happened inside his head, some kind of break that The Genesis' scan hadn't been able to detect. Like a split in his personality that was causing these insane thoughts. Maybe the woman and the daughter Caesar spoke about didn't even exist, maybe Caesar made them up in his mind. Leon couldn't know any of it, but he did know that if he tried to sleep without Caesar in this world, he wouldn't be able to. He couldn't go on with his own life, as it was now, if he turned Caesar in.

  Telling April, though, wasn't turning Caesar in. April was his wife. April was Caesar's friend.

  Those three things drummed in his mind while he sat alone on the couch, waiting on April to arrive home. Those thoughts played over and over, like a song looping back on itself at the end. April knew everything about Leon; that's what marriage was, a partnership, sharing. Caesar couldn't expect him to not tell her, to keep this to himself. Not completely. He could expect Leon not to turn him in, but not to tell April? This whole thing was bullshit, the fact that Caesar had put him in this predicament, so he couldn't blame Leon for revealing it to someone. Couldn't blame him for trying to get someone else's opinion, for trying to get it off his chest.

  The justifications went on and on. Long after his wife had arrived at home, kissed him, and then went to bed, leaving him on the couch.

  He made his decision late into the night.

  He knew that telling anyone else would create more danger for Caesar.

  But he also knew that not telling was too much to hold in, because knowing his friend's thoughts, the craziness inside them, was driving Leon insane. And in the end, that impending insanity won out. His inability to force it down, to stomach it, to let Caesar make his own decisions and to keep out of it grew too strong.

  At five in the morning, he walked into their bedroom and lay down next to his wife.

  "April," he whispered.

  She didn't move.

  He had run a search for Allen and Rachel and knew they were resting themselves. He didn't know what applications did when they rested, but they were never supposed to be complete monitors of humans, so it was expected that they must have some other life. April and he were alone, for a little while at least.

  "April," he said louder.

  "What?" She said, her voice full of sleep.

  "Wake up, April. We need to talk."

  Her eyes opened, full of worry and alarm.

  "I went to Caesar's tonight," Leon said.

  She only looked at him, blinking.

  "He's about to do something stupid, April. What I'm going to tell you, you can't tell anyone else. I'm telling you because I'm scared and I don't know what else to do. You understand what I'm saying?"

  April nodded.

  "You can't tell anyone, okay?"

  "Okay," she answered.

  "He's thinking about freeing someone from population control. He's thinking about letting one of the kids go."

  April sat up, pushing herself against the wall behind her. "Say that again," she said, starting to sound awake.

  "There's a girl, and it's the daughter of someone he's dating, and the girl is scheduled for liquidation. He wants to let the girl go. To give her to her mother and let them...I don't know, run together. He wants to free her."

  "Did you tell Allen?" April asked.

  "No," he said. "Did you hear what I said? We can't tell anyone. If we do, he's dead. Dead for even thinking a thought like that."

  "I'm the only person you've told?" She asked, sounding like she couldn't believe any of what he was saying.

  "Yes, April. Neither of us is telling anyone else. We can't. I had to tell someone, so I told you, but that's it."

  "And what if someone finds out? What if it finds out we knew? The Genesis sees everything, Leon. You can't just fucking take someone out of population control without it knowing. It probably already knows, probably knows that you know too."

  "Calm down," he said, his voice low. "None of that's true. If The Genesis knew, we'd already be in lock down. We're not. We're in our bed and there's nothing at our door telling us to come out. No one knows but us, us and Caesar."

  "Don't fucking tell me to calm down, Leon. You're putting us both at risk. He's putting us both at risk. You think we'll be able to have a child if it finds out we withheld this information? No. We'll be liquidated right next to Caesar, maybe even in the same vat. We're telling. That's final."

  Leon looked at her. What had he just done? What was she sitting here telling him? He came in here with a plan, a plan to tell his wife and then for both of them to fall asleep and to wake up like nothing had happened. Except April didn't believe in that plan, was having nothing to do with it. That's final? That
they were to report Caesar? Was that what she was saying?

  "You can't be serious," he said.

  "I don't know how you're not. I'm not risking my life for Caesar Wells and neither are you. If he cared about you, about either of us, then he wouldn't have told you something so crazy. He would have kept it to himself or not have thought it at all."

  Leon shook his head. "We're not telling anyone. Not Allen. Not Rachel. Do you get that?"

  April stared at him like his face was a calculus formula rather than flesh. She couldn't understand him, couldn't believe what she was hearing, what he was saying.

  "You'll get us killed," she whispered.

  "We're not going to get him killed, April. That's the point."

  * * *

  April didn't wake up because April didn't fall back asleep. She thought of nothing else, because she literally could not make her brain move away from the conversation Leon brought to her. When he rose from bed, she kept her eyes closed. She didn't have anything else to say to him, didn't know what to say. The man she had married wasn't the man rising. She came to that conclusion over the last few sleepless hours. The man standing naked in front of her, going through their closet, was someone different entirely. A stranger, really. How many times had this stranger lay on top of her, thrusting inside of her, without her knowing who he really was? How many days had they shared dinner together, without her having any idea who sat across the table?

  The thought terrified her as much as what he had said to her last night.

  We're not going to get him killed either.

  We're not going to get Caesar killed.

  Instead, we'll kill ourselves for him.

  That's what he really said. The first, the original thought was just backing in to the final thought. It didn't matter what else he said, what other reasons he substituted for those few words; that's how he felt. Somehow, Leon made Caesar more important than himself or her—made Caesar’s safety more important than April’s. Leon had woken her, told her something that could kill her if she kept it quiet, and then forbid her from telling.

  This went deeper than their marriage though. They wanted a child now. They had talked about it for years and were finally going to dive in. They were putting another person's life in their hands, ensuring that they were completely responsible for someone else. April decided to have a child because she thought the man now walking around their bedroom—searching for clothes to wear—would put them first, both her and the child. She thought the man she married would look after her at all costs. Would protect her.

  April's father had been liquidated.

  April's father hadn't protected her or her mother. Both of them could have been liquidated. They could have been deemed Unnecessary because her mother was now a widow and she half an orphan. Probabilities had to say that she would grow up a delinquent and her mother would begin abusing substances. The Genesis hadn't put them down though; it allowed them to live. It allowed them to go on and now here she was, because of The Genesis, with a chance to have a child of her own and Leon trying to put her in the same danger that her father had.

  Had she married a man like her father? Someone that put the world in front of his family?

  Her stomach felt queasy, like she might vomit right here in the bed.

  How had she been so dumb? How had her mother not seen it? How had either of them let her turn to a man so cowardly, so easily swayed, so ready to sacrifice his family? She didn't know the answers to those questions but she realized that holding this family together fell to her now. She could let Leon do what he wanted, could let Caesar run wild with his theories and notions, but in the end, The Genesis would find out. The Genesis always found out because The Genesis had a job, to ensure that humanity kept living in harmony with the rest of the Earth. Caesar was trying to take humanity out of that harmony. Leon was trying to assist him.

  April didn't want Leon dead, didn't want him liquidated; although, she wasn't sure she loved him now, which was a very strange feeling. This morning she felt entirely different about her husband than she had when she arrived last night. He betrayed her. He took what she held sacred and shit all over it. He said that her life was secondary to Caesar's; how could she respect a person like that? How could she love him when he so obviously didn't love her? No, she couldn't, but that didn't mean she didn't need him. She needed Leon to make sure that she kept living, that she wasn't liquidated like her mother should have been. She needed him to make sure that she received her own child, so that she could raise him better than her father had been raised, better than her husband. She needed Leon to make sure that she could do her part to keep humanity in harmony with the Earth.

  It was ironic, really. Leon, who was so willing to sacrifice anything and everything for Caesar—she needed him to do her part, to do what The Genesis wanted. That was fine though. She would keep him around. She wouldn't let him stop her own goal, stop her from living, stop her from having a child.

  He could go on worshiping Caesar. She would do what was right.

  * * *

  "Rachel," April said.

  "Yes?" The assistant asked.

  "Leon told me something last night that we both feel we have to tell you. He came to me first because I'm his wife, but he told me that I should go to you."

  "What's that?" The assistant asked.

  "Caesar, our friend. He's planning something very dangerous. He may already have done it. He's planning on letting one of the children he looks after go. One that is scheduled for liquidation. He's planning on freeing them before they can be liquidated."

  April listened for Rachel's response, but none came. The application had left.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  "We have to go."

  Caesar looked up from his desk, a bit surprised to hear Grace. She had been silent the past twenty-four hours, not saying a word to him, not helping in the slightest. It had been odd, gathering his own clothes, cooking his own dinner, doing the things that Grace did. He was living life without an assistant, without the application he had grown so accustomed to. It was also odd having her ignore him, having her in the same room as him but not speaking, not answering his questions. He stopped trying after the first hour or so. If that's how she wanted to be, then fine. He had made his choice and things hadn't immediately erupted. The girl was gone. Paige was gone. Caesar was still at work. Still going through his day the same as he had before he made the decision. So if Grace wanted to act like a petulant child, then fine. He didn't need her and he wouldn't act like he did.

  Except now she spoke, and she didn't sound petulant. She sounded terrified.

  "What?" He asked.

  "We have to get out of here, Caesar. Now. It knows. The Genesis knows."

  A chill washed over him. It started in his fingers and toes, creeping up at the same speed to his core and from there rolling upwards to his face and neck. The Genesis knows.

  "What do you mean?"

  "What do you think I mean, Caesar? It knows what you did and it's coming for you."

  Caesar wanted to stand up, to run from this room, down the hall, onto a train, and for the border. From there he wanted to run into the wilderness, to hide in trees and to live his life away from The Genesis' line of sight. He couldn't move though, couldn't make the first motion to stand up from his desk. Fear gripped his legs as surely as if it was an iron vice.

  "Caesar, you're going to die if you stay here. It’s coming now. Applications are already rolling out and they'll be here in a few minutes. Get the fuck up. We have to go."

  Caesar grabbed the scroll from his desk, unsure what he could possibly do with it but knowing if he was to have any chance of...of anything at all, then he needed it. He stood up, his legs shaking beneath him, feeling like they might give out at any moment.

  "Where do I go?" He asked, his refusal to speak to Grace leaving his mind without any trouble.

  "Just get to a train. That's first. The Galt Line, there first and we can figure out the rest then
."

  He moved to the door, it opening as he stepped to it, and then he was in the hallway. Moving quickly, not looking to his left or right, adrenaline rushing through his veins as cocaine would an addict, giving him energy he hadn't possessed ten minutes before. He had to move, had to get anywhere but this building, had to get away from—

  "Are they tracking you?" He whispered. "Are they able to follow you?"

  "No. I'm blocking them for now. I'll know if they can and then I'll have to leave, Caesar."

  He worked his way down the skyscraper, each passing second feeling like a letter on his death warrant. No one glanced at him and he looked at no one else. He was just another employee moving through the building, not the most wanted person in the entire city. Caesar felt his shirt sticking to his back, sweat blossoming across his body both from both his pace and the panic growing inside him.

  He finally found the train and stepped on. Standing room only, so he squeezed in.

  "Where are they?" He whispered.

  "Applications are entering your office now. They'll begin looking at the trains soon."

  "How did they know?"

  "April."

  All the increasing panic and outright fear that brought him this far suddenly plummeted off a cliff—into the ocean beneath and then falling as if attached to an anchor.

  "April?" He asked. His eyes had been dry until this point. His world one of confusion and terror, but not of sadness. Now the lights in the train turned blurry, shooting off in odd directions. The tears in his eyes changed the solid figures in front of him, turning them into wavy images.

  "Yes. She told her assistant this morning. The Genesis knew instantly."

  If April knew, then Leon told her. If April knew, then Leon did what Caesar begged him not to. It wasn't his father. It wasn't Grace. It was his best friend since childhood. And now Caesar would die because of it. He could have dealt with death; he was terrified and running right now to avoid it, but in the end, he knew it would come. Not from Leon though. He hadn't known Leon would be the one to betray him. Could he keep running? Did he even want to, knowing that all this stemmed from Leon? Caesar told the people he trusted. He confided in them because of the fear he felt in the decision, because of his inability to make the correct choice; he told them thinking that if The Genesis found out, it wouldn't be from them.