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  But it had been. The Genesis knew and that knowledge traced back to Leon.

  The door to the train opened but Caesar didn't look at it. He didn't care.

  People exited and entered.

  "Get off at King's Station. We're going to try to make it to the border from there."

  Caesar said nothing. He didn't look at the stops on the wall of the train, didn't care about where he was at all.

  "You're going to die now," the voice said from behind him. Not Grace, but a man's voice. "Don't turn around."

  The old man. The one from the train a day ago, the one not human, was behind him now. He wasn't loud like yesterday, not boisterous and uncaring of who heard him. He whispered, not quite as low as Grace because he couldn't get as close to Caesar as she could, but low enough.

  "I told you not to do it. I told you to keep on keeping on, that there would be other chances."

  Caesar said nothing. He didn't know if this thing was part of The Genesis or some different kind of Unnecessary that The Genesis couldn’t track down. It didn't matter. He didn't care in the slightest what the man behind him said. He could use this entire train to fuck himself.

  "If you turn yourself into The Genesis now, you might still have a chance. It might take leniency on you and only your assistant will die, for not guiding you right. That's your only chance. If you run, like she's telling you to, it'll catch you and it'll liquidate you the same as it did the man you watched when you were twelve. You'll die if you run. You'll probably die anyway, but your only chance is to have her report your whereabouts and let them come."

  Caesar squinted as he tried to fight the tears threatening to fall. He didn't care if the people around him saw anymore. He didn't care if these people all started shouting in unison, "UNNECESSARY!" while pointing at him. He didn't care what this man thought and he certainly didn't give a fuck about living. Even thinking about turning himself over to The Genesis made him ill. He picked this choice, and even now, betrayed by his friend and alone in this world besides an application that could never be human, he wouldn't take it back. He wouldn't put that little girl in a vat and zap her so that others could eat her virus infected DNA. Fuck that. Fuck this thing behind him, too, for even suggesting such a thing. Fuck The Genesis and goddamn it, FUCK LEON.

  Caesar turned around, looking into the dark sunglasses in front of him, the glasses that hid the machine underneath. The man's face didn't change into either surprise, fear, or anger. He looked on, the same as a Gargoyle from one of those ancient castles in Quadrant One.

  "I'd jump off this train before I turned myself in. I don't know what you are and I really don't care. I don't know who those people were on the last train with you and I don't care about them either." Caesar didn't look around at anyone near him. He didn't care if they stared. Didn't care if they heard. He didn't care at all anymore. Let them listen and let them report. Let them do whatever they wanted. "But if you ever tell me to relinquish myself to The Genesis again, I'll kill you."

  The old man stared, not smiling, not giving any signal that he heard anything Caesar said.

  The doors to the train opened and Caesar stepped off, not caring at all which station he was at.

  * * *

  "I did what you should have done," April said.

  Leon looked up from the scroll in his hand. "What?"

  "I saved your life. My own too. Our future child's."

  Leon's head turned into a beehive; thoughts flew around one another, picking up speed, all of them seeming to move randomly—they weren't, though. His thoughts were all serving an inescapable conclusion, faster than his brain had really ever worked before. The conclusion of what April was talking about. The conclusion that...

  "You're fucking kidding me," he said, dropping the scroll to the table beneath him, not hearing as it clanked loudly. "You didn't."

  "I did. The moment you left for work, I did."

  He stood up and faced his wife. He didn't know what to say, didn't know what to do. Rage, a rage that he didn't know—a foreign feeling, surged up inside him. Rages like this were supposed to be bred out of humanity. Rages like this were the entire reason for The Genesis, to stop them. Rages like this killed people.

  "You goddamn bitch," he said.

  "No. I did what you couldn't because you weren't man enough to. I did what you should have done; I protected our family. You would have let Caesar ruin us both, kill us both, kill any chance we have of living a life and raising a child. You would have let Caesar—"

  Leon lunged forward, grabbing her face in his right hand, stopping her mouth from moving up and down, stopping the words from spewing out, the nonsense, the goddamnn lies. He kept pushing forward, throwing her back until she slammed into a wall, her eyes full of fear and doubt and a knowledge that she might die. Leon saw it all and it didn't slow him in the slightest. While his right hand smashed her face together in ways that weren't natural, his left hand came to her throat and he clamped down. He didn't know if Rachel or Allen were around and couldn't have cared less. He was going to murder this bitch right here, right now.

  He watched as her face turned red. Listened as he heard tiny clicking noises in her mouth, either from her trying to talk or gain air that he refused to let her have. He looked her directly in the eyes, a vein standing out across his own forehead.

  "You..." Leon said, not knowing he was saying it, not knowing what it meant or where he planned on taking the sentence. "You. You. You."

  He let go and April fell to the floor, her knees completely unhinging. He stood above her as she rolled to the side, gasping in heaves, trying to force air into her lungs. He looked down at her for a second, her eyes no longer searching for his but desperately, frantically, looking around the room for something that could possibly help her lungs open.

  Leon walked away from his wife, leaving her to the floor, to her search for air that he didn't care if she found.

  * * *

  Caesar stood in an ocean of people. He had stood like this a week or two ago; he couldn't remember how long for sure. He had stood at a different train stop with a different building in front of him, and he had turned around and tried to kill himself. The first suicide in years and years and years. Someone had reached out and pulled him back. Someone had been paying attention. Someone had seen he was close to dying and wouldn't allow it to happen.

  Paige Hedrick.

  Paige.

  A woman that he knew briefly and would never know again, because hopefully she was gone, hopefully she was into the wilderness and hopefully she would find some way to survive out there. She had saved him and then he saved her daughter and now he would die just as he had planned to a few days ago.

  So things worked out.

  "Caesar, can you hear me?"

  He could. Grace was in his ear, so how could he not? He just didn't want to listen. What was she going to tell him? What could she possibly tell him that she hadn't told him a hundred times before? His decision was made and there wasn't anything left to do. Run? Where? Find Paige and try to live like a little family out in the wilderness? Just a laughable thought, a goddamn riot. Leon made his choice and that choice might have been more important to Caesar than his own. Why run? Why go anywhere if your best friend could roll over on you, could feed you to the beast?

  "We've got to leave. Now. We've got to get out of here. You can't sit and stare and think and whatever else you're doing. There will be time for that later, but now, you've got to focus, more than you ever have before. We have to get away from The Genesis."

  "I don't care," he said, his voice carrying fine amongst the people walking around him. "I'm not running. I don't care."

  "Please, Caesar. For me, if not for yourself. For me."

  Caesar only stood and stared at the building in front of him. He thought a lot about Leon. He thought some about April. He thought about Paige and the little girl he'd seen for a few minutes in his office. He thought about his Dad, about being able to sleep at night. He didn't know
if he'd ever sleep again in his short life, didn't know if he could stop thinking long enough about betrayal to sleep.

  Leon.

  Leon.

  Leon.

  How had he done it? How had he told his wife and how had she told The Genesis? How long had Caesar known her? Years and years. And now he was going to be a puddle of bone and blood because of her.

  He stood and he thought, and when the application bent his arm back faster than necessary, he didn't even grimace.

  "Good bye, Caesar," Grace said.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The Life of Caesar Wells

  By Leon Bastille

  Humanity tried to accomplish the collective raising of children over and over again. We always thought that if the government could raise our children, they would do a better job than the individual parents. Thus, public schools. Thus, public preschools. Thus, free and reduced lunches. All of these things were tried a thousand years before I was born and every one of them failed miserably. Every time humanity tried to take the onus off the individual and place it on a collective body, things got worse. Education rates dropped. Delinquency rose. Resources were spent with virtually no return on investment.

  Again, I didn't know these things until Caesar taught me. I know them now though, but that's not the purpose of this chapter, to talk about the failures of the past. Those people back then were so different from the people that live now, arguments can be made that we're not even the same species. Apes and humans; The Genesis would argue we're the humans and Caesar that we're the apes. Or at least, at one point, he would have argued that. Perhaps not anymore.

  The Genesis decided to do the same, to collectively raise children, but as with everything The Genesis did, it was wildly successful. Humanity wanted to raise children that were smart, driven, successful, and could think critically. The Genesis wanted to raise humans who were happy. Humans could never be happy when they were constantly striving forward, and in that unhappiness, they thought the next goal, the next achievement would buy them that happiness. And on and on it went, until weapons of mass destruction sat piled in bunkers, ready to destroy everyone at once. All in the name of happiness.

  The Genesis figured out that humans can only find happiness when they're not striving, and when they're not striving, they're not destroying everything around them. They're living in harmony. That was the starting point for the collective raising of children. A world in harmony. A world where humans were happy just living. How does one do this? Humanity had never considered it, not really—perhaps the Buddhists, but their ideas went so against the grain of human genetics it mattered little. The Genesis, though, considered it well. The first thing, maybe the most important, would be the ability to sort those out that didn't fit the mold of this new humanity. That could only be done if children were collectively raised, if an autocratic source decided who fit in and who didn't.

  Once humanity's leaders were out of the way and many of those deemed unfit dead, it was easy to corral children into large 'schools' as The Genesis started calling it. Children were taken from their mothers at birth and brought to these schools, where they were cared for by specifically chosen people, those that could teach and instruct and live the moral code that The Genesis set out. A lot of people didn't like it, although some thought it was for the best. No one wanted to go back to the brink of war every year, and so society went along.

  Plus, what choice did they really have? All the people left were the meek, the ones willing to listen, the ones that had listened their entire lives.

  That worked. Not perfectly, but it allowed The Genesis to begin tapping into humanity's underlying genetics, to understand what made certain children one way while others acted completely different. The liquidation began here, in these collective schools. Caesar wasn't the first human to figure out why they did it, but there weren't many before him. It truly was genius, something that allowed The Genesis to propel its goals forward by thousands of years. Without the liquidation, the evolution of genes in the way The Genesis wished would have taken millenia, maybe. Instead, in only a thousand years, The Genesis was pretty close. In the liquidation process, The Genesis could sift through the DNA, could mix and match, could identify the problem children. Then, and this was the most important piece, it could put a virus—or coding—into the problem children. What really got to Caesar, and I truly don't understand why, was that in order for the coding to be properly uploaded, the DNA needed to remain alive. It couldn't die or else the coding failed. So in the liquidation, in the vats, the human was alive in the sense that its cells still operated. The coding was uploaded and the human processed in a way that allowed it to be inserted into food, all the while the cells still operating, never dying. Once ingested, the coding went to work, spreading out among the new host, correcting the DNA in others if it resembled the DNA in the liquidated. To me, this was perhaps the most humane way to do it.

  I keep using that word, humane.

  Had liquidation not been created, The Genesis would have marched child after child to the furnaces the moment they were deemed Unnecessary. Millions each year, probably, because genetics don't change quickly. Evolution works like a clock, unable to stop turning, but moving at a singularly slow pace. Liquidation sped the clock up. Kept more and more children from being burnt and their ashes piled into huge graves. It disgusts Caesar, but I respect it. It makes sense, and if you were to press Caesar on it, he'd probably just stop talking to you because he can't admit it. He hates what he did for all those years, feeding the living to the living, even if it meant he saved so many in the process.

  That's the first piece of the collective rearing of humanity.

  There was another problem though, and The Genesis recognized it—obviously—as well. There are reasons we've done what we've done, why Caesar started this and why I went along, but I won't sit here and write lies. The Genesis is very cognizant of humanity and its, more or less, collective wishes. The Genesis doesn't want to harm us, not as a whole, it only wants us to live in a manner that will fit with the rest of the Earth. Taking children away from mothers, at their birth, didn't go over well with most people, as you can imagine—especially the mothers. I doubt The Genesis ever thought humanity could revolt, but it didn't like seeing the distress this created. So, it got to work on a fix.

  Even now, all this time later, I'm still in awe at the things it's managed to do. The creativity. The genius of it all. When humans played God, when they began The Singularity, they created maybe the most beautiful thing in the world. You'll see Caesar's change in this book, but you won't see mine. I'm consistent in my belief that The Genesis is the most perfect instrument ever created and wholly evil at the same time.

  How did it take away the feeling of ownership from mothers while at the same time allowing humanity to reproduce? The gene pool had always been a misnomer, meaning the constant mixing and matching of genes when humans mated. The Genesis actually created the pool of genes. Now, every human after the age of twenty donates his or her genes to this pool through a simple blood donation. It's only done once and then everything that person is made up of can now contribute to the reproduction of mankind. Natural reproduction was outlawed, and quickly. You became pregnant? Liquidation. An accident, you say? Too bad. The Genesis would easily, painlessly, perform a procedure where you need not ever get pregnant again, even if you tried to create children every hour of every day for the rest of your life. The Genesis does not accept excuses. Once it sets out on its path, that's it. You're either on board or you're not, and if you're not, there's a vat waiting to hold your remains.

  The collective raising of children became known as Population Control, and Caesar found work there for many years. It's odd, that the supposed savior of men spent so long killing countless children.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Sample of Child's Scroll inside Population Control

  Lesson #43892

  World War II

  Humanity flirted with complete annihi
lation for a century. There are numerous, numerous examples of this through the 20th century and into the 21st century. Some of these are economic annihilations such as market crashes. Other examples include complete destruction of the human race through nuclear holocaust.

  Perhaps, though, World War II is the most apt lesson as to how quickly humanity can move from peace to horror, not just for itself but for other life on Earth as well. Adolph Hitler started World War II and has, consequently, been demonized throughout history. Even after The Singularity, Hitler was considered one of the worst human beings to ever live. This may be true, even today, a thousand years later; however, in that demonization, humanity missed the most important aspect of Adolph Hitler, of World War II.

  That's why, after the war that occurred in the 1930's and 40's, a new war occurred almost every decade from then until The Singularity. Because humanity missed the most important point.

  Adolph Hitler was not an anomaly. He was not someone special who thought up something new. He was not someone, specifically, to be demonized, as he was simply another piece of humanity—another piece of the genetic predisposition to conquer, to destroy, to kill. In demonizing him, humanity exonerated themselves, saying that they—the rest of them—could never do such a thing. And when they did that, they guaranteed, indeed, that someone would do it again. That's what The Genesis recognized, what humanity refused to see: on any given day, any human was capable of being an Adolph Hitler.