The Singularity: Box Set (Books 1-4) Read online

  He started to melt.

  Caesar had seen things melt before, ice cream, snow, wax. It took those things a long time to melt, so that one could barely notice if they stood and stared. They only saw that something had melted later, when they came back to look at it.

  The man on the stage, though, didn't need that amount of time. His skin simply started dripping; Caesar saw his chin first, the skin on it falling off like melting plastic. As it dripped down, it stretched, but eventually the individual strands of his flesh snapped, revealing raw meat beneath. The skin around his eyes stretched downward, showing the skull below, and then that started to melt as well. His fingers dripped to the floor, bone and skin and hair mixing together at the bottom of the tank. The man still stood though, his legs not completely dripping away yet, and he started screaming. The shrieks were delayed, like he hadn't noticed his body turning into a soup beneath him, but when they came, they filled the entire space with pain that Caesar never thought existed. He screamed until his vocal chords melted, and then the noise fizzled out and was gone, the man standing there with his mouth open and the veins in his neck trying to burst open. Caesar couldn't see his vocal chords melting, but imagined they simply dripped down his esophagus and into his stomach.

  In the end, the man was a puddle on the stage. A red puddle without a single solid piece of him left.

  Chapter Two

  "It's time."

  "You're sure?"

  "Yes. If we wait any longer, it'll find him. It has to start now."

  "What if you're wrong about him?"

  "Then we'll probably all be dead two weeks from now. It doesn't matter. Get it started."

  Chapter Three

  The Life of Caesar Wells

  By Leon Bastille

  This doesn't end well, but that's no reason not to write.

  If anything, what happens next gives me a stronger reason to write.

  We're not at the end yet, but we're close. Or rather, he is close—Caesar. This was always about Caesar, not me, nor my wife, nor his family, nor anyone else. The story I'm putting down is Caesar's and Caesar's alone. I'm writing it because it won't be told otherwise. The Genesis will never allow the truth out. It will spin this, tell its version so that in the end, Caesar is a hero and humanity saved. The thing is, I'm not sure The Genesis would be lying; The Genesis' truth is still truth, even if a complete lie.

  There is another truth though, and it starts at the beginning. It starts when The Singularity began and it plays out until now, until Caesar makes his choice. That's the truth I'm going to tell here. My name is Leon Bastille and Caesar Wells is my best friend. He went further than any man before him, and I suppose that is something to be proud of. I can rejoice in that, although now, at this point, it feels hollow. It feels like winning a game against a team composed of blind people; regardless of what the score says, there is nothing to celebrate.

  So this is Caesar's story about how he tried to save humanity. I'm in this story, but my place has always been to follow Caesar. He was the greatest of us, all of us, and whoever thinks they shine brightly, they are only a candle in the sun when next to Caesar. Do we rejoice in that? That someone like Caesar came along? That we had a chance, that he gave us a chance to become more than what was planned? Or do we weep that the chance disappeared like sand in the wind? Maybe I'm writing this for me as well. Maybe this is how I cope with what should have been. If so, if The Genesis doesn't find this and destroy it, then whoever finds it down the line will have to endure my tangents and feelings. I'm no historian. No detached observer that can write down the facts and ignore the emotions. Everything that comes next, I lived. Everything that you read is the truth as I saw it, the truth as a lot of us saw it.

  We're close to the end and I don't know how to stop Caesar.

  I want to tell you that up front, before you start on this journey.

  It's not going to end well, for anyone.

  Chapter Four

  Caesar opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling.

  Fish swam all around him. He didn't move, didn't stir, just watched as a hammerhead shark propelled itself forward, inches from his nose. He would have loved to watch this all day. To see the ocean play out before him, to watch these creatures go on throughout their life without him ever having to get up from his bed. He looked on for another few minutes, watching a tiny fish swim in and out of a bed of coral, completely unaware of the dangers surrounding it.

  Caesar sat up and the scene disappeared. He swung his feet off his bed and stood up, low background music starting as the sensors on the floor registered his body temperature.

  "Good morning, Caesar," Grace said.

  Caesar didn't answer her, moving instead to the bathroom.

  "Don't act grumpy," she said, her voice following him through the air particles.

  She, he thought. She, she, she. Caesar smiled. There was no she. No person at all. There was an entity which held no gender, no physical body even, that connected all the way back to The Genesis in some chain that Caesar never tried to contemplate. The voice he heard now was nothing more than electrically charged particles bouncing off one another to form speech patterns that resembled a human. Even now, if he was turn to turn and try to find Grace, he would see only empty space, because Grace couldn't take physical form.

  "You're too cheery in the morning," he said to her. "Now give me some privacy." He shut the door to the bathroom, but only out of a long ingrained habit. Grace would know everything he did in this house regardless of doors or locks or anything else. She would know if a hormone inside him raised a milliliter above its normal level. Still, he shut the door because that's what he'd grown up doing, and at least she would shut up if he asked for some privacy. Grace may not be human, but she was polite, which was more than Caesar could say about other assistants. He had lucked out with her and he was happy for that, because he didn't want to have to find another assistant—didn't want to go through that awkward stage of learning each other. His friends told him horror stories about such things. An assistant wanting to listen to music until three in the morning when his friend needed to be up at five. Neither of them able to agree on the healthiest diet. The list went on and on. No, Grace may not be human, but she certainly wasn't the worst intelligence he could have come across.

  An entity granted free will, just like himself. He once wondered why The Genesis wouldn’t simply create drones that did everything it commanded of them, why create applications that could choose? The answer was simple, even if no one else asked the question—not even The Genesis had the power to control everything all the time. By giving its applications free will, but programming them with the knowledge of why they were here, of their purpose, it could trust them to make the decisions it needed them to. The Genesis created an unlimited number of free willed entities, yet all of them were completely committed to its cause.

  Caesar opened the bathroom door and walked out into his bedroom.

  "What time is it?"

  "Seven-twelve. You've got forty-eight minutes to get to work. You're behind schedule," Grace answered.

  "Do I have to go?" Caesar asked, Grace already extending the clothes she had picked out for him from the ceiling. He grabbed the underwear and pulled them up.

  "No, you can always stay at home, but I don't advise it."

  Caesar didn't wince, but his eyes narrowed. He saw the puddle, the only puddle like it he had ever witnessed, up on the stage where the man had simply ceased to exist in about thirty seconds.

  "I'm sorry," Grace said. "I can be stupid sometimes. You know that's not what I mean. No one gets liquidated because they skip work. Don't be ridiculous."

  Caesar grabbed the pants and put them on. Why had he gone back to that scene just now? How many years ago was that now? Twenty? Had to be, and he had never seen another liquidation. They didn't even have public liquidations anymore, and certainly someone wouldn't be killed because they decided not to show up to work. So why think about that?

/>   "It's not your fault," he said, putting his arms through the sleeves of his shirt.

  "I'm actually surprised the memory doesn't come to the surface more often, given your profession," she answered. Grace had a lot of positives, but her clinical diagnoses weren't one of them.

  "Thank The Genesis for small miracles, I suppose."

  "Indeed," Grace answered. "It's seven-seventeen. Time to get moving. I'll have breakfast ready for you on the ride."

  * * *

  Caesar entered his office and looked at his desk. He’d rather go to it, but knew he couldn’t. Knew that he needed to sync before anything else happened.

  He had his specific time to be at the sync, a specific time that The Genesis would send out the information necessary for him. These things had to be ordered, especially with the amount of information The Genesis took in and gave out daily. Time for certain applications to upload the information they collected, time for The Genesis to relay information out to both the human populace and its applications. One day, perhaps, data would flow freely up and down the levels of communication, but for now, even The Genesis had to establish order to keep everything from collapsing, from overloading.

  He walked to the wall and placed his hand into the sync, thirty seconds before his download was to begin. It was Monday and this would be the largest data download of the week, given that he hadn't synced in the past forty-eight hours. He hated this part of the week. Hated it worse than the rest of the week combined.

  Caesar read a lot in his spare time. He didn't download, like the rest of society, but actually grabbed an ancient ereader and went through books that way. It took longer, a lot longer, but that just meant it passed the time. He knew that none of his friends, certainly not his brother, spent their time reading like that, which was fine. When you download, like he was about to do now, you couldn't savor the intricacies of what you learned. It all came at once, like being thrown in a pool, rather than stepping in slowly and letting your body adjust to the temperature. When he read, he could take in each word one by one, letting his brain do the work of sifting and sorting, of filing. When he downloaded, all that was done for him, and in the end, the process was more efficient, but not as enjoyable.

  He read a lot about the early twenty-first century. Grace said he was mildly obsessed, and she might have been right. The Singularity was built, and then The Genesis born during that time period. Caesar's entire world was created from those years, so he dug into any book he could find on the subject. He imagined that these Monday data downloads were similar to what the office drones in the early two-thousands had felt about their email after a weekend. So much to read and most of it completely worthless.

  "You're sitting here thinking about how you hate this download, aren't you?" Grace said, whispering so that no one else heard. He ignored her and pushed his hand down on the sensor.

  The information rushed in, and Caesar stared straight ahead, not glancing anywhere, acting like the information was drowning his mind. His mind wasn't supposed to keep up with any of the surroundings, any of the people in the room, anything else at all besides the tremendous amount of information being shoved inside it. Caesar and Grace both knew what was supposed to happen, what happened to everyone else when they downloaded information, and they both knew that nothing resembling overload occurred to Caesar. Grace, technically, should have reported it immediately, but she never had. Even now, with his hand taking in all of the information from the entire weekend, every word uttered by the crop, she was breaking protocol. Not laws. There were no laws. There was only protocol, but Grace could find herself deactivated if her withholding ever came to the surface.

  The human brain never evolved to take in information all at once. It evolved to take it in bit by bit, discerning what was necessary and what could be discarded. Thus, when the brain synced with part of The Genesis, it couldn't pay attention to the rest of the world; it was completely overwhelmed. It happened to everyone. Except Caesar. He realized it when he was six years old, looking around him at the rest of his crop, all of them downloading protocols for their first class. Each one taking on glazed eyes and slack faces while Caesar remained alert, taking in both the information from The Genesis and the information reality continued feeding him. He should have been liquidated right then. Grabbed up from the sync and pulled to some back room where he ended up in his own puddle. Maybe through luck or maybe some instinctual notion inside Caesar, but he had donned the same look as his classmates and continued to do so ever since. For all The Genesis' power, all its knowledge, it missed that single thing about him. For years, Caesar feared that each time he stuck his hand into a sync, The Genesis would find him and it would melt him just like all the others deemed Unnecessary. Nothing ever happened though. He kept moving through life and now when he downloaded he adopted the stale face of a cow and thought nothing of it.

  He was Unnecessary, though. Regardless of what happened, he had to remember that. If The Genesis ever found out, if Grace ever malfunctioned and decided to blab, he was Unnecessary.

  You're one second away from liquidation.

  But isn't everyone? His mind answered.

  The download finished and he went to his desk, thinking on the information. Everything appeared okay with the crop, but they tested today. Every year he tested a new crop, and every year this day was the most important of the year. The Genesis, and really, the world, needed to understand who was Necessary and who wasn't. The test today helped determine that. It wasn't the only way they found out such things, but it was a major piece. Caesar's whole team would be here within an hour; they would wake the crops up, give them breakfast, and then bring the children to the testing room.

  * * *

  Caesar sat at his desk, the wall in front of him cycling through the different rooms of his supervisors. Twenty million children preparing to sync. The whole process still struck awe in him. The sheer power of The Genesis could be best seen on this day, as twenty million children were organized for a testing that determined life or death—all of them four years old and having been raised and reared by The Genesis. Caesar controlled Quadrant Two, three other quadrants around the world producing the same amount of children yearly. At the age of four, their IQ level was tested, and again at six, and then at eight one last IQ test was administered combined with a personality profile to hopefully determine acceptance of the current system. Today was the first test for this crop, the one where they pruned the largest number.

  He watched his team, as they watched those below them. Things usually performed fine without any reason to stress—the main need for caution was to ensure accurate testing. They wouldn't get another chance for this, not for two years. If they failed today, the classes, the programming still continued. Not a single day could be wasted, not if the system was going to continue to pump out twenty million children per year.

  Years ago, when Caesar first took this job, he calculated out the reasoning behind the twenty million number. It was complex, nearly too much for him to handle, but he finally came to a solid foundation of The Genesis' reasoning. It included death rates, future production needs for society, the population's wishes (the most fickle part of the whole equation), as well as the Earth's ability to sustain population growth. Numerous other tiny calculations played into the overall equation, but those were the main pieces. And thus, a fairly consistent twenty million children from his quadrant per year.

  All of these children, grown like crops, and then gifted to loving parents waiting on them. Even now, two parents were somewhere waiting on their child that would be delivered to them in four years’ time. If they passed this test. And passing meant you didn't do too well or too poorly. Passing meant average. That's what they were shooting for here, all of them—a great big average.

  * * *

  "How did it go?" Leon asked.

  "Fine," Caesar said, sitting down across the table.

  "You ever had a year when it didn't go fine? Every year you freak out right before this a
nd every year you say it went fine." Leon scrolled through the menu on the table in front of him, his eyes moving to flick through different options, the table registering and reacting to the tiny movements. "I really wish they would upgrade these things, get the menus that overlay the food right across your eyes."

  Caesar blinked, opening his own menu in front of him. "One year things weren't fine. The problem is we didn't know it for two more years. One year a boy's hand wasn't placed exactly right in the sync and we missed him. He went on for two more years and by the time we retested, he had created two separate groups inside the crop. That ended up almost costing us four thousand children, and even though we didn't liquidate them right then, they're still being watched now and that was seven years ago."

  Leon didn't look up. "Why didn't you liquidate them?"

  "All things work for The Genesis, my man. I imagine it didn't want to deal with what thousands of parents would say when they found out their children had been liquidated because a single child didn't have his hand positioned just right, and thus someone a bit too smart slipped through a hole."

  "Did I tell you April and I are thinking of applying?"

  "For a child?" Caesar looked up. "When did that come about?"

  "Past week. It'll be eight years before we get one, and by that time I'll be thirty-eight, so if we're going to do it, we should probably do it now. Any idea what the likelihood of being accepted is?"

  "That's administration. I'm in operations. Two totally different silos," Caesar said, blinking to make his choice at one of the burgers below him. "You know what you're having yet?"