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There weren't any door closings or footfalls as the two applications left. Caesar waited for about thirty seconds before speaking, assuming they were gone, but having no real way of knowing.

  "I need to talk to you about something important. Something that you can't tell anyone else about, not even April."

  "What do you mean?" Leon asked.

  "If you tell anyone, I'll be liquidated."

  He watched as Leon's face, which had been full of inquisition, changed—his eyes widening, and his mouth opening slightly. "Don't tell me then," he said.

  "I don't know what to do, Leon. I don't know who to talk to about this, about any of it."

  Leon didn't say anything for a few seconds; he sat on the couch and stared at Caesar, his lips still not closed. "I don't want to know. I don't want to get involved with something like that. You get me? I don't even want to know about something that could get someone liquidated."

  Caesar recognized real fear in his friend for the first time in their lives. Leon had never been scared, never had anything to be scared of. Their lives were planned out in neat little steps, and the biggest decision Leon ever had to make was whether or not to request a child. Caesar hadn't considered this, considered that his friend never faced any real difficulty. No death, both his parents were alive, no thoughts plaguing him like Caesar's own. His life was peaceful, and how had Caesar just introduced this to him? Basically, if you tell anyone what I'm about to tell you, I'll die. How had he been so stupid? How had he not thought through this more? But it was too late now. If he left it like this, Leon would tell April and then an application would pin Caesar's own arms behind his back.

  "The girl I'm dating, she is supposed to receive a child in two years. I found out today that I'm supposed to liquidate the child."

  Now it was out and Leon couldn't hide from it. He couldn't beg Caesar not to say it and he couldn't act like he hadn't heard it.

  Leon leaned back on the love seat, laying his head against the back and staring up at the ceiling. "Fuck you, Caesar."

  Caesar said nothing.

  "What the fuck are you telling me this for? What do you want from me? What are you even asking?"

  "They're liquidating her because she might not be able to distinguish between green and red. Because she might be a bit color blind," Caesar said.

  "Stop."

  "Her name is Laura. She's six," Caesar said.

  "WHY ARE YOU TELLING ME THIS!" Leon shouted.

  "Because I don't know who else to tell. I don't know what to do."

  Leon looked at him. "You don't know what to do? Are you fucking kidding me right now? You don't know what to do? You do your job, Caesar. You liquidate the kid just as you would anyone else. There are reasons for this, reasons the child is being liquidated. Reasons you don't understand and aren't supposed to. Your job is to make sure certain people come through and certain people don't. What are you even thinking, talking about this like there's another choice?"

  Caesar leaned forward, placing his elbows on his knees. "There is. There's another choice, Leon. I could not do it. I could let the child go. I could let her and Paige both go, give them a chance. That's the other choice."

  "Do you hear yourself right now?" Leon said and then he laughed, loud and angry. "Have you even thought about the position you're putting me in? What am I supposed to do knowing this? Not tell someone? Not report you to my assistant the moment he gets back? Just act like this didn't fucking happen? I'll be as dead as you when you try to free the girl. Are you wanting to get me killed too? Are you not enough?"

  "So I liquidate the girl? That's all the advice you have for me."

  "YES! Of course you do! What you're considering is insanity. Complete insanity. You liquidate the girl and you never contact her mother again. No matter what you say, that's the only option."

  Caesar looked down at his hands. "I'm sorry I brought you into this."

  "Fuck you, Caesar," Leon said, standing up from the couch. He walked out of the apartment without saying anything else.

  Chapter Eighteen

  "What was that about?" Allen asked.

  Leon lay back on his chair and watched as the people in the entertainment center talked to each other, not hearing a word they said. Not caring in the slightest whether the show was a thriller or a comedy. April still wasn't home and so it was just him and his assistant. He'd left Caesar's apartment without bothering to let Allen know, just found a train and ended up back here on his chair. Now Allen was back and wanting to know what just happened.

  "Nothing," Leon said.

  "Nothing doesn't make you get up and leave without even telling me. When we got back, Caesar was by himself staring into space."

  "We got into it is all. It wasn't a great conversation," Leon said.

  "Why not?"

  He couldn't skate around this. He couldn't just tell Allen that he didn't want to talk about it, because he'd never told Allen anything like that before. He either had to tell the truth or he had to lie. He either had to turn his friend in or he had to lie to his assistant and risk his own life. How long had he known Caesar? They'd grown up together, friends since they met in their own crop. He'd known Caesar longer than he knew his own parents. Caesar had been there since the beginning, since before Leon could really remember much about his life.

  And now his friend was considering something that made no sense. Something that went against the very fabric of society, that cut the fabric in two, that said the fabric shouldn't exist. He was challenging The Genesis' wishes and that was enough to get yourself killed. That was enough to end your own existence. Why was Caesar saying these things? Because of some woman he'd just met? Even that didn't make sense, sounded completely crazy. The woman would understand the truth of the matter, that the child needed to be destroyed because the child was a threat to the entire society. It didn't matter if the little girl was to grow up to be a murderer or color blind, The Genesis knew the probabilities of everything. The Genesis knew whether or not she should live and it wasn't Caesar's place to question that. Caesar's place was to press a button and keep protecting society, so what in the hell was he talking about? And now Leon was supposed to protect him? To protect this insanity?

  If he turned Caesar in right now, that was it, the end of him. Thirty-three years of friendship evaporated in a few words to Allen. Leon understood that Grace and Caesar had a deeper relationship than he did with his assistant, and that was fine. Leon felt no loyalty to Allen; his loyalty was bound up in The Genesis, bound up in the knowledge that The Genesis kept the world from spiraling into a rotten mass of death. And what was stronger, his loyalty to The Genesis or his loyalty to Caesar? What mattered more to him?

  He simply didn't have time to think about this any longer. Allen was waiting on an answer and the longer he sat here staring at the entertainment center, the more Allen would wonder.

  "He doesn't think we should have a child. He thinks we'll regret it," Leon said. He didn't look around the room, didn't blink, didn't move at all. He stared straight ahead as if he had told Allen because Allen asked, but that he didn't want to talk about it anymore.

  "Yeah?" Allen asked.

  "Yeah. So I left. He's full of shit," Leon said.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Life of Caesar Wells

  By Leon Bastille

  I've known Caesar longer than anyone. Longer than his parents. Longer than any of his followers. The only thing that has known Caesar longer is The Genesis.

  I've thought a lot about his childhood since this all started. I've wondered over and over if there were pieces I missed, if there were things he did that I should have picked up on, that would have let me know how this would all end. Had I known what was to happen, I would have turned him in; I wouldn't have gone down this road. Too many people have died. Too many people are going to die. And in the end, none of this will end well. I'm in now, sleeves rolled up and doing the work, but I would trade it all if I could go back. I would have told the moment I knew somethi
ng was off about Caesar. If this had a chance of ending differently...but that's an if that won't happen, so there's no use thinking on it. Caesar's mind is nearly decided, and insane or not, there isn't anyone that will be able stop him. Not me. Not his followers. Not Paige. Not The Genesis. This is all in Caesar's hands.

  So what did I miss when he was a child, because there had to be some clue of where his mind would go. Part of my inability to see rests on my own intelligence. I'm the only one in his group deemed Necessary by The Genesis. The rest of them, all of their IQs surpass anyone else in the world. He has, without a doubt, assembled the smartest people on the planet around him. So maybe I was too dumb to see exactly what was going on. I'm fine with that; I'll own it. But still, there had to be something that would have shown us where he was headed. That he wouldn't work day in and day out, serving The Genesis' wishes, wanting to keep the world peaceful at all costs.

  When we were fifteen, our parents took us on a vacation outside of the city. We went west, to see the wilderness. I'd never seen anything like it before in my life. Caesar and I lived in a place of vast towers, tightly compacted living quarters, and business all around. There was a speed to the city that permeated our entire lives, so that we knew no other way to live.

  Our families were close because the two of us were close, and so we tried to take our vacations together. We went out west and we camped inside the woods. The Genesis had created places that were safe, places where animals couldn't get to, but where we could still observe them. There were strict rules and all that, created so that the animals wouldn't be any more disturbed than we were.

  We saw a pack of wolves tear down a deer.

  It was the first piece of violence I ever saw in my life, and the last I saw until Caesar started talking differently. Those wolves and that deer spilled the first blood I ever saw.

  They attacked it with a ferocity I didn't know existed. They came at the deer like their lives depended on it, and back then I didn't recognize that their lives did depend on it. That if they didn't kill the deer, they might starve. The deer ran with the same intensity, trying its best to escape death. It tired quicker than the wolves, though, and they were on it as soon as its hoof missed a step. They pounced, grabbing onto its neck and hind legs with jaws covered in foam from their own exhaustion. The deer went to the ground, and that was it. We watched it struggle a bit, trying futilely to find its feet again, but you could see that it knew it was done. That death had found it and there wasn't any escape. There was nowhere to go.

  Both families stood and watched. No one said a word. We just watched, terrified, all of us. My parents had never seen something so horrible, and I doubt Caesar's had either. All of us were so sheltered to what the outside world was. The Genesis didn't try to bring peace to nature, only to humanity, because nature reached an equilibrium with its violence. All of us imagined the world outside of our city was just as peaceful as the world inside. That was the first time we recognized it wasn't so, that an entire place of violence existed.

  Nightmares haunted my dreams for months after, watching the deer go down again and again, yet still trying to struggle to get up, to live. It never lived in my dreams, though; it always died.

  My mother cried at the end of the scene, and we all packed up our camping gear and left the wilderness. We spent the rest of our vacation at a theme park. We never went back. No one wanted to witness anything like that ever again. It was the scariest thing any of us had ever seen.

  I asked Caesar if he dreamed about it, if it still scared him. This was maybe a month after we returned back to the city.

  "Scared?" He said.

  "Yeah, do you still think about it? Do the wolves scare you? The deer dying?"

  He looked at me strangely, like maybe I was speaking a different language. "What are you scared of?"

  "I don't know...Dying. Murder. The violence of it all."

  Caesar looked away then, at his feet. It took him a minute before he spoke. "The Genesis hasn't touched them. Violence is how they survive. It's strange that we think it shouldn't be so with us."

  I didn't know what he meant when he said it. I didn't even consider it again until almost twenty years later. We didn't know violence and there was no reason we should ever need to. The Genesis saved us from that. Now though, I see what he meant, what his brain was already building. He saw the world differently and he was smart enough to keep it locked away; he only let me see it that one time. Somehow I got him to open up just a bit without even knowing it. I didn't understand and had I done so, I would have turned him in right then. I would have had Caesar liquidated. It would have saved us all a lot of pain.

  Chapter Twenty

  The old man stood from his chair and walked across the room. No one else stood up but they all watched as he walked.

  "You're sure you want to go? It doesn't have to be you."

  The old man put his hands behind his back and looked out the small window in front of him, looked out on the desert.

  "It's too dangerous for you, especially if we don't know what his choice is going to be," someone else said from behind him.

  All of these things were true. The old man knew it before anyone even said anything to him. But really, he didn't care. If this one wasn't the person they needed, then he didn't think they would find anyone else. He hadn't told anyone else that, of course, but he wanted to lay eyes on this person before they brought him into the fold. He wanted to see for himself what he'd been searching for his entire life, to see if he was wrong, if this man was just like all the other men he'd come across—full of promise and nothing else. He didn't think so. He thought this was it.

  Or was he just hoping this was it?

  Because he knew he didn't have a lot of years left here. Not nearly enough to find someone else that could do what they needed this man to do. So if this man wasn't the person they needed, so long, it's been a nice life. And that was frightening, wasn't it? That he might have spent his whole life trying to find someone that he would never find. That he might have led this whole group for so many years, only to end up dying and leaving them leaderless.

  None of that's going to happen. You're an old man and you're getting scared. That's all. You've found him. Caesar is the one you've wanted.

  He turned around and looked at the few faces in front of him.

  "I'll go. I want to see him," he said.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Quarterly Report

  Quadrant Four

  Given our investment in wildlife, as well as the planetary ecosystem, it is extremely powerful to see the fruits of our labor. This past month, four more species have been brought back from the edge of extinction: polar bears, African elephants, spotted leopards, and an insect named Heredotus. All four of these animals were a few years away from complete annihilation when The Genesis' started focusing on saving them. Yesterday, the first polar bear in the past thousand years was finally born in the wild. After centuries of breeding inside artificial habitats, the animal is now being reintroduced into the wild.

  The African Elephant, once hunted for its ivory tusks, have now completely reclaimed their traditional living grounds across the Quadrant Four plains. Humans have been segregated away, giving both species adequate living requirements and making sure that one's greed does not affect the other. Included in the appendices of this report are videos of elephants in their natural habitat. Also included are a few trips humans have taken and their interactions with the elephants. The magnificent beasts seem completely at home with humans living around them, now that they dominate the area and are not in danger of poaching. It's an amazing opportunity for all species to live in harmony with one another. If you have not yet taken advantage of The Genesis sponsored trips to interact with African Elephants, you can sign up through any scroll. All expenses are paid for, as The Genesis believes it is necessary for humanity to understand the importance of all animals, even the ones that appear terrifying in their size.

  The Heredotus is
a cousin insect of the Praying Mantis, originally found in the rain forests of Brazil. Unfortunately, the Purification of Humanity did not fully reach the forests and much of the Heredotus habitat was destroyed before The Genesis could bring the insect into an artificial habitat. Less than a hundred specimens could be found when a process to save them finally began. The Heredotus did not take well to artificial habitation, both dying off quickly and refusing to breed. The insect number, at one time, hovered at less than fifty in the entire world. Through an effort combining both humans and The Genesis, a small piece of rain forest was dedicated specifically to bring back this species. After one hundred years of this effort, The Heredotus has finally started spreading outside of the square mile originally reserved for its survival, venturing out into the forest. Indeed, humanity's compassion and The Genesis' wisdom has created a better world for another species.

  Briefly, it's important to think about the oceans across the world. At the time of The Singularity, forty-seven percent of the oceans were uninhabitable. The oceans are an extremely resilient ecosystem, both self-purifying and keeping a healthy PH level throughout the billions of gallons of water cascading across the globe. The forty-seven percent eventually crept up to fifty-one before The Genesis could act. Huge water purification cities were built, with humans and applications working together to try and save the oceans. Indeed, The Genesis estimated that at fifty-five percent pollution, humanity would have had no chance of survival, with much of the rest of the world's animal and plant populations dying off as well. Through planning, effort, and luck the pollution was pushed back, and now less than one percent of the oceans are uninhabitable due to human enabled pollution. In the appendices, you will be able to view the Australian Great Barrier Reef, an ancient tourist attraction that was relegated to a grave yard of animal and plant life—now, it's roared back, and like the African Elephants, humans can take guided tours through the reef, seeing the beauty of nature without the danger of encroaching and causing harm.