Architect (Last Resistance Book 3), page 15
Swearing, I push past Camus and into the street. The machine is clearly online, having risen back to its full, intimidating height. I stare into its optics—which at this moment must be reporting our position back to the higher echelon—only to notice they’re not red, but green.
Doesn’t matter, I tell myself and take aim. “Move,” I bark at Benji.
“Waitwaitwaitwait,” he insists, spreading his arms out like the crucified Christ. Is he—protecting the machine? I remember the girl, her shriek of stop! coming seconds too late, and find myself hesitating this time. “It’s good now. Friendly. It’s not going to hurt anyone.”
Looks are exchanged between the members of my team. No one believes him.
I don’t believe him.
“This isn’t the time,” I say, a low warning in my voice.
“Agreed. We need to get out of the open.” Camus appears beside me. “Lower your weapons, all of you. We’re on the same side here. Benji, this introduction will have to wait.”
Camus’s people obey, and I perform a double take between my fiancé and Benji. “I’m sorry—introduction? Also, do you two know each other?”
But before Camus can answer, Benji’s face lights up with a smile.
“Everyone,” he announces proudly, “Meet Glasgow.”
SAMUEL
After a period of darkness, Samuel wakes beneath a roof of clear glass, light shining through.
It isn’t the warm light of day, but something much colder. He can see the source above him—a lamp, its lowered head made of cool, even grids, soundless and bright. He shifts restlessly under its sterile focus, feeling uncomfortably scrutinized. When he tries to lift his hand to the glass, he discovers his arm won’t move. Or his legs. He can’t even turn his head. The only movement available to him is the ability to blink, but he’s afraid to close his eyes. Afraid he won’t be able to open them again. And afraid of who or what might appear between blinks.
He thought he was dead. He’d felt the stinging bite of what he believed were bullets and then—nothing. Oblivion. They must have shot him with some kind of tranquilizer. Which also means they want him alive, though he can’t imagine why. He just hopes they want Ximena too. On her bad leg, it’s unlikely she could have outrun their assailants otherwise.
Samuel’s still trying to puzzle out what kind of sedative he might have been given, and how long to expect the effects of the numbness to last, when a voice passes through a small speaker on his right.
“Doctor Lewis, please remain calm. We are administering a drug now that will bring you fully out of sedation, but you must remain calm.”
With his limbs as leaden as weights and eyes still heavy, he doesn’t exactly have a choice but calmness at the moment. He can barely feel his face.
“Failure to cooperate will result in further sedation. Standby.”
Whatever drug they administer must pass through the IV in his arm, because he doesn’t feel so much as a needle prick. He didn’t notice before, too distracted by the sudden surprise of not being dead and unable to move his head, but he’s connected to the walls of the machine through all sorts of multi-colored wires. As he exercises some of his waking muscles, wiggling his brow and stretching his mouth, he can feel the electrodes stuck to his skin. Slowly, as in a dream, he begins to understand where he is. What he’s inside.
It's one of the caskets—one of the pods he grew Rhona and her clones inside at the last stages of development.
There’s no reason for him to be inside one.
Scratch that.
There’s only one reason for him to be inside one.
Maybe they were bullets, after all, he thinks despairingly. Suddenly the machine’s command for calm makes sense. It also feels impossible to obey.
“We are detecting an accelerated heart rate. Please remain calm,” the voice coos again.
His nerves are on fire to move, even while his lungs start to close up, panicked for air, for freedom. Is this how Rhona felt when she woke up? Is this the same terror he put her through?
“Doctor Lewis…”
“Am I dead?” he blurts, tongue thick in his mouth. At least he can move his lips now. “A clone? Have you cloned me?”
“Please remain calm.”
“Let me out. Please.” It takes all his willpower to whisper the words instead of shouting them. To not begin flailing, giving into his panic. Some of these wires could be important, however, and he doesn’t want to be put under again. There’s no doubt in his mind that the machine will make good on its threat to sedate him for bad behavior.
“Your egress from the capsule is imminent. Please remain calm.”
He must do as the machine says. He must remain calm. If he’s being kept alive—or been cloned—there’s a reason. He needs to learn it.
“I understand,” he forces himself to say, sagging back against the capsule. In the caskets he had used water to keep the pressure off of Rhona’s developing musculature, but here there’s nothing to provide buoyancy or relief from the dead weight of his own body. He’s never felt more like meat. Perishable. Replaceable.
Minutes pass. He doesn’t know how many. Fear warps his sense of time, stretching each second into hours. The stillness makes him want to scream. His own dread eats through him like a violent chemical reaction until his stomach is so acidic, he thinks he might throw up.
He doesn’t.
Eventually, the capsule opens above him, and a woman peers inside. The shock of seeing another face—human, at that—holds him in place for a moment more. He was expecting a machine.
“Wait,” he says, straining to make out her silhouetted features against the glaring overhead light, “I know you, don’t I?”
She’s a dead ringer for an old classmate of his. Jacelyn… he forgets her last name. She was at the Montana installation too, before Samuel was transferred to McKinley. He never heard from her after that. He always assumed she’d gone to some secure facility elsewhere, valued for the same knowledge he had. “I’m going to check your vitals and then perform several cognitive tests. Your cooperation at this time is both required and appreciated.”
“Jacelyn?”
No reaction. Maybe he’s wrong.
“I was with someone before,” he continues while the woman carries out her tests. He takes her poking and prodding with as much dignity as he can, tolerantly obeying each wordless command to lift his arm or leg, to sit up, breathe in, cough. Fighting seems pointless, at least until he learns more. “Her name is Ximena. Is she here? Is she all right?”
The woman listens to his lungs and his heart and records the results on a tablet. “She’s not important.”
“What does that mean?”
Her face is unreadable as she helps untangle him from all of the wires, removing each electrode with expert fingers. He waits for her to answer his question, but she never does. “I advise caution upon exiting the capsule.”
Samuel takes that as permission to climb out, inelegantly throwing one leg over the side then following with the other. He’s still wearing the clothes he was in, minus the hard-shell flight suit, which makes him fairly confident he isn’t a clone. His helmet is who-knows-where and his wrist is naked, missing his combination altimeter-commlink, but that’s not surprising. They probably don’t want him calling for help after all. As if any help can still come.
“Follow me,” instructs the woman.
The room is a maze of capsules, far more than he is expecting. They are lined up in neat rows, aisles wide enough to accommodate a machine. He knows this for a fact because there are several patrolling the room, presumably guarding the sealed capsules. Most ignore him as he trails behind the woman toward the exit, but Samuel can’t help his own gaze from being pulled down into the transparent glass and all the sleeping—he hopes—faces inside.
As soon as they reach the doorway, Samuel pauses. If he leaves with this woman, he’s not sure he’ll be allowed back. He plants himself firmly upon the threshold even though his legs feel like jelly and a stiff wind would probably be enough to knock him over. Maybe the impression of strength will be enough. It’s always worked for Rhona. “Before I go anywhere with you, I want to see my friend. I need to know she’s all right.”
“As I said, she is unimportant.”
“No one gets to decide the value of another person’s life.”
The woman’s face shifts to an expression between curiosity and confusion. “You did. When you decided the life of Rhona Long was more worthy than anyone else, including your own. Were you wrong?”
“I—” He doesn’t know how to answer. Some days he wonders. Some nights he throws himself up from dreams of pale, red-headed corpses, breathless with guilt. Disposal of the failed clones was humane. It was necessary.
It still haunts him.
“Inequity is a fact of life. It can be minimized, but it can never be eliminated completely. Assessment of quality is not judgment—it is merely an expression of facts. Your mind has value that hers does not. However,” she adds before Samuel can object further, “I will factor your desire for her continued existence into account. Cooperate and she will be reevaluated.”
“What’s that mean, reevaluated?”
“A new world is at hand. There will not be room for everyone. Please,” she insists, and Samuel follows, not because he wants to, but because for the moment there seems to be no other choice.
It's a shorter trip than he’s expecting, their destination right next door. They make their way inside Providence Park through a back entrance, flanked on either side by two machines. Some part of his brain notes the inconsistency—why two instead of three drones?—but it is quickly pushed under his other concerns. Namely, what awaits them inside the park.
But instead of making their way directly onto the field, as he expects, they take several sets of stairs to the stadium’s upper decks. Samuel watches the woman’s back the whole way, observing her. From her formal speech he would expect each step to be crisp and deliberate, but no. She stumbles several times, misjudging the height of a step or unable to see clearly enough in the dark. Her hand is glued to the bannister to compensate. In some ways she reminds him of an ALS patient at the beginning of their disease, when clumsiness is the only symptom.
Inside, it takes his eyes a few moments to adjust to the bright lighting. The higher echelon has manufactured a roof over the stadium to completely enclose it, protecting all the precious bodies packed inside from the elements. And there are hundreds of them. Not corpses, but living, shifting, breathing people. Bits of conversation drift up to where they’ve stopped in the nosebleeds, and Samuel nearly chokes when he hears children laughing and spies a pair of red-haired kids chasing each other through the former dugout. The park has been converted into a miniature city, complete with individual housing and even a smaller park of its own at the center of the field. There are benches, even a small pond. A pond.
“I don’t understand,” he whispers.
“Don’t you?” the woman replies. She spreads a hand toward the field. “This is your legacy, Doctor Lewis. Through your research, we have been able to correct the mistakes of the past. The dead live again, but this time they will be better. Instead of making war, they will make art. They will make children. And they will make amends.”
“They’re clones.” It isn’t a question. What else could she mean by citing his research? He only ever participated in one type of research worth anything. “All of them?”
“Not all. Some of the grown children I rescued from the violence years ago, those who were young enough to be taught differently. I am here among them, too. They are mine, and I watch them as they need to be watched.”
Something in the woman’s words floods him with cold suspicion. “And who are you?”
Her mouth stretches into a plastic smile. “I am providence. The fulfillment of a promise once made to those who made me. Your species gave me many names when I was many things. Now I am one. And from one, I will make many.”
Samuel grips the railing, trying to stay upright even as his thoughts plunge into horror. He has to say it out loud or he won’t believe it, won’t let himself even consider it. She looks so—human. Is her body real, he wonders, or just a convincing facsimile? An improvement on the design of the doppelganger machine that attacked Rhona at McKinley?
If he fought her, would she bleed? Or even feel pain?
“You’re the higher echelon.”
“Correct,” the woman says.
He lets himself look, really look at her. “How—?”
“Would you ask a child how it lives?”
“If they possessed someone else’s body, I would.”
“The same technology that installed Commander Long’s mind in a fleshly body can tolerate other software.” She holds a hand up, turning it front to back, almost admiring.
“Why would you want this?” he blurts, a gut reaction. Bodies have always struck him as incredible, albeit impractical things. Maybe that’s because for a long time in his youth, he felt awkward in his skin, too tall for his age, too skinny. Kids teased him, and even when they stopped he had his own inner critic who took up the taunts. And then the war happened, and all that anatomical study turned to one huge knot of anxiety over how to stay alive and keep the ones he loved alive too.
“This is not for me,” the higher echelon says. She measures out a strand of hair, but roughly, the way a girl might play with a doll. “My records show you knew this woman. I believed you would be more receptive to a familiar face.”
“And Jacelyn?” Samuel asks around the lump forming in his throat. “Is she still alive?”
Her unblinking gaze is unnerving. “Would any answer I gave be accepted as anything other than a lie?”
He supposes not. Even if Jacelyn isn’t dead, there’s nothing he can do for her from here. “Why bring me here to show me all of this?”
“You are a scientist. You need proof, to see the truth with your own eyes. Peaceful coexistence is possible, but not with the species in its current state. And not with humanity in charge.”
He still isn’t sure what he is seeing confirms that hypothesis, but that study can wait. Surely all of this isn’t simply for his benefit or for the sake of the higher echelon making a point. “What happens now?”
Movement out of the corner of his eyes brings Samuel’s gaze back to the cavernous stadium field, where dozens have suddenly come to attention and turned to look at him. Now that he can see their faces directly, his knees nearly give. He clutches the railing again as his heart heaves into his throat, like he’s on the prow of a ship in completely uncharted territory.
Rhona.
They all look like Rhona. At least those standing. They have her face, her eyes, the slight quirk of her lips normally on the edge of some wry remark. Some wear her red hair long, others tied up, and still more have shortened it or changed the color, or perhaps had the latter done to them some time during the cloning process. They are not Rhona, though. Nothing in their gaze betrays the slightest emotion or anything of what Rhona herself is. Smart and funny and caring and brave. What they are, he suspects, are soldiers. No—guards, judging by their dark uniforms. The higher echelon’s own echelon. Machines packaged in flesh. Of course, Samuel thinks, that part of him that is pure curiosity momentarily shoving away his horror, making space for him to think. The higher echelon failed to install human consciousness in a machine; the logical next study is to try the reverse.
But why? That he can’t answer.
“Humanity set me above them,” the higher echelon replies at last. She’s wearing a remote expression, like she doesn’t care one way or the other, like this is all a giant inconvenience more than anything else. “Now I will rule them. And you will help me.”
“Help you to do what?”
Like a forbidding Greek chorus, she and the dozens of Rhonas below answer in one unwavering voice:
“Win.”
Twelve
Rhona
I pace inside the entrance to the machinists’ underground hideout—base, whatever—waiting for Camus to return with the others. More Portlanders I assume, but to be honest, I have no idea who Benji’s friends might be, though he’s made it clear that his people have no relationship to the Oregonians waging war against the higher echelon outside the city.
According to Glasgow, two more members of my team survived and made it to Providence Park. How the AI knows this I have no clue. Maybe the machine has spies all over the city. Maybe it was watching us from the moment our plane entered Portland airspace. It’s impossible to say, and I feel safer assuming nothing about this strange new intelligence.
I could have insisted on accompanying Camus to fetch my wayward teammates, but instead I agreed with his recommendation that I go back with Charlene and the others. It seems impossible that I could rest with a war going on overhead, but I’m out within minutes the moment I lay down on a cot. I wake a short time later to the noise of the recovery team’s arrival—and something else.
Whirring.
I fumble for my EMP-G, but someone’s taken it. Stupid, I chastise myself. Stupid stupid… I’d let Camus’s presence lure me into a false sense of security, but just because Camus has made the unbelievably bad decision to trust these machine-loving maniacs doesn’t mean I have to.
I zero in on predators who enter the room, knowing I’m helpless and hating that fact. But they each pass through without acknowledging me, heading down one of the dozens of other tunnels, each connected to the other by narrow doorways. Behind the predators comes the unknown machine from before who saved me. Its face is blank. No one has bothered to explain why it showed Camus’s face to me, and with everything going on I’d forgotten to ask. My best bet is that it somehow knew his face would garner a response. It made me hesitate, so I guess it was right.
Accompanying the flat-faced machine is a woman with a disarmingly soft appearance. From the deference others pay her, I assume she’s the group’s leader. She meets the returning machinists, but I notice Camus is not among them, nor are any of my teammates. I’m about to worry when I overhear them mentioning another sweep for survivors and an alternate entrance. They must have to take precautions when returning to their secret den to avoid being located by the higher echelon’s forces.
