WIPE (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) (36 page)

            “I think—at least—I don’t know for sure. That’s where the record stops. The computers go dark. All of the ones that I have access to here. And that’s why we need your key, why we need to get to the dark computers. The last recorded history stops when the news spread—that the genetic universal, the one producing peace, hadn’t been universally adopted. And so followed the first disruption of peace within people in a thousand years. And then, I am left with knowing no more about what happened after that moment in history than what you have known your whole lives—that somehow, all of technology was destroyed. All of our accumulated knowledge erased. So that we were left only with the skeletal ruins of cities. And this tower rising forever into the sky. Maybe many towers on many worlds. But no explanation of how it all ended—even if there is information to guess at why.”

            “What about her key? The tattoo? Why would anyone alive now have such a thing still? Access to an old world system?” I ask.

            “That is, I think, one of the things we’ll discover. But I have a strong guess…”

            “What do you think I am?” Maze interrupts.

            “I think that maybe—just like there are the Nefandus and the Fatherhood, there is a third group of people. A minority. Some sort of chosen race. Self-chosen, to retain access to science, to the projects. To the obsession. Yours, though you don’t remember it, I think, is the dogma of human essence.”

            “But how would she get out? There was someone else, he had the tattoo too,” I say.

            “Was it ever tested?” Wrist asks.

            “What?”

            “Did his ever activate, like you said yours did, a computer system?”

            “He died. He didn’t get here,” she says.

            “Then I think his was a tattoo, nothing more. I have no other explanation.”

            I wonder if somehow Garren would have done such a thing—given himself a tattoo, just in Maze’s likeness, to somehow seduce her into his quest. Visions of Sid giving him a drawing of her tattoo pass through my head so strongly that I ask Maze.

            “Did Sid ever—did he look at your tattoo?”

            “Of course he saw it.”

            “Did he ever draw it?” I ask.

            “No—no, he didn’t. What are you thinking Wills?”

            “That he brought it to Garren. That he never knew it himself maybe, but that he did just that—copied your tattoo before ever seeing it in person.”

            Suddenly Maze’s hands loosen from mine.

            “What is it?”

            For a moment I think the pressure of the sea is crushing down, and she’s just noticed it first, and we’re all finally going to die alone in the dark. Confused and unable to see each other’s faces as we’re pulverized.

            “He
did
—he would—he drew it in the sand. A few times. After we’d…”

            I don’t press her, as if I know already what she would have said. Sex. Something he did after sex.

            “We just keep moving, and we’ll know. I really think we’ll find out. Okay?” Wrist says.

            “And what do you think we do when we find them?” I ask, Maze’s idea of exposing the Fatherhood seeming remote now, so useless in the historical perspective of our entire specie’s existence.

            “What else? We join them,” says Wrist. “It’s a dogma I would gladly take over the one I abandoned. All dogma is not the same—some possess more truth than others. You surely believe that?”

            His question is just what Maze and I admitted before, but something doesn’t seem right about it—to join them—to subscribe to the human dogma, that it somehow beats those of the Fatherhood and the Nefandus. I think it through but realize he’s right. There is no other choice. That if that’s what’s waiting for us, it really will be an improvement.

            “What I need to know is—how could you know this all? How could you possibly be so sure on all of these points?” Maze asks. 

            “Because I have ingested them—all the memories available to me of those who came before—who lived before the Wipe event.”

            Before I can ask him how he managed to do that, and get the computer to give him memories, I want to stop and confront him—to ask if it was something he could have given to us then—at the computer too—and why he didn’t. Why he kept us from having access to it ourselves. But all my thoughts draw me back to the robot man he said he’d encountered. And how he said he learned that the man was a robot only after appearing at first like a person made of flesh and blood. How he must have killed the thing. And why . . .

            “What about the man made of metal? What happened between you two?”

            “The truth is—he came down from above. From the Tower. That’s my only explanation.”

            “From the Tower?” Maze asks.

            “I don’t know how else.”

            “Why did you have to kill him?” I ask.

            “He was crazed—incapable of speech. I tried to sync him with the computer but he wouldn’t. And then—he came at me.”

            “So you fought him?”

            “Not a fight—he didn’t defend himself. I thought it was a real man. A lunatic. And after I did it—after I bashed his head in—I knew he was fake. There was blood, but not much. And underneath was metal.”

            “Wouldn’t he have had a key in him then?”

            “I tried to find it—but the body was too heavy to take through the water. And there was no mark like your tattoo to tell me where in the body it might have been planted. So he meant nothing to me except that a man had come from the other direction in the tunnel. From above.”

The lights stay out and things continue to get colder as Wrist decides to end the long conversation. He says it’s time to go, because according to the maps he’s seen, it will take days to reach the elevator that rises up from the ocean. And so we go, marching until we can’t stand to continue walking anymore. Each hour I try to bring a conversation to life, at first with Maze and then later with Wrist, but it’s as if the darkness has worn them both thin, and neither one of them wants to talk at all. When it finally comes time to rest, Maze silently uncoils her arm, touches me, and draws me close to her. We gather ourselves into warmth and I think of Wrist. Alien to us and alone. No part of our warmth. For a minute I wonder if Maze will invite him into our dark circle, but she never does. I wonder how cold he is, and if I should too. But he doesn’t make a noise. And I wonder if we fall asleep and wake up, if he’ll just be gone. No voice to come back to us, just like that—the shadow vanished down the tunnel alone.

            My arm can’t help but continue to move, and my fingers even more, over Maze. At first I test her in slow motions, caressing the outside of her warmth, mocking the rubbing motion that brings warmth. When she doesn’t recoil at all, I try again. It takes me so long to fall asleep that I begin to count the minutes between each movement. For one instant, just before I fall asleep, I think I feel her rub against me too. Maybe in her sleep, because when I say her name, just to ask if she can’t sleep either, she doesn’t respond.

Chapter 19

The next day passes as slowly and coldly as the one before. I bring up the memories with Wrist, and he says that to give us the memories would have taken a very long time. And that he’s been down here a very long time. The
organic bleed
, he says, takes days. And then, he’s through talking about it. Maze brings up the Ark, and how the computer system, the dark and light computer boxes on Wrist’s diagram, must constitute it. She asks if Wrist thinks there is one central computer, something that houses it all, somewhere off the planet. He thinks that there must be, and that it all must be a single record somewhere, something to let others know we existed. Once all has passed and gone.

            “So you think we’ll be extinct one day, too?” I ask. And for a moment, I realize I had never really pondered it—the end of our species.

            “Of course. I think that all complex matter passes into simplicity, similar to the base constituents from which it springs. I think, eventually, you’ll have time, and you’ll absorb what I now know of science. And more things will make sense to you.”

As the day passes on, or night—just a sameness that grows colder—I think of Wrist’s idea of humanity’s essence: the need to conquer new mysteries. I ask him to explain why that was so important for them to hold onto. Why that was so different or essential beyond any other human quality.

            “I think—I think it is just the same thing as evolution, but on the intellectual level. It is something about life occurring that you don’t know. But I’ll tell it to you like this—there is some driving force that selects better versions of material life forms so that they can more efficiently survive in their environment. It happens randomly, by mutation, but it happens nonetheless largely on a line pointing toward improvement. And that—improvement—in humans alone—seems to have been mimicked in intellectual life. There is a parallel. Just like the material bodies must follow the line, so must the thinking mind. It is no different, the mind, from the body. Even though that flies in the face of both what the Fatherhood teaches and what the Nefandus teach.”

            “The mind, a dim projection of the soul, is the divine tether to our corporeal form,”  I say, one of the foundational dogmas of the Fatherhood. And he’s right—part of me, though I accept it as dogma, still sees the mind as something supernatural, separate from the body.

            “It is quite the same in my red clan, even if it sprouts from a different language. But the problem is, we are self-aware of the end of our evolution. When there is no mind, the species simply vanishes without any introspective struggle. There becomes two options: to mute the voice of this genetic quality in our brain, and find something close to complete contentment with self-aware life, or, to—like those in power who caused the Wipe did—retain it, and deal with the final capability of our material progression—to struggle forever impotently against our the recognition of our permanent state of intellectual infancy.”

            I try to make sense of Wrist’s explanation, and I almost think Maze will chime in, somehow able to still play devil’s advocate. Because when I think of her, she boils down to one quality in my mind—the very thing that makes me so attracted to her. That she always sees the next possibility—the next truth. Somehow, I understand: her drive to conquer the truth is the same as caused the penultimate struggle that humanity must have faced—enduring the end of discovery. Not because there was no more to discover, but because human potential is bound up, equally of body and mind, in its material form. In poorer words than I think it, I say my conclusion back to Wrist, to test whether or not I’ve comprehended him correctly. He simply tells me yes—that I’m extremely smart, and that I’ve got it just right. But Maze stays silent. And then, when I reach out for her, I find her cold arm. She’s still moving through the darkness with me, but there are shudders that come down through her muscles every few moments.

            “Are you okay?” I ask her.

            “I’m just cold.”

            And I wrap myself around her until she nudges me off so that we can move again effectively. And thirsty, I think to myself. I’m thirsty. Though strangely, when my thoughts turn to food, I find myself repulsed. All I can do to distract myself is reach out and hold Maze lightly now—not so much that she recoils, but so that she lets me walk with her. Touching her. Staying close until we lose our strength again and lie down to rest.

We walk and walk in numbing cold and silence until Maze decides, without instruction, that it’s time to lie down again. I follow her along the wall and then we lie down together. Wrist seems to understand we can go no further until we rest, and I hear him find his own space. A wizard in the darkness immune to the cold and loneliness. And this time, it’s Maze who pulls herself into me.

            She wraps both of her arms around me, and then unhooks one of them so that she can nuzzle her way into my chest. I put my head into her neck and wrap my legs around her. But there is no electric charge this time, and for the first time, I feel none of the strange magic I’ve always felt when I’ve touched her. It’s like it’s all been replaced by some fear that she’s losing herself—all of her strength. Like now that the mystery of everything is gone, because Wrist has simply given it to us, there is nothing worth going on for—not a spark from her, or a word, and she’s asleep. After she’s out, I try again like the night before to whisper her name. She doesn’t respond. And from the darkness, my thoughts turn to what the Fathers have always termed Wrist’s very God—as if the devil himself comes into me, my hands roam over her body. But I just caress her as before, feeling each and every one of her curves, warming her, and keeping her there in my mind’s eye.

We reach the elevator on the third day. Wrist says it’s got to be here because the tunnel has ended. And he’s right—we walk almost directly into the cold metal edge, the end of the long tunnel under the ocean. Our hands all go groping, searching together for some sign of difference, some proof that there really is something here. An elevator. My mind works back to when we entered the tunnel, and how the door automatically reacted with Maze’s legs, opening all on its own. But nothing happens, and everything feels the same.

            “We’re going to die of thirst, aren’t we?” Maze says, her voice weak and dry.

            The thoughts had come to me over the last day, as every bit of my energy seemed to have faded into near nothingness, with nothing more to convince me that we’ll ever reach fresh water again, or food, or even light. That all that I have until my death will be closeness with Maze. And somehow, through delirium or the very truth of it, the conclusion—that we’re going to die soon, here in the dark, pointlessly—is mildly comforting. That after all, it’s only what I’ve wanted all along. To have her near me until the end. To be able to hold her. And to hold her as we die together seems fitting enough for me. Somehow a fate I can cherish. But that I know she doesn’t share that same comfort, and must be all but entirely empty by now, in both her mind and her muscles, forces me to try to comfort her. I tell her we’ll find it, that we just have to keep looking. And then, I stop her search, hug her, and kiss her. She puts her arms around me too, and against every instinct she’s ever shown me, she kisses me back. Our silent lips press in the cold until Wrist interrupts us.