WIPE (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) (38 page)

            “You’ll kill me? It’s him you need to kill,” Wrist says. “Everything I told you is true, but there’s more.”

            “Say it!” I scream at him, the rage of his indictment drawing me nearly into a blackout—some kind of death wish that wants me to charge at him even as he holds out his pointed blade—because what he’s attempting to do is kill not me—but for some reason—the love that has finally formed between Maze and me. To turn her against me, to make her see me differently, after all that’s happened between us.

            “Then, I’ll tell you. And after I’m done, you’ll help me kill him, Maze. You’ll help me. But I knew you wouldn’t want to do that. I didn’t want you to have to feel this way about him before it happened…”

            Something spills over—almost as if I believe he’s about to really make her believe something horrible about me even though I know it’s impossible—and it causes me to rush forward. Maze tries to stop me, to pull my arm and hold me in place, but I rush forward anyway, entirely devoid of sense—a blind hatred that overloads my legs and springs me forward until I stumble over my own feet and fall. And then, before my eyes clear and I gain my footing to continue the charge, I feel the brush and cut of steel against my neck.

            “Stay back, or I slice his throat,” Wrist says. And something about his body is impossibly strong. When I attempt to move, and apply my strength to break free, I feel the press and sting of the knife on my neck. Finally, I stop. My eyes drift up from the floor and I see Maze. Her eyes are fixed on me, and then Wrist, consumed with paralyzed rage of her own. Her knees twitch, and her hands stay balled tightly, everything in her ready to uncoil and pounce forward, but Wrist warns her again.

            “Then it’s like this you’ll have to hear me out. But make one move closer, and he dies. The irony is—you’ll wish to do it yourself when I’m through. He’ll beg you to do it.”

            “Say it then!” I scream in tears. And I can’t do anything but look at Maze. She watches me helplessly—my defeated, weak and pathetic form under the red body and orange light, crying. But I can’t help it, and I cry. Because I know that he’ll kill me no matter what now, and she won’t be able to stop him—and even more because I fear that he’ll have some horrible lie that is strong enough to distort her love for me just before I die.

            “Like I said—it’s all true. But I left something out.”

            I feel the knife leave my neck just for a moment, and then I twist, struggling to get away. The knife comes back just as quickly and Wrist wrenches me to the ground and drives his knee into my back. “Don’t!” he yells. And then, the knife is gone again, but the pressure is too much, and I have no more chance to escape. All I can do is watch Maze’s face as he does something that I can’t see. And as I watch her face, the anger dissolves into disbelief, as her eyes go wide and her jaw drops.

            “What is it Maze?” I beg her. “Tell me!”

            “He—” she starts, and then her amazement intercepts any other thought, as if she’s watching something from which she cannot look away or speak of. And finally she says it, her face settling into blank confusion.

            “He’s metal—Wills he just,” she starts, but then it’s in front of my face on the floor—a long patch of wet, reddish skin.

            “Of course I am. Did you think a biological organism could sync with the computer terminal? Could download memories? But don’t think me very different from you. I am every bit as human as you. In every way but one. And more human than
him.
It is just that I lack something—something that all of us who dwell in his After Sky lack,” Wrist says.

            “You’re from here,” Maze says to him. And now, with a welling sadness blending into my fear, her eyes stay on Wrist, mesmerized, as if she’s forgotten me completely.

            “Yes. Is it starting to become clear? You remember more than you should have, don’t you? It’s inescapable in purely biological experiments. Loose memories. The organic brain is—imprecise, I should call it.”

            “What experiments?” Maze says.

            “Don’t believe him—whatever he says Maze—he wants to kill me, you can’t believe him,” I say. But the drive of the knee and the then the sting of the knife returns, together with Wrist’s shout: “Shut up!” And then, when I feel the knife press in, enough to see blood dripping down onto the metal in front of my face, he releases the pressure. “You see?—I
am
just as human. Just as prone to irrational outbursts.”

            “What experiments?” Maze says again, her foot moving a step closer.

            “I will begin by saying that, in the end, you shouldn’t feel bad at all about being an experiment, and that we are all of us experiments. I am the experiment of your ancestors, as you are the experiment of us—as you are our experiment.”

            “What am I?” she says, her voice all but a thin gasp.

            “And he—he is
their
experiment. The Fatherhood’s. More specifically, God’s. God created Wills. And everyone else in that village. Even your hated Father Gold. But it is not the God they teach you. Oh not at all—you see, God is an oligarchy of mortal men. Secret dabblers in science, with their own agenda. To ensure that the human essence can be completely taken away, and even with that, that intellect can return eventually in some disgusting, subdued form. That is the difference between you two—that you would act on your beliefs, Maze, move toward the conquest of knowledge, and him—a reduced form, sterilized from a time before his seed was even created—to only nihilistically recognize his own impotence. Did you not see the Fathers in the Deadlands? You were right to believe they gather resources there. But did you also guess that it was all funneled to your God, that group hidden deep in the mountains, working still toward that original goal of the solar system—to create a race of happy humans, devoid of their most vital essence?”

            “Don’t believe him Maze—you know me,” I say. But even as I try to convince her, I realize that he’s convinced me myself—that he must be right. Something I’ve fought in the presence of Maze my whole life. No other way to explain my lack of desire to strike out and unravel the untruths I have known to exist all along—to remain contented instead in Acadia, completely contented except for my desire for her, the only person I ever recognized as
different
from everyone else. But even on my love for her—it’s plain—I never acted. I stood by and let her go. Let her find someone who could act, Sid, and lost her to him.
No—you learned.
The voice comes in, coldly scolding myself. And I think of the elevator, and in the ocean when I first kissed her. And the change and growth that has happened in me.
But behaviors can be learned
, another voice sides with Wrist. And it was only her that could have taught you what you changed into. Of your own volition, you’re nothing more than a sterile coward, just like Wrist has called it.

            “I don’t believe anything—what do you think of that?” she says to Wrist. “I think it’s like what Gala said—there is no belief. It’s all probability. What you’re telling me now—just because you’ve cut away your arm to show me metal—that’s not enough,” she fires out.

            “Then listen to what you know already is true—what you’ve known since you could first remember your dreams. You’ve
known
that there is something out there, and you sought to find it. And you are the first one to make it to me. You see, I am just as lucky as you. I’ll tell you what happened after the Wipe. The masses won. They’re goal to strip away the last human essence was their victory, but it came at such a cost. They used weapons that call up the fears of atomic wars in the first age of civilization—being in this age those that uniformly destroy a planet’s technology. A solar system’s. That destroy humanity’s very memory of itself. And the few, though they were few, who harbored the resolve to retain their human essence, fought back with the power of all of their wealth, such that despite their defeat, the solar system was set back into a dark age. But all was not lost.
We
survived. Inhuman to
you
,” Wrist says, his voice suddenly driving down at me with hatred, “to you God and Devil worshippers—Nefandus and Fatherhood alike, who would call us the scum and last remnant of sin.”

            “But you were Nefandus?” Maze says.

            “I was
never
. This skin is one of any I could have chosen. But it was the best one to bring you here. You see—I’ve seen every thought you’ve ever had, and witnessed every moment of your life unfold. And everything up until now has been a test—and you performed brilliantly, the first specimen to succeed.”

            “All of it?” Maze says, and I watch the belief settle in her. That she can’t any longer hold onto the romantic shield that Gala gave us. As if all of what Wrist is saying makes too much sense now.

            “All of it—orchestrated. But you weren’t handed your victory. Do you know how many specimens we sent down? Managed to plant into the communities of the Fatherhood? The entire Resistance we had to concoct, so as to produce in the world a place from which rogue children might come and be indoctrinated into a world that the enemy sees fit to proliferate. The tattoos, all of it. Just a matter of drawing you securely into a test environment where you have a chance to show that we’ve got the gene created correctly.”

            “What gene?”

            “The one that his world thinks will lead to inevitable disaster. The gene that I told you of earlier, that makes a human at its core most human. So with you a success, we know we’ve got it right. And now, it can finally start all over. You see, they thought in their victory that they’d destroyed every last Ark. For there were thousands of them, all identical replications of the same information. But there was one—in whose memory banks was stored the genetic material of the rich and powerful and intact human leaders of the old world powers who resisted the subhuman settling for happiness—that survived. And do you know how it survived?”

            Maze, as if she can’t take it anymore, falls to the ground. Her hands grab her hair, and in tears she looks up at me as Wrist continues. I shake my head, my own tears blurring my vision, in the hopes that somehow we can ignore it all—go back to our ignorance—have some kind of dumbed down, pacified married life existence in Acadia. The very thing I have wanted more than anything in the world since I can remember. The very thing I realize now is the difference between her and me—my rooted out sentiment to keep going, searching, and conquering new and strange things—and hers, ever rooted, so much that it is her fundamental force. And there can be no shared life between us—no shared vision of the same goal for happiness. For I would be happy to ignore everything, I know deep in my heart, and to even accept the dogma, if it meant safety and security with her—a full and long life of shared love and happiness. But I know her too well, even without Wrist’s revelations—she could never do it. She could never stop long enough to turn it off—her desperate need to strike out and explore, to find something always closer to real truth in the next adventure. And the burden of my failed life’s dream weighs down upon me so much that I want to scream out for Wrist to end my life now—to send the knife in and bleed me out, impotent human next to her that I am, in sacrifice so that she can do what she must feel now she has to do.

            “Do you know how it survived? The genetic material—the one and only missed Ark?” Wrist repeats.

            “How?” Maze sobs. And in her voice, I sense my own defeat. That maybe she’d shared, that she must have at least thought she could share, my own dream. And now she knows too that we are impossibly far apart—severed before our love could even start.

            “Us. Your drones. Your greatest servants. And
his
side, the victors, who’d thought they’d eradicated us all—in their universal bombing strikes—had forgotten one group of us. Just one. A very human error. A ship that had reached out beyond the solar system, unaccounted for, with an Ark, and a team of robots. Just scum. Just fake versions of yourselves,” he says, driving his knee in and twisting the knife along my neck again. “But you forgot. In all your human brilliance, you forgot about us. And it almost didn’t matter, because we’ve been dying off. Without the proper materials, I’m the only one left. You see, the robot didn’t attack me. I had to harvest him for the most precious of metals, the ones too scarce now to be obtained. And it was him and me until then. And now, it’s just me. But I am sufficient to complete our task. With the most improbable of probabilities, it will happen. We will win out, and the victory will be ours. We’ll create from you, for the first time in hundreds of years, real humans.”

            “How will you create from her?” I say, finding myself only meant now to somehow help ease Maze’s suffering, to prevent her from having to die like me.

            “The sperm is in place, frozen. That part will be easy.
To think—
in the elevator, you two, so near to copulation. To foul up, to
contaminate,
the last human and make an impure, wasted child. No, it will happen right now.”

            “Okay. I’ll help you,” Maze says, rising to her feet. “But you have to let him go. That’s the only way. Or I’ll kill myself.”

            “You will
not
kill yourself!” Wrist rages, and I almost feel his weight release from my body, but then he brings himself back down along with the knife, still afraid to let me go. “And he cannot live. For no more of a reason than he presents the possibility of trouble for us. You see, things are nearing completion, but they are still very precarious. And he knows everything now. I didn’t want it to happen this way, but you two—you two have developed a strange and disgusting bond. But now you see him for what he is—the heir to the enemy, to the very forces that warred against your ancestors, to strip you of the very essence at the heart of your being. Question yourself Maze—you know this difference between you and him. And if somehow you let that his future slip into your mind, forget it now. He must die. He is your enemy, and he must die.”