CONTROL HQ - RUSHM
AD 3999/AE 1999
John sat back down, not only physically drained but now also emotionally exhausted . The weight of his newfound knowledge and understanding was almost more than he could bear. It pressed upon him like his nightmares had so often done before. Only unlike his nightmares, this burden would not dissipate with the light of the day. Indeed, the daylight would only add to its cumbersome weight, for if John ever returned to Loston, he would look up and know that the sky was not real. It was an illusion crafted by technology beyond his grasp or understanding. It was a dream, and caught in that dream forever, John would have no safe place in which to hide from his nightmare existence.
"My father wasn’t real," he said.
"I’m sorry," said Adam, looking genuinely sorrowful. "We take viable children from their parents, and tell them they died in birth or soon after delivery. And we give them to other parents, who will be able to provide a higher level of care in the event of an emergency." He paused, and then added, "In your case, it saved your life."
"So what now?" asked John.
"We send you and Fran back to Loston. She’s been asleep since the mines, and she’ll stay that way. At least then we won’t have to explain all this. We’ve given her something, too, that will incline her towards thinking that the last few days were just a very vivid dream. You get married, live happily ever after. Most of all, you try to have children."
John was silent for a moment as the enormity of what Adam was saying sunk in.
Adam, he thought, shouldn’t that be my name? With Fran as my Eve?
What he said was, "How do you know what she and I will make it? That we’ll...love each other?"
Again, Adam was silent a moment before answering. "Because we programmed your ex-wife to be just like her. And we programmed her ex-husband to be just like you."
John felt his hands clench at his sides as he began to truly understand just how choreographed his life had been. Nothing left to chance. Not even love. Not even his own heart. "You bastard," he said.
Adam winced. "Please understand, I had nothing to do with those decisions. As I told you, the Controllers are rarely even aware of who is human and who is not. The computers that have been running events for over a thousand years decided your fate, not me." Adam dropped his eyes for a moment, as though penitent. Perhaps he was. But then he raised them and said, "Though I would have done the same thing they did. We needed you two to fall in love. Just sleeping together would have been enough, I suppose, but we have found that humans do better in a family environment, married, and we wanted you two to have as many children as possible."
John flinched. "I’m sorry to say it that way, but it’s true. The crudity and the importance of it is that we need you two to have sex all the time, and the computers figured you’d be more likely to do that with someone you truly loved. So they created perfect matches for both of you, then gradually changed them to match the real mate you would eventually both meet. Then we planned to retire the ‘bots. Give Fran a great job in Loston, where her cousin, who just happened to be your best friend, would be trying to set her up. And voila."
It registered in the back of John’s mind that Adam hadn’t said any of this proudly. It wasn’t as though he was showing off the brilliant system they’d set up here. He said it like he was tired. Tired of having to play the one role that a man could never be capacitated to play: that of God.
But John only felt that realization peripherally, as he hadn’t heard much past what he felt keenly as the most painful and important word in Adam’s explanation of the cold mechanics of a computerized fate.
"So you ‘retired’ my wife?"
Adam closed his eyes.
John heard a savage growl escape his throat. The growl turned to a scream, and he leapt across the desk, sliding over the surface that separated him from Adam. He grabbed the older man by the throat, weeping madly, then hurled Adam to the ground and stood over him, tears streaming from his eyes.
"And if Fran’s husband hadn’t been conveniently killed by the Fans at the proper time, would you have ‘retired’ him, too? Would you have intentionally put her through the same hell I’ve been living in for the past two years?"
There was no hesitation in Adam’s voice. Weariness, yes. Sorrow, certainly. But no hesitation. "Yes," he answered.
John screamed again. He raised a fist to kill this sonofabitch and Adam stared up at him, not cowering, not angry, not sad, not anything but tired. John fell to the floor beside the other man, crying and clutching his stomach.
He felt Adam’s hand on his shoulder. "I’m sorry. I really am. And I’m tired. I’m exhausted from the effort of keeping humanity alive, even for one more day. But more than any of that – more than anything at all - I want you to live." His grip tightened, pulling John closer, almost to an embrace as the two men lay side by side on the cold ground of Adam’s room. "And I think you really, truly have a woman who will love you. And you will love her. More than you ever loved your wife. I know it. Does it matter whether that happiness has come because of fate or machines, or because of the machinations of a tired and lonely old man? Won’t that light make the darkness worth passing through?"
But John couldn’t hear him. He rocked back and forth, saying, "Annie, Annie...," over and over, as though by repeating her name he could call her forth from her grave and make the whole bad dream that was his life disappear. Oblivion would be welcome, for he had always believed that his wife had gone to Heaven, but now he knew that if she had then that meant God was a machine. No, there would be no Annie in Heaven, for there had never been an Annie at all.
He felt Adam’s arms encircle him, the older man taking John in his arms and rocking him back and forth like a baby. In a remote part of his mind, he was struck by the strangeness of it all: of seeing a man from the future comforting a man who had just lost his past. But it was, at the same time, right. Somehow, it was right. John realized that this man was the closest thing he would ever again have to a father, to someone who would watch out for him, and pick him up when he fell.
John’s weeping slowed, and his tears dried.
There was silence.
And then the alarm sounded.
***
Sheila tried to make sense of it all, to stay in control, but she felt like she was struggling to remain afloat while at the apex of a tidal wave, aware not of the height but of the depth of the force that threatened to overwhelm her. Jason was nowhere to be seen, and though she always missed her husband’s presence whenever he was absent, at times like this, times of crisis, she felt his lack more keenly.
She breathed a sigh of relief when Adam entered from his office. John stood behind him, eyes red and troubled.
"What’s happening?" asked Adam.
Sheila pointed at a bank of monitors. These weren’t hooked up to any ‘bots, rather they showed the installation inside Rushmore. Fights could be seen on all the screens.
"Attack," she said.
"Fans?"
Sheila nodded. She pointed to one of the monitors. Onscreen, Malachi blew the head off a Controller, a man she’d worked with and known all her life. She jerked as though the shot had hit her, then jerked again as Malachi aimed the gun at the vid-unit and pulled the trigger.
The screen went black.
"How did they find us?" whispered Adam. Sheila shrugged. Then shrugged again as Adam said, "Where’s Jason?"
"I don’t know," she answered. "He said he was going to check on some things, and a minute later this happened."
"How many are there?" asked Adam.
"A few hundred is what it looks like."
She caught another glimpse of Malachi on one of the monitors, running down one of the halls. Adam saw it too, and blanched, his already pale skin draining completely of color as he ran out the door.
"Where are you going?" she screamed after him, desperately afraid of what was going to happen.
"He’s heading to the infirmary. He’s going after Fran!" hollered Adam over his shoulder. John ran out after him, and Sheila was alone again. In charge of the Doomsday situation that they’d all hoped and prayed would never happen.
***
John followed Adam through a nightmare twisting and turning of tunnel paths. He realized after a moment that it was familiar, and wondered why.
Then he realized that it was similar to the layout of the Resurrection mine. Not exactly, but similar. Clearly the machines that had designed each little world in the make-believe reality of the dome zoos had taken bits and pieces of already-existing structures and strung them together to create facsimiles of cities and towns, and even mines.
He followed Adam around a corner and suddenly found himself in a fight with two of what Adam had called Fanatics. They held old-fashioned six-guns, straight out of a spaghetti western. Both Fans reacted as Adam and John dove away from them, shooting their guns and shrieking at the tops of their lungs.
John saw Adam spin around as one of the shots took him in the shoulder. Then he felt himself hit the ground. Immediately he rebounded, springing back at one of the Fans in a quick move that took the man by surprise. John grabbed the man and spun him around in front of him as the other Fan fired, shooting his compatriot in the chest. John grabbed his captive’s gun from hands that were suddenly limp, and shot the other Fan. The bullet took the man in the eye and the Fanatic pitched backward.
John ran to Adam, who held a hand against his shoulder. "Shoot them again," he gasped. "In the head, toward where the neck joins. Have to kill the master computer."
John nodded and returned to the men, both of whom were twitching again. He shot each, placing the muzzle carefully at the base of their skulls and pulling the trigger. The killing sickened him; it felt like murder, though it was done in self-defense and though they were machines.
His grisly task done, he returned to Adam and helped him to his feet.
***
Malachi found the door he was looking for. He put away his shotgun and drew a new weapon, a hideous, fat-barreled thing that looked like a deadly slug.
He pressed the door release and stepped in.
Not into the infirmary, though. He entered Central Control, the nerve center that kept all the domes alive.
Controllers sat at their stations, the good little machines they were, and were surprised when he stepped through the door and pulled the trigger.
Liquid fire coursed from the barrel of his weapon, a flamethrower he had brought with him for this purpose. The incendiary stream sluiced through the air and hit the nearest Controller with a flowing beauty that Malachi loved, because he recognized it as the beginnings of the Dream made real.
All of the world would burn.
All of the earth would perish.
The Controller shrieked as the weapon - one that dated back to the real twentieth century and which Malachi had saved for an occasion such as this - discharged and set him ablaze, his skin charring and his blood beginning to boil and steam within his veins almost instantly.
Malachi turned to the next Controller.
Sheila.
Her weapon was in her hands, already aimed at his heart. Malachi smiled at her, waiting for her - daring her - to pull the trigger.
She didn’t, as he knew she wouldn’t. "Primary function, deary," he said to her, "Protect the real people." He pulled the trigger again, and the fire coursed over her, as well, cooking her and melting the eyes out of her head. He held the trigger down, and turned the spray on everything that surrounded him, Controllers, monitors, computers.
All around him, machines were dying.
Malachi smiled and laughed as he burned them. He burned them all, and felt his dream coming true. Perhaps he had Dreamed too great a dreaming, he thought. Perhaps the entire earth would not be covered in flame. But though the whole earth might not be burned, this was the earth’s heart, and it would die by fire.