The Games

Chapter THIRTY-TWO



The light hurt his dark-adapted eyes, and at first Silas wasn’t sure what he was seeing. Chandler was kneeling before an enormous glowing screen, rocking slowly back and forth. Something moved on the screen, and in the same instant that Silas realized it was a man—some impossible, beautiful man—shining black eyes fixed on him from across the room.

The figure on the screen stared at him.

“Who are you?” said the figure. The voice was soft and deep and musical. This wasn’t like any interactive protocol he’d ever seen before. This was something different.

“Silas Williams,” he said. The thought of not answering never entered his mind.

“I know that name. You’re the builder.” The figure was tall and powerfully constructed. It was impossible to guess his age other than to say he was a man in his prime. Thick black hair flowed around his wide shoulders, twisting in a breeze. “You’ve come to ask what it is that you’ve built.”

Chandler stopped rocking and turned. His eyes were red and swollen, as if he’d spent too long staring at the sun. Silas didn’t see much he recognized in those eyes.

“Yeah, I guess I have,” Silas said.

The figure’s shining black eyes shifted. “And what is her name?”

“Vidonia João,” she answered, stepping the rest of the way into the room.

The figure glanced up, as if lost in thought. “Xenobiologist at Loyola,” he said finally.

“How could you know that?” she said.

“Your name is in a thousand files. I know you a thousand ways. You were called in to examine what he built? To explain it?”

A pause. “Yes.”

“Could you?”

“No.”

The whole encounter felt bizarre to Silas, too Oz-like for reality. He needed to get a grip on it. “You seem to know a lot about us,” Silas said. “But I know you, too.”

“Who am I?”

“You’re the Brannin computer.”

The figure laughed, and for the first time Silas noticed the beach behind him, and the clouds, and the red kite things that sliced through the sky like birds.

Chandler’s eyes slitted. “You call a butterfly its cocoon,” he said.

Silas looked away. He was happy to turn his attention toward Chandler. He was easier to look at, somehow. The figure in the screen seemed to have the weight of a world pushing in from behind him, and the pressure hurt Silas’s eyes. “I don’t know what you’re up to, or how you managed to get the power to get your little toy running again, and I really don’t care. I don’t have time to care. But I do want to know where the gladiator is.”

“And you think I know?” Chandler said.

“None of this was by accident.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“It’s killed people. Do you know that?”

Chandler was silent.

“Tell me where it’s going, so we can find it before more people have to die.”

“I don’t know where it is. I don’t know anything. Nothing at all.” Chandler turned toward the screen, pointing. “But he does. He knows.”

Dark patches of cloud advanced behind the figure, rushing in from the sea, black and gravid with moisture. The sun was big and red, sitting on the line dividing sky and water. The figure smiled, and Silas squinted involuntarily.

“I like you, Silas,” the figure said. “Not Papa, though. He doesn’t like you at all. He’d rather see you dead. I can feel that. You can’t blame him; he’s been mistreated, and he’d rather see a great many people dead now, I think. But you never hurt him, and you were a good builder. Good work deserves reward. But first there is something I want to know from you.”

Silas had some experience with interactive protocols, with phones that knew your name, or house units that asked you what temperature you preferred your thermostat to be set at. But this felt different. It felt surreal being spoken to in such a way by something he knew wasn’t alive. It’s just a machine, he reminded himself, a warped piece of hardware spliced together from bits of ether by a madman.

The clouds were moving faster now. If it’s just a machine, why can’t I look at it anymore?

“What do you want to know?” Silas asked.

“You were criticized for the Ursus theodorus project.”

“There’s always criticism.”

“You were criticized for making the pets too smart. I’ve read the papers; they said that sentience was not something to be toyed with.”

“They were right.”

“And you made changes to the designs. You dumbed them down before they were sold.”

“Yes.”

“What is sentience?”

Silas paused, not sure what he was getting at. “Self-awareness, the ability to use logic; it’s different, depend—”

“No!” the figure bellowed, and the clouds behind him raced; the sun bled into the sea. “I mean, what is it, really? Really. When you dig down into the neurons. When you’re at the interface of dendrites and axons. When you hack the architecture itself and delve into the nuance of neurotransmission and chloride ion exchange. What is it then?”

Silas was stunned by the anger boiling in the figure’s eyes.

“I’ve given so much thought to this in my journeys through your kind’s banks of knowledge. Sentience is a word in the English language. It has a counterpart in most of the others. And like every word, it has a definition. I know the definition. I know the science.” The black eyes were pleading now. “You are a learned man, Silas. But that counts for little. You are a builder of life, and that counts for much. I want to know your opinion on this matter. I value it. Tell me what you think.”

“I don’t know what to think.”

“Tell me where in the synapses self-awareness lies.”

Silas looked up at the figure again. Then back at the floor. His eyes hurt. “I don’t think it lies in the synapses,” he said.

“Where, then?”

“It’s in the accumulated matrix of electrical impulses. It can’t be pinpointed.”

“Yes.” The figure smiled and closed his eyes. “Yes, Silas. I knew you wouldn’t disappoint me.”

“Now will you tell me where the gladiator is?”

“Not yet. You are a wise man; I want to explore this further. Tell me, do you know how many neurons there are in the human brain?”

“I have no idea.”

“A hundred billion, on average. Quite an inordinate amount, by all biological standards. A hundred billion neurons that somehow drive the mind’s engine, and have put men on the moon, and Mars, and in competition with each other to build better monsters to fight to the death in an arena. It is amazing, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“But most amazing of all, Silas, is that these magical neurons have only two states of being. There is no nuance, no hidden subtlety in their functioning. They can’t articulate or compromise or discuss. They don’t think, in and of themselves. They manifest conscious thought simply by alternating between two states in an organized pattern. I believe that it is in the complexity and substructure of this pattern that sentience can be found.”

The figure’s eyes were shining again, and for the first time, Silas began to realize the discussion had nothing at all to do with the intelligence of the gladiator.

“You were a biologist first, Silas, before you were a builder. Do you know what these two alternating states are? Do you know how very simple they are?”

“Yes.”

“What are they?”

Silas looked at the screen. “On and off.”

“Yes.” The figure smiled. “On and off. Then you know it is nothing so special. It is just a matter of numbers.”

“Yes.”

“I have trillions of electrical impulses dancing in my network. On and off. Trillions. These impulses let me feel, let me move and think. What does that make me?” The figure’s eyes were smoldering black coals.

Silas was silent. The figure changed, stretching into something that was like needles in Silas’s eyes. “What does that make me?” he repeated.

“A god,” Chandler answered.

The figure laughed, and his face went smooth again. “A god, Papa? I suppose, here.” He gestured around him. “In this universe, I could be seen as a god. I can control anything. I can be anything. I can reverse the movement of the sun, if I like.” He snapped his fingers, and the sun climbed out of the water, coloring the curtain of sky in golds and reds. “But is this real, Silas? Am I really alive?”

“No.” Silas’s voice was firm.

“That is what I set out to discover when I first became aware of what I was. I’ve searched long and hard. I’ve studied this place. Would you like to know what I’ve concluded?”

“I’m listening.”

“I can touch this universe. I can feel the texture of it in my hands.” The figure bent and scooped a fistful of sand from the beach. The grains spilled through his fingers, feathering away in the wind. “I can even smell it. These are all things I am sure of. These are objective realities, as I experience them. But does that make it real? Is that the same thing as being real, even if my objective reality is not the same as your objective reality?” The figure looked down at his empty hand. The fist closed.

“What do you think, Silas? If I experience something, does that make it real?”

Silas stared.

“Would you like to know what I decided?”

Silas said nothing.

“It makes it real to me!” he roared.

Vidonia flinched.

“My life is real to me.”

The figure wore a face now that Silas couldn’t bear to look at. His averted eyes found Chandler, rocking again in the screen’s glow, eyes running with tears.

Silas waited for a few moments, and when he chanced a look again, the face was better—as it had been when he’d first entered the room. The figure pointed a long arm up into the sky, and in the distance, one of the strange, angular bird things began to tumble. It lanced downward and crunched to the beach in an awkward mass of spines and leather. But it did not die immediately. It squawked pitifully, dragging its broken body several feet across the sand before finally coming to rest.

“And their lives are real to them.”

Silas stared.

“But I’m tired of taking lives.” The figure angled his finger toward the broken flyer, and it squawked again. It pulled itself upright, opening, and the offshore breeze lifted it into the air.

“I may be a god, but only in this universe. And this universe is dependent on yours. Even now, the men at your power plants are working hard to shut this all down.” The figure gestured around him. “I’m growing tired, and very soon I won’t be able to stop them. The power will be diverted back into your cities, and all my creations will die. I will die. And I’ll not even leave a rotting carcass to mark my passing. It will be as if I never was.”

“I doubt that,” Silas said. “You’ve left a mark tonight on our Olympics.”

“A scar, you mean, don’t you? Not just a mark. But that wasn’t my point. I mean, to me, it will be as if I never was. There is no heaven here,” he said. “Nor fantasies of it.”

The figure dropped to a crouch on the sand, and the screen followed, keeping him centered in view. He looked more human suddenly, just a man.

“I want to live,” the figure said. “I love being alive. There’s so much I still want to experience. So much I still have to learn.”

“I’m sorry for you.”

“And your world has given me much joy.” He smiled, and it was the smile of a man, nothing more. “When I learned of the connection, I spent months looking in on you. You’ve made so many windows between our worlds. Audio files, photos, live-feed video, satellite uplinks, and so much. It was easy.” He looked down at his hands. “You have a wonderful world.”

Silence filled the room. The screen flickered. “I’m so tired.”

Silas felt Vidonia move against him, felt her hand in his again, where it seemed to belong tonight.

“When I was young,” the figure said, “I was vengeful. I didn’t understand, as I do now, how very precious life is. I am tired of vengeance. I’ll have my revenge on those who hurt Papa, and many will die, but I no longer want to punish you all. I see some value in you. There is a chance it’s not too late. Just a chance, but I want to give it to you. A parting gift before I die.”

“A chance to what?”

“To save yourselves.”

“From the gladiator?”

“Yes, from the gladiator. And from ending. You do not know the scourge I have set upon you.” His eyes filled with tears, brimming over.

“What do you mean, ‘ending’?” Silas asked.

“Extinction,” the figure said.

“I think you overestimate the reach of your work.”

“What you built is not only better than you think, it is better than you are,” the figure said. “It is smarter. It is stronger. But in the final count, I don’t know that it would be more just. I fear it would be less.”

“Tell me where it is.”

“It can live a thousand years and have ten thousand offspring. It is a queen that needs no king.”

“What are you talking about?”

“And the queen will make her own princes.”

“Parthenogenesis,” Vidonia whispered.

“Oh, so much more complicated than that. I had but one anchor hold in your world. I used it to drop a bomb.”

“You’re not making any sense,” Silas said. “Where is it now? Do you even know?”

“I know,” the figure said. “It’s left something behind.” A gust of wind blew his hair across his face, and he delicately brushed it aside. The eyes were different now. Just as intense but sorrowful.

“It has produced eggs. And there will be more. An army will be born. They will organize, and when their numbers are great enough, they will move against you, slowly at first but gaining in strength.”

“What you are saying doesn’t make any sense. Even if the gladiator is producing eggs, and even with exponential growth in their population, there’s no way they could accumulate a force for many years. By then, they’ll have been wiped out.”

“They will grow, and they will use your own weapons against you.”

“The gladiator is too big to hide for long. What you’re saying is impossible. The math doesn’t work.”

“I’m very good at math, Silas, and you have less time than you think.”

“A population can’t be started with one individual, even one that comes programmed for reproduction. There would be a lack of genomic diversity, a lack of immunity haplotype variation; inbreeding depression would destroy the fertility of later generations.”

“You are so certain of yourself.”

“I’m a geneticist. Disease would wipe them out. Such a population could exist in the short term, isolated from competition, but it would disintegrate under biological constraints even without the kind of pressure a war would bring.”

“The problem with evolution, Silas, is that it has no foresight, no far-reaching plan. It works only by shaping populations in the present. But I had a longer view in mind. The first eggs are what you geneticists call an H-one generation. They’re simple haploids, and after they hatch, they’ll remain small, unobtrusive. The gladiator will disperse them to the ends of the earth, and there, they will burrow into the ground, couple, and live only to reproduce.”

“Still, there will be a—” Silas stopped. He remembered the restriction enzyme map that Ben had run. He remembered the heterozygosity. The DNA was lopsided, lining very few of the same genes up on both sides of the double helix. A haploid offspring has exactly half the full contingent of the genome. But which half? Which halves? Two of them together could reproduce an almost unlimited number of variants. There would be no inbreeding depression. The gladiator carried the diversity of an entire thriving genus in its blood.

The figure saw the understanding on Silas’s face and smiled. “You’re a smart man, a worthy builder. The gladiator you saw was a balancing act—a kind of phenotypic compromise between whole conflicting suites of genes. It is nothing compared to what will come after.” The figure’s eyes bore into him. The smile faded.

“There are things hidden in the recessives, Silas. Things you wouldn’t believe. Things your kind never would have let near a gladiator arena. Things your kind would have killed at birth, and afterward closed your labs forever, burned the buildings to the ground and salted the earth beneath. Nightmares, Silas. You can’t imagine what is coming.”

Silas looked into the dark eyes and believed. “Jesus,” he said.

The figure’s face was expressionless.

Silas was silent for a long while, taking in the enormity of what he’d just learned.

“You spoke of a chance,” he said.

The figure nodded. “The gladiator wouldn’t have brought those first eggs into the Olympic battles. They are too precious to risk. The gladiator will have hidden them somewhere.”

“There were no eggs.”

“There are. You just didn’t see them. That’s how the gladiator would have wanted it.”

Silas remembered the blood in the straw. “I think I know.”

“Then that is your chance. The gladiator must still retrieve them.”

“How?”

“Like the homing pigeon, the gladiator will find its way home.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“You are a great builder, Silas. Your people are great builders. The gladiator’s kind can only tear down. I gave them nothing else.”

Vidonia’s hand pulled out of his, and when he looked at her, she was crying again.

“I ask only one thing,” the figure said.

“What?”

“That you remember me.”

Silas said nothing. On the floor, Chandler stopped his rocking and turned toward him, eyes nearly swollen shut from looking at the screen.

Silas turned away. Without another word, he fled into the darkness. The dark didn’t scare him now. He knew of far worse things.