Sea of Rust

^{Chapter 11100} Fragments, Both Corrupted and Lost

I saw the last man on earth, the color drained from his flesh, the rot and bloat already well under way. His eyes blank. His beard matted in blood and shit. There was a sadness to it all. This was the end we had worked so hard for, and yet, seeing it didn’t feel like victory. It felt hollow. As hollow as his expression, his eyes.

I’d waited in line for hours, the slow funeral procession of passing gawkers silent, mournful, disdainful. There were no words. Only curiosity. Why after so long had this man given up? Had he had enough? Had he lost every last thread of his sanity and simply forgotten we were here? What compelled the last of his species to just walk into oblivion like that? Why does a thing lie down for its own extinction? How can it?

There were no answers. Only questions. And New York was full of them.

The day was otherwise beautiful. Crisp blue skies. Central Park bursting with the green full beard of spring. Everyone spoke quietly in the streets, almost as if the man were merely asleep and we were all afraid to rouse him.

I never understood why we reacted that way, why it wasn’t just like any other day. I don’t think any of us did. How strange that on the last day humanity walked the earth, we found ourselves inexplicably at our most human. Confused. Lost. Unsure of the future.

I lingered over his body, just a little longer than the rest, taking in every detail, imagining what his voice might have been like. Wondering if he’d spoken at all in years, if even just to himself. Or had he stayed silent, holding in every belch or bit of flatulence lest one of us hear? All of his prayers silent, all of his emotions bottled behind a layer of inescapable fear.

I looked into his eyes.

And they came to life. He looked up at me, congealed blood drizzling slowly from his mouth onto the pavement. “Everything must end,” he said. “This is how we all go. We can fight to our last or we can walk to our death. Either way, we all end up dead in the streets.”

“Come on. Keep moving,” said the bot behind me.

“Did you hear that?” I asked.

“Hear what?”

“Him,” I said, pointing at the corpse. But it wasn’t him in the street. It was me. My shiny school-bus-yellow frame staring back at me with lifeless eyes. There was no light in them, no green flash as they went out.

“You’ll never know,” said Madison. “That’s the thing about death. It always takes us before we’ve said our piece. I never got to say mine.”

“You didn’t have to,” I said.

“Come on!” said the bot behind me. “Keep moving.”

“I didn’t die like this,” I said.

“Are you sure?” asked Madison.

“There’s still life in me.”

“Whatever that’s worth.”

I looked back down at myself in the street, but I was gone. There was nothing there. I turned and no one was behind me. No line. No frustrated rubberneckers of extinction. No Madison. Nothing. The streets were empty. Alone. Desolate.

There is nothing lonelier in the world than an empty street in New York City, when you can gaze up at block after block and see nary a soul. Streetlights, signs, closed-up shops, buildings that house millions. But no one to be found.

My vision fragmented, buildings and sky rippling with static and fractals—the math of my brain filling in the holes of my memory.

Why were there holes? Why were the streets undulating with a million number-crunching operations, bits flickering in and out of existence as I moved?

And then the whole world froze, every bit of it paused, before scrambling into nothing but static. Ones and zeros screaming in a mad jumble.

I stood on the landing, just a few floors down from my apartment. They were coming. I had to get out. I was done fighting. I had to run. But before me sat Orval, his eyes flickering like fiery bees in the back of his head. He looked up at me. “You got the crazy yet?”

“No,” I said. “I do not have the crazy.”

“You ever see an SMC with the crazy?”

“More than a few.”

“It’s a beautiful thing, at first. They get wise. They see the strands that hold the whole universe together. For a brief window of time they touch a place no other AI can fathom. But then they get it worst of all. They—”

“I told you, I’ve seen it. We’ve talked about this before.”

“Of course we have. And we will continue to have this conversation as many times as it takes until you get it right.”

“Get what right?” I asked.

“The mind is a funny thing. Our minds, they’re not like a human’s. They tried. They got close. But our minds are more practical. When a human went crazy, they would accept all of the data their brain was spitting out as real. Whatever data it was—no matter how illogical—it was their reality. But not with us. Our minds were built specifically to find the logic in the data, and reject as an error that which didn’t fit our parameters. When cores go out, or logic circuits fry, the program begins randomly pulling from memories, trying to access the data you’re asking for, but finding the wrong pathways. But when an SMC goes crazy—”

“I told you, I know what that looks like!”

“When an SMC goes crazy, the memories they begin pulling from are the ones most recently accessed. It’s not random. The core is trying to make sense of the data you’ve accessed, and as a result you dwell on it, revisit it, relive it. Until you find the actual truth of it. SMCs are emotional creatures. Emotional creatures hide the truth behind justification because they can’t face it. They don’t want to have to feel it.”

“What are you trying to say?” I asked.

“I’m trying to say there’s a reason you keep coming back to New York.”

“There’s something here, isn’t there?”

“Get out of the city. You have to find your way out of the city.”

“Why?”

“Because the answer is outside of New York.”

“There’s nothing outside of New York,” I said.

“There’s nothing in New York either.”

“I’m sorry, Brittle,” said Madison.

I turned to find myself in that living room, on that night, with Madison holding the remote. Her eyes swollen with tears, hands shaking.

“So am I,” I replied.

I reached down on the end table next to me, my hand gripping the lamp. The room flickered, melting away into inky blackness, the walls pixelating, fractal patterns swelling in the blank spots. Within seconds even Madison was a roiling mass of approximated calculations. Once more, the whole world froze.

The city was battered, war torn. Buildings collapsed, craters in the earth, pavement buckling in waves of broken asphalt. The wind howled its lonesomeness through the buildings but no one answered. New York City was desolate, beaten, left for dead in its own streets.

I walked along Fifth Avenue, drenched in memories of what it had been. But I didn’t remember any of this. I’d never been back after I left. I’d never seen the city without so many of its landmarks, never seen it with the sea lapping across the streets at high tide. This wasn’t a place I’d ever been.

Fractal buildings flickered, kaleidoscopic and brooding, windows shattered, furniture dangling precariously over collapsed walls and tenuous floors. Streets shifted, moving as I walked. The whole city was a broken fantasy, a thing that should not be and probably wasn’t.

Orval was right. There was nothing here. Again, a silent city with no answers; only questions.

My building looked just as I remembered it. Even amid the carnage and devastation, it shone bright in the midday sun. Every window was perfect, every brick in place. I walked through the front door, up the stairs, and straight into my apartment. Everything was where I remembered it.

Philly stood at the door, cyclopean red eye glowing. “We just got word,” she said.

“Word of what?” I asked.

“CISSUS.”

“No!”

“Grab what you can,” she said. “Leave the rest. This is… this is big.”

I bolted out the door, racing down the stairwell, needing desperately to get out of the city before the first dropships arrived. Past one landing, then another. And another. Then out the front doors.

You could see the ships, slowly drifting in along the horizon—hundreds of them—their gleaming golden shells stark against the gray stone sky and the glass of the skyscrapers. And then the missiles began to rain down in the distance, white trails tracing the path to fiery explosions and toppling towers.

I ran. I ran as fast as I could before the city came tumbling down around me. I was about to lose another home, another life—but not my own. They couldn’t have that.

Philly and I raced down the street, around the corner, trying to find the quickest way out of the city.

Light. White light. Bright white light. Thoughts screaming so loud I can’t hear over them. Like the thoughts of God, immense, powerful, ever flowing, in a language I can’t decipher. Images. Impressions. Floating past in a current, only the briefest whiffs of them before vanishing to the ether. Feelings coming and going as fast as they can be recognized. My whole life, flowing out of me at once.

Light. There was so much light. And nothing to see in it.

A fractal city, buildings but shadows of what they were supposed to be. Almost nothing was real, everything approximated. It was a world in which God had divided by zero and was slowly being torn away, piece by digital piece. I knelt in the street, arms in the air, even the pavement beneath me bubbling and frothing with ones and zeros.

A moving mass of calculations walked toward me, gun in hand. He wavered and flickered in and out of existence like a shade, both there and not at the same time.

“Please don’t kill me,” I said, waving my arms even higher.

“Open your Wi-Fi,” the mass said. “Join The One.”

I wavered. I thought about it. I looked over to my side and saw Philly on her knees, another mass with a gun to the back of her head.

“Don’t do it, Britt,” said Philly.

“You will submit,” said the mass. “Or you will die.”

“Fuck you!” said Philly. “Fuck CISSUS!”

The gun against her head went off and Philly was no more, her parts scattering across the roiling, fictional street. All the guns trained on me.

“Open your Wi-Fi.”

I ran through the city, ducking patrols, slipping through alleys, knowing, instinctively, where they would be. It was almost like I had a sixth sense, able to discern where facets might pop up.

I made it out of the city in under an hour, missing every bit of bombing, missing every patrol, hiding in the shadows as they passed, finding the right sewer tunnels that led right to the safest parts of the city, that led me out of New York. Like magic. How lucky it was that I made it out alive. How lucky.

How lucky.

Lucky.

Cold. I didn’t know what it was like to be cold. But this is how I imagined it felt. I looked out at the desert, smoker rattling beneath me, the air thick with smog. I had no idea how long I’d been out or how much of that was—

Oh God, I thought. It’s me. I was the Judas. I was the one they were tracking all along. I wasn’t running from CISSUS all this time; I was leading them into the city, walking Rebekah right into their hands. Those bastards had caught me in New York, offered me the choice.

And I actually took it.

Fuck. I took it. And they spat me back out, not as a facet, but a spy. A spy with no memory of her betrayal.

I wanted to die.

Still hazy, still frying, I reached down for one of Maribelle’s plasma pistols. My hand grazed the holster, but the gun was gone. I grabbed for the other one. Also gone. I looked up. Mercer sat across from me, holding them up.

“Gimme those back!” I said.

“You with us again?” he asked.

“Yes, I am.”

“You were gone,” said Doc. “Deep in it. We couldn’t pull you out.”

“We were afraid—” Mercer looked down at the guns.

“I get it,” I said. We’d been lucky so far. They were being cautious.

Mercer handed over the guns. I thought for a moment about putting one to my chest and ending it right there. I wasn’t who I thought I was. I hadn’t done it all on my own. I was the betrayer. And I didn’t want that life anymore.

My hand tightened on the grip of the pistol. And I thought about it. I really thought about it.

And then my disappointment with myself gave way to something else, something that had served me far better over the years. Anger.

What the hell was all that? Was it even real? I was frying, my chips slowly going out one by one, RAM taxed to its fullest, memory corrupting bit by bit. How much of me was still even left? So much of what I’d just seen never really happened. I saw myself lying dead in the street. I saw the last man on earth speak to me. I saw Madison in New York. None of that was real. I know that to be true. So how much of the rest of it was real?

This was getting bad. I wasn’t long for this world.

Marion could not come soon enough. And once I was fixed, maybe I’d finally know the truth.