"But if you don’t know who is real until they’re threatened, how do the Fans know?" asked John.
"The reason we don’t know is that we don’t want to know, because knowing would threaten our sanity and our existence. And by extension, the existence of humanity. But the knowledge
is
there, if someone knows how to look."
"Someone like Malachi," guessed John.
"Exactly," agreed Adam. "He knows. He knows where the real people are, or at least he managed to find out their names and dome locations before he left us. The real people are the ones who can carry us forth, who can hopefully bring humanity back from the brink."
"And Fran is one of them," whispered John, guessing how this would turn out. He guessed half of the truth.
"Fran is," agreed Adam, nodding. "She’s also the fertile last fertile female alive in the world. If she dies before reproducing, then so does humanity. And all that’s left is a world of machines."
OUTSIDE CONTROL HQ - RUSHM
AD 3999/AE 1999
Malachi looked behind him. His legions followed closely, riding their stolen hoverjets and cycles over the rocky, barren soil that covered the whole earth. Death had already won on this planet, and only a few didn’t accept that reality.
Well today they would be instructed of that fact. Malachi knew that God was with them, and the thing that made God into God was the fact that He never lost.
Never.
Today Malachi would be God’s instrument. He closed his eyes for a moment, savoring the idea of heavenly wrath descending once again to finish the job that nuclear weaponry had begun two millennia before. The Controllers dead, Fran destroyed, the world would follow irrevocably. But this time the world would not be consumed by nuclear fire, it would be destroyed by fiery insanity and a flood of madness more complete than the Noachian tide that covered the earth once upon a time.
The old Bible had said that God gave the rainbow as a sign that He would never again cover the earth with a flood. But after Endwar, the sky had not permitted rainbows. They were a thing of the past. The promise was no more, and the flood was coming.
Malachi focused on the tracker that was leading him and his people to the hidden Controller hideout.
Rainbows were gone. And in a few hours, hope would follow those bright arcs of years past, disappearing in the darkness of death and eternal night.
CONTROL HQ - RUSHM
AD 3999/AE 1999
John blinked rapidly, feeling as though he were waking from a dream so real that it doesn’t surrender its grip upon waking. "Fran’s the last?" he asked.
"The last," answered Adam. "After the wars of the late twentieth century, there was a significantly higher radiation count. And one thing it affected more than anything else was the reproductive process. There were fewer females born than males. We’ve been harvesting sperm from the real men scattered through the world, but that doesn’t change the fact that females have been an ever-shrinking number. Fran’s the last."
When Adam mentioned the wars of the late twentieth century, it spawned another question. It seemed that for everything Adam explained, fifty new mysteries arose. "What about the Gulf War?" he asked. Adam hesitated. "Tell me," John insisted.
"This is going to be hard to understand, but the Gulf War was nothing but a fabrication. Vietnam, Korea, both World Wars, the others. In the twentieth century - the real one, not the one we built for people like you and Fran to live in - they never really happened. There
were
wars, but they were terrible things."
John shivered, remembering the eyes of the little girl who’d looked at him while he hid in a hole in the sand, remembering the possibility that he might have had to kill her. "Iraq was terrible."
"Not compared to the reality of two thousand years ago."
"Then why invent something like the Gulf War?"
"To prepare you. We needed to have a good reason to draft people into the armies, so that they could train and be ready."
"Ready?"
"The ‘bots in your city are programmed to protect you. Their thalamic operations sense the proximity of a real person - you, for instance - and they orient to keep it safe. But what if there’s a glitch? Like what’s happened to you. How long would you have lasted if you hadn’t been in Special Forces?"
John didn’t have to think very long to arrive at an answer: "About four seconds."
"Exactly. The war you fought was for your benefit. You and a few other humans were the only real participants. And you were always protected, despite what may have appeared to you as direst peril, in what you remember as a tragedy that took thousands of lives. But it prepared you for the eventuality of something like what’s happened in the last few days. It kept you and Fran alive. And hopefully you two will have children and the human race will be one step closer to living on its own again."
Both men paused a moment. Then Adam continued, in a softer voice, "I know what you’re thinking. There would be other ways of preparing you. Why invent a horrible war? Why cause suffering?" John was silent, but knew that his eyes told Adam he was thinking exactly that. "Think about it, John. There has to be difficulty. Opposition is what makes us strong, what makes us appreciate the easy times, too. So we created worlds that held opposition in them, hoping that living in those environments would teach you - and all humans - how to be strong and good. So that someday, when and if there were enough real people, they could be strong and good enough to heal the world and make it a home again."
Adam hit a button on his desk and a ladder slipped quietly from the ceiling. He handed John a pair of goggles, motioning him to put them on, and slipped a matching pair over his head. John put on the eyewear, wondering what would happen when he did.
Nothing. The lenses were clear, and he looked at Adam quizzically.
"Protection," said the older man, and hit another button on his desk.
A trapdoor at the top of the ladder slid open, and John winced at the strange, red light that streamed in through the opening.
Adam climbed the ladder, motioning John to follow. He did, climbing up and out and finding himself on bare rock under a red, hazy sky. John stood, looking right and left. He could not discern where he was. He only knew that he stood on a high spot, looking down at a landscape that was burned and scarred beyond recognition.
"Wouldn’t the radiation have dissipated by now?" he asked. "Two thousand years is longer than the half life of a lot of nuclear byproducts."
"Of course," answered Adam. "But the nuclear strikes utterly destroyed much of the atmospheric filters that are meant to keep the world safe from microwaves, gamma rays, and a host of other nasty cosmic attackers."
"Oh," said John. "Then – " He stopped speaking suddenly as his stomach, still clenched in fear’s cold grip, now threatened to be crushed by the jagged grasp of sheerest terror. He stopped speaking as his world tumbled again, dropping around him in shards of reality that were forever broken and changed. He stopped speaking as he recognized where he was.
He stood on Mount Rushmore.
Below him were Lincoln, Roosevelt, Jefferson, and Washington. Now two thousand years older than he knew, the tops of their heads clearly visible to him and pitted and scarred from millennia of harsh climate.
John looked down and saw the valleys below. No trees, no nothing. Only bleak barrenness under a red sky and a sun that glowed a strange purple. Domes dotted the horizon, though, dozens of them standing across the sweep of the pitted land, huge constructs of metal and plastic that seemed to gleam in the weird light.
Adam pointed at the largest. "That’s Los Angeles dome, where Fran came from. It’s the biggest. She flew out in a plane we picked up, then we sedated her and transported her overland to that one," he pointed at another, much smaller. "That one is Denver airport, where people ‘land’ before we re-drug them and ship them to their final destinations. They just think they’ve had a nice nap all the way from home." He pointed out another place. "Chicago dome. Twenty two humans in there that we are aware of. All male of course. There was a female, but Malachi killed her a short time ago." His arm moved slightly, pointing to yet another. "Loston," he said.
John looked at it, automatically memorizing its placement among the others.
"They’re all in different times, too," said Adam
"What?"
Adam smiled. "The Los Angeles dome is set in nineteen ninety nine, like Loston. The Chicago dome is in the nineteen twenties. Others are in other times. We’ve been experimenting for the last two hundred years or so to find out which time period works the best for our purposes, which one creates the proper mix of protection and stimulation. So far the nineteen nineties are ahead." Adam looked up at the strange sky. "We’d better go back inside. You’re probably already sunburned."
He dropped back down into the office, John following quickly after.
OUTSIDE CONTROL HQ - RUSHM
AD 3999/AE 1999
Malachi stared at the mountain that lay before them, still small in the distance but easily recognizable. "Rushmore," he said, and began laughing.
It was so perfect. He should have guessed.
He raised his hand, and his people moved again. They were the army of Israel, come again to liberate Cana. And as it had been to the Israelites, so it would be with Malachi’s followers: they would destroy the interlopers, and the promised land would be theirs.
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.