Something appeared to be affecting the flow of walkers away from the edge of the street. I moved toward where I could get a look and there was a man. He had a youthful appearance, black hair and dark blue clothes, and he lay crumpled up against a building. He must have been there for a little while, the sun had burned the exposed side of his face. I returned to work.
I assumed that the street was to be bombed in some covert manner and that the goal probably was either to destroy peoples confidence in the government or to let them know that there was more than one side out there. Based on those assumptions I had written several recommendations on where to set the explosive and at what time to detonate it, as to kill the most people or the fewest, and how to cause the most property damage or to make repairs take as long as possible. The last option seemed the best. A work crew attempting to repair damage would be a reminder of what had happened for a very long time. Yet, I didn’t concern myself with harming the people that wandered these streets much, sort of as if they never were really alive so it’s not as if they’re losing much.
The weapon rode taped to my back, concealed by a thin, but loose wind-breaker. I pushed my way through the crowds. My hand was feeling a lot better. The Revolutionary, as I had begun calling him, had taken me to a doctor who, because he was sympathetic to the cause or eager to find a new source of income, treated my hand and numbed the pain. Now the microscopic little machines were doing their part of it. People pressed up against me from every side as I pushed my way from the column I had been caught up in, which had gained a northward momentum, to one moving south. Everything was going to be all right, I had found a purpose. Death in the pursuit of improvement was acceptable, I was tired of waiting around for life to get better or end, a painful smirk worked its way onto my face, or to even just change.
I made my way over the rubble being careful not to fall in any glass, noting how quiet it was. The city lights glared at my back as I slowly picked my way through cracked foundations and collapsed shops. There it was. An old five story building. Very old, I’d never seen it’s sort of style. It was very dark, the building was rectangular and though there were many windows on the front and back there were none on the sides. The city lights struck the side of the building and none penetrated to the spacious, dusty interior. Upon entering I spotted the occasional bit of junk on the floor, but for the most part it was clear. For a time I sat silently, thinking and listening, but eventually I became curious and began to walk around the room. It was large.
As I walked from one side to the other I heard footsteps behind me. As I dropped to a knee I heard a thump, I scanned around me for movement. My heart tensed. I stopped breathing and listened, but it was completely silent. A few seconds after I started walking I heard something again. I waited, but no sounds came. There was no reason to be so paranoid I decided. If they had come for me it was over, there was nothing that could be done, and if they had not come then there was no reason to worry.
I walked toward a large counter. It’s side was ornately carved wood. I placed my hand on top of it and pushed a large mound of dust to the side. The top was made of some sort of material that was cold and hard and perfectly flat, but it didn’t look like metal. It was white with darker veins moving along the surface. There was nothing behind the counter. I started toward a staircase on the far wall and heard footsteps again. I started walking and after several steps stopped again. I lifted my foot and slammed it down hard on the floor. A thud came in delayed response. I smiled and stomped on the floor several more times enjoying my discovery thoroughly. Eventually I gave up on trying to determine what made the response sounds happen here, but not in my apartment or workplace.
I moved to the staircase, it too was elaborate and made of wood. It rose from the floor at each end of the room and met in a long walkway high up on the wall, with metal doors behind leading to higher floors. The purpose was obvious, but I had never seen one. It looked to take too much room. I cautiously began walking up it. At the top I looked out over the room. The blackness was penetrated by soft blue pillars of light which seemed to have come from somewhere away from the city, by the angle they entered at. The staircase was beautiful and completely unnecessary. A single side of the room with stairs would have been more than enough, so why had they put in a second. It seemed so inefficient, the architect must have been trying to force something into the minds of those who saw it, but what. I looked at it more carefully. It was meant to be pleasing, enjoyable. The idea disturbed me; I loved it.
I moved up into that bridge between the staircases and sat overlooking the room. I was silent, just waiting, trying to imagine what role I would serve in the next couple of weeks, but no one came. I have to be careful about falling into an instant and premature sort of depression. Life’s always disappointed me and I tend to assume the worst. I waited for what must have been hours.
Finally, I stood. The notes I’d made were tucked into the lining of my clothes. I pulled them out and tore them at first calmly, but then more and more violently and flung the shreds to the floor. I walked very slowly, through the door and back into the rubble, but without so much care to avoid falling or cuts. There was no hurry, there was nothing to be accomplished, no purpose to my movement.
By the time I reached the city it was nearing dawn. I walked forever and randomly, but eventually something came to me and I turned toward the street I had studied. I stepped out onto the street in the area where I had seen the young man lying against the side of a building, burning in the sun, and looked around. Two men in black uniforms lifted his body roughly and flung it into the back of a large vehicle. They climbed in and began to drive away, taking his body off to be burned. To my surprise they stopped a ways down the road and climbed out once again. I ran forward to see what they were doing. There was another body, this one of a graying woman. When they opened the rear hatch to throw the body in I looked inside and saw many more. I ran off down the street and found body after body. I kneeled beside one and looked at the neck. There was no scar.
I slowly dragged my body up and over a particularly tall pile of rubble. From the top of heap I looked out over crumbling buildings lining an ancient shattered road. What one would assume to be a scene of desperation and decay I saw as a place of hope and freedom; empty and ready to accept any purpose applied to it. The many-colored lights of the city glared at my back for one last moment as I descended into the shadows of a forgotten place. I stood and began to walk. I felt each step jarringly smack the pavement as it halted my forward fall, allowing me to lean forward, overextending my upper body once again, and swing another leg forward to save myself from falling. Your own body is very alien if you really think about it enough. None of its processes were designed with conscious thought in mind, if you start to invade the realm of involuntary or even automated action, like walking, with your mind you’ll find that you don’t understand yourself as well as you might have thought. I know how to walk, but I don’t know how I walk. Is it enough? Is it enough to know that you can walk, that you can get to your destination, or is there more to it. Is understanding as important a piece of the thing as completion. I imagine that’s like asking if it matters what we do in life since we all arrive at death in the end. We all exist in a strange form of slavery, our body forcing us to seek food so that we are still around to search for food tomorrow. There’s no purpose there. Life is an arbitrary game we can’t win. The laws of thermodynamics have sentenced us all to death. Perpetual motion is myth.
I realized I had arrived. The blood from my hand still stained the ground where I had slept and the city lights still played on the boulders at the opposite edge of the rubble. It was here that this had all started. It was here that I had met him. I sat facing the city, staring at the patterns of luminescence without concern. I heard a cautious step crunch gravel behind me. He slowly lowered himself beside me, looking toward the lights. I wondered if he was trying to understand what I was thinking or if he was contemplating himself. I had forgotten how Latin his features were; the mustache, the line of his chin and his hair. I spoke in my usual slow and quiet manner. "You look perfect for your job. Distinguishable from others; you look very different and so one assumes you are." He didn’t move. His eyes didn’t waver from the city. "When I first saw the bodies I knew it was me. I knew that I was responsible, but I didn’t know how. Originally I thought that you must have used me as we had agreed without my knowledge. That you must have injected me with a virus and not told me because you feared I wouldn’t go through with it, but as much sense as that made it didn’t seem right. I saw the news and the government claims that I was a Coalition agent and I saw that they had identified the weapon you gave me as Coalition and I thought that they must be right, but then I saw diagrams of the spread of the virus." My finger traced consecutively larger circles in the air. "Several hundred thousand infected, in perfectly concentric circles of decreasing cases of infection. I knew that was impossible. The virus would have spread across the city randomly by train as infected citizens went to work each day, but that didn’t happen. Somehow the spread was controlled, but by who and how? How do you control the spread of a virus and why would an enemy want to control the spread at all?"
He nodded slowly still looking off into the distance. "Then I remembered something you had said to me before." I said it very precisely, as if it carried a great weight precariously balanced on the end of my tongue, "population control." He didn’t acknowledge me. "Why? Their is no population growth. Only one child per adult. Why is the government reducing its own population?"
He looked intently at the precession of trains skirting the edges of the city, miles away. "Before either of us were born, the violent outward expansion of the three powers into the solar system was threatening the future of each. Within our government a faction fearful of the other two powers seized control and reversed the old population growth laws. They believed that when war came the great production capability of a tremendous population was more important than the difficulties of maintaining such a large society. They were thrown out a few decades later and population controls were reinstated. There were a lot of people to support and no need for them."
I saw that he would say no more. "I tried to figure out what kind of virus it was. It could have been airborne I thought at first, that probably would have been easiest. Some sort of cure could have been put in the cities food supplies or maybe the water, so as to arrive at that pattern of infection. It seemed like the best idea to me, but I remembered something a doctor had said several months before. He said that the types of metals and amounts that went into my medical unit had been changed. Why would they do that unless the types of drones my unit was creating was going to change. Then I realized what had happened. You took me, at the governments order, to that doctor for my hand and he injected me with a virus that could only be spread through blood and he reprogrammed my medical AI The unit produced tiny little machines which spread from me to other people in the crowds carrying minuscule amounts of infected blood, while I thought I was researching the street for you."
We sat silently. I looked up at the points shimmering above me, moving about like insects at work "I think you’re the only one that can hurt them, you’ve seen so much. How do they control you?"
He lifted his left arm and tapped the graying hair above his temples. I felt sorrow. That pathetic torn man that had cried in the streets demanding my help would live forever as far as I knew, while this man who seemed so oddly capable of sympathy and understanding would die of nothing more than age.
Looking at the side of his face I saw skyscrapers reflected on his eyes. He waited a while and then said, "It wasn’t just you, you couldn’t have spread it far enough. The doctor had been told to change many peoples doses. In addition to the blood carriers your body produced program carriers. They moved from person to person until they found one with a medical unit like your own. They would deliver a bit of code which told the unit to begin producing blood carriers and program carriers just as yours was. People with medical units are highly skilled though, none of them will die, their AI’s also received the instructions for a cure to be used after they had finished their job as a carrier."
He glanced at me for a moment and I understood that I was not one of these. I looked back toward the city. No thoughts passed through either of us, just mutual understanding as we found ourselves lost in the pattern of lights. Some time later I asked, "how long?" and in return he whispered, "very little now."
He sighed. "I know you don’t know much history but-" he stopped suddenly and restarted softly, his eyes appeared blank as they focused on the images within his mind. "My face once appeared on the networks, just like yours. There was the Great Fall. The world ran out of the old fuels and the nations which depended on them starved when food was no longer brought to their swollen cities and the bodies piled high in the streets with no vehicles to remove them, which then spread diseases, causing the bodies to pile even higher. The three powers already existed and they watched as civilization disappeared on two continents. The powers were overpopulated already and each claimed the newly open land. I was young when I was sent as a colonists to the city of Carthage, construction on a tremendous scale was going on year round as more and more military units were moved there along with excess population of a thousand cities. There was for a time a precarious balance between the three. Each knowing the others would fight to control the land and knowing that the fighting could not help but escalate until one would ruin the prize to deny its enemies. They agreed that the continent was to be untouchable to any of the three powers and so each had to remove its belongings. Within a week all of the military personnel in the city were gone. I was invited by a member of my universities staff, which I had met only a few times, to travel out into the countryside. I saw the entire city annihilated in nuclear flame. The excess population which had been unwanted by their cities had become unwanted altogether. I was blamed. The man that had brought me out of the city offered me a choice." He rubbed his forehead roughly with his right palm. "I could either die or I could become worthy of the blame I had received and work as I do now."
I turned to him slowly. "You are saying I have a choice?"
He closed his eyes. His chest spasmed lightly in both pain and amusement. He shook his head, "no, I won’t do that to you."
I felt a connection to him. An understanding I had never known before. "I know they sent you here, but I think you would have come regardless. That’s what matters."
I kneeled. My arm extended toward the dark stain in the dirt and my fingers slowly traced it again and again. I didn’t know why I had returned to this spot, but there was, quite simply, no reason to go to any other. I didn’t know how long it had been since I had slept here, but it didn’t look as if a moment had passed. The blood which had been flowing from my hand still stained the ground, the ring of boulders sat as it had for decades, the city lights washed over me no differently, and as I looked up I saw the bright points of light going about their business as usual. I was overcome with a sense of eternity, of an unchanging universe that, despite the most overwhelming changes in the people which inhabit it, is indifferent and oblivious, completely static. There is a great inertia to reality which corrects variation.
He stood beside me until the end.