Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Now

“I’ve been calling you three times an hour for the last twenty-four hours,” Jay says, and I can tell he’s trying to be calm, not lash out, like I’m doing—like our marriage counselor told us is corrosive. This makes me totally crazy, because I am not calm.

“Fuck it. They made a mistake. There’s supposed to be a Bluebird on Crook Road tonight,” I say. “It’s the last one from outside. We’re a military family. They have to let you on.”

“Sounds like a plan. We’ll go as soon as I get the kids in shoes.” There’s no gas anymore. I realize they’ll be walking three miles through God knows what.

“Why did we rent off-base? I should be with you right now. I’m an idiot,” I say, and in my mind I’m holding one of the kids. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Myles or Cash, just so long as I’ve got something beloved in my arms.

“We’ve got this under control. You save the afterworld,” my husband hollers over the sirens. “I love you, Nicole.”

Aaaaroooaaah! Aaaaroooaaah! Aaaaroooaaah!

I’m terrified all of a sudden. It’s because he said my name.

“Squeeze them for me. And yourself. I love you, too, Jay.”

By the time I’m back at my lab, the sirens are dead, and an RC-135 has crashed into a block of townhouses on General’s Row.

“Your family get Tickets?” I ask the rest of my crew in cybernetics. There’s six of us left. The rest of the building has been evacuated. We’ve volunteered to keep working because we think this is important.

Troy Miller doesn’t look up from his dendritic sample.

“How about you?” I ask Marc Rubin. Marc closet eats, can’t lose a pound, and breakdances at office parties. Before Aporia switched course for Earth last year, he’d taken his job just seriously enough not to get fired.

“It’s just my ex-girlfriend, Jenny Carpenter. She got her Ticket, didn’t she?” Marc asks. He’s given up the closet, and is munching cold hot dogs from the plastic pack. There’s a cafeteria on every floor here and they’re all still stocked. Aside from Shelter Nine, this is the best place to be when the Aporias hit.

“You?” I ask the rest of them.

Without comment, Jim Chen, Kris Heller, and Lee McQuaid all pull out their phones and check messages, forgetting that this is a secured building without external connections.

“I think my parents did. They must have,” Kris says.

I’m squeezing my forehead. The lab’s a mess. Monkey brains are scattered in steel pots like jellyfish in kids’ buckets at the beach. The examining tables are overturned, tools splayed, raw materials precariously propped along walls. The cleaning people haven’t come for weeks. Neither have any enlisted. They’re either trying to break into the shelters, or deserting this secret war America started fighting six months ago, against most of Asia. Nobody knows why it’s been happening, or why the Networks have been going down one by one.

“My family didn’t get their Tickets,” I say.

Troy Miller still doesn’t look up. He’s tall, wears a suit under his lab coat every day, and would be in charge around here if he wasn’t such an aspie. “Our families don’t need Tickets! Jeeze! It’s all fingerprint and voice recognition.”

“I hope you’re right,” I say. “Any progress?”

Troy points at an android that’s gone dark. Its lifeless body slumps against the freezer door. “If you want to call that progress.”

“Fail?” I ask.

“Epic. It went ape-shit. Literally,” Lee says. “It folded its articulations until its legs turned into stumps.”

Kris covers her face, remembering. “It tried to unscrew its head. We need an off switch. It kept screaming.”

“That’s it. We’re done with primate brains,” I say.

Troy looks up from his dendrite at last. “We shouldn’t use organic. This should be strictly AI.”

“We don’t have the time for AI. The Aporias hit in five hours. Let’s thaw the human samples out of cryo,” I say.

“Mmmm,” Troy grunts, which is his way of voicing dissent.

Lee, who’s turned rough around the edges from all this stress, noogie-knuckles Troy’s back, just between his shoulders. “Come on, buddy-boy! It’s a brain! Wrap it in Teflon and we’re good to go!”

Troy shrugs. Lee keeps knuckling the poor nerd.

“Cut it out, Lee,” I say.

“We can’t go human,” Kris says. “It’s wrong. Morally.”

“Come on, you bleeding hearts,” I say. “To the freezer.”

We thaw all nineteen brains. They’re shaped like the undersides of horseshoe crabs. The cold has dry-burned eleven beyond repair. Troy cinches a hemostatic forceps into Cadaver Nineteen’s desiccated parietal lobe. “This is what we’re losing in translation,” he tells me. “The higher order senses.” He’s got this high-pitched voice. It’s like talking to a cartoon character.

“Right,” I say. But the parietal’s the least of it. The real dilemma is left-right synthesis. In humans, lobes of the same brain experience and remember stimuli in different ways. They develop different personalities. When it comes time to make a decision, they chat, or even fight. The winner decides. In people with split lobes, you can actually see the fighting. One hand will grab a cigarette, the other hand will push it away. In drunks, one lobe takes over and the other tends to go dormant, which is why some people get so vicious after a pint of gin, and why brain damage victims might remember their families and long division, but not act quite the same, ever again.

Anyway, it’s this chatter between lobes that makes for better decisions. It’s this chatter that, in fact, accounts for sentience. We’ve been trying to reproduce it in our AI, but keep failing.

Troy plucks the closed forceps from Cadaver Seventeen’s postcentoral gyrus. There’s this mucky sound. “A human would go insane trapped inside a metal can,” he says. “Especially if it can’t talk or hear or feel someone’s touch. I’m telling you, we should stick with AI.”

“He’s got a point,” Kris says. Kris was born paraplegic, so she knows what’s she’s talking about. She built her own legs, grafting her neurons to limber plastic encasings, which is why she got chosen for this position out of ten thousand applicants, even though she’s only twenty-one years old.

“Guys,” I say. “Unless we figure something out, nobody’s going to survive down in those shelters. Who’s got a better idea?” They get quiet after that. I don’t hear any better ideas.

Just then, a keycard beeps and the airtight door hisses open. General Howard Macun charges in. He’s the head of Space Defense, and the highest ranking official at Offutt who isn’t in Nine by now. There’s this gash over his forehead. It’s a straight line from temple to temple, as if made by a factory machine.

Macun comes straight for me. I realize that my coat is wet with brain spatter. So is everyone else’s. We must look like a collection of butchers.

He seems about to grab and shake me. Then, somehow remembering himself, he stops short and salutes. I’m civilian SCS, but from the looks of things, he’s lost his wits. He’s not the first. I play along, saluting back.

“Status, Captain?” he asks as he swipes the blood from his eyes. It’s falling fast enough to soak his clothes and pool by his feet, leaving a trail from the door.

I click my Keds for him. “Sir! We’re close. But I wonder, how are the other cybernetics teams progressing? I’d like to suggest we move our work and our families to Shelter Nine and join forces with the cybernetics team over there. This is no time for proprietary research.”