Matthew Tysz - The Last City of America

Secretly, Rouge was the only man alive Wilco had any respect for.

“The only reason Teddles should kill the man is if the man has nothing to say,” Wilco reclined on the bench, “in which case he was never worth the host’s attention. The underhost will buy that explanation and take it to the host himself. If the host doesn’t like it, it will be the underhost on the cross, not us. Fair enough?”

Rouge turned a page on his clipboard, rolled his eyes, and led his entourage away.

Wilco let his head rest again when they were out of sight. He turned to Teddles’ door.

Still not a sound.

Young people like to question. But they can only question what they are presented.

They weren’t forcing him to do this. They weren’t coercing him. They didn’t scare him. If Harold didn’t feel that doing this would help him advance in knowledge, he would gladly defy them all. He’d defied their intimidation tactics before, even as a teenager. He was here because he wanted to be. He was doing this because he wanted to.

The obsession to learn had driven Harold to many hobbies. The difference between right and wrong was just another thing he would have to come to terms with someday.

Doctors older than Hephaestus stood around the edge of the circular auditorium, looking down into the center. Harold was on the stage, arms folded. Across the stage was his subject: a middle-aged woman bound upright against a gurney. A lab assistant was standing next to her.

“I now instruct the assistant to inject the subject with the contents of syringe A,” Harold announced to his audience.

Rush University was just a pot. The tree that grew inside it had been transplanted many times, watered by generations of men who called themselves the Transeternal. There were about forty of them today. Most were over a hundred years old.

The subject was not gagged, however distracting her pleas for mercy were. (Her sounds needed to be scrutinized as the demonstration continued.) She begged Harold to let her go back to her family. She begged the young lab assistant, in whose eyes Harold observed heavy guilt. Harold had worked with him before. Nice kid. Very useful. He felt bad for his anxiety.

Begrudgingly, the lab assistant obeyed, and injected the syringe into the screaming woman.

Barnabas was not the founder of the Transeternal; he merely inherited it. The history of the Transeternal stretched back much further. The men who maintained it kept no track of this history, because they regarded their work as eternal. No names were kept, no events recorded, no dates marked. All they kept was the knowledge they discovered.

“The parasite is now settling in the subject’s brain,” said Harold to the latest generation. “Soon she will feel pressure underneath the skull, as her immune system tries to kill it.”

The woman cried loudly. The assistant wiped her tears with a cold wet cloth. She asked, squealing, what was going to happen to her. Harold looked on.

The success of the Transeternal was the great mystery. One great discovery was an evolution of a discovery made before; The discovery made before had evolved from the discovery made before that. But there were gaps in the Transeternal’s advancement, which occurred more often the farther back in the chain of evolving knowledge Harold searched. By the time he reached the beginning, he had no idea how he got there.

Who knows what these scientists on top withheld from one another, who knows what they illicitly divulged to their apprentices? Among Harold’s own inferiors could well have lain pieces of the puzzle he didn’t even imagine.

It was whispered down some of these lines that deals with the devil had been made to make the clandestine Transeternal as powerful as it was. Of course, there were no records concerning this. It was also said that the devil himself would one day come to take back what was his—to guide the Transeternal into a new reality. That, of course, was another thing you wouldn’t find in the lab manual.

Harold scanned the rows of shadow-covered doctors looking down. Doctor Iris was looking away.

Barnabas made every decision concerning Harold’s future from fourteen to forty. But the true teacher was Richard Iris. It was his patience and Harold’s determination that bonded the two through more than twenty-five years. But all that time, there was something that the teacher was hiding from the student. Harold was sure of it.

The woman stopped crying and started convulsing. Her head pushed back against the gurney. Her eyes fluttered. Her limbs shook so hard the leather straps looked like they might come lose. Harold told his assistant to hold her. The assistant grabbed her arms. Her eyes flared. She tried to bite him.

“The subject is now induced in a nightmare-like state,” said Harold. “A moment ago, she was afraid of me, the syringe, the bindings around her arms and legs, of arbitrary prospects of the future. Now, she is afraid of the floor. And the walls. The lights, the chairs, her own skin. Adrenaline is coursing through her. Her sense of judgment is gone. You might call it a high… a fear high. Her conscious is overwhelmed and her brain overloaded by every negative thought it can manifest, an intense version of what had been referred to in the old world as ‘generalized anxiety.’ No relief, no peace, just panic. The subject becomes defiant to reality itself, attacking everything that moves.”

The subject salivated copiously, growling like an animal.

One of the doctors cleared his throat. “This is astonishing work, Doctor Del Meethia. I wonder… what have you learned from it?”

Harold instructed the assistant to gag the subject. After a brief struggle, the screams were muffled. “What I have learned from this latest project, doctors, is that there is so much more that can be done to a human than sterilizing their genitals. As a student, I have been given tools by the Transeternal and on a whim created this. With a few adjustments, I could turn this woman into a flesh-eating zombie. And I think the only reason Barnabas didn’t do it himself is because he didn’t think it would have been original enough.”

The doctors around him laughed as though he’d told a joke.

Harold knew there was more. And the Transeternal knew he knew it. Whatever it was, he could get there on his own. But why bother when these men could save him the time? The only reason he agreed to this review was to convince them there was no point in hiding it from him anymore.

“You developed this concoction on your own?” one of the doctors asked.

“Of course, Doctor,” Harold called back. “Why? Do you find it possible that I used some hidden research of yours?”

The doctors laughed again, and the lights came on. The doctors started clapping. That must have meant they weren’t going to answer his question. Some of the doctors walked out, some remained in the outer-reaches of the room, scribbling notes. Some came down to inspect the subject, assaulting the lab assistant with questions, who just kept pointing at Harold. One of the doctors came to Harold directly. Unfortunately, it wasn’t Doctor Iris; Iris was long gone.

Doctors approached him often to congratulate him. None to offer insight, none to expand on his ideas or correct his methods. Just a quick handshake and sentiment.

Harold watched the last doctor leave the room. He looked across the stage. The woman had struggled herself into exhaustion. His assistant was beside her, awaiting orders.

“Here,” he pulled the cure out of his pocket, tossed it to the assistant. He didn’t believe in waste.

They left early for the LIM, but not too early. You wouldn’t want to be there when the cranky early morning staff arrived. And you definitely wouldn’t want to be the first thing they saw. It was better to get there around ten, when they had finished their coffee.