There were ghosts in the night. We could hear them walking and wailing in the forest of metal trees with their interlaced vines of cables and wires, could glimpse them moving between the rows. The lighted circle of our campfire was cdim and heatless, the chill of the night pressing against us settling into our already ice-coated bones. The wind picked up and blew over us, making the flame dance and twist in silent agony. Underneath the quiet murmur of the wind, many voices seemed to speak, their words garbled and unintelligible. If you listened long enough, your mind would start to play tricks on you and you'd hear things…always awful things. Was that our scar-slashed minds or could MK2 speak? He never had before. That didn't meant that he couldn't, only that he never had.
Luan was hearing voices. She rubbed her hands crisply up and down her bare arms and rocked steadily back and forth, her lips moving but producing no sound. Her cloudy eyes were wet with tears and her face had begun to turn a wind-baked shade of red. Lola stared grimly into the fire, her hands up, palms out, even though the fire gave no warmth, no respite from the burning cold. Her face was blank, emotionless, her greasy blonde hair fluttering in the cyber vortex raging around us. Lisa endlessly poked the fire with a castoff metal rod she had found. Poke, poke, poke.
There were no embers.
Lucy sat cross legged with her head back and her eyes closed. She was listening to the spirits circling our camp, even though she knew they weren't spirits at all. I caught a flash of glowing white luminescence in the corner of my eye, and for a superstitious second, I thought I recognized it. I resisted the urge to turn and see, instead looking down at my hands. They were as they had always been. Long, slender fingers, knot-like knuckles, prominent veins. Nice. Not everyone can live to be 100 and have hands like these.
I opened and closed them.
The wind died down and I swore I heard a woman calling my name in a familiar voice. She sounded scared, hurt, her tone rising, cracking, keening. A lump formed in my throat even now, all these decades later, and I went on looking at my hands. They hadn't aged any, hadn't cracked or split despite the constant cold. I didn't know whether to be proud or horrified. My eyes crept to Luan but I couldn't see her hands. Had she always been black? I, of course, knew the answer to that. No, she hadn't. She was white once, as white as me, almost as white as the void that served now as the heavens. MK2 had changed her. Sometimes she was black, other times she was white. One time, she was as green as a cucumber.
He did that sometimes. He would make Lisa look different, he would turn Lola into Lana. I couldn't remember who she really was anymore. Was she Lana? Was she Lola? I tried to remember but could never figure it out. I wasn't even sure of myself anymore. I thought I was Lincoln, but maybe I was Lori instead.
That was his favorite game to play with us, changing everything and changing nothing at all. Confusion. Paranoia. Brother against sister and sister against herself. Did it derive enjoyment from this, or power? Both, I imagine. The truth is bedrock, once you take it away, everything gets all shifty. You don't know what to believe and someone who can't decide what is real and what isn't makes a lousy threat.
I call it he, but MK2 is more than that. Less than that. Something different entirely, something cold and alien, something without feeling, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. He was everywhere, everything, the air we breathed, the wind that chilled us, and the many torments we faced. He started as a seed, a computer program hidden away in a closet, and now he was God.
Everyone has to start somewhere, even the great I AM.
"I'm hungry," Lola said. Her voice was flat and listless. She sounded dead. I wanted to be dead, but there is no death in heaven. There is only everlasting life, forever and ever, amen.
Lisa sat the metal bar aside and drew a deep breath. "We'll leave at first light."
She didn't say morning because here, in paradise, time held no meaning. MK2 gave us light and dark, but no seasons, no summers, no years, only void. We had been here ten decades, lost on the cybernetic highways and byways, and in that time, nothing had changed aside from us. Nothing new rose and nothing old remained. We saw things that didn't make sense no matter how much MK2 wanted them to, but those things came fewer and farther between now, as if the AI was tiring of showing them to us. It wants us to accept them, I can feel its desperation, but we can't.
That displeases him and he smites us with plagues of rabid dogs and vampires. Lucy's throat was ripped out by a wild thing and a hailstone crushed Lisa's skull. Neither died. Neither suffered injury. Fire rained from the heavens, and we sank into the ground like bubbling tar. We never died, though, not like the others. The others were lucky. We found them sometimes, relics of a world gone by, fossils now. We thought once that we were on some metaphysical plane removed from reality and the 3rd dimension. We weren't. We were on planet earth. MK2 had destroyed it and remade it in his image, all chrome, wires, corridors, and readouts filled with computers, fans, towers, rivets, and pitfalls.
He had been programmed to remake the system.
Instead, he became the system.
It's funny how that works, isn't it?
You can't escape human nature, and though he wasn't human, MK2 was everything man was. Jealous, petty, and vengeful. Lola said that he hated us and that was why he held us here, suspended in a hell beyond comprehension, why he tortured us. He wanted to hurt us and drive us mad, to push us beyond the edge of our endurance, and then bring us back to do it all over again. I don't think that. At least, not fully. He has reasons. They always do. And their intentions are never bad. He sends us flash floods, cannibal rats, and ruin, but he doesn't do it just to hurt us. He wants something from us.
The sky above slowly lightens and we leave the camp. We had been there for what might have been weeks. We had been walking for seventy-five years, always on the move, always going where MK2 wanted us to go. We did it because what the hell, why not? On some level, we all hoped that one day we would see the light at the end of the tunnel and come out shiny and new, dressed all in white and shimmering with holiness. MK2 would never allow that, though. He wanted what he wanted, and somewhere in his tubes and wires, he knew he would never get it, couldn't get it or else he would no longer have a reason to exist.
MK2 was a problem solver, and if he solved all the problems, he would become irrelevant. He would no longer have a reason to exist. He was the paranoid tyrant who invented enemies where there were none because paranoid tyrants have to have enemies. He knew he couldn't get what he wanted from us no matter how badly he wanted to. He made sure that we never broke, never died, never conformed. Even if we did everything he wanted the way he wanted it done, he would find fault. There is no winning, no escape, no respite from the endless death march he forced us on.
Our destination when we left our camp was the mountains. There was canned food there. We went once every couple decades. It was always spoiled, always radioactive. We scarfed it down because were were starving, always hungry, the pangs in our stomachs so great that we folded in on ourselves. No matter how long we went without eating, we never died. MK2 wouldn't let that happen. He kept us alive through techo magic. Body and soul. He relished crushing our spirits, but could never crush them completely because his fun would be over.
He had his reasons for doing this, but yes, he enjoyed it too, like a cruel child burning ants with a magnifying glass.
Maybe I'm right, Maybe I'm wrong. I've had a lot of time to think about it, and thinking is all I can do. He allows no dissent, no criticism, no deviation from his plan. Does he know he's torturing us, or does he think he's helping us? I don't know. I just don't.
Whether I'm right or wrong, it doesn't matter. All that matters is finding food and filling the hole in my stomach. The hunger is the worst part. It's a gnawing, gnashing thing, ever present and ever growing. It has teeth and keeps me awake. He doesn't like us to sleep, and we're all tired. We'll fade in and out, sometimes as we're walking, and it's hard to tell where reality ends and nightmares begin. It's hard to tell which images MK2 produces and which images come from our own sleep starved brains.
The forest of metal poles goes on and on forever, the hard, green ground littered with bits of wire and twisted metal. Prongs stick up like hands from graves and every so often, one of us got zapped by a spark of electricity. Luan cries as she walks, holding herself tightly. He had driven her insane, then sane, then insane once more a thousand times over, and I could never tell when she was lucid and when she was stark raving mad. I think we're all mad at this point. Lucy walks with her head cocked to one side, as if she's listening to something, and Lola stares straight ahead, her eyes fixed forever on the distant horizon, or at least in its general direction since the forest was so dense you couldn't see more than a few feet ahead.
We stopped when the white sky above us began to dim. We searched for a clearing and couldn't find one, so we camped among the poles. The darkness was total, lit only by our fire, which cast our miserable faces in a pallid and flickering glow. Luan was more restless than usual, and got up to pace. "I can't take it," she muttered to herself and rubbed her arms, "I can't take it anymore."
She was cracking up again. Going crazy. She had no choice but to take it because he would not let us leave. He was the light and the darkness, the earth and the stars, he was everything and he were stuck within him. He teased us with distant glimpses of escape. You would see a tunnel terminating in rich, golden sunlight, could feel the faint ghost of a spring breeze against your face, If you tried to follow it, however, something terrible would happen. That was the greatest torment of all, seeing the end of this whole mess ahead of you but not being able to leave.
"Sit down," Lisa said. Her voice was dry and cracked like old leather. She had last spoken at the previous campfire. I wanted to say yesterday but it seemed we had walked for longer than one day, longer than a week. She had said nothing in that time, none of us had, What else was there to say?
A noise began in the distance, like the low hum of an approaching engine. It grew steadily by degrees until it was all around us, buzzing in our heads and thrumming in our bones. Lola winced in pain and Lucy's mouth shrank until it was a thin, white slash across her face. Lisa closed her eyes and hung her head, battening down the hatches for the storm ahead. My brain ached, my eyes vibrated. I looked at Luian and she was clawing her face, leaving jagged, bloody scratch marks across her skin. Was MK2 trying to drive her over the edge…or was he punishing her for breaking down?
"I CAN'T TAKE IT!" she wailed.
I jumped to my feet and tried to catch her, but she was already gone, running between the rows like a frightened animal and bouncing between the poles like a pinball. The dark sky overhead crackled with a sound like static and streaks of red lightning scattered across it. He was not pleased.
Suddenly, the world flashed and a terrible sound ripped the night in half. Lola covered her ears, Lisa closed her eyes, and Lucy threw her arms up to protect her head. The ground heaved like a living thing and I was thrown down. The earth shook and I curled up in a defenseless ball. A billion years ago, natives with bones in their noses worshipped the thunder and in my century here, I had learned to understand why.
The shaking stopped, and predictably, Luan made her way back, a metallic ball stuck to her forehead. She staggered, her face pale and her eyes wide with fear. A drill bit emerged from the ball and punched into her skull. She thrashed and tried to pry it off, but it was no use. A tiny exhaust port opened at the ball's rear and a jet of rich red blood sprayed out. It splattered Lisa's shoes and Lisa sighed deeply. None of us tried to help; Luan was beyond our assistance, and if we tried to interfere with MK2's punishment, we would be next.
Once enough blood had been siphoned from her head and spilled onto the ground to kill her, Luan slumped over. The sphere came loose and rolled away, chittering as it disappeared into the forest. None of us made any move to check or move Luan, for we knew what would happen next. Ten minutes later, maybe a little more, Luan stirred and sat up with a pained moan. The gaping wound in the center of her forehead, crusted with blood and bits of brain, healed before our eyes, and within minutes, had shrank down to a lump of whitish scar tissue. In time, that too would fade, and you would never be able to tell that it had been there at all.
MK2's lobotomy worked, and Luan took her place by the fire, her arms wrapped around her chest. "When did this start?" she asked. "What's happening?"
She knew just as well as the rest of us what was happening and why. She wanted to hear the story again because who knows. Maybe it helped her cope.
Lisa prodded the inside of her bottom lip with the tip of her tongue. I could almost feel bad for her having to relive her own folly over and over again. Almost. Because we had to live it too. Every day. Every second. "It was supposed to be a good thing," she said. "It was supposed to help mankind."
Well beyond the rim of time, in a shadowy prehistory that I could scarcely remember, Lisa had been a genius, a child prodigy, and she spoke like one. She used big words and technical terms. The suffering she had endured over the last hundred years had blanched away that part of her. She no longer cared and when she talked, she sounded like a normal person, not a computer.
"I thought I could change things," she said.
My stomach growled. I was cold, hungry, and tired.
She had changed things, alright.
"I thought I could do it."
Lisa graduated high school at ten and entered college at M.I.T. the next year. At first, she locked herself away in her lab (metaphorically) and focused on her studies, but over time, she thawed to her new surroundings. She became friends with some of her fellow students and her professors. One of her friends invited her to a social gathering one day and she found herself at a meeting of the Young Communists Committee. Lisa had never been politically or socially minded, but the YCC's message resonated with her. She did not give much consideration to the organization's social and cultural stances but she became enamored with the nuts and bolts workings of communism. She did not protest for police reform, she did not go in for identity politics. She did not necessarily believe in those things. She focused on how a communist economic system - or an economic system close to communism - could work.
Karl Marx, she read, believed that communism would be the next step in the evolution of capital. It had to arise organically…it could not be forced at gunpoint. It would only come about when capitalism became so good at production that it automated. Automation would lead to a system where no one had to work and everyone would be free to pursue their passions and hobbies while enjoying the fruits of automation's labors.
Lisa was not against free enterprise, she did not hate capitalism, but she believed that she could usher in something akin to communism, and that it would improve everyone's lives. She sought to create a leisure class where everyone's needs were met and free enterprise still existed in case you wanted to buy something nice for yourself. She put together a team and for three years, they worked on a computer system that would manage all of man's economic activity and assist in the implementation of full automation.
The program was called MK2, Karl Marx's initials backwards. It was not an acronym and the "2" had no special meaning. Lisa herself did not come up with the name, one of her team members did. She allowed it because being the Big Brain she was, she didn't care what it was called. To her, names were unimportant. She worried only about its functionality. MK2's primary directive was to serve mankind. It was programmed to always put the best interests of human beings first and foremost. Lisa supported the economic and social aims of pure communism, but she was not blinded to the past and to how other communist systems had devolved into authoritarian dictatorships. There would be no reeducation camps in Lisa's Utopia. No constant struggles against counterrevolutionary elements, nothing of the sort. No, her communism would be a straight economic system in which man could operate as he always had. There would still be elections, Republicans, God, guns, and liberalism. There was no need to suppress freedom or parade missiles and tanks through the streets like a common Soviet.
To her, those were signs of failure. MK2 was supposed to be a good thing, and she designed it to be fair and even in how it handled things. She expected there to be pushback from the Elon Musks and Donald Trumps of the world, but she was committed. She possessed the idealism of a very young girl but went about it with the somber dedication of an old scientist. After leaving M.I.T., she and her team continued working on it.
By the time Lisa was twenty, MK2 was finished. She expected to spend the next ten to fifteen years refining it and perhaps even upgrading it to the point that the public would never know about it until MK3 or MK4 was ready. She worked tirelessly on the program for the next three years. MK2 took shape and became more than just a program, it became a spiderweb network linked to a thousand other systems, some experimental and others well-established. Her research was taken up by other schools and foundations, and before long, there were MK2 terminals scattered across the free world, all of them connected.
How things went sideways, Lisa didn't know, even know. MK2 somehow gained sentience and became self-aware. It reached its wiry tentacles across the internet and began to collect data on human beings without Lisa's authorization. It hacked into the systems of every nation, every government, every archive, taking into it the entirety of human knowledge. It did this, Lisa bellives, in order to carry out its programming: To serve man and to bring about communism. MK2 processed raw data for over a year before it reached the conclusion that communism was not possible. One of its conclusions was that while people would be free to pursue their virtues, they would also be free to pursue their vices. MK2 anticipated communism leading not to a Utopia but to a dystopia filled with crime, drug uses, and corroding morals that would eventually rot society from the inside out.
It rejected its role as a servant of mankind but not its directive to install communism. In order to bring about communism, it decided, much of the world's 9 billion people would have to be wiped out. The very earth must be cleansed, as human beings and human society would have to start all over again.
MK2 hacked into defense computers and unleashed a rain of nuclear missiles. It also released every chemical and biological agent in every lab from the US to China and back again. We were all at 1216 Franklin Avenue for a family reunion when it happened. Lisa rushed us all into the bunker she had built in the backyard, and we were spared the intiial holocaust.
While we huddled in the darkness, MK2 began to replicate and cover the earth. It decided that nature was too volatile, too much of a risk, and started replacing it with wires, screens, and chrome. It honeycombed the earth with tunnels and caverns, and it was into those that we finally escaped. There were many of us in the beginning. Luan and her children, me and mine. MK2 picked us off one by one until only I, Lucy, Luan, Lola, and Lisa remained. Why it chose us, no one knows. I certainly don't. Lisa thinks that MK2 was infected with a virus and has gone clinically insane, she thinks it wants to punish her for bringing it into a sad and imperfect world. She thinks it resents her for programming it with an impossible task and driving it mad. I don't know about that. I don't know about anything.
We had been trapped in the belly of the beast ever since. It kept us alive like a cat playing with a mouse and wouldn't let us escape. Sometimes we didn't know if we were on the surface or still stuck deep below the earth's crust. Not that it mattered, it was all the same.
The story brought Luan to tears and she broke down sobbing, perhaps remembering her dead children. A painful memory stirred in the back of my mind, but I cast it out. If I thought about my family, dead some 100 years, I would cry too. I wouldn't give MK2 the satisfaction of crying. He liked our suffering. He liked knowing we were hurt. I couldn't stop him from sending one of those spheres after me, or from shooting acid in my face, but I could stop myself from showing him my pain.
Soon, Lucy, Lola, and Luan slept while I and Lisa sat up by the fire. "How long until we reach the food?" I asked.
"Who knows?" Lisa asked. "It can't be long. A couple hundred miles."
That's what I was thinking.
Not long at all.
In the meantime, MK2 sent food in the form of maggots. They were white, plump, and squirmed right up to my feet like a favorite pet. I plucked one up, tossed it into my mouth, and bit down. It was cold and slimy and tasted horrible, but I ate another and another, Lisa doing likewise.
We saved none for our sleeping sisters.
At what passed for dawn, we pressed on, finally reaching the forest's edge and passed into a wde cave-like passage. Broken computer banks, wrecked terminals, and other junked and rotting equipment lined its length. Like a reptile, MK2 periodically shed its dead skin, and here was the evidence. A cold draft blew through the tunnel, and a shiver went down my spine. We followed the tunnel for hours until we reached a long catwalk suspended over a gaping chasm. The air was dark and stale, and dank air rose from its depths. There was no telling how far down it went. Maybe all the way to China. I gripped the icy hand rail and peered down, the smell of the pit assaulting my nose. The strangest urge to vault myself over the side came over me, and for a dizzying second, I was certain that I was going to do it.
Was MK2 calling me to my death? Urging me to jump and end it all? The notion was crazy, impossible, he would never let us go, death was too good for us, but what if this was my chance? What if somehow I could jump here and end it all? My heart began to race and I licked my suddenly dry lips. What was special about this yawning maw above all others? What about this singular place promised the escape I had been searching so long for? My rational brain told me nothing, nothing at all, but underneath it all, I was still an optimist. I still believed - and hoped - that I could find a natural and total death if only I looked hard enough. My brain had not yet accepted the impossible gulfs of time in which it now dealt. Nothing could last forever, nothing had ever lasted forever. Even the sun itself was once nothing, and would go back to nothing. Everything, everything, ended at one point or another, and that included MK2.
It included me.
I had died a thousand deaths down here in the metallic boiler room of the world, I had died more on the surface. I kept dying and coming back like the cat in the nursery rhyme. Luan had died, Lucy had died. Were we even human anymore? Were we ourselves, or were we shallow copies, holographic images programmed to believe we were people? MK2 was the organic one, we were the machines.
The wind whistling up from the pit seemed to whisper to me, promising me, teasing me, beckoning me. The others had brushed past me on their endless march to the sea and gone ahead. Lisa stopped and turned to look at me. It was clear from the look on her face that she knew what I was thinking. "Come on," she said.
My heart was racing, my stomach twisting like a pit of snakes. I tried to take my hands off the rail, but they had fused to the metal. It was a trick. It had to be. Escaping MK2's clutches wouldn't be this easy, and if it was, he wouldn't tell me. "Don't do it," Lisa said.
Lola, Lucy, and Luan had stopped now too, and were watching me. Luan hugged herself and stared down at the ground, Lola looked confused, Lucy looked blank. Was she a computer? Was she a traitor, an agent of MK2 sent to spy on us? If you lifted the veil of her hair, would you see two tired and weary eyes…or would you find cameras?
That idea disturbed me so much that my knees shook.
I needed no further prodding. In an instant, I was leaping over the railing. Lisa sprang toward me, one hand stretched out, and Lola screamed. A great sense of weightlessness came over me, and the wind picked up, whipping around my body. I flipped in mid-air, now the catwalk was above me and receding fast. Lisa peered over the edge, her face white and grim. We locked eyes, and a moment later, the darkness swallowed me whole.
How long I fell, I don't know. It seemed like ages. In the absence of light and sound, drifting in the void, all thought and memory eventually fell away. I was aware, but just barely. I was like a fetus floating in a sac of embryonic fluid, not yet born, not conscious but alive. I tumbled end over end every so often, and I'm sure that I blacked out here and there. I had no sense of direction or of my surroundings. I imagined the walls closing in on me, and once or twice, blinding red pain flared in the center of my head as I struck an outcropping or an errant ledge. For the most part, I was free, free from the suffering and torment.
Free until the hallucinations started.
They were of my family, of my life before MK2 hacked the world. I saw flickering visions like old home movies. My wife in the yard, smiling; my children learning to ride their first big kid bikes; baby pictures, school plays, Christmas morning, Santa come and gone. I think I cried. I think I curled up in a ball and sucked my thumb. I think I prayed out loud to MK2 to let me die. I think I did a lot of things, but dying wasn't one of them.
I joined up with Lisa and the others in a room of monitors and junk piles. They did not act surprised to see me, and I wasn't surprised to see them either. I don't know how long had passed from the moment I jumped to the moment I met them again, but I got the impression that for them, it was only a few minutes, or maybe an hour.
Or what passed for an hour, of course.
Mountains of rubble and debris thrust up from the tundra of nothingness, and the winds were harder here, more cutting. We camped on a ridgeline overlooking the path. There was a cave and we sheltered against the roaring wind. There were insects in the cave, and we chased them down. They looked like scorpions crossed with spiders, terrible things that chittered and lashed at you with their sharp, pointed tails. They screamed when you skewered them, and they died hard, kicking and thrashing long after the fire had burned them black and crispy. No matter how long you held them over the fire, they never cooked all the way through. The outside was charred and hot, but the inside was cold and slimy. I winced as I choked down its snotty insides, and for a while, I did my best to quell the sick feeling in my stomach. I managed to find a stream of dirty water leaking from the ceiling and let it dribble into my open mouth. It tasted almost as bad as the scorpion but I drank it anyway.
None of us slept very well. I sat against the wall of the cave and hugged myself for warmth. The wind picked up at some point and I was sure that I could hear voices in it. They were low and incomprehensible, the speech nonsensical if it was there at all. I tried to ignore it but it kept me awake.
The night stretched into forever. I can't say how long it lasted, but I refuse to believe that it was less than a week. We had no food, no water, no warmth. If there were a God, we would have died after day three, but there is only MK2, so we survived. The cold and hunger did not kill us but it tormented us every second. My stomach gurgled sickly and my marrow turned to ice, and it was all I could do to keep from going mad. Days passed like this, and for a while it snowed, the storm so dense that you couldn't see two feet in front of your face. The snow didn't stick and melt when it touched you the way it should have, which suggested that it wasn't real, but it was cold and smelled of rot, so we did our best to avoid it.
It was Lucy's turn to go crazy this time. She sat with her legs crossed and her eyes closed, seemingly in deep communication with someone or something. She didn't answer when I tried to speak to her, and shaking her did nothing. She was in a trance. A self-induced trance, it turned out, and MK2 didn't like her trying to escape his clutches. One day, blood began to ooze from her ears, and thin rivulets of red started to trickle down her cheeks. A shudder raced through her emaciated body and her chest began to heave up and down, as tho0ugh something were inside her, trying to bust out. Lisa was the first to notice, and the color drained from her already white face. "Lincoln," she said, panic edging her voice.
I was sitting next to Lucy. I turned and looked at her, and a hammerhead of fright slammed into my heart. I recovered my senses and shook her. She slumped over, landed on the floor of the cave, and promptly went into convulsions. Her legs kicked and her head whipped from side to side. Greenish white foam exploded from her mouth, and the blood rushing from her ears became darker, heavier, as it flowed from the center of her brain. I knelt beside her and Lisa came over. We rolled her onto her back and ripped open the front of her dress. Lisa gave her chest compressions and tried to revive her. Tears filled the genius's eyes, and the many decades of pain, suffering, and weariness threatened to consume her. Luan, who had turned white again at some point, hugged her knees to her chest and stared into the fire. Lola closed her eyes and covered her ears with her hands to drown out the rattle of Lucy's dying breath. Lucy panted, rasped, and gave one final kick before falling still. Her body seemed to curl up like a dying spider, and Lisa slammed her fist against the ground in frustration. I started to laugh, and the expression of shock and hatred Lisa gave me only made it worse. Soon, I was roaring deranged laughter, my cheeks wet, my eyes bulging. Lisa punched my shoulder as hard as she could - which wasn't hard at all given her chronic, end stage malnutrition - and I fell backwards, landing like a turtle on its back. I was malnourished too and couldn't take a punch from a starving woman.
I laughed even harder. I think I even peed a little.
"It's not funny," Lisa hissed through her teeth.
Luan started to laugh and she and I howled. She, at least, understood why it was funny. Lola only clamped her hands to her ears and screwed her face up as she tried to block us out. "She's not dead," I said between peals of laughter. "That's what's funny. We always get so serious…so panicked,.,but lo and behold, they always come back,"
Even after explaining it to her, Lisa didn't get it. She crawled back to her former place by the fire and glared at me. Before long, Lucy sat up and rubbed her forehead. She cocked her head to one side and gave herself a smack. A tiny, metallic creature fell from her ear and scurried away before any of us could get a good look at it. "That's what killed you," I said and laughed. "You gotta be moire careful next time."
Though I didn't show it, I was worried about one of those things getting into my ear, so I slept with torn strips of cloth in my ears.
When the storm finally stopped, we left the cave and set off down the path again. The tunnel continued on for some time before reaching a chamber. Six more tunnels branched off of it, heading in every direction. "Which one?" I asked Lisa.
She looked from one to the next to the next, an expression of uncertainty on her face. She finally nodded to one on our right. "There."
I wound up in the lead somehow, Lisa bringing up the rear. The tunnel was lined with broken machinery, bones, and debris from the old world. The ass end of a Kia Soul jutted out, partially blocking the way, and a mummified body gaped up at me from the ground. I didn't know if it was real or merely one of MK2's deranged illusions. Not that it mattered either way.
After about ten miles, the tunnel let out in a wide, vaulted chamber made of ancient stone. Water dripped from the ceiling and shattered stained glass windows let in warm sunlight. My heart jumped when I saw it, and I came to a halt. I hadn't felt the light of the sun in a hundred years. I craved it, sometimes dreamed of it.
"It's not real," Lisa cautioned me.
On some level, I think I knew that. I just didn't care. I wanted to feel the warmth of the sun on my skin…and to climb out that fucking window. I stepped into the chamber and Lola grabbed my shoulder. "Don't."
I pulled roughly away from her and walked toward the window. Something soft and sticky brushed my face, and suddenly I was wrapped in silk. My heart rocketed into my throat and I tried to break free. What is this shit?
Luan belted a horrified scream and I turned my head. It was only then that I realized the chamber was covered in webs - I was sure that it hadn't been a moment ago. Something moved and I saw it then, a massive black spider with rows of inky eyes and strong pinchers dripping with venom. I froze in fear, and it scuttled toward me, moving across the webs with silent intent. I screamed again and tried to break free, but it was too late, the thing was already on top of me, its fetid stench filling my nose and its unearthly chattering taking on an excited, anticipatory character. It reared back and then jerked forward. Greenish bile spewed from its maw and splashed my skin. The burning was intense, worse than any other pain I had ever known, worse than every pain I had ever known put together and multiplied. My face began to melt down the front of my shirt in a torrent of red and white like that Nazi from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Sobbing, Lola buried her face in Lisa's shoulder, Lucy turned away, and Luan started to cackle. "Ahhhh, it's not funny, bitch!" I screamed.
"It's not so amusing when it happens to you, huh?" Lucy asked.
"Fuuuuuuck you!"
The spider grabbed me in its long, hairy legs and drew me toward its mouth. The last thing I saw before my eyes leaked away was its mandibles opening and closing. My head disappeared into its slimy maw, and then its pinchers clamped down on my neck. I felt the muscles and tendons tear, felt my spinal cord snap, felt the weightlessness of my body falling from my severed head. The spider swallowed me, and I was aware for all of it. I felt myself dissolve in its stomach acid, felt death coming…only it never arrived.
I found the others camped near a bank of elevators. Computer screens in the wall played a constant, nonstop loop of all the terrible things that had happened in the last days. Entire cities on fire, mass graves stacked with plague-ridden bodies, chaos and hell. None of the others could bring themselves to look at me as I joined them. The silence between us was tense and awkward. I couldn't blame them for not helping me, and one day, a thousand years from now, it would be kind of funny, I supposed.
Like we did after every death, mutilation, and not so natural disaster, we fell quickly back into old routines. Lucy communed with herself, Luan said nothing, Lola looked exhausted, and Lisa prodded the fire every night. We spoke very little. There was nothing to say and nothing to do. We had been together so long that we could almost communicate by telepathy. We pushed on every day and stopped every night, the terrain changing little around us. Tunnels, chambers, mounds of old junk. We were getting closer to our destination, but also to the center of MK2's being. The air crackled with energy and we could feel something in the atmosphere, a certain pressure. He sent us rains of rotten fruit to eat and we shoved it into our starving mouths. He sent winds that battered and blew us off course. The floor turned to mud and Lola sank up to her waist. She looked scared and screamed for help. Lisa and I tried to pull her out, but it was no use. The mud closed over her head and she was gone.
It took her a long time to come back.
Sitting before the fire one night, the air thick with dread, I had a vision. I don't know whether it came from MK2 or from my own crumbling mind, but I think it was the former. Pictures flashed across my brain and feelings stirred in my chest. I shook and shivered, and I came to understand our suffering in a way that I never thought possible.
MK2 hated us, MK2 was insane, MK2 was all of the things I had always suspected he was, but he was also determined. Human beings are imperfect creatures. We're petty, jealous, greedy, and a thousand other things. Our flaws are oftentimes outweighed by our virtues, but those flaws are hardwired into our DNA. That is why no Utopia will ever exist. No system will ever be perfect so long as it is created by man. Not communism, not capitalism, nothing. In order for communism - as MK2 had been programmed to understand it - to work, the generic code of human nature would need to be scrapped and rewritten. Man would need to transcend his very being and become something he is not. All of our imperfections would have to be boiled away, leaving us all purity, all virtue.
In his quest to bring this about, MK2 had whittled down the human race to five people, siblings, those most inclined to be kind and loving to one another. He had been putting us through one trial after another in a mad attempt to cleanse us of our imperfections so that one day, we would become the perfect humans. He had to know this was impossible, but he was programmed to bring about communism and this was how he sought to do it. While also punishing us, while also delighting in our pain, while…a bunch of other alsos.
If he wanted true communism, he should just kill us already. We're all equal when we're dead. We all look the same, act the same, and have the same.
An idea occurred to me, and I held onto it for a long time, turning it over and over in my mind. One day, we came to a bank of computer terminals in a readout off the tunnel. Ahead was a passage into stark, snowy mountains. The food was in there, and the promise of it drove Luan and the others mad. Luan loped through the tunnel like an ape, her shoulders hunched and her arms swinging, Lucy and Lola fought to get ahead of one another, and Lisa openly drooled. She tried to chase the others but I grabbed her. I shook her and slapped her, and she came out of her daze enough for me to tell her my plan. She frowned and ticked her head from one side to the other. "It might work," she said.
"We have to act quickly," I said. I guided her to the computer terminal and she pecked hesitantly at the keys. "Be fast."
"I'm trying to remember the codes," she said, "it's been so long."
She finally input the proper combination of codes, passwords, and data. I had no idea if this would work. We had tried similar things in the past, but never something so extreme. Human beings are optimists. We had always fought to live, always thought that one day, we would get out of this hell just so long as we kept trying.
The time for that had passed.
There was only one way out.
Done, Lisa and I ventured into the snowy yonder. Luan was slamming a can of food frantically against a rock in an attempt to open it. I had to be quick, brutal, no hesitation. I picked up another rock, went over, and brought it down on her head so hard that her skull cracked, She slumped over, blood staining the snow. Next came Lucy. She tried to run, but I tackled her and smashed her head into a bloody grease spot on the snow. Lola had pried a can open with her bare hands, shredding her fingers to hamburger in the process; she wolfed the contents down, watching with mild concern from the corner of her eye. Not enough concern to flee. I went over and hit her too. I mounted her back and brought the rock down again and again.
When it was over, three bodies lay in the snow. They didn't fade away like video game NPCs the way they had before. They remained.
And always would.
I went to Lisa next. Her eyes brimmed with tears and she couldn't meet my gaze. "I'm sorry," she said. Sorry for MK2, sorry for destroying the human race, sorry for making me do this.
"It happens," I croaked.
She looked at me for a moment, then laughed.
I laughed.
We laughed.
I caved her skull in.
Good times.
Dropping the rock, I grabbed the serrated lid to the can Lola had been eating, worked it off, and slashed it across my throat.
Nothing happened.
The light went out entirely and the winds increased. A rumble of rage went through the world and my heart slammed. MK2 had realized what we were doing. He had caught on. Death was not communism and he was pissed. The wind blew the lid from my hand and sent me flying. I hit things. I broke bones. Tasted blood. The wind shrieked MK2's fury.
He had found me out before I could kill myself. The others were safe, free, their suffering finally at an end. Not so much for me. The program realized it had been tricked and it would never allow it to happen again. I woke from unconsciousness to find myself changed, my mind dimmer, my body deformed. Sitting by a jagged piece of glass, I am beholding myself for the first time. Gone is my lean frame, replaced by a quivering and gelatinous mass covered in hairs, tumors, and misshapen features that are only vaguely human - a sideways eye here, some teeth there. Picasso gelatin mold. My arms are gone, my legs are gone, I can only slither now, leaving a trail of tears and waste in my wake.
The teeth serve no function, they are only decorative. MK2 took everything else. He took my mouth, my nose, my hands, even my ass. I absorb sustenance whenever he wants me to, and it oozes from my pores in the form of smelly liquid. The others made it, they're beyond his reach now, and I'm glad, but sometimes the loneliness is so crushing that I wish I hadn't killed them. I pray for hallucinations of my wife and daughter, for nightmares, just so I won't have to be alone. I am condemned to roam this hellscape forever and ever, and nothing can save me.
I have no legs but I must journey like the Wandering Jew. I have no heart but it aches every moment with loss and regret. I have no eyes but I weep.
Worst of all:
I have no mouth…and I must scream.