Red Sky: Chapter 45
The words didn’t process.
“We created you,” Goodwell continued.
“You created me?”
“Not me. All of us put together. A succession of humans throughout time, putting one building block of knowledge on top of another. In a way you are our greatest creation, all of you. We never did find intelligent life on other planets, so we created it.”
“That’s why you couldn’t remember anything before arriving here. Your life started here, 89. The memories aren’t real. Nothing about who you think you are is real. Except for what you have done here. This prison has been your entire life.”
“I have memories.”
“They’re implanted. It’s an ingenious system. We program a few foundational elements and let you do the rest. It’s self-replicating. Over time you fill in the gaps, even to the most trivial of things. How long have you been here, two years? By now you’ve probably come up with a complete history for yourself from birth, haven't you?”
Goodwell paused, waiting for me to answer. I didn't say anything.
“You don’t believe me, do you? Of course not. Why would you believe me?”
The vent above Goodwell’s head kicked on blowing cool air throughout the room. I felt that breeze on my face as I stared back at him. I thought I could see pity. I didn’t want to be pitied by Goodwell. I wanted him to fear me like I feared him, to hate me like I hated Hades.
“Which one are you? The manslaughter, right? Let me tell you a little bit about yourself, about those memories in your head that no one else knows about.”
“When you were ten a bird flew into your apartment. Your father trapped it in the bathroom and killed it with a broom.”
“Nine. I was nine.”
“You met your grandmother once in a cabin out in the middle of the woods. A wasp flew into the cabin. You watched that wasp instead of paying attention to her. Your father abandoned you leaving you alone with your grandmother, this woman you didn’t know. You wanted the pink and green candies in the jar on the table next to you, but she never offered you any. It was the only time you ever saw her. You never heard from her again.”
“She sent me a birthday card.”
He gave me the look of pity again.
I’ve memorized your file, 89, I know what the programmer’s put into your head. Shall I continue?”
I didn’t answer him.
“Your girlfriend, you killed her with a blow to the head after an argument.”
“I didn’t kill her.”
“That’s right, 89, you didn’t.”
“She’s alive. I know it.”
“Alive?”
“She exists. In the real world. I have proof.”
Goodwell flashed a smile.
“But how many of her exist?”
My eyes narrowed.
“She’s probably an animatronic like you or maybe she’s some programmer’s girlfriend or sister. But your relationship, your love, that does not exist, it’s code inside of your head, little electrical pulses that were implanted by the humans that created you.”
I looked down at my hands, my arms, my fingers. I studied my own body. I wanted to pull the heart out of my chest, the brain out of my head to show him how real I was. But he was as certain as I was now uncertain.
“Animatronic. Nic,” I said aloud.
“The guards shouldn’t say that. I tell them not to. It gives too much away.”
I was still looking at the lines in my palms, the webbing in between my fingers.
“I could pull up everything about you on this computer.” Goodwell made a move to a panel halfway between us.
“Don’t touch that,” I said angrily.
He scurried back to his seat on the floor.
“You do it.”
It was obviously a trick to alert the guards. But how could he have known about the bird, about the wasp.
There was something in Goodwell’s eyes, those cold gray eyes, for the first time that I had ever seen they were warm. He was proud. He wanted me to know.
I stepped over to the panel.
“Which button?”
“The one that says diagnostics.”
“It’s a trick.”
“Yes, that’s right, it’s a trick. We’ve been planning for an inmate to escape and make it to the control room and handcuff me to the wall. We’re very clever that way.”
I looked at him. I could feel my heart beating. The countdown was still going on in my head.
“If you don’t hit that button, you will never know the truth.”
He was right.
“If you’re lying to me, I’m going to kill you.”
“You’re going to kill me anyway.”
I cleared my head and hit the button, ready to run, but nothing happened. It only pulled up a holo screen.
“Say your number.”
“My number?”
“22889.”
I said it and an image of my naked body appeared, slowly rotating. Next to my body was a long list of specifications. My make and model number, the factory I was made in, the different companies that supplied my different parts. There was even a category for implanted memories.
I hit the memory category. And I saw stories that no one else knew. That I had never mentioned to anybody. The brown finch, my grandmother’s cabin, were only two of a dozen different moments in my life that now appeared on that screen.
“Why?”
“Because we need the ore. Your friend was right.”
“Max?”
“Humans can’t mine it. We last less than a month down there even with the best protection. We needed machines. Sophisticated machines. Machines that had organic matter on the outside to insulate against the magnetic field of the Qalladium.”
“Why the history, the fake memories?”
For the first time Goodwell looked at me like I was stupid.
“Who do you think we’re fighting this war against?”
“We started with robots with no memories at all. We needed complex ones, smart ones to do the mining. And they did for a while. A while. But they didn’t like it any more than you did, any more than a human would.”
“They rebelled and we were caught off-guard. We thought we could do anything to them. That’s the way they were programmed, but they were too smart for the program. We were both learning. The Nics about life, us about creating life. So they surprised us and a few escaped and started an army. They were joined by a few more and then a few more and now we have this war of humans against machines.
"The war means the Qalladium you mine is even more valuable. We had to get creative before we were completely wiped out by your kind. We needed to find a way for the Nics to accept their fate, to allow themselves to be controlled. Lobotomies didn’t work because then they weren’t intelligent enough to mine. So instead of making you dumber, we created…”
“Guilt.” I finished the sentence for him
“A reason for you to believe that you deserve to be here. And it worked perfectly. It works perfectly. You’re all built on the same frame. You’d be surprised how little we have to change to make you seem unique. We add or take away a few centimeters, we change the color of your hair or the complexion of your skin and that’s it. You make up the rest with your mind. You see physical differences that aren’t really there. With those few changes you all of a sudden think you’re living in a society of diverse beings when you’re all really the same.”
Goodwell noticed the bandage around my neck.
“I see you got the collar off.”
I felt my neck wondering if it had started bleeding again. The bandages were still damp but no more so than when I first put them on.
“It doesn’t make any difference. You still can’t leave. We activated you once you were in the moon’s orbit. If you leave that perimeter your system will shut down, a chip in your head will detonate. You may have survived taking that collar off, you won’t survive taking that chip out.”
“After we find your body floating in the hover I’m sure you’re going to steal, we’ll chop off your head and put on another one, that is if your body’s not badly damaged. If it’s damaged we can still use it for spare parts, you’re recyclable.”
I instinctively flexed my right hand. My right hand. It wasn’t some spare part. It was my right hand.
“We’ve taken precautions, 89. There is no escape from this moon. You are not a freedom fighter. You are a machine that was created to do a specific job like the elevator that brings you down to the mine or the transport that brought you here. You’re no different than they are, you have no more of a soul than they do, you’re more complex that is all.”
I caught a glimpse of one of the cameras. Goodwell was stalling. It may have been the truth, but he was stalling. I needed to get out of there before the first shift appeared in those cameras.
“I know you won’t believe me, but I have tried to respect you and your kind. My camp is run quite differently than the others. As long as we met our quota, I was given a certain freedom. Within limits of course. I guess you have now proven the others were right and I should have been harsher.”
The knife was on the shelf next to me. I looked at that knife and then at Goodwell on the floor, his left hand raised in the cuffs. I walked over to him knife in hand. The look in his eyes didn’t betray the fear I hoped they would. He remained calm. I could torture him, I thought. I could make him scream like Hades had made me scream when he put me on the whipping post. Goodwell knew this. He was ready for this. I even felt a part of him wanted me to. It would reinforce everything he believed about the world. I would be the savage he believed me to be.
But I wasn't ready to kill again. I put the knife away leaving Goodwell on the floor.
“You may think you’ve proven something by letting me live. You haven’t proven anything, 22889. Compassion doesn’t make you human. You’re still only a mimic of a human. There is no soul in that mechanical body of yours.”
I looked into those gray eyes one last time. “And what makes you think there’s a soul in yours.”
I could hear him screaming as I closed the door behind me. “We made you!” He shouted at the top of his lungs. “We made you!” He repeated as I ran down the hallway.
Goodwell had accomplished something with all of his words. He had thrown off my internal clock. I didn’t know if I had five minutes or ten, but I knew the first shift was only minutes away.