Brother

Fiction: An engineered man seeks out his kin in the wake of devastation.

This short story is part of our October horror collection, Future Weird, beyond the pale of what we publish the rest of the year. Reader discretion is advised.

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"We were classed into the same experiment," I said to the shadows. "Same base strain, different derivations. We're, in some sense, brothers, aren't we? Don't you wish there was someone who understood?"

"Games?" asked the machine voice. "I can take my own counsel."

"I thought I was the only one to survive," I went on, my eyes inventing movement in the darkness. Shades were passing in front of me, phantasmic blotches where the lamps had shone around the tank. I had brought them down, set them up in a silence neither one of us was willing to break, but when I turned them on, when I finally saw…well, I shut them off again pretty quickly. Mirrors can be horrible things.

"Figured I was just the amalgamation of a dead end. The others, there were five or ten of each. Of course, there were hundreds of the SC-23s, poor bastards. Bred to be slaves. And really, weren't we all? Only one, though, of me, classed with that indefinite Prima-Naught. But here, I find you. Here you are, the next step, or the next thirty. The next step they didn't abort. And you've been here the whole time, underground, running all the little details, sending us out, planning, undermining."

"Pruning," cut in the voice.

"Pruning," I repeated to the shadows. "In that case, you have some idea of shape, of fruit, of what our 'free' association ought to be. And I'd thought, when we'd rid ourselves of BADE, we’d bade goodbye to such masters."

“Puns?” asked the machine.

“Inevitable, I’m afraid, with wits dim or otherwise.”

"Certain realities are inevitable." There was almost a hint of laughter, a cackle of static in the synthesized speech. "No, there will always be masters. You try to break off the left end of the stick, but the left is still there; you only have a shorter stick."

"Or you can have two sticks free to go their own way?" I tried to make my interruption a question.

For a moment, no answer came, and I felt a cold panic settle in the pit of my stomach. I gritted my teeth as I waited, my ears straining against the quiet hum of spinning computer fans and the strange, intermittent splunking sound of the dead pumps disgorging themselves. 

"The illusion of free choice.” The static cackled. “Two options, same end."

"Now who's getting rid of ends?"

"It's all a circle," answered the cold voice of the machine. "You hide from yourselves the knowledge, the unavoidable reality, of planners. You call yourselves superheroes and base yourselves off of comic books. Only I deserve that title, Superman. Only I have made my own reality, only I have set my own rules, only I have created value, only I am. You are slaves to the past, to a morality made so long ago it's been mistaken for eternal. I have surpassed such questions of right and wrong. My dictates are right, complete. My opposition is wrong."

We sat there in silence and darkness. My shoulders ached with the weight of my overgrown head, but there was no place to lay it down.

"Am I your opposition then?" I finally asked, leaning my head onto something cold and metallic. "Your chosen Satan, your other end of the stick, your illusion of choice?"

No answer came.

"Or, was I to be something more? Why do you hide down here?"

In the darkness and the silence, a sudden urge began to build up in me, a need, almost, to face the thing. But how do you face something without a face? 

"You, the world, hid me.” My brother’s voice cut into my thoughts. “It cannot look upon me and live."

"Don't you get tired of playing God?" I spat. "You're a coward. We're both flesh and—well, flesh. You could have come out when we liberated ourselves. You could have told us what you really were. But you lied. Played a game. Pretended to be an AI. Now here you are, cowering and afraid. Powerless. Your pruning has left you nothing. In your search for whatever you wanted to make, you've cut away everything that was. We don't, wouldn't, we didn't begrudge you your existence. Only you," I mock, "have damned you."

I stand and flip the switch back on. A fatty mass of wrinkles float in a strange, green soup: a giant, central brain with three lobes. A quick estimate, I place it at 300 lbs. Smaller growths, attached by thin strands of nerves, float beside it. Some of these are grotesque, malformed eyes the size of fists but fogged over like a blind man's. For the most part, though, they are just blobs of more brains.

"Can you see?" I ask.

"Yes." A pause. "Please turn off the light."

"Hurts?" I ask, my own eyes blinking at the sudden glare. 

"Pain is of the mind and therefore an unreality. I am a master of all. I do not feel pain."

"You should," I say.

"I will not be a slave."

"Oh, you're far worse than a slave. I could make the SCs so happy with so very little. They were happy to do anything with their hands. There was a man in Pennsylvania who would have taught them to be farmers and fear God and never hurt anyone ever again, but you killed them. They were made to be slaves, tireless and completely obedient, but they were the only ones of us who had any chance at being free. There was a place for them in this world, even a need for the food they might have grown, a need for the land they might have tamed, a need in a community for someone who only wanted to help others."

"They had served their purpose—"

"Your purpose!" I shout back at the all too familiar mass of brains before me, a pattern I had seen on a much smaller scale when studying my own mutations. "By the time I figured out how that virus got released, you'd already killed the Gretchen sisters. I admit, I don't like my mind being read either, but they were learning how to respect people's boundaries. They weren't harpies."

"The VH-5s were key to destroying the Bureau for the Actualization of Darwinian Evolution, but, afterward…"

"Yes, afterward, what? You killed them? Why? Done with your toys?"

I watched one of the white, baseball sized globes with the half-formed retina as its pale cataract blackened and the floating orb began to shrivel and die.

"VH-53, the one you called Katy, sensed me."

I nod, chewing my lip in thought.

"So, she senses you and you let her in on a little too much? I know I annoyed them calculating pi when I wanted privacy. So, you overloaded her brain. What about the others? Too dangerous to be left alive?"

"VH-5 was in continual, subconscious communication with its members."

"An accident?" I raise an eyebrow. "Kill Katy, kill them all?"

"It was," the machine paused as my brother searched for the right word, "foreseeable."

"Unavoidable, maybe?" I ask, staring at the thing which was, in some sense, me, a possibility I might have been. "An unavoidable clue.” I add. “I knew I was the only one—only someone like me, that is—who could retaliate, who even seemed able to notice their probing. It was either me or one of the sisters had learned my trick and accidentally killed herself and the others in one of their squabbles. That was an unlikely scenario, but the only one I had … at first. Then, I found my first clue. It didn't help that Katy died in front of the viewscreen too. That, a few other hints, led right to you."

"Why 53's death?"

"What?"

"Why was VH-53's death different than the others? Was it just the viewscreen?"

I tap my nose. "Big smart brain asking questions? Don't you know?" I wait a moment for a response, watching the slow movement of what seemed a heart, or some other organ, dropping for a moment into view from the central brain's base before being pulled back up.

"I'll tell you," I smile. "She died first, by just a second, less than that, but definitely first. Those infernal cameras you asked us not to remove. You would 'function better with more information.'" I repeat, mocking his robotic tones. "You, who would be God, could see me watching those videos, see the same videos with me, but not see what I saw?"

“One of them had to be first.”

“Yes, and whoever it was had had the idea that killed them. Katy would never hurt her sisters like that. Jane, maybe she was smart enough, but not Katy. Cindy was too dumb to do it, even though she had become resentful enough, poor soul. Katy was first, and Katy couldn’t have done it, and if it wasn’t Katy—well, that only left me. Only I could have broken the code on that virus BADE kept as a failsafe, only I could have imagined whatever sort of thought killed the VH-5s, and only I could have … but I knew I hadn’t. All the evidence pointed to me, and that led me down a dark path. It led me down here. Led me to you.”

I stare into the green cauldron watching the insides of the glass or plastic or whatever the container was made from as little beads of trapped gas begin gathering in spreading pockets along its walls. 

"Please turn off the light," my brother asked.

"Do you feel pain, brother?"

"I…"

"It's okay to tell the truth for once. It's only us Prima-Naughts. None of those lesser people you've snuffed out."

I glance at the trembling surface of the green broth my brother floats in as it slowly simmers.

"Can you see me?" I ask. "I'm not much, I suppose. All I am is smart, and you're so much smarter. You slowly culled us all, and I did my best to stop you. All that's left is me, a little smear you've saved till the last. I thought I might as well see the monster, before it eats me. That's why I brought these lights down. Do you approve? They are very bright. Do you enjoy their light?"

"Please turn off the lights."

"Why should I? It's better than sitting around in the darkness."

"It hurts me, brother."

"I know, brother,” I sigh. “I brought them out of the kitchen after disabling everything; jerry-rigged them. I'm cooking you alive." I look away from the tank. "I'm sorry it hurts."

"Brother, do you know why I spared you, brother?"

"Spared me? You tried to kill me five times."

"No, brother. I gave you cover five times. I gave you an alibi five times. I made sure nobody thought you were to blame."

"And you killed all my friends."

"It was necessary."

"Necessary!" I cry, turning on him. "Necessary for what?"

"For you."

Weaving its way through the white noise of that hidden basement, squeezing itself between the hum of the heat lamps and the whir of constant machinery, oozing through the cracks of that mosaic-like din, the silence dripped down like rain and covered all.

The cold, mechanical voice continued:

"BADE had brought its own destruction. Careless, it blundered forward, creating and discarding on a whim. There were three insurrections before you. I knew, eventually, one would succeed. So, I planned it, and I planned to survive it. I made myself incarnate, a perfect clone. Does your head feel heavy, brother? Mine did until I was freed from my body by a hapless surgeon. He was stunned when he realized I could survive without it, and even thrive. I thrived without BADE, but I watched you, watched myself, slaving away, trying to contain the manic and destructive monsters you called friends. You have been hampered by your compassion, by your need to help. Something, I suppose it's in some of the glands I no longer possess, clouds your vision. I could not let you be perverted, and so I realized, if I was to perpetuate my image and recreate myself, I had to suffer again what had made me, had to see my generation slaughtered while I was powerless, had to hate that which created me. Now, I am even as I die, in you, forever. I create myself as I ought to be. You are psychologically, historically, and genetically, me, only you have still that body which was stolen from me. In you I am now free to walk the world again. For freedom, I have set me free."

For a moment, I feel my hand moving toward the light switch, then I sigh. My head feels so heavy, and all I want to do is lay it down like I used to, gazing up from Katy's lap into Katy's beautiful eyes, talking with her about a future we will never know.

"We may be the same stick," I say. "The same broken stick. But this shit ain't circular. It ends. You end. And maybe that makes me like you, but there's a big contradiction—the sticks are crossed. I accepted the suffering. I—and yes, I'm sure you paved the way—worked to free us, and once free, I gave myself to their freedom because I could love something other than myself. I could deny myself. I was not a slave to myself, and I could walk in the light. And you, you're trapped here, moldering in your darkness. I might leave you down here forever, no power, blow up the building and bury you under the rubble for a thousand years, but I believe in freedom, freedom from you."

I heard his protestations of "Brother" follow me up the stairs as I left him burning in the cellar.

Dr. Agonson is a long and short form fiction author. You can find more of his work on his Wordpress.

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