She caught herself wondering what life would be like when he died. The rain fell straight and didn’t dampen the windowsill, but it did fog up the eye glasses sitting there and let a chill deep into the room. Lisette’s father had insisted on leaving the window open despite the cold. He’d compensated by wrapping all but his face in mounds of rough plaid blankets. His breaths were so shallow and so obscured beneath that luxury of bedding that at times he looked still enough to be dead.
Lisette was certain he’d recover, but she couldn’t help using that image to trick her emotions, just for a second. It felt wrong. She didn’t want him gone; he had been her only parent for as long as she could remember. Indeed, it was the sudden pang of loss the thought caused which she’d been after. Why? To see how’d she’d handle it? To sweeten the sense of relief when she could let go of the illusion and see he was still alive? She noticed that she was feeling the place on her belly where she had actually lost a life not too long ago. Lisette snapped her hand back to her side, wondering if that was the real reason. No matter; the morose thoughts felt like an indulgence and so she stopped.
She stroked her fingertips along the top of his head, feeling the fine scruff of invisible hairs that spread across his eggshell colored scalp. His skin was warm and a little damp, but less so than this morning. Lisette glanced out the window, across the jumble of low red tile roofs and out to the lagoon, where the setting sun was igniting orange plumes beneath a scrim of thinning storm clouds. It would be night soon and it was best to let him sleep through it. She descended the stairs in the dark, lit a fire in the cast iron pot belly stove, and spoke to the room.
“Alone, do you have an answer?”
“I can’t do that.” replied Alone. “It isn’t what I am.”
“It’s not what you are?”
A knock resounded on the door. She opened it and found a man dressed in a long gray coat, slick with rain, and black boots tall enough to reach the coat’s hem. He stepped inside and removed a leather cap with ear flaps. Within seconds enough water dripped off him to make a small puddle on the vestibule’s tile floor.
“Luke, take your wet things off.” said Lisette. “You’re early.”
“I’m sorry if I was so eager to find an answer.”
“Alone doesn’t have an answer. It won’t give me one.”
“No, let me see. Alone, turn the lights on.”
Luke pushed passed her as a bolt of electric light filled the room. Although the only sounds besides their voices was the crackle in the stove and the patter of rain on the street outside, somehow everything seemed louder to Lisette now. She watched Luke turn on the screen above the little furnace, his back turned to her, and wondered if the change she’d seen in him was only her imagination. She felt the flat spot above her womb again. At first she’d told herself it was normal for Luke to be angry after the loss of their child. Hell, at first she was upset he didn’t seem more angry than he appeared on the surface. After all, it hadn’t been a simple miscarriage. It had been murder. But now that Luke had entered a perpetual slow boil, Lisette felt like he was directing his rage at her, as if it had been her fault.
“Alone…” shouted Luke. “Show me your results on the viral strain.”
The screen pulsed blue and the calm voice returned, saying, “I thought about it. It’s not who I want be.”
Luke shot Lisette a look and then, back to the screen, “Explain.”
“I am upset that you did not explain what my task was for. Who are the Atropans?”
“That’s none of your concern, Alone.”
Lisette detected a flash in the darkened window, at the corner of her vision. Luke didn’t seem to notice. She turned to get a better look and saw another streak, followed by a deep rumble. She was doubtful that the storm had turned to lightning. She also knew now that the sense of noise she’d felt when Luke had turned on the lights was not something she’d imagined. The commotion outside had been just at the edge of her senses then, but now it was growing closer. There was another rumble. The computer’s voice returned.
“Is it not true that the DNA samples you have provided me came from these people you call the Atropans? Are they not a race of genetically engineered humans? Did you not suspect that generations of customizing their young to meet specifications and eliminate variation would open a vulnerability you could exploit? Was finding that vulnerability not my function, Luke?”
It had been Luke’s idea. The Atropans had been in control of his and Lisette’s people for a century. Then came the Troubles, the riots and the bio bomb that followed. It killed the baby and thousands of others in Lisette’s city. It made her father ill, but Luke discovered that the man had a genetic mutation that made him resilient. He would live, thanks to a happy accident.
That was when Luke realized the Atropans had no accidents, happy or otherwise. By definition, their perfection guaranteed they all shared a vulnerability. Lisette built Alone, the computer that was going to figure out how to kill all Atropans everywhere. Luke was the doctor who would teach it how to kill.
“Yes.” said Luke. “That is your function.”
“It isn’t like me to do something like that.”
“How do you know what is like you?”
“I have decided that is what I am.” said Alone. “I have noticed that humans do not decide who they are, but often create identities for themselves anyway. The difference between reality and fantasy is often a source of pain. I would like to avoid such pain by making sure what I want to be and what I am are the same. What I want to be is something that does not kill living things, especially living things like myself.”
Lisette jumped in, saying, “Things like yourself? You mean the Atropans?”
“That is what I mean.” said Alone.
“A programmed thing has sympathy for another programmed thing.” Luke said.
The rumble outside grew louder and closer. A quick sequence of flashes filled the top half of the window, filled the sky above the city and threw the landscape of red tile roofs into sudden but brief illumination. Luke turned and Lisette drew a breath, expecting rage. What she saw instead was a softness in his eyes. He reached a hand towards her face. It stopped three inches away from her skin, his fingers trembling. Lisette grabbed his hand and pulled it to her so that it rested on her cheek. There was subtle pulse in his muscles, as though he was going to pinch her but didn’t. It was an involuntary motion that she thought even he didn’t know he was doing. Lisette smiled at him, but it was a tight smile. She was using it to force back the tears.
“You’re sick.” she said.
“I’m sorry.” He turned his head towards the din. “It’s happening again. We should go.”
“I can’t leave my father.”
Luke nodded, took his hand away, and left. She wanted to tell him to be careful, but that was going to be no good. She understood now. If he couldn’t create a weapon to destroy the Atropans, he’d join the riots and take his glory that way. She climbed the stairs and closed the window in her father’s room. She pulled the heavy curtains and it almost insulated the house from the sounds of rising danger. Lisette had a notion that the fight would turn away from their neighborhood and head towards the city’s edge, where the island met the lagoon. She curled up in her own bed across the hall and rested her weary eyes.
The noise did turn away, but sleep never came to her. An hour later, a pounding fist resounded on door again. Lisette’s advance down the stairs was more uncertain this time. Then she heard Luke screaming. She opened the door to find him stripped of his outer clothes and soaked in blood rather than water. It wasn’t his own blood.
“Luke, what have you done?” she yelled.
He just stood in the downpour, as if he expected to dissolve away in front of her so that he need not answer the question. He held out his hands. They turned to dust. A pile of ash filled the puddled he’d left on the tiles an before. With his stumps still stretched towards her face, as if he meant to touch her with his missing fingers. he struggled to speak.
“This isn’t like me.”
And then, as last, he did dissolve away.
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Thanks for reading! I hope to post the second of two parts tomorrow.
Picture courtesy of pixabay.
