19. The Magus

Chapter 19

The glass vials, the test tubes, jars and machines, are covered in dust. But the smell of chemicals still worms into my nostrils. I have not entered this room since Eva left it, when she was a day old. I had no need to. The lights flicker overhead, bulbs needing changing.

"Why didn't you say something? Why didn't you stop me? You knew!" my voice is a whisper, a snarl, a growl. If I let out any more than a sliver of noise, I'll let out a roar. I am an animal, just as I am a machine. The only thing I am not, is a man. I have no control. I don't have to turn to know that Iago has followed me into my lab, the one place in my manor that Eva is not permitted to enter, the place where I tried to recreate her so many times, a place where I have failed so many times and succeeded just once. This place is filled with my sleepless nightmares and sleepless dreams.

"You know that I think we should all be free to make our own mistakes, Genji."

I do know that. "But this is different," I say, "You knew, and you could have stopped me, but instead you helped me!"

The wedding had been a disaster. Eva, beautiful, standing before me, hair fragrant, dewy, and curling from the moistness of the morning, she was all I ever wanted, all I ever would want. My focus was myopic. I wanted her. I was determined to stop anyone else from taking her from me, no matter what the cost. I should have known—no, I did know. So, I lied to myself, I deluded myself, told myself that the way I had chosen was acceptable, even though I know there is more nuance to dealing with humans, I charged ahead like a bulldozer. And I thought machines such as myself were straightforward, guileless, incapable of being of two minds.

"Could I have stopped you though? Could I have talked reason into you? I don't think so. Would you have let the boy marry Eva?"

"I would have killed him."

"And do you think that would have been wise?"

"No."

"Why not?"

I don't like how this conversation is going. It reminds me too much of when Eva used to teach me, trying to lead me to the answer instead of just telling me what to do. To have Iago speak to me this way is jarring. I turn to glare at him.

"She's crying," I say, "I made her cry. She's afraid of me."

"Yes," agrees Iago, "You did."

"I'm going to destroy him." I don't stop the armory of guns that blasts from my arms, shattering empty, dusty vials to either side of me. I can't stop the rage. I'd do anything to be empty of it, and releasing my guns makes me a bit emptier physically, though it seems nothing will empty the emotion. I want to unload all my ammo. I want to destroy and be destroyed. I want to instill fear in humans and drink it up. I want to take Eva from this place, run away, hide her in a cave.

"You can't destroy him," Iago pretends not to notice the violence in me. He pretends we are having a civil, calm discussion. He is so in control. I thought I had control. I thought years of unfulfilled urges had re-wired me for control. I was wrong.

"I can," I say.

"Well, you shouldn't. Eva will be even more frightened of you," Iago responds.

"What do I do then?" The smell of Eva's fear when I kissed her fired off wires within my skull that hadn't gone off in centuries. Neural networks that should have rusted went off as if a switch had been so easily flipped. I wanted her. And I wanted her to be afraid.

All through breakfast and the horse ride home, I had felt myself a predator, stalking my prey. Eyeing it, slavering over it. It took every ounce of restraint I had to let her leave when she excused herself from the table. I was a starved tiger, and when Eva had said those words that allowed me to touch her, the bars of my cage came down. The cage I had been in gave me the illusion of the self-control I'd forgotten that I've never had.

"You should let her go," Iago says.

He's right. I should let her go. But I can't. She is afraid of me. I made her cry. She wants to be with the boy. I want to preserve her safety. I want to preserve her happiness. Logic dictates I should let her go. I can't. "I can't," I say.

"She's going to try to run away," Iago warns me.

"I won't let her."

Iago looks at me with a measured gaze, his green eyes that can jump from delight to despair, devoid of expression. "Poor Genji," he says.

I punch him in the face. The crack of his nose under my fist is satisfying. I pull away and pull back to strike again. I need this. I need this violence. I need to clear it out of my head to think again. A trickle of silver blood flows out of Iago's nose, wetting his lip. He could stop me, he is stronger than me, but he just stands there, waiting for the second blow to land. At the last moment, I divert my punch into the stone wall, pulverizing granite to dust, leaving a crack in the masonry. This is already the ugliest room in the manor because Eva never sees it, and I have just made it a bit uglier.

"You're—such—a—damned—pacifist," I punctuate my words with punches against the wall. Shaking the foundation as I puncture hole after hole into it. My knuckles leave gray stains of artificial blood on the true gray stone. I savor the pain. I wish that my scraped knuckles would take a bit longer to heal.

"Punching a pacifist—a priest, in the face? what a low blow." Iago rubs his already perfectly healed nose for dramatic effect. I keep punching at the stone, filling my lungs with granite dust. The fine hard dust will linger inside me a bit longer than any other injury could.

"Stop it Genji," Iago says. I ignore him. I made Eva cry. I made Eva afraid. Part of me enjoyed her fear. Hungered for it. Drooled over it. My precious, perfect Eva, I hurt her again. I don't learn my lesson. I'm immutable. Unchangeable. The same monster who woke up on that operating table ready to destroy and instill fear into the hearts of man. A soulless cyborg with my programming written in stone.

"History is doomed to repeat itself," I snarl at the wall.

"Stop it Genji, just stop," Iago pleads.

"I can't!"

"Stop it! You are shaking the foundation!" Iago orders.

Eureka. Like the mathematician Archimedes that Eva made me read about, I found it. I can't stop myself from chasing after Eva, caging her in, suffocating her, murdering her beau, but Iago can. I can see the rain crashing down outside the breach in the wall when I still my fists. This room never had windows before. I turn towards Iago with a smile—or maybe a snarl, I lost the nuances of human expression the first time I lost Eva.

"I can't stop myself from going after Eva, but you can," I say. "Order me. Make me. Use my true name."

Just like that, Iago's face falls to despair. His jaw sets, but there are tears misting his green eyes. How can a being that has existed so long, still so easily cry? While the eons have hardened me, he has only grown softer. Or perhaps we have both remained exactly the same.

"Don't ask me that. Anything but that," he whispers.

"I need you to. I can't do it on my own."

"You don't know that you can't! You've never even tried!" He raises his voice to a pathetic shriek. "Please, Genji, I believe in you. You can do it if you try. I know you can."

"I can't," I glare at him. Sweet, desperate, lonely Iago, with his optimistic ideas about ‘free-will' and swimming against the tide of our nature, and of human nature. He treats everything as a game. He is unattached. He feels no repercussions. All he has are his phony ideals.

"Please, Genji, it won't count if you don't do it yourself. You need to break the cycle on your own. You can be free of her. You have free will, you can exercise it. You are a man, not a machine. Don't make me do this. Just try."

"No."

"Please," he says.

I try to put it in words that Iago can understand. "Asking me to move on from Eva," I tell him. "Is like asking a real man, a human, to hold his breath. He can for a time, but eventually he will pass out and start breathing automatically again. I don't need to breathe, but Eva is my air. I suffocate without her. Even leaving her alone in the room was difficult for me. I can't stay away from her on my own. I need your help." I wonder how apt my simile is, considering I have no idea what true suffocating feels like. "You should stop pretending we are human because we aren't. We never will be. We don't have free will. We have programming. We exist by different laws."

"Please, Genji, my brother, please," Iago wrings his hands in front of him as if he's praying. "Just try to forget her, just once, if you try and you find you really can't, then I will help you any way you want." The tears are spilling freely down Iago's cheeks. But I am a monster. I am a predator. I have no sympathy. I only have Eva on my mind.

I am done discussing this. I have been indulging him by even trying to explain myself. I say the words that I know will topple his resolve: "Please, Iago, my brother. Do this thing for me."

Iago's expression shatters more than it did when I punched him. Part of me, the predator, delights in breaking him. Part of me, the robot, is indifferent to it. And another part of me, the lobster, clacks its claws together, impatiently. Yes, I have the DNA of a man inside me too, but that part is so minor, so silent, that if it has a reaction, I can't feel it.

"I'll do it," Iago sobs. "But only because you said ‘please.'" He is crying, but he is laughing too. He can find humor under any rock. Maybe that is where his resilience comes from.

"Okay, good. Thank you," I say the human niceties. I smile. I pat Iago on the back. I say, "Chin up, champ, it's not so bad. Nothing to cry over."

He laughs harder. His tears drain. He is my brother. He is what I am—more or less. He has been with me almost since the beginning. He is the only being who cares about me, who has ever cared about me, I know. Now that I am assured that I will receive what I want from him, I do not dislike him. I don't yearn for his suffering. I cannot smell his fear, if he ever feels it. Unlike the lobster, I am not cannibalistic.

"Okay," Iago places his hands on my shoulders, steading himself as much as me. "Genji, what do you want me to order you to do, exactly? Or not to do, as it happens."

"Order me to let Eva run away. Order me not to chase after her."

"And the boy?" Iago snickers.

Reluctantly I add, "And the boy, too. Order me not to chase either of them, or the maid, order me to let them run away, order me not to cause them harm."

Iago says, "Destruction Number 7, do not chase the human boy named Theo or the human girl named Eva. Do not chase the maid. Let them leave here unharmed. Do not go searching for them, and do not cause them harm."

Just like that, the bonds are around me. A restraint I cannot feel. An order I cannot even attempt to disobey. A laugh rises in me, easily, happily, from my stomach. Laughter full of gravel dust. The taste of stone is in my mouth.

"Don't you harm her either," I say to Iago, serious once more, but with a smile shadowed on the corner of my mouth.

"Don't you trust me?"

"With my life."

We both laugh at that, hard, Iago slapping me on the back, "Ahahaha, that's the funniest joke I've heard in a hundred years—aside from maybe the one about the priest and the pudding. So hard to hear a good joke nowadays when you hear the punchline in the joke-teller's head before they say it."

"Please arrange for Eva to leave now." I say. "And make sure she meets up with the boy."

"I will. I'm already on it. And Genji?"

"Yes?"

"What will you do now? Please tell me you won't do anything nuts."

I look around my laboratory. The thought occurs to me that I can start over. I can make a new Eva, from scratch. I can try again, I can try not to mess things up so grandly this time, to truly make sure that this Eva is happy and never afraid of me. But the thought of two Evas in the world at once—it is too much to handle. I'd be split in two.

"For now, I think I will find a quiet little place to destroy myself," I could use the bliss of nonexistence and the days of excruciating physical pain that comes with being re-fabricated. Who knows, maybe this time I really will manage to be destroyed forever. One can always hope.

Eva did not speak to me on the way back to the lab from the farmland. I tried to ask her about the woman who had seemed so familiar, Sophia, but she used my true name to order me not to speak.

"Who was that woman?" I said when we were in the public transportation pod, with no one else in it but us. "Sophia? She seemed to recognize me."

"Drop it," She said.

"But she–"

"Destruction Number 7," Eva said. "Do not speak again until I give you the order that you may."

She leaned against the window, arms crossed, and looked at me as if I was a dog that had dared to strain at my leash, one that she might return to the shelter at any moment.

It was a screeching break of a reminder that we were not in fact equals. Sitting next to her in the pod, my thigh pressed against her thigh, bound by her gag order, the thought crossed my mind: I could rip out her tongue right now and run away with her and she, unable to speak, unable to order me about, would be able to do nothing to stop me. I could find a place to hide her away and then we, both mutes, could be together until she died.

I ground my teeth. She would die. Maybe not now, but someday. I had a choice: rip out her tongue and live with her hatred until she died (whereupon I'd destroy myself) or preserve whatever scraps of affection she might have for me and go to my destruction exactly as she wished. The logical answer was to go to my destruction sooner, rather than later. That was what I was made for and only that planned for destruction would be able to cut my suffering short.

She always looked ahead. Stared straight in front of her with a clear purpose. I had managed to make her waver slightly, she had turned to look at me for a moment in eternity, but if I snatched her tongue from her, she would surely never look at me again. Perhaps now, she would at least watch my back as I walked to my destruction, maybe she would save a bit of me, remember me.

Schrodinger stood up when I entered the bunker. Still unable to speak due to Eva's order, I walked past him. Even if I could speak, I had nothing to say to him.

"Destruction Number 7, this is an order: speak when you want to," Schrodinger said.

I stared at Schrodinger. I felt I could now speak, but I still had nothing to say. It was curious to me that we could order around each other, and Schrodinger, knowing this, had not ordered us to escape with him. He had asked us. I considered asking him, ‘Why?' but I didn't really care to know.

I didn't say anything the next day when Eva came to the bunker to pick me up. Normally I'd say, "Hello, Eva, how are you?" or "Hi Eva, how's it going?" just like Eva had taught me was appropriate as a human greeting, but I didn't want to give her an ‘appropriate' human greeting if I didn't have to.

When she said, "Hello Pavlov," and I said nothing in reply, she said, "Ah yes, I suppose you still can't say anything." I waited for her to order me to speak, but that order never came. She wasn't looking at me, she was looking straight ahead. Her voice was empty of inflection.

In the classroom, I tried to kiss her. She pushed me away, but she didn't order me. She simply put her soft hands against my hard chest and pushed.

I opened my mouth to say, "Let me touch you," but shut it again. I wanted to see when she, of her own volition, would allow me to speak once again. A static of resentment for Schrodinger crossed my mind—if he hadn't rescinded Eva's order not to speak, then I wouldn't have to consciously try not to speak. It would have been easy and natural.

Eva said nothing more than was necessary in order to get me dressed properly in a black and white suit and follow her out the lab. She was dressed all in black as well, a black dress, but for the golden heart locket she kept clutching. Once out of sight of the lab, in a pod going in the opposite direction from the zoo, she relaxed enough to stroke my forearm when I put my hand on her knee, but she did not loosen her grip on the locket.

We stepped out onto a quiet street with huge sprawling houses on one side and a tall cement wall on the other. I followed Eva through a gate, under an arch that read, ‘Hyacinth Cryometery.' On the other side of the gate, there was a lawn of green with headstones crowning rectangles of blue, what I guessed were graves.

Eva says, "The wealthy like the views of cryometerys because of all the plants, the grass, and the eternal hyacinths. But they never visit. They don't need to visit because they rest assured that their loved ones will come back to life, preserved as they are in a cryometery pods.

"They know that one day technology will catch up, and it will be possible to bring their loved ones back to life. So, they don't even mourn when someone dies. They don't say goodbye, they just say, ‘see ya later.' They have no idea what suffering is. They shouldn't even keep their pods in here, they should put them in a warehouse. With them here, it is like they are mocking the dead who have no chance of being re-awakened."

We walked as Eva spoke, passing a few great marble blocks with glowing blue windows, through which could be seen serene sleeping human faces—mostly of older men and women. Eva indicated to me that they were cryometery pods in which the wealthy preserved the bodies of their loved ones until they could be reawakened.

Eventually, Eva stopped on a grave, growing with blue flowers, in front of a marble headstone that read, ‘Lost, but Ever After Remembered, Beloved, son, brother, and fiancé. Caesar Xavier Marin.'

Eva sat down on the rectangle of blue, "You asked me about Sofia," she said.

I nodded and sat beside her. I pulled her, so that she was leaning her head against my shoulder. She smiled up at me, a smile that did not reach her lovely, intoxicating, whiskey-colored eyes. Then she turned to stare back at the grave.

She said, "He was like, FDR, Marilyn Monroe, Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Jesus—you know, just someone you knew was going to be someone someday. He was like a laser, slicing through to the core of things. He was so special, so unique. He really cared about things. You know? He was tuned into reality, to what was going on, what needed to happen. He was going to change the world. He was larger than life, unreal. You couldn't tell him he couldn't do something. He didn't know what ‘can't' means; ‘impossible' was not in his vocabulary. Telling him he couldn't do something only made him more determined to prove you wrong.

"Even when he was dying, he kept insisting he'd live. He'd fight through it..."

Eva's voice trailed off. She pushed closer to me. I wanted to tell her to remain quiet. I wanted to pull out her tongue. But I didn't do either of those things. There was contentment in sitting on flowers with her folded against me.

"He is my reason. He's why I do everything I do. I'm not... My goals aren't the same as my colleagues'. I actually hate them. You see, Caesar... He... I love my parents, but they are so wrong. They seem to think they deserve life and happiness more than other people just because they made more money. I don't think anyone deserves more happiness than anyone else. Caesar wanted to help people. He wanted to cure the disease that the farm workers die from, that damages DNA, the very essence of people, but instead, it killed him. When his dad died, he dropped out of college to work in farming and help support his family. I told him not to, I told him I would help him, but he didn't listen, and he refused my help. He said he didn't want my pity. He said he could do it on his own. He wanted to hold the world up all by himself... I know my parents would consider me a traitor if they knew my intentions, but sometimes the ends justify the means. They never understood Caesar—they thought I would get over him—he would have done anything to achieve his goals. And so will I. He would have wanted me to avenge him. I think he would have done it himself if he had lived."

I stare at the gravestone, still and mocking me, ever after remembered. Who, exactly, was this Caesar to you? I wanted to ask. What does this have to do with me?

"I never got over him. My life was changed forever the first time he kissed me. How can anyone get over a boy like that? I devoted my life to him when he was alive, so why would I stop devoting my life to him just because he is dead?"

Whoever he was, he's dead, he's dead, he's dead, I reassured myself. I stopped breathing, even though Eva was right there next to me, perfuming the air with her scent. I held utterly still. I, who was created to instill fear into the hearts of humans, was frightened—afraid of what I would do if I moved an artificial muscle, spoke a word.

Eva plucked a blue-purple flower and handed it to me, "This flower is a modified Hyacinth. They never stop blooming. They need next to no care. They grow hardier than weeds. They were bio-engineered because rich people didn't want graveyards to look so depressing, filled with wilting flowers. They are toxic and where they grow nothing else can. Human beings are killing the world. We know we are with each little genetic modification, each little spray thinning out the ozone layer. Even people who don't work in farms are getting sick, dying. Plants and animals are dying. The world is ending because they won't stop. Last week I saw packaged cattle feed at the grocery store labeled as human food—they called it nutri-mix—the food shortages are just beginning. The rich say it is too late to stop and so they aren't stopping—they are leaving. You know, the sky used to be blue. My grandparents used to tell me about it, that when they were little, the sky was blue. In the old movies I've shown you, the sky was blue. That wasn't a fantasy just for TV and virtual reality. Now it is brown, orange, and gray on a good day."

The sky was brown that day, mottled by gray clouds. I twirled the blue flower between my thumb and forefinger. I smelled it, like I had seen humans do in movies. Sickly, saccharine sweet. I knew much of what Eva was telling me. It was meaningless to me—she could talk about the flowers and the sky, but we were sitting in front of a gravestone, and I knew that he was still on her mind. Whoever he was, he's dead, dead, dead, I told myself. I crushed the flower in my fist, tossing the pulp of it aside. Blue staining my fingers, I wrapped my arm around Eva, huddled my shoulders around her. Hoping, hopelessly, that if I could engulf her with my body—a body that wasn't even mine but belonged to the military—she would lose sight of everything but me.

"You asked me about Sofia yesterday," she began again. She paused for a long time, "I hadn't planned on really telling you anything. I... I know you aren't really human. That you don't experience any true emotion, you imitate it...You're a machine. I know I am just projecting my own delusional feelings onto you. But I don't know why, I want to tell you about everything. Sometimes, when I am talking to you, I feel like I am talking to myself. I'm going insane. I'm having conversations with an inanimate object. And when I touch you or let you touch me, I feel things that I know are wrong."

I stroked her brown hair. She looked me in the eye and then looked back towards the gravestone. Ever After Remembered. Ever. After.

"Caesar was… Sofia's son. As it says in Hamlet, there used to be equality in death. Everyone died, and that was the end of it. You're dead. But now, you can use money to get a second chance at life after being put in a cryometery pod. I offered up every cent I had to Sofia to ask her to preserve Caesar's body in a cryometery. She refused. She said Caesar would have preferred to be put to rest once and for all." Her voice hardened. "It shouldn't have been her choice to make."

I closed my eyes. I wished I had been installed with a function to close my ears as well.

"He was my fiancé. But I feel like ‘fiancé' doesn't describe the depth of our connection. He was more than that, he was my soulmate."

Focus on her warmth, her smell, her heartbeat, I told myself in an effort to not react, not to burst. Every one of my wires was lit painfully with burning electricity. Eva is MINE, every atom of my being spun with that false knowledge.

I heard a small click and opened my eyes to see Eva holding up the locket she always wore. It was open to an image of Eva, younger and smiling, with a man—with me. But not me. His face looked wrong. Worn, scarred, blemished. His nose was slightly crooked, and his hair was curlier, and his bones were less defined, and his expression was all sincerity. "Even when he was alive, I kept a lock of his hair in this locket. I know Caesar would have supported what I am planning, I know he would have wanted to be a part of it. So, when the opportunity came to use his DNA as an ingredient for one of the android clones we were making, I took it."

She snapped the locket shut and tucked it back in her shirt.

"I wasn't expecting you to look so much like my Caesar. I sure wasn't expecting you to be...to be attracted to me, like you are. But I guess that just shows how much chemistry Caesar and I had. I even liked the smell of his armpit sweat. DNA calls people to be lovers if they have compatible immune systems, studies have shown. Caesar and I were so compatible. I've taken comfort in you. You sometimes make me feel as if I am with Caesar again, but seeing you also hurts me. You aren't Caesar, you're an imitation. You don't have Caesar's soul. You don't have a soul at all."

My hand was around her wrist, squeezing, I couldn't stop the grinding crack of fragile human bones, made of calcium and collagen, in my steel grip, even when Eva's gasp of pain pierced me.

"Why can't I be Caesar?" I ground out, "We have the same DNA. What else is there?" I felt my lips and nose warp into a snarl and my eyebrows crush into a glare.

Eva gasped through pain, through the tears streaming down her lovely face, "Free will, you spoke on your own even though I ordered you not to...Are you, could you really be, Caesar? Reincarnated?" She was smiling, her wet eyes glittering, gleeful, pain forgotten.

I dropped her wrist, and I dropped my head into my hands. I could lie to her, not tell her about how Schrodinger had ordered me to be able to speak, and then she might truly believe that I was Caesar—and wasn't I Caesar? I had his DNA. I thought of the cloned tigers in the zoo. They were without a doubt all the same tiger with the same stripes. But the lie was unsustainable. She would undoubtedly test my lie—that was the kind of woman Eva was. Always testing, learning, experimenting. Trying to unwind the yarn of life and rewind it into a neat spool.

"Schrodinger—Destruction Number 11—ordered me to be able to speak once more," I told her.

Eva's face contorted, as if the signals of her nerves alerting of her broken wrist were only now reaching her brain.

I kept talking, desperation fraying the edge of my voice. "But just because I don't have free will, doesn't mean I am not Caesar."

With her good hand, Eva slapped me, painlessly, loudly across the face, "Don't you ever, ever touch me again, Destruction Number 7!" she ordered, "You're not Caesar, you're nothing like Caesar! You are a soulless, evil robot. You were only created to destroy and be destroyed! And guess what? Part of the reason I decided to tell you about Caesar today is because your mission has been moved up again. You're going to be destroyed in just two days!"

She broke down sobbing, clutching her wrist, she smelled of fear, while I sat there, helpless.