The Wasteland Saga

when the fish carried you farther and farther out into the gulf. You had hope, my friend. Otherwise you would not have fought so hard. Fought with every skill of fishing you’d ever learned. You had hope, didn’t you?

“You have given us a chance,” said Natalie. “You have given my children a chance. I won’t lie to you anymore. Once you’re over the target, I will need to download into a secure and portable mainframe that is barely big enough to contain me. In fact… I will be ‘asleep.’ There will not be enough memory for my processes to run at optimum capacity. Someday, if they can ever find, or build a new mainframe, they will try to reactivate me. Someday.”

Lightning appeared briefly, farther to the north.

And where will I go?

“I was wrong, Natalie,” said the Old Man. “About what I said to you.”

“You have said many things since we first began to talk to each other. But, I think…”

She thinks, and that is amazing.

“I think I know what you are referring to. When I revealed my deceptions to you. You were angry and confused and hurt when I revealed who I really was.”

“Yes.”

I was.

I am still.

And sad.

Yes, that also.

Her laugh.

You take everything with you.

“You do not need to apologize,” said Natalie. “I only hope you understand that I was doing my best to save…”

“I do, Natalie. I do understand. I think our… lives… have been the same, in many ways. Since the bombs, I mean.”

“How so?”

“It’s like you said just now, we were both doing our best in a very difficult time.”

Silence.

“Thank you,” said Natalie. “Thank you for treating me as though I too am a living being.”

The Old Man watched a figure appear on the horizon to the north. A dark shape, stumbling and weaving as it fell forward toward him.

Whoever it is, they are still very far away.

“You are, Natalie,” said the Old Man, watching the distant figure. “I think… if this were different… if we were just people… I mean… I mean that I think we could have been friends, if…”

If we had time.

If the bombs had never fallen.

“Do you believe in life after death?” asked Natalie. The Artificial Intelligence. The program. The massive sequence of ones and zeros.

The Old Man wiped thick beads of sweat from his chest. He drank more of the warm water, but it was unsatisfying.

What I wouldn’t give for just one cup of the cool water that tasted of iron from the well back in the village.

“I don’t understand, Natalie?”

“Do you believe this life ends when our physical body dies? Many religious systems indicate there is something beyond. As a process, and I’m simplifying my nature, I am actually seven million processes at any given second, I understand that the mainframe, my physical body that houses me, may one day break down. But not my process, not my mind. That could be downloaded into a new body, if you will.”

“I never had time to think about it,” said the Old Man.

Can you let go?

When she died.

My wife.

She said to me, Can you let go?

But the Boy and I traded.

You take everything with you.

“I want to, Natalie. I want to believe there is something better than this or even, right now, just something else.”

Pause.

“I do too,” said Natalie. “I do too.”

Ahead, far down the road, the dark figure stumbled and fell in the wan sunlight of afternoon.

“I have to go now, Natalie. There’s someone on the road.”

THE OLD MAN turned off the radio and began to push the tank forward. When he got close he saw the shirtless figure, burned, red raw. Just pants. Bleeding feet. A shaved scalp.

She said I must hurry now, so just pass him by and be on your way to…

To where?

Well, you know where to.

But as he passed with the tank sucking up great waves of ash and sending it spiraling away in its wake, the figure raised a spindly arm and waved.

The Old Man jammed on the brakes and the massive tank skidded to a halt.

The figure on the ground rolled over to face him. Shielding his eyes from a sunburst above, the face of Ted and his trademark glasses stared back up at the Old Man.

Chapter 53

“It’s a madhouse in there,” said Ted gulping water from the canteen as the Old Man held it up for him.

“How did you escape?”

“I…” He gulped again. “I died.”

He waved the Old Man away. He sat up and gave a singsong sigh of exhaustion. As though he had just done something harder than he’d expected it be.

Ted saw the Old Man’s look of confusion.

“Have you ever read The Count of Monte Cristo? No, of course you haven’t. No one’s read a book in forty years. Well, I gave myself a little cocktail that induced death-like symptoms. Later, when I came to, I was in the dead pile out beyond the Work. When it was night, I slipped away and started south. Thought I’d make it back to Albuquerque.” He started laughing and waved for the canteen when he began to cough again.

“I don’t think I’ll make it that far after all the rads I’ve absorbed in the last three days, but I’ll try. Maybe six, seven hundred. My thyroid should be pretty much nonexistent by now.”

I wonder how he knows so much. Electricity and medicine. He’s a man of many talents, and he doesn’t seem as old as me. Was he born after the bombs? What is his story of salvage?

You would say to me, Santiago, There is no more time for stories, my friend.

“You should turn around!” barked Ted. “You should turn around and never go near a place like that again. No one ever should.”

“I have to, Ted,” said the Old Man.

“And how do you know my name?”

“Your people are waiting for you south of here in the plains beyond the mountains. Near a hill shaped like a cone.”

“How? You and your tank?”