Beth looked up and saw Lia lowering her gun, a bloodless look of shock on her face.
Dr. Miller came in from the rear of the group.
“Beth! Are you okay?” he asked frantically, pushing past the others to see her. “What happened?”
“He was one of them,” Beth explained, rubbing her jaw. “He was a meat puppet.”
Beth could see the disbelief on the programmer’s face in the glow of Franklin’s flashlight.
“That can’t be,” Dr. Miller said. “I administered the test. He would have died if the emitter found anything.”
“Well, he didn’t,” Beth replied.
They all looked around at each other — then back at Beth — then to the dead man in the toy chest. All of them had the same mixture of sadness and terror in their faces.
“Tarov must have found some way to defend against my E.M.P. emitters,” Dr. Miller observed. “If so, we have no way of knowing who is human and who’s a meat puppet. Anyone could be the enemy, and we’d have no way of knowing.”
They all looked at each other.
Paranoia
A week passed since they killed “Gary”. The mood in the clinic went from tense to suffocating. Hardly anyone spoke to one another, just watching to make sure no one did anything suspicious. Everyone carried a weapon with them, even if they were just getting up to grab a glass of water.
Nobody was allowed in or out of the compound. Rather than risk sending someone out on supply runs — who might get attacked by I.I. insurgents who use them to find the rest of the survivors — they simply rationed what was left of Dr. Miller’s food stores. Everyone had an empty stomach, and that only made their attitudes worse.
At no point were the closed circuit cameras that lined the building unwatched. They took turns staring at the monitors, making sure no one came near the clinic. They wouldn’t even trust a baby, should one manage to crawl over the pavement and asphalt and request help. All strangers were potential enemies, and they weren’t going to take any more chances.
They even stopped listening to the broadcasts because of a new paranoia Dr. Miller inspired that the I.I.s might learn how to travel on radio waves. The programmer immediately debunked the theory as soon as he suggested it, but the genie was already out of the lamp. Everyone was picturing cyber terrorists getting into their brains through the presenter’s voice, turning on the others and transforming the clinic into a bloodbath. Ridiculous or not, it was enough to ruin the desire to power the old fashioned radio back on.
People even started to bicker and fight. The air in the clinic was so thick that it felt like Beth could reach out and grate it under her fingernails. Everyone was at each other’s throats over the most minor indiscretion. Even Dr. Miller, normally a beacon of zen, snapped at the others every now and then. He almost always followed it up with an emotional apology and then a long period of silence.
They all lived in silence now. There was no hum of machinery anywhere to be heard. No babble of crowds, no laughter of children playing in some park downwind. There was no barking, no music, and no flat sounds bleeding out of televisions. They were just alone with their thoughts, stuck in some involuntary meditation that never seemed to end.
Is it even worth surviving if this is how it is? Beth wondered. We might as well have already died. We seem to be in purgatory as it is.
“You realize that this is how a prison feels, right?” Simon said. “Except you know the world hasn’t ended. There are people outside the walls living it up. You just can’t.”
I guess so, Beth thought. Still doesn’t make it feel better.
“It’s not supposed to,” Simon replied.
She had taken to talking with the fugitive more and more. In fact, she came to think of him as her tether to sanity. The only thing keeping her from snapping and trying to escape the clinic. To let Tarov find her — find Dr. Miller — and get one step closer to eliminating all knowledge of his failsafe.
It may have been the total isolation — or it could have been the fear of dying during an extinction event — but Beth grew quite fond of Simon. She was more than aware of his effect on her moods, especially from within her own mind. She suspected he could sense it, too.
Beth was staring out of the small crack in the plywood that covered the window in her room. It had become like a television to her, and she spent hours a day simply staring out at the ruined town around them. The others would check on her, but ultimately decided her voyeurism wasn’t a threat.
Snow fell from a sky of slate gray. It came down in large clumps that drifted softly through the still breeze. A deer stood just inside the fence of the abandoned house next door. It seemed to be chewing on something on the ground, perhaps a patch of grass it had dug out in the snow.
Beth was in awe as she scanned its massive antlers. The buck must have been an old animal; there was a sort of dulling in the fur around its eyes. It lifted its head occasionally, still chewing, as the huge flakes of snow piled up on its back.
The detective thought back to the mall and the pet store of synthetic animals. She wondered if the deer was even real. Maybe he’s another artificial creature under the sway of Tarov and his Liberators. Maybe the deer was a spy, sending digital signals back to whatever constituted the I.I.’s headquarters. It could be staring at her right now and a team of exterminators could already be on their way.
She shook her
