The Hauntings of Playing God (The Great De-Evolution) (8 page)

15

Making her way through the rows of Blocks, she finds herself thinking things like,
I can’t believe I ever managed to do this back when there were four entire quadrants; fifty-eight is still too many.

The first day after an entire row was sacrificed, she was able to finish by midnight. But the next day it was already twenty minutes later before she completed her tasks. Two more days and she was back to one o’clock again.

I’m too old for this. I’ll never be able to keep up with all these people.

The thought is still there when she reaches Jeremy, her train conductor. She is only in row 3 of quadrant 2 but is already an hour behind schedule if she wants to be done by midnight.

I do this so everyone else can live
, she thinks, her fingers already twisting Jeremy’s feed line away from his nutrient bag.

With a click, it disconnects. She lets it fall to the ground. The Block in front of her doesn’t reach to reattach the nutrient bag’s line. His thick eyebrows don’t rise in alarm. He can do nothing but remain staring at her—not at her exactly, but at where she happens to be standing—until she moves along with the rest of her chores and he is staring at the place she used to be. When she comes back the next day, his lifeless eyes will still be fixed on that same spot. That is his life.

She once warned Elaine against personalizing the people in front of them: “You’re going to convert this body into a make-believe friend, and one day they’re going to die. Isn’t it better just to leave them how they are so we aren’t as attached when they pass away?”

But her friend had laughed this concern away. “They’re already people. We’re just giving them memories of a better life than the one they actually had.” And then, frowning, “Now stop trying to ruin my game by taking it too seriously.”

Jeremy, Elaine had said, was a train conductor until trains became obsolete. There was a brief time, after the migrations started, in which trains were thought to be the savior of the overburdened. It was much easier to load a train with thousands of Blocks and transport them south than it was to load an endless caravan of buses.

The idea did not last long.

Jeremy’s life was never the same after the derailment. A train going from Montreal to Boston twisted itself into a fiery ball. Motionless bodies, only a few of which managed to survive, lay scattered about an apple orchard. With the living not being able to yell for help or raise a hand when a call for survivors was made, responders had to walk up to each body and check for a pulse. It took people longer to check for survivors than it had taken to load the train in the first place. In the end, two thousand Blocks, along with the hundred people charged with their care, were dead, their bodies scattered over the distance of a mile.

Someone had inspected the entire line from Montreal to Boston and reported that it was safe. So how did the train derail? Was it sabotaged? Had the inspector simply missed a crack in the iron rails?

Another derailment occurred between Edmonton and Calgary. It was easy enough to get out and change a flat tire if you were driving south and hit a bad stretch of road. The same luxury was not given to the trains; a single problem with the tracks was enough for the entire train to go up in flames. Some said the tracks were being intentionally damaged so the living cargo would have no chance of making the trip safely. Although there was no evidence to support this, no one trusted the tracks after that.

There were people who proposed that the trains crawl along the track while a man walked ahead of it. If the man inspecting the rails noticed a problem, he would signal the train to stop. The journey wouldn’t be fast, but unlimited cargo could be transferred with less hassle. This was only attempted once, on the route between Minneapolis and Milwaukee. Somewhere along the way, the man walking ahead of the train was eaten by wolves. No one else was willing to attempt the hike after that.

Everyone else who wanted to migrate south had to use the roads. Giant caravans of buses and minivans appeared on the highways. Train stations around the country were filled with engines and cabooses, each rusting and becoming a home for various species of birds and vermin. All across the country, trains were left in random places on the tracks as if the last conductors had simply disappeared into the wilderness and left the hundred train cars to fend for themselves. Jeremy, Morgan’s conductor, had known how to do one thing—get a train from one point to another. After the trains stopped, he had nothing left.

“It’ll be okay,” she says, putting a hand on Jeremy’s forehead. A final gesture of humanity for the man who grew up collecting toy trains, and who, upon seeing one in person for the first time, knew there was nothing else he would rather do with his life.

Jeremy does not focus on what is going to happen to him. All he is capable of is loving his trains: “Do you have any idea what it’s like to take hundreds of tons of steel across the country, through mountains, under bridges, across rivers?”

This is exactly the moment she had feared when she told Elaine their game might not be a good idea. She has no idea what Jeremy’s parents actually named him. His real name, assuming he had one, disappeared when he was left at the gym’s front door. His name, his occupation, even his words, are all thanks to Elaine.

And now Morgan is the one who has to put an end to those memories and experiences. Whether they are real or not does not matter. They are ending all the same. It seems to her that a made-up life should not cause sadness when it’s over, especially not compared to the very real lives and memories she shared with Elaine. It does, though. To her, this body in front of her really was a train conductor at one time.

In this moment, she is all too aware of being the last normal human on the face of the earth. Her body offers reminders that she has far surpassed even the most generous life expectancy. These realizations force her to live with the manufactured personalities and histories around her. Only they are here to join her in her final days.

It’s obvious that this game makes it even more difficult when she has to sacrifice the good of one for the health of the many, but she cannot help it. Without a bond to keep her thinking each person is an ally in what they are all going through together, she would go crazy. Or she would be like George and simply walk away from the group home one day. But at the same time it destroys her a little when she must do what she does next…

She leaves Jeremy there, the nutrient bag no longer connected to his arm.

“It’ll be okay,” she says again, this time away from where Jeremy would be able to hear her.

Life is fragile. When he was younger, Jeremy might have lasted a week without having his nutrient bag refilled. Now, his pulse weakens after only three hours. She walks by his bed again once she is done caring for everyone in quadrant 4. When she touches his wrist, she doesn’t bother trying to feel a pulse against her fingertips. Her hands have long since succumbed to the trials of old age. Instead, she wants to judge his body temperature. Already, his body is colder than the others. Death is creeping over him.

In the morning, he is even colder. His heart is no longer beating.

She cannot let the body rest amongst the living. Everything she does is guided by the Golden Rule; she would not want to spend the day next to a dead body, so she does not force those in her care, even the voiceless, to suffer through it.

The forklift comes to life. Jeremy’s bed, his body still on it, is carried over to the incinerator.

16

It rains all day and all night. At least this time there are no winds, only rain. But the amount of water dropped on top of the group home seems endless.

She was taught in science class that the world has some things that vary wildly based on outside elements: the amount of plant life determines how much oxygen there is, there is a finite amount of gold and silver, the number of mosquitoes fluctuates based on the severity of the previous winter. But for other things, such as energy and water, there is always the same amount. The same quantity of water always exists, just in different forms. A glacier turns to water, the water evaporates but the clouds refill. But if this is true, where is all of this rain coming from?

She still smiles at the thought of her mother walking in on her one evening, after listening to her science teacher talk about how water changes from glaciers to ocean water to rain water and so on in an endless cycle. Morgan had been standing at the bathroom sink with the water running even though she wasn’t washing her hands.

“What are you doing?” her mother had asked, her hands on her hips, the pose of an adult ready to put a stop to whatever youthful shenanigans may be going on.

“It’s okay, Mom. It just goes into the ground or into the sewers until it becomes rain again.”

Her mother stood in the doorway, her eyes closed, until she could respond without being mean. When she finally did say something, right after reaching over and turning off the water faucet, she had smiled and said, “The amazing things they must be teaching in school these days! It’s a shame your science teacher didn’t teach you about water bills.”

And with that, Morgan had been sent to the kitchen to help clean dishes.

If it keeps raining this way, the entire city will be washed away.

She looks over at one of her Blocks, who promptly says, “If you think this is a lot of rain, you should have seen the concert I played in the Philippines. Now that was a lot of rain.”

Jasmine is one of Morgan’s favorite Blocks. Inspiration found people in many different ways during the Great De-evolution, but maybe none in such a haunting fashion as Jasmine. In her earlier years, she had been part of a girl band. She and four other girls had hit single after hit single and sold out stadiums all over the country to screaming kids. She tried a similar act, albeit by herself, a couple of years later after the group broke up, but no one in the States seemed to like one girl singing and dancing when there had previously been five. She was hugely popular in Europe and Asia, though. For the next decade, none of her American fans saw her again.

“Great people overseas,” she tells Morgan. “It’s a shame you never got to go over there.”

“Don’t rub it in.”

“Sorry,” Jasmine says. “My bad.”

Forgotten in America but as famous as ever overseas, Jasmine continued singing to crowds that could tell she meant everything she said in her songs. When the Great De-evolution began, a new song started playing back home, different from anything she had done previously. It had a ghostly piano, only a couple of notes, accompanied by what sounded like an opera singer bellowing about broken hearts and lost loves. The song reminded everyone of all the people they had ever known that they might never see again. The most requested song in the country, it brought about another round of fame for Jasmine in America.

Sometimes, when Elaine was tired of hearing the rain fall, she would sing a couple of lines from one of Jasmine’s songs. Now that her friend is gone, Morgan finds herself humming the lyrics, too:

Saw him every day of my life

Until one day he wasn’t there,

Guess he made up his mind, just like all the others

If I go south too, will he even care?

Jasmine had a song for every part of the Great De-evolution that could upset a lovesick teenager. Any time a boy or girl had to say goodbye to their first love because their parents said it was time to move south, they could listen to one of Jasmine’s songs and cry themselves to sleep.

What’s the point of being sad today

When the world will be different tomorrow?

When the world keeps changing every day

Maybe everything can turn out to be okay.

When people wanted to remember the good times, they listened to her song about how everyone’s parents want a better life for their kids. When someone wanted to take their mind away from being scared about the future, they listened to her song about how tragedy spawns the greatest loves mankind can ever know.

And now, finally silent after years of singing, of bringing people to tears with nothing more than her voice, she joins Morgan’s other Blocks in quadrant 3.

Jasmine offers the best encouragement she can muster: “I wrote the lyrics to
When the Lights Go Out
during a rain storm just like this one. I always found it inspiring to listen to the rain fall.”

“Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind.”

Morgan finishes cleaning the retired singer, reconnects the nutrient bag to the line running into her arm, makes her way to the next bed. Jasmine will live another day.

But while it rains through the rest of the night without pause, Morgan is unable to find anything thrilling about massive floods that threaten to wash them right out of the only place they can all live together. Humming another of Jasmine’s songs provides little comfort.