Under Their Skin (18 page)

FORTY-SEVEN

Everything about the cave terrified Eryn. It was so dark—her flashlight beam seemed practically useless against the thick blackness pressing in on her and Nick. And with so little ability to see, she found that even the tiniest sound was magnified and turned horrific. Water dripped ominously somewhere farther in, again and again and again.

Then she heard a sound like a pebble falling.

Is that going to turn into an avalanche of falling rock?
Eryn wondered.
Right on top of us? Were we total idiots for ignoring the “keep out” signs, and now we're going to die for our own stupidity?

Mom and Dad would be so sad. Even if they were robots.

Eryn froze, but the sound stopped. And then she forced herself to go on. Each step reminded her exactly how much she was a child of civilization. She wanted bright glowing electric lights that banished any hint of shadow from every
corner of the cave. For that matter, she didn't even want to
be
in a cave—she'd rather be looking for answers in clean, tidy rooms with no strange sounds that might be bats or mice or the beginnings of a rockslide.

But she kept going. She did her best not to let Nick see how scared she was.

Then something struck her that she couldn't help sharing.

“Remember back at the beginning, when we first heard about Ava and Jackson?” she asked Nick, even as they inched deeper and deeper into the darkness. “Didn't you think,
Oh, if I just find out what sports they play, or whether they like art or music—then I'll know what they're like?”

“I guess,” Nick said.

“That's not even true about us,” Eryn said. “Maybe it is for some kids, but . . . I don't care that much about tennis or being in the school play. I don't even think you care that much about lacrosse.
This
is what we're like. This is our true identities. That we nagged Mom to bring us down here. That we're walking into a supposedly dangerous cave because we
have
to get answers.”

“Is that just what we're like, or is that what all humans are like?” Nick asked quietly.

“I don't know,” Eryn admitted.

They kept creeping forward. Every few steps, Eryn would sweep the flashlight all around, in case there was something important off to the side or overhead they might have missed otherwise.

There never was. Rock, rock, dripping rock, shadowy rock . . .

Eryn took a few more steps, stopped, and did another sweep with the flashlight.

“What's that?” Nick gasped.

Eryn moved her flashlight ever so slightly backward and squinted into the shadows.

“I don't see anything,” she said.

“Isn't that a doorknob?” Nick asked, pointing.

Eryn was about to say,
It's just another rock. Rock formations look like doorknobs all the time. Especially in caves.
But just to be sure, she took a step toward the wall Nick was pointing at. She held the flashlight steadier.

It
was
a doorknob they were both staring at. Surrounded by a door built solidly into a doorframe in the rock wall.

“Who would put a door in a cave?” Eryn asked, rushing forward. “It doesn't make sense.”

“Humans don't make sense,” Nick whispered. He was right on her heels.

They had to climb over a small pile of rock rubble on the floor, which made Eryn think uncomfortably of rock falls, but they kept going.

“If it's locked, we'll figure out how to pick it,” Nick said. “We've got experience.”

Eryn moaned.

“I don't have any bobby pins with me,” she said. “I didn't think—”

“We'll find a really sturdy twig,” Nick said. “Or we'll figure out how to rig up the batteries from the flashlight into some kind of explosive and blow the door open.”

“You're crazy!” Eryn said, half laughing and half convinced she'd be right there with him building bombs, if need be.

But she reached for the doorknob, and none of that mattered.

The doorknob turned easily as soon as she grasped it. The door swung open.

FORTY-EIGHT

“Shine the light in—let me see!” Nick called, grabbing for the flashlight in Eryn's hand so he could direct its beam too.

The light beam spun crazily, out of control. With both of them trying to move it, it zoomed over everything too quickly for Nick to figure out what he was seeing. But Eryn gasped, “Oooo, there's a light switch!”

Nick started to complain,
That's not going to work. Not after centuries.
But Eryn had already reached over to the wall beside them and flipped the switch.

Light poured down on them from above. After all the darkness, this was like being doused in light, being drenched with it.

It was so bright, Nick couldn't see.

He blinked frantically, his eyes finally managing to focus on the center of the door they'd just opened.

There was another “Keep out!” sign on it. Before, he'd been too intent on the doorknob to notice.

“Oh, right, because they didn't
already
tell us to keep out,” Nick muttered.

“No, Nick,
look
,” Eryn said.

Her hand shook as she pointed at small print at the bottom of the sign: “Absolutely no robots allowed past this point. No robots allowed into this room.”

“We were right,” Eryn whispered. “They did want humans to be the first to find this secret.”

Because . . . it's so much fun finding out for ourselves how people can all die?
Nick thought uncomfortably.

“Finally we can find out how to save humanity,” Eryn said, almost as if she knew what Nick was thinking, and she wanted to flip his ideas around.

Nick blinked again—just like Mom—and turned away from the door, toward the open room before him. It had a black-and-white tile floor that reminded him of the cafeteria at school. The walls were a pleasant light gray. And the only furniture was a glass-topped desk right in the center of the room.

“Their technology had to have been more advanced than ours,” Eryn said in a hushed voice. Nick wasn't sure if she was whispering because she was awestruck or because she was scared. “Remember, they had already gotten past the early twenty-first century. That's why they have lights
that will still turn on after hundreds of years. And this room must have been airtight. Look how there aren't any spiderwebs or dust or mouse droppings. . . .”

Nick stepped forward, and he knew he was leaving footprints, since his shoes were dirty from walking through the cave. He shoved the door shut behind him so at least they wouldn't let anything worse in.

He was mostly just relieved that they hadn't found skeletons.

“Okay, so to find out all the secrets, we're probably going to have to figure out how to operate something that's, like, the great-great-grandson of an iPad,” Nick said. “Whatever we're looking for, I bet it's in that desk.”

Together the two of them walked to the desk. But there wasn't any sign of anything like an iPad. The glass on the top of the desk was smoky and impossible to see through. And though they both tried to get a grip on the glass to lift it, it seemed to be locked down tight.

“Maybe the desk itself is the computer?” Eryn suggested. “Like maybe computers got big again, instead of always getting smaller? Where do you think we turn it on?”

She began feeling along the sides of the desk.

“Doesn't this kind of remind you of something?” Nick asked. “Like . . . remember when Mom took us
to Washington, D.C., and showed us the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence at the National Archives?”

“You think this is the same kind of display case?” Eryn asked. “What'd the guide call the ones there—‘hermetically sealed'?”

Nick began running his fingers underneath the display case. He heard a click—and the glass lid of the case slowly began to rise.

“Oh, good job!” Eryn said, crouching down to see whatever was in the desk that much sooner, before the glass lid opened all the way.

Nick did the same.

Inside was a stack of papers.

“They didn't get more technologically advanced—they went old-school,” Nick whispered.

Then he saw what was handwritten on the top of the stack: “For human eyes only. Absolutely no robots are allowed to read these papers.”

“Okay, okay, we get the message,” Nick muttered. “This is something we've got to do for ourselves. Our mommies and daddies aren't allowed to baby us anymore.”

Eryn reached out and pulled aside the top sheet of paper. Underneath was another handwritten page that
began, “Instructions for the new generation of humanity . . .”

Eryn had always been a little faster at reading than Nick was. So he heard her gasp. And then he saw why.

The rest of the hand-scrawled message on the second sheet of paper was:

“Our own robots were the ones who destroyed us. You must destroy your robots before they destroy you.”

FORTY-NINE

Eryn took a shaky step back.

“Our robots? Mom and Dad?” she whispered. “They mean we have to destroy our own parents?
Kill
them?”

“There's got to be some mistake,” Nick muttered. “Or this is a joke. A
bad
joke.”

The glass lid, which had continued rising, began wobbling back and forth, as if it were meant to go still higher but had gotten stuck.

And then it broke off its hinges and crashed to the floor in an explosion of glass.

Eryn and Nick both jumped back, but Eryn guessed that they still ended up with tiny shards of glass on their clothes.

They were both too stunned even to brush themselves off.

At least we're not hurt,
Eryn thought.
At least the ceiling didn't cave in on us; at least the ground didn't fall out from under our feet.

Wasn't being told that they needed to destroy their own parents worse than any of those things?

“See, even their mechanized desks don't work right,” Nick said. He probably meant it to be funny, but his voice trembled too much. It just made Eryn want to cry.

“Nothing works perfectly every single time,” Eryn said, and her voice came out sounding like a whimper.

“Probably the robots who destroyed the humans, they probably just . . . ,” Nick began.

Eryn knew what he was thinking. There could have been some problem, one that turned robots into killers the humans couldn't stop.

“But the robots we have now, the ones like Mom and Dad—they wouldn't kill anyone,” Eryn said. “They're working the way they're supposed to.”

“Except that Michael and Brenda created Ava and Jackson,” Nick said numbly. “They went against their programming for
that.
”

Eryn found herself clutching the side of the desk. She had to, to hold herself up. Her ears were ringing, and she wasn't sure if it was because of the crashing glass or just shock.

Did you think there was going to be something cheerful about finding out what made humans go extinct?
she wondered.

She hadn't. But she had kind of expected joy—and maybe even fame and glory—in finding out how to stop humans from going extinct again.

She hadn't expected to be told she needed to kill her parents, and everyone else's, too.

How would anyone even do that?

She pushed the thought away. She wasn't considering doing what the writing on the paper told her to do. It could just be the scrawling of a madman. It could be utterly meaningless.

She already knew it was vile and cruel—and inhuman.

“Maybe we should at least read what else it says in these papers?” Nick suggested in a small voice.

Eryn didn't trust her own voice to respond, but she nodded.

“We can split it in half so we get through it faster,” Nick said, reaching for the papers.

Eryn blindly took the half of the stack he handed her. Both of them sank to the floor and began reading.

Evidently hers was the bottom half, because her first page started in the middle of a sentence: “. . . were on a quest to build superintelligent computers, artificial intelligence that would far surpass our own limited human capabilities . . .”

Somehow Eryn seemed to have lost the ability to read words in order, one after another, all the way down a page. Every time she tried, her eyes jumped ahead or began to see other words superimposed atop the actual words on the paper.

The words she kept seeing were: “You must destroy your robots. . . . You must destroy your robots. . . .”

She found the best she could do was just skip around, grasping a phrase or two at a time: “military implications . . . sending robotic creatures into war zones rather than risking soldiers' lives . . . became efficient killing machines, unsurpassed in their ability to extinguish human life . . . began to think for themselves, completely outside our control . . .”

In spite of herself, her mind started putting together a story, figuring out a connection between the phrases.

The military had been trying to save lives—human lives. They'd come up with robots to send into battle so human soldiers didn't have to die.

The robots were really good at killing. That's what they were
for.

But then the humans lost control of the robots. They couldn't be stopped.

The robots began killing everyone.

I guess they weren't programmed to count embryos
in embryo banks as human,
Eryn thought.
So they didn't kill us, too.

People like Dr. Grimaldi and Dr. Speck had known that. They must not have known how to stop the killing robots, but they knew how to start humanity again, after all the killing was over.

They just had to rely on robots, the same type of creatures that had killed all of humanity in the first place.

And then, once the human race was established again, they wanted Eryn and Nick and the rest of their generation to destroy their robots before humanity was destroyed once again.

“But the robots now—Mom and Dad—they weren't designed to kill us,” Eryn moaned. “It's different.”

Her eyes fell on a line on the papers that might as well have been an answer to her moan: “. . . clear that robots will always evolve, just like living things . . . it's inevitable that humans lose control of what their creations become . . .”

Just like Michael and Brenda had defied their programming to create Ava and Jackson.

“Ready to trade?” Nick asked beside her.

Silently Eryn handed him the papers she'd been reading, and took his stack instead. But she didn't bend her head to look down at the pages.

“Do you hear something?” she asked. “Outside?”

Distantly, even with the door shut, she could still hear the dripping of water somewhere out there in the enormous space known as Mammoth Cave. It'd been there the whole time, a background noise she'd tuned out while they'd turned on the light, discovered the desk, shattered the glass, and read the horrifying papers.

But something about the dripping sound had changed. That was what made her notice it again. It wasn't just dripping. Was it maybe also the sound of . . .

Footsteps?

Eryn clutched Nick's arm.

“Listen!” she hissed, leaning close. “What if some of those killer robots are hiding in the back of the cave? What if they heard us come in here? What if—”

Nick looked up. His eyes looked so big and terrified they seemed to take up his whole face. Eryn guessed he'd put together as much of the story of the extinction as she had.

“The signs on the door,” he said. “And at the front of the cave. They'd keep robots out. All robots.”

There were definitely footsteps sounding outside the door. They were definitely coming toward this room.

Then the door began to open.