Tamara Wilhite
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Tamara is the author of Not In Thy Footsteps, Gone in a Flash, Eden Again, Neo-Lacto-Vegan, and May These Stones Give Shelter.
Be sure to read Byzarium's interview with her, as well!
“They’re just kids,” Donovan said to the Proctor. He spoke only after the door had shut behind them, ensuring that Marshall did not hear him.
“Do you want them to grow up or not?” the Proctor retorted.
Despite knowing that this day would eventually come for all of his students, it still hurt Donovan to know what could happen. To be a teacher is to know that one day your students will learn their lessons and leave.
“Of course,” Donovan snapped. “I don’t spend years training them so that they don’t grow up. I don’t want to waste my time.”
“As did their foster parents before you. As did the surrogates who carried them. As did the geneticists who made them.” The Proctor put her hand on the control panel. It lit up at her DNA and finger print combination, activating the drone. A door opened in the training room, revealing the black contoured thing Donovan had learned to dread, though he had designed its predecessor. His student, Marshall, took an immediate fighting stance. The boy had trained against similar drones in their dojo. He doesn’t know how different this one is.
The drone scanned the room, ensuring that there was no one else to deal with. Once in a while, teachers had broken down and tried to stop the test. When that happened, the drone killed them. For all those who had survived the War, the loss of those few was the price of preventing future generations from repeating history’s mistakes. Even a small act of terrorism by a rogue mind could destroy them all now. Better to teach and test individuals than risk another disaster.
Marshall knew this was a test. Donovan knew that the drone’s programming was calibrated to each student’s level of physical skill.
The drone began to circle slowly. It released several appendages into the air, mostly mechanical arms and a single stunner. First level. Marshall would handle that with ease.
“Why always first level to start with?”
“We have to make them overconfident.” The Proctor's voice brought a sense of déjà vu, briefly and eerily familiar, which Donovan chalked up to synaptic leakage. No one he’d known even remotely in his prior life had survived the War.
Marshall progressed to level 2 within minutes. “You want them to think it's easy to win,” Donovan commented.
“Superior ability breeds superior ambition,” the Proctor retorted, “and extreme ability brings extreme arrogance.”
“I know,” Donovan snapped. He hated watching. Marshall began integrating gymnastics into his defensive maneuvers. “Have you ever had a student damage a drone?”
“The machine adapts.”
“Have they ever damaged it to the point that the student won?”
“That activates the second drone.”
So there is a spare drone, Donovan thought. Marshall was already jumping and whirling far faster than an ordinary human could. Pity I don’t have spare students. “Have you ever had a student die in there?”
“Only those who used drugs or other synthetic means to boost their physical abilities.” The Proctor snorted in disgust. “And given the advanced warning, any student who cheats should be eliminated from the gene pool. If they cheated like that for what they thought was a standard fitness test, they aren’t fit to live in the real world.”
Marshall did a triple flip as he sought to avoid the multiple blades the drone had produced. Sweat made the shirt Marshall wore stick to his body, revealing a perfectly formed torso, the results of both advanced genetic and social engineering. Level 4. When the risk of physical injury is introduced.
Marshall had to cartwheel and twist simultaneously to avoid a barbed whip. A short stub arm thrust out abruptly, catching the boy in the chest.
Marshall fell backward into the window. The plexiglass vibrated. From among her forest of surveillance implements, the Proctor summoned an image of Marshall’s face. The boy was heaving for breath, nearing total exhaustion, his face red and strained. This was the hardest workout Marshall had ever had, Donovan knew. Their own drone’s blades were dulled by law, the stunner a mere device for discomfort. Donovan had warned Marshall that this drone’s implements had no such limitations.
The drone scanned the boy again, checking his physical condition. Hidden heart conditions and metabolic disorders sometimes came to light in these tests, and the Proctor knew that. The scan was of little comfort to Donovan. A physical flaw like that would cost a student more than the careers they had been conditioned to desire; Donovan had only vague knowledge of what happened to them, and he did not want the specifics. The monitor flashed green. Marshall nearly collapsed in relief.
The Proctor turned on a speaker. “We’re not done yet. Advancing to next level.” Marshall’s eyes widened with disbelief. The woman’s tone made Donovan wonder if she’d been in media broadcasts.
A blade combination moved threateningly slowly toward Marshall, prodding him back into action. Marshall, as some of Donovan's more leadership-oriented students often did, refused to budge. Donovan read his lips through the images; he yelled that the test should be over. A shallow slice to the arm made him start sliding sideways from the mirror. The threat of more blood shed got him on the defensive again. Marshall was angry at being forced to go where he didn’t want to go, as they all were. A stunner began firing at random, set to agonizing, adding another element to the mix of things to avoid. Level 5.
“What is the highest level any student has ever achieved?”
“Level 8.”
“Is that as high as this thing goes?”
“There is no limit to how high the drone can go.”
“Shouldn’t there be limits?”
“The only limits in the world are those we all agree to impose upon each other and must agree to enforce. You should know that.” The Proctor’s gaze flicked from the sensor data feeds to Donovan before snapping back to her assigned task. “You should be teaching your students that, as well.”
“I do. With great ability comes great responsibility. But they so often merely seem empty words -–"
“Which is why they must be tested. To engrave it into them irrevocably.”
“I thought this lesson was to teach them about their vulnerability.”
Marshall limped on a stunned leg as he blocked a spinning implement with his arm. Another implement, this one barbed, hit him so hard he spun and fell, more blood from a new injury spattering across the floor. “That, too,” the Proctor said absently.
“I wish it could be any other way.”
“Whether via foolish acts of free hand rock climbing, deep sea diving, or even murder and suicide, that belief that we are man-made Gods and should be treated as such has cost us. And everyone else.” Donovan’s heart caught in his throat as Marshall collapsed. “He’s close.”
“Not yet,” the Proctor said. Donovan closed his eyes. “You had to have learned life’s lessons to be allowed to raise them.”
“I almost died after an attempt on my life.”
“Human?”
“No. One of our own kind.”
The drone paused. He heard the console’s beep of an affirmative scan. The boy wasn’t critical. He heard the high pitched whine of a pain inducer. The plexiglass rang out from another impact.
“Over a girl?” the Proctor asked.
“Yes and no. Leadership struggle with a girl.”
“Is that why you lived? She couldn’t kill you in hand-to-hand combat?”
“No. She was fully capable of doing it. That’s why I almost died. I didn't want to kill her.”
“That compassion –- and the mistakes you made from it -- let you live. And it lets you impart those values to the next generation.”
The observation window shook from yet another impact. The soundproofing drowned out Marshall’s screams of fear and pain. Donovan asked, “How did you learn?”
“I almost drowned pushing myself past limits that I refused to acknowledge.”
Donovan opened his eyes and kept them fully trained on the Proctor, whose own eyes were locked on the sensor readings. “You don’t look impaired.”
“The only damage was physical and it's been almost entirely repaired. My mind is unaffected.”
If she could witness suffering like this time and time again, how could she say that? Unless her emotional centers, too, were affected? Or if she lacked the capacity to understand what was lacking? The sensor display showed Marshall’s heart rate approaching critical levels. Every instinct in Donovan's body screamed for him to slam buttons on the console in an effort to turn off the torture device, even as he knew that doing so would result in his dismissal and possible execution. Besides, only the Proctor could control the drone. He wondered what kind of fail safes would prevent him from forcing her hand to the controls. But the Proctor had to have other command methods, perhaps sub-vocal or pressure point based, to ensure her control.
Marshall crashed into the window again. Donovan saw his student's terrified eyes, the boy’s hands clawing at the window, screaming. Come on! Give in, and it’s all over! Donovan asked, “Does this thing kill the student if a teacher interferes --?”
“If you even have to ask, you have lost your perspective and should lose your position.”
Donovan’s mouth snapped shut. As much as he cared for Marshall, he cared for the right to teach his successor more. His life and livelihood depended on it. Marshall would come to maturity in there or not at all. If Donovan tried to save him, they’d both likely die. For life to go on, they both had to learn life’s lessons, and irrevocably so.
Marshall’s body finally gave out on him. He fell limp before convulsing in cardiac arrest. The machine immediately ceased its attack and lowered the boy to the floor. The drone retreated as the medical unit swept into the room. The equipment encircled the boy. Sensors affixed themselves as an IV line was inserted into the boy’s arm. The voltaic panels descended to Marshall’s chest. The Proctor watched with vague interest as the device discharged.
Donovan threw himself onto the window as a second jolt was administered. The first discharge had not worked as it should have. A human medical team was admitted through the side door and carried Marshall out. Donovan felt better knowing that there was, indeed, a human back up. They did care about the boy’s life. He remembered his own words: I don’t spend years training them so that they don’t grow up. I don’t want to waste my time.
“I’m never going to see him again,” Donovan muttered.
“Why is this time any different?” the Proctor retorted. “Unless you’re regretting all this.”
“No. I know he’s in the psychological team’s hands now.”
“That’s where they always go if they pass this part. They have to make sure he comes to understand the limits of his flesh –- no matter how engineered it may be, no matter how superior he was intended to be. And he has to fully absorb the concept of mortality –- something he shares with everyone and everything, even the humans we tried to dominate.”
“I bet the psyche team is human.”
“If you weren’t so blinded by your attachment to this student, you would have deduced that before now.”
Donovan wanted to race out after Marshall. He wanted to cradle the boy and tell him everything would be all right. He wanted to apologize for the pain he had caused, though he knew he hadn’t apologized for his own training sessions, some of which were nearly as painful. He ached, knowing that the boy would wake and want him there, only to realize that he was going to be living in the human’s world for the rest of his life. His last words to Marshall had, in actuality, been written by some psyche expert Donovan had never met, and they came back to him as the medics closed the training room doors. You have to learn life’s most important lesson –- that there are limits, that we all have limits, and we have to abide by them if we want to survive. Just because we have greater physical brains or mechanical ones doesn’t mean we’re better at anything except the speed and efficiency at which we can kill. If you want to grow up to live in the real world, you have to learn where yours and everyone else’s limits lie. . .and learn to abide by them.
Donovan knew the human therapists were experienced in helping people move past near-death trauma. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, his own doctor had told him when he’d been saved. Be strong for others, and you’ll make this world a better place.
In the end, his desire to make up for the lives he’d taken had led him to help teach the next generation how to live without killing –- unless it was to directly protect other, more innocent lives. Marshall might grow into a brilliant civil engineer on a reconstruction project or a programming wizard to recover all that data lost in EMP blasts. He wasn’t a medical type who sought to create cures for all the plagues that had been loosed, but then again, he might change course after this experience. Donovan had.
“He’s moved on to recovery,” the Proctor said.
“You don’t have to tell me that. They usually only tell me I can leave.”
“You seemed to need to hear it.”
Donovan trudged out the door, unable to bear the sight of the killing machine he had long ago helped design when life and death hadn't mattered to him. What price, peace? It was used to bring their children to the brink of death so that they would understand the pain they and their creations could inflict. This was the price of his kind's survival. Teach the lesson the hard way, or no more of their kind would be allowed to be created. He started to hate the Proctor for willfully participating in it all, though he knew that irrationality could get him killed.
This pain I feel is the price of our peace. I do this so they won’t make the mistakes I did, we all did.
Donovan wandered through the empty halls, knowing they had been systematically cleared to keep him from running into any humans. They did all of this because the humans required it. And his surviving peers let the humans release their remaining embryos a few at a time, to be carried to term by human surrogates. His kind were either sterile from the war or by design.
Donovan and the few of his kind allowed to train the young for these formative years lost them again to the human world they had nearly destroyed. Did his pain equal that Marshall's foster parents had felt when they had lost him?
Donovan longed for one of his siblings to talk to. But he was the only one of the 18 batch mates to survive. Why was it that only those who had almost died of their own stupidity were the only ones to survive the War? Donovan sat in an empty waiting room, tears flowing down his face, the emotions beyond his control. He grieved Marshall’s loss more than he’d grieved the deaths of his genetic relatives.
The tears stopped at the memory of the dead. Donovan closed his eyes. He hated his friends more for leaving him in the destroyed world they had created than he hated the humans for taking his students away in their efforts to repair it. There were humans who wanted them all dead, but there were too few people of any kind to not utilize good brains and backs to try and make things better. What price, peace? This pain - this price - for this peace.
Donovan heard the Proctor enter the waiting room. “I want to retire,” he told her.
“The supervisors who witnessed your reactions have already decided that.”
“What am I going to do?”
“You were the designer of lethal killing machines, you know.”
“I’ve been a teacher to them, too, both flesh and AI,” he said with only a hint of resignation. “My greatest challenge has been putting them both to productive uses.”
“You were good at your job. That is why your sentence was suspended so long. But you clearly can’t do it anymore.”
Donovan felt the pacemaker from his ancient injury go off. His heart faltered at the first jolt. He fell to the floor, the emotional shock making him unable to resist. The signaling device to cause the lethal discharge had been one of his inventions, too. A nice, easy, clean way to assassinate old people in your way.
“You don’t have to be here, to see this,” he whispered, not certain if his voice was on his lips or in his head.
“I needed to see this.”
The second jolt made Donovan convulse as his engineered heart refused to fail. His eyes locked on the Proctor, who glowed like a mythical angel as his heart finally gave in.
With the fading of his vision, he remembered the girl who tried to kill him and failed. She’d been prone, and he’d been unable to deliver the final blow, and he had been cast out of the gang for his weakness. She’d risen up and clubbed him on the head as he yelled at the angry mob of their own kind, making him the vulnerable one. She’d stabbed him hard in the chest, more angry that he’d bested her than the physical pain he’d caused. He was left to die as the crowd dispersed. She remained, and eventually called an ambulance to his location. She stayed in the shadows as they loaded him in. They had spoken silently, reading each other’s lips.
“You don’t have to be here, to see this.” He’d felt only gratitude that she hadn’t in fact left him to die.
“I needed to see this.” She grinned a victor’s smile. “Your emotions help you make excellent things that inspire terror, but they make you weak. As long as you live, you’ll remember that I could have killed you and let you live –- though you’ll probably only last a little while. You’ll have to remember that I’m better than you are for as long as you’re still here. And I promise you, I’ll be here long after you’re gone.”
She could have let Marshall fail and refused to revive him and let Donovan be there as he died, proving both of them to be painful failures. Instead, she revived the boy and gave him to the humans. All so she could see Donovan fail one final time, but on her terms, in her own way. It wasn’t enough for her to outlive him. She wanted him to know for certain who she was, so that he would know that she was the victor.
The angel’s face grew into a menacing angel of death. Donovan wanted to scream out to the humans that she was a far greater danger than he’d ever been, but as history had already taught him, fate preferred to take people too soon.
copyright © 2007, Wilhite
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