Simple (6 page)

“Don’t try to make yourself out to be so righteous.  You are the one who made the mess!”  I stood up and pushed my chair back.  “That’s like shitting on the floor and then blaming it on the person who fed you!” I said.

“Okay, okay, let’s all just calm down,” Giz said gently.  I walked to the trashcan and tossed my paper cup.  The coffee wasn’t cutting it. I needed something stronger.  Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything to be had.  No upstanding patient or doctor kept liquor on hand in a hospital, and I wasn’t the pill-taking kind of woman.  I sighed and pushed up to sit on a table closer to the doors. I ran my hand through my hair in frustration and exhaled loudly.  The men stopped talking.  Both were watching me with intense curiosity.

“Are you always this tense?”  Mic asked.

“No.”

“Yes,” said Giz at the same time.  I made a “tsk” sound and crossed my arms.  “I’m not a people person.  I need a drink,” I mumbled under my breath.

“I’ve got a pint of Jack in my backpack,” said Mic.

“Can I have some, and another smoke?”  I asked.

“Can I have some and another smoke?”  Giz repeated in a whiney voice. “So now you like me again, huh?” Mic said.

“I never said I didn’t like you.” I hopped down from the table and crossed the room to them.  I did my best impression of a nice-girl smile.

“Too late for apologies,” he said, reaching to unzip his pack. 

“Who said I was apologizing?”

“Oh for Christ’ sake, knock it off you two!” joked Giz.

Mic took a long pull from the bottle and then passed it to me.  The amber liquid burned my throat, and warmed my insides as it went down.  I passed it back and watched him as he took another swig.  He pushed the bottle back in front of me.  “Don’t you want to offer some to your friend?”  I asked with a grin.

“I don’t drink.  Fish knows I don’t drink.  You can have my share,” he said, waving his hand at the bottle dismissively.

“Your loss,” I said teasingly, and took another sip.

“So tell me about the code, Fish.” Giz pushed back from his laptop and took a gulp from a can of orange soda.

“Well, it’s something I’d been playing with on the side.  You know how we’ve been so focused on pushing out a mass update through the gateway?  I started thinking, what if we had some way of doing the same thing, only on a much smaller scale.”

“Right, right that makes perfect sense,” muttered Giz.

“It took me a little over a month to figure out what system held the simp master maps.” He turned to me. “Those are basically schematics that identify all of the sensors and the ports for each neurotronic cerebral mechanism.”  I nodded, although nothing he said made much sense.  He smiled at me and continued, “Once I finally found them, I started tracing evolution patterns and then, working backwards, identified each parameter.  Over time, I began to see a pattern that I could build off of, so I spent some time writing out some code that would shut down an individual simp at the cortex level.  Granted, the simp population works through distributed systems, but at an ideal nanotechnological level, manipulating the NIP should work, right?”

“The NIP, of course, that should totally work!”  I said with exaggerated enthusiasm as I tugged the bottle from Mic’s hand.  “Oh, sorry Hailey, the NIP is the neurological IP address.”

“Right, of course.  I knew that.”  The liquor was getting to me, and I was finding myself actually interested in this geek speak.  Well, not exactly interested in the geek speak.  It was more like I was interested in the geek that was speaking.  He continued to explain his theories and his findings, and I continued to check out his bone structure – and fine bone structure it was. 

“So you can shut down individual simps!”  I stated louder than I’d meant to.  “That’s totally fantastic…can we go smoke now?”

“Jesus Hailey, you’re lit!”  Giz said giggling.

“And you, good sir, should drink more than orange soda.  It’s a lot more fun to drink this!”  I said pointing at the bottle.  He shook his head and then yawned.  “Right, because you’ll be feeling so much better than I will in the morning.”

“Oh believe me, I’ll sleep good tonight and that is well worth the hangover in the morning, Red.”

“Don’t call me that.  It’s Giz to you!” he said, still laughing.

“I’m sorry to be so distracting you guys. I’m really trying to follow, but my head is fiercely buzzing, and I want a cigarette, a shower, and a pillow in that order.”

“All right, c’mon, I’ll take you downstairs for a smoke, because I don’t want to smoke by Giz.  He hates it.  Then you can go get your shower and we can finish our conversation.”

“Why aren’t you as buzzed as I am?”  I asked, realizing that he wasn’t even slurring his words.

“Because you drank most of the bottle, lady.”

“Well, fine and dandy.  Is it gone?”

“You can have the last sip.”  He handed me the bottle and I turned it upright, allowing the last of the liquid to do its job.  I intended to sleep and not dream of broken neighbors, or scary shark versions of myself.  I didn’t give a damn if I looked like a fool in front of these two, because they were dorks, and even though Mic was very good looking, he still pissed me off just by being who he was.

“I feel like you don’t like me,” he said, after we’d left Giz and entered the elevator.  I looked up at the ceiling to avoid his eyes.

“It’s not that I don’t like you, it’s just that you represent the loss of everything I ever loved.”  Booze was making me more blunt than usual. 

“I’m sorry,” he said, as the elevator opened.  I didn’t say anything more as we walked down the hallway to the main entrance of the hospital.  The double doors opened automatically and we stepped out front.  I instinctively felt for my slingshot, which was in my back pocket.  If I needed to use it, it wouldn’t matter how much I’d had to drink.  Simps had a way of making me alert regardless of my mental condition.  I took a quick survey and didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary.  Mic handed me a cigarette and lit it for me by cupping one hand over the lighter.  The wind was blowing and it was still extremely warm.

“So Mic, I’m curious,” I said, exhaling smoke upwards.  “How does it feel to be the fallen angel?”

“I’m no angel, and I never was,” he said flatly.

“Well, you were definitely society’s golden child, and it must be strange to be where you are now.”

“I never cared about being anything to society.  I only cared about making an impact in the scientific world.”

“I thought you were a programmer,” I said.

“I am.  I’m also a scientist.  Didn’t the media cover that?”

“I guess I wasn’t paying attention,” I said.

“Well, we see what we want to see.”

“I guess you’re right about that.”  If we were having a pissing contest, no one was winning.  I didn’t really feel like arguing with him anymore.  The alcohol had relaxed my nerves enough that I just wanted to relax and smoke my cigarette.  I’d pay for it tomorrow, but for now it was exactly what I needed.

“So are you and Giz the only ones here in the hospital?”

“No, there are two others.  A lady named Barbara, in her late forties I believe.  She was a patient before the simps turned. A young boy named Jacob who is with her.  I guess his parents were killed trying to get here.”  He nodded.  “That’s a shame.  Poor kid.  How old is he?” 

“I’m not sure, but I would guess about nine or ten.”

“Where are they?”

“They stick to themselves, and they stay in the ICU area.”

“Are you sure there are no others?”

I thought about that for a moment. “No, actually I’m not.  I haven’t explored every floor, and Barbara actually found me while I was scavenging in the doctor lockers.”

“We should probably do a full search of the facility to see if there are any others.”  I thought about this and agreed with him.  If there were, we needed to know so, that we could protect our resources.

“So, out of curiosity, do you have any idea why the simps won’t enter this place?”  I asked, flicking ashes in the wind.

“I do, actually.  It’s a statistical application.”

“A what?”

“Simps are designed to break down statistical data for the most probable outcome.  Their rationality indicates that any association with a medical facility correlates with a less than probable life expectancy rate.  To cut to the chase, their brains are wired in such a way that they figure anyone who is in the hospital is either sick or dying, and therefore not worth the effort to pursue.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said, remembering Jacob’s words.  He’d said he knew why the simps didn’t come inside the hospital.  He’d said it was because of the math.  I had to assume that his father had explained something in such a way that it related to mathematics.

“I’m not kidding you.  You have to keep in mind that Sam Yen created a virus in wartime.  He plotted the variables from both a tactical and economic perspective.  If the actuarial value indicated that a hospital contained a certain number of healthy humans versus a certain number of sick ones…well, I guess the variable data suggested it wasn’t worth the risk.”

“So you mean to tell me that all human life is safe from these android zombies if we just stay in hospitals or medical facilities?”

“Not exactly.  They are, by nature, built to evolve intellectually.  I can only assume that, in time, they will discern that there are human life forms worthy of eradication inside these types of facilities.”

“Eradication?  Ewe, you sound so clinically removed,” I said.  I didn’t like the way he reduced human life to a statistic.  I was more than that, and if he was trying to convince me of his empathy, he’d have to do better than that.

“I’m not trying to sound cold.  You have to understand, I’m an analytical- minded person.  It’s just my nature.”

Okay, I get that, but you need to work on your people skills.”

“So do you,” he said with a laugh. I exhaled the last hit off the cigarette and flicked the butt.  I was done with this conversation. Despite the fact that Mic was pleasant on the eye, I’d reached my limit on human interaction for the day and was ready to go back to sleep.  My body was demanding rest and I wasn’t going to argue.  I hoped that the whiskey would knock me out and keep the nightmares at bay.  I yawned and raised my arms up over my head in a deep stretch.  Mic stepped on his cigarette.  “Ready to go back inside?” he asked.  I nodded and we walked in silence to the elevator.  He told me that he was going to stay up late in the cafeteria with Giz so that they could get some more work done, and I said goodnight as the elevator door opened to take me down to the basement.  The cafeteria was on the third floor so he would need to go in the opposite direction.

Back in the basement, I did a quick inventory of my supplies and then changed into an over-sized t-shirt I’d found in one of the rooms.  It smelled a little stale, but I knew it was clean because I’d found it folded in a drawer.  The sheets felt wonderful against my skin, but I told myself not to get used to it.  In the back of my mind, I knew that this couldn’t last.  As I drifted off to sleep, Mic’s words came back to me…
they are, by nature, built to evolve intellectually
.  I wanted and needed to be positive.  I longed to find some semblance of hope before this android apocalypse destroyed me both emotionally and physically.  I knew there was no way I could leave now.  I wanted Mic and Giz to succeed and put an end to this mess – regardless of who was to blame for it all.  I made up my mind to help them, or at least to try.

When I woke up the next morning, I was disoriented.  It took me a second to register where I was and why my head hurt. The clock on the wall said it was just a little after eleven.  I’d slept halfway through an entire day. My throat was scratchy, and I regretted the smoking as soon as I swallowed.  It would be a while before I did that again.  I threw my legs over the side of the bed and realized that I was alone in the room.  Giz’s bed looked untouched. He’d probably stayed up all night with Mic, working on their code.  Neither scenario really concerned me.  In fact, I’d made up my mind that, as long as I was planning to stick around for a while, I might as well find quarters of my own.  The hospital was a safe zone (at least for now) so there was no reason to stay down in the basement.  I’d scout out a place that would give me the privacy I needed, after I got something to eat.  After washing my face, brushing my teeth, and changing into some clean clothes, I collected all of my things, stuffed them back in my backpack, and slung it over my shoulder.  I spent a little time scouting for a potential room for myself, and then I went up to the cafeteria in search of them.

When I arrived, I found the two men sitting on either side of a very hysterical Barbara.  Her face was buried in her hands, and she was rocking back and forth muttering, “Oh God, please, please…no!”

“What’s going on?” I asked as I approached.

“Jacob’s gone missing,” said Giz.

“How long?” I asked, dropping my pack on an empty table.

“Sometime during the night.  She woke up and he was gone.  We heard her running down the halls screaming for him.  We’ve all been looking for him ever since.”  The woman moaned miserably.  “It’s my fault, I should have known.”

“Should have known what?”  I asked.