Chapter Twenty-One
The Creator
The inside of the building housed the sterile interior expected to be found in a hospital or a medical laboratory. The walls and floors, coated with sleek white linings, were pristine and unwelcoming. Chantel tried not to choke as the odour of bleach tainted the air. The guards, still uncharacteristically jovial, led the group down the white corridor and stopped at a door just before the end. There, one of them placed their fingers in the slots required to activate the opening of the door. The door slid open to reveal a decadent chamber, fitted out with luxurious couches cloaked in satin sheets. The litter and crumbs of food snacks were strewn throughout the room, completely in contrast to the luxurious furniture. Chantel guessed that this was the room where the guards spent way too much time per day. The walls of the chamber were covered in projection screens displaying the dungeon interiors of each of the stone structures.
‘It would have been every voyeur’s fantasy,’ thought Chantel, ‘except for the monotonous motion on show.’
The guards gestured to a door at the other end of the chamber.
“The Creator will see you in there,” one of the guards mumbled.
“All of us?” Wolram inquired. “Or just me.”
The guards had already made themselves comfortable again on the couches and grunted an indecipherable response. Taking that to mean that they should all go, the group hesitantly followed Wolram through the door at the other side of the chamber. Proceeding through the door, the group found themselves again in a large sterile white laboratory. Clearly the voyeur’s chamber was just an anomaly in this building. The laboratory was lined with shelves that contained all sorts of electronic equipment, a slightly less cluttered version of the CCC. However in addition to the microchips and electrical debris scattered throughout the laboratory, there also lay a vast range of paraphernalia dedicated to the human brain. Plastic sculptures of the insides of the human skull were set up along the tables, charts and other 3D projections showed close up imagery of the different brain segments, but by far the most offensive items on display were the various glass jars containing suspended extracts of the human brain in yellow coloured liquid, the pieces of the organ preserved in suspended motion like fruit set in jelly. Chantel almost gagged at the sight of them. At the far corner of the room, in a wheelchair much like Beren’s, sat the oldest, frailest looking man Chantel had ever seen in her whole life.
“Adam, you’ve returned,” he said in a barely audible hoarse whisper.
The group looked enquiringly at Wolram.
“Adam is my first name,” he explained.
“And who is this,” Beren asked, knowing full well the answer already.
“This is the person that made me,” Wolram said, barely able to disguise his abhorrence.
“Now, now, Adam,” said the Creator condescendingly, hardly even acknowledging the rest of the group. “I would expect a bit more respect from you. After all you have me to thank for being alive. And look at what a fine specimen you turned out to be. You were always my finest, my first, the prototype upon which I would base all the others.”
The Creator rolled himself closer to the group to get a better look at Wolram. Chantel recoiled as she caught the whiff of a mixture of medicinal smells wafting off his wrinkled flesh, the odours of purification and preservation which had been fermenting in the folds of his skin for who knew how many years.
“You know too well that I owe you nothing. I never asked to be alive. You cannot expect to be thanked for that. You only created me so you could enslave me. What are you doing with all the other purebloods?” Wolram fumed, barely about to contain his anger at seeing the Creator again.
“Adam, you must remember that was the plan for you and the others like you all along. The slaves you saw are playing a very important part in fuelling the world with electricity. We live in a world of depleted resources. It was always my job at Utopia to find a way to create energy sustainably. If you had stayed with us, you could have been a part of this.”
“I would rather have died than become a part of what you’re doing out there,” Wolram retorted, as the Creator ignored him and carried on with his monologue.
“What more sustainable mechanism is there than the use of human energy to make electricity? That wonderful contraption you saw out there, that generator was invented by me when I first came to this wasteland zone. It was my first assignment for Utopia – to find a way to make electricity. I was ecstatic with my success when I first built the machine. The sheer charge of the generator was enough to power up to 100,000 lights for an entire year. I was proud of having achieved what Utopia needed.”
The Creator took a moment to rejoice in having had achieved such worthy accolades from Utopia before he took a deep sigh, shaking his head to illustrate his disappointment.
“What I hadn’t accounted for though, was the fickleness of human nature. It was not long before the employees I took on to run the generator became slack and lazy, much like that useless bunch of guards sitting out there.”
The Creator rolled his eyes, waving a feeble hand towards the exterior chamber.
“I needed diligent people who could be relied upon to perform the integral role of making power for the people. Robots would never do; they need power themselves after all. I needed people that would do it no matter what, whether they were tired or bored, or sick or hungry. I needed slaves, people I could depend on.”
The Creator paused, as if to emphasise his disgust for the tardiness of human nature.
“At first I thought slavery was in the blood. I remember reading records from long before the Great Mainframe Disaster of 2160 about purebloods being kept as slaves.”
Chantel almost choked. Could it be that this man was alive before the great mainframe disaster? The guards were not exaggerating when they said he was over a hundred years old.
“That’s when I started the tedious process of creating you, Adam. I searched through our genetic databases for any last remaining purebloods that could be used as slaves. I couldn’t find any. It would seem that there were no more purebloods in existence. Then I started the painstaking job of analysing our DNA heritage, identifying all the strands of DNA that could be traced back to the ancient purebloods. Once I linked them all together my jigsaw puzzle was complete. I had the DNA configuration I needed to make the first pureblood.”
Wolram’s was almost crying with rage at this point, tears streaming down his face with the revelation that his entire existence had been the result of a vile act of a mad genius, obsessed with power and Utopia’s adulation.
“But it didn’t work did it,” Wolram choked. “You couldn’t enslave me.”
The edges of the Creator’s mouth turned up slightly, into what would be a wry smile if he could convey any more emotion than a corpse.
“No I knew you would never obey me, which is when I realised that slavery was not in the blood – it was in the brain.”
Wolram touched the chip in his head again in revulsion. The scars from his previous episode were still evident in the skin around the chip, making the surrounding scalp look red and raw.
“Yes, that was the start of the next experiment. You got away before we were successful in implementing the next stage. Unfortunate yes, but by then we had plenty more like you so all was not lost. We experimented with tapping into brain waves and seeing what we could do to control motor functions. Again this was a dead end. Slaves are not slaves because we can control their body. Slaves are slaves because we control their mind.”
The Creator moved himself closer to one of the shelves to fondle one of the specimens of the brain, submerged in translucent goo. Chantel could feel her insides getting queasier by the second.
“The brain is an amazing organ isn’t it? The mind is able to sense a hundred trillion different types of pleasure. Remarkable is it not? That we have so many sensors just in this one organ alone that are capable of making us happy. Eventually we, well I, worked
out that all I needed to do was isolate the neuro function that gave people pleasure. Once I located that, it was pretty simple to configure the chips to suppress that nerve. Without pleasure, people exist in a state of slavery. They have no desire, no impulse, no will. They are completely and utterly mine. I basically programmed the purebloods to want nothing more to life than to eat, sleep and walk around in circles all day. Its sheer genius, is it not?”
Chantel couldn’t contain herself any longer.
“You’re a monster,” she cried. “How could you do that to people? Have you no human decency? How do you think you can treat people that way? You’re a vile, disgusting old man that doesn’t deserve to be on this earth.”
The Creator acknowledged the presence of the others in the group for the first time.
“Is that what you think young lady? Is that what all of you, you strangers think of me? That I’m a monster for giving purebloods a chance of life? Is that what you think when you’re sitting there enjoying your holograms and riding in your tubes and charging up your electric motors? You don’t wonder where all the energy comes from? Typical. You people living in the civilised worlds. You’re happy to take the electricity, to use up our resources so that there’s hardly any left in this world. You don’t care about what it takes to make more. This is the price the world has to pay to keep turning. This is the last resort for power. What would you rather sacrifice? Another being’s liberty? Or your electric chair? Don’t think you can preach to me about respect for life and all that crap. Who do you think put us in this situation but you dwellers in the metropolis zones.”
Chantel felt horrified. She had never thought of it that way. She hadn’t realised that the consumption of electricity had been so dire, that the world was running out of alternatives, and that she, as a person from the city undoubtedly using more than her fair share, was partly to blame. Wolram wasn’t going to let the Creator get away with blame that easily though.
“Don’t you dare try to point the finger at anyone else except for yourself,” he seethed. “This is nothing more than an excuse for you to play god. You didn’t need to bring back any purebloods to run your machine. You wanted to so you could be in control of what was lost. You wanted to be the owner of a lost race. That’s all this is. Don’t pretend that it has anything to do with electricity or that it’s the fault of the metropolis zone dwellers. This is about you and your mad obsession to create people for your own sake.”
The Creator tried to conjure up another smirk.
“That’s the thing about you Adam. You were always too smart for your own good. That’s the reason why things were so difficult with you. But yes, I made those purebloods working on the generators. By virtue of that fact, and by virtue of the fact that I made you, they and you belong to me.”
“Human beings belong to themselves!” Wolram thundered in a triumphant cry. “You have never owned me, no matter how hard you tried. You may have spliced together my DNA, you may have sown the seeds of my creation, but that’s not the same as giving me life. You, you’re just a manipulator. You don’t have that sort of power. The only people who can make a human being are the mother and the father of that human being.”
“Are you saying that you are the only person with the power then, Adam? Seeing as you are the father?”
“What do you mean…”
Wolram staggered back aghast, realising the truth now about the purebloods.
“Well you must realise Adam that the purebloods, all of them, are your children in some way or other. You were the first Adam. They are all your descendants.”
Wolram reeled in horror with the realisation that his bloodline ran through all the enslaved, mindless drones working the generators.
“No,” he shuddered. “No, no, no, no!”
Before anyone could stop him he was shouting at the top of his lungs in an involuntary burst of anger. Hands reached forward for the Creator’s throat, arms pulled the Creator out of his chair, legs kicked and beat the Creator. It would be useless for anyone to stop him. That most primeval of human instincts, anger, had gripped Wolram by the senses and swung him into action. Amidst the screams and the shouts, the hammering and the beating, that basic irrepressible desire of humankind was making itself evident – the desire for revenge. The group watched in horror as before their very eyes a human life was lost; whether he deserved it or not, whether he should have seen it coming or not, the Creator was beaten to a bloody pulp. Wolram came to his senses all of a sudden with the limp body of the Creator slung on his arm.
“Adam, I’ve been waiting for you to return. I gave you life and you gave me death,” groaned the Creator, still defiant to the end. “You see, the circle is perfect.”
With those last words, the Creator took his final smug breath. Wolram tossed the lifeless and soulless body of the Creator away in disgust. By trying to become something more than human, by trying to play god, the Creator had relegated himself to something subhuman; he had deprived himself of that very force that defines human beings – the empathy for each other’s existence. Wolram discarded the Creator’s body for what it was, just the shell of a man.
Chantel slumped down on the floor exhausted. In the last few moments she had seen a man die, a victim of the most tremendous rage she had ever witnessed in her whole life. It was definitely the most action packed time she had ever experienced. After all the excitement she noticed a blinking red light in the corner of her eye and realised that she had left her internal hologram recorder recording the entire time. Thinking that there could not possibly be anything else that would happen to her today that would be worth recording, she reached towards the red light and deactivated the recording.
Just at that moment, finally realising the commotion in the room the guards opened the door to the laboratory and found themselves amongst a scene of carnage. It took them some time to react before they gathered their senses and tried to locate their laser shooters. In the space of that moment Beren had geared into action and pointing his wheelchair in the direction of the guards he delivered a series of powerful laser beams that incapacitated and disarmed the guards. Chantel looked at Beren amazed.
“You had your laser shooters in your wheelchair the whole time?”
“I told you I packed them somewhere you wouldn’t be able to find them,” Beren winked.