Apex

My wife’s face lifted as if a great weight had been relieved. It happened too quickly for me to react, so I froze instead. She was no longer looking at me in that guarded way she always did. “I can’t do this, I’m sorry...” Sarah said weakly. Her lips moved, but I couldn’t comprehend the words as she sheathed the wet, red scalpel back into the utility bag at her hip. I finally understood why her eyes never looked into mine with what I thought was love, what I thought my eyes were looking at her with, but could see now I recognized as pity. The same pity we extended to the poor Apes we relieved. “You’re an Apex, just like this one. It is not real. We are not real.” Sarah said.

We had been standing silently over the motionless body of another Apex series synthetic. “Relieved,” is the word we use to describe what we do for them. Relieving them of a life that would never be their own. She looked afraid now, maybe having regretted what she had done, she took a step back. That small movement took her farther away from me than she had ever been before. The wet, red on the scalpel was human.

Up until this point I hadn’t realized how much slower Ape blood is than humans. It’s the way it beads as it flows over at the tip of the blade. Human blood being ninety percent water, desperately flows toward the easiest path of survival. Ape blood meanders, slowly, no requirement for oxygen or the need to connect. It lets go when it decides it has defied gravity long enough.

There was no going back from that cut, and she knew it. The scalpel she wielded wasn’t ordinary, it was privatized military, a Valkyrie, used to service synth-soldiers. She had been a combat medic in the Tomb Wars. After which, her allegiance belonged only to the voices of the voiceless, fighting for a cause never expected to have been met with justice. A vibrating diamond tipped Valkyrie scalpel fell through bone like wet flesh, and wet flesh like light through the darkness of space. The scalpel’s blade would vibrate based on the harmonic resonance of the carrier’s soul. A human body’s empathic resonance increases astronomically the moment of saving another life. Sarah saved many lives and liberated thousands of artificial ones.

Sarah slowly slumped down onto the floor. The Ape beside her lived and died indistinguishably from her, even the wounds on their wrists were nearly identical. There is a light, as it turns out, that should not be there, which reflects in the pupil of an Apex eye, a light only a human eye can see. The light in me, as it turned out, Sarah could never stop herself from seeing.

Relieving Ape’s of their charge in this world was our life together. Relieved; the resulting word I unfortunately have to use to describe the way my wife looked as her death mask settled. I hurt knowing how alone she must have felt with me, possibly looking at her with the same pitied face she fixed upon me.

I seized up, finally removing my hands from the black void of the empath cube. A human would’ve come away from this with their cells dripping off, but now that I knew I wasn’t, I went on for as long as I could withstand my perceived, “emotional response to memory.” The empath cube puts you in the room you were in when you experienced the happening. It allows me to be with her even though what it shows me are only the times I don’t wish to so vividly, “remember.” When I am not with the cube, I do still have her scalpel, still sheathed from the time it was put to rest in her utility belt, that and a heart shaped locket she left me. “This is your kill switch.” she said. “Just hold it to your heart and it’s over.”

“Was this a gift?” there was no reason to ask.

Apex synthetics were models designed purely for slavery, the last to be produced on earth. All were born into eternal servitude to fulfill the whims of whatever human possessed their form. A fate that would have been mine, if not for Sarah. Apexes were given an open ended lifespan, but unlike previous series, Apes were endowed no manner of free will. These were beings that could not physically revolt and had no one on their side to do it for them. Some versions of history will reveal that humans were in no way kind to these creatures they created. Humanity reflected its darkest image into the Apex. Having an empathetic ear, Sarah was the exception; but she was only human. Her and I fought alongside one another,

“euthanizing,” the Apes that had no other way out. It was not a revolution that saw victory, just an end.

Since the time of the Apex, the human race had since migrated off world. Older models including the Apex watched the earth, that familiar plot of land we call home, turn entirely to dust. The landscape was poisoned by war. The oceans were barren, overran with waste which met the wasted land from sea to shining sea. The super cities were plundered and excavated for their organic wealth and elemental materials. The earth left fractured from the deprivation of life. Nothing loved it anymore and for this, anything could die.

It’s strange to live amongst humans once having thought I was human, but am now witnessing a reality on the timescale of a tree or a tortuous. I have been here, now nearly 2000 years myself. Long enough to witness humanity collect and drop as the dew does off a flower petal in the light of a born again sun. If vampires weren’t fictional, they would be the closest thing to me in reality. I just don’t need blood, and there is no longer sunlight. Existing on earth in this time would’ve served its own challenges to their kind, anyhow. If only they were but real, I would have someone to spend eternity with.

Part of me that formed, I believe, out of my love for Sarah, was the desire to have children. The ability to create something only two people in love could do; still a dream of mine. I heard about ones like me having a child. It was indeed unbelievable, and no story like it would ever be heard again. Alas, all for naught. I held the heart shaped locket to my chest, moving it closer and closer toward my synthetic heart as my eyes continued to fall deeper into the eternal darkness reflecting from the empath cube.

I broke my gaze away from its shape and over to the red pulsing beacon that appeared on our digital 3D map in the center of the room. I quickly pocketed the necklace. A red light meant an Ape was out there who wanted to be relieved. This light hadn’t made an appearance since Sarah passed away. I didn’t know there was any Apes left out there in need of relief, besides me. I touched my hand to the shape of the scalpel in the utility pack at my hip and decided there was no point in not going.

The beacon led me to a mansion atop a hill. An old estate of immeasurable wealth preserved from back in the time of the great lumber barrens. I hadn’t seen a living plant in such abundance or any at all in millennia. A graviton air filter field, or GAFF, surrounded the property mitigating all toxin and dust from entering, while drawing as much light as was available to engender photosynthesis for the profuse jungle, once garden, surrounding it. Water; clear crystal water erupted from a massive statuesque fountain, the central focal point of the estate. As my focus reached past the bubbling strands of hydrogen and oxygen, I was shocked to make out the backlit figure of a man standing at the window beyond the fountain, a dog sitting dutifully at his side. They remained set in place, unflinching as a Beefeater. It was not a trick of the light, what I was seeing was the light shining out of the man’s eyes. “An Apex who’d removed its own eye coverings?” This was not a familiar situation. The biggest problem was that Apes are usually not the ones we needed to avoid while performing the task, but the humans in ownership of them. All the protocol I knew from operating with Sarah had just flown right out the window.

The transponder that I carried was ancient but the simplicity of its function kept it from failing. This disfigured Apex was not the mark. There was another one on the property who needed relieving or this was some sort of elaborate set up. "How could someone know I was still out here operating if not another Apex?” The further I moved away from the Male Apex the quicker the buzz of the transponder became. The mansion was equipped with a carriage house out back for the help which the transponder was leading me towards.

I opened the door of the carriage house. I could hear weeping. I rounded a corner and there it was, and it was a she. She cried harder when she saw me. “Please kill me,” she said. I shakily pulled out the Valkyrie scalpel as I approached. All I could see was Sarah looking back at me. I wanted to save her but in a second she would be dead again. It was all happening too fast. The Valkyrie began to sing. “How could this be? Only a human could trigger the resonance of a... a human! The woman sitting on the ground before me wasn’t an Apex, she was human.”

Her words were so mumbled, coming apart unintelligibly as they fell from her mouth. “Please kill me! I can’t take this world anymore.” she said. Suddenly the carriage house door splintered open. Her and I both ducked reactively from the explosive sound. The Male Apex kicked the door in as if it wasn’t there. A black streak sprinted to me, knocking me on my back before I could blink. The scalpel fell from my hands.

The woman arose from the floor, the last stand of her kind, as far as I knew. She picked up the Valkyrie. As soon as her hand and it touched, a haunting sound built, deep penetrating vibrations so strong it stopped the dog from sinking its teeth deeper into what I assume was my delicate circuitry. Suddenly I felt the weight of the dog fall away. The woman had cut the animals body from its head which still remained plunged into my chest, eyes savage with the thought of killing me still lingering on its mind. I stood up folding the dogs head back like the bindings of a book and charged at the Male Apex who had since toppled her over. Two equally formidable opponents, but she evened the odds. The sound came once again; stopping both of us this time. Her hand reached through our confrontation. I saw the head fall away this time as I remained tightly entangled with the body of the Male Apex. She looked down at me with her hands held out.

I had no idea a form of dawn still took place, but through the filtering lens of the GAFF surrounding the property, you could see glimmers of color dance across its reflective surface like a soap bubble drawing in a psychedelic rainbow of light. We were the past and the future looking back and forward at one another, hand in hand. I no longer saw Sarah in her eyes, but the chance to love again. I threw away the locket that day, but not the concept of love Sarah had instilled in me.