The Download

The young woman looked around breathlessly. She didn’t know where she was or how she had gotten here. Only moments ago, things had seemed so dark, but now the sun was out, and the sky was beautiful. A clear blue. She felt like she could see miles of green pastures spotted with tiny red and blue and yellow flowers. It was such a warm and welcoming summer day, so she marveled that she felt so chilly and had a constant itch in the back of her neck that she couldn’t manage to scratch.

She felt herself shivering slightly, hands clenched tight, numb and tingling. She brought her hands up to rub them together, only to pause, looking at her tightened fists. The backs of her hands looked strange. She fought through the numbness of her left hand, trying to straighten her fingers. It seemed she had to focus on them to get them to straighten; even still, they felt numb and tight. She reached over and touched the back of her right hand, still closed in a fist. She moved her fingers up her arm. It was strange, knowing this was her arm but with something not quite right. Her arms looked thinner. Pale? No, tanned. It seemed like she realized things right after she thought them. Finally, the most apparent difference hit her, the birthmark she had had all of her life, right below the bone on the back of her right wrist. It was gone.

She thought about a scar on her left leg. A compound fracture in her tibia from ninth grade. She looked down and saw nothing but bare skin, flawless, no scar. She bounced on the concrete beneath her and realized the pain in her leg wasn’t there either. She had fallen from the giant oak tree near Westwood elementary while showing off for that boy. She thought for a moment. Taylor, he was Taylor. She felt like she was chasing a fleeting thought, remembering him from school, then nothing, but suddenly she remembered more. Where was Taylor? Where am I? She thought. With that thought, she was back in the present. She looked down at the concrete, which she could swear was grass moments before. It was as if, when she expected it to be there, it was.

The sudden change jarred her, and the cold and shivering overtook her. Her eyes were closed. When and why did she shut her eyes? She tried to force them open, only achieving a sliver. The beautiful countryside was gone, and she was no longer standing but lying down. She tried to move her head but couldn’t. She couldn’t move at all. As she struggled to open her eyes more, she saw movement in front of her hovering behind glass. It was a man standing in a room. She tried to blink as double vision overtook her, slightly opening her eyes only to realize it wasn’t a double vision. The man, or both men, identical men, stood there looking in at her.

Their mouths weren’t moving, but they seemed to be communicating as they looked out the window at her. She tried to move her mouth to say something to them and found it impossible. They were pointing at her and at the window between them while not saying a word. Looking from each other back to her and all around the window. She was finally getting her eyes to open more. The two men were in some sort of laboratory full of computers. One of the men shrugged and walked over to a computer console. She wanted to yell to him and get him to come back. Help me, it’s so cold. She kept thinking, wishing she could speak, or scream, or even cry. She noticed movement in the lab, the man at the console was looking at her and reached down, pressing a big green button. She felt her eyes drooping shut as she felt the itchy tingling in the back of her neck. It was dark again.

The two identical men walked over to look through the glass; it was not them enclosed, but her. The large white chamber, nearly eight feet long, stood four feet high to accompany the inner machinery and the woman inside it. They looked at each other without saying a word because their thoughts fluttered seamlessly between their heads.

“Why is it not taking?” The thought seemingly belonged to neither of them, just existing inside their minds.

“We’re not sure,” multiple voices echoed.

“If it doesn’t take, we may need to dispose of this one. Or open it and inspect it.”

“That is risky. We can’t let even one of these loose. Give it another hour.”

The young woman was once again standing, fully awake. Her eyes were blurry and vision fuzzy as she thought about the lingering cold in her limbs. She was no longer in the open fields, though. There were tall modern buildings around her in every direction. She started walking, her limbs feeling very strange as she moved down the empty street. A tall windowed building was stretching along her left as she walked down the sidewalk. She glanced into the empty lobby. She felt so weird alone on the sidewalk and thought, perhaps, around the corner up ahead, she would find more people. Instantly she was at the corner of the building. Had she walked here that quickly? It seemed to come from nowhere.

Looking to her left, she suddenly heard the hustle and bustle of a busy street. Hundreds of people walking the sidewalks. She should have known earlier there were so many people nearby. She turned and walked down towards the crowds. Every person she approached seemed not to notice her, and she couldn’t seem to put her thoughts into words to speak to them. A hand grabbed her shoulder and spun her around. A young man had her shoulder and was looking at her intently. His mouth was moving, but she was struggling to hear his words. It was garbled and static-like. She could make out some words. War. Clones. Many left. The last one was a question. Many what left? What war? What were clones? He was insane. Then she heard a name, Jean. Was that her name? She suddenly realized she couldn’t remember. A moment of panic hit her when she realized she didn’t know her name or anything about herself for that matter. Who was she? The man was shaking her by the shoulders. Another word caught her attention. Wake. Wake. Wake up.

The cold. Why was she so cold? Her eyelids felt stuck together as she forced them open a slit. She tried to visualize her body as it refused to acknowledge her brain’s commands. She lay there immobile, legs numb, the scar on her left leg burning as it often did in the cold. Clenched together, her hands were unmoving. She stopped. There was something there, inside of her right hand. She struggled to move her fingers. A loud suction sound and a pop. Warm air flooded around her as the glass moved away. The cold and numbness immediately transitioned to pain as the warm air brought back some feeling. The window had been a door, and she noticed as it opened that she was also in the laboratory. The two men stood on the other side of the door and examined her closely. Again she tried to speak. Again she failed.

The two men looked at the nearly frozen solid woman, then each other, and their thoughts flowed freely between them. “It’s is waking up. We should have just destroyed it.”

“No, that is wasteful. We can fix it and put it with the others.”

“Look.” A thought flooded into their minds.

“Its hand, the right hand, is shaking. There is something there. It must be interfering with the equipment.”

One of the men reached down and grabbed a small chain hanging slightly from her frozen hand. He pulled it out as far as he could before it stopped. Whatever was at the end of the little gold chain was stuck in her closed hand. He reached down to pry the fingers open. Snap! A finger broke off the woman’s hand and fell to the bottom of the chamber.

“You broke it, you idiot.”

“It was a small piece, hardly useful.”

The second man reached into the chamber. The woman thought he was coming for her face. She frantically tried to open her eyes more and speak. She could smell him as he got closer; it was an odd smell. Plastic? Or synthetic? His hand went around her face, and he felt him touching something behind her. The itching in her neck intensified as he tightened the cable inserted upward into her neck, right below the base of her skull. He pulled back from her and looked her up and down before stepping back.

The men closed the door, and the warm air of the laboratory immediately left her. It was getting cold again, but not before the pain from her missing finger began to shoot through her body. She wanted to scream. She couldn’t scream. One of the men had pressed the big green button, and she felt the anesthesia seeping into her body through the strange cable in her neck. Her eyes closed.

The haziness of the world was gone, and the woman found that she was no longer in a busy street but sitting comfortably in a lawn chair. Her two children were playing in the small pool her husband brought home just the other day. He sat next to her, smiling at the children in the pool. She was happy and warm. Such a strange thing to be so appreciative of, the warmth. Taylor saw her looking over at him, and his smile widened. He didn’t say a word; he simply reached over and took her hand. She smiled, looking down at his fingers interlocking hers. Most of hers. She was missing one.

The two men watched the computer monitor as the transition finished. The human’s mind had finally been downloaded into the machine, and the body was now an empty shell.

“It’s completed.” Both men thought at once.

As if on queue, the door opened. A third man stood in the doorway, holding the handles of a large wheelchair. The fourth man, the fourth identical man, sat there unmoving with a cable protruding from the back of his neck, just under the skull.

“I felt it join the others.” The man in the wheelchair thought to the collective. “What was the problem with the machine?”

One of the two men approached him, reaching out his hand and holding an object out before the invalid. A golden, heart-shaped locket hung there. It had opened when he removed it from the woman’s hand, and in it was a picture of the woman with a small family. On the back was the engraving, “Jeanette.”

“Toss it with the others and take this chamber to the warehouse.”

The man pushing the wheelchair guided it out and down a long hallway, hearing the other two men working behind him. He glanced to his right through a large window as they passed it. The warehouse, several stories high, the walls were lined with similar chambers. Frozen lifeless bodies of the humans. They would be used as fertilizer for the crops and food for the livestock. The Earth would be rebuilt. Trapped in hundreds of terabytes of computer storage, their minds waited for the clones to tap into the shared knowledge. The walk ended on a grand balcony overlooking destroyed landscaped, ashen fields as far as they could see. Fires burned off in the distance as cities crumbled. Waiting beneath them were several thousand identical men.

“We have done it.” The seated man thought telepathically. “The last human is dead; its mind is ours.”

With unmoving mouths, the clones cheered.