Kill Switch: Chapter 40
We Cool
And that night I dream about a cratered face, the face rising from a pile of ashes, hovering in midair, bullets flying every which way, a headless zombie lumbering toward the head, attaching itself to the head, the head turning into an olden time television, static filling the screen, and then the TV-headed-zombie tilts forward, and the static turns to a livestream of The Without Hunter. He’s in hell, burning, chained to stone. He looks at me, his eyes lit with flames. “I’ve saved you a spot,” he says, nodding toward a set of chain on the rock next to him. “I’ll see you soon, Inbetweener. Oh, and don’t worry, my mom cooks the best goo!” He laughs maniacally, and I follow his gaze upward, to a cage hanging from the ceiling. Inside the cage is Mama Bear stirring a cauldron full of scalding hot goo that keeps dripping onto the empty stone, hissing with each impact, searing the stone black. My stomach lurches, and I tumble into the screen.
I wake up, breathless.
Yide grabs my arm.
“Vonn,” she gasps. “What’s wrong?”
I sit up, wipe the sweat from my brow. My chest is heaving up and down. I reach for a glass of water. I’m starting to enjoy the sensation of the cold liquid hitting the back of my throat.
“It’s nothing,” I say, taking a sip. “Just a nightmare.”
Yide strokes my arm. “You’re just stressed. It’ll be alright. In a few hours, the world is going to look very different.”
I set the glass down on a plastic sidetable. “I think that’s what’s stressing me out. Do you think we’re doing the right thing?”
“Yes,” she says, immediately. “We don’t have a choice. The Within is a nest of lies. We have to expose the truth.”
I take a deep breath. “I’m not so sure. I mean, is the truth worth killing people over? Is The Within really that bad? Think about it, people are safe down there. They’re taken care of. They live in abundance.”
Yide snorts. “An abundance of lies.”
I shrug. “Who’s to say what is and isn’t a lie?”
Yide rolls her eyes. “We all know that The Within is bullshit. They keep people locked in a gilded cage, doped up on tech and sex and drugs. They make them sick and then give them an antidote to treat the symptom, not the disease. They’ve turned an entire population into remote assassins. They’re ruining the land one game at a time. It can’t go on like this. Something has to change. Don’t you want to be that change, Vonn?”
I’m silent for a long time, thinking about change.
“All I know,” Yide finally says, “is that I can’t play the game anymore. I mean, for Efficiency’s sake, Vonn, I was using an auto-response synth to interview for jobs that I found so meaningless that I couldn’t even feign interest. That’s no way to live. I want more. I deserve more. Everybody does.”
Once again I’m silent for a long time, thinking about everyone. “But is it worth it? Risking everything? I mean, people could die tomorrow. Do you think that the truth is worth killing people over?”
Yide sighs, as if disappointed in me. “People are dying every day in The Without because thousands of Withiners are addicted to the dopamine hit of a high score. We’re the good guys, Vonn.” She pats me on the leg. “Don’t forget that.”
“Ok,” I say, leaning back, “you’re right,” but I’m not actually convinced, and when Yide falls back asleep, I get out of bed and walk to Elijah’s chamber. He’s asleep, so I shake him awake. He doesn’t look startled to see me. In fact, I’m reminded of Orson, the way he turned so nonchalantly and said, in a calm and assured voice, “I’ve been expecting you.”
Elijah puts on his spectacles. “It’s good to see you, Vonn. Bunny told me about your trek up the mountain.”
“I wish you could have come,” I say.
Elijah shakes his head. “I don’t think the trip would have been as successful with me present. I would have just held you back, not only because of my bum leg” – he slaps his knee – “but because of my anger toward my father. Now that he’s dead, I’m just now beginning to see that my anger toward him was blinding.”
“He loved you,” I say. “I don’t know much about love, but I know he loved you. And he was proud of you. And admired you. And, for what it’s worth, he knew he was wrong about dNet, that he should have never created it, that you were right to rebel against everything he stood for. He wanted to say that to your face, to apologize, for everything.”
Elijah nods, tears welling in his eyes. “Bunny said he died a noble death. He sacrificed himself so that the three of you could escape. I suppose our trajectories are crossing in that sense.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I’d like to think that my father lived an ignominious life and died a noble death. But me? Well, I’ve at least strived to live a noble life, but I’m afraid that I’m headed toward an ignominious death. I don’t think I’ll make it out of this cave alive, Vonn, and I’ve come to see my inability to fight with fists and bullets, as Bunny put it, as a sign of weakness. I wish I had your strength, your killer instinct. It would come in handy in a moment such as this, with death biting at my heels.”
“I’m not proud of myself,” I say, “if that’s what you think. In fact, I’m haunted by what I did to The Withouter Hunter. I just had an awful nightmare about it. Which is strange, really, because I’ve killed many times before, down in The Within, plugged into dNet, and never once did I have a nightmare about the lives I took. Never once did their ghosts come back to haunt me. So what’s different this time?”
“Knowledge,” Elijah says. “That’s what’s different. There was always evil in the Garden of Eden. It just wasn’t until the snake tricked Adam and Eve into the apple that they came to know about it. And that’s when everything went to shit. You see, Vonn, evil isn’t the problem. Knowledge is.”
“Adam?” I ask. “Eve? I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
Elijah adjusts himself in his bed. “Look at it this way, Vonn. Before, on dNet, you were killing people, but it wasn’t really your choice, because you didn’t have all the data, for lack of a better term, to choose between good and evil. But with The Withouter Hunter, you knew what you were doing, and you chose to kill him. Whether or not that choice was the right one, well, that’s for you to decide. But it was a choice nonetheless, and a choice you’ll have to live with.”
I stare at a spot on the cave. “Operation Digital Disruption is kind of like the apple you were talking about. The one that Adam and Eve ate.”
Elijah’s eyes alight with amusement. “I’ve never thought of Digital Disruption that way, but yes, I suppose you could say that.”
“Which makes me the snake,” I say. “I don’t want to be the snake, Elijah. But what else am I supposed to be?”
“Yourself,” Elijah says. “That’s all you can be. Because wherever you go, there you are.” A faraway stare overtakes his gaze. “In the end, Vonn, if you choose to go through with the plan tomorrow, you shouldn’t do it out of anger or a sense of injustice, or to defend some ideal, or even to save anyone else. You should do it to save yourself. Plain and simple. If you save yourself, the rest will follow.”
Elijah blinks, and there’s a great deal communicated in that blink, so much so that it will take me years to process, to understand, what it is he has just told me.
But for now, it’s enough to give me the answer I needed.
I clasp his hand and thank him.
“I’m not going to say goodbye,” I say, “because I refuse to believe that this is the last time we’ll see each other.”
He smiles wanly, and I’m grateful when he doesn’t argue the point.
On my way back to Yide, I run into X, who’s looking more harried than usual.
“Yo, simul,” he says. “I just talked to Cosmo about the plan. I want in, yeah? I want to come with you. Fight the power, you know.” He pumps his fist, jowls vibrating. “We cool?”
“Yeah,” I say. “We cool.”
And instead of going back to bed, I show X the shaft wall, and we climb to the top and stand among the spindly trees, watching the sun rise in the distance, bombs scattering the sky with bursts of white.