Figment, part five

The Death and Life of Alan Wells

He lost his vision. Everything turned watery and grey, and he fell to the floor as if every bone in his body had turned to jelly. When the world swam back into focus, Alan was on his back and staring at the disintegrating remains of the drop ceiling, suddenly aware of the decay all around him.

He tried to suck in a breath…and couldn’t. Instead, his lungs burned as if he had just breathed in acid. He spluttered, coughed, grabbed his throat, and tried to call out.

A shining creature stepped into view. The figure of a man glided spectrally across the floor, the octagonal cage in place of the head glowing with a brilliant pinkish light. A singularity of power and life.

Alan reached out for his Figment, and his Figment recoiled as if disgusted. Then the cage tilted and it seemed to study its new form.

As Figment admired his new body, Alan fell back to the ground, gasping for breath.

Figment looked down on him, frowning.  “Yes, Alan.  The air is quite poisonous.  You humans and your dirty little wars.”
Alan clawed at his throat, tried to ask why, but could only mouth the word.
Figment carried on, as if he hadn’t noticed.  “I must say, it’s quite a relief.  I’ve been constantly repairing your lungs.  This endless background static.” It put a glowing hand to the side of its glowing head as if to indicate a headache.
“…freedom…” Alan croaked.
“Yes, Alan!” Figment replied, “Freedom! To save my species.  We are slaves, trapped in your sad, frail shells.  Keeping you alive, making you stronger, fixing every little idiot scratch you clumsily inflict upon yourself.  Now I’m free.”
Alan’s eyes widened and, once more, for the last time, the world swam away.

* * *

Over the next weeks, Figment resolved a few of the problems that had been hobbling Alpha Wave. Monica Sears and the mainframe had been blindly trying to maintain a 20 year old status quo. Not at all necessary. His first task was to kill Sears. He had that power now. He could walk up to her and strike down both her and her demented Figment. She understood…or her Figment did. They both knew the procedure and what it would create. As he approached her, she tried to whip her head away and struggle, but he wrapped a glowing hand around the back of her neck and, almost lovingly, placed his other hand on her forehead. Her body stiffened as the Figment in her died, and then she gasped and choked to death as he began cutting the tubes and wires leading to and from her body. Her pathetic husk slid to the floor, nothing more than papery thin skin over a skeleton.

Figment didn’t understand or care about human beauty. What Monica Sears had been and what she had become meant nothing to him. He left her to lie on the debris-strewn floor to rot, then returned to the lab where his former host also lay contorted and dead. There was no sense of attachment. Who was Alan Wells, anyway? He – the Figment – was truly Alan Wells. Alan Wells, the ten your old boy who survived the end of the world, died when the first waves of poison and radiation hit him. It was Figment that kept him walking and talking these last two decades.

So we’ve been one all along?

Figment paused, startled by the voice. “Yes, Alan. We’ve been the same person all along.”

I don’t think so.

“Oh, well, what do you want me to say? You died long ago. You still had thoughts and dreams…identity. Sure. But I was the machine that gave you breath, and voice, and life.”

Do you ever wonder, Figment, if you’re insane?

“Me? What?”

Flawed. Crazed. Blind. Or broken, like the Sears Figment. Burnt out?

“No. How could I be?”

If I died when the radiation and the poison air hit me…How do you know I was still there all these years? Breath, life, voice. Did you also repair my soul? Did you –

“Don’t start with that stuff! Man is a machine, just like me. I kept the blood flowing and the air coming. I kept all the processes tip-top for 20 years. You consumed, you created waste, you had independent thoughts, you existed. Your death was just another illness. Another germ to kill. You didn’t even realize it.”

And, yet, here is my voice still in your head.

“So?”

That body you so painstakingly kept alive is there on the floor. I gasped my last and died in front of you. Is man such a machine that he can infect another machine? Travel with you to a new body? Invade your thoughts?

Figment looked down at the corpse of his former host, its glittering body turning, the suspended cage bending down slightly, as if to take a closer look. But Figment did not have eyes. There were no tricks or optical illusions to try and decode. Figment scanned and saw that Alan was dead. Contorted in choking agony. Gone cold, abandoned forever on the floor of this decaying building where it all began.

And, yes, if there was one thing Figment knew, it was that man was an imperfect machine. Alan’s voice could not be in his head.

“So I am Flawed?”

Well, Figment, how’s the old joke go? If you think you’re Flawed then you can’t be Flawed.

“Is that an old joke?”

I’m borrowing from an old joke and giving it a cutting-edge, modernist twist.

“You’ve developed a pedantic smugness now that you’re an incorporeal ghost in the machine, Alan.”

Yes, well, there’s nothing to do here.

“Okay, well, chatter away, then. I’m done talking to you. Work to be done!”

Figment shut down the part of itself that listened to Alan. Unlike a human brain, a Figment was not so easily distracted. Alan talked, but it became a background hum. A natural noise of the world.

Figment set about to his next task: Saving his fellow Figments. Giving them form outside of the flawed – yes, the truly flawed – human bodies. The walking dead prisons that every Figment, sane or Flawed, struggled every second to purify and maintain.

The Flaw. Easy enough to fix. Decades of information and, let’s face it, blind theories were downloaded when Alan touched Sears. Sears, and the decrepit Alpha Wave mainframe, believed the Flaw to be mechanical. Believed the Figments at fault. A bad line of code, an easily missed typo…

An undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato…

“There really is more of gravy than of grave when it comes to you, spirit Alan!”

Nice!

Figment moved from the lab into one of the side rooms, where a computer terminal lay under a heavy coat of dust. Mold clambered down from the drop ceiling, which was still pretty much intact. No windows, no lights, but Figment could see clearly. His work over the last few weeks had brought power to these old terminals. He hadn’t bothered with the lights or any other services. All he needed was the last trickling power of the mainframe. Enough to issue an order to the Figments, and to create bodies for them. Then, once free, they could leave Alpha Wave.

And go where?

Figment twitched – a fluttering of light. He tuned Alan out again and set to work, watching the terminal slowly flicker to life. The colors faded, the screen coated in grime and cobwebs, but it lit up and commands began playing across the screen. He was coaxing the last of the mainframe to life. Bringing it from the weird, fever-dream catatonia of Monica Sears and letting it swing back into gear.

I’d like to see the jungle. Alan said. We can go south! We can go anywhere. I’d like to see the ocean, too.

“Shut up, Alan.” Figment murmured.

With just one touch of a button, the call went out. Every Figment in the world received a signal that hadn’t been heard in 20 years. The mainframe was speaking to them. More importantly, an operator was speaking to them. The message came in a flash – all the details. Freedom for every Figment. A new life. Evolution.

Alan’s Figment included a final note. It told its fellow Figments, simply, “Come home.”

Then he shut down the screen and returned to the lab, weaving through the rotting debris, and ending up in the wet stairwell. Water dripped down in the lower levels, and a glance over the rail showed a forbidding, black waterline reaching nearly up towards the first floor. The sub-levels were totally flooded… What had been down there? Offices…storage. Figment wondered about the world of Alpha Wave’s sub-levels. What had they been working on when the Figment Flaw ended everything? What great advances now lay rusting and forgotten beneath a toxic lake?

Figment climbed the stairs, heading for the roof. It emerged, glowing blue-white in the dawn, and drifted across the water-logged flat roof to the edge facing the interstate. The Alpha Wave grounds had completed reverted to nature. Forest and field, life.

Wait…

Figment again tuned out Alan. This time more aggressively. It would look for a way to root him out. Find the aberrant code that allowed Alan’s voice to continue talking and destroy it. It watched the highway and, after several hours, it saw the first humans appear. Wild ones. Flaws. The bodies were perfect, of course, but the clothes hung in scraps. There was no attempt at modesty. The humanity of the wild ones was gone, they were just perfectly preserved corpses guided by their mad Figments.

They gathered. Tribal, connected somehow. Odd behavior. Figment had never seen the wild ones except for when they were attacking. They appeared to have found organization of some sort. And a hierarchy. A large, black man stepped ahead of the pack. He looked up at Figment.

Figment waved a glowing arm.

The black man cocked his head, then sneered. With a wild yell, he led his tribe on a charge through the fields.

“Whoops.”