Hero (Gone 9)

Malik wanted to turn and run away but felt his legs would not obey his commands, felt that they might buckle at any moment. He had stopped breathing. His heart thudded in his chest.

Now the man, not alien, but man, stood an arm’s length away. And Malik saw.

“Yes, Malik. I am Dr. Malik Tenerife, of MIT. I am you.”

CHAPTER 42

To Be or Not to Be

“THERE IS NO escape,” Malik said bleakly.

They sat in the control room, a platter of fruits and snacks untouched in the center of the table. Armo had dragged a sofa into the room, and he lay spread out there with Cruz perched on one of the sofa’s arms. The others all sat around the table.

Dekka frowned and said, “Hold up a minute there, Malik. You’re saying all of this, the FAYZ and this new reality, all of this, really is a simulation?”

Malik nodded.

“And the one who created it . . . is you?”

“Me. Yes. A future me, a me twenty-six years from now, from our now. Yes, terribly smart Malik, doing terribly smart things in the future. Playing around in a lab. Coming up with a never-before-seen use of an AI to create a sim.”

“Well, get back over there and tell future you to cut it out!” Armo said.

Malik shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that. AIs aren’t computers; you can’t reprogram them. He . . . future me . . . cannot change anything about this reality. He can only watch. He and his grad students and scientists around the world, they are the Watchers.”

“What the hell do you mean he can’t change it?” Simone said. “He made it!”

Shade said, “No, Simone, he’s right. We can create AIs, we can feed them sets of data, but what they do with that data, the processes inside—”

“This is insane!” Cruz interrupted, jumping to her feet. “We’re in hell and the god who made us can’t save us?”

Malik said nothing, just looked down at the dusty, unused carpet of their “command center.”

“He can do something,” Francis said quietly.

“What?” Astrid snapped, shooting a suspicious look at Malik.

“He can . . .” Francis turned pleading eyes to Malik.

Malik, sounding like he was straining for every word, said, “He can turn us off.”

Every eye was on Malik. Dekka felt a wave of panic inside herself and reminded herself sternly that she was supposed to set a good example, supposed to be the leader, but what she felt was suffocation, like all the air had been sucked from the room.

“Tell us,” Dekka said.

Malik looked up, his face glistening with tears. “He cannot alter our world. He can only pull the plug. We would cease to exist.”

“That’s our choice?” Cruz asked, almost sobbing the question. “We can go on living in hell? Us and everyone? Or we can die? That’s the choice?”

“Yes,” Malik said. “I told him . . . told myself . . . that I could not make that decision alone. I know the way back now. I can give him our answer.”

“What is our answer?” Cruz asked, looking to Dekka.

“Edilio said on big stuff we vote,” Dekka said. “There’s nothing bigger than this.”

They found paper and pencils.

They found an empty wastebasket.