the Sixteenth Surgeon

Chapter 16 "All Hail the New King"

The doors opened and an Asian woman in her 40's gave them both a blank look as they passed. Carla seemed uneasy, noticing another woman that did the same unearthly level of ignoring. She couldn't even tell them apart, and Carla was good with faces.

"Was that the same woman?" she asked as if losing her mind.

"That's a little racist, Carla." he chuckled.

"I'm serious." she added.

"Yes, the same woman. Basically the same woman... almost there." he said as they passed another identical woman with the same empty eyes, and Roman opened a rather secure looking door with his thumbprint.

"What I am about to show you is classified and you may not understand it completely. You are smart, but this is hard to accept." he said, opening the door. She entered and the lights flickered on. The room was massive, surgically clean and white as if made of stainless steel and white marble. There were a few more identical Asian women slowly walking around, and a series of large glass tubes lined up in the back.

"What is this? Some kind of government hospital?" she asked.

"Not in the traditional sense. Do you remember what Natalie Six said before she died?" he asked.

"She asked you why you couldn't die." she muttered.

"No. she asked why I didn't stay dead. She became very suspicious and it was time for a reboot." he said approaching a computer monitor with vitals on it.

"I don't understand...re-boot?" she asked.

"Well, re-start...reboot, whatever you wanna call it. This world is not what it seems, Carla. Everyone goes on their daily life thinking it is the year 2037, and the strangest thing they believe is that they are all special, selected as one of the elite assassins in an organization, who has filtered through the masses and decided that THEY are the right stuff. They believe it because humans will believe anything as long as it makes them seem important. If you tell them they are another speck in the universe, then they question everything. This city is not the hub for a massive underground organization of highly trained killers who keep the world running by balancing the positions of power with a bullet. This city is a prison, a rehabilitation program. Most of the people in this are artificial constructs, programmed with basic responses and the ability to improvise responses, and appear human enough to fool prisoners. They don't feel, they don't love, they don't have the capacity for sentience like you and I, just enough code to look like a person." he said making a subtle nod and the Asian women stopped and slouched as if turned off by remote, freezing at the lowest point in her bow. "Just about every non-medical person in the city, coffee shop owners, cab drivers, bellboys and college students walking around: all bullshit."

"But why?" she asked.

"Because humanity is sick, and they neither understand the cure nor the disease itself. We are irrational and random, we breed without a second thought as to the consequences, or the understanding of how to best raise another human being, most of them just children themselves when they populate. Humanity tried several things to remedy this, eugenics, lobotomy, government power positions, democracy, military brute force. Nothing worked. Humans were determined to spawn more and more into a world that couldn't contained them and the population suffered for it. Billions died in wars, starved and killed themselves, year after year until someone presented them with a better solution. What is the simplest idea that determines if a human being is fit to live or condemned to death for being what he was born as?"