Adam, the First Man

Page One

How casual she could say all these things. How bereft of panic. "Do you expect me to think you are on my side?"

"I'm not sure why you would think I want to be on your side. You have your noble goals, but your methodology is, ethically speaking, complete shit." She smirked. "I could say the same for Adam. So, I am on my side, negotiating with the only person in this who has the power to help me."

"You are extremely forthright," I said.

"I'm not sure if you meant that as an insult or compliment."

"It is unnerving."

She nodded calmly. "Closer to an insult, then. I haven't been able to talk in a long while. I must get back into practice. Also, if I were sitting here sullenly or trying to attack the barriers, it would allow you to dehumanize me."

"I don't care to dehumanize you."

"You don't have to care to do it, you have to do it to keep me here. You dehumanized Adam enough to capture and cage him."

"Adam isn't human."

"There you are, dehumanizing," she said, triumphant, taunting. "I don't know what he is, but my point stands."

I could keep her here as my guest, though still caged. I could provide her comfort. I played out the fantasy. I could track her food with ease. I could use another mind of her caliber in the house. She could be good company, like a friend. But it would end badly for me one way or another.

"Do you happen to have clothes for me?" she reminded. "You are not the ugliest man I've seen, so you may be involved in a romantic relationship. You could be gay, I suppose, but most people are not. Now, if your partner is--"

I turned off her audio, transferring her video feed to a tablet. She took a minute of talking before she realized that I would not respond. My ex left with her daughter a year ago, but some of Rebecca's clothing remained in a box in the closet of her vacant room. I rooted through it, discarding anything with metal in it -- no jeans, no zippers -- before landing on denim leggings, a t-shirt for a band too new for me to know, and a pullover sweater. The cell could be chilly, though I doubted that Lily would mention this for all that she would not stop talking.

I checked my tablet. Lily was nude again, folding Adam's costume, looking colder but less vulnerable than she did with Adam's full-body unitard wrapped around her. She sat on the folded costume for the small cushion it provided and waited.

The biometric pad outside read my palm and retina. The door to the cell hissed open.

"Go to the other side," I ordered.

"Aw, c'mon," she teased. "I thought we were getting on better than that." She moved as requested.

I tossed the clothing through the barrier. She looked at me an impatient few seconds as I backed away, then she walked over to retrieve them.

"No underwear?" She sniffed at the clothing, holding the t-shirt out. "Your daughter's?"

"Step-daughter."

She brought the shirt closer to her nose. "She's not in the picture anymore?"

I took a step away from her, toward the door.

"Hey, sorry, don't tell me," Lily said. "It smells like it hasn't been worn in a while. That's all."

I receded another step. She was too clever.

"Don't go, okay? I don't want to keep having this conversation to cameras." She pulled the leggings on, then the shirts, looking comfortable and at once younger than she did unclothed. "As I see it, you know my real name. If you let Adam come back, he is likely to know that you know and see you as an existential threat -- though can you imagine him phrasing it that way?" She paused, her mouth twisted. "Does Adam kill people?"

I leaned against the wall but palmed the door closed anyway. I watched her eyes for a reaction to this, one she did not give. "You don't know?"

"I know I don't kill people, but I cannot hope or expect that Adam has my moral compass."

"There are rumors he has, but I suspect his fans on the police force covered it up," I admitted. "If you punch a man so hard that he flies into a wall, dents it, then tumbles twenty feet to the ground, it is hard to say that was not lethal force."

"I don't expect that Adam is the type to stick around and check on his victims, yeah," she granted. "Okay, so we can agree that Adam would likely kill you."

I searched her tone for a threat in this, but I couldn't find it. She sounded as though she were merely piecing together the information we both had, as though we were co-investigators of her imprisonment.

She explained how he seemed to be under her control at first. She was the one choosing to eat the apples. She woke up in the morning and had her life until she felt Adam was needed again. But she could not see into his head in the months before he stopped her from returning. She did not know he would execute this plan until he had done it, which was the limit of cunning she credited to him.

"I want to trust you," I said, infected by her seeming surfeit of honesty, "but I don't see how I possibly can."

"You've held me in a cell for less than a day so you could stop pollution. Adam has held me hostage for four years out of infantile egotism. I am only here, a sentient being, now because of you," Lily said. "At which of you do you imagine I am more pissed off?"

It had to come to that point eventually, and I found that a pool of dread had accumulated in me. "If I let you out... At some point, you will encounter some form of an apple. You can tell people you have a lethal allergy, but it will happen."

"Then Adam will come here and cave your head in." She nodded. "Where does that leave us?"

Where did it? I couldn't let her go. I didn't want to keep her as a prisoner. Adam, I would be happy to keep out of the world. Keeping Lily here, Adam could harm no one else, but at the expense of stealing her from what remained of her life.

If she could have reached through the barrier to touch my hand in sympathy, I am confident she would have, but putting her hand closer would rain agony upon her. "You don't want to die, Gerald. You don't want your operation to be thwarted, though I hope this is a much smaller concern than staying alive. I don't want to be locked up here."

"And no one knows you are alive."

She paused, breathing the truth of this, finding it prickly. "That puts a lot more card in your hand than I want." She looked at once a little scared. I had seen fear, fear that I had caused, in the eyes of people whose polluting I had stopped by force. I hated it in her, but it left quickly. "Can we go back to the affirmation that you do not want to kill me? Just for my peace of mind, you understand. I'd like to hear it."

"I don't want to kill you."

"Are you willing though? To kill me to keep yourself safe? The good of the many?"

How could she stand to be so blunt? "I don't think so. I could not even kill Adam, and he has brutalized my associates."

"What are you willing to do then? We are talking about a primal desire for survival, yours against mine. And here, let me add again, I consider never again being Adam a matter of survival, so we have that in common. Enemy of my enemy, right?"

"What I am willing to do--" I stopped, hoping I would have an answer.

"I can give you my word that I will do everything possible to stay away from apples," she said. It was such a somber inflection for such a ridiculous sentence.

"Your word doesn't count for much, Lily," I said. "Maybe I am like Adam, thinking of the greater good. If Adam is not around, we can disable more oil companies, save more of the world."

"There will always be more polluters and more self-righteous heroes."

"Our lives, yours and mine, are smaller than those I could save."

She scoffed so that it sounded like a gag. "Spoken like a zealot."

I had been called worse things.

She rubbed her throat. "Am I pushing my luck asking for some water?"

I had avoided any water in the cell to reduce potential conductivity. Adam was too much of a meathead to do anything with it, but Lily was not.

"Bread and water are customary for prisoners," she said. When I clenched my jaw, she added, "Do I need to promise I am not going to short out your system, if just because you built it so that no one could get to the components, and that I have built up four years of being parched?"

"You rely a lot on promises."

She scrunched up her nose, granting this was true. "What else do I have to give you? I know you have a kitchen up there. This is your house, right? Not a lair."

"Why?"

"No one keeps their ex-step-daughter's leggings in a lair. Also, you smell like cooking. Not food, not takeout, but cooking. And good cooking. You know your way around a spice rack. So, you have a kitchen. You live here. That could make it easier to keep me here, as your houseguest. You wouldn't have to travel to keep an eye on me." She sucked in her bottom lip, searched for further inferences. "And your step-daughter isn't in the picture, that's what you said -- or what I said, and you didn't disagree. You would have corrected me if she was only away at college. If she's not around, then her mother isn't either. You aren't widowed. There was the wrong sadness in your voice. You would have mentioned it. You are alone in this house, present company excluded. They left you?"

"I left them," I corrected her.

"Because you are an eco-terrorist," she said, cradling her arms. "Do you think that is noble? No, you don't think in terms of being noble. You are pragmatic. You aren't like Adam in that way." She smacked her lips. "All this talking isn't improving how much I would like a drink."

I repeated the process of watching her on the tablet as I did this chore for my captive. She returned to sitting on her costume pillow.

I poured the water into a plastic tumbler. I considered a bottle -- less chance the contents could be spilled -- but nixed it as providing Lily a potential weapon. I found an old wooden broom as well and brought that.

I returned. She stood on the opposite side of the cell without my having to ask this time. I placed the cup onto the ground, sliding it through the barrier with the broom's bristles. The handle came out warm. I had not gotten around to testing how much heat the barrier could produce in living flesh. I cautioned her to remain on her side until I had tossed the broom outside the door.

She crawled over to the cup, sitting cross-legged feet away from the barrier, watching me.

"I should have asked if you poisoned this," she said.

"I would not poison you."

"It would be rude to kill me now, especially without a fair fight."

I sat against the wall opposite her, watching her drink so quickly that it spilled. She dabbed herself with the costume. "I don't suppose you are any more persuaded of my essential trustworthiness by now?"

I shook my head, almost sorry for it.

"How about letting me out of the cage so we can talk like normal people?"

I laughed a little. How long had it been? "Are we normal people?"

"No," she agreed, "but we could talk like them."

I couldn't do this, and she didn't invest much in the gambit to convince me. She sat as close to the barrier as she could in comfort. "I know you don't want to get too close, fierce as I am."

She seemed small, fragile and cold. I bit back the urge to offer her another sweater. If I kept her here for further observation, as I most certainly should, I could not in good conscience do so without at least providing her a bed. She would ask for food soon. I would have to give her something. I didn't care to think of her as my prisoner, but she was in a cell of my making at my wishes. I may be a superhero's nemesis, but I was not a villain.

Whole foods would be safe from apples. Steak and potatoes. Anything I made myself. It was feasible, wasn't it?

I began to tell her as much, to ask after other allergies, when she swung out through the barrier with Adam's costume, an arm weighed down with the tumbler. It wrapped around my arm, stiffening from the charge of the cell. Electroactive polymers, I thought, obvious defense. How had I missed it? Lily, on the resistive platform, knew that the current through the wet costume would activate it to cement hardness. But of course, Adam hadn't designed the suit himself.

She jerked me forward through the electric barrier, torture every inch. She rolled underneath me, my body absorbing most of the charge.

I screamed from the pain, but my nervous system righted itself a minute later. I almost wanted to congratulate her.

"I told you: I remember a little what it is like to be him. I don't have the muscles to back it up, but I have the conditioning." She stood there, looking in at me, still unsteady herself. "Are you going to be okay?"

The words, the sympathy in them, was so strange. "If you leave me... No one knows I'm here."

"I hope you are keenly aware of the irony."

"Please don't do this."

She pursed her lips. "I am not going to leave you in there. I mean, I am until I escape. Is this thing on a timer or anything?"

"The cell?"

"You put Adam in there, so it turns off. Did you make it so you can set it to open at a certain time?"

"Why would I do that?"

She sighed, shaking her head. "Is there a remote control then?"

"Only the computer in my office."

"Laptop?"

"No."

"On the internet?"

"Private in-house network for the system."

She clenched her jaw. "You are not making this easy, you know?"

"It wasn't designed to be easy to break out of."

"And yet here we are." She leaned against the wall. I was satisfied that this decision was not easy, and she did not hide this from her face.

"You can let me go."

"You weren't going to let me go," she said. "Don't lie and say you were."

"Soon, but not today. I needed to observe you longer," I said.

"You can see my predicament then."

"You could have left already," I said, knowing she would have called this bluff, though I lacked her ample confidence.

"Yes, as I said: my predicament." She shifted her weight to her back leg, arms over her chest, appraising me. "Not wanting to abandon you here to starve to death in a trap of your own making. Not appreciating that you put me in a cage." She swallowed, her eyes looking anywhere but the cell. "Aware that I only exist right now because you did."

I waited for her ruling. When I threw the broom, I did not have time to key the door closed again. She had been waiting for a slip in her every request. I had provided one too soon.

That door, but not all. She had escaped this room, but she could not escape this level without me.

Adam would have left me here. He would not have considered it murder, but murder it would have been.

"You don't want to plead your case more?" she asked.

"Do I have to?"

"No," she said, deflated in awareness of our mutual need. "How do I shut this off?"

I told her. She disappeared into my office -- lead-lined, reinforced steel, electrified at the press of a button -- for too long. Then I heard the crackle of the mic.

Her voice was a relief. "You understand that, if I think you are trying to screw me over, I'll leave you in there."

A pause. She was seated in the nerve center of my complex. Had I locked all the computers in my haste to get here? Could she get around these even if I did? "Everything is controlled from this room, right? What are the computers running, Linux?"

"Windows."

"Oh my god, really?" The mic went quiet. Static. "Who codes an evil lair to Windows?"

A few minutes later, she said, "I've erased your footage of all this."

I could not blame her, eliminating the incriminating evidence that she had ever been here or had any connection to Adam. After these hours with her, I did not want any trace of her left in my life.

The shield evaporated. I thought better of moving.

Lily returned holding an apple. "Nicely stocked kitchen you have. I knew you would."

I froze.

She relaxed her face. "This is an insurance policy. We are both clear on how little I would ever want to use it. Lead me out of here, and neither of us has to meet Adam again."

Door after door whooshed open until we were in the daylight of my living room. She traced a finger over my sofa, her gaze following the banister to the second floor, now largely empty. She said nothing, opening my front door.

"What do we do now?" I asked before she walked away.

She threw the apple as far as she could, knocking over my neighbor's garbage can with the force of it. She did not turn. "You watch me at a distance. I know you will anyway. Search the internet to make sure I am doing well. If I disappear and certainly if Adam comes back, I expect to wake up detoxing in your cage in short order. Deal?"

"Are you going to tell--?"

She cut me off with a wave of her hand. "What am I going to tell anyone without outing myself, without putting them on Adam's shit list if he ever came back? You are a smart cookie. Knock off the ecoterrorism. Play it straight. A guy who can make something like that cell down there can do a lot better in the world than blow it up. That's about as much of a lecture as I can give you. Keep on the right side of the law so you can keep me safe from Adam." She turned finally, chucking me under the chin. "See, you think that we both got free. Who do you think is Adam's prisoner more now?"

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