Evolution's End by Steven Spellman

Author:Steven Spellman [Spellman, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781732168756
Publisher: Spellman Books, LLC.
Published: 2019-08-27T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

Marcus watched the small television screen and could hardly believe his eyes. The images were from the robot’s own perspective and they were disheartening at best. The streets of the city were more crowded and filthy than Marcus remembered and the faces in those crowds showed no joy and their eyes held no hope. There were dead bodies in the street that people walked over as if they were stray pieces of trash. Marcus had watched from the robot’s perspective as a man was mowed down by a cargo truck that had been trying to avoid hitting another car. The driver stopped the truck but only long enough to check the man’s pockets for anything valuable. Then he drove away and left the man to die slowly and painfully on the curb. The crowds already lining the street and curb never thinned and no one passing by paid the dying man any mind beyond a passing glance. Death was too common for anyone to care much where it struck.

No, after the guy had bled to death on the curb one gaunt and sickly looking young man did stop to pay the victim more than a passing glance. He bent down to work the shoes carefully off the dead man’s feet and was gone as quickly as the driver as soon as he had them. A pale rainbow of refuse and human excrement clogged the hallways in the buildings the robot entered and in at least one building more dead bodies than normal were littered amongst the litter and human waste. Marcus gasped when he realized that this was one of the city’s only excuses for a hospital. There were more dead people in the hospital rooms than sick people and most of the doctors and nurses looked as if they needed to be in a hospital bed themselves. People waiting desperately for medical attention shuffled through a cloud of other people desperately in need of medical attention that had fallen asleep from exhaustion or others who would never wake up again. Some of the shuffling victims were bleeding profusely or else coddling injuries that were so terrible that broken bone and torn tendon and bloody lacerated muscle was clearly exposed through pulverized skin. It was an awful sight and certainly a more awful experience. After watching for a while Marcus thought he could almost feel the uncomfortable closeness of so many tightly crammed corpses, he thought he could almost feel the searing heat amplified by a closed building whose air conditioning system was probably not working, he could almost taste the suffocating fugue of death and putrefaction that must be permeating the air. He swallowed hard.

Then Ed the robot deftly stepped over bodies and moved around scuttling patients and staff, to check the charts inside the hospital rooms. Ed’s eyes not only functioned as high-resolution recording devices, they also fed the robot’s dual CPUs information at a staggering rate. Ed could tell a person’s temperature to within a single

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