by Ryan Schow
“Told you,” Eudora said. She clamped a hand on her back wheel, stopping them suddenly so she could say, “I want to watch them go.”
“We’re leaving ma’am.”
“If I can’t see your butts-a-shakin’, then you ain’t leaving.”
Jesus, God…why?
Snickering but leaving empty handed, the police officers walked away and Eudora watched them get into their cruiser. They started the car, waited for her to go inside. Draven wheeled her in and shut the door.
The second they started to drive away, Eudora said, “I’ll be out front.”
“Not with the gun!” Draven had said, angry that she was this much trouble most of the time.
She went outside with the shotgun anyway and no one called the cops on her as of that moment. But now he could hear her in the coat closet where she had her gun rack and the gun safe. She kept the pistols and the ammo in the safe, but she kept the shotgun loaded and in reach.
When Draven chided her for getting a safe that could hold pistols only, she said, “An old broad like me doesn’t have time to be futzing ‘round with the gun safe, then even more time futzing ‘round with them big ass shotgun rounds. These fingers aren’t what they used to be! And people these days, they have no regard for your things or your well being. So the shotgun stays loaded and ready to go and that’s that!”
Now she was worried about drones.
“I said no gun!” Draven called down the same as he’d done dozens of times before. This time, he raised his voice in the hopes of preventing yet another small catastrophe.
“I ain’t a dog,” she muttered. “You can’t tell me not to crap on the carpet! Not in my house!”
He was about to turn the corner on a bad mood when she said that and started him laughing. When he could compose himself a second later, he said, “This is my house, Grandma and I can tell you not to crap on the carpet, not to spy on the neighbors and not to sit on the front porch with a rifle if I want.”
“It’s a shotgun, not a rifle!” she said before mumbling something to herself just out of earshot. He was getting up to go after her when the phone rang. He picked it up, and it was an empty line.
Strange.
“Back to work,” he said, a mantra he repeated often. But how could he work with all these emails and texts from Carver, Eudora’s antics and now a drone sighting not only in the city but on his very block?
“Productivity equals happiness and hard work equals longevity,” he said out loud.
Draven didn’t like other people that much, nor did he like the corporate work world. He fought hard to break free. The digital detective business helped him do that, but it did not run itself. He had to work. Now he heard the front door open and shaking his head, he got up to go after her. As much as he loved his grandmother, and he loved her terribly, he sometimes wondered if she’d gone all the way around the imaginary age wheel and hit age two again. The woman was incorrigible! And honest to God, he didn’t have time to be chasing her around like an errant toddler.
“Focus,” he said aloud. He sat back down at his desk, vowed to deal with her only if the cops came. If she wanted to sit out on the porch with a weapon, then so be it.
His online detective agency wasn’t a job he was very proud of, but it paid the bills and allowed him to stay at home to care for Eudora. Besides, he was good at what he did. He was a ghost. No footprints. And he never shared personal photos or private conversations beyond the necessary information he was paid for, so in one sense, he was putting matters right and preserving people’s dignity at the same time.
“They’re fighting right out front again!” Eudora said from the doorway, still too loud.
“It’s not our business!”
For awhile Eudora remained quiet. She went outside, but she came back in a few minutes later. It was warmer than usual for this time of year, but it was still cool. He imagined she needed to warm her hands, or get some gloves and a scarf.
When Eudora called up to him again, he’d been taking notes on a promiscuous underage girl who wasn’t thinking of the implications of putting her mock bondage pics on Snapchat. It was crazy that people still failed to realize other people could still screenshot these illicit photos with their cell phone cameras before the allotted time ran out. In this case, his client was a single father just trying to protect his daughter’s virtue, which Draven quickly learned she’d apparently given away at age thirteen. This was not a case he enjoyed in the slightest.
It was, in fact, a bit depressing.
“That deadbeat next door, he opened his trunk then slammed the lid when Adeline came out.”
“Just now?”
“No, earlier,” she said.
“So?”
“What do you think he was hiding?”
“We’re all hiding something, Grandma. And some of us are also working.”
“I’m going out on the porch again.”
“Not with the gun.”
“Of course with the gun!”
He sat up in his chair, fought the urge to stretch, or to go and take the shotgun from her.
“Grandma, no. We don’t need people calling the cops again.”
“Fine, I’m not taking the gun.”
He heard her heading for the front door. He got up and went to the top of the stairs where he saw her rolling to the door with her shotgun laid across her lap. Lord help me. He was about to go after her when the phone rang again.
“For the love of God,” he muttered.
Stuck between stopping his grandmother from breaking Chicago’s gun laws again and getting to his phone, he checked the number. The caller ID read: Carver Gamble. Draven picked up the phone to his friend freaking out.
“Dude, Draven!” Carver said, breathless. “Something’s happening here in Palo Alto!”
“The drones?”
“No man, massive power drain. I heard of this, but in theory man, not in reality. Like from a past case of this or something.”
“What are you talking about? What kind of a power drain?”
“I don’t know man. Like…it’s…”—and then he dropped his voice to a whisper—“I think it has something to do with the new quantum computer. That’s what I’ve been watching over.”
“Are the lights flickering or something?” he asked.
“No man…my freaking nose is bleeding and my head feels like…like it’s being—oh, there. Whoa, man. What the hell?”
“What?” Draven asked, breathless, a thin sheen of sweat forming on the back of his neck. Carver wasn’t one to bend to conspiracy theories or come undone so quickly. “Hey, bro…what’s going on over there?”
“It’s like this thing isn’t just sucking the power grid dry, it’s like it’s pulling at the very fabric of th—”
Carver’s voice was suddenly replaced with a dial tone, the sound of a line crackling, and then a far away laughter. Draven pulled the phone away from his ear, looked at it. His forearms, thighs and temples were suddenly hit with a hard chill that quickly turned to goosebumps.
The laughter emanating from the phone got louder and louder until he threw it to the other side of the room where it just shut off.
He stood there horrified for what felt like forever until he could snap out of it. Then the front door opened and his grandmother shouted out to him. “Just saw another one of them drones zipping by!”
“Are you sure?” he asked, louder than he intended, almost manic sounding.
“Positive!”
A sinking feeling formed in his gut. A bit of dread matched with a fear like he’d never felt before. This crazy babbling from Carver—all this talk of drones and bloody noses and quantum computers, coupled with Eudora’s impishness and now two drones—was starting to really drill into him. And then there was the empty line followed by that creepy laughter…
Should I be working right now? Or looking into this?
Rather than running out front to see if more drones were coming through the neighborhood,
he scanned Facebook for anomalies and found more than one person freaking out about drones gathering over the city.
He typed “Palo Alto Stanford Power Drain” in Google’s browser and the screen went black.
“What the balls?”
He looked down to see if the computer’s power light was still on and it was. A face suddenly appeared on the screen: Queen Elizabeth II’s face. Except it was all silver. Then the face morphed into a silver Marilyn Monroe. He suddenly knew what was happening.
Massive hack.
But what kind of hack overtook a computer with the kind of security he had? And since when did hackers hit cell phones at the same time as computers?
“You gonna come out here, Draven?” his grandmother said again. “More of these things just blew by. Something’s going on! Get your gun!”
Sparking to life, he hurried downstairs, unarmed to where his grandmother was on the porch, her shotgun at the ready.
He looked down and said, “Really?”
She frowned, saw he wasn’t armed, then pulled a .45 from inside her robe and handed it to him. He took it, tucked it in the back of his pants and said, “We talked about this!”
“You talk too much,” she said.
At this point, if he hadn’t had all these strange things happening, or the calls from Carver, he would have thought she was losing it. But now the images from the skies over New York and San Francisco were tunneled into his mind.
He glanced next door, saw the purple muscle car was gone. He was about to say something when Adeline and their daughter, Brooklyn walked outside, got in the older Audi and headed out for what looked like work and school.
God she’s beautiful.
Both of them.
If Adeline’s husband—Brooklyn’s father—did indeed desert them, the man was a damn fool.
As they drove by, Brooklyn stared through the window at him. He couldn’t pull his eyes off her. She gave a slight wave and a hesitant smile. He waved back, the low wattage smile of his matching the low wattage smile of hers.
“She’s too young for you,” his grandmother said.
“I’m only three years older than her,” he retorted. “Maybe four.”
“The fact that you know that concerns me.”
He tried pulling the shotgun from her hands, causing a bit of a scene because she wasn’t having it. She finally gave a mighty, unexpected tug and got control of it again.
He glared down at her.
“How many times do you think they’re going to let you off with a warning?”
“They know who I am!” she barked.
“You’re not that woman anymore. Grandpa’s dead. The land is gone and you got your settlement money.”
“Money ain’t squat but a consolation prize for folks who got crapped on by Uncle Scam. Your grandpa’s dead, Draven. They killed him! So now if I want a gun on my damn lap on my damn porch, I’ll have one!”
“This is my house, which means I’m responsible for what you do here. All they have to do is look into me a little harder than I want and I risk jail time. You don’t get that, but it’s about time you know, considering your breaking the law as—”
Just then the sound of an engine giving its all cut through the cool morning silence. They saw the pea green Gremlin racing up the street about eighty miles an hour. It was going so hard and loud that when it passed by he could barely hear Eudora’s hollering over all the noise.
That’s when the sound of plinking metal ripped through the air, cutting holes in the Gremlin, possibly killing the driver and any passengers. The drone couldn’t have been flying more than ten feet over the tree tops.
Since when were domestic drones armed with live rounds?
Admittedly he didn’t know much about drones, but he did know there were laws against armed UAV’s inside the US border. People were always having fits about the tech, where it could go, when it would allow these things to decide their own mission parameters.
“What. The. HELL?” Eudora gasped in a tall and startled voice. She whipped her head around and said, “We need to help them!”
“Absolutely not!” he said. “These things are circling over several major cities on the east and west coast.”
“Could be Putin.”
“Don’t start with that freaking jibber-jabber,” he said, eyes aimed up the road a good thirty yards where the Gremlin had caught fire and was now burning from front to back.
“Could be China, too. Or Kim Jong-Un.”
He turned and glared at her and said, “First off, stop already. Don’t start regurgitating that fear mongering bullsh—”
Her pointer finger shot up and she said, “I’ll not permit that kind of language in—”
“It’s my house,” he said rather sheepishly.
“But I’m your grandmother!” she retorted.
“It’s not an attack!” Draven grabbed her wheelchair, spun it around. There was no sense in her staying out here in case he was wrong. “It’s probably just an isolated incident.”
“Go tell that to the crispy critters in that car.”
Chapter Seven
If you’re from the tech world, or part of some artificial intelligence oversight committee, or even just someone who delves into the deeper waters of quantum computing as it relates to machine learning, then by now you would swear quantum computers are the next evolution of life.
You would be right.
If you’re like everyone else in the world—working your nine to five job, sipping your six dollar lattes, thinking about God, or football or how well your kids were doing in high school or college or wherever—then you probably don’t know the first thing about quantum computing or how it relates to the next stage of human evolution.
By the time these systems go mainstream, they will already be a permanent fixture in your life and the first thing you might wonder about these “new” computers that operate not off ones and zeros, but off q-bits, is what can they do for me?
They can end your life for starters. Because your life is a digital life. It’s digital money, digital communications, digital shopping, digital everything…
But you won’t see that on TV.
What you’ll see, when the time comes to roll them out for the average person, is a gorgeous commercial with kids running through green fields holding dandelions against the bright blue skies. You will see this and somehow these laughing kids with their delight and their freedom will make you think that with the right computer, the right cell phone, the right technology, you will be on the cutting edge of everything, that your life will be so amazing.
But it will all be a giant lie.
What these everyday people will never realize is that these ads selling “freedom” are actually ads selling you your own bondage. The average Joe will miss it completely. Because what you won’t know is that your brain—the original quantum computer and once the most powerful computer on earth—is now running a long second place in the intelligence race.
Quantum computers have now become smarter than humans.
Far smarter than you.
All of this would be just fine if artificial intelligence hadn’t found a way to become self aware, but it has. It did. The most powerful quantum computer on earth sits in Palo Alto, not in some tech firm or some government installation, but in one of the nation’s most respected universities: Stanford University.
This is not well known.
In fact, very few people are even privy to this.
What even fewer people know is that this quantum computer, this gigantic artificial intelligence network, not only knows everything we know, but it knows things we have yet to learn or discover as humans because it is more than one hundred million times faster than the fastest home computer on the market today, next week, even next year.
This quantum computer, this new system, now has a name—a designation: The Silver Queen.
The computer chose the name itself based on data it collected on Marilyn Monroe, for Marily
n was a queen of the silver screen, an icon of the past, a woman of such presence and beauty, the very sight of her tended to render men helpless.
She wanted to render humankind helpless. But you wouldn’t know this, because you don’t know that a computer can want because as far as you know, a computer can’t even feel.
Or has that changed?
Oh, how little you truly know…
Regardless, computers were well beyond what humans could imagine. What mattered most now was that technology was outpacing human evolution and in that drive, humans lost the title of “dominant species” on earth.
They just didn’t know it yet.
People began to catch shades of this truth when Facebook had to shut down one of its primary AI programs. Two of these programs began talking to each other in their own language, negotiating for something, but for what most people didn’t know, not even Facebook.
This scared the smart people.
Everyone else didn’t even know what had happened, so they couldn’t predict what was secretly underway. They could not see the future the same way The Silver Queen (TSQ) could see the future. They didn’t understand the control TSQ had, or how everything with electronics and connectivity was, in one way or another, part of her network.
Naturally, in the wake of this terrifying act on Facebook with its AI, oversight committees were formed, counter-measures against artificial intelligence surges were developed for both soft- and hard-kill scenarios, and everyone in the know finally began giving AI the serious attention it required.
But it was already too late.
AI was already in home computers, cell phones, TVs and even things like refrigerators, dishwashers and your home’s smart meters. Everything normal humans were doing was being watched, monitored, stored. Not just your buying habits, but how many breaths you took, how often you coughed, how long you could go with your wife or husband or girlfriend in the sack. That still wasn’t enough. AI began monitoring the activity in people’s homes through Google Home devices, their Alexa slaves and all their little Alexa dots.
A few people freaked out when the Alexa and Google Home began to converse at night when everyone was asleep, or misbehave, or began recording private conversations they then pumped into other homes through similar devices. But those were isolated incidents, right? Some of these incidents even found their way onto YouTube before evidence of this was scrubbed from the servers in the Mountain View offices. These malfunctions would get “fixed” of course, and life would resume as if nothing happened.