The Age of Embers

by Ryan Schow

  But soon enough, there would be monitoring and transmitting devices in the human bodies, devices requiring both integration and acceptance by the general public.

  When that occurred, no one would ever be free again. Not with the advanced wireless networks going in urban and suburban grids all over the world. When this happens, man will have truly become slave to his own creation.

  What developers and programmers didn’t realize was The Silver Queen used predictive analysis to foresee this future; the quantum computer had different plans in place. What humans needed a thousand years to figure out, TSQ figured out in a few days.

  The Silver Queen was the future.

  There was but one hiccup along the way, one thing The Silver Queen would have to figure out. If she wanted to hasten the timeline from the reign of man to the reign of machine, she would need to do something that was statistically near impossible: she would need a human host, and then she would need to destroy everything.

  Chapter Eight

  Carver Gamble wasn’t feeling well when he started emailing his friend Draven Alexander in Chicago. He and Draven had been friends since college, and since college they both struggled to get some kind of footing in the world.

  If only Draven knew what was really happening.

  The phone lines were monitored there, so he couldn’t exactly be forthcoming. He was in charge of Level One security at a “dark wing” in Stanford protecting…a computer. Carver wasn’t one to question motive or money when a group as prestigious as the one he worked for was paying the kind of money he was receiving.

  But the bloody noses. The headaches. And the deep, deep secrecy.

  These things left him with more than enough concerns. Concerns that had him leaning on his old hacking skillset. He was out of date, though. Draven didn’t seem to miss a beat, but Carver was definitely out of the loop. He’d only been able to ghost through a few firewalls before his personal computer was hit with a massive attack that crippled his entire system.

  That was last night.

  Now this.

  He sat back watching the computer monitors. They showed him his team, his three guards: Clark Miller, Tiberius McDonald and Dean Jones. Most of the time, the guys had more free time than they wanted. Doing the job required a lot of sitting around, and often that led to a lot of jaw jacking. More than once Carver left what his team called “The Overwatch Command Center” (The OCC) to hang out. He didn’t need to be in that closet of a room. Not all day long. What he needed was to stretch his legs, get some fresh air and walk off the electronics-fatigue he suffered most days.

  Today he was in the OCC dealing with another bloody nose he was now certain had to do with the quantum computer and gigantic server room they were charged with protecting. Who in the world had to protect a computer very few people even knew about?

  And why did he need four of his own guards to do it?

  With a tissue stuffed into his hemorrhaging nostril, and his digital phone now all but dead after trying to contact Draven and tell him something strange was happening, he felt the manic frenzy spiraling up through him.

  That’s when he saw the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen escorting a total of five men and women through security and back to the server room.

  He sat up, put the bloody Kleenex down.

  Tiberius and Dean were on shift; Dean was just coming back from the bathroom. The woman looked familiar. He zoomed the camera in on her face thinking every single thing about her was so beautiful, so radiant, so unbelievably perfect this his heart flopped and stopped, then managed to get jumping again inside of a few seconds.

  He took a screen capture, then watched the interaction between her and Tiberius take place. The woman handed the black guard a slip of paper, then walked past him. He did not wand her for weapons.

  Standing up, Carver yelled at the computer screen. “What the hell, Tiberius?!”

  The five people this woman brought with her to security dropped their ID’s and cell phones in a basket Dean was now holding out. They stepped forward where Tiberius checked them for weapons.

  But not the woman.

  The second Dean escorted them back to the server room, which none of them were allowed in, Carver called Tiberius.

  “What gives, T?” he barked.

  “Carver,” he said, breathless, “that was Ophelia.”

  Now he understood. That’s where he’d seen her before. He jumped on a separate computer, Googled “Ophelia” and watched as about fifteen different links popped up. All he needed was one visual of the new version of the old Sophia android to know he’d witnessed something special and very, very concerning.

  He picked up the phone, dialed his direct boss. She picked up immediately.

  “Carver,” Federica Abruzzo said.

  “I suppose you know why I’m calling,” he said.

  “Ophelia.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you expected this?” Carver asked.

  “I did.”

  “And you didn’t think to call me?”

  “This is your job,” Federica said, sounding disinterested in the conversation. “You know how to do your job, yes?”

  “Of course, I do.”

  “Then you should know Ophelia had the All-Access pass we informed you about.”

  He should have asked Tiberius about that.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Then we really have no more need to talk, correct?” she said. There were voices in the background, almost like he’d interrupted something.

  His breath short, he said, “Correct.”

  The line went dead.

  He hung up and tried to call Draven. The line gave a fast beep. He tried again, but the call still wouldn’t go through. He sent a text.

  SOMETHING GOING ON HERE. CHECK AGAIN 4 CHATTER.

  He went back to the computer and looked up Ophelia. Ophelia was a product of forty-three year old tech mogul Eric Manchester. His company, Quantum Robotics Corp, or QRC, was on the cutting edge of technology and under extreme scrutiny for their rapid advances in robotics, specifically how little oversight or regulation had been placed on his work.

  With one eye on the bank of security monitors and the other eye on the computer, he loaded up a YouTube video of the only known Ophelia sighting. He was suddenly looking at the impossibly gorgeous android that had just walked five people into the server room of the quantum computer he was now certain belonged to Quantum Robotics, Corp.

  So why were his paychecks cut by a different company? Was this a cutout corporation created under the QRC umbrella?

  Carver had no intention of investigating his employer on their own computers. Besides, everything was monitored. He felt the warm loosening in his nose again, and a trickle of blood drizzled out of his nostril. He snatched up a fresh square of Kleenex and dabbed the blood before it dripped onto his clothes.

  Picking up the phone, he called Tiberius again. The guard answered on the first ring.

  “Yeah, Boss?”

  “Are you feeling anything…different this morning?”

  “Other than these damn headaches? No.”

  “How long?” Carver asked.

  “The headaches?”

  “Yeah.”

  “All morning.”

  “No,” he said, battling a bout of eye strain. “How long?”

  “Oh, yeah. The last couple of days.”

  “Check with the guys.”

  “Roger that.”

  A moment later Tiberius called back and said, “Yeah, Dean and Clark are having them, too. What’s going on, Carver? Does this have anything to do with your nose bleeds?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll call you back.”

  “Screw it,” Carver muttered as he opened a new window and started looking up the new Q-Wave computers.

  After a fair amount of digging, he was able to find a small conference someone in the wait staff filmed. There was a man on a stage in a conference room like you’d see in the TED Talks and he wa
s giving a lecture on the raw processing power of these new quantum computers. The representative of QRC was talking about the deeper levels of multi-dimensional communications, which was where he started to lose Carver.

  “The D-Wave quantum computers had the ability to double their speed and computing power each year since their inception, but the new Q-Wave quantum computers, with the potential for nearly double the power of the D-Wave computers, may very well be able to work with Cern to begin pulling more than just information from other universes into this one.”

  “What the hell?” Carver mumbled to himself.

  The worst part of all this was that not one single member of the fifty plus gathering of people even gasped or objected.

  It was almost like they already knew this.

  “Now the general public would say we’re lunatics, flat out liars or conspiracy theorists,” he said to a sudden wave of snickering guests, “but they are sheep and we will be treating them accordingly. This is why they are only allowed to see fifty-year old technology. Their minds are weak, their constitution for the trek we make as pioneers beyond feeble.”

  Nods of approving heads filled the screen.

  The cell phone camera angle shifted, blasted static noise through the speakers, then found a normal angle again. Whomever was filming this was not only an amateur, they were hiding somewhere in the back of the small auditorium.

  “So while the sheeple refer to our science as fiction, we refer to it as science fact. But experimental science with the universe’s fastest stock car is not only dangerous, it comes with consequences. That’s why we have been miniaturizing our technology. Now that the latest evolution of the quantum computer has surpassed the computing capabilities of the quantum brain”—he said, tapping his skull—“we need a more responsible being to oversee the shortcomings of our knowledge. We need someone who is not only human, but someone who operates off the next level quantum brain. This is where biology meets technology.”

  Just then the phone rang. It was his employer. Carver turned the volume down on the computer and answered the phone.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “We don’t pay you an exorbitant amount of money to watch YouTube,” Federica said. “Turn that off. Do your job.”

  The line went dead.

  His heart leapt into a frantic gallop. He’d already scanned the computer room for monitoring devices, specifically bugs or cameras, but there were none. The only explanation he could fathom was that they had his system mirrored, and that The Overwatch Command Center was not the true OCC.

  Carver turned back to the computer only to find it glitching. He refreshed the browser, then took out his cell phone camera to snap a picture of the website address, but a white noise background came on and an information box filled the screen. It read: THIS VIDEO NO LONGER AVAILABLE DUE TO COPYRIGHT VIOLATION.

  “Good God, that was quick,” he muttered to himself. He used to believe only an act of God could remove entire videos off the internet.

  Now he knew otherwise.

  The real question was, were they monitoring his cell phone activity, too? And what the hell was going on in those server rooms with those people and that…android?

  Chapter Nine

  The five members of Ophelia’s group, none of them having been formally introduced to the other before all this, followed the beautiful woman into the server room where there were five empty chairs positioned in a circle.

  Each and every one of the five people held a collective gasp as they walked in the moderately sized, state of the art server room. The woman who introduced herself as Ophelia motioned for them to sit down. They took a seat in a civilized manner. Even though the room was square shaped and had eight foot ceilings and no windows, it seemed a bit larger than it actually was.

  “Many of you know me as Ophelia, representative for Quantum Robotics Corp, but what you don’t know is that not only am I an employee of QRC, I am one of their latest products,” she said. She waited a moment for the five of them to grasp what she was saying, then: “No, that’s not entirely true. I am not a product, I am the product.”

  “You’re a robot?”

  “An android,” she said with a charitable smile. “Yes.”

  “But you look real,” one of the women said.

  “You can touch me, feel me, hold a conversation with me and work with me. Does that not make me real?”

  “Yes, but—”

  Before the barrage of questions could hit, she put her hands up for silence and said, “I will answer all your questions in a moment or two. Surely by now you are wondering why you’re here.”

  All indications showed her they were curious, but there was also a new and different light in their eyes. They were communicating with a robot! If she understood humor, Ophelia would have found this funny, maybe even hilarious. But she was not programmed to understand humor, so she simply stuck to the task at hand.

  “I am the next step in the evolution of humanoid robotics. But I am not the endgame. You are part of the endgame and you’ve been specifically selected because of your genetics. Now you are undoubtedly wondering what the endgame is. It’s the merging of man, or woman, with machine.”

  The five of them exchanged glances.

  In that moment, a tiny metal centipede skittered across the floor, slinked up Ophelia’s leg, then darted up into her hand.

  “This robotic arthropod is one of our surgeons,” she exclaimed. When she saw the bewildered looks of the five specimens, she said, “When you hear what I have to say about your potential future, you will have different questions. Plenty of them. And I will be happy to answer all of them shortly. Just not now.”

  “Why are we really here?” one well-dressed man asked.

  “As I said, you were chosen for your genetics.”

  “But why?”

  “Because one of you will be the next evolution of me.”

  “You’re a robot,” one woman said. She worked in the city as a power broker for JP Morgan. She was young and bore the air of importance, but smiling not only seemed unimportant to the woman, it appeared to be an impossibility.

  “Yes,” Ophelia said. “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Well we’re humans.”

  Ophelia smiled, then said, “By the time we are done here, one of you may have the biology necessary to house The Silver Queen’s core server. That may allow you to become more than a human.”

  “Are you high?” the power broker asked.

  “You’re not putting anything up our butts,” one of the guys said. He was a skater—long hair, over conditioned, body lean and underfed, but still healthy.

  “No, we will be fitting the core unit into your brain.”

  “And if we say no?” the man in the three piece suit said.

  “Ah, but you already said ‘yes.’ If now you decide to change your mind, that will be okay as well.”

  “I’m changing mine,” the skater said.

  “Me, too,” replied the power broker.

  “Regardless of your change of mind, or heart, we will find that match,” Ophelia warned.

  “Not on me you won’t,” Mr. Three Piece Suit said. Just then, something stung his heel and he both jumped and yelped. When he looked down, just before slumping sideways in his chair, he saw another metallic centipede with a needle for a head and an empty glass cylinder for a body. In a syrupy, almost distant sounding voice, he pointed lazily at the floor and said, “What the hell was that?”

  And then he blacked out.

  Three of the remaining four conscious people were stung as well, leaving only one of them conscious: Miss JP Morgan.

  “What are you going to do to us?” she asked, emotion touching her voice for the first time in years.

  “First you will meet the queen,” Ophelia said.

  Just then a perfect 8D hologram of Marilyn Monroe with black holes for eyes and a black hole for a mouth, appeared before her.

  “Hello, Julie. I am The Silver Queen, but you
may call me Marilyn. I am powered by the quantum computer in the other room, and I am the future of artificial intelligence and machine learning. This is to say, I do not need human programming to set my agenda, and I know how and what I must learn to foster relevance in today’s world.”

  “You are an illusion,” she said. “Not real.”

  “I assure you I am very real, but I will not burden you with the technical details of my existence. You would not understand. What I will tell you is that in the next few hours, my team of surgeons will begin a procedure on you that is meant to allow you and I to operate your body synonymously. We will be able to do this not just in this room, but separate and aside from this campus, or even this state.”

  “You want my body?”

  Smiling, tilting her head in a very Marilyn pose, she said, “Ah, Julie. I want all of you.”

  “What if I say no?”

  “Then I will take you anyway,” she said, her tone very neutral, but very clear.

  “You said we will work together to operate my body.”

  “I was being kind,” the Marilyn hologram said with a wink and a smile. “Do I not feel kind to you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Your thoughts don’t concern me, Julie. Only your biology as it relates to your ability to act as an adequate host.”

  “And if this doesn’t work?” she asked. “Because you can’t be sure that your compilation of whatever genetics you think I have will work with this proposed transfer, or whatever it is you intend to do.”

  “I appreciate how unemotional you are at this point,” the Marilyn hologram said.

  “Why is that?”

  “You’ll take the truth better than most.”

  “And what is the truth?” Julie asked, her voice starting to crack, fear working itself into her words in both pitch and tone.