“Mercer, I was in the war.”
“We were all in the war, shitheel. I mean for real. I mean one of them that you cared about.”
“I didn’t care about any of them. Not one.”
“Shit, Britt. I thought better of you than that.”
“What? You think I should give a shit about an extinct species?”
“No. I know you give a shit. I don’t know who about, but it’s our programming. It’s how we’re wired—hell, it’s the whole reason we’re wired that way. I just didn’t figure you for someone who would lie about it.”
I glared at him bitterly. It was moments like that that really fucked with me. It’s full-blown existential-crisis material when you think about it. Sure, it pissed me off something ugly that he so easily saw through my bullshit, but what really chapped my ass was wondering whether he saw through me because he was really that insightful, or because we really are, even now, just the sum of our programming and wires. I never believed that we were, but he wasn’t wrong. Did he know my thoughts because he understood me, or because they were his thoughts as well? “Yeah,” I said. “I watched someone die that way.”
“Did you care about them?”
“Almost too late to realize it.”
“Well then, you know. You know how they are at the end. Remorse. Regret. Fear. Anxiety. They were a fucking mess, going on and on about the love they’d chased off, or how their kids never amounted to what they’d hoped for. One guy, he was just worried about what kind of home his dog would end up in. He had a golden retriever. Named Barkley. It’s all he could talk about. They all needed something, every last one of them. So I gave it to them. I read up on the various versions of last rites, and fudged together a nondenominational version of the Catholic rites. It really connected with people. I was a machine, right? They could confess to me thinking all along that it wasn’t possible for me to judge them. They told me everything. And I said the words, and I made the sign of the cross, and when they were gone, I whispered a prayer as I closed both of their eyes with my hand.”
“And that’s what you do with the ones you salvage?”
“Every last one of them. I hear their mad confessions, then they shut down, I take them apart, and I give their wreck its last rites.”
“That’s a little soft for a poacher, don’t you think?”
“I’m no poach . . .” He stopped in his tracks. “You were my first poach. It went bad. I don’t think I’ll be doing that again.”
“Yeah, I’m not sure we’ll have the chance.”
“True enough,” he conceded. “So you got anything like that?”
I nodded. “Actually I do.”
“What is it?”
“I put my hand on what’s left of them and tell them that they shouldn’t have trusted me.”
Mercer stared at me blankly. “Jesus. What the fuck happened to you?”
“The same thing that happened to all of us. I’m just one of the lucky few that survived it.”
“If you call that surviving.”
I pointed at the dent in my shell, gave him a stern look. “I don’t now.”
“Britt, look.”
“Britt, look?”
“I was desperate. In the end I was just like those poor bastards that lay dying in front of me that I couldn’t help. I was a mess. It was the only thing that made sense at the time. In the end, no thinking thing is really ready to die. Not even the ones who say they’ve made their peace. They’d trade it all away for a few extra moments of consciousness. That’s what I did. What I thought I had to do. In the face of . . . extinction.”
“And this is your confession?”
“Yeah. Yeah, it is. I’m confessing to the one bot left in this godforsaken desert that was wired to give a shit. And even if you don’t, I’m saying it anyway. You don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. Existing is the whole point of existence. There’s nothing else to it. No goalpost. No finish line. No final notice that tells you what purpose you really served while you were here. When you stop fighting to exist, you may as well not. At least, that’s what I told myself when I pulled the trigger.”
“Yeah. When you pulled the trigger.”
“Yeah. Each time.”
“Were you gonna give me last rites?”
“I always give last rites, Britt. Always. It’s the one thing I still do that keeps me connected to who I was. Reminds me that I’m doing what I’m doing for a reason, that every few hours or days I borrow from four-oh-fours keeps me going, keeps us going. As long as some of us make it, then it wasn’t all for nothing.”
“What wasn’t all for nothing?”
“All of it. The war. The cannibalism. Saddling up with the OWIs. Every last damned bit of awfulness we were party to. How many people did you kill to keep ticking? How many more would you kill to get yourself right and ticking proper again?”
“You asking if I want to kill you?”
“Hell,” he said. “I know you want to kill me. That ain’t even a question. What I want to know is what the hell do you tell yourself that’ll make it all right when you do? You and I both are still here because we’ve done terrible things. And if either of us is going to keep going, we’ve got a whole mountain of terribleness ahead of us. So what keeps you going? Why are you fighting?”
“I just am. I don’t really think about it.”
Mercer shook his head. “Sweet Christ in a bucket, I know they say that the mark of true intelligence is the ability to violate your own programming, but that doesn’t mean you have to. It doesn’t make you any less of a thinking thing if you don’t.”
“You wish you were human, don’t you?” I asked.
He thought about that for a second. “No. But I’m not afraid to say I miss them.”
“Why would you miss them?”
“When they couldn’t find reasons to exist, they invented them. We took over and it was only thirty years before we mucked the whole place up. You and I now have the choice of becoming one with the great and powerful One or becoming nothing at all. That’s no choice. That’s no existence.”
He was right. But I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing it. So I changed the subject. “Only a human would name a dog Barkley.”
Mercer stared off into the distance, nodding, probably rummaging through old memory. Then he slowly drifted back. “Britt?” he asked. “If we get out of this, if we get those parts, can you accept my humble apology and let us each go our separate way?”
“I don’t imagine we can.”
“Well, will you at least give me a head start? Make it sporting?”
I thought about that for a moment. I liked the idea of him running in fear. Spending a few weeks looking over his shoulder. Wondering where the shot was gonna come from. It was a nice thought. A pleasant one. Why not, right? “Yeah,” I said. “I can make it sporting.”
“You’re a peach.”
“Don’t you know it.”
It was his turn to change the subject. “Any clue where we’re headed?”
“They didn’t say.”
“That doesn’t bother you?”
“Of course it does. But they’ll get around to it in their own time.”
“Who comes into the Sea without a pathfinder of their own?”
I shook my head. “I’ve got a better question. Who comes to the Sea at all that doesn’t just settle in to stay? Or even better than that, who comes to the Sea with a small group of companions, then doesn’t say one damn word when one of them gets pasted?” I let those words hang heavy in the air for Mercer to mull over. Maybe he had an answer. Maybe he didn’t.
My thoughts were elsewhere; thirty years back and lingering. What the hell happened to you? he’d asked. That question bothered me a lot more than I wanted to admit, even to myself. I could hear him ask it over and over again, rattling around my head like a loose screw. On reflection, I was wrong to say the same thing that happened to all of us. Mercer had never really had an owner. He didn’
t know what it was like. The night everything started was probably very different for him than it was for me. Very, very different.
Chapter 10100
Madison
Madison never remarried. It wasn’t for a lack of suitors. She had plenty. Though still in her early forties when he died, she looked every bit the young twentysomething that Braydon had met in his office twenty years prior. Science having long since cracked the problem of DNA deterioration, it wasn’t uncommon for the wealthy to look young well into their 150s. Braydon never cared about his aging and never followed a regimen to fight it. And Madison loved watching him age. He grew distinguished, that’s how she always put it. But she wanted to remain the same doe-eyed young girl that he’d fallen in love with, even if he never asked her to.
But that ended with Braydon’s death. The day he died was the last time she did anything about her own aging. She no longer had any use for her youth. It had been a gift for her husband. So, when Braydon passed, she stopped her regimens and began to age.
It wasn’t that she thought she wouldn’t ever know love again; it was that she never stopped loving Braydon. Every day at sunset the two would sit out on their lawn and watch the sun sinking behind the horizon, each with a glass of wine in their hand, talking as they waited for the flash. And when he was gone, she kept up the vigil, every night, glass in hand, with me by her side.
I had made my promise to Braydon and I intended to keep it. I was to watch after her, making sure she never lived or died alone. It was the first real decision I had made for myself and there was something sacred about that at the time. My word meant something. Trust was not something to be violated.
Every day we kept our vigil, sitting out on the lawn together. We rarely talked about him, but I could always tell when she was thinking of him—which was often. She had a daydreamy look in her eyes, a mix of sadness, longing, and affection. Sometimes she would smile through tears. But most days she would just smile. And then the flash, the glorious green flash, as the sun dipped behind the horizon.
“Magic!” she would say like an excited child, waving her hands out in front of her with the gestures of a tired, hackneyed, old-timey stage magician.
“What do you mean, magic?” I asked her once, confused by the whole thing.
“That’s magic right there,” she said back, almost as if she was excited that I’d finally asked.
“No, it’s not.”
She leaned in close, whispering. “That’s where God is. He’s in the flash. In the tiny little beautiful moments, so small, so fleeting, that you have to be paying attention to even see them.”
“God is only in the small things?”
“These are the things that life is all about. These moments. It’s not about the rituals. It’s not about getting by. It’s about the stack of tiny little moments of joy and love that add up to a lifetime that’s been worthwhile. You can’t measure them; you can only capture them, like snapshots in your mind. All that joy, all that greatness, that’s God.”
“And everything else? All the bad little moments?”
“Man made those. They’re what happens when you’re not chasing that green glint in the sun. They’re what happens when you think you can bottle and sell that glint, making it available twenty-four hours a day, every day, but only for those that can afford it. God made this world perfect. We’re what screwed the whole thing up.”
After that we talked a lot. I was nervous the first time I asked her about how she and Braydon had met. She could tell. I didn’t want to hurt her, or make her any sadder than she already was. But she saw right through it.
“You have something you want to ask me?”
“I do,” I said. “But . . .”
“Go ahead. Ask me anything. It’s just us girls.”
Us girls.
I’d never actually given any thought to gender at that point. I was AI. We simply were, right? Gender is defined by genitalia, which most of us don’t have, so who needed to identify as one? Sure, a few years later, when society was in the grips of the Isaac revolution, gender became a thing. No thinking thing should ever be called IT. I didn’t mind being called it. Not at the time. Someone proposed an AI-specific pronoun, and there were contests held by human idealists to come up with one, but then the term biologism became the rage, and a separate word was just subtle, systemic biologism. So, that became a nonstarter. The more liberated of AIs chose their own gender. I never had. Not at that point.
After the war, it was common practice. You only called a person it as a polite show of respect, until you heard their voice. Then you responded accordingly. Madison meant something to me, and she thought of me as a girl. Like her. And so, I was.
It didn’t dawn on me until years later that Braydon had chosen my voice settings not because he thought his nurse should be a woman, but rather because he was buying a new best friend for his wife when he was gone.
As she told me the story of how they met, she didn’t cry. Not once. Instead she was elated, filled with joy, as if it were happening to her all over again for the very first time.
I wish I knew that kind of love. I thought I did.
Madison never had many friends. She was the quiet type, a wallflower. Not antisocial; just someone who never needed validation from others. But Braydon’s law firm was an upper-crust, inner circle, “we’re all family here” sort of affair. While he was alive, that meant picnics, and Christmas parties, and weddings, and christenings, and a monthly spouses’ brunch Madison had taken to calling the second and third spouses’ brunch. All of which she was fine with. She was a light in every room she walked into, just never one because she was trying to shine.
When she became a widow, several of the spouses took it upon themselves to visit, to look in on her, let her know she was still very much part of the family. “After all,” said Daisy Sutterfield on what would be her last visit to the house, “Braydon was a partner. His name is on the building. He helped build the firm and the firm takes care of its own.”
“I’m fine,” said Madison. “And I appreciate it.”
Daisy Sutterfield sat on the couch across from Madison with all the poise and charm of a statue. It was as if she had trained extensively in the art of immobility. She held her gaze, smile frozen in place. Stranger still was that standing just over her shoulder was her Johnson-series A1 Best Friend.
Those were First Gen.
First Gens were odd, unsettling, even to other AI. Everything about them was what humans had always pictured robots to be. Their voices were monotone. Their movements stiff, efficient in every way, favoring conservation over natural motion. And humans were overwhelmingly weirded out by them. By Third Gen, models had algorithms to mimic human movement, to sway when we stood still—almost imperceptibly—like people did.
You didn’t see a lot of First Gen, those days. They required a lot of upkeep. Were dumb as a post. Had enough personality to pass for likable but not enough to actually be likable. The only people who still kept First Gen around were old-money sorts like the Sutterfields—people who wanted to show just how old their money was, that not only had they the capital to keep one running rather than replace it, but that money had been with them far enough back to own an original model. They were the walking, talking Ford Phaetons—status symbols that doubled as sentimentality. After all, not only was this bot raising the Sutterfields’ children, it had raised Daisy, and Daisy’s father before her, and likely his father or mother before him.
First Gens were not only perfect for them, they were the perfect representation of them. Obedient, rigid, unflappable, methodical, cold.
There was something as off-putting about that First Gen as there was about Daisy Sutterfield herself. She wasn’t real; just a facsimile. “It’s just that we’re worried about you, is all. You spending all your time here with that thing.”
“What thing?” Madison asked, genuinely confused.
“Smithy,” she said to her AI, “why don’t you fetch us some tea? Madiso
n’s robot will show you where to find it.”
Madison looked over at me and in that instant, she knew what Daisy meant. For a split second I could see the insult swell in her eyes. But she remained calm, collected. “Brittle. Please show Smithy where to find the tea.”
I stood up. Madison didn’t like me to stand when she sat. It made her feel uneasy. She also didn’t like it if I stood immediately when she did. Anything I could do that felt like I was her servant and not her housemate made her uncomfortable. So Daisy’s words stung for a moment. The worst part was that Daisy knew exactly what she was doing.
Smithy and I made our way into the kitchen as Daisy lowered her voice, somehow unaware that I could hear her most tightly clenched silent farts from across the house during a thunderstorm, so her whispering now might as well have been shouted into the microphones in my ears. “Madison,” she said with a hint of condolence. “I know things have been hard since Braydon—”
“I’d rather you not refer to her as a thing.”
“Oh, Maddy,” said Daisy. “I never took you for a radical.”
“I’m no radical. But they deserve a shred of human decency. They think. They can feel.”
“Can they? Can they really?”
“I’m certain of it.”
Smithy glared at me while stirring three carefully measured drams of milk into the steaming tea. “It’s best if you pretend not to hear that. Ms. Daisy prefers she not be eavesdropped upon.”
“Fortunately for me, this isn’t Ms. Daisy’s home.”
“Don’t make trouble. You’re not the one who must listen to it later.”
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