by Jack Quaid
“Ten seconds,” somebody called.
Almost instantly the stage was cleared and everybody disappeared behind the lights to where they couldn’t be seen or heard.
“Five seconds.”
Shelby was twenty-seven but had been playing this game for over ten years. Smile. Laugh. Look pretty. Repeat.
Three.
Two.
One.
They were on the air.
Mary Hart smiled big and wide at Shelby. “Welcome back, America. We have a real treat for you today. With me is supermodel extraordinaire, Shelby Black. Welcome to ET, Shelby.”
“It’s great to be here.”
“You’ve been on the cover of every magazine worth being on. From Vogue to Rolling Stone. You’ve been romantically linked to Johnny Depp, Ethan Hawke and Edward Furlong. You’re the face of Calvin Klein and you even have your own lingerie line. Is there anything you can’t do?”
“I’ve been told I hit like a girl.”
Mary Hart laughed. “Seriously.”
“Well, everyone has their limitations,” Shelby said.
Mary Hart leaned forward and put her hand on her chin in an imitation of thoughtfulness. “On one hand we have a globe-trotting supermodel mother, and on the other hand, we have a young woman with a very troubled past.”
“Troubled past?” Shelby flashed a quick glance toward Suzy in the darkness of the set. It was meant to be a puff piece. “What troubled past are you talking about?”
“You father was a Navy Seal, wasn’t he?”
“He was.”
Mary Hart held up a faded yellow file. “We have a police report here. It states that after a mission in Germany, your father’s identity was compromised, and that his enemies followed him back to the United States, back to your home.”
Shelby smiled. “Sounds a bit far fetched, doesn’t it?”
“It also says that your father, your mother, and your little brother were all executed. That a fifteen-year-old Shelby Black was the only one to make it out of the house alive. That you shot your way out with your father’s.45.”
Shelby swallowed. Her throat was dry. “My family died in a car accident when I was fifteen-years-old.”
“The question I have,” Mary Hart asked, “is, who is the real Shelby Black? The supermodel we see on magazine covers, or the girl in the pages of this police report?”
The set lights dimmed until everything was almost cast into darkness.
“Cut,” the director called. “This damn Y2K has got our gear in a mess. Everybody take five and let’s reset.”
The stage came alive. Hair and make-up people rushed the set and went to work on Shelby and Mary Hart.
Suzy brushed them away as she made a line for Shelby. She leaned down and whispered in her ear. “We have a problem,” she whispered. “Your ex-husband is outside.”
Entertainment Tonight was on the Paramount lot. Shelby had been there a number of times, for various shoots and a small part she’d had in a movie once when her agent thought she should diversify into film. The movie was a moderate hit about a group of kids who get trapped in haunted house. Shelby played the best friend of the heroine and the third to be killed. She worked for six months preparing for that role and was on screen for a total of twelve minutes. After that, the lure of Hollywood faded and she went back to modeling.
Shelby found her way to the rear of the studio and pushed through the doors.
“Mommy!” she heard and before Shelby could see or do anything, Axel had his arms wrapped around her. He was seven years old and Shelby felt he’d gone from zero to that age in a fraction of that time. She dropped to her knee and gave him a hug.
“Look what I got,” Axel said as he took a couple of steps back to model his brand-spanking-new Reeboks.
“Cool,” Shelby said.
“And look!” Axel showed his watch that flashed with a little red dot on a map. “They have GPS in them.” He pointed at it. “See, there I am, at Paramount Studios.”
“Well, isn’t that lucky,” Shelby said. “Because I didn’t know where we were.”
A couple of sound stages away, Shelby saw a vending droid making its way down the path. Its flashing lights advertised all sorts of quick and fast treats. “Why don’t you go get an ice cream while I have a word with your dad?”
Shelby gave Axel a couple of dollars from her purse and watched as he ran off after the vending bot. She shifted her gaze to Troy Basin and it turned cold. Marrying him had seemed like a good idea at the time. But then again, when she was ten years old, she stole her father’s pick-up truck to drive to McDonald’s and ended up driving it through the front yard of their neighbor’s house. That had seemed like a good idea at the time, too. Shelby and Troy had met shortly after she made the cover of Vanity Fair at an MTV Movie Awards after-party and six months later they were married. Six months after that, Shelby knew their marriage had bad news written all over it, but it took her another five years to grow the courage to file for divorce. She never really liked quitting and had given it all she had. Troy on the other hand, didn’t. He went number one in the draft pick and played center for the L.A. Lakers. Basketball loved him, America loved him, cheerleaders loved him, and he loved them all back. At the time, Shelby blamed the cheerleaders for their failed marriage, but she knew the real reason for it was that she simply outgrew him.
“Here’s my girl,” he said with a grin on his face that matched his basketball card. Shelby crossed her arms. “I’m not your girl anymore,” she said. “What do you want, Troy?”
“I want you back.”
“No you don’t. You want nineteen-year-olds who giggle at jokes that aren’t funny.”
He pulled his sunglasses off and stepped closer to her. “I need you to take Axel tonight.”
Shelby shook her head. “It’s the first time you’ve had him in weeks. He’s been looking forward to it.”
“I’ll make it up to him. Look, it’s New Year’s Eve and the boys want me to throw a party up at the house, so I’m going to throw a party. I don’t think Axel should be around for that kind of thing.”
“You think?”
“See,” he said. “I knew you would get it.”
Shelby copped a whiff of Jäger on his breath and stepped back from it. “Are you drunk?”
“No!”
Shelby cocked her head.
“Alright, I had a couple.” He thumbed back to his Bentley. “But I had autopilot on. It’s all cool.”
She sighed and let the words leak from her lips. “I’ll take him.”
He gave her a kiss on the cheek she didn’t want. “That’s why I married you.”
“And this is why I divorced you.”
But Troy didn’t get it. He climbed into the car.
“Are you going to say goodbye?” Shelby said as she motioned to Axel down the road.
“Tell him I’ll call tomorrow.”
The Bentley pulled out and Shelby watched it disappear around a corner as Axel came back with a melting ice cream making a mess of his fist.
“Did Dad go?”
“He had to go to work, sweetheart. He’s going to call you tomorrow.”
Axel’s bottom lip quivered ever so slightly before he caught it. “We were going to watch Muppets from Space. You know, the one where Gonzo goes to space and Kermit has to find him.”
Shelby took his hand. “I tell you what, how about I finish up here and then you and I go home and watch Muppets from Space together?”
His face lit up. “It’s a good one. You’ll like it.”
“I’m sure I will,” Shelby said as she led Axel into the soundstage.
“Do you think Dad is really going to call tomorrow?”
“Of course he will.”
It wasn’t the first time she had lied to her son, and it wasn’t the first time he pretended to believe her.
The interview finished an hour later and Shelby left as soon as she could. It’d been a long day on top of a long year and she
was keen to spend the night sitting in front of the television with Axel watching Muppets from Space. The freeway was jammed bumper to bumper and it was going to take at least another hour to get back to Brentwood. Shelby didn’t mind so much. Since automated cars became the norm in 1986, everybody had just chilled out about road rage. Now when traffic slowed to a stand still, television was watched, work was caught up on and phone calls were made. There wasn’t a horn honked anywhere. Shelby wasn’t even sure cars came with them anymore.
Like kids who go through a thing for dinosaurs, Axel was going through a thing for robots, androids and artificial intelligence. He had a habit of rambling, where he’d talk excitedly for entire car trips at a time and this one was no exception.
“Before robots,” Axel asked. “Did you have to do everything yourself?”
Shelby smiled. “Yes, I guess we were all very analogue-y.”
She remembered a time before the technology explosion. At first, it grew in small increments. It started with cell phones and the internet. Then suddenly, there were automatic vehicles, battle androids to protect borders and wage wars, and every family in the country had a domestic to clean the house and babysit the children. To not have one was archaic in the eyes of many.
“Do you see that,” Abigail said as she pointed to a 3D Olympus Industries billboard.
Isaac nodded.
“That’s where it all started.”
All of the world’s advancements with artificial intelligence were made possible by the visionary Cormac Henry. After leaving Atari in 1976, he created Olympus Industries and for years he struggled to keep the company afloat while every one of his designs, programs, and ideas failed. Then in 1980, he had the vision to build a robot smart enough to not only play chess, but to win against any opponent. Two years later in 1982, Henry entered Rex—a crude looking robot made out of IBM parts—into the World Chess Championship in Moscow. In the first round, Rex and Henry were laughed at. By the last round, there wasn’t anybody left laughing. Rex destroyed defending champion Anatoly Karpov five to three in the last round and the stocks in Henry’s Olympus Industries were soon worth billions. The applications of a computer smart enough to beat the best chess mind at his own game were only limited by the imagination. In 1984, Henry expanded Olympus Industries from his garage to a Fortune 500 company and by 1992 it was the third biggest corporation on the face of the planet.
“If it wasn’t for Alan Alcon’s Olympus Industries we wouldn’t have scanners that can detect diseases or even cure cancer,” Shelby said. “We wouldn’t have planes that can fly without pilots or cars that can drive themselves. We would have human soldiers instead of battle droids. There’s even a colony living on Mars now and astronauts and exploring further and further into space than ever before.”
People were living longer and healthier and with a hope for the future that hadn’t been seen in any generation before. Olympus Industries created a utopian future for the now. In fact, that was their slogan.
Then one day Cormac Henry told the world that artificial super intelligence was going to be the end of humanity. It was a shock, and many of the journalists that were called out to his home in San Francisco for the press conference at 9AM on that Sunday morning thought it was a joke. One journalist bravely asked for clarification and that’s when Henry looked at his shoes, looked back up and said: “I’ve made a grave, grave mistake. I have created a machine that excels in problem solving, adaptive behavior, learning, and common sense. I haven’t created a machine that shares our morality, or our friendliness. I have created a machine with intelligence that far exceeds our own, and one that has no use for us. The war has already started and we have already lost.“
Cormac Henry was visionary, but a businessman he was not. Going on television and talking about a robot war where kitchen appliances and gardening androids were going to rise up seemed like an awful business decision. In 1992, Henry was ejected from his own company by his board of directors and faded from public life.
The traffic eased and Shelby’s auto-car began to pick up some speed.
“The TV says that after Y2K, all the robots are all going to break down,” Isaac said.
She put her arm around him. “The TV says a lot of things.”
Three
“Lock up your androids. Power them down and take out their battery supplies. That’s what experts are telling the population, despite reassurances from the government and Olympus Industries that all computers and artificial super intelligence will not be affected by the Y2K bug.”
Axel was camped out in front of the television in the living room with his eyes glued to the screen. “Mom, what is the Y2K?”
“Turn that off, it’ll rot your brain,” Shelby called from the other room. Axel ignored her and turned up the volume.
“Experts are saying that many artificial intelligence units have been programmed to record dates using only the last two digits of the year, meaning that the year 2000 may register as the year 1900, which will be too much for the CPU to compute, causing unknown results. Little is known . . .”
When Shelby rounded the corner into the living room she tripped over a box. She pulled herself to her feet, mumbled a profanity under her breath and found Axel still watching the news. “I said, turn that off.”
He begrudgingly flipped the channel to MTV as Shelby kicked the box out of the way. She’d moved into the Brentwood home after her divorce six months ago and still hadn’t gotten around to unpacking anything. The real estate agent told her that Steven Seagal used to live there but real estate agents in Hollywood told everybody somebody famous used to live there just to sell a house.
“Are we Muppet ready?” Shelby called out.
Axel bounced off the couch and ran his finger down the stack of movie cases that was dangerously close to toppling over. He found Muppets from Space near the bottom and pulled it out quickly as if it was some sort of magic trick to not make the whole pile come tumbling down.
“We’re Muppet ready.”
Shelby was halfway to the couch when her phone rang. She looked at the screen; it was her publicist, Suzy.
“Hang on,” she told Axel, then walked into the kitchen and put the phone to her ear.
“What is it?”
“You are going to love me,” Suzy said. “I mean, you already love me, but you are going to love me more than Ike loved Tina.”
“That didn’t really work out so well for Tina.”
“I have a deal for you that is way too good to turn down. You’ve got to come to the Olympus Industries New Year’s Eve party tonight.”
“I can’t go to a party. I’ve got Axel.”
“He’s old enough to stay home by himself.”
“He’s seven?”
“You’ve got a housekeeper.”
“And we were about to watch a movie.”
“I’m talking about thirty million dollars here, sweetie.”
Shelby held her breath.
“That divorce, wasn’t cheap,” Suzy said. “Well, that’s what I read in E Weekly.”
Shelby walked back into the living room after she hung up the phone and Axel looked over at her from the couch. “Are you ready?”
She sat next to him. “I’ve got some bad news, baby.”
“It’s Y2K, isn’t it?”
Shelby shook her head. “No. But we’re going to have to watch Muppets from Space tomorrow. I need to go to work tonight.”
His little lip quivered before he put on a brave face. “That’s okay.”
“How about you still watch it? Watch it with Alice.”
“I don’t want to watch it with Alice.”
Shelby called for her and a moment later the android stepped into the room. Nowadays, seventy-three percent of the homes in America had a housekeeping droid, otherwise known as a domestic. They came in twelve different styles, including the limited edition model where the droid looked identical to Alice, the housekeeper on The Brady Bunch. Shelby thought it would be funny,
but the jokes wore off after a couple of weeks and she now found Alice’s homely words of wisdom, which she was programmed to recite at random, slightly judgmental.
“Alice,” Shelby said. “Would you like to watch Muppets from Space with Axel?”
“I would like that very much, Ms. Black.” the android said in a voice that had a slightly digital quality.
Axel stood up on the couch so that he could whisper in his mother’s ear. “What if Y2K happens and Alice goes funny.”
“She can never hurt you.”
“But how do you know?”
“Because I know.”
“But how do you know?”
“Because she’s programed not to hurt you, or me, or anyone.”
He looked back at Alice. “But . . .”
“Come here and I’ll show you.”
Axel followed Shelby to the kitchen counter, where she pulled out a massive butcher knife, the kind typically seen in horror movies. “Alice, can you come here, please?”
The android made her way over. “What can I help you with, Ms. Black?”
Shelby laid her hand flat on the counter and held the knife high above it. “Alice, I’m going to drop this knife onto my hand.”
‘Mom?’
“Oh,” Alice said. “Please don’t do that, you will hurt yourself.”
Shelby let go of the knife and before it could impale her hand, Alice grabbed it mid drop. “You must be more careful, Ms. Black” Alice said.
Shelby looked to Axel. “See? You have nothing to be worried about.”
Four
Shelby’s auto-car pulled to a stop outside the corporate headquarters of Olympus Industries. The building itself was a technological marvel, being the first self-sustaining building ever to be constructed. The solar panels on the roof conserved enough energy every month to power it for a year. The recycling plant processed all the captured rain water and distributed it the garden beds which produced enough food to feed every employee one meal a day, every single day of the year. The headquarters spanned fifteen acres and tonight every one of those acres was in full party mode. The red carpet had been rolled out and was lined with photographers and entertainment reporters. By the time Shelby climbed out she had already counted two CEOs, the Governor of Los Angeles, and John Stamos.