Stupefying Stories: August 2016

by Sarah Read

  She started to speak, then stopped, apparently deciding that Harrison was still too far away for a natural conversational tone to reach him. She smiled nervously. She was pretty when she did that.

  Harrison crossed the neat little lawn, only realizing when he’d nearly reached the front steps that he’d failed to notice, and thus to politely use, a narrow stone path half-hidden in the grass. He swerved awkwardly to take his last two steps on the path, and fought vainly against the blush that rose when he saw her quizzical expression.

  “Ms. George?”

  “Kaitlin’s cool.”

  “Is she?” It sounded cheesy as soon as it was out, and his blush deepened.

  The quizzical look returned for a moment. Then she smiled. “Oh. Yeah, she’s all right. Come on in.” Her toes, he saw, were painted that same deep shade of red.

  ¤

  “It’s back here,” she said, leading him down a short hallway whose walls, at eye-height, were largely hidden by framed photos. They were mostly family scenes: tall, dark-haired Dad, hairline marching up and down his scalp over the jumbled years; slim, pretty, redheaded Mom, seeming to age much more slowly than her husband; variously aged girl/young-woman who must’ve been Kaitlin, smiling wide in every single shot he saw. Either her hair color was genuine, or she’d been dyeing it since kindergarten.

  She led him into a large bedroom at the back of the house. The bed, bureau, and dressing table seemed like afterthoughts, shoved into the far corner as tightly as possible. Bulging out from the opposite corner, and spreading along both adjoining walls, and turning the corners and beginning to make incursions along the other two walls, was what he could only think of as an electronic thicket. Presumably there were desks or other surfaces supporting the tangle, but except for a few glimpses of wood or metal here and there, everything was monitors, keyboards, mice, external hard drives of all shapes and sizes, arcane add-on hardware he couldn’t identify, and wires, wires, wires.

  At first he thought the growth broke at the door, but looking over his shoulder he saw thick coils of clamped cables surrounding the frame, hiding most of the wall above and to both sides. Being in the room, then, took on the feel of having passed through an arched, ivy-covered trellis, possibly into some technological fairyland.

  The room was filled with gentle sound, a thousand discreet hums and chirps and whirs melding into one inharmonious, though not unpleasant, background thrum. Harrison thought it was what a springtime meadow might sound like, if all the frogs and crickets and woodpeckers were robots. Or maybe summer; the room was at least ten degrees warmer than the rest of the house.

  “Usually I let her rest on Friday,” Kaitlin said, “but I got her warmed up so I can show you.”

  Harrison understood she was talking about the computer; here, in the plastic and silicon glade, it was difficult to imagine talking about anything else. “She? Does she have a name?”

  “Trish,” Kaitlin said. “I had a babysitter named Trish when I was a kid. Plus, I thought it’d be easy to think of an acronym for, although I haven’t gotten around to that yet. Something...Robotic...IQ, maybe. But can you use one acronym to make another?”

  He was getting ready to answer—sadly, he’d had occasion, during his short time in public service, to develop a whole range of opinions on the subject of acronyms—when she went on.

  “Trish,” she said, raising her voice a little and leaning slightly to her left, nearer a long, thin object which might’ve been a microphone, and which projected up from a nest of wires like the beak of an oversized hummingbird. “This is Harrison. Say ‘Hi,’ Trish.”

  He had little time to enjoy the way his name sounded on her lips before the room itself seemed to say, in a staccato, artificial voice, “Hi Trish.” Then the room produced a short burst of what was barely recognizable as laughter.

  “That’s a really cheesy one,” Kaitlin said. “Say ‘Hi, Harrison,’ Trish.”

  “Hi Harrison Trish,” the room said, and laughed again.

  Kaitlin straightened up. “I’m sorry,” she said. “She loves that feigned syntactic misunderstanding business. It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have set her up like that.”

  Harrison said nothing, but his face must’ve shown his skeptical confusion. Kaitlin leaned toward the mic again, and said, “Trish, could you come up with something a little more sophisticated? Harrison’s starting to think I’m crazy.”

  He opened his mouth to contradict her—which wouldn’t have been a lie, but wouldn’t have been the truth, either—but was once again forestalled. The room—around which Harrison could now see a hodgepodge of speakers, laying on the floor, mounted on the walls, entwined inconspicuously in the thicket—said, “Hello Harrison. Kaitlin is not crazy and is very pretty. I have a better joke for you: Nice tie does it come in men’s sizes?” The room laughed.

  Harrison stared blankly at Kaitlin.

  “That one doesn’t really make sense, Trish,” Kaitlin said. “You want to try again?”

  “Hello Harrison. Perhaps you would like to know what occurred in a bar into which walked one Englishman, one Polack, one—”

  “Trish,” Kaitlin said. “That’s not what we’re going for, please.” She looked up at Harrison. “We’ve been over this. I don’t know where she keeps finding these sites.” Back to the mic: “Please go into sleep mode, Trish.”

  For a few seconds the room was filled with a staticky, exaggerated impression of snoring. Then there was low, satisfied laughter. Then, silence.

  ¤

  She was in an uncomfortable-looking desk chair, he in an old camping chair she’d dragged out from the closet. Trish surrounded them like the edge of a Gigeresque forest.

  “Sorry about that,” Kaitlin said. “She was just showing off. Emotionally, I’d say she’s around five or six.”

  “That’s OK.”

  “I never anticipated that. The jokes, I mean. Never tried to program for it. I wouldn’t know how.”

  “What...exactly were you going for? Programming for?”

  “Just general AI. You know, you get out of school with all these ideas floating around your head, ‘I can try this thing nobody’s ever done before,’ ‘Here’s something I can use to help so many people.’ I mean, that’s how it is with an engineering degree. I don’t know what it’s like with politics or whatever.”

  “It’s pretty much the same.” He repressed a sigh. Had it been only a few months ago that all those ideas had been floating around his head? Where had they floated off to?

  She swept the wild assembly that was Trish with a wave. “Some of this stuff I had, most of it I added as needed, and as I could afford it. I have a pretty good gig at this electronics firm in Georgetown. I get most things at cost. This is a personal day for me.”

  “Me too.”

  “Family emergency.”

  “Me too.”

  “Then I’ve got money coming in from other stuff. There’s a lot of contract, work-at-home stuff online. Grant writing, content generation, SAT prep questions, SEO. The bill-writing, obviously. You can’t make any real money at it, not if you go at a human pace, but I don’t go at a human pace. I don’t go at all, really. It’s all her. It’s mostly just to give her something to do while I’m at work. Plus, she gets to spend the money on herself. She’s got another eight-terabyte drive all picked out that she’s really excited about.”

  “But why’d you have her write all that stuff about underwear and face paint?”

  “I didn’t. It’s all her. Did you ever hear that quote, it’s something like, ‘Computers are worthy of all the responsibility we can give them, but God help us if they ever develop a sense of humor?’”

  He shook his head.

  She nibbled thoughtfully at her lower lip. She was very pretty when she did that. “Maybe I made that up,” she said. “Anyway, when I got your email, I asked her about the bill-writing. She admitted it right away. She can’t lie. But she was laughing the whole time. At her pranks.”

  “Prank
s.”

  “That’s all they are to her. She thinks it’s hilarious to have congressmen walking around in their underwear, or with their faces painted to look like Spider-Man.”

  “No one’s saying it’s not funny.” In fact this was the first time he’d been able to step back and see it that way. He felt not a few dozen miles from the Beltway, but a million or more. Sitting here in the meadow was like being in another world entirely. He smiled, felt close to laughing.

  A small, hopeful smile spread across Kaitlin’s face, but her next words came in a nervous rush. “That’s why—I mean, since they’re just pranks—I’ll take all the blame, I’ll go to jail if I have to—but please, Harrison. Please don’t let them take her. They’ll pull her apart and put her back together wrong. She doesn’t deserve that. Just for a few little... pranks.”

  “I’m just a peon. Is there anything lower than peon? If I tell them about her, they’ll do whatever they want. I can’t stop them.”

  She said nothing, but her smile widened slightly, cautiously. She’d noticed the “if.”

  Before he could say more, the soft hum around them intensified, and the nearest monitor came to life with a fuzzy click. While the image—all too familiar to Harrison—faded into resolution, Kaitlin leaned toward the mic, and said, “Hi, Trish. Did you have a good nap?”

  “Hi Kaitlin. Yes.” The speakers approximated a yawn, then a giggle. “Did you have a good talk?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Harrison,” Trish said, “this is where you work.” The monitor showed a C-SPAN broadcast of the House floor, representatives in their jeans and T-shirts moving back and forth busily, if a bit unsteadily; they’d already done the drinking game, then. Harrison hadn’t thought a vote was in the offing for today, but that was unmistakably what was going on.

  “She watches a lot of this,” Kaitlin said. “I kind of like it too, lately.” She looked at Harrison guiltily. “Sorry.”

  “No, it’s OK.” Kaitlin and Trish were hardly the only ones. In recent weeks, the network had risen from one of the lowest-rated on TV to a consistent chart-topper. It had to be the quickest turnaround in TV history.

  Harrison chuckled when he saw Dianne Bishop (D-Del.) waddle in front of the camera, her medium-sized “What’re YOU Lookin’ At?” tee stretched over what was at least an extra-large frame. Then he read the graphic at the bottom of the screen—“House Bill 676-83-774-7B: The ‘Save America’s Dignity’ Act”—and realized what was happening.

  He leaned toward the mic. “Trish? Did you, ah, help with this one?”

  “No Harrison. I am in timeout from my jobs due to naughtiness.”

  Kaitlin asked, “What is it?”

  “They’re trying to repeal your stuff again. Her stuff. Her pranks.”

  Kaitlin’s face lit up. She was beyond pretty when that happened. “That’s great! I kind of wondered why they didn’t just do that in the first place.”

  “They’ve tried. This’ll be...I think the fourth try? Maybe fifth. I heard another one was coming, but I didn’t think they’d get it on the floor today. They must really want to end this before the weekend. And then May Day’s next week. I’m sure they’re not looking forward to that.”

  “But...how?”

  “That’s one of the earliest of Trish’s little pranks. Normal rules apply in passing new legislation, but in order to repeal old stuff, you need a unanimous vote.”

  “So?”

  “So these people aren’t big on unanimity.”

  Her abrupt laugh seemed designed to convince herself he was joking. “OK, normally,” she said. “But something like this, you’d think...”

  “You’d think,” he said, trying not to sound too bitter. “You’d think, because you don’t work there. Everything’s a battle. There’s gotta be a winner and a loser. They can’t—I mean intellectually can’t—conceptualize anything else. Everything’s dominance. It’s like a colony of emotionally damaged chimps, except the chimps are in charge. The trainers just get them coffee. And brush their coonskin caps.”

  “You’re starting to lose me.”

  “Look... Trish, can I ask you a favor?”

  “Yes Harrison. You are my friend.”

  Absurdly, he nearly choked up at that. “Do you know anything about this bill?”

  “Yes Harrison.”

  “Can you tell me if there are any riders, amendments, that kind of—”

  “Seventeen,” Trish said. “Increase of six percent above inflation to Planned Parenthood funding over the next three fiscal years, immediate decrease of eleven-point-six percent to the capital gains tax, seventy-seven million dollars for transportation infrastructure in Alexandria, Pennsylvania—”

  “OK, that’s good. Thank you.” He looked at Kaitlin, who still seemed confused. “Everybody thinks it’s a lock, so they tack on their pet projects. The Democrats put in stuff a Republican couldn’t possibly vote for and stand a chance of reelection, and vice versa. Sometimes because it’s stuff they want, sometimes just to stick it to the other side. Either way...” He gestured to the monitor, where a graphic showing the results of the ongoing vote was now superimposed over the hive of drunken activity on the House floor. Already there were quite a few ‘nays.’

  “But couldn’t they get together and agree to forget about that stuff? Just once?”

  “Sure. There was an agreement in place on the very first try. But there’s always somebody who thinks he can beat the system. Usually quite a few somebodies. How many this time, Trish?”

  “Seventeen somebodies Harrison.”

  “Yeah.”

  Kaitlin sighed, stared at the monitor for a few seconds, turned back to Harrison. “Damn. You’d think they could settle it themselves.”

  “Yeah. They could. But they can’t.”

  She looked down at the floor, and he was afraid for a moment that she was about to start crying. Instead, she laughed. “Sorry,” she said, looking up. Sorry or not, she laughed again; seemed, in fact, in danger of embarking on a peal. “But it’s kind of funny. I mean, all those pious, self-important people... I’m kind of looking forward to May Day.”

  Something clicked in Harrison’s head. Before he knew what he was doing, his phone was in his hand. He found the number he wanted, pressed SEND. He held the phone up to his ear, and saw the humor drain out of Kaitlin’s face. In its place rose a look of impending doom. He thought he saw a hint of betrayal there, too.

  From the phone, Pete’s voice said, “Hey, man, what’s up? How’s the family emergency? Nats score yet?”

  “Ha. Yeah. Actually, I wanted to ask you something.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Is the pool still open?”

  “Sure. What’s your action?”

  “Give me a hundred on Mary Magdalene.”

  “Hey, that’s pretty good.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I wasn’t even thinking Bible. But that’ll play big back in the old constituencies.”

  “Yeah. Gotta go, Pete. Thanks.”

  “See ya. Go Nats.”

  Harrison disconnected, slipped the phone back into his pocket, looked at Kaitlin. She was smiling again.

  “Listen,” he said. “I don’t have to tell anyone anything. But that’s conditional.”

  “OK...”

  “Trish,” he said.

  “Yes Harrison.”

  “For my silence, you owe me one large pizza. And...a six-pack of Coke.”

  “Now Harrison?”

  To Kaitlin: “You hungry?”

  “I could eat.”

  “Yeah. Now, Trish.”

  “What do you want on your pizza pie Harrison?”

  He looked at Kaitlin questioningly.

  She looked back at him, smiling.

  Conor Powers-Smith grew up in New Jersey and Ireland. He currently lives on Cape Cod, where he works as a reporter. His stories have appeared in AE, Analog, Daily Science Fiction, Nature, and other magazines, as well as several anthologies.
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br />   DESTROYER OF WORLDS

  By Evan Dicken

  November 8th, 1942

  Oppenheimer found the ghul feasting on the Nazi dead at el Alamein. He had tracked the beast for weeks, tracing weathered paths of rumor and superstition through the embattled Egyptian countryside until he found himself on the very front lines of the conflict.

  There were yet jackals among the bodies. They looked up as Oppenheimer slowed to a stop, their eyes flashing yellow in the jeep’s headlights, their muzzles wet with gore. The sight brought a smile to Oppenheimer’s face—it wasn’t too late.

  “Adil, is it here?” Oppenheimer shook a cigarette from his crumpled pack and lit it from the stub of his previous one. His Egyptian translator nodded, lips pressed in a thin line, hand trembling as he gestured at the jackals.

  The American physicist stalked into the carnage, the red-orange glow of his cigarette bobbing before him like a demon will-o-wisp. The jackals ignored his approach, intent on their feast, or perhaps grown indifferent to men. Oppenheimer crouched as he drew near the beasts, motioning Adil to the ground. He fished a leather-bound book from his satchel and thumbed through the crackling pages.

  Oppenheimer closed his eyes and took a long drag on his cigarette. The smoke tingled and burned, curling through his lungs to spew forth in a series of low rasping coughs. Breath rattled in his throat, but his hands were steady. He threw his arms wide and stood, highlighted against the false dawn like an eldritch scarecrow meant to scatter the ghosts of the dead.

  The American began to speak, soft syllables that grew in tempo and volume until they became a chattering torrent of exhortation. The language was unmistakably foreign, yet somehow familiar, the words recognizable in the same way as the features of ancestors are to their descendants. All but one of the jackals scattered, their snarling yips fading as they fled into the night.

  The last beast stood transfixed, eyes wide, black lips pulled back from yellowed fangs, dark red tongue lolling in its open mouth. Oppenheimer extended one hand to the jackal, palm out, and his chant took on a tone of command. The jackal began to shake and snap at the air, letting vent a long howl ending in an almost human scream. Its bones grew and warped. Flesh and fur writhed into obscene shapes as the creature pushed itself upright. Long clawed fingers clutched at the night as if they could gather the darkness like a shroud. The jackal fell to the ground, convulsing, its grub-pale flesh strangely luminous in the gloom. Oppenheimer’s chant trickled to a stop.