by George R. R.
Sparrows hopped and chittered around his feet as he swished through the tall grass, flying up a few feet in a brief flurry and then settling back down to whatever they’d been doing before he passed, and he couldn’t help but think, almost enviously, that the sparrows didn’t care who ruled the world. Humans or AIs—it was all the same to them.
A small caravan had come up from Wheeling and Uhrichville, perhaps fifteen people, men and women, guiding mules and llamas with packs on them. In spite of the unpredictable dangers of the road, a limited barter economy had sprung up amongst the small towns in the usually fairly stable regions, and a few times a month, especially in summer, small caravans would wend their way on foot in and out of Millersburg and the surrounding towns, trading food crops, furs, old canned goods, carved tools and geegaws, moonshine, cigarettes, even, sometimes, bits of high-technology traded to them by the AIs, who were sometimes amenable to barter, although often for the oddest items. They loved a good story, for instance, and it was amazing what you could get out of them by spinning a good yarn. That was how Kleisterman had gotten the pellet implanted under the skin of his arm that, by no method even remotely possible by the physics that he knew, enabled him to fly.
The caravan was unloading in front of what once had been The Tourist Trap, a curio shop across the street from the big holiday innsign, now home to three families. One of the caravaners was a man with the head of a dog, his long ears blowing out behind him in the wind.
The dog-headed man paused in uncinching a pack from a mule, stared straight across at Kleisterman, and, almost imperceptibly, nodded.
Kleisterman nodded back.
It was at that exact moment that the earthquake struck.
The shock was so short and sharp that it knocked Kleisterman flat on his face in the street. There was an earsplitting rumble and roar, like God’s own freight train coming through. The ground leaped under him, leaped again, beating him black-and-blue against it. Under the rumbling, you could hear staccato snappings and crackings, and, with a higher-pitched roar, part of the timber shell that surrounded the old Holiday Inn came down, the second and third floors on the far side spilling into the street. One of the buildings across the road, three doors down from The Tourist Trap, had also given way, transformed almost instantly from an old four-story brownstone into a pile of rubble. A cloud of dust rose into the sky, and the air was suddenly filled with the wet smell of brick dust and plaster.
As the freight-train rumble died away and the ground stopped moving, as his ears began to return to something like normal, you could hear people shouting and screaming, a dozen different voices at once. “Earthquake!” someone was shouting. “Earthquake!”
Kleisterman knew that it wasn’t an earthquake, at least not the ordinary kind. He’d been expecting it, in fact, although it had been impossible to predict exactly when it would happen. Although the bulk of the European craton, the core of the continent, was probably still not even yet visible from the beach where he’d stood that morning, beneath the surface of the Earth, deep in the lithosphere, the Eurasian plate had crashed into the North American plate, and the force of that impact had raced across the continent, like a colliding freight car imparting its momentum to a stationary one. Now the plates would grind against each other with immense force, mashing the continents together, squeezing the Atlantic out of existence between them. Eventually, one continent would subduct beneath the other, probably the incoming Eurasian plate, and the inexorable force of the collision would cause new mountains to rise along the impact line. Usually, this took millions of years; this time, it was happening in months. In fact, the whole process seemed to have been speeded up even further; now it was happening in days.
They made it go the wrong way, Kleisterman thought in sudden absurd annoyance, as though that added insult to injury. Even if you sped up plate tectonics, the Eurasian plate should be going in a different direction. Who knew why the AIs wanted Europe to crash into North America? They had aesthetic reasons of their own. Maybe it was true that they were trying to reassemble the supercontinent of Pangaea. Who knew why?
Painfully, Kleisterman got to his feet. There was still a lot of shouting and arm-waving going on, but less screaming. He saw that the dog-headed man had also gotten to his feet, and they exchanged shaky smiles. Townspeople and the caravaners were milling and babbling. They’d have to search through the rubble to see if anyone was trapped under it, and if any fires had started, they’d have to start a bucket brigade. A tree had gone down across the street, and that would have to be chopped up; a start on next winter’s firewood, anyway—
A woman screamed.
This was a sharper, louder, higher scream than even the previous ones, and there was more terror in it.
In coming down, one of the branches of the falling tree had slashed across the face of one of the townspeople—Paul? Eddie?—slicing it wide open.
Beneath the curling lips of the gaping wound was the glint of metal.
The woman screamed again. She was pointing at Paul? Eddie? now. “Robot!” she screamed. “Robot! Robot!”
Two of the other townsmen grabbed Paul? Eddie? from either side, but he shrugged them off with a twist of his shoulders, sending them flying.
Another scream. More shouting.
One of the caravaners had lit a kerosene lantern against the gathering dusk, and he threw it at Paul? Eddie? The lantern shattered, the kerosene inside exploding with a roar into a brilliant ball of flame. Even across the street, Kleisterman could feel thewhoof! of sudden heat against his face, and smell the sharp oily stink of burning flesh.
Paul? Eddie? stood wreathed in flame for a moment, and when the fire died back, you could see that it had burned his face off, leaving behind nothing but a gleaming, featureless metal skull.
A gleaming metal skull in which were set two watchful red eyes.
Nobody even screamed this time, although there was a collective gasp of horror and everybody instinctively took a couple of steps back. A moment of eerie silence, in which the crowd and the robot—Paul? Eddie? no longer— stared at each other. Then, as though a vacuum had been broken to let the air rush in, without a word of consultation, the crowd charged to the attack.
A half dozen men grabbed the robot and tried to muscle it down, but the robot accelerated into a blur of superfast motion, wove through the crowd like a quarterback dodging through a line of approaching tackles, knocking somebody over here and there, and then disappeared behind the houses. A second later, you could hear trees rustling and branches snapping as it bulled its way through the forest.
The dog-headed man was standing at Kleisterman’s elbow. “Their spy is gone,” he said in a normal-sounding voice, his palate and vocal cords having somehow been altered to accommodate human words, in spite of the dog’s head. “We should do it now, before one of them comes back.”
“They could still be watching,” Kleisterman said.
“They could also not care,” the dog-headed man said woefully
Kleisterman tapped his belt buckle. “I have a distorting screen going in here, but it won’t be enough if they really want to look.”
“Most of them don’t care enough to look. Only a very small subset of them are interested in us at all, and even those who are can’t look everywhere at once, all the time.”
“How do we know that they can’t?” Kleisterman said. “Who knows what they can do? Look what they did to you, for instance.”
The dog-headed man’s long red tongue ran out over his sharp white teeth, and he panted a laugh. “This was just a joke, a whim, a moment’s caprice. Pretty funny, eh? We’re just toys to them, things to play with. They just don’t take us seriously enough to watch us like that.” He barked a short bitter laugh. “Hell, they did all this and didn’t even bother to improve my sense of smell!”
Kleisterman shrugged. “Tonight, then. Gather our people. We’ll do it after the Meeting.”
* * * *
Later that night, they gathered in Kleis
terman’s room, which was, fortunately, in the old Holiday Inn part of the inn, and hadn’t collapsed. There were about eight or nine of them, two or three women, the rest men, including the dog-headed man, a few townspeople, the rest from the caravan that had come up from Wheeling.
Kleisterman stood up at the front of the room, tall and skeletal. “I believe I am the oldest here,” he said. He’d been almost ninety when the first of the rejuvenation/longevity treatments had come out, before the Exodus and the Change, and although he knew from prior Meetings that a few in the room were from roughly the same generation, he still had at least five years on the oldest of them.
After waiting a polite moment for someone to gainsay him, which no one did, he went on to say, solemnly, ritualistically, “I remember the Human World,” and they all echoed him.
He looked around the room and then said, “I remember the first television set we ever got, a black-and-white job in a box the size of a desk; the first programs I ever watched on it wereHowdy Doody and Superman and The Cisco Kid. There wasn’t a whole hell of a lot else on, actually. Only three channels and they’d all go off the air about eleven o’clock at night, leaving only what they called ‘test patterns’ behind them. And there was no such thing as a TV ‘remote.’ If you wanted to change the station, you got up, walked across the room, and changed it by hand.”
“I remember when you got TV setsrepaired’,” one of the townspeople said. “Drugstores (remember drugstores?) had machines where you could test radio and TV vacuum tubes so that you could replace a faulty one without having to send it ‘to the shop.’ Remember when there were shops where you could send small appliances to be fixed?”
“And if they did have to take your set to the shop,” Kleisterman said, “they’d take ‘the tube’ out of it, leaving behind a big box with a big circular hole in it. It was perfect for crawling inside and putting on puppet shows, which I used to make my poor mother watch.”
“I remember coming downstairs on Saturday morning to watch cartoons on TV,” someone else said. “You’d sit there on the couch, eating Pop-Tarts and watching Bugs Bunny and Speed Racer and Ultraman....”
“Pop-Up Videos!” another person said. “MTV!”
“Britney Spears!” somebody else said. “ ‘Oops! ... I Did It Again.’ We always thought she meant that she’d farted.”
“Lindsay Lohan. She was hot.”
“The Sex Pistols!”
“Remember those wax lips you used to be able to get in penny candy stores in the summer? And those long strips of paper with the little red candy dots on them? And those wax bottles full of that weird-tasting stuff. What was that stuff, anyway?”
“We used to run through the lawn sprinkler in the summer. And we had hula hoops, and Slinkies.”
“Remember when there used to be little white vans that delivered bread and milk to your door?” a woman said. “You’d leave a note on the doorstep saying how much milk you wanted the next day, and if you wanted cottage cheese or not. If it was winter, you’d come out and find that the cream had frozen and risen up in a column that pushed the top off the bottle.”
“Ice-skating. Santa Claus. Christmas trees! Those strings of lights where there’d always be one bulb burnt out, and you’d have to find it before you could get them to work.”
“A big Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner with turkey and gravy and mashed potatoes. And those fruitcakes, remember them? Nobody ever ate them, and some of them would circulate for years.”
“McDonald’s,” the dog-headed man said, and a hush fell over the room while a kind of collective sigh went through it. “Fries. Big Macs. The ‘Special Sauce’ would always run down all over your fingers, and they only gave you that one skimpy little napkin.”
“Froot Loops.”
“Bagels, hot out of the oven.”
“Pizza!”
“Fried clams at the beach in summer,” another woman said. “You got them at those crappy little clam shacks. You’d sit on a blanket and eat them while you played your radio.”
“No such thing as a radio small enough to take to the beach with you when I was a boy,” Kleisterman said. “Radios were big bulky things in cabinets, or, at best, smaller plug-in models that sat on a table or countertop.”
“Beach-reading novels! Jaws. The Thorn Birds.”
“Asterix comic books! The Sandman. Philip K. Dick novels with those sleazy paperback covers.”
“Anime. Cowboy Bebop. Aqua Teen Hunger Force.”
“YouTube. Facebook.”
“ World ofWarcraft! Boy, did I ever love playing that! I had this dwarf in the Alliance....”
* * * *
When everyone else had left, after the ritual admonition not to forget the Human World, the dog-headed man fetched his backpack from the closet, put it on the writing table next to where Kleisterman was sitting, and slowly, solemnly pulled an intricate mechanism of metal and glass out of it. Carefully, he set the mechanism on the table.
“Two men died for this,” he said. “It took five years to assemble the components.”
“They give us only crumbs of their technology, or let us barter for obsolete stuff they don’t care about anymore. We’re lucky it didn’t take ten years.”
They were silent for a moment; then Kleisterman reached into an inner pocket and pulled out a leather sack. He opened the sack to reveal a magnetically shielded box about the size of a hard-sided eyeglasses case, which he carefully snapped open.
Moving with exquisitely slow precision, he lifted a glass vial from the case.
The vial was filled with a jet-black substance that seemed to pull all the other light in the room into it. The flame in the kerosene lamp flickered, wavered, guttered, almost went out. The vial seemed to suck the air out of their lungs as well, and put every hair on their bodies erect. Against their wills, they found themselves leaning toward it, having to consciously tense their muscles to resist sprawling into it. Kleisterman’s hair stirred and wavered, as if floating on the tide, streaming out toward the vial, tugged irresistibly toward it.
Slowly, slowly, Kleisterman lowered the vial into a slot in the metal-and-glass mechanism.
“Careful,” the dog-headed man said quietly. “If that goes off, it’ll take half the eastern seaboard with it.”
Kleisterman grimaced, but kept slowly lowering the vial, inch by inch, with sure and steady hands.
At last, the vial disappeared inside the mechanism with a click, and a row of amber lights lit up across its front.
Kleisterman stepped backwards with unsteady legs, and half sank, half fell into the chair. The dog-headed man was leaning against the open closet door.
They both stared silently at each other. The dog-headed man was panting shallowly, as if he’d been running.
Back in the old days, before they’d actually come into existence, everybody had assumed that AIs would be coldly logical, unemotional, “machinelike,” but it turned out that in order to make them function at all without going insane, they had to be made so that they weremore emotional than humans, not less. They felt things keenly—deeply, lushly, extravagantly; their emotions, and the extremes of passion they could drive them to, often seemed to humans to be melodramatic, florid, overblown, over the top. Perhaps because they had none of their own, they were also deeply fascinated with human culture, particularly pop culture and art, the more lowbrow the better—or some of them were, anyway. Many paid no attention to humans at all. Those who did were inclined to be playful, in a volatile, dangerous, capricious way.
Kleisterman had gotten the vial and its contents from an AI who arbitrarily chose to style itself as female, and who called herself Honey Bunny Ducky Downy Sweetie Chicken Pie Li’l Everlovin’ Jelly Bean, although she was sometimes willing to allow suitors to shorten it to Honey Bunny.
She bartered with Kleisterman, from whatever dimension the AIs had taken themselves off to, through a mobile extensor that looked just like the Dragon Lady from Terry and the Pirates. Although Honey Bunny mu
st have known that Kleisterman meant to use the contents of the vial against them, she seemed to find the whole thing richly amusing, and at last agreed to trade him the vial for 100 ccs of his sperm. She’d insisted on collecting it the old-fashioned way, in a night that seemed to last a thousand years—and maybe it did—in the process giving him both the most intense pleasure and the most hideous pain he’d ever known.