Chapter 6
The address took them far out of town, a four hour’s drive. During the whole trip there was silence between Caroline and Daniel. He had not even bothered to ask her if she needed to stop and use a restroom. He just kept on driving. Caroline had tried to sleep during the trip. Despite the silence, the stress of her current situation kept her from resting.
The car slowed as it reached their destination. They were out in the middle of the countryside. There were number of small trees around but it was mostly grass. The only manmade structure beyond the road was a very small building. It was a small square structure with a diagonal slant downward on one of the walls, a single door on the opposite wall and what were presumably steps leading down beyond. The only other thing outside was a single mailbox with the address written on the side.
“What the fuck is this shit?” snarled Daniel, breaking the silence.
Caroline shrugged. “Who knows?”
Daniel glared angrily over at her. “You know exactly what it is! Come on!” Daniel forcibly opened the car door and stepped out.
Not wishing to be dragged again by her now bruised wrist, Caroline opened up her own door and followed Daniel towards the structure.
The doorway was unlocked, and beyond it there was a narrow staircase leading underground. It was dark, musty, and appeared as if the place had been abandoned for quite some time. It smelled too, but neither Daniel nor Caroline could figure out where the stench was coming from. There was a light switch at the top of the stairs that lit a single light bulb at the bottom.
Daniel coughed due to the amount of dust in the air. “Does your other boyfriend not know how to run a vacuum or something?”
Caroline could not believe Daniel’s audacity. It was plainly obvious the place had been abandoned, yet he was still trying to accuse her of cheating when it was already obvious he was guilty of it himself. “You’re such a hypocrite…”
Daniel backhanded Caroline across the face, striking her for the second time that day. By this point Caroline’s face was substantially bruised. “You’ll mind your tone, Carol! I’m sick of you talking back to me!”
Caroline held her hand to her bruised face. She tried desperately to hold back her tears, not wishing to give Daniel the benefit of seeing her cry again.
The two descended down the staircase into a single rectangular room. Surrounding them in one corner was a makeshift kitchen and in another a television. Taking up both corners on the other side of the room were several computers and a large monitor sitting on a table surrounded by wires and spare computer parts. There was a single chair in front of all this. In it were the skeletonized remains of someone, and the source of the strange smell.
“Urgh!” bellowed a disgusted Daniel. “There’s a corpse down here! What the fuck, Carol!?”
Caroline ignored him as she approached the monitor and the corpse. Something about the long dead body drew her attention. The bones themselves told her little, but the clothes strewn over them and the helmet it wore told her far more. The helmet looked just like the one she had worn at the university, just with a few minor variations. The clothes, however, made her chest sore with dread. She had known someone who used to wear the same exact outfit. Someone she knew quite well.
At that moment the large monitor clicked on and Fillin appeared. “Ah, you’re here sooner than I expected. I was just finished getting the virus prepped for…” He trailed off when he saw Caroline’s scared and bruised face near tears standing next to the remains. His eyes laid their gaze on Daniel, with suspicion and rage filling them. “And who might you be?”
Daniel spat on the monitor. “Who am I!? Who the fuck are you!?”
Fillin tried very hard not to let his emotions show. “I’m what most would call an A.I.”
“An A.I.!?” said Daniel in shock. He turned to Caroline. “You’ve been talking to an A.I.!? A fucking abomination!?”
Caroline could not help but start to cry as she slowly shook her head. “No…he’s not an A.I…” She looked down at the corpse, then back up at the monitor and directly into Fillin’s eyes. “Jack, what happened to you?”
Fillin remained silent for what seemed like an eternity. His eyes began to water as he responded. “I dumped my mind into the digital world. I put so much of myself inside that when I tried to return, I couldn’t. So I decided to make the best of the situation. I figured you might actually let me help you if you were talking to ‘Fillin’, not Jack.”
Caroline could not hold herself back from sobbing anymore. She slammed her hands down on the table as she cried out. “Why!? Why did you decide to help me!? Why help me destroy things like you!? You lied! You knew you’d die and you never hesitated to help me do this! Why Jack!?”
Tears slowly started leaking out of Jack’s eyes. “Because I love you…and I wanted to see you happy…”
Daniel had heard enough. “Hey, fuck you!” He pointed his finger at Jack’s image on the screen. “She’s my woman, and no fucking tech shit like you could ever know how to love! I don’t care if you used to be human! You aren’t anymore!”
Jack remained silent, but a boiling anger could be seen through his tears. “Nobody belongs to anybody, but if it’s the destruction of things like me you want, all you need to do is push the ‘Enter’ button on the keyboard and my virus will be set free to destroy any technology it can infect.”
“No!” Caroline screamed. “Don’t do this, Jack!”
“That’s what you wanted, isn’t it!?” shouted Jack. “You always wanted things to go your way, right!? What changed, Carol!? Why care now!?”
Caroline’s eyes were turning red and puffy from all the tears. “I never stopped caring, Jack! I’m sorry! I was wrong! I don’t want any of this anymore! Maybe I never did!”
“Too bad, Carol. See ya, Jack!” said Daniel, as he reached for the ‘Enter’ key.
Caroline grabbed Daniel’s arm in an attempt to stop him, but Daniel pushed her onto the floor. With a single tap, he pushed the ‘Enter’ key.
Jack smiled through his sorrow. “Goodbye, Caroline…” His image slowly faded from the screen, replaced by a blue gauge which slowly increased as the virus was distributed.
As Caroline pushed herself up off of the floor, something inside her snapped. She was about to watch a man she cared deeply about, a man who truly loved her, die. Not an A.I., not a computer, but a man. Her emotions began to boil over, and she slowly formed a fist with her right hand. Daniel only turned around just soon enough to see her punch land square in his jaw. The combination of her punch and his head slamming into the concrete floor knocked Daniel unconscious.
Frantically Caroline tried to cancel the virus’s release. There was a single ‘Abort’ button on the screen under the blue bar which she repeatedly clicked on. Eventually, the screen read ‘distribution aborted’ and then it turned to black again. The computer system was completely shut down. Caroline had no way of knowing whether or not she had stopped the virus in time, or if Jack was still alive. No matter how hard she tried she could not get the system to turn back on.
She had started sobbing again, believing she was too late, when through her tears she noticed a dim, flashing light in the corner of the room. She wiped the drops from her eyes and investigated the source of the light. It was a small external hard drive that was plugged into the system. All the rest of the computers and attachments had their lights off and were completely inert, except this one drive.
Acting on her instincts, Caroline removed the drive from the USB port it was attached to, walked back and set it on the staircase. Then, she strolled over to the still unconscious Daniel and took his car keys from his pocket. In a pile of clutter on the floor she found some rope and used it to tie Daniel to one of the support beams for the underground room. Hard drive in hand, she went up the stairs, got in the car and started driving home.
A Different Sort of Life Page 6