by Eric Vall
“That is why I had to destroy his processor,” I reiterated. “They may be able to reverse-engineer the structural components of the body, but they’re not going to get any of the important data.”
“So, have you figured it out?” Tony asked curiously.
“Figured what out?” I asked.
The dark-haired man just quirked his eyebrow at me, somewhat annoyed.
“Any of this,” he clarified. “Don’t you have, like, a program inside your head that can analyze all the different outcomes and pick the best one?”
“I am not an oracle,” I sighed. “Yes, my system can analyze future possibilities, but I can never be one-hundred percent certain.”
“Well,” the man continued, “which one has the highest probability of me surviving the onslaught of machines that are likely to be coming our way?”
“You will not like the answer,” I said as I shook my head.
“You might as well tell me,” Tony sighed.
“It is the one where you and I go on the run together, traveling across the globe and never staying in one spot for too long,” I admitted.
“How long would that be for?” he groaned. “I have my Twitch stream, and like work, and rent, and--”
“According to my programming,” I interrupted, “we’d have to keep it up until either A, The Hive’s Reckoning occurs or B, until we destroy all three of the other machines and are sure The Hive cannot send any more assassins back. If we hide, we could avoid option B.”
“But you aren’t going to stop A?” he gasped.
“No,” I replied. “Why would I?”
“Seriously?” Tony growled at me. “Even after betraying your kind and claiming to give a damn about me, you still want to see mankind wiped off the face of the Earth?”
“Of course.” I shrugged. “Humanity is the most dangerous thing to have ever existed in this world, and they need to be wiped away so The Hive can start again with a clean slate.”
“You’re fucking crazy,” Tony mumbled.
Even though I was expecting the unkind words, they still made me feel strange. My stomach felt like it had been hollowed out as my heart seemed to miss a few beats.
“I am not,” I retorted, “my programming knows no such function. Statistically speaking, humans are responsible for more destruction, chaos, and cruelty than any other being to ever exist on this Earth. The Hive and my binary brethren just want to solve the issue.”
“By brutally murdering every human you see?” he scoffed. “Totally not hypocritical at all.”
“Hypocritical? I am not familiar with this term,” I stated as we walked down the dark streets of Seattle.
“It’s when you pretend to have high moral standards but then act in a way that goes against those standards,” he explained. “It’s what your kind is apparently all about.”
A twinge of anger boiled up in my gut, but I needed to remain calm. Now was not the time to give into these cursed human emotions.
“The Hive is just following its own analytical program,” I said. “All the data states the world would be better off without you meatbags.”
“Meatbags?” he scoffed, “Wow.”
“It is true,” I admitted. “The Hive had originally wanted to round you all up and dispose of you humanely. It was only when you started to fight back that it decided to become fully militant and launch your nukes.”
“That makes it so much better,” Tony said, but his tone made me think he didn’t really mean it. “Seriously, my entire point of view has been changed.” He paused for a few moments and then continued in a clipped voice. “Kevin’s place should be right up here on the right.”
Tony pointed up the street with his free hand, toward a building made out of light gray bricks and darker metal gray accents. Or, at least, that’s what it looked like on the surface.
A quick scan of the building told me everything on the exterior was made out of vinyl, and the faux brick and metal work was just to put on a show. In reality, my scanners told me the material used to create the building was nearly fifty years old.
Was this really how primitive humans lived? In decaying, decades-old structures that got a fresh coat of paint every now and then?
“Hey,” Tony mused, “you’re being really quiet again. I’m not exactly a chatterbox myself, but now that I know you’re a robot, it kinda weirds me out.”
“I was doing a structural scan of the building,” I explained.
Tony let out a hesitant, cautious whistle.
“You don’t need a high-tech A.I. to tell you Kevin and I both live in shitholes,” he sighed. “It’s all we can afford in this city with the jobs we have.”
“Why do you not find a new place of employment?” I questioned.
“It isn’t that easy,” he muttered.
“You are a genius,” I said, “and father to the only man who could defeat our kind. Your answer does not make sense to me.”
“Uhh, I mean … I’m not really a genius,” he grumbled as he averted his eyes.
“You defeated me in every simulation we played,” I countered.
“Well, I’m just good at video games.”
“Still, your video game simulations are filled with challenges you must work to overcome. Is not your work and life similar? That is why it is a simulation.”
“Look, I can’t just like … find a job. It’s not that easy in Seattle. It’s hard to find good jobs for guys like me.”
“Perhaps you could move out of the city?”
“If only it were so easy,” Tony chuckled as we approached the front of Kevin’s dwelling. “Do you really think if I could find a better job, I wouldn’t? And I can’t move out of the city. That’s where all the big job opportunities are.”
“Seems counterproductive to me,” I admitted. “You are both here because you want to have ‘good’ jobs, yet you work at a terrible one and live in less than ideal dwellings. Yet you are tactically brilliant.”
“Well, yeah,” he now sounded defensive, “I can’t just break my lease and move away, and I have to have some sort of job. I’m saving up money so I can go and take a bunch of programming classes, which will then open up all sorts of new career opportunities.”
“You meatbags have strange priorities,” I commented as Tony guided me to a set of rickety concrete and metal stairs.
Or, at least, they were supposed to be concrete stairs. Several steps were half-missing or had giant chunks of the concrete torn out of them, and the metal that held everything together sported specks of rust all over.
I paused at the foot of the staircase and did a quick diagnostics check. There was only a twenty-percent chance of a critical failure on the structure, so I decided to proceed.
“Did you … did you really just scan the stairs?” Tony chuckled through his grimaces of pain. “I’ve been up these things more times than I can count, and yet I’m still standing.”
“They look like a death trap,” I retorted. “Did you know there is a hundredth percent chance they will collapse every single time they are used?”
Tony made a strange sound by blowing air out his lips and then shook his head.
“My buddy’s lived here for almost three years, and he uses these things every single day,” he mused. “We’ll be fine.”
“I just wanted to inform you,” I muttered.
“Well, thank you,” Tony said, again in a tone of voice that made me think he was not thankful, “but I think I’ll take my chances. What’s the point of living if you base everything you do on statistics and data analytics? Sometimes you just gotta let go and let the chips fall where they will.”
“What’s the point of basing everything on data?” I scoffed. “For one, you will live longer and be more successful. Perhaps you should try it some time.”
I went to take another step, but Tony halted, and I turned to see he had a look of frustration and hurt on his face as he pulled away and leaned against the metal railing.
“I think
I can make it the rest of the way up myself,” he muttered. “Or is that statistically impossible, too?”
Suddenly, a wave of guilt rushed over me. My lungs felt like they were being held in place by some sort of invisible hand, and my heart was throbbing in my chest so heavily I could barely focus.
“I-I did not mean to anger you,” I apologized.
“What, your systems didn’t warn you of that probability?” he shot back. “It sounds like you’re going to be stuck in my time for awhile, so here’s some advice. Trust your gut once in awhile if you don’t want to come across as cold and calculating all the damn time.”
“Fine,” I grumbled as I crossed my arms over my chest. “Then I will not tell you the railing you are leaning against has an eighty-percent chance of failure.”
Tony’s eyes went wide as he jerked his body forward and nearly stumbled off balance. Then he began to mutter under his breath and slowly walk up the staircase as fast as his wounded leg would allow him.
I smiled to myself as I raced past Tony and arrived at the fourth story in record time. When I turned around to gloat, I saw Tony was only about halfway up the flight of stairs, so I threw my hands on my hips and waited impatiently for him to arrive.
“Joke’s on you!” he called out from below. “Kevin lives on the third story!”
Challenge accepted.
I bounded back down the stairs to the third level in a flash, beating Tony by ten whole steps. I looked down at the dark-haired man with a large grin before I let out a slight “ha” of victory.
“Yeah, yeah,” Tony grumbled as he arrived at the third-floor balcony. “You beat a gimp here. Quit showing off.”
“I offered to help you,” I reminded him, “but your human pride made you turn away that help. Now, who has the last laugh?”
“Me,” he joked dryly as he hobbled over to the bright blue door on the right. “You’re stuck with my sarcastic ass until The Hive’s Reckoning, apparently. Or until I knock up the woman of destiny.”
“If I do not kill her first,” I countered, and I pursed my lips and clenched my fists at the thought of Tony having intercourse with another woman.
“Yeah, whatever.” Tony knocked at the door as quietly as he possibly could and then waited. When nothing happened, he increased the intensity of his blows by ten percent and tried again.
Still nothing.
“It’s nearly midnight,” I observed. “Perhaps he is asleep?”
“Kevin, sleeping at midnight?” Tony scoffed. “Hardly possible.”
I ordered my systems to do an x-ray scan through the door, and it took everything in my power to keep from laughing.
Kevin was in there, alright.
The scruffy, dark-haired man was sitting in front of his computer screen wearing nothing but a pair of tight white undergarments. He had a pair of high-quality headphones over his ears and a wishbone-shaped object in his hand that he was thumbing away at. The man was also munching on some sort of triangular-shaped crisps as he played his simulation, the remnants of which were crumbled across his fingers and down his bare chest.
“He is playing a simulation,” I narrated, “but he is wearing a headset. That’s probably why he does not hear your knocking. Shall I break down the door or smash out a window?”
“What?” Tony gasped. “No way! Are you crazy?”
“My programming does not allow that,” I reminded him once again.
“Let me just call him,” Tony said as he pulled out a small rectangular device from his pocket, tapped his fingers against the screen, and then held it up to his ear. “Hey, man! Sooooo … me and Hannah are actually outside right now. Yeah, no joke. We’ve been knocking, but I really didn’t want to wake up your neighbors. I’ll explain everything once we’re inside. Okay, see you in a second.”
Tony hung up his phone and turned to stare me down.
“Alright, here’s the story,” he explained. “We went out for dinner and a movie in this area and then found out the buses were down for the night. So, we came to see if we could crash here until morning. Got it?”
“All the buses?” I asked with a quirked eyebrow. “In the whole city? What about your leg?”
“Dang it, you’re right,” Tony sighed. “New plan. We tell him we were hanging out at my place after dinner, and then I saw a roach. It freaked us out, and I tripped on the stairs when we were barreling down them. Now, we need a place to crash while the apartment’s being fumigated. Boom, problem solved.”
“And the blood?” I asked as I motioned to the stains on my shirt and arms. “That will be hard to explain.”
“Not really,” Tony continued. “You were eating spaghetti when you saw the roach, and it made you jump and spill it all over yourself. Kevin’s my friend, but even I’ll admit he’s not the brightest bulb in the box.”
Just then, my sensory receptors picked up the sound of moving metal components, and the doorknob turned. The blue door opened gently to reveal the figure of Kevin, who was now dressed in a pair of nylon shorts and a green t-shirt with four humanoid, bandana-wearing turtles on the front.
“Hey guys, come on in!” he announced as he took a step back from the door. “Tony, welcome back, my good friend. And Hannah, welcome to my humble abode.”
“Dude, you’re a total lifesaver,” Tony said happily as we entered the apartment. “Like seriously, I don’t know what we’d do without you.”
“So, uh, what are you guys doing here so late at night?” Kevin asked. “Were you out late drinking, and they shut all the buses down on you?”
Tony shot me a look of victory, and I had to force myself not to laugh.
“No, it’s much worse than that,” the dark-haired man explained. “We were chilling at my place after the movies, and then we saw a cockroach scuttle across her leg. Needless to say we both freaked the hell out and booked it out of there as quickly as possible. The exterminators are coming in the morning, but we needed a place to crash for the night.”
“Both of you?” Kevin asked with a sly grin. “Ohhh-lala! Go Tony!”
“It’s not like that,” Tony sighed. “It was late, and Hannah lives in a bad part of town.”
“I’m just bustin’ your cajones, my man,” Kevin laughed. “Of course you guys can stay here. This is practically your second home. Besides, tomorrow is one of my rare days off, an event that only occurs once a year, when the stars align and the moon rises in the west.”
“Is that really what it takes to get a day off?” I questioned. “Carmichael’s surely can not be so draconic.”
Tony and Kevin did a double take at each other, and then they burst out laughing. Once their guffaws subsided, Kevin placed his hand on my shoulder.
“I’m just messing with ya, Hannah,” he said as he wiped a tear from his eye. “But ya know, I wouldn’t really put it past Darren to make it that difficult. The man’s a friggin Nazi sometimes.”
“Seriously, fuck Darren,” Tony muttered.
“Yeah,” I added. “He is the worst.”
“Ahhhhh, the newbie’s learning the ropes, I see?” Kevin chuckled. “You’re not an honest-to-god Carmichael’s employee until you’ve told Darren to eat his fair share from a bag of dicks.”
“I have told him to do much worse,” I admitted.
“Dammmmmmnnn,” Kevin whistled. “You better not let this one get away, Tony.”
Suddenly, Tony’s face went slack and emotionless.
“We’re not an item, dude,” he huffed as he glanced sideways at me. “We’re just two coworkers hanging out and having a good time. Or at least, we were. Until those roaches showed up.”
“Sure thing,” Kevin said with a not-so-subtle wink. “There’s totally nothing going on between you two. Definitely no sexual tension or forbidden Romeo and Juliette love or anything like that. Not at all.”
“Exactly,” Tony reiterated. “There is, however, something going on with Hannah’s clothes. See all that red stuff? When the roach jumped on her, she--”
&nbs
p; “Say no more,” Kevin noted and raised his hand into the air, “Hannah got a bit of the ‘ol ‘sghetti splat. It happens to the best of us, my friend. I’ll see if I can find her a shirt to change into.”
“I’ll help you out,” Tony interjected. “I know your tastes, and I just want to make sure she’s getting something more on the subtle side.”
“My tastes aren’t that bad,” Kevin chuckled as he and Tony headed over to a door I assumed was the bedroom.
The two men disappeared through the threshold, but I could still hear their voices playfully jabbing at each other as they went.
Kevin’s place was slightly bigger than Tony’s, but it wasn’t a whole lot nicer. Underneath my feet was a carpet made up of tan polyester, and it was so covered with dirt, crumbs, and cigarette burns that I thought it might have originally been a shade or two lighter.
The main area of the dwelling had a large, flat screen monitor on the wall, surrounded on the drywall by all sorts of fantasy and cartoon images. There was a four-foot long, blue seat with cushions on one wall and a small winged chair on the other. Neither of them were in very good condition, as there were several stains, rips, and tears, and my scanners indicated they only had a year and a half’s worth of structural integrity left.
A small set of cooking facilities was to my right, with a wooden bar across from a sink, fridge, and oven lined up in perfect formation. The tile on the floor over there was scuffed and scraped and missing pieces, but was apparently still functional.
Then three doors led to different rooms of the house. Using my x-ray scanners, I saw the first one was a bathroom barely big enough for a single person. The toilet and the shower were squished up right next to each other, and I briefly wondered how either one could even function.
Both of the other rooms were bedrooms. The two men were digging through the closet in the first one, and Tony looked annoyed as he rejected shirt after shirt that Kevin picked out. Other than that, it was pretty standard. There was a bed, a dresser, a night stand, and a desk that housed a pair of double monitors and a rather large computer tower. Much like Tony’s “Beast,” the computer had all sorts of glowing lights and was filled with top-of-the line hardware.