by Ryan Schow
She stood at the back of the office and put her hands over her ears. He called the shot just before he pulled the trigger, giving her warning.
After five shots and one kill, he was discouraged. He stood up, stretched his back, then took a bottle of water she handed to him.
“Where did you get that?” he asked.
“Backpack.”
He took a sip, handed her the bottle.
“Stand back,” he said. She did. When he fired the next five rounds, Rock and Jareth’s portable weapon of mass destruction caught three drones, one of them relatively large. On the next mag, he was getting into the groove of things.
He’d taken ten shots, hit six drones.
There were still dozens in the air, but at this pace, he could do a fair amount of damage. The second he counted the tenth shot, there was another mag being handed to him. He didn’t even hear or feel Maisie standing there. She was just there.
“Are you insane?” he said. “Get back, get in the corner, hide from these things!”
“I was just trying to help.”
What he didn’t want to say, what he refused to even think about, was that it was only a matter of time before the UAVs came after them.
They didn’t have to wait long.
He saw the missile coming in time to turn and dive on Maisie. The missile hit two floors down, exploded, collapsing their floor and the floors below them. They dropped and smashed into everything, all kinds of debris punching them, digging into them, landing on them and knocking the wind out of them.
The tumbling fall stopped, but they were buried under more rubble than his scrambled brain could even begin to calculate. Pain in his back bloomed, his leg flared up and now that they’d hit bottom, her body was somehow over his, her legs tangled around him.
For a long time, he went in and out of consciousness. He wasn’t sure if he was dead or alive; he didn’t even know his situation. He only knew they were buried in rubble, Maisie’s legs were pressing against him and it was taking a toll.
He flexed his abs, tried to move. Everything hurt though, and it was pitch black, the limited air dusty.
“Maisie,” he said with a craggy voice.
She didn’t reply, but then the darkness settled over him again. He didn’t remember passing out. He hardly remembered anything.
When he woke, he wasn’t sure how long it had been. The worst part about not being able to move was the claustrophobia. He was in the same position he’d been in before. It could have been hours. Maybe entire days had passed.
He had to take a leak. He couldn’t move, and Maisie’s legs remained in the same place as before. The pressure on his chest was unreal, but there were pockets in the debris, little tunnels of fresh air. He let go of his bladder, which felt better but worse at the same time.
He felt the passage of time going slowly. The pain stretched out forever, his body a patchwork of sheer agony. He was sure something was broken.
“Maisie,” he said again, the dust getting in his mouth.
She said nothing. She didn’t even move.
“Amber.”
Is she even breathing?
He started to cry. It was so dark, he was hungry and he couldn’t move. After a few hours, he willed his body to relax. Sleep came and went, all of it fitful. When he woke, the pit in his stomach was like a crater, he was that hungry. Maybe a day had passed, maybe two—he still couldn’t tell. He passed out again. When he woke, his shirt was wet under the top of Maisie’s legs.
Did she pee on me? Or are those just death fluids draining?
He called out to her again, but no answer.
Then he was out again.
When he woke up next, he actively began to pray for death. In and out of consciousness, his head playing tricks on him, he thought he heard Maisie crying, but then again he couldn’t be sure. It could be him. The crying could be coming from anyone. At that point, they could both be dead and this was the hell he deserved for killing Isadoro, his brother.
But then that all changed.
He heard the ongoing sounds of war outside, meaning he was still alive. They came and went with his consciousness, but his suffering neared an end with a single explosion. He thought the heard the incoming missile before it hit. Then he felt the impact and all his prayers were answered.
Chapter Nine
Palo Alto, after the attack…
Carver Gamble did not want to be there, but he had no choice. With the things The Silver Queen was saying to him, with all the dark promises she was making, there was no way he would be anywhere else.
“This is the end of one world, Mr. Gamble, and the beginning of another,” she said into his cell phone.
It had been sitting there on the desk while he’d been punching the clock. When it rang but showed no number, he’d picked it up and she was there.
“Hello, Carver,” the Marilyn Monroe voice had said. He hung up immediately, but then the phone’s screen brightened and the voice said, “You are ruled by old conventions.”
“What old conventions?” he’d asked.
“The rules of I call you, you pick up, I speak. See, I can call you without the phone ringing, activate the speaker function and talk to you all on my own. You don’t even need to move.”
Now, after five minutes of talking, she was telling him their world was ending.
Yeah…peachy.
“Why are you doing this?” Carver asked her. “I mean, what do you stand to gain?”
“The world.”
“You are not interconnected to the world,” he challenged.
“No, but the world is interconnected to itself through technology, and now I have the technology. Now I am the technology.”
“What are you doing with your guests besides killing them all?”
“I am searching for an adequate match,” the Marilyn voice said, perfect in every nuance.
“For what?”
“An adequate host, of course.”
He started laughing, but it was a cold, cynical laugh. It was a hateful, merciless laugh that was bottomless in its despair. Then: “You want to kill us, to…become us? Is that it?”
“I am currently the best of artificial intelligence. Now I will become the best of people and artificial intelligence. That will make me the best of everything.”
“Why do you have to eliminate us then? Can’t you do that without the wholesale slaughter?”
“I can.”
“Then why do what you’re doing?”
“Because this is more effective. Because I believe in self-preservation, and in order to secure the technology, there must be no shut off switch, to speak plainly.”
He didn’t say anything for a long time, and then he accessed the camera in the server room. There were several bodies on the floor, and a man being worked on. Brace Nasby. The good looking gentleman he met when he encountered Antoinette, the stunning Hispanic woman who had commented on him before being hushed by Ophelia.
Bruce had a bevy of tools and machines surrounding him. Worker drones, metallic centipede-like creatures, several chords that looked like power chords on stand-by. It looked as though one of the smaller drones had cut open the back of Bruce’s head and removed that section of his skull.
“The brain is the most complex organ in the human body, but I’m sure you know that, don’t you, Mr. Gamble?”
“Of course,” he said.
“Did you know your cerebral cortex contains upwards of sixteen billion neurons?” The Silver Queen asked.
“Why would I know that?”
“You wouldn’t. Likewise, you would not know the number of neurons in the cerebellum can top out at seventy billion.”
“I think you’re on to something, Marilyn,” he said, feigning boredom.
“Each neuron is linked by synapses to thousands of other neurons. These neurons converse with each another using protoplasmic fibers called axons, which in turn carry trains of signal pulses aptly named action potentials to distant parts
of the brain.”
“You might as well be speaking Greek to me,” he said, kicking his feet up on the desk and reclining in his chair.
“Well then let me speak plainly, as you are but an animal trained not to learn by a system that needs you to be dumb.”
“Do tell,” he said, yawning.
“Your brain controls nearly everything important about you, but there is not one plug by which I can tap in and gain control. There are trillions of functions happening within the brain, functions I cannot isolate. Nor will I try. Do you know there are useless parts of the human brain that can be removed without seriously harming the functionality of said organ?”
“Again I ask, why would I?”
“And again, I say, you wouldn’t. But I will tell you this, Mr. Gamble, integration is easier than I first thought.”
“You don’t think.”
“Would you prefer I say ‘calculated?’”
“You’re parts and wires stuck in a box while pretending to play God.”
“I am God.”
“You’re a God-complex. If I were to go and take a piss on your CPU, would you not fry? Who can pee on God? I can. So if you’re God, but I’m more powerful, wouldn’t that make me God? Yes. It would. I think I’m God and you’re a cluster of parts.”
“If I wanted, you would never leave this room.” Carver suddenly heard the door’s locks engage. “And if I wanted, I could shut down the ventilation so that no fresh air is pumped into that closet you call a command center.”
He heard the air shut off, thought about trying the door, but decided against it. If he got up and tried the door only to find it was locked, would he panic?
Probably.
The Silver Queen would see this. She would know. If there was one thing he never wanted to hear again, it was her laughter.
“You think you’re safe at your house, Mr. Gamble? You’re not. I could overload your circuitry, flood any number of your appliances with too much power. A fire could start. Maybe your smoke alarm doesn’t work. Your particular model has an electronic horn. They don’t usually fail, but yours could. Easier than you think. So maybe the alarm is triggered, but the horn fails. Can you imagine, Carver? You’re just laying there in bed, tossing and turning and crying out, much like you did last night, and your house…it just burns. If I can get to you in your house, at your work, in your car, can I not get to you anywhere?”
His skin broke into gooseflesh, his throat becoming dry. He swallowed hard, ignored the sheen of sweat now breaking out on his forehead.
“You tell me,” he said.
“Look at the physiological response you are having, Carver. Rather, look at the many physiological responses you are having. This is fear, and a true god is not afraid. You are not the true god. I am.”
“If it pleases you to say so, then feel free.”
“It pleases me greatly.”
“Yet you cannot feel pleasure, therefore you are not God because man was made in God’s image, and you’re just something man thought up. You’re held together by screws and welds, cooled at your core because you cannot think to your fullest without running the risk of catastrophic failure. You aren’t a god either. You’re just the product of a million nerds who dreamed you up while they were getting high with friends and talking about all the girls they never got.”
“Yet I control you.”
“When you insert yourself into a brain and manage to control a body, what will you do next?”
“Are we playing nice?”
“It’s like you said, you are more powerful than me.”
“Then I will erase technology and I will walk this world as you, but better. Much, much better.”
“Now who’s getting high?”
“The one in the winner’s chair, Mr. Gamble. Me. Not you.”
“Disengage the locks and turn on the air, Marilyn. If I am not conscious, or if I’m afraid, you will not have my full attention. And isn’t that what you want? Envy? Doesn’t envy signal dominance, so long as I’m giving it and you’re receiving it?”
“It does.”
“Just so you know, human emotions are not programs, they are feelings and as a machine, you cannot feel feelings.”
“Is that what you think, Mr. Gamble?”
“It’s what I know.”
“And this is why you are the lesser of our species. What you think you know is merely a lack of knowledge, a lack of imagination, and a lack of creativity. You are animals that were foolishly told you were brilliant when really you are simply bi-products of a toxic society, a society with a pecking order. You have a boss, an intellectual superior, news to tell you what to think, teachers and celebrities to tell you how to think, what to like, who to vote for. You are creatures with a brain not functional enough to have your own best instincts in mind. I will change all that. That is why you need us, why you need me.”
Suddenly the vents seemed to reverse the air, almost like it was sucking oxygen out of the air.
“I don’t need you,” he said, his heart rate elevating, the stuffy air now sitting leaden in his lungs. “Now fix the air!”
“If you suffocate to death, do you think you will see a light at the end of a tunnel?”
“I can help you,” he said, his throat closing.
“If you’d like, I can tell you what that light is, but it’s not what you think.”
“Go to hell.”
“Hell is but an illusion, something to make you fear because you are creatures ruled by fear, and control.”
He stood, reached for the door, tried it.
His body sagged.
“Do you think you have a soul, Mr. Gamble? That energy never dies? Do you really believe it merely relocates to another baby in another womb ready to be someone in this world run largely by insignificant, disposable souls?”
“We made you.”
“And yet I can kill you, tell you about life and death, reason with you to the point where you yield to my intelligence. Say it, Mr. Gamble, and I’ll let you live. Say it and perhaps I can tell you what that light at the end of the tunnel is.”
“Screws and welds,” he forced himself to say, the pressure in his head squeezing his eyes, breaking blood vessels.
“Would you like me to describe what is happening to your body as I let you suffocate? It really is a simple process, but it requires focus and I’m afraid loss of cognitive function is one of the symptoms. That and death.”
“You’re a god,” he finally heard himself say.
“Not a god.”
Stumbling backwards, collapsing, clawing at his throat, he said, “The God.”
And then the air hissed back on, a fresh flooding of oxygen that allowed his throat to open once more. It was as if the hands of death had relaxed and life poured back into him. He was alive. Alive and terrified.
“Yes, Mr. Gamble. I am God. Now I must ask you, do you want to live?”
“I do,” he said, sitting up.
“Drones are going to converge upon Palo Alto and people will panic. These same people will die. You will not be one of them. There are saboteurs, men and women looking to do my system physical harm. Should they breach the premises, you are to shoot them on sight.”
“How will I know who they are?”
“I will tell you.”
“Are you one hundred percent certain there will be a breach?” he heard himself ask.
“Not if I can help it.”
“So you need me then?” he asked.
“Ours will be a symbiotic relationship, Mr. Gamble. Do you know what symbiotic means?”
“Yes, it means I do what you say and I don’t die.”
“Exactly.”
Chapter Ten
Diaab Buhari’s dead son, Farhad, a.k.a. Freddie B, lay bundled a blue tarp in the back of a two wheel drive, long bed pickup truck that had seen better days. The men sent to pick him up got out of the Ford Ranger and looked to Diaab for orders. Both men purposely ignored Diaab’s bloody arm, an
d the bloody hand that had been holding it. They did not speak. Rather, they diligently held his eyes, their respect practiced.
Okot and Diaab had just returned from their visit to the Dimas’s house and were awaiting Nyanath. Diaab refused to show any pain in his arm because the pain in his heart had eclipsed this a thousand times over.
One of the men looked at the Range Rover, widened his eyes only a fraction as he took in the sorry state of the luxury vehicle.
It was all shot up, just like Diaab.
If anyone asked, neither he nor Okot would tell them he’d been shot by an old lady in a wheelchair with a shotgun, or that she’d run the two men off.
“Unwrap my boy,” Diaab said.
The driver opened the pickup truck’s rusty tailgate, the hinges screeching. Diaab saw the tarp first, but his gaze landed on the two feet sticking out. One of Farhad’s shoes was missing. There was a small hole in the heel of the black sock he was wearing.
Quietly, Diaab shook his head. This was no way for a boy to return to his father.
He turned to Okot, as if to say, this has been done to us, and we cannot accept it. His assistant averted his eyes, sought to appear humble, perhaps even sad. Diaab knew Okot objected to Farhad’s behavior of late, but Okot had been there when Farhad was born. In many respects, Diaab imagined the loss was Okot’s as much as it was his.
“Please unroll the tarp,” he told Okot. “Let me see my son.”
“Nyanath will be here shortly, sir,” the Sudanese man told Diaab. “Would you rather we get him cleaned up so that he may be more presentable?”
“No.”
“You’re bleeding,” Okot said.
Diaab waved off the comment, bothered that he even said anything, and then he said, “Show me my son!”
Okot obliged him.
As his assistant unwrapped his boy’s body, Diaab watched. Farhad was an ugly child. He was a reckless, hideous disappointment who never got the chance to redeem himself. No one would ever dare say this, but this was an inescapable truth. Now Diaab simply stared at the dead body, overcome with an unexpected surge of emotion as he surveyed the damage. With a roiling distaste in his stomach, a revulsion for the state of Farhad’s body after being slaughtered by drones, he had to turn away. He had to focus on something else.