9 Tales Told in the Dark 21

by 9 Tales Told in the Dark

  “Hello,” he said to the hammer.

  “...” no response.

  “Do you have a name?”

  “...”

  “Aww, c’mon man, I know you’re alive...just tell me what it’s like.”

  “...”

  “Fuck you then,” he said, throwing it across the garage into a corner.

  The dream that night was worse than the first. He was once again in a factory, only now there was a wide-open space with a single conveyor belt at its center. At the end of the belt, on the far side of a great metallic chamber that stood like a huge iron maiden, there sat a large wooden cabinet. Behind the cabinet, leading off into the haze that obscured the walls, was a line of objects: sinks and books; camera-drones; shovels; shoes; toilet paper rolls; electrical plugs; so much more, on and on. The conveyor belt then began to move. From out of the haze to his right came a child, moved along by the belt. The child was young, a soft-faced girl in a white jumper, hair roughly cut down to her scalp. Her face showed no emotion, as if she had been anesthetized. The belt pulled her along. The chamber’s door slid open and inside Tim could see nothing but darkness, an unnatural dark, an impenetrable black. The door shut behind the girl. A whirring came from inside the chamber, something shifting into gear, a horrible machine-beast waking up. And then the screams began. They came from inside the chamber, loud and out of control, wildly modulating in pitch and tenor. This went on for minutes, the screams only barely covering up the sounds tearing, the snap of tendons, the pulverizing of meat. When the sounds had ceased, a small robotic arm extended from the far side of the chamber, reaching a spray canister toward the cabinet. The arm sprayed the contained fluid all over the cabinet – a deep brown mist clouding the air around it. The cabinet shuddered and moved, its corners became somehow slack, easy, the knobs seemed to now hold potential, to contain the means of expression, to just barely cover up an intelligence. The next child appeared on the conveyor belt. Tim woke dripping in sweat, mouthing “No,” over and over.

  In the morning, Tim messaged Paul, the neighbor’s kid, asking him to come over to help him with a computer problem. The kid staggered in an hour later, bed-headed and dressed in pajamas.

  “When are you gonna get a job,” Tim asked, pouring Paul a cup of coffee from the instant-pot.

  “Psst, why bother. What do you need?” accepting the coffee and wiping at his eyes.

  “What’s like, the current state of Artificial Intelligence?”

  Paul eyed him up, smiling, “Why do you care, did you get swindled by one? Have you been dating one?”

  “What? No, no. I saw these things at the amusement park the other day...”

  “Anthros. It’s ridiculous that we came up with them but use them to put on shows for fucking kids.”

  “But they’re just AI’s right?”

  “No, man, they’re way more advanced than that. Well ‘advanced’ isn’t right...you’re talking like science man, bio shit, not high-tech, not really.”

  “Jesus, Paul, get to it, what are they...do they have brains, what?”

  “Ughh...okay, well we gotta do some history. Forever really, we’ve predicted where we’d be with AI and it just never works out, or never works out as fast as we thought it would. Like when I was a kid, I remember reading all these websites that made predictions about Artificial Intelligence, like they were truth, like everyone was so sure we’d have an AI running the world by now, but we’re not even close. There’s tons of issues like –”

  “So they’re not computers?”

  “I was getting to it, jeez. There was a pretty decent subgroup of neuros and code junkies who didn’t think that intelligence was a thing but instead a symptom or like a product of all these other things. And of course, that’s obvious, but everyone kept trying to make AI’s that were divorced from everything except their own intelligence and everyone kept plugging away at ‘em without figuring out – and maybe this is wrong, I don’t know – that the ‘intelligence’ part of us, or animals, was based on a million other things. The body, for instance. Maybe history.”

  “Okay?”

  “No one wants to think they’re just a product of all these parts…there has to be something more, right? Only there’s not, not really. So some of these splinter groups got together and created the anthros, more to prove a point than anything.”

  “I don’t buy it.”

  “That’s the secret man.”

  “What secret.”

  “I mean, you want there to be a secret, the secret is that there is no secret.”

  “Are you high?”

  “Yeah, man. Here, check out some videos on these things.”

  Tim sat with his head in his hands as Katy cleared off the table. His mouth felt dry, his brain clumsy. It was as if there was a pin pricking at the crevices of his thought, some leftover bit of food trapped between teeth. There was some understanding he wished to articulate, some change of lens in his view of the world. However much he tried, he could not place it.

  “Are you thinking about the anthros Dad?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “You could get me the one I asked for last year, the stuffed cat.”

  “Why wouldn’t you just get a real cat?”

  “You wouldn’t let me...and what’s the difference anyway.”

  “Yeah,” he said absently.

  “Why don’t you just go for a tour at one of the places where they build them?”

  “You can do that? I hadn’t thought of that.”

  Most of the places he called said that they did not offer tours, but he eventually found one, associated with a theme park of course, that said they offered daily tours. He went to sleep feeling fearful. He dreamed that night of the factory. He was the only thing in it, no machines, no objects, no conveyor belts. He could not see the walls for the haze. And with that horrible dream knowledge he knew that there were no walls, that the factory extended to the ends of the earth, that if there were walls a million miles away that they contained everything within it, they contained all of the love he’d ever felt and all of the mileage he’d put on his body through the years, and all of the days spent alone and dull and all the nights with friends and beer, all of it under one roof. All of it product of the same process. He woke and kept his eyes shut until he heard Julie stir sometime after dawn.

  He kept Katy out of school the next day and took her with him for the 90-mile drive to the theme park and its facilities. “Oh, please can we see the rides? Or the animals?” she asked when they pulled into the parking lot. “No, we’re going on a behind-the-scenes tour.” Katy grumbled and Tim stepped out of the car.

  They grouped up with an enthusiastic tour guide and a smattering of tourists and their children who were staying at the resort, the tour probably included in whatever vacation package they were paying for. The tour was scheduled to take an hour. They spent the first half of it messing about in the candy-making plant, getting to taste freshly made chocolate in the shape of the park’s mascot. The next ten minutes was a walkthrough of various interconnected offices and production lines. Just when Tim was worried they weren’t going to see anything related to his interests they were led onto yet another factory-floor, as bright and shining as all the others, incredibly clean, thousands of moving parts overseen by two staffers in white lab coats.

  “Now this is where we make the moving objects everyone enjoys so much,” their guide said, smiling, “Their parts are made in separate facilities and are brought here and put together before being tested and eventually put into one of the exhibitions in the park.” That seemed to be it, as the man led the group toward the exit doors and the gift shop beyond.

  Tim grabbed Katy’s arm, “Wait,” he said putting his hand to her lips to silence her. The tour group left through the doors without looking back. Tim looked around, but all the shining machinery offered no clues to their purpose, gave him no solace of mind. “Fuck it,” he said to himself and climbed the steps leading up to the control units where
the staffers stood.

  “Can we help you sir? Did you get separated from the tour group?”

  “No, I have some questions.”

  The woman in the lab coat whispered something to her partner, who then walked down onto the production-floor to fiddle with some knobs. “What can I help you with?”

  “How are these things made?”

  “They are put together here from a large number of parts that are made in other facilities.”

  “You know that’s not what I mean.”

  “I don’t know that, sir.”

  “I’ve watched videos, I’ve seen them at other parks, they can talk, they think.”

  “Yes?”

  “So how?”

  “Dad, this is embarrassing.”

  “You put the pieces together in the correct way and it makes a thing. The engineers who came up with this spent a lot of time, a lot of different combinations to make things that could move and think. I’m not personally sure what the application of these things is but for the time being they are used for entertainment, perhaps we will find a better use for them in the future.”

  “But why make them human-like?”

  “They aren’t, they are thing-like.”

  “They walk and talk and think.”

  “Humans are walking things, language-using things, breathing things, thinking things, and on and on.”

  “I am not a thing.”

  “Of course you’re not.”

  “Dad, let’s go, please.”

  Tim let go of her hand and raised his own to complete a motion he had done hundreds of times, a motion that was an extension of his parts, a motion that the hazy world knew he would do at that exact moment, had always known. And in that moment, he understood. And perhaps understood too that it didn’t much matter. He shook his head, “Let’s go get some ice-cream Katy.”

  THE END.

  BIO:

  Steven D. Hamilton is a writer and manual laborer. His fiction has been published in Rivet Journal and Chantwood Magazine. In 2015, he was selected as a finalist in the Central PA Magazine Writing Contest.

  BIKUTIMU by Shelly Macaroy

  Tokyo subways were jam packed during rush hour, but at night when he finished work, usually around 22:00, trains were basically empty. Sometimes he’d get lucky. Sit across from a pretty girl. Japanese women knew how to dress for him too. Skirts. Girls all wanted men to look, so he thought.

  Hard to blame him considering how often the ladies would sit with their legs spread eagle, targeting him. Chanting, “Hey, what’s up here?”

  It was his dream to pick a girl up on a subway. He’d fantasize about making love to one along the stairway around midnight when no one in Japan was awake. Desires aside, he wanted to learn Japanese as a means to pick up women. That’s why he studied from an app on his way to and from work. Karasu: crow and raven, he read in his head. Shikataganai noted as a popular saying, which meant, “It can’t be helped.” Bikutimu: victim.

  The train stopped. Two people got on soon after. An old man sat in the handicap section. A schoolgirl hopped in the seat directly across from him.

  Surely, he’d have morals and not check her out, being twice her age. She looked just as old as any thirty-year-old did, however. The way she smiled at him, with her cheeks shiny from the effulgent lighting above—he believed the girl had to be at least a senior. Graduating soon. He convinced himself her cheekbones were a sign of her being older. Eighteen at least. Not a kid.

  So logically, as she sprawled out in her seat, he scanned her sensual body. She was busy on her phone.

  Oh, why did they make those uniforms so hot?

  Of course, she had to wear pigtails with red cutesy ribbons to match her skimpy plaid skirt, which was so high up on her thighs it was pointless to have on at all. He could see her white panties with pink faded hearts without even trying.

  At first, he felt perverted. Then she gazed his way with her eyebrows arched and lips perked toward him. She fell into her seat to make her skirt push up, giving him a better view.

  Sure, she wore a navy jacket that covered her upper body. Buttoned, the thing pushed up everything high enough to say, “Take me, now.”

  Her white blouse was see-through and the buttons were down so much so he could see the lining of her bra. Her red bowtie had been undone along her neck, sat there as if a ribbon on a present to be undone.

  He didn’t want to look down at her knee-high socks or her platform shoes, had to. Someone told him girls in Japan wore shoes too big for their feet so they’d fall into a strong man’s arms. Hers were a tad large. He imagined embracing her after a fall.

  She smirked at him and giggled. He realized she knew he was undressing her with his eyes. Eighteen. Definitely. Legal where he was from, so his desires were okay. If she led him on and then said, “No,” he decided to not accept rejection. Another bizarre attribute in his favor, girls who got hurt rarely reported so in Japan. Not to say he wanted to harm her. If he had to be mean, because she was a prude, this guy was prepared.

  His dream of banging a girl off the subway would come true, and tonight. Nothing would stop destiny. At this point if she wasn’t eighteen, he didn’t care. The little girly had been giving him the “do-me” stare from the start. She asked for it.

  He pondered which part of her was the most attractive. Her big doe eyes that exclaimed “Play with me.”

  Maybe.

  Did he like her glossy lips, which she kept biting, wetting, for him, most?

  Perhaps.

  Her bust wasn’t quite hand-sized. Not those. Legs were long and not too skinny. She was potentially a track star, or probably one of those girls who played basketball. Explained her being up so late. High school clubs owned members. He knew because he’d often see kids leaving the academy near his house when he got home around this hour.

  If he got the chance, he’d ask if she was in a club. Truthfully, he’d hoped there wouldn’t be a lot of talking between them. His eyes scrolled up to her pair of browns on him, unmoved.

  The two smiled at each other. The trained stopped. One more to go, then home. She got off and looked back at him, in his chair still. What’s wrong with me?

  He jumped out of the train before the doors sealed him away. She touched his forearm.

  “Strong man.” She clearly didn’t speak English well. Hearing her talk was like listening to a parrot that’d memorized a few words to impress its master. Her body pressed against his.

  The girl was so warm. She groped his muscles and looped her elbow around his. They walked. He grabbed her behind and savored the heated feeling of youth. Everything was happening so fast he didn’t even realize she was leading him out of the subway.

  A park? This was an unfamiliar area. She seemed confident about where they were headed. She was in complete control now. Good enough for him. Safe? No matter. He’d get lucky tonight.

  To his surprise, the two didn’t go to a park. Instead, she led him several blocks until finally turning him toward an alleyway. Once he did it in a restroom stall. Dark secluded places were as perfect as anywhere else, too.

  He got a good grip of her hair, roughed her against a wall, and forced her to look up at him.

  “You like young girls,” she said without question. “Shikataganai.”

  “Whatever. I like you right now. All that matters.”

  She laughed. He pressed her mouth to his and felt her softness. Her knee circled his crotch, massaging. Her leg was gentle. Rock hard from a soft touch.

  His hands caressed her from her underwear. She moaned for him. She pressed her body against his. He could feel her stroke his abs. Her tongue played with his tongue.

  Pants dropped. She leaned back against the wall as far from him as possible. Hands behind her back. Head down. If she was going to say no, screw her. He balled a fist. Then she pulled him close to her and stared up at him with those dark, comely eyes of hers. She longed. He leaned down.

  And then they kissed. This time when
she pulled away he yanked her back by the hips, made her tongue him. He was ready to be inside her no matter what. Then he felt it, her knife, as she opened his throat with the razor-sharp blade. She stood there, touched herself, and moaned while she showered in his blood.

  He gagged for dear life. Fell to his knees. No words from her, just nefarious laughter. She kicked him to the ground where he’d bleed out. The last sound he'd hear would be the clank of her oversized heels as she skipped away.

  THE END.

  CUSTOM SOLUTION by Janis Zelcans

  As soon as “Complete Capital Bank” had become “Society Holding,” its lobby changed for the worse. The luxurious curtains were swapped for pale and featureless drapes. All the plants were removed, leaving vague shapes in the dust that no one bothered to clean. Even the comfy leather armchairs, one of the few things that Ben liked about the place, were replaced by stiff wooden counterparts. While uncomfortably seated in one of them, he started to suspect the changes concerned local fauna as well.

  “Mr. Allen, do you even comprehend the silliness of your request?” the young clerk in her early twenties seemed to hold back a chuckle. “This is already the third loan you are requesting this year. May I ask you what so urgent has come up this time?”

  All that Ben wanted was to leave and stop this humiliation, but he knew all too well that this place was his only chance.

  “You see, me and my wife, Marie, we’re not getting along too well lately. I really don’t know what I’m doing wrong. But Marie is a wonderful person and deserves to be happy. I think we need some time to fix our relationship - go on a small vacation or take a break from our jobs.” Ben glanced at the girl whose feelings seemed untouched or completely absent. Judging by her short, messy hair and crumpled jacket, Ben guessed she didn’t care much about anything.