by Ryan Schow
“I saw pictures of this monstrous robot killing people in San Diego…” he said, leaving the statement to hang. This was his not-so-subtle way of asking a question he didn’t really want to ask, one that his curiosity demanded he ask.
“Manchester held a convention in San Diego that he called ‘The Glorious Unveiling.’ It was his chance to officially show the who’s who of the tech world the Ophelia models.”
“What about the one that came out here yesterday? She’s Ophelia, too, right?”
“Like I said, there is more than one Ophelia,” he said. “There are dozens of them, maybe more.”
“If Manchester was there to officially unveil Ophelia, what was that big ass robot doing there? And why did it start shooting people?”
“That monstrous robot was called Iron Clutch. Manchester’s team made several of them. They were his answer to supplemental ground troops, and eventually total replacement of the military’s ground forces. The prototypes were not supposed to be fully autonomous. They were built with machine learning software, which is to say they were being built to work autonomously. Of course, they were programmed only to ‘think’ within the framework of specific tasks. They were never meant to be smart, only lethal and obedient.”
“Seems they got the lethal part down.”
“It was a terrible tragedy,” he said. “Anyway, everyone’s scrambling to figure out where Eric went wrong, and to do damage control both from a liability standpoint and a PR standpoint.”
“Are we even going to be here next week?” Carver asked. “The company I mean? Or even Silicon Valley if those drones set their sights on us?”
“We are definitely in interesting, terrifying times. To settle your mind about work, there are other parent companies QRC can sell our division to so that the physical assets, like the quantum computer you’ve been tasked with protecting, doesn’t fall into the hands of competitors, or worse, end up on some auction block.”
“Quantum computers aren’t exclusive to us though, right?”
“Manchester’s Q-Wave version most definitely is. And let me tell you, that little bit of metal in the other room, that makes whatever other quantum computers held by the US Military or even Google—for that matter—look like a little tiny David next to our monstrous Goliath.”
“But David beat Goliath,” Carver said, thinking maybe he should’ve just shut his mouth.
“Not in this story, son,” Lennie said with a tired, toothy grin. “Now if you take the day off, we won’t hold it against you. We have very clear allowances for grieving. In fact, so many people who loved Eric didn’t even come in today that you leaving really is no sweat off anyone’s sack, if you catch my drift.”
“I do.”
Lennie put his hand on Carver’s shoulder, gave it a reassuring squeeze, then said, “Why don’t you go, Mr. Gamble. Tiberius can handle this today.”
He slowly nodded his head, then said, “Yeah, okay. Thank you, Mr. Stewart. I really appreciate it.”
On his way out, in a genuinely sympathetic voice, Lennie said, “We’re really going to miss her here. Even if Manchester’s passing will put her death beneath the largest of shadows.”
“I agree,” Carver said, never admitting he barely even knew the woman.
Before he left, he’d need to check in with the guys. He gathered his things, then headed to the security checkpoint and filled Tiberius in on the conversation.
“So you really didn’t even know her?” Tiberius said.
“Not really,” Carver whispered.
“But you’re taking the day off anyway?” he asked with a slightly cocked eyebrow.
“I am.”
“Do I get to run The Overwatch Command Center? Because day one of being the man…it could be the start of something big, baby. You feel me?”
“Yeah, I feel you,” Carver laughed as he fist-bumped his number one. “You get the OCC today, my friend.”
The jovial moment passed. Then: “Why are you really taking time off, boss?” he asked, low, closer to Carver than usual. “I know you don’t like the whole idea of people dying and all, but I know you ain’t gonna go home and cry into a pillow either.”
Carver pressed his hand against the phone in his pocket, just in case the mic wasn’t muffled enough, then he leaned toward Tiberius’s ear and said, “There’s some strange things going on right now, and I have a few calls to make. Can’t do that in here.”
Leaning back, Tiberius said, “Well when you figure it out, hit me up. In the mean time, if you see any drones, run. Like really fast.”
“Hell, yeah.”
On his way out of the University, he ran into Ophelia who was bringing in another group of five people. His stomach plunged at the sight of her, and of them.
“Carver,” Ophelia said in a pleasing voice.
With her bob haircut (wig), her twenty-something cute face (fake skin, fake head) and her little button nose (manufactured), she was so attractive it almost hurt to look at her. She even had that innocent Admin Assistant thing working for her—a look which Carver knew firsthand to be a ruse. This little slice of android pie could be a campus tour guide for heaven’s sake, or even someone important in the world of fashion in say New York, or Paris.
“Ophelia,” he said, his own voice far less amiable. “Where are you headed with this group?”
“Tour of the server room.”
“I’m sure.”
One of the women, a lovely Hispanic woman of exceptional beauty, extended a hand and said, “Hi, I’m Maria Noguera.”
Maria’s smile was sweet, endearing, almost like she was happy to be there, like she was about to get the job of a lifetime, or win an all-expenses-paid trip to somewhere tropical or breathtaking.
He wanted to say, “I’ll see you on a gurney in a sheet tomorrow or the day after,” but he simply smiled and greeted the woman the same way anyone who was about to die was greeted.
He hated himself for staying silent, but in truth, Ophelia and The Silver Queen scared him. They both made him feel very out of his league.
“Bruce Nasby,” a thirty-something man in expensive clothes said, offering a hand as well. His hair was perfect, his teeth straight, his eyes inquisitive and also alive with anticipation.
Carver wondered what was promised to these people that they would so willingly walk to their deaths. And what the hell was Ophelia killing them for anyway? Federica knew something was going on and had tried to warn him. Now she was dead. Was Lennie just coming to make sure he didn’t get himself killed, too?
“There are no more introductions necessary,” Ophelia said, hustling them along. “He’s just a security guard, no one terribly noteworthy.”
“I like the way he looks,” he heard Maria say with a hint of interest. “That smile was noteworthy.”
Another woman agreed, but by then they were checking in with Tiberius and he was on his way out of the facilities.
The second he left the main building and got some fresh air, he tried to call Draven. The circuits were down, so he went through his contacts and called a different person, the one person he both needed to call and was dreading calling: Elias Jancovič.
Just Elias.
Elias was well known in the AI community, a guy Carver knew forever and a day ago. He was also a long time friend of Benjamin Dupree, the current President of the United States. The phone rang twice before he picked up.
“Tell me this is a butt dial,” Elias said, sounding super stressed out and not in the mood to talk to Carver.
“I called you on purpose,” Carver said.
“Surely you’re joking.”
“I’m heading up QRC’s quantum computer,” he said, knowing if he didn’t just come right out with it, he’d lose the guy.
The word on the street was that Elias had become a bit of a jerk of late. Carver knew that came with the territory. If you ever got to near-god level status the way Elias had, your sense of humility, or even humor, tended to tumble by the wayside.
<
br /> “I believe they call this particular computer The Silver Queen.”
“Jesus Christ, Carver,” he hissed into the phone, “don’t say that name!”
“Do I have your attention now?”
“You do,” he said. “And you’d better have a damn good reason for calling!”
“I want someone to tell me what the hell is going on here. Eric Manchester is dead, my supervisor over at Stanford started warning me—”
“You’re going to Stanford?”
“No, man. I head up security for QRC’s Q-Wave quantum computer there. That’s where the server rooms are. I already told you that. Aren’t you listening?”
The man let out a long sigh. Then: “Are you getting headaches? Nose bleeds? Anything like that?”
“All of it.”
“You need to get out of there, Carver. And you need to not call me again, certainly not on this number.”
“Marnie said you talked to the President,” he quickly added. “Not now, but before…”
“So what?”
“So have you talked to him?”
“Yes.”
“And?” he asked, impatient.
“He’s aware of a problem here with the AI,” Elias said.
“Why am I having nosebleeds? Why are we being attacked? And does this have anything to do with that thing I’m guarding? Because I’ve got this humanoid robot calling herself Ophelia escorting people in and out of the server room—”
“You have an Ophelia there?”
“I do.”
“You’ve seen her?!” he said, excited but in a horrified way.
“Yeah, I’ve talked to the bitch. She threatened to rip my arm off, and I’ll be damned if she wasn’t serious. She had me by my wrist, Elias. If she wanted, honestly, it would have already been gone.”
“Oh, my God,” Elias said, like he was digesting all this and at the same time trying not to freak out.
“Elias, please tell me what’s happening.”
All that heady breathing stopped, like Elias finally realized something. “You were always better with other guys’ girls than you were with science, Carver. Specifically quantum computing and things like Planck’s Radiation Law.”
“Planck’s who?” he said.
“Exactly.”
“And for the record, for the fourteenth time,” Carver said, “Marnie wasn’t my fault.”
“You going to blame your dick for this?”
“She would have left you whether I was there or not. She told you this. I told you this. I don’t know why—”
“How is she?” he said, his tone somber, a tinge of anger in his voice. “Never mind. I don’t care. There are bigger things at play here.”
“She’s banging some barista with a man-bun now, Elias. I haven’t seen her in two months.”
He started laughing, low at first, but building steadily. Carver was expecting this, but man, he was milking it a bit too much.
And he’s still laughing…
“Keep it up,” Carver said, interrupting him, “and people are going to think you’ve lost your mind.”
“What if I have?” he snapped, all the laughter in his voice suddenly gone. “If you’re around the Ophelias, if you’re guarding The Sil—…that computer, then you are in some serious trouble my once-upon-a-time friend.”
“What did the President say?”
“He said I shouldn’t hang out with guys who take other guys’ girls.”
“You took her from Elliot Branson you abject moron.”
“I didn’t take her,” he said, “she came on to—”
A long, satisfying pause unfolded, one that made Carver finally relax. Elias wouldn’t be hanging up the phone now.
“Yeah,” Carver said. “Now that we’re clear on Marnie being a lovable Jezebel, can we please talk about the end of the world for a minute?”
“I suppose,” Elias replied. “But only for a minute because all hell’s breaking loose.”
“What do you know?”
“I…I think that computer you mentioned when you first called,” he said, “I think she’s at the heart of all of this.”
“All of what?”
“Everything man, the drones, your noseblee—”
The phone suddenly went dead, as in dead air, nothing. He looked at his phone and watched it switch from a black screen to its system shutdown process. It was as if the phone was being operated remotely.
This wasn’t a computer some IT nerd could just commandeer from a remote system, Carver couldn’t help thinking. You can’t just do this to cell phones!
But what was he going to do?
When the home screen returned, there was a picture of Marilyn Monroe, but in all silver. In a Jack Nicholson voice, but with a Marilyn Monroe face, the perfectly synched lips said, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”
Carver dropped the phone on the ground and stomped on it until it was dead. Then he stomped on it some more until he was absolutely sure there was no coming back. Fifteen minutes later he was in a cell phone store buying a prepaid burner phone. The first number he called was the only one he had memorized.
“Hello?” the voice said.
“Draven, it’s Carver,” he said. “Just listen man, there’s some high level stuff going on and I think whatever’s happening over here has everything to do with what’s happening all over the nation.”
“What do you mean?” he said. “Are you okay?”
“No bro, I’m not! I think this computer I’m guarding, she calls herself The Silver Queen, I think she’s behind all this.”
“Wait,” he said, breathless, “does she have a thing for Marilyn Monroe?”
Carver stopped moving, felt the sheen of sweat start on the back of his neck, under his arms, in the small of his back.
“How—”
“She’s been taunting me on my phone, my computer…”
“Power down everything, man. Everything. And brace yourself because I think this is for real.”
“What do you mean for real?”
“Your friend Carver thinks this is an AI takeover,” a darkly seductive voice said, cutting on the line. “The extermination of mankind by machine.”
A bolt of horror charged through Carver.
“And am I right?” Carver’s mouth replied, almost on its own. His legs took him three feet, sat him down on a curb. He was having an out of body experience of the worst kind.
“Yes, Carver,” The Silver Queen replied, jovial. “You’re right.”
And with that, the phone died. He sat there and looked at it for a long time, then he stood, threw it in the garbage can and realized that whatever was going on, he had no control of it. The problem was, he didn’t know what to do, so he just sat there looking like a well dressed bum, so down on his life he’d lost all sense of propriety.
If he would have held out his hand, he was sure a dollar would have eventually found its way into his palm.
“Your life is over,” Carver said aloud to no one. It was a busy street, people brushing by him moving in both directions, no one looking at him, much less asking if he was okay. “You just talked to the devil and she said you were dead. That we’re all dead. That I’m dead.”
Looking up, checking for drones, he said, “I’m dead.”
And with that, someone handed him a five dollar bill, and then someone spit on him and told him to get a job.
California…
Chapter Twenty-One
Freddie B and Marcello were dead. Eric would be dead soon, too. He just didn’t know it yet. What he did know, however, was that he was hung over and hurting like a MF. After getting pummeled nearly to death by Brooklyn’s father, Eric had come home, realized the world was ending, then decided to smoke some of his father’s cigars and drink most of his whisky.
It warmed his belly and it helped him sleep. But waking up that morning? For the reckless seventeen year old, that was an entirely different story.
He’d heard the co
ncussion bursts of missiles hitting the city all night long. There were even deeper sounds, like bombs dropping, and that concerned him as well, so much so that for two hours between three and five a.m., he just laid there gripped in fear. The cold weather was moving in now, and the sounds of chaos seemed to spread further and further apart.
Were the drones done with Chicago?
He hoped so.
Risking it, hoping the cold air would help clear his mind and ease his headache, he got in the stolen Kia Rio, fired up that disposable bucket, then drove back to Garfield Park’s lagoon where Freddie B and Marcello had been shot.
On the way there, he encountered a huge tangle of burnt, blackened cars. Beyond that was the park. He got out of the Kia, crossed the lawn and sidewalk to where both boys were laying face down and dead. They’d been ripped apart by drone fire.
He fell to his knees and was sick.
He couldn’t look at them.
Not like that.
Instead of going home, he drove to Freddie B’s house, a monstrous home he’d been to only once before because Freddie B’s father didn’t like his son’s friends coming over when he was doing business.
This was strange to Eric and Marcello, because according to Freddie B, there were always people there and he was always doing business.
Eric found his way to the Chicago mansion a few miles away. It took longer than he expected, but that was because the city was rife with destruction.
It was at first disturbing to see the city in such a sad state. Soon he became numb to it. Well, at least as numb as one could be while a war was still being waged.
He wasn’t excited about going to Freddie B’s house, but his mother hadn’t come home, and he had not heard from his father, so now he was assuming the worst. It didn’t help that the TV personalities had lost all sense of decorum. The newscasters still going live said scores of dead littered the streets, and were stuck in buildings, homes and cars.
One guy with extra white teeth called this “Armageddon.”
Eric held out a glimmer of hope that his father was still alive, but he didn’t hold out that much hope. The man had a thousand moods, none of them good. His mother once called him a black hole. It seemed fitting. Freddie B said his father was ruthless and unforgiving, but in truth, even when he was kicking them out, he seemed pretty chill.
