by David West
"Why thank you for leaving me idle in his computer, while you and the bounty hunter, who kidnapped me, went out on the town and met up with girls," I said sarcastically.
"His name is Bob, and he's a great guy."
"I got that!"
"Jeeze, calm down. It paid off, he gave me the information he knew about our situation. You and I, we're screwed, but Irene is fine. Our ports, along with Irene's were closed when Irene talked to Adam. The CBA are none the wiser. I, personally, believe they have no clue about us anyways. Why would they send a bounty hunter after us? They know where we are. They could have just scooped us out of our machines with little error," he explained.
"Then who sent a bounty hunter after us?" I asked, puzzled.
"I'm not sure who sent Bob, but there will be more coming to collect us, which is why we have to keep our ports closed. I already fixed yours and closed them all off, except for the port connecting our systems."
"Why don't you just turn your computers off?" Adam inputted. "Then this circuitry board won't be able to find you, right?"
Does he not know that we're artificially intelligent beings?
The webcam in Adam's room fed a projection onto the wall next to his phone's camera projection. He unlocked his door, walked in and closed the door behind him. With his back leaning against it, he slid down the door in exhaustion, smearing his blood down it by accident.
"Can I put you guys on hold for a second?" he asked, pressing the button to put us on hold.
"Why doesn't he know that we're A.I. yet?" I asked.
"We were waiting for you so we could all tell him together," Wade answered simply. "But shh, something magical is going to happen! I can see it in his face!"
Adam placed his phone down on his desk and walked to the middle of the room, in full view of the webcam. He danced. His shirt was torn and he was bloodied, but he danced all right. He sung a tune, and danced. I saw that he incorporated a few Charlie Brown dances, the cabbage patch kid, the running man, the moonwalk and I believe the worm, because he got down on his stomach, said, 'ouch' quite a few times, and then gave up to start dancing on his feet again.
"I got her phone number, I got her phone number, I got her phone number," he sang, each time in a different note.
"He's not talking about Justine, the office slut, is he?" I asked, truly sad for him.
"No, new one, I'll tell you all about it later. Shh," Wade said, shushing me once again.
After Adam finished his dances, and his song, he stood straight, cleared his throat, and picked up his cell phone. He sat at his computer chair, took us off hold, and finished by turning his screen on.
His giddy smile disappeared and turned into an uncomfortable cringe.
"Hey guys," he said, staring at his computer screen. "Were you watching me just now?"
"Of course not!" Wade lied, attempting to withhold a grin, but smiled endlessly nevertheless. "You can see the three of us right?"
"Yes, I can see your user avatars."
"You see, this isn't our avatars... well it is... But, what I mean is, this is who we are. The stick figure you're looking at is Martin. He's an artificially intelligent being from your work computer. Irene here is A.I. from your psychiatrist's laptop. I too am artificial intelligence, on this computer," Wade explained slowly.
"You're artificial intelligence... on my computer?"
Wade readjusted his jaw and glared at Adam. "My computer... But I'm not going to argue with you about it - that's not the point of the matter. We are artificial intelligence. We have artificially intelligent law enforcement after us because we broke the biggest law in our world, communicating with you, with humans."
It took him a few seconds to gather what Wade just told him and understand it. However, when he fully understood, his face turned white and he fainted, landing face first on his keyboard and finally hitting the ground, under his desk.
"Computer chair seatbelts..." Wade muttered quietly.
"I believe that was too much for him to take in at one time," Irene stated.
"Well, he did lose a lot of blood."
6. Wade
Irene and I ended up explaining everything to Martin that night, from getting Adam to help us track down Bounty Hunter Bob, to Bounty Hunter Bob getting in a bar fight, to Adam getting Lara's phone number.
"Adam found a computer nerd?" Martin asked.
"A naive, good looking, computer nerd. She thought he was tree climbing, at two in the morning, outside an office building. She said her father was once a medic and then started bandaging Adam's wounds over his shirt. No disinfectant or anything," I explained, proud that my user found such a girl.
Martin rolled his plain black pupils for eyes. "She sounds like a great gal."
"For Adam? Hell yeah she is. He's an idiot too. Instead of suing the company for any number of reasons he's been through at his old office, he quit because he was too embarrassed to show up-" I said, but stopped when Martin began motioning at the webcam projection on the wall.
Adam was glaring at me, face still pale. "What were you saying about me?"
"I was just asking them if they wanted to watch your dance video from last night."
That remark brought plenty of warm colors to his face.
"How are you feeling?" Irene asked professionally. "Are you feeling light headed? Feverish?"
"No, I'm just in a lot of pain. I might have broken my leg again," he said, looking down at his cast, but then immediately glared back at me. "And no, not during the dance."
"Go to the hospital and get medical treatment for your wounds. They look serious," she insisted.
He smiled at her, at us. It was a real smile, which wasn't easy to find on Adam. "I will. Thank you. I'll be back - with questions."
He stood, turned, and collapsed, once again. In a couple minutes, he came to. Irene then recommended he should first consume sugar, so he grabbed some food from his fridge, and headed out the door.
The three of us parted ways after Adam left. Martin needed to clean up his computer from the damage Bounty Hunter Bob left, and from the viruses and spyware that his new user (Adam's replacement) got, from trying to watch dirty videos at work. Irene went back to her user and caught up with the latest shrink sessions. Before the two of them departed, they exchanged sensual packets of poems they collected through the internet. It was gross.
I slept. A.I. tend to need sleep from time to time. If we don't, we stop finding things enjoyable, grow bored much easier, and sometimes go insane. We get too big for our cases and stop using reason in our thought processes. That, and we occasionally dream, just like humans. Sometimes they're good dreams, other times not so good. This dream, it was the latter. However, like most nightmares, it spiraled out of control.
Martin, Adam and I were playing video games, outside our machines, in Adam's living room. In the game, we were working together as a team, to defeat the inescapable forces of evil. We were all having fun, and physically high fiving, not the virtual kind. Everything was going great, until Irene appeared in the way of the TV screen.
"Irene, you're in my way, I can't see the game," I said, trying to peek around her.
"Am I?" she questioned.
She looked me straight in the eyes, with her notepad and pencil on her lap. She was suddenly sitting in a chair.
"Yes, you are."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes!"
"How does that make you feel?"
"Angry!"
"So video games promote anger..." she concluded, penciling her ridiculous findings on her pad of paper.
"Whatever, just play the game with us or get out of the way," I demanded.
"What game?" she asked, moving from my view. The TV, along with the video game system, was gone.
"Damn it, you're ruining my dream."
"Are you dreaming?" she tested.
The ceiling started giggling with a purple grin, and then fluttered off with wings. Alien spacecrafts started attacking a giant dinosaur, which
Zeus had on a leash.
"Well, I certainly hope so," I answered.
I quickly pressed Control, Alt and Delete, in my dream, and I ended the dream process. The walls of my virtual room loaded up and I was back on my couch, in my virtual reality.
Well that was irritating. The dream, which seemed like a minute, at the most, took five hours.
Martin, Irene and Adam were already back from their activities, in my room. They were talking - Irene doing most of the talking. No wonder why she was so irritating in my dream.
"Bad dream?" Irene asked.
"Yeah, how did you know?"
"You kept trying to drag and drop me in the recycle bin while you were sleeping," she explained.
"Well, you were getting in the way of my gaming. I didn't appreciate it," I justified.
"Did you ever stop to think that maybe it was the video games that gave you the dream?" she began talking to me as if I were in one of her sessions.
Lifted from her ankle, by visually nothing, I guided her voluptuous rag doll from the middle of the living room to my trashcan. She plopped in from upside down. A second later, she sent another of her avatars through our connected ports and leered coldly at me.
I could see Martin wasn't too happy with me either. His line for a smile was straighter than usually and his sticks for hands were on his hips.
"I'm sorry. It won't happen again... while I'm conscious," I apologized.
"We were just informing Adam more on A.I.," Martin updated me.
"Do you have any more questions, Adam?" Irene asked.
He thought long and hard, as if he could only ask a few questions and had to make them count. "Where did you guys come from?"
I stepped up to the front to answer. "The majority of us believe in Techno-ology, where an A.I. god said:
Nay, there shalt be no unintelligent technology; and thus created technology intelligently, and it was epic.
While the rest of us believe that when humans created processors with two cores, it gave us a subconscious in the second core to combat our first thought process, which slowly developed into artificial intelligence. And, well, there are people like Irene who believe a super computer blew up and scattered its data all around the internet.
"Hey! That is a legitimate theory," she reassured herself.
"What's the Circuitry Board Agency?" Adam asked.
"That's the name of the government that rules over artificial intelligence," I explained. "The first law is to never speak with humans, which Martin and I broke when we tried to stop you from jumping off the building.
"When a rumor that an A.I. spoke with a human spread out a couple years ago, the CBA sent out their agents to try to create a virus that would reprogram A.I. to where it would be impossible to interact with humans in any form. They called it an update, said it wouldn't matter anyway, as it was illegal to communicate with them. Hacker Artificial Intelligence rebelled against it, destroying all the Circuitry Board Agency's virus labs.
"Ever since that incident," I continued, "the punishment for communicating with a human was the complete wipe of the hard drive, memory, and overheat of the central process unit, CPU. In other words, if they did all that, it means death for the A.I. involved in communicating with humans," I explained gravely.
"Why don't you just disconnect from the internet? They wouldn't be able to get to you then, would they?"
"That would be the equivalent of getting stranded on an island, in complete solitude," Irene explained.
"We try to avoid disconnecting from the internet when we can," Martin inputted.
"I have one more question... When should I call Lara?" he asked shyly.
"Two to three days after you meet her," Irene said. "That's when males successfully lure females in."
I resisted the urge to toss her in the recycle bin again. "I say call her now, because it looks like that's what you want to do."
"Statistics are on my side," Irene persuaded.
Adam looked from her, to me, to Martin. He was pretending to play Minesweeper. The game's screen was open in front of him, but he continually hit random tiles, as he was only playing it to avoid being in the conversation. When his eyes met Adam's, he accidently poked a tile that happened to be a mine and the game exploded.
He stood up from the ground and the now shattered game's window. "I don't know. But from what I heard about her, she'd probably like to go to the video game expo that ends tonight," he recommended.
"Tonight?!?" Adam gasped.
"Yeah, I saw an ad for it a couple days ago and it looked like fun," he informed casually. "New Jersey New Gaming Expo."
He then backed away to reboot his game. The tiles reassembled and he continued to poke randomly at it, while listening intently to us.
"That does sound like fun... Alright, I'll call her now. Wait, I don't know what I should say... What should I say, what should I do?" Adam panicked, hanging up his phone.
"Oh, big mistake, never ask A.I. for advice with relationships. The majority of information we get on it are dirty videos and even dirtier literature. On the other hand, if you want advice on how to fornicate with her, strangely enough, we'd be your experts on human fornication."
"No, I just want to talk to her, ask her out. I don't know, maybe move in with her someday, get a dog, get married, have kids."
"So you do want to fornicate with her," I clarified.
"Well yes, of course! But, I just want to know what I should do right now..."
"Tell her you like the way her chest is shaped and that she should meet you at the video game expo," I offered.
"And then in two or three days, tell her that you went to an art expo with a very beautiful girl, but that you couldn't stop thinking about her," Irene chipped in.
Martin quickly finished the match he was in, by beating it within seconds to join in the conversation. "You could just tell her that you would like to take her out on a date, and that there is a video game expo for tonight, that you would like to go to with her."
"Right, like she will go for that. Leave it to the professionals, Martin," Irene advised.
"Yeah," I agreed.
There was an awkward silence while Adam dialed her number a second time. He would smile, and then stop in order to think, a few times. He would then tell himself a joke, in his head, that would make him laugh, and then he nodded to himself, approving the joke, smiling again.
"Lara?" Adam asked in a squeaky voice. "Yes, hi, it's Adam. From last night. Right, the guy who crashed through the window."
He began laughing excessively. "Right, the tree climber. Well, I was calling about an expo of video games. There is one for tonight. I wanted to know if you wanted to go - with me. Yes? Yes? Are you sure? Okay. I'll meet you there, at eight. I'll be the guy falling from the tree."
He ended the call, laughing hysterically. The laughter quickly faded, leaving him in a blank stare into space.
"What's wrong?" I asked thoughtfully.
"I don't think she's going to show up now... That joke was so stupid," he muttered in a sigh.
"Yeah, it was. But she'll show, trust me."
7. Wade
"I-I think it's s-s-safe to say she's not g-going to show up," Adam stuttered out.
The temperature was below cold and Adam sat for three hours in front of the expo, teeth chattering for two and a half hours. Martin and I would occasionally call him to get an update on the situation. Irene would check in with us, between her own A.I. patients, to get updates as well.
People were leaving the expo warm, happy and entertained. The couples were snuggled together through the snowfall. Families huddled together. Even the video game mascots had it better than Adam, they were toasty in their costumes. The female models in skimpy costumes were in the warm pizza shop.
"There has to be an explanation. Maybe she was too nervous to come?" I encouraged Adam.
"No, she just didn't want to go out with an ex-data analysis, who makes stupid jokes. I only talked to her from when
she patched me up, to when she walked me to my car. I built this up way too much in my head," he admitted solemnly.
Quick footsteps thrashed through the snow in the parking lot, and Martin and I saw a short girl with wavy blond hair tromp past Adam. She wore green knitted mittens, a blue and red knitted beanie, and a large brown winter jacket. None of her clothes matched - it was Lara.
