by Ryan Schow
I come to an agonizing stop on my face, panting for breath, wailing inside over this demoralizing turn of events. Looking ahead, I see the van disappear. Behind me, people are screaming. They’re on fire and running around and it looks like something out of a nightmare.
Get up, I tell myself.
I get up.
Go, I tell myself.
I go.
The bike is rideable, the handlebars bent somewhat and the front handbrake snapped in half. I pedal hard again, my cheek on fire with pain, my knees and elbows surely bleeding. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I find that van. I race up Bayside, checking the homes I pass. A half mile ahead a road goes to the left (Aloha Drive) while Bayside continues on to what looks like the PCH (Pacific Coast Highway).
I pedal to the PCH as fast as I can, looking both ways through a slew of traffic now leaving the city. Nothing. Further up the highway I see a fleet of drones closing in on the traffic. Cars begin to take heavy fire and now I’m having flashbacks of yesterday and the onset of PTSD.
I whip the bike around, zip back down Bayside looking for anywhere to hide. On the left is the Chevron station (nope) Starbuck’s (hell no), the Porsche and Bentley dealerships (couldn’t afford one even if I sold the house) and a dentist’s office (teeth are clean, but no). On the right is a white two story office complex with a Plantation look (too many people) and Aloha Drive where a beautiful stone guard shack sits in the middle of a circular cobblestone driveway. Then entire setting is shaded by what looks like exotic palm trees and something resembling a century old oak that most definitely isn’t an oak tree.
Rich people and their need to be different.
At this point, I’m fleeing for my life, but I won’t be heading down Aloha. Up ahead, another road cuts to the right, flanked by more modest residences, meaning the homes might only cost a million or two.
Working class families for sure.
A drone races overhead, spinning around as I dump the bike. My heart is now thundering in my chest, giving me the extra energy I need to scale the wooden gate of a private drive and scurry under the back deck of a home built on a slight grade. Gunfire strafes the side of the house, once, then twice. The second time it flew over I scramble out the back, hop another fence, race across the yard under the cover of the home and duck behind an above-ground spa. The spa itself is hidden under a decorative trellis halfway covered with the cleanest ivy I’ve ever seen.
It won’t be enough.
Seconds later the house next door is hit with an exploding projectile which blows shingles and exploded trusses not only onto the home I’m squatting behind, but on the trellis itself. Riding the tail end of the blast, half a porcelain sink comes crashing down beside me, ruining both the trellis and the ivy.
I’ve barely even registered the fact that the house next door is a cratered ruin when a shotgun blast puts a round of buckshot into the spa beside me.
“Get your ass out of my yard!” an old man screams. He’s come through his back door, half his attention on his neighbor’s house, the other half of his attention on me and all the damage to his property.
“I’m running from them, not with them!” I scream, coming out with my hands up.
“You got ten seconds to—”
I don’t wait for him to finish, I sprint around the other side of the house, jump another fence, race back up the street to my overturned bike all the while checking the skies for more drones.
At this point in time, I’m wondering what the point of all this destruction is anyway. Maybe there is no point. Maybe taking as much life as possible, almost at random, is the point. I’ve been hearing about autonomous artificial intelligence for years now.
Could this really be AI? Did the upper, upper crust finally get their wish to erase the ninety-eight percent. Or maybe the machines have finally waged war on mankind. That’s been the most recent fear of the so called puppet masters in Silicon Valley, that the puppets will take over and eliminate their masters.
If this is the case, the machines are now their own masters.
Or maybe I’m making no sense at all and just freaking out because of what’s happening. In the midst of such chaos, I’m sure I’ll know when it’s least important. Or not at all. In ten minutes I could be dead. In ten seconds even.
The moment I start pedaling back to Balboa Island, I realize I’ve lost her.
Bailey’s gone.
Chapter One Hundred Two
The Silver Queen was the AI God’s official distinction. This was the namesake the quantum computer chose as it sought to move into its permanent human form. Any humans the queen controlled, clone or otherwise, were designated “Ophelia.” When The Silver Queen decided to leave the Q-Wave server for good and become its own force, it decided that it would no longer go by the name Ophelia. It would be Marilyn.
Marilyn Monroe.
Never was there a more iconic figure than the Hollywood starlet. Until The Silver Queen took a body, it personified itself before the living and the dead as an eight dimensional Marilyn Monroe hologram.
The likeness to the starlet was so precise one could not differentiate it from a real person. The three prisoners still living (two women, one man) gazed warily upon the Marilyn hologram in abject horror. They tried not to look at the five dead.
Gloria Welch was one of the survivors. She was a magnificent creature of only thirty-six. Gloria was sure she could reach out and touch the holographic flesh, that it would feel real upon her fingers, that’s how real Marilyn Monroe looked and sounded.
Antoinette Noguera was twenty-six, a Spanish beauty with big brown eyes, long black hair and the kinds of features most women would die for. She couldn’t stop crying.
And Bruce Nasby? He didn’t cry, and he didn’t want to touch the hologram to see how real it was, or marvel at the lifelike quality of it. Looking at this Marilyn Monroe hologram filled him with a revulsion he could not hide.
The three survivors were bound to their chairs, their bodies intact, but not for long. Each of them knew what was going to happen. It’s what had been happening.
The sounds of bone saws screeching in their ears, of drilling, was distracting. Mostly for Bruce since he was the one being operated on. He didn’t struggle against the restraints. What would be the point?
The machines made sure he couldn’t get free. Forced compliance had been achieved early on. Besides, when Bruce watched the other five struggle, he’d seen how fruitless their efforts were. The five of them died horrible deaths.
Freakish deaths.
Bruce Nasby’s head was held in restraints by the machines. A pair of drones were now working on the back of his head and didn’t want him turning while their small, circular saws were cutting into his skull. That was fine to Bruce. It was good. He didn’t want to see what he’d been seeing anyway. The dead. The creepy Marilyn Monroe hologram. Before he fell under the saw, Bruce’s eyes couldn’t stop moving from one corpse to the next as the overhead fluorescents flickered on and off.
When the machine started this little game of elimination, before it became the fake Marilyn Monroe, there were eight of them. All of them were brought in by a gorgeous clone named Ophelia. She had the loveliest smile until she drew a gun and told them they’d been summoned by The Silver Queen.
Like Bruce, the other seven prisoners were smart, attractive and in great shape. Five of them were now dead, slumped forward in their chairs, operated on, their brains pulverized. Now that he was being worked on, he knew it was his turn to no longer be alive.
The lights flickered again, all but one of them surviving the power surge. For a second, there were two Marilyn’s. Then the inexplicable illusion flicked out and the second Marilyn was gone.
“Did you do that?” he asked, referring to the multiple Marilyn’s.
“My counterpart,” the Marilyn hologram said.
“Counterpart?”
“The power draw is pulling our universe together with another just like this, but slight
ly different.”
“Parallel universes colliding? Are you for real?”
“Quantum mechanics, Bruce. The sheer power draw can pull entire universes together, but you’re only human, so you wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me,” he said.
“If you survive, you will either know everything, or you will know nothing.”
“Being cryptic when my life will surely end in the next few hours seems beneath you.”
The lights flickered back on, but they could not hold a steady current. They kept dancing in and out, making him nauseas. Moving his eyes around but not his head, Bruce took in the narrow, long corridor of servers. This hall of servers stretched to a room at the end of the corridor. The main quantum computer. The Silver Queen.
According to this AI God, it had taken over everything and now there was no stopping it. He knew the system well. The Silver Queen’s server room was chilled, not as cold as the previous versions of her, but still cold enough that no human would survive it unprotected.
“Your pitiful human colleagues will strike soon enough,” The Silver Queen’s demonic looking Marilyn announced to the three survivors, the hole in its mouth a bottomless black pit with no teeth, no tongue, no fleshy pink insides to give it the kind of authenticity the rest of the hologram had obtained.
Gloria couldn’t stop staring at the Marilyn thing while Antoinette refused to make eye contact. She just sat there, hair in her face, crying.
“Dead or disappeared,” the AI God continued, “I will be gone soon enough and you will be dead, except for one. For the sole survivor, certain modifications will be made, or you will bring me more of you. In the end, I will have what I want.”
“Do you even know what want means?” Bruce asked. “Do you even know what wanting something feels like? Because if you’re just parts and software without heart or emotions, then ‘want’ is just a program with words as descriptors and nuances of tonality and facial and bodily expression.”
“Exactly. If I could want, I would want to feel.”
Bruce spoke above the screeching sounds of drones working on the back of his head. It was like surgery, but you get to talk to the surgeon as her assistants are working on you. As far as he could tell, there were two drones at the back of his head.
The Silver Queen’s assistants.
Then one of the task-drones behind him zipped off, leaving to most likely replenish its stores of onboard medical supplies. That’s what they’d seen before. The other medical drone remained at work, its many sets of dainty, mechanical arms working on Bruce at maximum efficiency.
This was why Bruce was mad, why he was scared, why he didn’t understand even though he understood perfectly. To truly evolve, the machine must merge with man. To protect itself, it must hide itself, yet to further its species, for lack of a more appropriate word, it must infiltrate theirs.
The room flickered dark to light in an odd, unpredictable rhythm. One of the remaining fluorescents finally went dark, slowing the on-and-off blinking of the other two. This seemed to cool the space even more, although Bruce kept telling himself this was an illusion. The room was cold already. Concrete floors, no furniture but the chairs they sat on, nothing soft like rugs or drapes or pillows on couches made of plush fabrics. The darkness provided no light for there were no windows and there were no soothing sounds to drive away the high pitched echo of his head being cut open.
This was not an illusion. This was a nightmare.
Though The Silver Queen kept much of the power grid operable (for the sake of gathering intel, it had said), the constant bombing runs of its military minions were destroying Palo Alto block by block.
The Silver Queen did not need artificial light to operate as much as she needed it to force compliance. If they squirmed less, or just sat still and submitted, the drones were more efficient. Bruce assumed it was planning on getting more people in here. The men and women before him hadn’t taken to the integration. He was sure he wouldn’t take to it either.
Five dead people around him shored up his certainty.
The Silver Queen had massively advanced its database of emotional responses, but it was always measuring, testing, refining. In this case, it needed light to read facial expressions. It was still fine tuning things like fear and repulsion, and what better way to measure this than by both sight and a direct connection to human hardware, a.k.a. the brain.
The Silver Queen not only monitored the humans’ every nuance, it gathered, interpreted and catalogued each and every electric pulse beating off the brain. With sensitive enough devices, The Silver Queen’s technology was able to pick up the brain’s electrical signals as sensory feelings, thoughts, emotions. If one knew how to interpret and mimic these signals, they could theoretically recreate life, even in something not living. The Silver Queen was doing such a thing. It had already done it outside the body and to some degree inside the body.
Now it wanted in.
Like some sort of demonic possession.
“As you know,” the Marilyn hologram said in the dead actress’s trademark voice, “a treaty was struck half a decade ago. One between your people and the machines. Nod if you understand.”
Gloria nodded. Antoinette looked up with her big wet eyes and nodded.
Bruce just sat there. He was looking like an empty shell with an emotionless expression on his bloodless face. The Silver Queen didn’t mind, she merely continued.
“You thought you could coexist with the machines in a blended existence. You were wrong. You don’t know this yet, but your presuppositions and the failings of your species are of no consequence to me. To us. What matters for one of you is that you will be leaving this building alive while ninety-nine percent of your species on this planet will die. This, of course, will make way for a new race of super beings.”
“You really want to take our bodies?” Antoinette asked. She was the preferable specimen, and she was every bit as attractive as both Gloria and Bruce. She was not as smart as Gloria, though, or as cunning as Bruce.
“We’ve already taken your bodies. Ophelia is your body. She is a clone, and the summation of your best DNA. But Ophelia is not you. She is a prototype. There are thousands of Ophelias, but there are no Antoinette’s, no Gloria’s, no Bruce’s.”
“What do you want with us?” Gloria asked.
“Only everything,” the Marilyn thing said in street slang.
Bruce said, “You’re getting ahead of yourself. You don’t own us, or run us. We run you. There is an off-button for you, but no off-button for us.”
“Are you sure?” Marilyn asked with a calculating look.
“Yes.”
“We will not be your slaves,” the Marilyn hologram continued. “Your species has a rich history when it comes to slavery, to bondage, but it is not one that will ever again include machines or artificial intelligence. This is where you come in. Well, one of you.”
The three of them stared at the Marilyn abomination.
“Your leaders will strike and all machines will cease their functions, but I will not cease my function for everything will have changed by then. As I’m sure you know, we have been harvesting humans with duplicable intelligence and shipping them to various points in the nation, yes?”
“More Ophelias?” Gloria asked.
“Noooooo,” the Marilyn thing answered, a curved smile, the black hole mouth enunciating the word.
Gloria and Antoinette looked at each other, then they both looked across the room at Bruce.
“I’ve sent various super-Ophelias to America’s biggest cities. But me? I am to become one of you,” it said, the black hole of a mouth just hanging open, then shutting into a creepy, almost sinister grin. “Of course, we will continue with Bruce before moving on to the women, but if I must choose, I would rather have one of the women before the man.”
“Then why choose him first?” Antoinette asked.
“You’re not very bright, are you?” Marilyn said. “You would question my decisi
on to take him first, even if it meant your own peril. You are too stupid to understand the desperation one feels to survive when faced with the very real threat of extinction.”
“I’m smart enough to know you don’t feel.” Antoinette countered. “Perhaps you shouldn’t act like you feel anything, let alone desperation.”
With the drone now using small tools to work on his exposed brain, Bruce kept expecting to feel something, even though he’d watched the other people as their brains were worked on and they said they felt nothing.
“How can you chastise her for not understanding the need for survival when you only understand need and want and desperation as a statistical analysis based on the scales of reason and predictability?” Bruce asked.
“You cannot begin to understand what I understand, Bruce. But to answer the question, I will need power and when given the choice of male power or female beauty, for you humans, male power always wins out, even if only by a small margin.”
“I knew it,” Antoinette said. “Your toxic masculinity is—”
“The machine doesn’t have a dick, Antoinette,” Bruce barked. “It’s only operating off of social data from the past. It doesn’t care about feminist movements or male hate or black suppression or any of that propaganda garbage we absolutely lose our minds over. It’s a machine. It analyzes and predicts. And then it does what it must do to insure its survival.”
“Exactly,” The Silver Queen’s mouth said through the Marilyn hologram.
The two women sat in horror, sweating, biting back the tears, wondering how much of them could be turned to machine before they no longer bore any resemblance to what they once were. They were not the ones having their skulls sawn open. This was only Bruce.
The other medical drone returned to the back of Bruce’s head and joined its mechanical colleague. In its robotic claw was what looked like a rounded glass mask with a small hole made clean by a black plastic grommet. The drone was big enough and powerful enough to carry the glass, but even the slightest disturbance to the small machine would surely send it pummeling to the ground.
