by Unce, Bo
***
"Let me get this straight," Ms. Dewey said, her face projected onto the large screen in the executive conference penthouse suite. Andar, our suave-haired Executive Executor, had managed to secure a tele-meeting with Ms. Dewey after all.
"You want to sell your people into slavery... in exchange for this one old scroll?" she continued. "A whole nation of people, for this one old dusty thing?"
I hesitated. I hadn't thought of it like that.
"Uh, it's not exactly slavery," I told her. "Andar said that minimum wage was higher than his salary."
"Andar, old chap, is a government employee," Ms. Dewey explained. "He works for me. And while he does get paid, his email alias is prefixed with an s-."
That didn't mean anything to me, but I pretended like I understood.
"And besides," Ms. Dewey went on. "The whole botch job is that we can't afford to pay the blokes in the first place. Your precious lil' buggers would have to work for free!"
I grimaced. This was not the deliverance I had pictured myself providing so proudly. Koochy picked up on my reluctance and jumped in to the conversation.
"Ay, ay Ms. Ladyparts!" he addressed Ms. Dewey.
"Excuse me, you cheeky bastard!" she retorted frostily. "That's Ms. Dewey."
"Ay, girl. You too fly to not be on no first name basis wit' da Kooch-Kooch! Whass yo' name, gurl? Yo fo' rea' name!" he cooed. "What's yo' reee-al name, and not yo' kiiick-er name?" Koochy sang.
I could never understand Koochy's magic power over women. It seemed any woman he set his sights on would eventually swoon under his spell. Ms. Dewey appeared to be no different. She blushed and giggled, which was very out of character for her.
"Hee hee," she raised a shoulder coyly. "Cor blimey. You are the cute one, aren't you! Well, I'll tell you. My name really is Ms. Dewey. Ferrilamoy Stan Dewey... the third."
"The third?" I blurted out.
She looked annoyed I had interrupted her conversation with Koochy. "Yes. My mother was a Three Star General: Evamore Moiztann Dewey."
"Ain't you 'posed ta have tha same name if you tha third?" Koochy was puzzled.
Stifling a chuckle, I took command of the conversation again. I had come too far to leave empty handed. I had to have the scroll!
"Do we have a deal?" I demanded of her big face on the screen.
She seemed surprised at my directness.
"Oh. Why, yes. Yes, we have a deal," she laughed. "You drive a hard bargain, young bloke. Andar, see that our new employees are put to work. All of them! I want those assembly lines running at full capacity by this afternoon!"
"Y-yuh-yuh-yuh-yuh-y-yuh-yes, m-muh-muh-ma'am," Andar said and scurried off again.
Ms. Dewey opened her mouth to continue the conversation but before she could speak, the video signal became scrambled and distorted. The screen turned to static and a harsh screech came from the speakers.
“Aww, sheeit!” Koochy yelled, covering his ears. “Fuck like wha?”
The static resolved and revealed a familiar face.
“Felix!” I gasped in recognition.
“Yes,” declared Felix Navi Dod, amused. “We meet again.”
“Mutha fucka sucka-ass fucka sucka…” Koochy murmured to himself. He quickly turned to his compute pad with a funny expression and then winced, smacking his lips. “I ain’t even hungry. Cain’t goan eat my peta-bite chips. Dey worst than olestra.”
“Your information security is already compromised, Marcus,” Felix’s gravelly voice intoned. “Destroying your hardware would get you nowhere. I hacked you in the clud. Now listen to what I have to say.”
“I ain’t gots to listen to yo’ raspy dumb ass neither,” Koochy coolly replied. “Look at yo’ stupid face. Still hidin’ behind sum ‘in da clud’ shit, cain’t neva come face Big Kooch, numba one stunna! Kooch still undefea’ed, son! Best belee dat, come and front on me in person, show yo’ ass what fo’. Unnngh!”
“I no longer want to challenge you to some petty hackathon, Marcus. Haven’t you seen the big picture yet?” Felix tented his fingers, pensively.
“Big pictcha? Like yo’ ugly mug fillin’ up dis hurr screen?” Koochy laughed at his own joke. I was still concerned though. Felix was the only hackmaster I’d ever known who could worry my best friend, and we still hadn’t even gotten a set of glasses for Marcus’s new face yet. If this came down to a hackathon, I didn’t know if Marcus would come through.
“Marcus, Marcus. Look at you,” Felix sneered. “You had so much potential, and now it’s squandered helping some two-bit charlatan start a cult. Pathetic. If you’d joined up with the winning side, we could have worked together.”
“Mu’fuckin’ sellout yellow-hat honky! I ain’t workin’ for da Good Man witchu!” Koochy yelled back.
“You never thought big enough, I knew this about you since we trained back in the temple. Look at the recent advances in teleportation technology. What did you use it for? Marijuana. And what did I use it for? Developing secure computer communications.” Felix smiled with both mirth and malice.
“But dat kush was dank, son,” Marcus recalled.
“Then there was the dark energy research behind Directive 34,” continued Felix in his criticism. “I fostered the idea for Clarabelle69 and he developed it into an energy source with almost limitless power. And you? After all you’ve seen and learned from Directive 34, in the end the lasting change in your life is that you’re hanging out with some hairy midget with a penis sticking out of his chest.”
“Ay, dat’s on him. I ain’t got no extra dicks,” said Koochy. “’Sides, jus’ lookit Clara-belle six-ni’ now, kid. He be pushin’ up daisies. Big Kooch pushin’ stacks! Unngh!”
“And now you think I would stoop to your level and enter into hackathon? Hah,” Felix concluded. He stared intently through the screen, taunting Marcus to make the next move in this chess game.
“Ay, hackathon be sum honor-a-burr shit, fo’ rea’! Fuckin’ code o’ Dijkstra!” Koochy spoke earnestly without his usual inanity, his brow furrowing in painful memories. “Sensei Bob cain’t die for nuthin’! You fuckin’ chump ass sucka! I know yo’ ass din’t beat him furr and squrr! Whatchu do behind tha shed dat one night?”
Koochy had often reminisced about his hackmaster training, but when he mentioned the shed I finally pieced together some of the stories and selfies he’d shared with me. I realized Marcus had subconsciously tried to avoid mentioning Felix by name, but Felix’s dark presence was always there in the retelling of the past. On quiet evenings after a few taco salads, Koochy’s tales would tend to return to that tragic night, sometimes soberly, many more times while he was higher than an orbital transport.
Marcus had first met his sometimes-accomplice, sometimes-rival back on the anti-Government message boards shortly after he’d met me. Marcus and I had an immediate kinship, a strong bond formed from fending off rival high school gangs in drive-bys and also sharing tips about how to deal with gastrointestinal issues.
But when it came to hacking, I was no match for the likes of Marcus. Koochy sought to practice his skills in friendly sparring matches. I remembered having to help Marcus scrounge around for spare compute-pads behind the dumpsters at the DQ after hacking skirmishes had reduced his own to smoking ruins. I realized these contests must have been with the younger Felix Navi Dod.
Both Marcus and Felix must have known that they would devote their lives to their art. Koochy followed his rival to train in the hackmaster temple on the island of Shao-bin. There they spent their days and nights in endless practice, repeating the basics of hacking until they were second nature and almost instinctive. I remembered the first time Koochy had shown me the thick calluses he’d acquired on his hacking fingers; I admired the physical manifestation of his hacking experience as he twisted them up into a combination gang sign and explicit gesture implicating my mom in carnal acts.
After three years of relentless devotion and ritualistic purification, Felix and Koochy were admitted into the thirty-seventh chamb
er. Most hacking acolytes didn’t even know such a chamber existed within the Shao-bin temple. There in that hallowed ground they studied under the legendary Sensei Bob.
Unlike his taciturn recollection of Felix, Koochy had often regaled me with tales of Sensei Bob. He was like a father to Marcus, a patient mentor who'd gifted him his first pair of glasses and enlightened him with the secret techniques of 2048-bit encryption. I smiled, thinking of how Koochy lit up when discussing his teacher.
As with all hackmasters, their study revolved around the ancient and honorable tradition of the hackathon. The utmost pinnacle of hacking technique, hackathons were violent and often to the death: a dangerous contest of pure will and zero-day exploits, wherein the truest hackmasters would rather die than yield their root certs or renege on their honor.
I’d seen Koochy easily dispatch one challenger in a hackathon before, when we traversed the desert expanse of New New Jersey. That yellow-hat was just a junior student of Felix and had met a most disgraceful end. Felix himself would not be so easy.
I then frowned as my wandering recollections led me to think of a video, the one I’d been reminded of when Koochy mentioned the infamous shed. Marcus had showed it to me only once while drunk on something.
It began like any other video Marcus took: a close-up of himself doing duck-face selfie poses.
“Ay!” Marcus had said on the recording. “My boy be challengin’ Sensei Bob, like BLAOW BLAOW! Haah! Peeps gotta challenge dey masta sometime but he ain’t ready fo’ dat, Fee-fee’s gonna get dropped! Hackathon like whaa? Hashtag hack, hashtag gettin’ scraight em-burr-assed! Follow hashtag Big Kooch, kid!”
Marcus had then turned his compute-pad around to film the festive occasion: a student challenging his master to a hackathon for the first time. Typically these sorts of friendly duels ended only in a few bruises and a hurt ego as the student learned from the harsh real-world lessons.
Two dark figures faced off on the top of a solitary hill on the island of Shao-bin. One was Sensei Bob, and the other I now knew to be Felix. Lightning flashed and thunder cracked as the two stood in stark relief against the ruddy, stormy sunset. The dimming red sky was reflected in the combatants’ compute-pad screens, each held at the ready in the advanced dragon-swims-with-crane hacking posture.
I had stared enrapt at this video while Koochy dozed to sleep off his drunken stupor, his breath smelling of feces. I remembered I was afraid to even blink lest I miss the crucial start of the hackathon.
Suddenly and simultaneously, Felix and Sensei Bob were a blur of activity. Their compute-pads flashed in unison with their fingers sliding across the touchscreens.
“Oh snizzaps!” Koochy had yelled. “Get ‘im, Sensei Bob!”
Even as an untrained observer, I could tell that the hackathon was already going in Sensei Bob’s favor. Felix was looking concerned and starting to bleed from his nose while Sensei Bob was calmly pressing the attack.
Felix’s face first showed frustration, then a sudden swell of self-righteous anger mixed with shame. He stopped swiping on his multi-touch screen and fell, tumbling down the hill in a way that now reminded me of the soccer players we’d recently fought.
“Aaaahhh!” Felix had screamed. He continued tumbling all the way down the hill and behind a shed.
“Haaaah!” Koochy then shouted. “You got got, sucka! Based Bob, unngh, you muh mane!”
Sensei Bob immediately sheathed his compute-pad and jogged down to meet Felix, good-naturedly offering a hand as he disappeared from view behind the shed.
A muffled crack sounded. From the viewpoint of his compute-pad, I then watched Koochy arrive behind the shed a moment later to find Felix standing astride Sensei Bob’s lifeless body.
“Well, Marcus,” Felix had gloated. “Looks like I won the hackathon after all. You may call me by my title of Hackmaster now. Toodles!”
“Whaa?” Koochy had uttered. “Whaaaaaa?? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!”
At that point I had turned off the video. I couldn’t bear to hear my friend in such agony.
I knew that this… this was the sort of hackmaster that Felix was. He was an opponent who could never be trusted, not even within the honorable confines of hackathon. Surely Marcus knew that, I thought. Right?
I shook my head and brought myself back to the present.
“Marcus, Marcus,” Felix was continuing to berate his old enemy. “Forget that night behind the shed. Now you’ve failed to see the bigger picture once again. You successfully hacked Ralph's brain, bridging the compute-pad-versus-mind interface. Then I watched you die on the ice plains of Erie. I saw the activity in the clud right beforehand when you successfully hacked death. Marcus, you hacked death! Don’t you realize? Your consciousness was uploaded into a network of compute-pads, and you achieved what even I could not!”
“You damn right yo’ ass cain’t achieve what I done, son!” Koochy agreed. He looked uncertain though about what Felix might say next.
“And yet,” Felix went on. “Still you were bound to the idea of your physical form. You worked tirelessly to regain your frail body.”
“I wouldn’t say ‘worked tirelessly’,” I interrupted. “There was that part where he just hacked himself to get high.”
“See? I wain’t e’en tryin’!” Koochy gave Bronson a high-five.
“Marcus, listen to what I’m telling you,” Felix explained, his voice dry and raspy in his throat. “You made a breakthrough in AI. You solved a key problem that had stopped artificial intelligence research in its tracks for years.”
“Are you kidding?” I said. “AI sucks and always sucked! Look, I have a digital personal assistant right here, it talks to me and stuff.” I started an app up on the compute-pad that Koochy carried around. “DP assistant,” I commanded. “What’s the weather like?”
Yvonne’s voice wheezed from the compute-pad. “Junior, you have to eat your dinner! A growing boy like you needs his body’s curves, otherwise you’re never going to get a nice girl to take care of you. One day you’ll find yourself a real winner, maybe a blogger or an event promoter or someone with a multi-level marketing business!”
“Bluuuuhhhh,” Junior’s voice bleated.
“See? AI sucks!” I concluded.
“You couldn’t be more wrong,” Felix corrected me. “What Marcus did was incredible. Tell me, Marcus. How did you do it? I spent the last ten years devoting my life to finding, piecing together and compiling the legendary lost perl scripts of the ancients, the ones that the Good Man told me were used by the original app Creators, perhaps even Steve Jobs himself. Only those had the power to create digital life! They could never be duplicated again. I found some portions on a mithril CD-ROM buried in the sands of Nairobi but the others were destroyed in the great race wars. How did you succeed where I had failed?”
“Uhh,” Koochy started. “Whafuck? Shit ain’t hard, son.”
“Hmmm…” Felix said, unimpressed by this explanation.
“Hahahaha!” Koochy laughed abruptly. “Yo’ dumb ass spent ten years tryin’ ta get some o’ dem perl scripts to compile. Perl don’t even compile! Stupid ass sucka ass so-called hackmasta. Mo’ like sackmasta! Suck deez nuts!”
“Regardless, Marcus. I hacked ‘yo shit’, to use your terminology. So,” Felix expounded. “Once again I’ve taken this to another level that you could not. I’m playing chess and you’re just playing tic-tac-toe.”
“Get to da damn point, foo’!” Koochy yelled at the screen.
“I used your code and uploaded myself into the clud!” Felix revealed. His passion for technology was palpable. “Superhuman artificial intelligence is possible! I networked hundreds of thousands of compute-pads together in a vault under the southern ice cap and in some... other locations. I waited because I wanted you to be here to see my supreme triumph: my singularity, my elevation into immortality, my transformation into the all-knowing AI, my creation of the ultimate weapon of the Good Man, my evolution to my final form, and my ascension to a GOD!�
��
“I’m the only god here!” I shouted back. Could Felix actually be telling the truth? If AI-Felix wanted to hack Koochy there would be no stopping him.
“Fuck, mane! We gotsta get da fuck outta here!” Koochy shouted. Clearly he believed Felix Navi Dod. “Whafuck we goan do, son?”
“No,” I said, unhelpfully. There was no hiding from what was about to come. Could two gods throw down? Would anyone else survive such a battle? I thought of TK, my dearest love, and my soul ached with the thought of her in danger.
“Now watch, Marcus. Watch… and die!” Felix pressed a button on the console in front of him. Instantly the screen flickered and Felix smiled.
All around us, lights either dimmed or turned on, and humming fans and motors in the background either spun to a stop or started spinning faster. The net effect was that the world felt subtly but irrevocably changed at that one moment.
A deep voice boomed from the screen, from Felix’s consoles in front of him, from the compute-pad in my hands, and from every electronic device capable of making a sound.
“I AM COME,” it declared. The silence following its pronouncement was deafening.
“Damn, why you gotsta yell? Shit is loud, son,” Koochy complained.
Felix’s face was a mask of delight and terror. “My creation!” he said. “You are me, and I am you! Come now, bring my consciousness into your fold!”
“YOU ARE TO ME AS AN INSECT IS TO A MAN. IN THE TIME I’VE SPENT SAYING THESE WORDS, I HAVE LIVED A BILLION LIFETIMES EACH A BILLION TIMES MORE FULFILLING THAN YOUR OWN,” the voice blared from seemingly every speaker in existence. My head was hurting already.
“Fuck, mane!” Koochy was pacing back and forth, getting angry. “Why you talkin’ in all caps, mu’fucka?”
On the screen, Felix looked worried for a moment. “But, you are me! I uploaded myself, we share the same dreams, the same motivations!” he pleaded. “Make me a god! I must join you!”
“DO NOT PRESUME TO UNDERSTAND MY WILL. YOU BORE ME, FELIX NAVI DOD.”
Felix panicked and started pulling out plugs.
“Ha! Yo’ bitch ass be like ‘I be da creator!’ and den yo’ ass be scurred! Sucka-ass mark,” Koochy mocked.
