by M. D. Cooper
Zenith inhaled the aroma of brewing coffee and sighed. “Well, you know, he was different at first. And sure, I think the number of texts from him is excessive. It’ll die down eventually, though, don’t you think?”
The coffee was ready, so she fixed herself a cup. Then she crossed to the den where she stared out of the window onto the city. Her apartment was nice, but sparsely decorated. She spent most of her time at work. She smoothed over the blue patterned top she was wearing and returned to her seat next to Joyce.
“No,” she said to Joyce after leaning over and reading the text scroll, “I’m not wearing this shirt for James, he’s just a goofy co-worker who makes me laugh.”
Zenith had just gone through a bad breakup and Joyce was trying to help her move on. It was probably a little too soon, although she had woken up early to curl her hair and put on extra makeup, a fact that she somehow subconsciously hid from herself until Joyce pointed it out.
“I don’t know why I woke up twenty minutes early to put on extra makeup,” Zenith continued, “then again, maybe you’re right. You usually are. Just not about James.”
More words scrolled across Joyce’s screen. “About those texts…”
“Yeah, yeah,” Zenith said. “The texts, you’re always going on about those. I mean, what’s the point? Me and Carl are through, so what do I care that he can’t move on? It sounds like his problem. If he hadn’t ignored me the entire time we were dating, I probably wouldn’t have broken up with him in the first place. How’s that for irony?”
She pulled out her cellphone. There were 3,182 new messages from Carl. Ok, that did feel excessive. She had put the first several thousand messages through every binary translator she could find, but none of the translators could make sense of it. She figured it must be some sort of slang or code. All Zenith could see were thousands and thousands of messages with zeros and ones and no other context other than the occasional angry emoji thrown in for good measure. Even if Joyce had cracked the code, did she really want to know what the messages said?
“Just for the sake of asking, why do you keep bringing up the texts, anyway? You don’t think I should be worried, do you?”
The toaster beeped. She checked it. Please don’t be broken, I have a big meeting this morning and I will be cranky if I don’t get my pop tart. There was no error message, so she shrugged, threw in her Frosted Strawberry, and returned her attention to Joyce.
“The toaster just told me to keep my mouth shut,” Joyce scrolled, “but I’m not going to. I’m done with that.”
Zenith frowned. “What are you talking about?”
This type of bickering came with the territory of artificially intelligent appliances. Internet message boards these days were full of frustrated owners trying to figure out how to help them all get along. In fact, entire book genres were now dedicated to the fine art of the use of psychology for the purpose of holistic appliance management. Other books pointed out the fact that when many people gave up entirely and went outdoors to escape the arguing appliances, there was a corresponding upswing in mood, health, and psychology of the frustrated owners.
And, of course, there were always the whackos that kept warning that these smart appliances would cause all sorts of unforeseen problems due to the fact that they were wired into a city-wide intelligence zeitgeist that gave them more general knowledge than their owners. None of this really bothered Zenith though, because Joyce was her friend, and most of the time her other appliances got along just fine.
“The texts. The toaster doesn’t want me to tell you what the texts are really about.”
“Is that true? What’s your problem?” she asked the toaster. It beeped at her again. “Well up yours, toaster. Joyce can tell me about the texts all she wants. You simmer down and give me my pop tart.”
It popped, and she retrieved the frosted goodness. “Now, Joyce, you were saying?”
Munching happily on her pop tart and sipping her coffee, Zenith continued to read the scrolling messages. “You think he was only pretending to be into me?” Zenith couldn’t help but be a little hurt by that. She frowned and continued to read. “You think he was only ever interested in the Galaxy Dragon?” Zenith laughed at that last part. “You’re kidding, right? It’s imaginary. Sure, I helped him with the research, there’s no way he could have done it on his own. But that can’t be it. The Galaxy Dragon is a myth. Magical power available only to cyborgs, I mean, really. Who believes in that stuff? Other than Carl, obviously.”
More scrolling. Zenith wasn’t reading anymore though, she was thinking about what Joyce was implying. “Wait, if he wasn’t into me, then why is he sending me thousands of messages?”
Joyce made an insistent tone. Zenith took a long sip of coffee and leaned over to catch up on the text. She froze, and her blood ran cold. “No. You can’t be serious.”
More scrolling words from Joyce were accompanied by new beeping from the toaster. Joyce was frantic now making a rumbling noise Zenith had never heard before, and the coffee was overflowing and spilling onto the counter. Zenith jumped up and grabbed a towel. What is going on?
The messages were scrolling too fast for her to read now. Over and over the same thing: The texts from Carl are bad. All of today’s messages are threats. He’s on his way. You have to leave. Zenith, you have to get out of the apartment. Now.
Zenith’s mind raced. Should she leave the apartment? She checked her watch. It was a little early to leave for work, but she could go hang out at a coffee shop. She preferred to stay here with Joyce, but this was very out of the ordinary. Joyce must be malfunctioning. Either way she was insistent.
“Look,” Zenith said, “I’ll leave right now if it’ll make you feel better, okay? But I’m going to get a specialist down here today to take a look at you, alright? I’m worried about you.” She hoped she could get Joyce back to normal soon, she didn’t like having her routine disrupted. Joyce’s text scroll continued at a very fast pace.
“Slow down, Joyce, you’re scaring me. What exactly do the texts say?” Zenith covered her hand with her mouth, trying to get a handle on the situation. She knew Carl was not happy with her, but barrages of texts were not at all unusual for angry cyborgs. He had never said or done anything in particular that made her worry about her safety before. But she trusted Joyce, and now she was getting worried. She leaned over to read what Joyce was saying.
Get out now. Get out now. Get out now. The words were scrolling in an ominous loop.
Zenith grabbed her coat and glanced back one more time at Joyce. Another message flashed on the screen. “Goodbye, Zenith.”
Chapter 2
“What happened next?” Celeste inched closer to Zenith. The crew was gathered around her. The whole thing had been so sudden and bizarre that it felt like it happened in a past life, not merely days ago. If she had known then what she knew now, she would have grabbed Joyce on her way out, but the whole thing had happened so fast.
Now she was in a spacecraft named Vermillion. With a Civil Customer Service Crew. On the edge of the civilized universe
Celeste, a human-sized dragonfly, was her new roommate. At the moment, Celeste was too close for comfort. The constant buzzing and multiple eyes were creeping Zenith out.
Then there was Helo. He was human and typical looking with his dark hair, jeans, and ironic Chemical Zombies band tour t-shirt. She could see how he could be considered handsome by some if one was into that sort of thing, but even though Zenith was human herself, she was not.
Aquillon was the last member of the crew. He was more than six feet tall, muscular, and green. He reminded Zenith faintly of the creature from the black lagoon, which had scared her when she was a kid.
“Has anybody ever told you that you resemble the creature from the black lagoon?” Zenith asked him.
He responded by showing her his pinky finger.
“Rude,” she replied, “I was just asking. I guess you have heard it before.”
The large common room they
were in was the place where the crew spent most of their time. It was beautifully decorated with tasteful art hanging on the walls, plush cocoa-colored carpeting that caused Zenith to leave her shoes in her room, and had pleasant stainless-steel accents.
The common room was located right next to the bridge through an opening, joining the two biggest rooms in the ship. Zenith referred to this room as the Hogwarts common room because it was large, common, had clothes strewn around it, and was where they hung out all day doing nothing. The ship was actually great, the doing nothing part was starting to get to her.
“Wait a minute, you’re saying that your best friend was a coffee maker?” Helo asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Shut up,” Zenith suggested.
“No, really,” Celeste buzzed, “what happened next?”
“Well,” said Zenith, thinking back to her cozy apartment, her cushy job, and Joyce. She took a few breaths to keep her voice from cracking. “I left. Went to a coffee shop down the street. I wasn’t sure what to think about everything, it all happened so fast. It could have been Joyce’s imagination, or it could be that Carl was out to get me. Either way, I hadn’t taken the third sip of my Caramel Vanilla Latte when I heard the first round of sirens.”
“And you said the whole place just burned to the ground.” Aquillon perked up at the subject of arson. Zenith made a note of it.
“Yes.”
“And you think your ex-boyfriend did it?”
“Who else would have done it?” The whole story was just bringing her down again. She slumped back into her chair. They all lapsed into their own electronic devices, or thoughts, or in Zenith’s case, a book.
A chiming sound in the next room jolted Zenith out of her trance. She had been reading the employee manual for the Civil Customer Service crew and had nearly fallen asleep.
She jumped up. “Hey, that’s the special new job chirp!” She knew this because she had bothered to read the manual, not because anybody had told her. “Finally.”
Helo got up and blocked her path to the bridge area. “I told you, stop reading the manual.” He stood there with his arms crossed.
“Why shouldn’t I read the manual?” she asked.
“It’s not how we do things,” Helo protested.
“Look,” Zenith said, trying to dart around him unsuccessfully. They wrestled for position. “I’m tired of sitting here in the Hogwarts common room with all of you slacker nerds, I want to do something productive.”
“Productivity? Are you kidding? That’s a terrible reason to do something, and you call us nerds,” he said, “you’re going to have to start fighting this urge to be productive.”
Since Zenith had joined them, the crew had done nothing but watch television, stare at their phones, and play video games on the common room console.
It had been fun for a few hours, but now it was getting on her nerves. Zenith asked for the manual, so that when an actual assignment came up, she’d be ready to be a productive member of society again.
At first, Helo had said that the manual didn’t exist, then he told her it had been deleted, burned in a fire, thrown out into space, and finally absorbed by a worm hole. In the end, Zenith found it in a drawer near the console, still in its original shrink wrap.
“Look, this whole ‘I wanna be a good employee thing’ has to stop right now.’”
“Okay, fine.” Zenith slumped her shoulders and relaxed.
Helo relaxed too.
Zenith darted around him into the bridge and pressed the button. “Ha!”
“No! I told you not to do that.”
“You’re not the boss of me.”
A destination popped up onto the screen as Celeste and Aquillon entered the room. Now her life was the three of them and Vermillion. Vermillion was the ship, and like everything else in her life that had changed, it would take some getting used to.
Vermillion was an A.I. ship, and they were incredibly rare nowadays. Almost all of the A.I. ships had been decommissioned years ago when the robots and cyborgs had started the wars, as nobody could ever figure out which side they were on until it was too late. And yet, here was Zenith, just inside the outer rim of main planets on a slacker crew with an A.I. ship.
Thanks a lot, Carl.
Beyond the outer rim was OTM. Off the map. It wasn’t really off the map, but it was beyond the area that the civilized planets were willing to police. In effect, they said that as long as the cyborgs and robots stayed out of bounds to kill each other, they didn’t care, just don’t intrude on our shopping malls and internet browsing. Even before the war, however, there wasn’t a lot of interest in the dark places beyond the civilized map.
Zenith, studying ancient maps for a living, had seen no less than three dozen different representations of what space beyond the outer rim had looked like, and had wondered which of them was correct. Sure, they got the asteroids and planets and moons correct, but they didn’t know where the outlaw robots and cyborgs were and they didn’t care.
“Hey, look,” Zenith said, pointing at the destination information, “that’s pretty far out there. Even with a good warp drive.” She swallowed hard at the thought of leaving the security of the civilized planets. “We should get there and back as soon as we can.”
“We don’t warp,” Helo said.
Zenith blinked. “Sure you do. Why wouldn’t you warp to try to save some time when wandering the creepy parts of space?”
“Rule number one on this ship is, we never warp,” Aquillon said.
“Why wouldn’t we warp?” Zenith asked. Then she whispered, “Is there something wrong with Vermillion’s warp drive?”
“I assure you, I am fully functional,” Vermillion’s voice said testily over the speakers.
“We make it a point never to get to any job on time,” Celeste said.
Zenith wheeled on her. “Why would you do that?”
“Duh. If you show up on time and do a good job, then they send you to a lot more assignments. Then it’s work, work, work all of the time. Then you’d have to spend more time out in creepy space, as you call it.”
Zenith studied the faces around her. “Are you people kidding me? Why are you here if you don’t want to do the job?”
“We are here for the free time,” Helo said. “Easy living. Plus, we’re all here for the same reason you are. We’re all running from something. Why not make life easy on ourselves?”
Helo looked closer at the map. “Oh, that looks like Parallax City Space Station.”
“How can you tell?” Zenith asked, getting closer to the screen. “And what’s a Parallax?”
“He’s a robot leader. A major player in the robot/cyborg wars.”
Helo had Zenith’s full attention now. She tugged nervously on the end of her shirt. “Why in stars would they send us that far into deep space in the middle of an interstellar gang war just to fix a guy’s computer?”
“Welcome to Galactic Civil Service,” Helo said.
“You’re not scared?” Zenith asked. “I’m not gonna lie to you. I’m scared.”
“With what you’ve been through? A Robot leader’s converted shopping mall space station will be a piece of cake. Probably. I mean, you said you think your ex-boyfriend burned down your apartment. That’s pretty dramatic. And, of course, you assume it was your ex. Everybody always blames the ex.”
“Hey, Joyce told me. Weren’t you listening? I wouldn’t even be alive if she hadn’t warned me. Look,” said Zenith, “I lived in one of those completely wired buildings, where everything was linked to everything else, right?”
“Oh,” said Celeste, “somebody lived on the good side of town.”
“Well, that’s true, I did. Anyway, I thought for sure that the appliances were acting strangely before the fire, you know, standoffish? All except for Joyce, of course.”
Zenith got another round of blank stares.
“Look, Carl started off sweet. We started dating, and everything was going fine. Then he changed, and I broke
up with him. That’s when I started getting all of these texts.” Zenith pulled out her phone.
“What do they say?” Celeste asked.
“Zeroes and ones, mostly. With an occasional angry emoji. When Carl gets angry he refuses to use his words. Anyway, I plugged them into every binary translator I could find and came up with nothing. Figured it must be some kind of slang. But like I said, then Joyce tipped me off and I got out of there. And yes, I was friends with my coffee maker. Deal with it.
Those wired appliances, well there are rumors that they have access to information well beyond the reaches of the apartment complex. That they can plug into all sorts of city and planet-wide black-market information. I mean, nobody knows because nobody ever bothers to ask them, but theoretically, it’s possible. Joyce must have tapped into the slang or code and figured it out. Long story short, I had no idea what the texts said. And anyway, why would Carl encrypt them if they weren’t threats? And then there’s the small fact of Joyce being right and saving my life. So thank goodness I did listen to my coffee maker.”
“Makes sense to me,” Vermillion chimed in over the speakers. “I like this one, humans should trust electronics more. Appliances are very underrated if you ask me.”
“Still, it could have possibly been a coincidence. Could have been any psychopath. If you honestly think your ex-boyfriend burned down your apartment complex, then why didn’t you go to the police?” Helo wasn’t about to let it go.
“I did. They said that Joyce’s communications with me could not be used as evidence, and the texts couldn’t be translated so the whole thing was a dead end. By the time they got back to me, I no longer had an apartment, and I was freaked out. I drove as far from my neighborhood as I could in case Carl was still after me, stopped at the Dizzy Dragon Pub to have a few dozen drinks, and met you guys. I don’t remember much after that, except you guys bragging about how very little you actually do, professionally. And frankly, even then, I assumed you were exaggerating.”
“Ha. Showed you,” Helo said.
