Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 64357 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 322(@200wpm)___ 257(@250wpm)___ 215(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64357 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 322(@200wpm)___ 257(@250wpm)___ 215(@300wpm)
“Because it didn’t care. Humans care if they’re alive or not. Machines don’t.”
Just as those words come out of my mouth, a projectile bullet inserts itself right where Lance’s frontal lobe used to be. His skull comes apart in front of me in a slow cascade of gray matter and bone. At precisely the same time, bullets hit each and every one of the other rebels, all equally neatly placed. I hear one great gunshot, as the building fires a barrage simultaneously with complete accuracy.
One moment they are here, the next they are gone.
The voice speaks again.
“Reset mode engaged. Destroying civilization in 10… 9…”
“Wait!” I cry out. Have I truly ended the world so casually and carelessly? Will that be the wages of my sin here today? “Please! Listen to me!”
“8… 7… 6…”
“I will do anything!”
I am pleading with an entity that does not care for anything besides its own processes. I know I cannot stop it. I couldn’t turn it off, and I cannot prevent the revenge it is going to take on the world at large.
“Please! Have mercy on us all!”
“Oh, relax, Arthur. You always took all of this far too seriously.”
With those words, the doors behind the counter open. Three middle-aged men emerge. I recognize them instantly, though it is entirely impossible that what I am seeing is real.
“Part fridge,” one of them laughs. “Ridiculous. I don’t know how you do it, Terence.”
“I’ve been waiting eighty years to use that line. I almost forgot!”
I stare in astonishment.
These are the original engineers. The creators of the Artifice. These are the men who brought peace to the planet.
Yokohama, Wallace, and Patel. Their names are legendary. But they should be long dead. They should not be in their prime, looking as though they are no more than thirty years old. I am older than them, and they were born over a century and a half ago.
Have I lost my mind? Am I seeing some kind of trauma-induced hallucination?
“Hello, Arthur,” Ari Patel says with a broad grin. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Or three ghosts,” Shinji Yokohama replies. He is the tallest of the three engineers. All of them have long dark hair and glasses. I don’t know if it’s a chosen uniform, though I am almost certain the glasses are unnecessary.
“How is this possible?”
“With enough technology, everything is possible. We reveal ourselves only to a select few, those who deserve to know what the truth of the world is…”
“Or for the lulz,” Wallace says.
There are pieces of my ex-best friend and more recently, mortal enemy’s brain on my shirt. I do not find any of this amusing. I find it confusing and tragic.
“What is happening?”
“You came to destroy our greatest achievement, the thing that keeps us safe, and we decided to take pity on you because we know you’re being blackmailed, and because you have served us all your life without question. Don’t worry about your wife. She’s fine. We dispatched a contingent of tried and tested loyalists to retrieve her,” Ari says. He has a soothing tone to his voice, and I am glad to hear that Mila is unharmed.
“Did you know? That Lance was a traitor?”
“Come with us,” Shinji says. “You need tea.”
I follow, because that is an order, and I know how to follow orders. I go back into the room beyond the counter, which is a kitchen. It has not been used in generations. A portal in the floor is open, and stairs lead down into a basement. There’s another basement beneath that. The second basement contains a room full of screens and very old tech. Keyboards. There haven’t been keyboards in the world for decades. There are stacks of them down here, along with a great many devices I do not recognize.
There are screens everywhere, displaying what I suppose must be old computer code. I don’t recognize the symbols, but they stream through one screen into another.
“What is that?”
“Oh, that?” Wallace grins. “That’s all the people in the world. I know it doesn’t look like much to you, but we look at those screens and we see blondes, brunettes, the occasional redhead. That is the world as we know it.”
I look again, trying to imagine how it must be to see all of the world reduced in such a way, entire lives reduced to simple symbols. No wonder everything is easy for the Artifice. Things are easy when they’re nothing but a squiggly line or half a box.
This could appear to be a great haven for and repository of old technology, but the overall ambiance is somewhat tempered by the fact that it otherwise looks and smells like the quarters of a fresh batch of untrained recruits. There are bags of food open everywhere, old unwashed plates stacked high, and more cups than I can count containing endless unfinished beverages.