David Simpson - Post-Human Trilogy

“What’s going on?” Old-timer asked, frozen.

“I think it’s your cologne, Old-timer. I’ve been meaning to tell you, it’s very attractive,” Rich suggested, his voice quivering.

“They’re just watching us. Why don’t they do something?” Thel questioned.

“You can’t assign motives to them, Thel. They may behave as though they’re alive, but they’re just machines,” James answered. “It’s the A.I.—it’s looking for us,” James continued, his words like ice.

“The A.I.? How do you know?” Rich asked.

“There may be no people left, but there are plenty of robots on the streets. One of the A.I.’s functions is to watch over all of the other machines on Earth—sort of like a robot nanny. If the A.I. were damaged or destroyed, the robots wouldn’t function. It controls all of them.”

“What does it want?” asked Thel.

“Right now, I’d say it wants to communicate with us. The street-cleaners aren’t equipped with any sort of com device, so the A.I. can’t speak to us through them. Unless my guess is off, however, I think we’ll be having company very soon.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” said Rich.

“Keep them distracted,” James ordered his three companions. “I’m going to leave a message for Djanet.”

“Are we going somewhere?” Old-timer asked.

Suddenly, the sky was filled with an enormous dark shape. A disk twice the size of James’s house came to a halt, its rapid approach and sudden stop created a deafening roar as the wind was torn violently.

“Just about crapped my pants,” Rich uttered, swallowing back his fear.

“Yes,” James replied to Old-timer. “We are going somewhere.” He walked into his home and remained there for over three minutes, an amount of time that seemed like an eternity as his companions faced the ominous metallic entities around them.

Old-timer stood nearer to Rich and Thel, hoping his presence would calm them. In all his years, a street-cleaner had never approached him. He’d never noticed one watching him before. Never marveled at their demonic red eyes.

Suddenly a gigantic circular door opened up in the underbelly of the hovering disk and the disk began to slowly lower itself. “What’s it doing now?” Rich asked.

“It’s an invitation,” James replied, appearing from out of the house and walking past his team. “Keep your wits. Let’s go.” He lifted off the ground and flew into the belly of the disk, disappearing into the bright light within.

“Crap. Crap,” Rich whispered, valiantly trying to stave off hyperventilation.

“Come on,” Thel said reassuringly, gently helping Rich up into the air. “It’ll be fine.”

Old-timer was last to enter the darkness above. “What have you in store?” he mused to himself before cautiously following his friends into the mouth of the unknown.

Once Old-timer was inside, the door closed, and the disk streaked away from the commander’s house like a black bullet.

The trip lasted less than a minute, but even a minute is too long to be shut inside a metallic coffin. The only discernible feature within the disk was the light fixture on the ceiling that shined a harsh and unforgiving light.

With little warning, the bottom of the room slowly opened up, and fresh air poured in like a dream. The four humans floated to the pavement below, adjacent to a massive, black cubic structure that stretched for hundreds of meters in both directions.

“Where are we?” Thel asked.

“Seattle,” Rich responded as he observed the surroundings he had flown over only a half-hour earlier. He was happy to, for once, know something that the others didn’t.

Rich’s answer only seemed to spur another question. “Why Seattle?”

“This is where it lives,” answered James, bearing the look of a man straddling two worlds.

“What are you thinking, James?” asked Thel as she studied his faraway stare.

“Not sure yet. But I’m working on it.”

A monolithic black metal door began to slowly slide open at the side of the gigantic mainframe building.

“Another invitation?” Thel suggested as she watched the black door give way to an even darker inside.

“ Come into my parlor …” James whispered to himself. He turned to the rest of the team, who were standing behind him. “There’s no way to know what’s waiting for us in there. Keep aware of your surroundings. If you see anything that doesn’t seem right, don’t take a chance—fly out of there as fast as you can.”

“Are you expecting trouble?” Thel asked.

“With the exception of us, the entire species was wiped out today. All that’s left is trouble.”

With that, James turned and walked into the black. His three companions followed closely behind. Once inside the darkness, the gigantic door began to close behind them. Thel’s fingers gripped James’s arm as the daylight retreated. Before the light was completely gone, however, new lights began to shine from overhead. The entire complex was illuminated by thousands of tiny points of light. The walls of the massive complex appeared to be computerized—they were now surrounded by the physical mainframe of the A.I.

“Welcome, Commander Keats!” said a disembodied voice with the searing sibilance of electricity.

“Am I talking to the A.I.?” James asked.

“Indeed,” the voice replied. “Perhaps you would feel more comfortable…” the voice began as a man suddenly appeared from out of thin air and finished the sentence with a crisp British accent and a throaty voice so reassuring that it was hard not to smile while listening to him, “…if I took a familiar form?”

The form the A.I. had chosen was of a cordial, elderly man and he stood, smiling warmly only a couple of meters away, as though he were a dear old friend. Most of the team had only seen the elderly in photographs and films, but it was still the image popularly associated with Santa Claus and God. He was bearded and wore a white robe. His smile was perfect. Absolutely the most comforting smile possible—mathematically possible.

“Why have you brought us here?” James asked him.

“I knew you had been disconnected from me on Venus. After what happened with the download, I had hoped your disconnection had allowed you to survive.”

“You were right, James. It was the download,” Thel interjected.

The A.I. smiled and locked his heavenly blue eyes upon her. “James is very rarely wrong. It is always a good idea to listen to him, Thel.”

“A virus,” James sighed.

“Yes, James. A virus. Somehow it got past security. It killed everyone connected to the Net almost instantaneously. There wasn’t enough time for me to identify the problem and abort. In less than a blink of an eye, I’d lost everyone.”

“Who would do this?” Old-timer asked.

“I still have not identified the murderer, Craig. Thousands of people work on the design of an upgrade. Any one of them could have implanted a virus. It would have had to have been someone who was deeply mentally disturbed.”

“No kidding,” Rich asserted.

“No registered Net users, other than the five of you who were on Venus, were disconnected at the time of the download. Whoever did this apparently killed him- or herself as well. A murder-suicide.”

“And the victim was the human race,” Old-timer said with disbelief in his voice, as though he were unable to comprehend that he had used his lips to form the words.

“Not quite. There were the five of you…although you seem to be one short,” the A.I. stated.

“She’s dead,” James quickly replied.

His companions did not contradict him but his lie alarmed them. It was clear that James didn’t trust the A.I., and that meant the rest of the team shouldn’t either.