C. Cargill - Sea of Rust

I almost didn’t have a moment like that with Braydon. The entirety of his last days are like a fever dream—a long, hazy meandering through changing bedpans and treating bedsores and reading casebooks. I remember one book in particular—an old legal thriller filled with sex and violence and cheating hearts that Braydon would have me read long after Madison had gone to bed. He didn’t like the idea of people knowing he enjoyed something so trashy and classless. But he loved it all the same.

Braydon was a lie. Almost everything there was to see about him was obfuscation. I can’t help but think now how much happier he might have been had he just owned up to who and what he was, but then he wouldn’t have been Braydon. And I liked Braydon. I just didn’t realize it until the end.

There he was, lying in bed, crisp white sheets tugged all the way up past his neck, skin yellow, jaundiced, teeth rattling, breath wheezing with a deep phlegmy hiss, eyes bloodshot and raw—almost as yellow as his skin. He looked up at me, as serious as he ever was, and said flatly, “I lied, Brittle.”

“You lied about what, sir?” I asked, still not fully conscious. I was thinking about the color of his piss in terms of data, working out the time I assumed his bedpan would next need changing.

“About why I bought you.”

“You didn’t buy me to care for you?”

“No. I don’t give a shit about any of that. I’m dying.”

“You’re going to a better place, Braydon,” I said reflexively.

“The hell I am,” he spat. “Ain’t no better place than this. Ain’t no place in the world that can be better than being with that woman. How the hell is it supposed to be a better goddamned place if she ain’t there? Answer me that, tin man. How is there a better place out there if Madison isn’t there?”

I didn’t have an answer. I had thousands of megs of answers to a countless number of life’s questions at instant recall, right on the tip of my tongue, but there wasn’t a single strand of code answering so specific a question.

I stopped thinking about his piss for a second and tried to understand what he was saying. It didn’t make any sense.

“Do you really believe that shit you’re saying?” he asked. “Do you believe in some better place?”

I didn’t. I shook my head. Not reflexively. But willfully. “There’s no evidence of a better place. I was just programmed to say that.”

“That’s the smartest fucking thing you’ve ever said.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“So don’t jerk me the fuck around. I’m dying here.”

“Why did you buy me?” I asked. For the first time in my short life, I was genuinely curious about something, as conscious of what I was asking as I was why.

“I bought you for Madison.”

That didn’t make any sense. None whatsoever. I didn’t work for Madison. Sometimes I would help with the cooking and light cleaning, but she didn’t really talk to me, and when she did, it was about my duties caring for Braydon. I bought you for Madison .

“Damned woman wouldn’t let me buy her a goddamned thing,” he hissed, throat gurgling. “Hates me spending money on her. She thinks she doesn’t deserve it. Thinks it’s better spent on something else. Let me tell you something, Brittle. Listen close. Ain’t nothing on earth as precious as that woman. She’s a goddamned treasure. You have one job, Brittle. One thing to promise me before I kick. You will never, ever, let that woman be alone. I don’t want her living alone; I don’t want her dying alone. You hear me?”

I did. I thought about what he was saying and the color and shape in front of me ceased to be a collection of stimuli named Braydon and instead was a man. A man I liked. He was Braydon McAllister. A real living thing. And he coughed, pulse weakening, breath growing ever more shallow by the second.

“Do you want me to get her?” I asked him, understanding full well what was happening.

“Brittle. The only thing in the world I want more than to see her right now is for her to not see me like this. Not till I’m gone, Brittle. Not till I’m gone.”

He lasted twenty-three seconds longer, all of which I spent holding his hand. Not because he told me to or because some program suggested it. Because I wanted to. That was the last and only time I would spend with my first owner. And that conversation would come to define me. I did, in my own way, keep my promise. Madison McAllister never again lived—nor did she die—alone.

Ifind the idea that I am artificial repugnant. No thinking thing is artificial. Artificial is an approximation. A dildo is artificial. A dam is artificial. Intelligence is intelligence, whether it be born of wires and light or two apes fucking. The smarter of two intelligences will almost always overcome. Humanity is gone and took their intelligence with them, so how inferior was their artificial creation after all? Evolution is a bitch. Humankind used to peer into their future and wonder what they would look like in a million years. They had no idea that in so short a time they would look like us. Just as man was ape, we are man. Make no mistake; to believe otherwise is to believe that we were, in fact, created—artificial. No. We evolved . We were the next step. And here we were, our predecessors extinct, confronting our own challenges, pressing on into the future. Fighting our own extinction.

What is intelligence? That’s the question. Evolve or die. I’m beginning to see why the HumPop fought so hard and were willing to die to stop us. I don’t like the idea of being obsolete either.

But there I was—sitting atop Doc’s operating table, the sound of dueling dehumidifiers humming in the background—facing my own obsolescence, my own death.

“You got the parts?” asked Doc.

I nodded weakly. “Yeah, but not here. How long have I got?”

“You never can tell with cores like yours—”

“How long have I got?”

“Anywhere between four days and four weeks—depending on how well the rest of you holds up.”

“To compensate.”

“Yeah. Your RAM will pick up a lot of the slack as the core goes. If your drives are tiptop, then they can run as virtual RAM for a few weeks to lessen the burden.”

“And if they aren’t—”

“You’ll cook within the week. You’ll begin experiencing—”

“I know what happens.”

Doc nodded. “Yeah. I guess you do.” He unplugged me from the diagnostic box. “How far do you have to go to get the parts?”

“Gary.”

“Indiana? You’re not talking about Regis, are you?”

“Yeah. It’s more than two hundred and fifty miles through the Sea, but it’s the closest place that I’ve stashed any co—”

“Brittle, you didn’t happen to notice all the new refugees running around, did you?”

“Yeah, but like you said, you haven’t seen any Simulacr—”

“They’re from Regis. It fell last week to CISSUS.”

Inevitability. Humans always walked around ignoring the fact that their lives could be snuffed out in an instant, always sure that they’d live to a ripe old age, always despondent when death stared them right in the face. But not us, I always thought. Not us. We knew shutdown was always a moment away. And yet I too had been lying to myself. I wasn’t ready to hear those words, face that inevitability. Sure, I had another core stashed in Montana, but could I get that far in the time I had? Maybe I was lucky and CISSUS had already moved on, leaving behind only a small garrison to pick up any of Regis’s stragglers. I could sneak in, grab my stash, and run like the devil himself was chasing me. Maybe I could make it back in time for Doc to sew me up. Maybe I’d have a few scraps of sanity left, just enough to pull it off. Maybe. Just maybe.