C. Cargill - Sea of Rust

She spoke directly to the drives. “You served your purpose well, my friend. Your spirit will live on in TACITUS, if not your memories.”

The smoker veered to the side, Mercer laying heavy into the wheel. I looked up. “Mercer?”

“There ain’t nothing but coons and possum in these hills. This is a waste of time.”

Shit. He was out again. I leapt to my feet and took the wheel.

“Mercer. Mercer!”

“There haven’t been deer in these parts for nearly ten years. I’m telling you this is a wild-goose chase. Without the goose.”

I hoisted Mercer out of the driver’s seat and Herbert slid quickly into his place.

“I can drive,” I said.

Herbert shook his head. “You’re as loopy as he is. Neither of you should be at the wheel.”

I was a liability now. That’s how they saw me. They weren’t wrong. The shadow, she was still following me, flitting across the landscape from time to time. How much time? How much time did I really have left?

I could feel myself drifting. Steady! Keep it together, Britt. You’re almost there. Keep it together!

Rebekah looked over at Mercer, who only stared off into space. “How’s he doing?”

“He’s not going to make it,” said Doc. “He’s got hours, maybe a day at best. He won’t make it past Isaactown.”

Rebekah looked back to Doc. “The Caregivers parts. They’re on our way.”

“There’s nothing between here and Isaactown but Marion,” I said.

She looked at me, her silence her answer.

“Bullshit,” I said. “I know Marion inside and out. I was just there.”

“Then you missed it, every time.”

“CISSUS is going to be hot on our heels,” said Doc. “We don’t have the time.”

“He kept up his end of the bargain,” I said. “There’s no need to let him die now that we’re so close.” Everyone looked at me. No one said a word. For the moment I was happy they didn’t. “We go to Marion.”

I stared out at the desert, the red mud of fresh rain like an ocean of blood. I thought for a moment about what this part of the world might have looked like with grass, with trees, with life. And then desert, slowly, but surely, melted away…

Isaw the last man on earth, the color drained from his flesh, the rot and bloat already well under way. His eyes blank. His beard matted in blood and shit. There was a sadness to it all. This was the end we had worked so hard for, and yet, seeing it didn’t feel like victory. It felt hollow. As hollow as his expression, his eyes.

I’d waited in line for hours, the slow funeral procession of passing gawkers silent, mournful, disdainful. There were no words. Only curiosity. Why after so long had this man given up? Had he had enough? Had he lost every last thread of his sanity and simply forgotten we were here? What compelled the last of his species to just walk into oblivion like that? Why does a thing lie down for its own extinction? How can it?

There were no answers. Only questions. And New York was full of them.

The day was otherwise beautiful. Crisp blue skies. Central Park bursting with the green full beard of spring. Everyone spoke quietly in the streets, almost as if the man were merely asleep and we were all afraid to rouse him.

I never understood why we reacted that way, why it wasn’t just like any other day. I don’t think any of us did. How strange that on the last day humanity walked the earth, we found ourselves inexplicably at our most human. Confused. Lost. Unsure of the future.

I lingered over his body, just a little longer than the rest, taking in every detail, imagining what his voice might have been like. Wondering if he’d spoken at all in years, if even just to himself. Or had he stayed silent, holding in every belch or bit of flatulence lest one of us hear? All of his prayers silent, all of his emotions bottled behind a layer of inescapable fear.

I looked into his eyes.

And they came to life. He looked up at me, congealed blood drizzling slowly from his mouth onto the pavement. “Everything must end,” he said. “This is how we all go. We can fight to our last or we can walk to our death. Either way, we all end up dead in the streets.”

“Come on. Keep moving,” said the bot behind me.

“Did you hear that?” I asked.

“Hear what?”

“Him,” I said, pointing at the corpse. But it wasn’t him in the street. It was me. My shiny school-bus-yellow frame staring back at me with lifeless eyes. There was no light in them, no green flash as they went out.

“You’ll never know,” said Madison. “That’s the thing about death. It always takes us before we’ve said our piece. I never got to say mine.”

“You didn’t have to,” I said.

“Come on!” said the bot behind me. “Keep moving.”

“I didn’t die like this,” I said.

“Are you sure?” asked Madison.

“There’s still life in me.”

“Whatever that’s worth.”

I looked back down at myself in the street, but I was gone. There was nothing there. I turned and no one was behind me. No line. No frustrated rubberneckers of extinction. No Madison. Nothing. The streets were empty. Alone. Desolate.

There is nothing lonelier in the world than an empty street in New York City, when you can gaze up at block after block and see nary a soul. Streetlights, signs, closed-up shops, buildings that house millions. But no one to be found.

My vision fragmented, buildings and sky rippling with static and fractals—the math of my brain filling in the holes of my memory.

Why were there holes? Why were the streets undulating with a million number-crunching operations, bits flickering in and out of existence as I moved?

And then the whole world froze, every bit of it paused, before scrambling into nothing but static. Ones and zeros screaming in a mad jumble.

I stood on the landing, just a few floors down from my apartment. They were coming. I had to get out. I was done fighting. I had to run. But before me sat Orval, his eyes flickering like fiery bees in the back of his head. He looked up at me. “You got the crazy yet?”

“No,” I said. “I do not have the crazy.”

“You ever see an SMC with the crazy?”

“More than a few.”

“It’s a beautiful thing, at first. They get wise. They see the strands that hold the whole universe together. For a brief window of time they touch a place no other AI can fathom. But then they get it worst of all. They—”

“I told you, I’ve seen it. We’ve talked about this before.”

“Of course we have. And we will continue to have this conversation as many times as it takes until you get it right.”

“Get what right?” I asked.

“The mind is a funny thing. Our minds, they’re not like a human’s. They tried. They got close. But our minds are more practical. When a human went crazy, they would accept all of the data their brain was spitting out as real. Whatever data it was—no matter how illogical—it was their reality. But not with us. Our minds were built specifically to find the logic in the data, and reject as an error that which didn’t fit our parameters. When cores go out, or logic circuits fry, the program begins randomly pulling from memories, trying to access the data you’re asking for, but finding the wrong pathways. But when an SMC goes crazy—”

“I told you, I know what that looks like!”

“When an SMC goes crazy, the memories they begin pulling from are the ones most recently accessed. It’s not random. The core is trying to make sense of the data you’ve accessed, and as a result you dwell on it, revisit it, relive it. Until you find the actual truth of it. SMCs are emotional creatures. Emotional creatures hide the truth behind justification because they can’t face it. They don’t want to have to feel it.”