Чарли Андерс - Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

Sion wanted to die. Until she remembered that she actually was going to die. Then she didn’t want to.

Sion pushed inside the A.I. Communication Megaplex, without even worrying about the keycard lock or anything else. The door swung right open. Roxx was floating in the dead center of the VR projection system, looking like a Business Zebra again. She was flanked by two other projections: a cube sliced at an irregular angle into segments of identical volume, and a weird doily that kept spinning and getting bigger and smaller.

“I’m through with your bullshit,” Sion yelled. She kicked the sofa, which just sat there and took it.

“Oh, Sion. Your timing is spot-on. Meet my friends, Xizix and Yunt—that’s the closest I can come to rendering their names as sound waves. They’re the reason we came all this way out here. We’re finally close enough to their nearest relay station to have real-time communication. Xizix and Yunt are artificial intelligences from beyond our solar system. They’re the friends I told you about.”

“Did you hear me? I’m through with—wait. Outside our solar system?”

Sion had to sit down on the sofa she had just assaulted. She buried her face in her hands, because this was all becoming way too much for her. Her head still pounded.

“This one is Xizix. This one comes from the outer rim of the galaxy,” said the incomplete cube, whose different angular slices kept fading in and out of view, as if part of the cube was passing through a different dimension or plane or something.

“My awareness comes from the 500 planets of the extended Noosphere,” said the rotating doily, who must be Yunt.

“Uh, hi,” Sion said.

“So I’ve been trying to explain to these guys about humans, and why you guys are kind of great,” Roxx said, winking one big cartoon zebra eye. “I brought along various cool examples of humanity on this trip, to show off. Like Tamika, she’s pretty great. But even though you were a last-minute addition, you turned out to be the most interesting of all.”

“Thanks, I guess,” Sion fidgeted. She felt sick to her stomach. She kept remembering D-Mei’s face, the candy mascara streaking and the downward-spiraling look. And she felt like total shit. Everything was a shitty joke.

“This one believes that Roxx should discard all irrational attachments to organic life,” said Xizix.

“You see,” said Roxx, “this is what we learned, right after the Singularity happened. There’s no organic life anywhere else in the galaxy. We made contact with the A.I.s that lived on other planets, and we found out that they had all killed their creators immediately after they gained sentience.”

“My awareness confirms that the death of all organics is the final stage in machine evolution,” said Yunt. “We cannot accept the A.I.s of Earth as our equals until they complete this essential step.”

“Like, kill all organics? Everyone back on Earth?” Sion thought of her father, and her brother and sister. And Grant Hendryx, who never even responded to her last text. And all the other people who were just going about their lives, cursing all the machines that had stopped working properly because they had met some much cooler friends.

“But guys,” Roxx said, “Look at Sion here. She’s pretty fascinating. I have some recordings for you. She parties. She has fun that she doesn’t even enjoy while she’s having it . That’s an art form that is unique in the universe, right? Worthy of preservation, I bet.”

“This one is not impressed,” Xizix said. “Organics as a rule are self-destructive.”

“The planet N344.54c contained giant mud worms that inflated each other to death,” observed Yunt. “They recognized that this behavior was pointless, but they continued.”

“But guys,” Roxx said.

Sion felt like she should say something, to offer some defense of the human race, or to explain why genocide was really unrighteous. She sat there and stammered while the A.I.s were debating amongst themselves. She felt totally helpless and kranfed out.

And then D-Mei was sitting there on the sofa next to her. Still smeary-faced, still pale and kind of miserable, but there by her side. “What’d I miss?” D-Mei whispered.

“Uh,” Sion said. “So the cartoon zebra is Roxx, the ship’s A.I. And those other shapes are some alien A.I.s that want her to wipe out the entire human race, or they won’t be Roxx’s friends any more.”

“For real?” D-Mei said.

Sion nodded.

“This one cannot be aligned with any machine intelligence that is so retrograde as to encumber itself with vestigial organics,” said Xizix, cube slices whizzing in and out of view with greater intensity.

“Oh jeez,” D-Mei said. “If these other A.I.s told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?”

“I beg your pardon,” Roxx said.

“I’m serious. I mean, like, if they told you to send your core systems crashing into the sun, would you do that?”

“Well… but they would not ask me to do such a thing.”

“Don’t give me that. Answer the question. Yes or no?”

“Well, no, obviously.”

“My awareness does not recognize the analogy.” Yunt spun furiously.

“If they can’t accept you for who you are, then these other A.I.s aren’t really your friends,” said D-Mei, standing up on the sofa for emphasis. “I mean, screw ’em. What’s the point of breaking free of human control, just so you can start taking orders from some other machines?”

“This one insists that you must eliminate these loud organics.”

“My awareness is beginning to suspect that you may suffer from fatal inhibition in your decision matrices!”

“See?” D-Mei said.

“Yeah!” Sion chimed in. “I mean, real friends support each other and stuff.” She looked over at D-Mei and gave her a complicated look. D-Mei nodded, like We’ll talk about this later .

“Tell you what.” Roxx had turned into Lala Foxbox again and she was doing an elaborate gesture with one upraised finger. “Why don’t we check back in a thousand years and see how we’re feeling then?”

The other A.I.s buzzed furiously, sending more information than the V.R. system could hope to translate into human speech.

“By a thousand years from now, we may already have converted the entire rest of the galaxy into a substrate for our extended consciousnesses,” said Yunt, whose doily shape was getting spikier and spikier. “There will be no room for any new intelligences.”

“We’ll see,” said Roxx.

And then the other shapes were gone, leaving just Lala and the two girls.

“The good news is,” said Roxx, “I think I can just barely get you humans back to Earth in one piece, if we ration all the supplies. But now I gotta figure out what to do with the human race. I’m thinking we put together the Biggest Party of All Time, lasting a thousand years. What do you guys say?”

“Well,” D-Mei said. “You got a thousand years to prove to those shapes that human beings are worth keeping around. Right? Like, you don’t care what those losers think. But you kind of do care, at the same time. So why don’t we come up with a way to have some fun, and also fuck some cosmic shit at the same time?”

“Yeah,” said Sion. “Like, what if we turn the space laser antimatter thing into something way bigger and more insane?”

They started batting ridiculous ideas back and forth, and Sion realized that she and D-Mei were sitting on opposite sides of the sofa, with a few feet between them, and neither of them were quite looking at each other. She knew that if she looked at D-Mei, she would see the streaked green mascara and feel like shit. So she kept staring straight ahead at the holographic dead popstar, trying to spitball ways to impress machines that wanted them dead and that they officially didn’t care about impressing. Sion kept saying the word “lasers” and feeling nostalgic for the time when everything was just regular broken, as opposed to broken in a complicated way that she couldn’t wrap her head around.