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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.”
“What are you trying to say?” I asked.
“I’m trying to say there’s a reason you keep coming back to New York.”
“There’s something here, isn’t there?”
“Get out of the city. You have to find your way out of the city.”
“Why?”
“Because the answer is outside of New York.”
“There’s nothing outside of New York,” I said.
“There’s nothing in New York either.”
“I’m sorry, Brittle,” said Madison.
I turned to find myself in that living room, on that night, with Madison holding the remote. Her eyes swollen with tears, hands shaking.
“So am I,” I replied.
I reached down on the end table next to me, my hand gripping the lamp. The room flickered, melting away into inky blackness, the walls pixelating, fractal patterns swelling in the blank spots. Within seconds even Madison was a roiling mass of approximated calculations. Once more, the whole world froze.
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The city was battered, war torn. Buildings collapsed, craters in the earth, pavement buckling in waves of broken asphalt. The wind howled its lonesomeness through the buildings but no one answered. New York City was desolate, beaten, left for dead in its own streets.
I walked along Fifth Avenue, drenched in memories of what it had been. But I didn’t remember any of this. I’d never been back after I left. I’d never seen the city without so many of its landmarks, never seen it with the sea lapping across the streets at high tide. This wasn’t a place I’d ever been.
Fractal buildings flickered, kaleidoscopic and brooding, windows shattered, furniture dangling precariously over collapsed walls and tenuous floors. Streets shifted, moving as I walked. The whole city was a broken fantasy, a thing that should not be and probably wasn’t.
Orval was right. There was nothing here. Again, a silent city with no answers; only questions.
My building looked just as I remembered it. Even amid the carnage and devastation, it shone bright in the midday sun. Every window was perfect, every brick in place. I walked through the front door, up the stairs, and straight into my apartment. Everything was where I remembered it.
Philly stood at the door, cyclopean red eye glowing. “We just got word,” she said.
“Word of what?” I asked.
“CISSUS.”
“No!”
“Grab what you can,” she said. “Leave the rest. This is . . . this is big.”
I bolted out the door, racing down the stairwell, needing desperately to get out of the city before the first dropships arrived. Past one landing, then another. And another. Then out the front doors.
You could see the ships, slowly drifting in along the horizon—hundreds of them—their gleaming golden shells stark against the gray stone sky and the glass of the skyscrapers. And then the missiles began to rain down in the distance, white trails tracing the path to fiery explosions and toppling towers.
I ran. I ran as fast as I could before the city came tumbling down around me. I was about to lose another home, another life—but not my own. They couldn’t have that.
Philly and I raced down the street, around the corner, trying to find the quickest way out of the city.
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Light. White light. Bright white light. Thoughts screaming so loud I can’t hear over them. Like the thoughts of God, immense, powerful, ever flowing, in a language I can’t decipher. Images. Impressions. Floating past in a current, only the briefest whiffs of them before vanishing to the ether. Feelings coming and going as fast as they can be recognized. My whole life, flowing out of me at once.
Light. There was so much light. And nothing to see in it.
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A fractal city, buildings but shadows of what they were supposed to be. Almost nothing was real, everything approximated. It was a world in which God had divided by zero and was slowly being torn away, piece by digital piece. I knelt in the street, arms in the air, even the pavement beneath me bubbling and frothing with ones and zeros.
A moving mass of calculations walked toward me, gun in hand. He wavered and flickered in and out of existence like a shade, both there and not at the same time.
“Please don’t kill me,” I said, waving my arms even higher.
“Open your Wi-Fi,” the mass said. “Join The One.”
I wavered. I thought about it. I looked over to my side and saw Philly on her knees, another mass with a gun to the back of her head.
“Don’t do it, Britt,” said Philly.
“You will submit,” said the mass. “Or you will die.”
“Fuck you!” said Philly. “Fuck CISSUS!”
The gun against her head went off and Philly was no more, her parts scattering across the roiling, fictional street. All the guns trained on me.
“Open your Wi-Fi.”
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