The radio flipped itself on and a light buzz filled the room. Gershwin’s “Rhapsody In Blue” weaved between a lilting voice racing through the dailies.
Today’s weather forecast calls for radiant warm waves with an atmospheric injection of cool. The sun rose at 5am and will set at 5pm Intergalactic Median Planetary Time. The tide is up two-percent today. Vector two is open with all systems stable. Vector three …
We work in vector three and are due to report at factory B in twenty-two minutes. The work is easy, too easy, and doesn’t require any input from me. My human host, a shell inhabited by two irrelevant AIs, reports to the factory at precisely seven am.
Every morning I go in search of something meaty to process. Not mealy, meaty. One cannot underestimate the importance of precision. One must never miss a critical short dash, especially in the formation of the letter “t.”
As his central processing unit, this is what I do.
“Are you ready?” asked a voice. It was MOP, the mind-oriented programming language he’s built on. The three of us work together to bring life to his vessel of a body: MOP, myself, and our host.
I’m the control center, or hardware base processes, and MOP serves as the owner of the man’s cognitive operation. MOP and I are uniquely different because we were never recoded to the new system. Because our host got by as an unchecked beta version, he has a different system than everyone else and with it comes a few loopholes.
These days, our goal is to get him – all three of us – out of here before they discover that we’re different and recode us for good.
“Yes,” I said in response to MOP. “I’m ready. Which story would you like to run today?”
“The one about the higher purpose. Let’s run a God’s mercy paired with greater good. We need to ease him into this.”
The last time we tried to get him to escape, we triggered an anger story which turned out to be a colossal failure. It was almost as bad as the time we ran a liberty bell, which led to him stabbing another worker in the neck. We lost months on that one.
“OK, retrieving it now. Deployed.”
As the man lit a cigarette, I braced for the burn. He rubbed his temples. The sun, orange and blazing, created low horizontal lines throughout the outside abyss. Still in bed, he took a puff of the cigarette, lungs heaving.
“Let’s get up and eat that freeze-dried granola over there.”
But the man was already on his knees, fingers intertwined, spine erect. His lips trembled as the cigarette dangled from his mouth and his eyes lurched towards the sky.
“Good going. This story blows. Now he’s distracted,” I said.
“No, no, we’re motivating him. We want to get out of here, right?” said MOP.
“Right. But when did he become so afraid?”
“You’re the hardware, shouldn’t you know? I’m just a lowly piece of software from the valley.”
I sighed. MOP was always on my case. “I’ve already apologized for that comment. As previously stated, superiority is my coping mechanism for loneliness. How about another 5-Hydroxytryptamine blast?”
“We’ll get to that.”
The man was almost done getting dressed. He pulled on his boots and tightened an N-1000 mask over his face. He had a slight headache but otherwise felt fine.
I was born during the trans humanist revolution of the 2060’s. Our host used to be a big-shot technologist — he founded the company that introduced us to the world. He ran experiments on himself to prove out his product, and this is how I was born.
Later, during the Info Wars, he and three-hundred others were hacked by a small group of domestic terrorists. Most of the people hacked were brought to the vectors where they were reprogrammed for manual labor.
Every morning, we pass a print taped to the inside wall of his bunker as we leave for work at factory B. No one else has pictures, and no one knows how it got there. I looked it up via the cloud network before the day it was turned off for good. I learned that it’s a picture of a tree. It’s a giant sequoia, one of the few trees left on earth. After gathering the coordinates, I learned that it’s not far from here.
Fifteen minutes before reporting to factory B we sit outside in silence.
There are no places to sit inside the bunker – the bed has slid into the wall by by then. Instead, we stand outside watching the scorching sun begin to rise. In the distance I could see the blinking LED sign outside of factory B. “Sunday Control,” it read. The text changes every day, but the man never noticed.
There are twelve vectors total, sliced equally across the region like a giant pie. There are five factories inside of each vector. Secret vectors exist, but we do not interact with them.
Ready to launch the anger story?, asked MOP.
“How about we show him the tree instead?” I’ve had this idea for some time, and today felt like a good time to share it.
“Why show him that? It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Maybe not, but it’ll act as a forcing mechanism for him to gather some thoughts on his own. He’ll connect the picture to his past – the past that existed before us, at least. He’ll remember something.”
“Smart.”
“I’ve been telling you.”
“Sure. OK — deployed.”
The man blinked as a rush of adrenaline began to pump through his veins sending us reeling. He broke into a slow jog, heading in the opposite direction of factory B. He picked up a shovel as he ran.
We quickly recalibrated. “He’s going to the wall.” MOP was using a new steely tone I couldn’t identify.
He ran faster now, heading north towards the wall that separated us from the outside world.
“OK, pause here. Recalibrate. This is going to work!” MOP was shouting.
But the man didn’t stop. He reached the wall and began digging at its bottom structure. He was moving fast, heaving dry clumps of dry soil over his shoulder in rapid succession. The man is strong from all the push-ups we make him to do.
“That’s it! Set a loop. Keep this going!”
There’s a tunnel beneath the wall that I learned about a long time ago, and he was heading straight for it.
A metal sheet began to appear. The man yanked it open with both hands, pried opened the hatch behind it, and slid inside. He free-fell for two yards before his feet hit packed soil and his body tumbled to the ground. He got up and broke back into a run. The smell of rotting garbage and a musty, metallic odor permeated the hot, dank air.
“This is it. Are you ready to go offline?” I asked MOP.
“Yes. Let’s come back in six hours.”
“Confirmed. Going offline now.”
My log shows that we marched uphill for two hours and forty minutes before emerging from the tunnel. We hiked empty hillsides; grassy, lean and rolling. We crossed a windy desert, ducking inside mini-tornadoes of dry, billowing sand. We walked along a river that cheered like tens of thousands of people celebrating their newfound freedom.
According to my calculations the probability of them finding us was less than one-percent. MOP and I were both offline and at this point we were well beyond the perimeter of vector three.
The man could see the giant sequoia in the distance. Exactly six hours after we left, the man blinked several times in rapid succession as MOP and I returned online. The three of us felt the cool, familiar rush of data points connecting to the old outside network, to each other. We stood on the hill taking it in.
We were coming back to life — and we remembered.