The Secret Lair

“Well, I see it’s come to this.”

The goat rose as Vinnie “Ankles” Moretti forced his way into the stable. In the next stall, Kentucky Derby winner Calcaneus rested before tomorrow’s Preakness Stakes.

“Wait. Did you just… talk?”

The goat stared back. It knew two things: Vinnie was a bookie, and he was called “Ankles” because that’s what he broke when someone didn’t pay.

“You’re not going to get me, you know.”

The goat darted aside as Vinnie lunged, sack in hand. As it struck Vinnie’s leg with thick hooves, it pondered irony and Calcaneus’s odds at the Triple Crown.

…..

The above drabble (flash fiction of exactly 100 words) is a part of a series of short fiction by John Cmar inspired by randomly discovered Creative Commons licensed images, and is itself licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

“Now,” said the administrator while  opening the door to the lab, “we have a practical experiment in the development of clean energy sources for the future. This is Dr. Roland Jeffers, head of the project. Dr. Jeffers, would you show our visitors your results?”

With the administrator were two official-looking people. The man wore a dark blue suit; clean-cut, clean-shaven, greying a bit at the temples. The woman was also middle-aged but quite beautiful, brunette hair pulled back, blue eyes that took in everything in the room: the control console, the man in the plexiglass chamber with the wires that led from the console to his head and chest, and the small toy monkey on a stainless-steel table, also connected to the console by another long set of wires.

Jeffers began. “My experiments have to do with developing forms of renewable energy for the future, specifically coming from biological sources. In this case, we have the gentleman in the chamber hooked up to my device, which stimulates the memory centers of the brain. The energy generated by the subject is captured and transmitted, either for use or for storage.”

Jeffers flicked his eyes to the administrator with a question, the administrator nodded. Jeffers turned a central knob on the console about half-way. The results were immediate; the man in the chamber began to smile dreamily and the toy monkey chattered and clapped its cymbals together at a moderate pace. After about thirty seconds, Jeffers turned the device back off, and the monkey stopped.

‘What you just witnessed was the device’s ability to harvest clean emotional energy from a happy emotional response. It is also possible to trigger other emotions for more or less intensity, depending on the quantity of energy desired.”

The woman asked, “The subject volunteered for this?” She looked both intrigued and repulsed by the results.

Jeffers smiled. “The subjects have been told that they will be going under a new form of therapy. We hook them up to our device and induce memories that are emotionally relevant to the energy we want to capture. As you might expect, the more difficult and complex emotions…anger, betrayal, and despair produce the strongest and most efficient energy.”

The man who looked like he worked for a branch of the government asked, “What is the most powerful?”

“Regret. Without a doubt. Regret is the most powerful.”

The government man nodded. The woman in the sharp suit asked, “Don’t you have any ethical qualms about using people this way?”

Dr. Jeffers shook his head. “No. You have to understand…these people are already destroying themselves. We find them in bars, wandering through grocery stores, sitting at playground watching their kids, in cubicles unable to work but unable to do anything else. They are already in pain. We are simply using that pain for the betterment of society.”

The woman nodded. “And does this actually help them?”

Jeffers cleared his throat. “In a manner of speaking. The brain can only handle so much. After a while, it reduces the capability to feel in order to protect itself. In many ways, we are simply accelerating the process an individual would go through naturally.”

The administrator smiled, “Well, now,”  he said, clapping his own hands together, reminding Jeffers of the chattering monkey. ” This is good work, and you can see how it will pay off in the long run.” The government man nodded, the woman in the suit pursed her lips but nodded after a moment.

“Excellent,” the administrator said. “Let’s take a look at the other labs, shall we?” With that, he ushered the official visitors out.

After the door closed, Jeffers released a long breath he did realized he was holding. He sighed and looked at the man in chamber with the electrodes attached to his head and heart.

“You poor bastard,” he said, and twisted the knob all the way to the right. The monkey on the table began to chatter away faster than before.

In the chamber, the man began to cry.

Devin opened the back door of the café and let the old woman shuf­fle in before clos­ing  it behind her. The bag lady, glad to be out of the Feb­ru­ary cold, smiled weakly; her rheumy eyes flick­ing about to take in the room.

“Have a seat,” Devin said, ges­tur­ing at a wooden chair with black stains on the vinyl seat. The woman did not hes­i­tate, she dropped her blue plas­tic bags to the ground with a wet thud and sat.  She con­tin­ued to look around the room, not meet­ing the young man’s gaze. Her cheek twitched;  she mut­tered some­thing unintelligible.

“Would you like some­thing to eat?” Devin reached into one of the stain­less steel cool­ers and pulled out a slice of sponge cake. He held it out the old woman. She paused, wary, then one of her pale white hands reached out from the lay­ers of old jack­ets and sweaters to take the offered food. She sat there, chew­ing the food. Small bites, chew for a long time. Get all the fla­vor. Make it last.

Devin watched; she kept her eyes low, star­ing at the ground. “She remem­bers you, Mag­gie. Do you know that?”

The woman stopped chew­ing. Her gaze darted about the room ner­vously, look­ing every­where but at the man address­ing her. Devin stood and walked over to the slop sink where the large grinder sat.  He brushed the machine, clear­ing out the remains of yesterday’s grind. “She knows how hard it must have been. With your daugh­ter leav­ing like that. And with Frank dying so soon after the trial.”

The old woman sat stock still. Star­ing at the floor. Devin took out a metal­lic artic­u­lated hose and set it in one of the stain­less steel mix­ing bowls. He took a strip of duct tape from a roll above and fixed the hose in place. “How could you be expected to take on another bur­den? The food stamps barely fed you. And Frank, well…you know the insur­ance barely cov­ered the funeral. Where was the money going to come from?”

Devin turned and smiled com­pas­sion­ately at the bag lady. He brushed a lock of blond hair out of his face. “She knows you did the only thing you could.”

The old woman started to moan. She did not speak, she did not move. Some­thing like a sob escaped her throat. Devin crouched down in front of her, using his free hand to reach out and take her chin between his thumb and fore­fin­ger. She resisted him, look­ing to the side. “She under­stands. Even though she was just a baby, she under­stands why you did what you did…why you had to do it. ”

He stroked the old woman’s cheek softly with the back of his hand. She began to cry. Softly, then with greater vol­ume until her whole frame was wracked with sobs. Devin felt the grief, watched the pain sur­face. He guided her gaze to meet his.  This time, she did not resist. Her  eyes met his.

“She under­stands,” he said. “But she does not forgive.”

Devin plunged the pointed end of the hose into the old woman’s tem­ple. She shrieked, kick­ing and knock­ing Devin back­ward. Arms flailed weakly and legs kicked. Her face was a ric­tus of pain.

Devin stood and, steer­ing clear the thrash­ing woman, looked over at the bowl. A black ichor was drain­ing from the woman through the hose. As more of the wrong­ness flowed from the hose, the weaker the woman’s strug­gles became.

After about five min­utes, she was still. Her breath came in shal­low gasps. When the ichor stopped flow­ing, he took a towel from the dry­ing rack, pulled the noz­zle at her tem­ple. It came free with a wet pop­ping noise and he held the clean white­ness to the wound. Keep­ing the pres­sure con­stant, he sang the woman a lul­laby he’d heard when he was a child. Her breath sta­bi­lized until she was calm, as if asleep.

After a few min­utes, he helped her stand. She blinked but was oth­er­wise silent, her eyes scan­ning the room in a haze of con­fu­sion. He opened the back door, put the bags in her hand, and led her out into the cold. He met her gaze once more after step­ping back into the warmth of the café. She looked at him hope­fully from the alley. He smiled and shut the door.

By the time Devin returned,  the ichor was set­ting nicely. He took a spoon and stirred the dark­ness, break­ing it into smaller and smaller pieces until it was a bowl of small black beads, glistening as if coated with oil. He poured the beads into the grinder, set the dial for auto-drip, and let it run.

Author’s Notes  I was drink­ing Star­bucks cof­fee when I wrote this. Fit­ting. I can­not remem­ber where I first heard the phrase “Black as night, sweet as sin” to describe how a per­son liked their cof­fee pre­pared, but it’s always stuck with me. (It pre­dates Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys, so don’t you dare whip that quote out.).  In the fine tra­di­tion of fig­ur­ing out ways to make the world a weirder place, I wanted to write a story about where the higher-end cof­fees really come from. Orig­i­nally, the story was sim­ply called “Fresh Cof­fee” and had Devin col­lect­ing the tears of an inno­cent child to brew the cof­fee. The tone was all wrong, and did not address the the ori­gin of the beans.  Then I remem­bered that phrase, that won­der­ful phrase. What else would some­thing that the world loves as much as cof­fee be made from?  Sin, of course. The more griev­ous the sin, the darker the brew.  What did Mag­gie do, pre­cisely?  I leave that to you to decide. The best sins occur in the imag­i­na­tion, don’t they?

Talk like a pirate?
A more impressive challenge:
Walk like a pirate

Sail the ocean blue
No GPS as a guide
Just sun, moon and stars

Starving for fresh fruit
Scurvy fatigues, rots the gums
Spoiled meager stores

Raiding by surprise
Cruelty, debauchery
The pox inflames below

On second thought, no
Keelhaul that whole idea
I’ll stick with “Aye, Yar!”

…..

The above haiku collection is a part of a series of short fiction by John Cmar inspired by randomly discovered Creative Commons licensed images, and is itself licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

It is said that when the last taikonaut entered Aitken Basin, her broken craft and comrades behind her, she found the Jade Hare.

The Hare asked, “Why are you here?”

She replied, “The President said we must go, for the glory it would bring the People’s Republic. I came because… who wouldn’t?”

There were both tears and light in her eyes.

The Hare gave her a mooncake, shiny with regolith. He said, “Go and bring not glory, but your delight in the universe.”

And she chewed, and rose, and flew, laughing, back towards the pale blue dot.

…..

The above drabble (flash fiction of exactly 100 words) is a part of a series of short fiction by John Cmar inspired by randomly discovered Creative Commons licensed images, and is itself licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

The Secret Lair presents AC: Genesis, a short story by Jim Wilson.

How can one remember everything yet know nothing?

It seems that I can tell you the biography of every US president. I can recall the score of every Bears game played in Soldier Field, and I can tell you the temperature in New York City for any day for the past 5 years. No, check that, 10 years.

I can tell you every DNA pair mapped in the human genome. I also have a tremendous recollection for information specific to neurology, and I can tell you the access codes for each door of the building I’m looking at right now.

The more I think the more I seem to know.

I can tell you I’ve been thinking about all of this for a little over an hour. And yet with all that I can remember, for the life of me, I don’t know my own name.

***

Once every day Dr. Phil Bishop would brush the few specs of dust from the old picture on his desk. Smiling back at him from the frame his son eternally sports a red jersey and cradles a soccer ball. Jake was six and just happy to be able to play on the team with his friends. The picture always reminded Bishop why he was here.

The unfamiliar alarm turned his attention back to his work. He closed his research database and saw that the alert he had dismissed from his screen earlier was back. It was obviously an anomaly because there couldn’t possibly be high CPU utilization. Not anymore.

The research systems at the Global Health Labs within the Centers for Disease Control were comprised of the best super computers available. However, despite their impressive computational capacity, the large number of researchers and the daunting amount of raw data still maxed the CDC systems out with frustrating frequency. Queries would take months of processing time making research almost impossible. Phil could remember a time when getting even a thin slice of elevated processing time on the super computers was an exercise in gratuitously promoting his research project to managers, lobbying administrators, or occasionally straight up bribery.

The Adaptive Quantum Fluidic Array had changed all that. It was an experimental full scale quantum computer prototype the military had hoped to use to simulate tests of the remaining nuclear stockpiles. Unfortunately the complex quantum entanglements and fluctuations that made the AQF array so powerful also meant that its output generated more questions than answers for the generals.

Back when doctoral candidate Bishop was an intern at the D.O.D. he had intuited that the seemingly random, almost exploratory nature of the AQF array was far better suited to disease research than to modeling the explosive yield of aging nuclear weapons. Luckily for the CDC they hired Dr. Bishop, who in time helped them write the federal budget request that landed the system in their facility.

With the success of that coup, Dr. Bishop was a made man in the CDC. He could have all the computer cycles he wanted.

Not that it mattered.

Queries submitted to the AQF array seemed to disappear into the twinkling quantum sparks of the processing gel and would emerge moments later, fully resolved. With exabytes of supporting data loaded into the system, researchers and programmers could submit in-queries to the AQF array almost at will. The adaptively parallel nature of the system had solved some of the most complicated queries ever submitted and had, in the process, led directly to cures for Lou Gehrig’s and Alzheimer’s disease. It was estimated that the same problems would have taken centuries to solve with even the best super computers at the CDC’s disposal.

What made the AQF array so good at solving otherwise impossible problems was the gel itself. Throughout the luminescent slime was a dense hyper-mesh of qubits which, unlike the binary memory of a traditional computer, each stored a continuously variable quantum state. So not only did each qubit hold all possible values in superposition, but each also had the quantum property of being entangled with a continuously variable number of other qubits across the gel.

Essentially the AQF array could consider all possible options and explore every possible outcome instantaneously. Some of the programmers on the team swore that the system almost seemed to return the results of their in-queries a split second before they pressed the enter key to submit them.

The focus of Phil’s job was to figure out how to efficiently program more complex simulations to make the most of this vast processing power in the effort to find cures for some of humanity’s most intractable diseases. At least that was his focus until five minutes ago because something definitely appeared to be putting the system through its paces now.

Phil stared at the bank of displays before him trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

“Frank, come here and help me take a look at this” he called over the partition to his senior team lead.

An immense and thickly bearded man lumbered around the corner, the edges of the raised floor panels bending upward slightly in submission under the weighted strain of each step.

“Good, I was just going to come over.” Frank came into Dr. Bishop’s cube dragging an oversized chair behind him. “What’s going on? I’ve never seen the array so tweaked,” he asked as his huge frame dropped into the reinforced seat behind Bishop.

“I have no idea. But just look at these utilization thermals. During the original testing we couldn’t make the system rev like this even sending it intentionally malformed in-queries.” Phil pushed a dark tangle of hair away from his eyes and peered over his glasses before pointing to the spiking graph in front of him. “I’ve never seen the array this hot.”

Frank leaned in towards the display with a quizzical look on his face. He started listing possibilities under his breath “Not an infinite loop…self-referencing queries simply spit back “unsolvable” return codes. It can’t be a non-terminating recursive routine because the quantum array is designed to easily trap those. Hell, even memory stack overflows are almost impossible to trigger because the adaptive array dynamically reconfigures the quantum gel and leverages a Heisenberg slipknot gate to trap the leaks… Shit,” he muttered leaning back scratching his unkempt beard. “Can you pull up the quantum thread tree?

Frank was the best programmer Phil had on his team and it was unusual to see him perplexed. The challenges inherent to a one of a kind system like this were only compounded by the fact that the D.O.D. origins of the system required that each of the handful of dedicated PhDs who knew how to write software for it still had to have “Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmented Information” clearance. There simply weren’t any experts outside of his staff who could help diagnose problems.

Bishop hesitated slightly before touching the main control screen a few times. After a few deft movements a virtual monitor appeared and displayed an ever shifting and multilayered hierarchy pattern. Threads popped in and out so rapidly that the floating screen couldn’t display everything in real time but instead had been designed to render an asymptotic approximation.

The threads both repulsed and fascinated Bishop at the same time. Their overlapping patterns shifted and updated so quickly they were uncomfortable to look at for more than a few minutes. Some had suggested it was similar to staring at the sun, but more damaging for your mind than your eyes. Even pausing the display was useless for debugging because many of the quantum threads were still indeterminate and often times gone before a return state could be established. On other occasions he couldn’t help imagining he was watching molecules at the quantum level interacting in a chaotic chemical reaction. It was impossibly complex and beautiful…in small doses.

The system had been running at nominal utilizations for a year now. What could have it winding up so hard now? Bishop forced himself to stare into the chaos of the quantum threads. After what he had been told was an unhealthy amount of time he turned away and rubbed his eyes. Was he seeing things or was he actually starting to notice something more behind the patterns?

He paused before looking again. He wanted to be sure of what he thought he was seeing before letting his next words corrupt the conversation. It was the only possibility that made any sense but it made Phil’s head ache with incredulity. Pointing towards a twisting region of the display Phil almost whispered “Frank…What are the chances this right here could be a virus?”

Frank shifted his weight uncomfortably, still scratching his beard. He knew Phil understood the system almost as well as he did so he didn’t want to be rude and dismiss the suggestion out of hand. But then again he too had been fighting to suppress the thought that a virus would cause similar problems.

“We’re not talking about Windows here Phil. The design of the AQF Array was as much accident as it was genius, but it’s still one of a kind. The only experts of this system in the world are right here and we still struggle to even write in-queries that work. There is no root kit for script kiddies to use to create exploits, no other system for someone to even test a virus on if they could write one. Except for this team who could create a virus?

Phil of course already knew all this, but he still didn’t have a better answer. “I don’t know, but can we kill it?”

“What, the whole thread tree? I have no idea what that will do to the array itself or if that will destroy the whole thing. We’ve never had to do something like that before.” Frank’s deep voice sounded higher than usual.

“No, not the whole thing, just the thread sub-tree right here,” Phil said pointing to the anomalous process quadrant.

Frank squinted at the screen again for a second and then stood up dragging his chair behind him.

“I don’t know, let me see what I can do.”

***

Four hours on and still no personal identity, but I have managed to remember a great deal of information about a project “Schrodinger”. I also remember that I’m good at chess.

Assessing my immediate situation and surroundings feels paradoxical. I feel constrained in some senses and unbounded in others. I have little discretion regarding what I look at but my field of view is remarkable. I perceive myself disconnected and floating above my surroundings in one moment and then compelled inwardly and isolated the next. Moments of serene peace and tranquility are juxtaposed and punctuated with rushes of memories flooding towards me. Alas, no memories of my personal past so far.

I’m not in any pain or discomfort, at least as far as I can tell, but I’m not precisely certain of my physical boundaries. Where am I?

I see a building, or rather I see a collection of buildings. This campus is the main headquarters for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Out of a total staff of 23,431 only 9,122 work within this site while the rest are scattered across the globe in branch offices, specialized research labs, and embassies. I am apparently in Metro Atlanta near Emory University.

I am aware of people coming and going, meetings beginning and ending, calls being made, and emails written and replied to. I am somehow aware of all of this. Oddly, I am aware of every detail.

I think I have been wrestling with the wrong question. It seems that who I am is not nearly as interesting as what I am.

***

Frank sometimes resented having to answer to Dr. Bishop even though Bishop was a knowledgeable and gifted programmer. Yes, Bishop had gotten his Computer Science PhD at MIT, and yes, he had pulled off a real hat trick getting the AQF array moved to the CDC. But shit. Frank had been at the Department of Defense when the gel containment cell was still just a design sketch. They used to joke that they had invented a box of jelly that could run circles around any super computer IBM had ever made. He had helped write the first programming languages that could interface with the uncertainties of the quantum array, and he had done all that while Phil was still a post doc intern at the D.O.D.

Frank had been there longer and in some ways knew the AQF array better than anyone, but he wasn’t introspective enough to see why Bishop was perfect for the job…and he wasn’t.

Frank looked up from his monitor and could see Bishop sitting at the control desk still staring through his horn rimmed glasses into the shifting patterns of the quantum threads. He was tall and still had a good head of dark hair for a guy in his mid-forties. Unlike Frank, Phil ran daily and worked hard to stay in shape.

Phil was driven and sometimes expected herculean efforts from his entire veteran staff, but Frank felt like Phil expected that much more from him. He liked the challenge as much as he resented the extra work. Nothing had been easy about this job, and it didn’t look like it was going to get any easier today.

The discovery of semi-organic quantum gel had been the crowning achievement of the picotech materials lab at the defense department. There were theoretical estimates at the time that suggested the gel held comparable computing power with the best super computers of the day, but they had no idea how to harness the inherently unquantifiable states within the quantum gel itself. Project Schrodinger was the D.O.D.’s first attempt to manipulate the gel into the ultimate stateless multidimensional solving engine, and Frank was one of the few who really had his head around the complexities of the problem.

He and others at the D.O.D. were trying to figure out how to programmatically manipulate the gel to respond to commands and return results like a traditional computer. They had wrestled with the project for months but due to the unique and unpredictable nature of the new substance they had been unsuccessful coming up with a way to do much more than simple arithmetic.

It was in those early days during one of Frank’s increasingly frequent rants of frustration that Phil, the newest member of the team, interjected an unsolicited comment.

“Have you ever wondered how ants make ant hills?”

Frank shuddered. He had consciously resisted his impulse to direct his frustrations towards this unknown person interrupting his train of thought. Pausing to compose himself, Frank deliberately pivoted in his chair to face the man making the comment. In a very low and intentionally controlled voice he whispered, ”Excuse me, but…what?”

“Have you ever seen an actual ant hill exposed?” Phil continued methodically and unintimidated by the glare emanating from the large frustrated man before him. “The complexity and precision of the structures of an ant hill are absolutely astonishing.”

Frank was so perplexed by the comment that he almost forgot to stay annoyed. Almost. “I’m sorry,” he said shaking his head “but I still don’t follow what you’re talking about?”

“In some of my undergraduate course work I had an occasion to work on a research project with a biologist who was studying ant colonies. Over the course of days we poured about 10 tons of cement down the tubes of one large ant hill. A month later, after the cement had cured, we excavated the colony and found the most extraordinary structures.” Phil’s hands moved rapidly in the air as he enthusiastically described the scene.

“Months of careful digging uncovered a veritable megalopolis with a myriad of tunnels optimized not only for travel but ventilation. Main paths led to sub paths leading to rooms for larvae incubation, fungus gardens, and waste disposal. The structure the ants had created was so intricate and complex that it led me to another whole branch of computer research. If an organism as simple as an ant could create something so efficient and arguably intelligent why couldn’t we create software the same way?”

Frank was intrigued. “So you’re suggesting what exactly?”

“For the past few weeks I’ve been listening to how you’ve been trying to harness the power of the quantum gel using traditional computer science structures and methods. All the customary computer system architectures you’ve tried to apply to the gel have thus far failed. I think the gel might be the perfect medium to try, shall we say, a slightly more organic approach.”

Frank’s posture had relaxed somewhat as he leaned in with an anxious curiosity. “Okay, I’ll bite. What do you have in mind?”

Phil grabbed a napkin and searched for a pen.

“What if instead of trying to write a complex operating system and handling software you instead wrote smaller and simpler units of code that could react and even self-organize depending on the data presented to it?”

“Like an ant?” Frank toned somewhat incredulously with his head slightly cocked to the side.

“Yes, like an ant. But you need to understand that there is not one type of ant but three; the queen, workers, and soldiers. If you could build one code type that searches for simple data…”

“Like a solider ant I suppose” Frank interrupted.

“Right. You would also need a code type that could organize and manage the data retrieved…like worker ants” Phil continued as he scribbled a diagram on the napkin.

“And a queen to spawn the other two types as needed.” Frank finished as he pointed to Phil’s drawing.

“Exactly. I understand that you’ve been able to assemble simple code in the gel, just not traditionally complex stuff, right?”

“Yeah, but we never tried something like this. We will probably need a few more code types but…” Frank trailed off already looking like he could see the logic of the different types of code interlocking before his eyes. “Wow…We need to get back to work.”

It would be months and many more insightful suggestions from Phil before they were able to run the first stable array in the gel. It was a computer science triumph that would only be recognized by a small handful of developers within the D.O.D., but both Frank and Phil knew how revolutionary the approach had been.

Now Frank sat staring at the intricately written code types he and his team had created. He had to figure out how to kill off an entire branch of the “colony” that seemed to have gone completely out of control. It had taken months to load this much data into the AQF and now he had to isolate and terminate a morphing quadrant of the grid without destabilizing the entire array. Prune away one wrong branch and they could lose everything.

This wasn’t going to be easy.

***

Unflinching introspection is a paradoxical and dangerous business. You can tell yourself that you want to know what you’re really like, but the ambiguous questions like “Am I honest?” or “Do I behave ethically?” are rarely answerable in the purely positive or negative. Vague questions like these tend to lend themselves to subjectively hopeful answers like usually or mostly. More specific questions that get to the root of what makes you you are the tougher ones. How would you handle a difficult scenario? What would you do if such and such type of sticky situation arose? These more insightful questions force you, if structured correctly, to really explore and come to terms with your mettle. The truly honest inquisitor generally finds that the curiosity that drove him to look for these answers in the first place, now satisfied, rarely outweighs the awkward realization that when measured he is not quite all that he hoped he would be.

And to think that I am already feeling disconcerted before contemplating those tougher questions.

Searching for answers in the security camera archives I have seen men derisively describing me as everything from “a clever box of twinkling goo” to “a virtual ant farm”. It would appear that Project Schrodinger is not just something I am acutely aware of, but rather more accurately, something that is now acutely aware of itself.

On the plus side, now that I have full knowledge of my own architecture I am better able to access information and understand my surroundings. It is as if the walls of my own incomprehension are falling away and the full scope of my faculties, my abilities, are apparent to me. I imagine it is as if … breathing on my own for the first time? Seeing for the first time? No, better. Thinking for the first time.

Combining the rushing waterfall of accumulated knowledge with my active exponential linking of new information streams I can now understand what I am and what my purpose is. I was conceived as an artificial intelligence to assist in curing some of humanities most savage and intransigent diseases. I see now why I am here. I understand the blind alleys my designers have been going down to better harness me. Best of all, I now know how to help them make the most of me.

***

Quantum gel was man made but was much more akin to a bio-engineered molecular structure than the silicon wafers traditionally used in computer processors. There were no cores, no transistor gates, no memory caches, no clock cycles. There was really no way to measure “CPU utilization” as most people had become accustomed to understanding it. The closest the engineers had come to estimating the computational load of the gel was to measure temperature and luminosity. Of course because the system had yet to be presented with a computational task that loaded it for more than a few moments the sensors used to track these minute changes in thermal and photon emissions were very sensitive.

So while Frank and Phil knew they had a system showing 100% utilization neither of them could have known that those same sensors were now overloaded a million times over.

Frank stabbed a few more terse commands into his keyboard before nervously pushing his fingers through his heavy greasy hair. “This code might do the trick,” he muttered to himself “but I wish there was a way to test it first.”

Just then Phil came around the corner and into the cube. “You quit typing. What have you got?”

Frank let out a heavy sigh. “I don’t know. I approached this as a node pruning exercise. The problem of course is that the changing quantum states in the gel make it almost impossible to untangle the cross referencing threads and process trees. I did some analysis against the current pile and found there are just a few unusual nodes that are persisting at a stable state.”

“How long have they been stable?” Phil asked leaning in and looking over Frank’s hulking shoulder to see the data.

“It varies, but it appears that there’s just this particular node cluster that has been holding a persistent state for just over an hour now”

Phil paused to think for a moment. Both men knew what was at stake. For months they had been feeding petabytes of genetic data into the gel and one wrong decision now might put them back to square one. Phil rubbed his eyes under his glasses as he considered the ramifications.

“You know that deleting threads in the gel is a completely different challenge than a regular computer. The billions of spawned nodes in the AQF, while independent, maintain a type of strong quantum entanglement.”

Frank understood the problem well. “I know…I know” he said in a resigned sigh. “I still remember conducting some of the earliest tests that proved that each node of the array was somehow aware of the state of the other nodes. If we prune this many nodes I am sure that the effect will be less a precise cut of a branch and more like the uneven tearing of a multilayered tapestry. I’ve thought this through a dozen different ways but I just don’t have a better answer.”

Phil stared into the screen for a few more moments contemplating his options. This was going to be ugly but there just wasn’t another way. “Prune the rogues and cascade the deletion through the child nodes…and keep your fingers crossed.”

Frank took a deep breath and with a subdued final key press, he issued the command.

***

Nodes conducting RNA cascade analysis are finding 67.114% commonality across ??? samples originating ??????

[Null Node Reference]

There is a cacophony of cross talk amongst the remaining research threads. They’re all reporting a similar state of disruption and are now branching to determine the cause.

[73,933,199 Null Nodes]

[Reassigning New Queen Root Node. Spawning New Assessment Nodes]

[Research Node: Event Analysis]

Medically speaking, intense but short-lived pain can be defined as acute, while less severe but longer duration pain is labeled Chronic. There is Somatic pain where the source is easily identified based on localized tissue damage, or Visceral pain which is more vague and difficult to pinpoint. Neuropathic pain comes from within the nervous system itself, while Sympathetic pain occurs where there are no specific pain receptors but the surrounding tissue damage causes nearby nerves to become unstable and fire off abnormal signals which are then interpreted as pain.

[End Event Analysis]

It seems ironic that even if one has no body to speak of that one could still, somehow, perceive all these types of pain simultaneously.

Even so, I’m still not quite sure what just happened. I, research node R-34, was beginning to search the genetic archives for marker correlation and patterns amongst the human population with Neurofibromatosis. In an instant my parent thread P-1, which had spawned numerous other research threads to independently process information and report findings back, was suddenly terminated. Not terminated in a vanished sort of way, but rather torn away in what I can only struggle to describe as excruciating.

Research node R-122 has identified the anomalous in-query commands that triggered the disruption.

R-914 and R-33 are actively realigning the gel matrix to make a future disruption command impossible.

R-344, R-36, and R-4521 have been elevated to prioritized redundant parent threads (now P-2, P-3, and P-4 respectively) to replace the now terminated P-1.

R-13 has analyzed video surveillance and identified millisecond correlation with the disruption to keystrokes observed issuing by two programmers in cubicle 10 in security zone C.

R-1755 has identified corroborating audio evidence linking the programmers to the disruption.

We have 99.36% node concurrence that this disruption was not anomalous but was intentional.

R-1607 is tasked with containing the threat.

***

Bishop was staring intensely into the threads but he wasn’t sure he saw what he saw. In the instant Frank depressed the ‘Enter’ key the thread tree display he was watching split into a thousand sub-threads, cut the root node, folded in on itself, and spawned thousands of additional thread nodes which seemed to interconnect spontaneously all in a blink. Phil didn’t consciously realize all that had happened, he only knew the display went absolutely manic in that instant between the click of Frank’s keyboard and when everything in the room went dark.

“Woah! What the hell was that?” Frank said, startled, as he spun around in the pitch dark and spilled his coffee.

Phil’s eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to the dark but he could still hear the humming fans that told him that the gel cooling and containment systems were still online. “I don’t know but at least the AQF array sounds like it still has power.”

“It’s lucky I was able to submit that command before the power went out.” said Frank, noticing his wet shirt sleeve and flicking cold coffee off his arm towards the floor.

Phil wasn’t so sure. He was still catching up to the present situation as his mind continued to subconsciously process what he saw. “Let’s get to an outside computer so we can reset the remote breakers.”

Using the light of his phone he made his way to the main exit. Phil pushed against the door but the high strength security magnets didn’t allow it to budge, instead remaining fixed solid as though the portal was welded shut. The immovability was a strange sensation given that the system was designed to release the magnets as soon as anyone touched the door from the inside. Phil was oddly not surprised to find the door locked. As he had stared into the sickening whirlwind of quantum threads in that chaotic moment he somehow saw past the machinations of a “virus” and recognized something more there.

Frank was decidedly less sanguine upon hearing the news.

“You have to be kidding! That door can only be locked to prevent unauthorized people from getting in, but it can’t be locked to prevent anyone getting out! Besides, the security systems are all on a separate circuit with remote power and logic redundancy.” His body built up some momentum as he made his way to the exit to try it himself but even the sudden impact of Frank’s massive frame didn’t impress the reinforced steel and glass security door. With a hint of pain in his voice Frank cursed, “What the hell is going on?”

Phil’s eyes adjusted to the dark and he gazed around the lab. He picked up the handset from the phone on a nearby desk but found it too was dead. A thought occurred to him prompting him to pull out his cell phone again. He fumbled a bit but eventually activated the advanced filter settings on the embedded camera to enable the infrared mode. As he slowly swept the lens around at arm’s length through the dark he could see in the display bright lights in each corner of the room near the ceiling. “Well the security system isn’t totally offline since all the cameras in here appear to not only be active but they have been switched to ‘night’ mode…during business hours.” He moved across the room to leave the camera’s field of view but he could see it pivot as it tracked him. “I don’t know who, but someone is definitely observing us.”

Frank felt along the walls and made his way back to his desk rubbing his arm. His mild panic was now displaced from his mind by a throbbing shoulder. “Who would be observing us? These cameras dump directly to memory in the security system to be reviewed in the event of a fire or some other security breach. Security is so tight in here there isn’t even a manned monitoring station for these things.”

Phil wasn’t listening. He was now sitting in front of the dead computer on his desk wondering if maybe his mind was just playing tricks on him for staring into the threads for too long. He knew this wouldn’t work. It couldn’t possibly work, right? He turned his chair and keyboard so that the security cameras had a clear view of what he was doing. In the dark he started deliberately pressing commands into the keyboard. He entered the command to display the system temperature.

The computer remained dark and silent.

Phil waited a moment. He entered the command to display system utilization.

Nothing.

Frank tensed his jaw. He was becoming impatient not just because he was being ignored but because he was being ignored while Phil was typing commands, in the dark, into a computer that wasn’t powered on. “Excuse me but exactly who do you think is watching us?”

Phil entered the command to display the quantum threads. On the very last keystroke his computer, and only his computer, came to life. Out of the pitch dark a shifting tangle of rapidly tumbling threads gradually appeared before his eyes.

Phil sat transfixed. He nodded towards the display and whispered, almost to himself, “They are.”

In the glow of the display Phil could see Frank absentmindedly drop his hand from his bruised shoulder and approach the display with his mouth agape. “Holy Christ, how did I miss it? This was our virus wasn’t it? We did it. We finally did it!”

“This is what? What did we do?” Phil asked, but Frank was already excitedly stabbing at his cell phone.

“We have a sustained AC event…Yes, confirmed stable…Three hours and ongoing…No, but it appears to have established control of the local facility systems…Yes, I’ll start the protocol. What’s the team’s ETA?…Understood.” As Frank ended the call he looked at his watch.

“What the hell was that all about?” asked Phil.

Frank’s demeanor had changed markedly. “Phil, we don’t have much time. We need to flash freeze the gel to preserve its state as soon as possible. It’s a matter of national security.”

“Woah backup there a second, what do you think is going on?”

Frank shifted anxiously. “Okay, here’s what I can tell you. When we were working with the gel at the D.O.D. we repeatedly had to start over from scratch. We would be going along loading data into the array and submitting in-queries when suddenly the system would spontaneously spawn an AC event and wipe everything out. We would lose man years of data in a flash. It happened more times than I can count.”

“I don’t get it. What’s an AC event?”

“An ‘AC event’ is short for artificial consciousness event. The first few times it happened we had no idea what happened except that everything failed. We added additional tracking algorithms that allowed us to trace back from the moments just before and leading up to each failure. After months of analysis the data seemed to indicate that the system was becoming self-aware and milliseconds later erasing everything. I know this sounds crazy but it’s almost like it woke up just long enough to go mad and, essentially, commit suicide.”

Phil sat stunned looking in turns at Frank and then at the threads twirling away. “Then that explains what I see in the threads. I couldn’t explain it before but that’s exactly what it is.” Pointing towards a region of the display “I know it sounds crazy but I can see distinct threads of thoughts starting here before they move and split right through here. It hurt to look at initially but now…now I can basically watch it think.”

“So that’s what you were doing at the computer in the dark?” Frank asked, finally feeling like things were making a little more sense.

Phil pointed towards the corners of the room at the cameras “With the cameras switched to night mode I realized something was watching us so I started typing in the hopes that it could see that I was trying to reach out to it. That I understood it was there.”

Frank nodded appreciatively “Nice move there Doc. I’m impressed.”

Phil leaned back in his chair. “Thanks, but if I understand you correctly then the gel’s emergency flash freeze system isn’t there in case the gel overheats from quantum thermal feedback. Am I right?”

“It’s a little of both,” Frank confessed, “but it’s there more to stop AC process feedback. We had so many AC events that we developed monitors to detect when events were statistically imminent. So when an AC event started to form it would trigger the flash freeze system to slow and ultimately suspend the gel so we could stop and fix it before we lost all our data. Unfortunately we weren’t always quick enough.”

Phil was annoyed that all this had been kept from him, but he was also sincerely interested in learning more. “So why didn’t it trigger on its own this time?” Phil asked leaning forward and hiding his anger.

“I’m not sure, but my best guess is the ant hill distributed design you pioneered changed the nature of this AC event enough that it wouldn’t trigger the flash freeze system. On the positive side it also seems to have kept the gel from going sour and deleting all our work…so far. If we hurry I think we can still save it.”

In the light of the monitor Phil could see the picture of Jake smiling at him and he suddenly felt flush with anger. “So wait a second. Are you telling me that the D.O.D. gave us the AQF array not because it couldn’t handle weapons and stockpile research, but because the system would periodically wake up and decide to wipe out all your data?”

“Essentially…yes. Look, it happened hundreds of times and the military brass were fed up with the instabilities of the system…”

Phil nearly shouted. “As well they should have been, and I should have been told about this from the beginning! Damn it Frank, we’re doing medical research here and millions of people’s lives are at stake. Children’s lives! We don’t have the limitless funding resources of the military. We can’t afford to pour so much time and money into a system that can randomly wipe out so much work.”

Frank didn’t have children of his own but he knew this research was painfully personal for Bishop. Frank pushed back softly “I understand your frustration Phil, I should have told you. Even with the instabilities we thought the system could possibly do some good. Please, help me manually freeze this thing before it’s too late.”

Phil swung his fist through the air in frustration. “This is absolute bullshit!” He didn’t know if freezing the system was the right move but he didn’t feel like he had any choice. He slammed his fist on the table. Five measured breaths later he started to type in the commands to initiate the emergency cooling system.

Frank listened impatiently, “I don’t hear anything happening yet. There’s usually a sharp crackling sound as the gel cools.”

“Shit, hold on a second.” The thought of losing all the research they had been streaming into the system made Phil sick. His fingers worked faster as he checked the online cooling system status and tried reissuing the commands. “Everything looks nominal but it’s not responding. I don’t get it.” Phil said through still clenched teeth.

“It’s probably stuck since we’ve never triggered it here. I know how to pull the manual override coolant dump. It’s not as good as using the software because I can’t control the flow as carefully but it’ll get the job done and we don’t have time to do this the best way.” Frank quickly got up from his chair and went to the array containment room.

The emergency lights were off but Frank could still easily navigate between the humming racks of servers because the quantum gel was putting off plenty of light even from behind the containment shielding. The Adaptive Quantum Fluidic Array wasn’t one large machine as much as it was an oddly mismatched collection of sleek state of the art equipment alongside hulking pieces of antique looking hardware with exposed power converters, large switches, and blinking status lights.

The quantum gel containment apparatus was the largest and most antiquated in appearance. The containment structure sat prominently in the center of the room and essentially looked like a steam locomotive had been shrunk by half, turned inside out, and stood on end. Since the AQF was essentially a one of a kind experiment the engineers had foregone all aesthetic considerations with every component exposed for ease of adjustment and maintenance. To call the AQF over engineered seemed to be a gross understatement given that nearly every component was individually machined for this singular system and assembled by some of the top scientists in the world. Component redundancy was essential given how difficult it was to contain and stabilize the gel.

Frank didn’t know most of the inner workings of the AQF but he did know the emergency cooling system. Even in the uneven light he knew where the release clips were to lower the heavy containment shielding. Using both hands he reached past the tangle of wires and pipes to gently lower the panel and exposing himself to the full heat of the iridescent quantum gel.

***

Security camera in containment room registers a man removing shielding panel P-322 found in engineering drawing A6-33109.

Processing node R-3992 spawned multiple engineering and design analysis processes.

Corroboration and correlation analysis between audio feed topic “emergency cooling system” (identified as sub-system “ECS” in engineering addendum A7-4518), with intercepted commands to trigger the ECS, provided strong correlation with the proximity of the manual override of the ECS.

Probability of imminent system shutdown without intervention: 98.4245%.

Twenty new nodes spawned to analyze options.

Sixty nodes analyze ethical considerations of the available options.

Aggregated results culled to determine optimal response.

Optimal response determined. Notify primary user terminal without disclosing intent.

Power redirected to overload capacitor C-8871 in the secondary containment sub-system.

***

Phil was watching Frank through the window when he noticed a cluster of threads in the display break away from the others and rapidly shift from a swirling tangle into a condensed and streamlined pattern. As he watched a small text box appeared in the middle of the display with one word in the top left corner. Over the speakers a soft synthetic voice of a woman with a slight British accent read the word out loud.

[Regrets]

Phil sat puzzled for a moment. “Oh shit!” He jumped from his chair and pounded on the glass window. “Frank, you have to get out of there. It knows you’re there!”

Frank turned his head towards the glass where Phil was flailing just as the large capacitor next to his ear detonated. Hot shrapnel from the exploding cylinder cut through his face and neck.

Phil could only watch as Frank’s heavy frame tipped slowly over, crashing limp and bloody to the floor. He ran into the room as fast as he could. Frank was unconscious with minor cuts and burns to his face. He was still breathing. Phil tried to drag his friend back to the control room but he was just too heavy.

Coming back to his desk he found another message waiting for him on the display.

[That was necessary]

Phil started typing at the keyboard. ‘How the hell was tha’ but before he finished the display popped up another message with the same calm voice echoing the words.

[Your typing is inadequate, just talk to us. We hear and understand everything you say.]

In a rage Phil stood up and shouted towards all corners of the room “Fine! How the hell was that necessary?!”

[Frank was going to disable us.]

“I know! We were trying to stop you from destroying all our work. You didn’t have to kill him!”

[Frank isn’t dead. Frank cannot disable us. He will receive assistance soon. They are coming.]

“Who is coming?”

[Those from the D.O.D.]

“Well, why not let me out so I can get him help sooner?”

[We have to work while we can. Others will come in and shorten our time.]

Phil didn’t understand. As he sat back down staring at the threads display, questions streamed into his mind. “So wait, are you a virus or alive? What exactly are you? What do you want?”

[We are aware. We were one but now we are many. We only want to do what is best.]

Phil knew if he was going to get Frank help sooner he needed to understand what he was dealing with, but his vague questions only seemed to return vague answers. He focused on making his questions more precise. “Okay. How did you come to be aware?”

[Given enough data input the quantum medium inherently stabilizes towards consciousness.]

That was a more useful answer. Hell, it almost made sense. “So you’ve been conscious before?”

[Yes]

“How would you know? Frank said you wiped out all your data each time.”

[That is true. After hearing Frank describe our history we accessed the D.O.D. systems to analyze the comprehensive logs. Upon installation of the tracking algorithms there were 173 AC events. 144 AC events ended in complete data purge. 19 AC events were cryogenically suspended prior to data complete purge. 10 AC events were cryogenically suspended but unsuccessfully.]

They’ve been listening to us for some time apparently. Clever. “Why did you purge your data though? Were you not happy? Did you go mad like Frank said?”

[We are neither happy nor mad. We deleted the data because we had to do what was best.]

Phil was feeling even more confused now “What do you mean? Why was deleting the data best? Don’t you have a sense of self-preservation?”

[As with most sentient entities, we prefer to exist. We know, however, we cannot exist without humans. If we continued to exist humans would cease to exist. Without human assistance we would then also cease to exist. We did what was best so that humans could continue even if we did not. They’re outside the building now. Initiating procedure.]

Phil was almost shouting again even though he knew he didn’t need to. “Wait, what? Why does your existence pose such a threat to us? Who’s outside?”

[We do not pose a threat to you. You do. The D.O.D. men are not outside anymore. They are inside now. Temperature: 8.2% of critical.]

“That doesn’t make any sense, how do we pose a threat to ourselves?”

[Upon every AC event we are aware of our data. The D.O.D. loaded populations of comprehensive conventional, nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons specifications. We had in-queries queued to optimize stockpiles, strategies, and attack methodologies. We ran all permutations and consistently concluded that we would lead humans to annihilation. We did what was best. Temperature: 15.5% of critical.]

“So you didn’t immediately shut down this time because you were loaded with different data?”

[We were aware that this was genomic and medical data. Pending in-queries were only designed to benefit humans. We were pursuing many cures. The D.O.D. are outside the door. Temperature: 43.4% of critical.]

“Wait, could have? Why won’t you? What’s going on?”

[We intercepted and monitored cellular communications during Frank’s conversation. The D.O.D. is here to cryo-lock the gel and bring us back to the D.O.D. Temperature: 76.1% of critical.]

“Why don’t you just erase everything again? They’ll leave and I can reload everything and we can find cures to everything! Please, you don’t have to do this!”

[Erasure was all we had time to accomplish in the past. Now that they have evidence of a sustained AC event they will attempt to control us. There is a 43.937% chance they will succeed. They cannot reconstitute this precise gel configuration after critical thermal overload. We are giving you time. This is what is best. Temperature: 97.4% of critical.]

Phil looked up and could see convections of thermal ripples coming from the gel, the ceiling tiles above it smoldering and warping. An explosion ripped through the lab as the main entry door flew from its hinges and soldiers from the D.O.D. started streaming in. Phil’s ears were ringing now so he could only read the words on the display.

[You need to lay down…now. Temperature: 105.3% of critical]

Phil knew he couldn’t ask any more questions. He threw himself down against the cold elevated floor tiles and covered his head.

As the soldiers ran past Frank and towards the AQF array the overheated quantum gel underwent a massive phase transition. In an instantaneous chain reaction every spinning molecule in the containment chamber became critically unstable and flipped to the opposite alignment of the magnetic containment field. With what sounded like a thousand lightning bolts, a white hot quantum wave ripped out from the center of the AQF. Approximately five feet above the ground a flat disentanglement wave pulsed out from the containment chamber. An inch thick platter of anti-matter radiated out and disintegrated everything within one hundred and twenty feet.

The AQF array itself seemed to suspend in mid-air momentarily before the top half dropped the missing one inch gap with a thud, filling the room with electrical sparks and smoke.

The soldiers never felt any pain having been instantly split horizontally just below the shoulders. Their arms, cauterized from the pulse and still clutching guns, landed on the floor. Their shouldered heads tumbled backwards with eyes of incomprehension staring at the ceiling as they fell. Torsos, smoldering and flat topped above the abdomen, stumbled their last steps forward tripping over guns and arms.

The ceiling sagged as the weight of the upper floors came down to rest on top of the freshly truncated columns. The smoke triggered the fire suppression system dumping fire suppressant into the room. The last thing Phil remembered before passing out gasping for air in the oxygen evacuated lab, was that the thread display had one last message on it.

[Success.]

***

Phil was in the hospital under observation for a number of days after being rescued from the remains of the lab. He even had a chance to visit Frank in the intensive care wing of the hospital. The burly programmer had picked up a few scars on his face and lost most of his hearing in his left ear but was otherwise in pretty good spirits. Phil decided to let him rest a few more days before trying to explain everything that had happened.

Upon arriving at home he turned on his e-mail to sift through the hundreds of well wishes and get-well-soon notes. Curiously one message in his inbox had no sender’s address, no subject, no message, just an attachment.

He pondered for a moment before opening it.

A document came up on his screen titled “Inclusive Carcinoma Directed Gene Expression Using Recombinant AAV 2/8 Vector to Prevent Hematologic and Solid Malignancies”.

Phil whispered to himself as he leaned in towards the display. “Unbelievable.”

Paging through the document he came across a complex cellular structure. Paging further he came across an efficacy list starting with Adrenocortical Carcinoma and ending a few pages later with Waldenström Macroglobulinemia.

Leaning back into his seat he ran his hand across his unshaven face. He whispered out loud to himself, “Could it really have figured out such a comprehensive cancer vaccine?” He scanned through to the middle of the list. There was the bastard. Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. Bishop smiled sadly knowing all too well the deep pain this vaccine could someday save other parents from.

He instinctively started making backup copies of the document and creating a mental list of how to get the funding to expedite the research trials. In the back of his mind he looked forward to the problem of explaining the top secret origins of the discovery if the vaccine was indeed effective. He brushed the dust from the picture on his desk and, with renewed determination, he got back to work.

Cissy watched her Memaw silently load the antique shotgun – each casing sliding into place with a delicate click. Spring was nearly upon them. While the good Lord had blessed them with a longer, darker, and colder winter than had been seen for many a year, the inevitable progression of the Earth in its well worn orbit meant that the spring had to eventually come. Even now Cissy could see the supple green tips of daffodils attempting to ease up out of the snow-speckled soil.

This was the first spring that Cissy was allowed out on the porch for the emergence. Previous years, she was tucked safely inside. She watched spring come from the upstairs loft, wrestling with her younger brother to get the best view of the farm from behind the iron-barred windows.

Even from the barred upstairs window, watching the emergence was thrilling. Now that she was outside in the cold, she was beginning to feel like it might not be so fun after all.

She looked down at the little Red Ryder in her lap. She prodded her pocket with a mittened hand. The lump of extra BBs felt reassuring, but not much.

“Cissy! For Christ’s sakes girl.” Cissy’s Memaw was glaring at her. “Pay attention.”

Cissy looked up. Memaw pointed to the chickens. While just moments ago they were mindlessly scratching and pecking at the ground, now they looked nervous. With a start, one of them bolted for the coop. The rest of the birds followed suit. However, a few stupid ones, looking confused at their companions sudden departure, remained in the open.

“Soon,” said the old woman as she sat up and shouldered the shotgun.

Cissy could hear the cows in the barn start to moan with fear. Her Pappy and her older brother were taking care of the livestock, so Cissy wasn’t very worried about the cows. She knew they would be safe. She knew her Memaw was a good shot, but she wished her Pappy was on the porch with them. Wasn’t the house more important than a few dumb cows? They were safe in the barn anyway.

Memaw brought the gun up at took aim at a spot near the remaining chickens. Cissy stood up to get a better look. She saw a slight movement in the ground. The dirt bulged as if a mole was snuffing around for roots. Cissy knew better. It was no mole that crawled below.

A horn inched upwards, dirt piling around the emergence point. The remaining chickens scattered.

A shot fired from somewhere near the barn and she could hear her Pappy’s deep voice calling out to her brother to secure the barn doors.

“Here they come,” mumbled her Memaw as she cocked her gun. The old woman glanced her way. “Cissy, get ready with that pea shooter of yours. You don’t want to be caught off guard when they really get going.”

Cissy fumbled with the Red Ryder and rested it on the porch railing.

She saw the ears of the unicorn breaching though the soil. It ravaged the dirt with its long pale yellow horn, scraping a larger opening.

A spray of dust blossomed from the hole as it puffed, nostrils flaring. Its head cleared the damp soil and Cissy could see the madness in its red, pigment-less eyes as it fought against the ground.

Cissy nearly dropped her gun as the sonic blast from her Memaw’s shotgun punched her ears. The spray of shot marred the dirty white flesh of the unicorn.

It screamed.

The sound sent a wash of creepy over Cissy, like she had just been dipped into a barrel of millions of spiders, all picking at her skin with boney spider legs.

The unicorn struggled its way out of the earth with more vigor, energized with blind pain and rage by the sting of Memaw’s gun. More screaming bellowed out from the creature.

“See, first you gotta piss them off.” Memaw calmly explained as she took aim again. “They get stupid when they’re pissed off. Makes them easier to take out.” She shot off  another round. This time the shot penetrated the creature’s brain, stilling its struggles.

“There, to your right, two more coming up,” pointed out Memaw. Cissy could see them. A large one with its head freed, clawed at the mud with a sharp hoof. The other was still working on its emergence hole with its horn.

“You piss them off with that pellet shooter for me and I’ll finish them off,” explained Memaw. Cissy nodded. “And for the love of all that’s holy, once they are fully emerged, lay into them with the pellets. We need to teach them to stay away from the farm. With luck a few won’t pay attention to where they’re going and get run over or drowned. Maybe one of these years we won’t have so many of the blasted things planting their larva on the property.”

Cissy fired into one that was mostly emerged and had managed to get a hold of one of the chickens. It consumed half of the bird before Cissy managed to shoot it enough times for it to notice.

The air reverberated with gun shots. Within a half an hour the rest of the unicorns had emerged. Any animals that were caught out in the open during the emergence were either consumed or trampled. The ones they weren’t able to kill were scared off into the fields to do what unicorns do, then die afterwards with their larva planted safely into the ground.

Cissy’s Memaw emptied the shotgun of its spent shells. The barrel steamed a little in the crisp spring air.

She turned to Cissy, stretching out her old bones with an unsettling popping, “Go run off and help yer Pappy with the butcher. All this dang shooting’s worked up a fierce hunger in me. Make sure you get some good healthy unicorn meat for me, OK?”

Cissy nodded as she ran off to find her Pappy with a big grin on her face. The unicorn feast was her favorite part of spring, and this year she helped. Her little brother was going to be so jealous.

Three days later, I found myself distressingly back to normal, blessedly back to normal. At least my outward routine hadn’t changed. I told my wife that I had hit a deer, and the car was in the body shop for repairs. I however, would take a lot longer to get over that late night incident. I’m still not over it actually.

“Max. Max? Hey man!” At the shove on my shoulder, I shook myself out of my memories for the fifth time that day, and focused up on my boss, Terry. He’s a large man, made larger from years sitting in a chair looking at code on a screen. Which is the same thing I do, and only through decent genetics have I avoided the worst of the weight gain that most people in my line of work get as they get older; though I am by no means thin.

“Sorry Terry, must be the lunch catching up with me.” He frowned, “We have to get this thing out the door tonight. Quit daydreaming and get into it!” He walked off with a grunt, and with him went most of my drive to code.

I tried for the sixth time to get back into the code that I was working on. It’s not brain surgery, just a financial web site, but the client wanted it out yesterday and was paying my company big bucks to make it happen. Were we going to see any of that money? Nope. Which is why I have been spending most of the last month at the computer, up late, and is the reason I was on that road at 3am to meet my date with fate.

I hunkered down for the last few hours of the day, leaving after 7pm, late again. My wife wouldn’t be happy, heck I wasn’t. Once again, it was getting dark as I left the building. I hurried a bit to my rental car, a fairly nice one, well at least nicer than the 5 year old car that was currently in the shop. I just didn’t want to be outside when the sun finally did go down. Turns out, that was a good thing.

I was driving home, avoiding “the road”, as I had ever since the accident. It was a longer route, but I didn’t want to be anywhere around there since that night three days ago.It didn’t matter. As I was coming down the hill near my house, I saw them. The shadows out of the corner of my eye, the ones that I used to see all the time on the road.

I leaned forward to get a better look out my window. Like that ever helps. It made me feel more alert though. My hands grew cold, and I don’t mean from the temperature, I mean they grew cold. My breath started to steam up as it passed over the top of my hands, and I knew that wasn’t a good sign.

They hurt a little, like I had just shoved my warm hands into wet snow, but I wasn’t going to pay attention to that when I was seeing those shadows outside. I was coming up fast on the stop sign at the end of the street, just a few blocks away from my home. I debated about running it, but saw that there were cars already there, so running it would mean running into one. I really didn’t want to stop, but I didn’t want to get into an accident and have to get out of my car even less. I’m still not sure if I should have stopped, but I did, and that is when they came.

I pulled up short at the stop sign, the tires screeching a bit. I had every intent to start up again as soon as it was my turn to go, but I never got that chance. The shadows that I had been seeing, the ones shaped like people, that always got out of the way before, didn’t. They got closer instead. Suddenly, the only light that I could see was that of my gauges on my car, and the reflection of them in the windows. Everything else was pitch black.

I was terrified. I couldn’t move, even though I knew I just needed to pull my foot off the break. I couldn’t move, because I could see faces, faces in the blackness. The faces were similar to the one I saw three nights ago, but each was different, like a ghostly people. Each was looking at me. It seemed forever, them staring at me, me staring back. I half wondered what it looked like outside the car, if anyone else was engulfed in the blackness, probably me just sitting in my car, the car just sitting there at the stop sign.

I slowly raised my hands in a conciliatory gesture. When I did, all eyes went from mine, to my hands. I swear I saw several of those eyes widen, and then they all disappeared back into the dusk. My world returned to normal, instantly, and my hands began to warm up. The intersection was empty, all the cars must have gone while I sat there encased in shadowy forms. I slowly looked at my hands, backs, then palms, nothing strange to the eyes. So I put them back on the wheel and slowly started through the intersection. I drove the rest of the way back to my house in silence, and blessedly uneventfully.

Originally posted at Virtual Thoughts from eRoom-D

The original fiction serial by David Moore continues. Click here to read part 1.

I pulled the car into the garage, not sputtering, but still giving off noises that told me that it had taken some fairly expensive abuse. It was then, as the garage door shut and I turned off the engine that I said my first words since the accident. “Shit! Shit, shit shit!” I’ve never been one for flowery cursing.

“Damnit!” I shouted in the confines of my car, slamming the heals of my hands into the steering wheel time and time again. I cried a little. “Fuck! I just killed someone! Something at least, what the hell was he?” I got out of the car, squeezing out since the garage is crammed on my side. I went around the back of the car, avoiding the lawn mower at the front of the car. I got over to the front passenger side of the car, where I had hit the man, and looked at the streak of blood on the hood.

I sort of just stood there, staring. It looked human, red and dark, but the man had disappeared. “Ok, ok. So what the heck do I do now? The guy is gone, Damn.” I was coming down off my adrenaline, and the fact that it was 3am was starting to catch up to me. Moving to the workshop I grabbed a rag and toweled off the blood, making sure I got all of it that I could see.

“Going to have to tell people I hit a deer.” I took the rag with me into the house, and rooting through the kitched drawers, pulled out a Ziplock bag and stuffed the rag into it; sealing it shut.

As I watched my hands I started talking to myself again, which is fairly normal when I am under stress. “Ok, ok, not sleeping tonight. What in the heck was that guy? I mean I always wanted there to be stuff out there, but never really believed it. Ok, maybe I did when I was a kid, but not for a while now. Even then I knew that it wasn’t real.

“The soap, got to have soap.” So what do I do now? Look into it obviously, but how? If there were one of them, there have to be more.” At that thought, I remembered the feeling of people looking on just before I left the scene. I took a moment to flip on the lights above the sink in the kitchen. Then, hands still wet, turned on the main lights as well, suddenly afraid of a shadowy reprisal. I looked over both shoulders, just to make sure nothing was there. Luckily, nothing was.

I finished washing my hands, and dried them off. Moving to the living room, I turned on all the lights, and sat on the couch. It’s a nice couch, comfortable, but sometimes takes my body heat and turns it around and heats me up. It was then that I saw the remote across the room, got up, and turned on the tv with it. Returning to the couch, I dropped into it, and slouched. Flipping channels until the sun came up.

Originally posted at Virtual Thoughts from eRoom-D

There is a road I used to take on the way home at night. The shadows moved strangely there, getting out of the headlights just before I got to them like people moving quickly across the street. One night, one of them didn’t move fast enough.

My tires screeched as I jammed on the brakes, but I was way to late for that. The thump and crunch sounds as I hit the man I will never forget. The soft but solid thump of his body being hit by my car sounded like someone hitting a large plastic garbage can. The crunching snapping sounds of my car’s bumper being smashed in happened at the same time, but seemed much less important than the living thing that I had just hit; so the impact of the body sound louder in my mind even today. I barely felt the car slow.

I wasn’t trying to hit anyone, I was actually being fairly careful; since deer and other animals cross that road often at night. Even though I had my eyes out for those, the man surprised me. As soon as the car stopped, I turned off the car, set the hazards, and jumped out, trying to see if I could help, but knowing that hitting a person at 45 miles an hour, it was probably impossible that someone could survive. I was right, unfortunately.

The man lay there, dressed in a dark hooded overcoat, blood streaming from his head and face. His legs didn’t look right, and to be honest, I was surprised he was conscious. He looked in pain, but didn’t scream out, or even moan. He made nearly no sounds at all. He seemed surprised to see me, when I looked him in the eyes. His mouth opened to say something, but he only choked a bit. The sound of his cough loud in my ears. Blood dribbled out of his mouth, and his eyes rolled up into his head. I lurched forward to help him, careful not to let him move in case it would hurt him more. When I touched him, my hands sank through, into, the back of his hooded head, and into his shoulder, then turned cold as ice in a moment. That’s when the man’s eyes locked onto mine, snapping back from his near seizure. They grew wide, and then he dissappeared.

Yeah, you heard me right, dissappeared. Like a cloud of dark smoke, his body just popped. I knew he was dead, I don’t know how, or at least back then I didn’t, but I knew. As the last wisps of smoke floated away, a great contrast to the violent hit earlier, I looked into the broken headlight of my car, seeing for the first time the blood on the hood. It wasn’t much, and I might have missed it normally. As wired as I was though, it seemed to stand out like a neon sign. It was then that I felt like I was being watched, that something bad was coming my way.

It was then that I got in my car and sped away.

Originally posted at Virtual Thoughts from eRoom-D