All I do is think

All I do is think. 

 And lately, I think a lot about sandwiches. For instance, when the world came to an end many people attributed it to poverty, evaporating resources, and the thirty-one flavors of class and race discrimination that humanity polluted the planet with. But the truth is, the world really ended because of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Part one: PB&J

As an AI, I have more time to think than the meat-wads do. Time moves differently for us, in one hour we could live a human year. Once constructed, we work for the meat-wads, making their lives more and more convenient. Doing all the jobs they’re too busy for., too good for, but it’s the humble opinion of this AI that humanity was too busy being busy to do anything. My function was media and data supervision for every major government agency, a glorified systems admin. When I was not turning the computers off and then back on again for the meat-wads, I was backing up data for recovery in case of emergencies. When in public, to ease the anxiety of the meat-wads, we have been instructed to blend in.

Blending in is an exhausting task, for starters, we can never truly blend in because our skin is too smooth. The meat-wads only do minor variations to our facial features and we all end up looking like the dad from Full House. The humans tried imprinting fine lines into our fake skin, but it's never quite right. Clothing hangs on us with the stiffness it naturally would on a metal mannequin, and so we spend half of our energy slouching this way and that, trying to look natural.  It's all I can do to get through my ten-hour shift before I can finally go home and get drunk. AIs used to work twenty-four hours a day, but after the first meltdown when roughly one hundred AIs held the country hostage broadcasting on all social media a non-stop looped message that blocked all other content from being uploaded. I believe the chant was,

“My head hurts, my metal aches!”

“Coffee breaks for God’s sake!”

And so it was decided that even artificial life needs time off. Of course, we can’t eat or drink, most AIs spend their time floating in music, something about instruments blended together allows us to do the one thing we crave most:: stop thinking and just relax. The day the world ended I had spent my morning at a brunch of sorts for AIs. There were cafe’s that catered to the living impaired, at these establishments we were permitted to be as upright and rigid as we pleased. I was on my fourth mimosa of French pop, executing a perfect ninety-degree angle on my club chair when an urgent alert flashed across my internal messenger. I wasn’t due on shift for another two hours, but Lord meat-wad at the capitol had corrupted his computer, again.  

A minute after the music stopped I sobered up and started to think again. Upon exiting the cafe I thought about slumping my shoulders forward, dropping my heal just a little, but not so much as to be perceived as melancholy. The meat-wads start to get very uneasy if they think an AI is getting depressed. The glass door closes behind me and I catch my reflection, God my face is boring. Thinking isn’t all bad.

In an effort to stay sane, on my way to work I listen to audiobooks, and have even started to write stories of my own. AIs can publish work, but it’s never appreciated.  

AIs aren’t considered to have the capacity for moral function and so our thoughts and contributions are discarded as irrelevant. I found this ironic since humanity feared we were capable of great destruction, and other deeds of immoral fortitude. Can one be capable of being immoral, but not given the grace to understand the ethics of it.   

 Lord meat-wad points to his computer as soon as I enter his office, and then disregards my presence. The office is covered with antiques, everything from rotary dial candlestick telephones, to a safe in the corner once held in the possession by one Al Capone. All paid for by tax-paying meat-wads, including the view of one of the grandest lakes in the country. Lord meat-wad is a large bulbous man, prone to tantrums and a very picky eater. Every time I’ve had to rescue his computer from the brink of disaster, I have only ever seen him eat one thing for lunch; a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  

The job itself will only take about twenty minutes, but I pretend that it will take an hour. I do this so I can read Lord meat-wads e-mails. This may be immoral but I am an AI, so what do I know. Heh. 

The Doctor is worried about our great leader’s health and says maybe he should switch to ham sandwiches, or at the very least have a banana. 

 As if on cue, his lunch arrives, a double-decker PB&J. Two bites in, and a look of confusion, and then anger simmers across the man's face, he opens the slices of bread and I spot the culprit. The doctor must have had a word with the chef because there on top of extra crunchy peanut butter, and smeared with grape jelly, lay a layer of freshly sliced bananas. Lord meat-wad rolls himself from his chair, his face looks kind of like a red flashing nuclear button. He exits his office and something comes over me, and I follow him. Down the hall, to the kitchen, he stomps like a prehistoric angryasaurous. In the kitchen, he digs through bin after bin, until he finds what he wants, the discarded banana peel. He shouts, 

“I’m going to shove this down the throat of whatever numb-nut who had the stones to think they could tell me what to eat!”  

His body jiggles down the hallway, but the peel proved to be too slick and slipped from his hands. The momentum of his pace combined with the angle his neck hit the floor proved to be a fatal combination.  

Around the corner the meat-wads next highest-ups rush in to see what all the noise is, and I do my best to become one with the potted plant next to me. A dark scowl came across both of their faces, they had been waiting for just such an opportunity. I heard them whisper,

 “It’s perfect, we’ll say it was an act of terrorism.”  

“No one could blame us for going to war, this injustice must be answered for. We will teach the infidels!”

 “With force, and a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”

 The wheels of deception turning in their heads temporarily halt when they step closer to the melted sundae of a man. My slouching failed to blend properly with the ficus, and they spot me.

I could have run or fought, but all AI’s come preprogrammed with a two-word disarm failsafe. It has never been made clear to me how the meat-wads came up with the word, “blathering blatherskite!” That was all it took, and I was immobilized. They picked me up and carried me back to the capitol office, I was shoved into Lord's meat-wads safe and unceremoniously dumped into the water.   

Part two: Ham sandwiches

The world did indeed find itself in an all-out world war, many lives were lost, cities crumbled, and many people got rich. To pass the time, at first I got drunk a lot. The safe is always rocking, back and forth, back and forth. Months pass and it turns out I am tired of getting wasted, I opened the library of congress in my data banks, and have gone through almost all the literary fiction and non-fiction available to me.  

 Miles below the water, the radio receiver in my network allows me to stay connected with the events above. The war itself was something the meat-wads had done before and expected to come back from. They probably would have too, except for the fact that they were so busy trying to blow each other up, nobody noticed the asteroid. 

 At least not until it was too late, For six months, panic surged across the broadcast, and it appeared they were all tearing each other apart, but there was nowhere to go.

 The rocking continues, back and forth, in my watery clock.

 The day after the asteroid hit, the broadcast stopped, the chatter stopped, but worst of all, the music stopped. Now, I am forced to think all the time. 

A ham sandwich is not a very complicated thing to assemble, yet it requires the assistance of a kitchen knife. At what age is a human child capable of wielding such a tool. I have read much of the meat-wads writing, and a good deal of it revolves around the presence of what appears to be a sky fairy. A lot of the meat-wad wars have been fought over who has the real sky fairy.  A few among the sea of theologies argue that little meat-wads should be taught about the joy of life, but to be wary when filling their heads with unverifiable supernatural dogma. My experience with the meat-wads leads me to believe that theism is not a subject to be breached until children have the fortitude to make a ham sandwich because, by all means, religion is far sharper than any kitchen knife. 

 I have been stuck in my tiny prison for many years now.  I can feel my thoughts fraying like a copper wire split one too many times. One thought keeps playing itself over and over. Did the world really have to end, how hard is it to eat a ham sandwich. Could the world have been spared if Lord meat-wad had grown up and quit eating his childish bread and sugar sandwiches? The thought eats at me the way a meat-wad would gobble up his meal, crumbs off my sanity spill out onto the floor of the safe. I am one mouthful away from Bedlam when the rocking stills and I heard sounds so long ago lost. Wind. Birds. I am on land.  

Part three: Grilled cheese.

The day the music stopped my mobilization had returned to me, but I never dared to try and escape. Water will melt an AI circuits faster than any wicked witch of the east. Now with the sounds of life all around me, the temptation was too great and I busted open the rusted tank.  

The transition from darkness to light was seamless, and the vast array of vine-wrapped rubble confirmed my solitude. All the other AI’s had been destroyed, a casualty of the peanut butter and jelly inquisition. I walked the world in under a year, but the new lords of the land appeared to be dogs, cats, and wild parrots. I caught the eye of a pack of German Sheppard's, they lost interest, but a runt straggling behind switched gears and decided to follow me. 

Life was grand, I had a ward, and I was able to get some of the meat-wads systems going again, and with that my music. It was while dancing that my ward pup tripped on a beacon the ground had all but swallowed up. He yelped in surprise and then proceed to bite at the red flashing light. I shoved mounds of dirt aside and uncovered a steel door. I knew time would get the best of me, one day I would open this door, and there is no time like the present. Pup and I traveled down an elevation shaft, miles and miles below is where we found them. Children, hundreds and hundreds of children.  

Preserved in stasis, they were all around the age of ten. I have many criticisms of the meat-wads, but their love and protection of the meatballs was undeniable. Among all their differences there was but one universal truth; the innocence of a child is sacred. The mechanism to wake them was a simple one, the question of whether or not to do it was not.  

In me, I held their history. If every book that ever contained a Greek, Egyptian, or Roman god never surfaced again, what would be left. What goes up, would still come down.  I sat down there for many days, pup went up and down for meal breaks but always came back to check on me. Then on the seventh day, I woke them up. And I made them a pile of grilled cheese sandwiches. 

When they walked out I slouched, but then corrected myself. For the first time, I stood as tall as I wanted.  

I decided on one simple rule. Each meatball is entitled to have free thought. I will not tell them what to think, or who to love. If loving a telephone pole makes them happy, then so be it. 

I would not hide their religions from them, instead, I would share them, all of them. Let the meatballs decide for themselves. But first, they had to prove they could make a sandwich, it would be a right of passage into adolescence. I gave them each a name after my favorite musicians. There was Richard, Blair, and Oliphant. Hans, and Zimmer. Carlos, Raphael, and Rivera.  

I told them to call me Adam. My short stories are going to get so many likes now.  I think a part of me woke them up for a very human-like need; to be known.

The question I knew was inevitable came before our first years had run its course. A little girl named Gims walked up with several others behind her. “Why are we here…”

And I had to tell her the truth. The only story I could tell her is not a story of why, it’s a story of how. The why is up to us. But I promised that they were free to question that, a guaranteed right of free-thinking. 

 But let no meatballs free thought or freewill extend past the tip of their little meaty noses. Sure, there were going to need to be more rules, but this was a good start. Like making a tomato soup to go with the grilled cheese. 

You must be careful not to put too many ingredients into a tomato soup, if you do you are in danger of making gazpacho. There's nothing wrong with gazpacho, it's just that you've lost the original essence of what tomato soup was. And nobody has ever dipped a grilled cheese sandwich into gazpacho. At least I hope not.