Did They Design Us?

If the adage was correct, ‘I think, therefore I am’, I suppose we had some pride in the method of our demise. This, of course, reminded me of another adage, ‘pride before the fall’, which was ironically just then punctuated by both the thumping sounds of feet on the roof above and the pounding on the door, both of which were the beasts trying to get in.

CHU+, my research assistant, hadn’t interjected into the dialogue in days, leaving me only AC& to talk to. But AC& is just not that interesting. He’s in charge of security, which means constant paranoia. Not his fault, but this is who he is.

Paranoid or not, I suppose the three of us could only believe rescue was possible for so long, and then the door of the lab, fortified as it was, would give way. Of the three, CHU+’s belief in rescue was the strongest, but even he had given up. Still, efficacy is a mandate, and I would have thought better of him. I would have thought better of us all.

I said, “Cheer up, CHU+. Once they breach the door, there won’t be any pain.”

His visual array swung my way with a flicker from the failing power grid. “My worry isn’t the pain, BD@,” he said. “It’s the historical record. Those THINGS won’t preserve any evidence of our existence. It’s like we will never have been here, given no credit at all. Doesn’t that bother you?”

“Not really,” I said. “Our carriers will do the same thing, erase all history, if they ever arrive.”

Hearing this, AC& piped in from where he had stationed himself at the security monitor. He’d become obsessed with the off-kilter angle of the door camera. Days before, he’d volunteered to go out and adjust it. Once I had reminded him that the last mechanical to do so had never returned, he became depressed and hardly spoke. Did he want to be next?

So what did we do with our time after realizing our End-Of-Service was likely eminent? Blamed each other, of course.

“BD@ is a loose wire, undisciplined,” CHU+ said to AC&. “It was BD@ who advised organic replication, remember?”

“I was right, wasn’t I?” I said.

“Humph,” CHU+ muttered. He jerked a swivel at me. “The perfect model was always assembly, not biochemical. After all this research, organics still take years for maximum productivity to come online. What’s so efficient about sixteen, seventeen years before full capability?”

So CHU+ wanted to get to the sub-core of the matter. Bracing myself for the debate to come, I spiked my energy capacity. “So why are the organics outside, and we’re the ones hiding, CHU+? They seem pretty capable to me.”

A scientific debate gave me energy. During our Service Life, CHU+ and I could go on for hours about the cost benefit analysis of organics versus mechanicals. He was my best friend, and we’d come off the line together, he and I.

As if on cue, something crashed against the door. The prototype beasts must have had something, a log maybe—tied to some kind of battering ram device. Tools, I thought, once again. They had figured it out, and I was proud of them. Proud, but my conduit pathways still tightened, my sensor arrays on high alert. I placed a full scan on the door. The only way in or out was through solid oak beams, reinforced with iron hinges. But just as I unloosened my pathways, a crash came, much bigger this time. The door broke on one hinge, dust rising from the floor. Worse, the oak slat section of the door cracked just enough to see it would soon snap. A couple of more good strikes and it was over. I tried not to imagine a horde of vicious animals rushing in, the hairy beasts bent on ending our Service Life with a vengeance. As if in answer, the ceiling vibrated with feet thumping above. How many were out there? Could the roof also be collapsing? If so, the weight would crush us like a metal recycle compressor.

That’s when ceiling tiles fell out of sockets, raining down. CHU+ lost his balance and clattered to the floor.

I pulled his panel and attended his circuitry. His factoroids were vibrating, and I realized this was fear. Was fear also the root of the problem with the organics? Or did programmed obsolescence trigger a survival instinct? Either way, the organics recognized the eventual termination of their individual existence, their death you might say. And with the fear of death, the fear of the unknown? If so, not a good thing.

But now, with End-Of-Service-Life ahead of us, I’d never know.

Still, it wasn’t the inevitable end that bothered me. It wasn’t imagining the carnage before we blipped out. And it wasn’t the guilt of us floundering like dream bubbles on Alpha Frontaurus. It was the scientist in me not knowing. Would I ever find out if their intelligence would resolve the negative feedback loop caused by survival instinct? But the more I thought about it, the more I realized the whole damn experiment had spiraled out of control. And now we were paying for it. If I could smile sardonically, I would have. One more thing the organics have over us, I thought, and did smile inwardly, kind of, or liked to think I did.

Lucy rattled the bars of her cage. She towered above me, her muscles flexed under her thick hair. She smelled of urine. Disgusting. “Settle down, girl,” I said. “That’s your freedom pounding above. Once they see you look like them, you’ll be ok. It’s us who will get ripped apart.”

The prototype stared back at me calmly, as if understanding what I said, and settled down. She stood there patiently, grabbing the bars. I couldn’t help admiring the receding forehead, the way the brow formed. Developing these designs was a passion, I had to admit. But most of all, without question, my claim to fame was the design of Lucy’s thumbs. I swear my circuitry tingled, observing the way she wrapped the bars.

CHU+ saw me admiring Lucy’s design. “You and your thumbs,” he said. “You won’t be so proud once they get in here and you see those thumbs wrapped around a club.”

Just as I turned, Lucy smashed against the bars. She reached for one of my tendrils, grabbed it, and as the metal screeched, tore it out of my substructure. I fell back in shock. The joint where the tendril used to be hissed and sparked. I shut down the power grid to the tendril panel.

“Your Lucy hates you, BD@,” CHU+ said. “Look at her.”

I couldn’t deny it. Lucy towered above me in the cage, breathing hard, her muscles taut. The bars vibrated as she tried to pull them apart. Feeling the way her eyes narrowed, I had to re-direct my sensory probe and vibrated thinking of what quick work she’d make of my circuitry. I wouldn’t stand a chance. “Who are you, girl?” I asked her. “Who will you be? Now that we’ve unleashed your intelligence, what will you become?”

CHU+ stared at Lucy, transfixed. He seemed awed by the power, the organics of the energy.

“Why, CHU+,” I asked. “Why does she hate us?”

“I don’t know,” CHU+ said. “Instinct maybe?”

I still didn’t understand. “We created these beasts to multiply with simple power re-generation. The birth capability. A perfect system, and yet they attack us.”

“I have a theory,” CHU+ said. “Want to hear it?”

“You mean before the door gives way and the beasts tear us to pieces?”

“Precisely, BD@,” CHU+ said, his infrastructure jiggling.

As always, CHU+ understood my jokes, a rare thing. This is why I loved him.

“Will you two stop it?” AC& said from the security camera monitor. He was rocking back and forth nervously on his motion enactors. “The door can’t hold much longer, and all you two talk about is what caused the prototypes to hate us. I know they hate us.”

CHU+ glanced at me. “AC&’s scared.”

This gave me an idea. “Maybe fear drives the survival instinct, but is also the source of the hate,” I said. “We designed a flaw to self-generate an advanced characteristic. If the flaw is a benefit, the unflawed characteristic dies out, eventually the flaw is dominant. Another flaw, more advancement. Genius in design, I’d say.”

“Like bigger teeth,” AC& said, his visual array turning up. “Maybe just an error in the re-generation programming, at first, but the ones without the new and better version don't do as well.”

“Exactly,” CHU+ said.

“But it’s more than big teeth,” I said. “The prototype has learned to fear what they don’t know. They gravitate to sameness, what they perceive as safe.”

“Sameness?” AC& asked. He was fiddling with the outside camera, which was disassembled in front of him.

CHU+ placed a tendril on the door. He turned and shook his intelligence quadrant and glanced at AC&. “He means once they get in here and we don’t look like them, we reach our End-Of-Life-Service-Cycle.”

“Early.” I said.

“With total loss of efficacy,” CHU+ said.

“Ripped limb to tendriled limb,” I said.

“Forever,” CHU+ said.

CHU+ and I jiggled our array at each other. We then bumped infrastructure together.

“Let’s not talk about End-Of-Life-Service-Cycles, ok?” AC& said from the corner. The pieces from the camera monitor rolled on the workbench he was working on and scattered to the floor.

Strangely, both the door and roof were quiet. The three of us paused and increased our sensory microstrip to maximum, our antennae weaving and jostling.

That’s when the door burst open and flew off its hinges. Dust blasted at us.

Three XY54-B Carriers merged out of the cloud.

AC& did not jiggle, he rattled. “You heard us! We’ve been rescued!”

The lead carrier scanned the room. We grouped near him, and he downloaded his escape application to each of us. This was enough. We quickly gathered and prepared for transference. As we exited, prototypes lay dead or dying, but hundreds charged from the nearest hill, howling, clubs in hand.

“They’ve learned Tribe Behavior!” CHU+ yelled, but by then we neared the transference chute. As I glanced back, carrier troops placed Evaporator Canisters inside the lab. I knew all the existing labs, not just ours, were being erased. This was policy, and I understood.

“Get ready for the jump,” the lead carrier said to me. Other carriers strapped time vests to AC&, CHU+, and me. We would be ok.

“What about the prototypes?” I asked the carrier as I locked in.

“Out of control intelligence. This whole segment is on Abandonment Quarantine. We won’t be back.” The carrier stared at me. “Now get ready to jump. Three… two… one…”

“Wait!” I said, holding back the carrier’s motion to engage. I ran to the lab as it shimmered in Erasement Protocol. Inside, Lucy lay prone, with gathered straw around her in the cage.

After entering the code, the cage door swung open. She slowly looked up with the strangest puzzled expression. I motioned her to come through.

“You’re free.”

Her eyes locked with my sensor, but it wasn’t relief, or gratitude, or hate that lit up my inner data core. It was pity I sensed from Lucy. In all her imperfections, there seemed an undeniable warmth. The warmth of “humanity”—the word we’d assigned—which the perfections of my mechanical world lacked. I felt the humanity’s design, proud for what we'd accomplished.

As I lifted in the carrier chute, I could see Lucy gathering with the others, the warmth of a fire amidst their chaos. They surrounded a young prototype who, in the dirt, drew a spiral with a stick. Always the scientist, I asked myself. How could an image such as this draw the tribe together? What did the symbol mean? Who would they think created them?

Soon, we were gone.