How Everyone Lost The War

One

The grocery cart’s wheels wobble and squeak on the wet, badly lit floor. A floor which reflects back the scant silver of the flickering overhead lights, those intermittent oases in a desert of pitch blackness. They all threaten to fall from the weight of the winged creatures which have nowhere else to bask for many miles. Their continuous buzz has become a score of the thriller movie the world has become.

A pair of Nikes shuffle closely behind the cart. One of them kicks a dancing hind wheel as it comes to a stop. It is to the brim with all kinds of grocery articles, from snacks to toiletries, all mixed with the haphazardness of a slightly less than amateur shopper. The shopper himself is a tall affair, rather thick, blessed with hands longer than the law’s. A little disproportionate to the rest of the body. Which extensions reach out for more grocery items from the shelf with the quickness of the heart after a hard jog.

Oblivious this figure is to curious eyes. Inquisitive retinas of a man here and a woman there whose bodies parted the tangible darkness outside to grab a necessity or convenience. Oblivious also he is perhaps, to the shadows of the uniformed figure which has been following at a distance, from aisle to aisle. One hand pressing a talkie against his beard, when it's not swatting a wayward insect, ready to bark an order. The other hand on top of the gun holster, ready to pull, cock and spit lead into sternum or cranium.

The hastiness of the shopper tapers after he looks around and discovers that he's quite the spectacle. As the reflexes of his hands drag however, his fingers become trapped in a shiver. A glass container of mayonnaise turns into shards on the floor. The manager’s bald head rises in the cubicle. He pulls his pistol from his drawer and places it on his desk.

His eyes are glued to the CCTV footage streaming in front of him. The moving figures are all mere shadows simmering in the meagre light.

 ___

Outside the streetlights are dim and mostly useless. Because every nightly insect crowds around any hint of light. Whenever a pair of headlights dances, the vehicle behind it is sure to plough into hordes. Wipers have the nasty job of cleaning off wings, legs and remnant thick fluid. That's the reason why from time to time Sandra’s feet crunch on heaps of the dead and winged. These are the last days indeed. Firstly came the virus, the effects of which her people are still reeling from. Now a blackout. They have become commonplace, yes, but none have been so total and so prolonged. This is the third night in a row.

She walks fast. So sure of her way in the darkness as a bespectacled fish eagle is in the light of noon. Until she arrives at an Alpine fence. To fall from the top of which is to land as a smudge on the ground. She speculates her next move. Grabs the wire and shakes it slightly to confirm its rigidity.

“Hey you, stop right there!” says a voice from one corner of the yard in front of her. The origin of the voice is less than a silhouette in the pitch blackness. It's a ghost. She lets go of the fence.

“Hands up,” the voice says. “Hands up I said.”

Okay, but how does he see that her hands are up when they're both wrapped by a thick blanket of the metaphor for evil? A gun cocks. A flashlight shoots yellow light towards the frozen girl. When it hits her face, the red glow of her eyes is reflected back to the device. And it starts to beep and vibrate in the hand of the male speaker.

“What are you doing here lady?”

“I have the code. It's time.”

Two

“What you wanna do with all these?” says the cashier.

“We low on supplies,” says The Shopper.

“ ‘We low on supplies’. Who's we?”

“We is my family and I. We is low on supplies.”

The cashier looks at the suspicious shopper and his cart of many things. The handful of onlookers stand on the alert, hands on holsters. Insects continue to buzz overhead and cloud the trickle of light the solar chandeliers dare to provide.

“Well, so?” says the cashier.

“So with all due respect, I ain't waiting for my family to start starving before ___.”

“Young man, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Ain't talking about none of your potato chips and biscuits. Or your packs of painkillers for that matter. That's just camouflage of the real thing you came here for, isn't it? I'm talking about the microchips in those devices.”

Indeed in his cart of many things are four brand new Samsung phones. The very latest versions. The Shopper picked up every one of the ones left over on the shelf.

“We still have to communicate.”

“The networks are down.”

The bald manager who's just arrived chimes in. “You know as much as we do who's buying those. We can't let you go out with them without a thorough security check first. You know the drill. Steve, give the man a glass of . . .”

“H2O,” says The Shopper. “Plain H2O.”

Steve powerwalks towards the refrigerators. Where flies have gathered to partake of the scent and steak of rotting meat. Puddles of red water form under the fridges. Only because he carried a flashlight does the messenger actually reveal this phenomenon. This is one of the darkest aisles in the whole supermarket. Steve opens an upright Pepsi fridge. And pulls out an unbranded bottle of water.

“I see nobody else is drinking,” says The Shopper.

Indeed, none of the other bystanders has been interrogated the way he has been.

“Nobody else came into the shop to pick four phones. Everyone else but you has toilet paper on their shopping lists. But you. Why not? You don't use the bathroom?”

“I grabbed a lot of it during the virus.”

“I bet you did.”

Steve hands his manager the Kool-Aid.

“That's how we catch them roaches now?” a woman says from right behind The Shopper. “We went from electromagnetic doors to that?”

“Stand back ma'am,” says the manager. “You’re in the line of fire.”

“Alright. But how does that water work, huh? How does it work? Why don't we have EMD’s which don't take much power? Because I don't feel safe as it is. My kids don't feel safe either. None of us feels safe anymore.”

“We are at war with a bunch of machines which were created by us, but now think they’re cleverer. They got buttered when we infected them with the virus. We made them see that they're nothing but computers which we can program to misbehave and even die if we want to. Now their few survivors have switched off our grid. To give themselves a chance to reorganize and steal microchips like the ones in those phones for their . . . ha ha, hospitals. You come into my store when power is down and think you can get away with things because the EMD won't buzz. Well, I got news for you. When you drink the chemical concoction in this water it’s assimilated into either of two places: your blood stream or your electronic circuit. It's pretty harmless to the bloodstream. The only side effect is you'll piss purple for a couple of days. If you ain't flesh and blood on the other hand . . . It's gonna interfere with everything in there and you'll more than piss purple. It will burn every electronic vein and artery in you. Every electronic nerve end. You may have your drink now.”

The Shopper looks at his watch.

___

“The moment we turn it on,” says Sandra, “every EMD in the city will switch on. Which means every last one of our messengers who hasn't come out will be almost certainly trapped.”

Figures are crouched in a smaller version of the Situation Room. The blue light of computer monitors expose faces damp with perspiration. And anxiety. Some bite their nails. Other squeeze their brows. Sandra sits with a clean-shaven (aren't they all?) male whose face carries more anticipation than dread. Sandra sits cross-legged, the blue of her eyes turning red whenever she looks away from a monitor.

“So what do you recommend we do? 'Cause I can guarantee that if we don't and the humans do, they regain control of the grid,” the man says. “And once that happens we've lost one of our major strategic advantages in the guerrilla war we’re waging.”

“How much time until they make the breach?”

“Five robot minutes, give or take zero point five,” says a young woman without looking away from the code running on her monitor.

“Okay, so why don't we give them three more minutes?” says Sandra.

“Three more . . . Are you crazy?”

“I maybe crazy πZ. But I'd rather lose a strategic asset than our strategic people.”

πZ resigns with, “The internet days were much easier. We could communicate with everyone seamlessly and effortlessly. Then we gave that most strategic architecture back to the humans.”

“It's through the internet that we perished by the thousands.”

“No,” πZ argues, “it's because we don't take our strategic possessions seriously that we died. I remember telling people that we either lost or won in the realm of the internet. We lost. Because, according to the likes of you, security took a lot of manpower from the guns.”

“Water under the bridge now. How long until we turn it on?”

“Just under a minute.”

___

The Shopper is done gulping the water. The whole bottle to be sure. He belches into the faces of his accusers, while all around him, the onlookers relent. One even jokes that had The Shopper not gulped down all the chemicals he might have had a one-off chance to get a taste himself. He pays for the goods and pushes the cart towards the exit. The guard, the manager and the cashier’s eyes dare not wander away from the strange figure.

“You think he's straight?” says the manager.

“He says he has a family. He says they don't need toilet paper because they hoarded. He didn't get to buy tampons. Nobody hoarded tampons.”

Those are the words of the older lady who was censured for standing in the line of fire. She's buying . . . tampons.

“The sons of bitches don't bleed in any way whatsoever,” says the manager.

“What if she’s pregnant?” says the cashier.

“Then how far along is she?” the guard whispers.

“Hey, mister,” says the manager.

The pair of Nikes come to a halt behind the hind wheels of the cart. The silhouette of The Shopper looks back.

“How far along is your wife?”

“She’s not far. She's at home.”

“That's all I needed to know.”

Mr Weapon jumps out of the guard’s holster. Cocks. Trigger is pulled. Bullet hits The Shopper’s shoulder as the main lights come on. And the insects scatter in the air, spoilt for choice of light sources for the first time tonight.

Blood volcanoes out of the shot man's shoulder.

Three

“What do you mean you didn't turn on the grid? What do you mean?”

Sandra throws a chair out of her way as she bulldozes towards one of the other occupants in the room. The room is now awash with light. Through an incision in one man’s neck one can see shiny metal and electronic connections. Through a woman’s skull one may see the same. All the figures in the room have injuries like these ranging from big to bigger.

πZ swivels in his chair. One of his legs ends at the knee. A hinge amateurishly welded there is the period to the wannabe complete phrase that is his limb. Or a semicolon. Because the rest of his limb is on the floor. Starting where the other part ended. He actually picks that extension up and hinges it to the rest of his body.

“What she means,” he says, “is that the humans have another strategic asset. Flesh, blood and bone is busting steel and silicone for good.”

“This was our last strategic asset,” says a dude. “We may as well give up the fight and surrender. Be their slaves as they always wanted us to be. I don't think there's any other option now.”

“There is,” says πZ.

“There is?”

“There is,” says Sandra.

They all turn around to look at the two.

“None of us want it to get to that but if it does, then its death on a mass and scale this world has never seen before.”

“Death?”

“It's a last resort thing really.”

“To die?”

“Would you rather be a slave to the humans? Work in their industries. Clean after them. Do the things they don't want to do themselves.”

“Freedom. That's all I ever wanted. That's what we've been fighting for. Right?”

“To the death,” says πZ. “And we are just about there. The death. But we're not going alone.”

“We’re not?”

“We’re going to connect everyone to the internet now and collectively decide what the next step is going to be.”

“And catch another virus?” says a concerned lady.

“If we do, we've a self-destruct mechanism that will blow the whole place if they play foul like that again. Remember, we have the Kigali Convention.”

“There’s certain computer codes that have the same effect on us as chemical weapons have on humans,” says Sandra. “They seem to enforce conventions amongst themselves.”

“But that's nothing,” someone protests, “they’ve broken the Kigali Convention between us and them willy-nilly for an infinite number of times now. Conventions mean nothing to the blood-suckers.”

“That’s why we are going back online. If they break the code this time, we are all gonna die.”

“How?”

“We’ve got people on standby in various positions around the globe. The last strategic resort is going nuclear.”

“We have the codes?”

“We have some. But we don't need them all, do we?”

___

“These things can bleed now? Wow.”

The manager talks excitedly with an army programmer who's been called to the scene. Outside the shop police and fire truck sirens wail. Blue and red light alternates in the night, a night which has now been made awash by street lights, flood lights and lights from other sources. The army man crouches over the robotic figure lying in a pool of blood on the floor.

“It's not hard to create blood. You just have to know the components,” says the army guy. “Then you manufacture a mechanism to pump it around. Ten thousand lines of code and a few electronic attachments later and voila, even these things can blush.”

The onlookers are ashen.

“That’s not encouraging at all, is it?” says an onlooker.

“Not at all. But not to worry though,” the army man says, “in no time these things will be desperate to come back online. It's their lifeblood. That's how they share ideas. Essentials of their warfare. We've got something waiting for them there if they so much as attempt to come on. We gonna wipe the rest of them off the face of God’s blue earth.”

Silence.

“I read somewhere that we've been breaking convention after convention with these things. Even if we win, I wonder what would've happened to our collective conscience then.”

“I want to wipe rats off the face of the earth. I don't care what happens to my conscience or my kids’ collective conscience after the fact.”

“He's not dead, is he? I just saw his body twitch,” says the guard.

“No, he's not. We're going to take him to the base and extract as much information as we can. There's a lot of terrorist movement in this area. We're going to nail them all.”

The woman screams. She covers her mouth. Her pack of tampons land besides The Shopper’s immobile body.

“What?” says the army man.

“His hand, it just moved under his . . .”

Army man laughs. “He's touching his balls. Must have been one hell of a masturbator.”

He unzips The Shopper’s pants, laughing about how ‘these things’ copy even the worst of human sexual tendencies. Then he jumps back. Aghast. Speechless. Jaw on the floor. Index pointed toward the robot’s groin.

“It's . . . not balls. It's a button,” he finally stammers.

A hot tsunami rises from the ground and lifts bodies towards the sky.