>>>“Cookies!” A boy’s voice synthesized out of the makeshift android’s body.
I blinked. “I said state your purpose.”
“And I said I want cookies!”
“Can you execute the functions or not?” I said, losing my patience.
“Depends.”
“Depends?” I screeched.
“Yeah, on if you can get me cookies!”
I exploded. “I created you out of wires and circuits I bought with every scrap I could save for the past ten years!”
I picked it up from under the arms and started throttling it. “DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT–”
“Waaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh,” it started wailing. An hour later I was hand-feeding it a bag of freshly baked convenience store cookies.
>>> 

>>”What happened next mommy?” the android girl asked, fingers curling around the unicorn-patterned blanket and bringing it closer to her neck.
“The engineer learned to have empathy for Artificials, and the boy helped him achieve his dream after that,” I said, patting her head.
“What was his dream?”
“To destroy all the android factories.”
Her eyes grew wide. “Why? Why would anybody do that?” she yelled.
“Because he believed in us. He knew we could be more than just the tools we were being produced to be.”
“You know him mommy?” she tugged at my nightshirt.
“Of course I do. That children’s story is based on Mr. Gurney Slick, the current CEO of Humanoid Corp, the most trusted producers of friendly Artificials in the entire industry.”
“Wow! He sounds like a hero!”
“Yes sweetie, he really is.” I leaned in to peck her on her forehead, next to the bright sheen of the Humanoid Corporation logo.
>> 

>“Check out this crap,” I said, flinging the hovering holographic monitor to Joe.
It sailed across the kitchen table and froze behind his extended finger.
“More Artificial propaganda?” He sighed, swiping across the panels.
“I know. After such a scandal like that no less, can you believe it?”
“I don’t think I want to.”
“The nerve of these corporations! How can they believe a bunch of nuts and bolts can replace flesh and blood Joe? Flesh and blood!” I said, shaking my hands.
“I don’t know Karen…” He rubbed his temple. “What scares me is what they’re teaching our boy at school. We have to make sure he understands what they are.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll have a talk with him after he flies home…”
> 

“Conversations like this are growing more and more common in upperground metropolis apartments,” I announced, clasping my hands firmly together. “Especially after the recent whistleblowers from Humanoid Corp engineers, public unrest about Artificials, new customizable android variants for home use, has substantially increased.”
I mentally queried the image database and several 3D holograms of leaked documents and gorey gifs of android violence popped out beside me. Time to drive it home.`
I pointed to a looping video, displaying a naked android staring at the camera with dead eyes, standing above a man clutching a growing red stain on his chest. “And this concern is not unwarranted.”

You’re totally right, I scratched that sentence. Sorry about that!

Can you try checking again? I think I included all the reqs; thanks

The End of the World

​

<> <> <>

At the end of the world, nothing had changed. The phylogenetic tree carved into the tall, serpentinite wall of the museum still told the same tale. And what other tale was there to tell? Every story was fundamentally reducible to the same story about the lurching endeavors of humanity, man’s grasp gradually falling shorter and shorter of his reach.

The domed roof had caved in. Blue-green rocks fuzzy with moss and discolored by chemical decay had crumbled into slanted heaps. Magenta clouds swirled in the exposed sky above. Cracked Greek columns guarded the side walls of the main gallery, dark brown foliage creeping between the interstices.

“Not much of an inheritance, is it?” The old man’s voice croaked as he plodded through the rubble, his staff thundering as it hit the ground.

I sat on the stairs beneath the giant mural, chin on hand, studying his weary body as he approached. “I had never expected blooming meadows, but it is quite pitiful, father.”

“Ahhh-kh-khhh.” His voice scraped his throat. “So it misquemes you, does it? You’ll find a way. You have to.”

“And if I can’t?” I asked, but he didn’t reply.

The steady clack of his staff pounded in my head. His robe was muddied and rasped as it dragged across jagged stones like the injured wing of some flightless bird. He was on the steps now. Ragged breaths and long pauses. Beside me now, he perched a wrinkled hand on my shoulder.

“No alchemist, no ecologist, nor geneticist can save us now,” he said, gazing up at the wall.

“No historian will again steal through the night to save our story,” I said, rising and turning to face the tree.

“No inventor, no scientist, nor engineer will blueprint a machine to light us with glory,” he said, climbing with me, our hands around each other’s shoulders.

“And no poet,” I said as we reached the platform, “will ever travel to starless caverns before we have.”

“We were the first.” He retracted his hand from my back.

“And the last,” I finished, letting my hands fall limp.

Rain began to fall. Drops trailed and diverged on the grooves on the wall like a thousand splintering meteorites. At the root of the tree was a single node from which all others branched. Within it was etched a lonely word: Human.

Days after he passed, the sky burned black for the first time in months. Falling ash stained my teary cheeks and I collapsed on the gravel of the road. My cheek rubbed against coarse particles and I tried to find meaning in the pebbles, warring and internecine like TV tuned to a dead channel. I thought I saw his face traced there like lines in a zen garden, his smile shining brightly, but it was just pareidolia.

Months passed before I found another, her eyes wild and red and feral. She crawled like an animal and bared her teeth when I approached. When she saw what I was, she choked and convulsed. Her growls fluctuated as she struggled to fight the animal she had become. Not wanting to see her suffer, I turned to leave.

“Ple-laease, stayyy.” She managed to whisper, but I didn’t look back.

Years passed. Long years stretched by spasms of involuntary memory, lost somewhere in the overgrown streets of dilapidated cities. Short years ripped away from me like the health of the earth, flickering past like the pages of a cheap flipbook. I had more time for reflection about my father, about the dying world he and his generation had left us. More time to detox the bitterness from my heart, more time to let time let heal it. Our suffering wasn’t in vain; it only felt that way because the silver lining of it belonged to the people of the past. They had squeezed blood out of the heart of the world for their pleasure at the expense of the children of the future. It was that simple, nothing personal. We had been left for dead by a people who had never known us.

I trudged up the snow blanketed hill, wondering if he could see my growth. It hadn’t been his fault, I had realized. His generation was handed a world hardly better than we were. All was forgiven, even that which I could not bring myself to forgive. I focused on the distant horizon, listening to the crashing waves of sludge. The vortex of darkness parted like a dead eye opening, iris still white, at the end of the universe where crimson shafts of light spilt past the edge and mirrored off the toxic ocean and scattered into a handful of eyes that were still alive in a dead world or dying in a world that might still yet live.

Observer

A flash, a byte-green tunnel, and I was back in the arcade again. My white-knuckled sweaty hands were still gripping the joystick. Dim flickering lights of lonely machines bleeping retro 8-bit game synths. Dead chill, windows fogged up, puddles outside lapping on spilled neon.

“Waka-waka-waka.” Pac-Man ran from his ghosts.

I saw her out of the corner of my eye but pretended not to. She wasn’t playing. Sleek body, nimble fingers, dressed in black leather, vertical chip slot on her forehead. Anachronist. I lit a cigarette. Closed my eyes. The beachfront was seared into my mind, waters so blue they were green. Children chasing each other, feet caked with dried sand as I talked to her for the first time for a second time. Paradise in the palm of my hand. But I knew how the story ended. Please god, please let-

“Observer effect,” she said.

I exhaled a dark cloud slowly, suddenly bitter. I had thought there was time enough at last. Fuck me right? “The act of observing alters the thing being observed. Catch-22 thought-loop total mindfuck. I get it.”

“No, actually. You don’t.” She smiled disarmingly, but her white teeth were too clean. A rat scuttled across the floor. “Hop on a Traveler’s slipstream, you piggyback them into their past as a projection.”

“Like,” I started, taking a long drag and blowing at her, “second-hand smoking.”

Her eyes lit up. “That’s exactly right! Full points!” She mimed a congratulatory clap.

“That’s still bad for you.”

“Exponentially worse for the smoker.”

“How is it different from two-player?”

“Two-player is genuine collaborative Travel. Mutualistic agreement to bring 2 to the time and place immortalized in the mind of 1. Piggybacking distorts the projection of the past. It’s very much like creeping into someone’s bed while they dream, oblivious. That’s the observer effect. By entering your past, I irrevocably change it.”

I closed my eyes again. I had looked up from the children. Skyscrapers rose from the ocean, an entire city breaking the surface, waves lapping at windows. The sky had turned leaf-green. In worry, I glanced at my girl, but her face was already gone. Tanned oval in its place, hilly contours that suggested something human but not quite, all lines erased from the face. I opened my eyes. She was grinning. That bitch!

“Sorry. She was really beautiful. I guess I got a little jealous.”

For a moment, we said nothing.

“You were lucky.”

“Yeah… guess I was.”

“You know why I’m here, don’t you Ken? You know who I am.”

Funny. “You know, you heat are funny,” I said, wagging the cig at her. “Traveling illegal and all but you do it yourselves.” I laughed. “Necessary evil eh?”

She pressed her lips together. “Someone has to impose order on chaos.”

“Fuck you.”

She arched her eyebrows. “I think you misunderstand what we do. We protect this reality from Traveling distortions. Everyone Travels.”

I blinked.

“I’m not here for you honey. Not yet. Just checking in on your first run. Now, if you cause ripples in someone else’s string, they will come after you.” She shrugged. “Different anachronism division.”

She turned to her machine. Pinball. She reached for the joystick, hesitated.

“Find another arcade Ken. Too many people know about this one.”

“And if I don’t?”

She glanced up at me. Not once had her plastered smile faltered. “One of many outcomes.”

“Tell me,” I managed. “Is it real? Is any of it real?”

“Oh sweetie… that’s for you to decide, or for them to when they come for you.”