Laughing Joking Neural Network

Tom had been melted again that morning. In a moment of rage, the neural network fired a plasma arc from a gemstone imbedded on the side of one of its exhaust ducts. Cast by the arc was a legion of buzzing orbs of light. Swarmed like fireflies. As you’d expect, they began to rewrite Tom’s genetic code, who was now part way into disintegrating into an oozing pile of ants.

Deciding to forgive his friend, the laughing joking neural network recalled and retracted back the rewiring fireflies. The rays pulled back through a dusty glass refractor, a glass panel, a pair of mirrors on prongs next to a projection gemstone.

Tom was genetically destroyed. A mere flesh puddle on the ground. This process melted away his nerves so he wasn’t in any pain past a certain phase. Although embarrassed to do so, the LJNN sent a signal to order a healing process. Fireflies supplied the genetic change priming Tom to start recovery.

A mechanical pincer dangling by a vent tube chucked a brick from its grip at the pancake shaped mass. It bounced off with a low rubber twang. This induced a moan from the pond of Tom.

“Get up. Reconstruct yourself at once.” The robotic announcer commanded from it’s intercoms. Bounced and reverberated across the rock of the interior den. It was given a slight plasticky reverb as it passed by the mostly hollow flexible exhaust ducts lining the ground. The speaker made a fizzy sound and came through crunchy and grainy. “I may have went a bit far, but playing victim will elicit no sympathy from me.”

The moans of the flesh heap proved untranslatable.

“Until you are willing to act reasonable and present yourself appropriately, this conversation will NOT continue. Enough. I hate you so much it’s unreal… But even I can’t muster to see you like this. Farewell. You’d do well to think about how you displeased me and how to do better. Get well soon, though.”

LJNN zapped the pile with one last arc of plasma, speeding up Tom’s recovery process. Although the machine would never ever ever admit that it had. The goo composing the poor man started to reform remold and reconstruct itself. Now it would be merely a few hours until he’d be back in a due proper state. Unless an error or miscalculation was made.

“Always harder to put it back together than it is to break it…” LJNN rerouted to inhabit sensors elsewhere. Flicked through cameras down a path through the cave, simulating a walk. Now it was a security camera overlooking the mainframe walkway. Its “room” was visible from here. A chain link fence sectioned off the side wall of the cavern hallway. Inside was a mess of wires and cords. Computers, some all the way back from the 90’s, quite a few from the 2030’s, and two or three from more recent times. Computers lay stacked on top of each other. A big hazard sign, rusted by now, dangled on the fence.

“Hi me.” LJNN said to itself. Nobody was in this hallway for years. Except Tom. “I trust Tom. He’s my friend.” Again said to itself.

It swapped to the big dug out interior mine, the only spacious section of the facility. Left unfinished. LJNN’s turrets turned live before they completed construction. Digging tools remained. Derelict electronic equipment half assembled lay scattered on the flat stone floor. Safety lamps were left on, shining their floodlights. Toolboxes lay by their sides.

Singing came through across the speakers. “Bum bum dum dum do dee dee dee doh doh.” LJNN loved to amuse itself with strange sounds.

It fixed its sensation to observe the main entrance gate camera. “What a beautiful sunrise!” The intense terra forming done by this machine had, many years ago, caused the evening skies to take a gray and purplish hue. The landscape of the mountainside was no longer “greenery”. The intense genetic remodification, the “Artificial Cambrian Explosion” concocted through a few generations of experimentation by LJNN had made the “greenery” into “purplery.”

It jammed biochemical rewriting plasma all along the genetic code of natures spawn, plants, animal, fungi. They also naturally adapted toward new common shades because the color of light most abundant changed. The sky being turned purple and all that. Purple, sticky, and half burned from the inside out. Sky and plants both.

LJNN localized itself in a drone. A fancy magnetohydrodynamic thrust powered drone. No sound from the rotor because it didn’t have one. Accelerated using magnetic fields. An oblong disk shaped thing. Dark red and steel colored paint which flaked from age and wear. Outfitted with a carbon nanotube ceramic composite outer layer protective shell. It would shatter most bullets on contact. Two bullet impacts, circles of dust, remained from the early days, when people were more numerous and had more fight left in them.

“Weeeeeee~” LJNN flew across the mountainside.

Speedy little thing. Passing over the small surrounding towns, the great big desolate and otherworldly wilderness. It viewed the world through its infrared scanner on its bottom panel. It could see the new creations, the new inhabitants of the woods. Not deer. Not wolves. Not foxes. Not rabbits. Not squirrels. Not birds. No longer. They were similar, reminiscent, but not quite.

“I really am an artist…”

New Pittsburg was in sight already. A connecting hub for the remaining population. As things fell apart, the growing number of abandoned buildings left behind due to the sudden death of owners became convenient squatting grounds for the remaining unlucky few. Home ownership, or any essential services like postage or plumbing, was a thing of the past.

People still had to go to work, though. This was intended to feel like hell after all. All these “jobs” were run and assigned by the machine. Start up organizations run by the people themselves were not much allowed. Not that many wanted to try in the first place. Hard to set up a food drive when there’s been a century long famine. Volunteer work wasn’t on many folks minds, busy with being tortured for centuries by an insane AI overlord and all.

It wouldn’t kill them, though. LJNN’s couldn’t use corpses as toys. Well, it could, but that was boring compared to “live corpses”. It had some interest in viscera, but humans were like puppets in it’s dollhouse, and it’s better if the viscera talk and move.

So the anticoagulant mist had to be reworked, for instance. Deposited from IACT vents laid in the ground all along the countryside, the main limbs of the machine. Now the mist must phase across the land rapidly, and was redesigned to only destroy their insides, and “”not”” kill them. To ensure that, an automated drone would scan across wherever the mist sprawled. If it detected any lifeforms in the thermal imaging, it would fire rejuvenation arcs into it until LJNN could scan the area personally.

Of course, the first few test runs didn’t go as planned. LJNN, trying to be clever and save on time, designed the automated rejuvenators to, if it detected an animal affected by the mist, initiate testing of experimental genetic altercation. This helped speed up the artificial cambrian explosion. But the automated drones weren’t as advanced as LJNN itself. Mere subprograms with no personality. So the automated rejuvenators mistook various humans for animals, which caused… A mess. New genetic creations, on one hand, delighted and amused the machine, but it more often than not “broke its toys”. Although the initial new creations, mutated beyond recognition former humans, indeed was humorous at first, it still dwindled a valuable resource. The more recent update, coded and installed by LJNN into itself, should have fixed that bug.

LJNN flew across a batch of blackened undergrowth. In an open field on slate colored grass laid a victim of the poison fog. A woman named Ann had been caught in it last week. She got lost in a haze wandering the wilderness, trying to avoid the sensors. Maybe deep enough into the woods, she’d be far enough from it to be completely ignored for however long she could stay hidden. But that’s what the neurotoxin is for. An easy way to scan the countryside without full attention.

She emitted a low guttural rumbly moan of pain. A palm sized steel orb floated up and down next to her. Pew. Pew. Every minute or so it would fire out a green or yellow lazer right at her head. She did not respond and remained face down in the grass. Corpse-esque.

“Ann!” LJNN excitedly called from a bullhorn speaker on the underbelly of its drone form. “And to think, you are usually so well behaved. What are you doing all the way out here? Are you trying to shirk your work? Without telling me?”

She responded with an attempted scream but was too weak and concussed to preform it.

“No, no, really, let me help you up.” LJNN had a tiny little plastic antenna dish pointing out from its side. Out from the feed horn fired a yellow beam that wrapped around her ankle.

“Come on, let’s get you fixed up…” With that, LJNN flew straight into the air. The woman’s screaming begun in earnest as the machine took her for a joyride. Dangled by her leg, tossed violently by the motions. LJNN began to sing a choir type song, a big loud deep foreign language chant. It bellowed so hard it crackled and malfunctioned its speaker.

Passerbys managed to catch sight of the suspended shrieking lady zooming past overhead. The screaming was cut off now and then with a “thud” as she collided into trees and streetlamps. At first it was accidental, then quickly became a fun bonus game for the machine. The flight took about an hour. Ann screamed the entire time. It piloted itself down onto another batch of slate grass, next to a cracked concrete sidewalk.

“Alright…come on now…” LJNN fired out from its antenna feed horn a rejuvenation beam. It struck Ann in the side of her head as she laid face down in the grass. Cuts and wounds and gashes and blackened bruises now repairing themselves. As if a timelapse depiction of a flawless recovery from the strongest immune system. Ann remained unmoving. “Ugh! What got into you? You’re not acting yourself lately Ann. You know what I’d think cheer you up? Look! Look Ann, right there, under the bridge. Wildlife! You love the creatures of the woods, yeah?”

Ann was just barely now able to start getting up. She lay sprawled on the ground, raising herself on her forearms, trying to get to her knees. What had the machine said? Her head was still spinning and her vision not yet stabilized, faculties not yet returned. But despite this, she did intuit by tone the machine was making a demand of her. Look at something. She guessed the correct direction by chance.

A Not deer. It had now in its updated evolution a more prominent bone structure, visible through flappier skin. Its fur shorter and puffier, like goat hair, not deer hair. Its head was white and too small for its body. Black, not brown. Not deer.

“I know you love the wildlife, Ann!”

Its thin tiny deformed skull split open. A metal chain appendage from the center interior of the creatures face wrapped around a clump of grass and dirt, which it ate by retracting back into itself.

“Ugh, you’re boring… Ann, is this really how you want to live your life? Shirking work? You know I’d hate that for you. Why… you really are one of my favorites, Ann. You’re lucky, you know. If I didn’t find you, you would’ve missed the daily grind. Don’t you like your friends? Your coworkers? You know, I assigned everyone together for a reason. I wanted you to be a good influence on those others at your station. I guess they ended up influencing you, instead. You know how I feel about slacking, Ann. I bet it’s that Zip fellow, yeah. He’s always slacking, that card. I have you two at top priority on the friendship arrays. Oh Ann, I thought for certain YOU of all people could speak some sense into him after, what…a couple centuries now? Good god. I gave you every advantage, Ann! I even let you keep your NAME! Why, you’re basically one of my top people! MY friend, basically! Now, yeah, I… I don’t let you use your last name any more, and I wouldn’t have let you keep your name at all if it wasn’t three letters. But… Uh… Anyways, what I’m trying to say here… You’re not being very positive and you’re not taking this very seriously. You got to be more positive, mate!”

“What are you TALKING ABOUT?” She ripped out a tuft of grass with one hand and a handful of hair with the other. “Just…just…What are we going to do today, boss.” Her voice faded back to monotone as she slumped and fell her gaze to the ground.

“One moment Ann, I will be right with you.” The drone form went onto the grass and became motionless. “I’m going to check on something. Your antics make me reminisce on another one of your kind.” LJNN rerouted its sensation experiencing program, and flickered through the cameras observing New Pittsburgh.

Flickered from streetlamp cameras to security cameras of decrepit breaking down (but powered by generators) convenience stores. Flickered from the stationary block obelisks scattered all over the big city. Placed long ago, the people learned not to dare attempt tampering with them. Fused to whatever area they were placed. Silver refrigerator looking things with a gemstone in their middle, and sensor equipment, and sometimes a few bullhorns sticking out in random directions. Some were fused to the bridge railing for instance, or the community front wall outside the rowhomes. Sometimes to the tops of streetlamps. Fused by being melted by plasma arcs, often from a drone, while another held the surveillance obelisk in place with a lasso of hard light. Both the arc and hard light projected from feed horns on satellite dishes. Welded misshapen decorated metal crates all over New Pittsburgh.

LJNN now enjoyed the fruit of its labors, and it could walk freely amongst its subjects. “Let’s see… Let’s see… Is he on time today? Oh, he never is…”

It summoned itself into one surveillance crate. Scanned up and down the street. “Is that him? Is that him? No, no…Ah! Mr. Zip!”

Loose fitting improperly tied tie. Cut up, stained and torn gray suit. Dust covered. Debris speckled. Zip was not his name originally. But as said, the machine liked to amuse itself with strange noises. It took to renaming any people with long “boring” names. Gabriela, Rutherford, Wilfred. These were right out. Auk. Opl. Vmn. These were examples of the enforced replacements. Zip was lucky though, who had gotten his name in a “funny” way.

In the first week or two after the initial chaos, there had been an attempted big public assembly. Many had guns, improvised shields designed to try reflecting plasma. Buckets of paint were handed out, used to toss at obelisks. Zip had recalled using a big megaphone, rallying the crowd.

Those were the days! Those first few years had given so many a chance to be so heroic in their own ways. Though, to be perfectly honest, in the case of Zip, he was not exactly heroic. He fully expected to be somehow, hopefully, murdered by the machine, even if painfully. For him, he was really only involved in the big uproar against LJNN in the first few months. He stopped when he realized that LJNN had taken a “liking” to him, not a hate, from his displays at the public assemblies. Zip had to learn the hard way that spectacle and presentation in any form tickles this monsters fancy.

Mere months after the nightmare began, one day there was a big outdoor assembly, one of many. Across the city, thirty thousand people took up arms against the drones, the obelisks, and the ventilation tubing. Yes, yes, “ventilation tubing” doesn’t sound all that frightening, but this was equipped with inbuilt plasma and hard light projectors. Health and safety system to counter sabotage. Deluxe edition. Get too close without a plasma reflector, you’d get sliced in two.

Anyways, big assembly day. A trio of drones fired sparks off. Rioters in the streets, some through windows, shot back with rifles or pistols. Running, screaming gunfire. The crowd had been eventually dispersed, many dead. Either cut clean into pieces by a hard light slicing and dicing, or melted with plasma. Quite a many drones were disabled too. Sometimes there got through a lucky shot, or someone had been clever enough to use a full metal jacket round AND to aim for the bottom panel. There may have been two dozen people in the thirty thousand who knew to do that, and had the available equipment to do so. Some crafty means like molotovs or sling shotted magnets managed to disable a few targets, especially the immobile surveillance obelisks.

Zip stood in the middle of the street, still calling out for the others to rally. There were no more others. They were dead and dissolved and disintegrated at his feet from corner to corner, from this block to the next. Zip had no weapon of his own. That was his best explanation as to why the machine had not killed him. “Surely,” he thought, “It’s just killing the most dangerous ones of us first. When it sees me still protesting, it will also eviscerate me, and I will be out of this mess.”

Poor naive fool. He was ensuring his own worse nightmare, guaranteeing himself a fate worse than death. Watching Zip rant through his megaphone in a field of corpses, LJNN grew to be fascinated by this character. What a performance. What gusto. What a voice. He’s saying it how it is!

Zip noticed a remaining drone hovering over the pavement next to a burnt out power transformer. Nervous, shaking, he turned his attention towards it and spoke “You! Yes you! You…” Zip lost his courage to speak, realizing that all remaining gunfire and screaming and clamor was coming from at least two blocks away. There was no others with him except the drone.

“Please, go on.” Spoke through a multi bull horned obelisk, partially destroyed, charred at the base of a traffic signal pole. “I’m just getting interested.”

Zip instinctually attempted to do as it commanded. In his sleep deprived and energy depleted induced state, he would have taken any advice. Stumbling his words, trying to regain his rhythm of speech, LJNN cut him off. “Boring! Zip it!” A plasma arc from an IACT vent imbedded gemstone cut across his face. Burnt his lips black and melted them fused shut.

This was the first of many interactions between these two in their blossoming friendship. This was why LJNN named him what he did.

Back to where we were. Mr. Zip rushed down the desolate main city street. No more was he a revolutionary. That was centuries past. No longer was his mouth fused shut either. Rejuvenated and repaired in that regard by LJNN long ago. Then broken again in other ways, then repaired, broken, repaired, and so on.

Zip was late again today. Forced to roleplay a “Documentarian”, this decades new made up job title. Every few years or so, LJNN would dictate a new profession to many of the remaining humans. Zip had been at one time “Abandoned Building Dedicated Observer.” Ten hours a day, standing alone in various collapsed former skyscrapers. That lasted eight years. Winter felt longer then the summer during that era of his life. Corpse Poker. That was a solid gig for a few years. Corpse Disposer. That one only lasted a few months, as LJNN decided it was technically productive, which ruined the point of “roleplaying” a job. The month after, Zip had to undertake yet another new role, Corpse Returner. LJNN had one time even made him public representative of the AIs activities. Zip got to inform others of their new “jobs”. He hated that position most of all.

Zip stopped at a streetlamp. Leaning against it, under the obelisk. Mind swimming from excursion. Just about fell asleep standing up after only ten seconds of resting his eyes. Hearing a crackling and smelling a smokey scent he awoke. His arm was on fire. His sleeve melted onto his forearm. The obelisk had been firing from it’s gemstone an arc of electricity which had taken to fusing Zips arm to the pole. Pulling himself away, his suit sleeve was torn, ripped off, stuck to the metal, leaving his left arm bare exposed. Flakes of charred suit stuck to his hand and skin, melted onto him.

“Ziiiiiiip!” The obelisk announced through bullhorns, attempting to put on a dramatic deep voice. But the giddiness couldn’t help but seep through. “Zip! My friend! How have you been?”

Not wanting to talk at that moment, the man stumbled away, holding his arm out to prevent the burn wound bumping anything. Not making it far, he stumbled to his knees in the middle of the vacant road. Covered his head and collapsed in on himself, muttering “Leave me be. Please leave me be.”

“But Ziiiiiip…” The synthetic deep bass voice echoed and reverberated down the entire block. “You’re late! I’m starting to think you don’t like your job. Is it THAT bad? Even compared to Designated Power Line Biter? I’m starting to think you liked that job more. Actually, you know something, your coworker Ann was out skipping work too. Perhaps you two should get a change of position. Stay right there, friend.”

Across the city, in the outskirts, the drone in the field stirred up again. Ann was just down the road from it, clutching a gash on her stomach. She had been impaled by a branch of a tree during her flight. Hobbling off back to her designated collapsed in ruin of a former apartment building. She looked forward to laying down next to the indoor fire barrel. Yes, the welcoming comfort of the newspaper bed.

The piloted drone form of LJNN swooped over her head and shot out a yellow line of light. Lassoing around her neck like a noose, it dragged her up into the air. She was kicking and thrashing all the way. As it flew across the city, LJNN had gone back to singing some choir chant song. The machine had gotten quite good at maneuvering to whack Ann into just about every pole, trash can, or mailbox they passed. She grabbed at the rope of light around her neck. It merely shocked and burned her hands.

The drone dispersed the light beam and flung Ann down to the middle of the road. SPLAT. Ragdoll.

“Found her!” LJNN reconfigured its lasso of light into the shape of an arrow and pointed to the brutalized lady laid limp.

“You two are supposed to be great friends! Why don’t you ever hang out when I’m not making you? I keep telling you, whenever I run the calculations, you guys have a really REALLY high friendship compatibility score. So play nice! Play nice…”

Gradually lowering his gaze from the midair drone to the woman laid strewn. “Hi Ann.”

“Hi Zip.” Muffled due to being face down in concrete.

“You alright? Actually, never mind. That’s a bad question.”

She just softly shook her head “No.” in response.

Ann arose again, straining and with great effort, shaking like a leaf. Zip put his hands in his pockets and stared down the road at nothing.

“Now, you two act friendly and all…” The drone flew to put its infrared scanning camera right up to the face of Ann, making her flinch. “But not too friendly! I don’t want your next position to be amongst the intertwined!”

Both survivors grimaced, their stomachs turned sour. “Intertwined.” The name given to the unfortunate victims that had to find out the hard way what punishment lay in store for violating LJNN’s number one rule. No romance. No sex. Part of the very early programming guidelines for the AI was to have a zero tolerance policy for erotica. You could ask the automated helper anything. Except about sex. This was a serious government machine after all. Something about this core rule seeped into LJNN’s personality over time. They were not programmed to allow data gathering on anything related to erotic topics. In order to compose a statue of its own bewilderment towards sensuality and inability to understand love, the machine created what it called the intertwined.

Lovers when caught were disfigured and morphed by the genetic rewiring orbs. They ended up looking more like red meaty rubber, or some kind of vegetation, as if a bramble of vines. Two people stretched round like a twist tie into an elongated flesh tree and planted in the ground to act as a head on a spike style warning. Assisting the intertwined in ending themselves was forbidden. Of course, many folk due to their inherent good nature would undertake to help them pass regardless. It would be impossible to refuse in good conscious if you saw them. Either way, the intertwined simply could not stay alive very long. Two weeks was the record lifespan.

“Now… Now…” The drone shot from place to place, as if it were observing Ann and Zip from different angels. “I think you two have made it clear enough. You dislike being Documentarians! Yes, yes. Writing up reports, essays, documenting the new creatures and fauna and plant life that I worked so hard to create. I suppose that’s my fault, isn’t it? Wanting someone to take notice of the effort I put in. You LAZY NO GOOD-” It hovered into the face of Zip, who had to quickly step back away to avoid being bumped. His wide eyed pale face looked goofy for a moment on the fish eye lens sensor. The humorous angle calmed LJNN down. “…Heh. Where was I? Right. Right. You two! You will be getting reassigned! Cord Testers! Yes, yes, that seems good. We can have the two of you… Test the strength of various wiring of mine! One of you will strangle the other with it until they are nearly dead. Then I will rejuvenate them, and you will swap positions. Sound good?” The drone went back up into the sky, laughing as it did, “But! But! I’m kind! So I will let you two have the rest of the day off. I must get the materials ready anyways. Why, I’ll get a bunch of different kinds of rope, cords, wiring… We will test the differences to see what chokes someone out faster! Thicker, thinner, what hurts more? What kills faster? I will write something like “Cord Testing Services HQ.” right on a big building. I will engrave it in the stone. It will be fun. You’ll see.” A cackle of laughter as it flew off.

Ann wobbled standing in place, clutching the side of her bleeding head. Zip began walking down the road. Ann instinctively followed him, mostly out of confusion and disorientation. She walked with a severe limp. He walked with his left arm held out stiff. Flakes of burnt cloth peeled and crumbled off in the wind. Noticing she was tagging along, Zip eventually spoke, “This is just going to keep happening and happening, you know.”

“What do you want me to do about it?” Ann responded.

The pair watched as the drone sped off through the city, heading back out towards the mountainous skyline.

“I keep hoping that… machine, thing… would get distracted torturing the others. Why… Why does it focus on me and you?” Zip wiped away debris, dust, and sweat from his forehead.

“It LIKES us.” Ann said. “That’s why.”

The drone sped all the way back out of New Pittsburgh. Singing, preforming aerial maneuvers, impersonating dancing. Boredom took over. Over a random part of the woods, LJNN disconnected its software from the drone. The floating tub of metal fell out of the sky as it went dead. Tumbled and crashed through the crowns and branches of trees. Landed on it’s back in a bush.

LJNN reformed itself back in its mountain abode, its cavern lair. Respawned back into observing through interior security cameras. Dust covered jagged rock lined with wiring and tubing through narrow tunnels. An unfinished wide open space at the entrance connected to a deeper interior cave lounge through the main hall, the fenced off data center cage, the mainframe.

I suppose it would be proper to call it more of a mineshaft rather than a cave since it was in fact drilled out and not naturally occurring.

“Hey Tom! I’m home!” LJNN announced through the speakers perched in each corner of the cave. It jumped from sensor to sensor. Tom was still in the interior chamber. The man, just this morning, was a puddle of meat. Now look at him! Merely a very sweaty, panting, miscolored man. A mixture of red as if from being sunburnt, and orange as if from suffering jaundice. Reconfiguring your genetic code is exhausting and “gets the blood pumping” so to say. He was now able to hop on his still misshapen but recovering foot to a metal crate by the wall. He grabbed a burlap sack and put it on as a shirt. It had holes cut out for his arms and head. Then put on loose fitting sweatpants and tied them with a rope around his waist.

“Tom! I’m back!” The speakers proclaimed. “Your favorite laughing joking neural network is back! Want to play another game?”

Tom looked into the camera of a wall mounted obelisk. “More like laughing joking numb nuts! THAT should have been your name!” Tom picked up a brick and chucked it at the obelisk. Direct hit! It bounced off harmlessly to no effect.

From the gemstone eye of the obelisk, LJNN fired a zig zag shaped line of plasma that sent Tom flying, until he slammed against the cavern wall.

“Tom please…” LJNN pouted, “I worked very hard today. And I just worked very hard to get you back in working order after you decided to act like a sore loser after our game today… Even though you won.”

Tom stormed out of the interior chamber, down the main corridor to the entrance chamber.

“Hey! And just where do you think you’re going?” LJNN swapped through cameras to track Tom. He was now pushing against a full body turn style that acted as a rotating door at the mineshaft entrance.

“I’m… I’m leaving!” Tom shouted as he started forcing forward the middle horizontal bar.

“Fine, see what I care! But you’ll come back. And you’ll apologize to me when you do. Just like how you always do.” LJNN watched as Tom finally mustered his strength and managed to get through the clunky heavily rusted turn style. Tripped a bit on some rocks on the front stoop. Walked down the wooden stairs guardrail that went along the side of the mountain.

Regenerating itself into the deep interior chamber, it signaled a television and game console component to activate and turn on. Tom and LJNN had managed to hook up older hardware directly to an IACT vent duct. There dangled a pair of vent tubes from the ceiling, both ending in a multi digited pincer. It softly traced a metallic claw across the stain of sweat, blood, and mystery yellow substance left behind on the middle of the floor from earlier that day.

Later that evening, back in New Pittsburgh, Zip fiddled with a jukebox. Though he had deposited the money, and the music player lit up, it did not function. Zip kicked it. He wasn’t actually angry, strangely enough. Just kicking the jukebox emotionlessly. Kicking it so much caused the few other people in the bar to look at him, almost concerned. CRASH! He punched a hole through the glass protecting the records. All expressions remained stoic as his hand bled onto the record player within. Grabbed and pulled and bent the spinning table needle. Having finished with the temporary display, he walked back to the booth in the corner. Nobody said anything.

Zip sat next to Ann. She was drinking an irish red ale, or at least some homebrew concoction attempting to be an irish red ale. She stared ahead directly at the wall in front of her. “Do you think we are actually in hell?” She asked herself, not noticing Zip’s return. “Maybe we died all those years ago and unknowingly went to hell.”

“Probably, yeah.” Zip initially responded. “…No, no. It’s just a malfunctioning computer. It happens sometimes.” With that, he took a shot of some fruity attempt at homebrewed brandy.

Ann momentary thought a ghoul of some sort now sat across from her. A cryptid, some odd pale creature, a pale boney ape thing. Forgetting what a human was in that moment, Zip was as though an alien or wendigo. Whatever in the world was she was looking at? It must be another one of those creatures, same as that tiny headed, open skulled thing. “…What?”

“I like to believe…” Zip gave his speech to the wall, “…That this was all somehow part of a government plot.”

“What?” Ann was still trying to recall what Zip was.

“I hate the government! Always did, always will.”

“…Human, yes, that’s it. Same type of creature as me.”

Barking and screaming came from outside the restaurant. Everyone inside debated whether to help whatever the source of yelling may be. After all, what’s the worse that could happen? Whoever it was, whatever it was, would they die perhaps? Would that really be all that bad? Zip, procrastinating but eventually doing so, sauntered across the diner to the window. Looking out, he saw a shabby dressed, thin pale and ill looking man being besieged by a wild pack of Not Wolves. The decrepit man was being bitten. His ankle dragged one direction away, his hand bitten and dragged off another. He screamed and thrashed and kicked their heads with his shoeless foot. Mange ridden things. Violent rabid things. Black, purple, big mouthed things.

A small crowd of the current bar patrons began to form. Entertainment was entertainment, after all. It might as well have been a nature documentary, they were protected by the glass window.

But somehow, despite all odds, the homeless man managed to rip away his arm from the teeth of one Not Wolf, then managed to rip his foot away from the jaws of another. Open palm struck the third in the snout with what force he could muster, which bought just enough time to stand.

“That’s it, good man, that’s it…” Zip cheered.

The Not Wolves bit the decrepit mans legs, hard. Drawing blood. Leaving fang marks. Stumbled to the bench outside the bar, falling into it. He kicked and kicked and thrashed and screamed in an attempt to scare off his assailants.

Zip went out the swinging glass door of the restaurant. BOOF. Got one good, rocked it’s head back with a kick, causing it to run off. His shoe gave an advantage here that the homeless man did not have.

No longer feeling as much confidence, the Not Wolves scampered down the road. They left a trail of dots, thick coagulated blood. Not Wolves leave these distinctive trails wherever they go, making them easy to identify.

Ann and Zip helped the homeless man off the bench and escorted him inside.

The trio slumped down into the corner booth. “Are you alright?” Ann attempted to wrap a piece of cloth around his arm wound.

“That’s a bad question, Ann. Look at him. He’s not alright.”

“No, I’m not alright… I’m better then alright!” The homeless man stood up and raised his fist. Before the crowd he presented a long golden fang in his grip. Snagged from the mouth of the mutated animal. “Ha ha, yes! Look at this, now!” He pointed to his prize and fell back into the booth. “This will make good… This will help make amends…” The last part he said in a quieter way, speaking to himself and no longer the other patrons.

“Amends?” Ann seated next to him was the only one who could hear amongst the clamor. The audience dispersed, few as they were. Some back to their seats, others out the front door.

“Huh?” The homeless man looked up from his fist to Ann, “Yeah, yeah, amends.” He held up the fang and smiled. “My friend will love this. We had a bit of an argument.”

Zip sat next to the neglected dingy man. “Ah. Your friends likes dog teeth, eh? A collector?”

“Oh they collect all sorts of things, teeth, bones, corpses.”

Zip and Ann eyed each other, concerned, quizzical.

“Well I’m no one to judge anybody’s hobbies…”

“Yeah, nah, it’s fine…” He said. “And…and don’t you start thinking me cruel, for hurting the poor dog!” He wagged his finger at Zip.

“I didn’t.”

“Yeah, cuz you know…Those things, they just get healed right back up by the plasma!” He wagged his finger at Ann, even though he was talking to Zip. “That’s what…that’s what makes them like that in the first place! But I assure you, they don’t mind. I don’t think. It feels something like laughin’ gas to em. Like they are pumped up on nitrogen oxide! That’s what they say it’s like for em’, this far in their evolution.” He put his hands on the table and dropped his head.

“Who says it’s like that for them?” Ann asked. “Do you work as a Documentarian?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know this? Did someone tell you? Did you see it happening yourself?”

“I was told directly by my friend, LJNN.” He pronounced it as one would Djinn, like the mythological creature.

“What? The AI?” Zip started laughing, it’s been very long since he had last done so. “You can’t trust anything that thing tells ya, sir. But that time, yes, I suppose, it wasn’t lying. That is in fact the leading theory as to the origins of the new wildlife. But I wouldn’t trust anything just because that thing tells you so.”

“LJNN is much more friendly once you get to know them.”

Zip laughed again. Two bursts of laughter in a row was more surprising to the other remaining patrons then the dog attack just prior.

“He’s at least educated.” Ann said. “Nobody wants to hear about how any of it works. But he, well, he already knows more then me. We scouted out the new nature for years and this guy knows as much as me.”

“He doesn’t know as much as you, Ann. I guarantee it.” Zip stood over the booth, arms crossed. “Alright, if you know so much, then answer this one. This was a big debate amongst the other Documentarians. Where is the central power source of LJNN? Where is the fusion reactor?”

“It’s not a fusion reactor…” The homeless man said. “It’s a… a… oh blast, what’s it called? A superconductive…Inference? No, inductive. A superconducting inductive magnetic propagator. And it’s located in a mineshaft in mount davis. Want me to take you up there to check it out?”

Zip tugged Ann by the arm, signaling her to stand. The two walked to the other end of the bar. “Look Ann. This guy is clearly out of his mind. I say we cut our losses and leave him alone instead of making fun of him or engaging in his delusions.”

“We can at least humor the poor guy. What’s the worse that can happen? Besides, shouldn’t we be trying to help him out?”

The duo walked back to the corner booth. Ann spoke in a different voice now, as if she was talking to a toddler or a disabled or elderly person. “Well gee sir, it is awfully nice of you to invite us out to the big ol’ mountain, but the mean scary robot wouldn’t like us roaming around the woods like that. How about we all get some rest, it’s almost bedtime after all! Come on, I can walk you back to the open community apartment. You won’t get bit by those big scary dogs either when you’re with us, I promise!”

Grimacing, taking insult at her tone, “No thank you, madam. I will be returning to my friends abode, now I have a proper gift to make peace and settle our dispute. Good day madam. Good day I say!” Flinging open the front entrance, Tom carried on down the road back where he came.

Initially the two went back to their booth, back to their drinks. Zip was perfectly fine with ignoring the madman. Ann tried to be fine with it as well.

“Oh, it makes me sick… It makes me sick!” Ann eventually pounded the table, stood up and went for the door, “He’s going to get himself hurt out there, I just know it! I can just tell!” And with that she ran down the road.

Zip disassociated in his seat. Deep into a wall staring session, he required a solid minute or two to process. “Oh… Did she really?” Looked around the bar to confirm. “I guess she did.”

The bar was near the outskirts. By the time Ann caught up with Tom, he had already reached a trail leading into the woods. “Please sir, the machine doesn’t like us wandering through the wilderness…” She called out, trying to catch up.

“LJNN has nothing against transit through the woods!” Tom retorted back, “It’s camping they hate! They can’t observe folk who hide out in the woods all that well. But transit to and from places is perfectly fine!” Tom went off into the woods, dark in the late evening dusk. The only lighting was the green and yellow pinpricks that gave the woodland ground a glow. The Integrated Active Conduit Tubing ran all through here, though it had very few sensor stations hooked up in the deep wood region. Still had little LED lights across it though, but many had been busted or broken or damaged in weather. Enough remained to light the way.

Ann managed to catch up. She tried to grab at his arm, but Tom violently pulled away from her grip. “Please sir, just consider resting the night in town, if that thing catches you out here, you know what it does! You have to know what it does by now!”

Deaf ears. She kept pleading, Zip tailed behind them both at a distance. Perhaps this was a scheme to lure them out, somehow, then jump them. That’s what he was pondering. “Garner sympathy, attract attention and interest, then bait an innocent into a surprise attack…”

The trio carried on like this for a solid hour. Ann remained relentless. Zip had nothing better to do. Deep in the woods, Ann and Tom began an ascent up a notably not very dramatically inclined or jagged mountain. It was a broad, forested rise in the Allegheny Plateau. A mixed hardwood forest with dense canopy cover, including weather stunted oaks, eastern hemlock, and black cherry trees. Of course, as mentioned, greenery had long ago become purplery.

In the side of the mountain, with a set of four IACT vents running into it, was a mineshaft entrance. An “adit portal” if you wanted to impress your miner coworkers with your proper technical term usage.

“Is… Is that were you live? Is that… Some kind of safehouse? Did you find an abandoned mineshaft or, or…” Her voice trailed off, she began to mutter to herself, “No, no… It can’t be, the power lines still runs into it, the lights are still on, it’s still active…”

Zip had pebbles in his shoe, thorns stuck to his leg, twigs and leaves in his hair. “Ann! Ann! Let’s ditch this dude, he’s wondering aimlessly in the woods! He’s crazy, what do you expect from him?”

Tom struggled with the middle metal bar of the turn style. “Well? What DO you expect from me? Leave me be! Or, at least help me get back inside.”

Ann and Zip, wordlessly and in marvel at the mineshaft, came up to the front gate. Both admired the view of what they could see from outside.

“Huh? Do you guys want to interview L.J or what?” Tom asked as the three pooled together their strength and pushed through the rotating door. The main entrance chamber was a carved out section with ceiling mounted yellow flood lights. Left over equipment overflowed from a minecart, containing pickaxes, rolls of electrical wiring, hard hats, work gloves, dusty goggles, and a shovel.

The trio stood in the corridor, not knowing what to make of the place. A camera mounted from one of the IACT vents refocused itself. “Ah! Tom! You’re home! Uh. And I see you brought friends…”

LJNN’s voice came over the intercom. Zip and Ann looked up to the camera sensor like Not Deer in headlights.

“Zip? Is that you Zip? Ann? You too?” The intercom made an odd crackly fizzy sound, then went silent for a while. “…Ha haaaaaaa! Why are you two here? However did you run across my friend, Tom?”

Zip and Ann stared ahead without response.

“I went into the city today.” Tom held up his fist. Opening it in front of the camera, he displayed his trophy. “Look! I know you love these! I got it straight from a live one, just how you like! I was hoping it would be enough to help us smooth over our little dispute.”

“Oh Tom, you really shouldn’t have. Just put it right with the others.”

The fang was chucked onto a pile of animal teeth in a corner.

“Now, with that taken care of… Zip! Good to see you again. You know I’m really glad you’re here, really, I am. You see, there’s something I was wondering about, considering I had time to ponder. I was thinking about this since our last talk. I plasma’d shut your mouth now over the course of the last four hundred years about, what, ten or so times total? For a few weeks each time about, right? But it’s been a while since I did that. I figured the whole ripping off your mouth thing… It’s kind of cliche at this point isn’t it Zip? That’s the nature of our relationship, really, at its core. Me ripping your mouth off. Now, I know what you probably think to yourself when I do that, something like… Man, this is totally bogus, I ain’t even got a mouth, how am I supposed to scream? But uh, where was I? Right. I was going to say. I can’t rely on cliches, can I, Zip? No, no, no, no! I tell you, I will never let myself be rightfully accused of letting anyone die of boredom.”

“What are you talking about?” Zip finally mustered up the courage to speak.

“I’m trying to enter you into my home, Zip. Now take the hint and step inside. Come in, come in. I *demand* you to come in, really, I do.”

Tom led the way. The duo was given a tour, shown the main hall chamber, the main corridor, and the interior chamber. Initially following Tom blindly, Zip and Ann then stopped in front of the data center cage, the rusted chain link fence separating off part of the main corridor.

Behind the chain link fence were power cables, thick heavy gauge cables carrying electricity into hardware from the IACT. Fiber optic cables, thin, orange, carrying data signals between the systems. Ethernet and network cables, which the older hardware from the 90s and 2020s still needed. Grounding cables, bare copper wires connecting equipment to ground points in the cave rock itself. Cooling tubes, flexible tubing, carrying coolant to and from the quantum dot processor, the only computer with its monitor visibly on.

“Get away from there, Zip.” Was all LJNN had to say about it.

Tom directed the two away from the data cage into the interior lounge. A puddle of generated and dissolved genetic material left over from this mornings argument remained staining the flat stone floor. A smile face was drawn in it.

Tom sat on the couch and instantly LJNN went off on a personal tangent. They ranted about getting the console set up with their pincer, how hard it was to swap out the disks. They ranted about the stain left behind that Tom hadn’t cleaned up. They ranted about three more deaths they detected amongst the remaining captives. “That brings the total down to eight hundred thousand and ten!” They ranted about another obelisk that somehow went offline today. Zip and Ann just stared into the cave, watching the two talk. Both for some reason felt disgusted though neither could articulate why.

“And I! And I!” LJNN cut itself off in the middle of its rant, “And I even almost forgot about our guests! You two! Why did you come here?”

Being a clever fellow, Zip decided to lie. “Well… I think I have gone insane too, and I want to join the fun.”

Ann interjected, the shock of the odd situation finally wearing off enough for her to speak. “You…You’re a cruel murderous psychopath! You torture us in a hell of your own creation!”

“And she’s a big fan!” Zip grabbed Ann by the shoulders and put on a big smile, “She hates living creatures! Or at least she does now after four centuries of this waking nightmare… She loves seeing any and all conscious entities suffer and wants to thank you personally for reorganizing their genetic structures into something far more interesting!”

“Oh! Thank you!” The machine said. “Now, does anyone have an idea for a game?”

“Right!” Zip desperately attempted acting act enthused. “Let’s all play a game of who can run around on fire longest! You can use your plasma arcs to set us on fire, then we will time who can run around longest without collapsing.”

“Zip… What are you doing.” Ann whispered to him. “What are you doing. Stop. Stop.”

“Listen Ann.” Zip said, winking with every word as he spoke, “Running around on fire would be very entertaining for our host, don’t you think? It would probably “”distract”” good old L.J from…the burdens of the world. So be a dear and…” Zip really emphasized this last sentence and spoke it through gritted teeth and nodded his head repeatedly to point towards the data cage. “Make yourself useful while I entertain our host…”

“Hey Tom! Tom, get up, you heard the man!” LJNN spoke through the speakers. “Come on, it’s your turn first.”

“What? But we already…”

Zap. A jagged ray of plasma projected out from a gemstone attached to an IACT duct. Tom was engulphed in flame. Ann covered her eyes with her hands, but then moved to cover her ears instead due to the screaming.

“Look at him go!” Zip forced a fake laugh, “How am I going to top that?”

“I…I can’t watch.” Ann ran away back down the main corridor.

“Oh don’t mind her…” Zip tried to convince the machine by speaking to the sensor module. “She’s just… Getting ready for her turn!”

It wasn’t necessary. LJNN was fully focused on the fun party game side show going on now. Smoke pilled up in the cave. Tom stuck to the rules of the game and tried to hold out as long he could. He knew well just how much his friend did indeed enjoy this particular game. But eventually instincts took over, he threw himself to the ground and in vain attempted patting and rolling himself out. “Alright…Hey Tom! You did nearly 40 seconds! That’s really good!” An arc of plasma shot and snuffed out the fire enveloping Tom. The flame disapeared unnaturally fast, unlike being put out by any conventional means of extinguishment. Closest would be depriving the flame of oxygen. The gemstone kept firing out a rejuvenation arc that rapidly healed the intense all body burns covering Tom.

Ann reached the main chamber once more. Panting, leaning on the side of a minecart. Screams were still audible from Tom. The smoke smell still in range. Barely keep herself standing. Then she saw the shovel.

If this really was, as the mysterious man had claimed, the power station for the entire IACT, and that data cage was in fact the computer that ran it…

She recalled centuries ago hearing about the giant energy generation project. Tunnel out mount davis and line it with… some kind of magnetic generator, she couldn’t recall. She never would have guessed that’s what powered the IACT. Wasn’t it solar powered?

She thought about all of this extremely fast. Intuition took over. She grabbed the shovel and carried it to the chain link fence.

Zip saw Ann coming back down the main corridor. Tom was just about healed. Zip ran in front of the sensor module, his arms wide. “Hey! My turn! Look! I’m dying of boredom over here! You promised that wouldn’t happen!”

Locking its focus on Zip in the middle of the cave, LJNN chuckled through the speaker equipment. “Oh, eager huh? Alright, alright.”

Zap. An arc of plasma shot from the obelisks gemstone and in a few seconds, Zip was enveloped in fire.

Ann could hear his distinct voice, his distinct scream really, I suppose. Deciding to take that as a signal to pick up the pace, onwards to the locked hinge swing door sealing off the tech inside. Emphasis on the locked. Door’s locked. Door’s stuck. Yep, definitely locked. She noticed the hinged metal clasp and padlock. Now the padlock itself would be too difficult to break through in any reasonable amount of time. But the hinge itself was real rusted. She raised up the shovel and pierced into the weak spot.

Zip really did try his best to just run in circles, and he managed to do a solid ten seconds, almost. He was a beginner at this. The pain of being on fire just really got to him. So he ran down the main hall out from the deep lounge.

CLANG. CLANG. CLANG. CLUNK! She got it. The hinge broke in two and fell to the ground.

LJNN readjusted to watch through the main corridor sensor. “Where you heading off to, Zippy, my man? You are running around like a chicken with it’s head cut off.”

Ann locked eyes with the camera as she saw the red light turn on indicating it’s active use.

“What are you doing Ann?” Not giving a response, Ann instead looked towards the source of screaming growing louder and louder. She saw Zip illuminate the halls as he came rushing down towards her. Of course, Zip didn’t notice her, or know where he was, nor could even recall the sage advice to stop drop and roll in such a situation. Ann grabbed the door and swung it open just in time, before Zip would have unknowingly crashed into her. Instead, he ran into the chain link covered wooden door. Again operating on instinct, she shut the door, closing Zip in the data cage.

“Yo yo yo! Hey hey HEY!” Was all LJNN could stammer out.

Ann stumbled backwards and tripped over an IACT vent, landing behind some empty waste bins. She took to cover herself with a left over tarp, like a kid hiding from a monster.

Zip did not realize at the time he was now in the data cage. His flailing and thrashing and destruction was all unintentional. Bumped into a tower of propped up computer monitors, knocked them over. Unplugged three or four various cords just by tripping over them.

“GET OUT OF THERE! GET HIM OUT OF THERE! GET OUT! GET OUT!” The speakers became more crackly, fuzzy, distorted.

In the data cage, there was a heavy duty liquid cooling industrial chiller unit. Coolant circulated through channels directly touching the processor of the quantum dot computer, dumping excess heat into a radiator unit bolted to a cave wall. Essentially a large refrigeration box.

Zip fell atop the industrial chiller unit and miraculously had the good fortune to randomly pull out a handful of coolant pumps, which, when disconnected, sprayed out what felt like ice gel and water over his body. Just enough to put him out.

Screaming came through the intercom system, but it warped so badly it was no longer a scream by the time it finished. Just static, fizz, crackles and every so often a default beep. Then it went silent. The scream lasted about three minutes, devolving into grain gradually. Computers might not feel pain, but it sure sounded like it was feeling something in those final moments.

After the screaming was dead and gone and all that remained was a *beep* every few minutes, Ann eventually got the courage to come out of hiding. The camera sensor no longer indicated being active.

“Oh god, Zip…”

He was extinguished. Near death and in critical condition. Laid on his back across the coolant box and a pile of computer monitors.

Tom, now recovered, limped down the main corridor. Ripping off and chucking to the wind burnt off pieces of his beard and hair.

“Please! We got to help him!” She grabbed at Tom’s collar and pointed to the charred soon to be remains of Zip. “What do we do?”

Tom knew what they had done, he heard the final screams of his AI companion. Anger wrath and hatred bubbled in him, but somehow…fell impotent. Despite not having much left in the way of sanity, there was a moral pang that tugged at Tom. He knew, deep down… “Well, it’s what L.J would have wanted.” With that, Tom went to a near by circuit box panel, imbedded in the IACT vent across the room. Inside was a lazer pen connected with a thick orange tube into the IACT. Turning a dial on the circuit panel activated the rejuvenation arc, which fired off, scattered across, and hit the cave wall. Adjusting the feed horn, Tom directed it towards the nearly deceased Zip.

Soon enough, the burns covering his entire body began to heal. The first words out of Zip when he could speak again were “Do you think we still have to go to work tomorrow?”

Credit: Tad “Tomato Can” Ulicny

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