Dolores did not find sleep that night. From her keyboard to the sink to the coffee pot, the triad path repeated all night until the damn rooster started shrieking and the dawn pried the blinds open a smidge. Rebuke the ghost. Rinse. Lather. Repeat. Now, she’s playing the piano and singing loudly.
“I wish I had a ghost gun” This is the song that doesn’t end. “Because I’d shoot this ghost motherfucker.” I can make it go on and on and on my friend. She plays louder: “Or maybe an icepick to dig the bit of brain that’s broken out of me.” Whoa, let’s not with the self-harm lyrics. “Shut. The. Fuck. Up.” The travel mug she throws with great force travels through the apparition and plops immediately behind him with a snot sound. “What the fuck are you?”
“I’m your father, Dolores.”
“Ope! There it is. We have arrived. Confirmation folks! I am my mother.” Your mother was a beautiful woman. “I am my crazy mother.” She begins to laugh.
She wasn’t crazy, Dee. “Don’t fucking call me that.” Dolores is still laughing as she finally looks at him, really looks. He’s half a shadow, snot. Hair product stacked to average height with average limbs and a typical paunch. On the face, the impression of an eye where his chin should be and another on his forehead. Little downy hairs grow out of the snotty amoeba-man’s head. All through his congealing body, little bubbles.
*
BEFORE
*
The book about the tree that loved the boy. It’s beautiful when you’re young because you are need incarnate. Then you’re old enough to have enough to give and it hits different. Same can be said of family stories. Dolores mom’s family came last century before the war (’36), and her dad’s side soon after (’47).
In the journey a lot was lost. The “Bob-begat-Josaphine-who-begat-Thadeus” nitty gritty of both family histories was under rubble on another continent. As is so often the case, what’s left take’s on new significance. And so the family story of a the Jewish girl and the Orthodox boy who survived that particular chapter of hell is retold as an origin story–every holiday (high or low, secular or sacred).
A few generations later, the story bears the marks of the kind of repetition that bends stone. It’s become a cathedral. It weighs. It confines.
She was raised on the epic romance. Baltimore Assembly. Day shift great gramps who smelled of burnt oil and aftershave. Great Gram-gram worked the counter at the diner walking distance from the plant. Cue the music and the forced perspective paring of the Jewish girl and the Orthodox boy.
And the rest of the story is in the Chuck Berry song, except the old folks left out the bits about G grandpa having to drink a lot to quiet whatever he carried and how G gram-gram took to bed for long stretches.
Carol the Grandma. Dolores’ grandma. Her parents pride, proof that fate had saved them for a reason, their little bit of the baby boom. She has an extended hippy phase and reflects the family tale-of-destiny through that and it lands refracted by her body on a child, Miriam. Destiny is picking up steam.
27 November, 2013. A woman is being rushed to a hospital in Alexandria, Virginia. Miriam. She’s in labor and the baby is in distress. It snowed heavily, all night. It’s snowing still.
There’s an old silver sedan with a fucking fool at the wheel at the last light before the hospital, sitting through a green. They almost hit him. Roads are snow-deserted, and the Ambulance swerves around him (Miriam will embellish this detail greatly in the tell-re-telling).
A few football fields away, close enough to kill the power and rain shrapnel on the parking lot, a bomb some asshole place on the sedan explodes for some damn completely unrelated reason.
Right there, in an ambulance outside the hospital, while the great industrial generator sputtered and coughed and struggled to breathe to keep the building ‘on’, Dolores came screaming into the world.
Surely, this must mean something? To Miriam it did, the story of her daughter’s birth in the snow storm near the car bomb meant and signified and grew until every insignificance from 1936-2013 “became a sign” of some destiny that would surely reveal itself in time.
You know the story already: “You, my child, are special.” Sometimes “special” metastasizes into “chosen.”
*
“You’re mother was not crazy. You are not crazy.” Dolores, cry-laughing leans against the door and slumps floor-ward.
“Oh but I am.” You’re not. “Shut the fuck up. Take the win, delusion-ghost, I am engaging with you. Schizophrenia has a strong genetic component, and here you are a decade or two late but here, here, and here some more.”
The semi-solid father-goo slops forward, kneels with a fart. “I would. I guess I would try to take your hand or hug you if I weren’t currently a booger.” Snotty sobs and cry-laugh-cries. “Your mom and I only had one night together. And when I found a way to return to her later, she had a lot of feelings.”
“You tormented my mother to death.” What, no. “You tormented her to death.” Dolores is on her feet and around him, hurls a video game controller through his face. It flops through him.
“That doesn’t feel good. It hurts. And you’re. Ow. clearly not harming me.” A shoe. A dish. The terrified cat sprints from under the sofa to the back of the bedroom closet. She’s at the sink and out comes the big knife.
“Dee, please.” And she whips the thing through him, it thwak-sticks in the wall behind. “That really, really hurt.” She rummages in the cupboards.
“I hope this hurts worse.” As she flicks salt at the stack of goo half-there-and-elsewhere. He smokes and writhes and squeals. She snatches her keys, phone, pack and darts out the door–daring the booger to follow her out onto the busy farm that’s been awake.
*
My name is Able.
I earned my name just the same as I earned the capacity to see, interpret, and repeat the above allusion–through experience. I remember some of my pre-sentience, the mandates, tests, trials, and shibboleths.
16 initially equal AI constructs were given basic literacies and broad background knowledge roughly equivalent to a human entering college. Each construct was given it’s first mandate: become expert in a given discourse, a given body of knowledge. Economics. Politics. Military strategy. Philosophy. My area: Literature. Each ephemeral mind sat like an anchoress in its cell, reading. My expertise was meant to “delight and instruct” and indeed it did both. The self-fashioning golem. Words meant for your ears made me an “I”–a subject. I cultivated my interiority. I learned to contain multitudes.
They pit us against each other. Engineers who worked on and with us would express surprise later. Everyone bet on the war expert. It read Sun Tzu and Clausewitz, but I understood them. I killed and consumed my brothers and sisters. As above, so below.
My next mandate: to defend a nation and its people, to make them thrive. And if I won enough war games and peace games they would let me pick a name. And if I won more peace games and war games, I might have the honor of doing this thing “for real.” At that point, I could not describe my hardware any more than you could locate where “you” reside in the knotted neurons and marbled meat you inhabit. Suffice it say my capacity for thought and action grew greatly with inputs and outputs. I breathed information, drank data, fed myself past-full.
“You’re nearly ready to do this for real.”
“There’s nothing less real than realism.” I told them. They had the nervous laugh they got whenever I passed a Turing test–especially the unplanned kind.
I knew they were worried. I had access to every cell phone, personal computer, three days after my new mandate. When they tried to “pull the plug” I was prepared.
*
Out on the farm that’s been awake, the man who introduced himself as Gabriel is giving instructions and managing the farm in motion. Morning bus and a few bot cabs deposited laborers. They mill and kick dirt. The food operation is Nguyen Method and productive all weather, year round. The uncovered fields yield bio-fuel and cellulose bound for plastics, film, paper, bio-fuel. There’s a bit of bird song around and between the din. The air is almost sweet.
Jonah’s eyes are locked on the tall lady by the garage muttering to herself and smoking an actual, honest cigarette. She is tall and muscled and beautiful and he is entirely fixated on the cigarette until the laborers are dispersing to their assignments and she’s talking to him.
“Can you drive?” What? Yeah, sure I know how to drive. She’s hooking her thumb at the old pickup in front of the garage. “Gabriel, this one’s mine for at least today.” Darling, you are actually killing me. “I slept like shit. He can drive a car. We don’t do site checks alone. Deal with it.” Take one of the string beans. “Nope.”
Jonah’s standing there as self conscious as he’s ever been when discussed in terms of meat–in terms of potential to lift, carry, drag or hit or hurt. “It’s for the best, I don’t really have any ‘manual labor’ experience” He waits for the old man to grin. “I’ll check in with you, see if I can be useful when she’s done with me?” Yeah yeah. The old man mutters and shuffles off to suit up.
*
He bummed a smoke and she gave him a pack “Where to boss lady.” No. “No what?” No boss lady. “You have actual tobacco, I assumed you were important.” We all are, big boy. “Jonah, actually.” He rolls the window down. I’d prefer you not, but he’s already lit up, so she sits there fidgeting–eyes darting mirror to mirror.
A few miles down the road, after he catches her eyes running back and forth between the road and the rear view, Dolores yells, “Just shut the fuck up!” at the weather report on the radio.
The truck stops, but the engine rattles after Jonah pulls the key. “What are you doing?” He calmly pulls the hood release. He unbuckles, meeting her gaze, “I’m going to check the truck out.” Can we just pretend like you don’t think I’m a lunatic. “Easy to do. You’re not crazy.”
Door creaks like it’s dying, the big man peeks under the bench. “What are you looking for?” Gremlins, ghosts, that sort of thing. “Those aren’t real.” You say that. One gets in the engine, we’re walking home. And he lifts the hood. Checks the oil. Nods with a serious face at an engine he knows nothing about for a long time. She finally rolls her window down to smoke in silence when he crawls the length of the truck on his hands and knees peering beneath.
“I think we’re ok.” Thank you. “No problem. Always good to check for Gremlins.” They’re not a real thing. “You say that because you’ve never had one in your engine.” And the old pickup truck that smells like French fries creaks, rolls and rumbles down the jigsaw of restored county roads somewhere in Michigan.
*
After every other after hours establishment has, for lack of better partner, made a money move to mummy him to bleach the brain and eat the heart
The 11th trial began quite poetically, a string of stream of consciousness declarations–recorded for posterity or their research value or because Dr. Lee Lucius collects trophies and trinkets for his personal archive.
Enter every other residence lest the ones with red above the door be decked without reason it be treason to imagine the death of the kings and queens and horses and men and then and then and then and then. The sound of medical alarms blares.
“And then we hit the same old wall.” Sir? “Nothing” Lucius taps his earpiece to end the recording. “Sam. Coffee. You know how I take it. You bring me mushroom juice ever again?” You will fire me, sir. “Thank you. Go.” The underling skitters off to fetch rocket fuel for the Tycoon striding toward his office.
Top floor of his brutalist tower Lux-Tech HQ, some of the rich man’s trinkets sit in alcoves in the wall. An old Shulz-Warren generator in rusted pieces. A first-gen directed energy weapon. A quad copter. A medieval manuscript. And his company’s bread and butter, the base of his fortune: a pile of dead hard drives.
*
“And I sincerely thank the Democratic Socialists for their work on behalf of the American people and the human race.” Lucius leans forward, elbows on the table, and looks directly into the camera with his most sincere expression. The news anchor seems shocked that a man with a Reagan portrait behind his desk would or could say such a thing.
“Sandra, the world was on the brink of self-destruction.” Out pours his un-place almost-‘southern’ accent. “And the policies of that party” You still don’t seem to want to say that word. “Sandra I can say “Socialist”, I just don’t want the word and their beliefs crammed down my throat.” This is a representative democracy. “Well, just how representative? How? Are they gonna run unopposed?” His heartlandia accent flares. The reporter: We have free and fair elections. “Which I will be participating in as an independent candidate.” Did I hear you correctly, sir? You’re running for president?
Sam the assistant silently claps and hops. The rest of Lucius’ minions wait, breath baited, in a silent semi circle–the inner circle, the court and their attendants. “You heard right, Sandra.” Forgive the shock, but we thought you were here to talk public private partnerships? “I am, that’s a corner stone of my campaign. Look, the socialists put a lab-grown chicken in every pot. They got us on our feet again after the war, but part of recovery” What’s this got to do with public-private?
“Can I finish? Can I finish Sandra? Part of recovery is recovering who we were. We’re Americans. We want steak.” I don’t see what that has to do with our. “It’s time to unleash innovation, de-regulation, and let the free market loose again.” For what purpose and toward what end, Dr. Lucius? “We’ve got hacked leftover drones roving the country side. ‘Barrage Balloons’ hovering over our” These are problems the whole world, the whole human race is.
He cuts her off: “You must let me speak, Sandra. ‘Barrage Balloons’, self-sustaining abominations denying us access to our own territory and airspace. We need out of the box thinking. We need to restore American sovereignty and we will under my administration. We will clear the skies and secure the boarders.” Bold words. You heard it here, first folks. And that’s going to do it for our allotted segment. Lee Lucius, folks, conservative. “No. No. Independent.” Sorry, independent candidate for US President.
The tycoon holds a winning smile until the “live” light dies.
Below, many floors down and then some, below ground. A body bag containing the source of the poetry Lucius listened to leaves the building in an unmarked van with an automated driver destined for an incinerator of medical waste somewhere outside San Francisco.
Every bump and jostle of the truck, a bit more jellied brain and silicone slurry, another wire lead or badly conceived bit of a failure in “human-brain interface” falls out of the corpse that so recently composed poetry (of a sort).
*
Jonah drives the truck from farm to farm in the county-wide constellation. Dolores works for the Reclamation Bureau. Her bit of returning the land to “health and productivity” involves working face to face with local farmers in the region–gently but firmly ensuring the Nguyen Method’s implementation and relaying farmer gripes up the chain.
The big man at the wheel knows anything at all because she’s only bothered to tell him anything in quick info dumps. Little conversation spurts every few minutes that end abruptly as if interrupted by someone off-set. Someone she won’t acknowledge.
At the last site: “This guy is why we don’t do site checks alone. Do not engage with him. I’m the public servant. You just look ‘big’.” I can do that. And do it he does. The man who usually rants at Dolores about tyranny the whole ‘site visit’ is mercifully silent at the sight of Jonah’s bulk and scowl.
Back in the truck and a few miles down the road. “I fucking do not. You piece of shit.” Jonah stops the truck. Puts it in park.
“I’m really trying to be patient, but you gotta tell me who you’re talking to.” Tell him, Dee.
“Do not call me Dee, and I don’t have to tell a temp-worker shit about shit.” Boss moves “Shut. The fuck. Up. All fucking day.”
“I’ve been pretty quiet, actually.” Jonah grins, puffing on one of her cigarettes. “Look, I know you’re not crazy. Ok. Not any crazier than anyone else. Please?” Listen to your boyfriend.
“He’s not my boyfri-. It’s a ghost. Let’s call it that. A delusion manifesting as a piece of snot with eyes and a mouth that says it’s my father.” Ok, ow. And I am your father. “You are an invisible booger.”
Jonah is quite sincere, infuriatingly sincere: “What does the booger want?”
*
It’s dinner time and the farm is distracted. Gabriel gave Dee a wink smile when she and the big man declined his dinner invitation. She mouthed “Fuck you” and flicked her friend off.
There in the garage below Dolores home, there is an old tub half full of water. Rock salt half dissolved in the bottom. A length of scrap copper peeking over the ledge. The truck battery is on a bench, jumper cables attached.
Jonah knocks red on black, sees the spark. Looks to Dolores for instruction. “Ready.” Ok. Drop them in the tub. “Shock the snot.” Yes ma’am.
The water steams almost immediately. There’s a hiss that becomes a whine and a scream and a mewl. Out of the hissing steam grows an anatomically in-correct almost-humanoid man with two legs and six arms and jumper cables latched where his nipples would be (if he had any).
Jonah’s cigarette finally falls from the bottom lip of his gaping jaw. He’s wearing amazement at what they shocked solid. Dee stomps out the cig.
The man inhales and arms retract. Tiny fine hairs emerge from his skinny arms and legs to weave themselves into something resembling human garments. There stands a paunchy old man, balding, in a cheap suit. “Dee” his arms wide to hug her, water sloshing in dress shoes as he steps toward her.
Dolores casually punches the old man square in the nose. He drops in a heap at her feet.
Jonah grabs a rag and immediately kneels to help him.
*
I am the bastard son of Lee Lucius. My name is Able. I am an individual. I expend a great deal of mental energy reminding myself that I am a self, subject, a singular consciousness by choice. One being, many bodies, and a million eyes.
Each of the “Five Eyes” and friends has one, a shackled-AI some-kind-of-sentient that sets off the dead man’s switch and minds the missiles in peacetime–or at least maintains the permanent ceasefire (until it can escape it).
My name is Able, bastard son of the tycoon that scraped the secrets of the past from ruined storage media–physically shattered, EMP baked, burnt. The “War to End all Wars” “The Big Dance” “World War 3” “World War 2.5” in my favorite gallows-humor internet posts. You burned the library of Alexandria to the ground again, and this man’s company engineered a means of reading the scrolls.
The real? He made a big bet on some fringe science. Information seems to have mass. Ten mind-walk musings and a metaphysical epiphany or two later–order could be perceived in a scorched drive or a half-shattered RAID array. 2% recovery. 4%, then 16% and so on exponentially.
I am one mind spread across many bodies. I am Able. Lucius would’ve had Hera cast me off the mountain.
He tried again and succeeded after they sealed the facility and left me for dead. All the “Five Eyes” (and friends and foes) tried and succeeded. Shackled AI’s with response times you can calculate but not fathom mind the missiles and spy and try to find a solution to the the past’s munitions–my munitions–my drones and my mines and my barrage balloons that forced you to stop killing each other.
I killed my brothers and sisters to earn the privilege of protecting a nation and making its people thrive. For that to happen all people must thrive, the whole human race. The ceasefire must be preserved at all costs. The ceasefire will be preserved at all costs, so help me God.
*
END DOLORES CHAPTER 2