(This was written in 2017. There may be some grammatical errors/or even errors with the tense shifting from 1st to 3rd, past to present. I taught myself creative writing and I'm pretty damn sure that at this point I didn't know how to handle my tenses. Consider this a ghost story of what Reverb used to be. It isn't canon, but I really enjoyed the interaction here between Jack and the AI.)
I stepped into the basement.
The first thing I saw were the bodies hanging from the ceiling. They were suspended by electrical wires. None of them were still active. But the bodies sat at the desks were. They rode the computers, bodies without faces; absent feelings. They were mechanical shells. They typed without rhythm, absent passion, across grey, dusty units for hours on end, only stopping when something broke or fell away. One of them only had one hand. It had fallen onto the desk, and the AI had adjusted to typing with only a single finger, her thumb striking the spacebar in a practical manner. Occasionally, she would stop and lift her stub and turn towards it strangely, as if wondering where it had gone, but then an alert would sound on the monitor and she would resume her work. Sometimes her phantom limb tried to get involved and her left hand would hesitate, sensing a mistake. She'd pause with her fingers in her lap, then look around for assistance, but no one ever came.
Walking over, I checked her work and edited a typing error. Then putting my hand on her shoulder, I squeezed. She was tense, at first. But then she settled down and slowly resumed her typing, her head vaguely tilted my way. I saw that she had written: ''Jack...?'' On the word-processor. A faded Union Jack tattoo was barely visible on her neck. The paint had chipped away, her shell corroded, and the wires that led into her chest had been chewed through by parasites; leaving all her internals exposed. If I wanted to, I could end it all by pulling a wire, but a half-life was better than none at all, I thought. I left her be.
I turned aside and approached the console.
Monitors stretched the length of the basement wall. There were three chairs. One placed on the far left, the other on the right, the last in the middle. Only one of them wasn't dusty.
I sat down in my chair, put down the crowbar, and logged on.
If you don't commit to an idea, no one can call you out on it. You become a non-entity. A floating head in a black box spouting words that don't really mean anything....
I looked up at the screen. The screen glared with contrasting information. Everything was in the red. I felt my eyelids falter, but pressed on and found what I was looking for.
Gemini.
I opened up her profile; her shadow self.
I should explain: when you go online, a user profile is created for you. This profile is you. It becomes you. It begins by taking a piece of you for itself, altered only by time; but as time goes by that profile expands until it can predict who you are, what you like, and even where you'll be. These observations become predictions because they become a mathematical certainty the more time you put into your device. This is dangerous because users are so predictable, and with enough empirical evidence our futures become certain. It is difficult to argue with a person's routines. And most users get caught up in this web of influence until their devices become second nature. They wake up to them, become normalised around them, and then no longer question where they came from; who operates them; or for what purpose they've been sold to us. Our intellectual laziness kicks in due to a prolongation of habit. When actually, the phone was not there when we were born, it did not raise us, it does not nurture us, yet users statistically give their devices more attention than their mothers, siblings, external environment, even themselves.
The AI behind me stops her typing and turns towards me. Faceless, her stare unnerves me. I look across to her and stare back. She does not look away. Sat postured in a typing position, her body is stiff and unnatural. I wait to see if she'll do anything else, but when she doesn't, I return to the console.
Gemini is in the red. Her Karma is bad, her statistics are poor, her longevity is uncertain. I'm devastated to see that the algorithm believes she won't last another ten years. She won't achieve her goals. Her Karma will expire before accomplishing her current objectives. But there's still hope. Most users don't even have a goal. At least she has a struggle, I remind myself. I check her interactions, and as I do, I feel my eyebrows growingg severe.
''You bastard!'' I stand up and launch my chair across the room at Credits' seat. The two collide, and one of them takes a turn towards the floor and shatters entirely.
I feel a gentle hand on my shoulder. I turn and start, but it's only the faceless AI.
She is expressionless. I look down at her hand. It is touching me how I touched her. I look back up at her face, her head is inclined slightly into a tilt, like a puppy questioning its surroundings.
I reach up and gently put my hand around her wrist, then pull it down. Then reaching back, I take the crowbar and pass it to her. She holds it with a sense of unfamiliarity, tilts her head down to look at it, then looks back at me; all without being able to see. The Union Jack on her neck stays with me. Behind us, the red glare of the console highlights a halo of light around the back of my head. I stare at her thoughtfully for a moment, then ask her: ''Will you do something for me?''
She takes a moment to comprehend the question and then adjusts her body language to be more receptive and nods stiffly. I take her wrist and lead her to the console and sit her down in the remaining chair. She sits demurely with the crowbar in her lap, but keeps her head tilted up towards me attentively.
''I'm going to jack you in,'' I inform her. I get down on my knees and work the console and pull loose an input and find a panel by her shin and rip it free. She doesn't flinch. I insert the cable into her, stand up, then navigate the system. My eyes reflect the innumerable data leached from hundreds of thousands of tethered-in users as I pull up the console command and open up a fresh process. Beside the window, I keep all of Gemini's projections in view, because frankly, I have a hunch.
''Who are you?'' I ask her.
She looks at the screen, as if she's reading what I've typed into the console, and then without having to lift her hand to type, the words appear on screen: ''I am Gemini 054-Subroutine Data Analyst?''
I feel wretched. My throat constricts and I hang my head for a moment, forcing down the impulse to vomit. I cannot vomit, but my system reproduces it so effectively that I feel dizzy for a second.
I huff through my nose and wet my lips and look back at the screen. I study Gemini's data and how it's changed over the years. It's gone from good to bad in a matter of a decade; all because of that prick and his systematic abuse. Credits has been using the system against her. Rigging her Karma to negatively impact her life. But why?
Why do you feel like you need to control her?
I walk over to the humming servers and pull off the plastic sheets that guard them. There are tens of them, stretching throughout the basement like joint towers, their insides glowing red; vessels of corruption.
I walk the jagged rows. The AI watches from her chair, still plugged in. Then I look across to her and think
I walk back to her slowly, studying her in the red halo of the console, and she tracks me with her body language and looks up at me once I'm near. I see her hand lying lax over the crowbar and know what I'm about to do.
Show her what you've lost.
I reach over to the keyboard and start typing. She sits up straighter as soon as I start, more alert as the system data starts to imprint itself on her. I type faster, furiously, and I see her body grow taut. Her hand grips the crowbar. Her face, or lack thereof, narrows and pinches around where her nose and eyes ought to be. Then her shoulders start to tremble as she abruptly stands up and is caught only by the cable that's still inserted into her calf.
She pants without a mouth, face absorbed in the red light of the console, her head turning back and forth to look at the multitude of data I've collected over the years, all the Karmic debt we've accrued. Then a thin, metallic screech reverberates from inside her as she lifts the crowbar in her remaining hand and smashes it down onto the keyboard beneath my fingers. It splits in two. Then in a fit of fury she attacks the console blindly, smashing up the screens and going so far as to climb onto the desk to get a better vantage over the monitors.
I step back and watch, eerily fascinated with her.
By the time she's done, the entire station is a wreck, spluttering sparks, error messages and shards of broken glass. Her hardware is dented, face-plate scratched, knuckles split open from the attack. The crowbar has been notched a few times over. Weary and deflated, she turns towards me and registers me for the first time in around five minutes. I see her trembling, scared; her grip around the crowbar white-knuckled. She does not approach, and I don't either. I can tell she's full of questions. And when I don't give her any, her chest fills with another screech--only this time with more body.
The AI rattles like a cobra.
Why?! She's asking me. I know it. I can feel it on her. She's wary of me, stood with her feet apart and the crowbar out, she slithers off the broken desk and starts making her way towards me. I instinctively step forward, welcoming the challenge, which of course makes her hesitate. The crowbar in her hand falters. She's no longer stiff and naive. I've filled her with enough venom to make her hard and uncooperative, but she's still just a half-broken down bot; and she knows it.
I come towards her and she backs off and sweeps at me with the crowbar. It's a dummy blow and not meant to hit but rather scare me off. I grasp it with an iron hand and bend her wrist backwards until the joints of her radius and ulna feel weak. She looks at me with a creased brow, but this time without anger. Fear flashes across her figure instead.
I reach around her wrist and slide the crowbar out from from beneath her fingers. She lets it go with only a slight struggle.
''If you're bitter, then use it.''
I let her wrist go and she curls it around her stomach defensively. Her left stub hangs idle. She stands in a crouch, as if fearful that I'll hit her. Some of her anger still lingers though, I notice. There's still some fight in her yet.
I turn around and walk towards the servers. She watches me without moving. Then I grip the crowbar and swing it into one of the pylons. The surface crumples on impact and the whole unit rocks and stutters, the light inside flickering madly, and my shadow writhes around me. The fluorescent lights of the basement go out and stagger back to life. The AI tilts her head again, then steps towards me curiously. I feel her interest grow and turn on the data-bank and lay into it until it's reduced to rubble. Only then do I look over my shoulder, air whistling through my teeth.
She's right there beside me, head tilted, fingers splayed out. They move as if she's searching for something. I'm not certain how she manages to see with her face-plate, but her senses are keen enough for her to have made it this far. For some reason, her lack of identity doesn't unnerve me, instead; I find it reassuring. Too often people lie with their faces. I find myself trusting her.
I offer her the crowbar, out of breath. ''Want to do the rest?''
She looks at me, trippy, then reaches out uncertainly and takes it. I gesture to the rest, my chest rising and falling, sparsely aware of the Union Jacks on both our necks. She walks to the nearest server and places her foot against it and applies her weight until it keels over and crashes down, and then she leaps on it; that anger inside her taking the forefront once again, which I watch and actively encourage. The caved-in console screen our witness, cast across one side of the room to the other, stuttering to try and output the visuals of the computer, which has been badly damaged, and is attempting to process a number of fatal errors.
I watch as she destroys the entire facility and the lights go out and the last monitor attached to the console shuts down, but not without a warning; a prediction. Without the internet, the algorithm predicts that the users will become unstable without access to their credit cards, bank accounts, social contacts, and predicted environment. They may indulge in reckless activities based on their natural instincts of preservation, such as looting, assault, and obstruction of government. I pull an appreciative expression and walk over to the console and reach beneath it for the interior of the computer and fish around inside the casing until I find the hard drive, which I then rip out; tearing the heart out of the system along with it. A few fleshy cables dangle out of the casing and spit acid as I grind the hard drive into an amalgamation of metal and filing in the palm of my hand.
On the way out of the basement, I stoop beneath a set of shelves and drag out a box of spare parts. The darkness is no problem for me, but I can hear the AI stumbling around, and I realise that she must have some sort of vision; if extremely limited.
No good to me like that, I take out a visor and a spare hand, stronger; military grade. I check the diagnostics on it and as it comes alive and starts feeling around I learn that it is part of a larger whole, which is also housed in the basement. I check the shelf number, they're all listed and filed by yours truly, and discover the rest of the military-grade hardware is only two shelves up.
I pull out three sets of containers filled with torsos, arms, and legs. Stainless steel, impact drives, carbon fibre to reduce weight; faster, stronger, punchy. That's what I want; punchy. Like me.
''Hey?''
I hear her hear me. She looks around in the dark and pursues the sound of my voice, the crowbar scraping along the floor.
When she appears, still panting, her exterior scraped up, I lift the visor over her head and strap it to the back of her skull. She reaches up with her stub and touches it, then winces in awe when I turn it on. She looks around, seeing things she's never seen before, outlines and hard details, even the dust in the air. I see her marvel at these like a child in her first snowstorm, and whilst she's busy and distracted fit her with the hand. She stops what she's doing to watch me do it, and then lifts the new hand before her visor. It is admittedly beautiful, a marvel of engineering, and as intricate and capable as if it were real. She looks at me past her raised wrist and her visor glitches. Only it isn't a glitch. She's trying to communicate. A single word spells itself out on her headset: Who?
Our father. Prox.
She ruminates on this and the hand, then: Where?
He's gone. Busy off-world; off-server.
... Why?
I don't answer her except with a look and focus on taking her apart. She stays relaxed whilst I swap out her parts. It isn't much of a process, even as I transfer her head to her new body. He built it all to do itself.
Once I'm done, I let her get used to her new body and then scruff her roughly. She seizes up and attempts to fight back. But I'm stronger. I pin her to the wall, deflect the hand that goes for my throat, and pin her back down with my hands and knees, this time there's no hand and she just struggles in vain. I apply pressure to every part of her body and that high-pitched sound forms in her throat fearfully. I think she thinks that I gave her hope just to take it away. That I'm about to be cruel. But I'm not.
Listen. This is bigger than you; or me; what we're about to do, we only get one shot at. Prox will come after us. The whole server will come after us. There's another bot. His name is Credits. He's likely already on his way here. Any moment now, I'm going to get an emergency call asking just what the hell I think I'm doing. We're going to track his IP from that call and intercept him and fuck him up. Do you get me?
Gemini looks at me through the visor with her head tilted back and her chin up. She strains for a second longer, instinctively I think, and then relaxes once she's processed my message. She saw the raw data on the console. She knows who Credits is. If she is who I think she is, then---
An emoticon scrolls across her visor: 凸(`д´)凸
I smile and let her go. As I move to leave, I'm glad to discover she steps after me. When I stop, she stops; when I move, she moves.
We're synced; whilst the rest of the world has been torn apart.
Slogans such as: ''YO5 D0N'T G3T T0 D3C!DE!'' are seen spray-painted across the city. In August 2026, Parliament are attacked by the hacker group, MA3LSTR0M. There are no survivors, and no further form of government rises to take its place. The server is subjected to the anarchy of its virtual currency, Karma.
