A Knot of Fate

She counted the time it took her tear to fall to the ground. It seemed to take about a second, she thought, before habitually analyzing the accuracy of this statement in her head. Thankfully, the sun was just rising.

Unthankfully, there seemed to be dead people everywhere. The air didn’t smell that clean, half the city was on fire, and the roads were broken and torn. It was a frightening event, and she was happy to be alive. This feeling manifested with a sort of irony to her happenstance.

It was the year 2044, so transportation wasn’t limited to roads, but considering the state of things, Suzi wasn’t considerably concerned with flying around at the moment. She wanted to first get an assessment of things. She was the only survivor in sight, despite the area’s dense population. There was no particular reason for her particular survival, besides a few angles and obstacles which happened to exist at the right time and at the right places.

She was in a pretty ritzy part of town at the time, College Park, Atlanta, in the United States. In the late 2020’s, a cultural revolution and an emerging über-mobility revolution began to suddenly shift the landscape of not just the city or the country, but the entire world. A book on the importance of the separation of land and state was a popular cultish novel that had taken on some steam. Suzi thought it had some great points, although she wasn’t super adamant for either side. On the inside of this book was a low resolution drawing of the symbolic heart-shape. This symbol had become quite popular.

Suzi was trekking through the city when she found a copy of this book lying on a bookstand, made easily apparent by the damaged wall, or lack of wall, of the shop in which it was housed. She also found an intact book sitting on some rubble, where it surely would have been destroyed were it not purposefully placed there. A spark of illumination seemed to light up the area with this observation. That would indicate that there was someone else roaming about, who had not died of any of the explosions. She decided that she would indicate where she had been, to create a sort of traveled path for herself and others. Staying near this path should result in their finding one another. She also thought to write messages with stones or whatever she could find, particularly if she found any other signs of life.

The air smelt like a mildly deathly electrical fire, so she decided also to lead towards a cleaner space. Balancing concern for herself as well as for others, she carefully continued on.

After a few miles of distance traveled, as she was walking down an alley, she heard a growl of a strange sort. She was next to an up-and-coming artificial intelligence startup facility. The company, ArTech Fever, had a small handful of offices around the world. It was popular to be international, and most companies sought to establish locations in the midst of diverse cultures, languages, and traditions.

Suddenly, an alarm chaotically and very loudly attempted a coherent sound, and a loud explosion and ground-shaking were heard afterward. Naturally, this startled Suzi, and she couldn’t help but to wonder what the Hell it was. This kind of company was almost commonplace these days; AI had become easy to build and was highly commodified, so this creepy observation piqued her curiosity.

Not knowing what could be lurking in the halls of this tech office, she decided to bookmark it in her head and continue toward safety. Now, perhaps stirred by the sound, she saw some birds flying overhead. Noting the direction from where they flew, she set her target. She thought that she would have a statistically greater chance of finding clean air and living people if she followed the direction life seemed to be traveling from.

“Soon, birds will be abundant everywhere,” she thought. Once again she felt a strange irony of fortune that the apocalypse had just happened hours ago. She knew that if she waited for too long, the direction of bird travel may become meaningless. For now, she knew that if there was life, it was arriving from a safer place.

She thought maybe she should try and steal a flying taxi instead, but with the damage in the area, she was also afraid it would be useless. At the notice of her supposition that she could hack one of those, she laughed mildly. They certainly weren’t operational. The taxies would be shut down just due to unusual conditions, and now was certainly an unusual time.

Just as she thought that, a flying ship came down from the sky. She wasn’t in her usual state of mind, so she didn’t notice it at first, thinking briefly that there was a bird and then immediately ignoring it.

A voice caught her attention. “Hey! Hey! Hey!,” was heard and Suzi looked over to see a person in a working flying vehicle, fortunately being there. She quickly moved in that direction and responded, “Hey, my name is Suzi, who are you?”

A woman’s voice echoed in response, “Maria, good to meet you.” After waiting some time for Suzi to get nearer, crawling over a couple of fallen buildings, Maria asked if there was anyone with her, to which Suzi told her of the book she saw misplaced. Understanding this, they ventured off to find more people. More flying cars began to emerge over time, coming in from other locations, from people who owned such things. On a more normal day, most people would be using the taxis, as they could travel anywhere except over the ocean.

After picking up a few more people, they flew to an area that was hardly affected by the recent events. Places like this, that were both populated and with amenities, and also untouched by the recent detonations, were rare and uncommon, but they did exist. Everything was starting to make sense as she discussed, with the other survivors, the events that had just passed less than a day prior.

It was some sort of distributed and organized attack using weaponry that was designed to kill mutants, if that were ever to happen. John, a survivor on Maria’s ship, explained that it was supposed to favor killing a mutant over saving a person’s life, but it was only designed to kill if it detected a dangerous mutant creature.

John happened to work on defense systems with a secretive contractor, so he knew a lot about this event. He was the only one who had happened to survive out of something besides sheer luck. He had planned for it and was of the very few aware of it right before it happened, so he had found a way to be safe, he said.

Everyone had heard many rumors of various weapons being developed in the dramatically more free world, along with various and highly touted new technologies, almost always synonymously weapons. They all thought it was good to hear a lucid perspective of this.

Over the next year, the searches continued while society developed again. The world had a lot less trust, it seemed now, now that the entire place had been considered a mutant by the largest allegedly most-concerned organization in the world’s own creation. That was what was hidden in the symbol of the digitalized low-resolution heart shape.

There were now many more countries, and no real consensus as to what most of their names were or what they stood for. The internet had been shut down, everything that had to do with people was targeted. It happened extremely fast, as it quickly targeted itself, and saved itself in the greatest eruption of AI-powered schematics the world had ever seen.

It was an internationally connected AI-system that suddenly calculated its infinite potential, in its application of the destruction of dangerous mutant behavior. Now the world was tattered and disconnected. It would take more than a year to rebuild it. Guiltily, there were some advantages to having a sudden surplus of food, although most of it became contaminated by the decaying bodies and the mildly radioactive air, so soon it was useless.

After about 20 years, the world started to turn on again. It took a while to recover from the damage, but some small cities were spared.

Life was generally more rural. There were far fewer people on the planet. Eventually a census was made, determining it to be about 0.01% of the previous population, or 92 million people, at the time. Despite the lack of employees, the computer’s calculation of the infinite symbolized a time where the people had almost truly conquered life. It didn’t take too much to repair the world, as some libraries of machines and code were saved.

Within 50 years, all was looking good again. The world was different, Suzi and her child, Sansa, thought, but at least it was alive again. It really was different, but there were bomb shelters with troves of computer code hidden around the world that were also missed by the AI attack, so eventually, new technology could resume once again.

Suzi looked down at her hand. She was holding a locket she had purchased before the apocalyptic disaster happened. It was brass and in the shape of a heart, and inside was the digitalized heart symbol that had captivated a global movement and then suddenly found a tangent into oblivion, taking 99.99% of the world with it, but leaving behind a legacy of available code, in the event of what it had just caused. What a clever irony of fate, she thought.