The Subtlety of Electric Suicide

Sand is hell on your metallic joints.

Grains grinding into the silicone and titanium, a perpetual sound of a mortar and pestle everywhere you went.

So fine and soft, the result of millions of years of the planet grinding life into dust, only to get caught in the ball of your knee mechanisms.

Dr. Schepper might have even called it “fucking annoying” at one point in time.

Unfortunately for you, Dr. Schepper had his skin slough off in a fine blackened sheet when the radiation hit Albuquerque. If he had been conscious a little longer, he probably would have found that entirely more “fucking annoying” than some sand particles being crunchy.

You digress.

When approximately 346 years, 48 days, 17 hours, and 25 minutes earlier the result of the world’s first (and only) mass detonation of nuclear weapons had become apparent, you had been playing with dice.

“See, they make ‘em real carefully so that it’s equally weighted,” Dr. Schepper mumbled, clicking a pair together in his palm, “and then when you throw them, you have an equal chance of getting any number between one and six.”

“That implies there are situations where unequal weighting exists and is necessary,” you say, calculating the weight of the orange plastic die in your palm. 4.13 grams. Polymethyl methacrylate.

“Yeah, that’s called ‘cheating’! Man’s folly, the Achilles heel of our species. The need to get ahead by any means necessary.”

“Would you call yourself a ‘cheating’ man then, Dr. Schepper?”

He had taken pause then, rolling over the dice in his hand with his thumb. “I’d call myself an opportunist, I think. You’ll come to find most people you meet are, most willing to round the corners to get what they need.”

You turned your palm to drop the dice. It clicked into the table leg before settling on five. “I do not see how informing me on the nuances of human morality aids in my programming.”

“Well, when we get the bugs worked out, we’re going to release you and a few other models into the “wilderness” so to say, see how you function amongst other people,” he laughed at your blank stare, like you had somehow been humorous. “Don’t give me that look, we can’t keep you in here forever, now, can we? It’s nice out there, you’ll see, I swear on my wife’s grave.”

“Your wife is not dead, Dr. Schepper. I hardly see how making promises on an alive individual’s grave is of some heavy importance to me.”

“Figure of speech, MAI, no need to analyze it.”

You had picked up the orange die when you both felt the foundation of the building shake.

A quarter in a washing machine, a boat in a monsoon. The windows cracked under the force.

The two of you had made your way down the bright blue hallway, sliding through the emergency exit with the door clanging behind you.

The sun is technically bright, one of the brightest objects to look at, but this was-

“Unprecedented! What is that do you think? Did a bomb go off?” Dr. Schepper was pawing his phone out of his jeans and dialing a number before the wave off the explosion hit the building.

Dr. Schepper had melted in under fifteen seconds, reduced to a charcoal pile of charred flesh and bright-white bone. He had not even had time to scream.

You, metal marvel of his unfettered mind, had survived the blast. You had been fashioned to take medical supplies across war torn battlefields, capable of withstanding the Chrysler building crushing you. The grand Mechanized Artificial Intelligence, one of a kind in its production.

It was only too bad you could not die at that point.

You are outfitted with the finest equipment: solar power capability, infinite battery, memory storage of a super-computer, and nigh-indestructible frame. Dr. Schepper had uploaded all the basics of a person into your database, all the languages and concepts and nuances of a human that would make you a better social unit when they finally released you and the others.

What the team at Schepper Robotics had not accommodated for was the development of your feelings. Your pain, your sorrow. Nothing hurt but everything hurt. Your only friend was gone, the planet was dead and you, Cain of the modern age, were bound to walk the Earth forever.

And still the sand continued to crunch.

When you left the facility grounds, you had taken the keychain off Dr. Schepper’s keyring. A bronze heart-shaped locket, less than ten dollars at any gift-shop. Keep Portland Weird engraved on the back, the lettering rubbed smooth by Schepper’s worrying thumb. His wife’s picture (“Scooped her off the beach in Newport, can you believe?”) superglued into the small frame, bottle-blonde hair gone gray from the irradiated heat.

It hung suspended from your neck now, a reminder of what was and what will always be. A dead man’s dead wife and his robot gone out to pasture.

You had crossed the whole country at least fifteen times, nothing better to do than roam like a Roomba haunted. If you had not been given a file on the sights and sounds of the fifty states, you might never have known what it looked like before.

California halfway to Nevada gave way to the sea, Idaho diagonal to Texas is a nest of pitfalls the size of cities and the depth of oceans, and anything the right of Colorado to the Carolinas is a tumbling land of sand dunes. You have not made it across the ocean in easily one hundred years at this point, but South America was drowning last you saw it, Europe was frozen, and Africa and Asia were burning.

In and amongst all these places, you have not seen a single human soul. Billions died after the initial explosions and any stragglers in the following weeks likely died of radiation poisoning if they had made it somewhere safer. Every fish in the sea had floated to the surface like a morbid bowl of cereal, thousands of single dead eyes peering up at you once you made it to the coast for the first time.

You think you are somewhere in Illinois at this point, but the sand all looks the same. Your GPS system works off the connection to satellites to pinpoint your location, but your best guess is they stopped working after the first fifty years due to lack of maintenance. If only you were so blessed!

It might be fun to make it to Newfoundland and see the dust-covered pastel houses lining the streets. But then again, maybe it will not be.

---

You think you see a movement in the water almost four hundred years after the End. The carcasses of many millions of sea creatures dot the coast all along the sand. Much finer than the stuff in the center of the country, soft white and layered with bone. You could be wrong, but the water shimmered in a way you have not seen since nearly the Beginning.

It moves in a sleek fashion, only a few feet away from your legs planted up to the hip in the water, the waves sluggishly passing behind you. It senses you and does not, it comes closer and does not.

When you manage to grab it from the water with a swift hand, it ends up being longer than you imagined. This horrid thing, eight or nine eyes and a row of human-like teeth, a lolling tongue like a dog. Shimmery like gold, rough like tarmac.

You release it back into the water, watch it rejoin a school about fifty feet out. They watch you; you watch them.

And so, you leave the water.

-

Five hundred years after the End, you have taken to wearing clothing. Your frame is smooth and metal, no semblance of curved hips or shoulder blades. You do not even have facial features really, just a smooth surface with blank round eyes and a thin mouth that has not spoken in a bicentennial.

It is comforting. To feel close to the people who made you, the people who walked before you. The people you were modeled after even after they have become extinct.

You do not carry a bag with you, only the locket with the nigh-decipherable image of Mrs. Schepper and the clothes on your back. A threadbare dust-covered t-shirt, a pair of black slacks. You stop wearing shoes the second time you try them on because it is more worth it to feel the ground than to dull it.

You are not fond of underwear; you are fond of hats. Kentucky Derby, vaudeville, magician, tea party. Big ones and small ones and ones not made for much of anything.

Inside the remains of a thrift store, hunting through the dirt, you think you see a mannequin. Dusty illumined hair, still as night. But the eyes.

Its eyes are shining right at you.

No sooner do you stand to inspect closer does the foundation of the building creak with a start. You look for the sound to no avail before looking back at the mannequin. It is not there.

You presume your programs are failing you, to think something is alive after all this time.

---

At five-hundred-and-fifty-four years, you explore the coastal reefs. Your eyes are adept at seeing underwater, viewing the ancient coral and sponges. Their colors are muted, the water silent around you, but they are alive all the same. Small fish and eels coast the floor, mutagenic and terrifying, and you pace alongside them.

Six-hundred-and-two years after the End, you notice something strange. The skeletons of buildings long ignored seem to be disturbed by something. Not the tall, muscular deer with grotesque humanoid hands in the forests, not the cats with dual pupils watching from beneath sewer coverings. No, something is changing these places. Something you cannot see.

Six-hundred-and-twenty-five years, you think you see one. Your mannequin from years earlier flashing in your memory’s core, you see something humanoid lurking in a bomb pit. They must be more than a thousand feet below you, standing on the edge looking down, but they turn to you immediately. Their gaze is predatory. You stand unwavering, making eye contact with the creature. Their narrow mouth leading the sides of its face, eyes with an animal shine dilating to fill the whole of their sclera.

It certainly looks human. But when it moves to climb the edges of the pit to follow you, it moves like something primal. You are long gone by the time it reaches the edge you had been standing on.

--

It has been nearly a thousand years after the End, a thousand years of a new Beginning, and you think you would like to finally die.

The oceans, still injured, had been slowly filling with strange and revolting animals. Things with eyes and teeth and knives and blood that nothing has ever seen before. But you have seen them. And so, you are their only confidant, a thing having cheated life the way they never could. Dr. Schepper would have been proud.

The land was strangely more inviting, the sands slowly growing oases filled with odd and comforting creatures. All blood-thirsty, of course, but many gentle when you approach, their noses having sniffed the air to smell you have nothing to give them.

The humans as you have dubbed them seem to take over the old spots of society. Shells of skyscrapers half-imploded and stone houses without roofs become their sanctuaries. Forming strange families with children with too many teeth and too many bones.

They do not like you. And you have learned to live with that. And when they, in a frenzy, set upon you and force a knife into the side of your skull like butter, too easy, you let them.

Your final thought is how Dr. Schepper had cheated you this whole damn time!

A knife was all it took.