The Ground Shifts

Parker hadn’t shown up to work and I was sitting there, staring at his empty chair. It was July 8th, and I had known where he was, the moment I walked in the door and saw that he wasn’t there, that his ridiculously huge Bass Pro coffee mug wasn’t sitting way too close to the edge of his desk, that his computer wasn’t open to the day’s news. It’s dumb to say that I knew, I mean, I couldn’t have really known; it’s a million to one chance that they would take someone close to you.

You just can’t even believe how statistically unlikely it is, honestly. Every year, on July 8th, they harvest about two dozen human bodies to use as storage compartments for AI servers. Two dozen, out of how many billion people in the US? And it’s a totally fair process—the selection pool is completely random. It could be a senator, for heaven’s sake.

But it wasn’t a senator. It was Parker.

I called his wife, heard the news that I already knew. Probably everybody in the office knew, and nobody would say anything, of course. It’s just not the kind of thing you talk about. We work in bio-neural technology—without the AI servers, we wouldn’t have jobs. They’re the only processors powerful enough to interface with the human brain on a seamless level—hence the need to store them in human bodies.

And just about then Ned shows up. The minute he walks in the door I know he’s not going to keep his mouth shut. I tried to look busy, but he paused behind my chair. I could feel him looking at the cubicle beside mine, and I was just willing him to keep his fat mouth shut, keep on walking, keep his opinions to himself. He doesn’t.

“Oh, Lucas…Parker got taken, didn’t he?” He steps around to look at me, but I won’t look him in the eye. My mouth is shut but I’m screaming every curse word in my vocabulary at this insensitive, prudish snob, too good to use a smartphone, too good to use a computer.... He’s looking at me with sympathy in that round, plain face with the out-of-style glasses and the weird mustache. He's built like a beanbag with legs. I don’t know how he’s still here, how he even fits in with us, why he’s here and Parker—

He's talking. “I’m sorry. I know you guys were close.”

I kick back in my chair, cross an ankle over my knee. “Nah, it’s fine. Circle of life, and all that, right? You expecting me to start crying over my phone? Say, we’re going out to Darwood’s tonight. Have a beer. Why don’t you join?”

He looks at me for a long time, and then he says, “Oh, well…okay.”

I hate Ned, but I love having him out for drinks with the rest of the guys. We just roast him the whole time, and today, I wanted to tear him to shreds. And the sad thing is, he knows he’s going to be the butt of every single joke if he comes, but he’s so lonely he comes anyway. It's what happens when you live in an AI powered world and you refuse to use anything touched by AI. How he's even managed to keep a job, I don't even know.

He walked into Darwoods after work, looking uncomfortable already.

“Ned!” I waved him over, “Come on, sit down. Unless you have a moral issue with enjoying the safety provided by our military and you’re going to go spend the rest of your life in a bunker to avoid depending on them?”

He just gave me a sad little smile, hitched up his pants at the knee, and perched on a barstool. It was slightly off balance, so he drifted to the left, and had to wiggle a little trying to get it back around to face us.  

“Come on, Ned,” Noah from Accounting laughed, “No response at all? I think it’s a pretty fair point! Why is it okay to depend on the military? But not on technology?”

“Ned’s no better than anybody else!” Damian cackled. There were some halfhearted giggles but I said what we were all thinking: “Shut up, Damian, you’re not funny!”

“Well, you volunteer for the military.” Ned said, blinking against the multicolored glare of the lights at the back of the bar. 

I throw my hands into the air. “Oh, well guys, there it is! Let’s all go flush our smart phones down the toilet because Ned just destroyed us all with his wit and logic!”

Alex put his elbows on the table and leaned in. “But no, really,” he said, “our smartphones are run by AI and the AI is human, right? I mean, it’s using a human life. So, if you really want to honor the…donors…then you keep your devices, right? Because throwing them down the toilet—you might as well just throw out a human life, right?”

They all cheered. And normally I would have, too. It was a good point. Somewhere in my head I knew that. But today, with the image of Parker’s empty chair indelibly burned into my mind, I wanted to punch something. I wanted to hurt somebody.

Instead, I volunteered Ned to buy us another round. I figured he would cut and run eventually. But he stayed there, a big, overgrown lout of an eyesore, drinking his club soda. We drank a lot, even for us, but somehow the conversation never seemed to get going. Nobody seemed as happy as usual. Probably Ned’s fault.

Alex was droning on, talking down to Ned, trying to educate the dumb oaf. “We get it, Ned. Yeah, okay, twenty-four people are chosen each year and they lose their lives to become hosts for AI. It’s not a pretty fact. But are you more likely to die just by driving your car to work? Yes. And you wouldn’t become incredibly valuable to our entire infrastructure by dying in a car crash, you’d just be dead. Losing your life to AI—it’s like a kind of afterlife, honestly. A higher state of being.”

“Why are you talking to him like this?” I snapped at Alex, who jerked backwards in surprise at my attack. “He’s too dumb to get it! He’s a prude! And I think maybe he’s a concrete learner, you know? Needs to experience something to get it through his stupid skull.”

Ned was looking at me, pityingly, of all people, Ned, pitying me! “How about we just install a neural net link into Ned, so he can understand what it’s like to be a poor sinner like the rest of us?”

They let out a raucous roar of approval. I was viciously pleased to see Ned’s eyes widen, and he struggled to get off his bar stool, but I’d got him by his fleshy arm before he could make it off. “Gents, lets head back to the office and perform a little surgery.”

I stuffed Ned into his car (I’m not about to waste gas on him) and drove the old clunker back through town to the office. It was dark, but I’m assistant manager and I have a key. We piled inside.

Offices are crushingly silent after hours. The deadness of the silence made the other guys nervous, and they started pushing and shoving and giggling like the drunk frat boys they basically were. I didn’t have time for stupidity. The neural net connectors were in the back warehouse. They were separate from the rest of what we produced on the factory floor because they were medical grade.

I swiped a box cutter as we headed back down the carpeted hallways towards the factory floor. I saw Ned see me take it and I waggled it at him. “I’m no surgeon, Ned, but I think we just slice open about two inches behind your ear and shove in the neural transmitter. I’ll just slap it back together with some superglue, and voila—you can be just like us!”

Behind me Damian started chanting, “Cut Ned up! Cut Ned up!” And the other guys joined in. We filed through the black undefined darkness of the warehouses, lit only by the cold blue light of our cellphone flashlights, chanting, dragging a stumbling, sweating Ned between us.

We reached the back warehouse and together, they stopped chanting. There was only silence, and breathing. I unlocked the door. Shuffling, we pressed through as a group, Ned in our center.

The stacks of boxes lined the walls. This was the part of the company I managed; the medical devices. I knew where the neural transmitters were stored.

I started down the aisle, leaving the guys and Ned behind. Damian, freed from my disapproval, began some kind of drunken singalong, but their noise faded as I walked until I could only hear my own breathing. My light shined up on box after box of different kinds of mental internet equipment. They towered up beyond the reach of my light. Every time one of these worked, they’d be using the body of my friend. He’d never ramble about fly fishing again. He’d never get excited about his kid’s being voted VIP of his soccer team. But I—I would be able to change the menu on my T.V. by thinking about it. My car would know what temperature I wanted it to be without having to twist a single dial.

I reached up to take a connector down from the shelf. My hand started to shake. I put it down, took a breath, and tried again.

I couldn’t.

 I couldn’t touch them. I was management here, for crying out loud…I had a mortgage, two kids to put through college, a wife with a bad credit card shopping habit…You can’t function in our society without using AI. People lose their lives driving cars all the time, nobody stops driving. I told myself all the things I’d said all my life, all the arguments I’d thrown at Ned. I tried to touch the boxes again. I couldn’t.

I sat down on the concrete warehouse floor. All the tears I had thought were anger came ripping out of me, boiling me, undoing me. I, Lucas Everson, grown man, high level management at NeuraTech Inc, curled into a fetal position on the warehouse floor and cried.

A hand landed on my shoulder. I peered up through waterlogged eyes at Ned’s dumpy face, full of concern. I babbled something incoherent at him. He put a hand under my elbow.

“Here, up you get, bud.” And he tugged me to my feet. “I thought this might happen when you got alone.” He started escorting me along, chatting in a companionable, calm way. “Come on. The guys are busy. I got some Solo cups out of the kitchen and distracted them.” He shook his head. “I didn’t even put any beer in them.” He took me towards the red square in the distance that turned out to be an EXIT.

The air was sweet and filled with the sound of crickets and peepers; a relief from the silence of the warehouse. We walked to Ned’s battered car. I weaved slightly, like a drunk man, which I suppose I was, but something more fundamental than my blood alcohol levels had shifted. The world itself had changed direction under my feet.  

I opened the side door and dropped into the seat, bumping a casserole dish sitting there. I glanced at it. Ned slid into the driver’s seat and noticed me look. He shrugged, embarrassed. “I figured Deena would be over with Parker’s wife today. Seemed like neither of you’d feel like cooking…”

Written on the top in neat block letters was “Chicken Alfredo. Bake at 350 for 30 minutes.”

I sat and absorbed that for a long, painful moment. Then I picked up the casserole. “Got a plastic fork?”

“Um. In the glove compartment?” He eyed me. “You’re supposed to cook it. It’s cold.”

I peeled back the foil and took a bite. “Delicious.”

“Thanks. It’s just Prego.”

I took another bite. Then I looked at him, the man I’d mercilessly mocked for the past seven years. “Why are you doing this?”

Ned sighed and started the car. “You know, I told everybody why I don’t do AI stuff, but I wasn’t entirely honest about what got me started. See, it was my sister. She got taken for a Harvest. Ten years ago, just right at the very beginning of the whole thing. So when they got Parker…”

“You knew.”

“I knew.”

I had to look away, too ashamed to say a word. But when I looked out the window, at the shops and cars and advertisements we were coasting past, a paralyzing dread took hold of me. That clothing store used AI for security. Those advertisements on that billboard were designed specifically for the people looking at them. As I had the thought, the billboard flashed: “Lose a friend? Experienced Trauma? Riccodan Trauma and Grief Counselors Can Help!”

I winced and turned away. If I couldn’t use AI, if I couldn’t do something as simple get a task list implemented at work without using the dead body of my murdered friend…How would I survive? I looked at Ned. He just drove along, looking slightly worried, as always, wearing the clothes he hand-washed, his antique analog clock on his wrist, driving his rattletrap car with the most simple of computers running it. The office laughingstock. Was this what I was destined to?

I looked down at the casserole in my lap. Maybe it wouldn’t be all bad, if I was this kind of person.