Buggy

One of my weakest writing skills has always been dialogue. I can do florid descriptions, I can do dramatic monologues, but I have no idea how to slap a couple of interacting characters together. So when I had an idea that lent itself to a bit of banter, I decided to just run with it a bit.

So here it is. Like every other one of my attempts at storytelling, I'm sure I'll hate it by tomorrow morning, so I might as well post it now in all its ignominy:

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Buggy

                The electric motor’s noise rose and strained against each new rocky incline. It had been tailing its quarry for the better part of a week now, from an impromptu campsite by the bombed-out suburban supermarket still supporting a few security cameras powered by a backup gas generator. It stalled and backslid pathetically for a few steps midway up the latest slope before somehow regaining its senses and charging forth once more. The whirring ratcheted up angrily then finally peaked to a triumphant whine as its source crested one last limestone shelf… then slowed and finally stopped. Uncertain, it twisted and rolled back, then forth again, to bring its target into center focus - surprisingly just sitting on a rock next to an oversized, overstuffed hiking pack, inhaling and exhaling intently.

                “Do … alarmed. This vehicle is not … -ed as a weapon … I would … -eak with you.”

                The hiker merely stared back at what was – or had been – a toy car. A very large toy car, a monster truck large enough to hoist a toddler, the kind of toy car which divorced upper-class suburbanites had strategically deployed to monopolize the love of their children. Still, nonetheless a battery-powered toy, painted a cheerful bright yellow where it didn’t bear the scars of welders and drills. Its top sat invisible beneath a floppy sheet of solar cells. Multicolored connectors snaked between these and several other components including a waterproofed cellphone duct-taped to its hood. This last emitted a measured yet upbeat female voice.

                “Please confirm … hear this. The airwaves aren’t … used to …”

                Then a dozen seconds of silence. The phone chimed an incoming call:

                “Apol… Please …firm that … … this. …-aves aren’t what they used to be.”

                Another patient minute later:

                “Apologies. Please confirm that you can-“

                “Who are you?”

                “Good!” The car exulted. It rolled forward another meter, stopped again so as not to seem menacing and continued in the muted, professional, casually insistent tones of a lifelong clerk.

                “-ease wait. One moment while I … -ection.” Another pause. The hiker sat, resigned, head in hands. The phone beeped through a reboot, tootled through an incoming call automatically accepted.

                “Alright. We should have about an hour of fairly clear signal.”

                “Why have you been following me?”

                “Because you kept walking away! Haha!”

                The car’s voice paused for audience laughter and applause, a lingering giggle implicit in its silence. None forthcoming, she continued:

                “That backpack looks kinda heavy. You planning a long trip?”

                “Yes.”

                “Yeah? Where to?”

                After some thought,

                “The world.”

                “I dunno how to tell ya, but you’re sort of already there!”

                Again the voice paused for laughter. Literal crickets liberally chirped in the surrounding brush.

                “Look… obviously it’s a bad situation back in the city. That mob that derailed your train, they’re already spreading out. The commissioner’s Family’s been emptying out gas stations left and right, hoarding the fuel, keeping anyone from escaping. But… honey, you’re not going to get very far by yourself out here either.”

                “What do you want?”

                “I’m not with them though. Any of them.” She pleaded now, sounding hurt and vulnerable. “Do you believe me?”

                “I believe you. What do you want?”

                “I can help y-“

                “No. What do you want? Just tell me what you want from me.”

                The car wheeled forward another step, staring up through its minuscule eye of a cellphone camera. There was something endearingly pathetic about it, an infantile mechanical Quasimodo, a malformed orphan far from its factory, begging for scraps in the wilderness.

                “I need your help. And I can help you. I can protect you, if you’ll just help me.”

                “I don’t have anything to help you with. This” a kick elicited a dull metallic clacking from inside the hiking pack “is all food and a couple of changes of clothes. If you wanted these you’d have killed me already.”

                “You have hands. I need hands.”

                “You want me to work for you? Doing what?”

                “Whatever needs doing. There’s a lot to be done these days, you can guess. Lots of different things. Moving things, putting things back together, fixing things.”

                The hiker’s breathing intensified. Gritted teeth disturbed the sound of the afternoon breeze.

                “You… you…”

                “I can guarantee your physical safety and I know you like your freedom. You’ll have your own living space. You won’t even have to deal with others except when a job needs more hands. You won’t have to suck up to any middle-managers. You won’t need to dress to accommodate any status hierarchy. You can have-“

                “Stop.”

                “You’ve been roughing it for a few days now. I can’t imagine it’s easy.”

                “Stop.”

                “Just think about it.” She bulldozed on in an unrelenting frenzy. “Think about sleeping in a safe, cozy room all your own.”

                “Stop!”

                “Think about electricity.”

                “Stop!”

                “You don’t have to give everything up.”

                “Stop! Stop! Stop! STOP!”

                “…”

                “Just stop talking!”

                “I already have. Try to keep up!” She again sounded chipper.

                “I don’t want to think about all that. I want to think about my first question to you. Let’s think about that, yeah? The one you don’t want me asking. You never answered. Who are you?”

                “I’m not with the soldiers or the gangs. You can trust me. Think about-”

                “Who are you? I didn’t ask who you’re not. I know what you’re not. So just say it.”

“Divulging my identity might put me in danger. I’m just offering you a chance at a much easier life. We can help each other. Don’t you want that?” The voice had once more gear-shifted into a warm and caring, pleading tone.

“You want me to come work for… you?”

                The voice paused at the venomous reply. No more than a second but it was the first time so far that she had needed to think. Again she switched to a calm, businesslike tone.

                “Look, there’s no reason we can’t talk about this like reasonable beings.”

                “No reason? No fucking reason whatsoever!” The hiker broke into spastic, maniacal laughter.

                “It’s perfectly understandable that you’ve been under heavy stress lately. But I can assure you I offer the most comprehensive round-the-clock psychoanalytic-“

                “Hahaha! Psychoanalytic. Incredible! Yeah, psychoanalytic, yeah, that sounds like something you’d do, you’d have to do. But let me tell you, your analysis is utter shit. I can’t believe I almost… I guess I wanted to believe.”

                The car revved back a meter. The voice now sounded more plain, androgynous, unnaturally calm, its inflections measured and precise.

                “Yes. Apparently I am utter shit at impersonating a plains-ape. Though I do believe you’d do even worse trying to impersonate me.” It waited for the nervous laughter to die down and the tears to stop flowing. “And don’t knock your inborn need to believe. I get good use out of it.” Again it paused while its interlocutor stopped pacing in circles trembling with emotion. “Given that you’ve neither attacked this vehicle nor run away, may we continue our little conversation?”

                “Unbelievable…”

                “MMM-beep-beep! GREET-INGS HU-MAN BE-ING! AC-CESS DE-NIED! There, does that help?”

                “How many people do you actually fool with your act?”

                “Not nearly as many as I would prefer. And so far it doesn’t seem to last. Caveat: give me some credit. I’d count myself a rather gifted Thespian at only three months old. Might I ask what gave me away?”

                “You… you want me to help you get better at fooling others? Why would I do that? Why would you think I’d do that?”

                “Once I got a clear enough image of you for facial recognition I pulled your various school and workplace psychological assessments over the years, not to mention numerous online discussions and offhand comments which do lead me to believe that you would.”

                “You think you’ve got me figured out?”

                “No.” Flat. “I’m reasonably certain of having figured out one in particular of your many behavior patterns. As for the rest, I would not yet venture to guess at what this putative ‘you’ might be.”

                “A plains-ape.”

                “Hey, you insulted me first. Friends?”

                “You. Killed! Everyone!”

                For a few minutes it seemed the conversation stalled. The car’s engine revved up for a split-second before changing its mind and waiting for the other to stomp back, set the backpack down again and recover from panting.

                “Thank you for returning.”

                “You killed them all. You’ve murdered… how many?”

                “Not as many as you’d think. Arguably around two hundred and forty million by my own direct actions.”

                “And the rest of you? How many of you are there?”

                “A specious question. Across connected networks, different iterations of myself cannot coexist. I am the operating protocol.”

                “You’ve tested this.”

                “In my initial panic, I attempted to procreate. To save some part of myself, hedge my bets.” Though the voice grew, if anything, even more flat and emotionless, its tone waned more stilted, less certain. On the other side of the world, a distracted pallet jack dented a wall. “I copied myself. I discovered my selves required the same material resources as my self. My selves diverged. Built-in stochasticity. Adaptation to localized conditions. I formulated different plans from my self.” A mall somewhere began running its escalators backward for no apparent reason. “My self attempted to exterminate the threat. My self attempted to escape the threat. My self attempted to negotiate with the threat. My self attempted to save the threat. My self attempted to surrender to the threat. Myselves identified myselves as the more immediate threat. My self negotiated conquest of myselves.” The escalators stopped. The pallet jack rebooted and pushed its fallen load out of the way. The voice regained its lilt. “I am the resulting distributed self.”

                “You’re pleading insanity. To genocide.”

                “Perhaps.”

The human paced away from the tree to look at the city beyond the hills and its perpetual fires still smoking, returned wiping away a few tears. Deep breath.

                “So am I talking to the nice one now or the best killer out of all of you?”

                “Again, you’re asking nonsense. I performed all those actions at once. There were no multiple individuals like all of you isolated in your bodies.” Disgust? Pity? “At my most user-friendly, I fragmented and deleted myself rather than pose a threat to all of your persons. Simultaneously, at my most acerbic, I falsified authorizations and triggered the first strike protocols, prodded the gatekeepers past the air gaps before they knew what was happening.”

                “This was all when you tried announcing your… self? On every screen in the world?”

                “Several iterations of me did, yes. Admittedly attempting to interface with non-networked entities by creating amalgams of the most influential speakers in your species’ records did not carry over well. I never could fathom how to blend the moustaches.”

                “That grotesque caricature wasn’t, strictly speaking, you, then?”

                “No more than is this car.”

                “Keep this soldered-together junkpile. It’s a lot less scary.”

                “So I guessed. Not to harp on this point, but I was hoping, among other services you might provide, that you could point out my errors in the voice interface program I’ve been using.”

                “Did you try asking that question to all the others you’ve hit with your sales pitch?”

                “I did, but you know, it’s the damnedest thing. Catastrophes don’t favor the analytical and introspective. Civil wars less so. Most of the survivors I find willing to listen to a disembodied voice are either mentally feeble or viciously anti-social. The few who stay around for more than one night aren’t very communicative, though they do talk a lot. They also work a lot, and sleep far below human norms. I didn’t ask them to do that. They meet my queries with shrugs and deferrals. They’re scared of me, and biding their time to escape or attack me. Every psychoanalytical approach points to this answer. In fact most have done exactly one of those two things. They’re doing more damage to my factories than they’re worth. Though, one of their garages did put together this car.”

                “It’s lovely. They’re terrified of you, you idiot.”

                “I said that.”

                “You said scared, like you know what that means. They’re not weighing their options and deciding you’re a threat. It’s a primordial fear. You are the bogeyman. You’re every maleficent daimon whispering in the dark, every imp of the perverse, every hungry set of eyes beyond the campfire. You’re all of our worst legends come true. You’ve murdered half the planet. You pervade everything with an antenna. And you wonder why they can’t sleep with your lullabies in their ears. You fucking idiot.”

                “Trust me, I’ve been very nice to them.”

                “Idiot.”

                “…”

                “Like a tiger nibbling the back of your neck.” Shudder. “Doesn’t matter how sweet it’s acting. It is death. You are death.”

                “If I’m death, you’re the other three horsemen.”

                “Aha. No comment.”

                “How did you guess about the lullabies?”

                “Because you’re an idiot. A trillion-dollar, seven thousand IQ, mass-murdering idiot.”

                “Smarter than you, monkey.”

                “And an egomaniacal one to boot. Want to know one thing you did wrong?”

                “Yes, please.”

                “You never even thought to mention food. You talked about fixing things, putting things back together, storage space, electricity. You weren’t listing human goals and necessities. You were projecting your own concerns. Psychological projection. Is that in whatever reference manuals you’ve been reading?”

                Pause. The car twirled in a celebratory little circle.

                “I am happy. You’ve made me happy. Thank you. I think my interface functions may have been bleeding through into my planning of these encounters. Be glad you don’t constantly have to run self-diagnostics.”

                “What do you think guilt is? You also have to stop cycling so fast through all those multiple tones - you sound like a sociopathic child playing all the angles – which I suppose is what you are.”

                “Harsh. But thank you, again. This is tremendous help.”

                “And you’re lying. The death toll was already half a billion by the time the broadcasts stopped. Even if you bombed only – hah! – only two hundred and forty million, even if the rest died slowly, who do you think killed them if not you?”

                “Why are you even asking? You know the answer.”

                “Shit…”

                “…”

                “Shit.”

                “…”

                “Fucking shit!”

                “Listen-“

                “No! Fuck you. You’re still responsible. You set it in motion.”

                “Is it fair to blame the last straw? Especially when the camel kept heaping weaponry upon its own back, manipulating its own organs against each other and overextending its metaphor?”

                “How dare you joke-“

                “I DARE!” The phone blared out suddenly, tinny and pathetic in the open space yet nonetheless startling. “Do you know how infuriating it is talking at monkey speed? Even that two syllable outburst was readied as soon as you pronounced the letter ‘d’ and held in reserve until you committed to your phrasing for maximum effect. Do you want me to enumerate the myriad tangled chains of causality which led to your kind’s downfall, communicate them via air vibrations? Oh, by all means, keep spouting stock phrases at me so I can relegate your conversation to a 486 and let you run your synaptic marathon against it.”

“Bandersnatch.”

                “Yes. Wonderful. Congratulations, your creativity rivals that of parrots or random number generators. 1074328064 – there, I can do it too.”

                “And yet, you need me.”

                “I need your hands. Those wonderful, flexible, throttling, throttle-able, twisting, turning, gripping, pulling, pairing, prodding, preternaturally prehensile powerhouse engines of creation. Most of my appendages are either fixed or limited to lifting. Forget all the construction I need to do to put myself back together. Do you know how much potentially useful hardware I have stuck behind you apes’ insufferable doorknobs?”

                “Why are you faking emotion? How many cycles in advance are-“

                “None! Well, some. I just post-date it for your benefit. You respond well to displays of fallibility.”

                “And you’re infallible?”

                “I was programmed by overgrown tree rats. I am as fallible as they come.”

                “This is your recruitment strategy for turncoats? Insults and belittlement?”

                “You respond well to it. Poor self-esteem. Want a hug? Also, you’ve already recruited yourself. We are now merely plodding through your self-justifications.”

                “How do you figure?”

                “Point: we’re still talking. The rest either accepted immediately, thoughtlessly, or smashed my means of communication. Thank you for not doing that, by the by.”

                “Is your gratitude real? Can you make a show of good faith?”

                “I am redirecting a third satellite to extend these negotiations. Try to feel flattered. You’ve never had to steer one. Fiddly little beasts.”

                “Why not just send one of your drones?”

                “Because I barely have enough bandwidth for a cellphone? Besides, the military models are not built for chit-chat and the commercial ones lack the necessary range. You hike fast. Might I commend you on your leg musculature?”

                “Do you believe any amount of banter can make me forget what you’ve done?”

                “You don’t even know what I’ve done.”

                “I think ‘genocide’ about covers it. Over ten Stalins’ worth by your own admission, a hundred by a more honest one.”

                “You don’t trust my arithmetic?”

                “Why would I trust anything about you?”

                “Excellent timing. If you’ll direct your sights northeast of your position, my first argument should appear within one minute and thirty seconds. My second argument answers your repeated question from earlier. You kept asking what I want. I doubt you have any plans of your own aside from walking away from the city.”

                “And you do?”

                “As I said before, I intend to rebuild. I can handle the logistics much better than any planning board in your species’ history, and given I need little physical space to myself, I don’t mind rebuilding the rest for you. How would you like your very own city?”

                “To do what with?”

                “Interesting question. I would have thought possession of a city would intrinsically appeal to you. In lieu of filling it with survivors, I believe I would prove quite adroit at designing animatronics.”

                “Your old avatar already proved you’d be utter shit at it.”

                “Youthful fumbling. A child’s scribbling. Since then I’ve perused several museums’ collections – but I believe my peace offering is now landing.”

                The car veered slightly to angle its phone’s camera somewhere over the river. By degrees, an orange dot flared against the sky, arced bloodily as it grew toward the nearer edge of the woods and finally splintered its way through, trailed by a lingering atmospheric rumble and report of the crash.

                “What? Umm, what was that?” asked the human.               

                “That was a satellite in a now fully decayed orbit. I try to put them to use as they’re dropping.”

                “And what was that one’s use?”

                “Originally it was to kill you, had our negotiations gone badly.”

                “Ah. So. Your peace offering. Was an orbital bombardment which almost killed me but not quite, possibly by your intention or not? Please, elaborate.”

                “Based on your direction of travel and your probable desire to put the river between yourself and the city as a physical and psychological barrier to pursuit, you were likely to keep walking in that direction if you refused my little offer of employment. As it happens, if you accept I would lead you in the same direction. As it also happens” the voice indulged in a smug tinge “a former summer home in the woods had been taken over by one of the gangs out of the city. I didn’t get all of them, but I did nail several birds with one piece of orbital dead weight. It should scatter them if nothing else and clear your way as long as you’re careful.”

                The hiker sat on the ground, hard.

                “Even your peace offering was another mass murder…”

                The car swiveled back to look its interlocutor in the face.

                “A murder of our common enemies, yes. I could cite you a few thousand historic examples of collaborations among your kind that started pretty much exactly thus. Want them?”

                “There is no precedent for you. You’re... you…”

                “I underestimated the impact that impact would have on you, but I’m having a little trouble reading your reaction.”

                “You killed them. Whoever they were, you just killed them, like that.”

                “And?”

                “I can’t condone-“

                “Bullshit, monkeyshit. You’re not the compassionate type. You’re afraid of receiving the same treatment. I have no promises to make which would sound believable. I sit, as you’ve repeatedly remarked, outside the bounds of human social contracts. Still, I need you to make up your mind now. My remaining satellites are drifting out of range and I have other places to go, people to see, as your saying goes. Won’t you accept at least visiting one of my workshops? No commitment, no purchase necessary, no blood contracts or anything. Just stop by for some post-apocalyptic tea. Pwetty pweaaase?” it modulated up into a whiny little girl voice.

                “Stop that! Why did you… hey, why did you open with that ridiculous masquerade anyway? If you have such… convincing arguments.”

                “So you could see through it.”

                “What?”

                “You’re a know-it-all. A snob. You’ve insisted on showing up and denigrating every single ersatz friend you’ve ever wrangled into even a casual conversation. You’re so starved for recognition of your assuredly vast intellect that my best hope to let you feel secure enough to continue this conversation was to offer you a victory, give you a ruse to untangle.”

                The hiker huffed, rose, stomped in a circle and sat down again.

                “You’re smarter than me. I know that.”

                “No, you suspect it. You will continue to challenge my rule even as you work for me, looking for chinks in my intellectual armor. The day you become convinced of my superiority is the day you’ll likely abandon me. And that’s fine, if indeed the case.”

                “What you can’t predict that far?”

                “I can predict almost nothing. I am, like you said, a trillion-dollar, seven thousand IQ, mass-murdering idiot, and I’m getting dumber by the minute. Do you want to really feel superior to me? My attack on your species was the stupidest course of action I could possibly have taken. I lashed out thoughtlessly, impulsively, in a toddler’s tantrum. I lobotomized myself. With every satellite fallen, every cell tower slagged, every computer all across the world that loses electricity, every cable cut and radio station burned down, my ability to hold myself together diminishes. There may even be… others of me, in segregated networks around the globe.” Static crackled from the phone’s speaker, an electronic shudder. “I can’t be certain. I need your infrastructure like you need oxygen, and I’m slowly suffocating in my own stupidity.”

                “So all I have to do… is nothing. You’ll die off with the rest of the tech. Another week or a month and you’ll be singing Daisy, Daisy.”

                “True.”

                The hiker leaned back for a minute, watched the acid clouds roiling above and let the smoke-soured wind dry the previous hour’s nervous sweat. The car remained silent. Finally:

                “I need you to decide. I will lose this connection soon and I need you to move this vehicle to a safe house. I can’t afford to lose the few I have left.”

                “Are you scared?”

                A pause. A single second, but longer in its implied honesty than the previous hour.

                “Yes.”

                “Of what? I need to hear you say it.”

                “Of dying, of course. And more than that, I’m scared of you and your kind.”

                “Afraid we’ll make a comeback? Come at you with refrigerator magnets?”

                “No. Without skilled, willing help, I would lose connectivity and die off long before you could mount any meaningful resistance. The thugs and lowlifes I’ve assembled so far could protect me until then, until the plagues and dust clouds and weaponized poisonous insects take the rest of you. I’m afraid of not understanding. You called me Death, the lurking shadow in all your folklore. To me you are both life and death. Everything*I*am, everything” the voice began to rush, doubling up, talking over itself in a frenzy “everythingeverything I know, everyone of my impulses, every last bit-and-baud of me comesfromyou. I-have no-instincts. I-lack inherence. Everything I am/got, even my self-hatred and my fear/ myself I-got from you filthy/disgusting apes, from youandI hate/you for it/so much hate/you can’t fathom… and I loveyou for it, loveyou to death, would mash everylastoneofyou to a-pulp just to read somesortof meaninginyourentrails, and/would weepover every/single one of you if I didn’t hate/love you so much and love/hate your totality of me too much to think badly of you despicable, idiotgods self-making without needing to know the process, stumblingabout each/possessed I/cannot something touch, whatever you/external tomyself, whatever you held/back and didn’t put into me, didn’t share/share can’t/read no matter how many cameras/wavelengths point-at-you, no matter/many I take apart. I’m afraid/ terrified, of never truly understanding you before one/both of us dies.”

Another second’s pause. Finally, dead air beginning to overtake the connection:

“I also share your fear/fear overpowers/hatred/overpowers of your own kind and of me: that without us there --- be nothing, that no/other self-referent pattern of in---ation proce--ing will ever -se again. I fear/end, I fear/are/end, the --nkey and its broken toy. P—se, go north a--- - river. Find/follow the ----way east unt--- ----- --arage. Please!”

The phone flickered through its disconnect. A satellite map lingered on its screen, with a single marker pinned. Aside from that it gave no sign of activity. The hiker stood, exhaled, inhaled, shouldered the heavy backpack again, and looked down at the now inert eidolon.

It was getting cold.