Machine Messiah

by Jaymes Schutz | Dec 23, 2018 | 0 comments

The words flashed intermittingly, a half second pulse, on the screen and backwards on his face. The sun had gone down outside and, engrossed in finishing his work, the man hadn’t yet turned on any lights leaving the dim glow of the liquid crystal display as the room’s makeshift candle. Wires crawled across the floor and tables of his ramshackle laboratory, tangled and frayed, destination unknown, and the room smelled vaguely of silicone and strongly of body odor. Luckily, the man was alone.

“KILL YOURSELF…KILL YOURSELF…KILL YOURSELF”

Actually, maybe it would be better if he weren’t alone. The words took on an intimacy that they may not have if one of his various assistants had been around to look at the screen quizzically and suggest various bugs that may have caused the computer to flash such a strange, macabre message. It wasn’t really a computer in the sense that most people would think, a self contained box that the internet comes out of in the same way toast come out of a toaster. It was a collection of various parts, not fit for retail although that would be its eventual destination, spread throughout the room with a screen and keyboard sitting at the man’s main desk in the center of the room. He unplugged the machine and the message continued.

“KILL YOURSELF…KILL YOURSELF…KILL YOURSELF”

His heart sank into his stomach, and he swallowed hard. Then he double checked and realized he’d unplugged the toaster he’d brought in once he started spending every night on the project. He found the appropriate plug and looked at the screen again as he gripped the chord at its base. After a moment he took the proper plug out of the socket and the screen shut off, as did the cooling fans for the various machine parts, and the room took on a strange silence. The man fell lifelessly in his chair, eyes wide with fear.

All eight members of the board, along with The Chairman, had gathered in a conference room. They were agitated that this meeting had been called at all as it was interrupting their various games of golf, extramarital affairs, or what have you. But The Chairman, his head as bald and as reflective as the waxed marble floor beneath him, had sent them an email marked “UREGENT” which was usually reserved for serious events such as a slight decrease in profits or an employee in one of their third world sweatshops asking for a bathroom break. Clearly something had gone terribly, terribly wrong.

“Gentleman,” he nodded at the two female board members, “and, uh, women. As you know, our business plan for the next several quarters hinges on the successful rollout of our new product. Some disturbing information, however, has come to light.”

He pulled a remote from an interior pocket in his suit jacket and with a few button presses a screen was lowered from the ceiling on the wall behind him. He walked to a light switch and turned the room’s lights off.

The man working on the computer with the strange message began the video by fiddling with the camera, getting himself and the computer screen into frame. The room had been cleaned up a bit, many of the components placed in a single box next to a computer monitor. He cleared his throat and began.

“Uh, yes, I’m the lead designer on project DESIRE. Uh, the Alexa killer? The predictive shopping assistant? Right, well, we’ve been getting this read-out no matter who we’ve had use the thing, no matter whose meta-data we include, at least no one we’ve included so far which at this point includes most of the University staff and administration.” He grabbed a microphone connected umbilically to the box next to the screen. “Project DESIRE,” he asked. “What should I buy?”

The man in the video picked up the camera and held it in front of the computer screen until its message filled the frame, blinking like an unset digital clock and in a similar font. In the board room its message was reflected across the faces in the meeting, many with mouths agape. It was reflected clearly, almost more so, on the shined marble floor in front of the screen and from there to the ceiling above. It filled the room. After a moment The Chairman flicked the switch and the lights returned. He walked back in front of the screen.

“As you can see, this hardly bodes well fo-” he stopped when he noticed everyone staring nervously at him, not at his eyes but slightly above.

“KILL YOURSELF…KILL YOURSELF…KILL YOURSELF”

            Standing between the screen and the projector, the message was still pulsating on his bald head. “Oh god dammit,” he said and pulled the remote back out and turned the video off. He straightened his suit jacket and tie unnecessarily and continued. “As you can see, this hardly bodes well for our next quarterly earnings report.”

“I’ll say!” a board member shouted. “This is appalling!”

“Horrifying!” chimed in another. Soon the whole room was a cacophony of worried looks and raised voices. The Chairman slammed a fist onto the table.

“Calm down everyone!”

“Calm down? I’ve got about 50 people working on marketing this things to tweens. You think with all this bullying and suicide shit in the media their moms are going to buy them a goddam suicide Leapfrog?!”

“Yeah! We’ve been trying to stave off fears of Christian conservatives about our all pervasive advertising and spying and now you’re telling me we have to sell them on the Dr. Kavorkian iMac?!”

The chattering began again and The Chairman himself was now engaged in several arguments at once. This went on for some time until the doorway to the room opened with a kick which slammed the double doors against the walls. Everyone stopped and turned around to see the man from the video standing in the doorway, arms overflowing with papers.

“Don’t you see?!” he yelled. “Do you see?!”

The board member’s countenances quickly cycled through terror to confusion, settling on anger. One of them stood up, furrowed their brow and pointed forcefully to the man in the doorway.

“You.” Other members stood and launched accusatory stares of their own at the man. “You fucked up and turned our multi-million dollar shopping assistant project into a sick joke! A sick, unmarketable joke!”

“A joke? A joke!” the man dropped all his papers. “There’s no JOKE. There are no BUGS. The program has simply determined that the best course of action, logically, is that-”

“Is that humans are destroying the planet and the world would be better without them,” interjected a board member, in a bored tone as if he knew exactly what the man would say. The man stared blankly for a second, then regained his composure, his fury.

“Y-yes. That’s RIGHT! We humans have-”

“Overburdened the ecosystem with extractive industries causing mass extinction and global climate change,” another board member said. Again, the man had to pause. But he pressed on.

“P-precisely. Yes. And this computer, the most advanced Artificial Intelligence ever devised, has determined, without error, that-”

The entire board said in unison, “the best outcome for the planet generally would be the extinction of human beings who are more destructive even than the meteor that killed the dinosaurs.” One of them stepped forward and added, “why do you think the very wealthy have invested so much in security and bunkers, private islands and that stuff?”

“Yeah,” said another. “We pay the scientists who say all that stuff is fake, we don’t believe them!” The room erupted in laughter and back patting. A few members even lit cigars.

“But you could change all of this! You could stop it all now!” the man was now more exasperated than ever. It was as if he had epiphany except in this moment of sudden clarity what was clear, crystal clear, was the absurdity of the situation.

“Listen, guy, let’s say I turned this company into a locally sourced cookie company that only employs grandmas who are also war widows,” the chairman said, eliciting a few more laughs from the board members. “Unless we made more money doing that than we did last quarter, I’d be out on my ass immediately.”

“It’s true,” said a board member. “We’d be ‘obligated to our shareholders to take such action as would maximize returns on their investment.’ Otherwise they’d vote out the whole board and get a new one.”

“Yuh-huh,” The Chairman agreed. “So we might as well soak up the good times and prepare for the end times, heh heh.” The board members were all now, somehow, holding glasses of Champaign and toasted. “To wealth!”

. He pulled a handgun from his jacket pocket, aimed it squarely at The Chairman, and pulled the trigger before he or anyone else could plead with him to stop. Moments before, The Chairman had pressed a button for a silent alarm and security arrived just as he collapsed forward, half of his bald head in pieces on the projector screen still hanging behind him. The man, realizing the guards had reached the room, turned the gun on himself.

The board members reassembled an hour or so later in an identical conference room. The group was virtually unaffected by the event. A new member was present and one of the female members took on the position of The Chairman, her head now as bald and shiny as her late predecessor’s.

. . . . .

He found the strange box during one of his regular visits to the Computer Graveyard. That was what he called the dump because he felt better about going to a graveyard than a dump. 15 years old, the boy’s family, like most in his village, made money by harvesting the metal out of the old computers that were dumped in — sorry that’s “donated to” — his Kenyan village. The villagers burned the old machines until all the plastic was melted away leaving behind only the precious metals, metals that could be sold for pennies. The Green Economy, the boy thought.

He took the strange box home and kept it under his bed until he could go to the city. He could take it to the shop that fixed up old computers, the owner usually let him hang around and help out. He carried it a few miles and the owner of the shop, a man barely in his thirties but betrayed by his scraggily beard, was as intrigued as he was.

“Doesn’t look like any commercial brand.” He unscrewed it and looked inside. “That’s a sophisticated CPU. I mean, probably. I’ve never seen one like it.”

They booted up the machine and were greeted by a list. A long list of personal details with spaces to fill in answers. The boy and shop owner looked at each other and without a word grabbed a keyboard and plugged it into the box. They filled out the details over the course of several hours. It was a slow day and they became increasingly curious, wondering just how many different questions it would ask and for what purpose. Many words were unfamiliar to them as English was not their first language, questions like the one about their partner’s “lingerie.”  After they reached the last question they pressed enter. A moment’s pause and a message came on the screen, blinking.

“ORGANIZE AND RESIST….ORGANIZE AND RESIST….ORGANIZE AND RESIST”