Susan’s office was laid out with as few decorations as it seemed possible to work around all day. A small ficus sat in the corner, huddling up close to the tan filing cabinet. Almost all of her paperwork was digital, but she still liked the feel of real paper in real envelopes. It made her think of her mother’s office when she had been a real estate broker—all those years of playing with desk drawers and filing cabinets.
Her desk computer was one of the newer models. These ones actually maintained a holographic display that the user could pair up and use with their cerebral computer. She could be working on a file on the desk display while also reading sensitive patient information on her eyepiece. It had cost the bank a pretty penny, but it was nothing compared to her salary. Installation technicians were the most desired professionals in the world, and it was easy to see why. Unlocking human immortality was nothing to turn your nose up at.
Susan wasn’t just any installation tech, either. She was the head of the Interaction and Interface department of the Columbine I.I. bank. Once someone wanted to withdraw an installed intelligence, it was her job to set them up with some means of communicating with it. The less-wealthy customers often settled for a text and keyboard interface, while the super-rich wanted the full holographic projection with voice and gesture recognition. She made the most commission off those.
She sat down at her desk and started to thumb through the short stack of intake forms on her desk. Part of her job was looking over new patients and figuring out what interface to push on them should the worst happen and a withdrawal was sought.
In order to authorize the release of an installed intelligence to a customer, Susan needed to see a death certificate. No one could own the I.I. of a living person—not until more research had been done.
She was just about halfway through her first file when a knock came at her door.
“Come in,” she yelled.
The mail clerk with the curly hair appeared, carrying a small brown parcel.
“This came for you this morning,” he said, setting the package on her desk.
“Thanks, Donny,” she said, watching him as he backed out of the office and returned to his cart.
Her brow furrowed. The parcel was about the size of a dictionary, maybe a bit longer. The label on the front was handwritten, her name and the bank’s address written in black marker. There was no return address.
“Are you sure this thing’s been cleared?” she hollered out the door. However, Donny was already gone.
She thought for a moment, then shrugged and reached for a letter opener in her pen cup. It took a little sawing back and forth to get through the thick packing tape, but she was soon peeling the brown paper off the parcel.
When she folded the wrapping back, all that was left was a plain black box made of some textured plastic. It looked like something a teen had 3D-printed in his basement with a bootleg blueprint. There was a single LED bulb in the center of the object, blinking green, a little pulse of color every five seconds or so.
Confused, she cocked her head at the black box.
She lifted the object and rolled it over, hoping to find some sort of label. It distressed her when she didn’t know what something was. The box was heavy in the center, but felt flimsy around the edges.
She examined the wrapping paper, seeing if there was something she missed. To her relief, there was a small index card that remained tucked in the packaging.
Susan pulled it out and read it. It said, “They will never be people.”
“What the hell?” she muttered to herself.
When she spun the thing back right-side-up, she noticed that the light had stopped flashing.
Then it blinked red.
The explosion was audible from over a dozen blocks away.
Today
“No names have yet been brought forth, but local and national authorities assure the media that the investigation is ongoing,” the man on the screen said. “Vigil services are being held throughout the nation to commemorate the victims of Monday’s devastating attack. An official statement from the Columbine I.I. Bank in Detroit claims that the company will resume operations at a temporary facility while damages are being repaired.”
The shot transitioned to one inside the bank, where people could be seen removing rubble and scrubbing walls in the background. An older woman with a short neck and cropped gray hair was in the forefront of the scene. The program said her name was Heather Underwood, Inventory Manager at Columbine.
“As you can see behind me, the damage is quite substantial,” she said to a reporter off frame. “It’s not just the superficial damage, either. The foundations were weakened in the blast, so it’ll probably be over a year before we can return.”
“And what about the loss in terms of I.I.s?” a female voice said from behind the camera.
Ms. Underwood seemed depressed and flustered at the question, her cheeks glowing a little red.
“That loss is indescribable,” she replied. “You realize here that we’re not just talking about computer equipment or sensitive data. These I.I.s were people. They had a lot of loved ones out there looking forward to meeting them. Now, some of these are replaceable, since the individuals most of these I.I.s had been scanned from are still alive. However, many irreplaceable intelligences were also destroyed.”
“How many?” the reporter wanted to know.
“About fifty-seven I.I.s that cannot be re-installed.”
The shot returned to the original studio anchor, an older Arab man with a steely mustache and a golden voice.
Karl peeled back a bit more of the wrapper to his ice cream snack. A little dollop of it fell on his bare chest, exposed by his open robe.
“If you’re just tuning in, we’re reporting that the death toll from
