* * *
Around noon and deep in the Wild the posse came across a spherical, warty-skinned floating alien, a metre and a half across, wearing a many-pouched belt and nothing else.
They killed it.
The killing wasn’t intentional, they were only trying to make it jump. A modern version of firing bullets around a man’s feet. They meant no harm.
They just weren’t very good shots.
“Better bury the sucker,” TK instructed. He supposed he should say a few words at the graveside.
“Little guy died long ways from home,” TK intoned. “It were purely an accident. We’re truly sorry, ever meet his kin we’ll make it right.”
That night they camped by a rock pool with rushes and sweet water, at the base of a steep, boulder-strewn hill. TK thought it perfect. They made a fire and ate stasis-packed chicken-fried steak followed by pecan pie, washed down with hi-alc Dr Pepper. Afterwards they sat drinking margaritas (okay, Dallas invented them, but so-o-o good), smoked a little joss and called home.
Family and friends all agreed about what was beamed from the Wild. First their loved ones’ smiling faces. A few happy words. Then, as Mary-Ellen, TK’s fiancée, sobbed prettily to the media, screams and hard, angry rainbows.
Only their jitneys were ever found. And their twisted chassis were so melted and fused with each other, the Houston rescue party was glad their people were gone. Even more so when a lone survivor was discovered naked and burbling half a kilometre from the campsite. Something had scooped away his eyes, nose, lips, teeth and half his tongue. No blood. The missing parts had been replaced by soft, newly grown skin. He could breathe through his mouth, and maybe hear through his perfectly shorn ears. It was, many of the relief party thought, with the hysteria that often comes with horror, the worst loss of face they’d ever seen. No one said so. Instead words of encouragement were intoned in case whoever it was could hear. Then they injected him with a massive dose of horse tranquilliser, a sentimental addition to many Texas rescue parties. The dead man was buried deep where he died and no one spoke of it again.
Many Houstonians got angry with the Wild... until the Wild released surveillance drone footage of the accidental death of an alien.
Mary-Ellen took up with a reporter. TK Jones never got his hologram.
* * *
Madness across the globe.
The same day the posse set off an event occurred seven thousand, seven hundred and ninety-one kilometres away.
Andrea Mastover, honorary mayor of Esher-within-Guildford, a protectorate of London City State, was told to “dress her age” by her personal AI. Who then added that she shouldn’t bother because her clothes draped like worn sheets thrown over a chair. The AI added that her husband was sleeping with the man next door, her children never came to visit because “you bore the fuck out of them”, and it, the AI, heard good things about a euthanasia clinic on the moon called The Last Dawn.
* * *
Both Houston and Esher were unthinkable, and dangerous in their implications. If anything the Mastover event was the worst. A personal AI was meant to be an unconditional friend, to love and support you until death or a newer model.
It wasn’t only the AIs who were misbehaving. Even as Andrea Mastover was sobbing brokenly over a large gin and tonic, the Pacific Riots began. There was much burning, killing and rape for no apparent reason other than fury and hate.
“I just felt angry,” a captured rioter from Sydney City State said, before he was taken away for the ceremonial shit-kicking without witnesses. “I mean, it’s all crap, right? Fuck 'em. So I did.”
Yet people still believed it was only a blip. Alien tech would triumph. Mummy would kiss it better.
Wrong.
* * *
On 5 July Berlin’s AI announced that the famous 7 restaurant, made possible by alien anti-gravitational technology, was (direct quote) “a massive architectural carbuncle and has to go”.
Anson Greenaway was in his office when Twist, the GalDiv AI, passed on the news. Greenaway’s first reaction was what the fuck?
The Berlin AI was behaving, well, out of character. It had always been scrupulously correct. But now it was more like Houston and San Diego.
Greenaway’s next reaction was a mixture of fear and excitement as he realised this was the final battle of a galactic war played out over millennia. Countless races and civilisations had vanished or been subsumed into an alien pre-cognition empire that lacked a ruler or even an army. Less an empire, in fact, than a way of existence that allowed no other.
Greenaway had taken Kara Jones to meet Marc Keislack at the 7 restaurant. A time of relative innocence for them both. Later they were linked by the simulity training and introduced to Tse. Much later they’d recognise the lies Greenaway had told, and understood why. He wouldn’t miss 7. It was where he’d privately regretted deceiving Kara Jones, albeit for a cause more important than human morality. Keislack could look after himself. Jones was a soldier, like Greenaway. She’d deserved the truth.
* * *
Greenaway stood in the crowd, wondering how 7 would be taken down. Berlin’s AI had marked out a safety perimeter in bright gold. Greenaway knew that if it wanted them dead, there were easier ways of doing it.
There I go again. Applying human emotions, logic, to an alien device.
He thought he heard Twist laughing, but it could have been the crowd.
* * *
Three hours after Berlin’s announcement 7 fell down. Slowly and gracefully rearranged itself into a neat cube with no entrances or exits. There was a smell of roasting meat and several people near Greenaway licked their lips.
“No real
