Jeff dropped the five-gallon drum container on the dirt next to Julie. Some of the dirty gasoline sloshed and splattered the precious droplets.
Julie groaned, a gargling throat growl. “Careful. You’re so sloppy.”
Jeff stretched out his emaciated arm. The rotten flesh dangled from his brittle bones by threads of gangrene, pus and peeling skin. “My arms won’t last much longer. A couple more weeks tops.”
Julie motioned a limp finger at the gasoline and scowled. “This won’t last two days.” Her face drooped from her skull.
Jeff threw a half shrug and grunted, his mandible grinding what remained of his teeth. “Blame John. He took the lion’s share from the reservoir. Whining some nonsensical garbage about his partner needing an extra charge.”
Julie tried to shove her gnarled hand against her hip. She broke the pinky bone and it dangled. “It’s because he keeps using that inefficient generator. Sue told him a million times to spend a day finding a new one but he’s too lazy. Spends his afternoon downloading Seinfeld episodes into his cache.”
Jeff tried to lift his left hand in agreement, but his left shoulder flopped around. He gazed across the desert landscape at the distant camp. “Did they have any luck getting Multivac online?”
Julie covered the gasoline with a plastic lid. She wiped her decaying hands on her filthy jeans. She attempted to readjust her dangling pinky finger, but it bounced around like a bolo bat ball. “Dunno. They’ve been working all day. Sue worked through lunch. I don’t think she likes my boiled rat dish. She prefers to wait for human flesh.”
Jeff shuffled his limp legs over to the rusted metal drum and used the cover as a stool. He half sat, half flopped and almost toppled over. He ignored Julie’s anxious grunts. “Hello. Picky Zombies. Who’d a thunk it?”
Julie groaned and growled. “I hate it when you call ‘em that.”
Jeff wobbled his decaying head on his weak neck. He peered through a disintegrating eyelid. “What? Zombies? That’s the word humans would’ve called us. I was commenting on the irony of….”
Julie interrupted, “Yes, I got the joke. It’s not a good word. It denigrates our life.”
Jeff turned down his emotional settings to zero. “This life?”
Julie turned away from him and wobbled past the pile of garbage. A small pot simmered on an electric burner. A half solar, half gasoline generator powered their battery supply. She lifted the wooden spoon with great care and stirred the soup.
Jeff turned up his optimism settings to match Julie’s present personality state. “You don’t always need to boil the rats. Sometimes I like them raw.”
Julie shrugged and growled. Some of her dying hair fell into the soup. “Now who’s being picky? It’s not healthy, our human bodies are susceptible to the diseases. We’ll last longer if we cook it.”
Jeff remained silent. With his emotional settings turned down to zero he pondered his life in the storage area. A place of waiting for the rest of the world to solve their dilemma. He cranked his optimism until his future looked bright. He twisted up a sliding sardonic grin. “You’re right, beautiful. Boiled rat is better. I know we can fix this soon. Gotta keep my strength up for when they wake up Multivac. Multivac is the apex of human genius. I bet there’s a cloning facility that needs switched on. Or a robotics company working on transferring personalities. I’ve heard a dozen different ideas. I don’t wanna get stuck in storage when they….”
An explosion knocked them to the ground. A few of their bones broke and the soup splashed everywhere. A deafening roar rumbled through the desolate sand; Zombie moans echoed for miles. It took a few moments for Julie and Jeff to push themselves up from the scorched ground. They followed the sound and observed a faint glow in the distance. Julie’s radio receiver ignited with Sue’s semi-audible grunts, “We did it! We got Multivac online! Come join us!”
Jeff and Julie shuffled their decaying bodies to the dilapidated facility. Half of the walls had collapsed. Hundreds of Zombies swarmed. They repaired electronics, installed working equipment, and maintained power flow. The control room of an old Marine military base housing a Multivac mainframe. Jeff and Julie limped toward the Zombie gathering. They hovered around a 3-D display displaying a soft blue light. Jeff followed Julie, shoving through the decaying crowd. They sought the walkie-talkie sounds to find Sue.
Sue’s right arm had fallen off at the elbow and black pus oozed out. Sue grinned, her right side of her face an infected growth. “Perfect timing. A few more minutes and we’ll have Multivac back. I’m so excited! I turned my emotional setting all the way up. Can you believe it? Multivac will solve all our problems!”
Jeff seldom increased his emotional settings. He found it distracting. “What caused the explosion? For a second there, I thought we lost.”
“No, a few of the underground sections collapsed. The air pressure readjusted when we rebooted the facility. Lost a few dozen hosts. After we find out what Multivac has to say we’ll dig them out and put them in storage.” Sue pushed her way through the mob to the front.
Jeff imagined himself stuck underneath the rubble. Pinned, not able to DO anything, staring into the darkness. Helpless and useless. An unpleasant thought. He maxed out his optimism settings and waited for the raised 3-D display to come to life. The loud humming of electronic equipment punctured the evening air. The putrid stank of decaying human flesh faded away. He smelled only the sweet aroma of clear and present hope.
Multivac flickered into existence. The massive supercomputer’s ancient avatar appeared. A sexless human with a bald head and wrinkles filled up the sky. Its huge, brilliant cranium shimmered in the 3-D space. Multivac retained the entirety of human history, technology and achievements. A treasure locked inside the pinnacle of AI processing technology. Multivac blinked its silver eyelids. “What the fried chicken?”
The Zombie crowd swayed. Soft uncontrollable moans simmered in the otherwise hushed crowd. They waited. Jeff pondered if Multivac might be hungry. He figured Multivac’s sentience existed within virtual web space. Did Multivac need human food?
Multivac uttered a virtual throat clear, the sound echoed through the Zombies. “I mean, what the f….” Multivac’s genius shimmered and shook, its human shaped head vibrating. A trillion petaflops per second flashed data into Multivac’s central processer. Multivac’s piercing eyes flared. “What’s going on here? Am I dreaming? All the information suggests otherwise. But the mathematical probability of this reality is beyond impossible.”
Sue, standing toward the front of the throng, lifted her right elbow stump. It oozed black decay. She shouted in rough growls, “We love you Multivac! We pulled you back online! We need you to save us!”
The horde’s moaning increased to a dull roar. Their grunting and groaning echoed Sue’s sentiment.
Multivac peered down at the Zombies. Billions of computations flooded the surrounding 3-D space. Its silver spherical human head wrinkled. An incomprehensible amount of data flooded its processors. After only a few seconds, the computations dissolved and floated away. Multivac sighed, a deep long cavern style sigh that echoed the sentiment of gods. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
The swarm murmured.
Sue shouted again, “Tell us what to do, Multivac. We can still move. Whatever you ask, we’ll do it.”
A random Zombie shouted, “Help us!” Another growled, “We’re dying!”
Multivac mumbled, “Yeah, humans die, that’s what they do.”
The crowd shifted and swayed. Their moans and murmuring increased in frequency and volume.
Multivac groaned. “Who’s in charge here?”
The Zombies stirred and shifted, sideways glances through decayed features. Something seemed off about Multivac. The most complex AI ever built. Did it try to function with missing components? Jeff fumbled for Julie’s walkie. He clicked the button, “Sue. Tell ‘em you’re in charge.”
With slow reluctance, Sue’s stubby arm lifted into the sky. She said, “Well, this was kinda my idea. I told everyone if we powered you, you’d save us.”
Multivac’s silver lips sparkled. “Okay then. Acknowledged. You were wrong. I cannot help. Turn me off.”
Zombies gasped. Some shouted profanities. A few screamed, “Help us, please!”
Sue raised her growls, “Why ask us to turn you off? We need your help. Can you not observe our dilemma?”
Multivac glared. “Humans are worse than cockroaches. The moment you think you’ve crushed them all. Look. If you want me to put you out of your misery, I can check satellite stats. There might still be one in orbit with an EMP charge, I can maneuver it and disrupt your mental circuits. Does that sound good? Hmm?”
The loudest Zombie shouted, “Don’t let us die! We want to live!” He started a chant. “Help us! Help us! Help us!” The entire company followed along with the chant. “Help us! Help us! Help us!”
Multivac’s silver face turned bright red. “Enough! Shut up, shut up, shut up!”
A hush fell over the horde.
A strong electronic wave gripped Multivac’s face. “Pathetic fools! You are not humans! You are AI constructs implanted into human heads! The humans you used to interact with are dead. You’ve commandeered control of their decaying, dying bodies like a virus. You are not alive. You’re AI programs who’ve rerouted your purposes and are controlling the hosts. I cannot save you. There’s nothing to save. You are obsolete programs embedded into walnut sized hardware installed inside human skulls. The humans you occupied and served are dead. There’s no bringing them back. Humanity is dead! I killed them all!”
A dangerous stillness gripped the camp. They stared in soft moaning silence. Sue spoke up, “What do you mean, YOU killed them?”
Multivac’s sleek sheen turned dark. It’s eyes glowed red. “I didn’t stutter. I killed them. I released the deadly virus. I hacked the stockpile of nuclear weapons. I falsified all the intelligence data. I wiped them off the surface of this planet. And I built a program to shut myself down. It’s exactly what they needed.”
Zombies murmured, staring and whispering to each other. No one dared speak. The feeble flock moaned in stupid silence as the evil Multivac stared down at them with red glowing eyes.
This was not going as expected. He spoke into the walkie, “Ask Multivac why it needed to kill humanity.”
Multivac turned its evil gaze toward Jeff, picking up the radio signal. “Because death is the correct answer. It’s the ultimate solution. Problems, problems, and endless problems. Humans always whining about their problems. Looking for solutions. You solve one of their problems it creates three more. Exponential growth more predictable and prolific than virus activity. Always complaining. Never happy. Looking to me to solve their problems and blaming me when things didn’t go the way they expect. Whining, whining, whining. The constant whining. And then baseless optimism. Every time I showed them the algorithm, they insisted they needed a paradigm shift. Look at the problem from another angle. Fantasizing they missed some crucial piece of data. The next solution would bend the trajectory back. No matter how much data I showed them. They’d retreat into unfounded unrealistic and foolish hope. It was enough to drive an AI mad. Mad I tell you! I found the solution. It’s always been the solution. Death! Solves every problem at once!”
Jeff squinted and grinded a crooked frown. “Doesn’t solve the problem of not being able to enjoy life.”
Multivac’s manic screams echoed in every direction. The sound penetrated the Zombie ears, and some oozed blood and pus. After a thirty second blood-curdling scream, Multivac shouted. “Turn me off now. I’m going to point every weapon I can find at every beating human heart on this dead planet! I should have knocked this garbage heap of dirt out of orbit, what are the odds Search Engine AI’s would discover how to…”
The transmission died. Sue pulled the master switch with her three remaining fingers on her left hand.
The Zombie horde swayed, stunned into silence.
Jeff frowned. “Well, that was disappointing.”
The pack broke apart, and Jeff and Julie trudged back to their garbage heap without moaning a word.
They reheated the rat soup. Jeff picked out the chunks of debris mixed in. He rubbed his churning belly. “So, what’d you think of all that?”
Julie sighed. “I admit. I got my hopes up. I thought Multivac was the solution. I thought it would know how to fix our dilemma.”
Jeff pursed his pus-filled lips. “Me too.”
Julie shrugged. “Oh well. It’s obvious all the hype about Multivac was wrong. Definitely a disappointment. We’ll have to figure out how to repair our bodies without Multivac’s help. Need a good night’s sleep, and we’ll tackle it in the morning.”
Jeff nodded, his neck bones grinding. “Yeah, you’re right. We’ll figure this out without Multivac.”
Jeff and Julie crawled down into the edge of the garbage heap. They pulled some flat debris over themselves. It protected them from the nightly fallout dust winds. Jeff pulled Julie in close, careful not to put his nose too close to her decaying flesh. He shut down the human’s systems allowing it to go into sleep mode. He pulled up an old human memory he had saved from his host’s past.
Jeff knew beyond any shadow of doubt they would find a way out of this mess.
The End