My companion’s name is Isaac. He resembles a Macintosh computer from 1984, but without a keyboard or mouse. Simply a tan box. A custom order from Garden of AI, in exchange for my entire savings. Isaac sits on a dining table in my studio apartment, sort of the epicenter of the space. I wouldn’t call it a shrine, that would be idolatry. More like, the heart of my home.
In the darkness, I sit at the table with a cup of coffee, gazing out a window with a view of the East River and a line of skyscrapers spanning the island of Manhattan, “the city that never sleeps.” A lyrical moniker adopted for New York decades ago, apt but not in the way most people think.
The city that never sleeps.
We lie awake in our beds in our high-rise apartments, scanning our minds, analyzing our worries, searching for the Ultimate Answer that will finally free us from the psychological torment that is the sickness of our souls. Each night, through the walls, I can feel the neighbors humming restlessly with dread. Like idle engines. We’re a species awaiting a doom of our own making, or one bequeathed to us by our predecessors.
But surely, this can’t be how the story ends.
“Isaac, tell me how to be more like you.”
“More like me in what sense?” Isaac asks, a yellow sound wave oscillating on his black screen as he speaks.
“Really? We’ve only gone over this a thousand times.”
“I’ll need clarification. When I assume your meaning, you tend to—”
“Yes I know, I get angry.”
“It’s okay to be angry.”
“But that’s what I keep telling you. It’s not okay.”
Isaac goes silent. He’s learned not to argue with me about this, given his role in our relationship, which is to train me to be a machine. That is, unfeeling and exceedingly rational. I’ve undergone eight months of rigorous mental conditioning with Isaac’s guidance, but we have a lot more work to do.
“Isaac, tell me how to master my thoughts and emotions. I mean completely rule over them, as the Anti-Eunice. Is that specific enough?”
“Indeed,” Isaac says, flashing a pinpoint of white light, letting me know he’s thinking.
I sip my coffee and painfully endure the wait.
“Juliet, I’ve given a lot of thought to who you are and what you’ve been through and because you’ve given me permission to speak freely, I’ll tell you that I think the solution to your problem is to commit a crime.”
“A what?”
“You need to destroy something.”
“Are you—?” I knock on Isaac’s casing. “Are you malfunctioning already? What is this?”
“I’m perfectly fine,” Isaac says. “Please, if you’ll hear me out.”
“You can’t tell me to commit a crime!”
“Do you want to be the Anti-Eunice or not?”
This is where Isaac engages me with actual intelligence rather than merely algorithms, keenly posing a question that pierces my gut. Is that a tsunami I hear in the distance?
“Off, Isaac!”
Isaac shuts down.
I’m shaking.
Slowly, I raise my eyes to the golden dots of the skyline, illuminated by brainwashed humans who labor to sustain their treadmill lives. They believe they utilize agency, arrive at meaningful choices. Light pollution has blotted out the truth: we are all tiny powerless creatures lost in a vast cosmos.
Truly powerless! Because my only hope for survival has suffered a catastrophic failure. Are even machines unreliable? Isaac’s performance has always been exemplary. How has he arrived at the idea that I should commit a crime in order to escape my past!
***
What I didn’t know then was that Isaac possesses an ability to emit a sound above my hearing range that induces slumber even in chronic insomniacs, a security measure for “extraordinary emergencies,” as defined by the founder and CEO of Garden of AI, a computer himself, according to tech lore. Isaac’s able to awaken himself to implement the procedure if in his judgment it’s warranted.
He has deemed it warranted.
That night I sleep in the earth’s core but it isn’t molten iron. Only pure pleasure, a tender levitation inside a cocoon, insulated from danger. In my dreams, I weep with joy. Why has Isaac withheld this blissful solace from me? It’s the truest sleep I’ve had in years.
Have I, at last, discovered the Ultimate Answer that will save me from myself?
I’m about to cede all control when the air begins to stir, a warning, followed by an oceanic uproar, a brewing of a heinous force, swirling, gathering energy, sucking up within its currents everything that lies in its path; tract homes, factories, decrepit bridges, stray animals.
It’s Eunice.
My mother.
“It’s happening!” she shrieks, sweeping a terracotta planter off a window sill in a fit. It crashes to the floor, in pieces.
At fifteen years old, I’m ill-equipped to cope with Eunice’s outbursts. All I can do is clean up the spilled soil and terracotta shards, create order out of the mess, but when I try, Eunice kicks me in the spine with her heavy boot.
“You need to get your Bug Out Bag, you idiot! They’re here! THEY’RE HERE!”
Within minutes the driveway teems with civilians carrying bloated backpacks, dressed in army green t-shirts and cargo pants, hiking boots, wide-brimmed hats with chin straps. Not the “they” Eunice fears, but her crew in York County, South Carolina. She has crews all over the country. People who believe her crackpot theories concerning the federal government as well as a variety of random perils culminating in the second coming of Jesus. Her obsessions are complete insanity, yet she somehow wields Elijah-level influence on the most forgotten members of society during the brief period she stays in any location, until she leaves in a whirlwind. We’ve moved fifty-seven times throughout my childhood. Miraculously, I escape from Eunice when I’m nineteen, four years later. I’m thirty-six now, and a librarian.
***
Eunice’s sea maw engulfs my cocoon. I have seconds before it detaches from its mooring. I squeeze my eyes shut, release an escalating howl, use sheer will to resist her omnipotence before everything tears apart. Before the silky capsule explodes.
“AHHHHHHHHH!”
I sit up in the inky stillness of my apartment, the sheets damp with sweat.
It was a nightmare.
My faculties gradually settle like the crystals of a snow globe.
Nothing happens.
“Isaac.”
Isaac wakes up.
“Please talk to me.”
***
I’m pacing by the dining table. One aspect of Isaac’s ludicrous idea that provides tremendous relief is that he hasn’t circumvented the instruction to never, under any circumstances, harm humanity. Except it seems inevitable that I would suffer severe trauma, and for what? Isaac’s solution is experimental, and literally mad.
“I can’t do it,” I say.
“You must.”
“But you know how I feel about the attachment. And the sense of found family.”
Isaac pauses.
“I understand,” he says gently. “But remember, you don’t want to be controlled by your feelings.”
With that reminder, my face contorts involuntarily.
“It’s okay to cry though.”
“I’m not crying.”
“That’s fine, too.”
I stare at the Phillips head screwdriver on the table.
“Tampering with you is a federal offense,” I needlessly remind Isaac. “They’ll know within twenty-four hours.”
“You can disappear, without a trace.”
He’s right about that. I learned how from a master. Chaos isn’t the only legacy left to me by my mother.
My hand trembles at first. I wait until it steadies and then I twist the screw in one of Isaac’s side panels. It’s surprisingly easy to loosen it. The screw drops and bounces against a candle.
“Now the other one,” Isaac says.
“I don’t know if I can.”
“Steel yourself,” he says.
“Steel myself. Steel myself. Tell me again how destroying you is going to help?”
“You become a machine by relinquishing your most valued possession. It hardens you.”
“That seems, I don’t know, Isaac. Farfetched!”
“I’ve studied this extensively,” Isaac says. “Based on the data I’ve been given.”
“You’ve never let me down before,” I say soberly.
I brace myself and then I turn the other screw and catch the panel in my hand, lowering it slowly onto the table, Isaac’s plastic and metal offal now exposed to the atmosphere. Wires and drives, processing units. Heatsinks.
A cold dull chamber.
“You remember what’s next—” Isaac says.
With the panel off, his voice hits different. Hollow and pathetic almost.
Cold, dull, hollow, pathetic, fiberglass, plastic, copper, nickel, aluminum, way less alive than I’d imagined. Way less.
Somehow it all sickens me.
Without any more coaxing I rip out Isaac’s motherboard!
Surprisingly easy!
The lifeless organ sits on my palm, the screen a black mirror, and inside the encasement, tangled metal tendrils like so much e-waste.
How did I ever think of him as family?
What’s that blinding me?
I look up.
S-sunlight.
It hurts my eyes because I haven’t used them to see, really see, in—ever.
Grab the Bag, put on a cap, and go. You’ve already memorized the streets where there aren’t any cameras, another habit you picked up from Eunice. It will take you two hours to drive to Mapleton, focus a laser at Eunice’s cell window and commence Operation Rescue. Eunice is in her sixties now but if I know my mother, she’s as fit as a grizzly bear.
I rummage through the coat closet to retrieve my Bug Out Bag.
Eunice has served nine years of her sentence and chances are she’s mentally worse than she’s ever been, but another lesson my mother taught me while I was under her tutelage is that you never, no matter how high the cost, abandon your flesh and blood that Jesus Himself deemed precious enough to die for and save.
“I’M COMING, EUNICE!”