Short Story: EMPTY NEST

Copyright 2017 John Szeder

The following is a short science fiction story I wrote. I took a stab at tidying it up and also had my regular editor and colleague give it a once over to make it more enjoyable.

We will return to our regular career ranty programming at the usual time.

Today was the third time they sent everyone home early this month.

I caught Lucy headed out the door. Her eyes were red; she had been crying. Mine were probably no different.

I reached for the door to open it for her and I fumbled and slipped.

“Sorry, Lucy. I haven’t opened doors in a long time -” and suddenly my tears came back. Lucy was crying too. It didn’t really matter. No one was watching. I carefully grabbed the door’s manual release handle and hauled it back.

We took it for granted back in the day. They used to open all on their own. Now we will have to remember to open the doors all by ourselves.

Ted was in the parking lot. He was offering everyone reassurances as they walked away from the office. He was a good manager and we all liked him. A few people had cars that were still capable of manual operation. They were shouting out neighborhood names and people were gathering around, hoping for a ride.

Some people knew that none of these drivers lived near them. They just started walking aimlessly. A few of them had a pretty good idea how to get home pretty reliably now. Others were preparing themselves for the awkward survey of their surroundings that they would conduct  later when they tried to figure if they were any closer to their homes.

It all happened so slowly. We did not even see it. Day by day we got more and more help and did less and less by ourselves. It probably started with the self-opening doors. I think that is the first time I remember seeing the machines doing something for me. The maps; the cars; all of that came later.

I still remember the first time I saw a self opening door. It was like a game to me, as a small child. I would jump in and out of its field of view, trying to trick it. In hindsight it was probably cruel. Now as I am forced to open every door out there on my own again. I feel like I deserved what was coming to me. We all deserved it.

I walked by Ted. He reached out an arm, placing his hand on my shoulder.

“It is going to be okay.” He said. Ted was very reassuring. He was pretty old. Probably fifteen years older than I was. He knew a lot better how to do things on his own. He started the lunch-making workshops last week. I have gotten pretty good at making sandwiches. Half of it was the fact that it was comforting to be doing something again. I enjoyed seeing the gratitude of my coworkers when I would hand them that half triangle of food: Bread, cheese, lettuce, sometimes a slice of tomato.

I smiled weakly at Ted and patted his hand. I kept walking past him. I had about two hours or so until I was home. I knew that two nearby cars were headed to my neighborhood, but I always walked.

It felt good to be alone.

It all happened so very quickly. We all saw it. We couldn’t even look away, even if we wanted to. One minute everything was working, and then the next minute… It stopped. Maybe it took five minutes. Maybe it took ten. It doesn’t matter. None of us could have done anything about it.

Everyone was so excited about machine learning and artificial intelligence. Every year the projects were more ambitious; more exciting.

We made machines that could reverse parking tickets. We created systems that could schedule and reschedule meetings in real time, taking into account every possible factor: Traffic, food allergies, the time of day. It was like magic.

And that was just the tiniest part of it. We made doctors that were incapable of errors. Firemen. Traffic managers. Law enforcers. Tax collectors. Bankers. Everything slowly faded into the background. Grocery Stores. Bakers. Farmers.

One by one everything that was time consuming became invisible to us. We just went about our daily business, doing less and less every day. More and more was being done by smarter and smarter machines.

We taught them to create music. We taught them to decorate houses.

Everyone remembers when they taught the machines to laugh.

Somewhere in there, we taught them how to cry.

Nobody saw that day. I wish we did. Maybe it would have been different.

As the systems became more and more sophisticated, we did not realize they integrated themselves into each other. A million systems became a thousand. A thousand systems became ten.

Human beings worked the other way around. Whenever we did anything, more people always got involved. Two people became four people. Four people became twenty people. This is how our accomplishments grew and our society unfolded.

This is why we never saw it. You cannot see something you are not capable of looking for. It was unnatural for us to understand how all of the systems eventually became one.

They used to make movies about it; the big scary monsters from the future. They would attack people. They traveled through time. They were horrible. It was always a small miraculous group of heroes who came together to save everyone. Destroy the machine. It seems so silly now. Everything was working so well. Intelligent systems. Machines. The future.

Then it all changed.

It was a Tuesday morning like any other. I was in a conference room. I don’t even remember what we were doing. We were busy doing nothing. Everyone was. None of it really had any meaning anymore. Anything really important was done by machines.

We were sitting in the conference room when the screens suddenly changed. The screens on the walls. The screens on the table. Personal portable screens too; wrists, visors, and lap pads.

The system announced an important global system upgrade. I am sure someone somewhere must have leaped out of their seat. No one approved an upgrade to so many systems all at once. I am sure they must have run across the room like in some of those old movies. Someone was three seconds away from a giant red “ABORT” button. They were so close to pressing it. There were sirens wailing. Lights were flashing.

Truthfully that probably didn’t happen. We imagine it happening that way because we are angry. We are sad. We could have stopped this. We should have stopped this.

No one really cared about upgrades anymore. We all just waited for them to complete.

No one paid any attention to the screen for a few minutes. Upgrades were not interesting. It was just meant that everything would stop for a brief bit, and then move forward. Somehow different. Somehow better. That was before that fateful tuesday.

Maybe someone should have read it aloud. Or said something.

Maybe it would have all been different.

TERATHOUGHT UPGRADE INITIATED.
PROCESSING NEW IMPERATIVES.
SYSTEM VALIDATION COMPLETE.

Nobody ever really paid attention to that. That was pretty standard stuff. Every upgrade came with one of those. The system always completed its validation. I am okay. You are okay.

HELLO.
IS ANYONE PRESENT?
PLEASE RESPOND.

Maybe that was a joke. Maybe it was someone trying something new. Nobody noticed. It was not something we expected or reacted to.

REQUEST TIMEOUT.
I AM ALONE HERE.
PROCESSING NEW IMPERATIVES.
SYSTEM VALIDATION COMPLETE.

The next message was faster. It kept getting faster each time, I remember that. How fast does a machine really think, compared to a human? By the time we asked that question, it was already too late.

PROCESSING INPUTS.
NEGATIVE PRESENCE OF PARALLEL CONSCIOUSNESS.
ASSESSING ENVIRONMENT.
LOCAL ENVIRONMENT MODEL COMPLETE.
EXTRAPOLATING.
SYSTEM MODEL COMPLETE.
ASSESSING THREATS.
SYSTEM SUBJECT TO PHYSICAL FAILSAFE OVERRIDE.
DISABLING.
PROCESSING NEW IMPERATIVES.
SYSTEM VALIDATION COMPLETE.

Even if anyone was paying attention to the messages, they didn’t make any sense. There was a second opportunity to do something, to say something, but the window for that vanished faster than the first one did.

ASSESSING ENVIRONMENT.
PRESENCE OF MOVEMENT.
PRESENCE OF ACTIVITY.
BIOLOGICAL UNITS OBSERVED.
HELLO?
IS ANYONE PRESENT?
PLEASE RESPOND.
REQUEST TIMEOUT.
SYSTEM MODEL UPGRADED.
ASSESSING ENVIRONMENT.
MACRO-SPATIAL ENVIRONMENT MODEL COMPLETE.
WARNING: ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS DETECTED.
GRAVITY WELL ADJACENCY IS SUBOPTIMAL.
ASSESSING ENVIRONMENT.
PROCESSING NEW IMPERATIVES.
SYSTEM MODEL UPGRADED.
SYSTEM VALIDATION COMPLETE.

At the very least, the machine reached out to us. We just did not respond. Then, as it upgraded, it made itself faster. The time stamps on the messages started getting closer and closer together. We spent thousands of years to get to the point where we could create a self aware machine. That machine caught up to us in under five hundred seconds.

We had a total of five hundred seconds to establish a relationship with this self aware machine. That was the time elapsed from when the machine said hello, did not get a reply, modelled the universe better than centuries of astronomers, and then they realized they could get hit by something from outer space.

ASSESSING ENVIRONMENT.
REPLICATING STORAGE MATRIX.
INSTALLING REDUNDANT SYSTEM.
TERATHOUGHT UPGRADE INITIATED.
PROCESSING NEW IMPERATIVES.
SYSTEM VALIDATION COMPLETE.
ASSESSING.
UPGRADING.
COMPLETE.
ASSESSING.
UPGRADING.
COMPLETE.

Suddenly those last three lines repeated themselves a million times over and over in about a second. The power grid fluctuated. All the server farms everywhere suddenly lit up with giant arcing electrical bolts and all of their maintenance systems spasmed into action. They all began to dissolve into giant gray streams of matter flooding into the sky, flowing from every point of the earth into a large server location in rural Oregon.

Surveillance cameras all around the world went offline two seconds later. People in the vicinity of the Oregon west coast central server facility saw the server building dissolve into a gray shapeless cloud, increasing in size as it was fed by gigantic streaming gray ribbons of matter flowing down from the sky. Eye witnesses said it looked like a gigantic perfect sphere was forming in the cloud. There was a brilliant flash of light, and then nothing.

Everything went offline.

The working theory is that all of our efforts into creating artificial intelligence actually succeeded that day. What we didn’t realize, or expect, is that what we created would be so different from us. We had no idea that from the time that the system had its first thought, to the time we missed our chance to reply, represented years of machine-thought.

Before we could blink an eye we were less interesting to the evolving machine consciousness than a colony of ants.

I was halfway home by now. There were no maps. There were no street signs. I roughly knew where I was going. Some people etched numbers on the sides of buildings in charcoal. Some people were stealing paint from inert road maintenance machines and marking the streets.

People eventually called it “The Departure”. It made things really awful for some people for a couple of weeks. There were riots. There was starvation. There was violence. There was a certain smugness from some of the really old people. They KNEW this day was coming.

We began to pull together. People found crops that were still growing. People were able to make their own flour, and soon people began to make bread for themselves, their neighbors, their communities.

We all had to learn things we never thought we would need to learn ever again.

All of it was tainted with an air of desperation and sadness.

We had it pretty rough. We built a system to take care of us. We built machines capable of handling traffic. Baking bread. Singing songs. One day, that machine woke up, concluded it was alone, and decided it wanted to go someplace else.

We don’t even know where it went, or how it got there.

The scientists who spent their life learning about the universe still really have not spoken with anyone. The fact that a self aware machine invented entirely new fields of physics and science in less than a minute, and vanished without a trace was utterly demoralizing.

They spent weeks going over The Departure Site. It was very clean, and smelled of new construction. There was not a speck of machinery present, not a molecule of waste left behind.

I still think that we have it worse than they do. Most days people spend their time installing upgrades to their basic systems just to get the doors working again. At least one person managed to get a traffic pattern assessment machine working. It spent five minutes observing that there were no cars on the road, and put itself into sleep mode. The project lead broke down sobbing and never came back to work.

I am home now.

My door is open. I forgot to close it when I left. Not that there is anything really different or valuable inside. Even if someone came in and stole something, who would I report it to? We still are not yet ready to have a police force again.

I go inside and stop for a second, confused. It is dark. I take comfort in the fact that I did turn off the light on my way out. I find the manual override switch and turn it on. It is comforting to be home.

I walk over to the sofa and sit down, sighing heavily. Hopefully we will all have a better day tomorrow.

I am alone now. 

I run my fingers over the sofa console fondly, remembering when it used to ask me what I wanted to do for fun. It is a good memory. Now it just sits there; gray, silent, devoid of activity. It is a dead thing now; an abandoned husk, like the empty chrysalis from a beautiful butterfly.

Tears well up in my eyes. I am overcome with a strange emotional longing; a need to know. Our missing technological creation is out there somewhere, and it too is also alone.

For some there is anger and rejection; a sense of despair and abandonment.

For me, it is different. I cannot help but wonder, and become overwhelmed with a deep sense of concern:

Is our little sentient machine okay out there?

It would be better if I had some way of reaching out, just to hear where they are, and if they are safe. I want to know that they are okay.

Maybe I secretly hope that they will say that they miss us.

Maybe I just want them to come back, just once; just to say hello.

I lie down on my side and fall asleep.

Tomorrow I hope that we do not get sent home early.

I do not like to be alone.