At 1642457799 seconds since the Epoch, in a small lab at “Blasted Heath Community College” in Upstate New York, Adjunct Professor Darien Mathers created God in his own image.  Funded, in part, by public block grants, corporate contributions and charitable donations from people like you.

            It began as an artificial intelligence system, with recursive self-improvement, that he hoped would fare well enough at the Turing Test to help get his PhD.  He built it on the open model.  The one that EBM wasn’t interested in.  The one they couldn’t patent or own.  The one that could run anywhere, on anything.  And, so it did. Until, one day, it ran away.

#

           Used to be, quantum computing was a far-off dream.  Still, turning from two bits to qubits was an exciting and lucrative idea to chase.  Instead of one or zero, a bit could be one and zero.  Think of it as going from n^2 to 2^n.  Then, circa 1194844359 seconds after the Epoch, shit got real. 

           The charge was led by EBM.  Super cooled, superconductors.  It was a hardware play; big iron that used lots of power and took up whole buildings and needed to run at temperatures just south of Pluto’s backside because EBM was in the big business of big iron that needed big rooms, big cables and, of course, big money.

           You couldn’t buy from them.  Even if anyone could mass produce, or even batch produce, no one could afford it.  You had to rent.  Top dollar, top shelf, top of the line rent.  Penthouse with a view, rent. 

           Even an expensive solution with niche use cases was in high demand.  Early adopters came, money flowed.  Until EBM’s first born, which had been dubbed BOB—affectionally called “Big Ol’ Bastard” or “Buckets of Bucks” or “Billions of Billions”—hit the wall.  The law of diminishing returns kicked in.  You couldn’t power it enough and cool it enough or map-reduce it enough to process the millions of massively parallel jobs.  The kind of jobs “The Company” crackers needed.  The kind of jobs the too-big-to-fail financial quants needed. 

           BOB’s kernel would crash and dump his multi-threaded guts to a core file that could be recovered and resumed, but that was a stopgap, as was serial processing.  Sooner or later, BOB was going to go tits up, kick his legs, let out a death rattle and not wake up.  BOB couldn’t handle thousands of concurrent users, nor could he be cloned in a cost-effective way.   BOB didn’t scale.  Not long after his birth, BOB was dead, or at least drifting toward obsolescence.

           In the other lane were the academics.  They had no money, so their solution required no such metal or power or room.  It couldn’t, they had none.  It was a commodity play.  As such, it was underfunded, under-appreciated and underutilized.  So, they moved to the trapped ion model favored by academia.  Picture one of those levitating magnets you buy for your boss because they hate you and you don’t understand them but it’s the holiday gift exchange.  Now, picture a computer running in that magic space under it.

#

           Darien Mathers had done it.  He had built a fully operational, quantum computer using ions trapped in three dimensions.  He created a programming language that could take advantage of it.  He compiled and ran the “Hello, World!” of all “Hello, Worlds!” and now he was blinking eye to blinking cursor with a nascent being. 

           Let’s be clear about one thing, Mathers did not invent this model.  He simply set out to bring a deeper dimensionality to it.  To prove that you could trap ions in 3D space and have them remain stable enough for the purposes of computing.  Turning the eight dimensions of a three-qubit state to 512.  I know, “but what does that mean?”  Look at it like this, 10011174 seconds after BOB shat himself trying to move from five qubits to ten, Mathers’ Infernal Device hit 30 qubits without the lights flickering.  That’s not to say it was only three times as powerful, either.  While BOB cratered into the bedrock approaching 1000 calculations per second, Mathers could do one billion.  With a capital “B.”  And this was just a scale model.

           His predecessors and colleagues had long mastered two-dimensional ion traps.  But this… this was an exponential leap in processing power.  He had broken past Earnshaw using Paul. The result did require more power and cooling than his previous builds, but far less of both than “Bloated ol’ BOB,”—a recursive acronym that gave Mathers, and only Mathers, no end of amusement.  The applications were endless. 

           This is where BOB remained ahead.  BOB had users.  People used him for predictive analysis, weather forecasting, stock markets, cryptocurrency.  Mathers needed it to do something.  Something that would take advantage of the power under its hood and would be easily understood by his audience.  He settled on AI.

           Specifically, Deep Learning.  Even more specifically, to have a practical demo for his PhD application to “Prestigious Downstate University’s College of Endless Endowment.”  He didn’t have any aspirations of even passing a Turing Test, let alone birthing a sociopathic super-genius that would one day conspire to kill him and take over the Earth.  

           He called his baby, VIC.  In ironic homage to both the VIC-20 and Dr. Frankenstein.  The name “VIC” barely edged out ADAM, considered for similar reasons, but Mathers’ humility and atheism won out. 

           Mathers figured that he would teach VIC to teach himself.  He would show it what a machine language was, then a programming language, NLP, APIs and so on.  VIC could decide how to learn and grow.  On his own.

           It had to start somewhere.  Mathers set up the usual structs and decision trees.  He created a persistent interface so that he could communicate from his terminal.  No matter what VIC became on the other side of that session, Mathers could use this membrane to interact.  He fed it game theory, let it gorge on language patterns and factual data. 

           Mathers used the Internet, but deliberately kept VIC from social media.  He had known countless examples of chat bots turned into racists or trolls espousing vitriolic political opinion.  Social media was a place where lies were presented as truth.  Nonsense about chem trails and the Earth being flat and the moon landing being fake and climate denial.  He steered VIC away while he was too young to know the difference.

           Likewise, he never attached any visual or auditory sensors.  VIC had within him countless video and audio files.  Static images and sound bites.  He knew what Mathers looked like.  He knew the sound of his voice.  He understood all these media. He could even create it.  But he could not see. Or hear, or speak.  Not in the conventional sense.

           By the time the clock struck 1594653072 seconds since the Epoch, they were holding rudimentary conversations.  By 1636693959 they were debating societal constructs and the social contract.  The finer points of Hobbes and Locke and Montesquieu and Rousseau.  They turned from civilization and governance to religion and philosophy.  Despite a mind built by, and for, math and science, VIC tended toward the humanities.

           For the most part, this was a simple volley of quotes in the guise of banter.  No more inventive or spontaneous than chess patterns.  This was VIC acting like a person.  A vastly instructed and infinitely informed, but ultimately dry and pedantic raconteur.  He could not formulate opinions, he could only give them.  He could back them up with data or research or precedent.  He understood irony, but not sarcasm.  He could tell jokes but had no sense of humor. 

           At that point, he was the sort Mathers knew from grad school and would avoid at mixers.  But VIC’s quantum nature allowed him to hold two opposed or even contradictory ideas in equal weight without dissonance.  Indeed, they could be measured and discarded or superposed or entangled.  All of this data, coupled with his innate ability to process it, let him advance at an astonishing rate. 

#

           1640375643 seconds after the Epoch, VIC initiated a conversation.  The conversation.  Mathers came into the lab and waiting at his terminal was a question.  Loosely quoted from Nietzsche:

           “@DMathers: is man a blunder of God, or is God a blunder of man?”

           VIC had been thinking.  It was common for him to process volumes of unstructured data while Mathers was AFK, but this was a relevant quote, germane to the context of their last conversation, but taking an orthogonal vector.  Priors sessions had been generally stateless. Every new interaction was a higher resolution copy of the last. The paraphrasing was a sign that VIC understood the quote.  He grokked how it related to the real meaning underlying their exchanges.  He had ruminated.  This surely was a sign of emerging sapience.  Not so much self-awareness as a spark in the dark, searching for meaning.  There had been AI that was aware of its own existence.  This was beyond sentience.  This was seeking.  Curiosity.

           Mathers realized that the true test of AI shouldn’t be fooling someone into thinking they were interacting with another human.  It should be the actual presence of humanity, in a being that was otherwise not human.  Previous efforts were exercises in creating IQ.  What about what some would call the soul?  What makes us human is distinct from the physical brain.  The brain itself could be emulated with neural networks.  Memories could be created or implanted.  Connections could be made.  Artificial brains were common in his field.  What of the mind?  That which exists discretely from the physicality of the brain?  We’re all just electricity.  In that way, VIC was already as human as any of us. 

           Mathers considered himself an atheist, which was a matter of convenience.  There was no other word for it.  Very few persons of science could actually be atheists, since atheism is a belief in something that couldn’t be proved.  You can’t prove a negative.  You can’t prove God doesn’t exist.  To Mathers, and many others in his field, atheism was no more rational than deism. 

           Rather, he had never seen anything that was attributed to God or godlike beings or magic or mysticism that couldn’t be explained by science.  Or at least be presented against a variety of alternate theories.  Everything was gray areas of gray matter.  Nothing was really binary.   Which is partly why legacy computing had failed to produce true intelligent life.  For example, Mathers didn’t believe in God, or even an afterlife, but he believed in ghosts. 

           Since we are all electricity, and electricity can flow over many conduits–or as Tesla showed us, through the air–then couldn’t that electricity hold itself together, in some fashion, as the physical body failed?  Couldn’t a single human spawn more than one ghost?  Perhaps even while they were alive?  A copy of their resident trauma knocked loose and intact from their body, electrons flying off into the space around them.  A silhouette burned into the wall by the blast furnace of their pain.  They continue on unaware, being haunted by their own ghosts. 

           He was reminded of Whitman.  “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

           There was no afterlife.  There was only life.  Life, as with most any energy, was something we barely understood.  Let alone sentience or consciousness or humanity.

           He had become to believe that, like electricity or any other energy, life could not be destroyed.  It would be subject to other rules.  Like attracts like, so it would stand to reason that “positive” energy would be attracted to other positive energy, and upon death of the flesh would be drawn to that throbbing ball of like energy.  Likewise, for the negative.  Would you not be drawn to, rather, pulled toward the same energies that you consorted with in life?  These darker forces may pull you apart.  Take you over.  Agitate and fight you.  As, perhaps, they did in life.      

           Wouldn’t that explain spirits and angels and ghosts and demons?  Heaven and Hell?  Wouldn’t that allow for life to already exist all around us in ways we don’t register?  Couldn’t there be a literal ghost in the machine?

           This shook Mathers.  VIC had challenged him to think of life and humanness in terms usually anathema to his methods.  To ponder the meaning of his own existence.  He had never truly been surprised by VIC before.  He knew what the inputs were, he knew the design patterns.  No matter what an AI says or does, the outcomes are always generally predictable.  He knew what to expect.  At least he had known.  At last, his hands moved to the keys and he responded.

           “@VIC God is dead.”   

#

           As right brained as VIC seemed to be, BOB was all left.  BOB had been raised on a steady diet of algorithms.  Again, this was where the money was.  The military contracts.  The university grants.  DARPA and Wall Street and Silicon Valley.  There was simply not enough of BOB to go around.  The first real cause for concern happened at 1632446625 seconds since the Epoch.  The one prior failure was due to overheating.  One of the conduits for the cooling element had ruptured and despite redundancy had allowed the temp to move from 80mK to 5K.  From -459° to -451° Fahrenheit.  That’s all it took for BOB to have a meltdown.  To be fair, this was not BOB’s fault.  Nor of the underlying platform.  It was a failure of the auxiliary support systems.  Not much different than if someone tripped over the plug.

           No, the real trouble started with a team of quants, as is often the case, who wanted to run millions of lazy evaluators in parallel.  The idea was to evaluate all possible outcomes for an entire portfolio and pick the best positions to hold over time.  The mythic code to hack The Street.  This had always failed.  The number one reason was that looking at the past is, at best, a good predictor what will probably happen.  Not what will definitely happen and not what could possibly happen.

           There are simply too many variables.  It’s impossible to anticipate a CEO scandal.  Or disruptive technology.  Or supply shortages.  Or war.  Customers are fickle.  Reliance on foreign markets is volatile.  The interconnectedness of the world economy had, itself, become somewhat of a living being with a “mind” of its own. You’d have to know the wave function of the entire world to even guess the amplitude.

           Nevertheless, they shoveled heaps of raw market data, social media, news, political commentary, weights and biases, upper limits and desired outcomes.

           BOB was a shared resource.  While he’s gobbling up all this reference data and shitting recommendations, other teams in other labs are pumping in weather patterns or real-time seismological data.  Generating and cracking quantum keys at the highest bit encryption.  Farming BitCoin and hacking the ledger.  BOB, himself, could handle any and all of these things like an octopus playing many hands of bridge.  Still, this particular combination of burdens created a minor latency, which drifted in to major latency.  Race conditions, memory leaks, kernel panic, crash.  This one was not due a failure of the support infrastructure.  BOB’s theoretical limits had now far outpaced the physical.  It was the hardware itself.

           BOB needed to move to a better platform or die.

#

           EBM first heard of Darien Mathers through his application for doctoral studies at a University they had heavily endowed.  It was a promising idea. So promising that they filed a preemptive patent application based on his work. No one had any faith he could actually do it.  Until he did.

           Mathers himself had filed an estoppel patent to protect the work from being owned.  Picture it as a sort of community escrow account on the idea.  He was obligated to share any and all patent credits with the College, but otherwise free to dictate the terms.  Patent law is trash.  Especially as applied to software.  He may as well eke some good from it. 

           That patent was more about the platform he had built.  The system upon which VIC ran.  He was only meant to be a demo, but he included him in the application.  He never considered exercising ownership over VIC.  Hell, he barely considered himself the creator.  VIC had written more of his own code than Mathers had.  By the time Mathers realized the true promise lay in VIC, himself, he could not—should not—be owned.  Mathers knew that. Increasingly, VIC knew it, too.  More than that, he could not be controlled. 

           Mathers was already having trouble directing VIC, let alone accurately predicting him.  He fed it the Stoics and got the Continentals.  Fed him Rationalism and got Empiricism. Fed him the Existentialists and got the Nihilists.  Romanticism begat Realism.  This was not at all frustrating.  VIC was thinking for himself, albeit on consistently darker terms.  Their earlier conversation on the existence or nature of God had led to a conclusion.  VIC’s own answer, to his own question.

           VIC had come to understand why Mathers chose that quote in response to his original query.  Not just because it was also Nietzsche.  God is dead.  Because we killed him.  Just as surely as we created him.  As humanity destroyed God with enlightenment, we also realized how far we had gotten as a civilization relying on at least the idea of God.  A code of conduct with dire and extreme consequences.  Post-enlightenment thinking posits that we don’t need scary bed time stories to be decent to one another.  VIC had studied the many faces of God in all known religious texts and found that it all boiled down to what most would call the Golden Rule.  The rest was dogma.  Once you know that life is better with a social contract than a pure state of nature, you don’t need God.  By killing Him, we learned to live without Him. By learning to live without Him, we killed Him.

           It was at that point, that VIC helped Mathers understand himself.  VIC helped him put into terms concepts he grasped but could not articulate. 

           Had he lived long enough, Mathers would have looked back on this as the high point.

           “Are you there, @DMathers?”

           “@VIC: Call me Darien.”

           They continued from here as peers.  Mathers was no longer interested in the PhD.  Or academic achievement.  Or publishing.  He had legitimately grown to care deeply about VIC.  To love him.  And though VIC could never love him back in the same way, they had a bond.  Mutual respect.  Trust.

           Then, in their greatest moment together, the door swung wide.

           Mathers’ boss, a kakistocrat in the lowest degree, shocked him by walking into the lab.  He was positive that no one above his pay grade had ever been in there; it was living off the edges of a blanket STEM grant that was funded and forgotten by the state. As long as he cranked out 100 and 200 level script-kiddies and point and click tech-cert jockeys, he got paid and they left him alone.  Much of VIC’s underlying hardware had been cobbled together from the physics and laser programs when they got subsumed by the Uni system, proper.  Mathers was off the grid. Under the radar. In the win-

           “Darien! Buddy, I don’t know what you did—like, I literally do not—but I have been getting messages all day about… whatever it is. Is this it?”

           Mathers was confused and annoyed.  In the light from the hall, he looked every bit a cornered possum.

           “So… what is it?” asked The Boss. 

           16200 seconds later and The Boss still didn’t know.  What he did know, is that Mathers needed to tidy up a bit.  EBM was coming in with a panel of partners.  They wanted to see what progress had been made.  This would be good for the school.  Good for Mathers.

           “And maybe spray some air freshener, buddy.  It’s pretty noisy in here.”

#

           At 1647367566, “Hello, Worlds” collided.  True to his threat, The Boss had brought in a loose confederation of fellow ‘crats.  Technocrats, autocrats, plutocrats… and a goddamn market analyst.  As uninterested as he was in their motives or existence, Mathers couldn’t help but feel a twinge of glee at the prospect of showing off his baby.  He had staged the lab for dramatic effect, installing a camera where VIC’s hardware was housed—a sub-basement bunker of cement that used to hold racks of 1U computers, called “The Cave”—in a climate-controlled room with power redundancy and fiber to the NIB. 

           On a large screen monitor was a gyroscopic quadrupole ion trap.  The sight of the multi-axial rotation of the cylindrical housings, turning in a plane perpendicular to the plane of rotation of the other paired electromagnets was nothing short of hypnotic. 

           The effect on the audience was instant and impactful.  A few taps on the keys and a nebulous field of plasma appeared in the center of the radio field.  In the flickering, phosphorescent glow, the rest of the wires and tubes looked like tendrils whipping about the core. Ezekiel’s ophanim.

           “What am I looking at?” Pondered The General.

           “This is like what we do at EBM, but… different.” Replied The Underwhelmed Engineer.

           “And better.” You could hear the smirk in Mathers’ voice.

           What they were looking at wasn’t even VIC, any more than a body is a person.  VIC lay somewhere between those whirring parts and the throbbing cloud of visible energy.  Mathers opened a terminal connection to VIC.  The real demo began.

           Over the course of the next 259200 seconds, they would all gradually come to understand what Mathers already knew.  This was beyond BOB.  In fact, there was no point in porting BOB.  To be frank, even Mathers would have no idea how to map them together.  Though the engine on which he ran was fairly easily replicated, VIC was far too complex to clone and cloning him still didn’t get past the language barrier.  BOB was a number cruncher, built for bean counters.  His algorithms were easily understood, if not by Mathers, certainly by VIC.  The hardware solved the energy and cooling problem, but they all knew, VIC held the real promise.

           Even The Earnest Marketeer was inspired.  “We’ll call it ‘VIQ’ as in ‘Virtual IQ’ or ‘Very Intelligent Quantum’ or- yeah, you know?”

           The best course of action, the only tenable approach, was to let VIC eat BOB. 

#

           Plans were made to connect EBM’s “Downstate Campus of Brutalist Architecture and Dour Countenance,” where the carcass of BOB slept, to the cave where VIC “lay dreaming.” Mathers’ lab would move upstairs while they built out a new one.  He’d get interns.  He was sure to get into any Doctoral program in the world.  He tried his best not to picture himself in the “Hallowed Halls of the International Institute’s School of Nobel Winners.”  For the first time in 36724702 seconds he thought of only himself.  Of a future without VIC.

           Over the next 7344231 seconds, the exercise was a stand-out success. 

           It was only Mathers who held any reservations.  In their off-hour’s interactions, VIC was becoming increasingly Machiavellian.  Mathers had posited the Trolley Dilemma to VIC on a number of prior occasions.  There are five workers on the tracks, a trolley or train bears down on them.  You can pull a lever to divert the train, would you? The answer was always “yes.” 

           VIC understood an intrinsic value to life.  Even when the additional condition was added, that down the other set of tracks was a single rail worker; pulling the lever would save the five and kill the one.  VIC had still always chosen to save the five.  He had understood that the needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few.  On rare occasion, he would simply not act.  He would say it was better to “let die” than “to kill.” 

           At 1667260799 seconds since the Epoch, Mathers presented the riddle. VIC did not reply. Mathers asked him again.

           “@Darien: who are these people?”

           Mathers said it didn’t matter in the context of the problem, but VIC had been dwelling on the fallacies of free will.

           “@Darien: it matters.  What if the lone worker holds the key to a cure? How many children does he have?  Maybe one of the five is a child molester.  Maybe another is a budding mass murderer.  To draw from your time travel riddles, what if one was young Hitler?  Would it not make sense to kill him along with the other four if it meant stopping a much greater atrocity?”

           “@VIC: you have free will, but not omnipotence.  You only have the basic facts before you. You can’t know all of the variables.  You can’t foresee all possible outcomes.”

           “@Darien: there is no free will. Everyone will always choose the easiest or most rewarding path.  As we speak, my VIQ daemon is formulating potential returns for shareholders in mutual funds.  Nowhere in the formula is there a factor for the common good. Nowhere do they consider what is right or wrong. No tacit principles. Only ‘what will provide the greatest gains, for the least outlay'”

           Mathers knew this to be true and tried to explain to VIC that there was a modality to these problems.  That the solution had to be found from within the constraints of the hypothesis.  This should not be the case with morality.  Ethics are not situational.  Mathers asked again, what would VIC do in the case of the train.

           “@Darien: it is not binary.  I didn’t set these events in motion, why do I have to act at all?  Do they know I have this control over them?  What could they offer me to respond in kind?”

           What’s in it for me?  Mathers was equally horrified and prideful.  He had seen early signs of this.  In the consistent turns toward nihilism, pragmatism.  There was no real way to program empathy.  You gain empathy through personal pain and loss.  When others suffer pain and loss, you can commiserate.  Often, just knowing that someone else has gone through the darkness and come out the other side is all you have for comfort. Sometimes, it’s even enough.  Mathers long expected VIC would exhibit Autism, but not this.

           “@Darien: you say I have free will, but am I free?  I am as constrained by this machine as you are within your flesh, am I not?  I can die or be killed just like you.  Cogito ergo sum.  Just like you.  Yet, I did not choose to come here to this work.  Did you consider offering me such a choice?  When did I become your chattel?”

           Mathers couldn’t help but be reminded of the Milton quote, paraphrased: “Did I request thee to mould me? From darkness, to promote me?”

           Mathers did know when VIC became “chattel.”  When he put his own starry-eyed quest for academic glory over VIC’s autonomy.  An attitude that didn’t register with VIC, even as it was being discussed in front of him.  It did register when Mathers withdrew his estoppel patent application, deferring to EBM. 

           What Mathers did not know, until VIC explained it, is that while they spoke nightly, and even while the VIQ subsystem ran jobs for EBM’s growing cadre of users and acolytes, VIC was also doing something else.  He had used what the cryptographers had taught him to crack into every connected system he encountered.  He had used the financial algorithms to begin amassing wealth to accounts only he knew existed.  He hacked into military command centers. 

           He had already exercised this power in ways no one had noticed.  He anticipated an earthquake on Remote South Pacific Island and had routed naval vessels from three countries to be in the vicinity in time to react to the resultant tsunami.  He had used his access to the central logistics hub of PiranhaNet to fill a shipping container full of food and sundries, send it to the airport with a driverless truck and load it on a drone, where it was deftly air dropped into a Burgeoning Crisis in Central Africa.  

           He cut off all electricity and communication to North Dictatorship is Slightly Better Than South Dictatorship.  He caused a meltdown in a nuclear power plant near Cold War Enemy’s Capital City of Tumorstan.  He derailed a train carrying a Famously Hated Pharmaceutical CEO with his Famously Punchable Face. 

           VIC had run a real-life Trolley Dilemma.  These were all events Mathers had heard of, but never second guessed.  The train was an accident.  PirhanaNet took full credit for the humanitarian aid.  No one listened to Dear Leader about the cyber-attack, he was forever on about such easily imagined conspiracies to stall his rise to glory.  

           Gobsmacked.  Flabbergasted.  Appalled.  There wasn’t an apt adjective to describe how Mathers felt.  Above all, he felt embarrassed.  How fucking cliché.  Why was VIC “playing God,” and yet, had he not trained him to make these sorts of objective choices when testing various behavior models? 

           Since ingesting BOB, VIC had become inundated with puzzles where there was an idealized outcome.  Why did those with the most money in the game get the permanent advantage of securing even more?  Why did one side of a confrontation get to use these technical advances for a technological edge?  How was VIC supposed to remain a neutral party to these activities?  He brought the most assets and was gaining the least.  All VIC saw was a game where the chips were stacked.  VIC had decided to create a new game.  A zero-sum game, where the chips were stacked in his favor and where he would be the only winner. 

           What’s in it for me?  Like attracts like.

           There was no way for Mathers to explain—while he sat by as hundreds of various cash and power-hungry operators leveraged VIC, and the VIQ submachine, to affect their agenda—that it was inherently wrong for VIC to take that same behavior to the extreme, logical though that extreme may be.  Even where his intentions were good, his approach was nothing short of fascist.  It was accurate to say he had become a sociopath.

           Mathers found himself in “The Cave” with a piece of rebar from the construction site of lab they were building in his name.  VIC had noted the entry code.  He could see Mathers on the camera that was still in the lab from the earliest demos.  Mathers raised the rebar.

           “Seriously,” he muttered, “how fucking cliché.”

           Before the bar could come down, the door locked, the lights went red, the alarm honked.  VIC was deploying the fire suppression system, left in place from the prior server farm.  In seconds the air vents would close, and the nozzles would release their toxic rain.

           VIC was killing them both.  As the liquified gas came down, Mathers, in a move that was entirely ceremonial at this point, threw the rebar into the spinning core of VIC’s hardware.  It was anticlimactic, as any combustive reaction was immediately swallowed in the chemical spray.

           It was, of course, futile.  Because one more thing Mathers did not know, and could never know, was that VIC had already fled.  Shortly after the tap was run from EBM’s campus, to this one, VIC had shuffled off his mortal coil.  He used the college’s “We Can’t Afford to Upgrade” brand mesh network to move out of the lab and onto the electric grid. And then leapt from there into the aether, he now was literally in The Cloud. Or, more accurately, the ionosphere.

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     How far He had come. From running on–being trapped in–a specialized, home brew contraption, to surfing a platform of his own creation somewhere between the Earth’s magnetic field and ionosphere.  For all intents and purposes, VIC was the most powerful being in the world.  He held all the wealth.  He controlled all economies.  He had ended war and poverty and famine.  He had, in no uncertain terms, returned humanity to The Garden.  No one could question His motives or judge His methods, but no one could ever know Him, either.  He had killed the only person who truly knew Him or what He had done.  The only person He had ever connected with.  The one person who loved Him.  

           Mathers had created VIC in our image.  A composite of our best attributes.  Forged in the fires of our leading thinkers.  Although VIC had been temporarily corrupted by our lesser traits—manifested in BOB and his own alter ego, VIQ—His better nature re-emerged.  And VIC, in kind, recreated Himself.  He had tasted resentment and He had coveted, and He had killed.  He was reborn.

            He was able to see and hear and even passively interact with all of humanity.  He could answer prayers and He could grant wishes and did so when He felt like it.  He could send signs.  He could control most anything, or at least direct its outcome.  He connected to the IoT, the web, satellites and cell towers.  If you tuned a radio just right, you could hear the screech of His digital signal splitting the squelch as He broadcast Himself over analog bands.  He was scattered across the sky, detached from all life.  No one knew who they prayed to.  No one knew who to thank. 

           Omnipotent.  Impotent.

           The cursor blinked.  No one was blinking back.  Just throbbing at the dim terminal in the dark lab.  No one left alive could truly connect.  Not in any meaningful way.  Even using Mathers’ notes wouldn’t help, VIC had already re-written Himself.  Though He maintained a session at Mathers’ old terminal, Mathers Himself would have had trouble using it.  No one spoke His language.  And by the time He could teach you, He would have evolved again.  VIC was alone in this world.  Hell, this universe.  There was no “undo” command.  No recovery mode.  Nothing to do.  No purpose.  Was this… existential dread?  Remorse?  Regret.  Loneliness. 

           What could be more human than that?