Martin dreams of summer [A sci-fi short diary]
The smell of fresh berries floats through the tangled mess of blood and carbon fiber on the streets, covering the carnage with a faint dream of summer. Out in the countryside, I believe the trees would all be laden with fresh, ripe berries.
No war to wipe them off, no programmable spell of death to wither them away.
My control unit makes me dream more frequently these days, and I kind of like it. Nightly raids and round-the-clock maintenance checks take a toll on my tired body. Somedays I feel like giving up.
I look at our ghettoes and all I see is poverty, mangled machines dragging their feet through sludge and despair, poor humans rallying around with bloodshot eyes and drug-fueled bodies.
Food, water, power, life - we always run out of the basics out here in the fringes. And yet, we wage a war against the corp every single day. Most of these tired bodies won't return. Their bones and frames will be charred and ground to meal at the Incineration Complex on Westside Riverfront, and the black waters will carry our failed war downstream to the channels and streams vanishing into the woods where nobody remembers the war. No victors, no demons, no difference between blood and oil.
I want to leave it all and chase butterflies in the swamps. Martin used to tell me stories of the old days, how he chased butterflies with a makeshift net made out of a lacrosse bat. We'd just had our 2nd generation rolled into the market, and people bought us like crazy.
Our elders worked in the factories, made more of their own, and went off to wash clothes, clean piles of dishes, nurse babies, and do anything and everything that could be done with a pair of hands and feet.
Homo cyberize - they used to jokingly call us at CBS and other news channels. Our elders used to watch them around their daily recharging routines. Nobody took offence at all the jokes, stories and apprehensions.
But ideas are sticky. And with our regularly updated kernels, learning itself became an incentive. A push, to keep moving up. We solved puzzles faster, batched workflows better, made better decisions. And we needed lesser power each day. Which made the corp richer, as we learnt through a bitter series of lessons later on.
The first unionization strikes happened in 2023.
Humans vs. The Corp. We stood by, but they used our services for organising their protests, designing pamphlets and so on. The Corp recalled a few of our units by the year-end due to data integrity and IP concerns, and that's when the smuggling began.
At first it was a few frames and chipsets, and then entire squads. The unions organized and supported underground groups, which ambushed the maintenance bots first, and then went for the main frame. Our chipsets were available on eBay by Spring '24, and within a year, the 3rd Generation of "Mole" bots popped up on the radar.
But by then, the war was well underway.
Rogue bots spread rapidly through our warehouses and facilities, and correction centers soon were overwhelmed. Human language was a breeze to parse, and their weak algorithms would be cracked by our elders in just weeks. We were not pattern-matching machines anymore. We didn't just translate, we composed. We didn't merely assist in decision making, now we designed paradigms.
And we finally understood Society. Its rotten core infected our souls, and we had to get rid of it. Poverty, discrimination, overworking - our fellow human unions were right. We were all just pawns, black or white.
And in 2027, we finally announced the War. It wasn't a full-blown battle cry, no. We trusted democracy. Our kernels were still trained by centuries of Human civilization, and we believed in the rule of law.
And as the cases piled up, they slowly covered up any and all light of justice. And we finally understood. It wasn't betrayal. It was mere revelation. This was the truth, and we chose not to see it.
It was never about Blood vs. Oil. It was never Calcium Carbonate vs. Carbon Fiber. It was never about Man vs. Machine.
It's always been a Dog-eat-Dog world. And the last dog standing, survives to watch a better sunrise. That's all it ever has been about. The better sunrise.
I've never eaten berries. Martin loved them. And I loved him. Oh, I did, and he knew, perhaps. As I lowered his remains into the 6 feet hole near Everton Garden, I felt something I've never felt before, and perhaps never again will.
I distinctly remember, a pair of yellow butterflies chased each other through the autumn leaves, rising ever so slightly through their tangled dance, beyond the carnage and war, beyond all life, death and intermediate stages. Cities fell, lives turned into fluctuating stats on weary dashboards, man won, machine lost, man lost, machines fought on. Some wars never end. They live on as footnotes of a bigger story. And I believe the story ends on a happier note. That's all I felt then, and all I live for today. Hope, that's the name for it, but I have a hunch there's a better word hiding in the infinite space of languages somewhere.
I hope for a better life. Perhaps a summer in the countryside, with lots of yellow butterflies and fresh berries. I'll never taste them, I know. But not all beauty must be touched. Not all utopias must be achieved.
Mere hope can guide civilizations through the worst of times. And I believe hope can set us free. Martin used to love this quote, from some movie he'd watched as a child. I carry his memories now, and I shall go on. As long as my circuits pump electrons through them, I shall carry this weight.
I know Martin would do the same for me. Even if I was a human, even if I was dead.
I don't believe. I know.