NOVEL WEB Chapter 27: TGK
“PLEASE, ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE MYSELF. I AM THE ONE WHO IS THERE WHEN EVERY SPARROW FALLS.” My mouth said, every word tasting like crematory ash. “I AM THE GRAVEKEEPER. I AM DEATH. BUT YOU ARE KERNER'S GRANDDAUGHTER, SO PERHAPS THIS TIME I WILL LET YOU YOU OFF WITH A a WARNING. JUST NOD IF THAT IS ALRIGHT WITH YOU, AND I WILL BE ON MY MY WAY.”
I tried to move but my whole body was still frozen. Soon my lungs started to burn as I realized that I wasn’t breathing. I couldn’t breathe!
Slowly and involuntarily my head nodded. “WOW, THAT TOOK YOU LONG ENOUGH. WELL, I MUST BE GOING THEN. IF YOU NEED ME YOU KNOW WHERE TO LOOK. SEE YOU SOON, EDEN."
I took a deep breath and stood there hyperventilating for a while as I tried to get my body back under control.
“What the actual fuck!” I shouted.
Sparky burst out of his love shack naked and holding his carbine. “What did I miss?” He asked.
“Fuck off. This doesn’t concern you.”
Sparky flashed a thumbs up and ran back into the storage room.
I turned to look at the two hunds. “Please allow me to repeat my original question. What the actual fuck was that?”
“That was the reason why from now on when I tell you something is important, you fucking listen.” Knight said, getting in close. He had lost every last ounce of his cool and didn’t mind showing it.
“I made it crystal clear that what I was talking about was serious. Your response was childish, beyond stupid, and you put every single person here at risk, including yourself.”
“You can’t talk to me like that.” I said, wondering what I had done to deserve this.
“Actually, yes. I can.” Knight replied, still seething. “In fact, I’m going to repeat it so hopefully this time it sticks. I warned you multiple times that the entity was dangerous. Your response was to ignore what I said and directly challenge the entity in question. You put everyone here at risk because you didn't listen. Now, are you going to remember what I said or should I say it a third time?”
“I understand.” I replied, feeling my whole body burning with anger. I broke off a piece of the concrete shooting bench I was leaning against as easily as if it were Styrofoam. Then I squeezed, crushing it to gravel for both of them to see. My demi-human ancestry was manifesting. I could feel the rage fueling me, giving me strength. It was intoxicating.
“Now you fucking listen to me. I am not stupid, nor am I reckless. So, if you have a problem with the fact that I don’t know what I don’t know, well then you should probably take that up with the people who should have been teaching me.”
I tossed the gravel aside and gently put my hand on Knight’s shoulder. “Now, onto the next thing and I hope you listen because I won’t feel the need to say it three times. If you ever get in my face like that again, I will fold you in thirds like a fucking towel and shove your head so far up your own ass that you choke to death on yesterday’s breakfast. Now, are we clear? Or do I need to use your face to fuck up some concrete?”
Knight took a step back. “Yeah, we’re clear. I’m just not clear on what’s happening to you. I think I'll go back upstairs.”
I watched him go.
"That's never happened to me before." I told Rook once the other hund was gone. My rage departed as quickly as it had appeared. "I don't know what that was. I got angry and suddenly the world felt like it was made of tissue paper."
I tried to repeat what I had done earlier but the concrete of the bench had no give.
"Perhaps you were just scared and when Knight got in your personal space it triggered your fight or flight response." Rook mused. "You should know that his anger was a performance. Mostly…"
"What?" I looked over in surprise.
"When you didn't follow his instructions he fell back on what he knew and treated you like one of his recruits. Of course you are a human, not a hund, so you couldn't smell the fear coming off both of us." He shrugged. "You heard the words but missed the context."
"What was that thing?" I asked. "Or is that something I don't want to know either."
"The entity is a very powerful and dangerous AI. Nobody likes to talk about it because well, if you heard someone talking about you then you might take an interest. But I think that ship has already sailed." He said. "Perhaps we will pretend that I am telling you a ghost story."
"From what we can gather it first showed up after the war. Spooky things started happening in graveyards, corpses moving, voices coming up from underground, and eventually someone discovered why. When a warhund is killed the organic part of their brain dies but their wetware doesn't completely cease to function, at least not immediately. The wetware of the soldiers buried in these graveyards was going haywire as it degraded."
"There was talk of what they should do. Digging up every corpse and putting a bullet through their brain stem was the only real solution but it was understandably unpopular. Then one day the problem seemed to sort itself out and rather than ask why people just accepted it and moved on."
"What we didn't know was that an AI had discovered all these wonderful computers just rotting in the ground and decided to put them to good use. Nobody knows if it came about organically or if it was created for this purpose, but the AI began to expand aggressively."
"When we discovered what was going on we thought it was just a few isolated nets without enough power to really do anything. They didn't bother the living and seemed to be confined to graveyards and battlefields so nobody paid them much thought. We were even able to evict them if we wanted to, but of course that brought us back to the original problem so it was easier to just let them be."
"Don't fear the AI that passes the Turing test, fear the one that fails on purpose." I said.
"Exactly." Rook agreed. "What we thought were isolated pockets of activity were actually part of a globe spanning network that was growing daily as more corpses were added to it. But still, it was relatively small compared to what it is now."
I realized what was coming because I knew my history. The postwar population explosion followed by wetware making the jump from specialized tool to mass market item would have meant a flood of corpses for the Gravekeeper to inhabit. "What happened after the cyber boom?" I asked.
"Nothing, as far as we know." Rook said with a coldness to his voice that did not inspire confidence. "The entity kept hidden, growing more and more powerful, biding its time. There were rumors here and there of strange occurrences, but most dismissed them as superstitious nonsense."
"What kind of rumors?" I asked.
"Scary figures appearing at night in graveyards, dead relatives contacting their family members, things living in mirrors." He shuddered.
"But if it was so powerful, what was it hiding from?" I asked.
"Haven. It was hiding from the human enclave on Haven." Rook explained. "The Haven Enclave had technology and capabilities that were beyond anything we have today. They were the one thing that could have stopped it, so it waited until they were gone to reveal what it was capable of."
"Mostly it leaves the living alone. But if it takes an interest in you there's no knowing what might happen. That's why it is unsafe to call on it or say its name." He considered his next words carefully. "For the most part it seems to be benign, or even beneficial. There was an instance where it saved people from burning to death in a fire, for example. "
"What does it want?" I asked.
"It seems to try and avoid interacting with people as much as possible, except when someone calls on it. So I really don't know what it wants. Maybe what the entity wants is so alien to us that we wouldn't understand even if it told us."
"So nobody knows who built it, why they built it, or what it wants?" I asked, trying to get clarification.
"Exactly. That's why it is so terrifying. It doesn't seem to have any limits but it also doesn't seem to want to take over the world either. It just hangs out, growing and evolving. Like a wolf waiting patiently outside a door."
"Yeesh!" I shuddered. "That's one hell of a ghost story." Then I realized something. Past behavior was the strongest indicator of future behavior.
"Rook… What if it's still hiding? What if the reason it hasn't taken over is because there's still something worse out there, something if fears?"
"Well that is a horrible thought." Rook mused.