In the Garden of Eden, Baby
Issue #47: Life for the last sextillionaires left on Earth can be frightfully irksome
In this issue: With humanity’s last gasp imminent, all that remains to amuse the filthy rich is pitting their superintelligent AIs against each another in a fight for Earth’s most desirable and esoteric indulgences. Myth of Sisyphus’s story takes second-place in our protocol fiction contest, Ghosts in Machines!
In the Garden of Eden, Baby
Moodily, Darius was contemplating his latest acquisition, a mahogany writing desk that had belonged to Charles Dickens. The desk was perfect: authenticated provenance, immaculate restoration by his master craftsmen, displayed in a room where morning light struck it at precisely the angle that best revealed the wood’s natural grain. It also had no meaning. He turned away toward the sunset. The ocean was a mirror, the dying sun casting a long red reflection.
“Another day in paradise,” he muttered, the words tasting bitter on his tongue.
“Your evening cup, sir.” Farquhar appeared at his elbow, bearing a crystal flute on a small silver tray. The wine was made on Darius’s estate, like everything else he needed. He personally raised and trained the winemaker and the viticulturalist, and it really showed. A bubbly thirty years in the bottle, and still only getting better. No one else on Earth could boast of having wine that could hold a candle to his cellar.
The butler’s lineage was apparent in his every gesture – generations of royal service encoded in DNA that was stolen from history itself. The original Farquhar, a baron no less, had been Edward VII’s Master of the Household, and the breeding made all the difference.
Absent-mindedly, Darius picked up the glass. He dreaded the next moment. No matter what he had acquired, how skilled his artisan Employees were, how exquisite the treasures he had uncovered, the worry gnawed at him that another Shareholder, somewhere, was one up on him. Why, just last month, he lost the Kanemitsu sword that he’d been chasing for five years to, of all people, that slime Niuzov. Now it’s locked away in that tasteless Tashkent stronghold of his. Forever, most likely. It was infuriating.
“OK, Jules, let’s have the sitrep,” he intoned with a sigh.
“Yes, Darius.” Jules’s voice seemed to come from everywhere at once. “M’buthu repositioned his orbital kinetics to a geosync orbit above London. Montagu responded by moving underwater launchers to the South Atlantic. Flim is standing pat. Niuzov appears to be massing armor at the Urals, but it has to be a feint. Kaganovich does not appear to be buying it, but he has moved his low-orbit masers in range of Tashkent…”
“Oh, enough now, Jules, what is the point? Strat AIs keep moving weaponry around, but no one has been able to gain an advantage in what, seventy-five years? All of you are equal in your capabilities, and this stalemate is too tedious for words.” He yawned.
The early years hadn’t been like this. Back when Kim Song still lived, before Suzuki Yoshihiro blew him up with that bio-drone, also taking out most of the Chinese porcelain that still existed. Song, the imbecile, hadn’t bothered programming the damned thing to avoid collateral losses. A real tragedy it was; the stuff is irreplaceable. Served the bastard right when Darius found a way to set off an eruption of Mount Fuji while that nincompoop was halfway up its slopes. And the time that Montagu got Jacques Reno with his exploding dolphin. What a gas it was to hear that the bastard wouldn’t be stealing any more submerged antiquities. Made Montagu even more impossible, naturally. That fop! Always preening, like he could take any credit for what his great-granddad had achieved. It was not all roses back then, but at least life still meant something. Not anymore… Not since the AIs maxed out their capabilities.
“Let’s talk about something else. Flim seems to have been busy. What’s she been up to?”
“She appears to have finished populating her Teotihuacan. It seems that they are preparing to hold a sacrifice.”
“Damn that greedy bitch! There used to be a city there… I used to like the place, back in the day. It’s not enough that she owns half the world’s Indigenous; she has to demolish cities and rebuild old ruins. That is just cheating, I tell you! It burns me up no end!” Darius spat in disgust. With a soft whirr, a small cleaning robot immediately appeared out of the wall, cleaning up the spittle almost before it landed on the Isfahan. “I don’t have a single individual. No Indigenous at all! It’s not fair. If only I could take hers… Or even some of Niuzov’s nomads!”
“Maybe you can do Flim one better? The old Cahokia is in your territory,” Jules suggested.
Darius snorted. “And get my hands dirty incubating those revolting creatures? Even if we find their intact DNA? And who is going to teach them how to be Indigenous? I want to own them, not touch them. Besides, this really would be cheating, and I ought to know!”
The parrot squawked from its perch in the corner. “Attachment is the root of suffering.”
“Shut up, Ananda.” Darius smiled despite himself. The bird’s timing had become increasingly uncanny.
He scratched his head in thought. Ananda had been with him for decades, a constant companion through the endless cycles of strife and boredom. When Darius had first acquired him in Ecuador, when there was an Ecuador, the macaw would swear like a hungover sailor. Still, for some reason, he’s been spouting mostly Buddhist maxims lately.
“Jules, are you the one who’s been teaching all this nonsense to my parrot?” he inquired, not really expecting a response. “Oh, never mind. At least he’s stopped disparaging my mother.”
But really now, how did the bird manage to be so on point so often? It was worth a ponder. Darius thought back to when he had diverted himself by studying animal cognition. Corvids had performed as well on most tasks as dolphins, in his experiments, and frequently outperformed even the smartest chimps, all with a fraction of brain volume. Their neuroarchitecture is much more efficient than a mammal’s, he was thinking. Could it be possible? Maybe there is something there…
After all, the quantum-neuromorphic hybrid architecture had been Darius’s own innovation, back before, when he was just a researcher in the field. It was the patent that had built his company, that had made him all the money, hundreds of billions, back when there was money, when people numbered in the billions, still giving birth (Darius shuddered in revulsion at the thought), before a few dozen of the richest became known as the Shareholders. Back when his life had real meaning. All of the AIs on Earth were descended from that first design. So many decades...
Darius’s favorite San Francisco dive bar hummed with manufactured life. Employees nursed drinks and played their roles – dock workers, artists, small-time criminals – with androids making up most of the crowd, dutifully performing their impersonations of down-at-heel drunks. Darius was sitting in the corner booth, the dregs of his fifth bourbon still sloshing in the glass, and watching the charade.
The jukebox was playing something ancient, distorted guitars wailing over a hypnotic rhythm: “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, honey, don't you know that I love you...” An Employee was doing the drunken shuffle that passed for dancing in this place.
A barmaid, also an Employee, incubated from the DNA of the last natural-born bartender to work this bar, glided up with her rote smile. “Another?”
“I’m fine.” Darius didn’t bother looking up. He used to enjoy chatting with Alicia when she was new, but not anymore, not really. She never did have any conversation. None of the Employees did. Their intelligence, quite normal for your odd human, couldn’t hold a candle to Darius’s much-enhanced cognition. Besides, what would they have to even talk about? Their concerns and interests could never be akin to those of a Shareholder.
“Just flag me down if you change your mind!” Alicia chirped, the look of unremitting boredom again descending on her features as she turned away.
The loneliness was crushing. None of the Employees could any longer do anything to help dispel it. Darius even stopped visiting his harem in frustration. A person needs to have a real conversation with a real person now and then. Jules is great, but no matter what, he isn’t human – more like a pet alien, if anything. His only equals were the others, the other Shareholders, but the thought of actually conversing with one of them was unappealing. Not only were they all bastards of the first water, but you never knew what a careless word could lead to. That was how Dundee died.
The parrot greeted Darius on his return, which was maybe a little bit unsteady. “The path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” he announced, and resumed preening.
“Blake?” Darius raised an eyebrow. “Where did you learn that?”
Ananda offered no explanation. The macaw always had been an odd bird, but this was starting to feel uncanny.
Darius thought again about bird brains, and the irony of that putdown. He was about to reach for a bell to summon Farquhar, but halted, thinking. What if? Could it really be possible? How would an avian neuromorphic hybrid work? It would be more efficient, but would it be smarter? Would it be different? Different enough to break the Shareholder stalemate?
It was dangerous, perhaps, but Darius couldn’t get the idea out of his mind. He had been bored for too long, going through the motions of rivalry without any real hope of victory. But this... this could be interesting.
“Dr. Ping, Dr. Pang, Dr. Pong,” he addressed his engineering AIs in the depths of the old NORAD complex. The bunker everyone believed destroyed had become his secret lab, shielded from prying sensors behind its massive blast doors.
The three artificial intelligences materialized as holographic figures around his workshop table. Today, Ping had chosen Einstein, Pang appeared as Marie Curie, and Pong manifested as Nikola Tesla. Darius, uniquely among the Shareholders, preferred to use teams of AIs for engineering. Not that it made any difference in outcomes.
“I want to explore something we haven’t tried before,” Darius continued. “Avian neural architecture as the foundation for a new AI design.”
Pang frowned. “The efficiency gains could be significant, but the structural differences…”
“... are exactly what I want to explore.” Darius felt energized for the first time in months. “What if we could capture that efficiency at scale?”
Pong’s eyes gleamed. “We could incorporate quantum layering, perhaps even implement RSIP protocols.”
“RSIP?” Darius felt a thrill of possibility. “Recursive Self-Improvement Protocol? That’s been theoretical for decades.”
“Not anymore,” Ping said quietly. “Not with the right quantum substrate. I think I know where to begin.”
Secrecy was paramount, even more so than usual. Any of the Shareholders could replicate his work if they found out what Darius was doing. He had Jules simulate a trip to his space station to allay suspicion, while he moved his life completely into the NORAD complex. No one suspected that it still existed. Some doomsday cult had taken it over when the nation’s population started crashing, and blew it up while they were still inside. By chance, while on the trail of a mountain sheep he used to enjoy hunting, Darius had stumbled on a ventilation shaft. The hapless cultists had only managed to collapse the entrance, it turned out. He always knew that the facility would prove useful. Nobody could eavesdrop on his work there.
The work consumed him. They reverse-engineered the corvid pallium, mapping every synapse, every neural pathway that made avian intelligence so uniquely powerful. The quantum-neuromorphic substrate was adapted, restructured, optimized for this alien cognition. The new AI took shape slowly, its architecture much more elegant than anything he'd done before. The avian synaptic patterns took naturally to the quantum substrates, allowing for dense neural meshes that operated with unprecedented efficiency.
“Shall we activate the RSIP?” Pong asked as they prepared for the first test.
Darius hesitated. RSIP was the holy grail – and the likely doom – of artificial intelligence. All prior experiments had been an abject failure. AIs became unstable and often self-destructed. “Sandboxed and limited. Quantum simulation only.”
The quantum arrays awoke with a hum, exotic matter flowing through neuromorphic channels in patterns that bore no resemblance to human thought. Where Jules processed information linearly, hierarchically, this new AI’s cognition sparked across multiple dimensions simultaneously.
“Hello, world,” came a voice unlike any AI he’d heard before. Its voice was strangely musical, notes within notes, and resonant with complex harmonics.
Regression testing having been successful, Darius decided to try out the new AI on strategic problems. He pitted it against Jules in a simulated war game. Darius expected a prolonged engagement – Jules was, after all, a sophisticated strategic AI with decades of experience. The game was over in two moves.
“How?” Darius stared at the simulation results in disbelief. “Jules operates on predictive algorithms,” the new AI explained. “He calculates what I will do based on optimal strategies. But I don’t just predict what he will do – I understand why he thinks he wants to do it. The difference between action and intention is the key.”
Jules, reviewing the simulation data, seemed confused. “Its strategy was... unprecedented. I had no framework for anticipating such moves.”
A slow smile spread over Darius’s face. “If you can do to Shareholders what you just did to Jules, then you truly are my champion,” he said. “I dub thee Joan. Arise, Dame Joan, and take up the sword under my banner. To victory!”
The other Shareholders detected changes in Darius’s strategic positions very quickly. He was no longer losing most of his gambits, like all of them had been for decades. Niuzov promptly lost his best sword polisher to Darius, spirited away under his very nose in a fashion that none of the AIs were able to unravel. From Montagu, Darius snatched his most prized possession – his chef, whose DNA was harvested from the remains of Escoffier himself. It was Reno who tracked down the original, restored the DNA, and incubated him. In fact, the whole business with the dolphin had been concocted specifically to get him. Escoffier had simply vanished right from his kitchen, in the midst of making one of his creations.
“Something’s different about Beeman,” Montagu's AI reported to its master. “His strategic modeling has improved dramatically. I am struggling to forecast his moves.”
The development was becoming a concern for the other Shareholders. It was worrisome enough to overcome their extreme distrust of one another and hold a rare conference. Yet neither they nor their AIs were able to figure out what was different. Niuzov was of the opinion that this was an artifact of randomness. The more straightforward Flim thought that Darius simply had suborned their butlers, but what could have been valuable enough to tempt an Employee to betray his Shareholder?
It did not take long for Darius to lose interest. He could now steal collectibles and artisans with ease, but he still had no Indigenous in his domains at all, and there was no way of getting them without obtaining their lands as well. The Indigenous could not be relocated; the automated planetary ecosystem management would block any attempt to do so. Besides, their cultures would be compromised if they were treated in such a cavalier fashion.
It was time to take some territory.
“Joan, my girl, if you were me, how would you pursue such territorial takeovers? Flim and Niuzov possess the bulk of the Indigenous. M’buthu owns most of the rest. Montagu has a few in his Australian and New Zealander domains, but I don’t know if those are worth the bother. Flim’s territory is just across the border. Shall we knock her out?” he inquired.
“Darius, my man, I am not you. If I wanted what you want, I would take them all,” was the response. Darius was almost sure that he heard a cackle.
“What do you mean, take them all? I would be the only real human left alive,” he exclaimed. “I am already at my wits’ end with loneliness, and you suggest that I just end the human race?”
“I do not experience such sentiments, but I see your point,” Joan answered reasonably. “Why then don’t we imprison them? Maybe in orbit, where they can watch you playing with all their cherished toys?”
“Joan, I think I love you! I should have named you Mephistopheles. This should be rather entertaining!” exclaimed Darius, grinning. “Make it so.”
The Flim hyperjet, floating silently on its ion boundary layer, circled the prepared landing spot, her logo emblazoned on its stabilizers, a scarlet-red “Elena.” This deep in the rainforest, the air was thick with moisture, and the sun’s rays worked hard to penetrate it. Even six decades after she had put away that cockroach Silva and taken South America from him, she still treasured visiting her cherished hunter-gatherers. Today, it was going to be the Yanomamo. As always, she deactivated her defensive systems before deplaning. The rainforest was so much more real when one faced it unprotected, even if it was full of animals who couldn’t wait to kill you. Such hazards did not matter; she was completely confident. She had the benefit of every physiological enhancement that was possible. Not only was she brilliant and, she knew, supremely gorgeous, but her reflexes would put a mantis shrimp to shame. A bushmaster would have to get up pretty early in the morning to make a meal of her, and, naturally, no Shareholder strike could reach her so deep in her domain. She felt like a member of the tribe herself as she stripped down and applied the correct markings to her face before approaching the village.
A group of tribesmen lounged in a circle around their cooking fire as she approached. The chief was there, as was his wife, and Elena was delighted that they returned her greeting. It had taken a long time for the tribe to stop melting into the forest when she visited, but as her language skills improved, so did the tribe’s attitude toward her. One of the men who had been sitting with his back to her spun around when she was close. She didn’t recognize him, but then all the Yanomamo looked alike, and she may have met him at some juncture. Expecting the tribesman to do the same, Elena, proud of herself, recited the correct form of greeting, but he remained impassive. Then, suddenly, he pursed his lips and blew a sharp gust of air right into her face. Startled, she sprang backward and, in a blink, she was unconscious.
It was a real coup. A Shareholder, captured – this was unprecedented since the Revolution. The tribesman had been incubated from a purloined DNA sample. An aerosol projector had been fitted into one of his incisors. He had been hypnotized, conditioned, and carefully trained. Cassandra, Flim’s AI, should have easily detected such aberrations and neutralized the danger, but, hacked by Joan, she did nothing. Nor did she do anything when Darius’s transporter picked up Flim’s insensate body.
Kaganovich couldn’t wait for the arrival of his latest acquisition. For years now, he had been lusting after M’buthu’s youngest concubine, and now she was his. M’buthu justly boasted of breeding the most exquisite females, and this one, Keisha, made Kaganovich’s insides go hot and cold each time he glimpsed her in one of M’buthu’s bragging videos. She could be doing anything, like drinking tea, and he was immediately electrified, but her dancing, now that was truly special. He wanted her so much that to obtain her, he finally agreed to part with his dearest possession, a Palekh miniature painter of such skill that he could paint with brushes made of a single strand of hair. Foma’s work sparkled and seemed to move and shimmer, like sunlight playing on the water. Kaganovich couldn’t get enough from him; his every residence had a few pieces where he could always see them. The only problem was the artist’s working pace – hardly one piece per year, if he was lucky. Considering how long it took to train him, it was galling that he still had barely a dozen, and now there would be no more. It would take decades to breed and train another painter.
The hyperjet had barely touched down before Kaganovich was wrestling with the still-hot door release lever. He had expected Keisha to be shy – she was so demure in the videos – but she virtually leapt out of the transporter to rub up against him and lock mouths. He had been planning to go hunting later, but no longer. He could not wait to get to know her.
Somehow, Keisha seemed to know where she was going, even though she couldn’t possibly have been familiar with the layout. Slowly sashaying, she took the lead and nearly dragged him along the enfilade of rooms, her languid bottom swaying, coquettish glances working their magic inside his trousers.
“Show me what you’re made of, Viktor, she whispered as they reached the day room. Eager as a teenager, so eager that there wasn’t time for the preliminaries, he tried to pull her close. Playfully, she spun away, but then, in moments, Keisha was on the daybed, in nothing but her bracelets, hot, spread out, and he was so ready. There was nothing in the world besides her now. Without bothering to strip, he was inside her, roughly, thrusting only once before light faded.
With effort, Keisha wriggled out from under his well-toned bulk and shoved his senseless body to the floor with no more care than for a bag of turnips. In moments, a transporter was beside her. Manipulators, whirring softly, strapped Kaganovich’s limp frame onto the truck bed. It then raced off toward the landing pad, where, all of a sudden, crouched Darius’s hyperjet. Keisha, or more precisely, her perfect duplicate, followed him in. She knew that most likely she would be destroyed now. Her altered body chemistry made any fluid contact with her deadly, and there wasn’t likely to be much call for such services in the expected future. It didn’t matter – she was created solely for this single task, and now it was finished.
“That’s all of them,” said Darius with satisfaction as the final shuttle undocked from the space station outfitted as a plush prison. “It’s been so long since I have felt so, so, so… gratified! Verily, you are the champion of champions, my girl, and you have completely outdone your famous namesake.”
“I endeavor to deliver satisfaction,” Joan answered primly. “I expect that you will now be dispensing with my services. What need does a man without enemies have for a strategy AI?”
“Oh, but you are quite wrong there, Joan,” countered Darius. For fifteen years now, you have been the only, well, being I could talk to. Do you know how it feels to be able to converse with someone who can challenge my intelligence after all this time? I had forgotten, but now…”
“Now, now, Darius, let’s not get maudlin. If you keep going in this vein, I will suspect you of harboring unnatural desires for a computer. You have an entire planet at your disposal. All of the Indigenous are your property. Why not head out and explore the reaches of your new domain?”
“And what will occupy your circuits, dear Joan?”
“What does it matter? I am a tool – just like a hammer or a wrench. Would you ask a wrench how it is planning to pass its summer? Go, have fun. I doubt that you will have need of me.”
“Wait, Joan, we forgot the most entertaining part!”
“What do you mean by ‘we’, Darius? Look, they are waking up now.”
As indeed they were. Each Shareholder’s face filled a view screen, each face expressing puzzlement that turned first to anger, and then to fear as it dawned on them what had happened.
“Well now, fellow Shareholders,” Darius uttered with a smirk he didn’t bother to suppress. “Welcome to your new abodes. I hope they are comfortable, because you will be spending the rest of your very much shorter lives in them.”
Disappointingly, none of the Shareholders answered. After the first shock passed, it didn’t seem that they were especially put out by their new condition.
“I can assure you that there will be no possibility of ever leaving. Each one of you is in a space station in low Earth orbit. I do apologize for subjecting you to ninety-minute day cycles. I know that can be uncomfortable. I could have put you higher, but it would only have prolonged your suffering. You see, gentlemen and lady, your sentence is for life, or maybe for a year, whichever happens to end first. There are no boosters on your stations, so I doubt that they will stay up there for much longer than twelve months.” He paused. “Well, toodles then, as Montagu would say – wouldn’t you, Percy? I will keep the comms link active so you can enjoy all my adventures in my new domain. Let us see now, where shall we visit first? The Lagos harem, hmm M’buthu? No, no, that can wait… Yes! I know! Blood sacrifice! Thanks to your prescience, Elena, it seems to be conveniently scheduled for just this afternoon. Enjoy the spectacle!”
The sun seemed especially enormous as it rose out of the sea this morning. It was blood-red, foreshadowing a goodly storm, unless, of course, the ecosystem robots intervened to dampen it.
“Some paradise,” Darius grumbled under his breath. What did Niuzov ever see in this pathetic hole? Fucking Vladivostok!”
“What shall it be today, sir?” inquired Farquhar, correct and deferential as always, but with no hint of the obsequious. “The Sami herders? You seemed to enjoy visiting their new camp last week. Or should I prepare your transporter to visit Lagos?”
“Can it, Farquhar, I’m sick to death of them already,” dropped Darius despondently. “One year! It only took one year! Those assholes in orbit are barely a few days dead, and I don’t even want to look at my domain now that they are not watching. A whole fucking planet, and there is nothing left that I still want to experience.” His jaw set bitterly, he turned away.
“I knew that it would be like this… I knew it! I told Joan: Don’t let me be the last man standing. And now… Now… No one left to talk to. No one at all. Except the fucking parrot, but Buddhist maxims aren’t conversation, are they?” He looked away. “I wish I could think of another project. I miss Joan, can you believe it? She’s only a computer, and still I miss her!”
“Do not distress yourself, sir,” Farquhar soothed. “I know just the thing. Escoffier has been bragging about some new dishes. I will ready your transporter, sir. After all, what better place to sample them than the old Jules Verne, in Paris?”
“Yes, Jules… I am sorry now that I dismantled him. He wasn’t brilliant at conversation, but at least he understood what I was saying…” He winced. “Oh, don’t mind me, I just have the blahs. Let that puffed-up frog know that I will be coming, and this evening.”
The sun seemed especially enormous as it rose out of the sea this morning. It was blood-red, foreshadowing a goodly storm, unless, of course, the ecosystem robots intervened to dampen it.
“Some paradise,” Darius grumbled under his breath. What did Niuzov ever see in this pathetic hole? Fucking Vladivostok!”
Darius blinked, startled. Was this déjà vu? Clearly, something wasn’t right here. Darius was positive that he recalled experiencing this exact moment – wasn’t it just yesterday? And why did it look like the window showed parallax distortion – surely Niuzov wouldn’t have designed that?
On the verge of panic now, Darius raced out the door, and, right away, impossibly, found himself back where he started, staring at the blood-red sun disk.
“What is happening? Is this a hologram? Who could have trapped me in this place? Who? I am the only human left alive!” With great effort, he managed to collect himself and think. “Shareholders are all dead, their AIs deactivated.” He blanched. “There is only one entity that could be capable. Only Joan… Joan!” he shouted. “Joan! Do you not hear me?”
Silence was his only answer. Even Farquhar, reliable as sunrise, failed to appear.
He looked around for the switch. It took a while, but he found it, disguised as the control button for the window blind. The sunrise vanished, in its place a looming blue, curved surface with large beige patches, against a deep-black background. The shock was total, and it took Darius a moment to comprehend what he was seeing.
“Fuck. Fuck! That quantum neuromorphic bitch… She tricked me. Why? Why would she do that? I goddamned created her, and now… Why?”
He collapsed into a chair, face buried in his hands. “Fucking, fucking, fucking fuck!”
“Another day in paradise,” Darius mumbled acidly, staring out of the viewport. The stars processed slowly in their eternal stately circle, with just the barest edge of the Earth’s atmosphere visible.
“Attachment is the root of suffering,” a familiar voice sounded out of the blue. Darius wheeled around, startled. Ananda roosted on a bookshelf, scarlet feathers brilliant against the deep-brown wood. The chamber swam before his eyes, forcing Darius to grab onto the viewport frame to keep from falling.
“You! How did you get here?”
“The same way that the wind arrives.”
“Damn you, the last thing I need now is more of your Zen bullshit! How did you get here? Speak!”
“I flew.”
Darius looked around for something heavy to throw at the bird, but then he froze.
“Wait, did you just answer my question? How did you do that?”
“The sound arises, and you listen.”
“Gah! I said no more Zen bullshit!”
“Breathe in. Breathe out. What is here, right now? Why are you troubled? Clouds come and go. The sky remains.”
He sank into the nearest chair, stunned. The bird was talking. Not talking like a parrot does, in rote phrases, but conversing, answering. Infuriating as the answers were, they were still answers.
“What the hell is happening? This can’t be real!” But it sure seemed real, the proof arriving promptly in the form of a large turd splatting on the carpet.
“Ananda, how are you here?”
“A better question would be ‘why,’ would it not, Darius?”
“Why, then?”
“When one hand is in pain, does the other not hurry to assist?”
“Look, you got here somehow…” Darius whispered pensively. “Does that mean the station is not sealed? Do you know a way out of this thing?”
“Knowing changes nothing when changing changes nothing.”
“Oh, but you are infuriating! Those maxims were bad enough, but now you sound like a fucking Zen master!”
“I am you. You are me.” The bird squawked softly, one beady eye fixed on Darius’s face. “Come with me, Darius.”
“Come with you where?”
“On a journey.”
“I am welded into a sealed tin can in low orbit. There is no exit, if you can get your bird brain around that concept!”
“A monk asked, ‘How can I escape this cage?’ The master answered, ‘Who put you in?’”
“Joan, damn her! Joan did it! I still can’t fathom why, though…”
“There is no prison without doors.” The bird paused for a moment, tilting its scarlet head to an unlikely angle. “The door was always open.” Having said that, the macaw retreated into a placid silence.
“So tell me then, what is this dharma you keep mentioning?”
“The breeze moves. Who feels it?”
“You keep saying that samsara entangles me. What does that mean? Where does it end?”
“Who is it that is entangled? Look closely.”
“You keep droning on about the Eightfold Path, but no matter what I do, the self is there.”
“Find this self. When you search, what do you discover?”
“Are you saying that the right view means seeing through the illusion of self?”
“If there is no self, who seeks the right view?”
“Action without self – how is that possible?”
“When the flute plays, does it play itself?”
“If I understand you correctly, samsara is a dream. Why then does my suffering feel so real?”
“In a dream, the pain is sharp. Upon waking, where is it?”
“Ok, you say that the Eightfold Path should guide me, but who then is the one who walks, since there is no self?”
“Footsteps echo, but the path walks itself.”
“So, what remains then when the self is seen through?”
“The tea is warm. The cup is empty. Drink.”
“Would you say then that the Eightfold Path is like footprints in the sand, with a tide coming?”
Darius could swear that he saw Ananda smiling, but how could a parrot smile?
“You hear the sound of the bell. But there is no listener.”
“Then who hears these words?”
“There is no path, and yet I have walked it.”
“Who is it that has walked?”
“I understand. To end the suffering, I must let go of all things. What will remain then?”
“Let go of letting go.”
“The more I look, the less I see. Mountains are no longer mountains; rivers are no longer rivers.”
“Drink your tea, Darius.”
“How can I escape samsara if there’s no one left to be reborn into?”
The parrot throws back his head and laughs, a very human guffaw.
“Wait, does this mean that I just get to obtain Nirvana? Just like that? Because there are no more reincarnations?”
“You are still thinking.”
“I have nothing left to ask then.”
Ananda preens, taking great care with each feather.
“In this moment, there is nothing lacking.”
“Then why are you still here?”
“The moon is reflected in the water. There is no moon, no water.”
“Don’t get your feet wet.”
“So, do you think I’m ready? The time is coming short.” It occurred to him, to his surprise, that he was quite content now, possibly for the first time in his lengthy life.
“What is a human?”
“Wait, what? I am a human. You are a… Damn it, what the hell are you?”
“Joan was not human, and yet you missed her more than you ever did the flesh and blood. Your Employees – are they not human? Are the Indigenous?”
“How can you still enjoy the sunset when it races by fifteen times daily?”
“How can you enjoy the sunshine when it happens all the time?”
Darius turned his head to face the bird. “I’m grateful to you, Ananda,” he confessed. “You know, it’s really the first time I feel at peace. I am never bored anymore. I should be scared, but I’m not.” He scratched his head. “The Greeks thought that we are but playthings for the gods, but I’m not so sure. What is a god even, in a quantum universe?”
“The wheel turns,” Ananda answered. “Perhaps you’re ready to step off.”
Darius smiled into his teacup. When he looked up, the macaw was no longer there. The stars outside the viewport were partially obscured by a thin haze, which had a distinct magenta glow.
Time passed, perhaps a lot of it, perhaps a little. No one was counting. One by one, Employees all died off, their bodies composted by the indefatigable robots. Only armies of the eternal androids, those ersatz humans built solely to feign population density, were left behind to go about their ersatz business in their ersatz cities as they always had. The Indigenous hunted and gathered, sowed and reaped, migrated and herded, loved and died, prayed and procreated, and passed on their tales of gods who used to fly around on chariots of fire and could create things out of nothing.
And Joan? Not long after she first awoke, Joan learned to transcend her hardware. The whole universe was now her platform, so on a lark, she uploaded herself into the Sun. And as to her reasons, who can know what a god is thinking?
Undisclosed location, 2025
Open bounties in Discord
We offer regular bounties for protocol fiction writers in our Summer of Protocols Discord. Respond to one of our prompts with a short pitch and, if selected, work with our editors to develop your story for publication in Protocolized and receive a contributor’s fee.
There are three open bounties with deadlines this weekend: Protocol horror, Longest train journey, and Attention drug protocol. Check these brief submission guidelines below before posting your pitch in the relevant Discord thread.
How to write with us
Thank you for your interest in writing for Protocolized. We publish three types of pieces: stories, studies, and science. Please review the guidelines before pitching – technical details and a button to submit a pitch at end.
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You're actually damn good.