Terminal Faults by Deidre J Owen

Author:Deidre J Owen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: artificial intelligence, hell, afterlife, androids, near future, scifi horror, damnation, scifi novella, horror scifi, scifi space
Publisher: Mannison Press, LLC

Although intently focused on his mission, Civic-1916 occasionally found himself bothered by his inability to track time without his internal chronometer. Encountering other Qubots was not helpful in this regard, though, as they, too, had had their chronometers disabled. In fact, they were not ever helpful in any regard.

He was dismayed to cross paths with a familiar unit, Civic-2910, whom he discovered to be tromping in circles and splattered with a sticky-looking, reddish-brown substance. Was he leaking vital fluid, or was he spattered with something biological in nature? Both disturbing thoughts. He had known 2910 from working Jettison together and attempted to inquire about his current state, but all attempts to engage him were met with excessive hostility. Thoroughly unhelpful. An endeavor best abandoned, he decided.

Also unhelpful were the two inert units he happened upon. He found them together in the same room, heaped in a corner amidst a pile of technological detritus as if huddled against the cold. They were uncommunicative and entirely unresponsive. Their bodies had both suffered catastrophic damage, rendering them physically inoperable.

He sat with them for a while. He studied them. He fussed with their wiring and, startlingly, established a brief moment of lucidity with the one marked Civic-2813. He was only ever able to decipher three garbled words, though: faulty, sadness, and deactivate.

1916 pondered this at great length. Not the meaning of the words, that much was clear, but rather the finality of compliance with the request…and the word sadness. He decided that their Response and Consequence programming had achieved sadness and that this was, indeed, sad. With some degree of hesitance, he accessed the primary control panel on the back of each unit and gently crushed their quantum magnetic cores.

The two android corpses were now also unhelpful. But all the same, he sat with them for a while longer, contemplating their prior usefulness and contributions to humanity back on Earth.

He took Art into his lap and fussed with his useless lever, contemplating his companion's former usefulness as well (whatever that may have been). Then he thought of his own current uselessness and the futility of his situation. Solomon Weaver had once said he believed Heaven and Hell to be as real as Earth. The ensuant discourse about his theories of multidimensional space and interdimensional beings had been, frankly, baffling for 1916. But having found himself in this isolated realm in deep space populated solely by Earth's cast-offs led him to ponder the potential validity of Solomon Weaver's theology. Perhaps it wasn't so outrageous a thought after all.

What a sad and lonely place to greet oblivion.

He wondered if his unfortunate kindred who lay nearby weren't, in fact, the more fortunate ones. Spared. He supposed they didn't have to be wholly unhelpful to him now, but the idea of cannibalizing their parts was deeply unsettling. As such, he trudged away as broken as ever, in body and in spirit, contemplating sadness and wondering if anyone would ever be able to grant him a similar mercy.

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