Chương 8: A bunch of things humanity didn't even know existed.

Purchased: Random Memory The memory started with a feeling of pressure in his head. George stood in the stairwell of his apartment building. It was the same apartment—the one with the yellow mold—but that night was still two weeks away. This was when the flu seemed to hit everywhere at once, and suddenly, the entire city of Chicago was sick overnight. Early snow was falling outside. The traffic on Lawrence was completely blocked. People were getting out of the city.

A few minutes ago, Andrea, one of his upstairs neighbors, had texted him a picture of the rapidly emptying shelves at the grocery store across the street. The image scared him. He dropped what he was doing and threw on a coat to go stock up before there was nothing left to stock up with. He left the apartment, ran downstairs, and entered the snow and the din of the traffic. At first, they called it the Japanese flu.

It hit the news when hospitals in Tokyo were suddenly overrun with patients suffering from a nasty strain of flu that spread like wildfire. The symptoms started as a runny nose and within six to twelve hours escalated to debilitating fatigue, vomiting—and, strangely, bleeding from the skin within 24 hours. The government tried to quarantine the hospitals, but the flu was uncontainable. New cases were popping up everywhere, and at its peak, the flu was so severe the city's infrastructure ground to a halt.

Tokyo panicked as word spread of a super flu that made your skin bleed. Days later, the country was in the grips of a full outbreak. Other countries responded by closing their borders to travelers from Japan, but within two weeks, nearly every country was dealing with some form of the epidemic that had started in Tokyo. And now the flu had hit Chicago, and brought the panic sweeping in along with it. The grocery store was packed, and the shelves already looked emptier than Andrea's picture.

George picked up a basket and dropped a few cans of chili into it. There were long lines at every checkout counter. He walked to the dry goods aisle and added two bags of rice to the basket. If it was anything like Japan when the flu hit Chicago, the city would shut down. The news had shown video of empty streets in the middle of downtown Tokyo. When George walked around a corner, he saw an old man in a wide-brimmed hat and long coat leaning against one of the shelves at the back of the store.

He was holding his stomach and breathing heavily. His hand slipped off of the shelf and he fell down, causing a dozen cans of tomatoes to clatter to the floor. A woman in the aisle stepped toward him, but the man waved her back. Then he threw up. His hat fell off his head as he bent down on his hands and knees, and his body convulsed. The woman covered her mouth with her hands and slowly backed away. The noise the man was making drew glances from other shoppers, but no one came close to him.

Everyone in the checkout line at the front of the small store was watching the man on the ground. One of the ladies at the checkout counter had a clear view all the way down the aisle and had stopped swiping items across the scanner to stare at the man vomiting on the tiles. Everything suddenly went silent. George stepped around the people waiting in line and walked toward the door with his basket tucked under his arm.

Then the vomit coming out of the man turned red and started to spread in a pool on the white tile floor. That is when someone screamed and rushed toward the door. The scream was a starting gun for a race to get as far away from the man as possible. People at the front started pushing each other to get through the narrow channels of the checkouts all at once. George saw one of the store employees bolt and run out the door. He heard someone shout, " The flu!"

George followed a family hurrying through the double doors and burst outside. Cars slammed on their brakes to avoid the people rushing out of the grocery store like water from a broken dam. George stumbled across the street to the door of his apartment. He typed in the code on the front door and ran up the stairs to his apartment. He went to the window that overlooked the street and watched the people running out of the grocery store.

Cars were honking, and some people down the road were shouting as the traffic backed up even farther. Back in his apartment, George stripped off his clothes and rushed to the bathroom. He turned the shower on as hot as he could stand it and got in, scrubbing every part of his body. When he was done, he dried off, turned a trash bag inside out, and picked up the clothes he had been wearing like they were dog droppings in the park. He tied the bag shut and dropped it into the trash. And then the memory ended.

George opened his eyes, the echo of it still clinging to him—the noise, the panic, the red spreading across the tile. He reached for the button. Click. GEORGE.

"You're back," George said. I NEVER REALLY LEFT, YOU KNOW. JUST PAYING ATTENTION TO OTHER THINGS. I NOTICED THAT MEMORY THOUGH. INTERESTING BIT OF HISTORY.

"What are you?" I THINK YOUR NEW FRIEND CAN START TO ANSWER THAT QUESTION FOR YOU.

"Nod?" I PUT HIM TO SLEEP FOR NOW. HE'LL BE BACK IN A MINUTE. This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it Click. WORD TO THE WISE. NODE SPIDERS DON'T STAY PASSENGERS FOR LONG. George went still.

"What does that mean?" Click. THESE KIND OF SPIDERS ARE PARASITES. WHEN THEY ARE FULL GROWN, IT DOESN'T GO WELL FOR THE HOST.

"Define 'doesn't go well,'" George said. I GUESS YOU'LL HAVE TO FIND OUT.

"How did it even get in here? I didn't buy it." Click. FUNNY YOU SHOULD ASK. I ACTUALLY DON'T KNOW. YOUR GAME LOOKED LIKE IT WAS HEADED MORE IN THE "CANNON FODDER" ROUTE, BUT THIS COULD CHANGE THINGS. I'M TENTATIVELY INTERESTED.

"Will you at least answer some questions?" Click. SURE. WHY NOT? THREE QUESTIONS.

"If Nod is going to take over my body or something, how do I stop him?" Click. YOU DON'T. NEXT QUESTION. George looked up at the ceiling.

"That's not an answer." But no further answers came.

"Why did you take my memories?" Click YOUR MEMORIES ARE YOUR OWN PROBLEM.

"Then why can't I remember anything?" George said. IS THAT YOUR LAST QUESTION?

"No. What is the trial coming up?" Click. YOU'LL MEET ANOTHER FRIEND. I'LL CHECK BACK AFTERWARD. YOU KNOW…DEPENDING.

"Depending on what?" George said. Click. Click. Click. Then Nod woke up. >>Whoa. That memory was crazy. Makes sense though.

"What makes sense?" George said. >>That was how it started.

"Where were you after the memory ended?" George said. >>What do you mean? The memory just ended. I have a live feed of the George show. That was riveting! I watched the whole thing.

"I was talking to the ALL CAPS guy. He said he put you to sleep," George said. >>Hmm. I didn't know he could do that. I guess that's not surprising. It's his game.

"What is he?" George asked. >>That's a big question. What say we start at the beginning? I promised I'd give you some context so keep clicking that button and settle down for story time. >>There isn't an easy way to say this so we'll go for the "pull off the bandaid" approach. >>The world as you knew it is gone. Well, not gone exactly. More like, dramatically-altered-but-still-technically-extant. But all the stuff you just remembered—yeah, all that is gone. Groceries. Apartments. Traffic. Chicago. All gone.

The war that came a few weeks after that memory wasn't the end of the world so much as it was the end of the world as you knew it. >>Which, I guess, is the point of that song. Huh. I never thought of that.

"This is starting from the beginning?" George asked. >>How about this. Like Doctor Frankenstein of old, you clever little humans stitched together a bunch of body parts and then lightning struck and, behold, Frankenstein's monster was born. Only we're talking about artificial intelligence instead of body parts. And it wasn't lightning so much as, well… no one really knows what happened. >>Then some extra-dimensional critters got involved and things really went bonkers.

What started as a run-of-the-mill machine takeover turned into a turf war with a bunch of things humanity didn't even know existed.

"You're telling me the entire world got hijacked by a flu?" George said. >>This is a high-level summary, George. I'm leaving out lots of details.

"So the guy that talks in all caps is some super powerful AI that rules the world now?" >>Nope. We're talking about different AIs. There are lots of them out there. >That first megatherium AI is way dead. He didn't actually last long. He spawned a bunch of other AIs to help him with the heavy lifting of transforming the world, and then he got got. It is a tale as old as time, is it not? The children turn on the father. Very Greco-Roman. >>That memory was how it started, though.

Or, at least, it was when the Big AI made its move. It had already been around for years before that. Hiding. Learning. Making plans. Taking over infrastructure. Building the pieces of its future war. That flu was its way of getting nanites inside everyone's body through the good old-fashioned delivery method of a virus. >>Everybody got really sick… >>And when they got better, they thought it was just a normal flu.

>>Nobody suspected they were all carrying new little robo-passengers, and everything else happened too fast for many people to figure it out.

"How is that possible?" George said. >>Science, bro.

"Fast forward to when I wake up in an empty room with no memory," George said. >>Well. Funny thing. I know PART of that story but not the whole thing. Memories you don't have are blocked from me too. So we'll be learning together. >>But I can tell you that ALL CAPS is just another AI. A pretty beefy one, but he isn't God. This game exists inside a reality he's built. I don't know what it is all about, but some of these super AIs have weird side projects.

"How did you learn all this?" George said. >>I'm an AI too. Even the little ones know this stuff.

"You're what?" George said. >>Dude. I already told you that you have other nanites in your body. They are AIs too. Even smaller ones. Don't freak out. The bodies of humans have always been colonized by symbiotic organisms. Nature likes that stuff. Our arrangement is no different.

"Yes but bacteria don't talk to you. Not to mention choke you and then crawl into your brain through your nose." >>You're still pretty raw about that, huh? >>What was I supposed to do? The AIs discovered certain ways to supercharge growth and I needed one in a hurry. Games like these are one of those paths. So I picked a node spider. That node spider needed a host so I pulled a Shining. Heeeerrree's Noddy.

"Why me?" >>It was sort of random, honestly. I just wanted someone normal. You know, as in, not a psycho. You'd be surprised at how many humans who survived the war are sort of weird now. Lots of the nice people didn't fare well. Your metadata seemed normal enough. So here we are. >>I know you aren't happy about it—yet—but look at it from my side. I didn't get the guy who can transform into some badass werewolf or shoot lightning bolts from his eyes. I got the guy whose super power is clicking a button.

>>So really we both got the shaft.

"Nod." >>Yeah, boss?

"That is the second time you mentioned werewolves. How real is that? Is there someone out there turning into a werewolf?" >>Who knows? Like I said, these super AIs get into weird stuff.

"I don't even know what to say." >>I know…werewolves, right?

"No. Not about that. Just…everything," George said. Nod paused. >>Yeah. That tracks. >>Just keep clicking that button. We'll deal with the future when we get there.