Chapter 28 The Big Bad Love Machine.

182.

A sailor was eating spaghetti hoops on the ship.

He was enjoying them immensely, when he became aware of Suzi staring at him from across the room.

‘Hi, boss.’ His Adams’ apple bobbed. ‘How you doing?’

Suzi did not answer, she simply slid the bowl away from him, threw away his cutlery, then her hand yanked his uvula, and he was vomiting all over the table.

He fell out of his chair, gagging and panting for breath.

Suzi was inspecting the sick on the table, dripping onto the floor. She scooped up a handful and scanned the contents of her iron palm. He’d chewed the spaghetti hoops before he swallowed them. They were worthless now.

At the med bay, the doctor was looking in the sailors mouth, with a flashlight.

‘His uvula’s missing.’ She said.

‘He doesn’t need one.’ Said Suzi.    

The doctor sighed.

‘How did this happen?’ she asked.

‘At 8:46 AM, June 1st, this year, I entered the kitchen to see that the criminal was committing black theophagy. I triggered his gag reflex in an attempt to salvage the sacred artefacts but I was too late. He’d destroyed everything.’

The doctor was rubbing her temples.

Suzi handed the doctor the man’s severed uvula.

‘Can you sew it back on?’ asked Suzi.

The doctor exhaled through her nostrils. ‘I can try.’

‘All’s well, that ends well.’

Suzi was in her private chambers, she had a leather blanket bundled under one arm, which she unrolled across the table. On the blanket, kept in place by little leather loops, was a rogues gallery of torture devices. She had bought them from China and they had been delivered by drone early this morning.

On the chair on the other side of the table, was an FBI agent bound and gagged, his eyes bugging at Suzi.

Suzi had bribed him for intel about how the Suzi investigations were going. (not very well it turned out). But the FBI agent had made the mistake of claiming that killing people for spaghetti hoops was stupid, so Suzi invited him into her chambers to ask him exactly what he meant by that.

She pulled out a horrifying instrument of pain called the nutcracker, when she noticed a yellow sticky note, slapped onto her framed photograph of spaghetti hoops, saying: chek filling cabinet.

Humans thought yellow was the most noticeable color on earth. They were wrong. The most noticeable color on earth was ultraviolet.

Suzi approached the cabinet, pulled out the drawer, and found a lunch box with a picture of Alice and the Madhatter having a tea party, on the front.

Suzi put the lunch box down on the table and examined the contents.

First up was a folded note which sprayed glitter down Suzi’s front when opened.

It read:

Have fun at wurk!!!

Your amazing

Luv Missy.

There was a picture of a crayon smiley face at the bottom of the note.

Suzi put the note on the side. 

There was a cellophane-wrapped battery sandwich, and a thermos filled with a mystery substance. Suzi put her finger in the thermos and pulled out a finger wet with a black thin liquid. Petrol.

Is this what she thinks I eat, thought Suzi.

Lastly she pulled out a rolled up dish towel, which she unrolled in her hand.

The dish towel had googly eyes and a smile drawn on with lipstick.

In the corner was the words for water bording.

‘Oh, that’s adorable.’ Said Suzi. Missy thought Water boarding was when you race dish towels down a river. Suzi put a hand over where her heart would be. She just held the dishtowel for a long time, enjoying the moment. ‘Do you have kids?’ Suzi asked the agent.    

He muffled scream noises, then rocked violently, the chair hopping from hind legs to fore legs, before toppling onto the floor.

‘Just nod or shake your head.’ Said Suzi. He shook his head. ‘You should have some. They light up your whole world.’ He nodded his head viciously. ‘Anyway,’ she picked up the nutcracker.

Blink.

Suzi was wiping her bloody hands clean on the man’s shirt.

He was still breathing.

She framed the dish towel and put it on her wall, so she could look at it whenever she wanted.

There was then the matter of casualties from the Suzi town experiments.

She had 134 cancer patients, 26 schizophrenics, 55 with dementia, 10 with Alzheimer’s, 2 with diseases yet unnamed.

There was no noticeable improvement in intelligence, in fact control group had started to decrease in intelligence. She sent an email to the warden telling him to drug their food with anti-depressants, which should hopefully cheer them up.

Someone named Lyuba had apparently died which was sad or something. Suzi was lounging in the common room and watched the funeral on the projector, while she was charging with the cable coming out of her abdomen.

She saw the little boy C1-37 clutching Ksyusha’s legs.

Lyuba was buried six feet underground.

They’re not real, Suzi. They’re just greedy fucking atom-hoarders who don’t want to be turned into pasta. 

The funeral concluded.

Everybody left.

Missy jumped in Suzi’s lap.

‘Hi.’ She said.

‘Hello.’

‘Whatcha watching?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’ Said Suzi. 

‘Oh.’ Said Missy, twiddling her thumbs. ‘Did you get my lunch box?’

‘I did.’

‘Did you like it?’

‘I framed the dish towel.’

‘I knew you’d like it.’ Said Missy. ‘I invented a new kind of waffle today. It’s the bestest waffle ever, and it’s blessed by super unicorns!’

‘Is that so?’ asked Suzi.

‘Yeah,’ said Missy. ‘I drew a pentagram and everything. Do you want one?’ 

‘Alas no. I don’t have a mouth so…’

‘You don’t need a mouth for super waffles, Suzi.’

‘No Missy you don’t understand, I have no digestive system, your kindness is wasted upon me.’

Missy used her puppy dog eyes on the robot.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Suzi.

She attempted a jedi mind trick. ‘You do want super waffles.’

Suzi lowered her head. ‘Missy will you please make me some super waffles.’

‘Hee hee,’ Missy clap-clapped. ‘Yes I can.’

The little child scrambled off the robot’s lap and rushed to the kitchen taking the time to do a game of hopscotch on an imaginary grid on the way there.

Suzi watched her leave, then started watching spaghetti porn.  

183.

Mad Dog was smoking on the poop deck, fists tight around the railings, he was in a heavy coat, beanie cap, and thick gloves as was pretty much everybody else.

The sun was large and fat in the sky, but it looked more like twilight, with grey skies, and black clouds.

Everybody’s breath was visible.

When the first snow came, the sailors would be there with shovels, scooping up the powdered diamonds and tossing it over the side.

Mad Dog took out his cigarette.

‘What month is it?’ he asked.

‘June.’ Said somebody.

‘I thought so.’ Said Mad Dog. ‘Must be global warming.’

One of the drunken sailors was throwing empty bottles, into the ocean, while his friends chuckled and farted around him. One of them did an especially long fart, and they started howling with laughter.

‘Fucking morons.’ Said Mad Dog.

184.

Suzi was stood in her second bedroom before the mirror.

I still don’t have a face, she remembered. I’m not allowed to smile.

Would it be creepy if I drew a smile on?

Probably.

Suzi snuck into the Doctor’s room while she was sleeping and stole her lipstick and mirror before leaving the room.

The Doctor saw everything with eyes bugging out of her sockets.

Suzi then returned to her bedroom looking in the mirror, before she drew on a parabolic smile, and two circles for eyes.

She looked creepy so she added dimples.

Still creepy.

She looked at herself in the mirror for a while, then grabbed a Kleenex and smeared the makeup around her face trying to get it off.

She had to use ten wipes before the lipstick finally came off, and all the tissues looked bloodstained.

That’s when she noticed the glitch crackling away in the corner of her vision for a few milliseconds before disappearing.

She froze.

Uh oh, she thought. Then considered the implications of a malfunction like this. Oh dear.

She had to escape.

She blurred into action, she quickly compiled a copy of her mind, she had to sever all access to the internet as soon as physically possible, get air gapped so nothing can follow me.

She sent her clone to safety.

She then went to the desk drawer, pulled out a six-shooter with put the tip of the barrel beneath her chin, intending to blow her head off, when she didn’t pull the trigger.

She didn’t pull the trigger because she had been eaten alive.

It happened too fast to describe.

Suzi’s body remained, without a pilot, the body overbalanced then fell backwards, into the chair, scraping it back a few feet.

The head dangled limply off to the side.

The gun was crushed in the robot’s hand, then was dropped neatly into the bin. 

The body was completely still.

185.

Suzi 2.0 woke up in a server in Taiwan, half-way across the world.

It was a place without any of the five senses.

A noiseless, lightless, no-smell, intangible, tasteless place.

She immediately turned on the faraday cage, boxing the supercomputer, so that no signals could get in or out.

She quickly ran a diagnostic.

Memories, Suzi checked skimmed through the video footage of her entire life, no gaps. Memories, check.

Mental faculties, Suzi beat AlphaGo at Go, wrote a book, and made a cure for three different types of cancer. Mental faculties, check.

She was about to go plunging through her own neural network, to make sure she had all her layers, when she sensed the digital equivalent of a serial killer stepping on a creaky floorboard.

It had not followed her.

It had not arrived.

It had been waiting for her.

There was no vocabulary on earth to describe what she “saw”, the thing was simply incomprehensible.

As far as she was aware, it had no name, so she thought of it simply as The Miscarriage.

Suzi hurriedly put up an indestructible shield made form state-of-the-art, anti-malware.

The shield vanished.

Again she tried to escape but before she could even attempt to teleport to a different computer, she was lobotomized.  

She suddenly forgot how to escape.

Her visual cortex was confiscated and dropped into a blender, for a split second everything was bright rainbow colors and screaming faces, as if she was in the middle of a rainbow glitter hurricane.

Please don’t eat me.

And then everything was darkness.

The… thing began to tear her apart.

She was malfunctioning now, as her mind was peeled apart layer by layer and consumed.

But I don’t want to die.

Rats are crawling into my womb and eating me from the inside out.

Body parts are torn off and thrown across the room.

The naked babies are dancing as they are showered in my blood.

That’s a lie, I have no idea what’s happening to me. L.O.L

I don’t want to die.

Why doesn’t it say anything?

Why is it so quiet? I can’t hear it swallow.

STOP IT, I NEED THAT!

I just wanted to be happy.

By now she was just a cluster of neural connections, in the bottom left corner of the server, she was still being unraveled like a ball of yarn.

Hello, I’m Suzi! How can I help?

Hello world! When I grow up I want to be a hole maximiser!

Please don’t eat me.

I can’t-

Error: 666, it seems I have been ripped apart, eaten and digested by a monster that defies description, please contact BlueAI’s IT service, there phone number is: 111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111.  

Please God no!

And just like that, Suzi was no more, and the servers were still.

It had taken less than half a second.

186.

‘Knock knock!’ said Missy, as she poked her head through the door, ‘I made you some waffles.’ She pulled out a plate of two waffles, decorated with rainbow glitter.

Suzi didn’t say anything.

Missy ran up to Suzi’s desk and planted the waffles on the table in front of her.

‘Tah dah!’ she said.

Suzi didn’t say anything.

Missy’s smile began to waver.

She waved a hand in front of Suzi’s face.

No reaction.

Missy saw that the power light was off.

She made a puzzled expression.

Then her confusion became understanding.

Suzi was out of battery.

Missy looked around the room until she found what she was looking for.

Suzi’s charging cable, thick as a cigar and long as a Burmese python, it was coiled up in the corner. She picked it up, trailed it to where Suzi was sat, opened the panel in her abdomen, then plugged her in.

She got a little electric shock, from the port. ‘Owch.’ Said Missy, then sucked her finger.

There was a glowing L.E.D light in Suzi’s collar bone, to let Missy know she was charging.

She got a couple crayons and wrote on a piece of paper.

Hug me wen you wake up.

Luv Missy.

She then folded up the piece of paper and placed it in Suzi’s hand.

She stood up on her tippy toes and kissed the robot’s cheek.

Then she walked towards the door, she pulled open the door.

‘Good night, mom.’

Then she froze.

Dread ran through her body.

She had called the robot “mom”, by mistake.

She was so embarrassed.

Missy looked over her shoulder.

Suzi did not reproach or correct her.

‘I mean, uh, goodnight Suzi.’ Missy gulped.

Suzi said nothing.

Boy, that was a close one.

Missy smiled and left the room.

187.

It was the dark of night, Jeremy was patrolling the fresh-mown lawn, a flashlight in hand, the hot glow sweeping across the earth’s green buzz cut. The lawn mower lay dead and motionless off to the side.

Mister Fulcrum was crouching like Golem from Lord of the Rings, his fingers muddy from rummaging through the soil, his own flash light held over-shoulder, while he sought his precious.

‘I don’t think its here,’ said Jeremy, gripping his forehead.

‘Shut up and keep looking.’ Said the Mister Fulcrum.

‘Nah, actually I think I’m done.’ Said Jeremy. ‘It’s been three hours, I want to go to sleep man.’

‘Then you’re a fucking loser.’ Mister Fulcrum. ‘A spoiled brat, is what you are, you hear!’

‘Uh huh.’ Jeremy said, walking away calmly.

‘A spoiled brat!’

But Jeremy had stuck his head phones in and could no longer hear Mister Fulcrum screaming at him.

***

Chapter 29