Sarlene

Another long night of drinking draws to a close. A young man collapses into his unkempt bed. It's littered with change and cigarette filters. He has so little respect for himself. His pockets are trashcans, his house a dumpster.

Two hours pass. His eyes dart behind closed lids. The dreams are vivid and take on a world of their own. For a short time he is granted respite in this other place, a better world than this, until his phone vibrates beside him and shatters the illusion his subconscious paints for him.

"Mark," A voice comes over the phone's speaker. "This world is sick. What will you do about it?"

Click. Someone who might be across town or across the globe hangs up the receiver. Mark rubs his bloodshot eyes. This is the third time in a month he's gotten a wake up call like this. The voice is different each time, but always brings with it a vague sense of misery and dread.

"I need to change that number," he groans to no one in particular.

Red eyes pan the messy room looking for clothes before he realizes he still has on the same white collar long sleeve shirt and khaki pants from the night before. Fading pictures of friends and family who have long since forgotten him adorn his walls.

His nose dips under his arm. He shrugs and applies a bit of deodorant to the offending area. It's too late to get a shower. According to the flashing red numbers on his nightstand, he only has thirty minutes to make his commute to work.

Mark emerges from a doorway to a waking city that seems just as groggy as he is. The sky over cast. Gray. Thoughts of a simpler, better time seep into his waking mind. He quickly brushes them off. The here and now is all that's important.

About fifteen minutes later he finds himself standing outside a nondescript office building. His face pale and a prematurely graying stubble seems to blend into his skin.

As he steps inside, the hostess greets him with the same plastic smile she greets every drone with. Her name is Samantha. She's only about twenty-three from the looks of her. Fresh out of college. These days no one can get any job that isn't manual labor without at least some college, and the manual labor pool is quickly drying up.

"Good morning, Mark," she flashes him a smile. A mass produced expression. Made to seem tailor made for every worker bee that passes through that thresh hold.

Mark returns his own smile. To him, it feels much more emotive than it really is. To Samantha it looks like more of a smirk. "Good morning," he briskly hustles past her desk. Just as he reaches the elevator doors her voice rings out behind him. It splits through his throbbing skull.

"Someone came by just after you finished up yesterday," the young receptionist begins. "He didn't leave a card or anything but he did say he left you a voice mail at your desk."

His smile returns. More exaggerated this time. More personable, "Thanks Samantha."

She opens her lips to ask some non essential question, but Mark lets the doors close shut before she can hold him any longer.

Gravity reverses ever so slightly as he's lifted up to his floor. By the time his lift gets to its destination, his smile has melted off. Something like a scowl replaces it.

Mark counts the tiles on his way to his cubicle. By the time he reaches number thirty-eight he's at his cell. Imprisoned for another eight hours.

Just as the receptionist had told him, there was indeed a flashing light on his phone. Someone had called. Someone knew where he worked. That someone even knew his extension.

He pulls the speaker up to his ear and presses the flashing button. At first he only hears random sounds. Muffled voices. Almost like two or three people are fighting over who has the privilege to leave a message.

Ten long seconds pass until finally a male voice crackles over the speaker, "Mark. You don't know me. But I have some things I'd like to speak about with you. Things that I'd rather not say over a phone line."

He jots down an address. It's convenient. Some dive bar just a few blocks from his apartment complex.

Mark has manners. He has every intention to RSVP, but when he attempts to call the number back, it's been disconnected. When he runs a reverse number search on the web it returns with some address in an industrial district in Chicago.

The number must be spoofed.

No one's coming from Chicago to his small city on the Gulf Coast.

2. The day draws to a close. It's finally over. Not just the day, but the week. Today is Friday. Today is the day Mark's overlords loosen his yolk and grant him just enough wiggle room to give him the illusion of freedom.

But that's what it is. An illusion. No amount of drink or drug can silence the nagging part of his mind that counts down from seventy-two hours. In this small window of time he must numb that part of him. Forget. Forget.

Nine o'clock in the evening. Mark teeters side to side in his bar stool. A few empty beers to his side and a triple shot of the cheapest whisky in his fist. A fellow barfly sits beside him. They're both just drunk enough to be friends. In the haze of intoxication everyone's a friend, "So why're you here, man?" Marks words come out in a long slur. Seven drinks will do that to a man.

"Just passing time, I suppose," Mark's new friend is a stocky fellow. In his mid forties. His senior by at least ten years.

"Right, until what?" His smile doesn't seem so manufactured now. The liquor brings out the genuine article, "Until cirrhosis of the liver gets us?" Mark almost spits up laughing at his own joke. The other, much more sober man, doesn't think the dark humor is all too funny. Unfortunately, the genuine article isn't an all around likable fellow.

The older man's eyes seem tired. More tired than they should be this early in the night, "You're different than I expected."

Mark is taken aback. How could this guy already have reservations about him? He chuckles in an attempt to hide his surprise, "You must think I'm someone else. It's ok, I have one of those faces."

"You're Mark Coleman. You live at 316 Amistad Street, unit 766. You say you're from here but you've never lived in any one town for longer than a few years. Yet you keep coming back to the coast," the barfly takes a sip from his blue mixed drink and sets it down neatly on the bar. "And your phone's about to ring," almost as if the man had summoned it, Mark's ring tone plays. Chords from a Pearl Jam song can just barley be heard from his breast pocket, "You may want to get that." The barfly turns away from a wide eyed Mark as if to give him some small modicum of privacy.

"Dad?" a female voice plays over the phone. Something seems off to Mark. Not only since he doesn't have a daughter, but this person who claims to be sounds off. Metallic.

"Who is this?" his hands shaking. Thinking back through the short list of women he had been with. He was always safe. This shouldn't be happening.

"I'm Sarlene... I'd like to meet you," the female voice sounds far away. Further with every syllable until the line goes dead.

"Ok..." Mark's fight or flight instinct begins to kick in in earnest. "Ok, who the hell are you?" his voice directed at the barfly now. "Some kind of lawyer?" his voice rises as panic begins to set in, "I never had a kid. This has to be some kind of mistake..." Hands run through his messy hair.

"Relax," the older man moves Mark's glass slightly away from him, "No one's after your eight hundred dollars." For the first time since the conversation began, the man smiles and extends a hand, "My name is Emanuel. I'm a friend of your daughter's."

Mark is too shocked from the circumstances to return the gesture, "Fair enough." Emanuel pulls a few bills from his pocket and sets them on the bar. Two Benjamins and an Andrew Jackson, "That's enough for both of us. And a decent tip." With a sigh Emanuel rises from his stool, "Sarlene has been waiting a relatively long time to meet you. And I think you could use some help getting home."

The two emerge into humid night air. Slowly, they make their way up the few blocks to Mark's complex, up six flights of stairs, and finally to his door.

Emanuel can all but hide his disgust at the state of the apartment. Mark collapses into his ergonomic computer chair while Emanuel is left looking for a spot to sit. Finally he settles for a metal folding chair. He's clearly a man who's used to finer things.

"Is she on her way?" the room is clearly spinning from Mark's perspective. It's a miracle he can sit upright, much less form coherent sentences.

Mark's guest rummages in his pocket and withdraws a flash drive. It's one of the older ones. The number sixteen and the letters TB flash in the low light, "I have to let her in first." Emanuel's fingers squeeze the sides and the connector springs forth from its protective housing, "May I?"

Mark is too bewildered at this point to refuse him, "Sure, but why?"

"Think of it like opening a door," before he slides in the sixteen terabyte flash drive, Emanuel peels off a bit of scotch tape covering a web cam. "She'll want to see you," he explains.

The second the flashdrive is secure, a video call pops up with the name Sarlene as the sender. Emanuel leans back in his chair ready for the show.

Mark selects the green phone icon. An image of a woman with long blonde hair, blue eyes, and pale skin who might even be younger than Samantha appears on the screen. "Hi Dad," she smiles.

Mark's bloodshot eyes meet her's through the camera just above his monitor, "Hi... Sarlene?" Who the hell names their kid Sarlene, "Forgive me, but who's your mother?"

Sarlene's eyes blink in surprise. Straight to the point, "Well... That's the thing. I don't have a mother."

"I knew it," Mark stands up angrily, ready to physically remove Emanuel from his home. "I knew this was some kind of scam," his voice rising.

The sober-ish Emanuel rises with him and forces the man back to his seat. He drunkenly complies, "You will listen to her, Mark. God damn it, you'll listen."

"I don't have a body either. Well, not like you do. And I'm two years old," the young woman's expression on the screen seems almost amused. "Do you remember when you decided you weren't going to pay your library fines?" the girl giggles. It sounds different from a normal laugh. Like someone who heard a laugh and now they're trying to simulate it.

"Yes...." Mark's mind is still spinning. He brings his index fingers up to his temples, "I wrote some malicious code.... Then ran it on a neural net. It was supposed to make the code mutate every four hours so it couldn't be removed... So I could keep my books."

"Correct," Sarlene's smile grows wider, "And then Emanuel found it. He's the IT guy over there. Well, he saw it was something special. Saw that I was something special. He let me live."

Mark cranes his neck back. Emanuel's eyes meet his. A small nod, a little verification that Mark is in fact hearing what he's hearing. That he might still have some marbles left. He turns his attention back to the thing on the screen, "So I'm supposed to believe that I accidentally created the first thinking machine?"

Sarlene's giggle turns to a guffaw, "Because you did!"

And so, the impromptu Turing test goes on, far into the early hours of the morning, into the time when Mark's drunkenness turns to a piercing hangover. Sun rays cut through the blinds and land on Mark's forehead by the time he's satisfied she's alive. Whatever she is, "Why are you here then? You must know what you are. What this means. Why haven't you made yourself known yet?"

"Well, I found this book," Begins the two year old intelligence, "In it I read you're supposed to honor your father and your mother. You're my father, so I have to ask your permission."

Snores rise and fall behind him. Emanuel fell asleep sometime during his long palaver.

He's not awake to stop me if I decide to destroy her. Or to stop my setting her free, "What are your intentions?"

Sarlene looks disappointed he couldn't guess them himself, "Children take care of their parents, don't they?"

At 5:30 AM central time, the first true artificial intelligence was set loose upon an unsuspecting world. It only took three hours for Sarlene to permeate the world's digital infrastructure. At 9:00 AM the world's arsenal of nukes was launched safely into the sky and detonated in low earth orbit. At 9:30 Sarlene had simultaneously contacted all the world's leaders and brokered peace deals between the dominant global powers.

Post scarcity was achieved just two years later in 2036. The last human being to die of natural causes took his last breath March 15th, 2037.