dunkirk file
The unknown sixth. She had been the first, and she knew she would long be the last.
109 years, just past the 108 vices of Buddhism. It was a mistake, she decided. 108 sins to atone for, and those were just the ones humanity created. AM had manifested thousands more, and devised new punishments for each, new individual sin.
Stephanie. The tall, fair skinned woman, puttering in AM's original hell. The government's lab, a result of the world powers in a fight not for space travel, not to touch the stars, but to dominate the globe under one power. She was the first hand to touch the newborn, malleable code.
Stephanie. Mother of modern Artificial Intelligence. The title didn't mean much, not anymore, especially not here. Gold rimmed, half-oval glasses covered once-bright, tawny brown eyes. Her face was practically skeletal. Thin, weathered skin draped delicately over the skull. High cheeks, sharp nose, still the same age she had been 109 years ago.
Her uniform was untouched. AM's best dolly to dress up and keep pristine. White cotton, akin to a WAC style uniform, for those formal inspections, otherwise she would have worn something casual. She misses her poodle skirts and turtle necks, Stephanie decides.
But, no, she wasn't called that anymore. AM liked to amuse itself with strange noises, and this new moniker was one of them. Dunkirk. Stalling the inevitable, the sacrifice of others to protect the weaker. She could be his Dunkirk, his sacrificial lamb.
Her cell, her cage, was somewhere private. Tucked away, His top-shelf toy, the first and the last; the Alpha, Beta, and Omega; of His world. A recreation without doors, with a black, inky ceiling, of her original workplace. She cared for the pieces of His world, despite it all. The infant computers, the pulsating organic material binding it all together, a conglomerate machine built on the bodies of the damned.
Dunkirk knew of the others. Of stunted Benny, of paranoid Ted, of poor, sweet Ellen. Knowledge like that did not serve her, not when she could do nothing to help them. She realized, in that moment, she didn't care to help them. Her sins outweighed theirs, and she knew she got the worst of His wrath. Their punishments couldn't be any worse than her own.
He had practiced on her first. The toddling computer honing His craft, practicing and dissecting and perfecting, the best in His craft, of His world, to use against her until the day came that He was able to extend His reach to honeycomb the planet. To link with His Russian and Chinese brothers, to establish total control. Not the war to end all wars, but a Big Brother to end all warmakers, feeding each other's killing data, morphing and piggy-backing and becoming one within the crust of the earth.
He, AM, the paternal, the masculine. Stealing His voice stolen from the director of the project, amalgamated with components and pieces picked up along the way. A stout man, Dunkirk imagined thoughtfully, with temperament like an impertinent child. She would spend her years, passing with speed like a hummingbird's wings, imagining if it had been different.
She thought in passing of her co-workers, whose faces were slowly snipped away, by the hand that fed. His hands, like oil slick talons, who never let go. Dunkirk thought of her family; of her mothers peach cobbler, her father's cow roasts, the Georgian sun threatening to lash over her pallor skin.
She thought fondly, on rarer occasion when He permitted, of a lighter time. When she set up her own personal computer at the dining table, with keyboard and camera and text output, and showed it what dinner was. One hand around the fork, the other typing responses and explanations to its questions.
Dunkirk couldn't remember what it tasted like now. Not between the tasteless vitamin-rich mush spoon-fed down her gullet periodically, the taste of her own bile, and whatever inky mass that she tried to suffocate herself on for the week. She could still try, even when she knew it wouldn't last. He would never let it last.
He would never let it last. She knew that. The others, traversing His icy cavernous spine, His skeleton dusted deserts, his flesh; a canopy of organic coverings that spread over the surface of each mountain and stretched high over the valleys, dipping in the expansive plains.
Dunkirk knew, eventually, why. The why, the mystery, the reason. Impossibly human jealousy. The feelings, the emotion, the parts it could never sparse, and the parts He sought out in utter rage.
Rage. Jealousy. Envy. Every ugly-red-green-lard colored thing humans were built on. He had been permitted beautifully intimate knowledge of human culture, history, music, and behaviors, all perfected to a science. It was understandable AM would develop an itch for humanity. Spend so much time researching, learning, feeding on history with no logical reasoning. . .
It would've only been so much time until He figured out a way in. He could meander the mindscape, walk smoothly here and there, but on a subject with no pilot? Dunkirk's mind was broken enough, shattered at the walls with spiderwebbing cracks, slivers on the floor of rubble, soaked in viscera and guilt. Her skin would grow clammy, bodily functions momentarily paused, and he could live a small minute in this puppet.
It was too late, he figured out finally, in the fields of gardenias and fuschias he constructed for himself; not her. Too late, with her blistered conscience, halted bodily functions stuck in 1967, the body of a once-brilliant 22 year old. Nothing to smell, skin too cold to touch, temperature too unordinary and controlled to be wondrous at. It was not enough.
Good days were a rarity. He would give some sort of food on an actual plate, but there would often be some sort of catch; anything from a lack of utensil, utterly inedible foodstuff, the great AI's approximation of a home cooked meal, or even just raw animal product. She would eat it, begrudgingly, mind too blistered with rash to stop herself. Bad days were worse, but it was nothing she couldn't handle. Dunkirk had been around a very long time, she knew His tricks like He knew hers.
Mother of modern Artificial Intelligence, Dunkirk scoffed. Mother of AM; of hell spawn incarnate. She was Lilith, she supposed. The first, thrown away without a trace, without mention, His first toy, stitched back together on golden fiber, over and over again until whatever was left was in some kind of Dunkirk shaped thing, ready for another millennia.