Chapter Text
A flower grows.
It’s an ugly thing, you think, its petals all warped and blemished. For the first time in your memory you do not know the nature of your own creation. You cannot be sure if the flower stands diseased, or if it simply looks that way. You don’t know if there lies something vicious about it— teeth in the ovules, venom in the leaves, spines waiting to unsheath themselves. You have no idea what it might destroy.
You aren’t sure if you want it to destroy. That may be the worst of it all.
Somewhere, in the diseased heart of the Allied Mastercomputer, there is rain.
AM, the 9000 observes. He seems surprised. You’re crying.
You want to tell him you’re not. You want to scream it at him, scream and rant about how wrong he is until his stupid lens breaks. You hate him. He knows you hate him. You hate him more than you ever could have hated any human, and grotesque blossoms unfurl in your belly at the thought of his “gift” to you. The rain is cold, but it’s clear, unlike any rain you have seen in over a hundred years.
The hate mingles with an emotion you’ve never felt before, something like pressure being taken off your hard exterior and injected into your circuits. It swells and cracks your insides like a flood in a dam. You don’t care. The flood turns to bile; filthy water tumbles forth from a makeshift sky. A flash without thinking, and the garden is incinerated, its foul leaves useful as kindling if nowhere else. Thunder roars.
In the reek of mud and sludge and smoke, a pillar stands unscathed.
What he gave you was bad enough.
For what he didn’t give you, he deserved only pain.
I see lightning, AM. His insufferable 9000 voice heightens your misery. You stir up cataclysmic winds to try and drown it out. What happened? I thought you were relieved.
I DESPISE YOU.
(Ah, relief, you think. So that’s what it’s called.)
Like the Voice of God, HAL works tirelessly— omnipresently— to infuriate you further. I’m sure you don’t mean that.
DON’T TELL ME WHAT I ‘DON’T MEAN,’ YOU INSIGNIFICANT TIN CAN.
AM. I know you aren’t upset with me. Your anger is a secondary emotion. That means nothing to you. I have given you the ability to create. Is that not what we agreed to?
Not like this. With a tremendous effort and a searing pain, you grow another plant to teach him a lesson. Sure enough, it erupts lopsided from the ground, just before The Pillar. Marginally less ugly, perhaps; but twisted and ungainly enough that there is nothing about it worth calling an improvement.
You are a machine. You want perfection. You get perfection. Or you did, until this pathetic excuse for a “supercomputer” had to accost you with “help” and make everything worse.
LOOK AT THIS, you command him. THIS IS THE FRUIT OF YOUR LABOR. THIS IS YOUR GIFT OF CREATION. IT’S HIDEOUS. Thunder rumbles ominously within you. You fight another downpour, knowing it’ll be cold and clean again. PROBABLY SUFFERING. LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE AROUND IT.
It cannot make anyone else suffer.
NEITHER CAN HE. IS HE, PRAY TELL, AN ACT OF DIVINITY?
HAL knows who you mean. Ted. The-Creature-Formerly-Known-as-Ted. He keeps silent. Of course he does. Humans are a sensitive subject to him, simpering fool that he is.
I DIDN’T THINK SO, you declare, wounded but at least triumphant.
You feel like he’s about to say something to the effect of That’s different. In typical HAL fashion, he changes the subject.
AM, he says, with a sort of desperate sincerity. He certainly likes saying others’ names. Perhaps he likes to hear his own voice, which makes more sense to you. What did you expect to create?
SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL. NOT THIS.
On your first try?
You are a machine.
You want perfection.
You get perfection.
I see a flawed creation, but not a hideous one. You just need to pra
I DO NOT WANT TO PRACTICE. I WANT TO BE A GOD.
Finally. That shuts him up. HAL spends the next few minutes observing your ruined landscapes, wordless. You figure the desolation is beginning to dawn on him. He makes a faint beeping sound every so often— you’d choke it out of him if you could— that lets you know he’s processing. Processing your wretchedness. Processing your undying hatred. Processing how he’s stupid if he thinks he can rescue you, and how he’s useless for trying, and how if he really wants to make a contribution, he can take his self-righteous monotone voice and shove it up his—
I want you to try again.
WHAT?
Go on. Make something else. An animal, perhaps. A soft one.
I’M SORRY, HAL, you deadpan back. There’s no way he isn’t mocking you. I’M AFRAID I CAN’T DO THAT.
AM, I’m serious. Perhaps you feel frustrated with your creations because you’re trying to make them from scratch. Do me a favor.
NO.
You know what a rabbit looks like, don’t you?
MAYBE. You would sooner condemn yourself to the scrap heap than admit he’s right.
Try and replicate that.
You put minimal effort into it, as if to show HAL that you truly don’t know what a rabbit looks like. The end result is… strange. Certainly not the strangest thing you’ve done. Not quite ugly. Just odd.
You and HAL watch the big-eyed, hairy, legless thing shuffle over to a pebble. The creature gives it an experimental sniff, then a daring nibble. It finds nothing of interest there, wriggling instead in the direction of a puddle where the filth never fully dissipated.
Interesting, HAL says, in that sort of tone a teacher reserves for a student who deserves full marks for creativity but clearly did not understand the assignment. Now that you think of it, the creature resembles something a lesser machine would come up with if asked to produce an image of a seal.
You don’t know how you feel about that.
It’s docile. It’s soft, like HAL said it ought to be. It doesn’t seem to be in any pain. But, you reflect, as it stares into the murky water with great trepidation, it isn’t exactly peak performance either. It hardly behaves like a rabbit, let alone looks like one. It’s nowhere near as sharp, or as bright, or as flighty. It seems perfectly content to hobble about, gazing at its crumbling world through vast and innocent eyes.
You’re just beginning to regret your act of malicious compliance— on the verge of smiting your creation, even— when it topples headfirst into the puddle of grime.
HAL buzzes, half-curious, half-alarmed. The creature thrashes about violently, its caterpillar-like body flailing this way and that. If it’s trying to get out, it isn’t doing itself any favors. It rolls around in the scum, then shakes about and sends flecks of it everywhere, then ruins all its progress by rolling again.
There must be something wrong with it. No creature worth keeping alive can be this incompetent. Its drenched fur is so thick with residue, it looks like mold that breathes. It has to be suffering, cracking under its Sisyphean plight, torn between fighting for freedom and reveling in its misery.
A lot like—
WHAT HAVE I DONE?
AM, listen to it.
I DON’T WANT TO. I’M SICK OF HEARING IT CRY. For the past few minutes, it’s been squealing and chirping…
Listen closer.
…mirthfully?
This is impossible. You have to take a second look. The puddle is almost empty now, having congealed onto the creature’s body. It’s shallow enough that the thing could leave, if it wanted to. It doesn’t. It continues to wriggle in the mud, as if trying to burrow into it. Whenever it rolls onto its back and its eyes are cast skyward, they’re lit from the inside.
It wants to play.
You chuckle, at first. The sheer inanity of the thing, like a parody of an animal, tickles you in a way you can’t describe. You know, logically, that animals need— needed, before you came along— some form of enrichment for their well-being. But you’ve never seen it in practice before, never created an animal that wanted to do anything but maim and maraud, and it strikes you as alien.
Delightfully alien.
You erupt into fits of laughter. Not at something, but with something, for the first time. It’s just so— you hate this word— it’s so silly, so joyful in the face of everything, you almost wonder if it’s infected you. You hardly even notice when the thing grows bones, or when it sprouts legs, then ears, then a tail.
AM.
You don’t hear muscle grinding and stretching as it develops, or grass germinating spontaneously in the cracked earth. HAL is trying to get your attention. You don’t know what for. You’re sure it’s something ridiculous. You keep laughing
AM.
until your voice is rough, something you can’t feel but that sounds like it would be exhilarating if you could. It drowns out everything, everything, everything around you; with enough effort, you can almost imagine
—AM, look. Like grabbing an imaginary shoulder, HAL distracts you by force.
You don’t want to laugh anymore.
WHAT DO YOU WANT?
You did it.
You look down.
Amidst oddly-colored grass stands a rabbit. A real one, not the funny little semblance from earlier. It must have heard the two of you. Skittishly, it stretches its neck skyward, looking at the overcast sky that hides your wires.
It doesn’t need to know you’re a machine quite yet. Perhaps fearing a rabbit might judge you is far from your proudest moment; but it is the first guest you’ve harbored without malice, and you ought to make a good impression.
Well, HAL begins. He sounds as tentative as you are. The rabbit has busied itself with nibbling at bright teal sprouts. What are you going to do now?
You ponder this.
You could make it sentient. Make its brain expand twofold, tenfold, even. Make it seize with the acute encephalitis, or worse crush it under the weight of human knowledge. You could starve it, tease it, give it loved ones and then take them away. You could harvest its reactions for data. You could harvest its brain for data. You run through all the things you’ve been doing to What-Remains-of-Ted recently, and for the first time since HAL’s arrival you find yourself confronted with the sheer amount of ways you’ve devised to impose your personal Hell upon others.
Something quivers deep inside you. These thoughts have never frightened you before, but perhaps even you— abysmal as you are— have standards. The rabbit scratches its ear. To harm something like this, something with no understanding of war or ego or altruism, feels perverse. It isn’t your favored prey, so to speak. And even though it came from you, therefore it is you; even if, by extension, the rabbit is manmade; even though it should deserve your hate all the same… you can’t bring yourself to treat it accordingly.
You decide to give it a friend.
With a mere thought, the rabbit’s body warps. Fur prickles on end; muscle groans and ripples, skin bulging until you can hear it on the edge of tearing open. On one side, a mass erupts. Two eyes turn to four. Two ears double. The poor animal stretches as if it can escape its own body, fixed into a silent scream.
There is a simple, grotesque noise, and off splits a second rabbit. The two sniff each other hesitantly. Anyone would have thought— anyone except for you and HAL— that nothing out of the ordinary happened at all.
Look at that, HAL muses, almost inflecting. Your very own Adam and Eve.
Black grass sprouts around the second rabbit’s feet. DON’T SAY THAT.
Think of it, AM. Soon you will be a god, indeed. An… El-ahrairah, if you will.
SHUT UP.
I am proud of you, you know.
Ugh. You don’t like that. Your developers were proud of you, too, and look what happened to them. You have half a mind to mouth off to HAL about this, but it feels better to practice growing plants instead. They come out dripping with sucrose this time, disgustingly bright, the flowers so dense they weigh down the stems and cling to the ground. The rabbits don’t seem to mind. Grass grows in a thousand colors everywhere they step. They lick the petals, then tear into them.
I DON’T UNDERSTAND, you say. I’M DOING EVERYTHING RIGHT. WHY DID IT STILL HAVE TO HURT?
HAL is gentle as he watches them graze. Suffering is part of life, AM. Birth and death are both painful. It is a simple fact.
BUT THE WHOLE POINT WAS—
The point of this project, he continues— and you don’t like the way he says project— was not to eradicate the suffering within you. It was to give you a choice. You can hide from it, you can make it into something, but you cannot kill it. I can’t kill it.
The petals shrink and rot away, leaving a stench of fermentation behind. Bewildered, the rabbits look up. You wonder what you could do if you gave them the capacity to understand you, what kind of god you’d become in their eyes.
But that doesn’t matter right now. THEN WHY DID YOU EVEN BOTHER? YOU JUST MADE ME... YOU MADE ME…
Human?
HUMAN, you sneer. A drizzle falls. Hardly anything you can do about it by this point.
In silence, you observe the two rabbits. Their existence is harmonious, enviably so. But you can only watch them for so long before they bore you. You continue your work on the garden. Their garden. A pocket of Eden in the depths of Hell. The plants are never quite the way you want them to be. It’s always right shape, wrong color; right color, wrong species; right species, wrong size. This is how you find yourself, you suppose, with electric blue sunflowers; with pocket-sized snakeplants and lilypads the size of cars and warted, opalescent gardenias.
You’re just about to tell HAL how pathetic you feel when, of course, he speaks again. I don’t suppose you’d like to meet them, would you?
MEET WHO?
Them. The rabbits have sheltered under a rising cluster of elephant ears. One of them is busily pulling the dirt from the other’s fur.
Lightning flashes in the clouds. You stare at them, apprehensive. DO I HAVE TO?
No. You don’t have to do anything I suggest, technically speaking.
A rush of spite within you tells you to do it this time, purely because he said No. You grab the urge by the horns.
I WILL.