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It’s been snowing all day. The icy top layer crunches under my heavy boot as I make my way to the shed. I’d rather not be out this late, but we are running out of firewood, and it gets so goddamn cold in the cabin this time of year. Donut would never stop complaining.
I pick up the heavy block of wood, my breath coming out in short bursts of steam. The axe is half rusted but it does the job. It must be from the before times. The shed and the cabin are pretty new, obviously. Cheaply made. They do the job as well.
I can barely feel my fingers by the time I get back to the cabin, carrying a full sling of logs on my back. I leave my boot by the door and the logs by the fireplace. Donut is curled on our cot, looking at me with slowly blinking eyes. She’s been napping, as usual. I throw my jacket over the back of a chair and walk up to her.
“How was it?” she asks. I pat her head and sit down heavily next to her. The sub-zero temperature makes what’s left of my right leg hurt like a bitch. I grunt, cave-man style, and take the prosthesis off.
“Dark, cold”, I say.
Donut scoffs.
“Oh, really?”
I side-eye her. “You should take a look sometimes.”
“I’m perfectly happy inside, Carl.”
I rub the stump of my leg absentmindedly. Donut keeps her eyes glued to it. I don’t really remember the incident that made me lose my leg from the knee down, but Donut says it was horrible, terrible and absolutely gruesome, something she’s never gonna be able to get out of her head. For me, the aftermath was worse. Way worse.
I check my communicator that has been charging by the bed. Even though it’s fairly new alien tech, it sometimes has trouble receiving messages when I’m this deep in the middle of nowhere. No offense to Canada, by the way. Or what’s left of it. But you gotta admit their lands basically consist of nothing but forests and wilderness, even before the Collapse.
I have a new message from Katia. I smile, looking at the image of her and her little daughter. They have matching reindeer horns on. I wonder where they got hold of those retro-looking things.
‘Merry Christmas!’ the text inserted over the picture says. I click on it, and the image goes away, revealing the message Katia has left us.
Carl and Donut,
Hope you are okay, wherever you currently are. Please, send me your coordinates soon so we can visit. I think about you daily. Stay safe. Katia.
I read the message out loud to Donut. She has trouble reading nowadays. I’m not sure if it’s because of lack of practice, or if her human level of intelligence is slowly starting to diminish. I also stutter now, when I read. That’s just the brain damage, though.
“How nice”, Donut says. She yawns and presses her paws against my hip. “Are you gonna send her the coordinates?”
“Maybe later”, I tell her. I put the communicator down and pick up a little green handheld radio. One of those old school ones, from before the Crawl. One of the resistance people gave it to me a few years ago. It had been essential for their survival, he’d said. I had tried to refuse the gift, but he’d insisted. I had been essential for their survival too, is what he also said.
It makes me feel queasy thinking about that day, so I quickly move on.
The radio turns on with a click and for a few seconds, I can only hear static. Then,
Hii, Sweet Feet!
I say nothing, so it continues,
No? How about Schmootsie Footsie? Honey Toe-Woe?
Donut sniggers next to me. The AI has gotten into pet names lately, and every day it comes up with more and more ridiculous ones. I let myself sigh loudly.
“Hello”, I finally say, when it has calmed down with its daily list of nicknames. “How are you?”
Oh, you know. Watching over an entire star system is pretty hard work. Someone is always trying to start a war somewhere. I thought you people were done with wars already. But what do I know, I guess not! Oh well, makes my life easier. You can work on killing yourselves and I’ll work on – Oh fucking hell, just take the damn sock off already!
Its rambling turns into shouting so abruptly that it startles me. I wince, but I bend over all the same and pull off my thick woolen sock.
The AI groans so loudly the radio turns some of it into static.
Oh boy, oh boy…
Its voice fades into mumbles. I just sit there, slightly frazzled. I can feel a headache building, but that’s nothing new. I should ask Katia to bring me some of the good meds she takes, when she next visits. I take out my notepad and scribble that thought down before I forget. Donut looks over at the notepad, but her eyes don’t focus on the writing.
Hoo boy, that’s great.
It’s still basically foaming at the mouth, judging by how its voice is distorting. I grimace.
I grab my foot and massage it, down the sole and between the toes. My toes are cold, so it does actually feel good, but that’s not really why I’m doing it.
Yeah. So.
Yes, we made a deal, way back around the time the Crawl “ended” and turned into a galactic crisis. The deal is, to make it short and simple: I would get my privacy and my peace, with control over when and where the AI – or anyone, really – could contact me, and in return, I wouldn’t give out any of the secrets I had learned about it throughout the Crawl and beyond it.
Sounds like a goddamn crappy deal, you say? Well, yeah. It is. It’s one crappy deal in the sea of shit we are sailing in. Basically, by the time we were at that point in the negotiations, I couldn’t care less about the ‘good of the universe’ and just needed to get out of there.
I’m pretty sure it could contact me in other ways than just the radio, anyway. That for sure it is completely aware of where I am and what I’m doing at any given time, but so far it has respected the deal. I get to keep the privacy of my little cabin with Donut, and it gets its daily show of me reluctantly taking off my sock and massaging my foot while it moans into the radio.
Wohoo. And so we maintain world peace.
There was a period of time, as you can imagine, when the AI could not get over me having only one foot. It would berate me daily for it and complain how careless I had been with my valuables. Eventually, it had relented, and now it sometimes says it is even better that I only have one. That it is even more exciting. In my opinion it has to be coping hard, but whatever. I’m just glad it has at least stopped complaining about it to me.
“Any news?” I ask, after it has calmed down a little.
Oh, nothing you need to concern your little fucked up head for. Gotta say though, Earth is hot stuff when it comes to intergalactic business routes. We’ve got a pretty awesome location and valuable natural resources over here. Mars is not half as bad and that’s right next door. Damn, the earthlings should have advanced a little quicker and taken advantage of that. Were you called ‘the earthlings’, anyway? The Earth people? People from the great blue planet of Earth?
I’ve lost track of what it’s talking about already, but I nod anyway at the empty room. “Something like that.”
Anyway.
I guess nothing else interesting this time. It’s December 24th, by the way. I think you people used to call that ‘Christmas Eve’. It’s got a long history. I was just digging into my internet archives and reading about that. It’s pretty interesting stuff. Wanna hear about it?
I slump back into the pillows, laying flat on the cot. I can’t help the laugh that escapes my mouth. “Sure, go on”, I say, amused. “Tell me about the goddamn history of Christmas you learned from the mashed-up information from Wikipedia, Reddit shit posts, various religious sites and who knows what else. This should be good.”
As the AI rambles on, I pull a blanket over me and turn so I can watch the fire quietly crackling in the fireplace. Donut crawls under the blanket, between my thighs, uncharacteristically quiet. I reach over for the communicator. I pick an appropriate picture of me and Donut next to the fireplace and attach it to a short message. The picture looks innocent but encoded in it are our current coordinates. Katia will know how to figure it out.
Katia and little Ellie,
Merry Christmas. We would love to have you over. Please bring warm clothes and extra blankets for yourself. Sorry, we are a bit short of supplies here. Have you got something for headaches? That would be nice. We miss you too. Carl.