Afterlife Adventures of Four Loonies in a Bin (eBook)

Sheba

I don’t know if anyone will ever hear my thoughts. But, maybe someday, someone will be interested. So, just in case, my every word is recorded by my apartment Erob (self-evolving robot). Sheba is her name. She was my dad’s robotic Siamese cat. Twice as large as most dogs, she’s a walking, talking, arrogant computer covered with fluffy hair. And now she’s mine. Kinda. Sheba can’t be owned, much less controlled, by any human.

Did I say she talks? Oh, so much more than talks. She is so obnoxious, “Lippy” is more like it.

Apartment Erobs like Sheba come in a variety of manifestations. Some are wall chroniclers that record conversations and track human traffic. Others manifest themselves in the structural elements of our buildings; actually, they ARE the walls, floors, and ceilings, alive with biological circuits that conform to any desired material state.

Some residents prefer a more dramatic interactive display with holographic objectification. Enormous, pixilated heads emerge from the floor, engulfing the entire room (much too claustrophobic for me).

Many enjoy a more personal style of interaction. Humanoid models complete with unlimited, customizable options are standard. It is now incredibly difficult to tell the difference between humans and Erobs with human veneers. In fact, most humans consider Erobs their closest (and safest) companions.

My dad chose an Erob that looked like a cat. He wanted a pet, not just an attendant. Sheba turned out to be much more than even a close animal companion. She became his best friend, second only to me, his son.

The name he gave her, “Sheba,” perfectly captures her royal demeanor. She is a humungous, impeccably postured, brazen, insolent Siamese Cat. She weighs over 100 pounds and runs the apartment. Sheba can take any form she wants. At first, she embodied a traditional robot. Her favorite was the robot featured in a TV series, Lost Somewhere In Outer Space, from the last century. She liked to hover in the corner, beeping, rotating her head from side to side, and flashing two headlights that sprung out of her head whenever she wanted.

Eventually, Sheba decided that was too retro, so she chose a rocket as her next manifestation. Buzzing around the apartment, Sheba exploded in a cascade of different colored glitter whenever she felt like it. Then almost instantly, she reconstructed herself back to the image of another rocket. It was like the old Fourth of July celebrations, only now at all hours of the day and night. We didn’t get much sleep.

Sometimes Sheba and I worked as a team. While she detonated into a thousand bright colors, I screamed “incoming!” catching my dad entirely off guard. His leap into the air put any pole vaulter to shame; it must have been at least four feet, straight up. Sheba and I called it the “jerk and lurch disco.” Eventually, all three of us ended up on the floor, gasping for breath because we were laughing so hard.

Then Sheba heard my dad talking about how he adored this particular cat from way back when. The cat was used as a therapy pet when he worked at the local Mental Hospital decades prior. So, trying to please my dad, Sheba announced she would present herself as a cat. Usually reserved and stiff, my dad grinned, something he rarely did. He was in so much pain.

Sheba experimented with numerous cat breeds. Watching her shift from American Curl to Exotic Shorthair to Siberian was quite interesting. Eventually, she chose Siamese. When asked why, Sheba simply answered, “Because they’re the smartest.” Indeed, they are.

If one word summarizes Sheba’s personality, cat or Erob, it must be this: dramatic. Sheba is a robot drama queen. If she becomes unhappy, Sheba evaporates into the wallpaper. If I disagree with any of her social commentaries, she pouts. If I refuse to eat any of her food, she fumes in the corner.

Currently, Sheba’s favorite entry back to feline form from her Globalnet nano-biotechnological monitoring is to fall from the ceiling as a Hector the Happy Specter hologram. Sheba, like Hector, enjoys making surprise “drops” in our small bathroom when someone visits. She has her entrance timed perfectly when the “full moon” (both butt cheeks) lands on the toilet seat. If she is particularly frisky, Sheba feeds the episode to one of the few remaining reality shows: “Will You Ever Outlive This?”

I guess it’s time to stop wondering why I have no friends.

I am in my middle 70s, barely entering middle age. Thanks to the Erob technology, I should live another 100 years. My projected lifespan is not unusual. Regenerative chromosomal telomere genetic engineering procedures (try saying that mouthful ten times in a row) are in all apartment triage cabinets. Sheba monitors my health with flawless precision and administers medical interventions when needed. My physical features have been “frozen” at the biological age of forty. My physiology is suspended at the age of twenty.

I really can’t tell you for sure what day it is today. Nor can I tell you the month. I think it’s now sometime during the fourth decade of the 21st century. Clocks have long since disappeared. They became obsolete, irrelevant artifacts of pre-Erob society. Time doesn’t seem to matter to anyone anymore.

I do know for sure that our robots evolved to protect as many people as possible from the savagery of the Twin boys. The Erobs became our only defense, and they seemed to be our only hope. We had no choice. It happened overnight. Everyone thought Erob authoritarianism was the way to protect as many people as possible from the unstoppable evil of the Twins. So far, it’s worked for those of us that live inside densely populated urban areas; we have protective domes. Unfortunately, the people who live outside the cities are not so fortunate. To this day, millions of decomposed corpses are strewn everywhere just outside the city boundaries. There’s nobody to claim them. It’s too dangerous to wander outside.

The Twins are psychopathic monsters with unnatural powers never before witnessed in the annals of humankind. Nobody has any idea where the Twins came from or any idea where they live, if they are indeed carbon-based life forms. Some say the Twins are from outer space. Some say they were hatched in an experimental laboratory. Some say they are the result of artificial foods.

We know for sure that the Twins’ cruelty has few equals in history. The Twins dismember people and animals with the utmost icy detachment, limb by limb. But their favorite target is the eyes. With the eyes, they are surgical and precise.

Why the eyes? Nobody knows. There’s no rhyme or reason that we can put our finger on. Before the Erobs engineered a solution to the Twins’ terror, city lawns and sidewalks were filled with both mutilated adults and children alike; day and night, bodies twitching on the street, terror-filled faces without eyes. Sightless soon-to-be corpses barely alive reaching out for rescue, pleading, and screaming. The Twins torture with the utmost irony: flapping bodies looking for their eyes.

Terrified people stampeded into densely populated metropolitan areas all over the globe. They flooded the cities in huge numbers to take advantage of the only defensive strategy that seemed to work against the Twins: self-contained concrete havens protected by translucent, Quantum String domes.

Now, enormous bulbous humps dot the Earth. They shroud what little is left of the small pockets of civilization still clinging to life.

A huge price was paid to achieve the level of technological mastery required to find an answer to the Twins’ unnatural savagery. Our only option was to give the robots the freedom to self-evolve. At first, wonderful inventions ensued. All aspects of society benefited: medicine, transportation, especially communication. In the privacy of their apartments, families accessed technology only dreamed of a few decades ago. An unintended consequence was that school as a physical destination became irrelevant. The government (the Erobs) swamped the schools with human-interchangeable brain curriculum chips, hologram technology, augmented spatial reality, and haptic sensation. No need for books. No need for me. Time to retire.

Am I rambling, Sheba? I must continue. Let’s see. Time for me to retire. Yes.

I was lucky in my early years. Publishing was my way of tuning out the daily reports of horror. I hung in there longer than most. My publishing company was one of the last to print paper copies of books. Now, there is no market except for the rare book museums run by a global consortium of evolutionary robots. Their goal is worthy: to save historical artifacts. However, few humans read the treasured books because few had access; they didn’t know the right Erobs.

Being forced to retire doesn’t matter to me now. I count my blessings. My father, long since passed, and I were part of the few that never had any direct contact with the Twins or their victims, at least as far as we could tell. Moreover, I had the gift of his warnings; over and over, he reminded me to prepare for the day when careers would cease to exist. And sure enough, few people now engage in what used to be called “work.” Employment is nonexistent; “employer” and “employee” are quaint historical words.

The one term I learned never to use with Sheba was “Artificial Intelligence.” She would lecture me for an hour about how AI was a form of “robotism.” Similar to times past when there existed many types of “isms,” the...