Page 59 of His Bride

“Intruders detected.”

A very calm, infinitely more mature voice speaks suddenly. Everybody freezes in place. The rebels, most of whom have the absolute nerve to be dressed in Artifice armor themselves, stare around in horror.

“I thought you turned it off,” Lance says to me.

“I did. It told me where the plug was.”

“It told you?”His eyes narrow at me. “What do you mean it told you? Why would it tell you how to deactivate it?”

“Because it didn’t care. Humans care if they’re alive or not. Machines don’t.”

Just as those words come out of my mouth, a projectile bullet inserts itself right where Lance’s frontal lobe used to be. His skull comes apart in front of me in a slow cascade of gray matter and bone. At precisely the same time, bullets hit each and every one of the other rebels, all equally neatly placed. I hear one great gunshot, as the building fires a barrage simultaneously with complete accuracy.

One moment they are here, the next they are gone.

The voice speaks again.

“Reset mode engaged. Destroying civilization in 10… 9…”

“Wait!” I cry out. Have I truly ended the world so casually and carelessly? Will that be the wages of my sin here today? “Please! Listen to me!”

“8… 7… 6…”

“I will do anything!”

I am pleading with an entity that does not care for anything besides its own processes. I know I cannot stop it. I couldn’t turn it off, and I cannot prevent the revenge it is going to take on the world at large.

“Please! Have mercy on us all!”

“Oh, relax, Arthur. You always took all of this far too seriously.”

With those words, the doors behind the counter open. Three middle-aged men emerge. I recognize them instantly, though it is entirely impossible that what I am seeing is real.

“Part fridge,” one of them laughs. “Ridiculous. I don’t know how you do it, Terence.”

“I’ve been waiting eighty years to use that line. I almost forgot!”

I stare in astonishment.

These are the original engineers. The creators of the Artifice. These are the men who brought peace to the planet.

Yokohama, Wallace, and Patel. Their names are legendary. But they should be long dead. They should not be in their prime, looking as though they are no more than thirty years old. I am older than them, and they were born over a century and a half ago.

Have I lost my mind? Am I seeing some kind of trauma-induced hallucination?

“Hello, Arthur,” Ari Patel says with a broad grin. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Or three ghosts,” Shinji Yokohama replies. He is the tallest of the three engineers. All of them have long dark hair and glasses. I don’t know if it’s a chosen uniform, though I am almost certain the glasses are unnecessary.

“How is this possible?”

“With enough technology, everything is possible. We reveal ourselves only to a select few, those who deserve to know what the truth of the world is…”

“Or for the lulz,” Wallace says.

There are pieces of my ex-best friend and more recently, mortal enemy’s brain on my shirt. I do not find any of this amusing. I find it confusing and tragic.

“What is happening?”

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