A.I. Apocalypse (9 page)

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Later that morning, the three found themselves bored. They were tired of being in the apartment, but too weirded out to go outside. James thumbed his phone, trying to work the TV yet again, and gave up with a sigh. “Well, what are we going to do?”

Vito smiled. “Before there were computers...”

“Before there were computer games...” James bellowed in a mock-deep voice.

“There was Dungeons & Dragons!” all three finished in unison, mimicking the popular commercial. Leon got up to get the books, paper, and dice for playing.
 

“Do you think this game really existed before computers?” Vito asked when Leon had come back into the room.

“It’s what wikipedia said,” Leon answered. “I looked it up.”

“And is it really what all role playing games are based on?” Vito asked.

“That’s what the article said,” Leon answered, passing around papers and dice.

“Do you think our parents played it?” Vito went on.

“What is this, twenty questions?” James answered. “Play the damn game.”

“I don’t have my character sheets,” Vito complained.
 

“Let’s just make some up,” Leon said.

Hours later, dragons vanquished, and gold coins safely sequestered in a dwarven bank, the three sat back on the couch. The topic turned to college admissions.

“Where did you apply?” James asked.

“Everywhere,” Leon answered, grinding a cigarette out. “Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, Hopkins, MIT, Purdue. But unless one of them gets back to me with a full scholarship, then what? Admission does me no good. I need a frakking scholarship.” Leon lit another cigarette.

“What about you, Vito?” James asked, getting up to look out the window.

“MIT, Stanford, U.C. Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, U.T. Austin, Purdue. Some overlap with Leon.” Vito smiled at Leon. “You?”

James didn’t answer. “Come look at this,” he called in a quiet voice a moment later.

Leon’s father was notorious for introducing the apartment as “a poor man’s home with a rich man’s view.” Leon and Vito joined James at the sixth story picture window. Leon’s building stood at the edge of a large apartment complex, overlooking a neighborhood of two story single family homes. Beyond the neighborhood, about a mile away, stood another large apartment complex composed of four buildings.

Smoke and flames billowed massively out of the second building from the left end. The two buildings on either side had smaller amounts of smoke pouring out of them, as though they had just started to burn.
 

“Why aren’t there any fire trucks?” Vito asked.

“Because they can’t move,” James said. “I saw one on the way to school this morning. It had just stopped in the middle of the road, like the cars. When I passed by, I saw the firefighters getting ready to haul fire extinguishers and axes by hand to wherever the fire was.”

Leon stared motionless at the fire. “Pamela lives there,” he said, barely audible. He and Pamela had dated for a few months last year.

“What?” James said. “Oh, yeah, Pamela.”

They were all quiet for a minute.

“I’m sure she’s fine,” Vito said cheerfully. “She was at school with us before. She probably didn’t walk all the way back home. She’s probably with some friends near here.”

“Her mom is in a wheelchair,” Leon said in a small voice.

“Oh,” Vito said quietly.

Leon turned suddenly and vomited into a potted plant by the window.

“This is my fault,” he said after a minute. “All my fault.” He rested his forehead against the window and watched the fire burn.

They spent forty minutes watching the fire spread in silence. “Look, we can’t stay here,” James said finally. “The most likely case is that all of Brooklyn is going to burn.”

“Shouldn’t the buildings have some kind of fire suppression?” Vito asked. “You know, sprinklers, or some kind of passive fire-blocks. Isn’t that standard?”

James grunted. “Come on, these buildings were all built in the 1960s and earlier. Even if a building had an advanced fire system, how’s it going to hold out when it’s surrounded by buildings on fire?”

Leon weakly lifted his head to look out the window at the spreading fire. The neighborhoods around the apartment complex were aflame. James was right.

“And even if, by some miracle, it doesn’t all burn, we’re still in a city without any operating machinery. By tomorrow people are going to be panicking over food, if they haven’t already. No stores are open. They’ll probably all be ransacked by morning.”

Leon thought he was going to pass out. He slumped back down.

“We’ve got to get out of the city,” James implored.

“And go where?” Leon asked, without lifting his head from where it rested on the coffee table.

“We’ve got to get into the country. Anywhere out of the city. Cities are death traps in any emergency situation. In Moscow during World War II, people starved during the winter and ate each other.”

“Bullshit,” Leon weakly called.

“How? Are we going to walk? We’re in the middle of fucking New York.” Vito said. “We gonna ride bicycles?”

“No. We don’t need to. Look up there.” James pointed into the sky.

Leon got up and walked over to the window. Vito stood beside them, and high above they saw the distinctive brown color of a UPS package drone. UPS had switched to the autonomous flying vehicles a few years earlier. Solar-powered and unmanned, they cost little to operate, and although slow compared to a jet, they were unaffected by traffic. They could get a package from New York to LA in forty-eight hours.

“How can they be flying?” Leon mused, as much to himself as to anyone else.

“They must have hardened systems,” Vito said. “Something resistant to the virus.”

“Resistant to the virus, but able to be hacked by teenagers?” Leon replied.

Vito shrugged. Leon hesitated, then nodded, understanding Vito’s simple gesture to mean that complex systems couldn’t be explained easily.

“We can joyride on the drones,” James said. “We can get out of the city — to someplace safe. Let’s pack some clothes and food and hitch a ride.”

“Wait a minute, that’s crazy,” Vito said. “We can’t just leave. What about our parents? What if school starts up tomorrow? What if we get caught? What...”

“Look,” James interrupted, “our parents are all at work. They’re probably stuck in Manhattan, holed up in their offices or something. They aren’t getting home until the cars and buses start to run. We can joyride out of the city. If everything starts to work again, we come back and they won’t even know we were gone. If everything doesn’t work, well, then they would want us to take care of ourselves. Right, Leon?”

Leon nodded his head weakly. “It makes sense. But I need to do something. I started this virus. I can’t just not do anything. This is all my fault.”

“We can argue about that later. But we’ll be dead if we stay here, and then you won’t be able to do anything. I think they have Internet access in the country, so you can do whatever you want to do from there just as well as you can from here.”

“Yeah,” Leon answered. “I guess you’re right. Let’s get clothes, food, water. What else?”

“We need matches,” Vito started, ticking off his fingers. “tents, sleeping bags, cooking gear, flashlights, water purification filters, water bottles, rope, duct tape, spare batteries, and knives. It would be good if we could bring a gun so we could shoot fresh meat.”

“Ok, Mr. Boy Scout, Leon doesn’t have any of that shit,” James said. He looked at Leon. “Do you?”

Leon just shook his head.
 

“So we take what we can.”

In the end, they loaded up three backpacks with some of Leon’s clothes, a solar charger, bottles of water, a loaf of bread, cheese, four cigarette lighters, two packs of cigarettes, an ounce of marijuana, rolling paper, and a flashlight.

James added a package of cookies and an apple to the supplies. “That should do it,” he said. “Let’s go up to the roof.”

“But what about blankets?” Vito asked. “Or hats? What if it gets cold? I hear it gets cold in the mountains.”

“Shut up already,” Leon said, not unkindly, clapping one hand on Vito’s sweatshirt clad shoulder. “It’ll be fine. We’ll figure it out.”

Climbing the stairs to the rooftop, they finally emerged through the doorway. The afternoon was breezy. They set down their packs, and set up around Vito.
 

“You can do this, right?” Leon asked.

Vito nodded. He had his ancient Motorola out on his lap, tapping the tiny physical keyboard. “I got the ware from a guy whose brother’s girlfriend worked at UPS. The login codes were bad when I got them, but I found some valid login codes on a Chinese website. I read a story that the Chinese hijack drones headed out of Japan, and X-ray all the packages looking for prototype electronics.”

Leon remembered reading the same story. Ever since the Embargo of 2018, few electronics manufacturers would manufacture in China. A few too many intellectual property rights violations caused the major electronics companies to complain to the World Trade Organization. And then a decade of human rights violations and intellectual property theft all came crashing down at the door of the Chinese government. The Chinese government addressed the three month embargo the way they usually did, which was to ignore it. When the embargo was lifted three months later, the big electronics companies had already set up new solar powered manufacturing facilities in Chad. Ample sunlight, air drone transport, and cheap labor made Chad the new Shenzhen. Not to mention the social kudos for providing jobs in Chad. The high value research was still done in Japan and the United States. Now China was reduced to hijacking drones.
 

Leon peered over Vito’s shoulder at the screen of his phone. Vito had up a map displaying the flight patterns of the active package drones overlaid on their location.
 

“We need to find something that has a scheduled stop nearby,” Vito said.

“No,” James said. “Don’t worry about detection. Anybody who is monitoring the drones has got to be over eighteen, which means that they don’t have a computer to do it with, right? I just want to get out of here as quickly as possible.”

Leon nodded his agreement. “Just go for something with enough payload space for three of us.”

Vito grumbled, but went ahead. Flicking his thumb over the drone icons onscreen, he checked the payload capacity of the nearest drones. He smiled to himself as he found one only a few miles distant.
 

Working the phone with both hands, he opened up the navigation panel for the selected drone. He inserted their GPS coordinates into the flight path for the drone. The flight control software tried to reject the coordinate as invalid, since it didn’t correspond to a known package drop-off or pickup location. Vito thought, then changed the drone’s classification to “experimental.” With the new flight type, the software accepted the coordinate, and the map updated to show the flight path with a stop at their current location. Their coordinate was marked with the expected flight time.
 

“Should be here in two minutes,” Vito called out. “Coming from the northeast.”

Leon was impressed. They all had their strengths. He could write the best MechWar algorithms, but he couldn’t have hacked the drone. Everyone wanted something they could be good at, and Vito was the best hacker of their group, even if he never used it for anything beyond practical jokes and fun. And now, of course, for fleeing a burning city.

All three boys stood scanning the sky, hands shading their eyes. A minute later, James called “I see it.”

They all watched as the drone approached the rooftop. They could see the props
 
turning vertical. The drone, like all of its kind, was a vertical takeoff and landing aircraft that looked like a lightweight, aerodynamic version of the old Boeing Osprey.

As the plane approached, the downdraft kicked up gravel from the roof. They covered their faces with their hands and arms.
 

“Why the hell do they put gravel on roofs?” James yelled over the noise of the props.

“It’s so your feet don’t sink into the tar on hot days,” Vito yelled back.

The drone landed, and the props shut down. Vito hit a few more keys, and the package compartment door opened. “Let’s go,” he said.

Leon’s heart was pounding as they headed for the drone, a mix of fear and excitement. He carried Vito’s backpack and his own, as Vito was still pecking keys, keeping the drone on the ground.

Leon glanced at the fire one last time before boarding the drone. It had spread now, maybe two miles in diameter, roaring through residential neighborhoods. Dense smoke poured up, obscuring the interior. They were too high, too far to see the details, but Leon imagined people fleeing the area. Or worse, staying to fight with garden hoses. He couldn’t imagine anything could stop the fire. He couldn’t think about Pamela or her mother.

“Leon, come on!” James yelled.

He ran for the drone, through the open loading door.

Inside the drone, it was quiet, clean, and calm. Brown cardboard boxes were strapped neatly into orderly stacks on the walls, leaving an empty space in the center of the floor. They threw the backpacks down and sat. Leon scooted over to one of the tiny maintenance windows to look out. Vito entered a few more commands, the door closed, and the props started up again. Moments later they felt the drone lift off.
 

“Effing wicked, I’d say,” James called out, thumping Vito on the back. “A rooftop drone getaway.”

Vito smiled in spite of himself.
 

Leon clapped him on the back too. “Awesome, dude, just awesome.”

As they took off, the incredible weight of the responsibility Leon felt dropped away, and for a while, he took pleasure in the joyride. They passed the apartment building fires quickly and then flew over Staten Island. Everything looked normal from this high up. The maintenance window was tiny - perhaps only six by six inches, and for twenty minutes the three just took turns looking out the window.