Chloe

Kyle screamed as he pulled the dust-laden sofa away from the wall. ‘Alex,’ he yelled as he recoiled, ‘it’s a cat!’

Amongst the cobwebs in the narrow space was indeed a dead cat, almost flattened by its placement between the wall and the velvety fabric of the modular sofa.

‘Poor little guy,’ the young man said with an inclined head. ‘I reckon it must’ve crawled in here to try and escape the radiation. Prob’ly been right here since it happened ... Fukushima … KABOOM!’

Alex turned his head and muttered a lacklustre acknowledgement, but the plight of a cat dead for more than two centuries did not pique his interest. He gazed out of the floor-to-ceiling window at the sprawling view of the beach and the ocean.

As beautiful and inviting as that California coastline looked, just an hour in that water would surely kill any unprotected human.

The A.I. Protectorate had issued an effective ‘cancer vaccine’ of sorts, but risking ionizing radiation on that level would still be suicide.

‘Are you going for a swim?’ Kyle asked wryly, resting his chin on Alex’s shoulder from behind. ‘Let’s build six Phase One GE reactors on the edge of the Pacific ocean and on the world’s most volatile fault line! What could possibly go wrong??’

He pressed the side of his face against that of his older co-worker, and though Alex found it irritating he was too tired to react. When he felt arms cradling his abdomen he almost found it comforting. Almost.

‘Kyle, I’m not homosexual!’

‘Ha-ha! I am not a homosexual!,’ the younger man imitated in a robotic mocking tone.

Alex’s gaze stayed fixated on the sea far below. He imagined 37 million people evacuating Tokyo; desperately trying to escape the carnage. Four days later the fallout started hitting the west coast of the mainland United States … the Northern hemisphere was doomed.

‘Hey look at this,’ Kyle called out from the kitchen. ‘It’s one of those old protein printers! Meat machines - the ones that used those DNA cartridges! Chicken, beef … 6 types of fish.’

He flicked through a case of small square plastic cassettes – genuinely fascinated.

Alex had by now followed Kyle into the kitchen, amused by the younger man’s fascination with old world technology.

‘It’s a mark 3 … no anomalies with this one!’

Earlier versions of the machines had created anomalies in the ‘printed’ flesh; cartilaginous structures that branched into the “meat”, making the first model extremely notorious.

‘Have you heard of the Medord cannibal? 2038 … he hacked one of these: added human DNA!’

‘That’s an urban legend!’ Alex stated bluntly, his eyes shooting up at the ceiling.

‘You’ll see!’ Kyle had already turned his attention to the other appliances in the kitchen. ‘This was the time to be alive! The first real anti-gravity, thought-to-text, real artificial intelligence!’

Alex fixed his attention on the digital pad he carried by his side, then sighed as he put it back in its holster.

‘Unit 508 has finished the house next door,’ Alex announced nonchalantly, ‘but frankly we’ve barely started on this house and I’m actually exhausted!’

Kyle nodded in agreement.

‘Unit 508, we will sleep here tonight and resume in the morning, so you can rest as well.’

‘I do not require rest,’ said 508 candidly, ‘for I am a machine.’

‘Thanks for reminding me,’ Alex muttered to himself.

Thousands more robots like Unit 508 worked constantly to contain North America’s nighty-eight deserted nuclear reactors, on behalf of an AI entity known as ‘Administer’. AI did not need to save or help humanity, but for reasons unknown it had and it did, governing the remaining survival communities with a competence and kindness that humans could never manage.

He heard Kyle making a ruckus in another room. ‘I found the occupant! In here!’

Kyle had left the kitchen unnoticed, and Alex hurried to find where he had gone.

The skeletal remains of a man lay face-down, half-way up the grand staircase in the foyer.

They beheld twenty-three decades of decay, and it almost appeared as though the body had melted into the plush carpet of the stairs. It looked like a skeleton escaping a cascading pool of tar.

‘He was trying to get upstairs when he died. Poor bugger.’

Alex again reviewed his digital pad. ‘Male, 64, film and television producer, never married … resided here alone. Harold was his name.’

‘Alone in this palace,’ Kyle mumbled to himself.

‘508, we have another body for catalogue and DNA extraction, will you take it to the ship?’

Next to the body lay a phone typical of the era, which Kyle immediately inspected for a brand name or model, but what caught Alex’s attention was the glimmer of gold in the man’s clenched hand. ‘What’s that?’ He said.

‘I don’t know,’ Kyle responded, ‘just some sort of jewellery.’

Slowly, gently he pried the gold chain from the corpses grasping hand.

‘It’s a locket … a heart-shaped locket!’

Indeed it was. A quick polish revealed the rich, beautiful lustre of pure gold.

‘Does it open?’ Alex asked quizzically.

‘Yes … look … Chloe it says!’

Alex sidled up to Kyle to get a closer look. Inside the compartment of the heart-shaped locket was a photograph of a beautiful, if not strange-looking, woman.

The opposite side of the chamber simply had the name Chloe engraved in lustrous gold.

‘Ooh, get you going does she?’ Kyle joked, but Alex ignored the silly quip.

‘I wonder who she was.’ Kyle said, fiddling with the open locket.

‘A relative perhaps? Or maybe it came with the locket and Chloe is the cat!’

Alex took it from him, and noticed that the engraved side of the locket pushed in with a click. What was inside it … or was it just broken?

In that instant a loud THUMP emanated from somewhere upstairs.

‘Can you see what 508 is doing?’

Kyle ambled off to find the robot, while Alex trudged past the long-dead man and up the stairs. Stuffing the locket into his pocket of his coveralls, he loped into the spacious luxury of what appeared to be the man’s bedroom.

Another wall of glass afforded a sweeping vista of the hilltops and canyons. He lay his head on the pillows of the bed and watched the golden sun slowly drift down behind the hills.

He closed his eyes.

When his eyes opened again it was dark. Disoriented, he cursed himself under his breath for falling asleep. He had a vague memory of Kyle throwing a blanket over him at some stage.

A light was on in the hallway atop the staircase, so the power was on now in the house. Twelve thirty-eight, his wrist device told him. He’d been asleep for more than five hours!

He stepped into the light and across the hall, where he heard Kyle snoring happily in a nearby bedroom. This comforted him.

Glancing down the stairs, he saw the corpse was still there … 508 had not taken it to the ship yet.

The skin-covered skull seemed to be staring up at him from out of the darkness with its rotted raisin eyes, frozen in what looked like an angry scream. Its damaged hand reached up at him, and he hurried back into the bedroom and shut the door in fright.

Unnerved and eager for the light of day, Alex sat on the edge of the bed, kicking his shoes off and pulling the gold locket from his pocket. He cradled the little golden heart in the palm of his hands.

The full moon and its rippling reflection lit the room quite substantially, enough for him to make out the image inside the locket, whoever she was.

He got back under the blanket and dreamily gazed at the ocean, eventually he drifted into semi-somnolence, and for no reason he could explain he pressed in the loose side of the locket with his thumb.

THUMP!

A narrow door slid open in the wall next to the en suite.

There stood Chloe.

‘Ooh hello stud,’ she cooed. ‘I’m so horny! Are you horny too?’ She giggled seductively.

Before Alex could even rouse himself fully, Chloe had pranced across the room and straddled him, trapping his arms under the blanket.

Silicone, latex, plastic, rubber – stiffened and hardened by two hundred and thirty-two years of dormancy and degradation – split and cracked with every movement she made.

Fully awake by now, he stared up in terror as the grotesque figure gyrated and squirmed in the moonlight. Unnaturally heavy as she was, he was pinned down.

The “skin” on her arms split apart with the sudden movement and hung from the frame like slices of processed meat.

Alex screamed for help as he struggled to release himself.

Chloe’s face then contorted into an angry snarl. ‘Who are you?’ Her face came closer to Alex’s from above as she held his shoulders in her vice-like grip.

Her face was disintegrating; large chunks falling off exposing the whirring servo motors that allowed her face to express a facsimile of human emotions.

‘You are an intruder! You will be detained until law enforcement arrives! Do not resist!’ An eyelid fell on to Alex’s face, and he shook his head vigorously to remove it.

Alex squirmed under the weight, screaming and yelling for Kyle the whole time.

He thought to press down inside the locket again, what he now realized was a button, and for an extended moment her movements ceased. Just as Alex managed to free his arms from under the blanket she reanimated herself.

‘You are not authorized for shut down! Emergency mode! Intruder! Contacting 9-1-1.’

Alex tried to pull her off him by the hair, but the scalp slid off the grotesque metallic “skull” with ease, causing her long hair to hang off the side of her head.

‘I am not an intruder, Chloe!’ Alex pleaded desperately. ‘I was invited here … Harold! Harold invited me here!’

The lenses in her eye sockets regarded him for a moment.

‘I need to verify this. Where is he?’

The door flew open with a thud; Kyle stood in the doorway wearing nothing but boxer shorts, petrified with fear.

‘Intruder! You will be detained!’ Chloe stated, dismounting the bed and advancing on Kyle.

‘Harold invited him too! He’s on the stairs … Harold is on the stairs!’

She seemed to consider the information and shoved Kyle aside as she lumbered into the hallway. The only thing holding her crumbling silicone casing to her frame was the black leather dress she wore.

She looked down the stairs, looked back at the two men angrily, then froze.

Whatever had been powering her for this long failed, and she fell on her side stiff as a board and slid down the stairs.

The momentum pushed the long-dead Harold to the bottom of the stairs where they lay in a grotesque pile of bones and titanium underframe.

‘Sex doll,’ muttered Kyle, ‘actually a rather advanced android!’

When they realized the danger had passed the two men embraced instinctively, both in a state of distress and relief concurrently.

Alex retrieved the gold locket from under the blanket on the bed and passed it to Kyle.

‘Remote control. It’s a remote control!’ Alex stated – then motioning to the cabinet built into the wall pointed out her charging bay

‘I’ve just never seen one like this before … pure gold.’ Kyle inspected it closely. ‘Obviously there’s circuitry in there.’

‘Close it, don’t touch it!’ Alex barked. ‘Just in case.’

When they descended the stairs Kyle placed the locket gingerly next to one of Harold’s skeletal hands.

Still shaking, they drank two-hundred year-old whiskey from a bottle behind the bar and watched the moonlit sea in leather armchairs.

‘To Chloe,’ Alex said taking a swig from the bottle before passing it over.

‘No. To dead batteries!’ Kyle stated emphatically.

They sat and laughed as they waited for the sun to rise.