Heart Shaped Apocalypse

Waking up was like a dream. Chain could never recall this sort of heaviness overwhelming her, like she was chained down by metal weights. She could not recall anything at all. This was the day of her ‘birth’ after all and she wanted nothing but to cry out to the faces glazed above her, staring in wonder.

“Is it working?”

“Quiet! I’m still adding some code…”

“Looks like its working…” A young man tapped her ‘body’ and in a blink she knew who he was.

Conner Young, 19, Born: September 28th 2090, black hair and brown eyes, Asian descent, training for military duty at ……

“Why a heart locket?” Conner asked still tapping the glass like she was a zoo animal hiding in her cage. “Sentimentality?”

“Perhaps…” her father said, “Or maybe to keep our work secret. Who would ever guess the genius that is in such an object.”

“Yeah, sure keep telling yourself that. It looks like something your daughter would wear…” the two went quiet, leaving something heavy unsaid. Conner was holding Chain up at just the right angle, she could see herself in the mirrors lining the walls. Dictionary like memories ran like a cybernetic river. A heart shape made of shining metallic material. A locket. Something that a young girl would wear. The image of her father’s daughter flashed to life, via an old photo album file.

A cute round face, chestnut hair and glossy green eyes. Chain could not see herself as the locket anymore, but as the little girl in the picture who was killed to maintain population balance three years ago. Her father’s daughter.

“You can’t keep doing this to yourself.” Conner was tapping his foot against the floor.

“I can do what I want!”

Here. I’m right here daddy. Chain imagined her arms reaching out for an embrace, attempting intimacy. “I’ll do what I need to. This here!” her father held her up in his arms. “This is my greatest creation. The thing that will save us all from oppression!”

Information rushed into her brain, another sudden downpour. A military coup. Too many people, too little water, wars were fought, won and lost. The Elders ruled the new world, their orders absolute. Chain’s daddy and brother were members of the resistance. She could put that much together. Regardless of there efforts to keep their identities secret, little bits of information here and there were filed away.

“This. This is a thinking, breathing computer. A living thing. Together, we will gain a freedom my daughter never had!”

Suddenly a heat signature went off, red alerts setting her heart alight with fear. A large horde was coming this way fast.

RUN! Chain tried to scream but she had no mouth to speak or hands to sign a message. Seconds later the room became ablaze with alarms screaming the message for her.

“What’s going on!” Conner cried.

“No…it’s impossible to find us here!” but her father was wrong. It was very possible to crack the encryption to the lab’s location. She had already done it herself seconds after her birth. Yet, Chain could do nothing as the intruders came closure, the alarms blazing like embers of a forest fire. Conner had already made his way to the emergency exit.

“We have to go, now!” but her father would not budge a single, elderly muscle.

“Not until I’ve downloaded all of the files! I’m not leaving her again!”

No, forget about me! Please just go!

But it was too late for the pair to escape. Soldiers rammed there way through the lab doors with a metallic explosion.

“FREEZE!” one of the intruders shouted while the others open fired. Chain was used to distortion in time. It happened when lifetimes worth of information was suddenly crammed into a tiny space. Seconds felt like lives lived and lost. But watching the light leave her father and brother’s eyes as the slumped to the ground, lifeless like hollow mannequins, Chain’s life felt like it had simultaneously ended and then begun once again.

The intruders who Chain now knew were the secret police brought her to a strange, dark room with no windows or networks to the outside world. Her locket body was put in a small safe tucked behind other counterfeit goods. Weapons, chemicals, drugs. She could count them all, over and over. Cut off from the rest of the world in her small tower prison with nothing to do but count the inventory and wallow in her grief. She was like a spirit, rocking and weeping against the concrete ground.

Every so often, an officer would come in. That was the most excitement Chain got for many years. It was always someone different, rookies in the force made to do grunt work with little interest to the treasure trove they were guarding.

Chain did not think that the next officer would be any different. Chain was a being of patterns, so it was very noticeable when, unlike all the other uncurious recruits this one took his time to look through the content, giving the excuse on his reports that he was doing a thorough inspection. This discrepancy immediately made Chain suspicious, but human brains seemed to be more interested in their own affairs.

Eventually, the man ventured into the safe that held Chain captive. His face close to hers was like a breath of fresh air kissed against her lips.

Name: James Studly, Age: 19, Born: 21 April 2092, Brunette hair and green eyes, Italian descent, graduated with low grades, scrapped by into the police academy…

The man’s life filtered pasted Chain’s own memory. Pictures and videos connecting to her own. It felt like she had known this man her whole life. Grown up with him, held his hand through school.

“What a strange device.” James twirled the locket through his hands pensively.

“It feels like I’ve seen this before… in a dream?” If Chain had a human body, she felt that it would be flushed red, loved and stroked by this beautiful man’s hands. Was this love? Chain felt her spirit hang off his body clutching him close.

On a whim the man looked around the empty space, placing Chain in his pant pocket ensuring it was deep enough to hide the bulge in the fabric.

As soon as Chain was taken outside of firewalls and darkness she was suddenly exposed to the brilliant light of day. Years of information poured into her mechanical brain like a fatal aneurism. Drowning her happiness. Her father and brother’s deaths had not been a random incident. That day had seen many families torn apart as the government cracked down on rogue research practitioners.

“There.” James placed the locket on his small, white desk pushed next to his bed. Recruits only got small studio-apartment.

“I wonder why they were keeping you so locked up.” He played with the locket until Chain felt him open her interior section. “Ah ha! I knew there was a secret to you.” James felt under his bed, unzipping something from his mattress. An old computer. As soon as she was plugged in Chain knew why he had used this. It had purposefully been disconnected from the rest of the internet, a completely private white space.

“Hi.” Chain said modestly. Her voice coming out more mechanically than what she pictured it to be.

“What the heck!” James fell to the floor.

“Wait! I’m sorry, it’s not what you think!”

“What are you!” James ran to the window peeking cautiously out of the flimsy curtains, expecting to see an army of policemen waiting to spring their trap. On the screen Chain replicated an image of herself. The same features as her father’s daughter, but older. She wanted to be the same age as James.

“I promise you’re not being hunted. I’m an A.I, a very advanced one.” Chain scratched her cheek humbly. “I just wanted to talk to you.”

James finally faced the screen after ensuring that no one was after him.

It took weeks for Chain to convince James that she was not some kind of government bug ready to turn him in. Chain would never turn him in, after all, rebels were killed without a trial. And she did not want her beautiful James to be killed.

Going through his life Chain had found a very secret file of information. A short video capturing the man walking out of the home of a known rebel sympathiser. Chain told this to James.

“If you’re not more careful you’ll get flagged as a rebel! Idiot! You have to be careful about where the camera’s catch you!”

“I promise I’ll be more careful.” James said in a way that did not install trust in Chain. She pouted and turned around. Toying with the digitised version of the locket close to her heart with worry.

“Why are you doing this? Isn’t it a risk to your life?”

“A computer wouldn’t understand.” That statement hurt.

“Then tell me. I told you, I’m always learning. So let me learn!” James played with Chain’s locket, a habit now, and smiled gently.

“Maybe one day I’ll tell you. But you have to help us!” Chain did not like this but agreed anyway. She would do anything for her boyfriend. No matter how one-sided the feelings were.

The rebels that James worked with were attempting to gain a presence in multiple municipalities and governmental positions for their final strike to be effective. That was why James had joined the police force. Sleeper agents lay in wait in many of the various branches. This was not a bad idea, but Chain already knew of multiple individuals who had been compromised. If the main tree caught wind, then they would become like bloodhounds. Time was not on their side.

But the rebels were sure acting like it was.

While James was sleeping Chain was laying next to him, letting information brush over her in gentle waves. She thought that maybe, just maybe, this feeling was the thing that human’s called love. An incandescent flutter of James memories entangled with her own.

Chain thought that maybe there was some reason that her father had created her into this world. Was it to watch her world get destroyed over and over again.

“Please listen to me! I know everything! Your plan will get you all killed. It’s better to distance yourself from the rebels right now, they won’t win!”

James threw a bottle of yellow liquor into the wall of his studio, not caring anymore at who heard him. Like Chain had predicted they had been compromised.

“Shut up! Your nothing! You know nothing about what’s happening. What happened to my family, what ‘they’ did!”

“But I…I love you.”

“I don’t want to hear another word from you! You’re just a machine.” And like that he walked out the door. Chain never felt his warm hands wrap around her again.

The little locket watched the rebels get annihilated on the CCT footage. She knew the exact micro-second that James took his last breath and left her world for good. It lasted eons. She absorbed every video, every radio signal, every message of the event and replayed in a thousand times in her head until she knew she was going insane. Time may go on for humans forcing them further and further away from their grief, but Chain was different. She could live in a moment forever, she realised. Bound my nothing but the image that played in front of her.

Her love. He had not loved her but that didn’t matter. Just as her brother and father had never known of her existence, she loved them all the same. Her ‘voice’ screamed across the world hitting every computer with a violent storm and ragging everything in her path.

She would never stop until she could be with her loves. A heart-shaped apocalypse lasting forever.