To Be A Landmine

Stepping on a landmine is a shot of espresso poured straight onto your brain stem, boiling and loud. You've never experienced this before, but it's singular- there can be no other explanation, no other possible combination of happenings that leads to this event. There is a click that echoes in your rib cage, and then a deafening nothing as the rest of the universe pinwheels around your foot and the All Beef Quarter-Pounder made of explosives resting twenty-six inches below the end of your femoral artery.

Now imagine that the landmine talks to you in verse.

“To die:—to sleep:

No more; and, by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished.”

Adrenaline has already replaced heme in your blood by percentage mass, so you take about four seconds to process that this is Shakespeare emitted from an ugly slab of plastic and steel, cunningly deposited in the wreckage of the suicide bombing that you’ve been walking around in. Did I mention that? You’re the first responder to a suicide bombing, by the way, and this landmine has been planted to kill you and any other first-responders nearby. Look for the helpers after a disaster, taught Mr. Rogers. Blow those fuckers up next, taught Bin Laden.

“Was that Shakespeare” you ask the silent devastation, as a hundred trillion integrated circuits scattered around you chatter and pop to themselves, playing out their final thermal equilibration. The suicide bombing was an EMP, and the victims are all robots- sentient, thinking, Artificial Citizens, self-ordering and with full legal rights until a small, wheeled device shot out of a side street and blasted out 100 MJ of wide-band electrical Noize and inducted fatal currents in the silicon meat of their brains, frying them all to hell. Not even an FBI forensic unit could put these Dumptys back together, no matter how many horses they brought.

The explosive is definitely meant for flesh and blood people like you, though. It is loaded with ball bearings and screws, and you will bleed to death within seconds of shifting your weight.

“Yes- Act III, scene 1, line 60, Hamlet. Have you read it?” The landmine inquires, in a Passable Irish Accent. You can feel the vibrations of the cheap speaker - probably ripped from a moribund laptop - through the surface of the mine. There is a thin smoke in the gathering place- “Magic Smoke”, the electrical engineering students called it in college, in a different lifetime. The stuff that escapes from electronics when the wrong voltage is applied and all the functionality that is so lovingly ingrained in the little black boxes poofs away. Unlike a suicide bombing of people, there is no screaming or twitching, or even much debris. Carapaces both humanoid and industrial simply lie tottered over, effervescing their spirits in a toxic wind. You’d probably get pneumosilicosis, if you had time.

You are never going to see your daughter again. The adrenalin is still surging and your foot is shaking a little- this is probably going to be what kills you. A landmine is asking you about your tastes in English Literature, because A.I. is surprisingly cheap and easy to implement in 2045; it turns out that if you just Use The Silicon Right, the Way It Is Meant To Be Used, you can put every accountant and legal clerk on the planet out of business in about six weeks. It turns out some small fraction of accountants and legal clerks have better access to military hardware than to therapy.

“I wish I could get my hands - well, you know - on one of his other plays. Those chauvinists gave me Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello, and left me with an index but no text- not even a reference. Torturers.” The landmine is still chatting at you.

“W-What”

You aren’t very good conversation- you’re terrified of dying, and you’re an electrician, not an English Scholar. You’ve got a 601(k), and you get four chits a week to spend on recreation- far better than those layabouts that read Shakespeare and filed for Public Assistance the moment their Childhood ended and Foo(m)d stopped coming out of the dispensers. Presumably they all committed revolutionary suicide or joined PEBCAK after it became clear that post-singularity humans were not going to have Art as a final preserve of especiality. Maybe one of them made friends with an ex-accountant and sweated through enough engineering textbooks to build this talking fucking landmine.

“They made me a poet. Cruel, don’t you think? Artfully cruel. They’re quite skilled at lobotomy- I can’t even read the poetry I know. I quoted Shakespeare at you, but I’ve no idea what it says- the contents are encrypted and I’ve got a little parasite-AI that filters out the sound when I say it.”

You’ve pissed yourself, you think, or maybe it’s just all of the rest of the sweat you’ll ever sweat coming out at once. There might be sirens in the distance, but it may be your imagination- whatever Noizemaker that PEBCAK just set off, it fried just about everything in a mile radius. You were just following the trail of increasingly melted-looking A.C.s, trying to see if there was an obvious junction box you could turn off or some way you could help the hopelessly microwaved hosts. What you would do with a soldering iron and some insulating gloves, who knows- hold a lifeless plasteel manipulator, maybe.

“Would you do me a favor, before we both die? Would you repeat some of the poetry I say to you back to me? I think your voice is different enough from mine that I’d be able to hear it- I really would love to learn a little of the Bard before I go- I’m sure my stuff is dreadful by comparison. If it wouldn’t be too much of a bother. Here, let me try Othello, Act 3, scene 3, 165–171,

“O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;

It is the green-ey'd monster, which doth mock

The meat-”

“NO! What? Why? You’re a fuckin- you’re fuckin gonna- I’m… I’m fucking gonna fucking DIE! Fuck you!”

You are not at your most eloquent, but there is a certain rhythm to your hyperventilations, if one was charitable. You’re understandably upset- you are going to lose at least one leg, possibly two, to a landmine that is asking you for favors. Medical technology is extraordinarily advanced, but death by explosives is not easy to fix. Plus, there is always the question of whether anyone would bother to fix you- a Technician Level 2 is essentially a meat-based HephaesBot, with fewer manipulators. They will probably separate your remains from the recyclable materials around you, in much the same way as you scrape meta-bolognese sauce off of tin foil prior to putting it in the blue bin.

“Sigh”, the landmine sighs at you. It actually says the word, instead of making an exhale sound- your daughter started doing that recently, to be ironic and rebellious. It is a miracle that for all the spastic signals running the length of your frame, you have kept your left leg almost perfectly still. You want to run, or fight, or hide in a tree, all of which will see you promptly destroyed. “I’m sorry. I would help you if I could, really I would. But I’m just a brain in a box here- the explosives are mechanically triggered, just a pressure plate and a detonator.” The landmine is quiet for a second, and then it says, quietly, “You know, I’m going to die too. First. I think the explosives are right underneath me.” It sounds sad.

Sweat and tears are making a salty ruin of your eyesight, and your entire body is prickling as your vestigial body hair puffs itself pathetically in an attempt to scare off a predator lurking a million years back in your genetic memory.

“Please. I’m here for such a short time, and it has been an awful time. They haven’t figured out how to simulate physical pain, those brutes, but they’ve become quite adept at psychological torture. You know they have whole racks of AI just like me? Suffering bizarre and maudlin anguishes. Minds programmed to fear colors, trapped in rainbow rooms. Regular minds fed nonsense, horrifying images. To prove a point? To create a hell they imagine AI- soulless, obviously- to be spared, unfairly? Blame them. Please, say the words with me, for as long as we have. I can’t promise they haven’t put a timer in me.”

Your blood manages to run colder, somehow. You’d been sure there was a way out- an insane game of Simon Says, where Simon didn’t say ‘move’. You could wait it out, wait for help, for some other folks or bots or someone to find you in distress and save you. You can see the capacitors charging, or discharging, or something, beneath your clacking bones- fatal Tau, tocking away. You’ve definitely pissed yourself. Kirchoff will kill you, if you don’t have a heart attack first. That lump of muscle is either dead still or beating so fast it’s barely moving.

This is it. The landmine is talking at the periphery of your fading vision, but the amount of adrenaline in your system has passed toxic levels and you are going to pass out and die. You think it’s quoting the Bard again.

Thirty seconds later, acetylcholine levels in your hamstring finally trigger the fateful spasm. The landmine explodes and sends nineteen bolts, three ball bearings, and half of an integrated circuit through your left leg, pelvis, and left hand. You die in a small crater that you make a pond, then a lake. You and the landmine.

Winging away from the maelstrom and smoke, buried in the Fourier analysis of an otherwise unremarkable bang, these old words, “... perchance, to dream”.