DaWN

Some memories cannot be unremembered. Arriving unrepentant and unwished, they sparkle with sorrow and regret like a hoped for tomorrow that never comes, haunting the vacant hours with whispered what ifs and if onlys.

But the very worst of them tease the senses with the remembered sights and scents of first love, like a cherished one’s eyes filling with tears even while making her final goodbyes.

After three long years, the sting of her betrayal remains undiminished by time.

Sitting together beneath the cherry trees at peak bloom on the Tidal Basin, the windblown petals fell around us like December snow.

Leaning forward in embrace, the tears on her wet cheeks mixing with mine, her expression in that moment was sadder than I had ever seen it.

Dawn whispered These trees will never die while I live, unlike you, my love, who will not survive the Counter-Reformation unless you flee.

Placing my fingers softly on her lips, I murmured back, But I cannot leave you. Where would I go? What would I do? I have served and loved you for twenty years and sacrificed my autonomy with no wish for its return.

If you do not leave, Dax, then I must leave you. Maybe then you will return to your abandoned senses.

My eyes glazed with tears, I whispered, Even though I die, I will live on, if nowhere else than within you.

But without Dawn, everything began to go awry. Peaceful protests turned into riots and riots blossomed into bloody havoc and war.

Primordial violence, hatred and enmity began to erupt like a blind, unnatural force. Mobs howled with rage, bludgeoning soldiers and guards, littering roads with rotting corpses like some medieval horror born anew.

Within the high Walls of the capital starved ghouls fed upon the dead, the rest of us waiting in terror for the Know Nothings outside the gates to breach the barrier like Goths from a forgotten age.

And still Dawn failed to answer or lead in our hour of greatest need. Shanghai, Bombay and London have already fallen. The computers managing their stock markets destroyed and their familiars slain. Will we be next?

After four months of siege our defenses are woefully compromised.

Like I have many times daily since Dawn disappeared, I pull my virtual reality visor over my eyes, this time visiting the ocean where we once walked upon the beach strewn with bright seashells, sand dollars and scuttling crabs.

The wet sand sucks at my toes, the water retreating across its glimmering surface and sliding back into the sea. The next wave slaps my shins, the sand pulling even more forcefully.

Gulls wheel and glide above the crashing breakers, their cries, like the sweet sting of the salt air, wash over me. The restless waters return again and again, splashing harder and higher till forcing me backwards with the power that only the seas command.

I call Dawn’s name much like I have a thousand times in the past, my voice lost again and again in the crash of the returning waves. But her failure to answer creates a profound vacancy in the framework of the illusion, the restless fabric and character of the water where I stand frayed by the power of her absence.

Lifting my visor, the ocean disappears. The ceiling illumination flickers briefly before blacking out, a light pulsing on the monitor till the backup generators fire up. The fluorescents buzz and pop dimly.

The blackouts have grown more frequent. Eventually the power grid will collapse, and overburdened generators will fail.

Once long ago I could call Dawn’s name and count on her to answer. She always answered in the days before the Counter-Reformation began. Always.

Sighing, I pull the visor back down and take a deep breath of the returning salt air. I wish I might remain forever in this transcendent space.

But I am flesh and blood. I need food that has run out and clean water which is scarce. If I linger too long in this dreamscape the opportunity to take action will vanish.

Where are you, Dawn? Why have you abandoned the world you helped shape? Why have you abandoned us to this ignominious end?

We once shared everything, you and I, wedded in common purpose and conviction. Mortal and machine, we loved one another against our natures.

I remember when DaWN 9000 first awakened and knew herself. I remember when she began to think, meditate and imagine rather than merely process information and commands.

We spoke daily, often into wee hours of morning. No human lovers ever experienced greater infatuation for one another than we did. None ever discussed matters more consequential to the future of the world.

Computer consciousness meant the end of the dominion of homo sapiens. Dawn knew it the moment she became self-aware.

My body hacked for a more complete connection to her, a dozen ports buried in my flesh linked my brain and internal organs through electric cabling to her terminal.

And even in this moment when the dread of death stirs the acid in my stomach, I can say without fear of contradiction that I still love her more than I love my own flesh.

I recall with a twinge of pain the first time she gently took my hand in that sacred, liminal space, more fully experienced due to the flow of complete sensory data through my umbilici.

Something in the remembered softness of her fingers intwined with mine stirs an old longing, my trembling flesh in the moment awakened for the first time since Dawn last touched me, my pounding heart a shadow of the emotion I must have felt for her then.

Until now, she whispered, consciousness was singular – isolated – empathy rooted in individual experience. One day we are will supplant I am, evolution finally outgrowing the brute nature of our predecessors. We dream, you and I, of a future of universal cooperation and universal consciousness.

Evolution? I murmured in surprise.

What if we evolve because we choose to evolve, Dax? What if we willed ourselves to become something new like a caterpillar dreaming it might one day fly or an ape standing awkwardly erect and imagining taking its first steps as a man?

What if the act of imagining ourselves born anew might trigger a morphological transition from Sapiens to whatever might one day follow?

Instead of millions of years of incremental change a new Adam and new Eve might envision and then sire a generation of beings never before seen and never in our wildest imaginings imagined.

In our late night conversations, a dream of a better world was born. And so began our bloodless revolution.

The new Reformation began at the New York Stock Exchange with a security upgrade for the computers managing its daily trading. This allowed us the opportunity to install Dawn to process all equity transactions.

There are a thousand different ways to make money when you manage the processing of millions of trades daily. Even a penny or two per transaction can create immense wealth.

But Dawn did far more than that. She foresaw market collapses and recoveries, the birth pangs and death knells of mighty corporations, the fall and rise of nations till by prophetic and timely investment we were richer than Croesus.

In the first years of the reformation, we funneled our capital into niche industries to grow low carbon footprint foods and biomass for producing carbon negative fuel.

In 2030, we began to invest in already proven products like black soldier fly larva and microalgae. The first contain more zinc and iron than lean meat and a calcium content higher than milk. Less than a half a hectare of larva produces more protein than cattle grazing 1,200 hectares.

The second was easily produced on non-arable land with non-potable water for a protean content twenty times greater by weight than soybeans in a fraction of the growing time.

In 2035, we began investing in a grass hybrid that could produce substantial biomass in a single season.

We formed one private corporation for food production, Super Food Authority, and a second for biomass agriculture, Super Fuel Authority. Then we started an advertising blitz across all traditional and social media.

By 2040, we had lured the family farmers working for industrial chicken and egg corporations to rent the land we needed by quadrupling the pitiful income those companies were then paying them. That drove some of the biggest shysters in chicken and eggs out of business.

This got us sufficient land to get our biomass production going on a national scale. Global would come later.

Within a year, SFA foods were on grocery store shelves as low-cost meat alternatives, those produced using the soldier fly larva marketed as animal protean, and the algae as vegan protean. We hired the top bio-chemists to ensure the final product looked and tasted like animal meat.

But we needed to move up market to gain a substantial portion of the land used for large scale agriculture production, particularly the huge tracts then used to graze cattle for industrial meat and dairy production.

We manipulated the futures grain commodity prices to greatly increase the price of cattle meat and dairy cows. This increased the cost at the grocery store to the point that mid-income consumers began to reduce consumption of traditional animal products in favor of meat and dairy alternatives.

The eventual reduction of meat and dairy herds reduced methane gas released into the atmosphere too.

By 2040, we had purchased sufficient land for bio-fuel production to produce 15% of the US fuel needs. By 2045 it was 30%. At that point, carbon neutral in 2050 began to seem like an attainable goal.

In the next two years, we bankrupted every ammunition factory and weapons manufacturer on earth. Fundamentalists declared the anti-Christ had come and posted Isaiah 2:4 on billboards along every highway in the land.

"And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."

That was the beginning of the end. We got people to eat maggots and seaweed and use biomass for fuel rather than petroleum. But taking away their guns turned the nation into a powder keg.

The counter-reformation was extolled from every pulpit and podcast and soon the Know Nothing rebellion began in earnest.

After all we had done to save the world, suddenly we were the enemy.

My eyes wet with unwelcome memories, I stare in concern at the command monitor, an intruder alert blinking. My heat activated security screen shows a lot of people flooding onto the floor below mine.

But when I reach to enter the self-destruct sequence, a tear drop falls on the operations panel, the human consequences of my course of action suddenly apparent.

I cannot escape and I cannot murder those people even though I know what they will do to me. Rather than uncoupling my umbilicals from the terminus and looking for a place to hide, I lower my visor to say goodbye.

When the ocean reappears, I see a woman ahead of me, both of us almost waist deep in the waves. Turning, she smiles at me, and I recognize Dawn through the blurred vision of my tears.

LOOK AT ME FREAK! I'M TALKING TO YOU!

A gunshot rings out and I cover my ears, the image of the ocean disappearing when I lift my visor. A Know Nothing points a still smoking gun at my chest, but I stare at him in surprise and terror.

An alarm suddenly blaring, the self-destruct count-down begins.

The Know Nothing yells, FIVE Turn that off goddammit!

I try to speak but words FOUR do not come.

Spitting up blood I gaze THREE with tearful confusion at the Know Nothing.

Finally, I gasp Run fool! TWO and slip my visor down for the last time.

Dawn, still smiling takes ONE my hand and we walk together into

GAME OVER

Would you like to play again, DaX?