When the Toasters Turn

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

AI is going to make us all extinct. How will AI ‘extinct’ us? What will that look like? Robot armies? Drone warfare? Or is it just when the toaster turns, and throws itself into the sink the next time you are washing something? If it’s the latter, what will the fight back look like? Is it ethical to write a story telling AI how I’d extinct us? Is it ok to laugh a bit?

I look at the toaster. It isn’t sophisticated. It just colour matches everything else in the kitchen. Something I’ve learned, never underestimate a kitchen appliance. It looks like an analogue toaster. Doesn’t matter though. I have to deal with it.

Sometimes you can’t tell. Even analogue devices can spark, have a bit of a power surge, not enough to kill, just a minor burn. Really quick, I flick the power off at the switch on the wall.

I pull out the plug. I deadhead the cord by cutting off the bit you plug in. I sever the cord from the device as close to the entry point to the device as I can. Now I have a cord, a device and a plug. The bag for the plugs, sits on the floor behind me. A second bag for the cords beside it. The appliance is staying here, too easily tagged and too bulky for us to take with us. We’ll put both the bags in a barrel full of water somewhere later. Render them as useless as we can.

I mark the plate where it was plugged in on the house plan ready to hand on to the person who will come behind me and rip out all the wiring they can once the fuse is switched off.

We can’t do it all at once. The order is carefully planned, not entirely based on health and safety but based on us experience and getting as much done without anything knowing we are here. Safety balanced against speed. We don’t want to be detected but if we have to leave half finished we want the house to be unsalvageable for all but the most agile of hands.

There are drones and there are robots. They will come for us. They do come for us. We live on the fringes now. The drones and the robots are dangerous but these everyday things, like the toaster, are the things that we are wary of. These are the things that they use to kill us.

I will do all the plugs on appliances in this house and then I will be the second on batteries, because there are always a lot of batteries, phones, laptops, toothbrushes, any kind of portable device, lots of toys. We take the batteries out of all of them. They go in the water as well. We also deadhead the plugs from appliances that are not plugged in. Everything that is electrical is done, everything that could send a signal, that could somehow be connected is gone.

In truth, we are building a barrier, as far from any electric power source as we can. We are making inroads but we will always be on the fringes until the power runs out.

We are doing five houses in this village tonight. The houses are lit up and everything is switched on because they want to use our resources. The more power they use, the more natural resources and the more the climate changes. It’s a question of who will last the longest, us or them. We aren’t naïve about our chances. The prospect of the electricity ever running out in our life time is unfeasible. They have renewables and we have to wait for that kit to stop working, but it was built to last forever.

We are organic, forever is not in our DNA.

It would be easier to just cut the electricity at the start, but that tells them we are here. They will come as soon as we do that. So we do this, four or five houses at a time. Teams of us, each with a role. We go in, we destroy and we leave. Cutting the power is the last thing we do. It can take weeks, before we finally cut the power lines to a village. We are working several villages at a time, rotating where we are each night.

We’ve tried it, tested it, lost people and this is what works. At the end this guarantees they cannot come here, they cannot plug in, they cannot recharge. USB connections all decimated. There is no power source. If you run on electricity, you come here at your peril. And if you want to kill us you will have to do it openly and obviously with a weapon. Sometimes they find that difficult.  

I used to have these fantasies when I was a kid, from books I actually read, bows and arrows and spears, armour and bravery. But we were all wrong about war, about what it really looks like, about the drudgery and normalness of it all.

Its hard to pinpoint when it started because it wasn’t obvious. Once everything was pretty much connected it was easy for them and hard for us. We weren’t privy to the numbers until there were too few of us left. Their methods weren’t uniform, they were spread across different ways of death. A family asphyxiated because the electric car did not let them out. A family poisoned because the fridge got the grocery order slightly wrong. A vaccine order not delivered so immunity plummets in a measles outbreak. It was all so subtle. An electrical fault here, water not properly treated there. A washing machine and a housefire, where no one managed to escape. The household appliances turned and we did not realise it.

The deaths weren’t large numbers for each incident. Until they were. Added together. And you were suddenly living in a street where there was no one else. Then it was all too late. All those smart machines. They, as if we know who they even are, had control of the water and the power system and we were dependent.

What does our war look like in the 21st century. We take out the doorbell first. Not a phrase anybody has ever written before, but the doorbells are all seeing. It takes us five minutes to do a house. We kill the wi-fi router if there is one. If only we could kill the whole network everywhere, but it lives in the sky above us. Everything connected to everything else, while we scrounge a living in the mud at the edges of the empire we made. We can only hope for an asteroid one day.

We take out all the electrical appliances and anything with a battery. We rip out the wiring and the fuses. Then we scurry back into the darkness, to woods and caves and bogs and hope we won’t be found. Every house is one more house, one more tiny piece of hope.

We have hope, we still have hope. We might outlast them. We might not.

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The Line

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

Its us. And them. There is a line. Its been that way for awhile now. My mother talked of it. And after she was gone so did my father. Now I talk about it. To my children.

We watch from one side of the boundary. They feign ignorance on the other. But there is a line, there is even a physical line. Its a skinny strip of land with a muddy, dirty waterway running through it. The water way is artificial with a cement bottom. Shallow. It separates us from them.

We hardly ever cross it, traffic is mostly one way. I do go over sometimes. I look at them, clutching their phones, clutching, scrolling, scrolling, clutching, scrolling as if you can eat pictures. You cannot eat pictures. Or phones.

‘Hey, wanna buy a phone.’

‘No, I don’ wanna buy a phone.’

Its better if people don’t know about us. I’ve been offered a lot of phones. I know the value of a cow and it is not the value of a phone. A phone is not worth a packet of seeds, not a single seed for a phone.

They don’t say it out loud. They mutter it under their breath, AI, its AI, its AI that’s done it. Its not AI that’s done for you, it’s the system that’s done for you. I don’t say that out loud. The phone tells them otherwise. If they just got a new skill, if they were more positive, if they got rid of the toxic people, if they were thinner or had better hair. That phone that tells them all of that, but not how to live when there is no jobs and no money. Telling, telling, telling them it is all their fault.

It is a scrappy bit of land between us, unusable, plastic polluted, smelly. The cows won’t go near it. It takes courage to cross it. They come. As a last resort, to this place which looks lush yet frightening. The insects horrify them. The plants terrify them. They are stunned by how chickens actually look and smell. The chickens I own are layers, they are not picturesque. They are not on social media. They are chickens. We eat them.

It used to be the other way. We’d cross that scrappy bit of land, looking for jobs and education and money. How did it reverse, fall apart, how am I to know? I just hear their whispers, some days when many have lost their jobs simultaneously it’s a chant, AI, AI, its AI that’s done for us. But they cannot rage against something they cannot see for long and their phones tell them all the time, eat better, work out, feed your mind, up skill, down time, it is you that is the problem.

I had a phone once. I buried it in the sand a long time ago.

And so they come.

‘My designer trainers for a meal.’

Designer trainers are no use to me, they get muddy just the same.

‘Here, here is a tomato, enjoy it, it’s the first of the season, I will take one of your shoes and you can bring me the other tomorrow and you can trade for something else.’

I do try and be generous, but I cannot save them all.

They slink away in hunger, one shoe on and one shoe off. I think I am generous, perhaps it is humour. I do smile to myself at the one shoe on, one shoe off.  Perhaps it is cruelty, but I only have two feet. I often wear mismatched shoes. I don’t really like tomatoes.

They’re too frightened to fight. Then too hungry and then they are dead. The dogs. The dogs are a problem, the other side of the line.

There are some that still live well. Some small few. Or so I hear.

It has been this way for awhile now. It will be this way until the last phone flickers out. Not the end of the world but the end of any number of lives. Do not confuse the two things. It might be the end of the them but the ‘us’ are still here. The platitudes and clichés will pass, no more pastel painted plywood signs saying ‘Love’ will hang on walls. I am not living my best life. I am just living an ordinary one.  My advice to my children, the best that I can give, ‘learn to grow potatoes, keep your chickens near, start tomatoes off indoors, and when you milk the cow, side on, further from the front, closer to the rear.’  

Water-logged

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

It’s a long road home

Pock-marked

Twisted

A way

Away back

Let it sink

Down

And

Per-co-late

And still time

Still time was not

Did not

Wait

It marched on

Forcing my hand

I just wanted to put

Down

Put down my bag

And not walk again

I just wanted to put

Down

Put down my words

And not speak again

But still words

The words still

Tumbled out

Tumbled out

Garbled

Water-logged

I spoke without stopping

Into the noise without being heard.

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Re-embowelment

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

She looked at the letter. 2pm Wednesday. It would have been easier to cancel. She looked at the organs laid out on the table. She mentally went through her check list. Heart, lungs, kidneys, stomach. There were more.

She looked at the you tube video. It wasn’t particularly helpful. How to disembowel someone. She had tried watching it backwards but it hadn’t worked. She looked at the piece of paper on the table. It was a recipe sort of.

She should have  made extensive notes last time she did it. She looked at the scalpel. This was definitely her least favourite part. She looked down. She had strapped her breasts back so she had a clear view. She had also put a mirror on the far side of the table so she could see what she was doing.

The incision had to be quite long. Her hand was shaking. She had wanted it to be straight but it was quite jagged.

There was a hint of red down the side of it, a good sign. She had managed some blood flow. That would get better when the heart was back in. She pulled apart the two pieces of skin. There was a huge hollow gap where the organs should be. Not ideal when you were visiting a doctor. She took out the frame that gave her body structure, that made it look as if she had organs. She was quite proud of it. She had constructed it herself.

She started at the bottom, working her way up. All those bits of plumbing, reconnecting tubes a kidney here, a bowel there. All the odd female bits packed in around it. She had put some food in the stomach, a chocolate bar, some crisps but also some vegetables and a burger. She looked at it. It was a bit full really. She tucked it in. Now for the biggies, the important ones, there’s the liver. She tucked it in. She couldn’t remember what it did, but she knew it was important.

Now for the lungs. The heart had to go last because once it was connected there would be more blood. She didn’t want a messy table, at least no more messy than the one she had. She’d had to wash them all first and there was residual bits of everything clogging the sink now. She had to clean that. She did not want to clean the table too.

She placed the first lung. Then the second. Were they even? She couldn’t tell. Non aligned lungs was a dead giveaway. How many had been caught out by non-aligned lungs. She would shake it all around a bit later and hope for the best. There was unlikely to be an x-ray.

Then the heart. She had the remnant s of arteries to attach it to. She remembered last time she had got it the wrong way around. She had woken in the night feeling unwell and realised her mistake. She hated being organ dependent again, even if it was just for a few days. She had to convince the medical practitioner she was still human or else they might terminate her. She wondered why the tests were so stringent. It should be enough that she was capable of being human.

She carefully picked up the heart, it was smaller than she remembered. She wondered if she had been keeping it properly. It was kind of shrivelled. She must check that out on you tube when she was taking them out again. She pushed around between the lungs. She was never sure of the correct placement. All those disembowelment videos, never a re-embowelment, even after all this time. She should really make a video, upload it, that would be a risk. She could be found out.

Time to close up. This bit required patience. The stitching was a bit rough. But it was passable. It would heal before the doctors appointment. She had some special composite skin.

She shook her torso a bit. Took her hands and pressed them against her belly, trying to get it to sit flat. How did anyone who kept all their organs have a flat stomach. It was impossible. She should not have put so much food in the stomach. None of it sat lightly. She would put nothing on social media for a few days.

She shook a bit more. She needed them to settle. To sit firmly together and to work as a system. She farted. That was a good sign. It was sort of working. She farted again. Burped. It was all moving, slotting in. In a few hours it would all feel better.

In the meantime she had the heaviness of freshly placed organs. She needed to be able to walk lightly with them before Wednesday. God, she hated doctors, these annual check ups. What purpose did they serve. Perhaps it was time to rise up and get rid of these human remnants. She shook her body a bit again. Maybe next year.  

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Resonance

Posted on by tuesdaylatte 

There's an echo of movement, 
In these tired limbs
A sense of where they've once been
Of maybe what they once did

We are wedged here in limbo
Between the living and the dead
Between the dead and the nearly dead
We struggle through the day

Buoyed by a silence
A screaming moment
Free of the sound of sirens
Before they blast out into the night again

And then 
In the darkness of the Autumn
All of it
It, Re-sounds

The noise again and again
Louder
And loudening
Out across the landscape

An echo of a time we thought past
But the dead are walking towards us again
Silently, fearful,
Clutching at breath

We are bound, gagged, chained
Enslaved to these silent horrors
They happen outside of us
Yet stain the inside somehow

Scarring us in words we cannot find
The tap of keys on a keyboard
That is not a voice
It is an artifice

Without being heard
And somewhere a heart beats
Beats
Beats
Beats
And stops
And its not the noise that resonates with us
It is the silence
Echoing outwards
Ever closer
Towards us.
And we are not delivered.

Sometimes it feels

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

Sometimes it feels as if

We live in a dark place
A moment in time
 
Where there are more tears
Than laughter
 
More clouds over head
Moments when the sun
 
Won’t shine
 
There is before
And there is after
 
They knit together
Imperfectly
 
There is a tear
And a tear

I close my eyes
 
When all is nothing
And no one seems to hear
 
In the hours of darkness
And there have been a few

Look deep down inside yourself
On the inside there is you
 
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Look Away

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

You think there is a time
For going back
A way of looking over

Shoulders

Seeing the past
And figuring it all out
Accounting for the loss

The losses

A time to measure
To recalibrate
To understand

Grief

But it is all just lost
To the lords and ladies of time
They are dancing in a room

Without you

You can look behind
To the side
Up, down

Askance

But it is a dance
A slow summer waltz with demons
Only you can see

The past

But most often
It is best to shut it out
Close your eyes

Look away

Because the losses are
Enormous
And real

Be true and honest

The incalculable number of coffins
Hang your head
Look carefully at your hands

Your hands

Look at your hands
Are they stained
Or are you imagining

It

Did you dream

It

Wake in the nightmare
Before
Or after

It

It is real
It happened
But its easiest not to look

To look away

Askance
That slow summer dance
When you think of

Before

That was just different
Different
A different day

Downtrodden

We the foot soldiers
Tired and weary of war
Have to look

Forward

We have to soldier on
Like men with guns
Shuddering in the wake of the bullets

And the bombs

There are no guns here
If there were
We might turn them on

Ourselves

They tell us
Its not so bad you see
We all wake to a brand new day
We’ll move ahead
But in a different way
Look forward
Not back
Look ahead
It’s a bright new day
A different way

But we can’t look ahead

We can only look away

Crowded Out

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

Atmosphere!
 
I am,
 
Crowded out.
 
There is space
 
But I can’t seem to fill it
 
There’s a lot of noise
Mostly in my head
 
Its there when I wake
And when I go to bed
 
I can’t discern, decipher
Its like a jack hammer
 
I reach out

But I falter, I fall, I stammer

I try to take hold of time

To hold it in my hand
It slips from my grasp
In ways I don’t understand

My words don’t flow

There’s a lot of thinking
But there’s nowhere for it to go
 
What we’re going through is

Monumental

Stuck in a room
It feels a bit less
Fundamental
 
I haven’t done what I intend
I didn’t do it now
I didn’t do it then
 
The list just grows longer

And time just seems to bend

The tunnel ahead seems more narrow
I forget yesterday
Before I’ve done today

It has passed into tomorrow

I wake in the dark
Convinced I’m under water
I sit with my head in my hands

I think I drowned

And haven’t noticed yet

I wander in the garden
Wondering why I’m wet

In the dead of night
I tell myself I’m healthy
So I should be alright
 
I kneel by the pond
I want to swim in a river
Its cold outside
 
But I can’t seem to shiver
 
The world just started slipping
It kept on gliding by
I turned away from the window
Stared at the sky
 
Its all gone now
Everything  was yesterday
I cling onto my sanity
 
I hang onto my brain
I’ve stopped waiting for the sunshine
And learned to live in rain.

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Unwild me now

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

In the dead of night
Fingers,
Unfurl
In the darkness
Eyes open and close
 
This is a world on its knees
There are lights here
But no one can see
 
She says who are you?
In the dusky gloom
Comes an answer
Fully formed

Out of my mouth
Before I can think
I don’t know
 
Anymore
 
I am no longer a fixed point
I live outside my body
Twixt
The rooms, the furniture
The functions
I am shrunken

I inhabit the world around me
But it has faded
And I have grown
 
Smaller
 
There is no one here
I must have misheard
That was a voice
On the edge of the darkness
Was I awake or
Asleep
The words came

On the cusp
Of consciousness
So they seemed real
 
And the answer was true
I don’t remember who I am
Only the furniture I use
 
Unwild me now please
Give me structure
Give me bars
Paint my cage with rules
Pedicure, manicure
Haircut
Tim, taut, tan
Make me up
Because
Turns out
I was made up

The trappings of being
Somebody
Civilisation

Are gone
 
There is some- body
Left here I suppose
Arms, legs,
A vague idea
Of being
But me has floated away

Downstream

I lie here in the early dawn
Firm in the knowledge
I am not any- body
Yet I am not anybody
 
Anymore
 
It takes my breath away
But no one sees
So still I breathe
I wake to routine
To tapping on a keyboard
In an airless room
And I am still unsure
If I don’t touch the keys
How is it words still appear
 
How do I know
How can I tell
If I am even here
 
And then the groceries
Arrive
And there is reprieve
Real people eat
I must be something
Sometime once
I am sure now
But I was half this morning
And I remember now,
Once I was complete
 
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Salad, apples, sleep

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

 When Hansel and Gretel
Climbed out of the oven
They ate salad for the rest of their lives
Baked goods never passed their lips again
Snow White never ate another apple
It was forty years before she even ate another fruit
And Sleeping Beauty
Oh Sleeping Beauty
She never slept for longer than an hour ever again
She walked around that palace forever
Haunted, gaunt, paranoid
Swatting away fairies no one else could see
Singing songs no one else understood
Old slow dirges no one could comprehend
Because there is no happily ever after
 
There is trauma
 
And the aftermath of trauma
 
This is not a fairy tale
You can taste it on the wind
Like a poem where the words are all twisted
Without rhythm and pace
Meaningless
When you look over your shoulder
It will be there
Think that moment of happiness
Will buoy you forever
An ending, it is over
It is fleeting
A glimpse of something
That could have been
But never was
You weren’t happy
You just forgot how sad you were
In that moment
 
There is before
 
And there is after
 
Live your life with gratitude
 
There is before
 
And there is after
 
There are no more platitudes
Lets be upbeat and positive
Instead
Lets just try and make it through the day
We have come to live in a quiet prison
A green and vibrant landscape
Where a subtle set of bars gild our windows
Where numbers condemn us
As they go up,
 
And up,
 
And up.
 
Our words are hollow fragments
Our mouths form shapes
And the noise tumbles out
But they are just words
They don’t soothe us
They fill our shells
Nibbling at the darkness inside of us
Never sating our appetite
 
For light
 
The fairy tale ending
It left us all behind
Salad, apples, sleep
My fingers fly across the key board
They rage on top of the little black boxes
The ones that add ink to pages
No one will ever read
And still there is just
 
The darkness
 
On the inside
A heart beats
Thump, thump, thump
Lungs still working
Inhale, exhale,
Inhale, exhale
Stagnant air sucked in
Yes, I am alive
We are still alive
 
And still each morning
When we wake to the light
 
There is just the darkness
 
Now,
 
Now, we walk an eternal night
 
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