I celebrated my fourteenth birthday on June 4th, 2062.

I was too old for parties by then, the kind with clowns and balloons anyway, so we went to that fancy steakhouse on the south side of town. While I was waiting for my prime rib, grandpa slid a colorful hallmark card across the table to me.

Inside was a fresh $1000 bill, which was a fair bit of money back then. More than my whole weekly allowance. Behind it, written in my grandpa’s crabby hand, was a short message: “Happy Birthday, David. Get some ice cream.”

Get some ice cream, David.

How I wish I had.

[hr]

“A thousand bucks, huh? Pretty cool.” Scout leaned down to unlock her bicycle, which as usual was parked beside mine outside the school’s south entrance. “Any plans?”

“My grandpa said to get some ice cream with it.” I gripped my bike’s handlebars and waited for the fingerprint sensors to activate. After a moment the bike beeped and the magnets holding it to the bike rack disengaged, and I was able to pull it free.

“Your grandpa’s a smart dude,” Scout said. “But you know what’d be cooler?”

I stood on the pedal and rode the bike like a scooter down the slope leading to the street, keeping pace with her. Once we got to the sidewalk I kicked my leg over and settled onto the seat. “What’s that?”

“If you got some ice cream, and then you got a second, larger scoop of ice cream for your best friend.”

“Huh, yeah, that’d be cool.” I made a show of looking around. “But Chris has lacrosse today.”

Scout slugged me in the shoulder, which sent us both wobbling on our bikes for a few fraught seconds. “Me, jackass.”

I looked up before responding. We were still two weeks from the official start of summer, but already the early afternoon sun of western Ohio was a punishing presence. I could feel the back of my shirt sticking to the sweat running down my spine. 

Yeah, ice cream sounded pretty good.

“Okay. But we gotta do something first,” I said. We reached the end of the street, and instead of turning toward downtown Hamilton I kept going straight into our neighborhood. Leafy trees cast welcome, dappled shadows on the sidewalk, and Scout kept pace easily on her old-style ten-speed through the quiet suburb.



“This? Really?”

“Yep! I stopped by on the way to school but didn’t have time to buy anything.” I set my bike down on its side in the grass and walked up to the packed driveway. Scout followed a few steps behind.

The house before us was a neat, single-story ranch with a mix of brick and vinyl siding, and the garage door was open. Inside, an older man chatted quietly with a college-looking couple. He gave me a squint, the kind adults always give to teenager boys – I’m watching you so don’t steal anything – but then he saw Scout with me and I guess that made him think I wasn’t up to any trouble, so he just nodded and waved a hand at the junk all around us.

“Didn’t think you were the garage sale type,” Scout said. She peered into a cardboard box loaded with dozens of garish ceramic plates, no two of which seemed to belong to the same set of dinnerware.

“I’m not, but I saw some cool stuff this morning. Hopefully no one bought it yet.” I picked my way through the boxes on the next table: neatly folded dishrags, ancient audio CDs that had turned yellow with age (“Collector’s Item!” a small sign hopefully offered), a lonesome black subwoofer that lacked any accompanying tweeters or, for that matter, wires. Lying among the boxes was a collection of snazzy antique carbon-fiber canes, and for a moment I considered buying one just for laughs.

But none of them were the box I wanted. I frowned and spun around, trying to remember which table it had been.

“Comic books?” Scout held a disintegrating collection of pages in the air. Little flakes of colorful paper rained down like snow. “They’re free.”

“No, it was in a box. I think… Oh, here they are.” Right next to the comics, actually. I unfolded the top, brushed away a little black spider that scurried around the underside of the lid, and gazed down at my prize with a stupid grin.

Electronics. [i]Pre-war[/i] [i]electronics.[/i] A whole box of the damn things! The faint hint of ozone and hot metal rose from them, like an electric motor run too hard. Tiny black streaks scored the metal seams and screw-holes, and the paint on most of them had bubbled and peeled from the intense heat generated when the EMPs had rolled across the globe.

Few electronic devices of any kind had survived the war, and the ones that did were either stupidly simple or heavily shielded. But sometimes, due to a quirk of fate or luck or the fact that your family’s refrigerator contained enough metal to generate a magnetic field table to divert the intensely energized electrons emanating from the e-bomb, something like your wifi router managed to survive, even though of course there was no power any more much less any internet for it to connect to. 

Statistically, about one in twenty pieces of hardware still functioned, to some extent, after the war. There were, I judged, about twenty various electronic items in the box, give or take. If this were Vegas, I’d have even-odds of scoring a winner.

Scout peered over my shoulder. “Really? You’re still doing this?”

“Hell yeah!” I reached in and pulled out a slender metal rectangle about the size of a paperback novel. “This hard drive? It has, uh, four terabytes of data! That’s almost as much as modern drives can hold.”

“It looks broke.”

I turned the drive over in my hand. Something inside rattled, and one whole side was discolored with the rainbow effect of overheated metal. “Well, this one had a spinning platter. Even if it had survived the war, it would’ve degraded by now. I mean, it’s at least forty years old. But other stuff in here might be worth something.”

Scout rummaged through the box, knocking metal and plastic doodads around in search of something that didn’t look busted. “If you say so, man. Probably some copper in here, anyway.”

“Yeah, that’s prolly worth a few hundred bucks by itself.” I folded the box top back and shouted over at the man in the garage. “Hey, mister! How much for this gear?”

He set down a magazine and walked out to us. Sweat had beaded on his bare scalp, and he wiped it away with the back of his hand before speaking. 

“Two-thousand for the whole box.”

I nearly spit. “What?! It’s junk, man!”

He shrugged. “It’s got some copper in it. Maybe some sapphire substrates.”

“But that’s, like…” It was a struggle not to roll my eyes. Sapphire substrates? You couldn’t recycle that stuff. I pulled out the thousand-dollar bill from my grandpa and held it up. “Look, this is all I got. You want it?”

“Hey!” Scout said. “That’s for the ice cream!”

If anything, Scout’s objection had the opposite effect she intended. The man glanced at her, glanced at the bill, then plucked it out of my hands. “All yours, kid.”

“Sweet, thanks.” I hefted the box experimentally and found it pretty manageable – pre-war electronics were cheap and light.

I couldn’t ride my bike with it, though, so we walked back to my house, Scout grumbling all the while about how nice ice cream would’ve been. She didn’t shut up about it until I promised to take her to get some later.

Girlfriends. More trouble than they were worth, sometimes.

[hr]

“Someday we’re going to get you a real hobby,” Scout said. She picked her way through my parents’ garage, stepping between plastic tubs and boxes loaded with every kind of wire, connector, data port and peripheral known to mankind. She pushed an old voltmeter off to the side and hopped up onto the workbench next to my soldering irons. Her legs were short enough to dangle in the air, and she kicked them absently while I stowed my bike.

“I guess we could do drugs. You wanna do drugs?” I popped the box open and considered the contents. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the collection, so I started pulling items out and setting them on the desk in a loose approximation of order. 

“I was thinking, like, theater. Or maybe JROTC? Jessica does that and she says it’s fun.”

I frowned. “You have to go camping in JROTC.”

“So? You go camping all the time.”

“Yeah, exactly. I don’t need to go camping more.” I pulled out a black metal-and-glass tablet and puzzled over it. It was about the size of a small magazine, probably a datapad of some sort. The screen was cracked and left a dusting of fine glass flakes on my fingers.

I put it in the pile with the melted hard drive. Finished consumer goods were almost impossible to repair.

Scout fished around in the box and pulled out a slim black wristband. It was just a few shades darker than her own skin, and nearly vanished when she slipped it on. “Hey, what’s this? Jewelry?”

I took her arm lightly and inspected the wristband, using the opportunity as an excuse to run my fingers over her skin. She giggled and pulled her hand back.

“Heart-rate monitor,” I said. “Probably a watch, too. People really cared about their heart-rates back then, for some reason.”

“Think it still works?”

“Uh.” I considered it again. None of the black polymer casing had melted, and it was pretty clearly a solid-state design. No moving metal parts, and probably not much metal at all. “It might. You’d need to find some way to charge it, though, and I doubt there’s any software left for it. You wouldn’t even be able to set the time.”

She pouted and stripped it off, then tossed it at my chest. I managed a bumbling catch and tossed it back, aiming for the modest cleavage exposed by her shirt’s low neck. I missed, but it was worth the squawk of indignation as she nearly fell off the workbench avoiding it.

The next few minutes were quiet. Scout watched while I sorted the electronics by type or state of repair. In addition to the hard drives and consumer products, there were a few other computer components: memory sticks, PCI cards, what appeared to be a truly ancient telephone modem, video-game controllers, headphones with a built-in microphone, dozens of miscellaneous wires and cables, and some things I couldn’t even identify offhand. 

And then, near the bottom of the box, something that made it all worth it. Something potentially worth a lot more than a thousand measly bucks. It fit easily in the palm of my hand, barely larger than a book of matches.

“Holy shit,” I breathed. “Do you know what this is?”

Scout frowned down at it. “A, uh, Seagate?”

“That’s the brand name,” I said. I flipped it between my fingers, studying the fine, fading text on the label. “It’s a solid-state drive. A hard drive, but with no moving parts. Instead of recording bits on a magnetic medium, it uses billions of transistors to store data by…” I could tell I was losing her, so I skipped a few steps to what made the drive special. “It doesn’t need electricity, it probably survived the war, and if it was made after 2020 it probably still has most of its data. How awesome is that?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Honestly?”

“Hey, it’s awesome to me.” I peered at the card’s data port. Looked like an eSATA gen 3, or thereabouts. I could rig something up if I had to. “Who knows what kind of data is on this?”

“Maybe the dude we bought it from? He was probably a kid when it happened.”

“He’d just want it back. Prolly say we should give it to the FBI or something.” I set the drive down and tapped it with my finger. “You know how adults are. They’re all so afraid.”

Scout was silent. After a moment she crossed her arms, hugging them to her chest like it was a cool autumn day instead of the height of spring. “Maybe we should. You said it could have anything. Could the Engine fit on it?”

I studied the drive carefully before answering. It was small, by ancient standards, with little more than a single terabyte of storage. “I don’t… no, not the whole thing, anyway. A kernel, maybe, but definitely not the whole Engine. That would take a million drives like this.”

“So it could have a seed?”

“Eh, it… maybe. Probably. Almost everything was infected by the end, but without a network the kernel can’t do anything. Even the whole Engine, if you had a single computer powerful enough to run it, couldn’t do anything without the internet. It actually existed for several years on a stand-alone system before some idiot connected it to the grid.”

There was no record of who that idiot at the University of Nebraska’s General Artificial Intelligence laboratory had been. Even if he survived – which he probably did, since there wasn’t any major damage to Lincoln – his employment files had vanished along with 99 percent of humanity’s data in the war that started a few minutes later. By the time it was over, two years later, the Engine was dead and the highest-technology nation on Earth was back to using typewriters.

I actually had a typewriter somewhere in here. I glanced around for it, distracted, until Scout spoke again.

“So it’s safe, then?”

I nodded. “Totally. There’s no computer in the world that could run it, and if you built one it still wouldn’t have a network to propagate on. It’d be like a ghost screaming in a box.”

Scout’s shoulders relaxed a bit, and she kicked off the workbench to lean on me. “Okay. But promise me you’ll call the police if it does have something dangerous.”

I gave her a quick peck on the cheek. “I will, but don’t worry. It’s probably just cat pictures. People loved those things.”

[hr]

Several hours and a few burned fingers later, I had a cable soldered together that I thought might be able to power the Seagate drive without melting it in the process. Computer power supplies that worked with antique equipment were rare, and of course none of the pre-war power supplies worked. They were, by far, the part most likely to be destroyed by the massive EMPs that had set humanity back by half a century during the conflict.

So I had to jury-rig one together. Fortunately the designs were stupid-simple, just solenoids with a bunch of copper wiring, really. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t electrocute me, either.

By early-21st Century standards, my desktop computer was a pretty wimpy thing. People back then owned smart wristwatches more powerful, not to mention they had access to the internet. Some of the stories my grandpa told, well, they made me jealous. To have literally the entire knowledge of the human race at your fingertips… They must’ve felt like gods.

But grandpa told stories about the war, too. I heard them all as I was growing up, and I figured, on balance, we could do without the internet.

Some things just weren’t worth the risk.

There was no way my puny desktop terminal could run off the solid-state drive. But it could – maybe, hopefully – read from the drive. Assuming it wasn’t fried.

Or corrupted.

Or the data hadn’t decayed over four decades with no power.

Or it wasn’t encrypted.

Or I didn’t blow it with one milliampere-too-much of power.

Or… well, really, there were more things that could go wrong than could go right. Best-case scenario, I didn’t melt my [i]own[/i] computer. I briefly considered disconnecting all the wires I’d spent the past hour soldering into place and just taking the drive down to the town’s recycling center.

Considered and discarded. I reached for the power switch, and was inches away when my mom’s voice sounded from the garage entrance.

“David, are you dressed yet? We’re leaving in ten minutes.” There was a pause as she took in my obvious state of not-being-dressed-at-all-for-an-important-event, followed by a quiet sigh, then the door closing.

Right, June 5th. The ceremony was tonight. I squeezed my eyes shut and disconnected the power supply.

“Guess we’ll see what’s on you tomorrow, little buddy.” I gave the drive a gentle pat, then went to get dressed.



The ceremony was at our high school gymnasium. I looked around for Scout as soon as we arrived, and found her sitting with the extended Padmanabhan family in the upper row of the bleachers. They wore bright, colorful saris and stood out like peacocks against the mostly white-bread residents of Hamilton, Ohio. Scout’s face lit up when she saw me, and we exchanged little waves before my dad plucked my sleeve and led us to an open spot near the front.

Personally, I didn’t think the 40th anniversary of anything was a particularly important anniversary, but apparently I was in a minority. I wasn’t born yet when they celebrated the 25th anniversary of the end of the war, and I could only imagine the 50th would be a pretty big deal.

But 40? Sometimes it seemed like adults fetishized any round number. I turned those thoughts over in my mind, just gathering wool, while the gymnasium slowly filled to capacity and beyond. Standing crowds spilled around the bleachers and extended out into the wide grassy sports fields.

The mayor opened the ceremony, and I couldn’t honestly tell you what he said. The usual stuff of boring speeches. Remembrance, sacrifice, America is the greatest nation on Earth, that sort of thing. I clapped when everyone else clapped and bowed my head when he called for a moment of silence, but instead of thinking about all the people who’d died, my mind kept returning to the little drive on my workbench and all the secrets it might contain.

Finally the mayor quit the stage, and I perked back up. This was the important part, why my family insisted we come. The reason we had seats in the front row, in the reserved section.

My grandpa shook the mayor’s hand at the edge of the stage, and then walked to the center. He was in his old uniform, which still fit nicely. There were only a few medals above his left breast pocket, not as many as on some soldiers I’d seen, who looked like they were wearing a fruit salad on their coat, but his mattered more. During the entire two-year war the military had awarded fewer than a dozen Army Crosses, and all but three of those had been given posthumously to the recipient’s family.

Grandpa stopped in the center of the stage and stood behind the lectern. He waited for the applause to finish, and spoke.

“Good evening, friends. Thank you for coming. I’m Lieutenant George Lawrence, retired, and I’d like to thank you for inviting me to speak at this ceremony.

“Mayor Christenson has already shared his thoughtful words about the importance of this day, so I won’t bore you by repeating them.” He nodded at the mayor, and a wave of polite, subdued laughter filled the auditorium. “Instead, he asked me to talk a little about my experiences in the war. ‘Tell the kids something they didn’t read in the history books,’ he said. So, if you all don’t mind the ramblings of an old man, I figure I’ve got a few stories to share.

“How many of you have heard of the Battle of Dearborn?”

I’d heard of it, of course. We all had. But I’d heard it growing up, listening to the very man who’d been there. From the hero of the Battle of Dearborn. The man who’d scrounged together bits and pieces of two dozen infantry companies whose officers were all dead or fled, and managed to turn back an assault by a full platoon of Engine armor: computerized, electronic tanks that had no fear of death and would run on miniature fusion engines until the sun ran out. And he did it with nothing heavier than anti-materiel rifles and a few pounds of explosives.

Each time I heard his story it grew more incredible. How one man, leading fewer than five hundred demoralized draftees, could defeat a weaponized artificial intelligence. But I’d read books about the battle, and if anything my grandpa’s stories [i]undersold[/i] his heroism. Anyone who pointed a weapon at the Engine’s machines up to that point had died, but in the space of a week then-Staff Sergeant Lawrence did the impossible. He beat the machines.

After that, they weren’t invincible anymore. Tough, yes, and the war ground on for another two years, but we knew we could beat them. Even as entire countries vanished in flames, we slowly beat them back here.

I realized, at some point, that I was crying.

But that was okay. Grandpa was, too.

[hr]

It was after school the next day when I finally made it back to my garage workbench. The little Seagate was still waiting for me, and I plugged the crude wires back in while Scout watched beside me.

“This is safe, right? Like, it won’t blow up?” she asked.

“Huh? Yeah, it’s safe. Solid-state drives draw almost no power whatsoever. Much less than modern drives.”

“Okay. I’m gonna stand over here, though.”

“Whatever floats your boat,” I said. Still, her caution was infectious, and I hesitated just a moment before flicking the switch on the power supply. The fan inside spun up with a quiet hum, the only sign that it was on.

Scout leaned forward. “That’s it?”

“Yeah, I told you, it doesn’t draw much. That’s one reason they were so popular.”

“So, does it work?”

That was the trillion dollar question, wasn’t it? I took a deep breath and connected the data cable to the jury-rigged mess of interfaces on the back of my desktop.

Nothing happened. I frowned and gave the mouse a little nudge – the cursor didn’t move; frozen. I tapped on the keyboard to no effect.

“Well, uh.” I frowned at the screen. “Shit.”

“Maybe it’s just thinking?”

“Pretty sure it’s not—oh, hello!” The mouse cursor blinked and jumped. I moved it again, successfully, and opened the file explorer.

And there it was. A new drive, capacity unknown, manufacturer unknown, format type unknown. I clicked it, heedless, and after another frozen second a seemingly endless list of folders appeared. The hard drive in my computer growled in complaint as it tried to keep up with the ancient technology.

“Wow. What is all that?” Scout said.

“Looks like folders of some kind.”

She hit me. “Thanks, jackass. What’s in them?”

I ignored her brutal assault and opened one of the folders, curious myself. Inside was a single HTML file with a dizzyingly long name composed of apparently random characters.

“Neat,” I said. “It’s a web file. Part of the old internet.”

“It’s not infected, is it?”

“Even if it was, it couldn’t do anything. It needs a special program called a web browser to run, and those don’t exist anymore.” I opened the file in a basic text editor and started scrolling down, looking for something intelligible. Most of it was tables and instructions and other lines of code too esoteric for anyone but a computer archeologist to understand.

But about halfway down, actual human-readable text appeared. Full sentences – or something like them.

[quote]'''Algebra''' (from [[Arabic]] ''"al-jabr"'' meaning "reunion of broken parts"<ref>{{cite web|title=algebra|work=[[Online Etymology Dictionary]]</ref>) is one of the broad parts of [[mathematics]][/quote]

I stared at the text, trying to puzzle through it without any luck. Beside me, Scout leaned forward to squint at the screen.

“Algebra? It’s about math? And what's with all the symbols?”

“It's a markup language of some kind. But, uh... yeah, no idea.” I scrolled all the way to the bottom of the file, looking for anything that might provide some context. 

One thing stood out. A word, apparently a name, that kept repeating. A quick text search showed that it appeared nearly four dozen times in the entire file.

“‘Wikipedia,’” I mumbled. “What the hell are you?”

[hr]

The next few days passed uneventfully. After a few final exams, school let out for the summer, which gave me plenty of time to mess with my new toy.

The first order of business was backing up the data. The solid-state drive had survived an AI apocalypse, followed by 40 years in some dude’s basement, but I had no idea how long it would last hooked up to my hillbilly power solution. For all I knew, it could catch fire any moment.

A second copy would give me more options, too. I could take it to an actual researcher, like the one from Cincinnati University who came to talk to our computer science class a few months back. 

Copying files was a slow process, though. My computer wasn’t really designed with that drive in mind – nothing built in the past forty years was – and it took hours of constant, mind-numbing processor time to even make a dent in the files.

So Scout and I went to get some ice cream. 

“So, it’s like, an encyclopedia?” she said. She sat across our small table at the mall’s Baskin-Robin and took a small bite from her double scoop of mint chocolate. A little bit got on her nose, standing out against her skin like the moon on a dark evening, before she wiped it away.

“[i]The [/i]encyclopedia, apparently.” I’d gone for my usual, a strawberry milkshake. Scout complained that milkshakes weren’t really ice cream, but I was paying so whatever. “It had entries for everything. Everything you could think of. People, events, animals, individual stars. Everything.”

“How big was it?”

“The whole thing? No idea. The version I have is an archive, apparently designed to survive offline through some kind of civilization-ending catastrophe.”

She snickered. “Well, I guess it did. So how big is the one you have?”

“About four million entries. The core, so to speak. Articles someone decided were important.”

She paused, her eyes losing their focus for a moment. “Wow. Not gonna read them all, I take it?”

“Nah. But just think about it, Scout! I’m not sure another copy of this thing exists anywhere in the world. A whole record of life, right before the war.”

“We have those. They’re called ‘People who lived through the war.’ Like your grandfather.”

I rolled my eyes. “Whatever. It’s still cool.”

It didn’t seem she agreed, but whatever. We had ice cream to finish.

[hr]

A week later I had several copies resident on various modern drives. They weren’t as nimble or secure as the solid-state drive, but I felt safe working with them, so I tossed the Seagate back in the box. A museum might want it.

In the meantime, I had a new toy: a primitive HTML translator that kinda-sorta rendered the Wikipedia files like they were meant to be read. Apparently Wikipedia used its own markup language that the reader couldn’t account for, so the text was still filled with odd characters and symbols, but it mostly worked. I could click on links, just like they did back in the old days, and it loaded the next page!

There was something addictive about it. I knew I could go to any library and look up all the same information, plus anything from the past forty years, but the ability to just [i]click![/i] and have anything I wanted at my fingertips. That’s how life was, back then. Everything, at everyone’s fingertips.

A lot of the articles were corrupted and unreadable. The solid-state drive wasn’t perfect after all. But for every corrupted or unreadable entry, there were five more in perfect condition.

Perhaps if I’d been a normal 14-year-old, more interested in girls or sports or videogames than stories salvaged from a dead, networked world, things would’ve been different. I wouldn’t have started searching.

But that’s who I was. 

So I read.



I found the first sign that something was wrong with the encyclopedia in the entry for New York City. I don’t even remember how I ended up on that article – following random links, maybe, or tracing the lines of some idle thought. 

The error was right there, in the first paragraph. “New York City was largely abandoned after the terror attacks of June 4, 2020, destroyed a large portion of Manhattan and western Brooklyn.”

None of that was true. Or, it wasn’t [i]exactly [/i]true. New York City was abandoned after the Engine detonated a small nuclear weapon in Grand Central Station. Until that day most people didn’t even know what the Engine was, much less that we were in a fight to the death with a rogue AI.

[i]What the hell.[/i] I clicked on the link to the supposed terror attack.

Nothing loaded. After a moment, the program went blank except for the words “Unable to read file.”

“Shit,” I mumbled. I reached for the keyboard, about to query the database for anything else on the attack, when an idea tugged at the back of my mind.

[i]What does the encyclopedia know about AIs?[/i] The archive, according to the time-stamp on the files, was created just a few weeks before the war. So anything about the war or my grandpa’s heroism was straight out, but there was a lot more to artificial intelligence than just the war.

Just thinking about the Engine sent a momentary shiver down my spine. It had fooled an entire generation of the smartest computer scientists in the world, and here I was knocking at its door. Or, at the very least, tip-toeing around its grave. It was the closest thing to a waking god our world had ever known, and I’d spent the past two weeks rooting around inside a piece of pre-war tech that probably contained traces of its code.

It took all my willpower not to reach over and shut off the power. Instead I took a deep breath and typed in the search box: [i]artificial general intelligence.[/i]

I don’t know what I was expecting, really. Something about the University of Nebraska’s AI school, or the Department of Defense’s Cyber Command. Maybe something about the Chinese, or the Japanese attempt at a primitive AI-powered ballistic missile shield. 

None of those things appeared. Instead the archive pulled up a lengthy, dry, theoretical article about AI research. Future developments. Proposed tests. Science fiction.

“What the hell?” I leaned back and stared at the monitor. It was like someone had scrubbed the archive and replaced it with articles ten years out of date, or – in the case of the New York City attack – completely wrong.

Three hours later, I was still stymied. The list of holes had grown, and the notes I’d scribbled now flowed onto a third page. But worse than the holes were the articles that simply shouldn’t have existed: terror attacks, Islamophobia, Wahhabism.

Al Qaeda. Now that was a long article, none of which made sense.

Well, there was an easy way to solve this: ask a man who’d lived through it. I shut the computer down and went to get my bicycle.

[hr]

Grandpa lived less than a mile away. He was outside spraying down his Honda in the driveway when I arrived.

“David!” He waved, then shut off the hose and coiled it on the drive. “How are you?”

“I’m good.” I gave him a perfunctory hug, the only kind teen boys can give in public. “I’m not bothering you, am I?”

“Of course not. Come in, get out of the sun.”

I followed him into the house, which was blessedly cool. He poured out two glasses of iced lemonade, and we clinked them together before taking a drink.

“How’s Scout?” he asked. 

“She’s good. Said she really liked your speech at the remembrance ceremony.”

Grandpa shook his head. “Sure she did. So polite of her to say so, though.”

“It’s true!” I protested. “It was, you know, pretty cool.”

“I’m glad you think so. Now, what brings you to an old man’s house on a beautiful summer day?”

I had a few notes written down, and I pulled them out of my back pocket. “I, uh, wanted to ask you a few questions.”

“Ah, let me guess.” He set his glass down and leaned back in his chair. “About the war?”

“No. Before that.”

He paused for a moment, and the look of something like surprise flashed across his face. I got the feeling he wasn’t used to being asked about life before he’d become a hero. “Oh? Okay, shoot.”

“Thanks.” I licked my lips and crinkled the notes before starting. “So, uh, when did people first learn about AIs?”

“Huh, not sure I remember specifically. A few years before the war, but they were just experiments, or things like smart cars. Not like the Engine.”

“And when did you hear about the Engine?”

Grandpa closed his eyes and nodded. “Same time as almost everyone else. The New York attack. After that… well, things changed real fast.”

“Yeah.” I cleared my throat. “What, um… sorry, this might be a little weird. What is terrorism?”

There was a long pause. Grandpa stared at me, his hand frozen in the act of reaching for his glass.

Finally, he spoke, and it was more breath than voice. “What?”

I swallowed, suddenly cold. “Uh, terrorism? I read about it somewhere, but it didn’t really explain what it was.”

“Ah.” He seemed to relax. “It’s something that doesn’t exist anymore, David. It was a crime designed to scare people. But it hasn’t happened in a long, long time. Since before you were born.”

“Oh.” That wasn’t really an answer, and I wasn’t sure how to proceed. “So—”

“Sorry, David, I don’t mean to interrupt, but where did you read about this?”

It never occurred to me to lie. Why should I? Grandpa was my hero, my idol. Of course he would know what to do.

So I told him the truth. “I found some old files from before the war, but they’re all messed up. Some got corrupted, and—”

“Corrupted?” He frowned. “David, is this about your hobby? You know better than to play with pre-War software.”

“No! Well, yes, but they’re safe. I checked a bunch, and there’s no way anything left over from the Engine could contaminate them. They’re just text files.”

“Nothing to do with the Engine is safe.” He got up and poured the rest of his lemonade in the sink, and I got the feeling our conversation was over. “Listen to someone who lived through it: nothing about that period is safe. We have to… We have to let the dead rest, David.”

How was a fourteen-year-old supposed to answer that? I stood, mumbled an apology, and scooted out.

[i]Let the dead rest[/i]. At the time, I thought he meant the people the Engine had killed.

But death, of course, cared nothing for how you died. Everyone was equal in its embrace.

[hr]

“Explain to me again why we’re here?” Scout asked. Her heels clicked loudly on the concrete pavers leading up to the Hamilton Municipal Library’s main entrance.

“Historical research,” I said. “Anything we can find on AI, or terrorism, or Islam.”

“What’s Islam?”

“Some kind of religion, I think. The files on it were missing, but it kept coming up. I think it had something to do with the Engine.”

“What, like, computer worship?”

We stopped at the card catalogue, and I counted down the files to the computer archeology section. “No, it was older than that. Hundreds of years old.”

She shrugged. “Never heard of it.”

“Well, see what you can find. I’ll look for stuff on the Engine.”

There was, of course, plenty about the Engine. Although research into AI was strictly prohibited, historical accounts of the war filled an entire bookshelf. But they all focused on the Engine’s activation, the first battles, the slow, grinding war against the machine, and finally the end. The e-bombs, the EMPs, the nuclear holocaust that wiped out much of the Middle East and South Asia. 

Granted, I didn’t expect an instruction manual for how to build an AI, but a little history on the University of Nebraska’s project would’ve been helpful. I sighed, pulled the most promising book from the shelf, and went to find Scout.

She was bent over a desk in the culture section, completely absorbed in some book. I snuck up behind her and poked her side, just beneath her ribs. She let out a gratifyingly loud squeal and spun around to scowl at me.

“David!” she hissed. “Seriously. We’re in a library.”

“Yeah.” I gave her a peck on the cheek as an apology. “Any luck?”

“Uh, sorta?” She gestured to the books on the desk. “Islamic art, Islamic calligraphy. Islamic architecture of the Northern Maghreb. Islamic Poetry of the 18th Century.”

“What about just Islam?”

She shrugged. “Nada. Maybe it wasn’t important?”

“No, it was all over Wikipedia. Even with all the missing files, it was everywhere.”

“Are you sure you can trust those files? If that drive was on the network at the same time as the Engine, it could’ve done whatever it wanted. Changed anything.”

“Yeah, but… I dunno. It’s just weird. Why would it do that?” I picked up the book on Islamic calligraphy. It was filled with glossy photos and illustrations of beautiful, twisting characters, like nothing I’d ever read before. It didn’t even seem like language. “I’m gonna get this, I think. You want anything?”

She shook her head, and we walked in silence over to the checkout counter. The librarian raised an eyebrow at our selection, and she paused a moment before stamping the due date in the AI book, but whatever she was thinking, she kept her peace.

Of course, given how old she looked, she probably knew more about the Engine than the book did.

We stopped outside. The sun beat down, and the air was so thick it felt like it poured down my throat with each breath. My shirt instantly stuck to my skin.

Scout squinted up at the sky, then shielded her eyes with her hand. “So, uh, what now?”

Ice cream would be great, I decided, but I had to get back to my computer. The truth was in that archive somewhere. “Home, for me. Wanna come by?”

“Sure, nothing better to do. Maybe we could stop at the…” She trailed off and stumbled to a stop. 

“Huh? Stop at the where?” 

She didn’t answer, though. She just pointed, and I followed her finger to the edge of the sidewalk.

A police cruiser was idling on the curb. A pair of cops leaned against it, their black uniforms as dark as night against the white paint. One of them looked at me, looked down at something in his hand, then back at me.

“David Lawrence? I need you to come with me.” He glanced at Scout and the books she was holding. “You too, miss.”

[hr]

They kept me waiting for hours in a sterile, bare room. There was only a table, two chairs, the lights overhead, and the door. Nothing else interrupted the painted cinderblock walls. Not even a one-way mirror like in the old police movies.

It wasn’t cold in the room. If anything it was warm. But I was still shaking when the door finally opened and a man stepped through. He was about my father’s age, tall, wearing a smart suit. Nothing about him screamed “cop” at me, but his eyes were sharp. 

“Hello, David.” He took the seat across from me. “I’m Special Agent Mark Crosby, from the Cincinnati office of the FBI. Do you know why you’re here?”

Maybe I took too long to answer, but he started to frown. Immediately I shook my head. I shook it so hard the chair beneath me rattled.

“Hm.” He pulled a manilla folder out from somewhere and set it the table, opened at such an angle that he could read its contents, but I could not. “You’re familiar with the Construction Laws, I hope?”

“Y-yeah,” I said. I had to pause before I went on. “You can’t make an AI, or research them. Not without approval.”

“And you know the penalty for violating those laws?”

“I wasn’t!” I shouted. I had no handcuffs or shackles, but it took nothing more than a glance from this man to sit me back in the seat. “I was just studying the history. I found some files, and I think there are some mistakes in them, or maybe mistakes in what we’re taught. There’s, like, a bunch of stuff missing, but there’s also a bunch of stuff that—”

He stopped me with an upraised hand. “We know about the files, David. We’ve already been to your house. I’m afraid you won’t be getting your computer back.”

When you’re a fourteen-year-old boy sitting in an interrogation room, losing your computer doesn’t seem bad compared with, you know, being in jail. “Okay. But, uh, I can go, right?”

“Sure.” Special Agent Crosby pulled a single sheet out of the manilla folder and slid it across the table, followed by a pen. “I just need you to sign this.”

I thought it was blank until I picked it up. There was only a single line of text at the top. My name was already filled out for me.

[i]I, David Fisher Lawrence, agree to abide by the terms of this pact.[/i]

There was a solid line below for my signature. Aside from that, it was empty.

I turned it over. Nothing there, either. I read it again, wondering what I had missed.

“What, uh… I mean, where’s the rest of it? What pact?”

“You can read the full pact when you sign it,” he said.

Even as a child, in the worst negotiating position possible, that struck me as unfair. “But how am I supposed to know what I’m signing?”

“You don’t. You’ll find out after you sign it.”

I put it on the table. “And if I don’t?”

He sighed, so quietly I almost missed it. “That’s up to a judge. Depending on how much he thinks you know, you’ll probably go to a special room, a lot like this, and you’ll live there until you do sign it.”

“Like, a prison?”

“Not ‘like’ a prison, David. An actual prison.”

I swallowed. “You can’t do that. I have rights.”

“We can do it, David. Every year we do it. Some people spend years in prison, but eventually they all sign. Now, it’ll go easier for you if you just—”

Some unknown anger seized me. “Do you know who my grandfather is? You can’t just make me disappear. He’ll find out, and then [i]you’ll[/i] be the one in prison!”

No answer. We stared at each other for what felt like a full minute, each waiting for the other to break.

Neither of us did, though. The door behind him opened, and the last person on earth who should have been there walked through.

“Sorry about this, Mark,” my grandpa said. “Let me talk to him.”

[hr]

I felt relief first. How couldn’t I? But grandpa didn’t take my hand and lead me out to freedom. Instead he sat in the agent’s chair and closed his eyes.

He looked much older than his seventy-three years.

“I’m going to break a rule,” he said after some silence. “I’m going to tell you what’s in the pact, and then you can sign it if you want. Everyone in my generation signed it. Your parents did. I hoped your generation would never have to, but now that we’re here, I hope you do. It’s much better than prison.”

“I, uh.” I stared at the page again. “Okay. Go on.”

“The first thing you have to understand is how afraid we were at the time. How afraid we all were. Fear… Fear makes people do things that might seem wrong later.”

I shook my head. “You didn’t have a choice, grandpa. The Engine would have killed everyone on earth. That’s not fear, that’s just normal human—”

“The Engine didn’t kill anyone.”

I stopped again. Several heartbeats passed before I found my breath. “But the war… Two billion people died.”

“I know. We killed them.”

The shakes had stopped. Instead I felt numb, like I’d gone a year without sleep. “What? No.”

“You have to understand that we were afraid, David. Nearly a million people died in the New York City bombing. They said other cities were next. Boston, Chicago. We couldn’t have taken that. No country could have.”

“They? But the Engine—”

“There was no Engine, David. There was a group of people who shared a religion, and they…” He stopped, and for the longest while I thought he might not continue. “They destroyed New York City. It wasn’t the first, and we knew it wouldn’t be the last, so… We were afraid. We had to do something.”

Something. The pieces were starting to fit together. The Wikipedia article on New York City. The complete absence of information about artificial intelligence. It was like a picture had suddenly come into focus in my mind.

Islam. Islam, an ancient religion that no one my age had ever heard of. I closed my eyes.

“How many?” I asked.

“All of them. Almost two billion, by the end.”

Please, please no. “Dearborn?”

“Dearborn had one of the largest populations of Muslims in the country. We couldn’t nuke our own city, so… So they sent us in.”

“Right.” I didn’t feel anything. There was nothing left to feel. “And the AI war? All lies?”

“When it was over… It was a bad time, David. We did what we had to do, but how could we live with ourselves after that? So we decided to forget. We made an agreement,” he reached out to touch the empty sheet between us, “and everyone alive at the time signed the pact. The Pact of Forgetting, we call it. And someday, if we are clever enough, and our lies convincing enough, the last person who signed the pact will die, and that will be it. There will be no history, no genocide. Just stories about a war that never happened.”

What would prison be like? I’d never really considered it, of course. Who does, at fourteen? But now, if my grandpa was telling the truth, that was precisely what lay before me. Prison, or sign this devil’s document. Become part and parcel to millions – no, billions – of deaths.

I realized I was crying. “You were a hero,” I choked out. “They said you were a hero.”

Silence, for the longest time. My tears dried on my cheeks, and renewed themselves again.

Finally, “There were no heroes, David. Now please, sign the paper, and we can go home.” He slid the pen closer to me.

I picked it up and held it in my hand.

And then I put it down, and pushed it away.