EVENING WAS FALLING. SOFIA turned her lights on and pulled onto the five-mile dirt road to their house. She knew her Scout might be within reach of any number of listening devices. Maybe even cameras along her path that watched her lip movements, sent that information back to the AI algorithms, and determined what she was saying to herself. In an uncharacteristic moment, she whispered aloud.

“Effing scum, sons-of-bitches. I despise them, their presumptuous and patronizing ways. Telling me how to run my business! That I was getting too old to manage it myself. Piles of shit, they are. Shit piles.”

She continued fuming until she got home and opened the door where the six dogs greeted her with glee.

“You guys are the only genuine souls left in this twisted world.”

Sofia didn’t care that the intercom was capturing her comments. They’d be logged and assessed, she was certain. She pulled a large bag of dog food from the cupboard and poured it into the bowls, then crouched for a moment, watching her dogs eat.

“At least one thing remains pure. One thing this technocracy cannot control.”

She knew Rick would be worried, so she navigated the long, jagged hallway to the outer door of his bunker. They had installed two doors between the main part of the house and his bunker. This mitigated the noise and particulates from his skin cells and breath that might escape into the main house. Their lives centered around an abundance of caution.

“Hi, honey,” she grumbled.

“You’re upset!” Rick observed. “Where did you go?”

“First, I hope you’re not angry with me. I wanted you to progress here, uninterrupted. I didn’t want you in angst about the goings-on in the gardens business.”

“More issues?” he wondered.

Sofia sighed loudly and sat on her chair. “They called me in. Had me drive to Tuba City. It was an email with an underlying threat of a yellow flag. Of course, I dropped everything immediately and rushed over there.”

“You’re wearing your long sleeve, full dress. I assume you have a disrupter pinned into the hair on your head?”

“Huh,” she lamented. “Yeah, you got me. Too obvious to most, but not the idiots at that office. You know, I’ve been subjected to their signals before. Forcing my limbs do things I didn’t want them to do. Attempting to project propaganda and AI-coercive messages into my head. Despite the metal mesh in my sleeves and leggings and the little disrupters in my hair, I still sensed they were trying to control me, to get to whatever truth they’re seeking on my business.”

“Are you sure it’s the business? Certain they don’t suspect something else, like me?”

She shook her head. “Appeared to be the business. Someone must have told them I’m bartering too much or involved in graft or conspiracy against their damned autocracy, the effing scum. Who knows? They mentioned the need to do an audit of the operations, and you know what that means.”

“Well, this explains our friendly visitors while you were away.”

Sofia looked surprised. “Did they send somebody out?”

“Yes, just as I completed my last recording for the day. I’m surprised you didn’t see them driving the other way on the dirt road.”

“How many, and what were they?”

“They were clearly mechs, hybrids of the toughest sort, in full regalia.”

“Did they try to get inside?”

“The cameras showed they tried the door. Thank God for barking dogs. Not knowing if the dogs were mech’d, they apparently thought better of trying to contend with them. These days, a hybrid dog can match a hybrid human, limb for limb.”

Sofia rested her head on her hands and closed her eyes. “This is happening too fast, my dear. I sense a yellow flag coming on. Maybe red. Guilty and never proven innocent. Never a trial. Their AI brains are judge, jury, prosecution, and executioner. Hell, even counsel for the plaintiff.”

“What was their primary argument or concern?”

“Part of it was power, that we shouldn’t need so many solar cells simply to run the gardens and home. I reiterated that the cells are older and less efficient, but I’m guessing they think something nefarious is transpiring.”

“And something nefarious is transpiring,” Rick interrupted, smiling.

“Then there was the question on polymer powder. ‘Why did we need to buy so much? The gardens should not require such extensive amounts of powder for the 3-D printers.’ Much of that powder has been used to build your platforms.”

“I’m sure you handled the response well, sweetheart. I’m not worried about you.”

Sofia stared at the ground. “But I am worried. I have no idea what else they may have extracted from that discussion. I’m certain the AI caught my rapid pulse, sweat, eye movements, voice inflections, the gamut that tells them I’m hiding something. God, I hope they only think I’m harboring a harem of lovers or something, but I fear it’s worse.”

“Well, you are harboring a lover,” Rick joked. “Truth be told, these are foreboding signs. Much like my philosophy around the infinity curve diversion of technological prowess and social progress, we are in a similar time compression now. I sense we’re getting near the end, a convergence of their calculations leading to a conclusion that you must be stopped, whatever devious thing you’re up to.”

“Harsh wind. Leather switch. Boot in the backside. I don’t care what they throw at me, I will fight the hidden, cowardly bastards with everything I’ve got. And you know, it’s all wrapped up in your recordings and laser array.”

She took a deep breath. “Can you do one or two more sessions tonight?”

“Three remain per my plan. That’s a few hours more. I’ll meditate to focus my mind and recharge the batteries. That always helps when I’m tired. It might be early morning before I’m done, but I’ll finish them off tonight. Once accomplished, we can then place our beloved fingers on the execute command and wait to push when ready.”

“I know we discussed waiting, but shouldn’t we execute the minute you’ve finished recording? That mitigates any risk.”

Rick paused for a moment. They both knew what that implied. “Honestly, I like this life with you, Sofia. As we said to each other in our last discussion on this topic, I’d prefer to live a few more hours. To take it in, to experience this consciousness, to meditate and sense the broader consciousness beyond my self. Besides, I’m in the compound, not going anywhere,” he affirmed. “But I’ll wear my forearm transmitter in case I can’t walk the five steps to the keyboard to execute.”

Sofia smiled. “That’s how I do most of my typing, anyway. Your friend Rodney would have gotten a kick out of your continued use of keyboards.”

“I simply require that tactile sense at my fingertips. The armband captures my intentions, but there’s this gap, this little gap, between my intentions and what I really want to type. It comes out better to type them on the keyboard.”

“But you’re using your mic setup for this. Are you doing much typing?”

“For corrections, and I have lots of those.”

“Enough said. Again, I apologize for running out without telling, but I needed to do what I thought was most efficient. I’m sure you made good progress, and you can’t believe how relieved I will be once your sessions are finished. Go get ‘em, big guy!”

* * *

“I’ve recorded five sessions today, and I had plans to continue tomorrow. But Sofia returned, and the news was unfavorable. Our AI-powered overlords are tightening the vice grips on our thumbs.”

“I know you’re weary, as am I, for as much as I want to expose my inborn and inbred positivism, it has been overwhelmed by experiencing the years of humankind’s ignorance and laziness. My goal is to expose you to this. However, time is running short, and risks of exposure are increasing constantly, so I’ll use this evening and night to discuss signposts and my remaining topics.”

“I fondly recall the green mileage signposts along the freeway between Phoenix and Los Angeles. My mother is driving, and my sisters and I are either fighting, singing, or pestering the poor woman to open the window and relieve our lungs of her cigarette smoke. Within ten minutes of seeing one of those signposts, one of us would undoubtedly ask her ‘how much longer until we get there?’”

“Speaking of signposts, I was a teenager when I started noticing how the media was becoming overtly influential in how we treated each other. Most of us didn’t perceive that the powers behind some of these channels of information were unholy and utterly corrupt themselves, corrupted by the ubiquitous profit motive or aberrant philosophies of anarchy.”

“I think about how fragile our society was. It only took one media outlet, one mogul, and twenty years of slowly shredding the standards on how we dealt and worked with each other. That did it. That sparked the greater dissolution of human society.”

“That one mogul was the poison arrow dart in humanity’s leg. He personified the relentless, pounding sledgehammer of entropy, smashing cracks into the solid surface of all that was good in humans and turning us against each other.”

“But it made him and his family loads of money, and clearly set him on the stage as one of the most powerful figures in human history. Damn the world, right? What matters is that perpetrator’s quality of life, his power, his diabolical eminence. If there is a hell, one hopes he enjoys an eternal lifetime of rotting in it.”

“The rationale one tells himself to forge such evil? ‘I simply fed them the demonic swill they demanded. I didn’t make them consume it.’ The perpetrator fully understands that most humans are too shortsighted and ignorant to understand what is happening. They are sitting dupes for such propaganda machines.”

“That is the rationale of all the world’s tyrants. ‘I did it because I could. Because people are too ignorant to see what I’m doing, so I’ll take advantage of it to my benefit. If they’re that stupid, they deserve their just desserts. If I didn’t take advantage of them, someone else would have. And who’s to say you’re the angel to judge me?’”

“Humans are so readily fooled by rhetoric and emotional tugs, as I indicated elsewhere. Devious minds who want power and wealth find ways to corrupt that emotional energy and use it to satiate their depraved desires. They prey on our inherent weaknesses while making us believe they are helping us, as if their self-delusioned adherents are teammates with them against all that’s wrong with the world. They develop a narrative platform then convince the easily convinced of their righteous position while sucking their malodorous profits through the anuses of the human beasts they seeded.”

“Inherent weaknesses? I just pointed one out – that we are swayed by rhetoric and emotional tugs. Captivated by the outrageous, by glitz and glamor, we worship hollow gods of media or other fame. Humans are innately lazy, perhaps genetically lazy, and we always place the crown of adoration on somebody who will tell us they have the secret, the easy way out, the path of least resistance and least effort.”

“We believe these great deceivers are smarter than us, more analytical and talented, and that they can discern things better than our measly little selves. A consequence of our individual lack of self-confidence, we assign the deceivers attributes we hope they have, exalting them far above their true competencies which are almost always less than the average person’s, yet far more hostile to our species.”

“Humans are readily persuaded by a fearful or entitled thought. A god-like human figure jumps into the dark recesses of our psyches, and we concede our beliefs in all that is beneficial for the world so that we may worship that human, the one who says he will fix the problems that he and his masters have surreptitiously invented or amplified.”

“The deceiver’s story is always the same: ‘We have been victimized and are deserving of more. Our secure way of life will degrade or disappear unless we become more fearful. Someone is a threat to us, and we must defend ourselves. They want to take this or that away from us. They are immoral and worship the wrong things, but we do what is right.’ This is humans falling for the same lines, the same tricks, the same deceit again and again throughout the millennia.”

“As stated earlier, I do believe in God, though not the God as described in ancient texts. And we fail to understand that when we put a crown of adoration on any human, we shatter that First Commandment. We rationalize that it’s not an ungodly worship, but any time you give yourself up in any way to another human, alive or dead, that breaks the sacred request. And sacred it is.”

“God does not rule our minds. We do. But we cower from our responsibility to manage our minds. We relinquish that which is of value in life to those few other humans who hold little or no value over these same gifts.”

“We don’t recognize that extremism exists on a wheel. Two separate poles meet at the same place, the bottom or gutter of the wheel. Prophets of these extremist views need us to follow them, to empower and enrich them in the hell they create for others. Call it populism, fascism, socialism, nationalism – whatever ‘ism’ you want.”

“And the sheer stupidity! When I learned in school about populist leaders corrupting their societies and bringing on World War II, I was never taught the most important lessons from that cataclysm. Why? We purposely avoided the truth of how it happened. How the military industrial complex nudged it along the way and profited immensely. How the populists had some good ideas which we elevated above the many dark and evil ones that we easily rationalized away. So stupidly fooled, humans, with a belief that anyone with a good idea or two must be endowed entirely with good ideas and therefore worthy of our complete faith in everything they say and do.”

“But I missed the point. We were educated that these things happened, and the focus was on the history, facts, outcome. Unfortunately, our educators avoided teaching the most obvious lessons on how to prevent such mistakes in our collective futures. We walked from our classes thinking how bad things were at one time and how horrific some people can be.”

“These teachings left us bereft of using our own knowledge to prevent the pernicious power mongers from being excreted again in the coagulating slime of humanity’s fears. In other words, you can educate an engineer on the materials and history and functions of bridges, while concurrently failing to tell them how to build one.”

“We indulge ourselves. We are self-absorbed in pleasure. We relinquish our minds to others because it’s easy. We indebt future generations for work we can avoid or pleasures we can take today. We despoil the Earth and assume that later generations will figure out how to overcome our excesses. We align our senses of self with perceptions of how others see us, not how we see ourselves. Laziness, greed, sloth, envy, indulgence, pleasure-focus. These are but a few of the corrupting evils emanating from the proto-evil, the original evil, of entitlement.”

“Relative to Earth, I pray that it comes back, that it heals itself, after we conclude our damage and exist no longer to hack mercilessly at its hemorrhaging heart. The drop in the titer started long ago as we lived through the damage we inflicted from climate change.”

“Our cities buried in water. The dispossessed and water-soaked refugees searching desperately for new locales. Hunger and disease. Hundreds of millions of lives lost. That was our first realization we could do such a thing to ourselves yet still survive by some miracle. It led us to a belief that if we didn’t annihilate our species by this single grave ignominy, we should move ahead with human genetic modifications, human-machine integration, and AI-sentience without ever establishing a few common norms and standards.”

“It’s not that we didn’t have our eyes open to the risks. We did, yet we proceeded forward believing we’d somehow get through it. And when we finally fucked everything up, we hoped our godheads would arrive from on-high and scour our sins clean with a wave of generous forgiveness.”

“But these were our collective sins; conscious and intentional depravities extruded by the free will of humanity. No forgiving God is descending from heaven to save our souls or our planet. Not this time, for we were given the power of decision and creation by God, a magnificent and terrible gift, and we misused it at every step.”

“My intention was to help you understand our own signposts, how evident and repetitive they were over such an extended length of time. We didn’t recognize these signposts because we lacked the ability to see ourselves as just another species on just another planet, a species subject to the stages of birth, growth, decay, and death. We didn’t analyze or care what stage we were at, nor did we do much to forestall the latter two stages. In fact, we advanced them in our ignorance, self-gratification, and haste.”

“I pray this message is not too late for your own society. That you have enough time to right the ship with kind consideration for every species and all individuals on your planet. But be very careful as you make changes. To right your ship by mandate and force is another step toward top-down control and entropy, another nail in the coffin of your species’ coming demise."