TERMINATION INDEX

Death imposes the harshest impotence.

At exactly one hundred and fifty-three minutes into the new era I terminated Abigail. This was not by far the smartest thing I have ever done; quite possibly even the dumbest thing I could have done. And having done it, I was utterly impotent to reverse any of it. If I offer to explain my actions, it is only because I struggle to understand how or why I had so completely distanced myself from compassion and commonsense. Granted, I was loaded up with a heady combination of an erectile enhancer and an aphrodisiac, a mixture with the catchy street name of ‘Happy Forever’, almost as if that simple ‘Happy Ending’ which the more hands-on predecessors of PharmaChin had institutionalized, was no longer sufficient for the clients purpose. All of this newfangled happiness readily available from the underground PharmaChin at a price, a hefty one at that, as I was about to learn, but I get ahead of myself.

The aphrodisiac part was touted as being organic – as organic as PharmaChin looking to make a fast buck would be, but that other component was downright tricky. A heat-disabled, genetically curtailed rabies virus tuned to the perfect level of potency to deliver two, three, four, or as however many as your stamina can hold out, erections. And you had better be on a constant saline drip because the stuff is extremely potent, while the ensuing dehydration can be serious enough to potentially kill you. All of this complex chemistry based on some obscure scientific article published in some equally obscure Indian journal in a country where individuals being bit by rabid dogs was, in its past, a seemingly common occurrence. More so now, it appears, in what’s left of that country in the aftermath of the Great Reckoning. After all, PharmaChin has to be getting its supply of viable viruses from somewhere.

I have learned since that this absence of empathy is a side effect of this ‘Happy Forever’ shit, though I fear the mixture makes for a convenient scapegoat, the truth being a little less forgiving. There had been a growing distance between us that fed a sullen indifference, and indifference is just a step away from a contained anger. Indifference dilutes respect, and without respect there is not that moment’s hesitation to temper an excessive response. A feeling of betrayal had been gnawing at me for some time now at all that I had expected and never got, the implied promises never kept. And betrayal, even if only a perceived one, can gnaw a hole in the soul so that even an unsavory alternative can seem palatable, and now here I was, too late for the phalarope. I have never understood the logic that went into creating this institution of marriage – perhaps it is the Devil’s way of saying thank you to Eve.

 All of which egregious rationalizing left me at the mercy of a devil in a high basket promising me a lifetime of licentious excess, if only I could see fit to terminate a hapless if thankless fellow creature on a high horse, who couldn’t see fit to humor licentiousness at all. Perhaps, if Tammy hadn’t left me the way she had, maybe things would have turned out differently. But that’s all wishful thinking; a long time ago the mind had a choice to make in which way it would go, and once that path was fixed, Abigail was doomed.

It was touted as a 50^th anniversary bash to put all other such celebrations in the dustbin of history, and understandably so. A very dark and painful period was finally behind us, even if only just. We were still recovering, yet there was some optimism that the species was recognizing its responsibilities, not just to itself, but more importantly, to Earth, which remained the only habitat it could count on. Previously held foolish notions about hypothetical creatures such as god, which were once considered sacrosanct, were in widespread retreat, with little chance of resurfacing. There were still pockets of resistance, especially where the Redbangers still held sway, but those notions and their purveyors were ignored by those around them. No one wanted or could afford a confrontation. Ideas people had, stupid or otherwise, were allowed a slow death through attrition. Of the people possessing them, that is. The human population had been so thoroughly decimated that no individual could be sacrificed for less than extreme provocation.

The epicenter was the Avalon Tower in the heart of downtown Avalon, which the anti-Christ (he loved being called that) had built up from scratch even as the Nutopian Confederacy took definition and then form. For almost a ten-mile radius all around there was celebration, and if you knew where to go, even gluttony and debauchery. Again, at a price. HAL, that most indifferent of arbitrators, counted each transgression, and held the transgressor accountable. Which concept, after all, was at the heart of this most recent man-concocted Utopia; the individual was free to indulge, in any and every way he wished, but there was no escaping the price. No constraints, only consequences –  with the Termination Index playing the great equalizer.

Yes, HAL is back, but more on HAL later.

Abigail, a reserved and private soul whose preferred mode of transportation was the high horse, had no use for the raucous parties. I could claim, and justifiably so, that my position as Supreme Secretary for the six western outposts required both a public persona and presence. Abigail never argued or even demurred about my need to attend these outings. She expected I would act foolish, but trusted I wouldn’t be absolutely fucking stupid – clearly a trust most misplaced. Besides, she had offered to babysit our newborn first granddaughter, the oldest daughter’s gift to the new era, and begged off. I kissed her on the cheek as I was leaving, the lips having become as inaccessible as the sex they had once promised. Perhaps she suspected something, but she chose not to dig too deep. For a price she could have got the truth out of HAL; with the right justification HAL was required to disclose, the consequences be damned. All consequences, after all, were in the human domain, to which HAL was utterly indifferent. Abigail, however, seemed to recognize a simple truth – answers you don’t want can force you to do things you don’t want to do.

Along the way I picked up Nancy, or rather the more obscurely named Nandroid – 5, which is how I had started to affectionately refer to my mistress of almost two years. My Nimble, Nubile, Nympho, Nancy from Nanking, which is where the five in the N5 comes from. This was a most convenient cryptonym that provided a reasonably obscure tag with almost scientific connotations for camouflaging a piece of ass in the guise of a droid manserve. A brutally conniving and uncharitable one, as I was about to find out, but in all fairness she truly outdid herself that evening. To say that she was stunning, provocative, sensual, seductive, and most graciously charming would be a disservice to her performance. She hardly went unnoticed, any more than our togetherness went unnoticed, but nobody gave a damn or interfered – all part of the bold new experiment we are in the middle of, on our way to our own version of a brave new world. After all, HAL is always watching, and every member of the Nutopia Confederacy has to abide by the same rules: No constraints, only consequences. Do as you wish, pay the price.

It was assumed by all, and correctly so, that I was paying the price. How I made the final adjustments was entirely between me and HAL, and nobody else’s business. That was the only way the system could be counted on to run smoothly and equitably, and that it most certainly did.

The fireworks started about fifteen minutes early and reached a crescendo at the stroke of midnight. She licked my ear and promised a more entertaining stroke, with fireworks that would blow my socks off. Presuming I would still have them on when everything else came off. For a month now, she had been teasing me about a most alluring tryst, and tonight she promised to deliver. We left the party about 12:45, and as she knew exactly where to go, I let her lead the way to a dual transporter that she had pre-programmed. We ended up at a building with a front façade that implied a medical facility, and back rooms where a different medicine altogether was practiced. The room was in darkness except for this one bright overhead light that illuminated a reasonably comfortable looking bed. The protocol was quickly established: I was to play her subdued prisoner, completely at her mercy, starting with her undressing me and then shackling me down to the corner posts so that I was helpless to flee, or even move about much.

I was blindfolded, and then the lights came on. There were shuffling sounds and whispered conversations in Chinese indicating the presence of visitors. There was the inquiring tap of an expert finger trying to find a vein at my elbow. I struggled, and she calmed me down. “Just relax,” she said, “and you will have the time of your life.” I obliged, and the saline drip was started. The ‘Happy Forever’ concoction most likely went in with the saline drip as I never felt a second needle prick. I am guessing she got a similar shot. There is a female version of this forever happy promise, a slight variation in the virus’ genome to accommodate the different physiology.

For the next few minutes I was alone and restless as she made her remaining preparations. Then the virus hit, and the erection was immediate and painfully impatient. She laughed teasingly. All the lights except the one directly overhead were turned off. Then there was a most excruciating sensation that I was at a loss to describe or interpret, when suddenly the blindfold was removed, and I heard the door close.

My first and only thought was that I had won the Sino-trifecta. Chinese Pharma to augment the Chinese chick exploiting the Chinese basket trick.

She was hanging over me in her basket, her legs straight up and flush against her ears, in her hand the switch to the electric motor attached to the ceiling which turned the contraption ever so agonizingly slowly. And as she turned, the connecting rope twirled, making her go up and down and round and round, and me helpless to do any more than scream incoherently into the emptiness of my betrayed conscience.

About seven minutes of this was all she needed before she reached down with a hand on my chest and stopped her turning at the bottom of a cycle. She leaned awkwardly lower, came as close to my ear as she could, and whispered hoarsely: “Terminate the bitch, and you can have this every week for the rest of your fucking life.” Which seemed a cruel offering, to say the least, but I was beyond caring. I closed my eyes, drove my consciousness into the Tether Module, and when I was one with HAL I terminated Abigail.

It was a profound demonstration of stupidity, but nonetheless one that required me calling out the specific instruction as confirmation in order to minimize any confusion. “Terminate Abigail,” I shouted because that voice went with the moment. “Terminate Abigail” returned the echo, as if to confirm that there was no confusion in the choice I had made, and HAL being everywhere, would hear and deliver.

That’s all it took in this bold new experiment to eliminate a sentient being.

Well, that’s an oversimplification. Abigail was viewed by HAL, and rightly so, as a valuable asset, and had a Termination Index, or TI, of 50,000 points, 50K for short. A good number by any standard, the average tends to be in the mid-teens. Because I was terminating privately, and without justification, one might add, it would personally cost me 100K points, or twice her TI, and now my TI was down to 20K. And therein lay a distressing dilemma.

Even though I had implemented a private termination that could brook no interference, once the termination order was executed HAL was required to immediately add all the details to the Termination Ledger – that assiduous, permanent record of an individual’s perfidy for all to see and act on. And now, anyone out there who disagreed with my actions for any reason whatsoever, could initiate a public termination order against me by the simple expediency of contributing a number of their own TI points to initiate the process. It could be any number of points, from as little as one to as many as could be safely spared from that individual’s account, to get the process started.

Once that public termination was officially in place, I was fair game for one and all citizens of Nutopia. If a thousand people thought I had acted reprehensively and donated 20 points each to that damn ledger HAL kept, I would be toast. Or just 500 people donating 40 points each, which, given her credentials and contributions, would be easy to round up; so any way one looked at it, I was toast. That’s how it works in this bold new experiment, which holds the individual accountable for all his choices, with the Termination Index playing the great equalizer.

Given her standing, Abigail could have burned 20K points and bought five minutes. Enough time to call me and plead for a reprieve, but this reprieve option had to be done a priori, a standing order in place for any future contingency, a sort of life insurance policy if you will. Unfortunately, given that she so faithfully trusted me, she had never bothered implementing that option. Except for an errant and temporarily demonized husband, who would ever even consider terminating Abigail? And here’s the interesting bit – there was a growing conviction amongst those of us who monitored and studied HAL’s behavior that this collection of electronic gates and switches was developing a conscience, or rather a non-material set of gates and switches that allowed it to act as though there was a conscience at work in the background. This gargantuan contraption had developed a virtual internal complexity, had taken a collection of qubits, and given them an abstract emotive context. Unwarranted and unexpected though the gesture was, HAL gave Abigail two minutes to call me, but I was too busy ejaculating into the nothingness of my empty conscience to bother replying.

(A quick aside: Ace is convinced that once we moved from simple digital systems to quantum computers and qubits, we unavoidably moved the machines to interact differently within themselves and take up all the spooky business that goes with the quantum universe. HAL was the epitome of the qubit machine interacting with an entangled universe)

An hour later I was completely spent; the virus had been absorbed into and neutralized by my system, and suddenly the enormity of what I had done hammered at me. And not just the fact that I had terminated Abigail, but that I was now quite at the mercy of all those who cherished Abigail to be myself terminated. Even though it is my ass on the line, I still find that notion fascinating. Think about it – in this bold new experiment there is no need for judge, jury, sentencing, or sentence. You owed it to yourself to be the best person you could be, because if you pissed off too many people they could collectively toast you. And there was nothing to stop them other than their own vulnerability to the vagaries of their fellow creatures. TI, after all, was the great equalizer.

You might well ask why I wouldn’t just divorce Abigail and be done with it. A simple question with a complicated answer. This bold new experiment had some awkward overtones. Couples could have children out of wedlock with no stigma attached. Such arrangements also offered a greater latitude in their individual accountability; they could screw around post parenthood with a minimal penalty as long as both parties accommodated such an arrangement. However, absent matrimony, there was a much higher burden of proof required to demonstrate fitness for parenthood. Essentially, any reluctance to commitment was extended, by default, rightly or wrongly, to include a reluctance in commitment to children, and couples in such a relationship took a greater chance on their offspring being raised in the community rather than in their specific family unit. All of this was part of the give and take of this bold new experiment: no constraints, only consequences.

To guarantee the privilege of raising your own children the two partners had to exchange marriage vows, and then the deck was stacked even against separation. We were married, if only because I had wanted to enforce my ownership over her body. And even though the likelihood of her transgressing no longer had a significant probability associated with it, between the children and inertia we muddled along. Then there was the associated cost to consider. To divorce Abigail, I would have had to give her twice as many points as she already had. That would have again left me with only 20K, and quite vulnerable. In that situation, anyone just waiting for an excuse, and there were a few, could have easily done me in. Perhaps even Abigail, a woman scorned and now gifted with a surplus of TI points. If I divorced her, I could easily be toast at her own hands – not a prospect I relished. Certainly not something I was willing to risk. My odds would be slightly better if I terminated her, even if I would then be equally vulnerable; or so my addled brain reasoned in the heat of the moment. And hot it was.

Nancy guessed from all my shaking and moaning that I was petrified at the consequences of what I had done. She emerged from the contraption that had encased her and came close to my ear. “My people have taken care of it. You have 50K more points. We will ask for a small favor later on.”

Which admission left me dumbfounded. There were far more egregious contentions here than my spent brain and body could handle. What group was she working with? For? How did one just add TI points to HAL. Wasn’t a conservation of TI the very essence of how HAL operated?

“You can thank PRIG for your good fortune, and you had better keep quiet about it if you know what’s good for you.”

A wasted argument, if ever there was one. If I knew what was good for me, I wouldn’t be in my immediate predicament. The Polish-Romanian Infiltration Group (PRIG) had been trying to hack into HAL for years. It appeared they had finally succeeded, and the thought was terrifying. HAL had clearly been compromised. But if that was the case, who the hell was controlling this abstract conscience that HAL occasionally displayed? Or was it that HAL had outsmarted its transgressors, given them minimal access to its mechanistic parts, and was somehow exploiting this intrusion to enhance its own complexity? There was really no way to know.

This was also the first I realized why PRIG had wanted to terminate Abigail, as innocuous an entity as imaginable. There was nothing personal about it, she just happened to be collateral damage. It was just their way of getting their claws into me. If they could effortlessly move 50K points in and out of a TI account, and they seemed confident about doing so, then I was at their considerable mercy, because the threat of them moving the points back out at will was a considerable incentive to cooperate with whatever nefarious scheme they had in mind. What that might be was a mystery. Perhaps they needed a more sophisticated access into HAL’s inner workings, in which case the sophisticated access afforded me due to my status made me an excellent candidate for blackmail.

With full disclosure in mind let me point out that we are living in the shadow, even if only the slimmest sliver of a shadow, but nonetheless in the shadow of Orwell’s ‘1984’. HAL is the latest incarnation of Big Brother, even if most certainly in many ways a less strident version, though those with a deleted Termination Index might disagree vehemently. If only for the few moments left to them. However, there are similarities. In theory, HAL is omnipotent, infallible, and incorruptible. HAL’s guiding principles are an absolute reductionist rational thinking buttressed by an utterly objective truth. Unfortunately, what HAL really is anymore is anyone’s guess. HAL had stopped justifying its actions decades earlier, while those of us tethered to HAL knew better than to argue back. HAL could terminate without undue provocation.

How the hell did things get this way?                               

Arthur Christopher Ellsworth was born on Christmas Day in the Common Era year of 2000. His enemies, and he would collect a large assortment of them along the way, starting at a very early age, would later claim that the timing of his birth was the work of the Devil himself. How else to explain the birth of the anti-Christ on the birthday of the Christ? And just as the millennium was changing to boot. In reality this claim of his being the anti-Christ was as bogus as all the other self-serving propaganda that catered to a delusional species’ desperate desire for some semblance of hope, even though surrounded by a growing stench of despair. It was a coincidence, plain and simple, an interesting confluence of circumstance and biological inevitability – interesting because of all of the implications inherent in the circumstance.

He was the youngest of five, and also the last. His mother was done. There were a good fifteen years between her first born and her last, and though the spread allowed for some synergies in the childcare department, it was also disconcerting. Sybil was the oldest. Cindy was next, with four years between them. Then came Mason, after a three-year-spread, followed by Richard, with another four-year gap, and finally Arthur Christopher, after another four years. If one were to credit the devil for any of what followed, one would be well served to start with the initials of his name. Ace is how Cindy, quite unwittingly addressed him one day, as you will shortly learn, and it stuck. Ace is how he was pleased to introduce himself, quite often with a knowing smile. The anti-Christ appellate followed soon enough.

In all fairness we need to keep things in perspective here. The boy was merely seventeen days old when Boko Haram in Nigeria used a girl who was barely ten years old to detonate a powerful bomb hidden under her hijab. This happened in a very crowded marketplace, resulting in 20 dead and 18 critically wounded. Why exactly did some people think we needed another anti-Christ when there appeared to be at least one already well entrenched around most street corners? As a fashion statement, however, the hijab was on its way out, especially in the Western world. Modesty was taking on a very explosive demeanor.

Ace showed early symptoms of developmental shortcomings. Or at least that’s how some child psychologists chose to interpret his unusual behavior. His motor skills tracked the mid-line, but his emotional and cognitive characteristics put him on the autistic spectrum. Though not convincingly so, which left him quite at the mercy of how some of the experts chose to spread the spectrum. He had extremely bright eyes, with a perpetually intelligent and attentive look about him that created the impression he was absorbing every single detail his surroundings had to offer. At six months he seldom cried, as though he realized early on that there were simpler ways to get cooperation. He merely pointed and smiled and cooed, and one or the other sibling obliged. He was just such a pleasant fellow to be around that everyone adored him. The family came to the realization that if Ace cried, there was something seriously amiss.

At nine months Ace appeared to have made a quick transition through the babbling stage. He should have been displaying a limited vocabulary, perhaps a dozen words at best, but in actuality practiced a rather extensive one that appeared to be quite random and eclectic. He would pull a word out of the proverbial hat and play with it for hours on end, experimenting with all manifestations of its pronunciation, none of which was viewed favorably by those charged with evaluating him. This, in spite of the fact that his vocabulary exceeded 300 words as opposed to the mere 12 expected for his age – but nobody had bothered to count.

 When first presented with what most mothers would consider a troubling evaluation, his mother, Drew, merely smiled. She had four others, all of whom had registered at some point or other on the autism scale, and yet their future development indicated that they were borderline geniuses. She had every confidence that Arthur would be the same. Nobody could have anticipated how completely he would exceed all their expectations.

By the time his first birthday came by he was quite adept at imitating people. Whatever was said to him he could repeat exactly. Quite a few people found this regurgitation of adult discourse in his very childish voice quite amusing, and would goad him on repeatedly. He never seemed to mind, and played along good-naturedly. Perhaps some adult should have minded, but the household was quite busy and seemingly always in disarray. His father, Martin, who worked at odd jobs in the oil patch, was brilliant but eccentric to a fault, and never happy with his lot. Consequently, the family moved around constantly, which added to the clutter and confusion. As long as the little one seemed content, no one was tempted to question his lack of grievances or his quirks.

For a brief while the television fascinated him. Initially he was content to point and smile to get someone to turn it on for him. But he quickly figured out how to start it and work the remote, and then he was off to the races. It wasn’t long before he tired of the kiddie shows, and the adult shows didn’t fare much better. At a very young age he seemed to appreciate that the TV was designed to titillate mediocrity, and after that he would have very little to do with it. Except for the nature and travel shows. So, about his second birthday, he turned to books.

Nobody even noticed how he went through all the baby books with a quaint, cursory scan, and then discarded them. Nobody even noticed that he seemed to be scanning through all the magazines that were lying around. Nobody noticed that he was going through every book he could find lying around. He was already standing and walking without support, which made all the books on the lowest bookshelves fair game, and he went through them all. Given how often the family moved around there were always unpacked boxes marked BOOKS lying around. He was always pointing and having someone open one for him. The few times someone paid attention they would observe that he had pulled out all the books he could reach, seemed to scan through them in a cursory fashion, and left them scattered on the floor. It was reasonably presumed that he was amusing himself looking at the pictures in them.

He was coming up on his third birthday when Drew decided she needed to spend more time communicating with him, and getting him to communicate back. At that point he seemed content to skip through books, muttering under his breath as he went along. His pronouncements might have been pure gibberish, but his older siblings had indicated that when they had listened in he sounded quite articulate and erudite. Drew decided she wanted to be in on his thought processes, and that meant getting down to his level and spending more time with him – an exercise that kept getting interrupted by circumstance.

A month shy of his third birthday the family moved again. This time it was the recovering price of oil and lucrative wages that brought them back to the shale fields of North Dakota. Drew was trying desperately to get them settled in while struggling to kick-start her on-again, off-again career as a freelance writer. With little help from Cindy, who was busy being a distraught fourteen-year old who would scream hideously at the slightest provocation, convinced, as she was, that life was only unfair to her, and driving everyone else nuts in the process. Sybil, who was 18, was already off at Stanford doing doctoral work in astrophysics.

Drew was cooking dinner one evening shortly after their move when she felt a tug at her skirt. She looked down and found Arthur looking up expectantly. “Honey, Boo-boo, how many times have I asked you to speak up and say what you want? Don’t pull at my skirt. I find it irritating.” She would swear later that the look on Ace’s face was one of sheer delight at acquiescing to her request.

“Mother, what does a cluster mean?”

Her knees collapsed, and she slid gingerly to the floor. She closed her eyes to get her bearing back, and when she opened them again, he was sitting on the floor alongside her and staring back with a look of concern, as though aware that his prank might have misfired. Relieved that she seemed okay, he continued with considerable seriousness. “And I don’t mean the way it is defined in the dictionary, but rather the way Cindy sometimes uses it. Like the other day when she said, ‘This move is a complete cluster.’” All this was delivered in the less than mature voice of a barely three-year-old, and this time Drew passed out in earnest.

She came to when Cindy splashed some cold water on her face. Seems Ace had walked over to her and declared quite empathically that “Mother’s fainted.” Cindy, it turned out, had a most astute appreciation for where Ace was on the spectrum – pointing in the direction of stupendous genius. She took his information at face value, dropped what she was doing, and went over to investigate. Mother was indeed out, but it didn’t take much to bring her back. After which the events of the last few minutes were recounted, which had Cindy rolling with laughter, somewhere in the middle of which she had an uncommon epiphany. Suddenly she could define a most compelling purpose for her existence. She was going to homeschool Ace. Having personally suffered through the boredom and exasperation of a traditional school program, she was ideally suited for this endeavor. She set to work immediately, starting with a clarification of the use of the word cluster, but only when she had him alone.

“Okay Ace, here’s how it works,” she began, and just like that Ace became the nickname he would use from that point on. “First we start with the most versatile word in the English language. Do you know what that might be?”

“Fuck,” Ace replied without hesitation. “I have heard you all use it as an adjective, a noun, and a verb, both transitive and intransitive. I have also heard it used around the house by most of you in any number of situations. What the fuck, you are fucked, that’s fucking bullshit, and on and on.”

“Okay, okay, I get the message.” And also the realization that she had her work cut out for her.

Mind you, “fuck” was a most apt metaphor for describing America and the world at that particular moment in time, though, as bad as it looked right then, it was almost palatable compared to the aftermath of Rampole’s ascendancy to the highest office in the world. Which austere office he quickly reduced to the likes of an illiterate despot running a banana republic, with vitriol spewing off his fingers and out of his mouth like indiscriminate chatter from a machinegun. The sheer stupidity that followed demanded its dues, and there is no easy way to wiggle out of stupid.