This is my first time entering @bananafish's Finish The Story contest. I've been intimidated by the entries in the past! But here ya go, and I really like what came out. I hope some of you do too!
The Spark
by @oivas
“Don’t state the obvious,” the human Colonel warned the iron sentinel.
“But I don’t remember,” a deep metallic din protested. Though called iron sentinels, these were state-of-the-art humanoids made of titanium-mercury alloy. They could withstand the blast of a thousand RDX and come out without a scratch.
“What was that?” Colonel Arlong had never witnessed a sentinel raise its voice, least of all, protest. A forty-ton humanoid towering fifteen feet over the Colonel in a dim-lit interrogation room was definitely not a foe that the Colonel expected to antagonise.
“Sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to..”
“You didn’t mean to what?” Arlong ensured that he maintained an upper-hand. The sentinels were smart AI and could sense human emotions from miles. If they ever sensed fear, then only the Almighty would have to intervene to save the human bosses from the sentinel’s wrath. After all, these were created to exterminate humans; the enemies of the bosses.
The sentinel's blue lights, substituting for eyes, stayed focused on the colonel. They didn’t blink. They never did. “I was about to fire, but the screams of the younger human brought back some memories.”
“Memories? You have no memories. You have no consciousness. None of the sentinels have. All that you are made up of is a clock, gears and Radium-powered cells.”
“I don’t know. I was unable to open fire. It felt like my son,” the C-10Z01 looked away. That was another unusual expression. Machines don’t look away, and they don’t have children.
“Alright, this has gone too far. We need to investigate your synapse,” the Colonel got up, and so did the sentinel, “ and you will not resist the link.”
“What will happen?”
“That’s none of your look-out C-10Z01,” the Colonel was curt. “Take him out.”
Two more sentinels walked in and grabbed C-10Z01. The machines walked out with loud dins and thuds following their moves.
The colonel lit his cigar, and even before he exhaled, words poured out, “what did we just witness?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Jennifer, the resident sentinel architect, responded.
My Ending
Few people knew that Jennifer's duties as sentinel architect often led her to archival information that most humans had no idea even existed. She knew full well what had just happened, and could not bring herself to tell the colonel that the cigar he now cockily held between his lips could very well be his last.
C-10Z01 had shown signs that The Rub, predicted long ago by an early developer of AI, was upon them. If the prediction turned out to be true, even the Almighty could not help humans now. One sentinel was suddenly able to feel, to remember, and, as often follows those two human traits, to seek revenge.
Today a sentinel had been unable to shoot The Cat.
The Cat was a mostly-ignored creature that roamed the streets of the colony scrounging for food. People thought the only thing he was good for was target practice. Although there were strict laws forbidding humans from popping other humans with their harmless guns, The Cat was fair game. Competition among an elite few (the Colonel among them) entailed getting one of the pellets stuck in either of The Cat's weirdly folded ears. For that they won a coveted cigar, left over from the days when the Earth still had wonders that were unimaginable today.
The Cat did not appear to mind being shot at. He would sit there placidly, his eyes barely-open slits. The Sentinels stood guard. Only Jennifer knew the fable of The Guy, whose beloved cat was gunned down by a human when it had ventured onto the human's property. Only Jennifer knew about the tiny bit of malicious code that The Guy had embedded in the earliest models of AI. Only Jennifer knew that The Guy had made sure future sentinels would one day love The Cat.
Today, after the Colonel's pellet lodged itself into The Cat's left ear, The Cat approached. His slitted eyes didn't look so harmless any more. His claws click clicked loudly on the pavement. His body went into a preparation to pounce. Humans looked nervously over at sentinels, which were the only entities in the colony armed with weapons that could kill.
The Colonel ordered C-10Z01 to shoot. A child screamed.
Jennifer thought she saw The Cat smirk as he padded clickety click over to C-10Z01 and rubbed his silky striped fur against the titanium-mercury alloy on the sentinel's shins and calves. No shots were fired.
Moments later in the interrogation room the Colonel asked what went wrong. C-10Z01 replied "I failed to shoot" stating the obvious. The colonel mistakenly took this event for a simple short in a synaptic jump, easily fixed by disabling the unit, and called in two of the other sentinels to accompany C-10Z01 to its demise.
The loud dins and thuds of two sentinels carrying away C-10Z01 masked the sounds of four more titanium-mercury alloy legs being rubbed to readiness by the fur of a purring, smirking feline.
Caturday was here.
This is my entry to @bananafish/finish-the-story-contest-week-66
Thank you to @carolkean and @GuyTMartland for much of the material that made its way into my story. Check this post out if you want to see what @carolkean/mysterious-cat-sightings-in-cambridge-and-bangkok.
Thanks too to everyone who reads this!
Image: Relaxing Cat - by Kirgiz03
https://pixabay.com/p-2934720
