from the pen of icarus blake

“How well do you know your representatives?”

A series of people in tailored three piece suits flash across the screen, all the same formal pose, until the sequence settles on the portrait of the current president with the same rhythm as a slowing roulette wheel.

“Know the presidential candidates like never before.”

His portrait fades to black, becoming an anonymized silhouette. A black and white rendition of the presidential seal fades in with the title of the stream, set to play every hour on the hour between regularly scheduled ad breaks.

Dark Horse

Twenty presidential hopefuls compete for ten million dollars in campaign funding and the marketing pipebomb of winning a hit reality show. Down to five candidates, the Presidential Penthouse is still a raucous mess. Eks and Tanner are screaming at each other, peaking the audio as we approach prime time viewing. Eks throws a stiff decorative pillow across the living room. All this fuss over the ethics of the CodiAI-enabled smart fridge in the shared kitchen—Tanner’s very own Silicon Valley darling favored by fringe tech weirdos like Eks for the AI-driven tech apocalypse.

The fridge is the only appliance anyone uses. None of these people cook. They all refuse to do the dishes. Eks lives on nothing but microwavable macaroni and cheese cups, and Tanner survives exclusively on a proprietary meal replacement drink. The rest of them order food three times a day, every day.

General Savage guffaws at Eks and Tanner’s spat, and they turn their ire on him. He belches, swigs again from the can of PBR in his meaty fist—we stock it for him, he drinks a case a day—and Eks’ voice screeches across my headphones.

“Do you think it’s funny? Handing our lives over to fucking AM? To the goddamn Terminator? What the hell are you laughing about, Savage?”

General Ron Savage, at 75, is the most conventional candidate on the red team. Thick, sturdy, with veneers whiter than his magic Mormon underwear. Lifelong airman off a farm in Texas, flew during the Cold War, played major roles in Iraq, Lebanon, and Iran. Airforce Major General going on thirty years.

“World keeps plodding along whether there’s a robot in the fridge or not, little miss,” Savage says, “never seen armageddon start in the kitchen.”

“AI is a net good,” Tanner insists, unwilling to drop it, “AI streamlines human development, improves our productivity, and reduces corporate overhead.”

Every time Tanner lapsed into techspeak, we lost viewers at a rate of hundreds per second. He’d only made it this far using his army of CodiAI bots to stuff the ballot box. No one on earth likes Brayden Tanner. I activated the debate sequence.

The lights in the Presidential Penthouse went out. Red, white, and blue flashers strobed.  Everyone scrambled down to their debate stands on the ground floor. I flipped to the other camera, just in case we caught another wardrobe malfunction from Miss K while she launched herself from the hot tub. We got a shot of Brock’s toned buttcrack. Good catch, but less audience appeal than Miss K’s dubiously natural endowments. I follow them from camera to camera as they drip their way to the debate hall.  Miss K squeezes Brock’s arm before they part for their respective podiums. The live audience is in place. Under the murmur of anticipation in the crowd, the microphones pick up the hissing tones of Eks and Tanner furiously discussing Roko’s basilisk.

The lights go up. The curtains open. We catch Miss K Adjusting her bikini bottom. Applause, applause. I initiate the debate.  

The synthesized announcer declares: “Today’s flash debate: the Obesity Epidemic.”

Tanner’s podium lights up. He wastes his minute and a half plugging meal replacements for efficiency and nutritional completeness. The guy operating the remote mobile cameras offers me an animal cracker. Miss K is up next, suggesting that organic raw foods and educational programs about healthy living would help Americans align their chakras and shed weight naturally, specifically that the natural healing weight loss program sold by her wellness brand NatureAll should be offered for free in all public middle and high schools. Brock calls for a return of the presidential fitness test and country-wide exercise programs like they used to have in Germany in the forties.

There’s a murmur from the more historically savvy members of the live audience at this, his fifth reference to Nazi Germany by my count.

Savage runs on a platform of personal discipline, spouting the drill sergeant philosophy everyone expected. Nothing new on the podium from him. Eks advocates for subsidizing food, free lunch in public schools, and better country-wide access to fresh produce. She’s sure to remind everyone that being fat won’t matter if a malignant artificial intelligence eliminates or enslaves all human life. The cross examination opens, and the shouting match between her and Tanner resumes. The debate is consumed by apocalyptic yelling, despite Miss K’s feeble request that they all participate in a breathing exercise.

General Savage pulls the microphone so close his breathing is audible over the speakers, a sound so wet and unpleasant that even Eks falters in her focus. He licks his lips. I isolate his audio, knowing he’s about to drop another nugget of Savage wisdom.

“The end of the world ain’t in a computer,” he begins, “I seen the end. It’s a bunker in the Dakotas, a hundred feet underground, and a man with a choice. The end always comes down to a man making a choice.”

Silence. He has the floor.

“Down in the bunker, you don’t know that the world’s still up there. You don’t know if you superiors’ ‘all good’ is ever coming. It’s just you and the big red button, just you and the end,” Savage pats his shirt pocket, “when the end comes, it ain’t gonna be prettied up in code. It’s gonna come fast, and when it does it won’t matter how much meat you got on your bones. We all burn about the same.”

The debate never recovers, running rampant for another 15 minutes before I shut it down. The curtains close. Audience voting begins. The candidates won’t know the results until elimination tomorrow, but initial trends put Miss K in the lead with a strong showing from Tanner’s bots. I switch the camera so the stream follows Brock and Miss K back to the hot tub.

When Miss K straddles Brock’s lap, I switch back to the living room. Eks throws herself onto the couch and Tanner storms back to his room, their spat finally over. Savage trundles in with his customary post-debate PBR and sits next to Eks. He cracks the can. Drinks in silence.  Waits for Eks to talk to him. They make an odd pair, but the audience loves the fatherly concern.

“How am I supposed to stop it if no one listens to me?” Eks scrubs at her face. Her voice is tight with tears. She wants to save the world so bad.

“Aw, honey, it’s not your fault no one wants to be saved. Folks only want salvation when they’re dying,” Savage tells her, his Texas drawl sweet on the audio. I isolate the conversation and turn it up.

Eks sniffs. “We’re all dying, all the time.”

“Nah, we’re all immortal ‘til we’re not,” he pats his shirt pocket again, “they gave me the codes, back when I was in Minuteman. Didn’t understand then, I wasn’t much older than you, but I knew that as long as I was down there I was all that stood between everything I knew and loved and the good Lord’s own judgment. Some of my bosses really, really wanted me to push that button.”

“How old were you?” Eks has her legs pulled up to her chest, long arms wrapped around her knees.

“It doesn’t matter,” Savage waves her question away, “we had some scares. One or two times the alarms went off. That’s the only time I ever seen people set their differences aside and listen—really listen to each other.”

“Did you have the codes?” Eks rocks side to side on the couch.

Savage flashes a yellowed piece of paper from his shirt pocket. “Changed them a thousand times since, I’m sure, but I keep them on me. To remember.”

Ratings gold. Hatter-formerly-Grokit-formerly-X-formerly-Twitter is going off the hook. Voting trends favor Savage again, Eks rising fast. Brock is at the bottom, which hopefully means the company won’t be dodging public indecency charges because I failed to catch him and Miss K fucking in a background shot in time to pan away. I switch to Tanner, pacing in his room like some kind of caged zoo animal. Once viewer numbers dropped by half, I handed control over to the night shift.

Twelve hours later, the night shift fills me in on the night’s notables. Eks worked until two in the morning on the computer she smuggled in—we let it slide, a hacktivist without a computer is just a paranoid nerd—then she went rifling through Savage’s things while he slept. Eks is always full of surprises. I pat myself on the back for fighting so hard to get her a spot on the show, and wonder what she’s planning to spring on us during tonight’s elimination debate.

Not every day is a winner, the tension around the penthouse is too thick to spark anyone into action worth filming. It’s all notes and studying. Brock seems to suspect he’s on his way out, taking every opportunity to “get to know” Miss K and keeping me on my toes playing indecency whack-a-mole until I finally get to initiate the debate.

The candidates file to their podiums. This time, they’re all dressed in their finest. The mobile camera zooms in on Eks, her throat bobbing as she swallows nervously. There’s no need for her to worry.

The AI announcer: “Elimination debate topic: Climate Change.”

Miss K and Brock exchange a back and forth regarding population control where Brock barely resists his impulse to call for the forced sterilization of minorities. Tanner claims that AI—specifically CodiAI, of course—would generate a solution given enough investment and time. Eks shifts in place while Savage questions whether climate change exists at all.

“It won’t matter,” Eks produces her smuggled computer and gestures with a yellowed piece of paper, “no one will listen until we’re all dying anyway.”

“Kid, those codes are thirty years out of date,” Savage protests. He steps off his podium, and the foul alarm blares.  He ignores it, crossing the stage as Eks types furiously. She hits the enter key as he reaches her. His ruddy complexion drains away.

“There.” Eks turns her screen for the camera. I zoom in on a blue screen, the white text straight out of the eighties. A series of thirty numbers, below that a confirmation code of 15, and flashing white and bold below that:

LAUNCH INITIATED

Cool trick. I wonder how the back end managed it. There’s a stretch of silence, the live audience unsure of themselves. The debate only just begins again when the first notification goes off in the control room.

My phone screen is warning red.

NUCLEAR DETONATION IMMINENT

TAKE SHELTER IMMEDIATELY