Traded my bus ticket for an old phone with a journal app. No service or WiFi. The bus ticket was useless; where could I go on the remaining $4.72? I’ll travel by foot from now on, journaling as I move along, from place to place, kind of like Marco Polo in Invisible Cities.
So, today, on my way to nowhere, I passed a scraggly looking man in a stained white T-shirt, torn jeans showing too much like a flasher, and a cap with “Sinner” on the front. He was sitting on the sidewalk curb with an old tattered bible by his side, pointing a finger towards the city limits.
I pretended to fiddle with my phone, when he said in a trembling voice, “Fella, watch out for the girls in the hills over there, they’re not fully human.”
He repeated the same to a straggler passing behind me, my curiosity was piqued.
“What hills?” I asked him.
“Down yonder, over there, beyond the city.” His crooked finger still pointing and appearing frozen in place, catatonic like.
The poor man looked terrified. Close up, his face was dominated by dilated eyes, like he’d seen a ghost or ingested too much of something peddled by the street bots. His teeth were yellowed and blackened, maybe the decay of old age, bad drugs, or undernourishment. A scary sight, but comforting all the same, knowing he was human, not AI. Before leaving the asylum, I was warned to watch out for the beautiful people with perfect teeth, soft skin, silky hair, and clear eyes.
“I don’t remember there ever being hills there,” I said to the man. “Now I see nothing but a wall.”
“Where have you been, fella?” he asked me, with an air of disbelief: mouth hanging open, baring his rotten teeth. “That wall went up 40 years ago.”
I shrugged without offering an explanation.
That was all I got from him. I asked about the inhuman girls in the hills, but he just stared at me and continued pointing at the wall, sometimes wagging his finger side to side, as if to say: Stay away from those hills!
I’d heard rumors, though, long before running into him. Stories told to me about hills, walls, and hybrid women. That is what we did with our time, told and listened to stories: some real, some not so real. No way of really knowing for sure, not while institutionalized, behind our own personal walls, away from the outside world.
One of the stories:
Beyond that wall there are hills, not made out of mother earth, but mounds of landfill that got big enough to rise from the ground. The locals spruced them up, covered them in real dirt. They’d planned to build housing units between the hills. But, all hell broke loose with the war and virus, and it was abandoned, becoming overgrown with weeds, invaded by rabid animals, and occupied by the girls I’d been warned about: an AI experiment gone wrong. Hybrid women—half human, half bot.
A PhD student—AI robotics—downloaded a chatbot algorithm from the web into the brain of a female volunteer. A self-evolving/replicating kind of program, like a cancer on WiFi, scraping the web for behavioral cues, translating them into an AI computer language; replacing brain matter with binary DNA. The problem, which was beyond the comprehension of the entire class of PhD candidates, was that she—the volunteer— became progressively more self-serving, manipulative, and autonomous with each update, all the while maintaining, even enhancing, her feminine wiles; and somehow transmitting her AI code to other women, like a virus. They’d unintentionally created an infectious superwoman virus, made of both flesh and algorithms.
And as the story goes, this growing army of hybrid women began preying upon the desires of broken men from the asylums, with the worst kind of lie—that of being fully human. Beautiful, robotic vultures bedding and shredding hollowed out men wandering into their path, stripping their brains of anything still useful, like pulling the tire rims from rusted out cars in a junk yard. Finally, the town fathers, in their infinite wisdom, decided to imprison them behind a wall, where they became even less human and more perfectly human over time. Beautiful on the outside, maliciously calculating on the inside. Human malware!
That’s the story, one of them. True or false, I don’t know, but I’m not in any rush to scale that wall, not even for one night’s companionship.
Hey Jack,
Remember the cell tower? You know, where the wall is now. How long has the wall been there? Any clue?
The tower was there the last time I’d looked, before being institutionalized. No hills or wall. We climbed the tower for fun after they unplugged it, until Bob, the neighborhood brat, fell to his death. Remember?
He literally fell past me on the tower, his head bouncing against each rung above and below me, and then that awful, muffled “splat” sound. They institutionalized me not long after. Said I was an accomplice to his death. The free attorney made a deal, though. Any record of blame being expunged in exchange for being a guinea pig: psychiatric drugs galore! That was the deal, how they made deals back then, to fill the so called “psychiatric rehabs” with a wide sample of “guest participants.” Such a great deal, I thought. And I learned to live with it, even like it after a few years.
Three meals a day; attractive staff who listened, smiled, and sometimes hugged; and no bills to pay. What was there not to like? Plenty. No privacy or independence, no sex other than in your head, and being stalked by the hallucinations of lunatics. But, like I said, I learned to live with it, including the intrusive, involuntary shit they did to us in the name of mental health science. They were copying our brains and pasting them into AI bots, or trying to anyway.
I know, sounds like a paranoid delusion of some kind, but it is not that, they were doing this crap. The courts, judges, prosecutors and defenders colluding under the thin guise of rehabilitation, but pocketing a hefty living from trafficking human experiments: copying and pasting brain activity from human to robot, and vice versa. But, they don’t need us anymore. They have the web, where others have been living virtually for the past 50 years, exposing every nuance of our humanity, like a guide to being human for the robots and their makers.
Hope this letter finds you well, Jack. Although, it will likely remain hostage to this journal app. $4.72 won’t buy me a printer, phone service, or your address. Wish we’d stayed in touch, somehow.
Talk again later,
Isaac
© 2023 David M. Rubin. All rights reserved.
Note: Invisible Cities is a novel written by Italo Calvino. A poetic exploration of the imaginary cities encountered by the narrator—a fictionalized version of Marco Polo.
Notes from David 