"Hugs and kisses, Mommy! Time to get up!"
The digital echo of Little Prince, who had once occupied the bedroom down the hall, issued gently from the alarm clock, an old-fashioned model that was less versatile and more comfortingly predictable than digital assistant on the dresser. A white cat stirred in the chair next to the dresser, looking mildly annoyed.
"Hugs and kisses, Mommy! Time to get up!" the clock said nine minutes later.
When another nine minutes had passed with no response from the empty bed, the little voice changed tactics. This last resort always got Mommy moving: "Alexa! Tell Mommy: What's new?"
"It's seven-eighteen a.m. on August 4," the black tube responded with amiable femininity. "Here's your flash briefing..."
Into the bedroom trotted a small calico beagle, always eager for human sounds, and always disappointed when Little Prince, whose voice warmed her, was nowhere to be found.
"From NPR News: there is no news today. From AP Top News: there is no news today. From Reuters: there is no news today. From the Centers for Disease Control Crisis Management Service: Pandemic statistics update - no new deaths have been reported in the continental United States this week. Ninety-six thousand, eight hundred and four deaths were reported on June 26. The total number of confirmed deaths nationwide is two hundred eighty-nine million, six hundred and twenty-five thousand, three hundred and sixty-six, as of June 26. The total number of confirmed deaths worldwide is six billion, seven hundred and ten million, five hundred and fifty-three thousand, eight hundred and sixty-two, as of June 26. Today's Forecast: sunny and clear with a high of one hundred twelve degrees and a low of ninety-one degrees. That's all for your flash briefing."
The beagle listened dutifully with head cocked, reassured by the cheerful, disembodied voice.
Rude orange beams of morning seeped through the bedroom blinds, tossing shadows across the floor as the leap of the cat from chair to floor brought the vanity to life. As he often did, the cat jumped onto the vanity and surveyed himself in the glowing mirror, which dutifully provided him with several reflections of hairstyling and makeup options. The beagle, realizing no more voices would be heard, turned and padded out the door and down the stairs.
The air conditioning sighed back to life as the beagle trotted into the kitchen, seeking breakfast. Her water bowl was reliably full; her food dish was inexplicably empty.
This had never happened before.
She looked around, uncertain. The cat had followed her down and proceeded to her own meal, diving in.
She scanned the kitchen in vain for Mommy or Little Prince, distantly aware that they would not appear. By the time it occurred to her to eat some of the cat's food, the cat had finished, prancing away absently. The kitchen, sensing his departure and the emptiness of the two dishes, dutifully reset the dispenser timer.
Hunger nagged at the beagle. She barked.
The homebot heard the call and reanimated, unplugging itself and proceeding to the kitchen a moment later. It quickly checklisted the scene and came up empty. Machine and beagle stared at one another for a long moment, until the latter barked again, demanding food.
With nothing apparent in the scene to account for the dog's displeasure, the homebot searched the kitchen records, and immediately noted that the animal's dish had not been replenished overnight, as it should have been. A rapid scan of the dispenser revealed it to be empty.
The homebot turned and left the kitchen, heading across the living room to the front door.
A large cardboard box sat in the shade of the porch, one of its sides torn away and the packages within scavenged thoroughly. The beagle inched out into the heat, which it did not enjoy, sniffing the odors of crumbs and paper. She stared at an intact face of the box, black with a curved orange line, distantly remembering that food did indeed come from such places.
But something else had gotten to it first.
The homebot scanned the label on the box and realized it had been delivered by drone while it had been recharging - a rare occurrence, a coincidence: normally it would have collected the delivery and stocked its contents upon arrival. This pillaging of the food within by a stray animal was, in fact, a first.
The homebot bluetoothed the news to the kitchen, which in turn informed Alexa, which ordered replacement dog food.
The beagle was oblivious to all of this, and wondered what to do next.
As if answering, another package-bearing drone drifted into the sky just above, bound for a house down the street. Braving the still-tolerable morning heat, the beagle left the safe shadow of the porch and trotted into the hot sunlight, eyes on the drone.
By the time the beagle caught up, the drone had deposited its payload on a neighbor's stoop and departed. The dog sniffed the box, which bore the same black-and-orange markings, and pawed it in frustration. If there was food within, it was undetectable - and inaccessible.
She jumped onto a porch chair and peered into the house through a window. There was no motion or sound. A gray woman lay completely motionless on a sofa.
The beagle hopped off the porch as the front door opened and a homebot recovered the package, retreating quickly.
Trotting down the lane, the beagle surveyed each house as it passed, hoping for a sign of a human or a drone or another animal. She was startled by a sudden spray of water droplets beside her as a sprinkler system surged to life, striving in vain to revive brown grass. Lawn mowers hadn't deployed in weeks, as no grass in the neighborhood had actually increased in length.
Pausing at an intersection with another street, the beagle scanned the neighborhood. At the end of the new street -
- a human!
She bounded down the center of the lane, suddenly indifferent to the heat, toward a figure on a bench next to the main road.
As she approached, she slowed, picking up a terrible scent. Cautiously, she moved toward the still figure. Dry. Bug-infested.
There was a tiny tremor in the ground, then a sturdy whisper from behind. Turning, she saw a mighty vehicle rolling straight toward her. She jumped back as it slowed and halted in front of her, sensing her, almost grateful to pause upon detecting her movement.
Sensing no motion on the bench, day after day after day, it normally cruised on by. Today, it opened its doors in welcome.
"Sixty-one X," it pleasantly announced. "Outer loop, west; airport."
The beagle stared, transfixed. The bus waited patiently.
There was no food behind; there might be food within. Slowly, trembling, the beagle placed a foot on the step in the bus doorway; then another, and up a step, and -
Behind her, the doors slid shut, and she lurched to the side as the bus began to roll.
"Please take a seat," the bus instructed. The beagle scampered to the back of the aisle, frightened, finally jumping onto the rear-most seat and pushing into the corner.
After a moment the calm motion of the bus ceased to be terrifying and even became soothing, and the beagle peeked out the window.
Beyond was the park, familiar in terrain and shape, differing only in the browns that now stained the greens in her memory. As it slipped rapidly past, she touched the window with a paw, longing to jump out and run up the knoll above the jungle gym as she and Little Prince once had.
The bus took a turn, and then another, then began to move much faster. A hypnotic procession of images flashed in the beagle's eyes: cars abandoned by the roadside; an occasional bus like this one, passing from the other direction. Occasionally the bus spoke to her, announcing a stop; but she remained silent, and the bus passed them by.
And then, beyond this road, another one high above - a bigger road, with two large trucks moving at far greater speed. Driverless, oblivious, laden with cargo ordered by machines fed numbers by warehouses, restocking inventories slowly decaying under routine, automated orders, goods unconsumed at their final destinations. Smart city. Intelligent supply chain. Sterile echoes of extinct expertise.
And preceded, digital logs would reveal, by emergency shipments of useless refrigerated vaccine launched in vain, now gone stagnant and unclaimed in sweltering heat.
As the road curved away from the morning sun, a very large rectangular building came into the beagle's view, an orange squiggle on its side - a squiggle matching the one on the box on the porch.
Food!
Within the warehouse, the home digital assistant's order was received and processed. A robot was dispatched by the warehouse to fetch the appropriate package from the appropriate shelf and to deliver it to Handling, where it was boxed and stamped and debited from inventory. The warehouse issued a launch order to a drone, generating and handing off a flight plan...
The huge building vanished as quickly as it emerged as the bus rolled down the parkway. It finally decelerated as it approached a cluster of smaller buildings.
"Hospital," it announced, rolling into a driveway but not quite stopping.
The beagle stared out at the blackened skeleton of the main building, charred and disfigured and damning in its narrative. On the ground surrounding it lay unmoving bodies dressed in uniforms, police and national guard, some containing bullets, some displaying blunt trauma. Dried husks, worm-ridden.
Just beyond the hospital a billboard glowed, flashing CDC alerts and instructions.
Hearing no requests and sensing no waiting passengers, the bus rolled out of the driveway and accelerated again.
The beagle curled into the seat, grateful for the cool of the air in the bus, and distantly recalled the occasional drive in the family car with Little Prince and Mommy - leaning against Little Prince in the back seat, feeling his arm around her, soothed by the rhythm of the car. The memory distracted her from the pangs in her belly, which weren't yet serious but which were disturbingly unfamiliar.
A terrible leviathan roar shook the bus and she bolted upright in her seat, looking this way and that, glancing out the window just in time to see the sky consumed by a mighty and frightening shape with wings, screaming down and across her view.
"Airport," announced the bus as it decelerated onto a ramp.
The great airbeast quickly passed from view, but she continued to hear it as it landed. Hers were the only ears that could, apart from whatever wildlife inhabited the terminal and the land around the airfield; the computer piloting the plane, and the robots primed to unload it listened in their own way.
Its cargo had been likewise gathered by machines - food planned by machines, grown and harvested by machines, processed and packaged by machines, then loaded onto trucks by machines and taken to a previous airport by machines and loaded onto the plane by machines. More digital logistics, machines learning, infinite loops of frugal analytics. As the ritual unwound, it would proceed to the huge building with the orange squiggle, to eventually sit on the porch of some family whose orders were routine and fixed.
One such plane had carried the mutation, in all its terrible purity, indiscriminate in its ravages and impervious to the most desperate efforts of immunologists.
Beyond the beagle's view, simple wi-fi guided an even mightier vessel into dock from the ocean beyond as an even greater army of robotic workers were readied to assist in emptying it. A digital manager aboard the ship instructed the hundreds of automobiles within to prepare to disembark, feeding personal instructions to each. Trucks stood by to load them and disburse to dealerships along the coast. Mashups of people behaviors, now free of aspiration, importance, or anything that could truly be called intelligence.
This, too, had been a path traveled by the mutation, when ships still carried people.
A ramp took the bus back onto the outer loop, curving gently eastward, and the beagle settled back into her hunger.
A nagging ray of sun stung her eyes and she turned to face the other side of the bus, just as it once again passed the large squiggle building. She hopped from her seat, over the aisle into the seat on the other side, pressing against the window as it passed.
Food...
Securing the small box with the dog food within, the drone acknowledged its orders and launched, tapping into the enterprise navigational network and proceeding to its cruising altitude.
A fast, large truck intervened, interrupting her view, and she settled down once again.
She was beginning to drift off, frustrated and hungry, when the bus announced another stop. Looking out the window, she saw the park - her park! - and let out a joyful yelp.
Hearing her, the bus slowed to a stop.
"Thank you," it said, opening the doors for her. "Watch your step!"
Leaping from the bus, she ran over the sidewalk into the brown field beyond as the bus doors pulled shut and the lumbering vehicle rolled away. She ran under the trees and through the jungle gym and up the knoll, not yet realizing that it was now hotter than it had been before, and in her current state, it was only a few moments before she felt sick.
She paused in the relative cool of shadow beneath a large tree.
From her left came a low growl. A dozen feet away she saw a larger dog, black and skeleton-bony, his fat and family long since gone. She had no way of knowing it was the thief who had plundered her porch stock, and he had no way of knowing he was the cause of her famishment.
He grinned at her with menace. Fright overtook her and she bolted, instinctively veering toward home along the route she had so often taken with her family. The black dog gave chase, but only enough to ensure her continued flight. He then returned to his scavenging.
Slowing under the burden of heat, she didn't notice the drone above, which passed her as it descended toward the lot where home stood.
The drone landed neatly on the porch, releasing its consignment with a quick alert to Alexa within, who dispatched the homebot to collect it.
When she finally saw the house, she was too weary and sick to run. She just walked tiredly across the yard and up the steps into the shadows of the porch, mustering a bark barely loud enough to prompt the door to open.
Once inside the cool air of home, she lay down in the foyer, sweating, breathing heavily. The cat stared at her with contempt from his perch atop the back of the living room sofa.
She and the cat. Masters of the house, sacred trusts of the machines that persevered. The last heirs of the dynasty of mind. The remains of a family.
Her capacity for wonder in pondering where she had been and what she had seen, slight as it was, went far beyond whatever happened within Alexa and the homebot and the AI in the bus and the plane and the ship and the squiggle building and all the other decision-makers with which they huddled - none of whom, performing the labors of empire, possessed any capacity for wonder at all.
She could experience the porch and the heat and the park and the journey and the sky - experience them in a manner not so different than the way Little Prince and Mommy had. But the machines could only observe them in the digital mosaics that enveloped her, the only things separating her from her feral cousin in the park. Her dark kinsman was unconcerned with the act of pondering, more intent on just surviving; and as she heard kibble flooding into her dish in the kitchen and then gratefully lapped cold water before digging into it, something bordering on awareness that she possessed the luxury of reflection flickered through her simple mind. It dismissed her dark cousin, unmotivated to consider which of them had a greater purpose. She would never know what purpose was, or meaning - but she remained behind to impart it.
All the meaning and purpose to be found in her world – all the meaning and purpose left in all the world, now – was in the warm little voice she heard each morning.
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