Death, the Devil, and the Goldfish (7 page)

Jeremiah the goldfish swam around in his glass fish bowl in his little, uptown London apartment. Due to his three-second memory span, he found it very easy to entertain himself. He would swim across his bowl and see a castle.

"Oh, a castle," he would say to himself. He would swim around the bowl, come back to the same castle and say, "Oh, a castle!"

He could entertain himself like that for hours at a time, sometimes days. Things had been increasingly difficult for him lately, though. Strange thoughts and pictures would pop into his head at random times throughout the day or night, even when he slept. He would forget those three seconds later, but it would appear that he had been receiving premonitions. Not that he knew what a premonition was, and even if he did, he wouldn't remember it after three seconds anyway.

He tried making notes of them, using the little coloured rocks at the bottom of his bowl, but he was never quick enough to get whole words out before he forgot them. So all he ended up with were a few letters that didn't make sense to him. But what he found, although he couldn't remember finding them, was that he could take these thoughts that popped into his head and throw them out of his head, out of his bowl, and send them hurtling out of the apartment.

Sometimes he could even direct the thoughts at people. But after he'd sent the thoughts or pictures out of his head, he would forget that he ever received them and he never really knew who he sent them to, anyway.

"Oh, that's strange, there's a castle here," said Jeremiah.

All this started about two years ago and had been steadily increasing until he was at the point where he would get frustrated. But then he would forget being frustrated and everything would be fine again.

"Oh, a castle," Jeremiah said to no one in particular.

Jiffy's newspaper stand existed when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, or at least that's what he told the kids who tried to steal candy from his little shack on the corner of Marylebone Road and Albany Street, next to Regent's Park. Whether the statement was true or not is a secret that probably died out with the dinosaurs.

"And I'll still be here when they come back an'all," he would shout as the children ran away.

Jiffy retired at the age of sixty-five and lasted all of two hours as a retiree before returning to work, claiming that living with his wife was a hell of a lot more stressful than selling papers from the crack of dawn to the dead of night.

When Nigel was fresh on the force, he was called out to Jiffy's newsstand twice a week due to constant reports of candy theft and dirty little buggers nickin' his walking stick when he wasn't looking. Nigel and Jiffy became fast friends, and even when the thefts were finally alleviated, Jiffy would still call twice a week so that Nigel would bring him a coffee and they could chat for a while about this or that.

Jiffy, an elderly man who despised youth, refused to admit that he had ever been that young and foolish. He often tried convincing people willing to listen that he was born, had been a toddler, then skipped the teenage and young adult years to mature into the five-foot-three-inch old codger he was today.

Nigel had come to see Jiffy as someone who was always up-to-date with the news, a streetwise gentleman who had seen the best of times and the worst of times and couldn't give a crap either way.

Jiffy had come to see Nigel as a friendly copper who brought him coffee.

Coffee was exactly what Nigel was on his way to pick up when he began to notice a slight change in the demeanor of London's people on this dreary, almost drizzly, morning. The homeless people weren't walking around muttering to themselves as they normally did. The average Londoners walked around with their heads down, not making eye contact with anyone and trying very hard to pretend that the world around them didn't exist. Today, everyone travelled around in excited little groups. People were actually talking to each other, which was practically unheard of in parts of southern England. The world around Nigel had changed, and he wanted to know why. He stopped in the little hippy-run coffee stall in the centre of Regent’s Park and bought himself a coffee and one for Jiffy. If something funny were going on with the world, then Jiffy would know about it.

Nigel found the newsstand in the usual spot and Jiffy happily accepting money from people as they bought the morning newspaper. The difference today was the abundance of people buying papers and staring wildly at the front cover, pointing and exclaiming.

"Amazing isn't it? Who would've thou—"

"—always knew this would happen—"

"—bloody weather—"

"—yaknow, my aunt Ettie passed away last year, I'm thinking of digging her up just to make sure because if all this—"

"—act of God—"

"—nervous ducks, I heard—"

"Nigel!" exclaimed Jiffy.

Nigel stopped his eavesdropping and handed Jiffy his coffee with a smile.

"Aw, thanks, lad, couldn't half use it today with business what it is an'all."

"What is all this, Jiffy? I must be out of the loop," said Nigel, feeling a little left out.

Jiffy gave Nigel the kind of look that only the old can give to the young, as if everything they said is completely ridiculous.

"Well, it's the news, innit? The worldwide phenonem-phemoneon—thing."

Nigel shook his head. "I'm not with you."

Jiffy leaned heavily on his walking stick and snatched a newspaper from a surprised-looking man about to purchase it. He stuck the front page in Nigel's face and waved it about a little for emphasis. The headline in large black print stared back at Nigel: The Dead Live!

All other news for the day seemed inconsequential due to the severe outbreak of not dying. Nigel skimmed the newspaper while Jiffy spilled his coffee and swore as only old people could. He finally got bored with verbally abusing his own customers and turned his attention back to Nigel.

"Are you going to buy that paper or what?"

"Sorry, Jiff, this is all new to me. Fascinating, isn't it?"

"You youngins’ always walking around with your bloody eyes closed, I suppose you were out on the pull all night?" asked Jiffy, leaning toward what he hoped would be an answer that would help him live vicariously, but contentedly through the rest of the day.

Nigel handed the paper back to him. "Actually, I was hanging upside down off a building this morning."

Jiffy shook his head and made a
tsk-
ingsound that sounded more like a pigeon pooping.

"You kids today with your new fads, hanging off buildings upside down, I ask ya! In my day, there was none of that, we were respectable folk back then, hard working, too. I walked myself to school 'cause there were no buses, not like today. It was a long walk an'all, through the snow in winter, through the rain in summer, uphill, both ways. Don't know how good you've got it, you lot. Ungrateful little—"

"Jiffy?"

"What?"

"Do you really think the dead aren't dying?"

"Maybe. No one's dropped dead at the newsstand yet, but it's still early."

"Has any of the news shed light on any possibilities?"

Jiffy rubbed his chin as his sixty-nine-year-old brain quickly recounted all the news he'd read that morning.

"Seems all there is are possibilities, and theories, lots of theories. It's probably some big joke. Some bugger probably got drunk in a pub, argued with a lamppost, and started the whole thing." Jiffy chortled at his own reckoning, which also, for some odd reason, sounded more like a pigeon pooping.

As close to the truth as Jiffy was, Nigel felt none the wiser and decided he should get on with the day, and bid farewell to his old friend, who again advised him, in his own idiom, that hanging off buildings was just plain stupid. Nigel managed to leave before Jiffy launched into another rant bashing the teenagers of today to anyone who would listen.

Dead not dying
.
Things like this just didn't happen very often
. Occasionally, strange things would happen in London's West End, but it often just turned out to be a bunch of theatre actors trying to express themselves and certainly never anything of this magnitude. There was, after all, still the case of Mrs. Jones' cat to take care of, and all this dead people not staying dead business wasn't going to disappear anytime soon.

Nigel's intelligent mind chose that point to spring to life, as it often did. He quickly worked over the possible reactions, reasons, and consequences of such events. But then he abruptly stopped himself as he decided it wasn't worth the effort quite yet. He might as well get this whole possessed cat thing out of the way first. Figuring out the world's problems was one thing, but a possessed cat was something else entirely.

First things first
.

Celina sat on the kitchen counter and finished off another tub of low fat yogurt. She had grown bored of trying to get out and so she decided to break into the kitchen, something that proved a heck of a lot easier than trying to get through the security doors. Celina's anger flared when the kitchen door refused to open when she simply turned the knob, and it took a bit of encouragement and some light pummeling with a heavy chair to convince it otherwise. She persevered, much to the desecration of the kitchen door, and found herself rewarded with the yogurt that was her primary reason for coming to the lunchroom in the first place.

Her cell phone chirped to life as it sat in the garbage bin in the lunchroom. Celina ignored the incessant beep. Chances were the call was probably just the video store again and she wasn't of a mind to talk to them. Instead, Celina let her thoughts race back a couple of years, stumbling here and there over memories of a failed romance and several calls from her mother complaining about her lack of grandkids, before it ground to a halt at the memory she was looking for.

Artificial intelligence seemed so remarkable and so full of possibilities when the research began, but now it all seemed so confusing and dangerous. Artificial intelligence was exactly how it sounded, an artificial mind that wasn’t actually alive. It was fake. False. Synthetic. Non-natural. Simulated. Not real.

The first attempt to create AI began with computers. Every household computer had its own AI to a point. It sensed when a virus was present and it could obey commands. But the command part was where the fatal flaw laid; it needed an action to produce a reaction. There was no way a computer would turn itself on just for the hell of it.

Majestic Technologies, in order for the Santa Claus Project to work, needed to go one step further. Celina and her team tried to produce a computerized brain that could operate independently and make its own decisions. The brain would need a host, so they built a host. A small host, just in case it got out of control. No point in creating a host that resembled a ten-foot gorilla and then have it go berserk, killing thousands. And so the world's first fully functional AI unit was born in the form of
Betsy the Hamster
.

Betsy the Hamster blinked to life at 7:30 a.m. on March 7, 2009. A remarkable success; Betsy instantly began to walk around. She looked up at her creators and blinked a few times. Then she awed the scientists as she began to talk. Simple stuff at first; she recited the alphabet, and then numbers. She identified colours. She went on to recite poetry; she hummed a few bars of Beethoven’s Fifth. She delineated the uses of quantum mechanics in relation to light speed and navigational trigonometry. She moved on to define life on planet Earth and started to explain the reason that all the ducks in the near future would begin to suffer from severe nervousness.

At 7:33 a.m. on March 7, 2009 Betsy the Hamster exploded into several thousands of small pieces. About ten minutes later, the disappointed scientific team figured out why Betsy had blown herself to bits. There wasn't a computer on Earth that could hold all the information of the world and process new information at the same time. The several thousand small pieces of Betsy the Hamster agreed and proved the point.

The Majestic Technologies robotics team admitted that they might have been aiming a little too high for their first try. Unfortunately, eccentric billionaires demanded results of their highly paid research teams, and when Neville peered into the plastic container that once held mayonnaise and was now the new home of Betsy the Hamster's remains, he simply snorted and told everyone to do better. Except for Celina, whom he winked at on the way out.