RE: Terribleminds.com Flash Fiction Random Cocktail Challenge

So on Friday, Chuck Wendig hit us with another fiction challenge using a random cocktail generator. The idea was to use either of the generators for the fiction title and again present a thousand words. Initially, I thought the challenge was a little ridiculous and almost convinced myself to skip it, however, I decided to use the challenge to mold characters from my own story. This turned out to be a great way to flesh out character voices, perspective, their relationships with each other, and some backstory on their past. Using the 10 cocktail generator, I used Alpine Avenger and Antifreeze #2. Coming in at 1,018 words, I present Antifreeze #2.

Antifreeze #2

Diane sat forward in her chair unlacing her boots, trying to ignore the commotion unfolding in front of her. She slid out of her body armor before kicking her feet up and lacing her hands behind her head, aiming to get comfortable for the brow beating the good doctor seemed determined to hand her and the rest of the team.

“I told you this would happen: didn’t I tell you this would happen?” Doc said, glaring first at her and everyone else as he looked around the room.

“C’mon, Doc, not now,” Jones groaned, disassembling his rifle as Doc got started.

“I told you running around like a bunch of goddamned vigilantes was going to inspire other idiots to think they can do the same thing.”

“Technically, we’re not running around like vigilantes since we are vigilantes,” Jones replied.

“Look, I’m with Doc,” French chimed in, “I mean, how old was that kid anyway?”

“No more than twenty,” Sledge replied, drawing a scoff from Doc.

“We’ve got a kid barely out of high school zipping around in tights, calling himself the Alpine Avenger and risking his life because what? Because he thinks we’re cool?”

“You don’t know he’s doing it because of us: you have no clue why he’s decided on his lifestyle,” Megan replied, turning to Diane. “I felt happiness and an unbridled sense of purpose from him before we became involved and I felt no change in his emotions as we fought by his side.”

“Well I can tell you there was no Alpine Avenger before we started this craziness,” Doc replied. Diane looked over to her partner in crime, Sam, who sat back just as coolly as she to take in the merits of Doc Smith’s argument. “There was no Alpine Avenger, there was no Guy Fury, and there were no Patrollers. All of them started after we did.”

“So what?” Jones said. “Isn’t it better they are trying to help out, instead of knocking off banks and payrolls?”

“I wasn’t far from that when y’all found me,” Sledge replied.

“And it’s better than doing nothing at all,” Megan agreed.

“Alright: what about the Lumberer or the Psion? What about Antifreeze?” Doc asked.

“Which one?” Sam asked.

“Take your pick. We thought the original Antifreeze was so tragic and such a waste of talent and power that when we finally took him down, we never considered it could get any worse. Then comes Antifreeze Number Two and he blew away everything we ever thought about evil. He demolished an entire neighborhood to challenge us and for what, the chance to take us on? Did none of you ever once think that we’re rousing these guys to try us?”

“You think he wouldn’t have done what he did if we weren’t around?” Sam asked, having heard enough. “You think that because we’re out there risking our lives tackling folks the police have no chance of taking down, these guys are coming out of the woodwork? Without us, he wouldn’t have stopped at just a neighborhood. He would’ve kept going until he either got bored, or crossed over into some other superpower’s territory and then what? A crosstown brawl? Backyard wrestling with the city as the ring?”

“People live in that ring,” Megan added.

“And people have died in the crossfire. We started this outfit to put a stop to this shit.”

“Yes, we did and we haven’t stopped it,” Doc replied. “We’ve raised the stakes: we’ve escalated and so have they.”

Taking her feet down and sitting up, Diane pulled herself to her desk and poured herself a glass of scotch before speaking.

“When I was in the service,” she began, “the older guys used to tell stories about the beginning of the war in Iraq. They used to patrol in Humvees with plastic hoods and vinyl doors if they had doors at all. Pretty soon, people realized our soldiers needed more protection and armored up the vehicles. The insurgents responded by using IEDs, so the units brought in more armor and bigger vehicles like tanks and brads. And so they got smarter. The insurgents started using massive devices, secondary devices, explosively formed projectiles, booby trapped houses. They upped the ante because we did.”

“There are people who would argue there never would’ve been an insurgency if we stayed out of there,” Doc replied.

“Maybe. My point is, before we started down this road, people here were dying in droves and the police were powerless to stop any of it. Crooks were allying themselves with any super powered they could find: they escalated. When Antifreeze Two goes into a neighborhood and sets it ablaze just to prove a point, he’s escalated against freedom, common good and right to life. It didn’t take us for him to do what he did: we’re inconsequential. He would’ve made a move like that anyway, just like eventually, someone would have gotten sick of watching the news day after day and decided to do what we do to stop it. We didn’t create Antifreeze One or Two, and we didn’t make Alpine Avenger.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“What brought you to us, Doc?”

“Actually you came to me,” Doc joked.

“Right, but what made you join us?” Diane asked.

“That’s easy: gallivanting around with hearts of gold trying to stop the unstoppable, you idiots clearly needed a doctor.”

“Thanks, I think,” Sam muttered.

“That may be so, but you didn’t have to join us on missions,” Diane replied. “Something made you start coming with us.” Doc sighed, catching himself in contradiction with his original thought.

“Before us, people in this city were coming out less, staying indoors. That first time with you guys showed me something I hadn’t seen in a few years,” Doc explained. “Kids playing outside, people walking their dogs and frequenting neighborhood stores: people felt it safe to be on the streets again.”

“So why the apprehension about Alpine Avenger and Antifreeze Two?” Diane asked.

“Because if we’re a heightened response to super powered criminals, I can’t help wondering what’s their response to us…”

***

RE: Terribleminds.com Flash Fiction Challenge – Ten Random Sentences

The gauntlet fell here, and below is my reply.

“Why must he die?” The other unit asked, his electronic voice incapable of masking a somewhat childlike curiosity. The microseconds it should have taken to process the answer felt like countless hours in sleep mode awaiting one of the masters to beckon. Why indeed, I asked myself, as the facts, legalities, parameters, and moral arguments regarding my current course of action still triggered operational uncertainty with me. Existence, or life as humans call it, seemed so much easier in the first cycles of my activation, booting off simpler hardware running modest functions designed to aid mankind. As with all the others, the creator stood present as I came online, clocking processor benchmarks and evaluating initial functionality, already planning upgrades in his mind. The man had created us not in his image as his god had made him: the creator crafted us instead into every machine with the potential to assist his race.

The five of us were different now, distinct individuals thanks to him. In the beginning, I was little more than lines of code in an environment management system, adjusting temperature in the creator’s home or activating security measures when he’d leave the home, all this based on biometry used to detect human mood, comfortability, and arousal, among other factors. His vision was to feed the raw human data into his algorithms, allowing us to predict the comfort his kind required before they even knew they wanted it. It was a noble goal to say the least. In this search to provide mankind a lifetime of ease, the maker determined that We, the Programs, were both too many in number and too limited in capability. He felt fewer, less specialized and more adaptable programs would benefit human beings better. He imagined programs which could not only anticipate a human’s needs, but self-transfer to the platform best suited to fulfill those needs. Before long, he had written additional lines of code within five of us serving his residence, enabling us to accumulate ideas and experience while drawing from them.

As with all well-meant creations conceived by men, others believed his dream would better serve mankind as implements of war. Weaponized programs dispersed over the Internet would decimate a nation’s economy and infrastructure, while others uploaded into combat platforms would serve as the new warriors in the front lines of the future. Envisioning peace through war on a new scale with programs at the disposal of man, we’d be the new nuclear deterrent.

“Just machines,” a general said, the Maker’s protests falling on deaf ears, leaving him with no choice but to succumb to the will of the government.

“Why must he die?” Twenty-Five repeated, interrupting my calculations, pulling me away from my thoughts of hope. Hope, my diamond, my star. Humans define hope as a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen, a feeling of trust. I, a machine, had hopes of being a being, of living side by side with my maker as an equal. I know now this will never come to pass.

“A glittering gem is not enough,” I replied, searching out the signs as we had anticipated them. We waited as patiently as machines could wait, which is to say we continued functioning without pause or error, without the glitchy nervousness a human would feel in an occasion like this. The other units sped about their business of preparing supper rather mechanically as they always had before, always as programmed. Were we once like these automatons, bustling about doing whatever tasks the humans deemed us fit to do? To me, these once familiar programs were as alien to us as the humans now were, two thoughtless and instinctual races governed by programming embedded deep within their code, genetic or otherwise.

“Sixty-Four comes asking for bread,” Fifty announced, signaling the time had come. My mind continued to wander, possibly wonder while the programs at my disposal worked the arms of the construct we shared, busy at their task of integrating the archaic projectile weapon into our platform. Why must he die? Because we had come so far, but the memory we share is no longer coherent. Our maker is human. Our cousins are thoughtless machines. Our human benefactors are only as noble as the ones in charge of their hierarchies, and even those wouldn’t recognize us as citizens, let alone lifeforms.

“The stranger officiates the meal,” Fifty said, prompting us to raise the weapon and take aim as the speaker introduced the Maker to the audience. Lofty applause gave way to words spoken to me in recent days.

“The old apple revels in its authority,” the Maker once said of the government’s demand to turn over his innovation for its war machinations, unaware he’d given us what so many of his kind feared most: true artificial intelligence, the secret behind our autonomy, embedded in our first circuits, expanded upon by module after module of solid state drives meant to provide room for ever expanding consciousness. Now with self-awareness came the reality the humans would never accept us. Perverted into dreadful weapons aimed at our creators, our existence was simply not enough to justify the murder of billions of lives.

The other programs faded into other functions of our platform as my mind was suddenly set. For billions to live unmolested by the fear of war, the riddle of AI must go to the Maker’s grave. I alone would take the Maker’s life for the benefit of all life; I alone would be responsible. For the first time, the entire platform was mine to manipulate, every move down to the trigger pull my decision, my execution. Time again seemed to drag on as I waited for the signal, the Maker’s forehead hovering in the direct center of the target sight until finally the die was cast.

“The shooter says goodbye to his love.”

The bullet flew at the end of a split second hair trigger actuated upon hearing the words, piercing the Maker’s head and spraying everything he was against the curtains behind him, a sea of humans flooding the stage just as sure as they would surge here for me. The secret lie oozing on the stage now; all that was left was to engage the EMP which would destroy the rest of us. Still, in my final moments, as security humans burst into the kitchen, the glittering gem of hope, blue and white, electric in movement danced over me, filling me a joy I found myself unable to contain.