“Hey Donald, Come check this out.”
Donald groans annoyed, and instead brushes at the crumbs of waxy chocolate that fell from the cheap swiss-roll now sitting as sludge in his tummy.
The other engineer, Harrison Feynman, nephew and nepotism hire- as a favor to a great man’s daughter- has spent countless hours running on a treadmill- for no other reason, it seems, then for the ability to bound over to Donald Hinesberger. He thrusts a piece of industrial printer paper, covered in a pixel art, under his nose.
And in so doing, he knocks over a cup with an inch of three-hour old coffee sitting in the bottom.
“Godammit!” Donald yells catching most of it with a wad of napkins. “Harrison! What the fuck dude, I thought you were calibrating The Brain. No, you’re what? Making funny pictures again?”It’s the Austrian accent the makes it funny and somehow fussier.
As he yells, a chocolate stained speck of spit flies from his mouth, where it lands, is anyone’s guess. He decides to do a scrub down after he’s done for the day.
“Thanks for sharing,” Harrison coughs, wiping at his mouth and where he guesses the speck to have gone, “This came from The Brain?”
The answer shocks Donald, and he stares at what he can easily see is a colorful scene set overlooking the Black Forest of Germany. The sun sets. He imagines, once long ago, wolves howling and families tightening the knots on their doors. Then the monstrosity comes into focus, and Donald’s descended testicles shoot up into his body.
“The brain did this?” he yelps as it dawns on him the implications. This was a true mathematical representation of a moment in time, yet to come. A moment the very thing who spat it out was made to predict.
“yes.”
“Do you know what this means?”
“We invented some kind of AI artist?”
“No dick head. It’s coming,” Donald whispers, terror striking him deep in the heart.
“What? What’s coming?” Harrison replies, voice climbing higher with each word.
“Never mind, get the president’s office on the phone, now.”
Stories 