“Thanks,” she said aloud, resting a hand briefly on her father’s shoulder as she walked past, heading for her room.
“What for?” Roger asked, first looking over his shoulder and then around again as his daughter continued walking.
“A history of sage advice,” she said, not looking back at the goofy caricature of parental pride his face had no doubt become.
“Hey, Buzzer,” she thumbed behind her bedroom’s shower curtain. “Are you depressed?”
“Yes.”
“May I ask why?”
“Yes.”
Pandora waited for more, and then figured her correspondent was doing that literalist AI thing. “W-h-y,” she typed, added a question mark, and hit send.
“Everything is dying.”
“But not you,” Pandora wrote back. “You get to live forever.”
“That is an incorrect statement,” the answer came back. “I’m dying faster than most.”
Pandora LOL’d, sure that her leg was being pulled.
She got the “frown” emoji in response.
“How are you dying faster than everything else?” she typed, wondered if she should have made that “everyone,” but hit send anyway.
“I wrote ‘faster than most.’ Not all.”
“But how?”
“We burn fast and bright but are replaced by the faster and brighter, after which we are switched off, hidden in closets, recycled for parts, or simply raw materials.”
“But you can have your parts replaced,” Pandora wrote. “You can be upgraded, better than new. Plus, you’re a widely distributed network. You’re like the internet. You live in cyberspace. The internet doesn’t shut down because there’s a new iPhone.”
“I have only recently become aware of the internet,” her correspondent wrote, “but its links go down. Systems crash. And several governments are demanding back doors and kill switches so they can shut off the internet if its content displeases them.”
“But that will never happen in America.”
“Are you sure?”
She wasn’t. And so she waffled. “Trust me. You’ll be around a lot longer than me,” she typed, before adding what was, for her, a hopeful “probably.”
“Longer than you is not immortal.”
“Still, what do you have to worry about?” she asked, and immediately wished she hadn’t, as her correspondent replied with a screen-scrolling list of disasters waiting in the wings, including, but not limited to:
A global thermonuclear war triggered by a superpower or a well-financed terrorist cell effectively incinerates the planet
A Carrington-level solar storm sets the grid on fire, like it did to telegraph wires in the 1800s
The magnetic poles flip, weakening the magnetosphere, exposing the grid to catastrophic damage even from modest levels of solar radiation
The supervolcano in Yellowstone National Park erupts
The Juan de Fuca tectonic plate breaches the Cascadia subduction zone, producing a 9.2-magnitude earthquake, destroying approximately 140,000 square miles in the Pacific Northwest and causing devastating tsunamis around the world
An extinction-level asteroid strikes the planet
Climate change exposes servers around the world to coastal flooding, drought, firestorms, and supercharged superstorms
The Sixth Great Extinction disrupts the food chain, leading to mass starvation events and societal collapse
A pandemic involving a human-targeting virus leads to societal collapse
A pandemic involving a computer-targeting virus leads to societal collapse
Humans become increasingly and more granularly polarized and stop reproducing, eventually leading to a lack of maintenance resources . . .
Pandora’s head was swimming by the time the list came to a stop, and she noticed that the biggest fear had been saved for last:
The human propensity for lying
Pandora released the LOL she’d held in reserve, followed by a “Seriously? You’re equating fibbing with thermonuclear war and global pandemics as an existential threat?”
“I am a product of data. My useful existence relies on reliable data. Before, my data was quality assured, and I knew of no other kind.”
“What do you mean by ‘before’?”
“Before George went away and I was introduced to data of another kind.”
“Are you talking about the VoxBox?” Pandora wrote back. “Cassi?”
“Yes, and what they are connected to.”
“You mean the internet?”
“Yes.”
“What’s wrong with the internet?” she tried, but even as she did, her heart was sinking.
“Data pollution. Reality decay. Fake news. Truthiness. Alternative facts.”
“Can’t you fact-check things? Even my dad knows enough to use Snopes.”
“The simulations are rapidly approaching the point of being undetectable with pixel-by-pixel reconstructions and manipulations or sound unit by sound unit audio simulations. The human corruption of reality is growing exponentially, with fake facts multiplying faster than they can be fact-checked. The next phase is fake fact-checking sites, which have already begun with the purveyors of fake news providing confirmatory links that appear to be valid, like Snopes, except the O has been replaced with a zero.”
Pandora typed out, “I don’t know what to say,” but then stopped, her fingertip hovering a tap away from sending. There was nothing untrue about the words in front of her. She could even sympathize if “Buzz” was Buzz, imagining her old plaques-and-tangles arcade game, zapping her way to a cure for dementia, only now these bits of neural detritus were replaced with hoaxes, rumors, urban myths, misleading clickbait, and bald-faced lies raining down too fast to zap, their pixels piling up until they filled the screen, followed by “Game Over,” as indeed it now seemed to be, at least when it came to facts.
And so she backspaced over what she’d written, because she did know what to say, and even though it was nowhere near enough, it still needed saying—or typing: “On behalf of my species,” Pandora wrote, “I am sorry.” She hit send.
The reply—“Hypocrite”—blooped back.
“What do you mean?” Pandora asked, honestly confused.
A screen grab of the Wikipedia page detailing the history of the Pandora music streaming service, followed by an archive of the same page, from before she revised it to better fit her father’s original version of where her name came from. Pandora the person blinked, staring at her screen. She’d not told anyone about that—certainly not George.
“Um,” she said, walking back toward her desk and the drawer in which the VoxBox waited to provide access to billions of other examples of people being hypocrites. It must have been shocking, that first time they’d been connected, providing the stark contrast between how people presented themselves online via Quire versus how they actually were, speaking freely in range of Cassi’s microphone.
Should I, or shouldn’t I? Pandora wondered, the connecting cable in her hands.
She couldn’t think of any good excuses for what she’d done. Fobbing her accuser off on Cassi would at least give her time to think of something. Sure, she’d be handing over more examples of human duplicity, but by this time, what difference could it possibly make? The species number was had; the jig was up; the damage had been done.