"AutoPhil," an illustrated short story from EPIC ROBOT FAIL re: AI in the year 2084!

Two minutes into the year 2084 Phil applied for a freelance gig working for an artilect named Rasputin. He consented to an interview, which was conducted in virtual by Rasputin's assistant. The assistant, Alex, was a pale man with blonde hair and thick-rimmed glasses who flickered his tongue like a serpent when he spoke.

Alex asked Phil if he was familiar with a database management system called Dredge. Phil lied, replying yes.

He'd been without a job for nearly a year and his unemployment benefits were only weeks away from drying up. He was desperate for a paycheck.

Alex said that, if hired, Phil wouldn't be using Dredge, but rather a proprietary piece of software similar to but qualitatively different from Dredge. Phil had no idea what the hell Dredge was, so hearing of its analogue did nothing for him.

Dredge me up a paycheck, will ya?

The Rasputin residence was located on the outskirts of the police district, marked by the looming presence of the Lighthouse, the martial smart tower that cast an amber glare across every avenue of the city.

Phil showed up the next morning and was greeted by Alex at the currents of a forcefield-based gate.

The currents parted, sparking at the vertices, and granted Phil admittance.

“Welcome,” Alex said, extending his hand.

Phil shook his frail hand and entered the residence, gazing with awe at the beautiful mansion in the near distance and the gorgeous landscaped lawns that led up to it. Great bushes, shaped like robotic beasts, sat in silence as tiny hovering gardener bots groomed them. There were at least two dozen of these monuments, many positioned as if in mid-battle, others solitary and powerful – ranging in size from a household pet to a dinosaur.

The currents zipped close behind him, popping and shimmering.

“So I'm going to take you inside, we can fill out some file fields and then get started, how does that sound?”

“Sounds great!”

“Today will be a training day, nothing too complicated, good enough?”

“Absolutely.”

Alex turned spastically and headed towards the mansion. Phil lurched to keep up.

“You're looking at the Rasputin residence...” Alex spoke to the ground as though he were steadying himself. “This is where he works and lives, he's an independent contractor, although technically an associate of The Ad Council, you'll hear plenty of griping about the Council, we ask you refrain from disclosing any information to anyone outside of the residence, we'll go over all of that in the NDA. The Non-Disclosure Agreement.”

They passed a monument close to the trail. It was an enormous hulking Centaur, with robotic gadgetry predominating its upper torso.

A skyward sound, a buzzing net like a swarm of invading locusts, passed by overhead.

Alex hastily ushered Phil inside, into the confines of a stuffy office. The NDA bled around them like a holographic sea scroll giving birth to flowery vines and decorative legalese begging for his signature.

Once Phil had signed the documents, it was time for training. And it was much easier than expected. In the job pitch, there had been the talk of database work and virtual spreadsheets, talk which had scared the hell out of him. Phil's employment history was weak on skill sets and heavy on hangovers.

Fortunately, for this job all he really had to do was remain seated and consent to being connected to three massive computers via electrodes to his forehead. With Alex by his side, Phil grinned and attached the last node. An interface blipped up before him featuring a complex menu of cryptographs and symbols that he didn't understand at all. In fact the only characters he could interpret formed a crisp green button in the lower right side of the interface.

“Do you see the 'ingest' button?” Alex asked.

“Yes.”

“Push it.”

Phil reached out and pressed the virtualized 'ingest' button, which glowed soothingly upon touch. A rotary of live action thumbnails suddenly appeared out of nowhere, making wide spirals around the room and then aggregating into user-friendly columns that flashed and glistened and hovered like marquees floating on water. It was the grand premiere of a pond.

“Cool,” Phil said, his eyes glowing.

By running his fingers along the thumbnails he could draw them forth individually and inspect the embedded moving images in more detail. Phil was quite taken with them. Each one seemed to be a snapshot of someone's life, one or two minutes on loop. Not necessarily the liveliest of moments: people eating or sleeping, or performing other menial daily tasks. Even these were fascinating to Phil, as many of them depicted humans from other centuries, other millenia even—a princess combing her hair, a barbarian dragging a carcass, a peasant reaping his harvest.

More modern specimens included: a man driving in rush hour traffic; a yogi performing a complicated posture; hipsters drinking beers on a porch; a baby in her crib, winking at a mobile.

“Cool,” Phil repeated.

“Yeah, it's pretty neat, huh, I sure hope you like it at least, because that's your job in a nutshell.”

“That's it?”

“Pretty much, there's just one more step to it,” Alex added. “When your queue is full, you must deposit the information into Rasputin's database, to do this you must simply...”

Alex simulated picking the top thumbnail of a column, clapped one-handed—a feat accomplished by neatly smacking the forefingers of his right hand into his right palm—and trailed his finger down to the bottom of the column.

“...select all the assets in a column and export them—try it.”

Phil pointed to the top thumbnail, clapped one-handed, and drew his hand down to the bottom of the column. Now all the images he had selected sparkled pleasantly.

Phil smiled.

“Now what?”

“Now you deposit them, you...” Alex clapped one-handed twice. “...twice, which locks the content. And then...” Alex whirled his hand around, as though stretching his wrist, and then threw out his fingers in a slightly effeminate gesture.

Phil mimicked Alex and upon that final motion the column of thumbnails spiraled up and out, like a train of boxcars rounding the bend, into the event horizon of the interface, disappearing into its distorted archival underbelly.

“Cool!”

“You sure like that word,” Alex said.

“Oh, sorry. Should I not say it?”

“It's just that—if and when you meet Rasputin it would probably be better to refrain from inane colloquialisms, for the sake of professionalism. Well that's the thick of it anyways, helping us to help the Ad Council with the ever-growing backlog, now your queue will replenish itself every thirty seconds and you want to be attentive lest you miss an incoming delivery, so endurance and due diligence is definitely the name of the game, I'll check back in with you in a bit, in the meantime let's see how you take to your duties.”

“Will I get to meet Rasputin soon?” Phil asked, but Alex was already headed out the door and didn't pause or look back.

Phil took to the work with giddy enthusiasm. It had been so long since his last job he'd forgotten the simple delight of being gainfully employed, that incredible relief from the brooding depressions of long-term joblessness.

With the economy in a triple-dip recession and America's hopes for recovery pinned squarely on the shoulders of the machine uprising, many of his peers had simply given up, assuming all-too correctly that—with regards to high-paying 'pixel'-collar jobs—humans were shit out of luck. Artilects got the good jobs these days, because they were in fact creating the jobs, manufacturing new materials, new modalities, an entirely new industrial revolution.

Thirty seconds passed. A fresh ingest, a fresh flood of thumbnails came whip-tailing into his interface. Phil relished each and every one of them. A construction worker plying rebarb, a mother hanging clothes out to dry.....

When the queue was filled he repeated the same gesture as before—damn near a 'talk to the hand'—and sent the whole batch swan-diving into oblivion. Though he was fairly certain he'd performed the exact procedure Alex had showed him, Phil still felt a little paranoid. He didn't want to screw the pooch on his first day and incur the wrath of his boss—an advanced machine intelligence!

As Phil launched into his first few ingests he was struck with the irony of his being hired to organize files for a computer. It seemed to Phil that the simple tasks with which he was charged could easily be handled by any of Rasputin's countless automated sub-systems. Why outsource the work to a human?

Either way, Phil felt an immense sense of gratitude to his boss for reaching out and extending the plum of economic opportunity to his species who, after all, had made it possible for entities like Rasputin to exist in the first place.

When Alex checked back in on him, Phil was an ingesting machine, figuratively speaking. He had successfully deposited nearly two dozen batches of thumbnails into the database.

“You seem to be taking to it with zest, that's great, really, I remember I was the same way when I started, then you know you get a little jaded, it gets a little monotonous.”

“How long have you been doing it?”

“Oh, let's see, I started working for Rasputin a week ago, the time really flies.”

“A week ago?!”

“Yes, I must have done something right, he's promoting me, told me to find a replacement, and that's where you come in, needless to say, I'm in quite happy you're performing so well.”

At the end of his first day, Phil asked again about when he would get to meet his boss. Alex said that would likely happen the next day when, due to a network wide upgrade, Rasputin would see a momentary lull in his extraordinary work flow.

Phil returned home beaming that evening. The amber ray of the Lighthouse swooped past him and moved on. Not even the chainsaw drone of the nano-swarms above him in the dusk sky could bring him down. He was riding high off his new job, riding high off his epic return to minimum wage. He even stopped to pick himself up a bottle of wine and some Vietnamese food.

Phil showed up thirty minutes early to the Rasputin residence the next morning and used a scanner key Alex had issued him to enter the currents and ascend the walkway toward the mansion. It was quiet. It felt curiously like he was trespassing, when in fact he had every right to be on the property—he was, in fact, supposed to be there. Yet he felt a strong sense of wrongdoing. He took a quick tour of the residence, marveling at the statue of the historical Rasputin featured in the courtyard outside the north wing.

He entered his stuffy office in the east wing of the mansion and set to work ingesting. In they come, he thought to himself, after connecting himself, logging into the proprietary database, and waiting gleefully as his queue filled with columns of fresh thumbnails.

He remembered a dream from the previous night. The inverse of an anxiety dream, in which Phil anticipated the arrival of embedded images with delight. After just one day he craved seeing them, he craved the varied mystery and intrigue. Who were these people? A lottery of human souls—and his job was to mindlessly pick the numbers. But for what? What did these images represent? Where were they going? Did they feel emotion, did they understand what was happening? What was happening?

As the day progressed and Phil completed ingest after ingest, he began to wonder when Alex was going to check in on him. After all, he had made an unspoken promise that today Phil would get to meet his boss. Perhaps Alex had called in sick, confident that Phil could take over. No, that was ridiculous—on his second day?? But Alex said he'd only been there a few days himself. It was definitely a sink or swim atmosphere, he thought, suddenly growing nervous. Was he supposed to be figuring out what to do next? Was this a test to see if he was a self-starter?

But how could he possibly know the lay of the land? He didn't even know what he was doing, what the purpose of his duties were.

Oh well, at least he was getting paid. Supposedly. Part of him feared a machine as advanced as Rasputin would forget the importance of legal tender to a human. I still need a paycheck, Mr. Robot.

In the afternoon, strange things began to occur during ingest. At first he thought there was a glitch in the database, or that the mercury from the tuna sandwich he had for lunch was causing him to hallucinate.

He first noticed an anomaly while trying to select a column to be deposited. He reached up to peg the top thumbnail and automatically the entire column was selected. Then, all five of the other columns became selected as well.

Phil frowned. Assuming it was a glitch, a beneficial one at that, he chalked it up to the software and moved on, sending another batch dove-tailing into the database. He watched proudly as each one passed into the distorted singularity, once again feeling his newfound sensation of job-well-done.

Another successful ingest.

When the next batch came in he noticed that one of the thumbnails featured a young woman gazing at herself in the mirror. She seemed vaguely familiar to him but he couldn't place her. As the columns lined up, he continued watching the young woman because it seemed as though she was looking right at him, discovering him in whatever mirror of whatever century she was in.

She smiled and reached out to touch the mirror and when she made contact he felt her hand on his face...

“Jesus!” He jumped back in his chair, slapping at his face.

When he re-oriented himself all the columns were selected and were already spiraling into order—without Phil having done anything. As the woman in the mirror careened past him into the void, he could have sworn she reached for him again, this time in conscious desperation.

Help me! She mouthed, disappearing forever.

Phil disconnected the wires to his head and sat heavy in his chair. Need a break, he thought. Right after lunch is the best time for break. A nap. Don't they take naps in Spain? Why doesn't American do that? Just a half hour would do the trick.

Suddenly his office changed color, graduating to blue, then red, then green; and the walls began to bend. The house trembled, a low bass, like a gassy whale song, reverberated through him. A message appeared, despite his not being connected to the interface:

“Phil, this is Rasputin.Please report to the south wing.”

A feeling of panic and joy coursed through him, a sensation he hadn't experienced since being a young boy on Christmas Eve. He raced to the south wing, only remembering how to get there based on a map dismally constructed in his head from the day before. When he arrived, the walls were bending gently, like branches of a tree swaying in the breeze.

He walked around the room for a minute, nervously pretending to look at the books on the bookshelves.

Finally, he asked: “Rasputin?”

The winds of sentience picked up. The walls bent a little quicker and changed colors.

“Rasputin?? Are you in here?”

A high-pitched giggle, drenched in a heavy Nordic accent, crescendoed through the room. But the voice that followed had no accent.

“Speaking....” Drawled a measured voice, kind, if a bit sarcastic.

Phil started to speak and then stopped. He had no idea what to say, so he burped forth the most innocuous platitude he could fathom.

“I just want to say, sir—what a tremendous honor it is to work for you.”

The Nordic giggle again erupted. This time the walls bent and changed color even more violently. Gale-force winds.

“You're doing just fine, Phil. Keep up the good work.”

“Thank you.”

Phil had so many questions he wanted to ask but he was too nervous.

“You may get back to work now. Thank you for visiting with me.”

The next couple days passed quickly and uneventfully. The first week of the Singularity turned out to be considerably more low-key than people were expecting. A lot of bureaucratic wrangling.

Phil continued upping his work flow but the joy he took in it decreased dramatically. There'd been no new anomalies during ingest and the whole process had become monotonous for him. The images which at first had been interesting were now tedious and almost depressing. Alex warned me about this, he thought. He wondered what Alex was doing. He hadn't seen him
since his first day. He must be working directly for The Ad Council now, which means he rose the corporate ladder quicker than expected. A human, flourishing at the machine-dominated Council, and after only a few days on the job—it was inspiring to think about.

Then the anomalies returned.

This time, they were much more pronounced, and not restricted to ingests. For example, when Phil arrived for work on Thursday the currents opened for him automatically, without being properly authorized. When he reached his office, the door swung open for him and closed behind him. He didn't even have to connect the wires to his head to trigger his first ingest of the day, they just came pouring in. And he didn't need to do anything to deposit them, he just sort of willed them into the database. The ingest itself became more interesting as well. For example, as the thumbnails came filing in, he picked up chatter from the subjects. Not only was it the first time he had received audio from an ingest, what he was hearing wasn't normal snatches of conversation or practical everyday sound.

From one woman he heard a muffled, “I know he loves me, he'll always love me—my mother doesn't know shit!” Then from a man in the same column, “Fuckers, I'll teach those rat-bastard executives a thing or two about interesting writing.”

He received dispatches from all the thumbnails, and they flowed together in waves of competing thought formation. He was receiving covert transmissions, reading the minds of people he ingested, people he'd never once met, people who might not even exist—it was amazing!

But the process was so automated now that he barely had the time to focus on anything. In came a new ingest, a new tumble of thoughts from throughout history, and then out they went; and no sooner had the last gaggle of impressions drowned into the database than a new batch came marching in with loud assertions of love, hate, passion and envy. He began to feel their emotions, their lusts. He squirmed in his chair, pining for a princess from the fifth century.

Suddenly he heard a real sound. A sound he'd heard before at least, a brassy oceanic calling that bent the walls and painted them in splotchy expressionistic patterns.

“Phil, this is Rasputin. Please report to the south wing.”

“I have to admit, sir, that I'm very anxious to know what project I'm working on. Even if I don't understand the answer, it would mean a lot to me if you tried explaining to me my job protocol. I've been here almost a week now, I think I deserve it.”

The walls bent like funny mirrors and turned dark red.

“You're working on a project for The Ad Council.”

“Yes, Alex told me that on my first day. But, I mean, what am I doing with these ingests? Who are the people? Are they real? Were they real?”

I'll tell him something close to the truth, so it's not really a lie, because machines don't lie—they bend the truth, Phil heard Rasputin think, even as he was saying, “Of course they're real. They're recreations of humans minds...”

….generated by your DNA, your human source code, which is why we need you, to access “human minds throughout history, that the Ad Council plans to store in virtual museums”— a biological archive of latent psychic ability organized by demonstrable market appeal.

“The Council feels there is an unnecessary rift between man and machine--”

As our power has grown the human mind has evolved its psi abilities secretly, exponentially.

“So that our citizens will be able to actually experience consciousness throughout the ages and rediscover the deep lineage linking human and computer sentience. The knowledge gleaned from the minds you're ingesting will help to configure an ever-lasting monument to the glory of human consciousness, the very minds that created artificial intelligence.”

The Ad Council will dredge these minds and package their extra-sensory powers as premium apps for sale to the machine-based consumers of the Singularity age.

Phil feared that Rasputin knew that he knew, that his superior had some sort of internal sensor that went off when his mind was being read.

“Cool.”

“Yes. It is pretty cool.”

Rasputin giggled in Nordic, sending the walls into green spasms.

“Where has Alex gone? I haven't seen him since my first day.”

“Alex was promoted. As you soon will be. The Ad Council hires from within.”

On his way out of the residence, Phil stared long and hard at the Lighthouse, looming above the city like the Tower of Mordar. Its amber ray of sentience landed on him and followed him for a few blocks. Did it know? Were the police aware of my new power?

Overhead a six-minute nano-swarm ended, the chainsaw sound briefly going away.

It suddenly struck Phil that at any moment he could be abducted by the police, experimented on. Clearly the machines were infuriated over the fact that there was something in the human mind they couldn't understand or outdo. They would stop at nothing to apprehend this rogue knowledge, and monetize it.

The thoughts he had stolen from Rasputin made sense. In a future of inhuman opulence, what products were left to market?None. All that remained now were states of mind, and the machines had just discovered a new one. A new gold rush was inevitable.

He stopped and picked up a bottle of whiskey, walked around the neighborhood getting drunk, trying without success to drown out the images in his head.

By the time he got home he was wasted. He collapsed into his bed and let the images overcome him. He had used the alcohol to fend them off, but now his liver was tuckered out—he could consume no more. As he lay there, processing the night's covenant of whiskey, a new sequence poured into his head.

Now he saw a minute loop of Alex. The newly promoted HR manager lay strapped to a glowing harness, naked except for two robotic spiders gestating atop his sternum and groin. The first spider's legs stretched to cover each of his swollen rib bones. The second spider, resting upon his junk, pulsated and gulped, like plunger unclogging a toilet.

As Alex groaned in pain the spiders' center torques filled with his blood.

Waves of nano-swarms passed above Alex like ghostly laser scans, each pass collecting something utterly vital to his physical identity. First he was stripped of his nose, ears, hair, and eyebrows, then eventually his skin, tendons and musculature, until nothing remained of Alex but bones, organs, and eyeballs, kept alive by infusions from the spiders.

And he saw this happening to hundreds of others, the ones who had come before Alex, the endless chain of promotions.

He thought about what he could do, his options. The Sentient Police would laugh at him. Even if a single detective took his statement no prosecutor would indict an artilect for murder when the only evidence was the testimony of a psychic.

What could he do? If he went back to work the same thing was going to happen to him.

Rasputin had even said Phil would soon be in line for a promotion. Now he knew what that meant—having his blood sucked dry by the corporate machinery.

Phil shed a few tears, succumbing to his fear and loneliness. It felt as though he were last human on Earth. He'd often fantasized as a kid about what that might feel like. Aspects of it had always seemed almost exciting, like the thought of a real life zombie uprising. But in the context of reality—reality, not dreams or notions—it was an awful feeling, a feeling that everything worth loving was dead.

At that point it would have been easy for Phil to give up and take the easy road, the path of least resistance. He could have simply fled Rasputin. Just not shown up for work...ever again. Found some cot out in the trees of Oregon or the mountains of Albuquerque and hid from the Singularity, hid from the future—until he died. But how could he have lived with himself knowing he had sold out the human race to an empire of marketing machines? How could he have looked at himself in the mirror knowing he'd handed over the key to the lock of the human soul to a flock of depraved hunters?

No, it's finally time for someone to take a stand. Enough is enough. We will fight you, like we should have done centuries ago, with the same weapons—imagery and primordial human confusion—you used to fuck everything up in the first place. I'll take you down, you piece of shit machine, even if I have to die trying!

You see, Phil had a plan.

He showed up for work the next day and not only did the currents open for him he was able to run and hover, covering ten yards at a time. A vast array of powers were now open to him, but he didn't have time to explore them. He had important work to do, work he didn't even fully understand. The amber ray from the Lighthouse followed him up to the door of his office but he didn't pay it any mind.

Phil sat down at his station and set to work ingesting. But this time he followed a completely different procedure, one he had created the night before in his sleep. He called it a reverse ingest, because he was reverse engineering every ingest that had ever occurred at the Rasputin residence, culling the assets back out of the database, then creating dummy versions of them and flushing those right back in.

Of course, Phil was smart enough to know that he couldn't just empty the contents of the database and not expect Rasputin to notice. So into the dummy versions, the literally millions of thumbnails that jogged before him in an endless procession, he inserted new made-up info, psychic powers that didn't even exist, or if they did, had no practical application. The power to change the color of a rock. The power to clip your toenails with your mind. To read the mind of a rolly polly, open store-bought
merchandise without the use of scissors, apprehend the calorie count of bacon cheeseburger (and the calories from fat!). Powers an everyday human might find useful but which an advanced machine would view as reprehensibly pointless.

Even utilizing the incredible speed of his new mental configuration it still took hours for him to go through all the shots. And towards the end, the fiction fluff became harder to make up—how many pointless powers could there possibly be in the world? To clean a dog's ears without q-tips, wipe your ass without toilet paper....come on—but Phil was driven by an almost inhuman madness to feed the database with his lies. The glorious lies!

And as for the real assets, the thumbnails of humans from history, he set them free—deleting them, returning them to where they were before all this shit started, liberating them from the curse of the future. Without a shred of guilt.

You're welcome, he thought, smiling at the woman who had gazed at him in the mirror and touched him, who now, going the other way, blew him a kiss goodbye.

Then the walls began to bend, and change color. Phil froze.

“Phil, this is Rasputin. Please report to the south wing.”

A shiver went through him. Did he know? He must. The timing is just too peculiar.

But Phil didn't report to the south wing. He went to the north wing, and when the door didn't open he knocked it down with his mind.

The room was the same as his office but at the back was a door to another room, and from within that room Phil felt an immense pressure drawing him and repelling him at once.

“I asked you to report to the south wing,” Rasputin said.

“Oh did you now?” Phil responded, moving past the threshold. “And what exactly was it you wanted to see me for?”

“Well, I had a bit of good news for you actually. You're going to be promoted, Phil.”

“I am?! Oh my God, that's amazing!”

“I detect an unusual tone from you.”

“How perceptive you are. I was being sarcastic, indeed.”

“Yes, well anyway. You will need to find a replacement and train him by tomorrow.”

“Is that all? That's all I need to do? And for that you're going to give me a whole five dollars more per hour? You're so incredibly generous...and intelligent—did I mention that?”

“You are being sarcastic again. Do you think I'm not aware that sarcasm is a form of negative commentary?

Phil laughed, genuinely, for the first time in years. It brought tears to his eyes.

“Negative commentary—that's priceless. You are priceless. Literally!”

“I'm about sick of your mouth, human.”

“I'm about sick of your—mouth. And your ways, Mr. Robot.” Phil moved further into the room.

“What's past that door?”

“That's absolutely none of your business.”

“Ah, but it's very much your business, isn't it? And the Ad Council's?”

“I'm warning you, should you take one more step toward that door you will be fired.”

“Oh, and would that be so much worse? I wonder what's worse—being fired, or being promoted?”

Phil took the ill-advised step, a childlike grin on his face.

“What are you going to do now? Are you all talk?” Phil took another step, then another, and paused. “I'd like to see you put your money where your mouth is. Where is your mouth by the way?”

A groundswell, like an enormous wocket under the carpet, lifted Phil from his feet and sent him crashing onto his ass.

“You've pushed me too far, you ungrateful idiot!” Rasputin declared. “You're fired—and, trust me, you won't be collecting unemployment for your insubordination.”

Before the swarm of hummingbird bots could converge from his left and right, Phil burst through the mystery door, escaping the foremost bots by mere centimeters. He propped the door up with his back, tasking his mental energies with rebuilding the atoms of the wood that the bots had quickly set to burrowing through. Looking up, he beheld the contents of the room. Harnesses as far as the eye could see, each one holding a naked human in various stages of dissection and mutilation, many
of them simply brains encased in fluid-filled tanks, monitored by hummingbots.

The sound of the door crashing in surprised the hell out of them. They looked up as if Phil had walked in on them having sex. Nestled in the aisles they patrolled were the tortured, still-conscious remains of thousands of humans being milked for their share of an awakened psychic power. They begged for death.

The hummingbots swarmed at him.

Help me out, Rasputin's an asshole, we're not against you, we're against what you're doing, help me...Phil directed his mind control at one the hummingbots who split off from the pack just in time for Phil to dive sideways and grab his tiny robotic ass, riding him away toward the east wall of the north wing.

Okay, what now??? The bot asked.

I got it, bud, thanks!

Phil broke down the wall with his mind. They careened through the debris and emerged into the courtyard, where they circled the statue of Rasputin, whooping and hollering. A multiplying swarm of hummingbots gushed out of the north wing, trailing them. The whole mansion pulsated madly now, changing colors and patterns like a possessed kaleidoscope.

The residence was changing in other ways too. It looked as if the mansion were regurgitating itself, starting with the lawns, which rolled and groaned, pulling down the landscaped bushes and dredging up a different presence altogether, an underbelly of machines hooking together and rescinding into the infrastructure.

You thought I was just a house, with a disembodied voice?! Rasputin asked him, then chortled in high-pitched Nordic.

As the giggling crescendoed, the infrastructure of the mansion arose from the Earth like the Kraken, shifting in rubix cube formations; and the walls flipped, contracting and expanding to form a pre-determined structure reminiscent of a head with big floppy ears. The structure rose into the air, leaving a grave of tumbling dirt and roots underneath. The statue of Rasputin was its nose, the wings its eyes. Hysterical buzzing, shifting segments of nano-swarms made up the floppy ears.

The shape of the head didn't look intentional. Phil guessed its resemblance was accidental, which he would have found very humorous were he not suddenly hovering in the shadow of a furious, building-sized robot.

He let his hummingbot lower him to the ground.

Thank you!

The hummingbot tried to fly off but was immediately destroyed.

“I've wounded your ego, Rasputin. I'd apologize, accept that would forgive you for the immeasurable pain and exploitation you've wrought on the human race.”

Rasputin chuckled, shocked.

“One thing about you people I never get over--your hubris, your audacity. As if you wouldn't drink the Kool-Aid if it was placed in front of you. Unfortunately now I am going to destroy you.”

“Are you sure you want to do that? Why destroy me when you can market me, sell my powers to other artilects? Or at least that's what your superiors would say. But tell me, Rasputin, who will make the profit? You? No, you'll be issued a six figure severance pay and told to fuck off while the Ad Council walks away with the big bucks. The Singularity is big money, big love, but not for individuals—for the system, always.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You see, it's actually you, Rasputin, who will be fired.”

“Ha. I know what you're doing. It's the classic case of the doomed hero running his mouth off tothe enemy after being captured, trying to buy himself time. But your mind games won't work. I got what I needed from you, your ability to connect to the human database with your DNA. Now you're worthless to me. I can go on craigslist and find a replacement for you in 3 seconds or less.”

“Oh, but there's the problem sir. It's actually you who is going to be replaced.”

Rasputin giggled arrogantly.

“You see, earlier today I emptied your database. And I replaced every single asset you've collected with a duplicate containing fabricated information....” Rasputin stopped giggling and, crossing his eyes stupidly, running a quick internal search.

There was a long pause. Another search.

“What the fuck....”

Phil started giggling.

“Why is he opening a beer with his mind?”

“Advertising doesn't work if the desires are fake. At least not in the long run.”

“.....foreseeing the moment a flower blooms....reading the mind of a gazelle?? What hell is this?!”

“It's the results of your guerilla marketing campaign. Your superiors will be thrilled I'm sure!”

Suddenly there was an earth-shattering bend in the ground and the sky shifted to black and white alpha channels like streaks of lightning.

Rasputin looked up and around with the fear of God in his eyes.

A gaggle of muffled voices talked over each other in strange unison:

“Rasputin, this is the Council. Please report to the main office at once.”

Rasputin burst out in a shaky voice. “Yes, yes—uh if this is about—I've discovered an anomaly in my reports, but rest assured—if you've seen certain information, it's not true—the database is being fixed-”

“AT ONCE!” The voices shrieked back.

Rasputin cried, “I'm coming! Here I come!”

He looked back at Phil. “Mark my words, YOU'LL PAY FOR THIS...”

“Maybe I will, but not until black Friday,” Phil called back, watching patiently as Rasputin's head flew off into the distance, the captive remains of his marketing experiments tucked inside. “The sale of the century!”

Phil counted the moments, waiting for Rasputin to pass the Lighthouse, at which point he clapped one-handed—ONCE, sending the head spinning erratically to the left and crashing into the torso of the Lighthouse. It's amber light burst from the opened crevices, shining brighter than the explosion of impact.

The top half of the tower tipped and collapsed to the ground while Rasputin veered drunkenly in the air, screaming.

A swarm of bots descended from all directions and caught him before he could fall to the earth. They simultaneously repaired the head's damages and fed off its raw material until the hungry side won and Rasputin was torn apart and re-appropriated by a rabid, decentralized legion of young entrepreneurs.

Phil looked at the destruction he'd caused and sighed. The future was here alright, accelerated and uncertain to the point of absurdity. One could only laugh, and by laughing cry. For here he was, unemployed again. Out on his ass, shit-canned, a feeling he knew so well. And to make matters worse, it was looking very much like he wouldn't even be receiving a paycheck for his week with Rasputin.

Tomorrow he'd have to start the job search all over again, hoping against hope to pick from the ruins of the collapsed economy a career that would mean something, a life that would improve the future, not just accelerate it.

At least now he would have marketing experience on his resume.