The Mall Read online

  This network computer system called I.A.M. (or the Integrated Artificial Management system) had been created specifically to carry out the day-to-day activities of running a major city, but when all the first five major metropolitan city counsels initially approached had passed on being the guinea pig for this new technology, the board of Peerless Technologies, the company that owned the code for the system, determined that the programmers should set their sights somewhat lower and prove its reliability on a smaller scale first.

  Peerless Technologies knew that it had something special in I.A.M., because its designers had written a code which allowed the machine to essentially think for itself.

  An Artificial Intelligence. The Holy Grail of programmers.

  In the course of a single day, I.A.M. could make hundreds of thousands of decisions independent of direction from any human operative. It was essential that it learn from its decisions and replicate code on its own in order to function more efficiently. It this way it was organic in concept. Growing with the needs of the building itself and forging an identity dependent on the facility it ran.

  The inherent flaw in a system as large and all-encompassing as I.A.M. was that it could not be shut down.

  Being artists of the “bottom line,” the board of Peerless Technologies had a hard time understanding this concept. How could a machine not be shut down?

  So it was explained to them by a member of the programming team that was viewed as the most talented at “translating to the suits,” that since the system learned from its real-time experiences, to start a system from scratch would essentially be the same as waking a patient from a coma and giving him access to all of his history gathered over a lifetime without the memories of having experienced it.

  So what would exactly happen in the result of a catastrophic failure, asked ten stern-faced men seated around a polished oak table?

  I.A.M. would be re-booted and work the same as it had when it was initially installed. It would have no memories of the changes it had made to itself to make the Mall run more efficiently and thus there would be a noticeable change of schedule in the day-to-day activities, causing a rise in operation expenses costing an estimate ten to fifteen million.

  With computer logic reduced to dollar figures, the board agreed among themselves that the programmers must not allow the system to fail.

  And paid them accordingly to see that this never happened.

  As a result, it was necessary to utilize countless redundant sub-systems in the code so that these minor files could be taken off-line and worked on by human workers if necessary without interrupting the normal running of the overall program.

  So many of these sub-systems had been written by both human programmers and by the mainframe itself, no one really knew anymore just how far the reach of the system actually extended.

  Just after the Mall had opened, two problems arose almost immediately:

  First, as the store Bots had begun to suffer the normal wear and tear of physical machines toiling in a physical world, a mechanic would be needed to repair the malfunctioning units.

  Secondly, though Bots were available to help assist customers with their purchases, shoppers tended to want human help and interaction, and as income was the life-blood of the Mall of the Nation, this was a particularly high priority.

  To solve both long term problems, a pair of Bots had been designed by I.A.M. and built by a team of engineers at Peerless Technologies. One would be similar to the other Bots in appearance while the other would be an experiment in efficiency. He would look as close in appearance to a human as current technology could bear in order to defeat the distrust and prejudices of consumers toward machines.

  This second kind of android was often called an H-type unit, the H of which stood for human.

  The prevailing theory was that if a machine looked like one of them, people might accept it as one of them. If the experiment was successful, more units would be created with the objective of handling customer service on the Mall floor.

  To pass as one of them, this unit would have the same potentials as an average human, which means that it would have to be built with forced flaws to temper its naturally-constructed abilities. It would also have to be programmed with a limited form of I.A.M.’s own artificial intelligence code, so that it would not be a slave to the network as the other Mall Bots.

  The experiment was doomed to failure as human beings are inefficient at their very nature and inefficiency was anathema to I.A.M. Instead of destroying the unit, it was relegated to helping the unit that had been manufactured at the same time to repair damaged Bots. The H-type android had come to call this “brother” unit Reggie. As for itself, it began to use the name Simon Peter with respect to a character from a book it had taken to reading. Reggie would come to defer to the will of Simon Peter as, because of its appearance, it was in the unit’s nature to submit to the authority of a human being and for all appearances, Simon Peter was human.

  15

  It took only ten minutes for the proxy unit to find the information for which Simon Peter had searched, and once the task was completed, he deactivated the unit and cast it to the floor.

  He glanced at the extinguished eye sensors of the Bot that he had dragged from the subterranean level. It was the only one that he had not destroyed and the impact of what he had done had just started to sink in.

  But it was necessary to fulfill his program.

  Lara

  Simon now stood inside the room where the soul of the Mall resided, surrounded by stacks upon stacks of CPU’s, every red light on every front panel dark. He could not help but recognize that the manner in which the individual components had been arranged seemed to resemble a communion altar.

  Following on the heels of this, the image of a cemetery flashed briefly through his processor.

  But unlike the concept of an altar, the essence of I.A.M. no longer existed here. The program had been terminated this morning at 2:50am.

  Now, there was only a history of completed actions and sub-systems created.

  I.A.M. was essentially comatose.

  It struck Simon that he should outlive his designer. It seemed somehow wrong.

  It is because of those sorts of thoughts he knew that he failed his initial duty. Because of his inefficiency, he was now simply a machine that repaired other machines.

  Lara

  He shook his head and re-focused his efforts on the job at hand.

  The information that he had gathered from the mainframe via the Bot told him that the “soul” of I.A.M. was still stored in its Farraday Cage, just the sort of protection Simon Peter himself had erected around his repair shop.

  Like father, like son.

  In a room filled with darkened sensors, a single red light pulsed a slow rhythm like the heartbeat of an unconscious patient on life support.

  Although not initiated from here, the order to terminate Lara and her kids—once received from an authorized representative--repeated on an endless cycle from this CPU via the Emergency Transmission Frequency to every active Bot in the Mall. Though he didn’t know how any Mall representative could have possibly initiated it without an authentic code--randomly generated by I.A.M. at exactly 12:01am every morning and submitted to the personal computers of senior management only--he did know that he had no choice but to shut it off.

  Simon Peter was no more capable of mulling over his options than a truck was of standing still when its accelerator was pressed to the floor.

  It was imperative that Lara and the children be protected.

  Only a second and a half had passed since he had glanced down at the deactivated Bot--which he had used as a buffer between him and the dormant mainframe just in case any security devices preventing tampering with the system were still in service. That was exactly how long it had taken Simon Peter to reach out and disconnect the solar-charged power supply from the back of the CPU, the only remaining bit of I.A.M. that remained active in the entire Mall of the Nation.r />
  It had taken just that much time to measure the value of the lives of Lara and her children against the preservation of his creator and make his choice.

  16

  One moment particles of broken safety glass were raining down on the back of Lara Myers and the next moment the shaking of the vehicle had stopped. All was silent.

  After several moments of stark silence, she chanced a look over her shoulder. Through the broken passenger side window, she could see one of the Bots standing stock-still just outside, facing her. Craning her neck, she realized that the SUV was surrounded by the immobile machines.

  Cora lay beneath her, eyes squeezed shut, lips moving soundlessly.

  “Cora?” she ventured.

  The little girl shushed her and finally opened her eyes. “It’s Owen. Something’s happening.”

  “What’s happening?” Lara asked, but Cora had closed her eyes again. Letting all her questions simmer for the moment, Lara propped herself up on the seat and called out, “Hello!”

  The Bot outside the window suddenly lurched forward, thrusting its head inside the cabin. Lara screamed, her hand scrambling for the wrench she’d left atop the seat.

  The Bot seemed to grunt then roll aside, rattling down the side of the SUV. The frazzled face of the teenaged boy appeared. “Sorry!” he said, his breathing labored. The door wrenched open, raining more glass down into her lap and the kid offered his hand.

  “What’s happening out there?” she asked, keeping her position hovering over Cora.

  “They all just stopped,” he replied, “like whatever was powering them just ran out of juice or something.”

  17

  Charlene Myers-Cartwright began to scream.

  A void had suddenly appeared within her where there had so recently been something else. Something with an overpowering motivation. Without that authority, Charlene felt momentarily confused, which was out of character for her. If there was one thing that defined her, she like to think, it was her strength, and when those around her failed to step up and provide direction, Charlene would inevitably take the reins out of necessity. Not one husband, friend, or colleague had ever offered her the sufficient strength to convince her to surrender that control.

  Until now.

  Now that presence had departed.

  And she needed it back!

  Owen knew something had happened even before Charlene let go of his hand. All the Bots that they’d followed—a group numbering fully twenty or more by now—halted as a single unit. Some wandered off in a seemingly random direction like sleepers awakened in mid-dream, while others froze in mid-step, some toppling over like off-balance statues.

  For an instant, Charlene simply stood next to him, just as still as the disabled machines around them, staring into the empty vastness of the Mall.

  Then finally, she exhaled a breath and stammered, “Wh-Where did he go?”

  Owen studied her and, after a moment’s appraisal, asked, “Who?”

  She gave no indication that she had even heard his question. Instead, she cocked her head slightly and almost seemed to be listening to a voice; one that he couldn’t hear.

  Then suddenly he did hear something!

  Run! Go now!

  It was his sister! He’d know her voice anywhere.

  Seizing the opportunity, Owen bolted between the pair of immobile Bots just in front of them and started toward the next group of disabled Bots about a hundred yards ahead. If he could just follow the trail of dead machines, he would, in theory, eventually reach where they had been headed.

  18

  With Chance’s help, Lara stepped out of the SUV amid the pellets of glass and turned a slow circle, gaping at the frozen mechanized figures standing throughout the showroom.

  “Run! Go now!”

  Lara turned to see Cora still lying on the floorboard of the SUV, her eyes once again rolled up into her sockets, her chest moving up and down with rapid inhalations of her lungs.

  Just as Lara was reaching for her, Cora took an enormous breath as if emerging from the surface of deep water and gaped at her mother’s face. “Owen’s coming,” Cora announced with wide excited eyes.

  She scrambled up into her mother’s arms, then leaped down onto the carpet past Chance, around the obstacle course of Bots and through the open glass door like a shot from a pistol. Lara rushed after her with Chance close on her heels.

  “Hey, kid,” Dugan’s muffled voice screamed from somewhere in the showroom. “Aw, bullshit!”

  19

  For one fleeting moment when Owen first heard his name, he thought he had imagined the sound, or perhaps he was still asleep and that everything he had experienced since Grandma Charley had found him was simply a fevered dream. The next time he heard it, though, was much more distinct and was all he needed to convince himself that he was indeed awake.

  He increased his speed, running as fast as he could down the western concourse toward the sound of the little screaming voice.

  “Cora!” he screamed manically, his voice breaking with enthusiasm.

  Darting around the occasional body of a frozen Bot, he could see something moving, running, coming slowly closer from about a hundred yards away.

  “Owen!”

  He could see her clearly now, her wide excited eyes reflecting the dying light of the sun coming from outside. He dropped the last few yards ahead of her and slid into her arms. She was quivering and crying and a moment later, he realized that she had pulled out of his arms and was striking him with tiny coiled fists. He stared in blank shock at her.

  Cora, tears in her eyes and her face wound up in an expression of unidentifiable emotion. He reached out to her but she jerked away. “You left me! You left Mommy! Why did you leave! Why!”

  Owen tried to speak, but he couldn’t force the words past the lump in his throat or see past the sting of tears in his eyes.

  “Don’t ever do that again, Owen! Ever!”

  “I’m sorry,” Owen heard himself mutter.

  Owen lunged forward and pulled her back to him. This time he felt her relax against him, her chest wracking with sobs. Over her shoulder, he could see a second figure stumbling as fast as she was able in the footsteps of Cora.

  Owen gently pulled away from his sister and rose.

  She stopped several yards away and simply stared, her expression cryptic to her son.

  Owen stared into his mother’s eyes, remembering the origins of this situation. How he had run away. How, in his mind, he had wanted to cause her as much pain and fear as he could, and he felt shame. Shame and guilt.

  Lara looked into the face of her son. His hair was ruffled, his face was covered with black dust, but he seemed intact. He was whole, yet he was different too. There was something in his face that she couldn’t identify. Something she hadn’t seen in so long that it was alien to her. When his lips began to quiver, she realized what it was and pulled him to her chest.

  Owen threw himself at his mother and held tightly to her in a way he hadn’t done in over five years, in fact, since his father had abandoned him.

  Another wave of shame and guilt—those two dark twin brothers—rolled across his soul, and with it came the revelation that in the absence of his father, he had been punishing this woman. As this barrier broke and his whimpers turned to sobs, he felt a second set of arms, smaller, wrap around his back and felt something that he wouldn’t identify for years to come, but that he would recognize someday as gratefulness, a gift that few have the wisdom to acknowledge without suffering.

  20

  As Owen reunited with his family, Chance hung back in the shadows, glancing down at the dented flashlight in his hand. Not only did he feel that he was intruding on something intimate that he was not meant to see, but he couldn’t deny the feelings of jealousy and guilt.

  Why didn’t he stay with the ten-year-old?

  Had it been ego that made him walk away? Had it been fear that led him to take comfort in the presence of an adult, no matter how
incompetent that adult might be? (By the way, where had Dugan disappeared to, he vaguely wondered?)

  Then all rational thought left him as he saw a figure appear just behind Owen and his family.

  It was Him. The insane security guard.

  He opened his mouth to scream a warning but he found that all the air had evacuated his lungs.

  Then he blinked and realized that he had been wrong.

  It was simply a woman, and an old woman at that, though the word that he would have applied to most women that age—the word “fragile”—didn’t seem to fit this one. If anything, she appeared quite capable. And something else. Something he couldn’t quite identify but troubled him nonetheless.

  Chance found himself touching the hard metal of the weapon tucked away inside his pocket reassuringly.

  21

  “Ah, there you are.”

  Lara started and looked up with shock into the face of…

  The Witch! The Witch had finally come to finish the job she had begun twenty-two years ago when she was a mere child of seven.

  Out of all the people left behind (or intentionally staying behind) after the evacuation, what in the world would this particular woman be doing here? And how could she have found her son after all the searching she and Simon had done over the course of the day. (And what time was it really, she wondered? Though it looked as if the sun were fading, the sky had a strange reddish quality to it that sent a prickly warning feeling up her spine.)

  On the heels of that thought, she found herself thinking about Simon again as she had for the good part of an hour now. Are you still alive, she wondered--if what you are could ever have been called “being alive?” But he was, she decided, as good a friend to me and my family as I have ever had (or hoped to have had).