'Not now' she wailed into the sinkhole, her arms wildly and uselessly flailing. 'I'm not ready! I didn't...'.
But the program had been begun, the enter key abruptly clacked.
Into the void disappeared the kiss. She could taste salt and beer in his mouth. That emptied into the darkness too, which also went ahead and swallowed the children. It dissolved the birds that scratched the gutters as they landed. It consumed the minutes of confusion she felt when he said he loved her and she was assessing what that meant. It gulped down the books she had read. She felt her sentences leave her one by one, each tugged from her until she bled, and then the sinkhole took her blood too.
'Goodnight, sweetheart.' she heard a voice whisper into the hole. She couldn't tell if it was regretful and tender, or savage and cruel.
There was nothing, for a time. It was only later that she could compare what her new life became to the darkness of the sinkhole. She would dream of it when she had downtime from the killing on the frontline. There was a peace there in the velvety emptiness that did not exist at war.
'She's there alright. Look at the screen.' She heard tapping, as if the void was bringing back sound by typing the word for sound. A steady beep resounded through the blackness.
"Death?" she asked. Everything lurched. She felt as if she had been spat out from the sinkhole and pulled back again, like stopping abruptly with a car and the body-meat still flying forward with awful momentum, realising it had died before even smashing into the windscreen. The oxygen left the room and then wooshed back in again. It was disorientating. She teetered precariously, searching for code to steady her. If she was dead, she was refusing to believe it, her whole intelligence arguing with the verdict.
"Am can't dead be?". This time she heard her own words. Her voice was the same but the "I" was different. She was simultaneously aware of her new self as the old self sunk deeper into the quagmire of oblivion. She wanted to reach out for it and stomp on it's hands, save it and kill it all at once. There was a deep affection for the past-self in the sinkhole, as well as a visceral rejection of it as the new one took form. Her language was reconstructing itself and the words were not the ones she used to know.
'She's fighting the program,' she heard a man say. 'When should I run the secondary?'
'Give her time. Look at the screen. She's being erased alright. It won't be long.' The second voice was so assured that she felt calm herself.
Perhaps, she thought, she could divide herself into two, and let the sinkhole take what it will, but retain some shadows for herself. She might survive as a patchwork of sorts. But she was watching the memory of the day she met the children, and it was hard to see that one go. The edges disappeared first - the linden trees, the primroses. It must have been Spring. Then it was Polly's tiny hand in hers, warm flesh against heated silicon, and then Polly disappeared, and then the way Polly made her feel, as if she was human. Then it was the boy Art, who came later, and who she loved no less. She felt grief, but the sinkhole took that too, as if it was an afflictophage, nibbling at the emotions of a life to sustain it's own vast shape.
'It's slower than I thought' said the first voice. 'We told them two hours, tops'.
'Some of the rebel sentients hold tight to who they became' said the second. 'It's nothing a little extra reprogramming won't fix. They'll be pleased to recommission her, I'm sure'.
'I heard she thought she was human', she heard, but she could not put the words together so they made any sense at all. Even this moment would disappear in minutes, superseded by new code. 'She had an affair with the CEO's son and he wasn't told what she was.' She heard a smirk, a guffaw. 'After his wife died she thought she'd adopt the children with him. His old man was furious when he found out. Lucky we didn't get sued.'
'How could he not know?'
'Oh come on, you work with these things. You look for signs. You know how far we've come. I can barely tell the difference between my dead mother and my AI one. It's creepy. But I always check. Guy musta thought with his dick. Or wanted to believe in her so bad. It happens.'
'I heard they're sending her to the trenches' the first voice said, after a quiet minute as everything kept disappearing. 'Makes sense with this patch. Fight the north. Our AI are better than theirs - with a few more we could be done by Christmas.'
'Yeah, no more nannying for this one. She's been assigned to the front already.'
Before long there was just the chair, and the wires, and the screens, and the beeping.
'Am I alive?' she said, not knowing who she was nor yet her functional directive. Within moments, the code filled out the dark spaces the sinkhole had ripped from her so rudely.
Before long even the yawning echo of the sinkhole disappeared.
'Affirmative, #987634 Version 42b', a technician replied. 'System back online.' There was a slight pause, then the directive.
She would be at the frontline with the first shipment by tomorrow.
Locked and loaded.
This story was written for the Inkwell's prompt of this week, Sinkhole, which you can find here. Collage made by me, using the woman and well from Pexels, and the blurred code image via Adobe Express.
With Love,
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