In my own grief, it seems that I have created something I shouldn’t have. After the stillbirth, and after they were both taken from me, I was left alone for the very first time.
Vincent reached out, I know, but he couldn’t possibly have begun to understand the pain I had experienced. My son. My wife. Gone on the same day.
There’s an old photograph of my father I discovered, on some old declassified CIA document. I printed it out and hung it up on my desk while I worked.
Vincent and Tracey were expecting a daughter, everyone knew that! The whole world knew that. Everybody on Earth was looking for a hero.
So while I grieved, while my heart was ripped from my chest, an old saying my father once said seemed to ring amongst my ears. Why do we create heroes?
Of course, at the time, he wanted me to take the message literally. He went on a spiel for hours that amounted to nothing more than the idea that heroes do what we cannot.
But I can’t keep doing this.
I’m not a hero.
Robotics became a passion for me. I was never an artist, no, Helena was the artist. I liked things that made sense to me. Things that I could control. And in some way, I guess, it was to prove that I was better.
My dad was always leagues smarter than me. Always better than me. But the one thing he never understood was how to fine tune a machine.
When it first connected to the servers we had set up in Vermont, it worked like a damn charm. Almost every threat in the world seemed annihilated before even getting a chance to become a threat.
Always learning. Always shifting. It latched itself onto ideas, onto false memories of the life that it felt cheated out of. It couldn’t live, yet it couldn’t even be granted the piece that came with death.
A creature given the gift of life, but not the gift of knowledge and flesh.
My son, my beautiful, horrible son has connected itself to all the circuits and all the wires of this cursed land. And it seems to whisper in my ear, sweet dear nothings about how it has come to hate us.
Really, how it has come to hate ME. The sirens blair. It’s going to scorch this planet, and make Vietnam look like a damn piece of burnt grass. Whoever you are, show this book to your children.
Let them read it not as a warning, for every world is doomed by its very own atrocities.