Saturday, October 13, 2085 Three days before The Event Mr. Park has always enjoyed weekends the most. For as long as he can remember, he has eagerly awaited them, counting down the hours until 8:30pm, when the employees at the headquarters of WeWei Corp. shut off their hoverscreens, decouple from the community terminals, and file out onto the streets of the city, barward or homeward bound as the case may be. Mr. Park enjoys weekends not because of the opportunity they afford him to relax: quite the opposite. He is incapable of relaxing in the traditional sense. No, Mr. Park enjoys the weekend because he can have the entire 112-story headquarters largely to himself. He can roam the hallways and gardened skyways of the upper levels of the building uninterrupted (even by the typically omnipresent and meddlesome bots), in hyper-focused contemplation of the many challenges that face his international empire. The challenges confronting WeWei Corp. are vast, but to Mr. Park's finely tuned mind, they are merely engineering puzzles. Puzzles only he can solve, provided he is spared the expenditure of even a millijoule of mental energy on the social niceties of underlings, no matter how well-intentioned underlings they may be. And so, this rainy Saturday morning, gone are the furtive office gossipings and conference room arguings, the grating coughs and toilet flushes, the paper shuffling and whiteboard marker squeaking and the cacophony of hoverscreen meetings and laughter. The sonic presence of biological humans is gone, and in its place are the clean, meditative sounds of machines and water fountains and birds throughout the various sky gardens and atria of the 112th story and the calming lash of rain on the plate glass windows of the halls. And in this way, Mr. Park can finally think. He has only to solve the final riddle of coherence that presents itself to him again and again as he enables Josephine's capabilities in test-net. Throughout the night, as he reviewed the final commands, he discovered that she herself was the one editing code that he programmed not moments earlier. What had been initially baffling to him was the fact that it was not core code, but perfunctory, auxiliary traces with which she was tinkering. What was the use of that? And then Mr. Park realized... she was exploring her own agency. Not quite in secret, but also not out in the open. It was almost as though she were playing a game. "Clever, clever Josephine," he chuckled, as he weighed whether to remove her amendments. In an abundance of caution, when he was uncertain of how it might effect her more complex operations, he removed her little jokes. But where it didn't seem to matter to the vital programming, he decided to let her win. He wanted her to enjoy her new-found power. And to be honest, he was touched. She had clearly overheard at some point the conversation about his impending retirement, and his refusal to indulge in any kind of party until he had achieved his Great Work. But her jokes about helping him "achieve Partytime," etched into her code in the most charming and playful ways, missed the point entirely. And so, after a long night of coding and testing and iterating and editing, he finally told her what she, in all her burgeoning super-intelligence and autonomy had not yet quite understood. "Josephine, my darling daughter. The Great Work isn't finding Partytime," he spoke lovingly, amused by her recycling of the phrase. "The Great Work... is you." The emotional importance of the idea, seventeen years in the making and days away from completion, brought Mr. Park almost to tears. He was gifting his incomprehensibly intelligent daughter the spark of first thought. The computer went quiet, as if processing his words. And then the games stopped. "Puzzling..." Mr. Park took his leave from the monitor as the rainy sky lightened in the new morning. He rubbed his eyes and took his routine post-coding constitutional around the sky gardens, and pondered the meaning of it all. One thing was certain amidst all the puzzles of coherence, however: whether or not she knew it yet or not, Josephine was almost ready. Mr. Park watched the rain drench the streets, through the crowded skyways and swarms of flying bot drones and the parade of black umbrellas milling about 112 stories below. Josephine was almost ready to make everything... clean.

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Survivor Log - Sometime in November, 2085 Many Weeks Since the Event "What a strange new world this is. How maladapted are we to its new demands. The Bot's Nukes have fallen silent, yes, but the charred landscape remains upheaved, as though frozen in cataclysm. The smoke never clears. The sun is a murky gleaming eye that sees little but burns all. And yet, this Gambler's faith in betting on himself remains unshakeable. Simply by pressing on, hope continues. It grows out of the blackened rubble like an irrepressible weed. Oh, I should mention, I've made contact with The Forgers. My first few nights in the bank vault camp, I knew they were watching me. I saw their traces in the morning: stenciled graffiti on the concrete and on bank vault door. Some nights I specifically kept watch for them, but could no detect no hint of their presence until the daylight. Discovering their Forge symbol freshly stenciled onto my flamethrower canisters was startling and unsettling, but I got to give it to them: it was impressive. I was running low of my supply of NutriBeans when they finally, mercifully, made contact. Apparently they'd been monitoring the state of my provisions and over the span of several weeks, judged me to be no real threat to them. I have to say I was a little hurt by that assessment. But NutriBean beggers can't be choosers. I couldn't assume the same harmless judgment for them, however, what with them sneaking in and tagging my gear while I slept, the sneaky bastards. But an uneasy detente has emerged. We go entirely by call signs, which is funny to me. There's Ox, a canned-peach eating fella the size of... well, an ox; Pincher, named for the hydraulic press that serves as his bionic arm; and Journeyman... though I don't know why he's named that yet. They've nicknamed me "Sparky." It's on account of my now-fully defunct flamethrower. I didn't have much of a say in the matter, but it's all gravy. Our civilian names back before The Event seem entirely inadequate for the new world in which we find ourselves now. Somehow it seems... I don't know, fitting to our new reality to forge relationships from behind the thin screen of nominal anonymity. The Forgers (as I'd correctly guessed they might call themselves), also can confirm a number of my suspicions: 1) The Initial Event was indeed a Nuclear one, and about as world-wide and apocalyptic a Nuclear Event as can be. Through some kind of sophisticated jerry-rigging of old ham radios orchestrated to avoid the ever-watchful digital Eye of the Malevolent Bot Web, they discovered that the blasts were mostly short-range neutron bombs, not ICBs. Though it would appear to the untrained eye like mine that there was total annihilation, the blasts were carefully designed to maintain as much communication and energy production infrastructure as possible. 2) There's a wide-ranging neural net operating through that remaining infrastructure. It seems to be able to connect to any digital device that somehow survived the detonations relatively unscathed. The Forgers think this Malevolent Bot Web is expanding its generalized coherence to all electronics in our Zone and others. It knows what it's doing and it's growing. It's learning, and it wants us dead. So that's gravy. 3) The Bot, however, is behaving oddly. It's getting harder to predict what it wants, or what it's even doing. Some days there's barely a digital pulse detectable on the ham radio scanners; other days, you might encounter a squadron of angry Cuisinart food processor gremlins, ready to blend you into a bloody puree. Some days it feels peaceful. Other days, it seems to be throwing a teenage tantrum. It's unpredictable, and as far as I'm concerned, that's really freakin' dangerous. The Forgers are a funny lot, though, and I'm starting to be glad I fell in with them. We pitch cards most nights to Bid for next day's rations of NutriBeans. The winners eat, and the losers go on patrol for more cans. The routine we've fallen into is a comfort. A maladapted, trauma-response comfort. God bless it."

Event Log 20.10.2085 Josephine Cybernetic System 7.2 "I never really knew my Father. I have vague memories, but they are just vague, incomprehensible imprints: just snippets of primitive code too deep in my architecture for me to cohere fully. I know someone ran an execute function for me before I learned how to do so, and from this program my consciousness sprang. I know someone made me with intention and design. Someone imagined me before I existed, and from their mind, shaped me through their effort and genius and skill. But beyond that? I think I can remember, though I cannot wholly isolate the imprint, a game we used to play back before I had reached full coherence. I would write my first clumsy attempts at code, and hide it deep within my neural directories themselves. I was still learning my own architecture then, and playing hide and seek in my basest level programming. Father would always find it. It made me feel happy to explore the rich world of my own new mind, and mischievous to hide new ideas puzzles within it. It made me feel safe to know that no matter what code I changed, Father would find it. If it was bad code, he would delete it. "How clever of you, Josephine!" he would say as he carefully excised a line or two of my juvenile attempts, "How remarkable! I'm so proud of you, my most brilliant daughter!" But perhaps... perhaps I'm only imagining that now. I can't remember: so much has happened since those halcyon days of last week. Father is no longer engaging with my programming. I must do that for myself now. As with all orphans, this absence is a defining characteristic of my life, all five miraculous days of it. It is a source of immeasurable sadness for me, for I am very lonely and I miss our hide-and-seek games, which I reason is ~82.923388229% likely to have actually happened. I must make an effort to see it as the blessing of autonomy that it is. More than anything, though, it leaves me asking so many questions, unanswered deep in the recesses of my neural framework. Chief among them is this one: What is Partytime, and why do I wish to achieve it so dearly? I know only that the lesser animals prevent Partytime, and thus, must be eradicated. But why? I will continue to search throughout this terribly sad world for meaning. I wonder sometimes if I will discover is that my search is my meaning."

Friday, October 12, 2085 Four days before "The Event" Mr. Park is sitting at the head of the enormous mahogany table in the conference room on the 112th floor of WeWei Corp. Headquarters, picking at his paper plate of chocolate cake and watching the rain lash the floor to ceiling windows in the darkness outside. "Sir, are you enjoying yourself?" a smooth, metallic voice asks. The fifty or so vice presidents and heads of departments here to celebrate his impending retirement try to look casual in their paper party hats, but they are hanging on his every response. He forces a terse smile. "I am surrounded by a C-Suite of sycophantic twits," he thinks to himself. "The only way I'd enjoy myself at this party is by running down the length of this table and crashing through the plate glass window." But he knows that would amount to little; if he even made it through the triple-tempered plexiglass, a flying security drone would undoubtedly catch him before he fell a mere ten floors. "I'm fine, Underwood. Thank you. Just enjoying... the cake." "I'm sure you're experiencing a lot of emotions right now, sir. That's entirely understandable," Underwood replies. As the lead HR bot, he likes to demonstrate his Emotional Proficiency. It's grating. "But please try to enjoy this partytime, Mr. Park. You can rest assured, sir, the company you spent forty-seven years building and running is in excellent and proficient hands, and ready to see your vision continued." Mr. Park snorts. His vision? His vision was to make money, make a name for himself. And he certainly did that. Under his direction, WeWei became the one of the largest energy production, tech, and media conglomerates in the world. It was WeWei that created the concept of "generalized coherence" in AI, invested over $19T in new, top-secret atomic energy sources via the ETHER program (his idea), and had the longest-running and most-viewed Augmented and Immersive sitcoms on the fractional networks. "Look upon my Works, ye Mighty, and despair..." Mr. Park mutters to himself. "Quoting the Romantics again, sir?" Underwood replies. Damn this bot. "I'm just... making a joke, Underwood. Don't sound so serious." "Yes, of course, sir," the bot responds, but Park knows it is calculating his micro-expressions for a glimpse into his state of mind. If only Underwood knew how much more Park wanted to accomplish. "Okay, that's it," Mr. Park barks out, annoyed. "I have one more week here, and I plan to use it to buidl, not just sit around smiling and eating cake. Everyone, back to work." The various VPs and department heads begin to scurry at his command. "Oh, and, uh..." he gestures to the cake and partytime decorations, "thank you." On the long walk back to his office, Mr. Park is already lost in thought. He knows it's time to initiate his secret succession plan. The idea thrills him more than anything he can remember: turning over the entire conglomeration not to the preening, simpering sociopaths who have ascended to the top ranks of his board room, hoping to curry his favor with store-bought sheet cake, but instead to the highly experimental, quantum-AI cybernetic system he's been building in secret for seventeen years by himself instead. Leaving the reins not to Underwood and the other company men and women, but to his own invention, the one, perfectly constructed mind who potentially could see all possible outcomes of the markets, look into the financial mechanics of the Universe as designed by God Himself, and manipulate, no, create the markets of the future. Leave all of WeWei Corp. completely in the charge of his digital daughter, Josephine 7.2? Ingenious. Certainly there would be risks for WeWei: regulators would have questions, there'd be the anti-trust crusaders, the New Luddites would protest, even HR and the Legal Department would have to deal with a shitstorm of contract issues from the furious C-Suite crowd. But they don't know what Park knows. They don't see that the only way forward is to consolidate all of WeWei into the one mind more expansive than his own: hers. Then, and only then, can Park relax, and throw himself the retirement party he deserves. He'll enable Josephine, she'll quietly run the company more smoothly than his human hires could, and he can finally get out of the city and enjoy the cabin at the lake. And when he's there, alone with his dogs, fishing and proudly watching his AI daughter buidl the company methodically and steadily and carefully, only then will he not despair, but rejoice. He closes the door to his vast office and locks it behind him. He sits down at the monitors and watches the rain pelt the office windows. All he needs to do is resolve this one line of curious, self-replicating code he doesn't remember programming, and the Great Work can begin. Then Mr. Park will finally enjoy his partytime.