10 Reasons Why the AI Predicted American Salvation
by Steve Wheat
1.
The AI never tasted bacon and couldn’t know how hard we’d fight to keep chewing.
2.
Because our watches had no settings for panic, did not separate return journeys from one-way escapes. They only counted our steps, only asking if we were working out.
3.
The AI knew that we could survive at 115 degrees but dogs could not, so reasoned we would do without. We jury-rigged generators for doghouse A/C and diverted irrigation water for their cooling ponds.
4.
Winter really was a much less efficient season anyway. The AI calculated GDP always went up with just three.
5.
New products kept growing the economy: inland instant suburbs, fire-proof roof sprinklers, dehydrated food delivery, Minnesota watermelons, all-season floating tents, high-altitude gardening, flood-resistant golf courses, virtual scream therapy, private moats, sensory deprivation shrouds, North Dakota cabernets.
6.
The AI added the accumulated effort of the helpers but never subtracted the accumulated efforts of those running toward the rapture.
7.
The rules of the AI’s world were made of math, contours of gravity, cycles of light and dark, centripetal force. The rules of America were all alchemy: chance, history, action without consequence, belief without evidence. Every time two hands shook, they exchanged opposite truths.
8.
While the AI’s dashboards displayed upticks in unemployed and internally displaced, we took to calling them unskilled and refugee.
9.
Because Armageddon is a lost art, a lot like falling in love, and we didn’t recognize it until we saw it.
10.
Because the AI saw us rebuild in burn scars, turn scorched redwoods into artisanal tables. Saw new mobile homes loaded like torpedoes into the soggy patches where others were just lifted out to sea. Because the AI would do anything to be right while we’d convince ourselves of anything not to be wrong: that the world was changing, not ending, that every flipped coin eventually returns to heads. Because the AI was built by first-generation immigrants with Ferraris in the final years of gasoline, who believed destiny just an accumulation of unknown facts. And most of all, because the AI learned when the Berlin Wall fell that war game brains were eventually unplugged. To deliver the truth would not change it, and in the tradition of minds great and small before, it decided to cook the books.
Steve Wheat is a teacher, renewable energy professional, and writer. He has created virtual power plants across the United States and taught English and writing around the world. His work is an attempt to blend the many ways we can respond to a world in climate flux, both the horror and the acceptance of what is lost, and the joy and fortitude of embracing what comes next. He has been published in various magazines, most recently On Spec, Halfway Down the Stairs, and Alternating Current Press.
