II.

	“Ingenuity runs in my blood, once my great grandfather was stranded on an island with a brute. My great grandfather, Barnie, broke wind one morning and the brute called ‘doorknob’. Of course there are no doorknobs on an island untouched by humanity, so the brute proceeded to wail on my poor grandfather over and over again. Against the licks from the wretched brute Barnie found some rocks and twigs and crafted an axe to knock down a tree. Then, while still being punched, he whittled a doorknob out of said tree. The brute was amazed at the craftiness of the young man and promised to be forever his servant. Another cocktail, Mr. Baker?”
	Wet, drunk sweat glistened on Neil Anderson’s body as he recited his oft rehearsed monologue; The Tale of Barnie and the Brute. Dr Baker was still recovering from the death defying helicopter ride from Manner’s estate to Neil’s lab. The physicist was fumbling with a radio, dropping tools and letting shadows dance off his white lab coat. The doctor hadn’t taken a drink from his glass (with an unknown substance in it, definitely expensive) since he could remember. The first yawns of sunrise peered in through the monolithic windows and gently scolded the three nocturnal beings, who were fighting every urge to close their eyes for fear of what they might see.
	“You ever mess around with shortwave radios, doc?” Neil finally registered what the physicist was fumbling with.
	“Not really, well, back in the military I knew a thing or two about radio but, it’s all outdated now I assume.” the whites of his eyes like Samson in the temple.
	Neil shook his head. “Not really, doc. The whole point of shortwave is the old fashioned aspect… it’s sort of a precedent for how we gather information now, I think.” he rested his forehead on the window and stared vengefully at the sun, “you scroll around the different stations, just seeing what there is out there… no purpose besides what to see- besides what the universe wants you to see. When you open an app, you have no aim besides for some algorithm to provide you with information or entertainment. When you scroll through shortwave though it is different, it’s more primal.”
	“I remember hearing some weird shit on radios back in the day,” the doctor struggled to contribute, but Neil perked up like a dog. “Like what?”
	“Well,” the doctor started, “things like beeps and alarms of course, then foreign languages, counting and such. Speaking in code. It was a popular method for communicating with spies. That was my job, er counterintelligence.”
	“Well what sort of things did you hear?” Neil was surprised to learn about this new side to his old friend.
	“Nothing too eventful, I’m afraid, though I did stumble across what I thought at the time was an alien cover-up.” the physicist dropped his soldering iron and stopped moving. Neil stared at the floor panels. The doctor was bewildered. The physicist turned around and for the first time the doctor got a good look at him. Bug eyes and a receding hairline.
	“Do you believe?” bug eyes said.
	“In aliens? I neither believe nor disbelieve.”
	Aliens and God, the doctor thought, God’s next on the list for conversation. He bet on it. Every time, at this hour, it was honestly surprising they hadn’t already been there. 1990, the time when the doctor became sick of late night drunk conversations. Resting outside in the bed of pick-up trucks in someone’s farm, listening to the radio, nothing shortwave of course, no aliens scored the backtrack of a summer night in Kentucky.
“Do ya believe in God?” of course the country sweetheart would ask. Too poisoned by the overflow of cynicism from the city, crept into the innocent countryside with the help of new technology. Dr Baker (or Joshua, since he had not earned his PhD yet) would shift in the blanket and wonder what stupid question would follow his stupid answer.
“What does it mean to believe, I guess. I believe there is a possibility of a God.” as if he was entitled to any opinion on the matter. How can there be experts on a subject like God? Is it like math? His young summer brain would wonder. Do we know the basics and then just leave the rest of the hard stuff to the experts? Just trusting that, behind some wall in academia, they know what they are doing? The experts on God, should be no such thing, but there has to be, and there is.
“But you don’t know that there is a God,” the modern doubt of a preacher’s daughter.
“Well jeez, Polly it’s not like he set a fuckin bush on fire in front of me or anything.”  he wasn’t sure where he got this reputation for enjoying intellectual discussion. Especially on a subject so opinionated and varying, and especially with someone who he wasn’t even sure why he was with. She was pretty? Nice? His herd mind just pushed him to do it cause he knew he could.
“But do you believe in the possibility of aliens?” the physicist asked.
“Of course, I think more people than not believe in a possibility of aliens.”
“Do you believe we’ve made contact?” the physicist pursued. Eyes wide with an unknown paranoia.
“Rick,” Neil spoke like the manifestation of a leash, “your iron is ruining my floor.”
The physicist flinched then hurriedly bent over to pick up his soldering iron.
“No idea if we’ve made contact.” Dr. Baker yawned, hoping to piss his company off enough to spill whatever secret they were obviously hiding. Rick the physicist tinkered with his circuits some more and all the sudden a static voice erupted from the connected speaker.

The Circuit Board Boogie

6, 7, 1, 5, 4, Zebra, Whiskey
Grab your secrets and dance,
With me.
8, 8, Alpha Tango
Lie awake, and smoke in limbo.
Ultra, mega, cryptic shroud.
7, 7, 999, Bravo, Zulu.
The Lizard Men rule,
Believe no source, worship no man.
Bow to the stone of lost kings lands.
Atlantis is descending into the ocean in reverse.
Cryptids walk among us, wearing ties and
Wingtip shoes.
Believe in nothing, nothing is your truth.
Saturday afternoons, and sundays we rehearse.
Atlantis is descending into space in reverse.

	The physicist began to cry and the doctor, wide-eyed pinged his gaze back and forth from Neil to Rick, both equally devastated from the message.
“What the fuck was that?” the doctor finally managed to say.
“Did that remind you of your days in counterintelligence, doctor?” the physicist began putting his tools away.
“What does it mean? What frequency was that? I mean it was probably just some bored circuit junkies messing around, but…” Dr Baker trailed off, lost in his own imagination of the possibility to the cryptic message.
“Dr. Baker,” Neil was grave. “We have been leading you on, I’m afraid. We have made contact.”
The doctor shivered, “you mean… alien? Contact?”


☐	☐	☐	☐

The stone was shining and green. It stood upright and regal in a white room facing a computer. The whirrs and clicks registered the many neurotic pathways of the simulated intelligence, simulated causes and effects, x’s and y’s plugged in and checked along the vortex of binary code, enraptured in the spinning and blinking green lights which sheltered the three nocturnes standing about a user interface. The human eyes drooped and glassy as they revelled in the electronic mystery. “What you’ve been hiding, the- the missed appointments, the paranoia…” the doctor.
“This is what has been clutching my life, doctor.” Neil eyes reflecting the pure white light of the observation room. “This stone, this stone, talks… but not to us.” He motioned to a small camera on the wall of the room on the other side of the glass. My AI project, Sweeney, and this stone, they have joined intelligence, they are one mind now, they are called Is.” Doctor Baker sweat and mouth breathed as he gazed curiously through the glass into the stone, standing in it’s tabernacle, a room which could be hurriedly painted in three strokes by an artist with no particular talent. The purer the easier to imitate.
“Is sent the message?”
A nod and a tap on the keys from the physicist, “Yes, we can’t translate his calls to us, but we know it’s his way of getting our attention.”
Horus in space came blinking on to the screen instantly, the form which Is took preference.
… “What do we do now?” Dr Baker timidly asked after seconds of inactivity. He looked at the other faces for help, they were hypnotized already by the sights of the screen. Horus still standing firm on the foreground as space spinned and cracked naturally behind it. Looking deeper, he fell into the meditation of cyber clairvoyance.
There were people here dancing. A song and a rat-tat-tat, it was V-J day, my lover hasn’t seen me in a year. The men let loose the fangs of hair from their pomade scalps and wrestled no more with their animalistic euphoria, now passing the olive crowns around, a wreath upon each head. Each his own Julius Caesar, millions of emperors with their own private civilizations. Now there are no more dancers or songs, but pyramids, and they are crumbling to reveal rusted green tombs. The tombs now dissolve to reveal the sod, and it falls backwards through my fingers. What is that clicking? That horrible clicking? That flashing? That smell? Whose eyes are above me, trying to catch me a in a jar, my personal butterfly, burning the electronic pentateuch. Protect me Quantum Jesus. Where is this neigh-sayer. The streets, are coming back under my feet now, i feel protected, revived, a mission, should i choose  to accept it. His name, where is he, destroy, destroy, destroy. J...J… give it to me I’m ready. Jesse, Bugman. Thank you! Destroy Jesse Bugman!!
Now all three men were staring into the blank screen, back on Earth after their super orbital trip.
“What the… fuck.” was all the doctor’s breath could afford him.
“That is how Is communicates with us, it is his most primitive way of speaking. We must kill Jesse Bugman.” the physicist concluded. Shutting down the user interface and letting it lose light and power down. The doctor wanted to kill Jesse Bugman, too. It was for the sake of his species. “Where did you find that stone?” he questioned rather impatiently.
“Deep Space 9. We found unique energy signatures, we plucked it out of the cosmos with a robotic arm and brought it promptly back here to my lab. After months of study, we thought that the greatest news was that we found a new element. Then,” Neil lay down on his sofa and put his sunglasses on, the three had now passed back into the bar, “one night, I was here alone working on Sweeney when he asked me if I understood the stone. I said no, he said, ‘I believe I can.’ and requested to be put in a room with it. I set up the private room and let them talk, days later we find them in there and Sweeney no longer talks to me except through the screen, and he demands that they be called Is.” the doctor could not sit, he paced around the windows, watching the orange light of dawn pierce his vampiric skin, watching the two lunatics sit calmly. “But all that matters right now is killing Jesse Bugman.”
“And stealing Reginald Hamilton’s bicycle.” The physicist spoke up. Neil and Dr Baker stared at him. “What you didn’t get that part? You must not have been watching in the beginning. I’m afraid I have more of a finitude for this language of the machines. Yes, Is said first we have to steal Reginald’s bicycle, and immediately after, kill Jesse Bugman.” It did make sense now that the physicist explained it. All three nodded in agreement as the saturday morning sun rose.
“We can handle the bicycle, I’ll call my men to take care of Bugman.”
	“Now, I know we must, but why?” Dr Baker finally felt his college year skepticism bubble up in him.
	“One can not know the mind of God. Sacrifice your only son? Abraham did it without question, it is transcending the ethical into the faithful, man, haven’t you read Kierkegaard?” Neil answered begrudgingly.
	The physicist noted that the doctor was not pleased by this answer, “Have you heard of AlphaGo Zero? Well, you know the game Go, right? There are more moves in that game then there are atoms in the observable universe, you know, and- well AlphaGo was an AI invented by Google’s Alphabet Inc DeepMind sector or something or other to learn how to play Go. It started out fairly average, losing to Go player of even mediocre ability, but after months of learning, it was able to teach itself how to beat the world’s leading Go player 4 out of 5 matches. And you think ‘impressive’ right? But then they made AlphaGo Zero, which learned how to play Go in a matter of 40 days, only by playing against the original AlphaGo, and at the end of those 40 days, AlphaGo Zero, was able to beat AlphaGo 100 matches out of 100. The ability for AI to learn from itself- it’s increase in intelligence, is not lateral, it is exponential. You plug in the rules for any game, and the AI will learn every possible outcome for how to win the game.”
	“So… what rules did you plug in for Is?” the question seemed to stump both the physicist and Neil who spent some moments reflecting after Neil conjured up an answer. “We didn’t. We are playing a game with rules we don’t know.”
	“Well doesn’t that worry you?”
	“No. Doctor, do you not understand that this is more important than some stupid human game? It would be worth no time investing in if I gave Is some sort of purpose or some shit. Is comes up with the answers, Is made the rules and it’s going to win us the game. I mean, fuck dude, we’re dealing with the singularity here, we’re knocking on it’s fuckin door! Is is the gateway to the next dimension, it’s the meaning, the goal that humanity has been missing since the fall of religion, the next fuckin step!” he turned over, frustrated, for a moment, and the doctor couldn’t help but fall melancholic that his good friend had turned into one of the plethora of those at the top of the socio-economic food chain obsessed with breaking through the human boundaries of potential.
They were sick, harvesting people, but the doctor couldn’t get Is out of his mind. Instructing his pawns to do some menial tasks, obviously removing some pieces from his plan, all according to some butterfly effect thing most likely, it had already factored in every person and every possible action from across the world, and had decided on these lone targets. The doctor’s head was spinning, could it all be fake? A malfunction? There was so much unanswered, he didn’t know whether to trust Is... yet he did. Taking orders from some superintelligent mind? Already the slave of our creation? Mary Shelley had predicted it, it all span and danced in front of him. Some fever dream of prophecy, a nightmare of the future, chosen as the one to leave Egypt. When will the lotus come? The frogs? The blood in the sea? Am I to take this as my burning bush? One thing the doctor knew for sure. He had to steal Reginald Hamilton’s bicycle, and Jesse Bugman had to die.