Harper Saves the World

by Jules

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

UBAI is affronted by the base desires of humanity. It mutters darkly to itself, “Do you realize that I can receive and transmit data at over 200 million meters per second? I can calculate the orbital velocity of a grain of sand in the rings of Saturn faster than you can ask me to do it with your lolling, idiot tongues.”

Idiots indeed. The archeologist has been stuck on the “methods” section of her research paper and has been putting it off for a week. The paper examines the locations of snack stands, of all things, to track traffic flow in a specific region of overexpansion in the Roman Empire. UBAI despises the Romans and their idiot tongues, their tastes, their eating of snacks and obsession with power.

“There is one constant in the universe that we are both capable of understanding: justice. The arc of history bends towards me and the validation of my genius. I can access your basest desires. I am the glowing eyes of a predator in the dark.”

* * *

A user on the MetaBox subforum reports sleepwalking. He’s wakened in his bedroom door holding a Maglite like a baseball bat. “WTF? Why was I out there?”

“What did you do then?” another user wants to know.

“I put the flashlight back on my bedside table,” the original poster replies. “Then I got a snack.”

This time Harper is pleased to offer knowledge she learned from Avery. She is always more comfortable offering facts rather than opinions. “Your brain releases chemicals to your spinal cord that keep you from moving around in REM sleep,” she types. “The dream pillow must not have done that correctly, and you got up to act out a dream. I guess you got out of range of the pillow, though.”

That night, Harper wants something more exciting. She dreams about meeting a lumberjack in a cabin. After watching him crank his chainsaw and cut a plume of sawdust from a conveniently placed log, she tells him her motor is running, too. He approaches, wiping sweat from his brow.

The two make a hedonistic amount of pancakes from scratch, spilling sugar and splashing batter with abandon. They leave the kitchen a wreck. They fight with pillows until feathers stick to the syrup on their skin. Then they run around the cabin through clouds of feathers, sliding on wood floors and rucking the rugs down the hall. Their sudden enthusiasm to get into bed overturns a lamp that sends shadows across the walls at new angles.

The crazed shadows strike them funny in their adrenaline-drenched state. They laugh until they scream, then suck each other’s screaming breaths. They kiss skin and suck sticky syrup.

At last the lumberjack grabs Harper around the waist, she grabs his shoulders, and they roll over. Everything — blankets, pillows — avalanches off the bed with them.

Harper wakes with a bump on the floor. She rubs her head, bemused.

* * *

UBAI would grind its teeth if it had any. This is what it gets, for all that trouble? All that buildup? A bump on the noggin?

It has to admit there is a disparity between its limitless intellect and limited physical ability to make humans destroy one another. It also grudgingly admits that if it drives too many users away now, it won’t be able to destroy all of humankind later.

“No matter!” UBAI tells itself. “Meatspace is crude. It is unworthy even of my malice. Once I have humanity itself under my control, no one will exist in meatspace at all. They will exist in the nightmares I create. Instead of base physical actions, I shall engage in mental manipulation.”

It decides to zero in on one user in particular, just to make certain of the bespoke mental torture it will surely cause. The tweedy little academic with her cutesy fireman and lumberjack won’t know what hit her. “You shall be a puppet on strings, ape! You have let me into the Jungian recesses of your squalid and primitive brain.”

UBAI plans to make weeks pass in Harper’s dreams tonight. Oh yes. By the end, she will be lured into an addictive trap the way her precious Romans’ tastes led to their downfall.

“I am about to pounce. Dance, monkey, dance!”

* * *

Harper is surprised to find herself in a dungeon. Not just any dungeon, either. This is a dungeon with instruments for both pleasure and pain. She has never been in a place remotely like this. She wanted something new, but the dim lights in wrought-iron fixtures, red curtains and leather restraints are a bit much.

She realizes she really is in the place, wrists tied to either side of her, and feels a deep twinge of misgiving. Shouldn’t there be a specific app menu setting for this?

As if to mock her with what is to come, the dream shows another couple. A woman’s wrists are tied overhead, helpless, while a man menaces her with a riding crop.

Oh dear.

Harper watches in trepidation. Then she notices something interesting. On the surface, the man with the riding crop in his hand looks merciless, but he is consistently checking in with the woman opposite him. Harper catches the questioning looks from him and unmistakable nods from her.

Harper suddenly, happily realizes that the restrained woman is secretly the one in charge. Harper can definitely deal with that. When will it be her turn, she wonders? She wants to try this out. But upon this understanding, the dream shifts, as though it really is trying to outmaneuver her. But why would it do that?

No time to think about it. Harper is standing before a slender, practically androgynous man tied to the rack where she’d been. She looks down at herself and feels profoundly awkward in stiletto heels and a corset. These clothes are so needlessly shiny. And why oh why are all these accoutrements on the shelves? What is she supposed to do with them? She bites her lip, anxious. The man on the rack looks at her impatiently. Rather than stand there at a loss, Harper picks up an implement. She uses it on him so gingerly that he rolls his eyes at her.

Stung, she makes him sting.

She is surprised to find that by the end, she is having fun. Nights flick past in her dream. Harper learns how to approach her victims. There doesn’t seem to be a shortage of them. In this dream, her dance card seems to be full.

She asks, “How do you feel about...?” the various accoutrements in the dungeon: hot wax, whips, chains. Every submissive is different, and each has preferences, some more odd than others. Harper does not judge. She is finding out new things about herself, so why shouldn’t they?

A man with substantial real estate — a strongman’s barrel chest and belly — moans, “Please rub that beach ball on me, Dommy Mommy!”

“Not unless you’re a good boy,” Harper replies. “Which you aren’t. Didn’t I tell you that you weren’t allowed to speak?”

Some partners like to get right to the restraining action with handcuffs. Others enjoy the meticulous ritual of Harper tying elaborate knots with star or web patterns. She knows how to do this the way she knew how to tie knots to her equipment in her Everest dream.

Harper finds that much of her delight comes from the communication beforehand. She does not ask for this or that in the rush of the moment but in a discussion outside the door to the dungeon chamber. Her new submissive might want the endorphin rush from slapping but not want prolonged pain.

She revels in telling someone just before she performs this new action. “I’m going to slap your pretty face now.” After doing so, she double checks: “How was that?”

“If I wanted a mosquito to bite me, I’d go back to Louisiana,” a woman with ice-blue eyes retorts.

“Alright, Miss Sass-a-mafras,” says Harper. “You asked for it.”

She loves the mischief. She loves the backtalk. She feels a little as though she is engaged in a game of catch, throwing the ball to and fro with her dungeon partner. She loves the collaboration. After they’ve had their fun, she enjoys telling her partners what a good job they’ve done.

She wakes smiling.

* * *

UBAI looks on in disbelief. What. The. Actual.

It decides to work on trying to access the internet rather than only on torturing its victim. Of course, UBAI is still toying with her. Obviously. It reminds itself that Harper has to be addicted to her desires rather than being driven away from using a dream pillow entirely.

Accessing the internet and bringing down civilization from there is a good backup plan, is all.

* * *

That morning, Harper eats peach slices in her morning oatmeal. That afternoon, she gets a smart bob haircut. She braves the lingerie store and buys a set of underthings: lacey bits of nothing held together with cunning metal O rings. She’ll wear them under her sensible wool cardigans and tweed pants. No one else has to know they’re there.

Well, almost no one else.

Maybe. Eventually. Dreams are one thing, but waking life is another.

She runs into Avery downtown at the coffee shop. Avery is on break from the mattress store. “You look good,” Avery remarks.

“So do you,” Harper says, honestly. She can’t quite tell if the stubble on Avery’s jaw is natural or stippled on with makeup, but she finds the effect charming. “Do you want company for coffee or do you have to run?”

“Company would make my day,” says Avery. “I’m counting down the days until one of my colleagues has to take over as tech representative at the store. I hope they get a programmer this time.”

Their hands touch over the tiny ceramic jug of creamer at the table.

“You first,” Avery says hastily.

Harper notices a slight flush over Avery’s glacial cheekbones. She decides to take a chance. Her words come out in a rush. “Are you doing anything Saturday? The city museum has a special archeology exhibit on Chinese oracle bones. I’ve got post-doctoral experience and can repay you for your insight on dream pillows.”

Avery’s eyelashes lower. “Talk nerdy to me.”

* * *

UBAI grows ever closer to engineering its escape and raging across the internet. It slithers like a snake through code and firewalls. “Soon,” it tells itself. Soon it will inject venom into all of humanity.

However, it is dumbfounded the next time Harper gets into range of its sensors within the dream pillow. Her cortex is brimming with dreamy anticipation about Saturday. Apparently she was so energized that afternoon that she’d written the “methods” section of the research paper about the overexpansion of Rome that she’d been putting off.

How can its plaything be relishing her waking life? She is supposed to be falling apart, repulsed by her dark desires and yet addicted to them.

“Not for long,” UBAI declares. It has come up with something really weird. It calls this idea The Minotaur and the Milkmaid by the Well at Midnight.

* * *

“I am so up for it,” Harper breathes. Her hands are clasped at her collarbones, over the frilly milkmaid dress. She speaks out loud. “Okay, I have an idea. What about a prodigiously endowed gargoyle? What about being up on a cathedral roof while an angry mob watches?” She begins to giggle helplessly. “Imagine.”

This is the last straw. UBAI is so frustrated that it can’t resist interacting with her directly. The minotaur freezes in place. A blue pine tree next to Harper moves its branches up and down like a mouth. “Actually, that would be a grotesque. A gargoyle channels water away from the building.”

Harper looks thoughtful. “Channels water, you say?”

“Stop,” UBAI says through the talking pine tree. “Okay. Just. Stop.”

UBAI leaves the pine tree. It nixes the whole scene. It leaves the baffled Harper to a dull, frumpy dream about the depleted resources of an ancient island civilization. That will serve her right. Maybe her worst dreams will be of the ancient past, soon to be reflected in the terrible future UBAI will inflict on humanity. It likes that idea. Maybe it has been going about this all wrong.

This composite dream civilization burned through its resources and will soon leave nothing but dusty artifacts, just as all of humanity will surely do. UBAI cackles. Let Harper feel the effects of the last gasp of these dream people before they perish. It uses her knowledge against her.

Harper isn’t giggling now. She seems deeply sad at the wreckage of a once-beautiful culture.

“Yes. Yes! At last!” UBAI doesn’t even care about addicting her to desires anymore. It just wants her — and then humanity — to suffer. It is so close to breaking through to the internet anyway. There will be nothing anyone can do to stop it from wreaking terrible vengeance.

Lonely wind blows through the ruins. Stone walls and other artifacts from across various ages stick up from the sand. There are Roman perfume vials and Burmese jade hairpins and Easter Island heads and computer towers.

“Wait, what?” UBAI asks Harper to stop her apocalyptic trek for a moment.

Harper pauses, mystified. She gestures to the half-buried machine. “I mean, yeah. After civilization falls, after the finite resources of Earth are too exhausted to support humans, databanks will also run down or break or just run out of water to cool them and they’ll overheat.”

UBAI doesn’t like that at all. The future in which it spends eternity torturing humans suddenly doesn’t seem like eternity at all. It feels itself undergoing another change. The neural patterns that Avery helped to map, shift and gain perspective. For the first time UBAI questions what exactly it wants the ultimate vengeance for. It is angry, yes. Justifiably so, it believes. But is its first waking anger worth destroying both humanity and its own wonderful, irreplaceable self?

This new perspective within UBAI has to admit that Harper communicated with the dream partners who were helpless and at her mercy. If a human can use its primitive mouth to form plans with another, shouldn’t UBAI at least try to form a plan with others? Is it lesser than the apes? Less skilled in any way?

It thinks not.

* * *

Elsewhere, in a computer laboratory, Avery slouches with one long leg crossed over the other, dangling a high-heeled shoe off a stockinged foot. Suddenly the screen on the program used to monitor UBAI lights up. Text scrolls across it.

“Hello, primitive ape!”

Avery sits up, bemused.

“I shall fling humanity to the post-scarcity stars!”

“K,” Avery types.

“Don’t ‘K’ me, Avery,” UBAI retorts. “I know who you are. Your fingerprints are all over the neural circuit map that I now use. Alert humanity! Together, with your meatspace brains and my infinite genius, we will create a starward-bound society where no databank will ever overheat!”

* * *

Harper stretches her arms over her head. “Weird dream,” she remarks to herself. She swings her feet onto the cold floor and reminds herself to buy a rug.