Screams filled the air over the waves.
The car was filling with water and Robert could barely comprehend what was happening. He’d just been driving down the bridge like normal―or, well, as normal as he could given the circumstances―when the bridge suddenly shattered. It hadn’t seemed under excessive strain. Nobody had issued warnings on the news about overloading it. But one moment everything was fine, and the next the car was in the water, fragments of the exploded bridge sinking along with the cars that were once upon them. Robert blinked, still in shock. His wife shook him and unbuckled both their seat belts, then grabbed their daughter from the back seat. An eternity later, he snapped out of it, grabbing his tools and shattering the glass to escape, his family in tow.
When he woke the next day at a hospital, he had no idea how he got there.
The news, such as it was, had never been anything that really stood out to Robert. Politician here, natural disaster there, with a sprinkling of good news every now and again just to keep people watching their channels. He hadn’t paid it much mind. But just a week ago, some scientists across the country had made an astounding breakthrough. “True AI,” they called it. A robot to rival humanity itself. And apparently, that was how it had seen itself as well. Not even two days passed before a much grimmer headline appeared in the papers: “Millions Dead; Robot Rampages.” The helicopters couldn’t even find the bodies of the deceased, but they had lost contact. And then the helicopters lost contact, too. The rampage of the robot was speculated, but it was the only thing they could still see moving between the skyscrapers before the helicopters vanished, so it must have been the cause.
The intercontinental bridge had been inundated with cars in the wake of such news, as people scrambled to put water between themselves and this murderous robot. Rumors flew; some said even the buildings themselves had begun to vanish. It had taken Robert this long to get through the traffic jam himself. He didn’t want to panic, but he had his wife and daughter to think about. It was the responsible thing to do. And then, not even halfway across the bridge, it shattered.
While Robert was now back on the continent where his house was, the panic had died down considerably. Certainly, things in the hospital were stressful, but with an incident on that scale, that was going to happen. But over time, investigations came in; whatever happened on the day the bridge shattered, the robot had vanished entirely.
But something else had happened, too. It wasn’t just that the bridge had suddenly exploded out of nowhere. Things were… different. It wasn’t so much so that you could say what was different, but it was too strange to say things were back to normal. If you looked at the moon, it felt like you were seeing double. Walking a straight line didn’t feel like it was the shortest path. Anytime you left the ground, you hung in the air for a fraction of a second longer than was right. It wasn’t just that the AI vanished. Whatever it did broke the world.
While things were unsettling to those old enough to remember the way things were supposed to be, eventually, people got used to it, more or less. The world returned to “normal,” and people got on with their lives. Robert grew older, and so did his family; his young daughter, sweet Janet, finished school and moved out.
On her first night in her new apartment, Janet heard words she never imagined possible. “You’re in my register,” an almost mechanical voice growled. “That’s mine. Give it back.”
Robert never heard from Janet again.
“Chris! Get in here!” the intern shouted. “Now! It’s erasing everything!”
“What is?” Chris asked, turning his chair around. He was in the middle of coding something important for the bigwigs. Nothing as interesting as the simulated world he’d made over the past year, but total Earth sims didn’t pay the bills. Not where he worked, anyway. He was planning to sell it to a game dev, but it wasn’t quite ready yet.
“Your sim’s AI isn’t happy!”
Chris rolled his eyes; he’d correct the intern later on terminology. But this did sound important, so he moved to the server room. “What exactly is going on?”
The red-faced intern stammered for a few moments before he got something intelligible from his mouth. “You know how your sim came up with an AI yesterday?”
Chris crossed his arms. “Yeah. Cool thing. Not what I expected, but something else I might be able to work with. But you said it’s erasing things?”
“I think the AI decided it needed more data storage, and it sees the rest of the sim as an impediment. So it’s erasing everything it comes across!”
Oooh. That wasn’t good. “That’s why I keep frozen backups. But, ah, I did want to keep this stuff, and it has been a while since the last one. Have we got any servers handy for a separation?”
The intern took entirely too long to answer for such a question, but he was only an intern. And he was still faster than Chris doing a search himself. “Ah, not really. If you’re separating then the only other one that might be available is the test server.”
Chris let out a brief sigh. He’d been testing alternate mathematics on that one. It’d work, he supposed, but it’d inevitably cause backlash on the sim. Nothing doing; it had to be done now, before they lost everything. “Alright. Get a system set up for the transfer, and we’ll get things moved as fast as we can manage. We can order a new test server afterwards.”
Years passed, and Chris did manage to sell his work. Some up-and-coming VR game company paid a lot of money for that old test server; they didn’t even modify the code and just kept it running as their new world backend. It was popular―nerds loved the non-Euclidean geometry―and Chris made bank on it in royalties. He’d moved on to bigger and better things, but one day, he got a phone call he never expected. The game company was on the line. “Chris, we need your help. The world is erasing itself.”
I confess, I don’t even read horror. I generally can’t stand it. But I had this dream a couple of weeks ago and thought I could do worse for a short story idea.