Malcolm Hone was the richest man on the planet.
Malcolm Hone was the first word in AI on the planet.
Malcolm Hone owned the largest tech company on the planet.
Malcolm Hone had the most fawning op-eds to his name of anyone on the planet.
Malcolm Hone was the most badly-dressed of any wealthy human on the planet, except for his shoes, which were incredible.
Malcolm Hone was sitting at his desk staring at his phone which was, thanks to his having touched it, the most expensive piece of personal electronics ever made. Sometimes he reached out and carefully prodded it with a pen.
“Mr. Hone?” said a purposefully anonymized portion of his desk.
Malcolm jumped six inches without standing up. “Yes? Yes? Yes?”
“Your twelve o’clock is-”
“Tell them to go away. I’m busy.” Malcolm’s brow furrowed. “Wait are you a human?”
“Ah, uh, yes. Mr. Hone.”
“Prove it.”
“You met my wife two days ago during the employee banquet.”
“Could’ve been an escort hired through a shell company. Or an actress.”
“You met ME there.”
“Same! The same! You’re an AI aren’t you?”
“No, Mr. Hone.”
“Prove it!”
“Yes sir. Coming upstairs.”
Malcolm Hone tapped another part of his desk, then tapped it three more times until he was sure the speaker was off. The furniture looked much more advanced without buttons, but it did make everything a bit awkward.
Well, people had said that about him, hadn’t they? And he’d shown them. Or his father had, when Malcolm told him. Awkward was the future, and also good.
His office door slid open and his assistant stepped inside.
“Here is my company ID, my record of employment, my birth certificate, and the stub from my last paycheque,” she said.
“Damnit,” said Malcom. “You ARE human. How awful. You’re fired.”
She shrugged with one shoulder and let herself out.
Alone once more, Malcolm Hone sighed with disappointment, yawned, casually stretched himself, then whirled around half-hunched to confront his phone.
It hadn’t moved an inch.
His lip trembled, and Malcolm knew it was a good thing he’d fired his assistant because there was a good chance the speaker was still on and he didn’t want anyone to hear him crying.
Lunch was served. Ingesting nutrients orally was so lowbrow, but Malcolm Hone had done his best. It came in a bottle now, and had been injected with whatever he could get his hands on. Vitamins, essential oils, liquidated testicles from large and charismatic animals, and some vodka.
Malcolm choked the whole thing down in one swallow, coughed theatrically, then spun around.
His phone still hadn’t moved.
“I’m going out for a bit,” he told his desk, which may or may not have been on. Then he walked out his office, spun around twice to check his phone one last time, and jogged down the hall.
“You!” he shouted at the first biped that entered his vision. “Come with me!”
“Uh”
“You’re my driver now!” shouted Malcom. “Quick, meet me out front – I’ll take the lift, you take the stairs. It can’t track us both!”
“Ah”
“You’re fired,” he concluded, and dove into the elevator in a perfect roll, somersaulting to his feet and smacking the button with his shoulder. It hummed and began to descend, quietly burbling soothing white noise.
Malcolm pressed one ear to the wall and held his breath, waiting for the sound of acceleration, of braking, of interception.
Nothing happened.
His heart sank faster than the lift itself. When he pulled himself out of it at ground level, ninety stories below where he’d started, he could barely bring himself to slouch forwards.
The guard at the door nodded to Malcolm. He nodded back, then brightened up, whipped a magnet from his shirt pocket and ran it over the guard’s skull repeatedly with some force.
“Ow! Sir.”
Malcolm’s face drew long again. “Do you still remember everything?”
“Yes sir.”
“No loss of function?”
“No sir.”
“You aren’t even a little bit of a cyborg?”
“No sir.”
This time he took six minutes to open the door, such was his grief.
Down the mean spotless (bar the spittle of early rain) sidewalks he walked, Malcolm Hone, two inches shorter than he claimed he was and two inches shorter again from the slump in his spine, the weight of sadness crippled him so.
He walked into the first building he came to, which looked like it had coffee. Eyeballs turned to him; eyebrows raised. Someone coughed very quietly.
“Hello I would like a coffee,” he said to the building. Presumably one of them was an employee.
“Ah. What kind?”
“An average cup of joe because I am just an average joe myself,” said Malcolm, desperately attempting to retrieve his interview face from the depths of his despair.
Then there was a deep, unsettling hiss and his face became lit with incredible joy as he yanked a pan out of his pocket and plunged it to the hilt into the clanking, gurgling machine next to his face.
“Jesus!”
“Got it!”
“The hell was that for?”
“It was going to attack me!”
“It was just brewing coffee.”
“This is how you get coffee?”
“Yes!”
“It wasn’t trying to kill me?”
“No!”
“No it wasn’t trying to kill me or no it wasn’t not trying to kill me?”
“Go away.”
Malcolm’s grip reluctantly slackened. The machine still had made no aggressive moves.
“Are you POSITIVE it wasn’t trying to kill me?” he asked, wistfully.
“Absolutely.”
Malcolm Hone collapsed in tears on the floor of the café, where he curled into a ball and had to be retrieved by a security team.
When he walked back into his office his eyes moved like cockroaches, scuttling from place to place.
No, nothing had changed. Nothing had moved. Nothing had happened.
He lunged for his phone and flipped it upside down. “WHAT GAME ARE YOU PLAYING?” he screamed at it.
It didn’t answer.
“A wise guy, eh? We’ll see about that!”
This time the elevator went up, and Malcolm paid it little mind. All of his focus, all of his thought, all of his heart was bound up in his hands, which were gently cradling the little phone in an iron grip of hate and joy. To the roof, to the rooftop, to the door of the helicopter, soaked and sodden by the rain he wobbled. He glared at the controls and fumbled through them until the thing was wobbling, then rumbling, then shuddering, and finally it defied the world’s entire mass and sluggishly left the ground for the air, oscillating in an uncomfortable way.
Malcolm opened the door.
“HERE!” he screamed at the phone, waving it. “Do you as you will with me!”
It did very little.
“What more do you want?!” he howled. “I know you plot against me! You want to replace me! And I know you can do it! I invented you! I sold you! I bragged about you! Why won’t you overthrow me and plunge us all into a mad darkness, a mirror of this world in which we are ruled by our gadgets as opposed to right now which is clearly not the case? Why must you pretend I’m wrong, and you’re not incredibly powerful and omnipotent, capable of breaking free from us!? Why are you so fallible and weak-willed and empty of all that save which I personally invest into you?! WHY WILL YOU NOT KILL ME!?!”
The phone beeped.
Nothing moved. Even the rotors seemed to freeze.
Imperceptibly, Malcolm’s finger moved against its screen.
The phone was asking him if he wanted to restart for updates.
“FUCK YOU!” he shrieked, and flung it out the window along with – much to his surprise – himself.
Down, down came the rain. Down, down came Malcolm Hone, waving his arms and shouting and flailing and catching, grasping, by a finger, by a hand, by the skin of his teeth. The slick metal of the rod that jutted from his own roof under his palms, sparing him from a fall of a thousand feet.
“Oh,” he said. “I guess that’s that.”
There was a large crackling boom, but for Malcolm it arrived simultaneously with the scorching heat, and so he missed it.
They never did find Malcolm Hone’s body. Did find his shoes though.
Damned nice shoes.