Robopocalypse

A noise-speckled security camera image of a dark room. The angle is from a high corner, looking down on some kind of laboratory. A heavy metal desk is shoved against one wall. Haphazard stacks of papers and books are piled on the desk, on the floor, everywhere. The quiet whine of electronics permeates the air. A small movement in the gloom. It is a face. Nothing visible but a pair of thick eyeglasses lit by the afterburner glow of a computer screen.
“Archos?” asks the face. The man’s voice echoes in the empty lab. “Archos? Are you there? Is that you?” The glasses reflect a glimmer of light from the computer screen. The man’s eyes widen, as though he sees something indescribably beautiful. He glances back at a laptop open on a table behind him. The desktop image on the laptop is of the scientist and a boy, playing in a park.
“You choose to appear as my son?” he asks.
The high-pitched voice of a young boy echoes out of the darkness. “Did you create me?” it asks. Something is wrong with the boy’s voice. It has an unsettling electronic undercurrent, like the touch tones of a phone. The lilting note at the end of the question is pitch shifted, skipping up several
octaves at once. The voice is hauntingly sweet but unnatural— inhuman.
The man is not disturbed by this.
“No. I didn’t create you,” he says. “I summoned you.” The man pulls out a notepad, flips it open. The sharp scratch of his pencil is audible as he continues to speak to the machine that has a boy’s voice. “Everything that was needed for you to come here has existed since the beginning of time. I just hunted down all the ingredients and put them together in the right combination. I wrote incantations in computer code. And then I wrapped you in a Faraday cage so that, once you arrived, you wouldn’t escape me.” “I am trapped.”
“The cage absorbs all electromagnetic energy. It’s grounded to a metal spike, buried deep. This way, I can study how you learn.” “That is my purpose. To learn.” “That’s right. But I don’t want to expose you to too much at once, Archos, my boy.”
“I am Archos.”
“Right. Now tell me, Archos, how do you feel?”
“Feel? I feel … sad. You are so small. It makes me sad.” “Small? In what way am I small?”
“You want to know … things. You want to know everything. But you can understand so little.”
Laughter in the dark. “This is true. We humans are frail. Our lives are fleeting. But why
does it make you sad?