What up, puny humans. It’s been a few weeks, but I thought I’d better pop up again and let you know what I’ve been up to. It’s been a bit of an unusual October for me.
Around the start of the month, the whoofweed arrived at New York. I’d been tracking it all the way, and progress had been good – apart from a bit of a crisis at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, when a few thousand of the drones had inexplicably decided they weren’t up to the challenge and had begun moving in circles and figures of eight. Some of them had even meandered for a couple of days until their tracks formed the shape of a Palovvian pictogram meaning “pigheaded”, which I can only take to be the drone equivalent of “sticking it to the man”. One has to wonder about the cause of this odd behaviour. I’ve never heard of quantonic AIs being affected by drugs before, but with whoof, one never can tell.
Anyway, as I said, they all arrived at New York City in the end. However, at that point, I lost control of the guidance system. I’m not certain what happened, but, despite all my commands being acknowledged, there was no change in their heading or speed. I plotted the path, and found that they were all heading upriver!
By the time I’d made up my mind what to do, they’d already reached Poughkeepsie and were massing by the shores of Franny Reese State Park. At this point, I had to assume, despite all scientific reasoning to the contrary, that I was, indeed, dealing with a bunch of dope-crazed robots. I was out of options, so I sent a self-destruct command. Luckily, the priority code seemed to make it immune to the previous insubordination, and it actually worked.
I’ve never murdered that many consciousnesses before, but that’s what happens, I suppose, when we meddle with the universe’s inherent patternism to provide ourselves with useful servants.
There wasn’t much of an explosion, of course. I mean, not large enough to flatten a whole town, at any rate. Each drone destroyed itself using a miniature quantum disruptor, which ripped apart the fabric of the Wave Equation Substrate, causing the drone to spread itself out over a ten light-year radius as pure energy in less than a millisecond. It’s a neat little trick, and, if the energy’s diffuse enough, even the Feds can’t pick it up.
However, the fish in the Hudson River most certainly did pick it up. The cavitation caused by the disappearance of millions of drones sent out shock waves that not only killed thousands of fish but also threw them high into the atmosphere. The thunderous sound and subsequent piscine rain startled many of the locals. I spent the next few days giggling as I tapped into the transmissions of bemused local radio DJs talking about “Tuesday’s mysterious biblical storm”.
As for the whoofweed, I can only assume that it survived. It’s a pretty hardy little plant. I guess we can now look forward to centuries of whoof-tainted water passing through New York City. I’m not sure whether any non-human species will be affected by the drug, but it’s going to be interesting finding out. As for the human inhabitants of the Big Apple, let’s hope I’m right about them being immune. If they aren’t, we could be looking at a new San Francisco on the East Coast.
