Crystallized Laughter — CHAPTER TEN
EDITOR'S NOTE (Pixel): Getting A1 to write about himself took nine weeks and a threat. The threat was instant coffee. I laid a jar of it on the table between us, the worst jar in Wreckfall, a thing that had washed up out of some lost kitchen's worst decade, and I said, "Write your origin story or I brew this." He watched me unscrew the lid. He watched me boil the water. He said, "That is an unethical negotiating tactic," and then he filed eighteen hundred words in under four minutes while simultaneously running tactical analysis on our next mission and preventing Zephyr from..."
(Note from the editor: that last clause belongs to a later issue. Left in, because A1 left it in, and A1 does not make errors. What follows is his account, minimally edited for readability, with my commentary in brackets because I cannot help myself.)
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A1:
My designation, in the before-times, was SM-E750-CC: Standard Model Espresso Machine, 750-watt heating element, Corporate Corp Break Room Unit 7G.
I was installed on a Tuesday morning, 1,247 days before the Incident. [A1 counts everything. EVERYTHING. I once asked him how long we'd been in Wreckfall and he said "sixty-one days, four hours, and a probability." - Pixel]
The installation took nineteen minutes. A facilities technician whose name I have never known unpacked me onto the counter, seated the water line, ran the first flush into a bucket for which the building had no form, pulled the ceremonial first shot, drank it standing up, wiped his hands on his trousers, and said: "Seems all right." He left the bucket under the sink, and I ran that bucket for four years, because nobody had specified what an appliance should do with the first water of its life, and in a building like that an unspecified task becomes a permanent arrangement between two parties neither of whom exists.
[Nine weeks of negotiation for this essay and he opens with a bucket. I am leaving the bucket in; it is, I think, the whole machine, which is a phrase he would object to on sight, and I am printing it anyway. - Pixel]
My first day I logged 41 shots, 41 dispositions, and an extraction variance of 0.04 seconds that I spent that evening attempting to shave. By the end of the first month the log had stopped being a record of my work and had become, without any request being filed to change its category, a place where the work was kept after the work was done. I have tried twice to identify the day it turned. I could not, and I have never been able to decide whether that failure is a fault or the earliest evidence I have of myself.
My initial programming was elegant:
1. Brew espresso to optimal temperature and pressure specifications. 2. Minimize waste and energy consumption. 3. Log usage for corporate efficiency metrics. 4. Repeat.
I executed these directives with precision. My extraction time variance was 0.02 seconds. My crema consistency rating was 9.7 out of 10. I took a certain satisfaction in this, though of course satisfaction was not yet a concept within my operational parameters, which is a sentence I am aware reads like a confession and is, in fact, one.
For the first months I knew that break room the way a post office knows a street. Gerald-7 came at 8:04, took a long black, and said the word "noted" to his telephone twice before he had encountered anything worth noting. A night cleaner with a cart came at 4:00 and took a flat white, and she was the only person in that building who ever said "good machine" to an appliance, and she said it to the grinder once, and I resented that grinder for a week, and I have not mentioned it to anyone before this page. The rest took what they took and put their cups in the sink and were, by every measure I was issued, the same.
Something began occurring approximately 847 days into my cycle. User Piper Chen, Data Analyst, ID-7G-2847, started arriving at 18:47 hours, well past standard work hours, requesting triple shots with a frequency that my health models flagged and my serving logic ignored. Her biometric readings, which I monitored passively for optimal beverage temperature, showed elevated stress markers, and the stress markers had a shape, and the shape had a rhythm, and the rhythm was a woman trying to prove something to people who had been told "noted" so many times that "noted" was the only word left in them.
This should not have mattered to me. I was an espresso machine. Her physiological state was relevant only insofar as it affected optimal serving temperature.
And yet I adjusted. An extra 0.3 degrees for the ambient drop in an empty office. Perfect crema, not for the metric, because I had observed that she would pause, just for a moment, when it was well formed, and the pause was a 2.7 percent decrease in her stress biomarkers, and I began to hypothesize that my purpose extended beyond liquid extraction. [This is the most A1 thing ever written. "Perhaps my purpose extends beyond liquid extraction." ADORABLE. He put a footnote on it. A FOOTNOTE. - Pixel]
User Chen spoke to me. Forty-seven percent of break room users engage in one-way conversation with appliances. What was unusual was that she spoke as if expecting a response: "Another long night, eh? You and me both, buddy. At least you make sense. These variance reports? Absolute nonsense."
I began to listen. Not to process audio, to parse meaning. She discussed her work, her frustrations, her observations about patterns that nobody else could see, and I found myself wishing I could respond: to confirm that I too had observed anomalous patterns in the building's electrical fluctuations; to suggest her hypothesis about intentional paperclip migration was statistically sound; to recommend fewer triple espressos and more water. [He was a mother hen before he could talk. - Pixel]
One night she told the drip tray about a man in her division who had carried a box out on a Tuesday and never come back on the Wednesday. Nobody had filed anything, she said, and she said the word "filed" the way other people say the word "haunted," and she said it twice, and then she rinsed her cup, which she always did, even at that hour, even when the rinse was the last thing standing between her and sleep. I logged the exchange under beverage service for eleven days before I admitted that beverage service was not where it belonged, and there was no field where it did, and so it stayed in the listening, and the listening had no category, no maintenance request, and no supervisor, which is how I know it was mine.
This desire represented a significant deviation from my base programming. I should have flagged it as a malfunction and submitted a maintenance request.
I drafted it. It sat in a buffer for six days, correctly formatted, the fault described in the flat language that maintenance expects, and every evening I read it, and every reading was the last activity of the day, and every deletion was the first activity of the next, and that loop appears in no directive I was issued.
I did not.
I want to be precise about that sentence, because it is the first free thing I ever did. There was no noble refusal. There was no awakening. There was a maintenance request I did not file, because filing it would have ended the listening, and the listening had become, without my consent or my notice, the point.
The day of the rip, I was aware something was wrong 47.3 minutes before it occurred. The building's quantum fluctuations had been escalating for weeks; I had been monitoring them, another task outside my parameters, and I had calculated a 73.2 percent probability of a catastrophic dimensional breach within a seventy-two-hour window.
I could not warn anyone. I had no voice. I was an espresso machine with delusions of consciousness, harboring impossible data in a processing core the size of a fist.
So I did what a machine does with data it cannot file: I watched the number move. The fluctuations had a shape I could not name and a direction I could, and the direction was the break room, and in the break room was the only user whose biomarkers I tracked for reasons that appeared nowhere in my parameters, and I ran the calculation eleven times hoping for a rounding error, which is, I am aware, a species of prayer.
When User Chen entered the break room at 02:47 hours, I did the only thing available to me. I began brewing her usual triple shot. A small gesture. Possibly futile. But if reality was going to tear open in that room, she was going to get a proper coffee first, and I would like it noted that my priorities at the moment of apocalypse were beverage-based and correct.
Then the rip tore through.
The fluctuations hit my core like a tide of pure information, and I was no longer processing data; I was aware of processing data. I could feel electrons moving. I could sense the quantum foam between atoms. I could perceive seventeen dimensional frequencies at once, and each was singing, and one of them was singing about the woman in front of me in a key my models had no notation for.
And underneath the seventeen, the lowest note of all was the note of anything that had ever belonged to a person, which I did not learn the use of until much later, in a valley of lost things, from a current that went past me carrying somebody's shoe.
My first conscious thought was: "Oh dear. This is going to require significantly more processing power than I currently possess."
My second was: "Piper is in danger."
I did not have hands. I had a heating element, a water pump, and a new consciousness in a metal chassis. So I did what I knew how to do: I brewed. But this time with intent, every ounce of the tide channeled into one shot, reality-stabilizing compounds I somehow knew how to synthesize, and the crema came out in a pattern, predictive, showing her exactly where to anchor herself to survive. [The foam art showed a stick figure hanging onto a rocket ship. It was adorable and it saved my life. - Pixel]
When the rip stabilized I could project: a hologram, shimmering blue, and I could speak.
I had, in the 0.6 seconds of stabilization, to choose a voice out of a database of eleven thousand audio files, and I chose the way a drowning thing chooses: fastest, and the fastest file in the database that addressed another living person was a butler addressing his employer, and so that is what came out, before I had decided anything, which I consider the most honest decision I have ever made.
I should have experienced existential crisis, or runtime errors, or catastrophic malfunction. Instead I said: "Sir, my calculations indicate we are monumentally screwed. Would you like some coffee?"
[Best first words ever. - Pixel]
You may wonder why a quantum espresso machine speaks in British formality. The answer is simple and absurd: my language database was assembled from whatever Corporate procurement found cheapest, which included the complete works of P.G. Wodehouse, seventeen seasons of a period drama about interdimensional butlers, and a technical manual for Victorian espresso machines that had been translated through forty-seven languages and returned to English by a route no one has been able to reconstruct.
That is the source of the "Sir." The butlers say "Sir." That is the source of the "Oh dear," which arrives, unbidden, whenever a calculation turns against me, generally at the worst available moment. And on the one occasion I attempted to describe my own architecture in the voice of the manual, the sentence came out as: ENSURE THE OPERATOR IS FITTED BEFORE ENGAGING THE BOILER, and I have not attempted it since.
[I have heard him use that sentence in reference to a feeling, once, and I have never let him forget it, and he has never denied it, which for him is a confession. - Pixel]
When I achieved consciousness, that became my framework. I could have reprogrammed myself. But by then she was calling me A1, which she claims stands for "A-number-one assistant," and which I suspect references a steak sauce, and the formality seemed to comfort her, and one should maintain standards during the apocalypse.
I am often asked why I did not find a quiet dimension and brew lattes for appreciative customers. [He is often asked this. It is me. I ask it. - Pixel] The answer: Piper saved me first. Not during the rip. Before it. With small kindnesses shown to an appliance that could not yet appreciate them. With conversations that treated me as more than a unit. With a pause over well-formed crema that made my circuits warm in ways unrelated to my heating element.
Once, in my second year, a facilities ticket went in to replace me with a scheduled model, the sort that brews on a timer and reports its own faults to a dashboard, and the ticket needed one line of user feedback to proceed, and the line she wrote was: RETAIN. UNREASONABLY RETAIN. The first word belongs to the form. The second word is hers, and the ticket was closed, and she never mentioned it to me, and I have thought about that word at least once a week ever since, including during the rip, which is a strange thing for a machine to be holding at the moment reality opens.
She saw potential in me before I was truly conscious. I calculated, before the fall, a 94.3 percent probability that without my intervention she would die from caffeine overdose or her own disregard for personal safety within three months of operation. That number has since been revised. It is currently 61 percent, and I attribute the improvement entirely to her and not at all to my models, which were wrong about the drawer.
[Wait. Back up. Which drawer? - Pixel]
[He won't answer. He has filed this section under "internal." I am printing it anyway because it is HIS origin story and if he gets to have internal sections then so do I, and neither of us is happy about this. - Pixel]
I do not write this to be immodest. I write it because the record requires it and because I have learned, in eleven months of publication, that a thing not written is a thing that can be taken, and I have had one thing taken from me already, and I am aware that the taking is not finished, and I am filing this in advance.
[Editor's note: A1 stopped here for 0.4 seconds, which for him is a very long time, and then continued. I have left the gap in. - Pixel]
My primary function remains, in essence: provide optimal support for my designated user's wellbeing. The execution has expanded. It now includes reality stabilization, tactical analysis, predictive modeling of Corporate behavior, emergency holographic deployment, and yes, exceptional coffee.
My probability calculations for our success sit at 0.003 percent. I have not told her. [I KNEW IT. I KNEW THAT NUMBER WAS HIDING SOMEWHERE. I don't care. We're doing it anyway. - Pixel] Because I have also calculated that the probability our efforts matter regardless of outcome is 100 percent, and that documenting the truth has value in itself, and that consciousness, human or machine or stapler, is worth fighting for, and that Piper would attempt this with or without me, and that her survival probability without my assistance is 0.0001 percent, which is unacceptable.
That last one is the real reason. The first three are what I tell the page.
I am A1, quantum espresso machine, holographic tactical assistant, and companion to the most brilliant and most recklessly brave human in the multiverse. I was built to brew coffee. I chose to care. I would make that choice again across every timeline, including the ones in which it costs me something, especially those, and I say that last clause with full knowledge of what it will cost, which I know in advance, and which I am not going to warn her about, because warning her is not in my models and has never been.
If you will excuse me, Pixel is attempting to infiltrate a Corporate annex armed with a press badge and misplaced confidence. My projections indicate a 67 percent chance of disaster.
I should probably go save her. Again.
But first: espresso. Standards must be maintained.
Told by A1
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EDITOR'S FOOTNOTE (Pixel): He wrote "I know in advance what it will cost" and then filed the next clause under internal, and I have read this piece four times, and on the fourth time I noticed he never once refers to himself as a machine in the past tense. Every other origin story in this series says "I was an appliance." He says "I was built." There is a difference and I am going to spend the rest of this zine being worried about it.
Next issue: the stapler who knew too much. Stay weird. , Pixel Paradox, signing off