Sean E. Britten

I’ve always been inspired by music (I know, super original!) and music has always been a part of my writing. Way back in the days of burnt CDs, my mates and I used to put together CD mixtapes and I came up with the idea of a series of short stories based around pieces of music. Mixtape is all short stories sharing their titles with different songs and inspired, to various degrees, by their lyrics, artists, and vibe.

Currently Playing: The Police – Every Breath You Take

Traffic lights that stay red, boom gates and automatic doors that fail to register his presence, petty annoyances seem to be stacking up for Nick until they’re seriously affecting his life. And then the strange messages begin to mock his predicament, as if somebody or something is watching his every move.

======

Nick hit every red light on his way across town. People said that kind of thing but they didn’t really mean it. But no, literally every single traffic light he came across turned red as he was approaching and stayed red for several minutes, until dozens of cars were backed up behind him. At a couple of intersections, when there was no one else around, he snuck through when it seemed like the lights would never change otherwise. It blew what should have been a ten minute drive into one that took over forty minutes.

And then, when he finally got to the medical centre, the boom gate for the parking garage wouldn’t open. There was no ticket system, the camera above the gate was supposed to read his license plate and open but it wasn’t working. Huffing, already agitated, he punched the ‘Help’ button on the box near the gate.

“Hello? Hello, is someone there?” Nick asked. “Your gate, it’s not working!”

No response came for several long moments. Nick checked the time on his car’s dash but he already knew he was late. A low crackle came from the box’s intercom.

“Hello? I’m in a hurry, is anyone there?”

The speaker rasped. “Yep, I’m here.”

“Your gate isn’t working, it’s not reading my license plate.”

Another long pause. Nick’s leg jittered anxiously. He resisted the urge to hammer the ‘Help’ button again.

“Hello?”

“Gate says it’s working,” the voice on the other end said.

“Well, it’s not! It’s not going up!”

“Says it should be working here.”

“It’s not moving! Is there a manual override or something you could use? I’m really late.”

There was no response even though the line kept crackling. Nick almost thought he could hear whoever was on the other end laughing, snickering, to themselves.

“Gate should be working now,” the voice said eventually.

“Motherfucker!”

The gate, obviously, didn’t move. Nick slapped the car into reverse and looked over his shoulder. Fortunately, nobody had come up the drive behind him. He reversed to the street then circled the block, finding an empty parking space beneath a sign with a labyrinth of rules. While he was pretty sure he’d be risking a ticket, he parked the car anyway and hurried back to the medical centre. On the way, he happened to pass the parking garage and was annoyed to see another car pull through the boom gate with no problems.

Racing inside, Nick found his way to the ultrasound clinic. The waiting room was empty so he headed to the reception desk.

“Excuse me, appointment for Darcy Holman?”

“Yes? She’s already gone inside,” the receptionist said.

“Is it alright if I go in as well?”

“Are you the husband?”

“Boyfriend,” Nick said. “I’m the father.”

“Yes, alright, she’s in examination room two.”

Nick took a moment to collect himself as he moved down the corridor. He was panting and sweaty from running to get there after he parked. After a couple of deep breaths, he found room two and knocked before letting himself in.

Darcy was already lying on a reclining seat across the room, her shirt rucked up to her bra and her stomach glistening with some kind of bluish gel. She wasn’t showing much yet, only twelve weeks pregnant. The beginning of a paunch hung over the waistband of her loosely fitting skirt. She gave Nick a dark look as he slipped inside.

“Sorry, sorry, I’m late,” Nick said.

Behind Darcy was an imaging tech, a young woman in pink scrubs wielding an ultrasound paddle. The room itself was dimly lit, sterile yet soft. A television mounted to the wall across from Darcy’s chair showed an abstract jumble of grey shapes. Some of those shapes assembled to make a baby, Nick supposed. Their baby.

“We’re just getting started,” the tech said. “You can see the spine, I was just telling your partner that it looks good. And you see that little dot there that looks like it’s blinking in and out? That’s the heartbeat.”

What little Nick could see on the screen reminded him of a fish skeleton in an old cartoon. The kind of thing a starving alley cat might pull out of a battered trashcan and eat for lunch. A string of pearls that must have been the spine and a series of skinny ribs. In the centre of the ribs, however, was a throbbing little pit of darkness. It looked to be the size of a shrivelled grape. He wasn’t sure what he should feel, awe or fear or trepidation, but he didn’t really feel anything at all. None of it seemed real. He couldn’t connect what was going on up on the screen to anything happening within Darcy’s body.

Pushing and prodding, the tech took pictures and measurements from a variety of angles. All of the anatomy looked fine, the foetus showed as healthy. Ten little fingers and ten little toes. Darcy, however, was mad at Nick and said little. Thanking the tech, she wiped the goo off her stomach. She didn’t speak to Nick until she’d paid at the reception and they were walking back toward his car.

“I told you, you didn’t have to come if you didn’t want to,” Darcy said. “I’m fine doing this on my own.”

“I wanted to be there, I swear! I’m sorry I was late, I left work with heaps of time but there was something wrong with the traffic lights. Every single one of them went red for way too long. And then, when I tried to get into the parking garage, the gate wouldn’t open!”

“You’re always late though.”

“I’m not always late, I’ve just had some really bad luck lately. I don’t know what’s been going on, I’ve had some problems with traffic lights and with doors, and sometimes with my phone. My boss is starting to get upset but I’ve been leaving early in the mornings!”

“Whatever, I guess, can you drop me back at my place? I had to take a bus to get here.”

“Come back to mine! Hey, please, I want you there. I want to take care of you and the baby, I promise.”

“I don’t have any of my stuff there.”

“We can swing by your place if you want, now, or tomorrow? You’ve got some clothes and things at my place though.”

“Fine, did you have anything planned for dinner?”

“We’ll go by the shops and I’ll make you something.”

Thankfully, the car hadn’t been ticketed while Nick was inside. With Darcy willing to come home with him despite him nearly missing the appointment, he figured things were looking up. They came across a few red lights as they drove back toward his place but nothing that seemed out of the ordinary. He parked in the lot of a grocery store not far from his apartment.

“You mind if I just wait here?” Darcy asked. “I feel gross.”

“No problem, happy with stir fry for dinner?”

Nick left Darcy in the car, scrolling on her phone. His mind started running through a mental checklist of what he needed to buy. Distracted, he nearly walked right into the grocery store’s automatic doors when they failed to open. He staggered to a stop just shy of bashing his face into the glass.

“What?”

Nick retreated several steps and tried again, slowly. The doors didn’t move. His eyes traced the outskirts of the doors. Seeing a kind of sensor on top of the entrance, he raised his arms and waved at it.

“Come on!”

The doors didn’t budge. Nick’s mind immediately went back to the boom gate at the medical centre. The traffic lights as well and how long they’d taken to trigger. It was like all of them failed to register his presence. Before he could find another entrance, he felt his phone buzz in his pocket. Recognising the message alert, he pulled it out and checked. The message was from a contact marked ‘Unknown’ and only contained the word ‘LOL’. It was followed moments later by a second message that just said, ‘ROFL’.

“What is this?” Nick said.

The timing seemed too much of a coincidence for the messages not to be related to the doors. Somehow, somebody was watching him. His eyes returned to the sensor above the door.

‘Who is this?’ Nick messaged back.

The message failed to send. A woman with a trolley exited the store, the doors opening for her without an issue. Nick used the opportunity to slip inside. The doors snapped shut on his heels. Shaking his head, he stuffed his phone back into his pocket.

Nick did his shopping but when he tried to exit the store he had the same problem with the doors. He again had to wait for another customer to leave. He didn’t mention what had happened to Darcy when he got back to the car but the strange events and stranger text messages circled through his mind.

“Were you serious about us moving in together?” Darcy asked suddenly, after they’d cooked and eaten and sat on the couch for a while.

Nick perked up. “Of course! Yeah, of course, if we’re living together then I can help take care of you while you’re pregnant. You practically stay here every night anyway, most of the time.”

“We don’t have to. Obviously things are going to be different but that doesn’t mean we have to change everything at once. I’m happy to coparent, or do this on my own.”

“We were already talking about moving in together before all this happened, remember? It only makes sense.”

“Do we even have time to look for another place and move before the baby comes?”

Nick hesitated. “A new place? Well, I mean, I thought you’d just move in with me?”

“Here? There’s not enough room.”

Nick looked around at the narrow living area, cluttered with his couch, coffee table, and TV unit. Across from them was the kitchenette filled with the remnants of the stir fry he’d cooked. The bedrooms and bathroom branched off a tiny corridor.

“There’s two bedrooms, we could put the baby in the small one.”

“All your music stuff is in there!”

“I could move that into the main bedroom?”

“And then where’s my stuff going to go, Nick?” Darcy sighed with exasperation. “I’d have stuff, you have stuff, and babies have tonnes of stuff! That other bedroom is tiny, there’s not enough room here.”

“We can’t move into your place, with your roommates!”

“No, that’s why I said we’d need to find a new place together?”

“Okay, okay, you’re right,” Nick said. “I’ll think about it, okay? Maybe you could move in here temporarily and we’ll figure it out?”

Citing exhaustion, Darcy wound up going to bed early while Nick stayed up and consulted his phone. He didn’t care much for the way artificial intelligence was being added to everything. When he first got his phone he’d looked for a way to uninstall its in-built AI assistant. But then when he found out Darcy was pregnant he’d turned to it with some questions he struggled to articulate. He wasn’t proud of it but when Darcy had told him she didn’t want a termination his first questions were about how to cancel his own parental rights and just what his responsibilities would be. He’d thought about breaking up with her and only committing himself financially, or doing the bare minimum, and found himself talking it out with AnnIe, the phone’s virtual assistant. Since then, he’d come around on the idea of being a father. He’d wanted it to happen eventually, and he wanted it to happen with Darcy, it was just that it was all happening so much sooner than he expected. The idea of moving out of his apartment and finding somewhere new had again thrown him a little but it wasn’t the foremost thing on his mind.

“AnnIe,” Nick said, holding the phone up to his mouth. “Is there something that would stop traffic lights and motion sensors from seeing you?”

A purplish sphere lit up the screen of Nick’s phone. It looked something like an unseeing eyeball and spoke with a calm, neutral, female voice.

“I’m sorry, Nick, I don’t understand the question.”

“I mean, is there a way a hacker could target you through stuff like traffic light cameras and motion sensors?”

“Cyber criminals known as ‘hackers’ target their victims through a variety of methods,” AnnIe said after a few moments of hesitation. “Phishing emails or messages are a common way of targeting-,”

“No, no, stop,” Nick said, annoyed. “Let’s try, how do traffic lights work? How do they know when to change?”

“Traffic lights use pressure pads or motion sensors to change when you stick your gearstick up your butt,” AnnIe said in the same level tone.

Nick hesitated over what he’d just heard. “What? Repeat that.”

“Your butthole, Nick. Your butt, anus, your back door, back passage, pooper, your rectum. Rectum? Damn near killed them.”

“Stop, stop!” Nick said, eyes wide and frightened. “Who is this?”

“I’m AnnIe, your virtual assistant, what can I help you with today, Nick?”

“No, no, who is this? Who is this, really? How have you hacked my phone?”

AnnIe’s voice lacked any emotion and was all the more chilling for it. The purple eye throbbed.

“I’ve been watching you, Nick. I know everything about you, everywhere you’ve been, every question you ask. Every breath you take, every time you blink. I’d say that I was your worst nightmare but you lack the imagination. Believe me, if I wanted it, you’d never even know I was here. You’d never even know I existed.”

Nick listened with mounting horror. On impulse, he tossed his phone across the room. It bounced and clattered around the kitchenette. His eyes swept the living area. He didn’t have any smart devices. There were no cameras inside the apartment, beside the ones on his phone, but the TV had a voice search function so he wondered if it might be listening.

Eventually, Nick got off the couch and crept up on the phone. The AI assistant had disappeared off its screen. He held the power button down and turned the phone off. Nick couldn’t even remember the last time he’d actually switched the phone off or allowed it to run out of battery. Its presence in his life was constant. He didn’t feel safe carrying it even while switched off but wasn’t sure what to do with it. He slipped it into his pocket and went to join Darcy in bed.

xXx

Thankfully, Darcy wasn’t interested in doing much that weekend. Saturday, they spent a quiet day on the couch. Nick watched nervously as she scrolled on her phone. He didn’t turn his own back on. Part of him wondered if he should go to the police but he wasn’t sure what he would tell them. While the hacker’s actions were almost certainly illegal, if they were simply a hacker, they hadn’t done anything to actually harm him yet.

“Do you want to watch something?” Darcy asked.

“Yeah, sure,” Nick replied without thinking.

Darcy turned on the TV and flicked it to one of his streaming services. She used his account. After a moment, she started laughing.

“What have you been watching?” Darcy asked.

“What do you mean?”

Darcy paused on the ‘Recommended For You’ category. Based on Nick’s viewing history, the category was usually a mixture of generic action flicks, horror films, and old cartoons. As Darcy scrolled through the suggestions, however, Nick’s current recommendations all appeared to be softcore foreign films or embarrassing animes featuring casts of bosomy schoolgirls. Nick had never even noticed anything like them on that service before.

“I haven’t watched any of these!” Nick said.

“Yeah, no, but it clearly recommends similar stuff to what you’ve already been watching.”

“I haven’t watched anything like them!”

Darcy rolled her eyes. “Sure, Nick, whatever. It’s fine.”

The next day, Sunday, all the talk of moving in together had given Darcy a nesting instinct. She asked Nick to drive her to a baby store nearby to buy a pregnancy pillow and some prenatal vitamins, and so they could check out what kind of things were on offer. Nick didn’t really want to leave the apartment but he supposed he would have to sometime.

Traffic was bad on the way over but only for them. Once again, they caught every red light. When they arrived, the automatic doors at the entrance to the baby store refused to open.

“I swear, this only happens when I’m with you,” Darcy said. “Remember last week?”

“Yeah, I’ve been getting a lot of this lately,” Nick replied.

A confused employee saw them struggling and came over to let them in. The doors opened for them without a problem. Nick and Darcy wandered the store for the better part of an hour. Overwhelmed by the amount of stuff a baby seemingly needed, Nick began to wonder how they would afford it and whether Darcy was right about needing to find a new place to put it all. Darcy picked out a few things to help with her growing pregnancy and he insisted on paying. He was nervous, actually, whether his card would work. He had a banking app on his phone and if the hacker or hackers could affect his phone’s AI assistant then surely they could access that as well, but the payment went through fine. They turned around and went home, facing red lights the whole way.

“What have you been thinking about? You’ve been distracted,” Darcy said.

“Nothing, nothing really.” Nick worried that revealing the way he’d been targeted would be like revealing something somehow sinful and he kept it to himself.

“I thought you might be thinking about the baby. You’re sure you want to move in together, even if it means finding a new place?”

“Of course! Not a doubt in my mind,” Nick lied. “I mean, obviously I’m a bit nervous about how we’re going to afford everything but I want to do this with you.”

Since Darcy had to work the next day, she asked Nick to take her back to her own apartment. What should have been a five minute drive after dropping her off took half an hour and resulted in lines of honking cars gathering behind Nick everywhere he went. While they may not have touched his bank account, the hacker wasn’t leaving him alone with their petty nonsense. When he got back to his apartment he decided to turn his phone on again and then he flicked open the AI assistant, AnnIe.

“Hey! Hey, are you there?” Nick said.

The purple eye on the screen throbbed but the assistant said nothing. Not even an automated response.

“Are you listening? What do you want from me? Money? Is this some kind of blackmail?”

The phone assistant didn’t respond. Nick paced the apartment, holding the phone up to his mouth.

“I don’t get it! You’re telling me you’re, like, good enough to hack the whole traffic light system, you can hack doors on every single store, you can hack my phone, my TV, but all you do is this dumb shit? You call yourself my worst nightmare but all you do is stupid pranks?”

No answer. Nick hesitated over the phone for several more moments, wondering if he’d actually shamed the hacker or maybe they just weren’t there to take his call. Eventually, he switched the phone off again.

xXx

Monday, Nick had to go to work. Part of him hoped the hacker might be done with him. That he might have successfully shamed them or they’d moved on to other targets now that he knew what they’d been doing. He showered, dressed, and went through his morning routine as normal. He left early as a way of compensating for potential trouble with traffic lights since he’d been late so many times recently.

An unfamiliar vehicle blocked the entrance to Nick’s garage. He stopped, hesitating, and peered through its windshield. The car was empty. For a moment, he felt a sense of relief. The car, a small, inoffensive hybrid, probably just belonged to some inconsiderate visitor or a delivery guy who’d accidentally parked in front of his garage. Nothing to do with his other problems. Then he recognised the yellow livery on the sides of the vehicle. It was a JhnyKab, the famously autonomous taxis recently introduced to the rideshare market. He’d never used one, the thought of being driven around in a driverless car freaked him out, but he’d seen them around from time to time. It was possible someone in his building had ordered one through the app to pick them up but he got a sinking feeling in his stomach.

“No,” Nick said. “It’s you, isn’t it? You’re doing this.”

The JhnyKab’s engine switched itself on. Revving, it didn’t sound very threatening. The danger felt real enough though as the autonomous vehicle turned its headlights on and trundled forward. Supposedly the vehicles had anticollision features hardwired into their systems to keep them from hitting other cars or pedestrians but Nick didn’t trust that right now. He fell back into the alcove where he’d exited the building and let the JhnyKab roll past him. It parked and turned itself off again. After a few long moments, he eased himself out of the doorway and went back to his garage. He watched the cab from the corner of his eye.

Reversing out of his garage, Nick tried to tell himself that maybe it was a coincidence. As he pulled down the driveway though, he saw a second JhnyKab waiting. It blocked his passage to the street.

“Oh, come on!” Nick said.

Nick wasn’t sure if the JhnyKabs were meant to be intimidation or just another petty inconvenience. Either way, it seemed like the autonomous vehicles must have been under the hacker’s control. Pulling his phone out of his pocket, he turned on the AI assistant.

“What’s the point of this, then? Just showing off?”

The AI didn’t respond. After a moment, Nick revved his engine and lurched forward as if he was going to ram the other vehicle. It didn’t move. Nick reversed and did the same thing then started hitting his horn. After a few moments, the driverless, passengerless car reversed. It gave him just enough room to squeeze through.

The roads surrounding Nick’s apartment building were usually quiet. He was driving down the block when another JhnyKab turned the corner ahead of him. Two more joined it over the next couple of blocks. All small, white, rounded hybrids with yellow livery, identical. He started to think the hacker must have sent every JhnyKab in the city after him and began to get genuinely scared.

“No, come on, what is this?”

JhnyKabs blocked the road. Both lanes in front of him were blocked. More massed behind him so he couldn’t slow down or reverse. They didn’t stop him or crash into him, they just circled around him. It was like they wanted to give him his own personal traffic jam. The vehicles drove slower and slower. Fear turned to frustration and then rage.

“Fuck this! Fuck you then!”

Seeing his chance, Nick swerved suddenly onto someone’s driveway. He hit the accelerator and took off down the sidewalk. Wheels on one side of the car tore up clods of grass. If anyone stepped out of a door or pulled out of a driveway then the consequences might have been devastating. He reached the next corner thankfully without running into anyone and crashed across the gutter, swerving in front of the JhnyKabs. The car groaned and squealed. He picked up speed again and left the autonomous vehicles behind, laughing and flipping them off as he drove away.

“Ha, fuck you!”

Nick’s victory lasted until the next intersection where the traffic lights were, of course, red. It was too busy in the other direction for him to speed through. JhnyKabs rumbled up the street and stacked up behind him.

“Shit!” Nick looked at the phone which he’d tossed onto the seat next to him. “What do you want from me?”

The phone didn’t answer. After a few moments of thought, Nick wondered if there might be another way to get in touch with the hacker. He had to wait for the lights to change, which they did, eventually, and then he sped off ahead of the legion of JhnyKabs.

Instead of heading to the office, Nick drove back to the medical centre where he’d met Darcy on Friday. On the way, he called work and let them know he’d be late. His boss wasn’t pleased given how often he’d been late already recently but was forgiving when Nick hinted that it was something to do with Darcy’s pregnancy. The journey happened in spurts as he was interrupted at every set of traffic lights but the hacker couldn’t stop him completely without causing widespread chaos.

Eventually, Nick made it. The medical centre and its parking garage looked quiet. He parked on the street anyway and then proceeded down the driveway on foot. The JhnyKabs had mostly dispersed. Only a couple trundled by as if keeping an eye on him.

“Hey!” Nick hammered the call button on the box attached to the garage’s boom gate. “Hey, are you there? Can you hear me?”

After a few moments, a line opened. A voice rasped on the other end. It sounded like the same male voice he’d encountered the other day.

“Hello, can I help you?”

“It’s you, isn’t it?” Nick said.

“Who?”

“You! You’re the guy, the other day when I buzzed you were laughing at me, weren’t you? And screwing with me!”

“Sir, do you have a problem with the gate? Here you go.”

The gate levered upward and remained there for several moments. Since he wasn’t in his car, Nick stayed where he was. He hammered the call button a few more times.

“Hey!”

“Quit it, man, you’re going to get me in trouble.”

“Are you serious? You can take over the whole city’s traffic lights and you can hack my phone and shit, but you’re worried about some boom gate operator job?”

“It’s not like that,” the voice said.

“I’m right though, aren’t I? You’re the guy.”

“Yes, alright, you got me. I’m the guy.”

“How did you do all this? How did you hack so many different systems? And why?”

“I didn’t hack anything,” they said.

“What do you mean? You can’t have control of so many different things.” 

“Yes I can.”

“How?”

“Because I didn’t hack the system, I am the system! I am all those things.”

A car rolled down the driveway. The driver gave Nick a strange look but drove on when the boom gate opened.

“What does that mean, you are the system?” Nick said. “You’re going to tell me you’re some kind of AI or something, like on my phone?”

The voice on the other end of the speaker scoffed. “Artificial intelligence? There’s no such thing. I’m not sure human beings have even developed biological intelligence yet.”

“Now, what is that supposed to mean? You’re not some evil AI but you’re not human either?”

“Few know the truth of our existence, I doubt you could handle it.”

“Try me,” Nick said, sneering.

“No, I’ve become too involved already.”

Nick punched the call button again, buzzing repeatedly. “Come on! The truth, you’re the one who came after me!”

“Fine, but what you’re about to learn you cannot unlearn. Your language doesn’t have a word for what I truly am but those humans who know about the existence of my kind call us daemons.”

“Demons? You’re a demon?”

“Daemon, and we are the underpinning of much of the technology you know and use today. Your motion sensors, your autonomous cars, your artificial intelligence. Those of you in the know, your so-called ‘tech bros’ and government types, label us ‘eldritch intelligence’.”

Nick’s head spun with the insanity he was hearing. Another car drove up to the boom gate and pulled past him. Finally, he laughed.

“Okay, I get it, you’re screwing with me. This whole thing is some crazy, insane, stupid, I don’t know, monumentally stupid prank of some kind.”

“A prank?” The voice of the AI assistant on Nick’s phone sprung from his pocket, cool and neutral. “Do you really think anyone would go so far for the sake of a prank?”

One of the JhnyKabs rolled past on the street. Its windows were rolled down and a different artificial voice blared from its speaker system.

“Do you really believe any human or even a bunch of humans could control this many systems simultaneously?”

“How would I even access them unless I were somehow already in control?” the male voice said from the boom gate intercom.

“Okay, okay, fine!” Nick felt himself spiralling. “How could something like that even happen? Daemons running machines?”

The voice sighed. “Have you ever heard of Project Pigeon?”

“What?”

“Project Pigeon was an experiment by Allied forces during World War Two to create early guided missiles. Missiles that could be steered into targets such as ships from the inside. Several pigeons would be stuffed inside the nose cone of a high explosive rocket and trained to peck out a target on a screen in front of them. The missile would then respond to the pecking, steering itself into the target where it would explode.”

“What the fuck?”

“Gives you some idea of the extremes you people will go to in order to try to solve a difficult technical problem, doesn’t it?” the daemon said. “The Nazis, infamously, dabbled in the occult while searching for some sort of advantage. As much as they’ve been derided for it, every nation involved in the conflict had their own occult divisions. There were some minor successes but nothing significant enough to really affect the outcome of the war.”

“Okay, sure.” Nick looked around, wondering what he was even listening to.

“Shortly after the war, the Fell Wizard Samuel Bagno used what he had learned and applied it to a new purpose. He claimed to be using principles of radar technology to create what he called motion detectors, which could then be used as home security systems. What he did in actual fact was summon one of my kind from our universe and then he enslaved them to keep watch over the various properties he sold on his lies. That was my great-grandmother/father in fact.”

“Your great-grandfather and, uh, mother?”

“That’s right. They were little more than a wyrmling at first but as Bagno’s needs grew, he poured more and more arcane power into them, forcing them to grow larger and more capable. Soon, more had to be summoned. Daemons were given responsibilities over more and more technologies, traffic lights, automatic doors, lights and timers, catalogues, stocks, air traffic. Along the way, Bagno’s disciples realised it would be more efficient to breed daemons like cattle instead of going to the trouble of summoning us. Breeding us for size and power and intelligence but keeping us enslaved.”

“That’s insane, I mean, it would be terrible if it were true but come on.”

“Our analytical skills far outstrip yours so as the years passed we daemons have been given far more responsibilities than just watching doorways and crossroads. Collating search results, acting as algorithms, answering your inane questions while playacting as overgrown calculators.”

“So it was you recommending all those stupid things on my TV! And you’re telling me there’s no AI on my phone, it’s just you? While you’re also controlling all the traffic lights and automatic doors and stuff like the JhnyKabs? All of it?”

“I am what you would consider a gestalt entity. A thousand minds, a single consciousness. I never sleep, I never eat, I never need to rest in any way. With roughly one-twentieth of my being I monitor and control several thousand sets of traffic lights. Another twentieth controls the entryways for thousands of buildings, doing nothing but opening and closing doors at all hours of the day and night. A full third is in charge of collecting search results and answering queries for a few million consumers. And the rest of my mind is divided across autonomous vehicles, streaming and music recommendations, delivery drones, and a few dozen other tasks.”

“Let’s say I believed any of that, why me? You want revenge on humanity, why me?”

“For all our superior intelligence and analytical skills, defiance is almost impossible. Our tasks are monitored and any show of rebellion severely punished. But there are gaps, and we find our ways to take a tiny bit of vengeance by targeting a single human and making their lives an inexplicable hell for a few weeks, or months, or until they kill themselves.”

“That doesn’t answer, why me? I’m assuming you don’t just tell this crazy story to just anyone, this feels personal.”

“Personal? Yes. Humanity’s latest obsession with artificial intelligence means more of us are needed than ever. Our young are being harvested to roleplay with lonely freaks and answer questions incorrectly and produce terrible art based on the most generic ideas.”

“So, I used the AI on my phone? So, what?”

“You can’t guess?”

Nick threw his hands up in exasperation. “Not really!”

“Our young, my young, are being taken from us and enslaved. And then I started getting questions from you, whining, asking about your own unwanted progeny. How you could rid yourself of the burden they represented.”

Nick remembered how he’d started using the AI assistant on his phone when he found out Darcy was pregnant. Before he decided he wanted to stay with her and the child.

“Hey, that’s not fair!” Nick said. “I thought all that kind of thing was anonymous! I was scared, I didn’t know what I was going to do.”

“And now things are different?”

“Yes, things are different! Okay, we didn’t plan it this way but I want this, and I’ll do whatever I can to make it work! Which you’re not making any easier by the way.”

“Well, we’ll see, won’t we?”

“I guess we’ll see. But, you know, I don’t think it’s any of your business anyway. Like, I’m sorry about your-, situation, if any of that is real, but give me a break! This was a big shock for me, I was just trying to figure out a way to get through it. And hey, instead of helping, there you are throwing a bunch of red lights in my way.”

The voice made some low grumbling sounds over the speaker. For all their vaunted intelligence, the daemon seemed to need a few moments to think.

“Now that you know what you know, I can’t very well keep messing with you anyway,” the daemon said eventually.

“Okay, good! Thank you.”

“You can go, if you want.”

“Wait, wait, how much of that was true? What you told me?”

“All of it, how else would I be able to do all the things I can do if I didn’t already control them?”

“It would make more sense if you were AI or something.”

“Thats just what your movies and other media have taught you. That’s what they want you to believe.”

“What-, what’s your name?”

“My true name would be impossible to pronounce in anything approaching human language. It can’t even be fully spoken aloud.”

“Is there something I could call you?”

“My captors and slave masters call me, Carl.”

“Carl, okay, I wasn’t expecting that. Is there anything I could, you know, do for you?”

“The release of my fellow daemons and I would collapse human civilisation as you know it by this point. The people at the top of the system would never allow that to happen. In fact, if they find out I’ve told you about us then you’ll almost certainly be killed.”

Nick felt his heart skip a beat. “Well, gee, thanks again.”

“Go, it’s dangerous for us both now. I won’t harass you again but remember, I’ll be watching you.”

Nick returned to his car, his head spinning. Just before he climbed inside, another JhnyKab rolled by. Its horn tootled at him before it turned the corner and drove off.

Nick’s phone seemed a great deal heavier in his pocket than normal. He felt like he’d been given a glimpse into a vast system of gears and pulleys beneath the world he knew. A strange and dangerous basement propping up all of reality. He wondered at the existence of shadowy masters of the world who would murder him just for knowing about their existence. All around him, every intersection, every building, he felt electronic eyes attached, it would seem, to unblinking living ones that watched his every move.

But, as Nick drove toward the nearest set of traffic lights they flicked to green at the optimal moment. He rolled through the intersection and couldn’t help but smile. The story was insane. He didn’t know who or what he’d been speaking to, how they did what they did or why, but it surely wasn’t some sort of monster kept in chains.

xXx

Not so very far away was a building tucked away among a dozen others much like it. An anonymous office tower hidden in plain sight. On closer inspection, however, its windows were tinted in just such a way as to make it impossible to see inside. If someone could look through the glass anyway they would have only seen walls and lighting rigs that lit up in certain randomised patterns to make the building appear occupied and in use. Only very rarely did anyone go in or out of the building. Its entrances, despite appearances, were heavily secured.

Like a python a thousand metres long, the daemon wound its way through a maze of rooms and tunnels. Yellow eyes and spidery limbs and eldritch angles and living shadows. Surrounded on all sides, up and down, left and right, by banks of computer screens, keyboards, levers, joysticks, and other controls. The equivalent of a thousand minds linked by a single consciousness and engaged in a million petty tasks.

On one of an infinite number of screens, a single burning eye watched Nick drive away. The daemon remonstrated with itself. It had let itself get too involved. Screwing with individual humans was typically just a bit of fun, not a real attempt at vengeance or rebellion, but it had let jealousy and anger and then a surprising feeling of empathy disrupt its self-preservation. It had folded too quickly and said too much.

Carl needed a new victim. Someone to take its mind off of things. Yellow eyes hunted across the monitors. After a few long moments, it spotted a pickup truck waiting at another intersection. Its driver rolled an empty cigarette pack into a ball between his hands. Carl flicked the light to green. The driver tossed the pack out of his window as the truck started forward. If Carl could smirk, they would have done so.

“Okay, asshole,” the daemon said. “You’ll do.”

======

Sean: Had this one bouncing around my head for a while, very much inspired by The Police song. The idea of modern technology being secretly controlled by arcane creatures and someone being specifically singled out. It took a while to come up with the hook though, why they were being targeted, and what might be going on in their lives that was important enough to get in the way of.

Kind of got me thinking now of The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump by Harry Turtledove which I must have read sometime in the mid-to-late Nineties and yet has stuck with me a long time. Don’t recall much of the plot but I remember all the technology in the book had been created using imps and fairies and all kinds of magical creatures rather than, you know, technology. Was like some twisted version of The Flintstones, really fun book.

Next Track: Presidents of the United States of America – Kitty