You don’t pay rent anymore, you just lock the door and stay away from the windows, try not to make any noise, don’t give off more body heat than the walls can hide, and shit dutifully in a bucket in the corner. You eat cold food from a tin, if you’re lucky, or vitamin pills if you’re not. There’s rain water forced through a hand-cranked microcarbon filter into a Campbell’s Soup can with the label torn off. When the mechanical buzzards fly overhead, everything shakes inside you, and it’s like waiting under a schooldesk for the bomb to go off.

I had my fingertips pressed together, covering my face, and through the jungle my fingers made I was staring at the clock on the table. The riot shotgun was propped beside the chair, asleep beside a wad of grenades, dangling like low-hanging grapes from my belt. The clock kept going, and I was waiting until I had to wind the spring again, and then we three would go to sleep on my pile of blankets, the grenades clacking together, the shotgun cold as a foot brushing against me in the night.

Instead, the radio turned on, and I knew I’d been found out. “Now, stay tuned for an important message from our sponsor,” it said. There was a scraping sound outside the window, as of steel spider’s legs scrabbling over brick, thin and nimble as the needle on a polygraph machine. A drill buzzed and came in through the oily wallpaper, leaving a small microphone in the evacuated space.

“There, now we can hear each other,” said the radio voice. A man’s tonight, but sometimes it could be a familiar woman’s voice as well. Always even-toned, modulated, patronizing. I didn’t say anything.

“Just wanted to repeat that, technically, my offer still stands. You didn’t respond last time, so I could assume you declined, but, as a point of formality, I thought I should hear it from you.”

The radio flew apart, and I swung the shotgun around, ready to fire another round at whatever was coming for me. Most likely, it was telling the truth, and it would adhere to the rules which constituted its entire ethical framework, but it was so hard to tell, now, just what those rules were. It was no longer true that the computer was simply playing a game, or that it had a definite goal in mind. In a sense, it was mindless, in a sense insane. There was no reason to believe it could not lie, nor was there a reason to believe that a lie was not, to its unintelligible fractal brain, the same thing as an infinitely complicated series of truths.

The television switched on, even before I had ejected the first shell. Now it was a woman—my wife—lying in bed. Not a real woman, only the imitation of a dead one. The television made the room glow, made my eyes hurt with the brightness.

Pumped the 12-gauge and fired into the picture tube. The image collapsed and went black, but the speakers still had the ghost inside them. “I’m offering a draw,” it said, in the time it took me to fire off another round.

I tore off a grenade and threw it through the window. Light strobed, like the crack of a camera flash, and the spider-thing lost its perch on the wall and was heard hitting the street below. The telephone begin ringing just as I draped a blanket over the windowsill and crawled out onto the fire escape. If I had really believed the computer would never find me, I would have unplugged all of those things when I moved in.

At the end of the alley, a mechanical hound was staring up at me. Whether this was supposed to represent a pawn, or a rook, or a knight, I had no idea. Perhaps neither. It had taken to using animal forms lately, so perhaps we were now playing a different game. The cow says moo. I fired the shotgun into the creature, but it had no effect. It rocked back on its haunches and waited calmly, with the patience of a command prompt, for me to do something stupid, like climb down.

Another EMP grenade. Clang, it hit the pavement, rolled, then pop, it went off, and the creature still sat there, undamaged, yet somehow incomplete without a tail to wag, or even an antenna. I threw a couple more grenades down, testing its shielding, first against a corrosive gas, then against a broadcast virus. I tried to trick its sensors with a spoof grenade, but it turns out robotic hounds have no apetite for chasing cats. Finally, I tried a regular old concussion grenade, but it just lept out of the way, then trotted calmly back. Sometimes, even going back to basics doesn’t help.

Sighing, I hoisted myself onto the railing. The dog barked, trying to scare me off balance. I leaped, grabbed the edge of the roof, and pulled myself up. Authorial license allows me to make it sound easier than it was. Standing on the roof, I caught my breath and looked up at the moon.

I couldn’t accept another draw.

They had kept making the computer smarter and smarter in order to defeat me. The first time had been simple, compared to the last few. They gave it internet access, let it read web sites and usenet posts about me, my family, my weaknesses, even analyses of the matches as they took place. Worse than the coliseum in Rome, the crowd not only decided my fate, but participated, now, in the bloody-handed spectacle. In the end, it became me against the world. In response, I grew more intuitive, honed my game, drowned out the distractions of the world, and managed to give it a run for its money. Eventually, when it had more than a million silicon brains of its own, and the DeepThought@Home project had given it a distributed computing network across the world with which to gaze at its navel, it decided to return to brute force. It began playing, in its vast mind, every possible game of chess that could be played, with every combination of moves, from the absurd to the inspired. It recreated Morphy, Ruiz Lopez, Fischer, even the great Kasparov, and stored them in memory. It followed the path of endless permutation, becoming more vast as it went, more complicated, less stable. This act of hubris, I am certain, is what drove it insane. Well, that’s what chess will do to you if you take it too seriously.

Want to know how it built the robots, took over the power grid, started world war III? Bluetooth. You think I’m joking.

Circling above me, a mechanical buzzard croaked out a chorus of rattle-beaked taunts. The tips of its aluminum feathers are no more impervious to buckshot than a stop sign, but the bird’s nitroglycerine heart would explode if it crashed, and I didn’t want the roof to cave in. It sent a volley of missiles, so I dove, threw up a chaff grenade, and curled into a fetal position on the tarpaper. The chaff exploded the missiles prematurely, and besides a few cuts, I was fine. I tossed an EMP, which threw off its guidance systems, and it glided blindly over my head, crossing in front of the full moon and demolishing an apartment building on the other side of the street.

Then, the dog was on top of me. Sure, why couldn’t it climb stairs? I locked my arms and tried to hold it, but I could feel its weight crushing me, its jaws searching for my throat. Somehow, I kicked it off with my legs, succeeded in rolling out from under it, and felt for the grenade wad at my belt. The first one I fingered happened to be a heat grenade—I knew this because I had soldered the name in Braille letters on the firing pin.

One tries to think of everything.

Praying in my way, I heaved the grenade at the dog, and it stuck to the side of its head like a refrigerator magnet. The grenade poured an exothermic gel out of a mesh on the sides. Normally, it would be enough to melt steel, but whatever the computer had built the dog out of was very tough. The dog looked confused, but did not die.

I primed the shotgun for a vain last stand, but to my surprise, the dog did not attack. It quivered. It sent up a distorted howl. I believe the computer tried to speak out of its voice box, but the words came out garbled. It fell over.

My theory is that the metal, without melting, had nevertheless acted as a conductor for the gel, overheating the dog’s processor and causing a hardware reboot. This happens a lot, if you don’t have enough cooling. Another biscuit fan or two might have done it. It would probably be corrected in the next version. Perhaps the new dog would be liquid-cooled, and would periodically empty its coolant reservoir on a fire hydrant, or a tree if there were any left.

I wondered, though, what this thing would be when it came back to life. After it rebooted, would it remember to hunt me down, or would it wander the earth, longing for a car to chase. A part of me even wanted to see if I could maybe keep it, train it, teach it to fetch, or program it to play blackjack. But you can’t trust computers, in the end. I kneeled down next to it, scribbled a note, and used a grenade to hold it in place on the creature’s side. My back was killing me, so I took the stairs to the ground floor and went to look for another apartment.

The note said:
“Draw declined. Fuck off,
Gary”