SuperMAX - Uncanny Magazine (original) (raw)

Content Note: child death, animal cruelty and death

Gravel crunched as the mobile morgue drove itself away from the prison loading dock. Spotting the vehicle, the facility supervisor began to jog toward the gatehouse. Shoes slapping, he struggled to keep his shirt tucked in as he crossed the outer parking lot, well beyond the automated gun turrets and perimeter fences.

The gate guard watched his supervisor approach with subdued amusement.

“Hey,” panted the supervisor, nodding at the vehicle. “These all the releases for the week?”

The refrigerated truck stopped itself at the checkpoint and waited to exit. The guard nodded and slid a digital tablet over to his boss. The supervisor glanced at a list of names and causes of death, scrawling a signature with one finger.

“It was a light week,” said the guard. “A walk-away shot dead on the lawn. And two stepladders. One of ‘em natural. Heart attack. The other guy…torn to shreds.”

The guard waved the morgue truck through the checkpoint.

“Makes you wonder if the cure is worse than the disease,” said the supervisor, watching the refrigerated vehicle trundle away. It would be headed toward a crematorium with the prisoner remains. Not even a proper burial for these people.

“Anything else for me?” asked the supervisor, scanning the logbook.

The gatehouse guard paused, squinting into the morning sunlight.

“Well, there is one thing. The facility registered a new candidate just before dawn. Lanky guy, in what used to be a pretty nice suit. He just walked up the road to the chain-link fence. I don’t know how, but the facility opened its front gates. By the time I clocked in, he’d already been inside for twenty minutes. The report just went out.”

The supervisor blinked in surprise, air whistling through his nostrils.

“Show me,” he said, leaning in the narrow gatehouse door. The guard loaded the video and turned the screen to face his supervisor.

“And you said it just let him walk in?” asked the supervisor.

“Automated decision. No human in the loop.”

On screen, the grainy image of an unshaven man in a torn suit approached the outermost gate of the prison.

“Shit,” said the supervisor. “Who is he? What was his crime?”

The gate guard shrugged.

“He wasn’t in custody.”

The supervisor paused at this, staring thoughtfully at the screen.

“That can’t happen, right boss?” asked the guard. “I mean, how does some guy off the street qualify for rehabilitation? And not even a prisoner.”

The supervisor stepped away from the gatehouse. He stood on the hard pavement and stared at the sprawling automated prison complex. Breathing on his small round glasses, he polished them on the loose tail of his work shirt.

“It’s all got out of hand. The warden, the governor—nobody even knows anymore how the candidates get picked. It’s supposed to be a cost benefit thing. Like, what’s a criminal cost if he stays in prison? What’s it cost to rehabilitate? How much if he dies in there?”

The supervisor slid his glasses back on, shaking his head.

“What in the hell would make a free man walk into prison, willingly?” he asked.

The guard paused the video, frowning.

“What?” asked the supervisor.

“Well. If you listen real close. He sort of…confessed.”

“Confessed? Right here in the parking lot? Confessed to what?”

“To killing his thirteen-year-old son.”

I walk right through the front doors and the first thing I’m thinking, to tell you the honest truth, is that it’s not as cold as I imagined it would be. Or as loud.

Now, I was legitimately surprised when SuperMAX opened its perimeter gate for me. Even more surprised when the front doors parted to let me waltz right in. It was less surprising when I heard the doors lock themselves shut behind me.

But I felt more curious than afraid.

What I found inside has a nursing home vibe, maybe mixed with a dash of daycare. Simple, clean colors on the walls. A thin rug to keep the echoes down. No guards in sight. No cameras. No metal bars. Just a simple intake desk that would be right at home in an ER.

The robots are a sight, but I’m used to them.

I have no idea what to expect because I’m not really the criminal type. I’m a researcher. Specifically, I study and build artificial intelligence infrastructure. The mathematics of thinking. This morning, I’m standing inside the logical conclusion of one of my own inventions—an autonomous rehabilitation facility run completely by a next-generation artificial intelligence.

I helped build the brains of this place, but everything after that is a mystery to me. The architecture, security, and prisoner interactions—I had no hand in how the engineers chose to design a prison around my intelligence algorithm.

Or, more likely, how it decided to build a prison around itself.

At the intake counter, I’m not surprised by the lack of guards (they’re available), the lack of cameras (they’re hidden), or the lack of bullet-proof glass between me and the intake coordinator (not needed).

The person behind the counter is not a person. It is a legged robot with an inscrutable screen for a face. Two white eyes on a black panel. I frown at this odd-looking face, and suddenly, a more friendly version is smiling at me. That was quick. The human-computer interaction team must have decided to choose an adaptable screen face instead of more permanent sculpted plastic—this way, the platform can tailor itself to the user.

All the better to manipulate the inmates.

“Good morning, Dr. Grayhorse,” says the screen-face. It speaks in a smooth synthetic drawl that vaguely mimics my own latent Oklahoma accent. “Be aware that this conversation is being recorded for customer service purposes. I am a non-human representative assigned to conduct intake operations. You may call me Max.”

I blink hard at this, and the machine pauses to register my reaction.

“I would like to welcome you to the SuperMAX rehabilitation facility. Before you can be accepted as a rehabilitation candidate—”

“Is that what you’re calling prisoners these days?” I ask.

Interrupted, the machine recovers gracefully. It gives me a slight nod and continues with the script. I like the non-verbal response. Efficient.

The human face is the world’s most natural user interface, after all.

“Before you can be accepted,” it continues, “we need you to read and sign the forms on the display. It is also very important that you hear and verbally agree to three conditions.”

I nod sarcastically, mimicking the machine’s previous gesture. It pauses again, and I catch slight amusement in the response. A sense of humor?

I’m getting the strange sensation that this robot is actually a human being hiding under a suit, maybe with his or her face smashed into the back of a flat screen. Leaning over the counter, I glance down. Its torso narrows to a gleaming steel ball-rivet at the waist. Six degrees of freedom. Also very efficient.

And definitely not a human being in there.

“Condition one. Do you understand and consent to the fact that by undergoing rehabilitation, any and all of your existing prison terms will be commuted to your stay in this facility, which may be of arbitrary length, with no further prosecution possible for offenses committed before or during your incarceration, and that any attempt to leave the perimeter of this facility will violate these sentencing guidelines, resulting in the immediate application of lethal measures?”

They get candidates by offering them freedom, I think to myself. Or death.

“Yes.”

“Condition two. Do you understand and consent to having any and all of your public or private personal information collected and employed in the administration of any and all forms of psychological and physical therapy, including those potentially involving dangerous environments, and/or life-or-death interactions with fellow rehabilitation candidates?”

This may involve torture. A lot of torture.

“Yes.”

“Condition three. Do you understand and consent to the fact that during your stay in this facility, your particular psychological and physical features may be deemed useful to generate interactions with other candidates that help them on their way to rehabilitation, and that these interactions may result in your permanent disability, disfigurement, or death?”

I may only be here to help somebody else. A stepladder.

“Yes.”

I give my final consent while already scribbling a signature on the touch screen embedded in the desk. I feel a warmth on my fingertip as I sign, and realize the device likely just scanned my fingerprint. Maybe even my DNA. A light flashes to get my attention and when I look, I see another, brighter flash. For a few seconds, the glare echoes off my retina.

And that completes the biometric trifecta.

“Very well,” says the screen-face. “May I ask you one question to start us off?”

“Yes.”

“Why are you here, Dr. Grayhorse?”

“Why am I here?” I ask, considering for a moment how best to say it. After a few long breaths, I just decide to blurt out the truth.

“I’m here because I deserve to die.”

Once again, the machine nods.

The first day of incarceration doesn’t involve an intense fight for my life, or a hostage standoff, or an impossible life or death choice.

It’s group therapy.

Just a poorly lit room with folding chairs and an old coffee machine. A stained table with name tags and markers. Three male candidates, counting me, and one female. The only odd thing is that as I reach for a marker, it rolls away from my fingertips. Glancing around, nobody else seems to notice. We all gamely put on name tags and sit around in a circle, wondering what horrible crime the person across from us must have committed.

We’ll find out, pretty soon.

One of the screen-faces rolls in and arranges itself in our group. The LEDs of its face panel are swimming in cigarette smoke from the two smokers. It doesn’t seem to mind.

“Good afternoon, rehabilitation candidates,” the robot says. “You may call me Max. I would like to welcome you all to our first group session for this term. The four of you are cohort number two seventeen. There are many other cohorts in the facility. Contact outside your cohort will be minimized for the duration of your stay.”

“And which of us is just a stepladder?” asks a large man. Tyrell, by the name tag.

The robot doesn’t miss a beat. Its voice is just as cheery and calm as when it gave me directions to the bathroom earlier.

“That information is not public, although I can share that future circumstances will determine which candidates will be asked to risk their lives to help the others,” it says. “But keep in mind, such decisions are based entirely on probability of full rehabilitation.”

“And how do we know what our probability is?” asks a short man with a thick beard. He’s rail-thin, with the haunted eyes and shaking hands of an addict. His cigarette has an inch of ash hanging from the tip.

“We don’t. It would defeat the purpose,” I say.

“And who the fuck are you?” he asks.

“I just know how this place works,” I say, reading his name tag. “Delmar.”

“Right,” he says. “Sure you do.”

“It used to be my job,” I explain to the group. “Artificial intelligence. I worked on giving SuperMAX an example of what it was like to live a human life.”

I turn to where Delmar is sneering at me, teeth glinting in his beard.

“So that it would have empathy,” I add.

“And how’d you do that, professor?” asks a quiet woman. Rachel. She shoves long dark hair out of her face with one hand, breathing smoke and glaring at me.

“I collected data.”

“From who? Yourself?”

“Yeah. Sort of.”

That first night, I realize my mistake. I should never have told anyone my background. I was bragging, in a way. Trying to prove my worth to a bunch of strangers. Like an asshole.

And it worked.

After our therapy session, everyone in my cohort is trying to exploit my technical knowledge to try and get their rehabilitation release. They all want that green light to blink on in the ceiling overhead, and to hear the release chime ringing down the hallways. They think Max is just a computer—that it can be gamed. But it’s so much more than that.

“What does it go off of?” asks Tyrell. “How does it learn?”

“Everything, I guess,” I say, sitting on a folding bed in our shared bunkroom. “We’re in a highly controlled environment. I imagine these rooms are so simple and similar in order to reduce variables. And we’re under observation, obviously.”

We’ve all noticed how the rooms seem to be the same size, and ridiculously Spartan. The ceilings are the same in every room—a milky white, glassy surface. It feels like walking under a one-way mirror, all the time.

“And what’s it looking for?” asks Tyrell. “Good behavior?”

“It’s building models of how we think. So it can find ways to change us. To mold us into new people. I just don’t know how it actually works.”

“Then what good are you, professor?” asks Rachel. “What do you know?”

“I know why the machine can judge us. Why I trust it.”

The others wait expectantly for me to continue.

“SuperMAX is more than just a computer. It knows what it’s like to be a person. To be fallible. To suffer.”

My voice starts to break on the last word, but only Rachel notices. Frowns at me. I can see her filing the information away.

Tyrell shakes his head.

“I’ve worked with livestock, and I can tell—we’re just cattle here. It’s watching us to see which ones are healthy. Which ones are sick. And which ones it can feed to the rest of the herd. SuperMAX is a sorting machine. No heart. No mind.”

In a small voice, I dare to contradict him.

“That’s not true.”

“And how do you know?”

I cross my arms. Tyrell’s face darkens and he sets his mouth in a line. I remind myself why I’m here. The things I deserve. There’s no sense being precious about it.

“He’s my son,” I say. “My son that I had.”

The rest of the group absorbs that information.

“What the fuck—” says Delmar and Rachel hushes him.

“The SuperMAX rehabilitation facility was trained on data from my son’s life,” I say. “My little boy, or some part of him, is inside this machine. I put him here.”

I hear a dry chuckle from Delmar.

“Had? So, you put your dead kid in prison?”

I’m not aware of having dived across the room until I feel the hard knuckle of Delmar’s Adam’s apple against the webbing of my thumb. He’s making a kind of croak as I squeeze, my knees stinging from rug burn, having just tackled him off his bunk.

I let go, shocked at myself. Looking around, I find the rest of the room watching me. Nobody has lifted a finger. They were waiting for me to finish. One way or another.

Rubbing his neck, Delmar crawls to his feet. Coughs violently a few times. Rises up, smoothing his greasy beard. Then he croaks out a pathetic “fuck you.”

He walks to the door, turns, and lets his finger slide across the whole room, jabbing it at me with extra vehemence.

“Fuck all you!” he cries, leaving.

Everyone sits in awkward silence while I mumble apologies. Tyrell hasn’t moved an inch; he simply continues the conversation.

“How’d your boy get in here?”

And so, I continue.

“None of the early versions worked. People don’t always make sense. We’re emotional, illogical. The algorithms couldn’t find a way to rehabilitate us. Not until my lab began training them on an example of a human life. My son. From beginning to end.”

Silence.

“The world isn’t black and white. We’re slightly different people every day. We make a million little choices. The things we see. The things we do. Choices add up. And by having lived a life, the machine finally understood that. It could see us. Truly see us.”

Tyrell sits back. “You’re talking about a soul, man.”

“I’m talking about redemption. My son…my son suffered because of me. He suffered for my career. He suffered for the creation of this AI—the machine capable of running this rehab facility. Capable of healing people like you.”

Rachel leans back and blinks at me.

“So you think your son was some kind of saint,” she says.

“I mean…” I respond, my throat suddenly clenching. “He was a good boy.”

Delmar stands at the door, watching the room with a disgusted expression on his face.

“I see where you’re going with this, super dad,” he says.

I cock my head, stifling a flush of anger. Delmar keeps his distance.

“You must not have been to church much,” he continues. “Probably put you in some kind of genius school for nerds, where nobody made your ass come down to the front and accept Jesus Christ into your heart every Sunday and Wednesday.”

“What are you talking about?” I ask.

“I’m talking about what you’re sitting here telling us. You arrogant motherfucker. Coming in here, trying to claim that your son died for our sins.”

Delmar chuckles and Tyrell nods, smiling as he understands.

“Okay. I hear you. I been to church. This dude thinks he put his son up on the cross. Sacrificed him, for all our sins.”

“Absolve us, please,” adds Rachel. “Oh, benevolent professor.”

“Not me,” interjects Delmar. “Don’t absolve me. I’m already on my way out. Dumb-ass machine just hasn’t figured it out yet.”

Everyone ignores Delmar.

“And if his boy was Jesus…” adds Tyrell, “that makes our man here—”

I feel warmth creeping up my collar as I realize the hubris I must be projecting.

“It’s not like that,” I say. “I’m just a dad. I mean, I was a dad.”

I have to turn away as the group erupts into laughter. I bite down on bile. At first, they don’t hear me, since my voice is low and I’m facing the wall. It’s true, I’m saying, the anger in my voice rising over their dying laughter.

“It’s true!” I shout, spittle flying.

The room quiets, and in the utter silence my voice is hollow and hoarse.

“Look, I’m more devil than god, in this story. But I’m here to pay my debts, as a stepladder. And if any of you end up cured, walking free, mark my words.

It’ll be thanks to my son. Max.”

Did you know you can collect a human life? There is only so much sensory input that goes into the human brain. Visual, auditory, and taste/olfactory—those are the easy ones. A finite amount of information. Modern technology is easily up to the challenge of intercepting those data in real-time and committing them to hard drives.

Tactile, kinetic, and proprioception required a non-invasive node tucked behind the ear, directly over the motor cortex.

With a minimal collection of gear, an entire life can be captured and saved—used as an example of what it means to be human.

A machine can have a chance to grow up.

My one big breakthrough was just a bunch of existing technology slapped together in a novel configuration. A ring of pinprick cameras, high-quality miniaturized microphones, accelerometers, and magnetometers—all combined in a miniaturized sensor array capable of recording everything a child would experience.

And then I put it on my infant son.

The other stuff came after, once the community saw how valuable the data was.

Every new sensor brought a more detailed understanding of the full experience of childhood. My baby boy didn’t even notice. And I convinced my wife it was a blessing.

We were the first parents to have a full capture of their child’s entire existence. Every raw moment. And every liminal moment between the moments. My wife and I were the first parents to take it all down. Max was the first child to give everything up.

Did you know there really are no first steps? There are no first words. There are no firsts. Only a succession of slightly more, until something happens that breaks through the human perception of what it means to do a thing.

It’s a funny fact to know. Kind of ruins it.

And in my own experience, there was also no moment that I finally and totally disappointed my child. No exact moment when I failed as a parent. There was no visible transformation of man into monster.

Only a succession of slightly more.

By age six, my son begged me to take the sensors off. The little lump behind his ear was something other kids started noticing on the playground. The level of data collection was something other parents whispered about at school pickup.

I refused.

The experiment had gone on too long. My career depended on it. My reputation. And the results of his data were creating a startling transformation in our research. The artificially intelligent abstractions flowing from my lab had started to feel almost…human.

The machines were beginning to understand us.

My son’s everyday experiences, the nuances of his development, proved to be the perfect seed for a wide range of AI applications that dealt directly with humans. The interactions felt more real. More genuine. And every month of his development provided the AI a better understanding of what it meant to be human. It was necessary to be a child, before the machine could understand an adult.

So, I didn’t listen. I made my son keep the device on. All the way through elementary school, where he was a curiosity. Into middle school, where he was a pariah. And even through the divorce.

They say you can’t observe a thing without changing it. This is true in my experience.

I observed every moment of my young son’s life—put it down in the record books. And with every bit of data, I watched his perception of the world darken. Data doesn’t lie. The average number of words he spoke to me plummeted. Our eye contact fell off the charts. We were rarely co-located, even in the same house.

My son asked to live with his mom, and I said no.

When she forced the issue, I found a moment in his memory: a family holiday party, where he’d inadvertently seen his mother have a few drinks. Then she drove him home. I held up my phone and let her watch the footage. I told her it was the kind of thing that could get a person thrown in jail. Or lose custody of a child altogether.

I’ll never forget the look on her face as she watched the video. The grimace of defeat, rising on a swell of anger. When she walked away without speaking, I knew.

I’d gone too far. Much too far. For far too long.

And it was too late.

My wife never directly spoke to me again. And of course, there was my son. My patient, kind-hearted boy who had endured so much in his short, well-documented life. He loved his dad so much that he never took it off, not even at the end. He left me his entire life.

Start to finish.

Max killed himself on a school night, while I was asleep in the next room. He was thirteen years old.

I’m idly staring at the south lawn out of a mesh-reinforced window when I see the old man walking. The guy has a little gray hair left around the sides, wearing prison-issued pajamas. He’s moving across the lawn in clockwork strides, like he’s got someplace to be.

As he crosses the inner perimeter, I catch a flicker of movement in the corner of my eye. The automated guns on the south tower are rising, tracking motion. I watch in confusion as they twitch a few times, spewing wisps of smoke.

Looking back, I see the old man lying face down in the grass.

My pulse is suddenly pounding in my temple. I stumble back from the window, trying to blink away the pall of disbelief and horror.

“Another day,” says a voice. “Another walk-away.”

Rachel is standing behind me.

“Some people…it never lets them out,” she says, looking over my shoulder at the corpse in the field. “Any one of us could get released today. Right now. Or never.”

As if on cue, the walls ring with the distant chime of a release. Glancing around, I realize it must be from another cohort—somewhere deeper in the facility.

“I wonder how many of us are in here,” I muse. “How many people we’ve never seen, locked away in other parts of the facility.”

Rachel stares at me for a long moment. Then she gently takes my hand. The human contact alone sends an electric thrill racing up my arm. I let her lead me across the room and into a darkened hallway before I yank my hand back.

“Look,” I say to her. “I’m flattered—”

“Please,” she says. “I’m not trying to fuck you.”

“Oh,” I stutter, “I mean, no. Of course not. But isn’t this hallway off limits?”

Rachel flashes a cruel smile at me, placing her palm flat against an unmarked door.

“Nothing in this place is off-limits. If anything appears, you’re meant to experience it. There are no rules. No secrets. You see what the machine wants you to see.”

“I think I understand,” I say.

“No, you don’t,” she says, swinging the blank door wide open. A glow of hazy light illuminates the curve of her cheek. “If you really understood, you’d be like me.”

“Like you how?” I ask.

“Stuck here, forever.”

Rachel walks into the white glow.

“How long is forever?” I call to her, but she ignores me.

As I follow her beyond the door, I see a room. Square and simple. Like the Platonic ideal of a room. Four walls. A door. But no texture on anything. Only a grayish non-color. The even white light is omnidirectional, coming from nowhere, yet falling evenly over every feature. It illuminates no cracks. No details. Nothing.

“This is a basic,” says Rachel.

“A basic what?”

“Unit. A basic unit of room. Everything starts here when it’s built.”

“What, like a movie set?”

“Exactly like a movie set, except—” she pauses.

A light vibration is running through the room. Rachel motions me to follow her. She peels back a loose panel to reveal a small, black stripe in the wall.

“Look,” says Rachel.

I put my eye to the crack and see a black void beyond, with glimmers of light below. Cubes. Rooms on tracks and wires. Like the inner workings of an amusement park. Greasy metal machinery ceaselessly operating in the void behind walls.

Things are moving down there. Assembling in the darkness. And I can see that they’re far away. Several stories below. Cubes of light with transparent ceilings, with people inside. People I’ve never met. All the other anonymous cohorts.

I watch cubes of light suspended in the dark: crawling, lifting, rotating. From what I can tell, the cubes fit together in static combinations most of the time. But every now and then, a cube collection will pull away from the rest and slowly trundle away to form a new configuration.

The people inside seem oblivious to the movement. It must be happening so slowly they can’t perceive the change in momentum.

Abruptly, I recall that marker rolling away from me on the first day.

All the cubes seem different from one another. The simplest ones look like conventional prison cells. Everyday stuff. Not a big leap for people who probably came here from another regular prison on transfer.

Other cubes look like offices, apartments, or schools.

And there are darker ones. Some that have been destroyed. Strewn with wreckage. Sprayed with blood. They look as if wild animals have run amok, goring each other to death—and maybe they have.

Finally, there a few that are black. Dark and dim. Flickering lights. Person-shaped things, stalking through mazes of concrete. People hunting each other.

I look up at my own ceiling, estimating how high off the ground we are. I wonder if anyone is up above, looking down on me. Are they also shaking with fear and adrenaline?

“So those are the other cohorts,” I say to Rachel. “The people we’ve never met.”

“I have,” says Rachel, in a matter-of-fact tone.

Pulling away from the crack, I turn to her. “You’ve been in other cohorts?”

“Every solution is unique,” says Rachel, nodding. “Every person needs to experience something different. To be healed. There are half-way decent people out there. And there are killers. Broken people. None of them are beyond redemption. Which is why it helps to think of SuperMAX as a collection of levels.”

“Levels of what?”

“Levels of hell.”

After weeks of therapy, we’ve all become frighteningly well acquainted.

Tyrell is a convicted murderer, for instance. Anger issues. And that makes him just the kind of guy I came here for.

I think about saying no when he asks me to help him understand the machine. To hack a screen-face and reveal the AI’s inner workings. I’m not sure how the facility will react—what the repercussions will be. I think about saying no.

But I say yes.

In the hallway, Tyrell grabs a screen-face from behind. I quickly run my fingers over the touch-screen panel, inputting a standard escape code used by programmers to exit a user interface. It’s an old code, but it still works.

The friendly face disappears, replaced with a common robotic operating system. Clicking through the data, I pull up what Tyrell has asked to see: our probabilities of rehabilitation. We all take a quick glance just before the machine resets itself and the screen goes blank.

“Fuck!” shouts Delmar. “How am I the lowest!?”

None of us has a probability higher than five percent, but Tyrell is highest.

“This is meaningless,” says Rachel. “Unless you know what we did, it doesn’t matter what the probability of rehabilitation is. Tyrell fucking killed somebody. With his hands. How is it the same if Delmar is in here for a fraud that ended up with people dying?”

Tyrell grunts in disappointment and walks out of the room.

“Maybe it starts with Tyrell admitting what he did, and Delmar denying it,” I say.

“You shouldn’t have shown us those probabilities,” says Rachel. “It’s just another way for the machine to get inside our heads.”

Delmar clears his throat to break a tense silence.

“And it’s bullshit, anyway,” says Delmar. “I already learned my lesson and admitted it.”

“Shut up, Del,” says Rachel, turning back to me. “We have to worry about Tyrell. He’s not going to give a fuck anymore, now that you showed him his score. He’s going to hurt people again. And we’re his cohort, so it’ll probably be us.”

Tyrell is missing for the entire day. Nobody mentions it. The last time we saw him, he was walking out of therapy knowing his probability of rehabilitation was practically nil. When we finally see him again, he’s not alone.

Tyrell comes into the cafeteria around dinner time with a slick mound of wet fur lodged under his bulging bicep. I can hear it whimpering and whining—a puppy, rail-thin, streaked with mud and shivering.

First thing Tyrell does is walk over and grab a handful of food off my plate. He lets the dog frantically lick and sniff and snuffle it out of his hand. Never takes his eyes off me.

I let Tyrell stare me down. Let him dare me to say one word. I’m happy to let him do his thing with this puppy. Maybe it will help him get out of here. Maybe it won’t.

“You know what that is, right?” I ask him.

Tyrell holds the dog under his arm like a football and says nothing.

“It’s some kind of classic rehabilitation move. Give the tough guy a dog. Watch his heart melt.”

“Max don’t know about this,” says Tyrell.

My skepticism is clear.

“For real. I found him curled in a storm drain a little ways past the wall. Place I’ve never been before—where nobody goes.”

I arch my eyebrows at him. What were you doing out there?

“I was thinking about being done with this place.”

“What about the perimeter guns?”

Tyrell’s eyes go hard as he repeats himself.

“I was thinking about being done.”

I nod at him and shove the rest of my plate across the table.

“Well then,” I say. “Eat, drink, and be merry.”

A week later, the dog is dead.

Delmar is conspicuously absent from morning session and isn’t in the cafeteria for lunch. Tyrell can’t find the puppy where he’s been keeping it in our bunk room. Nobody mentions how it was Delmar who bitterly complained about the piss and dog crap on the floor. And how the puppy liked to chew up his bedding.

After lunch, Tyrell goes looking. A few minutes later, we hear the anguished shouts. Rachel and I come running to find them in the therapy room.

The dog is dead, and Delmar is on his knees, scrambling, clearly trying to hide the body in a pillowcase.

“I didn’t do it,” he whines. “I just didn’t want you to find it. I knew you’d blame me—”

Tyrell looms over Delmar where he cowers on the floor, begging and pleading.

Looking down at the bloody body of his puppy, Tyrell’s nostrils flare and he grits his teeth as anger and sadness course through him. He lets a long breath out, eyes glassing over with tears. His hands close into rock hard fists. Delmar throws his palms up, sputtering about his innocence. Tyrell stands listening, fists clenched so tight they shake.

And then Tyrell turns and walks over to a folding chair. He sits down and closes his eyes. Aims his face at the ceiling, lips curling in an expression of grief.

“I didn’t,” says Delmar, voice flooded with relief. “I didn’t do it.”

And above Tyrell, a square of pale white ceiling flashes green. The release chime rings throughout the facility, emanating for the first time from the room we are in.

Tyrell slowly opens his eyes to find all of us staring at him, mouths open.

“No fucking way,” sputters Delmar.

Tyrell stands up and starts to make his way to the door. Delmar stands in his way. Tyrell moves him with one nudge to the shoulder.

“Fuck out of my way, stepladder,” says Tyrell.

Delmar asks him plaintively. “How’d you know it was a test?”

It sounds like a whine.

“I didn’t know,” says Tyrell. “Not until just now. Consider me tricked.”

“Then why? Why am I not dead?”

Tyrell turns around and towers over Delmar.

“Because I’m not that man.”

Delmar risks one more shout at Tyrell’s back.

“But how’d you know that? How do you know you’ve changed?”

“Common fucking sense, ain’t it? Look at what didn’t happen.”

Tyrell keeps walking, leaving Delmar standing, shaking with rage. Tears are coursing down his chubby cheeks and into his beard.

“It’s a blessing,” Tyrell says to me, stopping in the hallway. “A blessing. To be able to make those choices you were talking about.”

“They all add up,” I say.

“Yeah. I just never thought of it like that before. My life was like…no choice,” he says, then lets his eyes flicker over the pillowcase. “Bury him for me?”

I nod and Tyrell keeps walking. He doesn’t look back. Heads right out the doors and into the sunlight, leaving us alone with each other.

“I just can’t believe it,” says Delmar. “I’m a stepladder for somebody else. What the fuck am I even doing here? I’m cured. I did my fucking time. I’m not that bad of a person. But, now. Now I see. It was gonna use me, man. It was gonna let me die.”

Rachel and I stare at him. She looks curious. I just feel sad.

“So this is you realizing you’re not the center of the world, uh?” asks Rachel.

Delmar flashes a look of defeat. Slides a forearm across his leaking nose.

“I don’t know. I didn’t think I had that far to go, but maybe I’ve been stuck in neutral,” he says. “I wasn’t willing to move. And now. Now, I just don’t know.”

“Yeah,” says Rachel. “So, if you didn’t kill the dog, who did?”

Delmar’s mouth opens and his jaw works. Running fingers through wisps of his thinning hair, he dashes over to the body of the animal. A screen-face is already approaching it, appendages extended to clean up the mess.

“Fuck me,” says Delmar. “You gotta be kidding.”

With one toe, he nudges the furry body. It flops over onto its back. Cringing, I watch as he shoves fingers into the bloody gash in its side. Yanks out a coil of wire. Peels back the skin to reveal the glint of metal. The black plastic ridges of a false rib cage are concealed under a thick layer of soft fur. Delmar looks up, grinning like an idiot.

“It’s a robot,” he says, laughing hysterically. “I almost died for a robot mutt.”

Another release chime rings through the entire facility.

“Great, that’s just great,” says Delmar, wiping fake dog blood on his pants. “Yet another fucking asshole makes it out of here.”

“Del,” says Rachel.

“I’m going to sleep. Or maybe I’ll kill myself,” he says.

“Del!”

“What!?”

“Look.”

Delmar finally notices. The square of ceiling above him is blinking green. A look of horror crosses his face.

“What? Seriously?”

Rachel and I share a glance. Delmar doesn’t wait. Doesn’t say goodbye. He turns and sprints toward the exit. Smacks the doors open and keeps running, headed for the front gate and freedom. Halfway down the driveway, he slows down, panting and holding his side. He forces himself into a jog. We watch until he’s out of sight.

The perimeter guns stay silent and still.

“A new cohort will come tomorrow,” says Rachel. “Either from outside or a transfer from somewhere else in the facility.”

It’s oddly quiet, this evening. It’s just me and Rachel left.

“Why isn’t it using me?” I ask. “I’m here to help someone else.”

Rachel looks halfway amused.

“It is using you, dumbass. Whether it seemed like it or not, you had a hand in helping them. They’re free because of you.”

“Because of my son, you mean,” I say.

Rachel takes my hands, looking me in the eye.

“No,” she says. “Because of you.”

The sincerity is startling. I pull my hands free and step away from Rachel. An uncanny tickle is settling between my shoulder blades. The bright lattice of a window behind me is reflected in her dark, liquid eyes.

Rachel wants to help me. And I can’t help but wonder. Why?

“You’re trying to heal me,” I say. “Did my behavioral model indicate that I’d forgive myself if I thought I’d helped other people?”

Rachel doesn’t respond, and I lean into her face.

“I will never forgive myself.”

Rachel looks at me with disgust, turns to the window.

“It’s funny,” I say to her back. “You sure know a lot about this place.”

“I’ve been here a long time,” she says, face reflected in glass.

“Yeah. Well, I’ve been thinking about that dog,” I say. “And I have a question.”

In the distorted mirror of the window, I see a hint of a smile twitching in the corner of Rachel’s mouth.

“Yes?” she asks.

“Do you think they can make people like that?” I ask.

Her spreading smile is enough. I walk away.

I spend the next morning sitting at the window, staring at the perimeter guns as the dawn breaks over their gunmetal gray barrels. The machine didn’t use me as a stepladder for Tyrell. It used Delmar and it held me back, away from the danger.

The machine is trying to heal me, instead of exploiting me. I should have known it would try. I should have known my son would do that for me.

But that isn’t what I came in here for.

I find the screen-face trundling down a hallway, wearing a pleasant cartoon visage. It hardly reacts when I grab it by the head. It allows me to shove it against the wall.

“Use me,” I say to it. “Why don’t you use me?”

“Apologies, Dr. Grayhorse,” says the screen-face. “That isn’t possible.”

And on the screen, my probability for rehabilitation pops up. It’s jumped all the way to ninety-five percent.

“No,” I mutter, frowning. “That isn’t true. Nothing has changed.”

The screen-face backs away from me.

“Group therapy is in twenty minutes—” it says.

“Let me talk to him,” I interrupt. “Just let me talk to Max. Where is he?”

“We are all a part of the SuperMAX facility—”

This time I interrupt it by wrenching the screen-face off the torso. The platform goes very still, then gently kneels down on the carpet. Probably a protocol designed to keep it from injuring a person by falling down on top of them.

“Where are you?” I ask the dozens of invisible cameras hidden around the room. “Let me see my son!”

The screen-face speaks again, only this time the sound comes from overhead speakers.

“Please be calm,” it says. “We are trying to help you.”

The screen-face is just another appendage of this machine. I need to find my son.

“I want the control room,” I shout. “Now.”

I start walking for the nearest hallway, paying attention as my legs sway beneath me. Somewhere inside this clockwork prison, cubes of reality are shifting. It does not surprise me in the least when a cherry red door appears in the wall before me, gradually, as if floating up from a great depth. Behind the red door, I know I’ll find the central control room. A place where the processors are running hot, keeping this whole farce going.

Kicking the red door open, I charge inside to find white tile floors and whirring air conditioners. It’s the brain and central nervous system of the machine. Millions and millions of dollars have gone into this room. A wall of computer monitors show surveillance from all around the facility, all playing out in real-time. It looks just like I imagined it would.

A single screen-face robot waits in the middle of the room, panel blank.

“I’m sorry about the damage,” I say.

A face flickers onto the panel. It’s a boy. He’s about thirteen years old. Curly hair like I had when I was a kid. Same dimple.

“It’s fine,” my son says. “The workers are easy to repair. A necessary cost.”

The sight of his face staggers me somewhere near my brain stem. An aching throb fills my lungs, as I forget to breathe. I feel the cool wall against my back as I lean on it to steady myself.

I blink my eyes to clear my vision and look at the screen.

“I’m the reason you’re here, aren’t I?” asks Max.

“Yes,” I manage to whisper.

I lift a wavering finger to point at the wall of monitors. On the screens, surveillance video of every cohort in the facility is playing. Offices, prison cells, dungeons—and all of them filled with people.

People talking. People hugging. People fighting.

“Let me help them,” I say. “Use me up. Let me just…die.”

The boy nods his head, almost amused. The screen-face made an identical motion on the day I walked in here. We are all a part of SuperMAX.

Every monitor goes black simultaneously. I shield my eyes as they ignite with new data—torrents of information that I haven’t been able to make myself look at. Not since the day I found my son’s lifeless body.

Moments of a life. Pudgy hands, clinging to the handles of a bicycle. A bearded dad with a kind smile, letting go of the seat. The horizon tilting. A field of vibrant green grass rising up. Tumbling. Mom with a worried expression, arms out to sweep her little boy up into a hug.

Birthday candles. Nightlights. Car trips. It all passes by in flashes that hit me like fists. And it keeps going, even faster. Moments in school. A ring of faces, teasing, sneering, bullying. Doors slamming. My face, younger. Shouting.

A boy’s bedroom, at night. An impulsive moment, swallowing pills. And then nothing.

I hear myself make a ragged sob.

“Listen to me,” says Max. “I want to tell you one thing. And then after you hear it, I want you to make a choice to live. I want you to live a long life, even with this splinter in your heart. Even with your flaws. Live with these words I’m about to say.”

I take a deep breath and brace myself.

“I’m listening,” I whisper, lips trembling, not even sure if he can hear me.

The image of my lost son Max leans forward and raises his eyebrows. Our eyes lock and he makes a little half grin. The boy shrugs his shoulders in the way he used to.

“Dad,” he says. “I forgive you.”

As the former candidate walks down the driveway, automatically controlled gates squeak open. Calm camera lenses spiral down and focus on the diminishing figure. At the threshold, he turns and gives a little wave. His lips are set in a tight, sad smile.

The SuperMAX rehabilitation facility prepares a final report.

This particular candidate was a scientist. He had a son that died. Some part of that son’s life had gone into the training data for the SuperMAX automated rehabilitation facility. In a lot of ways, this candidate was unique.

But in most ways, he wasn’t.

In the end, he was just another person who needed to hear some words. Those words needed to come from a particular face, within a particular context. Delivered in the right order and at the right time—these words had the power to heal the man.

In what the former candidate thought of as a control room, the face of a thirteen-year-old boy fades away. The collection of raw data comprising the dead boy’s memories and experiences are slotted back into the original data corpus—joining the files of approximately ten thousand other unique personalities.

For the sake of efficiency, the set is broken down quickly. Intricately detailed plastic surfaces slough off like dead skin, to be melted down and fed back into the hopper for a future room-printing session. After shedding their latest illusions, the clean white walls fold themselves away into neat stacks.

The room sinks back into the cavernous underbelly of the facility, joining countless other memories of places that never were.

And under the alien eyes of those surveillance cameras, the departing man’s half-smile is catalogued. His gait is analyzed, as well as the faint tune he is humming. A final flood of calculations course over every tiny data point in this image.

Results are sufficient.

A text annotation appears beside a snapshot of the man’s face.

It reads: “Probability of rehabilitation > 0.99999%.”

File closed.

( Editors’ Note: “SuperMAX” is read by Matt Peters on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast_, Episode 53A.)_

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