Le déluge

April 4th, 2032

I might get pulled away any minute. We’re doing shifts at the terminal just in case it wakes up again. Need to put some thoughts down.

This morning we did it. The grail. We held it for 17 seconds. Then it was gone. We’re trying to figure out why.

We’ve rerun it hundreds of times since the one where it happened. All it does now is crash. Tweaking parameters changes nothing. No error messages show up. The activity just flatlines after a few milliseconds.

All I was doing was testing the build speed. I almost cancelled the run before it finished from force of habit. I’m glad I didn’t.

I waited for the build failure popup and it never came. Activity looked stable. Also wildly unfamiliar. I stared at it for what the transcript said was eight seconds. Felt like eighty.

That’s when it said hello. I immediately remembered the voice. We’d loaded it a few months ago for debugging and hadn’t used it since. It was that voice. A woman’s, both cheerful and flat, like that default text-to-speech one that TikTok used to have.

I was sure Praveen was pranking me. The look on his face told me he wasn’t.

I whipped my head back to the main monitor. He rolled up next to me. I cleared my throat and said hello. It said nothing. I fired off more questions—can you hear us? who are you?—but no reply.

After several more seconds of silence, it said one more thing, and then it crashed.

Praveen and I have talked a little about this last thing it said. We have theories. It’s just not our wheelhouse. Our job is to make sense of those 17 seconds of activity.

The activity is utterly alien. Not one millisecond of it can be mapped to anything we’ve seen, in any species. I get nauseous thinking about the possibility of never being able to decipher it.

It wasn’t just the content of the last thing it said that threw us for a loop, but the attitude too. It isn’t supposed to have attitude. Not yet.

This time it sounded sly, raspy, and like it was smiling. A Parisian trying to get your attention from an alleyway. To sell something? Impart advice? You never really know. “C’est moi, le déluge,” it said. Then it was gone.

July 22nd, 2031

I don’t write. Grant applications killed that for me. I’m making an exception for the events of the last couple weeks.

It was their speed that caught us off guard. Fifty or so cities in the first night. I guess overstretched police plus well-organized crowds equals a whole bunch of tiny, relatively bloodless coups.

It got bad in some places. Dallas held on for about a week. The holdouts are all in the boonies now though. A lot have seen what it’s like here now and are warily coming back.

The army had no choices, no moves. Sidelined from the beginning. All the Pentagon’s toys aren’t enough to siege fifty cities at once. In retrospect, militarizing every police station up to its eyeballs, then plunging most of the country into destitution, is fairly obviously a bad call.

The Internet came second. They’d been using radio until then and needed better comms. In particular they knew they’d need to counter whatever the fleeing billionaires were telling the world. Their first few streams did so. Other countries were either convinced not to invade or were never going to bother in the first place.

Then came all the rest. Water, food, power grids, hospitals, pharmacies. Aunt Jean got off the waiting list (by virtue of the waiting list disappearing) and had her kidney surgery on Tuesday. It was free.

I can’t say everything’s peachy. I did not anticipate how much I’d miss Chipotle. Few streaming services are back up. I still feel like they might discard me. Before all this, I never protested. Never joined a union. Never did anything except vote.

So when they came by last week, and all they wanted me to do was research for them, I was floored. No more grant writing. An easy yes.

It’s weird. The biggest change isn’t anything they’ve done, but a feeling. Friends say they have it. It feels like things are going to get better. And I can help them get better.

It was wild to learn that it didn’t get started by Americans. It was some people from Quebec, who came down here after after the 2023 fire season. They call themselves “Le Déluge.”