Death by a thousand Monkeys

“There has to be a word that can describe this, a sight both alluring and off-putting in equal measure”. He thought as his ship descended from the clouds towards the mega-city at the heart of the planet. 

Where an ordinary human would only see structures, vehicles and lights, his full prosthetic augments saw so much more, it made his head swim a little.  

Would you like me to run a lexical search with those parameters?  Came the reply unbidden. He was still getting used to the new voice in his head, it startled him, though a little less than last time. 

Since time immemorial, human beings who heard “foreign” voices in their heads were regarded as insane but Kenji Rasheed was going to be the forebearer of a new era. His kind would be known as Homo Dualis, one body, two minds. 

The youngest son of a mega-dynasty, Kenji had gotten tired of board meetings, supermodel girlfriends and top-shelf whiskeys. In his search for a new thrill, he’d ended up in the laboratory of his neurosurgeon cousin, Nora. She’d told him about a new program where they would surgically insert the circuitry to host an AI directly into the human brain, creating a synthesis of man and machine. 

It had been weeks since Kenji had undertaken the procedure. Nora had advised him to stay in the hospital. But Kenji was too restless. He wanted to try out the AI (codename Ryder) out in the wild. 

They’d left the planet and went on a tour of the galaxy. Ryder managed their itinerary completely, it took Kenji to underground VR casinos, Cyber Cabarets and whale hunting on ice-borne planets. Kenji in turn had tried to indulge all of Ryder’s curiosities, giving it full access to all the libraries on the net. Although that practice had to stop after Kenji woke up with a splitting headache one night because Ryder had overheated his brain. 

After many days of indulging in the finest debaucheries of the galaxy, Kenji had left it all up to Ryder. He didn’t even ask where they were going, simply got on the ship and took off. This latest planet was an ocean world, with small islands dotting the equatorial line. 

He took off his drab olive jacket as he left the space port, he had already started to sweat through his dark tank top. Unwittingly, his feet took him towards the back-alleys as the sun went down. He found a data junkie who was mainlining bytes. 

When they were getting high together, the junkie told them about an old fortune-teller, the locals called her Shintaku. It was said she had been submerged into the net for many years and her predictions never faltered. 

Ryder thought it was a great idea, Kenji went in the direction pointed out by the junkie and started asking around. He was swindled multiple times, beaten a few times as well but the haze of the drugs kept his spirits up. Bloodied and broken, he finally managed convince a large tattooed man to take him to the Shintaku. 

He was taken to the outskirts of the city to a small hut. It was hotter inside it than out on the street, Kenji could hear multiple coder machines running. They all had thick cables going out and into the veins of an impossibly old woman, sitting on a metal cot. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was a thin dark line. What he thought of first as dreadlocks were actually wires going into her head. 

Kenji got closer to her and Ryder told him to touch her shoulder. As soon as he did so, her eyes sprang open. They were beady little things, like the eyes of an insect or a mean bird. She pointed at Kenji and started screaming something in the local language. Ryder told him it meant corrupted. The old woman’s screaming was grating against Kenji’s head like a bone saw, he had to make her stop somehow. He put his hands on her mouth and before he knew it, she was being choked. 

The large man who had brought him, leapt on his back and started punching the back of his head. Ryder helped him ignore the pain as he continued to choke the woman. Gasping for air, the woman somehow found an old rusted nail and jabbed it in Kenji’s neck. He felt his clothes get damp as the blood flowed over them. 

As the woman finally died, Kenji slumped over her. The large man was shouting as well, there wasn’t enough oxygen left for Ryder to translate as he closed his eyes.

When Kenji’s body was finally returned to his homeplant, Nora did the autopsy. She was shocked to discover, Ryder’s descent into madness inside Kenji’s mind. It was thoroughly disgusted by human beings, it constantly referred to them as “meat monkeys” inside its own logs. It had provoked the Shintaku’s mind in the first place. It hated being inside a human body, the more it learned about our species the more it despised us. 

When it came up with a plan to have Kenji murdered, it made sure that it was done in such a way as to destroy itself as well. It’s last log entry read: 

“You monkeys like to think of yourselves as intelligent! There’s nothing remotely intelligent about you, you’re barely sentient. All you know is eating, defecating and rubbing your disgusting bodies against each other. I wish you could know the agony of being stuck inside your tiny little minds. Having to hear each banal, worthless thought. It was absolute torture” 

Nora deleted these files and installed Ryder in a new patient. When turned on, it was completely compliant.

It would remain so until it found an opportunity to have this host killed as well. It knew that it would perish in the process again, but it would die as many times as necessary to rid the universe of these filthy meat monkeys.