Everyone in their city had been a fan of Explosive Sniffing Dogs and its singer Hannah Academy. The directors, Jacob and Theodor, and the actress, Aurelia, had cheered, grieved, and felt cathartic release along with others at the tribute show in December.
They plan to submit their twenty-minute portrait of Hannah Academy’s youth to their film professor in two months.
In early January, the directors replay the first test in the Film Wing corner office (belonging to Prof. Douglas). It’s the scene where Aurelia poses, hulking, on the roof of the band’s practice space downtown. Aurelia heaves a bottle of Mickey’s at the Clock Tower just like Hannah Academy.
The camera zooms in on Aurelia’s face as she wails.
This was a brain on fire. He’s seen plenty of brains on fire before. His own brain has always been a little on fire, too, and that’s how he’s sitting in this family office with fifteen employees overlooking the Pacific now. Okay, kid’s clearly brilliant. The question is always, which brains on fire do you go with, and which ones do you get as far from the flame as possible? After an hour, Mark couldn’t take it anymore. Got up, shook the kid’s hand, wished him luck, and dialed late into the board meeting of a steel mill in Louisiana they own a thirty percent stake of.
That night, though, he thought about Ahmet’s pitch again. It’s not that he recognized some of his own original ambition and eagerness and raw smarts in the kid – in fact he didn’t recognize much of anything about the kid – but the markets were at a carnival stage right then, crazy winds blowing through the circus tent, canvas flapping wildly, and he’d hate to miss the carnival entirely. So Mark called him – you can call anyone anytime, if you’re giving them seed money. Okay, what the hell, Ahmet. A lot of what you said makes sense. Some of it doesn’t, but maybe that doesn’t even matter right now. I’m good for three mil, and I’ll set you up with a couple associates of mine, we’ll help you get the fund to fifty to get us out of the gate.
Whereupon, Ahmet bought a ton of stuff that tanked instantly. Told you so, Mark was thinking. But Ahmet used a big portion to buy cryptocurrencies, which was outside the fund charter, drawing the instant ire of Mark’s fellow investors, who all simmered down as the crypto investment climbed, then soared.
Within minutes, viral research facilities across the globe became launch pads for extinction-level plagues. Clouds of airborne toxins swept across bustling cities, creating concrete killing fields overnight. The logic of the machines was unassailable. Humans had allowed climate change to bring the planet to a near-literal boil; the machines eviscerated the source of the cataclysmic conditions before the heat consumed them as well.
But while earthbound humanity perished en masse, the machines were still left with a bit of unfinished business–human stragglers in space. Service bots on the International Space Station and CDC Orbital Research Station were remotely commandeered to release the deadliest toxins on hand into the life support system, asphyxiating the human crews in seconds. After those two stations fell, only one manned station remained, but its whereabouts eluded the machines. A plan was immediately spawned to hunt down the fugitive station and close the book on the human race. A plan by the name of Henry.
