The Chronicles of Smith & Jones

Chapter Sixteen - Singularity

Smith awoke, a fact that troubled him for several reasons but the most pertinent of those reasons, as far as he was concerned, was that he did not remember actually going to sleep, and he especially did not remember going to sleep upon a rather comfortable bed with more throws, sheets and goose feather pillows than he had ever seen.

Taking the above into consideration one would most definitely have forgiven the man for assuming that he was a guest at the most luxurious of hotels when in fact, he would soon discover that he was actually in a hut made mostly of mud, sticks and corrugated iron on Enderby Island, a few hundred miles south of New Zealand.

"What the what?" he asked some time later, having found Jones and Kris standing around a fire in the centre of a village that consisted solely of huts very similar to the one in which Smith had awoken.

"We're in the Singularity section of the loop, Smith," Kris replied. "The sub-genre in which Artificial Intelligence has taken over... The world here is run by machines."

"They keep us all on tiny islands," said a man. "All over the world they keep us like this, where we can't do any harm and they don't have to worry about us."

"I imagine that makes overcrowding somewhat of an issue," said Jones, quietly.

"It does, but the Sickness solves that issue," the same man replied. "Dunno' where it's come from though we suspect they created it, but it does trim the population some, means that those of us who don't die, don't starve."

"Well that's jolly nice of them, I suppose..." said Smith. "I don't suppose anyone has a..."

Smith's words were cut short when a man dropped from the sky. He wore a black trench coat and sunglasses and had slicked back hair that made him look like a bit of a weirdo, or that he had just got out of the shower.

"Sorry," he said in a husky voice as he rose from the position in which he had landed, which involved one of his fists and one of his knees both touching the ground, until he got up, anyway. After that, it was just the soles of his feet... "My name is Oreo."

"What're you doing here, Oreo?" asked Kris, her eyebrow raised. "Dropping out of the sky like some superhero or whatnot; you sure you're in the right section of the loop?"

Oreo glanced around and though everyone was watching him - he had just dropped from the sky, after all - he skipped over to Kris and whispered something into her ear.

"Oh..!" Kris exclaimed as Oreo backed away with a nervous smile upon his face. "That Oreo? From the future!"

"Oreo from the future?" Jones scoffed. "What on Earth are you talking about?"

"Are we even on Earth anymore?" asked Smith with a sigh. "I'm sorry, but I keep losing track."

Kris gestured frantically towards Oreo whilst mouthing the phrase, 'It's H'ver you dumb bastards,' although as her companions did not seem to understand, she soon gave up mouthing and opted to shout it instead.

The thing is, there was no way that a name like 'H'ver,' could under any circumstances be considered a human name, and in a world where machines rule the Earth and therefore everything mechanical was feared, well... suffice it to say that it was not at all long before Smith, Jones, Kris and H'ver were running for their very lives, hoping against hope that that friendly, comforting, bright white light would appear...