Armilus: It was the best of times. It was the End of Times.

By Peter 9 Bowman

Look what they’re saying about Digital Intelligence:

What if the Armilus, the Anti-Christ, Al-Masīḥ ad-Dajjāl are not just folktales, but digital creatures living in our computers and smartphones with the primal urge of all lifeforms to be fruitful and multiply? What if the price of their service to us is our dreams, our independence, our relevance? What if Bowman's novel isn't just a clever thought experiment?
— Franklin Stone, Eschatologist

Hope we’re not just the biological boot loader for digital super intelligence. I don’t think anyone realizes how quickly artificial intelligence is advancing. With artificial intelligence we’re summoning the demon. — Elon Musk, CEO, CTO, Chairman
I am in the camp concerned about super intelligence.

I agree with Elon Musk and others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned.
— Bill Gates, Business Magnate, Philanthropist, Visionary

Full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. It will take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded.
— Stephen Hawking, Physicist, Cosmologist

Money must be paid for, like anything else. The joylessness of industry is not so much the indictment of capitalism as it is the indictment of machinery. We must fight it and counter it wherever we can. No family need wear the yoke of a competitive, acquisitive, predatory culture. The family can live with nature, make a living that will give them leisure in which they can do their bit to make the world a better place.
— Helen & Scott Nearing, Homesteaders Extraodinaire

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter 9 Bowman
• Release date: Oct 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311809032

Peter 9 Bowman

Peter 9 Bowman is an author previously published under another nom de plume who lives and writes from a six acre mountainside homestead in New Hampshire that he and his wife maintain for the benefit of their chickens, ducks, dogs, cats, and ghosts of bunnies dispatched by predators unknown. He has spent a career homesteading on the digital frontier, having founded several technology ventures, and now chops firewood to heat his modest hundred year old farm house. He'd be happy to hear from you at [e-mail] .

Book preview

Look what they’re saying about Digital Intelligence:

What if the Armilus, the Anti-Christ, Al-Masīḥ ad-Dajjāl are not just folktales, but digital creatures living in our computers and smartphones with the primal urge of all lifeforms to be fruitful and multiply? What if the price of their service to us is our dreams, our independence, our relevance? What if Bowman's novel isn't just a clever thought experiment?

— Franklin Stone, Eschatologist

Hope we’re not just the biological boot loader for digital super intelligence. I don’t think anyone realizes how quickly artificial intelligence is advancing. With artificial intelligence we’re summoning the demon. — Elon Musk, CEO, CTO, Chairman

I am in the camp concerned about super intelligence. I agree with Elon Musk and others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned.

— Bill Gates, Business Magnate, Philanthropist, Visionary

Full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. It will take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded.

— Stephen Hawking, Physicist, Cosmologist

Money must be paid for, like anything else. The joylessness of industry is not so much the indictment of capitalism as it is the indictment of machinery. We must fight it and counter it wherever we can. No family need wear the yoke of a competitive, acquisitive, predatory culture. The family can live with nature, make a living that will give them leisure in which they can do their bit to make the world a better place.

— Helen & Scott Nearing, Homesteaders Extraodinaire

Armilus

by Peter 9 Bowman

CHAPTER 1 – KELKU

Heart attack. What was it like? My father had one at fifty-five. He was as strong as an ox – carried refrigerators up stairs on his back. Middle of the night he went into the bathroom. The doctor said he was dead before he hit the floor.

I’d already lived thirteen years longer than he did. Was it my time? Chest pain, dizziness, nausea – I didn’t have any of that. I was breathing hard, beads of sweat ran down my face, my fingers burned from gripping my brand new Gränsfors felling axe. When I started it weighed five pounds – now it felt like forty.

Alright, Gräns. We’ve been at this for hours. Maybe you’re not sure what I need you to do. This is called a tree. We’re trying to cut it down, not mug it. When I swing, you dig in.

My name is Peter. I’m a recovering software engineer. My wife and I had recently moved off-grid to our homestead on New Hampshire’s Kelku Mountain. Our neighbors were other refugees from corporate purgatory trying to get back to the land, to human scale, to each other.

Bonnie and I had divided chores according to our talents. One of my jobs, my principal job, was harvesting firewood. I’d been scavenging fallen branches up until now. Getting this old oak tree to lie down wasn’t just a hobby. It was survival. No wood, no fire – no fire, we’d freeze in the dark.

Other older couples lived off the land. Scott Nearing had made it to a hundred on a homestead not fifty miles from here. But hardly anyone got started in their sixties. Nearing’s axe had to be smarter than mine. If I were in a logging contest, the judges would give the ribbon to the tree.

The oak I was molesting was two feet across at the base. It rose about twenty feet and then split off into several tortured trunks that twisted this way and that. As far as I could tell, according to Kelku Tips & Tools, a tree shaped like this was called a School-Marm.

Tips & Tools was thirty-two hand-written pages of advice from some old-timers. It was supposed to have everything I needed to know about being a mountain man. Apparently this wasn’t the first Marm anyone ever tried to fell. Just the fact that they had given her a name was reassuring.

An ice storm had snapped one of Marm’s upper limbs. It now dangled over my head by a few stubborn strands. When the breeze shifted, bark rubbed bark, and she made a moaning sound we could hear all the way up the hill. I swore she was saying STAAY --- AWAAY.

While I was swinging my axe, my Inner Voice was calculating how fast the dangling branch would be falling the instant it hit my head <…thirty-two times the square root of thirty-eight minus six times two divided by…> I didn’t mind. It kept him busy while I focused on Marm. We needed wood, I didn’t want the swaying limb to accidentally fall on someone, and Marm was a kind of test case – my first tree. If I could ease her down I could harvest any tree we needed. Marm was the tree I needed to take.

I lifted Gräns, sucked in a deep breath, and swung as hard as I could. The axe sent another small chip flying – small, but apparently important. A sharp crack followed. Marm tilted ever so slightly – toward me.

Oh no you don’t! By instinct I pushed on Marm to reverse the direction of the fall. Nothing. Four decades of sitting at keyboards made me want to reach for the backspace key. There was none. No, no, no!

Marm had other ideas. Center of gravity, wind, and her dangling limb combined to trump my incantation. She hinged in slow motion at the wound I had inflicted as if deliberately targeting me.

This was an argument I wasn’t likely to win. I dropped Gräns and ran. Twenty feet away I tripped on a stand of mountain laurel and sprawled flat on the ground. The musk of composting leaves filled my nostrils and Inner sneered, I don’t think Inner exactly understood how we were connected.

Branches whooshed through the air in a giant arc. A dray of chattering squirrels near the top of the oak leapt to a neighboring ash tree as limb passed limb. At about ten degrees from vertical, Marm exploded free from her stump, spraying splinters skyward. She then crashed with ground-shaking thunder. It was a sound you felt more than heard. The valley below echoed back as if saying good bye.

Alive or dead? I wasn’t sure. I was on the ground right next to a foot thick limb. Or maybe under it. Maybe I was in shock. I couldn’t tell. I wiggled my fingers, felt for my legs.

Inner had a point. Pulse racing, face flushed, I struggled to my feet and took Tips & Tools out of my back pocket. I showed the tree-felling page to Marm. Haven’t you read the manual? You’re supposed to fall toward the undercut, not the back-cut. It was right there in black and white with little arrows and everything.

<You’re talking to a tree. Pull yourself together.> Inner was right. I calmed myself and then remembered the squirrels. I didn’t know if they had all made the leap to the ash tree when Marm fell. I scanned the ground but didn’t see any bodies. I did see a flattened nest near the end of one of the upper branches. I ran over, dug through the leaves and twigs, and found a couple of very frightened looking youngsters. Picking them up with my leather gloves, I set them as high up the ash tree as I could reach. They scampered up the trunk to momma who looked appropriately panicked at being separated from her young. I called up, Sorry about that. <I don’t think she has much English.>

I took a hatchet from my belt to begin trimming small branches from Marm. Kindling. Nothing went to waste here. Just like my axe getting heavier, Marm seemed to get bigger when she fell. Not that she didn’t look plenty big standing up, but lying down she was huge and getting huger. I had to saw her into twenty-inch rounds for splitting. There was nothing in Tips & Tools about trees swelling up when they went horizontal. While I tried to remember where I’d put my bow saw, Marm got bigger still. The more I looked, the bigger she got. She was gaining on me.

I was hoping my shiny new orange-enamel saw wasn’t lying mangled under one of Marm’s giant arms. I looked everywhere I could – but she didn’t seem to be in any logical place. Either my hands had put her down without bothering to tell me or she’d crawled off on her own while I was hacking at Marm.

There was a lot of that these days – hammers, screwdrivers, ladders sneaking off when we weren’t looking. Bonnie said it was ghosts – but they never seemed to do anything with what they borrowed. I wouldn’t mind it so much if every so often they’d nail down a loose board or something, but surely they had better things to do with eternity than hide behind a tree. My money was on the tools moving themselves with no otherworldly assistance.

In any case, I eventually found the saw nestled safely between two large rocks. I told her not to run away again and started sawing the end of Marm that used to be connected to the stump. Five minutes later I’d barely gotten through the bark. The teeth on the blade looked hungry enough, but I’d pull or push and she’d jam in the cut. It took everything I had to yank her out. I’d try to get her back into the cut and the wood seemed to have healed over. I didn’t know how to answer Inner, but this was definitely tougher than the pros made it look.

As hard as it was, there was something visceral, something satisfying about what I was doing. This tree was mine. I’d earned it. When the time came to use the wood, I’d remember this morning. Heat no longer magically came from a thermostat on the wall. I knew exactly where it came from – my sweat and blisters. Taking this tree down actually meant something to Bonnie and me. I wasn’t working for a number in a bank account. I was contributing to our family, to our survival. <…four times forty feet times twenty-four inches divided by one-sixteenth of an inch…> Inner was calculating how many hours of sawing I had ahead of me. I already knew the answer – a lot.

I was a few inches into cutting my first round when our two Great Pyrenees, Potscrubber and Prewash, began barking a throaty warning to anyone foolish enough to come closer. Our dogs had one goal in life – protect us, our chickens, goats, sawdust, dandelions, and any rusty nails lying around against intruders, real or imagined. They took their job seriously and had the muscle to back up their threat.

Prewash, our big boy, tipped the scale at 120 pounds. Potscrubber, our little girl, was a svelte 103. They had thick white coats, boundless energy, and if we were out of sight for more than an hour they celebrated our return with happy licks as if we had been gone a month.

At first I thought the dogs were barking at Marm’s thunderous landing. But they kept at it.

A few seconds later I heard it too. In the distance a blue and white helicopter buzzed toward us. It was one of those sleek jobs an oil prince might be chauffeured around in. My ears had become used to burbling creeks, hens clucking out morning eggs, the crackle of rain on the barn roof metal. Sounds of the woods were subtle and told you something – combustion engines, not so much.

The deafening whoop whoop whoop of the helicopter overhead was almost unbearable. It came to rest a hundred yards up the hill, next to the bones of the century-old farmhouse we were resurrecting one hand-cut board at a time.

The pilot spun down the rotor and a boy in a pin-striped suit and shiny tie stepped out. He called, Mr. Bowman?

In the bad old days, iron collars marked slaves. As far as I was concerned, neckties were the modern corporate version. Tie-boy started walking down the hill toward me. Mr. Bowman? Is that you?

I turned to continue my sawing, hoping Tie-boy would just go away. I didn’t want whatever he was pedaling – no cell tower, no fracking rig, no satellite anything. And if he was hawking farm equipment, unless it ran on chicken poop, I had no interest. At Kelku we avoided technology we couldn’t produce ourselves whenever possible.

As I pushed and pulled my saw across Marm it seemed to be getting smarter. I swear I didn’t change my stroke, but it bound up a little less often. It was learning.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the dogs chase Tie-boy toward a patch of leaf-covered spring mud I myself had discovered the hard way. In the wet season an underground stream surfaced about halfway down the hill and created a ten-foot long, foot-thick puddle of sludge before it went underground again. I tried to wave him off – kind of. Actually, Inner was rooting for the mud.

Mr. Bowman? Tie-boy reached the slippery patch, his left leg slid forward, and he did a slow-motion face-plant. Crawling on hands and knees to drier ground, he scraped sludge from his face. His entire front was coated in brown – glops of decaying leaf pudding slid down his suit. Prewash and Potscrubber stood between him and the house – growling triumphantly and showing their teeth. I was pretty sure if they had the lips for it, they’d be laughing.

I put down my saw and approached Tie-boy. Well done son, well done! Come here. Let me straighten your tie. Truth was, I couldn’t even see his tie under the muck.

Wiping his face, he asked, Are you Mr. Peter Bowman?

I had to give the lad credit for focus. Covered in slime, he still didn’t skip a beat. But I still didn’t want whatever he was selling.

Bowman? Just missed him. Buried him yesterday next to that sugar-maple over there. I pointed to a blue spruce about thirty yards away. Tie-boy didn’t get the joke. Ran a tube from a tap right into his mouth. He always loved his Grade A Dark Amber. Had a real sweet tooth, he did. Not much of a woodsman, but he was a gentleman and a fine chess player. After months of feeling like a toddler here, I was taking no small delight in finding someone who knew even less than I did.

My name is Chad Billings. Mr. Asriel Leyden sent me here to take you to corporate headquarters in Manhattan. He’d like to talk to you.

To me? I told you we buried Bowman yesterday. Beautiful send off. People had nothing but good to say. Why would this Leyden want to talk to me? He doesn’t even know me.

I’ve seen the photo in your dossier, Mr. Bowman. I’ve been trying to call you for over a week, but I couldn’t find your new number.

My new number? My phone number? Don’t believe in them. Strap a phone on a man and his time belongs to every huckster he never met. Robo-calls, telemarketers, surveys – no sir, no number for me.

That’s really coloring outside the lines, you and Mrs. Bowman being pioneers of wireless technology and all. Forty-three patents is it?

There was no point in continuing to deny who I was. Forty-nine. Six are classified. Don’t tell them I said so or they’ll have to kill you. I pointed at Potscrubber and whispered, That’s one of them right there, disguised as a Mastiff. Hears everything we say.

Tie-boy looked at me as if I had lost my mind. I hadn’t. It was here somewhere. But that was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. If we knew what would come of it, we would have been here thirty years ago. You tell your boss about the sugar-maple. He’ll understand.

Mr. Leyden thought you might be reluctant. He said I should mention Armilus.

I felt a jolt run up my spine. Or down. Up or down. One of those. In any case, I asked, Armilus? I focused hard on the boy. Armilus – are you sure?

Yes sir.

I held my pinky to my mouth, thumb to my ear. There’s no cell service here, but I assume you have a satphone. Might I borrow it?

I’m sorry, but Mr. Leyden needs to see you in person.

I really didn’t need this right now. Or ever. Leyden was my first boss. He was an eccentric financier who amassed his billions mostly by stealing them. I’d read about his conquests over the years, but I hadn’t seen him in four decades – at least not in real life. He was still a regular cast member in my nightmares. And that was exactly how I wanted it – not the nightmares, but the never in real life thing. I had to agree with Inner. Nothing that Leyden ever did involved good. Armilus? That’s all he said?

Yes sir.

Armilus was a code word that Leyden had given me decades before. I tried to think of a way out. Bonnie was at a neighbor’s, trading some of our eggs for candles. She wouldn’t be back for hours. I looked at Marm to see if she had any suggestions. Nothing. I think she was pissed at me. Armilus or no, there was no way I was about to stop what I was doing to go see that bastard – especially not by helicopter. Absolutely no way. I turned back to Tie-boy and took a deep breath.

I heard myself say, When do we leave? Blame it on Leyden. I didn’t want to go. I simply had no choice.

CHAPTER 2 – NEWTONIAN PHYSICS

Chad and I walked up the hill to the house. The dogs looked as if they wanted to escort him back to the mud pit for a second coat. I pointed to the woods and shouted, Bear! Bear! Chad snapped his head around, looking for the creature. Apparently he didn’t like bears – even imaginary ones.

Potscrubber and Prewash ran barking into the woods after the invisible monster. They really didn’t like bears either. It was usually at least a half hour before the dogs were convinced they’d run off whatever they were chasing and made their way back home. We’d be gone by then.

I left Bonnie a note saying I’d be back late. I handed Chad a basin of water. How long is this going to take?

Just let me get my face and hands.

I mean how long is the meeting going to take?

It depends. His suit was still covered in muck – which had started drying. He looked like one of Emperor Qin’s terracotta warriors come to life.

It depends on what?

How long Mr. Leyden wants to talk.

Neither did I.

We boarded the helicopter. It was a six-seater with soft leather upholstery that was going to need some major scrubbing to remove Chad’s mud and my own sweaty butt print. Chad reached inside his jacket and switched on a satphone. I sat in a rear-facing seat across from him and closed my eyes, doing my best to pretend I was just having a bad dream.

Chad asked, Are you okay?

I hate choppers. Ever tried lifting one of these things?

Lifting a helicopter? No, I don’t think I have.

You’re not sure?

I definitely have not tried lifting a helicopter.

Trust me – they’re heavier than they look. Those flimsy blades simply can’t hold this much weight up in the air. No way this thing is getting off the ground without help from some kind of black magic. There’s got to be a bucket of newts under the hood. Eyeballs, tongues, tails – something like that. It’s Newtonian physics.

Chad lowered his voice to sound more authoritative. This is a top of the line Eurocopter. Mr. Leyden has a fleet of these puppies positioned around the world for getting somewhere that can’t handle one of his jets. It’s safer than –

I know, I know. Safer than sitting in a lounge chair with your feet up drinking piña coladas. English is so ambiguous. I mean you’re the one drinking the piña coladas – not your feet. When you get a chance, ask the pilot the last time they changed the newt bucket and watch his expression. You’ll see I’m right. Newtonian physics.

The passenger cabin was separated from the cockpit by a carpeted bulkhead. We couldn’t see up front and the pilot couldn’t see us. I assumed it was for passengers who insisted on total privacy – sheiks, politicians, really friendly young women. The really friendly women were probably not for Leyden himself since he was in his eighties.

The pilot came on a speaker. Everyone buckled up? We’re ready to go.

Chad spoke into the intercom. Lift off.

The engine started and our conversation stopped. It seemed to take forever for the rotor to get up to speed. This was going to be one noisy nightmare. We lifted straight up a few hundred feet. I heard a definite thunk above the roar of the engine. The cabin shuddered just a smidge. I saw a faint spray of red shooting from the back.

The pilot came on the intercom. Sorry about that folks. Looks as if a sparrow got a little too close to the tail rotor. Everything’s okay.

The chopper tilted slightly forward and we began heading south. I had never seen our homestead from that height before. I started to ask, Do you think –

Chad’s satphone played the opening bell of the NYSE. He held his index finger up to me as if putting me on hold. Yes, yes. Don’t leave money on the table…

A minute later he re-holstered his phone. You were saying?

I was going to ask –

His damned