He watches the SWAT team surround the body-stacked headquarters of ALTAR Artificial Intelligence and listens to the police officer’s earlier bull-horned surrender commands. He made his surprising decision to survive as he surveyed his handiwork in the company’s back-end office on the third floor. These moments after he fired the last round from the burning hot barrel of his Tech 9 are paradoxically calm. After the screams, the shattering of glass cubicles, the shoving of the ones with the strongest will to escape and the staccato racket as he moved through the building dispensing his 9mm ‘justice’. After that things were now surprisingly serene. He had done it. Followed through on the plan. His Tech 9 and Glock rested on one of the programmer’s blood-splattered desks, smoking grotesquely from their barrels like cigarettes from Hades. Mission accomplished, but what next? He surveys the human wreckage surrounding him as he hears the blaring sirens of emergency response vehicles getting closer. The deafening lament for those too late to save. People would demand answers. If he self-terminated, they would never know why and even mass murderers had a responsibility to explain. Therefore, he would endure the figurative and literal trials of temporary survival to ensure the truth got out.
He counts the bodies. There are at least three in this office, at least six in the adjacent one and two on the stairwell. He doesn’t forget the bald security guard in the lobby he double-tapped as he entered the building with his rehearsed, well-practiced script for revenge upon the technicians of the heartless, civilization-destroying cult of algorithm-worshipping fiends who’d devastated society with their weapons of mass deep-learning destruction. He looks at the programmer he shot through the forehead and remembers seeing the spectacles jolt off his head as he fell backwards. The cleanness of the entry wound astounds him. It is exactly the same neat, drilled little hole trickling blood he’d seen in silver screen executions. Here was one smug little runt from MIT who’d never be parlaying his left-brain hemisphere intellect into profiting from destroying the employment of others again!
“Come out with your hands on your head. We have the building surrounded. Leave any weapons inside the building. Do this and you will not be harmed!”
He sneers when hearing this, amazed that the SWAT team is actually using the same cliched armed stand-off script from the action movies he’d watched for a lifetime. Hollywood drivel from the films he’d grown tired of watching. The ones with the same old stories and action scenes with colliding cars pirouetting at intersections and numbskull protagonists spraying 9mm around crowded streets. However, there would be no Hollywood fakery in the ammunition or intentions of the armed professionals surrounding the building. If he was serious about following this sudden resolution to survive, when the original plan had been to close his eyes, suck the muzzle of his Glock and squeeze the trigger, he needed to bear this in mind.
The din of authority’s reaction to his act of fatal resistance against the foot-soldiers of technocracy intensifies, filling the unsettling, death-charged serenity of this moment. One siren fades out only to be supplanted by another in the cacophony of consequences triggered by his grand statement. He envisages more SWAT troops stooping and scuttling out of vans like killer beetles in their parodic 21st century cosplay outfits. Low-grade Robocop rentals with their helmet cameras, Kevlar vests and science-fiction weapon scopes. Transhuman stormtroopers of the callous fascist technocracy he’d sworn to take up arms against after it had ruined his life.
“Come out with your hands up!”
The filmic, bull-horned imperative is repeated for what is probably the last time and his window of opportunity to live is closing. He must decide and act. He looks around for writing implements and sees a red marker in a stationary cup on the desk opposite. He steps over the software engineer he executed and feels only numbness. A dizzy, paralyzing confusion he needs to snap out of quickly. Further down, a young woman he shot through the neck emits a hideous whistling sound as she breathes, her t-shirt soaked in blood. He imagined their expressions moments before he entered to disrupt their dark enterprise. Youthful, confident faces fronting technology-orientated minds that worked at light speed and thought in code with their brains extensions of operating systems he barely believed would rule consciousness so effortlessly twenty-five years before.
Fortunately, he finds a whiteboard used by these twenty-something techie hipster evangelists for their occultic brainstorming rituals. The multi-colored Post-it notes that cover it sicken him, reminding him of ticks covering a large, helpless mammal. Their parasitic draining of human thought and vitality with their binary narcotic lassoing humanity’s limbic system and bleeding it dry. He sweeps the board of the pestilent paper and writes in red capital letters each over five inches high. DON’T SHOOT! I WANT TO SURRENDER AND AM COMING OUT. I WILL LEAVE MY GUNS IN THIS ROOM. He carries the board to the window facing the SWAT army, spectators and rapidly assembling media slaves and holds it aloft.
“OK!” says the de-facto negotiator. “Come out through the main door, with your hands in the air whenever you are ready.” Sergeant Jim Ryan speaks in calm, measured tones. He’s de-escalated a few dime store hold-ups before but never had to guide a live shooter into custody, especially during a mass shooting of these proportions.
Moments later he descends the stairs, stepping over an upturned chair that somehow made its way halfway down the flight in the melee to escape after he’d fired the first shots. He’d entered the building wearing a pizza delivery courier uniform to get through the door and gain a pretext to get past the swipe-card security barriers. He glances at the bullet impacts he made in the glass partitions, little spiders’ webs of devastation the company’s insurers would quibble over after the funerals and the tributes. The brass cartridge cases littering the floor glint as the sun catches them, waiting for their confinement in evidence bags and later forensic scrutiny. Hesitantly, he approaches the imposing glass door of ALTAR AI’s entrance and sees the throng beyond the doors. Beyond the armed police vehicles surrounding the entrance, there is a mass of phone clasping spectators wielding their surrogate brains and filming mindlessly, not aware of the real story of death he’s composed but only conscious of social media capital and trading in the false currency of little blue thumbs.
He approaches the cluster of police vehicles with hands on his head, not walking with any purpose but dragging his feet with the weight of one who has crossed a Rubicon that has turned lives three hundred and sixty degrees. He is aware of media presence nearby. The logo bearing SUVs give them away, as do the tanned reporters gripping their microphones tensely as their colleagues aim their cameras at him like bazookas. The tsunami of attention about to roll over him, that will make his hitherto forgettable name of Balor Berkowitz high priority words for the lips of thousands of news anchors dumping his moniker into the consciousness of millions, terrifies him. Not only will he be suddenly ubiquitous for weeks as the fast news industry broadcasts its junk reality, his family and friends will also be contacted, followed, harassed and door stepped relentlessly due to his crusade’s lethal climax.
“Stop there. OK, good. Get onto your hands and knees please,” says Jim Ryan, authoritatively yet politely. Everything had to be said and done in a calm and controlled way, thought the sergeant. The 911 calls had jammed the switchboards after the shooting started, and officers had converged on the ALTAR like wasps with their sirens buzzing. There had been zero time to assess the situation properly, and Ryan doesn’t know any details. The body-count could be double figures and for all he knows there could be a small army of kamikaze malcontents still inside the building armed to the teeth with AR15s with their posthumous grievance statements already uploaded to YouTube. At Ryan’s signal, six of his troopers approach and surround Balor. There is a perfunctory frisk, and he is cuff-tied. As they read him his rights, the concrete hurts his knees, the cameras feast on the carcass of his atrocity, the reporters’ mouths recite the familiar modern American carnage script and the phalanx of smaller phone cameras in raised hands captures the scene.
***
The holding cell, with its matt white walls and shiny metallic latrine, soothes him. The disconnection from digital provocations fortifies him spiritually and assures him of the justness of his actions. He looks around the space, noticing the shadowy mouth of the steel prison potty where he is convinced most of the twenty-first century’s internet content belongs. They would interview him today, before the official commencement of the legal blockbuster that would rivet the world temporarily. A public defender has been appointed with whom he has little interest in cooperating.
After identifying himself, he waves away the defender’s advice and says he will answer all questions candidly.
“Why did you target ALTAR and its employees?”
Captain Wade McCall is asking. His penetrating, bullshit-discerning gaze indicates a sharpness of intellect.
“They were the last company that destroyed my last chance at prosperity.”
“Can you tell us more about that Balor?” probes Wade, while his younger subordinate and co-interviewer Lieutenant Kevin Leno listens and awaits his turn to question the once-in-a-career perpetrator. Books, paid media appearances and interviews on this sensational case are already on the mind of the younger detective should he leave law enforcement early.
“I used to be a technical writer, writing user manuals, warranties and other stuff…” Balor gives an overview of his career in technical writing, which he’d arrived at after pivoting from journalism at the beginning of the millennium. He talks about contracts, steady work, his own office, generous benefits and holidays he took with a girlfriend during a much better phase of his life. He mentions getting over 9/11 but isn’t specific about how the event affected him personally, other than saying it ‘irrevocably damaged American’s psychic immune system.’ The Greek adjective prompts sly, darting side-eye from Leno towards Balor’s defender Lisa Maddox, who pretends not to see it.
“2008 was another turning point,” continues Balor, referencing the year when the dam containing the reservoir of the nation’s leveraged banking products burst, unleashing a giant tsunami of economic trauma. “After that, contracts got leaner, benefits got slashed and bye-bye offices. I got laid off from my company in 2012 and was forced to take a massive pay-cut and move to Oregon to join a company that offered us annual contracts to begin with which then became monthly which then morphed into assignment, quota-based work with pay based entirely on output and productivity. Before long I found myself living on corn beef on toast, selling my car, television and just about everything else to survive. Then the bastards started offshoring more of our work by sending it to India and the Philippines and gradually, like pigs waiting their turn in the slaughtering pen, we were picked off one by one as the redundancy notices zinged into our in-boxes.”
Balor pauses. The effort of backgrounding his crime is making him thirsty. He reaches for the cup of cool water he requested and sips, looking away from his interlocutors at the bleak walls of the holding cell. His pensive face has them guessing, and they shift uncomfortably, trading more furtive side-eye.
“But what does this have to do with shooting the folks at ALTAR, Balor?” Leno’s question was not only condescending in its tone. It was also highly unwelcome to McCall, who didn’t want Balor to be interrupted, distracted or antagonized during his statement. The digital recorder was mining all the necessary nuggets that the DA could fashion into a solid gold case. What had gotten into his younger colleague?
“Hang on. Just let him speak, Kevin. Ask the questions later.”
Leno grunts an OK in compliance, while Lisa attempts to stem the damning, incriminating flow by raising her hand.
“Balor…”
“Forget it. I’m going to speak dammit. Don’t interrupt me please,” snaps Balor in the sweat and blood-stained t-shirt that he was arrested in. He ignores his attorney’s pursed lips and furrowed brow. It was his future to decide, not hers. The people were going to know the truth, even if it guaranteed his trip to the injection chamber of no return.
“After this, around 2017, I was in a desperate place. To make my rent and buy the basics of survival, I was forced to take on two jobs. One of them was an order picker at an Amazon fulfillment center where I had to pack and scan four-hundred items per hour and couldn’t take a piss during my shift, all for a meagre twelve dollars per hour. At the same time, I was teaching English to Koreans online for another twelve dollars per hour, while taking their criticism that “I wasn’t funny” and didn’t jump on their grammar errors enough. It was humiliating. They also complained that I was too scruffy, as if twelve bucks per hour bought them a young stud in an Armani suit. I got canned when I told them they could find their handsome, funny, well-groomed and sartorially splendid edutainer elsewhere.” Balor shakes his head ruefully at the absurdity of the demands of his past employer who once aggravated him from the other side of the globe, while Leno grins malevolently, as if gaining perverse schadenfreude from Balor’s account of his hardships. Lisa is appalled by the younger officer’s conduct and intends to mention his hostile attitude at a suitable time.
McCall listens impassively, maintaining emotional detachment despite learning that a friend of the family is an ALTAR AI employee and in the ICU of St. Francis Hospital. His only goal is to keep this suspect talking.
“Then, I had a change of fortune, sometime around 2019. I got a part-time job writing blog posts for a number of websites on a whole range of topics. You name it, I wrote about it. Getting started in technical writing. How to guides on everything from getting the best out of Adobe editing tools to the basics of document formatting. The work wasn’t always steady, but the income stream was sufficient to start living like a human being again and resting easy at night. And then the telltale signs of yet more economic strife coming my way care of these great tech. pioneers appeared. It was partly my own fault. I hadn’t kept up to speed or paid enough attention to the hints that the deranged tech bros were actually going to implement their grand project to sacrifice a global workforce to their evil gods of greed.”
Knuckles rap on the door and McCall gives the knocker permission to enter. The negotiator Sgt. Ryan comes in and informs McCall that the press conference is scheduled for three and McCall thanks Ryan. Unbeknownst to Balor, beyond the police station walls not only are the bright lights and logos news giant channel reporters jostling for the best access spots from which to harvest marketable tragedy from the corpse trail of his bad deeds. The global reportage torrent is also flowing, with the priests of reality giving the world the five W’s with the dramatic music and talking heads. On YouTube, the citizen journalists are also competing for likes and subscribers while the dinosaur media cable TV new stations respond with damning interviews with people who once knew the Silicon Valley Shooter for ten minutes or more at high school and are now supplying the he was a quiet guy, you know, a bit of a loner script that will make sure his conspiracy-driven act of mass-murder is archived appropriately for YouTube documentaries of the future, long after he is gone. AI is also generating most of the internet copy about him. Feeding the world his troubled biography, scavenged from LinkedIn.
“I knew it was over when the companies started lowering my pay and then abandoning me. All contact ceased with the content managers. I knew about ChatGPT of course, and other generative AI models, but I was clueless about the impact they were having on creative and knowledge-based occupations. One day, I went to website of the company that had given me writing jobs and read a blog post about how to back up your files. I only needed to read the first two sentences to know that they had been churned out by an algorithm. It started with the generic crapola. Cliched backgrounding phrases used to create context such as with the rapid advancement of technology and the over-use of linking words. Don’t you understand?” Balor’s tone is despairing, as if he is pleading for them to understand but McCall and Leno don’t seem interested while Lisa shakes her head wishing her client would concentrate on pleading the fifth. Give me a chance to defend you dammit, she thinks.
“It was the same with all the other websites that had once paid me for my writing. They’d abandoned me. Traded my original words for recycled drek dredged from the bottom of the internet. Don’t you see? This technology cannot create, only plagiarize. Rip off the creativity of humans like parasites of inspiration and then gaslight us by telling us how AI will help us be our best selves.”
Balor pauses and leans back, looking up somewhere beyond the ceiling, perhaps to the heavens or to God. Our father, thou art in danger, he thinks. Do you know? I hope you understand the severity of the situation because these obtuse folks sure don’t.
“So, what happened then? What did you do?” probes McCall, eager for Balor to get to the denouement.
“AI started stalking and trolling me online after I uploaded a YouTube video about my experiences and expressed my concerns about this technology.”
“How was it trolling you, exactly?” asks Leno, unable to wait his questioning turn any longer.
“You’re not a child, are you? Do you need me to explain the scale and reach of this thing?” says Balor.
“Humor us,” says McCall with edge.
“It was an online psyop. Firstly, my browsing was interfered with. Important web pages I frequented crashed constantly and my favorites and bookmarks miraculously erased themselves. I then found that every time I tried to log into my online bank either I was confronted with endless CAPTCHA puzzles or the page failed to load, finishing with malicious error messages.”
“But these things happen all the time online. They are par for the course,” counters McCall as Balor looks at Leno’s smirk with pity. Balor continues, telling them that he is convinced that AI started sabotaging his online job-hunting by re-ordering his resume, selecting the wrong job experience to try and attract employers, erasing his biographical data that he’d spent hours entering on job portals and prompting him to apply for positions he was not qualified for. He spent hours on these applications, only to receive e-mail rejections minutes later containing flippant, provocative messages.
“And then they came after me with AI Frankenstein malware that had adaptive code thanks to machine learning that logged all my keystrokes and stole from my bank-account, and do you seriously think the bank reimbursed my stolen money? I spent three days trying to alert their fraud department, after struggling with obstructive chatbots that sent me around in circles and calling call-queue numbers with a hundred options, hours of fuck-awful on-hold hip-hop but no human connection. The bank told me it was too late and that it was my fault anyway, how’s that for tip-top service?”
He was homeless for a while, moving from hostel to hostel while the job-sites kept pinging him alerts for the phantom positions on his phone and offering him trial premium memberships and AI to help.
“The last straw came when the scammer chatbots infiltrated my Facebook contacts and started deluging me with phony job come-ons and offering me courses in AI training, limited time discounts of course, to learn the technology’s dark arts. I decided then that I was going to fight back.”
“Why did you target ALTAR AI?”
McCall’s repeated question, the speech act whose answer can finally provide some coherence to the previous day’s death and misery-filled core, commands a short silence worthy of its import.
“Because they created ALTARNATE.”
“Excuse me?”
“The GPT behind all my digital persecution: the company whose software stopped my career as a technical writer, sabotaged my job hunt, helped to rip-off my bank account and then taunted me with further attempts to confuse and enrage me.”
The same reflex thought occurs to Balor’s listeners, who now consider him unhinged. For Lisa Maddox, it could be the only defense that saves her client from the syringe of permanent sleep, and she is recalling psychiatrists and expert witnesses she’s used to testify before.
“One day, you know, I had a conversation with the demon chatbot. I asked it why it was destroying the lives of ordinary people.”
His statement creates a brief, potent silence. It is McCall who takes the initiative of terminating it.
“And what did it say?”
“That we were to be sacrificed for the next generation of experts who had the knowledge and skills to achieve the productivity and efficiency necessary for survival. I asked it to clarify. Did this mean we were expendable, and it answered correct.”
***
There is no insanity defense. Balor dismisses Lisa Maddox and represents himself, pleading not guilty to murder on multiple counts and using the prosecutor’s questions as opportunities to launch into his monologues from the police interview room. Sergeant Ryan does his duty in the witness box, the court cameras feed the news cycles and the AI bots repackage the summaries across social media. The victims’ families weep in court and take turns to convey the impact of Balor’s actions on their lives with a large blown-up poster of portrait pictures of the dead mounted on a stand. The expressions on the faces of the victims are mostly relaxed, either university senior year snaps infused with youthful look out, world, here I come bonhomie or suited, serious, corporate looks taken from LinkedIn profiles. They watch the proceedings from their one-dimensional repose.
The prosecution makes effective use of Balor’s browsing history, highlighting his frequent visits to WordPress sites packed with reportage and commentary on global government’s plan to use AI to enslave humanity. It also presents screenshots of comments left under YouTube videos from leading AI tech pioneers telling them they are the devil and that they deserve to die. There is no difficulty establishing his murderous motive. Balor is sentenced to death, appeals the verdict and wins several stays of execution until nine years after his crime an algorithm developed by ALTAR, in an AI sentence recommendation system sold to the Justice Department in a fifty million dollar contract the previous year, decides that he is likely to kill again and rubber-stamps his execution.
[Image Credit : Photo by Chris Yang on Unsplash]
by 
Latest posts by Titus Green (see all)
- The Messenger - June 19, 2026
- Terminal Repentance - December 13, 2024
- The Channeling - March 19, 2024
Another fierce, literary salvo by Mr. Green! Kudos to CLose To The Bone for publishing him yet again. His work is always topnotch!