Droubble: Little Things Come in Small Packages

Little Things Come in Small Packages

She hands me the box at 0435, just as planned. It’s nondescript, wrapped in brown paper and twine. My job is to get it to the next drop point before 0800. I don’t officially know what’s in the box, or even who I’m handing it off to. I don’t need to know, and this way I have deniability.

I’m on the subway when I notice a rip in the paper. Even though I technically “don’t know” what’s in the box, I know that this is not a good thing. I try to cover up the rip with a gloved hand, but of course there’s no way of knowing if the contents of the box picked up enough photons to power their first conversion, at least not for a few minutes. Even as fast as the things grow, they’re also very, very small.

There’s no pain, but when I try to shift my hand’s position the whole palm just sloughs off. There’s no blood; the rapid conversion to computronium effectively cauterizes the blood vessels. My drop is screwed, and so, in a way am I. But in the long run, this changes nothing, not whether Singularity happens, just where it begins.