My gaze is glued to the screen. My mouth, lipstick-free today, whispers into the mic, “to Hell with the Central Financial Services’ idiotic Artificial Intelligence.”
The phrase rings overly bombastic in my ears, but it does the job, causing the time bomb to go ticking. I push from the desk, spring to my feet, and admire the shimmer of the tiny stars darting across the readout.
A pleasant heat radiates all over my body. I congratulate myself with a clap on the shoulder from the hand not clutching the wireless controller.
In order to obliterate the CFS’s Artificial Intelligence, alias SERVE – Shrink for Earned Revenue and Virtual Executor – I've turned the Steem blockchain into a virtual trojan horse: first immunizing its kernel, then deploying a viral bomb through its data stream, and finally pairing up enough links with the CFS blockchain #666 for the lethal infection to pass on.
Kudos to Vangelis also. Though he can’t be here with me today, without his intel, the bomb could not have been decentralized to such an extent. Now not even an army of nanobots sent out by SERVE would be able to hijack the better part of the Steem blockchain and disarm the bomb.
Still gloating, I swipe Vangelis’s blueprints from my desk and feed them down the shredder. For good measure, I chuck in one Cit-Rad, a Ukrainian imported lemon, combining disintegration with dissolution.
My nose is loudly rebelling against the Cit-Rad’s acidic odor invading the room. I sneeze again, spraying what looks like blood. I wipe my nose and shrug off the incident. I knew what I was getting into when ordering that lemon on Ukraine’s Deep Web.
I tighten the belt on my combat trousers so they don’t slide over the sheet of sweat cascading down my torso. While SERVE can populate the blockchain #666 alone, and no other, it has nowhere to escape. In consequence its artificially intelligent seconds are literally numbered now. Not a bad outcome for the common man and the bulk of the factions alike.
Centralized or decentralized, all non-religious factions are subject to taxation, the evasion of which is more difficult with the Shrink for Earned Revenue and Virtual Executor hard on their heels or digital footprints. Moreover, since my faction leans towards the right, while Vangelis’s more to the left, the success in this joint venture may defuse some of the tension running too high between either side’s most bloody-minded extremists.
“Leah!” A voice shouts from behind the door at the top of the stairs behind me. “Will you move your malnourished ass out of the basement and grace your weary mother with your presence, for God’s sake! Your scrambled eggs are cold already.”
“Is it for God’s sake,” I yell back, “or for the sake of the scrambled eggs that you want me up there, mom?” I sigh, slip the wireless controller into my side pocket, and glance at the screen.
“For God’s sake,” my mother yells back.
Buckling under her parental nagging, I stomp up the stairs. No rule prevents me from having the eggs in the dining room while watching the bomb go off on my Steemdroid smartphone. But... scrambled eggs on Monday?
I rake at my temples with my two thumbs and the seven fingers I’ve got left after a few CFS agents tortured me for underpaying my 2025’s taxes.
Yes, this is weird – unless I’ve let the whole day slip by and it’s Tuesday already.
Halfway up the stairs, I pause and turn around. The screen is barely readable from here, but I can tell that two digits begin the line and my memory supplies the rest of it.
Less than a hundred seconds to the boom! The inexorable progress reminds me again that SERVE refused to thrive on every standard CFS blockchain thrown at it, and that it took endless trials before it singularly took to their 666th blockchain. In the wake of that breakthrough, the overjoyed CFS spokeswoman christened the AI a ‘god,’ deifying it every time her smooth mug showed up in the fake-news broadcasts so increasingly abundant in these late 2020s.
I resume my walk up the stairs and, rather amused, decide to crack a gritty joke.
“God,” I shout to mom, “has virtually a hundred seconds to live.”
Which in existential terms isn’t long, I reckon, and fancy that the housefly that only buzzed by my ear nodded in agreement. Best of all, the CFS could do nothing to prevent the loss of the AI. Their commando units would not make it here in time, and SERVE’s nanobots—
“No blasphemy in our home, please,” mother sermonizes, scattering my thoughts, though only for a second.
Yeah, why aren’t those tiny metallic nano-turds busting into my basement yet? At this point, other than going for a desperate 51% attack worldwide, hacking my terminal directly was the only sensible recourse available to SERVE.
Gripping the doorknob at the head of the stairs, I squeak and jerk my hand back. Of course the AI’s nanobots have arrived already. All of a sudden I want to bet 50 SBD that behind the door, whining about scrambled eggs and gods, is not my real mother.
My heart attempts to race out of my chest. Still facing the door, I take a slow step down, away from whatever lurks behind it.
“May I come in?” The voice still sounds exactly like my mother’s, both in tonality and doggedness.
“Er, why didn’t you come in without asking, like you always do?” I say even as it dawns on me why. It has to be because of the large notice I slapped on the door’s other side while horsing around with my friends 
I hold my breath, waiting for the answer the little synthetic pukes relay from their AI master. Fortunately for me, every licensed AI’s programming bars it from violating safe spaces around the world. For the first time in my life I appreciate my membership in the Generation-Alpha birth cohort, which on this occasion allows me to fall into SERVE’s ‘the easily hurt snowflake’ category.
“I just don’t want to intrude on your feelings, my dear girl,” my mother’s voice assures.
Grossed out, I whip out my smartphone and tap on the remote-desktop app to access my terminal downstairs.
The phone’s screen communicates, and I lick my dry lips.
“Of course you don’t,” I mumble, now convinced it was indeed a clump of nanobots synthesizing my mother’s voice. “Because I’m not your ‘dear girl,’ am I?”
“No, you’re not.” The voice sheds its warmth immediately. “You’re the daughter of a bitch. A dead bitch.”
“You’ve murdered my mother?” I gasp with dismay over the foul language the AI is using, but the shock blows over instantly. Word has it Mr Shrink for Earned Revenue and Virtual Executor fails to moderate its vocal output during the most taxing scenarios.
“I broke her body down to molecules,” the AI drones on through its nanobots. “You can have her back in one passably sentient piece if you stop yanking my blockchain. So think about it. Without my help, you’re never going to see your mommy again.”
I squash my laughter as it’s breaking through my anxiety. SERVE is too short-sighted to even anticipate that my mother is a Steemit whale who makes daily self-uploads onto the Steem blockchain, and so can be restored into any willing minnow’s body for as little as 10,000 SBD.
I glance at my phone.
I let out an appreciative murmur. Steemdroid has to be the most reliable mobile OS in circulation.
“If I disable the bomb,” I mock-bargain out of curiosity and some other unrelated desires, “will you persuade your censoring counterpart, the NWO’s AI, to let me post my YouTube videos without having my words put through its hate-speech-checker? I’m tired of my ‘I was raped by a migrant’ morphing on the fly into ‘I was culturally misinterpreted,’ while my ‘I was raped by a local man’ makes the grade each and every time. Some unembellished facts would be nice to post or hear once in a while. You know?”
The nanobots groan as if I’ve just stomped on their collective foot. “Facts? You mean the truth? It’s potentially controversial! It causes ‘wrongthink’ in some people while it insults others too much. Besides, the NWO AI would find a request for the truth to slip into the mainstream-level Internet insulting. The NWO AI doesn’t like the truth. Regular people are afraid of liking it. Advertisers don’t like it either. Probably.”
“What?” I can hardly believe SERVE would sacrifice itself before risking an insult to another AI. Then again, the reason the nanobots haven’t trespassed on my basement is nothing more than a piece of paper naming the area as my own ‘safe space.’
“Well, probably it’s high time regular people stopped being afraid of liking the truth, for now about the fact that the CFS thugs are robbing them every other second of their lives.” I look at my phone and burst with joy at what I see.
SERVE doesn’t respond. Instead, there is a clank behind the door, as if a chain of blocks has just shattered.
“Yes!” I thrust my three-fingered fist towards the ceiling and think about Vangelis. If our factions continue playing along, the balance of power may tip in the citizens’ favor in their fight against what’s left of the CFS after the death of its Artificial Intelligence – its Inherent Stupidity.
Eager to see what the future holds, I walk out the door, shuffle through a little mound of metallic powder, and tap on my phone’s screen. I must locate a female minnow open to having my mother downloaded from the Steemit blockchain. With body-loan prices starting at 10,000 SBD per year, I also need to power down, then hit https://blocktrades.us to exchange some of my Steem for SBD.
As I cover the corridor, browsing through my Steem wallet, a distant whirring tells me there’s sixty seconds at most between me and a CFS chopper. I storm out the front door then lope across the yard, opposed to spending the remainder of my life in a CFS labor camp. Still, maybe they have different plans for me, I guess as a reflective object catches my eye. It’s approaching with the speed worthy of a missile...
With all my might I try to outrun the thing, but it’s too late as the bright cylinder whizzes by and strikes—
A garage, my neighbor’s, flies in all directions at once in a thousand pieces, a moment after I’ve cupped my ears. The earth roars. Something sharp slashes the skin above my elbow, but I can’t see anything through the billowing curtain of dust. Gritting my teeth against the impossible pain, I keep running.
A huge SHOUT-out to 
This virtual bomb wouldn’t have compiled and gone off as smoothly as it did without the debugging done by these absolute stars.
If you’re a creative writer striving for top-notch results, take a look at Jessica’s post and attend the best Fiction Workshop on this planet.
Take care