AARON I looked back at Sean, who was laying on his side in his fully reclined chair. My son’s chest rose slowly but predictably. I remembered hovering over Lucas, as the little guy slept in his crib, desperately trying to determine if he was breathing or not. Fighting to focus through the low light of his nursery room to catch a glimpse of the rise and fall of his tiny tummy. I longed for that to be the greatest of my worries. I leaned over and looked at Elena’s phone, getting a good view of the screen. “Do you think she’s working for them? There’s no way she doesn’t know about our brothers and sisters dying once they enter the stake.” “I don’t think so,” she said, trailing off. I raised an eyebrow. “What else could she be doing?” Elena paused the live stream. “Do you see all these people in the back?” she said as the image froze of Miriam swinging the perspective around the main room of the stake as she turned around a corner. “Yeah.” “They weren’t there in the earlier videos. More and more people have been appearing as she posts, and I don’t recognize any of them.” “We haven’t lived in this area that long babe. I don’t think I could name even ten percent of the people there let alone recognize them from a video.” She rolled her eyes. “That’s because you’re an ass, and you don’t remember anyone who doesn’t have political significance.” I frowned. Her statement was normally meant as a joke; however, this time her tone had a touch of harshness to it. “Don’t snap at me and that’s not true at all. I care about all sorts of people.” “Oh really, want to tell me the name of the teacher’s aide assigned to Lucas’s class?” My mouth opened and then snapped back shut after a moment of silence that felt as if it were stretching on forever. “Why is the video a problem?” I said, trying to get back onto the topic at hand and not prove her point any further. “That parking lot was packed when we got there. Why are the videos only now showing an increase in people? She was walking around in there for her last three videos.” “Maybe these people are working with whoever is orchestrating this entire event?” “I don’t think it’s actually real,” Elena blurted out. “I think Miriam is dead.” I pulled back. “That’s insane. So what are you saying, that the machines are rising up?” “How is that insane? You literally watched one snap Heather’s neck,” she responded, the last words came out as a low hiss as she looked toward Lucas to make sure he was asleep. I threw my hands up. “It’s insane because it’s, well, it’s just insane. Machines can’t think for themselves.” She rolled her eyes. “We both watched that documentary about Artificial Intelligence, maybe someone finally made a fully aware one. Think about it. We’ve been having a whole bunch of issues communicating over long distances. If you wanted to take over humanity, what would you do?” I turned forward, watching as the car slowed down so as to not hit a car parked in the middle of the road, unlike all the others to this point. The car slowly rerouted around it, and we picked back up our pace. “You sound crazy.” “Have you seen any groups of people hunting down Mormons yet?” “I can’t be everywhere,” I responded. “It messed with the phones. It’s spreading lies to scare us and force us into central locations where its robots can kill us.” “That isn’t happening.” She tossed the phone down to the floor by her feet. “Then how do you explain the fact that we watched a damn robot murder someone?” I threw my hands into the air and gritted my teeth. After a second, I looked at her, exhaustion pulling my shoulders down. “Can we please not talk about this?” “Of course, you want to avoid it, just like how we never talked about Marianne,” she said, her tone nearly a hiss. My eyes went wide in frustration and bewilderment. “What the hell does Marianne have to do with anything?” She stabbed a finger at me and her mouth opened to speak when the central console pinged and we both looked at it. For the first time in hours, a convenience store along our route was registering as open according to our navigation app. I looked at the power gauge for the car and then looked back at Elena. “We should charge up.” She turned and folded her arms over her chest, looking out over the hood of the car and ignoring me. I shook my head slightly. “Look, I don’t know what the hell that was all about but can we please table it until we get to your parents’ place? We don’t need to get into a fight while the world is falling apart around us.”