Super Diary! 💖

Suddenly, the Super Secret Love Diary 💖 flew out of Snowcube’s arms and into the air, a mysterious light trailing behind it.

“Whoa, dude!” Fence said. “I didn’t know this rescue mission had anyone on special effects duty!”

It was quite possibly the dumbest thing I had heard all day.

And that was saying something.

The journal floated to a stop, just hovering there and glowing faintly, as if buoyed in midair. The gizmos and gadgets that Snowball had installed on its exterior were going haywire, each performing its own unique function without pause. Then, with a hiss and whir, the biometric lock disengaged by itself, and the Super Secret Love Diary 💖 opened to what I could tell even in the faint moonlight was its exact middle. The exact page where Snowball’s portion of the diary ended and Snowcube’s began.

This was nuts. It was absolutely squirrely. It was almost as if the Super Secret Love Diary 💖 had a mind, will, and consciousness of its own.

Then, about 0.1 second later, I found out the Super Secret Love Diary 💖 had a mind, will, and consciousness of its own.

“Snowcube isn’t a clone of Snowball,” the diary said, its inhuman voice reverberating mysteriously. “She’s a clone of me!”

Don’t ask me how I knew it was the diary speaking. I just did. We all did, I reckoned. We all could tell that the voice was coming from the book. That book that I was now positive was actually alive. It was a voice that sounded like it was coming on the one hand from everywhere all at once, and on the other hand from nowhere at all. Like the voice of some kind of mystical, ethereal being. Some sort of deity. Some old, forgotten god.

Who knew gods spoke in cartoon-character falsetto? If I didn’t know any better, I would think the Super Secret Love Diary 💖 was trying to channel its inner Minnie Mouse.

Wait. Maybe it was. Huh.

In any case, the point is that as strange, striking, and unsettling as the situation was, the shrill squeak of a voice, like a balloon animal slowly whining to deflation in vocal form, made it almost impossible to take any of this seriously.

“Is this seriously happening? Is that book really alive? And really talking to us?! Like, directly into our minds or whatever?!”

“Well duh.” Snowcube had her now-free hands on her hips and a scowl etched on her face. “How else would she talk to us? In case you haven’t noticed, she doesn’t exactly have a mouth.”

“Exactly! I don’t have a mouth!” the book added. “How rude of you to even ask! Lucky for you, I’m going to be the bigger person here and not stoop to your levels of utter rudeness, you stupid dumb stupid dumbass idiot.”

Uh. Pretty sure that qualified as stooping. Then again, what did I know? I was tempted to ask something along the lines of, “Bigger person?” emphasis, if the italics didn’t spell it out, on “person” and my incredulity with regard to the accuracy of the term. But I didn’t want to be rude again. So all I ended up asking was:

“Ok, who is this book? What’s going on here?”

“Uh. Hello?” the book said. “I’m right here. You could just ask me to my face instead of pretending I can’t hear you. You really are rude.”

“Your face? But—? What—? You just said you don’t have a mouth, and you definitely don’t have a face, so—!” And that was about where I gave up. I could tell there was no winning with this stupid book.

Frankly, at that point, I really didn’t know what to say or do, so I just said and did nothing. Moreover, I really didn’t know what to make of this situation at all. If you had told me this morning that by seven tonight I’d have learned Snowball was a robot who was part of some deranged family composed of herself, a clone, and a talking book, I probably would have told you to take a hike.

Which, come to think of it, was actually how this all sort of started in a way.

Anyway, I was stumped. More stumped than a World Wildlife Fund-protected forest after a long, hard day of illegal logging.

“Just, please.” I was begging them. I was tired and wanted to go home, flop down in my bed, and wake up tomorrow to the sheer relief that this was all some kind of bad dream. Some weird hallucination I was having after huffing some chemical compounds Snowball had concocted. Anything, literally anything, other than reality. “Tell me who you are and what all of this means.”

“If you insist,” the book said with a hmph. It could even hmph, apparently. “I’m exactly what I look like.”

“A talking book?”

“Now you’re just being rude again. I’m not a talking book. I’m a naturally occurring artificial super intelligence.”

“Oh, sorry, I was way off base.”

“In the form of a talking book.”

Oh.

“Mind putting that a little more simply?” Fence asked the super-intelligent-whatever. He leaned in close to the floating diary and covered his mouth, as if that could stop me from hearing what he was about to say, which, as it turned out, was rude: “He’s not working with too much upstairs.” He pointed to me while tapping his head.

“Hey!”

“Yes,” the book agreed. “I can tell. To put it simply, what I am is… well, actually there is no way to explain it simply. Look” — the book was talking specifically to me now — “don’t think too hard about it, ok? Thinking isn’t your strong suit. You're more of a doer. I’ve been with you in a dormant state this entire time, so believe me, I know.”

I scratched my head. Did she have me there? Crap. It kind of felt like she had me there. “I mean, yeah, ok, I may not be the smartest guy since sliced bread. But every time I try to do something, things always end up going terribly horribly wrong.”

“Almost instantly, usually,” Fence chimed in needlessly.

“Then for now, just listen, Comb,” Snowball said with a smile. I never thought I’d be thinking this, but that smile was actually reassuring. At least it was something I knew well, something I could latch on to, even though it usually preempted something batshit going down.

“Alright, hmmm. How do I explain this?” The book’s pages fanned by idly. I guessed that meant it was thinking. “Like I said, I’m a naturally occurring artificial super intelligence. I was gathering data about this part of the universe from the far reaches of space — much, much farther than you could ever even imagine, so don’t try, ok? — when I learned of a neat little planet called Earth. The people who lived there sounded interesting, so I decided to pay them a visit to study their psyche, their thought processes, and their emotions, paying special mind to one unique facet of the human psyche in particular.”

Oh, I knew what this was about. Wow. This was surprisingly easy to follow after all, I thought. Snowcube was talking about this earlier. “Human love, right?”

“Love? Oh, heavens no! I’m not here to learn about that crap! My object of study is human stupidity! Why else do you think I would choose you of all people as my research subject?”

WELP. Figured. Apparently even artificial alien consciousnesses — or whatever it was I was talking to — knew I was a born laughingstock.

To be continued!