Robot Uprisings

by Daniel H. Wilson

  Stinson leaned in a little closer, body still poised to jump away if the tiny cyborg moved too fast.

  “They’re so little,” she said. “I can understand that they’re working in unison, the sum of the parts is greater than the whole and all of that, but how do they make those big piles?”

  “Because it’s more than just working in unison,” Petra said. “They are a self-assembling material. Thousands of them, functioning as a single entity, like a collective organism.”

  They could do much more than that, but Petra was saving the details for her big reveal. There weren’t enough of them in this area to show the second-stage form. Petra couldn’t wait to see the look on Stinson’s face when there were.

  “Governor, we’re only half a mile from ground zero,” Petra said. “That’s where the minids will be the most concentrated. Let’s get going.”

  Roger nodded at her and walked back to the Humvee. Stinson wasn’t so fast to move.

  Petra poked Stinson’s shoulder. “You scared?”

  The governor gave her a curious glance. She clearly wasn’t used to people touching her in a playful, potentially disrespectful way.

  “Of course I am,” Stinson said. She spread her arms, indicating the ruined city. “This place was radioactive; who wouldn’t be scared?”

  Petra noticed that Stinson had said that loud enough for the cameras to hear. Now that Stinson knew they were safe from any exposure, she’d show her “fear” in order to let the world know how brave she was, how she would be the first one in before other Michiganders returned to rebuild. Smooth. Or it would have been, if Petra had just played along.

  “The city was never radioactive,” she said, also loud enough for the cameras to hear. “There was just radioactive fallout. And we found a way to remove that fallout.”

  Stinson smiled, a forced thing that didn’t quite hide a lip-twitch of annoyance. “That’s wonderful, Dr. Prawatt.” Then, her voice dropped low enough that her words were just between them. “I didn’t bring these cameras for my health. One little machine isn’t enough. I was thinking we’d see waves of them. Where are they all?”

  Petra looked around again, squinted at the setting sun. “They completed this area,” she said. “I told them to finish at ground zero.”

  “You told them? You make it sound like a conversation.”

  Petra shrugged. “In a way, it is. Just because they’re machines doesn’t mean they’re stupid. If I wanted dummies to do this I’d have told you to bring in soldiers.”

  The governor narrowed her eyes. “Petra, you are the smartest person I’ve ever met, but that makes it easy to forget just how young you are. At least, until you say things like that.” Stinson leaned in close, spoke low. “You’ve tried our patience with your God complex, young lady. When this project is over, you might want to make sure you’ve got more friends than enemies.”

  Young lady? Petra fought down her anger. Here she was saving an entire city, revolutionizing the field of self-replicating material, even setting the stage for human colonization of the stars, and she was still being looked at as if she were a little girl.

  Petra had fought against that image for years. She’d dyed her hair blue, gotten several face piercings, and enjoyed the reaction she got in scientific circles from a severe excess of eye makeup. But nothing changed that she was five foot two and still had the body of a teenager. She couldn’t help but resent the fact that if she had been born male, she wouldn’t have to do anything about her image—she would just be accepted as is.

  To make matters worse, this time that you’re just a girl attitude came not from a man, but from a woman. A powerful woman. To Stinson, maybe Petra wasn’t the right kind of female.

  “I would prefer it if you called me ‘doctor,’ ” Petra said. “And you’re ruining my parade. If you’re done posing for the cameras, can we go?”

  Stinson smiled her politician’s smile. She called out to her support team. “Saddle up, people.”

  The security team piled into one Humvee, the camera crew into another. Roger drove the third; Petra rode in the front and Stinson sat in the back, her posture somehow making it look like this was no different than her normal limo rides.

  The benevolent governor wanted to see them? No problem. This was Petra’s show, Petra’s coronation, not Stinson’s.

  When this day was done, history would know the name of Petra Prawatt, and then friends or enemies wouldn’t really matter.

  CHOCOLATE FROGS

  The Humvee rolled down Woodward Avenue, its big tires and heavy suspension easily crunching through both snow and the bumps and debris beneath. Her creations had cleared away all the smaller rubble, but construction and repair crews would be needed to make the streets traversable by normal cars.

  Stinson’s balloon softly bounced off the roof every time the Humvee hit a big bump. The governor’s fear clearly hadn’t entirely left her, but knowing the city held little radiation danger had brought back her confidence.

  “Dr. Prawatt, you were a real pain in the ass insisting we do this progress check on Thanksgiving,” the governor said. “As usual, you got your way. So tell me, why was it important to do it today?”

  Petra thought of telling the governor to go fuck herself, that her business was her business, but what the woman had said earlier nagged at her: You might want to make sure you’ve got more friends than enemies.

  Petra looked out the window at the snow-covered ruins. “When I was a kid my mom took me to the parade every year,” she said. “Just like her busia took her.”

  “Busia?”

  “Polish for ‘grandma,’ ” Petra said. “The costumes, the bands, the floats, the noise, and the smell and the spectacle … I loved it all.”

  At five, she’d been mesmerized by the forty-foot-long Snoopy balloon. By five and a half, she’d taught herself about air density and learned why things float. Two months before her sixth birthday she built a hot-air balloon that could carry her own weight. She’d floated out of the backyard and made it half a block before it came down again. Her mother had been furious, grounding Petra for two months.

  That was before her mother got sick, before she started to change, before she started to resent a daughter whose IQ was so high it couldn’t be properly measured. Petra’s happiest memories were from those childhood Thanksgiving Day parades, from Before the Time When Everyone Found Out She Was Smart.

  Detroit had fallen to shit well before the bomb dropped. Urban blight had already claimed the mansions of the rich, the performance palaces of theater and music, the mom-and-pop shops, and the department stores. Aside from a few downtown spots around the baseball and football stadiums and the big-business skyscrapers, much of Detroit had looked like a Third World war zone even before the ten-megaton yield turned Woodward Avenue into a bubbling black river of asphalt.

  Every Thanksgiving, however, the city came alive.

  Petra remembered the rage she’d felt watching the news reports, seeing the devastation of her home. She was a third-generation Detroiter. Hamtramck, her home neighborhood, had long since shifted from her ethnic group—Polish—to a new one—Arab—but that didn’t matter. Even if Petra didn’t live there anymore, Detroit was still home.

  “America’s Parade is always on Thanksgiving,” Petra said. “The parade always goes down Woodward Avenue. If there’s a day that we officially declare Detroit is back, it should be Thanksgiving.”

  Stinson nodded, as if that explanation was as good as any other.

  Petra turned in her seat to look at the governor. “How are you going to spin this? You were kind of late to the party. The project was under way before you were elected, but something tells me you’re going to take full credit for what I’ve accomplished here.”

  The governor nodded. “That’s politics, doctor. And you should know I’ve had far more influence on this than you might think. Where do you think the funding came from?”

  “From FEMA,” Petra said quickly. “I had meetings at t
he White House. I met the President and directors of departments that aren’t even on the books. I’m pretty sure my ass is covered on this.”

  “Was covered,” Stinson said. “Your insulting, prima donna attitude ruined that. FEMA wrote the checks, but I was a senator before becoming governor. I arranged for much of the funding, getting chunks from the Superfund, the EPA, BARDA, and quite a bit from DARPA.”

  Petra hadn’t known that. She’d assumed the strength of her work and the need to recover a major city were the reasons for her project’s massive budget. DARPA? The military was involved? And she’d never even heard of BARDA.

  Stinson smiled. “Ah, I see you didn’t bother to look down to the bottom of the deep pockets that keep you going. Am I going to take credit? Yes, because much of the credit really is mine, Petra. You needed funding to build your minids and those … those egg things.”

  “Root factories,” Petra snapped. “They’re called root factories.”

  “Thank you for correcting me, as you always do,” Stinson said. “At seven million dollars apiece, those root factories were a sizeable investment. And here you are, thinking you did all of this yourself? Many people have grown tired of your attitude and your arrogance, Petra. You insult the intelligence of everyone you work with.”

  “That’s not exactly hard to do,” she said, the words slipping out before she realized she was saying them.

  Stinson held up her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “See? That’s what I’m talking about. You’re so brash and caustic, in fact, that there was frequent talk of shutting you down. Two things kept your project going—your reports, which showed consistent progress, and me.”

  Petra let out a huff. “Oh, please. No one would shut me down, not when I’m so close to success.”

  Stinson smiled again, shook her head. “No one except the big corporations that lobbied to handle the cleanup, so they could sell decades-long, multimillion-dollar maintenance contracts. With your method, the radiation is gone forever and your work is done. In business, Petra, why get paid for something only once when you can get paid for it over and over again?”

  “I’m not in this for money.”

  “I know,” Stinson said. “And that is why you need friends. Your God complex will only serve you until this project is finished.”

  The Humvee hit a bump and rocked up, then down. Had to be a pretty big bump if the oversized vehicle’s suspension couldn’t handle it, but that was what happened to streets when they got nuked.

  “Sorry,” Roger called back. “I think that was a telephone pole.”

  Petra barely heard him. She had created an entirely new concept in robotics, fusing distributed intelligence and self-assembling construction with bacteria-driven power plants that not only broke down most kinds of hazardous waste, but also concentrated it for easy, safe removal. She’d turned the industry upside down. Only now did she realize that Stinson was right—when the repair of Detroit was said and done, would Petra be marginalized? Would politicians steal the credit for her accomplishments?

  They would certainly try, she knew: bridges are named after politicians, not after bridge builders.

  They drove south. To the northeast, she saw the wreckage of Ford Field. Tiger Stadium had been between it and Woodward, but there wasn’t enough left of Tiger Stadium to block the view.

  The Humvee’s headlamps illuminated a steep hill of tan rock and twisted steel that blocked the road. Roger slowed the vehicle, brought it to a stop. The blast had hammered One Detroit Center, dropping forty-three stories of granite, metal, and glass across Woodward. The rubble was so thick that the army engineers hadn’t even bothered with it.

  Stinson leaned forward, stared out the window. “No getting through there. I guess the trip down the parade route is over?”

  “It is,” Roger said. “Don’t worry, the army cleared a path to ground zero along East Congress.” He turned to look at Petra.

  Petra bit her lip. Her parade fantasy had been fun, but she’d known it would end at this spot. It had been nice to play make-believe for a little while, anyway.

  She raised the noisemaker to her lips and gave it one last blow, then put it in her coat pocket.

  “Okay, Governor,” she said. “You can let go of the balloon.”

  Stinson looked at Petra oddly for a moment, then opened her window. She pushed the red balloon outside and let it go. It floated up and away, out of sight into the night sky.

  Roger turned left onto Congress.

  A cloud-filled, starless night claimed the city, casting a pallor of gray across the ruins.

  In some places, Petra could see the minids working. Maybe not them, exactly: a brick that seemed to move on its own toward a growing pile of rubbish; a still-standing building frame slowly tilting, being cut into at its base by thousands of tiny little jaws; a cloud of dust filling the Humvee’s headlight beams as hordes of her tiny machines cleaned the dirt and snow from the pavement.

  Roger stopped the vehicle at Jefferson and Riopelle. Everyone got out. The Humvee’s headlamps played across the center of Detroit’s devastation. The blast had gone off a thousand feet above the intersection of Riopelle and Franklin, just two blocks to the south. Here, the damage was greater than anywhere else. Past ground zero, the Detroit River. Beyond the river, the city of Windsor, which had also suffered the bomb’s horrid effects. The Renaissance Center had once stood tall on this same shoreline; the nuke’s heat had melted the tower’s glass a few split seconds before the concussion wave shattered those structures into millions of pieces.

  Petra could say one thing for the new Detroit—everywhere you went offered a great view of the river.

  Below the dusting of snow, her creations were hard at work. The air was filled with a constant plink and crack of tiny machines breaking material and scraping hard surfaces. It sounded like someone was frying bacon.

  She looked at Roger. “How are the levels?”

  Roger held the Geiger counter, gave the wand a perfunctory sweep.

  “Two point six,” he said. “A little bit higher than before, but nary a radioactive click in sight, boss.”

  Two blocks from ground zero, and the radioactivity was still below where it had been before the bomb. Sometimes, Petra impressed even herself.

  Stinson stood next to her. “All right,” she said. “I can hear things happening, but I don’t see them. Where are they?”

  Petra pulled a thick flashlight from her pocket. “Roger, cut the lights. Governor? Could you ask your people to turn off the lights on the other two Hummers?”

  “Why?” Stinson asked. “It’s pitch-black out.”

  “Humor me,” Petra said. “It’s not like we’re going to get mugged.”

  Stinson called out to her security team. The lights of all three vehicles shut off, drowning the area in darkness. For the first time Petra felt like she was standing in a graveyard, which she effectively was—one of the biggest graveyards in history. Petra turned on the flashlight. It cast a sapphire glow on the ground.

  “UV?” Stinson said. “What’s that for?”

  Petra angled the beam along the rubble. The broken surface lit up in glowing sparkles of turquoise, sparkles that moved.

  Stinson stared, then laughed. “You made them fluoresce under a black light? Like scorpions? Aside from the fact that you never reported that, why?”

  Petra wouldn’t have expected Stinson to even know the word “fluoresce,” let alone that scorpions did, indeed, glow under UV light.

  “The minids’ coloration helps me detect movement patterns and cooperative behavior,” Petra said. “Also, because glowing is cooler than not glowing.”

  She moved the beam slowly to the right. She knew the root factory was close by, but couldn’t remember the exact spot. She saw increasing density in the glowing flecks of blue, then her light fell on a smooth, knee-high cone that was so covered in the little biomachines it seemed to shimmer like an aquamarine gem.

  “There’s the root factory,”
Petra said. “Come on, Governor, it won’t bite. Step where I step, please, so we have fewer feet trouncing the minids. And can you leave your entourage behind?”

  Stinson called back to her guards. “Bob, Phil, stay here, please.”

  The two burly men nodded.

  Petra led the governor toward the root factory. She felt that familiar swell of pride at her greatest creation. Greatest for now, at least.

  They carefully stepped over debris to reach the machine that stood in the middle of a leveled city block.

  Stinson looked at the device, looked at the surrounding ground, took in the moving carpet of glowing turquoise dots.

  “All of these”—she pointed at the root factory—“came out of there?”

  Petra nodded. “That’s right. There’s another farther north, and one across the river in Windsor. Each one had a starter colony of Geobacter and a hundred thousand dormant minids inside when we planted it. The root factory lives up to its name, extending roots to draw raw materials from the ground, then uses those materials to activate the stored minids. Those minids dig tunnels and add on to the roots, increasing the amount of material the root factory brings in. By the time the stored minids are all activated, the root factory has enough raw material coming in to build new minids from scratch.”

  Stinson rubbed her hands together, trying to ward off the cold. “So there’s no end to it? They’ll just keep breeding forever?”

  Breeding wasn’t the right term, but Petra knew what the governor meant.

  “The root factories are programmed to stop at five million minids,” Petra said. “They shut off then, or when there’s no more radioactive material to collect and power the minids.”

  Stinson shook her head. “Amazing. It’s truly a miracle.”

  A miracle? Leave it to a conservative like Stinson to turn scientific wonder into an act of the divine.

  But it was amazing. Petra had built a working Von Neumann device, a machine that could build copies of itself. Well, almost—that was the next step, teaching the minids how to construct a new root factory. Someday, probably long after her death, this same technology would be cast out to the stars: a seed that could land on a distant planet, prepare that planet for eventual human occupation, even make new seeds and launch them into space to find and prepare additional worlds.