Robot Uprisings

by Daniel H. Wilson

  For now, however, Petra’s creation was saving a city. When mankind spread beyond the prison of a single world, her work might ensure the survival of the human race itself.

  Petra handed Stinson a UV light of her own. The governor turned it on and directed the blue light over the ground, sweeping it across glowing dots that lit up like little stars.

  The beam flashed across something scurrying from one pile of rubble to the next, something the size of a rat—a fluorescing rat.

  “What the hell was that,” Stinson said, her voice thick with fear.

  “It’s okay,” Petra said. “It’s just the minids.”

  “But the minids are tiny! That wasn’t a minid.”

  Petra felt bad, and that surprised her; maybe she should have given Stinson the full picture after all.

  “Honest, Governor, it’s safe,” Petra said. “It’s the secondary working form. Just watch.”

  She reached down and scooped up a double handful of ant-sized minids. She held them in her cupped hand, felt the tingling of their tiny feet against her skin. “Chocolate frog,” she said.

  For just a moment, the minids’ movements ceased while they processed her command. Then, as a unit, they started crawling, turning, and wiggling. Legs locked with legs, hooking around each other in a snapping motion that bound them together as if they were two muscle cells connected at the ends. Long strands formed, then crossed diagonally, wove together as legs reached out and joined. The swarming minids formed four sheets of interconnected machines.

  Each of the four sheets curled up lengthwise, wiggling and bending until the outside edges met and tiny legs snapped together. Four hollow, metallic, inch-long worms now wiggled in Petra’s palms.

  Stinson took a step back. “That’s … that’s a little disturbing.”

  Petra smiled. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

  The machine worms wiggled and writhed until an end of each met in the center of her hands. The ends pressed against each other. Little legs again snapped, a rapid-fire sound as dozens of links formed, the worms joining to one another until the construct looked like a four-limbed starfish.

  The free ends of each tube pressed down against her palms. The center of the starfish rose up. Where Petra had once been holding hundreds of tiny, individual minids, she now held a single machine that glowed turquoise in the black light’s beam.

  A wide-eyed Stinson shook her head. “It’s almost as if you’ve created life, doctor.”

  Petra shifted the new machine to her right hand. She held her left hand above it, using her index finger to slowly caress the tubelike legs.

  “I call this form a frog,” Petra said. “It’s made up of about two thousand minids.”

  “You said chocolate frog,” Stinson said.

  Roger laughed. “Didn’t you notice Petra’s scarf?”

  Stinson looked at it. “I thought that was from that show with the time-traveling phone booth.”

  Well, at least the governor got some points for partial knowledge of Doctor Who.

  “You’re in the ballpark, Governor,” Roger said. “You ever read the Harry Potter series?”

  “No,” Stinson said. “I saw that first movie, but I don’t really have time to read children’s books.”

  Roger nodded toward Petra. “She was a kid when those books came out. So was I. A chocolate frog is a little thing from the books. You might want to read up, Governor—much of Petra’s nomenclature for this project is taken from elements in the series.”

  Petra lifted her hand closer to Stinson, who took a step back from the four-legged wonder.

  “It’s not going to bite you, Governor,” Petra said. “It doesn’t even have a mouth.”

  Stinson seemed to realize she was shying away from a machine held by a five-foot-two woman who wasn’t the least bit afraid. She stepped closer and held her flashlight just a few inches from the frog.

  Petra curled her fingers in, turned her palm toward the ground. The four-legged creation responded by crawling along her arm, up to her shoulder.

  The governor shook her head. “All the little bits move at the same time. How does it do that?”

  “Distributed intelligence,” Petra said. “They operate the same way whether they’re hooked together or they’re individuals. Each minid has a little processor. When it’s near another minid, the two processors sync up and act as one. So, the more minids you have, the smarter they all are.”

  Stinson stood upright. Again, she looked scared. She turned, playing her UV beam out across the block. Everywhere the beam fell, minids sparkled as bits of blue.

  “There are thousands of them,” she said.

  “Millions,” Roger corrected. He smiled, clearly enjoying the politician’s discomfort. “By now, there’s millions, Guv-nah.”

  “Millions,” Stinson said quietly. “So, uh, just how big can these … these collective kinds get?”

  Petra reached up and picked the frog off her shoulder.

  “This is the maximum size,” she said. “I haven’t figured out how to give them a structure that could support larger forms. It’s on the to-do list, but it’s not a high priority.”

  Stinson nodded. “Good,” she said. “I hope you never catch up to that one. Those things are spooky.”

  Petra smiled. “Don’t worry, I’ll save you. Frog, disassemble.”

  The air hummed with a chorus of clicks as little legs let go. The frog seemed to melt, disintegrating into hundreds of individual minids that fell from her hand and dropped to the ground like turquoise sand.

  “Three or four hundred frogs working as a unit can lift and move a one-ton object,” Petra said. “Think of it like this—if you had a thousand hands, but could control them as easily as you control your two, you could move some pretty heavy things. When the minids are in proximity, they operate as one individual.”

  Roger poked Petra’s shoulder. “She plays games with them,” he said. “She calls it research, but I think she’s just fucking around.”

  Petra felt suddenly embarrassed; why did Roger have to mention that now?

  “Roger, shut up,” she said.

  Stinson raised her eyebrows. “No, I want to hear this. What kind of games? War games?”

  And there it was—of course the government would be thinking of violence and death.

  Roger shook his head. “Nothing so cool as that. She makes the frogs play Quidditch.”

  Stinson’s eyes narrowed: she thought Roger was messing with her. “Quidditch? Oh, that sport from the Harry Potter movie? With the brooms?”

  Roger nodded.

  “But they can’t fly,” Stinson said. She turned to Petra. “Right?”

  Petra shrugged. “Not yet.”

  Something as small as one of her minids could ride air currents. She just had to figure out how to give them proper wings. She was working on the flight mechanics of Trichogramma as a reference point and model.

  Stinson looked worried, but tried to mask it with an air of annoyance. “You get any resource you ask for, and you use these things to play games?”

  Of course, she was too small-minded to understand.

  “Games are good,” Petra said. “Games make them think, make them react, make them conceive and test strategies. We can watch and learn from that.”

  “They strategize?” Stinson said. “So they think? For themselves?”

  Petra shrugged again. “Don’t blow it out of proportion. Trial and error isn’t an advanced concept in robotics. The minids are programmed to do random things in the context of a goal, like move their legs until they feel their bodies change location. When that happens, they lock that motion and start trying variations. I don’t program them to walk—they teach themselves.”

  Petra heard a different kind of clicking. She glanced to the source of it: Roger’s Geiger counter. Roger looked at it as if he were surprised to find it in his hands. Her light played off his face as he leaned in to read the meter.

  It clicked faster.


  “Something’s wrong,” he said. “This says we’re getting fifty-three em-ess-vees.”

  That was impossible … seconds earlier the dose had been barely measurable.

  Stinson turned her flashlight toward Petra.

  “What’s going on?” she said. “Are we in danger?”

  Petra shook her head. Fifty-three wasn’t going to kill them, but it wasn’t good news.

  The Geiger counter clicked faster.

  “Sixty,” Roger said. “No, seventy. We need to get the hell out of here.”

  Stinson cupped her hands to her mouth, screamed for her security detail. They drew their weapons and started scrambling over the rubble toward her.

  “Eighty,” Roger said.

  It didn’t make sense. They weren’t moving, so how …

  Petra turned, shone her beam to the right; the minids were packed together, a dense sheet of glowing turquoise. Every way she turned she witnessed the same thing. Left, right, behind them … so many.

  “Ninety,” Roger said.

  Mats of the glowing blue minids drew closer, flowing toward Petra as if she were standing on a small island and the waves were lapping higher on her shores, coming from all directions …

  … all but forward.

  “One hundred,” Roger said. “These minids are going to cook us, Petra!”

  Petra grabbed Stinson’s sleeve. “Come on!”

  Stinson shrugged her off.

  “Just stay still,” the governor said. “My people will get us to the cars.”

  Petra aimed her beam toward where she’d last seen the two guards. They had closed to within fifty feet and were coming fast. The guards had normal flashlights, not UV.

  The guards can’t see the minids … They don’t know they’re stepping on them …

  The trailing man slowed, suddenly reached down to rub violently at his pants leg. Then he lifted his hand and shook it hard, staring at it like one would stare at a sudden, unexpected burn.

  Both Petra’s and Stinson’s UV beams focused on the man’s hand.

  It glowed blue.

  The man looked toward his partner. “Something’s on the ground!”

  Just fifteen feet from Stinson, the other security man stopped and turned to look back. When he did, Petra’s flashlight lit up a nightmare.

  From either side of the guard who had cried out, the ground seemed to rise up like tendrils of blue lava that wrapped around him … and squeezed. The guard (Bob his name is Bob he didn’t do anything to anyone) tried to grab at the things holding him; his fingers pulled away sparkling, disintegrating clouds of minids, even as more tendrils shot up from the ground to snake around his legs, his chest, his head. All of the tendrils visibly contracted, smashing Bob to the ground.

  He vanished beneath a moving shroud of blue.

  “One-twenty,” Roger said. “We have to get out of here!”

  Petra realized that the other guard was also down, also covered by the living blanket. She aimed her beam toward the third Humvee, the one with the camera crew—the vehicle glowed blue, as if covered by bright plastic. There was no sign of the people who’d been in it.

  Petra turned her beam back to the one safe place she’d seen: the ground in front of her was still bare. She grabbed Stinson’s sleeve again, pulled hard. “Come on, Governor!”

  This time, Stinson didn’t fight. Petra yanked the shocked woman along. Roger fell in behind them.

  Petra’s UV beam bounced in front of her, a long patch of normal ground lined on either side by thickening walls of glowing, liquid sapphire.

  THE GOD COMPLEX

  The turquoise seas parted for them.

  Petra, Roger, and Stinson moved as fast as they could across the rubble. The night’s starless dark hid everything but the beams in front of them.

  “Down to eighty,” Roger said. “And falling fast. As long as we’re moving southeast, it’s getting better.”

  Southeast … toward ground zero.

  Stinson tucked her flashlight under her right arm, fumbled for her cell phone. “They’re herding us,” she said as she dialed. “They’re making us go this way. You said they couldn’t get that big, Petra, you said they couldn’t!”

  They … them … her minids. The chocolate frog was the largest form she’d created, but the two security guards had been taken down by man-sized tendrils. Trial and error … the minids had solved that engineering problem on their own.

  “Fifty,” Roger said. “Still dropping fast.”

  Petra kept moving, kept the others moving, stayed on the path provided for them by her creations. She didn’t know what was happening, didn’t know how it was happening.

  Up ahead, her beam lit up a shape of bright blue. A familiar shape …

  “Stop! Everyone, stop!”

  She pressed back against Roger. He put his arm around her shoulders, pulled her tight. Stinson stood with them, cell phone pressed to her ear. She turned, casting her beam across the sea of turquoise that surrounded them.

  Petra couldn’t look away from the shape. It was as tall as her waist, turquoise writhing over a pile of bent steel, rusted iron, sand, brick, and glass … a jumbled pile or ruin, but organized, with a familiar shape … a conical shape.

  From the top of it poured a constant trickle of bright turquoise, glowing rivulets that flowed down the sides to blend with the moving mat that coated the broken ground.

  “Roger,” she said. “That’s … that’s …”

  Petra couldn’t get the words out.

  She felt the hand on her shoulder go rigid, a metal talon pushing through her coat, squeezing her flesh.

  “A root factory,” Roger said. “Jesus Christ, Petra … they built one on their own?”

  Stinson aimed her beam to the left. “Over there,” she said, cell phone still pressed to her ear. “Point your light there!”

  Petra did so. Her beam landed on a growing mound of her creations. The material seemed to bubble, to lump, to coalesce like time-lapse video of a melting turquoise candle being played in reverse.

  Roger squeezed a little harder, fear giving him a painful strength. “Petra,” he said, “what the fuck is going on?”

  She shook her head, but didn’t look away from the growing mound, the top of which was now a good three feet above the freshly scraped earth. As it grew taller, the sides narrowed. Petra heard a grinding sound, a hissing and crunching … the sound of masonry and concrete being dragged, bits grinding into each other.

  In that vibrating mass, she saw things form and swarm and melt away again: frogs that existed for seconds but dissolved, a cube with flat sides that morphed into a sphere, then vanished inside the expanding mound, and—for just a second, had she seen …

  … a face?

  The grinding sound grew, now far louder than the Geiger counter’s fading clicks.

  The radiation continued to drop. The more “full” minids were moving off, taking their concentrated radiation with them. A shock of awareness hit Petra, awareness that Stinson was right—the machines had herded them, herded them to this specific place.

  Stinson handed Roger her flashlight. She pressed a finger into one ear, the cell phone against the other.

  “Yes, this is the governor. We need a helicopter, right now. We’re being attacked by Dr. Prawatt’s creation. Get us out of here!”

  The bubbling mound of turquoise moved faster. The tink of breaking concrete grew so rapid it sounded like a constant hiss of static.

  Roger put an arm around Petra, pulled her close. “This is bad, boss.”

  She nodded. She had no idea what had gone wrong, but then again, maybe it didn’t take a genius to figure it out. She’d created a life-form—a self-assembling life-form—that fed on radioactivity, then let that life-form loose on a nuked city. She had taught them to learn through trial and error, taught them to try new strategies … she had taught them to think. Her Hanford test site had used half a million minids, all working together to form a collective brain. Here? There were f
ive million of them, maybe even more. Did that create an exponential increase in intelligence?

  Stinson screamed into the phone. “Now! No, not a truck, you understand? A hel-i-cop-ter. Military, FEMA, a fucking news copter for all I care!” She paused, looked around. “Where are we? Uh … I’m trying to see.”

  There were no street signs—there were barely any streets—but Petra knew where they were.

  “Franklin and Riopelle,” she said. “Ground zero.”

  Stinson repeated that into the phone, screamed more threats.

  The shimmering mass was a mound no more. Now it was a lumpy, four-foot-tall tower, maybe a foot wide at the base. The sheet of liquid blue suddenly sagged away from the mound, finally exposing the rock and brick.

  Petra looked at the newly uncovered form.

  Impossible … it can’t be …

  “Oh, shit,” Roger said.

  Stinson glanced at it. She stopped screaming into the phone. She stared.

  Petra’s hands fell to her sides. She found herself looking at a statue of … of herself.

  It wasn’t perfect. It was crude, actually, but there was no mistaking it was her; the hair hanging in front of her right eye and the long scarf left no doubt. The statue looked … regal.

  Stinson turned, her face blazing with fury.

  “What is this, Prawatt? Why did you make them build this? Why did you make them kill my men?”

  Petra wanted to speak, but her mouth felt dry, glued shut.

  Roger reached out, gently took Petra’s flashlight.

  “Petra didn’t make them do anything,” he said. “They did this themselves.”

  He pointed the beam to the base of the statue. There, in sparkling blue letters, were two words:

  OUR CREATOR

  The freezing air of a Michigan winter flooded deep into Petra’s soul. She didn’t feel angry, or afraid, or anything, really … she just felt cold.