Robot Uprisings

by Daniel H. Wilson

  “Who’s going to break it to him?” Clausen asked, looking at Da Silva.

  “You’ve been sleeping for nearly a hundred and sixty years,” the man said. “It’s April, twenty-two seventeen. You’ve reached the twenty-third century.”

  Gaunt took in the drab mundanity of his surroundings again. He had always had some nebulous idea of the form his wake-up would take and it was not at all like this.

  “Are you lying to me?”

  “What do you think?” asked Clausen.

  He held up his hand. It looked, as near as he could remember, exactly the way it had been before. The same age spots, the same prominent veins, the same hairy knuckles, the same scars and loose, lizardy skin.

  “Bring me a mirror,” he said, with an ominous foreboding.

  “I’ll save you the bother,” Clausen said. “The face you’ll see is the one you went under with, give or take. We’ve done nothing to you except treat superficial damage caused by the early freezing protocols. Physiologically, you’re still a sixty-year-old man, with about twenty or thirty years ahead of you.”

  “Then why have you woken me, if the process isn’t ready?”

  “There isn’t one,” Da Silva said. “And there won’t be, at least not for a long, long time. Afraid we’ve got other things to worry about now. Immortality’s the least of our problems.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will, Gaunt,” Clausen said. “Everyone does in the end. You’ve been preselected for aptitude, anyway. Made your fortune in computing, didn’t you?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “You worked with artificial intelligence, trying to make thinking machines.”

  One of the vague disappointments hardened into a specific, life-souring defeat. All the energy he had put into one ambition, all the friends and lovers he had burned up along the way, shutting them out of his life while he focused on that one white whale.

  “It never worked out.”

  “Still made you a rich man along the way,” she said.

  “Just a means of raising money. What does it have to do with my revival?”

  Clausen seemed on the verge of answering his question before something made her change her mind. “Clothes in the bedside locker: they should fit you. You want breakfast?”

  “I don’t feel hungry.”

  “Your stomach will take some time to settle down. Meantime, if you feel like puking, do it now rather than later. I don’t want you messing up my ship.”

  He had a sudden lurch of adjusting preconceptions. The prefabricated surroundings, the background hum of distant machines, the utilitarian clothing of his wake-up team: perhaps he was aboard some kind of spacecraft, sailing between the worlds. The twenty-third century, he thought. Time enough to establish an interplanetary civilization, even if it only extended as far as the solar system.

  “Are we in a ship now?”

  “Fuck, no,” Clausen said, sneering at his question. “We’re in Patagonia.”

  He got dressed, putting on underwear and a white T-shirt, and over that the same kind of gray overalls as his hosts had been wearing. The room was cool and damp and he was glad of the clothes once he had them on. There were lace-up boots that were tight around the toes, but otherwise serviceable. The materials all felt perfectly mundane and commonplace, even a little frayed and worn in places. At least he was clean and groomed, his hair clipped short and his beard shaved. They must have freshened him up before bringing him to consciousness.

  Clausen and Da Silva were waiting in the windowless corridor outside the room. “ ’Spect you’ve got a ton of questions,” Clausen said. “Along the lines of, why am I being treated like shit rather than royalty? What happened to the rest of the Few, what is this fucked-up, miserable place, and so on.”

  “I presume you’re going to get round to some answers soon enough.”

  “Maybe you should tell him the deal now, up front,” Da Silva said. He was wearing an outdoor coat now and had a zip-up bag slung over his shoulder.

  “What deal?” Gaunt asked.

  “To begin with,” Clausen said, “you don’t mean anything special to us. We’re not impressed by the fact that you just slept a hundred and sixty years. It’s old news. But you’re still useful.”

  “In what way?”

  “We’re down a man. We run a tight operation here and we can’t afford to lose even one member of the team.” It was Da Silva speaking now; although there wasn’t much between them, Gaunt had the sense that he was the slightly more reasonable one of the duo, the one who wasn’t radiating quite so much naked antipathy. “Deal is, we train you up and give you work. In return, of course, you’re looked after pretty well. Food, clothing, somewhere to sleep, whatever medicine we can provide.” He shrugged. “It’s the deal we all took. Not so bad when you get used to it.”

  “And the alternative?”

  “Bag you and tag you and put you back in the freezer,” Da Silva went on. “Same as all the others. Your choice, of course. Work with us, become part of the team, or go back into hibernation and take your chances there.”

  “We need to be on our way,” Clausen said. “Don’t want to keep Nero waiting on F.”

  “Who’s Nero?” Gaunt asked.

  “Last one we pulled out before you,” Da Silva said.

  They walked down the corridor, passing a set of open double doors that led into some kind of mess room or commons. Men and women of various ages were sitting around tables, talking quietly as they ate meals or played card games. Everything looked spartan and institutional, from the plastic chairs to the Formica-topped surfaces. Beyond the tables, a rain-washed window framed only a rectangle of gray cloud. Gaunt caught a few glances directed his way, a flicker of waning interest from one or two of the personnel, but no one showed any fascination with him. The three of them walked on, ascending stairs to the next level of whatever kind of building they were in. An older man, Chinese-looking, passed in the opposite direction, carrying a grease-smeared wrench. He raised his free hand to Clausen in a silent high five, Clausen reciprocating. Then they were up another level, passing equipment lockers and electrical distribution cabinets, and then up a spiral stairwell that emerged into a drafty, corrugated-metal shed smelling of oil and ozone. Incongruously, there was an inflatable orange life preserver on one wall of the shed, an old red fire extinguisher on the other.

  This is the twenty-third century, Gaunt told himself. As dispiriting as the surroundings were, he had no reason to doubt that this was the reality of life in 2217. He supposed it had always been an article of faith that the world would improve, that the future would be better than the past, shinier and cleaner and faster, but he had not expected to have his nose rubbed in the unwisdom of that faith quite so vigorously.

  There was one door leading out of the corrugated-metal shed. Clausen pushed it open against the wind, then the three of them stepped outside. They were on the roof of something. There was a square of cracked and oil-stained concrete, marked here and there with lines of fading red paint. A couple of seagulls pecked disconsolately at something in the corner. At least they still had seagulls, Gaunt thought. There hadn’t been some awful, life-scouring biocatastrophe, forcing everyone to live in bunkers.

  Sitting on the middle of the roof was a helicopter. It was matte black, a lean, waspish thing made of angles rather than curves, and aside from some sinister bulges and pods, there was nothing particularly futuristic about it. For all Gaunt knew, it could have been based on a model that was in production before he went under.

  “You’re thinking: shitty-looking helicopter,” Clausen said, raising her voice over the wind.

  He smiled quickly. “What does it run on? I’m assuming the oil reserves ran dry sometime in the last century?”

  “Oil,” Clausen said, cracking open the cockpit door. “Get in the back, buckle up. Da Silva rides up front with me.”

  Da Silva slung his zip-up bag into the rear compartment where Gaunt was settling into his position, more than a lit
tle apprehensive about what lay ahead. He looked between the backs of the forward seats at the cockpit instrumentation. He’d been in enough private helicopters to know what the manual override controls looked like, and there was nothing weirdly incongruous here.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Running a shift change,” Da Silva said, wrapping a pair of headphones around his skull. “Couple of days ago there was an accident out on J platform. Lost Gimenez, and Nero’s been hurt. Weather was too bad to do the extraction until today, but now we have our window. Reason we thawed you, actually. I’m taking over from Gimenez, so you have to cover for me here.”

  “You have a labor shortage, so you brought me out of hibernation?”

  “That about covers it,” Da Silva said. “Clausen figured it wouldn’t hurt for you to come along for the ride, get you up to speed.”

  Clausen flicked a bank of switches in the ceiling. Overhead, the rotor began to turn.

  “I guess you have something faster than helicopters, for longer journeys,” Gaunt said.

  “Nope,” Clausen answered. “Other than some boats, helicopters are pretty much it.”

  “What about intercontinental travel?”

  “There isn’t any.”

  “This isn’t the world I was expecting!” Gaunt said, straining to make himself heard.

  Da Silva leaned around and motioned to the headphones dangling from the seat back. Gaunt put them on and fussed with the microphone until it was in front of his lips.

  “I said this isn’t the world I was expecting.”

  “Yeah,” Da Silva said. “I heard you the first time.”

  The rotor reached takeoff speed. Clausen eased the helicopter into the air, the rooftop landing pad falling away below. They scudded sideways, nose down, until they had cleared the side of the building. The walls plunged vertically, Gaunt’s guts twisting at the dizzying transition. It hadn’t been a building at all, at least not the kind he had been thinking of. The landing pad was on top of a squareish, industrial-looking structure about the size of a large office block, hazed in scaffolding and gangways, prickly with cranes and chimneys and otherwise unrecognizable protuberances, the structure in turn rising out of the sea on four elephantine legs, the widening bases of which were being ceaselessly pounded by waves. It was an oil rig or production platform of some kind, or at least, something repurposed from one.

  It wasn’t the only one either. The rig they had taken off from was but one in a major field, rig after rig stretching all the way to the gloomy, gray, rain-hazed horizon. There were dozens, and he had the sense that they didn’t stop at the horizon.

  “What are these for? I know it’s not oil. There can’t be enough of it left to justify a drilling operation on this scale. The reserves were close to being tapped out when I went under.”

  “Dormitories,” Da Silva said. “Each of these platforms holds maybe ten thousand sleepers, give or take. They built them out at sea because we need OTEC power to run them, using the heat difference between surface water and deep ocean, and it’s much easier if we don’t have to run those power cables inland.”

  “Coming back to bite us now,” Clausen said.

  “If we’d gone inland, they’d have sent land-dragons instead. They’re just adapting to whatever we do,” Da Silva said pragmatically.

  They sped over oily, roiling waters. “Is this really Patagonia?” Gaunt asked.

  “Patagonia offshore sector,” Da Silva said. “Subsector fifteen. That’s our watch. There are about two hundred of us, and we look after about a hundred rigs, all told.”

  Gaunt ran the numbers twice, because he couldn’t believe what they were telling him. “That’s a million sleepers.”

  “Ten million in the whole of Patagonia offshore,” Clausen said. “That surprise you, Gaunt? That ten million people managed to achieve what you and your precious Few did, all those years back?”

  “I suppose not,” he said, as the truth of it sunk in. “Over time the cost of the process would have decreased, becoming available to people of lesser means. The merely rich, rather than the super-rich. But it was never going to be something available to the masses. Ten million, maybe. Beyond that? Hundreds of millions? I’m sorry, but the economics just don’t stack up.”

  “It’s a good thing we don’t have economics, then,” Da Silva said.

  “Patagonia’s just a tiny part of the whole,” said Clausen. “Two hundred other sectors out there, just as large as this one. That’s two billion sleepers, near as it matters.”

  Gaunt shook his head. “That can’t be right. The global population was only eight billion when I went under, and the trend was downward! You can’t tell me that a quarter of the human race is hibernating.”

  “Maybe it would help if I told you that the current population of the earth is also two billion, near as it matters,” Clausen said. “Almost everyone’s asleep. There’s just a handful of us still awake, playing caretaker, watching over the rigs and OTEC plants.”

  “Four hundred thousand waking souls,” Da Silva said. “But it actually feels like a lot less than that, since we mostly keep to our assigned sectors.”

  “You know the real irony?” Clausen said. “We’re the ones who get to call ourselves the Few now. The ones who aren’t sleeping.”

  “That doesn’t leave anyone to actually do anything,” Gaunt said. “There’s no point in everyone waiting for a cure for death if there’s no one alive to do the hard work of making it happen.”

  Clausen turned around to look back at him, her expression telling him everything he needed to know about her opinion of his intellect. “It isn’t about immortality. It’s about survival. It’s about doing our bit for the war effort.”

  “What war?” Gaunt asked.

  “The one going on all around us,” Clausen said. “The one you made happen.”

  They came in to land on another rig, one of five that stood close enough to each other to be linked by cables and walkways. The sea was still heavy, with huge waves dashing against the concrete piers on which the rigs were supported. Gaunt peered intently at the windows and decks, but saw no sign of human activity on any of the structures. He thought back to what Clausen and Da Silva had told him, each time trying to find a reason why they might be lying to him, why they might be going to pathological lengths to hoax him about the nature of the world into which he had woken. Maybe there was a form of mass entertainment that involved waking sleepers such as himself and putting them through the emotional wringer, presenting them with the grimmest possible scenarios, ramping up the misery until they cracked, and only then pulling aside the gray curtains to reveal that, in marvelous point of fact, life in the twenty-third century really was every bit as blue-skied and utopian as he had hoped. That didn’t seem very likely, though.

  Yet what kind of war required people to be put to sleep in their billions? And why was the caretaker force, the four hundred thousand waking individuals, stretched so ridiculously thin? Clearly the rigs were largely automated, but it had still been necessary to pull him out of sleep because someone else had died in the Patagonia offshore sector. Why not just have more caretakers awake in the first place, so that the system was able to absorb some losses?

  With the helicopter safely down on the pad, Clausen and Da Silva told him to follow them into the depths of the other rig. There was very little about it to distinguish it from the one where Gaunt had been woken, save for the fact that it was almost completely deserted, with the only activity coming from skulking repair robots. They were clearly very simple machines, not much smarter than automatic window cleaners. Given the years of his life that he had given over to the dream of artificial intelligence, it was dismaying to see how little progress—if any—had been made.

  “We need to get one thing straight,” Gaunt said, when they were deep into the humming bowels of the rig. “I didn’t start any wars. You’ve got the wrong guy here.”

  “You think we mixed up your records?” Clausen asked. “
How did we know about your work on thinking machines?”

  “Then you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. I had nothing do to with wars or the military.”

  “We know what you did,” she said. “The years spent trying to build a true, Turing-compliant artificial intelligence. A thinking, conscious machine.”

  “Except it was a dead end.”

  “Still led to some useful spinoffs, didn’t it?” she went on. “You cracked the hard problem of language comprehension. Your systems didn’t just recognize speech. They were able to understand it on a level no computer system had ever achieved before. Metaphor, simile, sarcasm, and understatement, even implication by omission. Of course, it had numerous civilian applications, but that isn’t where you made your billions.” She looked at him sharply.

  “I created a product,” Gaunt said. “I simply made it available to whoever could afford it.”

  “Yes, you did. Unfortunately, your system turned out to be the perfect instrument of mass surveillance for every despotic government still left on the planet. Every basket-case totalitarian state still in existence couldn’t get its hands on your product fast enough. And you had no qualms whatsoever about selling it, did you?”

  Gaunt felt a well-rehearsed argument bubbling up from his subconscious. “No communication tool in history has ever been a single-edged sword.”

  “And that excuses you, does it?” Clausen asked. Da Silva had been silent in this exchange, observing the two of them as they continued along corridors and down stairwells.

  “I’m not asking for absolution. But if you think I started wars, if you think I’m somehow responsible for this”—he gestured at his surroundings—“this fucked-up state of affairs, then you’re very, very wrong.”