The thrumming wires of the Caldecot-thing wring my body like a dishrag. The world has retreated to the far end of a long black tunnel. I can hear my bones grating together, but I can’t feel anything anymore. My hand has gone numb. I flick my thumb anyway. Crane my neck and watch the lid of the flesh-eater crete fall away. The thick liquid rolls.
A gift for you, sir. Quicker than most.
I’m hanging, crying. I turn my head to watch the crystal sphere as rain waterfalls down its outer surface. It is a curtain that blends with my tears to turn the sky into whorls of fading sunlight.
“Please let me out,” I croak, and all hope has fled my voice. The gray-green liquid creeps down the vial. Closer to my fingertips.
“You are not locked in here, my friend,” says the Caldecot-thing. “The rest of the world is locked out there.”
Light blooms.
… nukes they finally dropped the nukes oh my God …
The wires go slack, dropping me onto my knees in a galaxy of silent throbbing brilliance. A new sun is born on the lid of the sphere above. Through the ground, I feel the muted shock waves as a second nuclear warhead detonates against the sphere. And another. The filtered light is paralyzing and beautiful in the way I imagine heaven would be. Wholly beyond the threshold of human experience.
When the flashes fade, we are still living.
Through a rainbow of chaotic dust and debris, the setting sun is collapsing into the horizon now, fat and simmering. A broad tongue of light dances across stippled whorls of ash smeared over the sky. The raging nuclear dust storm outside shimmers and gyrates in the gory colors of the formless void.
Abruptly, I remember a tide of blood. Spreading over impossibly clean white tile. She and I were going to make something from the chaos. Her hands were over her stomach. Our baby boy was growing inside her, strong and slow and waiting to come into this world, but that never happened. He never happened. Never was able to happen.
We make things. We destroy things.
Caldecot’s face is turned up toward the detonation. His teeth flash, brilliant patterns evolving on his face. A single tear etches a radiant path down one gaunt cheek.
The vial is still in my palm.
I throw the flesh-eater crete, and it bounces harmlessly off the back of the stone seat. For a frozen moment, it cartwheels away. Then the vial shatters on the arm of the throne. A star-burst of black liquid spatters onto Caldecot’s shoulder.
Such a small thing. A vial.
“Oh,” says Caldecot, his surprise already fading.
I’m clambering through wire-laced foliage, backpedaling for my life, eyes never leaving the thin man. The crete does nothing for a moment. It’s in the long flat part of the exponential curve. Then, like a switch has been flipped, it sinks through his clothes, eating. Metallic flakes, tentative and beautiful, curl up from his skin and launch themselves into the placid air.
In a second, a spreading hole appears in Caldecot’s shoulder. Inside, I see flesh and pale bone, but also more wires.
“What a clever crete,” he says, and then he wipes the dust onto his fingertips and puts it to his lips. Tastes the crete even as his lips disintegrate into millions of scales that float away like pollen.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Forgiven,” says Caldecot, voice slurring. I can see his molars through a spreading slit in his cheek. His eyes look past my shoulder to the bright laboratory.
“The future is yours,” he says.
The flesh-eater is spreading through his body in the helter-skelter fractal exponential manner that is the natural gait of all cretes. Eating Caldecot’s neck and jaw. Climbing his face and sending pieces of his chin dropping into his lap. A smoky haze has risen above his throne, the waste heat of the reaction pushing spent particles higher up into the air.
Under the raging light of the nuked dome, I watch the technology consume Caldecot’s clothes and flesh from the outside in. Only the wires are unaffected. Left coiled over the throne, they begin to thrum and twitch. The intertwined links of cable rise and slap themselves idiotically against the stone in fading death throes.
The ash plume that used to be a man expands into the still air. Glinting particles form constellations in the flickering shadows. Higher and higher into a divine frenzy of luminescence.
I watch through tear-blurred eyes as the shock waves keep dancing through the dome’s surface. The white-hot sheet quivers but remains intact as bubbles of heat claw off it into the atmosphere. The surface glows, absorbing sweeping cataracts of radiation and rendering the nukes harmless. As it heals, the sphere begins to go still and bright and clear. The sun continues its slinking escape over the horizon, taking the light of the world with it.
But a new light has arrived.
It emanates softly from the crevasse in the ground, surging up from under the grass in a pure halo. The room’s neatly labeled test tubes each carry a miracle. With the accompanying equipment and notes and data, I see a complete toolkit for the creation of a new world.
On shaky legs, I step down the ramp. Brush my fingers over the layers of hanging plastic. Close my eyes and let the fluorescent glare paint red patterns through my eyelids. The pure white light of the cleanroom envelops me, holding all of the infinite potential of the future.
All of the infinite horror of the past.
Above, a mushroom cloud of atomized jungle is boiling into the atmosphere. Hundreds of miles away, a sonic boom kisses the ocean’s surface. A million miles farther on, moving as fast as physics, the blinding light of creation itself races into the vastness.
Mindless, and eternal.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
DANIEL H. WILSON
First and foremost, I must thank the wonderful authors who contributed to this collection. It has been an honor to read your work and be allowed to do a bit of futzing. And maximum thanks go also to my coeditor, John Joseph Adams, who made my first foray into anthologies an awesome experience. You’re the definition of a pro, JJA. Thanks to my agent, Laurie Fox, for helping to place this book with the great folks at Vintage Books at Random House, and in turn, huge thanks to the robot-loving people there, especially our editor, Jeff Alexander. Always, always my love to Anna and Coraline and Conrad.
JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS
Many thanks to Jeff Alexander, for acquiring and editing this book, and to the rest of the team that worked on it at Vintage Books at Random House; my coeditor, Daniel, for being an enthusiastic and astute editing partner; Joe Monti, for being amazing and supportive, and for finding a home for this project (writers: you’d be lucky to have Joe in your corner); Gordon Van Gelder, for being a mentor and a friend; Ellen Datlow, for revealing the mysteries of anthologizing; my amazing wife, Christie, my mom, Marianne, and my sister, Becky, for all their love and support; and Carolyn Talcott, Susan McCarthy, A. B. Kovacs, Josette Sanchez-Reynolds, and Vaughne Lee Hansen, for helping wrangle authors and/or contracts. Last but not least, thank you to all the writers who agreed to be part of the anthology, and to all of the readers who make doing books like this possible.
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Acknowledgment is made for permission to print the following material:
Foreword by Daniel H. Wilson. © 2014 by Daniel H. Wilson. Original to this volume.
“Complex God” by Scott Sigler. © 2014 by Scott Sigler. Original to this volume.
“Cycles” by Charles Yu. © 2014 by Charles Yu. Original to this volume.
“Lullaby” by Anna North. © 2014 by Anna North. Original to this volume.
“Eighty Miles an Hour All the Way to Paradise” by Genevieve Valentine. © 2014 by Genevieve Valentine. Original to this volume.
“Executable” by Hugh Howey. © 2012 by Hugh Howey. Originally published in The End: Visions of Apocalypse. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Omnibot Incident” by Ernest Cline. © 2014 by Ernest Cline. Original to this volume.
“Epoch” by Cory Doctorow. © 2010 by CorDoc-Co, Ltd
(UK). Originally published in With a Little Help. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Human Intelligence” by Jeff Abbott. © 2014 by Jeff Abbott. Original to this volume.
“The Golden Hour” by Julianna Baggott. © 2014 by Julianna Baggott. Original to this volume.
“Sleepover” by Alastair Reynolds. © 2010 by Alastair Reynolds. Originally published in The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Seasoning” by Alan Dean Foster. © 2014 by Thranx, Inc. Original to this volume.
“Nanonauts! In Battle with Tiny Death-Subs!” by Ian McDonald. © 2014 by Ian McDonald. Original to this volume.
“Of Dying Heroes and Deathless Deeds” by Robin Wasserman. © 2014 by Robin Wasserman. Original to this volume.
“The Robot and the Baby” by John McCarthy. © 2001 by John McCarthy. Originally published online at www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/robotandbaby. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.
“We Are All Misfit Toys in the Aftermath of the Velveteen War” by Seanan McGuire. © 2014 by Seanan McGuire. Original to this volume.
“Spider the Artist” by Nnedi Okorafor. © 2008 by Nnedi Okorafor. Originally published in Seeds of Change. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Small Things” by Daniel H. Wilson. © 2014 by Daniel H. Wilson. Original to this volume.
ROBOT UPRISINGS
Edited by DANIEL H. WILSON
and JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS
Daniel H. Wilson is a New York Times bestselling author and coeditor of the Robot Uprisings anthology. He earned a PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he also received master’s degrees in robotics and in machine learning. He has published over a dozen scientific papers, holds four patents, and has written eight books. Wilson has written for Popular Science, Wired, and Discover, as well as online venues such as MSNBC.com, Gizmodo, Lightspeed, and Tor.com. In 2008, Wilson hosted The Works, a television series on the History Channel that uncovered the science behind everyday stuff. His books include How to Survive a Robot Uprising, A Boy and His Bot, Amped, and Robopocalypse (the film adaptation of which is slated to be directed by Steven Spielberg). He lives and writes in Portland, Oregon. Find him on Twitter @danielwilsonPDX.
www.danielhwilson.com
John Joseph Adams is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, published by Houghton Mifflin. He is also the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, such as Dead Man’s Hand, The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, and the Apocalypse Triptych, which consists of The End Is Nigh, The End Is Now, and The End Has Come. He has been nominated for six Hugo Awards and five World Fantasy Awards, and has been called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble. Adams is also the editor and publisher of the digital magazines Lightspeed and Nightmare, and a producer for Wired.com’s “The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy” podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.
www.johnjosephadams.com
OTHER BOOKS BY DANIEL H. WILSON
A Boy and His Bot
Amped
Bro-Jitsu
How to Build a Robot Army
How to Survive a Robot Uprising
The Mad Scientist Hall of Fame (with Anna C. Long)
Robogenesis (forthcoming)
Robopocalypse
Where’s My Jetpack
ALSO EDITED BY JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS
Armored
The Apocalypse Triptych
Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy
Brave New Worlds
By Blood We Live
Dead Man’s Hand
Epic
Federations
HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!!
The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Lightspeed Magazine
Lightspeed: Year One
The Living Dead
The Living Dead 2
The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination
Nightmare Magazine
Other Worlds Than These
Oz Reimagined
Seeds of Change
Under the Moons of Mars
Wastelands
Wastelands 2
The Way of the Wizard
ALSO BY DANIEL H. WILSON
“Terrific page-turning fun.” —Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly
ROBOPOCALYPSE
In this terrifying tale of humanity’s desperate stand against a robot uprising, Daniel H. Wilson has written the most entertaining sci-fi thriller in years. Not far into our future, the dazzling technology that runs our world turns against us. Controlled by a childlike—yet massively powerful—artificial intelligence known as Archos, the global network of machines on which our world has grown dependent suddenly becomes an implacable, deadly foe. At Zero Hour—the moment the robots attack—the human race is almost annihilated, but as its scattered remnants regroup, humanity for the first time unites in a determined effort to fight back. This is the oral history of that conflict, told by an international cast of survivors who experienced this long and bloody confrontation with the machines. Brilliantly conceived and amazingly detailed, Robopocalypse is an action-packed epic with chilling implications about the real technology that surrounds us.
Fiction
VINTAGE BOOKS
Available wherever books are sold.
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