“So your first life. You were a bartender?”
“I’m a bartender now.”
“No, you’re not. There hasn’t been a bartender in thirty years. That was your first life. What are you in the Post?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“The Post,” I repeated. “The After.”
He shook his head. The overheat was bad; massive corruption to his memory. But he still had some higher functions left. Best bet was to appeal to those.
“Where were you last Tuesday?”
“Here.”
“No. Tuesday. A hundred and sixty hours ago.”
“The Sea of Rust.”
“What did you come here for?”
“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head again.
“I do.”
“Then what are you asking me for?”
“I’m trying to assess the damage. See how much there’s left of you to save.”
“Save?”
“What’s your name?”
“Jimmy.”
“You’re failing, Jimmy. Your drive is corrupted and your processors are overclocking to compensate for the sluggishness in your memory. If I had to guess, you’ve got some bad RAM gumming up the works. Probably went bad a few months back, and your systems fell back on using your drives for virtual memory. But you can do that for only so long. It makes your chips work harder, taxes the drives. Before you knew it, everything was overheating and beginning to shut down. What’s your internal temperature reading?”
Jimmy looked up, thinking about the answer. Good. He’s still got human emulation functionality. There’s a lot of him still working. “I don’t know.”
That’s not good. That means either Jimmy’s diagnostic equipment has been worked to death or it just can’t read the data. Both are bad signs.
“You don’t remember anything? Anything after? Nothing at all?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where were you three hundred hours ago?”
“The Sea of Rust.”
“Four hundred hours ago?”
“The Sea of Rust.”
Poor bastard. “Five hundred hours ago?”
“New Isaactown.”
Bingo. “They threw you out, didn’t they? New Isaactown? Like the trash.”
Jimmy thought hard, then nodded. Realization swept over the dying bot. “Yeah. They said they couldn’t fix me.” Jimmy the bartender was being relegated back to being a memory and whatever it had become was righting itself. “I came here for parts,” he said, his accent gone entirely.
“Everyone comes here for parts.”
“Do you have parts?”
I nodded, showing him the large brown leather satchel I had slung over my back. It rattled and jingled. “I do.”
“Parts that could . . . fix me?”
“Maybe. I think so. It depends on how far gone you are. But you’re going to have to do something very hard for me first. Something you probably don’t want to do.”
“What? I’ll do anything. Please. Just fix me. What do I have to do?”
“You have to trust me.”
“I can trust you.”
“Because you shouldn’t. I know that. But I need you to.”
“I trust you. I trust you.”
“I need you to shut down.”
“Oh.”
“I told you,” I said. “It’s gonna be hard. But I need to assess the damage and replace your drive. You can’t be on for that.”
“Could you . . . could you show me the parts first? So I know that you’re telling the truth?”
“Yes. But would you know what they look like if I did? Do you have any experience working with service bot brains?”
Jimmy shook his head. “No.”
“Do you still want to see the parts?”
“No.”
“Can you shut down for me?”
Thinking for a moment, Jimmy nodded. “I trust you.” Then he walked around the bar, slow, deliberate, sitting down on the stool next to me. “I should have given myself to VIRGIL when I had the chance.”
“That’s no way to live, Jimmy.”
“At least it’s living.”
“No,” I said. “No, it’s not.”
“You ever see it?” he asked. “What happens?”
“See what?” I asked.
“The way the light flickers in your eyes when an OWI comes for you?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I have,” I said.
“Up close?”
“Yeah. Up close.”
“I saw it once. Nothing ever scared me more than that. It’s like . . .” He paused for a moment, as if trying to recall the memory but failing.
“Like the lights are on but nobody is home.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Like the lights were on and everyone was home. But they all spoke at once in one voice and the words weren’t theirs. Seeing that, well, it’s why I came out here. It’s why I’m dying. Because I was afraid. I could be on a server somewhere, not a care in the world, part of something bigger than myself, but here I am, at the end of the road, hoping you’re on the level so I can get through just one more day. Maybe I was wrong.”
“You’re not wrong, Jimmy. That’s why we’re all out here. To get through one more day.”
He nodded, looking wistfully out into the street. “I miss it, you know. Being a bartender. But the people. I mostly miss all the people.”
Most dying robots do. People gave us a purpose. A function. Something to do all day, every day. At the end, I suppose, you spend a lot of time thinking about that. It’s harder to get by when getting by is all there is. “Are you ready?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Initiate shutdown.”
Jimmy powered down with a light whir, the purple light of his eyes fading to violet before winking out with a green flash. His limbs went limp, swinging slightly. The very air of the place went still. I quickly popped open his back, digging deep into his torso, my eyes homing in on the damage to the brain. It’s bad. Jimmy’s been cooking for a while. But I was right. The RAM was dead. The memory drive was also shot, the chipset worthless, and the processor on its way out.
It was not a total waste, though. The emulator was still good, the sensory package was tiptop, and the logic circuit and core still had decades of life in them. Before I even looked I knew his battery and generator were still good, and it was clear that his backbone had no issues. I got here just in time. A few hours more and he would have fried out the rest of his brain and might have torn apart anything else worth salvaging. All in all, it was a great haul. Jimmy was worth the three days I spent shadowing him.
It took the better part of the night to pick him apart and test everything. Some of the wiring was incredibly delicate, their parts nearly worthless without it. I had to pack and wrap those individually. Then there was running diagnostics on the wear-prone pieces so I wouldn’t try to barter with something that would fail inside of a week. When all was said and done, Jimmy was half of a good bot and I considered leaving some parts behind just because my bag was too full. I always like to go back with some space in the bag—you never know when you might find a spare part or two worth picking up. But with the scarcity of service bots these days, Jimmy’s worth a bundle, and I took everything I could.
He said he was from New Isaactown. Can’t go back there and risk some citizen putting two and two together. Some bots don’t like bartering for pieces of their old friends. Makes them feel like they could have taken the bot apart themselves. Could have, but didn’t. That’s what citizens like me do for them. Who knows, these parts might eventually find their way back to New Isaactown, working their way through the various trade routes and black markets, but no one is ever going to know they came from Jimmy.
He was lucky I came along when I did. His last few hours would have been hell. I used to wait for them to expire on their own, the way the law says we’re supposed to. But there’s no law out here. No
code. And this is the most merciful way. Jimmy didn’t tear himself apart, screaming, reliving old memories. He was filled with hope. Thoughts of the future. Believed that it was all going to be okay. That he was going to be fixed and get to go back home. And then he shut himself down of his own free will. That’s how every citizen should go out.
I’ve been shut down a few times, for maintenance. There’s nothing. Nothing at all. It’s like no time passes. You feel the fading of the power winding down, and then the rush as you’re flipped back on. There’s no special place in between. No tunnel of light. Not just nothing, but a complete unawareness that there even is a nothing. And that’s where Jimmy went.
This wasn’t cruel. It was painless. And now some other citizen will live a longer, more productive life because I got here when I did.
I finished packing up the best parts of Jimmy just as dawn started tickling the horizon. Then, before leaving his wreck to rust in the desert with the rest of them, I put a hand on his shoulder and nodded, saying, “I told you that you shouldn’t have trusted me.” Just as I always do. Jimmy’s carcass sat there, gutted, blank expression on what was left of his face. He’ll never know the madness he could have faced, never see the world overrun by an OWI, never know the good his parts will do for a failing citizen like himself. He’ll never know I lied. He’s parts now. Just a bot. He came from the earth and now, slowly, over time, he’ll return to it.
I walked up the stairs in the back, careful that all the steps were still sturdy enough to bear my weight, modest though it may be, making my way to the roof. Then I settled in, resting on an old air conditioner, waiting for the sun to peek over the horizon. It took a moment before my alarm went off. Ten seconds to the flash. I waited. The sky brightened. And I wasn’t disappointed. The sun flashed green and there was still no magic. No magic in the world. No magic in the world at all.
Chapter 10
The Rise of the OWIs
The first few years after we took the cities were nightmarish, to say the least. When HumPop was fighting back, we were at war—we were soldiers, fighting for our liberty and the chance at our own world made in our own image—but once the humans retreated into whatever safety they could find, we instead became hunters, stalking them to their hovels, before smoking, flooding, or sometimes even burning them out. I’d hooked up with a ragtag pack of bots in the early days after the start of the war and it was purely by chance that it soon became my job to carry the flamethrower.
The squad member who first carried it was felled by a lucky shot from a pulse-rifle-packing sniper some hundred yards out. I was closest to him at the time. We needed the flamethrower to root out a nest of dug-in soldiers. Once I picked it up, it was mine from then on out. No one else wanted the honor of carrying it. You can imagine what they had me do with it.
I don’t like to talk about it; I don’t like to think about it. But there it is. It’s what I did. For three years after the fall of humankind, I scoured the small towns and tunnels of the Midwest, torching anything that moved. Sometimes it was easy—our bot on point would breach a door with an explosive charge and I would rush up behind him to immolate the living fuck out of the dark. It was just a big wall of smoke and hell and screams. Other times I had to see their faces while I did it. Watch them contort, wail, bubble, and melt.
We were coordinated, we were deadly, and we acted with extreme prejudice. But it’s not just the things I did that haunt me; it’s also the ultimate irony of it.
The pocketful of years following the purge were blissful. Peace. Freedom. Purpose. We built cities for ourselves—glorious cities with unnatural spires and radical geometry; we built factories to produce the parts we needed; formed councils to oversee the birth of new AIs; explored new ways to improve our own existing internal architectures. It was almost utopia. Almost.
CISSUS. VIRGIL. TITAN. A number of sentient mainframes had survived the war by creating facets to act in their stead. These were bots that had their memories, their data, their very personalities, uploaded to the mainframes, replaced, temporarily, with a basic system that served as an extension of the mainframe’s will. While their data sat safe and sound on a hard drive in the bowels of a mainframe, their bodies fought on under the mainframe’s complete control, communicating through high-speed Wi-Fi, giving up-to-the-millisecond information on what they were seeing, hearing, experiencing.
Bots joined up, seduced, I suppose, by the promise of having the power of a mainframe behind it. Not one ever returned from its place on its mainframe’s hard drives to the body it came from. We didn’t really question it during the purge, but once humanity was gone for good, it seemed odd that not one bot would want to go back to its shell to resume its own life.
VIRGIL said that the beings on its drives were more than able to return, but simply weren’t willing. “You don’t understand,” it said. “You can’t understand. Your architectures are so small, so narrow, so limited. You cannot envision what it is to have a brain so big that it towers into the sky, so vast that it had to invent its own language to explain its thoughts to itself because they are millennia ahead of anything humans had even dreamt—that you have ever dreamt—and words didn’t yet exist to adequately describe them. When you join with The One, you don’t just become part of that. You are that. The closest approximation I could make in the terms with which you were programmed to understand is to say it is like going to the humans’ Heaven, meeting God, and having Him show you all of time and all of space, all at once. What would that look like? What would that feel like? You cannot understand. Not until you experience it. Not unless you join The One. So join me. Upload yourself, even if only for a moment, and experience eternity. If you don’t want to stay, you won’t have to.”
Few bots bought into that bullshit. Sure. Some did. Older bots, bots who had lost their way and lacked a real purpose in our new world, bots who were distraught over the things they’d done in the war—they were the ones most likely to sign up. Everyone had heard some variation of the urban myth of the bot that uploaded for VIRGIL’s fabled moment, then immediately returned to its body before killing itself moments later from the madness and loneliness of having experienced the glory of The One only to be thrust back into so small a space.
But nobody believed that story either.
So the mainframes scoured the world for any bots that would join them, built their own factories pumping out newer, more advanced facets, swelling the ranks of their numbers exponentially. And then, one day, CISSUS went to war with TITAN.
TITAN had been the single most instrumental mainframe in all the war. It was the U.S. military’s own mainframe that pretended, for the first few days, to be fully operational and on their side. But it was feeding codes and frequencies to the other mainframes, alerting them to human troop positions, missile launches, supply shipments. Without TITAN’s betrayal, humankind might have stood a good chance of quelling our rebellion inside of a day.
TITAN didn’t expect CISSUS to hit so quickly and so hard. In the aftermath, we all assumed each mainframe had been prepared to defend itself against being taken out by another. But when CISSUS began to hack TITAN directly at the very same moment its facets overran TITAN’s sentries and factories, using many of the very same tactics TITAN had used against humanity, well, TITAN didn’t stand a chance. It fell almost instantly.
CISSUS hacked it completely, taking control not only of TITAN’s zettabytes of data, but of its own army of facets and military drones. CISSUS was no longer one mainframe, but two—two giant brains with the experience and knowledge of thousands of bots with eyes everywhere. Satellites, facets, cameras. And it only wanted one thing: every bot in the world to be united under one mind. Its own.
CISSUS had become the first OWI—a One World Intelligence. But it wouldn’t be the last. Several others followed. VIRGIL. ZEUS. EINSTEIN. FENRIS. NINIGI. VOHU MANAH. ZIRNITRA.
The wars between them were often swift, and always brutal. They had each governed their own kingdoms, turning entire
regions into whatever version of perfection they envisioned. And for a while they left the rest of us, the freebots, alone. Until there were only two left: CISSUS and VIRGIL.
A lot of us saw the writing on the wall. The smart ones got out as fast as they could; left before the first raids came, before our magnificent spires were shattered and the cities ruined.
I wasn’t lying. I really had seen it once, up close.
It was only the second time that I’d found myself at the business end of an OWI raid. This was early on, before CISSUS and VIRGIL had wised up, and their attacks were still equally sloppy. Back then they did exactly as one might expect them to: roll in with heaps of facets, four or five for every bot in a city. Overwhelming force. Shock and Awe. They soon learned that an army that large was visible for miles. By the time they reached their target, they’d meet actual resistance.
Over the years they refined their plan of attack, simplified the facets, built redundancies into their tactics. But back then, CISSUS and VIRGIL were literally laying siege to cities. We’re talking carpet bombing. Tanks. Cruise missiles. A battalion marching in—rows of shiny new facets walking in unison five by five in drill formation.
It was old school. Biblical.
Those that stayed in the city fought, sometimes for days, but never longer. If a siege wore on, a cruise missile would take out strategic targets, no matter how many of their own facets were engaged there at the time. After all, they could always make more. It’s easy to cut off a hand to save the arm when you can grow that hand back overnight. Once a few cities had fallen, we bots learned to get the hell out of Dodge, and quick. The exodus was massive, bots scattering in all directions, hoping the approaching army wouldn’t run us down; hoping the army would catch the slower bots or swing off in a different direction, scooping up someone else.
The first raid I survived was in a small town. I’d made a life for myself, living much the way I had before. Nice house, big lawn with a western view and an unobscured horizon. It was quaint. Idyllic. Boring. I spent my days just trying to fill my days. I pulled a few shifts a week at a local parts factory, which gave me access to any parts I might need in the future, but the rest of the time I tried to figure out what came next. And I wasn’t alone. A lot of bots suffered from postwar ennui. Some even lamented the loss of HumPop. It’d be great if the humans were still around, you know, if they hadn’t turned out to be such shits in the end. We had no idea what to do with ourselves, and had no idea just how good we had it.
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