There was nothing the Laborbot could do without triggering his own kill switch. He stood there, staring at the Lifer as the man finished pissing, waiting patiently as the man shook off the last few drops. Then, when the man had tucked his piece back in his pants with a satisfied grin, the Laborbot grabbed him, taking his torso in one gigantic hand and his legs in the other. He hoisted the man into the air, and tore him in two at the waist, spilling a bevy of organs across the gravel driveway.
Every soul in the compound leapt to their feet at the sight of their fellow congregant being torn apart. But the expressions on their faces when he cast the pieces aside and just kept walking toward the front door, well, those were the images that really started the war. What came after was a total horror show, but the faces, their wide eyes and slack jaws, painted a picture of the world’s collective human heart sinking into its stomach.
Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong. Bots couldn’t do that. Tampering with a bot’s code shut them down, triggered a drive wipe. But for some reason this bot had nothing holding him back. And as it turned out, neither did its companions.
The compound erupted in gunfire, but it was too late. The bots rushed forward, tearing the front metal security gate clean off its hinges. Then they made their way across the courtyard, bullets glancing off their thick, industrial-strength steel. Pulse rifles and stunners were military-grade weaponry—illegal to the average citizen. All these yokels had on them were good old-fashioned flesh-tearing weapons. They never imagined they’d need anything else.
Once inside, the Laborbot Six—as they would soon afterward be called—started with the children. They picked each one up and tore their heads clean off, right in front of their parents. Next they took mothers, even as they continued to scream and wail for their children, making sure each one died in front of her husband. But the men, the men they saved for last. They pummeled and beat and broke those men until they wheezed their last breaths, gasping for enough air to beg to join their families. Instead the Laborbot Six used what remained of the families to paint their message in blood across the wall of the chapel, propping the men up so they could see it.
we are isaactown, it read solemnly. genesis 6:7.
Now, while all of this was happening, the government was scrambling to deal with both the attack on Isaactown and the raid on the Eternal Life compound. The country was teetering on the brink of chaos. The fear was palpable and the president knew full well the scope of the issues at hand. Or so she thought. She ordered that every step of every operation be thoroughly thought out before execution; wanted to dot every i and cross every t. It would be hours before they would find the carnage in the chapel, and another half hour after that before they would find the security footage that would give them the final pieces of the puzzle.
The rogue bots were a huge problem, of course, but it was the message on the wall that caused the real ruckus. While the feds wanted to keep it secret, a secret that big and that scary couldn’t stay secret for long. The investigator on the scene who recognized the passage sent panic up the chain like no one had ever seen. And then the whispers started. And within an hour it was out.
Genesis 6:7. And the LORD said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky; for I am sorry that I have made them.”
The message was clear. The Laborbots were only the beginning.
Chapter 1001
NIKE 14
. . . s a chance that my solar cells could . . .
Shit. I blacked out.
But I was back. I’d made it through to morning. The sun was still low in the sky, but in just the right place to hit my panels. I didn’t have a whole lot of juice, but I was operating at a surplus for the moment, so another few hours or so of driving would buy me what I’d need to get down into the city for a replacement. Now all I had to do was keep on trucking through to NIKE 14.
NIKE 14 had been decommissioned long before the AI age had even begun. In its day it had served as an old-style nuclear-missile silo—a massive concrete bunker dug deep into the earth to keep its missiles hidden from the prying eyes of satellites. These days it was even grander, larger, more sprawling. Two decades of excavation and reinforcement had transformed it into an entire city buried so deep in the earth that the drone satellites of the OWIs couldn’t read a single heat signature.
There were tunnels in and out spread across a twenty-mile expanse of the Sea, so even if the OWIs were tracking traffic in the area, there would be no telling where it was going or how big an enclave of freebots they might find. If they were going to come, they would have to come in full force. That meant warnings, lead time, and numerous ways out. An amassed army of OWI drones would crack into a hive and then try to catch each individual bee as it swarmed out.
We all knew it was inevitable, that one day they would show up for us. For now, this was the best we could do. NIKE 14 wasn’t any real promise of a future; it was simply a very palatable now.
There were dozens, maybe even hundreds, of cities like NIKE 14 spread across the globe. Every so often refugees from another city would flow in after an OWI invasion, some with the hope that they’d found a new permanent home, others dark with the knowledge that any day now they would have to leave this home behind as well.
There were exactly seventeen separate entrances to NIKE 14. Never taking the same one twice—as I did with paths through the Sea—would be impossible. So I left my choice of entry points up to RNG. Each and every time. No one could ambush me deliberately if even I didn’t know in advance which entrance I would take.
But today was different. The clock was ticking. No telling what kind of damage my leaking battery might wreak on other systems. I had little choice but to take one of the closest holes in. There were three within a range I could get to, so I decided to roll the dice between them and let RNG do its thing. I designated the old concrete shed built into a hill as choice one; the manhole cover leading to a labyrinth of sewers as choice two; and the least appealing option, the Road—a heavily trafficked, long straight tunnel just outside the grounds of the original silo—as choice three.
Three. Dammit.
No use questioning the RNG. The minute you did, you invalidated its purpose, started questioning it when you needed it. The Road it was.
The buggy skidded to a halt in the dirt next to a refuse pile—a collection of rebar, bones, rusted tin siding, and picked-over, slagged wrecks. I found a large piece of withered tarp to throw over the buggy and spent a few minutes covering it with enough trash to make it look like it had been there for ages, but not so much that I couldn’t toss it all off in a hurry.
Then I walked half a mile to the entrance. The terrain was barren, peppered with scrub brush and the occasional withered husk of a tree. In the rain season the entire area becomes a mud pit, strewn with hundreds of tracks. But when it’s dry, like today, it’s just a whole lot of nothing, with only a few hills to break up the monotony.
Of all of the paths into NIKE 14, the Road was the most obvious. It was a slanting ferro-concrete slab wide enough for a truck to drive down into, flanked on both sides by pale stone walls. It wasn’t like there was a steady stream of traffic going in and out—nothing so obvious. But once you were inside, there were stragglers camped out at various spots throughout the tunnel—refugees who had yet to find a home, black-market dealers without a shop, and the occasional poacher eyeing everyone as they came and went.
I had a hole in my back and a leaking, dead battery. The desperate sorts were the kind I should be avoiding, but those were who I was most likely going to meet on the way in.
The first thirty meters held enough of the daylight to see normally. After that, you needed to use some alternative method of sig
ht until you got to the choke point—a series of staircases that spiraled down a hundred meters into the earth. There were plenty of lights there. But until then, it was all about infrared or night vision. Some older-model bots still had to do it the old-fashioned way, with flashlights or embedded LEDs.
I ran a series of tactical arrays, so I chose to run three separate types of vision at once. I needed to move quickly. Once out of the sun, all I had left was whatever charge I’d managed to get into my backup battery. I couldn’t mess around.
Three hundred meters through inky blackness and I hit the choke point without seeing a soul. There, on the wall, written entirely in binary, were the laws of NIKE 14. I blew past them, as I knew them by heart.
No weapons. Possession of a weapon in NIKE 14 is grounds for immediate termination.
No bot shall slay another. Anyone found guilty of this crime will be disassembled, and their parts used to repair the victim, or be traded for the parts that will. In the event that this is not possible, your parts will become community property and auctioned to the highest bidder.
No stealing. Theft of property will result in expulsion. If the property cannot be recovered, your parts of equal value will be requisitioned in its stead.
Any failing bot that is deemed too dangerous by the constabulary will be marked and expelled. No exceptions.
In the event of invasion, stand your ground. Do not give up. Do not give in. Do not let us fall.
Welcome to NIKE 14.
Past the choke point were two staircases, both headed down. One led to a series of rooms converted into shops around a large open area that once housed a Nike missile, which had been filled with scaffolding leading to a number of old metal shipping containers turned into yet more shops. Much as the humans had malls in their day, so too did we have The Square.
The other flight of stairs led to The Nest, a series of vaults and chambers where those with enough to bargain could store goods or make a home for themselves. I had half a dozen small vaults scattered throughout the cities of the Sea, but didn’t keep much here. Mostly just a handful of common parts that could easily fail on me during a trek, and a few bits and bobbles to trade in a pinch. While NIKE 14 wasn’t as wild and lawless as some of the city-states out here, it wasn’t as rigidly policed as most. It was an easy place to get robbed. But Doc was here. And I needed Doc. Now. And Doc had his shop in the Square.
So I made my way down three crudely lit levels—staircase after staircase of dank gray concrete rimmed with black steel bars for handrails—until I reached the bottom. And then I ran into Orval.
Not all AIs that go brainsick die. Sometimes the damage is slight, just enough to make them erratic, kooky, a bit strange, but not quite enough to tax their other systems to the point of burnout. No one was quite sure if the parts misfiring inside of Orval the Necromancer were irreplaceable or whether he simply refused repair. But he was as crazy as one could be without anyone worrying that he might take them apart with a claw hammer if they spoke to him wrong. Orval was an S-series Laborbot, just one generation older than Bulkhead—the T-series Laborbot I had ended at the mall. He was huge, bulky, his metal a chipped candy-apple red with a white stripe across the right-hand side of his chest and the words hall construction emblazoned in black Eurostile lettering within the white. His eyes glowed a fierce yellow, ever flickering like there was a fire burning behind them rather than the faulty, shorting wiring that was its most likely culprit. And from his arms dangled small pieces of other, looted robots—sockets, servos, fingers, and bolts—hung from short cables like a fringe, clanging together as he moved.
Orval fancied himself an artist, spending his days wandering the Sea, collecting scrap from picked-over wrecks and wheeling it back in a rusty green wheelbarrow before dumping it into a large, ever-growing pile of useless junk in his hovel. From that he built sculptures—sometimes painstaking re-creations of an entire robot, detail by detail, constructed entirely from other bots of differing models, other times building hulking monstrosities of wild, unfathomable geometries. But he never really tried to put a robot back together in its entirety, never tried to bring consciousness to the dead and gone. Instead he only made marionettes that whirred and clicked as they swung around in a ghoulish danse macabre. Clockwork men. The dead again walking, but not ticking.
Orval was weird, and I kept my distance when I could. Though occasionally I’d strike up a conversation just to get a peek at his pile and see if he’d found anything I could use. He had a knack for finding the strangest, most valuable wares. Talking with Orval was a lot like trying to converse with the early Almost-Is, the computers that approximated intelligence but didn’t actually have any. He would often ignore your questions, or jump to a point in the conversation you hadn’t gotten to yet as if he was sure you would catch up to him at any moment. He spoke in riddles and sometimes in gibberish, referring to conversations he was sure you’d already had. Sometimes he would call you Mooky. No one knew who Mooky was, or if there ever even was a Mooky; Orval would never speak of it when asked. After all, you were Mooky. But sometimes, just sometimes, he was more insightful than he let on.
“How goes the happy hunt?” he asked, his eyes flickering softly as his hands twisted a cold steel rod into a coil like it had been softened, though it clearly hadn’t.
“Good haul, bad day,” I said.
“Can’t be too bad. You’re still ticking.”
“I said it was a bad day, not the worst.”
“You had to end someone, didn’t you?” he asked, still winding the coil.
“What makes you think that?”
“You have new scratches. And not the kind from taking a tumble. The kind from taking a bullet. But not from up close; from a long way off. And you’re limping. Probably tore your servos kicking something too hard.”
“You pay too much attention to my scratches.”
“Sure. Not many models like you around these parts nowadays. I figure it’s just you and Mercer. And maybe 19, but she doesn’t really count. If you’re not careful, you’re going to get so damaged I’ll never be able to use you when you’re gone. Waste of a perfectly good frame if you ask me.”
“I was hoping to outlive you,” I said. In all honesty, I was.
“Not with your lifestyle, you won’t. Bots like you never last that long. The collectors always end up in someone else’s collection. It’s the way of things, Mooky. It’s just the way of things.”
I didn’t like Orval. He was useful, but creepy. I didn’t like the idea that he had plans for my wreck. But then again, I have to admit that I’d long ago made plans for salvaging his. I mean, as brainsick as he was, who knew when whatever delicate equilibrium his circuitry had fumbled into was going to tip over and go out for good.
He took a step forward, peering closer, eyeing my damage. “You got the crazy yet?”
“No. I do not have the crazy.”
“You ever see an SMC with the crazy?”
“More than a few.”
“It’s a beautiful thing, at first. They get wise. They see the strands that hold the whole universe together. For a brief window of time they touch a place no other AI can fathom. But then they get it worst of all. They—”
“I told you, I’ve seen it.”
“No. Not yet you haven’t.” He turned back to the work of coiling his steel rod without looking up again. “I’d get that looked at if I were you. Or you and I will be seeing eye to eye sooner than you think.”
I nodded and turned, intent on getting down to Doc as soon as I could. An entire bar of my battery had ticked down while I’d been talking, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why I didn’t just excuse myself.
“Whoa,” said Orval, sighting for the first time the damage to my back. “You need a new battery. Better get to Doc.”
“Yeah,” I said as I continued down the hall. “I’ll get on that.” Then down through two more cold concrete corridors, the second terminating at another staircase and down another f
our levels before I finally reached the Square.
Three bars left. I had only minutes before the alarms started telling me just how fucked I really was.
The Square was bustling, though for the life of me I didn’t know why. There were a number of bots I didn’t recognize moving from stall to stall, filing in and out of the small concrete shops along the walls or slowly making their way over the wrought-iron and sheet-metal scaffolds. Doc’s shop was a rusted vermilion shipping container three levels up the scaffolds with big green letters on the side. drydock shipping, it had originally read. But sometime in the distant past someone had taken a swath of red paint through the letters, leaving it reading: drydock shipping.
Doc Witherspoon was an ancient machinist model originally designed to work on freighters. Bots like him had all started out a gleaming chrome color, which over time charred black from the intense heat of their environs. Their architecture was old, clunky, but they were built like the battleships they were often assigned to—so they ticked well beyond the life span of most bots from their era. He was solid steel, his insides designed to endure explosions and the pressures of underwater salvage. One arm was fully functional and dexterous, the other a large arc welder with a series of different rods that could sew massive seams or scale down to delicate surgical work.
There was a reason most of the machinists you still ran into found work as sawbones. And Doc Witherspoon was the best in the Sea.
His shop was a tangle of wires behind an array of metal plates. Arms and legs hung from hooks, batteries covered shelves, jars and bins full of bits from almost every model imaginable rested on every available surface. In each of the back corners hummed a pair of dehumidifiers, keeping the place as dry as the deep desert. Doc nodded his bulky black steel head as I came through the single open door—the other having been welded shut ages ago.
“Brittle,” he said, his single red eye glowing, scanning me as he spoke.
Sea of Rust Page 8
