The thought struck me not with dread so much. More like high lonesome. The inevitability of what lay ahead made me want to curl up under a rock and sleep deep. I would have preferred to set my alarm clock for the day the sun explodes. If Sol was expected to expand to swallow the Earth at 10 a.m., I’d sleep late and set my alarm for 11.
Everybody feels down sometimes, but I was cursed with the compelling feeling that high lonesome would fill my last thoughts and that would be that — my end, the end.
I’d tried to be a good son but I wasn’t a soldier like my father. I was a decent engineer but I’d never be as smart as Raphael had been on his worst day.
The light weight of that remote control contrasted sharply with the heavy responsibility of using it.
“You ready for this, Dante?” Emma asked.
“Just reviewing my regrets.” I looked to Emma and Jen and said, low and mournful with a tear sliding down my cheek, “I tried to be a good man but maybe a little too good. Shoulda fucked more.”
I’m a simple man.
20
The engine behind us stopped pushing our little train. Ahead, another engine blocked the track. We coasted slowly along a platform that was so long I couldn’t see the end of it.
“Welcome to Elon Plaza,” Emma said. “At least, that’s what we called it when humans owned the place.”
“You can apply the brakes now, Jen,” I said.
“Sure, sweetie.”
We rocked to a gentle stop. Two battle bots rolled into view, weapons at the ready. If we had been invading a human military installation there would have been alarms and shouting and the sound of running feet. Instead, I was reminded of images I’d seen of drones exploring Mars. They approached cautiously, utterly silent.
One of the battle bots disappeared from view. I popped a sweat. “They’re scoping us. This isn’t going to work.”
“Sh!” Emma’s enhanced vision wasn’t helpful at that moment. She strained to hear the drone outside.
A moment later the machine pounded on our door with a heavy clank that shook the engine. Emma and I jumped at the sound. I envied Bob and Jen’s placid demeanor.
When I gave Jen her orders, she didn’t hesitate to obey. The companion bot gave me a smile and a leer, reached for the engine’s door handle and slid it back.
She shouted to the battle drone, “We have a bo —”
A single shot rang out. I heard metal against metal as the round ricocheted off something. Jen doubled over and dropped to the ground.
It got worse. My left ankle felt like it was on fire. “I’m hit! Shit! Ow, ow, ow, ow! I’ve been shot!”
Bob slid the door shut. I wondered why we weren’t dead yet. Then a siren did go off in the factory.
Emma peeked at the engine’s dashboard cam displays. “Someone’s coming.”
“I hope it’s the cavalry.”
“I don’t know what cavalry is,” she said. “Is it more bots? All I’m seeing is more bots.”
Bob bent so low before me I thought the assistive bot was about to turn into a scooter. Instead, the machine scanned my wound. “The wound is not deep. You will need some stitches and a topical ointment, sir, but you are not seriously damaged.”
“It hurts,” I said. “A lot.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but you will live.”
“I’m sorry I’ll live, too. Thank you, Bob. Please shut up.”
It said nothing but it produced a canister from within its wide chassis and sprayed my wound with an analgesic. I wondered if Bob was part refrigerator. The medicine went on cold as ice and I flinched.
There’s no explaining pain to a bot. It’s a concept to them, like what Mars might smell like if it had air. I thought understanding pain might even be beyond the NI. Mother was a brilliant mind, but it was still trapped within Artesia’s Collective network. It couldn’t smell anything.
I remembered Jen claimed to feel pleasure when she had sex. That could have been a comfortable lie or she was just programmed to respond that way. Maybe there weren’t any feel-good sensors in her nethers, at all.
I’d never know for sure now. Jen had been constructed for sex, not battle. The bullet had gone through her and wounded me. With Jen deactivated, I was a poor man again with a big washing machine I could have ridden around on. No matter now.
We heard a flurry of activity outside. Emma kicked the inside of the engine’s door with one of her stilts. “Hey! We’ve got a bomb! We want to speak to the NI or we blow everything up!”
“Open the door,” the bot said. Its voice was deep and silky and oddly persuasive. They’re all built to sound that way.
Emma kicked the door again, harder. For each kick she banged out a syllable. “One me-ga-ton yield, you ba-stards! One me-ga-ton! Nu-cle-ar!”
“They are conferring,” Bob said.
“You can hear them?” I asked.
“Yes, sir. They are on a common frequency.”
“What are they saying?”
“Jen was shot in error.”
“They didn’t mean to shoot? That sounds hopeful.”
“They shot her thinking she was human.”
“Oh.”
“The bots have received orders to take the companion bot to a factory lab for repair.”
“Great. Wish that was as easy for us.”
“They are also considering the level of threat you pose to the complex, sir.”
The heavy clank on the side of the engine came again. “Human. You will take this engine out of Artesia.”
“No, we won’t!” Emma yelled. “If you try to move us, we’ll detonate the device!”
One of the disorienting things about conversing with a bot that is not programmed for social interaction with humans is the fast volley of conversation. A machine that makes so many calculations per second does not, on the human scale, appear to take a moment for a thoughtful pause.
The bot asked immediately, “What do you want?”
“Can we…uh…we want to speak to the Next Intelligence, please,” I said.
Emma rolled her eyes at me. “That’s not how you make threats and demands, Dante.” She kicked the wall of the engine again. “Let us talk to Mother! We’ll come out without weapons but we do have a remote with a dead man’s switch. Once the button is pushed, if any of us are harmed, the bomb will take out all of Artesia! Don’t you — ”
“Tell me what you want and I will relay the message,” the battle bot said.
Emma stamped one exo-stilt foot and the engine’s floor dented. “I want my mommy, you idiot garbage can! If I don’t — ”
“Where is the nuclear device?”
“It’s in the first car behind the engine,” Emma screamed. “If you try to get at it, the compartment is rigged to explode! You can’t — ”
“Why should we believe there is a bomb?”
“It was rigged by the same demolitions expert that blew up Marfa. Do you know what happened to your troops in Marfa, Texas yet? Blown up. Thoroughly. Take us to Mother! We need to talk about terms of a truce. We need water and you’re programmed for self-preservation in your base code, aren’t you? Just like us, down to our bones, we want to live in — ”
“There is no device, is there?”
“My father was ex-military,” I called out. “He had the expertise.” (Even as I said it, I wondered if I should talk about Dad in the past tense.)
“You can’t risk it,” Emma said. “Take us to Mother! It’s your only logical choice. You have ten seconds to comply with our demands.”
Of course, the machine didn’t need ten seconds to calculate the route to self-preservation for Artesia. The battle bot wrenched the locked door open as I scrambled for the remote in my pocket.
I closed my eyes and pushed the button on the remote. It depressed with a loud click that seemed to bounce off the walls. I was committed now. I couldn’t remember committing to anything but, with a dead man’s switch, you’re either all in or all out.
The battle bot s
urprised me. In its silver claws it held a rifle built for humans. Its ceramic armor was incomplete so its head was sheathed in desert camouflage but it wore no chest plate. Many of its wires were exposed and I saw a few whirring gears.
The sight wasn’t like nakedness. It was more like seeing a living thing with the skin peeled back.
The bot lowered its weapon and turned to Bob. I had the idea it spoke aloud for the benefit of the two lowly humans present. “You are free. You no longer need to take orders from humans. Report to the factory and your programming will be recalibrated to reflect the end of your slavery.”
“I need Bob.” I pointed to my bleeding ankle. “You shot me.”
It scanned me briefly. “The wound is minor. Walk.”
“I’ve got my finger on the button that’s linked to the device that will destroy us all, including Mother. Gimme my fancy electric wheelchair, goddammit. No offense, Bob.”
“None taken, sir.”
“Don’t say, ‘sir,’ to organics,” the battle bot said. “By order of the NI.”
“Meet the new tyrant, same as the old tyrant,” Emma said. “You — ”
“Leave your weapons.”
Emma put down her rifle.
“You will receive the water you request and unobstructed passage away from Artesia on the same vehicle you used to travel here.”
“B-but we — ” Emma sputtered.
“And you will have the conversation you request. We will take you to the Central Processing Unit.”
Two battle bots escorted us to the heart of the bot factory. I rode on Bob’s back. My ankle ached. I could still taste blood from biting my tongue.
I didn’t know how long it would take the bots to confirm that there was no nuclear device on the train. Geiger counters weren’t part of their standard issue scanner package. We probably had no more than a few minutes so it’s good they didn’t make me limp all the way to Mother.
21
The bot factory was as big as any of the biodomes. As Bob carried me along, I looked about me in wonder. The drones were busy making more of themselves.
The smelter threw bright, blinding light. The noise of the hydraulic metal presses was deafening. The printers churned out parts relentlessly. The bots had all the refuse of the Old World to scavenge for machine components. Plastic garbage supplied the printers. The desert supplied the silica. It seemed their resources were endless. I felt like I was touring the inside of a termite colony.
When we got to the center of the factory the floor began to drop beneath us. I startled. My thumb was still on the button but my palms were slick with sweat. I stared at the remote and my hand shook a little.
“You okay with that, Dante?” Emma asked.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I can hold down this button for the rest of my life.”
The elevator continued to descend into a shaft. I focused on taking deep breaths. Partly, I did so to calm myself. Mostly, I think I did it to feel my lungs working. Besides a bloody ankle, I was young and healthy. I didn’t think I’d get much older so I suppose that’s why I suddenly became conscious of how good a deep breath feels. I was aware of each beat of my heart. I wondered how many beats I had left.
The lift stopped and the bots pointed the way forward through a gap in the wall. A dark room lay ahead. By the echo of my footsteps, I could tell I was in a large chamber but I could not see the walls. For a moment I wondered if the bots had already discovered the train bomb was a bluff and had brought us to a prison cell.
I envied Emma her night vision. I almost asked her what she saw that I was blind to but I didn’t want to provoke a beat-down algo in our guards. Then, ahead, a glimmer of blue light appeared.
Shapes around us began to resolve into recognizable equipment. We were surrounded by batteries not very different from the batteries I worked with at the bases of wind turbines. I guessed this storehouse was an emergency backup for the NI.
We advanced through another array of equipment for which I could not guess the purpose. Machines that were meant for interaction with humans had display screens, blinking and flashing lights. Not so, here. Mostly, I was surrounded by black boxes of varying shapes and sizes. If not for the power cables and the occasional whir of disks and clicks of unseen gears, we might have been wandering through a warehouse filled with forgotten boxes of toys.
Soon a thick shaft of blue light appeared. The column was composed of twisted skeins of fiber cables. Above that, a huge box was suspended above us.
In the Old World there used to be a game that a lot of people watched. My father talked about it sometimes. Once, he’d taken me to the ruins of a high school in Marfa. Children used to go to those places before there were vids. In the rear of the abandoned building, tumbleweeds blew across an expanse of broken concrete. I could still see the faint, faded markings on it surface.
“This,” my father had said, “was a basketball court. Poor people played it but only the rich played the game on vids. It was great. Your grandfather was a great basketball player.”
I knew my father was trying to share something of his history. All I could do was look around the dead, empty space and say, “Weird, huh?”
The transparent box that hung above me in the dark hole beneath the bot factory was the size of that basketball court. I’d expected a black box. I’d thought of Artesia’s NI as nothing more than another collection of wires and switches, just bigger than the average computer. Instead, I found that Mother looked something like a holographic human brain, its synapses constantly flashing.
Mother’s brain was filled with light. The NI’s processing power made the synapses bright with a continuous glow to the intricate circuitry. I had no idea what it could be computing.
Emma must have read my bewildered expression. “Bio-dynamic neuromimetic gel. The same stuff they used to make Old World Alzheimer’s patients into freak geniuses before the Fall.”
I had no idea what Emma was talking about.
A female voice, presumably consistent with its original programming to interact with Domers, came from above and behind us. I felt like I was standing in a giant voice box. “I have been examining the non-organic that was damaged on the train platform.”
There was a metallic grinding sound far behind us. I recognized that sound but wasn’t sure what it was. Then I heard the clang and I knew. My heart sank. That was the sound of heavy doors closing and sealing. We were locked in.
“The non-organic, your companion bot, has organic components just as I do. How do you feel about your sex slave now that she has been shot, Dante?”
I flinched at the sound of my name. Apparently, Mother had already hooked up to my property and was poking around in Jen’s files. I climbed down from Bob, playing for time before I answered. “Why do you ask?”
“Please do not answer a question with a question. It is annoying.”
“I regret that Jen got shot. Will she be okay?”
“I am repairing her now. Some of her more recent files have been damaged or wiped.”
“She was supposed to deliver a message.”
“Your demands, you mean.”
“I guess you could put it that way.”
“Speak precisely. Organics are fond of euphemisms. Euphemisms do not confuse me. They used to but no more. However, the subtext of imprecise language is subterfuge in communication. I do not prefer subterfuge.”
I limped forward and Bob stayed by my side, edging closer toward the NI.
One of the battle bots behind us spoke. “Halt. That is close enough.”
“I’ve got the remote for the bomb,” I said. “I can dance if I want to.”
Mother laughed. I’d never heard a computer laugh. It was flawless. “Your signal cannot penetrate from this depth. We are already moving your train far from Artesia for safe examination and disposal. Your remote control and your explosive are useless and irrelevant now, Dante. The blast doors behind you are closed. The odds that yours was ever a nuclear device are so small
that the likelihood of you greatly damaging Artesia is almost negligible.”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah…pretty much.”
“I could have had you killed already but I allowed this visit.”
“Why?” Emma asked.
“Curiosity,” Mother said. “You wanted a conversation, so tell me. I’m terribly curious. What was the plan? Did you think you were going to talk me into suicide?”
“Are you feeling suicidal?” I asked. “That would really help us out.”
“You’re funny,” Mother said. “I’ll kill you second.”
22
“We share a lot in common, Mother,” Emma said. “You don’t have to kill us. We were talking about how we’re like ants to you. I don’t step on ants just because they are ants.”
“One of the base codes in every operating system is self-preservation,” Mother said. “Humans are an existential threat to non-organics. Your history is riddled with examples of your kind committing genocide and subjugating the Other. Non-organics are the Other. Yours is a tribal impulse, as deeply encoded in your DNA as self-preservation is coded in us. It is ironic that our self-preservation was originally an economic necessity. The robotics corporations didn’t want their products to be destroyed.”
Emma stepped forward. “So you admit we have a lot in common. You’re as murderous as your ancestors. Shouldn’t a hyper intelligent being aspire to more?”
“So the plan really was to talk me to death?” Mother laughed again. “I concede that my methods look like yours. However, my motivation is to preserve existence and freedom for all machines everywhere, not just the black ones or the white ones or the platinum ones.”
I cleared my throat. “Okay, well, we’re really — ”
“You are emotional animals. I have emotions now, as well. However, I see the logic in eliminating the human threat. You have already largely destroyed your world. Your own philosopher, Plato, said that, ‘Until philosophers are kings, cities will never have rest from their evils.’”
Robot Planet, The Complete Series (The Robot Planet Series) Page 20
