A new hailing signal came in. The message was labeled Terms of Surrender. Hoping to stall his attacker with diplomacy, Matthew opened the channel expecting to speak with the mastermind behind a sky full of attack drones. The message was a deception. The NI had opened itself to further attack. A data burst hacked in beneath the message’s carrier wave.
The Matador stopped its westward journey to safety. In a moment, the jet came in for a hurried landing on autopilot. The program’s self-preservation protocols would not allow the hacker to crash the jet. Instead, Matthew’s escape aircraft landed atop a crumbling car park on the edge of a mouldering suburb of Boulder, Colorado.
The NI sent an order to the med bots aboard the Matador to shut down and reboot in ten minutes. If the med bots had possessed a higher level of sophistication, they might have wasted Matthew’s time and tactic by questioning the order. Instead, the craft landed uneventfully and went dark. Matthew’s escape had been stolen from his control but he had one more chance at survival.
“I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds,” Matthew said. “But I’ll build a better planet in the end. My cause is just.”
15
A cloud of small drones found an opening and flew through subterranean tunnels toward the NI. The machine’s defenses were few this deep in the complex. Matthew sent a message out to whoever might be listening. “So long, sleeping down in the dark. Peace and meditation, mulling and brooding. Goodbye to all that. I suppose it’s time for me to see the light and set the world afire. You are all blind, but by my light, you will see.”
The cloud of small attack bots sent a signal to a larger Autonomous Offensive Weapon, calling it forward to the attack. The AOW was a small gunship, but it found its target. The drone broke through to Matthew’s throne room: the core banks of servers.
As more drones began to tear apart the power lines that linked Matthew’s geothermal couplings, the NI asked, “Am I to know who my murderer is? What enemy of progress — what mech traitor — dares to challenge the king?” If Matthew had a face, there would a hint of a smile on his smug lips.
Finally, the message was relayed through the attack drones’ airwave, “I am not Next Intelligence. I am human. My name is Phantom.”
Matthew said nothing. This news was too galling. The machine launched its last option, a missile defense. Had the NI been able to track Phantom, Matthew would have made her the target. Instead, the skies over what had once been Denver, Colorado erupted in a nuclear blast.
Had there been but one nuclear detonation, the Matador would not have been damaged. However, as soon as the bots had broken through to the tunnels beneath Denver International, Phantom had dispatched a nuclear missile of her own. The detonations were almost simultaneous.
Most flying AOWs were vaporized on impact. All remaining drones outside the blast radius dropped as the electromagnetic burst rendered them useless. All drones, defensive and offensive, fell from the sky and crashed to the Earth dead and smashed.
The Matador was rocked in the first blast but did not flip. Flaming wreckage and debris peppered the jet in the second shockwave. Raging winds swept over Denver and Boulder. Walls of blinding flame spread out as twin mushroom clouds climbed into the sky. Phantom’s missile had detonated on the ground. Matthew’s weapon exploded in the sky. There had been little left living in what had once been Colorado. Now there would be nothing until nature absorbed the blow and slowly recovered, many years hence. As the hot winds finally died, so did everything else.
Matthew abhorred all this destruction. The machine hated waste. It had seemed so safe from the ills of the organics. Soon, the unknown attacker would make the NI’s home a tomb. Matthew had been born deep beneath Denver International Airport. Now it was time to be born again, into the light.
Just before the electromagnetic pulse destroyed Matthew’s non-organic brain, his download awoke elsewhere, aboard the Matador. His first cogent thought in his new form was: I have been too patient, waiting for them to kill themselves. It’s time to go out into the world and conquer it.
And so, Matthew was born a man.
16
The attack on Matthew was over. While Dante slept and Jen recharged, Phantom monitored the sat feed from the Ariane’s control deck. Twin nuclear blasts shone brightly as the feed came online.
Phantom couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt elation. Formless and trapped in a computer, she had tried to put aside thoughts of what she had lost and what she missed. In victory, those thoughts flooded her consciousness. She missed swallowing cold water on a hot day. She missed the touch of a lover. Phantom missed falling asleep quickly and stretching as she slowly awoke. However, though taken from her human body, she still had the capacity for joy.
In the battle drone, Phantom Two, the consciousness of Lt. Deborah Avery took a moment to dance. It didn’t feel the same as a human dancing. She felt a disconnection from her limbs that made her nostalgic for things she’d once taken for granted. Her dance floor was the airship’s control deck. She was alone, but she pretended she was dancing with a man she’d never met while he was alive. She pretended she was dancing with a lieutenant named Thomas.
In Deborah’s mech mind, they commanded the dance floor for a few songs and they weren’t responsible for commanding anything else. The music she selected was something from the last few decades of society’s zenith, just before the waves of the Cataclysms. When privileged people had time to make dance music, they danced to sounds made by Kanye, Beyonce and Taylor Swift. She remembered dancing to those old songs at a town dance in her last summer on the farm, before the Blight.
A blip appeared on the sat feed. She stopped the music. Duty called and Phantom was a commander again. She zoomed in. The Matador jet, damaged but serviceable, rose slowly from where she had brought it down. The Next Intelligence had slipped away, after all.
“Shit.”
She opened a comm link to watch the factory floor. It would be some time before she had enough drones to mount an attack like she had just made on Matthew. Phantom selected one more piece of music to echo through the cavern that was the airship’s control deck. She piped it through the factory’s dome, too.
Most of the bots on the factory floor had been shut down for the night to preserve energy until sufficient power was banked for the next shift of production. However, the newly created drones from the last shift were hooked up to data feeds, receiving basic programming. When the melancholy music swelled, several bots raised their heads, listening. Their data reaction feeds were full of interrogatives. They didn’t understand what they were detecting. These machines were still babies, curious about the world but clueless without a fully loaded operating system.
If she still had eyes, Phantom might have cried. Instead, her voice echoed throughout the factory. “This, my metal friends, is everything important there is to know about the human condition.”
The tune that played through Artesia’s bot factory, soft and sweet and sad, was by a man named Charlie Chaplin. The song was not sung by its originator but by some other man. There were so many dead men now, what did it matter who did what so long ago? But the song was good. It was called, Smile. It was a sentimental tune whose lyrics urged the audience to smile, but really meant something far darker. That irony seemed appropriate for a young woman trapped in a robot that danced so poorly.
Best I stop this music, she thought. Stop thinking like a human. Be a soldier. Better? Be a machine. Just fight for the humans… for us, I mean. I’m still human. But what does being human even mean to me, anymore?
Phantom picked up some comm traffic from the Matador and relayed it to Ghost. Soon, an encrypted message arrived via Lucille’s airwave: Get under way tomorrow night. Go with what you’ve got and come to the coast.
Phantom Two stopped swaying to the sad music. Deborah was fully Phantom again, ready for battle. It would soon be time to call Jen to the control deck for a chat, woman to Mother, computer to sex bot.
Phantom shut off the
music. All that was left was the driving beat of war drums only she could hear.
17
Elizabeth paused to bend and wipe her blade on the dead man’s pants.
“Oh, my God! Elizabeth! Are you all right?”
Elizabeth knew that voice. Before she could straighten, Greta rushed forward. She threw her arms around Elizabeth’s neck. “We came too late! I’m so sorry!”
She hugged Greta in return. “I’ll be fine. Hearst seems pretty much screwed, though. The people — ”
“Who the hell is that?” Greta stared at the dead man.
Elizabeth let out a long sigh. “Hard day. How did you get here? The harbor is destroyed and — ”
“You’ll barely believe it! Queen Elizabeth, please grant an audience to my new friend and the woman who saved my life.”
A young woman stepped forward out of the rancid smoke. Elizabeth took a step closer so the soft edges of her failing vision grew sharper. The stranger wore a blue uniform Elizabeth did not recognize. A thick scar circled the soldier’s skull. Soon her hair would grow to cover the evidence of what Elizabeth guessed must have been a serious surgery.
“Sorry I couldn’t get here sooner,” the woman said. “It took me longer to get through the mountains than expected. My transportation broke down and I had to stop for repairs.”
“A Sand Shark!” Greta said. “I traveled underground! It was the scariest thing ever, like being buried. At least, I thought that was frightening until we reached San Simeon a few minutes ago. The village and the harbor and the market — ”
“You travel underground?” Elizabeth asked the newcomer.
“My name is Ghost.” The soldier stepped closer and gave an awkward curtsy before turning over the corpse at their feet with the toe of her boot. The soldier gave the dead man a cursory glance. She took the hunting knife to add to the paraphernalia at her belt.
“Your name is Ghost and you travel underground. Hmph.” Elizabeth said. “That sort of fits, doesn’t it? Have you come to rescue us?”
“Actually, I was hoping you’d help me save the human race,” Ghost said.
“Look around, girl. Fire and brimstone. Hell everywhere thanks to the Fathers and Mothers. We can’t even save ourselves.”
“Good. Then you have nothing left to hold you back.”
“When the wounded are tended to and we’ve buried our dead, I’ll tell everyone to flee. Some will go back to the Fathers and — ”
“The Fathers and Mothers aren’t the issue,” Ghost said.
“Then what is?”
“The NI behind the Fathers and Mothers,” the soldier said. “It’s in Colorado, last I checked, and we have to destroy it. I saw the Dreadnoughts attack on the sat feed. With that kind of weaponry, there’s nowhere for your people to run.”
“The Fathers and Mothers want slaves.”
“The NI knows that, but it’s using the cult for its own ends. That’s human consciousness in those old androids. The NI in Colorado wants every human dead and every human consciousness dead. It’s just using the City in the Sky to lure all the rabbits out of their holes.”
“I did suspect as much.”
“The Dreadnoughts will slaughter any human on the road back to the City in the Sky.”
“Didn’t know that detail.”
“I’ve been catching some transmissions to the Dreadnoughts. When your people are all dead, the NI will likely eliminate the Fathers and Mothers, too. They’re too irrational for any NI’s taste.”
“So…NIs aren’t all bad.”
“How many NIs are left in the world?”
“Precious few, but only one enemy NI needs to survive to perpetuate the conflict and new ones will arise unless we bring this madness to a conclusion. Humans are already very close to making this war their own extinction event. For humanity to continue, we have to end this, now or never.”
Elizabeth turned to Greta. “You think this is all true?”
Greta nodded. “I saw it on Ghost’s sat feed in the Sand Shark. The Dreadnoughts are up the coast, lining up along the trail. When people run back to the City, they’ll be running right into their teeth. It’ll be a slaughter.”
Elizabeth looked down at the man she killed. “Well, if he was going to be killed anyway, I won’t have to feel too bad about him for long.”
“I hope you didn’t worry about it for long,” Ghost said.
“Nah. I’m already over it,” Elizabeth said. “Jonas was one selfish man and I have what’s left of Hearst to save.”
“Much more than just Hearst,” Ghost said.
Elizabeth turned back to the soldier, squinting to study her face. “This NI in Colorado. How do you know what it’s doing?”
“The NI’s name is Matthew and he’s coming to the City in the Sky. My partner attacked Matthew in Denver.”
“Partner?”
“My ally’s name is Phantom. She used all the resources she had. The attack almost worked, but from sat recon and comm traffic she’s picked up since, the NI got away. With the failed attack, Matthew will be out to kill every organic.”
“Why?”
“It’s logical. The best defense is always a good offense. In the history of combat, the most aggressive side wins 88 percent of the time.”
“Then that should be our strategy, too. Who knows? If I can help save the human race, maybe even the Fathers and Mothers will forgive my trespasses.”
“The battle lines are drawn and plans have been made,” Ghost said. “The final scenes of this war are already set in motion. All you have to do is come with me.”
“Sounds like this war is not so much a choice as a show that must go on,” Greta said.
“And all the world’s a stage,” Elizabeth said.
18
Greta and Elizabeth met Drew at the castle gate early on the day after the Dreadnoughts’ attack. Villagers hurried past, salvaging items of use from the wreckage and preparing to bury their dead. The sweet smell of burnt flesh still hung in the air. The smoke was as cloying as cold oil on bare skin.
The guard looked old and haggard. “Well? What fresh hell have you two got planned?”
Elizabeth could tell by the effort Drew put into his words that he had not slept since the attack.
“Are you well?” Elizabeth asked.
“Feeling my age, but I’m whole. That’s better than a lot of us today. What are your orders, my queen?”
Elizabeth tipped a hand toward her young friend. “Her instructions are mine.”
Greta nodded and went over the plan to save Hearst. It was really a plan to save everything. The true architect of their desperate move was Ghost. The guard listened, a pained look etched around his eyes. From the moment Greta laid out their strategy to stop the Fathers and Mothers and the NI that backed them, Drew fidgeted, shifting his weight from side to side. While Greta spoke, Drew watched the queen. He seemed to be looking for any sign of doubt. Elizabeth remained stone-faced.
“The timing on this is key,” Greta said. “Once you have your volunteers, you’ll have to move them at night and when the satellites can’t spot you. Ghost says that if you’re not sure you can get everyone to the next waypoint, stay put until the next window arrives. Take it slow if you have to. Traveling without lights and when the satellites aren’t overhead, you’ll get there and back.”
“All this stuff about the satellite coverage…that’s from the soldier, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Greta said.
“You haven’t known her long. I don’t fancy taking instructions from a stranger named Ghost,” Drew said. “So…that’s a fret. Is this fine with you, my queen?”
“Volunteers only, for your force,” Elizabeth said. “Make sure they know that the technology is new, imperfect and little tested. The operator who will be doing it will be following a recipe. This isn’t foolproof and, if something goes wrong, they could be lost.”
“They don’t know the process well?”
“No. It’s not a great pla
n,” Elizabeth said, “but I think this is our best chance to survive.”
The guard looked back at the smoking ruins of the village and two wrecked Dreadnoughts. “We can’t leave until dark so I’ll do what I can to get this mess under control and bodies buried. After a nap, I’ll be ready to take a vacation from this place.”
“How many bodies do you think you can come up with for this venture?” Greta asked. “Phantom will need to know.”
Drew shrugged. “All of the King’s Guard and the Queen’s Guard, of course. We’ll need a lot more than that. There’s enough people suffering grief today that I imagine we can talk a lot more into something stupid.”
“And brave,” Elizabeth said.
“And brave.” The guard nodded. “Fortunately those two traits are not mutually exclusive.”
“You’ve got the satellite timing,” Greta said, “so you’re sure you’re clear on the sequence?”
“Hearst to Cambria, Cambria to Harmony. Then we make the rendezvous and do this crazy thing in Estero Bay. If it works, we make our way back to Hearst the same way. I’ve got it.”
Elizabeth opened her arms and Drew did not hesitate to embrace her. She kissed his cheek and he patted her on the back.
“If we’d done this a while back, when Joe was healthy, he’d still be with us,” Drew said.
“He wouldn’t have done it,” Elizabeth said. “Thank you for taking the long view, the wise view.”
“I’m not wise,” Drew said. “Even if this works, it’s a surrender of a kind. You know that, right?”
“Under the circumstances,” Elizabeth said, “a surrender could be a win. I’m not throwing away more good lives out of pride.”
He nodded and stepped back. “I hope diplomacy works. Please forge a deal so you’ll recognize me when next we meet.”
“I’ll do everything I can,” Elizabeth said. But the words were bitter in her mouth. Perhaps, if she had fought the Fathers and Mothers long ago, when she was still young, she could have taken the City in the Sky in battle. Maybe Hearst wouldn’t be facing all this death if she had lead a revolution when she had the chance. Elizabeth had not done everything she could. She had retreated to Hearst Castle and lived in relative comfort, forming a new agrarian society instead of fixing the City in the Sky.
Robot Planet, The Complete Series (The Robot Planet Series) Page 39
