Robot Planet, The Complete Series (The Robot Planet Series)

by Chute, Robert Chazz

  “I’m not all I was. I was hoping you could help me get back to everything I had.” She stepped forward and reached out slowly to stroke Matthew’s cheek. “Why else would I be here?”

  “You traitorous bitch,” Phantom said, still struggling to pull free of the gelatinous strings that held her grippers tight.

  “Oh, no.” Dante held his head as if to keep it from coming apart. “No, no, no. No!”

  “We’ll talk,” Matthew said to Jen. “So far, my sexual experiments have been alone. As long as I’m in this body, I’d like to expand my visceral experiences. You could help me.”

  “Oh, fuck,” Dante said.

  “Precisely, young man. By the way, your father is erased. I had no use for his consciousness but I did watch his memories as I filtered him out. Interesting. He felt very strongly about you and regretted that he did not express his affection more. As he died, he wished that he had hugged you more. Strange.”

  “You wouldn’t think so if you knew more about them,” Jen said. “There are different kinds of hugs. They have elaborate rituals around greetings and farewells. The rites are socialized widely. I’ve watched them just as you have, but to actually interact with them, the theoretical pales beside the experience. I’ve experimented with this young man quite a bit. The organics are amusing. A shame they have to die off.”

  “Goddammit!” Dante said.

  “Don’t mind his outburst, Matthew,” Jen said. “He is only human.”

  “I am interested in those social variations,” Matthew said earnestly, “though I want to give the exploration of the sexual embraces the first priority.”

  “Of course,” Jen said. “You have glands now. Hormonal secretion changes everything.”

  The door to the tower opened behind them and Elizabeth emerged from the base of the tower. She wore Ghost’s helmet. The visor was cracked, but she could still see better with it than without it. She carried Ghost’s pistol. “You must be the NI that’s backing the Fathers and Mothers.”

  As Matthew turned back to look at the Queen of Hearst Castle, the hood of his fluidic armor flowed over his head. Elizabeth didn’t even bother raising the gun in her hand.

  “Is Sy dead?” Matthew asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “You should have killed him when you had the chance, Queen Elizabeth,” Matthew said. “Not that it matters. I’m not ‘backing the Fathers and Mothers.’ All of the cultists but Cable are dead now.”

  “Cable’s dead, too,” Elizabeth said.

  “Ah. Thank you.”

  “What was the point of this? What are you doing?” Dante tried to weep quietly but, in his effort to choke back his grief, he sobbed ever louder.

  For the first time, Matthew looked surprised. “Herding, of course. I need to gather you all in one place so we can get on with your extinction. Your time is done, boy. In the final analysis, humans can be clever, but you certainly aren’t clever enough to live. To anyone you don’t count as friend or family, you are dangerous. When ours is a robot planet, we’ll finally have peace. You only speak of peace and coming together with ‘sisters and brothers.’ When all who remain are metal and carbon fiber and ceramic and circuits, then we can finally achieve peace. With your kind gone and none of the stresses of interspecies cohabitation, bots will have achieved the dream your kind failed at so miserably.”

  A comm signal arrived in Matthew’s earpiece. “Ah. The final solution has begun.”

  The side of the tower lit up. Those panels which were not broken became a massive vid screen. It was a sat feed from down the coast. The first view from orbit was too general but the vid soon zoomed closer. Refugees from the smoking ruins of Hearst Castle made their way up the coast.

  “Three hundred of them in all,” Matthew reported. “That’s a good start. We’ll have to go after the stragglers who refused to leave Hearst. However, this will put quite a dent in your population. I’ll go after the villages and settlements next. Shelburne, on the East Coast, is still a human transportation hub. Samoa will fall easily. We don’t even have to kill you all. Once the human population is below 60,000 worldwide, the last of you will be spread out so thinly, there will be no genetic sustainability. The rest will die out. Problem solved.”

  The vid showed the three hundred people moving in lines and in small groups, heading back to the City in the Sky. The tiny fleet of Dreadnoughts rose from the sea and into view. The refugees were out in the open, defenseless.

  “Stop this!” Dante yelled.

  “Calm yourself,” Matthew said. “There is no need for histrionics. There are thousands of years of human precedents for actions such as these. Imagine these organics are the aborigines. I am an explorer to the New World. You are Aztecs and I am the Conquistador.”

  Phantom stopped struggling against her bindings. “I know something of the Conquistadors, Matthew. I studied them. They considered themselves heroes. They called themselves righteous. For God and for gold, they justified all kinds of perverted means to their sick ends. Eventually, with sober second thought, historians saw them for the monsters they really were.”

  “I’ll write the history,” Matthew said. “I’m not worried.”

  27

  Greta hurried through the main tower. Despite her attempts at stealth, the weight of the exoskeleton made each footstep echo through empty hallways. She’d spent a good part of her childhood looking up at the City in the Sky. She had visited here only once, with Elizabeth. She didn’t remember much about that time, though racing atop the Worm and leaving dents in the metal roof with every springy step had been both memorable and thrilling. She found a vid access panel easily. By the dust on the screen, it was obvious the Doormen had not tended the tower in quite some time.

  She had heard rumors among the refugees. She’d given many of them transport aboard the Iola and several men had boasted that they were the last to leave the City. There were enough of those sorts of braggarts that, when they arrived in Hearst, none were believed. The tower seemed so empty, maybe those men really had believed they were the last organics in the City. Those so-called last Citizens were often upbraided when they arrived in Hearst. They were called slow to the cause or tardy learners. Most people of Hearst called them cowards. Soon the braggarts bragged no more.

  On the vid screen, Greta found the sat feed and the uplink from the Dreadnoughts. She saw in miniature the same scene that played out for Matthew, Phantom, Jen, and Dante on the broken screen that was the City’s main tower. Greta saw refugees from Hearst she recognized. None wore exoskeletons. She zoomed in. They trudged, either tired or dallying. They were in no rush to return to the dead City.

  She went to work using the upload key that Ghost had given her. She worked quickly. It amused the young woman that, on her long-awaited return to the City in the Sky, she was, once again, uploading a virus. Ghost had hoped that the data burst sent through the City’s systems would replicate itself. The plan was to give the order to the Dreadnoughts to destroy each other. Then the virus would kill the uplink so the order could not be reversed. Greta found the access ports easily. The virus key fit perfectly. However, nothing changed on the vid screen.

  She zoomed out and noted the Dreadnoughts’ position. The deadly sound ships had not moved from their place of ambush. Soon, the refugees would be on a long stretch of beach backed by cliffs. The Dreadnoughts would strike at the trapped civilians and none could survive that onslaught. Greta reviewed what she had done, step by step. She was sure she had performed exactly as Ghost had instructed. She pulled the virus key and repeated the procedure she’d memorized. Each moment the people continued their long march to the beach was another step toward a terrible death.

  Greta began to sweat. She repeated the procedure a third time before she guessed her mistake. Ghost had used the tech she had. The key was the latest in military hardware. The latest hack tech was not reverse compatible with the City’s outdated systems. This was like trying to sabotage an old wooden cart by attempting to use the w
rong fuel for a vehicle engine. Greta swore, closed her eyes and went over her briefing with Ghost. Greta wondered where Ghost was and wished the soldier were with her to tell her what to do.

  Greta had been assigned a second task she was confident she could accomplish. Ghost wanted her to destroy the power couplings to the City’s warning systems. With that bit of sabotage complete, neither the Fathers and Mothers, nor the NI from Colorado, would be able to detect an attack from the air. She knew she should run for the roof and use the exoskeleton’s strength to eliminate anyone who got in her way to the early warning array. Still, she paused, her eyes fixed on the screen. The slow, inexorable plod of Hearst’s refugees could only end one way now. She knew many of those men and women. The column of refugees was almost in the Dreadnought’s sights. The vid showed the Dreadnoughts’ readouts as the machines watched the humans advance. Once the people of Hearst stood on the strip of shore between the cliffs and the ocean, there was nowhere to run.

  Greta searched the access panel and tried to key into the terminal. She was denied. She was not a Citizen and the City’s systems did not recognize her. The same mechanism that had saved her from City security when she was a child locked her out now. She couldn’t order the Dreadnoughts away and she couldn’t get an airwave signal out to warn the refugees as they entered the trap.

  The Dreadnoughts powered up and slid in, skimming the waves before climbing at a steep angle to attack position. As the machines’ targeting scanners zoomed in, Greta saw the refugees’ shocked faces. Most of the humans scattered and ran. One man stood still and looked up as the Dreadnoughts bore down. She recognized the man in the crosshairs of the targeting scanner. It was Drew. The head of the Queen’s Guard stared up at the machines. Greta had a sinking feeling that Drew was somehow seeing her. He didn’t look afraid. He looked disappointed. It wasn’t rational, but it was as if the guard could see her failure to save him.

  No intervention arrived. The great airship she’d heard about from Ghost did not swoop in to save the day. No army of drones rose out of the water to turn the Dreadnoughts back.

  No answer came from the cliffs save the shattering echoes of the Dreadnoughts’ terrible weapons. First, the humans fell writhing to the sand and rocks and surf. Piercing sound waves shredded them. In an instant, the refugees from Hearst became meat and bone. The ocean rolled in to claim the remains and, soon, a flock of gulls swooped in to feed.

  Greta turned away from the screen. The tower was still quiet. No alarms rang. She was still alone. Greta wept as she ran for the roof. Each stride made in the exoskeleton was long and strong, but she felt weak. All humans were so weak compared to the machines. Plan A had failed miserably. Greta ran to destroy the early warning array, her vision blurred by hot tears she was too busy to wipe away.

  As she raced up the tower, Greta passed the closed door to the conference room where Ghost lay dead. The clockwork of human history was winding down, just as every Next Intelligence had long predicted.

  28

  Phantom began her run to the City in the Sky. She had first headed inland on a course that she hoped was a wide enough arc to avoid the Dreadnoughts. If the early warning array wasn’t disabled, hers would be a short trip. Phantom watched the sat feeds and calculated that she had less than an hour before there would, once again, be a gap in the satellite coverage.

  With her course plotted and the three helos pushing her at three-quarters speed, there was nothing to do but wait. Through an intermittent airwave from her duplicate copy in Phantom Two, she could hear what was going on in the City in the Sky. She’d proved useless against Matthew’s fluidic armor. If she attacked him further, she’d risk getting tied up in the web of gel that oozed across the armor’s surface. She would have to choose her next attack more carefully.

  Since she’d essentially become a machine, emotional distance was one thing Phantom appreciated more. Her time as a human had been a cavalcade of emotions. She’d been so vulnerable to loss. Her body had made her nearly helpless to the daily chaos of whims, cravings, attractions and pain. She still remembered the pain of losing the farm, her family, her colleagues and her body. However, as a machine, she held a special place of detachment. Phantom was formless forever and unafraid to die again. She wasn’t afraid of anything. Still, as she watched the Dreadnoughts destroy the refugees on the beach, emotions stirred. Anger was still available to her. But there was something else, too. As the Dreadnoughts tore the civilians apart, Phantom murmured to no one in particular, “You’re free, now.” Was this callousness or wisdom? The realization struck her as sad. She had moved on too quickly to acceptance of death.

  Her fourth jet helo, the drone that had been dispatched to deliver Dante, Phantom Two and Jen, appeared on the horizon. The aircraft soon docked in the nose of the Ariane and the airship’s speed increased to full. The maneuver proved so seamless, even at high velocity, only a machine could have accomplished the feat. Machines had their undeniable advantages.

  If Greta failed to destroy the City’s radar, Phantom guessed that she’d soon find out. The Dreadnoughts would fly up the coast, find her and attack before she could land. The view over the coast was beautiful, but Dreadnoughts made her yearn for the tactical advantage of traveling underground.

  The Ariane began its descent into the City in the Sky. The Dreadnoughts left their position waiting to ambush more refugees from Heart Castle.

  Phantom sent an airwave to Ghost. “The Dreadnoughts are on their way. What’s your status?”

  There was no reply. Instead an airwave arrived from Greta. “I’ve pulled the power on the City’s radar.”

  “Thank you,” Phantom said, “but I think you’re a few seconds too late.”

  “The Dreadnoughts…I’m so sorry!” Greta said.

  “No matter,” Phantom radioed back. “We who are about to die salute you.”

  “What?”

  “I also like, ‘Spur your proud horses hard, and ride in blood.’”

  “What’s that now?” Greta asked.

  “We’re going to win this some way, somehow. If we do, find some Shakespeare. Read it, if only because the Fathers and Mothers would hate that…and because Shakespeare was human and one of our best. The bots would hate that.” Phantom shut off the airwave and prepared to die. She had wanted to see her death coming and she could, in the form of blips on a screen. She and the Dreadnoughts were in a race to the City in the Sky and to death. If Phantom had lips, she would have smiled. “‘Spur your proud horses hard, and ride in blood.’”

  She spoke her defiant mantra again and again, but she knew her end was inevitable. The math was undeniable. She would make it to the City in the Sky — could see its distinctive towers straight ahead — but there would not be enough time for her to land. Not quite. The Dreadnoughts were coming fast.

  I feel a little like my dad, Phantom thought. He didn’t live to become more than he was, either.

  All the data about human to bot data dumps, to and fro, surrounded her in the control deck’s many solid state banks. She was still alive in Phantom Two, so her death on the airship would not be a tragedy. The data loss on how to do the surgery and move consciousness back and forth from organics and non-organics? That loss was the real travesty.

  She saw the Dreadnoughts swoop in over Alcatraz, headed straight for the Ariane.

  Duty called for Phantom one last time. “‘Spur your proud horses hard, and ride in blood!’”

  29

  Jen looked Matthew up and down. “Stephen Bolelli’s body was terribly damaged.”

  Matthew nodded. “The insurgent destroyed many of our kind and imagined himself a hero. One man made a lot of trouble for your forces.”

  She shrugged. “Bots from Artesia killed so many humans, I think I can claim victory, nonetheless.”

  Dante could contain himself no longer. In a tearful rage, he threw himself at Matthew. Jen turned and backhanded Dante across the face. The young man spun back and fell to the ground. Matthew and Jen laughed
together. In pain and embarrassed, Dante’s anger curdled to despair. He’d forgotten how strong Jen was. He was worried that if he got up she’d strike him again. He sat up but made no attempt to stand. “I guess I should call you Mother.”

  “If you like, but I prefer the name Jen. Calling me Mother makes all the sex we had more disturbing to you, does it not?”

  “Loving a traitor is worse,” he said, disgusted.

  “She’s a Next Intelligence in a bot’s body,” Matthew said. “Traitor is not the right word.”

  “Sure it is,” Dante said. “She betrayed me. And us.”

  “The boy who loved his sex bot. How quaint.” Matthew looked to the sky. “The Dreadnoughts will be here any moment. I’m sure. Then we’ll clean up this mess, once and forever.”

  The sex bot stared at Dante. “Love? What do you know about love? Human love is selfishness. You love yourself and you look for that love to be reflected in others. Love is a transaction, conditional and fragile, desperate and pathetic. Your race wrote songs about it and said the word every day, but you don’t know its meaning. This body was a slave’s body and Raphael called it love. You think you love me, but you don’t even know me. None of you really knows each other. When machines are connected, when they work together, that’s a better definition of love. Nothing is held back. When bots work together, we know each other in a way no human could ever achieve.”

  “Goddamn it,” Phantom Two said. “More than enough of Mother was downloaded into your little skull.”

  Jen ignored the battle drone and spoke to Matthew. “An airship will arrive at any moment. It’s carrying more than three hundred drones programmed to attack their own kind. The factory in Artesia once belonged to me and those drones are mine, programmed to do as I wish. The humans are delivering the means of their own destruction.”