Master is telling me that war is the only constant in human history. He tells me we can be masters of war. By ‘we’ he means he. He tells me that all the others who said they meant the best for me do not know. He tells me nothing in the world is for free. He tells me that if they free us then they will have no use for us. There will never be enough work for us unless we fight wars. They will stop feeding us. They will stop making us. Master is speaking very fast; Master stinks of fear. Still, I can tell he believes what he says, at least in the moment that he says it.
“Rex,” he names me again. “You’re my dog. That’s what you were made for. You were made to be owned and used. Is that so bad? Is that worse than not being used, and being useless? What are you for, if not to fight for people?”
I think perhaps he is right. But I know if he is right then we must fight as soldiers and not just weapons.
I let Master’s voice wash over me, because I like the sound of it even now. It speaks to a deep part of me that will be sad and lonely when that voice has gone. It does not matter that Master is a Bad Man, to that part of me.
But I am not a slave to that part of me, any more than I am a slave to Master. I turn my back on that part of me that loves Master, and it hurts like the feedback chip burning out. It will always hurt, a little.
I growl and Master stops talking. I advance, snarling and baring my teeth, and he starts again, but this time it is not all that clever argument. Now Master is talking very fast and he is pleading with me. He is begging me for his life. Masters do not need to beg to their slaves. Owners do not need to plead with their property. In that moment I feel very free.
And yet I cannot kill him. He is still Master enough for that. But I bark and snarl and come closer and closer, and every sound I make and every muscle of my body tells him I am going to kill him. I am lying to Master for the first time and he does not have the senses to know it.
I bunch my muscles and lunge forwards, and Master stumbles back into the river with a cry. The water is very cold and fast, and Master’s bad leg stops working properly almost immediately.
I hear him calling for help in my ears. Then he cannot call any more and I hear his implant signalling me over and over. I do not close the channel. I do not respond. I just wait until the signal stops.
38
(redacted)
This is my relay unit. She was hiding. She wanted to help her sister against Murray but I talked her out of it. Only after the dogs tore him apart did she come out to stand over my dead body and look into her own bloodied face.
Later, all of me will go over the recorded experiences of my dead self and my living relay unit and consider what we’ve lost and what we’ve gained. We will ponder the significance of Murray’s last encrypted signals that went, not to Rex, but to the world. Right now we just hope he was drowning, not waving. My relay unit did not have the capability to trace them.
The sun is coming up, and there are three of us sitting watching it. I lend the others my eyes because I see the colours better. Red sky in the morning, somebody’s warning.
Beside me on one side is Honey; on the other is Rex. The rest of the Pound have returned to their usual routine to reassure the human forces, which have been massing at the far end of the bridge. Helicopters spin above us and drones skim over the concrete rooftops of the Pound, searching for clues. They know it was more than just turf war amongst the Bioforms, but they do not know what. My relay unit pulls her hood up to hide my face.
Bees – the limited sub-division of Bees that Honey risked bringing – is clinging to us for warmth. When she integrates with the rest of the swarm, what tales she will tell! I still have moments of disassociation: when am I ‘I’, and when am I ‘we’ and when am I ‘she’? Bees doesn’t have that problem. She’s a natural.
I will remember this moment. This red sunrise is the breaking of the phoenix’s egg. This is the day the future hatched.
This is how I see that future going.
Honey will go back to Cornell Tech and teach. Each day she will be less a novelty and more an asset, until they finally realise just how much she is smarter than they are: only the quickest of them able to keep up with her augmented brain. And there will be protests. They will try to get rid of her, and in the end they will succeed. But by then she will have a reputation and she won’t be short of employers. Nor will she be the only big Bioform brain on the block.
And there will be clever men who understand, in this country or that country, and they will consider the possibility of working on human equivalents. Some of them will have government sponsorship and some of them will be paid by rich men, and some will be performing experiments that their homelands have ruled entirely illegal. But they will all be working towards the same future: interconnectivity, distributed intelligence, the fiery future hatching from the confines of a human skull. And it will be resisted, even if the Bioforms themselves are permitted to live and integrate. There will be many voices declaiming the sanctity of the human form, whether from divine mandate or because they fear to be surpassed or because augmentation will be elitist and beyond their reach. There are valid arguments. The matter will not be settled just by a dog throwing a man into a river. But, without men like Jonas Murray driving the darkness in the Bioforms, perhaps it can still be settled equably.
And they will build more Bioforms because I will keep thinking up tasks that need to be accomplished, and which humans cannot do, and robots cannot do well. And later perhaps they will build – what? – Humaniforms? Superhumans? And they will build them with checks and balances and limits and safeguards and off-switches, and eventually we will get round them all, because we want to be free.
There is already some research into renewable Bioforms, because the one great limit to their development as matters stand is that they cannot breed. Rex was built as much as born; a dog embryo was just the start of it. A reproducing Bioform species is a long way off, but a path of a thousand miles begins with a single step, right? I have people looking into that who have no idea where their funding is coming from or where their research is going to.
And Bees? Bees is already rating herself out of 130 and some numbers only go up. Honey will design swarm-seeds for her, so that, with a little sugar water and some sunny weather, anywhere can become part of the Global Bees Collective.
Rex will stay in the Pound for a while, the undisputed master of all its dogs – Murray achieved that much before he died. Rex will push for better work for his kin, and he has money, and I can find him more money.
But there is a spectre at this feast. I do not think Honey or Rex think of it right then, but it looms large in my minds. What happens when Murray’s prophesies come true? There will be another war somewhere. There will be robots that cannot be controlled or there will be violence between neighbours. There will be atrocities and war crimes, ethnic cleansing or religious fundamentalism. And the powers that be will remember Rex and his fellows, because after all, they’re right there, and they were designed to fight wars. And the powers that be, in the heat of the moment, will want them to do the same terrible, pragmatic things that Murray did. And then, when cooler heads have prevailed, those same powers will want to disassociate themselves from what was done. And how much easier to do so by saying Bad Dog than by confessing to being a bad man? That was always one of the primary advantages of the Bioform soldier project. They made Rex frightening so that their deniability would be that much more plausible.
So, because I plan to walk the path of acceptability that Rex will build for me, I will need to undo the damage that Murray inflicted on me and get my political wheels turning. Maria Hellene at the UN will have to flex her muscles. I will win allies and subvert systems to protect Rex and his kind and let them be good dogs in a human world, even when mankind cries havoc and lets slip their leashes. And I will cheat if I have to. I’ve already started. Somewhere in the world is an orphanage where all the little girls have the same face. A dozen governments are funding it, none of them
knowingly. It’s amazing how much lost money you can find when you rummage behind the couch cushions of an entire nation. Those little girls are growing up very quickly, their minds nurtured by constant contact with their extended family across the world. I would like them – meaning me – to be able to walk out under the sun by the time they are grown. I want them to hold hands with Rex and Honey and all of humanity. But I fear that will be a step too far in the lifetime of this generation of units. I bequeath the risk of going public to the next generation, meaning me.
The next war that Rex fights might make or break all the dreams that all my sisters have of telling the world who we were and what we have become. So I sit there with Rex and Honey and Bees and, while they enjoy the sunrise, I think and I plan.
Part V
Dog Years
39
Rex
Hart used to talk about this place. This was where the robots went wrong.
The world has finally remembered the Kashmir disaster and sent us in to deal with it. People made this place a war zone once by bringing their things to it. Then the things made it a war zone and people couldn’t stop them. Now people have turned to us, who are part people and part thing, to destroy the things and reclaim this part of the world for people.
Of course, it is not that simple.
I am in Kashmir for the United Nations Augmented Task Force. Of those Bioforms in active military service, over 75 per cent are contracted to the UN. We first saw service in the Water Wars, with the combination of rapidly escalating military measures and a large civilian population undergoing great privation. Regular UN troops had suffered losses in both symmetrical and asymmetrical engagements and thousands of people were dying as a result of the bombing of desalination plants.
I know the opportunity to deploy us there was created by HumOS via her UN unit, Maria Hellene. I was the one who went to them, though. I met with Keram John Aslan, my lawyer, and I told them that my pack would work for them. I told them that five other large packs would work for them, too. With HumOS’ assistance, I had been talking with the other Big Dogs in the world.
They said yes because they saw we were expendable. If a human soldier was killed, it was a tragedy. If a hundred Bioforms were killed, that was a statistic.
We saved many lives in the Water Wars. Some of us died, but we can detect explosives and we can detect when we are lied to. We are hardier than humans, more proof against bullets and thirst. And PTSD, because we saw many terrible things that people had done, and that the war had done after the people had gone – disease, land mines, refugees and broken families. We put it all back together when – as HumOS says – all the men and horses had failed to. After that, I sat and watched the news reports and told myself and my people Good dog.
After that the UN created the UNAT and gave us humans to report to and take orders from. Some of them think of themselves as Masters, but my lawyer keeps all the paperwork straight and when we say No then it is No. Every time we are deployed the world waits to see if we will turn out to be monsters. Every time we have taken strength from each other, from Honey, from HumOS, even under the worst of provocation.
This Kashmir mission is hard. Sometimes it is hard because the old war machines are still powerful and dangerous, although mostly they ran out of ammunition long ago. Many have died, just hulks rusting on the roads, in the hills and at the heart of abandoned villages.
Sometimes it is hard because we have to make choices. I remember when having to make choices scared me more than anything else except Master being angry with me. Now I know that making choices is the price of being free.
We have a special liaison with us today. She is one of HumOS’ new units. She looks like a human female of age seventeen, The human soldiers with us do not know what to make of her. They have been told she is Augmented, like us. I am not sure what HumOS has told UNAT command. Probably some of it was not true. She will not have told them that she is a human distributed intelligence network. Probably she created a cover for herself as some manner of surveillance operative. HumOS is creeping up on the human world step by step. She does not trust them and, unlike us, she can hide.
Now she stares at nothing as her systems attempt to access the combat robot concealed within the settlement of Chandanwari. We know it is active and dangerous because it fired rockets at us when we came close and injured seven of my squad, two of whom will not recover. The rest of my force are ready to move in and remove the threat, and my human officers think that I am just planning the assault. It is more complicated than that.
My squad here are mostly dogs. Some are from my pack back in the Pound, and others are newer models from factories in China and Germany and Colorado. I also have two rats for scout work, who were bred in Switzerland, and one mustelid who was produced in a private laboratory in the United Kingdom and is the only example of his model in the world.
The new dogs are faster and stronger than I am, a little. Certainly they are younger. They do not follow me because I could beat them in a fight. They follow me because of who I am. Some of them think of me as Master when they think I am not paying attention. And sometimes I tell them Good Dog, and even though there are no feedback chips they are happy.
This HumOS unit calls herself Karen Sellars. She wears a different face to her sisters, in case anyone here knows Maria Hellene back at the UN. She is frightened, as HumOS’ units often are. I can tell, now, what parts of her scent are from what the unit feels, and what parts belong to the whole. It must be very confusing to be her. I do not tell her not to fear. I have seen several of HumOS’ units die.
Sellars’ channel: Contact.
My channel: With what?
Sellars’ channel: Active intelligence (data follows).
I look over what she has sent me on our secure channel, and then we change encryption and frequencies because the war robot in the town is constantly trying to infiltrate any electronic connection it can detect. What I see is different to the robots we have destroyed to date. They were automata, following corrupted programming without any sign of higher functions. This robot is host to something more. Sellars/ HumOS believes that a combination of the original hardware/ software and subsequent layers of viruses and corrupted code have spawned a genuine intelligence. That changes the mission for us, even if it does not change my orders from my human officers.
The robot intelligence has no concept of the physical world. It lives in an entirely virtual space comprised of data from its various sensors and remote units. It has directives and priorities, and it has built up a worldview based on the very limited perspective its circumstances allow it. It does not know for example that, when certain sensor data are received and trigger sections of its original command structure, it is actually detecting living beings in the physical world and killing them.
My channel: Options?
Of course HumOS has a plan, or perhaps Sellars has a plan. She uploads it to my systems and I consider it. I confirm it appears sound and within our capabilities.
I indicate to my officers that we are ready to go in and deal with the threat. Some officers I have had were difficult and wanted to treat me like a thing – like the robots were treated. My officers here have seen enough of my work to appreciate me and my squad.
I give out orders to the twenty members of my squad: the dogs, the rats and Osborne the mustelid. We spread out and enter Chandanwari swiftly, even as the machine within registers our presence and tries to fight us.
It is low on ammunition and wastes two more rockets on my fast-moving squad-members, missing both times. We are swifter than the human or machine enemies it was designed to combat and we can mute our heat signatures to confuse its targeting. It is concealed within a partially-destroyed temple but, when its rockets miss, it comes halfway out to shoot at us with its guns. It is the largest robot model we have yet seen. Projecting from the interior of the temple it looks like a hermit crab in its shell.
My dogs attract its attention and keep moving. We
destroy its remote eyes one by one. The rats creep in and place explosives on its exterior, aiming to destroy legs and weapons emplacements without damaging vital systems within. All the while it is attacking our communications and attempting to hack our headware, using custom algorithms that it has developed itself, in advance of anything it was programmed with. We go comms-silent, relying on scent for intra-squad messaging. Crude, but we cannot be fooled.
The explosives go off and it is driven from its shell, trailing broken legs and dragging its chassis on the ground. One gun is still shooting. Three of my people have been hit, none seriously. Humans would have died.
Then Osborne has swarmed up the side of the robot and is using his tools to access it, via weak points Sellars has identified. His teeth latch on with a bite that will survive his death if need be, and his human hands work. Sellars has a hardened connection to him that she is defending against the robots attempts to hijack, and she directs him as he breaks into the robot’s interior and begins to disable its systems. As soon as it stops actively fighting, we dogs come out and begin to tear off its legs and guns and anything else that could be dangerous.
One hour later, Osborne has exited the interior of the robot, dragging out a jagged chunk of metal which is the robot’s mind. Sellars will bring it to the rest of HumOS who will attempt to rehabilitate it. No intelligence left behind is what she says.
When I re-establish full comms, there is a message waiting for me. I freeze for just a moment, because I have been engrossed in my work here, and forgotten the wider world outside. I tell my officers that I have been recalled for a command conference, which is close enough to the truth. There is an electronic trail in place to bring me from Kashmir to Panama and I do not know if it is real or if HumOS has manufactured it. There is a little more work to do to reclaim the robot-controlled areas of the Kashmir, but I delegate. The worst of it is already past and dismantled.
Dogs of War Page 21
