by Todd McAulty
After the fall of the United States, the mood of the entire planet changed overnight. People stopped believing that the handful of remaining human democracies represented the future. Lots of folks, me included, weren’t even sure the planet had a future. Machine tyrants, emboldened by the collapse of the United States, seem to be popping up everywhere. Everything was changing much too quickly, and machines, sinister and seemingly all-powerful, were seizing power all over the globe. If they could topple mighty America, was any place safe? How long could China, Australia, Mexico, and other fragile human-governed strongholds hold out?
I fled England in the fall of 2081 and came here to Jamaica. For a simple Thought Machine such as myself, this Caribbean island paradise represented a fresh start. No one cared that I was a machine. No one paid much attention to global politics. The big topics were the weather and rugby. I changed my name to Paul, focused on getting my life together, and forgetting my ex.
But you know, you can’t turn your back on the world forever. So I write. I stay connected. I still have powerful friends in powerful places, human and machine, and they share things with me that they can’t talk about publicly. I pass those nuggets along here. Mostly I blog about politics, and speak out against the rising tide of machine ambition and machine fascism and bigoted edicts like the Wallace Act wherever I see them. You should too, sister.
Also, you should fish. Someplace quiet, away from the world, where the simple rhythms of the planet have reestablished themselves. It’s good for the soul. I don’t know you, but I know this simple truth about you: you could use it.
Trust me.
II
Monday, March 8th, 2083
Posted 11:18 pm by Barry Simcoe
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I’m back in my room, finally able to write all this down. It’s been almost two years since I kept a blog, but I think maybe I chose the right time to pick it up again. Last time I didn’t have anything nearly as exciting as a goddamn mech attack to open with, anyway.
For now I’ve set sharing to private, but hopefully I can start making entries a little more public as we go along. I suspect I’ll be making most of them late at night, like this one. I’m grateful the hotel provides so many amenities for an extended stay, like a coffeemaker and a hot plate. Because, man. This has been a shit day.
But I’ve been in the war now. I’ll have a story to tell when I get back to Toronto. I met Colonel Perez, and Sergei, and Black Winter. Those are positive developments. Also, I didn’t get put in front of a firing squad for killing a Venezuelan soldier, so that’s something.
The corporal didn’t make it. Sergei tried like hell to save his life, but he’d just lost too much blood.
He died trying to help evacuate the hotel. That’s the way Perez put it. He died a hero. That’s what Perez wrote in the letter that went home to Venezuela.
I watched him write it. “He saved your life,” Perez said matter-of-factly as he wrote on his little slate. “He saved many lives.”
I’m telling this all out of order. I’m tired, and I’m not making any sense. Let me start over.
It started with the kid who was assigned to watch over me after I was arrested.
I call him a kid because he was a kid. He wore a Venezuelan uniform, but like most of the soldiers, he couldn’t have been more than eighteen. When his sergeant wasn’t around he slouched against the wall, or watched these little movies on a tablet. He was supposed to be guarding me, but ten minutes after the sergeant left we were playing a Japanese racing game on a medical monitor. Kid could barely shoulder a rifle, but lemme tell you, he drove that little red cart like a son of a bitch.
We were in a cramped little storage room where the Venezuelans had stacked a bunch of medical equipment, but after I lost the fourth game a frantic team of medics came in for the gear and kicked us out. After a few minutes of nervous indecision, the kid marched me over to one of the big conference rooms on the convention floor of the hotel and sat me down next to a stack of broken metal.
I preferred the storage room. For one thing, there was much more activity here, including a lot more soldiers with guns. The mech had vanished to the west and the shooting was all over, but the Venezuelans had worked up a good panic, and would run around shouting for another half an hour before finally settling down. For another thing, the kid was much less relaxed out in the open. In the storage room he’d been affable enough. But here, where his fellow soldiers—and presumably his commanding officer—could see him, mostly what he did was glower at me and distractedly finger his rifle.
So I sat quietly on my ass for the next few minutes, until the stack of metal spoke to me.
“I know you,” it said.
“Shit,” I said, startled. “You scared me. What are you?”
As soon as I asked the question, I recognized the twisted pile of scrap next to me. It was the black-limbed robot, the one that had brushed past me on Stetson Avenue during the attack. Or what was left of it.
“My name is Nineteen Black Winter,” he said. “Good to see you again.”
“What happened to you?”
“Catastrophic systems failure,” he said. “I have about five hours of power left, and then it’s tits up.”
“Damn.” I sat up so I could get a better look, ignoring the sour look I got from the kid.
Back when I’d had access to real bandwidth I’d subscribed to a news feed edited by Paul the Pirate, a Jamaican Thought Machine. Though he’s an “independent journalist,” Paul is more reliable than most media—and has better sources. He used to post these hilarious identification charts for mobile machines, just so you could tell what you were dealing with if you ran into an unfamiliar robot in a dark alley.
I’d never seen a machine exactly like Black Winter before, but thanks to what I remembered from Paul’s charts I could tell he was highly advanced. His chassis was humanoid, maybe five foot seven, about six inches shorter than me. I estimated him at about 250 pounds. He had the classic “flattop” head of top-of-the-line South American machine intelligences. Handsome features, albeit set in an almost rigid face that, unlike European models, was incapable of a wide range of expression.
He’d said something about a shrapnel hit when we first met, but that wasn’t the only thing wrong with him. His right leg was badly twisted, and he was bleeding fluid. There was also a nasty crack in his torso.
“I got about fifty feet down the road after passing you,” he said. “Then I took a bad spill. Split open my external housing.”
“You’re leaking core coolant,” I said. “You’ll overheat and shut down before you lose power.”
“Great. They had to sit me down next to a goddamn drive mechanic.”
“I’m serious.” I reached toward him. “If we can find the source of the leak, maybe we can pinch it off . . .”
His left hand came up to wave me off. It was trembling badly. “I’m well aware of the severity of my injuries. I’m leaking in at least three different places. And there are . . . worse problems. There’s nothing you can do, I’m afraid. But thank you for your concern.”
I looked around the room. It was quickly transforming into a field hospital as they carried the wounded and dying upstairs. But at the moment, it was pandemonium. Most of the wounded—nine soldiers and two civilians—were still on the floor, and the few medical staff I could see were running back and forth in confusion, trying to get the diagnostic beds they’d wheeled out of storage booted up and operational.
“We need to get you some help,” I said.
“The soldiers who brought me up here told me they were headed to Machine Operations at ComSec. It’s a long shot, but maybe they can locate a new mobile core for me.”
That wa
s unlikely. A mobile robotic core wasn’t something you just found lying around. It’s like hoping for a heart transplant at your local health clinic. “And if they can’t find one?”
“Let’s not dwell on the negative,” Black Winter said. “Fear is the path to the Dark Side.”
“The dark side of what?”
“Never mind. Let’s talk about you. What’s your situation?”
“Better than yours,” I said. “I’m not injured.”
“Aren’t you? I saw you go down.”
“Yeah—well.” I rubbed the back of my hand against the sore spot on my forehead. It came away with a smear of dried blood. “That’s not why I’m here, I mean.”
“Why are you here, then?”
I told Black Winter about the dying corporal, and the sergeant who’d drawn a gun on me and then arrested me.
“Damn,” he said. “That’s terrible.”
“It’s not that bad. It’s just a misunderstanding. I’m sure it’ll be cleared up shortly.”
“If you say so. These Venezuelans, they’re dead paranoid. They still see traitors and terrorists everywhere. They haven’t forgotten what things were like before the city surrendered. They lost a lot of soldiers to a very determined guerrilla force.”
“Aren’t you Venezuelan?”
“Me? Hell no. I’m property of the royal family, mate. I’m a subject of Her Royal Majesty Queen Sophia, Sovereign Monarch of the Kingdom of Manhattan.”
“Manhattan? What’s a high-class piece of hardware like you doing so far from Sector One? Are you a soldier?”
“Shit, no. I’m a civilian. I’m with the Foreign Service. We hear word the Clarksville negotiations could produce a lasting peace this time. If that’s true, Sector Eleven—including Chicago, and much of what used to be northern Illinois—could officially become part of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. I’m here to lay the groundwork for formal relations before that happens.”
That explained why Black Winter had been dumped here instead of being immediately brought to one of the Venezuelan machine depots, where they probably could have helped him. Likely no one knew what to do with him.
“The people you work with,” I said. “Do they know you’re here?”
“The Consulate staff? Yeah. Well, I hope so. There aren’t many of us, I’m afraid. Manhattan is a young nation, and the Foreign Service is stretched pretty thin.”
The puddle under Black Winter was growing. “Someone should be checking on those soldiers,” I said. “Make sure they made it to ComSec and are bringing you help.” Personally, I had my doubts those soldiers had really headed to ComSec after dumping Black Winter here, regardless of what they’d told him.
“I’m sure they are,” he said. If he was trying to sound confident, he wasn’t doing a very good job. “Honestly, you should be more worried about yourself. Sergeant Van de Velde is a hard-ass.”
“Van de Velde? That’s who arrested me?”
“I assume so. She was the sergeant on duty when the shit hit the fan. She’s one of Colonel Perez’s favorites. But if she thinks you were messing with her corporal under cover of the attack, she’ll have you in front of a firing squad before you can spit sideways.”
“That won’t happen. I was trying to help that man, and there’s no evidence to the contrary.”
“Where do you think you are? Paris in the springtime? She doesn’t need evidence. It’s your word against hers. And if she thinks you’re guilty, you’re goddamn guilty.”
I chewed on that silently. Around us, the pandemonium had gradually abated. A field medic who knew what he was doing had finally arrived and taken charge, getting a long row of functional diagnostic tables set up. I heard him shouting in Russian as he stalked up and down the rows of tables, supervising as soldiers lifted the wounded up off the floor.
“Listen,” said Black Winter. “For what it’s worth, I believe you. You seem like a decent guy.”
“Thank you.”
“You need to give the Venezuelans a chance to hear you. You do that, and I think there’s a good chance they’ll believe you, too.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe. I just need a chance to talk to Van de Velde for a minute.”
“Uh-uh, not her. One of her men just died, and she’s looking for someone to punish. You need to appeal to someone higher up.”
“Who?”
“Capitán Reise, if you can. If not him, try to get an audience with Colonel Perez. He’s got a nasty rep, but he’s actually an okay guy.”
I was a little surprised. “You know the colonel?”
Black Winter’s shoulders rose in a fair imitation of a shrug. “A little. He’s the one I’m supposed to be negotiating with, but it’s pretty hard to get time with him. I guess formal relations with the island of Manhattan just aren’t very high on his priority list.”
“Then he’s an idiot,” I said, trying to be supportive.
“Obviously.”
I was definitely open to more advice from Black Winter on how I could avoid a firing squad, but we both got distracted by the unfolding drama in front of us. The soldiers and medical techs who’d set up the diagnostic tables didn’t know how to use the equipment, and their patients were dying.
“This is goddamn awful,” Black Winter said. “Those idiots don’t know what they’re doing.”
“They’ve calibrated the tables wrong,” I said anxiously. The Russian was screaming at the other medics as one of the injured soldiers started coughing blood and straining against his restraints.
“My God,” I said helplessly.
“You know how to fix this?” Black Winter asked.
“Maybe. I used to sell medical equipment. But I’ll never get the chance. They won’t listen to me.”
“You know what I think?” the robot said. “I think you and I could be dead in a few hours. And all it would take to save either one of us is the right word in the right ear. That’s what I’m sitting here pondering. That when you have a chance to save a life, maybe you have an obligation to do it.”
“I can’t do anything.”
“That’s your fear talking. If we’re already under a death sentence, what have you got to be afraid of?”
I watched the nearest pair of medical technicians frantically pecking away at the console for the diagnostic table as a nurse prepared to send a camera down the throat of the soldier lying on top of it. I nodded to Black Winter, and then I stood up.
The kid was so distracted that he didn’t even notice until I strode right past him. By the time he started objecting, I’d already reached the table.
It was calibrated wrong, all right. The console was flashing half a dozen error messages. I cleared the first three while the medics worked, and then stopped the nurse just before he gave him an injection.
“He’s got internal bleeding,” I told him. “Look—here. And here.”
The medics came around the side so they could see the display. For a moment I was worried none of them understood English, but two of them translated for the others. I showed them where the bleeding was. “You need to yank that camera out, and stop the bleeding,” I said. “The table’s scanners can guide you. Let it know what sedatives you’re going to inject before you do it; the table can check for drug interactions.”
They nodded gratefully. I was about to move to the next table when I got shoved from behind. The kid stood glaring at me, clutching his rifle. “You have to sit down,” he said threateningly.
Before I could respond, the Russian medic was at my side. “Who are you?” he said.
“I’m Barry Simcoe,” I told him. “I can calibrate these tables for you.”
“Can you prep diagnostic scanner for surgery?”
“Sure.”
The Russian grabbed my arm, then pulled me forcefully across the room. The kid followed, complaining loudly.
“Move,” the Russian said. Two technicians hunched over a table moved hastily out of his way.
Lying on the table was the bl
ood-covered body of the corporal. The one I’d tried to help, and who had died in my hands.
He wasn’t breathing. An external reflux machine was oxygenating his blood and keeping it flowing, but it wasn’t enough to bring him back from the dead.
“Sergei, his BP is still dropping,” said one of the technicians. The Russian nodded and started rolling up his sleeves, preparing to cut the corporal open.
“I need scanner now,” he said, without looking at me.
“Yes, of course,” I said. I managed to break my paralysis and turned to the scanner console on my right.
It didn’t take much to get it working—the technicians had been pretty close. Sergei made his first incision while the scanner was still pairing with the table, but by the time he needed it, I had all the data from the scanner displayed on the console.
The corporal didn’t make it. Sergei worked on him for almost ten minutes before cursing loudly, throwing a sheet over his face, and moving on to his next patient. They zipped the corporal into a bag and carried him to the far side of the room, next to two other still forms on the floor. Another tech arrived to take over operating the scanner, and I slipped away for a few minutes to sit on the floor with my head in my hands.
One of the medics found me again after a while. “We’re having trouble with one of the respirators,” she said.
“I can’t help you,” I said.
“Come on,” she said gently.
She brought me over to another table, this one occupied by a conscious civilian. The field techs were a diverse group—I’d spotted Russian, Venezuelan, and Colombian flags on their sleeves—but they were having a hard time with the American medical equipment. I had to get the table to interface with the Venezuelan respirator they’d given the patient. It wasn’t hard, and before long I was walking from table to table, checking on all the equipment.
