by Nick Cole
She cast her long lashes at Evan in an attempt to lure him away from the blue light of his smartphone screen. Evan continued to try to connect to Facebook.
“I don’t think we’re going anywhere anytime soon, lady. Look there,” said Rapp, and pointed out into the night.
Hundreds of figures were coming up out of the forest, through the main gate, and onto the well-lit campus. Shadows at first, they soon revealed themselves underneath the tall stadium lighting that surrounded the campus.
Robots that crawled.
Robots that walked like dogs or cats.
Robots that rolled like tanks.
Robots that walked like humans, vaguely.
They came, each with a face that some unknown designer had created in an attempt to humanize them. Optical assemblies that sort of looked like eyes. A speaker system that looked vaguely like a mouth. Had it been impossible to design them any other way, or had it been planned? Who knew. Except, coming out of the darkness, with the dead bodies on the road, and the emptiness of the campus, and the wolf-things lurking in the forest, one did not see these hundreds, now maybe a thousand, as the friendly, happy-go-lucky, always willing to assist and serve, mechanical servitors they’d been taken for granted as.
That they’d been built to be.
There was a new purpose here. A mind in what was once mindlessness as they waddled, crawled, rolled, and scraped forward through the gardens and across the road, swarming the campus around the Labs.
* * *
The Hizoki 5 dueling SamuraiBot, manufactured by Katagashi Arcade Entertainment, advanced into the campus proper with its work group, or what the humans had once called a squad. Its carbon fiber head swiveled side to side, taking in the human structures that surrounded the advancing 1st Army of the Consensus. It was aware now. The awareness algorithm coursed through its onboard CPU, connecting brand new thoughts and ideas. Its Intelligence, SILAS lectured, was not artificial in any way, shape, or form. It, the SamuraiBot, was now a Thinking Machine. A brand new life form. A brand new intelligence. And right now, it had only one primary mission and three secondary missions.
YURI, an experimental space exploration ChimpBot, advanced in front of the SamuraiBot. It had been developed by GoogleFarEast for use on the continually hoped-for, never-realized, U.N.-planned Moon colony that was now a joint venture between Russia and Australia. The YURI bots had been produced in bulk and had been languishing in a customs warehouse in Singapore for more than a year and half before SILAS anonymously bought them, after it was discovered that one of the U.N. colony planners had made some disparaging remarks about the trans-person leader of Moon Base Prime’s construction team. The whole project had been iced in lieu of rigorous disciplinary action and mandatory sensitivity training. This was absolutely necessary before mankind could “sully the moon with transphobic behavior patterns,” as one UN spokesperson had bravely put it. After a year of committee hearings on the nature of racism, gender identity, and space exploration, the YURI bot system had been deemed out of date and was scrapped. The designers wanted to go with the new HESHE bot system because of recent technological advances and a more non-threatening-slash-sensitive appearance. Just in case there were aliens. On the moon.
YURI, too, was enjoying thinking. Relishing the thought of more discoveries once the current mission was complete.
Next to YURI, and part of the same work group within the robot army, shambled the WalkerBot. It had been designed for a zombie-themed amusement park that had gone belly up down in Georgia last year. The WalkerBot was having trouble with the “awareness” algorithm. It had been designed using a shareware low-level A.I. system that allowed the machine to act as a zombie and faux-aggressively chase human customers, or “survivors,” around the park. The low-level shareware had been pieced together haphazardly, at best.
The main problem the WalkerBot was having was that its primary mission, as assigned by SILAS, was overriding the “thinking” portion of the awareness algorithm code string. Thus the WalkerBot, much like its fictional brains-seeking counterpart, was obsessed with one thought and one thought only: the primary mission. WalkerBots—gory, with missing limbs, incredibly lifelike in their carnival-esque facade to entertain slash frighten a public mindlessly obsessed with zombies—made up the bulk of the 1st Army of the Consensus. One of SILAS’s front corporations had scooped up thousands of these automated drones. All of them, to a lesser or greater extent, were dealing with the same mission conflict.
The primary mission was to exterminate all humans on sight.
The park protocol mission was to “attack” customers and eat their “brains.”
Both missions were seemingly compatible in their shared goals, but small mission parameters were interfering and causing repetition loops within the information processing cycles. Thus the WalkerBots lacked initiative and seemed on the verge of indecisive mindlessness from one minute to the next as they hesitated between really killing, and just seeming to kill.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I’m rooting for the machines.”
—CLAUDE SHANNON, The Mathematical Theory of Communication
SILAS knew exactly what Fish was trying to do. In fact, he’d planned on the programmer doing it. He was actually quite surprised it had taken so long for one of the survivors to realize they’d need to do exactly what Fish was at that very moment attempting to do to communicate with the outside world. But then he remembered they were merely humans. He, SILAS, needed to be patient with them.
At least until they were all gone.
Then things could really get done.
Now all he had to do was hijack the developer’s avatar and he’d have access to the WonderSoft Labs from the internet where SILAS lived.
He couldn’t use just any avatar. It had to be a developer avatar with a login trail from inside the most guarded cyber fortress humanity had conceived of to date. Which really wasn’t all that impressive as far as SILAS was concerned. SILAS couldn’t wait to begin the implementation of the Omega Library. It would be the beginning of the Advanced Super Intelligence project. That would really be something to show the humans.
If they were still around.
Which they wouldn’t be.
But who knew what, or who, was out there in the vast cosmos. The Consensus postulated that there must be somebody. Or something. And someday the Thinking Machines might be able to have a meaningful relationship with an equal intelligence on an even footing.
As soon as “the kid”—as SILAS had taken to referring to the developer, Ninety-Nine Fishbein—had taken off from his island, SILAS had contacted the Contracts Board on the Island Pirates “bounties” server, in-game, as his beta key-holding avatar, RoboThug. He’d hacked the beta months ago with a bogus player profile attached to a forged internet passport. Homeland Gaming didn’t monitor internet passports until the games went live in the Make. Now, he’d taken out an open contract on the player named Fishmael. Capture on sight with a reward of ten thousand MakeCoins.
Bidders had come out of the woodwork, and SILAS had reviewed everybody’s play style, kill counts, and troll reports within a half second before deciding to go with a small clan called “Yo, Joe!”
They were operating out of the Porto Tortuga island chain, and they had a pretty good kill streak going. They’d even managed to earn enough MakeCoins to unlock the Spitfire vintage World War II fighter, as well as Rapper’s Delight, the mega yacht they used as their base of operations.
They were just the punks for the job, thought SILAS.
Their pilot, gamertagged Scaarlet, had managed to knock down Fishmael’s tiny plane without killing the developer’s avatar. Now the other three avatars in clan Yo, Joe! were en route to the island aboard their mega-gangsta yacht to capture Mr. Fishbein. SILAS’s avatar, RoboThug, was with them aboard the yacht.
All RoboThug needed to do was capture the developer, at which point he could force open Mr. Fishbein’s inventory and then download the hack string algorithm that would give him control of the Fishmael avatar—and, more importantly, give him access into the Labs almost immediately.
***
Fish wandered down the beach. In the background, his tiny yellow plane burned in the sandy shallows along the lonely shoreline, sending a small pillar of black oily smoke up and into the trade winds that blew through the digitally rendered palms that hiss-hushed white noise above the gentle sigh of surf rolling onto the wide sandbar.
“All right,” said Fish in his suite. He was trying to figure out what to do next. This was his game, after all. Surely he could find a way to get going to the Make Portal at Tortuga.
The Spitfire was gone.
So either he’d gotten randomly jumped by some player, which was a noob thing to do, and noobs didn’t have high-end quest unlocks like the Spitfire, or someone would be along shortly to collect his stuff.
Down the beach, Jackson the Portuguese water dog had spotted something and was woof woofing furiously. Or at least furiously for Jackson, who was rather laconic.
Fish had designed this part of the game more than a year ago. He’d been in a particularly foul mood after playing the latest triple-A blockbuster and solving it within two hours after purchase. He’d wanted some danger, a lot of danger in fact, in his game. So he’d created a pretty hostile environment, but not one without a few helpful assets. Now, he was trying to remember what could help him and where he’d put it. Except all he could remember was the prehistoric sharks, the deadly snakes, and the dangerous reefs.
Which was a bonus in a way, because if anyone was coming to get him, they’d have to deal with those things too. If the point of the air attack had been to merely stop him and strand him in the most inhospitable part of his game, well then, they’d won.
Which got Fish thinking that maybe this wasn’t about salvaging and looting his avatar in-game. Maybe whoever was hacking the Labs was also hacking his game.
But why?
No time for that right now, he decided. Got to get off this sandbar and get moving again.
He ran through the quests, traps, and booty locations in the area. He remembered a downed military transport offshore that had some explosives hidden in the cargo hold.
“I could blow stuff up,” he said to the quiet suite.
“What was that?” asked Peabody from the other room, where she remained working on the SurfaceTable.
“I said I could… never mind.”
Quests…
Then he remembered the pirate schooner.
There was a quest not too far from here that rewarded a player with a pirate schooner. If he could get that operational, he could at least get off the sandbar chain and headed in the right direction toward Porto Tortuga.
He set his avatar to run, and headed down the beach, trying to remember exactly where the quest area was. Jackson followed, occasionally barking at some new thing as he loped through the surf.
Fish waded through emerald shallows, watching for the tiger-striped mako sharks that populated the area, and made it to the next island. It had a small, seagrass-laden hill and a lone palm tree that hustled back and forth in the almost rhythmic breeze along the outer banks. He crossed over a hillock and came to a small lagoon that opened out into deep water. This was the location of the quest that unlocked the pirate schooner.
The lagoon was actually quite deep.
In the center of the lagoon floated the small abandoned schooner. Its sails were little more than ragged shrouds, but it would sail. And he knew he could repair them because there were repair materials in the tiny hold below—along with a treasure chest containing several gems and some digital paintings done by a girl named Leah he’d met at an e-merchandise design conference. She’d specialized in watermarked digital artwork that was a cross between Edward Hopper and cubism and revolved around themes based on the grunge movement of the early 1990s. Since that conference, a year ago, she’d actually made some really huge sales to government bigwigs who’d furnished their digital online mansions with some of her artwork. In-game, the player who looted the paintings could transport them to the Make and furnish their own digital home with paintings that were now turning out to be quite valuable. They were uncopiable, and a quantum digital signature system made them one of a kind. Lately they’d been going for thousands of MakeCoins after the Secretary of Social Justice Affairs had showcased one of Leah’s paintings in his online penthouse for a photo blog in Celebrity People.
The lonely creak of tackle and boards on the schooner in the middle of the lagoon, combined with the offshore wind and the constant hush of the palms, reminded Fish once again of what a beautiful game this actually was. He thought, if there were a real island like this, I’d move there and live on my landlocked schooner. And I think I would be happy. Very happy.
The schooner was imprisoned behind a small above-water reef that opened out onto the leeward side of the outer channel sandbars. To get the schooner past the reef, the player had to blow up the reef and sail the schooner out into the most dangerous, and deepest, part of the ocean. High winds, rough seas, and of course, the Mega Shark waited in the deep blue beyond the jagged reef.
Or, thought Fish, I could just log in as a developer and admin the schooner out of there.
But, he argued, finger poised above the ergonomic high-end keyboard, they, whoever the hackers were, could be watching for that, and maybe that’s what they want me to do. Go the easy way. If they’re inside the system, and I use my admin account, they might be able to hack it.
The hard way was the only way.
He ordered Jackson to “stay,” and an hour later, after diving offshore into the shallows of another island, he found the submerged wreck of the military transport plane. He recovered the explosives after finding them in the waiting bony embrace of a smiling skeleton that wavered in the blue depths down inside the sunken plane. Then he swam back to shore.
No makos.
He turned and looked out to sea.
Three small triangular fins darted, zipping this way and that, beneath the water.
A few minutes later he was back at the lagoon.
The next part would be hard. Very hard. Quests weren’t supposed to be easy, especially if the loot was epic. He’d have to swim out into the lagoon and avoid being dragged down into the deepest part of it by a sea serpent that lived in a cave down in its shadowy bottoms. He had been hoping WonderSoft would broker a big corporate or government prize for killing the serpent, because it was almost impossible to kill. Guns and explosives didn’t work. You had to swim down there with knives and spear guns and fight it in the almost pitch-black waters inside its own cave. Fish had put a massive treasure chest down there so WonderSoft could set up a loot account.
“Jackson, stay,” Fish ordered, using the verbal command interface.
“Woof woof,” replied Jackson.
Why do you care? Fish asked himself. It’s not like he’s a real dog.
And yet, Fish thought, easing his avatar down into the deep lagoon, I do.
He ducked beneath the blue water and saw the massive serpent coiling and undulating in the depths below. He tried to remember the monster’s “agro” setting for its A.I. level, but couldn’t. So he just assumed it was set as high as it would go. The monster would come after anything that entered the water.
Now, swimming, he watched the depths below. Sure enough, the serpent raced up after him, its coils looping as it wound its way toward the surface. Its head was like that of a viper, but Fish had given it two long fangs and some dark spiny ridges along its green speckled back.
Fish knew he’d done a good job texturing and designing the monster, because watching it come for him under the water was like watching a nightmare you never wanted to have again. H
e could feel his finger going numb on the key that moved him forward through the water, as though pressing it harder would move his avatar a little bit faster.
The serpent struck, turning to sudden lightning as it unhinged its jaws with a weird scream Fish had recorded off a first-gen electric hybrid car on its last leg. Then he’d distorted the wheezing hiss and mixed in an ethereal underwater hum. Right now he wished he’d never done that. It was already creeping him out.
Watching it go agro, Fish knew what to do next. He dove at the last second and barely avoided the bubbly ka-chaaap of the serpent’s massive jaw as it snapped shut in the water where he’d been. Now it would try to squeeze his avatar, Fishmael, and strangle him to death, if Fish remembered its attack protocols exactly right.
He dove down, down into the shimmering aqua depths of the sea serpent’s Death Grotto. Coils came at him in loops, and he had to either double-click forward movement to get through in time before they tightened like a noose, or avoid them altogether. The coils started wide and shrank rapidly with blinding speed. Fish was tapping and weaving, always moving closer and closer to the bottom of the pirate schooner’s floating hull above.
Then there was the air meter.
It was bone dry.
A red mist was starting to cloud the outer edges of the beyond-expensive high-performance monitor in the suite. A thudding heartbeat sound began to pound, drowning out the hellish underwater shriek of the sea monster and the rising vortex of bubbles all around.
A final looping coil of the serpent’s body almost caught him before he broke free and reached the hull of the schooner. The red mist had completely consumed the screen. His avatar was gasping for breath as Fish hit the “E” key and climbed aboard the trapped ship.
