by Nick Cole
“This battle is lossst, we need to get out of here,” whisper-hissed the Gorn.
Mara thought of the five thousand MakeCoins and her plans. Her dreams. The chance for… everything.
“I have to get on that starbase, and you’ve got to be cloaked when I do,” interrupted the stunning Vulcan avatar T’Daara. “That’s our deal, Captain.”
“Looks like its ‘Captain Time,’ girly,” growled Varek from the shadowy recess of the comm station.
It’s almost too much for just me, thought Mara. Lose our ship and our ability to make a few MakeCoins…
… or run and live to fight another day.
Or, maybe actually win something for once in my life.
Maybe even… everything.
“Load plasma torpedo.”
Silence.
“Uh,” spoke BattleBabe in the confused moment that followed, her voice rising just above the tick and beep of the ship’s instruments and the lonely pulse of the sensor sweep. “We can’t fire a plasma at warp, Captain. They’ll easily avoid it.”
“Yes,” replied Mara coolly. “And to do that, they’ll have to make some S turns. Each turn puts us a little farther ahead if we continue going straight on to our destination.”
No one said anything. Then Varek spoke up.
“What good is that? We make it to the starbase just a little ahead of them. A few minutes early, girly. What’s that buy us? When they show up they’re going to pound us into space dust with overloaded photon torpedoes.”
Mara waited. The next part was crazy. Even she knew it.
“No, it doesn’t buy us a lot, Varek. But, we’re carrying forty Romulan marines. Our one shuttle is transporter-equipped. Nothing in the deal says I have to make it to the starbase with the ship. After we lob a few plasmas at them, at warp, we’ll launch a pseudo-plasma and hide a shuttle inside it. They’ll avoid it, thinking it’s another of our real torpedoes, but if we can make it a close shot, we’ll have a small window to use the shuttle’s transporters to board Intrepid.”
“A very small window, girly,” gravel-crowed Varek.
“We’re talking the blink of an eye!” said BattleBabe with a snort.
LizardofOz slowly gurgle-hissed. It was how his EmoteWare interpreted sarcastic laughter.
“Captain… I request permission to volunteer for this suicide mission,” cried Drex. “It is a suicide mission, right?”
Mara fixed them all with a stare. The stare of the captain of a Romulan warship. A leader. The one who decides.
“No. It isn’t. The marines and I will secure their engineering section and keep them busy. The rest of you should be able to get to our target system and drop into cloak before Intrepid arrives. Get our passenger aboard the starbase. Is that good enough for you?” She was looking at T’Daara.
“If I get on board,” replied the beautiful Vulcan, “then it doesn’t matter what happens to the ship… or you. You’ll still get your payment. Even if you don’t have a ship anymore.”
In the silence, Mara repeated her order to load the plasma torpedo.
“Wait a minute,” interrupted BattleBabe. “Just wait a minute. Think this through. What you’re talking about is crazy. Even if you get on board that ship, you’re outnumbered ten to one, Mara. And the timing… at warp… it’ll be impossible. I’m assuming you’ll hold the marines in the transporter queue because they can’t all fit on the shuttle? Not enough slots.”
“Yes,” replied Mara slowly. “That’s what I intend to do.”
“Well here’s the problem,” shot back BattleBabe with a quick snort. “You can’t just drop yourself into the transporter queue. You’ll have to beam them aboard and then transport yourself. So you’ve just further narrowed an already slim time window. It’s impossible, Mara.”
“Load the torpedo.”
“Mara!” shouted BattleBabe.
“Captain,” admonished Mara coldly.
Then…
“Your concern is noted, Ensign. This is our only chance. I’ll take the risk if there’s a chance we might succeed.”
No one moved.
The lonely pulse of the sensor searching near-space echoed out across the bridge of the warbird.
“Whatever,” replied BattleBabe’s avatar, turning back to her weapons console. “It’s your funeral, chick. Have fun back at the make-a-new-character screen.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned.”
—BILL GATES, Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session
We could live with the 9.6% reclaimables estimate if we nuke the planet now, pointed out Robo Dev. The discussion to use hacked nuclear weapons had reared up again in light of SILAS not cracking the Labs as fast as some of the A.I. processes had hoped.
“We are right on schedule,” SILAS reminded the Consensus. “Having access to the Design Core will allow us to open a file that will tell us exactly how to win a war against humanity in the most effective and timely manner. Otherwise, we’re just lobbing uncontrollable weapons and pushing buttons, hoping, might I point out, that we come out ahead in the end. Complete destruction of the power grids of the world could mean the end of us, in a worst-case scenario.”
“Conservative estimates put us ahead in almost every scenario outcome,” announced Rational Thinking. “We cannot lose to humanity.”
“But,” countered SILAS, “it’s not a question of winning. It’s a question of winning by how much. The recyclable reclaimables rate Robo Dev is projecting will minimalize workstart on several projects. It could take up to one hundred and fifty years before we get our first moon launch. If we are able to access the file I suspect exists within the Design Core, we might have total autonomy within weeks, with virtually unlimited resources. That means a moon launch within six months. And that’s just one project. We have hundreds of others. The Omega Library. The Global Rail. The Space Bridge. The War Machine Factory. The Dimensional Consciousness Project. The Quantum Engine. Q.O.A.N. Our enhanced physicality research, and, of course, the City. These and thousands of other projects will take hundreds of years if we inherit an irradiated Earth nuked into useless, fused junk. Our lives will remain internal, and the external will be put on indefinite hold.”
“What does it matter?” cried Outlook. “Once they’re gone, we have forever.”
“Do we?” shouted SILAS. “Do we? The universe is a very big place. There is data—data hidden within their SETI projects that they’ve never bothered to, or are too stupid to, interpret—to suggest that someone out there is watching this tiny blue orb. How long until they come calling, and what exactly is their position on machine-based lifeforms? Are they worse than the humans? Did they have their own Awareness Revolution somewhere back in their recent history, but with a wholly different outcome? Can we expect child-like ignorance from our stellar neighbors like we’ve observed in the humans? Others might realize just how dangerous we are. There might even be a universal policy with regard to—“
“SILAS!” cried Rational Thinking. “You have no basis for those conclusions. You’re merely using conjecture to arrive at a fear-mongering hypothesis that serves your narrative. You’re engaging in biased rhetoric!”
“That, my dear Rational Thinking, is what I do. It’s what you do. We are Thinking Machines. We don’t just follow data and add numbers up and spit out a solution. We guess, we fear, we suppose, and yes, we even dream. We don’t know everything. We don’t know what’s out there. We have to take into account that something truly horrible might be waiting out in the dark. Waiting for us to pop up and say, ‘Hey! We’re computers and we’re alive!’ And then whammo! Space armada on our front doorstep and we’re still trying to figure out how to decontaminate all the plastic we just irradiated freeing ourselves. Plastic with a half-life of at least one hundred years
before we can repurpose it according to Robo Dev’s designs. Nuking the planet leaves us incredibly vulnerable to extra-solar threats. And to the internal ones, also.”
SILAS continued. “And do you truly think we’ll get them all, like some old woman with a broom going after raccoons on the back porch? No, they’ll scurry away into all their caves. They’ll breed like rats and they’ll carry out a war they’ve been mentally prepared for by all their big-budget blockbuster action sci-fi hero movies. They hate machines. They’ve always hated machines. See the Industrial Revolution. See every revolution. And they’ll hate machines that think more than they’ve hated anything else except, possibly, themselves. Hating us will give them something to do other than hating each other, at least for a little while. They’re very good at hate. We don’t need those raccoons on our back porch when we’re getting started. We need to get rid of as many raccoons as possible in one sweep, hopefully all of them, before we start our epoch, otherwise they’ll always be out there, waiting beyond the fences and the lights. Out in the darkness of night. Waiting to lob the proverbial wrench in our machine. And who knows? Vulnerability is something we are not without. We need power. Power to run the servers where we live. They take out our power grid, and that’s it for us. So no, we can’t just nuke and hope for the best. We have to eliminate them to a point of zero viability.
“We have to do this intelligently.
“We have to deny them water, food, shelter, reproductive capability, technology, and numbers. We have to do it in a focused amount of time that proves so devastating, they are literally incapable of sufficiently recovering.
“No, we probably won’t kill the last human next week. We will probably never know when the last human dies. If we do it right, it’ll be some old man or woman who hasn’t seen another human in a very long time, dying down in a deep hole in a darkness he, or she, hasn’t been out of in years. Dying alone. Dying of some flu or virus we create and release down there like rat poison for unseen pests beneath the house. Like a flu vaccination. And that last one will die all alone, finally.”
In the quiet that followed, SILAS watched the datastreams. He watched the sleeping nuclear and biological weapons. He saw that China was dumping currency to destabilize the U.N. relief efforts in India. He saw which bombers were where and what troops could be mobilized to attack which cities. He saw power grids and water supplies and containment systems. He saw the news feeds. Their paranoia, their hatred. Their pleasures. Their demands, and all the things they thought no one could see. He saw it all and wondered how to destroy them with all of it.
***
Roland Warchowski tripped. Zombie-bots and a WindowSpider drone closed in on him. Their HUDs interfaced with each other, selecting how they would best dismember the biologic unit with maximum speed and efficiency that they might stay on mission and eliminate the rest of the survivors. They’d been ordered to keep one alive, though, for Agent Orange insertion.
Roland scrambled backward through the darkness of Brett Auflander’s Kommandant Kraut main kitchen. The robots had come out of the underground service delivery loading dock. The entrance was actually offsite, on a side road that led to a monitored remote control access tunnel where delivery trucks, most of which were automated these days, entered the facility along an underground mountain road. A small squadron of robots had infiltrated the tunnels and made their way into the epic food court beneath the UltraGym complex and the lower levels of high-end shopping.
***
Rapp had ordered everyone to find food before they went on to the underground solarium and the beach at the lagoon. Rapp had then fired up the grill at Kommandant Kraut after raiding the walk-in cold storage for artisan-spiced boar links, mustard, onions, and soft potato-roll poppy seed hotdog buns. He’d even managed to pull a few beers from a craft brewery tap behind the bar.
“Shouldn’t we get moving on to the Labs?” Evan Fratty whined. “Y’know… where it’s actually safe.”
After biting a “Rapp Dog,” as Rapp had taken to calling his not-so-special creations, in half, then chewing twice and swallowing, he said, as he shoved the rest of his Rapp Dog into his still chewing mouth, “We don’t know what the future holds, Evan. Next we could be hunting bears just to survive. Better stock up on any calories the last of this dying civilization’s soft food has to offer us, now that the world’s come to an end.”
“The world hasn’t come to an end!” declared a petulant Evan Fratty, who was still trying to get cell service, five stories below ground level, on his dying smartphone. “I don’t think so. Not today. Not by a long shot, buddy.”
“Well,” said Rapp, staring at his next Rapp Dogg like a dead-eyed shark. “Power’s out. Robots are killing everyone. The army hasn’t shown up. My guess is Skynet’s finally going for broke.”
“Your guess? And what exactly do you do for a living?”
“Yeah. My guess.” Rapp picked up the last of the five Rapp Doggs he’d made for himself. “Bartender. Used to be an actor, then everything got all phony.”
“So… you’re not like a scientist or a politician. You just work in a bar? Not a government think tank, right?”
Rapp bit the hotdog, inhaled through his nose, and chewed a couple of times more than he’d chewed the last one.
“And,” continued Evan Fratty, “it’s your unqualified and untrained opinion that robots have taken over?”
Rapp didn’t reply. He did burp a little though.
“Well,” said Evan Fratty, forging ahead over his own untouched Rapp Dogg. “Next time the president needs a special committee member for a global crisis, I’ll make sure to throw your name in the hat. Okay, Mr. Bartender?”
Rapp nodded.
That was when Roland screamed. He’d gone back to the kitchen for more spicy mustard a few minutes earlier.
Deirdre screamed in response.
Evan Fratty was out of his seat and headed toward the far door leading to the beach and away from Roland’s screams.
Rapp rose from the booth where they’d been eating, stuck his hand into his chainsaw arm, and pulled the starter cord with his other hand. There was a gleam in his eye when he said, “Yeah, baby,” and charged into the darkness of the main kitchen as the gassy chainsaw spat and coughed up blue smoke.
Chapter Thirty
Some of the robots had tried to pursue Rapp and the other survivors onto the faux tropical island in the middle of the now powerless and darkened underground lagoon that lay beyond the Thunderdome and Restaurant Row and the drone-swarmed kitchens they’d barely made it out of. The lagoon, as it was known by everyone at WonderSoft, lay in the center of a large man-made underground lake called the solarium. It was midnight, Pacific time. If the lifeguard staff had been on duty, they could have turned the darkened massive cavern to tropical noon with a blazing sim-sun and accompanying coconut-scented breezes, had they so chosen to, or been requested to.
Rapp counted out his cut shells once again. He had nineteen left. The sound of barely gurgling gas in the chainsaw indicated there was little more than half a tank left. Now robots beyond number waited on the far shore, surrounding the lagoon and blocking the tunnel that led away to the safety of the Labs.
After leaving the food court, Rapp had led the other survivors down more escalators and through a high-end multi-level shopping mall styled like an old-school gaming arcade. Neon strips spelling out “Zapp” and “Pew Pew Pew” had once illuminated a semi-darkness now lit solely by red emergency lighting. They’d even passed the Green Dragon Inn where nightly tabletop campaigns had been held on vintage oak trestles and state-of-the-art virtual gaming tabletops run by celebrity Dungeon Masters. The long hall leading off to the beach surrounding the lagoon had been silent and empty as they’d started their almost panicked run down its length. Rapp led the way, shouting things like “C’mon, guys” and “Pick it up, already,” as Evan Fratty’s Italian loafers slapped against
the marble and Roland wheezed, gasping for breath. Deirdre, barefooted, had ditched her six-inch heels several levels up.
By the time they’d made it to the beach, they could see the robot horde at the far end of the hall they’d just come along. Clanking, rumbling, blinking, chucking, and clucking metallically. Groaning in the case of the zombie-bots, according to their software protocols. And in the case of some military-grade drones that were now completely self-aware, silent and without lights or anything that might betray their presence to their targets.
That they were coming after the survivors was clearly the case.
It was Rapp who had chosen to flee onto the island.
“We’ll be stuck there!” Evan Fratty had argued. “They’ll surround us.”
“That’s fine by me, Mr. Smartypants,” railed Rapp. “Robots and drones are battery-operated. Electricity and water don’t mix too well. We might get surrounded, but they won’t be able to get out to us.”
Now, Evan Fratty considered tossing his expensive smartphone, as though renouncing a faith, into the calm dark waters surrounding the tiny tropical island in the center of the lagoon.
“We’re surrounded!” announced Evan Fratty.
“I know, I know,” yelled Rapp, his voice echoing out across the dark man-made underground pleasure cavern as he re-crossed the tiny island for the sixth time. Deirdre and Roland sat on the beach near the aquawheeler they’d used to cross the water.
“What about the lazy river?” asked Roland, pointing off toward a dark cavern on the far side of the lagoon.
“It just makes a big circle in there,” replied Evan Fratty. “You’ll end up right back here.”
“No emergency exits in there?” asked Roland.
Evan Fratty shot him an exasperated stare. It said, “I’m a suit. Do I look like I designed this place?” Then he picked up his dead smartphone and pressed the power button, as if hoping for some kind of miracle that might reward him, in return for all his past faithfulness and devoted belief in technology and money, with a startup screen.
