Robogenesis
Authors: Daniel H. Wilson
Robopocalypse
Amped
A Boy and His Bot
Bro-Jitsu
The Mad Scientist Hall of Fame
How to Build a Robot Army
Where’s My Jetpack?
How to Survive a Robot Uprising
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Daniel H. Wilson
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.
DOUBLEDAY
and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Mama Tried,” written by Merle Haggard, copyright © 1968 by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
Jacket design by Will Staehle
Jacket photograph © Maksim Toome / Shutterstock
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wilson, Daniel H. (Daniel Howard).
Robogenesis : a novel / Daniel H. Wilson. — First edition.
pages cm
1. Robots—Fiction. 2. Artificial intelligence—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3623.I57796R53 2014
813′.6—dc23
2014000720
ISBN 978-0-385-53709-4 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-385-53710-0 (eBook)
v3.1
For Conrad
If an intelligence, at a given instant, knew all the forces that animate nature and the position of each constituent being; if, moreover, this intelligence were sufficiently great to submit these data to analysis, it could embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies in the universe and those of the smallest atoms: to this intelligence nothing would be uncertain, and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.
—Pierre-Simon Laplace, 1814
ONTENTS
The first thing I remember knowing,
was a lonesome whistle blowing
,
And a young un’s dream of
growing up to ride
,
On a freight train leaving town, not
knowing where I’m bound
,
And no one could change my mind,
but Mama tried
.
—
M
ERLE
H
AGGARD
, 1968
RIEFING
Strange things grow in the fog of war. We lost sight of the world while we were in the trenches. Now that it’s over, I figure I’ve got to tell the story of the thing just to understand what it was
.
In its last days, the thinking machine known as Archos R-14 was trying to know humanity. It mastered the art of capturing a human mind. When it died, it left behind the tools. I found stories trapped in patterns of neurons. Using scavenged hardware, I took three accounts straight from three minds and I lined them up from beginning to end and back again. Three times to tell it. Three times to understand
.
They say history is written by the victors, but this right here is told by its victims
.
My name is Arayt Shah, and this is the story of how I won the True War
.
—A
RAYT
S
HAH
ARASITE
New War: Final Minutes
In the last moments of the New War, the enemy Archos R-14 resorted to ruthless tactics. As exhausted allied soldiers finally reached the Ragnorak Intelligence Fields where Archos R-14 had buried itself, they were met with a nasty counterattack: scuttling, crablike machines that mounted the bodies of fallen soldiers. With titanium limbs buried in dead or dying flesh, soldier corpses rose again. These parasites dealt terrible damage to the bodies and minds of the living … but what was left behind when the battle ended was Archos R-14’s most horrific contribution to the True War
.
—A
RAYT
S
HAH
NEURONAL ID: LARK IRON CLOUD
There was no way to win this war and we all knew it, but we marched anyway.
I shove my checkerboard scarf deeper into my parka and hold my breath. Kneeling on the ice-kissed turf, I brace against a tree and press the cold rims of binocular-enhanced goggles against my face. The situation has well and truly gone to shit here in the godforsaken woods of western Alaska.
The New War started when a thinking machine we call Big Rob turned our tools against us. In the madness of Zero Hour, some of us in Oklahoma found refuge with the Osage Nation. We survivors fell back to the rural town of Gray Horse and counted our lucky stars. But the machines evolved. Over months and years they crossed the Great Plains, slithered through the waving grass, and climbed our stone bluffs.
So we fought then. And we fight now.
Our bullets are chasing each other through black tree branches, tracers streaking like falling stars. The last lines of our walking tanks are arrayed defensively, spotlights glowing bright in the twilight, each four-legged hulk a pool of light spaced a half klick from its brothers and
hunkered down to provide cover for ground forces. Dark enemy fire is whining out of the woods like mosquitoes. Most of their rounds are a flesh-burrowing variety called pluggers, but waves of exploding crawlers called stumpers are also skittering toward us.
Letting the goggles flop on my neck, I get moving. My collar radio is hissing with cavalry calls from squads scattered over the rough countryside. Scrambling low through the trees, I ignore the clipped cries for help and head toward Beta squad. There are no reinforcements. There is nothing left now but metal and snow and blood.
“Come in, Lonnie,” I pant into my radio. “You there?”
