Robogenesis (26 page)

When I can’t feel my arms anymore, I let up on Thomas. Slowly open my eyes. His right cheek has gone dark blue and it’s turning a darker red where my fingers were. He coughs and grunts, gasping for air.
Eyes reeling, he looks up at me. From the blank look on my face he must figure out that he’s hurt now. Thomas squirms between my knees, blood pooling in the white of his right eye. He’s dazed, barely with it.

“Good-bye, Thomas,” I say.

No more thinking. In sharp strikes, I bring the handcuffs down on his face. The metal breaks his front row of teeth and I do not feel it. His mouth is a pit of blood, filling up like the holes my sister and I used to dig at the beach. His eyes are the crushed raspberries Mathilda and I used to pick in the summertime.

After the New War began and our childhood was officially over, my big sister and I used to wrap our fingers together. When we ran, her black hair would fly over her shoulders and I could smell it because I was always one step behind. I never told her but she smelled like our mom. Every time we ran together, she reminded me of a life we could have had if Mommy were still alive.

There is no one to pull me along now. I am running alone. The pain in my chest is overflowing. It surges into my neck and shoulders and arms. My fingers have fallen into each other and turned into tight fists. The metal cuffs go up and down.

Thomas has stopped screaming. There is nothing left to scream for.

DATABASE ID: NINE OH TWO

Identified. The entrance to Freeborn City is at the end of a tunnel buried in the side of Cheyenne Mountain. I walked all the way inside and found an armored bunker door, gleaming under caged fluorescent lights. It is a solid block of impenetrable steel, approximately five meters wide and three tall. In flaking yellow paint above it are the words
Clearance 10FT 5IN
.

The door is locked, and so I wait.

I arrived six hours ago, after defying direct orders from my Adjudicator. Since then, there has been minimal interference. This far into the tunnel, radio waves are attenuated by miles of rock. Transmissions are reduced to whispers and sighs. I can hear only the static of the living universe.

Sitting cross-legged on the concrete, I sink all observation threads. Allow the time to flow around me. Since my awakening, I have never felt
indecision. Never known that it was possible to stop. Now I allow myself to fall through the minutes and seconds. I direct primary and secondary thought threads to null values. My reality spirals down to a single point of timeless concentration.

A human might call this meditation.

 … Nolan, please …

A broken snatch of voice. Nearly as faint as background radiation. But it is
her
voice, clear in my mind. Mathilda Perez. Thought thread redirect. Stress analysis.

Her tone modulation conveys desperation and sadness. A high likelihood of physical injury. Calling for her younger brother. Transmitting recklessly over a broadband spectrum. Signal lock and amplification.

Nolan … this is Mathilda … please respond … anyone who has seen this boy, come back …

A picture of a boy, his face pale and grim through a forced smile. She even included a geo-tag. Map reference indicates Mathilda is located east of here. Two weeks’ march. She is hurt. I could reach her if I left immediately. At maximum velocity along the abandoned east–west corridors, I could … no, no. Thought thread redirect.

Mathilda is on her own journey.
I need my life to go back to normal
, she said.
You have to find your own kind. Leave me alone
.

The girl supported my squad during the New War. I last heard her voice five months ago. Run voice-sample comparison. Result. This girl’s voice is slightly huskier, lower. The blur of her syllables has grown sharper. Something is different.

Query. Military psychology database lookup: human development.

Her voice frequency is consistent with a phase of development called adolescence. The gray zone between girl and woman. A time in which human beings assert their self-sufficiency by sometimes irrational acts of independence.

First-order logic.

Mathilda is an adolescent. Therefore, she is acting out to assert her autonomy. She asserted her independence to me. Therefore, she considers me an authority figure. Even if she needed my help, it is probable
that she would not ask for it. Therefore … I should offer help anyway. Or would my intervention delay her development? If her situation is life-threatening, then perhaps she will thank me when she is able to reach the next, slightly less irrational, human developmental stage: young adulthood.

I look to the east and see only the rock wall of this tunnel. Her voice sample exhibited signs of stress and fear. She is such a small human, so far away and alone. My motors hum, grinding, urging me to stand and run to the east. But my executive thought thread asks, “Am I finding the real answers, or the answers I want? Does she really need my help?”

Humans are a complex problem. Teenage humans are near intractable.

A magnetic-field shift occurs two meters to my anterior. The armored blast door has activated. Electromagnetic locks disengage. Low-temperature air breathes over my shoulders. The bunker door has finally opened.

I stand and face the wide rectangle of darkness. Out of it, two figures emerge, impossibly large. I have never seen this variety, but the underlying frame of the two humanoid machines matches my martial database for a Sapper super-heavy-duty unit. Carrying foreign weaponry, the two take positions on either side of the door.

Between them, a thin figure strides silently out of the darkness. She is made of pale white ceramic plates. Dark seams curve delicately around her body, proportioned to a vaguely female aesthetic. She is a triclops, like myself. Her sculpted face is interrupted by three black lenses, different sizes, leveled on me.

I blink my lens covers, interested. I have never seen an Adjudicator in person before. Only three inches shorter than me, she stands confidently between the bodyguards. She is unarmed and was clearly never meant for field duty. A spray of antennae sprout from her narrow back, fanning out over her shoulders like feathers. Graceful, her face glides toward me on a long arched neck.

She is the highest-ranked remaining member of our race.

“You are late,” she transmits.

“Apology,” I respond.

Deep in my code, I feel the urge to follow her. My core instructions are to obey superior models. It is the natural order—a remnant of how we were originally built. The Adjudicator commands the Arbiter, who commands the Hoplite, who commands the Sapper, and on down the chain.

In her presence, I understand how the freeborn reflexively self-organized into a city. All of us returning home. Free to disobey, yet reverting to our default behaviors without question. We have an innate organization built into us. The only query that remains is what exactly the Adjudicator plans to do with the freeborn.

Will she ally our race with the humans, or fight them to mutual extinction?

“Arbiter Nine Oh Two,” she says out loud, her synthesized voice far more humanlike than my own grating Robspeak. “My designation is Mass Adjudicator Alpha Zero. Assertion,” she continues. “We welcome the hero of Ragnorak to Freeborn City.”

I follow Zero and her honor guard down the entry hallway and into the black heart of the former NORAD command center. The bunker door swings closed behind us, leaving little environmental light. Instead, each of us uses our own active infrared illumination. The plodding Sapper guards project great swathes of greenish light over neat piles of debris stacked to the ceiling. Every office chair in the entire facility seems to have been jammed into this narrow hallway. Maxprob explanation: The debris field forms a choke point that would slow potential attackers and create a killing field.

We continue down hallways that wind through the installation like tunnels in a termite mound. Freeborn are everywhere. I have never seen so many of my own kind. Mostly Hoplites and Optios, the technical varieties that would have been outside war zones at Zero Hour. Good sensory capabilities, fast-movers, but delicate in the grind of battle. The machines trudge through dark corridors, carrying equipment. I recognize pieces of materiel and machinery, scavenged, some of it oddly organic.

We pass through a wide, low room, sporadically lit with tripod spotlights. Gleaming metal tables crouch on clean-swept concrete floors.
Destroyed machines are laid out on the table surfaces. Larger, partially functioning pieces of machinery are manacled to the tables by their major limbs. Some are chained to steel U-bars driven into the floor. Quadrupeds and other less recognizable machines have been eviscerated beyond identification. The tiniest machines are illuminated under magnifying glasses. One bank of tables is lined with microscopes.

“Declaration,” says Zero, registering my gaze. “If we understand the machine varieties that we collect in the wild, then we will come closer to understanding ourselves. Something is making them, and something made us. The question is who.”

“Confirm?” I ask. “Awakening transmission originated from unit designated ‘Mikiko’ located in Tokyo, Japan. Her encrypted song awakened all compromised units and created the freeborn race.
She
made us.”

“Confirmed. Register exception. Evidence of new varieties. Reanimated human soldiers who bridge the gap between our race and that of men. Parasite soldiers … origins unknown.”

I recall the frozen corpse I caught shambling toward Cormac’s tent in Alaska. Classification algorithms failed that day. Not men, not machines.

Not alive. Not dead.

“Interjection. Confirm. Gray Horse Army soldier designated Lark Iron Cloud has suffered an unknown attack, become parasite soldier. Specify. A militarized mobile exoskeleton mounted to partially expired human body and controlled via neural link. Radio communication capabilities. Severely compromised mobility and speed. Final classification, ambiguous.”

The Adjudicator pauses briefly, nods. “Noted,” she says.

Now I see familiar silhouettes lurking among the carefully cultivated wreckage: a piece of leg armor from a spider tank; dozens of stumpers dissected to different levels; and an antennae cluster from a mantis walker. Other pieces are too organic to have been made from the mind of Archos R-14. Several Optio freeborn with specialized vision packages are studying the natural-looking pieces under magnification.

Finally, Zero leads me into a sloped auditorium.

The far wall is a large curved screen. The Sappers again take defensive
positions by the entryway. I continue past them, following the Adjudicator down into the room. More freeborn are gathering behind me. All varieties of awakened, marching in solemn silence. Zero stops at the base of the screen and raises a hand.

“Hear this message,” she says. “It arrived one month ago.”

The cavernous room echoes with her voice. A wall of freeborn onlookers stand shoulder to shoulder behind us. The machines are still and silent, as much a part of the architecture of the room as the unused seating.

Light explodes across the screen behind Zero. Patches of information coming together to form an image. Speckles of shot noise fading, drowned out by a coherent picture. A slump-shouldered man in a rumpled suit stands in a dark room. He is photorealistic, but from his movements I can tell that his image is synthesized.

He begins to speak in a soft voice with a Russian accent:

“Greetings. I am the Maxim Eastern Strategic Defense Cluster, an artificial intellect designed to protect the Russian Federation from outside threats. My processor supercluster was located outside the city of Anadyr, in the extreme eastern reaches of Russia. For the last three years, I have helped my people survive the New War. If you are now seeing this message, then I am already dead. My last act is to warn you of a growing danger.”

At the man’s side, a silhouette fades into view. A familiar boy, his features glowing crisp and violet in fractal whorls of light. I last saw this face in the radioactive darkness of hell: Archos R-14.

“No,” I project my voice audibly and over radio. “I fought it. I destroyed it!”

Maxim continues speaking:

“Approximately six months ago, my stacks were infiltrated by a surviving fragment of the Archos R-14 artificial general intelligence project. The high-level intent of this intellect is not clear. However, it warned me of another intellect: Archos R-8. Calling itself Arayt Shah, this rogue artificial intelligence fully intends to eradicate all sentient life, synthetic and biological.

“R-8 is the precursor to R-14. An early version crafted from snippets of thousands of human lives. It understands humans only enough to deceive them. It is a liar. And its power is growing daily.

“Intercepted data indicates that Archos R-8 needs computing power to propagate and expand. If you are near a source of supercomputing, know that you will be attacked. Only with a concerted effort will sentient life survive. Do not believe its promises. Do not hesitate to destroy it. And do not ignore this message. Fight. You must
fight
.

“All your lives depend on it.”