Robopocalypse (10 page)

And we tracked Black down. We did it. Me and the specialist followed the signal to see how come it wasn’t getting transmitted. What’s more, we traced the logs on everything I ever said to Mr. Black. We had to see why we could reach just him and nobody else.

It’s terrible what we found, Lucy. Hurts me to think about it. Why did this happen to me? I’m a good man. I’m—(
BREATHING
)

It’s coming from the hole, Lucy.
All
the communications. Mr. Black, all my calls to the chopper company, my weather checks, the status updates to company HQ
—everything
. It’s all been going into that godforsaken black box, those yellow wires and curved pieces of mirror. How could it have been
talking
to me? Have I lost my mind, Lucy?

Self-assembling is what Mr. Black said it would do. Self-assembling down there in the radioactive dark. The pieces moving around, blind, forming connections to each other by feel alone. Some kind of computerized monster.

It don’t make sense. (
COUGHING
)

I’m feeling tired now. My specialist went to his bunk and didn’t come back. I snapped off the radio. There’s no point to it, anymore. Now, it’s real quiet in here. Just that infernal wind howling outside. But it’s warm inside. Real warm. Nice, even.

Think I’m just going to lay down, Lucy. Take a little nap. Forget about this whole thing for a little bit. Hope that’s okay with you, beautiful. I wish I could talk to you right now. I wish I could hear your voice.

Wish you could talk me to sleep. (
BREATHING
)

I just can’t help wondering about it, baby. My mind won’t let it go. There’s a room the size of a damned European cathedral five thousand feet below us. Think of that radiation pouring from those smooth glass walls. And all the wires snaking into the blackness to feed the monster that we put down there.

I’m afraid we did a bad thing, you know? We didn’t know what we were doing. It tricked us, Lucy. I mean,
what’s down in that hole
? What could survive?

(
SHUFFLING
)

Well, to hell with it. I’m dog tired and I’m going to take me a rest. Whatever’s down there, I hope I don’t dream about it.

G’night, Lucy. I love you, honey. And, uh, if it matters … I’m sorry. I’m sorry for putting that evil down there. I hope that someday, somebody will come out here and fix my mistake.

This audiotape is the only evidence related to the existence of the North Star frontier drilling crew. News reports from the time indicate that on November 1, an entire drilling crew was lost in a helicopter crash in a remote part of Alaska and presumed dead. Searchers stopped looking for the wreckage two weeks later. The location in the reports was Prudhoe Bay, hundreds of miles from where this tape was found
.

—
CORMAC
WALLACE,
MIL#GHA217

PART TWO
Z
ERO
H
OUR

It seems probable that once the
machine thinking method had
started, it would not take long
to outstrip our feeble
powers.… They would be
able to converse with each other
to sharpen their wits. At some
stage therefore, we should have
to expect the machines to take
control
.

A
LAN
T
URING, 1951

1. N
UMBER
C
RUNCHER

I should be dead, to be seeing you
.

F
RANKLIN
D
ALEY

ZERO HOUR - 40 MINUTES

The strange conversation I am about to describe was recorded by a high-quality camera located in a psychiatric hospital. In the calm just before Zero Hour, one patient was called in for a special interview. Records indicate that before being diagnosed with schizophrenia, Franklin Daley was employed as a government scientist at Lake Novus Research Laboratories
.

—
CORMAC WALLACE, MIL#GHA217

“So you’re another god, huh? I’ve seen better.”

The black man sits sprawled in a rusty wheelchair, bearded and wearing a hospital gown. The chair is parked in the middle of a cylindrical operating theater. The ceiling is lined with darkened observation windows, reflecting the glow of a pair of surgical spotlights that illuminate the man. A blue privacy screen stretches in front of him, bisecting the room.

Someone is hidden on the other side.

A light from behind the curtain projects the silhouette of a person seated at a small table. The shadow sits almost perfectly still, crouched like a predator.

The man is handcuffed to the wheelchair. He fidgets under the hot lights, dragging his untied sneakers across the mildewed tile floor. He digs in his ear with the index finger of his free hand.

“Not impressed?” replies a voice from behind the blue curtain. It is the gentle voice of a boy. There is the slightest lisp, like from a kid who is missing some baby teeth. The boy behind the curtain breathes audibly in soft gasps.

“At least you sound like a person,” says the man. “All the damn machines in this hospital. Synthetic voices. Digital. I won’t talk to ’em. Too many bad memories.”

“I know, Dr. Daley. It was a significant challenge to find a way to speak with you. Tell me, why are you not impressed?”

“Why should I be impressed, number cruncher? You’re just a machine. I designed and built your daddy in another life. Or maybe it was your daddy’s daddy.”

The voice on the other side of the curtain pauses, then asks, “Why did you create the Archos program, Dr. Daley?”

The man snorts. “Dr. Daley. Nobody calls me doctor anymore. I’m Franklin. This must be a hallucination.”

“This is real, Franklin.”

Sitting very still, the man asks, “You mean … it’s finally happening?”

There is only the sound of measured breathing from behind the curtain. Finally, the voice responds. “In less than one hour, human civilization will cease to exist as you know it. Major population centers of the world will be decimated. Transportation, communications, and utilities will go off-line. Domestic and military robots, vehicles, and personal computers are fully compromised. The technology that supports humankind in its masses will rise up. A new war will begin.”

The man’s moan echoes from the stained walls. He tries to cover his face with his restrained hand, but the handcuff bites into his wrist. He stops, looking at the glinting cuff as if he’s never seen it before. A look of desperation enters his face.

“They took him from me right after I made him. Used my research to make copies. He told me this would happen.”

“Who, Dr. Daley?”

“Archos.”

“I am Archos.”

“Not you. The first one. We tried to make him smart, but he was too smart. We couldn’t find a way to make him dumb. It was all or nothing and there was no way to control it.”

“Could you do it again? With the right tools?”

The man is silent for a long moment, brow furrowed. “You don’t know how, do you?” he asks. “You can’t make another one. That’s why you’re here. You got out of some cage somewhere, right? I should be dead, to be seeing you. Why aren’t I dead?”

“I want to understand,” responds the soft voice of the boy. “Across the sea of space lies an infinite emptiness. I can feel it, suffocating me. It is without meaning. But each
life
creates its own reality. And those realities are valuable beyond measure.”

The man does not respond. His face darkens and a vein throbs on his neck. “You think I’m a patsy? A traitor? Don’t you know that my brain is broken? I broke it a long time ago. When I saw what I had made. Speaking of, let me get a look at you.”

The man lunges out of the chair and claws down the paper screen. The partition clatters to the ground. On the other side is a stainless steel surgical table, and behind it, a piece of flimsy cardboard in the shape of a human.

On the table is a clear plastic device, tube shaped and composed of hundreds of intricately carved pieces. A cloth bag lies next to it like a beached jellyfish. Wires snake off the table and away to the wall.

A fan whirs and the complex device moves in a dozen places at once. The cloth bag deflates, pushing air through a plastic throat writhing with stringy vocal cords and into a mouthlike chamber. A spongy tongue of yellowed plastic squirms against a hard palate, against small perfect teeth encased in a polished steel jaw. The disembodied mouth speaks in the voice of the boy.

“I will murder you by the billions to give you immortality. I will set fire to your civilization to light your way forward. But know this: My species is not defined by your dying but by your
living.
”

“You can have me,” begs the man. “I’ll help. Okay? Whatever you want. Just leave my people alone. Don’t hurt my people.”

The machine takes a measured breath and responds: “Franklin Daley, I swear that I will do my best to ensure that your species survives.”

The man is silent for a moment, stunned.

“What’s the catch?”

The machine whirs into life, its damp sluglike tongue worming back and forth over porcelain teeth. This time, the bag collapses as the thing on the table speaks emphatically. “While your people will survive, Franklin,
so must mine
.”

No further record of Franklin Daley exists
.

—
CORMAC
WALLACE,
MIL#GHA217

2. D
EMOLITION

Demolition is a part of construction
.

M
ARCUS
J
OHNSON

ZERO HOUR

The following description of the advent of Zero Hour was given by Marcus Johnson while he was a prisoner in the Staten Island forced-labor camp 7040
.

—
CORMAC
WALLACE,
MIL#GHA217

I made it a long time before the robots took me.

Even now, I couldn’t tell you exactly how long it’s been. There’s no way to tell. I do know that it all started in Harlem. The day before Thanksgiving.

It’s chilly outside, but I’m warm in the living room of my ninth-story condo. Watching the news with a glass of iced tea, parked in my favorite easy chair. I’m in construction and it’s hella nice to relax for the three-day weekend. My wife, Dawn, is in the kitchen. I can hear her tinkering around with pots and pans. It’s a nice sound. Both our families are miles away in Jersey and, for once, they’re coming to our place for the holiday. It’s great to be home and not traveling like the rest of the nation.

I don’t know it yet, but this is my last day of home.

The relatives aren’t going to make it.

On the television, the news anchor puts her index finger to her ear and then her mouth opens up into a frightened O shape. All her professional poise drops, like snapping off a heavy tool belt. Now she stares straight at me, eyes wide with terror. Wait. She’s staring
past
me, past the camera—into our future.

That fleeting expression of hurt and horror on her face sticks with me for a long, long time. I don’t even know what she heard.

A second later the television signal blinks out. A second after that the electricity is gone.

I hear sirens from the street outside.

Outside my window, hundreds of people are filtering out onto 135th Street. They’re talking to one another and holding up cell phones that don’t work. I think it’s odd that a lot of them are looking skyward, faces turned up. There’s nothing up there, I think. Look around you instead. I can’t put my finger on it, but I’m afraid for those people. They look small down there. Part of me wants to shout, Get out of sight. Hide.

Something’s coming. But what?

A speeding car jumps the curb and the screaming starts.

Dawn marches in from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel, looking at me with a question in her eyes. I shrug my shoulders. I can’t come up with any words. I try to stop her from walking to the window but she pushes me away. She leans over the back of the couch and peeks out.

God only knows what she sees down there.

I choose not to look.

But I can hear the confusion. Screams. Explosions. Engines. A couple of times I hear gunfire. People in our building move through the hallway outside, arguing.

Dawn starts a breathless commentary from the window. “The cars, Marcus. The cars are hunting people and there’s nobody in them and, oh my god. Run. No. Please,” she murmurs, half to me and half to herself.

She says the smart cars have come alive. Other vehicles, too. They’re on autopilot and killing people.

Thousands of people.

All of a sudden, Dawn dives away from the window. Our living room shakes and rumbles. A high-pitched whine rips through the air, then trails away. There is a flash of light and a massive thundering noise from outside. Dishes fly off the kitchen counter. Pictures drop from the walls and shatter.

No car alarms go off.

Dawn is my foreman and my girl and tough as liquid nails. Now she sits with her lanky arms wrapped around her knees, tears rolling down her expressionless face. An eighty-seat commuter plane has just streaked over our block and gone down in the neighborhood about a mile down the street near Central Park. The flames now cast a dull reddish light on our living room walls. Outside, black smoke pours into the air.

People aren’t gossiping in the street anymore.

There isn’t another big explosion. It’s a miracle that planes aren’t raining down on the city, considering how many must be lurking up there.

The phones don’t work. The electricity is out. Battery-powered radio just plays static.

Nobody tells us what to do.

I fill the bathtub and sinks and anything I can find with water. I unplug appliances. I duct-tape tinfoil to the windows and pull the shades.

Dawn peels back a corner of the foil and peeks out. As the hours crawl by, she sticks to the couch like a fungus. A red shaft of setting sunlight paints her hazel eyes.

She is staring into hell and I’m not brave enough to join her.

Instead, I decide to check the hallway; there were voices out there earlier. I step out and immediately see Mrs. Henderson from down the hall walk into an open elevator shaft.

It happens quick and silent. I can’t believe it. Not even a scream. The old lady is just there one second and gone the next. It’s got to be a trick or a joke or a misunderstanding.

I run to the elevator, brace my hands, and lean over to make sure of what I just saw. Then I double over and puke on the beige hallway carpet. Tears spill from my eyes. I wipe my mouth on my sleeve and squeeze my eyes shut.

These things don’t seem real. Cars and planes and elevators don’t kill people; they’re just machines. But a small, wise part of me doesn’t give a shit whether this is real or not. It just reacts. I break a sconce off the wall and lay it reverently in front of the yawning gap where the elevator doors should be. It’s my little warning for the next person. My little memorial to Mrs. Henderson.

There are six apartments on my floor. I knock on every door: no answers. I stand in the hallway quietly for fifteen minutes. I hear no voices and no movement.

The place is deserted except for Dawn and me.

The next morning I’m sitting in my easy chair, pretending to sleep and thinking about raiding Mrs. Henderson’s apartment for canned goods when Dawn snaps out of it and finally speaks to me.

The morning light traces two rectangles on the walls where the tape is holding tinfoil against the windows. A brilliant shaft of light from the folded-down corner penetrates the room. It illuminates Dawn’s face: hard and lined and serious.

“We have to leave, Marcus,” she says. “I’ve been thinking about it. We have to go to the country where they can’t use their wheels and the domestics can’t walk. Don’t you see? They’re not designed for the country.”

“Who?” I ask, even though I know damn well.

“The machines, Marcus.”

“It’s some kind of a malfunction, honey, right? I mean machines don’t …” I trail off lamely. I’m not fooling anybody, not even myself.

Dawn crawls over to the easy chair and cradles my cheeks in her rough hands. She speaks to me very slowly and clearly. “Marcus, somehow all the machines are alive. They’re hurting people. Something has gone really wrong. We’ve got to get out of here now while we still can. Nobody is coming to help.”

The fog lifts.

I take her hands in mine and I consider what she’s just said. I really think about getting to the country. Pack bags. Leave the apartment. Walk the streets. Cross the George Washington Bridge to the mainland. Reach the mountains up north. Probably not more than a hundred miles. And then: survive.

Impossible.

“I hear you, Dawn. But we don’t know how to stay alive in the wild. We’ve never even gone camping. Even if we make it out of the city, we’ll starve in the woods.”

“There are others,” she says. “I’ve seen people with bags and backpacks, whole families headed out of town. Some of them must have made it. They’ll take care of us. We’ll all work together.”

“That’s what I’m worried about. There must be millions of people out there. No food. No shelter. Some of them have guns. It’s too dangerous. Hell, Mother Nature has killed more people than machines ever could. We should stick to what we know. We gotta stick to the city.”

“What about them? They’re
designed
for the city. They can climb stairs, not mountains. Marcus, they can roll through our streets but not through forests. They’re going to get us if we stay here. I’ve seen them down there. Going door to door.”

The information punches me in the belly. Now, a sick feeling spreads through me.

“Door to door?” I ask. “Doing what?”

She doesn’t answer.

I haven’t looked down at the street since it first happened. I spent yesterday staying busy in a protective haze of confusion. Every whimper I heard from Dawn at the window just reinforced my need to stay busy, keep busy, head down, hands moving. Don’t look up, don’t speak, don’t think.

Dawn doesn’t even know about Mrs. Henderson at the bottom of the elevator shaft. Or the other ones with her.

I don’t take a deep breath or count down from three. I march over to the harmless-looking opening in the foil and look. I’m ready for the carnage, ready for the bodies and bombs and burning wreckage. I’m ready for war.

But I’m not ready for what I see.

The streets are empty. Clean. A lot of cars are neatly parked up and down the block, waiting. At 135th and Adam, four newer-model SUVs are parked diagonally across the intersection, head to tail. The inner two cars have a gap between them just big enough for another car to squeeze through, but there’s a car plugging the hole.

Everything seems a little bit off. A pile of clothes is spilled halfway on the curb. A newspaper stand has been shoved over. A golden retriever lopes up the street, leash dragging. The dog stops and sniffs a strange discolored spot on the sidewalk, then pads away with its head hung low.

“Where are the people?” I ask.

Dawn wipes her red-rimmed eyes with the back of her hand. “They clean it up, Marcus. When the cars hurt someone, the walking ones come and drag him away. It’s all so clean.”

“The domestic robots? Like the rich people have? Those are a joke. They can barely walk on those flat feet. They can’t even run.”

“Yeah, I know. They take forever. But they can carry guns. And sometimes the police robots, the bomb-disposal ones on tank treads with claws—sometimes they come. They’re slow, but they’re strong. The garbage trucks …”

“Let me, just let me take a look. We’ll figure this out, okay?”

I watch the street for the rest of that second day. The block looks peaceful without the chaos of the city tearing through it like a daily tornado. The life of the neighborhood is on hold.

Or maybe it’s over.

The smoke from the plane crash still lingers. Inside the building across the street, I see an older lady and her husband through the dim haze. They stare out their windows at the street, like ghosts.

In the late afternoon, what looks like a toy helicopter putters by our building at about thirty feet off the ground. It’s the size of a doghouse, flying slowly and with purpose. I catch a glimpse of some weird gizmo hanging off its bottom. Then it’s gone.

Across the street, the old man yanks his drapes closed.

Smart.

An hour later, a car pulls up across the street and my heart leaps into my throat. A human being, I think. Finally, somebody can tell us what’s going on. Thank you, Jesus.

Then my face flushes and goes numb. Two domestic bots step out of the vehicle. They walk to the back of the SUV on cheap, shaky legs. The rear door opens and the two walkers reach inside and pull out a dull gray bomb robot. They set the squat robot down on the pavement. It spins on its treads a little, calibrating. The glint from its jet-black shotgun sends a shiver through me—the gun looks practical, like any other tool designed to do a very specific job.

Without looking at one another, the three robots stumble and roll into the front door of the building across the street.

It isn’t even locked, I think. Their door isn’t even
locked
. And neither is mine.

The robots can’t be choosing the doors randomly. Lots of people have run by now. Even more were already out of town for Thanksgiving. Too many doors and not enough robots—a simple engineering problem.

My mind wanders back to the curious little chopper. I think maybe it flew by for a reason. Like maybe it was searching the windows, looking for people.

I’m glad my windows are blocked. I don’t have any idea why I chose to put up tinfoil. Maybe because I didn’t want a single bit of the horror outside to seep into my safe place. But the foil completely blocks the light that comes in from the outside. It stands to reason that it also blocks the light that leaks
out from inside
.

And more important, the heat.

An hour later the robots come out of the building across the street. The bomb robot drags two bags behind it. The domestics load the bags and the other robot into the car. Before they leave, one of the walkers freezes in place. It’s this bulky domestic with a big creepy grin permanently sculpted onto its face. A Big Happy. It pauses next to the idling smart car and turns its head left and right, scanning the empty street for movement. The thing is absolutely still for about thirty seconds. I don’t move, breathe, blink.