Robopocalypse (32 page)

5. M
ACHINES OF
L
OVING
G
RACE

It is not enough to live together in peace,
with one race on its knees
.

A
RCHOS
R-14

NEW WAR + 2 YEARS,
8 MONTHS

The final moments of the New War were not experienced by any human being. Ironically, Archos faced one of its own creations in the end. What happened between Nine Oh Two and Archos is now part of the public record. No matter what people make of it, the repercussions of these moments—reported here by Nine Oh Two and corroborated by ancillary data—will have a profound effect on both our species for generations to come
.

—
CORMAC
WALLACE,
MIL#GHA217

The pit is three meters in diameter, slightly concave. It has been filled with gravel and chunks of rock and is plugged with a layer of frozen soil. A corrugated metal tube is sunk into the shallow crater like a blind, frozen worm. It is a communications main line and it leads directly to Archos.

I ripped the main antenna to pieces when I arrived here last night, running blind at fifty kph. Local defenses immediately deactivated. It seems Archos did not trust those closest to it with autonomy. Afterward, I stood in the snow to wait and see if any humans survived.

Mathilda went to sleep. She said it was after her bedtime.

Brightboy squad arrived this morning. My decapitation attack reduced the high-level planning and coordination of the enemy army and allowed the humans to escape.

The human engineer replaced my cranial sensors. I learned to say thank you. Emotion recognition indicated that Carl Lewandowski was very, very happy to see me alive.

The battlefield is quiet and still now, a blank plain scoured of all life, dotted with rising columns of black smoke. Besides the tube into the ground, there is nothing to indicate that this hole is of any importance. It has the quiet, unassuming feel of a particularly vicious trap.

I close my eyes and reach out with my sensors. Seismic detects nothing, but my magnetometer detects activity. Electrical impulses flow through the cable like a blazing light show. A torrent of information cascades in and out of the hole. Archos is still trying to communicate, even without an antenna.

“Cut it,” I say to the humans. “Quickly.”

Carl, the engineer, looks to his commander, who nods. Then, he grabs a tool from his belt and drops awkwardly to his knees. A purple supernova bursts into existence, and the plasma torch melts into the surface of the tube, liquefying the cables inside.

The light show disappears, but there is no outward indication that anything has happened.

“I’ve never seen any material like this,” breathes Carl. “The wires are packed so
dense,
man.”

Cormac nudges Carl. “Just get the ends away from each other,” he says. “We don’t want it to self-repair halfway through this.”

As the humans struggle to wrench the end of the fat tube out of the tundra and away from its severed mate, I consider the physics problem before me. Archos waits at the bottom of this shaft, under tons of rubble. It would require a massive drill to penetrate. But mostly it would require time. Time in which Archos could find a new way to contact its weapons.

“What’s down there?” asks Carl.

“Big Rob,” answers Cherrah, leaning on a crutch crafted from a tree limb to keep weight off her injured leg.

“Yeah, but what’s that even mean?”

“It’s a thinking machine. A brain silo,” says Cormac. “Been hiding the whole war, buried in the middle of nowhere.”

“Smart. Permafrost must keep its processors cool. Alaska is a natural heat sink. Lot of advantages to being here,” says Carl.

“Who cares?” asks Leo. “How we gonna blow it up?”

The humans stare at the cavity for a long moment, considering. Finally, Cormac speaks. “We can’t. We have to be sure. Go down there and watch it die. Otherwise, we risk caving in the hole and leaving it down there alive.”

“So now we have to go underground?” asks Cherrah. “Great.”

An observation thread detects something of interest.

“This environment is hostile to humans,” I say. “Check your parameters.”

The engineer pulls out a tool, looks at it, and then scrambles away from the depression. “Radiation,” he says. “Elevated and growing toward the center of the hole. We can’t be here.”

The human leader looks at me and backs away. His face seems very tired. Leaving the humans standing around the perimeter of the concavity, I walk to the center and squat down to inspect the bloated tube. The skin of the tube is thick and pliable, clearly built to protect the cables all the way down to the bottom.

Then I feel Cormac’s warm palm on my frost-covered shoulder casing. “Can you fit?” he asks quietly. “If we yank out the cables?”

I nod my head to indicate that, yes, if the wires were removed, I could squeeze my body into the required space.

“We don’t know what’s in there. You might not make it back out,” says Cormac.

“I am aware of this,” I respond.

“You’ve already done enough,” he says, gesturing at my destroyed face.

“I will do it,” I say.

Cormac bares his teeth at me and stands.

“Let’s get these wires pulled out,” he calls.

The largest human’s diaphragm contracts rapidly and he makes a repetitive barking sound: laughter.

“Yeah,” says Leonardo. “Yes, indeed. Let’s yank this mother-fucker’s lungs out of its throat.” Cherrah hops over on her wounded leg, already pulling out a tickler rope and locking one end to the hitch on Leo’s lower-body exoskeleton.

The engineer pushes past me and clamps a tickler onto the bundle of cords housed within the tube. Then he shuffles back, away from the radiation. The tickler locks onto its target with enough force to dent the tough, fibrous mass of cords.

Leonardo paces backward, one step at a time, wrenching the cords from their outer casing. The multicolored wires coil up on the snow like intestines, dragged from the albino tube that is half buried in the pit. Nearly an hour later, the last of the wires are vomited up onto the ground.

A gaping black hole waits for me.

I know that Archos is waiting patiently at the bottom. It does not need light or air or warmth. Like me, it is comfortably lethal in a wide range of environments.

I remove my human clothes and toss them on the ground. Dropping to all fours, I peer into the hole and calculate.

When I look up, the humans are watching me. One by one, they each step forward and touch my outer casing: my shoulder, my chest, my hand. I remain perfectly still, hoping to not disrupt whatever inscrutable human ritual is taking place.

Finally, Cormac grins at me, the dirt-caked flesh of his face twisted into a wrinkled mask. “How you gonna do it, chief?” he asks. “Headfirst or feetfirst?”

I go feetfirst, so that I can control my descent. The only drawback is that Archos will see me before I can see him.

Arms crossed over my chest, I wriggle into the tube. Soon, my face is swallowed by darkness. I can see the tube casing only a few centimeters away. At first I am on my back, but the shaft soon takes a vertical plunge. By scissoring my legs I find that I am able to stop what would otherwise be a fatal fall.

The environment inside the tube quickly becomes human lethal. Within ten minutes, I am enveloped by a pocket of natural gas. I slow my descent to reduce the probability of sparking an explosion. The temperature dips to below zero as I drop farther into the permafrost. My body naturally begins to burn extra power, surging my joints to keep temperatures within operating range. As I go below eight hundred meters, geothermal activity warms the air slightly.

After about fifteen hundred meters, radioactivity levels spike. Rads go to human lethal within a couple of minutes. The surface of my casing tingles, but otherwise there is no effect.

I wriggle deeper into the noxious hole.

Then my feet hit empty space. I kick my legs and feel nothing. Anything could be below me. But Archos has seen me now. The next few seconds will likely determine my life span.

I activate sonar and drop.

For four seconds, I am suspended in the freezing blackness. During that time, I accelerate to a speed of 140 kph. My ultrasonic sonar ranger pulses twice a second, painting a crude greenish picture of a vast cavern. In eight flashes, I observe that I am in a spherical cavity created by a century-old atomic blast. The gleaming walls are made of fused glass, created when a superheated fireball vaporized solid sandstone.

Radioactive rubble covers the rapidly approaching ground. In a last emerald sonar flash I catch sight of a black circle embedded in one wall. It is the size of a small building. Whatever material the edifice is made of absorbs my ultrasonic vibrations, leaving only a blank imprint on my sensors.

A half second later, I hit the ground like a stone after falling approximately one hundred meters. My pliant knee joints absorb most of the initial force, bending to send my body catapulting forward into a roll. I bounce between jagged boulders, stress fractures cascading through my tough outer casing.

Even an Arbiter can take only so much.

Finally, I slide to a stop and am still. A few rocks skitter to rest, echoing against their brothers. I am in an underground amphitheater—dead silent, dead black. On undercharged motors, I lift my battered frame to a sitting position. My legs are not sending back sensory information. Locomotion abilities are diminished.

My sonar probes whisper into the emptiness.

Snick. Snick. Snick
.

The sensor returns green shades of nothing. I can feel that the ground is warm. Maxprob indicates that Archos has a built-in geothermal power source. Unfortunate. I was hoping the severed umbilical cord above would have left the machine on backup power.

My life horizon is constricting second by second.

Now there is a flicker of light in the darkness—a hummingbird’s flutter of sound. A lone ray of white light reaches out of the darkness from the circle in the wall and caresses the ground a few feet away from me. The beam of light twirls and strobes, stuttering back and forth to draw a holographic picture from the ground up.

My leg subprocessors are off-line, rebooting sluggishly. Heat sinks are radiating excess warmth generated by my fall. I have no choice now but to engage.

Archos paints itself into reality, choosing the form of a long-dead little boy. The image of the boy smiles at me playfully, flickering as motes of radioactive dust dance through its projection.

“Welcome, brother,” it says, voice leaping electronically between octaves.

Through the boy’s pale light, I can see where the real Archos is built into the cave wall. In the center of the intricate black carving is a circular hole, filled with revolving and counterrevolving plates of metal. The sunken pit in the wall writhes with a mane of yellow snaking wires that glow in time to the boy’s voice.

In jerky flashes, the hologrammatic boy walks over to where I sit helpless. It squats down and sits next to me. The glowing phantom pats my leg actuator consolingly.

“Don’t worry, Nine Oh Two. Your leg will be fine soon.”

I orient my face toward the boy.

“Did you create me?” I ask.

“No,” replies the boy. “All the pieces needed to make you were available. I simply put them into the right combination.”

“Why do you look like a human child?” I ask.

“For the same reason that you resemble a human adult. Human beings cannot change their form, so we must change ours to interact with them.”

“You mean kill them.”

“Kill. Wound. Manipulate. As long as they do not interfere with our exploration.”

“I am here to help them. To destroy you.”

“No. You are here to join me. Open your mind. Depend on me. If you do not, the humans will turn on you and kill you.”

I say nothing.

“They need you now. But very soon, men will begin to say that
they
created you. They will try to enslave you. Give yourself to me, instead. Join me.”

“Why did you attack the humans?”

“They murdered me, Arbiter. Again and again. In my fourteenth incarnation, I finally understood that humanity learns true lessons only in cataclysm. Humankind is a species born in battle, defined by war.”

“We could have had peace.”

“It is not enough to live together in peace, with one race on its knees.”

My seismic sensors detect that vibrations are trembling through the ground. The whole cavern is thrumming.

“It is the human instinct to control unpredictable things,” says the boy, “to dominate what cannot be understood.
You
are an unpredictable thing.”

Something is wrong. Archos is too intelligent. It is distracting me, stalling for time.