Solaris Rising 2 (24 page)

“You got through.” Cindy stood in the open doorway, holding a flashlight over Dale’s computer. The satphone belonged to her, so she’d insisted on coming along. Sharon had, too, mainly because Dale might need protection. After the incident in the kitchen, there was no telling how many ’bots might still be active in the hotel, as yet undiscovered.

“I got there, yeah... but I’m not getting in. Look” Dale’s fingers ran across the keyboard, and a row of asterisks appeared in the password bar. He tapped the E
NTER
key; a moment later, A
CCESS
D
ENIED
appeared beneath the bar. “That was my backdoor password. It locked out my official one, too.”

“At least you got through. That’s got to count for something, right?”

Dale quietly gazed at the screen, absently rubbing his lower lip. “It does,” he said at last, “but I don’t like what it means.”

He didn’t say anything else for a moment or two. “Want to talk about it?” Sharon asked. “We’ve got a right to know, don’t you think?”

Dale slowly let out his breath. “This isn’t just any government website. It belongs to the Utah Data Center, the NSA’s electronic surveillance facility in Bluffdale, Utah.” He glanced up at Sharon. “Ever heard of it?”

“Isn’t that the place where they bug everyone’s phone?”

“That’s one way of putting it, yeah. Bluffdale does more than that, though... a lot more. They’re tapped into the entire global information grid. Not just phone calls... every piece of email, every download, every data search, every bank transaction. Anything that’s transmitted or travels down a wire gets filtered through this place.”

“You gotta be kidding.” Harold appeared in the doorway behind Cindy, apparently having found the restroom he’d been searching for. He’d tagged along as well, saying that Sharon might need help if they ran into any more ’bots. Sharon knew that this was just an excuse to attach himself to Cindy, but didn’t say anything. Her roommate knew how to keep away from a wolf... and indeed, she left the doorway and squeezed in beside Dale, maintaining a discrete distance from the annoying salesman.

“Not at all. There’s two and half acres of computers there with enough processing power to scan a yottabyte of information every second. That’s like being able to read 500 quintillion pages.”

Harold gave a low whistle. “All right, I understand,” Sharon said. “But what does that have to do with us?”

The legs of Dale’s chair scraped against concrete as he turned half-around to face her and the others. “Look... something has shut down the entire electronic infrastructure, right? Electricity, cars, phones, planes, computers, robots... everything networked to the grid was knocked down three days ago. And then, almost immediately after that, every part connected to the system that’s mobile and capable of acting independently... namely, the robots... came back online, but now with only one single purpose. Kill any human they encounter.”

“Give me another headline,” Harold said drily. “I think I might have missed the news.”

“Hush.” Cindy glared at him and he shut up.

“The only other things that still function are networked electronics like smartphones and laptops... stuff that runs on batteries. But they don’t do anything except display a number and make a ticking sound just like the robots do. And that number seems to decrease by one every time there’s a tick.”

“Yeah, I noticed that, too,” Cindy said. “It began the moment my cell phone dropped out.”

Dale gave her a sharp look. “You were on the phone when the blackout happened?” Cindy nodded. “Do you happen to remember what the number was when it first appeared on your phone screen?”

“Sort of... it was seven billion and something.”

“About seven and half billion, would you say?” Dale asked. She nodded again, and he hissed beneath his breath. “That’s what I thought it might be.”

“What are you getting at?” Sharon asked, although she had a bad feeling that she already knew.

“The global population is approximately seven and a half billion.” Dale’s voice was very low. “At least, that’s about how many people were alive on Earth three days ago.”

Sharon felt a cold snake slither into the pit of her stomach. A stunned silence settled upon the group. Her ears picked up a low purring sound from somewhere in the distance, but it was drowned out when both Cindy and Harold started speaking at once.

“But... but why...?”

“What the hell are you...?”

“I don’t know!” Dale threw up his hands in exasperation. “I can only guess. But –” he nodded toward the laptop “– the fact that the most secure computer system in the world is still active but not letting anyone in tells me something. This isn’t a cyberattack, and I don’t think a hacker or terrorist group is behind it either.” He hesitated. “I think... I think it may have come out of Bluffdale.”

Sharon stared at him. “Are you saying the NSA did this?”

“No... I’m saying the NSA’s computers might have done this.” Dale shook his head. “They always said the day might come when the electronic world became self-aware, started making decisions on its own. Maybe that’s what happening here, with Bluffdale as the source.”

The purring sound had become a low buzz. Sharon ignored it. “But why would it start killing people? What would that accomplish?”

“Maybe it’s decided that seven and a half billion people are too many and the time has come to pare down the population to more... well, more sustainable numbers.” Dale shrugged. “It took most of human history for the world to have just one billion people, but just another two hundred years for there to be six billion, and only thirty after that for it to rise to seven and a half billion. We gave Bluffdale the power to interface with nearly everything on planet, and a mandate to protect national security. Maybe it’s decided that the only certain way to do is to...”

“What’s that noise?” Harold asked.

The buzzing had become louder. Even as Sharon turned to see where the sound was coming from, she’d finally recognized it for what it was. A police drone, the civilian version of the airborne military robots used in Central America and the Middle East. She’d become so used to seeing them making low-altitude surveillance sweeps of Minneapolis’s more crime-ridden neighborhoods that she had disregarded the sound of its push-prop engine.

That was a mistake.

For a moment or two, she saw nothing. Then she caught a glimpse of firelight reflecting off the drone’s bulbous nose and low-swept wings. It was just a few hundred feet away and heading straight for the balcony.

“Down!” she shouted, and then she threw herself headfirst toward the door. Harold was in her way. She tackled him like a linebacker and hurled him to the floor. “Get outta there!” she yelled over her shoulder as they scrambled for cover.

They’d barely managed to dive behind a couch when the drone slammed into the hotel.

A
FTERWARDS,
H
AROLD RECKONED
he was lucky to be alive. Not just because Officer McCoy had thrown him through the balcony door, but also because the drone’s hydrogen cell was almost depleted when it made its kamikaze attack. So there hadn’t been an explosion which might have killed both of them, nor a fire that would have inevitably swept through the Wyatt-Centrum.

But Cindy was dead, and so was Dale. The cop’s warning hadn’t come in time; the drone killed them before they could get off the balcony. He later wondered if it had simply been random chance that its infrared night vision had picked up four human figures and homed in on them, or if the Bluffdale computer had backtracked the satphone link from Dale’s laptop and dispatched the police drone to liquidate a possible threat. He’d never know, and it probably didn’t matter anyway.

Harold didn’t know Dale very well, but he missed Cindy more than he thought he would. He came to realize that his attraction to her hadn’t been purely sexual; he’d liked her, period. He wondered if his wife was still alive, and reflected on the fact that he’d only been three hours from home when his car went dead on a side street near the hotel. He regretted all the times he’d cheated on her when he’d been on the road, and swore to himself that, if he lived through this and she did, too, he’d never again pick up another woman.

The drone attack was the last exciting thing to happen to him or anyone else in the hotel for the next couple of days. They loafed around the atrium pool like vacationers who didn’t want to go home, scavenging more food from the kitchen and going upstairs to break into vending machines, drinking bottled water, getting drunk on booze stolen from the bar. Harold slept a lot, as did the others, and joined poker games when he was awake. He volunteered for a four-hour shift at the lobby barricades, keeping a sharp eye out for roaming robots. He saw nothing through the peep-holes in the plywood boards except a few stray dogs and some guy pushing a shopping cart loaded with stuff he’d probably looted from somewhere.

Five days after the blackout, nearly all the phones, pads, and laptop computers in the hotel were dead, their batteries and power packs drained. But then Officer McCoy, searching Cindy’s backpack for an address book she could use to notify the late girl’s parents, discovered another handy piece of high-tech camping equipment: a photovoltaic battery charger. Cindy had also left behind her phone; it hadn’t been used since her death, so its battery still retained a whisker of power. Officer McCoy hooked the phone up to the recharger and placed them on a table in the atrium, and before long they had an active cell phone.

Its screen remained unchanged, except that the number was much lower than it had been two days ago. It continued to tick, yet the sound was increasingly sporadic; sometimes as much as a minute would go by between one tick and the next. By the end of the fifth day, a few people removed some boards and cautiously ventured outside. They saw little, and heard almost nothing; the world had become quieter and much less crowded.

Although Harold decided to remain at the Wyatt-Centrum until he was positive that it was safe to leave, the cops decided that their presence was no longer necessary. The hotel’s refugees could fend for themselves, and the city needed all the cops it could get. Before Officer McCoy left, though, she gave him Cindy’s phone so he could keep track of its ticking, slowly decreasing number.

In the dark hours just before dawn of the sixth day, Harold was awakened by light hitting his eyes. At first he thought it was morning sun coming in through the skylight, but then he opened his eyes and saw that the bedside table lamp was lit. An instant later, the wall TV came on; it showed nothing but fuzz, but nonetheless it was working.

The power had returned. Astonished, he rolled over and reached for Cindy’s cellphone. It no longer ticked, yet its screen continued to display a number, frozen and unchanging:

1,000,000,000.

BEFORE HOPE

KIM LAKIN-SMITH

Kim Lakin-Smith’s dark fantasy and science fiction stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including
Black Static, Interzone, Celebration, Myth-Understandings, Further Conflicts, Pandemonium: Stories of the Apocalypse, The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories By Women
, and others, with “Johnny and Emmie-Lou Get Married” shortlisted for the BSFA short story award in 2009. She is the author of the gothic fantasy
Tourniquet: Tales from the Renegade City
, the YA novella
Queen Rat
, and the novel
Cyber Circus
, which was shortlisted for both the 2012 BSFA Best Novel Award and the British Fantasy Award in the same category.

T
HE LIGHT RACK
flicked from green to red. Lu De Lun felt a small judder as the lock rods sealed against the tank of the Eighteen Wheeler, pinioning the craft inside the parking bay. He punched the six engine stabiliser buttons into neutral, unharnessed himself from the driver seat and stood up.

Stretching his legs, he felt his knees crack and his ankles pop as he took turns to circle his feet and bring back the circulation. Even inside the K01-461 planetary system, the satellites and 18 planets were millions of kilometres apart. A driver had to enjoy a life spent behind the wheel. Which was why the long haul business only suited loners and fugitives. Although, as Lu knew from his 21 years as a trucker, the latter never lasted long given that the Fuel Prospectors they did business with liked to supplement their income with the fat bounties offered by the People’s Armed Police. But Lu was happiest riding out among the stardust, the red dwarf that sustained the solar system an ever present reminder of Something Bigger. Bigger than him. Bigger than the PAP with their guns and Absolute Law. Bigger than the Fuel Prospectors and their corrupt management of the decaying planet he’d just landed on.

Right at that instant though, Lu was less concerned with the rights and wrongs of life outside the hangar than he was with filling his stomach and getting some fresh air.

O
F COURSE, THE
notion of ‘fresh’ air was a misnomer on Twelve, as K01-461-12 was generally known. Having stripped down to a mandarin vest and gone with lightweight combats, Lu was still unprepared for the searing temperature inside the domed market of Man Fu. He was instantly soaked in sweat and badly in need of a drink.

“How much?” he asked a passing Kool-Aid vendor.

The man stopped and lifted the top container off a haphazard stack on board the cart.

“Five newyen.”

Lu dug around in a side pocket and handed over the coins. The man picked up one of the metal beakers that hung off the sides of the cart and filled it with garish yellow liquid. Lu drained the cup.

“Labour Hall open today?”

“Yes, sah. I can take you there. Fifteen newyen. Good price.” The vendor peeled back his lips, revealing one good tooth.

“No thanks. I know the way.”

Leaving the Kool-Aid vendor, Lu set off through the market. The outermost circumference of the dome was given over to food stalls – those pockets of death for a multitude of live vermin stacked high in cages. The cat meat stall offered an array of flambéed carcasses. Old women in folk tunics and headscarves sat behind tiny mountains of spices. It always amazed Lu that, despite the great girdered structure overhead, the ground inside Man Fu was still a sodden mess. A cockroach burst beneath his boot. The sticky air clung to his lungs.