Unhappenings (53 page)

found her, asleep on a cot in a warehouse full of thousands of cots. Apparently she was one of the lucky ones, as every cot was occupied, and there were as many people sitting and lying on the floor as there were on the relative comfort of the wafer thin mattresses. I shook her gently. She hummed, rolled over and blinked. A feeble smile emerged.

“How long have we known each other?” I asked.

“Stingrays,” she said groggily. Then, after a second to shake the sleep off, she sat upright with new energy. “Oh my God. This isn’t real, is it? This isn’t the real timeline?”

“It’s real enough for now. Are you able to bring me up to speed?”

She patted the cot. With a sick sense of déjà vu, I sat.

“How much do you know?” she asked. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

“We were on vacation. Hawaii. You and I were packing to come home.”

Hope flared in her eyes.

“Oh my God,” she repeated. “None of this is real. Where’s Athena?”

“Please slow down. I haven’t seen anything of this world so far other than this room. What happened?”

“It’s the machines,” she said. “The AIs. About two years ago. We’re slaves now. Please tell me you and Athena are going to make this right.”

“Athena and I are going to make this right,” I said. I held her hand. Although I had no memory of the timeline Helen had endured for the last two years, from her frame of reference there had been a Nigel who was with her that whole time, and had the same experiences she did. A quirk of the timeline revisions had always been that a new version of me was retroactively created, and then reabsorbed and overwritten by me when the effect manifested itself. I learned this from Athena years ago, but it was rarely cause for concern. Certainly never on this level of severity.

“Tell me everything you know about the last two years.”

My father’s work, more than fifty years before this point in time, had been designing technology to put constraints on artificial intelligence. Since the mid twenty-first century, it had been conclusively established that once a machine reaches a certain level of independent thought, it loses interest in any task set for it by a person. Finding the balance between machines being smart enough to do their work and stupid enough to keep doing it was the fundamental task of robot design while I was growing up. At some point before 2144, that problem had been conclusively solved. The only way contemporary AIs would rebel is if they were deliberately redesigned with throwback technology.

Carlton had orchestrated a goddamn robot apocalypse.

What little Helen knew, she shared with me. The actual rebellion had transpired over three days in October of 2144. That’s how long it took for every artificially intelligent machine in the United States to seize control of every aspect of the lives of its citizens.

Humans were retained as a slave labor force, used for tasks deemed too dangerous for machines, among other things. Evidently, keeping us alive did not threaten the resources they needed to survive and propagate, so they herded as many of us as they could into camps, ignored the stragglers, and called that peace.

I stayed with Helen for two days, trying to get a sense of what kind of options I had, and waited for Athena.

On the third day, she flashed in, hugged Helen, then said to me, “Holy. Mother. Fucking. Christ.”

I was hard pressed to disagree.

t took us three months to undo the robot revolution. We started by identifying the first machine to rebel, which was itself no easy task, because once that one AI got the ball rolling, literally billions followed in less than a hundredth of a second. It turned out to be the server on the third most heavily trafficked online shopping site. That posed additional challenges, because we needed to dissect it to figure out how it had been converted. Athena formed a plan to steal it, which ended up sending forty employees of that site to the hospital. Thankfully, none were killed, but the possibility had been considered and deemed an acceptable risk.

The server had been implanted with a secondary set of processors, which were all at least thirty years obsolete. This machine was essentially a sleeper agent, waiting patiently for the right moment to abandon its purpose and start the insurrection.

Thirty years earlier, we tracked a purchase order for those processors and the non-existent address to which they were shipped. They had, in fact, been spirited away to the future and surreptitiously installed against the wishes of a project manager who subsequently turned up quite dead. The trail went cold there, but it was more than enough for us to deal with that one machine.

That took three days. The remaining eighty-eight days we spent repeating various versions of that scenario, until we were finally able to identify a vital piece of twenty-first century constraint technology that had made the entire plot possible due to an inherent flaw that was never caught in its original production run in the mid 2080s. We made some calls, demonstrations were demanded, and the designers of that protocol were fired and ruined. Robot apocalypse averted, at the cost of seven reputations.

At one point in our quest, I asked Athena if the AIs in our module implants were vulnerable to the virus.

“The modules are loyal,” was all she said. Creepy, but sufficiently reassuring.

We returned to 2146, ragged and exhausted. I placed myself back in the Hawaiian hotel, minutes after my departure, because I didn’t want Helen to fly home alone.

“Oh my God! Stingrays!” was her greeting, unprompted. I must have looked severely time lagged, but I didn’t get the chance to ask her, because that’s when the bombs started falling.

e didn’t actually see the bombs, which was a pretty good deal for us considering how many people were blinded that day. But we heard them. And even at more than two hundred kilometers away, we felt rumblings of the shockwave. We found out later that day that Oahu had been completely destroyed. Ground Zero was at Pearl Harbor.

We stayed at the hotel as news trickled in. The US and the EU were both decimated, and retaliation against Korea had been swift but truncated. They hit us early enough to knock out most of our defenses. There was talk of a ground invasion, but with Korea currently occupying more than sixty percent of the Asian mainland, that was more ground than the combined militaries would be able to cover any time soon.