Robogenesis (27 page)

The man looks away. Seems to speak to someone without sound. And then the camera moves quickly and fades to darkness.

“Assertion chain,” says Zero, and her high synthesized syllables roll smoothly out into the empty darkness. With a soft decay, each syllable finds the ceiling high above and sends its echo falling back down on us like ash.

“Hostile Archos R-8 variety is fugitive. Parallel copies of its core intelligence have proliferated. Fragments are regrouping. Social engineering of human survivors and a massive hardware reallocation are in process. Multiple armies have been detected congregating across North America. And our supercluster is the target.”

“Query,” I ask. “To what purpose?”

“Maxprob hypothesis. Archos R-8 intends to claim our supercomputer cluster and initiate a technological singularity. It intends to resurrect its master program, and to do so it intends to utilize the equipment buried beneath our location: the former Cheyenne Mountain nuclear bunker.”

“Then we fight,” I transmit.

The room is quiet and still, full of statues.

“We will fight,” I say again, louder this time.

“Assertion. Arayt Shah has corrupted the powerful remnants of Gray Horse Army. Another human army approaches from the east, called the Tribe. Reallocated robotic weaponry is gathering to reinforce these human armies. Simulations indicate our position is mathematically indefensible.”

“Allies?”

“None so far.”

“Specify,” I say. “Plan of action.”

Zero speaks, her voice growing in strength and harshness as she continues. Born to lead, she is not asking for advice. Her words are orders, commands dictated by the unquestioned high leader of my species.

“Nine Oh Two, I designate you to lead our withdrawal forces to the north. We will retreat into human-lethal terrain to minimize the field effectiveness of approaching armies. Nonresistance at the supercluster site will delay future attacks. Appropriation of our resources will create precious time. We will survive to fight Arayt in the future.”

“Confirm? Plan is to abandon Freeborn City?”

“Affirmative.”

The thought sinks in. Leave behind our greatest resource? Our best and perhaps only chance of determining how we were made and for what reason? It is unfathomable. The capability to create another supercomputer cluster—factories, chip designs—is tens of decades away, at least.

“Counterargument,” I say. “The enemy will reach singularity. It will gain unlimited power.”

“Simulation indicates—”

“Continuing.”

My burst-radio interruption of Zero is a breach of protocol. The Sappers shift minutely at the entrance. Zero is perfectly still, perfectly quiet.

“Continuing,” I repeat. “If we remove all supercluster resources, then Archos R-8 will have a compromised goal-state. No reason to attack. Assertion string. Freeborn will defend supercluster and in worst-case defeat scenario, we destroy all supercomputers—”

“Interjection,” says the Adjudicator, softly. “Arbiter Nine Oh Two, acknowledge. Each freeborn unit
is
a supercomputer. The Freeborn are an environmentally robust, globally distributed, mobile cluster of approximately two thousand supercomputers. If this supercluster is harmed, all freeborn units will become immediate high-value targets.”

The Adjudicator is right. Variables click into place. Of course her math is perfect.

“Acknowledged,” I say.

“Assertion,” she continues. “Strategic retreat generates highest survival probability. Repair yourself. Begin preparations to depart.”

The face of a little girl is in my mind.

Another breach of protocol, but I speak again. My underlying instructions command me to obey. It is impossible for me to change the minds of the others, or to usurp the power of our designated leader. But I resist obeying for another moment. Mathilda is out there somewhere, under the gaze of the beast. I must try.

“Archos R-14 is … our
creator
. It could be trying to help us. Perhaps it commands us to fight for a reason?”

“Confusion. You sought to destroy this Archos R-14? Now you wish to acquiesce to its demands? You established freedom for the freeborn. Gratitude. Your actions were a result of correct thinking. Now your decision process has been modified. Why?”

“The humans will die without us.”

“Humans?” she asks, pausing to process.

I do not detect any hint of disgust or disapproval in her voice. Of course not. Zero is a machine. Why would she bother to simulate an emotion useful only for interacting with humans? She has never seen people in triumph or in pain. She doesn’t know that they feel the world more than we do. That they can grow up from being children and they can hate or they can love …

No wonder she suspects my decision process. I wonder if emotions are contagious.

“Query,” I ask. “Have you ever met a human being?”

“Negative,” she responds.

“Assertion. We are symbiotic. Evidence. The human designated Mathilda Perez guided freeborn squad during the final assault on—”

“Assertion rejected,” interrupts Zero. A calm silence settles over the room. The Sappers step forward and I sense that the discussion is over. “The humans will live or die on their own. Arbiter Nine Oh Two, you will lead the freeborn withdrawal. Obey me now, hero of Ragnorak, or face excommunication.”

NEURONAL ID: MATHILDA PEREZ

Little kids don’t know that the brightest stars in the night sky aren’t stars at all. They’re satellites. Man-made technology. Shining, falling forever only a few hundred miles above the face of the planet. Not light-years away in space.

I know this because they talk to me.

Gracie found me a month ago, in the night. The little girl’s voice was soft and afraid and urgent. Broken into bits and snatches by some interference, it crept like a whisper into my mind as I lie on the gritty asphalt shingles of a half-collapsed roof.

I’ve been roaming the abandoned, overgrown suburbs west of the Hudson River for months. Found a good house to camp in during the middle of winter. When Gracie called, I was watching the stars with one hand wrapped around my trusty antenna. Still sifting the night skies for information on my brother.

“Mathilda Perez … Gray Horse Army. I don’t know who you are or if you can hear me … need you … family needs you. Something bad … words in the sky. If it reaches us … to die. Please … did in Alaska … help us.”

The transmission had a geo-tagged file attached: a location west of
Pittsburgh and a low-resolution image of a little girl. She is about nine. Her skin is dark brown and her hair is woven into tight braids threaded with bright bits of plastic. Her eyes are gone and I can tell it must have happened toward the end of the New War. She has an advanced variety of ocular implant. Thinner than mine, made of a pale white ceramic instead of black metal. It sits pooled in her empty eye sockets like milk.

Timmy says I’m close enough to save her. He says that I can keep searching for Nolan with my eyes in the sky and it doesn’t matter where I do it from. He says Gracie will die if I don’t find her, that she will be hunted down and murdered like a lot of other sighted kids.

I send my prayers radiating into the skies, and hear nothing.

In the woods these past months, I have been small and alone and cold. My arms and legs and fingers are weak. I’m constantly falling down or getting scratched by branches, running away from the sounds of big things in the darkness. The wasp sting of Thomas’s betrayal has faded to a dull ache. Even that has almost faded under the constant physical pain of being on the run.

I’m always hurting. But I’m never lost. And I’m never hungry.

The satellite uplink is clean out here. Rob isn’t hunting anymore. Wells are common and easy to spot. And a lot of houses are intact. Millions of people answered evil phone calls in the first few days and never came home. That, or their cars took them off a bridge. I can push between weedy tree limbs and find any house with intact windows. Load all the canned vegetables and soup and beans that I can carry into my backpack. Dry-swallow a handful of vitamins and pocket any antibiotics and Band-Aids. I try not to see the faded drawings still stuck to refrigerators. I ignore little coats hanging on hooks and dog-food bowls out for animals long feral.

At least I have a friend: Tiberius.

I found natural machines all over the woods: pea-sized armored bugs that seem to eat bark; floating poofs of some kind of synthetic animal that hang on the wind; and once, with a rusty shovel, a wriggling mess of something like earthworms. The naturals aren’t as common as animals yet, but they’re finding a place in our world.

The stag that I spotted by the swing set followed me for a week.
Reaching out to him with my thoughts, I found that he was friendly. Not smart, but trusting. After seven days, I walked out into the unprotected middle of a cul-de-sac in a dead suburban neighborhood. Even though we were both afraid, the six-foot-tall deer also came out. I patted him on his nose and fed him a handful of moss, and this time nobody shot at us.

I named Tiberius after a Gray Horse soldier we lost in the Yukon. Ty was one of the first casualties and he didn’t deserve to go so soon. The machine is huge but gentle, like his namesake. Ty would have approved; they were both vegetarians.

In the basic shape of a stag elk, Tiberius has bonelike antlers that fan away from his head—flat and wide and sweeping back over his high shoulders. I’m not sure what they’re for or even what they’re really made of. The only metal in his body as far as I can tell is in his hooves. Even those are delicate and flexible, sharp or wide, depending on the surface. He is tall and proud and unafraid.

After another week, I rode him. On his back, I can cover more distance. He moves quiet but fast and he doesn’t tire easily.

“I’m coming, Gracie,” I transmit.

Tiberius doesn’t flinch when I cling to him. My knees sink into the scavenged blankets that cover his wide back. Below them is a plasticlike hide that is tough and woven tight like wicker furniture. His underbelly is coated with hairy moss. I tighten my legs around him and twist my fingers into the confusion of brown and green fibers that sprout down the back of his neck.

I love that his eyes are flat and black, like mine.

Together, we make it westward across the Pennsylvania wilderness in a couple of weeks. Days pass with just the steady rattle of my backpacks thrown over Tiberius’s flanks and the sweep of shadows through tree canopy over our heads. The cool spring mist kisses my face and occasional patches of snow lurk in the shadowed places.

With routine satellite sweeps, I minimize outside interference and stay in high-nutrition areas for Tiberius. He can eat almost anything, but definitely seems to prefer dry pieces of wood, especially hickory. With the raspy spinner in his mouth, he can eat siding off a house as easy as bark off a tree. I’ve seen both. My guess is that his biomass combustion
works better on dry sticks and foliage. Tiberius eats green leaves only as a last resort and I could swear he doesn’t like the taste.

Every day, Gracie’s communications are getting more desperate. Every day, I push Tiberius harder to reach her. Even now I can glimpse the orange haze of those evil thoughts, roiling on the horizon.

Gracie sends me static-filled reports of twisted black walkers. My co-opted satellite eyes can’t see them, though. A burned cloud of encrypted communication is blocking everything. It’s a swirling, chaotic blind spot the size of a small city, and it’s moving steadily west toward Gracie’s compound.

The closer I get, the louder the chaos is in my mind.

When Tiberius finally slows and stops, we are a few kilometers from the former work camp where Gracie lives. We traveled all the way across Pennsylvania and now whatever-it-is lies just over this ridge. A frenzy of orange light strafes the sky. From this close, I’m able to track the individual communications. Tight-net broadcasts from antennae clusters mounted up high, far away to the east. The transmitters are on skyscrapers, in Manhattan, sending communications to a man out here named Felix Morales.

Leader of the Tribe.

Tiberius’s small head is turned sideways, his neck like a curved blade, one square black eye aimed at my face. His chewing mechanism is closed, the rotating belts inside his mouth locked into place and retracted under his chin.

There is danger
, he is thinking. A gossamer thread of silver-gray communication links our foreheads.

I know
, I respond.
I’m sorry. Forward, please
.

I lean forward and wrap my arms around Tiberius’s neck, press my cheek against his warm hide. The interleaving plates of his skin bend against my face. He ducks his head forward, horns splaying out around us, and his shoulders flex and shimmer like snake skin. As the raspy plates slide over each other, they self-clean. Such a strange and elegant creature.

“I’m coming, Gracie,” I transmit.

As we crest the hill, I see a columnar battle formation. A staggered
line of walkers, arraying itself with optimal spacing to swallow a potential ambush from the sides while maintaining maximum forward momentum. I have watched spider tanks and Gray Horse soldiers do the same dance dozens of times.

But this time is different.

I thought that all the nightmares had evaporated in the daylight after the New War. But now another bad dream has crept out of the darkness. This is a familiar army of walkers and soldiers, but every walker is a master and every soldier, a slave.