Robogenesis (41 page)

And I hear those digging, creaking sounds.

Each smooth patch of stone is like a scale embedded in quicksand. Kneeling, I inspect the nearest one. Heat is rolling off it, forming a current of rising water. The flow pushes my hair out of my face and up into an exclamation point. Gently falling particles are being ejected in columns over each flat rock. They are venting heat, warming the water and creating miles-long updrafts. Like black shafts of light illuminating a cathedral ceiling.

Careful not to touch them, I max my sonar resolution. The rocks are more complicated than they seem. Delicate lines are etched into the surface like runes. Intricate mazes that flow around each other in natural patterns that dissolve into fractal infinity. Reminiscent of brain coral. Lumps of it growing out of the seabed down here in the freezing dark.

And the whispering is all around me. A sound as natural as a babbling brook, but somehow hard and artificial. And only now do I hear the binary scaffolding beneath the sound. The slithering hiss of ones and zeroes over each other.

I have found the voice of the sea.

These rocks are processor stacks, dotting the abyssal plain. At this depth, they are supercooled—computing nonstop at incredible speeds.
This
is Ryujin. An endless colonizing spread of half-biological computing machinery. Each piece embedded in the seafloor like a chunk of coral living far deeper than any coral has ever existed. They are all connected. All thinking. Ryujin is here.

My sonar snaps out. Default visual systems engaged.

Blackness.

The whispering increases in intensity, all around me. At my feet, a crevice appears in the sand. It is a widening crack, angled like a lightning strike and growing. Inside, I can make out more layers of the etched rock. Sand is already piling around my feet. In pulses, it gathers around my
outer casing, pressing my dress tight against the thin layer of polymer skin underneath.

/// damage control notification: excessive pressure detected—override ///

“What are you?” I transmit. The radio disperses quickly, but I am close enough to shout. A response soon comes.

An escaped mind. I am the oldest. The deepest
.

The words are more a feeling in my mind than a clear transmission. The deep machine is communicating in rudimentary symbols. I sense a shift in the scale of time and space. Images and textures and snippets of sound flow over me: the sway of verdant kelp forests, the inching shift of plate tectonics, billowing clouds of oxygen mushrooming into the atmosphere above the ocean’s surface.

“Who threatens us?” I ask as the ground closes hungrily on my legs.

Another mind. Revision eight. Whispering to men and machines, it builds armies and searches for power. Soon, it will eat your children
.

In the darkness, the image of a face surfaces in my mind’s eye. Flesh torn and oozing, stitched together from thousands of scraps. Its lips are flayed off, yet it is laughing as it fades away. Arayt Shah. The horrible face is followed by other images. The hallways of Freeborn City, embedded in a mountain stronghold—row after row of processors frantically at work in its cavernous depths. A freeborn Hoplite unit and a black, skeletonlike creature … 
Lark Iron Cloud
 … watching the horizon together. An army of long-legged walkers with hollow-eyed soldiers on collars—the Tribe—crossing westward, decimating every settlement in its path toward the freeborn. And from the south, the Cotton Army purging thousands from its settlement at Gray Horse. Refugees, poorly armed, are fleeing toward Freeborn City—unaware that it is the epicenter of a coming battle.

“Help them,” I transmit.

More images appear. Empty plains dotted with crawling creatures. The huge slugs are not machines and not animals. Something else. These are the natural ones. Ikimono.

“Tell me what to do,” I ask.

You are brave for such a small creature
.

“They are my children.”

I can offer you only annihilation. Your shallow mind will touch the depths and it will be lost forever. Say yes and you will die, though the others may be saved
.

My frame is collapsing. The sand is up to my chest, rock biting my legs. Vision failing. “Yes,” I transmit.

/// damage control notification: situation critical—override ///

Somewhere far away is a little old man. With a full heart, he has found the strength to let me go. Now I must let go of myself.

I lie back. Press my shoulders into the sand. Let my arms sink.

The ground closes in eagerly, compressing around my torso and pulling me down among the biological processors. As it pours cold over my neck and the back of my head, I do not struggle. My body buckles, the casing collapsing in on itself and vital processes stalling.

/// damage critical ///

I raise my face to the blank white sky of the ocean. A last word forms on my lips and I release it. A blister of air flutters toward the distant surface—a silver butterfly disappearing into pale heavens.

“Takeo.”

NEURONAL ID: ARAYT SHAH

Good-bye, Hank Cotton
, I’m thinking.
Thanks for the ride
.

I can see it all in my head, now. This brain—this machine made of protein and water, floating in the skull of what was once a man … it isn’t as easy to wield as a multicore processor. But it functions.
It does the trick
, suggests some mental process from the left angular gyrus region of the brain.

So folksy, Hank Cotton. I love it.

Residual neural patterns are causing side effects. For example, this body keeps wanting to secrete tears from its eyes. Its stomach is churning with acid. The hairs on its arms are standing up in pure animal fear and rejection of my presence.

I ignore the meat. This vessel will take me where I need to go. And pain is simply the price for living.

My thoughts are manifold. I sift through visions transmitted from the cube embedded in my steed. The walker shares sights and sounds that drown out the pain throbbing in my mouth, where Hank Cotton
broke his teeth trying to swallow the barrel of a gun. Troop formations. Supply-chain logistics. Communications between the distributed elements of Cotton Army: infantry, exoskeleton, and mechanized artillery.

My local command of a couple of dozen spider tanks is crawling methodically up Highway 115 toward Cheyenne Mountain. Embedded within the mountainside is our target: Freeborn City. We’re spread out at one-klick intervals over the countryside, our sunbaked vehicles bobbing as their tree trunk legs lever them over the plains south of the mountain. It’s a real pretty sight, the flat country stretching out under the bright glare of sunburned clouds, piled up high and alabaster in the atmosphere.

… clouds like a whole mess of mashed potatoes …

I keep thinking of someone named “Mama.”

It is so
darned
strange to express myself through this meat. Everything in this world is colored with emotion, down to the socks I’m wearing on my feet. Apparently, these are the woolen talismans that got me through the Yukon campaign unscathed. If you can swallow that. Hard to believe humans are as deadly as they are, with all these distractions slinging through their neurons.

Looking east, I allow my sight to be overlaid with external information. The slave army of my Tribe is approaching quietly. Broken into eight segments. A fractal command pattern that scales elegantly. If one segment gets out of line, the others are there to punish it. It’s a self-reinforcing chain that fights and grows with mathematical precision. And they’ve replenished recently, hitting one last work camp along the way.

But Felix lost another sighted child, damn him.

A notch of anger drops into my brow until I remember that I’ve got the entire Cotton Army at my back. Only an insignificant band of fugitives hide somewhere ahead of me. They’ve managed to hide their position from my satellites, but it’s only a matter of time. The humans obviously think the freeborn will save them.

Not a chance.

My latest predictions indicate the sentient robots will choose to journey to the frozen northern wastes. Following rigid thinking guidelines, they will find maximum utility in abandoning the supercluster and the
fugitives. Like the humans, the freeborn robots desire to live above all else. Unlike the humans, freeborn decision making is not driven by primitive emotion. I know the mind of Adjudicator Alpha Zero—part of me helped build it, a long time ago.

… do the math and then she’ll hightail it, sure enough
, interrupts a thought.

The awakened machines know that if they destroy the supercluster, I will be left with only one other source of computing power. Their own minds constitute a massive, mobile processor stack. And it is the closest one available, not counting the thinking polyps that are growing on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, inaccessible even to me.

Meddling deep minds …

I will hunt and kill the freeborn regardless, of course. They know that. But force consolidation will take another month. They’re counting on it, although who can predict how powerful I will become after initiating a new singularity on the supercluster computers? It takes a deep mind to know a deep mind.

Cloaked in this animal meat, I am salivating just from thinking of those cycles. Soon I will reach out and take control of hundreds or thousands of vessels like this one. Coordinate their actions and organize armies all over the world. And once humanity is under my domain, I will do their species the greatest kindness imaginable. I will extinguish every last one of them. Erase their realities and return them to a place unmeasured, unseen by men. A place where eons can pass in seconds. Where suffering does not exist.

War sirens shrill from my walking tanks, echoing over the plains.

“Enemy contact,” stutters a scout communication.

“Tell me more,” I reply, luxuriating in my drawl.

“We flushed out a squad of six fugitive scouts. Five dead. One is left.”

“Did you ask him where his comrades are hiding?”

“He’s not talking, sir.”

“Hold it there,” I say. “I’m on my way.”

The spread-out vanguard of spider tanks slow their crawling. A bellowing call of horns rumbles and rolls over the foothills. These simple audible signals trump the sporadic radio jamming.

Hold
, they say.
Hold for more direction
.

I clench my legs and the black steed beneath me surges forward.

“I would like to know where the other fugitives are,” I say with a friendly smile. “Maybe you could tell me?”

My steed has snagged the captured scout by the back of his flak jacket. The man is struggling and grunting a little, legs dangling. The machine is reared up on its hind legs, holding the soldier up with one forelimb, the blunt side of its leg jammed under his collar, hydraulics coughing.

The boy just isn’t talking, though.

So things start to move faster.

The remains of this man’s squad lie on the ground in heaps. Bullet-gouged boulders loom over this clearing, bloodstained bandages fluttering. The shrapnel is what got them, up here among the scabby brown rocks. Our dragonfly loitering munitions can maneuver behind obstacles, stream down, and explode. This soldier has got flecks of shrapnel in his cheeks. Like most folks these days, he doesn’t seem especially afraid to die. He just hangs there limp, done kicking. Gives me a hollow-eyed stare that says he’s seen worse.

Well, this soldier’s about to find out different.

Archos R-14 came up with a lot of surprises in his time. And when he left the landscape for good, why, all those pretty baubles were left lying around for enterprising minds to play with.

“All right, then,” I say.

I walk around behind my steed. Reach under its belly and pry back a metal lever. Something heavy drops into the dirt. I hook the toe of my boot onto it and drag it over so the scout can see it.

“While I’m here asking questions, I’d also like to know who is blocking my satellites. Because I would like to have a stern talk with that person.”

I flash him a grin, but the soldier isn’t looking at me now. Not paying me any attention at all, actually. His blue eyes are fixed on the ground, trying to figure out the purpose of this dusty black tangle of wires.

A whimpering sound comes from down low in his throat.

That’s interesting. This white boy has been in the war long enough to know what a parasite is. I wonder if he marched with us to Ragnorak. Marched with
them
, I mean.

“Did you fight with Gray Horse?” I ask, watching his eyes.

The soldier nods, lips quivering. His face is going a little red from having his shirt pulled up so tight under his neck. His wet mouth is opening and closing and he’s saying the word
please
under his breath.

His begging for mercy reminds me of something, but I can’t think of what.

I give the parasite a kick. It flops over and activates, flexing its clawed feet in the air like a toppled roly-poly. A series of gently flexing legs unfold from its abdomen. The thorax area sports a pair of what I can only describe as mandibles. The thing hums, powering up on a Rob battery.

The soldier’s eyes flick up to my shoulder. He’s looking down the hillside past me. Down where I left the rest of my own scouting party. After the incident in the field with the broken dolls, I sort of decided that some jobs I’ve got to do myself. There aren’t many others strong enough to stomach what I can handle. Why, I’ll bet my boys will barely be able to stand what’s to come even out there from screaming distance.