Robopocalypse (13 page)

Before this ends badly, the drumkeeper speaks. John Tenkiller is a rail-thin little fella with dark, wrinkled skin and clear blue eyes. Been around forever, but some kind of magic keeps Tenkiller spry as a willow branch.

“Enough,” says John Tenkiller. “Hank. You and Lonnie Wayne are eldest sons and you have my respect. But them headrights of yours don’t give you free license.”

“John,” says Hank, “you ain’t seen what’s happened down there in town. It’s a massacre. The world’s coming apart at the seams. Our tribe is in danger. And if you ain’t in the tribe, you’re a threat to it. We’ve got to do whatever it takes to survive.”

John lets Hank finish, then he looks at me.

“With all respect, John, this ain’t about one tribe ’gainst another. It ain’t even about white, brown, black, or yellow. There sure as shit
is
a threat, but it don’t come from other people. It comes from
outside.
”

“Demons,” murmurs the elder.

A little stir goes through the crowd on that.

“Machines,”
I say. “Don’t go talking monsters and demons on me, John. They’s just a bunch of silly old machines and we can kill ’em. But the robots ain’t playing favorites among the races of man. They’re comin’ for all of us.
Human beings
. We’re all together in this.”

Hank can’t contain himself. “We never let any outsider into this drum circle. It’s a
closed
circle,” he says.

“This is true,” says John. “Gray Horse is sacred.”

The kid chooses a bad moment to freak out. “C’mon, man! I cain’t go back down there. It’s a fuckin’ death trap. Everybody down there is fuckin’ dead. My name is Lark Iron Cloud. You hear? I’m as Indian as anybody. And y’all wanna kill me just cuz I ain’t
Osage
?”

I put my hand on Lark’s shoulder and he simmers down. It’s real quiet now with just the crackling of the fire and the field crickets. I see a ring of Osage faces blank as stone bluffs.

“Let’s dance on it, John Tenkiller,” I say. “This here is big. Bigger than us. And my heart tells me we got to pick our place in history. So let’s dance on it first.”

The drumkeeper bows his head. We all sit still, waiting on him. Manners dictate we’d wait on him until morning if we had to. But we don’t have to. John raises his wise face and cuts us with those diamond eyes of his.

“We will dance, and wait for a sign.”

The women help the dancers suit up for the ceremony. When they finish adjusting our costumes, John Tenkiller pulls out a bulging leather pouch. With two fingers, the drumkeeper reaches in and pulls out a wet lump of ocher clay. Then he walks down the row of about a dozen of us dancers and wipes the red earth across our foreheads.

I feel the cold stripe of mud across my face—the fire of
tsi-zhu
. It dries fast and when it does, it looks like a streak of old blood. A vision, maybe, of what’s to come.

In the middle of the clearing, the massive drum is set up. John sits on his haunches and beats a steady
thom, thom, thom
that fills the night. Shadows flicker. The dark eyes of the audience are upon us. One by one, we—the eldest sons—stand and ease into our dance around the drum circle.

Ten minutes ago we were cops and lawyers and truckers, but now we’re warriors. Dressed in the old style—otter hides, feathers, bead-work and ribbon work—we fall right into a tradition that has no place in history.

The transformation is sudden and it jars me. I think to myself that this war dance is like a scene trapped in amber, indistinguishable from its brothers and sisters in time.

As the dance begins, I imagine the lunatic world of man changing and evolving just past the flickering edge of firelight. This outside world lurches ever onward, drunk and out of control. But the face of the Osage people stays the same, rooted in this place, in the warmth of this fire.

So we dance. The sounds of the drum and the movements of the men are hypnotic. Each of us concentrates on his own self, but we naturally build into a fated harmony. The Osage men are mighty substantial, but we crouch and hop and glide around the fire smooth as snakes. Eyes closed, we move together as one.

Feeling my way around the circle, I register the red flicker of firelight pushing through the veins of my closed eyelids. After a little while, the red-tinged darkness opens up and takes on the feel of a wide vista—as if I’m staring through a knothole into a vast, dark cavern. This is my mind’s eye. I know that soon I will find images of the future painted there—in red.

The rhythms of our bodies push our minds away. My mind’s eye shows me the desperate face of that boy from the ice cream store. The promise I made to him echoes in my ears. I smell the metallic tang of blood pooled on that tile floor. Looking up, I see a figure walking out of the back room of the ice cream shop. I follow. The mysterious figure stops in the darkened doorway and slowly turns to me. I shudder and choke down a scream as I spot the demonic smile painted on the plastic face of my enemy. In its padded gripper, the machine holds something: a little origami crane.

And the drumming stops.

In the space of twenty heartbeats, the dance fades. I crack open my eyes. It’s just me and Hank left. My breath puffs out in white clouds. When I stretch, my joints pop like firecrackers. A sheen of frost lines my tasseled sleeve. My body feels like it just woke up, but my mind never went to sleep.

The eastern sky is now blushing baby pink. The fire still burns something ferocious. My people are collapsed in heaps around the drum circle, asleep. Me and Hank must’ve been dancing for hours, robotically.

Then I notice John Tenkiller. He’s standing stock-still. Real slow, he raises a hand and points toward the dawn.

A white man stands there in the shadows, face bloodied. A crust of broken glass is embedded in his forehead. He sways and the shards glitter in the firelight. His pant legs are wet and stained black with mud and leaves. In the crook of his left arm, he’s got a sleeping toddler, her face buried in his shoulder. A little boy, probably ten, stands in front of his daddy, head down, exhausted. The man has a strong right hand resting on his son’s skinny shoulder.

There’s no sign of a wife or anybody else.

Me, Hank, and the drumkeeper gape at the man, curious. Our faces are smeared with dried ocher and we’re dressed in clothes older than the pioneers. I’m thinking that this guy must feel like he done stepped through the mud and back in time.

But the white fella just stares right through us, shell-shocked, hurting.

Just then, his little boy raises his face to us. His small round eyes are wide and haunted, and his pale forehead is striped with a rusty crimson line of dried blood. As sure as that boy is standing there, he’s been marked with the fire of
tsi-zhu
. Me and Hank look at each other, every hair of our bodies standing on end.

The boy has been painted but not by our drumkeeper.

People are waking up and murmuring to each other.

A couple seconds later, the drumkeeper speaks in the deep drone of a long-practiced prayer: “Yea, let the reflection of this fire on yonder skies paint the bodies of our warriors. And verily, at that time and place, the bodies of the
Wha-zha-zhe
people became stricken with the red of the fire. And their flames did leap into the air, making the walls of the very heavens redden with a crimson glow.”

“Amen,” murmur the people.

The white man lifts his hand from his boy’s shoulder and it leaves a perfect glistening palm print of blood. He holds out his arms, beckoning.

“Help us,” he whispers. “Please. They’re coming.”

The Osage Nation never turned away a single human survivor during the New War. As a result, Gray Horse grew into a bastion of human resistance. Legends began to spread around the world of the existence of a surviving human civilization located in the middle of America and of a defiant cowboy who lived there, spitting in the face of robotkind
.

—
CORMAC
WALLACE,
MIL#GHA217

5. T
WENTY-TWO
S
ECONDS

Everything has a mind. The mind of a lamp
.
The mind of a desk. The mind of a machine
.

T
AKEO
N
OMURA

ZERO HOUR

It’s hard to believe, but at this point in time Mr. Takeo Nomura was just an elderly bachelor living alone in the Adachi Ward of Tokyo. The events of this day were described by Mr. Nomura in an interview. His memories are corroborated by recordings taken by Takeo’s automated eldercare building and the domestic robots working inside it. This day marks the beginning of an intellectual journey that eventually led to the liberation of Tokyo and regions beyond
.

—
CORMAC
WALLACE,
MIL#GHA217

It is a strange sound. Very faint. Very odd. Cyclical; it comes again, and then again. I time the sound with the pocket watch that sits in a yellow pool of light on my workbench. It is very quiet for a while and I can hear the second hand patiently tick-tick-ticking.

What a lovely sound.

The apartment is dark except for my lamp. The building administrative brain deactivates overhead lights each night at ten p.m. It is now three a.m. I touch the wall. Exactly twenty-two seconds later, I hear a faint roar. The thin wall quivers.

Twenty-two seconds.

Mikiko lies across my workbench on her back, eyes closed. I have repaired the damage to the temporal portion of her skull. She is ready for activation, yet I do not dare to put her online. I don’t know what she will do, what decisions she will make.

I finger the scar on my cheek. How can I forget what happened last time?

I slip out the door and into the hallway. The wall lights are dimmed. My paper sandals are silent on the thin, brightly colored carpet. The low noise comes again and I imagine that I feel the air pressure fluctuate. It’s as if a bus is driving past every few seconds.

The noise is coming from just around the corner.

I stop. My nerves tell me to go back. Huddle in my closet-sized condo. Forget about this. This building is reserved for those over the age of sixty-five. We are here to be taken care of, not to take risks. But I know that if there is danger, I must see it and confront it and understand it. If not for my sake, then for Kiko’s. She is helpless right now, and I am helpless to fix her. I must protect her until I am able to break the spell she is under.

However, this does not mean that I must be brave about it.

At the corner of the hallway, I lean my aching back against the wall. I peek around the edge with one eye. My breathing is already coming in panicked gasps. And what I see makes me stop breathing altogether.

The hallway by the elevator banks is deserted. On the wall is an ornate display: two strips of round lights with floor numbers painted next to them. All the lights are dark except the ground floor one, which glows dull red. As I watch, the glowing red dot creeps slowly upward. As it reaches each floor, it makes a soft click. Each click grows louder in my mind, as the elevator rises higher and higher.

Click. Click. Click
.

The dot reaches the top floor and pauses there. My hands are squeezed into fists. I bite my lip hard enough to make it bleed. The dot holds steady. Then, it
streaks
downward with nauseating speed. As the dot approaches my floor, I can hear that odd noise again. It is the whoosh of the elevator plunging straight down at the speed of gravity. A puff of wind is pushed out into the hallway as the elevator falls. Under the wind, I can also hear the screams.

Clickclickclickclick
.

I flinch. Press my back against the wall and close my eyes. The elevator barrels past, rattling the walls and causing the hallway sconces to flicker.

Everything has a mind. The mind of a lamp. The mind of a desk. The mind of a machine. There is a soul inside everything, a mind that can choose to do good or evil. And the mind of the elevator seems bent on evil.

“Oh no, no, no,” I whimper to myself. “Not good. Not good at all.”

I gather my courage, then scurry around the corner and press the elevator call button. I watch the wall indicator as the red dot climbs back up, one level at a time. All the way to my floor.

Click. Click. Bing
. It arrives. The doors slide open like curtains parting on a stage.

“Most definitely not good, Nomura,” I say to myself.

The elevator walls are splattered with blood and bits of gore. Fingernail scratches mark the walls. I shudder to see a pair of bloodstained dentures partially embedded in the mounting bracket of the ceiling lamp, casting strange reddish shadows over all I see. Yet, there are no bodies. Smears on the floor lead toward the door. There are boot prints in the blood, marked with the pattern of the domestic humanoid robots that work here.

“What have you done, elevator?” I whisper.

Bing
, it insists.

Behind me, I hear the vacuum-tube whir of the servicebot elevator. But I can’t look away. Can’t stop trying to understand how this atrocity has happened. A blast of cool air hits the back of my neck as the small service-elevator door opens behind me. Just as I turn, a bulky mailbot shoves itself into the back of my legs.

Caught off guard, I collapse.

The mail robot is simple: an almost featureless beige box the size of an office copy machine. It normally delivers mail to the residents, gentle and quiet. From where I lie sprawled on the floor, I notice that its small round intention light doesn’t glow red or blue or green; it is dark. The mailbot’s sticky tires are clinging to the carpet as the device shoves me forward, toward the open mouth of the elevator.

I climb to my knees and pull on the front of the mailbot in a failed attempt to stand. The single black camera eye on the front face of the mailbot watches me struggle.
Bing
, says the elevator. The doors close a few inches and then open, like a hungry mouth.

My knees slide across the carpet as I push against the machine, leaving twin ruffled streaks on the thin nap. My sandals have fallen off. The mailbot has too much mass and there is nothing to grab hold of on its smooth plastic face. I whimper for help, but the hallway is dead quiet. The lamps only watch me. The doors. The walls. They have nothing to say. Complicit.

My foot crosses the threshold of the elevator. In a panic, I reach on top of the mailbot and knock off the flimsy plastic boxes that hold letters and small packages. Papers flutter onto the carpet and into the drying pools of blood in the elevator. Now I am able to flip open the service panel on the front frame of the machine. Blindly, I stab at a button. The rolling box keeps ramming me into the elevator. With my arm bent at a cockeyed angle, I hold down the button with all my failing strength.

I beg the mailbot to stop this. It has always been a good worker. What madness has infected it?

Finally, the machine stops pushing. It is rebooting. This activity will last perhaps ten seconds. The mailbot is blocking the elevator door. I climb awkwardly on top of it. Embedded in its broad, flat back is a cheap blue LCD screen. Hex code flickers by as the delivery machine steps through its loading instructions.

Something is wrong with my friend. The mind of this robot is clouded. I know that the mailbot does not wish to harm me, just as Mikiko did not wish to harm me. It is simply under a bad spell, an outside influence. I will see what I can do about that.

Holding down a certain button during the reboot initiates a diagnostic mode. Scanning the hex code with one finger, I read what is happening in the mind of my gentle friend. Then, with a couple of button presses, I send the boxy machine into an alternate boot mode.

A safe mode.

Lying on my belly on top of the machine, I cautiously peek over the front edge. The intention light blossoms into a soft green glow. That is very good, but there isn’t much time. I slide off the back of the mailbot, slip my sandals back on, and gesture at the bot.

“Follow me, Yubin-kun,” I whisper.

After an unnerving second, the machine complies. It whirs along as I scamper back down the hallway to my room. I must return to where Mikiko waits, slumbering. Behind me, the elevator doors slam shut. Do I sense anger in them?

Speakers chime at us as we creep down the hall.

Ba-tong. Ba-tong
.

“Attention,” says a pleasant female voice. “There is an emergency. All occupants are pleased to evacuate the building immediately.”

I pat my new friend on its back and hold the door as we continue into my room. This announcement certainly cannot be trusted. Now I understand. The minds of the machines have chosen evil. They have set their wills against me. Against all of us.

Mikiko lies on her back, heavy and unresponsive. In the hallway, sirens chirp and lights flash. Everything here is ready. My tool belt is snapped on. A small jug of water hangs from my side. I even remember to put on my warm hat, the flaps pulled snugly over my ears.

But I cannot bring myself to wake my darling—to bring her online.

Now the main building lights are on at top illumination and that pleasant voice is repeating again and again: “All occupants are pleased to evacuate the building immediately.”

But, my soul help me, I am stuck. I can’t leave Kiko behind, but she is too heavy to carry. She will have to walk on her own. But I am terrified of what will happen if she comes online. The evil that has corrupted the mind of my building could spread. I could not bear to see it cloud her dark eyes again. I will not leave her, yet I cannot stay. I need help.

Decision made, I close her eyes with my palm.

“Please come here, Yubin-kun,” I whisper to the mail-delivering robot. “We cannot allow the bad ones to speak with you, as they did Mikiko.” The intention light flickers on the blocky beige machine. “Hold very still now.”

And with a swift swing of my hammer, I smash the infrared port that is used to update the diagnostics of the machine. Now, there is no way to alter the instructions of the mailbot from afar.

“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” I ask the machine. Then I glance over to where Mikiko lies, eyes closed. “Yubin-kun, my new friend, I hope you are feeling strong today.”

With a grunt, I lift Mikiko off the workbench and set her on top of the mailbot. Built to carry heavy packages, the solid machine is completely unaffected by the added weight. It simply trains its single camera eye on me, following as I open the door to the hallway.

Outside, I see a shaky line of elderly residents. One by one, the door at the end of the hallway opens and another resident steps into the stairwell. My neighbors are very patient people. Very polite.

But the soul of this building has gone mad.

“Stop, stop,” I mumble to them. They ignore me, as usual. Politely avoiding eye contact, they keep stepping through the door, one after another.

With my loyal Yubin-kun following close, I reach the stairwell door just before the last woman can step through. An intention light over the doorway flashes yellow at me crossly.

“Mr. Nomura,” says the building in a gentle female voice, “please wait your turn, sir. Mrs. Kami is presently pleased to go through the door.”

“Don’t go,” I mutter to the elderly woman in her bathrobe. I cannot make eye contact. Instead, I lightly grasp her elbow.

With a glare, the shriveled old woman tears her elbow from my hand and shoves past me, stepping through the doorway. Just before the door snaps shut behind her, I wedge my foot into the opening and get a glimpse of what is inside.

It is a bad dream.

In a confusion of inky blackness and flashing strobes, dozens of my elderly neighbors crush each other in falling heaps down the concrete stairs. Showers of emergency water rain down from the sprinkler heads, turning the stairs into slick, cascading waterfalls. The fire exhaust vent is on full strength, sucking frigid air up from the bottom of the shaft to the top. Moans and cries are drowned by the shrieking turbines. The mass of writhing arms and legs seems to combine in my vision until it is a single, massively suffering creature.

I pull my foot back and the door slams shut.

We are all trapped. It is only a matter of time before the domestic humanoid robots ascend to this level. When they arrive, I will be unable to defend myself or Mikiko.

“This is a very bad, bad, bad thing, Mr. Nomura,” I whisper to myself.

Yubin-kun blinks a yellow intention light at me. My friend is wary, as he should be. He senses that things are wrong.

“Mr. Nomura,” says the voice overhead, “if you are not pleased to utilize the stairwell, we will send a helper to assist. Stay where you are. Help is on the way.”

Click. Click. Click
.

As the elevator rises, the red dot begins its slow crawl up from the ground floor.