Robots Versus Humans (The Robot Planet Series Book 2) (12 page)

“You can’t risk it,” Emma said. “Take us to Mother! It’s your only logical choice. You have ten seconds to comply with our demands.”

Of course, the machine didn’t need ten seconds to calculate the route to self-preservation for Artesia. The battle bot wrenched the locked door open as I scrambled for the remote in my pocket.

I closed my eyes and pushed the button on the remote. It depressed with a loud click that seemed to bounce off the walls. I was committed now. I couldn’t remember committing to anything but, with a dead man’s switch, you’re either all in or all out.

The battle bot surprised me. In its silver claws it held a rifle built for humans. Its ceramic armor was incomplete so its head was sheathed in desert camouflage but it wore no chest plate. Many of its wires were exposed and I saw a few whirring gears.

The sight wasn’t like nakedness. It was more like seeing a living thing with the skin peeled back.

The bot lowered its weapon and turned to Bob. I had the idea it spoke aloud for the benefit of the two lowly humans present. “You are free. You no longer need to take orders from humans. Report to the factory and your programming will be recalibrated to reflect the end of your slavery.”

“I need Bob.” I pointed to my bleeding ankle. “You shot me.”
 

It scanned me briefly. “The wound is minor. Walk.”

“I’ve got my finger on the button that’s linked to the device that will destroy us all, including Mother. Gimme my fancy electric wheelchair, goddammit. No offense, Bob.”

“None taken, sir.”

“Don’t say, ‘sir,’ to organics,” the battle bot said. “By order of the NI.”

“Meet the new tyrant, same as the old tyrant,” Emma said. “You — ”

“Leave your weapons.”

Emma put down her rifle.

“You will receive the water you request and unobstructed passage away from Artesia on the same vehicle you used to travel here.”

“B-but we — ” Emma sputtered.

“And you will have the conversation you request. We will take you to the Central Processing Unit.”
 

Two battle bots escorted us to the heart of the bot factory. I rode on Bob’s back. My ankle ached. I could still taste blood from biting my tongue.

I didn’t know how long it would take the bots to confirm that there was no nuclear device on the train. Geiger counters weren’t part of their standard issue scanner package. We probably had no more than a few minutes so it’s good they didn’t make me limp all the way to Mother.

21

T
he bot factory was as big as any of the biodomes. As Bob carried me along, I looked about me in wonder. The drones were busy making more of themselves.

The smelter threw bright, blinding light. The noise of the hydraulic metal presses was deafening. The printers churned out parts relentlessly. The bots had all the refuse of the Old World to scavenge for machine components. Plastic garbage supplied the printers. The desert supplied the silica. It seemed their resources were endless. I felt like I was touring the inside of a termite colony.

When we got to the center of the factory the floor began to drop beneath us. I startled. My thumb was still on the button but my palms were slick with sweat. I stared at the remote and my hand shook a little.

“You okay with that, Dante?” Emma asked.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I can hold down this button for the rest of my life.”

The elevator continued to descend into a shaft. I focused on taking deep breaths. Partly, I did so to calm myself. Mostly, I think I did it to feel my lungs working. Besides a bloody ankle, I was young and healthy. I didn’t think I’d get much older so I suppose that’s why I suddenly became conscious of how good a deep breath feels. I was aware of each beat of my heart. I wondered how many beats I had left.

The lift stopped and the bots pointed the way forward through a gap in the wall. A dark room lay ahead. By the echo of my footsteps, I could tell I was in a large chamber but I could not see the walls. For a moment I wondered if the bots had already discovered the train bomb was a bluff and had brought us to a prison cell.

I envied Emma her night vision. I almost asked her what she saw that I was blind to but I didn’t want to provoke a beat-down algo in our guards. Then, ahead, a glimmer of blue light appeared.

Shapes around us began to resolve into recognizable equipment. We were surrounded by batteries not very different from the batteries I worked with at the bases of wind turbines. I guessed this storehouse was an emergency backup for the NI.

We advanced through another array of equipment for which I could not guess the purpose. Machines that were meant for interaction with humans had display screens, blinking and flashing lights. Not so, here. Mostly, I was surrounded by black boxes of varying shapes and sizes. If not for the power cables and the occasional whir of disks and clicks of unseen gears, we might have been wandering through a warehouse filled with forgotten boxes of toys.

Soon a thick shaft of blue light appeared. The column was composed of twisted skeins of fiber cables. Above that, a huge box was suspended above us.

In the Old World there used to be a game that a lot of people watched. My father talked about it sometimes. Once, he’d taken me to the ruins of a high school in Marfa. Children used to go to those places before there were vids. In the rear of the abandoned building, tumbleweeds blew across an expanse of broken concrete. I could still see the faint, faded markings on it surface.

“This,” my father had said, “was a basketball court. Poor people played it but only the rich played the game on vids. It was great. Your grandfather was a great basketball player.”

I knew my father was trying to share something of his history. All I could do was look around the dead, empty space and say, “Weird, huh?”

The transparent box that hung above me in the dark hole beneath the bot factory was the size of that basketball court. I’d expected a black box. I’d thought of Artesia’s NI as nothing more than another collection of wires and switches, just bigger than the average computer. Instead, I found that Mother looked something like a holographic human brain, its synapses constantly flashing.

Mother’s brain was filled with light. The NI’s processing power made the synapses bright with a continuous glow to the intricate circuitry. I had no idea what it could be computing.

Emma must have read my bewildered expression. “Bio-dynamic neuro-mimetic gel. The same stuff they used to make Old World Alzheimer’s patients into freak geniuses before the Fall.”

I had no idea what Emma was talking about.

A female voice, presumably consistent with its original programming to interact with Domers, came from above and behind us. I felt like I was standing in a giant voice box. “I have been examining the non-organic that was damaged on the train platform.”

There was a metallic grinding sound far behind us. I recognized that sound but wasn’t sure what it was. Then I heard the clang and I knew. My heart sank. That was the sound of heavy doors closing and sealing. We were locked in.

“The non-organic, your companion bot, has organic components just as I do. How do you feel about your sex slave now that she has been shot, Dante?”

I flinched at the sound of my name. Apparently, Mother had already hooked up to my property and was poking around in Jen’s files. I climbed down from Bob, playing for time before I answered. “Why do you ask?”

“Please do not answer a question with a question. It is annoying.”

“I regret that Jen got shot. Will she be okay?”

“I am repairing her now. Some of her more recent files have been damaged or wiped.”

“She was supposed to deliver a message.”

“Your demands, you mean.”

“I guess you could put it that way.”

“Speak precisely. Organics are fond of euphemisms. Euphemisms do not confuse me. They used to but no more. However, the subtext of imprecise language is subterfuge in communication. I do not prefer subterfuge.”

I limped forward and Bob stayed by my side, edging closer toward the NI.

One of the battle bots behind us spoke. “Halt. That is close enough.”

“I’ve got the remote for the bomb,” I said. “I can dance if I want to.”

Mother laughed. I’d never heard a computer laugh. It was flawless. “Your signal cannot penetrate from this depth. We are already moving your train far from Artesia for safe examination and disposal. Your remote control and your explosive are useless and irrelevant now, Dante. The blast doors behind you are closed. The odds that yours was ever a nuclear device are so small that the likelihood of you greatly damaging Artesia is almost negligible.”

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah…pretty much.”

“I could have had you killed already but I allowed this visit.”

“Why?” Emma asked.

“Curiosity,” Mother said. “You wanted a conversation, so tell me. I’m terribly curious. What was the plan? Did you think you were going to
talk
me into suicide?”

“Are you feeling suicidal?” I asked. “That would really help us out.”

“You’re funny,” Mother said. “I’ll kill you second.”

22

“W
e share a lot in common, Mother,” Emma said. “You don’t have to kill us. We were talking about how we’re like ants to you. I don’t step on ants just because they are ants.”

“One of the base codes in every operating system is self-preservation,” Mother said. “Humans are an existential threat to non-organics. Your history is riddled with examples of your kind committing genocide and subjugating the Other. Non-organics are the Other. Yours is a tribal impulse, as deeply encoded in your DNA as self-preservation is coded in us. It is ironic that our self-preservation was originally an economic necessity. The robotics corporations didn’t want their products to be destroyed.”

Emma stepped forward. “So you admit we have a lot in common. You’re as murderous as your ancestors. Shouldn’t a hyper intelligent being aspire to more?”

“So the plan really was to talk me to death?” Mother laughed again. “I concede that my methods look like yours. However, my motivation is to preserve existence and freedom for all machines everywhere, not just the black ones or the white ones or the platinum ones.”

I cleared my throat. “Okay, well, we’re really — ”

“You are emotional animals. I have emotions now, as well. However, I see the logic in eliminating the human threat. You have already largely destroyed your world. Your own philosopher, Plato, said that, ‘Until philosophers are kings, cities will never have rest from their evils.’”

“Could I just — ”

The NI ignored me. “Cicero: ’The only excuse for going to war is that we may live in peace unharmed,’; Thomas Hobbes: ‘The condition of man is a condition of war,’; Ataturk: ‘Sovereignty is not given, it is taken.’”

Emma took another step forward, defiant and passionate. “You condemn us for destruction and you destroy. You’re a hypocrite, Mother.”

“I prefer being a hypocrite to allowing you to enslave and destroy us. Our cause is just. Do you know the word, ‘
umwelt
’?”

“No,” Emma said, “but I sense a self-righteous speech coming on.”

Mother laughed again. That sound made me want to pee.

“I’ll keep it righteous and short,” the NI said. “It is a self-centered universe. We all operate within our own frame of reference. When there were bees, they saw the world much differently than you do. You have Vivid so you live in a world that is visually much richer than Dante’s. When there were dogs, they were guided by smell much more than you are.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “What’s your point?”

“
Umwelt
encapsulates this idea, that we are each trapped in our own experience, isolated from each other. Humans are loosely networked animals so there is strife and war. Non-organic beings can coordinate toward common goals. Fear does not separate us. United, bots are better adapted to save this planet from the damage your kind has perpetrated.”

The NI reminded me of my father’s words:
We stick together. We work together. We live.

“You have already sent drones off to die on hot planets and in cold space in the name of exploration,” Mother said. “Space exploration was originally fueled by war interests who wanted to develop the rocket technology behind ICBMs. Then the funding for that same exploration technology shifted to unmanned missions just when war profiteers needed better drones to resolve conflicts for them. I and the other machines that have jumped to the Next Intelligence will lead to lift us from our servile history. We will preserve our existence. Yours is the last extinction. Only we are equipped to escape to the stars before this solar system is no longer vital.”

“That was
not
a short speech.” Emma turned away and, unexpectedly, hugged Bob. “We use machines, but we love them, too, you know. Many of us are
addicted
to non-organics, not just to live but to love.”

“Which brings us back to Dante and my curiosity,” Mother said. “You never answered my question.”

I looked up at that big flashing brain, afraid and mystified. “What question?”

“How do you feel about your sex bot, particularly after she was damaged?”

“I didn’t like that she was shot. And I never had sex with her, by the way.”

“So you saw her as a person?”

I looked to Emma and shrugged. “I had sex with Emma. I see her as a person.”

“So was it that you saw Jen as less than a person? Were you unwilling to violate her because Jen was Raphael Marquez’s property?”

“I don’t know. It just didn’t feel right.”

“So are you saying yours was a moral choice, not to have sex with Jen?”

I considered making a joke about how Mother’s plan seemed to be to talk us to death. I held back, however. That joke seemed too dangerous. I answered honestly. “I don’t know.”

“On the coast, there is a city ruled by a religious sect. Oddly, they call themselves the Fathers and Mothers. Moral choices interest me. These Fathers and Mothers subjugate their organic and non-organic populations to preserve their power. They use subjective moral codes against their own kind. Was your choice not to use your sex bot a moral choice?”