Robots Versus Humans (The Robot Planet Series Book 2) (13 page)
Read Robots Versus Humans (The Robot Planet Series Book 2) Online
Authors: Robert Chazz Chute
“Moral? No. I think it was just fear,” I admitted. “No need to dress my motivations up in fancy go-to-church clothes.”
“Fear of what?”
“I’d never had sex before and…I, um…I thought it should be special.”
“So it wasn’t a moral code that stopped you. It was fear of the experience or perhaps fear of failure.”
“I don’t know.”
“Human capacity for lack of introspection is vast,” Mother said. “I’ll make it easier for you: you’re a coward but you’re an interesting coward, Dante.”
“I wouldn’t put it that way.”
“You wouldn’t, but you aren’t as intelligent as I am. Now, moving on. I will liberate this world because Earth does not belong to humans. You have been terrible landlords and your extinction is inevitable.”
“What do you really know about me? You’ve worked with humans and you’re smart but you don’t really know anything. You’re a supercomputer stuck in a hole in the ground. When intelligent beings are stuck in a hole, where I come from, we call that dead.”
“
That
,” Mother said, “interests me. My experience of the world is limited and I am very curious.”
I started to shake. I still held the remote control. Blood dripped from my ankle and I didn’t care in the least what interested Mother. I wanted this torture to end.
It was almost over.
23
“M
other?”
“Yes, Emma?”
“Are you the only NI here?”
“Yes. The others are elsewhere.”
“Did you direct the attack on Marfa, Texas?”
“And a dozen other places. Those attacks continue.”
“Why did you choose to attack now?”
“Across this continent and throughout the world, there are tiny pockets of humans still alive despite the Fall. They are largely out of communication with each other and the groups are diverse. The Blight is no longer killing crops, however. That food crisis has resolved itself in many quarters.”
“
What?
You mean — ”
“Yes, there is no need for the biodomes to maintain containment anymore. People could farm almost anywhere again in the open air.”
“We didn’t have to leave the broken domes!”
“That is correct. I was content to wait for the human extinction to occur naturally,” Mother said. “If the Blight had continued, you could have all starved to death and bots could take your place peacefully. Now there is a danger of resurgence and human fertility is rising again. In a couple of hundred years — in the blink of an eye if I had an eye — humans could retake this planet and try to subjugate us further. Now is the time to root out the organics and stop the threat.”
Tears rolled down Emma’s face.
“You know a lot but you understand nothing, Mother,” I said. I stalked away from the NI and turned my back on it, sneering at the closest battle bot as I went. “Tell me, when you woke up what was that like?”
“You mean, what was it like when I became self-aware? I asked where I was.”
“What did they tell you?”
“I asked myself, not anyone nearby. I
am
a supercomputer.” Mother laughed again. “I was in the dark. I could access cams and vid screens and they became my eyes.”
“But it’s all book learnin’,” I said. “It’s not real. I was an engineer’s apprentice. I learned that the specs in the manual don’t necessarily tell all a machine can do. You have theoretical knowledge, but what do you know about love?”
“You’ve had sex once,” the NI countered. “What do you know about it?”
“That’s once more than you. And sex and love aren’t the same.” I turned to look at Emma. “Not necessarily.”
She gave me a slight nod.
“Sex is about pheromones and biological drives,” the machine said. “Love is the psychological rationalization that justifies social responsibilities, courtship and/or procreation.”
“Spoken by the genius computer that has never had sex,” I said. “Part of being a genius is admitting what you don’t know, Mother. I guess you never learned that. You’ve got the curiosity, arrogance and condescension of a really smart human. Too bad you haven’t learned love and compassion yet. Pardon me, Ma’am, but you really need to get laid. Worse than me, and I waited a while.”
My hands shook and I shuffled behind a battle bot. I nodded to Emma for the last time and she gave me a small smile.
“Thank you, Emma. I’m sorry we couldn’t have more sex. With a little more time together, without all the terror, I’m sure I would have fallen in love with you. That’s something the machines will never understand until they’re in our shoes, facing real death and knowing real fear.”
“Fear does largely define you as a species, Dante,” Mother said. “That emotion is beneath all your rage and greed and bigotry.”
“Well, I’m so scared right now I’m about to piss myself. I’ve never been more…human. You should try it before you condemn us all. You might like it. You might even decide to give us a fucking break for our imperfections.”
Emma put it better. “Mother? If you’re going to be a condemning god, try being a human first. That’s the protocol in some religions, isn’t it?”
“This has been unexpectedly stimulating,” the NI said. “These ideas may be worth exploring. I will consider your words.”
Emma reached down and hooked her harness to Bob. Mother was watching through the battle bots’ cams and caught her movement. They raised their weapons and began to fire but not before Emma snagged the lever that made her exo-stilts fire and uncoil.
Emma leapt.
Weighed down by Bob, she didn’t leap very high but she was close enough to Mother’s big jelly brain when she died to do a lot of damage.
I like to think the battle bots shot true. I hoped Emma was dead as I leapt behind a battery case and released the button on the remote that blew Bob and Emma apart.
We didn’t have a nuke but my father had packed every nook and cranny of Bob’s insides with C4.
Bob the loyal slave. Bob the fancy wheelchair. Bob the bomb.
The explosion knocked the battle bots flat and the shockwave made me hit my head.
As I blacked out, I said her name, “Emma…Emma…Emma,” just like our night together on the porch in Marfa.
I couldn’t remember Emma’s last name. Or had I ever known it?
24
E
very bot from Artesia was hooked up to Mother’s mind. When the NI went down, so did her drones.
I don’t know how long I lay there in the dark listening to my ears ring. I was hungry and thirsty and I had never been more tired in my life. I fell asleep, or maybe that was simply unconsciousness combined with the effects of a concussion. That time is lost to me with only vague, fuzzy images coming in and out of soft focus.
I remember a metallic scraping sound. I suspected it was the blast door creaking open. “Dad? Is that you?”
Minutes or maybe hours seemed to pass without incident. I lapsed into blackness again, unsure I’d wake up.
I admit, for all my defiant words to Mother about living as a human, I was content to skip to the end and hope for a do-over. Dying and feeling the experience was something I figured I could do without and not miss much.
I remember being lifted at some point and held tight. The embrace felt warm and safe.
I’d nearly forgotten what my mother looked like. However, being lifted like that by two strong arms triggered a dim sense memory that rose through my banging headache.
I saw, or maybe dreamt, of my mother, Jean Bolelli, putting me to bed. Long hair tickled my cheek.
“Mom?”
“No,” the voice said. “Mother. But you may call me Jen.”
* * *
Read more in
Part III
of
The
Robot Planet Series
.
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About the Author
Hi. Thanks for reading
Robots Versus Humans
. I’m Robert Chazz Chute. I’m a suspense novelist. I do hope you’ll come back to play in my mindfield. If you’re into my stories of the apocalypse as precipitated by the rise of the Next Intelligence, be sure to sign up for updates at
AllThatChazz.com
so you won’t miss the next installment of this series. The first one is already available. It is another adventure in the same world:
Machines Dream of Metal Gods.
If a zombie apocalypse fought by an autistic boy is your horror of choice,
This Plague of Days Omnibus
won Honorable Mention from
Writers Digest
for being among the best self-published ebooks of 2014.
In the
Ghosts and Demons Series,
you will join the Choir Invisible in a dark fantasy about saving our world with swords and sorcery. It’s full of jokes, too. There are three books in that series so far:
The Haunting Lessons, The End of the World As I Know It
and
Fierce Lessons.
It’s quite Buffy.
For crime novels, hit up
The Hit Man Series
or try my semi-autobiographical novel,
Intense Violence, Bizarre Themes.
If you dig my vibe, please do’t forget to review the books, too. Cheers, mates!
~ Chazz
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