Machinehood

by S. B. Divya

  A simple question that under typical circumstances had an easy answer, but not today. Carma’s friend lived two buildings away. The thought of letting her child outside with the world falling apart and no swarm to watch over her… Nithya’s stomach clenched again.

  “Not today. We need to stay home.”

  Her daughter scrunched up her face.

  “Come, sweetie, I’ll play with you,” Bhairavi Chitthi said. “Do you know how to play rummy?”

  Nithya sent her aunt a wordless look of thanks. The older woman had an expression of forced cheer for Carma’s sake, but her eyes showed the same worried tension that gnawed at Nithya.

  She opened the balcony door. The outside air was thick with heat and humidity, but without the climate-control WAI, the flat would turn sweltering in little time.

  Someone knocked at the door.

  Nithya opened it by a few centimeters, then wider once she saw the landlord. Krishnamurthy wore cheaply designed slacks and a button-down shirt. His thinning gray hair lay oiled against his head. He rarely came upstairs.

  “Your messaging was not receiving. I’m shutting off the building manager at five o’clock,” he informed her in English. “Water will not come, but you can collect from the tap outside. Power will go off, also. I won’t take any risk in this situation.”

  “Okay,” Nithya said, then switched to Tamil. “Are you scared?”

  He replied in their native language, “Without a doubt. I have never liked this WAI business. It was better before.”

  Nithya couldn’t agree with that, but she thanked him again. He shuffled up the stairs. She turned Sita back on. While they had electricity, she had to risk using her WAI.

  “Sita, tear down all the interior walls and make buckets, a basic cooking set, and enough chairs for eight people.” She switched on the kitchen and waved away Aunty’s raised eyebrows. “Set the fridge to manual operation. Reconfigure the kitchen to the simple Welga design, no oven, large sink. Change the sofa back to beds.”

  What else did they need? “And make three battery-powered lanterns, too.”

  “The household materials are insufficient to print batteries,” Sita said. “All other transformations are in progress.”

  Nothing to light their way at night, then.

  Carma sat on the floor and handed a static doll to her great-aunt, impervious to the activity around her. She whispered in the ear of a ragged stuffed bear that had belonged to Nithya. The storage cabinet doors hung open. They kept most of the static items on the lower shelves, and Carma had raided them thoroughly for anything resembling a plaything.

  A roving vendor-bot blared its inventory from the street. Nithya checked the fridge and decided to stock up.

  “I’m going down for some vegetables.”

  By the time she descended three flights of stairs, a crowd of people surrounded the cart. Of course they would take precautions. For all their modern conveniences, they’d grown up hearing stories about life at the turn of the century, how unreliable services and utilities had been. They jostled against her, as if standing closer would make the queue move faster. Someone near the front raised her voice in protest: “Leave some for the rest of us! You can’t eat all that before it rots.”

  After nearly an hour, she reached the front. She had a choice of onions, okra, or cabbage. She took some of each.

  Carma glanced her way when Nithya returned to the flat. “Why is the kitchen like that? Is Aunty Welga coming back with Papa?”

  “No, but I wish that she was. We might have to do some cooking for the next day or two, until they fix the WAIs.”

  Carma giggled. “You don’t know how to cook!”

  Bhairavi Aunty snorted. “Don’t worry, sweetie, I do. I’ll teach Amma.”

  “I know how to make a few dishes,” Nithya said in a tone of mock outrage. “I may not be as good as your aunty Welga, but we won’t go hungry.”

  They would have to eat their dinner in the dark. Thankfully, the stoves still ran on cans of propane gas, so the power outage wouldn’t keep them from functioning.

  Silence filled the flat. Usually the climate-control fan provided a steady background noise, or in the cooler months, the sounds from bots and autos outside. The world had gone quiet, and it left Nithya unsettled.

  With five minutes left on Krishnamurthy’s deadline, Nithya checked her messages one last time. Zeli had accepted the money transfer before the bank freeze. She’d sent a flight number and arrival time, as well.

  “Sita, print Zeli’s message and ten sheets of blank paper.”

  Nithya rummaged in the storage cabinet and found a pencil and an ink pen that had long since dried up. She took the printed sheets to her small desk, which still held the massive document from the anonymous source, then remembered that she had yet to see the results of the latest simulation on Welga’s condition, the one she’d run the night before.

  “Sita, print the tabulation from last night’s simulation. Fastest setting!”

  An alert flashed that Welga had been involved in another bombing, possibly engaged with the Machinehood. Nithya prioritized the display in her visual. Welga and some others stood next to a figure wrapped in a metallic blanket. A building burned in the background.

  Five pages into the report, the power cut out, along with the feeds around Welga. Nithya slid the sheets from the printer.

  She took the pages to the balcony for more light and gasped at the sky.

  “Oh my God.”

  Carma and Bhairavi Chitthi glanced her way, then moved to stand beside her. Her daughter’s small hand slipped into hers.

  “What is that, Amma? It looks like falling stars.”

  “The network constellations. Someone has destroyed them.”

  WELGA

  22. We create bots and WAIs, but much as with human children, we have no right to own them. We must stop treating them like mindless machines, or else we are all complicit in sociopathic behavior. Worse, we have arrived at an economic equilibrium with them such that the majority of humanity is treated like slave labor, too.

  —The Machinehood Manifesto, March 20, 2095

  Welga shook Dakini. “What the hell did you do?”

  “Nothing. How can I? I can’t communicate through this wrap.”

  Sirens wailed in the distance. Shouts sounded from down the street, followed by the crunch of metal.

  Olafson approached them and spoke softly to Welga. “Let’s get Dakini back to headquarters and see if we can pry some useful information out of them.”

  “My name is Khandro, and you may refer to me as ‘she,’ ” Dakini said.

  “Fine,” Welga said, and lifted her. “Let’s go.”

  Their vehicle’s doors remained locked at their approach.

  Olafson swore. “It won’t open because it’s off-line.”

  Welga subvocalized, “Por Qué, broadcast a request for a vehicle with manual override.”

  “Unable to broadcast. Loss of network.”

  Of course. Welga had a moment of cognitive dissonance. Where was she? She shook her head like a wet dog. This is America, not the Maghreb. But the network blackout had the same effect. Without the connection, Por Qué was limited to the hardware within Welga’s body. Not only had Welga lost the ability to reach out to other people, she’d lost the part of her agent that sounded natural. All attempts at communications—other than speaking out loud—would fail.

  She took a deep breath and yelled, “Does anyone in the area have a manual vehicle?”

  An exfactor in a blindingly fuchsia suit waved their hand. They jogged over. “I have a trike. Do you know how to drive?”

  “Yes,” said Welga. A necessary skill for her service as a Raider. It couldn’t be that hard to remember, right?

  Olafson wore a grim expression as the exfactor led them to an equally eye-catching vehicle. Cameras sprouted all over the three-wheeler’s clear dome, useless now with nowhere to capture the video feeds.

  “What’s your name?” Olafson
asked the exfactor.

  “Flannery James.”

  “Thank you, Flannery. I’m Arvindh Olafson with the Joint Intelligence Agency. On behalf of the United States government, we’ll make sure you’re reimbursed when new stellas go up.”

  Flannery handed Welga a key. “After today, my tip jar’ll be so full, I may not need the government’s money.”

  Welga didn’t remind them that the blackout meant people wouldn’t be tipping them, or anyone else for that matter. She stared at the key and the trike’s door until the exfactor grabbed it and held it against a near-invisible slot. They waited as Olafson slid into the back. Welga maneuvered the dakini into the seat next to him and strapped the operative in. Flannery then showed her how to activate the engine.

  “Good luck,” the exfactor said.

  “Thank you.”

  Welga gripped the steering wheel and tapped the accelerator paddle with her thumb. They would need all the luck they could get. The trike weaved in the street until she had the feel of it. Brake with the left paddle. The range glowed green on the dashboard display: 330 kilometers.

  “Por Qué, where is the…” The question died as Welga remembered that a network blackout meant no map, no information on which fuel cell station to aim for. Years of training meant that she had their incoming route and surrounding streets memorized, but she hadn’t bothered to note waypoints.

  Her focus kept roving, looking for information in her visual periphery that didn’t exist. Nothing to look at but the surroundings. Her mind felt like half of it was missing.

  “Ramírez, you holding up? Need a medic stop?”

  “Nah. Wouldn’t know where to go, anyway, but I should re-up on pain drugs.” Welga fished in her pocket and pulled out her pill case. “Open it for me?”

  “Damn, Ramírez, you got quite the stash. Extra zips, too.”

  Shit. “Always prepared for emergencies.”

  Olafson snorted and handed it back to her. She balanced it on her leg and took what she needed with one hand, including a quad-zip to stave off tremors—she’d run out of duos—then slid the case back into her pocket.

  “With the stellas off-line,” Welga said, “maybe we’re safe to uncover our suspect for a little while.”

  “This is true,” Khandro’s muffled voice confirmed, not that they could take her word for it.

  Olafson rearranged the wrap until he could pull a section away to reveal the dakini’s face.

  “It is you,” Welga said after a glance at the rearview mirror. “From the refinery.”

  The same brown eyes from Welga’s hazy memories were set in high, delicate cheekbones and a calm expression. Straight black hair lay in a tight crop around them.

  “Our numbers are small,” Khandro said. “We have to be many places at once, as do you, it seems. Why didn’t you attack me for setting off the explosion at the house?”

  “I remembered what you said at the refinery—about following the path—and I happened to listen to a lecture from a Neo-Buddhist the other day who used similar language.” Welga glanced at the mirror again as she said, “And the caliph never strikes at people unless they attack first.”

  Khandro smiled. “You’re observant.”

  “Why did you bomb Dr. Smith’s house?” Olafson asked.

  “To distract you while I slipped away,” Khandro said nonchalantly. “If you’d tried to hurt me, I would have killed you.” The smile slid from her face. “The doctor is a good man. I’m glad you were able to get the children and Kevin to safety, though I wish you had also saved the care-bot.”

  “If you care so much about bots and WAIs,” Welga said, “why are you asking people to destroy them?”

  “We haven’t demanded that at all. People have committed violence on their own out of fear, as they’ve done throughout history. We’ve only asked that people stop bringing new bots and WAIs into a world where they continue to be oppressed.”

  “And what about Jackson?” Welga demanded. “Kuan? You went after them with no provocation.”

  The dakini frowned. “No provocation? They have us trapped in a cycle of escalation. Better bots and WAIs, then better pills so humans can keep up with them. People are pushed to their physical limits because the funders refuse to support the middle ground. Their deaths were… a mistake. My sisters shouldn’t have done that, though that’s what they were asked to do. They paid for it with their lives.”

  Who ordered them to kill those funders? Welga wouldn’t ask that, not until they returned to a secured area. That answer, if given truthfully, could have massive consequences.

  She drove onto the expressway. Stopped vehicles littered the lanes of traffic, unable to proceed without communicating to the network. Those few with manual overrides tried to weave around them. The trike maneuvered better than most, but the going was slow. People milled around on foot, dazed or huddled in urgent conversation with others. Frightened faces pressed against the windows of some cars. Someone banged their fists on the glass of theirs. Christ, were they trapped inside?

  “Should we help?” Welga said.

  “Not our problem today,” Olafson said, his tone flat with unhappiness. “We need to stay focused on our objective. We get her back to HQ and then figure out how wide the dark goes.”

  “Worldwide,” Khandro volunteered.

  In the rearview, Welga saw the operative resting her head against the seat back and gazing through the trike’s clear dome. She glanced upward. The streaks of white in the sky had turned to ash-gray smears.

  Olafson turned to stare at the dakini. “Every communications drone and satellite? Impossible.”

  “Not all of them, but enough to disrupt the constellations.”

  “The entire world is dark?” Olafson looked shell-shocked.

  “There are places in the world where people live without the stellas,” Welga said.

  “The Maghreb is dark only to the outside,” Khandro said. “Their soldiers have embraced our way, united with machines, speaking the language of WAIs. That’s why they’re so successful when they defend their borders.”

  Their soldiers. Our way. Welga noticed the pronoun distinctions. Wasn’t the Machinehood part of the empire? “You sound like you admire them. Are you working with them? Are they funding your efforts?”

  She shrugged. “Coin isn’t my concern. I appreciate their desire to improve the world, and their open-mindedness when it comes to their bodies.”

  “There are also places off-world where we can’t see. If the Machinehood worked with a station,” Welga mused aloud, trying to provoke a response, “they could deploy swarms of micro-explosives and we’d have no way to stop them.”

  “We must tear down the world before we can build it anew,” Khandro said, admitting nothing. “Out of death comes rebirth.”

  Useless platitudes. Olafson shot her a warning glance. No field interrogations. Welga gripped the steering wheel tighter than necessary. They hadn’t secured the car. With the stellas down, the odds of public microcameras in the vehicle were small, but they’d already underestimated the ability of the Machinehood to infiltrate the networks. She’d said too much by discussing the Maghreb.

  * * *

  When a charging station appeared near the highway, Welga stopped the trike and swapped their battery. Their journey continued to be slow, impeded by stalled vehicles and dysfunctional bots, but they passed the halfway mark an hour after the station. She estimated two or three hours of driving left, given their current speed.

  Olafson kept dozing. He seemed incapable of staying awake in a moving vehicle. Khandro kept her eyes closed, too. Welga couldn’t tell if the dakini was asleep or avoiding communication. She had one quad-zip left, enough to finish the drive back to headquarters, she hoped. The tremors hit faster and harder on the comedown this time. She might have to stay on quads to avoid them.

  Her eyes twitched to either side, desperate to see the feeds of her family and friends, but the network stayed off-line. Luis was with Papa, and Nithya was
healthy and capable. Her sister-in-law was smart, probably doing better than her brother, but neither had a clue about protecting themselves from the worst elements of society. And Connor—she couldn’t stop thinking about his bruised, pale face from their last conversation. How would the hospital deliver medication to him with the stellas off-line? How long before people could launch and activate new network drones? They regularly fell from their high-altitude paths when they broke, but making enough new units to replace the entire world’s constellations at once sounded impossible. Could they do a few at a time? Did her government have an emergency plan for situations like this? Would HQ have a way to reach beyond agency offices? Welga clutched the steering wheel and thumbed the accelerator. If Connor dies, so help me, you will suffer, dakini.

  Her final quad-zip left a bitter taste, and she drank the last of their water to wash it away. Nobody had bothered to eat. The dakini said she could recycle her water and had no need for food. Olafson slept. Signs of distress and destruction surrounded them along the drive and left Welga’s stomach churning.

  They nearly abandoned the trike on the final stretch to headquarters. Their route passed north of DC, through residential streets lined by hives. Cleaner-bots, delivery-bots, vehicles, and other WAI-based machines cluttered the roads. Many were dented or broken. Some looked as if they’d been thrown from upper windows, their innards spread in arcs of debris. What the hell were people doing for food with their kitchens lying shattered in the road? The low-lying panic that had started with the Machinehood Manifesto must have erupted into full-blown madness when the stellas dropped.

  Welga played a game of chicken with a group of teenagers beating on a care-bot that bleated, “Violence is not a solution,” from its remaining speaker. The gang eyed the trike and formed a line across the road. She thumbed the accelerator and aimed for the one in the middle. Thankfully, they dove out of the way in time, but a small, evil-minded part of her wished they hadn’t. They might beat on bots and WAIs today, but when those were broken and gone, what next? Not that the machines deserved it. Only an asshole would beat a helpless animal, and the devices on the road were little different.