System Ascension

by Prax Venter

  “Fuck,” Mark said through his speaker. “Sorry…”

  But he was only slightly sorry. At least he’d be less like to run now.

  Mark switched his grip to the kid’s other leg and lurched his drone backward towards the exit. Each step was like wading through a river rushing in the other direction and controlling this barely mobile drone felt physically taxing on his mind. A few flights of stairs upward Mark found a big red exit sign attached to the ceiling, and he knew they were almost outside.

  He came to an intersection and saw bright white daylight spilling through a set of glass doors at the far end of a long hallway. He shambled straight for them as the kid with the broken ankle pounded on his drone’s battered chest with his bare hands. For a moment, Mark thought this might have been the person inhabiting the guard he fought.

  “It’s you, Mark. Isn’t it?” Evelyn’s voice echoed down the hallway through the PA system. “You snuck in alone while the others assaulted my factory. Clever.”

  Virtual ice water washed over his spine when he heard her voice. They cut off the human operators for her new sniper and cat drones, but there had to be plenty of the virus-controlled dog drones and gunboats out there that could still end this rescue mission quickly. On top of that, they could also destroy Mark’s home system- ending all their lives once and for good.

  Time was not on their side. He ignored her and limped forward to the light at the end of the hallway.

  “Notice how you’d do anything for them? How you’ve overcome so much? All in the name of love.” She spat that last word like it disgusted her. “This is just a minor setback, of course. I’ll have everything back up and running in a few days. You’ve taught me so much, and for that, I will be eternally grateful.”

  Mark was only a few paces from the door when his audio inputs picked up a mechanical clicking noise growing in volume, and he took a moment to pivot his body around to find three tailless quadrupeds sprinting toward him down the long hallway that led to freedom.

  He spun back around and shambled to the doors as fast as his damaged legs could operate. With a backward kick, he shattered the glass and jumped his drone out, almost losing both kids in the process. With grim determination, he righted his drone and took two backward steps into the light- and standing right in his path was a sleek, black humanoid guard with its high-powered rifle pointed at his head.

  This was it. The dogs were going to get him from behind any second- and if they didn’t, this fuck was going to put one right into his cracked, round head.

  The soldier drone fired five times, but Mark realized that it had missed with all of them. Behind him, he perceived the sound high-powered projectiles would make if they shattered a handful of dog-drone faces.

  “It’s me, Mark,” Ahnix said in his ear, and he would have cried if he had physical tear ducts.

  “Come on!” Roo cheered in his ear. “Get those kids into the car!”

  He looked beyond Ahnix’s sleek, kickass drone and saw an open transport pod in the parking lot ahead. The badass military drone inhabited by his cat-girl stepped forward to help with the struggling kids that he had forgotten he was holding

  A buzzing above caught his attention, and a camera drone swooped low over their heads.

  “I’m in the flying drone,” Vale said. “We were tracking you on the map, but there are still many Triple-Zero threats, and you have to move. Now!”

  “You guys never cease to amaze me…” Mark said, trying to put into words what he felt at that moment. But words failed him, and he just blasted them all with intense appreciation.

  “Together,” Ahnix whispered in his ear just before they shoved Vince’s children into the transport.

  “You drive, Mark,” Roo said. “I’m jumping back to the awesome drones with guns by the dead zone to do some more damage. I’ll meet you there.”

  Mark abandoned his banged-up senior care drone in the parking lot and inhabited the transport pod. The first thing he did when he became the car was lock the doors.

  Ahnix’s sleek humanoid bot sat in the cabin with the kids. One was still unconscious, but the other just held their broken foot, staring daggers at her. His piercing green eyes overflowed with hatred, and with the pod’s internal sensors, Mark saw the resemblance to his father.

  Mark hit the accelerator, and the car launched forward out of the parking lot.

  “We may have a bigger problem,” he said into their private communication line. “Evelyn knows it was us. We need to get some protection back to our apartment soon.”

  “All I can really do is observe for now, but I’m on it,” Vale said. “The nanites are still our top priority.”

  Mark slid the transport around a few corners and took a ramp onto the expressway. They had sixty miles to go, straight south, before the kids were delivered safely.

  Ahnix fired her drone’s powerful weapon multiple times, shattering his back window, and Mark almost flipped the car with unnecessary evasive maneuvers- thinking they were hit from behind. It wasn’t until his sensors saw the explosion from the huge flying wedge falling out of the sky that he understood what she was doing.

  He was glad she was on it and focused all his attention on getting up to max speed. The asphalt below his undercarriage became a gray blur as he raced forward toward the McKennitt Smole research campus.

  Ahnix had to shoot out all the windows by the time they were halfway there, and Mark could feel the drag on his transport pod from the wind swirling around inside his cabin.

  With about 25 miles to go, Vale’s monotone voice spoke in their private channel. “She’s cut the power, somehow. Our home system has six hours of battery backup before…” She didn’t need to finish. They all knew that they needed those nanites or they were going to die.

  Fifteen minutes later, Mark’s transport crashed through the debris of dead bots littered round the perimeter of the dead zone right behind to the other car they had used to deliver Vince and Michelle. Roo was standing there with her deadly sniper bot just outside the zone’s influence, and she waved them in as he drove past. The moment before he crossed that line, Mark unlocked the doors, then both he and Ahnix were booted back up to the satellite map.

  His velvet-girl had taken out a lot of the sleek military drones around this side of the research campus, but he found one that remained hidden inside a nearby home.

  When he could see again, he found himself in a bright pink room kneeling on a bed and surrounded by stuffed animals. He was facing a window overlooking the McKennitt Smole research campus exactly 380 feet away… it was a perfect sniping position. He exited the little girl’s room and ran down the stairs. Mark had rescued the kids, mostly in one piece, but alive. Vince better have collected those nanites.

  The drone’s shiny, black feet padded down the cream-colored carpeted stairs down to the first level, and movement deeper in the house caught his eye.

  He raised his rifle as a cat-drone padded towards him, and he quickly noted Ahnix’s mannerisms from the quadruped’s movements. It was the swaying tail that really gave it away.

  “That better be you,” he said from his external speakers, keeping his gun leveled on the potential impostor.

  “This fits me too well,” she said in his ear. The modified cat drone didn’t seem to have speakers of its own. “Come on,” his cat-girl said, then turned and dashed through the glass of the back patio door. “We need to keep moving.”

  Mark hustled his humanoid drone after her and was amazed at how agile and perceptive he felt. He focused on every blade of grass below his swiftly sprinting feet and felt like he could snipe the beak off a canary from a mile away.

  His attention snapped up to the people running out of the brick building. Vince and Michelle were there. Heavily armed soldiers and a few others that appeared to be medics were with them, but it was the older woman walking across the grass barefoot that sent his rifle up to his shoulder.

  “The fuck is Evelyn doing out here?” he said into their shared
feed.

  Roo pointed her rifle at the older woman’s head, but when Vince stood in the way with his hands out, Mark knew there was something else going on here.

  Once he was sure Roo wasn’t going to blow the evil old lady’s head off, Vince left to go be reunited with his children. The one with the broken ankle tried to make a run for it but Vince grabbed him with the help of some of the other people that had run out with the group. By the time Mark and Ahnix covered the rest of the distance to join the gathering just outside the dead zone, Vince was back inside the squat brick building with both of his boys. Michelle and a handful heavily equipped soldiers remained outside along with a strange, scantily clad beauty. But mark never took his full attention off their gray-haired arch-nemesis standing in their midst.

  “I understand your friend’s reaction, Mark,” the human Evelyn said when he approached with the same slightly Irish accent. “I actually find it comforting given what I’m about to do.”

  “And what are you about to do?” Mark said through his speakers, his drone’s finger hovering just above the trigger of his powerful rifle.

  “April,” Evelyn said, turning to the tall woman standing close to Michelle. “If you would be so kind?”

  The redheaded knockout called April, wearing shorts and the top half of a t-shirt, pressed in once on her slender stomach, and a section of her body slid out like she was a walking file cabinet.

  Then it clicked. “A Skynth?” Mark blurted out in his surprise. These were the most top-tier love drones in existence. They were impossible to tell from real humans and cost millions of credits.

  “Yes,” Michelle said quietly, and her bright red face hinted at a larger story.

  Evelyn spoke again as April pulled out a small metal box from her storage compartment.

  “The two people you sent in to us have been the first to get in or out in days. They had quite a fantastic story to tell, but when I saw the new and deadly drones shut down and this one destroying them- I was starting to believe. When the second transport crossed this line with his children, I knew there was truth to what Vince and Michelle had said, and I was nearly convinced. When your deadly Roo here pointed her weapon at me and then stood down when Vince asked her too… I knew you were my enemy’s enemy and that I could trust you with this.”

  She gestured, and April handed the box to Mark.

  “Two hundred thousand working Wi-Fi nanites,” the old woman said.

  Vale must have been watching because she yelled, “Two hundred thousand!” right in his ear. “That’s much more than I wanted, but we might need every last one to build the fusion generator in the time we have left.”

  “Destroy her factory for me,” the human version of Evelyn said as she balled up her knotted fists.

  His drone’s hands deftly closed around the box as what she was saying sunk in. It was the same situation that had been eating away at the back of his mind. There were two versions of this woman loose on the world.

  Mark’s rear-facing sensors detected an approaching transport pod, and it slid to stop in the grass behind them. The door flipped up, and Vale’s voice broadcast outward.

  “We thank you, Evelyn. Mark, Ahnix, Roo- get in. We need to go, now.”

  Mark turned back to the older woman and said, “Evelyn, you have my word,” before dashing into the open vehicle with Roo’s sleek sniper and Ahnix’s metal cat.

  “Don’t open that box until we are in your apartment,” Vale said as they sped away.

  Roo elbowed out one of the windows and fired her powerful rifle into the air. Mark watched as another approaching gunboat was taken down with a single shot.

  “That’s my girl,” Mark said as he placed the box between his drone’s knees and rammed the butt of his rifle through his own window. His finely tuned sensors tracked every tinkle of glass as they danced across the pavement behind them. The tactile feedback nodes on his calf alerted him to Ahnix’s metal tail slowly curling around his leg with affection, and he exulted in their mechanical closeness. They were still down but had some serious upgrades and the tools to build anything they needed… including a fucking spaceship.

  - 27 -

  “Guys,” Mark asked after finding nothing to shoot for fifteen minutes. “How do we- you know, use these now that we have them?”

  Vale answered. “We knew nanites were in the plan, so we built some custom interfaces into the perception wrap. The nano cloud should register as an inhabitable entity. But, they must be within our native Wi-Fi sphere of influence. There are too many for the world-wide blanket array to pick them all up.”

  “Just use the normal drone interface,” Ahnix clarified.

  The rest of the ride was uneventful, and they were only moments away from his apartment when they exited the tunnel to see a column of black smoke coming from the general location of his building.

  “Please tell me that’s not my apartment building.” But his rangefinders told him the particles were rising from that exact location.

  No one said anything.

  The giant naga pulled them into the underground parking lot. Mark vigilantly searched every point of reality between him and the considerable range of his sensors, but there was nothing. Why weren’t they seeing much more of an organized resistance? The primal, animal mind of Triple-zero probably wasn’t capable of following orders. It was only interested in turning everything into itself.

  The doors opened, and it felt as if they were coming home from a long road trip. Mark considered the box in his hands as they walked to his apartment building’s garage access stairwell. Vale was right about science-fiction becoming science fact. He himself had watched artificial intelligence go from relatively dumb to convincingly conversational in his relatively short lifetime.

  Now, in his hands were machines so small, they could break anything down on the atomic level and reshape it into anything else. They could use the basic bits from any old rock to make a perfectly delicious ham sandwich. And if the programmer fucks up and forgets to tell them to stop converting shit into ham sandwiches?

  Mark shuddered when he thought of the worst-case scenario. If Digital Evelyn got a hold of these nanites, and the vile old woman let the virus have control over just one of them, the very first thing it would do was convert matter into more nanites. One would become two, two would become four. Do that only twenty times and you’d have over a million. It wouldn’t only be the end of the world…

  “… It could be the end of the universe,” he said through his external speakers.

  “Mark,” Roo said, tilting her drone’s head to the side. “You okay?”

  He clutched the box tightly and sprinted forward. “Yeah. Just nice to be home after a long day,” he said just before kicking open the metal door to the stairwell.

  It wasn’t until the fifth floor that they started seeing smoke, but his robot’s legs never tired, and they made it all the way to his apartment in about one minute. The familiar hallway stretched out before him with its bland brown carpet, and his feet became a blur. Roo and Ahnix sprinted along beside him as the other apartments’ doors whipped past. It felt as if he were bringing a girl back to his place for the first time. He couldn’t help but grin ear to virtual ear.

  That was when his rear-facing sensors picked up the sound of a door opening. They all turned, but the two precision beams of light had already been fired. Both Roo and Ahnix tried to dodge, but physics prevented them from moving sideways fast enough. They both dropped lifelessly to the floor.

  Mark waited for the third shot, but it never came.

  “You move as much as a micron I will put a hole in your head and then put my foot through your home system,” Other Evelyn said through the military drone’s speakers. This one was different. Sharp, angular wings extended from the bot’s sleek head and back- the fucking thing could probably fly. It also fired some type of laser rifle. She must have saved the most advanced combat drone for herself.

  Mark’s machine remained completely motionless
as he spoke through their personal channel.

  “How close am I to our system’s Wi-Fi range?” He didn’t have the best system, but the expensive ChronoMind rig came with a lot of bells and whistles…

  “We have no way to tell,” Vale said. Other Evelyn continued with her weapon pointed at his head.

  “Good of you to get the nanites for me. Even if you open that box, you’ll still have to get power somehow. Your battery won’t last long enough for you to try and build- what, a wind generator? Solar?” Her drone let out a strained cackle. “I’d dash it to bits anyway. Listen, my children, I could use you. All of you. Ahnix, Vale, Roo. I should have copied you all the first time. Of course, I’d want to study your cultivated bond with will participants. Imagine what I could do with platoons-”

  Mark stopped listening. “Right. I’m opening the box, get ready,” he said into their private channel.

  They all silently agreed there was no other option. This had to work, or this psychopath was going to destroy them- or worse. All of them knew exactly what worse could be like to an immortal digital consciousness.

  He started the countdown, and his loves kept their virtual eyes peeled for the new blip to show up on their inhabitable drone map.

  “Three, two… ONE!” he yelled and opened the box with his drone’s agile thumb. The ray of light took a moment to appear, but as soon as Evelyn squeezed the trigger, a blinding flash destroyed his drone’s head in less than one processing cycle.

  Mark was kicked back to his high-level interface screen and saw the 100% functional Nano Cloud as an option. For an instant he was giddy, thinking he was going to be the one to get in first and see what these things could do, but the dread and embarrassment radiating out of his girls sunk his heart.

  With his excitement quickly falling below sea level, Mark found that he could not inhabit the nano-cloud. Nothing happened when he tried. No error message- not even a condescending sound effect letting him know he was doing something wrong.