by C. G. Cooper
“You have one minute.” It was something he’d said to me on countless occasions, like when I snuck in late from hanging out with my friends or skipping school.
He smiled like he remembered the reference.
“I’ll do my best.” His smile remained, and the tale began. “I almost died that day. You were there. But I didn’t die, not completely. They were able to recover my body. My body was crushed, useless. Someone else would have left me, and I wouldn’t have blamed them. I barely had a pulse. It’s a miracle they were able to get me out.”
“Who saved you? How did they get to you?”
He’d been buried under tons of rubble. I’d been there. I’d tried to get to him but there was no way in, and there was no way to get him out.
“I think you know who saved me,” he said, his voice quieter now.
I didn’t know. How could I? I’d left right before the counterattack. It would’ve been suicide to stay.
Then the realization came, and I felt cold dread flood my body.
“Not them.”
The image of my father nodded.
“They were my only hope.”
“But how? I thought they were all destroyed.”
He looked at me now like a father about to tell his innocent child that the world wasn’t really made of rainbows and lollipops.
“You know me better than that, son. Did you really think I would throw away decades of research just because…”?
“Just because they killed the entire human race?!” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. He’d been at the root of the problem, had been warned and mandated to dismantle the program. So many deaths. So much death.
He didn’t try to explain his way around my declaration. Instead he said, “I guess I somehow initiated my homing beacon. They zeroed in, found me, dug through the debris and saved me.”
Then the weight of the lie, the betrayal, slammed into me like a locomotive. The Fed. The lush cavern. The unmanned bunker. It was them. It was all them.
My body was shaking now, anger and terror mixing into a toxic stew of human emotions. I raised my weapon then, thinking that it was better to take out the brain, literally.
In response, doors slid open all around the circular room. My aim stayed on the disappointed image of my father. I shifted to the right to get a better shot, but my father moved with me.
“Please don’t,” he said. He wasn’t pleading.
My finger moved to the trigger, and I saw him frown. Without warning they flooded through the doors, too many to count. The first cybots formed a single line barrier between me and the glass, between me and my father, a phalanx of unthinking automatons.
The one in the middle raised a polymer hand in a sign of peace, and then through its robotic mouth came my father’s voice.
“Lower your weapon, son.”
Chapter 31
I didn’t move, and neither did my weapon.
How could he be so reckless, so stupid?
Generations had been wiped out because of the things standing in front of me. It started innocently enough. As tech progressed from drones to unmanned supply missions, and then to cybot infantry (cybot because the units initially came under the purview of the U.S. Cyber Command) and Special Operations units, the free world all but wiped out every last vestige of terrorism on Earth.
Celebrations rolled across the globe. Freedom and peace had won, with only a minimal loss of human life on the side of the victors. And at the head of it all was the United States of America. We were the saviors, and everyone knew it.
It was supposed to be the beginning of something wonderful, a new Utopia and an era of prosperity that had the ability to last centuries, maybe more. There was even talk of employing the soon-to-be-retired cybot armies in tasks like farming, mining and manufacturing. But it didn’t last. The hearts of men are forever greedy, bent on power and exertion of their own selfish wills.
With battalions of American-made cybots roving the globe, squashing crime and minor uprisings, other countries soon took their first tentative steps into the arena. There were the knockoffs, the cybots with basic capabilities like house cleaning or walking the family dog.
But baby steps turned into great strides in innovation. Soon China, Russia and India were deep into next-generation cybotics. They took our platform and built upon it. Industrial espionage proliferated. We had said that couldn’t be done, and some of our scientists had even made that promise to the president of the United States. They were wrong.
Systems were duplicated, and they were bent to new needs.
Then the riots began. Human beings demanded the repeal of cybot use. And who did we send to quell the rebellions? Cybots. Cybot armies, to be precise.
They did what they’d been built for. Rioters were either jailed or sent home, and for a time it looked like our Utopia was back.
Nope.
The first known system hack happened in Japan. A cybot battalion training in Yokosuka turned on their handlers, slaughtering fifty before turning on the Japanese population beyond the naval base. Over a thousand innocent civilians were killed in the massacre, and it took five more cybot battalions to demolish the first battalion.
After that, things happened quickly. With a toehold into their “secure” telemetry, cybots were turned on their masters. And no, they didn’t come to life like in some horror film. They had new masters, a new breed of terrorist, and those new masters wreaked havoc from London to Los Angeles. They targeted power plants, schools, economic hubs and centers of government. But the worst were the nuclear arsenals. Before we were able to wrest control of the cybot armies back from the terrorists, they’d managed to seize and use nuclear weapons on nearly every continent. If there was a beginning to the end, that was it. Whole countries were wiped out in a blink.
An international coalition of cybotics and computer experts banded together to salvage what they could, and they attempted to regain control of the hostage cybots from the terrorists. All the while, still-loyal cybots hunted down and killed their errant kin. It took too long.
Panic ensued in those countries with populations still alive. Power grids crashed, and neighbors turned on neighbors. Economies collapsed overnight. One alarming day I saved the president from being murdered by rogue politicians; an hour later he was killed by a cybot programmed to find and kill the leader of the United States. Game over.
Through the valiant efforts of the last human warriors still in uniform, the remaining cybots were rounded up and destroyed. Before this new information, I believed that the last cybot on international soil had been dismantled by a team of American scientists who’d founded the American cybotics program along with my father. My father had stood on the rubble of the Capitol and promised the world that it was safe from the cybot scourge.
The cybots were gone, but they’d taken everything with them. As an added safety measure, what was left of the world governments ordered all tech seized. That was a hoot. Imagine all creature comforts gone, and then the government takes your toys. Ha.
The chaos flared, and human-on-human violence multiplied. I’d lost my father in one especially daring raid by a group of former commandos who were hell-bent on seeking revenge. They got it, but not before we killed them all.
By then, the damage was done. Infrastructure didn’t exist. What was left of the U.S. government relinquished control to the states who’d then been renamed The Zones.
Like I’ve said before, I didn’t know what happened after that. The world was in flames. You couldn’t buy food. Once-honest men took to killing in order to feed their families. They stole from the dead and dying. The old world was gone forever.
I took Jane and we ran. We found our little haven, and we hunkered down until we thought it was safe. We survived. We survived as billions perished, murdered either earlier–at the mechanical hands of the cybot armies, or later–by marauding former citizens.
Sounds crazy, right? Cybots designed to protect us were suddenly slaughtering us.
Well, it happened, and no one was laughing. Especially not me as I stared down my father and his phalanx of cybot guards.
For the first time I noted that these cybots were “softer” than I was accustomed to. Their heads and even their hands were smooth and almost mammalian. The cybots that had nearly destroyed the world were all military, with sharp angles meant to look menacing and warrior-like. These were something new.
“What did you do now?” I asked, my lips tight and quivering.
“I have so much to tell you,” he said, still using the body of the nearest cybot to talk, its hands motioning like he was my father. “There are things I need to show you - things you must see.”
His voice was giddy, like in the past when he’d come home and brag about the latest invention he and his team were about to unveil.
“Please, son. This time it is different, I promise.”
I don’t know why I lowered my weapon. I don’t know why I let him pull me in again. In the end maybe it was one of the most basic human needs that got me - hope.
Chapter 32
One of the cybots escorted me down a series of halls into a small hanger. There was a single Viper inside, waiting for me, its door open and engine idling.
“Stay here,” I commanded the cybot, who was really being controlled by the brain who was my father. The cybot didn’t nod, just turned and walked to the wall and stood there. The damn thing creeped me out. They all did.
The surprise in my stomach was still churning when I boarded the Viper, unsure again of why I’d agreed to see whatever it was that my father wanted to show me. Stupid. So stupid, I thought.
As a door large enough to accommodate the now-hovering aircraft slid open, I doubted that anything could be so cataclysmic as to change my mind. Boy, was I ever wrong.
+++
I couldn’t see much at first. This Viper had been modified so that windows lined every side, like a sight-seeing vehicle made for shuttling tourists. All I could glimpse for the first few minutes was the darkness of walls lit every few feet by lines of blue light.
Then I saw it up ahead, faint at first, like the sun peeking over the horizon. It got brighter as we got closer and, then, without warning, we were clear of the tunnels, and I was looking out at possibly the most amazing view I’d ever seen. Acres upon acres of farmland spread out below us, fed by rivers of crystal blue water, bordered by neat dirt roads.
I recognized the green husks of corn, tan plots of wheat and long rows of leafy greens. If the first cavern I’d encountered at The Fed had stunned me, this one left my mouth hanging open. We were underground, far underground if my sense of direction was still working correctly. But I couldn’t see a ceiling, just brilliant light, like a perpetually sunny day.
Like The Fed entryway, I saw the order mingled with precise creativity. Fields were laid out in precise right angles, but streams were allowed to flow in what seemed like natural patterns, sometimes even cutting jagged lines across perfect square farm plots.
“What do you think?” my father asked, his voice patching through my ride’s intercom.
I didn’t know what to think, other than this was where our food must be coming from. But why? Why was it here and not above ground where it could help so many?
That question fluttered away as we flew on. I actually pressed my face to the glass like a child, my eyes wide as I saw more fields, these filled with herds of cattle, then galloping horses, and then the muddy fenced squares housing lounging swine.
If that wasn’t enough, we next approached huge lakes with glistening water. The Viper swooped in and left a wake as we glided over it, almost skimming the water. I saw a fish jump, and then another, and when the water cleared, I saw a massive school dodging the Viper’s shadow.
“My God,” I whispered.
“Do you like it?” my father asked.
I ignored his question and asked one of my own. “Who built this?”
“I did, or at least, we did.”
By “we” I knew he meant he and his cybot army. How many cybots did he have to make such a place, let alone keep it running?
The place went on and on with no end in sight. How big was it?
“After The Collapse, and once I’d had time to come to terms with my new–situation–I set about building The Ark.”
“The Ark?”
He chuckled. “You know, like Noah’s Ark?”
“That’s what you call this place?”
“If you come up with something better, let me know.”
“Smart ass,” I said, almost forgetting that my father was some kind of machine now. “What did they do to you anyway? I mean…”
“You mean how did they keep me alive?”
“Yeah.” He didn’t sound upset by the question, but there was still that trepidation in me of a son speaking to his dad, like I still didn’t want to question him. I don’t know why.
“You want the long or the short answer?” I frowned, and he must have seen it from whatever camera he was controlling. “Fine, I’ll give you the short version. We’d been making great strides with the artificial intelligence and life preservation programs. In fact, it was where everything was headed before, well, before what happened. The combination of the two not only saved me, but enhanced me.”
The thought of it made me grimace again.
“You were going to load your A.I. program into the cybots, weren’t you?” I asked with more than a hint of disgust.
“Well, of course we were. They already had the ability to think independently in certain situations. The decision-making processes were improving. The next logical step was to integrate them fully.”
“You are so naive sometimes, you know that?”
“Why? Because I wanted to make something wonderful, something that could change the world?”
I laughed hard and bitterly.
“Oh, you changed it alright.”
We were both quiet as the Viper swept over more endless farmland, and then some sort of warehousing district. For the first time, I saw the cybots below, manning machinery and walking from workplace to workplace. They were everywhere now that I was looking.
“You’re right. I messed up,” he said.
“Did dying help you figure that out?”
I remembered my father’s attitude after the cybot destruction. He wasn’t sorry, not even close. While politicians and even my father’s colleagues mourned the losses, he looked at it like a failed chemistry experiment. So damned objective. He could never be wrong.
“Maybe almost losing my life did have its benefits. It gave me a new understanding of the fragility of life. You have to believe that I have changed, that I’m trying to set things right.”
I wanted to scream at him. It was no use. He’d set himself on some path that he would no doubt try to pull me onto. What he didn’t know was that I wasn’t biting.
“Can we get this tour over with so I can go home?” I asked, my body tired now, aching to be far from my father’s hopes and dreams.
“This tour is only the beginning, Ryker.” There was something in his voice that I didn’t like. He wasn’t telling me everything, but I didn’t have the energy at that moment to push it.
I spent the rest of the flight gazing out over the sprawling manmade landscape, trying to figure out how I could somehow kill my father for good, and give The Ark to the people who needed it most.
Chapter 33
“You don’t seem impressed,” my father said, after the Viper landed.
“Who said I wasn’t impressed?”
“I know you, Ryker.”
Right, he thought he knew me. At least his A.I.-enhanced brain couldn’t read my mind. Dad always thought he knew what I wanted, but everything had always been about him. Nothing had changed. All I needed to do was play along until I could find a way out.
I stepped out of the Viper into the same bay we’d taken off from. There were no cybots in sight, and I was glad for that. The path lit up ahead, showing me the way.
“Seriously, I am impressed.”
“Well, good. It’s taken a lot of work to get to this point. I’m sure you have more questions. You were never the silent type.”
He was right. That’s what had started the trouble. In kindergarten I got in trouble for asking too many questions. My parents had tried to discipline me, but it kept happening. After all, wasn’t that what kids were supposed to do, question things? I’d never admonished my own children for being curious. In fact, Jane and I encouraged it daily.
“What about the resources? Where did they all come from?”
“When we first started, I sent out the remaining cybots to scavenge cities. There was plenty of material to make the subsequent generations of workers.”
“And what about energy sources?” I asked. That was what I was really interested in. How the hell could they run an underground paradise without utilizing a boatload of energy?
“We use a mix of solar, wind and hydro,” he explained. “We’ve even reclaimed a handful of nuclear plants and set them up for use.”
Nuclear was what really did it. I knew there had to be something. While nuclear might have lost some of its luster half a century before, the tech had evolved along with the security. There really was no better source of near unlimited energy. The old Navy aircraft carriers were a testament to that fact.
“And the food you produce. How do you decide how to allocate it? How do you decide where it goes?”
“That’s a little more complicated, and it’s something I wanted to discuss with you.”
I’d been wondering about how The Fed made that decision. Did The Tennessee Zone get the same amount of resources as The California Zone?
I entered a door etched in blue luminous strips. Inside was the room in which we’d first met, with a single chair facing the wall of glass. I thought that odd for a moment until I realized that my father didn’t need a chair. A video image flickered to life on the surrounding walls. It looked like a live stream of The Ark, displaying rushing streams and all.