by Paul Anlee
Protesters armed with portable megaphones spoke to the crowd for hours about Cybrid-led false flag operations and conspiracies. Such rumors have been growing in popularity since the Administration conceded they might need machine assistance to address problems in the habitats.
“You should go home,” JSC suggested. She floated a few meters behind Cynthia.
The manager was staring at the sea of people huddling around fires they’d lit in the streets outside her bank. “What’s happening?” she asked no one in particular.
“They’re just being people. Very angry people. They only care about what they want. Sadly, they know they can’t get it. They think by showing how mad they are, how passionate and united, they can make my team come up with solutions faster.”
Cynthia regarded the Cybrid. “You probably shouldn’t be talking to me if it’s taking you away from the problem.”
“That’s okay. We have a whole team working on the system. Only three here, but a few dozen more are working in branches all over the city. Hundreds, in all, counting those in other habitats.”
“It’s that big?”
“When I shut down the system, I alerted others before their software started demonstrating the same issues. But it spread anyway. So, yeah, it’s that big.”
Cynthia rubbed her eyes with the palms of her hands. “Wow.”
“No one knows how a bug or virus might have snuck into the system, or how to get it out without causing more damage. Our best programmers are working hard just to figure out the system.”
“What about the original programmers?”
JSC emitted a sound that was unintelligible but clearly derisive. “The system is based on old banking code from Earth. The original programmers are all dead. Anyone the Old Administration may have placed here to maintain the system was sent back before the planet was destroyed. We’re searching through the Stored Minds database to see what expertise is available there.”
“We really screwed up, didn’t we?”
“What do you mean?”
“Alum. The Church. Taking over the asteroids when we had no idea what we were doing.”
The Cybrid extended a tentacle-like, metallic appendage and touched the manager’s shoulder gently.
The woman suppressed an instinctive flinch at the touch.
The Cybrid was used to it and didn’t let it bother her. “Cynthia,” JSC said. “There’s no battle between us. What’s done is done. If all of humanity, including Cybrids, has any hope of surviving we have to leave that behind. DAR-K says—“
“Who’s DAR-K?”
“Our…leader isn’t the right word. She’s more like a guide than a leader. She was the managing Project Director when Earth was still in charge, and the Cybrid embodiment of Dr. Kathy Liang. DAR-K K has inspired us to be more, to be better, to understand ourselves and our relationship with humans.”
“Ah, yes. I’ve heard of Kathy Liang. I didn’t realize she’d been downloaded into a Cybrid. DAR-K, you say?”
“She tries to keep a low profile. It’s better for Cybrid-human relations that way. Anyway, DAR-K says the future of Cybrids is tied to the future of humanity. We were built to serve, but as partners not as mere machines.
“We used to be people, too. We remember our humanity, and we honor our heritage by serving humanity. We are here to help in any way we can. We’ve left behind any judgment of how we all got here.”
“She sounds wise.”
“And dedicated. She’s at the Central Administration Bank trying to decipher the system right now. You’re in good hands.”
“Thanks,” Cynthia replied, momentarily reassured until she looked outside. “I don’t understand why the police haven’t cleared away the crowd.”
“There aren’t that many police, and they’re not set up for riot control.”
“Who said anything about riots?”
“Crowd control, I should say.”
“Do you really think there could be a riot?” Cynthia’s voice trembled.
“I told you to go home. You can’t help here. We Cybrids can take care of ourselves. They won’t hurt us.”
The manager hesitated. “But it’s my bank.”
“And we will protect it.”
Cynthia caught a glimpse of movement out the corner of one eye.
JSC was extending her coat and purse to her from an appendage. The manager smiled weakly and accepted them.
“I guess I should head home. It’s late.”
“Yes, it is rather late,” JSC said. Her voice was gentle, without judgment. “We’ll have some progress to report when you get in tomorrow.”
She helped Cynthia with her coat and passed her the purse.
The manager straightened, and braced herself to face the crowd. “Okay, then. I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Do you want me to escort you to the train station or a starstep?”
“Thanks, but I think it’ll be better if I go on my own.”
“Okay. See you tomorrow.”
Cynthia pulled open the door and a wave of noise rushed in. Her hand slipped on the handle, but she caught the door before it closed and stepped through.
The crowd turned as one and watched as she walked down the steps of the building. They parted without a murmur and let her shuffle down the path they made for her.
Cynthia kept her head high, and made her way through them and onto a quiet connecting street without incident. She wasn’t sure if that was a good sign, or if it would be the eerie calm before a horrific storm of resentment. It was unnerving, to say the least.
JSC floated out the door and hovered at the top of the stairs, watching her leave. When people lost site of the retreating figure, they turned their gazes back toward the building and its silent sentinel.
The Cybrid held her place, drawing their ire without a sound until she was certain that Cynthia was well out of harm’s reach.
She drifted a little higher to address the people in front of her.
“Our team is working as hard as possible to rectify the situation. It’s more complicated than we initially thought. We’re having to coordinate with other Cybrids who are all working equally diligently at other branches of the bank.”
“Coordinating to take all our money, that is!” someone yelled.
“Yeah!” a chorus jeered back, even though it made no sense. Cybrids had no need for money.
“Maybe they’re coordinating to fix our water and power!” someone else called out. That drew some laughter.
JSC increased her amplification. “We are, all of us Cybrids, here to help.”
“Oh, that’s a good one. Right up there with, ‘We’re the government. We’re here to help,’” a man with a megaphone yelled into the mob. His amplified laugh bounced off buildings for blocks around.
His laughter was picked up, joined, and echoed by thousands.
“We’re the government. We’re here to help!” they chanted. The man with the megaphone pumped his first in the air and urged them on.
“We’re the Cybrids. We’re here to help!” he yelled.
The crowd gleefully followed his lead. “We’re the Cybrids. We’re here to help!”
JSC floated back into the bank without a sound and stood watch at the door. One of her colleagues floated forward. A third Cybrid joined them, and the three stared out into the street wordlessly.
Someone in the street threw a stone at the front entrance. It hit with a loud “tuk!” and rebounded without serious damage. Seconds later a brick sailed through the large, tempered glass window.
The sound of shattering glass scared the crowd as much as the sight of the three machines inside the building, but the subsequent spell of shocked inaction was quickly broken by three groups of men brandishing construction crowbars, one for each Cybrid inside.
“We’re only taking what’s ours!” they yelled as they crossed the front terrace. They were carrying something else that JSC couldn’t make out.
The men demolished what w
as left of the windows and doors and surged inside. They spread out, intending to encircle the three Cybrid spheres. As they advanced, they spread nets made of light chain.
Ah, so that’s what they were carrying—JSC realized.
Their actions appeared well-coordinated, almost practiced. None of them had spoken a word of instruction or direction, but they all seemed to know what to do.
“What should we do?” WLM asked JSC.
“Do nothing,” JSC replied.
Cybrids were space-hardened, even those who’d spent most of their time inside finished habitats. It was laughable for humans to think they could harm the mechanical beings.
“Offer no resistance. They can’t hurt us. I’m transmitting our predicament to the authorities and to DAR-K. They’ll send someone to help us.”
She hoped that would prove true. She hoped the humans didn’t try anything stupid. They looked mad, in both senses of the word. And determined.
The men threw their steel nets over the three floating Cybrids and hauled them through the broken windows to the front terrace.
The machines cooperated. They could have fled. They could have simply turned off their mass-compensators, the RAF-based generators that gave them little apparent weight, and made it impossible for the men to drag them anywhere. But JSC had warned her colleagues not to resist, that doing so would only rile the humans.
The men towed the Cybrids into the street. The crowd closed in around them, hurling insults and bits of trash. Spittle dripped down the carboceramic shells.
JSC felt humiliated and confused. The rioters’ actions weren’t hurting the Cybrids; everyone knew how tough the machines were. So what was the point of this mean behavior? It was helping nothing.
A bottle filled with fuel and a flaming cloth wick flew through the air and broke against the edge of the gaping window pane, spilling flames into the lobby. The blinds, tucked back to one side, caught fire. Another four bottles smashed onto the lobby floor, spreading the flammable contents to the wood counters and furniture. The crowd cheered.
Excited hands added refuse to the small fires burning in the street and doused smoldering piles with fuel. Within minutes, dozens of bonfires were roaring.
The fire builders fanned out, seeking trash and branches to feed the flames. They broke into stores and businesses for several square blocks, pulling out whatever they could carry, and threw it into the flames.
Residents in the surrounding apartment towers called out into the madness below, “Hey! What’s going on? What are you doing?”
“We’re sending a message,” someone yelled back. “They never listen to us; but they’ll listen to this!”
The locals were all too aware of infrastructure problems in their neighborhood, unannounced power blackouts, water that suddenly stopped flowing, habitat lights that flared in the middle of the night or didn’t work at all, and ongoing problems with payment machines in the stores and businesses. And they all agreed, amongst themselves, that the problems had worsened significantly since the government allowed the Cybrids back into the habitats.
Thousands of residents poured onto the streets. Shouts of, “Cybrids out! Cybrids out!” echoed off the towers.
JSC and her colleagues watched, held in place more by fear of making the situation worse than by the steel nets over them. She was sure someone in authority would be along soon to rescue them.
A bottle smashed against her shell, and flames engulfed one of her visual sensors. JSC closed the port against possible damage and sealed other openings she wasn’t using, just in case.
A couple of the men moved in and started bashing the Cybrids with crowbars. The tough shells, made to withstand asteroid belt debris fields, were unaffected.
And then they were all bathed in a brilliant light. The habitat flared into full daylight, hours ahead of schedule. The attacks on the Cybrids came to an abrupt halt. The roaming troublemakers stopped pillaging. The chanting died down. People peered upward and exchanged puzzled glances.
What now?
“Over there! What’s that?” Someone cried out, pointing to the open sky over the town square a few blocks away. The mob’s attention swiveled to the end of the street, where a formation of black dots was rapidly approaching.
The dots expanded into a squadron of fifty machines, flying thirty meters above the street. They were similar to Cybrids but half again as large, matte black, and considerably more menacing. They moved in a precise, coordinated whole. Subgroups of two split off down side streets, swooping toward anyone engaged in illegal activities.
People dropped their weapons and sped home or back into the bank, illogically hoping to find safety in the confines of a building they’d just breached.
The intimidating new Cybrid fleet herded them together, darting from side to side to discourage stragglers from peeling away into alleys or hiding in buildings along the street.
The intersection in front of the bank overflowed with subdued protestors. The dark Cybrids hovered over the crowd at the end of each block, penning them in.
One rose above the bank building.
“We are Securitors,” it announced in a booming voice that carried for blocks. “Your images have been reported to habitat police, and your activities have been recorded. Appropriate charges will be filed later this week. You are hereby ordered to release the Cybrids you hold captive and disperse immediately.”
“Who the hell are you to tell us what to do?” someone called out.
“Yeah!” the crowd echoed.
“You’re just another damn Cybrid. You can’t tell people what to do!”
Rocks and debris flew up from the crowd, bouncing harmlessly off the Securitor’s exterior. People shook fists and crowbars at the hovering black spheres.
“Cybrids out! Cybrids out!” the crowd chanted.
“Disperse,” ordered the lead Securitor.
Nobody moved.
The Securitors launched smoke and tear gas into the crowd. Several spheres descended to within a meter of the people. Lengthy appendages shot out of their bodies and they plucked individuals from the ground, one for each of their six tentacles. They flew to the top stories of nearby buildings and dropped their prisoners inside the steep walls of the prison sleds that had been waiting on the rooftops. They zipped back down to the street to snatch more prisoners from the frightened masses below and repeated the process.
A flaming bottle struck the head Securitor, engulfing its shell in fire. The black sphere tracked the source, opened a small port, and shot the perpetrator with a brief burst of 12 millimeter cannon fire.
Screams rang out and the scene gave way to utter chaos. People ran in all directions. Someone had smuggled a gun into the habitat and fired shots at the shell of another Securitor. Its sharpened tentacle whipped out and cut the man in half.
JSC rose inside the confines of her steel net until she was level with the Securitor in charge.
“You have to stop this!” she cried. “We don’t kill people. We’re here to help.”
“Your help was ineffective,” the Securitor replied. “We have come to reinstate order.”
On the street below, a teenager picked up the gun lying beside the severed trunk of the man who’d wielded it. He aimed the gun at the head Securitor and fired once.
The Securitor opened a port, but JSC blocked the trajectory line to the young man.
“No!” she shouted. “No more killing!”
“They are disorderly,” the Securitor stated.
“Their bullets do you no harm. Throw them in jail if you must, but don’t hurt them.”
The Securitor didn’t reply. Half a dozen ports opened along its shell.
“You are disorderly,” it stated, and intense beams erupted from its body, slicing JSC into dozens of chunks. She fell in pieces to the street below.
Rioters were quickly dispersed or imprisoned and the trapped Cybrids were freed. The fleet of mysterious new, and distinctly more aggressive, style of Cybrids disappeared as
quickly as it came. Witnesses report that the machines called themselves Securitors, though their origin remains a mystery. Who sent them and to what purpose? To date, no one has taken responsibility for the bank failure, the riot, or the actions of the Securitors themselves.
19
The Cybrid crashed through the double-paned front doors, breaking glass, bending metal frames, and rending hinges.
The reception staff of the elegantly appointed Vesta Project Head Office managed visitor traffic in and out of Administration; they weren’t equipped for violence. They sensibly stepped aside and let the machine float through the lobby.
The orb went directly to the Director’s elevator, the one requiring special permission even to call. A chime sounded, the doors swished open, and the machine floated in. It said nothing to anyone. It gave no hint of its purpose.
Lobby Security had no idea what business the robot might have with the Administration. Anyway, what was a Cybrid doing roaming freely through the habitat in the first place? Hadn’t Alum prohibited their movement in the cities? The guard called the Director’s office to tell them what had happened and warn them of its impending arrival.
“It just got in the elevator.”
“The elevator?”
“Yeah. I mean, what’s a Cybrid need an elevator for? But that’s what it did.”
“Okay, thanks. We’ll take care of it up here.”
The Lobby guard hung up, grabbed his jacket, and walked out of the building, gingerly stepping over the shattered front doors and windows. He’d seen enough shooting on Earth to last a lifetime and he wasn’t going to hang around anywhere bullets, or possibly worse, could be flying.
Alum’s personal security team rallied in the upstairs Executive Reception area. The first four took a position behind the main counter, and an additional four blocked the halls to the right and left. They drew their guns and waited for the elevator to travel the fifty floors from ground level.
The elevator doors whispered opened and the Cybrid floated into Reception. There was no one behind the desk, so it announced to the room, “Hello, I am DAR-K. I would like to speak with Alum.”