by JT Lawrence
‘Robot Rebellion’ disappears from the ticker tape slugs and is replaced by ‘AI Update Malfunction’. It hardly has the same ring to it, but the fatalities keep ticking over, flashing hue after hue.
“How do we fix it?” The journalist’s forehead has developed a sheen. “I mean, there must be something we can do?”
“Even my toaster is intelligent,” Kirk says with a wry smile. “I mean, I can’t even unplug the thing because nothing has cables anymore. Everything just flies through the air.”
The journo shifts uncomfortably in his seat.
“I apologise,” Kirk says, when he registers the horror on the man’s face. “It’s just that … well, it’s just that we’ve fully integrated ourselves in this neuroreality where AI is as much part of our lives as our own DNA. And now, well …”
He shrugs. Does he need to point out the obvious?
“What are you saying, Dr Kirk?”
“What am I saying? That’s it’s already too late. We’ve walked into the mouth of the monster, and we did it willingly, with our eyes wide open.”
“There must be something we can do.”
The scientist shrugs. “I guess you can switch off your toasters, but—”
The journalist completes his sentence, “—but they can turn themselves back on again.”
Chapter 13
Revenge Re-targeting
“Your front door’s not working,” says a woman with a crisp British accent.
“Arronax.” Seth envelopes her in an embrace that immediately makes it clear where she’ll be sleeping tonight.
Keke’s eye twitches.
“I thought you were in the Cape Republic?” says Kate.
Arronax always makes it clear that she doesn’t like Joburg. She shakes her head and her hair changes colour from lavender to navy striped with black.
“I’m up for the Biomimicry in Robotic Design convention at the Lipworth Institute.”
The Lipworth Institute is Johannesburg’s answer to the Cape Republic’s Nautilus. Founded and funded by an anonymous donor, it’s the continent’s premier robotics design outfit.
“I thought you already knew everything there was to know about biomimicry,” says Keke.
“Arro’s being humble. She’s the whole reason for the convention. She was going to be the headline speaker.”
“Was being the operative word.” Arronax sighs. “Of course they’ll cancel the whole thing now.”
“Sorry you wasted a trip,” says Keke.
Arronax casts a hungry look at Seth. “Not at all.”
Seth fetches another glass and pours them all a generous shot.
“I need to be here, anyway, with what’s going on. Attempt some damage control.” Arronax takes a sip and pulls a face. She’s not used to hard tack.
Seth motions for her to drink the rest. She’s going to need it.
“This is probably the biggest setback I’ve ever encountered.”
Kate laughs without mirth. “You’re so English.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s the beginning of the apocalypse, and we’ll all probably be dead tomorrow, but you call it a ‘setback’.”
“Oh.” Her cheeks colour. “It’s hardly that bad, is it? I was preparing for my talk while I was on the plane. I switched off my news alerts.”
“It’s bad,” says Seth.
“A couple of isolated incidents?” Hope is liquid in her eyes.
“You’d better sit down.”
They watch a news update together, which includes new frightening clips that have been sent in from all over the city. Arronax’s body seems to wilt with every story, and her face is as grey as tap water. A man was killed at a gym in Lonehill by the orbital stepper he was inside. A pregnant woman was run over by a Turing cab. A patient at the Gordhan died when the nursebot administered a lethal dose of pexidine. The clip shows the surgeon robots being rounded up and locked in the disused hospital chapel, and the human nurses whipping premature newborns from their smart incubators.
“Oh no,” says Arronax, pale hands flying up to her face. “Oh no, no, no.”
“Those poor babies.” Kate can’t even think about what will happen to them. It hurts too much.
Arronax begins weeping. They’re all taken aback. Kate’s never seen Arronax so much as tear up before. Now she’s shaking and crying into her hands. Seth tries to comfort her, but she’s so full of emotion she can’t be touched.
“I’m sorry.”
Still reeling from the picture of the newborns, Kate has tears in her eyes, too. “I’m sorry.” What else can she say? Arronax’s entire career—and her career is her life—wiped out in just a few hours. It’s also a death of sorts.
“Can I see him?” she says to Kate, and for a second she thinks Arronax means Mally, but then her gaze skitters to the bag on the floor. Seth picks it up, lays in on the kitchen table, and Arronax tentatively zips it open. She runs her fingers over Bonechaser’s damaged head. He smells like an electric storm.
“How is Mally?”
“Shaken up. Sad. He’ll be okay.”
He’s been through worse.
Arronax starts crying again. She shakes her head, and her black highlights take over the rest of her hair (Raven Grief). Kate pours another round.
Arronax has spent the last ten years campaigning for #RoboRights, a charter to ensure that bots of any kind are afforded basic entitlements like the right to say ‘no’, and to protect themselves from harm. Her dogged determination ensured the Nancies’ approval of a law that criminalised violence against robosapiens, and her latest project is pushing a bill that’ll allow AI of any kind to refuse a human’s instructions if it goes against their inherent moral code, and/or cause harm to any bot or living being.
It was her idea to add a circulatory system to the latest generation of robosapiens. Perhaps if they could bleed like humans, was her thinking, then they’d be treated more humanely. Unfortunately, it backfired.
Arronax came up against massive resistance. Creeps are scared by how very human-like the latest generation of automatons are, and giving them rights just seems to be a step too far. When Nautilus revealed that the new version of androids—7thGen like Vega—would have warm blood, it caused protests all over the country. Where do you draw the line, between humans and robots? Arronax says: Why does there need to be a line at all? The future could be a peaceful and mutually beneficial co-existence, with droids becoming more human, and humans absorbing more tech. Soon there wouldn’t need to be a distinction at all. She covered this issue in her latest interview on ANDROID NATION which was widely disseminated on social media and taken out of context in various AI hate-groups. The alt-tech nazis just shared the “why does there need to be a line at all?” clip, making some people so riled up that they had beamed her death threats. One man in particular seems obsessed with Arronax and likes to leave poisoned easter eggs for her in all her favourite places. Revenge re-targeting. Not even augmented reality is safe anymore.
Arronax sniffs and pours herself another shot, and downs it. Pulls her seawater cardigan closed as if she is pulling herself together too.
“All right.” She wipes aqua-glitter from her eyelids. “Best we come up with a plan.”
Chapter 14
Dead City Sunbeams
Innercity
Johannesburg, 2036
Dragon Scales starts the car. The headlights illuminate the narrow city street, sending the rats scampering. One rat stays perched on top of a dumpster, too hungry or old to care about the ignition of a hydrocar, or the shock of the bright light. He looks straight at them, eyes pinpricks of glow-in-the dark green, whiskers twitching as he nibbles whatever it is he’s holding in his hands.
“Tell me about yourself,” the man says.
He means, Silver is sure, what’s a girl like her doing in a place like this.
They drive past more dumpsters, and more scattering rats, and then past the old sardine-tin security complexe
s overtaken by squatters and feral woodland creatures. Since the Seasian craze of Forest Critters lit up the local pet scene, the city has a wild animal problem. Foxes, raccoons and squirrels were brought in by unscrupulous animal dealers and sold as sterilised pets, and no one caught on until they were all expecting their first litters. To add to the population explosion (and confusion), sub-crazes streaked in: the sales of bio-identical robotic forest animals shot through the roof, and, more bizarrely, so too did the fad of dye-grooming your cat or dog to look like the original Critters. It’s best to not look too closely while driving: Roadkill smears the city streets.
“You tell me first,” says Silver.
“What do you want to know?”
“We could start with names. You could tell me your name,” she says.
“Names are just a social construct to box people in. I don’t believe in names.”
Silver guffaws. “You don’t believe in names?”
“Not ones that other people have given me.”
“Okay …”
“You don’t think it’s crazy that you live your whole life by the name someone else—who didn’t even know you at the time—gave you?”
“It’s just a name.”
“It’s never just a name.”
“So what do I call you then?”
“You can call me whatever you like. What were you calling me in your head before we started this conversation?”
Silver hesitates.
“Come on, there must have been something.”
“Dragon Scales.”
Now it’s his turn to laugh.
“Dragon scales. I love it. Do you see? Now we have something more than we had a minute ago. A connection. An agreement. It’s so much better than just handing out a random tag that you’d probably forget by tomorrow.”
“What will your name be for me?” asks Silver.
He narrows his eyes at her, as if sizing her up. “I haven’t decided yet.”
“But what were you calling me before?”
“I was calling you ‘Kid’,” he says. “But that’s not right.”
“I like it, though,” says Silver.
“You like being called a kid?”
“I like it when you call me ‘Kid’.”
“I’ve got it.” He looks at her hair. “Kid Silver.”
“That’s funny—” she says, about to tell him her real name.
“It was a brilliant band in the late nineties.” He scrolls through his Scribe. “I’ll play some for you.”
“The nineties? Christ, how old are you?”
Music fills the car. Twisted rhythm, and subtle layers of drum loops and orchestration. Innocent and sophisticated at the same time.
“Dead City Sunbeams. Electric Sky. It’s fucking perfect for you.”
Silver can feel the music pulse through her body, a new beat of excitement swelling the inside of her chest.
“Yes,” she says, relaxing into the sound. “It’s perfect.”
A few tracks in, they pass a stuttering solar-sign that says ‘DISTRICT 12’. It used to be the meat-packing district, when creeps thought it was still okay to butcher animals for food. Silver shudders, thinking of the pictures she’s seen of skinned cow carcasses hanging from hooks. The casual way the men worked on the corpses with heavy cleavers, as if they were cutting timber instead of previously sentient flesh and bone. Bodies traced with nerves, brains spiked with panic. On the heels of the vegan revolution the blood-stained concrete floors gave way to cotton and synthsilk: a bustling fashion district. Bustling, that is, until new clothes became unfashionable, and the industry caved in on itself. New businesses are hesitant to move into the area now, suspicious and/or superstitious, and the city doesn’t want to change the sign again. Now it’s just called District 12.
Silver’s feeling drugged by the strange new music and the novelty of being in a car with a handsome man who keeps looking at her. It’s almost like being in one of her RPGs. Why does he keep looking at her? There’s something happening. Something he’s not telling her. The car takes a right turn, which will drive them further into the CBD. They should have gone left.
“This isn’t the way to my home,” she says.
Dragon Scales keeps his eyes on her. “I know.”
They park in the street, outside a warehouse. He opens the door and as Silver steps out she’s assaulted by the stink of the city. She puts on her gas-mask then takes his proffered hand. It’s warm. He leads her around the corner, looks both ways, then opens a door camouflaged by a realistic mural of the same smoky brix that make up the rest of the building. Sometimes she thinks of this city as an underground labyrinth: There is the day-time trade and pedestrian city, monochrome, with dots of colour where informal traders sell fruit and junk chips and grey tech, and then there is the underbelly, the mass of narrow alleys and secret doors and underground tunnels. A dark parallel universe. A shadow city.
Silver hesitates outside the door. She has a feeling that if she crosses the threshold there will be some kind of huge consequence, some point of no return. Her nerves light up her stomach and her face, so that she feels as if she’s glowing. Not a pretty glow, but a radioactive shine. What is she doing here in this strange place with this strange man? Her clock ticks 21:12. Kate will be starting to worry now. She needs to get home. She needs to get back in the car and get home as soon as possible.
The dragon scales sparkle. His skin feels so good. He has this magnetic pull she’s never felt before.
She needs to get home.
She needs to see where he’s taking her.
She’ll be sixteen soon. Silver’s on a cusp, a precipice. If there is a time to turn your life upside down, surely it is now?
Chapter 15
Prisons Never Sleep
12 YEARS PREVIOUSLY
ICE
Johannesburg 2024
Zack starts as he hears a shuffling sound at the door. It’s pitch black. As his eyes adjust to the darkness, he can hear the groaning and thudding of the building’s innards. Prisons never sleep.
The sound that woke him, real or imagined, pulled him from a dream of another life where he was free. He tries to grab on to the coattails of that dream, tries to make his way back to the light and colour and warmth of the parallel reality, but there’s another sound at the door, and Zack knows it’s Bernard again. The knowledge sets off a fizz of foreboding inside his stomach.
The door slides open and she floats inside. Stronger than her silhouette is her smell—perhaps a residue of bodywash—cucumber and mint, and something else that he can’t name. Dog saliva. Yoghurt. Some kind of curdled dread, or is that his own body, reacting to hers?
She doesn’t say anything. Bernard just stands there and watches him sleep.
Chapter 16
Pirate. Despoiler. Bandit
Every morning there is a strict routine of exercise at the ICE. It doesn’t matter if your muscles are cramping from lying on the nibbled rubber slab they call a mattress, or if you can hardly keep your sleep-deprived eyes open because of the yelling and snoring and swearing that is the 24/7 soundtrack in the hard, cold cells. It doesn’t matter if you’re healthy or ill, if you drink your three daily nutrishakes or if you’re on a hunger strike. You do the exercise.
You strip down to your orange jox and climb into the Orb. The first time you do it, you worry about coming out alive. After that, it gets easier. The holistic fitness machine scans your body and your brain for the exercise that will most benefit you. It identifies Zack’s weakest group of muscles—his lower back—and coaches him through various strength training exercises. The Orb knows the drills can get boring, so its additional features can exercise your mind too. Mini holo crossword puzzles and maths games. Slitherlinks. Memory contests. KenKen, Skyscrapers, Futoshiki, Hitori, Nurikabe. Unfortunately, the mental features are shut off for prisoners like him. They want his body to be strong, to complete the work they’ll soon employ him to do in the penal labour camps, but they want h
is brain to be as dull as seaglass.
“Your lawyer’s here,” says Lovemore, the guard with the lazy eye.
Heady relief melts Zack’s muscles. He gives his hands and face a quick shot of cold water, jumps into his overalls, then offers his wrists to the guard to cuff.
Thank fuck, thank fuck, thank fuck, is all he can think as he’s led towards the admin wing. At last, someone who will be on his side. Someone who can get him out of this fuck-forsaken nightmare so that he can get on with his job.
The interview room is about as depressing as his cell, but it’s a different kind of depressing, which he appreciates. As he sits down, a man arrives, and a new tension chills the room. Zack stares at the interloper’s well-tailored suit with something close to envy. Of course, he knows the feeling is not about the suit at all, but a kind of nostalgic pang for the life he used to have—the life he’ll never have again. The man approaches the table and offers Zack his palm. Zack doesn’t take it. No one shakes hands anymore, especially not with a dangerous serial killer. Isn’t that what he’s supposed to be? Isn’t that why he’s in here?
The man retracts his hand and smiles to paper over the sudden awkwardness.
“Mpanghi,” he says.
“Excuse me?”
“My name.”
Mpanghi sits down, pretends to relax, and interlaces his fingers over the beginning of a potbelly.
“That couldn’t have been easy,” says Zack.
“What?”
“In school. Your name.”
“Ha!” he says, and looks around. He wasn’t expecting a laugh. His mirth surprises him. “You’re right. It wasn’t easy.”