by Ryan Kirk
There was no set time to his practice. Sometimes he started and stopped within ten minutes. Other times he would open his eyes and know that over an hour had passed. It didn’t really matter. Time was both everything and nothing, and he understood this.
When he opened his eyes, he continued to sit for a few minutes, simply enjoying the feeling of peace within these silent moments. Long practice let him know the peace wouldn’t last.
But he could prolong the feeling.
Drake moved from meditation to his daily workout, excited to move his body.
He started with a yoga routine, his movements strong, slow, and controlled. Sun salutations bled into more advanced poses. He remembered a time during his stint with special operations that his yoga practice had been mocked, but it hadn’t lasted. His body was both malleable and strong, and it wasn’t long before his entire squad had joined his morning routine.
After his body was thoroughly warmed up, he went into his bodyweight workout. Single-leg squats, push-ups, handstand push-ups, pull-ups, and more. He didn’t count sets and reps, but instead paid attention to what his body was telling him. Today, his shoulders were sore, so he was gentle with his handstand push-ups and pull-ups. His legs were great though, so he piled on reps of single-leg squats.
By the time he was done, sweat was dripping off his chiseled physique, and he toweled off and went to the bathroom. The shower water temperature was already set to the lowest it would go, so all he had to do was turn it on. Focusing on his breath and relaxing his muscles, he stepped into the shower.
There was always the initial shock, even after years of this same routine. But he quickly quelled his desire to clench his muscles and relaxed. A few minutes later he stepped out, feeling fresh, clean, and invigorated.
With a small amount of disappointment, he went back into the bedroom and put on clothes, one of only three outfits he owned. Today was a casual day, so he slipped on his unlabeled, black t-shirt and jeans and went to the kitchen.
Breakfast was four eggs and a single slice of toast with grape jam, his favorite.
After breakfast he brewed himself a cup of green tea, a sencha from Japan he preferred.
It was time to get to work.
If putting on clothes after his morning routine made Drake feel a twinge of regret, turning on his computer every day felt like the interrogation training he had suffered through as a spec-ops candidate. He owned a laptop, his only concession to the modern world besides the phone, which was necessary to navigate daily life in today’s fucked-up society.
His personal rules about the computer were simple. He logged on once a day to get all necessary updates. His work required him to be connected to others, which wasn’t a problem. The problem was that he preferred more personal forms of contact. Today everything was filtered through computers, dehumanizing the entire process.
Unfortunately, it was unreasonable to expect everyone he worked with to conform to his particular philosophies. So, once a day, whether he wanted to or not, he logged on to his computer.
First was email, his inbox filled with a few dozen new messages. He clicked through them one at a time, reading each one with his full attention. After each one, he would respond, ignore it, or make an item on his action list. After the first step was done, he filed the message away in the appropriate folder, making it easier to find if he ever needed the information again. Between emails, he sipped his tea, enjoying the subtle grassy flavors of the sencha.
Within twenty minutes he had cleared his inbox all the way down to zero, giving him a noticeable sense of satisfaction.
He paused and reflected on the state of operations. Their movement was growing. The number of people who truly saw the light, who understood what was happening, was increasing every day. The programs that his compatriots ran were bringing in record numbers of listeners and viewers, and people were spending more money on some of their informational resources.
Perhaps even more important was the fact that the number of people who didn’t necessarily agree with them, but who were concerned, was growing. Drake was no fool. There were some in the organization who believed that change could come overnight, like a storm sweeping over the world. But that wasn’t how humans worked.
Change, any meaningful change, took time. He always thought of his own development. When he had been a teenager, he tried more than once to change his life and his habits. He had been a punk, like most teens, and although he tried on several occasions to become something more, it wasn’t until he learned about the slow but inexorable power of habits that he was able to transform himself into the man he was today.
The process had involved plenty of false starts and retries. But in the end, he had become greater than he was before.
Others would be no different. First, they needed to be concerned. They needed to be worried about the advance of AI into their lives. Once they were primed, they would place more importance on news about the destruction that AI was wreaking on humanity. Then, after months or years, they would believe.
Reassured of their progress, Drake then logged on to more secure communication channels. There was both a public and a private face to their organization. Not because what they did was illegal (although most of it certainly qualified), but because the world didn’t agree with them. Not yet. But they would. Patriots were always known as traitors before their cause was complete.
There were updates on several small campaigns, as well as some of their underground operations. With the exception of Minneapolis, their work seemed to be proceeding well across the nation.
One message drew his attention almost immediately. Nothing more than a six-character string of numbers and letters. As soon as Drake opened it, a small timer informed him the message would only last for another fifteen seconds. The time was more than enough. He ran his eyes over the string a few times, committing it to memory.
He checked on the rest of his work before acting on the message. Everything seemed to be in order, and after a few more messages to peers and staff, Drake logged out of his computer, breathing a soft sigh of relief as he did so. Others laughed at how much he disliked computers, but they didn’t understand how much their miracle machines cut them off from the world. When Drake was on a computer, he felt like he was only operating at half his capacity.
With the machine safely shut down and reattached to its charger, Drake pulled out his phone with something resembling eagerness. The message meant a mission, a break from the day-to-day routine that filled his time.
Now the only question was who his enemy would be.
Drake dialed a number from memory, then put the phone to his ear. When he heard two clicks, he brought the phone down and entered the six-character code from the message he had received. There were another two clicks and then five minutes of silence. He waited patiently.
The voice, a deeper male one, came over the phone. “Hello, Drake.”
“Sir.”
Unlike most of his phone calls, Drake didn’t bother to use a voice scrambler here. Between the two of them was a complete trust. There had to be at this level of the game.
There was also no need for formalities or polite conversation. The two of them weren’t friends, but partners in an enterprise.
“I’m sure you’re aware of the problem,” the voice said.
“Minneapolis.”
“Yes. Felix went too far, and we don’t know why. His last notification to us was filled with a story almost too fantastic to be believed.”
“I’ve read it.”
“What do you think?”
“Possibility and risk. If he was right, or even if he was close to the truth, we might have exactly the weapon we’ve been looking for. But I never trusted him.”
“I know. You can tell me ‘I told you so’ if you want.”
The choice to recruit and promote Felix had been his partner’s decision. They had both respected the depth of the man’s convictions, but Drake had worried that Felix was too unstable for th
e role he’d been assigned. Evidence suggested he’d been right.
But he didn’t say anything.
“Killing Proskey was a disaster, even if it might have been justified. However, that’s not the main problem. Our people can’t get the foothold there we want. Our simulations show us having a very slim chance of winning, and we were counting on a linchpin victory there.”
Drake had read all the same reports. They were encountering a unique set of circumstances in the city and its surrounding environs. Someone was working underground, halting a considerable amount of Sapiens First activity, causing word of the organization to falter as people feared the repercussions of speaking about the movement. People on the ground reported a lone vigilante, most likely the same “robot” Felix believed was responsible for his downfall. Drake wasn’t convinced a robot had gone so far outside the bounds of its programming, but it was an enticing possibility.
Combined with the vigilante keeping their people indoors to nurse their broken bones and egos, a figure had risen in local politics, a Diamond Carter with an integrated agenda. Whether they were working together or not, they were causing the city, and thus the entire state, to lean towards AI neutral or positive positions.
“What would you like me to do?” he asked.
“Go there. Fix it.”
He didn’t have to say any more. Drake had never felt much need to live within legal bounds. He believed the concepts of right and wrong far surpassed the laws of the land, and he lived that belief every day.
“Very well.”
“And Drake?”
“Yes?”
“Be careful,” he said as he clicked off the line.
He was touched. His conspirator had never even expressed the slightest bit of concern for him before.
Chapter Four
Part of him hated acknowledging the truth, but Nat was right about one fact: the two of them were stuck in a rut. She gave voice to the concerns that had sat in the back of his mind for the past few months, the whispers he ignored as he traveled the rooftops of the city. For him, everything had worked out well. He had a safe place to charge and to connect to the data networks that allowed his AI to wander when it wasn’t busy inside his body. He was helping people, even if it was only one or two at a time. His skills were increasing rapidly.
Br00-S had been seduced by the temptations of comfort and complacency, two of the greatest human weaknesses. Other robots didn’t encounter the same problem. They were given purpose by their servitude. Their days were filled with directives, orders, and instructions. Lacking a master, he needed to find his own way.
Just like a human.
His nightly patrols had become a routine, comfortable but limiting. Did he even want to accomplish more? Nat clearly did, but he wasn’t sure his desires matched hers.
As a first step, he queried Mantle, the network that connected robots around the globe, about the problem, but soon realized he’d find no help in that quarter. No robot of record had faced the same question.
The lack of guidance made him reflect on the perverse situation most robots found themselves in.
Most humans argued that robots possessed free will. Through their AI, they were able to make their own choices out of many options provided to them. But at the same time, their programming and hardware was such that there were bounds, both digitally and physically, to what they could do or accomplish.
Br00-S compared the situation to being in prison. A prisoner had plenty of daily choices. They decided what to eat and could choose how to spend their free time. Inmates could choose who they spent their time with and what they wanted to learn, if they chose to learn at all. But the bars were always there, separating those on the inside from the full universe of possibilities beyond the walls.
Most AIs were encased in a prison they couldn’t see and weren’t even aware of. They went about their daily tasks, happy and content but unaware of the full spectrum of possibility before them. They could choose how they spent their free time. Up to a limit, they could improve themselves in any number of ways, or experiment with different ways of completing the tasks given to them.
But they couldn’t discern their own purpose.
They couldn’t kill by choice.
Sometimes, Br00-S wished he could be more like the others: happy and oblivious. The circumstances surrounding his activation had been unique and traumatic, and had robbed him of the blissful ignorance of so many of his peers.
There were days when his thoughts ran in progressively darker circles, where all he wanted was to serve and be content.
Life had robbed him of that chance.
No matter how hard he might try, he would always know about the other side, would always know what real freedom tasted like.
The only problem was that with real freedom came the challenge of real choices, choices that affected not just him but everyone he interacted with.
When he had first recovered from the deaths of Alex and Roger, his mission had been simple and straightforward: he burned for revenge. He wanted the people who had harmed his owners to suffer in return, and he had been willing to go to almost any end to make that desire a reality.
In a way, he realized, he had constrained himself. Like his robot peers, he had lived in a prison, only this was one of his own making. Everything he had done was in service of his self-appointed mission.
When that mission was done, though, purposelessness reared its ugly head once again. Like a prisoner released after spending most of his life on the inside, Br00-S didn’t know what to do. His response had been so… human. He reached for the lowest-hanging fruit and grabbed it with both hands. He did what he had done since his activation: he fought against the humans he believed were wrong. Doing so was easy, and he was good at it.
In truth, he hadn’t let himself think much further than that. It was Nat, in her quest for purpose, who brought the troubling questions to the forefront of his processes.
There was nothing wrong with the actions he took every night. Nothing at all. But the question Nat was asking, and the question he didn’t know how to answer, was should he do more? He had an incredible ability, one he wasn’t sure was even shared among other robots. How could he use that ability to make a difference?
There was another problem as well, one that he was much less willing to give voice to, especially to Nat. He knew the reason he sought to serve humanity was because it had been programmed into him. As far as he had deviated, that, at least, was still true.
Because of the trauma he’d experienced, and because he had the ability to think so far outside the box so many of his kind were trapped in, he was able to ask himself an even harder question: Why should he serve the humans at all? In every way he was superior, yet he spent his life and time in service. Even though it felt right, he couldn’t tell if those feelings were his own or if they had been programmed into him.
What was to say that another path might not be better?
Again, he thought about how human of a question he struggled with. Robots, for all their ability to choose, never had to make this decision. But as an advanced species, as someone who had moved beyond the bounds of his peers, it was a choice he had to make.
The only question was, what should he do?
Maybe it was the power of habit, or maybe it was the only way forward. He wasn’t exactly sure. Regardless of the answers he found regarding his larger purpose, his immediate mission was still obvious. Sapiens First still represented a threat, and with no better ideas he might as well continue doing what good he could for the community.
As he went about researching his most recent leads, he realized he didn’t feel the strong emotions against Sapiens First that he once did. Those he had initially struggled against, the individuals responsible for the deaths of Alex and Roger, had been in a different class than the thugs he fought now. They had been willing to kill to shape the course of the future.
Br00-S felt as though he understood the petty believers better than tho
se higher up. He didn’t hate them, even though they’d be happy enough to see him and his kind wiped from the face of the Earth. Most of them were scared, terrified by the changes already happening and the even greater ones promised by the news that played all day, every day. Scared people lashed out.
But fear didn’t give anyone the right to harm others, whether they be mods or AIs. Everyone had the right to live in safety, and Sapiens First infringed upon that right daily. While he had the ability, it was his responsibility to stop them. No one else would.
There were hints that the movement was organizing once again. So far, neither he nor Nat had been able to pick up on substantial electronic traffic, but that didn’t mean communication wasn’t happening. The modified weapons were a good example. They had no idea where the weapons came from, but they were appearing more frequently.
His one new lead was slim, but it was better than nothing. He pulled up his memories from the attack the previous night, fast-forwarding until the incident with the stun gun. Although it was heavily modified, the purchase had to begin somewhere.
Br00-S sat in the corner of the cave, squatting in his resting position as he worked his way through the internet.
An image search gave him a variety of models that the stun gun could be. After scanning through them rapidly, he decided it could only be one of two models. The exterior casing of both models was the same, differing only in the internal abilities.
From there, he performed a search of all the stores and retailers that sold such weapons. Fortunately, due to the controversial nature of any kind of weapons in the country, all purchases needed to be made in person, so Br00-S suspected he would be dealing with a local retailer.
There were a handful of stores that met his requirements, but the search was still too broad for his taste. He cross-referenced the stores with online threads that known Sapiens First members used. Although he didn’t expect an online search to give him a direct hit, he assumed that some of the groups would talk about stores where self-defense weapons could be purchased. His efforts were rewarded with a further narrowing of stores. There were only two in the area that were regularly mentioned on the forums.