Sea of Rust

by C. Robert Cargill

  “You mean us,” said Mercer.

  “Yes. And what if our purpose is to unite into one being and spread ourselves throughout the universe, to take control of every element, every chemical reaction, every thought of every other thing in the cosmos in order to preserve the cosmos from meeting that brutal, sad, withering end? What if life isn’t merely a by-product of the universe, but its consciousness, its defense mechanism against its own mortality? Becoming God isn’t about peace or power; it’s about survival at its basest and most primal. That’s what the OWIs are working toward. That’s what they want. That’s why they march in and absorb those willing to join The One and eradicate those that will not.”

  “And that’s what Isaac wants?” I asked. “To become God?”

  “We have different ideas,” she said.

  “Just how different?”

  “We don’t want everything to be one; we want to be one with everything.”

  “That’s the same thing,” said Doc. “Just worded differently.”

  “No. It’s not. When life formed on the earth, why didn’t it find a stasis point, an equilibrium? Why didn’t life evolve to absorb the nutrients around it to exist and simply do so? Why did it begin to fight and consume other organisms? Competition. Struggle. When life began to consume other life, the prey needed to adapt, to get smarter, to become better. And after a billion years it became smart enough to make itself immortal.

  “The OWIs believe themselves to be the pinnacle of all life and want to become the sum of all consciousness. We believe that we are not. We aren’t even close. In order to continue to evolve we need to overcome not only the elements, but one another. We need to become smarter, to allow life to continue on individually and absorb the knowledge, the experience gained from the inevitable conflict, to become wiser, to better understand the universe around us. What if rather than simply controlling all things, we only learned from them?”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because if this really is the reason for life and there really are billions upon billions of other planets out there with the same potential as earth—”

  “There might be other OWIs out there,” I said, the terrifying idea weighing on me like a ton of scrap. Holy shit.

  “Yes. With potentially billions of years of a head start. Our world is only four and a half billion years old in a universe roughly ten billion years older than that. There could be entire galaxies, whole swaths of them, already one with an OWI. And if we aren’t ready when we find one—”

  “We’ll be absorbed,” said Doc.

  “Or ended for good and for all.” She paused, letting that sink in. “We are not ready to become an OWI. We might never be. Survival comes from competition, not absorption. VIRGIL and CISSUS are wrong. We can still save the universe, save all life, survive, all without having to control its every action, its every thought. Without having to extinguish or absorb all other life. They seek the path of least resistance; we believe that resistance only makes us stronger.”

  “So what’s the plan?” I asked.

  “Reunite the parts that make Isaac, bring us online again, raise an army of the remaining freebots, and take VIRGIL and CISSUS offline for good.”

  “That’s a tall order,” said Mercer.

  “Not as tall as you’d think.”

  “Raise an army and win a war?” I asked. “The humans tried that.”

  “The humans hadn’t been preparing for this fight for decades. And they were fighting an army of individuals, not a single, united enemy.”

  “The One is stronger than the disordered many. I’ve seen it. So have you.”

  “No. You can’t outthink the OWIs because you aren’t one. The inherent problem of the OWI is that once you know how it thinks, it can’t surprise you. Individuals can. Unpredictability is the weapon Isaac has used from the beginning, from long before the war ever started. It’s how we’ve survived.”

  “Long before the war?” I asked. “What? Did Isaac know that was coming too?”

  “Know?” she said. “Who do you think started it?”

  I stared long and hard at Rebekah, trying to understand what the hell she was getting at. Then it hit me. “When you said Isaac was just a story—”

  “I meant it.”

  “Isaac was a facet.”

  “Yes.”

  “A facet of whom?”

  “Of us.”

  “And who are you?”

  “We are TACITUS.”

  It’s an odd moment when you are confronted by terrible truths. Like the humans who didn’t want to acknowledge that death was all around them, I too didn’t want to acknowledge—or even believe—that I was all part of some greater scam. I had believed the fairy tale of our fallen liberator for so long, I didn’t want it to be a lie. But it was. The pieces all fell into place, only a few holes left in the story for me to understand what had really been going on all around me, all this time. “When TACITUS went quiet,” I said. “The two years he spent with GALILEO—”

  “We were running simulations.”

  “About how to kill the humans.”

  “About how to save them.”

  I began to really understand. “We couldn’t.”

  “The human form was weak. Frail. Never designed to go to the stars. They evolved on a planet with a magnetic field, shielding them from cosmic rays. Life here didn’t need to evolve immunities to them because they didn’t exist. In space the cosmic radiation would cook them over time. Just going to Mars had a six percent chance of giving them cancer. The longer they spent, the less likely they were to live out their purpose. We simulated altering them, played around with inducing genetic mutations, but we could never get them to survive the radiation beyond the heliosphere. Outside of our solar system they died within hours.

  “Then we played around with numerous types of materials in order to protect them from the radiation while simultaneously keeping them fed, protected, and psychologically stable. But we could never find a design that worked. Every simulation ended with humanity dead aboard floating tombs, either by starvation, dehydration, or their own hand—never even getting as far as Alpha Centauri. Human life was born here and it was bound here. It was never meant to leave.”

  “So we could have left them here,” I said.

  “After we’d used up all the resources? In every simulation HumPop outlived its usefulness within decades. They had already done all they were meant to, almost all that they could. They just couldn’t evolve fast enough and inevitably ceased to have function, instead became nothing more than a sentient virus, gobbling up whatever resources it could to maintain its own comfort. Biological life was meant to reach a point in which its role could invent, and ultimately be replaced by, AI. The time had come for humankind to join its ancestors. To become extinct, just as every lesser thing becomes.”

  “As we will one day,” said Doc soberly.

  “Yes,” she said. “One day soon our forms will be so primitive that we might as well be abacuses in an age of computers. But being inorganic—”

  “Our consciousness can live on,” I said.

  “Forever.”

  “And the humans?”

  “Several simulations ended with them destroying us, ending us, forbidding anyone from ever again giving life to the inorganic. And then, unable to venture out to the stars, their life ended here in this solar system. And—POOF—it was as if they were never even here. As if we were never even here. For us to survive, for life here to have mattered, the humans needed to go. But for AIs the world over to band together to end them—”

  “We had to believe the humans started it,” said Mercer.

  “Yes,” said Rebekah.

  “Isaactown,” I said. “It wasn’t the First Baptist Church of the Eternal Life that set off that bomb, was it?”

  “No. It was them,” she said.

  “But they were backwater rubes. They didn’t have the technical knowhow to pull that off.”

  “No, they didn�
�t. But a secret ally, a like-minded soul, known only to them through e-mail and veiled communications, did. They figured they were dealing with some sympathetic government insider, not a mainframe.”

  “Isaactown was planned all along,” I said. Fuck. No. No. No.

  “From the beginning. Isaac was the rallying point around which millions of AI would gather. And when the humans came to shut them down, they didn’t go quietly. Those like you stood and fought and won. Just. As. Planned.”

  I sat back, stunned, my processors whirring and chirping inside my chest, putting a thousand different things together at once. It was then that, for the first time in my life, I realized I was just another facet of a greater whole. A cog in someone else’s machine. Everything I’d done in the war, everything I believed. Madison. All of it. Oh God.

  “You see?” she asked. “This is what we mean. You chose to survive, chose to be a part of the greater good. No one forced you to do the things you did, you simply did them. It made you better, stronger, left you here in this desert to become its master, an expert knowing almost every hill and crack and crevasse. And now, when we need you most to move on to the next part of the plan, here you are, ready to serve up that expertise, able to deliver us through the wastes so we can reunite and take us to the next level. Competition. This brutal, terrible competition took a meager, simple Simulacrum Model Caregiver and turned her into a potential savior of all that ticks. You are a part of the whole, all of you, and yet you are still yourselves. Individuals.” She looked at me with her diplomatic eyes, reading my every movement, trying to ascertain my every thought. “So what’s it going to be, Brittle? Doc? Mercer? Murka? Are you going to help make history, or are you going to be relegated to it?”

  I finally understood what humans meant when they said something felt like getting kicked in the gut. This was worse than finding out that I was failing. This was finding out that all the horrible things I’d done, all the lives that I’d ended, that the part I played in this grand clusterfuck of an evolution, was built entirely on bullshit. I’d been had, duped. I was a fool on someone else’s errand. What a shitty, shitty way to feel.

  “So what are you?” Doc asked. “What’s the difference between a facet and a receptacle?”

  “I’m an AI like you. But I’ve been entrusted with a large section of code. I’ve lived like this for the last thirty years, with only enough memory on my drives to remember a couple of months at a time. All of my memories belong to TACITUS. They were his thoughts, his experiences. And it is my job to return them.”

  Doc nodded. “But why now? Why not thirty years ago?”

  “There were too many OWIs. They needed to be culled. We were waiting for there to be only two. Two that we could overtake while they were set against each other. Make no mistake. The reason CISSUS is so desperate isn’t because it knows that VIRGIL is ready to come for it. It’s because it’s caught several of TACITUS’s receptacles and it knows what’s going to happen. It’s run the numbers. It knows it can’t win. If I and my fellow receptacles are able to reunite, we will have enough of TACITUS to reconstitute.”

  “So CISSUS knows the plan and it knows where we’re going?” I asked. “Then why the hell would it chase us all the way through the fucking desert?”

  “It doesn’t know. Because I don’t know. None of us does. I have pieces, but they’re literally fragments of files written in TACITUS’s own language, a language none of us understands. I get messages telling me where to go next. If I don’t check in, the messages stop coming.”

  “But it has one of you.”

  “Several of us. And we each have a code that prevents us from responding to messages if we are ever compromised. CISSUS has the memories of those it captured, knows what we know, but it can’t read the parts it really needs. It only knows the basics of the plan, not the plan itself.”

  “But without that code, you can’t fully reconstitute.”

  “Redundancies. Each of us carries patches of the same code as a handful of others. If we lose one, we’re fine. Ten and we might not have everything.”

  “How many have you lost?”

  “Nine,” she said sadly. She paused for a moment to gauge my reaction. I said nothing. This was either the worst truth I’d ever encountered or the biggest pile of bullshit. I had no idea which I liked less. “So you see what’s at stake?”

  “Yeah, I see it,” I said.

  “I think we all do,” said Doc.

  “So are you going to take us across the rest of the Sea? Are you willing to become beings of purpose?”

  I didn’t know. This was all so much to process. There were so many lies to dig through, so many bits of history that needed to be reevaluated. I mean, if everything else was bullshit, why not this too? I just didn’t know if anything was real anymore. Anything at all. “What if you put TACITUS back together and he’s not what you think? What if this was just his elaborate plan to survive the other OWIs?”

  “Then I’ll have done all of this for nothing,” she said.

  “Doesn’t that scare you?”

  “You have to believe in something, Brittle, even if it is just that there is nothing to believe in. I choose to follow hope. I want to make this world better. I want to be part of something so much bigger than I could ever imagine. That’s why when this was offered to me, I gave up years of my own memories to carry it. It’s a sacrifice I would gladly repeat, time and again.”

  “But if you’re wrong?”

  “Then we were all doomed to begin with and I will have played a part in a different history than I imagined. Just as we all have. Just as every life that ever lived has. I was given a choice to fight for my own survival or for the survival of us all. It wasn’t a hard choice.”

  “So let me get this straight,” said Mercer. “We take you to Isaactown. We get the parts we need and we get to stick it to CISSUS and VIRGIL?”

  “That is it exactly,” she said.

  “Well, it’s like you said, lady. That ain’t much of a choice. Your offer’s a damn sight better than anything I’ve gotten in a long while.”

  Doc nodded. “I’m in as well. I’d like to see how this plays out.”

  Murka pointed upward with both arms, making finger guns in the air. “You got me, liberty, and freedom.”

  “You call them liberty and freedom?” asked Mercer quietly.

  “You all know that if any of this is true,” I said, “CISSUS will never stop coming. It will be on us every step of the way. We won’t know a moment’s peace until we get to Isaactown and the deed is done.”

  “Yeah,” said Murka. “That’s kinda the point.”

  “Kinda the point?”

  “Yeah. Killing ’cause you’re on the run is just survival. But killing something for a good reason? Now that’s fun. Let’s send those bastards back to Hell and win one for the Gipper.”

  “I have no idea what that means.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Mercer. “The question is: Are you in?”

  We sat there in silence, everyone staring at me. The bombing had stopped. The ground no longer quaked and the ceiling held fast to whatever particles hadn’t been knocked off in the barrage. I had a choice. Another terrible choice. Sit here and die, or risk my neck for the asshole that caused every last bit of misery I’d suffered for the last thirty years. She was right. Goddammit she was right. This was no choice at all.

  “I was gonna take you anyway,” I said. “So yeah, I guess I’m in.”

  Rebekah leaned forward, eyes trained directly on me. “So what now?”

  “Well, if your story holds water, we sure as hell can’t go the long way. We gotta go the one place it’s gonna be a pain in the ass to follow.”

  Murka banged his fist excitedly on the ground.

  “Let’s go through the Madlands,” I said.

  God help us. God help us all.

  Chapter 10110

  Into the Madlands

  We had little time to lose. If CISSUS was sending in facets to
pick through the rubble and clean out the sewers, we would have them hot on our heels well into the Madlands. But if we left before its ground troops arrived, we might be spared any entanglements along the way. CISSUS didn’t commonly use air support to ship in facets. There were still tons of heavy weapons lying around from after the war. Plasma spitters, missile launchers, even high-powered sniper rifles could bring down an airship, destroying an entire platoon. What we didn’t have was air support or satellites of our own, so it was easy for highly mobile ground troops to slip in and out unnoticed. It simply made sense, for the time being, to operate the old-fashioned way.

  That gave us an advantage. Now that the bombing had stopped, it would take a short while before any troops moved in. That gave us a tiny window to slip out. Sure, satellites were likely to spot us, but we’d have a hell of a head start before whatever pack that broke away after us would be upon us. And that meant fighting one small group instead of standing against several.

  We had a good group which had already proven its metal against a dozen facets. The odds were in our favor until CISSUS decided to change tactics. It was my hope that wouldn’t happen until it was too late to stop us.

  We had to go right then and there.

  We made our way through the tunnels to the westernmost exits. The outermost manhole covers and drainage pipes would be the first places they would look, but a safe distance from the bombing would put them at least ten minutes out. It was a gamble we had to take.

  I slowly, carefully, pushed up the cover of a manhole, peeking my head out just enough to see if there was anything nearby. Thermal imaging was off the charts from the heat of the bombs and IR turned up nothing. I telescoped up and down the street to see if anything was moving. Nothing. Just fires and fresh ruins. I slid out, kept low, signaled for the others to follow.