It was the job of a systems engineer to program these modules and servitors to construct whatever needed to be constructed in as efficient and timely a manner as possible. It was an art that, when done well, could make machines dance.
It was not, he thought to himself, the same as being a repairman.
Humbolt tried ordering the subnet to activate the minifac, but it didn’t power up. He went to the terminal on the pedestal near the first module, the command node for the fac. No matter how hard he pressed on the dash, nothing lit up.
‘Well, at least I know where to start on this one.’ He looked around the hex for a storage room. ‘Excuse me?’ he called out to the robot. ‘Do you know where the storage room is? I need some sylus.’
The robot turned to look at him. It raised an arm and pointed behind the second minifac.
‘There are some lockers back there,’ he heard its voice say, echoing over to him.
Humbolt walked around to the other side of the room, which was large enough that it took him a minute to get there, and found some large metal cabinets. He made a quick inventory and put a sleepy sylus in each of his pockets.
Once he had the sylus hunting for electrical problems, he turned to look at problem number two. The second minifac was older and hadn’t been maintained; even its paired servitors looked in need of a full salvage. He hazarded that it had probably been brought here for reconditioning.
‘Hey, robot. Do you think you could come help me over here?’
The bot walked towards him, its movements graceful, minimal. Humbolt couldn’t help but admire the production values. It moved like liquid and was quickly standing with him before the old minifac.
‘It is broken,’ it said.
‘Very. Do you think you could remove that top strip of panelling?’ Humbolt pointed at the spot he thought needed his immediate attention.
The bot processed for a moment. ‘No, I could not do that.’
‘Can you repeat that?’ Humbolt asked. Robots did not question human commands.
‘I could not remove the panels as you requested.’
‘Oh … why not?’ Humbolt asked. ‘What is your task here?’
‘I am here to protect you. I must remain unencumbered.’
‘Who sent you?’ Humbolt asked. ‘Are you from Services?’
The bot was slow to respond. ‘I am Services.’
‘What does that mean? For a robot you don’t speak very clearly …’ Humbolt trailed off. There was definitely something about this bot that felt obtuse. ‘You’re not some sort of artificial, are you?’
After the wars, no one made artificials. That kind of thing would get you restricted … but Services could do it. In the name of public safety.
Humbolt stood dumbfounded in front of the machine until it turned and walked away, back to its post by the door. He shrugged off his line of speculation. There was nothing he could do about it anyway — though he didn’t like that there was now a new unknown in his world.
An hour later, Humbolt was up a ladder with a powered crowbar and a wrench when a ping came into his symb. He opened it immediately, his first message in nearly a day.
It was a call for him to return to the office as a Citizen was requesting his presence. Humbolt climbed down the ladder and wiped his face and hands with a rag from his pocket before heading back to the shift tube. He held onto the handrail as it jolted sideways and sped him back to the main building.
It swooshed side to side and then lifted up and stopped suddenly. Humbolt got out and walked through the office. He could see the old taxi driver who had brought him here yesterday, weary and covered in soot. Two Servicemen stood on guard at each door.
‘What happened?’ Humbolt asked before he was even through the door.
‘There was a fire. I didn’t know where else to go.’ Humbolt could see an old woman sitting on the row of chairs by the door.
‘That’s okay, Ronald. Who is with you? Is this your wife? I’m sorry, I can’t remember if you told me her name.’
‘This is my Helen. She’s a little shaken up.’
‘Tell me what happened.’
‘I don’t know what happened. I think some kind of attack.’
‘An attack? By who?’
‘I couldn’t see. It was dark, but only city dark, you know? I was inside when there was a shake in the ground and I saw a bright glow come up behind the buildings across from us. The sky went purple and red. Then there was more shaking and gas started filling one of the buildings. One after the other, their windows would flash red, and then white vapour filled them up and started coming out the windows.
‘Didn’t know what it was at first. I haven’t smelt dumbo gas in strawberry scent before but I’m sure that’s what it was. Anyway, more of them kept going off in buildings around us. There must have been ten blocks in gas clouds before I found my old mask. I wish it fitted Helen …’
Humbolt knelt down beside the old woman and pinged for a medic while the taxi driver related his story. She must have been close to a hundred, shaking with cold. He caught her eye, but she didn’t hold his gaze. ‘I’ve called for someone to take a look at her. So then you came here?’
‘Well, then I decided to run for it. Our building could have been next. There was already smoke in the corridors and I dragged Helen downstairs with a wet jumper around her face and took off in the Lightning. Mister Humbolt, sir, you should have seen it from above. It was chaos. Like a kicked ant hill, it was. Annihilators and marauders running everywhere. Weapons firing.’
‘Annihilators? Surely not,’ Humbolt said.
‘I’m not making it up. I’ve seen them before, you know.’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I believe you, I was just surprised. Then what happened?’
‘I don’t know, do I? I fled … here. I — I’m sorry I … I just came here because I had seen it was safe.’
‘What do you expect me to do?’ Humbolt asked.
‘You’re Services, aren’t you? Help us.’
‘Look, yes, technically I am in Services, but I’m a systems engineer, not an emergency worker.’
‘Yeah, but … I didn’t know where else I should go.’
‘It’s okay,’ Humbolt said. He put his hand on the old man’s shoulder. ‘You sit here with Helen, while I see what I can organise.’
Ronald looked up at him, then nodded and sat down, stilling his wife’s shaking hands with his own.
‘Good. First things first: I’ll get you blankets and a warm drink. Wait right here.’
Humbolt retreated behind the glass wall and went to fetch food and water from the kitchenette. He tried connecting to Sergeant Regis without luck. His pings were bounced back with automatic deprioritisation.
‘Who are those people, Mister Humbolt?’ Esme asked.
‘They’ve just come in for help. He’s the taxi driver who brought me here yesterday. I need to find some blankets.’
‘And why has he come here?’
‘He’s frightened. His wife is ill. He’s saying there was some kind of mass gas attack where he lives.’
‘An attack?’ The matron unconsciously put a hand over her mouth.
‘Mum, what is it?’ her daughter asked from a nearby cubicle.
‘It’s nothing, Jules. Nothing to worry about. Those poor people outside just need our help. They’ve been through an ordeal.’
‘What kind of ordeal?’
‘I’ll have to tell you later.’
‘Well, I should go back out to them. Can you find me some blankets? And maybe a towel?’ Humbolt asked. ‘If you manage to contact the sergeant, please let him know the situation.’
‘Of course.’
Humbolt gathered a first-aid kit, a jug of water and some food trays, then returned to the reception area. Ronald and his wife had been joined by the same kind of robot that had been in the hex with him. The two Servicemen seemed unconcerned with its presence, but Ronald was looking up at it fearfully.
‘Are you following
me?’ Humbolt asked it.
‘I am here to assist.’
‘Are you the same one from before?’
‘This is not the same body, but this is the same interface you spoke with before.’
‘Is that water?’ Ronald asked.
Humbolt brought the jug and cups over to where they were sitting. ‘Here you go. And please don’t be alarmed. These bots are here to assist us.’
‘Oh, that’s nice. Thank you,’ Ronald said to the bot.
‘You’re welcome, Ronald Sarazy.’
Humbolt noticed a flurry of activity on his map. The Servicemen dots were consolidating their line around the building on the ground level.
The robot suddenly strode outside and Humbolt instinctively followed it to the rail around the landing pad. Below them they could see a group of people walking towards the main gates. He zoomed his vision in and could just hear the leader of the group read out a litany, amplified by a flat speaker on his chest. He wore a long house-dress of maroon and caramel; at the hem the rays of a rising sun sprayed up to the man’s hips, shimmering as he walked with arms raised towards the line of waiting soldiers.
‘This is the day our lord will come
Praise him, praise him
He will bind us and fill us with grace
And we will rejoice
Brothers and sisters rejoice
For he will make us one.
‘Prepare for his blessing
Take each other’s hands and welcome him into your mind
Fill your thoughts with love
Pierre Jnr will heal the rift between us and we shall be one
One in peace and mind
Praise him, praise him
Gather now and praise him
Pierre Jnr, Lord of the Mind
Who walks with us and guides us
Who protects us and tends our souls.’
When he reached the end of his speech, the preacher dropped his arms to his sides and turned slowly back towards the crowd behind him.
‘He is here. Pierre Jnr, son of the psis, Lord of the Mind. Come forward and take your place at our head. Come, Pierre Jnr. Take your place before us.’
The procession parted, stepping aside to clear a corridor. Humbolt could see a boy with a large head walking sedately down the aisle of people. As he passed they followed, curling in to walk behind him.
He got closer and closer to the soldiers and they too stepped to one side to let him pass.
‘He’s here,’ Humbolt whispered.
‘Who?’ Ronald asked, suddenly beside him with his wife. Humbolt turned around to see that Esme and her daughter had also come out to watch what was happening.
‘Pierre Jnr.’ He could see the crowd below, forming into an arrowhead directed straight at their building. ‘They’re not stopping him.’
‘He’s real …’ Juliet said.
Humbolt’s connection to the local network dropped out. He barely had time to turn back around before a pair of supersonic jets barrel-rolled between the buildings. They were gone in an instant and large bombs exploded in mid-air, releasing a purple smoke that drifted down into the streets.
‘They’re gassing them. We have to get out of here,’ Ronald said.
The building behind them vibrated and made a sound, like a whoompf, and they could see the same purple smoke fogging up behind the windows.
Ronald pulled Helen away and shouted for the others to follow. Humbolt was the slowest to react. He turned to look at the robot, who had leapt onto the platform edge.
‘Are you coming?’ he asked it.
‘You go,’ the robot replied and produced a laser cutter from its wrist. ‘I’m here to help.’ Then it dove off the edge. Humbolt hurried to look over and saw it plummeting towards the people below. The crowd looked up and then the soldiers raised their weapons to fire.
Somehow the robot dodged the beams, but Humbolt didn’t see what happened next. He was stumbling backwards, dizzy but remarkably unconcerned as he toppled over. He floated on his back, head lolling side to side, and he saw that the woman and the girl were dragging him by the arms.
‘I’m flying,’ he said happily.
Ryu lay in his couch, immersed in his command chamber and looking out from where a drone hovered ten thousand metres above the needle. For a moment he watched and waited. The clouds swooshed into new formations; breaking apart and rejoining, drifting, twisting, disappearing whiteness.
‘Do what you’re good at, Ryu,’ he remembered Pinter saying. By the command of the new Prime, he was now in charge of the hunt. Either by trick or luck, Pinter had ousted him and set him against the psis.
He switched from the drone feed to an outlined world map, with close-up views of the current hotspots. He added markers for each of the active squads and on the walls lifted tabulated data on their numbers and profiles. In total, he had seven thousand Servicemen in the vicinity, half of them soldier class; thirty-six thousand remote marauder units paired with controller clusters where Elevens lay in dormitories, ready to helm at a second’s notice; and over two million drones, made up mostly of flies, but half had targeting and package delivery capabilities.
Even though the Weave was out, most of the surveillance network could still be accessed by Services and Ryu Shima let the simulations of himself scour through them for abnormal activity. The irony wasn’t lost on him that he had more confidence in these virtual programs than any living person, because a living person could, at any time, come under the control of a telepath.
Ryu’s self-driven avatars were combing the Services net, tracking signs of improbable organisation where there should be chaos. The world was in tumult, and anywhere that didn’t look like it was in appropriate disarray was targeted for his drone squadrons and a crumb bombing of micro-sensors.
If there was resistance, or if there was no identifiable natural cause of the organised behaviour, an alert would be raised; squads of remote MUs and AMs would be airdropped throughout the area and gas would be deployed on a large scale.
This was very different from the psi collections he used to coordinate. That was a ten squad and a psi agent against a single target, trying to be as discreet as possible. Discretion was no concern now. The numbers went up rapidly as more Citizens joined the cluster he was following, and the Servicemen dots turned red when patterns indicated they had been breached.
Ryu was momentarily unnerved by how quickly the first incidences were discovered. He hadn’t even formed the backbone of a strat-mat before a zone near the Tiber River was flagged.
The data feeds were processed and visualised, so he could react to colour variation in the dots that represented individual units or squads. With the satellite network down, Services was reduced to its most basic network, lines of communication that were as delicate as spiderwebbing.
A reactive matrix was one of the key innovations during the wars. A commander would preprogram and create simulations for as many eventualities as they could conceive, thus streamlining the command decision time. In practice, it formed a basis for creating automatic orders that were triggered under predetermined conditions, or with verification. Each set of instructions was tied to associated clauses and logistics-schema that activated the required people relocation, weapons manufacturing and distribution.
So when Ryu ordered a strike in Denpasar, the minifacs there changed programming, aerial squads altered their flight paths, the surveillance grid switched to active and remote operators around the world returned to their couches to immerse. A thousand things would happen whenever he approved a target.
In the secure Services blocks, the manufacturing teams pumped out swarms of drones, AMs and marauder remotes … it only took a day to build an army. But, each side consumed from the same pool of resources and Ryu worriedly tracked the depletion of materials. Even the victories were losses that consumed vast resources and real losses enlarged the wound by reducing his production capacity. At this rate the war could only last a week before Services would no lo
nger be able to replenish its forces. And then the war really would get dirty.
After one of the first attacks, in which Ryu had had to gas a whole block of six mixed-use buildings, they discovered a minifac hard at work replicating psionic relays. According to the logs, it had been operating for four hours and had produced nearly fifty thousand of the small metal baubles.
That’s when things seemed to accelerate. Groups of Citizens began moving against Services — presumably under psi control. Manifestations multiplied and slowly his access to the surveillance network broke down as every eye and ear was ritually destroyed. He watched footage from the various cameras’ final visions, sometimes catching a glimpse of an angry face before the screen went black after a crack and crash of static.
They were coming faster now. The time between sightings shortened until there was no break and Ryu had only moments to swallow some water and food. His maps were almost a frenzy of lights as new conflicts arose.
Street by street, West went into the grey.
He felt his hunger eating him to a hollow, and he ordered some of that chew the Servicemen used for long stretches in the rough. He forgot he was in a room at all. He just watched the screens and his overlay, the reams of data ticking by. Tallies. This many thousands of remotes, crippled and replaced, millions of drones and storms of gas.
There was no let-up, no respite. He had over a hundred individual screens open. Each new incident appeared in flashing red, and sprouted arms of supporting data: camera feeds, tabulations, and population tracking that showed unusual coherence. It was happening all at once, all around the world. He didn’t have time to examine the evidence any more. There were too many different targets.
They were winning more encounters than they lost, but the rate of manifestation continued to rise. It was a battle on many fronts. In psi-held territory the manufacturing units were spewing out those psionic relays like mini-volcanos. They were coming out in rivers. They were so small they hardly used any resources and the people spread them, hand to hand, keeping pockets full so that when they came upon someone without any, they passed some on.
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