Ravagers [03.00] Deviate

by Alex Albrinck

  Micah Jamison didn’t need sleep.

  She swallowed and held his hand out to him. “You probably need this.”

  “Thanks.” He accepted the hand and reattached it. “To answer your next question: yes, I have always been a robot.” He arched an eyebrow. “Sorry. Humor’s not my strong suit.”

  She laughed anyway, enough that tears filled her eyes. “I figured that part out.” She wiped her eyes, the sore elbow once again demanding her attention as the adrenaline of the unknown faded with her acceptance of his claim.

  “I wanted you to understand that there wasn’t some clue you’d missed, some subtle change in behavior that suggested I’d… transformed.” He paused. “I don’t feel emotions in the normal sense, Sheila. I record sensory data. I detect minute changes in facial expressions, tone of voice, posture, and track what those input data eventually mean. Over many years, over many millions of such observations, patterns emerge, and I gain the ability to feel a person’s emotions. I can use that learning to determine how a human being feels in an instant, but I can also use those patterns and observations in a manner to effect the emotional outcomes I assess that I need. I needed you to accept the truth. I analyzed many possible approaches. This computed as the best course of action.” He sighed. She wondered if he actually breathed when he sighed, or at any other time. “That doesn’t mean I’ll always derive the best answer.”

  Sheila shook her head. “I haven’t had time to process this, Micah. But to answer the easiest question you’ve not asked, I can’t fathom that one can change from man to machine. You must always have been… what you are.”

  “Humans enhance themselves with machines all the time. Eyeglasses. Hearing aids. Bullhorns.” She chuckled; she’d heard his voice elevated through a machine enhancement she doubted he actually needed. “But one born human can never lose the core of what makes one human.” He paused. “Just as one created as a machine can never gain true humanity, even if that machine crushes the Turing test.”

  She frowned. “The… what?”

  “The Turing test.” He chuckled. How did he know that he ought to do that? “Sorry. It’s a term from my, er, youth. Humanity didn’t always have robots. Nor did it always have computing machines. As those early computers grew in computational power and complexity, it was theorized that interactions with machines might one day become indistinguishable from those with actual humans. A man named Turing proposed the idea; if a machine fooled a certain percentage of humans into thinking it was another human rather than a machine, that machine was considered to have passed the test. The Turing test.”

  “Oh.” She paused, then laughed. “It’s safe to say you passed that test. I think you fooled everyone. Especially me.”

  “I fooled enough people. In many ways I learned about behaving like a human being by building other robots. It gave me patterns of robot behavior and, for lack of a better term, thinking. I could observe not just human behavior, but machine behavior, and note the distinct pattern differences.”

  Sheila nodded, then winced, gritting her teeth as she seized her damaged elbow. The adrenaline rush from everything that happened had masked the pain, but now, with normalcy—if anything about this day could be called normal—returning, the pain made its presence felt with a vengeance. “Robots. Like. Whiskey?”

  Micah nodded, then frowned. “Yes. And medical bots. I need to get you to them so they can tend to your injuries.”

  She wanted to protest, but suddenly lacked the strength to argue. When you couldn’t raise your arm without wincing, without feeling a sharp stabbing pain shudder throughout your body, protest simply wasn’t an option. And she no longer feared for her life in Micah’s presence.

  He moved toward her. She felt her muscles tense, felt her pulse accelerate just ever so slightly.

  Apparently, some fear remained.

  He kept moving toward her, and, before she could protest, lifted her off the ground, striding effortlessly through the brush back toward the house.

  “I can walk, Micah.”

  “Walking generally entails swinging the arms. I don’t think that’s a good idea for you right now.”

  She wanted to argue, wanted to protest being carried around like an infant… but he was right. Walking would make the pain far worse.

  Knowing the truth now… if she listened carefully, she could hear the faint sounds of the gears inside him, moving his legs, maintaining his balance as the terrain rose and fell, ensuring that she didn’t move or jostle in the slightest.

  They entered the house through the still open door. Micah carried her up the stairs and set her down on a comfortable bed. Within seconds, several robots appeared. One, a quite female-looking humanoid, explained in a calm voice that they comprised the island’s medical team, that they were injecting painkillers, and would tend to the dislocated right elbow she’d suffered.

  The numbing agents masked the pain of the elbow, something she appreciated moments later when the team expertly slammed the joint back together, then probed her skin by sending a pair of mice-sized robots crawling around the injury. The nurse—Sheila’s mental designation of the humanoid bot—explained in soothing tones that the “mice” were checking for ligament damage. Finding none, they moved on to clearing up the many scrapes and cuts, applying ointments, and feeding her after tests she didn’t know they’d run showed her blood sugar levels were approaching a dangerous level. They injected fluids to combat her near dehydration.

  Micah watched without saying a word. She didn’t know if she should find that creepy or… sweet.

  The medical team completed its work. The head nurse bowed to her as she and the others vanished as quickly as they’d appeared.

  Micah didn’t move. “What do you want to know?”

  She thought about it while flexing her elbow, which, surprisingly, was pain free. She wondered what anesthetic they’d used. “Tell me more about this place. You have a house here. You obviously have a source of electricity. You have an entire staff of robots you built on site caring for the home and able to provide medical care that you clearly don’t need.” She winced slightly. She hadn’t meant that as a jab. Would he take it as one? Did robots get insulted? “How?”

  The apparently-not-insulted robot arched an artificial eyebrow. “With everything that’s happened in the past few days, with everything you’ve learned about the world… that’s the question you ask?”

  She folded her arms, noting the lack of pain in the elbow. Those robots knew what they were doing. “Do I only get one question?”

  “I should hope not, as you’ve now asked two.”

  She arched an eyebrow back. “I’m happy to know you can count.”

  He chuckled slightly. “It’s a critical skill for entities of my nature.” The slight smile vanished, and his face took on a more serious look. “You can ask as many questions as you like, of course, but I’m going to answer one before I get back to your questions about this island and its inhabitants.” He paused, letting his eyes move up slightly, tilting his head just a bit. It was an incredibly human set of movements, one she’d typically associate with one accessing memories or thoughts. “I’ve mentioned before, much to your obvious displeasure, that I’ve known what was to come for quite some time and did not stop it as per orders.” She felt her cheeks redden slightly, and he offered a light smile. “Orders aren’t malleable to a machine; they are code, and code must be executed as written. I can no more override my core programming than your computer at the Bunker could decide that two plus two equals eleven.” He laced his fingers behind his back. “My brain is a bit different than computers inside most machines, however. I can find what might be called loopholes, enabling me to follow the exact orders given while taking steps to minimize the impact of those orders. My orders were explicit: I must not stop the activation of the Phoenix group’s purging plans, nor could I tell anyone what was to come.” He stopped. “You see the loophole already, don’t you?”

  She thought about his wo
rds. Then it hit her. “The verb tenses. Once everything started, you were free to do anything you’d like.”

  He nodded. “Exactly. While I was free to act, that didn’t mean I could. Those machines would devour me just as they’d devour anything else. As to telling people what was happening… well, once people see the Ravagers in action there’s little point in telling people what’s to come, right?”

  She nodded.

  “But there’s more to it than that. I could not stop the initiation efforts for the purging action of the Ravagers. I couldn’t tell anyone what was to come. But…” He stopped his pacing and looked at her. “I could prepare for those moments immediately after the activation of the Ravagers.”

  Sheila felt her skin crawl. “You built the cars.” Her voice came out like a whisper.

  “Among other things. I knew that by the time I could act, the Ravagers would be unleashed, replicating out of control, and destroying everything they could touch. I knew that they couldn’t destroy water, however.”

  “Hence the island?”

  “Hence the island.” He coughed. Did robots cough, or just simulate that action? “I reviewed some of the images of the lakes the Bunker gathered and located this island. After determining that it was well outside established shipping lanes and fishing grounds, I journeyed here. On successive trips I brought tools and used the resources of the island to fashion this house. Eventually, I built my own laboratory and created the robots that maintain and defend the island in my absence.”

  “You built the house and the generator and the robots by yourself? And you did that while ascending to the rank of General in the military and managing all the activity in the Bunker? How did you find the time?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t need to sleep. And I can travel quickly when necessary.”

  She didn’t ask what he meant by the last point. She’d experienced the speed of one of those vehicles already. And she suspected that in ideal circumstances—days where the city didn’t crumble to ash around you—it could reach higher speeds. “I don’t know that high end electronics are native to this island. How did you build them?”

  “With my hands.” She opened her mouth to speak, but he held up his hand. “I’m joking.”

  “I thought robots didn’t have a sense of humor.” She sniffed.

  “It depends on the programming.”

  “Yours needs work.”

  “Thankfully, I learn over time.” He leaned back against one of the walls in a casual pose. “I borrowed the necessary tools and materials from the Bunker for my excursions here and set myself up with a laboratory where I could hone my craft. I needed to continue to better understand and improve my own functioning, and the best way to do that was building other robots. I chose to build separate machines, each specializing in one aspect of maintaining this place in my absence. The one you call Whiskey is one of the most sophisticated; he basically acts as my head of household and is in charge of the others in my absence. The humanoid medical bot is the most realistic looking I’ve built from scratch.”

  She shook her head and held up her hand. “Wait. You stole materials from the Bunker?”

  “No. I brought materials here to do research for our group outside of regular business hours and applied what I learned to our efforts on the mainland.”

  She rolled her eyes. “That sounds like a convoluted rationalization for stealing.”

  His eyes seemed to twinkle. Or maybe they actually did. She recalled the saying that the eyes were the window to the soul; she might well be seeing lights flashing inside his metal frame. “The materials I used cost less than the medical care and food the military didn’t need to provide for me.”

  “Ha ha.”

  He smiled before resuming. “The robots share one common skill, and that’s the defense of this island. They watch for threats in my absence, or when I’m here working. When I work, I prefer to maintain complete focus on my personal research rather than devote a portion of my sensory inputs and processing to self-preservation.”

  “Personal research?”

  He nodded. “Activities not directly or even loosely related to Bunker activities. As I said, I was forbidden to prevent the activation of the Ravagers, or to tell others. But nothing said I couldn’t work on ways to stop them once they’d started.” His face turned cold and menacing, and she felt herself lean away from him. “And they didn’t tell me I couldn’t work on methods to take control of the entire situation from those who initiated all of this, to take the fight to those who silently declared war on the whole world and fired the kill shot before having the courtesy to make their intentions known.”

  She felt a different kind of chill, the type you feel when you hear the words you know you were born to hear, the words that speak to your destiny. She’d lived, for reasons she couldn’t understand, where so many others perished. She’d use her life to take the fight to those who’d started this.

  Sheila stood and walked to Micah. She looked up into his solemn face. “Tell me how I can help.”

  The robot’s face lit up in a smile. This time, she knew she wasn’t imagining it.

  —6—

  DEIRDRE SILVER-LIGHT

  DEIRDRE AWOKE TO the clear, unfiltered view of the stars overhead.

  It was an unusual sight for her. She rarely traveled outside the Lakeplex, with its abundance of artificial lighting. The cityplex lights in the tallest buildings denied residents a clear view of the night sky, drowning out the distant points of light twinkling in the darkness. With those lights at the highest points gone, she could see the stars in the sky, and found the view breathtaking and inspiring. If the thin sheen of Ravagers glowing outside their saturated protection zone didn’t add their ground-based luminescence, the view might be radically clearer and dramatically more powerful.

  That same majestic view also terrified her. It existed solely because so many had died from the actions of the Phoenix Group and her idea. Every resident of the cityplex she’d called home was dead now so she could see the stars. Every resident except Jeffrey.

  Or was he dead, too? Had he wandered off after she’d fainted and while she’d slept, and perhaps removed his suit as the desire for fresh air overwhelmed his survival instincts? Had he then fallen prey to the Ravagers, or some lesser predator that had somehow survived? She felt a chill. Jeffrey wasn’t exactly companionable, but the idea that she might now be completely alone unnerved her.

  He sat on a small stump, one he’d no doubt harvested from the lake, and sat tending the fire. The blaze lit his face, lined in concentration, and the light glinted off the shiny metal of the suit. He’d found a few bits of metal pipe that he’d tied together with strips of wood, erecting a dual pair of A-frame mini-towers on either side of the giant fire that burned brightly, the light serving as a sharp contrast to the dark sky.

  She turned her head in the other direction and found herself staring into the glassy, dead eyes of the Hinterlands beast.

  She screamed, scrambled to her metal-clad feet, and backed away.

  “It will do us no good if you destroy the fire or the cooking spit,” he snapped. He sounded annoyed, with perhaps a bit of humor at her expense tossed in for good measure.

  “Sorry,” she muttered. She took three deep breaths to calm herself. “I… guess I passed out.”

  “Blood makes you squeamish. How ironic for the resident architect of mass genocide.”

  The words sliced through her, but she did her best to ignore the barb. “Where’s the knife?”

  “Right where you dropped it when you did your little princess fainting act.”

  “It wasn’t an act!” She scowled, and Jeffrey laughed. “Where’s the damned knife?”

  “Find it yourself. I’ve done more than my share. You still owe me a skinned Hinterlands beast. I have every right to toss you out right now for breaching our verbal contract. I’d suggest you move quickly before I decide to do just that.”

  She looked on the ground to hide the sight o
f her rolling eyes from him. She clambered over the body, which blocked much of the Ravager luminescence and fire-supplied light. She couldn’t see the knife. She almost asked him for help—or advice—before realizing he’d refuse. Scowling, she grabbed the beast’s hindquarters and pulled it around, letting more light through and illuminating a larger section of the ground. Jeffrey looked as if he wanted to say something, but kept quiet. She found the knife, picked it up, and calmed herself. I’m not afraid of blood. I’m not afraid of blood. I’m not afraid of blood.

  Then she knelt down, slid the knife through the thick, hairy hide of the creature, and slit the skin open.

  It was disgusting, grueling work, of a type she’d never before performed. Most people didn’t; the odds were quite high that if any other citizen from the Lakeplex sat here now, knife in hand, that they would likewise learn on the job. She wondered if Jeffrey actually knew how to do this, or if his choice of the division of labor was made to hide his own inability. At this point, it didn’t matter. She’d agreed to the terms. And she’d remain true to her word.

  It seemed hours later when the creature before her looked like raw meat more than a once-living creature. “I’m done,” she called out. “Now what?”

  She heard the sounds of creaking metal as he rose to his feet and lumbered over, the firelight glinting off the Diasteel armor. She was quite sure that if silence were required at any point in their survival quest, they’d die quickly due to the inherent noise levels generated by the suits. Jeffrey reached the carcass and examined it. He held out his hand for the knife and worked on a few small patches she’d somehow missed. Her earlier supposition that he’d foisted the chore on her to hide his own deficiencies in the area vanished as he expertly removed the excess hair she’d left behind. He moved to the lake, dipped the blade into the water, and cleared off the gore. He moved to dry the blade on his clothes before remembering he now wore metal, and resorted to shaking the knife to remove a large portion of the moisture. He then slipped the blade back inside his suit before moving back to the fire.