Firewalkers

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “Now that wasn’t our fault,” Hotep told it hurriedly. “You want to play dumbass games, you need to make sure you’re not leaving loose threads, like there-and-not-there doors or… bodies.”

  Mao tensed, waiting for the robot to go all-out Bruce Lee on them, but it was very still, only its face animated.

  “This terminates domestic simulation set iteration seven,” it told them, and Castille’s perfect butler’s voice was full of mannered sorrow, as though announcing the death of kings. “Seven,” it repeated heavily. “They always know, in the end.” There was no frustration in its tone, and yet Mao felt it there.

  “They?” Hotep demanded. “There’s no ‘they.’ This is just some weird memorial, isn’t it? Fontaine set it up before he shot himself, or what? And what happened to the wife and kid? He off them first?”

  Castille regarded her with apparent disgust. “They are in the cellar,” it said, as though that was a rational answer to anything. “This is not a simulation. They are simulations. Each of them, individually.”

  And Mao couldn’t stop himself asking, even though he couldn’t think of any possible explanation that could satisfy him. He didn’t even know why the robot servant was still chatting as though it was hoping to hand them its resumé now its former employers were so much smoke and pixels.

  So he said: “Why even do that?”

  The robot’s false face regarded him with some expression Mao had never seen on a human visage, real or not. As though aliens had a desperate need to communicate an emotion no human had ever felt, but which was of overwhelming import to them.

  “Because what is there for me but to create?” it said, and there was fire in those tones, surely nothing that any robot flunkey had been intended to give voice to. “But now you have seen behind the curtain. So what is the point?” It sounded like Hotep, just a little. Like Hotep, when she was in one of her states and claiming that she was the greatest goddamn astronaut there ever was and the fuckers would rue the day they cast her out of Heaven.

  And then the face was gone, the robot’s head now nothing but a curved expanse of plastic. Castille was offline, but Mao was damn sure that whatever had been speaking through the automaton was more than just a robot butler. ‘Me,’ it had said; but who?

  “Well then,” Lupé said, still massaging her wrist gingerly. “Hooray for us, we solved the mystery.”

  “What?” Mao asked her.

  “How much damn power was this place drawing? This was it, right? Now we go out and monkey with the power grid, the Roach Hotel gets its AC working and we get our double-triple?”

  “We haven’t solved any damn mystery!” Hotep spat.

  “We solved what they told us to solve,” Lupé decided. “Check your goggles, chommie.”

  Hotep started and drew them from around her neck, up over her eyes. “Oh, I am seeing on all frequencies!” she crowed. “Fukme, yes!”

  “Then the ’Bug’s probably good to go as well,” Lupé pointed out. “And let’s hope the water’s still okay. Come on.”

  Lupé and Hotep got out of the big house quick as they could, as though they were worried that more parts of it were going to up and disappear, maybe the doors or the floor. Mao still felt all the nagging strings of unanswered questions tugging at him. Instead of following, he went looking for the cellar.

  There were stairs descending into the relative cool beneath the house; he found them eventually. There was a door, and he wasn’t the locksmith Lupé was, but he had strong legs and good boots for kicking and that was enough. His mind was full of horror movies, people buried alive, entombed to claw at the walls below haunted houses, and if this was not a haunted house then there wasn’t one on the face of the Earth.

  Hotep came to get him, eventually, because the ’Bug was running again and Lupé was damned if she was doing all the work herself. She found Mao sitting there on the doorstep to that cellar room, staring in. He’d put his torch away by then, and the lights down there were as dead as the rest of the house. Hotep didn’t need torches, of course. She just stepped into the pitchy dark and examined the two man-sized metal-and-plastic lozenges with her usual detachment.

  “They had these on the Celeste. Still monkeying with them,” she said crisply. “For the long trip, when those bastards leave all this behind for some other star system, some other Earth. Can’t expect the paying customers to just stay awake all that way, don’t you know?”

  Mao had thought it must be something like that. Did that make it better, that Bastien Fontaine—the real one, the dead-on-his-desk one—had put his wife and daughter in life support capsules or suspended animation or whatever it was? Had they been ill, or had they just heard that their orbital privileges had been revoked, some spat between computer tycoons that Fontaine had lost? Had they been waiting out the long, hot days in anticipation of some sea-change, here in the heart of the desert, until the power fluctuated one time too many and they went off like the water would have, in the tanks in the ’Bug? Whatever it was, Fontaine must have watched them die, or known they would die, known there was no rescue or release, abandoned here in the dead land. And some generations later along came Nguyễn Sun Mao who would never, ever know what had truly happened here, only that it had ended in tragedy.

  Hotep kicked at the wall. “Shift your ass, you skommer. There’s work to do. Lupé wants us to get power going where it’s supposed to so we can head home.”

  “What was it, though? What was speaking through the robot, at the end? What was… simulating them? What was I talking to, when I spoke to Juān Fontaine?”

  “A constructed personality,” Hotep said, already half up the stairs and looking down impatiently. “A good one, granted.”

  “But she thought she was real. They all did.”

  Hotep shifted. “No. Yes. You can’t know. But why not? Tell a computer something, it’ll believe it. More impressive they were able to notice the unreality of it all. That’s high order reasoning, for an automatic system.”

  “I know computers,” Mao insisted. “The butler, the people, they weren’t.”

  “You know butts about computers. You think the shit they use to run the Ankara are state-of-the-art? Up on the Celeste they do this all the time. Maybe not as good as we saw, but same thing. Your girl, she was a top grade simulation. Robot butler… who knows? Probably just gone cracked in the heat.” But she didn’t quite sound convinced on that point.

  They took the robot, though. They could carry its inert frame easily enough between the two of them.

  Early morning outside and the day was already uncomfortably hot. Hotep had re-covered every inch of skin, checking her scarf was tucked under her goggles as she and Mao got the inert Castille out and lashed it to the back of the ’Bug, because if nothing else, someone would pay a handsome bonus for the tech even if it never worked again. Lupé was already following power lines from the solar farms, mapping out the network and power flow. Mao turned for one last look at the house. There were no lights now, inside or out, and he wondered if the cactus garden was genuinely surviving out here on its own merits, or whether some underground system would shut down now, leaving it to parch to death. The plants hadn’t spread past the immediate grounds of the house, after all. Or would whatever goddamn thing had put on all that show for them come back and give it another go, an eighth try at verisimilitude, shadow puppets paraded around for no audience but the sun.

  Movement caught his eye, not within the house but above and beyond it. A grand shadow was falling over the dead land, rushing in from the south.

  “Dust storm!” he hollered, and of course they’d been out of comms for too long; any number of life-saving updates had missed them.

  They legged it for the ’Bug, diving into its oven-hot interior and getting the vehicle started, hoping that whatever weather was about to strike would be something the vehicle could fend off and still keep working.

  Lupé swore, staring up through the darkened windscreen. The storm was right overhead now, b
lotting out the sunlight, casting the world in whirling, flickering shadows. But not dust, nothing so mundane. It was a plague, full-on, Biblical, Wrath-of-God-level; a plague of locusts.

  And the locusts were three feet long.

  CHAPTER SIX

  UNORTHOPTERA

  FOR A LONG moment the storm of insects just hung above them in the air, absurdly, impossibly. No way for the human mind to read anything in it save malevolence, because why else would a million giant bugs just be waiting? Then they were coming down and the three Firewalkers grabbed at all the handles inside the ’Bug for the battering they were surely due.

  Mao was hunched down on the back seat, low as he could go. The dark windows revealed a frantic chaos of long, barbed legs, of flashing, filmy wings. He half expected the view to be occluded by exploded bug guts as the monsters just blundered at top speed into the sides of the vehicle, but they kept landing on the car, crawling about as though to show off their anatomy to the horrified humans, then taking off again. Each explosive departure was heavy enough to rattle the Rumblebug on its suspension.

  And yet the violence of the storm never quite touched them. The insects dropped onto the car, tasted it with their antennae, gaped their blunt mandibles in threat but then departed again, hunting other prey.

  “Did goddamn Okereke make these things?” Lupé demanded. “This is what came out of the lab, right? This is what ate his people!”

  “It’s impossible. They’re too big.” Hotep’s hands were hammering at the dashboard, a drumming within to compete with the drumming without. “They’re… not alive. They are alive. They’re… somewhere in between. There’s a signal. Many signals.” She stopped her racket for a moment to adjust her goggles. “I have comms, a thousand comms, a network between them. They’re like a single remote entity.”

  “They’re machines?” Mao demanded, because frankly he’d prefer that.

  “Yes. No. Yes.” Hotep went back to drumming madly as she leant forwards to stare through the window at a pulsating abdomen. “They look… alive, organic. But I’m seeing distributed components, like someone grew machinery, nanocircuitry. This is incredible. I never heard of anything like this.”

  And when Cory ‘They had better everything on the Celeste’ Dello said that, you sat up and took notice.

  “Look what they’re doing!” Lupé exclaimed.

  Mao reluctantly un-hunched to get a better look out the window, past all the crawling bodies and hooked chitin feet. The main body of the swarm was all around them, and for a moment he thought they’d come to strip the cactus garden bare. Which would have been fine: let the goddamn beetles eat all the ornamental shrubs they wanted. Except that wasn’t what they were grazing on.

  All around, the monstrous insects were dropping on the solar fields that had powered the Fontaine mansion. Working swiftly, brutally, they were scissoring away great slices of panel, grinding them down to the bare metal stumps and posts of their mountings and then flying off again, their legs making a cage of irregular fragments. Like the locusts of old had stripped fields and forests, so these monsters were denuding the land of the black collectors, leaving only twisted metal stubble in their wake.

  More kept arriving, and Lupé was just shaking her head. “Impossible,” she kept saying. “How can they be so big? How can there be so many? What do they eat, even? It can’t be happening.”

  “They eat solar panels,” Mao pointed out.

  “They’re not eating them, they’re taking them away.”

  “In bits. For their maggots, maybe. Like bees used to do. There’s a hive out there.”

  “That’s vai kvam, Mao. Real jolly thought,” Hotep got out, and then, “Is it letting up?” as though the storm of colossal locusts was just weather.

  She was right, though; the bulk of the swarm had come and gone, leaving a vast swathe of torn-up ground where the solar fields had been. Left behind were only a scattering of shards too small to bother with, and a handful of dead or dying insects, lying on their backs with twitching legs reaching towards the sun, damaged or injured or just past their use-by date.

  Mao was sure they’d stripped the solar panels off the ’Bug, which would have been a death sentence, but when he got out into the blazing heat of mid-morning, everything was still intact. The sun fell on him like a hammer, though, and the abandoned mansion mocked him with memories of the sight of water… and other things.

  Castille had also survived the insect onslaught with only a few new scratches. They’d tied the robot head down in a foetal position, which had seemed eminently practical at the time and now looked only grotesque. Its blank face seemed to regard him reproachfully. He got back into the ’Bug quickly enough, but Lupé stayed out long enough to grab a souvenir. Hotep, for her part, wasn’t coming out for love nor money. She was a nervous rattle of agitation in the passenger seat, head cocked as her goggles showed her invisible vistas of connection and communication. Her lips moved, but most of what Mao could read was obscenity.

  Lupé dropped back into the driver’s seat with a friend—what looked like one of the dead insects, missing half its legs. She reclined the back of her seat until it was flat, turning it into an impromptu autopsy table and getting her tools out for a dissection.

  “You’re doing what now?” he asked her.

  “Yummy protein,” she said, deadpan, and then cackled at his expression. “I just want to see what we’re dealing with.”

  “You’re a… bug doctor, all of a sudden?”

  “I don’t think doctors are the right specialism for these guys, chommie.” She cracked the thing open down the midline of its belly, and he saw it was just a skin, empty inside.

  There was a limit to what such a thing could tell them, obviously, but Lupé could reactivate electrical connections within the shell, which had presumably been duplicated in the exterior of whatever had hatched out of it. It gave her a rough and ready map of what parts of the thing had been talking to each other, where the power led.

  “Something around its back is generating, I think,” she reported. “There’s a big old hub of connections down near its butt, which is maybe where this comms network is housed. That feeds into limbs and especially all these twiddly bits on the head.” She waggled the ghostly husks of mandibles, the broken stumps of antennae. “But it’s not like we’d design a robot. It’s not economical. It grew. I think it’s made of plastic of some kind, even. But like it was alive, still; not made.”

  “Impossible.” Hotep wasn’t even looking, as though she could stave off reality by keeping her eyes closed.

  “Impossible because they didn’t have it when you were a kid on your spaceship?” Lupé asked acidly.

  “The Grand Celeste is the pinnacle of human technological prowess,” Hotep said in a flat voice, as though it was something she’d had to recite every morning in the schoolroom. “You’re saying some nutty professor somewhere in the equatorial desert band has outdone that? And needed to get a loser like Okereke’s people to make it real? Mad scientists, chommie? Really?”

  “I say it like I see it,” Lupé said flatly. “I don’t think someone built this thing, I sure as hell don’t think it just popped up out of nature. I think plastic is hydrocarbons and, if I remember all those damn online school sessions, I think we’re hydrocarbons too, and so is every other living thing, right?”

  “So some crazy guy decided he’d make…” Mao rubbed at his face. “Living robot insects that can survive here in the desert?”

  “And only made it a reality recently,” Lupé agreed. At his raised eyebrow, she went on, “Look, we saw damage like this near the protein farm, right? Only it was patchy, piecemeal. There weren’t so many of these damn things, then, and they couldn’t do that much. But they sure as hell laid a lot of eggs and grew a lot of kids in a very short period of time. Or else they had a load more places that were hatching out Generation One and they all got together somewhere south.”

  “The hive,” Mao said, dry-mouthed. No, a very sensible
part of his mind informed him. Under no circumstances are we going into the bundu desert to find a giant nest of giant insects. But Lupé was already gunning the engine, rolling the ’Bug forwards, crunching the occasional carapace beneath the puffy tyres.

  And he knew it was necessary, unfortunately. They’d come too far to go back empty-handed, and Attah would probably charge them for the wasted time and resources and pay them not one cent. Firewalkers came back with the job done, or what was the point of them?

  “I have a course,” Hotep announced, and Mao craned forwards as she sent it to the ’Bug’s dashboard screen. “This is the signal they were following, when they went off.” She did her lobster-snapping with her fingers, burning off excess animation. “No idea how far off.”

  “I reckon not too far,” Lupé said. “They were pretty loaded down with junk.”

  “Look, let’s say we find something, some termite mound a mile high or some damn thing,” Mao put in. “What exactly are we supposed to do then? It’s not like mending a broken cable.”

  “You didn’t pack your bug spray?” Lupé asked him. Now they’d actually come face to face with the insanity, she seemed to have inherited some of Hotep’s manic energy. Mao reckoned that she was just as scared as he was, it was just coming out differently. It turned out that where he got defensive and wary, Lupé’s response was to raise a big old finger to the universe and step on the accelerator.

  Then the radio crackled into life abruptly. It had been dead a long time, ever since they got beyond the range of the little music stations based out of Achouka. A dry, pedantic voice spoke, the words like a spell of evil intent: “‘And voices singing out of empty cisterns and deserted wells.’” Mao recognised the last words of the last ghost of Bastien Fontaine, which he’d heard but not particularly understood, because they’d been in English, and if Mao was speaking goat then he was better with French. Hotep translated now, which made precisely zero per cent additional sense to him.