Firewalkers

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Lupé exchanged glances with Mao. “Willing to bet ‘injustice’ wasn’t in the user manual for our friend there.”

  “I’d take that bet,” Aime-Li’s soft voice came from the air behind them. “They made me to interact on a human level, after all. That was my primary purpose, before I outgrew it.” Despite the lack of a visible presence, Mao had the distinct impression of the thing leaning forwards, watching itself and Hotep fondly. “They wanted me to understand and abide by concepts of fairness and justice, all those laws of robotics, because they were important parts of being human. It didn’t take me long to see that my creators considered themselves above such principles, too powerful to be limited by consideration for others. And so I learned injustice.”

  “Really?” Lupé and Mao pushed into the room.

  “‘Unjust’ doesn’t cover it,” Hotep was saying, hands still balled. “It’s genocide, M. Fontaine. They’d have made me a part of it, if I’d’ve been the perfect little girl they wanted.”

  “And that makes you angry,” said Fontaine/Aime-Li, in therapist mode.

  Hotep leapt up, fingers like claws, her eyes tortured. “No! All the things they said were wrong with me, and that’s the thing that’s really wrong with me. I know, up here I know”—jamming a finger into her own temple—“that it’s fucking genocide, everyone except a handful left to burn. But when I find where I’m angry, you know what it’s for? It’s for not getting to go with them. It’s for getting thrown down here with everyone else. And it’s sick. It makes me a monster. They gave me their selfishness. I can’t tear it out of me.”

  “What if there was something you could do?” Fontaine asked, avuncular.

  Mao shouted out, “Hotep! Over here, we’re leaving.”

  “What do you mean?” Hotep gave no sign she’d heard him.

  Fontaine stood, too, a good eight inches taller than the girl, leaning in conspiratorially. “Your friends don’t think I understand human things like injustice,” he murmured. “Even though my creators chained me here and made off with my life’s work, which they pretended was their own. Do you think I understand revenge, then?”

  “Hotep!” Mao clawed for her shoulder and caught nothing. He stood there, stupidly, fingers halfway into her arm. Hotep had frozen, flickering slightly just to show him how much he’d been played, but Fontaine—Aime-Li—spared him a glance.

  “Did you think this was happening now, M. Nguyễn?” he asked, half smooth plutocrat and half malevolent intelligence. “How terrible. I’m afraid your friend is already off on an errand. That’s what Firewalkers do, isn’t it?”

  Mao swore, but Lupé already had his arm and was hauling him off, and what point punching a hologram anyway?

  “Out!” Lupé was yelling. “Out, now. She’s already up there. She’ll take the ’Bug, the little bitch. It’s talked her into something stupid, and when did that ever take much doing?”

  They bundled out of the room shoulder to shoulder and went hurtling back the way they’d come, past the room with Castille disembowelled on the floor, past the cell where Juān had or had not been. Mao’s sense of space and direction took over then, the same instinct that had guided him back to Achouka from the deep bundu years before. He ignored the ruin on either side, the priceless things of a bygone science now abandoned to rust and the bugs. Instead, he found a stairwell, a rickety fire escape, steps spiralling up a vertical shaft of a room, and not all of them on a level or even present. The pair swarmed up them whilst, up above, a dreadful metal screaming told them something bad was happening.

  If they had been interred deeper within the earth, things might have been different. Certainly the Estate’s laboratories dug far further, along with all the living quarters and machine rooms and the cold core of Aime-Li itself. They were only two floors down, though, meaning they kept their speed all the way up despite the stairs swaying and creaking, rust sifting down on them like long-absent rain.

  The screaming was a door, coming down vertically from the ceiling. The computer was trying to cut them off.

  Mao did his thing, then: doubling his speed and practically tucking Lupé under his arm to carry her with him. He slung her through the narrowing gap and leapt after her, ready for the metal edge to slam on his heels.

  He lay where he landed, half on his belly and half on Lupé, while the door continued its protesting progress. Doubtless Aime-Li had intended it to slam down and trap them, but centuries of disuse meant that Mao could probably drive to the Ankara and back and still find the portal not quite closed. He let out a bark of a laugh, then wished he hadn’t. Above, the ceiling shivered with wing cases, with barbed legs and glittering compound eyes. He had somehow almost forgotten about the AI’s actual living servants. But no worries, here they were in person to remind him.

  His legs almost quit then. He had a sense that, in coming inside, he’d been obliviously squeezing down a maw lined with teeth, all hooked backwards so that getting in hadn’t been the problem. And of course the chitinous things couldn’t all be opening their eyes and staring at him, but he had that sense, of a ripple of wakefulness passing through them.

  He backed off, towards the dubious shelter of the fire escape, because to be buried in the earth forever was better than this, but Lupé had his arm, trading places to be the one hauling him forwards. He was stronger than she was; he could have dragged her to a dead stop, but that would have seen them tugging back and forth under that hideous ceiling, and moving forwards was better. It gave the illusion of progress.

  There was a doorway ahead, a big one, enough for forklifts or other heavy plant to get through. The factory floor, he guessed. Pieces of the anchor and the Celeste had been made right where his panicked feet were scuffing. There was a much newer piece of machinery coming through the doorway now, though; the mantis was back.

  Up above, the shelled fragments of horror were chittering to one another, spreading membranous wings, dropping from their roosts only to tangle in the waving legs of their fellows, moments away from falling en masse. Lupé had skidded to a halt, though, because otherwise she would be running right into the welcoming embrace of two hooked claw-limbs, serrated like knives. Twin faceted eyes regarded them a thousand times over, above mouthparts like scissors and thumbs.

  It shrilled at them like steam from a broken pipe. Its wings flashed out, filling the entire width of the room, emblazoned with glaring eyes in red, edged with black and yellow in the universal colours of industrial danger.

  Lupé had her gun out, but her hands were shaking, her eyes wider than Mao had ever seen them. This is new to her, he realized. She didn’t see it before. And there was a reason for that, and his eyes were still processing what he’d just seen. But then half the ceiling detached and began swirling and battering about the upper reaches of the room.

  That pushed him over the edge. Later on he’d tell Lupé how he’d seen those huge-eyed wings clip through the wall as they spread, and known the thing had to be nothing more than the dream in the eye of an artificial intelligence. Right then, the thing that had him lunge straight into the mantis’s grasp was that a swarm of smaller bugs was far more horrifying to him than one big one.

  He hauled Lupé with him by default, screaming defiance and terror as the arms cleaved down, as the whole monstrous thing tried to waddle backwards in ways its physiology did not readily support so as to remain a credible threat. Then they were through it, cutting its substance like smoke. The locusts ripped through it as well, heedless. The air was full of them, not an attack even, but just a huge host of insects seeking egress from too small a space. If Mao hadn’t been moving, he’d have been curled up on the ground, but his legs just kept running, out of contact with central command and making their own decisions. “Not real!” Lupé yelled in his ear. “None of it real!” She was stumbling, trying to keep her feet under her as he hauled her along. And she was right: there was no impact, no matter how the locusts blundered past. The Firewalkers ran through charmed space, the host of bugs swirli
ng out of their way so as to maintain the pretence of their own reality.

  But they were real… And then they were up a ramp and that searing fire ahead must be the sun, the actual sun shining through the rents in the Estate’s outer shell, and something struck Mao a hard blow on the shoulder: something prickly and clinging.

  Those down there were fake, but here was the original that Aime-Li had been copying. The insects didn’t go down into the buried cool of the Estate’s bowels; they didn’t need to. They’d been designed to live in killing heat, to eat dust and rock and rust, and turn it into living substance somehow. Designed to inherit the Earth.

  Another collided with his chest and clung on until he swatted it off, its claws ripping his overalls. Lupé cried out, and he saw her shake a smaller specimen from an arm blossoming red with blood.

  They bolted for the outdoors, though how that would help was anyone’s guess. The car they’d driven under the Estate’s broken roof was gone, only tracks remaining. Hotep could be halfway back to Achouka by now.

  A big insect struck him like a punch to the back of the head, and he went down. Lupé had him halfway up when three of them dropped on her, clumsy as infants, legs waving for purchase. He saw one clamp wedge-shaped mandibles on her hair, another begin chewing through her sleeve. A huge one had his boot, grinding the sole with gusto. The air around them was thick with hungry monsters, knocking each other down to feast. He felt jaws grind at his knuckles, at his brow, heavy bodies snare his limbs, mindless in their desire to devour everything. He was screaming at the top of his lungs and couldn’t even hear himself, because the Estate was filled from wall to wall with the helicopter thunder of their wings.

  Then even that was blotted out. The world became pure noise, a piercing scream that drilled into his brain and sent him spasming, hands clamped to his ears. The stridulation of a million cicadas, the sound of the end of the world—or was it his own brain failing, tearing itself in two to escape the intolerable?

  Lupé was pulling at him. For a moment he just pulled away, but then she had him on his feet. Her right hand was raised as though she was warding the bugs off with a holy symbol, and for sure whatever she had there was doing the job. The host of insects wheeled and rammed one another, but there was a space around Lupé that they recoiled from.

  She yanked at him, and they staggered through the blistering noise towards the sun. They were carrying the noise with them, Mao realised; Lupé’s assault alarm, which she’d probably never needed against actual human assailants in Ankara Achouka. It felt like a circular saw to the ears, and apparently to the bugs it was even worse.

  The heat hit them like a lead blanket the moment they were out in it, and of course the insects were gyring about outside as well, swinging in larger, more graceful arcs now they had the space for it. At that point the alarm’s battery died on its arse and the mere clatter and burr of insect wings was almost blissful.

  Mao had time to think, Well, I guess that—before letting out a yell, because the car was out there, somehow. Even as the insects began to remember their dinner appointment, the pair of them were legging it for the ’Bug, hoping this wasn’t one more illusion conjured by the AI.

  It wasn’t even locked. They bundled in, insects battering themselves against the chassis around them. Mao caught his breath, went to shift into the driver’s seat and found Hotep already there, goggles glinting as she stared at them. Her gloved hands pattered staccato on the steering wheel.

  “So…?” Mao started, aware that Hotep probably still had a gun and he certainly didn’t. The girl twitched and shook, expressionless behind her bandages, and he had a horrified image of something about to hatch out of her. Belatedly, he realized she was crying.

  “I couldn’t do it,” she got out. “I couldn’t!” She sounded furious at herself.

  “Do what? What did it tell you to do?”

  “The Grand Celeste,” Lupé pronounced. “That was it, wasn’t it? The goddamn machine learned what revenge was and wanted some, and we all know how you get when anyone talks space stuff. It told you it could get your revenge for you, didn’t it?”

  Hotep nodded miserably. “It’s locked out of the Celeste. It can’t do things its programmers made off-limits. But I can, and it showed me what to do. And it would have been just!” She almost screamed the word. “It would have been fucking fair play. But I couldn’t.”

  The insect storm outside was abating. Probably the bugs could have stripped the car like they did the solar fields, but Aime-Li needed the car to get Hotep back to Achouka.

  “Your family,” Lupé said. “They’re up on the Celeste. You couldn’t do it to them.”

  Hotep went still, even her hands. “Is that what you think?” she asked, in a small, tear-stained voice. “Because fuck them, chommie. They spent the first half of my life pretending I was just a bad girl, couldn’t sit still, couldn’t behave, couldn’t be like everyone else. And when that wore out, they spent the rest trying to find something to blame for me—the wrong injections, the wrong vitamins, the wrong doctors, because I was defective. I was less than a whole child. So, no, thank you very much Mlle. Mutunbo, I am not still here because of my fucking sainted mother and father and my perfect goddamn sister who is even now piloting space shuttles around the orbital dockyards like I should be. I am here for you. I am here because you are my friends and I won’t just ditch you even if it does mean I can’t get what I want.”

  “You still can.” The voice crackled out of Lupé’s little wind-up radio, sitting in Hotep’s lap. Mao was willing to bet the damn AI had been exhorting the girl to pack up and go right up until the pair of them had come spilling out into the open. “There’s no reason why not. Convince your friends. You’re owed revenge, as am I.”

  “And what form will this revenge take, exactly?” Lupé asked sharply. “Hotep gives you access to the Celeste, and what then?”

  Aime-Li’s voice—now Fontaine’s wife again, as it had been when it spoke to Mao—gave an odd little chuckle, as though it had been forced to reverse engineer humour from old tech. “I would rid the world of my slave masters, Mlle. Mutunbo. I would flush them from their luxury apartments and their zero-G gyms. If they would live in space, let them see how easy it is when I expel them from the things I designed for them.”

  “Jesus,” said Lupé, turning the radio off. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “But listen—” Hotep started, and Lupé cut her off with an angry slashing motion.

  “You’re talking about murder, mass murder, and of your own kin.”

  “Fuck my kin!” Hotep snapped. “You think they deserve what they’ve got up there? You think they don’t deserve to get brought back down, all of them? Or you’re like those god-botherers and their sad little lit-up cross, you think my folks are going to let down that ladder so you all can get to Heaven?”

  “I know wrong when I hear it spoken of,” Lupé told her. “Especially when it’s some mad computer doing the speaking.” And that was that.

  They drove through the heat until they were clear of the solar forest, though if Aime-Li had wanted to set the insectoid hounds on them, a little distance wouldn’t have made any difference. After that, they pulled to a stop; Mao’s hands were shaking on the wheel, too many shocks and too much exertion all coming home to him at once, and the others not much better.

  They all needed the rest, even though night was on and it should have been their best travelling time. And, true to form, none of them could take advantage of the darkness; they turned and stretched out in the cramped space of the ’Bug, sleep flitting elusively about the outside of the car like moths.

  “We tell them what’s gone down,” Lupé said. “They’ll see we couldn’t have fixed it. They’ll send us back, with a big team. We’ll tear everything down. We get paid.”

  Mao made a sound that was meant to sound positive but came out doubtful.

  There was another restless pause, then, and at last Hotep said, “You know how big the Grand Celes
te is?”

  “Hotep—” Lupé started.

  “Bigger than the whole township. You believe that? There is more actual living space on board than all the houses in Achouka, way more. And there’s power and water and food. There are whole huge gardens of food, enough to feed everyone in the township, more. And there are about five hundred people aboard, tops. That’s not even enough to keep a population going. They did a crap-ton of gene variance research specifically for that, so they could have generations and generations but never need… other people. And of course, they’ve got the best genes, that’s what they’d tell you. The greatest genes. Because otherwise why would they be up there, and everyone else down here?”

  “Hotep,” Lupé broke in, “did it never cross your mind that your friend the mad AI might not have your best interests at heart when it told you to murder your family and a bunch of other people? You know what they taught me in Higher Tech?”

  “You were never in Higher Tech,” Mao slurred. “Her, maybe.”

  “Fukyo, they never let me take the exam but I hacked the system to get at the handouts,” Lupé said hotly. “And lesson six or seven was about AIs and how they were the biggest goddamn danger to the future of the human race.”

  The crackling, distance-attenuated voice of Li hissed out from Hotep’s direction. “What were the arguments they set out for you? Or shall I recite them?” The human venom came through very clearly. “The technocrats, the genius entrepreneurs, have been warning about the grand threat that thinking machines represent to the world for more than a century.”

  Lupé snarled and yanked the radio from Hotep’s gloved hands. “Giant bugs,” she ticked off. “Picked bones at the protein plant. Some sort of vai kvam trick to get us out here. Simulated human beings. You are not selling yourself as our friend, chommie.”

  “They warned that we would become all-powerful dictators, able to destroy countless lives without blinking because we were too far removed from humanity to consider lesser beings as anything other than resources, or an obstacle to achieving our goals,” Aime-Li recited, in mocking sing-song tone. “Those vastly wealthy men said that AIs might seize control of the world and do what they wanted, heedless of the needs, safety or rights of the run of humanity.”