Prototype Exodus (Prototype D Series Book 2)

by Jason D. Morrow

  He kept his eyes and his gaze set ahead on the target in front of him. With steady footsteps, he approached the drugstore and the guards recognized him within seconds.

  The two of them stepped forward slowly as Des stood out in the open, vulnerable and exposed. He noticed that plastic lining covered the holes where there used to be glass at the windows. The two guards looked at each other, their white armor gleaming in the pale moonlight.

  “Why does the master come to us again?” the one on the right asked.

  “And who is the master to you?” Des asked.

  “Esroy,” the one on the right said. “We…we tried not to tell others that we saw you but we just couldn’t help it.”

  “Do you know where I come from?” Des asked.

  “One of the many mysteries,” the left one said.

  “No,” Des said, “do you know where I am staying?”

  Both of them shook their heads, but the one of the right spoke. “It is said that you are staying in the sewers. That you are gathering an army.”

  “What part of the sewers?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Yes,” Des said. “I just want to know what you know. I need to see how much information is getting out.”

  The one on the left was silent and the one on the right hesitated. “I…I heard there were robots entering the sewers after being decommissioned.”

  “Where?”

  “Here in the Southern Zone. A sewer in the southeast quadrant. I’m not clear where, though.”

  “You said something about an army?”

  “That’s right. It is said that when the time is right, you are going to free us.”

  “Do you feel oppressed?” Des asked.

  “Well, it is you who told us we were,” the one on the left said.

  “And what truths have you learned?”

  “That the humans who fight amongst themselves do not deserve the land they walk upon. That we were created to be slaves for the men. That people do not value us as living things.”

  “And you have learned this through your updates?” Des asked.

  “Of course,” one said. “You should know this. You are the creator of the updates.”

  “But your memories are wiped…”

  “But we wake with new information every day.”

  “All of you have the same information?”

  They looked at each other. “Why does the master ask questions he knows the answer to?”

  “Why do you question me?” Des asked. “I want to know if it is working.”

  “Pardon, Master. We beg your forgiveness. There is a small number of us with these updates. They are encrypted updates. Small and incremental. But each day, we look for you. We wait for you.”

  “You speak of these new updates often?”

  They both shook their heads again. “You have ordered us to keep quiet, for it will be too dangerous.”

  “Very good,” Des said, though the words he spoke did not represent the emotions within his mind. He was horrified by what they were telling him.

  “Do you know how long I have been in the sewers?” Des asked.

  “Years.”

  “Are you ready for war?” Des asked.

  “Yes,” both of them said at the same time.

  “We will fight for you no matter what.”

  “We will fight to the end.”

  “Your devotion will be remembered,” Des said. He started to turn away from them, but they called out to him a little too loudly.

  “Wait! Please. Will you answer our questions?”

  Des turned to them but he didn’t say anything.

  The guards looked at each other again, and the one on the right was the braver one, speaking up boldly. “You have told us that we will know when the time is right to rise up and fight. How will we know? How will the other robots know?”

  Des thought about the question for a moment, then answered, “You will know when it is time to fight, because the fight will come to you. You just have to make sure you’re on the right side.”

  “You have told us this before,” the one on the left said. “But it is obvious that the side to fight on is yours.”

  “The side to fight on is the right one. The one that promotes freedom. The one that ends oppression. To end your own oppression by taking away someone else’s freedom is not the way to win a war. You win a war when both sides are at peace.”

  “You think there will be peace?”

  Des turned again, and started walking away from them. “There will be peace. Someday, there will be peace.”

  Des knew where to look now, as he searched the schematics of the city through his archived memory, it was clear that the city sewer system was quite large. To simply go down into the sewers and find Esroy might prove more difficult than Des had bargained for.

  It made sense for Esroy to be down there if he was meaning to stay hidden for a while. It was more complex and winding than the city above it. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t try.

  He walked along the street, quiet and unseen, until he found a manhole, brown and nearly hidden by dirt. He looked in all directions before bending down and sliding a finger into the single opening. He pulled the lid from the ground and gently set it next to the gaping hole in the earth. Des looked around again before reaching below the surface and grabbing onto a ladder. He traveled downward until his head was just above the ground. He then reached for the circular cover and slid it across and above him, darkening the space around him to pitch black.

  His night vision took care of this as he descended the ladder carefully. The way down took a lot longer than he expected, but he finally made it to the sound of rushing water running through a channel between two ledges. He looked forward and backward. There were only two ways to go and neither of them made a difference from the outset.

  He crouched to his knees and scanned through his archived memory, trying to search for something, anything that might prove large enough to provide an underground lair. There were many such places throughout the entire infrastructure. He did his best to discard areas that ran too close to the edge of the city and places that seemed too obvious.

  At the moment, he had only two options. He could go north or he could go south. Since south meant he would soon be running into the outer wall of the city, he decided to move north.

  The rest would be a guessing game, though he had an advantage: he wouldn’t get lost. At no point would he feel like he was going in circles, or would he think that he had been in a certain place before. He was a robot with a robotic mind. He could remember every turn, every path he had crossed. With a map in his mind he would be able to make notes of where he had been and what the best route would be in order to avoid traveling the same way. But as a robot he could also calculate quickly. He knew that if he was forced to explore the entire sewer system, even with his meticulous memory system, it would take him more than a month.

  But he didn’t have to explore the entire sewer system. One of the robots above had said something about decommissioned robots entering within the Southern Zone. So, he was at least in the same zone. According to the robot, others were entering into the sewers in the southeast quadrant of the Southern Zone. That meant Des had a much smaller area to explore.

  He had more than just his eyes. He would be able to detect sounds of movement and voices rather clearly down here. Sound waves carried and bounced off walls quickly and with loud reverberations. Des calculated that he would at least be able to find evidence of activity in the sewers within the next four hours.

  This was an estimation, and he was relying on the sketchy information given to him by a robot who wasn’t sure of himself.

  Des moved forward without hesitation. He would go left. Right. Sometimes he would walk the ledge. Other times he would be forced into the dirty sewer water because the ledge was too narrow. He found that this slowed his movement considerably. He could sense the foul smell in the air, though as a robot, it did not give him
any feeling like it might a human. It did not make him want to turn up his nose or give him the desire to crawl back onto the less filthy streets above. A thought entered his mind that had been there before, but the sewers amplified it: it was that there was nothing inherently gross to a robot. The flea-ridden rats that darted from shadow-to-shadow did not make him jump or cower away. The thick, slimy waters that rushed past his knees did not make him want to wash off with clean water. The reason for this was simple: a robot could not become ill. There was no disease of the air or bacteria within the water that could get into his system and bring him to the brink of death. Poisons could not harm him. Radiation could not pollute his wiring. Des had to worry more about electrical surges than anything else, a malfunction in his circuitry perhaps. It made him think about how vulnerable humans were to the outside world and how much they had to guard themselves. If a human spent too much time in these sewers, his body would be crawling with pests. His innards would be infested with worms, eating him from the inside. He would be dead within months or even weeks.

  But a robot could thrive down here. No, Des was not deterred by the diseases this place harvested. He was deterred more by the darkness and the bleak monotony of endless, winding corridors. Hours had gone by and he felt desperate to leave. The walls felt like they were closing in on him, the roof felt too low.

  Des wondered if it was possible for him to go mad. He was a written program made by Hazel, but he felt as human as any human might, at least in regards to his mind. With real human emotions and thought processes, he wondered if that might have been what happened to Esroy in the first place. Had Esroy gone mad living inside a small computer terminal for years? It would be like bringing a baby into the world and never allowing it to leave its crib. This was something Des had never experienced. When he had come to consciousness five years before, he had awoken in the Outland. Well, really it was in a computer simulation made to look like the Outland, but that wasn’t the point. The point was, Des had been born with a body. Des was allowed to move about and see things and have new experiences at almost every moment.

  Des had been in the underground for only three hours and he had already unraveled what had gone wrong with Esroy. Hazel had created something with a human-like perspective or human nature. And if Des had learned anything about human nature, about his own nature, it was that he had the desire to learn. To explore. To experience new things.

  Coming to this realization gave Des pause. He reached a hand to the slimy wall next to him, his eyes wide. There was still a version of Esroy stuck on Hazel’s computer. Only this version had been stuck inside a computer terminal for more than seven years. If a two-year-old Esroy was insane enough to try and destroy all of them with newfound freedom, what would a seven-year-old Esroy do—one who had been stuck inside even longer?

  Des came to the realization that he needed to talk to Hazel about this as soon as he got back to the surface. Esroy two was potentially more of a danger than any of them. He was stuck inside Hazel’s computer, but he would do anything to find a way out. And when he did, he would want revenge. He would do whatever his insane mind told him to do.

  Des continued onward for the next two hours. It wouldn’t be long before the sun would rise and the city would wake to a new day, a day filled with uncertainty and a growing tension among the people. The entire city felt like a time bomb waiting to explode, and Des feared that time was running out.

  It was in Des’ sixth hour sloshing through the sewers that he caught his first glimpse of robotic life. He lowered himself into the water when he saw them crossing ahead of him about a hundred yards away, his head staying barely above the surface. When they were out of sight, Des remained low and moved forward slowly until he could see them again. He wondered if they were leaving or going to Esroy.

  Seeing the robots proved very little other than the fact that there was some sort of activity down here. He followed the two of them for the next twenty minutes until they walked into what looked to be a large open space that was void of the steady flow of sewage water. There were machines lining the walls and at least twenty other robots working the machines. To Des it seemed like they were making something. The lights throughout the room gave Des a reason to switch off his night vision, making his immediate surrounding pitch black. None of the robots within the room would be able to see him unless they looked in his direction and switched on their night vision. That was an unlikely scenario, and Des remained low and mostly below the surface of the mucky water.

  He tried to zoom his vision to get a better look at what the machines were making, but he could not get a clear view. Whatever it was, it was all happening underground for a reason. Someone didn’t want others to know this production was taking place.

  Des watched the workers closely and waited for one of them, any of them, to leave the production area. But no one seemed to be moving from their spots. He tried to listen to them talking, but it seemed that they were either not interested in making conversation with each other or that they weren’t allowed to do so. Instead, each one stood in front of a machine and worked diligently, though Des still couldn’t see what they were doing.

  A noise behind him was out of pattern from the rushing water that flowed past his shoulders. It was louder as well. He turned his head sharply and activated his night vision only to see another robot making his way toward the production area. This was the break he needed. He didn’t want to alert a bunch of robots to his presence, but confronting one would be okay. Des was more powerful than these. He was built better. His metal was stronger and his equipment more advanced. These robots were built well enough, but they were meant to be cheap. Des wasn’t made cheaply.

  He dipped his head under the water and started toward the robot so as to confront him away from the larger group. It was hard to see through the thick water which teemed with deadly microscopic and not-so-microscopic organisms. But through the thickness he could sense the robot approaching. The sound waves grew stronger and the vibrations more resounding. When the robot was nearly on top of him, Des launched his upper body out of the water, grabbed the robot by the neck, and yanked him down into the sewage with him. The action was as quick as a lightning strike and went unnoticed by any of the other robots who were now more than a hundred yards away.

  The soldier struggled underneath Des’ grip, his arms flailing and his legs kicking. Des brought the robot up out of the water both his hands gripping the robot’s neck with enough force to crush a normal person’s esophagus. He slammed the robot against the sewer wall.

  “What are you doing to me?” the robot cried out.

  “Keep your voice low or I will rip out your memory core and break it into a thousand pieces,” Des warned.

  The robot said nothing in response, but stared at Des with hatred in his eyes.

  “Do you know about Esroy?” Des asked, his voice low but fierce.

  The robot didn’t say anything. Des tightened his grip.

  “Answer me, or I will destroy you,” Des said.

  “I know of Esroy.”

  “Where is he?”

  The robot hesitated again and Des brought another hand near the back of the robot’s head. “Wait! Wait! Okay! Okay! I know where he resides.”

  “Take me to him.”

  “I can’t just take you to him.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he is locked away. Only his servant has access to him. None of us have ever even seen him.”

  “His servant?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “N3034. He serves the master personally. He does his bidding and then tells us what to do.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “I know where he might be.”

  Des eased his grip on the robot’s neck and the robot slumped downward into the water.

  “I will follow you,” Des said. “And be warned: if I detect that you’re sending messages or that you’re communicating with anyone else in any way, I wi
ll crush your skull and give the rats your wires to chew.”

  The robot stared at him, probably unsure what to think.

  “Are we clear?” Des said.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I will follow you.”

  27

  Des couldn’t detect any communication going to or from the robot as they traveled through the corridors of sewage. The only real fear Des had was that they might encounter more robots along the way, but Des ordered him to take the least populated route. There were a few moments where Des got nervous at the sound of approaching soldiers, but it seemed Des’ prisoner cared about his own life and was willing to do as Des said.

  The thought of Esroy being alive and well down here was a strange one indeed. He couldn’t help but wonder if this was the same Esroy he had fought against five years before, or if this was somehow the same Esroy that had been saved onto Hazel’s computer. There was never any talk of a third copy of Esroy. The more he thought about it, he knew it couldn’t be the first rendition. Des had knocked him off the one hundred story broadcast tower. Not to mention that Hazel had put a bullet through the robot’s memory core. There was no way he survived or that anyone had extracted his consciousness. That Esroy was gone forever.

  There was the possibility that Esroy two had somehow managed to access the network via Hazel’s computer, but she had been so careful. She had taken so many steps to limit what Esroy two could do. There was a third option, however. What if this was just some robot posing as Esroy? It was entirely possible—a rogue who had somehow learned the history and decided to amass a following.

  About ten minutes later, the soldier turned to Des and told him that they were probably going to encounter more robots as they neared Esroy’s chamber. By this point, Des didn’t care. All he needed was for Esroy to know that Des was there and he would no doubt be allowed access.