Apocalypse Machine

by Robinson, Jeremy

  He shrugs. “I know a lot about a lot.”

  A laugh leaps from my throat. His twist on my constant claim to know a little about a lot makes me happy, mostly because it means he remembers me. Really remembers me. Despite my frequent absences.

  “And he’s not joking,” Mina adds. “He’s our lead scientist now, and that has nothing to do with me.”

  Swelling with pride, I reach out to Graham, who hands me the backpack. I put it on the floor between Ishah and me. The kids swarm around for a closer look, like I’m opening a gift on Christmas morning. Do people still celebrate Christmas? I haven’t in fifteen years. Not Christmas. Not the Fourth of July. Not a single birthday.

  To my surprise, the mob of advisors, military personnel and Secret Service crowd around, too. This moment might carry the historical impact on par with the nativity scene that Bell put up every year, and they recreate the feel of it by encircling us, eyes on the backpack baby Jesus. I unzip the pack, reach inside and pull out the sealed plastic bag. There’s an audible sigh of disappointment as the group sees the ice ax. But not Ishah. I was an absentee father much of the time, and though I did not share Bell’s beliefs surrounding the holiday, I always gave the best Christmas gifts.

  “What is it?” the oldest of the children asks.

  I carefully turn the ice ax around, so Ishah can see the smear of red. “When we first encountered the Machine—”

  “The Machine?” Ishah asks.

  “The monster,” I say, and then I search my memory for the term used by the White House and the military fifteen years ago. “The aberration.”

  His eyes widen with recognition. They’re still using that initial non-descript name, which also tells me they know nothing more about it than they did all those years ago. “You call it ‘the Machine?’”

  “It calls it the Machine. Also ‘the Ancient,’ but ‘Machine’ struck me as more authentic, given its lack of emotion and relentless progress.” I wave my hand, shooing the subject away. “All that can wait.” I pat the ice ax and continue, “When the Machine was still encased in ice, when—”

  “A man from your party, Kiljan, stepped on it.” Ishah grins. “I’ve read the report. More than once.”

  I nod, wondering if he was trying to glean information about the Machine or his father. “I struck the exposed spine with this ax. And I scratched it.”

  Grumbles erupt all around us. They don’t believe it. One of the men in a military uniform says, “It seems to enjoy nuclear warheads, and you expect us to believe you scratched it with an ice pick?”

  “I don’t care what you believe at all,” I tell the man, and I turn back to Ishah. “I think it was still waking up. Or it could have been a dead outer layer, like skin. The scratch healed in seconds. It doesn’t matter how it happened, only that it did, because scratches are formed when material is removed.”

  I turn the blade around and lift it close to his eyes.

  Ishah takes the bagged ice ax from me, holding it with religious reverence. “Is that?”

  “A sample,” I say. “From the Machine. It’s been at the house all this time. I didn’t remember it until after our second encounter with the Machine.”

  “When you died,” Ishah says. “We all believed it.” He glances at his mother. “Most of us.” He frowns. “I’m sorry.”

  “I should have never gone.”

  The frown transforms into a smile. “What matters is that you’re back, and you’ve brought another gift from your travels. Let’s just agree that your life leading up to your death was all preparation for this moment.”

  “That sounds good, hon,” Bell says, leaning her head on my shoulder.

  Ishah stands, sample in hand, and looks down at me with a grin. “Would you like to see the lab?”

  It takes us an hour to actually reach the lab. Mina has returned to her duties. Graham and Mayer are being officially debriefed by a collection of generals who Graham would have outranked by now. The kids and their mothers, who I’m looking forward to spending time with, have returned to their quarters, where homeschooling is the norm. There are a few other families in Raven Rock, but not many. With space at a premium, procreation isn’t exactly encouraged.

  That hasn’t slowed down Ishah and his wife, though. From his perspective, our chance to successfully repopulate the planet began when the Machine started killing people. He’s been hard at work since he was sixteen, filling his every waking hour with two things: family and science. In many ways, he’s a lot like me, but smarter and a better father. He’s the man I should have been, and I don’t think I could have asked for anything more in a son.

  On our way to the lab, with just myself and Bell clinging to his arms, he told us a bit about Ike. He hasn’t seen his brother in more than a year, but they remained close. Ike, in Ishah’s eyes, is something like an action hero. Strong, brave, noble and deadly. His description sounds a lot like how I would describe Graham, so I was surprised when Ishah said, “He’s a lot like you.”

  Our arrival at the lab ended the conversation and sent me into full on nerdgasm. They have everything, absolutely everything, a scientist—of any field—could need. From gene splicers to supercomputers. There’s even an observatory atop the mountain above us, projecting the images it pulls to a screen in the lab. The large warehouse-sized space is partitioned into sections by clear glass walls, etched with the name of the field and a list of the equipment found therein. Within each partition are rows of long worktables, peppered with equipment. Between each work station are low shelves holding an array of equipment, some of which I don’t even recognize. I could play in here for years and never get bored.

  The immaculate space is also very empty. Through the rows of glass partitions, I see just a few lit work lamps and even fewer people. “A little understaffed?”

  “More than a little,” Ishah says. “Most of us don’t specialize, either. There are a few experts left over from the Old World, but most of us are young, and focused on ways to undo the damage done to the Earth.”

  As Ishah leads Bell and me down an aisle, I say. “Maybe you’re looking at it the wrong way.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You can’t undo what’s been done.” I say it as a fact, not a theory. “We need to adapt. To evolve. Not resist. All of this happened because we bent the natural world. We warped it. The Machine is setting the world back in order.”

  This stops both Ishah and Bell in their tracks.

  “By destroying it?” Ishah asks.

  “Not all of it.”

  Ishah looks disappointed in me for the first time since our reunification. I don’t think it will be the last. “The human race is almost extinct.”

  “Almost. But not quite. Look at it from the Machine’s perspective. We don’t know what it is or where it came from, but we do know why it’s here.”

  “We do?” Bell asks.

  “To something as ancient and vast as the Machine, humanity is insignificant, no more or less important than all the other species living on Earth. And yet, we were pushing all species toward extinction as fast as any mass extinction in the 3.5 billion years that life has existed on this planet. And we were doing it in a way that prevented new life from evolving. We weren’t just wiping out species, we were killing the Earth. All of it. The only way to prevent that from happening was to usurp the mass extinction started by the human race, and finish it the way it has before.”

  “You’re saying the Machine is responsible for the previous mass extinctions on Earth?”

  “Maybe not all of them, but I’m guessing the hole left by the Machine’s emergence in Iceland is going to look a lot like an asteroid impact in a few hundred years.” I put my hand on Ishah’s shoulder. “I’m not saying I like what it’s done, or that I’ll be opposed to destroying it if we find a way. But I understand its rationale, even if I don’t appreciate its methods.”

  “It’s a forest fire,” Ishah says.

  I snap my fingers and point at him. It’
s the same example I used when explaining this to Graham. “Yes!”

  The fire burning in his eyes shrinks down to a flicker.

  “That’s why it’s changing the world,” Bell says, “not just destroying it.”

  “It’s reseeding,” I say, “using radiation to accelerate adaptations and mutations. It’s treating our impact on the planet with the same aggressive tactics we use on cancer.”

  After a moment, he nods. “I get it.” He strikes out once more, moving deeper into the lab. “C’mon.”

  We turn into an aisle labeled Microbiology. I’m about to question the choice when I see his destination. A microscope. He’s starting simple, getting a closer look before we try to break the sample down and figure out exactly what it’s made from.

  He sits down at the work station, dons a pair of binocular loupe magnifier spectacles that look like sports glasses with two high powered lenses mounted on the front. They’re similar to the kind worn by surgeons and dentists. He carefully removes the ice ax from the bag, laying it down on the counter. After preparing a glass slide with a small water drop, he leans in close and uses a scalpel to scrape the tiniest fleck of red away from the ax and into the drop. He seals the miniscule sample with a clear cover slip, flattening the water drop and finishing his preparation.

  I let out the breath I was holding and step a little closer. He moves the slide into position beneath the microscope lens. Then he looks through the eyepiece, adjusts the focus and leans back.

  “What is it?” I ask. “What did you see?”

  He smiles at me. “I was just making sure it was centered. I haven’t turned it on yet.” He flicks a switch and the microscope lights up, illuminating the sample. He then turns on a flat-screen monitor beside the scope. The image on the screen is out of focus, but soon resolves into an angular red shape, like a fractured scale.

  “It’s still out of focus,” Bell observes.

  Ishah sighs, making minute adjustments that only make it worse. He stops after a few tries, confounded by his inability to clean up the edges.

  “It’s not out of focus,” I say as the epiphany slams into my mind. “It’s moving.”

  41

  Raven Rock isn’t just a subterranean backup Pentagon, it’s also a vast military complex and backup White House, complete with its own Situation Room. At any other time in the history of the Situation Room’s existence, fifteen years would have brought a lot of changes. From landlines to cellphones and then smartphones. From notepads to PDAs and then tablets. From paper maps to interactive touch-screen displays with satellite imagery. But now, despite the passage of fifteen years, this duplicate Situation Room looks identical to the one I remember. The long desk. The office chairs. The wall-mounted flat screens, most of which are turned off, having no outside feeds to display. The furniture looks worn from use, no longer able to be replaced with each new presidency.

  I sit beside my wife, the President, who is seated at the head of the table. Her fingers are tented in front of her weary face. She glances around the room, making eye contact with several of the people seated with us, no doubt trying to gauge their reactions to the information bomb dropped by Ishah. He’s not the most senior scientist in Raven Rock, but they seem to trust him, especially Mina, though she has questions.

  “What do you mean, it’s not alive?” she asks.

  Ishah’s first declaration silenced the room, but it achieved its purpose. He has their attention, not necessarily because of the information that he’s given them, but that he’s given them something for the first time since the last Situation Room meeting I attended. I look around at the faces watching him, searching for someone I recognize. The science advisor, or generals, all of whose names I have forgotten. But I see no one familiar, and most of them are younger than me. How many of the old guard were lost in the coup, I wonder, and then I turn my thoughts back to Ishah’s answer.

  “In many ways, it resembles life. It takes in energy, we think, from radiation, from the sun and from biological matter, most likely from the oceans, which it then excretes, or sheds, as new biological matter. My father calls it Scionic life, divergent from all previous life on Earth, but still related.”

  “Related?” someone asks. “To us? How?”

  The question is off topic, but I tackle it head on with the hopes of getting back on track. “The human race and most of the plants and animals we shared the planet with evolved in the wake of the Ordovician–Silurian extinction event.”

  “You’re saying that the human race...”

  “Evolved from the Machine, yes. We were shed into being, created from the elements of this Earth and allowed to be fruitful and multiply, until we nearly destroyed the garden we were given to tend.”

  “You’re suggesting that the Machine is...God?” The question comes from Bell this time.

  I shake my head. “It’s a tool, created by and left here by a higher power. Whether you believe that’s God or aliens or beings from another dimension, is up to you.”

  At the back of the room, the door opens and a man steps inside. I only see his head, but the tight shave tells me it’s another military man. I wait for him to push through and take a seat, but he seems content to linger behind the circle of aides and advisors, ready to spring into action.

  “You keep calling it ‘the Machine’,” one of the generals points out. He wasn’t around for my earlier explanation of the name, and Ishah wisely leaves that story out, focusing on the newfound scientific facts.

  “That’s because it is a machine,” Ishah says. “The sample provided by my father contained thousands of microscopic nanobots.” He points a remote at the large screen mounted at the back of the room. It shows a video captured by the microscope. At first glance, it looks like a close up view of tiny biological creatures flitting about. “Each one of the individual units you see is smaller than a speck of dust. Yet, they are machines, containing no biological elements. Separately, they are even more primitive than a virus. Their primary function is to seek out other nanobots and form more complex matrices, which we were able to modify with various electrical charges. Each one acts as a stem cell, able to become part of whatever is needed, whether that is part of a self-healing exoskeleton, or a more complex machine capable of genetically engineering new life.

  “We believe that the Machine is composed of more nanobots than we could ever count. Basically, a googol. And combined in that number, the Machine would be sentient, far more intelligent than any of us, and very capable of managing life on Earth, from the planet’s conception to its eventual demise at the hands of the sun.”

  It’s Mina who hears the silver lining in all that. “How were you able to modify it?”

  “Certain charges triggered changes in the nano behavior,” Ishah says. “We were able to instigate a merging, or tightening, in which the nanos coalesced into a dense ball. And we were able to separate them again, putting them in a kind of temporary dormant state.”

  “Could you do this to the Machine?”

  “Theoretically,” Ishah says. “But the effect would be momentary and would likely wear off before the effect even reached the far side. It would be like a ripple of dormant activity, moving at the speed of light. The best it would do is make it stutter, for just a moment.”

  “Can the nanos be destroyed when they’re dormant?” Mina asks.

  “Individually, they are quite fragile. I would guess that the nuclear blasts used against the Machine in the early days destroyed layers of them as well, but when pulling from a resource numbering googol, it’s virtually impossible to run out of replacement parts, especially when new parts can be constructed from the very Earth itself. And it’s conceivable that the nanos could form a structure sturdy enough to not sustain any damage.”

  The look in Mina’s eyes is one I haven’t seen before. She’s always been intelligent and logical, but now I see cunning. “And if a nuclear blast were to follow in the wake of a dormancy ripple?”

  Ishah looks as stunned
as I feel. Did Mina just unravel a way to not only defeat, but destroy the Machine?

  “Uh,” Ishah says.

  “In theory,” Mina says.

  “In theory.” Ishah gives a nod. “Yes, but—”

  “How fast can we—”

  “I think we need to take a moment and consider not just whether or not we can, but whether or not we should.”

  Mina has always hated being interrupted, especially by me, because I know better than anyone how much it annoys her. But the shock in her eyes is more than simple annoyance. And it’s not just her. Aside from Ishah, most of the people filling the situation room now stare at me like I’ve got bulbous peeled orange eyes.

  Like I’m a traitor.

  “It’s here for a reason,” I say. “And that was our fault. Humanity’s fault. We inherited the Earth and set about annihilating it and each other. If we destroy the Machine, there will be nothing to stop us from killing the planet in the future.”

  “That could be millions of years in the future,” Mina says, her voice strident, but not quite angry. This isn’t a personal argument between husband and wife. I’m talking to the President, who can do whatever she pleases, whether or not I agree. “I have to believe we are capable of learning from this. We can harness the power of nature without destroying it. We can expand into the stars. We can even learn to live with the...Scionic life. We can be responsible stewards. There’s a lot we can accomplish if we are focused on the task and present to get it done.”

  I don’t miss the slight dig at the end, and I nearly congratulate her on speaking like a polished politician. But those petty quibbles can’t compete with the affection I feel for my wife. And, I admit, her words are inspirational. I don’t believe our responsible stewardship of the planet is probable, but maybe it is possible, given the right start. Maybe that’s the real solution. Maybe the Machine is simply waiting for one of its evolved spawn to take responsibility? To grow up. That might be the furthest thing from the truth, but I’m not going to stand on the sidelines and let this happen without me.