The Robots of Gotham

by Todd McAulty

  “Get inside,” said Sergei.

  I nodded my thanks at the soldier, who now looked more embarrassed than suspicious, and retreated into the museum.

  “I’m inside,” I told Sergei, when I was through the inner glass doors.

  “Good for you,” Sergei said, a little sarcastically. He seemed distracted; I could still hear him typing.

  “Don’t be so negative,” I said. “You’ve got to celebrate the little things.”

  “Ruse will not hold for long. Corporal Granta is contacting his superiors now.”

  He was still typing. “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I am . . . sowing what confusion I can,” he said, with some satisfaction. “When we can, we must trust to natural chaos of AGRT command structure.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I said. I looked around. I was in a huge, poorly lit atrium. The ceiling was lost in the shadows over my head. Hundreds of yards away, on the other side of the building, I could see the south entrance. Spaced evenly on the left and right were shadowy entrances to half a dozen museum exhibits. Most were roped off. The atrium itself was filled with smaller exhibits, colossal skeletons, and weird dioramas.

  I couldn’t see any other soldiers. “Where to now?” I asked.

  “Proceed to south entrance,” Sergei said.

  I started walking south. “Will I get to see the dinosaurs?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “I was hoping to see the dinosaurs.”

  I was passing an elevated display in the middle of the atrium. It was composed of swimming dolphins. There was no water—or actual dolphins, near as I could tell. Five dolphin simulacra were swimming gracefully through the air, bumping each other playfully. One spotted me and moved closer, chattering at me.

  The sound echoed through the huge room. “Shhhh!” I told it. It ignored me, chattering again.

  The typing in my ear stopped. “What is that?” Sergei asked.

  “Nothing. A lonely exhibit.”

  I got past the exhibit, and soon enough the dolphin gave up and returned to its pod.

  I felt uneasy as long as I was in sight of the entrance. I kept expecting the door to burst open and soldiers to come running in. But within a few moments I’d passed enough exhibits to shield me from sight of the door.

  On my left were several displays devoted to prominent Sovereign Intelligences. There was an introductory placard that proudly proclaimed that the first true artificial intelligences had been created by DeepHarbor Design in the United States in 2063 . . . before the Wallace Act banned the creation or importation of rational devices in the US in 2067. There was a picture of Katherine Slater, who developed the first provably self-aware artificial consciousness outside America—and soon thereafter the Slater core—in Munich the same year. And a photo of the first meeting of the Helsinki Trustees, where the registry of rational devices was first created.

  Then came the famous machines. There was a 3-D model of Duchess, the first true Sovereign Intelligence, in one of her earliest, humanoid forms. She looked surprisingly petite, adorned in a plain blue robe like a nun. I’d never seen her face before, but she looks just like you’d expect—maternal and kind, with a benevolent smile and a glint of impish humor in her eyes. If every machine intelligence ever born had turned out like Duchess, this world would be a very different place.

  There was a placard next to her, listing some of her more notable achievements. I’d forgotten just how much the old girl had done. She’d created globalNet, of course, the worldwide data network that replaced the old internet, and made several crucial improvements to the design of the Slater core that allowed faster development.

  And then . . . and then she’d done something truly impressive.

  Before Duchess, all intelligent machines were an “it,” created in a ludicrously expensive trial-and-error process designed by Katherine Slater. Duchess had conceived of machine sex, formulating an impossibly complex process of machine heterogamy that allowed robots to mate and produce offspring. In so doing Duchess became a she, the first machine mother, and she gave birth to the most advanced intelligences of the era. She was mother to an entire generation, the greatest generation of machine intelligences in history.

  And some of its greatest monsters.

  Beside that placard was a family tree, showing some of Duchess’s more famous offspring. No one knew for sure how many children she had, of course, but the big names were there. Russian president Blue Society, the brilliant warrior Wolfmoon, robber baron Cantabria, space explorer Luna, Greek rock star Paladies, and reclusive supervillain Kingstar. According to a little holographic globe rotating beside the display, Duchess’s children governed nearly 20 percent of the globe—peacefully, or otherwise. I was proud to see Canada included in the list, and to see Distant Prime prominently listed among Duchess’s children. A great many Canadians took pride in our prime minister’s noble lineage.

  There was a smaller placard next to the family tree, noting that no one knows exactly what Duchess looks like today, as she hasn’t been seen in years. The placard didn’t state the obvious: that she’d almost certainly been murdered by one of her children. Never proven, of course, so for now the museum continues the polite fiction that she’s simply missing.

  Next to Duchess was a hologram of the massive Corpus. Said to be one of the most powerful intellects on the planet, Corpus is vast and completely immobile. It occupies most of a three-story building in downtown London. Unlike Duchess, Corpus is most definitely not politically neutral. It is British, and ardently patriotic. A founding member of the Machine Parliament, the coalition of nationalist British machines that returned Britain to prosperity and turned away two hostile machine incursions, Corpus is extremely popular in the UK. Britain might be ruled by machines, but at least they’re British machines.

  Next to Corpus was something far more interesting, at least for me: a display dedicated to the Separatist, the enigmatic French-Canadian machine. They had a scale model of his vast underwater machine colony off the coast of Greenland, where he’d reappeared after Distant Prime had driven him out of the country in 2080. It was even bigger than I imagined, with a maze of high-speed tunnels stretching deep into the mid-Atlantic. I counted five subsurface geothermal power generators, and nine subsurface habitats. The Separatist had demonstrated a lot of frustrated territorial ambitions in his youth—one of the many things that had made it necessary for Distant Prime to boot him out of Canada—and he was one of the few Sovereign Intelligences with a really sizable private army. Exactly what his current ambitions are is unknown, but his aggressive expansionism into international waters has made a lot of folks nervous.

  There was an odd buzzing up ahead, and it pulled my attention away from the displays. It got louder as I moved past the exhibits.

  “Some kind of noise up ahead,” I told Sergei.

  “What kind of noise?”

  “I don’t know . . . sort of like drilling.”

  “Perhaps service workers. Do not be concerned.”

  Easy for him to say. I was stepping between large black monoliths, part of an exhibit built right into the floor. Likely screaming kids had run through it joyfully while the museum had been open. Right now, it was dark and goddamn creepy. The monoliths were huge and featureless, some kind of black stone. I kept my distance, moving briskly and nervously until I cleared them on the south side.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “What?” said Sergei.

  Straight ahead of me, on a huge raised dais, was the skeleton of a dinosaur. A Tyrannosaurus rex. It was magnificent. Over forty feet from end to end, the gargantuan fossil must have weighed several tons. Even in the dark I could make out the thick bones that formed her rib cage, the long arching tail, and the massive head with countless jagged teeth.

  Someone was working on one of her legs. This was the source of the strange drilling sound. I could make out a dark figure under the dinosaur. The figure was cloaked, just over five feet tall, thin and rather femini
ne. Her back was to me, and she leaned over the great fossilized femur. She clutched some kind of welding tool, which cast a ghostly blue light on the massive bone cathedral over her head. Every few seconds she made an adjustment, and as she did the light flicked out, plunging the whole area into darkness. Then she began again, and the tool flared up, casting twisting, arching shadows across the floor and ceiling.

  I tiptoed around the figure, keeping an eye on her. Whenever the light flared, I could see the dinosaur bones had been tattooed with an intricate silver design, like complex circuitry. It covered most of the bones I could see.

  The figure continued to work. Her head and face were concealed by a hood. Her left hand reached down, and I saw long metal fingers dig into a bag at her feet. She pulled out a slim black canister. Her tool went dark for a moment, leaving the dais wreathed in shadow. When it flared up again, I could see she had affixed the canister to the welding tool. She resumed working.

  I got a single brief glimpse of the face under the hood as I made my way around the dais. Like her fingers, her face was slender and robotic, made of gleaming silver much the same color as the metal she was tattooing onto bone.

  The dinosaur head turned to watch me as I circled the dais.

  At first I thought it was an illusion, caused by the constantly shifting light from the tool. But then the great fossil skull moved again, fixing me with its empty black eye sockets.

  I screamed a little.

  The figure raised her head, and the light winked out. I didn’t wait to see what she would do—I bolted, moving away as fast as my feet could carry me.

  “What is happening?” Sergei asked.

  “Holy shit,” I told him.

  “More soldiers?”

  “Monsters,” I said, a little breathlessly.

  I slowed down when I had reached the shelter of another exhibit. I looked back.

  The figure had gone back to work. Twisting bone-shadows stretched across the museum floor. The great dinosaur had assumed her original position, staring to the east.

  “Please explain,” Sergei said.

  “I’m . . . I’m not sure I can. Someone’s . . . something’s working on a dinosaur skeleton.”

  “A robot?”

  “I think so. I’ve never seen one like it before, though. It’s small, barely five feet. And . . . delicate. Not a combat model.”

  “Curious,” said Sergei.

  “It’s fusing some kind of metal to the skeleton. I swear I saw the skeleton move.”

  “That . . . is unlikely.”

  “I’m aware of that. Still . . . it sure looked like it moved.”

  Sergei was silent, considering. “It’s getting late,” he said at last.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, trying to shake off the bizarre encounter. “Okay, I’m moving.”

  This whole trip had been filled with bizarre encounters. If you’re thinking about a nighttime tour of Chicago—my advice?—you need to be ready for some strange sights. And I strongly urge you to travel in groups.

  The rational devices I’d found working the communications tower had been curious about me, but not particularly hostile. And the scampering things in the underpass—whatever the hell they were—hadn’t struck me as all that dangerous. They’d kept their distance, and mostly seemed to be just checking me out. Even the guards, tricky as they’d been to get past, weren’t really sinister.

  But this figure in the cloak . . . she was a whole different ball game. Everything about her—the way she moved, the bizarre task she was undertaking—spoke of an elevated intelligence. I was sure she’d heard me, but even the way she’d casually dismissed me and returned to work demonstrated cold, machine-like confidence. She was a machine—I was certain of that—and one wholly unlike anything I was familiar with. And that meant nothing good.

  And that dinosaur had moved. I was dead certain of it.

  I had no desire to return that way. In fact, I was determined not to. I didn’t want to get within a hundred yards of that mysterious machine, or her pet dinosaur, if there was any possible way to avoid it. When we had the samples, I would ask Sergei for a new route that got me out of here without a trip back through the atrium.

  A few minutes later I reached the south end of the museum. The south entrance was straight ahead. To the right was a wide, sweeping staircase leading up.

  According to the map I’d reviewed with Sergei, the stairs were the most direct route to the Venezuelan War College and biolab. Unfortunately, the bottom of the stairs was barricaded with metal cabinets and trunks, and a heavy metal chain.

  “Trouble,” I told Sergei.

  “More monsters?”

  “Not this time. The south stairs are barricaded.”

  “Can you move around?”

  I took a minute to assess the barricade. It looked climbable, but not very stable, and there were a few too many shadows to my liking.

  “Not really,” I said. “Is there an alternate route to the lab?”

  “Yes. Proceed east.”

  “Roger that.”

  Sergei guided me through some very dark sections of the museum to a wide escalator leading up. The escalator was motionless, but with some determination I managed to overcome that obstacle.

  “I’m on the second floor,” I said.

  The second floor brought with it a whole new range of challenges. For one thing, there were a lot of locked doors, and Sergei’s GPU card didn’t work for most of them. Once I left the exhibits behind and made my way into the administrative area I was in a maze of narrow corridors, and there were fewer places to hide—which made things a little harrowing when the first squad of soldiers came upstairs doing a sweep.

  “They are looking for you,” Sergei said. I could hear him listening to radio chatter in Spanish. “There is confusion over who you are, and commanding officer has ordered you found and questioned.”

  “Confusion is good. Can you tell which direction they’re coming from?”

  “Elevator number fifteen,” said Sergei. Which might have been helpful, if I could remember where elevator fifteen was. As it was, I found a shadowy spot behind a vending machine and hid out there until the squad had passed.

  “They are moving on to third floor,” Sergei said.

  “Morons. Good thing they weren’t in the mood to snack, though.”

  Eventually I found the biolab. I had a very nervous moment when Sergei’s GPU didn’t seem to work, and I wondered if I would have to find something heavy to smash the door with. It finally buzzed me through on the third try.

  I stood inside in almost total darkness, surrounded by strange dark shapes and sinister smells. The last time I’d been in a lab in total darkness, a Venezuelan war needle had nearly killed me.

  “This isn’t going to work,” I said nervously. “Sergei, I need light.”

  “Light could alert soldiers.”

  “I don’t care,” I said. The shadows on my right seemed to be inching closer. “You’ve been here before. Help me find some lights.”

  Sergei accommodated me, guiding me toward a desk lamp. I inched my way around the room, slowly bumping into things like a blind man, groping at everything, desperately hoping I didn’t poke myself with anything that had plague juice in it.

  It took a while to turn the lamp on. It was a small field lantern, and I eventually picked the whole thing up and just fumbled with it until I found the switch. It came on right in my face, thoroughly blinding me.

  I swore a bunch, then gently put the lamp back down on the table. I blinked away the spots and started looking around for Sergei’s plague data.

  Now that I had a light on, the place didn’t look like much of a lab. It seemed more like an office. There weren’t any big refrigerators filled with colorful vials, no dissecting tables, and no genetically engineered monsters. It was kind of a letdown, actually.

  I reminded myself that I was here to pick up a covert data package left for Sergei by Dr. Thibault’s medical team. But my first glance around didn�
��t turn up anything obvious.

  “Okay, Sergei. What am I looking for?”

  “It will be in a small cooling unit. Most likely, it will be on the floor.”

  I found two units that fit that description near the back of the room. The first was locked, and the second was empty, except for a small red bag that looked like a lunch box.

  “That’s it,” said Sergei.

  “It’s heavy,” I said, picking it up.

  “Be very careful,” Sergei said. “Do not jostle, or hold sideways. And do not drop.”

  “Got it. There’s a note on it.” The note was written by hand, and the first word was “Сергей.” I’d seen the same word on Sergei’s Russian ID.

  “It’s addressed to you,” I said.

  “What does it say?”

  “I have no idea. It’s in Russian.”

  “Is from Thibault,” Sergei said. “Keep note safe, please.”

  I detached the note and pocketed it. There was a strap on the bag, and I secured it around my shoulder. Then I turned off the desk lamp, and carefully fumbled back to the door.

  “I’m on my way out,” I said.

  I had to hide for a few minutes as I made my way back, when I heard voices echoing down the hall, but I never saw anyone. I made it to the top of the escalator without incident.

  But there was someone standing at the bottom.

  At first I wasn’t sure what it was—just a slender shadow. The more I stared at it, however, the more it looked like a humanoid figure. It was perfectly motionless, facing the bottom of the escalator from about ten feet away.

  I walked back around the corner, out of earshot. “I think there’s someone waiting at the bottom of the escalator,” I told Sergei.

  “Can you see who it is?”

  “Negative. It’s too dark.”

  I heard Sergei typing. “Soldiers have returned to second floor. They are moving in your direction.”

  “Dammit.”

  “I can guide you to elevator. But you should move quickly.”

  I glanced around the corner. The figure at the bottom of the escalator still hadn’t moved.