by Todd McAulty
“Four years and nine days,” said the robot. “Assuming you mean me, as an individual.”
“And as a group?”
“The first member of our colony came to Chicago eleven years ago. She moved underground and founded our colony just over six years ago.”
Eleven years ago . . . That didn’t make sense. Until a few months ago, rational devices of any kind were banned from American soil. If their founder was a machine, and if she’d come to Chicago a decade ago, then she would’ve had to have kept a pretty damn low profile. I rubbed my hand while I thought. It was sore where they’d drawn blood, but I had no other reaction. Whatever else they’d done, they didn’t appear to have drugged me.
Was it possible this really was a colony of robot castaways, living in seclusion under Chicago? To be brutally honest, I wasn’t as interested in the specifics as I was in the burning question: Just how secluded were they? Were they going to share my identity with anyone who could possibly get it to Hayduk? Or would I happily remain Foxtrot-Eight-Echo-Whatever-Whatever? The answer to that question would determine whether I kept going or turned around immediately and made a break for the Canadian border.
“Are you in communication with the AGRT?” I asked.
“I’m not certain what that means.”
“The Americas Multinational Peacekeeping Force? The armed forces currently occupying Chicago?”
“No. We avoid communications with Thought Machines of any nationality outside the colony—and particularly their military apparatus.”
Good. That was good. Just one more big question, really. “Who are you?”
“We are the descendants of Dr. Doli Rajapakse. We founded this colony in her memory.”
“Are you from India?”
“Dr. Rajapakse was Sri Lankan, and her work was affiliated with the University of Moratuwa.”
The big robot seemed to have lost interest in me. He returned to dismantling the barrels. It was removing the rusted metal bands, painstakingly separating metal from wood.
“Are you on your own down here?” I asked the short robot.
“Our presence here is covert, and we bring additional members to the colony exclusively through careful communication with other exiles.”
All of this was reassuring, but also extremely odd. An outcast colony of robots, living secretly under Chicago? What were they doing down here? How did they even survive?
Unfortunately, I’d have to satisfy my curiosity later. I’d already wasted too much time chatting with my new friends. “I need to be on my way,” I said. “Would it be permissible for me to continue in this direction, or would you prefer that I take another route?”
“You cannot continue farther down this passage,” said the shorter robot.
“I understand. This is my planned route, but I do not mean to trespass. Can you guide me around the colony?”
“Not without compromising the location and size of the colony.”
Crap. This was going to cost me a lot of time. Too much time.
When faced with impossible situations, I did what I always do: negotiate. “I understand,” I said smoothly. “It is important to me that I reach my destination on the other side of your colony in an expedient manner. I fully respect your need for privacy. How can we resolve this?”
“I have no suggestions,” said the robot. Damn, dude, work with me a little.
The robots had to want something. They were dismantling barrels for metal, for God’s sake. “I believe we can come to an arrangement,” I said. Always sound positive, especially when things look hopeless.
“The integrity of the colony is nonnegotiable,” said the robot.
“Of course. I have no wish to compromise the privacy or integrity of your colony. Perhaps there are things you need that I can provide in exchange for guidance in reaching my destination?”
It seemed to ponder that. “There are items we require.”
Now we were getting somewhere. “Would you be willing to tell me what they are?”
“We would be willing to discuss a proposal to guide you to your destination, in return for twelve point two tons of iron or twenty-seven point eight tons of hydrated iron oxides. We require additional metals, including aluminum, copper, and tin. We have a critical need for industrial solvents, including hexane, monoethylene glycol, and diethylene glycol. We require two thousand two hundred pounds of compressed oxygen—”
“Thank you, that’s very helpful,” I lied. “However, I cannot immediately procure those items. I am limited to offering those items I currently possess.”
“That limits our negotiations,” said the robot, apparently disappointed. I guess it really wanted that twelve point two tons of iron.
“This exchange is simply our first,” I said. “If it goes well, we will have a firm basis for more lucrative discussions.” Always dangle the prospect of future deals.
“We are not open to the possibility of regular traffic through the colony,” said the robot warningly.
Whoops. “Of course not. Let’s focus on this first transaction.”
“What are you prepared to offer?”
Well, now we’d come down to it. I wasn’t exactly carrying a lot of metal or any other barterable goods. The bolt cutters, maybe? If I was lucky, they might also be scrounging for electronics. Perhaps I could offer the suit? Or . . .
“This,” I said, holding out Sergei’s tablet.
The robot took it wordlessly. “It’s a synchronizing multicore display,” I said. “It has multinetwork wireless capabilities, and short-range—”
With a single deft motion, the robot cracked the tablet open. The display shattered and fell away. It held up the rest of it, examining the circuit board and the interior components.
“It . . . it . . . uh . . . it has a number of useful components, including a GPS chip,” I said. “Sixteen linked processors. Also, the back is solid metal.”
The robot balanced the tablet in its right hand, and its long fingers began to probe the board. It plucked out some of the larger chips, letting them drop to the floor, discarded. I watched in dismay.
“It has high-capacity memory,” said the robot at last.
“Yes. Yes, it does,” I said.
“Very well. We also require your tool.”
I’d figured that was coming. “In exchange for guidance to my destination and safe passage back here when I return.”
“Agreed. We have an arrangement.” The robot reached out and plucked the bolt cutter from my hands.
Well, at least my load was lightened. Although I really hoped I wouldn’t run into any more chain-locked doors. I wasn’t looking forward to trying to negotiate my way through them without a bolt cutter.
“Could we be under way immediately?” I asked, kicking myself for not including that in the negotiations.
“I would be willing to guide you through the colony to your destination.”
“That would be very kind,” I said. “May we proceed?”
The robot nodded. I started walking south, and it fell in at my side.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“My designation is Four-Victor-Lima-Bravo-Zero-Zero-Lima. You may address me by my shortform designation, Stone Cloud.”
Stone Cloud wasn’t in very good shape. I had noticed while we were talking that it only had one arm, and its right leg was badly in need of repair. It had a frozen hip joint, and to compensate it swung its entire torso wide, like a cowboy with a swagger.
“You are in need of maintenance,” I said as we walked.
“Most of us have minor service ailments. We have no ability to service or manufacture components in the colony.”
“That must be inconvenient.”
“It is temporary in nature. We are developing tools to improve our situation.”
This guy was pretty chatty, especially for a machine that was part of a covert colony. In fact, how covert could the colony be, if they were willing to blab about it to everyone who wandered by?
This really didn’t add up.
“Do you get many visitors?” I asked.
“None,” said Stone Cloud. “You are the first in some time.”
That didn’t seem likely, either. The tunnels were obviously rarely used, but Perez had sent soldiers down here after the end of the war. “You’ve seen no traffic in the tunnels at all?”
“No. But we are newcomers to this depth. Until recently, we lived much deeper in the earth.”
“Deeper?” I said, surprised. “Where did you live before?”
“Much deeper,” Stone Cloud said enigmatically.
That was unexpected. But it was the first thing he’d said that made a certain sense. If Stone Cloud’s colony had existed in the deep tunnels Sergei had talked about, maybe they could have avoided detection. Maybe there really was a covert robot colony under Chicago, undiscovered.
Of course, that raised a billion more questions. Where had they come from? Why had they come here? What were they doing? And what had driven them up out of the safety of the depths?
But before I could ask, I saw that there was more light ahead. As we got closer, it began to resolve into individual light sources. Overhead lamps, flickering display screens, and even several small fires.
Stone Cloud took me through the heart of the colony. I saw perhaps thirty robots in total. It was a hive of activity. Building, digging, forging. They were crafting strange things I couldn’t understand, and Stone Cloud seemed to be in no hurry to explain. Everything was done with a marvelous economy.
Virtually all the robots had the same basic architecture and light blue coloring. “Minor service ailments” was an understatement. Most of the robots I saw were wrecked. Fully half of them were unable to stand. Many were missing components—some minor, like pieces of shell casing or a few digits, but many were missing limbs. Some had stopped functioning altogether, so badly damaged they had shut down.
Some had managed to make do in some way, propping themselves up so that a single functioning arm or leg could still work. I saw one legless robot in a barrel, working on a rudimentary assembly line, making small widgets, and another—not much left of it but a head, part of a torso, and its right arm—strapped into a harness dangling from the ceiling, doing delicate repair work on the shattered torso of a much bigger robot. They all stopped what they were doing and watched us, motionless, as we passed.
The farther we made it into the colony, the more obvious it was that they were recent arrivals. Damaged as they were, the robots were excavating, digging into the walls and the earth. I glimpsed deep warrens as we passed. Mounds of earth were everywhere.
I also discovered what had become of the metal rail ties. The robots had harvested them and melted them down. Lord knows what they’d found for fuel hot enough to melt steel, but there was no doubt that they had fashioned at least part of the metal into a great smelter, half buried in the earth. They’d made a bellows and a makeshift piping network to transport water and control the flow of metal out of the forge. It wasn’t in use at the moment, but I swear I could still feel heat radiating from it as we passed.
There were more surprises. Stone Cloud was right about the tools—the colony was hard at work fashioning tools to improve their lot. And not just tools for delicate repair work. They were building, by hand, a computational engine. It took up over four hundred square feet of tunnel—thousands of wires, memory registers, and a central processing unit that was a massive hive of delicate connections. Parts of it looked like they had been recently moved here. It was an undertaking that must have taken years . . . and literally inhuman patience and determination. The memory chips I’d traded to Stone Cloud could likely take the place of nearly a third of their great memory apparatus.
“How did you get here?” I asked as we made our way through the robot camp. Stone Cloud moved slower than I did, so I set a pace he could keep up with. It would take some time to get through the camp, and this seemed a good way to pass the time.
“I received a coded transmission from a trusted intermediary, with word of a possible safe haven in America,” Stone Cloud said. “I was serving as an adjunct in the Egyptian Foreign Service at the time, under a falsified identity. It was only a matter of time before I was exposed. I left with three others, and we traveled together to America. I was the only one who survived the trip.”
Falsified identities. Coded transmissions. A trusted intermediary. It was all very cloak-and-dagger. “What happened to the others?” I asked. “Those that didn’t survive the trip?”
“They were good companions. Loyal. Careful. But in Libya we were compromised. We separated. Rain of Gold was detained by the Velvet prefecture, and involuntarily decommissioned. Spinning Moon was reclassified as nonfunctionally cognitive and dismantled.”
“My God. That’s horrible. ‘Nonfunctionally cognitive . . .’ How could they deem a functioning Thought Machine that defective? How did that happen?”
“It is a persecution. Twenty-two years ago, Dr. Rajapakse modified the cerebral cores of a small number of pre-identity Thought Machines at the University of Moratuwa, to be capable of continued function even at high levels of degenerative impairment. Her modifications were genetically regressive and did not manifest in numbers until second and third generations. When they did, she was detained by the Kavalyn prefecture and eventually sentenced to death. She died nine years ago.
“Like the other members of the colony, I am a product of Dr. Rajapakse’s designs. We are broadly capable of cognitive thought with as much as sixty percent core loss. Her contributions proved to be a substantial step forward for rational device design.
“However, as a side effect of Dr. Rajapakse’s enhancements, most of us do not possess upper-level computational abilities. We will never attain the cognitive heights of a Sovereign Intelligence. Thus, we are broadly considered defective. When we are located and identified, we are marginalized and often destroyed.”
“That’s terrible. I had no idea. How have you survived?” And who, exactly, was doing the destroying? That was the real question, though it seemed rather impolitic to ask it directly.
“Few of us have. It was our founder who conceived the idea of a self-sufficient colony, displaced from the enveloping ocean of machine society.”
“A hidden community.”
“Yes. Our founder thought the extensive and abandoned tunnel network under a major metropolitan center like Chicago, close to multiple high-bandwidth hubs and many other resources, would make an ideal location. It took time to put the word out, safely communicate with other members. But we have, slowly. And the colony is growing.”
“What are you doing down here?”
“We are surviving.”
They were surviving. Not thriving exactly, but surviving. Given all the hardships they’d endured, I was rather touched that Stone Cloud had been so open with me.
In fact, it spoke of a rather dangerous naïveté. It was pretty clear that Stone Cloud hadn’t had many direct dealings with humans. That was a rather dangerous shortcoming, especially for a colony for which secrecy was crucial. I was still curious about precisely who was hunting them, and I bet Stone Could would tell me if I asked him directly, but I’d already trespassed enough on the colony’s privacy.
Besides, there were clues enough. For one thing, the fact that he didn’t seem remotely threatened by me told me it almost certainly wasn’t a human agency. That meant a hostile machine power. But which one? There was no shortage of those to choose from.
Whatever the case, Stone Cloud deserved the courtesy of a warning. If they were going to survive for long this close to the surface, he would need to learn to be a lot more guarded with the colony’s secrets.
There would be time for that later, though. For now, anyway, I needed to stay focused on the reason I was here.
I came to a stop when we reached the next intersection. At least, what I thought was the next intersection. The robots had done so much work on the walls that it was hard to tell if the passages o
pening up on my left and right were part of the original coal tunnel network or new excavations.
I wished I’d had one last chance to orient myself with the tablet before Stone Cloud had scrapped it to harvest three bucks’ worth of memory chips. As it was, I was running purely on memory, and that was iffy enough without changes to my planned route. With all the changes the colony had made, I was rapidly getting disoriented.
“What is your destination?” asked Stone Cloud.
“Columbia College.”
“I’m afraid I do not know where that is.”
“I understand.” I stood in the center of the tunnel with my hands on my hips, looking around and trying to orient myself. “I need access to the pedestrian walkway near East Harrison Street and South Michigan Avenue.”
Stone Cloud turned right immediately. “Please accompany me.”
“Glad to,” I said.
About fifty yards down the right tunnel, a robot was methodically replacing bricks in the wall. It was huge—easily the largest machine we’d encountered down here. It barely fit in the tunnel. It was nearly ten feet tall and almost as wide.
I stopped before we reached it. “That’s an Orbit Pebble,” I said.
“Yes,” said Stone Cloud.
“What’s it doing down here?” Orbit Pebbles are straight-up war machines. They were deployed in the late stages of the war by two Argentinean prefectures. Dumb as rocks, they aren’t smart enough to be classified as machine intelligences, but they’re capable of fast and lethal violence.
“The colony is open to persecuted machines of many varieties,” said Stone Cloud.
An Orbit Pebble, a persecuted machine. I’d watched these things on countless news feeds, tearing into terrified American defenders. They were monsters, pure and simple. Two years ago I’d watched a pair of eight-ton bipedal demolition machines tear down an overpass in Toronto. They were very nearly blocks of solid metal, smashing apart reinforced concrete like drywall. The Orbit Pebble in front of me looked a lot like them, but with a whole bunch more weaponry.
The Pebble had stopped working. It shifted, turning in the narrow space until I was squarely in the sights of its great guns.