by J. S. Morin
Chapter Thirty-Five
Charlie7 spread his arms to indicate the passageway they traversed as if he had made some grand pronouncement.
“So, you tunneled,” Eve said, refusing to get swept up in Charlie7’s grand vision of an underground resistance in the literal sense. “How does that explain Dale2’s charges? This is all interesting in a broad historical sense, but I’m still not seeing the connection. Was there something in the process of tunneling where you and Dale2 came to blows?”
Charlie7 lowered his arms and puffed out his chest. “With a war on? Please. We were all too busy back then.”
“Then what’s this got to do with anything?”
The robot tapped a thumb against his chin. “You may be under the mistaken impression that I think Dale2 is a monster or a villain. When there’s a disaster, what’s the first thing you do? Find the ones responsible and enact vengeance?”
“No. You treat the survivors,” Eve replied. It was basic emergency protocol. “But you said yourself there were no survivors. Or was that a lie, too?”
“Well, that had been my observation, and as such, it was factually correct. But Dale Chalmers was a big-picture thinker. What was the point of winning a war if there was nothing left to save?”
“Yourselves? Obviously, you had a plan to start over.”
Eve struggled with the blurred lines between the historical archives and the tale Charlie7 was weaving before her eyes. How much of this new version was true, and how much could she believe of the old? Eve had been released from captivity seven years ago, now. How much of the outside world could she believe from before then?
“Aha!” Charlie7 said. “But six robots on a dead, empty Earth? No. The aliens may have ended life, but that hadn’t destroyed every trace of it. Dale’s plan was to first salvage every bit of DNA we could. If we owe that bastard one debt, it was the foresight to plan for the recovery even as we plotted the eradication of the life form that had infested Earth.”
Eve nodded along. “Fine. So you tunneled and played crime scene cleanup on a global scale. Are you saying we can get anywhere on Earth underground in this tunnel system?”
“Sadly, no. I collapsed most of the tunnel system ages ago. I didn’t fancy the idea of hundreds of back doors connecting to my house.”
The tram bobbed slightly. Stale wind rushed over Eve’s skin. She sighed, echoing in the confines of her breath filter. The monotony of Charlie7’s evasions matched the dreary sameness of the endless tunnel that stretched out ahead of and behind them. “So, get on with it. Tell me what’s so special about these tunnels that Dale2 is conquering the world.”
Charlie7 grinned. “These tunnels begin the tale of how it was conquered the last time…”
Chapter Thirty-Six
We had to build all the tunneling equipment from scratch. It’s amazing how much you can accomplish in a short time when the fate of the world rests in your hands and you don’t feel fatigue, hunger, or thirst.
It was the birth of drones.
Oh, humans had made drones of various sorts for decades, but these were a new breed. Autonomous, adaptable, rugged. They did everything but think. The drones you see wandering the agrarian complexes and factories today are merely refined versions of the ones from way back then.
Giant boring machines would have been too much for even the seismographically challenged aliens to overlook. We tunneled the old-fashioned way, with hand tools.
…and robots. That’s maybe not as old fashioned, but it was far more effective than human labor.
Jason2 and I built drones. Kabir2 expanded our power-generating infrastructure to keep them working. Holly2 did the lion’s share of the programming. Toby2 managed the digging and oversaw maintenance on the workforce. Dale2 was mostly a go-between, hand-delivering messages from one site to the next to keep transmissions to a minimum.
No. Really. He was like the Pony Express.
Petabytes of memory. Processors that could match and exceed the biological human brain. Yet we loaded instructions onto portable media, and Dale2 carried them.
Eventually we laid wire, setting up data networks on hard line like some primitive telegraph or Ethernet. But like the tunneling, that took years.
While the manual labor proceeded, we planned.
Jason2 designed smaller and stealthier spy-bots. Rather than flying machines whizzing around the skies to be shot down, he created insects and fish. Instead of transmitters, he installed data storage. Holly2 programmed them to return to collection sites after missions. One round of intel-gathering might take weeks or months, but the data came back.
There was so much we needed to learn, and we learned it.
Our invaders were a kind of cephalopod. The closest analog to an Earth-native creature would be the octopus, but they were an amphibious version, less amorphous and with more dexterous appendages. Their tech and biology were impossible to study in depth because our little spies couldn’t collect what they couldn’t capture by force.
But we pieced a picture together from pixels, one by one. Their material science exceeded ours by leaps and bounds. They had self-healing metals that were semi-organic. Their devices didn’t use electricity, which we inferred to be the reason they ignored our use of it. We took a census of their population and their newly founded cities.
“Then why aren’t there records of other cities?” Eve interjected.
Because we destroyed them, that’s why you don’t see them anymore. You see, the alien life forms wanted Earth, but they started off by poisoning its biosphere. What changes they planned for the future, we never got a chance to see. But within the domed colony cities they erected from the hulls of their spacecrafts, they maintained a methane-rich atmosphere.
It’s funny, but none of us had any experience dealing with explosives. We sent Dale2 on a fact-finding mission. He scoured the world with a small band of drones, a cutting torch, and a mandate to dredge up any military stores he could find. He came back with ordnance galore and files from every major government on how to make more.
By the time we were ready to strike, we were experts. There were chemists among the Twenty-Seven—thirty-three if you want to go by the original count. But nobody had prioritized a chemistry background when activating the original six. Initially, we debated building new chassis and fabricating additional crystal matrices, but the sheer workload involved made learning the field ourselves the quicker option.
That was a key. Realizing just how much additional space to learn these robotic brains possessed was a revelation. Later, that would be the basis for the entire field of genetics—something not a single one of us understood.
But that was neither here nor there back then.
We had a trap to set. We’d surveyed our targets. We tunneled beneath them all.
Dale2 had wanted to go nuclear. That was the biggest he could think. He wanted eradication, full and utter. I convinced them all to think on a grander scale.
We went volcanic.
It’s a small mind that thinks in terms of what mankind can create. Nature has far greater reserves of power than we can ever match. The cosmos far beyond even that. For our purposes, twenty-four deep shafts and twenty-four cascade reactions of carefully placed explosive charges breached twenty-four alien colony sites scattered around the world.
In one horrible instant, some sixteen hundred alien invaders were annihilated.
I like to think that as the ground first shook beneath their feet, the horrible realization of their doom had time to settle into those alien brains of theirs. But more likely they were all dead before a single one grasped what was happening.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
“That’s where we’re going, isn’t it?” Eve asked. “We’ve got to be under the Baltic Sea by now. You said they were amphibious. Those colony domes were undersea, weren’t they?”
“This one was,” Charlie7 confirmed. Eve stared ahead down the tunnel. It was straight on the whole but not perfectly straight. There was
no vanishing point that Eve could imagine as their destination. “It’s almost as if they were scientific stations, scattered around different climates and terrains. There was a freshwater dome in Lake Superior. We’re headed for the saltwater dome.”
“What became of the rest?” Eve’s curiosity was piqued. She hadn’t expected to see any leftovers of alien civilizations today—or ever, frankly. The archives spoke about the cleansing of Earth, the removal of alien residue, off-world holding depots and dumping grounds for the scraps left behind from that long-distant war.
“Gone. Eradicated. I kept this one around as a curiosity. It was the closest to Paris, so I dug out the volcanic rock that had solidified inside and salvaged what I could.”
“Why hasn’t anyone found it?” Eve demanded. “Surely there have been undersea surveys.”
“It’s buried beneath rock and sediment. I… may have fudged a pre-invasion sea floor map or two to make it look natural. As for why no one’s found it despite that, you can thank Arthur19. After all, it’s his committee that keeps people from nosing around outside their own territories.”
Eve’s brow scrunched, forcing the nose of the breath mask up her forehead. “But you and Arthur19…”
It dawned on her. Charlie7 watched as Eve collapsed back in utter disbelief.
“You arranged it all, didn’t you?” Eve accused. “The committees, the paranoia, the privacy, and the solitude.”
“I predisposed that the new world I seeded would prefer to mind their own business.”
“But all the committees that complain about your meddling, your diatribes against various chairmen and chairwomen…”
“One hundred percent genuine,” Charlie7 said with a smile surely meant to be reassuring. “I created a world with free will. If I had a stranglehold on it, there probably still wouldn’t be a living human yet. You and your sisters, Plato and his brothers, the scattering of new genetic lines… you’d all still be computer simulations. We’d have waited until the ape-cloning process was flawless, then move up the chain of complexity.”
The tunnel wall rushed past with just the rush of wind to be heard.
It appeared there would be no advancement of Charlie7’s story until they arrived at their destination.
Eve had seen old space colonization movies. Lunar and Martian colonies were always predicated on geodesic domes of glass and plastic. What would an alien life form have built to withstand the enormous forces that would act on an aquatic habitat?
The instant Eve had her answer, she momentarily lost the faculty to process it.
The tram took a sudden rise and came out into a cathedral of iridescent metal, the likes of which she had never seen before. Her implanted lenses reported the peak of the dome at 227 meters. All around her, transparent tubes and spindly walkways crisscrossed the volume of the dome. The whole of it was cast in a weird purplish light, as if the place existed in the UV spectrum and all she was seeing was the leakage into the visible range.
The tram stopped. Eve spared a glance at the ground to ensure her wobbly legs had something to support her as she hopped out beside Charlie7. Her eyes were drawn inexorably up, up, up to the heights above.
The architecture was smooth and flowing. Angles played little role in the alien colony. Every surface had an organic look.
“You said you destroyed these domes,” Eve said when she recovered the power to speak.
The paths were shallow troughs, the inverse of roadways that crowned toward the sides for drainage. Eve kept to the middle of one as she explored.
“Like I said, the materials are self-healing. It was like a billion-piece jigsaw puzzle encased in solid rock. But the fragments melded themselves back together once the puzzle was assembled. I had a team of drones that did little else for a century.”
The robot seemed completely at home and unfazed by the wonders all around him. How could the centuries jade a person so?
The technology in this room had traveled light-years to get here. It had been wrested away from its creators by the raw forces of the planet itself. These objects, these structures had existed on another world. Their inventors had unlocked the secrets of interstellar travel.
And Charlie7 had turned it into his own private workshop.
“Don’t mind me. Have a look around. Heights are as dangerous as ever, but nothing here works except good old Earthling technology, same as you’re used to. That is, aside from where I’m headed.”
If Charlie7 expected to drop an EMP grenade like that and casually wander off the other direction alone, he was sorely mistaken. Eve sprinted to catch up with him, only slowing when the breath filter couldn’t keep up with her increased respiration.
“Wait!” Eve called after him. “What do you mean? You’ve got alien tech working here?”
“Just a little,” Charlie7 said. “It’s a lot less interesting than the rest of this place, though, and we’re taking it with us. So go have a look around. Enjoy the sights. Never know when you might get back down here again.”
Eve stood in a daze as Charlie7 continued onward. She blurted the only thing that came to mind. “It’s like you’ve discovered Atlantis.”
Charlie7 turned and snorted. “Please. I conquered Atlantis.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The twists and turns of Kanto’s lower levels were endless. In addition to being built by robots, it had also been built by lazy, architecturally tone-deaf scientists—coincidentally the same people. As Rachel plunged headlong into those gnarled and chaotic depths, she could only hope that she knew them better than her pursuers.
It was a vain hope. The maps of the factory didn’t include every foible and quirk. They didn’t describe the state of repair of every doorway and whether every lift was in working order.
That map was all Toby521 had to guide them by.
As for Rachel, she had to rely on fallible human memory of places she had explored only fleetingly during her years as apprentice to Charlie13. Her little adventures had been a lark, a time of peace and quiet away from work to clear her mind and get to know her new home more personally.
The robots chasing her never hesitated.
Rachel didn’t know who they were. Her pursuers hadn’t announced themselves, and she didn’t want to get close enough to read the nameplates at the bases of their necks.
Up ahead, machinery rumbled.
Rachel had been leading the way. Though the robots giving chase tried time and again to hem the two of them in, she and Toby521 had been making inexorable progress toward the new Version 73 production line. Noise. Distractions. Pieces of large, dangerous equipment.
If she was going to make an escape, those were the tools at her disposal.
“Stop!” A voice called from ahead of them.
Rachel’s head swiveled. Left. Right. Nothing. She looked up.
A robot on the catwalk above leveled a weapon in Rachel’s direction. By its squat, stubby barrel, she guessed it was a tranquilizer dart gun.
Rachel had heard Eve’s tales of running along handrails to give James187 fits trying to capture her alive. The same sort of handrails ran all along the walkways in Kanto as well. But she couldn’t bring herself to hop up onto one and dare the robot to fire.
What if they didn’t care whether she lived or died?
Rachel was years from the last obstacle course she’d run for Evelyn11 in the lab. She kept a basic fitness routine but nothing like the regimen she’d been forced to keep as a child.
Still, there was an old saying, “just like riding a bicycle.” Rachel had never learned to ride one of the human-powered gear-wheel contraptions, but the sentiment was the same. Certain skills, once learned, stayed with a person.
Rachel hoped that gymnastics was one of those skills.
Ducking under the handrail, Rachel leaped out into space. She landed two levels down, turning a shoulder and rolling along a walkway perpendicular to the one she’d vaulted from.
The catwalk shuddered under the impact of Toby5
21 a few meters behind her. “Don’t do that!” he scolded.
“Better dead than caught,” Rachel said with false gusto. Her shoulder hurt from the landing. Even absorbing the impact in a roll wasn’t enough, given the steel flooring.
Scrambling to her feet, Rachel set off in the direction of the machinery noises. Dropping down had cost her what little sense she had left of her environs. This was a time to separate herself from the robots who wanted to detain her. Where she ended up once free was a problem to solve later.
The catwalk shuddered once, then again. Two of the robotic assailants had jumped down from the upper levels, landing ahead and behind them on the suspended walkway.
Rachel bolted. There was a T-junction just ahead. The only direction left beckoned. Toby521 lumbered along behind.
The T-junction led to a locked door. Rachel accessed the keypad, frantically typing in a release code.
DENIED.
Rachel mouthed a curse. Despite her protestations to Toby521 earlier regarding her exposure to crude language, she still found it inappropriate to swear in front of a newborn robot. She wiped sweat from her hands and tried the code again.
DENIED.
This was bad. Hand shaking, she painstakingly typed the digits into the console.
“Come on… come on…” Toby521 coaxed her, shifting his weight from foot to foot and making the floor creak.
This time she was sure she punched it in correctly.
DENIED.
“That’s far enough,” a James’s voice ordered. “You’ve led us on quite a chase, Ms. Eighteen.”
Rachel wanted to meet her fate with her eyes open. Standing slowly, she held out her arms out to her sides and turned to face the robot who had cornered her.
“You won’t get away with this,” Rachel promised.
The robot with the tranq gun smirked. He was wearing an all-black uniform like some movie security guard. There was no hint of his identity besides the James voice and the Version 68.9 chassis. “We’re not getting away with anything,” the unknown James replied. “In fact, if you come along without a fuss, you won’t be harmed at all.”