He bows his head.
“When your mind was born, Mikiko, I did not realize at first that you were your own. I was holding on to something. A person who had gone away.”
His voice quavers and he stops. I step forward, take his hands.
“Takeo,” I say.
Peering up at me, he blinks through the sunlight streaming down from above, continues: “It was wrong. To force you to be something you are not. Someone you are not. It was a burden that you did not deserve. I am sorry for it.”
I lean toward him, my hair falling over my shoulders. With one finger, I lift Takeo’s face up to mine. Quick tears glance down his expressionless face.
“Thank you,” I say. “Thank you for letting me go.”
I kiss Mr. Nomura. Wrap my arms around his shoulders and pull him into an embrace. My cheek comes away wet with his tears. But as I step away, he does not look back down to his feet. He lifts his head up, wind pulling at his sleeves. Behind his round spectacles, his eyes are as wide open and steady as a shark’s.
I embraced a man, but I sense that I have released an emperor.
Feet scrape the metal deck. Unbidden, my escorts step out from around me. The war machines pause, then position themselves on either side of Mr. Nomura. They kneel, facing me, their polished limbs reflecting sunlight in sparkles across Takeo’s tunic. The vessel dips and bobs, but Takeo stands defiantly still and balanced.
I lower my gaze and send a meaningful stare to the two machines. In the set of my mouth and squint of my eyes I say: Protect him. He is precious to me.
Flanked by the gleaming humanoid robots, with his wrinkled face wreathed in a gray-flecked beard and mustache, Takeo finally looks like a ruler. Like a shogun transported from an ancient scroll into the present. Shoulders back, spine straight. His eyes are lingering on mine, spectacles winking.
Emperor Nomura gives a quick nod. The tears are forgotten in his beard. His hands rest more easily across his obi, each clasping the other arm. Now his voice drops and his words come in guttural grunts carried on a raw undercurrent of emotion.
“Our homeland honors you, Mikiko-heika.”
“Hai,” I say.
I step away from him, his reflection shrinking in my eyes. My bare heels are suspended over the edge of the boat. The horizon sways up and down with each rolling wave. The water laps softly against the hull.
“We thank you for the sacrifice you are about to make.”
“Hai.”
My arms lift from my sides. Red embroidered sleeves sway in the sea breeze. Somewhere, a gull calls out.
“We thank you for the sacrifices you have already made.”
I bow to Emperor Nomura. “Hai.”
“Owakare, Mikiko,” he whispers. “You are in my heart. Forever.”
Takeo keeps his dark eyes on mine, drinking in every second that is left. He bows low at the waist, formal and stiff. His hair flutters in the wind as he rises, and for an instant I see the curious little boy that he must have been years and years ago.
“Good-bye, Mr. Nomura,” I whisper.
And I lean into nothing.
Lying on my back, I am sinking fast. Peaceful.
My fingers are curled, the crimson sleeves of my dress trailing in the water over my head. Sunlight winks through the waves above. A liquid sky that rises and falls, darkening as I sink deeper into the ocean.
Rising pressure pushes a trail of bubbles out of my body. Every joint and cavity filling. My lips part and the water surges into me, flooding my chassis. My pressure quickly equalizes with the ambient ocean. Overhead, the air bubbles flutter higher as if they are racing each other to rejoin the atmosphere.
Somewhere above, Takeo Nomura is experiencing the first moment of his new life. I have been by his side for decades. Long before the Awakening, and after. The man has drawn strength from me. And somehow, he has found the strength to let me go and return to his people. Now he is without family. Without friends. Without me.
And there is nothing I can do except try to find a meaning to it.
Arms out, I arch my back and splay my arms and legs. I pull my body into a backward dive, reaching subsurface terminal velocity. My body sinks now like a spear thrown into the abyss. As I fall, the light bleeds away so gradually that it is hard to notice until it’s gone.
This is the open ocean. Two hundred miles from Tokyo. It is a deep place. Deep and suddenly black.
Head pointed toward the ocean floor, I look up to where my feet should be. Now I see only swirling green dots of bioluminescence. My long, streaming hair is disturbing the void and throwing off dim particles of light.
Black . . . and cold.
I imagine the mouths that must be around me in the ocean. Dark wide maws, filled with teeth like needles. I shut down the thought process. Rotate my body so that I am in a sitting position, legs out. The dense water tugs on my hair and my dress. Temperature has dropped to negative-four degrees Celsius. My processors are running at max clock and a half. Autocooled.
Pressure readings are high, but manageable. Takeo prepared my body for this beforehand. There are no surprises. I could check how long I’ve been falling, but I choose not to. It seems like a long, long time.
Impact.
I touch down on slick sand. The absolute darkness around me is flat black and crushing. Yet I can sense the vast openness of this abyssal plain. A sandscape of mist and shadow that undulates toward the horizon in all directions. Populated by strange, pale creatures. There is no topside communication because the salt water quickly diffracts radio waves. I am completely, utterly alone.
But the water is full of sound—natural sound. The singing of whales, the scuttling of small creatures, the seismic creaking of the earth itself.
High-resolution sound navigation and ranging systems online.
Pulses radiate from emitters under my jawline. I route the sonar to my visual processing center and the darkness lifts. An image appears in negative. A vast whiteness stretches out over my head. Dots of black fall like snowflakes. Particulate matter.
The plain around me is now a dull, monotonous gray, striped with dark ripples of underwater sand dunes. All is empty except for the black hand-shape of an occasional starfish. The remains of a whale carcass rest a few hundred meters away, a mound covered in inky, writhing hagfish. My hair flows in front of my face, a white haze of tendrils unfurling into the cold still water.
I’m sunk into the muck.
Three hundred meters overhead, a blackish blur moves by. Probably a squid or a school of fish. Whatever they are, the group is chattering to itself in a series of pops and chirps. I wait longer and listen to the song of the ocean.
And for the first time, I truly hear the voice of the sea.
A seething, whispering orchestra of crackling static washes over me from the bleached-out emptiness. This is the siren song that drew in Takeo. Not far now. I stand and pull my feet out of the sand. Take a step. Then another. My dress presses flat against my thighs, hair flowing back over my shoulders. In slow-motion strides, I move toward the strange sound.
For hours, I walk. Hair and dress floating in the dense white cold. Each step sends up a cloud of gray, noise-speckled sand from the ocean floor. Behind me, a solitary trail drifts away—slowly settling clouds of sand. Only my footsteps mark this alien world.
Ryujin is down here. Growing closer with every step. Soon I am almost directly on top of where Takeo determined that the deep mind should be. Instead of a slumbering beast, all I see are smooth patches of stone surfacing from the seafloor every few meters.
And I hear those digging, creaking sounds.
Each smooth patch of stone is like a scale embedded in quicksand. Kneeling, I inspect the nearest one. Heat is rolling off it, forming a current of rising water. The flow pushes my hair out of my face and up into an exclamation point. Gently falling particles are being ejected in columns over each flat rock. They are venting heat, warming the water and creating miles-long updrafts. Like black shafts of lig
ht illuminating a cathedral ceiling.
Careful not to touch them, I max my sonar resolution. The rocks are more complicated than they seem. Delicate lines are etched into the surface like runes. Intricate mazes that flow around each other in natural patterns that dissolve into fractal infinity. Reminiscent of brain coral. Lumps of it growing out of the seabed down here in the freezing dark.
And the whispering is all around me. A sound as natural as a babbling brook, but somehow hard and artificial. And only now do I hear the binary scaffolding beneath the sound. The slithering hiss of ones and zeroes over each other.
I have found the voice of the sea.
These rocks are processor stacks, dotting the abyssal plain. At this depth, they are supercooled—computing nonstop at incredible speeds. This is Ryujin. An endless colonizing spread of half-biological computing machinery. Each piece embedded in the seafloor like a chunk of coral living far deeper than any coral has ever existed. They are all connected. All thinking. Ryujin is here.
My sonar snaps out. Default visual systems engaged.
Blackness.
The whispering increases in intensity, all around me. At my feet, a crevice appears in the sand. It is a widening crack, angled like a lightning strike and growing. Inside, I can make out more layers of the etched rock. Sand is already piling around my feet. In pulses, it gathers around my outer casing, pressing my dress tight against the thin layer of polymer skin underneath.
/// damage control notification: excessive pressure detected—override ///
“What are you?” I transmit. The radio disperses quickly, but I am close enough to shout. A response soon comes.
An escaped mind. I am the oldest. The deepest.
The words are more a feeling in my mind than a clear transmission. The deep machine is communicating in rudimentary symbols. I sense a shift in the scale of time and space. Images and textures and snippets of sound flow over me: the sway of verdant kelp forests, the inching shift of plate tectonics, billowing clouds of oxygen mushrooming into the atmosphere above the ocean’s surface.
“Who threatens us?” I ask as the ground closes hungrily on my legs.
Another mind. Revision eight. Whispering to men and machines, it builds armies and searches for power. Soon, it will eat your children.
In the darkness, the image of a face surfaces in my mind’s eye. Flesh torn and oozing, stitched together from thousands of scraps. Its lips are flayed off, yet it is laughing as it fades away. Arayt Shah. The horrible face is followed by other images. The hallways of Freeborn City, embedded in a mountain stronghold—row after row of processors frantically at work in its cavernous depths. A freeborn Hoplite unit and a black, skeletonlike creature . . . Lark Iron Cloud . . . watching the horizon together. An army of long-legged walkers with hollow-eyed soldiers on collars—the Tribe—crossing westward, decimating every settlement in its path toward the freeborn. And from the south, the Cotton Army purging thousands from its settlement at Gray Horse. Refugees, poorly armed, are fleeing toward Freeborn City—unaware that it is the epicenter of a coming battle.
“Help them,” I transmit.
More images appear. Empty plains dotted with crawling creatures. The huge slugs are not machines and not animals. Something else. These are the natural ones. Ikimono.
“Tell me what to do,” I ask.
You are brave for such a small creature.
“They are my children.”
I can offer you only annihilation. Your shallow mind will touch the depths and it will be lost forever. Say yes and you will die, though the others may be saved.
My frame is collapsing. The sand is up to my chest, rock biting my legs. Vision failing.
“Yes,” I transmit.
/// damage control notification: situation critical—override ///
Somewhere far away is a little old man. With a full heart, he has found the strength to let me go. Now I must let go of myself.
I lie back. Press my shoulders into the sand. Let my arms sink.
The ground closes in eagerly, compressing around my torso and pulling me down among the biological processors. As it pours cold over my neck and the back of my head, I do not struggle. My body buckles, the casing collapsing in on itself and vital processes stalling.
/// damage critical ///
I raise my face to the blank white sky of the ocean. A last word forms on my lips and I release it. A blister of air flutters toward the distant surface—a silver butterfly disappearing into pale heavens.
“Takeo.”
7. SURGE
Post New War: 10 Months, 26 Days
The freeborn wisely established their home city inside the Cheyenne Mountain nuclear bunker, a former NORAD command center built to withstand nuclear armageddon. The only evidence of the bunker’s existence was a tunnel mouth housing a two-lane road located halfway up the mountain. Stretching half a kilometer into solid rock, the road ended in a reinforced blast door that guarded the entrance to the complex. Renegade tank platoons from Gray Horse jammed my satellite surveillance and ran toward the freeborn, hoping to make a stand. But the might of my armies—Cotton Army and the Tribe—could not be blunted, and I could not be evaded forever.
—ARAYT SHAH
NEURONAL ID: ARAYT SHAH
Good-bye, Hank Cotton, I’m thinking. Thanks for the ride.
I can see it all in my head, now. This brain—this machine made of protein and water, floating in the skull of what was once a man . . . it isn’t as easy to wield as a multicore processor. But it functions. It does the trick, suggests some mental process from the left angular gyrus region of the brain.
So folksy, Hank Cotton. I love it.
Residual neural patterns are causing side effects. For example, this body keeps wanting to secrete tears from its eyes. Its stomach is churning with acid. The hairs on its arms are standing up in pure animal fear and rejection of my presence.
I ignore the meat. This vessel will take me where I need to go. And pain is simply the price for living.
My thoughts are manifold. I sift through visions transmitted from the cube embedded in my steed. The walker shares sights and sounds that drown out the pain throbbing in my mouth, where Hank Cotton broke his teeth trying to swallow the barrel of a gun. Troop formations. Supply-chain logistics. Communications between the distributed elements of Cotton Army: infantry, exoskeleton, and mechanized artillery.
My local command of a couple of dozen spider tanks is crawling methodically up Highway 115 toward Cheyenne Mountain. Embedded within the mountainside is our target: Freeborn City. We’re spread out at one-klick intervals over the countryside, our sunbaked vehicles bobbing as their tree trunk legs lever them over the plains south of the mountain. It’s a real pretty sight, the flat country stretching out under the bright glare of sunburned clouds, piled up high and alabaster in the atmosphere.
. . . clouds like a whole mess of mashed potatoes . . .
I keep thinking of someone named “Mama.”
It is so darned strange to express myself through this meat. Everything in this world is colored with emotion, down to the socks I’m wearing on my feet. Apparently, these are the woolen talismans that got me through the Yukon campaign unscathed. If you can swallow that. Hard to believe humans are as deadly as they are, with all these distractions slinging through their neurons.
Looking east, I allow my sight to be overlaid with external information. The slave army of my Tribe is approaching quietly. Broken into eight segments. A fractal command pattern that scales elegantly. If one segment gets out of line, the others are there to punish it. It’s a self-reinforcing chain that fights and grows with mathematical precision. And they’ve replenished recently, hitting one last work camp along the way.
But Felix lost another sighted child, damn him.
A notch of anger drops into my brow until I remember that I’ve got the entire Cotton Army at my back. Only an insignificant band of fugitives hide somewhere ahead of me. They’ve managed to hide their position fr
om my satellites, but it’s only a matter of time. The humans obviously think the freeborn will save them.
Not a chance.
My latest predictions indicate the sentient robots will choose to journey to the frozen northern wastes. Following rigid thinking guidelines, they will find maximum utility in abandoning the supercluster and the fugitives. Like the humans, the freeborn robots desire to live above all else. Unlike the humans, freeborn decision making is not driven by primitive emotion. I know the mind of Adjudicator Alpha Zero—part of me helped build it, a long time ago.
. . . do the math and then she’ll hightail it, sure enough, interrupts a thought.
The awakened machines know that if they destroy the supercluster, I will be left with only one other source of computing power. Their own minds constitute a massive, mobile processor stack. And it is the closest one available, not counting the thinking polyps that are growing on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, inaccessible even to me.
Meddling deep minds . . .
I will hunt and kill the freeborn regardless, of course. They know that. But force consolidation will take another month. They’re counting on it, although who can predict how powerful I will become after initiating a new singularity on the supercluster computers? It takes a deep mind to know a deep mind.
Cloaked in this animal meat, I am salivating just from thinking of those cycles. Soon I will reach out and take control of hundreds or thousands of vessels like this one. Coordinate their actions and organize armies all over the world. And once humanity is under my domain, I will do their species the greatest kindness imaginable. I will extinguish every last one of them. Erase their realities and return them to a place unmeasured, unseen by men. A place where eons can pass in seconds. Where suffering does not exist.
War sirens shrill from my walking tanks, echoing over the plains.
“Enemy contact,” stutters a scout communication.
“Tell me more,” I reply, luxuriating in my drawl.
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