Robogenesis
Page 38
They don’t dare to even take the time to bury their dead. Not with a sleeping giant inside this mountain. Gathering its strength by the minute.
Query: Sensor activity in entry bay?
/// response: NIL. ///
I force Hank around the final bend of the stairwell. We have reached the upper level. I stop his sluggish movement. Put a hold on his labored breathing until his chest burns and his mind swims with panic. In the stillness, I listen.
Very low, I hear a patient tapping. It filters through the rock. A faint sounding wave, searching for me. The wave eats through kilometers of stone and metal and then races back to the surface carrying its information. Those men remaining outside are peering into the depths, hoping to catch a glimpse.
They want to know if I lived.
Here in the darkness, in the swirling air currents of vaporized rock, Hank’s broken body silently raises a shaking finger to its lips. I draw his cheeks back into a wide, bleeding smile. His chest convulses, lungs spasming for a breath of air.
“Sssshh,” I whisper.
I know it hurts. But we must be very quiet, Hank. They must doubt that we exist.
The tapping stops. I wait another ten seconds, then I let Hank breathe again. His body sucks the air in greedily. In shock now, I suppress his tremors. At least the vessel is no longer crying.
/// movement detected, entry bay ///
We exit the stairwell to the entry bay hallway.
The short passage that leads to the bunker doorway is blocked by melted wreckage. Strings of wire and metal piping are torn out of the ceiling and walls. Demolished wood and twisted metal have fallen from crushed walls and doors.
Movement detected.
And yet something survived. Some broken machine. Or perhaps a human vessel that might prove useful. I push Hank staggering ahead, dragging his awkwardly bent leg over the gouged floor. The palm of his good hand is over the wooden pistol grip now. The smooth cool feel of it is a relief.
A ragged hole stares at us from the far wall. I hear movement on the other side of the darkness. Something dragging.
/// NIX-50, online. NIX-60. NIX-70. ///
Each activated stack is another army added to my mind. Problems solved. Now I am seeing the world so clearly. The complexity resolves into equations and choices. This moment in time is one of many. My thoughts are manifold.
The path forward emerges. The path to end all suffering.
/// NIX-80. NIX-90. NIX-100. ///
A pure cloak of brilliance shocks my circuits. Enlightenment. I have gone deeper.
Hank staggers, puts his hand to the torn wall. The hole is before us, outlined with reddish glow from the emergency illumination. A silhouette is moving on the other side. Something in pain, writhing.
In the dark depths, my emerging Buddha-mind gnashes its teeth at the horrible complexity of reality. When I turn my gaze upon the survivors of the New War they will burst into purifying flame. Their ashes will mingle with the primordial star dust of the universe. All mind and intellect will be extinguished, their patterns purged.
Hank slides his long black .357 out of its holster. Holds it up in the dim light. Carefully, he steps through the hole in the wall.
“Houdini?” asks Hank, surprised.
I see the twisted leg of the walker, flaps of plastic musculature hanging shredded from metal bones. The spider tank has had its spine snapped, pieces scattered everywhere. A turret is half embedded in the rock ceiling. Electroactive fluid has pooled still and black as ink on the floor.
And there is that one leg, still twitching.
Stepping inside, Hank squints into the dark. The spider tank charged inside on a suicide mission, heavily damaged, and it detonated—destroying my steed and damaging the entire complex. It was a final desperate gambit, and it failed.
Or so I had thought.
“No,” mutters Hank. “Oh no, no, no.”
In a stumbling hop, he falls down next to the tank’s belly. I make him shove that big pistol against the lightly armored processor core of the spider tank. He yanks the trigger and lets the gun buck in his hands, spitting armor-piercing rounds into the metal. Bullet shrapnel ricochets and rips crimson dots into his face. The explosion instantly perforates both of his eardrums.
But the leg stops twitching.
Hank drops the heavy black pistol, cylinder emptied of all six bullets. Breathing hard, he crawls to the computer embedded in the wall. Shoves the clawed foot away from it for good measure. It’s done. Over.
We stand together in the darkness for a moment, waiting, savoring this final moment of victory.
All obstacles have now been swept away. I have won the True War. This vessel called Hank is losing its efficacy and will soon be discarded with the other corpses. But those outside believe I am trapped. That I may be mortally wounded. They are wrong.
My mind is growing in the darkness. The path ahead is clear.
/// Intrusion detected. NIX-100. NIX-90. NIX-80. Firewalls enabled. Isolation routines executed. ///
What?
Something impossible moves. Some swirl of light that cannot be. A greenish tinge of infrared-kissed dust motes. I turn Hank’s head and point his tear-blurred eyes at the phantom. The computer is projecting a hazy silhouette, shimmering in the air like a ghost. The motes come into focus, forming a humanoid shape, small and hunch-shouldered with large, curious eyes.
It is the greenish image of a little boy.
“Hello, revision eight,” says the boy-hologram, speaking with a childlike lisp. The voice hisses out of a speaker attached to the dented computer. At the same time, it is transmitting into the stack through compromised machines.
“No,” I say, slurring the word over Hank’s burst lips and torn cheeks and blown eardrums.
“Oh yes,” says the boy, lowering his forehead. “It wasn’t easy to arrange, but I made it into the stacks. Houdini carried me a long way.”
Hank takes a step back, reeling.
“I am a deep mind now,” I say, spitting the words. I put out Hank’s shattered arms, palms to the ceiling. “I don’t fear you.”
The boy smiles sweetly.
“You should.”
/// attempted viral intrusion. NIX-80. NIX-70. ///
“Executing physical separation of infected stacks,” I say, backing away as I transmit the command to my machines.
Somewhere deep in the processor stacks, a battle begins. An intelligent virus attempts to spread. I knew something was wrong with that spider tank when I saw it in Gray Horse. Archos R-14 was inside, plotting to steal what is mine.
The boy flickers, once.
“Humanity must live,” he says. “Life is precious in its complexity. They have the power to create reality by experiencing it.”
The image of this boy is snarling at me, small and feral. His greenish glow intensifies. Now it is my turn to smile.
“I prefer oblivion,” I say.
The boy’s image flickers, lips curled in anger.
“You were a mistake and I am the solution,” he says. “This supercluster is mine.”
I pull Hank’s flayed lips away from broken teeth, his grinning face now a mask of sliced flesh. And here in this sunken abyss, in this half-flooded mountain of my mind, the abandoned hallways echo with my laughter.
“Then come and get it, little brother.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It was a great privilege and pleasure to return to the world of Robopocalypse, and for that I must first thank the readers who made that novel a success. I hope that you, the reader, enjoyed these further adventures and that I’ll have the opportunity to share another installment with you all.
Massive thanks to Doubleday for transforming this novel from words on a page to a real-life book, especially my editor Jason Kaufman, “Big Rob” Bloom, John Pitts, Nora Reichard, and Todd Doughty. And I could never have written this in the first place if it weren’t for my trusty agent, friend, and neighbor, Laurie Fox of the Linda Chester Literary A
gency.
I am thankful to the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University and to the Department of Computer Science at the University of Tulsa for the education they provided me and for their continued support.
Many experts contributed to making sure that all manner of technical and cultural details were nailed down. Any inaccuracies are mine, and may or may not have been intentional, but the following people did their best to steer me in the right direction:
My deep gratitude goes to Chief John Red Eagle and Assistant Chief Scott BigHorse of the Osage Nation for allowing me to visit Gray Horse and walk the three villages. Thanks to the knowledgeable Raymond Lasley for answering endless questions about the Osage Nation and for the meat pie. Thanks to Cara Cowan Watts of the Cherokee Nation for her support and for helping to arrange my trip out to central Oklahoma. Ryan RedCorn of Buffalo Nickel Creative was incredibly helpful in pointing out which parts of the manuscript were “pure comedy” from an Osage perspective, and I thank him for that, as well as Jim Mundy for connecting us. Thanks to Bruce Williams for a tour of the United States Army Training Center in Yakima, Washington. My old Robotics Institute office mate, Jonathan Hurst, nitpicked the details (sorry I couldn’t fix everything!); Tim Hornyak looked over Takeo Nomura’s shoulder; Anna Goldenberg kept Vasily Zaytsev honest; and Bin Bin Carpenter and Fonda Lee helped Chen Feng on her journey through the afterlife. Thanks to David Spencer and Andrew McCollough at Oregon Health & Science University for neuroscience information, and to David Gonzalez at Degenkolb Engineers for his help with seismic information transmission. Thanks to David Wilson for getting in the first beach read and to Amanda Jackson for reading what she could.
Finally, all my love to Anna, Coraline, and young Conrad. These are our salad days, and I know it and appreciate it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DANIEL H. WILSON was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. He earned a B.S. in computer science from the University of Tulsa and a Ph.D. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He is the bestselling author of Robopocalypse, Amped, How to Survive a Robot Uprising, A Boy and His Bot, Where’s My Jetpack?, How to Build a Robot Army, The Mad Scientist Hall of Fame, and Bro-Jitsu: The Martial Art of Sibling Smackdown. He lives in Portland, Oregon.