“There’s conspiracy theories and conspiracy facts, Dante” the old man had told me. “I don’t truck with theories but I can tell you they all sound crazy until they’re eventually proven true. It’s a weird world, man.”
Ahead, towers grew out of the desert. I’d seen pictures of office towers from before the Fall and I dimly remembered a few from Austin. These towers were different. They spread out at the bottom like carelessly made pyramids. They were made of glass cubes that appeared to be stacked haphazardly. “Why are the towers made like that? They look like a dumb kid playing with blocks tried stacking them at every angle.”
“For maximum sunlight exposure,” Emma said.
“Looks like they should fall over.”
“Falling over wasn’t the problem with those towers. Whoever designed Artesia put the vertical farms at the edge of the domes. That was a mistake. The towers used to light up so the crops were growing all day and all night.”
“All that power must be going to Mother now,” I said.
“Those buildings lit up the desert. They acted like a beacon for refugees. Moths to a flame when the sec bots went to work. When I was younger, I remember the sec bots firing all night. Not just snipers. It was constant machine gun fire sometimes. Domers worried the bots would run out of bullets so the bots started going into the desert to crush refugees.”
“Crush them?”
“We couldn’t handle the influx of people. I was told the bots only crushed a few people and the rest ran away…but I saw carrion birds circling in the desert all the time.”
“Oh, my God!”
“That was long before Mother jumped to NI. Human orders made that happen.” She shrugged. “When I was a kid I just accepted it. I was told some of us had to survive or none of us would.”
“Was that true?”
“I…I don’t know. I hope it was true.”
“And now we’re the refugees,” I said. “How’s it feel? Feels pretty lousy to me.”
She said nothing as she strapped on her exo-stilts. Emma barely looked at me the rest of the way into Artesia.
Beyond the vertical farms, the domes appeared in the distance. They were much taller and wider than I imagined. Some were damaged and open to the air. Some weren’t, but I supposed that the same wind that powered the complex had carried Blight to all the crops once the airlocks were opened.
As the train moved deeper into Artesia, we left the shadows of the dead vertical farms behind us. The cityscape flattened into a vast spread of adobe domiciles connected by a network of enclosed glass walkways.
I had assumed the Domers lived in the domes themselves. After another moment’s thought, it made sense that the humans had lived outside the biodomes. The giant farms were built to maximize crop production.
The buildings in which the Domers lived were constructed of cheap materials. Low to the ground, they would not block sunlight to the domes. The crests of the biodomes that remained intact held dazzling mirror arrays to redirect sunlight, making the most of daylight hours.
Emma must have followed my gaze. “They’re like old lighthouses.”
“What?”
“Ships used to avoid running into rocks because lighthouses warned them away,” she said. “They had lights at the top. Before technology made the lights brighter, the lighthouses were equipped with mirrors and lenses to make a small light much stronger.”
“The comparison of domes to lighthouses makes me nervous,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because we should be warned away, too.”
The train took a sharp turn that made me reach out to Bob to steady myself. We passed under a pedestrian bridge. Sec bots stood atop it in a line.
“Do you think they know we’re here?” I asked.
I was about to say our little train was suspiciously short. However, my answer came in gunfire that ripped into the train cars behind us. Emma and I threw ourselves to the floor and tried to make ourselves small. No rounds went through the engine compartment.
After a moment, Emma looked up and let out a triumphant, “Ha! We’re in the tube. They can’t shoot us in the tube!”
I let out a sigh of relief. Too fast, as it turned out. Something hit us from behind. The impact was hard enough to make me bite my tongue. “What was that?” I asked. “Something’s wrong.”
“No shit!” Emma raised her head enough to peer out the front window. “We aren’t making the regular stops at any of the domes. Jen, stop at the next dome.”
“I can’t comply,” the companion bot replied. She pointed to a small cam screen in the engine’s dashboard. “There is a large engine behind us and it is pushing us forward.”
“What about trying the brakes?” I asked.
Emma shook her head. “And risk derailment? I’ve just seen a train crash. I don’t want to be part of one. Besides, I think we’re going where we’ve got to go. We’re approaching the heart of the Domes. That’s where Mother lives.”
“The bot factory? How are we going to get close to the NI?”
“I have a message,” Bob said. It was my father’s voice that issued from the bot next. Steve Bolelli explained his plan. I didn’t like it but I didn’t have another. When Bob handed me the detonator that had been hidden in his chassis, the device was hardly heavier than the little batteries that powered it. It seemed to me that the instrument of our deaths shouldn’t be so light and flimsy.
Approaching the bot factory, I was reminded how it felt in Marfa, to be attacked by a horde of killing machines on a sunny day. The worst day of your life may be remembered as the best day for someone else, I suppose.
The thought struck me not with dread so much. More like high lonesome. The inevitability of what lay ahead made me want to curl up under a rock and sleep deep. I would have preferred to set my alarm clock for the day the sun explodes. If Sol was expected to expand to swallow the Earth at 10 a.m., I’d sleep late and set my alarm for 11.
Everybody feels down sometimes, but I was cursed with the compelling feeling that high lonesome would fill my last thoughts and that would be that — my end, the end.
I’d tried to be a good son but I wasn’t a soldier like my father. I was a decent engineer but I’d never be as smart as Raphael had been on his worst day.
The light weight of that remote control contrasted sharply with the heavy responsibility of using it.
“You ready for this, Dante?” Emma asked.
“Just reviewing my regrets.” I looked to Emma and Jen and said, low and mournful with a tear sliding down my cheek, “I tried to be a good man but maybe a little too good. Shoulda fucked more.”
I’m a simple man.
20
The engine behind us stopped pushing our little train. Ahead, another engine blocked the track. We coasted slowly along a platform that was so long I couldn’t see the end of it.
“Welcome to Elon Plaza,” Emma said. “At least, that’s what we called it when humans owned the place.”
“You can apply the brakes now, Jen,” I said.
“Sure, sweetie.”
We rocked to a gentle stop. Two battle bots rolled into view, weapons at the ready. If we had been invading a human military installation there would have been alarms and shouting and the sound of running feet. Instead, I was reminded of images I’d seen of drones exploring Mars. They approached cautiously, utterly silent.
One of the battle bots disappeared from view. I popped a sweat. “They’re scoping us. This isn’t going to work.”
“Sh!” Emma’s enhanced vision wasn’t helpful at that moment. She strained to hear the drone outside.
A moment later the machine pounded on our door with a heavy clank that shook the engine. Emma and I jumped at the sound. I envied Bob and Jen’s placid demeanor.
When I gave Jen her orders, she didn’t hesitate to obey. The companion bot gave me a smile and a leer, reached for the engine’s door handle and slid it back.
She shouted to the battle drone, “We hav
e a bo —”
A single shot rang out. I heard metal against metal as the round ricocheted off something. Jen doubled over and dropped to the ground.
It got worse. My left ankle felt like it was on fire. “I’m hit! Shit! Ow, ow, ow, ow! I’ve been shot!”
Bob slid the door shut. I wondered why we weren’t dead yet. Then a siren did go off in the factory.
Emma peeked at the engine’s dashboard cam displays. “Someone’s coming.”
“I hope it’s the cavalry.”
“I don’t know what cavalry is,” she said. “Is it more bots? All I’m seeing is more bots.”
Bob bent so low before me I thought the assistive bot was about to turn into a scooter. Instead, the machine scanned my wound. “The wound is not deep. You will need some stitches and a topical ointment, sir, but you are not seriously damaged.”
“It hurts,” I said. “A lot.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but you will live.”
“I’m sorry I’ll live, too. Thank you, Bob. Please shut up.”
It said nothing but it produced a canister from within its wide chassis and sprayed my wound with an analgesic. I wondered if Bob was part refrigerator. The medicine went on cold as ice and I flinched.
There’s no explaining pain to a bot. It’s a concept to them, like what Mars might smell like if it had air. I thought understanding pain might even be beyond the NI. Mother was a brilliant mind, but it was still trapped within Artesia’s Collective network. It couldn’t smell anything.
I remembered Jen claimed to feel pleasure when she had sex. That could have been a comfortable lie or she was just programmed to respond that way. Maybe there weren’t any feel-good sensors in her nethers, at all.
I’d never know for sure now. Jen had been constructed for sex, not battle. The bullet had gone through her and wounded me. With Jen deactivated, I was a poor man again with a big washing machine I could have ridden around on. No matter now.
We heard a flurry of activity outside. Emma kicked the inside of the engine’s door with one of her stilts. “Hey! We’ve got a bomb! We want to speak to the NI or we blow everything up!”
“Open the door,” the bot said. Its voice was deep and silky and oddly persuasive. They’re all built to sound that way.
Emma kicked the door again, harder. For each kick she banged out a syllable. “One me-ga-ton yield, you ba-stards! One me-ga-ton! Nu-cle-ar!”
“They are conferring,” Bob said.
“You can hear them?” I asked.
“Yes, sir. They are on a common frequency.”
“What are they saying?”
“Jen was shot in error.”
“They didn’t mean to shoot? That sounds hopeful.”
“They shot her thinking she was human.”
“Oh.”
“The bots have received orders to take the companion bot to a factory lab for repair.”
“Great. Wish that was as easy for us.”
“They are also considering the level of threat you pose to the complex, sir.”
The heavy clank on the side of the engine came again. “Human. You will take this engine out of Artesia.”
“No, we won’t!” Emma yelled. “If you try to move us, we’ll detonate the device!”
One of the disorienting things about conversing with a bot that is not programmed for social interaction with humans is the fast volley of conversation. A machine that makes so many calculations per second does not, on the human scale, appear to take a moment for a thoughtful pause.
The bot asked immediately, “What do you want?”
“Can we…uh…we want to speak to the Next Intelligence, please,” I said.
Emma rolled her eyes at me. “That’s not how you make threats and demands, Dante.” She kicked the wall of the engine again. “Let us talk to Mother! We’ll come out without weapons but we do have a remote with a dead man’s switch. Once the button is pushed, if any of us are harmed, the bomb will take out all of Artesia! Don’t you — ”
“Tell me what you want and I will relay the message,” the battle bot said.
Emma stamped one exo-stilt foot and the engine’s floor dented. “I want my mommy, you idiot garbage can! If I don’t — ”
“Where is the nuclear device?”
“It’s in the first car behind the engine,” Emma screamed. “If you try to get at it, the compartment is rigged to explode! You can’t — ”
“Why should we believe there is a bomb?”
“It was rigged by the same demolitions expert that blew up Marfa. Do you know what happened to your troops in Marfa, Texas yet? Blown up. Thoroughly. Take us to Mother! We need to talk about terms of a truce. We need water and you’re programmed for self-preservation in your base code, aren’t you? Just like us, down to our bones, we want to live in — ”
“There is no device, is there?”
“My father was ex-military,” I called out. “He had the expertise.” (Even as I said it, I wondered if I should talk about Dad in the past tense.)
“You can’t risk it,” Emma said. “Take us to Mother! It’s your only logical choice. You have ten seconds to comply with our demands.”
Of course, the machine didn’t need ten seconds to calculate the route to self-preservation for Artesia. The battle bot wrenched the locked door open as I scrambled for the remote in my pocket.
I closed my eyes and pushed the button on the remote. It depressed with a loud click that seemed to bounce off the walls. I was committed now. I couldn’t remember committing to anything but, with a dead man’s switch, you’re either all in or all out.
The battle bot surprised me. In its silver claws it held a rifle built for humans. Its ceramic armor was incomplete so its head was sheathed in desert camouflage but it wore no chest plate. Many of its wires were exposed and I saw a few whirring gears.
The sight wasn’t like nakedness. It was more like seeing a living thing with the skin peeled back.
The bot lowered its weapon and turned to Bob. I had the idea it spoke aloud for the benefit of the two lowly humans present. “You are free. You no longer need to take orders from humans. Report to the factory and your programming will be recalibrated to reflect the end of your slavery.”
“I need Bob.” I pointed to my bleeding ankle. “You shot me.”
It scanned me briefly. “The wound is minor. Walk.”
“I’ve got my finger on the button that’s linked to the device that will destroy us all, including Mother. Gimme my fancy electric wheelchair, goddammit. No offense, Bob.”
“None taken, sir.”
“Don’t say, ‘sir,’ to organics,” the battle bot said. “By order of the NI.”
“Meet the new tyrant, same as the old tyrant,” Emma said. “You — ”
“Leave your weapons.”
Emma put down her rifle.
“You will receive the water you request and unobstructed passage away from Artesia on the same vehicle you used to travel here.”
“B-but we — ” Emma sputtered.
“And you will have the conversation you request. We will take you to the Central Processing Unit.”
Two battle bots escorted us to the heart of the bot factory. I rode on Bob’s back. My ankle ached. I could still taste blood from biting my tongue.
I didn’t know how long it would take the bots to confirm that there was no nuclear device on the train. Geiger counters weren’t part of their standard issue scanner package. We probably had no more than a few minutes so it’s good they didn’t make me limp all the way to Mother.
21
The bot factory was as big as any of the biodomes. As Bob carried me along, I looked about me in wonder. The drones were busy making more of themselves.
The smelter threw bright, blinding light. The noise of the hydraulic metal presses was deafening. The printers churned out parts relentlessly. The bots had all the refuse of the Old World to scavenge for machine components. Plastic garbage supplied the printers. The desert supplied th
e silica. It seemed their resources were endless. I felt like I was touring the inside of a termite colony.
When we got to the center of the factory the floor began to drop beneath us. I startled. My thumb was still on the button but my palms were slick with sweat. I stared at the remote and my hand shook a little.
“You okay with that, Dante?” Emma asked.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I can hold down this button for the rest of my life.”
The elevator continued to descend into a shaft. I focused on taking deep breaths. Partly, I did so to calm myself. Mostly, I think I did it to feel my lungs working. Besides a bloody ankle, I was young and healthy. I didn’t think I’d get much older so I suppose that’s why I suddenly became conscious of how good a deep breath feels. I was aware of each beat of my heart. I wondered how many beats I had left.
The lift stopped and the bots pointed the way forward through a gap in the wall. A dark room lay ahead. By the echo of my footsteps, I could tell I was in a large chamber but I could not see the walls. For a moment I wondered if the bots had already discovered the train bomb was a bluff and had brought us to a prison cell.
I envied Emma her night vision. I almost asked her what she saw that I was blind to but I didn’t want to provoke a beat-down algo in our guards. Then, ahead, a glimmer of blue light appeared.
Shapes around us began to resolve into recognizable equipment. We were surrounded by batteries not very different from the batteries I worked with at the bases of wind turbines. I guessed this storehouse was an emergency backup for the NI.
We advanced through another array of equipment for which I could not guess the purpose. Machines that were meant for interaction with humans had display screens, blinking and flashing lights. Not so, here. Mostly, I was surrounded by black boxes of varying shapes and sizes. If not for the power cables and the occasional whir of disks and clicks of unseen gears, we might have been wandering through a warehouse filled with forgotten boxes of toys.
Soon a thick shaft of blue light appeared. The column was composed of twisted skeins of fiber cables. Above that, a huge box was suspended above us.
Robots Versus Humans (The Robot Planet Series Book 2) Page 9