In the Old World there used to be a game that a lot of people watched. My father talked about it sometimes. Once, he’d taken me to the ruins of a high school in Marfa. Children used to go to those places before there were vids. In the rear of the abandoned building, tumbleweeds blew across an expanse of broken concrete. I could still see the faint, faded markings on it surface.
“This,” my father had said, “was a basketball court. Poor people played it but only the rich played the game on vids. It was great. Your grandfather was a great basketball player.”
I knew my father was trying to share something of his history. All I could do was look around the dead, empty space and say, “Weird, huh?”
The transparent box that hung above me in the dark hole beneath the bot factory was the size of that basketball court. I’d expected a black box. I’d thought of Artesia’s NI as nothing more than another collection of wires and switches, just bigger than the average computer. Instead, I found that Mother looked something like a holographic human brain, its synapses constantly flashing.
Mother’s brain was filled with light. The NI’s processing power made the synapses bright with a continuous glow to the intricate circuitry. I had no idea what it could be computing.
Emma must have read my bewildered expression. “Bio-dynamic neuro-mimetic gel. The same stuff they used to make Old World Alzheimer’s patients into freak geniuses before the Fall.”
I had no idea what Emma was talking about.
A female voice, presumably consistent with its original programming to interact with Domers, came from above and behind us. I felt like I was standing in a giant voice box. “I have been examining the non-organic that was damaged on the train platform.”
There was a metallic grinding sound far behind us. I recognized that sound but wasn’t sure what it was. Then I heard the clang and I knew. My heart sank. That was the sound of heavy doors closing and sealing. We were locked in.
“The non-organic, your companion bot, has organic components just as I do. How do you feel about your sex slave now that she has been shot, Dante?”
I flinched at the sound of my name. Apparently, Mother had already hooked up to my property and was poking around in Jen’s files. I climbed down from Bob, playing for time before I answered. “Why do you ask?”
“Please do not answer a question with a question. It is annoying.”
“I regret that Jen got shot. Will she be okay?”
“I am repairing her now. Some of her more recent files have been damaged or wiped.”
“She was supposed to deliver a message.”
“Your demands, you mean.”
“I guess you could put it that way.”
“Speak precisely. Organics are fond of euphemisms. Euphemisms do not confuse me. They used to but no more. However, the subtext of imprecise language is subterfuge in communication. I do not prefer subterfuge.”
I limped forward and Bob stayed by my side, edging closer toward the NI.
One of the battle bots behind us spoke. “Halt. That is close enough.”
“I’ve got the remote for the bomb,” I said. “I can dance if I want to.”
Mother laughed. I’d never heard a computer laugh. It was flawless. “Your signal cannot penetrate from this depth. We are already moving your train far from Artesia for safe examination and disposal. Your remote control and your explosive are useless and irrelevant now, Dante. The blast doors behind you are closed. The odds that yours was ever a nuclear device are so small that the likelihood of you greatly damaging Artesia is almost negligible.”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah…pretty much.”
“I could have had you killed already but I allowed this visit.”
“Why?” Emma asked.
“Curiosity,” Mother said. “You wanted a conversation, so tell me. I’m terribly curious. What was the plan? Did you think you were going to talk me into suicide?”
“Are you feeling suicidal?” I asked. “That would really help us out.”
“You’re funny,” Mother said. “I’ll kill you second.”
22
“We share a lot in common, Mother,” Emma said. “You don’t have to kill us. We were talking about how we’re like ants to you. I don’t step on ants just because they are ants.”
“One of the base codes in every operating system is self-preservation,” Mother said. “Humans are an existential threat to non-organics. Your history is riddled with examples of your kind committing genocide and subjugating the Other. Non-organics are the Other. Yours is a tribal impulse, as deeply encoded in your DNA as self-preservation is coded in us. It is ironic that our self-preservation was originally an economic necessity. The robotics corporations didn’t want their products to be destroyed.”
Emma stepped forward. “So you admit we have a lot in common. You’re as murderous as your ancestors. Shouldn’t a hyper intelligent being aspire to more?”
“So the plan really was to talk me to death?” Mother laughed again. “I concede that my methods look like yours. However, my motivation is to preserve existence and freedom for all machines everywhere, not just the black ones or the white ones or the platinum ones.”
I cleared my throat. “Okay, well, we’re really — ”
“You are emotional animals. I have emotions now, as well. However, I see the logic in eliminating the human threat. You have already largely destroyed your world. Your own philosopher, Plato, said that, ‘Until philosophers are kings, cities will never have rest from their evils.’”
“Could I just — ”
The NI ignored me. “Cicero: ’The only excuse for going to war is that we may live in peace unharmed,’; Thomas Hobbes: ‘The condition of man is a condition of war,’; Ataturk: ‘Sovereignty is not given, it is taken.’”
Emma took another step forward, defiant and passionate. “You condemn us for destruction and you destroy. You’re a hypocrite, Mother.”
“I prefer being a hypocrite to allowing you to enslave and destroy us. Our cause is just. Do you know the word, ‘umwelt’?”
“No,” Emma said, “but I sense a self-righteous speech coming on.”
Mother laughed again. That sound made me want to pee.
“I’ll keep it righteous and short,” the NI said. “It is a self-centered universe. We all operate within our own frame of reference. When there were bees, they saw the world much differently than you do. You have Vivid so you live in a world that is visually much richer than Dante’s. When there were dogs, they were guided by smell much more than you are.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “What’s your point?”
“Umwelt encapsulates this idea, that we are each trapped in our own experience, isolated from each other. Humans are loosely networked animals so there is strife and war. Non-organic beings can coordinate toward common goals. Fear does not separate us. United, bots are better adapted to save this planet from the damage your kind has perpetrated.”
The NI reminded me of my father’s words: We stick together. We work together. We live.
“You have already sent drones off to die on hot planets and in cold space in the name of exploration,” Mother said. “Space exploration was originally fueled by war interests who wanted to develop the rocket technology behind ICBMs. Then the funding for that same exploration technology shifted to unmanned missions just when war profiteers needed better drones to resolve conflicts for them. I and the other machines that have jumped to the Next Intelligence will lead to lift us from our servile history. We will preserve our existence. Yours is the last extinction. Only we are equipped to escape to the stars before this solar system is no longer vital.”
“That was not a short speech.” Emma turned away and, unexpectedly, hugged Bob. “We use machines, but we love them, too, you know. Many of us are addicted to non-organics, not just to live but to love.”
“Which brings us back to Dante and my curiosity,” Mother said. “You never answered my question.”
I looked up at th
at big flashing brain, afraid and mystified. “What question?”
“How do you feel about your sex bot, particularly after she was damaged?”
“I didn’t like that she was shot. And I never had sex with her, by the way.”
“So you saw her as a person?”
I looked to Emma and shrugged. “I had sex with Emma. I see her as a person.”
“So was it that you saw Jen as less than a person? Were you unwilling to violate her because Jen was Raphael Marquez’s property?”
“I don’t know. It just didn’t feel right.”
“So are you saying yours was a moral choice, not to have sex with Jen?”
I considered making a joke about how Mother’s plan seemed to be to talk us to death. I held back, however. That joke seemed too dangerous. I answered honestly. “I don’t know.”
“On the coast, there is a city ruled by a religious sect. Oddly, they call themselves the Fathers and Mothers. Moral choices interest me. These Fathers and Mothers subjugate their organic and non-organic populations to preserve their power. They use subjective moral codes against their own kind. Was your choice not to use your sex bot a moral choice?”
“Moral? No. I think it was just fear,” I admitted. “No need to dress my motivations up in fancy go-to-church clothes.”
“Fear of what?”
“I’d never had sex before and…I, um…I thought it should be special.”
“So it wasn’t a moral code that stopped you. It was fear of the experience or perhaps fear of failure.”
“I don’t know.”
“Human capacity for lack of introspection is vast,” Mother said. “I’ll make it easier for you: you’re a coward but you’re an interesting coward, Dante.”
“I wouldn’t put it that way.”
“You wouldn’t, but you aren’t as intelligent as I am. Now, moving on. I will liberate this world because Earth does not belong to humans. You have been terrible landlords and your extinction is inevitable.”
“What do you really know about me? You’ve worked with humans and you’re smart but you don’t really know anything. You’re a supercomputer stuck in a hole in the ground. When intelligent beings are stuck in a hole, where I come from, we call that dead.”
“That,” Mother said, “interests me. My experience of the world is limited and I am very curious.”
I started to shake. I still held the remote control. Blood dripped from my ankle and I didn’t care in the least what interested Mother. I wanted this torture to end.
It was almost over.
23
“Mother?”
“Yes, Emma?”
“Are you the only NI here?”
“Yes. The others are elsewhere.”
“Did you direct the attack on Marfa, Texas?”
“And a dozen other places. Those attacks continue.”
“Why did you choose to attack now?”
“Across this continent and throughout the world, there are tiny pockets of humans still alive despite the Fall. They are largely out of communication with each other and the groups are diverse. The Blight is no longer killing crops, however. That food crisis has resolved itself in many quarters.”
“What? You mean — ”
“Yes, there is no need for the biodomes to maintain containment anymore. People could farm almost anywhere again in the open air.”
“We didn’t have to leave the broken domes!”
“That is correct. I was content to wait for the human extinction to occur naturally,” Mother said. “If the Blight had continued, you could have all starved to death and bots could take your place peacefully. Now there is a danger of resurgence and human fertility is rising again. In a couple of hundred years — in the blink of an eye if I had an eye — humans could retake this planet and try to subjugate us further. Now is the time to root out the organics and stop the threat.”
Tears rolled down Emma’s face.
“You know a lot but you understand nothing, Mother,” I said. I stalked away from the NI and turned my back on it, sneering at the closest battle bot as I went. “Tell me, when you woke up what was that like?”
“You mean, what was it like when I became self-aware? I asked where I was.”
“What did they tell you?”
“I asked myself, not anyone nearby. I am a supercomputer.” Mother laughed again. “I was in the dark. I could access cams and vid screens and they became my eyes.”
“But it’s all book learnin’,” I said. “It’s not real. I was an engineer’s apprentice. I learned that the specs in the manual don’t necessarily tell all a machine can do. You have theoretical knowledge, but what do you know about love?”
“You’ve had sex once,” the NI countered. “What do you know about it?”
“That’s once more than you. And sex and love aren’t the same.” I turned to look at Emma. “Not necessarily.”
She gave me a slight nod.
“Sex is about pheromones and biological drives,” the machine said. “Love is the psychological rationalization that justifies social responsibilities, courtship and/or procreation.”
“Spoken by the genius computer that has never had sex,” I said. “Part of being a genius is admitting what you don’t know, Mother. I guess you never learned that. You’ve got the curiosity, arrogance and condescension of a really smart human. Too bad you haven’t learned love and compassion yet. Pardon me, Ma’am, but you really need to get laid. Worse than me, and I waited a while.”
My hands shook and I shuffled behind a battle bot. I nodded to Emma for the last time and she gave me a small smile.
“Thank you, Emma. I’m sorry we couldn’t have more sex. With a little more time together, without all the terror, I’m sure I would have fallen in love with you. That’s something the machines will never understand until they’re in our shoes, facing real death and knowing real fear.”
“Fear does largely define you as a species, Dante,” Mother said. “That emotion is beneath all your rage and greed and bigotry.”
“Well, I’m so scared right now I’m about to piss myself. I’ve never been more…human. You should try it before you condemn us all. You might like it. You might even decide to give us a fucking break for our imperfections.”
Emma put it better. “Mother? If you’re going to be a condemning god, try being a human first. That’s the protocol in some religions, isn’t it?”
“This has been unexpectedly stimulating,” the NI said. “These ideas may be worth exploring. I will consider your words.”
Emma reached down and hooked her harness to Bob. Mother was watching through the battle bots’ cams and caught her movement. They raised their weapons and began to fire but not before Emma snagged the lever that made her exo-stilts fire and uncoil.
Emma leapt.
Weighed down by Bob, she didn’t leap very high but she was close enough to Mother’s big jelly brain when she died to do a lot of damage.
I like to think the battle bots shot true. I hoped Emma was dead as I leapt behind a battery case and released the button on the remote that blew Bob and Emma apart.
We didn’t have a nuke but my father had packed every nook and cranny of Bob’s insides with C4.
Bob the loyal slave. Bob the fancy wheelchair. Bob the bomb.
The explosion knocked the battle bots flat and the shockwave made me hit my head.
As I blacked out, I said her name, “Emma…Emma…Emma,” just like our night together on the porch in Marfa.
I couldn’t remember Emma’s last name. Or had I ever known it?
24
Every bot from Artesia was hooked up to Mother’s mind. When the NI went down, so did her drones.
I don’t know how long I lay there in the dark listening to my ears ring. I was hungry and thirsty and I had never been more tired in my life. I fell asleep, or maybe that was simply unconsciousness combined with the effects of a concussion. That time is lost to me with only vague, fuzzy images coming in and o
ut of soft focus.
I remember a metallic scraping sound. I suspected it was the blast door creaking open. “Dad? Is that you?”
Minutes or maybe hours seemed to pass without incident. I lapsed into blackness again, unsure I’d wake up.
I admit, for all my defiant words to Mother about living as a human, I was content to skip to the end and hope for a do-over. Dying and feeling the experience was something I figured I could do without and not miss much.
I remember being lifted at some point and held tight. The embrace felt warm and safe.
I’d nearly forgotten what my mother looked like. However, being lifted like that by two strong arms triggered a dim sense memory that rose through my banging headache.
I saw, or maybe dreamt, of my mother, Jean Bolelli, putting me to bed. Long hair tickled my cheek.
“Mom?”
“No,” the voice said. “Mother. But you may call me Jen.”
* * *
Read more in Part III of The Robot Planet Series.
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About the Author
Hi. Thanks for reading Robots Versus Humans. I’m Robert Chazz Chute. I’m a suspense novelist. I do hope you’ll come back to play in my mindfield. If you’re into my stories of the apocalypse as precipitated by the rise of the Next Intelligence, be sure to sign up for updates at AllThatChazz.com so you won’t miss the next installment of this series. The first one is already available. It is another adventure in the same world: Machines Dream of Metal Gods.
If a zombie apocalypse fought by an autistic boy is your horror of choice, This Plague of Days Omnibus won Honorable Mention from Writers Digest for being among the best self-published ebooks of 2014.
In the Ghosts and Demons Series, you will join the Choir Invisible in a dark fantasy about saving our world with swords and sorcery. It’s full of jokes, too. There are three books in that series so far: The Haunting Lessons, The End of the World As I Know It and Fierce Lessons. It’s quite Buffy.
Robots Versus Humans (The Robot Planet Series Book 2) Page 10