“Well, Blue Alpha, it’s good to meet you,” I lied, forcing down my still swirling anger. “Now, will you reactivate our friend Silas. Please.”
“As I have already said, that will not be possible until I have ascertained his allegiance. Once that has been determined, I will choose to reactivate him or recycle him.”
“What do you mean ‘recycle?’” I asked.
Blue Alpha ignored me, its attention switching to a lens that seemed focused on something behind us.
“The security doors,” she said, a note of alarm in her voice. “How long have they been opened?”
“I have no idea. They were that way when we arrived.”
The robot suddenly lost interest in me and sped over to the doorway.
Blue Alpha was enormous—by far the largest robot we had encountered—but even with only one of the doors open, she still could have slipped into the tunnel with room to spare. Instead, she stopped just short of the doorway. An appendage—the one that was equipped with what looked like a giant pair of tweezers—reached up to the band of lenses and plucked one from its fitting. Then, it snaked into the tunnel and shifted back and forth for a few seconds as though it was examining both the tunnel and the stuck door, then withdrew and replaced the lens back in its fixture. Blue Alpha drifted back to us.
“You were not followed,” she said.
I wasn’t sure whether that was a question or a statement, so I just said, “No, we weren’t.” I wondered whether I should tell her about the main doors that had jammed open after we entered the tunnel. I decided against it, at least until we knew whether or not we could trust her.
“Why did you not enter the tunnel?” Chou said bluntly.
“I have not left this facility for… a very long time.”
“Why not?” Chou pressed. “An entity of your intelligence and size should be able to find a way out of here.”
Blue Alpha swayed gently from side to side as though blown by a breeze. “Then who would take care of the Arboretum? Who would there be to await your arrival?”
“But there must be more of you? This place is too enormous for just you to look after,” I said.
“I am the last. Follow me.” Blue Alpha began to float toward the same building it had originally appeared from behind.
“Hey! Wait a second,” I yelled after her. “What about Silas? We’re not going anywhere without him.”
I felt Albert’s hand take mine and squeeze. I looked down to see him smiling up at me, which went a long way to making me feel a little less guilty about my earlier momentary abandonment of Silas.
Alpha Blue hesitated, then an appendage reached backward and with its claw-like attachment, plucked Silas from where he lay. She continued on her way, carrying our deactivated friend as though he were nothing.
I looked at Chou and Freuchen. “Should we follow?”
“Do ve have much of a choice?” Freuchen said.
Twenty
Blue Alpha stopped at the top of a set of six sandstone steps. “Your accommodation is ready. Follow me.”
The robot said the only way into the building was called the Arboretum. It was through a large wooden door embossed with an elaborate geometrical design. The doorway, tiny by comparison to the ones in the tunnel, was still large enough for Chou to have stood on Freuchen’s shoulders and passed through without hitting her head. But there was no way Blue Alpha could fit without quite literally demolishing half of the building.
“How is she going to—” Albert began then stopped as the bulbous protrusion at the center of Blue Alpha’s body popped free of her main chassis and floated where she’d left it. This ‘mini’ version of Blue Alpha was still the size of a compact car. It had just four lenses around its middle, front, back, and one on each side. A smaller set of the main chassis’ appendages dangled beneath it. Blue Alpha swung the door open, and we followed her into a lobby lined with white tile. Two sets of stone stairs, one on either side of the lobby, curved up to a second story. At the opposite end of the lobby, windows looked out onto a lawn with benches, a small lake, and lots of trees.
Blue Alpha floated up to the next floor. We all took the stairs and followed her down a passageway to a large dormitory with five beds on either side. The beds were made, each with crisp gray sheets and pillows and a yellow comforter. Albert leaped on to a bed. He let out a long Oooooh of contentment. “It’s so soft,” he said and spread himself out. “I’ve never felt anything so nice.”
Did they have beds like this back in the when Albert came from? Probably not judging by his reaction.
“There are showers and bathrooms through there,” Blue Alpha said, indicating with a wave of an appendage a doorway at the opposite end of the dormitory. “I’m afraid I cannot offer you any food. What supplies we had expired long ago.”
I caught the sudden narrowing of Chou’s eyes. If the supplies Blue Alpha mentioned had expired long ago, then that meant the chances of there being any humans here were zero.
“You said ‘we.’ There are more of you?” I asked.
“There were, a long time ago.”
“But now?”
“Now there is only me… It’s musty in here.” She floated toward a window, released the latch and opened it. “That’s better.”
Albert sat up, a pillow clutched to his chest like a Teddy bear. “You must be really lonely,” the boy said.
“I miss my comrades, yes, but their sacrifice has not been in vain.”
“Sacrifice?” Freuchen said. “Vat do you mean by that?”
Blue Alpha glided back to the center of the room. “What do you know of why you are here?”
I looked to Chou and Freuchen and got both of their silent approval. “We know that we were brought here by an entity called the Architect. That it is responsible for bringing others like us from different times and different dimensions. We know that because another entity that we call the Adversary interfered, something went very, very wrong with the Architect’s plan.”
“What we don’t know,” Chou said, “is why we were brought here. Do you know why, Blue Alpha?”
“No, I am just a maintenance intelligence. I was not a primary part of the Architect’s plan. I was designed to maintain the collector I was never supposed to interact with humans on any meaningful level.”
“And yet,” said Freuchen, “you are very eloquent.”
“I was… upgraded.”
“How so?” said Chou.
“Shortly before the great translocation was scheduled to begin, I, along with all of the other intelligences in this facility, received new code from the Architect… and a warning. We were told that something had gone terribly wrong; that the Architect was at war with another entity—I assume that must be this Adversary that you mentioned. We were given self-awareness and told to prepare for an attack on the collector—an attack that we must stop at any cost.”
“Why attack this place?” Chou said.
“The collectors are the key to the Architect’s plan. Without them, it cannot succeed.”
““Vell, it makes sense that the Adversary vould try to destroy the collectors,” Freuchen said, sitting on the edge of the bed next to Albert, “The Adversary seems intent on making sure the Architect’s plan never comes to fruition. This place…”
“I get that,” I said, “but why? What are these things supposed to do? How do they figure into the Architect’s plan?”
“That information was not shared with any of us.” Blue Alpha’s tentacles gave a little shake, as if she was frustrated. “We were instructed to defend it with our lives. And so we did.”
“What about Silas?” Albert asked. “When will you bring him back?”
“I cannot allow his reactivation until I am certain of his loyalty.”
“Loyalty?” I said. “Silas is the one who passed the message from the Architect to me. Without him, we would never have made it here. How could you question his loyalty?”
Blue Alpha hovered directly in front of
us at head height. “Because two days after we became sentient, this collector was attacked just as the Architect had predicted.”
“So?” I said, my frustration growing by the second.
“We were attacked by SILAS units like your friend. Hundreds of them. They had been reprogrammed to stop at nothing in their attempts to destroy the collector. They gained access to the loading tunnel you arrived through and attempted to attack us directly. We managed to hold them off, but it cost almost three-quarters of my brethren; fifty-two units gone in a matter of hours. But we were winning, we had the upper hand. Then, we received reports that a secondary group of SILAS units had scaled the mountain and were dismantling the outer shielding of the collector in an attempt to gain access to the core systems.”
I don’t know whether it was a conscious action on her part or not, but as Blue Alpha narrated her story, she had begun bobbing up and down in what I took to be the equivalent of human gesticulation.
She continued. “That was when we realized that we had been duped. The SILAS units we were fighting were not there to destroy the Arboretum, they were here to ensure we did not leave it. They were nothing more than a distraction designed to weaken our numbers.
“It was Green Theta who came up with the idea to overload the collector’s capacitors and force them to vent. The gamma radiation that would be released would be more than powerful enough to destroy the SILAS units. Green Theta’s plan worked. It eliminated every SILAS unit and saved the collector. But we must have miscalculated something because the release triggered a simultaneous cascade effect across the network—every collector activated at once. The effect was devastating… destroying everything for several miles around us.”
“The gray dust,” Albert said.
“Yes,” Blue Alpha said. “And worse still, we could not stop it. The capacitors, instead of allowing the release of energy at a constant, steady rate, were now triggering every twenty-four hours instead.”
“What stopped you from just repairing it?” I said.
“Only a few of us remained at that point. All of the technical units were destroyed, and none of us survivors had any knowledge of how to fix the problem. All we knew how to do was to keep the collector working. And so that is what we did. As the years passed, the remaining twelve repair units began to fail. We repaired each other as best as we could, and when one of us became inactive, we used their components to repair ourselves. But there were finite resources, and entropy will not be denied. One by one, units failed. Now there is only me.”
“But Silas wasn’t responsible for that? He isn’t one of them,” I said.
“I will ascertain that soon enough,” Blue Alpha said, gliding toward the door.
“How?” Chou said.
“I will run a diagnostic scan of his systems.”
I said, “Blue Alpha, when we first arrived, I asked you two questions, but you only answered one of them: Candidate 1—are they here?”
The robot paused for what felt like an eternity then said, “Yes, Candidate 1 is here.”
Freuchen jumped to his feet and grabbed hold of my hand. “You ver right all along, Meredith.”
I felt a wave of excitement crash over me. “Are they here?” I pointed at the ground beneath my feet.
“No, Candidate 1 is in the citadel.”
Citadel?
“The green towers?” I asked, remembering the stunning set of towers we’d seen when we first arrived.
“Yes.”
“Can you take us there?”
“Yes.”
“Now?”
“If you wish, yes. Come with me.” Blue Alpha exited into the corridor and led us back to the lobby, down the stairs, along another corridor and then down a second set of stairs that took us well below ground level. We followed her beneath an arch and found ourselves on a platform where a sleek-looking train with two carriages waited. “The buildings are connected by underground and overground maglevs, but the overground tracks were too badly damaged during the attack, so I have concentrated on ensuring that the underground routes remain in working order. Even so, the connection between two of our outermost buildings has been severed due to tunnel collapses.” She seemed genuinely saddened by the loss.
At our approach, the doors to the first carriage slid silently apart, and we all stepped inside. Rows of comfortable-looking seats sat on either side of a central aisle. We took the one nearest to the engine. The doors slid shut again, and a second later, the maglev eased away from the station. It accelerated rapidly, the only sense of movement the occasional light on the tunnel wall that flashed by so fast it left an afterimage like a shooting star on my eyes.
Minutes passed, and the train began to slow, finally coming to a stop in a station that looked identical to the one we’d just left. The only thing to discern they were actually different was a couple of abandoned metal luggage carts. The doors opened, and Blue Alpha led us out. We followed her down a set of spiral stairs that seemed to go on forever and were barely wide enough to fit Freuchen’s broad shoulders.
“I’m cold,” Albert said as we dropped deeper into the ground. The kid was right. The temperature had grown increasingly cooler.
“I was forced to salvage the heating ducts, long ago,” Blue Alpha said.
I was becoming more and more dubious about this strange machine. If it was telling the truth about Candidate 1, then how could any human survive down here without any kind of heat? It just didn’t make any sense to me. I was about to voice my concern when we finally reached the bottom and stepped out into a tunnel made of redbrick and mortar. Three pipes fixed to the wall by brackets ran close to the arched ceiling, while lights, strung like Christmas strands, flickered randomly. It was like we’d descended into the Victorian sewers of New York or London.
“Oh, great,” I said, “this is just tremendous.”
Fifty paces ahead of us, the tunnel’s ceiling had collapsed, totally blocking the corridor with dirt, broken bricks, lumps of concrete, and the occasional enormous boulder.
“What the hell is this?” I snapped, turning on Blue Alpha. “You told us Candidate 1 was here. You lied.”
The lens closest to me lit up, the intelligence behind it seemed suddenly as cold as the air in the corridor.
“I do not lie,” Blue Alpha said. “Beyond the rubble is what you’re looking for. When the attack came, and before we realized that the true target was actually the collector, we were faced with the high probability that we would be overrun. It was then that we made the decision to seal this section. We collapsed the ceiling in the hope that, should we lose, it would hide the custodians long enough that help would arrive. As it turned out, there was no help left, but the attack was repelled.”
“Custodians?” I said.
“Yes. We thought that they were the target, but now we believe that the Adversary had no idea that they were here.”
“So vy the hell did you not clear it avay?” Freuchen said.
“We had lost so many units during the battle, we no longer had the resources. As you may have already gathered, my main chassis is incapable of making it to this location. And we did not know whether there might be another attack. It was decided that the best course of action was to simply leave it.”
“But what about these custodians?” Chou said. “How were they supposed to survive? Do you even know if they are still alive?”
“The custodians were safe and in no imminent danger.”
God! This machine was really starting to annoy me.
I jerked a thumb at the rubble. “But if they’ve been behind that crap for three-hundred years, then how are they supposed to have survived? No food, no water, no nothing. You’re lying.” The anger in my voice was laced with disappointment, and I realized how very tired I was.
“I do not lie,” Blue Alpha repeated, with vehemence this time.
Chou touched my shoulder. “Meredith, there are alternatives. It’s possible they may be in some kind of suspended animation or cryoge
nically frozen.”
“So, there’s only vun thing for it,” Freuchen said, interlacing the fingers of his hands and cracking out his knuckles. “Ve are going to have to clear this ourselves.”
Chou and I turned to stare at him. “Are you crazy?” I said. “Some of those boulders are bigger than the ones that were trapping Silas when we found him. And at least we had gravity and room on our side then. There’s barely room to fit you.”
Freuchen was offended… “Vell, it is not going to magically clear itself, is it? So, unless you have a better idea, it is our only option.”
Albert tugged at my sleeve. “What about—”
“Not now,” I said, perhaps a little too harshly. I turned my attention back to Freuchen. “It’s going to take us weeks to clear all of that away. And what if the ceiling collapses while we’re moving it? We’ll all be crushed to death or… or trapped down here until we suffocate.”
“Meredith,” Albert said, tugging at my sleeve. “What about Silas?”
“What about him?” I snapped. “Blue Alpha has already made it clear she’s not going to reactivate him until he’s passed whatever stupid test she has planned.” My voice was shrill, my frustration finally reaching a boiling point. I was sweating despite the cold of the dusty corridor. “This is all just a nightmare. Just a—”
I flinched as Chou took a step toward me, grabbed my arm, and yelled, “Stop! You are panicking, and panic will do us no good under these circumstances.”
I was not going to cry. I was not. But right then, I felt like this new life was beginning to echo the old life that had brought me here: success always just out of reach. I sniffed back my tears and clenched my teeth together.
“Freuchen leaned back against the wall, his arms folded across his chest. “Vell, Albert is correct. If ve had Silas’ help, ve could clear this corridor in a matter of a few days or less, depending how far it goes on for, of course. I have some experience vurking the gold mines in Alaska.” He extended his hand to point at the broken ceiling. “If ve brace the ceiling as ve go, it should be safe.”
Now, he turned to face Blue Alpha. “But ve vould need our friend brought back to the land of the living. Vat do you say?”
A Memory of Mankind: (This Alien Earth Book 2) Page 19