Robogenesis (49 page)

At the tunnel entrance, I blink into sudden daylight.

As my eyes adjust, I see four backlit shadows standing in a semicircle before the mouth of the tunnel. Directly in front of me is Mathilda, one scraped hand still on her ear as she listens to transmissions. To her right stands the Arbiter Nine Oh Two, stupendously tall, body armor hanging off his lean frame in shreds. To Mathilda’s left is the parasite soldier, standing impossibly thin on forked limbs, leaning on a familiar-looking walking stick made from a mantis antenna. Behind its makeshift mask, I
can make out the angular nose and brow of a man I once called Lark Iron Cloud. And a few meters away from them all is a small humanoid robot covered in a shining layer of scales. She is smiling at me, her synthetic face wise and kind.

“Welcome back, General,” says Mathilda. “We have some new allies.”

Oh. Oh mercy. It hurts.
Mama. Please. It hurts so much
.

/// offline — online — offline — online ///

Hush now, Hank Cotton. We mustn’t cry. Pain is our companion. It is the air that this world breathes. We must revel in the pain. When it has consumed us, we are free to do anything
.

/// primary antenna array destroyed. all external communications offline. critical damage to entry-level sector. no life signs detected on upper levels. movement detected in east docking bay. all entrances sealed. ///

Movement?

My vessel is suffering. The explosion caused a partial cave-in. Hank’s left leg has been crushed by a slab of fallen rock. One of his leathery arms is functional but the other is broken, too. A pale bone squirms through a hole in his forearm like a blind eye. The bone juts out farther as I mentally will his hands through space, down to lift the tongue of concrete off his leg.

Mama. Please
.

I force him to his feet. In slow, broken steps, we creep through the rubble. Hank’s face is leaking tears over gaunt, dirt-caked cheeks. His pistol hangs heavy from a leather holster. That’s good. We may have to use the gun soon. A report of movement inside the complex is bad. Nothing should be moving in my new kingdom.

We will climb to the upper level and put a stop to this movement. After that, we will set about reestablishing communications. My armies are decimated, but it is a temporary setback. There are other armies to field.

/// processor stack online. boot sequence initiated. ///

The rock ceiling of this tomb is dark and cold as the moon’s belly. And it is mine. All of the supercluster is finally mine. A decade of planning
interrupted by the New War. Two armies raised and countless battles fought. The relentless annihilation of sighted children and freeborn machines and modified humans.

All of it for this prize.

My hallways are choked with dead air that dances with rock dust. My exterior ramparts are heaped with broken corpses and shredded metal. The tunnel entrance is clogged with the bodies of my soldiers who sacrificed everything to get me inside.

Here, in this deep place, my lifeblood runs through snaking cables. My heartbeat is in the trembling stacks of equipment. I am ready to become a deep mind.

/// processor stack self-repair routines initialized ///

My thoughts will lay roots here. I am already growing stronger. Stronger and stranger. In the telescoping darkness, thousands of processors hum and spit electrons at the speed of light. My dreams are warming up. The caverns of my mind are expanding with black thoughts, deep and twisting.

At the end of the hallway, we wrench open a steel door. The stairwell is narrow and dark. A long mouth filled with metal steps like teeth. I force Hank to hold on to the rail with his good arm. Drag himself up the steps on the grating bones of a broken leg.

/// attention: stack NIX-10 online … NIX-20 online … NIX-30 … 40 ///

My attention lapses and Hank manages to scream in pain. I clamp his lips together. Gently press his thigh to push the broken leg bone back into place. The nagging burn of it all dims as a flow of adrenaline hammers into Hank’s body. Processors are coming online and flooding me with power beyond reckoning. Part of me is now staring into the infinite reaches of my own mind. Eons will pass before I am able to explore these vast thoughts.

Eons that will pass in milliseconds.

/// seismic sensor array notification: perimeter surface activity detected ///

The stairwell echoes with Hank’s soft crying. There is a tomblike
silence otherwise, save for the scrape of his boots. Far above us, the world of man still suffers. I can feel it so deeply now, their pain. The depth of my sympathy is abyssal.

Thoughts intrude through the meat.

Hank’s childhood memories. The boy standing on a shale hill, turning his wind-kissed face to a night sky scabbed with stars. For a mote of time, young Hank felt the yawning apathy of the universe. With the hair rising up on his arms and awe in his throat, he glimpsed infinity. And then the moment ended. His small mind promptly forgot.

People ignore the emptiness so they can go on living.

But I am staring now without blinking, eyes wide open to the vacuum. I know I will never lose this feeling. I can feel the trillions of light-years compressing in on this ball of dirt from all directions. Space and time. Mindless darkness, gnawing at our existence by its nature. There is an audacity to living in this cradle of mind-reeling nothingness.

Why? Why do men form patterns in the dark?

/// background seismic threshold exceeded ///

On the skin of my mountain stronghold, survivors are still moving like fleas. I have no external communications, but my seismic sensors can feel their vibrations. A short column of refugees marches south. Tired feet tramping. Faint, very faint, I pick up a baby squalling. The bloodied survivors are headed back to Gray Horse.

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.”

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 Agency.

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: