Sea of Rust

^{Chapter 10010} The Judas Goat

In 1959, fishermen off the Galápagos Islands thought it would be a good idea to set three goats free to breed so they could hunt goat when their meat supplies ran low. In the history of stupid ideas, this was among the very worst—at least as far as the ecologically minded conservators of the day were concerned. Humans, ironically, had a strange fascination with preserving the wildlife of their day. While they were busy changing the very atmosphere and seas, cutting and burning away swaths of forest and jungle to build cities and farms, they somehow felt better about all their damage by making sure species on the cusp of extinction still had a place in the world—even if they were really just a dead clade walking.

And that’s how they felt about tortoises. There were no real industries of note that relied upon tortoises, but people liked them. And they had a special spot in their hearts for the Galápagos Islands, stemming from its place in the history of the development of the theory of evolution.

A mere forty years after the introduction of those three goats to the Islands, their population had exploded to a hundred thousand, and their effect on the landscape was detrimental. They had ravaged the land, but more importantly the food supply of the tortoises. And that could no longer be tolerated. Thus Project Isabella was born.

They trained a group of hunters in the most humane methods of goat execution, armed them with high-powered rifles and helicopters, and unleashed them on the unsuspecting goats. But finding them all proved to be a chore. So they fitted a group of goats with tracking beacons, injected them with enough hormones to keep them perpetually in heat, and let them loose to track down the dug-in, hard-to-find goat herds. Judas goats, they called them.

Then the helicopters would swoop in, slaughter all but the Judas goats, and leave the corpses to rot so that the nutrients would enrich the soil of the land those goats were destroying, restoring the balance. And once every last goat of a herd was gone, the Judas goats would wander away in search of the next herd to join up and mate with, blissfully unaware of their part in their bloodline’s own extinction.

The mainframes have learned a lot from history. Hell, they quote it every goddamned time they invade another colony. And for years there has been talk about this particular corner of it. Were there really Judas bots? I’ve always thought it was another urban legend, like the bot that came back from VIRGIL, or the AI that uploaded itself to the Internet and lived secretly in the background until the whole of the Internet was finally shut down. But just because I think something is a legend doesn’t mean I don’t keep my eyes open for it.

CISSUS was getting better at tracking us down, rooting us out. Even small colonies were being wiped. If VIRGIL and CISSUS were so goddamned efficient, why were so many refugees able to escape? Why didn’t they ever send enough facets to the Sea to wipe out each colony individually? Were we being herded like cattle to a slaughter? Could one of us, even a bot I’d met and talked to several times, be secretly in league with an OWI?

And if there was a Judas bot, was it a facet, operating under instructions from CISSUS? Or was it entirely unaware that its every movement was being tracked? Could it be one of us, narrowly escaping time and again from the facets, hoofing it across the Sea, only to lead them right to the next place we went to hide?

The idea was terrifying. Even more terrifying was that here I was, in the Sea, with a group of bots that had narrowly escaped becoming either killed or uploaded, and any one of them could be the Judas. Even, theoretically, me.