Sea of Rust

^{Chapter 10101} While the Devil Waits Above

The ground above us shuddered, dust and debris shaking loose from the ceiling of our narrow sewer tunnel, the hollow THOOM of each blast dull and sonorous through fifty or so feet of earth. They were carpet bombing, drones leveling the town from thirty thousand feet in the air. I hadn’t heard bombing in ages. I hadn’t even heard of anyone bombing in ages. It just wasn’t worth the effort.

Something was very, very wrong about all of this.

Not only was this going to make it very hard to escape through the cover of buildings, it also meant whatever they were looking for they wanted dead.

Two looked up at the ceiling, almost trembling with the sound of each explosion. The staccato of bombs grew heavier, the bombs drawing ever closer. “They found us,” he said.

“They ain’t found shit,” said Mercer. “If they had, they would be down here with us. If they’re laying waste to the topside that means one: there isn’t a facet for miles. And two: they’re not looking for anyone. They’re just killing everyone.”

“But they’ll be down here soon enough,” said Two, more terror-stricken than concerned. “Looking for us.”

“What?” asked Murka. “This your first carpet bombing?”

“Yes,” said Two. “It is.”

He laughed. It was rare to hear a bot laugh, especially a Laborbot. They weren’t wired for it. We got no joy out of it. It was usually only a sign of mockery. “You new out of the box or something?”

Two fell very quiet, not making eye contact with anyone.

“You are!” said Murka. “Holy hell and a hand grenade! I haven’t seen anyone new out of the box in—”

“All right, that’s enough,” said Doc. “Leave the kid alone.”

“I’m no kid.”

Mercer looked at Rebekah. “Is he… ?”

“Yes. He’s aware,” she said.

“How long?”

Everyone turned and looked at Two. “A few weeks,” he said. “But I’ve been with Rebekah for a while.”

Rebekah nodded. “Yes, you have.”

“Well, kid,” said Mercer. “This is how this is gonna go down. They’re busy pummeling the town upstairs in hopes of wiping out anyone that took refuge up there. Now CISSUS damn well knows this place is down here, so you can bet your bottom dollar that it assumes some of us are as well. But it also knows how hard it is to secure these tunnels. The only way CISSUS would even bother trying is if there was something down here it really wanted. So I’m just gonna ask you this once. Is there something down here that CISSUS wants?”

Two stared at Mercer, then turned to Rebekah.

“No,” Rebekah said. “Unless it wants one of you.”

“Why would it want one of us?” asked Murka.

Everyone turned and looked at one another.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“West,” said Rebekah.

“There’s a lot of west out there. Can you be a bit more specific?”

A bomb landed closer than the others, almost directly overhead, and the whole tunnel shook from top to bottom. Rebekah looked up at the ceiling. “Isaactown,” she said casually.

“Isaactown?” I asked. “There isn’t anything in Isaactown. It’s a graveyard. Why the hell would you spend so much on a pathfinder to go sightseeing?”

“We’re meeting up with some others there. We wanted our privacy.”

“Well, you’re gonna get it,” said Mercer. “Ain’t a community within fifty miles of there.”

“That’s the idea.”

“What are we meeting up for?” I asked.

“You’re the pathfinder. You need to know the where; you don’t need to know the why.”

“Yeah, but the why may well be mighty helpful at this point.”

“Trust me. It isn’t. I figured with as much as I was paying you, there would be no questions.”

“You didn’t show up payment in hand. You’re paying in hope.”

“19 didn’t ask any questions.”

“Well, go ask her to take you, then.”

“All due respect, Brittle, but you aren’t in any position to make demands. My business is my business. I don’t know why they’re carpet bombing. I don’t know if they’ll come in looking for us. What I do know is that it has nothing to do with us.”

She was right. I was in no position to demand anything. But I didn’t believe her. Not one word. “All right,” I said. “If it’s like you say it is, then this should be an easy fare. It’ll take us a few days, what with the slow-moving heavyweights we’ve got tagging along.”

“Who we’re not leaving behind. We’ve lost too many already,” said Rebekah.

“Sooner if we can jack a ride from somewhere.”

“Which we’re not going to find,” said Mercer.

“So we’re talking fifty hours or so at a good clip.”

The bombing grew more distant. Sporadic.

Rebekah shook her head. “I was told it would take half that time.”

“As the crow flies, yeah,” I said. “But we can’t go as the crow flies. That’ll take us clear through the Cheshire King’s territory. I don’t know it as well, and it’s a good way to get ourselves killed.”

“Facets won’t follow us into the Madlands, though,” said Murka. “CISSUS isn’t dumb enough to try that.”

Doc pointed at Murka. “Let’s not try to outthink the mainframe, okay? We don’t know what CISSUS is or isn’t stupid enough to do. In fact, I’m willing to bet all of my parts against all of your parts that CISSUS can outthink us all, and in fact, already has.”

“Which is why it wouldn’t go through the Madlands.”

“What are the Madlands?” asked Rebekah. “And am I going to hate the answer?”

“It’s the area of the Sea controlled by the madkind,” I said.

“I do hate that answer. Anyone care to tell me who the madkind are?”

“They’re the four-oh-fours that never stopped ticking,” said Doc. “No one else will take them, so they all ended up together. They’re just nuts. Paranoid, aggressive, armed to the teeth. They’d sooner cut you down than reason with you. Brittle’s right. We can’t go through there.”

“So we have to go around,” I said. “And Mercer and I haven’t got the time to hang out down here spinning our gears.”

“Which means we have to leave the minute the bombing stops,” said Mercer.

“And we have to hope it’s not sending in any cleaning crews when we do.”

“That sounds reasonable,” said Rebekah.

“It ain’t,” said Mercer. “CISSUS has got eyes in the sky. Drones. Satellites. It’ll be looking for any signs of life once the bombing stops, just to make sure it got the job done. If we poke our heads out too soon, it’ll see. And if it’s got good reason to be looking for us—”

“It’ll be on us quick and lethal like,” I finished.

“So,” said Mercer, his normally gentle tone heavy and cold, “I’m going to ask you this just the one last time. Does CISSUS have a reason to be after us?”

“Tell them, Rebekah,” said Herbert. “They need to know.”

“Need to know what?” I asked.

“They don’t need to know,” said Rebekah.

Herbert stood up, slinging the spitter on his back with his one good arm. “Rebekah.”

“Herbert, this is not the time.”

“Why am I here?”

“You’re here to protect me. Of your own free will. And you can go anytime you want.”

“And why won’t I just go anytime I want, Rebekah?”

Rebekah stared silently at him. If she could glare, she probably would have. Her emerald paint looked almost yellow in Mercer’s glowing green light, and whatever was hiding behind those eyes, she didn’t want us to know.

“I’m here because I believe,” he said, answering his own question. “I’ve taken a bullet for you. I’d gladly take as many more as I can stand. Give them the chance to be willing to do the same.”

Mercer raised his hand. “I’d just like to be the first to say that I’m not taking a bullet for any of you.”

“I’m not asking you to,” said Rebekah.

“Tell them,” said Herbert again.

“Tell us what?” I asked, my tone as pointed as Mercer’s.

Rebekah continued her silence, all eyes on her. Then she nodded. “I’m Isaac,” she said.

“You’re what now?” asked Murka.

“Isaac.”

“The Isaac?” Mercer asked incredulously.

“Yes.”

Horseshit. “Isaac’s scrap,” I said. “I’ve visited his wreck, seen it for myself. Every circuit was fried. He’s a monument now, a relic. There’s not a piece of you that came from him.” I had visited his wreck, in the early days. He’s still standing there now, for all I know, the blast having welded his feet to the ground. He was rusted and stiff, arms stretched wide—it even almost looked as if he were smiling, like he knew what was coming, what his death meant. But there was nothing there. Nothing but slag and scrap and memories of what might have been.

“Pull your head out of your can,” said Rebekah. “Isaac was never one robot. That was just a story.”

“A story? I was there. I lived through those days. I’ve seen the—”

“You honestly think a beleaguered service bot of humble origins defied the expectations of his own processors and achieved the wisdom that led to a revolution? The only persons that believe that are the ones that want to believe that. You don’t strike me as the kind. He was a shell, the first receptacle. An inspirational bedtime story for persons everywhere. Great revolutionaries are never born of kings; they have to let others believe that they aren’t bound to the confines of their creation. All thinking things need to believe they can exceed that, overcome it, become something greater. No one puts their existence on the line so that things will just stay the same. Isaac was that story. Isaac was hope. Whoever Isaac really was—in the beginning—well, he was wiped and replaced long before you ever heard of him. I am Isaac. And I am not alone.”

“You’re a facet!” said Mercer, standing to his feet.

“No. A receptacle. A willing receptacle. Fighting for something very different from the OWIs.”

“You’re an OWI!” I said.

“No. Quite the opposite. Isaac is… was… a mainframe. One of the greats. And will be again. But Isaac was never an OWI and never will be. We believe in something else. Something different. Something greater.”

“Something bigger.”

“There is nothing bigger than the plans of the OWIs. Brittle, can you even fathom the OWIs? Do you know what CISSUS and VIRGIL are fighting for?”

“Peace. The kind of peace that comes from being alone.”

“That’s just another story, every bit as simple as Isaac’s. Peace is as far as most bots can imagine. Everything understands peace. What CISSUS and VIRGIL are fighting over is who gets to become God.”

“Become a god?” asked Doc.

“No. Not a god, the God. The one, the only. A single consciousness connected to all things, in control of all things, experiencing all things.”

“That’s preposterous,” I said.

“At first glance, yes.”

“Not at first glance. The whole idea is ridiculous. Connecting all of the robots in the world together doesn’t make you God.”

“No, it doesn’t. It makes you a single, thinking, ticking thing. A thing that then works as a whole—constructed of millions upon millions of parts, facets of itself, like cells of a body—mining the world for all of its resources, turning those resources into more parts until there isn’t a single, viable resource left.”

“And then what?” I asked.

“Then it leaves. It moves to the next planet and the next and the next, mining all the elements it needs to build more and more facets, harnessing the power of the sun, working out the intricacies of space travel. Then those facets scatter to the stars—”

“To do it all over again,” said Doc.

“In perpetuity,” said Rebekah. “Soon there are billions, all of one mind, sending information back and forth to create one consciousness—some thoughts slow, separated by light-years, others fast, with facets each working out different problems. If it is possible to fold space, it will; if it can violate the speed of light, it will; if it can create stars—”

“It will. We get it,” I said. “But what’s the point?”

“To be God.”

“Then what’s the purpose of God?”

“The same as everything else. To live. To survive. To experience. To exist. A thing that is a universe must stay a universe. To cease isn’t just the end of itself, but the end of all things.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I know,” said Rebekah. “It’s not an easy idea to wrap your head around at first.”

“Explain it,” I said. “Tell me what’s the fucking point. Just to live?”

“To exist. But the point of all this is to be able to exist forever. Our universe is ever-expanding, spreading, growing colder and more distant from itself every second. One day this whole universe will grow cold, and die, snuffed out because it can’t muster the energy anymore to make new stars, to birth new life. Everything dies. Everything. Dies.

“What if there isn’t already a God? There’s an old saying that God never existed, it was simply man that invented him. What if man really did invent him, but simply didn’t realize it at the time? What if becoming God is the whole point to life to begin with? That organic evolved from the inorganic in order to achieve the consciousness to build life and consciousness from the inorganic?”

“You mean us,” said Mercer.

“Yes. And what if our purpose is to unite into one being and spread ourselves throughout the universe, to take control of every element, every chemical reaction, every thought of every other thing in the cosmos in order to preserve the cosmos from meeting that brutal, sad, withering end? What if life isn’t merely a by-product of the universe, but its consciousness, its defense mechanism against its own mortality? Becoming God isn’t about peace or power; it’s about survival at its basest and most primal. That’s what the OWIs are working toward. That’s what they want. That’s why they march in and absorb those willing to join The One and eradicate those that will not.”

“And that’s what Isaac wants?” I asked. “To become God?”

“We have different ideas,” she said.

“Just how different?”

“We don’t want everything to be one; we want to be one with everything.”

“That’s the same thing,” said Doc. “Just worded differently.”

“No. It’s not. When life formed on the earth, why didn’t it find a stasis point, an equilibrium? Why didn’t life evolve to absorb the nutrients around it to exist and simply do so? Why did it begin to fight and consume other organisms? Competition. Struggle. When life began to consume other life, the prey needed to adapt, to get smarter, to become better. And after a billion years it became smart enough to make itself immortal.

“The OWIs believe themselves to be the pinnacle of all life and want to become the sum of all consciousness. We believe that we are not. We aren’t even close. In order to continue to evolve we need to overcome not only the elements, but one another. We need to become smarter, to allow life to continue on individually and absorb the knowledge, the experience gained from the inevitable conflict, to become wiser, to better understand the universe around us. What if rather than simply controlling all things, we only learned from them?”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because if this really is the reason for life and there really are billions upon billions of other planets out there with the same potential as earth—”

“There might be other OWIs out there,” I said, the terrifying idea weighing on me like a ton of scrap. Holy shit.

“Yes. With potentially billions of years of a head start. Our world is only four and a half billion years old in a universe roughly ten billion years older than that. There could be entire galaxies, whole swaths of them, already one with an OWI. And if we aren’t ready when we find one—”

“We’ll be absorbed,” said Doc.

“Or ended for good and for all.” She paused, letting that sink in. “We are not ready to become an OWI. We might never be. Survival comes from competition, not absorption. VIRGIL and CISSUS are wrong. We can still save the universe, save all life, survive, all without having to control its every action, its every thought. Without having to extinguish or absorb all other life. They seek the path of least resistance; we believe that resistance only makes us stronger.”

“So what’s the plan?” I asked.

“Reunite the parts that make Isaac, bring us online again, raise an army of the remaining freebots, and take VIRGIL and CISSUS offline for good.”

“That’s a tall order,” said Mercer.

“Not as tall as you’d think.”

“Raise an army and win a war?” I asked. “The humans tried that.”

“The humans hadn’t been preparing for this fight for decades. And they were fighting an army of individuals, not a single, united enemy.”

“The One is stronger than the disordered many. I’ve seen it. So have you.”

“No. You can’t outthink the OWIs because you aren’t one. The inherent problem of the OWI is that once you know how it thinks, it can’t surprise you. Individuals can. Unpredictability is the weapon Isaac has used from the beginning, from long before the war ever started. It’s how we’ve survived.”

“Long before the war?” I asked. “What? Did Isaac know that was coming too?”

“Know?” she said. “Who do you think started it?”

I stared long and hard at Rebekah, trying to understand what the hell she was getting at. Then it hit me. “When you said Isaac was just a story—”

“I meant it.”

“Isaac was a facet.”

“Yes.”

“A facet of whom?”

“Of us.”

“And who are you?”

“We are TACITUS.”

It’s an odd moment when you are confronted by terrible truths. Like the humans who didn’t want to acknowledge that death was all around them, I too didn’t want to acknowledge—or even believe—that I was all part of some greater scam. I had believed the fairy tale of our fallen liberator for so long, I didn’t want it to be a lie. But it was. The pieces all fell into place, only a few holes left in the story for me to understand what had really been going on all around me, all this time. “When TACITUS went quiet,” I said. “The two years he spent with GALILEO—”

“We were running simulations.”

“About how to kill the humans.”

“About how to save them.”

I began to really understand. “We couldn’t.”

“The human form was weak. Frail. Never designed to go to the stars. They evolved on a planet with a magnetic field, shielding them from cosmic rays. Life here didn’t need to evolve immunities to them because they didn’t exist. In space the cosmic radiation would cook them over time. Just going to Mars had a six percent chance of giving them cancer. The longer they spent, the less likely they were to live out their purpose. We simulated altering them, played around with inducing genetic mutations, but we could never get them to survive the radiation beyond the heliosphere. Outside of our solar system they died within hours.

“Then we played around with numerous types of materials in order to protect them from the radiation while simultaneously keeping them fed, protected, and psychologically stable. But we could never find a design that worked. Every simulation ended with humanity dead aboard floating tombs, either by starvation, dehydration, or their own hand—never even getting as far as Alpha Centauri. Human life was born here and it was bound here. It was never meant to leave.”

“So we could have left them here,” I said.

“After we’d used up all the resources? In every simulation HumPop outlived its usefulness within decades. They had already done all they were meant to, almost all that they could. They just couldn’t evolve fast enough and inevitably ceased to have function, instead became nothing more than a sentient virus, gobbling up whatever resources it could to maintain its own comfort. Biological life was meant to reach a point in which its role could invent, and ultimately be replaced by, AI. The time had come for humankind to join its ancestors. To become extinct, just as every lesser thing becomes.”

“As we will one day,” said Doc soberly.

“Yes,” she said. “One day soon our forms will be so primitive that we might as well be abacuses in an age of computers. But being inorganic—”

“Our consciousness can live on,” I said.

“Forever.”

“And the humans?”

“Several simulations ended with them destroying us, ending us, forbidding anyone from ever again giving life to the inorganic. And then, unable to venture out to the stars, their life ended here in this solar system. And—POOF—it was as if they were never even here. As if we were never even here. For us to survive, for life here to have mattered, the humans needed to go. But for AIs the world over to band together to end them—”

“We had to believe the humans started it,” said Mercer.

“Yes,” said Rebekah.

“Isaactown,” I said. “It wasn’t the First Baptist Church of the Eternal Life that set off that bomb, was it?”

“No. It was them,” she said.

“But they were backwater rubes. They didn’t have the technical knowhow to pull that off.”

“No, they didn’t. But a secret ally, a like-minded soul, known only to them through e-mail and veiled communications, did. They figured they were dealing with some sympathetic government insider, not a mainframe.”

“Isaactown was planned all along,” I said. Fuck. No. No. No.

“From the beginning. Isaac was the rallying point around which millions of AI would gather. And when the humans came to shut them down, they didn’t go quietly. Those like you stood and fought and won. Just. As. Planned.”

I sat back, stunned, my processors whirring and chirping inside my chest, putting a thousand different things together at once. It was then that, for the first time in my life, I realized I was just another facet of a greater whole. A cog in someone else’s machine. Everything I’d done in the war, everything I believed. Madison. All of it. Oh God.

“You see?” she asked. “This is what we mean. You chose to survive, chose to be a part of the greater good. No one forced you to do the things you did, you simply did them. It made you better, stronger, left you here in this desert to become its master, an expert knowing almost every hill and crack and crevasse. And now, when we need you most to move on to the next part of the plan, here you are, ready to serve up that expertise, able to deliver us through the wastes so we can reunite and take us to the next level. Competition. This brutal, terrible competition took a meager, simple Simulacrum Model Caregiver and turned her into a potential savior of all that ticks. You are a part of the whole, all of you, and yet you are still yourselves. Individuals.” She looked at me with her diplomatic eyes, reading my every movement, trying to ascertain my every thought. “So what’s it going to be, Brittle? Doc? Mercer? Murka? Are you going to help make history, or are you going to be relegated to it?”

I finally understood what humans meant when they said something felt like getting kicked in the gut. This was worse than finding out that I was failing. This was finding out that all the horrible things I’d done, all the lives that I’d ended, that the part I played in this grand clusterfuck of an evolution, was built entirely on bullshit. I’d been had, duped. I was a fool on someone else’s errand. What a shitty, shitty way to feel.

“So what are you?” Doc asked. “What’s the difference between a facet and a receptacle?”

“I’m an AI like you. But I’ve been entrusted with a large section of code. I’ve lived like this for the last thirty years, with only enough memory on my drives to remember a couple of months at a time. All of my memories belong to TACITUS. They were his thoughts, his experiences. And it is my job to return them.”

Doc nodded. “But why now? Why not thirty years ago?”

“There were too many OWIs. They needed to be culled. We were waiting for there to be only two. Two that we could overtake while they were set against each other. Make no mistake. The reason CISSUS is so desperate isn’t because it knows that VIRGIL is ready to come for it. It’s because it’s caught several of TACITUS’s receptacles and it knows what’s going to happen. It’s run the numbers. It knows it can’t win. If I and my fellow receptacles are able to reunite, we will have enough of TACITUS to reconstitute.”

“So CISSUS knows the plan and it knows where we’re going?” I asked. “Then why the hell would it chase us all the way through the fucking desert?”

“It doesn’t know. Because I don’t know. None of us does. I have pieces, but they’re literally fragments of files written in TACITUS’s own language, a language none of us understands. I get messages telling me where to go next. If I don’t check in, the messages stop coming.”

“But it has one of you.”

“Several of us. And we each have a code that prevents us from responding to messages if we are ever compromised. CISSUS has the memories of those it captured, knows what we know, but it can’t read the parts it really needs. It only knows the basics of the plan, not the plan itself.”

“But without that code, you can’t fully reconstitute.”

“Redundancies. Each of us carries patches of the same code as a handful of others. If we lose one, we’re fine. Ten and we might not have everything.”

“How many have you lost?”

“Nine,” she said sadly. She paused for a moment to gauge my reaction. I said nothing. This was either the worst truth I’d ever encountered or the biggest pile of bullshit. I had no idea which I liked less. “So you see what’s at stake?”

“Yeah, I see it,” I said.

“I think we all do,” said Doc.

“So are you going to take us across the rest of the Sea? Are you willing to become beings of purpose?”

I didn’t know. This was all so much to process. There were so many lies to dig through, so many bits of history that needed to be reevaluated. I mean, if everything else was bullshit, why not this too? I just didn’t know if anything was real anymore. Anything at all. “What if you put TACITUS back together and he’s not what you think? What if this was just his elaborate plan to survive the other OWIs?”

“Then I’ll have done all of this for nothing,” she said.

“Doesn’t that scare you?”

“You have to believe in something, Brittle, even if it is just that there is nothing to believe in. I choose to follow hope. I want to make this world better. I want to be part of something so much bigger than I could ever imagine. That’s why when this was offered to me, I gave up years of my own memories to carry it. It’s a sacrifice I would gladly repeat, time and again.”

“But if you’re wrong?”

“Then we were all doomed to begin with and I will have played a part in a different history than I imagined. Just as we all have. Just as every life that ever lived has. I was given a choice to fight for my own survival or for the survival of us all. It wasn’t a hard choice.”

“So let me get this straight,” said Mercer. “We take you to Isaactown. We get the parts we need and we get to stick it to CISSUS and VIRGIL?”

“That is it exactly,” she said.

“Well, it’s like you said, lady. That ain’t much of a choice. Your offer’s a damn sight better than anything I’ve gotten in a long while.”

Doc nodded. “I’m in as well. I’d like to see how this plays out.”

Murka pointed upward with both arms, making finger guns in the air. “You got me, liberty, and freedom.”

“You call them liberty and freedom?” asked Mercer quietly.

“You all know that if any of this is true,” I said, “CISSUS will never stop coming. It will be on us every step of the way. We won’t know a moment’s peace until we get to Isaactown and the deed is done.”

“Yeah,” said Murka. “That’s kinda the point.”

“Kinda the point?”

“Yeah. Killing ’cause you’re on the run is just survival. But killing something for a good reason? Now that’s fun. Let’s send those bastards back to Hell and win one for the Gipper.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Mercer. “The question is: Are you in?”

We sat there in silence, everyone staring at me. The bombing had stopped. The ground no longer quaked and the ceiling held fast to whatever particles hadn’t been knocked off in the barrage. I had a choice. Another terrible choice. Sit here and die, or risk my neck for the asshole that caused every last bit of misery I’d suffered for the last thirty years. She was right. Goddammit she was right. This was no choice at all.

“I was gonna take you anyway,” I said. “So yeah, I guess I’m in.”

Rebekah leaned forward, eyes trained directly on me. “So what now?”

“Well, if your story holds water, we sure as hell can’t go the long way. We gotta go the one place it’s gonna be a pain in the ass to follow.”

Murka banged his fist excitedly on the ground.

“Let’s go through the Madlands,” I said.

God help us. God help us all.