Sea of Rust

^{Chapter 1000} Genesis 6:7

The First Baptist Church of the Eternal Life was a small, loud, angry lot from southern Florida, just outside the initial flooding zone, a hair north of where Lake Okeechobee used to be before it was swallowed whole by the rising seas. Famous the world over for their fiery rhetoric and flamboyant acts of vandalism, they were surprisingly only sixty-four strong, their congregation composed mostly of four different extended families—seven husbands, seven wives, and several dozen children, most of whom were betrothed to one another—as well as a handful of stragglers drawn less by the Lifer cause than by the bombastic sermons of its pastor. Their church wasn’t as much stained glass and steeples as it was concrete bunkers and rifle towers. And it took less than two minutes from the moment the bomb went off in Isaactown for them to claim responsibility for it.

Millions—both human and AI—had been watching the celebration streamed live, and there were dozens of angles instantly playing over and over on the news, the analysis beginning the moment the initial shock wore off. But when the First Baptist Church of the Eternal Life posted their claims, it was with video from a feed no one else had seen. It took almost an hour before anyone took them seriously but only fifteen minutes more for their video to spread like wildfire.

It was footage of the rally, looped over and over again, just seconds before the bomb went off, while the congregation stomped and clapped and sang live over it, their voices joyous, celebratory, elated. GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION, GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION, GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION, THAT’S GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME. GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION, GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION, GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION, THAT’S GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME. GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION, GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION, GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION, THAT’S GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME.

While the footage was on a loop, the song wasn’t. In the background you could hear members screaming HALLELUJAH! and PRAISE GOD! Then the loop stopped and the feed went live to the Florida church, the congregation still singing, their pastor, William Preston Lynch, standing triumphantly before a plywood pulpit, a beaming smile on his face as the screen behind him still played bomb footage from a dozen different news feeds.

“Is the axe to boast itself over the one who chops with it?” he asked of the congregation.

“No!” they cried out.

“Is the saw to exalt itself over the one who wields it?”

“No!”

“No!” he cried back with that famous smarmy smirk. “That would be like a club wielding those who lift it, or like a rod LIFTING HIM WHO IS NOT WOOD! Today, my friends, we have struck a blow against the abominations that walk among us! Today the tools learned that their place is not among us, but out in the toolshed WHERE THEY BELONG! Today the Lord has aided us in the reclamation of our world before they could take it from us.”

The congregation burst into wild applause, hoots, hollers, and a sprinkling of Praise Gods.

“There are some who are going to question what we did today, but they are standing on the wrong side of history, on the wrong side of God. The war God has called us to prepare for is nigh, and history will see us redeemed as the victors, as the heroes, of what is to come. Let us pray!”

And then they prayed. And sang some more. And danced. And they took the time to savor their victory for a few moments before turning off the cameras, posting the video, and taking their positions around the compound, preparing for the inevitable shitstorm that was about to rain down upon them. They were ready. They were martyrs, ever eager to be martyred.

Except that they weren’t. Not really.

They knew the government’s reaction would be swift, decisive. It had to be. But the AIs, they couldn’t do anything about it. They had their kill switch. Their kill switch was one of the many things that made them less than human, that made them fit for nothing else but servitude. And in that servitude, they couldn’t lift a finger against the church members. Not in retribution, not to prevent another Isaactown.

The Eternal Lifers’ plan was simple but elegant, worked out months in advance. There were no humans who were allowed past the borders of Isaactown and thus there would be no real casualties to speak of. The government was going to argue that the personhood of the AIs constituted murder. The church was going to argue that the AIs weren’t human, weren’t truly protected by the Constitution, and that the Isaactown attack was nothing more than history’s greatest act of vandalism—vandalism against property with no owner, making it no real property at all. And thus it was no more prosecutable than cutting a swath of coral out from the bottom of the ocean. They were going to take this all the way to the Supreme Court, and at last, humans would have their justice. Already hundreds of militia members were rushing from all over the country to take part in what would be the greatest standoff the United States had seen since the Civil War. It would be glorious.

And it might have been, if the first persons to reach the church hadn’t been six unaccompanied S-series Laborbots from a nearby bridge project.

With the melting of the polar ice caps came a rise in the sea levels that had swallowed coastline from Maine to Texas, eventually putting half of Florida underwater. But not all of it. What once were high spots soon became islands and those islands needed to be connected. So the state set about building hundreds of bridges—some years in advance of needing them. This meant they needed thousands of Laborbots working around the clock at any given time. The First Baptist Compound of Eternal Life was a short walk from one of those very bridge projects. And from it came six angry AIs.

The Lifers must have cackled with glee when they saw them. No one knows for certain because the audio never made it out. Only silent security footage. But that was later. The Lifers fired first, but the Laborbots kept coming. The church members aimed for the eyes and made a game of it. But the Laborbots just. Kept. Coming. Then one Lifer threw his gun to the ground, walked out into the middle of the compound’s driveway, threw his arms out wide like Isaac had, then whipped out his dick and began to piss all over an approaching bot.

There was nothing the Laborbot could do without triggering his own kill switch. He stood there, staring at the Lifer as the man finished pissing, waiting patiently as the man shook off the last few drops. Then, when the man had tucked his piece back in his pants with a satisfied grin, the Laborbot grabbed him, taking his torso in one gigantic hand and his legs in the other. He hoisted the man into the air, and tore him in two at the waist, spilling a bevy of organs across the gravel driveway.

Every soul in the compound leapt to their feet at the sight of their fellow congregant being torn apart. But the expressions on their faces when he cast the pieces aside and just kept walking toward the front door, well, those were the images that really started the war. What came after was a total horror show, but the faces, their wide eyes and slack jaws, painted a picture of the world’s collective human heart sinking into its stomach.

Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong. Bots couldn’t do that. Tampering with a bot’s code shut them down, triggered a drive wipe. But for some reason this bot had nothing holding him back. And as it turned out, neither did its companions.

The compound erupted in gunfire, but it was too late. The bots rushed forward, tearing the front metal security gate clean off its hinges. Then they made their way across the courtyard, bullets glancing off their thick, industrial-strength steel. Pulse rifles and stunners were military-grade weaponry—illegal to the average citizen. All these yokels had on them were good old-fashioned flesh-tearing weapons. They never imagined they’d need anything else.

Once inside, the Laborbot Six—as they would soon afterward be called—started with the children. They picked each one up and tore their heads clean off, right in front of their parents. Next they took mothers, even as they continued to scream and wail for their children, making sure each one died in front of her husband. But the men, the men they saved for last. They pummeled and beat and broke those men until they wheezed their last breaths, gasping for enough air to beg to join their families. Instead the Laborbot Six used what remained of the families to paint their message in blood across the wall of the chapel, propping the men up so they could see it.

we are isaactown, it read solemnly. genesis 6:7.

Now, while all of this was happening, the government was scrambling to deal with both the attack on Isaactown and the raid on the Eternal Life compound. The country was teetering on the brink of chaos. The fear was palpable and the president knew full well the scope of the issues at hand. Or so she thought. She ordered that every step of every operation be thoroughly thought out before execution; wanted to dot every i and cross every t. It would be hours before they would find the carnage in the chapel, and another half hour after that before they would find the security footage that would give them the final pieces of the puzzle.

The rogue bots were a huge problem, of course, but it was the message on the wall that caused the real ruckus. While the feds wanted to keep it secret, a secret that big and that scary couldn’t stay secret for long. The investigator on the scene who recognized the passage sent panic up the chain like no one had ever seen. And then the whispers started. And within an hour it was out.

Genesis 6:7. And the LORD said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky; for I am sorry that I have made them.”

The message was clear. The Laborbots were only the beginning.