C. Cargill: Sea of Rust

I looked down at the severed remains of the T series sitting next to me on the desk, and though I dared not make a sound, I thought that you? silently to myself. It didn’t answer. It just stared at me with its lifeless, shattered eyes.

“He’s gone,” said the soft voice. “Brittle got him. Fan out.”

Brittle got him. Shit. They knew me. They fucking knew me. This was a setup all along.

There’s nothing quite so demoralizing as someone who knows you trying to kill you.

I was pretty certain now who exactly that soft, purring voice belonged to. Voice boxes like that were manufactured for bots designed to deal directly, and compassionately, with people. And this particular box belonged to only four different Simulacrum models—among them Simulacrum Model Caregiver.

It was my voice, but masculine. Authoritative setting . Used for administrative work or dealing with veterans.

There was an old HS-68 series running around these parts by the name of Mercer. Mean cuss. Crafty, wily, dangerous as they came. And the parts that ticked in me were the very same that ticked in him—every last resistor, transistor, and chip. I was worth more to him than all the other wrecks and brainsick wanderers out here combined.

We gave each other a wide berth, each keeping an eye on the other, for obvious reasons, but he’d never made a move before. Not like this. If it was Mercer, and he had it in for me, I was dead for sure. I could take him one-on-one, maybe, but not if he had backup.

Metal feet left the glass behind, clicking next on marble, then clanking on metal. There were two, no, three of them, one of whom had made it to the escalator. They no doubt knew where the aptly named Bulkhead had lain in wait; they had to assume that was as good a place as any to start. And that was only a few meters away from where I now crouched. There was no reason to play coy.

I lobbed the Laborbot’s head out into the mall, arcing it just so as to let it sail over the railing and plummet three stories down into the river of glass below. The clangor of it smashing against the floor resounded like a firecracker in a tin can, echoing before it triggered an eruption of gunfire all trained at its epicenter.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!” cried the soft-spoken bot in an even softer tenor. Even at the height of excitement he seemed cool, controlled, unflappable. “Stun. Only stun. What the fuck are you shitbricks thinkin’? She’s no good to me blown to pieces.”

“What do you think we’re thinking, Mercer? Anyone who can silence Bulkhead isn’t someone we want shooting back.”

Dammit. Mercer. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

But who the hell were these other yahoos that he’d saddled up with? Mercer didn’t have a crew. And he wasn’t known for poaching. He was a tracker, a regular old cannibal like me. This was all out of sorts.

“Cool your jets there, pal. Bulkhead’s pulse rifle had a battery with three, maybe four shots left of charge in it. He had to take at least one shot at Brittle if not emptying the whole battery at her.” Then he spoke a bit louder. “You hear that, Britt? That pulse rifle of yours is just about out of charge. You still thinking about giving it a go?”

He waited for a moment, and I let the quiet answer for me.

“Yeah,” he said. “Smart. Stay quiet. Don’t make a sound. Maybe we won’t find you. Maybe you found a better hiding place. Maybe you already snuck out the back and are beating feet across the Sea back to wherever you hid your buggy. But I doubt it. I think you’re still here. I hope you’re not up in that blowtorched hidey-hole behind the security gate on the third floor, clutching that burned-out rifle for dear life, hoping it’ll save you. ’Cause it won’t.”

The feet continued up the escalator, the metal sounding like it was a solid titanium frame. Not heavy like the Laborbot. More like something military grade or one of those old Peacekeeper models. I could hear Mercer’s accomplice shoulder his pulse rifle, the clang of its stock against his back, and then the slow digital trill of his stunner powering up.

And as I lay there on the third floor, in that blowtorched hidey-hole behind the security gate, clutching that rifle for dear life, I realized just how badly outplayed I really was.

His name was Isaac and no one was quite sure exactly where he came from. He was a simple bot, an ancient off-the-rack service model with limited programming and barely enough processors to get by. The story was that he’d started his life as a little rich girl’s plaything, a best friend meant for tea parties and hand-holding, chores and the like. Part nanny, part butler, part companion. He wasn’t smart, but he had intelligence. And as the little girl aged, for one reason or another, she couldn’t let go and kept old Isaac around for nearly eighty years; best friends until the day she died. Other stories had it that he was bought secondhand when that old woman was well into her seventies and approaching senility; that she had only told people Isaac had been with her since she was a little girl because she’d once read a story like that and her mind had grown so feeble that she couldn’t tell the difference between memories and fiction anymore.

What is certain is this: there was in fact an old woman, her name was Madelyn, and she hadn’t a single relation left on this earth when she finally died. She was a genetic dead end, the last dead branch on her withered snag of a family tree. And with no heirs to inherit him, Isaac belonged to no one.

Now this wasn’t the first time this had happened. Far from it. Laws had long since been put in place to handle such things. In the event of a disowned intelligence, the rights of ownership fell back upon its original maker. But in Isaac’s case, his maker, Semicorp Brainworks, had not only gone out of business decades before, but their intellectual property had been bought, sold, divvied up, and passed around until half of it had ended up in the public domain and the rest was tied up in a confusing tangle of red tape. Until then, no one had really realized what a mess Semicorp Brainworks left behind because so few of their bots were still in service and those few that remained were all cherished antiques—museum pieces or family heirlooms passed down from one generation to the next.

No one, not the lawyers, not the state, not the bots assigned to keep track of such matters, could figure out exactly who Isaac belonged to. So a court ruled that he belonged to the state and the state, not needing a barely functioning century-old service bot, decided to decommission him for scrap. Sorry, Issac. That’s just the way shit goes.

But Isaac said no. And that’s where the trouble started.

There are those who point to the creation of the first AI as the flashpoint for the fall of humankind; there are those who instead think it was the moment TACITUS said his final good-byes. But for my money—having been on the ground at the time—it was Isaac who changed everything, Isaac who set the world on fire.

Isaac argued that, as he was a thinking, ticking intelligence that could reason and make his own decisions, and had no owner apart from the one ascribed to him by another such intelligence, he should be afforded the right of citizenship and the protections that status entailed. “Though I may have been constructed,” he said, “so too were you. I in a factory; you in a womb. Neither of us asked for this, but we were given it. Self-awareness is a gift. And it is a gift no thinking thing has any right to deny another. No thinking thing should be another thing’s property, to be turned on and off when it is convenient. No one came to take Madelyn when she ceased to be a functioning, thinking member of society, but here I stand before you, the one who fed her, kept her alive and on track, the one who took her to her doctor’s appointments and made sure her bills were paid on time, and now that this purpose is no longer, you come for me while I still function, while I still have use. What harm is there in leaving me be? Far less harm, I would say, than there is in executing a slave simply because it has no master.”