C. Cargill - Sea of Rust

There was a moment of quiet, a pregnant pause between us.

Then his disappointed voice barked from the darkness. “Rust in Hell, Britt.”

The alarms in the back of my head were getting louder. I had two choices. Go in after him, hope to maintain the upper hand, and pry his battery out of his cold, limp shell. Or floor it and pray I made it to the nearest city. I hated both choices.

“Rust in Hell, Mercer,” I said. I punched the accelerator and the buggy lurched forward, its electric engine giving off only the slightest hum, the bulk of the sound coming from the crunch of the pebbles beneath its tires.

I rested the roughhouser on my shoulder, calculating my speed and elevation, then pulled the trigger, sending a shell arcing toward Mercer’s rifle. The shell popped with an explosive crack behind me, the sound of showering plastic and metal parts signaling that my aim was true. I was going too fast for Mercer to catch up.

He was no longer my biggest concern.

The sunlight was fading on the horizon and the twilight was growing thick. There wasn’t enough light left for my solar cells to recharge the backup battery.

I was fucked. Fucked for real this time. The closest safe city was NIKE 14, and that was half a night’s drive away as the crow flies. Playing it safe, away from obvious ambush sites and choke points, made it a whole night’s drive.

My backup battery wasn’t going to last that long. In truth, I wasn’t even sure how long it had left. They were notoriously unreliable when it came to the end of a charge. Maybe I had two hours; maybe I had three minutes. I just didn’t know.

So I was going to have to leave my own buggy behind and hope for the best. I set the coordinates for NIKE 14 into Mercer’s buggy, switched it over from manual to autopilot, loaded another shell into the roughhouser, and settled in for the long drive, fully aware that I might not see it through. My battery was going to die before I saw the end of it. The question was, what was going to happen after it did? If I could make it to morning, if I could make it to NIKE 14, then there wa…

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 God s.

“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.