C. Cargill - Sea of Rust

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.

…s a chance that my solar cells could…

Shit. I blacked out.

But I was back. I’d made it through to morning. The sun was still low in the sky, but in just the right place to hit my panels. I didn’t have a whole lot of juice, but I was operating at a surplus for the moment, so another few hours or so of driving would buy me what I’d need to get down into the city for a replacement. Now all I had to do was keep on trucking through to NIKE 14.

NIKE 14 had been decommissioned long before the AI age had even begun. In its day it had served as an old-style nuclear-missile silo—a massive concrete bunker dug deep into the earth to keep its missiles hidden from the prying eyes of satellites. These days it was even grander, larger, more sprawling. Two decades of excavation and reinforcement had transformed it into an entire city buried so deep in the earth that the drone satellites of the OWIs couldn’t read a single heat signature.

There were tunnels in and out spread across a twenty-mile expanse of the Sea, so even if the OWIs were tracking traffic in the area, there would be no telling where it was going or how big an enclave of freebots they might find. If they were going to come, they would have to come in full force. That meant warnings, lead time, and numerous ways out. An amassed army of OWI drones would crack into a hive and then try to catch each individual bee as it swarmed out.

We all knew it was inevitable, that one day they would show up for us. For now, this was the best we could do. NIKE 14 wasn’t any real promise of a future; it was simply a very palatable now.

There were dozens, maybe even hundreds, of cities like NIKE 14 spread across the globe. Every so often refugees from another city would flow in after an OWI invasion, some with the hope that they’d found a new permanent home, others dark with the knowledge that any day now they would have to leave this home behind as well.

There were exactly seventeen separate entrances to NIKE 14. Never taking the same one twice—as I did with paths through the Sea—would be impossible. So I left my choice of entry points up to RNG. Each and every time. No one could ambush me deliberately if even I didn’t know in advance which entrance I would take.

But today was different. The clock was ticking. No telling what kind of damage my leaking battery might wreak on other systems. I had little choice but to take one of the closest holes in. There were three within a range I could get to, so I decided to roll the dice between them and let RNG do its thing. I designated the old concrete shed built into a hill as choice one; the manhole cover leading to a labyrinth of sewers as choice two; and the least appealing option, the Road—a heavily trafficked, long straight tunnel just outside the grounds of the original silo—as choice three.

Three . Dammit.

No use questioning the RNG. The minute you did, you invalidated its purpose, started questioning it when you needed it. The Road it was.

The buggy skidded to a halt in the dirt next to a refuse pile—a collection of rebar, bones, rusted tin siding, and picked-over, slagged wrecks. I found a large piece of withered tarp to throw over the buggy and spent a few minutes covering it with enough trash to make it look like it had been there for ages, but not so much that I couldn’t toss it all off in a hurry.

Then I walked half a mile to the entrance. The terrain was barren, peppered with scrub brush and the occasional withered husk of a tree. In the rain season the entire area becomes a mud pit, strewn with hundreds of tracks. But when it’s dry, like today, it’s just a whole lot of nothing, with only a few hills to break up the monotony.