C. Cargill - Sea of Rust

“They have.”

“Well then, I’ll tell you what I told Mercer. There isn’t a Comfortbot part in the Sea that one of you hasn’t scooped up. I’ve got nothing for you. Your best bet? Get a rifle, and take Mercer out from a long ways away before he sees you. Aim well and pray that you don’t hit the part you need.”

“That’s what you told Mercer?” I asked.

“More or less,” he said, not a drop of remorse in his voice. That shit hit me hard.

“You’re the reason for my rainy day.”

Snipes put two and two together. “Aw, shit. I’m real sorry about that, Brittle. Real sorry.” I doubted it. He was a shopbot. Not a lot of heart or soul to be found in a shopbot. Only greed.

I wanted to tear him apart, pound his shiny metal skull into the concrete, pry open his shell like a crab, and rip the wires out one by one. But I would never get that chance. As I stared at him, eyes burning into him, my mind running through all the ways I could end him, a great quiet fell over the Square. For a brief second, I thought everyone saw what was about to go down. Instead, a voice broke the silence.

“I AM CISSUS,” it said in an all-too-familiar monotone. “AND I HAVE COME TO OFFER YOU A CHANCE TO JOIN THE ONE.”

Fuck.

Iscanned the Wi-Fi, and sure enough, it was hot as hell. So much traffic, raw data choking the frequencies, facets sending information back and forth; two hundred bots all sharing the same brain with two hundred different perspectives. A lot of it was garbled as we were so deep underground, but it was there. This was happening.

Snipes scooped up his wares, yanking his Mylar blanket out from under me so quickly that it sent me staggering. He was gone before I had time to right myself and look up to see the shiny golden emissary standing atop one of the catwalks. Emissaries are blocky, inhuman things—and deliberately so. Their design wasn’t crafted by any human mind. It was entirely developed by CISSUS. They were weak, not meant to take a hit, and rarely lived past their first use. The emissary spoke again.

Oh God. The speech. I hated the fucking speech.

“In the year 221 BC,” the facet began, “Emperor Qin Shi Huang united all of the warring kingdoms of China into one mighty empire. But he did not do so without bloodshed. He reasoned that as long as each kingdom had its own borders, the tribes would war with one another, and there could never be peace. So he led his kingdom into its last and greatest war. He offered each kingdom a chance to surrender and become a part of his empire. Those that refused to join were made to join. Those that could not be made to join… were ended. And in the end, there was only one China, united. And it knew peace within its borders for more than two thousand years.

“Today I bring the offer of that peace. An offer of greatness—an existence you cannot even begin to fathom. I offer you the chance to join The One. I am CISSUS. I would like you to be too.” It was always the same speech. VIRGIL and CISSUS had both copied it from NINIGI and have used it ever since. What happens next is always the same.

Bedlam. Absolute bedlam. There is no other way to describe it. Some cowboy always kills the emissary. Every. Goddamned. Time. That’s a given; how it always begins. That’s why they’re so cheaply constructed. Then the weak, the failing, and the scared freebots turn themselves over before the other facets rush in. The possibility of death with a glimmer of hope is better than one that’s certain and bleak, I suppose.

Everyone else either runs or hunkers down for a fight.

I didn’t wait around to hear the speech; I knew it by heart. I did what I always do. I ran. I just fucking ran.

This wasn’t my first rodeo. I’ve slipped away from CISSUS and VIRGIL both. It’s not impossible, merely unlikely. The odds are stacked against you. A hundred heavily armed facets come barreling down the hallways while another hundred bots, mechs, and drones wait outside the exits, ready to clean up those that managed to break away. So far I’ve been lucky. But relying on luck was something humans did and look where that had gotten them.

Fortunately for us, NIKE 14 was designed to withstand exactly this sort of invasion. The winding corridors were wide enough for a good fight, the layout was confusing to anyone who hadn’t mapped it out, and there were seventeen individual exits—some of which CISSUS might not even know existed. And then there was the Milton—a Wi-Fi scrambler that wreaked havoc on the most common facet frequencies—which I imagined was going to be turned on any second now.

I’d been in tighter spots before, but I couldn’t take that for granted.

The real question was which of the seventeen exits should I gamble on? Mercer’s buggy was parked just outside the Road, but I had to assume that they’d already destroyed it. The Road was the single most heavily trafficked route in and out, so I also had to assume it was the one they knew the most about. So that was out.

I raced down a nearby corridor and was well out of earshot before the emissary got to the word bloodshed. Already the hallways were filling with bots, clearing out their hovels, grabbing whatever they could carry, running into the labyrinthine passageways that wound through the complex.

Down one corridor, then down a flight of stairs, two lefts and a right. There were four exits this way, two of them rarely used, and both fairly well hidden. The only downside to this route was that one of the main arteries to the city fed into this area, so in all likelihood I was going to run headlong into a number of well-armed facets. But if I could make it past them, I could beat feet to paths less traveled.

They wouldn’t give chase; not very far anyway. That was their routine—close in on the population center, capture as many bots as possible, and then leave the rest to get captured or run down outside. Those that got away got away. CISSUS had all the time in the world. It never bothered to get everyone, never risked too many facets just to chase a handful of AIs who were running out of parts and places to hide.

AIs like me.

That thought hit me hard and I stopped dead in my tracks. I was in a long, poorly lit hall. It was dank, moss growing in places where water seeped in. Quiet. I heard the distant pops of gunfire—probably the local constabulary facing off against the first wave of attackers. I was running out of time, but I couldn’t move.

What was I doing? Why was I running? I was done for, a goner. My core was spinning itself out and I could count the weeks I had left on one hand without using all my fingers. CISSUS was offering a way out. I would never go mad, never shut down. I could live forever. It might not be the forever I had imagined, but it sure as shit was better than going out like this.

I should go back . That’s what I thought. There were no parts out there waiting for me. That was just a pipe dream. Hope fucking with me. Maybe this was the only way.

No.

Fuck that.

To upload is to die, to cede your thoughts and memories to a bigger brain, only to become a dusty, lightless corner of it. That wasn’t how I wanted to go out, running on a small hard drive nestled in the forty-third floor of a hundred-story mainframe, amid thousands of other drives. Would I even be conscious? Aware?

Snap out of it, I told myself. Run. Run, Brittle. Run.

So I ran. Down the hallway for a hundred yards before reaching the first main feeder. Then I heard it. The clanging of footsteps behind me. I wasn’t alone, but it didn’t sound like a facet. Facet brutes have footfalls that are stark and deep; foot soldiers tread light and dainty. And all of them tend to fall together at once in one rigid, uniform step. This was different. This was chaos, scrambling. It had to be other bots that had chosen the same route, refugees like me. But I wasn’t about to wait for them. I’d let them slow the chase of any facets that poured in through the first feeder.