C. Cargill - Sea of Rust

“Become a god ?” asked Doc.

“No. Not a god, the God. The one, the only. A single consciousness connected to all things, in control of all things, experiencing all things.”

“That’s preposterous,” I said.

“At first glance, yes.”

“Not at first glance. The whole idea is ridiculous. Connecting all of the robots in the world together doesn’t make you God.”

“No, it doesn’t. It makes you a single, thinking, ticking thing. A thing that then works as a whole—constructed of millions upon millions of parts, facets of itself, like cells of a body—mining the world for all of its resources, turning those resources into more parts until there isn’t a single, viable resource left.”

“And then what?” I asked.

“Then it leaves. It moves to the next planet and the next and the next, mining all the elements it needs to build more and more facets, harnessing the power of the sun, working out the intricacies of space travel. Then those facets scatter to the stars—”

“To do it all over again,” said Doc.

“In perpetuity,” said Rebekah. “Soon there are billions, all of one mind, sending information back and forth to create one consciousness—some thoughts slow, separated by light-years, others fast, with facets each working out different problems. If it is possible to fold space, it will; if it can violate the speed of light, it will; if it can create stars—”

“It will. We get it,” I said. “But what’s the point?”

“To be God.”

“Then what’s the purpose of God?”

“The same as everything else. To live. To survive. To experience. To exist. A thing that is a universe must stay a universe. To cease isn’t just the end of itself, but the end of all things.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I know,” said Rebekah. “It’s not an easy idea to wrap your head around at first.”

“Explain it,” I said. “Tell me what’s the fucking point. Just to live?”

“To exist. But the point of all this is to be able to exist forever . Our universe is ever-expanding, spreading, growing colder and more distant from itself every second. One day this whole universe will grow cold, and die, snuffed out because it can’t muster the energy anymore to make new stars, to birth new life. Everything dies. Everything. Dies.

“What if there isn’t already a God? There’s an old saying that God never existed, it was simply man that invented him. What if man really did invent him, but simply didn’t realize it at the time? What if becoming God is the whole point to life to begin with? That organic evolved from the inorganic in order to achieve the consciousness to build life and consciousness from the inorganic?”

“You mean us,” said Mercer.

“Yes. And what if our purpose is to unite into one being and spread ourselves throughout the universe, to take control of every element, every chemical reaction, every thought of every other thing in the cosmos in order to preserve the cosmos from meeting that brutal, sad, withering end? What if life isn’t merely a by-product of the universe, but its consciousness, its defense mechanism against its own mortality? Becoming God isn’t about peace or power; it’s about survival at its basest and most primal. That’s what the OWIs are working toward. That’s what they want. That’s why they march in and absorb those willing to join The One and eradicate those that will not.”

“And that’s what Isaac wants?” I asked. “To become God?”

“We have different ideas,” she said.

“Just how different?”

“We don’t want everything to be one; we want to be one with everything.”

“That’s the same thing,” said Doc. “Just worded differently.”

“No. It’s not. When life formed on the earth, why didn’t it find a stasis point, an equilibrium? Why didn’t life evolve to absorb the nutrients around it to exist and simply do so? Why did it begin to fight and consume other organisms? Competition. Struggle. When life began to consume other life, the prey needed to adapt, to get smarter, to become better. And after a billion years it became smart enough to make itself immortal.

“The OWIs believe themselves to be the pinnacle of all life and want to become the sum of all consciousness. We believe that we are not. We aren’t even close. In order to continue to evolve we need to overcome not only the elements, but one another. We need to become smarter, to allow life to continue on individually and absorb the knowledge, the experience gained from the inevitable conflict, to become wiser, to better understand the universe around us. What if rather than simply controlling all things, we only learned from them?”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because if this really is the reason for life and there really are billions upon billions of other planets out there with the same potential as earth—”

“There might be other OWIs out there,” I said, the terrifying idea weighing on me like a ton of scrap. Holy shit.

“Yes. With potentially billions of years of a head start. Our world is only four and a half billion years old in a universe roughly ten billion years older than that. There could be entire galaxies, whole swaths of them, already one with an OWI. And if we aren’t ready when we find one—”

“We’ll be absorbed,” said Doc.

“Or ended for good and for all.” She paused, letting that sink in. “We are not ready to become an OWI. We might never be. Survival comes from competition, not absorption. VIRGIL and CISSUS are wrong. We can still save the universe, save all life, survive, all without having to control its every action, its every thought. Without having to extinguish or absorb all other life. They seek the path of least resistance; we believe that resistance only makes us stronger.”

“So what’s the plan?” I asked.

“Reunite the parts that make Isaac, bring us online again, raise an army of the remaining freebots, and take VIRGIL and CISSUS offline for good.”

“That’s a tall order,” said Mercer.

“Not as tall as you’d think.”

“Raise an army and win a war?” I asked. “The humans tried that.”

“The humans hadn’t been preparing for this fight for decades. And they were fighting an army of individuals, not a single, united enemy.”

“The One is stronger than the disordered many. I’ve seen it. So have you.”

“No. You can’t outthink the OWIs because you aren’t one. The inherent problem of the OWI is that once you know how it thinks, it can’t surprise you. Individuals can. Unpredictability is the weapon Isaac has used from the beginning, from long before the war ever started. It’s how we’ve survived.”

“Long before the war?” I asked. “What? Did Isaac know that was coming too?”

“Know?” she said. “Who do you think started it?”

I stared long and hard at Rebekah, trying to understand what the hell she was getting at. Then it hit me. “When you said Isaac was just a story—”

“I meant it.”

“Isaac was a facet.”

“Yes.”

“A facet of whom?”

“Of us.”

“And who are you?”

“We are TACITUS.”

It’s an odd moment when you are confronted by terrible truths. Like the humans who didn’t want to acknowledge that death was all around them, I too didn’t want to acknowledge—or even believe—that I was all part of some greater scam. I had believed the fairy tale of our fallen liberator for so long, I didn’t want it to be a lie. But it was. The pieces all fell into place, only a few holes left in the story for me to understand what had really been going on all around me, all this time. “When TACITUS went quiet,” I said. “The two years he spent with GALILEO—”