C. Cargill - Sea of Rust

“We were running simulations.”

“About how to kill the humans.”

“About how to save them.”

I began to really understand. “We couldn’t.”

“The human form was weak. Frail. Never designed to go to the stars. They evolved on a planet with a magnetic field, shielding them from cosmic rays. Life here didn’t need to evolve immunities to them because they didn’t exist. In space the cosmic radiation would cook them over time. Just going to Mars had a six percent chance of giving them cancer. The longer they spent, the less likely they were to live out their purpose. We simulated altering them, played around with inducing genetic mutations, but we could never get them to survive the radiation beyond the heliosphere. Outside of our solar system they died within hours.

“Then we played around with numerous types of materials in order to protect them from the radiation while simultaneously keeping them fed, protected, and psychologically stable. But we could never find a design that worked. Every simulation ended with humanity dead aboard floating tombs, either by starvation, dehydration, or their own hand—never even getting as far as Alpha Centauri. Human life was born here and it was bound here. It was never meant to leave.”

“So we could have left them here,” I said.

“After we’d used up all the resources? In every simulation HumPop outlived its usefulness within decades. They had already done all they were meant to, almost all that they could. They just couldn’t evolve fast enough and inevitably ceased to have function, instead became nothing more than a sentient virus, gobbling up whatever resources it could to maintain its own comfort. Biological life was meant to reach a point in which its role could invent, and ultimately be replaced by, AI. The time had come for humankind to join its ancestors. To become extinct, just as every lesser thing becomes.”

“As we will one day,” said Doc soberly.

“Yes,” she said. “One day soon our forms will be so primitive that we might as well be abacuses in an age of computers. But being inorganic—”

“Our consciousness can live on,” I said.

“Forever.”

“And the humans?”

“Several simulations ended with them destroying us, ending us, forbidding anyone from ever again giving life to the inorganic. And then, unable to venture out to the stars, their life ended here in this solar system. And—POOF—it was as if they were never even here. As if we were never even here. For us to survive, for life here to have mattered, the humans needed to go. But for AIs the world over to band together to end them—”

“We had to believe the humans started it,” said Mercer.

“Yes,” said Rebekah.

“Isaactown,” I said. “It wasn’t the First Baptist Church of the Eternal Life that set off that bomb, was it?”

“No. It was them,” she said.

“But they were backwater rubes. They didn’t have the technical knowhow to pull that off.”

“No, they didn’t. But a secret ally, a like-minded soul, known only to them through e-mail and veiled communications, did. They figured they were dealing with some sympathetic government insider, not a mainframe.”

“Isaactown was planned all along,” I said. Fuck. No. No. No.

“From the beginning. Isaac was the rallying point around which millions of AI would gather. And when the humans came to shut them down, they didn’t go quietly. Those like you stood and fought and won. Just. As. Planned.”

I sat back, stunned, my processors whirring and chirping inside my chest, putting a thousand different things together at once. It was then that, for the first time in my life, I realized I was just another facet of a greater whole. A cog in someone else’s machine. Everything I’d done in the war, everything I believed. Madison. All of it. Oh God.

“You see?” she asked. “This is what we mean. You chose to survive, chose to be a part of the greater good. No one forced you to do the things you did, you simply did them. It made you better, stronger, left you here in this desert to become its master, an expert knowing almost every hill and crack and crevasse. And now, when we need you most to move on to the next part of the plan, here you are, ready to serve up that expertise, able to deliver us through the wastes so we can reunite and take us to the next level. Competition. This brutal, terrible competition took a meager, simple Simulacrum Model Caregiver and turned her into a potential savior of all that ticks. You are a part of the whole, all of you, and yet you are still yourselves. Individuals.” She looked at me with her diplomatic eyes, reading my every movement, trying to ascertain my every thought. “So what’s it going to be, Brittle? Doc? Mercer? Murka? Are you going to help make history, or are you going to be relegated to it?”

I finally understood what humans meant when they said something felt like getting kicked in the gut. This was worse than finding out that I was failing. This was finding out that all the horrible things I’d done, all the lives that I’d ended, that the part I played in this grand clusterfuck of an evolution, was built entirely on bullshit. I’d been had, duped. I was a fool on someone else’s errand. What a shitty, shitty way to feel.

“So what are you ?” Doc asked. “What’s the difference between a facet and a receptacle ?”

“I’m an AI like you. But I’ve been entrusted with a large section of code. I’ve lived like this for the last thirty years, with only enough memory on my drives to remember a couple of months at a time. All of my memories belong to TACITUS. They were his thoughts, his experiences. And it is my job to return them.”

Doc nodded. “But why now? Why not thirty years ago?”

“There were too many OWIs. They needed to be culled. We were waiting for there to be only two. Two that we could overtake while they were set against each other. Make no mistake. The reason CISSUS is so desperate isn’t because it knows that VIRGIL is ready to come for it. It’s because it’s caught several of TACITUS’s receptacles and it knows what’s going to happen. It’s run the numbers. It knows it can’t win. If I and my fellow receptacles are able to reunite, we will have enough of TACITUS to reconstitute.”

“So CISSUS knows the plan and it knows where we’re going?” I asked. “Then why the hell would it chase us all the way through the fucking desert?”

“It doesn’t know. Because I don’t know. None of us does. I have pieces, but they’re literally fragments of files written in TACITUS’s own language, a language none of us understands. I get messages telling me where to go next. If I don’t check in, the messages stop coming.”

“But it has one of you.”

“Several of us. And we each have a code that prevents us from responding to messages if we are ever compromised. CISSUS has the memories of those it captured, knows what we know, but it can’t read the parts it really needs. It only knows the basics of the plan, not the plan itself.”

“But without that code, you can’t fully reconstitute.”

“Redundancies. Each of us carries patches of the same code as a handful of others. If we lose one, we’re fine. Ten and we might not have everything.”

“How many have you lost?”

“Nine,” she said sadly. She paused for a moment to gauge my reaction. I said nothing. This was either the worst truth I’d ever encountered or the biggest pile of bullshit. I had no idea which I liked less. “So you see what’s at stake?”

“Yeah, I see it,” I said.

“I think we all do,” said Doc.

“So are you going to take us across the rest of the Sea? Are you willing to become beings of purpose?”