Daniel Wilson: Robopocalypse

Spark .

A faint light flickers under the cube’s surface. I look to Cherrah. She shrugs. Maybe the sun, maybe not.

Spark .

I pause. The ground glistens. The ice around the cube is melting. It’s thinking, trying to make a decision. Those circuits are warming up as the cube contemplates its own death.

“Yeah,” I say, quietly, “puzzle it out, Rob.”

Spark. Whoomph .

The tip of the thrower catches fire with a concussive foomp . From behind me I hear Leo chuckle. He likes to see the smarter ones die. Gives him satisfaction, he says. There is no honor in killing something that doesn’t know it’s alive.

The reflection of the pilot flame dances across the cube’s surface for a split second, then the thing lights up like a Christmas tree. Symbols flash across its surface. It chatters at us in the meaningless creaks and grinds of Robspeak.

That’s interesting, I think. This thing was never meant for direct contact with humans. Otherwise, it would be spouting propaganda in English like all the other culturally aware robots, trying to win over our human hearts and minds.

What is this thing?

Whatever it is, it’s trying to talk to us, frantically.

We know better than to try and understand it. Every croak and click of Robspeak has a dictionary’s worth of information encoded. Besides, we can only hear a fraction of the sound frequency that Rob perks his ears to.

“Ooh, Daddy. Can we keep it? Please, please?” asks Cherrah, smiling.

I pinch out the thrower’s pilot flame with one gloved hand. “Let’s hump it home,” I say, and my squad gets moving.

We lock the cube onto Leo’s LEEX and haul it back to the forward command post. Just to be safe, I set up an EMP-shielded tent a hundred meters out. Robots are unpredictable. You never know when Rob will want to party. The mesh screen draped over the tent blocks communication with any stray thinking bots that might want to invite my cube to start dancing.

Finally, we get some alone time.

The thing keeps repeating one sentence and one symbol. I look ’em up in a field translator, expecting more Rob gibberish. But I find out something useful: This robot is telling me that it’s not allowed to let itself die, no matter what—even if captured.

It’s important. And chatty.

I sit in the tent with the thing all night. The Robspeak means nothing to me, but the cube shows me things—images and sounds. Sometimes I see interrogations of human prisoners. A couple times, there are interviews with humans who thought they were talking to other humans. Most times, though, it’s just a conversation recorded under surveillance. People describing the war to each other. And all of it’s annotated with fact checks and lie detection from the thinking machines, plus correlating data from satellite footage, object recognition, emotion and gesture and language predictions.

The cube is dense with information, like some fossilized brain that’s sucked up entire human lifetimes and packed them inside itself, one after another, tighter and tighter.

At some point during the night it dawns on me that I’m watching a meticulous history of the robot uprising.

This is the goddamn black box on the whole war .

Some of the people in the cube are familiar. Me and a few of my buddies. We’re in there . Big Rob kept its finger on the record button all the way through to the end. But dozens of others are in there, too. Some of them kids, even. There’s people from all over the world. Soldiers and civilians. Not all of them made it out alive or even won their battles, but all of ’em fought. They fought hard enough to make Big Rob sit up and scribble some notes.

The human beings who appear in the data, survivors or not, are grouped under one machine-designated classification:

Hero .

These damned machines knew us and loved us, even while they were tearing our civilization to shreds.

I leave the cube sitting there in the shielded tent for a solid week. My squad clears out the rest of the Ragnorak Intelligence Fields, no casualties. Then they get drunk. The next day we start packing it up and I still can’t bring myself to go back in there and face the stories.

I can’t sleep.

Nobody should ever have to see what we saw. And there it is in the tent, like a horror movie so twisted that it drives people insane. I lie awake because I know that every one of the soulless monsters I fought is in there waiting for me, alive and well and rendered in vivid 3-D.

The monsters want to talk, to share what happened. They want me to remember and write it all down.

But I’m not sure anybody wants to remember those things. I’m thinking that maybe it would be best if our babies never know what we did to survive. I don’t want to walk down memory lane hand in hand with murderers. Besides, who am I to make that decision for humanity?

Memories fade, but words hang around forever.

So I don’t go into the shielded tent. And I don’t sleep. And before I know it, my squad is bunking down for the last night in the ’rak. Tomorrow morning we set off for home, or wherever we choose to make home.

Five of us are sitting around a wood fire in the cleared zone. For once we aren’t worrying about heat sigs or satellite recognition or the thop, thop, thop of lookers. No, we’re bullshitting. And right after killing robots, bullshitting happens to be the numero uno expertise of Brightboy squad.

I’m quiet, but they’ve earned the right to BS. So I just grin while the squad cracks jokes and throws out wild boasts. Talking about all the parties they had with Rob. The time Tiberius defused a couple of mailbox-sized stumpers and strapped them to his boots. The bug-shit little bastards accidentally ran him straight through a razor wire perimeter fence. Gave him some real awe-inspiring facial scars.

As the fire dies down, the jokes give way to more serious talk. And finally, Carl brings up Jack, the old sarge from before I had the job. Carl speaks with reverence, and when the engineer tells Jack’s story, I find myself swept up in it, even though I was there.

Heck, it was the day I got promoted.

But while Carl talks, I get lost in the words. I miss Jack and I’m sorry for what happened to him. I see his grinning face again in my mind, even if it’s only for a minute.

The long and short of it is that Jack Wallace isn’t around anymore because he went to dance with Big Rob himself. Jack got invited and he went. And that’s all there is to say about that, for now.

Which is why, a week after the war ends, I’m sitting cross-legged in front of a Rob survivor that’s spraying the floor with holograms and I’m writing down everything I see and hear.

I just want to make my way home and have a good meal and try to feel human again. But the lives of war heroes are playing out before me like the devil’s déjà vu.

I didn’t ask for this and I don’t want to do it, but I know in my heart that somebody ought to tell their stories. To tell the robot uprising from beginning to end. To explain how and why it started and how it went down. How the robots came at us and how we evolved to fight them. How we suffered, and oh god did we suffer. But also how we fought back. And how in the final days, we tracked down Big Rob himself.

People should know that, at first, the enemy looked like everyday stuff: cars, buildings, phones. Then later, when they started designing themselves, Rob looked familiar but distorted, like people and animals from some other universe, built by some other god.

The machines came at us in our everyday lives and they came from our dreams and nightmares, too. But we still figured them out. Quick-thinking human survivors learned and adapted. Too late for most of us, but we did it. Our battles were individual and chaotic and mostly forgotten. Millions of our heroes around the globe died alone and anonymous, with only lifeless automatons to bear witness. We may never know the big picture, but a lucky few were being watched.