Daniel Wilson - Robopocalypse

The eastern sky is now blushing baby pink. The fire still burns something ferocious. My people are collapsed in heaps around the drum circle, asleep. Me and Hank must’ve been dancing for hours, robotically.

Then I notice John Tenkiller. He’s standing stock-still. Real slow, he raises a hand and points toward the dawn.

A white man stands there in the shadows, face bloodied. A crust of broken glass is embedded in his forehead. He sways and the shards glitter in the firelight. His pant legs are wet and stained black with mud and leaves. In the crook of his left arm, he’s got a sleeping toddler, her face buried in his shoulder. A little boy, probably ten, stands in front of his daddy, head down, exhausted. The man has a strong right hand resting on his son’s skinny shoulder.

There’s no sign of a wife or anybody else.

Me, Hank, and the drumkeeper gape at the man, curious. Our faces are smeared with dried ocher and we’re dressed in clothes older than the pioneers. I’m thinking that this guy must feel like he done stepped through the mud and back in time.

But the white fella just stares right through us, shell-shocked, hurting.

Just then, his little boy raises his face to us. His small round eyes are wide and haunted, and his pale forehead is striped with a rusty crimson line of dried blood. As sure as that boy is standing there, he’s been marked with the fire of tsi-zhu . Me and Hank look at each other, every hair of our bodies standing on end.

The boy has been painted but not by our drumkeeper.

People are waking up and murmuring to each other.

A couple seconds later, the drumkeeper speaks in the deep drone of a long-practiced prayer: “Yea, let the reflection of this fire on yonder skies paint the bodies of our warriors. And verily, at that time and place, the bodies of the Wha-zha-zhe people became stricken with the red of the fire. And their flames did leap into the air, making the walls of the very heavens redden with a crimson glow.”

“Amen,” murmur the people.

The white man lifts his hand from his boy’s shoulder and it leaves a perfect glistening palm print of blood. He holds out his arms, beckoning.

“Help us,” he whispers. “Please. They’re coming.”

The Osage Nation never turned away a single human survivor during the New War. As a result, Gray Horse grew into a bastion of human resistance. Legends began to spread around the world of the existence of a surviving human civilization located in the middle of America and of a defiant cowboy who lived there, spitting in the face of robotkind.

It’s hard to believe, but at this point in time Mr. Takeo Nomura was just an elderly bachelor living alone in the Adachi Ward of Tokyo. The events of this day were described by Mr. Nomura in an interview. His memories are corroborated by recordings taken by Takeo’s automated eldercare building and the domestic robots working inside it. This day marks the beginning of an intellectual journey that eventually led to the liberation of Tokyo and regions beyond.

It is a strange sound. Very faint. Very odd. Cyclical; it comes again, and then again. I time the sound with the pocket watch that sits in a yellow pool of light on my workbench. It is very quiet for a while and I can hear the second hand patiently tick-tick-ticking.

What a lovely sound.

The apartment is dark except for my lamp. The building administrative brain deactivates overhead lights each night at ten p.m. It is now three a.m. I touch the wall. Exactly twenty-two seconds later, I hear a faint roar. The thin wall quivers.

Twenty-two seconds.

Mikiko lies across my workbench on her back, eyes closed. I have repaired the damage to the temporal portion of her skull. She is ready for activation, yet I do not dare to put her online. I don’t know what she will do, what decisions she will make.

I finger the scar on my cheek. How can I forget what happened last time?

I slip out the door and into the hallway. The wall lights are dimmed. My paper sandals are silent on the thin, brightly colored carpet. The low noise comes again and I imagine that I feel the air pressure fluctuate. It’s as if a bus is driving past every few seconds.

The noise is coming from just around the corner.

I stop. My nerves tell me to go back. Huddle in my closet-sized condo. Forget about this. This building is reserved for those over the age of sixty-five. We are here to be taken care of, not to take risks. But I know that if there is danger, I must see it and confront it and understand it. If not for my sake, then for Kiko’s. She is helpless right now, and I am helpless to fix her. I must protect her until I am able to break the spell she is under.

However, this does not mean that I must be brave about it.

At the corner of the hallway, I lean my aching back against the wall. I peek around the edge with one eye. My breathing is already coming in panicked gasps. And what I see makes me stop breathing altogether.

The hallway by the elevator banks is deserted. On the wall is an ornate display: two strips of round lights with floor numbers painted next to them. All the lights are dark except the ground floor one, which glows dull red. As I watch, the glowing red dot creeps slowly upward. As it reaches each floor, it makes a soft click. Each click grows louder in my mind, as the elevator rises higher and higher.

Click. Click. Click .

The dot reaches the top floor and pauses there. My hands are squeezed into fists. I bite my lip hard enough to make it bleed. The dot holds steady. Then, it streaks downward with nauseating speed. As the dot approaches my floor, I can hear that odd noise again. It is the whoosh of the elevator plunging straight down at the speed of gravity. A puff of wind is pushed out into the hallway as the elevator falls. Under the wind, I can also hear the screams.

Clickclickclickclick .

I flinch. Press my back against the wall and close my eyes. The elevator barrels past, rattling the walls and causing the hallway sconces to flicker.

Everything has a mind. The mind of a lamp. The mind of a desk. The mind of a machine. There is a soul inside everything, a mind that can choose to do good or evil. And the mind of the elevator seems bent on evil.

“Oh no, no, no,” I whimper to myself. “Not good. Not good at all.”

I gather my courage, then scurry around the corner and press the elevator call button. I watch the wall indicator as the red dot climbs back up, one level at a time. All the way to my floor.

Click. Click. Bing . It arrives. The doors slide open like curtains parting on a stage.

“Most definitely not good, Nomura,” I say to myself.

The elevator walls are splattered with blood and bits of gore. Fingernail scratches mark the walls. I shudder to see a pair of bloodstained dentures partially embedded in the mounting bracket of the ceiling lamp, casting strange reddish shadows over all I see. Yet, there are no bodies. Smears on the floor lead toward the door. There are boot prints in the blood, marked with the pattern of the domestic humanoid robots that work here.

“What have you done, elevator?” I whisper.

Bing , it insists.

Behind me, I hear the vacuum-tube whir of the servicebot elevator. But I can’t look away. Can’t stop trying to understand how this atrocity has happened. A blast of cool air hits the back of my neck as the small service-elevator door opens behind me. Just as I turn, a bulky mailbot shoves itself into the back of my legs.