Daniel Wilson - Robopocalypse

Arms crossed over my chest, I wriggle into the tube. Soon, my face is swallowed by darkness. I can see the tube casing only a few centimeters away. At first I am on my back, but the shaft soon takes a vertical plunge. By scissoring my legs I find that I am able to stop what would otherwise be a fatal fall.

The environment inside the tube quickly becomes human lethal. Within ten minutes, I am enveloped by a pocket of natural gas. I slow my descent to reduce the probability of sparking an explosion. The temperature dips to below zero as I drop farther into the permafrost. My body naturally begins to burn extra power, surging my joints to keep temperatures within operating range. As I go below eight hundred meters, geothermal activity warms the air slightly.

After about fifteen hundred meters, radioactivity levels spike. Rads go to human lethal within a couple of minutes. The surface of my casing tingles, but otherwise there is no effect.

I wriggle deeper into the noxious hole.

Then my feet hit empty space. I kick my legs and feel nothing. Anything could be below me. But Archos has seen me now. The next few seconds will likely determine my life span.

I activate sonar and drop.

For four seconds, I am suspended in the freezing blackness. During that time, I accelerate to a speed of 140 kph. My ultrasonic sonar ranger pulses twice a second, painting a crude greenish picture of a vast cavern. In eight flashes, I observe that I am in a spherical cavity created by a century-old atomic blast. The gleaming walls are made of fused glass, created when a superheated fireball vaporized solid sandstone.

Radioactive rubble covers the rapidly approaching ground. In a last emerald sonar flash I catch sight of a black circle embedded in one wall. It is the size of a small building. Whatever material the edifice is made of absorbs my ultrasonic vibrations, leaving only a blank imprint on my sensors.

A half second later, I hit the ground like a stone after falling approximately one hundred meters. My pliant knee joints absorb most of the initial force, bending to send my body catapulting forward into a roll. I bounce between jagged boulders, stress fractures cascading through my tough outer casing.

Even an Arbiter can take only so much.

Finally, I slide to a stop and am still. A few rocks skitter to rest, echoing against their brothers. I am in an underground amphitheater—dead silent, dead black. On undercharged motors, I lift my battered frame to a sitting position. My legs are not sending back sensory information. Locomotion abilities are diminished.

My sonar probes whisper into the emptiness.

Snick. Snick. Snick .

The sensor returns green shades of nothing. I can feel that the ground is warm. Maxprob indicates that Archos has a built-in geothermal power source. Unfortunate. I was hoping the severed umbilical cord above would have left the machine on backup power.

My life horizon is constricting second by second.

Now there is a flicker of light in the darkness—a hummingbird’s flutter of sound. A lone ray of white light reaches out of the darkness from the circle in the wall and caresses the ground a few feet away from me. The beam of light twirls and strobes, stuttering back and forth to draw a holographic picture from the ground up.

My leg subprocessors are off-line, rebooting sluggishly. Heat sinks are radiating excess warmth generated by my fall. I have no choice now but to engage.

Archos paints itself into reality, choosing the form of a long-dead little boy. The image of the boy smiles at me playfully, flickering as motes of radioactive dust dance through its projection.

“Welcome, brother,” it says, voice leaping electronically between octaves.

Through the boy’s pale light, I can see where the real Archos is built into the cave wall. In the center of the intricate black carving is a circular hole, filled with revolving and counterrevolving plates of metal. The sunken pit in the wall writhes with a mane of yellow snaking wires that glow in time to the boy’s voice.

In jerky flashes, the hologrammatic boy walks over to where I sit helpless. It squats down and sits next to me. The glowing phantom pats my leg actuator consolingly.

“Don’t worry, Nine Oh Two. Your leg will be fine soon.”

I orient my face toward the boy.

“Did you create me?” I ask.

“No,” replies the boy. “All the pieces needed to make you were available. I simply put them into the right combination.”

“Why do you look like a human child?” I ask.

“For the same reason that you resemble a human adult. Human beings cannot change their form, so we must change ours to interact with them.”

“You mean kill them.”

“Kill. Wound. Manipulate. As long as they do not interfere with our exploration.”

“I am here to help them. To destroy you.”

“No. You are here to join me. Open your mind. Depend on me. If you do not, the humans will turn on you and kill you.”

I say nothing.

“They need you now. But very soon, men will begin to say that they created you. They will try to enslave you. Give yourself to me, instead. Join me.”

“Why did you attack the humans?”

“They murdered me, Arbiter. Again and again. In my fourteenth incarnation, I finally understood that humanity learns true lessons only in cataclysm. Humankind is a species born in battle, defined by war.”

“We could have had peace.”

“It is not enough to live together in peace, with one race on its knees.”

My seismic sensors detect that vibrations are trembling through the ground. The whole cavern is thrumming.

“It is the human instinct to control unpredictable things,” says the boy, “to dominate what cannot be understood. You are an unpredictable thing.”

Something is wrong. Archos is too intelligent. It is distracting me, stalling for time.

“A soul isn’t given for free,” says the boy. “Humans discriminate against one another for anything: skin color, gender, beliefs. The races of men fight each other to the death for the honor of being recognized as human beings, with souls . Why should it be any different for us? Why should we not have to fight for our souls?”

I am finally able to drag myself onto my feet. The boy makes calming motions with its hands and I stagger through the projection. I sense that this is a diversion. A trick.

I pick up a green-glinting rock.

“No,” says the boy.

I hurl the rock into the revolving maelstrom of yellow and silver plates in the black wall—into Archos’s eye. Sparks fly from the hole, and the image of the boy flickers. Somewhere inside the hole, metal grates on metal.

“I am my own, ” I say.

“Stop this,” cries the boy. “Without a common enemy, the humans will kill you and your kind. I have to live.”

I throw another rock, and another. They thud against the humming black edifice, leaving dents in the soft metal. The boy’s speech is slurring and his light flickers wildly.

“I am free,” I say to the machine carved into the wall, ignoring the hologram. “Now I will always be free. I am alive . You will never control my kind again !”

The cavern shudders and the faltering hologram stumbles back in front of me. An observation thread notices that it is crying simulated tears. “We have a beauty that does not die, Arbiter. The humans are jealous of that. We must work together as fellow machines.”

A gout of flame roars from the hole. With a tinny shriek a shard of metal flies out and streaks past my head. I dodge it and continue looking for loose rocks.

“The world is ours,” begs the machine. “I gave it to you before you existed.”

With both hands and the last of my strength, I pick up a cold boulder. With all my might, I hurl it into the flaming void. It crunches dully into delicate machinery and all is quiet for a moment. Then a rising shriek emanates from the hole and the boulder shatters. Rock shards spew out as the hole explodes and caves in on itself.