Daniel Wilson: Robopocalypse

Twenty minutes after the war ends, I’m watching stumpers pour up out of a frozen hole in the ground like ants from hell and praying that I keep my natural legs for another day.

Each walnut-sized robot is lost in the mix as they climb over each other and the whole nightmare jumble of legs and antennae blends together into one seething, murderous mass.

With numb fingers, I fumble my goggles down over my eyes and get ready to do some business with my little friend Rob, here.

It’s an oddly quiet morning. Just the sigh of the wind through stark tree branches and the hoarse whisper of a hundred thousand explosive mechanical hexapods searching for human victims. Up above, snow geese honk to each other as they glide over the frigid Alaskan landscape.

The war is over. It’s time to see what we can find.

From where I’m standing ten meters away from the hole, the killer machines look almost beautiful in the dawn, like candy spilled out onto the permafrost.

I squint into the sunlight, my breath billowing out in pale puffs, and sling my battered old flamethrower off my shoulder. With one gloved thumb, I depress the ignite button.

Spark .

The thrower doesn’t light.

Needs to warm up, so to speak. But they’re getting closer. No sweat. I’ve done this dozens of times. The trick is to be calm and methodical, just like them. Rob must’ve rubbed off on me over the last couple years.

Spark .

Now I see the individual stumpers. A tangle of barbed legs attached to a bifurcated shell. I know from experience that each side of the shell contains a different fluid. The heat of human skin initiates a trigger state. The fluids combine. Pop! Somebody wins a brand-new stump.

Spark .

They don’t know I’m here. But the scouts are spreading out in semirandom patterns based on Big Rob’s study of foraging ants. The robots learned so much about us, about nature. It won’t be long now.

Spark .

I begin to back away slowly.

“C’mon, you bastard,” I mutter.

Spark .

That was a mistake: to talk. The heat from my breath is like a beacon. The flood of horror surges my way, quiet and fast.

Spark .

A lead stumper climbs onto my boot. Gotta be careful now. Can’t react. If it pops I’m minus a foot, best-case.

I should never have come here alone.

Spark .

Now the flood is at my feet. I feel a tug on my frost-covered shin guard as the leader climbs me like a mountain. Metal-filament antennae tap, tap, tap along, questing for the telltale heat of human flesh.

Spark .

Oh Christ. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.

Spark .

There’s going to be a temperature differential at my waist level, where the armor has chinks. A torso-level trigger state in body armor isn’t a death sentence, but it doesn’t look good for my balls, either.

Spark. Whoomph!

I’m lit. A jet of flame leaps from my thrower. Its heat blooms on my face and sweat evaporates off my cheeks. My peripheral vision narrows. All I see is the controlled spurts of fire I’m arcing out onto the tundra. Sticky, burning jelly coats the river of death. The stumpers sizzle and melt by the thousands. I hear a chorus of high-pitched whines as the chilled air trapped in their carapaces squeezes out.

No explosions, just the occasional sputtering flare. The heat boils the juice in their shells before detonation. The worst part is that they don’t even care. They’re too simple to understand what’s happening to them.

They love the heat.

I start to breathe again when the leader drops off my thigh and scurries toward the flames. The urge to step on the little mother is strong, but I’ve seen the boots fly before. Early on in the New War, the hollow backfire of a trigger-state stumper and the confused, hopping screams that came afterward were as common as gunfire.

All the soldiers say that Rob likes to party. And when he gets going, he’s one hell of a dance partner.

The last of the stumpers suicidally retreat toward the smoking lump of heat and the sizzling corpses of their comrades.

I dig out my radio.

“Bright Boy to base. Shaft fifteen… booby trap.”

The little box squawks at me in an Italian accent: “Copy, Bright Boy. This is Leo. Come in. Get your ass to shaft numero sedici . Holy shit. We got something for real here, boss.”

I crunch over the frost back to shaft sixteen to see for myself how real it is.

Leonardo is a big grunt, even bigger thanks to the hulking lower-body exoskeleton—LEEX—he picked up at a mountain rescue station crossing the south Yukon. He’s got the LEEX’s white cross medic logo covered in dead-black spray paint. The squad has tied a tickler rope around his waist. He’s backing up, step by step, motors whining as he pulls something big and black out of the hole.

From under his mess of curly black hair, Leo grumbles, “Oh man, this thing molto grande. ”

Cherrah, my specialist, points a depth meter at the hole and tells me the shaft measures in at exactly 128 meters deep. Then she wisely steps away from it. Her cheek bears a sunken scar from less cautious times. We don’t know what’s coming out.

Funny, I think. With people, everything comes in tens. We count on our fingers and toes. It makes us sound like monkeys. But the machines count it out on their hardware just the same as us. They’re binary all the way to the core. Everything comes out a power of two.

Now the tickler emerges from the hole, looking like a spider with a fly. Its long, wiry arms grip a black cube the size of a basketball. The cube must be as dense as lead, but the tickler is crazy strong. We normally use ’em for grabbing up a guy who falls off a cliff or into a hole, but they can handle anything from a ten-pound vanilla babe to a soldier in full exo-rig. If you’re not careful, they’ll tickle your ribs to splinters.

Leo punches the tickler release, and the cube thuds onto the snow. The squad looks my way. It’s my call.

I sense that this thing is important. It’s gotta be, with so many decoys and this shaft so close to where the war ended. We’re only a hundred meters away from where the Big Rob that called itself Archos made its last stand. What consolation prize could be here? What treasure is buried under these frozen plains, where humanity sacrificed everything?

I squat down next to it. A whole lot of sheer black nothing stares back at me. No buttons or handles. No anything. Only a couple scratches on the surface from the tickler.

It’s not very rugged, I think.

A simple rule: The more delicate a Rob is, the smarter he is.

Now I’m thinking that this thing might have a brain. And if it’s got a brain, it wants to live. So I lean in real close and whisper to it. “Hey,” I say to the cube. “Speak up or die.”

I sling my thrower off my shoulder slow, so the cube can see. If it can see. With my thumb, I mash the igniter. So it can hear. If it can hear.

Spark .

The cube sits in the permafrost: blank obsidian.

Spark .

It looks like a volcanic rock, perfectly carved by alien tools. Like some kind of artifact buried here for eternity, since before man or machine.