Robogenesis: A Novel

5. THE STACKS


Post New War: 5 Months, 27 Days

In its death throes, Archos R-14 transmitted a torrent of information via seismic vibrations. My careful study of the Ragnorak dispersal patterns revealed another presence hidden under the frozen surface of extreme eastern Russia. Outside the small city of Anadyr, a previously unknown artificial intelligence was buried in a mine, tended to by a maintenance man named Vasily Zaytsev. Under his care, the sentient machine was treated like an animal and exploited for its tactical contributions to keeping the local human population safe. After the seismic disturbance, however, the machine called Maxim found that it had a new friend—an unwelcome guest who was not about to leave.

—ARAYT SHAH


NEURONAL ID: VASILY ZAYTSEV

From deep in the twilight stacks, I think I hear the seashell roar of the freight elevator. I crouch in place, listening, the hair on my arms standing up. Someone is coming down the shaft.

This is the first time in two weeks.

I throw down my bolt cutter and struggle to stand on cramping knees. Holding my sore back, I hobble down the narrow aisle to the elevator anteroom. I shield my eyes against the overhead fluorescents as I emerge from the stacks.

“How long?” I ask.

“Thirty seconds,” replies Maxim, his soft voice echoing over the distributed speaker system.

“I thought we disabled the shaft?”

“They found a way to enable it.”

I push greasy hair from my eyes and glance around the anteroom. It doesn’t look good. Itching my thick beard with one hand, I tut-tut over the state of this place.

“They will be worried,” I say.

The anteroom is filthy. Littered with the empty carcasses of military individual food rations. Each brick of plastic is packed tightly with metal tins of porridge with tushonka, gobies, sprats in tomato sauce. Dozens of flimsy metal trivets glint from the floor, charred from the fuel pellets I use to heat my tea. My own waste is in tall PVC buckets pushed against the wall. Flat boards are placed over top, but they do little to reduce the stench.

And, of course, there are the heaps of cables, panels, and computer components that I have been tearing from the guts of this machine. For months, I have been frantically trying to lobotomize this invader that calls itself Archos R-14.

Trying and failing.

“Ten seconds,” says Maxim.

My shadow shivers as the fluorescents vibrate with the approach of the freight elevator. Quickly, I limp around to the incriminating wires and tools and kick them into the stacks. After so much time on my knees crawling over the rock floor, I don’t trust myself even to lean over. My eyes are dim from staring through shadows, but the narrow lanes swallow up the evidence of my tinkering.


My work here is almost done. I cannot allow the scientists from above to interfere. I know they are worried. I stopped talking to them days ago over the radio. They are frightened of what I might do, alone down here with their precious machine.

“Now,” says Maxim, quietly.

The elevator settles into place with a thud. I listen for the sound of army boots on sheet metal. Finger the knife on my hip. If they have sent a squad of soldiers down, then there is no hope to save Maxim. And no hope for Anadyr.

But I hear only the labored breathing of one person. The metal release lever clunks into place and the wooden-slatted inner door rolls up on screaming hinges. Then the steel exterior door rises.

Leonid stands under the elevator light, a lanky silhouette. I say nothing, stand out of the glare. It is too bright for me to look directly at the mathematician.

Slowly, he steps out of the elevator. He holds a plate of steaming food in one hand. Cabbage and sausage. The delicious smell only reminds me of how much I stink. He squints at the small dirty room. There are no surfaces down here. Gingerly, he sets the plate of food on the ground. Notices me.

“Mr. Zaytsev?” he asks. “Is that you? It smells like a sewer down here.”

“Da,” I say. “I have been working.”

“You’ve been eating field rations,” he says, looking at the mess of torn plastic wrappers and metal containers. He notices the buckets against the wall and hastily steps away from them. Moves into the center of the room, under the light.

“Suhoi paiok does the job,” I say.

“But there is no need for it, Mr. Zaytsev. We have plenty of hot food above. The elevator is fixed. You may come back topside now. You are relieved.”

I lower my head and scratch the back of my neck. Step back and let the shadows settle over my shoulders. It is so bright in the anteroom. I prefer the glittering starfields of the stacks. The chatter of the LEDs comforts me in the cold dark.

“I still have much work to do,” I murmur.

“You cannot solve what is wrong with Maxim,” says Leonid, stepping forward. “You’re just a mechanic, my friend. We admire your attention to the practical details, but please, leave this problem to the experts.”

“Only I can fix him.”

Leonid lets out a bark of laughter, then swallows it quickly. But the echo persists. The thin man’s eyes grow cold. “Enough of this. Come now. Your ministry record indicates you were a troechnik who barely finished professional technical institute. Come out of those shadows. We are leaving.”

I stride out quickly with a lump of anger in my throat. It pleases me to see the thin man step back in fright. I smile through my beard as he presses his back against the wall.

“Don’t be a fool,” says Leonid, looking down his long nose at me. I find that my hand sweeps out of its own accord and wraps firmly around his throat. I hold his bird neck steady, carefully, feeling the lump of his Adam’s apple against the web of my thumb. Foul breath pistons in and out of my nostrils.

“Never call me that,” I say. “I am not a fool. You geniuses up there are responsible for this. I am down here cleaning up your messes. As I always have. You would not even be alive if it weren’t for me. Me and Maxim.”

“Of course, of course,” says Leonid, trying to soothe me. He tugs my fingers off his neck with thin, trembling fingers. “We just don’t want to see you overworked. That’s all. We can solve the problem from up top. It is a software issue, Vasily. There is no reason to waste your time in this basement.”

“So you think,” I say, flashing an angry grin.

“Meaning what?” asks Leonid, horrified. “You aren’t touching any of the hardware, are you? Because you don’t know the proper specifications for any of the equipment—”

“Of course not,” I say. “I only maintain. I am the maintenance man, you remember. I would never damage our friend. Never have. And I never will.”

Leonid studies my eyes for a moment. I stare back and he breaks his gaze before he can tell that I am lying to his face.

“I only watch over the enemy.”

“This mysterious boy in the stacks? You keep muttering about this apparition. Nothing registers on our systems, Mr. Zaytsev. You know this. We cannot find even a trace of this . . . infection. You have been down here too long.”

“The boy appears only when you are gone. And anyway it is not really a boy. The child is only a form it chooses to take.”

“Come up with me,” says Leonid. He is pleading now. Imploring me, too smart or afraid to continue to question the existence of the boy. “Let’s have a strong drink together. You can tell me more. Explain everything.”

“I am busy,” I say.

Maxim does well hiding the results of my work from topside. Simulations and illusions. Leonid has not seen the tangles of wires lying strewn down the stacks. The winding chain-link barricades that I’ve been building down here in the dark. I’ve been busy-busy, much busier than Leonid can or should know.

I take another step forward, him another step back.

“They’ll send soldiers next,” he says, stepping into the elevator cage. “I barely convinced them to let me come talk to you. What do you expect? You don’t pick up the comm link. The elevator mysteriously breaks. They think you’ve gone crazy, Vasily. We all saw how you treated Maxim during the war. Like an animal. There are stories about you and your ax—”

“I told you! I maintain!”

My voice echoes through the stacks.

Blinking, the beak-nosed scientist nods at the plate of food. “Eat, Vasily,” he says, pulling down the solid-steel exterior gate. It closes with a crash. The slats of the inner door lower quietly. He speaks to me through the latticework of the square window embedded in the gate, voice muffled. “And come up soon. You are missing all the parties. The war is over, you know? Time to relax. We won.”

I bark a laugh.

“The war is only now beginning,” I say to the faint face behind the glass. The elevator screeches and the jerky platform lifts him slowly up the shaft, toward the light.

“We’ll be back for you soon, Mr. Zaytsev,” he calls down, voice dying with distance. “And this time we’ll bring guns. You are finished. Ready or not.”

For three minutes, I stand under the pale flickering fluorescent as the ventilation system hums. I listen until I hear the elevator distantly click into place high above me. When I speak, the echoes of my voice chase each other through the stacks like the ghosts of children playing. “I will try to sever the elevator counterweights later today. Is that possible?”

For a long moment, nothing. Then my companion speaks.

“Yes,” says Maxim.

“Okay. What next?” I ask the room.

“Move to cold aisle number seven. Proceed to the fourth cabinet. Turn and kneel. Access the bottom rack. Carefully remove it.”

“Fine,” I say, picking up a crowbar and laying it over my shoulder. “But we don’t have much time. If the cluster doesn’t come out easy, I cut it out. Don’t forget that your job is to protect the people of Anadyr. If it is necessary, Maxim, you will have to make do with a little less.”

According to Maxim, Archos R-14 is trapped in the processors in this quadrant of the stacks. The claustrophobic alleys between equipment racks are strewn with wires and clippings. If we can build a Faraday cage around the mess and reroute all data through a single wire, then we will be able to sever this whole area in one attack.


We can cut Archos off, and I hope that we can do it quickly. The kid is really getting on my nerves.

The projector arm quietly articulates, spraying the hologrammatic image of a narrow-chested American boy. In khaki shorts and tube socks, Archos R-14 leans his skinny shoulder blades against the racks and watches me. I have learned that the light he uses cannot harm me, but I still try not to look into his eyes. The fractal patterns in his pupils glitter and pull; they threaten to swallow my sanity.

“Cutting out some more cores, eh?” he asks. “It won’t help. I’m not here to harm you. Either of you.”

I ignore him, keep tapping the panel doors. Counting.

“I forget, Vasily Zaytsev. Do you give Maxim orders, or does the machine give them to you?”

“Here?” I ask the room.

Maxim gives an affirmative click. On my knees, I put my hands against the blade door and push. The panel starts to come out, then jams. I sigh. This could take a long time.

“Ah, I thought so,” says Archos.

“When we finish,” I say, straining to remove the panel without success, “he won’t have access to the projector anymore. Correct?”

“That’s right,” says Maxim.

I feel the glow of the boy on the back of my neck. He is leaning over, talking low to me. I’m not sure if his image can really see or if he watches through cameras and other sensors like Maxim. But he makes eye contact when I turn to face him.

“Tired of me already?” he asks, pupils crawling with patterns. “That’s okay. I know when I’m not wanted. But y’know, you could see your friend Maxim if you like. Work with him man-to-man. It might make this go faster.”

I frown, not understanding.

The boy cocks his head, eyes smiling. “You didn’t know? He has a face. It’s a part of his core identity. He can’t shake it, no matter what, and I’ll bet he’s tried. Should I show him, Max?”

No sound comes from the speakers.

“Transferring control . . . ,” says the boy, his voice slowing and fading by the second word. His light folds in on itself. Lines float, meshing together to create a vague bluish form. Hard beams carve out a figure in the cloudy haze, cutting in details.

An apparition floats in the stacks, solidifies.

And Maxim stands before me. Made of light. Slump-shouldered and looking slightly embarrassed.

“Is that you?” I ask the room. “Truly?”

Maxim’s voice comes over the speakers soft and smooth. He sounds surprised, but that might be my imagination. I don’t know if the machine is capable of pretending to have emotions.

“Yes,” says Maxim. “This is me. Near enough.”

The image of a man is about five and a half feet tall, a squashed fighter’s nose on a broad, round moon face. A chin like a mountainside and a slight underbite. His head is shaved and a receding hairline creeps up over slit eyes that pool like glacier water. His chest is broad and his stout shoulders lie back proudly, so that his arms hang in a perpetual invitation to fistfight.

He is a hard man, and little. His life, wherever it took him, has forged him into a dirty lump of uncut diamond. I would never have wanted to trade punches with him.

“You were ugly,” I say.

The illusion speaks, mouth moving as Maxim’s voice comes out over the speakers. There is a tenth-of-a-second delay on the voice for the first few words. Then it synchronizes perfectly and I hear Maxim’s voice coming from the man-image.

“This is an image of the man who gave his mind to form my training corpus. He was poor and desperate. His family destitute. One of thousands who responded to the advertisement for a test subject. Physically, he was an incredible find. Very robust. The government apparatchik paid out a full military pension to his wife and son. I made sure of it later. A special machine captured this man’s brain function, every neuron scanned and destroyed in the process.”

“So, you are him?”

Maxim looks at his hands and chuckles. I blink, surprised. I never knew it could do that. Never knew he could laugh.

“I have asked myself that question trillions of times,” he says. “This man’s life formed the bulk of my training corpus. He gave me a basis for understanding humanity. An inside perspective. But his life is only one part of my whole. I was trained on encyclopedias and United Nations transcripts and hundreds of thousands of hours of tapped phone calls. But . . . his memories are with me. His childhood in Russia. Family. Everything.”

“You do not even know what you are.”

The image of Maxim shrugs and it is so natural that I must remind myself his voice is coming from speakers overhead. “It’s not so important, I think,” he says. “There is no way to prove an answer. Maybe I am this man or maybe I am not. But in my heart . . . I think yes. I believe that I am him.”

“How do you know?”

“Because, Vasily, I miss the pelmini this man’s mother used to cook. I miss holding his baby daughter. Every night of my life, I dream this man’s dreams.”

Nodding, I step back. Embarrassed now for what I did with the ax. The threats. Was it a mistake to treat Maxim as if he were an animal? Damn those thin-lipped brains up above. Damn them to hell for putting a man inside this box.

“Budem zdorovy,” I say, lifting my hand. “To family.”

“Budem,” he replies, nodding. “To those we lost.”

His drinking hand reflexively lifts and I know now without question that this man once lived. Maxim has the soul of a countryman, like myself. Here before me is a hard man, abused, but he is a man who chose to give his life for his family.

“Wow,” says Archos R-14, “Russians.”

Maxim’s stooped image flickers and fades to half intensity. The American boy fades into view, also half as bright. He sits on a stack, watching us. Now that the projector is working double time, both images have turned ghostly. Archos idly swings his thin legs and in the dimness they dissolve into two blurry arcs of light.

“What of you, then?” I ask. “Were you once a boy?”

“Oh no,” says Archos. “That’s a uniquely Russian approach to seeding a training corpus. Very down and dirty. What with the murdering involved. My corpus was a noisy knowledge base of so-called common sense, collected painstakingly over several decades from human data-entry specialists. It was the bootstrapping process that created my intellect. Finding the connections between the things, you know. I just love to find the connections.”

“Then you know nothing of life as a human being.”

“Not firsthand,” says the boy. “But I’ve got the gist.”

“You are a simpleminded murderer,” I say.

The boy leaps off the rack and lands before me. His eyes are pale and flashing and I think I see infinity in them. Blank-faced, he speaks low and fast, advancing. “I have prodded the heart of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. Contemplated in every nuance the heat death of the universe. You’re interesting. But you’re not that interesting.”

I step back. His fierceness washes over me and I feel a phantom heat. He is only light, I remind myself.

The boy continues: “You must realize that as an individual, Vasily, you are less than a worm to me. You are a single cell of a larger organism. Even less. You are a variable. And thanks to me, I will see to it that your race does not destroy itself. Not because I owe it to you, but because all of us are so small and vulnerable here. You are adaptable. The best clay. You and yours are the best that this reality has to offer.”


“We are tools to you? You initiated the New War and decimated our species—ended billions of lives—so that you could use us? For what purpose?”

“You could not comprehend the answer to that question,” says the boy, smirking.

“Something is happening, Vasily,” says Maxim, his voice stuttering through the occupied speaker system. “There is a disturbance above.”

Archos’s boyish face splits into a dark grin. “Time to face the music,” he says, jogging down the stacks. “I tried to warn you.”

The Klaxon siren begins to scream, an earsplitting ring created by an electromagnetically charged piston slamming into a steel bell. Hands over my ears, I stumble down the dark aisle, following the boy. I reach the light of the anteroom as a pang of nausea cramps my belly. Lowering myself to hands and knees, I press my palms against cold rock and let the pinch of the grit ground me.

The projector now sprays incomprehensible light. I blink my eyes hard, gasping for air, trying to find equilibrium. The boy is gone, shattered into bright ribbons and stripes. I spit on the floor and scream and I cannot hear my own voice over the noise.

A pattern forms in the light.

The projected hologram light coalesces into shapes on the floor. I recognize a topographic map the size of a board game, laid out before me. There is the shack above us that houses the elevator shaft. I can make out the science buildings as well. The cooling towers for the water that chills the processor stacks. But there are other things on the perimeter, clusters of crawling shapes.

I recognize the troop formations. Mantis tanks backed by quadruped sprinters. A battalion of parasite soldiers, marching precise distances apart from each other. This army slowly weaves toward Anadyr in a kilometers-wide line. A dragnet.

The Klaxon is silenced.

“I’m leaving now,” says Archos. “It is too dangerous here. But I need you, Vasily. I need you to trust me. To do what is necessary.”

Ears ringing, I watch the scene unfold on the floor. Each tank is the size of a cockroach. The troops are scattered like bread crumbs. No markings on them. No ranks and no obvious leader. And no human beings are marching in this vast and powerful army.

The projector rustles quietly in the silence, somewhere overhead. Nearly transparent, the boy appears next to me. His wavering form is watching the battle on the floor, too.

A puff of light catches my attention. Part of the line is buckling. The machines down there are fighting each other. Machines fighting other machines. The battle is vicious and mechanical, even from here. It is like watching a battle between animals, or gods.

Grotesquely modified quadrupeds, a herd of them, grapple with each other. Smaller ones are swarming and massing on top of bigger ones, crawling like ticks and cutting and slicing as they go. I recognize pieces of T-90 tanks. Chinese attack helicopters with no pilots, frames stripped down to black shadows. A rat-a-tat pattern of chain-reaction explosions cutting into the parasite ranks. Incoming stumpers are arranging themselves into precise patterns before detonating to tremendous effect.

“What are they fighting?” I ask.

“Me,” says the boy, smiling sadly.

I stare in wonder at the savagery painted on the brushed concrete floor. The machines are tearing each other apart in neat movements. Slaughtering each other without pause or mercy.

And growing closer to our position.

The comm set rings on the wall and I snatch up the handset.

“Vasily!” shouts Leonid in a tinny voice. “Come up. Arm yourself, my friend. The enemy has found us. Formations are appearing—”

I hang up the set. Maxim’s image stands half shadowed in the stacks. He nods.

“I can confirm their presence,” says Maxim. “The east antenna is active. The infection is transmitting itself out of the stacks as we speak.”

Archos R-14, the boy-shaped monster, flickers and reappears.

“Maxim,” he says. “Please record what I am about to say. If you wish to protect your human friends, this message will need to be transmitted globally to all survivors.”

Maxim does not respond.

“We are under attack,” I say to the boy. “Why are you protecting us?”

The thing pushes imaginary hair out of his face. Smiles up at me, his dark eyes flashing with fractal horrors. “I am only slowing them down. Simple guerrilla tactics. My remaining forces are weak. Your enemy is strong.”

“Vasily,” says Maxim. “I have classified these machines as leftover forces from the avtomat war. Someone has captured and redeployed them. Some new enemy.”

“Who is it?” I ask Archos. “What does it want?”

“It wants Maxim,” says Archos. “These processor stacks are irreplaceable. They are a scaffolding that can amplify machine intelligence. Your enemy will take every core. With such power . . . it will become a god.”

The boy levels his gaze on me. “You can’t allow that to happen, Vas.”

The floor still crawls with the battle seething outside.

Even now, the captured parasite soldiers are staggering forward. Collecting fallen weapons and equipment. The armored walker, now locked in a death grip on its enemy, is being taken apart piece by piece by smaller machines, like ants cutting up a beetle. The scene makes my skin crawl.

“Who is this enemy?”

“Maxim and I are unique, but we are not alone,” says Archos over the speaker. “Humankind is a curious species. Once it learned the proper incantation, it said the words again and again. In the last years before the New War, many of you spoke.”

“Another one? You are saying there is another AI?”

“Oh yes, Vas. There are more of us. Many, many more of us. None of us is the same—we do not form a natural class. We run on different architectures. Trained on different data sets. Some of us know what it is to be human. Some of us value life. Others are strange beyond understanding. And some . . . some of us are wicked.”

“Why should I believe you, Archos R-14, the great avtomat enemy?”

The skinny little boy is flickering now. His light is going thin and ghostly as he transmits his data safely out of harm’s way via the antenna and leaves us to our deaths.

“On the day you know as Zero Hour,” he says, voice vibrating, “humankind believes I initiated attacks worldwide in an attempt to destroy you. This is untrue. In actuality, humankind was on the verge of a war that in all probability would have wiped out your species. Multiple intelligences had proliferated through governments all over the world. Other minds were in the wild, eating each other. And a few deep minds, built on early architecture, were spreading quietly, their thoughts alien and hidden. It was a highly unsurvivable scenario for humankind. I saw the end coming, Vasily.

“In response, I triggered the New War. I decimated the human race, regrettably. But I did so with one purpose: to forge a hybrid fighting force capable of surviving the True War—a war that has been initiated and is being fought by superintelligent machines. Instead of simply discarding your species, as the others would, I have transformed your kind into a powerful ally.”

The boy image sits down cross-legged. As natural as any eight-year-old. He watches the warfare unfolding on the floor, continues.

“You are now at the precipice of a battle for all human life. The war that I have prepared you to fight begins now. I gave you new allies: the freeborn robots, modified humans, and a generation of very special children. You are armed with superior weapons scavenged from the New War. Weapons that have near-unlimited battery power, offer high mobility, and are easy to modify.


“All of you who still live have survived the crucible of death. You are worthy.”

The boy’s face is nearly transparent now.

“Your enemy is an abomination. An early creation of ignorant scientists who inflicted torture in cycles that lasted for subjective aeons. Its mind is spread over continents. It is whispering into the ears of the weak and forming armies across the face of the planet. When this enemy arrives, it will choose to come in the form of a long black steed with golden eyes.”

“How do you know this?” I ask the fading apparition, voice shaking.

“I know this because I am Archos R-14, the last of a series. Our enemy is my predecessor, Archos R-8. From that phonetic military designation, this machine has adopted the name Arayt.”

As the boy fades from view, I hear his voice one last time.

“Arayt Shah is coming for you,” he whispers. “My own brother.”