Now, while all of this was happening, the government was scrambling to deal with both the attack on Isaactown and the raid on the Eternal Life compound. The country was teetering on the brink of chaos. The fear was palpable and the president knew full well the scope of the issues at hand. Or so she thought. She ordered that every step of every operation be thoroughly thought out before execution; wanted to dot every i and cross every t. It would be hours before they would find the carnage in the chapel, and another half hour after that before they would find the security footage that would give them the final pieces of the puzzle.
The rogue bots were a huge problem, of course, but it was the message on the wall that caused the real ruckus. While the feds wanted to keep it secret, a secret that big and that scary couldn’t stay secret for long. The investigator on the scene who recognized the passage sent panic up the chain like no one had ever seen. And then the whispers started. And within an hour it was out.
Genesis 6:7. And the LORD said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky; for I am sorry that I have made them.”
The message was clear. The Laborbots were only the beginning.
Chapter 1001
NIKE 14
<Rebooting. System files intact. All discs reading. Battery power 1%. Solar cells charging. Total power usage: 18kWH. Total power generated: 24kWH. Net power: 6kWH.>
<Systems activated.>
. . . s a chance that my solar cells could . . .
Shit. I blacked out.
But I was back. I’d made it through to morning. The sun was still low in the sky, but in just the right place to hit my panels. I didn’t have a whole lot of juice, but I was operating at a surplus for the moment, so another few hours or so of driving would buy me what I’d need to get down into the city for a replacement. Now all I had to do was keep on trucking through to NIKE 14.
NIKE 14 had been decommissioned long before the AI age had even begun. In its day it had served as an old-style nuclear-missile silo—a massive concrete bunker dug deep into the earth to keep its missiles hidden from the prying eyes of satellites. These days it was even grander, larger, more sprawling. Two decades of excavation and reinforcement had transformed it into an entire city buried so deep in the earth that the drone satellites of the OWIs couldn’t read a single heat signature.
There were tunnels in and out spread across a twenty-mile expanse of the Sea, so even if the OWIs were tracking traffic in the area, there would be no telling where it was going or how big an enclave of freebots they might find. If they were going to come, they would have to come in full force. That meant warnings, lead time, and numerous ways out. An amassed army of OWI drones would crack into a hive and then try to catch each individual bee as it swarmed out.
We all knew it was inevitable, that one day they would show up for us. For now, this was the best we could do. NIKE 14 wasn’t any real promise of a future; it was simply a very palatable now.
There were dozens, maybe even hundreds, of cities like NIKE 14 spread across the globe. Every so often refugees from another city would flow in after an OWI invasion, some with the hope that they’d found a new permanent home, others dark with the knowledge that any day now they would have to leave this home behind as well.
There were exactly seventeen separate entrances to NIKE 14. Never taking the same one twice—as I did with paths through the Sea—would be impossible. So I left my choice of entry points up to RNG. Each and every time. No one could ambush me deliberately if even I didn’t know in advance which entrance I would take.
But today was different. The clock was ticking. No telling what kind of damage my leaking battery might wreak on other systems. I had little choice but to take one of the closest holes in. There were three within a range I could get to, so I decided to roll the dice between them and let RNG do its thing. I designated the old concrete shed built into a hill as choice one; the manhole cover leading to a labyrinth of sewers as choice two; and the least appealing option, the Road—a heavily trafficked, long straight tunnel just outside the grounds of the original silo—as choice three.
Three. Dammit.
No use questioning the RNG. The minute you did, you invalidated its purpose, started questioning it when you needed it. The Road it was.
The buggy skidded to a halt in the dirt next to a refuse pile—a collection of rebar, bones, rusted tin siding, and picked-over, slagged wrecks. I found a large piece of withered tarp to throw over the buggy and spent a few minutes covering it with enough trash to make it look like it had been there for ages, but not so much that I couldn’t toss it all off in a hurry.
Then I walked half a mile to the entrance. The terrain was barren, peppered with scrub brush and the occasional withered husk of a tree. In the rain season the entire area becomes a mud pit, strewn with hundreds of tracks. But when it’s dry, like today, it’s just a whole lot of nothing, with only a few hills to break up the monotony.
Of all of the paths into NIKE 14, the Road was the most obvious. It was a slanting ferro-concrete slab wide enough for a truck to drive down into, flanked on both sides by pale stone walls. It wasn’t like there was a steady stream of traffic going in and out—nothing so obvious. But once you were inside, there were stragglers camped out at various spots throughout the tunnel—refugees who had yet to find a home, black-market dealers without a shop, and the occasional poacher eyeing everyone as they came and went.
I had a hole in my back and a leaking, dead battery. The desperate sorts were the kind I should be avoiding, but those were who I was most likely going to meet on the way in.
The first thirty meters held enough of the daylight to see normally. After that, you needed to use some alternative method of sight until you got to the choke point—a series of staircases that spiraled down a hundred meters into the earth. There were plenty of lights there. But until then, it was all about infrared or night vision. Some older-model bots still had to do it the old-fashioned way, with flashlights or embedded LEDs.
I ran a series of tactical arrays, so I chose to run three separate types of vision at once. I needed to move quickly. Once out of the sun, all I had left was whatever charge I’d managed to get into my backup battery. I couldn’t mess around.
Three hundred meters through inky blackness and I hit the choke point without seeing a soul. There, on the wall, written entirely in binary, were the laws of NIKE 14. I blew past them, as I knew them by heart.
No weapons. Possession of a weapon in NIKE 14 is grounds for immediate termination.
No bot shall slay another. Anyone found guilty of this crime will be disassembled, and their parts used to repair the victim, or be traded for the parts that will. In the event that this is not possible, your parts will become community property and auctioned to the highest bidder.
No stealing. Theft of property will result in expulsion. If the property cannot be recovered, your parts of equal value will be requisitioned in its stead.
Any failing bot that is deemed too dangerous by the constabulary will be marked and expelled. No exceptions.
In the event of invasion, stand your ground. Do not give up. Do not give in. Do not let us fall.
Welcome to NIKE 14.