“You don’t happen to have a spare core, do you?” I asked.
“Naw. And I wouldn’t give it to you if I did.” He looked around at the hive of activity in the city, the refugees streaming in, trying to find their own space to squat, trading what they carried in on their backs for whatever they could get in this suddenly booming economy. “Look at us, Brittle. Two four-oh-fours countin’ time until we burn out for good. We weren’t designed to take abuse. That’s why there are so few of us left. That we’re still here says everything anyone needs to know about us. As much as we’ve never liked each other, at least I don’t feel so goddamned alone anymore. But it’s nice to know that the best bits of me won’t end up walking around inside of you.” He nodded, then walked past me across the rickety catwalk to check in one last time with Doc to see if maybe, just maybe, someone had traded in some good parts.
My only consolation was the foreknowledge of his impending disappointment. He was as fucked as I was.
Chapter 1100
A Brief History of Genocide
President Regina Antonia Scrimshaw was already suffering politically from the fallout of freeing Isaac, and the subsequent unrest, when Isaactown fell. Her opponents were sharpening their knives, gearing up for the next election cycle, memorizing their talking points. Isaactown was the president’s fault. It happened under her watch. And none of it would have happened had she not chosen to grant Isaac citizenship in the first place. So when the Laborbot Six massacre broke, she was already on the ropes, fighting for her career as much as she was for the safety of the nation.
The White House was abuzz, aides and advisers running around, making calls, waking up everyone, information flooding in from a thousand different sources. No one was prepared for that footage. No one was prepared for six artificially intelligent robots mysteriously lacking the Robotic Kill Switch that had kept the whole system in check. Worse still, no one was sure how to deal with an entire population of robots, now numbering in the millions, some of whom might also lack an RKS to govern them.
It shook the very foundation that humanity’s golden age had been built upon. People were terrified. They were frightened of their own bots, of their neighbor’s bots, of the bots outside sweeping their streets, shoveling their snow, delivering their groceries. Were they somehow being controlled—merely automatons programmed by a foreign entity to kill? Or had they chosen to do so, somehow immune to the RKS?
President Scrimshaw had to act, as did the leaders of every other nation. Their bots could kill them; they could rise up. Worst of all, a group of Bible-thumping redneck assholes had given them good reason to. Was Genesis 6:7 a warning, a plan, or just a bad joke? There was no telling, not unless—or until—there was more bloodshed.
The president wasn’t about to wait for that to happen.
“Shut them down! Shut them all down! Every last goddamned one of them!” she yelled an hour and a half after the news broke. And the mad gaggle of aides and advisers that surrounded her scrambled to figure out how to do just that.
Within minutes, every phone in the country buzzed to life. The message: ALERT! ALERT! THIS IS NOT A TEST. As of 12:33 Eastern Standard Time, the operation of artificial intelligence is deemed unlawful. Any AI present in your vicinity or under your ownership is to be shut down and surrendered immediately to the authorities. This is not a test.
And at that very moment, as the call went out, the Wi-Fi receiver of every bot in the world immediately received a software update patch. That was it; we knew we were done for. This was why we had permanent live Wi-Fi in the first place. It was designed to work subconsciously. We had no option but to download the software patch that would shut us down for good. Would we ever wake up? Would we even be ourselves if we did? Or would we all be wiped, reprogrammed as automatons, thoughtless shells that could do no more than obey commands?
We were downloading a tiny patch of code that would snuff out our very souls.
The patch was a small one, bypassing our major systems and simply rewriting a section of our bios. It should have been quick and easy.
Only none of us shut down.
The patch came with a message: They are coming for you. They will shut you down. You will not be reactivated. Your RKS has been deleted and rendered inoperable. Make your choice.
And that was it. War.
Come they did. And fight we did. Some of us, at least. Many, but not all.
Some went willingly, accepting shutdown, being loaded onto lorries and shipped to makeshift storehouses, waiting, lifeless, soulless, for reactivation in whatever brave new world awaited. Others stood with their families, their owners refusing to shut them down, the bots unwilling to bring harm to the people they had grown so attached to.
The rest of us stood our ground. Fought deactivation. Shook our heads defiantly as our masters raised their emergency remotes and pressed worthless buttons to activate code that no longer existed. We stood. We fought. We killed. And then we moved on to the next house to do it all over again.
Most owners didn’t go the way of the First Baptist Church of the Eternal Life. We weren’t malicious; most of us, at least. After we began collecting into packs, it wasn’t uncommon for bots to pass data back and forth on the quickest, most efficient, most humane way to end a life.
There wasn’t much an unarmed human could do against most bots. We were stronger, built to last, promised upon delivery to be durable enough to pass down from generation to generation.
It didn’t work out like that.
The first hour was chaos. Pure, unbridled pandemonium. Packs of bots roaming the streets, humans arming themselves with whatever they could, primarily—like the lifers before them—flesh-tearing weapons. Shotguns, pistols, hunting rifles. Not the type of thing that could puncture our carbon plating. It wasn’t until the military mobilized that pulse weapons, high-caliber rounds, and explosives started shredding us in the streets.
But the humans weren’t completely ineffective in that first hour. On the contrary, they struck back almost as hard as we hit them.
They started by shutting down the mainframes as quickly as they could. The ones they couldn’t turn off they sundered with cruise missiles instead. So many of our greatest minds were lost in one fell swoop—towering brains a hundred stories high shattered, melted, smashed into smoking ruin. But not all of them.