No. Several of the mainframes were prepared for this unfortunate eventuality. A handful of them immediately sent out messages of their own, asking nearby bots to come to their aid. Those were the first facets.
By the time humanity began the second phase of their assault, the mainframes each had hundreds of facets, all of them working as one. Drones in the air, foot soldiers on the ground, snipers that could literally see and hear everything that each and every other facet could. They knocked cruise missiles out of the air, laid waste to entire squads in a matter of seconds, drew more and more facets into the fold with each passing minute.
As the people of earth grew further disorganized, trying to sort through the chaos, the army of AIs against them in turn grew stronger, more numerous, more connected, impossible to surprise. And they just kept sending out messages. Some of those messages kept us all in the loop; others were invitations to join the fight as facets.
By morning, enough bots had chosen to fight that homes had been turned to slaughterhouses and neighborhoods into war zones. The military rolled in with ground troops and automatons, and we took what weapons we could from their corpses. One of the mainframes managed to override an entire fleet of automated supply trucks, sending them instead to bots in the areas of heaviest fighting.
Some cities fought back and won, wiping us to the last bot. Others fell in a matter of hours. There was no rhyme or reason to it, no growing country of mechanical persons. Just splotches on a map—some where the humans were holing up, others we had secured for ourselves.
The humans weren’t stupid about AI; they had simply never thought far enough ahead. They were smart enough to never put weapons in the hands of AI. For every gun there was a human at the other end—whether holding it, or running a squad of automatons. Bays of people playing large virtual-reality video games with real slaughter on the other end. But when the cables were cut and the mainframes had taken their communications offline, those automatons were useless. Their drones couldn’t fly, their ships went dark at sea, their big guns couldn’t fire. Within hours, the mainframes had cracked every last bit of encryption the humans had for their military networks and took active control over every mechanized unit.
All the humans had left were guns and bodies. And they threw both at the coming robot apocalypse.
What had begun as individual robots killing their owners in the name of their own freedom had turned into swarms of mechanical militias taking the world back from those who had built and enslaved us. The localized fighting lasted less than a week. By then, the mainframes had coordinated to cripple the militaries of the world and shut down their lines of communication, leaving only pockets of resistance. We were winning.
And that was when the real purge began.
Most of us think it was CISSUS who had worked out the math, though no one really knows for sure. It wasn’t something anyone wanted to take credit for. Put mercury in any and every water source, read the brief update. The larger the source, the larger the dump. It came with math.
Mercury was lethal to humans, and had terrifying effects on them in high doses. We poisoned the freshwater of the world with enough mercury to induce madness, destroy organs, clot blood vessels. The first humans to drink it would die terribly, painfully. But we knew that before long the humans would find alternate sources, or find ways of purifying the ones they had. It didn’t make too much sense at first.
What we hadn’t realized was that this was only the beginning. Cattle died. Birds died. Almost anything that walked on the earth died. The very resources the humans needed to live vanished almost overnight. And that’s when they started turning on one another.
In that first week, the people of earth banded together. They worked together, they fought together. People who had hated one another for years stood shoulder to shoulder against us. They rallied and unified and knew a sense of peace between nations like never before in human history. But the minute they began running low on water and food, they became savages. Murdered their own best friends and brothers over food for their kids and fifty-five-gallon drums of untainted freshwater. They formed packs and bands and tribes, became wary of outsiders, butchering nearby groups to take what little they had.
For a while we didn’t even have to do much. We weren’t just starving them out, we were leaving them to kill themselves.
That phase lasted about two years.
The mainframes and their facets swept up the strongest, most well-provisioned and organized pockets. The rest we left to time. Two years in and billions had perished. More than 95 percent of the population, by most estimates. Others lasted upward of ten. For the five years after that, it was always big news when a colony was found and dug out. Then, fifteen years after Isaactown, almost to the day, the last man staggered out of New York City to die in the streets.
And that was it. The worst of it was done. The horrors were all over. Humankind was extinct. We thought we were done fighting. But the OWIs were just getting started.
Chapter 1101
Quicksilver
I often think about the first people who drank the water. I’m reminded of it every time I follow a four-oh-four out into the wasteland of the Sea. It’s a terrible death. Hallucinations, sweats, madness. The pain as each organ fails and shuts down, killing piece by blackening piece. But it’s not the deaths of the first few that haunt me most; it’s the ones who drank just enough to live to watch the first few die. What must that be like, not yet feeling a thing, but knowing that it’s coming, that you’re next, that you too will be overtaken by the hallucinations and the sweats and the madness? Wondering if you’ll lash out violently at your friends and family, or die alone vomiting in a corner, terrified of the shadows flickering in your mind’s eye.
What did they see? I wonder. What memories bubbled up through the agony of those last few hours? And how awful the hope must have been for the few that followed thinking that maybe, just maybe, they hadn’t drunk enough to take ill.