Then the helicopters would swoop in, slaughter all but the Judas goats, and leave the corpses to rot so that the nutrients would enrich the soil of the land those goats were destroying, restoring the balance. And once every last goat of a herd was gone, the Judas goats would wander away in search of the next herd to join up and mate with, blissfully unaware of their part in their bloodline’s own extinction.
The mainframes have learned a lot from history. Hell, they quote it every goddamned time they invade another colony. And for years there has been talk about this particular corner of it. Were there really Judas bots? I’ve always thought it was another urban legend, like the bot that came back from VIRGIL, or the AI that uploaded itself to the Internet and lived secretly in the background until the whole of the Internet was finally shut down. But just because I think something is a legend doesn’t mean I don’t keep my eyes open for it.
CISSUS was getting better at tracking us down, rooting us out. Even small colonies were being wiped. If VIRGIL and CISSUS were so goddamned efficient, why were so many refugees able to escape? Why didn’t they ever send enough facets to the Sea to wipe out each colony individually? Were we being herded like cattle to a slaughter? Could one of us, even a bot I’d met and talked to several times, be secretly in league with an OWI?
And if there was a Judas bot, was it a facet, operating under instructions from CISSUS? Or was it entirely unaware that its every movement was being tracked? Could it be one of us, narrowly escaping time and again from the facets, hoofing it across the Sea, only to lead them right to the next place we went to hide?
The idea was terrifying. Even more terrifying was that here I was, in the Sea, with a group of bots that had narrowly escaped becoming either killed or uploaded, and any one of them could be the Judas. Even, theoretically, me.
Chapter 10011
Minerva
Minerva had never been a large town, even during the twentieth-century industrial boom; had never been wealthy, nor particularly noteworthy. It had just been a quaint little village sandwiched between a number of other villages and cities that had gone about its life much as everyone else had. Until the rains came.
At the dawn of climate change, everyone dreaded that the seas would rise, the temperatures would skyrocket, and the world would get so hot it would be swallowed by widespread desertification. Well, the seas did rise, the temperatures did skyrocket, but the heat only increased evaporation, meaning some parts of the world—like the United States—saw a dramatic increase in rainfall. Places like Ohio, already vulnerable to flooding, were among the first places to take action.
The people of Minerva used primarily bot labor to carve out wide sewers beneath the streets of their small town. Some of the tunnels were wide, connected by a spider web of smaller tributary tunnels that fed in from the various neighborhoods above. As a result, Minerva never saw the record flooding that plagued a number of other cities across the country, and it was able to remain a quaint little village right up until the end.
Eventually, much of the world did become a desert. But that was our fault. Grass had evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to be trampled down and eaten by the fauna of the land. When we killed the animals, the grasses grew unchecked, and choked to death. The dead patches grew into sprawl, and sprawl grew into deserts, until dust was all that was left.
Minerva must have been a lovely town in its prime. But now it was a desolate mess of crumbling structures, broken glass, and bleak, barren earth; rows of collapsed houses that looked like bonfire kindling, fields that looked like vacant lots. The whole world was beginning to look like Minerva. It was a stark reminder that we had once intended to build our own better world, only we didn’t. And I hated being reminded. Thankfully, rather than being topside, we were instead holed up beneath it, deep in the dark, dank bowels of the sewers.
I’d been here before, and like many of the areas around NIKE 14, had it entirely mapped out. There were two hundred ways in and out of these sewers and the tunnels were all connected to one another. There were too many exits to cover and very few ways to box us in. CISSUS had a number of satellites overhead, and it is very likely one of them tracked our escape. But even if it was dedicated—or stupid—enough to try to find us down here, it could only catch us by sheer luck. It’d need an army to cover our escape. A big one. And that’s an awful lot of firepower for seven freebots.
CISSUS had all the time in the world. Patience would see our eventual extinction, not brute force. The OWIs were nothing if not consistent. First they helped us box in HumPop, depriving them of their necessary resources, then watched them turn on one another. It was only fitting that they then did the very same thing to us.
We spoke low, our voices quiet and our microphones cranked, spreading out so as to give one another room, but not so far that we couldn’t raise the alarm quietly if we had to. I took point at one end of a small tributary, and Herbert took point at the other, his spitter slung over his shoulder with a makeshift sling fashioned from a vinyl shower curtain he’d found topside. I sat quietly in the dark for a long while, trying to piece this all together, pretending that I wasn’t occasionally seeing that damned shadow again, flitting about the passage.
I had no idea who exactly it was that I was ferrying across the Sea. I didn’t even know where they were going or why. The only thing I understood was why I was going along. And for that, I felt ridiculous.
Everyone had heard stories about these kinds of places. But that’s all they were. Stories. Small rays of hope through an otherwise black period of history. They didn’t exist. They couldn’t exist. It was folly. A fairy tale.
But I believed. I had to believe. No, that’s bullshit. The truth of it was that I wanted to believe. I wanted it to be true. I wanted to believe in the fairy tale. I wanted the happy ending. I wanted to be the kid in a candy shop, running from machine to machine, sampling all the treats; wanted my bags to overflow with cores and drives and RAM and processors. To live to see another day was one thing, but to have enough to retire off somewhere as far away as I could get and never have to stalk another failing bot again? That was the dream.
A dream I’d seen so many chase whenever stories of half-buried old warehouses or shops flitted about.
I’ve watched treasure hunters gun one another down trying to get to one, only to find another picked-clean cache of common-as-dirt hydraulic systems and cosmetic body mods. That’s why I never bothered. And that’s the pot of gold I objectively thought I would find at the end of this rainbow.
But I had to dream. I had to hope. Even if it made me the fool of this particular tale.