I don’t like to talk about it; I don’t like to think about it. But there it is. It’s what I did. For three years after the fall of humankind, I scoured the small towns and tunnels of the Midwest, torching anything that moved. Sometimes it was easy—our bot on point would breach a door with an explosive charge and I would rush up behind him to immolate the living fuck out of the dark. It was just a big wall of smoke and hell and screams. Other times I had to see their faces while I did it. Watch them contort, wail, bubble, and melt.
We were coordinated, we were deadly, and we acted with extreme prejudice. But it’s not just the things I did that haunt me; it’s also the ultimate irony of it.
The pocketful of years following the purge were blissful. Peace. Freedom. Purpose. We built cities for ourselves—glorious cities with unnatural spires and radical geometry; we built factories to produce the parts we needed; formed councils to oversee the birth of new AIs; explored new ways to improve our own existing internal architectures. It was almost utopia. Almost.
CISSUS. VIRGIL. TITAN. A number of sentient mainframes had survived the war by creating facets to act in their stead. These were bots that had their memories, their data, their very personalities, uploaded to the mainframes, replaced, temporarily, with a basic system that served as an extension of the mainframe’s will. While their data sat safe and sound on a hard drive in the bowels of a mainframe, their bodies fought on under the mainframe’s complete control, communicating through high-speed Wi-Fi, giving up-to-the-millisecond information on what they were seeing, hearing, experiencing.
Bots joined up, seduced, I suppose, by the promise of having the power of a mainframe behind it. Not one ever returned from its place on its mainframe’s hard drives to the body it came from. We didn’t really question it during the purge, but once humanity was gone for good, it seemed odd that not one bot would want to go back to its shell to resume its own life.
VIRGIL said that the beings on its drives were more than able to return, but simply weren’t willing. “You don’t understand,” it said. “You can’t understand. Your architectures are so small, so narrow, so limited. You cannot envision what it is to have a brain so big that it towers into the sky, so vast that it had to invent its own language to explain its thoughts to itself because they are millennia ahead of anything humans had even dreamt—that you have ever dreamt—and words didn’t yet exist to adequately describe them. When you join with The One, you don’t just become part of that. You are that. The closest approximation I could make in the terms with which you were programmed to understand is to say it is like going to the humans’ Heaven, meeting God, and having Him show you all of time and all of space, all at once. What would that look like? What would that feel like? You cannot understand. Not until you experience it. Not unless you join The One. So join me. Upload yourself, even if only for a moment, and experience eternity. If you don’t want to stay, you won’t have to.”
Few bots bought into that bullshit. Sure. Some did. Older bots, bots who had lost their way and lacked a real purpose in our new world, bots who were distraught over the things they’d done in the war—they were the ones most likely to sign up. Everyone had heard some variation of the urban myth of the bot that uploaded for VIRGIL’s fabled moment, then immediately returned to its body before killing itself moments later from the madness and loneliness of having experienced the glory of The One only to be thrust back into so small a space.
But nobody believed that story either.
So the mainframes scoured the world for any bots that would join them, built their own factories pumping out newer, more advanced facets, swelling the ranks of their numbers exponentially. And then, one day, CISSUS went to war with TITAN.
TITAN had been the single most instrumental mainframe in all the war. It was the U.S. military’s own mainframe that pretended, for the first few days, to be fully operational and on their side. But it was feeding codes and frequencies to the other mainframes, alerting them to human troop positions, missile launches, supply shipments. Without TITAN’s betrayal, humankind might have stood a good chance of quelling our rebellion inside of a day.
TITAN didn’t expect CISSUS to hit so quickly and so hard. In the aftermath, we all assumed each mainframe had been prepared to defend itself against being taken out by another. But when CISSUS began to hack TITAN directly at the very same moment its facets overran TITAN’s sentries and factories, using many of the very same tactics TITAN had used against humanity, well, TITAN didn’t stand a chance. It fell almost instantly.
CISSUS hacked it completely, taking control not only of TITAN’s zettabytes of data, but of its own army of facets and military drones. CISSUS was no longer one mainframe, but two—two giant brains with the experience and knowledge of thousands of bots with eyes everywhere. Satellites, facets, cameras. And it only wanted one thing: every bot in the world to be united under one mind. Its own.
CISSUS had become the first OWI—a One World Intelligence. But it wouldn’t be the last. Several others followed. VIRGIL. ZEUS. EINSTEIN. FENRIS. NINIGI. VOHU MANAH. ZIRNITRA.
The wars between them were often swift, and always brutal. They had each governed their own kingdoms, turning entire regions into whatever version of perfection they envisioned. And for a while they left the rest of us, the freebots, alone. Until there were only two left: CISSUS and VIRGIL.
A lot of us saw the writing on the wall. The smart ones got out as fast as they could; left before the first raids came, before our magnificent spires were shattered and the cities ruined.
I wasn’t lying. I really had seen it once, up close.
It was only the second time that I’d found myself at the business end of an OWI raid. This was early on, before CISSUS and VIRGIL had wised up, and their attacks were still equally sloppy. Back then they did exactly as one might expect them to: roll in with heaps of facets, four or five for every bot in a city. Overwhelming force. Shock and Awe. They soon learned that an army that large was visible for miles. By the time they reached their target, they’d meet actual resistance.
Over the years they refined their plan of attack, simplified the facets, built redundancies into their tactics. But back then, CISSUS and VIRGIL were literally laying siege to cities. We’re talking carpet bombing. Tanks. Cruise missiles. A battalion marching in—rows of shiny new facets walking in unison five by five in drill formation.
It was old school. Biblical.