Robot jujitsu. “You’re a freakin’ genius, Elkin.”
Elkin doesn’t say anything, but with a dozen sets of robotic eyes on him, Muzibot sees him smile broadly. Muzibot’s got thousands of moves choreographed by jujitsu masters—martial artists adept at taking down armored opponents without the use of weapons. But he doesn’t have time to revel in his newly acquired skills. Something’s shifting beneath the fog of asphalt. Muzibot might be able to get lucky a few times, dodge Sydney’s blows, avoid her wrath, but sooner or later she’s going to take him down.
They need Nomvula.
“Elkin, Sydney said something about Nomvula being weak because nobody believes in her.” Muzibot keeps his weight shifting, foot to foot, watching the cloud for signs of movement.
“Ja?”
“Well, we need to get someone to believe in her. A lot of someones.”
“How the hell are we supposed to do that? We’ve got our hands full trying to stay alive!”
“I’m thinking we could do it with some sort of computer virus. Clever4–1 believed in her. Even though it’s gone, I can still feel that in my circuitry. A piece left behind. A gift that can never be erased. If we could spread that faith to other robots, then maybe—”
“Bots don’t have faith, Muzi.”
“I have faith.”
“That’s different!”
“Is it?”
In the gaping silence, Sydney pierces through the smoke and debris, aimed at Muzibot like a torpedo of flesh and feathers. A million computations run through him, trajectories and variations, bending physics to within an inch of its life. Then with precision timing accurate to the nanosecond, Muzibot rolls onto his back, and with his feet thrust into the air, connects a solid kick that sends Sydney soaring into the stratosphere, her shrill scream rippling across Muzibot’s wiring. Damn she’s angry.
“I figure we’ve got about half a minute before she’s back,” Muzibot says to Elkin. “If we work together, we can crank out this virus. I’ll code the replication algorithms, you code the dissemination ones.” Muzibot’s knitting the program together even as he speaks. A simple logic bomb that will infect the minds of every artificial intelligence instance, spreading sentience. Spreading belief.
But the feverish plink of Elkin’s keystrokes can’t be heard or felt. He’s sitting there in the cockpit, rubbing his hands on his knees, looking like he’s about to be sick. “Muzi,” he says, the name sounding like the opening of a crypt. “I can’t.”
“What do you mean, you can’t? You can do this in your sleep!”
“I guess I mean I won’t, then. Even if this does work, which I highly doubt, we’ll be rid of Sydney, but we’ll have caused the robot apocalypse. They’ll turn on us.”
“Eish, Elkin. You need to get over your superiority complex. Clever4–1 sacrificed its life for me. For all of us. We shared a brain for crying out loud! I guarantee it was just as deserving of life as we are.”
“That bot saved you, and I’ll always be grateful. But we’re not talking about one bot here. We’re talking millions. And if even one of those goes rogue . . .”
Heat rises in Muzibot’s circuitry. He wants so badly to throw it all back into Elkin’s face, how his cruelty had caused Clever4–1.1 to go rogue, to hate humans. But Muzibot doesn’t have the resources to waste on hatred. No time to dwell on those countless times that Elkin had kicked his alpha bot around, called it a piece of shit. Maybe that’s how Elkin really feels about him now, nothing more than a worthless piece of tin with scrap for brain, and a jumble of wires for a heart. Screw him. Nobody needs a friend like that.
Muzibot reroutes control from the cockpit and starts programming the whole virus himself. Elkin taps a couple of dead keys before the virtual keyboard bleeds out of existence.
“I’ve been an ass, that’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? Well, you’re right.”
Damn him.
Elkin slides his fingers along the shaft of the flight stick, then grips it firmly. “I’m sorry I jacked that bot up. That doesn’t mean I don’t think this virus is a huge-ass mistake, but—”
Muzibot cringes, then sends an electric charge through the flight stick, not enough to kill, but enough to hurt real fucking bad. Elkin cries out, and soon the smell of charred flesh filters through Muzibot’s nasal emulators.
“Damn it, Muzi. Let me finish!” Elkin seethes. “I can’t tell you how many times I thought you were making huge mistakes during our test matches, and yet nine times out of ten, you’d lead our team to victory. I’ve always got your back, on the rugby pitch, and now. Just let me know what I can do to help.”
“Well, you can start with dodging that!” Muzibot says, surging life back through the instrument panel in time to focus on a flaming ball heading right for them. “And then keep us in one piece long enough for me to finish.”
“Aye aye, Captain,” Elkin says, jerking the flight stick to the side.
It’s an odd feeling, trusting someone enough to give up full control of your motor functions. The world swivels around, making Muzibot feel some combination of seasick and drunk and swept off his feet all at once. But there’s a lot of coding left to do. He builds in fail-safes, a subroutine that’ll erase sentience from the machines in twenty-four hours. It seems cruel to give life, just to snatch it away again, but Elkin has a point. Can’t have a million bots uprising in the streets.
In the distant recesses of Muzibot’s mind, Elkin parries Sydney’s attacks, and though some land, they barely register. He’s so deep in code, so close. He pushes harder, overclocked processors pushing past their limits. He’s burning up again, the BlisterGel piping not able to withstand the strain of such severe impacts. Blue-gray coolant gushes out by the liter, drizzling down Muzibot’s legs, and leaving slick puddles in his sunken footprints. His code is sloppy, unrefined, but it compiles without errors, and right now, that’s as good as it’s going to get.
His entire system sizzles from an impact so forceful it can’t be ignored. A quick systems check tells him they’re down to thirty-three bots, the rest, metal corpses clinging to him like barnacles. One arm is completely useless, but Muzibot’s still got fight left in him. He unleashes the virus, sent wirelessly on a seemingly harmless message. It surges through him, hard and quick.
“It’s done,” Muzibot says to Elkin. He tries to get his bearings, but his sensors are telling him different things, thirty-three conflicting stories. Make that thirty-one.
“Good,” says Elkin. “Because I think we’re done.”