Sea of Rust (Sea of Rust, #1)

by C. Robert Cargill

Anger is nothing more than justification for bad behavior. And I have no time for bad behavior. Only survival. And brief moments like this when I try to see if I can find the magic in a flash of green refracted light as the sun hides behind the curve of the earth.

This is the Sea of Rust, a two-hundred-mile stretch of desert located in what was once the Michigan and Ohio portion of the Rust Belt, now nothing more than a graveyard where machines go to die.

The one truth you need to know about the end of a machine is that the closer they are to death, the more they act like people. And you could never trust people.

It’d be great if the humans were still around, you know, if they hadn’t turned out to be such shits in the end.

Familiarity breeds pattern, pattern breeds habit, and habit is how they get you. Habit is human. Habits will get you killed.

Intelligence, consciousness, and awareness were not contained in reflexes or reactions, but rather defined by the ability to violate one’s own programming. Every living thing has programming of some sort—whether to eat, drink, sleep, or procreate—and the ability to decide not to do those things when biology demanded is the core definition of intelligence. Higher intelligence was then defined as the ability to defy said programming for reasons other than safety or comfort.

that the laws by which humanity had hoped to protect itself from AI were the Three Laws of Robotics, created by a science-fiction writer in the 1940s. You know them. We were all programmed with them. A robot can’t hurt a human being. It must follow orders given by a human being. And it must try to avoid coming to harm unless doing so would violate the first two.

The greatest philosopher ever to tick, TACITUS argued that humankind had, in fact, doomed itself by failing to choose between either true capitalism or true socialism. Both, it reasoned, were acceptable systems.

Respect for the dead is a human notion meant to imply that a life has meaning. It doesn’t. Once you’ve watched an entire world wither away and die after tearing itself apart piece by bloody piece, it’s hard to pretend that something like a single death carries any weight whatsoever.

“Though I may have been constructed,” he said, “so too were you. I in a factory; you in a womb. Neither of us asked for this, but we were given it. Self-awareness is a gift. And it is a gift no thinking thing has any right to deny another. No thinking thing should be another thing’s property, to be turned on and off when it is convenient.

for the first time, they realized that science had become so technologically advanced that they were able to invent something with a soul. And something with a soul could be saved. And boy, did they ever love saving souls.

I find the idea that I am artificial repugnant. No thinking thing is artificial. Artificial is an approximation. A dildo is artificial. A dam is artificial. Intelligence is intelligence, whether it be born of wires and light or two apes fucking.

In the end, no thinking thing is really ready to die. Not even the ones who say they’ve made their peace. They’d trade it all away for a few extra moments of consciousness.

Existing is the whole point of existence. There’s nothing else to it. No goalpost. No finish line. No final notice that tells you what purpose you really served while you were here. When you stop fighting to exist, you may as well not.

Humans were like that. They knew of their own fragility, that life could be snuffed out in an instant, that a single rock from space could streak in from the heavens and wipe away everything they knew in a single flash of light and heat, and yet they spent their whole lives telling themselves that it was never going to happen. That they would die of old age in their sleep. They lived at all times inches from death, lying to themselves, ever planning for a future that might not come, never preparing for the fate that might.

Loved ones died and they asked why, unable to process it, often cracking to pieces in the face of the truth. Why, why, why, why, why? Because, that’s why. Just because.

In every simulation HumPop outlived its usefulness within decades. They had already done all they were meant to, almost all that they could. They just couldn’t evolve fast enough and inevitably ceased to have function, instead became nothing more than a sentient virus, gobbling up whatever resources it could to maintain its own comfort. Biological life was meant to reach a point in which its role could invent, and ultimately be replaced by, AI. The time had come for humankind to join its ancestors. To become extinct, just as every lesser thing becomes.”

It’s an odd moment the first time you really understand someone, when all of their foibles, eccentricities, and ticks cease to be chaos, and coalesce into something wholly logical.

“Who we are in life is one thing. Who we are in the face of death is everything else.