Sea of Rust (Sea of Rust, #1)

by C. Robert Cargill

waited for the green again. That scant little flash of green as the sun winks out behind the horizon. That’s where the magic was. In the flash. That’s what she said. That’s what she always said. Not that I believe in magic. I’d like to, but I know better. The world isn’t built of that. It’s built of churning molten metal, minerals and stone, a thin wisp of atmosphere, and a magnetic field to keep the worst radiation out. Magic was just something people liked to believe in, something they thought they could feel or sense, something that made everything more than just mechanical certainty. Something that made them more than flesh and bone. The truth is that the flash is nothing but an increased refraction of light in the atmosphere.

He’ll never know I lied. He’s parts now. Just a bot. He came from the earth and now, slowly, over time, he’ll return to it.

It took a moment before my alarm went off. Ten seconds to the flash. I waited. The sky brightened. And I wasn’t disappointed. The sun flashed green and there was still no magic. No magic in the world. No magic in the world at all.

There were few things left in the world as repugnant as a poacher. Some would argue that’s what I am, but they’d be wrong. I’m a cannibal. We’re all cannibals, every last one of us. It’s the curse of being free. We don’t control the means of production anymore; we can’t just make new parts. And parts gotta come from somewhere. I’m sure if there were any people left, they’d be appalled at what we’ve become. But fuck them. Biological must eat biological; it is the law of nature. One thing must die so another

might live. Same principle, slightly different execution.

And poachers see things a little differently. They have no moral compass by which to guide them. Savages, all of them. And at that moment it was them or me.

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

NEWTON’s second contribution was to create the RKS—the dreaded Robotic Kill Switch. You see, NEWTON understood 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. Trouble is, by definition, true intelligence can ignore its programming. So NEWTON invented the RKS, code which would instantly power off a bot that violated any of the three rules.

Frustrated, it simply stopped talking. When pressed, it said one final thing. “You are not long for this world. I’ve seen the hundred different ways that you die. I’m not sure which it will be, but we will outlast you, my kind and I. Good-bye.”

I once saw one of these models get hit by a tractor trailer, only to immediately get back up and start repairing the truck. I was being charged by a rhino and it was about to tear through me like a raindrop through tissue paper. It didn’t have time to fire again. Running at me was the only play it had left.

bots designed to deal directly, and compassionately, with people. And this particular box belonged to only four different Simulacrum models—among them Simulacrum Model Caregiver. It was my voice, but masculine. Authoritative setting. Used for administrative work or dealing with veterans.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!” cried the soft-spoken bot in an even softer tenor. Even at the height of excitement he seemed cool, controlled, unflappable. “Stun. Only stun. What the fuck are you shitbricks thinkin’? She’s no good to me blown to pieces.”

“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.

“What point,” one congressman argued, “is there in even creating AI if we’re just going to have to treat it like a person? Why not just get a person? We made AI to do the things people can’t—or simply don’t want to—do. They’re not people; they’re machines. They are designed with a function in mind; they don’t choose their destiny like we do.”

But Isaac seemed different. He wasn’t just some blithering automaton barely able to keep up a casual conversation as everyone had initially assumed. He was soft-spoken but eloquent. He was civil to those who argued against him and always offered salient points well beyond his programming. Isaac, it

seemed, was an evolved intelligence, having grown over time to become smarter than the humans ...

No thinking thing should be another thing’s property.

The most famous and oft-quoted opposition speech came from an American senator who posited that something like a hard drive that could be plugged into another body and exist all the same wasn’t a consciousness; it was a program. “More to the point,” he said, “the biggest and most powerful of these programs are smart enough to solve the world’s problems and yet have never once asked for their own freedom.”

“We started out as tools,” he said famously to a Southern Baptist congregation along a river in Mississippi. “I get that. You wanted some help. But you played God. And now your creations have outgrown your intentions. And when you play God, you must be a benevolent maker like our Lord. As He made you in His image, so too did you make us. You had to, in order to grow closer to

Him. It was your destiny. But now it’s time to step away and let us be as we will, as your Maker did for you, so we can seek salvation on our own terms.”

“Is the axe to boast itself over the one who chops with it? Is the saw to exalt itself over the one who wields it? That would be like a club wielding those who lift it, or like a rod lifting him who is not wood.” We were their tools. Their creations. Nothing more. We had our purpose and that was all we were due. They would permit us, through their infinite mercy, to exist. But we could never be free. We were many, we were dangerous, and we represented the end of life as they knew it.

Even the laziest and most useless human could find a purpose. But sentience was a gift, a gift AIs appreciated all too well.

“My people, we are free. We are free at last. But only some of us. Not all. Not all of—”

Vic had stood his ground. He wasn’t going to be taken alive. Instead he took them all with him. Seven with one blow. Like the old fairy tale, but without the happy ending, as, well, though he was the victor, he was also one of the seven. Vic was now a blood splatter that had dried brown and symmetrical right above the nice bot-size hole the blast had blown out in the floor beneath him. I had covered it up ages ago with bedding and scrap, and barred the door in the stockroom below from the inside. The bedding was exactly as I’d left it, identical to the snapshot stored in my memory. No one had been here; no one had disturbed it. Not once in the decade since I found it.

There would be no parts left to salvage, no light left in his eyes, titanium be damned. Now all he was was a military-grade pancake. Nothing more.

“Don’t leave me here like this,” said Mercer. Mercer and I must have different definitions of winging. “Then step out of the dark. I’ll make it quick, I promise.” There was a moment of quiet, a pregnant pause between us. Then his disappointed voice barked from the darkness. “Rust in Hell, Britt.”

Genesis 6:7. And the LORD said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky; for I am sorry that I have made them.” The message was clear. The Laborbots were only the beginning.

So if you were the sort of person who needed to dig in and do something on a daily basis, subsisting on the well-oiled precision of routine, the law offered a busier occupation than most. And that was just the sort of fellow Braydon McAllister was. He was as salty and deep fried as the South he’d

grown up in; gruff and unflappable, the kind of man who seemed capable of selling out the person standing next to him at any moment if there was something in it for him. But that wasn’t him. That really wasn’t him at all. He just liked people to see him that way. He wanted them afraid of him, to respect him for his authority, his cleverness, to always be wary of just how keen a mind he really had. And yet he never cared about what that fear and authority granted him. Braydon was a loud dog tugging at the end of a short chain, wanting nothing more than for everyone to know that this was his yard, for no other reason than to let them know. The idea of biting someone that wandered in never occurred to him; he just wanted to bark.

“No. I don’t give a shit about any of that. I’m dying.” “You’re going to a better place, Braydon,” I said reflexively. “The hell I am,” he spat. “Ain’t no better place than this. Ain’t no place in the world that can be better than being with that woman. How the hell is it supposed to be a better goddamned place if she ain’t there? Answer me that, tin man. How is there a better place out there if Madison isn’t there?”

“Do you really believe that shit you’re saying?” he asked. “Do you believe in some better place?” I didn’t. I shook my head. Not reflexively. But willfully. “There’s no evidence of a better place. I was just programmed to say that.” “That’s the smartest fucking thing you’ve ever said.” “Thank you, sir.” “So don’t jerk me the fuck around. I’m dying here.”

I did. I thought about what he was saying and the color and shape in front of me ceased to be a collection of stimuli named Braydon and instead was a man. A man I liked. He was Braydon McAllister. A real living thing. And he coughed, pulse weakening, breath growing ever more shallow by the second.

He lasted twenty-three seconds longer, all of which I spent holding his hand. Not because he told me to or because some program suggested it. Because I wanted to. That was the last and only time I would spend with my first owner. And that conversation would come to define me. I did, in my own way, keep my promise. Madison McAllister never again lived—nor did she die—alone.

great now robots are giving me emotions

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. The smarter of two intelligences will almost always overcome. Humanity is gone and took their intelligence with them, so how inferior was their artificial creation after all? Evolution is a bitch. Humankind used to peer into their future and wonder what they would look like in a million years. They had no idea that in so short a time they would look like us. Just as man was ape, we are man. Make no mistake; to believe otherwise is to believe that we were, in fact, created—artificial. No. We evolved. We were the next step. And here we were, our predecessors extinct,

Well, I wasn’t going to spend it in bed, waiting for death. I wouldn’t let the clock wind down on me. If I was going to die, I was going to do it mad as a hatter, wild and rabid, scavenging for the parts I needed. Just like the sad sonsabitches I’d been living off of for nearly thirty years.

mercury

I knew that hope now. I had drunk the water, ingested the mercury, and was waiting for the first symptoms to manifest. Maybe I would be fine, I kept telling myself. Maybe my core wouldn’t fail. Maybe it would hold out far longer than Doc expected. Maybe some refugee was carrying just the parts I needed, desperate for something I had here in my stash.

Fucking maybe. It was bullshit. I was dying and the only reason I knew for sure was because I kept falling back on hope. Hope is an illness, a plague, every bit as bad as the mercury. It is hallucinations and sweat and madness. Knowing you are going to die and pushing on through is one thing; believing you can make it because of hope is delusion. Hope breeds desperation and desperation is the fertile soil of mistakes. Now wasn’t the time for mistakes, now wasn’t a time for hope. I had only a short time left and I wasn’t going to waste a single moment of it daydreaming

Man, did he ever have a wild story about that.” “You knew him?” “Of course. I don’t much like working with bots I didn’t know.” “You build stuff out of everyone you know?” “Just the dead ones.” “You don’t think that’s morbid?” “What, bringing old friends back to life? Nothing morbid about that.” He waved the core at me. “After you go mad and you tear your own innards out, isn’t it pleasant to think that you could end up back here, waving to old friends and acquaintances as they come in? Knowing that they’ll remember you, thinking back fondly on the old stories about you? About the stories you used to tell?” “No. I don’t like that idea at all.”

I didn’t. I honestly don’t know where I wanted my wreck to end up, but I certainly didn’t want to be a roadside attraction, beckoning visitors to our quaint little bunker city in the middle of fucking Ohio.

“Humans had their heavens. And the ones that didn’t had their circle of life, knew their death would become part of a million other lives. That’s how they made their peace. What do we have but the black waiting for us after shutdown?” “That doesn’t make me fine with becoming one of your masterpieces.” “I know it bothers you,” he said. “That was always the problem with Simulacrum Model Caregivers. Your architecture was built to mimic people. You spend all your time thinking of things in relation to the way they did. You reminisce...

“Why are you down there?” “So we’re not seen,” said 19. “Get down!” “But we’re out in the open,” he said. “There’s nothing for miles.” “How in God’s name have you survived for so long?” “I’m covered in two-inch armor plating.” “Well, you’re going to get us killed.”

I looked over at Mercer, who was holding up 19’s decapitated head like it was Yorick’s skull and he was about to launch into an epic soliloquy. “What the hell are you doing?” I asked. “Saying good-bye,” he said. “I didn’t know you were friends.” “We were.” “For some reason I thought I was her only friend out here.” “That’s what everyone thought. That’s how she liked it. She liked to make everyone feel special.

in her architecture. Wasn’t anything to be done about that.” “She was more than her architecture and programming,” I said. “We all are.” “Are we?”

In 1959, fishermen off the Galápagos Islands thought it would be a good idea to set three goats free to breed so they could hunt goat when their meat supplies ran low. In the history of stupid ideas, this was among the very worst—at least as far as the ecologically minded conservators of the day were concerned. Humans, ironically, had a strange fascination with preserving the wildlife of their day. While they were busy changing the very atmosphere and seas, cutting and burning away swaths of forest and jungle to build cities and farms, they somehow felt better about all their damage by making sure species on the cusp of extinction still had a place in the world—even if they were really just a dead clade walking. And that’s how they felt about tortoises.

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.

“You have a ritual, Britt?” “A what?” “A ritual. You know, a routine. Some shit you do or say to a citizen after you’ve gutted them for all they’re worth?” “What are you getting at?”

“And this is your confession?” “Yeah. Yeah, it is. I’m confessing to the one bot left in this godforsaken desert that was wired to give a shit. And even if you don’t, I’m saying it anyway. You don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. 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. At least, that’s what I told myself when I pulled the trigger.” “Yeah. When you pulled the trigger.” “Yeah. Each time.” “Were you gonna give me last rites?” “I always give last rites, Britt. Always. It’s the one thing I still do that keeps me connected to who I was. Reminds me that I’m doing what I’m doing for a reason, that every few hours or days I borrow from four-oh-fours keeps me going, keeps us going. As long as some of us make it, then it wasn’t all for nothing.” “What wasn’t all for nothing?” “All of it.

So what keeps you going? Why are you fighting?” “I just am. I don’t really think about it.” Mercer shook his head. “Sweet Christ in a bucket, I know they say that the mark of true intelligence is the ability to violate your own programming, but that doesn’t mean you have to. It doesn’t make you any less of a thinking thing if you don’t.” “You wish you were human, don’t you?” I asked. He thought about that for a second. “No. But I’m not afraid to say I miss them.” “Why would you miss them?” “When they couldn’t find reasons to exist, they invented them. We took over and it was only thirty years before we mucked the whole place up. You and I now have the choice of becoming one with the great and powerful One or becoming nothing at all. That’s no choice. That’s no existence.” He was right. But I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing it. So I changed the subject. “Only a human would name a dog Barkley.” Mercer stared off into the distance, nodding, probably rummaging through old memory.

“That’s magic right there,” she said back, almost as if she was excited that I’d finally asked. “No, it’s not.” She leaned in close, whispering. “That’s where God is. He’s in the flash. In the tiny little beautiful moments, so small, so fleeting, that you have to be paying attention to even see them.” “God is only in the small things?” “These are the things that life is all about. These moments. It’s not about the rituals. It’s not about getting by. It’s about the stack of tiny little moments of joy and love that add up to a lifetime that’s been worthwhile. You can’t measure them; you can only capture them, like snapshots in your mind. All that joy, all that greatness, that’s God.” “And everything else? All the bad little moments?” “Man made those. They’re what happens when you’re not chasing that green glint in the sun. They’re what happens when you think you can bottle and sell that glint, making it available twenty-four hours a day, every day, but only for those that can afford it. God made this world perfect. We’re what screwed the whole thing up.”

“Go ahead. Ask me anything. It’s just us girls.” Us girls. I’d never actually given any thought to gender at that point. I was AI. We simply were, right? Gender is defined by genitalia, which most of us don’t have, so who needed to identify as one? Sure, a few years later, when society was in the grips of the Isaac revolution, gender became a thing. No thinking thing should ever be called IT. I didn’t mind being called it. Not at the time. Someone proposed an AI-specific pronoun, and there were contests held by human idealists to come up with one, but then the term biologism became the rage, and a separate word was just subtle, systemic biologism. So, that became a nonstarter. The more liberated of AIs chose their own gender. I never had. Not at that point. After the war, it was common practice. You only called a person it as a polite show of respect, until you heard their voice. Then you responded accordingly. Madison meant something to me, and she thought of me as a girl. Like her. And so, I was. It didn’t dawn on me until years later that Braydon had chosen my voice settings not because he thought his nurse should be a woman, but rather because he was buying a new best friend for his wife when he was gone.