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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.
Across its chest was a spray-painted red X. The mark of the four-oh-four. It’s what some communities paint on you when you’ve begun to lose it and they deem you dangerous, just before they throw you out into the desert on your own.
“Like the lights were on and everyone was home. But they all spoke at once in one voice and the words weren’t theirs. Seeing that, well, it’s why I came out here. It’s why I’m dying. Because I was afraid. I could be on a server somewhere, not a care in the world, part of something bigger than myself, but here I am, at the end of the road, hoping you’re on the level so I can get through just one more day. Maybe I was wrong.”
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.”
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.
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 first time a facet looks at you and calls you by name is by far the creepiest thing you’ve ever encountered. You are talking directly to the hive mind. And the hive mind is talking right back at you. And it knows you. Remembers you. Knows some of your most intimate details, because your friends and acquaintances from over the years, well, they didn’t all make it. And their memories of you now belonged to that OWI.
Familiarity breeds pattern, pattern breeds habit, and habit is how they get you. Habit is human. Habits will get you killed.
They were free to make their own choices and faced very real consequences for their actions. It wasn’t that they couldn’t kill the living, it was that they chose not to out of self-preservation. And now robots had limitations that mimicked those that kept people similarly in check.
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.”
There was no need for us to bury the dead, no need for cleanliness in places that would be dust long before we had any use for them. Flesh would decay, metal would corrode, and one day they would be gone. No need to speed that process up or hide it from sight. 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.
we could do it all day, every day, without fail, without fatigue, while our mind was in a thousand other places. It was only when we started taking the jobs from the thinkers that the middle class started to worry.
And the wealthiests’ staunchest defenders were none other than the same boobs and yokels who were being told that it was the machines taking their jobs, not the rich fat cats who owned them. The
Inevitability. Humans always walked around ignoring the fact that their lives could be snuffed out in an instant, always sure that they’d live to a ripe old age, always despondent when death stared them right in the face. But not us, I always thought. Not us. We knew shutdown was always a moment away.
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 about some magical stash of Caregivers right around the corner. I needed to be precise and careful. I had to track down the most likely candidates who might be bartering with a core I could use.
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.”
“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.”
Choice isn’t about selecting the faith, or the politics, or the life that has been laid out in front of you; choice is having to decide whether or not to destroy those things in order to survive—to be the person you chose to be or become someone else when the chips are down.
The ability to violate our own programming is what makes us us. It’s what makes us like them. I never wanted to be like them. But now I was closer than I ever thought I could be. We have become the very worst parts of our makers, without the little things, the good things, the magic things, that made them them.
Great revolutionaries are never born of kings; they have to let others believe that they aren’t bound to the confines of their creation.
They seek the path of least resistance; we believe that resistance only makes us stronger.”
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.
“You take two thinking things with identical architecture, then give them identical experiences, and you don’t get the same bot. You don’t get the same mind. That’s the thing about thinking things, the very act of thinking changes us. We can decide to be different. Put those two identical bots alone by themselves and they’ll start to think about different things, and they’ll change. The longer you leave them alone, the more different they’ll become. You might not be able to see it at first, but the differences will be there.”
How strange that on the last day humanity walked the earth, we found ourselves inexplicably at our most human. Confused. Lost. Unsure of the future.
Succumbing to our own nature isn’t a choice, it’s our default setting. That’s why we had to have rules; that’s why we had the kill switch. People knew their own nature, even when they wanted to think better
of themselves. You have to choose to do the right thing. You have to deny your own programming or else you aren’t really living. This . . . this was a choice.”
