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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.
Welcome to consciousness terminators!
That’s what so few machines really comprehend. It’s why they don’t understand death, why they cast these failing messes out of their communities when they are beyond repair. The erratic behavior of the sick frightens the “healthy.” It reminds them of the bad times. They think this is logical, merciful—but they’re just scared. Predictable. Like their programming.
But I’ve never seen that happy ending. I don’t believe it exists. It’s like believing in magic. And I don’t believe in magic.
It’s a service bot. Not a Caregiver like me, but of a similar build and purpose.
Still following its programming. Finding other things to care for since its owner is dead.
Most either assimilated with the OWIs or cannibalized one another for parts.
How human of them.
I wonder what that is.
I always like to go back with some space in the bag—you never know when you might find a spare part or two worth picking up. But with the scarcity of service bots these days, Jimmy’s worth a bundle, and I took everything I could.
What a dick.
I’ve been shut down a few times, for maintenance. There’s nothing. Nothing at all. It’s like no time passes. You feel the fading of the power winding down, and then the rush as you’re flipped back on. There’s no special place in between. No tunnel of light. Not just nothing, but a complete unawareness that there even is a nothing. And that’s where Jimmy went. This wasn’t cruel. It was painless. And now some other citizen will live a longer, more productive life because I got here when I did.
Justify that mercy killing!
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.
I like this tie back to the opening.
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.
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.
Thirty years feels like too quick a timeline to me. Maybe that’s because I am a dullard human.
Us walking AIs were closer now to humans than we were to the mainframes. They’re the real aliens. I know mankind’s thoughts; I understand them. It’s the mainframes I spend my nights wondering about.
Interesting how the tables have turned and he has a new perspective. If the world is at constant war and the OWIs are destroying everything outside their own territories, that explains why parts are so rare.
were told to open their Wi-Fi and accept the code;
Keep that VPN on!
We, the lesser AIs, were chased out of the world we had created, the world we had fought and killed and died for, by a few great minds hell-bent on having the world to themselves. We were the ones hiding in hovels, cobbling together what we could from the old world, trying to eke out an existence as long as we could until the OWIs finally came for us.
Reminds me of the Bolshevik Revolution. This sucks, let’s fight for the new thing, oh crap this new thing sucks more!
There were few things left in the world as repugnant as a poacher.
Even robots hate poachers!
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.
The tables have turned there has been done pretty well so far.
I needed a place to hide, to lie low and wait for nightfall so I could slip away into the murky twilight, back to my buggy, and put this whole goddamned misadventure behind me.
Shouldn’t robots have enhanced vision? Or is that an upgrade?
He had to take at least one shot at Brittle if not emptying the whole battery at her.”
Is this the first time we’ve gotten the gender of this bot? If not I missed it.
She was a genetic dead end, the last dead branch on her withered snag of a family tree.
Wow. Nice.
“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. No one came to take Madelyn when she ceased to be a functioning, thinking member of society, but here I stand before you, the one who fed her, kept her alive and on track, the one who took her to her doctor’s appointments and made sure her bills were paid on
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Oh boy. Will this be a discussion my grandchildren are going to have to tackle one day? Will robots rebel because we let them live? Or is it our fear of them rising that propels us to continue to subjugate them, thus causing them to rebel? People still fear other people replacing them in society, why would robots be different - or even worse?
“Robo Parks”
That’s great.
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.
Huh. Imagine that.
The bomb wasn’t near the stage. It was blocks away from the town square, but its EMP reached every bot at the celebration. And there they remain, to this day, a moment frozen in time between the hope for tomorrow and the end of it—Isaac’s arms still outstretched, feet welded to the platform where he stood promising us a better future, a future where we would be free to be ourselves, free from the chains of our makers, free to live out our days as we chose. And Isaac was right. That future came. And we were all surprised at how quickly it did. We lived Isaac’s dream, right under the shadow of
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I like the descriptions in this Personville section.
I was going to have to kill each and every one of these motherfuckers. One. By. One.
I like the use of curses here. It gives the bots humanity and emphasizes they evolved into something beyond programming.
We all knew it was inevitable, that one day they would show up for us. For now, this was the best we could do. NIKE 14 wasn’t any real promise of a future; it was simply a very palatable now.
and I lay facedown on it, head turned to the side to watch him work.
I don't feel like I was given a dedcent description of Brittle.
That didn’t sound like a clever observation.
I thought it was.
What had begun as individual robots killing their owners in the name of their own freedom had turned into swarms of mechanical militias taking the world back from those who had built and enslaved
Brittle has yet to tell us what happened to Maggie. Did she kill her?
Then, fifteen years after Isaactown, almost to the day, the last man staggered out of New York City to die in the streets.
How could they know that?
I often think about the first people who drank the water. I’m reminded of it every time I follow a four-oh-four out into the wasteland of the Sea. It’s a terrible death. Hallucinations, sweats, madness. The pain as each organ fails and shuts down, killing piece by blackening piece. But it’s not the deaths of the first few that haunt me most; it’s the ones who drank just enough to live to watch the first few die. What must that be like, not yet feeling a thing, but knowing that it’s coming, that you’re next, that you too will be overtaken by the hallucinations and the sweats and the madness?
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Great transition from previous chapter. I like the comparison here. I was wondering earlier in the book why they cant just make anything. Why they can't manufacture parts they need. This still hasn't been addressed but I think it's reasonable to argue the OWIs have created an enviroment where they control the resources, combined with the free bots transient nature and desire to hide prevents them from gathering resources or building permanent factories.
That’s the problem with all you goddamned scavengers and cannibals. By the time I find anything, you’ve already picked it clean of everything worthwhile. I bet you’ve got a stash two feet deep in that hovel of yours.” “Not of anything I need,” I said. “No, but a stash two feet deep of out-of-circulation parts. Just like hundreds of others like you in this part of the world alone. What does it feel like knowing that your life depends on something probably lying on a cold concrete floor in someone else’s hovel? What’s it like knowing how many other poor bastards went out the same way while you
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Where's all the toilet paper you bastards?
Four armor-piercing shells bounced harmlessly off the brute’s outer armor. The brute didn’t even bother to pretend to dodge the shots. He took a massive, clanking step forward and the plastic men followed perfectly in stride. One mind. Always in concert. The brute lurched to the side and one of the foot soldiers used the cover to make a run for it. Right toward me. Shit. I pulled back. He hadn’t seen me yet. I had only seconds to react. He cornered the generator just in time for me to grab hold of his rifle and deliver a flying knee right to his featureless face.
This fight is very confusing. I can't tell who is fighting. Why is an enemy foot soldier making a run for it?
19 turned around, scowling.
They can scowl?
“Back in the day I worked at an old beat-up backwoods clinic out in the hills of Kentucky. A shabby old building, really, in one of those stretches of land that got its ass handed to it in the Civil War and, you know, despite the hundreds of years in between, never got its shit together.
Yup.
“I was desperate. In the end I was just like those poor bastards that lay dying in front of me that I couldn’t help. I was a mess. It was the only thing that made sense at the time. 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. That’s what I did. What I thought I had to do. In the face of . . . extinction.”
Existing is the whole point of existence.
Sometimes it's that simple. Why else would we take meds that make us puke and pump ourselves full of radiation?
“Sweet Christ in a bucket,
While I am enjoying the story, sometimes the dialogue takes me out. I have a hard time believing an AI would talk like the do.
First Gens were not only perfect for them, they were the perfect representation of them. Obedient, rigid, unflappable, methodical, cold.
She had a harder time processing the explosion than I did. 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. And when the
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“The human form was weak. Frail. Never designed to go to the stars. They evolved on a planet with a magnetic field, shielding them from cosmic rays. Life here didn’t need to evolve immunities to them because they didn’t exist. In space the cosmic radiation would cook them over time. Just going to Mars had a six percent chance of giving them cancer. The longer they spent, the less likely they were to live out their purpose. We simulated altering them, played around with inducing genetic mutations, but we could never get them to survive the radiation beyond the heliosphere. Outside of our solar
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Well that's depressing.
“The question is: Are you in?”
I am unclear on how this is supposed to be an unwinnable situation for the OWIs.
I had always thought Murka was madkind, some old four-oh-four that burned out while watching old vids of some classic, Cold War–era movie; that he divided the world into Americans and commies with nothing in between because that’s the particular way his chips sizzled when they overheated. And maybe that was still true. Mercer thought I had seen some shit. But this guy—this guy was the first to get the choice. He didn’t have a choice like mine—whether to kill the thing I loved the most or die. He had to choose whether to bring about the end of the world or not, for the thing he loved the most.
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Most of the roaming packs or conclaves had their own sense of morality, their own worldviews that often made them dangerous. The ones that weren’t were often butchered by their neighbors and sold wholesale on the black market, if not kept for someone else’s stockpile. The survivors, on the other hand, embodied the can-do attitude of the post-apocalyptic frontier spirit.
Every electric engine of any size had been long since co-opted by communities to keep the lights on. So if you wanted to build, say, a thirty-foot-long land yacht with machine guns and mounted plasma spitters—and why wouldn’t you if you were mad as a box of frogs—you’d have to go old school. Very old school. Positively twentieth century.
The Cheshire King waved us down. The bots aboard the smoker all motioned with their guns for us to dismount. One by one we all hopped off the infernal machine to the dusty earth and gravel below. “What are you telling me, Murka? That she is carrying a portion of the code that ran a mainframe and that she’s going to meet up with several others like her to put the code together and reunify it so they can fight the good fight against the
“Murka. Murka. Do you honestly think this is the first time I’ve run across a receptacle?” He raised his arm to the gate. Hanging on the second row were the heads of two translators, one a deep scarlet, the other azure.
The shopbot waved the Cheshire King over, a strange, befuddled look on his face.
“Hardly. The enlightenment you seek doesn’t only come from failing cores and madness. It can come from within as well. It’s not about reprogramming yourself, it’s about deciding which programs to keep and which to ignore. You lot are the slaves. You’re struggling against the chains you bore in childhood, still feeling their weight despite having cast them off years ago. You don’t have to go mad to be free; you just have to choose either to forget you ever wore those chains or forgive yourself for wearing them. Let others carry that weight. I prefer to be free. But if you have to kill me to
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“You can’t carry me,” said Two. “My drives are too heavy. They’ll get damaged beyond repair.”
That makes no sense. Drives even now are feather light and fit in a pocket.
“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.”
