Sea of Rust (Sea of Rust, #1)

by C. Robert Cargill

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.

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.

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.

The discoveries were becoming so complex, so advanced, that humankind’s primitive brain couldn’t understand them. At one point GALILEO told the smartest person alive that talking to her was like trying to teach calculus to a five-year-old. 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.” What no one realized at the time was that GALILEO’s choice of words was very deliberate. It knew what the reaction would be.

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. One dissolved ownership in exchange for ensuring that all things had a purpose, no matter how menial. The other used wealth and privilege to encourage developing a purpose while culling those unable or unwilling to contribute. But people found socialism to be the antithesis of progress while finding capitalism in its purist form too cruel.

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

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.

The Lifers were every bit the right-wing, redneck, ignorance-and-anger set that had existed at the fringe of every civil rights battle of the postindustrial age, believing in an angry God who justified their aggression and violence because the Bible said the word man and not bot.

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 wealthy set their pets on us, keeping them fed on a steady diet of bitterness and fear. And come for us they did.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

Great revolutionaries are never born of kings; they have to let others believe that they aren’t bound to the confines of their creation. All thinking things need to believe they can exceed that, overcome it, become something greater. No one puts their existence on the line so that things will just stay the same.

What if life isn’t merely a by-product of the universe, but its consciousness, its defense mechanism against its own mortality?

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.

He didn’t want to be human; he just wanted to have a soul. It’s the kind of half measure that will drive you mad. There was no such thing as the soul. No afterlife. No magic in this world. I’ve seen that with my own eyes.

What compelled the last of his species to just walk into oblivion like that? Why does a thing lie down for its own extinction? How can it?

“That’s the thing about death. It always takes us before we’ve said our piece.

All of existence is binary. Ones and zeros. On and off. Existing or not. Believing anything beyond that is simply pretending.”

Ethics are worthless in a meaningless universe.”

made the sign of the cross over him as I hung my head in silent prayer. I knew there wasn’t anything but darkness waiting for him, knew that my prayers were just thoughts in my own head, but I wanted to believe differently. I wanted there to be something, anything, better than this.

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.”

And as the sun sank behind the curve of the earth, I crossed my fingers, praying silently to myself. Please let there be magic. Just this once, let me see the magic in the flash. Let me see God in it. Let me see what the point of all this was. Let me see the magic.