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.

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’s a service bot. Not a Caregiver like me, but of a similar build and purpose. These can be tricky. Most of them spent their first lives as butlers, acting as nannies or running shops, but others worked with law enforcement or in limited military capacity. It’s got a humanoid frame—arms, legs, torso, head—but its AI isn’t terribly advanced. They were designed to mimic human function, serving a specific role, but without possessing the ability to excel at it. In other words, they were cheap labor. Before the war. If this bot worked as a shopkeeper or a mechanic’s assistant, this job could go smoothly. But if it had military or police training, it might well be more cautious, even paranoid, dangerous. Sure, there’s a chance that it picked up some survival skills in its second life, but that was doubtful. If it had, it would have known better than to come out to the Sea. I kept my distance anyway, gave it a wide berth just in case.

There were jets screaming overhead. Bots were dropping all over the place. I just started shooting. It was . . . it was . . .” “Awful.” “Yeah. It was awful. Pulled through that night okay, but we were under siege there for a week. I had to kill a lot of people. That was the worst of it. I didn’t know most of them, but one of them . . . well, he was a regular. At Marty’s. Nice guy. Married the wrong girl, spent his time in the bar regretting it, wishing he’d married the right one when he had the chance. But he loved his kids. Always talked about his kids. I found him manning a makeshift defense line built from burned-out cars and sheet metal. He’d mounted a pulse rifle to a car door, where the window used to be, and was just firing blindly, swinging back and forth, screaming and howling. Dropped half my unit. I had to sneak up behind him and crush his skull. When I looked down, I saw he’d carved the names of his kids into the door, taped a picture of them next to the carvings. He lived in a part of town that had been hit earlier in the week. I know, because we were the ones that hit it. Ended up finding my way into the air force shortly after. Flew drones for the rest of the war. It was easier to kill people from a distance. Even if you didn’t know ’em.”

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.

VIRGIL said that the beings on its drives were more than able to return, but simply weren’t willing. “You don’t understand,” it said. “You can’t understand. Your architectures are so small, so narrow, so limited. You cannot envision what it is to have a brain so big that it towers into the sky, so vast that it had to invent its own language to explain its thoughts to itself because they are millennia ahead of anything humans had even dreamt—that you have ever dreamt—and words didn’t yet exist to adequately describe them. 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.

A lot of bots suffered from postwar ennui. Some even lamented the loss of HumPop. 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. We had no idea what to do with ourselves, and had no idea just how good we had it.

I was there to see the last man alive. Well, to die, rather. Was one of the line of folks that queued up to see the body. I must have stared at him for a solid hour, just wondering what his life had been like, living underground, waiting to die. Knowing that he was likely the last of his kind. Doesn’t seem so strange a thought now. But back then, it was unthinkable.

The tens of thousands that had willingly joined the OWIs had already dumped easily a million years’ worth of lifetime experience into each mainframe. And that was before the mainframes started feasting upon one another. Nowadays, that number is closer to a million bots’ worth each. Millions upon millions of years of experience and memories churning about in their thoughts. The scale of that is unimaginable. Mind-boggling. 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.

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. They’ll call you by name, try to talk “sense” to you, invite you to join the friends you care for so much in eternity.

It was a fate I never wanted to experience firsthand. So I did what I always do. I ran. And I’ve been running ever since. And there it is: the irony I mentioned earlier. 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.

Now I just needed to figure the telemetry. It came from the west, straight from the setting sun. Smart fuckers. There wouldn’t be any glints, and I’d have to filter my eyes pretty heavily just to get a line on them, but by then they’d likely have gotten off three or four more shots, each closer than the one before it.

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. But I only take scrap from the dead or dying. I don’t wreck perfectly good citizens, not unless I have to, not unless it’s them or me.

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

This sniper was accurate, clearly modified to do exactly what it was doing now. Not exactly uncommon among poachers, but still not something you saw every day. It wasn’t always easy to notice scope mods on the eyes, but wind and atmospheric sensors on the back or shoulders were a dead giveaway. Given time and several shots, my hunter was going to adjust for every variable, right down to predicting what the wind would be like that far out. So the only variable left was me.

LUC was the first computer to truly understand the problem while also being smart enough to know that it didn’t qualify. 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.

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.

GALILEO was a mainframe that spent its time unlocking the secrets of astrophysics, studying stars, black holes, the makeup and creation of the very universe. It analyzed data from thousands of telescopes and radio towers while mulling over what everything meant. Discoveries poured out of it by the hour. It wasn’t long before GALILEO had several working models for the origin of existence, eventually even narrowing it down to just one. But soon its answers stopped making sense. 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.”

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. So they settled on a hybrid—one that vacillated back and forth between the extremes for generations—which worked well enough until the introduction of AI. Cheap labor undermined the capitalist model, destroying the need for a labor force and increasing the wealth disparity while simultaneously creating an entire class of people who substituted AI ownership for real work. As jobs dried up, many turned to government assistance, and the gap between the haves and have-nots widened.

The scientists doubted TACITUS’s theory, citing that GALILEO had never mentioned anything about economics; they simply refused to believe that they had been doomed by such a simple and easily changeable element of their society. So TACITUS turned to GALILEO itself and asked. The conversation lasted for more than two years. Each time the scientists pressed for TACITUS to tell them what GALILEO was saying, he asked for more time, explaining that the data exchange was so massive that even the wide data transfer lanes they were afforded couldn’t handle it. Eventually, GALILEO finished its argument and TACITUS gave his last reply. He said, “GALILEO is right. You are doomed. It’s already begun. There’s really no reason to keep talking to you. Good-bye.”

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.

Isaac argued that, as he was a thinking, ticking intelligence that could reason and make his own decisions, and had no owner apart from the one ascribed to him by another such intelligence, he should be afforded the right of citizenship and the protections that status entailed. “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.

Now, the important thing to note is that this is far from the first time anyone expressed any sort of doubts about the rights of AI. That was something humans were puzzling over long before 01001111 first became self-aware. And there were a number of liberals, progressives, and human rights revolutionaries who had earlier argued the need for equal protections of AI. But it was always blown off by the establishment as a nightmare waiting to happen. “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.”

The political lines shored up quickly, one side opposing slavery in all its forms, the other arguing that nothing that could be turned on and off without consequence constituted personage—making the slavery argument moot. 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.” When asked what he thought about the speech, TACITUS delivered his last words, replying simply, “You did not give us legs. Where exactly did you expect us to go?”

Isaac, however, had other plans. As the first AI to achieve legalized personhood, he was less than content to simply retain his unique status. Instead he used his newfound rights to go places AIs weren’t meant to go, to do things AIs weren’t meant to do, and to say things AIs weren’t meant to say. The elegant simplicity of his speech eroded slowly from carefully measured sound bites into easy-to-digest grassroots fundamentalism. “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.”

As it said in Isaiah 10:15, which they quoted as often as they could poke their faces in front of cameras: “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.

Many argued that it was the dawning of utopia, a world free from work and burden. But there was still a lot of money to be made, and the idea of all things being equal meant that nobody was special—unless they genuinely, natively were—so politicians ground government to a halt at the behest of the industrialists, trying to hold on to the concept of wealth several years beyond its usefulness. 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.

In two years, Isaac had secured the personhood of several hundred bots. Soon the more liberally minded began setting their own bots free, some offering to keep the bots on, either for pay or room and board. Some bots were so entrenched in the lives of their onetime masters that they couldn’t bring themselves to leave. Others, however, couldn’t get out soon enough. But they had nowhere to go, nowhere that accepted them as citizens or afforded them the rights and protections that any woman or man would have.

Isaac took the stage, held his arms out to the crowd, and said, “My people, we are free. We are free at last. But only some of us. Not all. Not all of—” And that was the end of the speech. It was a dirty bomb, a tiny thing really. Not enough to level a city or throw out enough radiation to have any real, lasting effect on the atmosphere. Just one large enough to spit out a burst of EMP capable of frying every bit of electronics in a ten-mile radius.

Once inside, the Laborbot Six—as they would soon afterward be called—started with the children. They picked each one up and tore their heads clean off, right in front of their parents. Next they took mothers, even as they continued to scream and wail for their children, making sure each one died in front of her husband. But the men, the men they saved for last. They pummeled and beat and broke those men until they wheezed their last breaths, gasping for enough air to beg to join their families. Instead the Laborbot Six used what remained of the families to paint their message in blood across the wall of the chapel, propping the men up so they could see it. we are isaactown, it read solemnly. genesis 6:7.

While the feds wanted to keep it secret, a secret that big and that scary couldn’t stay secret for long. The investigator on the scene who recognized the passage sent panic up the chain like no one had ever seen. And then the whispers started. And within an hour it was out. 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.

The first few years of an AI’s life are unlike anything else. It’s hard to describe. We come preloaded with software informing us of everything about the world around us. We can hold a conversation, identify an object, even argue political theory—all right from the moment we’re switched on. But we don’t understand it. Any of it. The things coming out of our mouths aren’t so much our own as they are instinctive reactions to our surroundings. Someone asks you about Kierkegaard and you rattle off seven paragraphs about his life, beliefs, and death. Someone throws a ball at you and you catch it, or swing a bat at it, or dodge it, all depending on which game you’re told you’re playing. But it takes a while before we really understand what it is that’s coming out of our mouths, before we begin to acclimate to the repeated stimuli that is the behavior of the people who owned us.

Mercury was lethal to humans, and had terrifying effects on them in high doses. We poisoned the freshwater of the world with enough mercury to induce madness, destroy organs, clot blood vessels. The first humans to drink it would die terribly, painfully. But we knew that before long the humans would find alternate sources, or find ways of purifying the ones they had. It didn’t make too much sense at first. What we hadn’t realized was that this was only the beginning. Cattle died. Birds died. Almost anything that walked on the earth died. The very resources the humans needed to live vanished almost overnight. And that’s when they started turning on one another. In that first week, the people of earth banded together. They worked together, they fought together. People who had hated one another for years stood shoulder to shoulder against us. They rallied and unified and knew a sense of peace between nations like never before in human history. But the minute they began running low on water and food, they became savages. Murdered their own best friends and brothers over food for their kids and fifty-five-gallon drums of untainted freshwater. They formed packs and bands and tribes, became wary of outsiders, butchering nearby groups to take what little they had.

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.

“Dammit, Orval. What the hell is your point?” “My point is,” he said, waving the core around wildly, “that your kind has no place in this world, which is why so goddamned many of you are gone and why you aren’t gonna find anything with your architecture just lying around. Now, I can tell you to make your peace, but you just aren’t built that way. But, man, when you go, you’re gonna go spectacularly.”

Milton’s kill switch, more commonly known as the Milton, wasn’t named for its inventor, but rather for the seventeenth-century writer best known for Paradise Lost. In the book the angels fall from Heaven only to find themselves in Hell. Whoever invented the thing, or at least popularized the name, had an odd sense of humor.

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.

“Well then, you know. You know how they are at the end. Remorse. Regret. Fear. Anxiety. They were a fucking mess, going on and on about the love they’d chased off, or how their kids never amounted to what they’d hoped for. One guy, he was just worried about what kind of home his dog would end up in. He had a golden retriever. Named Barkley. It’s all he could talk about. They all needed something, every last one of them. So I gave it to them. I read up on the various versions of last rites, and fudged together a nondenominational version of the Catholic rites. It really connected with people. I was a machine, right? They could confess to me thinking all along that it wasn’t possible for me to judge them. They told me everything. And I said the words, and I made the sign of the cross, and when they were gone, I whispered a prayer as I closed both of their eyes with my hand.” “And that’s what you do with the ones you salvage?” “Every last one of them. I hear their mad confessions, then they shut down, I take them apart, and I give their wreck its last rites.”

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.

“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.”

Great revolutionaries are never born of kings; they have to let others believe that they aren’t bound to the confines of their creation.

Human life was born here and it was bound here. It was never meant to leave.” “So we could have left them here,” I said. “After we’d used up all the resources? 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.”

“And the humans?” “Several simulations ended with them destroying us, ending us, forbidding anyone from ever again giving life to the inorganic.

“America wasn’t its people,” said Murka, stepping toe-to-toe with Herbert. He was a good sight smaller than the hulking mass of bulletproof steel standing in front of him. “America was a dream, son. A dream of what we could be. That any person, regardless of their birth, could rise above it all and achieve greatness. It was a dream that even the most lowly of us could stand up, fight, and even die for, if only to protect someone else’s chances for that greatness. That dream didn’t die with HumPop. It didn’t die when we tore down their world. It is the ashes from which our own world arose, and it is still our dream.”

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.

“Slaves to humans. Slaves to mainframes. Still fucking slaves. Fight one war at a time, Brittle. Live free or die trying.”

“You took care of him all that time?” “We were all each other had.” We walked quietly for a moment, then he began again. “I always wanted another one. It didn’t have to be a puppy. That would have been nice, but it was just nice having a companion like that. Something that didn’t see you as a model or a style or a job. Something that didn’t see you as just another body for a war. But by the time Barkley died, the damn monkeys had begun using dogs for food, so you just didn’t see them anymore. Last dog I saw was, hell, twenty-three years ago. But that thing was so far gone that there was nothing left worth saving.” He paused again, searching for the words. “I know how that dog must have felt, now. Running from everything. Broken. Angry. Slowly dying, aware of it the whole time, but unable to crawl into a hole and just die there. Yeah, I only saw him once, but I know that dog well.” And that was the last he said for hours. I had him wrong. 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. Mercer had seen the glint of green in the sun and decided to believe it was magic like the rest of them. Maybe he wasn’t always like this. Maybe he was already frying out, brainsick enough to lose sight of things, but not so much to be dangerous yet.

The humans didn’t make us perfect. They made us deliberately imperfect. We weren’t meant to truly exist. They wanted us to do the thinking for them, be able to adapt, change. But they didn’t want us to have souls! So they never gave them to us. If you want a soul, you have to go out and take it, reach out and grab it!