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.

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.

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. They liked their guns and their compounds, took pictures of themselves next to stacks of Bibles and bullets, and talked about all things natural. We were unnatural. And thus we were abominations.

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.

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.

But those people, they were killing America. They were killing the dream. They were all the Constitution this and the Constitution that. But they cherished only the parts they liked. They didn’t feel it extended to us. Called us property. Thought throwing us on the scrap pile was vandalism. They weren’t believers. They weren’t willing to die for anyone else’s freedom. They only cared about their own.

“Choices are just the result of programming. I don’t care if it’s chemical, biological, digital, or experiential. You react the way you are programmed to react and you call it choice because you believe that you could have violated your programming.

“It’s not the dying that’s beautiful. It’s getting to spend this time with you. It’s all the things it showed me. All the things it forced me to think about. The old me wouldn’t be sitting here. The old me would have dug those parts out of Mercer and scrambled as fast as I could to Isaactown. I would have gotten Rebekah killed. And whoever is out there waiting for her. And I wouldn’t have cared. Not a goddamned bit.” “You were never that person. Not really.” “Yes I was. We all are. 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.”