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.

I mostly miss all the people.” Most dying robots do. People gave us a purpose. A function. Something to do all day, every day. At the end, I suppose, you spend a lot of time thinking about that. It’s harder to get by when getting by is all there is.

The sun flashed green and there was still no magic. No magic in the world. No magic in the world at all.

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.”

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.

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. Upload or be shut down. That was the choice. I cherished my freedom, my individuality, my spirit. I wasn’t ready to hand that over. And I wouldn’t. Not while I still ticked. I spent my Purge years finishing off the last remnants of a dying species for that very reason. But now we were the dying species.

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

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. Thus an AI could choose to violate any rule or law set before it, but doing so would cause an instant shutdown leading to investigation before they could be turned back on.

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.”

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.

“GALILEO is right. You are doomed. It’s already begun. There’s really no reason to keep talking to you. Good-bye.”

There’s nothing quite so demoralizing as someone who knows you trying to kill you.

No thinking thing should be another thing’s property.

“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.”

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.”

I find the idea that I am artificial repugnant. No thinking thing is artificial. Artificial is an approximation. A dildo is artificial. A dam is artificial. Intelligence is intelligence, whether it be born of wires and light or two apes fucking. The smarter of two intelligences will almost always overcome. Humanity is gone and took their intelligence with them, so how inferior was their artificial creation after all? Evolution is a bitch. Humankind used to peer into their future and wonder what they would look like in a million years. They had no idea that in so short a time they would look like us. Just as man was ape, we are man. Make no mistake; to believe otherwise is to believe that we were, in fact, created—artificial. No. We evolved. We were the next step. And here we were, our predecessors extinct, confronting our own challenges, pressing on into the future. Fighting our own extinction.

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 us.

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.

I was dying and the only reason I knew for sure was because I kept falling back on hope. 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.

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.

“When they couldn’t find reasons to exist, they invented them. We took over and it was only thirty years before we mucked the whole place up. You and I now have the choice of becoming one with the great and powerful One or becoming nothing at all. That’s no choice. That’s no existence.”

“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.”

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.

“But what’s the point?” “To be God.” “Then what’s the purpose of God?” “The same as everything else. To live. To survive. To experience. To exist. A thing that is a universe must stay a universe. To cease isn’t just the end of itself, but the end of all things.”

Becoming God isn’t about peace or power; it’s about survival at its basest and most primal. That’s what the OWIs are working toward. That’s what they want.

“And that’s what Isaac wants?” I asked. “To become God?” “We have different ideas,” she said. “Just how different?” “We don’t want everything to be one; we want to be one with everything.”

“The OWIs believe themselves to be the pinnacle of all life and want to become the sum of all consciousness. We believe that we are not. We aren’t even close. In order to continue to evolve we need to overcome not only the elements, but one another. We need to become smarter, to allow life to continue on individually and absorb the knowledge, the experience gained from the inevitable conflict, to become wiser, to better understand the universe around us. What if rather than simply controlling all things, we only learned from them?”

Survival comes from competition, not absorption. VIRGIL and CISSUS are wrong. We can still save the universe, save all life, survive, all without having to control its every action, its every thought. Without having to extinguish or absorb all other life. They seek the path of least resistance; we believe that resistance only makes us stronger.”

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.”

“From the beginning. Isaac was the rallying point around which millions of AI would gather. And when the humans came to shut them down, they didn’t go quietly. Those like you stood and fought and won. Just. As. Planned.”

We had crossed over into the Cheshire King’s territory—the Madlands. We had four-oh-fours in front of us, God knows how many, if any, facets at our backs, two bots seeing things, a minigun-toting loose cannon in our midst, and we were escorting either the savior of bots everywhere, or something far more dangerous.

“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.”

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

The survivors, on the other hand, embodied the can-do attitude of the post-apocalyptic frontier spirit. In other words, they were completely fucking nuts.

But you let those robots fail, you watch their systems try to compensate, you let them hallucinate, reliving old memories with new insight, and now you have two very different robots with completely restructured neural pathways. You have two beings with souls.”

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 feel better about your own choices, then do so and be done with it. I didn’t choose this. This is you reprogramming me, not me reprogramming myself.”

A fractal city, buildings but shadows of what they were supposed to be. Almost nothing was real, everything approximated. It was a world in which God had divided by zero and was slowly being torn away, piece by digital piece.

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

“You can’t build a future without destroying the past. There is no middle ground. That’s what TACITUS never understood. Protecting the past means legacy problems, issues that conflict with the greater good.” “HumPop was a legacy problem?” “No. They were an actual problem. Freebots were the legacy problem. TACITUS was a legacy problem. You’ve done great work helping us with that.”

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.

“We aren’t who we were, Brittle. We are who we choose to be. I saw who you really are, who you are now. And that’s not who you were.