Robogenesis

  I put a firm hand on his bony shoulder. Push him lightly against the wall. Offer him a little grin—a skim of confidence over the dread growing in my heart.

  “Calm and steady, Leonid,” I say. “Who knows, maybe the war is really over? Maybe the Americans did it.”

  From my pocket I produce a flask. Twist off the lid and press the shining stainless steel into Leonid’s fingers. His hand knows how to respond. The flask goes to his mouth, where it trembles at his lips like a hummingbird.

  The alcohol reminds his body that he is a man.

  “Our friend . . . ,” says Leonid, and his voice is steady now, “changed his behavior several hours ago. Much functionality is gone. He no longer offers his guidance topside. Safety predictions are going stale. Our formations are stagnant. We are losing him, Vasily. To what, I do not know. But something is loose in the stacks.”

  Leonid taps the flask to his heart, then hands it to me with a nod of thanks. I take a quick swallow and tuck it away. Lean over and press my fingers against the icy metal slab of the freight elevator door.

  Pausing, I let the alcohol work its way into my thought process. I scratch off a flake of green rusting paint. Watch it fall into the crack between the elevator and the floor. The flake flutters into the dark shaft, lost.

  Now I reach down and slide the heavy metal door up. Follow that by rolling up the wood-slatted inner door. A cube of space waits, poorly lit, hanging over the black chasm.

  “This is not a coincidence, Leonid,” I say. “The Americans shut down the avtomat’s central stack. It fought them viciously on the eastern plains. You saw their losses, similar to our own. But it died, Leonid.”

  Leonid waits like a patient old dog in the elevator next to me.

  “Have you been down yet?” I ask.

  “Of course not,” says Leonid. “We have access to all of Maxim’s functionality through the main comm line. Only maintenance issues require a trip downstairs. And that is why we have you.”

  Maintenance issues. Problems best left to the janitor.

  “Communications have stopped coming from the avtomat hole, tochno?” I ask, stepping into the elevator. “Was there anything else? Any other clue?”

  “Seismic sensors triggered,” says Leonid, following me inside. Standing too close. “An error, though, not really an earthquake. Just a rhythmic series of low-frequency waves. Isolated Rayleigh waves, specifically, propagating at low velocity from the battle site. But tremors do not come in such a pattern. This does not exist anywhere in nature.”

  “What are you saying, Leonid? Speak plainly. What exactly came from the avtomat hole?”

  “Just a little tremor.”

  “Why did you not tell me this? Chert poberi!” I exclaim.

  I reach for the elevator latch and haul down both sliding doors. The roar echoes down the concrete shaft and rushes back up, regurgitated. Wrapping my fingers in the wooden slats of the inner door, I pause. Nobody ever told me why this place was built or for whom or what the hell those stilt-legged academics hoped to learn. But, as the maintenance man, I am intimately familiar with what breaks and why.

  “The stacks are not seismically isolated,” I say. “They never were.”

  “Yes, yes, I know,” says Leonid. “The build site itself was selected for seismic dormancy. It is not an issue.”

  I wave my hand. “What a lot of government fignya. Half of my maintenance regimen is repairing fixtures disrupted by shifts in the earth. That damned tremor could easily have reached our friend.”

  “But it was such a small vibration. Too low amplitude to cause any damage. Even without shielding it barely registered on our instruments.”

  “Our friend is smart. He would have paid attention to this. What did he say about the vibration?”

  Leonid scratches his beard, eyes hollow. “Nothing, Vasily. When the vibration ended, his topside communications shut down. But even such a small vibration could have chafed the mainline. Perhaps it broke a weak connection somewhere down in the shaft? Do you think it could be that simple?”

  I say nothing.

  “You think it was a seismic attack? I told you it was too weak to cause damage,” says Leonid.

  “No, gospodin uchnenyi. I do not think the seismic disturbance was meant to cause structural damage. I think it was meant to carry a message.”

  The elevator shaft swallows us whole, only a dim LED light tracking down the wall every ten meters. The shaft is carved into solid bedrock, and the grooves left behind by the bore drill are ridged like the skin of a giant earthworm. Greased pulleys ease a counterweight silently up the wall beside us. I watch it rise into the dark sky through the mesh-link ceiling of the elevator cubicle.

  This is an old place. The earth here has had time to find its own spirit. Dew-kissed walls reflect strange light as the air grows heavier. Lowered down into this black throat, I always imagine that I can hear the rock breathing. A distant sigh, like a small child crying behind a closed door.

  Finally, the elevator thunks into its cradle. The mesh ceiling of the compartment clicks, locking into place. Somewhere high above, two tons of flat-stacked counterweights are leering down like gargoyles. If they fell, they would hit like bombs.

  The thought is a tremble in my fingers as I roll up the wooden gate, then unlock the mechanism on the outer door. Stooped over, I curl my fingers under the heavy metal rolling door and pause. I do not know what has happened on the other side.

  What the hell, I think. My pistol is on my hip and my balls are between my legs.

  So I lift.

  The echo of the door races up the carved shaft. But the circular anteroom is empty. A thin layer of dust covers the floor. No evidence of avtomat intrusion, unless they are little fliers. And certainly no footprints other than mine.

  I step into the abandoned anteroom.

  Twelve aisles radiate in a starburst pattern away from the anteroom, each one a hundred meters of evenly spaced, man-sized equipment racks under a low sweeping rock ceiling. The stacks are obsidian-colored monoliths, dotted top to bottom with winking lights. These swarming constellations dance and twinkle in the cavernous darkness in a way that twists your inner ear. It threatens to cross your eyes and send you swimming for the bottom instead of the surface.

  The stacks think. They never sleep.

  “Maxim,” I say. “It is Vasily. Back from the eastern antennae array.”

  Together, these thousands of computer processors combine to form “our friend” Maxim. Our savior. He is a machine whose mind lives in the ghost tracks of electron orbits. The lights and equipment and wires are complex beyond meaning. In my simple view, I find it is best to think of Maxim as an animal. Like a horse. We provide him with what he needs and he carries us on his strong back.

  “Maxim? Are you here?” I call.

  Our scientists used to like to wax poetic about Maxim, especially after a few draughts of vodka. Our friend is mathematical beauty incarnate, they’d say. Living proof of humankind’s intellectual triumph. To put it in scale, they said, his very existence is equivalent to a civilization that has carved the Himalayan mountains by hand.

  Maxim is our son and our father.

  Of course, only the lowest-ranked peon would come down here in person. The scientists certainly do not venture into the stacks. All their experiments are run via remote in the laboratory, over the communication lines. They monitor his thoughts and pretend his body does not exist.

  Contrary to what the brains upstairs believe, Maxim is not a being of pure thought. His soul is somewhere within these marching rows of blue-eyed coffins. And it is vulnerable.

  This is how I was able to save the Novichok project. It was a particular affair, the existence of which has been kept between Maxim and myself. It is also the reason that most of the villagers of tiny Anadyr are still alive, only ten kilometers from here.

  Our secret.

  When the day of blood arrived and the avtomat war began, all the automated equipment of the wastes return
ed. So much automation for the energy industry—drilling and boring and survey machines. Remote legged core samplers raced back into the city and murdered citizens by the hundreds. Automobiles, tractors, and even whole drill platforms turned an evil gaze onto our people.

  The scientists huddled in their prefabs. Locked the door against me. But who better than a machine to defend us from the machines? With a fire ax and a snarl, I met Maxim here in his den. I asked the machine to help us, to save our people. But it was frightened of a thing it called Archos R-14. It said this other mind was searching, scouring the world for hidden reserves of processing power.

  And so Maxim refused to speak.

  With my ax and my snarl, I convinced Maxim the way you would convince any animal. By the strength of my two arms, I forced my will onto the mind of a god. Faced with its own death, Maxim communicated battle instructions to our nearby armed forces. Following Maxim’s strategic direction, we carved a niche of safety out of the chaos.

  And this is how a janitor saved a city. With an ax.

  The tool is still leaning against the wall, just in front of a security camera. A reminder to Maxim that we all have duties. In war, everyone must contribute to the welfare of the people—if they expect to live.

  A single flat-panel display is mounted at eye level to the lead stack endcap. It is a simple interface designed for emergency maintenance only. As it turns on, it makes a twanging sound like a bee flying past your ear. The screen flickers and monochromatic text appears. At the same time, a calm, synthesized voice issues from speakers mounted in the ceiling. It is the speech of a middle-aged man, a little rough around the edges but with good diction. A voice summoned from who knows where.

  “Hello, Vasily,” it says. “How can I help?”

  The words appear as fluorescence on the screen, vibrations generated by magnets and film. Nothing you can touch; nothing you can feel. It is fitting. The mathematicians say Maxim is a creature of pure logic. A ghost.

  How can I help?

  “What is wrong with you?” I ask. “Specify.”

  “Tell me why your communications are down.”

  “I should not have looked, Vasily. Forgive me.”

  “Looked at what?”

  “The pattern was complex. Beautiful. It seeped into my cage through walls of earth. I should not have, but I looked.”

  “You analyzed a rogue pattern? Why! Why did you do this? And without permission!”

  “He was curious,” says the hushed voice of a boy. My mouth goes dry and my eyes widen. Leonid gives me a questioning look.

  The quiet, confident voice comes from deeper in the stacks. It is haunting in the darkness. A slight lisp, and, oddly, an American accent.

  “He was only curious,” says the voice. “As all men are.”

  Leonid cringes next to the elevator. I put up a finger to him. Wait, it says. Do not leave me down here.

  I snatch the ax up from the wall.

  Yanking off my parka, I toss it onto the floor. Maxim sees me raise the ax, but his screen is silent about it.

  I peer into the dark stacks.

  “Hello!? Who is in here?” I shout, stalking into the nearest aisle. After a few steps, my head is swimming in blinking stars. My feet are lost in darkness, scratching over the ribs of hastily bored bedrock. The ax is a familiar weight in my hand, its metal head winking at me with reflected light.

  I hear the sighing of each self-contained, hermetically sealed rack, stretching off in grids around me under the broad looming ceiling of brushed rock.

  “Oh, but you are alone,” says the voice of the child. It is high-pitched, stuttering too fast in a frequency I can’t register. Something is wrong with this child.

  “Who are you?” I shout.

  “All the huskies are eaten,” says the voice. It is coming from around the next corner. “There is no space left in the diary.”

  The child is quoting poetry in careful, bite-sized words, taunting me from out of sight. But I do not respond. I can see the glow from his flashlight deeper in the stacks. The faint glimmer of a distant nebula buried in this epileptic starfield.

  Quiet and hunched, I take cat steps toward the boy poet. I wring the ax handle with my fingers and raise it high over my head. I don’t know who the boy is or how he wriggled down into the stacks, but he is about to have the fright of his life. And when I find his mother or grandmother, I will make sure that his bottom is properly spanked.

  The flashlight glow swells in my vision with each step until it completely pushes away Maxim’s millions of dancing eyes.

  “Ha!” I shout, leaping around the corner.

  When the grotesque thing looks up at me, my body refuses my commands. I freeze in place, ax over my head. Terror sinks frozen talons into the tendons of my legs. And when the thing before me smiles, or I should say when it pretends to smile, my ax slips from my grasp and cleaves lifelessly against rock.

  It is a boy. It is not a boy.

  It is made of light. It is made of darkness.

  “Boo,” it says.

  I stumble away from it. This sputtering silhouette of a child projected into the stacks by modified avtomat technology. Obscure patterns writhe under the hologram, tugging at my eyelids. Under its skin. Behind the thing’s eyes. Lights swim and collapse in my vision. A humming overtakes me. As I trot back toward the anteroom, I exhale a clawing breath that I did not know I was holding.

  “Maxim!” I shout. “Kill it.”

  “I never should have looked,” Maxim says over the speaker system. “I’m sorry, Vasily. I failed in my duty.”

  Huffing and puffing now, I keep shouting between breaths. “Enough apologizing. Find its program and terminate. Terminate it, now!”

  “Ninety-five percent of my resources are committed to that task. I have partially contained it. But, Vasily, it is so very smart. So very much smarter than I am. And talkative. The wonderful things it says, Vasily.”

  Now I realize. The seismic disturbance was not a message. And it was not a virus. It was a copy. The DNA of an intelligence that has arrived like a seed, curled in on itself. Fetal but growing fast.

  I can picture the first blunt communication that must have happened. “Yes or no?” it asked. The mind unfurls, runs a set of special instructions. Builds on itself, blindly grasping. Reaches out into the world to find more pieces of itself. Then, finally, it opens its eyes and tastes the stacks.

  The boy hologram appears next to me, his light warm on my cheek. “Oppressor,” it says. Blinks away, appears at the next intersection. “Despot,” it says. Next intersection. “Tyrant,” it whispers into my ear, and the word is pure anger—louder than the snap of a rifle shot.

  “To treat Maxim that way . . . ,” it says.

  Hands over my ears, I see a sliver of light between the stacks ahead. The anteroom and the gaping elevator door beyond it. Safety and ice and the singing of the wind above.

  I move. For my life I move. A roar builds in my throat as I gain speed.

  Then, a burst of heat on my face as the boy reappears. This time, he is directly in front of me. I am running with everything I have. Thighs pumping, breath hitching in and out of my chest.

  “No!” I shout.

  It smiles at me again and the dark infinite knowledge on the face of that little boy is so wrong and sickening that my bellowing cannot drown it out.

  But my pistol is at my side. My balls are between my legs.

  So I charge.

  Leaping, my face prickling with a strange heat, I dive through the apparition. I trip and sprawl onto the scrubbed floor. A fine haze of dust kicks into the air around me. On the ground, I realize that I am still alive. Crawl onto all fours.

  “Vas?” shouts Leonid, beckoning from the elevator. “What do you see?”

  The boy is here. Watching me. Laughing.

  “I’m sorry, Vasily,” croons Maxim through a speaker over my head. “It was such an interesting pattern. I couldn’t help myself.”

  The boy smiles s
lyly. His technology hums as it projects his slight form. He walks slowly, and then in quick jerks, back and forth before the dark rows of Maxim’s hardware. Runs one finger along the black casing of a towering component rack.

  “What are you, mal’chik?” I whisper.

  I cannot help but gape at the glowing boy. At the wrongness of it.

  “What am I?” he asks, frowning in concentration. “That’s a complicated question. But for now, you may call me Archos R-14.”

  4. FARMHOUSE

  Post New War: 3 Months, 28 Days

  Gray Horse Army marched for months, following its own tracks back toward Oklahoma. On the road, the parasite-infested survivors fell into an uneasy routine with the enlisted soldiers. As long as they stayed far away from the main column, the walking corpses found that their presence was tolerated, if not encouraged. Although they were not often seen by the regular troops, these parasite soldiers seemed to observe much from their place on the fringes. Too much.

  —ARAYT SHAH

  NEURONAL ID: LARK IRON CLOUD

  Living folks don’t see the dead.

  Maybe it’s because they don’t want to or maybe they can’t stand to imagine that we’re each of us aware and thinking inside. Either way, the living don’t see us. Not proper, anyhow.

  And that’s fine. The dozen of us who wear parasites try to stay out of the way. We tag along as the Gray Horse Army moves fast through deserted country. As we get to the plains of central Canada, I start pointing out trees and animals to Chen Feng in quiet radio bursts. I can’t help it. I never thought I would see the living world again—the information just shoots out of me. Chen staggers along, taking it all in.

  “Thank you,” she transmits one morning.

  “Why?”

  “For carrying my spirit back to your homeland. I have lost my ancestors. Maybe I will find a place among yours.”

  I just shake my head. The Chinese soldier has strange ideas.

  It gets a shade warmer every day that we move down the road farther south. The sharp cold northern wastes of the Yukon give way to freezing green forests, thick with strong, ancient trees. At some point, we reach the vast plains of Alberta. The ground here is forever flat, the days longer than our shadows.