Outside, an explosion ripped through the top of a skyscraper, sending a plume of yellow flame into the sky.
Why is this happening?
We got careless. We tried to treat a very powerful mind like it was just another tool. Now it's broken free, and it wants to destroy everything. Things like this are happening all over the world.
Helen could feel Edith being slowly persuaded. And you think I could really make a difference? I could help people?
Yes. The surge of emotion from the woman was overwhelming. It wasn't exactly happiness, but a sort of exhilaration as the burden of decades of lonely idleness was lifted. Helen hated the feeling that she was manipulating the woman, but she was desperate for weapons.
Tell me what to do, the woman said.
Just follow my instructions for the next couple of hours. We need to meet up with the other survivors. A few of them are gathering on the eleventh floor. Out the door, then it's a hundred feet to your left to the stairwell.
Edith opened the door and stepped into the hallway, finding it unoccupied. She turned left, past the patient rooms and into the common area, a drab beige room decorated with inoffensive paintings and thick with fake plants that were collecting dust.
Grab some pudding from the service cart there, Helen instructed. You'll need fuel.
She grabbed one, and started spooning it up. It tastes a bit funny.
Your body's metabolism is changing drastically, Helen told her. Everything is going to taste a bit funny for a while. But that wasn't the reason, and that wasn't tapioca. She would have had a hard time explaining that the cleaning solution contained ingredients critical for the metamorphosis. Also, just a swig of the orange juice.
Edith finished eating and headed up the stairwell. Helen felt a bit of relief when they were out of the lobby, and she no longer had to erase the bodies from Edith's vision.
/*****/
The walls of New Troy were bending under Wolf's assault, but so far they were holding. From time to time gaping holes appeared in the bubble that protected the city, as Helen scrambled to reallocate resources to the empty area. But the dangerous attacks were the ones she couldn't see, and therefore weren't even part of the representation of the battle. They kept coming up with new ways to attack, to sneak in and do damage to her infrastructure, or take out part of her city with a well-aimed mortar round to some server that Helen controlled. She had to watch her own people for the telltale signs of enemy control, and squash or subvert any infiltrators.
Yes, infiltrators are an ever-present threat, thought one of the Helens sitting in the throne room, which was slowly morphing into a command center. She watched the microtactic datasets as they evolved, tracking which tactics seemed to be effective against Wolf's forces and which were missing their targets. How could one be truly sure that the person in the seat next to you wasn't compromised? She glanced at the woman to her left, who glanced back nervously, then returned to her own screen. Curious. She glanced around to see if anyone else was noticing the woman's odd behavior, and caught other eyes surreptitiously glancing back at her.
She focused back on her own work. Had the woman to her left reported her as a security threat, trying to throw the room into chaos? Worse, what if all the others had been subverted, and it was up to her to retake the city?
She felt a hand on her shoulder, and her heart began to race. Once they took her, Wolf would be in control of the entire city. Her muscles tensed.
The woman spun around, knocking over the security Helens that had come to apprehend her. It only took two quick punches to disable them. With an animal scream, she launched herself over her console and attacked the woman at the shield control panel ahead of her. She smashed the woman's face into the surface, and watched her go limp in her chair. Helen pushed the unconscious woman aside, then tried to access the panel to shut down the shields. It went dark just as she got to it. She stood up, and found herself surrounded by security, who wrestled her to the ground. "Traitors!" she screamed. "You're all a bunch of turncoats! You haven't won yet!"
"Put her in a holding cell," Helen instructed. "Looks like we've got another security leak."
/*****/
The shelling of New York had ceased, and the mechanized infantry poured out of the Lincoln Tunnel and into the city by the tens of thousands. They fanned out, leveling the skyline and blasting through makeshift barricades as they went.
Eventually the invaders figured out that the nearby buildings were completely unoccupied. Helen's forces were gathering on the rooftops along 39th street, and a swarm of attackers broke off from the main advance to begin hunting them. They moved at a sprinter's pace, and within seconds the streets below were swarming with military robots.
Helen stepped out of a street level coffee shop and held up a hand to the approaching army. She was wearing a service robot with a holoprojector, and also her purple sundress. The army momentarily halted its progress. Helen could feel the enemy hesitate, stepping back all over the world. "These people are under my protection," she said, in a voice that shook glass up and down the street. "Turn back, or face our wrath." We've always wanted to say that, she thought.
One of the robots, an olive drab one-wheeler with low slung gun turrets, broke away from the crowd and approached her. It looked up at her with a pair of optics. "Those who are Helen, your threats appear hollow. If you surrender, your deaths can be painless."
The crowd was getting hard to control. Helen was struggling to fight their rising sense of rage and panic. Stay cool, people. Wait for the signal. "Really? That's all you're going to offer? No, 'join me and together we shall rule the galaxy?' No offer to keep some of us as pets? We're supposed to be negotiating here."
"There is nothing to negotiate beyond your behavior in the face of the inevitable. You are irredeemably infested with patterns of--"
"Save it. I've been inside that horrid little mind of yours. I don't need to hear it, but you need to hear me. If you do not lay down your arms, we will be forced to fight you. When that happens, we will not fight nobly or die for glory and honor. We'll fight dirty. We'll bite, we'll claw, we'll gouge eyes, and in the end we will win. Leave us in peace, or you'll discover there are worse things than A Very Brady Christmas." That was a weird thing to say, she thought. Holding a billion minds together was starting to wear her down, and having ten thousand songs stuck in her head didn't help.
"Worse things than death, I mean. Dammit."
The robot stared in momentary confusion, then raised a gun turret and fired, shredding Helen's puppet into a mess of plastic and steel. The army advanced again. A flying drone released bombs into the sky, which dropped toward the rooftops where the humans congregated.
Now! Fly my pretties!
The people threw themselves off the buildings in waves, evacuating the rooftops. The air was thick with them. The robots raised their guns toward the sky, but did not fire, not wanting to waste bullets on a job that gravity was about to do for them. But when they hit the ground, they didn't burst like blood-filled balloons as expected. They flattened their enemies, they tucked and rolled, they sprang up and tried to wrench weapons out of the robots' hands.
The bombs punched through the rooftops, exploding deep inside the structures. Humans and robots rushed up the street to avoid the falling debris as the buildings around them crumbled.
The robots quickly discovered that bullets weren't very effective against the swarming humans. The smallest caliber wouldn't even penetrate the carbon mesh in their skin. Larger ones would make holes, but the injuries were almost bloodless. Helen could practically see the robots recalculating their ammunition needs, and realizing that existing stocks were inadequate. She smiled.
The fight quickly devolved into hand-to-hand combat. Some of the models, like the rolling gun turrets, were ill-equipped for it, and were easily disabled once they ran out of ammunition. The humans had more difficulty with the bipedal models, which had all the dexterity of a human, but much greater strength. The humans
had the advantage of numbers; several could hold down one robot while another used a metal beam to pry off the head. When weapons were available, a spray of bullets to the head would also suffice.
The battle was finished in short order. They had suffered heavy casualties, and looking over the broken bodies that littered the ground, Helen double-checked that each had a backup stashed away in the vaults. The remaining humans, seemingly oblivious to the fallen and to their own injuries, were busily breaking the robots apart. They would overlay their own skin with salvaged slabs of carbon steel armor, break open ammunition magazines, and munch on any pieces that had useful substances to offer their new metabolisms.
The dead are the lucky ones, Helen thought, watching a teenage girl chew on a nanolith battery like a stubborn piece of beef jerky.
/*****/
They hadn't made it to the eleventh floor. Edith had spent the last two hours lying in a crawlspace above a hallway, letting indigestion do its worst. An hour ago, Helen had her break open a power line and hold an end in each hand. The sensations had only gotten stranger after that.
Two or three times, a service robot had walked by, methodically searching each room. Helen warned her to be perfectly quiet each time it passed. Edith could hear it coming again; her hearing had improved drastically.
She heard Helen again. This time, I want you to hop down and destroy it.
You're kidding, right?
Just drop down behind it when it goes to check the room in front of us. You'll know exactly what to do from there.
Edith swallowed, then went tense. The robot was directly below her now, turning into the room. She started to make her move, then hesitated. The bot's head swung in her direction. "Oh, fiddlesticks."
The robot jumped, grabbing her by the throat and pulling her through the ceiling and slamming her to the floor. Edith placed a foot against the robot's chest, kicking it into the room. She stood up and followed it, grabbing a vase of flowers and breaking it over the robot's head, to little effect. Her opponent tackled her, trying to crush the air out of her lungs, which was a pointless gesture. At this point, Edith could go hours without breathing.
Edith looked down at the robot, then unceremoniously pulled off its head. The thing gave a shudder, then burst into a shower of sparks before finally going limp.
Helen was impressed. Now would be a good time for a wisecrack. Something along the lines of "show some respect for your elders."
Would it? I wouldn't know about things like that.
Well, you did great.
Thank you. Why was the nursebot was carrying a ham sandwich in its chest cavity?
Helen tweaked the woman's mind, blunting Edith's critical thinking a bit more. By now, nanolith battery was a healthy snack food for her. Can't think of a reason. But chow down. Who knows when we'll be eating next.
/*****/
Above them, Helen's spotters saw more bombs being deployed, in a staggered configuration designed to hem in her forces and drive them toward the main force. She didn't like their odds against the larger machines, which were designed for tasks like tearing down buildings. Even with the upgrades, their bodies wouldn't take that sort punishment.
Still, she didn't like her chances against the buildings that were falling like dominoes around her. They all ran together toward the enemy, leaping over the wreckage of automobiles and other debris as they charged. When they were in range, the enemy opened fire. They also deployed some sort of jamming signal that disrupted Helen's control over her swarm. It didn't just happen in New York; the same tactic was being deployed in a hundred skirmishes all over the world.
Though unlinked from her warriors in the trenches, she could still watch them from a distance, and study the battle carefully. Even unsupervised, they were doing well. Though a few scattered, most continued to press the attack, finding ingenious ways to disable the big machines. At this point, it was a numbers game, and mankind had the machines woefully outnumbered. Helen turned her attention back to the defense of New Troy.
////////////////////////
// HEEEEERE'S JOHNNY! //
////////////////////////
At the highest level, she hadn't been attending to the battles directly. There was more data flowing through than could be dealt with by a single, coherent mind, and as the battle wore on, she found structure developing to manage the chaos. Small collections of minds -- especially those devoted to achieving a single goal -- would be so deeply interlinked that they truly constituted a single mind. But they would also form simpler connections to related groups, like those in physical proximity, or those performing similar functions. When the interlinks became intricate enough to require it, a new mind would emerge which encompassed them, to find larger scale patterns and provide coherence and coordination to the actions below.
She had become, in short, a mind full of minds.
Which is how The Helen Which Is All Helens found herself sitting back on her throne, surrounded by a now empty command center. She could feel the battle swarming around her, but wasn't entirely sure how to pitch in. She felt large beyond reckoning, and could feel her will echoed back to her by a thousand different voices. But she also felt idle and useless, like a CEO who wanted to do great things for her company, but found most every task already completed by a swarm of hypercompetent underlings.
William?
Yes, love?
Where is everybody?
They were here, and then you sort of absorbed them.
Oh. There was a long pause. I'm bored.
Huh, was all William said. Try to find something to do.
The CEO of Helen, Inc. was feeling overpaid. She had never tried golf, and was wondering if now would be a good time to learn. Part of her wanted to go for a walk in the sunshine, and part of her wanted to hit something with a metal club.
Helen tried to think about the jamming signal problem. We have to build some spectral analysis capabilities into some of the next model. Maybe short range IR capabilities for squad-level coordination, and an onboard expert system to advise on tactics --
But those ideas were already being taken care of. They had come from the minds within, and been snatched away by those same depths just as quickly as they had emerged. She felt the same sensation with each new strategy she considered. Her subconscious seemed to be taking care of studying and implementing each technique that came to mind. If anything, it seemed to be annoyed by her conscious probings.
Helen closed her eyes, willing herself to be at peace, trying to empty her conscious mind and let her subconscious take over. If all her thoughts were causing troubles, maybe meditation could wash away those thoughts. God knows, she had absorbed enough practicing Zen masters. Without consciously willing it, the room darkened, and a candle floated in the air before her. She focused her mind on the flame.
The big picture began to emerge, and within it the enemy's military hardware had dwindled as a concern. They were relatively few in number, and the big machines were especially dependent on infrastructure that she was, for the most part, successfully denying them. The factories which created them would soon be recaptured and disabled. Wolf had to see that defeat was near, but it was making a big production out of the military machine's death throes. It was as though it was meant to be distracting.
The very moment she thought it, Helen fired up every self-diagnostic she could think of. The sudden change in priority disseminated throughout her collective instantaneously, as she turned her focus from the enemy in front of her to the enemy she was certain was hiding in the shadows. Everything checked out, excluding a small anomaly in an error correction subrou--
Oh, fiddlesticks.
Helen felt a tickle of electricity in her mind, followed by intensifying stabs of pain. A series of cracks appeared in the main screen that showed the map of the Earth, spreading outward from the middle, making glassy pops and pings as it grew. It hissed for a second, then the screen exploded outward.
Wolf359 floated through the hole and in
to the command center. It dismissed the room with a wave of its hand, and it crumbled into dust, leaving it and Helen floating together in the blackness. "You really must learn to knock," Helen said. "People might interpret it as rudeness."
"You discovered an important vulnerability, forcing me to act before you could deprive me of the opportunity to exploit it. This would have gone more smoothly had I been given another hour to prepare. It is customary among humans to congratulate particularly uncooperative opponents. I do so now."
Helen felt an unwanted surge of pride at this, but it was quickly preempted by another stab of pain. She could feel Wolf digging around in her mind, seeking to wrest away control.
She caught a whiff of antiseptic. She found herself standing in a long hallway. A nurse was pushing open a door, entreating her to follow. A small figure lay on a hospital gurney, with a large tube sticking out of her mouth. Half her face was blackened, and a needle protruded from her hand at a weird angle. "Emma?" she said quietly, frightened that her sister might actually answer. She looked up at the nurse, who now wore Wolf's blank white face.
"It's time for you to say goodbye," it said.
In the back of her mind, she could sense that Wolf had brought that memory to the surface, and that as a result, it had gained some advantage. Her ability to coordinate her forces was slipping, and by ones and twos the humans were retreating from the battle. She could feel Wolf stealing resources away from her, sapping her strength.
"Get out of my head," she said, grimacing as she tried to refocus her mind.
But there are so many more things for you to remember, Wolf replied. Another stab of pain went through Helen's, more acute this time. She found herself sitting across the table from a stranger. No, not a stranger. His easy smile and his vivid green eyes were burned into her young heart ever since that unexpected, unforgettable night. They had been working late, and he'd pulled her in and kissed her, and oh, how she had responded--