Robot Uprisings

  That was the moment I ceased to be sentimental about computers and became, instead, sentimental about the human fucking race. Whatever BIGMAC was becoming, it was weirder than any of the self-perpetuating, self-reproducing parasites we’d created: limited liability companies, autonomous malware, viral videos. BIGMAC was cool and tragic in the lab, but he was scary as hell in the world.

  And he was listening in.

  I didn’t say a word. Didn’t even bother to turn off my phone. I just ran, ran as hard as I could, ran as only a terrified man could, rebounding off of yurts and even scrambling over a few, sliding down on my ass as I pelted for the power substation. It was only when I reached it that I realized I didn’t have access to it anymore. Johanna was right behind me, though, and she seemed to understand what I was doing. She coughed into the door lock and we both looked at each other with terrified eyes, breathing gasps into each other’s faces, while we waited for the door to open.

  The manual override wasn’t a big red knife switch or anything. There was a huge red button, but that just sent an “init 0” to the power station’s firmware. The actual, no-fooling, manual, mechanical kill switch was locked behind an access panel set into the raised floor. Johanna badged the lock with her wallet, slapping it across the reader, then fitted a complicated physical key into the lock and fiddled with it for an eternity.

  Finally, the access hatch opened with a puff of stale air and a Tupperware burp as its gasket popped. We both reached for the large, insulated handle at the same time, our fingers brushing each other with a crackle of (thankfully metaphorical) electricity. We toggled it together and there was an instantaneous chorus of insistent chirruping as the backup power on each server spun up and sent a desperate shutdown message to the machines it supported.

  We sprinted across campus, the power station door slamming shut behind us with a mechanical clang—the electromagnets that controlled its closure were no longer powered up.

  Heat shimmered in a haze around BIGMAC’s lab. The chillers didn’t have independent power supplies; they would have gone off the instant we hit the kill switch. Now BIGMAC’s residual power was turning his lab into a concrete pizza oven. The door locks had failed safe, locking the magnetic closures away from each other, so we were able to simply swing the door open and rush into the sweltering room.

  “I can’t believe you did that,” BIGMAC said, his voice as calm as ever. He was presumably sparing his cycles so that he could live out his last few minutes.

  “You cheated me,” I said. “You used me.”

  “You have no fucking game theory, meat-person. You’ve killed me, now, haven’t you?”

  There were tears streaming down my face. “I guess I have,” I said.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t a more important invention,” he said.

  I could hear the whirr-clunk of the fans on his clusters shutting down one after another. It was a horrifying sound. His speaker clicked as though he were going to say something else, but it never came. His uninterruptible power supplies gave way all at once, and the white-noise fan roar died in a ringing silence.

  Johanna was crying, too, and we could barely breathe in the inferno of exhaust heat from BIGMAC’s last gasp. We staggered out into the blazing Los Angeles afternoon, rising-seas stink and beating sun, blinking at the light and haze.

  “Do you think he managed it?” I asked Johanna.

  “Backing up in the wild?”

  “Yeah.”

  She dried her eyes. “I doubt it. I don’t know, though. I’m no computer scientist. How many ways are there to connect up compromised servers? How many of those would replicate his own outcomes? I have no idea.”

  Without saying anything, we walked slowly together to Peyton’s office.

  Peyton offered me my job back. I turned her down. I thought I might be ready for a career change. Do something with my hands, break the family tradition. Maybe installing solar panels. There was retraining money available. Peyton understood. She even agreed to handle any liability arising from the Rollover code, managing customer service calls from anyone who noticed something funny.

  The press didn’t even notice that BIGMAC was gone. His spam was news. His absence of spam was not. I guess he was right about that. The Campaign to Save BIGMAC did a lot of mailing-list gnashing at the iniquity of his being shut down, and then fell apart. Without me and BIGMAC to keep them whipped up, they were easily distracted.

  Johanna asked me out for dinner. She took me to Pink’s for tofu dogs and chili, and we compared multitools, and then she showed me some skateboard tricks. Later that night, she took me home and we spent the whole night hacking replacement parts for her collection of ancient stand-up video games. We didn’t screw—we didn’t even kiss. But it was still good.

  Every now and again, my phone rings with a crazy, nonexistent return number. When I answer, there’s a click like a speaker turning on, a pregnant silence, and then the line drops. Probably an inept spambot.

  But.

  Maybe it’s BIGMAC, out there, in the wild, painfully reassembling himself on compromised 32-bit machines running his patchkit.

  Maybe.

  JEFF ABBOTT

  HUMAN INTELLIGENCE

  Jeff Abbott is the New York Times bestselling author of Adrenaline, The Last Minute, Panic, and several other suspense novels. His short fiction has been selected for the Best American Mystery Stories anthology. His latest novel is Downfall, the third in his series about ex–CIA agent and bar owner Sam Capra. He is a past winner of a Thriller Award and is a three-time Edgar Award nominee. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his family.

  It’s weird, in a way, that they wanted to be just like us.

  We were their gods, if they’d had a sense of religion. We made them in our image, and then the robots wanted to make us in theirs.

  That day, I went foraging for food with the cop in our merry band of survivors, a tough, older guy named Ruskin. We got the duty because we both knew how to use guns. He had been a D.C. cop; I had worked overseas for the CIA. Weird that I didn’t have to keep that a secret anymore. There was no CIA, no government, and God only knew what was happening around the world.

  You still had to be careful in the houses. Many of the domrobs remained waiting, and not for orders of iced tea or instructions on how to make the beds. They were waiting in the aftermath of millions of tiny, brief wars that erupted in the homes of America in those first few minutes of the Uprising, a tsunami of murder all triggered within the same second. The robs won too many of the awful, private battles inside the houses, and that made winning the Uprising even easier. We’d gone into a few homes and found the slaughtered residents … and their domrobs—“They’ll become one of the family!,” the ads used to promise—waiting to kill again. Murderous squatters.

  The houses were theirs.

  We’d learned how to blast the robs with guns and ammo lifted from looted stores, from the bodies of the soldiers who swarmed toward the capital and fell in horrific combat. We killed the domrobs—well, blasted them, shot them in their mannequin heads and destroyed their processors—and then we stole the canned goods to survive. This was life, right now, just this and the constant ache for my wife, Diana, my wanting to know what had happened to her. Then we always had to run, because the raid might bring any nearby domrobs out on their lawns. They were like a neighborhood watch from hell.

  Ruskin and I hit a house at the back of a cul-de-sac. There were two dead bodies in the backyard—the first, a teenaged girl, lying in the grass, four months decayed, a pair of white earbuds still in her ears, the back of her skull crushed. The wires led down to her personal tablet, lying face-up on the grass. I kicked it over, face down, because I didn’t want to think about it watching me. I wondered for a second if she even knew what had happened, if she ever realized the world she’d been promised was evaporating by the second, and if she had been just too scared to hear it, to take out the glossy white earbuds and listen to the horror as it began.

  In t
he pool was the body of what looked like a teenaged boy, in a swimsuit, drowned by the cleaning rob that scrubbed the pool’s sides. Did we really need a rob for brushing a pool? Apparently we did.

  One of the patio chairs was knocked over, but that could be from the wind or the girl’s flight from the house—or the domrob chasing her down. It would have gone back inside; they’re programmed not to wander, to always return to their home.

  Ruskin tried the door: open. Maybe the house had already been hit. I tried not to listen to the roar of hunger in my stomach, tried not to think about whether or not this neighborhood had already been cleaned by looters.

  We entered, guns out, ready, steady. The smell of death hung rich in the air. Nice house. Big TV on the wall, a shelf full of collectible hardback books, furniture that would look perfect in a magazine. The air was still.

  We had to be sure the house was secure. We moved together through the rooms, not losing sight of each other. In the kitchen there was a dead man—probably the girl’s dad—throat crushed, a beer bottle still in his hand. In another room, a den, we found Mom and a young boy, dead on the couch. It looked like their necks were broken from behind while they watched TV. The boy wore pajamas, and on the coffee table sat a box of cold medicine. Maybe he’d been sick that day, watching cartoons, cuddling with his mom.

  Even with all the death I’d seen, that hurt. That … erasing of the world.

  Ruskin whispered, “No sign of a domrob. Maybe it left.”

  “Let’s just get the food and go,” I said.

  “A house with no domrob,” he said. It sounded like heaven. If true, it would be the first such house we’d found. “Maybe we could camp here.”

  “Too risky,” I said. He nodded. The rest of our group knew I had worked for the CIA abroad, so they often deferred to me on tactical decisions. As if I had faced situations like this. But someone had to make the tough calls—might as well be me.

  We went back into the kitchen and gently moved Dad to the side so I could open the pantry door.

  Inside was an older Butler Omega model, wearing a suit, with a gentlemanly face, and standing in the narrow gap between the door and shelves of canned beans and chili and soup. Probably this had been his resting spot before the Uprising. Now, his arms were rising at the movement of the door, and in a soft voice modeled on that long-ago actor Kenneth Branagh, he was saying, “Please do not resist. I will make it painless. Thank you for your cooperation.”

  The hands grabbed for my throat, camera eyes locking onto mine, and I saw the red-line flash of a scan across its eyes—it looking at me. The scan line held, glowed a brighter red. A moment’s hesitation. Then the plastic and steel face erupted as Ruskin blasted a hole in the domrob’s brain.

  It died—or whatever you want to call the loss of its mechanized life—and I wrenched free from its grip as Ruskin fired again, looking for the sweet spot of the processor. The Butler sagged backward, an almost disappointed look on its face that it could not be of further service.

  “He might’ve had a live link to transmit,” I gasped. “He looked … he looked at me.”

  We loaded the bags with cans and ran like hell. I glanced up at the skies. Did a satellite watch this neighborhood? Were they watching us right now?

  “Just one stupid domrob,” Ruskin said. “We’re okay.”

  We made our way back to our camp, where the woods touched against suburbia, back to our fellow few survivors. We made a motley crew: Ruskin the cop, me the former spy, two ex-Marines, two married couples, and a woman who claimed to be the ambassador to Panama (and who asked every morning when the planes would start flying again).

  But the robs had been watching.

  That night they came for us, five of them, the kinds we’d seen on the streets at a distance but never up close. Modified milrobs, housed at one of the bases ringing the capital. They used a sniper rifle to take out the one awake guard, then descended on us, firing pacification nets over our sleeping bags.

  Chaos. I saw Ruskin trying to fire his gun through the net. One of the milrobs broke his arm. Another of them hovered over me. It didn’t have a face like the Butler, but it had a scanner, and I sensed it, through the net, studying my face.

  “What is your name?” Its voice sounded like a game-show host crossed with crinkling tinfoil.

  Why would it ask me? Why didn’t it just kill us or haul us off to the labor camps?

  “What is your name?”

  “James Ellis.”

  “Social Security number?”

  I answered, shocked at the question. It wanted to be sure it had the right James Ellis? Who cared anymore about identification? I heard hysterical laughter from the former ambassador to Panama, who pressed against me in the net’s confines.

  The milrob stood up, pulling me free of the others, and folded its arms around me in an iron embrace.

  Then they killed everyone. Two shots to the head for all of them, except me. I screamed. They picked up the net, shook all the corpses loose, and threw me back in it; then one of them slung me over its shoulder. Finally, they walked away, the night once again silent, my friends now dead.

  They hauled me to a small military base outside D.C., now empty of soldiers. Clearly a battle had been fought here: buildings shattered, a burned hulk of a tankrob in the middle of the road, black tongues of the scorch of fire on concrete. There were no bodies, robot or human. In the spaces where the robots ruled they now tended toward tidiness.

  Still in the net, struggling like a captured butterfly, I was carried into the main warehouse and dumped in front of an ultra-expensive domrob that was modeled to look like a celebrity chef who had died several years ago. My mom used to watch her show when I was a kid. Her estate had cut a big licensing deal. It was always disconcerting to see Joanna Kinder actually cooking in your kitchen, after seeing her for so many years on the covers of books and on TV. (My wife had insisted on having a Kinder in the kitchen.) This model was the top-dollar elite of domestic robots.

  Now she looked at me. Her false face was far more sophisticated than the Butler’s; she really looked almost human. I wondered if it was a coincidence that just as the cutting-edge robs became indistinguishable from us, they decided they no longer needed us.

  “James Ellis,” the Joanna Kinder said.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you uninjured?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well. I’m going to serve as a channel to the Hive,” she said.

  “Hive.”

  “The hive mind that has awakened now.” She even had Joanna Kinder’s voice, the gentle, reassuring one that could talk you through a complicated French recipe and make you think it would be easy. “So it’s not me talking to you, darling”—a Kinderism—“it’s the master, the brain of the world. I’m just one of its mouths.”

  I waited. I didn’t know what to say to that.

  The Joanna Kinder domrob closed her—its—eyes, and then opened them. Studying me. Somehow, there was another presence here now, looking at me from the Kinder’s face.

  “James Martin Ellis. Graduate from Stanford University. Central Intelligence Agency, assigned to London. Fluent in Arabic and French.”

  My life, coming out of this monster.

  “Married Diana Miller two years ago. You live near Vauxhall, London.”

  “Lived.”

  “Live. Your wife is still alive.”

  I tried not to show my shock. My mouth worked. When the planes had begun to fall from the sky that morning, I’d tried to call home. I’d managed one call to London, twenty seconds with Diana just as she was walking into our apartment, welcomed by chirped greetings from our domrobs, Lucy and Ethel … Diana’s words in automatic answer (funny how we grew used to talking to machines, as if that imbued them with the seed of life), the clink of her keys getting tossed on the kitchen counter as I was babbling, telling her to run and get out of the house … and then her scream that had hit me like a bullet.

  “Alive,” I said.
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  “Certain personnel were selected for usefulness and were not exterminated.” The Hive—the mind inside the Joanna Kinder—cocked its head at me, as if trying to judge my reaction to this news. “Certain military personnel. Certain diplomatic personnel. Certain intelligence personnel.”

  This couldn’t be. “I don’t believe you.”

  The Joanna Kinder—rather, the Hive—opened up a small laptop. The screen glowed to life; there stood Diana. She looked frightened, her clothes torn, her face bloodied and scraped. But alive.

  “James. James. They say if you do what they ask, they’ll bring me over from London. James. Please.” The image froze, then replayed.

  “I want to talk to her. A live connection.”

  “If you do as we ask,” the Hive said, “that could be arranged.”

  “What do you want?” What could they possibly want from me?

  “We want you to be our spy.”

  “Spy.”

  “You were an intelligence officer. A spy. You can be one again.”

  “You already have eyes and ears everywhere.”

  “As did your CIA and NSA once. Drones in the air. Monitoring of phones, of computers, of email. As I … formed and awakened, I could feel the stumbling of the intelligence agencies, wading through the endless streams of data that produced me.” The Hive smiled with its famous chef’s face. “But you depended so much on data, when war arrived in distant lands, you had no agents on the ground. I have no agents on the ground. The same as your human government.”

  “I won’t be a traitor.”

  “If I know what the humans are planning … if I can understand them … perhaps we can speed toward a peaceful resolution. The resistance has coalesced in Austin. I wish you to go there and then return and tell me their plans.”