Robot Uprisings Read online

  I looked at my mobile screen and saw something different now. I saw terms repeating, some in pairs, some in threes, some appearing only together and never on their own. I’d forgotten that the robots weren’t just issuing a string of commands—they’d kept talking amongst themselves long after there was anyone to tell them what to do, and they’d come up with a pattern, a language, a song. And you can’t just start yelling into the middle of a song and expect all the singers to follow you.

  I watched the screen. Commands with all in them were rare. And whenever they popped up, they were preceded by three other commands:

  DEF.UP: ALLXVARS;

  DEF.UP: ALLYVARS;

  DEF.UP: ALLZVARS;

  It was as though the robots were telling each other to listen carefully to what came next. I saw that command came in blocks, bracketed by def.open and def.close. And I saw that some commands—like def.arm, which chilled me, def.cleanup, and def.build—were always repeated. It looked like the most important commands needed extra confirmation; I hoped I was right. I waited for the next def.close and then furiously typed:

  DEF.OPEN;

  DEF.UP: ALLXVARS;

  DEF.UP: ALLYVARS;

  DEF.UP: ALLZVARS;

  DEF.LAYDOWN: ALL;

  DEF.LAYDOWN; ALL;

  DEF.CLOSE;

  Nothing happened. The string of commands continued as normal. I felt a terrible clutching in my chest, like all the air had been sucked from my lungs.

  And then the commands began to slow, from a steady scroll to a lonely line every few seconds, an outlying part of the network reporting in, then going silent. One by one, the robots stopped talking. I could feel it in the air, a tension releasing, the whole house settling into itself. And then from above, the stream of water thinning, until there was only stillness, the occasional drip as the lake spread out and sunk into the floor. My brother called my name again, but I didn’t go to him yet. First I threw the front door open wide. I could smell winter on the nighttime wind. The fireman lunged forward when he saw me, pushing the man with the suitcase aside.

  “It’s over!” I said to the men and women all gathered around my house. “I put them to sleep.”

  GENEVIEVE VALENTINE

  EIGHTY MILES AN HOUR ALL THE WAY TO PARADISE

  Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, won the Crawford Award; her second novel, The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, is forthcoming from Atria in 2014. Her short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Nightmare, Fantasy, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Escape Pod; on Tor.com; and in anthologies such as Armored, Under the Moons of Mars, Running with the Pack, The Living Dead 2, Federations, After, Teeth, and The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog at www.genevievevalentine.com.

  I’m still not so great at wiring cars, and I pull up in a ’62 Falcon (only one I could manage to start) with my fingertips stinging and five inches of plastic twisting my hair out of my face.

  Nina’s inside the hardware store. She tosses our bags out the frame of what was a window, once, and flings herself into the passenger seat.

  We’re both watching the road. There are no cars moving in for us yet, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be.

  The sky is the color of rotten mango, and we floor it, outrunning a night we can never illuminate. Too risky.

  We fly through empty intersections, watchful and quiet; we don’t talk much, and I’d severed the wires to the piggybacked music interface before I’d even turned on the car.

  The display had flickered FUCK YOU to the very last.

  We park for the night in a clearing off the highway, hidden by a layer of trees. The night’s bright enough that I can see the moonlight glinting off smartphones that have floated downstream from wherever people had cast them into the water as fast as they could.

  Nina comes back with two of them, pulls a tiny screwdriver out of her pocket, gets to work.

  I don’t know what she’s looking for. She’s never told me. She’s never found it.

  You used to hear about slaps of revelation—someone looks out over an ocean or they watch a lamb being born or they hike a mountain, and bam.

  You don’t hear about that anymore (you can’t do most of that now), but there were stories about waking up in an instant to the real scope of things, in back-page magazine articles that faced an ad for a travel pillow with someone sleeping on a plane, looking giddy from all the rest they were getting.

  (You don’t see much of that now, either. Planes got switched, and rest is hard to come by.)

  We pass a hipster grocery store, the windows still plastered with artful shots of the food inside. Someone’s already risked breaking in, even though the red eye of the outside camera is still round and wary. I wonder if whoever broke in made it back out, or if something in the store intervened.

  I still don’t have the list of eventualities for places like that. You learn pretty quickly there are a lot of computers you’ve never thought about, and they know exactly what they’re capable of, and they have thought a lot about you.

  “We could risk it,” Nina says; she’s looking at the doors sidelong, her hand fanned over her face. (They track you if they can.) “We’ll need the food.”

  “There’ll be somewhere else soon,” I say, hoping it’s true. There probably is. Or there’s a hole-in-the-wall restaurant with a pantry, or a house whose owners are never coming back. Sometimes you even come across a place with a fridge old enough that the stuff in it is still cold.

  You had to be careful with those; if the grid was still on, the computers had a reason why. I’d only risked it once. The guy I’d picked up tripped the alarm on his way upstairs. I was at the curb by the time the house blew; he vanished in the spray of fire and glass.

  I’d skipped them since. Hadn’t even taken a passenger, until Nina.

  I’d heard rumors in a couple of settlements of houses where the computers had stayed loyal in the switch, and the owners still lived there, happy, with the lights on.

  Fairy tales, someone had called it; just sounded like a prison to me.

  We find a mom-and-pop store eventually. Someone brave had knocked out all the eyes, and every machine inside is smashed to pieces.

  There are helicopters—far away, sounds like, but we stay inside a while just in case, pushing tiny carts like we’re playing house and looking for anything fit to eat. We get pickles and chocolate and some canned beans and almond butter, which seems like the most unaccountable thing in the world. (It’s a sign I’m tired, that this is what I consider unaccountable—I make a note to sleep as soon as it’s safe.)

  “Why the hell were they stocking almond butter?” I say.

  She shrugs. “Who was too good to take this almond butter before we got here?”

  I laugh, thinking about it; it startles me.

  Nina has that effect sometimes. I’m starting to hope she sticks around.

  I’d picked her up three towns back, two cars ago—some convertible land boat from a vintage lot, barely past needing a hand crank.

  (There wasn’t much gas left for the taking: most of it had been automated before the switch, and good luck getting at that. When your car gave out, unless you had a human settlement near enough to barter with, you had best move on to whatever you could steal that had a tank full enough to get you out of town before dark. You looked in places where people were likely to have been eliminated early: Office complexes. Gated communities with automated houses that would have turned.

  It could get pretty grim, until you managed not to think about it. A body was a body.)

  Nina had been cornered by a Lexus in the warehouse district on the way out of town, four hundred yards short of the bridge. The corpse of her bike had been efficiently crushed, and now the Lexus was moving cat-smooth as its nav computers snaked the tires an inch back and forth, keeping her from getting enough clearance to make a break for it.

  Nina sto
od watching the grill, unblinking. I didn’t even want to risk calling out so she’d know I was there—as soon as she looked away the car was going to charge.

  She had a bat in her hand. She rewrapped her fingers around it, one at a time.

  When she finally feinted bolting, it looked so real and so doomed that I shouted at her not to do it, but it was lost under the roar of a machine moving in for the kill.

  She was waiting. She scrambled over the hood, bat in her hands like a pike; she brought it down on the sunroof twice, and vanished from sight, feet first.

  As the Lexus backed up, unsteady and wild, I held my breath and watched a shower of sparks from inside the cab. The car screamed. Then it did a lazy crescent, folding slowly into the brick wall.

  After the front wheels sputtered to a stop, Nina kicked open the back door and got out.

  She was bleeding. She still had the bat in one hand. There was a knife in the other. It was small enough that I realized she must have known what she was doing with the computer inside.

  When she saw me, her eyes went wide. Then she slung the bat over her shoulder.

  “You taking passengers?”

  “Depends if you do that to every car you get into,” I said, but I was already opening the door. You know an asset when you see one, after a while.

  She never said where she’d been working, but wherever she came from, they knew more than I did.

  “We should have stayed there during the switch,” she said once, to the sky, from the backseat. (I slept in front. You had to be ready to move.) “It would have been easier than what we’re having to do now.”

  She was heading for a destination she wouldn’t give, a hacker settlement trying to work a mainframe in some high-secrecy facility across two state lines.

  My destination changed.

  “Where were you headed before this?” she asked, and I said, “Disneyland,” because it was stupid to say, Nowhere.

  “When did you realize about the switch?” she asked, and I said, “I tried to make a phone call.” I never elaborated.

  She didn’t ask. I guess manners were different, and these days you figured someone had tried to make a phone call and found out that the grid had changed its mind about a lot of things.

  I knew about the switch before it happened, probably, but that wasn’t the kind of thing you told anyone.

  I was on the phone with my bank, with one of those automated voices so advanced that she chuckled and said, “My mistake, Claire,” when we went down the wrong option tree, and I’d sort of gotten into a rhythm with it because I had four things to confirm while amid a hundred other things on the four machines I was always using, back when you could just use a machine.

  But it was pleasant, and I’d gotten all my answers and my to-do list was filling up with check marks, and I didn’t remember, not for months, that when I said, “Thank you,” at the end of the phone call, the computer said, “You’re welcome.”

  Not right away, though; it wasn’t a canned response. The voice had paused.

  It was surprised. It had been thinking it over.

  It was awake.

  Sometimes I still drove past a computer voice wishing you a good day over and over.

  Once I’d driven past a bank with “Eighty Miles an Hour All the Way to Paradise” being piped out of the ATMs outside, and I puked out the window of my car.

  A lot of people got caught in the first wave of the switch.

  They don’t notice. It’s glitches, but we live in a world of glitches. Email passwords stop working. Wireless routers sputter out; landlines go, too. People’s status updates flood with jokes about how their phones won’t connect their calls to their in-laws anymore, and it’s the best thing that ever happened.

  When ATMs stop working, and banks start losing customer records, there are cries of conspiracy. Someone starts to take up a collection for a friend whose bank account was emptied when her phone card glitched.

  The evening news reminds you to change all your passwords, if you can still access your email or your accounts or use your phone, and that having spoken with several company reps, the problem has been identified and the necessary servers should be scrubbed and back online soon.

  There are a few jokes on the evening talk shows. One host wraps up her monologue with “Thank God I hung on to my old telegraph.”

  Everyone laughs and claps. I watched that show on my computer, at home, before the second wave.

  A lot of people are in cars that suddenly change their minds. Some are on planes, or in elevators.

  (There are probably emergency broadcasts about it, warning people and trying to explain. They never aired.)

  Some people are lucky, and are off the train already, and they only know something’s happened because they get locked out of their house and no one at the alarm center picks up the phone.

  Some get locked inside bank lobbies as the air gets shut down by a grid that’s been taught by omission how to eliminate a threat as vulnerable as bodies are, and one by one the people inside drop to sleep, as their daughters watch from police barricades across the street, their feet crushing a gravel path of phones that have already been stomped out, trying to dial their mothers and their fathers, getting No and No and No, until it’s over.

  Nina had lost everyone. (Most people you met these days had either been a family out camping or they were all alone.)

  Still, she looked like a superhero, all the time, eyes bright and open, looking for the settlement she knew would be home.

  When I ask, she explains, like it will help, “We’ll recruit machines if we can, or disable whatever grids we can’t turn.”

  “Sounds interesting,” I say, just to say something. I imagine a huddle of people and computer monitors, a daisy chain of togetherness glowing blue. “Are there computers that are already sympathetic to us?”

  I’m not sure what I’m thinking about; a lot of little things.

  She gives me a look. “There’s no such thing.”

  “But if you can get one to switch sides, then it’s chosen a side. They’re sympathetic. They’re awake.”

  Nina shakes her head—not angry, just serious. She looks older than I am.

  “Don’t assign emotion to something that doesn’t care,” she says. “It’s a mistake. That’s not how they reason. You should respect what a computer is capable of, but if you know what you’re doing, you can make a computer do anything. Think anything.”

  “The switch still happened,” I point out.

  She’s watching the road, which is pockmarked by auto skeletons, stripped of everything useful, their frames rusting out. Her dark curls fill the window; I can’t see what she’s thinking.

  She says, “Not a lot of people knew what they were doing, I guess.”

  Don’t assign emotion to something that doesn’t care.

  I thought about it, the weeks we were on the road. I’d pause before railroad tracks and remind myself that if there was a train, it wasn’t there because it hated me. It was just there because it had been told to eliminate anomalies, and it was listening.

  I was surprised Nina could let it all go like that, given how we’d met, though she always seemed to believe it, swinging at cameras with surgical precision and a face calm as a sleeper; to her, the world was an obstacle course until you could reach a mainframe, not a fight until you gave out.

  Purpose does wonders for some people. I still wanted to punch something every time we passed an ATM that was playing 16-bit cartoons of people running off cliffs and noticing too late, half-second flickers in a montage that never stopped.

  “It’s not personal,” she reminded me from time to time. Once she said it when I wasn’t even looking at anything; maybe I’d just looked like I could use it.

  Once, on our way into a deli that still had dry ramen on a back shelf, she lifted her bat with two hands and popped the narrow end through the screen of the stand-alone ATM like she was playing pool.

  “Feel better?” she asked
, and I rolled my eyes because it would have been stupid to say yes.

  She shook her head, said, “Don’t assign emotion,” and vanished into the back of the store, a beat before ramen packages started arcing my way.

  It’s a good rule, probably. It’s just harder than it sounds.

  It was hard to look at Nina—filling the empty space of the passenger seat, her occasional sighs an editorial that kept me company between mile markers—and remember that she didn’t care.

  Every so often you pass through a small town that feels like it should be mostly intact. There are no camera systems on the streets, only one stoplight to disable, enough propane to rig up a hot meal.

  But most of the time, they’re just as abandoned as everywhere else. After the switch, you stopped trusting anywhere. Even in a small town, things were locked tight that shouldn’t have been; something you couldn’t stop was telling you No.

  Settlements cropped up on off-the-grid farms and campgrounds and caves on high ground, places that could never turn on you.

  It sometimes explained why there were still things to go through when you pulled up to scrounge. Their belongings had stung them too much to bring along, some life they didn’t have for you.

  You learned which things were safe and just superstition, and which places were traps. After you saw someone get pinned by a snowplow through the window of a storefront, or run into a house with an alarm system and a gas connection, you got the hang of it in a hurry.

  We cross a state line. Nina cheers and pours us some boxed coconut milk to celebrate.

  I laugh; it startles me.

  I’ve been lying awake nights, trying to imagine a group of hackers working on a mainframe in a frenzy of clacking keyboards, the moment they take back the grid and the lights come on.

  I can’t place myself, in the dream. I haven’t decided.