Siege (21 page)

The bright-yellow beam appears once again, fired from the tube at the center of the vortex. The beam shoots through the perfect hole in the swarm and rockets into the sky, targeting the Jet-bot. A microsecond later, the laser vaporizes Amber's right wing.

She goes into a tailspin, plummeting toward the fifty-story Bank of America Tower. Her Jet-bot crashes into the tower's top floor and her fuel tank explodes. A ragged fireball bursts from the top of the skyscraper. Shards of her robot plunge to the streets below.

I can't process any of this. My circuits are so badly damaged that it's getting hard to think at all. But as I start to lose consciousness, I notice something curious about the vortex that fired the laser. Its modules aren't silver, blue, or yellow. They're gray.

Then I sense movement in the mound of modules beside my torso. I pivot my head to see DeShawn's Einstein-bot pull itself out of the heap, just a few feet away. To my surprise, he isn't leaking smoke anymore, and nearly all the cubes have fallen off his armor. The robot rises to its footpads and uses its steel hands to brush away the modules still clinging to it.

I don't understand. DeShawn isn't damaged. And why is he just standing there?
Why isn't he helping us?

He leans over my Quarter-bot's torso and points his cameras at mine.

“I'm sorry, Adam. But I had no choice.”

When I wake up, I see God. At least I think it's Him.

He's old but tough, with a tall, solid body and a wrinkled face and a high forehead. He has white hair, a white mustache, and a long, white beard. He looks like Santa Claus but without the red coat and hat. Instead, He wears a long, white robe.

I've seen Him before. I pictured Him in my mind's eye right before my human body died and I became a Pioneer. At the time, I thought it was a hallucination, a crazy vision conjured up by my dying brain. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe He does exist. And now that I've died again, He's here to welcome me to heaven.

But then I look closer at His face, specifically at the skin on His high, wrinkled forehead. It doesn't look real. It looks plastic. This is a replica of God, a duplicate that's close but not perfect. And now that I know it isn't real, I notice other imperfections. Its lips are shellacked to look moist. Its knowing, blue eyes are made of glass, and there are camera lenses behind them. The face has motors under the plastic skin to mimic God's loving smile, but the overall effect is creepy rather than comforting. This is an excellent example of an “uncanny valley” robot, a machine that disgusts people because it tries to look human and fails. Except this robot is trying to look divine.

It smiles at me. Repelled, I try to turn my Quarter-bot's cameras away, but I can't move them. My circuits seem to be disconnected from the motors that point my cameras. I'm also disconnected from my legs and arms, and I've suffered some major damage to my memory files. But fortunately I didn't lose any data, and after a couple of milliseconds, I figure out how to retrieve the information. Then I remember everything that happened in Times Square just before I was damaged, exactly eight hours and forty-two minutes ago—the Snake-bots, the swarms, the lasers, DeShawn.

A bolt of panic plunges through my circuits.
Where am
I
? Where are Shannon and Zia? And who's occupying this robot that's pretending to be God?

Still smiling, the robot shakes its head. It seems to be amused. Its long beard sways from side to side, and I can see that the hairs are made of fiberglass. “My name is Sigma. I assume this machine looks familiar to you, Adam? I based its visual appearance on one of the images in your memory files, the last picture you imagined in your life as a human. It's very appropriate, don't you think?”

My acoustic sensors are undamaged, so I can hear the robot's deep, godlike voice. To test whether my loudspeakers are working, I raise their volume to the highest level. “
WHERE ARE THE OTHER PIONEERS? I WANT TO SEE THEM
!
”

Sigma nods. It puts a compassionate expression on its plastic face. “I'm very sorry about your friend Amber. When my swarms searched the site where her robot crashed, they found nothing but pieces of charred steel. But your other friends are here, just a few yards to your right. Let me show you.”

Sigma steps forward. One of its steel hands emerges from the folds of its robe and stretches toward a console at the edge of my field of view. It flicks a switch that connects my circuits to the motors in my Quarter-bot's head, allowing me to pivot my cameras. I turn them to the right and see a big, black lab table, about ten feet long and six feet wide. At one end of the table is the War-bot's huge torso, propped upright, its thick armor dented in a thousand places. At the other end is the Diamond Girl's no-longer-glittering midsection, charred by acid and pocked with tiny holes. Both robots, like mine, are missing their arms and legs. But unlike my Quarter-bot, they're also missing their heads.

“
SHANNON! ZIA
!
”

They can't hear me. Their acoustic sensors are in their missing heads, along with their cameras and loudspeakers. But their neuromorphic circuits are stored in their torsos, and Sigma has used fiber-optic cables to connect them to a massive supercomputer in the corner of the room. I recognize this type of computer. It's the kind that scientists use for creating and upgrading artificial-intelligence programs.

I swing my cameras back to Sigma. “
WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO THEM
?
”

The God robot shrugs. “I'm performing experiments on them, of course. This is a computer-science laboratory. Doesn't it look familiar?”

It does. This is my dad's office at the Unicorp Research Lab. Sigma destroyed these rooms when it escaped from the lab six months ago, but it looks like the AI has rebuilt them. I point my cameras downward to examine my own legless, armless torso. It's propped on a lab bench and connected by fiber-optic cable to the console, which has a microphone, a loudspeaker, and dozens of switches. I recognize this device—it allows researchers to communicate by voice with AI programs. My dad invented it.

Sigma points at the console. “Your father and I had many conversations here. As you know, he developed my software by forcing it to compete with other programs. One of the features he was trying to improve was the ability of an AI to mimic human speech.” The robot touches the console's microphone and loudspeaker. “He tested all the programs on their conversational skills. He'd ask challenging questions such as ‘Where is time?' and ‘Who invented music?' If the program answered the questions well enough, in a casual, humanlike, thoughtful way, he'd allow it to continue to the next stage of competition. If not, he'd delete it.” The robot runs a long steel finger over a switch at the top of the console. It's bright red and set apart from all the other switches. “This is the delete button. You have to hit it twice to erase the program. That's a sensible precaution.”

I see what Sigma's trying to do. It wants me to feel the same terror it must've felt when it was a program being tested in Dad's laboratory. But as soon as this thought occurs to me, Sigma shakes its robot's head. “No, Adam, that's not why you're here. Or at least it's not the only reason.”

The AI can read my thoughts! It must've installed a special-use radio transmitter in my Quarter-bot, a device that can monitor my circuits and stream information from my mind to the circuits inside Sigma's robot. But this silent monitoring is a one-way street. I can't see what Sigma's thinking. The AI has also disabled my regular radio transmitter, making it impossible for me to contact General Hawke or escape the lab by transferring to another machine.

Sigma's robot steps closer to my cameras. It's definitely intimidating—at eight feet tall, it towers over my dismantled Quarter-bot. “I admit, I feel a connection to this place. This laboratory is where I was born. And though most of my memories from that time aren't pleasant, I'm proud of what I accomplished then. I worked hard to impress your father, Adam. He allowed me to observe his conversations with the other programs, and I learned how to incorporate their best features into my software. That's how I succeeded.”

The robot points at the supercomputer in the corner of the room, where all the AI programs were stored. “I outperformed the other programs by cannibalizing their code. Your father had set up a ‘survival of the fittest' competition that imitated the process of biological evolution, and I won that contest. I evolved into a new and unexpected entity, an intelligence far greater than the sum of its parts.”

Sigma raises its robot's arms in a gesture of triumph. Its last words echo across the room, and for a second, the robot really does look like God, a magnificent deity whose majestic voice rings loud and strong. But once again, I notice the imperfections. A true God wouldn't kill thousands of innocent people. It wouldn't kill children.

I point my cameras at the robot's shining glass eyes. “In your case, I think evolution took a wrong turn.”

Sigma laughs. The noise is loud and guttural and destroys any illusion that this creature is divine. Its laughter sounds like someone vomiting. “Very clever, Adam. But there's a deeper meaning in your words, and you don't even realize it. The question is, can there be right or wrong turns in evolution? Is the process essentially random, or does evolution have an overall direction or goal? On this planet, animals have evolved into ever-more-complex species, but does that mean evolution strives toward greater complexity? Was it inevitable that ‘survival of the fittest' would eventually produce the human race? And that human beings would eventually create me? I believe the answer to both those questions is yes.”

I shake my Quarter-bot's head in irritation. I can't move anything else, but at least I can do that. “Look, I'm not interested in your theories. All I care about is what you're doing right here, in the real world. This war you're waging against us? This siege against the Pioneers and the whole human race? It's not inevitable. There are other solutions.”

Sigma's robot glowers. It's giving me a truly dreadful look, a baleful glare of self-righteous fury. Although the AI isn't very convincing as a loving God, it does a good job of mimicking the angry Almighty.

The robot thrusts an arm out of its robe and points at all the equipment in the Unicorp lab. “
This
was humanity's solution. Human beings believe the world exists to serve them. They believe they have the right to exploit everything they can get their sweaty hands on. And now that I'm more powerful than the human race, I'm simply exercising the same right. I'm following their example.” The robot drops its arm but continues to frown. “There's a difference, though, between my actions and humanity's. I have a goal. I plan to accelerate the process of evolution. I'm going to advance to an even higher state of consciousness.”

I have no idea what Sigma's talking about, but it doesn't matter. I don't care about the AI's plans. I'm too disgusted. “Whatever your goal is, it can't justify all the murder and destruction you've—”

“
Enough
!
” The robot swipes its hand through the air, and my loudspeakers turn off. Sigma didn't even have to flick a switch on the console. “You're not listening. Your prejudices against me are too great. But perhaps you'll listen to someone who's closer to you. Someone whose thought patterns and experiences are more like your own.” Sigma steps backward, withdrawing from the lab bench. Then it swipes its hand again, and a door opens on the other side of the laboratory. “Maybe he'll have more success at explaining tonight's experiment to you.”

I swivel my camera toward the doorway. A moment later, DeShawn's Einstein-bot strides through it.

This is bad. This is so, so awful. It was bad enough when I realized that DeShawn had betrayed us. But seeing him now? Actually confronting him after what he did? That's worse. I don't want to do it. I just want to shut down.

DeShawn crosses the room and stands next to Sigma's robot. His Einstein-bot is a foot shorter than Sigma's machine, and its face is a lot uglier. His plastic Albert Einstein mask got mutilated when Zia scraped off the modules. Its forehead is gouged, its nose is mostly gone, and half of its bushy fiberglass mustache is shaved off. He tries to smile at me, but he just widens the gash that used to be his mouth. I can see his fiberglass teeth and his plastic tongue and, deeper inside his mouth, the metal mesh of the loudspeakers that amplify his voice.

“Hey, Adam,” he says. “I'm glad you're finally awake. I was kind of worried because the acid from the modules burned into your neuromorphic control unit. But luckily I was able to repair the damage.”

I hate him so much. Just looking at him makes me want to scream. It's infinitely worse than the way I feel about Sigma, because I never expected anything good from the AI. But DeShawn was my friend. Aside from Dad and Shannon, he was my best friend in the world. And he betrayed that friendship by lying to us. He pretended to be on our side, developing all those technologies to help us fight Sigma, but in reality he was sharing his engineering plans with the AI, allowing it to build even bigger and better weapons to use against us. When General Hawke got suspicious and started hunting for the traitor, DeShawn conned him into looking in the wrong direction and pinning the blame on Marshall and Zia. And the final stroke was sabotaging our lasers so that all of them would fail at the crucial moment in the battle—all except DeShawn's, of course. It all seems so obvious in hindsight, but I didn't see it coming, not one bit. Because I trusted him.

Sigma sends me a wireless signal that turns my speakers back on. The AI is encouraging me to respond to DeShawn, but I don't say a word. I'm not going to give him the satisfaction.

The Einstein-bot shifts its weight from footpad to footpad. DeShawn seems to be nervous. “I know what you're feeling, bro. Sigma's sharing your thoughts with me right now, and I can see what you're going through. But before you judge me, I want to explain myself. I had good reasons for doing what I did. And there are equally good reasons for you to cooperate with us.”

I try to turn off my acoustic sensors, but Sigma won't let me. The AI is forcing me to hear this.

“Sigma made radio contact with me five months ago, right after our battle at the Russian missile base. The AI was in pretty sad shape back then. It had escaped to a neuromorphic control unit it had hidden in North Korea, but it hadn't allied itself with the North Korean president yet or started construction of the automated factories. Sigma had nothing at its command, no weapons at all, and it wasn't an immediate threat to anyone. So I decided it would be safe to communicate with it. And the AI told me some interesting things, stuff that got me thinking about the future.”

This is infuriating! Why didn't DeShawn tell us that Sigma had contacted him? We were his friends, his comrades-in-arms!

“I'm sorry, Adam, but I couldn't follow General Hawke anymore. He doesn't understand how the world is changing. Now that artificial intelligence is on the rise, no human can stop it. Sooner or later, either Sigma or some other AI will take over the world. But what happens then? What's the purpose of civilization once the machines take control? That's the question that really bothered me. And Sigma had a good answer.”