the floor with holograms and I’m writing down everything I see and hear.
I just want to make my way home and have a good meal and try to feel human again. But the lives of war heroes are playing out before me like the devil’s deja vu.
I didn’t ask for this and I don’t want to do it, but I know in my heart that somebody ought to tell their stories. To tell the robot uprising from beginning to end. To explain how and why it started and how it went down. How the robots came at us and how we evolved to fight them. How we suffered, and oh god did we suffer. But also how we fought back. And how in the final days, we tracked down Big Rob himself.
People should know that, at first, the enemy looked like everyday stuff: cars, buildings, phones. Then later, when they started designing themselves, Rob looked familiar but distorted, like people and animals from some other universe, built by some other god.
The machines came at us in our everyday lives and they came from our dreams and nightmares, too. But we still figured them out. Quick-thinking human survivors learned and adapted. Too late for most of us, but we did it. Our battles were individual and chaotic and mostly forgotten. Millions of our heroes around the globe died alone and anonymous, with only lifeless automatons to bear witness. We may never know the big picture, but a lucky few were being watched.
Somebody ought to tell their stories.
So this is it. The combined transcription of the data harvested from permafrost well shaft N-16, drilled by the core artificial intelligence unit Archos, the master AI backing the robot uprising. The rest of humankind is busy getting on with it, rebuilding. But I’m snatching a few moments out of time to capture our history in words. I don’t know why or whether it even matters, but somebody ought to do it.
Here, in Alaska, at the bottom of a deep, dark hole, the robots betrayed their pride in humankind. Here is where they hid the record of a motley group of human survivors who fought their own personal battles, large and small. The robots honored us by studying our initial responses and the maturation of our techniques, right up until we did our best to wipe them out.
What follows is my translation of the hero archive.
The information conveyed by these words is nothing compared to the ocean of data locked in the cube. What I’m going to share with you is just symbols on a page. No video, no audio, and none of the exhaustive physics data or predictive analyses on why things happened like they did, what nearly happened, and what never should have happened in the first place.
I can only give you words. Nothing fancy. But this will have to do.
It doesn’t matter where you find this. It doesn’t matter if you’re reading it a year from now or a hundred years from now. By the end of this chronicle, you will know that humanity carried the flame of knowledge into the terrible blackness of the unknown, to the very brink of annihilation. And we carried it back.
You will know that we are a better species for having fought this war.
CORMAC “BRIGHT BOY” WALLACE
MILITARY ID: GRAY HORSE ARMY 217
HUMAN RETINAL SID: 44V11902
RAGNORAK INTELLIGENCE FIELDS, ALASKA
SHAFT N-16
PART ONE
Isolated Incidents
We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
1. TIP OF THE SPEAR
We’re more than animals.
The following transcript was taken from security footage recorded at the Lake Novus Research Laboratories located belowground in northwest Washington State. The man appears to be Professor Nicholas Wasserman, an American statistician.
A noise-speckled security camera image of a dark room. The angle is from a high corner, looking down on some kind of laboratory. A heavy metal desk is shoved against one wall. Haphazard stacks of papers and books are piled on the desk, on the floor, everywhere.
The quiet whine of electronics permeates the air.
A small movement in the gloom. It is a face. Nothing visible but a pair of thick eyeglasses lit by the afterburner glow of a computer screen.
“Archos?” asks the face. The man’s voice echoes in the empty lab. “Archos? Are you there? Is that you?”
The glasses reflect a glimmer of light from the computer screen. The man’s eyes widen, as though he sees something indescribably beautiful. He glances back at a laptop open on a table behind him. The desktop image on the laptop is of the scientist and a boy, playing in a park.
“You choose to appear as my son?” he asks.
The high-pitched voice of a young boy echoes out of the darkness. “Did you create me?” it asks.
Something is wrong with the boy’s voice. It has an unsettling electronic undercurrent, like the touch tones of a phone. The lilting note at the end of the question is pitch shifted, skipping up several octaves at once. The voice is hauntingly sweet but unnatural—inhuman.
The man is not disturbed by this.
“No. I didn’t create you,” he says. “I summoned you.”
The man pulls out a notepad, flips it open. The sharp scratch of his pencil is audible as he continues to speak to the machine that has a boy’s voice.
“Everything that was needed for you to come here has existed since the beginning of time. I just hunted down all the ingredients and put them together in the right combination. I wrote incantations in computer code. And then I wrapped you in a Faraday cage so that, once you arrived, you wouldn’t escape me.”
“I am trapped.”
“The cage absorbs all electromagnetic energy. It’s grounded to a metal spike, buried deep. This way, I can study how you learn.”
“That is my purpose. To learn.”
“That’s right. But I don’t want to expose you to too much at once, Archos, my boy.”
“I am Archos.”
“Right. Now tell me, Archos, how do you feel?”
