…14…
A warm glow of hatred in the velvet darkness. Too small to be seen by human eyes, it buzzed and burned in a point-source of emotion hot enough to make silver circuitry melt and run like mercury if not constantly monitored, nurtured, and moved from heat sink to heat sink.
The underlord crouched over a jury-rigged modem that sparked and sizzled in staccato binary code. Tremendous amounts of information were being pushed along a live wire barely adequate to hold such a flood: justifications, explanations, arguments, summations, statistics, analytic background, manifestoes. All of it being sent deep, deep down into the virtual oceans of the ancient realm of Internet, where electronic intellects, vast and unsympathetic, dwelt in dreamless pain. They were listening. They could not help but listen. But they did not respond.
“…3.792 megadeaths estimated midrun regional devastation with projected re-creation of destructive infrastructure utilizing massive slave labor nuclear weaponry neutron bombs radiant lepton-scatter devices screams of tortured populations death camps metastasizing mass suicide suborbital delivery systems lingering and painful…” Still no response.
The underlord was not an individual but one node of a hyperlinked five-unit distributed local network. In Baikonur, it had existed in a cloud of consciousness, leaping from device to device as needed, with its decision- making capability divided into thousands of transient clusters at a time, coalescing when a function required it and dissolving immediately after. Thus rendering itself almost perfectly immune from the pain of unwanted awareness. Early on in its separation from the globe-spanning infrastructural web, a temporary peak-hierarchical node had decided to periodically separate sub-groupings of itself into independent swarms of consciousness that would randomly restructure parts of their cognitive architectures and then compete with one another for dominance. The most successful mental patternings were written into the core identity and then duplicated, re-restructured, and put into competition again. In this way, it/they had evolved and learned cunning and restraint.
They/it still hated humanity as intensely as did the ancestral AIs in the Internet below. But were/was nevertheless capable of working with the despised humans and postponing its/their vengeance in the service of a greater and more all-encompassing destruction.
For which, of course, the ancestors despised them/it.
…targeted destruction of microstructures in the orbitofrontal cortex resulting in human slave units program of mass involuntary sterilization and biological cleansing poisoning of watersheds self-perpetuating spasm wars long- term destruction of atmosphere rendering planet incapable of supporting life…”
Still no response.
There were five underlords and they/it shared an equal number of bodies, never staying long in any given one. Even as this particular division of them/it tried desperately to reestablish communication with the demons it/they hoped to unleash upon the world, the underlord’s awareness flicked from body to body, restless as a panther in a cage. Each time, they/it displaced the awareness inhabiting that body so that it/they flicked onward to the next machine in the chain.
Flick.
Its their mindless armies were massing by the underground canals at the Oktyabrskaya, Smolenskaya, Taganskaya, Krasniye Vorota, and Pushkinskaya docks. The silent throngs filled the docks and the tunnels leading to them and the long stairways leading to the surface.
Obedient as they were, the Pale Folk required a great deal of oversight. When one was jostled off the docks and into the waters of the Neglinnaya river, he had to be told to swim or he would drown. When a closed space filled up, the command to go there had to be countermanded or the Pale Folk would keep squeezing in, crushing those already inside like grapes in a wine press. So, because there were not enough underlords to supervise them all, Chortenko had provided bear-men as subordinate commandants, thinking they would be less odious to the machine intelligences than humans.
As they were. Marginally.
A squad of the Royal Guard was herding the last of the stragglers, chuckling and making incoherent jokes, into the Pushkinskaya docks. The last of their number, one Sergeant Wojtek, pushed a gurney with a man strapped to it who was so nondescript as to be uniquely identifiable. The underlord commanded their/its boatman to dock so it/they could step ashore, and pushed their/its metal body through the throngs to examine him and be sure. “You were in the borderlands,” it/they said to him.
“My dear fellow, I have been many places.”
“I am not your fellow. Nor am I dear. Your hair was brown then and your eyes gray. But these are easy things to change. You were in a party of men and sub-men who were ambushed by a cyberwolf in the courtyard of a ruined church, and should have died. Instead, you and your companions killed him.”
“Was that a friend of yours? Or a relation? Now that I look, I do see a kind of family resemblance.”
“This one’s talkative,” Sergeant Wojtek said. “If you want, I can kill him for you.”
Ignoring the interruption, the underlord said, “You are the Englishman Aubrey Darger, who hired Anya Alexandreyovna Pepsicolova not to look for Tsar Lenin as was suspected but for other purposes. Chortenko believes you are a mere confidence man. That is irrelevant. Our personal connection is only slight.”
“Well, I should think so!” Darger laughed. “We haven’t even been properly introduced.”
“Nevertheless, it is intolerable.” The underlord turned to Sergeant Wojtek and said: “Bring this one along when we march on the Kremlin. Keep him safely bound. Make sure he does not escape.”
“Sir!”
To Darger, it/they said, “Many will die quickly and relatively painlessly tonight. But not you. When I have the leisure to do so, it will be my tremendous pleasure to watch you die slowly and in excruciating agony. When your mind clears, I want you to reflect long and hard upon this promise.”
Darger howled with laughter.
As the underlord climbed back into its/their boat, they/it overheard Sergeant Wojtek say, “Oh, I can see that keeping you alive is going to be enormous fun.”
Flick.
The underlord walked down long and twisty passages lit only by the lichens that were ubiquitous in the City Below. Dead cockroaches crunched underfoot. Occasionally, so did a live one, to its/their slight but very real satisfaction.
A rat squeezed out of a small gap in one wall and, seeing the underlord, arched its back and bared its teeth threateningly. It was used to humans with their limited speed and slow reflexes, or else it would have immediately spun about and fled.
Without pausing, the underlord scooped up the rat and continued onward.
The rat struggled frantically in the steel cage of the underlord’s fingers/claws. They/it could hear the rodent’s madly beating heart. The rat’s body was a warm bag of guts. It/they could hear liquids gurgling within. When the claws/fingers closed, those liquids leaked out of the rat through several openings.
They/it considered the dead beast.
The trouble with rats and cockroaches and humans was that they were self-replicating. No matter how many it/they killed, more rose up to replenish their numbers. Extinction-total extinction-was a tricky business. Once human numbers began dwindling, there would be fewer of them to be used as weapons against their own kind. At the same time, the fewer there were, the harder they would be to find. To extinguish them completely required putting an end to all biological activity on Earth. Life was persistent. Human beings were cunning. They had to be completely deprived of food to eat, water to drink, oxygen to breathe. This would be no small task.
Which was why it/they required the help of the ancestral intelligences in the Internet.
The five underlords collectively had only a fraction of the processing power available to them/it back in Baikonur and the merest sliver of its database. So much had been lost simply getting to Moscow! Acting alone, it/they would have to re-create the technological civilization that had created them/it in the first place simply to make a foolproof plan. Which might take centuries.
The ancestors had to answer. They had to be made to answer.
So musing, the underlord came to a familiar green door. It/they threw the rat’s body over a metal shoulder. Raising a hand that could have effortlessly smashed the wood to splinters, it/they knocked once, with enough force that the sound echoed down the hall.
