Robopocalypse

hand back into the metal arm straps.

“You make a fine point,” he says.

“Yeah,” says Lurker. Then he taps Arrtrad on his metal shoulder with one wicked blade. “Besides,” he asks, “you don’t really want to live to old age with me? On a bloody houseboat?”

A slow smile spreads across Arrtrad’s birdlike face. “You do make a fine fucking point.”

* * *

The streets of central London are mostly empty. Attacks came too fast and too organized for most citizens to react. By law, all the autos had full-drive capability. Also by law, hardly anybody had guns. And the closed-circuit television network was compromised from the start, giving the machines an intimate view of every public space in the city.

In London, the citizens were too safe to survive.

Visual records indicate that automated trash trucks filled dumps outside the city with corpses for months after Zero Hour. Now there’s nobody left to destroy the place. No survivors brave the streets. And nobody is around to see two pale men—one young and one old—encased in military exoskeletons as they leap in ten-foot strides over the weedy pavement.

The first attack comes only a few minutes in, as they sprint through Trafalgar Square. The fountains are drained and filled with dead leaves and blown trash. A couple of broken bicycles lie out but that’s it. Covered in roosting birds, the granite statue of Lord Nelson in his admiral’s hat looks down from a hundred-and-fifty-foot-tall column as the two men bound across the plaza on elastic foot blades.

They should have known there was too much wide-open space.

Lurker notices the smart car a couple of seconds before it can ram into Arrtrad from behind. With one leap, he closes the twenty feet between them and lands on the run beside the speeding car. A blossom of mold has spread across the top of it. Without a regular car wash, nature is eating up the old stuff.

Too bad there are plenty of replacements.

On landing, Lurker hunches down and drives his foot-long forearm blades into the driver’s side door of the car and lifts. Steam jets from the hip and knee joints of his exoskeleton, and the diesel engine surges as he wrenches the whole side of the car upward. While on its two right wheels, the car veers but still manages to clip Arrtrad’s right rear leg midstride. The car flips over and rolls away, but Arrtrad is off balance; he trips.

Falling down at a twenty-mile-an-hour jog is serious business. Luckily, the exoskeleton can tell that it’s falling. Leaving Arrtrad no choice in the matter, the machine jerks his arms close to his body and his legs curl into fetal position. The roll cage becomes pertinent. In this crash pose, the exoskeleton rolls over a few times, then plows over a fire hydrant and comes to a stop.

No water comes out of the decapitated hydrant.

By the time Lurker lands next to him, Arrtrad is already climbing to his feet. The pudgy blond man stands up and I can see he is grinning, chest heaving.

“Thanks,” he says to Lurker.

There’s blood on his teeth but Arrtrad doesn’t seem to care. He pops up and sprints away. Lurker follows, on the lookout for more cars. New ones appear, but they’re slow, not ready. They can’t track the speeding men as they leap through alleys and tear across parks.

Lurker put it best: It’s only a single fucking mile.

From a new camera angle, I see the cylindrical British Telecom tower looming in the blue sky like a Tinkertoy. Antennae bristle from the top and a ring of microwave transmitter dishes wrap just below, pointing away in every direction. It’s the biggest TV switch station in London and it’s got whole highways of fiber-optic cable buried underneath. When it comes to communications, all roads lead to the BTT.

The wiry exoskeletons appear and dart around the side of the building, stopping in front of a steel door. Arrtrad leans the scratched-up frame of his exo against the wall, huffing and puffing. “Why not just destroy it from here?” he asks.

Lurker flexes his arms and jounces his head back and forth to loosen up his neck. He seems exhilarated by the run. “The fiber is buried in there in a concrete tube. Protected. Besides, that would be a bit crass, wouldn’t it? We’re better than that, brother. We’ll use this place against the machines. Pick up the phone and make a call. It’s what we do best, isn’t it? And this is the biggest goddamn phone in the hemisphere.”

Lurker nods toward a bulge in his pocket.

“And if all else fails… kaboom,” he says.

Then Lurker jams his forearm blades into the steel door and wrenches them back out, leaving a rip in the metal. A couple more stabs and the door swings open.

“Onward,” says Lurker, and the two step inside a narrow hallway. They hunch over and creep through the dark passage, trying not to breathe their own diesel fumes. In the low light, the LEDs embedded in the curve of metal over their heads brighten up.

“What are we looking for?” asks Arrtrad.

“The fiber,” Lurker whispers. “We’ll want to get down to the fiber. Best-case, we hijack it and send a signal for all the robots to jump into the river. Worst case, we blast the jammer and free up the communications satellites.”

At the end of the hallway is another steel door. Gently, Lurker pushes it open. His LEDs dim as Lurker pokes his head out.

From the built-in camera in the exoskeleton, I see that the machines have almost entirely hollowed out the interior of the cylindrical building. Shafts of sunlight arc in through fifteen stories of dirty glass windows. The light falls through dead air and shatters through a latticework of rebar and radial support beams. Bird calls echo through the cavernous space. Vines and grass and mold are growing on the mounds of trash and debris that cover every surface of the ground floor.

“Bloody hell,” Lurker mutters.

In the middle of this arboretum, a solid cement cylinder juts straight up through the entire height of the building. Encrusted with vines, the pillar disappears into gloomy heights above. It is the final support structure holding this place up. The backbone.

“Building’s gone native,” says Arrtrad.

“Well, there’s no way to reach the upper transmitters from here,” Lurker says, looking at the heaps of moldering rubble that used to be the floors and walls of upper stories. “Doesn’t matter. We’ve got to get to the computers. Base of the building. Down.”

Something small and gray scuttles over a pile of moldy papers and under a tangled heap of rusted office chairs. Arrtrad and Lurker look at each other, wary.

Careful of his forearm spike, Lurker raises a finger to his lips. Together, the men creep out of the hallway and into the arboretum. Their feet blades indent the moss and rotting trash, leaving plain tracks behind.

A blue door waits in the base of the central pillar, dwarfed by the sheer size of the hollowed-out building around it. They move to the door at a fast trot, keeping noise to a minimum. Arrtrad rears back to stab the door, but Lurker stops him with a gesture. Pulling his arm out of the exoskeleton, Lurker reaches down and turns the doorknob. With a yank, the door opens on creaky hinges. I doubt it has been opened since the war began.

Inside, there is dirt in the hallway for a few steps and then things get very clean. The faint roar of air- conditioning grows louder as they walk farther down the cement hallway. The floor is angled downward, toward a square of bright light at the end of the tunnel.

“It’s as if we’ve died,” says Arrtrad.

Finally, they reach the bottom: a cylindrical white clean room with twenty-foot ceilings. It is filled with row after row of humming racks of equipment. The stacks of gear are arrayed in concentric circles, each row getting shorter the closer it is to the center of the room. Rows of fluorescent lights shine down, starkly illuminating every detail of the room. Condensation starts to form on the black metal of the exoskeletons and Arrtrad shivers.

“Plenty of juice down here, anyway,” says Lurker.

The two men walk inside, disoriented by the millions of stuttering green and red lights that line the towers of hardware. In the center of the room is their goal: a black hole in the floor the size of a manhole, metal stairs poking out of the top—the fiber hub.

Four-legged robots made of white plastic climb up and down the racks, slipping between stacks of whirring equipment like lizards. Some of these lizard robots use their forelegs to stroke the equipment, moving wires or