Daniel H. Wilson - Robopocalypse

ALSO BY DANIEL H. WILSON

A Boy and His Bot
Bro-Jitsu
Mad Scientist Hall of Fame
How to Build a Robot Army
Wheres My Jetpack?
How to Survive a Robot Uprising

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2011 by Daniel H. Wilson

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.doubleday.com

DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Houghton Mifflin Publishing Company for permission to reprint an excerpt from All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace from The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster by Richard Brautigan, copyright 1968 by Richard Brautigan.
All rights reserved.

Jacket design by Will Staehle
Jacket image by Giimann courtesy of TurboSquid.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wilson, Daniel H. (Daniel Howard)
Robopocalypse : a novel / Daniel H. Wilson. 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. RobotsFiction. 2. Artificial intelligenceFiction. I. Title.
PS3623.I57796R63 2011
813.6dc22 2010043134

eISBN: 978-0-385-53386-7

v3.1

For Anna

We are a better species for having fought this war.

C ORMAC B RIGHT B OY W ALLACE

Twenty minutes after the war ends, Im watching stumpers pour up out of a frozen hole in the ground like ants from hell and praying that I keep my natural legs for another day.

Each walnut-sized robot is lost in the mix as they climb over each other and the whole nightmare jumble of legs and antennae blends together into one seething, murderous mass.

With numb fingers, I fumble my goggles down over my eyes and get ready to do some business with my little friend Rob, here.

Its an oddly quiet morning. Just the sigh of the wind through stark tree branches and the hoarse whisper of a hundred thousand explosive mechanical hexapods searching for human victims. Up above, snow geese honk to each other as they glide over the frigid Alaskan landscape.

The war is over. Its time to see what we can find.

From where Im standing ten meters away from the hole, the killer machines look almost beautiful in the dawn, like candy spilled out onto the permafrost.

I squint into the sunlight, my breath billowing out in pale puffs, and sling my battered old flamethrower off my shoulder. With one gloved thumb, I depress the ignite button.

Spark.

The thrower doesnt light.

Needs to warm up, so to speak. But theyre getting closer. No sweat. Ive done this dozens of times. The trick is to be calm and methodical, just like them. Rob mustve rubbed off on me over the last couple years.

Spark.

Now I see the individual stumpers. A tangle of barbed legs attached to a bifurcated shell. I know from experience that each side of the shell contains a different fluid. The heat of human skin initiates a trigger state. The fluids combine. Pop! Somebody wins a brand-new stump.

Spark.

They dont know Im here. But the scouts are spreading out in semirandom patterns based on Big Robs study of foraging ants. The robots learned so much about us, about nature. It wont be long now.

Spark.

I begin to back away slowly.

Cmon, you bastard, I mutter.

Spark.

That was a mistake: to talk. The heat from my breath is like a beacon. The flood of horror surges my way, quiet and fast.

Spark.

A lead stumper climbs onto my boot. Gotta be careful now. Cant react. If it pops Im minus a foot, best-case.

I should never have come here alone.

Spark.

Now the flood is at my feet. I feel a tug on my frost-covered shin guard as the leader climbs me like a mountain. Metal-filament antennae tap, tap, tap along, questing for the telltale heat of human flesh.

Spark.

Oh Christ. Cmon, cmon, cmon.

Spark.

Theres going to be a temperature differential at my waist level, where the armor has chinks. A torso-level trigger state in body armor isnt a death sentence, but it doesnt look good for my balls, either.

Spark. Whoomph!

Im lit. A jet of flame leaps from my thrower. Its heat blooms on my face and sweat evaporates off my cheeks. My peripheral vision narrows. All I see is the controlled spurts of fire Im arcing out onto the tundra. Sticky, burning jelly coats the river of death. The stumpers sizzle and melt by the thousands. I hear a chorus of high-pitched whines as the chilled air trapped in their carapaces squeezes out.

No explosions, just the occasional sputtering flare. The heat boils the juice in their shells before detonation. The worst part is that they dont even care. Theyre too simple to understand whats happening to them.

They love the heat.

I start to breathe again when the leader drops off my thigh and scurries toward the flames. The urge to step on the little mother is strong, but Ive seen the boots fly before. Early on in the New War, the hollow backfire of a trigger-state stumper and the confused, hopping screams that came afterward were as common as gunfire.

All the soldiers say that Rob likes to party. And when he gets going, hes one hell of a dance partner.

The last of the stumpers suicidally retreat toward the smoking lump of heat and the sizzling corpses of their comrades.

I dig out my radio.

Bright Boy to base. Shaft fifteen booby trap.

The little box squawks at me in an Italian accent: Copy, Bright Boy. This is Leo. Come in. Get your ass to shaft numero sedici. Holy shit. We got something for real here, boss.

I crunch over the frost back to shaft sixteen to see for myself how real it is.

Leonardo is a big grunt, even bigger thanks to the hulking lower-body exoskeletonLEEXhe picked up at a mountain rescue station crossing the south Yukon. Hes got the LEEXs white cross medic logo covered in dead-black spray paint. The squad has tied a tickler rope around his waist. Hes backing up, step by step, motors whining as he pulls something big and black out of the hole.

From under his mess of curly black hair, Leo grumbles, Oh man, this thing molto grande.

Cherrah, my specialist, points a depth meter at the hole and tells me the shaft measures in at exactly 128 meters deep. Then she wisely steps away from it. Her cheek bears a sunken scar from less cautious times. We dont know whats coming out.

Funny, I think. With people, everything comes in tens. We count on our fingers and toes. It makes us sound like monkeys. But the machines count it out on their hardware just the same as us. Theyre binary all the way to the core. Everything comes out a power of two.

Now the tickler emerges from the hole, looking like a spider with a fly. Its long, wiry arms grip a black cube the size of a basketball. The cube must be as dense as lead, but the tickler is crazy strong. We normally use em for grabbing up a guy who falls off a cliff or into a hole, but they can handle anything from a ten-pound vanilla babe to a soldier in full exo-rig. If youre not careful, theyll tickle your ribs to splinters.