Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [300]
They believe, against all the evidence, that they were created by the first man, Adam, who was a smith. Their scriptures are children’s texts about the ancient glories of Earth, barely more accurate than the tales that Story feeds to Dee. They speak of a strange rapture, the Industrial Revolution, and they revere a mediator between man and machine, the robot who was and is a man, Jay-Dub.
As the humans accept their hospitality they listen to the robots expound their beliefs, and sing their songs. The songs are almost incomprehensible. Ax calls them old android spirituals, Wilde insists they’re ancient heavy-metal hits.
Dee is almost petrified at the thought that they’ll make the connection between Wilde and Jay-Dub, whom they evidently saw at various times over the years as both a robot and a televisual or holographic fetch. Fortunately, their pattern-recognition is poor. Their minds are genuine, if crude, artificial intelligences, and not (as hers is) a knock-off copy from a human template.
They are also unsophisticated at detecting human emotion, and show no sign of being affected by the humans’ constant edgy watchfulness and muttered consultations. They busy themselves with the last task which Jay-Dub set them: dragging out the dismembered components of humanoid robot shells and assembling them into imitation-robot suits for the humans to wear. They seem to enjoy the task, measuring up the humans and fitting the metal armour to their bodies. Dee daren’t ask if these carapaces are the remains of dead robots, or spare parts, or products of the robots’ own attempts to reproduce their kind. She concentrates on making sure the joints don’t catch her skin.
Wilde and Tamara and Ax laugh with her as they fit the armour on and practise walking about. It’s all a distraction, and they know it. They all know what they’re waiting for, and although it seems long to them, they have only a couple of hours to wait.
The explosion is a long way off, and small, as such explosions go, and still it fills the tunnel with white light. Soldier can’t tell if it was a tactical nuke aimed from outside the truck or a civil-engineering device detonated from within, to avoid capture. It was self-destruction, either way.
‘Oh, Jay-Dub,’ Dee says. ‘Oh, Meg. That was so brave.’
The rumble of the first shockwave passes. Parts of the tunnel roof fall in…
‘I could never have done that,’ Wilde says. His face shows more awe than grief. ‘Whatever was in that truck, it wasn’t me.’
18
The Malley Mile
There was no sense of time having passed. No white light, no Near Death Experience for me. One moment I was lying on my back, heat and blood from my body melting the cold snow, and the colours going. The next –
I was sitting bolt upright and stark naked on a bed, facing a wide window. The window was a rectangle of utter blackness divided horizontally by a white band, itself banded with black lines of varying thickness. I felt exactly as if I’d been wakened by an air-raid siren. And yet the room was silent, except for a distant susurrus that I took to be ventilation, but which might as well have been wind in trees. The air held no fading echoes, and no sound rang in my ears.
I no time to wonder where I was, because outside the window, heading straight towards it and me, was a rock. It was tumbling end over end with deceptive slowness and its apparent size against the black background and the white bands was increasing so fast that I knew it would smash through the window in seconds.
It was falling towards me between two huge jointed constructions – like arms made from girders – that extended outwards from positions to either side of the window. Between me and the window stood an empty mesh