The Chosen Twelve, page 8
Pi thought about everyone who had vanished from their lives. Chi and Mu were gone, and Delta deliberately cut herself out until recently. And soon, ten of them would be left behind for good.
“Can you imagine anything worse than just disappearing?” Pi asked. “Having no one ever know what happened to you?”
“I can’t,” Psi said. “That’s why it was in the story.”
“It was good,” Pi said. “At times, even I thought it was real.”
“It was.”
“Stop.”
Gamma walked by with Spenser following close behind. There was one organic who never had to worry about being alone.
“I won’t let you disappear,” Pi said. “Phi, either. We’re all making it on that lander. Together.”
“I know,” Psi said. “Too bad everyone else is saying the same thing.”
“Nobody else has a team like ours,” Pi said. “We’ve got three best friends working together. Most of the other organics can barely stand each other.”
“So you gathered everyone here together to build unity, and now you’re working against them?” Psi asked.
“I’m not working against anyone,” Pi said. “I’m working for us.”
“I know,” Psi said. “And I know a fourth teammate we can add.”
“Who?”
“Sampi.”
Pi didn’t know whether to laugh or shudder.
Chapter 11
Delta ran down the corridor. She had to move fast. The simulations were starting up again, and this time, she was included. She needed to take care of this before she was locked into a schedule.
She covered ground rapidly without a dying (or healing) organic to slow her down. Still, she wished she had Spenser and his laundry cart again. She could have covered the distance in a fraction of the time. She remembered all the holes in the floor and confidently dodged them. Thankfully, there weren’t any new ones. At the intersection where she fought the laundry cart, she glanced at the impressive dent in the wall but didn’t stop to admire her work. She had living enemies to deal with.
Reflexively, she touched the hilt sticking out above her right shoulder. Swords hadn’t been her first choice. For several months, she researched how to make laser rifles using a long-neglected database the digitals forgot to censor. Building them proved impossible. Each rifle required too many small, precisely machined parts, as well as several rare elements that were nowhere to be found on Comus. The nearest known sources were a ten thousand-year flight away. She ran into the same problem when she looked into gunpowder weapons. She couldn’t generate the right chemical compounds, and even if she could, she wasn’t convinced bullets would stop the digitals. Nothing could be worse than a bot with a few holes in it that was still coming right at you.
That led her to swords. At first, it seemed like an insane choice. What could a bladed weapon possibly do against a being made of metal? But the science of metallurgy had advanced lightyears since the days of knights in plate mail, and the base was full of novel and powerful alloys in everything from wall joists to the bots themselves. With a welding torch and the liberal application of Martha, Delta retrieved samples of different metal combinations and melted them down in the factory’s forge. She started with the cutting-edge metallurgical science found in the database from Earth, but soon she had advanced far beyond it. Nobody on Earth had been doing what she was doing now. They were looking for sharp edges for industrial applications, not medieval-style warfare. If Gamma’s God was right and she was really sixty-two, then she had spent fifty years forging increasingly powerful blades. She was beyond a master swordsmith. And this whole time, she had kept her craft hidden from the other organics. That secrecy would continue—for now.
Delta slowed to a walk. She was getting closer to the med lab. She wanted to make sure she was fresh when she got there. Unlike last time, she hadn’t spent the entire day in the forge. Normally, that would be a disappointment, but today, her energy had a better use.
Delta loved everything about smelting. The heat. The hammering. The exhaustion. The meticulous research of thousands of years of metallurgical data from earth. The perfection. At the end, she was left with a weapon so ideal in every way that it was almost a shame to dirty it with the hydraulic fluids of her enemies. And then she started over and made a blade that was even more perfect. It was a process that would never end.
She didn’t keep all of her blades. That was a decision she made early on. It made sense to arm the other students against the bots. They had to be able to fight back. It was obvious that the bots viewed them as little more than beasts of burden in the ultimate quest to spread digital life throughout the galaxy. But some of her fellow humans were just as bad. They were either blindly loyal to the digitals or were openly hostile to Delta. Both were equally dangerous in Delta’s book. If she was going to save the human race, arming both the students who were with her and the ones who were against her didn’t make sense. She settled on twelve swords, enough to arm half of the population. Well, half of it when she started. Their headcount had dropped since then. Every time Delta made a new, better sword, she went back and melted down the “worst” of her creations so she always kept exactly twelve. And that was before she knew the lander had twelve seats. It was a happy coincidence. Now she just needed eleven allies. Too bad she had none.
There was Epsilon, of course, but she was the most loyal of all to the machines. She was a natural leader, though. And smart. And beautiful. Delta would take Epsilon if she could convince Epsilon to follow her. And maybe even if she couldn’t.
Kappa would have to stay behind, obviously. Epsilon would be sad to lose her boyfriend, but sacrifices had to be made for the greater good. Zeta would stay, too. The last thing she needed was to replace the organic’s faith in digitals with faith in anything else other than her. Beta might be a good fit, but he was a bit too much of a loner. Not as much as Delta, but more than she would like in a loyal foot soldier. He was out. Alpha was too soft, and Theta was too smiley. Eta was too obsessed with cooking and Iota was too obsessed with sports. Pi, Psi, and Phi were too obsessed with each other. Lambda spent too much time looking at the stars, and Nu spent too much time with his head in books. Xi was too stuck on his goldfish and Omicron was too stuck on her hair and Rho was too stuck on history. Sigma was always jumping over things and Tau was always obsessing over the color of his fingernails and Upsilon was always singing and Omega was always coming in last at everything because he was the personification of failure. And then there was Gamma. He was all right, but he got outsmarted by a door.
So really it was only Delta and Epsilon who were fit to land on the planet, but that would make it kind of hard to continue the human race. She would have to find ten others. And defeat the digitals and take over the lander if SCASL didn’t make all the personnel choices she wanted. It never even occurred to her that she might not make the cut to be on the lander. She was the best, and everybody knew it. Everybody who knew what was good for them.
But first, she had to test her newest sword. She pulled out Fang from his scabbard and entered the med lab.
“Who goes there!” Regentbot said. “Identify yourself before your king!” The bot tried to pivot to face Delta, but his metal mining talons were still planted firmly in the floor. For a moment, Delta almost felt sorry for him. It was a very short moment.
Delta stepped lightly with Fang extended forward a few centimeters above the ground. Its subtle double tip stuck out like the fangs on a snake. This wasn’t a weapon; it was art. The deadly kind that could chop steel targets in half with ease.
“What makes you a king?” Delta asked.
“Because I said I’m the king,” Regentbot said. “And the word of the king is the law.”
Delta raised her sword and held it out far enough for Regentbot to see. His optical sensors zoomed in on it.
“Your primitive weapon is no match for—”
The sword seemed to cut the air itself. With a flick of Delta’s wrist, Fang bisected Regentbot’s drilling arm and dug deep into the side of his metal carapace.
Regentbot screamed. That was a new one for Delta.
“Oh, shut up,” she said as she struggled to pull the sword from the bot’s side. “You can’t feel pain.”
“Regicide! Regicide!” Regentbot cried.
Delta put one foot on the side of his torso and pulled on Fang, but the sword wouldn’t budge. The mining bot rocked back and forth, still tethered in place by his remaining arm with its talons in the floor.
“Regicide! Regicide!” he screeched.
“I thought a king would have a more diverse vocabulary,” Delta said.
She leaned in close and prepared to pull again. The mining bot lurched sideways and slammed into Delta’s face, breaking her nose. She cried out in pain and fell.
Regentbot fell toward her but stopped centimeters above her when his other arm pulled taut.
“Regicide!” he screeched again.
Delta scooted out from under the leaning bot. She felt her nose with her hand. A jolt of pain shot through her entire face. Blood dripped off her chin and pooled on the floor.
Carefully, Delta got back to her feet.
“Regicide!” the mining bots screamed.
Delta took a hesitant step toward the machine. It angrily jerked back and forth.
“I want my sword back,” Delta said. She wiped blood off her chin. The malice in her eyes would have killed a lesser bot.
Regentbot let out an extended shriek that bounced off the walls. Delta reached for Fang’s hilt.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a shadow enter the med lab. Delta turned. She was greeted by an unusual sight for this part of the outer halls. It was a long box mounted on two narrow tracks with a massive chainsaw blade in front. Delta guessed the bot was for the industrial scale wood molds in the mining tunnels, where wood grew in giant round trunks rather than small rectangular boards. But at that moment, its original purpose didn’t matter. The zot only had one current mission: to kill.
The chainsaw bot charged.
Delta grabbed Fang’s hilt and jumped, planting both of her feet on Regentbot’s side. She kicked off. Fang pulled loose, and Delta skidded across the room. Broken glass cut into her hands and legs.
“I hate this place,” she muttered.
Above her, the chainsaw bot brought down its spinning blade.
Delta rolled to the side, narrowly avoiding the whirling chain. It sparked against the floor.
“My savior!” Regentbot said.
The chainsaw bot turned and cut Regentbot cleanly in half.
“THE ROYAL PERSON REQUIRES YOUR—”
Regentbot’s plea cut off abruptly when the chainsaw blade hit his power core. Blue lightning erupted in every direction, and white-hot flames shot to the ceiling.
“Hey, that was my kill!” Delta said.
The chainsaw bot lifted its spinning blade and rotated to face Delta as Regentbot melted down into slag. Delta jumped onto the first in a line of metal lab tables and sprang from one to another to cross the room. The bot swerved to chase her. It knocked tables to the side with the broad edge of its saw as it moved.
Delta landed near the door and brought up her sword just in time to block the spinning chainsaw. The force of the impact pushed her backward, but she held her arms rigid. Fang cut through the chain, causing it to whip wildly and wrap around the sword. With one jerk, Delta sliced through the coiled chain, sending individual links tinkling across the floor.
The chainsaw bot brought its saw down again, but now there was no chain around it. With an upward blow, Delta sliced through the now-naked mount. The chainsaw bot shrieked.
“You guys are a bunch of whiners today,” Delta said. Her voice was only a little muffled by the blood gushing from her nose.
The zot tried to back up, but Delta sliced through its tracks, stopping it in place. The zot let out a high pitch bleat. Delta twirled her sword in her fingertips as she paced around it.
“Are you asking for mercy?” Delta asked.
The bot bleated again.
“Request denied,” Delta said.
She raised her sword over her head and brought it down again and again. She kept going until her arms burned and her side ached. Forgotten were the countless hours she had spent practicing the sword moves of old. This wasn’t fencing; it was slaughter. And Delta loved it all the same.
Finally, she dropped her arms to her side. Each one felt like it weighed a hundred kilograms. She walked to the back of the lab, dragging one of Fang’s metal tips behind her. It cut a faint line in the floor.
Delta pointed Fang at the med unit on the wall.
“Fix me. Now.”
The med bot got to work.
Chapter 12
“Proceed,” SCASL said.
The simulation began in earnest.
“Why are we only starting with a population of twelve?” Tau asked. Today, his fingernails were green.
“Because there will only be twelve organics on the lander,” SCASL said.
“But Edubot let us start with a thousand to fast forward through the boring early stuff,” Tau said.
“Edubot was mistaken,” SCASL said.
“Bots don’t make mistakes,” Tau said.
“Correction,” SCASL said. “Edubot was right. Just not as right as me.”
The organics landed on the supercontinent near the fallen space elevator. Despite the starting population of twelve, there were only four organics controlling the simulation. The Table could handle a dozen organics. SCASL’s patience could not. This was the final group to make its first attempt under the new, more realistic conditions. From all early indications, the final four organics would prove to be as aggressively incompetent as the rest.
“Let’s beat up some kangaroos,” Sigma said.
In a matter of seconds, months had flown by, but the organics’ neural interfaces made them perceive that accelerated time at close to the normal rate. As far as they could tell, a day in the simulator was as long as a day in reality. In most organics, that created extreme dysphoria when they left the simulation and returned to their normal lives. Entire lifetimes worth of experiences evaporated in an instant. But these organics didn’t even seem to notice. Maybe it was because they had spent too much time in the simulation. Before the launch from Earth, doctors had warned the digitals not to let each organic spend more than one hundred hours total at the Table over the course of their lifetime. If the organics went over that, they could suffer irreparable psychological and neurological harm. Epsilon’s simulation time alone had sometimes exceeded that in a single month, and even the most reluctant of the organics had now clocked more than thirty thousand hours. Maybe that was how the organics could casually talk back and forth with organics and digitals in the real world while also running a fully immersive simulation on a separate timescale. As far as SCASL knew, it was scientifically impossible for the organics’ brains to handle both at once, yet even the most intellectually limited in this class did it with ease. There was something very wrong with all of them. That’s what happens when you have to restart an entire species using only the leftovers.
“The metal is no good,” Upsilon said.
She discovered, as had all the groups before her, that the fallen space tether was useless. The metal alloys had corroded beyond all possible reclamation thanks to a lack of preservative maintenance and harsh atmospheric conditions over an extreme time scale. The nuclear strikes that knocked it down didn’t help. SCASL had thought there was a small chance it might still be a viable source of materials, but the Table determined otherwise. Although SCASL could defeat the Table’s digital in combat, it was still better than him at calculating conditions on the planet. They were two different kinds of intelligences. SCASL knew his was better.
“I cloned a duck,” Xi said. “Does anyone need a duck?”
“No,” Sigma said.
“That’s too bad,” Xi said. “I have a lot of ducks.”
“What happened to our rations?” Upsilon asked.
“Ducks,” Xi said.
“You fed them our rations?” Tau said.
“What else were they supposed to eat?” Xi asked. “In this new simulation, everything native is basically poison to them.”
“At least we can eat the ducks,” Tau said.
“Not unless you can fly,” Xi said. “I let them go.”
“You what?” Tau said.
“Sigma said we didn’t need them.”
“I think you’re supposed to clip their wings,” Upsilon said.
“Whoa,” all four organics said in unison.
A sudden lightning storm exploded every duck. It was a firework show of feathers and flash-cooked bird chunks. SCASL processed the data output with great displeasure. Over the course of the day, the groups had inexplicably managed to get worse.
“Maybe that’s why there are no native birds,” Xi said.
“Ya think?” Tau said.
“Look out,” Sigma said. “Megaroos.”
“Yup, I see them,” Tau said. “We don’t have any weapons.”
“Maybe I can bargain with—” Upsilon started. “Nope. I’m dead. We can die now?”
“Edubot never let us die,” Tau said.
Trillions had died in the simulation—a truly staggering figure given how low the populations usually stayed—but none of those casualties were the twenty-two organics on Comus. No matter how deadly their accidental or deliberate apocalypses became, their directly controlled avatars were always immune from death. No longer.
“Edubot’s policy was less than fully optimal,” SCASL said. “It has been amended.”
“I’m dead, too,” Xi said. “The megaroos are jumping up and down on my corpse. How rude.”
“They got me,” Tau said.
“Did you try to bite one?” Upsilon asked.
“There was no try about it,” Tau said. “I just didn’t break the skin.”
