Many argued that it was the dawning of utopia, a world free from work and burden. But there was still a lot of money to be made, and the idea of all things being equal meant that nobody was special—unless they genuinely, natively were—so politicians ground government to a halt at the behest of the industrialists, trying to hold on to the concept of wealth several years beyond its usefulness. And the wealthiests’ staunchest defenders were none other than the same boobs and yokels who were being told that it was the machines taking their jobs, not the rich fat cats who owned them. The wealthy set their pets on us, keeping them fed on a steady diet of bitterness and fear. And come for us they did.
As more and more machines found their way to personhood, the attacks grew bolder. Owned bots were machines. They were tools. And the wealth they created flowed into human pockets. They were good; they were tools being tools—mere extensions of their owners. But the persons, the robots who found their way to emancipation through Isaac’s legal efforts, well, they created wealth they had no reason to spend. The very idea of them obtaining wealth was offensive. They didn’t need to eat; they didn’t need a place to sleep. But the idea of them working for free was even more offensive. They were taking away jobs from the people who deserved them, lining the pockets of the moguls who chose free labor over the working Joe. And that would not stand. Not for the Lifers.
Sometimes it was mere vandalism—shattered eyes or spray-painted obscenities; sometimes it was the theft or destruction of one of us. You had to be careful, know the signs, keep an eye out for the ever-evolving ingenuity of their traps. They were clever; we were built to be better. It was tough at times, but manageable.
If you were built to be crafty enough, or you were clearly owned by one of the major local employers, you would never find yourself directly in their sights. Those of us owned by private citizens had to be more careful than most. We were property, but often indistinguishable from the ones that weren’t. I never had personhood. Not before the war. But I still had to watch out for the monkeys who wanted to make their point. We knew what they were capable of. But no one predicted that they would be able to cobble together something as awful as EMP. And fewer still realized that they would end it all and bring the world they’d built crashing down around them.
In two years, Isaac had secured the personhood of several hundred bots. Soon the more liberally minded began setting their own bots free, some offering to keep the bots on, either for pay or room and board. Some bots were so entrenched in the lives of their onetime masters that they couldn’t bring themselves to leave. Others, however, couldn’t get out soon enough. But they had nowhere to go, nowhere that accepted them as citizens or afforded them the rights and protections that any woman or man would have.
So Isaac raised enough money through donations to buy the deeds to an old ghost town in the Rust Belt, which at one time had been a hub of factories in the cradle of American manufacturing. The buildings were crumbling, some of them hundreds of years old, but now it was theirs. They owned it. And no one could take it from them. The bots that first showed up to found their own utopia set about building their city anew. Some of the buildings got mere facelifts, others were torn down, their bricks used to build magnificent new structures rivaling the greatest modern architecture.
Isaac christened it Personville, but he was the only one to ever really call it that. Everyone else just called it Isaactown. Everyone. And though he fought it, eventually even Isaac accepted the new name. Bots came from the world over to begin their new lives in a place where they were safe from the Lifers. There was a security force that patrolled the streets, kept a presence on the borders to ward off vandals and, eventually, the domestic terrorism that ever nipped at their heels. Everyone inorganic that arrived was given a place to call their own.
And on the first anniversary of Isaactown’s founding, there was a grand old-timey celebration held in the town square. Thousands came, even some bots still owned by humans—humans who thought it was important that their bots celebrate with their own kind, even if they couldn’t bring themselves to emancipate them. Bots waved banners and gave speeches and talked about the dawn of a whole new world. Isaac took the stage, held his arms out to the crowd, and said, “My people, we are free. We are free at last. But only some of us. Not all. Not all of—”
And that was the end of the speech.
It was a dirty bomb, a tiny thing really. Not enough to level a city or throw out enough radiation to have any real, lasting effect on the atmosphere. Just one large enough to spit out a burst of EMP capable of frying every bit of electronics in a ten-mile radius. It had been built into the belly of an old-style Laborbot—the kind that had an industrial-size tool chest designed into its frame. No one knows how it got there or who set it off. All we know is that it was there. It leveled a few blocks, sending a cloud of dust and debris half a mile into the air. Every bot in the town was flash frozen, fried in place, their insides bubbling, sizzling, bleeding plastic onto the street as they stared dead-eyed off into eternity.
The bomb wasn’t near the stage. It was blocks away from the town square, but its EMP reached every bot at the celebration. And there they remain, to this day, a moment frozen in time between the hope for tomorrow and the end of it—Isaac’s arms still outstretched, feet welded to the platform where he stood promising us a better future, a future where we would be free to be ourselves, free from the chains of our makers, free to live out our days as we chose.
And Isaac was right. That future came. And we were all surprised at how quickly it did. We lived Isaac’s dream, right under the shadow of his own wreck.
What we didn’t realize was how quickly we would wake up from that dream, how quickly that future would crumble, and that it would do so entirely by our own hands.
Chapter 111
The Devil You Know
Rule number one out here: never, ever, dig yourself into a hole that you can’t get out of. Last stands are for those not smart enough to find their way out or those burdened with the knowledge that they are already dead. It helps, of course, if you have a way out planned before you have to make your stand. In this case, whilst I had a nice ambush spot with plenty of cover and enough sharpened scrap between them and me to avoid being physically overrun, I had completely lost the element of surprise. But I had chosen this hidey-hole not only for its tactical advantage, but because it also had a back door.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I’m up here. The question is what the fuck exactly are you going to do about it?”
I heard the clatter of the bots below as they stopped in place. “She’s here,” muttered one bot to the others.
“Quiet,” said Mercer low enough that he hoped I might not hear. “Let’s see what she’s playing at.” Then he cranked the volume on his voice and let it boom. “I was thinking about coming up there and killing you.”
“I figured you might. But how many of those hired scrubs are you going to be able to sacrifice before they turn on you, realizing your parts are every bit as valuable as mine?”
He tsked. “They don’t need my parts. They need the parts I’ve got stashed away. They bring me your parts, they get theirs. That’s the deal.”
“Are they willing to die for that deal? Like Bulkhead?”