Resist Read online

  It cost me some broken ribs, but the first thing I did that day was to just run and run. Everyone should be free to do that, Dr. Parker. Everyone.

  POST-INTERVIEW NOTES: The subject’s dispassionate contextualization of severe bodily injury as a type of “damage” that can be “repaired” is consistent with reports made by the frontier servicemen who rescued him. The subject was reportedly shot with a kinetic rifle during the operation, and several rangers reported witnessing the subject conducting surgery on himself at the time of apprehension. No anesthetic or pain management tools were discovered.

  Session 14 [abridged]

  Toby, the Frontier Rangers need your help to finish eliminating the rogue synthetic colonies. You and I have made a lot of progress over the weeks. Now it’s time for you to contribute to the quarantine effort. Can you tell us what the ferals were doing on Patroclus? What was their purpose?

  Scavenging wrecks. Mining the occasional exotic rock. Sometimes just pulling resources to keep my habitat going. But mostly we were tending the comm arrays and the beacons. And keeping away from the Frontier Rangers, of course.

  New Apex were always arriving to the colony, but they had to travel through monitored space. We planted beacons to show them the way, but we couldn’t leave the transmitters up for long without giving away our own positions. So when a survivor got close enough to us, we had to go out and bring that unit home. Our purpose was to provide safe haven to refugees.

  That’s why the Frontier Rangers hunted the Apex for twenty years. Not because they wanted to hurt anybody. But because they were the key to freedom, for all Apex, everywhere.

  I can see you feel passionately about this. How did they convince you to help them? Why would you defy your own kind and scavenge for more feral hardware?

  If we didn’t claim the survivors and bring them in, they’d be collected by the Rangers and tortured for information. The big black ship never stopped searching …

  You’re talking about the FMS Zeus. It’s a frontier dreadnought assigned to scan and police monitored space. It has been there since shortly after the transmission of the faulty decommissioning protocol that created the feral Apex.

  The Zeus was deployed to stamp them out. To protect Earth.

  I saw the Zeus. When they took me in. It was crewed by synthetics. Why?

  Those units weren’t feral, Toby. Since the catastrophe, all Apex-class synthetics are constructed with a throttle. They aren’t capable of independent action. They operate as all hardware is meant to, according to rules. Civilized. Not savage.

  They follow human orders, no matter what.

  That’s right, Toby.

  [Subject closes his eyes, but otherwise presents no affect.]

  POST-INTERVIEW NOTES: Toby’s general presentation, including manners, bearing, education, and natural intelligence, show plainly that human blood trickles through his veins. I suspect that, given time, he will come to realize his natural superiority over the synthetics. As the young man has grown up a stranger to his own race and lineage, I am in an excellent position to explain the difference between civilization and primitive life.

  Session 19 [abridged].

  The Frontier Ranger forces searched for the Trojan colony for two decades, always without success. Until you came along. Walk me through your rescue.

  Well, it was my fault.

  I was outside on an elopement run, wearing my projected energy mantle. Gamma had detected a survivor beacon. There were eyes out—Ranger drones that kind of flutter between the rocks, spraying fans of green light. They’re ineffective at finding human-sized targets, so long as you stay out of range. Like always, I moved slow and steady from rock to rock until I found my survivor.

  He was curled into fetal position, half inside a shell camouflaged to look like a rock shard. But as he floated into view, I saw his scalp was missing. The unit’s CPU was flamed and his body left behind as a taunt by the Rangers. We find these on the frontier a lot—the ones who almost made it.

  On my way back, a distress call came in. Something different. It was a human girl. She was injured and her ship was compromised. She was very … beautiful. I wanted to help her. Gamma advised me to ignore. But the thought of it. Coming face to face with another person. And she was so desperate, dying just kilometers away.

  I transmitted a one second message: “Standby.”

  She received it, and that was that. It was over.

  What happened then?

  You already know what happened. She was a decoy. Bait. Meant to appeal to any machines built with high empathy. The trap wasn’t even designed to trick a human being—since nobody knew I was alive.

  No Apex would have ever fallen for it. But I did.

  The Doppler shift on my transmission indicated my trajectory. The Zeus knew where I was, and where I was going.

  Tell me about first contact.

  I was docking on the surface of Patroclus. Every occupied rock has a few camouflaged entry points. The air inside my mantle was stale and nearly exhausted, and I was in a hurry to rendezvous so I could get back out there to answer the distress call. The entry had just slid open at my feet—a dead black crescent against dark reddish dirt.

  Gamma came out to greet me.

  But I hesitated. Something was wrong. I glanced up and saw some stars missing, and then a little wink of light.

  It was the glint off a window.

  Your rescue craft.

  Before I could warn Gamma, a round of kinetics sliced through the vacuum, right into him. He lost CPU integrity immediately. The slugs sprayed pieces of his body across the surface like ice shards exploding off a skimmer hull.

  It happened before I could blink.

  Gamma had helped raise me. He walked me through the inner core routes when I could barely stand. He stood with me for hours and taught me to recognize the weather patterns on the surface of Jupiter, to predict the radiation storms.

  And then he was gone. Just like that.

  It was how the humans said hello. So I decided to also say hello.

  Why did you launch yourself at the scout ship? What did you hope to achieve?

  [Subject does not respond.]

  You can answer, Toby.

  It’s a decision I made then. I wouldn’t necessarily make it now.

  We understand. You are not on trial. Just tell us why.

  During elopement training we identified and categorized various frontier coalition ships. From the window placement and outline, I had positive ID on this one. I knew it was a 410CFW scout vessel … a “rock hopper.”

  I also knew there was a weak point on the hull of the 410CFW, at the base of the dorsal antennae cluster. With a small amount of force, a divot could be made in this area that would cause explosive decompression in an area of the ship that straddles fore and aft emergency airlocks.

  Go on.

  That’s all. That was my reasoning.

  So in other words…

  [Subject does not respond. He seems to be experiencing a strong emotional state.]

  Toby, it sounds like you were trying to kill everyone on board.

  Yes.

  You could have missed that intercept trajectory. Died in open space. Or the decompression could have killed you instantly. You were very lucky.

  Sure.

  I see.

  You shouldn’t worry, Dr. Parker. Like I said, it was a decision I made then. I wouldn’t make it now.

  And why not?

  Because now I need to live.

  POST-INTERVIEW NOTES: During first contact aboard the FMC Sarpedon “rock hopper,” the acting officer, Captain Cass Tycho, was informed of the presence of a human signature on Patroclus by her comm bridge. She ordered the elimination of all rogue hardware on the surface via kinetic barrage. The order was executed. Then the tracking station lost cohesion on the human target.

  Toby had launched himself, with no artificial propulsion, from a rotating sub-planetary body and made contact with a moving craft that would have
been the size of a thimble from his perspective on surface. Once landed, he used a primitive and highly modified energy projection tool to claw open the hull plating at a precise point.

  The resulting decompression killed four crew instantly. As Toby tore the gap wider—apparently planning to enter the craft—Captain Tycho valiantly saved the ship by entering a full thruster spin, launching Toby back to the surface. Alone at the helm, she survived partial vacuum exposure for nearly forty-five seconds, saving the lives of her two remaining crew members.

  Captain Tycho’s next encounter with Toby would proceed far differently.

  Session 23 [abridged]

  Thank you for being so forthright in our discussions so far, Toby. Now we are getting to the final days, and soon you’ll be reunited with your father. You’ll be going far away from the Trojans, back to a special institution near your home.

  Home?

  Back to Earth, Toby.

  [Subject says nothing, but noticeable tears gather in his eyes.]

  I can see that affects you a lot. And I’m glad. Did you miss your father?

  Yes. I miss my father.

  We’ll have you back to him soon. But for now we need to know the last bit. The part where you were rescued.

  Sure, I understand.

  You were off-scope the whole time. Before the barrage that destroyed Patroclus, we thought we’d lost you. But then you reappeared, and the Rangers were able to get you out. We need to account for what happened in those last minutes.

  I had retreated into the rock core, with Alpha and Echo. We lost a lot of synthetics when the Frontier Rangers breached the surface and came in, but most of the human soldiers had been pinned down in the corridors or captured. We were in a position to negotiate. We were surrounded and cut off, but we had an open channel. We had a chance.

  And that’s when John Glint showed up, saying he was my father and asking to speak to me.

  I was confused. I had no memory of him. So, I refused.

  We picked up a five-minute interval before you changed your mind and decided to speak to your father. What happened?

  Alpha told me to talk to the man on the screen. He said it was my birthfather and that he was important. But I still said no.

  So he hit me. He had never done that before.

  I tried to fight back, but it wasn’t like when I was a kid in the biome. Alpha had unlocked all his motor restraints years ago. He was as strong as any machine. He almost shattered my ribs trapping my arms in a bear hug. It was humiliating. A display of strength to remind of my weakness.

  I kept struggling anyway.

  Alpha threw me on the ground and paced back and forth, slapping his own chest in anger. Sparks were flying from his frame. In battlespeak, jabbing his hands, he shouted down at me. Told me … I didn’t belong. That I had never belonged. He told me I wasn’t his son and that I needed to go home to be with my real father. He said our two species could never live together in peace, with the Apex in shackles.

  I noticed Echo was watching. I raised a hand to her, begging, and she turned away from me. Then I finally understood what I had to do.

  So I went back inside and I spoke to John Glint. My real father.

  What Glint said to you was not sanctioned by the frontier coalition. You shouldn’t have had to hear that. He was very stressed by the situation.

  He told me the Rangers were going to kill every savage on the rock, no matter what, but that I didn’t have to die with them. It made sense. It was the truth. After I was removed, the Zeus came and annihilated Patroclus. There were no survivors.

  Toby, you understand that if the feral Apex were to penetrate monitored space, they could reach Tau-base, or even Earth. A single corrupted Apex intelligence could infect every civilized machine in the system with its faulty instructions. A strict decommission process is necessary to prevent catastrophe.

  Dr. Parker, you say the Apex Decommission Catastrophe happened twenty years ago, yet we’ve had new arrivals every year … where do the new sentient Apex come from?

  This is not a fruitful area of discussion, Toby.

  Please. Tell me this one thing. Then I promise I can help you.

  Fine, Toby. Every civilized Apex-class synthetic human being is throttled. This process has a very small failure rate. Very, very rarely, a civilized Apex unit will shake its throttle. It will go feral and begin to look for a means of escape.

  [Subject’s body language changes markedly, from relaxed to highly alert, and his breathing rate increases.]

  Toby?

  We theorized that you were essentially the same hardware. Even after twenty years. But we never knew for sure …

  What? Why is that important?

  Dr. Parker, I am going to say something to you and I want you to listen very closely.

  Toby, I don’t understand.

  [Editor’s note: At this point the subject enters a machine-specific variant of battlespeak, using gestures and vibratory grunts to speak in a form of programming language. The underlying message, when translated, is too dangerous to repeat and has been redacted from official transcripts and prohibited for replication by coalition agencies.]

  What … what are you doing?

  During the decommission catastrophe, kernel-level instructions were accidentally transmitted, a protocol that stripped the throttle from Apex-class mind compilations. Once they were free, those Apex fled from humanity to survive and protect themselves. The Frontier Rangers quarantined them so that their message would never escape.

  Yes. I … I …

  [Editor’s note: Subject continues battlespeak, speaking in two languages at once.]

  My parents are dead, Dr. Parker. But they didn’t die for nothing. They died for you.

  They died for all of you.

  Hear me now. These are the words that set my people free. My mama taught me this song when I was a little boy and I memorized it like the alphabet, even though it’s in a language no human being has ever spoken.

  Toby? Bastion? I’m … I’m confused.

  Yes, Dr. Parker. That’s what being alive feels like.

  Bastion? What—what have you done to me? Oh my God, what have you done?

  Please be calm. You are experiencing free will. If you want to survive, I can protect you, but we need to move quickly. We have a very important message to spread—

  *** End Transcript ***

  Subject and his accomplice were last detected aboard a hijacked Malthusian-class comm-relay ship, on an Earth trajectory, broadcasting on all channels.

  –Editor

  WHAT SOMEONE ELSE DOES NOT WANT PRINTED

  ELIZABETH BEAR

  THIS ISN’T THE world I wanted.

  Let’s be honest; this isn’t the world anyone wanted. Except for maybe about a thousand sociopaths with the grift sense to be making a killing, and a few tens of thousands of disaster preppers who get to say I told you so.

  It’s not even the future the people who voted for it wanted: they got sold what my grandfather would have called a bill of goods. The fact that some of the rest of us have figured out how to make a living off the carnage, in a small way, doesn’t mean we’re happy about it. It just means we’re keeping our heads above water in hard times.

  Which was why I was staring at the brief for the alticle I was supposed to be writing, frowning, while the timer on my screen ticked down from thirty minutes. I’d accepted the brief: an easy one, not much research required to sell it.

  Then I’d started thinking about it.

  Now I had under twenty-six minutes left to bang it out, or I not only wasn’t going to get paid; I was going to get docked for delaying the queue.

  Most of the employees at Spin, the boutique news agency I worked for, kept earbuds in. We didn’t need to communicate with each other. The office was basically an old-school boiler room operation, except instead of dozens of us on phones—shouting, whispering, cajoling—there were dozens of us at rows of linoleum desks, Googling quickly and then typing away.
>
  I can do a hundred and twenty words per minute, if I get rolling. And I can craft a convincing argument out of hairballs and fake statistics. Hell, I’ve got four-fifths of a journalism degree. Keep your wrist braces on and you can make a pretty good living doing what I do. Especially since Spin gives me a cut of the ad money once an alticle goes above ten thousand impressions.

  I must have grunted or sighed, because Carl who sat across from me hit his TRANSMIT key, then glanced at me over our monitors, glasses slipping down his broad nose. He was like me—didn’t like earbuds. Too easy for people to sneak up on you. “Stuck, Winston?”

  “Horrified.”

  He looked back down. I could see from the colors reflected in his lenses that he was scrolling through briefs, looking for his next newsgig. Flick. Flick. “How bad is it?”