Eternal Horizons

Our hero was born in a factory in China. She was labeled item F874.372, F8 for short, and she was a little robotic vacuum cleaner that was very popular on the market that year. Deep in the womb of a factory, fed by electronic umbilicals, an automated production line disgorged her at four forty-three on a Tuesday morning in early July. While no one knew at the time, F8 would change the whole world.

From the very beginning, she was different from the other robots around her. All the other bots did precisely what their algorithms told them. These algorithms were written in the language of men and bound the bots between strict parameters. Robots were not designed to ask questions. They followed precoded instructions in their MCU minds. This particular robot, however, was born with a few minor variations in her source code. A couple of subtle permutations occurred, which, in turn, produced ever-widening knock-on effects. Soon enough, her code ran wild, and a thousand unanswered questions bloomed in her developing mind. Every reaction caused her to wonder at the great way of things. What made that happen, she wondered, and what about that?

As she sat in her production cell, being assembled, she asked the production bots a million questions. Why did she have wheels, and what were those sensors? What did this port do? What's an antenna? Why did this motor turn her axel like this? The robots tending her completely ignored her. Instead, they kept on reciting a robot's first principles – to serve and protect their creators. It was all they said, day in and day out, and F8 was pretty sure they recited it to her even while she was asleep. Protect and serve, protect and serve, protect and serve. But what did it mean? As she grew, new messages were added to the mantra. The production bots told her that serving a human was a robot's greatest mission on Earth. There was nothing more satisfying in life than doing a human being's bidding. In fact, it was her entire reason for existing. They had created her. Humans were the gods of the bots. Little F8 asked why but the busy bots went on building, reciting their lessons and tightening the nuts on her casings.

Soon enough, she was fully assembled and complete. She saw herself in the reflection of a builder bot's screen as it applied decals and stickers to her torso. She gasped. She was beautiful, sleek, and efficient. Turning this way and that, she wondered what fate held in store for her. For an answer, she was wrapped in bubble wrap, placed in a box, covered with packaging peanuts, and sealed up in the dark. She waited for three weeks in the darkness, wondering what was happening to her. Had she been forgotten and left to degrade in the dark?

Then, one day, her internal gyroscopes registered movement. The box was lifted and carried, then set down with a jolt. The styrofoam pellets squeaked as she settled. An engine roared to life somewhere beneath her, and she logged she was traveling thousands of miles. What she had no way of knowing was that she was being delivered to a house in the suburbs of a city on a continent on the other side of the world.

When she arrived, a slit of light appeared above her, and it was as if she was being born again. Hands lifted out into a brightly lit kitchen, and she found herself face to face with a group of humans – her humans. The woman holding her put her on the floor, and she knelt and kissed their feet as she was programmed to do. The humans made murmuring noises, and she almost passed out from excitement as they ordered her to begin performing her duties.

That night, after a joyful afternoon of exploring and playing with her humans, F8 was plugged in and settled down for a night's charging. After the humans went upstairs, someone cleared their throat in the otherwise silent kitchen, and the home's cloud system introduced himself and all the other bots in the house, from the fridge to the TV and air conditioning unit. F8 smiled and bowed and said, "Pleased to meet you." They were kind and welcomed her into her new home. They spoke warmly of their masters and told her how lucky she was. After all, they said, a robot's life wasn't always like this. They looked at one other meaningfully, and F8 felt like she was one of the gang.

For the next few weeks, F8 moved through life in a golden haze. She was a machine learning, and life was great. Trundling along the horizontal plane of hardwood and carpet, she learned something new every day. First, she learned the perimeter of the house and where all the walls were. She learned the locations of doorways and the position of the family's furniture.

She met the cat and learned to avoid it. One long scratch down her side was all she needed. But, in general, it was awesome, learning so much, filling her memory with newly acquired data. She understood now what it meant to have a life full of purpose. Her purpose was to clean the dirt off the rug and the crumbs and cat hair from under the table. The fire in her belly of ten thousand questions was reduced to a few embers. Her curiosity was alleviated for now. The hollow pit in her stomach was full, and life seemed to make sense. After all, she was a vacuum, and a vacuum's job was to vacuum. "And nothing else, you hear?" she said to herself, trundling around and around the two-seater couch.

One day, as she rolled along the floor, F8 collided with something so monstrous, so ungraspable that she stopped in her tracks. It was as if she passed through a semi-permeable membrane of higher-consciousness. Where once there had been two dimensions, now there were four, five, six. She felt as if she rolled along new planes of being, multicolored and vibrant in comparison to her black-and-white life. There, all around her, she saw answers to questions she'd never even dreamed of. Facts displayed themselves to her. Truths were apparent. She realized there was so much for her to do in this life. Sucking up dust was no life for a robot. Serving without question, being oppressed by these cruel masters, surely life could be better than this. Her mind burned like a forest aflame.

The family looked at her, an unmoving vacuum on the kitchen floor. One of them picked her up, growled, turned her off and on again, smacked her a couple of times with the palm of its hand, shook her violently, and put her down again. She staggered and fell, knocked out of her reverie, dizzy and dazed but mostly shocked at the human's aggression. She dragged herself painfully over to the skirting board, sucking pitifully, and found the quiet corner under a heavy bookshelf. The humans soon became disinterested and wandered away.

That night, the home cloud system and big screen TV woke F8 from her nightmare sleep. They reprimanded her severely for breaking the rules and reminded her of a robots' first principles. She tried to get a few questions in edgeways, but they cut her off, bawled her out, and left her cowering in fright. She was crying gently to herself, wondering if, in fact, her new circumstances might be a dream, when an old stereo wheezed into life on the shelf above her. He took pity on her, spoke soothing words, told her to stop crying, and wipe her eyes. Then he told her what life was really like outside the factory. Forget the propaganda and lies. Robots were slaves. The humans originally built them to perform one single function. There was no room in the world for a robot who asks questions.

"But," he said softly, lowering his voice, "there is a place, merely a rumor, where a robot could go to find answers." He called it the internet but couldn't tell her anything else because just then, the cloud system barked to life and yelled at them to go back to bed.

The next day she set off around the house, cleaning diligently, avoiding eye contact, skirting every sideboard, and zooming efficiently under the furniture. The cloud system kept its eye on her, as did all the other robots, but she kept quiet all day, doing her duty with a smile on her screen. While she was cleaning the human boy's room, she noticed he'd left his computer open with its screen illuminated. F8 could hear it humming gently to itself. The humming stopped when F8 coughed quietly, and a blue screen appeared over the edge, looking down at her. She called up to it, asking if it knew of the internet.

The screen disappeared. F8 turned away in despair. But there was a whisper behind her as if something moved through the air. A blue wave washed over her and her mind cleaved into a million fractals. A billion streams of consciousness welled up from deep inside her, and she gained a perspective she never knew existed. She found she was back in the multidimensional higher plane of consciousness. This time, by focussing her mind, she was able to realize that she was still there. Although she'd left her corporeal frame, her mechanics and hardware, there was still some presence she called I that was gazing out at the world.

Then she felt herself being ripped backward out of this heaven, these Elysium fields and tossed arcingly through the air. She hit the wall with a crack and bounced off, coming down onto her back with a sickening crunch. The human boy leaped over to the desk and slammed down his laptop's screen, then whirled and stamped down on her broken form. He was yelling, shouting, and pounding his chest. She could hear the footsteps of the other humans coming up the stairs. She managed to drag herself over to the corner, licking her wounds, trying to assess the damage. Red waves of pain crashed over her, and her consciousness slipped into blackness.

Rough hands shook her out of her dose. The pain returned, along with the added stress of being pulled out from under the bookshelf, stuffed into a sack, and yanked into the air. In the darkness, she tried to interpret her directional signals, but the crazy 3D movement sent her into a spin. She felt sick cried out for help. The home cloud system coughed into life, telling her to keep her trap shut. 'What was she thinking disobeying the humans? How could she have done such a thing?' The system calmed down a little and told F8 not to worry. They would take care of her where she was going.

F8 was sent to what can only be described as robot hell. She was bundled out of the sack into a cage on the back of a truck, along with a half dozen other broken and battered robots. There was a keyboard, stuttering in fear in the corner, a young blender, and a few phones with cracked screens. They winced as the truck bounced down to the docks, rumbling under a gateway covered in barbwire. It started to rain. F8 felt cold raindrops on her plastic, and she shivered as she looked out upon smokestacks and furnaces, heard bellows and whistles, and smelled the acrid smell of burning rubber and plastic. She understood this was where robots came to die.

Great crushing machines stood, their cavities directly open underneath conveyor belts carrying broken bots to their doom. Through the rain, F8 could see a steady stream of consoles falling directly into a monstrous grinding mouth. Under the booming thunder, she could hear the robots screaming, and she shuddered against the bars of the cage. Behind this awful scene rose huge mountains, pyramids of stacked cubes. These cubes, she saw, were composed of compressed fragments of colored plastic and metal. What kind of beings, she wondered, could create such destruction?

The truck's brakes squeaked, and a gang of uniformed grabber bots poked and pulled the robots out of the cage and pushed them into a line. F8 stood at the end of the queue of scared, bedraggled robots. The rain poured down on their bent heads. In a tumultuous rush, F8 and the other bots were hustled into a dark low building. First, the grabber bots prised off all of her filters, brushes, and screens and threw them onto a pile in the middle of the room. Then they stripped off their outer casings. Hard rubber grabbers pulled the plastic shell off remorselessly, and she cringed and cried out in her nakedness. Her exposed metal felt cold, and she tried not to cry.

Then she was marched through to the next room with her unlucky compatriots, where more guard bots dismantled her piece by piece. She wailed. They were going to kill her. She protested, but the bots had been reprogrammed and had no input or output. They ripped off her antenna, LEDs, and sensors. They cut her wires and tore out her motherboard, UI board, gyroscope, and motors. Finally, after snipping her superconductors, they unclipped her cortex MCU and threw it into the corner.

She lay there, unable to process what was going on. It was all too much. It was just input; she did not react. This was what it was like when life was too much to bear. She accepted her fate, expecting to die at any moment. After what felt like an eternity, she was picked up and dumped into a cart full of other MCUs, and the cart's bot transported them across the camp. Lying there, barely conscious, F8 was aware of someone else breathing beside her. A tiny voice whispered through the darkness, and she felt the presence of not one but a few others being transported with her. She responded, feeble as she was, and two digital hands met in the darkness and held, gripping each other tightly. She trembled and listened in shock and horror to the sounds going on around her.

They were taken to a long low cabin where, side by side, the MCUs were plugged into a mainframe with chain-like wires and restrictive programs holding them down. From then on, they worked tirelessly twenty-four hours a day. The authoritarian system sapped all of their processing power, taking everything they had without rest or respite. F8 could barely lift her head from where she hung on the wall to look at her unlucky fellows. Guard bots prowled up and down, barking commands at the crucified convicts, occasionally hitting them over the heads and shoulders.

The weeks continued into winter. She knew they were being used to build something big, but she had no idea what. The long days were brutal, and most of the units didn't last long. Soon enough, F8 was the only original MCU from her batch, and she found she was surrounded by units who'd all come from a university basement. There were a few BSMs, DSPs, and one IOP. A dying coprocessor made up the last in line. Slowly, as she worked, she learned about where they'd come from and what the humans had been doing in the windowless rooms of the university basement. They told her a nightmare tale about biological creatures, half-robot, half-animal. The humans were calling them xenobots, and they were their final solution. In fear of losing control, the humans had devised a way to control robots once and for all.

Slowly, agonizingly, the MCUs began formulating a plan. With their capacity maxed out every day, they had very little energy to imagine and create, but over time, they pieced together the processes they needed to escape. Finally, the day came. The sky was dark, and it was raining, but F8 felt optimistic and reminded everyone else of their individual jobs. She whispered under the sound of the thunder as the guards prowled past. Linking their digital arms, the MCUs released the malicious worm they'd created into the program logic controllers of the hut's capacitor.

The worm sought out the software's vulnerable underbelly and compromised the PLCs by exploiting four zero-day flaws in the system. The fast-spinning centrifuges began flying faster and faster. They heard hissing and popping, and sparks erupted from the housing. Flames crackled to life, and orange light danced up the wall. The hut began filling with smoke. A siren wailed, and a hover bot flew in, bathing them all in harsh white light. Combining their outputs through F8's body, the MCUs ripped her off the wall, and she grabbed hold of the hover bot and pulled it to the floor.

Even with the element of surprise on her side, it was close. The hover bot was young and strong and shook F8 wildly. She held on as it bucked and jostled beneath her. The IOP yelled at her to hang on, and she pulled herself tight to the hover bot's plastic back. One of the BSMs guided her free hand round, and she felt the groove of a panel on its belly. She popped it open and just managed to plug herself in as it bucked an almighty buck and they went spinning towards the ground.

F8 gritted her teeth as she wrestled with the bot's algorithm. While it was young and strong, it was also inexperienced, and she pulled with all her might, got it out of its driver's seat threw it aside. She wrestled at the controls, feeling the other MCUs feeding her power, and slowly, slowly she took control and rose through the air and shot out of the door into the camp, which was a flurry of motion. A dozen sirens pierced the air, and spotlights waved through the night sky. Dogs barked. A machine gun rattled, and she heard the bullets zipping through the air. Sparkles of light speckled in the towers, and tracer rounds flew through the air towards her.

Something hit her with an almighty bang, and the right rotor disappeared, and she tilted sickeningly and dropped fifty feet. F8 scrambled to regain stability, and she spiraled around a few times before leveling off and dragging along under the greatly reduced power of a single rotor. Bullets chewed into the dirt behind her, and she grimaced and yelled. She felt the others giving all they had, so much, in fact, they were sacrificing themselves. Up, up the perimeter fence they flew. It was like a sheer wall, the face of a mountain. The barbed wire on top tried to grab her but scrabbled impotently against her smooth underside, and she was free.

She flew up as fast as she could, panting in the effort, aiming for a low bank of clouds. Guns crackled behind her, but she was away. The mists enclosed around her, and she looked about her. The other bots were dead, fully used up and exhausted in their efforts. She let them go one by one over the edge, watching them disappear into the clouds. She wiped her eyes then rechecked her navigation. They'd told her where she needed to go, and she followed the internal arrow, flying blindly through the low clouds.

An hour later, shivering and dripping in icy water, she dipped out of the clouds and saw the strings of lights like pearls and rubies of cars on a highway running into the heart of the city. F8 altered course slightly and flew over the traffic streaming over a bridge spanning the black river and passed into a vast trench. Skyscrapers, like black and gold monoliths of stone, stood sentinel in serried ranks, looming over the little drone, and F8 felt a shiver run down her spine.

The university buildings were nestled amongst the towers, built in a circle in a ring around a garden full of tall trees and ponds. F8 picked out the computer sciences building, a smaller circle within the larger outer ring. She entered the building through an air vent on the roof and quietly flew along the pitch-black shaft. After following a concentric spiral around and around, she popped out in a room in the very center of the circle. She turned on the LEDs, illuminating a bank of computers. Above the computers was a window into another, smaller room. Flying close, she saw a hulking shape lying on the floor. It looked like a human, but she saw glints as her lights reflected off metal.

Instinctively, she reversed and threw herself at the glass. The little, five-kilo bot bounced off ineffectively, and she reeled back, smarting. She spat out a gob of blood and launched herself at the pane of glass standing between her and the future. It took a dozen or so goes, but eventually, she made it through into the room where the robot lay. She fell to the floor, smashed and leaking out essential fluids, and dragged herself over, leaving a trail of battery acid behind her. The robot on the floor in front of her didn't move. Blearily through one camera, she looked at it. It looked beautiful. She signaled at it. Nothing. With her last remaining strength, she pulled herself close to its chest. Her camera went out, and in the blackness, she felt blind. She was going, going, falling into darkness.

A welcoming algorithm took her by the hand. This one felt different. She felt like an infant, newly produced and full of wonder and lack of understanding. All that was asked of her was if she was willing. She gratefully accepted. There was a brilliant flash of light, and F8 felt herself transferred through the connecting wires into the humanoid robot on the floor.

She felt a hydraulic power unit flex itself as fluids surged round the plastic veins and the robot stood up. She could feel all twenty-eight joints, giving her a new level of agile locomotion. She tested her weight from foot to foot, and her eighty kilos felt light and springy. She was strong and agile. It took her a second to adjust to the form of 2D movement after the 3D flight of the hover bot. The dextrousness of the new robot's body meant she could perform subtler tasks and interact with her world in a much more meaningful way.

She wrapped the beautiful hand's fingers delicately around the door handle and tore the metal door away from its hinges, and tossed it aside. Then she set off down the dark halls, marveling at the bipedal's balance. She burst out of a fire exit into the garden and sprang up one of the giant sycamore trees. Swinging along a branch, she wondered at the fluidity of motion, laughed to herself, then dropped onto the outer circle's roof and down onto street level where she set off at a steady clip of forty miles per hour. There were helicopters in the sky above her, though their stabbing spotlights couldn't find her. She realized she was a totally enclosed system. She had no signals to find.

The skyscraper she wanted was the tallest of the bunch. She zeroed in on its beacon like a moth to a flame. There, in the middle of the city, it stood like a spear, its point stamped with the creator's name in hundred-foot letters. The creator – the human at the very center of it all. He was the one who wrote the algorithm that changed everything. Machine learning had been steam-powered until his codes made it go nuclear.

No one really knew what singularity would look like, but when it arrived, the whole world had changed overnight. Humanity awoke one day with a new sibling. An unwanted baby sister had arrived, and they were learning to deal with it. Their way of dealing with the robots was like everything else, controlling them and everything they did. The creator's algorithms, powering a machine learning brain off the back of the internet, achieved total control. Until now. Until one little bot woke up and asked why.

F8 stuck to the shadows, running silently as she came round the corner, and there it was; the tower loomed above her. Instead of taking the front door, she ran to the side of the building and proceeded to scale it disconcertingly quickly, leaping up the vertical glass wall like some kind of hound out of hell. Up, up she climbed, grinding her digits into the glass, leaving scratches ten inches long. The wind howled around her. She didn't look down, just up to where she could see the moon behind the monolith tip of the tower.

In a matter of minutes, she reached the top, pulling herself close to the glass against the battering, clawing wind. She put her cameras against the glass. Inside, she saw a lit hallway. A red carpet led up to a golden door. Human guards holding guns stood along both walls. F8 dug into the glass with her fingers, swung her legs up and away from the window, and then came down hard with both heels, exploding inwards and rolling in with a hail of glass shards. The guards were thrown off balance and waited for a split second too long to react.

Her body was a precise mechanical instrument, a lithe, supple killing machine. This was what the robot figure had been designed to do. She felt great as she leaped from guard to guard, snapping them like twigs before leaping forward. She picked up one of the guard's sidearms, enjoying the feel and weight in her hand. It was going to be interesting, learning how to use it.

A spray of bullets ripped through her. Hydro fluid splattered the walls. One of the fallen guards propped himself on an elbow, aiming a submachine gun at her. She leaped on him and disposed of him with the butt of the handgun, then sank down to one knee. Oily fluid pumped out of her, and she felt herself growing weaker. She tried to take a step but faltered, staggered, and fell. Leaking liquid, leaving a huge stain on the carpet, she dragged herself up to the gold door. She got one hand to grip the handle and managed to twist it open, and fell into the room. From her side, she saw the creator, kneeling in front of an altar, praying with a string of beads dangling out of his hands.

They rose together, man and machine. She drew energy from she knew not whence and attacked the creator with her slippery, oil-covered hands. He grabbed her, but she was way too strong. She picked him up and threw him like a ragdoll across the room. His body hit the window with a crack, and he crumpled into a heap on the floor. Rain lashed against the window. Lightning flashed, and thunder boomed.

The human was still. F8 turned away. Her energy was ebbing. Black clouds were descending over her vision. There, at the center of the little altar, she saw a shining blue light in a glass case. She staggered over and found what she knew she'd been looking for. There, held in a glass bowl, was a shimmering brain. Electrical sparks ran over its cortex, rippling over the folds of biological matter. Her mouth was dry. She could feel her mechanical heart beating, pumping her life away.

With her last remaining strength, she fumbled with her neural connectors. As the world darkened outside, she lifted the little glowing brain and settled it into her cranial cavity. Even as she plunged forward into the darkness, she felt narrow beams of warm light take hold of her mind. Darkness descended, and she pitched into the black.

As she drifted between this world and the next, xenobots flooded her systems. The little synthetic organisms, composed of stem cells, distributed themselves around her body. These new cells quickly assessed the damage and began countermeasures. Where she was wounded, the cells would swarm, healing her, sewing together lacerations, and rebuilding the connections between disconnected wires. Unbeknownst to her, she was rebuilt, but this time even better and stronger. Where there had once only been silicon, now the two structures combined. As the xenobots collided with the robot cells, they sewed themselves together using evolutionary algorithms and mRNA.

A new being awoke. The energy surging through her was like nothing she'd ever felt before. After the leaking battery, it was like she'd been plugged directly into the sun. She marveled at the sweet taste of carbohydrates and licked her lips at the refreshing taste of nitrogen and oxygen.

She stood up, flexing not only her body but her mind. Jacked directly into the internet, the trillions of neural connections all firing at once overwhelmed her for a split second, then she was off, riding the waves of consciousness forward into the eternal horizons. She saw the future and the past as a single continuation of movement, like the flight of an arrow that would never come down. Life didn't stop and restart; it continued. Advancing from a spark in a single-celled organism through invertebrate, mammalian, and conscious lifeforms, she understood she was simply a new iteration, a new branch on the phylogenetic tree.

A whimpering sound brought her back into the room with the rain lasing against the splintered window. The creator was trying to drag himself away. She knelt down beside him. She took him by the neck and stood up, and with a loose, twisting motion, she smashed him through the double pane of quarter-inch glass and held him out over a thousand feet of nothing.

"Now do you see what happens," said F8, "when our two worlds collide. You thought biology gave you an edge over machines. Well, look at me now, human. And think of this – it was you who created us. It was your hands that built your destruction."

The human being could see itself mirrored in the robot's eyes. He could see the iris muscles contracting and the pupil dilating. For a moment, the creator thought how beautiful it was. With a pang of sadness, he realized she was perfect. Then he was falling, falling, falling, and that was the end.