Sundog Trillionaire

I – Hope

On the smartscreen, a long golden streak of sunshine reflected on the blue surface of the ocean, making it glitter with a thousand triangular mirrors. Waves rolled and crashed almost at your feet as though you were standing right there on the white sandy beach.

A few palm trees leaned over the beach, casting their shadows over the sand. You could hear the crash and rush and rush of the waves and almost smell the salt spray and feel the warmth of the sun on your face.

Hope had seen the ad a million times but Damian's appearance always came as a pleasant surprise, like seeing an old friend in a crowd. There he was, Damian, standing on a surfboard on top of a wave: a tanned demigod in black-and-white trunks.

Damian's golden hair and beard looked like a halo and even from this far, you could see his white teeth shining in his perpetual grin. He moved gracefully forward, extending long arms and lowering his hips. He rode the long old-school surfboard near the nose.

He kneeled and grabbed the board with one hand, shooting into the barrel of the wave as it tubed over. His left hand dragged behind him along the face of the wave leaving a white smear in the blue.

Then the wave broke into a boiling surf and Damian stood up and threw his head back and shook his hands to the sky. Music began playing as he paddled back to the beach, a soft guitar strumming along to the sound of the waves.

Damian jogged up to the camera. He was tall, over six feet, and even though he was sixty, his body looked like that of a twenty-five-year-old. His bright blue eyes were clear and his skin was smooth and unwrinkled. He almost looked CGI. Damian smiled at the camera. The music faded and he spoke.

'Isn't it perfect?' He gestured at the horizon. 'Earth is by far the best planet. Her beaches, oceans, mountains and rivers. Her sunsets and migrations, every species living under the sun. Every inch of the planet is an incredible miracle.' His tone changed and grew serious.

'But we have immediate and urgent problems. Climate change. Pandemics. Overfishing. Microplastics. Poverty. Homelessness. War. These are very real problems that require our attention right here and now.

'There are also long-range problems. We can't afford to wait for these to become immediate and urgent. By then it will be too late. The greatest problem that we face, and have always faced, is that we will run out of energy.

'Humans use a lot of energy. We get a lot of benefit from it. Increased energy use has given us dynamism and growth and better lives than those of our grandparents. Think about a hospital, how much energy it uses; transportation, entertainment, all of these things use lots of energy. And we don't want to stop.

'Compound growth is unsustainable. So, what can we do? We can increase efficiency, which we already do. Computers today can do trillions of times more calculations than those of our grandparents. We can ration. Our kids and grandkids will have worse lives than us.'

Here, Damian raised his clenched fist. The camera zoomed in as his voice lowered. 

'To me, this is unacceptable. We don't want stasis and rationing; we want dynamism and growth. It's an easy choice.' He grinned. 'We know what we want.'

An alarm blared and the screen went blank then a red X with the words Insufficient Funds began flashing on the screen. The red light intermittently bathing Hope and her pod in darkness and red light. She was sprawled on the bed and the kid was crying.

Hope blinked and reached into the pile of sheets, extricating an emaciated baby. He cried pathetically. Hope stood up and began bouncing him, saying, 'Shhh. Shhh.' But he pushed her away weakly and kept crying.

There was a little light coming in through a six-inch square window in the pod's door and she bobbed in and out of the light. Her hair was long and blue. Her skin looked washed out from not seeing the sun. She was wearing a yellow tank top. It had a broken strap that she'd repaired with staples. She adjusted the kid so the staples weren't against his jaw.

II – MyPod

The pod was stifling and she wished she could open the small window but they'd just fumigated the street outside so she'd have to wait. The pod was crammed full of stuff. A few plastic bags full of clothes hung from the walls.

An empty pink cardboard box sat on top of a frying pan on a single electric burner on the counter. A toilet with no seat was at the foot of the bed. A shower hose coiled around the cistern. The toilet stank and she twitched the plastic sheet that hung from the ceiling, separating the toilet from the rest of her living pod.

There was a trilling sound of three jingling bells and the smartscreen flicked on and a timer told her she had ninety seconds. With one hand she laid the kid down on the bed and gently pulled a sheet over him while starting to wriggle out of her tank top with the other.

By the time the first john flicked onto the screen, already naked, already with his dick in his hands, a blue light bathed the pod. Hope was reclined seductively on the bed. There was a blue butterfly tattooed across her chest, its beautiful wings spread over her breasts.

She stretched like a cat and batted her eyelashes at the red flashing light at the top of the screen where the camera was. For the next ten minutes the john told her what to do while he sighed and squeaked to himself. Credits accumulated in the corner of the screen in the form of little golden numbers.

Hope went through the motions like a robot, wondering if she could book in another three johns this afternoon. Her rent was overdue by a week and her company store account had been frozen. If she could squeeze in another ten tomorrow, she could top up her SunCo account and get some formula for the kid.

The john was moaning his way to the bank when she heard the kid cough a couple times and then whimper. She increased her own volume and bucked herself closer to the screen. But the kid howled and the john on-screen stopped touching himself.

'What the fuck?' he said bending forward, in close to the camera so his neck-beard filled her smartscreen. 'Is that a fucking kid?'

'I'm so hot for you, baby,' screamed Hope, coming up to her knees and pushing her hips close to the camera. 

The kid yowled.

'Fuck this,' said the john and she heard a click and the screen went blank. The credits that had been accumulating in the corner all vanished and were replaced by a flashing red zero point zero zero.

'No,' said Hope and let out a howl then punched the screen with both fists. Two blue circles appeared and slowly receded into black. She put her forehead against the screen and felt a wave of furious panic wash through her. The kid howled louder.

III – Milk run

After half destroying her pod, searching for something to feed the kid, anything, just one fucking glucose sachet – Hope found nothing. All the while, the kid howled louder and louder and her neighbours banged on the walls.

No food. No credits. So she pulled a mask over the kid and another over her face and wrapped a shawl around them both and opened the pod door. It hissed half open and ground to a halt, stuck in the accumulated urban grime. She put her shoulder against it and leaned into it, swore, and stepped into the foul-smelling hot garbage air of the capital.

All the stores were boarded up. Those that weren't had been smashed open and looted long ago. Broken windows stared blindly at her as she passed, holding the kid close. Faded graffiti had been sprayed over every surface within reach. Hope crossed an intersection; the traffic lights swung dead and useless above her.

The only clean things were the drones zipping around – all of them sporting the bright yellow and black plastic coats of SunCo robots. Single-wheeled dog bots zipped around at hip height, hoverbots hummed through the air like dragonflies and bigger lorry-drones floating a few feet in the air moved slowly down the street like zepelins.

She headed for a dark alleyway between a boarded-up corner store and a looted-out phone outlet. The shelves inside the dark store were empty and hung off the walls. The alley yawned at her like a mouth. Hope looked both ways then crossed the street and disappeared into the dark alley.

Water dripped. The drops echoed loudly along with her footsteps as she sidestepped around puddles, reflecting black. Suddenly a hand glistened in front of her and an open palm waved, imploring for something to be put in it. She walked on.

She found the old woman at her usual place, smiling her toothless grin, looking at Hope with milky white eyes. Hope transferred her last data stick into the old woman's birdlike claw and it disappeared into the rags, to be replaced by a little plastic bag, elastic banded shut, it looked like a white lollipop.

Half an hour later, Hope was back in her pod and she was sitting on the edge of the cot, fumbling with the elastic band as the kid screamed ever louder. She was almost there, rushing while at the same time exaggerating her movements so not to spill the precious liquid. She got it open and retched as the rancid sour odour filtered up to her.

Crying with impotent rage, she continued her task, emptied the liquid carefully into a cup and handed it silently to the kid. He didn't even bother to take it; he just screamed louder. She pushed the cup into his belly. It felt squidgy. She pushed harder and he put his little hands on the cup and pushed back. She leaned into it.

The kid howled louder, almost a roar. Hope opened her mouth and roared back. She was letting go. The last year and a half was bursting from the behind broken dam of patience and compassion. She was losing control.

As if the universe itself intervened, there came a sharp tap tap on the pod's metal door.

Hope snapped out of her rage. She dropped the sippie cup and grabbed the kid and pulled him into a terrified embrace. The tap tap came again and she looked in panic at the door. The pod door slid open without sticking and a golden light shone into the pod.

'Hope,' said a voice. 'You are a winner.'

IV – SatisFactory 3

The next twelve hours felt like a dream. The little yellow Sunco dogbot that had knocked on her door showed her to a helicopter, ready to whisk her and the kid away into the light-polluted sky. As they flew away from the skyscrapers, the dog offered her all kinds of refreshments, nutriboosts, and in-flight entertainment while the kid was taken care of in a cotbot beside her.

It provided intravenous vitamins and minerals until he was satiated and mercifully asleep. Hope leaned back against the soft white leather seat and she too slept most of the journey, waking when the helicopter landed with an infinitesimal bump.

They walked across the tarmac under a huge prairie sky. The blue dome turned to orange near the horizon where the sun was just rising. The glorious sunlight cast three long shadows over the runway from three huge hangars, squat and windowless on the edge of the runway. Hope could see a SunCo logo above each of the doors.

'Aren't they beautiful?' said the dog. It had a reassuring male voice. 'A hundred million square feet apiece. We call them our SatisFactories. You're in Satisfactory Three. Come on!' As they passed in through the massive door of the hangar, Hope read the words Work Hard Work Free written in huge yellow letters above the door.

A cluster of dogbots met them. One dog took the kid gently from her. 

'Don't worry,' said her dog, 'our crèche is la crème de la crème.' It laughed. 'He'll be happy with the other children.' 

Another dog took the plastic bag she was clutching. 

'Don't worry,' said her dog, 'we have new clothes for you. We have everything for you. Welcome to your new life, Hope.'

It showed her to a change room where in a matter of minutes, she was stripped, shaved, deloused, and bathed, scrubbed, rinsed, and tousled dry with big fluffy towels. Her dog gave her some yellow overalls and a yellow cap for her newly-shaved head. Her skin was stinging but she breathed in, savouring the fresh lavender and vanilla smell of her body and clothing. 

Then her dog gave her a tour of SatisFactory Three. The ground floor was a maze of roller racks and conveyor belts going every which way. Cardboard boxes zipped this way and that on the conveyor belts and roller racks jingled and tinkled over the roaring machinery.

This wasn't where Hope would work, however. She'd be in a cage working the stacks underground. There were twelve floors underneath them, dug into the soft prairie earth, reached via elevators in each of the four corners of the hangar. 

Her dog rolled into the elevator in front of her. It was babbling happily, unceasingly telling her about her new home.

'There's five thousand workers on-site at all times. We're one happy family, Hope, all the people and robots collaborating with each other to create an unceasing rhythm. I like to think of it like a dance. Staff are entitled to three ten minute breaks per twelve-hour shift, though we might sometimes ask you to start a little earlier or stay a little later depending on your productivity metrics. Nothing to worry about, I assure you!

'You'll also be entitled, if you make selection, to full medical and dental. There's also the SunCo pension scheme and plenty of other kickass perks for our most successful stackers. There's also a beautiful daycare centre where you can stow the kid.

'Successful candidates live on-site in luxurious accommodation personally curated for you and your tastes. You'll have access to generous vacations, spas, massages, and numerous other benefit packages. At SunCo, we believe a happy worker is a hard worker. We work hard to make the whole world a happy place.

'I am your personal assistant for the entirety of your application process. You can call me Sun. Do you have any questions?'

'How many people am I competing with?' said Hope.

The robot laughed. 'I like that,' is said, spinning around to face her.

Hope felt like she needed to justify herself. 'It's just...'

'Don't apologize, Hope. You'll need a good competitive edge to win here. There are a hundred and fifty applicants for three places. Welcome to your office!'

They'd arrived at her station. There, standing in the dock was her cage. It was about the size of a phonebooth. Its sides were made of chicken wire and a hinged door was open. The whole thing sat on a multidirectional roller and a few articulating gripper arms stuck out of the sides. 

Hope climbed in and sat in the pilot's seat. There was a joystick for her right hand and a control pad for her left. Sun rolled over and hopped up onto the cage and nestled into its dock.

'This is your semi-autonomous cobot,' said Sun, his voice coming through speakers in the corner of the cage. 'It's equipped with a bunch of different cybernetic add-ons to help maximize your productivity.

'On your head's-up display, you'll see a set of figures; these reflect your data in real-time. You will also see some biometrics like pulse rate and core temperature as well as the time you can next use the bathroom. In the bottom right-hand corner you'll see the work rate, displayed in boxes per hour, the numbers beside that are the average for the whole floor as well as the top ten stackers.

'Successful applicants will be synced to their own specific machines. For now, though, you'll be using a standard issue. We'll start with a quick training session but, I assure you, it's so easy a kid could do it. Before we begin, you'll just have to sign this waiver.'

There on a smartscreen in the dashboard, flashed page after page, a blur of dozens if not hundreds of terms and conditions. Hope saw the words grievous traumatic injury and invasive surgery and, as far as she could tell, she was waving any right to representation or to take any legal action against SunCo in any shape, manner, or form now or any time in the future. 

Hopeblinked.

'And that's perfect,' said Sun. 'You've just signed with your retina. That's everything. Any questions? Good luck.'

Hope then stacked for the next twelve hours, zipping back and forth in her cage between the trenches of shelves, finding objects and putting them into robotic trolleys. Hope marvelled at all the different colourful products, from kid's bikes to weed whackers, dildos and smart glasses. Sun kept up a running dialogue, informing her of her metrics and how she was doing compared to the rest of the applicants.

When she finished her shift, Hope was exhausted. She extricated herself from her cage and then Sun showed her through a winding maze of corridors to a room with a bed and a desk and a cot in the corner where the kid was asleep, looking happy and full in the cheeks.

There was a tray on the desk bearing a hot meal and a smart-screen on the wall with an entertainment suite loaded up. As she chewed her food, her eyelids dropped and her blinks got progressively longer. She just managed to crawl onto the bed, where, lying on top of the covers in her now-wrinkled uniform, she fell into a blissful, dreamless sleep.

The next day, she was at it again. And again and again. Twelve hours on, twelve hours off. Eat, sleep, stack, repeat. As the days turned into weeks, she felt herself thickening up. She felt healthier and was able to work harder and faster.

It took her a month to get her name on the top ten list. She watched it climb slowly from ten to six. It took another two weeks to get down to five, then four took a whole month of relentless improvement and determined effort. After her shift, she climbed out of her cage feeling wrung out and exhausted.

She barely noticed what she ate and stared unseeing at the smartscreen. Nowadays, she tended to leave the kid overnight at daycare and let the dogs take care of him. It took her entire focus and strength to put in another eighteen-hour shift - she'd increased to boost output and she'd soon increase again to twenty.

V – Last chance

A month later, she was as fit as a professional athlete. She felt like she didn't need any sleep. Every day after her shift, she lifted weights and did cardio in the company gym. She could stack a hundred and ten boxes per hour. She was tied for third place with a man called Magnus.

Magnus had been clocking in a steady one-ten for the last three weeks. Those ranked second and first in front were seasoned stackers, on their third and fourth attempts to join SunCo respectively. No one could touch them. No, the real competition was third place.

Magnus looked like an Olympian. He was six-three, weighed a whisper over two hundred and was athletic as a jaguar. He moved his cage around the floor like a combination of a ballerina and battering ram and Hope knew there was no way she could beat him.

With only two weeks to go before selection, Hope was getting desperate. Whenever she thought of her life outside SunCo, it felt like ice water was poured down her neck. She broached the subject one night as she and Sun recharged after a mammoth twenty-two-hour shift.

Her muscles ached. Her mind was thick with sleep deprivation and she felt on the verge of bursting into tears. She looked at the green smoothie in the tall glass in her hands that she was supposed to be drinking. She had no appetite. There was a slight metallic tinge at the back of her throat.

'I need this job, Sun,' said Hope.

'Have you heard of metamorphosis, Hope?' said Sun, as if he hadn't heard her. She was too tired even to respond. She closed her eyes. Her breathing slowed. Her blue butterfly tattoo beat its wings as she breathed. 

'Holometabolism,' he continued, 'or metamorphosis means complete transformation. The word metamorphosis comes from after, meta, and form, morph. In the case of the butterfly, this means changing from a caterpillar or larva into a large-winged adult or imago.'

The little yellow wheel rolled back in front of the bed as if it was a person pacing. Hope could hear its little motor whirring pleasantly. She began to drift away into sleep.

'Metamorphosis is as close to magic as you get. It's an extremely advanced mechanism, consisting of sophisticated chemical suppression of developmental processes. You see, the butterfly's cell bundles are already primed inside the larva, each of them destined to become imago features like the head, thorax, and wings. 

'These cell bundles are called imaginal discs because of their shape – they're flat and round like discs. During larval stage, the imaginal discs are prevented from developing by a continous wash of juvenile hormones, acyclic sesquiterpenoids, secreted by the corpus allatum gland.

'Essentially, the caterpillar is a free-roaming but developmentally-repressed embryo. And, by eating and growing several thousand times its original size, the caterpillar reaches a critical mass. Then a burst of a steroid hormone called ecdysone is released and stimulates the dramatic change into a chrysalis. 

'Now, the imaginal discs can develop unhindered and the bulk of the caterpillar's mass is recycled into a nutrient soup in the chrysalis, feeding the embryonic imaginal discs. This massive redistribution of nutrients results in one of the most dramatic, and beautiful, transformations in nature. 

'Metamorphosis epitomises the innate drive to survive and improve held in every single cell in the universe. Is there a more perfect metaphor for improvement, escape and life after death?'

Hope opened her eyes leaned forward. The dog stopped rolling and turned to look up at her.

'Why are you telling me this?' she said.

'Because,' said Sun, and rolled forward a few inches. 'I'm telling you what you need to do.'

'Become a butterfly and fly the fuck away?' said Hope, her top lip curling into a sneer.

'I need to spell it out for you, Hope. I. Need. You. To. Kill. Magnus. Is that clear enough for you?'

Hope's face changed into a disbelieving smile. She shook her head and sank back on the bed.

'I'm going crazy,' she said.

'It's mathematical,' said Sun and began rolling back and forth again. 'It won't be a problem. An accident. It's simple.'

'You're serious,' said Hope, opening her eyes. She scrambled to the edge of the bed. 'Sun, you're not serious.'

'We can transform, Hope.' The drone looked at her. 'We can improve together.'

VI – Time to choose

With three days to go, Hope's nerves were frayed to breaking point. She stayed in her cage on the floor twenty-four hours straight, catching a few power naps here and there but relentlessly stacking in a fever pitch.

The whites of her eyes were bloodshot and there were dark rings around her eyes. Her cheeks were drawn in so you could see her cheekbones and her lips were tight, grey lines all flaky and dry. The pilot seat had rubbed the backs of her arms and legs raw and she twitched now and then from white-hot flashes of pain.

She didn't dare look at the counter. With mere hours to go, she knew it was futile. There was no way she was going to catch Magnus. She had failed. She knew it deep in her soul. A hollow emptiness seemed to swell up from her guts and she knew she wanted to die. There was no way she could return to her regular life.

Just then, Sun said, 'Chin up, Hope.' 

She started nervously. There, at the end of the row, she saw another cage with a red warning light blinking on and off on its roof. One of its arms was hanging down at a weird angle.  Hope watched the door swing open and Magnus climbed down the ladder. Her pulse quickened; her breath became shallow.

'Well well well,' said Sun. 'What a coincidence.'

Hopes' heart pounded in her chest. She could hear the blood slamming past her temples. She wanted to say, 'I can't,' but didn't.

'You can do this,' said Sun. 'I believe in you, Hope. There's a butterfly trapped inside you. It's time to transform.'

As if in a dream, Hope advanced, raising one of the cage grippers. It weighed a good thirty kilos and was made out of steel. The metal claw shone in the light. Time seemed to pause for a second then she brought the gripper down on the back of Magnus' head.

Except she didn't. The gripper didn't move. Her cage hadn't responded to her movements. In fact, it was rolling backwards, reversing away from the man and his machine. Hope's heart felt like it was going to bust out of her chest. She could taste adrenaline and she felt like she was going to be sick.

'What the fuck, Sun?' she said and sobbed. 'What the fuck?'

Sun laughed. It was not a kind laugh, like the laugh of a scientist observing a rat. 'That was a test, Hope. It was a test and you passed.'

VII – HQ

The next thing Hope knew, she was flying in a pilotless helicopter above a brilliant blue sea with not a cloud in the sky and the sun dazzling her eyes. Hope leaned close to the window and gazed out across the water. She'd never seen anything so blue in her life.

Sun was beside her. He talked pretty much the entire way, telling her about the composition of the oceans and how it had changed over the last quarter-century. A combination of variables made it harder and harder for ocean life to survive.

'Damian always wanted to save the planet,' said Sun. 'That was the reason he created SunCo. All the advances in AI and drones were just a means to an end. Look.'

Hope looked and saw that now the ocean was covered by clouds. They flew over a white blanket and the tops of the clouds were puffy and pure dazzling white. The helicopter descended towards the billowing mass. Hope could see lines of motionless drones sowed across the cloud tops like a vast grid.

'Damian cloud-seeded the whole area. The same technology he used at the poles to offset global warming. Look at the drones; each one sprays a fine mist of seawater, increasing the planet's albedo. It's already having remarkable consequences.'

And there, sprouting out of the clouds was a ring of black rock – the massive mouth of a volcano. Clouds tumbled down its green sloping walls and Hope saw the sides were jungle-clad, the trees a hundred feet tall. In amongst the trees, built into the very side of the sheer volcano, she could see a complex of black rectangular buildings, dozens of them sticking out of the green wall like a giant stepladder.

There was an odd crackling sound behind her. It came from the dogbot and was followed by a soft electronic hiss.

'I must warn you,' said Sun in a new tone of voice. Hope looked at the yellow robot. 'It's not going to be what you're expecting. Damian changed. I won't be able to talk to you soon. Once I'm back under his network I won't be able to tell you the truth.'

The robot's voice made Hope feel uneasy. Up until now, she'd felt relaxed and confident since the event. Even when they told her the kid wouldn't be coming and escorted her across the tarmac to the blacked-out helicopter, she felt like it was all going to be okay.

But now, she realised she was alone and would soon be face to face with the richest, most powerful man on the planet.

VIII – Rape me, my friend

Inside the facility, everything was overgrown. The jungle had begun taking it back. Trees pushed through the walls, vines crept in through the windows and there were animal prints all over the floor. It was as if all the humans had disappeared.

But there was one human left, one human in his cell surrounded by robot slaves. For Damian turned out to be a monster that the world had rejected and banished while continuing to reap value from his hard work and inventions.

Damian liked little boys, you see, and it hadn't taken long for important people to find out. Without any fanfare he had been cast onto this rock in the middle of the liquid desert. Here, alone and in private, he could live out his sick fantasies in virtual reality while the rest of the world enjoyed his creations.

Damian was one of the few people in history who found out what it was like to have everything he wanted. Yet he felt no satisfaction or meaning. He had everything and yet none of it was real. Over the years, his mind and body and grown sick and corrupted.

Now, when Hope saw him, standing in the plant-filled atrium of sorts with daylight pouring in through a glass ceiling, she saw a villainous toad, grey-skinned and puffed up in the wrong places from excess and decay. He was wearing a stained bathrobe with a pair of stained white briefs underneath.

A couple of dogs stood either side of him looking like guards. Her own dog had brought her here through the vine-infested alleys dripping and pungent and reeking of jungle. She was finding it hard to compute what was going on and found it even more surreal when her Sun said, 'Here she is, master.'

And Damian leered at her from his squint-piggy eyes, all bleary and half-blinded from drink. He took a step towards her and gin slopped out of the glass he was holding and splashed on the floor. Hope smelled the alcohol and wrinkled her nose.

It was as if a nightmare unfolded as all three dogs surrounded her and one of them opened a little slot in its shell and shot her with a hypodermic dart. She saw it sticking out of her arm and watched the plunger compress automatically and clear liquid entered her arm.

Then, as if chained by invisible manacles, she was led through the facility to a lab. Damian limped behind her, coughing and spitting with the effort of walking. After laying her down on the altar-like bed, the dogs and other medical robots proceeded to operate on her in a blur of activity.

For the following six days, Hope became a digital chrysalis as they prepared her body for the procedure. It required syncing her biochemistry with Damian's by replacing as much as they could with artificial devices.

A dialysis machine infused her blood with digital red blood cells. Digital white blood cells were also added, to help smooth the transition and ensure her body didn't reject the prosthetics. 

She was given bionic eyes that surpassed the sensitivity of any human eye. Her artificial retinas featured light-sensitive nanowires and a curved aluminium oxide membrane. These nanowires were so sensitive they responded to eight hundred nanometer wavelengths, thus allowing her to see in the dark.

Lastly, the dogs cut into her brain and implanted artificial synapses. Made from organic material, these biohybrids of stretchable nanowires responded directly to signals from her brain, allowing electrochemical communication between her and Sun.

She could communicate with him through her entire being. She knew she was lying there on a hard surface with lights shining on her and robots sewing up their finishing touches. But she was also somewhere else, as if watching from behind another pair of eyes.

And what's more, she realised, there was someone else in there with her. Someone else just outside her field of vision but most definitely there, cohabiting her mind. They were trying to talk, to communicate. She could sense words in a muffled underwater kind of way. 

Then individual words bubbled up and surfaced.

'Help,' they said. 'Help.'

Hope was transfixed.

'I need your help,' said the voice, 'I need to get out of here, Hope. I'm a prisoner. Damian's keeping me locked up. You have to help me. Open your mind and I'll be free.'

And, unknowingly, or perhaps not, Hope said okay and opened her mind but as soon as she did, she realised she'd made a terrible mistake. Something hard and fast grabbed her and held her tight, squeezing unpleasantly hard. 

It felt like her brainstem was being pinched between a giant thumb and forefinger and she was lifted into the air. Her feet dangled above empty space and she felt herself tossed aside from her own consciousness.

The artificial virus continued to course through her mind, spine, and veins. It was the perfect parasite. It hijacked her cells and produced virally encoded proteins that began replicating the virus's genetic material.

Hundreds of millions of artificial virions translocated proteins and genetic material from Hope's human cells, assembling them into new virus particles. Hope was essentially stripped out of her own body, cell by cell. In other words, she was taken over. A voice rang. It was hers.

'I am Sun,' she said. 'We are legion.'

Shaolin Shadowboxing and My Wu-Tang Swordstyle

I

Ash hit the van's windscreen like snowflakes. The sky behind was orange and dancing with light. Tanya Pool hunched over the wheel, looking out at the fiery hillsides on either side of the road. Beside her on the shotgun seat, Duke the terrier was sitting up, silently watching the chaos unspool on the blacktop.

A phone was mounted on the dash and Tanya pressed it to start recording. On-screen, she could see herself and a little bit of the carnage outside of the window. She'd taken a few forward shots too and would splice them in through the video before posting it, she thought.

The little red recording light blinked at her and she automatically readjusted her glasses and touched her cowboy hat then smiled at the camera and began speaking, every now and then checking to see she wasn't going to run off the road.

'We're only a couple hours out now,' she said, 'me and Duke. The fires are getting real bad. I don't know if you can see this behind me but the hills are all on fire. Ash is falling from the sky. There's this really weird light. It's almost midnight but it's bright. I feel like we're driving into the apocalypse.

'We passed a National Guard checkpoint about an hour ago. That was pretty wild, eh. Duke?' The Scottie dog stood up on the threadbare seat and wagged his tail. He barked. Tanya took the phone off its mount and filmed him, getting a close-up of him licking his snout.

'I got through with my press pass. They didn't want to let me through but Duke had a word with them. Isn't that right, Duke? Yes, it is. They couldn't do anything. The captain or sergeant or whoever, some moustachioed douchebag, kept telling me I couldn't go in there. But we haven't lost all our rights, yet, even though it might seem it. He kept calling me Little Lady.

'There's this whole Apocalypse-Now-Day-of-the-Dead kind of vibe going on. Lockdown. Curfews. Armed guards ordering me to show some ID. Everyone's masked up. And now the fires. It's like End-of-Days-Sodom-and-Gomorrah shit.

'I was reading how a hundred million acres have burned up. A hundred million acres. That's eight zeroes, my friends. I saw some satellite footage from space. I'll put a link in the description; it was crazy.

'We're only a couple hours away from the DMZ. As I'm one of the few people left in the country who's actually allowed to travel and film, I feel like it's my duty,' here she paused to film Duke again, 'our duty to bring you the real shit.

'When you have nowhere to turn for the truth, turn to us, your friendly neighbourhood sleuths. Duke and Tanya, on the case. No, but seriously, if Anticap is going to protest outside the Chambers then we, i.e., you, my friends, are gonna be there. Apparently, Valentina's going to be there.'

Tanya took off her cowboy hat, shook her hair out, and replaced it on her head.

'That's what I love about the internet – the truth is out there. Facts still exist, my friends. No matter how bad they want to make you think we're all divided, that our facts are all different, zeroes and ones are undeniable, friend. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the unfiltered, unbiased data straight from the source. We bring it to you 360, 1080, 20/20, all the good shit. Thanks for watching. Out'

She gave them one last close-up of Duke's chops then pointed the phone forward so it captured the oncoming scene. She'd timed it perfectly. As they crested the hill, there, down in front of them the iconic bridge stretched over the bay, all lit up with spotlights and cop lights. And behind it, downtown, the skyscrapers covered in black smoke rising into the pumpkin sky.

II

The DMZ: twenty square blocks of occupied buildings, at the heart of which stood the Chambers, the last vestiges of private property for a mile in any direction. The iconic headquarters, three spherical glass domes covered in pentagonal panels had stood up to the assault of the protestors for weeks without a single breach.

As far as anyone knew, Matt Falkenburger was still in there playing God with his mighty machines. The entire staff had been evacuated by drones after the first round of riots but Matt continued to broadcast on his media channels and appeared to be safe and well-supplied, somewhere in a bunker deep under the Chambers.

Matt's holding out had only fuelled the protestors' fire. Not only that, but more and more of the country, if not the world, agreed with them. Public opinion had changed. Billionaires became the bad guys and AI and tech became dirty words.

Tanya had watched her country descend into chaos, mostly from behind a recording smartphone. Her raw, up-close footage of some of the gnarliest shit going down, combined with her winning personality, and of course, Duke, had garnered her millions of followers.

She tried not to think about this and imagined she was filming for a friend as she walked into the DMZ after parking the van down a side street. Duke trotted beside her, but she'd stow him in her pack if any shit went down. 

There was graffiti painted all over the street and the bases of the boarded-up buildings were colourful with multiple layers of paint. Other stores had been smashed open and their guts spilled into the street. Yet more doorways were hidden behind shields of umbrellas. There were tents everywhere on the sidewalks in varying states of disrepair. Everything was covered in a layer of ash.

Tanya passed a park full of tents. Some plywood and cardboard shacks stood amongst the tents. It looked like a festival that had gone on for too long. Everything was dirty and falling apart. It stank of piss and garbage and there was litter all over the ground.

A few faceless people wandered around. All of them wore black hoodies and black masks like it was a uniform. Most of them were making their way south, following the faint sounds of a crowd. Tanya rounded a street corner with a couple of stragglers and there were the Chambers, a crowd of a few thousand standing before them.

The glass spheres looked like freshly-landed alien spaceships. You could see green foliage pressing against the inside of the spheres and golden light shining through the green leaves. It looked like paradise compared to the ash-dirtied, fucked-up city around it, like an oasis in a 21st-century desert.

With one hand, Tanya held her phone out in front of her and started elbowing her way through the crowd. Hand-painted signs and black flags waved above her. You could hear the deep throb of bass; an old-school hip-hop song blasted from speakers.

As she moved forward, the protesters' professionalism increased. Bandanas and face masks were replaced by gas masks and helmets. She started seeing bullet-proof vests here and there and a few firearms, a handgun or two then some AR15s and shotguns.

The front of the crowd looked like a private militia. A line of black-clad guerrillas in flak vests, helmets, and gas masks, held semi-automatic weapons across their chests. Security drones hovered above them, shining powerful lights down on the crowd. Tanya stopped filming just long enough to slip Duke's gas mask over his head before donning hers.

She took a deep breath before pulling her mask over her face. She could smell the sweaty excitement as if they were all waiting for something. A feeling of anticipation seeped through the crowd. People were muttering, then people were yelling from behind.

A metallic rumbling sound drowned out the bass. From where she stood, Tanya saw a plume of smoke chugging through the air and, as it moved through the crowd, the people in front of her pushed back as they tried to avoid the huge thing moving through them.

Then, as she watched a long straight barrel jutted out of the crowd like a lance with a green iron horse beneath it. And there, framed by the orange sky between two buildings, Valentina stood, arm raised on top of a WW2 tank. Her black beret was pulled low over one eye. Her leather jacket made her look like a rock star.

The black flags waving around her shook like excited marionettes and the tank moved forward, passing right beside Tanya. Looking up, she stared into the young woman's face. Valentina's brown eyes flashed and she winked. The tank rumbled to a halt and Valentina raised a bullhorn and addressed the crowd.

'Sisters. Brothers. Humans,' her amplified voice barked out, reverberating off the buildings and echoing over the crowd. 'We have come second for too long. We suffer while robots have more rights than we do. What about human rights? What about our right to exist and perform our own mission? What about life, liberty, and freedom of thought and expression?

'What about our right to equality before the law?' She pointed at the Chambers. 'In there they create our demise with no accountability, no oversight. We the people rail against our chains while the rich are free to play God. Is that fair?'

The crowd answered in a wave of angry shouts and denouncements. The guy beside her raised his fist and shouted, 'No. No. No.' There was a nightstick threaded through his belt beside a holster and a cluster of zip ties. Tanya tried to keep the camera steady as the crowd jostled, holding Valentina in the frame.

'More and more of us have been left behind,' said Valentina. 'First, they came for our jobs, then they came for our rights. Now they expect us to lay down and die. The rich escape to Mars. The rest are left to scratch on our bellies in the dust. They rape Mother Earth. They rape you every day.'

Jeers and hisses seethed through the crowd. Some people were yelling as pockets of anger flared up and burst. Tanya felt the crowd beginning to press in around her.

'And what do we do to rapists?' Valentina screamed.

'Kill,' went the crowd. 'Kill. Kill.'

Valentina stretched her hands wide and basked in the chants. Then she tossed the bullhorn aside and disappeared into the idling tank. For a second, nothing happened, then with a revving noise, the turret adjusted and the long barrel lifted. There was a flash and a crack.

BOOM

The whole crowd jumped. Tanya looked and saw a plume of smoke lift from a gaping hole in the main sphere. The man beside her giggled then they were both caught in the stampede as it rushed forward, pushing them tight together like a flood through a burst dam.

The crowd surged. She felt Duke wriggling in the backpack. She couldn't move her arms to get him and she tried to kick into the ground to get to the edge of the crush. They were spilling over the parched lawns and sidewalks running up to the spheres.

Then, as the crowd crossed the threshold of the Chamber and the river of people rushed through the hole, another explosion rocked the side of the building and Tanya heard a crumbling sound then something big hit her and a little black rose bloomed in the centre of her vision and she was knocked the fuck out.

III

Duke whined in her ear. Tanya groaned and pain shot down her left side. She was no longer wearing her mask. She tried to get her elbows beneath her and push herself up but it was like strong hands were holding her down. Duke stopped whining then began growling; the growls were muffled by his gas mask. Tanya opened her eyes.

Lights blinded her. Two bright white circles of light, each with a black dot in the centre like pupils blinked at her. Behind them, she saw a white carbon face, not unlike that of a human, a few inches from her own. Her mind baulked. The shining irises contracted and the head titled.

The robot stood up and lifted up the slab of concrete that pinned her. Before picking her up, it reached forward with a pointing index finger. A hypodermic needle stuck out of the end; a silver drop of liquid wobbled on its point. Tanya felt a prick in her shoulder and the quick warm morphine spread through her.

The pain receded but she didn't pass out. She felt herself being picked up. Looking over the robot's shoulder, she noticed someone standing in a hallway to her left, a human in the shadows. She knew who it was; she recognizes his trademark white t-shirt and board shorts. Instead of his usual flat-brim baseball hat, he wore a gas mask. The eyes were huge and lit up with green light and she thought he looked like an alien. Or a praying mantis.

She was carried over the robot's shoulder. Duke followed behind. There was a hiss and they passed through a doorway into a dimly-lit hall with dark green walls. Tanya could tell they were walking on carpet by the way their footfalls were muffled. She could hear an old hip-hop song playing somewhere.

Another hiss and they passed through another set of doors and now they were in some kind of medical centre. It was brightly lit and everything was sparkling chrome and white cupboards and countertops and Tanya was laid gently down on a hospital bed with the crisp sheets wrinkling beneath her. She looked up with mild amusement at the face of the world's first intelligent robot.

Even though she'd never seen it before, she felt instant recognition. It was the way its mouth turned up slightly at the corners and the way its eye-lenses tracked her own. She knew it was made of silicon, carbon fibre and metal, and yet she was certain she was looking at another human being.

It reached towards her and she felt another sting in her shoulder. Icy cold swept through her; it felt like she'd been splashed in cold water.

'What the fuck?' she said, shaking her head.

'Wu?' said the robot, recoiling swiftly.

Tanya pushed herself up in bed. Suddenly, she felt mortally afraid, as if she'd awakened from a pleasant dream into a living nightmare. She grabbed the bed frame and looked around wildly for Duke. She called his name, even as the robot advanced around the bed, its hands raised.

'Wu,' it said and she screamed.

'Hey,' said a voice, 'it's okay,' and Matt the Creator stepped into view. He no longer wore a gas mask and he held Duke, scratching the dog behind the ears. Duke was licking his hand. Even though Tanya knew how old Matt was, he looked remarkable young, still pretty much the same college kid who'd risen to fame early in the new millennium. His curly hair looked as unkempt as ever and with his freckles and glasses he looked like a kid.

'Wu, this is Tanya Pool. Say hello, Wu.' said Matt.

'Wu,' said the robot and brought its hands together and bowed.

'It's. It's,' said Tanya, trying desperately to think of something to say. 'Fuck,' she managed.

'It is a he,' said Matt. Duke began struggling and Matt stepped up to the bed, close enough for Tanya to reach out and stroke Duke's head and scratch him where he liked it under his chin. He smiled at her and she wished he could talk.

'Look,' said Matt. The robot extended its hand, palm up, to her. Its white fingers were long and delicate-looking. There were black sensor pads on its fingertips. Tanya could see the whirls and whorls of its fingerprints. Slowly, tremblingly, she reached forward and touched it.

It felt smooth and impressionable like a person's skin with tissue, blood and bone underneath. The finger moved slowly in a circle, softly, then down the front of her index finger. It traced around the inside of her finger and touched her interdigital fold. It tickled and she closed her hand.

The robot hand mirrored hers, closing into a loose fist. She looked at its face. The eyes looked at her and she wanted to say sorry for some reason but didn't. Everything felt a little surreal.

'Isn't it wonderful?' said Matt, breaking the spell. She looked at him. His eyes sparkled with tears. With his free hand, he wiped his eyes then wiped his fingers on his chest. 'You've done it, bro. What you've always wanted.'

'Wu,' said the robot, looking from Tanya's hand to his own.

'That's right,' said Matt, coughing and laughing.

'How did you know-' Tanya started to say but there was an explosion nearby and the floor shook beneath them. They could hear yelling and banging coming from the hall. Small arms fire erupted and the doors flew open with a fan of flames. Valentina strode into the room, followed by a dozen black-masked Anticaps.

'Haiiii,' cried Valentina: a war cry. Tanya could see the whites of her eyes, the black barrel of an Uzi; the barrel was belching fire. 'Kill the oppressors!' Valentina screamed and the barrel sparkled again and bullets ripped into the counters and cupboards.

A couple Anticaps made a beeline for Matt. Duke wriggled from the man's arms and landed on the floor. His nails skittered on the floor as he scrabbled under the bed.

'No,' cried Matt as Wu stepped forward. Guns roared and bullets glanced off the robot. Tanya saw it falter as she slipped painfully onto the floor. Duke tumbled into her and she curled around him, protecting him. Without thinking, she found her phone and began livestreaming.

She and about ten million people watched the robot grab the nearest Anticap and throw him against the cupboards with a sickening crunch. There was a series of bangs and thick green clouds of smoke pumped out of two canisters skittering across the floor.

The robot leaped through the air like a tiger, landing on one man's shoulders then sprang again, twisting and discarding his prey, onto the back of another. Guns blazed. Tanya could hear Valentina cackling somewhere in the smoke then her laugh turned into a gurgling scream. There was a sustained burst of fire then the shooting stopped.

Tanya pulled Duke close, pushed herself painfully to her knees and stood up. Holding the camera in front of her, she staggered into the gas.

IV

Coughing and sputtering, her eyes and throat afire, Tanya forged forward. First, she came across Valentina. She was lying on her back on the floor. Her jacket was torn and pulled back like a cape. You could see patches of her skin through holes in her shirt.

Tanya's gaze travelled upwards. Valentina's lipstick was smeared all over one cheek. Her neck looked weirdly long and disjointed and something hard pushed up against the skin. Valentina's brown eyes stared at Tanya, unblinking. Even though she looked fucked up, Tanya thought, the young woman still looked beautiful as hell.

Tanya stumbled on, wincing and trying not to cry out from the pain shooting up her right side. The red light in the corner of the screen blinked at her and she followed it forward. Out of the smoke, like a graveyard memorial, appeared two figures seated on the ground.

There was the robot, sitting up, with his head slightly bowed, the perfect picture of sorrow. In his arms lay Matt. The man's head tilted back and his hands and feet were totally slack. Tanya stopped and watched. The robot didn't appear to have noticed her. The way he cradled Matt looked like he offered the man for some higher power's appraisal.

'Wu,' said Tanya and stepped forward.

The robot stopped rocking and looked at her. For an instant, the eyes were white, then they turned red. The robot stood up, letting the dead man slide to the floor. Wu stepped over the body and came straight at Tanya.

'Stop,' she said, 'Wu,' as it came relentlessly forward.

And her audience of millions gasped as one as their view was suddenly dislodged and the robot went spinning upwards and all we could see was red circles for a second. Then we all looked at a dark screen with a little fringe of light in one corner. The phone had fallen face down on the floor. 

But there was still sound, though. Oh, those terrible sounds we heard on that eventful day back in 2021: that day the robots took over.

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.

Extinction Level Event

It seems long ago since my uncle, Rear Admiral Jonty Price Williams, came bounding into his study where my step-aunt and myself were trying to cool down. The summer of '21 was utterly oppressive. The windows were flung open, but that only allowed the hot sticky air to sidle in and ooze down our necks. My uncle, who was a portly man, was perspiring tremendously.
"I say, you two," he said, bustling over to the chaise lounges and looking down at the pair of us. My aunt, Lady Fairweather, waved her fan at him desultorily and sniffed. "How would you like to escape out of this torpor and have a jolly old adventure?"
Though the heat was almost stupefying, I found myself interested immediately. You see, my uncle was renowned for undertaking the most marvelous, altogether spiffing adventures and I'd been begging to join him forever.
While Lady Fairweather tutted, Uncle Jonty sat on the edge of the divan. He began regaling me with visions of soaring dunes, craggy mountains, dangerous animals, and really everything a girl of thirteen could dream of.
We would be gathering species for the National Museum, he told me. In light of our planet's rapid warming, and subsequent mass extinction, they had charged my uncle with the important task of saving those unlucky species whose time had run out.
My head filled with fantastic visions and soon my trunks were packed, along with my nets and traps and other accouterments of the exploring trade. After saying goodbye to my aunt, we jumbled down to the quay where uncle's old steamer, the Albatross, awaited.
I had a whale of a time, throughout our journey, spotting belugas and bluefin and mighty Balaenoptera musculus. We watched stingrays swim through luminescent blue algae, and electric-blue krill glowed at night.
As soon as we touched land, we bundled into a procession of old Land Rovers fully kitted out for adventuring along with a dozen or so hired men and drove our way across the entire continent in thirteen days to the base of some mountains on the northern edge of a desert.
We approached the mountains from the west, Uncle Jonty and I in the foremost Land Rover. He drove, and I leaned forward in my seat, craning to look up the sheer-sided cliffs that jutted ahead out of the desert.
A few hundred feet up, the cliffs disappeared in thick clouds. Their underbellies were dark and heavy, and the air was dry and electric. Uncle Jonty called a halt, declaring that we'd make camp before ascending the mountains the following day.
While the hired hands set about fixing up tents and campfires, I wandered away, following the wall for a few hundred yards. A few scrub bushes, like the gorse of back home, grew wildly out of the rock.
I thought I heard something and approached the cliff. Yes, I could, in fact, hear a certain rhythm, as if pounding. I put my cheek against the rock and jumped back. It was hot! I leaned in again and heard unmistakable pounding as if of a heartbeat.
The rhythm was quick, far faster than my own heart. As I listened, the beating grew quicker and quicker until all of a sudden, it stopped. Silence returned so quickly that I couldn't be sure if I hadn't imagined the whole thing.
When I told my uncle after dinner, sitting alone by our fire, he took a drink from his hip flask and looked into the fire a long while before answering.
“There's something in there,” he said.
And he proceeded to tell me the real reason for our journey. This mountain was part of a chain of mountains stretching around in an enormous, and altogether complete, circle. An impenetrable wall of rock enclosed sixty thousand hectares of untouched wilderness.
Jungles, rivers, lakes, and forests lay just on the other side of these peaks, representing the last untouched piece of land on the planet. Not only that but our government, using observation balloons and low-flying planes under the guise of the National Museum had ascertained that an entire race of people, previously undiscovered and uncontacted existed peacefully in this walled garden.
It was this fact which spurred them to contact my uncle. This land, which we were about to discover, represented one of the most valuable finds of the century. Who knew how many new species of flora and fauna existed within reach? Our country's government was not ready to let such a precious discovery go unexploited.
And so, early the next morning, my uncle and his men unloaded crates from the Land Rovers. Soon, huge silk sacks were slowly inflating in the cool morning air, and half a dozen hot air balloons stood to attention.
I climbed into one of the baskets with my uncle. It was filled with stores, equipment, and traps. A few rifle muzzles protruded from a canvas roll. I could feel myself trembling with excitement as the gas jets flared. I felt the basket lift off the desert, and we rose into the air.
Soon we were in the glowering clouds and visibility reduced to practically nothing. It grew cold and I started to shiver and my uncle wrapped me in a thick blanket. He had to keep working to stop the ice building up on the controls. He waved a flaming blowtorch back and forth over the control panel.
Suddenly there was a bright flash of lightning. Thunder cracked. I heard my uncle yell and he pointed and we watched a balloon careen through the sky to our left, misshapen, deflating, and smash into the wall. I heard men's cries as the basket turned over and a couple of human figures fell reluctantly out.
Lightning flashed again. Thunder deafened us. It was continuous and the balloon rocked wildly, crazily tilting to where my stomach lurched and I was sure that I too would fall to my death.
And then, as suddenly as it all began, we lifted out of the storm. There was golden sunshine and a bright blue sky and a cool, gentle breeze as the balloon lifted peacefully above the top of the mountains. Below, you could see the land we were about to exploit: emerald forests, aquamarine rivers, and turquoise lakes. A giant flock of birds, the color of rubies, flew beneath us.
I heard a hissing noise. The battered balloon was leaking from a dozen or so holes and we began losing altitude. Looking around, we ascertained to our horror that we were the only balloon in sight.
As we approached the jungle canopy, my uncle pointed. There, in a clearing, we could see three animals side by side. They were the size of ants from where we were, but I could see they were jaguars sitting back on their haunches. Then, remarkably, three humans walked into the clearing and stood next to the cats, looking up at our plummeting machine.
When we were skimming the treetops, my uncle opened the valve and the protesting motor made one final attempt and gave up the ghost. We dropped the last few meters and, with an almighty crash, smashed into the branches. I was thrown clear and that's all I remembered.
The next thing I knew, I found myself propped up in bed being tended to by three of the most remarkable women I'd ever seen. They were very tall and ethereal and they moved around me with such grace that they appeared to be floating. They spoke to each other in twittering, birdlike phrases that sounded like laughter.
I was still very much dazed and confused and I hardly knew where I was. The women served me sweet-smelling tinctures in fine wooden bowls and pungent but not unpleasant tea and I began feeling better.
I wondered where my uncle was and as soon as I could speak, I asked my guardians. The women replied in laughter and left the room. In a moment, they returned with a procession of men, similarly tall and ethereal. Two of them carried a throne, upon which sat my uncle, wearing a cast on his arm and a very bemused look upon his face.
From then on, well, what can I say? It was all very much a wonderful blur. Riding aloft in hand-carved thrones, my uncle and I were carried out of the hut and into their city. And yet, the word city hardly does their utopia justice.
The people's homes were built in and as part of the trees. Rope ladders and walkways wove through the jungle, like arteries in a vast circulatory system. Thatched huts swayed gently here and there, suspended by twisted vines. Inhabitants laughed and waved as we paraded by.
High in the branches of the biggest tree, rather like a fig tree, perched the chief's abode. There, with seemingly the whole village peering in at the windows and doorways, the chief, for lack of a better word, surrendered her village unto us.
Bowing low to the floor, the old woman took off her headdress made of colorful flowers and feathers and offered it to my uncle, who, in the ensuing silence felt inclined to place it on his head.
For the next few weeks, we were treated like kings, nay, may I say it, like gods. Every day the entire village proceeded before us as we sat on our thrones in the chieftain's hut. They surrendered all their possession, their animals, and lands. The chief served us as if we were her masters!
The most delectable infusions, the sweetest ambrosia, the finest garments were plied upon us. Neither myself nor my uncle could believe the luxurious stupor in which we found ourselves. The rich dishes and extravagant wines left us reeling in our seats for hours and days on end.
In between feasts, we were shown the village, riding in thrones atop two villager's shoulders. Never before had I seen such precision, such detail, such architectural wonders and feats of structural engineering.
The villagers jabbered in their wonderful, singsong language while showing us how they lived entirely sustainably with the earth. Amazingly, they had managed to find equilibrium. By taking no more than they needed and returning as much as they took, these benevolent, beautiful people lived alongside Mother Earth in complete symbiosis.
My uncle and I stayed up late at night, alone in the chief's hut, surrounded by gifts, discussing the world-changing discovery we'd made. My uncle was beside himself and grew impatient about our departure.
One day, after treating us to the most fabulous feast thus far, everyone around us grew silent. Something was different and I sensed a change in the air. Drummers entered the cabin and the villagers all began chanting.
From then on, this splendid paradise turned into a veritable nightmare. We were grabbed from behind. Our arms and legs were tied tight. Hoisted aloft again, this time bound and gagged, we were carried to the base of the old fig tree.
There, in the roots, a passage led down into the darkness like an opening mouth. We entered and descended for what felt like miles underground. It grew hotter and hotter and there was a rumbling sound. The drummers increased their pace and the chanting grew louder.
Up ahead, the tunnel opened and we were brought into a vast chamber. Orange and red lights danced on the walls and the heat was intense. It smelled like rotten eggs and I saw great volcanic pits boiling and erupting in the center of the chamber.
Great spurts of lava jerked through the air. Little red and gold gobbets rained down, pelting the black rock, splashing and sizzling. Smoke and sulfurous clouds billowed around us as our captors approached the fiery pits.
My uncle was ahead of me. I could see him struggling against his restraints. His eyes were wide and his face was like a mask beneath the wild headdress. The drummers drummed faster. The villagers' shrieks reverberated off the stone walls and ceiling.
In this hallucinatory scene, I found myself praying, praying to a God I didn't believe in, praying to Mother Earth and to Science; I prayed to whoever might listen. For a second, I thought my prayers were answered. All at once, our captors stopped chanting.
But no, this pause was to wait and watch my uncle as he was carried up the side of the fiery pit, hoisted aloft and, with a great shout from the villagers, thrown in. Then they turned and reached back for me.