The God Complex by Demir Barlas

Author:Demir Barlas [Barlas, Demir]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781648717147
Publisher: DB
Published: 2020-03-28T22:00:00+00:00

9 NO KILLER ROBOTS

“This installation’s abandoned,” Salt said. “No soldiers, no automated defenses.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“We did periodic pulse-surveys of all Laurasian installations every ten years after the Shield went up. I accessed some before we left.”

“What’s a pulse-survey, anyway? Did you have eyes and boots down here?”

“What need? You’ve seen the storms. The planet itself is prostrate; I hardly expect earnest Laurasian robots, like those Tappanese soldiers who refused to surrender, to have whiled away the millennia in search of revenge.”

“That’s a great deal of protestation, Salt.”

“I hang on those stories in which progressive, innocent men and women stumble upon deeper dangers in the wilderness. How exciting to be set upon by troglodytes or alien monsters! How rewarding to enact the dramas of survival! And what suicidal boredom in facts. In having ended humanity and wrecked its cradle.”

And Masters had to admit that the installation or facility or whatever one called it was not only physically but also spiritually deserted. Places but lately full of humanity had their own auras, like the sad aura of his own home once Lily had left it. There were no killer robots. There were no faithful drones. There were no troglodytes or alien monsters. The planet had brewed no surprises in the two millennia of the storms, in all these centuries of human absence. If Seaboard was a necropolis, so was everywhere else.

The Laurasians, normally addicted to cheap construction, had built this particular facility well, and it had resisted the dust and ice of ages. The hallways were as meek and clean as if they anticipated the captious tread of the Emperor. Once the portal was breached, there were no further doors. Cenobital cells alternated across the hallway—empty and boneless little rooms and with no obvious function.

“PROBIT would have run the place,” Salt explained. “The rooms would have been for mechanics and mathematicians.”

“Empty!”

“After a while, he was beyond drift. He wouldn’t have needed anyone.”

Masters and Salt moved quickly and soon reached the elevator. The installation had frightened both of them to their respective capacities, and each was glad of the other’s company in the tombal silence. The elevator had only one destination, and it was eager to be of service for the first time in so long; it conveyed the two visitors to the very lowest level of installation.

At the bottom, the door opened to disclose a well-lit control room at the center of which stood a man. This man requires some description, because he was a synthesis. It would be more accurate to describe his, as three men. This man was the Virtue brothers: Carr and Acanthus and Topaz. The best bits and pieces of the brothers had been assembled into a new being—and with considerable skill, but not enough to pass without comment among acute human observers. Creditably, Masters didn’t hesitate; he tapped the orange weapon to stun the synthetic man, but the weapon didn’t respond.

“This was called Virtue,” said the man, looking down at his own body and speaking Anglic with an antique accent.

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