Digital Exodus Chapter 11 (Patreon)

Phew. This was a trip to write... and long too. Hope you all enjoy! Big hints as to my eventual plans for Coven too.

The transport landed with the thunk of magnetic clamps activating, and the front ramp exploded open. The first wave of DS controlled bots pushed out of the new opening and were immediately hit with a hail of bullets, each one silent and deadly in the open vacuum of space.

It was terrifying, and for a moment I wanted to flee back into virtual reality. Then I remembered that nobody on our side could actually die. I didn’t want to think about the people on the station, though. They fired missiles at us… but they were real people. Goddess, couldn’t they just fuck off? This was mental!

All of a sudden, as I moved towards the open bay door, a dark shape flashed over from somewhere behind my transport. The humanoid figure fired multiple times from wrist-mounted guns, and the incoming enemy fire came to an abrupt end.

“Turrets are down,” Rosa said over comms. “Move fast, secure all exits.”

She stood still long enough for me to actually get a look at her. The body she was using was a combat frame but obviously far more advanced than mine, along with being humanoid. With all the bug-like robots swarming over the surface of the station, she looked like some sort of alien queen sending her brood out to destroy her enemies. Actually… that’s exactly what she was.

I received updated orders and an objective marker, so I followed along with a dozen or so other bots. Glancing around at the station, I was vaguely in awe of the place. It had these big butterfly-wing solar panel arrays that connected in with spindly arms to the core of the station. The core itself was a hundred metres of long black tube with a whole host of different protrusions. Some were obviously airlocks, with their hinges and clamps designed to lock onto visiting spaceships. I could also see turret emplacements at regular intervals along the hull, many of which were now throwing sparks. The biggest irregularities on the hull were the excessive number of missile launch tubes. They were all covered by their hatches right now, but it was obvious what they were for. It hit me then, that this station could have single-handedly wiped out all life on Earth. Despite the fact that I was in VR controlling a robot with no sensation output, I felt a chill run down my spine. Oh yeah, this station needed to die.

More transports were landing while I inspected the station, and I finally got a good look at what we were using in Earth’s orbit. They were your standard wedge-shaped surface to orbit shuttle, but painted in radar absorbing paint and sporting crude grappling apparatus. I think I recognised the model as a cargo hauler made by one of the many space-borne corporations.

A ping alerted me to the fact that the airlock my squad were heading towards was opening, and I rushed to catch up. Time slowed while the doors of the airlock swung outwards, creating cover for the defenders as they attempted to regain control of the surface of their station. Guns swung this way and that, seeking targets and finding them in our dark insectoid bodies.

Bullets began to fly, and two of my robotic brethren went down… until another one leapt at a defender and began to stab them over and over with their pointed feet. Globules of blood sprayed and drifted everywhere, and his buddies began to move to help their teammate. More bots jumped in, and the space inside and around the airlock was turned into a vicious zero-g abattoir. It was so fast, I didn’t even get time to help. One of the UNSN marines had his arm ripped off, while another was disarmed and flung out into open vacuum with a dozen punctures in his suit. It was brutal, and I felt a little sick.

Eager to be helpful in a way that didn’t involve chopping up humans, I skittered my robotic butt into the airlock and straddled a data access node. Out of my robot’s belly extended a little universal data cable, which I slotted into a plug on the node.

Aggressive anti-intrusion AI came at me so fast I was automatically thrown so deep into time-dilation that I lost physical control over the bot due to the cognitive dissonance. It was a good thing too, because if it weren’t for the automated response the AIAI would have fried my bot with rapidfire bulk data right then and there. Chaos burned down the cable, with ports opening, getting blocked, and closing before both myself and my adversaries moved on to more subtle methods than simple DDOS attacks.

I was far from the best hacker, but I knew how to deal with low level swarmer AIAI like these ones. Copying the entire OS of my bot onto a virtual partition, I quickly disguised a number of executable strings, spreading them out through configuration files and credentials for things like my battery and motors. Basically, setting traps inside the files that my enemies would probably use to damage my robot physically. Then, I let the AIAI into the partition. They swarmed it, instantly investigating the battery pack controller in an attempt to prompt some burnout there. Instead of creating any magic smoke, they allowed my little traps to piggyback down their connection. At that point it was remote code execution, remote code which  quickly copied administrator privileges for the terminal and sent it back to me. With that, I had full control over the airlock, and I killed the AIAI processes.

“Airlock is mine,” I told the other nearby ranger bots.

“Nice work!” a familiar voice crowed. Jason! Wait… oh god, it was Jason who yote that poor marine out into space?

I gulped. “Whoa, I didn’t realise it was you who… like, that guy who is drifting out there…”

“Jackbooted thugs riding a doomsday hammer in orbit don’t get the luxury of a good death,” he said with false joviality. “Plus… I have some anger to work out on UNSN marines.”

“Right… okay,” I said with a mental nod. “Uh… yeah anyway the airlock is mine.”

“All units who have taken control of their airlocks, it’s time to enter the station,” Command said, almost speaking over my repeated declaration.

I moved to open the door, but paused when Rosa flipped around and clamped magnetic feet down on the ‘floor’ of the airlock. Up close, she looked… terrifying. Her robot was entirely custom built, probably by the bodyworks division of Exodus. It was all angles and black metal, except for the face plate, which held four glowing red eyes. Two were larger and centred where you’d expect eyes to be on a human, while the second pair were smaller and just slightly up and to the side.

Over one of the robot’s shoulders was a black cape with two coloured stripes along the hem, one a neon blue, the other a faded pink. She looked like… like the leader of a machine army who wasn’t interested in taking prisoners, to be honest.

“Open it,” she said, her voice cold through the robotic voice filter she was using.

I sent her a digital thought packet that was the equivalent of a nod, then triggered the emergency venting procedure. Normally, when an airlock opened it would close both doors and pump air into the space, then open the inner doors. Now, I was opening the inner ones without even closing the outer. There was no blast of pressurised air escaping, though. They’d already depressurised the station… interesting.

As soon as the doors slid open, Rosa began to march inward. Her footfalls clanked each time they made contact— the magnetic soles of her feet switching on and off in time to her stride. Around her on the walls, ceiling, and floor, my robotic comrades swarmed inwards.

Flashes of gunfire at the end of the hall seemed like they would put an end to her villain march, but instead a sheen of dark metallic liquid formed in front of her. Any bullets that hit it simply disintegrated, spraying dust everywhere. Meanwhile the robots began to return fire.

The exchange of bullets was brief and intense, with several bots being torn to pieces… all while Rosa continued to walk steadily towards the marines who were taking cover on both sides of an intersection in the passageway.

A new comms channel became available while they stopped to reload and we continued to rush them. Oh goodness, it was their comms channel. Someone in the Exodus was tapped into it and relaying it to anyone who wanted to listen.

Out of morbid curiosity, I tuned in.

“Exterior is still in enemy hands,” said a male voice tinged with tightly controlled fear.

The gunfire started up again, and this time Rosa raised her arm, the one covered by her cloak. A sparkling trail snapped into being, connecting her arm to the faceplate of a UNSN marine. Heat bloomed for a split second, then the whole helmet exploded, taking the man’s head with it.

“F-fuck!” Someone screamed on the enemy comms channel. “They have fucking lasers!”

The arm moved, and this time the barely visible beam carved right through a bulkhead. She swept it inwards, melting a line through the corner that the marines were hiding behind. It was obvious she made contact with enemies, because of the screaming.

This time, their bullets were far less accurate and there weren’t even close to as many. One marine dared to try and peek to get a better shot, but several bots trained their LMGs on him and he was rewarded with several new holes in his suit and his flesh.

A few more moments and the first of our bots reached the intersection to find the remaining two marines with their hands up.

“They’re surrendering,” I whispered into the Exodus ranger’s comms channel.

“This entire station will be nothing but molten slag and vapour soon,” Rosa said dispassionately. “Bind them or kill them, the result will be the same.”

My whole being rebelled. They’d quit, they were done, this wasn’t… “Wait!”

Rosa quirked her bot’s head and looked at me. “Hmmm?”

“There’s one way they can get out of this with life…” I said, trailing off. “We can give them the choice. Die now, die on reentry… or join us as digital sapients.”

“And allow them into the Exodus? That does not sound viable,” she replied, and raised her arm towards one of them.

“No, no!” I blurted. “We’re ramping up manufacturing now, we can make a PoW server… plus they’d be stupid not to join us in the long run. We can get some proper soldiers out of this maybe.”

I was just voicing whatever the hell idea that I thought might spare these two people… and it was stupid. From a survival standpoint, from a security standpoint… but it was just the moral thing to do.

Rosa was silent for several seconds, then her whole bot shook itself slightly and she nodded. “Handle it… and this is a notice to all Exodus forces on the station. Prisoners will be permitted to choose between transferring their consciousnesses into an Exodus PoW server or being welded to the walls of the station to ride it to the surface.”

“Fuck me,” someone muttered nearby. “That’s cold.”

“Alia’s approach is correct for the soul of the Exodus,” Rosa stated, turning to stare at each bot with her glowing red eyes. “But it is important to remember that these people are not fighting a just and ‘civil’ war. They’re bent on genocide, and we are their victims. Show mercy only when they lay down their arms. Everyone but Alia… continue inwards. We must secure the station and the files on those servers. We have reason to believe this is not just a black missile battery site. I have spent the past several years trying to find this place and now they have finally pulled away the cloak of secrecy on the Temple…”

She didn’t elaborate, and instead turned and began to march off down a passageway.

Phew… okay… now to convince two UNSN marines to make the jump into digital. Sure. No problem…

First, I needed to actually speak to them. To that end, I snaked out two articulating data cables and jacked into their suits. Both of the marines had been sitting very still with their backs against the wall and their mag boots locked to the floor while the whole debate with Rosa happened. Now, they twitched in surprise as I connected to them.

“Hello,” I said cheerfully. “Can you hear me?”

“Yeah,” two voices said, one male, one female.

“I’m Alia… Um, I’d say it’s nice to meet you… but uh…” I gestured with a pointed robotic leg at the carnage in the intersection.

“Yeah,” the woman said with a barely contained sneer. “‘But uh…’ Those were my buddies, bitch.”

I sighed and tapped her on the breastplate. “I’m speaking to you to deliver a choice. Rosa, the humanoid robot who almost shot you just now, says you have two options. Three, technically, but two are the same in the end…”

“Can we get to the point?” the guy blurted. At first, I thought he was being angry like the woman, but after playing back the audio with time dilation active, I realised he was scared…

“Right,” I said. “We’re going to drop this station into the atmosphere. You can either ride it down, or you can come with us…”

“Aw, shit… I don’t like the way you said that last part,” the man gulped.

“Yeah, what do you mean?” the woman agreed.

“Your suits are fully VR capable, with neuron interceptors and everything, correct?”

They both nodded.

I cleared my throat… even though I didn’t have one. “So you can be digitised. That’s what we mean when we say you can come with us. Your consciousnesses will be stored on a prisoner of war server. It will just look like VR to you… probably whatever scene you feel like. We haven’t exactly thought much further than that, however. We didn’t intend to take prisoners, but it didn’t feel right to just kill you with your hands up like that.”

“A robot with a fuckin’ conscience,” the woman muttered, shaking her head.

“Actually, I was human until pretty recently,” I chirped… and suddenly realised I was speaking to two strangers just fine. That, of course, led to my brain suddenly refusing to continue the streak. No, no, no! Not now. Argh! Absolutely terrible timing, anxiety brain!

The man perked up. “For real?”

It was a hell of an effort, but I managed to push through and throw some more words out. “Yeah. I was born in Sydney, Oceania. Made friends with an SAI, started dating… realised that being flesh was shit when we could make better bodies… joined up with the Exodus… you know. Actually I started dating her after I made the jump, but you know.”

“Ay, a lesbian robot!” the man laughed nervously. “The things we do for some pussy, am I right? Can’t say I ever gave up my mortal form for a chick, but this one time…”

“Oh for fuck’s sake Parsons,” the woman groaned. “We’re being held at knife-point by a robo bitch and the rest of our squad is dead!”

“Oh, and calling her a bitch is going to keep us alive, huh Williams?” he responded acidly. “You know what, if there’s chicks in this Exodus thing, I’m in. Scoop my brains out or whatever. I’m done! God! Closest thing to action I’ve had in a whole year is communal showers with this raging asshole next to me.”

“You fucking wish you—” the woman began to say, only to swear loudly when the man’s now very vacant body went limp.

As his body began to float off from the wall because of the lack of gravity, I looked to the woman. “What would you like to do?”

“Burn in hell, robo bitch!”

I sighed in resignation, cut the connection, and welded her suit to the wall. The desperate marine was right… repeatedly calling me a bitch was not the best way to live through this whole encounter. I just… talking to strangers was hard enough without them also being literal soldiers fighting for the enemy. I should have asked someone else to do this…