Wilson 2.0
/Robogenesis
By Daniel H. WilsonDoubleday, 2014In 1954's The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov introduced detective Elijah Bailey and his partner, the humanoid robot Daneel Olivaw, to audiences who awaited artificial intelligence with cautious hope. Decades later, director James Cameron showed us what might happen if robots decided to heat up the Cold War in his triumphantly savage Terminator films ('84 and '91).At opposite ends of the spectrum, both fictional futures emphasize that sentient machines won't be like other tools we've created—nuclear power and religion, for example—that help or harm depending on who wields them. Independently thinking robots (or more likely, computer networks) will be alien, just-fathomable beings deserving a basic respect that we frequently deny animals and each other. How they'll respond to us, their creators, remains one of the richest mines in science fiction.Asimov's robot universe (including the I, Robot stories and The Naked Sun) feature two of his landmark creations: the positronic brain, which mirrors ours, and the Three Laws of Robotics, which prevent robots from directly or indirectly harming us. He nevertheless explored human/robot relations through the lens of his own society, namely the incipient Civil Rights era of the 1950s. Early in The Caves of Steel, one scene involves robot clerks in a shoe store drawing customer scorn. With a mob just outside, a woman vents that these simple models have forced real men out of work.Today this scene reads quaintly, with a chuckle; robots serve us at the check-out counter, but then again they are the check-out counter, not burnished humanoids that might inspire rioting. Enter Robotics PhD Daniel H. Wilson and his latest offering, Robogenesis. This sequel to 2011's Robopocalyse follows survivors of a global war against the A.I. Archos R-14 as they cope with a decimated civilization. And this story, like The Caves of Steel once did, targets the emotions of modern readers.The chaotic guerrilla war of Robopocalypse started when Archos became self-aware and decided that humanity was a virus to be exterminated for the sake of Earth's biodiversity. This meant turning the millions of gadgets populating Wilson's very-near-future—the robot domestics, the sophisticated toys, the sex dolls, the smart cars, and everything else Apple adherents would wait in line a month to buy—against their owners. As society crumbled, members of Oklahoma's Osage Nation organized the resistance and created the Gray Horse Army. Archos, meanwhile, initiated the evolution of wild, “freeborn” machines, capable of bootstrapping themselves into weapons of war. A clever
I'm being flayed alive, straining and groaning against black spider legs gripping my body, doing drunken pirouettes in the slush. Knotty black arms are slicing into the meat of my thighs, sprouting smaller feelers like barbs. Others grip my biceps, elbows, forearms, and dammit, even my fingers.
The monstrosity then severs Lark's spine and starts using him as a meat puppet. The twist, however, is that with Archos defeated, these freeborn creations are no longer waging total war against humanity. Lark, now a shuffling robotic zombie, can direct his own movement while merged with the parasite's black frame.Setting up the epic conflict of the True War, Wilson pivots to Hank Cotton, also of the Gray Horse Army. Cotton is a petty man, jealous of heroes like Lark, and eager to gain some advantage in the ruined world that they've just saved. While on lookout in the woods, he finds a strange cube in the snow—and Wilson introduces one of his new villains with tightly-crafted creepiness:
The woods are even darker now and the pretty colors of this thing are flashing in my eyelashes like Christmas morning. The light it makes is hot against my cheeks. It's warming up my fingers through my gloves like a loaf of bread hot out of the oven. Up close, I can tell it's making real quiet noises. A flow of static like the breath of wind over a creek bed full of dry leaves.
Hank remembers his mother's warning against spooklight (which probably refers to swamp gas), and the dangers of praying to heathen phenomena. But the glowing cube—actually an Archos thought component—speaks soothingly, so he picks it up and hides it from everyone. Holding it, he feels like a “walking talking million-dollar bill.”Eventually, the rising intelligence of Archos R-8—or Arayt Shah, as it calls itself for sinister effect—compels Hank to surgically implant a chip in his own head, for better control of both the man and the army. Across the globe, in an underground bunker storing stacks of processing hardware, Arayt explains itself to Russian researcher Vasily Zaytsev as an earlier iteration of Archos that had been discarded. Where R-14 wanted to study a controlled remnant of humankind, R-8 does not.
A gelatinous blob of transparent plastic is sifting slowly up the shore with each shallow racing wave. Hundreds of plasticlike tendrils radiate from it, dancing in the froth. The thing is a machine, yet I can see no purpose for it except to live.
That's Takeo Nomura speaking, an elderly Japanese man whose sex doll Mikiko came fully to life, and now rules benignly over the freeborn robots. Their chapters are comparatively gentle, meditative, and it's through them that we can best see the stunningly thoughtful Wilson 2.0, who has tamed Wilson the juvenile action buff. There's still reams of paper dedicated to flying bullets, sure. But the notion that artificial intelligence may choose a form that isn't human, may choose to exist for its own sake without catering to our narcissism, is a beautiful one.Robogenesis, like sentient machines themselves, reflects the individual's depth of vision. Dudes at the beach need only enjoy the action and gore, followed by nightmares about Siri. Other readers will see Wilson's ending—in which the “deep mind” Ryujin initiates a new race of synthetic organisms—as the sparkling rebirth of a potentially shallow series. Of greater concern is whether or not the horrors of total warfare will, in sixty years, be as embarrassing as a shoe store riot.____Justin Hickey is a freelance writer, and editor here at Open Letters Monthly.
