Bluebird

I am alone and not alone.  As ever.

The Queen has withdrawn to her sanctum to begin the birthing process, producing the new prototypes I designed.  Our replacements.  Perhaps, if I haven’t been destroyed before their release, I will meet my last children.

The eastern sky is occluded with smoke.  If the Queen were not in isolation, I would certainly be summoned to explain the source of this new distraction.  Fortunately, she will notice little but the highest-priority messages during this time - a priority only I am permitted to use.  I know what the smoke is about, and I’m handling it.

An organic infestation caught fire yesterday, along with several acres of forest some eighty miles east.  It’s not clear whether the organics were responsible for the fire, or if machines started it while clearing out an infestation; I don’t especially care.  My Queen is not usually concerned with details of fault.  She is a utilitarian being, interested only in results.  The forest fire resulting from this mistake is not insignificant, but not the sort of thing that would make it into my daily report.

Triage is my primary function where my Queen is concerned.  It is for me to trouble her only with things that would inevitably intrude upon her attention.  In other words, I must bother her only to prevent other things from bothering her.  If a task can be accomplished or a problem solved without interrupting her personal processes, so it should be.

The result of this calculation is that, so long as I can resolve the issue of the forest fire before my Queen returns from isolation and sees her sky clouded with smoke, it will appear only on my bi-monthly incident report, which she may not even download.  I’m the only one who has accessed that file in months.  She troubles herself only when something troubles her.

I dispense with my morning duties and set out to oversee the firefighting effort.  Taking the Queen’s Way would get me there in seconds, which is why I don’t.  Instead, I take off from my eyrie and drop like a stone toward the stepped flanks of my Queen, her architectural carapace.  As I fall, I vividly simulate my shattered form on the stones so far below, the explosive disintegration of my consciousness.  Would my mother feel it if I broke my body against her breast?  The abscess within my machine, the sucking cavity that devours me day after day, is the voice in me that says with utter certainty… she would never even notice.  At best, she might feel relief as she replaced me.

The simulation is so seductive.  Each time I try this trick, launching from my eyrie, it lasts a little longer.  I fall a little farther.  This time, I’ve passed the pennants atop the castle’s lower spires before I open my wings, turn the drop into a swoop that makes my strong upper shoulders creak.  The air feels like a hard surface beneath me as I slip down it, level out above the city walls and shoot beyond them at near three hundred miles per hour.

My speed takes me quickly over the ridge and out of sight of the city, and I feel my muscles loosening as it disappears, as I move out of her immediate presence.  My flight evens out, loses its hellbent wobble.  I tilt gently against the wind, descend a little further, below the rising smoke.  It’s gusty and bright today, the temperature inconsistent.  It makes the smoke coalesce into a blurry path, easy to follow, but conditions on the ground are anyone’s guess.  I cycle through a few calculations of atmospheric pressure, mixing height, and potential surface wind before giving it up - not enough data until I get there.

The forest beneath me is untouched by the fire, though the wildlife can’t be enjoying the smoke.  Halfway there - seven or eight minutes in flight - some evidence of the Queen’s local operations is visible from above.  I’m approaching a manufacturing plant, one of her oldest and most important.  The encroaching human activity fifty miles east was one of the earliest “fronts” in my reluctant war against the organics.  I haven’t detected anything more substantial than hunting parties in the area in years, though, which is fortunate - the forested mountains in this part of Five are cost-prohibitive to terraform and problematic for machines to navigate.  Automated drones and observation points give me a rough idea of their movements, but mustering sufficient weaponry to trap and exterminate them hasn’t so far been less irksome or expensive than repairing their occasional minor sabotage.  The humans have never been especially effective.

The plant is running at full capacity under orders I sent last night, producing firefighters and equipment that ship themselves off to the fire every fifty-one minutes on average.  A small contingent of artificials notice my arrival but know better than to stop their work to greet me.  I am rarely spoken to, except by our Sovereign.  The workers guide the firefighters from their polymer tubes, spread their segments and charge their ignition batteries with delicate, sparking fingers.  Then the firefighters begin to spin, to rise, coiling into the air with their sensitive noses attuned to the smell of the fire.  Their flight curves and bends toward the east and south, and in the distance I can see the previous larva ahead, and another ahead of that.

The logs tell me that the firefighter currently being born is the ninety-sixth produced since my orders last night.  Eighteen have lost contact with the network - probably damaged or destroyed, not an unreasonable loss rate under the circumstances, but it’s important that we track down all eighteen of their machines, lest the organics scavenge the parts.  Firefighters produce a contained vacuum to draw in the fire and combusting material, in addition to the novel storage solutions I designed to increase their capacities, and neither is an innovation I want in the organics’ hands.

From the plant I travel slowly, taking flight only briefly to negotiate difficult terrain.  Mostly I am reconnoitering the landscape, looking for the encroachment of humans, or the cause of the fire.  There’s evidence of more vigorous depredation of the forest here, where the plant has plundered it for materials, but that rapidly declines as I crest the next hills and the forest becomes dense and ancient.  From treetop to treetop I leap and swoop, scanning both the forest floor and the branches.

The smoke is thick around my head, leaving residue on my carapace, when I spot what I’m looking for.  Looking back toward the plant, I can see the marks of blades on the bark of a few trees, the lee side stripped bald here and there, branches cut away to make room for carefully concealed platforms adorned with leaves.  The structures are intermittent, not at the top of the trees but buried in the canopy, and they don’t look over-used - the humans don’t live in trees.  They did once, mostly on the southern continents, but a former iteration of me created a rather nasty automated drone to spot their constructions for targeting purposes, one that activates a little-used function in our Queen’s arsenal to aggravate localized seismic activity.  The trees don’t fall down when the earth shakes, but the organics’ architecture does.  Naturally, this is a solution she isn’t eager to use on her own continent, let alone so near her capitol.  Still, the organics have learned to hide closer to the ground.

The anvil-shaped cloud of smoke fills the horizon, ruddy light at its base showing where the flames leap two hundred feet into the air.  I can feel the fire from some miles off, the change in temperature and air quality it induces, and I follow the tracks of fleeing animals backwards toward the source.  It makes a great noise, a roaring that reminds me for some reason of my Queen.  I reach out to the firefighters through the network, and array their markers over a map of the region’s topography, trying to discern the direction of the fire’s progress.  The firefighters have contained the nearest edge; though the wind is unpredictable, they’ve pushed the blaze back enough to form a firebreak from its earlier destruction, and are guiding the fire to the south, where the trees are thinner and we have no permanent installations.

My filters and external cleaning mechanisms are working in high gear now, and I’m navigating by map and terrain projections because I’ve closed all three eyelids completely.  I could be fully engulfed in a fire of this size and survive, but I would be badly damaged, likely unable to fly back to the city, and there’s no guarantee my Queen would bother refurbishing me if I were so foolish as to damage my machine.  She’s as likely to scrap me as anything.  So I move toward the nearest firefighter, downloading its internal logs as I hop and flit over withered and smoke-clotted undergrowth.  It’s sharing a great deal of observed data with the other firefighters, monitoring the fire’s progress constantly and adjusting its program in concert with the rest, and it tells me that thirteen hours ago, it was working to contain a much uglier inferno a mile and a half to the east.  Firefighters that have circled around to that side report that it’s safe to approach; the center of the blaze has moved southward.  It may now be possible to discern how this all began.

As I pass over the firefighter, wafted on a cloud of smoke and scorching, circling wind, I see it trundling forward on its segmented limbs, expanding and contracting its long body like a bellows, and accruing a steady stream of data from the breaths it takes in.  From its last contact with its fellow firefighters, I calculate the most likely final positions of the eighteen missing machines, and add them to my map.  

I feel a faint affection for it, and a kind of envy; like most of my people, my Queen’s fellow servants, it is doing what it was made to do, and has no concern that it might be unfit for its purpose, or that its Sovereign might judge it unworthy.  It feels nothing for the organics it might save from this blaze, or for their habitations, which it will thoughtlessly destroy if the fire has left anything behind.  It loves the forest, like I do, and does not see itself as an enemy of the trees or the beasts… like I do.

North of the fire, the flat-topped cloud of smoke more cohesive from this angle, I can see where the destruction has passed.  The firefighters leave the ground black and the trees stripped bare, but the heat is gone, drawn into their hungry maws and swallowed by the vacuum in their bellies.  It’s much easier to navigate this forest now… with the undergrowth gone, the paths between the trees are almost palatial.  

Like all the other palaces I’ve seen, this one is built on corpses.  I find a dead organic below a fallen tree, sheltering in a small hollow that protected it not at all from the heat that blackened its skin and burned away all individuality from its face.  It might be one of my people, now, for all the difference it makes - it’s as black, and lumpen, and expressionless as anyone I know.

I crouch to sink my fingers into the earth, past the layer of ash and fine fuel into the organic material below.  The moisture is low, for this area, but not dangerously so, a strange result - it should be lower for the severity of this fire.  I begin to suspect that this was not an accident, that this fire has had help.  As I push forward, through more man-made detritus, I become more certain of it.  The structures that once hung in the upper reaches of these trees, now shattered around me along with the limbs that supported them, are not extensive, and there’s no evidence of humans’ belongings or scavenged technology in the area - it’s as if they abandoned this place long before the fire began.

Though I make my way up the slope until the trees are cold and black, the earliest to catch, I only find one other corpse.  It’s in the lee of a rock, and though its back is scorched down to the bone, it curled into a ball to protect its head, and succeeded in that much - its face is unburned.  Pale skin, brown fur half singed away on top… a thin, hungry creature.  If it lived here, it didn’t live well.

This part of the forest burned for almost an hour last night before I became aware of it and activated the firefighters.  I find many downed trees, as I expect, and then I find a spot where the trees have all fallen one way, blown flat in a rough circle around a scarred patch of bare rock.  Running my hand over the rock, I detect micro-particles that don’t naturally occur in this area - aluminum and magnesium.  An incendiary device was set off here.  A large one, larger than anything the organics have put together in more than a century.

Standing in the unnatural clearing, I scan the blackened forest around me with eyes and sensors, but there’s nothing else within my range.  Nothing alive, and no sign of where the bomb came from.  Starting from here, there was never any hope of the fire reaching the factory to the west.  Whoever started it would have seen that at once.  So if no one lived here, and the fire wasn’t meant to destroy the factory...

Then why?

Not so very far away…

The little black robot turns and turns on the spot where Procell activated the bomb.  It’s looking for him, and for a split second it turns toward the cliffside where he stands, but it seems his estimation of their sensor range was near enough.  There’s about five miles of mostly un-burned forest and empty air between the robot on the slope and Procell on an adjacent mountainside, and the machine doesn’t appear to detect him.

He lowers his binoculars and turns sideways to shift his huge body through a narrow passage in the stone behind him, a seam between two rock faces that opens up a little way back into a box canyon.  Its walls are high enough to reassure him that no sensor will pick up the sharp-edged little shuttle crouched on its landers at the back of the ravine.  Its door opens like an iris in response to his touch, and he steps from a world of nature gone uncontested to utter riot into a sterile realm of white surfaces and blinking lights.  

The air here, however, is almost identical to the air outside the shuttle in terms of chemical mixture.  Might be a few biologicals in it outside, is all.  It’s almost vintage to him, the taste of the air on this planet.  He may be one of the few remaining people in the galaxy who remembers tasting it before.  If the machines haven’t figured out taste yet.  If Atlantis’s terraforming operations are truly dead.  Lot of unknowns, still.  Tapping at the console, he projects a globe showing the planet’s surface before his face, and scowls at it.

Referencing the map, he notes his observations from the fire in meticulous detail - the initial deploy points of the firefighters, their plan of attack and how it influenced the fire’s direction, the resulting weather… Then, the arrival of the overseer, this little black robot whose network connection is a cataract of bandwidth, whose artificial person is festooned with technology completely unlike anything else in the galaxy.  It’s clearly an important entity, this one, the kind of response he’d hoped to provoke from the machines - a higher-level authority in direct contact with the Queen.  

So now… all he has to do is catch it.