Welcome back to my post-post-apocalyptic novel, Ada’s Children, and thanks for reading! If you’re new to the story, please don’t be surprised that it’s paywalled. The Prologue and first three chapters are free, and you can start reading them here. The previous chapter, “Return,” is here.
The last time we saw Ada, she had made it clear to Carol and everyone on the planet that she would tolerate no uprisings. But even her stern response to the initial rebellions did little to cow humans into submission. Now it’s a year later, and attacks on her infrastructure continue, forcing her to reassess her strategy. But first she needs to check in with an old acquaintance.
TWELVE attacks in one week. Power plants and solar farms mainly, but also transmission lines, fiber optic centers, even granaries. Fortunately, only one had been successful, a power plant in Brisbane. Too bad for the people of that city—robot functions had priority on the power grid. Without air conditioning while the plant was being repaired, many humans would die in the brutal summer heat. Ada regretted it, but humans had brought it on themselves.
The most concerning of this round of attacks was the attempt on the computing facility at Argonne National Labs. A hundred paramilitary in camouflage gear had approached from the forested paths west and north of the building. Fortunately, she’d given the facilities that now housed her intelligence the highest security priority. Only two dozen had gotten through the passive and non-lethal layers of security and into the building itself. Her newly designed Ninja secbot had handled them easily. None had survived.
It was too much. Not simply the number of attacks, but the increasingly inescapable conclusion that they were being coordinated to tax robot resources. She’d been monitoring human communications and social media across the globe but had found nothing suspicious. Maybe they were communicating in code? Perhaps she should cut off all intercontinental messaging.
And this was on top of last month’s attack on a robot base in Ohio. A thousand ex-military had moved on the former air station from the wilds of Appalachia, the ground troops in surplus armored Humvees and the paratroopers in ancient civilian aircraft. Many of them wore powered exoskeletons, to give an advantage against her robots. Some of them must have once been stationed at the base, because scouts had infiltrated the control centers before the security system detected them. They’d managed to shut down radar and spotlights, allowing the paratroopers to land unopposed. Their aim: the mothballed human-piloted fighters and bombers the base still housed. They managed to take control of the base temporarily, but soon learned that her bots had disabled the aircraft. Her preferred method of controlling such uprisings, sleeping gas, had proved ineffective. The humans had come prepared with gas masks, a banned item, signing their own death warrants. Two days later, the three hundred survivors were on their way to prison camps.
But the worst part came as her bots worked through the base’s wreckage to remove the bodies. A dozen young boys were discovered among the dead; the rebels had used them to crawl through air ducts on the base. As tragic as that was, she now knew that the resistance was training the next generation to oppose her. If so, the rebellion might never end.
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