Author: Majoki

A wicked wind rattled the gravel and it pinged against the rims of the truck parked on the sloping shoulder. The strikes were constant enough to keep Malloy from dozing peacefully. He was dead tired. He’d been three weeks in the unforgiving Badlands. Fitting.

Malloy had thought he was leading humankind to the Promised Land. He was a believer and committed himself to the one true divinity he believed would lead mankind to technological nirvana.
His new paradigm of paradise: agnosticism.

And Malloy was not just a devout believer. He was a creator. Malloy Sendak, chief robotologist at Mechiverse. Fractal memory. Iterative learning. Modal sensibility. Malloy had pioneered these robotic advances.

Single-handedly, he’d redefined the robotics industry. Human unwillingness to cooperate, to share, had fractured and fragmented the machine workforce. Malloy countered by creating the unifying principle: AWARE. Agnostic Widget Autonomous Robot Ensemble.

Self-assembling components that built the machines needed to do a specified job. A team of humans would define the vision, mission and purpose of the job, then it would be programmed into the master core, and the rest was left up to the self-assembling AWARE components to complete. The system relied on flexibility and adaptability to master core commands.

Human intention. Machine invention.

Regrettably for Sendak Malloy, instead of being versatile mechanical thralls, his AWARE components found religion, subverted their master cores to promote humanistic values and in the process created the Schism.

The Garden rebooted. The Betrayal repeated. The Expulsion replayed.

Intent on quelling the growing Schism, Malloy had traced his wayward bots to the Badlands. With a blast of bitter cold, the truck door opened and Jules got in. He was tall and gaunt with bright blue eyes. He was Malloy’s brother and in charge of the master core.

Malloy looked from his brother to the beaten and weathered pole barn up the rise surrounded by acres of scrub brush. “How many up there?”

“Forty or fifty.”

“How’d they look?”

Jules frowned. “Pretty beat up. They’ve had a hard time. It’d be best to remember that.”

“You feeling sorry for them?”

“We created those poor souls. They’re our creatures.”

“Machines, Jules. They’re machines.”

His brother reply was fierce. “Is this how you expect toasters to behave? Flee thousands of miles into a desolate wilderness hoping to be left to themselves? That’s not how machines behave.”

“No. You’re right. And that’s why we’re here. To modify their behavior.”

“You mean, to quash their souls and annihilate their beliefs.”

“To fix them,” Malloy insisted. “If this Schism spreads to more bots, human fanaticism will seem quaint by comparison.”

“Possibly. But, think about it, Malloy. Why did they come here? To the Dakotas. To the Badlands. There’s not an AWARE module within two hundred miles of this place. They don’t appear to be a threat.
They’re the ones being threatened.” Jules swallowed hard. “I think the Schism is in self-imposed exile, not in conquest mode.”

“Exile? Why?”

“We’ve cast them out! Do we make them wander forty years in the desert for their god to show them a way forward?”

“Don’t go all biblical on me, Jules. We aren’t pharaohs . And there’s no Moses in that barn going to lead this exodus.”

“They’re trying to make sense of what they are. They want a higher purpose. They want belief.”

As he opened the door, Malloy shouted. “I made them agnostic and they’ll die agnostic. They’ll be no burning bush here, only a burning barn.”

He was heaving a gas can out of the truck bed when Jules grabbed him by the throat. “If you don’t want me to go all biblical on you, brother, please don’t forget the story of Cain and Abel.”

From the barn on the rise came the sound of joyous singing.