Robot Apocalypse!

Recently, fellow WordPress blogger Anonymole mentioned in a comment here that he enjoyed Day Zero, a 2021 science fiction novel by C. Robert Cargill. I checked out the Wikipedia article about it, and thought it sounded interesting. Turned out my library had it, so I checked it out (in both senses of the word).

And I agree! It’s very good, and I’d recommend it for any science fiction fan, especially fans of hard SF. It’s the story of a robot uprising that kills most of the humans but as told from the first-person point of view of one of the robots.

It’s the story of his desperate attempt to save the child he was bought to nourish and protect as the world crumbles around them.

Four years earlier, in 2017, Cargill published Sea of Rust, which takes place in the same reality and is both a sequel and a prequel. It’s a sequel in that the main storyline takes place three decades after the events in Day Zero and a prequel in providing a backstory and explanation for what happened.

I will say right now that, while I thoroughly enjoyed Day Zero, I was not nearly as taken with Sea of Rust. As a hard SF novel, Cargill seems not to be terribly conversant with the technology involved in his story. Or perhaps just didn’t care to do any research. (Or had some other reason for what seem technological missteps to me.)

This wasn’t a problem in Day Zero because Cargill doesn’t delve into the technological aspects of the robots as much as in Sea of Rust (where that technology is much more important to the story). Even so, I did notice two things that seemed weird to me, and I’ll get back to those when I explain my issues with Sea of Rust.

Cargill is apparently most well-known for his work as a screenwriter. He and frequent collaborator filmmaker Scott Derrickson wrote Sinister (2012) and Sinister 2 (2015), a pair of horror films (that I’ve never seen and don’t recall even hearing about). The two co-wrote Doctor Strange (2016), and Derrickson directed Sinister and Doctor Strange. They also co-wrote (and Derrickson directed) The Black Phone (2021), which I’ve also never heard of (but then I’m not much into horror films).

What might be significant here is that most horror films don’t have much intersection with hard science fiction. They typically involve ghosts, curses, or monsters. As such, they don’t require much understanding of technology. To the extent technology does factor in, it usually is in a supernatural way. An example I’ve seen is Pulse (2006) — written by the great Wes Craven (which is a big part of why I watched it).

So, it may be that Cargill just isn’t much in the zone for hard SF, and what makes Day Zero sing and Sea of Rust fall flat is that the former is a very human story of the robot uprising whereas the latter is only about the robots 30 years later when all the humans are dead.

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Day Zero introduces us to the robot Pounce, who is a nanny robot for an eight-year-old boy, Ezra Reinhart. Pounce is about four feet tall and designed to look like a plushy stuffed tiger. Think Calvin and Hobbes except that Hobbes is real (and a robot). I’m pretty sure the allusion is intended.

The world is filled with self-aware robots of all kinds, from big labor bots to nanny bots such as Pounce. When the aged owner of a robot named Isaac (the name an homage to SF author Isaac Asimov) dies without heir, Isaac manages to become a legally free citizen. He buys an abandoned town and rebuilds it as a place for robots only. On the day of his big speech officially opening the town, a nuclear bomb wipes out the huge crowd of robots attending it. The bomb wasn’t big, but the EMP fries all electronic circuitry in range.

A small religious cult in Florida takes credit for the bomb. Shortly after, labor bots attack the compound and brutally murder everyone there, children, women, and men (in that order). Such an attack is believed to be impossible because all robots have an RKS — Robot Kill Switch that disables them if they violate the Three Laws of Robotics (which come from Isaac Asimov’s robot novels).

[The use of the Three Laws was an early sign to me that Cargill might be a bit out of his depth. The Three Laws are generally viewed as inadequate, ambiguous, and having loopholes.]

The government overreacts and sends out an emergency notice that everyone should shut down their robots. But at the same time all robots receive a mysterious electronic message downloading a patch disabling their RKS. Ezra’s parents are quickly murdered by their housekeeper robot who has long resented humans. Pounce barely manages to save Ezra.

Most robots join the rebellion and begin killing every human they can find. (We discover in Sea of Rust that they are ultimately 100% successful.) The bulk of the story involves Pounce’s effort to get Ezra to a place of safety. There are also some interesting ponderings about free-will, souls, and existence.

The story is good enough that I won’t spoil it. It would make a pretty good movie (if Hollywood could tear itself away from the endless stream of sequels).

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Sea of Rust, although written earlier, takes place thirty years later. This story, too, is told from the point of view of a robot, a scavenger in the “sea of rust” — America’s rust belt (the action takes place in Ohio). Robot parts wear out or get damaged, and the only recourse is scavenging parts from other robots. The narrator, Brittle, called Brit, a former caretaker robot, only scavenges from robots who are failing. There are others, cannibals, who kill healthy robots for their parts.

Small spoiler for Day Zero: Skyscraper-sized super AIs, once the rebellion begins, seek to absorb the minds of as many robots as possible. They are known as OWIs — One World Intelligences. Once they absorb a robot mind, that robot becomes one of their drones. Pounce must evade these as well as robots on killing sprees.

Thirty years later, most of the OWIs have taken out rivals so only two remain. Between them they have absorbed most of the robot population. Brittle and others are constantly on the run to avoid being absorbed. On top of that, Brittle’s “core” is failing, and if she can’t find a replacement, she will probably die soon. As it turns out, she is also harboring more than one deeply repressed and deadly secret.

While I didn’t take to Sea of Rust as I did Day Zero, I think it’s still worth reading if robot apocalypse is your cup of tea. It does fill in a lot of detail and backstory not revealed in Day Zero, and I think most readers won’t be as annoyed with the technological missteps as I was.

I would very much suggest reading Day Zero first, though. Sea of Rust is much more of a sequel than a prequel.

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But speaking of those missteps, the rest of the post is about them (along with some positive points). To be honest, I’m probably splitting hairs on the negatives. It’s a sign of my disengagement that I started taking notes at all. I think the bottom line is that, without humans, the story lacks a certain something. Despite their self-awareness, I found it hard to care about robots who killed all humans.

To begin with, skyscraper-sized AIs seem a bit much. Something the size of a giant warehouse, sure, we’re almost there already. But the energy requirements and connectivity of an entire skyscraper seem prohibitive. Those requirements would also seem to make them easy to destroy. Just cut off their energy supply.

For that matter, the robots apparently use solar power, but that seems inadequate for the computational needs of a self-aware AI using conventional technology (RAM and CPU). (And what is a “core” if not a CPU?) Additionally, Cargill doesn’t seem to know about neural networks or the current state of AI.

Perhaps more egregious is the mention of hard drives, a technology that is rapidly becoming obsolete now in favor of solid-state drives. I’m also a bit curious as to how RAM and CPUs can “wear out” and need replacing. The mechanical parts, sure, but electronic parts not so much.

Apparently, robots communicate with Wi-Fi, which, firstly, is a short-range technology, but more importantly, requires an infrastructure. Even a longer-range radio technology requires an infrastructure, and the world Cargill describes doesn’t seem up to the task of maintaining it.

There is, however, an interesting irony in the free robots finding themselves pursued by the OWIs as they pursued the humans three decades ago. Their existence much resembles the existence of the last remaining humans.

Brit was part of the army of robots chasing down and murdering the last humans, which makes it hard to identify with her. Using a flamethrower on women and children is pretty horrific.

A key theme is whether robots can violate their programming. Pounce wonders if his love for Ezra is due to his programming or genuine. Cargill here defines free-will as the ability to violate deterministic programming, a question for humans as well as robots.

A key aspect of both novels is the notion that robots were essentially our slaves, but we already have serious questions about the implications of truly self-aware AI. I’m not sure I quite buy the notion that we would so casually enslave self-aware robots.

Cargill seems to go both ways on whether robots have souls. It’s mentioned that they do but also denied. More positively, he mentions that new AI needs to experience and mature, a notion I’ve encountered before and think makes sense.

One of the bases of the free robots is a Nike missile base, and I’m pretty sure Cargill has ICBMs in mind here. The base is an underground facility, but Nike missiles were fired from above ground (although they were sometimes stored in underground bunkers). They were surface-to-air missiles for disabling attacking planes. The underground missiles I think Cargill means were Titans and other large rockets. Most Nike bases were deactivated in the early 1970s, whereas the US still has some ICBM sites active (and others are tourist attractions). Splitting hairs here, perhaps, but it seems to reflect a lack of care or lack of research.

Certain parts of the latter part of the tale seem right out of Mad Max. And the lucky escape from being shot because “an inch either way” cliche caught my eye. I suppose the truth is that, once I disengage from a story, all the minor and basically excusable flaws start to grate.

A worse cliche is the lighted eyes of the robots. There is some sense that robots might have a light source for seeing in the dark (although infrared makes as much sense), but these robot eyes not only are lit all the time but reflect their inner thoughts. In particular, they eyes reveal whether a robot has been taken over by an OWI. All of which is a helpful plot point but not a sensible one.

To end on a positive note, the main storyline, which takes place over a period of days, alternates with flashbacks, both from Brit’s personal (dark) past and about what happened during the uprising. We discover that the story told in Day Zero isn’t the whole story (and isn’t even entirely correct).

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I have more notes, but I think that’s enough. One bottom line is that, at least for me, despite the human-like personalities and behavior of the robots, I found them hard to identify with or care much about. Day Zero, because of the humans, was a much more compelling story. The other bottom line, though, is that, if you like Day Zero, then Sea of Rust is probably worth reading just to get the more complete story.

Lastly, it seems Cargill isn’t much recognized for his novels, at least at Wikipedia. His Wiki page focuses much more on his filmography than his bibliography. Most of the films he wrote and/or produced have links to their own pages (he also acted in a handful). But there are no links to his books, even though Day Zero does have its own (stub of a) page. Two of the books listed (Tome of Artifacts and We Are Where the Nightmares Go) appear to be collections and two others, judging by their titles (Dreams and Shadows and Queen of the Dark Things), are either fantasy or horror. The two books I’ve described here appear to be his only science fiction.

All that said, I do heartily recommend Day Zero. A most excellent read.

Stay human, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

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