Book 6. Chapter 15: The quick and the dense
“Bad human.” Came the gravely synthetic voice of a Runner.
Not Yrob this time, Abraxas. Same energy though.
The connection request had come relayed through Yrob though. Abraxas had sent the initial message by a mite terminal, which pinged right to a pack of Runners hanging around that terminal. And from them, it was sent to Yrob through the machine network looking exactly like normal gossip between Runners. And Yrob would then patch it through to me.
A giant game of hot potato, and I had no idea how many more hoops it was going through on the other side of the mite wall. It did make contacting the ancient machine a lot easier than finding a mite terminal.
“As I mentioned before,” I said, one hand holding my forehead, “Wrath bought us some time, and I think she really could use some closure on this.”
It had been her city. I mean, once she conquered the scrap out of it. But generally I didn’t hear any kind of negative from her control over the time she had. No giant sweeping changes or regime changes, no abuse of power or trying to terrorize the local population.
If anything she had run the whole thing flawlessly, using her computational speed and giant army of utterly loyal and tireless soldiers as a workforce to get her will done. Things ran better and faster for cheaper and with higher quality. Buildings that hadn’t been renovated for years due to lack of budget were fixed up, roads cleared, infrastructure added, all the gripes of the regular people were getting suddenly addressed for practically nothing. All because she could actively speak to a few thousand people at the same moment, getting direct feedback on what needed to be done and having a direct control via her minions on getting it done.
The people who hated Wrath and all she represented were die hard human holdouts who hated the idea of machines in the first place. Rest of the population quickly found her a mix of endearing, competent, and kind. Most of all her Chosen, who had a near family-like devotion to her.
And then all at once, it was over. The city had to evacuate in every direction immediately, all the machines scattered into the walls, and Wrath had vanished off the maps. For the Chosen, it hit the hardest. Tamery knew what had happened and relayed it to the people, but that didn’t make it any less of a bitter pill to take.