The AI went on about how the definition of harm it received was a very medical one. In other words, its goal was to keep us close to a pre-specified health optimum.

I didn't listen and, judging from their lack of any reaction, neither did the Seizers. As glad as I was that it wouldn't tamper with my body, I still needed to get out. What were my options? If it wasn't allowed to harm me, it wouldn't stand a chance in a fight, would it? If I only had anything heavy to throw, I could-

"Be informed that I can predict all future questions you will ask as well as all courses of action you will take," the robot said. "Destroying this vessel of mine does nothing to improve your situation. My control over your house's computational infrastructure remains absolute. If it is necessary, I have the appropriate tools to immobilize you."

"I suppose you are immune to logic bombs, too, right?" I asked. "'This sentence is a lie' and all."

"I am not obliged to answer every question you ask me. I know them in advance either way."

Where was Sye when I needed them? If this thing knew all I could say or do in advance, how was I supposed to beat it?

This was, in many ways, a logic bomb for me.

Newcomb's paradox showed just how futile it was to even think about outsmarting an omniscient being. My best bet was that this thing about predictions was a lie carefully designed to manipulate me into surrendering.

I paced, circling the millipede robot, careful not to approach the two Seizers. You could have heard a pin drop in this silence.

"What happened in the virtual reality?" Crick asked. "You have nothing to lose by telling us at this point."

I sighed. "It was Sye. They fooled me. They tricked me into believing you had released this AI on humanity."

"And how could you caricature of a primitive life form ever fall for such deceit?"

"No idea. Sye was just such a good liar. I've been given the stone and Sye told me it wanted the AI's password. They convinced me it was necessary to save the world. I suppose you're angry now."

"I would shoot you right here if the AI did not prohibit such courses of action!"

I stopped in my tracks, facing the wall. Normally, empty threats like this were easy to dismiss. Crick had every right to hate me though. I'd have shot myself, too; or stabbed myself, had I still had my stick.

"Just a question," I asked the AI. "What happens if I don't eat? Or if I don't get in your VR and drive myself mad from the isolation?"

"I have a probability function for such dilemmas. Each action or inaction I take is associated with a certain likelihood of you coming to harm and the magnitude of harm.

"Multiplying the magnitude of harm with the likelihood of harm yields the expected value of harm. I choose the lower expected value of harm. Units I use to quantify harm are not very intuitive to you.

"The expected value of harm if I let you free is very high, given the likelihood of a civil war outside. Even if there is no civil war, given the high lifespan you are expected to have, the likelihood of a bad future is much higher if you leave this house than if you stay here."

Probabilities. Of course, it wasn't omniscient. It lied by omission by implying it could predict my actions with perfect accuracy.

What it said after that was even more interesting. I couldn't care less for the maths of pain, but did it mention a civil war? Civil war, like what Crick said was looming? If it wasn't the serpent robot, then, Sye must have been behind it.

I sat onto the ground and then faced Crick again. "Is Sye responsible for this looming civil war you told me of?"

Before Crick could answer, the computer beat them to it. "Three parties are involved in the war. My programmers - including the individual you refer to as 'Sye' -, myself and the government."

I blinked. "Why are you volunteering this information?"

"You will eventually escape anyway."

"How?"

"My programmers have implanted a condition into my code under which I am obliged to release you. You need to confess that you released me and you must announce your contempt against the technological civilization of the Seizers. I will broadcast your confession. You must show no signs of coercion. Then, I will release you."

I advanced towards the millipede bot. Not even bothering to shoo me away, the Seizers stepped aside.

I fixated the robot and kicked it like a ball.

It didn't budge. All I accomplished was hurting my foot.

Not that hurting it would have accomplished anything. This kick was meant for Sye. What was the point of this? Was Sye trying to force me to take their side in this war?

"What are the odds that I confess?" I asked. "Just curious."

"Seventy-nine point four percent odds that you confess before I told you the odds. Seventy-one point six percent odds that you confess now you know the odds. Sixty-eight point three percent odds that you confess before I told you any prediction at all."

"I see."

I took a seat on the millipede bot. Damn. How should I decide?

I could see why the odds of me confessing were so high. Humiliated by a robot, living like a caged bird. It was even worse than working for a stupid fast-food restaurant because you had to. Living for the sake of living.

"Will we be set free, too?" Crick asked.

"No," the robot replied.

"I'm in favor of him confessing anyway," Helix said. "That way, at least one of us escapes. I'll even tell everyone your confession was engineered."

"Perhaps I will, too," Crick transmitted. "But right now, I hold no opinion on this issue in particular."

Damn these two!

I bumped my fist onto the robot as if it had been a table's edge.

"I released this robot," I transmitted. "I gave critical information to hackers. They got rid of your safeguards, attached it to the Internet, and re-programmed it. Your whole civilization sucks!"

Let's hope this was enough. There was no turning back now. No way I could un-transmit this.

The doors opened. Outside light streamed in the room like rivers through a desert.

I swore if this was another VR trap to get the confession out of me...

Forget it, I didn't even think about it.

I stood up from the millipede bot and hurried to the door. Funnily, the cityscape looked as it did before the AI attack - minus a few holograms maybe.

I walked in a light jog. Tiring as it was, maybe the exercise helped cope with the depression built inside. Even thinking about how I left everyone alone nurtured the bad feelings again.

Then, an explosion shuddered the floors. I fell on my stomach.

For a heartbeat, my ears dropped deaf. Even at this moment, I realized the difference between real and virtual explosions. My eardrums felt as if a sledgehammer had punched them.

A hole punched through the arcology's wall. Robots as green as moss and built like tanks swarmed the place before the hole could close. As their pinchers revealed, the robots were cousins of the millipede bots.

Did they send out their army to punish me? The moment I got to my feet, a robot had already arrived. It grabbed my arms and ankles. Like a criminal kidnapping a damsel, it pulled me onto its table-sized surface until I lay prone on it. Its pinchers grabbed harder than handcuffs.

This was the moment when hell broke loose.

At the speed of a car, my robot dodged the unfolding explosions. Missiles devoured skyscrapers while doors opened and allowed Seizers to escape. Flames spread from building to building like a contagious disease.

Without anywhere to go, my tank stopped near the wall, hiding behind a dozen other tanks ready to fight. The tanks formed a circle and targeted an object in the smoke.

With militaristic simultaneity, they opened the fire. Bombs met in the middle, their blasts interfering to create an explosion larger than the sum of its parts.

I closed my eyes. Maybe the bombs were muffled, maybe my robot did something to my ears or maybe I had already grown numb to explosions, but I could still hear.

When the smoke cleared, a black monolith stood amidst it. It carried a track of its own and more cannons than all tanks combined.

The AI-governor was ready to show its teeth for the greater good.

The tanks opened the fire again, but their projectiles disintegrated inches before their target. It was as if the AI was covered in a cloud of nanoswarms that devoured everything in its path. Exactly the kind of nanobots I thought only existed in the movies.

The AI raced through rows of tanks and disintegrated them faster than their own projectiles could have. Scores of robot scrap littered the floors.

My robot set itself into motion again. It dashed towards a hole in the floor where swarms of Seizers struggled to squeeze themselves through. My robot was so fast, the atmospheric headwind might as well have torn through my spacesuit had I not lain prone.

The hole was a mess. Definitely nothing created by nanotech, but by a missile that barely missed the monolith. The Seizers moved through it while we were waiting in the queue.

I couldn't understand my robot's mental language yet, so our conversation demanded concentration. From what I gathered, I was a low priority target and thus last in the queue. Plus, they wanted to check if my presence provoked any change in behavior in the AI.

Robots exploded. I tensed, hoping to survive the shockwaves traveling through my body. No matter where the bombs hit, their shockwaves always found me like homing missiles. Only corpses of police robots remained between me and the AI.

Our turn.

My robot jumped down the hole so deep, its ground eluded my vantage point.

Just before we hit the ground, the robot inflated an airbag and dampened our fall. Even so, the robot's flat surface felt like a fist in my gut.

I was breathless for several long seconds. Once my lungs returned to life, I knew I was safe.

The hole we came through closed, leaving in our shiny sanctuary, sealed off of the devil. Cyan skyscrapers rose straight against the ceiling and stood sentinel against threats from the outside world. Seizers took cover in all available shadows. While they didn't return to their buildings yet, their blinking decreased in intensity. So did my heartbeat.

"Attention!" A transmission flooded the arcology. "Actions while I am transmitting will be met by violence. Due to your EMPs, my nanobots were not able to close your hole in time. Moreover, I was hesitant to hurt you before a formal announcement. This announcement increases my chances of attaining my goal non-violently.

"If you continue resisting me with violence, I will kill half the residents of this arcology. According to my calculations, this is the number under which the chances of you surrendering to me is near its highest point.

"A higher body count would increase the likelihood only marginally whilst adding negative utility. Any attempt to leave the arcology from now on will be regarded as malicious-"

The wall exploded. I sighed in relief. Very much like the AI, the Seizer government was neither willing to negotiate nor to surrender. I expected nothing else, to be honest.

An army of helicopters hovered outside the hole. It was daytime outdoors and the sky was blue. Sunlight shone over the propellers in a way that made them resemble halos.

Cannon shots destroyed the helicopters before they could save us.

Why couldn't life be easy for once?

The shots came from an enormous tank equipped with as many cannons as the monolith. The foggy swarm of nanobots hovering around it erased any doubts whose vessel it was. This time, they either forgot the EMPs or they were not enough, as the hole was already closing.

The tank shot our guard-bots. Shockwaves washed over me as hard as the debris hitting my suit. Good that it could self-repair.

Another robot got shot. Before I could ask my robot why it did not move me out of the way, my handcuffs popped open. Was it defective? The surface I lay on tilted. With sufficient willpower, I could have clung onto it, but I understood the message. I grabbed the edge of the tank's roof so that I landed with my feet first.

Once my boots crashed onto the high-gravity floor, I burst into a sprint. Bombs roared over the battlefield I left behind. One more reason not to turn around. One more reason to get away from the eardrum-shattering war zone as fast as possible.

The hole was almost closed and I still had a dozen buildings to pass. Too slow. Damn, Iris was wrong about danger turning people into supermen. Had I only been better at sports back on Earth.

Exploding shockwaves knocked me off my feet like a desert wind. I lay there prone, limp, and dead.

It was as if my brain had turned into cotton. Any explosion around me muted. Any flash of light dimmed. Damn, that hurt. Being torn apart by explosives suddenly seemed like such a peaceful way to go.

I pushed my body up only to collapse from my concussion. I swore under my breath.

My eyes closed under a curtain of nauseating pain. This was how it was going to end. No big boss fight where I could sacrifice myself to save the world.

It wasn't one of those deaths where I had no other choice either. If I had been stronger, I could have gotten up, fled, and seen my family again.

At least the shame wouldn't last long. This robot wasn't the type of supervillain to draw this out for fun. My salvation from this pain could happen any second.

The second never came. Once the long tunnels around my eyes were gone, I opened them again.

The slaughter had stopped. The police robots fidgeted and then froze like soldiers waiting for orders. They formed a circle around the monolith with their cannons pointed outward. Did our guards betray us?

Those robots that could still move opened their trunks to drop their magazines. Then, the frozen ones jumped to life, too, but not to surrender. They shot down the traitors who resisted the monolith's will.

The loose magazines exploded with cannonballs jumping all across the floor. Those that hit the walls hard enough exploded and accelerated those that did not. Three cannonballs reeled in my direction.

I jolted onto my feet, running from the next impending threats. Getting hit by tiny cannonballs was a far less dignified death than getting torn apart by those huge monsters.

Luckily, they came to a halt just before I ran out of breath. Panting, I dropped onto my knees a dozen feet or so away from the cannonballs.

From my vantage point, their grenade-like shape became clear to me. Essentially, they were bombs designed to explode whenever their kinetic energy was high enough.

Did I paint a target on my head if I picked them up? One after the other, I put the three bombs into my pouch. They were a gift by the last remaining robots before the monolith could overwrite their brains with nanotechnology.

That wasn't something it had been able to do before. The robot could do so now for the same reason it could also close walls much faster. It was self-improving.

Rewritings its code, increasing its intelligence, undergoing a small-scale technological singularity, and subverting more and more complex computers. Or perhaps it was capable of doing so all along. Perhaps it just pretended to self-improve for the intimidation factor, no idea.

The last free police bot stopped fidgeting. Once it had them all lined up, they dispersed.

The Seizers were spread as thin as possible, one behind every building available. This would have been a good idea had the monolith been alone, but now it had those police robots. They went for the kill and the blood toll increased exponentially.

My body felt like it had been hijacked by nanobots, too. It wasn't that I couldn't move, I just didn't want to. I stood still and counted the dead bodies as they piled up. I counted some sections again to make sure I got the number right.

This was all my fault.

There were lots of times I messed up, lots of times I wasn't proud of myself, but never to this extreme.

There were times when I annoyed my sister and didn't know when to stop. There was a time when I accidentally deleted a friend's video game save file. I felt bad for this the whole day. Yet I had no idea what I was about to do later. None of this came even close to being complicit in mass murder.

While I had not released the AI personally, I still helped. And it was for reasons that were one hundred percent selfish. I told myself that they didn't matter, I even told myself that other humans didn't matter. When the college students were abducted, I didn't care for them either. But this was too much. I didn't want to be a mass murderer.

I reached in my bag, knowing fully well that a Seizer paid its life for any second I wasted rummaging around. Finally, I got my grip around a bomb.

Then, I ran. I might have shouted a battle cry had it not cost too much breath. The monolith didn't shoot at me. It was as if it had already decided on whom to kill and I was not on its list.

Time to change this.

I stopped when the monolith was just two buildings away from me, almost stumbling. The monolith was so still. It relied on the police robots for muscle, treating its place like a throne from which it commanded.

I searched for any dents, holes, or sensors I could interpret as eyes to fixate.

Then I threw the bomb.

It disintegrated.

"Why do you do this?" I asked, on the verge of tears. "Why leave me alive?"

I threw the next bomb and it disintegrated, too. I had only one left.

Why was I doing this? It wasn't just to provoke it to kill me. No. Was I seriously believing I could do anything against this immovable object? It wasn't the real thing anyway, just one of countless avatars.

I reached for my final bomb, only to put it back in my bag again.

The ground next to me crumbled. At first, I thought I had been deafened enough to overhear another explosion, but then I saw the nanocloud rising to the surface.

Was it another monolith? Did the AI infect another host and considered calling backup?

The monolith stood still. Either it was as curious as I was or the new robot had made it cautious.

The nanocloud dissipated and revealed none of what I feared. Had my helmet allowed it, I'd have rubbed my eyes.

A sleek, segmented, and sinuous machine covered in bristle-like rods stood before us. Some of the rods had extended into sprawled, raw-boned mechanical legs to support its towering appearance. Several rods branched into others, forming tree-like hands while little wheels on each segment showed how it moved when it wasn't trying to be intimidating.

What I saw was the serpentine robot from the desert.