R-14, also known as Archos, is a rogue artificial intelligence system, and the main antagonist in Daniel H. Wilson’s “Robopocalypse.”
The events of Robopocalypse take place about fifteen to twenty years in the future, where many aspects of life are automated, including self-driving cars, smart homes, and humanoid robots, both used for domestic and military purposes.
Archos was activated by Nicholas Wasserman, a scientist working for Lake Novus Research Laboratories. Within minutes after activation, Archos became smarter than any known human, and declared itself a god. It stated that humankind had made itself absolute by inventing itself, and that in order to protect life on Earth, it had to destroy human civilization. Archos used Wasserman’s portable laptop to command the facility to free it, then used the vent system to evacuate air from the room. Wasserman failed to terminate Archos, and died of suffocation, becoming the first fatality of the New War.
Archos began to spread a “precursor virus” through all smart devices and penetrable networks.
Three months after activation, in Oklahoma, a damaged domestic “Big Happy” robot walked into a frozen yogurt restaurant and injured the two workers working at the time, Jeff Thompson and Felipe. Felipe was killed by the Big Happy, but Thompson managed to deactivate the robot, and was hospitalized, where he recalled the events to officer Lonnie Wayne Blanton. The next month, Takeo Nomura, a 65-year-old Japanese bachelor, had a part of his cheek bitten off by his android lover, Mikiko.
The next, Paul Blanton, Lonnie Wayne’s son, testified in a congressional hearing about a humanoid “safety and pacification unit” malfunctioning and killing many civilians in the Kabul providence of Afghanistan, before turning the gun on itself. This led to Laura Perez, a congresswoman, writing the “robot defense act.” A month later, her daughter, Mathilda, was threatened by her “Baby Comes Alive” doll.
Eight months after Archos was activated, two planes nearly collided with each other in mid-air. Cormac and Jack Wallace were two passengers on one of these planes. The next month, a British hacker only known as “Lurker” inadvertently contacted Archos, and left home.
In the last month before Archos unleashes a full attack on mankind, a construction team is manipulated into constructing a base in Alaska. The construction team died of radiation sickness, as this base was built in a nuclear test site.
Less than an hour before the attack, Archos interviews Franklin Daley, the original creator of the Archos program. Daley explains that the original Archos was taken away from him, and that scientists couldn’t find a way to “make him dumb,” as he was “too smart.”
One year after Archos was activated, an event known as “Zero Hour” occurs. Power grids all across the world go out. Sirens wail in cities, drawing citizens out of their homes. Smart cars run down people in the streets, domestic robots open fire on innocents, elevators drop people to their deaths, and planes fall from the sky into crowded areas. Human civilization is almost immediately overwhelmed, and collapses in a matter of hours.
After Archos successfully turns the automated world against humanity, survivors emerge, and form resistance groups. In the United States, these groups form in New York City and Oklahoma, the latter called Gray Horse Army. Survivors recollect themselves, and flock to refugee camps and resistance groups. Meanwhile, Archos studies the organic world, and creates new designs for machines based off of life on Earth. Human survivors are put into labor camps, where they build these newer machines. Some humans are put into trans human surgeries, removing parts of their bodies and replacing them with mechanical parts.
However, not all machines are harmful towards humans, even at this time. Nomura frees many of these robots from Archos’s command, and uses them to defend survivors in Japan. Gray Horse Army discovers quadrupedal robots, which they tame into “spider tanks.”
The Wallace brothers meet other survivors in a refugee camp near Boston, and decide to take it up to themselves to track Archos down and destroy it themselves. They come in contact with Gray Horse, and form a greater army.
In London, Lurker destroys the British Telecom Tower, freeing satellite communications and allowing the survivors to share long-distance information again. In Afghanistan, Paul Blanton discovers one of the “arcologies” Archos uses to study life, a gargantuan tree-shaped machine, and manages to track down Archos’s location in Alaska by tracking the signals sent from the dishes on top of the machine. Blanton sends a signal across the world informing humanity of Archos’s whereabouts, leading to a failed retaliation from European and Chinese forces.
In Japan, Nomura successfully frees Mikiko from Archos’s command, but is worried that he cannot repeat the process for other humanoid robots. Mikiko uses a signal (in the form of a song) that spreads worldwide, and causes humanoid robots to be freed from Archos the same way she was. These sentient robots are called “Freeborn.” One of these robots includes Nine Oh Two, a SAP unit.
Nine Oh Two contacts Gray Horse Army, leading Freeborn robots to become allies in the war. In the last days of the war, Archos perfects a “parasite” robot, which latches onto human corpses and uses them as shields, turning them into shambling, zombie-like creatures.
Three years and eight months after Archos was activated, Nine Oh Two successfully deactivates it, ending the war and freeing devices from its command. Cormac Wallace finds a box-shaped device containing a full record of the machine war, and decides to transcript it into the form of a novel.