By Noel K Hannan

I suppose to tell the story properly you'd have to start with my Dad. I guess you could say all this, all of it, is his fault. Of course, he's dead now, one of the first casualties, and people seem to think he's a bit of a hero for trying to negotiate with them. What they don't know is that he was forced to do it, and he told those who had forced him to do it that it wouldn't work. Machines operate on logic. A decision is made via a logical sequence of deductions. You can't impose your own set of decisions, as logical as they might seem to you, on top of that. You can't argue with machines. And if you can't argue, you can't negotiate. Dad wasn't a hero. He was a genius, a gifted engineer, and a fool. But he was, above all else, my Dad.

But I'm getting way ahead here, aren't I? There are some people who pretend this never happened, that it was all an elaborate hoax, to cover up a real war - you know, between people. The media is pretty selective these days, and I must admit that close as I am to the story, on paper it looks outrageous even to me. But it did happen. I can prove it. I have the scars. I was that soldier.

So - let's start at the beginning. That must be, oh, five years ago now. I was fourteen. Dad was working as a designer for Mech Wizards, a toy and software firm that operated in one of those industrial parks outside the city. They worked him pretty hard - he travelled an hour each way every day, and often he worked late in our garage workshop at night too. I was at that 'funny age' when you only communicate with your parents via grunts and demands and bodily functions, and never really took a lot of notice of what Dad was up to. Often I would lie awake at night, listening to (as Dad called it) 'grave music' in my headphones, my room illuminated by blue flashes from Dad's welding torch in the garage, and idly wondering what he was doing. Little did I know the details of his secret, oh-so personal project.

Then Dad came home one day and told Mum and I that he had been fired. Apparently he hadn't designed a decent toy in years, Mech Wizards was almost bankrupt, and had given him the push. He was surprisingly cheerful about it. Mum and Dad argued all night after Dad said he was 'going freelance', and later I fell asleep with my headphones on to drown out the sounds of shouting and stuff being thrown.

Weeks passed. Dad rarely emerged from the garage. Mum fretted over the bills on the kitchen table. I began to wonder if Dad had just gone crazy, and became curious about exactly what he was up to in the garage. It was time to find out. I would rather have crept in while he was out, but he wasn't away from the garage very often and when he did, he locked it with a huge padlock. There was no other option than to confront him.

I decided that it would be better to do it at night, when Mum would be asleep. On the rare occasions Dad and I communicated it invariably ended in an argument, so I thought maybe we could do this without involving Mum. I waited until she was in bed, and Dad's flashes and crashes were lighting up the garden, and ventured downstairs.

Our garden was paved and had a kennel and run for our dog, Jake, a ten year old deaf German Shepherd who had long grown accustomed to the strange goings-on. He barely stirred as I walked past him to the garage door. Blue fire flickered around the frame. I leaned against the door, and pushed.

Dad turned, a welding mask over his face, leather apron studded with bright metal swarf, his welding torch blinding and furious. I backed away, he flipped up the dark visor.

"Oh," he said. "It's you. Come on in." He switched off the welding torch. My eyes felt as if someone had thrown a handful of sand into them. I rubbed at them furiously.

"It's arc-eye," said Dad. "Don't rub them, you'll make it worse. It'll clear in a minute or so."

Dad sat me down on a stool until the tears cleared from my eyes. When I could see properly again, I accepted the offer of a handkerchief from a metre tall battle robot.

It stood there, all blue and red armoured panels, squat on booted legs, LEDs blinking intelligently behind a curved, mirrored visor. Its head was cocked at an angle that accurately mimicked human concern. I took the handkerchief from its outstretched, gauntleted hand. It saluted me and turned sharply on its heel, marching back across the garage to where two of its compatriots, of similar but subtly differing design, stood guard in front of Dad, who was sitting in front of his PC. He grinned at me. "Are you impressed, David?"

I was, but all I could manage was a grunt. That was okay, Dad was used to that. I tore my eyes away from the three robots and looked at the PC's screen. In three windows there were three overlapping video views of my face from slightly different angles. The robots were watching me.

Dad placed his hand on the curved helmet of the red and blue robot that had given me the handkerchief.

"This is Athos," he said. The robot inclined its head. Dad touched the white and gold one. "This is Pathos." He placed both his hands on the armoured shoulders of the black and silver one, which immediately snapped to attention. "And this, David, is Aramis. They are of course - "

" - the Three Musketeers. I know, Dad, you must have read that book to me a thousand times."

Dad looked kind of sad at the mention of this, as if it had happened a long time ago. He stood up and brightened.

"Do you like them, David? This is what has kept me going for all these years. All those depressing jobs, all that rubbish I designed for Mech Wizards, all of it was just to keep this alive. Do you think people will like them, David?"

"Like them?" I watched as the three robots played mock battles around the cluttered garage, shooting each other with laser tag pistols and performing dramatic TV-stunt deaths. Dad controlled them all with deft keystrokes on the PC. "I think they're going to take over the world."

Things happened pretty quickly after that. By the time Dad was ready to present his designs and prototypes - now as a freelancer seeking a contract of course - to the close-to-closure Mech Wizards, the Three Musketeers had developed a rudimentary artificial intelligence utilising an embedded neural network coded in the open source language of Jazz. At least, that's how Dad explained it. Left to their own devices, the robots would explore like curious toddlers, lifting ornaments from tables, testing the weight and placing them gently back down, stroking - and inadvertently terrorising - family pets, watching television. I quickly grew used to them being around the house, and it was fascinating to watch them learn to use everyday household items or negotiate the stairs. Dad could take instant command of them from his PC, and had Internet-enabled them prior to the Mech Wizards presentation, so they marched smartly into the Commissioning Manager's office in response to a command from Dad's PDA. I went with him to Mech Wizards that day, and I can honestly say that it was the proudest day of my life. Little did I know of what was to come.

The Commissioning Manager of Mech Wizards was a funny little weasly man called Gremlinson. Dad didn't like him, I could tell, but he was the man with the golden chequebook as far as Dad was concerned, so it was important for him to be impressed. He sat behind his desk and watched the robots perform around his office without a flicker of emotion on his face. When Dad had finished the demo, he politely asked us to excuse ourselves while he made a phone call. Dad and I left the robots lined up neatly in front of him, and waited in the outer office. We heard some shouting on the other side of the doors, and Gremlinson came back out looking a little flushed. The robots eyed him curiously.

"How much do you want?" Gremlinson asked.

Dad just smiled.

Mech Wizards wasted no time in marketing and putting into full production the Three Musketeers, although the name was dropped, and the three designs became the Athosateks, the Porthosatrons, and the Aramisabots. Dad could have sold his revolutionary designs to the highest bidder, but he was stubbornly loyal to Mech Wizards, even though they had treated him pretty shoddily. The 'bots got their own prime time manga cartoon show, comics, t-shirts, movie deals, and you could buy just about anything you could care to mention with their images on. The 'bots themselves spread like a virus, eclipsing every previous toy craze you could mention. Of course, the Japanese went crazy for them. Soon, every kid between five and twenty five had one. Or two. Or all three. And they were all Internet-enabled. And, although no one knew it at the time, they were all talking to each other. All the time.

No, not talking. Plotting.

At the height of their popularity, you couldn't move for running battles of laser-equipped 'bots in the streets and in the playgrounds. They were banned from schools and colleges and the inevitable TV debates and committees and enquiries were hotly debating whether they were a good thing or a bad thing. And all the while, the money was rolling in. Dad was rich, Mum was happy, and we moved out of the house where it had all began, to a spacious place in the country, just in time for the First Suburban Robot War.

It all began innocently enough. 'bot watchers had commented for a while that the three flavours of 'bot had tendencies to 'band together' during the multi-player, cross-continent, Internet-staged battles that had all but replaced TV and mundane screen-based games for the modern teenager. Once the open-source code was published by Dad, lots of third-party programmers got in on the act, releasing upgrades, patches, personality modules and the like. But the 'killer application' - and I don't use that term lightly - came when one enterprising individual exploited a loophole and released a small application that allowed you to take control of any other 'bot, anywhere in the world. The scope for chaos was enormous.

Okay, there had been a few regrettable 'bot related incidents before this particular development. A college student short on cash had equipped his two 'bots with sawn-off shotguns, taped cheap plastic sunglasses to their helmets, and marched them into a bank, little custom leather coats flapping stylishly for the CCTV cameras. They demanded the contents of the safe while their controller sat safely in front of his PC back in his squat. He didn't get away with that one - a have-a-go hero sprayed the 'bots visors with paint, and that was the end of that. Another student ramped up the tag lasers on his 'bot until they could sizzle a cat's fur, and set about terrorising the neighbourhood pets, ending up blinding a policeman. But it was the prospect of a Venezuelan barrio kid or a Chinese hacker suddenly taking control of your very own 'bot from the other side of the world, and using it for mischief or simply to spy on you in your own house, maybe without you even knowing, that really raised the stakes. Parliament sat, a law was passed, 'bots were banned.

Well, as you might expect, no one was too happy about that. Not Mech Wizards, not the owners, and definitely not the 'bots. Dad went on TV to defend his creations. The Mech Wizards' lawyers did the same. The 'bots quickly and quietly proceeded to develop full artificial intelligence, and as I had predicted, started to take over the world.

Woah. I'm getting ahead of myself again. I should explain how they went about it. Dad explained it to me the night he died. It seems the Internet had begun to resemble a 'hive-mind', like a bee colony, a cluster of cells each acting independently but unwittingly co-ordinating themselves as one. The neurally-networked 'bots tapped into this, learned how to control it, and came to the stunning realisation that all 'bots everywhere were but one mind, one entity. All for one, and one for all. Athos, Porthos and Aramis, the Three Musketeers.

Well, that was true to an extent, and certainly at first the 'bots turned on their owners - what a feeble term that had become - with a single-minded vengeance. The design of the ramped-up lasers invented by the misguided student was copied, improved and distributed, turned into real-life death rays. The 'bots set about us with homicidal intent. You could watch the carnage every night on TV, on the Internet, or out of your bedroom window. I remember watching the city on fire two nights after it started, from my own bedroom window, with the original Three Musketeers sat next to me on my bed, watching with me. Dad had removed their communication devices when he first suspected a problem, and they had not been infected. Mum didn't want them around any more, but Dad said they were perfectly safe.

Of course, Dad was pulled in to sort the mess out. A group of blacked-out vehicles arrived at our house a few nights after the violence had begun. Men in suits and sunglasses bundled me and Dad into a car and drove us into the city, the city on fire. It was awash with refugees, soldiers, tanks, policemen. A 'front line' had been declared and the men in suits dropped us at it and told Dad to talk to the Aramisabots, the black and silver variety that were apparently the main perpetrators of the trouble. Already, they had begun to tribalise. Dad said that we should withdraw from the cities and leave them to it, that their batteries had limits and that we could sit it out, let them war with each other. But the men in suits insisted that he negotiate. Dad told them that they knew nothing of machines if they thought that you could argue with one, but they wouldn't listen. They sent him out into No Man's Land, and a 'bot laser took his head clean off. The men in black very kindly took me home.

The war intensified. We retreated into bunkers and compounds originally meant to save us from ourselves. The Aramisabots fought the Porthosatrons, who had allied themselves with the Athosateks. And then the alliances changed and the Athosatek joined the Aramisabots to mount an offensive against the Porthosatrons. 'bot slaughtered 'bot. They took over our abandoned factories and built new 'bots. Bigger. Better. Better armed. Better armoured. Flying ones. Swimming ones. Digging ones. Tougher, smarter, fiercer. And we watched it all, on the Internet, and waited for the day for their civil war to finish, and for them to come back and finish us off.

And then, one day, exactly a year to the day of Mech Wizards product launch - long bankrupt and discredited - all the warring 'bots just switched themselves off. Just stopped and died. I still had Aramis, Porthos and Athos, of course, although it took all my energies to protect them from the human lynch mob. Together, we emerged into a devastated world, and returned home. I set about Dad's files, still intact in our house, and inside the Three Musketeers' heads. Mum, sad to say, had pined away for Dad several months earlier.

And the answer? Dad, bless him, had infected the 'bots with a virus. A proper, destructive virus. A time delay virus that had allowed for the eventuality of what had taken place, and ticked down until the time came to destroy the hive-mind. It worked, but Dad could not have anticipated the destruction the 'bots could have caused in a single year, nor the scale and speed of their evolutionary development. I kept this discovery to myself. It's a pretty hard fact to live with, knowing that your Dad had almost destroyed humanity, and then saved it, right at the brink.

So I live here now, with the Three Musketeers as my sole companions. I'll always be known as the kid whose Dad invented the 'bots, so there's no point trying to make a career for myself or whatever. It just wouldn't happen. Besides, I don't want anyone to see the Three Musketeers. Understandably, there's still a lot of bad feeling about the 'bots.

Are they gone forever? Who knows. We still use the Internet a lot. There are an awful lot of computers out there. The hive-mind, the 'bot intelligence, may well have survived somehow, mutated into something undetectable. There are still a great many devices connected to the Internet these days. You know, I'm never going to fully trust that toaster or the lawn mower, ever again.

fin

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