The story begins at the end. To be precise: twenty minutes after the great war between robots and humans comes to an end. A soldier in the war named Cormac Wallace comes across a strangely perfect black cube no bigger than a basketball which seems relatively innocent enough considering the context of its finding, but which will turn out to be one of the greatest discoveries in human history.
The cube contains nothing less than an entire history of the recently concluded war, and it was created by the robots, no less. It is a message from the robots to humans and what is contained in that history provides the backstory which takes up the bulk of the narrative. Wallace is at first hesitant about the idea of making the content of the archive public, but is quickly moved to change his mind once he figures out that rather than being a typical history written by one side against the other, the cube is actually intended to be record of the heroic efforts by a number of humans throughout the conflict.
Flashback to nearly four years earlier when Professor Nicholas Wasserman is playing around with yet another incarnation of the artificial intelligence program he has been working on for some time. The program, nicknamed Archos, obviously possesses the ability to speak but that is small potatoes compared to the everything else. In essence, this version of Archos has been endowed with abilities never before accomplished in the field of AI. As often happens in these situations, the computerized brain has been pumped so full of knowledge that it calls itself a god and declares all humanity to be obsolete. Will these computer nerds never learn? Well, not Professor Wasserman, anyway, who is rather quickly and efficiently sacrificed in a strange sort of Oedipal showdown. Fortunately enough, Mrs. Wasserman is nowhere to be found or things might have taken a really weird Freudian twist.
Here’s the thing about the internet. It was originally conceived by some computer nerds for the purpose of connecting computers across vast reaches of geographical distance in a way that nothing before it ever had—not the telegraph, not radio, not even television. True enough, connecting computers in and of itself is not inherently a bad idea likely to go wildly off the rails, but once those computers are handed the programming jobs normally reserved for humans, well, all it takes is one incredibly smart AI program to unleash havoc all around the world. Just imagine that an Archos-like supercomputer were able to hack internet-connected refrigerator and stove. This is what happens on a much grander scale in the wake of Archos planning to take over the world. Before you can say Intel Inside, a robot is killing a completely innocent yogurt store employee and Japanese sexbots are turning into killbots.
A member of Congress responds to this rise of the machines by introducing a legislation deviously called the Robot Defense Act. Archos and his minions prove themselves infinitely smarter than those who blindly supported the Patriot Act by realizing the misleading implications of the purposely innocuous name. Subsequently, the Congresswoman’s young daughter is targeted for an attack by the ironically named Baby-Comes-Alive doll she loves so much.
After several months of robots launching attacks against the people who own or work with them, what later becomes revered to as Zero Hour occurs. Turns out all these random attacks have merely been part of a plan by Archos to determine how humans would react to a rise of the robots and what he seems informs him of a beautiful truth on his part: humans have no real plan. And so Zero Hour marks the launch of an all-out assault by smart technology against dumb humanity. Eventually, society undergoes something far more viscerally disturbing than the mere genocide which it had feared. The robots turns human into forced labor and conduct medical experiments that transform humans into half-machine hybrids working at the beck and call of Archos.
Still, machines can’t be everywhere since their one fatal flaw seems to be facilitation of transportation and it doesn’t take long for some smart humans to devise ways around their seemingly superior power. Key to this turn of events takes us back to the Japanese robot wife whose “husband” is finally able to reprogram her so that she is no longer a slave to Archos. Thus begins the movement of robot rebellion that produces what come to be known as the “freeborn” that decided to work together to help save humanity.
This sea change has the effect of turning the tide of the war, but not before things get really dark with the robots joined in battle by human corpse reanimated by parasitic robots. Fortunately, not being human, the freeborns are not at risk and can do what soldiers like Cormac Wallace dare not.
The novel comes to an end with Wallace expressing optimistic hope about the future for humanity. At the same time, however, the story concludes on the menacingly ambiguous note that Archos may have—or may not have—been able to make a copy of itself before the original was destroyed.
