Mech 3: The Empress (19 page)

Her father would know with certainty she was worthy of his pride.

#

When the attack came, Sixty-Two and his mechs were taken by surprise. The humans came in the form of a large cavalcade of knights that swept into the ravine where Sixty-Two had built an important forward base. The mechs hid beneath protective camouflage webbing.

When the knights attacked, a terrific slaughter commenced. None of the mechs carefully prepared defensive measures worked. Always before, the humans had sent in perrupters—mechs built with a battle-class chassis. These had been easily disabled with EMP blasts and viral transmissions. Later, those mechs that were still serviceable could be reprogrammed to join Sixty-Two’s growing horde.

This was not the case today, however. The enemy brought no combat mechs, and seemed furiously determined to fight. Often, human forces fled when their mechs were disabled in their very faces, not having the stomach to fight alone. These knights were different. They
wanted
to fight, and fight they did. Sixty-Two was immediately reminded of the twin youths who had attacked him one day early in the campaign—in fact, taking a moment to examine the banners that streamed from their mounts—was that not the blue and white of Droad House?

“Mechs, rise up!” he broadcast to his confused army, only to find his transmission jammed. He shouted his commands through his speakers after that, with his volume turned up to the maximum, but in the din of battle, it was difficult to be heard. Without orders, his mechs fought without organization and only when directly attacked.

Still, he knew he had the numbers. He had a full regiment of four hundred mechs stationed here, and he felt confident they could take on at least twice their number in humans.

But then the air assault began. Combat aircraft swooped down upon them from above without more warning than the scream of their engines. A moment later, huge explosions blossomed. Any tight group of mechs was targeted and bombed, scattering their bodies as orange-white shockwaves rippled through the ravine and rebounded from the walls. Spinning chunks of debris flew past Sixty-Two as he ran out into the open desert. A severed gripper twirled by, missing his orbs by inches.

Sixty-Two paused at the rim of the ravine, gazing down in horror at the slaughter below. He had left his mechs behind, and without his leadership, they had no organizational skills on their own. Most were cut down where they stood, as helpless as the mechs they’d blasted and virally disabled. Such a weakness! It made Sixty-Two sick at heart to see it exploited against his own people.

A few engaged the human knights and took them down with guns and flashing grippers, but their defensive programming wasn’t good enough. The enemy was far better organized and every second they outnumbered the mechs more severely as the rebels fell. They did not even know enough to flee when the battle was hopeless. If Sixty-Two had been capable of tears, he would have cried at the sight.

Long before it was over, he turned and headed out into the open desert.

#

Nina spotted a figure high up upon an outcropping of stone. She recognized it in an instant. No other mech wore a cloak. No other mech stood apart and thoughtful.

“That’s him!” she cried, calling to her personal guard. “To me! Break off, and follow!”

She wheeled her mount and zoomed up a rocky path toward the rim of the ravine. Behind her, a dozen comrades flew close behind. Among them was Old Hans himself. The knight looked as if he was having trouble catching his breath due to the battle, but his eyes were still hard and ready to fight.

It took several minutes to reach the spot, and when they did, there was nothing there but a few footprints leading out into the desert. These soon vanished in the shifting sands of Sunside. No footprint lasted more than a few minutes this close to Twilight. The winds were omnipresent.

They rode hard in every direction, but found nothing.

“Damn,” Nina cursed when at last they gave up.

“What are we chasing?” Hans asked her.

“A ghost,” she said. “A mech who wears clothes like a man. A mech who thinks as we do. A cunning abomination that must be put down.”

“Who is he, milady?”

“I have no idea.”

“Is he so important as all that?”

Nina turned to him and nodded. “I think so. I think he may be the key to this entire war.”

“It is a war now? Not just an uprising?”

“It’s always been a war, Hans. There is no difference.”

The old knight looked troubled, but added nothing further. Nina stared out into desert from a high point with squinting eyes behind her goggles. Twice now, the mech had escaped her. She wondered that it had not killed her when it had the chance upon their first meeting.

She told herself it didn’t matter why the phantom mech had passed by that golden opportunity. Her enemy had made a crucial error—one she was determined it would regret. She knew in her heart that if she was given the opportunity to avenge Leon’s death, she would do so without hesitation.

#

Sixty-Two returned to another hidden base, this one in the region of the various mines he’d liberated. He’d been careful not to stay at the mining facilities themselves, as that would be too obvious of a target.

He was angry and remorseful. He’d led his people poorly. Early successes had goaded him into a sense of invincibility. He’d been a fool. As solace, he sought out the companionship of the female mech named Lizett. She wasn’t a genius, even for a mech. But she had more life in her than most of them did.

“Lizett,” he called. “I wish to speak to you.”

She immediately set down a load of ore she’d been carrying, over a ton’s worth by the look of it, and trotted over on clanking feet. “You’ve returned. I’m pleased.”

“I’m pleased to see you as well. But I have bad news. We’ve lost the forward base, all the mechs there have died.”

“That is indeed bad news,” Lizett said.

Sixty-Two sighed. She
knew
it was bad news, and she could comprehend the fact, but there was no grieving in her. She did not cry out, as a human would. She didn’t scream or blame him for the loss, or demand the details of the story. She just absorbed the information and stood there, waiting for her next instruction.

Sixty-Two felt defeated in the face of Lizett’s relative indifference. Sometimes, strong emotions were critical to survival. They indicated to a life form when its current actions must be overridden and changed. Without emotional responses, how was a creature to judge what was more important and thus had priority over everything else it was doing? Programming the mechs with described responses for every single unexpected event that may occur was impossible. He lamented the thoroughness of the Ignis Glace mind-scrubs. He knew that mechs on other worlds were left with far more natural minds when the process was over. But here, as they were to be slaves, they didn’t have much in the way of free will. Judgment was the key to free will, and they weren’t left with much of that, either.

“What is wrong, master?”

“Don’t call me master. Don’t call me that ever again.”

“How should I address you?”

“Call me—” Sixty-Two felt a fresh wave of despair. He didn’t even know his own real name. He doubted he ever would. He thought of choosing a human name, perhaps a famous one from history. But wasn’t that simply glorifying past humans? Wasn’t that admitting they were superior to his kind? Sixty-Two made an odd sound of disgust that blared out of his speakers.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t understand your instruction,” Lizett said.

Sixty-Two tried to collect his thoughts. “You should call me Sixty-Two. That is a good enough name.”

“Yes, Sixty-Two. Have I upset you in some way?”

“You’re responses are wrong. You have just learned of hundreds of your comrades dying in battle—and yet you seem to not care.”

“I care. I wish that event had not occurred.”

Sixty-Two sighed again and tapped his grippers together thoughtfully. “I suppose that will have to do for now. I wanted to ask you something: I left the group with a question before I traveled to the forward base. Have they made their decisions yet?”

“You asked if they wanted to be individuals, with free will such as you have exhibited.”

“That’s right. I told them to think about it. How many have made their decision?”

“All of them.”

“How many have decided to take my offer?”

“All of them.”

Sixty-Two felt crushing disappointment. “And their primary reason for this choice?”

“They’ve calculated it would be the best course.”

“Meaning it would please me, their master.”

“That term is now forbidden. They wish to please the mech known as Sixty-Two.”

Sixty-Two immediately went to his command center and contacted every mech in the facility via a broadcast link. “Fellow mech rebels,” he said. “I’m here to ask you to reconsider your choice. Take my wishes out of your calculations. I want your immediate responses this time, as they probably will not change with time for careful consideration. How many of you now wish to become free of mind as I am?”

The responses flooded in. None of them wished to have Sixty-Two’s gift. He was only slightly less annoyed with them than he had been the first time around.

“And what was your reasoning this time?” he demanded of them.

In the end, after talking to a dozen of them, he came to understand their reasoning was precisely the same: after the destruction of the mechs at the forward base, they believed the change would lower their odds of survival. Sixty-Two nodded to himself thoughtfully. After pleasing their master, their next highest concern was survival. Fair enough.

“Okay then, and what if I tell you that those mechs were slaughtered because they did not know what to do on their own? Because they could not write their own programming, and that fault made them easily defeated? With that new information, what do you all choose?”

Unsurprisingly, the vote was unanimous. They wanted their minds freed—every last one of them. Sixty-Two opened the broadcast connection again.

“Very well,” he said. “You have made your choice—as best you were able. You will get your wish. The humans will soon see what they have wrought in Sunside today!”

Thirteen

Over the following ten-day, Sixty-Two studied the process of mind-scrubbing in depth. He discovered he had something of a knack for working with the equipment. He wondered if perhaps he’d done this sort of work before.

His desire to reverse the process in his fellow mechs drove him onward in his investigations. He’d been working on the topic for a long time, ever since he’d violently won his freedom from Sunshine Mining Facility #4. At that point, he’d picked up several items from Megwit Gaston. He still wore dead man’s hat and his cape. The third item he’d purloined was a small satellite receiver capable of tapping into the planetary web.

A wealth of information on every topic was available online, provided freely to anyone by the Twilighters. Even the sparse populations of Sunside and Nightside were allowed free service. What fools they were. They were not even tracking their users, there were so many. Sixty-Two supposed they’d never considered the possibility of a hostile mech using their libraries against them.

Digging deeply into the topic of mind-scrubs, he learned many things. For one, the term ‘mind-scrub’ was a misnomer. Really, they should have called it a ‘mind-lock’. To erase unwanted portions of a human brain’s memories wasn’t easy. There were literally billions of connections possible between neurons. To break them all would take an incredible effort and doubtlessly kill the patient.

The solution was fiendish and simple. They did not erase the memories; they simply isolated the portions of the mind where they were stored. This was much easier, but was still a daunting task. The human brain did not store data in neat, organized rows. The information was often scattered in different physical locations, and even duplicated in several spots. This was why individuals with brain damage could often recover part or all of their faculties. They simply had to find a spot in their minds where the memories were retained in an undamaged state.

The mind-scrub process was therefore at least partially reversible. Experiments had been done—always on convicted people who were sentenced to become mechs anyway—to break and repair memory connections. There were chilling medical journals on the web, documenting countless repetitions of breaking and reknitting the hapless minds of criminals for the supposed greater good. The argument was the knowledge gained would allow scientists to repair the damaged minds of injured persons in the future. Sixty-Two would have liked to apply the cruel procedure to some of these doctors himself, while telling them it was for the good of others.

Sixty-Two called in Lizett to discuss it with her. There really wasn’t any point, as she did not understand the topic and that left the conversation one-sided, but he found it helped him think at times to have someone to talk to. He called her his muse for this very reason.

“I’ve deduced over time what must have occurred in my own case,” he told her. She had spent the last several minutes listening raptly without comment.

“What?” she asked, after she realized he’d paused for a while and some kind of response was required.

“I must have been part-way through my own mind-scrub when that Gaston character wandered off and never finished the job. I regained consciousness after he’d erased my specific memories, but not my personality—my natural emotional responses. They must be at a deeper level.”

“A deeper level?” Lizett piped up without prompting.

Sixty-Two swung his orbs toward her. He thought she was getting somewhat better at feigning interest in his speeches. Mechs were capable of learning things, but there were always gaps. “Yes, that leaves me with important questions. I now know how to reverse selective elements of the mind-scrubs that have been applied to all of you. The question is, how far to go? Should I attempt to regain everything you’ve lost? Or should I leave your detailed memories in the past, and only return your emotions?”