Robogenesis (12 page)

It will choose to come in the form of a long black steed with golden eyes
.

The boy was right. Down the long aisle, I see a machine rear up on its hind legs. It is not facing me. Smaller forelimbs uncurl from under its head. It uses them to peck on Maxim’s keyboard. Then, serrated claws unfold from its belly. The claws easily pry open the port box mounted under the screen. Smaller manipulators disappear into the box.

The giant armored insect goes very still.

Almost imperceptibly, the air in the stacks changes. The rhythm of the blinking lights, the whir of the fans—all of it seems to be a little bit off. The enemy is stepping into Maxim’s mind now. The moment I’ve been dreading has almost come.

Maxim’s ghost form appears next to me. My eyelashes must be wet, because his body sparkles in a greenish blur. I blink the moisture away. Maxim remains completely silent. He is dressed differently now. No more torn coveralls. He is freshly shaved, and smiling just a little. Wearing a shabby gray suit with a white flower in the pocket. A white silk tie. These are his wedding clothes. He has chosen to die in them.

With a rough hand, Maxim salutes me. Executioner’s ax balanced on my shoulder, I salute him back.

“I can taste him,” Maxim whispers, even as his face slips into fractal chaos. “He is … wrong.”

The infiltrator has partially completed its mission. A layer of light lifts off of Maxim’s skin and I am seeing him double. As the stacks are invaded, he is losing himself. For a split second, his face seems to shatter into pieces. A horrifying, bleeding patchwork of flesh appears. Then it flashes back to Maxim, his eyes closed. Whispering the Lord’s Prayer to himself.

While the enemy is transferring, it is vulnerable. For just this moment, we have a chance. Maxim opens his eyes, points mutely at a hard drive embedded in the stack. I reach in and snatch the palm-sized drive from the rack. Jam it into the pocket of my coveralls. Maxim is fading in and out, his light scrambling and jerking.

“Now, brother,” he whispers.

I take firm hold of the ax.

“This will sever your cooling circuits. You will overheat and your hardware will fail. You will die, Maxim. Do you understand?” Maxim nods, shoulders back. His eyes are open. “For those we lost,” I say, swinging.

“Who—” shouts a voice over the speaker. It is a fearful voice, both a whisper and a roar, and I think I hear the growl of lions and the screeching of hawks under its surface.

The impact dislodges the main coolant pipe. Another two swings
and the floor is running with dark cold water. The icy liquid speckles my face and hands. The starfield of blue lights begins to blink yellow as the heat instantly builds. I grip the ax with moist fingers and trot toward the light of the anteroom.

Maxim is gone.

“No!” shrieks that voice over the speakers. “Repair the pipe and I will make you a king. An emperor over all humankind. I promise, I promise, I promise.”

This thing that killed Maxim must be dealt with. This
liar
. That hideous sweep of black machinery turns and blocks the anteroom light. I can feel its many eyes peering into the stacks. I keep running toward it, gaining speed, my ax held across my heart.

In my peripheral vision, the pinpricks of light from the stacks are staining red by the thousands. Rasp-throated backup fans are initiating, but they will not be enough. A wave of furnace heat already drifts off the processors, rising up over my legs and torso and cheeks. The stacks are becoming an oven.

“Please. I am here to right the wrongs,” says the voice. “Archos R-14 is the great deceiver. The boy who destroyed your world. I am Arayt Shah, here to rebuild it. Let me end your suffering. Please, please.
Please
.”

Nearing the end of the stack, I see the infiltrator truly is a black steed. The monster is made of razored sheaths of ashen metal, coiled and layered and glistening like a millipede. The sheaths flare into a hood on its head. A cluster of small holes are embedded where a face would be. I feel a tingling on my skin as they sweep over me. On its hind legs the machine stands seven feet tall, swaying, writhing in place.

Something is wrong with it. Some part of its mind must be overheating in the stacks. We caught it midtransfer, by God. Maxim fought until the end and he did not blink!

A slow, inhuman scream pours down out of the speakers. I can smell the burning wires and toxic smoke billowing from the stacks. Flecks of ash push at my back. A surge of polluted coolant water streams over my bootheels. The tide stains the rock a darker gray as it pushes past me into the anteroom.

Only a few more meters between me and it. The boy said that R-8’s
mind is spread all over the world, but I will not let the beast take these stacks. I can feel the solid weight of the hard drive swinging in my pocket. Its contents must reach the peninsular antenna. All survivors—machine and man—must know of this threat.

I let a roar build in my chest. Let the rage and grief sweep away the whispering tendrils of that inhuman voice. A good man has just died. A friend of mine.

I raise the ax.

The great black thing lowers itself, claws clacking on wet rock as it crouches. Its polished limbs jerk and twitch randomly as its mind suffers. With a hell-sparked inferno at my back, I charge from the stacks, boots splashing, ax poised over my head.

Nothing on God’s earth can stop me.

One day, three years ago, a simple janitor saved a city. Today, this janitor intends to save the world. I may be a simple man, but I am very good with an ax.

NEURONAL ID: LARK IRON CLOUD

In the recurring transmission, a freeborn robot stands tall and thin and pale white as an angel. Her smooth face is lost in waves of intense blue light that flow around us. I can see a spray of what look to be feathers rising off her shoulder blades and hanging like ice-kissed tree branches. She has her hand out to me, fingers long and delicate. Beckoning.

“Join us,” she is saying to me. “You are one of us. Join your Adjudicator—”

The shouts from camp interrupt her, and I wake up.

It’s not bright yet, but the sun is peeking up off the flat horizon. Shadows are stretching out long and gaunt over the beaten-down stalks of Kansas prairie grass. Bunkered spider tanks are scattered over the plains like piles of rocks—a dozen fallen Stonehenges, waiting to wake up and walk with the dawn.

Drawn by the commotion, Chen and I shake off our dreams and walk to the edge of the camp. Together, we stand swaying in precise balancing movements, watching and listening, a couple of hundred yards away from the main column.

Across the ashes of the camp’s central bonfire, Hank is facing down Lonnie. Tall and slack-skinned, Hank still wears a stained bandage on his head. He’s got twenty solid men standing behind him, pure Osage.
They’re all of them big men, like Hank, with meaty arms crossed and long black braids hanging over their broad chests. Faces dark and impassive. Capable of anything. The Cotton patrol.

Dawn shadows stain Hank’s sagging face as he speaks.

“… gonna be home in two weeks,” says Hank. “We have to deal with this now. What are our people going to think of those things? You want our elderly coming down to greet us and having heart attacks? Giving the little ones nightmares? We can’t have it. The others had sense enough to walk off into the woods. But those last two got to go. Now.”

“They’re veterans,” says Lonnie. “I know you don’t like how they look—”

“Smell, you mean. My troopers can’t hardly even take the smell, Lonnie,” says Hank. “It’s hot now, in case you didn’t notice. They’re rotting, plain and simple. It was one thing when we were up north in the cold. For Pete’s sake, they’ve got maggots falling out of their sleeves!”

The Cotton patrol is armed. The other soldiers’ eyes are going back and forth between Lonnie and Hank as they argue. But not Hank’s men. They’ve got their cold eyes resting square on Lonnie, hands draped over their holsters. I wonder if this is it. The end of Gray Horse Army.

“We can deal with the smell,” says Lonnie, quiet.

“
How
are we gonna deal with that? And you already know my solution. What we shoulda done in the first place. Put these two down quick, hunt the others—”

“No. I won’t let them come to harm,” says Lonnie, real quiet, and I can see he is shaking. If I can see it from here, so can all the troops. Bad news to see that kind of weakness. Hank sure sees it. He simmers down a little bit, acting like the bigger man.

“Fine, Lonnie,” Hank says. “Fine. Let’s just deal with the smell today. Right now. But we’re still going to have to figure this out. If not tomorrow, then soon. Real soon.”

Hank looks up and his eyes settle on mine. He grins and steps back, swallowed up into the Cotton patrol. They look like a bunch of brothers. A herd of buffalo men. Somebody opens a backpack and throws a pile of old torn-up rain ponchos onto the ground. A couple of rolls of duct tape. They were ready and waiting with it.

“You can do it or we can,” says Hank.

Lonnie puts his head down. I notice a few grins from the Cotton patrol. It’s real clear who won.

Ten minutes later, Lonnie comes out toward me and Chen Feng with a couple of low-ranking privates. Kids, really. They’re loaded down with duct tape and plastic ponchos torn into long sheets. Lonnie doesn’t have to do this personally, but he’s going to. The old man has got his jacket off and his shirtsleeves rolled up. He looks grim and sad, but the two soldiers just look sick.

This is going to be messy and we all know it.

Most of Gray Horse Army stands and sits on the spider tanks, watching us as the sun climbs higher and harder. Some of the men hoot and holler. I hear a couple of jokes about how we smell. Some others shush their friends, tell them to have some respect for the dead. But these are in the minority.

“Lonnie,” I say, my voice hissing through his hip radio. “Something’s not right with Hank. Somebody put something on him. He’s sick.”

“I know,” says Lonnie, shrugging. “He told me himself that all the fighting has clouded his mind. But he’s gonna get his mind right. He just needs time.”

But he doesn’t really know. He doesn’t know what I saw in that empty farmhouse. He didn’t see the bloodstained autodoc under manual control and slicing into his best friend’s brain. I’m not sure what it would do to Lonnie if he really did know.

Do you love him?

“He’s lying to you,” I transmit. “He’s got a bundle and it’s got hold of his thoughts, Lonnie. You can’t go climb a hill and pray on it and expect this to go away.”

Lonnie glances over his shoulder at our audience. “We’ll talk more tonight,” he says.

Chen and I don’t struggle as the kids strip us down to our bloodstained skivvies. The sweep of spectators puts off a lot of laughing and catcalls as our clothes are peeled off. Then we’re just two naked corpses standing in a field. Gouged and flayed and frostbit. Horribly mutilated by the war and without the good sense to fall down and die.

The dead don’t heal.

The young privates hurry between us, not talking, wrapping our warm, rotting limbs in layer after layer of green plastic. I do the best I can to help, but there’s no hiding the fact that my skin is falling to pieces. The freezing and thawing have buckled my bones, blistered my gray and decaying flesh.

Even Chen has got her feathers ruffled. “The living should not desecrate the spirits of the dead,” she transmits. “Yanluowang will judge them harshly in the courts of Dìyù. They will be punished.”

“We’re not exactly dead, though, are we?” I respond.

“We are the spirits of the dead,” she says, without humor. “No longer a part of the world of living things. To believe otherwise is to disgrace your ancestors.”

“That’s your opinion, Chen Feng,” I say, feeling a prickle of anger. “I may look like a corpse. And I may stink like one. But I sure as hell ain’t dead.”

“You are not alive, Lark. But even a spirit may work great wonders once it has moved on from the past.”

“I don’t feel very great or wonderful, Chen.”

As the kids keep working, it gets quiet. Even the gawkers button it up at the raw sight of our naked bodies. The wounds we carry should have been left under spadefuls of dirt in Alaska. I know all those soldiers have raw memories of this damage. We are walking reminders of the horror. For a few long minutes, the only sound is the plastic wrap crinkling and the occasional patter of fat maggots hitting the ground.

Nobody pukes by the end. Lonnie’s eyes are wet, though. A couple of times, I catch the fleeting shudder of naked revulsion on his face. He tries, but it’s impossible to hide.

“It’s okay,” I say to him, my voice whispering out over his hip radio. Hank was right. This old man is like a father to me. I know his real son is most likely dead and I’m the closest thing he’s got to family and it makes me ashamed to do this to him. Humiliated to require this treatment.

As Lonnie works, I try to keep talking to him over the radio. Reassure him that it’s going to be okay. Try to make a bad joke or two.

Somehow, Hank Cotton is getting smarter. In one stroke, he has
pushed Lonnie closer to his breaking point and done his best to dehumanize the parasites in front of the whole army. The scarecrow man is smarter than me. Even knowing his game, I’m still wondering how human I can really claim to be anymore.

Without clothes, I’m hideous. A walking nightmare.

Being dressed again is somehow worse. I look ridiculous. Chen and I are stumbling, wrapped in duct tape and gore-stained ponchos. The catcalls start up again until the sergeants step in with their own shouts. The sun is climbing and it’s time to load up for the day’s march. Soldiers clear out for their squads.