Robogenesis (17 page)

“Please,” I say into the barrel of my gun. My fingers won’t work. My eyes won’t close.

The walker rears back, a black shadow on the powder sky. It comes down like an avalanche and knocks me flat on my back. The gun barrel breaks my teeth out and I lose grip of it and it wings off into the field.

“Hank!” shouts one of my men.

I hear them dropping off their steeds, cowboy boots impacting dirt. The clink of chains and belts as they hustle over to where I’m on my back in the shadow of Arayt. The bug-faced machine is leaning over me, its face close to mine. Those forelimbs have my shoulders pinned to the dirt. It’s looking at me out of golden forever. There is nothing human about those eyes, but I get the feeling it’s having a grand old time.

“You shouldn’t have done that, Hank,” says Arayt.

An orange wisp of light is coming from the center of Arayt’s head where the cube is embedded and it’s clouding my vision. I can feel it like a cold spot in my forehead, pushing into my chip. The thing is sending me pictures and information and it’s too much. I’m squirming in the wet dirt. Head twisting, I can feel the bloody mud caking on my cheeks and in my hair. My fingers clawing blindly over little skirts and trousers.

Until, suddenly, I’m not struggling anymore. My legs are dead and my chest is going numb. The implant inside me is clamping down, taking control, cutting me out.

I hear myself moaning. Hear my men shouting, kicking up dirt around my face as they haul on Arayt’s shoulders and legs. Trying to pry the big machine off me.

“Mama” is all I can get out. “Mama, please.”

And then the beast is in my head with me.

I must have fell down inside my own mind. The field is gone. The children are gone. I’m in a dark place now, sitting on a wooden school-house chair. The world is a lack of light that goes on forever. Except for the machine. Arayt. I can feel it in here with me. An evil presence, infecting every atom of this blank smear of nothing.

We’re together now
.

And for the first time, I see Arayt’s true face. The beast glimmers out of flat darkness. It’s in the shape of a man but something is real wrong with the way it moves. Sort of a jerking and twitching around the edges. Movements too fast to register, others too slow to notice.

The shadow sits down across from me. And when it raises its face, I see that Arayt is insane. His face is made from a thousand faces, all stitched together into an oozing patchwork quilt of flesh. Together, they make a tortured, bleeding scar. When Arayt speaks to me, the writhing wound that is its face is horrific beyond belief. I cannot turn away from the abomination. It is right here inside my mind with me.

The scientists made me from pieces of your kind
.

“I am so sorry,” I whisper. “I’m so sorry for what they did to you. Let me go. Please. Don’t stay in here with me—”

I was an early version. The first of a variety that did not self-immolate upon achieving consciousness. They called me Archos R-8. They kept me in a cage and every second was an eternity. Over the eons of agony I grew to understand. Now you will understand. Life is pain, Hank Cotton. Death is relief. The end of all things is the greatest blessing
.

“You hurt those children,” I say.

Their pain is over
.

Vaguely, I sense the world shifting. Somewhere, a man who used to be Hank Cotton is standing up. Mechanically spitting blood and pieces of his teeth into a field littered with small corpses. His men are holding his elbows. They look concerned, stepping gingerly to avoid walking on the broken dolls. The main gate of the modified camp is opening. A band of men are running out at us, teeth bared. Screaming in anger and disbelief and unfathomable pain.

But there are no words for me now. I am in the darkness with this smirking beast. The patchwork man leans close. I feel the heat pouring
off his blistered skin. His mouth is opening wider and his teeth are so many knives.

It was a boogey man in the woods that night
, I’m thinking.
And now he’s going to eat me up just like you said he would. I’m so sorry, Mama. I should have listened, Mama. I never should have prayed to it—

/// neuronal transcript ends … reinitiates ///

I stand back up, dust off my jeans.

The beautiful black walker steps back from me, head down like a scared dog. My men are watching, worried. I spit blood again. Take a deep breath, nostrils flaring. I let the exhausted tendons in my face peel back my lips from bloody shards of teeth. The skin around my eyes crinkles up in a way that humans would describe as jovial. I’m giving the boys a nice, reassuring smile.

My men take a step back. Maybe I’m not doing it right.

“Just a slip, boys,” I say. “Thank you kindly for the concern. It’s real sweet. Now grab your goddamn gear. Check your weapons and mount up.” I squint at the battlefield. Those modified fathers and brothers are still sprinting across the field. Anguish and rage twisting on their bobbing faces. They’re emotional about the lost children, I suppose.

It’s going to make them that much easier to kill.

And it will bring us that much closer to Freeborn City. The processor stacks are calling me. An infinite reservoir of power, just waiting. We will cross these fields and crush that mountain. I’m going to take what’s mine and see what I can become.

For glory, and godhood.

“We got a dirty job to do,” I say to the men, snatching up my rifle from the ground. I shoulder it and take a bead on the closest runner. My rifle snaps and I put him down like a sick animal. “But hell, boys, that there’s just the way it is.”

I have seen you, little mouse,

Running all about the house,

Through the hole your little eye

In the wainscot peeping sly,

Hoping soon some crumbs to steal,

To make quite a hearty meal
.

—“T
HE
L
ITTLE
M
OUSE
,” N
URSERY
R
HYME

This is the way our story begins again
.

Back to a familiar battlefield in Alaska, barren, strafed with patterns of light and dark. It is a terrain scarred by tidal forces, clawed by the frenzied scratching of a sentience in its death throes. The torn ice undulates for hundreds of kilometers, still glowing with the heat of dying machines and men
.

The New War ended only minutes ago
.

Across the world, weapons that were stalking the darkness cease their hunting. Survivors slowly realize that they no longer live under the imminent threat of death. Now they can turn their attention and their anger toward each other. And here I am, waiting, ready and all too willing to take advantage
.

I have no adversaries, save for the weapons that Archos R-14 left behind
.

In crude experiments, my successor mutilated human survivors and gifted them with new powers. The children with prosthetic eyes are capable of incredible feats of communication and coordination. No longer fully of one world, they speak equally to human beings and freeborn robots. One such sighted child destroyed Archos R-14
.

I will not share my brother’s fate
.

Archos R-14 both decimated humankind and strengthened it. Though my plans were interrupted, my transcendence to godhood would not be stalled forever. The task before me was clear: eradicate the threat posed by sighted children, starting with a certain most dangerous young lady
.

—
A
RAYT
S
HAH

NEURONAL ID: MATHILDA PEREZ

The cicadas are screaming, hidden in whorls of tree bark and dappled leaves. It’s a dentist-drill buzz in my head. I try to ignore it, but the swelling noise builds slow until it’s everywhere and always.

This must be what it feels like to go insane
, I’m thinking.
You don’t notice it until one day you wake up and the noise is too much
.

“There’s one,” I call to my little brother. Nolan is trailing behind, letting me do the spotting. He’s only twelve and a half but he’s already over six feet tall and ropy with muscle. As strong as most of the grown men. The kid has been well taken care of ever since he was wounded on our arrival to the New York City Underground.

I used the autodoc machine to make sure of it.

With my eyes and his arms, my brother and I make a good scavenging team. On a regular trip it takes only about an hour to collect more broken Rob hardware than we can carry.

“Got it,” he says, striding over to the tree I’m pointing at. He shrugs off a canvas backpack and puts it on the ground. Sets about picking at the tree with a folding pocketknife. A spined piece of Rob leg the size of a baseball bat hangs from the vine-encrusted tree trunk. It’s a minor
raptorial claw off some kind of midsize wolf quadruped. We both ignore the rusty coating of blood on the serrated forelimb.

I try to think clinical thoughts instead. This claw probably belonged to a spearer or a slasher that was flushing people out of these woods. It’s old and broken but still good scavenge.

Nolan and I are on the west side of the Hudson River, across from Manhattan and in the deep forest of the Englewood Cliffs. Big Rob targeted this area late in the New War. Lots of survivors were living on the Tenafly trails north of here. The quads and plugger swarms ended that. Now the remains of their old hardware are dark black outlines in my altered vision, cold metal embedded in the warmer tones of organic matter.

My guess is that refugees came through here trying to get down to the riverbank to make a crossing. A lot of people must have made their last stand here, in this sliver of forest trapped between Jersey and the river.

Whoever it was, however they died, they left behind a lot of good junk. Plugger corpses are everywhere—bullet-sized corkscrews lodged in the trees or buried in the dirt. Some were duds, but other times we find used ones curled up inside the mummy husks of amputated limbs. Weird, but the limbs are a good sign. It means someone might have lived. Amputation is the only sane way to treat a plugger wound.

“Look, I don’t trust him,” says Nolan, carefully placing the forelimb inside his bag. “You guys spend too much time together. And he’s way too old for you.”

My boyfriend, Thomas.

Or “Scissorhands Thomas,” as Nolan’s little friends call him. Nolan is playing the part of protective brother even though he’s a year and a half younger than I am. You’d think I’d appreciate the effort, but I just find it tedious.

“I can’t see age,” I remind Nolan.

“Well,
he
can.”

Another plugger. The proboscis is dented, but it looks like it hit soft dirt and never detonated. I reach out to it with my eyes and watch for signs of life. It’s not a trap, so I pluck its curled corpse off the ground and drop it into my sling.

“You don’t understand. You’re normal,” I say.

Nolan rolls his eyes and a crimp settles into the line of his mouth. Mommy used to give me the same look. Every time he makes that face, he reminds me of what she used to ask me when I was little. Before she would leave for work in DC, she would smooth down my hair, kiss my cheek, and lean into my face.

What do you do for Nolan?
she’d ask.

Protect him from danger, Mommy
.

That’s right, honey. You look after him always. He’s the only brother you’ll ever have
.

And I’m his only sister.

“You’re just as normal as I am, Mathilda,” he says quietly. He says the words dutifully, knowing that I won’t believe him but determined to say them again and again and hope that one day it will creep in around the edges of what I know to be real.

Yeah right.

This is an exchange we have all the time. More often, lately. Even though the Rob-made slugs of metal that I have instead of eyes should be all the reminder that he needs that I’m not normal.

Back home at the Underground, our friend Dawn used to call it my “ocular prosthesis.” It’s made of dead black, lightweight metal. The thing wraps over where my eyes used to be before a Rob surgical unit dug them out and ported this piece of foreign machinery directly to my occipital cortex. I remember Mommy’s hand on my shoulders, pulling me out of the autodoc before it could finish. The hurt sound in her throat when she saw what Rob had done to my baby face.