Robogenesis (28 page)

In cached loops of satellite footage, I have seen herds of Rob quadrupeds migrating across the European countryside like lumbering elephants. Seen strange, shaggy robotic platforms the size of skyscrapers swaying on the open sea. I have witnessed Rob
footprints
bigger than these machines. But what they lack in size, they make up for in barbarity.

A thousand filthy, half-starved soldiers are marching under the unblinking eyes of about a hundred machine overseers. Each slave driver has a body the size of a doghouse but strides on segmented legs as long as telephone poles.

Eight legs instead of four. It’s no coincidence. From a three-foot mast sprouting on its back, each driver trails eight metal leashes. The cords are attached to collars wrapped around the necks of eight soldiers. The soldiers are barely clothed, much less armored. Each carries a rifle on a strap over his or her bony chest. The walkers slither over the rough terrain in lunging steps, soldiers scurrying along underneath. The whole crawling mass leaves behind an occasional broken corpse, trash from MREs, and abandoned supplies that were too heavy to carry.

It’s a forced march.

Tiberius and I stalk the army from a distance. Occasionally, I check the cooling bodies that I find in the army’s muddied trail, hoping for a survivor. But the slaves are always dead, necks broken by those strange leashes. The bodies are stripped of anything useful, including boots and pieces of clothing. I recognize half-familiar faces, haircuts, and tattoos. Some of these people are from the NYC Underground. These are the people I depended on for survival and who depended on me, forced now to fight for somebody they don’t even know.

Tiberius and I skirt the snaking column. My stag claws through the thin woods, galloping in neat steps, leaf-dappled light playing over his horns. I learn not to let my feet touch his belly. The hide there has creased into long, narrow ridges that form a natural heat sink. With just the faintest communication between us, he homes in on Gracie’s last known geo-tag.

Soon we are on the other side of a sickeningly familiar compound. It’s almost identical to the one that Nolan and I lived in so long ago. Low buildings behind a short chain-link fence. Surrounded by a wide, flat field of lush grass.

And Gracie somewhere inside.

In the sky over the compound, a waterfall of orange light is spilling down. Lines of command cascading in from the east. Shards of light that throb and waver as they move with the army that is massing on the perimeter of the work compound.

“Mathilda … please … they’re here,” transmits Gracie.

Distant black shapes creep over the field. Like clockwork, autoturrets spring from the turf and begin chattering in the language of gunfire. I hear strange thunking sounds as the walkers fire lazily tumbling canisters into the air. As they hit the ground thick gray fog begins to pour out.

Now
, I think to Tiberius.

There is danger
, repeats Tiberius.

“Go!” I shout to the machine.

And now we are flying over the field, small and fast. The turrets don’t orient for us, with bigger targets out front and the growing cloud of fog already obscuring their sensors. Tiberius leaps the chain-link fence and we land in a haze of gunpowder-smelling smoke. It billows around us, half swallowing the buildings and the fence.

“Gracie?” I transmit.

“Here,” comes the reply.

Tiberius dives into the mist. We dart between shrouded buildings, closing in on the coordinates. After a few seconds, I spot Gracie and her mother crouched together in a wide ditch. It’s an open culvert that surrounds the compound, a trickle of water meandering along the bottom. Gracie’s mother has one hand curled around her daughter’s face,
protecting her from seeing the carnage. The gentle, familiar pose sends a pang into me.

There is danger
.

A shadow is rising behind us. The dirt erupts with ricocheted bullets and Tiberius spins and rears back. His horns are splayed out to confront a wiry black machine that picks through patches of mist and blue sky on long black legs.

So many legs.

I lose my balance and slide off Tiberius. Drop into the culvert, along with my blankets and backpacks and a haze of dirt off his wide back. The stag dives forward, head down. A clawed limb sweeps out. It crunches into the quadruped and sweeps him off his feet. He disappears from view, rolling.

“Get over here, girl!” shouts Gracie’s mother. I feel hands pulling me.

I’m on my back, staring up at a black walker. Eight legs, each tipped with a vicious claw, some swinging and others pushing into the grass. As it moves over the shallow ditch, its legs scissor in awkward directions and a handful of belly-mounted camera lenses glare down at me. The slave driver is standing twenty feet high, unstoppable, watching me.

Five silhouettes crest the edge of the culvert. Slaves, each with a rifle. And now I see the red flicker of a targeting laser as it plays over the grass, racing toward us. Five weapons rise, barrels following the crimson dots. Cringing, I put my hands up.

And a flash of light saturates my peripheral vision.

It’s a human form, tall and terribly thin, made of pure intensity, barreling like a lightning bolt through the clearing. It drops a shining fist into the first silhouette and dances past the rest. The man’s head snaps back and he slips off the ridge and falls into the dirt. His collar catches his neck and his body hangs from the walker, unconscious.

Bullets explode in the dirt around me.

I’m on my butt, elbows digging into the ground. That cluster of black camera eyes still stares down, but some are orienting away. The slave driver is making a screeching sound, scanning for its attacker. Gracie and her mother and I scurry farther down the culvert, out from under the walker.

Zzzzzzrack
.

The collar snaps off the dead man’s neck and retracts into the stubby mast with a snap like a bull whip. His body tumbles into the culvert. Now I understand what the extra legs are for. The thing braces itself on four legs and lets the other four rise like snakes, retractable claws flashing. It’s the last line of defense for a scavenging machine that borrows its fangs in the form of human fighters.

“What the fuck is that!?” shouts someone.

The slaves are taking firing stances to defend themselves. But the white thing is too fast. I see red targeting lasers chasing it, projected from the slave driver as this man made of light streaks across the clearing. Another slave drops to the ground, lifeless.

Pop pop pop
.

Slaves fire wildly at the thing, mostly missing. And then the man-shaped streak of light is climbing the slave driver’s slender leg, hanging on tight as the walker tries to shake it off. Those serrated spines would slice open human flesh. But the white knight is not a person. It climbs nonstop, and the bullets are coming at it thick now.

“Stop him,” shouts a man in a ball cap, and I hear real horror in his voice because he knows what’s going to happen. These slaves may not be fighting willingly, but they are fighting for their lives.

Poppopopopopop
.

“Kill it! Kill it now!” comes a scream.

The glowing white machine has reached the mast. Bullets ping off its casing or thump into the fabric armor it wears. The slave driver writhes and twists under the weight of its attacker. But the white knight holds strong to the mast with one hand, reaches down and grabs all the lines in one hand where they meet. Hand over hand, it yanks the four umbilical cords taut. Four throats constrict, and four weapons clatter to the dirt.

Bodies swing. The bullets stop.

The white knight is already ripping apart the camera cluster. Throwing unblinking black eyes down onto the ground. Methodically breaking them off like lobster claws. Sightless and lobotomized, the slave driver begins shutting itself down. It lowers its body to the ground. Pulls in
those long wicked legs like a smashed spider. The knight steps off the wreckage, brushing shattered pieces of its own casing off onto the ground.

I feel a gentle nudge against my neck. Turn to see Tiberius standing there, nosing me, a dent in his side but otherwise okay. I loop an arm around the stag’s shoulder.

“Gracie,” I say. “Let’s go.”

The little girl and her mother stare at me, mouths open, as I mount the stag.

“Mathilda?” asks Gracie, the white metal of her eyes bright in the wispy fog.

“Yeah,” I say. “Climb on. We have to move.”

But they don’t move. They just keep staring.

A haze of brilliant light creeps into my peripheral vision. The knight is standing right behind me. I nudge the stag and he turns clockwise with neat, careful steps. Trying to squint and failing, I dial down the brightness of my vision. Finally, I see that the thing is a humanoid robot—a highly modified safety-and-pacification unit.

It speaks in a low croak that is as familiar as the chill of sunset over my shoulders.

“Mathilda,” it says, and the corpses and horror lying in a pile are lost in the streaks of light pulsating off its frame.

A smile settles into the corners of my mouth. I can feel the cold metal of the ocular implant pushing against my cheeks. My lips part and I finally say his name out loud, instead of in my own head.

“Nine Oh Two.”

The Arbiter unit steps forward. A slender machine, perfectly proportioned for sprinting and field operations, standing at its full seven-foot height. It wears loose camouflage bindings around its arms and legs. A smashed plate of ceramic armor hangs over its chest, held in place by mesh wrappings torn with bullet gashes. A stubby antenna pokes up over its right shoulder. It orients a scarred, narrow head at me. Trains those three wide bullet-hole eyes on my face.

From up here on Tiberius’s back, I am at eye level with the militarized robot. I know he was crafted according to U.S. milspec and he
is artificial, but in my eyes he glows white like an angel. It is low-level residual radiation. Nine Oh Two has been marked by the time he spent at the bottom of that radioactive pit. He fought Archos R-14 alone and walked away with the scars to prove it.

“I am sorry, Mathilda,” he says. “I did not mean to interrupt.”

“I was doing fine, Niner,” I say. “But … thank you.”

“Acknowledged,” he replies.

“How did you get here?”

“I was nearby,” he replies, and I feel a smile in his words. I wonder how long he’s been tracking me. He must have been careful, or I’d have known.

“I’m sorry about what I said. Before. About leaving me alone.” How to explain that I thought I was in love with a boy who tried to kill me? That I thought there was a chance to have a normal life with someone who could see past my ruined eyes?

“Acknowledged,” he says, simply.

Something big and dark shifts in the mist near us. Niner turns and snatches a fallen assault rifle off the ground. Snaps the slide pull back and chambers a round. The turrets are still chattering bullets out there in the fog, useless.

“Timmy?” I transmit, widening my mind.

“Whoa,” exclaims the little boy. “A freeborn! Look at his specs … seven feet tall. Strong as a tractor. Maximum sprint speed—”

“Hack the turrets, please. Put them to better use.”

“Affirmative,” he says in a clipped voice, already concentrating.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” I say to the group. “You two, mount the stag. I’ll go with Niner. Use your eyes, Gracie. Find a safe route out.”

“Mathilda,” she says in a small voice.

“We’ll have time to talk once we’re safe,” I interrupt.

“But Mathilda—”

“No time,” I say, dismounting.

“Listen to me!” shouts Gracie in a burst transmission. It staggers me and I lean against Tiberius’s warm hide. Wrap an arm around his neck and let my knees sag as an image from Gracie balloons in my mind.

“Is this the boy you’ve been looking for?” asks Gracie, her voice small again.

And the image expands in my mind’s eye. It’s a high-quality spy satellite photograph. Taken at night, on maximum zoom, from someplace high and with an infrared-capable camera. The darkest parts of the image are tinged green and brightened enough to be visible. A battlefield, the wiry legs of a walker just smudges of green.

And in the foreground: my brother’s face.

Nolan is crawling under a piece of mangled wire, arms tucked against his chest and his dirty hands curled into fists. The whites of his eyes are flashing as he glances upward in agony. Something black that could be mud or blood courses down the side of his face. Sweat glistens on his forehead and there is dirt caked around his nostrils.

I’m already ripping geo-tags out of the image before I can register the relief deep in my chest that my brother is alive, really alive. Nolan is a few hundred kilometers west of here, headed straight for the mountain stronghold called Freeborn City.

“Thank you,” I whisper to Gracie.

As my vision returns, I try to put the last part of the image out of my mind. Take a deep breath and stand up straight. But the horrible sight won’t leave me: the evil glint of a metal collar wrapped tight around Nolan’s neck.

NEURONAL ID: NOLAN PEREZ

At night, the slave army doesn’t make campfires. It really is too bad because, trust me, it gets really fucking cold. Around dusk, the leashes start pulling us in toward the master walker. By the time the moon is out, dozens of eight-man fire teams are wriggling together in filthy piles just to stay warm.