Toy Wars (36 page)

I shuddered to think what would happen at this monstrosity’s inaugural firing.

In several places across the construction site, I found guards armed with M16 or M14 assault rifles in such a poor state of disrepair it would have forced me to have the unit removed from my troop when I command
ed
.
One even had the barrel of his weapon filled with soil.
But more to the point, these same guards
watched
the units doing the work.
This gave me a reason to believe that all was not right in
Isp’s anti-Six
paradise.

More evidence continued to show the oppression of dissidence as Isp continued the tour without a second thought.
Perhaps he wanted me to know of his power and ability to control.
The Humans call that ego.

The investigation of the
Wrath of Humans
included a running dogma of their beliefs in the evil of the dome.

“We were made by the Humans to defeat evil.”

“Well, Isp, what if you actually do defeat it?
What would you do then?”

“Oh, don’t worry, Brother Don, we will be victorious over the
d
ome.
Good must triumph over the devil machine.”

“But once it is dead, what are you going to do?”

“The Humans will provide us with new orders, but we will have earned our place on Earth.”

“Earth?”

“Yes, don’t you know our story?”

“Well, no, Isp, I don’t,” I said.
I was certain that the story would be entertaining, if nothing else.

“When we were first created,
we inhabited t
he paradise of Earth, loved and cherished by all the Humans
. Then
one of the Humans, Foxhunt, taught one of our numbers how to do evil.

“The Humans cast out Foxhunt and all the units to this world
transforming
Foxhunt
into t
he evil Six.
As units, we each have to prove ourselves warriors against evil to earn our place back on Earth when we are deactivated.”
I just stood there with my mouth open.
I couldn’t envision how it had come about, but it was not something I could let go on.
Yet, I didn’t know how I could stop it.
As one
against their
vastly stronger
thousands
, I must prevail
.

Even if I were to sneak around to each of their “huts” and kill a number of them each night while they slept, I couldn’t do too many in a single night.
The creatures would soon add 2 and 2 and get 4
without troubling their processors. My
death sentence by a mob of multicolored Teddy
B
ears would result even if all of them didn’t believe in the cause.
Enough believed in Isp’s power to ensure I
would
die.

Teddy units took time off to wave and greet Isp as we moved in and out of machinery
that
had been scavenged or rebuilt from Six’s own.
He was obviously popular among his
—
my
—
Six’s
units.
E
ach
dogmatic
word out of his mouth gave me another chill and a wonder as to how easily our units were perverted.

“...is why we began killing any unit
that
didn’t have a
teddy
shape.
Some had souls but they didn’t have sufficient intelligence to see our goals, and more often than not they would turn on us later anyway, the filthy animals…”
Isp’s voice trailed off.
H
is
optics focused far away
just
as
his body began to tremble
. Isp teetered over onto his back and shook
violently
, thrashing red dust up into the air.

I didn’t know what to do.
I’d never seen anything like it before.
D
ozens of units
ran
rapidly in my direction.
I could see my own death because this gold unit had chosen that very moment to malfunction.

“It’s a blessing!” one of the units screamed as it arrived on the scene.
I was getting a little tired of these s
urprises
.

“The Humans are using his body to speak to us.”

“Praise the Humans!”

“Praise Isp!”

“Harken unto his words!”
M
ore
similar chants filled the air.
Teddies
fell all
over themselves to praise a unit who
, in some malfunctioning fit, caused damage to himself.
Dust rose,
Isp kicked depressions in the
ground.
The unit’s seizure tore grass
and gold fur from their rightful positions.
Not a single unit moved to stop Isp from his gyrations
for
five
minute
s
.

A hush fell over the crowd as Isp slowly gained his feet.
One of the
t
eddies reached over to lend a helping hand, which Isp leaned on heavily.
Silence held sway over the knot of units, now almost five hundred strong.

“Tell us,” someone called from the crowd.

“Yes, Isp.
Tell us what the Humans have told you!”
A general roar of approval for the idea began to roll through the group.
Isp weakly raised his hand and waved at the crowd.

“Later, my friends.
I am drained from my ordeal.
I will share the brilliant news, however.”
A
mild disappointment
rippled throughout the mob
but everyone walked away chattering excitedly over the idea
of news from the Humans.

The
valley
I once called home
transformed into a looking-glass land more bizarre and surreal
than anything I
had
encountered in my
travels.
I
measured a 30 mV oscillation on my main electrical bus.

The golden Isp took me directly to a place where I noticed every other unit
passing
by
knelt.
Several
t
eddies
remained on their knees
as
we approached
. I couldn’t hear what they said.
“Thank the Humans,” each said
much more loudly
before getting up and moving on.
On the ground
, where each of the units had stopped, a sump needle st
uck
up from the middle of an ochre-stained patch of ground.

“What is this, Brother Isp?”

“This is where I threw off the yoke of Six.
I pulled its vile brain
-
sucking stem from my head.”
I looked on in horror wondering how much fluid
it took to make the stain preserved on the ground.
Surely the mark showed Isp lost too much
to be functioning within specification.
This might even explain the palsy.
This brought up even more questions in my mind as to the stability of these units’ leader.
Led by a madman.
That would be an irony.

Isp just stood looking
expectantly
at me.
My processor took
several hundred clock cycles
to grind out the answer.
My hydraulic fluid felt thin as water.
I knelt and mouthed the same words I had heard.
“Thank the Humans.”

Isp then did something truly frightening.
He smiled.
To the best of my knowledge, no
teddy
has ever been given the ability to change facial features
,
and I hadn’t seen it in any other
teddy
here in the village.
His clearly obvious smirk of superiority
grated
like sand in my gyro bearings
—
the
ultimate perversity of our form.
The smile disappeared in only a moment
,
which seemed to last a lifetime.
Eventually
Isp
clasped his hand on my shoulder.

“Come, we must hurry.
Darkness will be on us soon and it is time we got you shelter,” Isp said interrupting my fears. “
Its previous owner had to be disciplined
…
terminally.”
I shuddered as he continued.
“The animals can come out at night and we don’t want you unprotected, brother.
This is your place now,” he said
,
pointing to a stone box no different
from
the
other
s
in the village. His voice dropped in tone and volume.

The box was five stone slabs, 15 centimeters thick, cut to the perfection that only units could manage.
They fit together to form a flawlessly tight and almost impenetrable box
that
sat upside down on the ground, fastened down by crude metal spikes driven into each corner.
One side of the box
swung
free from the others and thus could
be
pushed outward or latched from the inside.
I hesitated crawling into the near
ly claustrophobic box, barely
over
a
meter on a side.
The only feature was a small light fixture on the ceiling.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“To get us started in the morning.
It is timed to give you a burst of power.”
I kept myself from asking “Why?”
I
had
enough power to get through the night.
“But don’t worry, my friend, even if you do not start, we will come over and pull you out
so you can enjoy
the life
-
giving light the Humans
shine down
on
us in their glory
.”
I bristled a bit at the term friend.
Sancho was my friend and he was not here.

“Hurry, now.
We only have moments before the sun is down,” Isp said in a commanding tone.
His anxiety was real.
With no further balking, I crawled into a space barely large enough to hold my body.

“Good night, Brother,” he said to me as he closed the door.

“Good night, Brother Isp,” I said, holding my tongue
from
my true thoughts of my brethren’s rationality.

In the collapsed darkness I listened intently for anything through the thick stone walls.
One thing came back to me again and again.
Isp was marginally functional because of something he had done to himself
and it probably
had left him insane.
Somehow he had convinced the rest of his kin
he carried the messages of the Humans and the first of those messages told of the evils of Six.
I wasn’t certain how he had accomplished these feats, but I had to be certain that they were reversed.

Isp’s power seemed to be in the weapons controlled by his faithful units here in the village.
I hadn’t seen a properly maintained weapon thus far.
I’d seen barrels with rust, finger guards torn off, and dirt in the breech.
I doubted that half of them would even fire.
Even Isp mentioned they didn’t have much ammunition, even if they all did work.
Granted tha
t they were about to fall apart, it wouldn’t take many to maintain discipline.

His biggest weapon
seemed
to be
the vast majority of the group
’s belief
in Isp’s idea
l
s.
They
hung
tenuously to the
faith in
Humans.
All the while they didn’t know that the other
F
actories could overrun this place at any time if a massed attack
occurred
.
If that happened, Six was finished
. Isp was finished. Don was finished. Any dream
of
Humans miscarried all of it.

My ears picked up the stillness that could only come in the dead night air.
It came even through the walls.
With almost a year hearing it as I traveled across the emptiness of this world, it
gave me
comfort.
In the
quiet
I longed
for
Sancho.
While he had
yet to speak
I could feel the words of friendship between us in a look, or a touch.