Robogenesis (36 page)

“Is that right?” I ask, my rifle still heavy hanging over my chest. I guess my eyes must slide toward the piece. The old man raises his hands and waves them in an “ah, phooey” gesture.

“Not trying to threaten. But yes, that’s right.”

“Do you need assistance? Do your people have enough supplies?” I ask.

“It’ll be close. Winters are rough this high up, but there are plenty of deer in these woods. We’ll grow crops in the spring. The most important thing is that the machines had us well defended. Now that they’re gone, we’ve got some control over the old defenses. These days, that’s all that matters.”

Of course, this used to be a Rob work camp.

“Why do you need defenses?” I ask. “The war is over.”

“You’ve been off trekking, son. Otherwise you’d know better than to say that. The war has just begun for us, out here. Lot of survivors aren’t so friendly to the modified. It’s people we worry about, you understand?”

Something moves onto the porch, crouching over the fallen Big Happy. It’s a woman’s corpse, flesh rotting from limbs that are creased by black metal bars. There is a parasite wedged into the back of her neck, and I can see her teeth through a hole in her cheek. I take a deep breath. The parasites
lived
. That thing must be Joey.

I’m sorry, Lark
, I think to myself. I remember how the Cherokee soldier came stumbling back out of the Alaskan woods, wearing one of those things. And then I shot his face off.
My God, I’m so sorry
.

“It was a modified who saved us all. Did you know that?” says Cherrah. “A little girl named Mathilda Perez. She guided the final assault on Archos R-14. Without her we could never have won.”

The man grins. “We did hear that. Most people don’t believe it. From the description, though, that little girl sounded like she had a full orbital prosthetic plugged into her prefrontal cortex with hardwired radio and infrared capabilities.”

Cherrah and I share a glance.

“How did you know that?” I ask.

“Tim?” he calls. “Timmy, pop up for a sec.”

Nothing happens. The grizzled man leans and speaks quietly. “He’s skittish because someone’s been … Well, someone has been after the children specifically. Hunting the ones with eye prosthetics. Killing them. Timmy has heard the other kids over the radio. Begging.”

Over around the side of the house, a small face peeks out. It’s the boy we followed in. The one who I thought had on goggles.

“Come on,” says the man. “It’s all right.”

The boy steps into a shaft of sunlight. He lifts his chin and now I see he isn’t wearing goggles. His eyes are missing altogether. Instead, a flat black strip of metal stripes his face across the bridge of his nose.

“Timmy here saw you all coming from miles away,” says the old man. “Sees everyone coming for miles and miles. Everything. Man and machine.”

“How?” asks Cherrah.

The old man shrugs, a smile creasing into his face behind the shaggy salt-and-pepper beard.

“Your tank,” says the boy. “Houdini. When he talks, it looks like ribbons in the sky.”

“He can’t talk,” I say. “Houdini is just a tank.”

“Well, he talked to me,” says Timmy, nonchalant.

The kid steps farther into the clearing and is followed by someone who must be his mother. A whole group of people emerges from inside. Some have shining prosthetics instead of limbs. Arms, legs, and joints. They are men and women, young and old, but all of them are rail thin. Big sunken eyes and yellowing teeth.

“You can come with us, you know,” I say, looking at their leader with dismay. “Our walking armor can protect us back to Gray Horse. They know the truth about how the war ended. They won’t have a problem with … modifications.”

The old man is already shaking his head. “No offense, but nothing is for sure out there. In here, we’ve got protection. And plenty of it.”

Something catches the corner of my eye. A stealthy movement. The bushes are moving oddly. I watch, rifle dangling from my chest strap, and fight to keep from reaching for it. Instead, I raise my voice.

“If any of you here want to leave, I can guarantee you safe passage,” I call to the group. “And if there isn’t enough food here, then you’ve got to come with us. I’m not negotiating.”

“Oh, neither am I,” says the gray-haired man.

Now I identify the movement: turrets. Three of them, flat and low. Sprouting up slowly from the turf on elevated gun assemblies. On top, each one is covered in a platter of dead leaves and grass and earth. Underneath, each has a minigun with a stubby six-barrel cluster peeking out ominously. They are glistening with gun oil and polished, obviously well maintained.

When those barrels start spinning, I’ll start running.

“You were prisoners before, but that’s over with,” I say. “Big Rob is dead. We killed it. There won’t be any more experiments. No more torture. You can all leave. You’re free to go.”

Emaciated faces stare back at me. Whatever comprehension might be there is swallowed by the horrors that have been inflicted on these people. The young ones cling to the bony legs of their parents. And the older ones—well, I hope they heal.

The old man limps out of the woods and moves between us and the group. He steps closer to me and talks low: “You haven’t seen what we’ve seen. Rob is not our problem. People are our problem. It’s best that you move on. We thank you for your service. We really do. But this thing has turned into a whole other can of worms.”

“Let’s go,” says Cherrah, quietly.

I don’t move as she takes my arm. Pulls me gently. For a few steps, I stumble backward without taking my eyes off those people. My mind is racing, trying to determine the right thing to say. Without Big Rob to maintain this camp, winter is going to come here and it’s going to kill them. How would a hero save the lives of these innocent people? What would my brother, Jack, have done?

But I don’t see any way besides fighting. Jack would have found a way, but I’m not him. No matter how much I wish I were.

Cherrah and I walk back to the road together where Houdini waits patiently. Not looking back, we stow our gear in his belly net. I drop a couple of boxes of MREs onto the road. What we can spare. Then we climb the metal rungs and take up our touring positions.

Standing high on Houdini’s gunnery platform, I peer into the icy woods. Survey the thin, hungry faces watching from dappled shadows around the compound. Sunken eyes and fleshy ears sprouting from skin
that is stretched too tight over skulls. It’s hard to shake the empty feeling in those faces. As if they don’t belong to human beings at all. Just masks of meat on top of walking zombies.

“Come on, Cormac,” urges Cherrah. “It’s time to move out.”

“Jack,” I mutter. He was my brother and he died for me and just saying his name out loud hurts like a pocketknife twisting into my lungs. I blink my eyes and the strands of broken people waver behind a layer of warm salt water. “Jack Wallace would have done something for them. He wouldn’t leave these people like this.”

“You’re not Jack,” says Cherrah. “We did what we could, Bright Boy. Walk on, Houdini.”

The quadruped powers up, his intention light flaring briefly. Those scarred ropes of black muscle flex and contract, high-tension cables singing.

“Wait,” calls a thin voice. It’s the boy. Timmy.

Up close, I estimate that he is probably ten or twelve, but physically he looks about eight years old. Looking down at him, my gaze goes straight to where his eyes aren’t. I glance away automatically, then force myself to stare directly back at his deformity. I never did meet Mathilda Perez in person—I only listened to her intelligence reports over the radio—but I doubly appreciate what she did now that I see the metal rooted in the skin above this little boy’s freckled cheeks.

It looks like it hurts.

The boy walks confidently toward us. Stops at Houdini’s scorched foreleg. Fearlessly, he puts a palm flat against the polymer-muscled slab. Looking Houdini up and down, he cocks his head to the side sort of funny. His thin little lips are moving.

This kid isn’t blind. Far from it.

“What can I do for you?” I call down. He ignores me for another few seconds. Still talking to the voice in his head. Finally, he stops and points his face at me.

“Houdini is smart, you know,” he says. “He wants to protect you.”

“Serious? You can really talk to the tank?” asks Cherrah.

“Yeah, but only when he’s close,” says the boy.

“Ask Houdini how he was repaired,” she says.

Timmy bows his head. After a moment, he looks up apologetically.

“He says that he doesn’t know.”

A thought occurs to me. Mathilda said she was in New York City, watching from satellites as she guided Gray Horse Army through the arctic woods toward that unmarked hole in the ground. She said she used an antenna to reach us. A big one.

“Tim, have you ever touched an antenna?”

“Antenna?” asks the kid.

“Any kind of big piece of metal. I think you’ll be able to … talk to people farther away. If you find an antenna.”

“I can try …,” he says, nodding solemnly.

“If you do find one,” I say, “look for a girl named Mathilda. Mathilda Perez of Gray Horse Army. She’s one of the good guys. She can show you how to use those eyes to help your people here.”

He nods. Drags a foot across the dirt. Stalling.

“You have something else to say?” I ask.

The kid scratches his neck. Looks away, then peers up.

“I just noticed … I thought I should say …”

“Go on,” I urge.

“There’s something inside you,” he says quietly. His voice is clear and sharp out here on the still road. The words he’s said stop my breathing.

Something inside me?

I throw a leg over the railing and slide off the armored side of the tank. Drop to the muddy road right in front of the boy. He doesn’t flinch. Cherrah follows, lowers herself onto the dirt next to me. We stand before the boy in the shadow of Houdini. The kid is so small that I kneel just to keep from intimidating him.

Assuming I
can
intimidate him.

“What do you see inside me?” I ask. “Is it Rob-made?”

“Not you,” he says, pointing. “Her.”

Cherrah and I exchange a worried glance. She slowly steps forward. Takes both the kid’s hands in hers.

“What’s inside me, Timmy?” she asks him.

The boy wraps his arms around Cherrah’s waist and presses his face against her stomach. Instinctively, she puts her hands around his thin
back. Gives him a tender hug that makes his shoulder blades stick out like chicken wings. The kid inhales and his breath shudders on the way out.

You haven’t seen what we’ve seen
.

Finally, the boy stands up straight. Blinks.

“It’s a baby,” he says. “A little baby boy.”

NEURONAL ID: TAKEO NOMURA

What is a mind, but a pattern? My mind or yours. Man or machine. Simply an arrangement of atoms. Each of us, a unique expression of the mind of the universe.

Thoughts are precise bullets of electricity, fired through our neurons in timed pulses. Our bodies are layers of folding skin and muscle laced with fractal lightning. Natural, like veins on a rain-soaked leaf. Cracks in a tumbling stone. Or the sigh of this wave, lapping my shins until they are cold and numb. The clear liquid flows in, suspends the fine black hairs on my legs, and then retreats, laying the hairs down in new configurations. The sky leaks raindrops over my bony shoulders like Morse code.

We are patterns. Trapped inside other patterns.

After six months of listening, the sea sends an emissary. The towering bulk of a bizarre machine approaches our outermost seawall. A glistening spire, afloat, the size of a skyscraper. It forges ahead, slow and steady, through azure stripes of rain. From the salt encrusted on it, I would say it came from the open ocean. The dreamer only knows what this derelict has been doing out there on those endless blue plains.

I am staggered by its layered complexity.

Half submerged in Tokyo harbor, the spire is saturated with living things. It sprouts so far into the heavens that its upper reaches are shrouded in the rain haze. Some kind of muscular fiber makes up the main trunk, braided thick as the Tokyo Skytree, resembling bark but clearly with much higher tensile strength. It bears further study, as does the stability mechanism. The island-machine flutters delicately on flat fins the size of baseball fields, rising and falling, surfaces curling with wet sea grass on top and studded with barnacles below. Each pulse of the surf surges over the lip of the rear fin and washes straight through the marshy ecosystem.

“It is beautiful,” I say to Junshi-88.

The humanoid robot stands in the surf with me, trinocular lenses protruding at maximum zoom. It wears no human clothing, only a camouflaged green and black armored outer casing. Spurning human adornments is a mark of autonomy.

I hear the raucous squawking of seagulls from here. Hundreds of them circle the treelike structure, hunting the fish that swarm below in its safe harbor. The birds are nesting in the upper branches and have been for many generations, it seems, above clouds of insects. The fiber base is shit-stained and covered in seaweed, riddled with dens and nests and burrows. The voice of the sea has manifested itself to me in the most enormous and ancient form of life possible.