Robogenesis (46 page)

“Taking casualties. Repeat.
Assist
.”

The male is screaming a word at the moaning female. It does not register in my English-language corpus. The word gets louder and more desperate until the plugger detonates, rocking the female’s chest. He continues to sputter the word through a flow of liquid released by the mucous membranes of his face.

“I’m not a part of Gray Horse Army no more, Arbiter,” responds Lark. “I wish it were different, but I had to put that away. I’m freeborn now. If my people fight, then I’ll fight.”

The unrecognized word the male is repeating—it is the female’s name.

“Iron Cloud,” I transmit.
“Please.”

The slavers are launching smoke grenades to screen their movements. Gas-powered, fully automatic weaponry screams around me. A haze of gunpowder joins the white clouds roiling off smoke canisters. Evil things are approaching through the mist.

“Sir, Freeborn City is locked up tight, over,” radioes the sergeant.

I remember what happens now from before—in the cold woods of Alaska.

“Acknowledged,” I transmit to the thing perched on the ridge, unstrapping my heavy machine gun. “Request retracted … freeborn.”

Around me, grim faces are lit by muzzle flashes. Crying and cursing. I remind myself that this is only air rushing over their vocal cords, nothing more. These men and women are not my kind. Yet I still cannot seem to get used to the sight of humans dying.

I clamp one hand onto the truck door and rip it off its hinges. Using the door as a shield, I push the nose of my M240 through the window and level it. Step out from behind the barrier. As I walk, I ignore the
wide, questioning human eyes that are on me. There is nothing left to say—without the freeborn, our survival probability is nil.

My actions are my only answer.

I squeeze the trigger. The gun sputters and spits streaking metal at the feral spider-forms flashing over the battlefield. Plastic explodes. Flesh is torn. And all around me, my humans die.

NEURONAL ID: MIKIKO

The world is wet and dark and close. She wraps her manifold arms around my body. She compresses every atom of my being into her warm blackness.

Inside is safety.

The light cannot penetrate my mother’s folds. Her arms are shields that hold me and construct me and make me whole. In the darkness of my mind’s eye, I see a gentle old man. He is sitting on a scrap-metal throne. Part of me whispers his name.
Takeo
. Love of my life. This whispering part of me knows that Mr. Nomura is very far away now. Gone, but his memory lingers in my mind, speaking to me.

You cannot stay inside
, says the memory.
Go and fight. But please
, live.

The familiar squeeze is becoming too tight. A novel sensation that must be pain arcs through my body. Walls of muscle around me are contracting. Each surging cramp tightens a band of pressure, pushing me down through a hot suffocating confusion of black plastic. Wet bands lick my skin. Pushing me down, down, down.

A rip in reality appears at my feet and I fall into bright sunlight. My wet eyelashes meet and shatter the brilliance into kaleidoscope shards.

Mother is giving me to the world.

A throat of chilled air swallows my legs as they emerge from the hole, trailing sticky plastic fibers. Stiff stalks of grass press against the tender arches of my bare feet. The ground noses roughly against my calves as I slip through the breach, arms crossed tight over my chest. Curled into fetal position, I smell dirt and plastic and rain.

The mother shape above me shifts away.

Now a sheer blue emptiness pins me against the earth. Where has the ocean gone? The last thing I remember is the sand swallowing me. Compressing my body into gossamer strands. The deep mind spoke. My thoughts must have wandered. For a time, I must have been dreaming with the dreamer itself.

My mouth is opening and closing. I am coughing, chest contracting, spitting liquid out of my throat. It seems as if the whole world is spinning, trying to fling me into the sky. Wiping a forearm over my eyes, I clear my vision. Plant my palms flat against the dirt, fingers spread, and lift my head up above this flat endless sea of blurry brown.

I suck in another lungful of air and let it rush out of me in a high-pitched shout. I am breathing. I am screaming. The sound resonates in my chest and throat and head for a long time. The shout echoes away into the empty plain.

You are not safe, my love
, says the kind old man in my mind’s eye.
Please, listen. This is a battlefield
.

Blinking, I lift my hand to my face. Am I still dreaming?

It is not my hand. The limb is thin and brownish and light. Elegant and long as if carved from wood, yet far stronger than that. And softer. My fingers are delicate and supple. Clenching them, they feel strong enough to claw through solid rock. I see that I have glittering half-moon fingernails.

Something mechanical groans and I hear a soft rattle.

A car-sized machine lies in the dirt a few meters away. Headless, the creature slithers forward on blunt, crocodilian feet. Liquid-soaked plastic straps spill out from a wet slit in its belly. Each push forward digs those feet into the turf and sends a spray of loose dirt into the air.

It is a birthing machine. I was made inside it.

On either side of me, flipper trails of dirt are carved out of the grassy plain. Liquid from the birther coats my body, evaporating quickly. Wet straps still encircle my feet and legs. With trembling fingers, I pluck off the springy bands. They are made of the same material as my body and have the unfinished look of leftovers. I run my palms down my thin, naked shins, fingernails dragging over a layer of sticky liquid on my legs. I am not made of flesh. But this is not molded plastic, either. Some kind of synthesis.

Please
, says shadow Takeo.
Please act quickly
.

Body diagnostics are offline. All my specs are different. Ryujin, the voice of the sea, has remade me. I am somewhere else now. Someone else.

The birther is ten meters away, making steady progress. I squint at it, head swaying with the effort. I keep my fingers buried in the grass for balance. The air is so cold on my skin.

“Hai!” I shout at it. “What am I? What did you do?”

The birther does not respond. Its body contracts again and surges ahead another meter. Dirt flies, patters lightly against the ground in a precise parabolic spray.

Then I hear the echoes. Like the gentle sweep of rain across a still pond.

Dozens of birthers. Like sea turtles come ashore to lay their eggs. In their wakes, I see new varieties, created by the deep mind. The plain swarms with newborns. Most are four-legged, deer-sized. Knobby knees and sharp hooves. Streams of liquid dripping from muscled flanks and the wide-spaced eyes of herbivores.

An egglike sac falls onto the ground from a birther. Part of it swells, rippling in the wind like a half-deflated balloon. The skin stretches and the wind rolls the thing a few meters. Then a gust catches it and the floating jellyfish is gone into the sky, trailing swaying tentacles. Peering into the blue, I see dozens of similar shadows.

There are no other people-things, like me.

Instead, I see flat-packed radar pods and quill-like antennae. Glittering scales made of solar cells. The deep mind is creating whole new species, populating the world according to a hidden pattern.

“What are you doing, Ryujin?” I ask out loud.

I realize my voice is high-pitched. It carries the pure clarity of the reed vibrating in a bamboo flute. No electronic speaker generates my sounds. Cords in my throat are crafting the words, vibrating in complex symmetry. Without the grate of my earlier screams, it sounds quite beautiful.

I have a voice
, I think.

Standing, I can see smoke in the distance. Smell the burning on the breeze. Beyond the birthing plain is a pall of dust on a mountainside. Glinting figures are knifing through ranks of fleeing humans. Metal winks in the sun. I hear the faint whinny of wounded horses screaming. Human forms falling.

Help them
, says the memory of Takeo.
You came here to help them
.

But I am naked and alone. My Warden honor guard are far from here. There are no other freeborn allies. No projectile weapons. Not even a blade. And I’m cold, body shivering. What was once a number reported by a sensor is now a
feeling
that races over the surface of my body and grinds insistently into my awareness.

I am in
pain,
Takeo
.

“What!? What am I supposed to do? I have no weapon!” I shout into the sky.

In response, I hear the shiver of wind through dead leaves. Then a crawling sensation creeps up my legs. Fear building, I lower my gaze to the ground. Around me, thousands of tiny brown shapes are writhing in the dirt. They flitter and flip over each other like a swarm of insects. Their motion forms a strange pattern; a multitude of rasping movements that create a harsh whisper. And a band of pale green light rises from the ground, a message that rises to my face.

Welcome to my dream
, says Ryujin.

Somehow, I sense vast amusement behind the words.

One of the insects lands on the back of my hand. It climbs to my fingertip and squats down. I shake my finger, afraid it may bite. But it clings to me, splaying iridescent wings that flash sharp blues and greens in the sunlight. Another leaps onto my arm. Then another. I suppress panic as thousands of tiny claws tickle my flesh. More join until the swarm is covering my naked body. I try to brush them away, but as each
individual latches on, it forms a knobby scale. Moving deliberately, the insects lock together into a mesh—a gleaming coat of film-thin armor.

Smoke still rises from the east.

I am no longer afraid or in pain. I take a hesitant step, and the scales move as I move. The chills are gone. My skin feels warm.

I break into a jog, headed toward a road.

“What are they?” I ask.

The scales over my chest rustle together. Sounds form a pattern. A ribbon of communication forms and a quiet voice enters my mind.

They are your sword and your shield
, it says.

The shining scales of my living armor sing as I sprint.

I lean into the breeze and push harder, my carved fiber legs slicing the air, conserving the energy of each stride in precisely machined tendons and harnessing it to propel me forward over the rutted terrain. A trail of dust rises behind me, the particles floating gently on the wind after the violent stabbing of my bare feet.

Cheyenne Mountain looms up the road, the bulk of it throwing a sweeping velvet shadow upon the plain. On its flank, a group of people are fighting and dying on a mist-shrouded battlefield outside the mouth of a tunnel. Slow, echoing booms and the hollow chatter of gunfire skitter over the rocks to me on the wind.

I am not in Japan anymore, but the motions of survival I see on the mountainside are familiar. The akuma attacked us relentlessly in Adachi Ward. Tokyo herself was shattered beyond recognition. But Takeo collected the strongest among us. Instead of running away or hiding, we fought until we were sharpened. Freeborn and human. The akuma taught us to survive. And Takeo gave us a reason to live.

The battle slides out of view as the road curves. The incline is getting steeper. I hear only my footfalls on pavement as I round a final bend. My armored scales are rustling with anticipation, waves dancing up and down my body. At my joints, the scales flutter their small wings to dissipate waste heat. I now recognize the machined flakes as natural born—ikimono, like me.

At the final bend, I slow and stop. A bank of foul smoke is curling down the mountain road, waist-high. The screams of the living and dying and the stutter of their weaponry perforate the misty calm. And under it all, I feel the mammoth vibration of the black walkers as they lumber into battle.

Ryujin has given me a weapon, however, and I intend to use it.

Head leveled, I stride into the chaos. Crimson lasers dissect the smoke, searching for targets, leaving roiling patterns. Bullets snap through the crisp air. Something big and dark flashes over my head. Spiders, the height of houses, are charging through the haze. They trail long black tentacles, many with men attached at the neck. These slave soldiers obediently fire their weapons wherever the red targets appear. Overhead, I notice a rustling blue sheen on the sky. Freeborn are communicating nearby.

I don’t notice the soldier until it is almost too late.

A black cord snakes into view, connected to a vague shape that becomes clear only in proximity. The malnourished human blinks at me, dirty face tight and tense, his rifle shouldered. Then I hear the distinct cough of an AK-47.

I drop to the ground.

The dirty pavement is cool on my knees and elbows, and my body is freezing cold. My scales are gone. They flutter in place, a silhouette remaining in the air over my head, still in the shape of my body. Bullets are tearing through them, but they’re so small that they are simply pushed away.

A decoy.

I flick my fingers over the dirt at the man in front of me, an almost instinctual gesture. In response, a few dozen flakes flutter toward him in pirouetting swoops. He stares at the butterflies, unafraid. Then they land on his arms and face, biting. The man screams hoarsely and grabs for his collar as brown flakes wriggle underneath. He spins in a circle, cord whipping over his head, fingers scratching at his neck. I hear a pop and a whiz as the collar retracts.