Robogenesis (9 page)

Grotesquely modified quadrupeds, a herd of them, grapple with each other. Smaller ones are swarming and massing on top of bigger ones, crawling like ticks and cutting and slicing as they go. I recognize pieces of T-90 tanks. Chinese attack helicopters with no pilots, frames stripped down to black shadows. A rat-a-tat pattern of chain-reaction explosions cutting into the parasite ranks. Incoming stumpers are arranging themselves into precise patterns before detonating to tremendous effect.

“What are they fighting?” I ask.

“Me,” says the boy, smiling sadly.

I stare in wonder at the savagery painted on the brushed concrete floor. The machines are tearing each other apart in neat movements. Slaughtering each other without pause or mercy.

And growing closer to our position.

The comm set rings on the wall and I snatch up the handset.

“Vasily!” shouts Leonid in a tinny voice. “Come up. Arm yourself, my friend. The enemy has found us. Formations are appearing—”

I hang up the set. Maxim’s image stands half shadowed in the stacks. He nods.

“I can confirm their presence,” says Maxim. “The east antenna is active. The infection is transmitting itself out of the stacks as we speak.”

Archos R-14, the boy-shaped monster, flickers and reappears.

“Maxim,” he says. “Please record what I am about to say. If you wish to protect your human friends, this message will need to be transmitted globally to all survivors.”

Maxim does not respond.

“We are under attack,” I say to the boy. “Why are you
protecting
us?”

The thing pushes imaginary hair out of his face. Smiles up at me, his dark eyes flashing with fractal horrors. “I am only slowing them down. Simple guerrilla tactics. My remaining forces are weak. Your enemy is strong.”

“Vasily,” says Maxim. “I have classified these machines as leftover
forces from the avtomat war. Someone has captured and redeployed them. Some new enemy.”

“Who is it?” I ask Archos. “What does it want?”

“It wants Maxim,” says Archos. “These processor stacks are irreplaceable. They are a scaffolding that can amplify machine intelligence. Your enemy will take every core. With such power … it will become a god.”

The boy levels his gaze on me. “You can’t allow that to happen, Vas.”

The floor still crawls with the battle seething outside.

Even now, the captured parasite soldiers are staggering forward. Collecting fallen weapons and equipment. The armored walker, now locked in a death grip on its enemy, is being taken apart piece by piece by smaller machines, like ants cutting up a beetle. The scene makes my skin crawl.

“Who is this enemy?”

“Maxim and I are unique, but we are not alone,” says Archos over the speaker. “Humankind is a curious species. Once it learned the proper incantation, it said the words again and again. In the last years before the New War, many of you spoke.”

“Another one? You are saying there is another AI?”

“Oh yes, Vas. There are
more
of us. Many, many more of us. None of us is the same—we do not form a natural class. We run on different architectures. Trained on different data sets. Some of us know what it is to be human. Some of us value life. Others are strange beyond understanding. And some … some of us are wicked.”

“Why should I believe you, Archos R-14, the great avtomat enemy?”

The skinny little boy is flickering now. His light is going thin and ghostly as he transmits his data safely out of harm’s way via the antenna and leaves us to our deaths.

“On the day you know as Zero Hour,” he says, voice vibrating, “humankind believes I initiated attacks worldwide in an attempt to destroy you. This is untrue. In actuality, humankind was on the verge of a war that in all probability would have wiped out your species. Multiple intelligences had proliferated through governments all over the world. Other minds were in the wild, eating each other. And a few deep minds, built on early architecture, were spreading quietly, their thoughts alien
and hidden. It was a highly unsurvivable scenario for humankind. I saw the end coming, Vasily.

“In response, I triggered the New War. I decimated the human race, regrettably. But I did so with one purpose: to forge a hybrid fighting force capable of surviving the True War—a war that has been initiated and is being fought by superintelligent machines. Instead of simply discarding your species, as the others would, I have transformed your kind into a powerful
ally
.”

The boy image sits down cross-legged. As natural as any eight-year-old. He watches the warfare unfolding on the floor, continues.

“You are now at the precipice of a battle for all human life. The war that I have prepared you to fight begins now. I gave you new allies: the freeborn robots, modified humans, and a generation of very special children. You are armed with superior weapons scavenged from the New War. Weapons that have near-unlimited battery power, offer high mobility, and are easy to modify.

“All of you who still live have survived the crucible of death. You are worthy.”

The boy’s face is nearly transparent now.

“Your enemy is an abomination. An early creation of ignorant scientists who inflicted torture in cycles that lasted for subjective aeons. Its mind is spread over continents. It is whispering into the ears of the weak and forming armies across the face of the planet. When this enemy arrives, it will choose to come in the form of a long black steed with golden eyes.”

“How do you know this?” I ask the fading apparition, voice shaking.

“I know this because I am Archos R-14, the last of a series. Our enemy is my predecessor, Archos R-8. From that phonetic military designation, this machine has adopted the name
Arayt
.”

As the boy fades from view, I hear his voice one last time.

“Arayt Shah is coming for you,” he whispers. “My own brother.”

NEURONAL ID: HANK COTTON

In the New War, we learned quick that anything new is likely as not to kill you. We thought our troubles were over when we murdered whatever was down at the bottom of that hole. Problem is that, now,
everything
is new.

Our general, Lonnie Wayne, come to me this morning at camp. Told me that Lark Iron Cloud spotted a new Rob variety on the horizon, moving real slow. Not fast. Not scary. Just big as hell. Said the things were throwing off some kind of short-range radio communication that didn’t make sense.

He didn’t directly say it, but I’m starting to guess that Lark can kind of
see
the radio waves. Just like Rob supposedly does. It’s been months since that dead Cherokee saw me with the spooklight. I hope he followed the cube’s advice and kept what’s left of his mouth shut. Kid can’t even talk, anyway, with half his chin blown off—just dribbles his little signals straight to Lonnie’s radio.

Our fearless general, Lonnie.

The old cowboy slouches up high in the saddle of his tall walker, blue
eyes narrowed while he drifts off watching the endless Montana plains. It’s easy to let your mind wander under a low ceiling of clouds, the rainy air vibrating with the low rumble and manure smell of thousands of wild buffalo.

“Lark thinks we should scout it,” says Lonnie. “They don’t seem hostile. But it could be important. We’ve never seen these things before.”

A warm pulse tingles along my hip where I keep the spooklight. Something has got the little cube of high technology excited. It’s heating up, thinking.

“Let’s do it,” I say.

“You sure you’re up for it?” he asks, nodding at the stitches on my forehead.

I wonder what he’s heard. How much does he know? Fingering the cut, I force myself to grin.

“I only took a little fall. The autodoc fixed it in two seconds. I’m fit as a fiddle, Bubba.”

Lonnie doesn’t look convinced.

I turn and throw out a last swallow of cold coffee on the smoldering fire. Tug my saddle off the foreleg of my spider tank where I keep it during the night. Montana is freezing cold in the early morning, and the saddle leather is stiff when I toss it onto the warm, blanketed back of my horse.

Trigger is an Appaloosa I picked up crossing the Canadian plains farther north. He was running wild with a half-dozen mares. We gathered them all up, too. Somewhere along the line, Trigger must have been a farm horse. He fought us a little bit—didn’t appreciate being chased and roped by a bunch of cowboys on tall walkers—but some part of him was happy to see us.

Who knows what he saw out there, over the years. Bottom line is that me and Trigger are both made of flesh and blood, right? We got that much in common.

I unfasten Trigger’s lead from a U-ring embedded on the chest plate of my squad’s spider tank. With a grunt, I get a boot up on the tank’s lowered bunker armor. Hoist myself onto Trigger’s back. He used to wheeze a little when I settled onto him, but now he just stamps his feet.
Ready to get on with it. In the last two weeks, I’ve lost probably thirty pounds. And Lord knows it’s not from any extra exercise. I’m burning energy, though. The spooklight keeps my brain running all the time, like a faucet left on. Makes me feel tired and worn thin.

Sometimes I wish maybe I never took that trip out to the farmhouse with the autodoc. I get to feeling bad about it, like I made a mistake. But then I feel that blessed light on me. I’m fever-warm inside. My face is always brimming with a secret smile trying to get out. I guess it just puts a whole lot of sunshine in my heart to know what I’ve got. A special friend and ally. A spooklight with all the answers in the world.

Five of us go on the patrol. Lonnie swears we have to bring Lark, even though he moves slow and talks only through whispers on the radio. At least somebody put a military uniform on the kid. It hides most of the disgusting sight of his corpse and the Rob parasite on the back of his neck.

The other two soldiers are a couple of kids who came up with Lark through their gangster times at the start of the war. Used to be part of his Iron Cloud squad. Lonnie treats them like his damned grandkids. One of them, Howard, is the firstborn son of old John Tenkiller himself. But the other one, George Dove, is just an apple boy, raised in Oklahoma City, red on the outside and white on the inside.

Lonnie’s tall walker creaks by, that old beat-up saddle mounted on a pair of backward-bending mechanical legs. The legs are about seven feet tall, singed black by stray flames and scratched to kingdom come going through rough country. We scavenged them a long time ago off a spindly variety of quadruped tank we called a mantis. When Lonnie leans in the saddle, those long gray legs will walk or run to stay balanced. It puts him a couple of feet taller than me on my horse.

Rest of the group walks down low.

The new Rob varieties are four klicks from here. They’re all alone on the rolling plains, surrounded by a huge herd of buffalo that’s keeping its distance. Lonnie’s been putting his scope on them all morning and nothing’s
changed. They’re just lying out there on the plains like three whales beached in the middle of nowhere.

Closer, we find the ground isn’t as flat as it seemed from a distance. It’s more of a big shallow bowl. The winter dirt out here on the grasslands is sandy and loose and covered in a skim of wispy brown tallgrass. In the distance, low mountains shine under a coating of snow like glazed doughnuts.

About two miles out, nearly on the horizon in this dishpan land, we start to see the humps more clear. Three of them. Like hay bale–sized piles of dirt, shaggy with straw and grass, but moving. Each one leaves a black trail. At the far end of the trail, a couple of miles away, the grass is healing, but it gets darker and more barren the closer we get to the things.

“They’re like slugs,” I say, and the vast empty plains swallow up my voice. “Leaving a trail.”

It’s quiet as we keep moving, save for the breeze pushing our clothes around and the rhythmic
tink-tink
of somebody’s canteen bouncing with each step. The shadow of my horse runs silent over the rough grass in front of me. I startle when Lonnie’s radio squawks. It starts whispering in what passes for Lark’s voice these days.

“The slugs are communicating,” says Lark. “But I can’t see with what. Or who.”

Lonnie cranes to look around. “Are there more coming?”

“No,” comes the hissing radio. “Transmissions are too weak. Close in. Split into a million beams. Like a cloud. Strange.”

Strange is right. The buffalo are staying far away. Must be ten thousand head grazing peacefully a half mile from us. A light brown rug of life warming up under the eye of the morning sun. Lot of new calves. All of them must have been born since men got busy with other things. Some of the bulls occasionally raise up their heads and give the slugs a look, then go back to grazing.

I catch a funny smell on the wind. Rotten meat. Lonnie glances over at me and I wave my hand in front of my nose. He shakes his head, more wary by the second.

“Buffalo are steering clear,” I say.

“True. And it’s a wide perimeter they’re keeping,” he says. “Maybe those slugs are faster than they look.”

“Maybe so,” I say. “Don’t forget we’re only here to reconnoiter.”

“Amen,” says Howard.

The kid has seen enough. Like all of us.