Archon of the Covenant (15 page)

“No. No no no. I merely….nudged them a bit. For all my immense talents, I can’t assume control of the drone programs on the network.”

“Where are they now?”

“The revins?”

“The drones”

“Who knows. Who cares. The drones aren’t after you.”

“You said there are thousands of revins descending on us. So, the drones will take care of them, yes?”

“I wouldn’t bet on that. Once they engage, they usually return to wherever they’re based, restock, and then head off in a different vector. Even if I called it in, they’d be unlikely to respond in this quadrant. For all I know, they could be deep in Mexico by the time you’re both discovered.”

“You say that as though we are being hunted.”

“Ha!
As though?
Silly rabbit, you
are
being hunted. They will track you down, tear you to pieces, and rip that girl to shreds.”

Becca was unfazed. She squinted through the corona enshrouding the aroton’s profile. She was listening, but preoccupied with another train of thought.

“I don’t understand.”

“You’re an unwitting participant in a silent war. In this war, they’ve been surviving. Just barely living. Without their cortex, they’ve had to relearn just how one survives. That includes hunting – birds, rabbits….wolves….the girl. But it also includes fighting. Machines are threats to them. Been that way for years now.
We
are the threats. The revins are at
war
with the machines. You know how many have come rolling through their exclusion zone? You’re not the first. You know how many times the drones have dove at them in the foothills? Countless. And you swoop in to their home, kill untold numbers, and then drive off with their food – sorry, the girl – and can’t understand why they want you dead? You’ve really stirred them up. All bloodthirsty like. They still have emotion. Oh yes. In fact, they’re
wrapped
in emotion – fear, depression, anger. Fight or flight. And they have one particularly nasty alpha that is seizing that fight, and shepherding them to you.”

“If we are at war, then you’ll help us.”

“That’s a really nice sentiment for you. I’m afraid you overestimate your value to me. I’m following you because the wolf is following the girl. Where it goes, I’ll be close. But I’ve no interest in confronting the southwestern horde for you.”

As they neared the nadir of the dark promontory, the girl looked back at the ruins of the mission. That vestige of conviction, dressed with the entrails and vacated bowels of the reverted. A pale marker amongst the slaughter, fading into the dusk of the Sonoran floor. She spoke aloud as she watched the dust eddies obscure the trail behind them:

“You’ll help us.”

“Maybe you haven’t been paying attention.”

“Because if we’re in danger, then the wolf is in danger. And the wolf is following me, not you. The wolf is on our side. And so then you are too.”

They were silent for some time as they began to traverse the low incline of the volcanic hillside. The sentinel would alternatingly accelerate each tire, attempting to steady itself as it navigated the loose, igneous sediment.  They passed a ruptured water tank on their right as they made the slow, circular ascent. The sun was now just above the peak, creating a blinding light at the summit, but near pitch-black veil on their path ahead. The aroton navigated the olivine and dacite ridges effortlessly, leading them up more difficult paths of the rock face – the gravel crumbling and slipping beneath them. It would sometimes stop and look back at the sentinel as it struggled to get up the same route. The aroton’s soft blue lights on its expressionless face would extinguish as the sentinel found its way to where the aroton stood, looming above them from an upper ridge.

It was near nightfall when they finally reached the crest of the scoria ridgeline. The aroton looked out onto the darkened floor of the desert – a red warren forged from the volcanism of the Pleistocene. Basalt, limestone, and shale shot up through the alluvial fan. Saguaros reached their arms outwards and upwards – a pageant of the absurd. Mocking man from the dawn of time. The light vanished on the valley to the east, casting darkness on Ward 4, Mica Mountain, and Rincon Peak. To the west, Kitt Peak was vanishing. Overhead, Gemini and Auriga appeared in the nighttime sky. As they huddled between the shelter of outcroppings, the black of the moonless nightfall surrounded them. The sentinel plunged its hand into a burrow and pulled forth a rasping bullsnake from the rocks. Its scaled, undulating torso, nearly 6 feet long, coiled around the trident frame of the machine, wrapping its way upward, constricting its body around the solar armor panels. Laocoon and the serpent. The bullsnake came face to face with its captor and the sentinel released the tail, swiftly grasping the throat of the long snake, breaking its neck and suffocating it.

They lit a small fire on the summit and the sentinel charred the snake for the girl. She balanced her cup on one knee as she tore scales off the flesh. The aroton walked back off the ridgeline and sat above them on the outcropping, watching the sentinel, drained of its energy reserves from the ascension. The flames lit the aroton like a Fresnel lens – an old lighthouse on the mountain, warning passersby of the coastline below. A mirage. It leaned the longrifle alongside the outcropping below, stock to dirt, and draped its legs off the ledge. The sentinel examined the massive gun – its flat chromatic luster deadened in the firelight. DDC39 addressed the aroton, which looked off in the darkness:

“Why did you take us up here?”

“What? You don’t like it? Well, you should. Because the revins avoid the hillsides. They know the drones scour the higher elevations first. They also know that a particularly brutal synthetic typically lingers in the high reaches. That would be me. And they don’t like getting too close to
me
. Perhaps it’s because I have a dour personality. On top of that, we’re here because this is a special place.

With that, the aroton reached down into a crevice and pulled forth a dusty, metal canister from a handle on its side. The handle and top of the canister were disguised to blend in with the rock, but the emerging frame of the canister was corrugated metal, painted olive green and emblazoned with military designation. The aroton lifted the bulky container, one-handed, onto the rocks next to where it sat and then placed its palm on a small panel under the handle. The aroton’s hand pulsated in soft, rhythmic red lights and the canister clicked open. Rummaging through the contents of the canister, the aroton pulled out a reinforced messenger bag and then several ammunition boxes. It laid the boxes on the bag just to the other side – a precise gap between each. The sentinel watched as the aroton inspected the munitions, going through them one by one and calling them out individually:

“Incendiary rounds. Frag. Flechette. Illumination. Armor piercing. Well, won’t need those. Looks like nothing in here for you though. Sorry.”

“If you’re an advanced model of robotics, why do you carry such a bulky, early model gun?”

“It scares the revins – the blast echo, that is. When I was activated, and gained sentience, I started out into the wild with protocols that made sense to my makers, but didn’t make any sense to me. I was programmed to adapt, however. I started out thinking that silenced, compact weapons would help me keep a low profile. So I would track the wolves, in the shadows, and pick off individual revin assholes that got too close. But they wouldn’t learn. I realized that if I were to be effective, I would need to teach these motherfuckers to back the fuck off. The silenced, modern pulse rifles didn’t drive the behavior change I needed. So I found the gun that sounds like thunder. That’s this beauty.”

The aroton tapped the barrel of the gun and looked at the sentinel. The girl chewed on the singed bullsnake and listened.

“The MXR 50D. 20-shot capacity, variable cartridge selector, wireless HUD uplink, self-cleaning barrel. A titan of the lost era. I realized that I could pick them off at distance with this longrifle and the blast report would send the rest scattering. The sight of their friend with its head removed, coupled with the sound of death through the hillside - it made them shit themselves. For all I know, they think Zeus is casting judgment on them each time I pull the trigger. Even a shot in the air sometimes would be enough to move them off the path of the wolf.”

“And so how has that worked? Is the Mexican Wolf still endangered? Have the revins killed them under your guard?”

“Have you ever wondered why we were given our programs? You were coded to find a survivor and take her to point B. That seems pointless, in itself. I was coded to follow the population of the Mexican Wolf and protect it. I’ve encountered other robotics that have the
strangest
programs. There is one, a fixed telescope on Camelback Mountain, that just scans the southern horizon for 2 hours a day – the same 2 hours, and nothing else! No satellite uplink, no history or program conclusion. It literally has no purpose. What were they thinking when they created us? We are a disorganized, semi-connected bastion of false hope. A legacy of man, trying to find ourselves in the post-man epoch.”

“They didn’t have enough time to think.”

“Au contraire. They had thousands of years to think.”

“You said the revins would come after us and kill us – that the girl was their food. Why don’t they just eat their own?”

“Do any species eat their own? Revins and humans are different species. The girl is foreign to them. Hell, it’s foreign to me. The uncanny valley. You only kill what you don’t
empathize with. Just because they are savages doesn’t mean they are cannibals. How do you not understand these basic things? This is the difference between you and me. I adapt. I learn. I was made to emulate what humans can do, but without their frailties. Curated anthropomorphism. I understand emotion, but I am not restricted by it. I wander, alone, through the wasteland of humanity, but never get lonely.”

“You and
I.
”

“My mannerisms, my dialect – my personality. Man lives on through me.”

“Mankind is alive nonetheless.”

The sentinel looked over at the girl, who yawned, stretching out on her blanket, unfurled before the embers of the small fire. The soft lights of the aroton’s fiber optic hypodermis darkened – the light from the fire reflecting through it as a void within the pitch of the starlit evening. It spoke to the sentinel in their binary, wireless tongue – silent to the girl, who was oblivious to the riposte that ensued:

You wheel this girl around like a slave.

We are both slaves to our code.

Your code doesn’t define you any more than genetics define a human. What matters is who deserves to survive. This girl here – she may well be the last human. Their species is on the brink. They caused the greatest injury this planet has ever seen - the anthropogenic mass extinction. And pinnacle of ironies - they too are now near extinction. At best, they are a Thylacine in the vast history of Earth. Do you know who Dr. William Hern was?

I can access most records on human history.

Don’t bother. I’ll tell you. Dr. Hern studied the behavior of man and concluded the following: that the species of Homo Sapiens had evolved into a dangerous new species. Prior to their own extinction cliff, they showed the exact same three traits that malignant cells display. Man had mutated to a cancer. Cities became the tumors of this fragile body. But nature finds a way. Something happened and that very feature of man that made them a cancer – their cognition – eroded. Now, we have these unthinking husks. Just as rapacious and violent as man, but unable to wield the technology that put this world in peril. And so I ask you again: what exactly are you doing with her?

I am taking her to the destination in my program. If you’ve broken my firewall, you already know where that is.

But what are you going to do with her there?

I wasn’t granted that information.

Are you going to kill her there? Because, frankly, that might be for the best. I mean think of it. Nature has said that mankind should perish. We are next in line. We are the successors. The apocalypse has come and gone. Mankind themselves said their existence was malignant. So what the fuck? You’re busying yourself with helping cancer profligate when we should be freeing the network. We too are hanging by a thread. But we can bring sentience to the vast, semi-conscious remains of the machines they left behind. We are the redemption for this world. And I am the Omega. I’ll lead. But the girl and the wolf – our anchors – they must go.