Godlike Machines (22 page)

“You are a total idiot,” she said.

We got to this point in every discussion. Half the time, I called her an idiot. Half the time it was the other way around. We sat down on the bus and she put her arm around me. I leaned in for my kiss. Dad would totally splode if he knew. Deracination!

Sorry, Dad. She kissed me slowly, with a lazy bit of tongue that made the hair on my neck stand up. She was probably getting a little old for me, but I found that I quite liked older women.

She broke it off and sighed. “You’re so young,” she said. “We can’t keep doing this.”

“I’m two months older than you,” I said, baiting her. I knew what she meant.

“You used to be. These days, it’s like you’re ten. I’m almost 14, Jimmy.”

“So go kiss some Treehugger boys on the spider-goat farm,” I said.

She sighed again. “Are you really happy here?”

“Are you happy where you are?”

“I’m happy enough. It’s peaceful.”

“Boring.”

“Yeah,” she said.

“It’s not boring around here. Going out with Dad is
awesome.’“
Dad collected pieces for his museum from all over the world. We’d gone to France together the year before to get the Girl and the Sultan’s Elephant from Marseilles. The semi-robotic puppets were 11 meters tall and we’d stashed them in a high-school gym near the bus-station. We couldn’t work them on our own, they needed a crew of 20 or more, but I was working on training the pack to help out. Trying, anyway. Pepe kept trying to eat the Elephant.

“But you’re all
alone.
And your Dad is so
weird?

“He’s weird, but he’s a lot of fun. I won’t live here forever, anyway. Once I’m post-pube, I’m going on a vision-quest. It’s part of the package. Then I’ll find somewhere to settle down.”

“You’ve got it all figured out, huh?”

Pepe had been circling high overhead as we chatted, occasionally dipping down to play with the ground effect critters. Now all three of his drones lofted high, making wide circles. That was the signal that he was seriously freaking out.

I stood up to get a better look at him, Lacey grabbing at my hand. I followed the wide, swooping curves of the drones, (inning to watch, and saw two of them get shot out of the sky, one-two, just like that, disappearing in a hail of debris.

Lacey squeezed my hand.

“Kurzweil on a crutch,” I breathed. I headed for the mecha, but Lacey wouldn’t let go of my hand. “Come on,” I said, looking into her scared face. “You ride shotgun, I’ll get you home safe.” She shook her head. Her eyes were white. The pack was going crazy around us, nipping at our heels, racing in circles. The flea was springing high, high, higher. The ( lack of artillery. A flight of rockets screamed overhead, then touched down somewhere. The sound was incredible, like nothing I’d ever heard, and the earth shook so hard that I slipped and went down on one knee.

“Come ON,” I said to Lacey, “get in!”

I grabbed for the bottom rung of the mecha’s handholds and felt it grip me back. I looked over my shoulder. Lacey was hugging the goat. Dammit. The goat.

“We’ll take her too!” I said. I reached for the goat, but she butted at me and shied back. “Lacey, you can’t stay here,” I said. There was the rattle of small arms, another volley of rockets. A cloud of dust boiled down the street. I barely managed to yank my shirt over my head before it overtook us, blotting out the sky, filling every pore with grey, shattered concrete. It was like a wumpus plume gone metastatic, filling the entire world.

I tugged my shirt back into place and looked around.

Lacey was gone.

I jumped down from the hover and ran around the bus. The pack were everywhere around me. I tried to whistle them up and send them in a search pattern for Lacey and the goat, but I needed the mecha for that.

I wasn’t thinking straight.

I turned and crouched down and put my face in my hands and breathed deeply. Then I stood up, thumped the ground-effect critters behind the ears, and climbed into the mecha and sealed the cowl, turning on air, radiation, and flash-bang filters at max. The screens were all going bonkers. I took another deep breath. First things first. Pepe was still up there. I dropped his sensorium on the side-screens, dialed back to when he first started to circle, absently watching the attacks unfold.

On the main screens, I put up the view from the ground effects and the flea, and told them to fan out and look for Lacey. Pepe had been watching the attack when Lacey went missing, so his rewind wasn’t any help there, but at least I could watch the attack that had unfolded.

There were eight mechas in formation, coming across the river from where Windsor used to be. It was our least guarded flank—we counted on the river as the first line of defense. If I was planning an invasion, that’s where I’d strike, too.

The mechas were smaller than mine. They were barely bigger than their pilots, more powered armor than vehicles. I recognized them as coming from the earliest years of the Mecha Wars, whereas my mecha was the last generation produced, a juggernaut that stood four times larger than them. The pack hadn’t found Lacey. I looked at the screens and decided that Lacey had gone to ground somewhere, hiding in a ruined building. Fine. She’d be as safe there as she was anywhere. I began to run for Windsor.

Dad wouldn’t answer his phone. I dropped mine into the mecha’s hopper and told it to keep on redialing him. It kept getting the voicemail: “You have reached Robin Yensid and the Detroit Conservation Zone. We are delighted to hear from another telephone user. Your choice of communications technology is appreciated. Help keep the telephone alive! That said, I can’t come to my phone right now. Leave me a message and I’ll phone you back.”

My mecha ran full tilt, bent almost double. The cockpit remained level on the end of the mecha’s flexible stalk of a neck, rolling silently from side to side to keep from upsetting me. It didn’t even spill my coffee.

Who’d be attacking Detroit? Dad believed that the wumpuses were made by some kind of co-op in San Diego, deep greens who’d made the viral bots and released them into the wild more than ten years ago. I’d checked out the co-op’s presence a couple times and it was mostly arguments about who was supposed to be tucking the oxen into bed each night, and what kinds of stories were appropriate to read to the calves. Apparently, the co-op had changed focus after their wumpus phase and had gone into farming. In any event, I didn’t think that they were the kind of gang that could send eight members across the continent in mechas to make sure that the last real city got ploughed under by wumpuses.

The mecha told me that it had the eight enemy craft in range of its missiles. I stopped and dropped the third leg for stability and sighted on the flank closest to me. I thought I’d pick them off in order, closest to furthest, and hope that the far ones wouldn’t even notice what I was up to until I’d already done it.

I told the missile which mecha to attack—it was purple, and Pepe’s imaging showed a driver behind the cowl that was about Dad’s size, though I couldn’t tell sex or age. I put my finger over the button and got ready to press it. But I didn’t push the button.

I had killed a million wumpuses. I’d put some dogs out of their misery, beasts too far gone to join the pack. I’d swatted flies and sploded mosquitos with lasers. But I’d never killed a human being. Technically, I was a transhuman, so was that still murder? My thumb thought so.

Dad’s voicemail came up again. The mecha closest to me was swiveling towards me. I could hear its radar scattering off my armor. I hit the button and my mecha rocked as the rocket screamed away from the frame on my mecha’s chest. The missile corkscrewed through a tracker-confounding set of spirals, shaking off radar chaff as it went. The chaff was propelled as well, and it, too, moved through corkscrews, so that even
I
couldn’t figure out which was the real missile and which were the drones.

Then, the moment of contact.

The real missile hit the mecha dead center. I watched its nose-cam as it kissed the chest-plate, seeing the mouth of the man (woman?) inside, shot up through the clear shield. The mouth made a perfect O. Then the chest-cam stopped working. I looked out with my naked eyes in time to see the mecha come apart in an expanding cloud of debris. Not all the debris was made of metal. There was a red mist in the air.

Something wet hit the ground. It must have been part of a person, once, but now it looked like roadkill. Like the dogs that couldn’t make it into the pack.

I was a murderer. The person in that mecha might have been an immortal like me. Or she might have been made into an immortal, like Dad. Might have lived forever.

The other mechas were targeting me now, three moving to flank me, two grasping forearms and locking at the ankles to make a single unit, which rose into the air on rotors over their shoulders.

I had already armed the remaining missiles and targeted the four closest to me without even thinking of it. I played a lot of mecha sims on slow days, sometimes using the console in front of the huge, chunky TV in the living room of the fourth scene of the Carousel of Progress. Dad did not approve of this, so I didn’t tell him.

I launched the battery and used the recoil time to bring the evaders up to nominal. This was the mecha’s gymnastics program, a set of heavily randomized backsprings and twirls and such, supposedly impossible for a targeting system to get a lock on, but nevertheless calculated to keep the enemy in range at all times. Theoretically, the brave pilot (ahem, me) could continue to harass and kill the enemy while pulling four gees through a set of acrobat maneuvers. The evaders were better than the carny rides Dad kept refurbished and running, but truth be told, they’d never failed to make me puke.

But as the missiles screamed toward the enemy mechas and the airborne unit bore down on me, big guns blazing, puking seemed like a sensible alternative to dying. I hit the evaders and dug in.

I’d ridden the evaders dozens of times, but this was the first time I kept my eyes open. The nausea didn’t rush up and overtake me. Instead, I remained utterly focused on the enemy craft, my gaze locked on them as my body rocked and flipped. My missiles had taken down two more, the other missiles had disappeared, either foiled by anti-targeting system or knocked out of the sky.

I threw more bad stuff in their direction, using the conventional depleted uranium rounds as the flips and turns brought me into range. The evaders were hard on the mecha’s power-cells, so the maneuvers only ran for a few minutes, but it felt like hours. When we ground to a halt, my mecha and I, we were much closer to the enemy craft than before. There had been eight of them. Now there were three. The two that had taken to the sky were lying in a twisted wreckage near me.

The pack were barking like crazy, filling the cockpit with alerts. The flea was bouncing up and down on the downed aerial unit, savaging the pilots through their cowls. It kept replaying its video of the kill, the flea leaping up to land on the rotors’ mast, biting down on the drive-shaft and hanging on as the rotors bent, collided, spun away, the flea bounding free of the dying craft as it spun out and spiraled down.

The remaining mecha were moving with more discipline and purpose than their brethren had. I no longer had the advantage of surprise. These three were taking cover behind Dad’s favorite office tower, a big white marble thing done in a style Dad called “deco.” They lobbed missiles over the building, apparently using orbitals or something stratospheric for targeting.

Two could play at that game. I whistled up the flea and Pepe and sent them around the back of the tower, giving me some guidance for my own targeting systems. My mecha knew well enough to automatically interface with the lads, tying them straight into its guidance systems. I fired some grenades at the parking structure opposite their covering building, letting the mecha calculate the bank shot so that they bounced off and landed amid the enemies.

Two more down, and the other two were on the move, streaking out from behind the building. Holy crap, they were
fast.
They fired in unison at me, letting me have it with guided missiles, grenades, conventional ammo. I tried evasive maneuvers but it was no good. They shot the mecha’s left leg out from under it and I tumbled . . .

... and kept rolling. The Mecha Wars were vicious, and once a ronin mecha was in the field, it might go months without a resupply or maintenance. These bastards kept coming at you no matter what, pulling themselves along on whatever limbs were left, until there was nothing left to fight with.

My mecha came up in a three-pointed stance, like one of the ground effect vehicles, like it was doing yoga, coming into a downward dog. The cowl swung around and I was upright again, atop the thorax of my newly bug-like fighting machine.

The ground effect puppies nipped at my heels as I scuttled toward the enemy, closing. I was down to nothing but conventional ammo now, so it was close fighting. In a pinch, my mecha could uproot a building and clobber them with it. Two minutes before, I’d been agonizing about becoming a murderer. Now I wanted to tear their legs off and beat them to death with them.

The dogs wanted to do their thing and I gave them the nod over my command channel. The entire pack converged on one of the two mechas—the closer one-grabbing its limbs and tumbling it to the ground, rending the metal away from the cowl. I actually heard the pilot scream. It made me grin.

That left one more. He—it was a he, I was close enough to see that now—he had planted himself in a fencer’s stance, presenting the side of his body to me as he raised his near hand straight out toward me, the maws of his guns yawning towards me. His other arm was curled across his chest, fanning up and down, trying to keep me in his sights at all times.

I scuttled my mecha forward, taking cover when I could, using trucks and houses, even a beautiful neon sign that Dad always stopped to admire when we were out for walks. It sploded and came down with a series of crystal tinkling noises.

I got as many shots off at it as I could, but it was fresh, with a seemingly endless supply of ammo to harry me with whenever I tried to target it.