Godlike Machines (32 page)

This was my living: collecting the junk of our erased civilization. I knew an assemblage sculptor who’d pay handsomely for it in processed cereals, refined sugars, and the other old evils that were nearly impossible to derive from the Utopian plants that sprouted all around us. There were sweet edible flowers you could put in your tea, there were mushroom loaves that tasted like whole-grain bread, but there weren’t any Twinkie bushes or cigarette trees.

The thing about the main road is that you can see down it for a long, long way, so theoretically it should be hard for the youth gangs to stage an ambush. And the old roadbed was kept smooth by the passage of feet, yielding a less bumpy ride in the mecha, which was a comfort to my old bones.

I stayed away from the road from a little before dusk to a little after dawn. The youth gangs grew more fearless then—or so it seemed to me—and they owned all the high-traffic routes after dark.

But it’s not a hard-and-fast rule. That day, they surrounded me on the road, moving like they were on casters, that same eerie precision. It had been five years since I last met a youth gang in the woods at the eve of the militia’s dissolution, but I still recognized these kids. They were the same kids—not just similar looking, the same kids, I’d never forget their faces.

They hadn’t aged a day.

Again, I rotated my mecha at the waist, looking at each in turn. They met my gaze calmly.

They were filthy now, so grimed that they were all the same mottled brown and green. One appeared to have fungus growing on his shirt. Two were barefoot. They looked like they needed a parent to sit them down and bathe them and put them in a new suit of clothes. And administer a spanking.

I found the one I’d chased to his hidey hole, the one who’d moved with so much preternatural grace and agility. I gave the mecha his scent, told it to track him, only him, to grab him, no matter what. Then I spun a little around, looking a different one in the eyes, hoping to trick them all about the focus of my attention.

They each raised an arm in unison, and tried to mind-rape me. The headache returned, the same headache, book-marked and reloaded five years later, and I slapped at the activator control as it descended.
Fetch
, mecha,
fetch!

The mecha lurched and spun and grabbed, in a series of clicks and thuds. I’d told it to put itself into relentless pursuit mode, without any consideration for me. I heard one of my ribs snap and gasped. That old rib was the same one that had snapped all those years ago.

The headache disappeared, swallowed by the pain in my chest. I heard/felt the rib-ends grating, had a momentary vision of the sharp rib-end punching through my lung. The mecha would be my grave. It would chase the boy and catch him or not, and I would bubble out my last bloody breaths, immortal no longer.

But we were lurching too hard for me to spend time on these visions. The boy was running and dodging through the jungle, again choosing his route based on the mecha’s limitations, the places it couldn’t leap or smash through. I took over the controls and added my smarts to the mecha, trying to model the boy’s behavior and guess where he would go next.

There, he was going to jump into that swampy patch and pull himself out along that old rotting log. So, coil the legs and spring, aiming for the log, doubling over in the air and grabbing for him. Little fucker wasn’t going to generation gap me again.

I did it, roared into the air and roared at the pain in my ribs. Caught him on the first bounce. Wrapped my hands around his skinny chest and turned him right side up and held him in front of my faceplate.

He was eerily calm. I could feel him trying to work his way into my head, his SQUID battering my mind. I flipped on my PA.

“Cut it out,” I said. I was breathing hard, each inhale agony from my ribs. “Why can’t you little creeps just leave me alone?”

“Jimmy,” he said. “What have you done to yourself?”

He spoke in my father’s voice.

I think I blacked out for a while. I don’t know how long I was out, but then I was back and he was just disappearing into another hidey hole, his scrap of a shirt still caught in my mecha’s fist. I grabbed for him, but the pain in my ribs nearly made me black out again.

I switched on the mecha’s medical stuff and let the needles and probes sink into me while I set the inertial tracker to backtrack-gently—to home. I could see my artist friend some other time and do my trade.

The man with the rings and necklaces and the dandelion clock of hair was waiting for me when I got back.

“That was some chase-scene,” he said, as I pried myself out of my tin can.

“Hand me my canes,” I gasped, stepping onto the wide limb that led into my treehouse.

He shook his head as he did so. “You don’t look so good.”

“You want to tape up my ribs?”

“Not especially,” he said. He rummaged in his pack and then tossed me something. “Compression shirt. Just put it on and let it do its thing.”

In the end, he had to help me into the t-shirt, which was snug and electric blue. It gradually tightened itself around me, like a full-body hug. He showed me how to get it to loosen up for later when I wanted to take it off. I slumped onto my bed.

“What have you done to yourself?” he said.

“You’re the second person to ask me that today.”

“Yeah, I heard.”

“You’ve been following me, huh.”

He pointed to the sky. “Midges,” he said. “My familiars. I have millions of them, all around these parts. They keep me filled in on all the doings on my territory.”

“Your territory.”

“I’m the shaman of the southland, son. You should be honored. Most people don’t even know I exist. I’ve come to you twice.”

“You said you could reverse this,” I said, gesturing with my skeletal, liver-spotted arm.

“I said that. It’s not hard, really. Just need to send a kill signal to Chandrasekhar’s bots and your cells’ natural robustness will kick in, lengthening your mitochondria. Once it reaches critical length, bam, you’ll just grow back into the boy we programmed you to be.”

“I want to stop at 18,” I said. “That was a good age.”

He nodded sagely. “Might take the last couple thousand years off your life, you know.”

“How many will that leave me with, though?”

“Oh,
lots
,” he said. “I mean, not into the stelliferrous period when the stars grow cold, but put it this way: plate tectonics will have rendered the Earth’s continents unrecognizable.”

“I thought you said that it took a long time to judge the success of immortality?”

“I’ve got really good models. Lots of compute power these days, if you know where to look.”

“All right then, do it. Make me young.”

“Ah, there’s a little matter of payment, see? Always pay for what you get. There’s no other way to run a world.” His smile curled in and in, the dimples multiplying.

“I have half an old tire I could let you have,” I said, shrugging and slumping back into my bed. “I guess you could have the mecha, once I’d recovered.”

He nodded. “Mighty generous of you. But I had something else in mind: a favor.”

I closed my eyes, knowing that this was going to be bad.

“It’s those kids. You heard what the one you caught said to you. He’s not himself anymore. The Midwich virus turns kids into harvesters for a vast upload-space where models of the consciousness of billions of humans exist in a hive-mind.”

“They do what now?”

“They steal your mind and put it in a big computer.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re programmed to. Whoever designed the Midwich virus wants them to. The second wumpus war was the same thing. Those human-attacking wumpuses were scanning and copying the humans they ate. I think that the Midwich hive-mind has assimilated the wumpus-mind, but I don’t know for sure. Maybe they’re rivals.”

“But
why?”

He shrugged. “You know the answer. We both do. They do it because someone thought it would be cool. The line between thought and deed is pretty fine these days.”

“And why me?”

“Jimmy,” he said, sounding disappointed. “You know the answer. You’re not stupid. You’re our superhuman. Start acting like one. Why you?”

“Because the youth gangs have no effect on me?”

“Yes. And?”

“Because they’re derived from me, somehow?”

“Yes. And?”

“Because my father is in there, somehow?”

“Yes. That’s a weird one, isn’t it? We all assumed he was dead. Maybe he was in cold storage, awaiting scanning. Maybe they scanned him right away.”

“What do you want of me?”

“That part’s easy,” he said.

I’d spent so much time ducking youth gangs, but now I was actively seeking them out. Perversely, I couldn’t find them. I stuck to the main roads, ranging up and down the keys, letting the mecha drive itself while I kept my eye out for them.

It was one of those perfect days on the keys, when the sky was a cloudless blue to forever, the air scented with delicious, wet jungle smells. I took a break and did a little fishing, using the mecha’s radar to spot and plot the fish, then diving forward and snapping up a big grouper and cupping it in the mecha’s hands while it thrashed. I put it in a refrigerated compartment on one thigh for later. I loved to pack them in mud, build a fire and put them among the coals. It had been a long time since I’d had fish. But I’d have something to celebrate tonight.

I jogged up and down the keys some more. I came to the place where I’d run into the youth gang the day before and checked to see if the mecha had still buffered the route it took chasing down my little friend. It had. I set the inertial tracker to re-run it, letting the shaman’s brace do the work.

I came to it, an unimpressive hill covered in scrub, the entrance to the cave hidden by branches. I dug at the hill with the mecha’s huge hands. It was slow going.

An hour later, I had barely made a dent in the hill, and I still hadn’t found any of the kids. The tunnel twisted and dipped around the tree roots.

Fuck it. Once upon a time, my mecha had an enormous supply of short-range missiles, not nearly so smart as the ones on my original beast, back in Detroit, but still able to get the job done. When I walked out of the militia, I had the good sense to fill up my frame, the dozen-by-dozen grid that held a gross of explosives.

Over the years, they’d been depleted. The last couple I’d fired hadn’t detonated on contact, but had gone up a few minutes later—luckily I’d had the good sense to keep back of the unexploded munitions.

I backed off from the hill and sighted down the tunnel. The flavors of missile I had left were really antipersonnel, low on heat, high on concussion. I figured that if I could get the missile deep enough into the hillside, the concussion wave would crack it open like an egg.

I fired. And missed. The missile tried valiantly to steer itself into the hole that I’d told it to aim for, but it just wasn’t up to it. It screamed into the top of the hill and blew, most of the concussion going up and out into the sky, making an incredible roar that the mecha’s cowling did little to dampen. I waited for my head to stop ringing and fired another missile, correcting a little.

This one went true, right down into the tunnel, down and down. I counted one hippo, two hippo, and
whoom,
there was a deep
crump
from down below the mecha and the hill disintegrated into the sky.

It sploded like an anthill in a hurricane, turning into gobs of mud that arced in all directions in a rapidly expanding sphere. Caught in it were flinders of tree-root that stuck to my cowl and slid down slowly. For a moment, I caught a glimpse of the crater I’d made, then two huge trees-something derived from cypruses—topped into it, followed by a great inrush of water from the surrounding water table.

I waded in as the water rushed and swirled and scooped my arms through the soup, looking for evidence of the youth gang that had burrowed there, but whatever evidence there had been was now gone. I’d had visions of the hill opening like a stone, splitting dryly and revealing a neat cross-section of the tunnels inside. I hadn’t really thought about the water table.

The mud was sucking dangerously at the mecha’s legs. If I got it stuck here and had to abandon it, I’d never be able to walk out of the swamp on my own. I levered myself out of the sinkhole and stepped out into the world. I was covered in mud. The skin of the mecha would shed the dirt eventually, but for now, my shiny metal carapace was covered in disgusting, reeking glop.

I was clearly not going about this right.

I moved back out onto the road and headed for the Sugarloaf Key bridge. The wumpuses had left the bridges intact-otherwise how would they make their way up and down the keys?-and they were the most conspicuous remaining example of human life in the good old days. It was the bridges that the youth gangs staked out most avidly.

It was there I’d find them.

Being covered in mud had its advantages. I crouched under the bridge amid the rocks and made myself invisible. I set the mecha to estivate and recharge its batteries, leaving only its various ears and eyes open.

Before shutting down, I primed my whole remaining missile battery, getting them aimed for fast launch, and recorded a macro for getting myself out of there when the time came, before the bridge could come down around my ears. It would be quite a bounce, but I was prepared to give up a rib or two if that’s what it took.

Now it was just a matter of staying alert. I kept thinking about my mouth-watering fish and the feast I’d cook that night, drifting off into mouth-watering reverie. Then I’d snap back to my surroundings, looking back at my screens.

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

Then: something.

Gliding out of the wilderness at both ends of the bridge like they were on casters. Silent. Eerie. I waited for them to converge on the center of the bridge before I hit it and quit it.

Ker-BLAM! I barely had time to take satisfaction in the incredible, synchronized splosion of the struts at both ends of the bridge giving way, tossing lumps of reinforced concrete high into the sky. I was in the belly of the mecha as it sprang away, leaping nearly as high, landing with coiled legs, pushing off, somersaulting in mid-air, coming down blam-blam, one foot, two foot, on the remaining section of bridge, snatching out with both hands, seizing a wriggling child in each hand, knocking their heads together and leaping away.