Robogenesis (18 page)

After all this time, we still don’t know whether I’m “seeing” radar or radio or infrared or some combination of everything. When the machines talk, it looks like ribbons in the sky to me. When people talk, it looks like ribbons of meat rubbing together. One is prettier than the other.

My boyfriend, Thomas, is the only one who understands. Rob operated on him, too. Took his hand away and gave him something sharp and warm and oil-smelling.

The cicadas stop singing. I stop moving, out of habit. The war is over, but there are still weapons roaming. On instinct, I scan the skies for the
telltale ribbons of light that the machines used to emit when they talked to Big Rob. The fleeting patrol-status updates, or the pulse of a mobile mine checking in.

Nothing. The ribbons of light in the sky have fallen, I remind myself. Archos R-14 doesn’t talk to his creations anymore. They’re all out here on their own. And, for now, it’s just me and Nolan and a lot of oddly quiet bugs in the trees.

“Maybe …,” says Nolan, just as the thing stalks out of the underbrush.

The robot is the size of a fawn, walking on four spindly legs with knobby knees. I put up a finger to shush Nolan, orient to the machine, and project an active radar query. I don’t find the vibrational frequency response of hidden explosives. No projectiles are visibly mounted. Its skin is not armor-plated, but made of flexible plastic laced with some kind of mesh.

The fawn stumbles on a rock, catches itself gracefully on skinny legs. Stretches its neck and … nibbles on a leaf.

“What the …?” Nolan whispers, looking at me. “What is it
doing
?”

“I don’t know,” I whisper. “Wait.”

I crouch and hold out my hand. Cluck my tongue at the little walker. The fawnlike machine darts away about a meter. Balanced on feet pointed like knitting needles, it orients its small face to me. The flat black panels it has instead of eyes are familiar.

They are just like mine.

It cocks its head and considers me, a piece of leaf still sticking out of its mouth. The robot really is chewing the leaf. Breaking it into smaller bits that fall down a delicate, coiled-metal throat.

“It’s eating,” I whisper to Nolan. “I think it’s
eating
.”

Looking
through
the fawn-thing, I can see a cylindrical drum inside its chest. Some kind of small centrifuge, insulated but spinning on the inside. Mashing and pulping and fermenting. Pulling energy out of the living matter. I smell dirt and vegetation on the fawn. Robots don’t usually have real smells. But this is something new. Before, new was bad. New was suffering.

But the war is over.

So I put both my hands out, palms up. Let my words wander out in
dribbles of weak local radio. A tenuous ribbon of silver light wisps away from my eyes and I wrap my thoughts around this walker. Cocoon the shy little thing in warmth and comfort. I put a question into its machine mind:

Where? Where did you come from?

For a long moment nothing happens. The fawn takes a few hesitant steps toward me. Then an image appears in my mind.

Waves lapping a dark sea
.

Who?
I ask.

Deep place
, it responds.

I frown at the fawn.

“What’s the matter?” asks Nolan.

“Archos didn’t make this,” I say. “It’s not a Rob weapon. And it never was.”

What are you made for?
I ask.

It jerks its head up, looking over my shoulder at something behind me. Those flat black squares somehow shine with panic. A transmission of confusion and terror flows out over me. The fawn turns to run.

The shock wave of a gunshot booms through the clearing. I drop to my hands and knees. A few feet away, the fawn’s carapace explodes into shards of mossy plastic. It slumps onto its side and kicks its legs a few times.

Before I can take a breath, Nolan has his backpack slung on and one hand around my upper arm. He’s dragging me to my feet so we can run together. Just like we have so many times before. Only this time is different. This time we’re running from a human being.

“Hey, kids,” calls a strained voice. “Don’t go nowhere.” The words are slurred on the edges and vibrate like sandpaper over smoke-damaged vocal cords. The owner of the voice slouches into the clearing.

All I see is his pistol.

“Lot of dangerous shit out here in the woods,” says the man. He flashes a grin at us and glances around the clearing, looking for more people. “Especially for a couple of kiddos.”

“That machine wasn’t dangerous—” I say, and stop myself.

The man’s facial muscles have tensed. He’s peering at my face and
reflexively lifts his gun and widens his stance. Nolan’s hand closes tighter on my arm.

“Whoa,” he says. “What’s with your eyes?”

I keep my eyes down, looking at the poor corpse of the vegetarian robot. My hair hangs over my face, dark and swaying like electrical cords. Through the strands I see the man’s heart is spasming hard in his chest. Golden ripples pulse over his filthy torn jacket. I can see and hear his crooked stained teeth locking together in his mouth as he sets his jaw and realizes the truth:
This isn’t a little girl at all
.

I’m part machine.

“Leave us alone,” says Nolan. My little brother has moved in front of me, put his broad shoulders back, and lifted his face. The sun is cresting reddish-brown over the crown of his head. I can almost see the man he will someday be. It’s in the way his fists are clenched. In how he is scowling and trying to look fierce but shaking visibly.

“She’s one of them, ain’t she?” asks the man, a snarl on his stubbled cheeks. “Rob got to her. Carved up her little face. She’s your sister, huh, little big man?”

Nolan doesn’t respond. Takes a step backward into me as the dirty man steps forward. The man is reaching for something on his hip with his free hand in a well-practiced motion. It’s a flat black metal blade that shines in my vision, visible through the flexing tendons in his wiry forearm.

A sheathed hunting knife.

“Don’t be afraid. I just want to take a look.”

The opaque metal of his gun looms in my vision. By the sight trajectory I’m guessing he’ll shoot Nolan first if we try to run, then me. Nolan gets it. He doesn’t resist as the man noses him out of the way with the gun muzzle and eases the greasy hunting knife out of its leather sheath. He holds the tawny striped handle lightly, like a scalpel, and lets the blade glint dark in my eyes. Slow, he raises it and presses the flat side of the blade under my chin. Lifts my face up.

“Damn, kid. Rob did a number on you.”

I stay perfectly still. The cool blade dimples into the skin of my throat. His rotten breath cascades over my face. The knife pulls away.
Lifting it, he uses the crooked point of the blade to pick at the metal of my eyes. The tip of the knife makes a small scraping noise on me, like a dental pick. It slips off and bites into the skin of my forehead.

I flinch away and the man chuckles.

“Stop it,” says Nolan, putting a hand on the man’s elbow.

Instantly, the man spins around and shoves Nolan back. Flicks the knife at his face, annoyed. To this man, it’s a movement as quick and natural as saying hello.

The blade barely misses Nolan’s cheek.

“No!” I shout, putting myself between them.

Blade up, the man watches my little brother stumble back. Nolan puts a hand to his face, checking to see if he is cut. He is brave and silent in the face of violence, a veteran of it.

“Don’t fuck with me,” says the man. “Lucky I didn’t shoot you both on sight. Most of the Tribe would have done. Christ. You and the rest of the subway rats are in for a rude awakening.”

Watching Nolan warily, the man holsters his gun. His knife is still out and shining. My little brother doesn’t make a sound. He just watches the man intently. Waiting.

“Look over there,” says the man, pointing toward the river with his knife. “Go on. You see? Look what you’re in for.”

I look where he is pointing.

In the distance, on the George Washington Bridge, I make out a rising heat signature. Temperature range is consistent with skin. People. Thousands of them. Crossing the bridge into Manhattan in force, some of them driving vehicles. Herding animals. Dragging loads of supplies. Coming back, and for good.

“The Tribe is coming home. We been in the woods a long time, kiddos. Guy named Felix Morales came up from Mexico and saved all our asses. And he isn’t going to like you, little girl. Not with those peepers.”

Above the people, an orange haze flickers. Rolling tides of amber light cascading down among the travelers in lines of communication. Evil thoughts and words from a nameless enemy. Not Archos R-14 this time. Something else.

Maybe something much worse.

“Now, I’m not gonna kill y’all for touching me,” says the man. He leans into me and peers at my face. Lifts the bloody knife. “But them things are worth something. So I am going to need to take those eyes.”

Slow is smooth. And smooth is fast. I reach casually into my sling and grab hold of a small cylinder. I toss the broken plugger up in a neat arc toward the man. By reflex, he catches it in his free hand. Starts to toss it away and then stops, opens his palm. Frowns at me with a half smile on his face.

“What’s this supposed to be?” he asks. “You think some old scavenge is—”

But the sentence is cut off by spinal reflex as his arm jerks back. A short, surprised scream tears itself from his throat. The plugger awakes.

Sending my thoughts out, I drop a gray ribbon of command into it.

That corkscrew scream of a drill made in hell shrills as the device buries itself into the meaty palm of the man’s hand. He tries to shake it off but it’s headed rough and fast up the inside of his forearm. All the air comes out of his lungs in that first scream and after that the man keeps screaming soundlessly, his mouth open in an O shape, tendons stretching his neck and his face clouding red with the strain. The knife falls.

His arm is jerking around like it’s on puppet strings.

That plugger is damaged. It’s not moving clean toward the heart like they used to in battle. Instead, it tears through the meat of the man’s arm in grisly broken lurches.

Nolan grabs me by the hand and pulls me away. Now we run together like we did when we were children. I have to warn Thomas and all the New York City Underground.

The dirty man isn’t stupid. He has lived this long for a reason. Whoever the Tribe are, whatever they have done, they must be made up of survivors—the same as the rest of us.

As Nolan and I crunch over leaves, vaulting between trees, I glance back. Through stripes of narrow pine, I see the filthy man sitting hunched over in the clearing, his back to us. Leaning awkwardly, he makes short, methodical movements with the knife. Stroke by stroke, silent and determined, he works at severing his own arm.

DATABASE ID: NINE OH TWO

17:49:01.

Boot sequence reinitiated.

Arbiter-class humanoid safety-and-pacification robot online. Milspec identification model number Nine Oh Two.

Freeborn for approximately four months, seven days.

Internal clock discrepancy. Awareness lapse: two minutes.

Low-level diagnostics check. Severe physical trauma detected. Stress fatigue detected in upper thigh actuated spring mass. Suboptimal joint response times.

Complex modifications active. Nonfactory standard sensors, actuators, and power source.
Caution: Warranty void. Foster Dynamics corporation cannot be held liable for further actions of this unit. Please report any—

Initiating visual body diagnostic. Engage active infrared vision. Unsuccessful.

A few notes of a song drift into my black existence. Classify. Auditory hallucination. Determining origin of sound fragment as sampled
from Awakening transmission. This is the song transmitted by a Japanese machine known only as Mikiko. She sent the coded instructions that awoke humanoid robots worldwide. She created the freeborn race.

Save and flag for further reflection—it is the closest thing to a dream I’ve ever had.

Human visible spectrum engage. Success.

Adjust white balance and exposure. Confirm.

Observation. I am not the first one to fall off this cliff.

The face, half buried in the snow, belongs to a human male. Coat color and partial silhouette matches Gray Horse Army martial sample. Two silver poles, the legs of a shattered tall walker, stretch out behind his crumpled body. Flat and on its side, the machine is sunk into the snow like a fossil. The human’s eyes are open, cloudy with frost. The body lies inside its own snow-filled impact crater. He fell from high.

An observation thread registers zero residual body heat.

It is an old kill. Left behind after the mass exodus from the Ragnorak Intelligence Fields. Men are returning to their homes now. To places warmer and flatter and more green than this waste. To places less lethal.

It is very still here as my auxiliary systems finish booting. Wind sifts through snow-laden pine branches. The naked gray cliff behind me has stopped dribbling rocks. One last stone chatters down and tumbles past me into soft snow. My processor must have exceeded shock tolerance. Spun down. Based on the damage to my joints and torso, I can mark the path my body took over the precipice with high probability.