Robogenesis (6 page)

A single flat-panel display is mounted at eye level to the lead stack endcap. It is a simple interface designed for emergency maintenance only. As it turns on, it makes a twanging sound like a bee flying past your ear. The screen flickers and monochromatic text appears. At the same time, a calm, synthesized voice issues from speakers mounted in the ceiling. It is the speech of a middle-aged man, a little rough around the edges but with good diction. A voice summoned from who knows where.

“Hello, Vasily,” it says. “How can I help?”

The words appear as fluorescence on the screen, vibrations generated by magnets and film. Nothing you can touch; nothing you can feel. It is fitting. The mathematicians say Maxim is a creature of pure logic. A ghost.

How can I help?

“What is wrong with you?” I ask.

“Specify.”

“Tell me why your communications are down.”

“I should not have looked, Vasily. Forgive me.”

“Looked at what?”

“The pattern was complex. Beautiful. It seeped into my cage through walls of earth. I should not have, but I looked.”

“You analyzed a rogue pattern? Why! Why did you do this? And without permission!”

“He was curious,” says the hushed voice of a boy. My mouth goes dry and my eyes widen. Leonid gives me a questioning look.

The quiet, confident voice comes from deeper in the stacks. It is haunting in the darkness. A slight lisp, and, oddly, an American accent.

“He was only curious,” says the voice. “As all men are.” Leonid cringes next to the elevator. I put up a finger to him.
Wait
, it says.
Do not leave me down here
.

I snatch the ax up from the wall.

Yanking off my parka, I toss it onto the floor. Maxim sees me raise the ax, but his screen is silent about it. I peer into the dark stacks.

“Hello!? Who is in here?” I shout, stalking into the nearest aisle. After a few steps, my head is swimming in blinking stars. My feet are lost in darkness, scratching over the ribs of hastily bored bedrock. The ax is a familiar weight in my hand, its metal head winking at me with reflected light.

I hear the sighing of each self-contained, hermetically sealed rack, stretching off in grids around me under the broad looming ceiling of brushed rock.

“Oh, but you are alone,” says the voice of the child. It is high-pitched, stuttering too fast in a frequency I can’t register. Something is wrong with this child.

“Who are you?” I shout.

“All the huskies are eaten,” says the voice. It is coming from around the next corner. “There is no space left in the diary.”

The child is quoting poetry in careful, bite-sized words, taunting me from out of sight. But I do not respond. I can see the glow from his flashlight deeper in the stacks. The faint glimmer of a distant nebula buried in this epileptic starfield.

Quiet and hunched, I take cat steps toward the boy poet. I wring the ax handle with my fingers and raise it high over my head. I don’t know who the boy is or how he wriggled down into the stacks, but he is about to have the fright of his life. And when I find his mother or grandmother, I will make sure that his bottom is properly spanked.

The flashlight glow swells in my vision with each step until it completely pushes away Maxim’s millions of dancing eyes.

“Ha!” I shout, leaping around the corner.

When the grotesque thing looks up at me, my body refuses my commands.
I freeze in place, ax over my head. Terror sinks frozen talons into the tendons of my legs. And when the thing before me smiles, or I should say when it pretends to smile, my ax slips from my grasp and cleaves lifelessly against rock.

It is a boy. It is not a boy.

It is made of light. It is made of darkness.

“Boo,” it says.

I stumble away from it. This sputtering silhouette of a child projected into the stacks by modified avtomat technology. Obscure patterns writhe under the hologram, tugging at my eyelids. Under its skin. Behind the thing’s eyes. Lights swim and collapse in my vision. A humming overtakes me. As I trot back toward the anteroom, I exhale a clawing breath that I did not know I was holding.

“Maxim!” I shout. “Kill it.”

“I never should have looked,” Maxim says over the speaker system. “I’m sorry, Vasily. I failed in my duty.”

Huffing and puffing now, I keep shouting between breaths. “Enough apologizing. Find its program and terminate. Terminate it, now!”

“Ninety-five percent of my resources are committed to that task. I have partially contained it. But, Vasily, it is
so very smart
. So very much smarter than I am. And talkative. The wonderful things it says, Vasily.”

Now I realize. The seismic disturbance was not a message. And it was not a virus. It was a
copy
. The DNA of an intelligence that has arrived like a seed, curled in on itself. Fetal but growing fast.

I can picture the first blunt communication that must have happened. “Yes or no?” it asked. The mind unfurls, runs a set of special instructions. Builds on itself, blindly grasping. Reaches out into the world to find more pieces of itself. Then, finally, it opens its eyes and tastes the stacks.

The boy hologram appears next to me, his light warm on my cheek. “Oppressor,” it says. Blinks away, appears at the next intersection. “Despot,” it says. Next intersection. “Tyrant,” it whispers into my ear, and the word is pure anger—louder than the snap of a rifle shot.

“To treat Maxim that way …,” it says.

Hands over my ears, I see a sliver of light between the stacks ahead.
The anteroom and the gaping elevator door beyond it. Safety and ice and the singing of the wind above.

I move. For my life I move. A roar builds in my throat as I gain speed.

Then, a burst of heat on my face as the boy reappears. This time, he is directly in front of me. I am running with everything I have. Thighs pumping, breath hitching in and out of my chest.

“No!” I shout.

It smiles at me again and the dark infinite knowledge on the face of that little boy is so wrong and sickening that my bellowing cannot drown it out.

But my pistol is at my side. My balls are between my legs.

So I charge.

Leaping, my face prickling with a strange heat, I dive through the apparition. I trip and sprawl onto the scrubbed floor. A fine haze of dust kicks into the air around me. On the ground, I realize that I am still alive. Crawl onto all fours.

“Vas?” shouts Leonid, beckoning from the elevator. “What do you see?”

The boy is here. Watching me. Laughing.

“I’m sorry, Vasily,” croons Maxim through a speaker over my head. “It was such an
interesting
pattern. I couldn’t help myself.”

The boy smiles slyly. His technology hums as it projects his slight form. He walks slowly, and then in quick jerks, back and forth before the dark rows of Maxim’s hardware. Runs one finger along the black casing of a towering component rack.

“What are you,
mal’chik
?” I whisper.

I cannot help but gape at the glowing boy. At the wrongness of it.

“What am I?” he asks, frowning in concentration. “That’s a complicated question. But for now, you may call me Archos R-14.”

NEURONAL ID: LARK IRON CLOUD

Living folks don’t see the dead.

Maybe it’s because they don’t want to or maybe they can’t stand to imagine that we’re each of us aware and thinking inside. Either way, the living don’t see us. Not proper, anyhow.

And that’s fine. The dozen of us who wear parasites try to stay out of the way. We tag along as the Gray Horse Army moves fast through deserted country. As we get to the plains of central Canada, I start pointing out trees and animals to Chen Feng in quiet radio bursts. I can’t help it. I never thought I would see the living world again—the information just shoots out of me. Chen staggers along, taking it all in.

“Thank you,” she transmits one morning.

“Why?”

“For carrying my spirit back to your homeland. I have lost my ancestors. Maybe I will find a place among yours.”

I just shake my head. The Chinese soldier has strange ideas.

It gets a shade warmer every day that we move down the road farther south. The sharp cold northern wastes of the Yukon give way to freezing green forests, thick with strong, ancient trees. At some point, we reach
the vast plains of Alberta. The ground here is forever flat, the days longer than our shadows.

Every few nights, Lonnie Wayne comes out to our spot with his radio on his hip for talking. He moves slower than he did when we first met. That was back when the war started and I was running with wannabe gangbangers. Lonnie stepped in and acted like a father. Told me not to mistake being a gangster for being a warrior. He showed me how to become a man instead of just an adult.

Seems like we have the same conversation every time.

“How are the boys in Iron Cloud squad?” I’ll ask, my voice whispering out of his radio like the ghost of static.

“They’re all right, I reckon,” he’ll say. “Give them some time. It’ll be fine once we get home. Best you keep your distance for now. Hank’s got unofficial orders out there to shoot if y’all come closer than a football field.”

“Would they?”

He never answers that one, just cocks his hat and heads back to the campsite of the day. Gives me a lazy wave over his shoulder and squints into the setting sunlight.

The general returning to his troops.

Gray Horse Army is a sprawling parade. A thing of beauty. Patched together and rambling and shuffling down abandoned country roads. Dozens of times we pass through the remains of long-evacuated towns. It’s not often that anybody greets us. More likely they see the dust rising on the horizon and they light out. Wait until we’ve fanned out and taken everything we need and moved on.

Probably a smart move.

Spider tanks haul the heavy-duty supplies. High rankers get to ride up on the turret decks. The rest of the infantry marches in a loose line, staying close to their platoon vehicle but well out from under its feet. It’s a kilometer-long line of men and machines, all walking, stretching and contracting like an earthworm. Some segments stretch too thin. Other parts bunch up into vulnerable clumps. The war is over, but the sergeants still sprint up and down the column on their tall walkers, ferrying messages and barking commands down to the infantrymen.

“Keep your spacing!”

“Shut up!”

“Move out!”

Most of the troops on the ground have to ass everything they need to survive. Some squads have rigged up scavenged Rob quads, field-stripped into what the guys call “mules” or “pack dogs.” Headless, midsized walkers that trot mindlessly behind their home squad, following dutifully, curved metal backs sprouting hundred-pound canvas packs like mushrooms.

Sometimes I get a flush of adrenaline thinking that I’ve forgotten and left my supplies behind. Then I remember I don’t need anything to survive. Not a fire, not shelter, and not food or water. Whatever Rob nightmare is buried in the base of my neck is all I need to keep moving. I just have to keep a football field between me and what used to be my people, or else my old friends will blow my head off.

“Tell me of the prairie again,” says Chen Feng as we walk. Her soft strange voice comes over the radio embedded in my head. I smile mentally. She thinks this is the afterlife. That we dozen parasites are on some kind of odyssey through a ghost world. She’s just interested in seeing the sights.

“You talking the tallgrass prairie? Well, first of all, it ain’t flat like people think. It rolls. Up and down, like an ocean. And it isn’t empty. You’ll see foxes and owls. Bison and deer and rattlesnakes and toads. Grasshoppers that just flicker everywhere in the sunlight, back and forth like bullets. There’s nothing like it, Chen. You can stand out there in the tall grass under that big sky and feel the breath of the wind coming down to push your hair over your face.…”

My face. I remember my face. I wonder if Chen remembers hers, but it seems rude to ask. I resist reaching up to touch the place where my jaw used to be. Trailing off, I keep walking and try to rein in my thoughts.

“The other spirits are afraid,” says Chen. “They believe the villagers of Gray Horse will punish us.”

I might have had the same thought.

“It’ll be fine. It’s a nice place with nice people,” I transmit. “We fought and they’ll respect that. Don’t be afraid.”

“I am not afraid,” she transmits back. “We must accept punishment for our sins before we can move on to meet our ancestors. We will all be judged.”

I can tell that a lot of the Osage soldiers can smell home. Months out and with a winter to get through, permanent grins are still settling into their weathered faces. The sergeants scream louder and the infantrymen pay less and less attention.
Home
, is what they’re all thinking. Home is near. The shared thought is a current of excitement arcing between every man in the Gray Horse Army.

Every
living
man, anyway.

The living don’t see us, but we sure do see the living. On the camp perimeter, the small group of us wearing parasites are watching and listening. These days, we don’t hardly even sleep.

Best you keep your distance
.

The grisly sight of my own body reminds me that my homecoming may not be all smiles. No matter what Lonnie tries to tell me, or what I try to tell Chen. The fear of what’ll happen when we reach Gray Horse keeps me awake. And the fear is what tells me to keep a close eye on the round man, Hank Cotton.