Toy Wars (17 page)

I turned my back on my fellows
both literally and figuratively
.
Their lives were over.
I had to move on.
Even
as I mourned
for my brethren, I was overjoyed.
Think of what information and power I
possessed
.
Here
I was
the supreme
thief
infiltrating
a den of thieves.
I was no longer Six’s soldier.
Between two fighting factions, I neither belonged as part of one or the other.
The thought stopped and sobered me. I didn’t belong to Six. I didn’t belong to this other group.

As I stood there among literally thousands of units, which just moments before would have stood in line to take my life fluids from me, I realized I was on my own, completely.
I could, if the mood struck me, do anything I wished.
I
ndependent or not, Six created me and as such I still felt loyalty to it.

With the CCT from an animal, I would be ignored by all the combat units of this yet-to-be-discovered, possibly mythical, other Factory.
But to what end?

A
28
-
centimeter, blonde-haired doll, in a blue petticoat dress, walked within touching distance of me.
I shuddered.
I knew that
solid plastic explosive formed the
doll
’s
body.
I had seen the dolls explode within a group of
Six’s
units
.
Si
x’s units were identical. I catalogued several of the types of units I could see:
T
edd
y Bears
,
Tommy Tank
s,
Nurse Nan
s,
D
ella
D
ollies,
E
llie
E
lephants, and even some
J
eff
e
ry
G
iraffes.
Identical units, interchangeable parts, and alternate CCTs
;
this said only one thing to me
—
another Fac
tory out there
built these units.

Suddenly, as a dump
truck rolled by me to claim some of the dead for reprocessing, I realized I might attract attention if I continued to be still with no apparent goal or task.
Not a single one of these enemy units had yet acknowledged my presence, but I didn’t dare take the chance.
If I was going to make my new mission work (mission clock reset to +0d, 0h, 0m, 0s), it was a risk I couldn’t afford to take.
I walked
3.4
kilometers away before stopping and sitting on a rock outcropping to process my new self-directed mission parameters.

I hoped I was right and that my suspicions did have a basis and that there was another Factory.
While no other supposition for the data at hand came to my processor, there could still be another explanation.
But, if I could confirm it and achieve a truce, it would be my ultimate victory
—
a
victory that wouldn’t require any
more victories.

But, first things first
.
I had to discover where the animal
s’
net went.
What was at its hub?
My guess was that there was another Factory similar to Six, even if this did stretch my own credulity.
How could there be more than one of something that there could only be one of?
This weighed against all the physical evidence to the contrary: other seemingly identical units and another net.
Which was right?
Id
eology warred against empirical evidence.
I wonder if Einstein ever doubted what his own
famous
formula told him.
I
think that I
felt that same way.

If there really was another Factory then I had to talk with it and make peace between our units.
Maybe, just maybe, I could correct the horrible mistake
that
was an
entire war.
Somewhere m
y processor told
me that ending the war was my
real
purpose, not the immediate concerns or survival of Six.
It touched so close to blasphemy against
my programming that I shut down that entire subroutine.
Six must survive. My focus must remain
ending the war before Six lost any more territory or units, or at least as little as possible.

Bringing my processing ability back to my task at hand, I realized that discovering the hub would prove more difficult than it sounded.
First, I had no idea where the animal net led and second, the vast distances to travel
often
were daunting.
In the past if I needed to travel somewhere I just jumped on the nearest train and it took me where I needed to go.
But I couldn’t have dare
d using the animal’s trains
.
If even one unit realized I was in the wrong place, I was D-E-A-C-T-I-V-A-T-E-D and my mission
and existence both
would be aborted as quickly as the subroutine I had just terminated.

Before now I
never thought of how to track the net to a location.
My knowledge of what a net even consisted of was sketchy.
It was like the way Humans thought about their air
—
it
had always been there, so why worry about where it came from, how it was made, or what it consisted of.
Those were all trivial bits of information.
My memory banks contained schematics of net concentrators
,
2
meters tall, with a cylindrical body topped with an elongated cone and three spindly support legs.
Net concentrators, or NCs,
processed no information, contained no sentience or
mobility.
They merely took power and commands in the cone’s open end and focused them toward the next NC.

T
hree things prevented
me from just hailing the
F
actory
: the Factory having its units ride right down on me, the Factory ordering me to self
-
destruct, and my own fear that I might be wrong.
Any one of these reasons begged of me to make my first communication in person.

My processing was interrupted by a brassy command being sent over the animal net.
I found I could hear over the new net, something I hadn’t been sure about until to this point, but this WAN wasn’t the net I had been using for the last two years.
It seemed to be almost identical in construction and command structure
but differed in the
booming dictatorial voice directing operations with an iron fist, directing almost each unit in its task as opposed to Six’s method of giving general commands to groups.
At any rate, the orders over the net were clearly given.
This group of animals intended an imminent attack on the train tunnel.
I wasn’t about to stick around
anywhere even close
and watch my comrades slaughtered.
I may have had to desert them to serve a greater good, but I couldn’t stand to be a silent witness to their sacrifice.

I stood up and tried to get a bearing on the nearest NC.
It was difficult, but I got a range of angles,
4
to
8
degrees south of east, which expressed the probable location of the closest NC.
I started my march in that direction.
I didn’t turn even when I heard the gunfire and explosions behind me.
Lot
’s beloved wife became a pillar of salt when she turned back to look, or so says the Bible.
I had to live with a decision equally as painful.
I knew there was only one way to obtain absolution
—
to succeed in my newly acquired, self-actualized mission.
The worst guilt hit when the sounds of battle halted.
I continued on, even with the death of almost everything I’d ever known behind me.

Adventurer

At first
the prospects of a new adventure excited me.
I was u
nsure of where I was going in the exploration of this new world
—
a
Six version of Christopher Columbus
,
or maybe more appropriately Marco Polo.
Over days, those thoughts soon wore thin.
While I had a singular purpose, the method for getting there was mind numbing.
I found I couldn’t keep my concentration focused on each day and remain sane.
I didn’t keep track of how many days I traveled.
OK, so that isn’t exactly true; while I didn’t consciously keep track of the sun’s rise and fall, my internal chronometer couldn’t help but record these events.

I spent most of my time randomly testing the net for concentration levels
—
that
is the amount of energy at that particular location.
That information, properly interpreted, t
old
me how close
I
was to the nearest concentrator.
My idea was to skirt the barest edge of several NC concentrators to get an idea of their location, and with that information
I
should
have
a general direction of their source.
As an added bonus, I was less likely to be noticed at those far reaches by the enemy.
The optimax solution
remained bounded
in a range of solid curves expressed in detection versus energy gained versus navigational information gained.
Well, I could give the entire technical details and three-dimensional calculus but it bores even me.
Bottom line was that it was taking an incredibly long time.

The terrain I walked through was unremarkable to me.
Silver
-
veined thorn grass, the most ubiquitous ground cover, stretched as far as the eye could see in weaving patterns of waist-high barbed blades.
In the distance I could see high dark mountains casting an almost perpetual shadow on the earth at their feet.
Tiny biologics scampered out of my way and hid as I created a wake through the crimson growths.

Every five hours or so I would curse Six, curse this planet
,
and curse that there was no easy way to get where I needed to go.
I resolved never to disparage trains again.
They made life much easier.
This mode of travel
belonged to biologics
, not civilized units.
It took too damned long
to travel by
foot.
Despite their foul attitude, trains were good at what they did.
Even a race car would be appreciated now.

In between cursing sessions, I found time to read and reread almost everything in my internal library from
The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
to
Zenobia’s
Wedding: The Lunar Mob’s True Massacre
—
2
65.83
terabytes of information in all.
I have no knowledge why these volumes inhabited my memories, but it
cut the
inevitable boredom
that came
with my choice of misadventure.

Human interactions puzzled me.
I understood, in a very abstract way, the reason for
Human
procreation activity, but the ritual and energies, pleasures and writings spent toward it seemed excessive
—
wedding, kissing, intercourse, dating, dowry, honeymoon, dances, and the list goes on.
It seemed like their ent
ire society was built upon a ground of sexual relationships.

War baffled me as well
.
I understood
why units fought and died from a
real
world
perspective
. What evaded logic is how
Human
s, being as powerful and advanced as they are could possibl
y
be associated with
so destructive an activity
. It made no sense.

These were all very good exercises at keeping my mind occupied
because a
ny time I didn’t consciously push those thoughts out of my mind, I saw the faces of those doomed units, sleeping on the ground of the cave, and flashes of mayhem that I knew had been perpetrated on their bodies.
I had to constantly break through this by reminding myself that I was doing this for the good of Six...And that some units needed to be sacrificed.

“But you wouldn’t like to be sacrificed, now would you?” came a voice from deep inside me.

“No, but…”
Arguing with one’s self was pointless, but I was doing it anyway.

“There are no buts.
You did what you had to do.”

“If giving your life would have saved Six would you have done it?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Well, then there is your answer…forget them, they are gone…you are alive.
Make it work!”
Not only was arguing with one’s self pointless, you always lost, no matter the outcome.

My travels weren’t without incident.
An infamous Human once said, “War is six weeks of boredom followed by six minutes of stark screaming terror.
What kept you on the verge of insanity is not knowing when that six minutes will start.”
I could empathize.

The only unusual thing I saw for days was a low electrified fence,
30
centimeters high.
The three-metal stranded fence stretched out to either horizon
broken only by the wooden rails holding
it up.
The voltage in each of the lines wasn’t all that terribly high.
Beyond the fence, the thorn grass was cut so short as to be barely noticeable above the raw
dirt
.
What did this mean?
As I didn’t understand it, I ignored it.

The days flew by at first and then began to merge together into one large sameness of red grass, earth
,
and the occasional silver rivulet. I made progress
,
but without a speedy mode of transportation this would be a lengthy mission.

On day fourteen of my new mission, I began to get a vague uneasy feeling of being watched.
I kept noting repeated movements in the corners of my eyes but when I turned I saw nothing.
I decided to program a pattern of random head turns in that general direction.
It took four more hours to get a perfect fix on it.
It was a life
-
form, a biologic, not a unit
,
and it was quick to react to my movements.
The biologic was something
that
had never been catalogued near Six, so I had no data.

The
saurian creature
sported
six
sprawled
legs
between which swung its massive torso
—
low and parallel to the ground.
It bore
a
long tusk out the center of its snout, twin serpentine tails and a great number of sharp teeth in its mouth
—
a
carnivore.
The creature’s skin changed color a
nd texture with whatever it sprawled over in a camouflage which made my dirt
-
covered troopers look pathetic. I could only see it well when it sprinted from one stopping point to the next.
Normally
,
I would have cataloged the creature and moved on, barely giving it clock phase in my processor.
Most biologic life ran at the first sign of a unit, but instead this biologic chose to advance on me when I stopped.

I decided that this life
-
form
’s intelligence didn’t do it service
as it
failed to
recognize
that as a non-biologic, I shouldn’t be considered prey. At 146
percent
of my nominal mass, the creature could
theoretically do some serious damage to me with its long claws or ragged maw.
Reptilians are noted as a class for having exceptional jaw musculature
,
and I for one did not wish to put this to the test.

The carnivore, which I tentat
ively named a basilisk after
an ancient mythological creature
that
could turn Humans to stone, was cagey about its approach.
It hunted by darting
forward with amazing speed for a dozen or so meters, in a wiggling motion characteristic
of
creatures with multiple pairs of legs, before stopping to blend into the surroundings.
After a few moments the basilisk repeated its
sprint
and pause to once again
disappear from view.
In that sprint-pause-sprint motion it traveled exceedingly quickly even over long distances.

While intrigued, I felt that teaching an object lesson in food theory to the creature was better
saved for another day.
A Factory awaited my brilliant talents to save it.

I pulled out my M16 and fired a three round burst into its middle.
It stopped.
Assuming that it was dead, I turned to move on.
The basilisk’s unique motion once again caught my attention.
The
expletive,
biologic-eating lizard
still lived! I considered that perhaps I
’d
missed with my first burst.
I took more careful aim and put three bullets dead center into the creature’s back.
I watched the creature slump to the ground.
I enhanced my vision until I saw the holes in its fleshy back.

“That should finish you off,” I said with finality.
B
efore I could even turn to leave, I saw the holes on its back close up.
It stood and made another sprint in my direction.
The creature
,
w
hich I
had
tagged as a nuisance
,
I now classed as
a true threat.

I quickly weighed my almost nonexistent options and decided that “run” was probably the best.
I started off at my top cruising speed, considering my limited power input
from the animal NC
.
It took only two minutes to realize it wasn’t enough.
The lizard dropped any pretext of hiding and merely matched me, step for step.
I learned quickly that
six
legs were better than
two
in this respect.
I put on a burst of speed from my batteries.
That velocity briefly allowed me to outpace it, but my batteries could only hold me for minutes at that output level.
To maintain my speed I would have to close on
the power grid of the other Factory, something I was truly afraid might compromise my mission.
I
had to find some way to make the basilisk understand that I wasn’t lunch.

My memory banks contained information about how certain biologics couldn’t see without movement.
I decided to go perfectly still.
I stopped in a short number of meters and became motionless.
Only my hydraulic pump and my sump made any physical motion.

The basilisk moved unerringly toward me.
I was going to have to be more creative, but my processor was drawing a null.
I whipped out my weapon again and put three more bullets into the creature’s snout, but the effect was the same
—
either the creature regenerated exceedingly fast or its body form
also
mutated to its surroundings.
In either case the results were the same.
It kept coming closer.

At less than
40
meters
,
I had nothing
that
made any sense as far as a plan went.
I decided to run again.
It would at least buy me some time.
As we settled into a race I would eventually lose,
I could probably buy fifteen minutes before I was overtaken.
It took twenty.
In twenty minutes of wasting power, nothing came.
Not a single idea that I hadn’t already tried or that didn’t involve a face to face confrontation
or
that
I couldn’t get away from if something went wrong.
I watched in terror as the creature closed meter by meter.

At
5
meters I put on a burst of speed.
I
t
bought me another
six
minutes before the
basilisk
once again closed the gap.
Its powerful jaws opened wide and snapped closed on
my right leg, just below the knee
.
I pitched
forward into the dirt.