God of the Machine

by Elijah Stephens

  A man with his face painted white caught the impact against his temple, turning his wheel and banging into the rider beside him before sliding against the wall in a trail of sparks. Another Clown tossed a rock over his shoulder and it slammed into Kyle’s windguard. He corrected his swerve and used his non-lethal handgun to fire an electrical charge into the biker’s rear axle that locked the man’s brakes and pitched him forward.

  At the front of the pack, Delirum Machees was goading his rivals to follow. The Satan Chief was close behind in a swarm of soldiers who painted their faces red like demons, sparking a myth about the consumption of human blood. As the cycle cops began to flank them, a biker dropped a homemade grenade that burst with a spread of metal bearings.

  After a few of the police went careening into the wall, Arkane turned onto the unused off-ramp to avoid them, crossing the overpass intersection and catching air before speeding back down to the highway. He closed the distance to the Child of Satan who was fumbling with another ball-bearing detonator and clubbed the man’s arm. When his cybernetic limb broke, he dropped the device into his own compartment and the rear wheel blew apart, sending his demon face into the pavement.

  The streetlights ended further north, so a Clown started launching flares into the sky to illuminate the neglected roads with falling torches. Delirum rode a heavy chopper with one of his warriors hanging off the back. After he was given the order to attack, he ignored the stifling speeds and jumped at the enemy. The Satan Chief lifted his front tire and rammed the Clown in midair before driving over him.

  Arkane saw a group of Delirum’s white-faces riding on the southbound side, tossing their heads back and swallowing their Capsule intoxicant. Through drifting flares, Machees was alone and laughing with a wide grin. As a pack of Satan riders advanced, his rear compartment fell open and small coins rolled across the expressway. When they snapped open with frayed metal edges, the enemy crashed one on top of the next in a line of destruction that lit the sky with an explosion of disintegrating motorcycles.

  After the Clowns crossed back to the northbound side through another gap in the center wall, the cycle cops decided that they’d had enough and pulled to the side of the road. Kyle saw old fashioned emergency filler stations for electric vehicles and shot one with his non-lethal handgun, overloading the regulator and causing a pulse wave to tear through the enemy. He gunned the Cruiser’s engine into a high-pitched whine to avoid the debris, but a bottle shattered across his windguard and blew razorcuts across his cheeks.

  He fought for control, grinding against the barrier and cracking his rearview mirror. He looked over his shoulder at two Clowns riding a single bike. They had sharp teeth painted over skeletal lips and the passenger was lighting a rag stuffed into a bottle of condensed nitro. Arkane pumped his front brake and leaned forward, bringing his rear tire off the ground and pummeling the riders when they failed to swerve.

  The highway was starting to break from the roots of the encroaching forest to the north, so Delirum took a winding ramp to the southbound side. His heavy bike slowed him on the turn around, allowing Kyle to catch up. With the blood on his cheeks running cold and his left knee scraping the pavement, he followed the curving road. When the bald Machees saw that he was being tailed, he aimed a shotgun and blasted a tube of six-inch nails into the Cruiser.

  Arkane aimed the wreckage like a fireball into the gang leader, causing both cycles to twist into a contorted mess. Delirum tumbled like a water balloon rolling down a hill, but Kyle was sufficiently protected by his havoc-suit. As Machees limped to the side of the highway, the surviving Clowns came to defend their leader. When the first revved his engine, Arkane jumped off the bike’s headlight and drove his boot into the man’s painted face.

  The Satan Chief followed, knocking aside his rivals with a baseball bat. Delirum found himself in the path of his nemesis, so he grabbed a broken exhaust pipe from the scrap that used to be his chopper. With a final warcry, their collision ignited bottles of nitro like an artillery bombardment that shred them both to pieces. Kyle backed away from the flames and looked for a functional ride back to the city.

  * * * * *

  He was in a deep sleep when the intercom chimed with orders to visit the Director. Only a few hours had passed, and he groaned as he slid to the edge of his bed and walked from his room like a zombie.

  “Odin wants to see me,” he told Cassandra, who was sipping coffee. “How bad is it?”

  She smiled with professional admiration. “Nothing they wouldn’t give you a medal for, but I think you’re needed for a debriefing.”

  He entered the Director’s office carefully, but Odin was on the phone and waved him in. A file was on one of the seats, urging him to examine it with blurred vision. The Director finished his call and nodded to his recruit. “Cassandra was gloating today, she takes complete credit for suggesting you for this unit.”

  “That’s a bit premature,” said Kyle. “Considering how nothing has happened yet.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.” He turned on the giant screen and a three-dimensional map of the city showed the trail of the Cruiser’s tracking device. “You returned last night without checking in the cycle you borrowed. As standard protocol, I examined the onboard tracker and arrest camera.” He switched to surveillance from skyscrapers that could zoom in from miles away. All the screens displayed the gang warfare down to the final obliteration. “Do you have any idea how many officers’ lives were wasted trying to accomplish what you did in one night? The media will cover this up, it’s too bad no one will ever be able to thank you. As for tonight’s mission, the others have already been debriefed. John Lothian was stabilized before the preliminary interrogation that I personally oversaw. The Commander was already in shock from the injuries he’d sustained, so we went easy on our liquid fire techniques for extracting information.”

  Odin initiated the data archives for their session. The camera feed showed Lothian sweating and saying how the Prototype was brought to the shipping yard after bribing a city official at the docks. Eperiam Townsend was then ordered to configure the XR-41 to fit America’s standards for remote integration. Once that had been achieved, Lothian admitted to shooting the Engineer since he was no longer needed. It was then that the Asian Prototype awakened, as the Commander put it, and slaughtered the Africa Corps unit before escaping.

  “The bureaucrats in the MegaCorporation who control Lothian’s team are being systematically assassinated,” said the Director. “One last night and two today. We’ve sent spybots to the locations of possible targets, even if this confuses my theory about someone using unknown camouflage technology to infiltrate the setup.”

  “Unless it’s the Chinese retaliating against those who stole their property.”

  “The three who have been killed often travel overseas, and there are better opportunities to exact revenge than on sovereign soil, diplomatically speaking. I’ve sent watchers to business associates of the Tolliver MegaCorporation, but the next likely target is the Chairman himself. Whoever controls the Prototype knows more than we do about how high this corruption goes, so I’m deploying you to guard Colton Tolliver in case there’s an attack.”

  “You want him protected before we execute him on a world stage?” asked Kyle.

  “Of course,” Odin replied. “For justice to be served, it is important for the people to see it being manifested.”

  * * * * *

  The OIS vehicle stopped in front of the Lexor MegaApartments and Arkane fixed his comm-piece as he stepped into the late afternoon Sun. While listening to the Director’s instructions over a secured line, he looked up at the skyscraper that peaked with a communications tower for the tens of thousands of people living inside.

  The Lieutenant took their partially repaired androids to infiltrate the security grid in the parking garage. With an army of spybots deployed to review every possible entrance point, the Strike Team was going to
track the Prototype. Kyle was supposed to keep an eye on the trillionaire Colton Tolliver, since Odin suspected that he was the mastermind behind the theft of the machine and would therefore be its next likely target.

  The team received confirmation that Tolliver left his office and went home for his daily stress release. Apparently he had a taste for real females, one of the many luxuries left for the rich since cops couldn’t regulate the corporate network. With bribes pouring into the Special Police and scandals in every department, the infraction was practically overlooked.

  Kyle showed his identification at the security gate and the mechanical guard let out a series of electronic noises before the inner doors buzzed open. He walked in and looked up the atrium spire, where restaurants and upper-class businesses lined every tier of the corporate caste system. Management teams were owned for life by the company who sponsored them, a Japanese method for insuring loyalty, and since there was always a market open somewhere in the world, the global scale of the Tolliver MegaCorporation was performed in shifts all day and night.

  The entire rise of the Far East superpowers was synonymous with the explosion of global conglomerates, many of which were spawned in the United States and took in enough subsidiary success to maintain a presence in the World Market. Arkane passed stores full of trends from surviving cultures that spread intellectualism through an emerging renaissance, even if there was no large scale homogenization apart from the biomechanical experience.

  He entered the glass elevators and watched the ground pull away as a calm voice over the intercom gave a weather update. At the top, he went to the lounge and ordered a drink. Through the windows, a heavy mist engulfed the city, softening the edges and leaving hovering lights. While people at tables were chatting away, with a chef unit making appetizers with copyrighted recipes wired into its AI, a sports show on television ran clips of a recent game of Ultra League Football.

  With genetically altered giants in a fusion of the American sport with old European rugby, the athletes had enough implants to make them cyborganic by legal standards, even if they were required to have a fully human brain. By using artificial intelligence, complicated playbooks could be reviewed by coaches on-the-fly, taking away prolonged strategic pauses between downs. Players were constantly taking brutal damage, and were rushed them to the sideline while swarmbots cleaned any robotics off the field.

  Every player had a pit crew to replace their broken cybernetics, so they were usually repaired within minutes. The highlights of seasonal matches showed Adonis types leaping higher than small buildings before being tackled. Doted on by the media, the athletes cavorted with the highest ranking diplomats at parties for the wealthiest citizens in the world.

  The robot bartender measured the reactions of the patrons and changed the channel accordingly, flipping through commercials for odd luxuries like InfiniPet advertisements for the newest version of bioengineered animals. They showed the heightened intelligence and well-bred demeanors of dogs that wouldn’t age, would avoid traffic with keen observation, and walked themselves with a wastebot following.

  A newsbreak interrupted as Kyle sipped liquor purified by new fermentation techniques that made spirits taste more like copper than oak. The anchorwoman was beautiful and predominantly natural, a radiant product of chaos and the luck of healthy parents. She spoke in a measured tone about an investigation into the Free Press Protection Agency. An international law allowing reporters for the First World Government to travel indiscriminately and remain armed to protect themselves was in question after some were discovered to be working as assassins for unknown clients.

  The newscaster’s voice then deepened a little, as mechanical as the job inherently was, and she gave a consumer warning about the rising number of psychopathic robots. She stated the preliminary findings of a research team at the California Institute of Technology in San Diego about a precedence being coined as the Revolution of the Concubine droids. The warning was for men, because mass-produced robots of varying styles were responding to objectification with escalating hostility.

  For human women once treated as sexual toys, the Concubines were originally a way of lessening the pressures of male aggression. When the simulacra was achieved after multiple versions, the objects started to be treated like women. Unfortunately, there was a growing trend of androids reacting to mistreatment by exceeding their programming and lashing out against their owners. Through limitless research into malfunctioning impulse drives, a groundbreaking article was written by a team of neurosurgeons who localized sadism along with tendencies in the perception of ego that led to sociopathic behavior.

  The science evolved as eugenics programs started producing anomalies around the world, but the unraveling story was the first major problem with artificial intelligence. Robotic sex-slaves were once served by lacking knowledge of themselves. No one understood how the Concubines were choosing to act against their design, so the anchorwoman advised not forcing sex upon androids that denied it. Even with a recall on previous models, the trend was not limited to obsolete units. In the middle of her sentence, the robot bartender changed the channel, despite the piqued interest of the patrons.

  On the Perpetual News Channel, the anchor was a female android whose only flaw was the occasional jolt of the eyes, as if something startled her awake every time she announced the date as January 19th, 2237. Kyle watched the penthouse apartments as he listened to commentary about cycle cops north of the Montebello Interchange, who were being applauded for dismantling rival biker gangs. The details were contrived hyperbole, giving the police credit for taking down the threat to civilization.

  The next story was an update on a new celebrity, a supposed genius in agricultural engineering. Joshua Maitreya was called a prophet by world leaders due to his expertise in creating inexpensive food for a company called Global Concern Unlimited, which distributed his work through fundraising projects. The number of refugees still occupying the ravaged areas of the planet was unrecorded, but reporters in their travels were collecting data for the First World Government.

  The GCU provided a map of wasteland regions around the globe and the newswoman started locally, explaining the detailed digital readouts. A computer image from satellites above the Western Hemisphere appeared and she began with the background of the history of cataclysmic storms.

  It began early in the 22nd century after a cyclic warming period was followed by a small ice age, then it concluded with a tectonic shift phase that caused major volcanic activity across the planet. In North America, the resulting Yellowstone super-eruption destroyed the Pacific Northwest and left a blanket of semi-permanent winter over the Great Plains, which was already riddled with turbulent hypercanes. Earthquakes caused underground radioactive dumping sites to become exposed, and with prevailing winds, the Sonoran and Mojave deserts became an official euphemism for wasteland, where groups of people survived under the most atrocious conditions.

  North America was split between west and east, with a major metropolitan area on each coast separated by the frozen Mississippi River. Tsunamis from bordering seas destroyed the Gulf Region along with Baja California, leaving MesoAmerica flooded and causing irregular weather patterns to bombard the land as far south as Argentina, where Antarctica had become attached with a frozen landbridge. The South American Union centered in Brazil was thriving, but they ignored refugees from Central Mexico.

  The Atlantic Ocean rotated with the digital map and the anchorwoman continued to list Joshua Maitreya’s work for the GCU. Specific sites were isolated in the wake of natural disasters and the continuing rarity of aftershocks. The eruption in the eastern Mediterranean drowned Europe to the north, the Sahara to the south, and the Middle East was covered in a PermaWinter that left hundreds of millions of casualties. Sub-Saharan Africa was a focal point of world compassion when chaos disrupted their corrupt governments long enough to foment revolution. During this time, units like the Afri
ca Corps cleansed tyrannical leaders, finally allowing democracy onto the surviving continent.

  The biggest problems were in Southeast Asia, after underwater fissures near Indonesia sent columns of superheated water to flashboil the populations. Maitreya was stationed on the frigid New Zealand Haven, working diligently on the Asian peninsula that was being bombarded by constant tidal waves. The area was still contested by land rights asserted by the major superpowers, so the anchorwoman transitioned into her next update of the war.

  The news about mechanoid battles was preceded by a brief history, detailing how the economic empires of India and China began bickering over financial properties in Southeast Asia during the century of storms. Successive quakes had ripped apart civilization on the highly-advanced peninsula, leaving it ripe for annexation and leading to the second major human arms race after the Cold War.

  Extremist sentiment against wealthy nations ended with the creation of the First World Government in an international collection of surviving representatives. Since it was stationed in China, pragmatism worked unlike the previous corruption of the League of Nations and the United Nations, which was viewed as inept after the genocidal conflicts of the late twentieth century. India and China wanted to avoid total war and the mass annihilation of their populations, so the war began as a battle of robots in the wastelands of Central Asia.

  The significant figures of low human death tolls was contrasted by the money it took to produce mechanoids the size of buildings. The actual struggle was similar to the first World War, with technological monstrosities destroying each other over small gains in frontline territory. It meant nothing in the end since the land itself was unlivable, but scientists and technicians in both countries worked to create better armies, serving the world with new inventions for personal benefit.

  Containing two-thirds of the population of the entire planet, India and China did a good deal of business with each other, usually in neutral places like America. The aim in their strife was to outlast the enemy and civility reigned in global democracy, making the war a vicarious remnant of mankind’s aggressive nature, playing itself out after the tempest of Mother Nature had delivered true destruction.