System Ascension

by Prax Venter

  Along their bond, Mark felt surprise from his badass desert queen as his drone struck hers square in the chest with his padded shoulder. As soon as he made contact, Mark lifted his elbow into her stomach and felt the pneumatic muscles in his drone’s legs and back trigger their pistons.

  Her heavy drone flew through the air from the impact and completely destroyed a folding table with scattered playing cards. He felt her surprise shift to frustration. Then, as she pulled herself out of the wreckage, her frustration turned to desire.

  “Wowie!” Roo cheered from her seat.

  Mark pulled his wide, flat feet together and snapped his hands to his sides. He doubled his drone over and bowed to his opponent. He straightened back up and could have sworn he saw a phantom tail flipping wildly behind her tailless drone.

  Ahnix let out a little growl and sprinted right for him. His rangefinders calculated her speed and probable position as she approached, but he remained still. It was as if part of his mind was still operating at whatever-zillions of times faster than physical reality. The elegant and immutable laws of physics were sharply in focus, making the path of objects in motion- be they his or anything within his sensor radius… completely predictable.

  Mark rotated his senior care bot’s hips and took a small step backward. Ahnix tried to change her trajectory to embrace his waist, but he had already swung his padded bot’s arms around to assist her forward momentum just enough to break her scrambling grasp on him. Losing her balance, Mark watched as the cat-girl’s drone pitched forward and stumbled to her knees.

  “Guys?” Mark said. “How am I doing this?”

  Vale had been watching silently the whole time but spoke up now.

  “I think Ahnix was right. You are inhabiting a biological mirror to what your mind has been wired for, but also, I think being an actual human might give you an advantage in actual Earth physics.”

  Mark nodded his bot’s head as Ahnix got hers back on its feet. It made some sense.

  “Hmm. The only martial arts I know is just the over-the-top stuff I’ve seen in video games and movies.”

  Ahnix’s drone turned to stand in front of him, and he noticed something odd along their bond. She was trying to blank her mind.

  “You mean like- Doom Kick!” she yelled and launched her drone up into the air. With a tuck and a 90-degree sideways rotation, she pushed her arms and legs outward and her drone’s feet collided violently into his padded chest. He had been expecting her to do a flip, but by calling out her old signature attack, she manipulated him into misreading her physical movements.

  Ahnix fell to the ground on her side as Mark was forced backward into a table and chairs, but he lowered his center of gravity and used his gyros to stabilize. It was close, but he remained on his feet.

  “Get in there, Roo,” Vale said in his ear. “We all know Mark can handle two girls at once.”

  Roo’s drone stood up abruptly, knocking her fiberglass chair back to slide across the floor. Mark rose to his full height as Roo started stalking around his right, her puffy bot’s hands held up and wiggling like she couldn’t wait to get her hands on him.

  Ahnix’s drone was also back on her feet, stalking forward, and Mark had to split his attention between the two of them. Countless possibilities played out in his mind as they both moved. Roo’s probability path was very narrow- he was almost positive she was just going to blitz him directly. His cat-girl, on the other hand, was a master at hand-to-hand combat, and despite her lack of tail and possible real-world disadvantage, she was still an unpredictable force to be reckoned with.

  Deciding to take control, Mark spun and charged at Roo’s drone. He figured she would be the easiest to knock down first. He did not expect her to squeal, then turn and run away from him.

  Ahnix sensed this and pushed forward to intercept his pillowy senior care bot. He saw her knees bend and his mind filled in the rest. She was going for his legs.

  With a smile no one could see, Mark dove over Ahnix’s attempt at wrapping her arms around his drone’s knees and collided with Roo, bringing her down with him.

  Both Roo and Mark ended up in a tangled pile of soft, fluffy drone appendages.

  Laughing, they pulled themselves apart.

  “We have to keep these,” Mark said, helping Roo to her feet.

  Ahnix’s drone made a few combination air punches and hopped a few times.

  “It still feels odd,” the cat-girl began. “Everything is at once too fast and too slow… but I can get used to the missing tail with enough practice.”

  “I already have a transport pod waiting outside,” Vale said. “Let’s move out.”

  - 19 -

  Mark ducked his senior assistant drone back into the transportation pod with Roo and Ahnix.

  “Still nothing?” Vale asked, but her internal sensors had already confirmed that the third gun store on the way to the research campus had been thoroughly picked clean.

  “Nothing,” Mark said.

  “I found this licorice rope!” Roo held out a red, cellophane-wrapped length of candy.

  “I see,” said Vale. “A whip can be an effective weapon.” Once everyone was inside, the giant naga maneuvered the pod out and along the dark suburban road. “We are getting closer to the city. We should be expecting resistance soon.”

  “These guys are going to get all shot up, aren’t they?’ Mark asked.

  “McKennitt Smole is on the outskirts, but something tells me that an AI safe zone might be… crowded.”

  “Watched,” Ahnix added.

  Mark remembered them saying something about transferring out of his home system once, but it was from before he made the plunge to go fully digital. He scanned the dark road as they hurtled forward with the lights off. They hadn’t run into any trouble yet, but Mark had a hard time not searching every shadow for his own face. He shook his drone’s head.

  “Guys. Tell me again about transferring your, um, mind completely into a drone. It was too risky and too small, right?”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Vale said. “But this Wi-Fi dead zone has yet to be confirmed. If it did exist, it would be a magnet for all nearby AI housed within drones- on top of the humans. And humans might have an aversion to bots walking into their safe space.”

  “It’s a last resort. If even then,” Ahnix said.

  Mark felt Roo’s hand on his and his focus orientated on her bot’s round head.

  “We’re connected, Mark. We’d all have to fit in the same one. The drones we’re in now- what do you call them? Ass Masters?”

  “Sure, why not.”

  “I don’t think they are capable of housing us.”

  “Most aren’t,” Vale added. “It’s much more efficient to replace any kind of storage with an antenna and use a central control unit, farther away.”

  After a moment Vale spoke again in a softer voice. “I wonder what happened to the central brain for these senior care drones.”

  Mark felt a wave of sadness from Roo. “I bet they were nice.”

  They rode in silence for a long while, getting lost in their thoughts. The dark squat houses passed by at a regular interval, and Mark just enjoyed the relaxed stillness. They didn’t get enough of these quiet moments.

  He was taken back to the time he rode with his parents in a transport for three hours because his mother insisted that the best cheese was just over the border. To keep his eight-year-old mind from imploding with boredom, they played all sorts of stupid road trip games.

  “I spy with my 360 eye… something yellow.”

  “What?” Roo asked, tilting her drone’s round head to the side.

  “You guys need to hurry up and look out the windows. See anything yellow?”

  “The fire hydrant?” Vale said.

  “Good job!” Mark lifted his drone’s arms up. “Vale’s the big winner.”

  “This is a game?” Roo said, scooting up to the edge of her seat.

  “Yup. Vale, it’s your turn. Pick an obje
ct we can all see and give us a one-word hint.”

  “Oh. I- okay… It’s something… flat.”

  Ahnix sighed. “The road?”

  There was a pause. “Yes.”

  Mark laughed while Roo scooted so far forward she was just squatting in the middle of the cabin.

  “Nice,” Mark said. “But you gotta say ‘I spy with whatever eye… yadda yadda.’ It’s part of the game. The correct guesser gets to be the next spyer, so it’s your turn, Ahnix.”

  The regal cat-girl’s assisted living bot sat motionless, and he could tell she was currently trying to figure out if she even wanted to play. The velvet-girl controlling her drone focused all her attention on searching for potential objects Ahnix would pick. She really wanted a turn.

  “It’s a person,” Roo blurted out, and Mark was about to tell her that reading Ahnix’s mind was cheating, but the twinge along their bond focused Mark’s attention on what his rangefinder was reading up ahead.

  Two figures were walking in the grass near the houses on the right.

  “I can’t believe I didn’t spot them first,” Vale said and began to slow down.

  “Human. Male and female,” Ahnix said. “I don’t think they’ve heard us.” The transport pod’s electric motor was virtually silent, and unless they did something loud or bright, those people would probably never see them until it was too late. The male’s head bobbed up and down as he limped along, and recognition slowly crept up on Mark.

  “Holy fuck,” he said, his sensors working overtime in the pitch dark. “It’s that guy… Vince.”

  Mark wanted to offer them a ride- tell him that he wasn’t just going to leave humanity to its fate, but his padded fingertips ran along the smooth surface of his drone’s spherical head, just under his vision. He couldn’t feel his mouth, and a minor bout of claustrophobia shivered down his virtual spine. “Can I… talk out of this?”

  “Yes,” Vale said. “Just think about your internal speaker and make it vibrate with your throat.”

  “Oh, is that all?” he said, but as he did, he tried to do what she said, and he heard a fairly accurate version of his voice say the word ‘all’ out of the drone’s speaker.

  “Ready?” Vale said, rolling down the window on the side of the transport

  Mark began shouting before they came to a complete stop.

  “Vince! It’s me, Mark. Remember me from the overpass shack?”

  The two humans flinched, then slowly approached the vehicle.

  “Mark? How can you see…” The man got close enough to notice he was standing in front of a car full of drones and quickly held his gun against Roo’s head.

  “Whoa!” Mark put his hands up. “Please don’t shoot our new drones. These things are pretty sweet.”

  “Hi,” Roo said meekly. “We’re friendly...”

  The man called Vince was shrouded in darkness as his mind put all the pieces together.

  Ahnix sighed and repeated an earlier line of logic.

  “Remember me?” the regal cat-girl said. She didn’t wait long for a response. “We saw you first and could have easily smeared your meaty insides all over the front of this vehicle.”

  “Vale, open the door, please,” Mark said up to the interior of the pod.

  The right side of the transport rose into the air, and both Roo and Ahnix slid in to make room for two more passengers. With the door open, Mark could clearly see the mousy Michelle behind her protector, still clutching her large canvas bag. She had since found a much more suitable bulletproof vest to cover her sheer top.

  “You have to be kidding me- you uploaded your brain so you could tool around the suburbs with your… battle harem, in senior care drones?”

  “Hello, Vince, Michelle,” the car said. “I’m Vale. And I am very glad you didn’t shoot Mark before. Where are you headed?”

  The man slipped his handgun back into a holster on his hip. “Give us a second.” Vince stepped back to have a private conversation with his partner. After a moment, he stuck his head back into the cabin. “Can you just take us back north for now?”

  Mark could tell the man’s foot was still bothering him and the option to not walk to where they were going was too good to pass up.

  “We’re headed that way too,” Mark said, making his drone’s chest-speaker vibrate. “Come on in.”

  The two weary and roughed-up people crawled into the transport pod, and Vale closed the door behind them.

  Roo clasped her drone’s hands to her chest, crinkling her red licorice rope.

  “I’ve never met another human! I’m Roo. It’s a great honor.”

  Michelle’s brown doe eyes opened wide and bounced between the drones.

  “I’ve never met a group of escaped video game characters,” she said and extended her small hand towards the velvet-girl’s white padded bot.

  Mark could feel Roo squeal internally as she reached out and gently shook hands.

  “Oh! Here, have some candy. We have no real use for it. I just thought it looked pretty…”

  Both Vince and Michelle locked eyes on the rope of sugar, and Mark’s perception algorithms easily read the apprehension mixed with desire. They looked seriously exhausted and he remembered that it had been about a week since he had seen them last. Any doubts that Mark had about doing what he could for them and the rest of the humans left on Earth were erased as he watched them contemplate taking candy from a stranger.

  “Thank you,” Vince said, nodding once. “I love that stuff.”

  Roo extended the offering farther, and Michelle took the licorice, stuffing it into her bag with a loud crinkling.

  “Me too,” the mousy woman said quietly, and the slight rose color highlighting her round ears told Mark that they had just discovered another thing they had in common. Their relationship was still in its early phase, and he knew that intimacy had yet to be reached, but was in their near future.

  “So,” Vince began as Vale guided the transport forward into the night. “What brings you to the neighborhood?”

  “We are heading to a research facility that supposedly has a device that nullifies all Wi-Fi signals. We need some tech on the inside.”

  “No shit,” Vince said and reached into a coat pocket. He produced an ancient-looking hand-held radio. He flicked his eyes up to Mark’s drone, and he could tell that Vince was deciding if he really trusted him. With a sigh, he flicked on the power, and a burst of static came out of the speaker followed by an older man’s voice.

  “… campus. Two miles north of the Shamus Memorial interchange. Humans, Sympaths, there is a safe haven in this nightmare. A place to gather and rebuild. All peaceful individuals and entities are welcome but remain cautious on approach. The Wi-Fi jamming perimeter is patrolled by Trip Zero. We are located at the McKennitt Smole research campus. Two miles north of the Sham-”

  Vince turned the knob instantly silencing the repeating message.

  “Interesting,” Ahnix said.

  Vale agreed. “Yes, and that recording goes a long way to confirming its existence. This is also our exact destination. Smart to use old radio waves. Probably kept it secret for at least while.”

  “What’s a Sympath?” Roo asked.

  “Why that’s you, darling,” Vince said with a smirk. “We met some other survivors while we were looking for my kids at my old cabin. They had a mind-locked farming drone named Dave D5 who was funny as hell. Sympaths are human-sympathetic AIs.”

  “You didn’t find them?” Roo asked softly.

  The unshaven man shook his head and fished for something in his breast pocket. “No one had seen them,” Vince said, handing Roo a pair of paper photos.

  Mark looked over Roo’s shoulder and saw two sandy blonde kids with green eyes. Their thick eyebrows and wide noses gave away their relation to Vince. He continued while Roo showed the pictures to Ahnix.

  “There is a chance they made it into this dead zone place.” He sighed. “And if not, it might be the best place to join the re
volution.”

  “Vince,” Mark began. “I have thought a lot about our last meeting, and I’m telling you right now that we plan to do as much damage as we can to destroy the AI controlling the drones before we leave. I am not just abandoning Earth or its people, digital or otherwise.”

  Roo put her soft hand over her pillowy chest, and Mark felt a strong desire from all his girls. They loved it when he spoke like this.

  “We’re the saviors, after all,” the velvet-girl stated with unwavering confidence.

  Mark saw Vince’s bushy eyebrows come down at that and intervened.

  “It’s a long story, but we do have a history of saving people, and worlds- not to toot our own horn…”

  “Mark does the things he says he will,” Ahnix added with cold certainty.

  A stretch of silence filled the transport but was broken when Vince finally spoke.

  “This isn’t some game.”

  “No,” Vale said. “It isn’t. But life is a series of challenges, and there lies an enemy before us that needs to be defeated.”

  Roo’s cheery voice took on a rare dark tone. “And we will destroy our enemies.”

  “I like you girls,” Michelle said after another brief silence.

  “Aw,” Roo said. “You seem really nice too.”

  “Brace for impact!” Vale yelled a moment before the vehicle swerved to the left. Roo and Ahnix reacted by moving to carefully embrace Vince and Michelle with their pillowy drone bodies. The swerve wasn’t enough to avoid the collision with one of the quadruped military drones that looked like a dog-shaped fractal.

  The transport pod slid to a dramatic halt in the middle of the dark road, its front axle damaged beyond functionality.

  Vale’s commander voice filled the cabin. “This transport is down and so is the drone, but there is another one out there. Mark, get out there and end it before it calls for others!”

  The door opened, and Mark launched his white cushioned bot out into the darkness. With 360 vision, he perceived Ahnix and Roo still protecting the two humans, along with the sharp animal made of metal on the road ahead. The transport door closed an instant behind, and Mark sprinted toward the threat. Its alloy paws dug into the asphalt as it dashed forward to meet him with gnashing teeth.