Toy Wars

by Thomas Gondolfi

  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 animals’ 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? Ideology 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 my 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 dared 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.

  Three things prevented me from just hailing the Factory: 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 unsure 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, told 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—265.83 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 entire 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 Humans, being as powerful and advanced as they are could possibly be associated with so destructive an activity. It made no sense.

  These were all very good exercises at keeping my mind occupied because any 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 remindi
ng 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 and 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 tentatively 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. Before 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, which 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. It 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.

  My sensors told me the bite carried massive force. It crushed my hard outer casing and began a sideways sawing motion. I reached back and bashed the thing with a handy fist-sized rock, right across the nose. The only effect seemed to be to knock the huge horn off its nose, but if it felt discomfort it did not give any indications.

  I had hoped the creature would stop its attack once it realized I had no meat on my bones. But alas that was not the case. It continued mauling my leg, tearing it further asunder, twisting its body over and over in the dirt like some biologic motor. I was worried that it might succeed in wrenching my limb from its socket. Instead, my body rolled violently with each motion of the basilisk.

  As my head flipped over and my arms flailed uselessly about, I remembered the low fence. I guess I could blame the inspiration on getting a repeated whack on the sump.

  I spread all my limbs out as far as they would go on the creature’s next rotation. The leverage of my left arm against the ground stopped the spin. The grinding action of his teeth on my leg didn’t. With trepidation, I reached down to feel my damaged leg. There I tried my best not to get my fingers involved in the mastication of the biologic. On the whole I was successful. I slipped my fingers inside the torn fur and even further into the body cavity of my calf. My kinesthetic sense exceeded even normal units. I quickly found two of my ankle servo wires by touch alone. I only got one of my fingers slightly mangled as I ripped them right out of their contacts. I lost one wire as a particularly sharp attempt to flip me again knocked my hand away. Retrieving it and remaining in a single attitude against the
determined effort of a creature half again my mass, involved acrobatics and some wild luck. I caught it on my fourth attempt.

  The basilisk, to my great fortune, ignored my actions. Apparently it didn’t feel they were of any interest. I shoved the now exposed wires, one to each opposite side of the creature’s head. The charge to my servos didn’t reach over twenty-four volts but the creature acted as if it had been struck by lightning. It jerked heavily, releasing my leg as it did. I jabbed the electrodes into it again before it could catch its mental balance. It uttered a metallic whistle and sprinted away at an even more fantastic speed than it had stalked me with. I was free. I watched the carnivore race out of my sight before I turned my attentions to myself and the mess I was.

  My right leg was a disaster below the knee. Over 70 percent of the armor casing was damaged beyond my simple ability to repair it, and 100 percent of the fur was gone. The leg’s main hydraulic lines slowly leaked ochre-colored fluid into the wound. There were also the two wires I had ripped out, but a simple five-minute fix would correct them. The worst injury was the metal tendon which held my foot in the correct attitude. My encyclopedic brain named it the Achilles tendon. It was broken two-thirds down from the knee to the base of the foot and the upper piece bent inward at an extremely awkward angle.

  “First things first,” I muttered to myself. While I was contemplating the other items, I patched the leaking lines. Of all the items in my body, the fluid I couldn’t easily replace. My body had no method for the intake of fluids and converting them to use. It was either the right substance, or I couldn’t function. I could operate fairly effectively even at a loss of nearly four liters, but after that my capabilities dropped dramatically. Luckily, my sensors registered less than a quarter liter of loss. That was good. I would have to guard against future losses. Now my other injuries needed attending.