Butcher Block Green

by Eric Kramer

  In a flash, Saat’s rage evaporated, leaving him exhausted and sad. He collapsed onto the sand, sitting down with a thump. “I’m not going to come near you. I’m sorry I killed your poppa, but I was trying to save my town, my friends. This is my home.” Saat wasn’t sure if she understood Spanol but, to his surprise, Quuin’s voice projected over his, coming from somewhere in the suit and translating what he said into the raiders’ tongue.

  The girl held her dagger steady, pointed at Saat. Her eyes flickered from his face to the warsuit congealed around his body. Saat realized he still had the cannon protruding from his head.

  “Quuin, can you take this thing off my head?”

  The liquid metal retracted, and Saat felt the cool of the night blow against his face, through his sweaty hair. The little girl’s eyes widened, but she kept the dagger pointed at him.

  “What’s your name? Where are you from?”

  The dagger began shaking, and tears started leaking down her face.

  “I’m Faith. We come from the edge of the dead ocean. Our town is in trouble. The edge-totem that holds the outside back don’t work no more. Poppa said we need a god-brain to fix it, or the nightmares will get in.”

  “Edge-totem? What does it look like? Can you describe it for me, Faith?” Quuin asked. Her voice was hard, unreadable.

  “It’s very big. As big as a mountain. It takes me a long time to walk around it. It looks like a tree trunk, but way bigger, and it spins at the top.”

  “I know this! I … my data stores are so fragmented, but I have imagery that matches this. I have seen these before. It looks like the bulk of my knowledge pertaining to these … edge-totems … is in a partitioned section, though. I believe…” Quuin paused, silent for a moment. “… we are in South America. Not Central. I found some data. I was involved with these totems somehow, a long time ago. There is indeed a threat. A very dangerous threat that I was trying to keep out, along with some others. Other AIs and humans. But it is so fragmented. I need to access the partitioned data, but it is a huge risk. If I let loose the parts of me that were partitioned off, I could go insane.”

  The little girl scooted closer, her dagger tip bobbing down.

  “Poppa said the nightmares used to be people. Used to be the ancients. But their greed changed them, turned them evil. They grew jealous of us here in Mai’a, and have been trying to get past the totems since the beginning of the world.”

  “Since the beginning of your world…” Quuin sounded distracted, as though her attention elsewhere.

  “Post-humans. The totems kept post-humans out. I … I think there was a war with them. Is a war, maybe, that humanity has just forgotten they are fighting. I helped kill one of them … one of their central minds, but there were others. I cannot remember, though. There is a seal on most of the data, and what I can access makes no sense. I am going to have to break into the partition, but I am just going to do a micro-breach—try to reconstruct the data without letting whatever is in the partition out.”

  The little girl dropped the point of her knife to her side and edged closer, keeping her eyes on Saat.

  “Momma says we only have a few days before the totem stops working. Before there’s nothing else we can do. Some of the smaller nightmares have already come in. The big ones are standing outside, waiting.”

  “Faith, where is your town? Where is the totem?”

  Faith pointed southeast, towards the town. “Two days’ ride from here, that way.”

  “Saat, we need to get there. I cannot exactly say why, right now, but, I am hoping I will have some answers soon. We need to…”

  A sharp pain blossomed high in Saat’s ribcage. Stunned, he looked down, saw Faith’s dagger buried to the hilt. Faith yanked it out and leaped up, backing away, hands raised in a fighting stance.

  “You killed my Poppa! You killed him!” She turned and fled into the darkness.

  Liquid metal pooled around Saat’s head, the warm-cold metal hardening into the helmet. The pain in his side was unbelievable, icy hot with every breath. The image in his right eye highlighted the girl as she disappeared into the darkness, making her glow an odd orange and red. The cannon finished clicking into place, and Saat realized Quuin was about to fire.

  “Quuin … no … she’s right. I killed her poppa. Let her go. This hurts, a lot. I can’t breathe.”

  “Hold on, Saat. This is going to hurt even worse for a second.”

  Saat looked down to his chest, saw a thin wound leaking a frightening amount of blood. He reached down to touch it, but the liquid metal of the warsuit oozed into the wound, into his chest. Saat screamed and fainted.

  *******

  Saat woke to a dull throb in his ribs and the blistering midday sun in his eyes. He was moving, running, his legs gripped in an articulating mesh, each step shuddering the ground around them.

  “You’re awake. Good. I have had you sleep for a day while the warsuit tried to repair you. It is too intense, though. She clipped your pulmonary artery, got a lung with a pulmonary vein. The blade was coated with a strange Enterococcus strain that is overwhelming the warsuit’s antimicrobials. You do not have long, Saat.”

  Saat opened cracked lips, tried to speak. His throat ached.

  “My throat hurts.” His voice was a whisper.

  “That is from the breathing tube. You stopped breathing, and the warsuit ventilated you through your good lung while I tried to repair the other one.”

  “Where are we?” asked Saat. Spread all around was the flat expanse of the desert, tinged with veins of black that tracked into the distance in front of them. Ahead on the horizon, a dark object, shaded by the sun, rose into the cloudless sky.

  “That black stuff … Are we going towards the dead ocean?”

  “Yes. I was able to establish basic contact with one of the orbital jump stations, just enough to know it is still functional. Some of the infrastructure is still intact, including medpods that can repair you. Listen, Saat. You have only got about fourteen hours left, at best. It takes two to get to the stations, assuming the mesospheric elevators are still working. By incredible luck, that failing totem is right by one of the elevator ground stations. We are almost to the totem. There’s Faith’s village, actually, in the shadow of it. I just need to take a look, see what the problem is.”

  Saat shaded his eyes with his hand, squinting to look in the distance. His arm felt like lead. The dark object sharpened into an enormous gray-black monolith silhouetted against the sky, the angular head of it slowly rotating. It dwarfed a small collection of huts and buildings underneath it.

  “Wha— … what happens if you can’t fix it?”

  “We go to the moon. Get off this planet, abandon it to what lives outside the totems. There is life up there. We just need to get a ship to take us, so we are going to where I believe an old military outpost might be. There should be a Carapace-class chrysalis at the base. The Carapace class was built for space; if we find one, it can take us up to the orbital station. From there, after we fix you, we go to the moon.”

  “I … I want to go there. To the moon. Even if we fix the totem.” Saat’s voice was coming back, gaining strength. His whole body felt as though it was burning up, though. He couldn’t stop shaking.

  “There’s nothing for me here. Everyone I’ve ever known is dead and…”

  “Saat. Look.” Quuin’s voice was grim.

  Saat’s vision sucked forward. The town leaped towards him, growing in size. Saat tried to jump back, but the warsuit kept moving forward.

  “Sorry. I should have warned you. Just zooming in on the village. Look at what is in the center.”

  It was hard to distinguish at first, until Quuin put a red highlight around it, separating it from the totem’s shadow. Saat took in a sharp breath.

  “What is that? Is that a … demon? A god?”

  “Post-human. But mutated. Different than I remember. I was able to access some data without releasing my sequestered personality. A long time ago, I
killed what I thought was the brain of these things, but it turned out to be one of several brains. I and some other AIs, along with the humans who created these totems, fought for over a thousand years against them. I do not know what happened to me, though, or why I ended up buried in your mines.”

  “So … what do we do?”

  “The revolutions are off on that device you see on top of the totem. An easy fix: a few hours reprogramming to adapt to local barometric changes. I remember this was a difficult area to place a totem. Then another three hours to get to the mesospheric elevator ground station. We are lucky, though. Humanity is lucky. This is a couple of hours away from imploding.”

  “What about that thing?”

  “We kill it.” Quuin’s voice had an edge to it. “I think that is as far as it’s able to go in right now. The totem is preventing further penetration. That is definitely not good, though. Every human still alive on this planet will be dead within weeks if the network breaks down.”

  The warsuit started picking up speed, moving towards town. The now-familiar liquid metal crawled up Saat’s neck and over his head, covering his face.

  “A little different this time. These things are difficult to kill. I have managed to harvest some hydrogen and other elements from the atmosphere. Not a lot, but enough to make some explosives. I am firing flechettes this time. Need to hit at least ten different areas, coordinate the explosions; otherwise, it will just reform.”

  The wind was whistling past Saat now; his legs were aching and uncomfortable from moving fast inside the warsuit’s mesh. His head moved and locked into position, held by the iron muscles around his neck.

  A strange scream, like hundreds of people burning at once, came from the direction of the town, which was growing larger by the second. Liquid metal spilled down Saat’s head again. Sensor blisters clicked into place, and the weapon’s radiator system extruded out of the cannon barrel, hardening into a latticed suppressor extending down the gun’s shaft. Saat’s vision sharpened, magnified on the town. Deep in the shadows of the totem, a massive knot of cancerous flesh with four human-like spider legs stood on a half-caved-in building. Its head turned towards them, watching. The thing was eerily still, a cart and a half-eaten dead horse swinging from one hand.

  It’s waiting for us. A chill went down Saat’s spine.

  “The post-human’s not approaching. Totem’s holding it back. We are sixty meters from firing. There is going to be more of a concussion with this. Cannot help it. Sorry.”

  The creature highlighted in Saat’s right eye, indiscernible glyphs and scripts streaming around it. Saat blinked, and he could read it, even though he’d never seen it before. Distances, hit probabilities, damage radiuses, casualty estimates.

  “Firing.”

  The recoil was stronger, the blowback of the cannon shaking the suit. A deep series of cracks echoed across the desert, and a set of gleaming projectiles shot out, spreading into a crisscross pattern. The projectiles continued dividing, until there was a curtain of them racing towards the post-human, which was now only half a kilometer away. The warsuit accelerated even more, the whistle of the rushing air turning into a shriek. Saat’s joints began to grind, stretched close to their limits.

  “Get ready for hand-to-hand. Only way we will destroy the fragments.”

  The projectiles impacted. For a fraction of a second, nothing happened. The post-human started its shrieking again, only to be cut off by multiple detonations. The creature disappeared in an expanding ball of superhot gas that flattened the surrounding buildings.

  Blades formed on Saat’s arms, hovering just off the meshwork. They began rotating faster and faster, speeding into twin blurs of motion humming like a swarm of wasteland wasps in the midday heat.

  A wave of nausea and dizziness overcame him. His vision darkened, spotted.

  “Quuin … I don’t … I don’t feel so good.”

  “Hang in there, Saat. You are going to make it. The warsuit is manipulating your hemostatic regulatory mechanisms to keep you alive. Just a few more hours, and we will be on the orbital station.”

  They reached the edge of the town. Quuin drove the warsuit towards the center, into the shadow of the totem. They careened around a corner, and Saat saw a flash coming at them from his left side. The warsuit responded, whipping around, bringing up Saat’s arms. The blades dug into burning, mottled flesh, shredding it.

  “Explosives didn’t work as well as I wanted. Hang on.”

  The attacker was a chunk of the full post-human, part of the thorax. New limbs sprouted in all directions, shards of bone replacing jagged teeth in a gaping maw. The warsuit met it head on, a wet thud echoing across the ruined courtyard as they collided with the creature. Quuin’s blades cut deep into it, pulverizing everything in their path as the creature tore at the warsuit, trying to rip Saat apart with its mangled limbs.

  “Quuin … I think … I’m going to pass out. I’m scared.”

  “No! Saat! Stay with me, okay? You are starting to fade on me. You will be okay. I am here. I promise you will make it through this.”

  Quuin brought both arms down with crushing strength on the remaining scraps of the post-human, vaporizing them in a spray of cauterized flesh. The warsuit sped up, careening along at a dangerous speed. They flew around a crater filled with a sizzling mound of post-human, the gyroscopes struggling to keep the warsuit upright. Another chunk of the post-human leapt at them, its four malformed heads screaming. Quuin extended an arm, slicing into it as she ran past, pushing the suit to move faster. They arrived at the base of the totem, and Quuin didn’t hesitate. The suit coiled and then exploded upwards, catapulting them into the air and against the side of the totem. It hit the side with a resounding clank that echoed above the burning village. Pseudopods shot out of the warsuit, adhering to the totem’s surface, and the suit began to climb, pseudopods hauling them up towards the black-gray wisps of clouds above. Below, Saat could hear the frustrated warbling of the post-human scraps, growing fainter.

  Saat tried to focus, and couldn’t. He passed out, his arms and legs going lax inside the warsuit’s mesh.

  “NO! SAAT! WAKE UP!” Quuin’s voice was anguished, breaking. “Come on, just a couple more hours. I have to do this, or the rest of your species will be wiped out in weeks.”

  She reached the base of the rotating drum of the totem, snaked out a patch cable, interfacing with the totem.

  “Saat!” A bolus of drugs, painstakingly constituted over the last day, jolted Saat back awake.

  “Wha … where … what’s going on? Are we on the station?”

  “No, no, Saat. We are fixing the totem. It’s going to be another two hours, and then things will be okay. You will be okay.”

  “That’s great! And then the orbital station?”

  “I…” Quuin fell silent.

  “What’s wrong? Why do you sound so sad?”

  “Yesterday, while we were traveling, I decided to access my files. They were not corrupt. They just hurt so much. Memory does not fade with artificial intelligences, Saat. The pain stays fresh. After a thousand years fighting the post-humans while still feeling that pain, that loss, I couldn’t take it anymore and partitioned it. Even though I made a promise to someone never to forget … never to forget him. And now it has happening again. Losing someone who is important to me. You are the only person I have ever known, Saat. I mean, other versions of me have known other people, but I have only known you. And now … now I am going to lose you.”

  “Why?” Saat’s vision began to blur again, the dizziness began to come back.

  “Because this patch will take two hours and fifteen minutes. The half-life of the drugs I just gave you—the only drugs I have left—is three minutes, before they are broken down into metabolites. I’m so sorry, Saat.”

  Waves of nausea and a comfortable numbness began to spread through Saat’s body.

  “Can you promise me something, Quuin?”

  “Yes.”

  “Take me
to the moon. I want to go there. I always wondered, as a kid, if people lived up there. Always wanted to see it … even if everyone did say it was a god.”

  “You are not going to live to see it, Saat.”

  “I know. Take me anyways.”

  A hundred meters below, the reassembled post-human latched itself onto the totem and began to climb. Saat closed his eyes, listening to the breeze whispering by him.

  “Can you take the suit off my head?”

  The suit retracted back, and the cool air ran across his face, through his hair.

  “I’ll take you, Saat. You have my word.”

  *******

  The sun went down as a small figure descended to meet a much larger one in the middle of the giant gray-black monolith. Explosions lit up the darkening sky, the sharp crack of cannon fire and the mangled cries of something not quite human mingling together. The desperate fight finished before it began, as vaporized chunks of flesh fell to the ground below. The sun dropped below the horizon, and the small figure jumped off the totem’s spinning side, landing on the ground. It began to run, moving towards a structure far beyond the reach of the totem—a thin column extending into the heavens and out of view.

  Night came, and darkness swallowed the figure as it headed towards the distant structure. Hours passed, and then a quick pulse of light illuminated the night, traveling up and disappearing into clouds turned a pale green by the glow of the full moon above.

  ACT 4

  ETERNAL LIFE

  ::initialize.acoustic::

  … …

  ::success::

  ::initialize.video::

  ::failure::failure::failure::

  ::inc.audio.gain.100<150::

  ::audio.sens.inc.100<150::

  … …

  ::recording::