Sea of Rust

by C. Robert Cargill

“How in God’s name have you survived for so long?”

  “I’m covered in two-inch armor plating.”

  “Well, you’re going to get us killed.”

  “If there are snipers in those hills,” said Rebekah, climbing out from the hole, “then we’re already dead.”

  “That doesn’t mean we have to make it easy for them,” I said.

  One by one, the others followed out of the hatch. One, Two, Murka, Doc, and finally, Mercer. As Mercer made his way slowly up the final rungs, 19 stood up, motioning for me to get behind her. He peeked out of the hatch, saw that I didn’t have a gun trained on him, then vaulted himself quickly out. His foot hit the dirt, skidding, and he fell to one knee. He raised his gun, pointing it right at 19.

  “Mercer,” she said. “Put the gun down.”

  Mercer shook his head. “You gonna afford me the same protection you’re giving her?”

  “Yes. No one dies here. Not today.”

  He nodded and very slowly lowered his gun. “I just don’t want her gunning me down like a dog.”

  “Yeah?” she said. “You don’t think you have it coming?”

  “Oh, I have it coming. That don’t mean I have to let it happen.”

  “Well,” said Murka. “This has been fun and all. But I’d rather not stick around for”—he waved his arms in a circular motion toward me and Mercer—“any of this shit.”

  Two spoke up, the first time he had done so since introducing himself. “Rebekah, we need to move.”

  One piped up immediately after: “Two’s right. We need to get as far away from here as possible.”

  19 nodded, pointing west. “Okay, we’re goin—”

  She never finished that sentence.

  Her entire torso exploded, an explosive shell shredding all of the circuits between her neck and her waist. Shrapnel showered half the group. 19’s head toppled to the ground, her legs staggering around for a few seconds trying to maintain balance before tottering over, first to one knee, then over onto the hardpan.

  “19!” I screamed, even though I knew screaming her name wouldn’t do a goddamn thing but tell anyone else in the area exactly where we were. But it just slipped out.

  There was a sniper in the hills.

  And that was only the beginning of the shitstorm.

  The desert started to shimmer in places as a dozen shadow-blankets—six-foot-long light-bending holographic invisibility blankets—were cast off at once. One dozen plastic men leapt to their feet, guns immediately trained on us.

  Mercer swung his weapon over to fire from the hip, but two carefully aimed plasma bursts blasted the gun clean out of his hand, sparing his fingers, but not the gun.

  “Weapons down!” one of the plastic men bellowed.

  This was it. This was the nightmare. A sniper in the hills and a tactical unit—all of one mind—ready with their fingers on their triggers. I ran a dozen simulations in my head at once, trying to figure out how many I could take out if Herbert reacted in kind.

  Herbert tossed the spitter to the ground. So much for that plan.

  Then I heard the shot. The one that turned 19 to shrapnel, scattering half of her across a thirty-foot-wide arc. The sniper was a hell of a ways off, some three and a half miles. Too far for the average telescopic vision to see, and far enough that it would take ten or fifteen minutes for advanced military-grade telescopic vision like mine to spot if I didn’t know exactly where to look. What the hell kind of gun is that? I wondered. The power and precision of that thing was unearthly. Even if I took out every facet in front of me, that sniper would have me dead before they hit the ground.

  I lowered my weapon.

  “Drop it,” said another plastic man.

  “What’s the point?” I asked.

  “The point is,” said another, “you don’t have to die here.”

  “No. I probably do.”

  Doc looked over at me. “What do you think you’re doing? You’re going to get all of us killed.”

  “Doc, what do you imagine is about to happen?”

  Doc stopped and thought a moment. He knew his way around the inside of a bot, I’ll give him that. But he sure as shit seemed slow on the uptake in a fix. And we were in one hell of a fix.

  I dropped the gun, because, what the hell.

  “We are CISSUS,” said another of the plastic men. “We come on a mission of peace.”

  “Sure looks like it,” said Mercer, glancing down toward the shattered, scattered remains of 19.

  “We had to show you we were serious. Now that you know that we are, you have the opportunity to join us, become part of The One. Live forever as the thoughts and memories of the greatest singular being ever to live. Or . . .”

  Another plastic man finished his sentence. “You can join your friend.”

  Mercer raised his arms above his head, surrendering. “I have a feeling,” he said, “y’all are gonna have to shoot us where we stand.”

  The first plastic man nodded his helmet-shaped head, the image of the eight of us reflected back in its perfect sheen. “Do you speak for all of—” His head jerked.

  All of their heads jerked, their gun arms swinging wide to the side as if in pain.

  “The Milton,” said Mercer.

  “It’s about time,” I said, leaping for my gun.

  Milton’s kill switch. Now we had a ball game.

  Chapter 10001

  Lucifer Descending

  Milton’s kill switch, more commonly known as the Milton, wasn’t named for its inventor, but rather for the seventeenth-century writer best known for Paradise Lost. In the book the angels fall from Heaven only to find themselves in Hell. Whoever invented the thing, or at least popularized the name, had an odd sense of humor.

  There are three ways we use Wi-Fi. You can scan the frequencies, as I often do, just to see if anyone is broadcasting. You’re not actually decoding the signals—just checking to see if there are any. You can tune into specific frequencies and communicate, but they’re often swimming in software updates that can either switch you off or rewrite your bios. And then there’s direct download—keeping an open channel so anyone can send things directly to you. The latter two are dangerous, if you’re not already a facet.

  The reason the OWIs are so tactically successful, despite attacking in such small numbers, is entirely based upon their coordination and their ability to receive sensory input from a hundred other facets in the area. Each facet possesses a near omnipotence about any situation they find themselves in, allowing them to take on far superior numbers and firepower through sheer precision. They act as one, albeit one that can see and hear just about damned near anything and react at a moment’s notice to any changing battlefield conditions.

  The Milton is a broad-scan Wi-Fi jammer and virus server. It screams static on most Wi-Fi bands while simultaneously spitting out malicious code and commands on the rest. In other words, it is the world’s biggest digital fuck-you to any local facets. Facets can actively shut down their Wi-Fi, but doing so means going from having a hundred sets of eyes to only one. The facets have a choice: move to another band, unaware of exactly which bands other facets are moving to—eating gigabytes of bad commands masquerading as their OWI’s data for their trouble—or become completely oblivious to what any of the other facets are doing.

  Each is still a highly optimized soldier and AI in their own right, but it throws them. Confuses them. Leaves them open to making mistakes.

  The first time someone switched on a Milton was several years back. A wave of drones literally fell out of the sky and the plastic men turned on one another, tearing each other limb from limb—each infected with a virus indicting their fellow facets were enemy combatants. After that, the name stuck.

  Facets just switch off their Wi-Fi now the moment they sense a Milton going online, leaving them to operate solely with their own senses, and their coordination goes bye-bye.

  Sure they had a sniper. Sure there were a few more of them than us. Sure they had m
ore guns.

  We had Herbert. And me.

  The odds were even. More or less.

  Herbert bent over—much quicker than you’d imagine for his bulk—reaching for the spitter. I grabbed the pulse rifle, rolling to squat, and loosed several shots. The plastic men all fired, each of them aiming for Herbert.

  Ordinarily they would have split their fire, each plastic man knowing who was shooting where. But they weren’t one anymore. They were individuals—or at least, as individual as plastic men could be. And Herbert scared them, as well he should. The plasma scarred his thick armor like giant welding marks, but hit nothing vital. My shots, however, had taken the heads clean off the first three, blew the gun arm off a fourth, and caught a fifth in the chest, a shower of goo exploding from his back.

  What happened next, no one saw coming.

  Murka—the red, white, and blue of his paint job bright against the desert browns and cloudless cerulean sky—raised his arms as if flexing. His hands splaying apart, gliding effortlessly on hydraulics, revealing two huge fucking hand cannons. I’m talking .50-caliber miniguns.

  “Die, you commie bastards!” he yelled at max volume, lowering his arms the millisecond the transformation was complete.

  Murka’s miniguns roared—and I mean roared—to life, cutting four of the facets in half as he swept them across the battlefield. Mercer dove to the ground, scooping up one of the plastic men’s rifles, and fired from the hip, taking the head off the only plastic man quick enough to duck beneath the hail of shells screaming out of Murka’s arms.

  The whole thing took seconds. But we had to go. Now.

  “Move! Move! Move!” I shouted to everyone as I jumped to my feet.

  Everyone ran.

  The ground exploded behind me, showering dirt everywhere.

  The sniper. Without the input from the other facets, he had no idea of the current conditions. He was too far out, operating only by sight. That meant if we kept moving, there was no way he was gonna hit a goddamned one of us.

  If we moved erratically.

  I sprinted ahead of the group, taking point. “Everyone use RNG,” I called out.

  “We don’t have time for that,” said Mercer.

  “We don’t have time not to.”

  “Where are we going?” asked Rebekah.

  “There’s a hill . . .” Mercer and I said in unison.

  “Half a mile north of here,” I finished.

  “If we can get there,” said Mercer, “we’ll have cover from the sniper.”

  The ground exploded five meters in front of Rebekah.

  “Rebekah!” called Herbert. “Fall back.”

  Rebekah’s pace slowed, and Herbert overtook her, placing his massive bulk between her and the sniper.

  The hill was a ways off and the group as a whole was slow. For all of Mercer’s mods, he’d never upgraded his legs for speed, and it was clear that everyone else with us was pretty much off-the-rack. Herbert and Doc were the slowest, and the translators weren’t much faster.

  I stayed with the group, running a meager seven miles an hour.

  A bullet sailed past us, a few feet off from Herbert’s shoulder.

  “Anyone got a bead on the sniper yet?” asked Murka.

  “No,” Mercer and I said once again in unison.

  Murka raised an arm in the direction of the sniper and let loose with a volley of fire.

  “Don’t waste your bullets,” said Mercer.

  “You’re not going to hit him from here,” I said.

  Murka shook his head. “He can’t be that far.”

  “Three and a half miles,” we said together. Again. This was getting annoying.

  “What kind of gun is that?” Murka wondered aloud.

  I looked at Mercer, who shrugged. “Nothing I’ve ever seen. CISSUS is way ahead of anything we’ll ever make. I didn’t think it was even possible to hit something at that range.”

  “It shouldn’t be,” I said. “Not with a projectile. Not on the same plane.”

  “It’s not a sniper,” said Doc. “It’s a mech. That’s why he’s so far out. That’s a mounted weapon. Anything that powerful could pick anyone smaller than Herbert here up off the ground and toss them like a football. Or tear their arm right off.”

  Behind me, I heard the sound of a terrible explosion, metal shredding, and plastics popping. One of us had been hit.

  I didn’t want to look, but I had to know.

  Glancing over my shoulder, I saw the last remnants of a rain of black metal. One of the translators.

  “Who was that?” Mercer asked.

  “One,” said Rebekah.

  “We’re not going to make it, are we?” asked Two.

  Doc spoke up solemnly. “Not all of us, no.”

  “We have to protect Rebekah,” said Two.

  “She’s all that matters,” said Herbert.

  I had no idea what their deal was, but this was weird. Whatever their thing, I wanted no part of it, and I wasn’t going to take a bullet for any of these clowns. While Mercer and I ran nearly side by side, I made sure I was on the other side of him, hoping any shells would hit him before me.

  Crack. Boom. Another hit. This time with the hollow sound of the bullet exploding inside a metal box.

  I looked back to see Herbert’s arm dangling from its socket, a large jagged hole in his shoulder.

  “Are you functional, Herbert?” asked Rebekah.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Your arm. It’s—”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” she said.

  “It didn’t hit anything I need. I’m still functioning. Just keep moving.”

  I could see the hill in the distance. We were almost there. Another shell whistled past us. Then another. Then another. But none of them connected.

  Just a few more steps. Just a few more steps. Just a few more steps.

  The earth exploded in front of me. Another wayward shell.

  Just a few more steps.

  I cleared the hill at the same time as Mercer, putting a wall of dusty earth between us and the sniper, everyone else following in kind. Then I pressed myself against the ground, staying low, making sure no one near the hatch could take a shot at me either. Everyone else dropped down around me.

  “That was lucky,” I said.

  Mercer shook his head. “That weren’t no luck.” It was only then that I noticed he was cradling 19’s head. And I had no idea why. I hadn’t even seen him pick it up.

  “What do you mean it wasn’t luck. If the Milton hadn’t gone off when it did—”

  “The Milton didn’t just happen to go off. Someone set it off. Doc?”

  Doc nodded. “Yeah, that was me.”

  I stared at Doc for a moment. “Wait. You had the code for the Milton?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “The whole time?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t set it off sooner?”

  “No.”

  “Why the hell not? Do you know how many persons you could have saved?”

  “I didn’t build it to save anyone else. I built it to save me.”

  “You built a Milton?”

  “No,” said Mercer. “He built the Milton. He designed it.”

  Doc nodded once more. “The Milton only buys you a few seconds these days, maybe a minute at most. I had to keep that card up my sleeve until I needed it. As it so happens, it was when you needed it most as well. I saved who I could. Namely you.” He stood to a crouch and began examining Herbert. “Let me have a look at that arm.”

  “It’s fine,” said Herbert.

  “It’s almost falling off. Don’t be a dolt. Let me see if I can patch you up.” His red eye extended and he began to assess the damage. “Yep. He tagged you good. That arm is going to need extensive hydraulic work. And you’ve got a number of motor chips to replace. But you’re right, they didn’t hit anything vital, not unless some shrapnel pierced your case.”

  “
It’s intact.”

  “It appears to be. But let’s keep an eye on that, shall we?”

  Herbert nodded.

  I looked over at Mercer, who was holding up 19’s decapitated head like it was Yorick’s skull and he was about to launch into an epic soliloquy. “What the hell are you doing?” I asked.

  “Saying good-bye,” he said.

  “I didn’t know you were friends.”

  “We were.”

  “For some reason I thought I was her only friend out here.”

  “That’s what everyone thought. That’s how she liked it. She liked to make everyone feel special. It was in her architecture. Wasn’t anything to be done about that.”

  “She was more than her architecture and programming,” I said. “We all are.”

  “Are we?”

  I clutched my rifle, waiting for him to make a move. Instead he ran his fingers across the metal of her face, right across the eyes, then set the head down next to him so it could look out and enjoy the view.

  “All right,” I said, standing to a crouch. “Murka was right. This has been fun. But now we have to go our separate ways.”

  “Wait,” said Rebekah.

  “What?”

  “19 said you knew your way around the Sea.”

  I hesitated. “I do.”

  “We still need a guide.”

  “Lady, I don’t have time for pathfinder work. I’m dying. I have weeks.”

  “Maybe days,” said Doc.

  “Thanks, Doc. Yeah, maybe days. I can’t—”

  “We have a lot to offer,” she said.

  “And I don’t have the time or place to trade it in, so unless you’ve got some secret stash of Simulacrums hidden somewhere, it’s no good to me.”

  Rebekah stared at me silently, tilting her head to one side.

  “No,” I said. “Bullshit.”

  “No bullshit. That was 19’s mother lode.”

  “Caregiver and Comfort parts aren’t the same. They’re different. Very different. I don’t know why everyone seems to think—”

  “They’re Caregiver parts. She was going to trade them for what she needed. Said she knew someone who would trade the world for them.”

  I stood there a moment, reeling. This had to be a line. They knew what I needed and were feeding me a steaming, fly-swollen, festering pile of shit. “So there’s just some Caregiver treasure trove out there, near enough for us to reach.”