MECH

by Tim Marquitz

  “I would expect as much, yes,” she said. “Standard protocol.”

  “But you see, I don’t care about the suit surviving,” I said. “This is something I have to do. I either find the Dakkar or die trying.”

  “Suicidal tendencies in a human are grounds for remote takeover of your exosuit,” she said, her voice haunting and calm once more. “Initiating in three, two, one…”

  Julia Two paused, the whirring sound of her contemplation dying in the sounds of alarm all around me.

  “Experiencing technical difficulty there, Jules? That’s you not trying to save me. It was a tricky work around to disable your directive to protect me, but sometimes you have to just say fuck the laws of robotics when you’ve got a job to do.”

  “You will die down there,” she said, a simple statement of fact.

  “Need to concentrate,” I said. I twitched my eyes, engaging the comms kill switch. “Sorry. Will catch you on the flip side, provided I stick the landing.”

  “Finn, this is madn—”

  LINKDEAD flashed across the HUD before vanishing completely. A large, unnatural reef rose up from the bottom of the fissure just as Julia’s voice vanished. Only the soft whirrs of the suit’s controls filled my ears along with the ever-growing warnings blipping within the helmet.

  “Madness it may be,” I whispered to no one except myself, taking a strange, lonely comfort in it, “but since when has sanity been my strong suit since the dreams took over?”

  With alarms blaring, I focused my concentration on the approaching landscape as the Lobster’s metal-halide beams lit it up.

  Even prone on the ocean floor and covered in caked on layers of barnacles, the Dakkar was still recognizable. Memories of it from printouts and clippings from my youth flooded my mind like the water that now began to leak into the bottom half of the compromised Lobster.

  I needed out, and I needed it fast. Images of what would happen to an unprotected body at these depths flashed through my mind, but I pushed them aside. I had to focus on survival. I marveled as I searched for familiar spec signs on the Colossi underneath the overgrown reef. Decades had settled over the mech and I couldn’t help but be astonished at the thickness of the layers of barnacles and coral formations that ran jagged all along its structure. Not to mention that it made it impossibly hard to get my bearings, more so with the critical alarms throbbing throughout the Lobster’s dome.

  Familiar patterns emerged among the rough shapes of the reef, and I hit the jets to orient myself better to the Colossi’s layout. The older Colossi models like the Dakkar had relied on manual systems for both entry and exit from the craft should the power ever fail during battle. I went along the reef until I found one of the hatches along the machine’s lower back and forced my failing Lobster exosuit into place in front of it, hammering my machine’s claws down on the accumulated barnacles and sediment covering the hidden door.

  As water rose chest high within the exosuit, a chill ran through me, but to its credit the Lobster still managed to maintain a constant pressure while it fought a losing battle against the ocean’s depth. How much longer it would last, I wasn’t sure.

  As the suit’s arms became less and less responsive, my clearing of the hatch faltered, but I fought on until I had chipped away enough to reveal the release mechanism folded into the hatch itself. Twisting the handle popped open several coin sized holes to pressure release the hatch, allowing the sea water to rush into the Colossi. Once it equalized the pressure, I could hopefully swing the door open. I waited as long as I could in my quickly filling exosuit, then grabbed the door’s handle and yanked hard outward and upward. The hatch swung open, and I ducked under it and propelled myself into the darkness of the Dakkar’s interior, pulling the heavy door closed behind me. Instead of sealing shut, however, it caught on the malfunctioning right arm of the exosuit, preventing me from draining the interior chamber of the Colossi.

  “Shit,” I muttered as I struggled to pull my suit’s arm free from it but, as power shorted out in different systems of the Lobster, all control over that arm went dead. With the Lobster giving up its electronic ghost, I needed to get the damned door closed or I’d be just as lifeless as much of the suit’s dying mechanics.

  “Reroute remaining power to life support and left mandible,” I shouted.

  A long pause stretched out before the HUD lit up once more.

  REROUTED, it read. SUIT INTEGRITY AT SEVEN PERCENT.

  Adding as much human strength to that of the suit’s mechanics, I brought my unimpaired arm down hard over and over against the now lifeless one. The failing mechanical arm tore away from my exosuit’s torso and allowed me to pull my exposed arm free. I arced myself fully into the murky interior of the Dakkar, then waited for the Lobster’s broken claw to float out through the open hatch. When it cleared completely, I pulled the door shut and slammed the button marked PUMP mounted next to it, praying the purge systems of the Colossi were still online after so many years.

  Machinery growled to life throughout the water around me, lessening the pressure on my exposed arm as I felt the stirring shift of water begin to drain from the chamber. When it lowered below my shoulders, I unlatched the exosuit’s helmet, slipping a clamshell comms device over my ear. I had barely switched it on before it sang with the sound of reconnection as Jules once again came on line.

  “Finn, are you all right?” she asked. “Body sensors—the ones still active within the suit, anyway—indicate both elevated vital signs and a flat line.”

  “Yeah, well, almost dying will do that to you,” I said, and shrugged off the top of the Lobster, the chest plate clanging to the now empty chamber’s floor. I braced my hands to either side of the suit’s hips and pulled my legs up and out. A surprising burst of pain shot through them when I stepped down. I staggered as fatigue overwhelmed me, but I refused to let my legs buckle and steadied myself against one of the still dripping walls.

  My ragged breathing filled the darkness over the sounds of the last of the water draining, and only when the pumps quieted did I finally regain my composure.

  “I’m fine,” I said and reached down to my now lifeless exosuit for the hunchback shaped case on the back of its torso section.

  With a hard tug, the hard case came free. I punched the button marked FLARE, and the pack lit up with a soft blue glow that illuminated the chamber. With the Colossi prone at the bottom of the ocean fissure, working my way up to the control room would have to be done by traversing it sideways, the doors leading from the chamber sitting out of place higher up along one of the walls.

  I felt along the floor until I found the interior hatch release for the door up on the wall and twisted it. As the sealed door cracked open with a hiss, stale wind hit my nostrils, sending a chill through me that settled in my bones.

  “Christ,” I said. “Need to bump the heat in this big boy.”

  “If the system is still online,” Julia Two added.

  “Better be,” I said, searching for handholds to lift myself up and through the door. “You’d think it would be easy to warm things up on a nuclear-powered vessel like this, right?”

  I didn’t wait for an answer. Instead, I strapped the hard case across my back, pulled myself up and through the door, and headed up through the decades dormant Dakkar, the glow of the pack easily providing enough illumination to guide me through the narrow corridors.

  As I progressed with caution, I fought to keep my bearings. The interior layout was similar to several of the other Colossi I’d salvaged but, even with that knowledge, I still managed several wrong turns before being stopped by an unpleasant aroma like that of long rotted fruit, causing me to double back. Nothing good would come from moving toward that smell.

  Julia Two’s computational whisper hummed in the clamshell over my ear.

  “Would you care to tell me why you went suicidal by shutting me down?” she asked.

  “You mean why I risked a potential one-way ticket to the bottom of the ocean?” I as
ked. “Like I said before, this salvage is personal. Is it suicidal to want to be rid of the dreams? To sleep peacefully for once? To want to be rid of these headaches? This is my father’s tomb. I need to make peace with that, for my sanity’s sake. What you call suicidal, I call medicinal…healing. Hopefully.”

  When Julia Two failed to respond, I couldn’t help but take a personal pride in the victory of shutting her up, continuing on through the Colossi.

  The corridors of conduits, circuitry, and pipes opened up twenty feet ahead into the familiar layout of the tightly packed control center of a Colossi. I paused at a brass plate embedded at the entrance, tracing my finger over the embossed letters on it.

  Stewart “Stew” Lawlor, Commander. Colossi Dakkar.

  The cockpit beyond sat still with only the faintest hint of life shining dull from its atomic core indicator lights. I shuddered as I entered the confined space, stepping into it with a reverent awe for my father’s history here, going quietly as if I might awaken this great slumbering giant. The empty console chair at the center of it all sat empty, the monitors, switches and levers surrounding it lifeless. In front of it stood an array of viewing windows, the ocean black as night on the other side of them. Pausing first for a moment of silence in respect to the Colossi’s long departed captain, I dropped the hard case pack to the floor and slid myself into the pilot’s chair.

  “Let’s see if I can wake this old girl up.” I said took to the controls all around me. After a cursory assessment, I stopped, the Colossi still lifeless.

  “I’ll be damned,” I said with a laugh.

  “What is it, Finn?” Julia Two asked.

  “Despite this being a Colossi model I’m familiar with, nothing seems quite in the order I’m used to.”

  “Are you not familiar with the schematics for this older model?”

  “It’s not that,” I said. “I’ve studied what the books have told me about the Dakkar, but I don’t think any of them had access to my father’s actual Colossi. This layout is completely unique. I’m pretty sure my father must have rewired the thing for battle, something more to his personal liking. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. The history books say the man rarely did things the conventional way, which is what I think is their polite way of saying Stew Lawlor was a little bit on the crazy side. Great men often are.”

  “Would not a mental deficiency disqualify him from the piloting program under the core rules of the training program?” Jules asked. “Specifically, per the regulations in the Colossi pilot manual, subsection c, paragra—”

  “Crazy in a good way,” I said, stopping her before she could quote chapter and verse from the training manuals. “There’s crazy crazy, and functional crazy. Pretty sure my dad fell into the latter category. The longer I look at his control scheme, the more intuitive it seems.”

  I leaned forward in the pilot’s chair and slid the biometric harness over my shoulders before settling back again. Following the logic of my father’s wiring, I worked my way through a series of hat switches, buttons, and levers before the atomic core of the machine thrummed further to life. A fresh wave of processed air pumped out of hidden vents, giving life to the stifling stillness of the control room.

  “That feels like progress,” I said and eased my hands into the physical control rigs that resembled a giant pair of steel gloves.

  Despite the signs of electronic life, the Colossi itself remained unresponsive. Undeterred, I began to trigger my way through the rest of the controls in the hope I would work out issues through the process of elimination, at the very least.

  After several minutes of tinkering, several dormant display screens crackled to life, a steady hiss of monitor static mixing with what reminded me of voices being flipped through from the older days of analog radio.

  “Jules…?” I asked with a bit of hesitation. “If you’re trying to patching through to the Dakkar’s comms, you’re going to need to keep the squawk down and filter the noise, okay?”

  The display screens in front of me flickered on in the same manner, but nothing more. I rapped my knuckles on the closest one.

  “Jules?”

  “Colossi Dakkar,” a deep voice boomed from the Dakkar’s speakers. “Commander Stew” Lawlor at COMM.”

  The sound of my father’s voice hit me hard. I’d of course heard it through the videos and interviews he had done decades ago, and I held a dim childhood recollection of the real thing, but to hear his last shipboard recordings from what had become his watery tomb was almost too much to bear. Tears I could not stop formed at the corners of my eyes and fell, their saltiness hitting my mouth.

  “Vital signs spiking again,” Jules said, her voice coming from the clamshell. “Is everything all right?”

  “Just a creepy father and son reunion.” I took a deep breath and wiped away the tears as I pulled myself together. “Hearing him like this caught me off guard, is all.”

  “Understood, Finn,” she said. “Shall I save the audio file of this for future playback?”

  “Yes, please, Jules. Thank you.” I’d never wanted to hug an artificial intelligence so hard in my life.

  “Finn,” my father’s voice said, coming over the speakers once more.

  I jumped with surprise hearing my name, and a nervous laugh escaped my lips. “That was double creepy,” I said. “Okay, so maybe it’s not a recording, but early AI set to mimic the Colossi’s captain. Didn’t realize the old onboard computers of my father’s generation were able to generate human-like conversation cues in response to overhearing things like my name.”

  “Your vital signs spiked at that, Finn,” Julia Two said. “To keep your heart rate in check I will remind you that even first generation Colossi came equipped with such systems. There is a long history of machines mimicking people over the past few centuries. In fact, the Turing test was invented in the mid-Twentieth Century to parse out the difference is machine and human interaction.”

  “Doesn’t make it less spooky to have the Dakkar addressing me by name, even if it is mimicry,” I said and set my mind back to the task of sorting out the controls.

  “Hello?” the voice boomed out, but I ignored it. I already had one artificial voice going in my ear. I didn’t need to get into my daddy issues by engaging the other.

  Then, after a moment of silence. “Who’s there?”

  I sighed. “Jules, a little help here,” I said, trying to control my agitation. “If you can shut the chatter down, I might actually be able to concentrate and get this monster of a machine off the ocean floor.”

  “I’ve scanned the entirety of the Dakkar, Finn,” Jules said, “but I do not see any indication of the linguistics system running. I have also checked the journal functions of the onboard memory and while there are record logs archived, they are not broadcasting.”

  “Finn,” the voice said again. “That is what I named my boy.” An uncontrollable chill ran through me. My hands drifted off the Colossi’s controls, and I pressed myself back into the seat, away from the staticy screens. “That doesn’t sound like Turing Test mimicry to me, Jules. Can you hazard a guess as to what the hell’s going on, exactly?”

  Her computational whisper purred in my ear for what felt like a lifetime before she spoke again.

  “Insufficient data for a meaningful answer,” she said. “I will continue to observe and assess.”

  With my heart pounding in my chest, I spoke, my lips barely able to form the word. “Dad…?”

  “No,” he said, an adamant quality to his voice. “I could not possibly be your father. Surely. My son Finn is just a boy.”

  “Dad,” I said with growing certainty. I must be mad. Some result of the pressure or something in the air of the decades lost Colossi, no doubt, but I could not help but engage the voice. “It is me. I am your son. Finn. But I’m not a boy any more. I’ve grown up. I’m forty-two.”

  “Grown?” he asked. “How? How is this possible?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but you’ve been
dead for over a quarter of a century.”

  The voice on the speakers boomed out with laughter that was at once both a relief but also terrifying. “I do not feel dead.”

  There was an air of formality in the way he spoke, one that I recalled from my childhood long ago, and I gave a grim smile. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

  The Colossi’s speakers went silent for a long moment before he spoke again. “Battle,” he said. “Unspeakable horrors rising from the depths. I had to stop them. There were so very many of them. The Dakkar gave its best, but I fear it was not enough.”

  “You died a hero, Dad,” I said, unable to stop the tears that welled in my eyes. “A captain goes down with his vessel to save others, and I don’t understand how, but my whole life has led me here to you. I’ve felt you calling me.”

  “Calling you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “In my dreams. I’ve been haunted by this place, by the way you and your Colossi went down. I know my purpose in coming here. To settle your soul, to rescue this vessel so you can move on. To stop my dreams.”

  “My boy,” he said, uncertainty thick in his voice, “why would I call you here when I knew well my own fate?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but you did. Reclaiming this Colossi either stops the madness of my dreams, or if I fail, I guess I’ll find a comfort in my own eternal aquatic slumber. Honestly, I’d prefer the former, but since I am sitting in a tin can talking to my dead father, the latter choice—crazy as it may seem—is just as likely, I suppose.”

  I set myself back to the task of freeing the Colossi. The older models were scoffed at for their clumsy bulk, but I hoped that only meant it maintained its integrity when it had first sunk. Having tried most of the switches my father had rewired, I took up the controls once more and my heart soared as they responded to my touch. Prone as the Colossi remained, after several minutes of finessing, it there was no mistaking the minute shift of the vessel. Crumbling sounds echoed through the command center as the Dakkar broke free from the caked-on layers of its resting place.