MECH

by Tim Marquitz

  With a surprise move that catches me off guard, the thing spins around, slamming its tail across Daikoku’s waist, instigating a new flurry of warning lights. Too much more of this and the hull will be too degraded for space travel, and that’s something I can’t repair. This fight needs to end. Now.

  As the creature circles for another attack, I take a defensive stance.

  Then, it comes, bounding wildly once more. I sidestep the attack and thrust both powerful arms down, connecting with the thing’s head and driving it to the ground. It tries to recover, but I throw Daikoku’s weight atop it, pounding with one fist while I place an open palm atop its head. For a moment, I’m sure the thing is about to fling me off and start this whole process over again, but then the drill activates, spinning down through armor, bone and flesh, punching a hole through the creature’s brain—or at least where I think the brain should be—and into the ground beneath it. There’s a moment of struggle, and then stillness.

  I stand up and back, Daikoku hunched and struggling to stay upright like the mech is an actual person. Through flickering screens, I see the monster, its head pinned to the ground by the twelve-foot drill rod ejected from Daikoku’s arm. I don’t waste time reveling in the victory. I turn my full attention to the damage reports, scanning them for signs of structural and hull integrity.

  “Good news,” I say to the mech, “space is still our friend. Now we just need to get you there.”

  I’m about to start the process of self-repair, focusing on the boosters so we can get into orbit and finish with the freedom of movement that a lack of gravity provides. But motion in my periphery stops me cold. I turn my head, and Daikoku’s, back toward the lake. A second wave is approaching.

  And a third.

  And a fourth.

  Paradise, it seems, has already been claimed. And they’re territorial.

  There are more than I can count, and far more than I can possibly escape. And that leaves me with only one option.

  “Sorry, big guy,” I say, hands working the keyboards, initiating a series of instructions with one goal in mind—survival. A series of small explosions mark the ejection of several survival pods containing food, water, medical supplies and weapons. I’m not sure where the pods will end up, but they’ll land somewhere within a mile of my current position. I’ll find them…if I live long enough.

  My next step is to trigger Daikoku’s automated defenses. It will respond to threats with far less finesse and efficiency than if I were in control, but the mech won’t go down without a fight. In this scenario, that’s important, because the things rising from the lake will be more interested in the mammoth robot than they will be in the human being fluttering back to the planet’s surface.

  As the first of the eyeless behemoths rises from the water, I eject. I’m catapulted up and away, still strapped to the command chair. A thousand feet up and two thousand feet away, the parachute deploys. As the effects of rapid acceleration fade, my vision clears. The horde of giants clears the water and charges headlong for the mech—my mech, and my home, and yeah, its corny, my friend. The first blow against Daikoku’s shoulder triggers a response from the mech, activating drills, torches, steam vents and a flurry of motion. Two of the creatures are knocked back, but the largest of them tackles the mech, taking it to the ground with a thunderous boom.

  Debris coughs into the air, blocking my view. I hear roars and mechanical grinding, but I lose sight of the scene as I fall through the broccoli-like canopy of the strange forest, finding the covering far less dense than I’d assumed. Rubbery branches slap against my body, driving the air from my lungs, but slowing my descent. I land on a cushiony surface, like moss. Then I detach from the chute and strike out in search of the survival pods.

  The fight is over for Daikoku, but for me, it’s just beginning.

  Douglas arrived first. He wore a linen suit, which highlighted his burnished tan and copper hair. He wore an expensive watch and brown loafers without socks. He smiled at the waitress who greeted him and called her by name, even though she wore no name tag. She blushed at his familiarity, and he saved her further embarrassment by rattling off the ingredients for a complicated cocktail that utilized three of the most expensive rums on the top shelf of the Atrium Bar at the Sunset Beach Resort on St Lucia. He also ordered a caipirinha. For his companion who would—as he assured her—arrive before she returned with the drinks.

  When the waitress returned to the table, Douglas was, indeed, in the process of shaking hands with another man. His name was Eduardo Poeseda, and he was several centimeters shorter than Douglas, bereft of hair on the top of his head, and wearing a wrinkled suit made from synthetic fibers. Douglas didn’t judge Poeseda for his lack of stylish attire because he knew the other man’s brain was more inclined to gnaw on complicated genomic quandaries than deal with shopping at boutique haberdasheries.

  “Cheers,” Douglas said, holding up his glass. He wore a bracelet of tiny gold links, and his smile was a display of hideously expensive orthodontistry.

  Poeseda tapped his tall glass against Douglas’s short one, and then nervously sucked at the straw as he maneuvered his butt into the chair opposite Douglas.

  Illustration by ROBERT ELROD

  “How are Lupita and the kids?” Douglas asked. “Serrina is what? Eleven?”

  “Twelve,” Poeseda replied.

  “Twelve? Really?” Douglas puckered his lips and looked out at the expansive view of the azure waters of the Caribbean. “They grow up so quickly, don’t they?”

  “Why did you ask me to meet you here?” Poeseda asked, his nervousness making him bold.

  Douglas smiled and sipped his drink before replying. “We’re making a new model,” he said. “It’s going to operational by next summer. We need a monster.”

  Poeseda shook his head. “My government provided you with a monster five years ago, and its defeat was rather debilitating to our national morale. Our economy is only just starting to recover. We’re supposed to have eight years.”

  “Yeah, well, the African Coalition cut a deal with Russia, India begged off, promising they could double the threat matrix if they had another two years, and the European Union is still pissed that a couple of their national treasures got trashed the last time.”

  “What about China?”

  “China’s playing hardball, saying they’re going to build their own competing program. Who knows? They might. Which nobody wants, really, but China always has to do this monkey dance bullshit before they settle down.” Douglas shrugged and looked at his drink. “I guess when you have over a quarter of the world’s population at your disposal, you can be as prickly and quirky as you want, but it’s terribly tedious.” He knocked back the remainder of his drink in one gulp, then looked over and caught the waitress’s eye, waggling the glass to indicate he wanted another.

  He put the glass down on the table with a solid thump, making Poeseda jump. “Regardless, we need Brazil to step up,” Douglas said. “We’ll get you promoted. The Minister of National Security will call on you to serve your nation with the utmost integrity, and he’ll insist that you be given enormous assistance by every branch of your government.”

  Poeseda’s shoulders slumped. He stared mournfully into his glass. “I…I am flattered, of course, but you ask the impossible. I don’t know how it can be done,” he stammered. “We’d need at least six months to introduce a working mythology into the cultural zeitgeist. Eighteen months to build a functional prototype. Another year of tests. I…I…It can’t be done.”

  Douglas reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and retrieved an old paperback book, sealed in a plastic sleeve. He dropped it on the table and slid it over to Poeseda. “We’re not unaware that this is putting an inordinate strain on the Brazilian economy and infrastructure,” he said, “but the global economy has to keep churning. You get eight years to rebuild. America doesn’t. America has to have a win every two years or it’s all going to come apart. And if America falls, what’s
the rest of the world going to do? Go play with China?” He shook his head. “That’s not going to happen, regardless of what China thinks. Or wants.”

  Poeseda picked up the plastic-protected paperback. Its pages were yellow, and its cover depicted a luridly colored landscape populated with strange many-eyed monsters. “What is this?” he asked.

  “My agency is willing to help,” Douglas said. “This is your backstory. The author’s been dead for over a hundred years. Copyright ran out a couple decades ago. You’re free and clear to use any of that as you like.” Suzette came up to the table and replaced Douglas’s empty glass with a full one. He smiled at her, and then turned his smile on his confused companion. “I just saved you six months of prep, Poeseda,” Douglas said. “And you know what else? The Bloop.”

  “A what?”

  “Not ‘a.’ The Bloop. The only Bloop. An underwater anomaly that was recorded in late ‘90s. It was originally thought to be whale calls or some such crap like that, but it was picked up by listening stations almost 5,000 kilometers apart. If it was a whale making that noise, it was a whale much larger than any ever recorded. We almost used this for Leviathan, but there was a fortuitous upswing in apocalyptic Christian cults in the heartland that year. You remember? Man, those nuts made it easy for us. Quote a little chapter and verse at them and boom! Instant national cohesion. Production shot up almost two hundred percent.”

  “I remember,” Poeseda said wistfully.

  Douglas knew Poeseda’s story. He had been a research scientist at the National Institute at that time, doing work on aquatic swarming and regeneration matrices. Trying to figure out how to get schools of fish to act as cohesive structures with mass and shape, but his funding had been cut six months later when his country had been chosen to build the monster to fight America’s giant robot. Without any other options, he had done his national duty and gone to work for the Ministry, helping them craft the monstrous sea turtle that had threatened to devour Florida. And even though the turtle had been vanquished before it had even reached Cuba, the Minister of National Security had been impressed with Poeseda’s contributions and had remanded him to a position of greater responsibility. A position which Douglas’s agency was happy to take advantage of.

  Poeseda sucked heavily at his drink. “UGE has benefited some more than others,” he said.

  He was referring to the United Global Economy treaty that had been the final act of the last American President before he stepped down. The “All for One and One for All” treaty as he had dubbed it for Channel One, and it had called upon every industrialized country to actively contribute to the betterment and enrichment of every other nation. Of course, the Protectorate High Command had a slightly different understanding of that phrase, but the time was well past crying over that misunderstanding, wasn’t it? Poeseda—and many of his friends—still had jobs, didn’t they?

  Douglas glanced at his watch, which told him much more than just the time and date. “Take the book. Give a read on your flight back to Brazil. There’s a Digital Data Dump page bound in the back. It has all the paperwork for the project. All pre-signed, notarized, witnessed, and all the other crap that usually takes half a year to get done. You can tell the Minister of Finance that the same payment schedule as last time is already pre-loaded. As a sweetener, you personally—and this is why they’ll need to promote you—will have access to assets in Japan and Australia. You can go to them for bulk tissue manufacturing, skeletal fabrication, and weapons testing.”

  Poeseda nodded absently as he turned the paperback book over and started to read the back cover copy.

  Douglas watched him get lost in the story of cosmic monsters still slumbering deep in the ocean, and he chuckled lightly. “See?” he said. “I’m telling you. It’s going to be a killer season for monster hunting.”

  The kid in the Marine uniform who checked IDs in the ground level lobby of the Lincoln Complex squinted at the card in Douglas’s hand. “I’m sorry,” the kid said. “It’s catching the light weird. I can’t quite read it. What agency did you say you worked for?”

  “TLA,” Douglas said.

  The kid wiggled the card in his hand one more time, and light reflecting off its holographic surface dazzled his optic nerves. The kid blinked a couple of times, and then massaged his eyes for a moment. When he looked at Douglas again, all the confusion was gone from his face.

  “You’re all clear, sir,” the kid said, pushing a button underneath his desk that unlocked the steel barrier. “Have a nice day.”

  “You too,” Douglas said as he slipped his card back into the front pocket of his suit jacket. He pushed through the metal gate and walked down the short tube that was filled with two dozen different scanning technologies. Most of them would read the imbedded chip in his card and disable themselves for the few seconds that it took for him to walk along the rubberized floor of the scanning tube. The few that didn’t would receive the pre-packaged data that his watch was broadcasting.

  No point in being a spook if you weren’t invisible.

  Beyond the scanning tube, there was another station with a pair of stern-faced Marines and a single elevator. Douglas nodded at the pair, his eyes tracking the series of security camera blisters mounted along the high ceiling of the lobby. Security feeds would record his face, but the data duplication subroutine that his agency had implemented in all levels of the military IT infrastructure would recognize his features and accidentally drop enough pixels that any data query later would return facial recognition hits of early twenty-first century film actors.

  His agency had also underwritten a lot of the virtual avatar software code widely adopted by Hollywood during the digital revolution.

  He waited patiently by the elevator door and, within less than a minute, it voiced a pleasant tone and the heavy door slid open. An older man with a thin stroke of a beard stepped out. He wore a navy blue suit and purple tie, and he smiled when he spotted Douglas. “Doug, my boy,” the man said. “How was your trip?”

  “A rousing success, John,” Douglas said. He was mildly surprised to meet the section chief of the ultra-dark division of the Territorial Liaison Agency here, but he was a good spy and didn’t let his face betray his emotional reaction. And John was a spy, too, which meant his appearance was always unexpected, especially to other spies. Douglas held out his hand in greeting, as if they were merely old business associates who happened to run into each other from time to time.

  Which was partially true, but typically not in ultra-secure government locations like this one.

  “Splendid,” the man said, clasping Douglas’s hand firmly with his own hand and sealed the deal with his other hand on Douglas’s elbow. They held the pose for a microsecond longer than Douglas preferred, but he couldn’t let go until he was sure the other man had managed to steal his watch.

  John suffered from the slow onset of arthritis in his hands. He hadn’t told anyone yet, but he had fumbled the report handoff more than once in the last six months. Douglas knew, but only because he had known John a long time. Almost as long as the person he was suffering the security gauntlet at the Lincoln Complex in order to meet.

  “Give my best to Claudia, will you?” John said, letting go of Douglas’s hand. His fingers curled around Douglas’s expensive watch, hiding it from the watchful camera eyes, and he slipped his hand into his pocket.

  “Absolutely,” Douglas said. He clapped John on the shoulder as he passed, turning his body so that he blocked the two Marines’ view of the other man’s back. His hand slipped under the back of John’s jacket, his fingers seeking the cool metal shape hanging out of the other man’s back pocket.

  The two men smiled at one another and walked away: John, out through the scanning tube, Douglas, into the elevator where he told the voice-activated system where he wanted to go. As the elevator door shut, he raised the watch he had lifted from the TLA section chief and briefly examined its myriad of dials and faces before he slipped it onto his wrist and fastened the
band.

  “Hello, Claudia,” he said. “Upgrades again?”

  Tiny needles pricked his skin as the watch initiated its interface.

  Hello, Douglas D. Douglas, a voice said in his head. Eighteen modules have been upgraded. Would you like to review them?

  He leaned back against the wall of the elevator, which morphed slightly to be more comfortable. “What’s my ETA at the Foundry?” he asked the empty elevator.

  Fifteen minutes, the voice in his head replied.

  “Might as well,” he said. “Unless one of those upgrades is a direct to cortex video feed.”

  I’m afraid not, the voice said.

  “Go old school then,” Douglas said. “You know how much like I like having a comfortingly familiar female voice read to me.”

  During the first Asset Realignment and Strategic Expansion following the Transitional Government, the land between Ithaca, New York, and Scranton, Pennsylvania had been ceded to the new Protectorate High Command, who dug a giant pit. The project had a typically byzantine military acronym, but everyone from the Beltway to the Boonies simply called it The Foundry. Except for those who had been summarily relocated to Kansas. Mostly, they called it “The Butthole.” Regardless of its name, it was the best—and last—military defense project ever initiated on American soil. The Foundry was where the giant robots were made.

  The high-speed transit elevator from the Lincoln Complex deposited Douglas at Station Forty-Seven, two clicks south of Foundry Central Command. He didn’t mind the walk along the elevated path as it gave him an opportunity to examine the progress on Big Boy One.

  The latest iteration of the Singular Task Force Unit—Mark 18—topped out at twenty-five meters, nearly ten meters taller than the Mark 17, and it required a dedicated team of five operators who all but lived within the titanium shell. The head, larger than most government allocated single person domiciles in downtown Manhattan, had been cast and framed. It was mounted on thirty-six pylons and held in place by several miles of steel cable thicker than Douglas’s waist. The eyes were temporarily filled in with double-paned glass, allowing visitors—such as himself—to look into Big Boy One’s data recording and fight telemetry center.