MECH

by Tim Marquitz

  Personally, Douglas thought the endless array of flat panel monitors and nitrogen cooled CPU racks was all for show, but he understood the need for show. It gave people a sense of ownership. Of pride. Of security. And weren’t all those things exactly why the STFU program had been implemented?

  He took his card out of his pocket and clipped it to the lapel of his pocket as he approached the metal doors of the FCC. The pair of Marines at the doors—armed with assault rifles and even more stoic than their counterparts at the Lincoln Complex—nodded as he approached. The security eye mounted over the doors read the holographic display on his card and was not nearly as confused by the flickering image as the kid back in DC had been. A whooping alarm sounded and red lights flashed as the massive doors lumbered open enough for him to slip through. The noise and light show continued until the doors had settled back into their closed position, and he shook his head slightly at the lingering echo ringing in his ears.

  The FCC sprawled across several square kilometers, a half kilometer beneath what had once been the tiny borough of Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania, a historic logging community until the trees had all been cut down. None of the residents had been that distraught at being moved—wholesale—to a plot of land halfway between Americus and Emporia in Kansas, a plot similarly bereft of old growth trees. Tunkhannock had been converted into a vent farm, which created unusual local micro-climates as far south as Scranton. While most of the FCC was nothing more than endless rows of server farms, there were several thousand offices devoted to the layers and layers of sycophantic administration that comprised the bulk of the Protectorate High Command. These offices were arranged in concentric arcs along the central shaft of The Foundry. Like tree rings, if there were any trees within a hundred kilometers.

  Given the Protectorate High Command’s predilection for complicated naming conventions, it was easy to get disoriented and lost within the office rings. Claudia would have whispered turn by turn directions if he asked, but he knew where he was going. He had dropped by Tin Star’s domain twice in the last eight months, and his unerring sense of direction and eidetic memory guided him as readily as Claudia’s illicit blueprint of the FCC. He nodded at faces he recognized, and smiled privately at the constant confusion such familiarity caused.

  He could tell he was getting close to his destination when the mood changed. People walked more briskly past him. The lights were a few lumens brighter and, in places, the paint on the walls seemed like it had been peeled off and repainted. Such was the experience working for a ten-star ranking officer.

  Protector General Hollis G. Washington was The Man. The man who had single-handedly brought all the American armed forces under one command. The man who had informed the last sitting American President that his service was no longer required. The man who had announced at a U.N. general session meeting that they were all now under the protection of the World Task Force, and that the only police force any of them ever needed again was the STFU. He was the man with the vision and the plan. He wanted a giant robot, and he got one. He got more than one. And Big Boy One—the eighteenth version of his vision for unified world peace—cost as much as the entire gross national product of consolidated North America.

  Of course, the economic model only worked if Tin Star Washington’s robot had a reason to exist. If consolidated North America wasn’t dedicated to robot building, there would be no jobs. Without jobs, the unified global economy was a joke, a punchline that no nation state wanted to hear. And so, it had fallen to the remaining clandestine agency—Douglas’s TLA—to make sure that Tin Star Washington’s robot had something to fight.

  Douglas felt the pressure wave of the Protector General’s entourage through the halls of the FCC a few moments before he heard the clamor and hubbub of one of Washington’s infamous walking meetings. Douglas slowed to a stop in front of one of the many inspirational posters designed by a Hollywood studio, pretending to be moved by the emotional subtext of a giant robot hand lifting children and puppies to safety from a burning house. The noise of dozens of voices all calling for the Protector General’s attention became a squawking cacophony as a bustle of bodies came storming around the curve of the hallway. A quartet of burly bodyguards preceded the stocky shape of the Protector General, and Douglas stood still, his hands held down at his sides, palms up, the universal sign that he knew the drill.

  One of the bodyguards spotted him, thrust a stubby finger at him and then at the wall, indicating what he wanted Douglas to do. When Douglas didn’t immediately comply, the bodyguard reached for his sidearm, but his motion was arrested by a loud bark from the Protector General himself.

  “Douglas,” the Protector General shouted. He never spoke at anything less than ninety decibels, partly to be heard over the noise of his entourage, but also because he was, by nature, a blustery bruiser. “I knew I could count on you.”

  Douglas nodded and smiled. Unlike the General, he disliked shouting. It drew attention. And while he had no idea what the Protector General was talking about, he knew it was best not to show confusion or uncertainty. He had seen, firsthand, what happened to wolves and apes who were timid in their approach to the pack’s alpha.

  “This crew of infantile idiots haven’t got the collective creative power of a grow vat of boneless chickens,” the Protector General roared. “I need a man with more brains than sperm cells, Douglas.”

  “That’s why I’m here,” Douglas said. He hadn’t spoken loud enough for the Protector General to hear him over the hubbub, but his smile signified that he was agreeing with whatever the Protector General was saying.

  “I need a signature move,” the Protector General stormed. “Big Boy One is the pinnacle of American military might. It’s the biggest, stronger, most bad-ass robot this country—no, this world, this whole mother-fucking galaxy—has ever seen. It needs a closer, and when we beam video into space, this move will make every intergalactic shit stain eyeing our beautiful blue marble piss themselves. Or vomit their stomachs out. Or whatever the fuck it is that these aliens do when they’re lost control of their bodily functions.”

  “You need something that says, ‘I am America, hear me roar!’” Douglas said, pitching his voice over the lessening noise of the crowd.

  “Exactly,” the Protector General blustered.

  “‘Keep your alien sex tentacles to yourself before I shove them up your ass,’” Douglas said.

  “Precisely,” the Protector General shouted.

  “But it needs to be both terrifying and representative of our humanity,” Douglas continued. “Something that says, ‘We have lifted ourselves up by our bootstraps and we’re never going to give up.’”

  “You are a goddamn visionary,” the Protector General cheered.

  Douglas raised his hand and made a fist, which caused two of the bodyguards to snatch their enormous .50 caliber revolvers from their holsters. Douglas looked at the bodyguard on his left, maintaining eye contact until the man relaxed, and then he turned his attention back to the Protector General. “Donkey punch, sir,” he said.

  “What the fuck is a donkey punch?” the Protector General roared.

  “Big Boy One’s signature move,” Douglas said. He nodded at the nearby poster on the wall. “This is the hand that tilled the earth and made it ours. This is the hand that chopped down the trees and made our towns. This is the hand that can also make a fist and—”

  “I get it,” the Protector General growled. “I’m not one of those gibbering milk sops that need to be brutally bludgeoned with the marketing message.” He made a fist, too, and it was twice as broad as Douglas’s. He raised it and narrowed his eyes at Douglas.

  Douglas cracked his fist against the Protector General’s, and if he hadn’t spent hours pummeling a brick wall as part of his historical boxing training regime, he would have cracked a metacarpal from the contact with the Protector General’s rock-hard fist. “Heehaw, you dumb monster,” Douglas said, stretching out the first word like it was the braying sound
made by a donkey. “What’s more heartland of America than that, sir?”

  There was silence in the hall, a lack of sound utterly unheard of in the Protector General’s presence, and finally a timid voice spoke up from somewhere in the mass of sycophants, scientists, and secretaries behind the Protector General. “Uh, excuse me, Protector General, sir. That term—donkey punch—is a sexual slang term from—”

  “You’re goddamn right it’s sexual,” the Protector General hollered. “I’m getting a hard-on just thinking about throat punching some forty ton, fire-breathing, nuclear-powered lizard.” He smacked Douglas’s fist with his own, and Douglas did his best to ignore the sharp shocks of pain running up his arm. “Heehaw, Douglas. Heemotherfucking-haw!”

  He clapped Douglas on the shoulder as he continued his mad trajectory around the circuit of the FCC, and Douglas gladly slammed himself up against the wall as the Protector General, his bodyguards, and his entourage swept past him. Within moments, they were gone, leaving nothing but an echo of their passage and one other person in their wake. A tall woman, wearing a white lab coat over a retro-hipster plaid outfit.

  She was old enough to remember when gray hair commanded respect and indicated wisdom, and she wore an equally retro pair of spectacles on a silver chain around her neck. “The donkey punch,” she said, shaking her head.

  “I did you a favor,” Douglas said, inspecting the knuckles on his right hand. “It is a marketing message unless he decides to graft a genetically modified donkey to Big Boy One’s arm. We don’t need a repeat of the Mark 11’s World-Splitter Thunder Stomp fiasco, do we?”

  “Let me see that,” the woman said, and she took Douglas’s hand in hers.

  “It’s fine,” he said, but he didn’t stop her as she wiggled each of his fingers in turn, checking to see if there was any lasting damage. “Brazil’s going to do it,” he said. “I set it all up. I gave them the book, too. They have all they need.”

  The woman nodded absently, as if he had said something as innocuous as making a comment on the weather, evidence of which she probably hadn’t seen in the sixteen months she had been managing the construction of Big Boy One. “Will they make their own or will they go looking for the sunken city?” she asked.

  “There’s going to be a reactor accident in Queensland early next year,” Douglas said. “It’ll contaminate all the bio vats. They won’t have any way to finish building their monster. They’ll be desperate.”

  “And the Chinese? What if they decide to help?”

  “They won’t.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Having checked Douglas’s hand to her satisfaction, she released it. She toyed with the frame of her glasses, glaring at Douglas.

  He knew that look. He’d been getting it from her for most of his life. “I’m a professional, Mom,” he said. “I know what I’m doing.”

  “I hope so,” Douglas’s mother said. She sighed. “Some things are better left undisturbed, Douglas.”

  “Tin Star is right about one thing: they’re out there, and they’re eyeing this planet. We have to let them know it’s not for the taking.”

  “But waking one of them up…” She shook her head.

  “It’ll be the only chance we have,” Douglas said. “And it will buy us more time.”

  As Douglas had predicted, an unexpected reactor accident in Australia the following February sent a fulminous cloud of toxic ash skidding across the South Pacific. Efforts were made to rescue the isolationist cult on Pitcarin Island before the cloud reached the tiny speck of rock in the middle of the ocean, but before Great Britain could put together a financially rewarding incentive package for the South American Maritime Guard, a series of undersea signals were picked up by listening stations far, far away from the South Pacific. Dubbed the “Return of the Bloop” by Channel One—a name which had been fed to them by an anonymous deep background source highly placed within the Protectorate High Command—the signals rapidly became a worldwide sensation.

  But nowhere were they as eagerly welcomed into the cultural zeitgeist than in the streets of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo.

  Douglas’s watch noted that the first of these new signals was recorded on March 15th, local Foundry time. He asked Claudia to send his mother a text message, wishing her the best of luck with launching Big Boy One. He couldn’t help but add a postscript, noting the date, though he was sure she had noticed as well.

  It was the little symbolic touches that gave him job satisfaction.

  Two weeks later, while systems tests were still being run on Big Boy One, undersea listening stations lost their minds as they picked up the sound of something incredibly massive moving through the deep. Something that shouldn’t—that didn’t—exist. Channel One hyped the story with all their usual aplomb, but it was clear to the discerning viewer that they had seen this show before. It had been cool and exciting the first few times an aquatic monster had been discovered but, by now, the viewing public were bored with giant turtles and biblical leviathans.

  Claudia informed Douglas that Mr. Poeseda was trying around the clock to reach him. Douglas informed Claudia to send all of Poeseda’s efforts to voice mail.

  The following Tuesday, at eight in the evening local time, something devoured the Galapagos Islands. Turtles and all.

  Six hours later, with a thunderous roar that shattered every window east of the Mississippi River, Big Boy One launched from the central bay of the Foundry. At least one migratory bird species went extinct from fright.

  Midmorning, while the sun was still struggling to reach its zenith, Big Boy One landed astride the Panama Canal, straddling east and west and north and south. He hadn’t been painted his signature colors yet, but his naked exoskeleton gleamed so brightly in the sun that Channel One’s celebrity fight commentator declared that the conflict between the giant robot and the as-yet unseen monstrosity would be over quickly. However, by the time the tsunami wave that had been rolling in from the deep Pacific hit the coast, the fetid cloud from Australia had dimmed the glow of the sun and the commentator’s bluster struck some as slightly premature.

  The wave thundered against the narrow isthmus connecting North and South America, scouring the land clean of trees and buildings and the top two meters of soil. The water came up to Big Boy One’s knees, and everyone in the FCCCC held their breath as the robot shifted against the pressure of the rushing water. But the wave crested before the robot lost its balance, and the collective breath was collectively exhaled.

  There was a tense moment when the carbon dioxide ratio in the Command Center went in the red, but someone—probably a well-respected and wise scientist who had been through several battles between robot and monster over the years—triggered the emergency oxygen flush and brought the room back to proper equilibrium.

  Just in time to witness the emergence of a true monstrosity from the chaotic waters of the Pacific Ocean.

  The world stared. They had seen giant turtles, fire-breathing lizards nearly thirty meters tall, gargantuan gorillas, luminous tripods that squashed cars and cows flat with equal indifference, flying bats with wingspans greater than the biggest cargo plane ever designed by the Protectorate High Command, and subterranean snakes that eagerly devoured metal and rock and plastic. But they had never seen anything as alien and as familiar as the monster who had been woken by the nuclear accident in Australia.

  It towered over Big Boy One, and the Channel One fight commentator mused that its lack of visible extremities reminded it of a creature that he had seen on TV as a kid. A cartoon monster, which, he quickly noted, was not the same thing as a real monster. One that was threatening to end humanity, unless it could be stopped by Big Boy One.

  The monster’s face—if such a creature that suffered from so many contorted angles actually had a face—was a mass of writhing tentacles.

  Squidface, the Channel One fight commentator dubbed it, and the name stuck.

  Squidface roared, a noise that drov
e men and women listening to the live feed mad, and charged Big Boy One. The world cheered. The fight was on! In Vegas, the Big Board lit up and the pots exploded, exponentially. What was the monster’s secret power? Was it lasers from its eyes? Would it summon storms? Or did it have a pinpoint black hole hidden under the hundreds of waving tentacles?

  And what would Big Boy One do? Rockets? Sonic Weaponry? Heat Wave?

  Server farms nearly as endless as the ones at FCC recorded every bet in the few seconds between when Squidface attacked and Big Boy One responded. Half of the struggling nation states threw down their entire reserve. Some even had managed to convince Vegas to let them buy futures based on third-party economic projections for the next few years.

  Douglas made a bet, too. “One punch,” he told Claudia. “Put it all on one punch.”

  His net worth wasn’t much compared to what else was being posted on the Big Board in Vegas, but the odds were long. He liked those odds.

  Plus, he knew that Big Boy One had failed a critical systems test shortly before it launched. None of its weapons systems were online. The bypasses and secondary failsafes hadn’t been routed and connected yet. The monster had come four months early.

  Big Boy One turned its hips slightly as Squidface stormed toward it and, watching the Channel One feed from the relatively safe location of his mid-level suite at the Sunset Beach Resort on St. Lucia, Douglas smiled. He recognized that stance. He had done it himself, many times. Punching the brick wall in the basement of the house he grew up in. The house he had never told his mother that he had bought, years after she and John had finally married and moved to DC. The house where he stored his birth father’s collection of vintage paperbacks. His safe house.