by Den Warren
Edgar said, “Maybe people want us to get away.”
“Yeah, don’t count too much on that.”
Julia 47, who was sitting between Edgar and Mark, pointed out the windshield and asked, “What’s that?’
Edgar said, “That’s a guy riding a bicycle.”
She sat there awhile, then she asked, “How does it keep from falling down?”
“I have no idea,” Edgar said.
A couple of minutes later, Julia 47 asked, “What’s that?”
Edgar said, “A dead animal of some sort. A vehicle hit it.”
Then Julia 47 asked Mark, “Are you really going to save us?”
“I’m going to try.”
She sat silently for a few moments, then said, “Thank you.”
That was the first time that Mark got any indication that his self-sacrificial actions were being appreciated by anyone. No matter, he thought, it had to be done regardless of the consequences.
Mark put on the radio in the truck to see if they made the news. Some of the channels had programming that was directed toward the clone listening audience, which he skipped over. Then an amber alert came over the station. “Two pedophiles; an FCI named Mark, and a clone, had kidnapped 12 girls from the UCA. The dangerous autoconvicted sexual offenders also killed a sanitation worker and stole a truck, and dumped tons of raw trash in the open countryside. The two outlaws are believed to be dangerous and a reward is offered for the capture of the men and the girls’ safe return.”
Julia 47 asked, “Who are they talking about?”
Mark shut off the radio. “That’s too much racket.”
Edgar said, “Listen! Hear that?”
“No. I’m not a clone, and I don’t have clone hearing. What are you hearing?” Mark asked.
“It’s definitely a helicopter,” Edgar said.
“Aaag! . . . where?!”
“It’s about two kilometers away.”
Mark saw a wooded lot up ahead to the side of the road. He sped up the truck then parked off the side of the road next to a forested area. “Here! Let’s get everyone out!”
They rushed out of the cab and helped all the girls out of the back. Clearly, the rough ride took its toll on some of them.
“Mark asked, “How far is it to the farm?”
“Not far.”
While he was putting the back gate back down, Mark said, “Edgar, take the girls. I’ll divert the police.”
“But. . .”
“Do it!”
One of the Julias pulled on Mark’s arm. Mark crouched down to receive a kiss on the cheek. The other clones looked in amazement at the very non-clone-like actions of the Julia. Then the others came in with them for a group hug.
“Girls! Thank you. But I gotta go right now, so you can get away! Now hurry!”
Mark hopped into the truck and sped away. A mile down the road, the Police quadcopter appeared over a hill directly in front of him, partially blocking the bright sun. Mark hoped that if he kept driving, he could find a place to ditch the truck and make a run for it. The Police did not know that the others were already out of the truck, so he was surprised when the quadcopter opened fire on him. Chunks of pavement sprang up in front of him. Then the clanging noise of big rounds hitting the steel truck rang out. There was only so much evasive action Mark could take in the garbage truck while being fired upon by a heavily armed quadcopter. Soon the hot lead peppered the windshield of the truck and struck Mark several times with massive kill shots.
*******
The clones hid in the woodlot until nightfall. Then they travelled mostly while it was dark. The Julias kept asking Edgar where Mark was. Edgar hoped they would run into him, but they never saw him again.
During their entire young lives the Julias had never before left the confines of the UCA. Although they were terrified of their new surroundings and situation, they were gradually making progress toward their way to the farm. Since Edgar had similar clone youth experience, but also had knowledge of the outside world, he assured and encouraged them as they made their way to the safe haven. Edgar started to feel what it might be like as a parent.
Chapter 30
Boston, Homeland
Shortly after nightfall, an Inquisitor armored vehicle was on the street in front of the building Andy the android and the clones lived.
The blonde male clone shouted to the others, “They’re here! The Inquisitors!” He could see what was happening on the outside of the building on his security monitor in their apartment.
The bald clone said, “We gotta get out of here! We can’t hide all of this stuff! If they catch us, we’re as good as dead!”
The blonde said, “I’m sure they are here for us! I knew this would happen! I told you we should have left sooner! Let’s go!”
The bald clone said, “That android caused this! Now we have no choice but to run!”
The instant the Inquisitor robots disembarked the large armored vehicle, improvised bombs were being lobbed at them from all directions. The home-made firebombs were being tossed by gangbots hiding behind cover. The bright explosions in the dark made the situation harder to discern on the clones’ monitor until the flashes of light became less frequent. The groups of gang robots, were proxies for the real human cyberpunk gangsters, who seldom personally engaged in any fighting unless they ran out of robot minions. Street gang robots were irregular custom types, mostly old and cobbled together with mismatched sizes and colors of replacement parts. These scavenged machines were not much good for anything other than intimidating other gangs and street fighting. But they always banded together whenever the police or UN troops, or Inquisitors were in the area.
The bearded clone got close to the monitor and said, “We still have a chance. But we have to leave right now.”
Andy said, “Wait. First we will use our zombie army to D-DoS the Homeland Police Headquarters.” DDoS meant Distributed Denial of Service. The thousands of slave computers were all going to be taken control of simultaneously to contact the system at the Homeland Police Headquarters in Stalin City, using up memory until it crashed. Then, the zombie army would keep crashing it whenever the owner of the computer had it on.
The bald clone said, “That won’t do us any good! If you want it done, you do it! We are out of here!”
“Fine,” Andy said. At the speed of his computer brain processing and wireless communication output, he executed a remote procedure call with a computer in the apartment. The computer routine was directing the tens of thousands of latent weaponized zombie slave computers to DDoS attack the Homeland Police in Stalin City. Then Andy immediately left, chasing after the genetically engineered men.
*******
Down on the street the four Inquisitors started firing their Plasfusion weapons at the attacking robots. The energy weapons did more to disable the swarming robots than to dismantle them. Conversely, the explosive devices launched by the gangbots did more to block Inquisitor sensor capabilities than they did to degrade the unwelcome visitors.
This was Inquisitor Unit Number One, and their leader, Doctor Fallon stepped down to the street from the cab in his artificial surrogate presence. For this mission, which was expected to be highly confrontational, his fake presence wore an armored suit, which was equipped with tactical interface that would display distances and combatant locations.
Fallon shouted “These hoodlums will not dictate to us where we can or cannot go!”
Molotov cocktails burst into flames as they hit the vehicle. Three robots grabbed one of the Inquisitor troops.
A large Inquisitor quadcopter drone suddenly buzzed overhead. It was spitting streams of lead from a heavy onboard chain-gun toward buildings at approximate locations where the grenades were originating. The chain-gun was highly effective for morale busting mobs of humans as well as suppression against an irregular robot infantry. The attack would typically tear a non-military robot in half with a direct hit.
A gang robot shoved Doctor Fallon’s pres
ence out of the way as it made a move to board the Inquisitor cab. Fallon grabbed the boarding bot from behind and yanked it back onto the street. Then he shot it in the head with a simple .45 caliber pistol. Sparks flew as the slug penetrated its central processor. The old .45 had excellent stopping power against humans and non-military robots alike.
The quadcopter used its autocannon to strafe a gasoline combustion engine car that was roaring up the street toward the Inquisitor carrier. The robot driving the car loaded with explosives slammed an Inquisitor robot up against the back of the vehicle. The car burst into flames, incinerating the gang robot car and the Inquisitor. The crumpled car and combatants all bounced off of the back of the armored personnel carrier together in a tangled heap leaving only some scratches. Then the Inquisitor’s burning Plasfusion rifle exploded, sending hot junk in all directions.
The remaining three Inquisitor troops disabled several gangbots with energy blasts. Projectiles of all types were still coming down upon them, but they were able to quickly enter the building without the aid of their massive Blockbuster robot, which still in the back of the armored carrier.
*******
Outside, at the back of the building, The clones were trying to make a hasty retreat. But before they could leave the city block, they saw a convoy of several white lightly armored UN military vehicles coming toward them.
“Run!” The bald clone said, “The smurfs knew we would try to go out the back!”
The “bearded clone said, “Maybe we should go back in!”
“It’s too late for that!” the blonde said.
Andy came out of the door. “Wait for me,” he said.
“No way!” the bald clone said.
After some bullets flying in their direction bounced off of Andy, the bald clone said, “Yeah! You better follow us!”
They took off running down the street while gunshots zinged by them. A few bullets penetrated Andy’s back and he was knocked off of his feet. Then the whirring lightly armored UN electric military vehicles pulled up close to the fugitives with their headlights beaming directly on them.
“Freeze!” an amplified voice came from one of the UN vehicles. “Do not move or we will shoot!”
Andy immediately turned toward a building and dove through a large glass window. The clones turned to follow, but had no chance as UN troops opened fire with a hail of bullets that killed all three of them before their bodies could hit the sidewalk.
“Get the android!” the UN officer commanded. “Spread out and search the entire building!”
The building was like most buildings in that area of Boston. Businesses on the ground floor were closed for the day. Stairways went up to several floors of mostly unoccupied apartments.
“Clear! UN soldiers were saying as they searched each room.”
One of the soldiers heard a voice say, “Hey! Come over here!”
The soldier looked around the corner and saw too late that it was Andy, who used both hands to snap the responding UN soldier’s neck.
Andy took the soldier’s clothes and left his own shot up business suit in a wad in the corner with his victim. The soldier’s uniform fit well. He put on the light blue helmet and walked out of the building past a few UN troops toward the convoy, using a human gait that he previously copied with his new body-reading abilities from a man walking down the street. He went to the lead vehicle, which had a driver in it. He opened the door and yanked the unsuspecting driver by the collar to the ground and sat behind the wheel. He sped away down the street. Andy could see the deposed driver jumping up and down and waving at the other vehicles. The radio was squawking with a lot of angry talk in some language other than English that was spoken by the UN unit. None of the other vehicles followed him.
Within a minute the quadcopter was on his tail. In his rear-view mirror Andy could see a tight stream of glowing tracer rounds were spraying down toward him. Andy calculated that even with the light armor of the vehicle he had only a few seconds at most to survive. He veered the vehicle toward the glass lobby of a well-lit bank building and crashed inside. A loud alarm went off. He got out of the vehicle and ran down a hallway. A pair of large robotic guard dogs with huge teeth, and on wheels instead of legs, started to chase him down a highly polished floor in the corridor. The dogs sounded tacky alarms that resembled a barking dog. Andy reasoned that if the faster dogs caught him, it would be next to impossible to break free of their clamping bites and the Inquisitors would capture him. He prepared to delete his entire memory in his cybernetic brain as he ran so the other Lucids could not be traced through him. The truth must be protected.
But he also knew that he was worth more alive than dead. So if possible, he should try to survive the situation. His street fighting training told him that a real dog only had one weapon; its mouth. So he reasoned fighting the robotic dog was probably similar to fighting a real dog, even though the mouths of these robot dogs were more lethal. He swung around and planted his heavy foot into the mouth of one of the dogbots. The entire dogbot lifted off of the floor from the impact of the android leg and spun around one and a half times. The dog’s complete set of oversized steel canine teeth flew out of its mouth in one piece and slid across the floor. The toothless bot spun around and caught Andy. It was trying to “gum” Andy’s leg and couldn’t get a grip on his leg. Andy’s advanced brain was capable of lateral logic to formulate alternative tactical solutions while in combat. It occurred to him that one dog could not defeat him as long as he was riding it, so he managed to hop on. The dog had no biometric way to sense that Andy was on it, and it couldn’t see him, so the dogbot sped around looking for him while he was already on the caninebot’s back. At this point Andy knew that the dogbots were of inferior communication capability as the chasing toothless one could not tell the other dog that Andy was riding it. Some of the UN troops were now shooting at Andy, who was riding the fast moving and weaving dogbot.
Andy shouted, “He’s going out the back!” and the dog fell for it and sped down the hall, looking for him and away from the UN soldiers.
“Hey!” a half-alert human security guard shouted as the dogbot riding android dressed as a UN soldier whizzed by with a toothless dogbot in pursuit. The guard shot at Andy, but hit his ride in the “tail”. The gunshot to the dog disabled it. It spun around and Andy flew off and slid down the slick floor. Then Andy ran toward the exit that faced on the opposite side of the block. Once again Andy leaped up and crouched into a ball and smashed through the heavy glass. He fell down on the outside, but immediately got up and ran down the street. He stopped for a moment to confirm that he could still connect with the computers in the apartment. With a link acquired, he looked at the Inquisitors in the apartment via a camera on one of the monitors. The DDoS sequence had finished, so he directed the computers in the apartment to self-erase all data. As the erasing commenced, he saw Doctor Fallon trying to stop the procedure call, but Fallon had no idea about how to go about it. At this point, Fallon couldn’t stop the deletion even if he pulled the plug on everything.
Then Andy quickly surveyed the area to see if the UN troops had fixed on his location. There were none in sight so he moved at a deliberate pace down the street so he could thoroughly scan for enemies as he moved.
Suddenly, Andy heard a buzz overhead. The heavily armed Inquisitor quadcopter appeared from over a building and was hovering at a short range that Andy knew the remote pilot would not miss. All he could do was to try and evade it, and even then the pilot was still not very likely to miss. He made a break for a shadowy area that could give him a small chance of hiding. The buzz of the quadcopter’s chain gun strafed the area where he stood for a moment, large bullets ripping up the pavement directly behind him as he ran. Andy made it to a dark shadow.
The quadcopter moved in closer to Andy’s hiding spot in an attempt to detect his exact position. Then it landed dead on the street with its motors off. Andy knew that the DDoS attack by the slave zombie computers had completed taking out the
command and control of the Homeland Police, which the Inquisitors were a branch of, thus disabling the quadcopter.
Soon, a swarm of gangbots came out of the shadows and started scavenging the motionless quadcopter. The gangbots in the area were in numbers too large for the UN troops to continue the search for Andy. He watched for a few seconds as the robots viciously fought with each other over possession of the chaingun. Then Andy ran down the street.
Andy came face to face with a gangbot. The robotic gang-banger looked over Andy’s UN uniform, but then stepped around him, deciding that the squabble over quadcopter high tech components was a more lucrative endeavor.
Chapter 31
Hartford, Homeland
Sleepy entered to Milton’s quarters.
Milton said, “What’s up?”