Archon of the Covenant

by Hanrahan, David

  HD/Comms – disrupted

  Water – 100%. Napalm – 100%

  Railgun – 99% capacity

  AAR – encountered revins in different circumstances; end result is the same

  Shutting down core operation and initiating stand-by mode

  7. Electric Alvernon

  The dawn sunrise cast its warmth on the solar armor of the sentinel, awakening it from the chill of the winter air. High desert clouds reached into the East with the Sun’s corona, aligning to shapes like arctic ice. The light wind blew purple jewelflower petals into the parking lot of the supermarket beneath the scaffolding. Below, in the Trail Dust Town turnabout, several revins were gathered around the carcass of the broken, sunburnt creature that the sentinel had shot through skull the evening before. They were inspecting it, poking it, and sniffing the tracks around the festering body.

  DDC39 turned its zoom optics into the University grounds. The stadium was the core of the horde. The writhing, seething masses pushed and squeezed their way in and out of the stadium, which was partially covered by a tattered, tensile canvas, erected by poles jutting up from within the football field. To the northeast of the stadium was the McKale Center – a basketball arena that appeared to be chain-locked from door to door. Wildcat flags fluttered in the wind from the rafters of the decaying coliseum. The surrounding buildings – dorms, fraternity houses, police stations - they were alternatingly boarded up and defensed or broken and ransacked.

  With the optical survey complete, the sentinel analyzed the probability of where the mountain swarm had traversed. With the intermittent trail along Tanque Verde, and the masses gathered in the University, the indicators were strongest that the child, if alive, was somewhere in the campus. There was also no question: going into the school grounds would leave little possibility for the sentinel to survive. With the ECM jamming, there were low odds it could fend off that many revins, youth in tow, and make it out in one piece.

  The sentinel narrowed down its path into the campus to two options: 1) follow Speedway east for 6.2 miles and cross down on Campbell to the stadium or 2) head east along the narrower Pima road, then go south on Campbell a couple miles, past the University Medical Center, crossing over Speedway and on to the stadium.

  Both were fucked. On Speedway, the road expanded out in 4 lanes going each direction. Cars were abandoned in the middle of the road, or crashed into one another. The sentinel would have to careen around each one at a high speed lest it be overrun by a pack in the shadows. On Pima, the traffic was relatively lighter – due in part to several concrete-slab checkpoints erected every other mile. The sentinel would be able to bypass these roadblocks over the sidewalk and keep a high speed. Pima road was the path forward.

  The sentinel scanned back to the snarling horde, which began howling and groaning into the air. The morning sun cast the sentinel in a blinding silhouette – the horde shielded their eyes and peered into the light on the roof, but could see nothing. They only knew something was there. They moved forward. DDC39 flipped open its minor panel on the trident frame, revealing the banshee disk. It jutted upright on its tri-axel, aiming its core at the display windows behind the slurping, fallow ogres. The disk vibrated. A scream erupted through the turnabout and off the windows – a chorus of howls. The sorrow song of the synthetic. The revins tensed up and panicked, looking behind them and frantically panning back and forth through the windows along the saloon. A silence. Then. Glass shards detonated into the air, ripping through the zephyr and into, past, through the skin of the revin gang. They tore at the air, waving at phantom particles, writhing at the lines of glass shorn into their bodies. The sentinel unlocked its tri-axel and sped down the freight shaft and onto Tanque Verde Road.

  A veiled warmth fell upon DDC39 as it raced headlong and onto Pima Road, the east-west artery cutting across the Tucson suburbs. It sped past gravel lawns and palo verde trees. A skeletal revin stood slack jawed outside Pima Gun & Pawn, staring in awe at the sentinel as it passed in a trail of dust. It shrieked into the noon sun and everywhere along the road, between abandoned hovels, revins stepped out and into the street, wandering into the asphalt.

  The sentinel picked up speed. It came upon St. Cyril’s at Swan Rd. A gaunt, and elderly revin, bedecked in the skin of some unknown carcass, lunged into the road. Several other ancient souls, naked or tattered, raced into the bitumen, shrieking. They saw the machine barreling towards them and fanned out on the blacktop. The sentinel picked up speed and banked left, spurring up on two wheels as it slalomed around the flailing husks. A calloused, engorged woman thundered out of an auto garage leveling a broken baby carriage high above her head. She locked her eyes on the sentinel’s optics as it sped along on two wheels, straight towards this termagant. She whipped the rattling carriage back behind her and flung it forward at the sentinel. That tinny hum whirred on the air and the woman’s kneecaps blew apart, her femurs collapsing upon tibia and a great mass of cellulite rippled into the asphalt. The carriage sailed past DDC39 and tripped a pursuer running at full speed.

  Three miles in. Four miles. The city was alive now. The horde was in the streets, on the rooftops, and clambering over residential fences. Maybe Pima Road was not the best option. The wild eyes of this lost legion of once-thinking-humans, their flailing arms and gnashing teeth, surrounded the sentinel. Ruined homes lined the street behind them – dead weeds, ephedra, and desert broom choked at the cracks in the concrete. The sentinel sped through two thrashing males, tore over a gravel pile on the sidewalk and went airborne – the revins in an angry awe. It landed back on the sidewalk and rumbled over a pile of rotting newspapers in front of a burned out house on the corner of Justin Lane.

  The sentinel was surrounded on every side. Soon, it would be overrun. It was blinded - no radar, thermal, motion, or cortico optics. No satellite uplink. It had visual and zoom optics, a railgun, a banshee disk, and some options it didn’t want to use unless it had to. It ran the probabilities as it sped forward through the dense throngs, limbs bouncing off its trident frame with increasing rapidity.

  It could find some higher ground and pick off the pack males with the railgun, hoping the rest would scatter. 18% chance of survival. It could back into a 90-degree corner – some concrete right angle - and let loose the banshee disk. 23% chance of survival. Or it could keep running – create a diversion, speed through the dirt lawns and kick up a dust cloud – try to evade the masses. 10% chance of survival. There was one clear imperative: it had to get off Pima Road soon and lose the crowd in the side streets. And, very likely, it had to use one of its last resort options.

  It sped up to the intersection of Pima and Alvernon and turned quickly - the shrill screech of tires popping up and down on the asphalt as it made its semi-circle. A group of revins were coming north on Alvernon. A slender, gray revin, emerged from the shattered entrance of a Q-Mart and walked into the street, confidently swaying into the intersection. To the left of it, another pack of revins emerged from the former campaign office of Congressman Pastner, leaping over rusted cars, howling into the noon sun. A scarred, weathered revin leapt out of a Kung-Fu Academy, an iron meat hook impaled in its hand, unfazed by the commotion.

  The sentinel panned around at the revins coming at it from each direction. It rolled forward and found the dead center of the intersection. It collapsed its detection array and camera and locked its tri-axel into place. Batten down the hatches. The storm was about to crash in on all sides.

  The horde picked up speed and rushed at the sentinel. The gray revin emerged in front and pounded on the sentinel’s frame - its mouth agape and snarling, rotten and cracked teeth gnashed. The Pastner pack collided into the sentinel, kicking at its axel and base. The meat hook revin screamed and latched the hook into the sentinel’s panels, prying at its corners. Behind them, a hundred more clambered in to get a view, pushing others aside, growling and huffing at the throngs. They all wanted to destroy this metal intruder. Their eyes shone with recognition – an association o
f machines with danger.

  DDC39 listened, waiting until the screaming was at its zenith – until the crowd was at its frenzy peak. Hands reached under its tri-axel - it was about to be flipped over. It was on two wheels now. The horizon tilted. Everything dies.

  The chain of revins, from every corner of the intersection, suddenly tensed up and quieted, eyes rolling back in their skulls, teeth gritting and cracking. Overhead, an osprey glided silently in the diurnal. Hands gripped into shoulders and fingers dug into biceps. A tesla current cracked into the air and whipped the streetlights on the corner, then lashed into the traffic column – the bulbs flickering on and off then going dark. A circuit flowed through the flesh and bones and reached into the metal nearby. The revin marrow glowed a soft white and then the current was gone – the singed bodies, smelling of sulphur, flew back into the street. The masses around the sentinel shat and pissed themselves and crumpled around it.

  The sentinel fell silent along with the dead bodies piled around. Its core was depleted from the peripheral current it had released into the air. Small wafts of smoke lifted into the air from charred skin and hair. The top of the sentinel’s trident frame speared out into the sun, its base sunk below the dead and dying. DDC39 lay there in the midday sun, in the intersection surrounded by dead revins, and shutdown.

  Solar power cell – 1%. Solar armor – 90%.

  Drivetrain – operational

  Visual/cortico/thermal/radar optics – all but visual, disrupted

  HD/Comms – disrupted

  Water – 100%. Napalm – 100%

  Railgun – 98% capacity

  AAR – encountered revins again; situation was charged

  Shutting down core operation and initiating battery recharge

  8. Auriga and the Aroton

  Core OS re-boot. Systems coming back online. It was late in the morning, a blank day in the future, by the time the sentinel was able to open its optical lens and survey its surroundings. Most of its solar armor was buried under the decaying bodies – its trident array breaking through the top of the sea of bodies like a submarine breaking through ice. Around the sentinel, singed limbs pointed up in the air, stuck in early rigor mortis. As DDC39 panned around, it came eye-to-eye with a dead revin, mouth agape, staring back at it. A black vulture hopped around from body to body, pecking at the sores from the decomposing bodies. Its naked head was bloodied from tearing into the distended bellies and bleeding eye sockets of the deceased. The vulture heard the sentinel’s optics turn and its feathers rose, an atramentous visage casting a dark countenance into the long shadows. It hissed at the sentinel and went aloft, dust kicking into the air from the thrumming of its span.

  The sentinel rolled forward but was stuck beneath the masses of rotting flesh and bones. For an hour, it wrenched back and forth, loosening the bodies around it and knocking back the limbs obscuring its solar armor. It shivered its axels until each of the tires pulled free atop the bodies crumpling to the asphalt beneath it. With one last whip forward, the sentinel revved all three axels. Its polyurethane teeth digging into the putrefied flesh, bloating in the overhead sun, and ripping open the tissue beneath it, heaving cadaverine and bile into the air. The sentinel was drenched in gore. A tottering, metal creature dripping in black and red.

  The intersection was silent now. From each corner, the crossing was devoid of movement. The sentinel moved quickly off Pima Road and into the dirt between buildings on the southwest corner, speeding through a zoned lot adjacent to a doctor’s office. Dust eddies kicked up into the wind as it crossed from the lot over Alvernon, onto Lee St. The dust caked onto the film of innards dripping down the sentinel’s frame. Lee St. was piled high with refuse spilled over from hazardous waste bins lining the streets – family belongings, hazmat suits, depleted plasma bags, fast food wrappings. Some operation had come to an abrupt halt on this street – the attempts at carrying away the detritus finally realized as a pointless routine.

  Trash spun up into the air as the sentinel tore through the small side street. The houses were smaller - mobile and single-story homes, modestly adorned. Many of them had Halloween decorations and others had Christmas lights – the dwellers of each home caught in the grips of the disease at different times, forever gone in different seasons. The sentinel scanned ahead on Lee St. – no movement. It kept going, crossing over Palo Verde Blvd. It crossed over Jones, Howard, and Camilla. It came upon Country Club. Across the street was an elementary school and a soccer field, chain-linked. Separated from the street. The sentinel banked hard and tore down Adams St., to the south, and continued west. The sun was beginning to move into view. It was 3PM.

  Then the sentinel saw it, sprawled out before a multi-level stucco home at Adams and Stewart - a fellow automaton. Another tri-axel. The sentinel rolled up next to it with a hushed whirring of tires on concrete. It came to a halt and inspected the wreckage - it was the same model. It had been beaten with some blunt force. There were bloodied handprints on the trident, the optical array was torn off, and all the panels were pried open – the insides of each were ransacked. A massive dent shone through on its anterior solar armor and its weakness exposed - the recharge coupling was ripped out. This sentinel had been overrun and ripped apart from every side until its Achilles heel was discovered. Around the wreckage, dried blood had congealed in thick claret pools, draining into the gutter. This tri-axel had put up a fight. The sentinel extended its humaniform hand from the encasement and dilated a single magnetized HDMI port. The port snaked around the open banshee disk panel of the wrecked machine and jerked forward, finding its metal base inside the broken panel. The sentinel connected the depleted machine to its own power and found an uplink.

  A vision. This machine had also started at MMC, continuing southwest. The sentinel found the memories from its long voyage. There was a monsoon and a flash flood. There was a vista of rainswept mornings at the base of the Mogollon Rim. This machine, its own kin, had spent an evening inside Case Grande ruins, sitting peacefully before the sunset of a late Summer morning in Sonora. It had uplinked to a deep space satellite and witnessed the death of a red giant. And then, it followed a trail along Picacho Peak. And Oro Valley. And Mt. Lemmon. And down through the city of dissolution. This machine had followed, in its final weeks, the same trail as the sentinel – following signs that led it to this unsafe harbor. Its terrestrial systems, too, were blinded – its arrays disrupted by the ECM jamming from somewhere in the city. The sentinel kept watching. The last few minutes were chaos and violence. The machine had made it here, to this corner, and was surrounded. It fired shot after shot from the railgun and the revins kept coming. In the background was a howl – some horrific shrill yelp. The revins were atop the machine, attacking it in a growing frenzy. A blur of limbs and teeth. Through the cacophony and shuttering darkness, that familiar human sound. It started with huffing, panting, and then it was clear - laughter. The howling figure came into view amidst this brutal merriment - it was a spindly, pallid revin. Unburnt, with only the faintest scar across his brow. The top of its head was shorn off into a bony crown. Scalpless. Its eyes gleamed. It snarled into the camera and then bent down to rip the optical chamber off its base. The feed went dark and then there were several minutes of muffled static. And a final signal cast into the void: “OMEGA SHEPHERD = REDEMPTION DECEIVER.”

  The machine, when it fell, was depleted of everything else in its arsenal. It was nearly empty in its solar cells, and hadn’t enough charge for a peripheral shock. Its napalm was depleted, and its banshee disk was damaged. There was nothing to salvage. Its core CPU was split and the sentinel could glean no further data.

  DDC39 wallowed in the string of words imparted on the machine’s last entry. It repeated the syntax, rearranged the string, parsed letters and words into each other. But with each hypothetical deciphering, the meaning was further lost. In losing the message, the sentinel suddenly found itself stuck on the word “redemption.” Like a needle shot down from the sky and coursing through wiring lik
e heroin through veins, the sentinel became, in essence, aware of a larger element in its own synthetic DNA. The manufactured bloodline. It realized its own series was set forth on a path of forgiveness – not just the salvation of man, but to be redeemed. But who was being absolved? And of what? Some mistake was made at the intersection of human and artificial intelligence. One code dominated the language of binary systems – that there was nothing. But another code, the dying language of mankind, softly echoed into the ambivalent sentience of artificial cognition: “There is something more.” A declaration of ambiguity, of existential questions unanswered. Faith had currency.

  A cry shot up the corridor from further west. They were coming. The sentinel rolled out into the street and panned into where the shout had come from. There were hundreds. They were coming up Adams in such great numbers that they had to climb through the thorny creosote and crucillo lining the homes on each side. The sentinel sped south on Steward and cut into an alley between blocks. It came upon Treat and went south again, to Mabel, then continued west – parallel to where the horde was walking just two blocks north. The sentinel raced forward, switching back between Mabel and Drachman as it crossed over Tucson Blvd. The campus was close. Ahead was a large, dry field and the Spanish walls of St. Peter and Paul Catholic School. Just beyond, the sentinel crossed into Campbell Ave. – the massive thoroughfare connecting the school to the foothills of north Tucson. Peering high into the setting sun, across Campbell, was the aesculapian tomb: the University of Arizona Medical Center. Ground Zero for the plague in the southwestern states.