“Yes,” continued Kafka, gesturing grandly over the mech with a sweeping hand, “we all know her as Marina Kojic, wife of Luka Kojic. She was turned into a zombie when, in a tragic accident, Luka tried to kill her. Once an unfaithful wife, now she is an obedient mechanized soldier, a deadly weapon in the transition to the new world order, a marvel of science and metaphysics!”
Peter and Ehsan trained their assault rifles on Marina. Kojic only stood there gawking at her, a long tear streaming down his left cheek.
“But that’s not all,” Kafka announced. “Would mystery guest number two step out?”
Another hulking mech stepped out from behind a stack of crates on the other side of the room. It stomped over, taking its place on the other side of Kafka.
Peter’s mouth dropped open when he saw the face on the monitor it had for a head.
“That’s right, folks,” continued Kafka, “I’d like to introduce you to Barry Birdsall, father of yours truly and Peter Birdsall, disgraced ex-Major of the U.S. Army. Abandoned by his country that he served so diligently, Peter turned to the only family he felt he had left. Barry took him in, gave him a place to stay and a job. How did the prodigal son repay him? He allowed him to become a mindless zombie when he had the chance to save him. So, once again, I took it upon myself to intervene. Now Barry, too, is a walking marvel of bio-digital technology, an evolved being in his own right.”
“You’re a monster,” said Peter to Kafka.
“No, you and Kojic are the monsters. You made them what they are today, and boy do they have a bone to pick with you guys.”
“Dad,” Peter called out, but the digital face in the monitor, the plastic countenance of his father, gazed back at him with empty eyes. “Carl, Dad always defended you, even with all of the horrible things you’ve done. Now he’s nothing more to you than a remote controlled toy?”
“I told you to infect him, Pete. Right there in the hardware store. The ball was in your court, but you dropped the ball. Didn’t you?”
“Don’t turn this on me, Carl. This was all you. You’re the monster. Dad was the only family we had left, and you turned him into some kind of…abomination.”
“Pete, you’re the one doing the mental gymnastics. You couldn’t protect your squad in Tijuana or Xcaret, you couldn’t protect those poor people in Italy, you couldn’t protect me, and you let Dad down.”
“What about you, Carl? You let Mom down.”
“Nice try, Pete.”
“You had to look at that enlistment center in the mall…”
“It’s not going to work, Pete.”
“You had to have that argument with her…”
Kafka squirmed a little. “Stop it.”
“Just enough time. You bought that suicide bomber just enough time…”
“Shut up, Pete.”
“Just enough time to line Mom up…”
“I said that’s enough.” All four eyes were blinking quickly. Kafka took a few steps backward.
“Shit, you even backed your car out of the way so he’d have a clear shot at her…”
“THAT’S ENOUGH!”
Kafka took off his RGT headset, dropped it at his feet, and lunged at Peter. Both mechs rushed forward and Kojic and Ehsan opened fire on them. Peter grappled with his brother, but he was quickly overpowered.
Kafka forced him to the ground, holding his wrists in his long hands, his claws digging into Peter’s wrists. As Peter struggled, Kafka kicked him in the face repeatedly and then flung him across the room.
Kojic ducked as the Barry mech swiped all kinds of sharp instruments at him. The Marina mech was chasing Ehsan around the room.
Peter got up as Kafka descended on him. Peter tried to block his punches, but Kafka was too fast. His fists moved in a blur, striking Peter in his midsection and face. Kafka delivered a swift sidekick, knocking Peter on his back.
Ehsan hid behind a control panel and fired at Marina, hitting her monitor. The picture of her face flickered as he heard Kojic scream from across the room, “Don’t you touch her! Don’t you ever touch her!”
It only took a hot second. Ehsan turned to look at Kojic as Marina advanced upon him. She hopped the control panel, landing with a heavy thud behind Ehsan
The mech reversed its features in a whine of motorized parts and grabbed Ehsan in a bear hug. Kojic, dodging the blades of Barry’s mech, had a second to look Ehsan in the eye one last time as Marina swirled her mechanics, dicing Ehsan into little pieces.
“I told you, Pete,” said Kafka, “I’m stronger than you. Betancourt screwed you when he gave you that serum.”
“He saved me,” insisted Peter. “I’m still human, not a monster like you.”
This time Peter threw some punches, but Kafka blocked them relatively easily. He punched Peter in the throat and then in the jaw, dislocating it. He delivered a body blow that sent the wind right out of him, feeling Peter’s ribs crunching under his fist.
Peter dropped to the floor, clutching his midsection, coughing up blood, moaning through a mouth horribly distorted by the unnatural angle of his mandible.
“Peter, no!” cried Elicia, powerless to do anything.
Kojic was cornered by Marina as the Barry mech approached, covered in gore. “My Marina,” he pleaded. She stooped down until her monitor was at his level. He stroked her monitor delicately with his hand. The digital face recoiled, hissing at him.
Kafka grabbed Peter by the roof of his mouth, his long, greasy fingers reaching inside, gagging him. He dragged Peter over to where Elicia was sobbing on the ground.
“Here, watch your boyfriend. I have work to do,” he commanded.
Across the room, Marina reached out and took Kojic into her arms. He went willingly, closing his eyes as he was pressed against her metal parts. It was his Marina. She wouldn’t harm him now. He would give himself to Kafka’s Cause.
If it was the only way he could be with her, then so be it. Even if it meant the extinction of the human race. At least he would be with his Marina. She was better than she was before. She was powerful.
He opened his eyes and saw that her monitor was looking down at him. She was looking into his eyes. For a moment, he saw…recognition. She recognized him. She saw her husband.
Her face disappeared from the screen and memories popped on the monitor…her memories of him. How they first met in Serbia on her father’s farm. How her father told her they would be married. Their wedding day. Their tender wedding night.
Kojic saw himself through Marina’s eyes, in first person view, and he wept in her strong, mechanical arms. He saw himself above her, making love to her in their marriage bed. He saw her hand rise up and stroke his face tenderly.
He saw her watching him work tirelessly in the kitchen from her view in the living room, tinkering away with his electronics. He became distant, not just physically but emotionally. Marina’s view became more of a spectator’s than a participant’s.
Then he saw himself guiding her to sit on the toilet as he placed the portable RGT headset on her head. He saw himself change right before her eyes. His expression changed from inquisitive to incredulous, and then to rage.
He saw himself grab her and throw her into the bathtub. Water filled the monitor as he saw a distorted view of his own hands hold her down. The monitor shuddered with her death rattle, and he shuddered in her robotic arms.
Then the screen went black.
“Marina, I’m so sorry. My sweet Marina.”
Her face reappeared on the screen so suddenly it startled him. Her milky eyes were narrowed in anger as she hissed at him, snapping her digital jaws through the monitor.
Kojic felt the twisting of mechanisms against his chest. In a fraction of a second, he felt searing pain slash throughout his body. Marina looked him in the eye with her cold, dead eyes and she released him from her cold embrace.
Kojic looked down at his body as blood oozed from everywhere, and his last sensation on this earth was that of his body falling to pieces. H
e was dead before they all hit the floor.
Kafka pressed a button and a hatch opened on the small, skull-shaped casket of a spacecraft. He lowered himself inside, and the mechanism immediately responded to his presence. Little electronic wires and fibers reached out like cybernetic vines, embracing him, enveloping him.
The headrest in the seat opened up, metal teeth separating, as Kafka’s head disappeared, the teeth closing back over it. He became mummified in what looked like liquid mercury.
Elicia cradled Peter in her arms, his head in her lap. He tried to speak to her, but his jaw was too swollen to allow intelligible speech. His tongue flapped around his mouth like a fish out of water suffocating in the toxic air.
“Sssh. It’s okay. We did our best. We did our best.”
The two mechs lumbered over and stood on either side of the small sarcophagus-shaped craft. Elicia moved herself and Peter out of the way, making room for the Barry mech.
Zombie mechs. Now Elicia thought she’d seen it all. This was her future. To be surrounded by all things undead, a vile melding of man and machine…
…a melding of man and machine.
She looked down at Kafka’s discarded portable RGT headset. She reached out and grabbed it. She looked nervously up at the two massive mechs, but they were preoccupied with watching their master.
She placed the headset on Peter’s head and started turning knobs on the portable tower. Peter asked what she was doing, but it came out virtually unintelligible.
The humming of the craft dropped a few octaves, rattling the fillings in Elicia’s teeth.
“Peter, listen to me carefully. You have the serum inside you, like an antivirus.”
Peter nodded his head.
“I want you to reach out to Carl, use your memories. This technology seems to run on memories. Think of your childhood, your most precious memories. Lure him to you. Then infect him with the antivirus.”
“Ha,” he said, which he meant to come out as How?
Elicia was grasping at straws here. She really didn’t know if it was going to work. “You’ll know. You’ll feel it, just like Carl does.”
Peter nodded his head in her lap, and he closed his eyes. He tried to focus through the pain. His body was going into shock, which helped him.
As he felt himself disassociate from his own body, he began to think of him and Carl as kids. He thought about playing tag in their back yard. He thought about birthday parties, family vacations…
What are you doing? Stop that. It’s no use.
Peter wasn’t sure if this was the voice of his doppelgänger or Carl, but as he slipped into shock the voice became more distant. As it became more distant, it became more desperate.
Listen, you little asshole. It’s not going to work. You’re too late. The invasion is here. Do you hear me?
Peter thought of watching his little brother as an infant in his mother’s arms. He remembered her words. ‘Peter, this is your little brother. He’s all yours. You have to look after him.’
The voice in his head was gone. He started to feel something else.
He thought of his mother, her smiling face, putting Carl’s birthday cake in front of him as they all sang happy birthday. He struggled with blowing out the candles. Peter remembered standing behind him and blowing them out over Carl’ head and Carl’s squeals of delight in thinking he actually blew out the candles.
Peter felt it. He felt Carl. Carl was being drawn to Peter’s memories like a magnet. He resisted the memories, but Peter felt the tendrils of Carl’s mind involuntarily reaching out for them, like moths drawn to a flame.
Peter thought of his family sitting around the Christmas tree, his mother watching in delight as he and Carl opened the presents, his father getting a fire going in the hearth. He felt the warmth of the fire, the warmth of his parents’ love enveloping him like a warm terrycloth robe on a cold winter’s night.
The tendrils of Carl’s mind were touching the tips of Peter’s memories. Peter reached out…
There was a handshake. Peter’s memories latched onto Carl’s mind and flooded it, and with it the serum in digital representation. Peter felt himself pouring into Carl, the two becoming one.
When Peter opened his eyes, he saw Elicia looking down at him; her tears were falling on his face. He tasted their salt as he raised his head off of her lap. He saw that Kafka had been released by the craft, the wires and liquid metal receding in rejection.
Kafka looked confused. “What happened?” He looked down at Peter wearing the RGT headset. “What did you do?”
Peter didn’t know what made him do it, but he sent out a mental command to the Barry mech. It reached out and embraced the craft, crushing it in its grip. Metal grinded on metal. When it let go, the hatch was fused to the craft.
Kafka was banging on the inside. He was shouting at the mechs. “Let me out! Goddammit, let me out!”
They stood there, looming over the small craft that was to become Kafka’s coffin. Peter sent out another mental command, and the Barry mech reached out and began to rip wires and circuit boards out of the Marina mech. Marina stood there stoically as her lights went out.
The Barry mech threw the mechanical carcass to the ground and began to stomp it to pieces under its heavy metal feet. After a moment it stopped. It stood there, awaiting Peter’s next command.
Carl punched the inside of the hatch with all of his might, recoiling at the pain it caused him. Peter and Elicia looked on in amazement.
“You did it,” she said. “He’s weak. You interrupted his virus, isolating the code.”
She helped Peter to his feet. He looked at her and tried to speak. It came out garbled, but somehow she knew what he was saying.
“We’ll have to go outside and see. If we’re in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, then I guess we were too late.”
Peter looked up at the mech that was his father. He remembered what the voice inside his head said. The bio-digital code that was their soul never died. It just went dormant. If he removed his father’s hard drive, his CPU containing the code of his existence, he’d never really be dead.
However, he looked up at his father’s image in the cracked monitor, into the glazed eyes. This abomination was not his father. Barry Birdsall was dead. He had to let him go.
Peter clenched his teeth and choked back a sob as he sent out a thought, and the Barry mech again embraced the small craft.
“Pete, what are you doing?” Kafka cried out.
Barry’s face in the monitor was face-to-face with Kafka’s in the pod. There was the digital ticking of a countdown coming from the mech.
Peter limped over to the pod and put his hand on the hatch. He put another on the mech. He was saying goodbye to his family.
“Dammit, I was always on your side, Carl.”
All four eyes blinked in unison, tears welling up and streaming out of them. He put his hand on the inside of the hatch opposite Peter’s. “I know, Pete. I’m so sorry.”
“I know you are, Carl.”
“You’re not responsible for what I did. I chose this.”
Peter looked into his brother’s eyes, his own tears now streaming down his face, and reached out with his senses. He knew he was now talking to Carl, not Kafka. The serum was holding Kafka back, if only for a moment, so that Carl could say goodbye.
Elicia put her hand gently on Peter’s shoulder. “We have to go.”
He nodded.
As they walked away from the building, the zombie employees just stood there in a daze, awaiting their next commands that never came. They were even devoid of their hunger for flesh.
Peter looked at Elicia. “Conul Befanct?”
She shook her head. “The Colonel’s dead.”
As Peter limped, supported by Elicia, it occurred to him that the only official person who was aware of their innocence and their role in saving the human race—the only person in the position to exonerate them—was dead.
They were still fugitives.
When they were a considerable distance away, there was a large explosion, a flash of light, and a shockwave that nearly shoved Peter and Elicia off their feet. The spacecraft, Carl, and his father were all gone in an instant, as were Kafka and the Automaton.
Good, bad, or indifferent, all that was left was whatever world lay outside Groom Lake.
Chapter 17
Tucupita, Venuzuela
One Month Later
A pretty young woman entered the bar. Dressed in beige shorts and a black tube top clinging to her for dear life in the humidity, she strolled passed the tables with a tablet computer under her arm and saddled up to the bar.
Although she was attractive, and a gringa no less, she curiously didn’t draw any looks from the half dead patrons in the sleepy bar. She put her tablet flat on the bar, pressed a button, and waited.
The bartender said something; the computer identified it as Warao and translated it as, “Are you lost?”
She shook her head and ordered. Her tablet translated her speech into Warao.
“One beer, please.”
The bartender smirked at her manners and poured her a beer that smelt like rat piss in a dirty glass with a hairline crack running down the side. She pressed a button on her tablet, paying the bill, and she grabbed the pint.
She raised the glass to her parched lips and gulped the warm rat piss down heartily until she emptied the glass. She let out a loud belch and wiped beer head from her lips with her tongue.
Once again, no one looked up.
“Another beer, please,” she called out to the bartender.
The bartender snickered, but he obliged the gringa girl. He took her dirty glass and poured her another pint of warm rat piss. He slammed the glass down in front of her.
“Thirsty?”
“I’ve been looking for someone all day, and I was told to come here.”
The bartender regarded her disdainfully. “You’re a long way from home, young lady. Maybe you should go home and forget about this man.”
“Funny,” said the young girl, taking a long swig of the beer, “I never said it was a man I was looking for.”
I am Automaton 3: Shadow of the Automaton Page 34