Artificial Evolution

by Joseph R. Lallo

  “What happened here, Dr. Dreyfus?” Michella asked, trying to bring him around from his dazed state and checking him for serious injuries.

  “Ms. Modane? Why are you here? I… the… the specimen. It was the specimen. It… I should have realized… I had my theories but I didn’t know how quickly…” he rambled.

  “The specimen did this? The extraterrestrial?” Michella said.

  “It wasn’t one thing. It was an army. A horde of mechanical spiders with plasma cutters,” Saunders said. “Only eight members of my team got to the safe room. How many of the other bodies did you find?”

  “We haven’t found any bodies. Only blood,” Lex said.

  Saunders grimaced and spat. “There should have been six bodies in that hallway. Those things must have…” She coughed and spat again, this time with a tinge of red. “Well… I suppose I don’t want to know what they did with them.”

  “Did more of those things come? Was this some sort of an invasion?”

  “They didn’t come,” Dr. Dreyfus said. “They were made. That’s… that’s why it was stockpiling the samples we were presenting. It was creating a duplicate of its core. And from there each made another. Self-replicating. I didn’t realize the power of its cutting devices. It must have stripped away pieces of the enclosure, found its way to a power cable… The military backers made us close the lab, raised the clearance level. We couldn’t keep an eye on them properly.”

  “So… are you telling me all of this damage…?”

  “Every missing piece of structure, every scrap of equipment—converted into more of them. A rough estimate, based on the mass and conversion efficiency I’ve seen… there are thousands, minimum.”

  “Why didn’t you call for help?”

  “Do you think we didn’t try? Do you think I would let my whole team die before calling for backup?” Saunders growled. “It was a coordinated assault. They took out power, backup power, and communications almost simultaneously. Lockdown protocols sealed us in. Outer walls are radio shielded, so handhelds wouldn’t work. Repeater was down from the power issues and completely gone within the first few minutes. The damn things even targeted our slidepads and communicators before attacking us.”

  “Where are they now? Where did they go?” Michella asked.

  “You mean you didn’t clear them out?” Saunders said.

  “I’m a courier and she’s a reporter. I don’t think either of us could have managed to eliminate whatever it was that did this,” Lex said.

  Saunders looked to her gun and saw that it was empty. “Find me a clip, a gun, anything.” There was a steadiness and resolve in her voice now, as though the wounds were an afterthought. “Those things will be back, and if any of you are getting out alive, we’ll need the firepower to blast a hole through them.”

  “I think we need Garotte and Silo in here,” Michella said. “It looks like those things punched enough holes in the building to disrupt the radio shielding. I’ve got a signal.”

  “I’m already calling,” Lex said.

  #

  Beside the mouth of the mine, Garotte was still watching as the scout module endlessly trawled the tunnels.

  “Anything yet?” Silo asked over the radio.

  “Yes, my dear,” Garotte said. “Several minutes ago I found a signed confession from the individuals responsible for tonight’s attack and a complete hierarchical chart of their criminal organization, but I decided to wait until you’d asked me a third time.”

  “No need to get snippy, hon. Oh. It looks like Lex is calling in.”

  The radio chirped as Lex connected. “Hello? Garotte, Silo?”

  “What is it, my boy?”

  “The laboratory is a warzone. We’ve got a whole security team down, and they say it was a swarm of mechanical spiders.”

  “That doesn’t sound very much like what we found during our run-in with the Luddites,” Silo said.

  “I don’t know what you saw then, but if the security chief is right, we’ll need some major reinforcements if those things come back.”

  “Have you seen anything? Heard anything?” Silo asked.

  “No, but if you saw the shape of these people, you’d want to know that help is on the way. There’s an emergency crew on their way here, but something tells me they don’t have the taste in guns that Silo has.”

  Silo shook her head. “Police forces never stock up on good high-quality ordnance. Shame, really. What do you say, Garotte?”

  He looked to the screen. The video feed had just been cut off. “I say we just lost the recon-module.” He drew his weapon. “What do the sensors say?”

  “They say…” Her voice turned serious. “Audio and EM both say there is something massive working its way out of the mines. Forty seconds. No, it’s accelerating. Twenty. Coming down for pickup.”

  “My boy, find yourself a defensible position near the roof and prepare for extraction. Closing connection.”

  Garotte quickened to a run. He didn’t need to have sensor readings to know something was coming. Pebbles were dancing across the ground with an audible rumble. The Declaration flickered into view and dropped close to the ground. Its weapons were hot, and the cargo door was open.

  “Five seconds!” Silo cried over the public address system of the ship. “Inside, now! If we’re going to fight a horde of anything, I want you at the controls and me at the guns.”

  He took two final steps and leaped to the open door, catching it with his free hand. There was a burst of flying stone and clattering metal behind him. The ship began to climb sharply, testing his grip, but he held firm. It pivoted slightly in the air and gave him his first glimpse at what they were up against. On the ground, which was now five meters down and dropping, a string of mechanisms was emerging from the mouth of the mine. At least three dozen of them were visible already, and more poured out of the tunnel with every second.

  Silo shifted the high-intensity floodlights of the ship upon the gathering legion of mechanisms. No two of them looked precisely the same. They all had the same general shape—a mass of exposed electronics, motors, and pneumatics organized into a central chassis and perched atop four mechanical legs—but the actual materials used to construct them varied wildly from robot to robot. Dull gray metal, muddy brown polymer, and gleaming reinforced glass were all used in random combinations on the mechanisms. Some of them were bulky and armored, others were spindly and incomplete. In the case of the smallest among them, their construction contained unsettling features: yellow-white rods stained with red, twitching bundles of red tissue, scraps of things that could easily have been flesh and bone.

  A firm hand grasped Garotte’s wrist and pulled him up to the surface of the lowered door.

  “Get to the controls, sweetheart. I don’t want to trust our survival to autopilot,” Silo said, setting him down and steadying him.

  “Nor do I, my dear,” he said. “But at the moment it appears maneuvering won’t be our primary concern. Whatever those things are, they appear to be decidedly earthbound.”

  He made his way to the controls and trained the ship’s viewer on the swarm of robots. The flow from the mine was slowing. All told there were probably five hundred of them so far, climbing over one another like ants. They were centering themselves directly beneath the ship.

  Silo shut the door and took the targeting controls for the ship’s guns. “Earthbound or no, I don’t want to take my chances. These things are really starting to look like the sort of thing that the Neo-Luddites would drool over. And that sensor we took from them is going bonkers.”

  “Well, they aren’t shooting, so that should make things simpler. But as you say, the Neo-Luddites were quite eager to get their hands on these things. Their noted predilection toward pyrotechnics, coupled with the fact they were carrying EMP weaponry exclusively, suggests we may be dealing with some sort of mobile bomb. I’m thus reluctant to fire indiscriminately.”

  “Understood, but all the same, I don’t intend to leave these
buggers crawling around.”

  The mass of robots were beginning to gather into six individual clusters and climb upon one another. Garotte guided the ship a bit higher, just in case the devices were trying to form a makeshift ladder to reach them. Fortunately the robots stacked only a few deep before the mounds they formed began to dip in the middle.

  “Perhaps you can single one of them out and destroy it.”

  “You’re asking me to target one bee out of an angry swarm?”

  “What’s wrong? Too difficult?”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “Any one in particular you want me to shoot for?”

  Suddenly the dented mounds bulged upward, each one launching a flailing robot with frightening velocity and accuracy.

  “Any of those!” Garotte yelped, pulling the controls hard to the right.

  His quick maneuvering dodged three of the robots, and Silo’s skill with the trigger dispatched two more with the ship’s guns. The final robot glanced off the energy shields of the ship, slashing madly with a cutting torch and some sort of dangling wire. Silo squeezed off a shot as it plummeted back toward the ground, blasting it to glowing scraps of metal. By the time the pieces clattered to the ground, each group of interlocking robots launched another of their swarm at the Declaration. Garotte was able to gain enough altitude to get out of their range.

  “Well, that was educational,” he said. “Assessment?”

  “That one that brushed our shield managed to knock it down by five percent, and the charge is coming back awfully slow,” Silo said.

  “Best not to let them touch us again, then. Having now destroyed a few without devastating explosions, I think we can safely fire at will.”

  “I’m way ahead of you, hon,” Silo said with a grin.

  Her targeting screens were painted with markers at the center of each of the churning mounds. She pulled the trigger and the guns sent six pairs of plasma charges streaking toward the robots. Like roaches when the lights switch on, the robots scattered with astonishing speed. Only a few were damaged, only one enough to stop moving. She continued to fire, but it became clear that the current armaments weren’t working.

  “I can’t use ship-to-ship cannons on these things. If I’d known we’d be facing a nimble swarm, I would have gone with the antipersonnel load out,” Silo said. “Keep us clear. We need something with a little more spread. I’m getting the grenade launcher.”

  The ship’s radio gave a chirp, and Lex’s breathless voice filled the control cabin.

  “Okay, we’ve done our best to patch the two survivors enough to move, and we’re heading toward my bike, but with four people and a funk on a two-person hoverbike, I’m not going to be able to do much maneuvering. Are you guys okay? What’s your ETA?”

  “We’ve made contact with the enemy, and they are proving rather bothersome but not a credible threat, given room to retreat. Our weapons on hand aren’t well suited to crowd control.”

  “How many are there?”

  “A few hundred.” Garotte glanced at Silo as she clicked a barrel of grenades into her weapon. “Fewer in a moment. Be ready for us, my boy, we’ll be after you directly.”

  Silo stepped out onto the cargo door of the Declaration, securing herself to the interior of the ship with a safety strap. After some quick mental calculations, she tapped commands into a control panel of the hefty weapon and fired four quick shots, slipping back inside the ship after they were on their way. Grenades the size of beer cans followed steep trajectories toward the mass of robots. Unlike the brilliantly illuminated plasma charges, the grenades were nearly invisible in the darkness. Whatever sensors had allowed the bots to dodge the plasma were utterly blind to the explosives. Four chest-rattling thumps split the air, each grenade detonating about three meters from the ground. Shrapnel shredded through vital components, causing dozens of robots to flail, sputter, and fail. A brief light show followed as a smattering of fragments reached the shield of the ship and speckled against it.

  “How’d I do?” Silo called to Garotte.

  He looked at the viewer. “Looks like about two-thirds of them are down, if not out.”

  She spun the barrel, pulled four fresh grenades from her bandolier, and loaded them in. “One more volley ought to do it, but I’ll give them all six rounds, just to be sure.”

  Six more well-placed shots and six more percussive thumps later, the battlefield was little more than a pile of twitching metal and circuits.

  “Fine work as always, my dear. Now let us see to Lex.”

  Chapter 11

  Lex and Michella, at the urging of Chief Saunders, had rummaged through the fallen security team’s equipment and found three functional energy pistols with at least some charge left, plus a full recharge for the chief’s rifle. Getting Saunders and Dr. Dreyfus to the hoverbike had been difficult. Dreyfus’s injuries were minor, but his spinal condition meant that he had to be carried. That task had fallen to Lex, who hauled the doctor across his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. As for Chief Saunders, the liberal application of bandages and something called surgi-bond—along with painkillers and sheer grit—had gotten her up on her remaining leg. With Michella under one arm and a crutch made from pieces of a cot under the other, Saunders was just able to hobble along the hallway. Squee stuck close to them along the way, ears turning to every sound and eyes scouring each dark corner. The light was provided by the camera, which still hovered and automatically captured the action. It was useful in that it didn’t require any of them to hold the light, but it also meant that the light focused on them instead of where they were going.

  After a slow, tense walk down the scarred hallway, the pool of light from the camera revealed the hoverbike.

  “That is how we are supposed to escape?” uttered Saunders.

  “I didn’t know I was going to be doing an evacuation,” Lex said. “But it’s not so bad. All we have to do is get as far as the Declaration or the cops, whichever shows up first. They’ll get us the rest of the way.”

  “Not having far to go doesn’t solve the problem of how we’ll get there,” Saunders said.

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Let’s get you into the sidecar. In the shape you’re in, I don’t think there’s going to be any other way you can ride.”

  Lex lowered Dr. Dreyfus to the ground and helped him lean against a wall, then helped Michella lift Chief Saunders into the sidecar. It took a great deal of effort to do it without reopening any of her many wounds, but they did so.

  “Okay, what’s next?” Lex said.

  “It’s simple. Trev, you take Saunders up to the roof, then come back and get us,” Michella said.

  “See, that’s a great idea, except it requires me to leave my girlfriend in a demolished laboratory with nothing but a pistol and an injured and disabled scientist. Come on, Doc, you’re going on the seat behind me. You think you can hold on?”

  “I believe so,” he said, taking Lex’s hand as the younger man hauled him to the back of the bike.

  When he was in place, Lex took a seat.

  “Fine, then take the two of them,” Michella said.

  “We’re all going. You can get on between me and the handlebars, facing backward. Like we used to do back in college,” he said.

  “Maybe now’s not the time to bring that up, Trevor,” she said. “Just go! You’ll be two minutes; I’ll be fine.”

  “I’m not leaving without you.”

  “We don’t even know if that thing will get off the ground with four people on it.”

  “I guarantee it will. Get on the bike.”

  “It is more important that you get them out. You could be there and halfway back by now!”

  “Mitch,” he growled, “tell me you’re not trying to send me off so you can get a shot of us leaving and then have a solo shot to do a monologue or something, or to take the extra time to snoop around before the cops lock this place down.”

  She glared at him viciously. “Trevor, now you listen to me
. I—”

  Whatever piece of her mind she was preparing to speak was interrupted by a high-pitched buzzing growl. All eyes turned to Squee. Her hackles were up and she’d bared her teeth, her nose pointed into the darkness. A moment later the action-tracking camera pivoted, casting its light down into the ruined lower levels. Three patchwork monstrosities slid from the shadows of a ruined hallway. They were the same spidery shape as the ones that had faced Silo and Garotte, but far less functional and complete. They looked like they had been built of ill-fitting scraps left over from the other robots, legs irregular lengths or torsos sagging under the weight of their mechanical innards. The trio began limping their way up an exposed staircase, and slowly more of them began to emerge, sparking with loose connections and leaving behind smoldering holes in the ground with torches that wouldn’t extinguish. Rattling up from below, beyond the reach of the light, was the clatter of hundreds of similar legs.

  The light swiveled back toward Michella, revealing that she’d fished out the remote control. She recalled the camera, then quickly clamped it in place on the rear chassis of the sidecar with a few deft clicks of levers. When she was satisfied it was secure, she vaulted over the handlebars and landed hard on Lex’s lap.

  “Fine, flyboy.” She slipped on her goggles. “Have it your way.” She did her best to lock her legs with his and wrapped one arm around his back, to hold tight to both Lex and Dr. Dreyfus.

  Lex whistled, instantly bringing Squee leaping into the sidecar to huddle beside Saunders with her head poking out over the edge. He revved the throttle of the overloaded bike, and it groaned ponderously into the air.

  “Mitch, would you do the honors?” he asked. He executed a slow turn and drifted unsteadily out into the more damaged portion of the facility.

  Michella released her grip long enough to pull the pack of gum from his pocket, remove a stick, and pop it in his mouth. “Do what you do best, baby.” She looked down at the rapidly approaching galaxy of sparks and smoldering torches. “But be quick.”