Brother, Frankenstein

by Michael Bunker

  But in the beginning, it started with him finding the connection. Knowing where it was.

  Now, focusing, he still knows. Only now the interface doesn’t feel like something foreign. Now he has the sensation of something being missing. Just like with the ghost pains he read about in his offline database while lying in bed one night, not long after he’d realized he wasn’t like other people. Back then, he suffered ghost pains just about everywhere. His everything had been severed from him, and at first his brain remembered all of it, and it wanted it back. Back then, his brain still thought his body was there.

  But slowly he learned to adapt to his new reality. To embrace it. And now, bathed in darkness in his lonely room, he feels the overwhelming need, like a survival instinct, to find where the interface is. To identify just where the soft computer—his brain—connects to the man-made computing system.

  The room retracts again and the outside darkness presses in. He feels a headache start somewhere he can’t describe, and it radiates out to somewhere else just as locationless. His thoughts muddy a bit, and he has to focus to clear them.

  Find the connection.

  In the games, he had to identify and use the right tool for the game. The right weapon. The right solution. And it occurs to him, fighting through the growing fog, that memory is his tool. Memory is the right tool for this task.

  So he remembers. Puts himself back in that old decrepit barn. Back when the rat was chewing on him. How did he do it then? How did he switch himself back on?

  And he sees it…

  Not with eyes. He sees it in the room. The interface. Like a thousand- thousand strands of red and blue, all plugged into a small piece of a machine.

  The room shrinks again. The not-real walls close in until he feels surrounded, like he could reach out and touch all four walls at once.

  The interface is there. Right in front of him. The image blurs and disappears, and then clears again.

  He needs to focus, to send whatever energy is in his brain into the machine.

  The image fades again… and then…

  It disappears.

  The darkness swallows him whole, and his consciousness retracts to the size of a pin in the dark night sky. Like the tiny star he stared at one night from the loft of the Shetlers’ barn.

  Just a dot of light in the black vacuum of the universe. A pinprick in the sheet of inky nothing that sheathes the world.

  * * *

  I struggle to maintain consciousness as blow after blow rains down on me. Kicks and punches coming from every conceivable direction fall on me like a landslide. I feel pain at first, but then it dulls and I just feel the blows. A rib cracks, and before the feeling can really even register in my consciousness, a boot glances off my cheekbone.

  “Don’t kill him,” a voice says. “The boss wants this one.”

  “What about the girl?”

  “Leave her alone. If the boss wants her terminated, he’ll order it when he gets here.”

  “He said eliminate all resistance,” another voice says.

  “She’s just an Amish girl!”

  I hear April scream “Frederick!” and then feel another blow as she lands on me with all her weight, and I open my eyes to see the blurry outline of her face above mine.

  “Pull her off!” the voice says.

  April is torn from my body, and one more blow connects with my sternum.

  That was the one.

  That one explodes through me, and I feel the air evacuate my lungs in an instant. It feels like my lungs have collapsed and my throat spasms and shuts, failing to take in oxygen.

  I’m struggling for air, but I can’t inhale. Can’t catch my breath.

  In the distance I can hear snippets of a conversation.

  “… eliminate all locals? Really?”

  “… an EMP. It took everything out…”

  “… pacify this sector…”

  “… I’m not going farm to farm to kill these people…”

  “… we got who we wanted…”

  I feel my hands being jerked up behind me, and zip ties are slid over my wrists and pulled tight. So tight I can feel that the hard plastic has cut my skin.

  I struggle for air. It’s like trying to pull a bowling ball through a straw.

  The light wavers, and my eyes blur as my lungs scream for air, for breath.

  Then the lights go out.

  * * *

  “What the hell is it, anyway?” a soldier says.

  “We need to get this thing out of here,” Dresser says as he turns to walk away from the crowd of soldiers and technicians who surround the prone HADroid. “Strap it down and let’s get it to Wright-Patt pronto.”

  “You want we should call in a Transport helo?” another soldier says. “Our shit’s busted.”

  “I don’t care how you get it there, but I want it there yesterday, and I want it protected all the way.”

  Dresser puts on his shades, and his mouth turns upward in a snarl as he strides away.

  “The rest of you,” he shouts over his shoulder, “advance on the farm and help mop up!” He tosses the butt of his cigarette onto the road as he walks, and then shouts at an agent who’s heading toward the HADroid, “And by ‘mopped up,’ I mean clean!”

  * * *

  The pinprick throbs. Latent brain activity hasn’t ceased, and the vast darkness is interrupted here and there by flashes of light, like in a distant summer storm. Memories, sensations, and data flash in the empty neural sky in what seem like random intervals and places, like lightning. Then the black returns until the pinprick glows again.

  A flash. There is a vision, like a firefly blinking on at night. A picture of John, lying on the ground behind Polly, about to be stomped. But the image lasts for only a microsecond and then is gone. Another flash: numbers, bus station times, and in a beat that vision is gone, too.

  Flash: Doc, firing at the bad men.

  Flash: Thelma the waitress with a plate. Gooey eggs and orange mouth.

  Flash: John. My friend.

  And in that last flash, Frank is back. He grabs the memory of John, clasps it tightly, and it’s as if he’s squeezing it into himself, holding the electronic memory with crippled dwarf arms against a misshapen body.

  And he pushes. He doesn’t know what he pushes or why. He can’t grasp it all yet, but in a flash the darkness is pushed back, and Frank can see the interface. In that split second, he pushes all of it, all of the life force he has left. An electrical current surges through him, and he watches it as it passes through the red-blue fleshy strings into the machine.

  The lights come back on, and his HUD blinks to life in the left side of his vision.

  Power Reboot Initialized…

  OKC Reserve Cells Protocol Activated…

  Mainframe reboot… Achieved

  Weapons reboot… Achieved

  Combat Mode Activated

  Tracking First Priority Targets…

  27 Targets… LOCKED

  Frank struggles to clear the mud from his mind, but out of instinct he activates his laser while still prone and the red light burns a furrow in the dirt and grass. He swings his whole chassis until he is up on one knee, and then he rotates three hundred and sixty degrees on a swivel, cutting down man and machine as he turns.

  He is up and moving backward before any of his enemies can return fire. His target acquisition highlights enemies, and his brain gives the command to fire, but there is a delay. Before he can think to fire again, the machine responds and starts taking out targets.

  The HADroid, operating for a moment free from human override, vaults rearward, firing lasers and in-air guided bullets that shred targets on all sides. The robot tumbles backward perfectly into a one-hand vault, and when his feet hit the ground he launches himself to his west, clearing a burning truck and rolling low before popping skyward again in a leap that puts him nearly thirty feet in the air. In free fall, he rotates and fires at the soldiers cowering or firing at him from behind the
crippled truck. He lands smoothly, and his head and weapons platform rotate to the left, scanning for targets.

  Wow, Frank thinks. I didn’t know I could do that. Like Baryshnikov.

  He’d heard the doc describe the HADroid’s capabilities before, but he’d had to look up Baryshnikov.

  His mind is steadily clearing now, and his consciousness eases him back into the game. He begins utilizing override again whenever he sees he can make a shot faster or better than the computer might.

  Once Frank feels like he’s back to near one hundred percent, he activates human override as the default, and begins clearing out targets in a sweeping flanking action that starts to the west.

  * * *

  Dresser’s aide is trying to get the soldiers to fall back amid explosions and laser fire. Some of the men, on the orders of some commander working according to his own logic, had begun to dig in and establish fortified positions during the brief respite, but now Dresser is ordering everyone to completely disengage and fall back. Orders are being passed by voice and by messenger since none of the equipment works. Even cell phones are useless.

  And Dresser seems almost pleased as he orders the full retreat.

  His aide knows why. Because in Dresser’s mind a loss is as good as a win. With the TA embarrassed and DARPA at fault again, he’ll get more power. More and better equipment. His license to kill is about to get multiplied by a thousand.

  The aide sees Dresser walking toward him along the road, barking orders, unaffected by the mayhem and carnage going on around him. Like some corrupt and darker Stonewall Jackson, only without the religious zeal… or the love and respect of his men. A rocket blast hits four soldiers sheltered behind a crippled truck, and exploded bits of clothing and men spray outward in a gruesome blast pattern. A clump of meat and bone lands on Dresser’s shoulder as he walks, but he doesn’t look down. He brushes it off with a gloved hand like so much dust and maintains his stride.

  When Dresser is about fifteen yards from his aide, he raises a hand to call the man to him. As the aide approaches, Dresser pulls off his shades. There is a self-satisfied smile on the man’s face.

  “Pure slaughterhouse, eh?” Dresser says, and as he says it, a bright beam of pure red light bifurcates him from his right shoulder down to his left hip.

  The smile disappears from Dresser’s lips as his top half begins to slide to his left and blood and guts tumble to the ground. Behind Dresser, in the split second when the bottom half of the man is still standing and the top half has sloughed off to the ground, the aide sees a frightening sight that almost stops his heart. He sees the HADroid, black and terrible and dishing out death like prison food to inmates.

  The aide turns away and feels the confused urge to simultaneously run… and vomit. He does neither, because just as his mind moves to urge him to one action or the other, he’s shredded by heavy-caliber machine gun fire that chews him up and peppers the road and men behind him.

  He never has time to regret following Dresser, because that time has passed forever.

  * * *

  I return to consciousness lying on my belly in the barn.

  I feel a boot on my back and the cold rigid steel of a gun barrel pressed to the back of my head, but for a minute that is all I know. In slow motion my mind starts to rejoin reality, and as it does, I find I’m saddened that I even woke up. I begin to remember who I am and why I’m here, and the death that surrounds me now like a shroud. With measured caution, respectful of the gun aimed at my brain, I slow-swivel my head to the right, and I see April, seated with her back against a milking stall. Our eyes meet, but almost immediately her gaze flees from mine.

  When the retreat starts, we don’t know what’s going on or why. We just know it starts. First there are shouts and cries in the distance, then we hear screams and gunfire outside the barn and the soldiers who guard us begin scattering in every direction. There are explosions, and we listen as the sounds of battle move past us and northward.

  I roll over on my back and stare upward, baptized in the sickening feeling that nothing good will ever happen again. That the whole world is drowned in sorrows.

  Then April appears. Looking down on me like an angel. She doesn’t smile. She just kneels, and I can feel her turning me back over. I give in to her pushes, and I can feel as she cuts the zip ties that bind my arms.

  I roll over, and the angel reappears. Again, there is no smile. No glint of a shared dream. No look of forgiveness or understanding.

  “Find Ben and go,” she says without tremor or affection in her voice.

  I sit up and watch as she walks away. When she’s gone, I speak to her. But she’s too far away to hear me.

  “His name is Frank,” I say.

  * * *

  The battle is over. Frank won.

  The rest of us lost.

  We made it out of there, at least so far, Frank and I did. After April left, I searched the rubble of the house for a set of clothes for the naked Frank, and I found an old pair of Mose’s boots too.

  I didn’t see Mose or Sarah again.

  When it was over we took horses (another theft to my account) and made our way cross country to Drury Falls. We got there after nightfall, and the town was completely dark. A town that had once seemed to me like a trip back in time to a simpler and purer day in Middle America was now more like a scene from a Twilight Zone episode.

  Not a soul stirred. No soldiers standing around fires. No Amish refugees, homeless and fleeing destruction. No dogs searching for a meal. No Englischers. It was as if some force had sucked all the life out of the town. The single traffic light was dark too, like a black period at the end of a sentence.

  We located the drugstore and found the door open. There were newspapers spilled on the floor, signs of a hurried evacuation, but no one had looted the place. It wasn’t that kind of town. It was just empty. As if everyone had left in the Rapture. Like maybe they vanished into the ether. Of course they did. Drury Falls would now forever be an anecdote, a cautionary name… like Chernobyl or Lexington Green or Sainte-Mère-Église or Waterloo.

  I was able to get some hair dye and some razors and things. A couple of power bars and bottles of water and Gatorade. We’ll need to change our appearance, and stay alive if that’s possible. Because that’s all we have left. Not hope. Only the challenge of staying alive when everyone wants us dead.

  We couldn’t head directly south from Drury Falls because I figured the soldiers would still be down there. Somewhere. Regrouping. So we headed north until we reached the edge of town.

  As we passed the old abandoned motel, I looked over, and for a brief moment I thought I saw the flash of purple-blue flame. A lighter flaring in the night as we rode by. And in my mind I thought I heard the name “Kenny” on the wind and a chuckle traveling with it. I stopped, and that’s when I saw the shadowy outline of Gordon the Night Watch leaning against the last building in the row. Smoking a cigar shorter than his thumb. The red cherry of the stogie glowed and then disappeared as the homeless man threw it to the ground.

  When I looked again, Gordon was gone.

  We swung to the left down a turn row to cut through some trees, and as we did I thought I heard Gordon laughing.

  “Be safe, Kenny!”

  That’s what I thought I heard. But I couldn’t be sure.

  * * *

  Frank doesn’t speak.

  At least for now he doesn’t. He just rides along in silence and does what I say. He stims now and then, but his bolts are gone and he shows every sign that he’s retreated back into the shell of autism. Back where I found him. Or maybe he’s just hiding out, unwilling to deal with man’s inhumanity to man. No outbursts or changing now, but he’s lost something he’d had there for a while. That spark of hope that maybe the world is worth experiencing.

  The outside seems to hold nothing for him now.

  We’ll make our way to somewhere, and from there we’ll go somewhere else. Who knows? I reckon we’re dead already anyway. Wh
at else can I do?

  I’m not a good man, and I’ve never been one. I’m plenty bad I suppose, now that I’ve seen the consequences of my actions up close and personal like. No… I’m definitely not a good man. Still, I want to keep Frank alive as long as I can.

  Maybe that is the only good thing I’ll ever do.

  THE END

  EPILOGUE

  We’re on a bus headed south. As much as possible I’ve changed our appearance, but with what’s going on right now in the country I doubt it matters much one way or the other. Frankly, I’m surprised the buses are still running at all.

  Frank is wearing jeans and a bulky hoodie with a knit cap pulled down low over his ears. He wears yellow sunglasses and has earphones in, even though they only run into his pocket—he doesn’t have an iPod or anything. He’s just looking the part like I told him to do. He can watch or listen to almost anything he wants right in his head.

  I was glad to find the safe warehouse in Lexington was still there and intact, so now we have IDs and burner phones and ways to make contact.

  And Frank reloaded. He didn’t ask me. He just did.

  Who am I to stop him?

  I look across the aisle, and a man is reading a paper. The headlines shout the things we’ve heard in snippets and bits and fevered rumors whispered by strangers ever since we caught the bus just south of Lexington, Kentucky.

  DARPA Downed by Hack Attack

  Terrorist EMP Devastates Ohio; Unrest in Middle America

  Government in Disarray after Massive Cyber Incursion

  And then there was this one…

  Bank and Credit Card Companies Helpless After Loss of Data; Backups Wiped Clean