by Jake Bible
Clay glanced at the readout in front of him. He’d been so focused on the herd coming at them that he hadn’t noticed the thin line directly before them. As the mech got closer, he quickly saw that the line wasn’t so thin. It was quite wide.
“Gibbons? I need a new route now!” Clay shouted as he piloted the mech north, parallel to the raging river that was only a quarter kilometer ahead of them. “Gibbons!”
“I heard you!” Gibbons shouted back. “I hear everything you say, pal! I don’t have a damn choice, ya know!”
“Then give me a new route!” Clay barked.
“There isn’t one!” Gibbons yelled. “We are going to have to cross this river!”
“Son of a bitch,” Clay growled as he turned the mech back towards the long body of water that was violently raging through the middle of the prairie. “Where the hell did this river come from?”
“I don’t know,” Gibbons said. “I cross-referenced all maps in my database and have no record of it. The last time the database was updated, there was no river.”
“Yeah, well, we know how long ago that was,” Clay said. “So no surprise that the landscape has changed.”
“Not this dramatically,” Gibbons said. “Come on, pal, a river this size doesn’t just show up without some help.”
“Man-made?” Clay asked.
“Duh,” Gibbons said.
“That’s worse,” Clay said.
“How so?” Gibbons asked.
“It means resources and machinery capable of making a river,” Clay said. “We don’t want to get anywhere near the person or organization behind that.”
“Oh, right,” Gibbons said. “Very true.”
“Bridges?” Clay asked.
“No,” Gibbons replied instantly.
“How about shallow points we can ford?” Clay asked.
“Can’t tell,” Gibbons said. “We’ll have to get closer.”
“Great,” Clay said.
He piloted the mech directly at the river, getting it within ten meters before turning back in a northerly direction.
“Anything?” Clay asked.
“A possibility up ahead,” Gibbons said. “Six meters or seven meters.”
“Six or seven meters? Deep?” Clay exclaimed. “That’s up to the cockpit!”
“It is either that or twenty meters,” Gibbons said. “Whatever made this river put a serious gouge in the earth.”
“You’re telling me,” Clay said.
“Four meters then cross,” Gibbons said. “But we have to hurry.”
“I am,” Clay said.
“No, hurry!” Gibbons insisted. “Hurry! Clay, we need to cross now!”
Proximity alarms rang out in the cockpit and Clay looked at the scanners. The bison were on them. The mech was caught between the huge river and the giant herd. There was nowhere to go.
“Clay!” Gibbons yelled as the herd crashed into the mech, taking it out at the legs and sending it tumbling onto the riverbank.
Which quickly crumbled under the weight of the machine and the herd. It all happened so fast that Clay barely had time to register that the riverbank wasn’t mud and dirt, but thick concrete.
“Seal us in!” Clay yelled as the water rushed up over the cockpit.
“I am!” Gibbons yelled back. “But we have a problem! Air tanks are not full! Not even close!”
“Dammit!” Clay yelled as the mech was swept downriver by the raging current, thousands of bison floundering about them as they were forced into the rapids by the power of the herd.
Three
“Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.”
“I hate you…” Clay whispered, his breath short and shallow. His chest hitched as he struggled for air. “So much…”
“Yeah, sorry, pal,” Gibbons said. “I’m just trying to keep your spirits up as I figure a way out of this for us.”
Clay couldn’t answer. He fought to keep his eyes open, his lids heavy, his need to sleep overwhelming. But in the end, his body couldn’t hold on. The struggle for air was not a negotiation, it was an immutable law.
“Clay?” Gibbons called. “Clay! Wake up, pal! Come on, man, you cannot die yet! I’m close! So close!”
Clay’s head rolled on his neck in response, but he did not open his eyes.
“Clay! Dammit! Wake the hell up!” Gibbons yelled.
He boosted the volume in Clay’s com, creating a high-pitched whine of feedback that should have jolted a coma victim awake. Clay only sighed, his chest deflating, deflating, deflating. But not inflating.
“No!” Gibbons cried.
He tried to get the mech under control, to swim it over to the side of the impossibly deep river, but the current was too strong. He even fired the stabilizing booster engines in his legs, something only to be used in emergency free falls, but all the engines managed to do was boil the water around them, destroying visibility.
Not that there was much to see. The view outside the cockpit was mostly drowned bison and submerged detritus that streamed past the mech. Thousands of dead animals bumped and banged into each other, their brown eyes wide with the fear of their last, living thoughts. Their mouths hung open, tongues lolling in the watery grave, powerful teeth destined to never chew another bite of prairie grass.
“Okay, think,” Gibbons admonished himself. It was a human affectation since his processing power meant he had several trillion thoughts in the time it took for him to utter the useless phrase. “THINK!”
An idea hit him. It was not a good idea, but it was an idea.
The mech was equipped with flamethrowers. They utilized a mix of gasses, since biodiesel fuel was too precious to waste despite the abundance of hemp crops on the continent. If he could divert the oxygen mixture from the torches, he could at least give Clay a few more minutes.
But Gibbons was an AI, not a fully articulated robot. He could pilot the mech, control a fifty-foot battle machine, but he couldn’t manage any intricate manipulations. Not the kind needed to detach the oxygen tanks from the flamethrower system and hook them to life support.
Unless…
“This is a bad idea,” Gibbons said as he managed to reach one giant mech hand over to the opposite forearm and pop open a hatch.
It was a struggle, but Gibbons got one of the tanks free. It hissed out oxygen as he brought it up close to the cockpit. He knew the weak points in the enclosure and he took aim. Then he slammed the hissing end of the tank straight through the plastiglass in the bottom right corner of the cockpit hatch.
Oxygen streamed into the cockpit. Along with as much water as could fit in the gaps between the tank and the plastiglass. It was a race between gas and liquid.
“Clay!” Gibbons yelled. “Clay! Wake up!”
Clay stirred as the pure oxygen reached first his lungs then his brain. His eyes blinked a few times and he groaned.
“Gibbons?” he croaked. “I’m…alive.”
“Not for long, pal,” Gibbons said. “Take some very, very deep breaths, alright? I need you to fill your lungs and body with as much oxygen as you can.”
“Sounds…like a…plan,” Clay whispered and struggled to give a thumbs up.
“Deep breaths,” Gibbons coached as Clay forced himself to fill his lungs. “That’s it, deep breaths. More. Keep going.”
“Phew,” Clay said. “I feel funky.”
“It’s pure oxygen,” Gibbons said. “Humans aren’t designed to breathe pure oxygen for long. But it’s better than dying.”
“Hey, Gibbons?” Clay asked as he rolled his head about and looked at the cockpit hatch. “Is that water? Is water coming in?”
“Yes,” Gibbons said. “Sorry. But it’s not a bad thing.”
“Are you shitting me?” Clay growled.
“Okay, it’s a bad thing,” Gibbons admitted. “But it’s what’s going to save your life.”
“Water filling the cockpit is going to save my life?” Clay as
ked. “I thought that’s what the oxygen was for?”
“No, like I said, humans aren’t designed to breathe pure oxygen,” Gibbons said. “Not long term. I just needed your brain to have plenty circulating through it before I do what I really need to do.”
“What’s that, buddy?” Clay asked. “What do you really need to do?”
“Drown you,” Gibbons said.
“You what?” Clay barked. “Have you lost your AI mind?”
“Nope, it’s right where I left it,” Gibbons chuckled. Clay did not. “Sorry. I’m a little nervous.”
“You’re nervous?” Clay yelled then began to cough. “Ow. My throat.”
“Yeah, that means it’s time,” Gibbons said. “Hey, Clay?”
“Screw you,” Clay said.
“I’m going to get you out of this,” Gibbons said. “It’s late October, so the water is cold enough. Doing this will buy us about twenty minutes. After that, I don’t think I can revive you.”
“Screw you,” Clay replied.
“Yes, well, I know you’re mad, but I can’t figure out any other way,” Gibbons said. “Twenty minutes more time to pull us out of this river. It’s that or you asphyxiate.”
“Which is different than drowning how?” Clay snapped.
“Your brain will still have oxygen when you drown,” Gibbons said. “If I let you asphyxiate, then your brain will use up all the oxygen before you die. Drowning equals dying first. It’s a race.”
“Screw you,” Clay muttered.
“Sorry,” Gibbons replied and plucked the oxygen free from the cockpit hatch.
Water poured into the cockpit, filling the space rapidly.
“This sucks! This sucks! This sucks!” Clay yelled.
“Stop it!” Gibbons yelled back. “You’re using oxygen! Breathe normally until the water reaches your head! Do not hold your breath and use up your oxygen! Gulp the water down as fast as possible and let it fill your lungs! I promise I’ll bring you back, Clay! You hear me, pal? I promise!”
Clay growled, but didn’t yell the long list of expletives that hovered on the tip of his tongue.
The water rose fast. It was an easy thing to do since the mech was tumbling head over heels down the huge river. There was no real up or down, just space to fill. It took less than a minute before Clay’s face became submerged.
He fought for only a second then opened his mouth wide and exhaled the air his lungs held. He inhaled, panicked, thrashed, tried to scream, then slowly went limp, his mouth gulping at non-existent air once, twice, three times before he went completely still.
Gibbons had formulated a plan. So while Clay drowned, the AI had been busy gathering as many dead bison into the mech’s arms as possible. A dozen then fifty then a hundred corpses were pressed to the mech’s chest. Several bison corpses got free and continued their journey under the river’s surface, but not enough to thwart Gibbons’ intentions.
The corpses were huge, and Gibbons had easily grabbed enough, so that the mech slowly began to rise, the gasses inside the dead animals buoying them towards the surface. But the mech weighed a hundred tons on a dry day. Many of the non-water tight storage compartments distributed throughout the mech’s body had already filled to capacity. His plan was not working.
“Come on you stupid corpses!” Gibbons shouted. “Float, dammit!”
They did not float. They just added to the mass that held the mech below the surface.
“Crap,” Gibbons sighed. “This sucks. Clay is going to kill me for killing him.”
Then the mech came to a sudden, jarring halt. Thousands of bison corpses began to pile up against it, pinning it to whatever had stopped its momentum.
“What the hell?” Gibbons muttered as he checked the scanner readings.
A wall. The mech was pressed against a huge concrete wall. Along with a couple hundred thousand bison. In seconds, the mech was covered in dead animals, not a single centimeter of its structure visible.
“Sorry, Clay,” Gibbons whispered. “So sorry.”
Four
The pain was excruciating. Both from the electricity that coursed through his body and from the expulsion of the immense quantity of water in his lungs. Clay puked and moaned, puked and moaned, then held up a hand.
“Stop,” he croaked. “Gibbons. Stop.”
“Alive!” Gibbons crowed. “You’re alive! Holy shit, I did it!”
“I’m alive,” Clay said and twirled a finger in the air. “Yay. And ow.”
“Sorry for the jolts,” Gibbons said. “I can’t perform CPR, so I shorted the controls in your pilot’s seat in hopes the shocks would start your heart back up.”
“It worked,” Clay gasped.
He lay in the pilot’s seat, his body limp and weak. He was freezing and didn’t even have the energy to shiver for warmth.
“Heat,” Clay whispered.
“Sorry, pal, but the heater is shot,” Gibbons said. “It’s going to take both of us a long while to fix it.”
“Wonderful,” Clay sighed. He blinked a few times, then stared at the cracked cockpit hatch as his eyes started to regain focus. “Gibbons? What the hell is going on?”
“We’re stuck,” Gibbons said.
“I figured that,” Clay said. “Where?”
“My guess is we hit a set of locks,” Gibbons said. “But sensors, scanners, and pretty much all external vid devices are crap. I’m working on rerouting systems now so I can get more information. But for the moment, all I can tell you is we are buried under a few hundred tons of dead bison.”
“Yeah, I can see that,” Clay said. He grimaced. “And smell it. Damn, that’s rank.”
A shiver finally came, but not to warm his body, it was out of disgust for the fluids that were leaking from the corpses and through the cracked cockpit hatch. Blood, urine, feces. It all came dripping into the cockpit. Luckily, the angle kept the fluids from hitting Clay directly. Which was of small comfort.
“How long was I dead?” Clay asked.
“Fifteen minutes,” Gibbons replied. “I wasn’t sure I could revive you.”
“You’d said I had twenty minutes?” Clay snapped. Or tried to. He didn’t have the energy to give a proper snap. “Gibbons? Did you lie to me?”
“Lie to you, pal? Nah,” Gibbons said.
“Ass,” Clay responded.
“There are many cases where humans have been revived after twenty minutes or more,” Gibbons said. “So, I didn’t lie. I just held back the fact that the numbers are very, very low and most die after only a few minutes.”
“I can’t believe you played me,” Clay said. “We’re talking death here, buddy. That’s not something we flesh and bone folks like to be toyed with.”
“Are you alive?” Gibbons asked.
“Yeah, I’m alive,” Clay answered.
“Then shut your meat hole, pal,” Gibbons said. “Unless you want to say thank you.”
Clay sat there, in silent thought.
“Oh, come on!” Gibbons shouted.
“Thanks, Gibbons,” Clay said finally. “I appreciate that you saved my life. Even though you did kill me first.”
“The water killed you,” Gibbons said. “I did not.”
“Splitting hairs,” Clay said.
Gibbons started to respond, but went quiet as the pile of bison they were buried under started to shift.
“Can you stand?” Gibbons asked.
“Are you kidding me?” Clay laughed. “I can barely blink. I was dead for fifteen minutes, you know.”
“As I am sure you will remind me for the rest of your life,” Gibbons said.
The pile shifted again, and the mech shook slightly. Clay felt the machine shift underneath him.
“We aren’t stable, are we?” Clay asked.
“Not in the slightest,” Gibbons said. “We are sandwiched between corpses. There are as many under us as are on us.”
“You said something about locks? What locks? Are we against a door?” Clay asked.
“No, locks like with a dam,” Gibbons replied. “This river is man-made. It’s entirely concrete, and we have hit the end. The water was drained through the locks. I believe the river still flows underneath and around us, but I am not sure.”
“Huh,” Clay said.
“That’s all? Huh?” Gibbons responded.
“What else am I going to say?” Clay asked. “I just came back to life. Concrete river locks are underwhelming after that experience.”
The bison corpses continued to shake and shift. Slowly, glimpses of light began to peek through the bodies. Then a huge chunk of the pile of death was removed as a thick metal crane claw clamped around the corpses and lifted them up off the mech’s cockpit. Clay shielded his eyes as muted sunlight slammed into his brain.
“Oh, man, I’m going to need some aspirin,” Clay said. “And at least two barrels of hooch. I don’t care what kind as long as it numbs everything.”
“I have minimal functions,” Gibbons said. “From what I can see, that’s a Vernacht construction mech claw. I couldn’t say the exact model. Unless it’s only a salvaged part on a different machine.”
“Out here, it could be anything,” Clay said. “These prairies ain’t exactly a wasteland, but they are damn close. Who knows what the locals have cobbled together.”
From far above, faint and barely audible, Clay could hear shouting. He squinted into the sunlight, but the top edge of the riverbank, if that’s what it could be called, was too far off to see anything clearly.
“Company,” Clay said.
“I had surmised as much since Vernacht construction mechs do not operate themselves,” Gibbons said.
“Where’s my pistol?” Clay asked. He hunted around by the pilot’s seat and saw a strip of leather belt sticking out from underneath. “There we go.”
He tried not to grunt in pain too much as he reached down for the belt. Clay managed to get it free from under the pilot’s seat, but as he lifted it up, he realized it didn’t make much difference. Water poured out of the barrel and cylinder as he plopped the weapon into his lap.
“The cartridges are probably crap,” Clay said. “I’ve never been a good enough munitions tech to make them perfectly sealed. Good enough so they kill and don’t explode in my face, but not water tight.”