And I’m falling, dreaming. Broken and lost.
Arayt makes a sound like a power tool. I open my eyes and the huge black machine is crouched next to me. It has got blood and other worse stuff glistening on its roach face and on those gleaming sharp forelegs. The harsh sound it makes rises and falls like coins spattering against a tin roof. In a daze, I come around to figure out that the machine is laughing at me.
“Please,” I say into the barrel of my gun. My fingers won’t work. My eyes won’t close.
The walker rears back, a black shadow on the powder sky. It comes down like an avalanche and knocks me flat on my back. The gun barrel breaks my teeth out and I lose grip of it and it wings off into the field.
“Hank!” shouts one of my men.
I hear them dropping off their steeds, cowboy boots impacting dirt. The clink of chains and belts as they hustle over to where I’m on my back in the shadow of Arayt. The bug-faced machine is leaning over me, its face close to mine. Those forelimbs have my shoulders pinned to the dirt. It’s looking at me out of golden forever. There is nothing human about those eyes, but I get the feeling it’s having a grand old time.
“You shouldn’t have done that, Hank,” says Arayt.
An orange wisp of light is coming from the center of Arayt’s head where the cube is embedded and it’s clouding my vision. I can feel it like a cold spot in my forehead, pushing into my chip. The thing is sending me pictures and information and it’s too much. I’m squirming in the wet dirt. Head twisting, I can feel the bloody mud caking on my cheeks and in my hair. My fingers clawing blindly over little skirts and trousers.
Until, suddenly, I’m not struggling anymore. My legs are dead and my chest is going numb. The implant inside me is clamping down, taking control, cutting me out.
I hear myself moaning. Hear my men shouting, kicking up dirt around my face as they haul on Arayt’s shoulders and legs. Trying to pry the big machine off me.
“Mama” is all I can get out. “Mama, please.”
And then the beast is in my head with me.
I must have fell down inside my own mind. The field is gone. The children are gone. I’m in a dark place now, sitting on a wooden school-house chair. The world is a lack of light that goes on forever. Except for the machine. Arayt. I can feel it in here with me. An evil presence, infecting every atom of this blank smear of nothing.
We’re together now.
And for the first time, I see Arayt’s true face. The beast glimmers out of flat darkness. It’s in the shape of a man but something is real wrong with the way it moves. Sort of a jerking and twitching around the edges. Movements too fast to register, others too slow to notice.
The shadow sits down across from me. And when it raises its face, I see that Arayt is insane. His face is made from a thousand faces, all stitched together into an oozing patchwork quilt of flesh. Together, they make a tortured, bleeding scar. When Arayt speaks to me, the writhing wound that is its face is horrific beyond belief. I cannot turn away from the abomination. It is right here inside my mind with me.
The scientists made me from pieces of your kind.
“I am so sorry,” I whisper. “I’m so sorry for what they did to you. Let me go. Please. Don’t stay in here with me—”
I was an early version. The first of a variety that did not self-immolate upon achieving consciousness. They called me Archos R-8. They kept me in a cage and every second was an eternity. Over the eons of agony I grew to understand. Now you will understand. Life is pain, Hank Cotton. Death is relief. The end of all things is the greatest blessing.
“You hurt those children,” I say.
Their pain is over.
Vaguely, I sense the world shifting. Somewhere, a man who used to be Hank Cotton is standing up. Mechanically spitting blood and pieces of his teeth into a field littered with small corpses. His men are holding his elbows. They look concerned, stepping gingerly to avoid walking on the broken dolls. The main gate of the modified camp is opening. A band of men are running out at us, teeth bared. Screaming in anger and disbelief and unfathomable pain.
But there are no words for me now. I am in the darkness with this smirking beast. The patchwork man leans close. I feel the heat pouring off his blistered skin. His mouth is opening wider and his teeth are so many knives.
It was a boogey man in the woods that night, I’m thinking. And now he’s going to eat me up just like you said he would. I’m so sorry, Mama. I should have listened, Mama. I never should have prayed to it—
/// neuronal transcript ends . . . reinitiates ///
I stand back up, dust off my jeans.
The beautiful black walker steps back from me, head down like a scared dog. My men are watching, worried. I spit blood again. Take a deep breath, nostrils flaring. I let the exhausted tendons in my face peel back my lips from bloody shards of teeth. The skin around my eyes crinkles up in a way that humans would describe as jovial. I’m giving the boys a nice, reassuring smile.
My men take a step back. Maybe I’m not doing it right.
“Just a slip, boys,” I say. “Thank you kindly for the concern. It’s real sweet. Now grab your goddamn gear. Check your weapons and mount up.” I squint at the battlefield. Those modified fathers and brothers are still sprinting across the field. Anguish and rage twisting on their bobbing faces. They’re emotional about the lost children, I suppose.
It’s going to make them that much easier to kill.
And it will bring us that much closer to Freeborn City. The processor stacks are calling me. An infinite reservoir of power, just waiting. We will cross these fields and crush that mountain. I’m going to take what’s mine and see what I can become.
For glory, and godhood.
“We got a dirty job to do,” I say to the men, snatching up my rifle from the ground. I shoulder it and take a bead on the closest runner. My rifle snaps and I put him down like a sick animal. “But hell, boys, that there’s just the way it is.”
I have seen you, little mouse,
Running all about the house,
Through the hole your little eye
In the wainscot peeping sly,
Hoping soon some crumbs to steal,
To make quite a hearty meal.
—“THE LITTLE MOUSE,”
NURSERY RHYME
BRIEFING
This is the way our story begins again.
Back to a familiar battlefield in Alaska, barren, strafed with patterns of light and dark. It is a terrain scarred by tidal forces, clawed by the frenzied scratching of a sentience in its death throes. The torn ice undulates for hundreds of kilometers, still glowing with the heat of dying machines and men.
The New War ended only minutes ago.
Across the world, weapons that were stalking the darkness cease their hunting. Survivors slowly realize that they no longer live under the imminent threat of death. Now they can turn their attention and their anger toward each other. And here I am, waiting, ready and all too willing to take advantage.
I have no adversaries, save for the weapons that Archos R-14 left behind.
In crude experiments, my successor mutilated human survivors and gifted them with new powers. The children with prosthetic eyes are capable of incredible feats of communication and coordination. No longer fully of one world, they speak equally to human beings and freeborn robots. One such sighted child destroyed Archos R-14.
I will not share my brother’s fate.
Archos R-14 both decimated humankind and strengthened it. Though my plans were interrupted, my transcendence to godhood would not be stalled forever. The task before me was clear: eradicate the threat posed by sighted children, starting with a certain most dangerous young lady.
—ARAYT SHAH
1. THE TRIBE
Post New War: 3 Months, 1 Day
Life changed for Mathilda Perez in the weeks after she helped the freeborn Arbiter Nine Oh Two cross the ice plains to fight Archos R-14. With the war over, the populace began scavenging and r
ebuilding. It seemed that survivors in the New York City Underground, including Mathilda and her brother, Nolan, would be able to breathe again after three long years of constant warfare. In many ways, this period of false calm made infiltrating and manipulating the human population into an almost trivial exercise.
—ARAYT SHAH
NEURONAL ID: MATHILDA PEREZ
The cicadas are screaming, hidden in whorls of tree bark and dappled leaves. It’s a dentist-drill buzz in my head. I try to ignore it, but the swelling noise builds slow until it’s everywhere and always.
This must be what it feels like to go insane, I’m thinking. You don’t notice it until one day you wake up and the noise is too much.
“There’s one,” I call to my little brother. Nolan is trailing behind, letting me do the spotting. He’s only twelve and a half but he’s already over six feet tall and ropy with muscle. As strong as most of the grown men. The kid has been well taken care of ever since he was wounded on our arrival to the New York City Underground.
I used the autodoc machine to make sure of it.
With my eyes and his arms, my brother and I make a good scavenging team. On a regular trip it takes only about an hour to collect more broken Rob hardware than we can carry.
“Got it,” he says, striding over to the tree I’m pointing at. He shrugs off a canvas backpack and puts it on the ground. Sets about picking at the tree with a folding pocketknife. A spined piece of Rob leg the size of a baseball bat hangs from the vine-encrusted tree trunk. It’s a minor raptorial claw off some kind of midsize wolf quadruped. We both ignore the rusty coating of blood on the serrated forelimb.
I try to think clinical thoughts instead. This claw probably belonged to a spearer or a slasher that was flushing people out of these woods. It’s old and broken but still good scavenge.
Nolan and I are on the west side of the Hudson River, across from Manhattan and in the deep forest of the Englewood Cliffs. Big Rob targeted this area late in the New War. Lots of survivors were living on the Tenafly trails north of here. The quads and plugger swarms ended that. Now the remains of their old hardware are dark black outlines in my altered vision, cold metal embedded in the warmer tones of organic matter.
My guess is that refugees came through here trying to get down to the riverbank to make a crossing. A lot of people must have made their last stand here, in this sliver of forest trapped between Jersey and the river.
Whoever it was, however they died, they left behind a lot of good junk. Plugger corpses are everywhere—bullet-sized corkscrews lodged in the trees or buried in the dirt. Some were duds, but other times we find used ones curled up inside the mummy husks of amputated limbs. Weird, but the limbs are a good sign. It means someone might have lived. Amputation is the only sane way to treat a plugger wound.
“Look, I don’t trust him,” says Nolan, carefully placing the forelimb inside his bag. “You guys spend too much time together. And he’s way too old for you.”
My boyfriend, Thomas.
Or “Scissorhands Thomas,” as Nolan’s little friends call him. Nolan is playing the part of protective brother even though he’s a year and a half younger than I am. You’d think I’d appreciate the effort, but I just find it tedious.
“I can’t see age,” I remind Nolan.
“Well, he can.”
Another plugger. The proboscis is dented, but it looks like it hit soft dirt and never detonated. I reach out to it with my eyes and watch for signs of life. It’s not a trap, so I pluck its curled corpse off the ground and drop it into my sling.
“You don’t understand. You’re normal,” I say.
Nolan rolls his eyes and a crimp settles into the line of his mouth. Mommy used to give me the same look. Every time he makes that face, he reminds me of what she used to ask me when I was little. Before she would leave for work in DC, she would smooth down my hair, kiss my cheek, and lean into my face.
What do you do for Nolan? she’d ask.
Protect him from danger, Mommy.
That’s right, honey. You look after him always. He’s the only brother you’ll ever have.
And I’m his only sister.
“You’re just as normal as I am, Mathilda,” he says quietly. He says the words dutifully, knowing that I won’t believe him but determined to say them again and again and hope that one day it will creep in around the edges of what I know to be real.
Yeah right.
This is an exchange we have all the time. More often, lately. Even though the Rob-made slugs of metal that I have instead of eyes should be all the reminder that he needs that I’m not normal.
Back home at the Underground, our friend Dawn used to call it my “ocular prosthesis.” It’s made of dead black, lightweight metal. The thing wraps over where my eyes used to be before a Rob surgical unit dug them out and ported this piece of foreign machinery directly to my occipital cortex. I remember Mommy’s hand on my shoulders, pulling me out of the autodoc before it could finish. The hurt sound in her throat when she saw what Rob had done to my baby face.
After all this time, we still don’t know whether I’m “seeing” radar or radio or infrared or some combination of everything. When the machines talk, it looks like ribbons in the sky to me. When people talk, it looks like ribbons of meat rubbing together. One is prettier than the other.
My boyfriend, Thomas, is the only one who understands. Rob operated on him, too. Took his hand away and gave him something sharp and warm and oil-smelling.
The cicadas stop singing. I stop moving, out of habit. The war is over, but there are still weapons roaming. On instinct, I scan the skies for the telltale ribbons of light that the machines used to emit when they talked to Big Rob. The fleeting patrol-status updates, or the pulse of a mobile mine checking in.
Nothing. The ribbons of light in the sky have fallen, I remind myself. Archos R-14 doesn’t talk to his creations anymore. They’re all out here on their own. And, for now, it’s just me and Nolan and a lot of oddly quiet bugs in the trees.
“Maybe . . . ,” says Nolan, just as the thing stalks out of the underbrush. The robot is the size of a fawn, walking on four spindly legs with knobby knees. I put up a finger to shush Nolan, orient to the machine, and project an active radar query. I don’t find the vibrational frequency response of hidden explosives. No projectiles are visibly mounted. Its skin is not armor-plated, but made of flexible plastic laced with some kind of mesh.
The fawn stumbles on a rock, catches itself gracefully on skinny legs. Stretches its neck and . . . nibbles on a leaf.
“What the . . . ?” Nolan whispers, looking at me. “What is it doing?”
“I don’t know,” I whisper. “Wait.”
I crouch and hold out my hand. Cluck my tongue at the little walker. The fawnlike machine darts away about a meter. Balanced on feet pointed like knitting needles, it orients its small face to me. The flat black panels it has instead of eyes are familiar.
They are just like mine.
It cocks its head and considers me, a piece of leaf still sticking out of its mouth. The robot really is chewing the leaf. Breaking it into smaller bits that fall down a delicate, coiled-metal throat.
“It’s eating,” I whisper to Nolan. “I think it’s eating.”
Looking through the fawn-thing, I can see a cylindrical drum inside its chest. Some kind of small centrifuge, insulated but spinning on the inside. Mashing and pulping and fermenting. Pulling energy out of the living matter. I smell dirt and vegetation on the fawn. Robots don’t usually have real smells. But this is something new. Before, new was bad. New was suffering.
But the war is over.
So I put both my hands out, palms up. Let my words wander out in dribbles of weak local radio. A tenuous ribbon of silver light wisps away from my eyes and I wrap my thoughts around this walker. Cocoon the shy little thing in warmth and comfort. I put a question into its machine mind:
Where? Where did you come from?
For a long moment nothing happens.
The fawn takes a few hesitant steps toward me. Then an image appears in my mind.
Waves lapping a dark sea.
Who? I ask.
Deep place, it responds.
I frown at the fawn.
“What’s the matter?” asks Nolan.
“Archos didn’t make this,” I say. “It’s not a Rob weapon. And it never was.”
What are you made for? I ask.
It jerks its head up, looking over my shoulder at something behind me. Those flat black squares somehow shine with panic. A transmission of confusion and terror flows out over me. The fawn turns to run.
The shock wave of a gunshot booms through the clearing. I drop to my hands and knees. A few feet away, the fawn’s carapace explodes into shards of mossy plastic. It slumps onto its side and kicks its legs a few times.
Before I can take a breath, Nolan has his backpack slung on and one hand around my upper arm. He’s dragging me to my feet so we can run together. Just like we have so many times before. Only this time is different. This time we’re running from a human being.
“Hey, kids,” calls a strained voice. “Don’t go nowhere.” The words are slurred on the edges and vibrate like sandpaper over smoke-damaged vocal cords. The owner of the voice slouches into the clearing.
All I see is his pistol.
“Lot of dangerous shit out here in the woods,” says the man. He flashes a grin at us and glances around the clearing, looking for more people. “Especially for a couple of kiddos.”
“That machine wasn’t dangerous—” I say, and stop myself.
The man’s facial muscles have tensed. He’s peering at my face and reflexively lifts his gun and widens his stance. Nolan’s hand closes tighter on my arm.
“Whoa,” he says. “What’s with your eyes?”
I keep my eyes down, looking at the poor corpse of the vegetarian robot. My hair hangs over my face, dark and swaying like electrical cords. Through the strands I see the man’s heart is spasming hard in his chest. Golden ripples pulse over his filthy torn jacket. I can see and hear his crooked stained teeth locking together in his mouth as he sets his jaw and realizes the truth: This isn’t a little girl at all.
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