Cyber-Knife: Apex Predator

by Phil Wrede

  “Can you manipulate lights of all sorts?” Cyber-Knife asked. “Is that how you managed to chase off my attackers, and stay hidden otherwise?”

  A younger being peeled herself off from the group and approached Cyber-Knife and the old woman. She was taller, relatively, and lankier, probably in her physical prime. “Grandmother Hnid, you have to stop!” she yelled, a warrior's authority in her voice.

  Cyber-Knife was startled at this sudden outburst, but the old woman stood her ground. “Pkar, you need to have more patience. And a little faith wouldn't hurt you, either.”

  “I will have as much faith as you like when we walk along a well-trod path, but this? Never in our history have we brought a stranger freely and willingly to our home,” Pkar said.

  “You can see into his heart as well as I, see the goodness inside him,” Hnid replied.

  “Goodness?” Pkar spat. “Grandmother, this man, his people, there is no room in their hearts for anything but lust for conquest. He will not save us.”

  A low murmur began to rise in the crowd; clearly, Pkar didn’t hold an opinion unique among her people.

  Though his creators had not designed him with gentleness in his nature, Cyber-Knife tried to speak gently. “May I speak for myself?”

  The old woman held out her hand, pressed it to Cyber-Knife's chest to hold him back. “You do not have to do this.”

  Pkar smiled, and Cyber-Knife could see that the sharp teeth in her mouth. “Speak,” she said, “though you may find that you cannot manipulate us as easily as others your people have come to conquer.”

  “I did not come here to conquer anybody,” Cyber-Knife said. “I didn't even know about you before I dove in through your camouflage. My mission will win this war, and leave you in peace. You can make your lives where you wish: underground, or on the surface, without any threat of oppression or annihilation.”

  “I see your thoughts in my mind. You kill innocents,” Pkar said, “and with no small amount of glee. We rescue the tunneling rodents from the enemy, free their minds and rehabilitate them. If we had come upon you earlier, we would have rescued them instead. You murder them because to it is inconvenient to let them live.”

  “I have come here to save the world,” Cyber-Knife proclaimed, “and I have the ancient weapon Excalibur at my side to ensure that I succeed.”

  Grandmother crossed to granddaughter, saying, “Take a good look at him, Pkar. Does he hold anything in his mind besides belief in the words he speaks?”

  “His mind contains more voices than just his own,” Pkar replied. “That gives me pause.”

  “He has promised to leave us in peace after he completes his mission. If we can help in him in task, we should welcome him,” Hnid said.

  “Not if he's an enemy himself.”

  “I know what I am doing, granddaughter,” Hnid said, forcefully.

  “As you say,” Pkar grumbled, stepping close to Cyber-Knife. “Do not remain one more moment than you must, American; our jeopardy grows the longer you are here. If your actions contrast with your words even slightly, I will punish you.”

  With every word Pkar spoke Cyber-Knife felt a dull pressure grow in his chest. Soon, he could feel not only the oxygen in his bloodstream vanish, but the reactors powering his cybernetic components dim. Whatever she was doing to him, it would kill him, and faster than any way the alien robot ninjas could. “I... understand,” he gasped. Instantly, the pressure released.

  Silent, Pkar turned her back to Cyber-Knife and her grandmother.

  “What -” Cyber-Knife heaved in between breaths, “what did my people do to you?”

  “You need to rest,” Hnid replied.

  The old woman gently sidled up to Cyber-Knife, offering herself as a walking aid. Cyber-Knife gladly accepted her silent offer of help.

  As they walked, Cyber-Knife asked, “Could you at least tell me what you call yourselves, so I know how to describe the people I need to win over?”

  It was several halting steps before Hnid replied, “We call ourselves the Taykinh.”

  CHAPTER 4

  True to Pkar's word, small pens of the rat-like creatures dotted the town, ones the enemy's twisting and influence had not mutilated beyond saving. They chirped serenely as Cyber-Knife and Hnid passed them - had the Taykinh domesticated them, given them salvation as beasts of honest burden?

  As near as Cyber-Knife could tell, Hnid was a woman of stature and respect in the community, but that didn't entitle her to a more elaborate living space than anyone else. Cyber-Knife knew of materialism by reputation, so he thought that maybe in a society where the visual sense had been replaced by other abilities, the need to show off, to dramatize your living space in the hope of impressing guests and passers-by, did not consume you as completely. If no one sees it, there's little reason to collect it.

  Hnid had two rooms within her dirt-packed walls: one for sleeping, and another, larger, like a living room. Aside from a little sunken area right in the middle that looked like a space for cooking, the main room had no furnishings, not even a stool. When he first walked in, Cyber-Knife appreciated being welcomed into someone's home, but he didn’t quite know what differentiated the ground in here from the rest of the cave.

  It took barely a moment for him to understand just how wrongly he’d assumed. Hnid pointed at a spot on the ground near the cooking area and it rose up, a great curving shape forming out of the earth. Cyber-Knife couldn’t match the shape with references from his databanks immediately, but it didn't take him very long to realize he stood before an earthen approximation of a fainting couch, one that looked almost perfectly proportioned to his size.

  Hnid held up a single finger. “Before you sit, a favor. That weapon on your hip, it fires plasma?”

  Cyber-Knife's eyes widened; of all the things she could know, how would she know that? “...Yes,” he eventually said.

  Hnid pointed that finger at the cooking circle. “Please take your weapon and shoot it in here.”

  “Just like that?” Cyber-Knife said.

  “Precisely.”

  Cyber-Knife drew the plasma pistol from its holster and aimed it hesitantly. “All right. I'm firing now.” The pistol's emitter whirred as he squeezed the trigger, and with a little zapping sound, the blast flew forth, lighting up the room with a green flash.

  It didn't reach its target. Faster than even Cyber-Knife's eyes could see, Hnid had dashed forward and caught the bolt in midair. She held it between her hands, though she didn’t touch it directly, and began to almost knead it, flattening it out like a disc. A little while longer, and she placed it at the base of the curve in the ground. As she stepped away, a green fire sprouted from the floor, flames licking up near the top of the basin. She eventually brought over a pot, and a kettle, and shaped out of more earth arms from which to hold them over the fire.

  “Tea is a great aid to rest,” she said, placing the pot and kettle on their hooks.

  Though he didn't need to eat, Cyber-Knife had indulged his curiosity in the past, and he certainly felt curious today. He didn't begrudge Hnid her hospitality and laid right down on the couch, Excalibur across his chest. Hnid sat with her legs crossed next to the couch, slowly rubbing her hands; she clearly didn’t want to pass up a roaring fire, either.

  “I think I have a good idea how your people destroyed the Unknowns when they found me,” Cyber-Knife said, as much to make conversation as to investigate.

  “Unknown...” Hnid replied, “you call the metal plasmapedes that? Even coming from the military, that name indicates little imagination.”

  Cyber-Knife tried to think of the right way to respond. “I have a computer in my head that has all the information we've ever learned about the alien robot ninjas. All of their different types of warriors have a different designation: Class One, Class Two, like that. The computer couldn't recognize it when it saw it, and because I have the least creative computer of all time in my head, it flagged them 'Class Unknown.'�
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  “Creativity is a subjective thing,” Hnid said, "and I think you made a mistake ceding those decisions to machines in the first place. But, yes, our patrol of warriors could redirect the enemy's weapons back into themselves and chase them off when they saved you.”

  Cyber-Knife repositioned himself so that he could see his host. “Your people amaze me, Hnid, the way you can fashion the world to match your desires.”

  “I must caution you, this world we've made is not a very large one.”

  “But it's yours; you've built it, and you can defend it. If I knew a fraction of what you know, I could end this war in hours.”

  Hnid gestured to the poisoned ground above them. “This gift does not make reparations for generations of warfare. Our world exists simply because your world, in its turn, made us.”

  Cyber-Knife's eyes bulged and he tilted his head ever so slightly. It took him a moment before he could say, “Why haven't you evacuated to a safe zone? A refuge should be able to absorb your community without much impact on its supplies.”

  Hnid sighed, as though she spoke to a child. “Your cities would not welcome us, nor would we ever feel at ease enough to call them home. Such a wide gulf exists between the peoples we have become that the word, 'American,' causes our old to shrink in terror, and the young among us to bristle with anger.”

  “Couldn't you at least rebuild this place somewhere without the alien robot ninja threat constantly overhead?” Cyber-Knife said.

  “You underplay the danger. The beachhead for their occupation of this world lies not far from here at all,” Hnid said.

  “You would rather live among the enemy than us. Jesus fucking Christ,” Cyber-Knife spat.

  Hnid reached her hand out towards the kettle atop the fire, waving her fingers as though she played some kind of musical instrument. “Pardon me a moment, please. Our tea is almost ready.” Indeed, it had begun to steam. As Hnid poured the water over leaves floating in a pair of modest cups, Cyber-Knife found himself wondering if those cups had actually sat next to the fire a moment ago, then decided he'd rather not think about it. He set Excalibur down on the ground and straightened himself upright.

  Hnid handed Cyber-Knife hot tea, certainly, but not scalding. He could drink it immediately, which did not always happen with tea, at least according to what his computer told him. He sipped it, and it tasted strangely bittersweet, like the regret that teases at with a faded memory. He felt his nerves calming as he swallowed, and deployed a squad of nanites to analyze the tea's chemical composition, for archival purposes.

  Hnid took long, languid sips from her cup, breathing in deeply; she moved as if each action she took had its own specific purpose, and it needed fulfilling before she could go on to the next. They drank their tea without talking.

  Cyber-Knife broke the silence. “You have secrets. How do you decide if you can trust me with them?”

  “The tea will help me to know,” she replied.

  Cyber-Knife burped, tasting something foul as the air rushed up his throat. “Come again?”

  Hnid set her cup down, stood, and said, “The way your body processes it will tell me more about you than I could learn if I spoke to you for a decade.”

  Cyber-Knife coughed violently, dropping his cup to the ground, feeling his mechanical eyeballs do something they had never been intended to do - bulge in their sockets - as he curled back into himself. The computer had completed its analysis: the chemical composition of the tea looked nothing like anything it had ever seen. He could barely hold enough air in his lungs to say, “Why?”

  As Cyber-Knife fell off the earthen couch, vomiting up the liquid in his stomach, Hnid leaned over him. “When the Taykinh first retreated down here,” she said, “we could hope to drink only this tea. It purified the poisoned water that seeped down from the surface. We thirsted, and it quenched that thirst; now we control the degree to which it affects us. It kept us alive in the early years, and it keeps us alive in the here and now.”

  The slat in Cyber-Knife's right palm slid open, his internal plasma blaster hummed as it charged. What he threw up now, he'd never seen before, let alone eaten. A lance in the back of his mind grew hot and started to move forward. He could feel the rage building to a tidal wave inside him again. Someone needed to pay for doing this, and Hnid would be that someone as soon as he could stand upright again.

  Hnid took Cyber-Knife's human hand in her own, seeking to tame the monster lurking just beneath his skin. “Do not fear what happens here, Cyber-Knife. The hard part here has nearly passed. No need to kill.”

  Cyber-Knife had begun to dry heave, his muscles twisting and contorting themselves around the vacuum in his belly, but as suddenly as it had come upon him, the sickness passed. Sweat dripped off his brow and onto the floor, spattering the dirt beneath him, and the pain had started to pass into a kind of vague euphoria - as if his body, having purged itself of the weight of toxins, had become so much lighter. He couldn't remember what had caused him to feel such fury a moment ago; he switched his plasma blaster back to a standby mode.

  “What," he hissed, “the fuck,” teeth clenched to guard against more vomiting, “did you do to me?"

  “We did not understand what happened the first time we drank the tea, either,” Hnid said, “but over time, we determined that it cleanses you, body and spirit.”

  Excalibur practically bounced along the floor as it added, “An imperiled world and vagueness make for a terrible marriage, my dear lady!”

  Cyber-Knife spat out the rest of the detritus that had collected inside his mouth. He felt something wriggle as it passed his lips, and he had no interest in getting a better look. “So, I'm not just puking out warm water and tea leaves, here? That, what, this is some kind of literalized version of the bad in me?”

  “Yes.” After a moment, Hnid added, “You had less inside of you than I had imagined.”

  What if I had had, I don't know, too much?”

  “Then, you would have died, just as some of my people have died every year since we first moved underground. But, it pushes only those with true wickedness in their spirits to death. Your spirit has no greater weight holding it down...” Hnid's voice trailed off as she examined Cyber-Knife, her palms facing forward, “than a child's.”

  “I know a good explanation for that,” Excalibur said.

  “Of course,” Hnid said. “You weren't born, but grown. The poisons of the evils of the world do not coarse through your veins like blood. Not to say that you have an innate immunity, of course.”

  Cyber-Knife sighed. “Have you waited for a savior?”

  “You think in such specific terms,” Hnid said. “We hoped for an opportunity, and the world is not so cruel as to afford us only one.”

  “Would you tell me if you thought I brought that opportunity with me?”

  Hnid smiled. “On the contrary,” she began, sitting down next to Cyber-Knife and pushing her matted hair out of her face, “you came to us at a critical juncture in your development as a man. The right push could lead you to do great things, and the wrong could spur you on to commit unspeakably evil acts. Without the help that I and my people can offer, you may lose your way, and travel so far down a path of darkness that not even the mythical Excalibur can save you. I refuse to let that happen.”

  “We refuse to let that happen!” Excalibur cried.

  Cyber-Knife pushed himself to his knees, half-heartedly dusting the dirt from his clothes. “You sure change your tone quickly,” he said to the sword.

  “Not such a tough thing to do when you have the right information,” Excalibur said. It swiftly turned its attention back to Hnid. “What do you reckon you could teach him to do?”

  Hnid wrinkled up her lips in a long thought before she responded, “Your creators bred you, equipped you for victory over the occupiers. I can teach you something far grander: how to win victory over yourself.

  “The machinery the Army implanted in your head doesn't
just empower you - it restricts you, as well. The ultimate weapon would not have much use to its creators if they could not aim it reliably.

  “Long experience with machines of war have taught us many things," Hnid continued, "but particularly that the machines' builders often fear them the most. They build in layers and layers of redundancies to ensure those weapons do not turn back towards them. Inevitably, they will have treated you the same way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Men made you, Cyber-Knife, some of them honorable, or even good, but men overwhelmingly terrified at the thought of a world that refuses to bend to their will. When they decide you have served your purpose, or that your strength has become too great, they will activate the safety protocols buried beneath every layer of your programming, and whatever those measures do to you, you can feel confident they will either imprison you and make you wait until the time that they need you to kill again, or killed outright yourself.”

  “You think you can serve me some tea and turn me against the people for whom I’ve fought every day of my life?” Cyber-Knife said, moving to pick up Excalibur, “I've heard enough of this. We have a mission.”

  “And after you complete it, one of two things will happen,” Hnid said. “They either blow you up and activate another weapon, or they lock you away and make you live a life of endless war. Is that what you really want?”

  “I was made for this!” Cyber-Knife yelled, slamming his hand on the ground. “Do you have any idea how many people spend their lives lamenting a lack of purpose, thrashing about for some meaning in the world?” He gestured at his temple. “I've had that since the instant the generals selected my chromosomal sequence: a calling. Life for me means fighting this war; I refuse to walk away from it.”

  “I do not want you to abandon your mission,” Hnid said, calmly. “But consider the effectiveness of a warrior free to choose. Something wanted to kill me the moment you felt the tea's effect, but not you. If that urge has come upon you before today, have you had the strength to fight it off? I suspect not. We could cut out the leech inside your head, and ensure that what you do, you do on your own terms. If ever you wish to retreat -”