Return to Mech City

by Brian Bakos

  ***

  He was able to maintain a steady pace throughout the morning, pushed along by the banshee wind.

  Gooooooooo!

  Three years before, Winston had ridden through this terrain with the Master. At that time, crops had grown in the fields; well-maintained houses and stands of trees had dotted the rolling landscape. Now the whole area was devastated, an appropriate venue for Gorzo to stomp around. The trees had died, the crops were gone, and deep erosion troughs slashed the fields.

  Tough, prickly weeds growing in ditches alongside the road were the only plants in evidence. Occasionally, Winston heard the scurry of little creatures among these weeds but he never saw any animal life forms.

  ***

  He spent the first night standing in inactive mode on the road shoulder. Around him, a vast silence pressed in, broken now and then by a fitful breeze and the chirp of some lone insect. A slash of red along the south horizon indicated that a great fire was burning somewhere.

  5: The Middle Days

  day two

  Escalating difficulties began to assail him. At first, Winston hoped that his stiffening left hip joint would limber up with some motion, but as the day wore on, so did his hip.

  Grind, step – Grind, step

  By mid afternoon, he was scarcely moving at all. His largely immobilized leg dragged behind him like a ball and chain. Lord Tennyson’s verse tried to buck him up:

  That which we are, we are

  ... Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

  The cloud cover was a bit less thick now, the sun actually managed to break through it. Winston paused to bask in the warmth.

  “The air seems a little cleaner out here, but I’m still glad I don’t have to breathe the stuff,” he opined.

  He noticed a dark cloud moving in from the east. At first he thought it was an approaching rainstorm, but it was going much too fast for that. He strained his optical sensors. Whatever the cloud might be, it was heading straight for him!

  Winston glanced about for refuge. The barren landscape offered none ... There, back around that curve, a narrow drainpipe running under the road!

  Winston lurched back toward the drain pipe. By the time he got there, the sky had darkened above him like the wrath of some human god. He glanced up to see a huge swarm of dragonfly-like creatures dropping down. Buzzing, slashing insects swarmed over him.

  “Get off me!”

  Winston jumped down to the drain pipe, tumbling among the weeds. The bugs fluttered away, but quickly resumed their attack. Winston crawled to the pipe and jammed himself in feet first. The creatures surged after him, but he blocked their way with his backpack ...

  Many minutes of fear passed as Winston remained wedged in the dark, claustrophobic pipe. The insect things outside buzzed and whined and tore at his pack, but they could not gain entrance. Finally the sounds abated, then disappeared.

  A new horror took their place – Winston was stuck fast! He seemed caught in a giant vice crushing down on him.

  Logically, Winston knew this was not true, but he could not prevent his sensors from registering phantom heat and pressure data. He shoved his pack out of the hole.

  Outside was damp and gloomy – the sun must have retreated behind the clouds again. Except for a few dead bugs littering the ground, the attackers were gone. Winston’s panic retreated a bit.

  So, this was how his mission was destined to end. What would Tennyson say about that? The great modern “Ulysses” entombed beneath a highway! Bitter laughter rumbled out of Winston’s speaker unit, echoing in his auditory sensors.

  Then another sound –

  Something else was in the pipe ... just behind him in the darkness! It was feeding off Winston’s terror, like a vampire. It had taken over Winston’s laughter, adding a dark, evil tone.

  “Ssstay with me,” it hissed.

  Winston felt its spidery fingers curling around his feet.

  “Ahhhh!”

  With a super-robotic burst of strength, Winston wrenched himself free, thrusting out of the pipe as if shot from a cannon barrel. He seized his pack and scrambled up the slope, completely unmindful of his damaged hip. He stood on the road shoulder gaping down at his refuge / prison.

  There couldn’t have really been anything in there, right?

  Didn’t the Master say that he had an “overactive imagination?” And now it was being fed by the mass of literature stored in his data banks. Winston shuddered at the memory of his transformation into the “Walking Library of Alexandria” ...

  A robotics technician named Dr. Leonid had come from the Robotics Development Institute in Mech City to install the extra memory banks in Winston’s mechanism, filling up every available space, even amid the mechanical elements in his thighs.

  Winston had disliked Leonid. The man seemed arrogant and contemptuous, a human with a mean streak. The Master had not cared for him, either. She’d requested that Dr. Edgar Rackenfauz perform the upgrade. Her university was paying for the work and would have foot the bill to have the chief designer himself do it.

  “Rackenfauz isn’t the chief designer any more,” Leonid said. “And the new one’s busy, so he sent me.”

  Clearly, the Walking Library of Alexandria project was not a top priority among the “mech heads” of the RDI.

  Advances in miniaturization had been extensive the last few years, Leonid said, and the new hardware could hold an unheard of amount of data. Even so, the extra memory banks had added little to Winston’s physical weight.

  They’d added a great deal to his mental burdens, however. Supposedly the new data would be isolated from his standard operations, waiting inert until somebody chose to download it. But it was always leaking unbidden into his consciousness, as the Tennyson poem had, giving him “the willies” – to use the Master’s phrase.

  A “librarian mode” had been programmed into him whereby he could consciously enter the data banks to retrieve information. In this mode, he seemed to wander a vast hall of towering book shelves, echoing with the pronouncements of the “God of Knowledge.”

  This personification had been concocted by some wiseacre mech head, Winston knew, but it was still spooky and intimidating. He disliked librarian mode and had avoided using it ever since the trial runs ...

  A low gurgle emerged from the pipe, pulling Winston out of his recollections.

  “Yow!”

  He took off fast and was fifty meters down the road before his grinding hip finally brought him to halt.

  Calm down, Winston, he admonished himself, you’re afraid of your own shadow!

  Only there were no shadows, as the clouds had obscured the sun once more.

  He examined his pack. It was ripped in many places and would require duct tape. A dead creature was tangled in the fabric – a mech bug, designed to hunt biological insect pests, back when there were such things.

  Why had they attacked him? Why had Rob been so hostile? Where was the Master when he needed her so much?

  Nothing made sense.

  ***

  Winston’s anguish increased as the day wore on. He took to examining any vehicle he encountered, hoping to find something that could be of assistance. But the cars were all empty and as lifeless as their surroundings. At an exit ramp, vehicles jumbled in a big pile-up looked promising, but again he found nothing of value.

  Why not just collapse among the other wrecks and deactivate – put an end to everything?

  But not yet. He could still move, right? As long as he could move, however slowly, there was hope.

  “Mech City ... Mech City”

  He repeated his destination aloud in the dead air, like a religious mantra, straining his eyes to the horizon as he limped along.

  A sudden blast of wind knocked him over.

  He lay face down on the pavement for a long time, the dank atmosphere pressing him down, hoping that consciousness would cease. But it stubbornly held on. Visions of his past life flashed by – the happy
days with his human family, his work with Dr. Horvath on her research projects, the terrible illness that carried them off – and the final, grotesque image of Rob flushing down the river current tangled up in the baby carriage.

  Finally, he mustered the strength to look up.

  Across the road, a short distance away, sat a car with a child’s scooter jutting from the back window.

  Of course! Why didn’t I think of that earlier?

  Because he’d never had to worry about a long trip before. Until yesterday, he’d never walked farther than a kilometer in one stretch – the time he’d visited the waterfall with the Master and Charles.

  The world was starting to unravel back then with wars and rumors of wars. The first of many epidemics had begun to sweep through humanity, carrying off millions ...

  The scooter was stuffed in amid a jumble of luggage and household furnishings. This must have been a refugee car driven by people trying to flee the city. They would have clung to the vain hope that conditions elsewhere would somehow be better than those they sought to escape.

  He approached the rear of the vehicle.

  “Hello ... is anybody here?” he asked.

  No answer, of course. Winston tried to yank the scooter free. But it was packed too tightly and the window was closed up snug against it. Winston had nothing with which to break the plasti-glass.

  He hobbled to the front of the car. The windows were darkly tinted, and Winston could not see through them with his second-rate optical sensors. He moved back a few steps.

  The car just sat there on the shoulder where it had died, all black and shiny like some ponderous insect – a scarab beetle that had dug its way up from a tomb and was now beckoning him to join the other corpses. He looked back toward home.

  Death images flickered through his mind like an old movie: Charles and Dr. Horvath on their beds, the bodies in the park, the other human remains he’d observed over the past months lying in the streets. He looked the other direction toward Mech City.

  Would things be any different there, or was he just trading one chamber of horrors for another? Only one thing was certain – without that scooter he wasn’t moving very far from this spot. He lurched back to the car and seized the door handle.

  Be brave, Winston!

  He yanked the door open.

  Nobody was inside. He entered the vehicle amid a wash of relief.

  Baggage filled the entire storage area and half the back seat. Winston figured that two parents and a child had occupied this car. As he dug the scooter out, he concocted scenarios for the little family:

  When they sensed the end was upon them, they must have abandoned their vehicle and wandered off into the wasteland to perish together. Or maybe the child died first, and the parents took him out for burial. Then they lacked the strength to return, or perhaps they didn’t care to return.

  The child had surely been a boy, judging by the thunderbolt graphics on the scooter and by the other playthings – toy guns, sports equipment.

  Although Winston was the size of an average human male, he weighed much less; the wheeled machine bore his weight, no problem. By placing his largely immobilized leg on the scooter and kicking off with his better one, he was able to roll along at a steady clip. His balance capability could handle it!

  He waved back at the car. “Thanks!”

  The route sloped generally downhill, and a prevailing wind at his back aided progress. He ran far into the night along the faint, moon-lit ribbon of concrete, trying to outrun the eerie silence and the crimson light flickering along the south horizon.

  He stopped only when a soft rain began to fall, and he spent the final hours of darkness sheltered under his plastic sheet. It had been perforated by the bugs, but kept him reasonably dry.

  day three

  For many hours Winston toiled through a blasted landscape. Large craters disfigured the fields and damaged the highway. In the distance lurked the skeletons of wrecked towns. Winston struggled past the devastation with increasing dread.

  Each bomb crater was its own chamber of horrors out of which peered the ghosts of humans. They materialized in the periphery of Winston’s optical sensors, but when he tried to look directly at them, the presences ducked back into hiding – where they waited for Winston to join them.

  “Sorry to disturb you!” Winston called. “I’m just passing by.”

  Late afternoon, he finally emerged from the war zone and was able to pick up the pace.

  He hurtled along, faster and faster, as if the kilometers could erase the death images from his memory bank. Night came, and dim moonlight reflecting on the highway center strip illuminated the way.

  But just as he began a downhill leg, clouds obscured the moon. He careened blindly, nearly going over. At last he made it to the shoulder and tumbled onto the gravel.

  6: To the End of the Road

  His journey became a steady push along gently rolling terrain. Progress on the inclines was slow, but the vigorous downhill runs made up for lost time.

  By dusk of the fourth day, he was only 10 kilometers from his destination – according to a metal road sign. He rolled onto the shoulder beside it and stopped.

  Hot damn, I’m going to make it!

  He considered pushing on but decided that a daytime arrival would be wiser. He had no idea what the situation might be in Mech City, and his standard grade optics put him at a nighttime disadvantage. If he were to meet anyone ... well, better that it be in daylight.

  Besides, his diagnostics indicated that his energy level was getting low, and he didn’t want to fumble around switching power cells in the dark. This was not a particularly difficult procedure, but Winston was not adept at it. Charles had always insisted on performing this task for his “Uncle Winston.”

  Tomorrow would be soon enough to deal with it. He entered inactive mode – sensors on maximum alert so as to waken him at the least provocation.

  ***

  When he resumed active status at first light, he could scarcely budge.

  Idiot! he berated himself. Why didn’t you change power cells yesterday?

  If his moving parts were in adequate repair, he’d be all right, but now he lacked the energy to overcome stiffened joints cooled by hours of inactivity. He could do no more than swivel his head and move his right arm a little. He tried to shrug off the backpack so as to get at a spare power cell, but he was only able to grip one strap and tug feebly.

  Things remained in this gridlock for over an hour. From the direction of Mech City, the low sun broke through its cloud cover for a while, taunting him with its invitation to resume his trek. Winston’s sensors registered an increase in ambient temperature, but this did nothing to limber his frozen joints.

  Then he glimpsed someone, or something, coming towards him up the road. He began to cry out, but the effort died in his speaker unit.

  Something was not right.

  Winston differentiated two creatures coming toward him. His optics lacked telephoto capability, but even from a distance, the things appeared to be large canines of some sort. He could not tell if they were biological or robotic.

  But large mammals had disappeared from the world, hadn’t they – and who’d ever heard of a canine robot?

  The creatures moved down the highway at great speed, sparks flying where their claws impacted the pavement. They slowed to a cautious walk when they came within a dozen meters of him.

  Winston could see them clearly now. They had the appearance of large timber wolves with reddish eyes that seemed to bore right through him. Their coats bristled dark gray, and large fangs protruded from their mouths.

  “Nice doggies,” Winston said.

  One of them paused two meters in front of him – the leader, presumably. The other one moved behind him outside of view. Winston felt like one of the pecans the Master used to break open in her nutcracker device.

  The leader came up closer and bared horrific yellow fangs that looked strong enough to tear off
Winston’s limbs with a single bite. A deep growl rumbled in its throat. Winston’s self-preservation programming screamed to the fore – run! But he couldn’t do a damn thing except talk.

  “I-I’m very glad to meet you,” he managed to say. “My name is Winston Horvath. I am a scholar model ... uh ... not designed for long distance travelling, I’m afraid.”

  The leader cocked its head. The fangs retreated back into the muzzle structure, and the growling stopped. A dull, crafty intelligence glittered in its eyes. The creature was robotic, Winston was sure of that now. It didn’t breathe or pant, the growls had a mechanistic quality. And it appeared to understand language, at least a little.

  “I am experiencing mobility difficulties, your leadership.” Winston gestured awkwardly toward his backpack. “If I could just get a spare power cell, I could be on my way.”

  The creature’s expression became distant, as if it were listening to some far off voice that Winston couldn’t hear. What had seemed to be intelligence in its eyes switched off, the thing seemed no longer interested in him.

  The leader moved away, but the other wolf stayed in position. With trembling effort, Winston swiveled his head until he could see the creature directly behind him. It was crouched and ready to spring.

  “Be brave!” Winston cried.

  The wolf was upon him. Paws clung to his shoulders and the terrible fangs glinted alongside his face. Winston steeled himself for the rendering.

  Then, abruptly, he was no longer on this earth. In his turbulent mind, he was hurtling through the sky toward the loving embrace of the ‘Great Technician.’ Winston could see the benevolent, white-coated figure step out from behind a cloud and beckon him with open arms. The sun blazing behind the Great Technician sent shafts of holy light scattering all directions.

  What an interesting routine! Winston couldn’t help thinking. It appears that I have been programmed, during episodes of extreme danger, to anticipate the commencement of an afterlife.

  But something interesting was taking place right here on the earth. Winston forced his mind back to reality as the Great Technician in the Sky withdrew behind his cloud with a friendly wave.