Nebula Awards Showcase 54

by Nibedita Sen

  I feel the charge rush through me as the cannon arm primes. I know what comes next.

  The house on fire, smoldering ruins and bodies, and smoke blanketing the air above.

  My arm grows distant and hollow, unresponsive. I stop, aware of what I was trying to do. The cannon lowers, and I turn my back to the people on the shore, fixing my gaze on the horizon.

  Am I a man dreaming that I am a machine, or a machine dreaming of being a man?

  • • •

  Back in the hangar, anxious tech-priests scuttle around me, tapping, tinkering. Little two-legged ants crawling everywhere. Phantom itches on my skin.

  “It’s not the radiation, Babaji,” says Sanjaya, a worried voice in my ear. “Your outer skin registers a few rads, but the inner skin is completely untouched. Electronics, neural conduits, all in perfect working order. Your gun arm might need a re-servicing, but that’s it.”

  I KNOW WHAT I SAW. I KNOW WHAT I FELT.

  “I know, Babaji, but I can’t explain it,” he says, a desperate note entering his voice. “It’s not hardware.”

  “Maybe you need some rest,” says Bhanu.

  Unasked, the question on all their minds, the problem none of them will say out loud: Babaji, maybe you’re desyncing.

  LEAVE ME, I growl.

  They bow and back away. My children fear me. I sigh, the hangar reverberating with the emptiness I feel inside. But before they can leave, an alarm screams, and the voice of Command and Controls drills into my skull.

  VISHNU TO BAY SIX. VISHNU TO BAY SIX. WE HAVE A SITUATION.

  Bay six. My main reactor re-ignites. I break into a run, ripping cables out of my plugports. This is not good.

  • • •

  Bay Six is fifty kilometers away, a vast fortress that dwarfs my own waterside dwelling. My bay is low, sleek, and modern—designed to be broken apart, towed down to wherever I’m needed, and re-assembled. Bay Six, on the other hand, is an immense thing built out of ten-ton blocks of stone. It is more than a launch pad, it is a temple. A shrine.

  To the greatest and most fearsome of all of us.

  A shrine to Kali, Goddess of Destruction.

  My target is along the coastline, which lights up on my heads-up display. My steel feet claw small valleys in the soil. The lights of Chennai strobe in and out in the background, throwing small shadows of me onto the floodlit waters. For a moment I am a man again, with outsized legs, chasing a metal giant in the darkness.

  Bay Six, all towers and spires, sits on a high artificial hill. The whole thing is lit up in a ghastly red. Alarms blare from inside. I can’t jump, but one push from me and the gate crumbles, and my steel bulk is in the main courtyard.

  It’s a large place, almost ten square kilometers of stone and buildings. There should be people here, a veritable army, but nothing. There are vehicles, but they lie scattered and abandoned. The army flags are burning. The stone is slick and coated with a thick black.

  SANJAYA?

  Oil, I think. I follow the oil trail inside. Bay Six has three courtyards, one inside the other. I pass through the second courtyard, and here the metal of the military gives way to something older and more sinister. Giant stone frescoes adorn these walls, depicting the Mother Goddess in all her aspects: Kali creating, Kali destroying, Kali dancing on the body of her consort, clutching the severed heads of her enemies in her four arms, her tongue lolling with madness.

  Except here, instead of the black-skinned goddess I grew up knowing, Kali is a metal giant. As I draw closer, the shapes resolve themselves: Kali, four-armed, wearing a skirt of human heads. Kali, holding her own severed head in her hands, the head drinking oil out of the stump of her metal neck, trampling a couple in the throes of passion.

  The oil that I’ve been following is everywhere. It coats the walls. It drips from the severed heads of the statues and the frescoes.

  SANJAYA?

  A hiss, a whine of static. “Baba­ji…sig­nal…block…re­ports…Ka­li…full de­sync,” comes the familiar voice. A hiss, a crackle. “Power…authorized…”

  The voice fades away. I have a bad feeling about this.

  The Kali technicians have always been more than just technicians. They worship her. My children call me father, but Bay Six… We’ve all heard the stories. It’s no small thing to see your gods come alive. And servicing the Mother Goddess has always been more than just an oil change.

  I prime my lesser cannon and break through into the third and final courtyard. And I stop, and I shudder, even though I cannot feel horror in this frame.

  Ants lie everywhere, lit by the flames that adorn the walls. In the flickering, I can see white hazmat suits. Cultist robes woven with technician insignias. Army uniforms. Great piles reach up to my knees, staked through and pinned with great metal rods. Arms wave and mouths scream in agony. From them ekes a slow, unceasing river of what I had mistaken for oil.

  And above them, kneeling, is the four-armed Shikari herself. The firelight flickers across her red metal skin. The gaping maw is open in a terrible silent parody of laughter, the arms wrapped around her body, shaking. A necklace of severed heads bleeds onto the carapace.

  KALI, DESTROYER OF ALL THINGS.

  The gaping mouth closes, the great metal face droops to one side, the eyes shine a terrible and brilliant red.

  VISHNU, PRESERVER, PROTECTOR, she greets me. HAVE THEY SENT YOU TO TAKE MY TOYS AWAY FROM ME?

  I raise my main gun in response. She shakes her head, and out of the throat comes something like a chuckle.

  YOU THINK YOU COULD TAKE ME? She roars, spreading her four arms wide. Flames sprout from her mouth, charring the closest of the piles. ME, THE FIRST, THE MOST TERRIBLE?

  I CAN TRY, I say, BUT I’M NOT HERE TO FIGHT. POWER DOWN, KALI.

  She screams at me, a sound that will carry clear to the cities nearby and make grown men tremble, and leaps. It’s a noise that could make my unflexing steel buckle and warp. But I’m ready. I leap back and fire, aiming for the knees. My trusty Padma spits hellfire. Kali’s left knee explodes. The great arms miss me by mere feet.

  She makes no attempt to defend herself, but claws at me, as if to rip me apart with just her hands. I swing out of the reach of the crushing arms. My autocannon rake her sides as I roll. She staggers, crushing corpses, swearing. Her curses are a stream of napalm. I kneel in the slick ooze and fire again. She slumps, red eyes confused.

  WHY? HAVE I DONE SOMETHING WRONG?

  THIS IS TERRIBLE. THIS IS EVIL.

  The great head lolls about. Something is happening inside. WE ARE TERRIBLE! WE ARE GODS! THEY WORSHIP US AS GODS! WORSHIP DEMANDS SACRIFICE!

  I look down at the screaming heaps of dying men and women. WE WERE SUPPOSED TO PROTECT THEM.

  She wavers, as if confused. And then some part of her—the part that once knew love and duty, the part that signed on a dotted line—regains control, and she realizes what she has done. She screams, a long, wailing shriek that will haunt my nightmares forever.

  • • •

  “That’s the fourth,” says Sanjaya softly. “Kali-Shikari is too unstable. I think they’ll retire the whole line.”

  “It’s the arms,” says Bhanu, who has studied these things. “Too many arms, too much weaponry. Too different from the human body-map. I’m going through her technicians’ logs, and it turns out she’s had the symptoms for months. Memory loss, confusion, the shakes. Nobody reported it. They were too busy worshiping her.”

  They speak to me from the comfort of a helicopter gunship, safe in the distance, as I accompany the long train towing the bodies of men and women out of that terrible place. Long lines of the living, men and women, are converging on the site, the charnel stink keeping them away from me, but still close enough that I can hear their wailing. The families of the dead, probably. There are picket lines and a politician holding court. I pause to look at them, and they shake and back away.

  “Six hundred staff,” says Sanjaya. “She butchered six hundred.”

&nb
sp; IT’S NOT JUST THE ARMS, I want to tell them. SHE BECAME WHAT THEY THOUGHT SHE WAS. SHE BECAME A GOD.

  But I don’t. Instead, once the train is done and the officials have made the appropriate noises, I wade into the ocean. The waves wash over me. The moon is bright tonight, like an iridescent pearl, and the water rocks me gently as my feet sink into the ocean floor.

  “Babaji?” tries Sanjaya, ever faithful.

  LET ME BE, I tell them, weary beyond all measure in a body that can never feel tired. Kali’s scream still rings in my head. LET ME REST.

  It is hard to see a Shikari gone bad. It starts with little things—anger, memory loss, small tics and tremors. The human mind is a fragile thing. We were meant for a fleshy prisons, not these bodies of steel and alloy that they put us in. Touch. Taste. Adrenaline. Dopamine. Oxytocin. Emotions. These things matter. The software that they wrap around us tries to simulate this stuff, but nothing’s perfect. Eventually, the sheer wrongness of it gets to you. Once the neural feedback loops kick in, you’re done for. Anxiety, terror, depression—they told us this in boot camp. It starts with the shakes. Then the blackouts. Time lost, unaccounted for. Then the hallucinations. Psychosis. The fragmentation. And not always in that order.

  The Kali line has always been a bit on the manic side. There are others that have just stopped moving, lost all will, until the techs ripped them apart and dug into the brains and found nothing, just dumb software running routine checks, the ghost of a pilot somewhere inside occasionally lighting up something in a poor imitation of life.

  The techs call it desyncing. We—those of us who fight—call it death. All we had to do, they said, was hold on long enough until they’d figured out how to make AI that could do the job.

  All we had to do was kill and kill and kill until we die, screaming, inside the metal tombs our own bodies.

  A new voice penetrates my skull. “Vishnu, this is Command. Report for debriefing ASAP, over.”

  The waves wash against me in silence.

  “Vishnu, I repeat, this is Command. If you can hear me, report for debrief immediately, over.”

  I HEAR YOU, COMMAND, I say at last. I’LL BE THERE SOON.

  And in the darkness, my hands shake.

  • • •

  Command is an old man in battle fatigues, tall but bent with age, surrounded by a rolling office of technicians and soldiers who all seem to have the same face. The only one in nonregulation uniform is the psychiatrist, a woman dressed in short, strangely utilitarian green. They make me go over what happened.

  I play back all my logs, explain my interpretation of the incident. The technicians make notes and parse the data, making incomprehensible noises to each other. The psychologist walks dangerously close to me, heels—who wears heels in a military base?—clack-clack-clacking against the steel, peering up at me. The old general is frowning. I have the strange feeling that I’ve seen him before, but for some reason—maybe because this place is shielded—my facial ID system isn’t working properly.

  “And you’re one hundred percent positive you saw no signs of desyncing before this? One hundred percent?”

  MY LAST DEPLOYMENT WITH HER WAS IN SEPTEMBER.

  “Dammit,” he says. “We’re losing them faster than ever.”

  “Perhaps it’s the upgrades, sir,” one particularly noisy technician volunteers. “The neural load on Kali must be very high already, and those six arms… It’s not like we’re built to operate six arms—”

  The general quells him with a look. She mumbles and falls silent. The psychiatrist, meanwhile, has come to a stop in front of my arm.

  “Vishnu-ji,” she says. “Why is your hand twitching?”

  BATTLE DAMAGE, I say automatically. NEURAL FEEDBACK FROM REPETITIVE GUNFIRE. IT HAPPENS.

  I don’t know why I said that. It’s not true.

  The psychologist doesn’t believe me. But I am a god, dammit. You will believe me. My twitching hand curls into a fist.

  “Leave us,” the general says to the psychologist.

  She hesitates. “Sir, I am mandated by the High Court—”

  “This is a military facility, Doctor Chaudury, and when I say leave, you can either walk out or be thrown out.”

  He waits until her clack-clack-clacking has died down, then turns back to me.

  “Lieutenant,” he says. “I’m talking to the man I once signed up and trained for this job. The man inside this tin hulk. You there, Officer?”

  I AM VISHNU.

  “Lieutenant Arjun Shetty,” says the general coolly, looking straight into my eyes. Eyes the size of his head. “They can put you in a glorified metal uniform, but you’re still the boy I took and trained into this.”

  I AM VISHNU, SIR.

  But suddenly I know him. And suddenly I can see the faces of the people standing around him. They’re not the same faces at all. The only thing they have in common is that they all look terrified.

  “I know you’re dying in there,” he says, not breaking his gaze. “I know you’ve fought for your country and you’ve done us proud. But there aren’t enough of you. Not enough Shikari, not enough soldiers like you willing to put their hearts on the line for our country. So I’m going to give you an order: if you’re going to crack, you’ll tell us. You won’t hurt anyone. You were built to protect. Vishnu. Shetty. You are protectors. You don’t fall apart on us the way that bitch did, you understand?”

  My fists clench and unclench. One of them is shaking, and I can’t control it, but I can still salute.

  SIR.

  They haul me into a metal coffin and take me home. On the way back, Sanjay keeps trying to tell me something.

  “The DRDO research guys made a huge breakthrough, Babaji,” he keeps saying, over and over. “It looks like those creatures are silicon-based through and through. Silicon-based! It’s not armor but skin! Just like you, Babaji. They say it looks like every inch of that body can suck up silicon, basalt, carbon, all sorts of material, and use it to heal and grow. Their neurons look like transistors! They say the skin samples even look like they can replicate! Sand, Babaji, sand!”

  THAT’S GOOD, I say, not really listening. I’m trying to keep my hands from shivering. Open. Close. Open. Close. There is a darkness closing in that is more than just the darkness of the transport vehicle.

  “Explains why they hit the Moon, yah? All that material just lying around. They hit the Moon, replicate, replicate, leap down the gravity well to the Earth, and we have so much more silicon lying around, our crust is like twenty-five percent silicon . . .”

  SANJAY. I DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHAT THEY’RE DOING ON THE DAMNED MOON. JUST TELL ME IF THIS MEANS WE CAN KILL THEM FASTER.

  Sanjay, for once, ignores me, too caught up in his own excitement. He starts yapping on and on about logic gates and electromagnetic fields and disruption flows. All I hear is “EMP” and “bomb.”

  “That’s why that Japanese Shikari was doing so well, Babaji! The Matari, remember? Susanoo or some strange name like that. Electrical discharge weapons? Their Lightning Whip technology?”

  THAT’S GOOD, SANJAY, I say slowly, letting the darkness take me. Open. Close. Open. Close. THAT’S VERY, VERY GOOD.

  • • •

  I dream. I dream of darkness and moonlight on the ocean, of thunder and lightning, of a man screaming in pain as his wife and children die.

  And in my dreams, the darkness rises and crashes into me, bowling me over.

  • • •

  I wake.

  The ocean swells. My quivering hands: waves roll, I shake. Roll. Shiver. Roll. Shudder. Roll. Shake. There’s a voice in my ear and a terrible buzzing in my head.

  The moonlit ocean touches my skin, and I taste the ghost of salt water in a mouth that no longer has anything to taste with.

  Not far from me lies a dark and terrible shape, bleeding a thick ichor that turns the dark ocean silvery.

  It wasn’t a dream. I’ve blacked out. The ruins of my delivery vehicle lie twisted and mangled on th
e shore. There’s a crater of some kind there that I can’t process. The road is twisted, tangled.

  Am I desyncing? Is this fear that makes me shake? Fear is for ants. I am Vishnu. I get to my feet. Warnings, error messages. My servomotors are screaming. L3 and L4 command relay nodes are down; the backup routing system has taken over my entire left side. My secondary batteries have almost been ripped out of my ribcage. My cannon is almost out of bullets.

  “Baba-ji—” Crackle, hiss.

  The Enemy lies just a stone’s throw from me, bleeding but conscious. It reminds me of a time where I perused the Internet, looking at the bizarre crosses of creatures artists came up with. This one falls somewhere between a lobster and a scorpion. Four crustacean-like pillars support its bulbous body, all layered in glistening chitin. Segments of folded shell stretched out far behind its body. I can see where my bullets have blasted it to bits, gouging out silvery chunks of flesh the size of men. A pair of pincers, broken and shattered now, sit at the ends of knobby limbs protruding from below its flat skull.

  A great eye turns in its face and rolls to greet me out of that nightmarish bulk. Curved, sickle-like mandibles erupt in a terrible grin from what might be its face. Something thrashes behind it, stirring up new waves that bow out to the sides before falling flat. Another of the appendages breaches the surface of the water, flailing alongside the first.

  Even in death, it challenges me. I fire once, twice at that hideous eye. At this range, the bullets explode with so much ferocity they reduce the entire head into silvery rice and curry.

  And suddenly there is a great thunderclap as a meteorite hits the ocean not far from where I stand, sending up a wave that smashes into me like the fist of God himself. I’m picked up and flung head over heels. For once, my thoughts are cold, analytical. A new Enemy, I decide immediately as I scramble to my feet in the mud.

  There’s no ceremony in its arrival. The creature shakes itself, sending beads of water back into the ocean. Its carapace is the color of burning rock. Ripples of red light dance over its shell, winking out of existence as it turns to face me.

  The fear drains away. Vishnu doesn’t do fear.

  Something like fangs click together like a helicopter’s blades against stone. Something like arms bare. Something like a mouth screams.