by Simon Archer
“Kill them.”
The bloody cries that war should have now resounded throughout the city streets as all of my soldiers slew the heroes they stood next to. The openings were easy to find, even from where I was, and the heroes were all weakened from the conflict. They were like sheep to the slaughter.
And I couldn’t have even told you how many of those updates popped up in front of my face to inform me that I’d collected some hero gold.
“Sir!” One of my soldiers stepped up to me as I walked towards the municipal building that was my next goal. “Do you want us to collect the bodies of the heroes for you?”
“You have until I finish speaking with the mayor,” I informed him. “Whatever you can’t manage, just incinerate. I don’t want any dead bodies on my streets.”
“As you command.” The soldier returned to the others, giving my commands out to the people.
“Yomura, we should still have plenty of time before the national army gets here, right?” I spoke over my earpiece. “I may have taken my time toying with the heroes’ last remnants of leadership.”
“We are currently ahead of my time table by over ten minutes,” Yomura called back to me. “They are thirty minutes out from you.”
“Excellent.” I marched up the many stairs to the door into city hall. “Gives us plenty of time to make the proper negotiations. Make sure that you and Nick are ready to analyze those schematics I was talking about and integrate them into the prototypes. The prototypes are ready, right?”
“Of course, sir,” Yomura informed me, “if the schematics are truly as detailed and advanced as you say they are, the prototypes will be up and running in less than a day. Otherwise, we will have to hold off on using them for months. Possibly years if I am not allowed to devote my full attention to them.”
“If they don’t do everything I want, then a lot of people are getting fired.”
As I reached the top of the stairs, Natasha’s flying cloud creature floated down and evaporated as Natasha and Kate landed themselves on either side of me. Crawling up my back were the nimble paws of Minou as her cat form strode up to my shoulders to rest.
“Man, I wish I was a cat.” Natasha hugged onto my arm. “Just ride around on your shoulders all day, get scratched under the chin. That’s the life.”
“It does have its perks.” Minou purred. “I would say that hairballs are not one of them. I am glad that I am able to shower in my humanoid forms to clean all of this fur.”
“Could you not do that as a cat?” Kate asked. “It’d be a lot easier, since you have a lot less space to clean, right?”
“While the feline form is indeed graceful,” Minou cooed, “the range of motion I am capable of is limited to a very specific set of movements, namely running. Anything else is just a bonus. Cleaning myself thoroughly is well beyond that bonus.”
“I could wash you as a kitty cat, if you wanted!” Natasha, excited at the aspect of cleaning a pet, jumped around with her arms tethering herself to my immediate area. “We could have a party! A kitty washing party!”
“I think I am more than capable of washing myself as a humanoid.” Minou’s cat eyes thinned down to a razor’s width as she backed away to my other shoulder. “In this form, my instincts would kick in, and I would be more than happy to claw your arms to shreds rather than let anyone wash me.”
“But what if I gave you little kitty scritches?” Natasha scratched underneath Minou’s chin. “And then some nice kitty pets?” The blonde’s tiny hands pulled down Minou’s back all the way to the unreachable spot right at the base of the tail. “And then some more kitty scritches right here?”
“Okay, you win!” Minou’s eyes forcibly closed as she stretched her backside up towards Natasha’s hand. “Those are good scritches. Just don’t stop.”
“Would I be able to join the party?” Kate asked, petting Minou’s head.
“If both of you are here, then perhaps I would not want to remain in my cat form for very long.” Minou’s purrs were louder than a motorcycle engine, yet softer than a fur pillow made of sound. “Would Dantem want to join these parties as well?”
“You fucking know it--hold up, business before pleasure.” I ended the conversation quickly as we passed through the doors into the mayor’s office. “Hello, Mr. Mayor. I assume you’re not busy?”
“And I assume that you’ll…” The mayor, a short, egg-shaped individual, with a balding head surrounded by a crescent of shaggy, grey hair, shuffled his bushy beard at me and forced a massive gulp down his throat. “… you’ll clear my schedule if I said that I was busy?”
“You’re very correct, Mr. Mayor.” I stepped forward, pulling a piece of paper out of my pocket along with a pen. “I’ll keep this brief; I’m the new mayor of this city, hereby taking political and economic control of Tirnberg. I’ll need you to sign an official surrender, and then I’ll need you to show me where Gorntech Industries is.”
“Oh, um…” The egg mayor took the paper and pen, obediently beginning to sign his name. “What business do you have with Gorntech, if I may ask, New Supreme Leader?”
“I’ll need their latest robotics project they’ve been working on,” I told him. “I need to build me a bunch of robots real fast.”
7
“Robots?” Nick kicked against a wrench, twisting the massive mechanical fastener on a metal panel. “I mean, I’m a fan. I love the idea. Can’t wait to get crazy with these bad boys. But, you know, why?”
“Never underestimate the power of free labor.” I pushed Nick to the side and pushed the wrench down, fastening the nut in place. “A dozen millennia of human history will tell you that slave labor is the way to do anything big. Except, you know, there’s them pesky ethical ramifications of racial subjugation. To avoid such ramifications, we’ll just make robots fill the role.”
With a press of a switch, Nick moved us both back on the articulating platform, the massive mechanical arm shifting us both back to the edge of the testing facility, a massive room with bright white walls covered in panels just waiting to reveal all the various gadgets and mechanisms we’d used to showcase the capabilities of whatever new idea Nick had come up with.
Sitting at the center of this room was our masterpiece, the robot in question. Towering at over twelve feet high, the deadly droid stood on six tubes as legs, each ending in deadly spikes at the end for grip and for damage. Every spike was tipped with a dense, hardened compound that could puncture through the hull of a ship just as easily as it could step on it.
The body of the robot was a spherical monstrosity covered in six round sockets for the metal tentacles that spread upward. Topping all of these tentacles was a different, terrifying contraption littered with pointy bits, blinking lights, and as many dangerous extensions imaginable as possible. Many of the functions of these tools were redundant to the other contraption tips, meaning that the droid could lose an arm and still retain several of its functions in the other arms. The mace-head-looking tentacle topper could still fire ammunition and lasers, for example, and the cannon-like tentacle could still extend miniature spikes to become a massive club. All for the sake of diversion and confusion.
Covering nearly every square inch of the synthetic ‘creature,’ yet invisible to the naked eye, there were thousands of cameras and screens, allowing for forty-one thousand two hundred fifty-three degrees of three dimensional, spherical vision. At the same time, the screen plating allowed not only for surprisingly durable protection but also for projections of the images of the cameras on the opposing sides of the sphere, giving the creature minor, mirage-like invisibility. It’d be easy to see the creature up close, especially if it was moving rather frantically, but from far away, at night, or while standing still or slowly moving, the mechanism would hardly be noticed until it struck.
“It’s almost enough to make a grown man cry.” Nick tried to stifle a tear. “So, what do you want to call this bad boy? How about ‘Killbot?’”
“‘Killbot’ might be
a bit on the nose.” I put my hand to my chin. “It’s a decent name, but there’s no art to it.”
“‘Murder Machine?’ ‘Death droid?’” Nick’s naming scheme was a simple one. “Homicide Drone? Cyber Squid? Tentacle Trooper?”
“Is ‘Harbinger’ too dramatic?” I asked him. “It’s more appropriate for the designed purpose, but I don’t need it to be too edgy if it’s just going to revolve back to ridiculous.”
“Do we want people to be tipped off by the name, then?” Nick followed up with his own question. “We might be thinking about this all wrong. If we don’t want the enemy to suspect anything, we could call them ‘Cuddlers’ or something like that.”
“I actually like that name.” I nodded and stared at the machine, matching the name to the creation. “It starts out silly, but kinda switches to an ironic dread once you get a good look at what the name’s referring to. And I expect that people will be scared of these things, no matter what they’re called.”
“Perfect.” Nick jimmied the controls on the platform a bit, bringing us down to the ground. “We just have to make a few hundred more of these bad boys, and we’ll be set.”
“Did you not have these already built?” I looked at my head scientist. “I thought I told you that we’d need these on the field the day after we took Tirnberg. As of right now, we’re looking at hours before the next phase is supposed to begin!”
“Relax, boss, I’m just kidding.” Nick chuckled. “The rest are just through here.”
With another shift of the platform, we moved through the testing facility, the mechanical arm holding us up as it moved along rails built into the ground. As panels opened up to reveal a hallway, we shifted through the inner metal workings of Nick’s special workshop, finally making our way to another space that dwarfed the first room by what could have easily been a literal mile.
Far below us, conveyor belts and assembly lines shifted and spun, while several arms mechanically manufactured plates, circuit boards, and other robotic parts in various sparks of light. At the other end of the room, taking up nearly half the floor space, several hundred more identical cuddler droids stood at attention like a colony of motionless insects and obedient soldiers. Nick leaned over the railing of the mobile platform, smugly smiling at me as I stared at the army he’d been hiding away.
“This is way more than I thought you’d be able to finish before today,” I admitted. “At most, I expected that you’d have around twelve ready for the next raid.”
“All they need now is some good programming to operate, and they’re good to go.” Nick clicked his tongue while shooting a finger gun at me. “One thousand cuddlers, ready to invade whatever poor city we’ve got our sites set on next.”
“You made sure to prioritize all of those durability modifications I asked for, right?” I moved the controls of the platform myself, moving us high above the automated warehouse manufacturers to get a better look at the cuddler drones. “I need them all to last against some heavy firepower. I don’t want to find out you skimped out on those upgrades to make a few more of them.”
“I mean, I did take out a loan that I expected to have repaid with the money from the bet you and I just had, but yeah, they’re sturdy boys,” Nick answered, glancing over the financial faux pa he nearly committed. “I’d nuke them to prove it to you, but you’ve deemed that a ‘safety hazard.’”
“Yeah, that’s one of the primary functions of nukes.” I rubbed my temple to prevent the stress headache. “I’m not letting you just let one off every time you want to make a point. And what the hell was that about you taking out a loan with my money without my permission?”
“I knew that we had the money, and I was sure that my bet was a sure thing!” Nick failed to justify his business dealings well enough to assuage my ire. “It was just more preparation for the robots that you told Yomura and me to do before you got that thing from the place.”
“Never again.” I flicked him on the forehead, my enhanced strength proving more than enough to throw him backward. “Understand? I am to be informed of any transfers of my money before they’re made.”
“You’re no fun.” Nick slumped himself over the railing of the platform dramatically. “So what was this stupid thing you wanted for the robots that you needed to conquer a city for, anyway?”
“It’s… a robotics operating system,” I said, “shouldn’t you already know that?”
“D--um, yeah, of course, yeah, sure.” Nick sprung himself back up to an upright position, trying his best to seem like he was on the same page as I was. “I just wanted to know, you know, if, um, what kind of operating system it was.”
“You didn’t even read the message I gave you after I returned from my mission, did you?” I accused him. “It wasn’t even three sentences long!”
“I was… busy,” Nick couldn’t come up with an excuse fast enough. “With… things.”
“Your web shows can wait until your work is done,” I called him out again. “They’re terrible, anyway.”
“Love Among The Cogs is a great piece of Television history!” Nick defended his horrible taste in story media. “The intricacies of the relationships between robots in a post-apocalyptic future are lost on a savage like you!”
“Nothing about that show is intricate,” I argued back, having been forced to watch an episode of it once. “It’s already obvious that Count Gearsworth is going to kill Baron Von Ballbearring, and that he’s Hertz Ratio’s creator-father.”
“What?!” Nick shouted. “That’s absolutely… huh. Oh shit, that makes too much sense.”
“Anyway, we took Gorntech’s latest robotics project,” I told him what he should have already known, “Yomura picked up some intel that they were perfecting some combative AI technology ready for action, and that’s what gave me the idea for all of this.”
“Why couldn’t we just make our own robots again?” Nick asked, “just get Yomura to whip up some code and throw it into these guys. How hard can that be? Control, shift, murder. Execute command ‘execute commander.’”
“This was much faster,” I answered. “I needed the robots to function both autonomously, individually, and cooperatively simultaneously. That’s a lot to teach a bunch of robots from the ground up. Now, he’s just gotta make some adjustments to the programming, improve upon the designs, and we’ll have our army ready for the next city.”
“Why aren’t we using our people to fight this next city?” Nick began moving the platform back over to the testing room. “We handled the last city with, like, zero casualties, right? We’ve got this city-conquering thing in the bag.”
“Tirnberg just had a bunch of heroes to deal with as the biggest threat,” I explained, “easy enough to handle if you lay the groundwork right and cripple the guild beforehand. This next one’s New Carmanelo, and it’s not going to be so simple. Not only do they have heroes, but they also have a Ghoul executive.”
“Oh, shit, really?” Nick asked. “Which one? Is it Beast Lord? Jacque Frost? Calamity Conqueror? Please tell me it’s not the Industrialist.”
“Who came up with these names?” I chuckled at the aliases Anu gave us for his former colleagues. “No, it’s actually Don John Perignon.”
“The mafia don John Perignon?” Nick repeated, “I guess it won’t be long until Don John Perignon and his throng of wrongdoing are long gone. We should sing songs when the day is won and eat bonbons. Does he have any spawn? Any Shawns, any Rons, any Hans...es? You know, it’s quite the con we’ve put on to kill such a Don, this John Perignon the mafia don and his throng of blonde spawn, with its Shawns, Rons, and Hans--”
“Yes, that one.” I stopped his Seussian rhyme scheme. “Despite the silly name, he’s way out of our league at the moment, and so are his entire army of thugs. Even more so than Anu was when we fought him.”
“His throng of blonde spawn, you mean?” Nick tried to correct me.
“Stop it.” I slapped him upside the head as the platform returned to its dock
ing station in the testing room. “From what Yomura could gather, Don John’s got a whole mess of people armed to the teeth at every corner of New Carmanelo, and they’re all ten levels higher than us on average.”
“There you go with those ‘levels’ again.” Nick rolled his eyes. “What is your unit of measurement for a ‘level?’ How do you know the transition between one level to the next? Why do you have your own personal measurements for people’s combat effectiveness, and yet you won’t let us work with it, too? Wouldn’t that make things a hundred times more efficient? Why are you holding out on us?”
“Trust me, you do not want to know.” I tried to let him down gently. How was I supposed to tell a computer program that he was part of a video game? They wouldn’t even listen to me, anyway. No one in the game can physically acknowledge that the game systems exist, though they could apparently get really close from Nick’s constant questioning. “They’re just stronger than us, and I’m perfectly confident in that fact.”
“And the robots are supposed to help bridge that gap?” Nick walked beside me as we moved to the elevator. “Or are they just supposed to be fodder for them while we sting them with our real attack force?”
“Oh, Nick, your thinking is so small,” I laughed as I pressed the button on the elevator to the main floor. “Why would we use our own attack force?”
“Um.” Nick squinted at me. “What?”
“Why use our own people to finish the job when we have other options?” I reworded my rhetorical question. “It’s just a waste to throw my good men down the drain when there are others so willing to take up the job for me.”
“The cuddlers?” Nick tried to guess my plan. “If the Don’s guys are really so strong, do you think they’ll be enough to take the city by force? It’s war, boss. We’re going to expect at least some casualties if we’re going to take on people from the Ghoul. We’ll be losing a lot of these bots, just for one thing.”
“Who decided that?” I asked, “Why do I have to send all of my robots when probably a dozen or so will be enough to do the trick?”