“But nothing about yourself.”
Orissa grunted.
“Shame. Well, what now? Do we just—”
“They’re up to something,” said Orissa. She popped the remaining stub of squirrel into her mouth and clapped her hands clean. Kneeling, she opened a cabinet door, then closed it. Opened another one and slammed that one shut too. She popped up like a meerkat, looking around. “Where did I—ah. There it is.”
She took a tube of sorts from atop the fridge and flattened it out on the table before Leon. It was a map, dirty and dingy and yellowed.
“We’re here,” she said with a stabbing finger. “Right over here, about twelve miles away, is an opening in the hillside. A laboratory, maybe. Clearly human made.”
Leon looked up. “You’ve been there?”
“Not inside. I just found it a couple days ago. But I’d like to visit it. See what we can dig up. I’m running low on supplies, and now there’s not just me to feed and clothe and arm. And I’d like to leave this place sooner than later.”
Leon leaned back, fingers interlocked behind his head. “Why? You could just live here, in the wilds, keeping yourself hidden.”
Orissa frowned. “Until what? Old age takes me?”
“I guess.”
She shook her head. “That’s not living and you know it.”
“Then what is?”
She flattened her hands on the map and lowered her face toward Leon’s. “Ruining, annihilating, and destroying Machines. I want to obliterate them all.”
Leon swallowed. He sat forward, tongue poking into his cheek. “Not a bad thing to want, I guess.” He chuckled. “Oh, what the hell. All right. I’m in.”
Orissa smiled. “Good. We’ll let the swarm die down a bit. Give it a couple days. They’ll think we crossed westward. This place isn’t much, but—”
“It’s better than being surrounded by four metal walls and having a damned bot come in every morning with a coffee and muffin.”
“Or pills.”
Leon groaned in remembrance. “Or pills. I’m happy to see you’ve got real food here.”
“We eat whatever we hunt. As humans should.”
He smiled at that. “As humans should. I like that.”
Chapter Four
Leon had so far spent a week without sunlight. One hundred and sixty-eight hours of toiling about the stuffy darkness of a vault, the deep smell of earth all around him. In all those hours, he’d seen Orissa for less than five.
As it turns out, being with another human when you’ve never had human contact was harder than it seemed.
It could drive a man to madness. To say Orissa had character flaws would be like saying winter was cold. It didn’t quite tell the whole story.
His sweatshirt was hanging on a line to dry, having been washed in a bucket of old rainwater and dollops of crusted and congealed shampoo. He was shirtless, laboring away at clearing a room of debris. He hauled rock, boxes, and trash into the hallway, cleaving a deeper path into the den.
There were caches of valuables in these rooms, Orissa had claimed. It was where she’d found extra flashlights, rusted varmint rifles, ballistic armor, and solar panels that surprisingly still functioned.
All Leon had found so far, however, were relics of the past: activity trackers with busted screens, dusty virtual reality headsets, routers without cords, mismatched memory sticks, and the like. He’d also come up with several tablets and computers whose insides he stripped clean for ocular memory chips, which stored a relatively small amount of information, but functioned like holographic projectors—perfect for conveying vital information that might be misinterpreted through text.
He didn’t find a single one, but he did pocket several Vaunton cubes, memory storage devices that were nearly indestructible, could store a nearly infinite amount of information that was—unfortunately—always encrypted.
What might he find in those cubes? What wouldn’t he find? The people who dwelled here would have recorded their day-to-day life on them. Maybe not explicitly in the form of journals, but through records, data sheets, and emails. Probably there was more about the Rise on those cubes—how it happened and, more importantly, why.
Of course, without anti-encryption software, he’d never crack them. But he kept the Vaunton cubes all the same, never knowing when he might stumble upon a key.
From behind him, Orissa’s voice. “Put this on.”
He turned to see her standing in the hall, his sweatshirt and jacket balled up in her arms. She averted her eyes.
I’m not that bad looking, Leon thought, but he bit down on the joke. It wasn’t really the time, and Orissa didn’t seem like she had a good sense of humor.
Didn’t seem like she enjoyed idle conversation, either. So he wouldn’t dream of telling her that she wasn’t bad looking herself. But she certainly wasn’t. Could be that he hadn’t seen another woman in… well, ever, except for in his memories, but he found his eyes drawn to her like metal to a magnet.
Her skin, even in the darkness of the vault and lit by halos of flashlight, seemed to glow. It reminded him of cinnamon. Her hair looked like black strands of woven silk, and from under them brooding eyes the color of deep jade. She had broad shoulders from months—years?—of living in the wilds, running from and killing Machines. From there, her frame spun down to a narrow waist and long, powerful legs.
Leon couldn’t envision a fitter, stronger woman. As beautiful as she was, she looked just as deadly, with a holster at her side, rifle around her shoulder, and a ballistic vest clinging tight to her chest.
He put on his sweatshirt and jacket, tugging them down for good measure. “I could have gotten these myself when I was done. But thanks.”
“You’ll have to finish clearing out this rubble later. It’s time.”
Excitement stirred within him. “Good. I’ve been itching to get out of here. I don’t know how anyone could quarantine themselves in a vault for weeks, much less years.”
“Decades, I imagine,” said Orissa. “It’s easy to think about when the alternative is being murdered by Machines.”
A sobering outlook, but she was probably right.
They were ten miles into their twelve-mile trek. They cut through an old city, buildings gutted and windowless. Most were still standing, but all had been reclaimed by nature. Woody vines erupted through streets where people had once frolicked, and skyscraper lobbies that had probably held hundreds of businessmen and women were now home to chittering squirrels hiding their windfalls of acorns in shrubs and weeds.
Leon had never hiked with so much equipment before. The Directive Machine had only ever given him a plasma rifle and a handful of utility items, the minimum of what he needed to survive, and all of which he still carried.
Orissa, however, had a bounty of armaments that she’d gathered and, in her own words, stripped from the mutilated bodies of those bastard Machines: a submachine gun that utilized plasma cartridges, solar grenades, plasma grenades, thermal arrays to overwhelm robotic sensing, electromagnetic knives, and lock-on throwing knives just to name a few.
She also carried bandages, four canteens, a syringe of liquid pain-relieving medication, and a needle and thread for amateur stitchwork.
Orissa had given Leon a solar grenade, one bandage, and a set of lock-on knives. On the handle of each knife was a trigger, she explained. Upon pressing it, a green laser would project from the knife tip. Another press of the trigger locked in a target. When the knife was thrown, gyroscopes would keep the knife oriented toward the target. A nano-computer within the knife’s handle stored the target’s vector and was responsible for controlling the gyroscopes.
“And the solar grenade?” Leon had asked.
“The more energy it soaks up from the sun, the bigger the explosion—up to a maximal of… I can’t remember. It’s a large number.”
Leon couldn’t decide if he was more excited about using these new weapons in action or learning more about them as Orissa had. Knowl
edge, after all, was power.
A bullet to the skull was more power, granted, but still.
Orissa stopped him. “Across that bridge is the lab.”
“You sure it’s a lab?”
“No. But that’s what I’m calling it. You can’t see it from here, but it tunnels into that mountain.”
Leon took in their surroundings. “Looks like the only way there is that bridge. Or swimming.” A wide river flowed beneath, its waters pristine and clear as glass.
“We’re taking the bridge,” said Orissa, beginning toward it.
Leon waited, convinced she was in on a joke that he wasn’t. But as she kept walking, he realized she was deadly serious—with an emphasis on deadly.
“Wait,” he called out. “Are you crazy? We’ll be exposed like deer in snow.”
“Keep your head down,” she said flippantly.
“You’re kidding.”
Orissa continued walking.
Leon sighed. “You’re not kidding. Are you sure you’ve done this before?”
“Many times,” she said, talking like a mother exasperated by her toddler’s ceaseless questions. “It wasn’t until some rocks fell down the hill that the lab opening was exposed. Don’t worry, the warbands are long gone. When their heat sensors didn’t pick us up for the past week, they’ll have assumed we weren’t here anymore. That we made our escape across country.”
“Even if that’s true, there are more than warbands out there.”
Orissa took a pair of binoculars from her belt. She kept moving as she looked through them. “Not many more. Most of the Machines have entered a long sleep. A stasis of sorts.”
“Why?”
“Don’t know,” said Orissa.
“For how long?”
“Don’t know.”
Leon muttered under his breath. “What do you know?”
She snapped her head back. “That your talking is becoming very annoying. Keep your head down and keep quiet.”
They stepped up onto the bridge, chickenweed woven around the gaps in the steel floor. Leon’s throat was as dry as yarn. He couldn’t ever recall feeling so nervous.
Or so alive.
The bridge was a mostly rusted orange, but beneath that soiled appearance were hints of its true color, flecks of golden yellow. In its prime, it was probably the eye’s envy. Leon imagined cars driving across, people strolling along the side pedestrian paths, talking with one another and laughing. Maybe they were going to the theater, or to drink themselves stupid at a bar. Maybe they were going to the park or out to eat.
Those years must have been the pinnacle of humanity, he thought, crouching low as he followed Orissa.
“See that tree in the hillside? The one with a bare spot in the needles.”
“Over there?”
Orissa nodded. “Get close enough and you’ll see steel tracks that climb up the hill, starting there.”
“What for?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe that’s how people used to get to the top.”
Leon expected her to follow that up by explaining how those tracks fit into her plans to access the lab. But no, she pushed onward, keeping low.
It was a rare moment of Orissa being a person. Showing some humanity, rather than… well, a Machine with a single objective in mind.
He squinted, scanning the crest of the hill. The bones of buildings—houses, it looked like—were sheathed in vines and moss, crowded in by evergreens.
Such a shame, he thought. He followed Orissa off the bridge and onto a road. Patches of pavement peered up at him through overgrowth and weeds. He and Orissa followed the road’s curve and ascent for a few minutes, then hopped a metal rail and aimed toward a hillside.
“There,” Orissa said, stopping suddenly, withdrawing her submachine gun.
Leon saw it. A gaping hole in the side of the mountain. He pulled up his rifle, activated thermal sensing, and searched the darkness for emissions.
“Nothing,” he finally said.
“Good. Come on.”
A voice in his head told him this was a bad idea. He was twelve miles from the vault. That meant if shit hit the fan—which was entirely possible as they were wading knee-deep in shit—he’d have to run half a marathon from Machines. And from what he knew of military-class Machines, there were several faster than him, chief among them Primes.
You’re an idiot, the voice told him. You just escaped those metal fiends, and now you’re going to throw it all away.
A sensible voice. Reasonable. It was the sort of voice that had allowed humanity to evolve into the apex species of Earth, to build civilizations of grandeur, to construct societies that spanned the globe.
But curiosity is a strong thing, next to perhaps only sexual arousal.
So Leon kept his feet moving, and he followed Orissa into the darkness.
He kept his rifle up, activating its flashlight. Creeping along slowly, he heard only the sound of his uneasy breath in his ears. He stepped lightly, on the tips of his toes and gently down onto the ball of his foot. Neither he nor Orissa made a noise that they could help.
They passed through circular doors that were stuck partway open and into an expansive room filled with equipment. Steel crisscross supports held up a ceiling. Leon’s flashlight illuminated desks and chairs, the fabric chewed and torn—perhaps by time, or by rats.
On the walls were rectangular screens, some cracked but most intact and pasted with dust and dirt. There were keyboards and mice, cords neatly bundled together under desks and coiled along the molding of walls.
“We’ll come back here,” said Orissa, aiming her submachine gun into an adjacent hallway. “I want to see what else there is.”
Of course you do, thought Leon. They proceeded into another room, this one packed with more computers. This place seems less a lab than an office.
Neither Leon nor Orissa spoke, not until they were certain the lab was clear. And indeed it was. They paced every hallway and checked all four rooms and found no sign of Machines.
“Let’s go back and check all the computers,” Orissa suggested.
They opened up each tower and found they’d been stripped clean. Machines had already been here, most likely.
“Dammit!” Orissa swore, kicking the foot of a desk. Hands on her hips, she shook her head in frustration.
“Might as well get what we can,” said Leon. “Let’s search the cabinets, desk drawers, etcetera.”
Orissa was frowning, staring at her feet. She’d been staking this place out for weeks. To come here and have found nothing of use must have been terribly disappointing.
But what had she truly expected? Most of the ruins that Leon had cursorily scoured contained little of note. It’d been hundreds of years, maybe even thousands, since the Rise. The Machines had long since taken most items of importance.
Leon swung open cabinet doors, hoping for some plasma cartridges, or knives, or canteens—whatever they could use.
Instead, sheafs of crumbly yellow paper stared back at him, along with a lone can of baked beans that he wouldn’t dare open.
He stepped back and was about to slam the last cabinet shut when something in the corner of the room caught his eye.
“Another computer,” he said, bending down and picking up a laptop slathered in thick dust and cobwebs.
He went to blow the dust off, but a greedy pair of brown hands darted down. Orissa wrenched the laptop from his grasp and set it on a round table.
“I want a finder’s fee for that,” Leon said.
She turned the laptop upside down and reached into a pocket of her belt for a screwdriver. “You stayed in my vault rent free for a week. You’re welcome.”
He snorted. “You should pay me for having to suffer in that place. Do you have any idea how much mold I probably inhaled? That stuff cuts your life short.”
She spun each screw of the case out impatiently, letting them fall to the floor without care. “So does being a Rogue Hunter who doesn’t escape.”
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Orissa undid the last screw and pried the back panel off. Reaching in, she disconnected some wires, grunted and undid a pair of clasps, and came out holding a tiny blue cube between her thumb and forefinger.
A Vaunton cube.
“Jackpot,” she said, smiling.
She shouldered off her backpack and pulled out her own laptop, along with a device foreign to Leon. It looked like a little black cradle designed specifically for Vaunton cubes.
“What is that?”
“It’s two things,” explained Orissa, plugging it into her laptop. “It functions as an external cube slot, and also as a decrypter.”
“That would have been helpful to know. I’ve a dozen or so Vaunton cubes I salvaged from the tunnels. Would’ve liked to see the data within. Does this thing of yours have a name?”
She shrugged, clicking the Vaunton cube into place. “It’s Machine made, so no. I call it the Cradle.” She powered on her laptop. The computer booted up to a purple screen featuring an amateur painting of a knife slicing open a robotic head.
“Classy,” said Leon.
“I thought so.”
She lowered herself into a chair and leaned back while the lights flashed intermittently on the Cradle. After a few minutes, there was a satisfying click and the light turned a solid green.
“Perfect,” said Orissa. “It’s recognized.” She hovered over a new drive that appeared on the screen, then double-clicked. When it opened, hundreds of folders populated the screen.
“It’s going to take weeks to go through these,” said Leon. “I don’t think this computer was purposefully left here. Sitting in the corner by the door—seems like someone hauled ass out of this place and it fell out of his backpack.”
Orissa sorted by most recent date. “Emails,” she said with a lift of her brows.
“Strange thing to keep on a Cube.”
“Not if you expect to be offline for an extended period of time.” She opened the folder. “And not if they’re important.”
The emails were sorted alphabetically by subject headers.
Algo Updates | 4-1-2078 | Received
Rebirth (Archives of Humanity Book 1) Page 3