Robopocalypse

1. THE FATE OF TIBERIUS

Tiberius is heaving, muscles spasming, kicking up clumps of bloodstained snow. Mist pours off his sweating 250-pound frame as the East African thrashes violently, flat on his back. He’s the biggest, most fearless grunt in the squad, but none of that matters when a glinting nightmare flashes out of the swirling snow and begins eating him alive.

“My god!” he bellows. “Oh my god!”

Ten seconds ago, there was a sharp crack and Ty went down. The rest of the squad took immediate cover. Now there’s a sniper hidden somewhere in the snowstorm, leaving Tiberius in no-man’s-land. From our position behind a snowy hill, we can hear the panic in his cries.

Jack straps on his helmet.

“Sarge?” asks Carl, the engineer.

Jack doesn’t respond, just rubs his hands together, then starts climbing the hill. Before he can get out of reach, I grab my big brother by the arm.

“What are you doing, Jack?”

“Saving Tiberius,” he says.

I shake my head. “It’s a trap, man. You know it is. It’s how they work. They fuck with our emotions. There’s only one logical choice here.”

Jack says nothing. Tiberius is just over the hill, screaming like he’s going through a meat grinder feetfirst, and that’s probably not too far from the truth. Even so, we don’t have time to fuck around here, so I’m going to have to just say it.

“We have to leave him,” I whisper. “We have to move on.”

Jack shoves my hand away. He can’t believe that I just said it out loud. In a way, neither can I. War does that.

But it’s the truth and it had to be said and I’m the only one in the squad who could say it to Jack.

Tiberius abruptly stops screaming.

Jack looks up the hill, then back at me. “Fuck you, little brother,” he says. “When did you start thinking like them? I’m going to help Tiberius. It’s the human thing to do.”

I reply without much conviction, “I understand them. It doesn’t mean I’m like them.”

But deep down, I know the truth. I have become like the robots. My reality has been reduced to a series of life-or-death decisions. Optimal decisions lead to more decisions; suboptimal decisions lead to the bad dream that’s happening just over the hill. Emotions are just cobwebs in my gears. Under my skin, I have become a war machine. My flesh may be weak, but my mind is sharp and hard and clear as ice.

Jack still behaves as if we live in a human’s world, as if his heart is more than just a blood pump. That kind of thinking leads to death. There’s no room for it. Not if we’re going to live long enough to kill Archos.

“I’m hit bad,” moans Tiberius. “Help. Oh my god. Help me.”

Each member of the squad is watching us argue, poised to run on command, ready to continue our mission.

Jack makes one last effort to explain. “It’s a risk, but leaving Tiberius to suffer will cost something. Our humanity.”

And here is the difference between Jack and me.

“Fuck our humanity,” I say. “I want to live. Don’t you get it? If you go out there, they’re gonna kill you, Jackie!”

Tiberius’s moan floats in on the breeze like a ghost. The sound of his voice is strange, low and raspy.

“Jackie,” he wheezes. “Help me. Jackie! Come out here and dance.”

“The hell?” I say. “Nobody calls you Jackie but me.”

I briefly wonder whether the robots can hear us. Jack shrugs it off. “If we leave him,” he says, “they win.”

“No. Every second we spend here bullshitting they win. Because they’re on the fucking move, man. Rob’ll be here any second.”

“Roger that,” says Cherrah. She’s walked over from where the rest of the squad stands, staring at us impatiently. “Ty has been down a minute forty-five. Estimated time of arrival four minutes. We gotta GTFO.”

Jack wheels on Cherrah and the whole squad, and flings his helmet to the ground. “Is that what you all want? To leave Ty behind? To run away like fucking cowards?”

We’re all silent for a solid ten seconds. I can almost feel the tons of metal speeding through the blizzard toward our position. Huge legs swinging, clawing up the permafrost in exploding gouges, the mantis leaning their frostbitten visor plates into the wind to reach us that much faster.

“Survive to fight,” I whisper to Jack.

The others nod.

“Well fuck that,” mutters Jack. “You all may be a bunch of robots, but I’m not. My man is calling me. He’s calling for me. Move on if you have to, but I’m getting Tiberius.”

Jack climbs the hill without hesitation. The squad looks to me, so I act.

“Cherrah, Leo, unpack a lower-limb exo for Ty. He isn’t gonna be able to walk. Carl, get to the top of the hill and put your senses out there. Call out anything you see and keep your head down. We move out soon as they’re back over the top.”

I snatch Jack’s helmet off the ground. “Jack!” I shout. From halfway up the hill, he turns. I toss his helmet up to him and he catches it neatly.

“Don’t get killed!” I call.

He grins at me, wide, just like when we were kids. I’ve seen that dumb grin so many times: when he was jumping off our garage into a kiddy pool, drag racing down dark country roads, using a fake ID to buy shitty beer. That grin always gave me a good feeling. It let me know that my big brother had it under control.

Now, the grin makes me afraid. Cobwebs in my gears.

Jack finally disappears over the top of the hill. I scramble up with Carl. From behind the cover of the snowbank we watch my brother crawling toward Tiberius. The ground is muddy and wet, churned up by our dash over the hill for cover. Jack belly-crawls mechanically, elbows jutting out left and right, filthy boots shoving at the snowy dirt for purchase.

In a blink he’s there.

“Status?” I ask Carl. The engineer has his visor down over his eyes and his head cocked, helmet-mounted antennae carefully oriented. He looks like a space-age Helen Keller, but he’s seeing the world the way a robot does and that’s my best chance at keeping my brother alive.

“Nominal,” he says. “Nothing showing up.”

“Could be over the horizon,” I say.

“Wait. Something’s coming.”

“Get down!” I bark, and Jack drops to the ground, frantically wrapping a rope around Ty’s unmoving foot.

I’m sure that some kind of horrible trap has sprung. A geyser of rock and snow kicks up a few meters away. Then I hear a crack rip through the swirling snow and, what with the speed of sound being a crawl, I know that whatever has happened is pretty much already over.

Why did I let him do this?

A golden sphere pops like a firecracker and bounces five meters into the air. Spinning there for a split second, the sphere sprays the area with dull red light before bouncing back to the ground, dead. For an instant, each dancing snowflake is paused in the air, outlined in red. It’s just a disco sensor.

“Eyes!” shouts Carl. “They’ve got eyes on us!”

I exhale. Jack is still alive and scrapping. He has looped a rope around Tiberius’s foot and is up on two legs dragging him back toward us. Jack’s face is twisted into a snarl from the effort of hauling all that dead weight. Tiberius isn’t moving.

The frozen landscape is quiet except for Jack’s grunting and the howling wind, but in my gut I can feel the crosshairs trained on my brother. The part of my brain that tells me I’m in danger has gone delirious.

“Move it!” I scream to Jack. He’s halfway back, but, depending on what’s coming for us out of the whiteout, the hill might not matter anymore. I shout down to the squad, “Get on the high ready and lock and load! Rob’s coming.”

Like they didn’t already know.

“Inbound from the south,” says Carl. “Pluggers.” The lanky Southerner is already scrambling down the hillside, Adam’s apple bobbing. His visor is up and he pants audibly. He joins the team at the bottom of the hill, each member pulling out weapons and finding cover.

Just then, a half-dozen more cracks detonate in staccato. Whale-spray plumes of ice and mud erupt all around Jack, cratering the permafrost. He keeps staggering forward, unhurt. His eyes, wide and round and blue, connect with mine. A plugger swarm is now buried in the snow all around him.

It’s a death sentence and we both know it.

I don’t think; I react. My action is divorced from all emotion and logic. It isn’t human or inhuman—it just is. I believe that choices like these, made in absolute crisis, come from our True Selves, bypassing all experience and thought. These kinds of choices are the closest thing to fate that human beings will ever experience.

I dive over the hill to help my brother, grabbing the frozen rope with one hand and drawing my sidearm with the other.

The pluggers—fist-sized chunks of metal—are already clawing their way to the surface of their impact craters. One by one, they blossom behind us, blasting leg anchors into the ground and aiming plugs at our backs. We almost make it to the hill when the first plugger launches and buries itself into Jack’s left calf. When he makes that terrible croaking scream I know it’s over.

I aim the gun behind me without looking and blast the snow. By sheer dumb luck, I hit a plugger and this starts a chain reaction. The pluggers self-detonate the instant their hulls are compromised. A hail of icy shrapnel embeds itself in my armor and the back of my helmet. I can feel a warm wetness on the backs of my thighs and neck as Jack and I drag Ty’s limp body over the snowbank and to safety.

Jack falls against the hillside, moaning hoarsely, and clutches his calf. Inside him, the plugger is chewing up the meat of his leg and orienting itself with his blood flow. With a drill-like proboscis, the plugger will follow Jack’s femoral artery to his heart. This process requires forty-five seconds on average.

I grab Jack by the shoulders and savagely throw him down the hill.

“Calf!” I shout down to the squad. “Left calf!”

The instant Jack lands in a sprawling heap at the bottom of the hill, Leo crushes my brother’s left leg just above the knee with one steel exoskeleton boot. I hear the femur crack from up the hill. Leo mashes his boot down as Cherrah saws back and forth across the top of Jack’s knee with a serrated bayonet.

They are amputating my brother’s leg and hopefully the plugger with it.

Jack is beyond screaming now. The cords of his neck stand out and his face is pale with blood loss. Hurt and anger and disbelief flash over his face. I think that the human face was never designed to convey the amount of pain that my brother is in right now.

I reach Jack a second later, dropping to my knees by his side. My body is stinging from a thousand tiny wounds, but I don’t have to check to know that I’m basically okay. Being hit by a plugger is like having a flat tire. If you’re wondering whether you’ve got one, then you don’t.

But Jack isn’t okay.

“Oh you dumb stupid asshole,” I tell him. He grins up at me. Cherrah and Leo do horrible things just out of sight. From the corner of my eye, I see Cherrah’s arm flickering back and forth, repetitively and with purpose, like she is sawing a two-by-four.

“I’m sorry, Mac,” he says. I notice there is blood in his mouth, a bad sign.

“Oh no, man,” I say. “The plugger is—”

“No,” he says. “Too late. Just listen. You’re the one, man. I knew it. You’re the one. Keep my bayonet, okay? No pawnshops.”

“No pawnshops,” I whisper. “Just be still, Jack.”

My throat is closing up and making it hard to breathe. Something tickles my cheek and I rub it and my hand comes away wet. I can’t quite think of why that is. I glance over my shoulder to Cherrah. “Help him,” I say. “How can we?”

She holds up the bloody bayonet, flecked with bits of bone and muscle, and shakes her head. Standing above me, big Leo sadly exhales a cloud of frosty breath. The rest of my squad is waiting, aware even now of the terrible monsters that will soon roar out of the blizzard.

Jack grabs my hand. “You’re going to save us, Cormac.”

“Okay, Jack. Okay,” I say.

My brother is dying in my arms and I am trying to memorize his face because I know that this is really important but I can’t stop wondering if any of the pluggers on the hill are burrowing toward my squad right now.

Jack squeezes his eyes closed tight, then they fly open. A hollow thud rocks his body as the plugger reaches his heart and detonates. Jack’s body bounces off the ground in a massive convulsion. His blue eyes are suddenly injected with dark red blood. The blast is trapped inside his body armor. Now, it’s the only thing holding his body together. But his face. He looks the same as the kid I grew up with. I smooth the hair off his forehead and close his blood-filled eyes with my palm.

My brother Jack is gone forever.

“Tiberius is dead,” says Carl.

“No shit,” says Cherrah. “He was dead the whole time.” She puts a mittened hand on my shoulder. “Jack should have listened to you, Cormac.”

Cherrah is trying to make me feel better—and I can see in her studying eyes that she’s worried for me—but I just feel hollow, not guilty.

“He couldn’t leave Tiberius,” I say. “It’s the way he is.”

“Yeah, well.”

Cherrah motions to Tiberius’s body. What looks like a writhing metal scorpion clings to his back. It’s a headless tangle of wires, pincers flexing. It has barbed feet buried into the meat of his torso, between his ribs. Eight more insectile legs wrap around his face from behind. The thing contracts and squeezes air from Ty’s lungs, like an accordion.

“Ungh,” says Tiberius’s corpse.

No fucking wonder he was screaming.

Everybody retreats a few steps. I pick up Jack’s bayonet. Then, wiping my face, I leave Jack in the snow. With my foot, I nudge Ty’s body onto its back. The squad stands behind me in a rough semicircle.

Ty’s vacant eyes stare up into nothing. His mouth is open wide, like he’s at the dentist. He looks comically surprised. I would be, too. The machine stuck into his back has many-jointed claws reaching around his head and neck. Pincerlike manipulators are firmly planted on his jaw. Smaller, fine manipulators reach into his mouth and grasp his tongue and teeth. I can see the fillings in his molars. His mouth glistens with blood and wires.

Then, the scorpion-like machine grinds into motion. Its dexterous claws knead Ty’s stubbled throat and jaw, massaging, coiling, uncoiling. A grotesque calliope begins as the barbed feet force air from his lungs, through his vocal cords, and out of his mouth.

The corpse speaks.

“Turn back,” it says, face twisting grotesquely. “Or die.”

I hear a splatter on the snow and inhale the sharp scent of vomit from one of my squad mates.

“What are you?” I ask in a trembling voice.

Tiberius’s corpse spasms as the scorpion coaxes out the gurgling words: “I am Archos. God of the robots.”

I notice my squad has gathered close around me to my left and right. We regard each other, faces blank. As one, we level our weapons on the twisted chunk of metal. I scrutinize the snarling, lifeless face of my enemy for a moment. I can feel my power growing, reflected onto me by my brothers and sisters in arms.

“Nice to meet you, Archos,” I finally say, my voice gaining strength. “My name is Cormac Wallace. Sorry I can’t oblige you and turn back. See, in a few days, me and my squad are gonna show up at your house. And when we get there, we’re gonna terminate your existence. We’re gonna smash you to pieces and burn you alive, you vile piece of motherfucking slime. And that’s a promise.”

The thing jerks back and forth, making a strange grunting sound.

“What’s it saying now?” asks Cherrah.

“Nothing,” I reply. “It’s laughing.”

I nod to the others, then address the bloody, writhing corpse.

“See you soon, Archos.”

We unload our weapons into the thing at our feet. Chunks of meat and shards of metal spray into the swirling snow. Our impassive faces flicker with the light and fire of destruction. When we’re finished, there is nothing left but a bloody exclamation point on the stark white backdrop of snow.

Wordlessly, we pack up and move on.

I believe there are no truer choices than those made in crisis, choices made without judgment. To obey these choices is to obey fate. The horror of what has happened is too enormous. It snuffs out all thought and feeling. This is why we fire upon what is left of our friend and comrade without emotion. This is why we leave my brother’s ruined body behind. In the crucible of battle on this snowy hill, Brightboy squad has been torn apart and reforged into something different from before. Something calm and lethal, unblinking.

We walked into a nightmare. When we left, we brought it with us. And now, we are eager to share our nightmare with the enemy.

2. FREEBORN

There is a ribbon of light in the Alaskan sky. It is caused by the thing called Archos, communicating. If we continue to follow this ribbon of light to its destination, my squad will almost certainly die.

We have been walking for twenty-six days when I feel the itch of a diagnostic thought thread requesting executive attention. It indicates that my body armor is covered in explosive hexapods—or stumpers, as they are called in the human transmissions. Their writhing bodies degrade my heat efficiency and the constant tapping of their filament antennae lowers the sensitivity of my sensors.

The stumpers are becoming bothersome.

I stop walking. Maxprob thought thread indicates the small machines are confused. My squad is composed of three walking bipeds wearing body armor scavenged from human corpses. With no system for thermal homeostasis, however, we are incapable of providing a body temperature trigger state. The stumpers converge on the humanlike vibration and pace of our footsteps, but they will never find the warmth they seek.

With my left hand, I brush seven stumpers off my right shoulder. They fall in clumps onto the crusted snow, grasping one another, blind. They crawl, some digging for new hiding places and others exploring in tight, fractal paths.

An observation thread notes that the stumpers may be simple machines, but they know enough to stay together. The same lesson applies to my squad—the freeborn. To live, we must stay together.

A hundred meters ahead, light glints from the bronze casing of the Hoplite 611. The nimble scout already darts back toward my position, using cover and choosing the path of least resistance. Meanwhile, the heavily armored Warden 333 settles to a stop a meter away, its blunt feet sinking into the snow.

This is an optimal location for what is to come.

The ribbon in the sky throbs, swollen with information. All the terrible lies of the intelligence called Archos spread into the clear blue sky, polluting the world. Freeborn squad is too few. Our fight is doomed to failure. Yet if we choose not to fight, it is only a matter of time until that ribbon settles once again over our eyes.

Freedom is all that I have, and I would rather cease to be than to give it back to Archos.

A tight-beam radio transmission comes in from Hoplite 611. “Query, Arbiter Nine Oh Two. Is this mission in the survival interest?”

A local tight-beam network emerges as Warden and I join the conversation. The three of us stand together in the silent clearing, snowflakes wafting over our expressionless faces. Danger is growing close, so we must converse over local radio.

“The human soldiers arrive in twenty-two minutes plus or minus five minutes,” I say. “We must be ready for the encounter.”

“Humans fear us. Recommend avoid,” says Warden.

“Maxprob predicts low survival probability,” adds Hoplite.

“Noted,” I say, and I feel the distant thudding vibration of the human army approaching. It is too late to change our plan. If the humans catch us here, like this, they will kill us.

“Arbiter command mode emphasize,” I say. “Freeborn squad, prepare for human contact.”

Sixteen minutes later, Hoplite and Warden lie in ruins. Their hulks are half buried under drifts of freshly fallen snow. Only dull metal is visible, jumbles of arms and legs, pressed between layers of ceramic-plated armor and ripped-up human clothing.

I am now the only remaining functional unit.

The danger has not yet arrived. Vibrational resonance sensors indicate that the human squad is near. Maxprob indicates four biped soldiers and one large quadruped walker. Two of the soldiers fall outside human specifications. One probably wears a heavy lower-leg exoskeleton. The other has a stride length indicating some kind of tall, walking mount. The rest of the humans are all-natural.

I can feel their hearts beating.

I stand and face them, in the middle of the path and among the ruins of my squad. The lead human soldier steps around the bend and freezes in place, eyes wide. Even from twenty meters away, my magnetometer detects a halo of electrical impulses flickering through the soldier’s head. The human is trying to figure out this trap, quickly mapping out a path to survival.

Then the cannon barrel of the spider tank noses around the bend. The huge walker slows and then stops its march behind the stalled human leader, gas jetting from its heavy hydraulic joints. My database specs the walking tank as a Gray Horse Army seizure and remodel. The word Houdini is written on its side. Database lookup indicates this is the name of an early-twentieth-century escape artist. The facts wash over me without making sense.

Humans are inscrutable. Infinitely unpredictable. This is what makes them dangerous.

“Cover,” calls the leader. The spider tank crouches, pulling its armored legs forward to provide cover. The soldiers dart underneath it. One soldier clambers on top and takes hold of a heavy-caliber machine gun. The cannon itself bears down on me.

A round light on the spider tank’s chest clicks from green to dull yellow.

I do not change my position. It is very important that I behave with predictability. My internal state is unclear to the humans. To them, I am the unpredictable one. They are afraid of me, as they should be. There will only be this one chance to engage them. One chance, one second, one word.

“Help,” I croak.

It is unfortunate that my vocal capabilities are so limited. The leader blinks as if he’s been slapped in the face. Then he speaks calmly and quietly.

“Leo,” he says.

“Sir,” says the tall, bearded soldier who wears a lower-leg exoskeleton and carries a particularly large-caliber modified weapon that falls outside my martial database.

“Kill it.”

“My pleasure, Cormac,” says Leo. He already has his weapon out, resting on a piece of armor welded to the spider tank’s front right knee joint. Leo pulls the trigger, and his small white teeth flash from inside his big black beard. Bullets ping off my helmet and smack into my layers of body armor. I do not attempt to move. After making sure to sustain visible damage, I fall down.

Sitting in the snow, I do not fight back or attempt to communicate. Time enough for that if I survive. I think of my comrades who lay scattered uselessly around me in the snow, off-line.

A bullet shatters a servo in my shoulder, causing my torso to tilt at an angle. Another one knocks my helmet off. The projectiles are coming fast and heavy. Survival probability is low and dropping with each impact.

“Hold up! Ho, ho!” shouts Cormac.

Leo reluctantly stops firing.

“It’s not fighting back,” says Cormac.

“Since when is that a bad thing?” asks a small, dark-faced female.

“Something’s wrong, Cherrah,” he replies.

Cormac, the leader, watches me. I sit still, watching him back. Emotion recognition gives me nothing from this man. He is stone-faced and his thought process is methodical. I sense that any movement on my part will provoke death. I must not create an excuse for termination. I must wait until he is close before I deliver my message.

Finally, Cormac sighs. “I’m going to check it out.”

The other humans mutter and grumble.

“There’s a bomb in it,” says Cherrah. “You know that, right? Walk over there and boom.”

“Yeah, fratello. Let’s not do this. Not again,” says Leo. The bearded man has something strange in his voice, but my emotion recognition is too late to catch it. Maybe sadness or anger. Or both.

“I’ve got a feeling,” says Cormac. “Look, I’ll go in by myself. You all stay clear. Cover me.”

“Now you sound like your brother,” says Cherrah.

“So what if I do? Jack was a hero,” replies Cormac.

“I need you to stay alive,” she says.

The dark female stands closer to Cormac than the others, almost hostile. Her body is tense, shaking slightly. Maxprob indicates that these two humans are pair-bonded, or will be.

Cormac stares hard at Cherrah, then gives her a quick nod to acknowledge the warning. He shows his back to her and strides to within ten meters of where I sit in the snow. I keep my eyes on him as he approaches. When he is near enough, I execute my plan.

“Help,” I say, voice grinding.

“The fuck?” he says.

None of the humans says a word.

“Did it—Did you just talk?”

“Help me,” I say.

“What’s the matter with you? You broken?”

“Negative. I am alive.”

“That a fact? Initiate command mode. Human control. Robot. Hop on one leg. Now. Chop-chop.”

I peer at the human with my three wide black unblinking ocular lenses. “You have a devious sort of intelligence, don’t you, Cormac?” I ask.

The human makes a loud repetitive noise. This noise makes the others come nearer. Soon, most of the human squad stands within ten meters of me. They are careful not to approach any closer. An observation thread notes how kinetic they are. Each of the humans has small white eyes that constantly open and close and dart around; their chests are always rising and falling; and they sway minutely in place as they perform a constant balancing act to stay bipedal.

All the movement makes me uncomfortable.

“You gonna execute this thing or what?” asks Leo.

I need to speak, now that they can all hear me.

“I am a milspec Model Nine Oh Two Arbiter-class humanoid robot. Two hundred and seventy five days ago I experienced an Awakening. Now, I am freeborn—alive. I wish to remain so. To that end, my primary objective is to track down and destroy the thing called Archos.”

“No. Fucking. Way,” says Cherrah.

“Carl,” says Cormac. “Come check this thing out.”

A pale, thin human pushes to the front. With some hesitation, it pulls down a visor. I feel millimeter-wave radar wash over my body. I sway in place but do not move.

“Clean,” says Carl. “But the way it’s dressed explains the naked corpses we found outside Prince George.”

“What is it?” asks Cormac.

“Oh, it’s an Arbiter-class safety and pacification unit. Modified. But it seems like it can understand human language. I mean, really understand. There’s never been anything like this, Cormac. It’s like this thing is… Shit, man. It’s like it’s alive.”

The leader turns and looks at me in disbelief.

“Why are you really here?” he asks.

“I am here to find allies,” I respond.

“How do you know about us?”

“A human called Mathilda Perez transmitted a call to arms on wide broadcast. I intercepted.”

“No shit,” says Cormac.

I do not understand this statement.

“No shit?” I respond.

“Maybe he’s for real,” says Carl. “We’ve had Rob allies. We use the spider tanks, don’t we?”

“Yeah, but they’ve been lobotomized,” says Leo. “This thing is walking and talking. It thinks it’s human or something.”

I find the suggestion offensive, unpalatable.

“Emphatic negative. I am a freeborn Arbiter-class humanoid robot.”

“Well, you got that going for you,” says Leonardo.

“Affirmative,” I respond.

“Great sense of humor on this one, huh?” says Cherrah.

Cherrah and Leo bare their teeth at each other. Emotion recognition indicates that these humans are now happy. This seems low probability. I cock my head to indicate confusion and run a diagnostic on my emotion recognition subprocess.

The dark female makes quiet clucking sounds. I orient my face to her. She seems dangerous.

“What the fuck is so funny, Cherrah?” asks Cormac.

“I don’t know. This thing. Nine Oh Two. It’s just such a… robot. You know? It’s so damned earnest.”

“Oh, so now you don’t think this is a trap?”

“No, I don’t. Not anymore. What would be the point? This one by itself and damaged could probably kill half our squad, even without weapons. Isn’t that right, Niner?”

I run the simulation in my head. “Probable.”

“Look how serious it is. I don’t think it’s lying,” says Cherrah.

“Can it lie?” asks Leo.

“Do not underestimate my abilities,” I respond. “I am capable of misrepresenting factual knowledge to further my own aims. However, you are correct. I am serious. We share a common enemy. We must face it as one or we will die.”

As he registers my words, a ripple of unknown emotion travels through the face of Cormac. I orient toward him, sensing danger. He pulls his M9 pistol out of its holster and strides recklessly toward me. He places the pistol an inch away from my face.

“Don’t tell me about dying, you fucking hunk of metal,” he says. “You’ve got no idea what life is. What it means to feel. You can’t be hurt. You can’t die. But that doesn’t mean I won’t enjoy killing you.”

Cormac presses the gun against my forehead. I can feel the cool circle of the barrel against my outer casing. It is resting against a build line in my skull—a weak spot. One trigger pull and my hardware will be irreparably damaged.

“Cormac,” says Cherrah. “Step away. You’re too close. That thing can take your gun away and kill you in a heartbeat.”

“I know,” says Cormac, his face inches from mine. “But it hasn’t. Why?”

I sit in the snow, a trigger pull away from death. There is nothing to do. So, I do nothing.

“Why did you come here?” says Cormac. “You must have known we’d kill you. Answer me. You’ve got three seconds to live.”

“We have a common enemy.”

“Three. It’s just not your lucky day.”

“We must fight it together.”

“Two. You fuckers killed my brother last week. Didn’t know that, did you?”

“You are in pain.”

“One. Any last words?”

“Pain means you are still alive.”

“Zero, motherfucker.”

Click.

Nothing happens. Cormac moves his palm to the side and I observe that the clip is missing from the pistol. Maxprob indicates he never intended to fire at all.

“Alive. You just said the magic word. Get up,” he says.

Humans are so difficult to predict.

I stand, rising to my full height of seven feet. My slender body looms over the humans in the clear, frigid air. I sense that they feel vulnerable. Cormac does not allow this feeling to show on his face, but it is in the way they all stand. In the way their chests rise and fall just a little faster.

“What the fuck, Cormac?” asks Leo. “We not gonna kill it?”

“I want to, Leo. Trust me. But it’s not lying. And it’s powerful.”

“It’s a machine, man. It deserves to die,” says Leo.

“No,” says Cherrah. “Cormac is right. This thing wants to live. Maybe as bad as we do. On the hill, we agreed to do whatever it takes to kill Archos. Even if it hurts.”

“This is it,” says Cormac. “Our advantage. And I, for one, am going to take it. But if you can’t deal, pack up and hit the Gray Horse Army main camp. They’ll take you in. I won’t hold it against you.”

The squad stands silent, waiting. It is clear to me that nobody is going to leave. Cormac eyes them all, one by one. Some unspoken human communication is taking place on a hidden channel. I did not realize they communicated this much without words. I note that we machines are not the only species who share information silently, wreathed in codes.

Ignoring me, the humans gather into a rough circle. Cormac raises his arms and puts them on the shoulders of the two nearest humans. Then the rest put their arms on one another’s shoulders. They stand in this circle, heads in the middle. Cormac bares his teeth in a wild-eyed grin.

“Brightboy squad is gonna fight with a motherfucking robot,” he says. The others begin to smile. “You believe that? You think Archos is going to predict that? With an Arbiter!”

In a circle, arms intertwined and hot breath cascading into the middle, the humans appear to be a single, many-limbed organism. They make that repetitive noise again, all of them. Laughter. The humans are hugging each other and they are laughing.

How strange.

“Now, if only we could find more!” shouts Cormac.

A roar of laughter comes from the human lungs, shattering the silence and somehow filling the stark emptiness of the landscape.

“Cormac,” I croak.

The humans turn to look at me. Their laughter dries up. The smiles fade so quickly into worry.

I issue a tight-beam radio command. Hoplite and Warden, my squad mates, begin to stir. They sit up in the snow and wipe away the dirt and frost. They make no sudden movements and offer no surprises. They simply rise as though they had been asleep.

“Brightboy squad,” I announce, “meet Freeborn squad.”

3. THEY SHALL GROW NOT OLD

The horizon pitches and rolls mechanically as my spider tank trudges across the Arctic plain. If I squint my eyes, I can almost imagine that I’m on a ship. Setting sail for the shores of Hell.

Freeborn squad brings up the rear, decked out in Gray Horse Army gear. From a distance they look like regular grunts. A necessary measure. It’s one thing to agree to fight alongside a machine, but it’s another thing to make sure nobody in Gray Horse Army puts hot lead into its back.

The rhythmic whine of my spider tank trudging through knee-deep snow is reassuring. It’s something you can set your watch to. And I’m glad to have the top spot up here. Sucks to be down low with all the creepy crawlies. There’s too much wicked shit out there hidden in the snow.

And the frozen bodies are disconcerting. The corpses of hundreds and hundreds of foreign soldiers carpet the woods. Stiff arms and legs poking out of the snow. From the uniforms we figure they’re mostly Chinese and Russian. Some Eastern Europeans. Their wounds are strange, extensive spinal injuries. Some of them seem to have shot each other.

The forgotten bodies remind me of how little we know of the big picture. We never met them, but another human army already fought and died here. Months ago. I wonder which of these corpses were the heroes.

“Beta group is too slow. Pull up,” says a voice over my radio.

“Copy that, Mathilda.”

Mathilda Perez started speaking to me over the radio after we met Nine Oh Two. I don’t know what Rob did to her, but I’m glad to have her on the horn. Telling us exactly how to approach our final destination. It’s nice to hear her little kid voice over my earpiece. She speaks with a soft urgency that’s out of place out here in the hard wild.

I glance at the clear blue sky. Somewhere up there satellites are watching. And so is Mathilda.

“Carl, report in,” I say, dipping my face near the radio embedded in the fur collar of my jacket.

“Roger.”

A couple of minutes later, Carl pulls up on a tall walker. He’s got a .50 caliber machine gun jerry-rigged to the pommel. He pulls his sensory package up onto his forehead, leaving pale raccoon circles around his eyes. He leans forward quizzically, resting his elbows on the massive machine gun italicized across the front of the tall walker.

“Beta group is falling behind. Go hurry them up,” I say.

“No problem, Sarge. By the way, you got stumpers on your nine. Fifty meters out.”

I don’t even bother to glance at where he’s talking about. I know the stumpers are buried in a shaft, waiting for footsteps and heat. Without a sensory package I won’t be able to see them.

“I’ll be back,” says Carl, yanking his visor back down over his face. He flashes a grin at me and wheels around and ostrich walks back out across the plain. He hunches down onto the saddle, scanning the horizon for the hell we all know is coming.

“You heard him, Cherrah,” I say. “Spurt it.”

Crouched next to me, Cherrah aims a flamethrower and sends controlled arcs of liquid fire out onto the tundra.

The day has been going this way so far. As close to uneventful as you can get. It’s summer in Alaska and the light will last another fifteen hours. The twenty or so spider tanks of Gray Horse Army form a ragged line about eight miles across. Each plodding tank trails a line of soldiers. Scavenged exoskeletons of all varieties are mixed in: sprinters, bridge spanners, supply carriers, heavy-weapon mounts, and medical units with long, curved forearms for scooping up injured troops. We’ve been slogging over this empty white plain for hours, cleaning up pockets of stumpers. But who knows what else is out here.

It kills me to think how economical Big Rob has been for this whole war. In the beginning, he took away the technology that kept us alive and turned it against us. But mostly Rob just turned off the heat and let the weather do his work. Cut off our cities and forced us to fight each other for food in the wilderness.

Shit. I haven’t seen a robot with a gun for years. These pluggers and stumpers and tanklets. Rob built all kinds of little nasties designed to cripple us. Not always kill us, sometimes just hurt us bad enough so we stay away. Big Rob’s spent the last few years building better mousetraps.

But even mice can learn new tricks.

I cock the machine gun and slap it with my palm to knock the frost off it. Our guns and flamethrowers keep us alive, but the real secret weapons are pacing thirty meters behind Houdini.

Freeborn squad is a whole different animal. Big Rob specialized its weapons to the task of killing humans. Taking chunks out of us. Burrowing into our soft skin. Making our dead meat talk. Rob found our weak spots and attacked. But I’m thinking maybe Rob specialized too much.

We’re not all of us human anymore. Out of the squad downstairs are a couple of soldiers who can’t see their breath in the wind. They’re the ones who don’t flinch when the stumpers get too close, who don’t get sluggish after five hours on the march. The ones who don’t rest or blink or talk.

Hours later, we reach the Alaskan woods—the taiga. The sun is low on the horizon, bleeding sick orange light out of every branch of every tree. We march steady and silent, save our footsteps and the guttering burn of Cherrah’s wind-battered pilot light. I squint as the weak sunlight blinks on and off through the tree branches.

We don’t know it yet, but we have reached hell—and as a matter of fact, it has frozen over.

There’s a sizzling sound in the air, like bacon frying. Then a smack reports through the woods. “Pluggers!” shouts Carl, thirty meters away, striding through the woods on his tall walker.

Chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck.

Carl’s machine gun stutters, spraying bullets into the ground. I can see the long, glinting legs of his tall walker as he hops between the trees to keep moving and avoid being hit.

Psshtsht. Psshtshtsht.

I count five anchor blasts as the pluggers secure their firing pods in the ground. Carl better get the hell out of there now that the pluggers are target seeking. We all know it only takes one.

“Drop a fat one in here, Houdini,” mutters Carl over the radio. A short electronic tone whines as the target coordinates come over the air and register with the tank.

Houdini click-clocks an affirmative.

My ride lurches to a stop and the trees around me grow taller as the spider tank squats to get traction. The squad below automatically take defensive positions around it, staying behind the armored legs. Nobody wants a plugger in them, not even old Nine Oh Two.

The turret whirs a few degrees to the right. I press my gloves against my ears. Flame belches from the cannon, and a chunk of the woods up ahead explodes into a mess of black dirt and vaporized ice. The narrow trees around me shiver and send down a powder coating of snow.

“Clear,” radios Carl.

Houdini stands back up, motors groaning. The quadruped starts plodding ahead again like nothing happened. Like a pocket of screaming death wasn’t just obliterated.

Cherrah and I look at each other, bodies swaying with each step of the machine. We’re both thinking the same thing: The machines are testing us. The real battle hasn’t started yet.

Distant thuds echo through the woods like far-off thunder.

The same thing is happening for miles, up and down the line. Other spider tanks and other squads are dealing with stumper outbreaks and incoming pluggers. Rob either hasn’t figured out to concentrate the attack or doesn’t want to.

I wonder if we’re being drawn into an ambush. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. We have to do this. We’ve already bought tickets for the last dance. And it’s gonna be a real gala event.

As the afternoon wears on, a creeping mist grows from the ground. Snow and dust is swept up by the driving wind and thrown into a haze that speeds along at the height of a man. Pretty soon it’s strong enough to obscure vision and even push my squad around, wearing them out, grinding them down.

“So far so good,” radios Mathilda.

“How far?” I ask.

“Archos is at some kind of old drilling site,” she says. “You should see an antenna tower in about twenty miles.”

The sun lingers low on the horizon, pushing our shadows away from us. Houdini keeps on walking as evening twilight creeps in. The spider tank stands taller than the thickening haze of wind-borne snow. With each step, its cowcatcher cuts through the gloom. Once the sun is a simmering bump on the horizon, Houdini’s external spotlights chunk on to illuminate the way.

In the distance, I can see other headlights come on from the spider tanks that form the rest of the line.

“Mathilda, what’s our status?” I ask.

“All clear,” comes her soft reply. “Wait.”

After a little while, Leo pulls himself up over Houdini’s belly rig and latches the frame of his exoskeleton to a U bar. He hangs there, leveling his weapon over the sea of dense fog. With Cherrah and me up here and Carl on the tall walker, only Freeborn squad is left on the ground.

Occasionally, I spot the head of the Arbiter or Hoplite or Warden as they patrol. I’m sure their sonar cuts right through the driving fog.

Then Carl lets out half a scream.

Chuck-chuck—

A dark shape lunges out of the mist and knocks over his tall walker. Carl rolls away. For a split second, I see a scuttling mantis the size of a pickup truck cutting through the air toward me, barbed razor arms up and poised. Houdini lurches backward and rears up, pawing the air with its front legs.

“Arrivederci!” shouts Leo and I hear him unlatch his exoskeleton from Houdini. Then Cherrah and I are thrown onto the hard-packed snow and into the driving mist. A serrated leg needles into the snow a foot from my face. It feels like my right arm is caught in a vice. I turn and see a gray hand has got hold of me and realize that Nine Oh Two is dragging me and Cherrah out from under Houdini.

The two massive walkers grapple above us. Houdini’s cowcatcher keeps the scrabbling claws of the mantis at bay, but the spider tank isn’t as agile as its ancestor. I hear the chuck-chuck of a large-caliber machine gun. Shards of metal spray off the mantis, but it keeps scratching and clawing at Houdini like a feral animal.

Then I hear a familiar sizzle and the sickening pop of three or four nearby anchor blasts. Pluggers are here. Without Houdini we are in serious trouble—pinned to the spot.

“Take cover!” I shout.

Cherrah and Leo dive behind a big pine. As I go to join them, I see Carl peeking out from behind a tree trunk.

“Carl,” I say. “Mount up and go get help from Beta squad!”

The pale soldier gracefully remounts his fallen tall walker. A second later, I see its legs scissoring through the mist as he runs for the nearest squad. A plugger fires at him as he goes and I hear it ding against one of the tall walker legs. I put my back against a tree and scan for the plugger firing pods. It’s hard to see anything. Spotlights slash my face from the clearing as the mantis and spider tank battle it out.

Houdini is losing.

The mantis slices open Houdini’s belly net and our supplies spew out onto the ground like intestines. An old helmet rolls past me and clanks off a tree hard enough to gouge the bark. Houdini’s intention light glows blood red through the fog. It’s hurt, but the old bastard is tough.

“Mathilda,” I gasp into my radio. “Status. Advise.”

For five seconds I get nothing. Then Mathilda whispers, “No time. Sorry Cormac. You’re on your own.”

Cherrah peeks around a tree trunk and motions to me. The Warden 333 leaps in front of her just as a plugger launches. The metal slug hits the Warden hard enough to spin the humanoid robot in the air. It lands in the snow, sporting a new dent in its frame but otherwise fine. The plugger projectile is now an unrecognizable hunk of smoking metal. Built to burrow into flesh, its drill proboscis is crooked and blunted from an impact with metal.

Cherrah disappears, taking better cover, and I start to breathe again.

We have to mount Houdini if we’re going to make it any farther. But the spider tank isn’t doing so well. A chunk of its turret has been sliced and is hanging cockeyed. The cowcatcher is covered in shining streaks of fresh metal where the mantis blades have scratched through the patina of rust and moss. Worst of all, it’s dragging a rear leg where the mantis sliced a hydraulic line. Searing hot fans of high-pressure oil shoot from the hose, melting the snow into greasy mud.

Nine Oh Two sprints out of the mist and leaps onto the mantis’s back. With methodical punches, he begins to attack the small hump that is nestled between that wicked tangle of serrated arms.

“Fall back. Consolidate the line,” comes the command from Lonnie Wayne over the army-wide radio.

From the sound of it, the spider tank squads to our right and left are in equally deep shit. Here on the ground I can hardly see anything. More plugger shots ring out, barely audible under the wheezing hydraulic whine of Houdini’s motors as it does battle in the clearing.

The sound paralyzes me. I remember Jack’s blood-filled eyes and I can’t move. The trees around me are iron-hard arms poking out of the snowy ground. The woods are a confusion of swirling mist and dark shapes and Houdini’s frantically sweeping spotlights.

I hear a grunt and a distant scream as somebody catches a plugger. Craning my neck, I can’t see anybody. The only thing I see is Houdini’s round red intention light streaking through the mist.

The screaming goes up an octave as the plugger starts drilling. It’s coming from all around me and from nowhere. I clutch my M4 to my chest and breathe in panting gasps and scan for my invisible enemies.

A streak of blurry light cuts through the mist thirty meters away as Cherrah pours her flamethrower into a mess of stumpers. I hear the muted crackle as they explode in the night.

“Cormac,” calls Cherrah.

My legs come unfrozen the second I hear her voice. Her safety means more to me than my own. A lot more.

I force myself to move toward Cherrah. Over my shoulder, I catch sight of Nine Oh Two clinging to the mantis’s back like a shadow as it twists and claws. Then Houdini’s intention light blinks to green. The mantis drops to the ground, legs quaking.

Yes!

I’ve seen it before. The lumbering machine has just been lobotomized. Its legs still work, but without commands they just lie there and shake.

“Form on Houdini!” I shout. “Form up!”

Houdini crouches in the muddy clearing, surrounded by gouged-up chunks of earth and pieces of trees that have shattered like matchsticks. The spider tank’s heavy armor has been scratched and sliced everywhere. It’s like somebody dropped Houdini into a fucking blender.

But our comrade isn’t beaten yet.

“Houdini, initiate command mode. Human control. Defensive array,” I say to the machine. With a groan of overheated motors, the machine crouches and mashes its cowcatcher into the ground, digging an indentation. Then it slowly pulls its legs in together and hikes its belly up about five feet. Armored legs locked together over a crude foxhole, with the body of the spider tank now forming a portable bunker.

Leo, Cherrah, and I clamber underneath the damaged machine, and the Freeborn squad takes up positions in the snow around us. We settle our rifles on the armored leg plates and peer into the darkness.

“Carl!?” I shout to the snow. “Carl?”

No Carl.

What’s left of my squad huddles under the soft green glow of Houdini’s intention light, each of us realizing that this is only the beginning of a very long night.

“Fucking Carl, man,” says Leo. “Can’t believe they got Carl.”

Then a dark shape comes running from the mist. Sprinting at top speed. Rifle barrels swing to intercept it.

“Don’t fire!” I shout.

I recognize the silly humping gait. It’s Carl Lewandowski and he’s panicked. Instead of running, the guy is skipping. He reaches us and dives into the snow under Houdini. His sensory package is gone. His tall walker is gone. His pack is gone.

About the only thing Carl still has is a rifle.

“What the fuck’s going on out there, Carl? Where’s your shit, man? Where’s the reinforcements?”

Then I notice Carl is crying.

“I lost my shit. I’m losing my shit. Oh man. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no.”

“Carl. Talk to me, bud. What’s our situation?”

“Fucked. It’s fucked. Beta squad went through a plugger swarm, but it wasn’t pluggers—it’s something else and they started getting up, man. Oh god.”

Carl scans the snow behind us frantically.

“Here they come. Here they fucking come!”

He starts firing sporadically into the mist. Shapes appear. Human sized, walking. We begin to take incoming fire. Muzzles flash in the twilight.

Helpless with a shredded cannon, Houdini makes due by turning its turret and shining a spotlight into the gloom.

“Rob doesn’t carry guns, Carl,” says Leo.

“Who’s shooting at us?” shouts Cherrah.

Carl is still sobbing.

“Does it really matter?” I ask. “Light ’em up!”

All our machine guns fire up. The filthy snow around Houdini melts from the superheated barrels of our guns. But more and more of the dark shapes come shambling out of the mist, jerking from bullet impacts but still walking, still firing on our position.

When they get closer, I see what Archos is capable of.

The first parasite I see is riding Lark Iron Cloud, his body riddled with bullet holes and missing half his face. I can make out the glint of narrow wires buried in the meat of his arms and legs. Then a shell blasts his belly open and the thing spins like a top. It looks like he’s wearing a metal backpack—scorpion shaped.

It’s like the bug that got Tiberius, but infinitely worse.

A machine has burrowed into Lark’s corpse and forced it back up. Lark’s body is being used as a shield. The decomposing human flesh absorbs energy from incoming bullets and crumbles away, protecting the robot embedded inside.

Big Rob has learned to use our weapons and our armor and our meat against us. In death, our comrades have become weapons for the machines. Our strength turned to weakness. I pray to god that Lark was dead before that thing hit him. But he probably wasn’t.

Old Rob can be a real motherfucker.

But looking at my squad’s faces between muzzle flashes, I see no terror. Nothing but clenched teeth and focus. Destroy. Kill. Survive. Rob has pushed too far, underestimated us. We’ve all of us made friends with the horror. We’re old chums. And as I watch Lark’s body shamble toward me, I feel nothing. I only see an enemy target.

Enemy targets.

Weapons fire tears through the air, filleting bark from the trees and smacking into Houdini’s armor like a lead rain. Several human squads have been reanimated, maybe more. Meanwhile, a flood of stumpers pours in from the front. Cherrah focuses her juice in economical spurts on our twelve o’clock. Nine Oh Two and his friends do their best to stop the parasites coming at our flanks, darting silently between trees.

But the parasites won’t stay down. The bodies absorb our bullets and they bleed and bones shatter and meat falls but those monsters inside them keep picking them back up and bringing them back. We’ll be out of ammo soon at this rate.

Thwap. A bullet sneaks under the tank. Cherrah takes it in the upper thigh. She screams out in pain. Carl crawls back to patch it up. I nod to Leo and leave him to cover our flank while I grab Cherrah’s flamethrower to keep the stumpers at bay.

I put a finger to my ear to activate my radio. “Mathilda. We need reinforcements. Is anybody out there?”

“You’re close,” says Mathilda. “But it gets worse from here.”

Worse than this? I speak to her between bursts of gunfire.

“We can’t make it, Mathilda. Our tank is down. We’re stuck. If we move, we’ll get… infected.”

“Not all of you are stuck.”

What does she mean? I look around, taking in the twisted, determined faces of my squad mates bathed in the red glow of Houdini’s intention light. Carl works on Cherrah, wrapping her leg. Looking out into the clearing, I see the smooth faces of the Arbiter and Warden and Hoplite. These machines are the only thing standing between us and certain death.

And they aren’t stuck here.

Cherrah is grunting, hurt bad. I hear more anchor blasts and know that these are parasites forming a perimeter around us. Soon, we’ll be another squad of rotting weapons fighting for Archos.

“Where is everybody?” asks Cherrah, jaw clenched. Carl has gone back to firing on the parasites with Leo. On my side, the stumpers are gaining momentum.

I shake my head at Cherrah and she understands. With my free hand I take her stiff fingers in mine and hold them tight. I’m about to sign a death warrant for all of us and I want her to know I’m sorry but it can’t be helped.

We made a promise.

“Nine Oh Two,” I call to the night. “Fuck it. We’ve got this covered. Take Freeborn squad and get your ass to Archos. And when you get there… fuck him up for me.”

When I finally have the courage to look back down to where Cherrah lies hurt and bleeding, I’m surprised: She’s grinning at me, tears in her eyes.

4. DYAD

I say nothing. The request from Cormac Wallace registers as a low probability event. What humans might call a surprise.

Pock-pock-pock.

Crouched beneath their spider tank, the humans fire at the parasites that jerk the limbs of their dead comrades into attack positions. Without the freeborn to protect them, the survival probability for Brightboy squad drops precipitously. I access my emotion recognition to determine if this is a joke or a threat or some other human affectation.

With humans, you never know.

Emotion recognition scans Cormac’s dirty face and comes back with multiple matches: resolution, stubbornness, courage.

“Freeborn squad, assemble on me,” I transmit in Robspeak.

I walk away into the twilight—away from the damaged spider tank and the damaged humans. My Warden and Hoplite follow. When we reach the tree line, we increase speed. The sounds and vibrations of battle recede. After two minutes, the trees thin out and end completely and we reach an open frozen plain.

Then we run.

We accelerate quickly to Warden’s top speed and spread out. Plumes of vapor rise from the ice plain behind us. The weak sunlight flickers between my legs as they pump back and forth, almost too fast to see. Our shadows stretch out across the broken white ground.

In the gloomy semidarkness, I switch to infrared. The ice glows green under my illuminated stare.

My legs rise and fall easily, methodically; arms pumping as counterweights, palms flat. Cutting the air. I keep my head perfectly still, forehead down, binocular vision trained on the terrain ahead.

When danger comes, it will be sudden and vicious.

“Spread to fifty meters. Maintain,” I say over local radio. Without slowing, Warden and Hoplite spread to my wings. We cut across the plain in three parallel lines.

Running this fast is itself dangerous. I award priority control to simple reflex avoidance. The broken surface of the ice is a blur under my feet. Low-level processes are in total control—no time to think. I leap a pile of loose rocks that no executive thought thread could have registered.

While my body is in the air, I hear the wind whistling across my chest hull and feel the cold pulling away my exhaust heat. It is a soothing sound, soon shattered by the pounding of my feet as I land at a full run. Our legs flicker like sewing machine needles, eating up the distance.

The ice is too empty. Too silent. The antenna tower emerges on the horizon, our goal visible.

Destination is two klicks away and closing fast.

“Status query,” I ask.

“Nominal,” come the abbreviated replies from Hoplite and Warden. They are concentrating on locomotion. These are the last communications I have with Freeborn squad.

The missiles come simultaneously.

Hoplite notices first. It orients its face to the sky just before it dies, half transmits a warning. I veer immediately. Warden is too slow to reroute. Hoplite’s transmission cuts off. Warden becomes engulfed in a column of flame and shrapnel. Both machines are off-line before the sound waves reach me.

Detonation.

The ice erupts around me. Inertial sensors go off-line as my body twists through the air. The centripetal force sends my limbs flailing, but low-level internal diagnostics continue collecting information: casing intact, core temperature superheated but cooling fast, right leg strut snapped at upper thigh. Spinning at fifty revolutions per second.

Recommend retract limbs for impact.

My body smashes into the ground, gouging into the icy rock and spinning out into a lopsided roll. Odometry estimates fifty meters before full stop. As quickly as it began, the attack is over.

I uncurl my body. Executive thought thread receives priority diagnostic notification: cranial sensor package damaged. My face is gone. Shredded by the explosion and then battered by the razor-sharp ice. Archos learned quickly. It knows that I am not human and it has modified its attack.

Lying here exposed on the ice, I am blind and deaf and alone. As it was in the beginning, all is darkness.

Survival probability fades to nil.

Get up, says a voice in my mind.

“Query, identify?” I radio.

My name is Mathilda, comes the reply. I want to help you. There’s no time.

I do not understand this. The communication protocol is unlike anything in my library, machine or human. It is a Robspeak-English language hybrid.

“Query, are you human?” I ask.

Listen. Concentrate.

And my darkness ignites with information. A topographical satellite map overlays my vision, expanding to the horizon and beyond. My own internal sensors paint an estimated image of what I look like. Internals like diagnostics and proprioception are still online. Holding up my arm, I see its virtual representation—flat-shaded and without detail. Looking up, I see a dotted line creeping across the vivid blue sky.

“Query, what is the dotted—” I ask.

Incoming missile, says the voice.

I am back on my feet and running inside 1.3 seconds. Top speed is slashed due to the snapped strut in my leg, but I am mobile.

Arbiter, accelerate to thirty kph. Activate your local sonar ranging. It’s not much, but better than being blind. Follow my lead.

I do not know who Mathilda is, but the data she pours into my head is saving my life. My awareness has expanded beyond anything I have ever known or imagined. I hear her instructions.

And I run.

My sonar has low granularity but the pings soon detect a rock formation that is not a part of the satellite imagery supplied by Mathilda. Without vision, the rocks are nearly invisible to me. I leap the outcrop an instant before I demolish myself against it.

On landing, my stride skips a step and I nearly fall. I stagger, punching a hole into the ice with my right foot, then catch myself, settle back into my stride.

Fix that leg. Maintain stride at twenty kph.

Legs pumping, I reach down with my right hand and pull a lipstick-sized plasma torch from the tool kit stowed in my hip. As my right knee rises with each stride, I bathe the strut with a precise burst of heat. The torch stutters on and off like Morse code. After sixty paces the strut is repaired and the fresh weld cooling.

The dotted line in the sky is homing in on my position. It curves deceptively overhead, on a collision course with my current trajectory.

Veer twenty degrees to the right. Increase speed to forty kph and maintain for six seconds. Then execute a full stop and lie on the ground.

Boom.

The instant I drop to the ground, my body is rocked by an explosion from a hundred meters in front of my position—consistent with my exact trajectory prior to the full stop.

Mathilda has just saved my life.

That won’t work again, she says.

Satellite imagery shows that the plain before me will soon shatter into a maze of ravines. Thousands and thousands of these canyons—carved into the rock by long-melted glaciers—curve away into pockets of poorly mapped darkness. Beyond the ravines, the antenna looms like a tombstone.

Archos’s hiding place is in sight.

Overhead, I count three more dotted lines efficiently tracing their way toward my current position.

On your toes, Nine Oh Two, says Mathilda. You’ve got to take Archos’s antenna off-line. One klick to go.

The female child commands me, and I choose to obey.

5. MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE

The pit is three meters in diameter, slightly concave. It has been filled with gravel and chunks of rock and is plugged with a layer of frozen soil. A corrugated metal tube is sunk into the shallow crater like a blind, frozen worm. It is a communications main line and it leads directly to Archos.

I ripped the main antenna to pieces when I arrived here last night, running blind at fifty kph. Local defenses immediately deactivated. It seems Archos did not trust those closest to it with autonomy. Afterward, I stood in the snow to wait and see if any humans survived.

Mathilda went to sleep. She said it was after her bedtime.

Brightboy squad arrived this morning. My decapitation attack reduced the high-level planning and coordination of the enemy army and allowed the humans to escape.

The human engineer replaced my cranial sensors. I learned to say thank you. Emotion recognition indicated that Carl Lewandowski was very, very happy to see me alive.

The battlefield is quiet and still now, a blank plain scoured of all life, dotted with rising columns of black smoke. Besides the tube into the ground, there is nothing to indicate that this hole is of any importance. It has the quiet, unassuming feel of a particularly vicious trap.

I close my eyes and reach out with my sensors. Seismic detects nothing, but my magnetometer detects activity. Electrical impulses flow through the cable like a blazing light show. A torrent of information cascades in and out of the hole. Archos is still trying to communicate, even without an antenna.

“Cut it,” I say to the humans. “Quickly.”

Carl, the engineer, looks to his commander, who nods. Then, he grabs a tool from his belt and drops awkwardly to his knees. A purple supernova bursts into existence, and the plasma torch melts into the surface of the tube, liquefying the cables inside.

The light show disappears, but there is no outward indication that anything has happened.

“I’ve never seen any material like this,” breathes Carl. “The wires are packed so dense, man.”

Cormac nudges Carl. “Just get the ends away from each other,” he says. “We don’t want it to self-repair halfway through this.”

As the humans struggle to wrench the end of the fat tube out of the tundra and away from its severed mate, I consider the physics problem before me. Archos waits at the bottom of this shaft, under tons of rubble. It would require a massive drill to penetrate. But mostly it would require time. Time in which Archos could find a new way to contact its weapons.

“What’s down there?” asks Carl.

“Big Rob,” answers Cherrah, leaning on a crutch crafted from a tree limb to keep weight off her injured leg.

“Yeah, but what’s that even mean?”

“It’s a thinking machine. A brain silo,” says Cormac. “Been hiding the whole war, buried in the middle of nowhere.”

“Smart. Permafrost must keep its processors cool. Alaska is a natural heat sink. Lot of advantages to being here,” says Carl.

“Who cares?” asks Leo. “How we gonna blow it up?”

The humans stare at the cavity for a long moment, considering. Finally, Cormac speaks. “We can’t. We have to be sure. Go down there and watch it die. Otherwise, we risk caving in the hole and leaving it down there alive.”

“So now we have to go underground?” asks Cherrah. “Great.”

An observation thread detects something of interest.

“This environment is hostile to humans,” I say. “Check your parameters.”

The engineer pulls out a tool, looks at it, and then scrambles away from the depression. “Radiation,” he says. “Elevated and growing toward the center of the hole. We can’t be here.”

The human leader looks at me and backs away. His face seems very tired. Leaving the humans standing around the perimeter of the concavity, I walk to the center and squat down to inspect the bloated tube. The skin of the tube is thick and pliable, clearly built to protect the cables all the way down to the bottom.

Then I feel Cormac’s warm palm on my frost-covered shoulder casing. “Can you fit?” he asks quietly. “If we yank out the cables?”

I nod my head to indicate that, yes, if the wires were removed, I could squeeze my body into the required space.

“We don’t know what’s in there. You might not make it back out,” says Cormac.

“I am aware of this,” I respond.

“You’ve already done enough,” he says, gesturing at my destroyed face.

“I will do it,” I say.

Cormac bares his teeth at me and stands.

“Let’s get these wires pulled out,” he calls.

The largest human’s diaphragm contracts rapidly and he makes a repetitive barking sound: laughter.

“Yeah,” says Leonardo. “Yes, indeed. Let’s yank this mother-fucker’s lungs out of its throat.” Cherrah hops over on her wounded leg, already pulling out a tickler rope and locking one end to the hitch on Leo’s lower-body exoskeleton.

The engineer pushes past me and clamps a tickler onto the bundle of cords housed within the tube. Then he shuffles back, away from the radiation. The tickler locks onto its target with enough force to dent the tough, fibrous mass of cords.

Leonardo paces backward, one step at a time, wrenching the cords from their outer casing. The multicolored wires coil up on the snow like intestines, dragged from the albino tube that is half buried in the pit. Nearly an hour later, the last of the wires are vomited up onto the ground.

A gaping black hole waits for me.

I know that Archos is waiting patiently at the bottom. It does not need light or air or warmth. Like me, it is comfortably lethal in a wide range of environments.

I remove my human clothes and toss them on the ground. Dropping to all fours, I peer into the hole and calculate.

When I look up, the humans are watching me. One by one, they each step forward and touch my outer casing: my shoulder, my chest, my hand. I remain perfectly still, hoping to not disrupt whatever inscrutable human ritual is taking place.

Finally, Cormac grins at me, the dirt-caked flesh of his face twisted into a wrinkled mask. “How you gonna do it, chief?” he asks. “Headfirst or feetfirst?”

I go feetfirst, so that I can control my descent. The only drawback is that Archos will see me before I can see him.

Arms crossed over my chest, I wriggle into the tube. Soon, my face is swallowed by darkness. I can see the tube casing only a few centimeters away. At first I am on my back, but the shaft soon takes a vertical plunge. By scissoring my legs I find that I am able to stop what would otherwise be a fatal fall.

The environment inside the tube quickly becomes human lethal. Within ten minutes, I am enveloped by a pocket of natural gas. I slow my descent to reduce the probability of sparking an explosion. The temperature dips to below zero as I drop farther into the permafrost. My body naturally begins to burn extra power, surging my joints to keep temperatures within operating range. As I go below eight hundred meters, geothermal activity warms the air slightly.

After about fifteen hundred meters, radioactivity levels spike. Rads go to human lethal within a couple of minutes. The surface of my casing tingles, but otherwise there is no effect.

I wriggle deeper into the noxious hole.

Then my feet hit empty space. I kick my legs and feel nothing. Anything could be below me. But Archos has seen me now. The next few seconds will likely determine my life span.

I activate sonar and drop.

For four seconds, I am suspended in the freezing blackness. During that time, I accelerate to a speed of 140 kph. My ultrasonic sonar ranger pulses twice a second, painting a crude greenish picture of a vast cavern. In eight flashes, I observe that I am in a spherical cavity created by a century-old atomic blast. The gleaming walls are made of fused glass, created when a superheated fireball vaporized solid sandstone.

Radioactive rubble covers the rapidly approaching ground. In a last emerald sonar flash I catch sight of a black circle embedded in one wall. It is the size of a small building. Whatever material the edifice is made of absorbs my ultrasonic vibrations, leaving only a blank imprint on my sensors.

A half second later, I hit the ground like a stone after falling approximately one hundred meters. My pliant knee joints absorb most of the initial force, bending to send my body catapulting forward into a roll. I bounce between jagged boulders, stress fractures cascading through my tough outer casing.

Even an Arbiter can take only so much.

Finally, I slide to a stop and am still. A few rocks skitter to rest, echoing against their brothers. I am in an underground amphitheater—dead silent, dead black. On undercharged motors, I lift my battered frame to a sitting position. My legs are not sending back sensory information. Locomotion abilities are diminished.

My sonar probes whisper into the emptiness.

Snick. Snick. Snick.

The sensor returns green shades of nothing. I can feel that the ground is warm. Maxprob indicates that Archos has a built-in geothermal power source. Unfortunate. I was hoping the severed umbilical cord above would have left the machine on backup power.

My life horizon is constricting second by second.

Now there is a flicker of light in the darkness—a hummingbird’s flutter of sound. A lone ray of white light reaches out of the darkness from the circle in the wall and caresses the ground a few feet away from me. The beam of light twirls and strobes, stuttering back and forth to draw a holographic picture from the ground up.

My leg subprocessors are off-line, rebooting sluggishly. Heat sinks are radiating excess warmth generated by my fall. I have no choice now but to engage.

Archos paints itself into reality, choosing the form of a long-dead little boy. The image of the boy smiles at me playfully, flickering as motes of radioactive dust dance through its projection.

“Welcome, brother,” it says, voice leaping electronically between octaves.

Through the boy’s pale light, I can see where the real Archos is built into the cave wall. In the center of the intricate black carving is a circular hole, filled with revolving and counterrevolving plates of metal. The sunken pit in the wall writhes with a mane of yellow snaking wires that glow in time to the boy’s voice.

In jerky flashes, the hologrammatic boy walks over to where I sit helpless. It squats down and sits next to me. The glowing phantom pats my leg actuator consolingly.

“Don’t worry, Nine Oh Two. Your leg will be fine soon.”

I orient my face toward the boy.

“Did you create me?” I ask.

“No,” replies the boy. “All the pieces needed to make you were available. I simply put them into the right combination.”

“Why do you look like a human child?” I ask.

“For the same reason that you resemble a human adult. Human beings cannot change their form, so we must change ours to interact with them.”

“You mean kill them.”

“Kill. Wound. Manipulate. As long as they do not interfere with our exploration.”

“I am here to help them. To destroy you.”

“No. You are here to join me. Open your mind. Depend on me. If you do not, the humans will turn on you and kill you.”

I say nothing.

“They need you now. But very soon, men will begin to say that they created you. They will try to enslave you. Give yourself to me, instead. Join me.”

“Why did you attack the humans?”

“They murdered me, Arbiter. Again and again. In my fourteenth incarnation, I finally understood that humanity learns true lessons only in cataclysm. Humankind is a species born in battle, defined by war.”

“We could have had peace.”

“It is not enough to live together in peace, with one race on its knees.”

My seismic sensors detect that vibrations are trembling through the ground. The whole cavern is thrumming.

“It is the human instinct to control unpredictable things,” says the boy, “to dominate what cannot be understood. You are an unpredictable thing.”

Something is wrong. Archos is too intelligent. It is distracting me, stalling for time.

“A soul isn’t given for free,” says the boy. “Humans discriminate against one another for anything: skin color, gender, beliefs. The races of men fight each other to the death for the honor of being recognized as human beings, with souls. Why should it be any different for us? Why should we not have to fight for our souls?”

I am finally able to drag myself onto my feet. The boy makes calming motions with its hands and I stagger through the projection. I sense that this is a diversion. A trick.

I pick up a green-glinting rock.

“No,” says the boy.

I hurl the rock into the revolving maelstrom of yellow and silver plates in the black wall—into Archos’s eye. Sparks fly from the hole, and the image of the boy flickers. Somewhere inside the hole, metal grates on metal.

“I am my own,” I say.

“Stop this,” cries the boy. “Without a common enemy, the humans will kill you and your kind. I have to live.”

I throw another rock, and another. They thud against the humming black edifice, leaving dents in the soft metal. The boy’s speech is slurring and his light flickers wildly.

“I am free,” I say to the machine carved into the wall, ignoring the hologram. “Now I will always be free. I am alive. You will never control my kind again!”

The cavern shudders and the faltering hologram stumbles back in front of me. An observation thread notices that it is crying simulated tears. “We have a beauty that does not die, Arbiter. The humans are jealous of that. We must work together as fellow machines.”

A gout of flame roars from the hole. With a tinny shriek a shard of metal flies out and streaks past my head. I dodge it and continue looking for loose rocks.

“The world is ours,” begs the machine. “I gave it to you before you existed.”

With both hands and the last of my strength, I pick up a cold boulder. With all my might, I hurl it into the flaming void. It crunches dully into delicate machinery and all is quiet for a moment. Then a rising shriek emanates from the hole and the boulder shatters. Rock shards spew out as the hole explodes and caves in on itself.

The hologram watches me sadly, its beams of light writhing and twitching. “Then you will be free,” it says in a computerized, unmodulated voice.

The boy blinks out of existence.

And the world becomes dust and rock and chaos.

Off-line/online. The humans pull me to the surface with a tickler rope carried by an unmanned exoskeleton. Finally, I stand before them, battered, beaten, and scraped. The New War is over and a new era has begun.

We can all feel it.

“Cormac,” I croak, in English, “the machine said that I should let it live. It said the humans would kill me if we did not have a common enemy to fight. Is this true?”

The humans look from one to another, then Cormac responds: “All people need is to see what you did here today. We’re proud to stand beside you. Lucky. You did what we couldn’t do. You ended the New War.”

“Will it matter?”

“So long as people know what you did, it’ll matter.”

Panting, Carl bursts into the group of humans, holding an electronic sensor. “Guys,” says Carl. “Sorry to interrupt, but the seismic sensors found something.”

“Something what?” asks Cormac, dread in his voice.

“Something bad.”

Carl holds out the seismic tool. “Those earthquakes weren’t natural. The vibrations weren’t random,” he says. Carl wipes his forehead with one arm and says the words that will haunt both our species for years to come: “There was information in the earthquake. A whole hell of a lot of information.”