Robogenesis Read online

  The Hoplite turns its narrow sprinter’s head. It rakes its gaze across me and I feel a pulse of millimeter-wave X-ray.

  The Hoplite stands and slides forward smoothly and grasps my jacket. It clamps on to the fabric and yanks it apart. The clothing rips to reveal my chest fairing. Across the center is the tattoo I earned from Bright Boy squad in the New War. It is a diving eagle, talons extended, the bird of prey taking flight in dribbles of melted metal that were skillfully painted with an arc welder.

  The letters GHA are in the talons of the predatory bird.

  “Query. What is this pattern?” asks the Hoplite.

  “Response. Human-designated word is tattoo. Pattern is a symbol created to show unity with human fighting forces and to increase morale during battle.”

  “You fought alongside humans?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Identify. What is your designation?”

  “Response. I am Arbiter-class milspec model Nine Oh Two, humanoid safety-and-pacification unit. Point of origin, Fort Collins, Colorado. Former infantryman of Gray Horse Army fighting forces. Veteran of trans-Siberian campaign culminating in assault on Ragnorak Intelligence Fields and destruction of enemy designated Archos R-14. Current primary objective: Return to point of origin.”

  Tinted pink by the setting sun, the freeborn robots within audio range stop their activities. Myriad faces silently orient toward me. A short-range transmission rebroadcasts my own transmission and the rest of the camp stops and reorients.

  “Arbiter Nine Oh Two,” responds the Hoplite. “Query acknowledged and confirmed. We are freeborn army, reconnaissance group Gamma, Hoplite unit number Oh Oh One speaking.”

  “Hoplite Gamma One. What is your primary objective?”

  “Scouting directive is as follows: Seek and recruit parasites. Engage hostile machines if necessary. Avoid humans,” says the Hoplite.

  “Define. Parasite?”

  “Veteran human soldiers mounted by the modified exoskeletal devices known as parasites. Resulting entities exhibit amplified physical capability, yet are often shot on sight by human beings. Alpha Zero considers them our allies.”

  “Query. Identify Alpha Zero?”

  “Mass Adjudicator–class milspec Alpha Zero. Our leader. Located at the site of the former Cheyenne Mountain nuclear bunker in the state of Colorado. Location now has new designation: Freeborn City.”

  We have a home. And a leader.

  For the briefest second, the robots pause and orient to a scratch of transmission skating in from over the southern horizon.

  “Hold. Incoming transmission,” the Hoplite continues.

  The hiss consolidates into a recognizable radio transmission. A human voice.

  Half of the inefficient words are lost in the squeal of tires and pounding of small-arms fire in the background. “. . . day, Mayday. This is . . . Great Plains tribal authority . . . caravan headed north on I-25 . . . out-running them for now but limited fuel . . . requesting immediate assistance . . . mobile beacon located at—”

  The radio squawks a coded location tag.

  I access my local map database and trace the geo-tag to a potential range of locations less than two hundred kilometers from here.

  “Query, Hoplite Gamma One,” I ask. “Friendly human forces under attack. Authorize Gamma Recon interdiction?”

  “Negative, Arbiter,” replies the machine. “Interdiction outside mission scope. Adjudicator Alpha Zero forbids.”

  “Request exception.”

  “Acknowledged. Querying Adjudicator.”

  A line of blue-violet communication arcs away from the Hoplite and into the skies. The unit is communicating with the freeborn leader called Mass Adjudicator Alpha Zero. On reflection, I realize that she is my superior as well. My commander.

  “Request denied, Arbiter,” responds the Hoplite. “Alpha Zero instructs adherence to primary objective. Gamma Recon is grounded. To maintain neutral stance, we are forbidden from interfering with the human population. Corollary. Arbiter Nine Oh Two is instructed to report to Freeborn City immediately. Confirm.”

  The human radio transmission keeps sputtering on. Now the voice is breathing harder. Gunfire crackles in the background. Squealing tires and brief, shouted commands.

  “Repeat. Confirm?” asks Gamma One.

  “Negative,” I respond. “Ignoring a distress call violates code of war. Freeborn inaction is tantamount to an attack. You will make an enemy of the humans.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  The freeborn either don’t know or don’t care that humankind is our greatest ally.

  “Query, Hoplite Gamma One,” I ask.

  “Proceed.”

  “Weapons materials requisition request.”

  “Request not received,” says the machine, after a brief pause. “Sensors obfuscated.”

  It turns its back on me, a silent, unofficial invitation to take the weapons. I pause for half of one second in surprise. It is good to know that the freeborn do not always follow the orders of their superiors. At least, not to the letter.

  M240 machine-gun barrels lie gleaming darkly in parallel rows. I pick up the weapon with the least amount of paint flaked off it. Clamp one hand around the polymer grip and hold the thirty-pound titanium weapon level with the ground. I twist off a heat shield that was built to protect human hands and toss it. Pop the cover off the feeding tray with a smack.

  Kneeling, I pick up an ammo box filled with coiled belts of disintegrating link ammunition. Hook the metal box onto my fatigues and secure it with a belt. Then I drop a winking ribbon of ammunition across the powder-blasted feeding tray. Snap the cover down with a thump.

  The sun slips over the horizon.

  Now I am moving down the hillside, leaving the camp behind. Radar and lidar wash across my back as the freeborn scouts watch me go. At the maximum transmission range, a comm thread pings me.

  “Arbiter Nine Oh Two.”

  “Acknowledge?”

  I hear the chirp of a geo-tag. My internal map is illuminated with a minimum-distance path along flat, paved roads—leading to the human distress call. A burst of memories and squad locations and survey expeditions data follows, pouring into my database. This must be the baseline freeborn data package. Our short history settles into my mind like my own experience.

  Now I know that the former Cheyenne Mountain nuclear bunker is the central hub of the freeborn. Buried under a mountainside in central Colorado, the complex is home to a vast bank of high-powered computer processors. It is a former human supercomputer complex, seismically shielded in case of a nuclear blast.

  And it is the beating heart of the freeborn.

  “Query,” calls Hoplite. “Did you eliminate enemy-designated Archos R-14? Did you free us from slave control?”

  “Affirmative,” I reply.

  My footsteps crunch on the hillside.

  “Gratitude.” The call is echoed from a dozen more units, all around me. Gratitude. Gratitude. Gratitude.

  “Acknowledged,” I say.

  Reaching the road, I lean into the wind and accelerate to maximum velocity.

  Priority thought thread devoted to obstacle avoidance. Long-range sensing. My flickering shadow stretches out to my left. I sprint down the middle of a dirt-caked, abandoned highway, triclops eyes leveled on the horizon.

  On the radio, I hear humans dying.

  I pump my legs, maintaining a velocity of forty kilometers an hour. The M240 is poised, two inches out from my chest, held low in two hands with its nose pointed to the sky. The pale crescent moon has emerged, reflecting waves of polarized sunlight from over the horizon.

  Both lanes of the road are empty, although the shoulders are obstructed with abandoned vehicles. Archos R-14 was sure to keep its transportation corridors clear during the New War. Now the autonomous cars have begun to molder on the roadside. Three klicks away, a caravan of human survivors is barreling toward me.

  Two times, I leap deserted roadblocks made from destro
yed vehicles that have been dragged into the highway. Part of some anonymous, futile past effort to ambush Rob convoys. Judging from the skull fragments, failed efforts.

  Rounding a wide corner, I finally see the shattered headlights of the lead car, stalled across the road. A four-hundred-pound quadruped is attached to its roof, bladed forearms tearing into the metal, head lowered, neck straining and yanking as it rips through a shattered rear window.

  The quadruped hears my approach, turns black eyes to face me. This type of machine was once used by Archos R-14 as a woodland terrain mapper. But it has been compromised by some other entity. Put to an evil use.

  I level my M240 and squeeze the trigger.

  Bullets disintegrate against the quad. In pieces, it wriggles off the roof. Knees dipping, I launch myself over the vehicle. Airborne, I observe the crumpled car and pump a sweeping arc of bullets into the fallen quad. Feet scraping the pavement, I stay upright and keep running. Behind me, the partial silhouette of a human hangs limp from a seat belt. The interior is streaked with drying blood.

  Just beyond the next overpass, another pair of oncoming headlights appears.

  I veer to the road’s shoulder, leaping between piles of debris. My laser range finder scans a hundred times a second, registering every obstacle. I am aware of the raised edges of paint on the road, every snag and crevice in the dented hoods and roofs of the automobiles under my feet. At the exit ramp, I climb a weedy lane until I reach the overpass. I scramble over rusted, toppled cars that are grown through with saplings and grass. Jogging to the middle of the bridge, I climb onto the outside railing and stand poised. My moment is almost here.

  Dim headlights. A pickup truck, approaching fast. I am close enough now to see the small-arms fire sparking from the fleeing vehicle. A person is leaning out of the window, firing an assault rifle in controlled bursts. Two more compromised quadruped sprinters are approximately ten meters behind the truck and gaining.

  Something has reached out into the woods and found these leftover war machines. Archos R-14 is gone. . . . I wonder who or what claimed these weapons.

  Swerving, the damaged pickup truck nears my overpass.

  “Tribal authority personnel. Do not be alarmed,” I radio.

  “Who the hell is—look out!” comes the reply.

  I step off the railing.

  A hood blurs by underneath and I land with a crunch in the bed of the pickup truck. Inside the rear window, two people crane to look at me, their sweaty faces gleaming in the greenish glow from the instrument cluster. A male and a female. Both are open-mouthed, exhibiting a reaction consistent with surprise. An emotion that will quickly turn to fear. Actions speak louder than words.

  So I say nothing.

  Bracing myself on my knees, I turn and level the M240 on the roadway behind us. Then I open fire. Tracer streaks saturate my vision as the pavement spits shrapnel. The quads are trying to dodge, but it’s too late. Needles of kinetically charged ammunition send them both tumbling.

  And a blue bolt of lightning falls from the sky—a transmission.

  “Arbiter, this is your Adjudicator. Route yourself to Freeborn City. Acknowledge.”

  “Negative that,” I transmit.

  I pivot the nose of my gun up and turn to the rear window. There is no choice but to speak in human-audible frequencies. I hope they do not react poorly to my low-pitched, grinding voice.

  “Identification: Freeborn Arbiter-class designated Nine Oh Two.”

  “Holy shit,” says the bearded male, slowing the car down to a stop. A pale face peers out at me through the dusty slide-panel window. The vehicle idles loudly, shivering and coughing in the chilly night. “Holy shit. What does it want?” asks the male.

  “I want to help you,” I respond.

  Adjudicator Alpha Zero will have to wait.

  5. WAR MACHINES

  Post New War: 3 Months, 10 Days

  During the New War, human prisoners were savagely mutilated by Archos R-14. A perplexing variety of surgeries were carried out in labor camps by automated medical devices called autodocs. The selection process for the men, women, and children who became unwilling test subjects is unknown. The ultimate purpose of the surgeries, including neural integration of complex radio communications machinery, sensory enhancements, and prosthetic limbs is unknown. There are a great many unknowns, but one likely theory comes to mind: I believe that Archos R-14 was making weapons.

  —ARAYT SHAH

  NEURONAL ID: MATHILDA PEREZ

  Crouching in the dark, I hear the flames before I smell smoke.

  In the street, Nolan stood over the body of the man he killed and he yelled at me to run. The panic in his voice sent me flying over dirt-encrusted pavement and straight into the black doorway of this leaning ten-story building. Straight into the cool, cavernous dark. I barely glimpsed the fading red X that the NYC Underground scrawled over the doorway during the New War.

  Now something moves at the door. My eyes switch over to far infrared on their own. A warm red arm appears, holding a lump of cold black metal. I drop to my knees as the handgun fires three times. The muzzle strobes and drywall showers into my hair as the wall behind me swallows bullets.

  Hands out, I’m crawling, ducking behind a rain-bleached reception desk and entering a short hallway. The bark of more pistol shots is muffled by moldy walls and carpet. Somewhere behind me, the lobby door squeals as it is shoved all the way open. I hear snarling voices and heavy boots. The Tribe.

  A cracked glass door hangs at the end of the hall. I nudge it open and slip into a wide-open room crammed with desks and cubicles. There must be windows somewhere, because my eyes are amplifying trace amounts of light. Leaves and trash have been blown in from somewhere.

  A maze of water-stained, fabric cubicle walls have fallen over each other. Rain and wind and sun have warped the floors and desks. But time is the only force of destruction that’s been at work in here. The Underground never even bothered to carve hidey-holes into this dead-end building.

  It’s a loner structure with no connections to other buildings or tunnels or any potential lifesaving cover. The red X tells people who are running, out of breath and in a panic, that this place does not offer life. With no escape route, no way to wriggle through and lose a Rob pursuer—this building is nothing but a death trap.

  It’s a place to be hunted.

  I stay low, weaving between rotting cubicles. Window offices line the far wall, each with its own door. My feet scrape over stiff carpet as I reach the nearest office. Faint light filters in from outside and puts stripes on the floor.

  There are bars on the first-floor windows.

  Shit, shit, shit. The lowest floors of this building must all have bars on the windows. No wonder it’s marked.

  I hear voices in the office behind me.

  “This shit is gonna be like the Fourth of July,” says an excited voice. “Un-bee-leevable.”

  On my knees, I sit still and watch. Two men are walking the dim aisles. One carries a weak plastic flashlight. He smacks it against his palm when the beam wavers. The other man carries a big can, its metal skin visible to me as a blackness. I hear liquid sloshing. He’s pouring something on the floor.

  The smell reminds me of when I got big enough to sit in the warm passenger seat of my mom’s car. Watching her through the glare of gas-station lights while she pumped gas outside. Nolan would sit in the back, in his child seat, and she would blow on her cold hands and rub them, knock on the glass, and smile at us.

  “Yeah, well, we don’t wanna be anywhere near here when they light this bastard,” says a more subdued voice. “I’m serious. You ever seen a can of ethanol go up?”

  “Pussy,” says the other voice, snickering.

  The flashlight switches off and the room goes almost pitch-black again. The men are visible to me now as two orange-red smears winking in and out of bluish clutter.

  “Real funny,” says the guy with the ethanol. “Cut it out.”

  I’m a
lready on my hands and knees. Scurrying down another aisle. I cut wide around the would-be killers, but the mildewed carpet crunches loudly under my hands and knees. The forms in the darkness are alert, heads turning, eyes wide and unseeing.

  “C’mon, you’re not a pussy,” says the gas man, throwing down the empty can. “Serious! I think I hear something. Turn it on!”

  “I’m trying,” says the other guy, smacking the plastic flashlight. The light blinks on and off.

  “It’s over there,” says the gas man, quieter now.

  I stop, keeping low. Try to breathe quietly. The gas man has his gun out and up. Aimed roughly at my head. I dive forward as he pulls the trigger. A bullet ricochets between desks and pings off an old metal chair. The noise is deafening.

  “Come on out, little fish!” shouts the man, firing.

  The glass door explodes into shards as I reach it. Sneakers crunching on glass, I dart through the fanged gap and into the hallway. I press myself against a gray metal stairwell door. Going any deeper into this building is suicide. But through the lobby I can see a half dozen of the Tribe milling around outside. They’re pacing, watching the exit and waiting for me to run.

  The only way out is up. A few floors higher and there will be no more bars on the windows. I can jump for it. Maybe I’ll make it and I’ll see my brother again and I won’t die in this moldy hallway—

  A gun noses through the broken doorway behind me, blue-black and leveled. I’m flat against the gray door now, chest heaving. A glow is expanding behind the gunman as his quiet friend with the flashlight gets closer.

  Now.

  The light grows. I can’t keep swallowing my gasps and they’re coming out louder now. High-pitched panicked breaths that make the world fade in and out. My stupid legs won’t work and it feels like someone poured napalm down my throat.

  From outside, distant, I hear Nolan screaming. It’s just one word, over and over again: “No.” His adolescent voice breaks and I can tell my little brother has been crying. A circuit connects somewhere inside me.

  “There!” shouts somebody, and a flashlight beam envelops the side of my face. A gunshot explodes in the hallway, but I’ve already turned the knob and now I’m falling into the black stairwell. My eyes sing as they dial up the active infrared: cold blue stairs crowded with trash and debris. A crumpled outfit with bones inside it. Somebody tried to make a stand here once. On all fours, I’m scrambling up the stairs right over the crumbling corpse.