E-Day

by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

He drew both of his katanas, activating the energy blades by clicking the hilts.

  The biggest of the soldiers stormed toward his glowing blades wearing bulky armor with spikes on the shoulder plates. Akira moved into a defensive stance, seeing then the antler-styled bones forking off this soldier’s armet didn’t encase the face of a normal human.

  Red eyes stared back at Akira.

  This was a Breaker, the Coalition’s augmented response to the Engines. The beast of a man raised an energy axe with a blade the size of a tire.

  He swung it at Akira but vanished in a wave of plasma bolts from Tadhg’s WMD at point-blank range.

  Akira slashed at a second Breaker with both of his blades, connecting at the neck and taking off the helmet. As the headless corpse slumped out of the way, the mammoth man that Tadhg had shot got back up, melon-sized holes smoldering in his chest and torso. He grabbed Akira by his neck and picked him off the ground.

  Okami leapt and grabbed the man’s crotch, crunching through armor and eliciting a scream of pain. Akira fell back down and thrust his swords into the plasma holes, prompting an even deeper, almost animalistic screech. Okami held onto the man as he fell to the ground.

  Tadhg had pulled his sword, struck the third and final Breaker in the shoulder, and cut through the body diagonally with his energy saw. He gripped the buzzing long sword and came back over to Akira.

  “You good?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Akira grumbled.

  Okami led the way up the road to access the top of the quarry with the two Engines running after him. By the time they got there, the rest of the squad were all standing among a field of corpses.

  “Together, we are one,” Frost said, confirming everyone was still alive.

  Akira nodded, still trying to catch his breath.

  A whirring noise came from the sky, and the squad spread out with their weapons, only to lower them when they saw a stealth MOTH.

  The workhorse spacecraft of the Nova Alliance Sky and Space Patrol had four rotating wings and mounted thrusters on each of them to allow for vertical take-off. Two compound engines were mounted around the gray hull of the cockpit like the eyes of the insect it was named after.

  “Did you call in evac?” Ghost asked.

  “Negative,” Akira said.

  Whoever was coming to get them must have had a damn good reason for risking such a valuable aircraft in enemy territory.

  Akira picked up Okami and used his jetpack to blast into the open underbelly of the troop hold. Standing in the darkness of the open bay was a hulking figure in golden armor, a man who had saved Akira a decade ago, and recruited him into the Engine program.

  “War Commander Contos,” Akira said, trying to hide his shock.

  “Nice mess you created down there, Shadow Squad,” Contos said in his gruff voice.

  He motioned to the racks along the hull. “Rack in, we’re headed to Sector 220 at the Titan Space Elevator. I’ve got someone… something you all need to meet.”

  — 3 —

  The sun remained behind the perpetual gray sky, choked off by the constant smoke drifting across the Megacity Paris skyline.

  Chloe Cotter fastened her breathing mask to block out the contaminants in the air, pulled her hood down, and stepped out into the frigid late afternoon. The temperature had continued to plummet, and halfway down the street she stopped to zip up her jacket. It would also keep out the stench of the city that penetrated her layers and clung to her clothes on her rare journeys outside.

  Trash piled up in the street corners, attracting rats the size of small dogs. One skittered in front of her, nearly grazing her boots. They weren’t afraid of humans, and she was no longer bothered by them, either.

  Nine years had passed since the Coalition revolution in Megacity Paris. She had been just twenty-one then, working with her parents in a droid factory that provided some of the best custom Service Droids in all of the city.

  The chaos had engulfed Paris so fast they were trapped inside the walls. As the bloodshed spread, her family had gone into hiding, hoping the Nova Alliance would be able to stop the revolt. But there was no stopping the barbarians that metastasized here and in Megacity Moscow.

  Although almost a decade had passed since the city fell, Chloe still remembered what it was like before the Coalition took power. Full of life, history, and art that attracted tourists from around the world. Thriving gardens and parks offered vibrant colors in the spring, summer, and fall. But her favorite season was winter, when lights hung from the historic buildings and trees, and fingers of smoke reached out of the brick chimneys.

  The smoke clogging the sky now was from the Coalition fires, intended to keep the Nova Alliance from seeing what was happening inside the city’s walls. These fires burned around the clock, roaring all day and night.

  Soon there would be nothing left to burn.

  The heart of Paris was dead now. All signs of AI had been eradicated, and instead of lights hanging along the tiled roofs, there were often people and droids, nailed to the sides of buildings or hanging from trees.

  People who believed in Artificial Intelligence.

  People like Chloe.

  And her parents…

  They were gone now, taken during the first days of the Coalition’s revolution that overthrew the government and took over the city. While she hoped her mom might still be alive, she knew that hope was a dangerous thing to cling to in this city.

  She was close to where her dad had died. It felt like disrespect not to look up, where she had once seen him hanging from the rafters of a destroyed building, but today she didn’t have it in her.

  She kept her head down as she walked the cobblestone road. Most of the storefronts were boarded up or smashed open. Coalition soldiers and their families had taken up residence in some of these buildings, but most lived closer to the center of the city.

  Today was the one day of the month that Chloe risked leaving her basement for something other than rations. Today she would visit Suzanne and Todd, former citizens of the United States who had fled to Megacity Paris during the early years of the war, only to find themselves in an occupied zone. The former teachers were friends of her parents, and they had loved her like a daughter over the past nine years.

  Chloe cut down another back alley full of frozen trash jutting out of the fresh piles of snow. A plastic bottle crunched under her boots. She stopped.

  She could hear shouting.

  Not shouting…

  Screaming.

  A gunshot cracked, echoing through the sound of barking dogs, and then—silencing all the animals—the staticky howl of an Iron Wolf.

  Chloe considered turning back, but gunfire and the sounds of Dr. Otto Cross’s hybrid-animal droids weren’t unusual out here. There was still an underground rebellion, consisting of brave men and women of the Nova Alliance that continued to fight back against the Coalition occupiers.

  Knowing they were out there, fighting, gave Chloe the strength to continue through the streets. Besides, her visits with Suzanne and Todd were the only thing she really looked forward to anymore.

  Calming her nerves with a deep breath, Chloe pushed onward, taking the alley to another road, and then a street of rowhouses. Suzanne and Todd lived in the one halfway down the street. In the summer, they had a beautiful produce garden in their fenced yard. Even when there wasn’t enough to go around, Chloe never left the house empty-handed.

  She cut through another alley, subtly looking both ways. There were only a few people out, most of them women, except a single man who pushed an electric cart with a box full of dead animals.

  In the tenth year of the occupation, the former Nova Alliance citizens were starving, despite daily aid drops from the Nova Alliance peacekeeping force. There was plenty of food, but the occupiers mostly hoarded it for themselves.

  A chorus of coughing erupted from down the next street, a familiar sound there. Turning the corner, she saw a fri
ghtening, familiar sight. People sick with SANDs lined up outside the medical clinic.

  She counted herself lucky she had not yet developed the disease, unlike thousands of people in Megacity Paris. She was fortunate to have near constant access to the masks and filters that reduced the amount of environmental contaminants and pollutants from entering her lungs and spreading through her body.

  Thankfully, she had also found ways to access clean water. Those who were denied that privilege sucked down dangerous nanoparticles with every gulp, accelerating their race toward SANDs, like a person basking in waves of radiation heading toward unavoidable cancer.

  NOVA researchers said that as humanity quit using nanoparticles without caution, the sheer volume of particles in the environment had been slowly dropping. Men like the AAS CEO, Dr. Jason Crichton, promised that someday, perhaps SANDs would no longer even affect people.

  But looking down this street, Chloe had a hard time believing that.

  The line of patients was even longer today. An elderly man wearing a stocking cap that matched his long gray beard stood behind a frail, white-haired woman in a wheelchair. She moaned as Chloe passed, hardly having the strength to open her eyes, her muscles twitching.

  These people couldn’t wait years, maybe decades for the nanoparticles that caused SANDs to eventually disappear. Already affected by the disease, they didn’t even have months to live.

  A mother held a wailing toddler, his fingers and hands twisted, an early symptom of the terrible disease that had no cure.

  Chloe tried to stifle her emotions and moved into the shadows when she saw a Coalition soldier on the sidewalk watching the crowd. He, or perhaps she, wore black and gray armor with an enclosed helmet that sported tusks off the chin. A chest plate of bones hung over the barreled chest plates, trophies from past kills.

  The soldier dragged the glowing blade of an energy spear against the concrete.

  Chloe remained in the darkness, unseen, as far as she could tell.

  When he turned his back, Chloe wasted no time rushing down the road in the opposite direction. She stopped outside an iron fence and looked in the front window. The drapes were drawn back so she could see right into the home. Suzanne and Todd were sitting at their table in the living room.

  Chloe immediately realized something wasn’t right. Normally they were all smiles when they saw her, but they appeared scared, their faces tight. And the drapes were never open.

  Suzanne must have noticed her. She slowly wagged her left finger as if to say no, no, no.

  Chloe understood. Lowering her head, she walked right past the house.

  At an apartment building ahead, the front door burst open. A Coalition soldier wearing an elongated helmet with a rack of antlers threw a man down the stairs. He rolled out onto the cobblestone.

  “Please, no!” he pleaded in French. “I beg you, please, I’m an atheist like you! AI is—”

  The soldier silenced him by stomping his head under a steel-toed boot, crushing his skull. An eyeball burst from its socket.

  Chloe turned, holding a shocked breath in her lungs. She crouched behind the wall of a patio. Hooves clattered on the street on the other side.

  Three hybrid horses with metal legs galloped by, their riders holding energy spears and plasma rifles. The Coalition soldiers dismounted outside of Suzanne’s and Todd’s house.

  Chloe looked over the wall to see her two friends pushed out the front door by another soldier who had been inside. They were the only two people who knew about her past of working in a droid factory besides her Uncle Keanu.

  If they told the Coalition…

  She started to walk away as the soldiers shackled Suzanne and Todd.

  The wind changed, and the wafting smoke moved across her path. She coughed into her mask and kept low. The streets were almost empty now.

  People watched from their windows. An elderly woman looked down at Chloe and mouthed what looked like “RUN,” before pulling the blinds shut. Keeping to the sidewalks, Chloe trekked over the compact snow. Frightened voices surged over the crunch under her boots.

  Taking refuge behind a brick wall, she waited before sneaking a look around the side. On the next street, dozens of towering chimneys speared into the sky from an ancient factory abandoned before the war. Hundreds of Nova Alliance citizens huddled together in front of it, under the guard of ten Coalition soldiers on foot. Five more on horseback circled the group.

  Iron Wolves prowled, pulling on chains held by muscular Coalition soldiers.

  An electric truck rolled to a stop, disgorging more people.

  Suzanne and Todd were the first two, their hands still bound. Guards pushed them into the crowd that surged toward the factory buildings.

  Chloe couldn’t move. She stood there, watching in horror.

  Screams filled the early evening as the citizens were marched into a warehouse. They were going to work the fires.

  Chloe knew then that she would never see her friends again.

  She stared in horror, unable to pull her gaze away until animalistic cries snapped her from the trance. Flames belched out of the chimneys. The smoke grew heavier. The scent of burned flesh made it through Chloe’s filters, her worst fears confirmed.

  Tears flowed down her cheeks as she ran home, finally slipping into an alley to make sure no one had followed her. Hearing nothing, she pushed a dumpster away from a hidden door.

  Her Uncle Keanu was waiting inside the stairwell with a shotgun.

  “Chloe, you’re late,” he said. “Get inside.”

  She squeezed past him. He looked both ways before pulling the dumpster back in place and closing the door.

  Chloe rushed down the concrete stairs. A fire burned inside a black stove, the glow lighting up the windowless cellar. The few furnishings included a table, beds, and wooden chairs.

  She sat and began sobbing.

  “What happened?” Keanu said.

  He closed the door at the bottom of the stairwell and locked it. Scratching his black beard, he made his way over to her, glasses framing his concerned brown eyes.

  “Chloe, whatever happened, you’re safe now.”

  She got up, and he hugged her, pulling her tight to his scratchy wool sweater.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  She shook in his arms. “No.”

  He pulled away and looked at her. “Tell me what happened.”

  She stammered out what she could.

  “Were you followed?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “You’re safe now,” Keanu said. “It’s going to be okay.”

  He hugged her again and then motioned for her to sit on a bed. He went to the small kitchen to make tea.

  “Something’s happening,” he said. “I was able to tap into the outside network, and I think the Nova Alliance is planning an attack. There were Engines in Megacity Moscow today.”

  “Maybe that’s why they are rounding people up…” Chloe said.

  He brought her a mug of tea. She took a sip, and it warmed her throat and guts.

  “From now on, no more trips outside, except for food,” Keanu said. “We stay here, hunker down, and hope…”

  “Hope.” Chloe shook her head. “Don’t use that word anymore. It means nothing here.”

  She took her tea and went to the only door, opening it to their workspace. Inside, a single holo-screen glowed over two desks with a kit of power-tools she once used to modify droids and a mini-computer she had used to reprogram or code them.

  “Chloe, sit with me, please,” Keanu said.

  “I’m sorry, but I need some time alone, to think.”

  She closed the door and pulled two loose bricks out of the wall next to it. Reaching inside, she pulled out a parrot droid that her parents had given her for her fifteenth birthday.

  “Hi, Radar,” she said.

  It was offline, unable to respond or talk, but just holding the droid brough
t her comfort. She relaxed with the droid in her arms, remembering her youth.

  Before the Coalition stripped everything away.

  ***

  “When will you be home?” Betsy asked.

  “Soon,” Jason replied to his wife. “Can I see the girls?”

  “They’re sleeping.”

  “I know, but I just want to see their faces.”

  He smiled at the holo-screen, but Betsy didn’t smile back. Her blue eyes seemed sad, and perhaps a bit angry.

  Not that Jason blamed her for those feelings. He had been gone for weeks at a time, and now he wasn’t even on Earth.

  He sat at the desk in his office, located at Sector 220 of the Titan Space Elevator. His company, Achilles Android Systems, owned five of the sectors, and some of the brightest minds on his staff worked here.

  But the brightest light of them all was gone.

  Forty-one days since her death, Jason missed his sister more than ever. But she was, in a way, still by his side. The hologram of Petra was out of view of the Commpad, but Jason could see her perfectly.

  Apeiron looked so much like his sister that some of his staff seemed disturbed by the resemblance. Jason didn’t care what they thought, but he did care what Betsy would think, and she still didn’t know.

  The holo-screen went dark as Betsy took the Commpad into the bedroom where their daughters slept. She switched to infrared mode, bringing the device close to them.

  “Thanks,” Jason said. “I miss you all so much.”

  “Then come home to us,” Betsy said.

  “I will soon. We have big news to share.”

  “Can you tell me now?”

  Jason paused, desperately wanting to tell her about Apeiron. Years ago, she would’ve been excited to hear about his latest projects, but he wasn’t sure she would understand. Hell, Darnel still didn’t even seem to understand.

  “I need to tell you in person,” Jason said. “I will be home soon, I promise.”

  Betsy yawned. “I better go for now.”

  “Goodnight, my love.”

  “Goodnight.”

  Jason let out a breath as the feed clicked off. On his desk was another accomplishment he was excited to share, not just with his wife, but the world.