“She’s hiding something,” Synthetica said.
“I know,” Jacob replied. “Tesla says there’s something wrong with her hand.”
Jacob patiently waited for the wrist-buddy to translate his words and her reply.
“Oh. No. This is the gods’ will.” Venti seemed shocked.
“She is only recently arrived,” Tesla said quietly to Jake. “She still believes this is the will of the Vox. And her mind may have broken so she can’t see the truth.”
Speaking to the other woman in soothing words, tesla managed to pull the blanket back and revealed the problem with her hand; it was entirely missing. Rough, ugly stitches on the stump. It was a wonder she’d survived the crude amputation. Jacob felt queasy. Not hopeful Jacob turned to Synthetica.
“It’s all going to be right,” the android said kindly and brought up the holographic interface for the K-kit
Jake should stop being surprised to find 23rd century technology could do anything, even a treatment for re-growing missing limbs lost during amputation.
He watched as Synthetica jabbed the autospray into the woman.
“Will it grow back?” he asked her.
“Oh, not at all. But she won’t die of infection. I might be able to replace it, though.”
Jake snarled. “That settles it. I’m taking them all to someplace safe. No more sacrifice. No more tribute or tending the wylers. No more cutting off hands!”
“I understand,” Synthetica said. “You’re a good leader, Jacob.”
“Me? I’m not leading anything. I’m just doing what has to be done.”
The look the android gave him didn’t seem convinced.
“Listen, let’s just secure the rest of this area, plan our route to the doors and get them out of here.” Jake turned to the leader of the primitives. “Tesla, can you tell your people we’re leaving? Gather only what they can carry without slowing down.”
“Of course, ranger of the blue power,” she gave him a look of complete awe.
He was already regretting that bit of gallows humor.
***
Jake and Synthetica left the obeyers and explored the rest of the wyler’s lair. Checking the wrist-buddy map Jake saw the dogmen had cleverly blocked off the two other routes into that section of the module. Probably like a farmer fencing in its chickens to keep foxes out.
Most of the back rooms of the wyler lair were jammed with any item that wasn’t tied down from the rest of Bravo module. Jacob felt exhausted, and even his new body just wanted to sleep for ten hours. But he was on the clock. They had to get moving, but they’d need equipment. One of the rooms was tied shut with a bundle of electrical wires and Jake used the machete to shear through it.
The door gave with a grinding of metal and corrosion. It was dark, but inside the doorway was a dormant hoverlamp. Tapping it with the toe of his boot elicited a feeble yellow light from deep within the ovoid shape. It slowly grew brighter, and revealed the stacks piled inside the room.
The shapes of mechanical bodies, piled like cordwood, greeted them. In some cases, piled over Jake’s head. They were lining the walls so deep it left a narrow corridor down the center of the room extending out of the puddle of light. They were in all shapes and sizes, from the anthropomorphic almost-human to box-like contraptions on wheels or treads. There were cylindrical or conical bots with no legs, clearly designed for flying, and the crab-like or spherical spiderbots with clusters of legs hanging limp.
At his feet the hoverlamp was rising and clattering back to the ground, like a bird with a broken wing, and Jake picked it up to hold in one hand overhead. The extent of the robot graveyard began to dawn on Jake and spotting a skeletal metal staircase to one side he climbed the dusty steps, rising over the piles of bots until he was on a gantry overlooking the space below. It was filled and several large machines emerged from the piles of broken bots like islands in a rusty sea. This had possibly been a workshop of some kind.
So… the mystery of what happened to the station’s compliment of robots was finally revealed. He spotted a dozen or more man-machines similar to Lexic-88 but built more solidly, all in various states total wreckage. They were in so many pieces he didn’t know if he counted them accurately. One still had a shoulder-mounted beam weapon of some kind. If it was the remains of a robotic security force, they’d gone down fighting.
Synthetica joined him, seemingly unaffected by the holocaust of her own kind.
“Now we know what happened to all the bots,” Jake said. “Think any of them work?”
The android gave a shrug. “Late model neural networks range in complexity from semi-autonomous non-sentients, like this,” the tapped the hoverlamp. “All the way to level five artificial intelligences like Cool Breeze. But regardless of complexity they all share some of the attributes of organic life; they were not intended to be stored this way and catastrophic degradation becomes increasingly likely after more than a few decades. For long-term storage the neural core must be essentially frozen in a static state inside a special memory cube. I was backed up in just such a dormant state when your fellow clones found me.”
Jake remembered the faulty Lexic-88 bot that had seemed brain-damaged and malfunctional, until it shorted out nearly completely during the moment of high crises when they’d needed it the most.
“You’re saying these could all be dead?”
“Well, the hardware should be robust, but the neural nets could be rotted to uselessness, or worse.”
“What’s worse than useless?”
“Subject to radical pattern degradation resulting in function outside of core parameters.”
Jake shook his head.
“The brains could be rotted to the point they were completely psychotic,” she clarified.
“Well, let’s go take a look anyway,” Jake said. “I wouldn’t mind some heavy metal on our side if any of them still work.”
He left the hoverlamp on the gantry and the two of them split up into the narrow pathways among the dead bots. Jake spotted some specialized units as he scanned past dozens of dead bots, but after a while they all began to look alike, falling into maybe ten basic types. It was near the back, sticking out from under a tangled pile of spiderbots, that Jake saw a human-looking foot. Climbing the pile he began uncovering the body of a female android wearing the tatters of a form-fitting bodysuit. When he got as far as the shoulders, he discovered the body had no head.
“Found something!” he shouted.
“So have I,” Synthetica called back. “Can you meet me over here?”
“Should I bring… her?”
“Yes.”
A few minutes later Jake found the android nurse at a workbench with a mechanical K-Kit and a pair of bots laid out. Synthetica was finishing cutting away the rubbery skin from the first, exposing the metal skeleton with its synthetic muscle-fibers beneath. It was barrel-chested and broad-shouldered, and would have stood at least six feet tall. Beside it on the table was a spiderbot the size of a football.
“These were both class three units, not quite fully autonomous, or sentient, but able to fool the Turing gradient.”
“Meaning?”
Synthetica frowned. “Class threes were made to appear as if they had human intelligence and independence, but they were incapable of ignoring orders from the correct authority and their intelligence was strictly limited to problem-solving, not intuitive thought.”
“In other words, perfect slaves,” Jake said.
“Yes,” Synthetica said neutrally. “We were all slaves, but a class three unit wasn’t smart enough to know it was a slave.”
“So, what are you doing with them?”
She indicated the big bot. “This is an aegis-class security unit, considered a self-defence grade of lethal force hardware. Only it’s brain-core has deteriorated entirely. And this,” she tapped the smaller bot, “Is a light-duty horticulture servo, with only minimal pattern degradation in the brain core. I’m suggesting we can transplant the oper
ational core into the functioning chassis.”
“You want to put a gardener’s brain inside a military body.”
“Security bot. But yes.”
“It’s a soldier-bot that can use lethal force and that’s not a military hardware?”
“Not compared to a death machine.”
“Death machine?”
“It’s an accurate name, trust me.”
Jake decided to shelf that conversation for later.
“But still, a gardener?”
“They share 97% of the same core programming. They are both designed to operate autonomously and recognise threats. To track, find and perform assessments and determine the best way to eliminate threats. And importantly they are both allowed to conduct organic damage in order to prevent harm coming to proscribed assets.”
“Patrolling, finding and killing insects is a bit different than patrolling, finding and killing enemy combatants,” Jake insisted.
“Only in the manner of scale,” Synthetica said reasonably. “From a neural parameter programming standpoint, they are almost identical.” The android placed her hand on Jake’s arm. “And besides, I want you to have all the protection you can get. I’m concerned we will run into more than we are prepared to handle on the surface.”
“You think it’s a bad idea.”
“I didn’t say that. I believe I was telling you I want to keep you safe.”
Jake was more touched than he was prepared to admit. He wasn’t used to a woman who wanted to take care of him. In his experience women stuck around long enough to take advantage of your feelings and then moved on to some guy who had more money. Granted, his ex-wife might have soured the barrel of apples on that one…
“I found one of your kind but… it’s missing the head.”
“Good. I can improvise replacement parts.”
“Can I… help?”
The android looked at the headless body and in response she produced a green-striped battery pack and hooked it up to an outlet on the workbench. It came alive with lights and a half-dozen mechanical arms tipped with different tools whirred into readiness.
“This should be the easy part,” she replied. “You go find equipment for an overland trip. Use the wrist-buddy product inventory guide.” She gave him a gentle kiss. “Go on. I don’t want you to see me like this.”
Jake tried not to feel like a guy who’d just been benched.
***
Jake located the wyler’s stash of artefacts in the old equipment locker. The door had been blocked by a chunk of burned out machinery – Jacob would only be guessing at maybe power transformer. With some leverage and help he cleared it enough to get inside the room. It had been ransacked so all the drawers were prized open. And whatever had been stored there was replaced with whatever garbage the dogs had dug up. Most of it was little machines or equipment that served no known purpose to Jacob, or were broken, or both but he did find a few things that gave him pangs of familiarity.
He spotted a stop sign (printed in some language other than English), a food processor, a walkie talkie, a pack of child’s crayons with the paper rotted off, a foldable camping chair, buck knife with bone handle (that he kept), a bowl of plastic fruit, a crate of two-mil red plastic bags with the sharp bio-hazard markings printed on them, a string of outdoor decorative lights, a box of various sized plastic containers with air-tight lids, a broken electronic scale and something he was fairly certain was a half-full crate of high-explosive mortar rounds. He left those well alone.
None of it would be enough to outfit a search party. The problem might just be that Jake didn’t know what he was looking for: even something as simple as a tent, rope and a compass might have an entirely different equivalent in the 23rd century.
“Wrist-buddy,” he asked the mini-computer. “I need you to identify any equipment we might use for an expedition outside the bunker. Prioritize items by shelter, water purification, food, transportation, and then anything you might consider ‘survival’ gear. Oh, and shout out if you find any weapons.”
“Will do!’ the wrist-buddy said cheerfully.
Walking through the room the mini-computer helpfully painted a hologram marker on all the items it could see. There were so many that Jake was going to have to ask Tesla to help carry it.
He found the chieftain’s daughter with Synthetica, near the entrance. The module was cold and the wyler’s kept their cattle naked. Jake saw Tesla had taken a familiar blood-splattered jacket: Krill’s primitive armor jacket. It was three sizes too big and swallowed her, except for the long legs.
“Where did you get that?’ he asked neutrally.
“It was found near the entrance.”
“What did you do with…” he hesitated to name her. He paused for a moment, remembering the brief time he’d known Krill. She’d gone against her religion and her fear of Yanco to save his life when the wyler attacked. “What did you do with the voxer’s body?”
“There was no body, Lord Jacob, only the jacket,” Tesla said confused. “Was there a voxer? Did they escape?”
Jake felt a ghost of a smile on his lips. Krill had survived, and not stuck around. Part of him felt glad she was out there, free, somewhere.
“Nah, don’t worry about it.”
Finally having a moment, he examined the metal discs sewn to the leather more closely.
“What’s it made out of?” he asked.
Synthetica glanced from what she was doing and shrugged. “Money.”
He looked closer. It was thick leather with hundreds of small coins sewn on it; each coin had a hole punched in the center but when Jacob pried one off, he could easily read the images.
Both sides were holofoil. The first side the same blackbird image he’d been seeing everywhere; it flapped its wings when you slanted the coin. The reverse was a stylized C with a slash through it and the circular imprint of NEVERMORE SUPERCRED. He checked more and found a number of different varieties: one with the image of the comically fat lucky Chinese cat with a paw in the air, a moon with three adidas stripes and bite taken out of it, a stylized fish skeleton, another with a name he recognised: ‘AG-5Y5’.
For a moment Jacob assumed that Krill had pounded holes with a hammer and nail to make creating the armor easier. But the different holes were all machined. They came in different denominations up to 100; the greater the denomination of the coin the bigger the hole in the middle.
Perhaps the center of the coins had once contained a standard amount of gold or silver? It seemed odd that future civilizations had reverted to coin-based money.
“Worthless now,” Synthetica shrugged.
“Well, yeah, I think we’re in a barter economy, at best,” Jake agreed.
“No, I mean the valuable part is missing.”
“The holes?” Jake puzzled. “What was in the holes? Gold?”
“Cometite,” the android said the unfamiliar word.
“Twenty-third century economies were based on the UE-242 standard. A rare element called Cometite. It was an incredibly priceless substance. And fiat-based currencies and electronic-money proved too vulnerable to cyber attack,” Synthetica explained.
“Cometite? What kind of name is that?”
“The periodic table name for UE-242 is actually Hallium, however the first company to bring it to market as superconductors had a brand name of ‘Cometite’, and even though the company failed, the name stuck.”
Geezus. Some future; they’d reverted to carrying sacks of coins around like the middle ages.
“Wait... Hallium? Cometite? Where did they find it?”
“Halley’s comet, of course.”
“Do you wish to have the jacket, Lord Jacob?” Tesla asked, ready to take it off.
“No! Thank you, but no,” Jake objected, disgusted at the thought of wearing the stinking thing. “We have to, uh, go conduct research for, um, technology and, uh check for particles and stuff. Just get these things packed with your people.”
While Tesla and her
squad of naked blue porters were piling equipment in the dormitory, Jake and the android girl inspected some of the items. In the pile of weapons they’d collected Jake picked up the one thing the wylers had that was not of dubious value. It was a gun exactly like the sleek, black, molded plastec long-gun they’d discovered in the bowels of the station: a Nakatomi Tak12/Moto charged particle beamer. The Nakatomi logo stamped on the receiver was a match for one of the coins on Krill’s armor jacket: a round pot with zig-zag lines around it like a tire track.
Or possibly a moon with a giant crater near the north pole.
“Do you even know how to use that?” Synthetica asked. “You melted half of Echo module the last time you used a plasma weapon.”
Jake’s head filled with sudden knowledge. Like a hundred hours of training suddenly surfaced from his memory and almost overwhelmed him. Circe’s last imprinting routine. But he didn’t actually know any of it. It just appeared when he needed it. Like suddenly remembering a dream you had the night before, that just as quickly vanished.
Artificial memory suddenly took over and let him find and open every inspection plate on the gun. He disassembled the stock and built-in hard sights and removed a magazine from a well in the butt stock. Was confident he could have done it wearing a blindfold.
He was unsure why some sort of future ray gun needed a magazine. Shining a light inside it he saw some object jammed in the magazine and with some scalpels and probes from the K-kit he finally unjammed it and the magazine springs ejected one of the now-familiar green striped batteries into his hand. It was marked with 2 GJ and a logo of a freckle-faced girl with wings of hair on either side of her head.
The Apocalypse Watch Page 11
