Robot Uprisings

by Daniel H. Wilson

8

  Instead of returning over covered ground, Stitch takes us on a wide loop back toward the base. Heavy rubber respirators bouncing against our chests, we resist wiping sweat from our faces. After twenty minutes, I smell diesel gas on the wind.

  In an isolated clearing, we find three soldiers, full-timers, judging by their fatigues, facing into the forest. They don’t look up at our approach, focused instead on something out beyond the trees. The shirtless young men are panting, grinning, and hunting whatever-it-is. They call to each other, wide eyes winking in the sun as they lunge with the excited playfulness of bloodhounds on the scent.

  A portable pump is snuffling liquid from a metal barrel on one end and coughing up white liquid through a shuddering hose on the other. Two of the soldiers hold the flexible tube in the crooks of their arms, wrestling to aim its spray into the jungle. Another soldier operates the pump, one gloved palm flat against its quaking surface and his other hand twiddling knobs, sweat pouring from his forehead as he tortures the shrieking device.

  Pale, shining fluid arcs through the air in an alabaster spray. It shatters the harsh sunlight into a rainbow spectrum. Trees and leaves and vines droop under the weight of a sticky layer of liquid that reflects the light in an eye-dazzling cascade.

  Under the sheets of rapidly hardening creticide, the plants begin to look like statues made of newly poured concrete. A dense onslaught of shimmering vines and branches halted in an unnatural attempt to creep out of the darkness. Limbs are swaying, leaves quivering. A confusion of tree trunks lean toward the three hooting men with a slow-motion malice.

  “Hey!” I shout over the din. “Hey! What’s going on?”

  The soldier on the pump smiles, keeps his eyes on the instruments. “Jungle been walking, man. Some of it, anyway.”

  “Impossible,” I say, my voice loud in my ears.

  But in the wafting shadows, the trunks and vines are intertwined, sponging into each other like fleshy limbs. Surfaces quiver and ripple; the wind pushes bark like sagging skin. Shadowed muscles form in the valleys and hills of tree trunks. And I detect a nearly imperceptible twitching. A subtle but rhythmic shudder. A pulse.

  The tendons in his neck straining, another soldier belts out: “And a walking jungle is not in the motherfuckin’ plan!”

  The man has his shirt off. His back is dark, scabbed with metal scales. The chips of metal flex and squirm as he moves. He is grinning hard and mechanical as he chokes the convulsing hose under his arm. I can’t tell whether it is pain or humor that is yanking his lips back from his teeth.

  I hurry to catch up with my pair of rebounders.

  Stitch and Tully are still walking, heads down, wordless. The bare-chested soldiers don’t pay us any mind and I don’t bother to call out to them again. This scene has a familiar feeling. It’s been played out before. It will play out again. Behind us, the soldiers keep pounding mindlessly against the jungle, and the jungle pounds back.

  9

  We’re less than a kilometer from base when we see the diamonds.

  In a dusty clearing, I step over the first scattering of glinting rocks. Odd sizes, odd shapes. Each lying in a small circle of dirt that looks like a meteorite impact crater. My peripheral vision fills with shimmering sparkles.

  Tully steps toward me, eyes wide.

  “What are they?” he asks. “Are they really diamonds?”

  “Leave it alone,” says Stitch.

  “I’ll take a look,” I say, digging into my satchel for a pair of tweezers. “And Stitch is right. Stay back.”

  I lean over, hands on my knees, and consider the droplet of light lying nearest me. Carefully, I pluck it off the ground with the tweezers and hold it up to the sun. Tully has crept even closer.

  “It is a diamond,” he says, jaw slack. “Swear to God. Diamonds everywhere.”

  The soldier is right. A jewel has fallen from the sky and slammed into the loose dirt. I turn it over, and as I do, the glittering confusion shifts into focus as something eerily recognizable.

  A horsefly.

  This diamond appears to have been shaped into an exquisite sculpture of a fly. Only it’s not a sculpture of a fly. In actuality, I realize this is just a very, very dead fly.

  “This is a horsefly,” I say. “Or it was.”

  Some kind of diamond crete has gotten to it.

  “Bag up!” shouts Stitch. I’m already scrambling to put my respirator back on. I drop the tweezers and the dead fly on the ground. Tully gapes at us both in disbelief as we pull respirators over our faces.

  “It’s still a diamond,” he says. The rangy kid squints down, hesitates for a second, then carefully snatches the diamond out of the dirt.

  “No contact!” Stitch shouts at Tully, his voice muffled by the cans on his face. “Don’t fucking make contact!”

  But Tully is smiling now, holding up the diamond triumphantly. His fingertips are still clean, and between his index finger and thumb is that frozen fly, twinkling with a mad intensity.

  “There’s more! In the dirt here. All around!” he says, stuffing the diamond into his pants pocket. “We’re gonna be rich!”

  “You’re gonna be infected,” says Stitch sadly. He is already backing away, hand on his gun.

  Tully’s grin flickers like a broken neon sign. “No,” he says, standing up. “How? Where am I infected?” He spins around, kicking up more dust. “I’m fine, you guys.”

  But even I can see that he is lopsided now. His balance is off because his left hand is getting heavier. The arm attached to it is stretching sickeningly at the bicep, like taffy.

  “It’s nothing, you guys,” he says, staggering, yanking his shirt off over his head with his good right arm. His eyes kind of bug out when he sees the left arm. A crete has gotten into his bloodstream. Traveled up his forearm and then latched on somewhere. The skin of his bicep is going taut as it elongates. It’s hard to tell what it is just now. What it is becoming.

  It’s not right that isn’t right.

  I back away, breathing in sharp panicked gasps that trigger the cutoff valve of my respirator. I try to slow down my rate of inhalation, straining and hearing a little groan deep in my chest. My lips curl moistly into the respirator at the sad insanity of what is happening to Tully.

  It’s a weapon-maker crete. Must have been in the dirt.

  The paratrooper’s left hand has collapsed in on itself now. The fingers are fusing together and the whole mess is solidifying into a metallic hunk. Some part of my brain is estimating the iron percentages contained in human blood. How much carbon is in human skin? Is that why Tully is so pale? Is the crete breaking down the metal in his blood?

  “Oh,” says Tully.

  I’m seeing a weapon design now. A cylindrical shape rippling under the skin of his forearm like a submarine about to surface. Tully’s teeth flash white in the sun as his flesh splits and the unblinking black eye of a gun barrel pushes out through the top of his hand. I can hear his knuckles grinding against each other as the hand spreads and collapses.

  Tully finally screams. Reaches for us with his good right hand. He is begging now. Left shoulder humped. Dragging that melting piece of foreign weaponry on the ground, his arm stretched out like bubble gum, the barrel in his ruined hand cutting a furrow through poisoned dirt.

  “Wait!” he shrieks, fumbling for his sidearm with his good hand. “Don’t leave me!”

  A hiss followed by a snap. Leaves waft down around us as another diamond rips through the canopy. This one sounds bigger than a horsefly.

  “I am so sorry,” I say.

  Stitch and I run together. More impacts slash through leaves around us. Precious gems thunk off tree trunks. We’re dealing with a highly infectious diamond crete, and it must have an airborne transmission capacity if it’s vectoring into goddamn flies. Head down, I do the only thing I can: keep moving.

  In the distance, behind us, I hear a gunshot. Just one.

  Stitch pauses, speaks to me in rapid bursts. “We’ll circle arou
nd. Go back through a different area. Double time.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, panting. “He was your friend.”

  Stitch shrugs. “Sometimes you catch a bad breeze.”

  We push deeper into the jungle. Moving farther from the shoreline, closer to Caldecot. I cringe every time a piece of grass flutters against my leg. The creticide that coats my boots and pant legs is turning gray with the corpses of millions of gummed-up cretes. The material still has that odd stiff gleam and I’m thankful for it now in a way I never imagined I could be before.

  I watch Stitch’s shoulders. Focus on my breathing and on keeping up with the lanky soldier. That’s why I see the fist-sized diamond hit Stitch on the back of his calf mid-stride.

  It must have fallen from someplace high, because the diamond smacks into him with a meaty thump that sends the paratrooper staggering forward. To his credit, he doesn’t fall down or do anything stupid, like grab a tree limb for support. He just hops a few feet, slows, and stops. Throws his elbows back until his shoulder blades kiss. Then he screams into the sky long and loud. The sound echoes back from the jungle in a strange, flat way.

  “No,” he grunts. “What was it? Did it break the skin?”

  I scan the ground and find the culprit: a bird, made of diamond. It is beautiful, frozen—wings still splayed in flight. A parrot.

  “Yeah,” I say, putting a hand on Stitch’s upper arm. He leans against me, heaves a shaking breath, and peers over his shoulder at his calf. His pant leg is shredded. Muscle exposed. Black-red blood leaks in aimless rivulets from the impact wound.

  “Oh no,” he says, and collapses to a knee with his bad leg laid out behind him. Slowly, gratefully, he touches the ground with his palms. Drops his head and lets the sweat drip off his nose. I crouch beside him, keeping a safe distance.

  A sharp twanging vibration plucks the air behind me. I look back down the path. The landscape has changed.

  The sun is staring low from the horizon and blinking at me through what looks like a layer of plastic wrap. Not plastic. Diamond. The cretes are spreading, eating the jungle whole, fabricating a frozen diorama of fine crystal. Trees are igniting into splinter bursts of light.

  “Take it off,” Stitch says. “Take the leg off now.”

  I turn back to the fallen man, panic rising in me. I watch the raw pain dance up his spinal cord and germinate in shivering beads of sweat on his forehead. Behind me, the world is turning to ice.

  A seesaw sound wavers out of the diamond frost. Like the chirp of electrical wires in a storm. It is followed by a gentle warmth pushing out of the crystalline jungle: the waste heat generated by an exponential atomic reaction taking place five hundred yards away. A spreading wall of contagious diamond wreathes the jungle in light and is closing in on us fast. I start to rise, urged ahead by the hot breeze.

  “Please, just take the leg off,” says Stitch. “Please. Then you can go.”

  The leg stretched out behind him is becoming stiff. The edges of the wound are already turning pale and going translucent. Carbon to carbon. Patterns wrought in flesh.

  “Then you can go,” repeats Stitch. “Please.”

  My hands move before I dare to think about it.

  With a gentle nudge, I push Stitch down onto his chest. Pin his thigh under my knee, careful not to touch the ground myself. He groans but doesn’t complain. Looking at the ripped flesh of his calf, I gauge this will be a transtibial amputation. Just below the knee.

  Common enough.

  I pick through my satchel and find that Fritz has sent me off disturbingly well prepared. Quickly, I snap on a pair of creticide-coated latex gloves. With two quick tugs, I widen the rip in Stitch’s pant leg and expose the skin around the wound. It is frosting up quickly, with diamond material jutting through in unpolished ridges. Byproduct water courses out of the wound, making the ground muddy. I smell the brightness of pure oxygen. The wound itself is not bleeding anymore, but I wrap his thigh with a tourniquet anyway. Tie it off tight.

  All I can hear now is my own breathing inside the respirator. Wet exhalations flowing over my nose and mouth, hot as they leak out under my neck. Sweat courses down my cheeks, into my eyes.

  I draw out a hand-sized portable surgical saw, tear the sterilized plastic protector off the blade, and let it fall fluttering into the hot breeze. How thoughtful of Fritz. I think of his other special gift to me—the vial of flesh-eating nanorobots in my front pocket.

  Quicker than most.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I say to Stitch. “Be still.”

  “It hurts inside,” says Stitch.

  The saw blade spins up with a thin whine. My fingers are so clumsy compared to this shining steel. Like rubber gloves filled with liver pâté, gross and graceless. I flinch as another bird hits the ground a few feet away. The jungle is waking up, crete victims striking the dirt around us like missiles. I drop the blade edge against Stitch’s sweating calf, as close below the knee as I can manage.

  “I’m gonna be okay,” says Stitch, whimpering through the reassuring words. “I’m gonna be okay.”

  It helps to think of something else. Anything else.

  The beauty of a crete. Technology so much cleaner and more elegant than the human form. A billion dancing atoms with a singular purpose. Each nanorobot a flawless unit, carrying nothing extra, none of the baggage left over from eons of evolution. Each crete made perfect in its own image. Ready to make something out of the chaos.

  And none of this filthy meat.

  “I’m gonna be—”

  The medical saw sinks into Stitch’s flesh with no resistance. Like filleting a fish. A red line appears under the blade, four inches above where the white-and-pink skin brightens into a shining clump of diamond. My elbow dips as the saw eats. The whine drops into a grinding pulse as the blade bites into bone.

  “I’m—”

  And then the blade stops spinning, bucking in my hands.

  Stitch has his face pressed against the dirt. No more talking. His breath convulses in his chest, sending dust tornadoing away from his nostrils. I yank on the saw and it won’t move. Oh no, oh no. The crete must have gotten it. Craning to look into Stitch’s wide, tear-filled eyes, I get the feeling that he isn’t seeing anything.

  His chest rises and it doesn’t fall.

  Leaning back on my haunches, I resist the urge to wipe my forehead with my arm. Sour wind on my neck, I watch the fading sunlight refracting in Stitch’s open eyes. And for a split second, I see the most beautiful sight of my life.

  The diamond crete has spread into Stitch’s bloodstream. Remade his bones and his veins and flesh until finally, the cretes must have traveled into his optic nerves. The tiny machines have converted the lenses of Stitch’s eyes into orbs of pure colorless diamond.

  His dead eyes flicker with the captured fire of the sun.

  I let go of the stuck saw. The wound is no longer bleeding and the pink-white of his bone has faded away. The steel saw blade bit into diamond. Now, the carbon in the steel is also turning to diamond.

  Time to run.

  A fresh surge of heat grips my shoulders and I abandon Stitch’s frozen body. Dancing heat shadows caper over the ground around me. That wall of diamond is rising higher, twanging loudly as it builds itself. Through it, the sun’s rays feel accelerated, impacting my skin with an otherworldly velocity.

  The whistling updraft is doing something to the weather. Clouds are gathering, swirling. Angry thunder rumbles out of a darkening sky.

  Alone, I run from the frozen trees, away from that tortured cobweb simulacrum of a jungle, deeper into the island. The wall of diamond is spreading behind me. Only the barrier isn’t straight. It curves around me to the right and left, leaning over my head, growing taller.

  It isn’t a wall.

  This shining thing rising up behind me is the dawn of something incomprehensible. As it arcs over my head, I can see now that the cretes are growing into something else entirely. They are turning into a perfect dome.<
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  10

  My only choice is to plow forward, away from the heat of creation.

  The sun is falling now, spreading fading tendrils of light through the haze of crystal. That odd twanging and chirping fades as I proceed farther down the path. After a couple of kilometers or so, I come to a wooden gate next to an empty guard booth. From either side, a chain-link fence topped with razor wire stretches off into the jungle, forming a gleaming perimeter.

  Beyond this point, the previously overgrown road becomes paved and straight.

  I step around the sagging wooden slat of the barrier. Feel the familiar solid pavement under my boots. This road, a last vestige of civilization, leads straight across manicured grounds to the rogue research facility. Or what’s left of it.

  I walk the final kilometer in a daze.

  Jeeps and army trucks are abandoned on the sides of the road like flotsam left behind after a tidal wave. Some of the vehicles lie in puddles, the metal having melted into rubbery piles feathered with flakes of green paint. Others have partially sunk into the ground, their noses pointing out at awkward angles like fallen lawn darts. Titanic forces have twisted and disfigured the landscape here, and everything in it.

  The bodies themselves are hard to recognize. They’ve been pulled into strange shapes. Dissolved and folded in on each other. People melded with their own equipment, bodies tortured into unthinkable dimensions. The road is covered with bundles of angles, acute and obtuse, but none identifiable, not as human beings. No flies trouble these rotting, rusting carcasses. There are no birds and no animals. Only the sigh of infected wind. A bad breeze.

  All of it is digesting in the harsh, fevered light that weeps through the dome.

  Ten klicks in, where the light gets dim, and the sights get mighty strange.

  The earth here is crusty, broken in sweeping patches. I catch sight of the hull of a ship, half-buried, breaching out of the ground with the obscene weight of it buckling the earth and cantilevering a swathe of jungle up into the air. Naked tree limbs sway in the breeze and clap to themselves, having dissolved into what look like propeller blades. A sheer rock face has grown into cannon bores and collapsed under the weight of the deformation. I walk by logs made of furrowed human skin, bleeding gently under a coating of moss.