Toy Wars

by Thomas Gondolfi

  The cars, less than 500 meters from my position, swerved to follow a much different course. More cars mounted the summit, pouring over the top of the tiny hill like reverse flowing mercury—and all of them angled away from me by at least half a radian. They were now chasing a ghost and ignoring a simple simulated biologic sitting next to the river.

  I must have heavily damaged my circuits. Overloads and commands chased themselves around until my processor rebooted.

  Wanderer

  Consciousness seeped in slowly like a gradual realization that I was getting input and processing it. The nearby river roared most prominently. The fresh smell of moistened earth and the slippery feel of being coated in mercury spray nudged into my processing queue next. Body sensors started firing off data one by one…

  I started, sitting straight up. Looking around wildly I saw no units of any kind in range in spite of expecting the muzzle of automatic weapons ringing me. The hunters took the bait, all of it. I sighed with relief.

  My internal clocks told me that some fourteen hours had passed and my body expressed insistent concerns over its wellbeing. I did some quick checks and discovered that I would survive, even if my battery power edged well below nominal. Several minor and intermittent shorts filed into the repair list as did my scorched hydraulic fluid.

  Taking them as read, I could no longer replace my power from 55474’s net, and I had no fluids, hydraulic or otherwise. That only left the shorts as something I could work on immediately. My internal sensor pointed to all the damage in my neck area as a direct result of tearing out the CCT. Using the mercury as a mirror again, a gaping void lay where the tertiary CCT would sit. Several multicolored wire strands waved feebly about in the stiff breeze, causing tiny electrical arcs.

  My medical tools came in handy again. I cheered my own ingenuity in taking them. I took my time to coat each of the errant bare wires, six in all, with nonconductive sealant. Overlaid with the concentration of the first aid, a weighted sense of failure came over me.

  With my primary mission shot, I guessed it was time to return to Six. Six couldn’t hope to stand up to the might of 55474. It was a lost cause. Would returning to Six be considered suicide or duty? I couldn’t really think of either.

  Did Six stand any chance if I returned now? Could I return to 55474 and try again? Failing that, could I destroy 55474? No. No. No. I was beginning to hate that word. It pointed even more harshly to my inadequacy. For three hours I sat there worrying on the problem that always ended in my own deactivation.

  I had an epiphany. There was a long chance. There was at least one more Factory out there because of the battle where I had 55474’s units repair me. If I could try again to talk sense into that other Factory, Six would still have a chance in two against one. 55474 would be outnumbered if this other Factory had any semblance of the military machine I had seen fighting 55474. It was my only chance to stop the carnage, much less survive. My internal locator pointed off in the direction of this possibly mythical third Factory. The possibilities of redemption were meager but almost none is much better than zero.

  For six days I trekked, constantly looking over my shoulder for pursuit. Nothing showed. 55474 and his minions had been completely duped. It might be a short-lived victory as power levels had fallen below safety.

  This was a problem I had anticipated but wasn’t expecting quite so soon. Ongoing computations still didn’t have a means for charging my systems yet. My memory held 674 different methods of generating electricity but they all required huge apparatuses surrounding a pile of transuranic materials or large quantities of wire spinning at a large number of radians per minute in a strong magnetic field. I rummaged through my backpack to see if perhaps there was something, anything that would be useful. Nan tools, knife, extra ammunition, grenades, CCT of the Factory I was looking for, and a lot of batteries. Batteries? Hmmm. That gave me a possible solution for the interim. Swapping out my batteries would give me some time. The same ones I had ghoulishly stolen from the dead teddy probably contained nearly a full charge. That was only a temporary solution as I was bound to be away from an accessible wide area net for quite some time.

  I mentally reviewed my power diagrams. Each of my thick thighs contained dozens of batteries with which to run my internal systems. The batteries were good for nearly fifty hours of peak use or, as I had recently found out, seven days optimax use. Filtered energy conversion panels on my broad back and each of my rather large ears recharged the batteries. The flexible panels were hidden underneath the fur. The filters were tied directly into the CCTs to fine-tune the power and command reception. I reached up with one of the Nan tools and carefully removed my left ear. There was enough supplemental wiring to allow me to bring it out in front of me.

  The metallic silver of the collectors set ensconced within the deep translucent black quartz of the tuning filters surrounding them. I wondered if I could retune the filters by hand. The power converters slipped easily out of their quartz sheaths. As a shock, my system began to register power generation. I hadn’t done anything but I began to receive power anyway. The amount was tiny—it trickled in, but it was power nonetheless. I slipped the filter back on the energy panels and the amperage dropped to zero. I pulled it back off and the trickle of power registered again. I turned the panel around until the power maxed. It pointed directly east. I could only assume an untuned net concentrator lay in that direction. It would do for the time being.

  I reconnected my ear and began to work on the other one. The other ear was off and filter removed in minutes. The sun was setting but I didn’t care. I worked as well by starlight as by daylight, but I began to notice a decrease in the power being fed to recharge my batteries. By the time the sun completely set the incoming power ceased. I could think of only one theory that fit this group of facts and it didn’t involve an untuned NC, but rather the conversion of the rays of the sun to usable energy. Morning would tell for certain, but I needed to be busy.

  By midnight I had filters off all the power panels on my body, even though working with the parts on my back challenged me in a way I don’t recommend even for the most intrepid contortionists.

  I still had plenty of power for the rest of the night so I decided to push on. As the sun began to peak over the nearby hills to the west, I found power trickling down into my batteries from my ears and back. It barely supported current operations. If I continued, I would have no power available for night operations. After mulling it over, I could only see one good solution and it was in two parts. One, I needed to recharge my entire battery system. As low as it was, one good rain shower and it might have been the end. Second, I would have to travel at night. I couldn’t keep my panels optimally positioned to the sun while trying to set a course. I would sit unmoving during the day and power up.

  I programmed my systems to move so as to focus the maximum light upon the panels during the day even if I shut down cognitive functions. To conserve energy even further, my program shut down all other systems, including my consciousness. Thus, I became nocturnal.

  It took me six days to recharge all my batteries. I can’t explain how boring it was to do nothing, so I watched the stars revolve around me and wondered what it would be like away from the bounds of this planet. They taunted me with their freedom. I wanted to be with them, roving around the cosmos. It seemed to be a pipedream. How could I aspire to such heights when I couldn’t yet even save my Factory? Even if I did, Six wouldn’t spend any resources on such a fanciful notion. I tried to program the stars and their movements into my inertial locator; it didn’t respond. This puzzled me.

  I took a quick review of the path I’d taken but found my last six days absent from my locator’s memories. It responded with data to any query, but that data always showed the same position, that of Factory 55474. Somehow, the solid state locator’s function and memory were nonfunctional. In essence, I was lost.

  The last two nights of charging I spent in despair. I’d come so far. I’d overcome such
obstacles. Why did the Humans have to put another hurdle in my path? I would have to find a way to navigate. If I were completely honest with myself, the answer already struck me in the processor, but I first had to purge the self-pity.

  The stars and moons would guide me as they had Human seagoing vessels for centuries. Each night as the sun would set in the east I would mark its spot against some high mountains. As the sunset cleared off, the stars peeked out to greet me. The first night I found a point of light that moved not at all through the darkness.

  Presumptuously of me, I named the star Polaris, the polestar. The direction of the rotation of the stars was east and toward Polaris was north. This gave me my compass to keep track of my journey. Tracking the placement of the three moons with respect to the horizon also gave me a tight positional fix down to within about a hundred meters. Together they weren’t as exact as my locator but it would have to do—besides who needed to know where they were to the nearest millimeter. On the seventh night, my batteries full, I resumed my trek using my new navigation scheme.

  Within two days the terrain got increasingly rugged. With the mountain ridges blocking off the last hour or more of daylight, I no longer received a full charge during my day. The first few days the amount registered only intellectually. Over a week later, deeper in the mountains, more and more light evaded my power cells each day. Each day my reserve dipped lower.

  During the travel I contemplated happiness. I always looked forward to one of two things—either I had just won a victory, or I had a Factory to converse with. Right then I felt an absence of happiness. Not a negative amount, which would translate into sadness, but just a lack of something that had been a part of me for so long: being nurtured by Six.

  I hadn’t always agreed with Six, but I’d always tried to do the best for it that I could manage, even if that meant disobeying. How I wanted to go home and be happy again and I knew I couldn’t, as there would soon be no home left if I did.

  As I continued to climb over the mountains, on those few occasions when I chose to remain conscious through the day, I noted a daytime mist. Apparently, the mercury boiled out of the ground even earlier in the day. It had to have something to do with the air pressure, which here, so high in the mountains, was considerably lower, but I had no way to gauge it.

  My sensors weren’t designed to note air pressure. I could get some estimation of it by the sound of my own voice: the higher the pitch, the lower the pressure. My approximation had me 7,000 meters above the level of Six’s dome. A week later, when I thought I had reached 10,000 meters in height, the fog remained constant day and night.

  The moist haze didn’t keep the light pressure of the sun from recharging me. It wouldn’t have bothered me save that it obscured my vision and made my footing treacherous. At least three times I slipped on rocks. One of those times I saved myself from falling down a 200-meter ravine by blindly flailing my arm into the crook of a tiny shrub-like growth on the edge of the cliff. I peeked over that particular edge and concluded that after such a fall, remaining operational would have been miraculous. I opted to slow even further after that near miss.

  Along my ascent, I made a conscious decision not to take the easier passes through the mountains. I could get stuck in a situation where there was no sunlight at all to recharge, so I had to do it the hard way—up and over. The peaks slowed my advance by 80 percent or more. I was hard-pressed to tell my straight-line speed as I kept going up and down so much. With my inertial locator damaged, I was reliant on something the Humans call “by guess and by golly.”

  The mountain peaks contained an increasing number and diversity of biologic life forms. Almost all of them ignored my presence. Only one tiny, multi-toothed carnivore, all of fifteen centimeters long, attempted to take a bite out of me while I slept. My internal sensors woke me to the threat and I eliminated it with a single shot from my sidearm. My voltage fluctuated wildly for several hours after that incident, making it impossible to justify shutting down.

  Plants covered the entire ground beneath me. Although a healthy shade of pink, it reminded me of the green carpeting in my dream of so many days ago—when I had turned off for my CCT replacement. The vegetation and life forms here still were mostly unlike any I had ever encountered. It was something to keep my mind occupied as I traveled each night.

  Only one of the flora or fauna gave me any real trouble. One evening I awoke to find myself entangled in a crimson and pink growth of vines and leaves. When I tried to free myself, not only did I find that I could not move but the vines wrapped more tightly around me. I struggled to lay my hands on my pack, but the creepers intertwined with my arms so well I couldn’t move. My gun, slung over my shoulder, was of no use.

  I spent almost the entire night twisting and turning, first trying this group of motions and then that. Not only did none of it help, but the animated plant seemed to hug me even tighter. I might as well not have any limbs at all.

  Morning came and no new ideas came to me. I hadn’t quite despaired at that point, but visions of watching each erg float away filled my mind. It seemed too much to believe that a biologic, and a plant at that, could keep me from completing my mission. The idea was laughable at best. But that didn’t change the cold, hard fact that I could not move.

  Oddly, my idea came from yet another biologic—a 2-kilogram quadrupedal insect that filled the same ecological niche as a Terran rabbit. It even looked remarkably like one if you discounted the blood-colored carapace and convinced yourself that its two 20-centimeter antennae were ears. This rabbit, for want of a better name, edged up to the periphery of the growth that surrounded me and began nibbling on the outer leaves. I screamed at it in hopes that it would at least save itself. Without moving, it kept one eye on me as it continued to munch on the leaves.

  The vines attempting the encirclement of its new prey moved with the speed of frozen mercury. Every few seconds the insect just walked out of its reach and continued nibbling, this time on a new vine. After about an hour of eating and occasional leisurely dodges, the rabbit walked off, sated and free.

  It did give me an idea. I didn’t know why Six created me with a mouth or for that matter, teeth. My mouth had, up to this time, served only as my vocal apparatus. I had only ever used my teeth once—against the T.rex. It was time to do it again. I reached down and grabbed a mouthful of vines in my teeth and bit down hard. The vines parted easily. I spit them out and repeated.

  Every time I got close to freeing an arm, three more vines slithered, with all the speed of a rock crab, to take their place. Chew and spit. Bite and expel. It was a race to see if I ran out of power before the plant ran out of vines or tentacles. I won.

  Eventually, it had committed the last of its leaved resources to the battle and I managed to chew enough to get my first arm free. The process of liberating myself speeded up tremendously as I pulled the knife from my backpack and slashed away at the rest of the offending plant in broad, exaggerated strokes. The plant parted easily to the onslaught of the blade, barely offering resistance. Once completely free I moved out of the immediate vicinity, fully charged or not.

  As I walked I couldn’t help but feel nauseated by the concept of chewing on the vines. To think that biologics actually ingested food to survive was a horrid thought. Even more, why did I have a mouth? Or teeth? No answer was forthcoming for these truly puzzling questions.

  I retreated at least half a kilometer before looking for a new place to recharge. This time I chose a large, barren rock without so much as a twig lying near it. Even with this I kept my processor online all day and jerked at even the slightest breeze hitting my fur. I took the time to fully recharge by spending another full day lying in the sun. By the second day at least I didn’t start at every little sound or movement.

  I couldn’t decide if I’d just succeeded or I’d been an idiot for lying into the creature in the first place. In the end it didn’t matter. I was finally able to return to my quest.

  Creator

 
; Five uneventful days later I came over a sharp ridge. Two Tommy Tank units and a pair of elephants ran a random patrol in a tiny valley. The tanks’ turrets spun toward me. Tracers spit out directly at me. One came close enough to part the fur on my left arm.

  I dropped immediately to my belly. It took a few moments to understand why I’d been spotted so easily. Looking back, I had silhouetted myself against the triply moonlit sky.

  I don’t know whether their net told them to attack or they were running standard orders in dealing with a fauna. I rolled to my right to take advantage of some cover provided by a group of large rocks. I pulled out my M16 and sighted down the hill.

  The elephants ran surprisingly fast, weaving as they climbed. The tanks darted in amongst rocks of their own, but always upward toward me. I lay still and kept my eyes peeled for an opportunity. I knew where to hit most standard units to score kills—I was just waiting for that perfect shot. Patience rewarded me with clear shots at the tanks one after another in rapid succession. Two of my bursts equated to two kills on the tanks.

  Another kill shot through the processor brought the first pachyderm to an abrupt halt. I sighted in for the final kill but something stopped me. I had the shot and didn’t take it. An idea began to form. Instead of blowing its sump apart, I once again used my knowledge of unit anatomy to place two aimed shots, shattering the knee joints on the forward legs. It went down in a heap.