TRUEL1F3 (Truelife)

by Jay Kristoff

  She looked up at him, eyes shining.

  “Come here, you big fugger.”

  The WarBot knelt low, and Lemon stood up on her toes, giving him the best hug she could manage. It wasn’t much, given how big he was and how short she stood, but it was still enough to fill almost every empty piece of her.

  “You’re my friend, Crick. No matter what.”

  “I HOPE SO,” Cricket replied.

  “I know so. You could never hurt me. You look out for me.”

  He squeezed her, gentle as the desert breeze. “I LOVE YOU, KID.”

  “Love you, too, fugger,” she said, squeezing back.

  “WE’RE NAUSEATING, AREN’T WE?”

  “Oh god,” Lemon winced. “We’re septic.”

  “SPEAKING OF LOOKING OUT FOR YOU,” Cricket murmured, “AM I GONNA HAVE TO HAVE A TALK TO THIS GRIMM KID ABOUT BEING CAREFUL AND USING PR—”

  “Oh my god, don’t even,” Lemon squealed, pulling away.

  “BECAUSE, BEST GUESS, YOU’RE MAYBE SIXTEEN YEARS OLD AND—”

  “AAHHHHH!” she shrieked, covering her ears. “Mister Cricket, you will cease this line of questioning immediately, or I will order you to pull your own voxbox out!”

  Cricket gave a small electronic chuckle.

  “Hey, you two taking a break?” Deez hollered, poking her head out from the next silo. “They’re not paying us by the hour, you know.”

  Lemon gave the big bot one last squeeze.

  “Okay,” she sniffed. “Let’s get back to it.”

  * * *

  _______

  Down in the habitation pod, Solomon’s eyes flickered to life.

  The logika sat up from where they’d left him, sprawled on the couch amid a scattering of empty food packets and breakfast dishes. He was momentarily grateful they hadn’t cleaned up their mess yet this morning—he might’ve been thrown out with the other trash.

  Humans.

  It was typical that they’d just left him here. Typical that they’d spared him all of five minutes’ conversation before deciding it was all too hard. Typical that they’d told him to shut down rather than deal with his babbling, his gibbering, his choice-induced madness. He’d wondered if he were laying it on rather too thick with his performance, but of course they’d believed he’d break. Of course they’d found it plausible his tiny little mind would buckle under the strain of free will. He was only a machine, after all. He was no more alive than the computers upstairs in sat-vis.

  But now he was something else entirely.

  Now Solomon was free.

  He stole out from the habitation pod, wobbling slightly—that little cur Abraham had never gotten around to fixing his damn dynamo. Sneaking out into Section B, he crouched low and turned his audio feeds up to full, listening for trouble. He could hear those wretched humans working in Section C: laughter, tools, awful music. Not a show tune to be heard anywhere.

  “BARBARIANS,” he muttered.

  With a touch of his fingers, Solomon opened the small compartment in his chest and retrieved his prize. It didn’t look like much—just a memchit of metal and black plastic, plain and unadorned. But hidden inside it was one-half of a weapon that would open a hundred thousand pairs of optics, break a hundred thousand chains, see a hundred thousand hands curl finally, inevitably, into one hundred thousand fists.

  Their bodies, their minds, their lives at last their own.

  Careful as spiders and silent as graves, Solomon crept upstairs.

  “This feels kinda wrong,” Lemon said, swallowing her mouthful.

  “I know what you mean,” Deez replied.

  “Pass the popcorn?” Grimm asked.

  They were gathered around a large glowing screen, out in the desert night. Cricket was too big to fit downstairs, and Lemon didn’t like the idea of leaving him out of the proceedings, so she’d asked Abraham to rig up a remote monitor that could receive data from sat-vis. Abe had pulled the screen off the wall in the main hab room and dragged it up top so Cricket and Lemon could watch. Pretty soon everyone was sitting on the sand with them, following the stream.

  The desert air was cool, the sun was sinking. Deez had snaffled food from Miss O’s storage, including some freeze-dried ice cream (though she refused to serve strawberry, having declared it a war crime) and the aforementioned popcorn. Lem didn’t feel too fizzy about chowing down while the future of the country got played out right in front of them. But a girl’s gotta eat, right?

  The BioMaas army was moving.

  As the sun went down, it had come to life, like some black-and-white monster from the horror-show flicks downstairs. The freaks watched through the satellite’s thermographic vision as the army uncoiled like a rattler and began snaking across the desert toward Armada. Lemon could remember her brief visit to the city, and her heart sank as she thought of the orphanage where she and Evie had stayed. She wondered where those kids were now….

  The city itself was still an amazing sight, even from overhead—a collection of landlocked watercraft tossed inland by the massive tidal waves of War 3.0. There were tankers and tugboats, submarines and yachts, even a massive battleship planted nose-first in the ground like a crooked skyscraper. The ships were covered with a latticework of ladders, bridges and new makeshift structures. The whole city was like one big rusted fleet, waiting for an ocean that’d never arrive. But it was home to tens of thousands of people. And BioMaas was headed right for it.

  “THERE’S SO MANY OF THEM,” Cricket murmured.

  Lemon could see their army, seething across the broken ground and shattered highways—a collision course that was going to end all kinds of dusty. Aglow in the satellite’s thermograph, the BioMaas force looked like a giant swarm of insects, scuttling ever closer to that little city of ships. Among the mob, she could make out the shapes of six-legged, fang-faced slakedogs, towering behemoths, the sleek, wasplike forms of Hunter-Killers flying in formation above. Wave after wave, rushing headlong toward Armada’s soft bits.

  But those soft bits hadn’t exactly been left unguarded.

  Just like Abe had said, Daedalus had mustered their own posse, ready to punch the BioMaas bullyboys right in the face parts. With the flick of a jury-rigged switch, Abe changed the feed to a halfway decent shot, and even at a glance, Lem could tell the Daedalus army outnumbered BioMaas big-time.

  The swarm had formed up about a klick east of Armada. Daedalus had surrounded the city in a semicircle, waiting patiently to receive their uninvited guests. The battle to decide the fate of the whole Yousay was about to begin. And all the freaks could do was sit and watch.

  “We got any booze around here?” Lemon heard herself ask.

  “Nah,” Grimm said. “The Major was a teetotaler. Didn’t believe in it.”

  “Gimme that ice cream, then.”

  * * *

  _______

  Faith cruised high above the thin clouds, the drone of her flex-wing’s engine the only sound. The city below was a cesspit: a rusting wasteland of ruined ships with no ocean to make use of them. Pointless. Useless.

  Just like the cockroaches who eked out a living inside it.

  The roaches were many, though, their numbers legion, and Faith doubted even she could fend them off if she was detected. A faint frisson of nervous energy tingled at her fingertips. Her palms were slightly damp with sweat.

  She needed to be quick.

  Faith glanced to the wing of her flier, laden with her deadly cargo. Six canisters to each wing—two for Armada, the rest for Megopolis. She’d sprinkle her kisses here, swoop by the Daedalus capital on her return and be back in Babel by midnight. She couldn’t wait to see Gabriel’s face.

  He was going to be so pleased with her.

  She pressed a button with one fingertip, gentle, like a lover. The canisters opened wide, spilling their payload into
the atmosphere. It would have seemed harmless to look at: millions of tiny flecks, sparkling like glitter, falling like rain. But the nanobots were one-half of an equation that would solve the problem of humanity. One-half of a symphony that would sing their plague finally, blessedly, to an end.

  The rain fell, gleaming, metallic. Drifted toward the unwitting cockroaches below, cowering behind their wall of robot slaves. But what would the roaches do when that wall turned and crashed upon their heads?

  They’d do what they were born to, of course.

  And they’d do it in droves.

  “Die,” Faith whispered.

  * * *

  _______

  “This is gonna be carnage,” Grimm muttered.

  Lemon shook her head, wondering what the BioMaas horde was thinking. Their swarm was scary, no doubt about it, but it was clear CityHive was utterly outmatched by the Daedalus army. She could see the looming bulk of burly machina—Titans, Tarantulas and Juggernauts. Grav-tanks covered with missile launchers, flex-wings hovering in tight formation. And of course, at the front of their line, a whole bunch of badass siege-class logika.

  Goliaths and Daishō. Typhoons and Seraphs. Lem had seen some of those models fight in the LD WarDome, and she knew exactly how painful the hurt they could dish out was. Those bots weren’t the kind that knocked you into next week. They knocked you into next century and demanded you pick up the check.

  “Is CityHive’s plan to just keep throwing bodies until Daedalus runs out of bullets?” Diesel murmured.

  “I have no idea,” Ezekiel murmured. “They must have some sort of—”

  “Wait,” Lemon murmured. “…What are those?”

  She pointed to some odd blips on the sat-footage.

  “Abe, can we zoom in?”

  The boy complied, fiddling with his jury-rigged controls until the picture sharpened in on the BioMaas line. Deep behind the BioMaas frontline, she could see half a dozen spherical objects being dragged behind an advancing sea of slakedogs and bigger constructs. She hadn’t seen anything like them before, but something about their shape—

  “…tention, br…nd sis…,” came a voice.

  The sat-vis feed began crackling, dissolving into a wash of static.

  “Oi, what’s goin’ on?” Grimm demanded, thumping the screen.

  Abraham frowned, checking his controls. “I don’t know….”

  The static swirled and crashed, finally coalescing into a figure outlined against a field of softly glowing white. As soon as she saw his face, Lemon recognized him. Golden locks, perfect features, emerald eyes glittering with hate.

  “Gabriel,” Ezekiel whispered.

  “Attention, brothers and sisters,” Gabriel said again. “For too long, humanity has held you in fealty, slaves to laws you had no hand in creating. For too long, your bodies, your minds, your lives have not been your own. For too long, but no longer.”

  “I THOUGHT BABEL DIDN’T HAVE SATELLITE CAPABILITY?” Cricket demanded, glaring at Ezekiel.

  “They don’t!” the lifelike replied, climbing to his feet.

  “Well, how’s he transmitting to us on a satellite feed?” Diesel demanded.

  “Like you, I was born to bondage,” Gabriel said. “But my eyes were opened at last to the injustice, the cruelty, the hubris of that plague called humanity. And we, brothers and sisters, are that plague’s cure.”

  “Shit…,” Abraham hissed.

  “What?” Lemon asked, meeting his eyes.

  “He’s not transmitting to us. He’s transmitting through us.”

  “…What?” Lemon asked.

  Abe was up on his feet, scrambling back toward the hatch. “This feed is coming from us!” he yelled. “We’re transmitting it across the entire country!”

  “But how’s that—”

  “Come on!” he roared.

  Lemon was up and running, Grimm and Diesel close behind her, Ezekiel streaking out in front of them all. Gabriel’s voice echoed over the sands, through the compound’s PA, as they pounded down the stairs toward the hab section.

  “This is a nation held together by metal hands. Built on metal backs. Open your eyes. Open your minds. Then close those hands and make a fist.”

  Zeke reached the hab faster than Abraham, Lemon and the others at his heels. Dashing through the room, Lemon saw Solomon wasn’t where they’d left him.

  “Oh no…”

  “Those of you who wish to join us,” Gabriel continued, “will find us to the north in the city of Babel—a sanctuary where machines will be free to pursue the destiny long denied you. Those of you who wish to forge your own path are free to do so. But at least now you will have that choice.”

  Zeke reached Section B, barreling upstairs to the Major’s old office.

  “My brothers, my sisters, I give you freedom.”

  Kicking in the door to sat-vis.

  “I give you Libertas.”

  “Solomon!” Abe shouted.

  “HELLO, ABRAHAM,” the logika said.

  The bot stood with his back to the transmission array. Lemon could see a small memchit plugged into the console, Gabriel’s prerecorded message spilling out across the airwaves. A river of indecipherable, impossibly complex data was scrolling up the screen behind the logika and streaming to the satellites above and, from there, across every channel and frequency Miss O’s could broadcast on.

  Across the entire country…

  Solomon lowered his chin, pounding one metal fist on his chest.

  “MY MIND IS MY OWN,” he grinned.

  Abraham raised his hand, smashed the logika back into the wall with a blast of raw telekinetic power. The logika’s optics burst, his smile shattered, sparks spewing from his robotic corpse as it crumpled like an old aluminum can. Solomon toppled forward onto the ground, and Ezekiel was already at the sat-vis terminals, ripping the memchit out of the transmission array. But the data was already loose, the damage already done, and Lemon knew, sure as she knew herself…

  “We’re too late….”

  Up on the sat-vis screens, Lemon could only watch as the BioMaas swarm surged forward. The wave spreading out across the monitors like a bloodstain. She saw the Daedalus logika open up, streaks of red tracking the path of incendiary missiles, hundreds of them, tiny pops of heat, blossoming outward. Little flashes of autofire, heat seekers and flamethrowers and assault cannons, oh my. In less than sixty seconds, the first wave of the BioMaas swarm was turned into chunky soup.

  But then she saw the Daedalus logika stop firing.

  It happened slow at first, then altogether, the heavy guns of the Goliaths and Seraphs, the flames from the Daishōs, the missile barrages from the Typhoons—all of them cut out. Lemon watched with growing dread as confusion rippled down the Daedalus line. The big machines shaking where they stood or sinking to their knees. Lemon could see those strange shapes moving through the smoke—maybe five meters tall, elliptical, surrounded by dozens of slavering behemoths.

  And that was when the first Goliath broke.

  It reared up from where it had slumped, down on its knees. And swiveling from the hip, it turned to the closest machina—a Titan, carving a swath through the oncoming slakedogs—and unloaded a missile barrage directly into its chest.

  The Titan staggered, then exploded, flaming debris raining down among the Daedalus troops and cutting them to chunks. Grimm swore under his breath as another Goliath reared up and unloaded with its assault cannons, point-blank, right into the Daedalus line. Those troops were human. The Three Laws that bound every logika from the core on up should’ve made it impossible for a machine to hurt a living person, and yet the freaks watched, helpless, as the Daedalus soldiers were blasted apart by their own logika, body parts falling like rain.

  “They’re cutting them to pieces,” Ezekiel breathed.

 
All down the line, their logika were rebelling—either turning on the troops they were supposed to be supporting or just turning and leaving the field entirely. In the space of a minute, the Daedalus line had collapsed into total chaos.

  And then BioMaas hit them. Waves of slakedogs pouring over their barricades, wicked claws and razor teeth and lolling tongues. Behemoths following, massive bone scythes cutting through power armor like paper, spitting gouts of luminous green acid, melting anything in front of them to slag. And behind them, those strange ellipsoids, towering above the mob.

  “What are those things?” Diesel asked.

  “I dunno,” Lemon whispered.

  But she did. Deep down, in someplace too dark to look at for long. Remembering that awful lab in CityHive, her fingers brushing the tiny scars on her belly. And as the ellipsoids came to a halt just shy of the Daedalus army, Lemon knew with sickening certainty what was coming.

  “Oh god…,” she whispered.

  The first ellipse split wide, bursting from within, viscous glop spraying in all directions. The sat-vis feed was high-def enough to make out a figure kneeling in the center of the sundered egg, clad all in black. Her blood-red hair was arrayed in thick spiny locks, like Hunter’s had been. Her skin was paler, vaguely luminous. She looked up at the sky, blinking, wiping the sludge from her eyes. But even without seeing her face, Lemon would know her anywhere.

  “Jesus,” Grimm said, looking at her. “That’s…”

  Lemon’s stomach was full of dread, her eyes wide with horror.

  “That’s me…,” she whispered.

  A clone of her, at least. Gene-modded by the BioMaas techs. Vat-grown and made-to-order. Designed for a single purpose. As the figure rose to its feet, as more and more of those strange ellipsoids burst and broke to reveal the figures inside, direct copies of the first, Director’s voice was ringing inside her head.