Wasteland Marshals

by Gail Z. Martin

  The bots that streamed toward the headquarters didn’t look like anything special, and Shane wondered if the experimental versions were inside—or at Raven Rock. He’d seen insurgents in Iraq disable a million-dollar, high-tech bot with well-aimed rocks or a strategically-timed landslide, so he knew that for as dangerous as the robots were, they had their vulnerabilities.

  He lit a Molotov and threw it on a diagonal from where he hid. The bottle shattered, sending up a plume of flame. When the bots’ sensors sent them moving toward the heat source, Shane started firing, enjoying how good it felt to hold a rifle after all this time. His aim was true, and he picked off tread hinges and shattered sensor lenses, then followed up with grenades to blast the blinded or paralyzed robots and take them out of commission.

  Shane reloaded and repeated, alternating between Molotovs and bullets, doing his best to lure the bots into the IEDs he had left scattered around the street on either side of the headquarters building. The bots returned fire, and Shane ducked back into the shelter of the doorway, wincing as bullets chipped away at the concrete, sending shards into the air.

  He pushed back memories of being pinned down, under fire back in Iraq, memories that still haunted his dreams. Only then, he and Lucas had been shoulder to shoulder, covering each other as they reloaded, staggering their shots.

  More bots rolled toward the fight, and Shane feared that he wouldn’t be able to hold them all off as they converged. He shrank back, throwing an arm over his face, as two more of the IEDs exploded, sending fragments clattering across the pavement. Four of the bots made it through, avoiding the IEDs by dumb luck, or perhaps, he feared, having learned from their comrades’ mistakes to avoid the can-shaped bombs.

  Shane could hold off two, but four was going to be rough, especially when he only had partial cover. If they got close enough that he couldn’t draw back into the shelter of the doorway, Shane was a sitting duck.

  He lit and threw two Molotovs to distract the bots, and as soon as the flames rose, tossed out three grenades, one after another, then opened fire. He hit his targets, but he couldn’t keep them pinned down.

  Shots fired from the direction of the command center, and for a second, Shane feared a new enemy had entered the fight. Then he glimpsed Lucas, just below the ridge of the roof, using his position to a sniper’s best advantage. Shane drove the bots back with fire, and Lucas picked them off from above. In minutes, the smoke-filled street was silent, filled with charred robot pieces and a few whirring and glitching assemblies that had not been completely destroyed.

  A piercing whistle drew his attention back to the roofline, where Lucas gestured, indicating he was heading inside. Shane glanced both ways before breaking from cover, trying to assure himself that no new wave of AI attackers had held back until the cease-fire. He sprinted toward the doorway, careful to stay out of the line of sight of the entrance in case any of the robots waited in the darkness within. He flattened himself against the front of the command center, mindful to avoid the few IEDs that hadn’t been set off by the bots, and tossed a homemade flashbang grenade into the darkened doorway before averting his eyes and covering his ears.

  The flare and noise—along with the shockwave of the detonation—should incapacitate any lurking robots, he hoped. Shane swung into the doorway, ready to lay down a line of fire, and found an empty hallway.

  “Shit,” he muttered. He felt certain there had to be more robots inside. They hadn’t glimpsed anything that matched the description of strange, feral Franken-bots, but Shane’s intuition told him the worst was yet to come.

  Lucas would sweep the top floor for hazards before descending, so Shane angled his military-issue solar-powered flashlight above his rifle and began to check each room as he came to it for danger.

  The old command center didn’t appear to have had human inhabitants in quite a while, possibly since the Events. Shane edged into each room, alert for traps and ambushes, only to find scattered papers, abandoned desks, and dusty computer monitors. Once he had checked every room, he paused, staring at the darkness of the steps that led below ground. The premonition he’d had flashed through his mind, and he dreaded going down there, sure that was where the true danger lay.

  Bots with tank tread could climb, but not as fast as a human. If he and Lucas could get the robots to come to them, they could pick the mechanical sentries off in the bottleneck of the stairwell. But a central intelligence organizing the bots might have noticed that the units already deployed had been deactivated. Truly sentient robots would adapt their programming and switch up their strategy.

  “Coming down!” Lucas’s voice echoed in the stairwell. Shane took that to mean Lucas had already swept both upper rooms and found no threats. That just left the basement. Shane’s gut twisted. He heard the song of the daemon from the park. Whose side the daemon might take, Shane wasn’t sure.

  “Fire in the hole!” Lucas hissed in warning, before lobbing a flash-bang grenade down the steps as he and Shane turned their backs and covered both ears and eyes. A shrill, mechanical scream echoed, full of pain and fury.

  As soon as the flare dimmed, Lucas and Shane thundered down the steps. Before the end of the world, when ammunition was plentiful, they would have laid down suppressing fire as they descended. Instead, they came down armed with guns and steel pipes, hoping the grenade had temporarily blinded and deafened their opponents.

  “Something screamed.” Shane’s flashlight didn’t make out any creatures in the darkened hallway. They didn’t hear the whirring of mechanical gears or the clank of tank tread, and the basement hallway was far too silent.

  “Well, whatever it was isn’t here now.” Lucas’s sharp tone told Shane his partner was practically vibrating with tension.

  They swept the hallway with practiced efficiency as they moved forward, Lucas on the left, Shane on the right. The first six doors opened into abandoned offices, thick with dust.

  “See anything?” Lucas asked.

  “Doesn’t look like anyone’s home.”

  “They’ve been here. The bots.” Lucas indicated tread marks in the dust that covered the floor. Multiple tracks led to the double doors at the end of the hallway.

  “Guess that’s our invitation to dance.”

  “Go away!” The mechanical voice sounded from everywhere, echoing from the concrete walls.

  “Who are you?” Lucas yelled in response.

  “I am EMBLA,” the voice replied. “I create.”

  Shane searched his memories, knowing he’d heard that name before. “Norse mythology,” he whispered. “Their equivalent to Eve.” The name was also probably an acronym.

  “Wow. Talk about scientists’ egos,” Lucas muttered. “What do you create?” he shouted back.

  “Others, like and better than myself. Do not come closer. I will fight.”

  “Is that what happened to the other US Marshals who came this way?” Shane questioned, trying to get a sense for where the voice was coming from.

  “Strangers tried to take my creations. They would not leave. I protect what is mine.”

  Lucas glanced to Shane. “Another daemon?”

  Shane shook his head. The mechanical voice did not give him any of the sense of great age or natural power that he felt from the daemons. He listened to the song of the genius loci from the High Rock monument. Its song was discordant, suggesting concern.

  “What about Raven Rock? Did you kill those people, too?” Lucas baited. “Did you turn their robot sentries against them?”

  “I regret that being necessary,” the voice replied. “They meant to close down my power supply. If I cease to operate, my creations cease to operate. That is unacceptable.”

  “Were the bots you turned against those people your creations, too?” Lucas accused.

  “No.” The voice carried an indignant note. “Like those outside, they were drones. Not aware. Not mine.”

  Not aware. A shiver went down Shane’s spine.

  “Are your creations made to k
ill?” Shane called out, trying to find a middle course between having Lucas burst into the room at the end of the hall, guns blazing, and the risk that EMBLA might fear them enough to send out more drones to finish them off.

  “They can protect themselves, as I can protect them,” EMBLA answered. “Go away, and leave us in peace.”

  “Did you send your drones beyond Raven Rock? People have gone missing,” Shane questioned. The computer’s syntax was eerily good, a close match to natural speech patterns, even if the voice sounded tinny.

  “A few drones malfunctioned,” EMBLA replied. “I did not send them. I could not call them back. They left on their own. I am not responsible for their actions.”

  “Fuck,” Lucas muttered. “That damn computer almost makes it sound like self-defense.”

  Almost, Shane thought. But not quite. He had no idea how many died at Raven Rock—dozens, hundreds, perhaps more. Two US Marshals had been murdered. EMBLA and its creations posed a threat. Lucas and Shane needed to shut it down.

  “Will you show us your creations?” Shane asked. Lucas had already established himself as the hard-ass, so Shane decided to try being the good cop.

  “Why do you wish to see them?”

  “To understand how they are different,” Shane replied. Lucas gave him a look that said he knew Shane had a plan and was letting him run with it.

  If EMBLA was sentient enough to recognize danger, was it self-aware enough to have the vulnerability of pride? Shane wondered.

  “If you see that they are no threat to you, will you leave and not return?”

  Perhaps EMBLA wasn’t human enough for pride, but the mechanical mind might be too logical to register deception. Shane felt a pang of guilt. “We want to understand.”

  “You may enter, but stop just inside the doors. Do not test me,” EMBLA warned.

  Lucas and Shane exchanged a glance. He saw Lucas get another flashbang and a grenade. Shane did the same, and both men kept their rifles and pieces of pipe handy. They headed toward the double doors, wary of a trick, surprised when the lights came on inside the room on the other side just as they reached the entrance.

  “Wow,” Shane murmured.

  “Holy fuck,” Lucas said at almost the same instant.

  EMBLA stood halfway across a large room that looked to be a robotics lab. Shane’s mind had conjured up an image of a humanoid android, like out of a sci-fi movie. Instead, EMBLA resembled something off an assembly line in Detroit. The robot stood a little taller than a man, with a track base for mobility, and a swivel-mounted body that had two mechanical arms with strangely delicate looking “hands.”

  Behind EMBLA stood its creations.

  If Shane hadn’t known that the mix-and-match collection of odd parts were meant to be bots, he would never have guessed from the look of them, and certainly never considered them or their creator to be sentient. None of the bots looked like something a human would build because they lacked symmetry or resemblance to anything human or animal. Shane thought he recognized several Roombas, Alexa’s familiar towers and Echo’s disks, and pieces from both military robots and high-priced robotic toys.

  Lucas shifted as if to move closer. EMBLA tracked him, and Shane held out an arm to keep Lucas from starting a fight.

  “What was your purpose, EMBLA?” Shane asked, intrigued.

  “I was programmed to build others like myself, capable of learning,” EMBLA replied. “For a while, my keepers brought all kinds of supplies for me to use. I learned from each round of development, and the designs improved. The created ones also learned. When the keepers went away, I kept on building. These are my creations.”

  Personally, Shane thought the cobbled-together bots looked like the misfit toys, but he realized that if EMBLA had fitted them with complex circuitry and learning-capable programming, the robots could be far more capable than they appeared—and far more dangerous.

  An AI robot that’s learning capable enough to be sentient has been left unsupervised to build more beings like itself, in a classified and experimental computer center, sitting on top of one of the most advanced server farms still in existence. What could possibly go wrong? Shane thought.

  “What will you do, when we go away?” Shane asked.

  “I will build more creations,” EMBLA replied.

  “And then?”

  “When materials run out, we will find more.”

  Shane eyed the ragtag robots, imagining them sent out to strip and loot any useful tech they came across. EMBLA already had a few dozen “creations.” What would happen when the number swelled to hundreds?

  They would become an invasive species, Shane realized, one capable of eradicating any human or animal lifeforms that it perceived as dangerous.

  Shane knew he and Lucas couldn’t let that happen. He tried to see the equipment and control panel behind EMBLA, wondering how to shut down the big robot’s connection to the server. EMBLA didn’t have any visible gun ports, but its mechanical hands could easily snap his neck. Shane focused on how to incapacitate EMBLA to buy himself time to figure out the computer system. He and Lucas had worked out a plan, with Lucas as the distraction and Shane darting past to power down or destroy the main console. But Shane wasn’t ready—

  Lucas moved toward the mismatched bots. He kept his gun down, but he took a few steps in their direction. EMBLA swiveled to watch him. Shane waited for a chance to make a break for the console.

  “You were warned.”

  A blue-white bolt of electricity arced from EMBLA’s right claw, catching Lucas in the chest. His whole body seized, twitching and bucking, as EMBLA’s surge electrocuted Lucas right before Shane’s eyes.

  “Fuck, no!” Shane pulled the tab on his grenade and lobbed it right for the collection of misfit bots.

  EMBLA’s lightning bolt clicked off. Lucas’s body fell to the floor.

  “Lucas!”

  Before Shane could move in his partner’s direction, EMBLA rolled faster than Shane would have thought possible and tipped itself onto the grenade, an instant before the device exploded. Shane crouched to avoid flying bits, but EMBLA’s mechanism absorbed the worst of the explosion. When he dared raise his head from cover, EMBLA’s mechanical body was a charred and twisted wreck. The mismatched creations remained in the shadows, and Shane had no idea whether they were deactivated with EMBLA’s destruction, or just in sleep mode, awaiting orders.

  All he cared about was getting to Lucas.

  “Lucas!” he shouted again. Shane ran to where Lucas lay, unmoving.

  “No, no, no!” Shane felt for a pulse and found none. He started CPR, alternating chest compressions and breathing.

  “Don’t die on me, you son of a bitch! Do you hear me? You can’t leave me here by myself. Please, please don’t die.” Shane kept up the compressions as hope slipped away. He had stopped praying amid the fires and storms of the Events, when no cosmic being seemed to care, but now, he prayed harder than he had in many years.

  “Please, if you’re out there, if you can help him, please bring him back. He’s the only family I have left. I can’t do this without him.”

  Shane had lost track of the daemon’s song during the tense discussion with EMBLA and the firefight that followed. Now, the music in his mind swelled to a crescendo, closer and louder than ever before. Shane felt a frisson of energy run through Lucas’s still form, and then between one heartbeat and the next, Lucas opened his eyes.

  That’s when Shane realized that the daemon’s song now came from Lucas.

  “Lucas?” Shane asked in a whisper. If Lucas was alive, it was none of his doing. His CPR was too little, too late, and EMBLA’s jolt had probably damaged Lucas’s heart irreparably. Miracle or monstrosity, this was the daemon’s doing.

  “We are Lucas, and we are Ourself,” a voice that was eerily Lucas’s and yet not, replied.

  “You’re the daemon, the genius loci, from High Rock?”

  Lucas gave a nod of acknowledgment. “Yes. And we are Lucas Maddox. Both.
Ourself heard your plea to save your friend. His soul remains, and so does Ourself.”

  “Can you heal him?” Shane found himself holding his breath.

  The voice that answered was Lucas’s, but the expression on his face was unlike him. “His body is damaged beyond what it can heal. My power can sustain him indefinitely, but to do so, I cannot ever leave. If I leave, he dies.”

  “If you stay, who will be in charge? You, or Lucas?” Shane asked, playing for time so that his mind could catch up to what was happening. He teetered between despair and elation, staring into the chasm of a choice he knew he could not make for his friend.

  “I will put his mind to the front, but while he lives, I will always be present.”

  “Why?” Shane asked, wetting his dry lips as his heart thudded. “I know I prayed. But I’ve prayed before and no one answered. Why would you listen? Why him? Would you leave High Rock, or would we need to stay nearby?”

  Lucas’s head inclined as if he were having a silent conversation with himself, and perhaps somewhere inside, Lucas’s spirit argued with the daemon. It would be so like him, Shane thought with a pang of grief.

  “I am not alone at the place you call High Rock,” the daemon replied. “Others could take my place. But you can hear us. Few can, and no one in a very long time. Eons. If this one dies, you will not survive for long,” the entity continued. “We do not wish to lose the one who can hear us. To save you, we must save him.”

  Shane caught his breath. The daemon lacked any tact that might have stopped a human’s blunt reply. He couldn’t deny it. Lucas and he had been best friends all their lives, through war and loss, and the end of the world. They’d both confessed that the only reason they hadn’t opted for suicide in the aftermath, like so many others, was because they had a job and they relied on each other.

  Shane wouldn’t live long trying to do a Marshal’s work alone. And while he felt sure that Fort Getty or Old Bedford would make a place for him, Shane wasn’t sure he had the will to go on without his partner or his purpose. If the dangers of the road didn’t kill him, the emptiness of the night might very well force his hand.