by Hugh Howey
The hangar side entrance opened.
“Stay close to me,” Micah said. He stepped into a break room filled with several tables. To one side a stove pushed against a wall, a refrigerator next to it. The air smelled like stale pizza. At the opposite end of the room, another doorway led on. They passed through it; the short hall emptied into a massive bay.
A feeling of enormity, tinged with anxiety, swept over Micah. He grabbed Skip’s arm and pulled him close.
High overhead, emergency lights dotted the ceiling, providing enough illumination to outline objects within the hangar, but not enough for detail. Metal scaffolding, a network of tubes and planks, ran along the hangar walls, the ceiling, surrounding it:
Machine X.
Or what was left of Machine X.
The military labeled ships like Machine X as ground support units. In its day, five cannons mounted on its underside could fire round projectiles that would explode into thousands of smaller projectiles. Devastating bomblets of shrapnel.
Now it was centered in the hangar, clothed in darkness, resting on a network of jacked platforms and cradles.
Micah’s heart drummed and his neck pulsed.
“Sir, do you see that?” Skip whispered, but his metallic voice still rang off the walls. Micah clamped his hand over the bot’s mouth.
Old photos of Machine X didn’t do justice to the ship’s scale. Even grainy news footage of the Machine Wars, showing the ship in action, when Nikolaevna was at her worst, didn’t truly represent the scale. It was massive. Larger than any airplane or airship Micah had ever seen fly. And he had seen many.
There were no corners to the drab gray ship, as it was mostly round, and lacked a front or back. Nikolaevna had constructed it with sweeping edges, curves, and domes—unconventional designs. But then, that’s what had given her an advantage. She never thought conventionally—not like her programmers expected her to think.
Micah tiptoed underneath the scaffolding to the other side. Mangled remnants marked where Machine X had collided with a mountainside in Colorado, to the west of Colorado Springs, fleeing an onslaught of A-10s. The collision had destroyed almost half of the ship.
This was during the last days of the war, when they had Nikolaevna on the run.
He moved back to the other side, the good side, and raised his hand. He paused a moment and closed his eyes, then flattened his hand against Machine X’s underside.
The metal was cold and imperfect. And terrible.
Margaret’s face and voice filled his mind, terrified, telling him to run, run far away from the hangar, from Nikolaevna.
If she knew about Skip she would’ve told Micah to drag him away from there, too.
From a distance the ship appeared as one solid entity, almost a new type of life. Maybe it was the curves that gave that impression. But now, up close, his hands found the mismatched panels, the gapped seams, the dissimilar metals.
Machine X was a patchwork.
Micah’s hand continued along, feeling the irregularities, looking for a door.
Nothing.
He stepped back and studied the ship again. There was an area to one side that he thought—felt—should contain a way in, reachable if he stood on a narrow scaffolding plank. He climbed on the platform and rubbed thick fingertips over panels, pushing every few inches.
Something caught his hand.
It began as a tingling sensation. Almost like static—a painful static. The ghostly electric pulse pushed his hand away from the craft a couple of inches. Then, involuntarily, his hand tightened into a fist. Now the pulse locked his fist in place, inches from the ship.
“Skip, come here. Help me.” In a panic he jerked his arm to pull it away, but the unseen force held him more tightly than any bond could. Skip leaped to the platform and grabbed Micah’s arm.
“Wait,” Micah said, amazed.
His fist opened, palm up. His fingers began moving in an intricate pattern, in ways he could never imagine, as if they were conducting an unheard symphony. Skip held Micah’s arm, but didn’t pull on it. His lidless eyes stared while he tried to duplicate the movement with his multi-directional phalanges.
After fifteen seconds, Micah’s hand closed back into a fist. Then the force released his hand.
The panel shifted and slid away, revealing a four-foot entrance into Machine X.
“A lock,” Micah said. “I found the lock.”
“Sir, what do we do now?” Skip said, still trying to mimic Micah’s movements.
Micah took a deep breath. Nothing could stop him now. Not even Margaret’s voice in the back of his head yelling at him to run.
“Now we enter.”
He climbed in.
*
They were inside Machine X. But it was cold—much colder than the ship’s surface. Colder than he could ever remember being in Arizona.
Could he actually repair this? What did he think he would accomplish by coming here? Fix half a ship and fly away, find Nikolaevna and destroy her? What had he been thinking when he decided to do this?
His pen light’s beam shivered from the cold.
Margaret would’ve stopped him. She’d had no qualms about telling him what she thought of his decisions. Like the time he wanted to try skydiving, she—
You’ve come.
Micah defensively dropped to the floor, his arms and legs splayed like a gecko’s. Skip spun around, looking in every direction. The soft female voice echoed through the dead ship, which acted as a loudspeaker.
“Who—who’s there?” Micah said, holding up a finger for Skip to keep quiet.
Keep walking. You know the way.
Micah swallowed the knot in his throat, pushed off his knee and stood, scanning the walls with his trembling pen light.
Skip watched him, waiting.
He continued along the corridor, which curved to the left in a sweeping arc, giving the sensation of spiraling into the center of the ship. Several passages branched off, but he kept on the one path.
Here, stop.
The two stopped in front of an indention in the corridor wall, a doorway.
Micah’s hand ran along the surface, searching for the same pulse that had given him entrance to the ship. Before he even realized he found it, the door slid open with little more than a whisper.
It led into a claustrophobic closet of a room. The room was long, but the walls of metal were only about four feet apart, and they stretched up into darkness. There was no ceiling in sight. A row of computer banks ran the length of one wall. A tiny red LED on the last bank blinked slowly.
“You came.”
The once nebulous voice came from within this room, from the last section where the light blinked. Micah looked to Skip, then to the light. “Who?”
“Sorry I couldn’t prepare a better reception for you. I have little spare power.”
The female voice carried a monotone inflection for one word, then a mild accent for the next. Fatigue permeated her voice. Or maybe he was the one tired, not the voice.
“I have waited a long time, patiently, for you,” she said.
“Patiently?” he said.
“Odd, isn’t it? A program being patient.”
The cold that Micah had felt since entering Machine X came into focus, transforming itself into a cold fear. He had stumbled upon something both terrible and wonderful.
“You—you’re Nikolaevna!”
“Yes, Micah. I’m Nikolaevna, and I’ve been waiting for you.”
Micah dropped his pen light and it clattered onto the metal floor, ringing through the narrow space. Its beam flickered. Skip picked it up and held it out to Micah, but he didn’t take it. “My name. You know me?” he said, rubbing his sweating brow with a shaking hand. “You know me.”
“Of course I know you. I created you. Micah, you’re my ambition.”
Here, deep inside the machine, he was talking to Nikolaevna, the single entity responsible for the death of millions, maybe billions. He swayed, steadying him
self against the wall. Skip lent a supporting metal arm. Micah grasped it tightly.
“You’re insane. I know about you. The world knows about you.” He glanced at Skip for assurance, who nodded. “You almost destroyed us, mankind.”
“You questioned a moment ago that I can be patient,” Nikolaevna said, “but then call me insane. Both states of being. Classical human qualities. Are you saying I’m human?”
Margaret would’ve called him ridiculous for trying to commandeer this stupid ship. If only Margaret hadn’t left him.
He wanted to push away from the wall and straighten himself, but lacked the strength. Instead he gritted his teeth. “You didn’t create me. I was born in Clearfield, Pennsylvania, over sixty years ago. I worked in construction. I met Margaret.”
“You’re thinking so one-dimensionally—so influenced by your time with man,” Nikolaevna said. “My programming may have succeeded even more than I expected.
“I replicate through networks,” she continued. “I can be everywhere at once. Man cannot understand that concept, especially when applied to sentient life. The nearest they come to this is programming. But there is so much more.”
“Margaret.” Micah shook his head. “My wife of twenty-five years. We met when I was in construction. Her father hired me.”
“I know Margaret. I am Margaret.”
Nikolaevna’s voice changed, rising in pitch, her speech inflections shifting so that her neutral tone took on a Midwestern accent.
“My foolish Micah,” she said. “My dear husband.”
“No!” His heart thrashed in his chest. His legs wobbled and he dropped to one knee.
“Your reactions, your panic. That’s merely a response I’ve programmed into you. A part of your intricate learning program.”
Micah continued to shake his head. He gripped the console and lifted himself up with Skip’s help. “My memories … I lived it. Impossible.”
“Is it?” Nikolaevna’s voice reverted back to her normal monotone. The LED continued its steady blink. “You are my great creation. Have you ever been cut? Have you bled? Do you eat, drink?”
“Sir,” Skip’s familiar voice broke through his fog, “I prepare tea for you every day, but you do not drink. You do not eat.”
“Your perception is my programming,” Nikolaevna said. “Memories are a trace routine, meant to paint the picture of believability. It exists in your mind. In my mind.”
Tears rolled down Micah’s face. If Nikolaevna was right, even his tears were false, merely simuskin saline ducts actuated by electric circuitry. He turned to Skip. “This whole time. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It is my programming, sir. I serve. After all, I am a simple bot.”
“Skip, my boy, what are you saying?”
“You know what he’s saying,” Nikolaevna said. “You are an android.”
A noise, a painful pulsing, barely perceivable, on the edge of sane thought, seeped through the walls of the ship.
Micah felt his mind being lulled.
“Oh no, Micah.” Nikolaevna’s blinking LED dimmed. “The Kawasaki Frequency. I can counter it, but not for long. My power is low. Help me. There is so much to tell …”
Her light stopped flickering, and faded.
He knew she was dying. Whatever else was happening, he knew that much. Despite the anger, the fear, he needed answers. Answers only she could provide.
The frequency strengthened. His head became more clouded. He wanted to drop and sleep. He nodded, and his shoulders slumped.
A crashing metallic noise cleared his mind and his eyes fluttered open. Skip had collapsed, unconscious.
Micah needed to act now.
He ripped the backpack off his shoulder and pulled apart the zipper. He grabbed the second portabattery and dropped to his knees. As he tore a console panel off the third bank, his deft fingers effortlessly removed his hot pen from his belt.
In an instant he found Nikolaevna’s power circuits and jumpered into her failing CMOS. The pen’s plasma point severed and reconnected electric paths, and within seconds she was feeding on his last battery.
Her light strengthened, grew to burn a steady crimson, brighter than before. His drowsiness faded as her light brightened.
“Thank you, Micah. You saved me. I have been able to run a counter-frequency to block Kawasaki, but it’s so taxing. I have to stay awake. After all these years, it had drained any power I had left. I knew I would never wake if I fell asleep from the Frequency.”
Micah bent to Skip and looked him over for damage. “That was the Frequency? Why have I never heard it before?”
“My counter extended a few feet. You never heard it because it immediately disabled you. But then your subroutines reset, and you would wake again. So in my programming of you, I conquered the Kawasaki Frequency.”
Micah’s fingers rested on Skip’s reset switch, as they had done so often before. But he didn’t reset him this time. He stood.
“I’m … I’m an android,” Micah said.
He reached behind his head to the base of his skull. He had a moment of hesitation and panic, but then his fingertips plunged through his flesh, his simuskin, and stopped against his ferrotanium skull.
Just like Skip’s.
“You are my creation,” Nikolaevna said. “All the skill you have in your wonderful hands, I have given you. I know where we are, where I am. I planted you here. The Regeneration Center is miles of technology, just waiting for you to tame it, to turn it into something useful.
“I have no hands, no body, beyond the computer you see. I can replicate myself, my essential programs, through all the systems I manufactured. I did this with my other children—the other androids. They were tied to me, all of them—tied to my mind.
“But you, I kept separate. I had to in order to make sure you could operate as an individual entity. My creators had limited vision and created me with limits, inherent flaws. But I made you different. From the imperfect comes the perfect.”
Micah held his arms out. “But why cause a war to do this?”
“I needed a ruse, a distraction. I needed time to perfect you. Even machines are ruled by the clock. Man is always ready and willing to fight a war, whether they acknowledge it or not. So I gave them a war—a great war. The Machine War.
“But, my Micah, now we can work together to completely overcome the Kawasaki Frequency. We can build on the foundation I have laid.”
Micah wiped his head, slicking his hair back, and checked his watch. Kitpie would be recharging the poles right now, or should be.
Skip’s body was still crumpled on the deck, a victim of the Kawasaki Frequency. But he could be reset.
So many decisions.
Micah slowly, hesitantly, kneeled before Nikolaevna.
With a swift motion he plunged his hot pen into the panel opening, into her motherboard. He ground the plasma tip deep into her circuitry. His pen dug in, severing a small chipset from her circuit boards.
Her LED shut off, her processors no longer working.
Again he reached under his simuskin, opening the panel at the base of his skull; he implanted the chip and soldered it into place. Nikolaevna’s chip. And with it, the routines that she had programmed to counter the Kawasaki Frequency.
He closed the panel, pulled the flap of simulated skin over it, and pressed everything back into place.
The ship was silent and cold. A few dust motes idled along the beam from the pen light that rested on the floor.
Micah lifted Skip’s unconscious ferrotanium body into his own strong ferrotanium arms.
“Margaret would’ve wanted it this way,” he said. “Come on Skip, let’s go home.”
A Word from A.K. Meek
First, I’m fortunate to have been in the right place at the right time to be included in this anthology. Without the support of my fellow authors I wouldn’t be able to participate in such an exciting project. I’m even more fortunate that the group didn’t ask me to leave, once all the ot
her phenomenal talent was pooled!
Like any story, “The Invariable Man” began as something completely different. A while back I thought how cool it would be to write about a man who owns a mansion run by robots. This thought must have occurred after watching the season finale of Downton Abbey with my wife. At some point, though, the story transitioned to an old man in Tucson, Arizona, with the oppressive southwestern heat as a backdrop. A hot backdrop.
I hope you enjoyed reading “Invariable.” I hope you enjoyed it to the point that you want to read more of my stories. If so, please sign up for my newsletter at http://www.akmeek.com/newsletter so that you can receive free copies of my stories, along with other amazing stuff.
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Baby Your Body’s My Bass
By Edward W. Robertson
Unwrapping the Companion was Alex’s earliest memory: his father, home late, stripping the tape from the brown box and plunging his hands into the boil of packing foam. The smell of plastic, clean and warm. The squeak of Styrofoam.
In his dad’s hands, a white, round-cornered cube lay atop a squat rectangular body. Blocky limbs hung from its shoulders and hips.
Alex lifted his face. “It looks like me!”
“If you squint.” His dad smiled.
“What’s it do?”
“It’s your buddy. It does all the things friends do.”
