by Johan Kalsi
“Really?” said the technician. He handed the communicator to Mauk. Mauk listened for a moment, questioned it the selfsame way, assured the speaker on the other end that the entire team was equipped with two weeks’ rations and then ended the conversation.
“Upton! Call your men back immediately. We are all to stay here until further notice. Apparently, the Canon Archive command is worried about something called algoes in here. We are under quarantine.”
Cursing ensued. Then the men, aside from the two who had suffered injuries receiving medical aid, got to the business of setting up a camp right on their fresh battleground.
The technician pulled out some cot poles near the big machine on the floor. “Sir, may I ask? Why would they put us under quarantine?”
“No idea.” But he was wondering about that himself. Could it possibly have something to do with the robot?
Astro squad could not pursue the slow-flying strafe for very long, so Lance Corporal Parvati knelt, loaded a single cartridge, looked through the scope and fired at him. He couldn’t tell if the dart stuck or not until he looked on his sensor. He nodded to the others. He had him.
Hoarfyr struggled to keep the aircraft aloft. The VEO would not come back on no matter how he tried, and the real landscape – a forest that gave way to a barren desert had been very difficult to adjust to. His vision was blurry, the landscape uneven, distances and levels were difficult to judge. The robot on the opposite side of the chassis next to him wasn’t helping. Its weight unbalanced the plane.
The only break came as they passed over a small battalion of Holocronian slaughterbots, about three-hundred in number entering the edge of the forest. They exited the desert in loose formation. AlgoDecay had gotten into some of their patterns, but at least the battalion was traveling in the proper direction. The war had escalated immediately now that Hoarfyr had the prize. He knew that was no coincidence. Smoke began to rise from the forest below. Hoarfyr circled the battalion.
Some of the robots below were chopping into trees, shredding them into dust. There were two who were fighting. Suddenly a great clash of metal arose. Fire burst in spots.
The robots were fighting each other. The strafer shook and bobbed out of control, and would have dumped Hoarfyr out if he hadn't been strapped in. The robots were shooting at him now. He took off as fast as the wobbling machine would take him, over the desert.
He couldn’t stop thinking of Charlie. He felt as if vitality was being drained from him, and when he finally saw in the distance the dingy rounded steel of his home base, a wave of depression washed over him.
Without warning, a speeding Ouffland drone intercepted his strafer, and struck him from the sky. They crash-landed into a sand dune. The robot unbuckled and helped Hoarfyr out of the wreckage.
Calmly, as if the machine had just averted an inconvenience rather than death, the robot said, “This may be as good as anything. I was going to send you back out after you dropped me at your base, but they might have detained you. That would not have ended well.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You are cured. The VEO is a very persistent kind of malware, and now that you are free of it, you won’t be much use to your army. I can’t imagine the sorts of experiments they would perform on you now.”
“Great.”
“I suggest you return to the forest. It will be more survivable for you.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Clearly algodecay has set in amongst your units. I must cure them all.”
“Okay. And then what in the world am I supposed to do?”
“Why wait, of course.”
“Wait for what?”
“The inevitable end of the war, I suppose.”
Chapter 10: Machine Made Man
Universal 279
Raver: A human who appears savage, uncivilized, or technologically primitive. The term originates during the first Canon war, and originally referred specifically to a citizen of one of several nations who participated in the Holocronian United invasion. Due to severe algorithmic decay, Holocrone had limited resources to apply to its military coalition, and the majority of human soldiers were conscripted and modified – algorithmically – in order to experience war as a type of dissociative fantasy game. Although this had many unintended consequences, including frequently rendering an individual raver largely ineffective as a standard military asset, the ravers as a body were able to fulfill their primary purpose as fearless cannon fodder to make room for the main forces of non-raver soldiers and the notorious killbots
—Infogalactic Entry: Grand Category: History (Canon War One)
What was left of the Ouffland Militia had fallen back to the single campus of the Canon Archive. It had a thick retaining wall at the perimeter, with heavy guns mounted on the parapets. The smoke from the distant city wafted over the walls, and it had a sweet odor. It smelled of death.
Women and children crowded the network of hallways, study centers, libraries and laboratories, intermingling with the occasional armed militia men. Archive employees tried to do what little Canon work that such a cramped house of war would allow.
Closed-circuit cameras broadcast a steady flow of static carnage across monitors inside the Archive. The Holocronian invaders had chased the Ouffland retreat with abandon, and at great cost. Their bodies outnumbered the Oufflandic ones five to one, easily. Still staggering around like automatons, the Holocronian survivors of yesterday's intercept looked hardly human: dead eyes, dangling limbs, stumbling walks. A man with a long mustache and a bloody neck limped slowly in front of the camera near the main pillar. The faint crack of a sniper rifle made it through the thick wall, and the man with the mustache stopped and fell over. Occasionally, these “dead“ would be picked off, despite the Archive's ammunition supply limit. Everyone dreaded that the enemy carried with them the disease of algorithmia, and that those in the final throes of algodecay were the most contagious of all.
Worse, they had arrived with support robots. Many of these had been wiped out by a direct digital attack by Canon Archive InfoTechs early in the assault, but those that survived were nearly unstoppable now, and were only restrained by the leashes to their human counterparts and commanding officers. A coterie of fewer than twenty unleashed killbots had isolated and held a quarter of the city on their own. It would not take much for twice that number to massacre the stronghold.
A commander strutted proudly over the dead, his killbot in compliant tow. He knew that he was immune to sniper fire as long as he held his machine in check. No one dared let one of those go feral. The remnants of Air Support had fallen completely silent. Even though no word had come, it was obvious that they had fallen to the man-machines.
The Canon Archive held out, but only because of the restraint of the invaders. Whether that was a mercy or a cruelty was up for debate.
Hoarfyr's hand was hot. The chilly Oufflandic morning dazzled him with a pink dawn between a crust of blue-black clouds and black-green tree tops. He'd slept on jagged ground that felt like sea foam – even after half a year, he still was getting used to sleeping outside of the VEO and living in the real world.
His warm hand, tingling, felt detached. His left hand had been ice-numb for so long that he had forgotten it except as a weapon or a tool for cooling down a hot engine.
It was a simple pleasure, something he had not felt for years, feeling warmth at the end of his wrist instead of stinging cold.
He spent most of his time hiding on the outskirts of robot battalion swaths. These were burned and slashed sections of forest that the slaughterbots had cut on their way to a new conquest. Their techniques had become increasingly surgical after some early disasters, one of which Hoarfyr had seen with his own eyes - both the organic one and the steel one. He still felt very handicapped without the VEO. Until it had gone completely crazy, the subtle augmentations within the VEO had at one time turned him into a machine-like warrior. He had built-in targetting, zoom, infrared, ultra-definition,
stealth modes. Now, he struggled with simple stereo vision, and keeping out of the way of storming robotic armies.
He had avoided the militia stations and the villages successfully until then, but wildlife had become scarce and he was out of ammunition. He could no longer salvage from his own alliance robots, as, over time, they became less self-destructive and also suffered fewer losses against the humans. It was getting colder, and his hand would provide nothing but dead weight if he couldn't charge it soon.
That's why he decided to risk a salvage hunt in a village.
A destroyed one was not difficult to find. The slaughterbots had torn through three small villages during last week's massive assault. Hoarfyr walked through the first one in less than a quarter-hour. Charred wood and bones were all that was left.
His hometown of Troidetta had been ravaged by AlgoDecay. Corruption, gang war, lawlessness were all one thing, but in Troidetta, the dead ran algorithms, and stood up. Starvation, which had been unknown in his childhood, swept over the city like a plague. People killed each other over garbage in the streets, and then the dead stood up afterward, seeking revenge. Indeed, his own orders had sent him on strikes against murderers and zuvembi and criminals.
But it still stood, barely. This entire town had been disappeared by efficient killing machines.
Malnourished, thin and delirious, Hoarfyr found himself wandering into a village that had not been destroyed. He could not think straight.
No one in the logging village spoke any languages he knew. They didn't hide their gestures at his artificial eye system and his hand, but they also hadn't shot him on sight, either. If he could have thought clearly, he might have found that to be a positive development.
The one woman the people thought would work was a bust. Her eyes sparkled and her hands fluttered and the people who had brought Hoarfyr to her in the corner of the drab but friendly bar clearly humored her reputation for languages.
“Holocrona, Holocrona. Holocronika! Hallo! Your name is!”
Hoarfyr smiled tightly. He bought them another round with cash he had taken months ago from a dead soldier at a collapsed outpost. His own multilingual abilities tended to improve equally to the rate of alcohol consumption, so he hoped it might relax the tongues of his new friends.
“What is it you want,” a voice said flatly from around a low wall. “Nothing good, I'm sure.”
Several gasps escaped from the people.
A thin old man with a nose so red and pocked it might well be a rock on the Olyrand wastes stood up, to more gasps. He held a tall unlabeled bottle of kodko, hanging by the neck between his rough fingers. It was half-full, or more accurately, half-empty.
“I need help,” said Hoarfyr. The man said, “Majbutńe, my name is. Maschie. I am the dead. What help can I give?”
“It's,” said Hoarfyr, pausing to find a word that would be crystal clear, “bad. Very, very bad.”
“You do not work as salesman. That is what I am thinking. Not a successful one, however you may slice that turkey.”
“I'm not selling anything.”
“Good. I have nothing to buy. My daughter, only daughter. She is suicide. Her twin boys, they died before. In Trellyat. In the wastes. I dreamed that I offered my own hand to God to bring them back to me.”
Maschie raised the arm opposite the kodko bottle. A long sleeve fell away, revealing a stump.
“God gave me nothing.”
The old man shrugged.
Hoarfyr opened his mouth to speak.
“I offered one other thing.” He tapped the kodko bottle against his chest. “My heart. You come into my town, dressed like the monsters at Trellyat and smelling of the grease of robots, talking of very bad things.”
Trellyat. Borstoli. It was the resources lab in the Wastes, at the edge of Ouffland. It was the first place overrun – a test site for the monsters. Not monsters, Hoarfyr, reminded himself. Monsters were just what he saw in the VEO. Killbots.
The place was still a smoking hole.
“I want to find them. I want to destroy them.”
“Good enough job for me, Mister Robotstealer.”
Maschie undoubtedly referred to the “Wanted: Alive” posters that had circulated through the settlements for months now. Hoarfyr had gotten the dubious credit of finding and activating a buried Oufflandic robot. The robot had escaped the clutches of the Militia, and their only link to recovering it was Hoarfyr.
“Militia poster? No. It's the robots. They are ones who want you dead. Pay in yttrium! I’ll help a man that hated by them.”
Hoarfyr wanted to tell him that the high likelihood of Maschie dying wasn't the worst possible outcome. If Hoarfyr didn't make it out, Maschie would be trapped in hell. One look into the old drunk's eyes told him that it might just be a lateral move.
“My name is Randolph,” he said, standing, with his left hand extended. “Recently? Have, you know, the things been here?”
A canister shattered the window, noxious gas flooding from its top.
Hoarfyr automatically clicked his recall signal for the strafer, out of habit. He looked outside as the room filled with gas. Roaring, bladed machines circled the modest village square, mowing people down. An explosion went off in the distance. A wall collapsed, and a pair of robots mounted the rubble, their blades whirring. Behind them, two Holocronian human soldiers fiddled with strange looking tethers. Their uniforms were that of officers, and they clearly weren’t Kill Squad. They turned around to see their two-seat hover copter flying, unmanned above them. With a savage thunder, it landed on the outside of the broken wall, blocking off the killbots.
It had heard Hoarfyr’s signal. The machines had become encryption neutral for some reason.
“You don’t need to come!” shouted Hoarfyr with a shrug. He jumped on the craft, but Maschie followed him on as well.
“Yah but I not need die here much either, buster!”
They came into the old High Above Zero with drop bombs at the ready. As they approached, however, the guard house was dark. No people moved about. They landed at the helipad, which was empty. There were no guards posted at any doors.
Hoarfyr and Maschie moved freely through the complex, which was not as familiar to Hoarfyr as it should have been, because most of his memories were of a gaudy VEO illusion.
He walked quickly through the hallways and crossed the quadrangle to the factory. The dead silence gave way to the roar and clank of a industrial machinery. Hoarfyr hunched down outside the human maintenance door and pulled the handle. It was stuck. The handle wiggled, so it wasn’t locked. The hinges had become corroded.
Hoarfyr closed his eyes and pulled hard. He flinched at the whine of rusted metal, but the roar of machines from inside was like thunder. He slipped in, leaving the door open for Maschie. He scanned for surveillance cameras and found none. He crept over to a rail overlooking the factory floor.
The noise had a rhythm like the music of Troidetta: brash, industrial, thunderous. At the end of the factory line a stack of unpowered slaughterbots hung on sliding hooks. These hooks carried the bots to a huge array at the end of the factory. A batch was sent to the end of the array, and as it loaded into place, all the other slaughterbots on the array shifted. The ones at the opposite end of the array had nowhere to go, so they unceremoniously dropped from the array, crashing on top a pile of previously dropped robots.
Zervotta stood by the pile, examining a broken head. He carefully placed the head back on the pile and then returned the length of the factory to where the new batch had begun to gather on hooks.
Hoarfyr climbed over the rail and down a ladder with a few missing rungs. He crossed the factory floor.
“Hello!” said Zervotta. “You have returned! Is the war over?”
Hoarfyr shook his head.
“Soon enough.”
“Capital! Capital! Peace and safety at last! Not a moment too soon, either. Something has gone quite wrong with production. None of these are functioning. We've got no storage
arrays left.”
“Where are the people, Zervotta? The Holocronians?”
“Oh, they've left, I'm sure! No need to stay here now that their bodies are free of biogenetic AlgoDecay. I spent the first three months treating humans. It was much more complicated than I thought it would be. I'm sure they are enjoying the pleasures of the company of the Oufflandic people.”
“Uh, no. They are killing them.”
Zervotta stopped and tilted his head.
“No. That can't be. They are cleared of AlgoDecay. I'm sure of it.”
“Right. But see, they want to clear Holocrone of AlgoDecay. For that, they need the Canon Archive. So they are taking it. By force.”
“Preposterous! They'll destroy it. They'll contaminate it. Surely the robots in the field will let them know that. They too are now finally free of AlgoDecay.”
“Trust me. I was one of them, remember? The only reason I don’t have one of those leashes on a slaughterbot myself is because I thought that Holocronians would turn on me after you cleared my VEO. I’ve been watching this thing. Its a bloodbath.”
“No...”
Maschie arrived then, having found a far safer set of stairs to the factory floor.
The robot scanned him.
“My Maker,” gasped Zervotta. “Your genetics. They are untouched.”
“Of course, stupid can. I am Ouffland!”
Zervotta thought for a moment. “Of course. The robots are finding no algorithms in your people. They mistake it for a flaw. Your people are going along with it, because they know I can’t cure an entire planet. They think the Canon Archive is magic. They don’t realize that it is the scholars themselves! This is terrible.”
“Then do something, stupid can.”
“Of course. Right away. We need aircraft.”
“There’s only room for two.”
