His sanity not the least of it.
EIGHTY-FIVE
A meteor streaked across Earth’s upper atmosphere towards the ground. When the solid slammed into the earth, the concussion wave flattened several score acres of trees.
A closer inspection of the impact site revealed Natty inside the burnt out hull of the robo-suit.
Robo-Defector moaned, “I need a raise.”
Natty staggered to vertical, wobbling, once on two feet. He surveyed the flattened forest. Shouting at the robot, he said, “Did I mention I'm a nature lover!”
Robo-Defector “farted” some final blasts of unspent fuel. “Tell it to your union rep,” he coughed out.
“Nicely done, Natty,” Laney’s voice said inside his head.
Natty fluffed up, standing tall and erect again, no longer wobbling, his chest out. “Hey, you think you've gotten good enough with that chip now...?”
Laney's avatar materialized in front of Natty. She was solid enough for him to caress this time, and kiss. “You're getting better at thought projection.” More kissing, which Natty interrupted to say, “You know, I invented that chip?”
Laney's avatar lost its solidness and his arms collapsed around himself. “I see you still prefer your own company to me,” she chastised.
“I most certainly do not!”
She studied his expression for earnestness, then re-solidified, and they resumed their smooching. Was she still, strictly speaking an avatar? Or had she mastered being in two places at once, taking advantage of the quantum-chip’s manipulation of nonlocality? If this hug and kiss was any indication…
“Whoa! What's that?” Natty said.
“I thought you might like to see what Leon and the rest of the gang has been up to.”
“No, not really.” He resumed his kissing of her. Then, sighing, he said, “I suppose the ‘mature’ me would say, friends don't let friends die alone.”
She smiled at him. “You're coming along nicely.”
He relaxed his mind again and allowed the inrush of memories she was downloading to him that honestly weren’t his to share. So in that sense, it was quite the gift.
As he played the movie in his head, he hiked towards the soldiers streaming out of the FORESCO compound, located just down the mountain from him.
***
Natty had halfway caught up to the soldiers, his pace enlivened by the data dump Laney had provided him detailing their latest war exploits, when his attention was drawn to the sky.
Once again he saw the giant robots being vacuumed up into the atmosphere. Heard the pulsating hum of the spaceship. Though it remained cloaked. Damaged and fully functional robots alike were being reclaimed. Though, Natty noted satisfactorily, some of the Native-costumed self-piloting Goliath-Bots remained. They slipped into the forest in their roles as shamanic protectors of all that was holy down here.
The same ritual-summoning was underway for the sentient serpents, the Nomads and the Umbrage. As before, the wounded and the dead were reclaimed along with the living into the innards of the several-miles-wide ship. But not all were taken. Enough remained to defend the forest.
How did the ship know to do as Natty wished? Was it governed by an AI, and now that Truman was out of the picture, the AI had shifted its allegiance to Natty? How did it scan his brain to know his thoughts? Had it merely figured out from context with the war games what was going on even before Natty realized what he was doing unconsciously?
How would he summon the spaceship the next time he needed it? Would it just know to come? Was it accessible from RevoCorp headquarters, and maybe now that he had access at the CEO level he’d be indoctrinated in how and when to open his planet-hopping toy chest for all the toys inside?
For what purpose had the miles-wide spaceship truly been built in the first place? Had his father, long out of the picture, picked up on extraterrestrial threats to Earth long before Natty found out about such threats? Had he been the one to build this ship as Natty had expected all along, possibly working from his son’s designs? His father, the inexhaustible scientist whose engineering skills were only matched by his son’s design skills? If nothing else, the spaceship’s construction might be a fitting excuse for an absentee father who might actually have the one forgivable reason for staying away this long.
As always with RevoCorp, more questions remained unanswered than answered. The kinds that haunted Natty and would not let him rest.
Watching the brave warriors drift up in the shaft of blue-colored light, disappearing into the clouds, Natty thought of the halls of Valhalla, where all great and selfless champions whose job it was to protect life and liberty go. As a kid, unsatisfied by myths, had he chosen to design the plans for how to build Valhalla? To create the vessels that would encourage the warrior gods to ride them, as Jacko had summoned the gods to ride his pack of loyal subjects? If so, what other “vessels” were included in the menagerie?
Even the dead bodies of the Ubuku and those of ALPHA TEAM were being reclaimed by the ship. Was its intent to study them for lessons on how to make the next generation “vessels” all the more unbreakable, to better stand up to being ridden by gods? Laney’s comments earlier regarding what went on aboard ship with the sentient serpents suggested that constant tech refinements were going on within the ship, as much scientific lab as warship.
Natty glanced back at the FORESCO compound. Its legions of self-repairing, self-replicating robots already tending to the restoration of the superstructure. The hundreds of scientific human minions inside no doubt carrying on as before, figuring leadership changes within RevoCorp were the least of their concerns.
EIGHTY-SIX
Tobor looked up in time to see the attack. Launched from the trees. Over a dozen monkeys were descending on his convoy of silver suitcases like the last bits of unwelcomed rain on already swamped land.
“Hey, guys!” he shouted tentatively after the soldiers. But they were traipsing down the mountain ahead of him, all the worse for wear. It was doubtful a bomb going off behind them would get them to turn their heads at this point.
“So, it’s just me then. Wonderful. Now I can add animal cruelty to my resume.” He trudged over to the chimpanzee determined to make off with a suitcase he could barely move. Tobor grabbed the handle away from him. This did not dissuade the monkey in the least to release his grip on the suitcase. He simply slid his hand over to the handhold on the opposite side of the case. He screeched for his friends to assist.
Several of them ran over, grabbing hold of the first chimp’s back and pulling.
“We’re really going to do this?” Tobor said. “Fine.” He sighed. “Like I couldn’t use a little tug of war match to break the monotony.” He waved the rest of the frustrated chimps over, finding the other luggage too difficult to move singlehandedly as well. “Come on now,” he said. “It’s going to take at least twelve of you for a decent match. Okay, more like twelve hundred, but you may as well live on false hope like the rest of us. Ready, set, go!”
He pretended to be straining, making pained faces at them. “Oh, I think you really got me. I’m not sure I can hold on another moment. Not,” he said, flinging the whole bunch about in a helicopter motion until they broke free and flew into the trees.
About the time he got the suitcase repacked in its cargo container, he noticed the trees were filling with hundreds of monkeys. “Hmm, who knows, this may turn into a fair match after all.”
EIGHTY-SEVEN
Leon and what was left of his people were beating a path out of the jungle, looking pretty ragged.
Towards the back of the line, the morphing bots appropriated from FORESCO, currently in pack mule configuration, were dragging the bodies of Ajax, Crumley, and DeWitt that had been reclaimed from the jungle. The suspended animation pods they were in were advanced enough for the bots lining the cylinders to breakaway to perform lifesaving surgery in case the suspended hibernation failed or the patient experienced difficulties during the freezing process. If
the pods couldn’t handle the problem, the cooling procedure would still engage so that surgery could commence at the first opportunity to thaw them. Not that any of those services were needed right now. Leon had a general no-one-left-behind policy that superseded Natty’s more general concerns of running into the sentient serpents—voiced during a period prior to their forming any kind of rapport; hence the reason the three soldiers were with the departing contingent at all. But at the back of the line the three fallen comrades remained; no one needed the painful reminder right now of what this trip had cost them.
Just behind them was the zombiefied branch of Leon’s ALPHA UNIT contingent, the ones with the tiny crab-bots crawling over their naked bodies like an elaborate exoskeleton. Or as if see-through indestructible lace outfits were all the fashion. The zombies were now under Satellite’s control; he had figured out the frequency to short-circuit the hive mind of the morphing bots that propelled the undead. It was anybody’s guess, once Natty and Laney had a better operating theater to work with back home, if the ALPHA UNIT soldiers could be reclaimed from the twilight world of shadows they inhabited, or if they would forever more need the life-support of the parasites that had taken them over.
At the middle of the pack, Skyhawk was trying to get in step with the soldiers of ALPHA UNIT marching beside him. “Any of you guys get a chance to meet this Patent dude yet? What a character.”
“He’s our trainer, dude,” said the one marching to his right.
“You’ve gotta be shitting me.” Skyhawk swallowed hard. “It’s like not too late to defect, is it? Because if I need to lay low from that guy, I mean, I have the money for the facial reconstruction surgery and everything. I’m like three shades from Jessica Alba with this hairdo as it is.”
***
Patent stood by the side of the dirt road, watching the parade march by. He was anxious for the zombie contingent to roll past him. Though he wouldn’t exactly be clapping and cheering for it. Sure enough, the heartache he’d been expecting was not denied him. A lot of his best recruits had gotten taken over. All of his stars from the Mutant Onslaught, not officially a campaign, the night he wrestled with a two-headed black jaguar. Their Bow and Arrow Woman. Flame Thrower. Flash Bang Grenade Guy. Each of whom had used their favorite weapons to dispatch no small amount of mutant Caymans and anacondas that fateful night, what seemed so long ago. Teen Chic Anaconda Wrestler who’d demonstrated Patent’s optic-nerve reflex maneuver she’d been taught on an anaconda could now also be counted among the zombies. Finally, Ariel, who’d designed the doughnut that had allowed them to escape an intractable situation the night of the mutant onslaught. The doughnut was a self-piloted Frisbee of death that could cut through ridiculous swatches of jungle, mowing down the enemy in ways traditional firepower could not. She had saved them but he could not save her.
A short space of battle time had gobbled up months of intense training, and left Patent with nothing but his crusty hardened exterior to defend against his rising tide of emotions, like the sea swelling against a rocky shoreline at the beginning of a storm.
If there was a positive takeaway from all this, it was that their tech was getting better all the time. Who knows, given the months and years ahead, how many could be pulled back from the brink? Likely they’d live to fight in more than one war in their current zombie state before graduating their purgatory-like world.
Patent tapped his ear-mike twice, jumping on his private frequency with Leon to report in the daily death toll. It was a grim ritual they shared that was as much a part of their bond as anything else. “Final tally from all the campaigns to date: Three OMEGA FORCE dead. Fifty-five ALPHA UNIT cadets dead, twenty from this final battle alone. Going by the numbers, maybe it’s OMEGA FORCE that should be considered the pussies.”
There was no laughter forthcoming at opposite ends of the COM line. It wasn’t clear to either party if the line had even been meant as a joke.
“Each one of those minds forfeited represents an incalculable loss to the world of potential transhuman breakthroughs it will now never see.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Patent said, correcting him. “We have brain scans of each of them. Their creativity will live on in the form of disembodied AIs. It’s not Valhalla, but for my people, it’s the next best thing.”
As was part of this ritual between them, there was no “over and out.” There were no parting remarks. Just silence to bandage the psychic wounds. The longer that bandage stayed in place, the better each wound would heal.
Patent severed the line.
He harrumphed like a bullfrog burping out its undigested feelings, and joined the parade.
***
Those at the front of the advancing party trailing down the mountain could see the military closing in on them. As in “We’re the Brazilian armed forces and we aren’t screwing around. Can you tell from the toys and the numbers of soldiers we brought to the party?”
Craning his head upwards, Leon regarded the fighter jets patrolling the area. He could barely walk, so he didn’t much fancy dancing around stinger missiles fired from above. God forbid they decide to carpet bomb the place. Hard to outrun the kind of explosives that made the ground rise and recede in waves like the ocean.
“Should we raise our weapons?” Cronos asked.
“Shit. I’ll need a masseuse working on that arm for an hour or more before I can raise it empty-handed,” Leon said.
“So we rot in a jail cell at the behest of yet another corrupt government. They torture us mercilessly. Just so the prison food is bad enough to give me the runs, I’ll take it as a win. God, what I’d give for a good shit right now.”
The lead Humvee spearheading the Brazilian military’s advance braked in front of them. The guy with all the medals on the front of his shirt stood up and said, “You are all under arrest for war crimes.” Leon actually had trouble processing what he was saying. He was too busying thinking, “What idiot wears his medals and dress regalia out in the field?” Maybe he’d been yanked out of a state ceremony he was attending to deal with them and didn’t have the presence of mind to change.
“If I were you, pal, I’d worry about those war crimes,” Leon said, pointing to the giant earth movers clearing what looked like a wide enough birth through the jungle for a five-lane highway. Just ahead of them, the logging trucks sliced through old growth trees like butter. Anything the lumber cutters didn’t deem worthy of being carted away was being burned with flame throwers. The soldiers on the gasoline trucks had a platform they used to wield their fire hoses. Animals fleeing the forest that couldn’t get out of their way quickly enough were being torched alive.
“You Greenpeace types will not get in the way of national progress!”
“We Greenpeace types?” Cronos said.
“Yeah, I think you have us confused with those Greenpeace types,” Leon said pointing.
All Medals turned at the sound of the roar of a hundred foot Nomad charging into the clearing. It picked up one of the giant earth movers and crushed it in its teeth before tossing it.
***
MOMENTS EARLIER
“Yeah!” the copilot shouted standing sharply from his seat, fists to the air. “We bitchified your ass!”
The pilot glanced down at the small chunk of flesh in the maw of his mechanical grip, meant to grab hold of trees, that he’d taken out of the juvenile sixteen-foot-tall Nomad, before it went screaming back towards the forest. He then looked up in the direction the youngster had fled at the sound of a roar that couldn’t possibly be coming from it.
“How fast does this thing go?” the pilot asked.
“Like two miles an hour. Why?”
The pilot slipped the gears of the rig into reverse.
“You might want to clean your windshield of the blood spatter.”
The copilot did as requested, pressing the button on his dash to release the cleaning fluid and working the wiper blades with another lever. Once his side was clear, he could see the hundred-f
oot-tall mama Nomad coming out of the woods the juvenile had fled into. The copilot gulped and collapsed into his seat trying to assist his partner as best he could.
He talked into his shoulder mike, which he activated with his free hand. “I’d like to dictate my living will.”
The pilot snorted, fighting with the gears and checking his rearview mirror to make sure he had clearance. “Talk fast, buddy. Talk fast.”
“To my wife, I’d like to leave my 1970s Spanish Disco collection, and to my mistress, the black light Elvis tee shirts. To my dog, Fifi…”
The copilot never got to finish his phrase. The teeth of the mother came through the cab, cutting both men off at the waist. The copilot thought of amending his final statement to his wife. But went with, “Fifi, the ‘I love you’ chew toy is all yours. Make sure the wife doesn’t get her hands on it.”
***
PRESENT TIME
Another half dozen hundred-foot-high behemoths joined their hundred-foot Nomad friend, all doing the monster mash on the heavy duty industrial-sized forest killing machinery.
The Brazilian Armed Forces main battle tanks were already moving into position to fire at the adult Nomads. The American acquired M60 Pattons and the German acquired Leopard 1s. Not to be outdone by the Brazilian-made ASTROS 2020 multiple rocket launchers moving into position and unfolding their launching platforms the way one unfolds a pocket knife. A few tanks managed to get off a shell before the twenty to forty foot juveniles, charging from the tree line to join the fray, bit down on the turrets to put the tanks out of commission. No matter. The adult Nomads were immune to the tank fire as they were immune to the missiles coming their way from the fighter jets above and the rocket launchers below. All the bombardment did was fry the ones wielding the heavy equipment trying to clear the roads of trees inside their vehicles before they could make it to cover.
Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1) Page 66
