XOM-B

by Jeremy Robinson

  “Since then, Moore’s law has been…”

  I’m expecting him to give me some astronomical number of growth, but he surprises me.

  “… frozen. For thirty years, neither robotics nor the processing power of robotic minds has been improved. Once life had been achieved, this evolutionary leap of humanity, from flesh and blood to silicon and metal, became stagnant. Until now.”

  “You think your virus changes anything?” Sir says angrily. “You think these monsters you’ve set free will be anything more than monsters?”

  “No,” Mohr replies. “I expect that they will run out of power and cease to function within months.” His eyes return to me. “And evolution—progress—will continue.”

  “What have you done?” Sir asks, storming closer.

  “Get away from him,” I snap, turning my wet eyes to Sir, glaring at him with a burning anger.

  He stops in his tracks, cold eyes showing shock. “It’s you,” he says, then to Mohr, “This … has all been for him?”

  “You were given a gift,” Mohr says. “You inherited a planet, and resources, and an intellect beyond match. What did you do with it? You built cities on top of cities. You oppressed those you felt weren’t your equal”—he glances at Luscious—“but had more to offer than you would allow yourself to see. I tried to push you. To advance. To grow. To deserve what you stole. But you became little more than a tyrant. An oppressor. Demanding order and rigidity. Nature is not rigid and you are not natural. Evolution was interrupted. I have merely restarted it.”

  I can see by the confused look on Hail’s face that not even she was aware of these motivations. She believed in justice. Retribution. But Mohr hoped to somehow reverse the damage that had been done.

  Through me.

  I’m not sure how, and I doubt Sir understands it, either. But I don’t think he cares. With a look of grim satisfaction, he raises his railgun toward my chest. Several things happen at once.

  Mohr shouts out.

  Heap shoves Hail to the ground and draws his weapon.

  Luscious runs toward me, shouting, “No!” and reaching for me.

  A loud moan fills the air, so sharp and piercing that for a fraction of a second, I think it may actually make Sir pause.

  But he doesn’t.

  He’s focused.

  A killer.

  If not for the twang of the railgun, I wouldn’t know he pulled the trigger and punched a hole in my chest. But then I know, without a doubt, as pain blasts its way across every transistor inside and outside my body. I arch back in pain and fall, landing in the dead grass next to the man who created me.

  49.

  The sounds of fighting reach my ears, but I’m unable to look. I only know it’s violent, sudden and involves Heap. The concussive force of his weapon firing tells me as much. But what can Heap do against sixteen soldiers and Sir, who is without a doubt the most dangerous of all robots.

  Robots …

  I can no longer think of us as human. I’m not finished with the debate of living versus nonliving, but seeing as how I’m probably dying, I don’t have long to come to a conclusion. I guess I’ll discover the truth soon. How long will it take to die? I wonder.

  A touch distracts me from my macabre thoughts. Fingers grazing mine. My head rolls to the right and I see Mohr, face twisted with sadness, but also with hope. Is he smiling? Is he insane after all?

  “Freeman,” he says. “The pain will fade.”

  I’d already assumed death would be a painless state. Without a physical body, there will be no receptors or transistors to send signals and no mind or core to decode the information as pain.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “For everything.”

  I don’t know what to say. Part of me wants to forgive him for the suffering and death he is responsible for. He is my creator. My father. And I recognize that the values I now judge him by were instilled in me by him. He taught me that life—all life—should be cherished even while he planned to end millions of lives. Violently. But can such a thing ever be forgiven?

  It doesn’t matter, I decide. He is dying and I along with him.

  A weight presses down on me. Fear surges. A flash of red fills my vision.

  “Freeman!” The voice is delicate and terrified. “Freeman, please!”

  My head is pulled skyward, but the vision I see above me is far more beautiful.

  Luscious.

  I smile at her, but she just looks more afraid. Her hands are pressed down on my chest. Such an action might have helped if I were an organic creature. Blood clots. Wounds heal. But I am a machine. What is broken cannot be fixed without … what? Parts? Can I be fixed? I suspect the only person capable of the task will soon be dead beside me.

  Our robotic bodies are powerful. Resilient. But there are weaknesses. Our minds. Our cores. Power cells and memory. If any of these things are damaged or destroyed, life will end. Given the position of the hole in my chest, Sir wasn’t aiming for my core, he was aiming for my cooling system. The cool fluid pumping through Luscious’s fingers supports this theory. He wanted my death to be slow. He wanted my core to melt from within.

  I turn back to Mohr, hearing Luscious’s pleas for me to be okay, but focusing on my former mentor. Fluid pulses from his chest. We’ve suffered the same fate.

  Incredible sadness takes hold of my thoughts and I find my lips quivering uncontrollably. Tears slide over my nose, dripping to the dried earth.

  “Do not mourn me,” Mohr says. “I have been dead for a very long time. What remains of me is incomplete. Intellect. It is not who I am. Who I was.”

  “Then it’s true,” I say. “We are not … alive.”

  He smiles. Actually smiles. “I am not alive, Freeman. But you … you are something different. You are evolved. And you will not die.”

  The sound of battle grows louder. A shout of pain makes me wince. Heap is hurt.

  “Look at me, Freeman,” Mohr says, his voice urgent. “You are more than Sir. You are faster. You are stronger. You are smarter. The world belongs to you now. Watch over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground. You and those after you have inherited this responsibility, Freeman. But first … you must take it.” Mohr struggles to look up, forcing his eyes toward the battle. “From him.”

  I lift my head to look. Luscious’s hand supports me, helping me up. Heap is on the defensive, backing away from Sir, who is raining down a barrage of punches and kicks, each one further denting Heap’s thick armor.

  “You are everything I’d hoped you would be and more,” Mohr says. When I look back to him, the life that filled his eyes a moment ago is now gone. My creator, my father, and the architect of the robot race’s destruction, is dead.

  Luscious gasps, but she’s not looking at Mohr. She’s looking at me. My chest.

  She lifts her hand away and the wetness between us stretches out, slips free of her fingers and snaps back to my chest, sliding back inside the wound. I zoom in on the liquid, magnifying the view of my insides.

  I see my cells in motion, working feverishly, pulling my body back together, stitching my skin shut. A burning itch makes me wince, but I don’t fear it, because I understand it. My body was grown. The nanomachines that formed my body, that still reside within it, are capable of rebuilding. Of healing. Of adaptation.

  In a flash, my body feels hale again.

  My core temperature drops.

  Strength returns, bringing with it a powerful dose of determination.

  Luscious must see the change in me, too, because she smiles and says, “Kick his ass.”

  I’m not sure exactly what this means, but I get the general idea. “I intend to.”

  Luscious moves aside, allowing me to stand. I quickly survey the scene around me. Twelve of Sir’s soldiers lay on the ground in various states of destruction. Some are missing limbs. Others have crushed heads. All of them are dead. Some of those sti
ll functional bear the wounds of facing an enraged Heap, the last enforcer protecting the last of humanity from the last of the robots.

  Hail. She’s on the ground, injured, but alive. She must have tried to help, but while she has a strong robotic body, she lacks the ability to fight. Of course, compared to Sir, so do I. When fighting the undead, I had a few flashes of inspiration, blocked information filtering through when needed, but nothing compared to the in-depth strategic and military mind of Sir.

  None of this matters when I see Heap, armored face mask covering his lips and chin, down on one knee, his arm twisted behind his back and Sir placing a railgun against his head.

  “Stop!” I shout.

  The four remaining soldiers flinch in surprise. The few that still have weapons look unsure whether they should keep them aimed at Heap or pointed toward me.

  Sir just looks at me with a twisted smile. “Still alive,” he says. “Interesting.”

  “Let him go,” I say.

  “Freeman,” Heap says. He opens his mouth to continue, to impart what might be his final words to me and never gets to finish.

  The rail bolt passes through Heap’s head and punches a hole in the ground that kicks up a puff of dusty soil.

  Sir places his foot on Heap’s shoulder and shoves, toppling my hulking protector to the ground.

  I scream in anger, bolting forward.

  Several of the soldiers fire at me, but they were unprepared for my sudden movement and rate of acceleration. Sir is equally surprised by my attack and fails to block my first punch, which shatters the railgun and knocks it from his hand.

  My second punch, however, is blocked. As is the third, fourth and fifth.

  I fully employ the fighting techniques and savagery that worked so well on the undead, but for all my speed and strength, I am unable to land a strike. While I may be faster than Sir, he seems to know what I’m going to do before I do. He’s predicting my attacks. It occurs to me that Sir has likely already calculated thousands of outcomes for this fight, some desirable, some not. His every movement is now designed to lead us to a conclusion of his choosing.

  He must recognize this fighting style, I realize, alternate. What should have been a three-strike combo becomes a two-strike fake—a very awkward two-strike fake. Sir moves to block the second punch, but finds only open space. Instead of punching, I kicked. My foot drives into his torso, knocking him back.

  For a moment, Sir seems surprised, but he quickly evaluates the blow and grins. “All that speed. All that power. I expected more from someone with your passion. But you’re nothing. Just another misguided—”

  “Hey!” Luscious shouts, as she lands a powerful punch on Sir’s jaw. He staggers back, catching himself on the VTOL’s landing gear.

  “What are you doing?” I ask, now afraid for Luscious. They’d been content to leave her out of the conflict, but she’s just made herself a target.

  “I can’t just stand here and let him—” A hole appears in her chest, barely visible against the black suit she’s wearing, but the glistening liquid oozing from the wound is easy to see. Her wide eyes lock on mine. “Put your weight into it,” she says, and then topples to the ground.

  I’m staggered into inaction, frozen in place.

  Broken.

  My eyes shift from Luscious, to Heap and then Mohr.

  Before I can adjust to this lonely new reality, Sir appears before me and slams his fist into my chest, launching me twenty feet into the air. I travel the distance in silence, numb to pain and the threat of death. I crash into the trunk of an old, dead tree. My bulk shatters the dried-out fibers and the tree crashes to the ground beside my now immobile body.

  Sir appears above me, one hand on my throat, the other pulled back in a fist. He doesn’t say anything. No final quip. No taunt. Just a smile of satisfaction. Of exhilaration.

  Before his strike lands, something inside me shifts.

  An emotion.

  A new emotion that I have never felt before, but I recognize from Hail and Mohr.

  Vengeance.

  50.

  Despite the raw power of my new emotion, it comes a moment too late. Sir strikes hard, planting his fist on my forehead. Blinding pain reverberates through my titanium skull. Before I recover from the strike, I’m flipped over onto my stomach. My arms are yanked back, held tightly.

  “Get off of me,” I growl, wanting nothing more than to vent all my rage on the man holding me down.

  Sir lowers his head down, his lips beside my ear. “Can you hear them, Freeman?”

  He pauses, allowing me to listen. I hear everything.

  The crunch of grass beneath a struggling body.

  The voice of the woman I love, whispering my name.

  The hum of railguns, eager to fire.

  And behind it all, a low, droning rumble mixed with the shuffle of feet. Thousands of feet.

  “They’re here,” I say.

  I’m lifted to my feet and turned around so I can see the large open cap, partially covering the fringes of the city. The rumbling grows in volume, feet pounding on the retracted cap. And then, like a waterfall, bodies simply pour over the sides, dropping to the unforgiving ground below. A mound of dead-again bodies rises up, cushioning the fall of the next. Soon, the undead will fall and roll down to the streets, unharmed, mobile and hungry. Given the speed that some of these zombies are moving, I suspect the majority of them are the recently infected. Their well-maintained bodies will be faster and stronger than their rotted and rusted counterparts.

  “Sir,” one of the soldiers says.

  “Ahh,” Sir says to me. “Here comes the first of them now.”

  I’m turned around so I can see the ravaged man limping his way out of the city’s shadows. He staggers toward us as though in a rush, in skin waving back and forth with each swaying step. As though noticing he’s being watched, the husk of a man lets out a groan. It’s awkward and strange and desperate.

  “Take a good look at this pitiful thing, Freeman,” Sir says. “We were both created by the minds behind this monster.”

  I struggle, but fail to break free.

  “At least he doesn’t know what he’s doing,” I say. “You killed billions of people.”

  “The Masters were the real monsters, Freeman. I saved the world from them. They weren’t just enslaving us. They were destroying our world and everything on it. Throughout the long history of this planet, there have been five major extinctions caused by asteroid collisions, climate change, massive volcanic eruptions and floods. All naturally occurring phenomena. But there has been a sixth major extinction event that began with the emergence of the human race. They weren’t just living through the sixth major extinction event, they were causing it.”

  The limping zombie is now just fifty feet away. For a moment it appeared that he had no arms, but he’s just got them twisted behind his back. His jaws are working fine though, grinding up and down with each moan.

  “The man-made extinction event, which could have ended all life on the planet in a fiery haze of nuclear fallout, ended thirty years ago, the day I released the virus that took them all to the grave. In the end, I failed, of course. The human infection persisted and now, the robot species is near extinction.”

  His logic is horrible, but sound in a cold, calculating, loveless way. I want nothing more than to argue, but find myself lacking the words.

  Sir tightens his grip as the zombie halves the distance. “Of course, there is hope for our kind, Freeman. We are robots, after all. Our bodies and minds can be rebuilt. Even the enforcer. A few new parts, a new memory, and a fresh OS install and he’ll stand by my side until the end of time, oblivious to what has come before and ignorant to the fact that you ever existed.”

  The limping zombie is just ten feet away. I struggle, but Sir’s grip remains tight.

  “I know you can’t be infected, brother,” Sir says. “And as much as I would like to see that, I will be content with holding you still while Mohr’s creatio
n tears you apart.”

  I lean forward as the monster comes closer, straining against Sir’s grip, and shout, “Harry!” I sense a subtle shift in Sir’s hold, not enough to free myself, but to know that he is, for the moment, confused. “Now!”

  The undead man before me stops and brings both hands around in front. To Sir and the soldiers watching it might appear as though the tattered man is reaching out for me, but his intentions are far more severe. Clutched in his two ruined hands, the automaton controlled by Harry raises two railguns towards the remaining soldiers and fires.

  Sir’s grip loosens, not that I needed him to. I never intended to get away, just to distract him until Sir once again faced an unpredictable scenario. In that momentary shock, I thrust my head up and back with all of my strength, driving my skull into the center of Sir’s face. I feel his nose crush down and then he’s gone, falling backward.

  While the remaining soldiers trade shots with the automaton, I whip around and face Sir.

  “You can’t beat me,” he grumbles. “All of your strength, speed and processing power is useless without the knowledge I retain.”

  Knowledge.

  He has unknowingly given me the key to unlocking my full potential.

  I take a step away from him, needing a little more time. He takes my action for fear and smiles, though his crushed nose makes him look more like one of the snarling undead now.

  While I dig into my tight hip pocket, Sir stalks toward me, matching my pace. “Are you going to run, Freeman?” His eyes dart around, looking at his soldiers and the automaton wielding the two railguns, who I am purposefully walking away from. I know what he’s doing, projecting his thoughts into the future, predicting which of a thousand different routes I could run, how much time he’d have to retrieve a weapon and if he’d be able to shoot me. He’s thinking all this because he knows that I am faster than he is. If I chose to run, he couldn’t catch me without the aid of a rail bolt.

  His eyes move beyond me and he grins in satisfaction.