by Tim Marquitz
Ten years ago, the Garnethian invasion fleet had arrived in orbit, dropping cyto-bombs on Earth’s major cities without warning. The ooze irradiated everything it touched, and the population began dying faster than bugs on a zapper. That was when an angry young Harold signed up for service, the last of humanity fighting for survival against the alien scourge.
Humankind finally won the battle for the planet after the development of Decimators, forty-story-tall walking tanks that looked like giant robots but fought like Chuck Norris. They took the fight to the invaders for the first time, and kicked Garnethian butt (although the tentacled things’ biology didn’t have any obvious “butt”).
However, the prize for victory was a barely habitable planet, soiled with Garnethian glow-bomb residue with major cities no more than empty wastelands. Small, untouched towns became the gathering centers for survivors, which rapidly grew into society’s new hubs in the subsequent years.
But the empty, contaminated cities were abandoned, just a giant no-man’s land, requiring cleanup.
As the disturbing images faded on the screen, Harold swallowed the bile in his throat and returned to his chair. This is my last chance. “Fine, I’ll stay. That was a fargin’ dirty trick.”
“Truth is never a trick, Harold, and this is not a subterfuge. Travailiant therapy doesn’t rely on those types of mind games. We prefer a more…hands-on approach.”
Console lights popped on in the chamber, and the wall in front of Harold shimmered into a triple view screen to reveal that he was in a hangar of some sort. Buttons and a joystick rose from the armrests of his contoured chair. Though he’d never been in one himself, he recognized the configuration.
“I’m in the cockpit of a fargin’ Decimator! You’ve gotta be fargin’ kidding me. I’m not qualified to pilot this thing!” Panicked and overwhelmed, Harold once again considered fleeing the room. He hated anything connected to the big cocky, clumsy mechs and all they represented to him.
Brenda …
TAIT spoke quickly, but calmly. “Please remain in your seat, Harold, as the controls align with your mental systems. This is a decommissioned mechanized combat platform that contains no live weapons, rebranded as the Travailiant. You’re perfectly safe, and no specialized training is needed. The guidance AI will be calibrated to your thought patterns.”
Harold aversion gave way to a curious, albeit perverse curiosity. “It does anything I think of? What if I want to make this thing dance an Irish gig?”
“I’ll broadcast “Dillon’s Fancy” or “Toss the Feathers.””
“What if I want to play a game of Decimator hopscotch?”
“I’ll have someone draw up a very large court. Do you prefer American or English rules? My only goal is to see you overcome your anger issues, Harold. This is your therapy. Shall we begin?”
Warily, Harold sank deeper in the chair, grasped the armrest controls. “So, what am I supposed to do? Fight some imaginary Garns and get my anger out that way?” This simulated shrink didn’t even know why he was so angry.
“No, we have something more constructive—or should I say, destructive—in mind.”
Harold raised an eyebrow. For a computer, TAIT had a mischievous tone to his voice.
Harold completed a series of calibration tests, both physical and mental, as a crown of wires dropped from the ceiling and snugged itself around his skull. He felt ridiculous putting it on and hoped that no one other than the damn computer was watching him.
When all of the giant mech’s systems had been linked to his mind and body, Harold set off, prodded by TAIT. “It should feel natural to you, Harold. Just walk, one foot in front of the other.”
The mammoth Decimator detached from the hangar, taking the cockpit “therapy room” with it, and Harold realized he was deep inside the machine. He lifted a foot, set it down, took another step. His body was the size of a skyscraper!
“I will guide you,” TAIT said. “Just follow the preselected path.”
The Decimator strode along, leaving the hangar and the outskirts of the new settlement. Harold was amazed by the speed, grace, and power of this gigantic machine. Since all the systems were so intimately connected with his own thoughts and movements, and the robot mirrored his own vastly smaller form, Harold felt accustomed to the machine in no time at all. “This is less complicated than riding a bike!”
“We will not be riding bicycles, Harold,” said TAIT. “We have a more specific set of tasks for your first therapy session.”
Harold strode across the landscape, which still showed scars of the war; he covered a mile in only a few minutes, and he saw the jagged, crumbling skyline looming closer. “Looks like we’re going into the old city. I thought it was contaminated…off limits.”
“There’s no need for concern, Harold. The shielding on a Travailiant is far superior to what you’d be wearing on glow duty. You’re safe in here.”
The mech ate up road quickly, leaving the steady construction of a world rebuilding and entering the decay of a world lost. Skyscrapers dripped like Dali’s Persistence of Time, their plaster flesh melted away to reveal decrepit metal skeletons. Sprawled across the buckled roads were dark smudges that once had been cars, trucks, fleeing people. Even during his stint in the service, Harold hadn’t been this close to the city since the withdraw order had come down.
Memories stepped unbidden from the locked recesses of his mind. This landscape reminded him of a series of pictures he had seen back in the internet age, back when Harold had been a child—abandoned amusement parks, a collection of pictures of places given up after hurricanes, war, recessions. Devoid of joy, they were haunted with the ghosts of lost dreams.
The city trumped all those images put together. It was a graveyard of empty rooms.
“You seem to be experiencing some sort of emotion, Harold. Care to describe?”
Harold felt anger flare inside. “What do you think, you soulless piece of junk? Millions died here, buried under caustic slime! Of course I’m going to feel something. I’m not a machine.”
TAIT voice suggested no offense. “No, you’re not. You were here during the war, correct? One of the troops defending this place. I have reviewed all of your day-to-day military duty logs—”
Harold balled his fist. “My military record is none of your business.”
“Sorry, Harold. I have accessed your records to best understand your needs. That’s why you’re here. We need to explore the roots of your anger. Tell me about what you did in the war.”
Harold continued to thunder along in the giant Decimator, lumbering into the ruins of the city where the empty buildings were like trees in a geometric forest. But his attention was focused on the disembodied voice harassing him. “I keep telling you quacks, I’m not angry because of the war. Y’all think I got PTSD. But I never saw firsthand combat, never wrestled with any Garnethians. I never even got to fight.”
“Correct. You were in a support capacity because you were physically too big to be a pilot. How many times did you apply?”
TAIT’s question brought a wave of regret. Was the AI therapist trying to annoy him? When Harold didn’t respond immediately, TAIT answered for him.
“Five times, right? You must have really wanted it badly, yes?”
Harold couldn’t help that he’d been born big boned, that his metabolism made it all too easy to put on weight. No matter how much he wanted to fight, even the rigors of basic training couldn’t get him down to combat weight.
An icon flashed on the GPS and Harold rotated the viewer—and the Decimator’s mammoth head—to see a target painted on the side of a crumbling building, along with the overlaid words, “Strike here!”
“Each rejection must have stung more than the last one,” TAIT taunted.
Anger welled up inside of Harold and, seeing that he had permission to hit something, he willed his mech to punch the target. The Travailiant’s monstrous fist shot out and struck the mark, slamming a clean hole in the brickwork. Lightnin
g-bolt cracks spidered throughout the rest of the building. Slowly at first, but picking up speed, support beams twisted and crumpled until the whole building collapsed before him.
TAIT sounded pleased. “Nicely done, Harold. How did that feel?”
He watched the tumbling girders and stone, mesmerized by the dust cloud that billowed from the rubble of the once-powerful bank building. He rotated the arm until the mech’s massive hand hovered in front of the view screen. He flexed his own fingers and the machine mimicked him. So much power at his disposal! “That felt…kind of good. Can we do that again?”
“Yes, Harold. Let’s talk about the friends you lost in the war.”
“No.”
“Tell me about Slinky, tall kid from Alabama.”
A service picture of John “Slinky” Jenkins appeared on one of the monitors. Harold backhanded the monitor, trying to make the picture go away, and his Travailiant responded by taking out an overpass.
“I said No!”
Each time TAIT pried into Harold’s past, poked and prodded and provoked, Harold flinched, reacted—and destroyed another target. He wasn’t even paying much attention anymore, using ruined buildings as punching bags as his anger grew. The GPS targeting service directed him to a new location. Harold gradually realized there was a pattern to his destruction, though, and he didn’t need to be a civil engineer, nor a shrink, to see that TAIT had an agenda.
“You’re using my anger issues to clear the fargin’ city? Pissing me off to do the dirty work of the United Earth Alliance?”
TAIT let out an unconvincing artificial chuckle. “Consider it therapeutic community service. You get the psychological help you so desperately need and a reconstruction department makes progress leveling contaminated sections of the city. It’s a win-win.”
Harold laughed. It felt good to laugh. He couldn’t remember how long it’d been. Before Brenda…
“I think I might like this therapy after all.”
“Good, Harold. Our session is at an end for this week. Please return the Travailiant to the hangar. See you next Tuesday?”
Harold soon grew accustomed to releasing his rage through the body of the giant mech, smashing dead buildings and clearing rubble. By the third session, he and TAIT made it all the way to the heart of downtown. The gigantic robot stood in the center of Sixth Street, surrounded by two dozen cancerous monoliths. Harold gaped at the task before him. “You don’t expect me to take all these down, do you?”
“Tell me, Harold, who’s Brenda?”
Harold froze in place. “What? Don’t say her name!”
TAIT repeated, “Who is Brenda? We have no record of a Mrs. Hodges, but clearly she was special to you. Was she a girlfriend? A lover lost in the war?”
The mech clenched its fists and crouched in a defensive posture. “How did you find out her name? Nobody knew about me and Brenda!”
“During one of your drunken blackouts, after you’d beaten up three servicemen in a bar fight, the police doctor noted that you were moaning the name Brenda. Care to elaborate?”
He whispered, “No.”
“Come now, Harold. We’ve made such progress. Tell me about Brenda. She was close to you?”
“She is nobody! Leave it be.” He swung his giant augmented arm, slammed into a skyscraper.
TAIT had to increase the volume of his voice to be heard over the sound of the first decimated building. “Did you lose her in the war?”
“I said leave her out of it!” Harold lashed out in an impotent attempt to hit the virtual psychologist. “You have no right to bring her into this!” He karate-chopped connecting walkways into piecemeal.
“Did you lose her in this city, Harold?” TAIT prodded. “In the last wave, when the command pulled you back? Is that when she died?”
“You. Know. NOTHING!”
Like a berserker responding to Harold’s rage, the Travailiant went wild, punching and kicking everything it could get its hands on. Debris piled up around them. Inside the cockpit, Harold yelled out his fury, no longer hearing anything the AI therapist said. He didn’t know how much time passed, it became a blur but, when he came back to himself, all of the buildings around him had been reduced to rubble.
TAIT’s voice sounded meek. “Um, Harold? I think that’s all for today.”
But Harold wasn’t finished. The anger still rolled through him in waves. “Brenda was everything to me!” The exertion turned Harold’ s jowls ruddy with sweat, and his breath became labored as his body’s movements directed the machine. He pounded on the chair’s controls. “I loved her!” The Travailiant stomped along, pounding the dead streets and making cracks the size of drainage ditches. The big mech stumbled as a tunnel collapsed underfoot.
“Be careful! This isn’t indestructible, you know.”
As if the universe wanted to prove TAIT’s point, a construction crane toppled from the side of a building, tumbled and struck the giant robot’s back, deflecting it into the side of the nearest building, but that only made Harold angrier. In response, he grabbed fistfuls of the building and used them like brass knuckles to smash everything in sight. When even that wasn’t enough, Harold bounded forward, bent low, and drove the enormous body headlong completely through another structure, leaving a mech-shaped hole in the side. He found a puddle of old Garnethian ooze there pooled in a collapsed parking structure.
“Stay away from the ooze, Harold. Harold? Are you hearing me? I’m your therapist, and I say you need to calm down now. Calm down!”
Oblivious to TAIT’s warning, Harold scooped up handfuls of the substance and threw them like a monkey flinging poo at visitors outside its cage.
“It’s not fargin’ fair! You hear me? God! It’s not fargin’ fair! She was all I had left! WHY?”
The Travailiant’s hands smoked from the toxic ooze. Though the Decimators had been designed to withstand the alien stuff when they were new, this recommissioned Travailiant was well past its warranty. The acrid smell of burnt wiring and oil stung Harold’s nose and eyes.
A loud creaking sound penetrated the cockpit, and the structure they stood inside fell to pieces like a child’s stack of blocks during a tantrum. Girders and office furniture rained down on top of them.
TAIT squawked in a voice that sounded genuinely panicked. “Harold, if you don’t calm down, we’re going to DIE!”
Awareness of their situation finally flooded Harold’s senses, snapping him out of his blind rage. He had just enough time to raise his giant mechanical arms to shield the cockpit before the roof collapsed on top of them…
Harold gradually returned to consciousness, shaking his head, feeling his skull throb. He’d slammed his temple against the edge of the pilot’s chair. Red lights blinked on the console, and a warning buzzer annoyed his left ear.
He groaned, sat up. “TAIT? TAIT, you there? You okay?”
“Yes, Harold. I’m actually housed in a central facility. I just stream in to the mech. Are you injured? I’ve lost some of the monitoring equipment.”
Harold slowly got to all fours, but the Travailiant remained buried beneath the collapsed building, barely able to move under the mountain of rubble. They weren’t going anywhere.
The taste of blood and the sharp pain of loose teeth made him spit both onto the floor of the cockpit. He gave his body a mental survey and decided he didn’t have any serious injuries, although he did have some scrapes. “I think I’m going to make it.”
“I’ve called a retrieval team. Congratulations! You’re the first patient to take out a whole city block and a three-million-dollar piece of technology at the same time.”
Harold let out a weak chuckle. “Mom said I was an overachiever.”
TAIT snorted, a strange sound coming from a computer. It caused Harold to laugh. TAIT’s responding laugh grew until both had a good gut-buster going. The AI stopped first.
“And how do you feel inside? After letting out all that rage?”
Harold wiped away his tears. “Good. Great, actu
ally. Better than I’ve felt in years.”
“It’s hard on a person to keep all that pain buried, Harold. To carry all that weight and guilt…especially after someone you love dies.”
Harold was surprised. “Whoa, who died?”
“Well…Brenda, of course.”
Harold blinked in surprise, then guffawed. “Brenda didn’t die! She dumped me—for a mech pilot. I was so angry I couldn’t even see straight.”
The AI therapist sounded genuinely surprised. “What?”
“Yeah. Brenda thought they were all sexy with their shiny Decimators and their giant guns. I just worked in the motor pool, so how could I compete?” Harold paused, realizing the long-standing misconceptions. “Didn’t any of you brainiacs notice that all my brawls were with mech pilots?” He grumbled. “Thought someone would have picked up on that. How many PhDs did you say you have?”
TAIT paused. “Now that you point it out, yes, the data supports that hypothesis.”
Harold heard the sound of a skyscraper being lifted off the Travailiant. Giant girders and stone walls were lifted away. The recovery crew had arrived. The cockpit roof hatch popped open, and light streamed in. Harold blinked as the crew lowered a ladder down to him.
Before he climbed up to safety, he called out to TAIT, “Same time, next week?”
“Sure, sure,” the AI therapist said, with considerably less swagger in his voice now.
Harold Hodges smiled as he entered the facility, heading straight for the cockpit chambers and the Travailiant controls. He liked the anger-management therapy, looked forward to it all week. The courts seemed content with the progress he had made, as well as the community-service work he was completing. They scheduled him for one more round, saying that if he hit his final goals, his record would be expunged.
He felt cocky as he sat down in the operator chair. “Hey, TAIT. You ready?”
“Yes, Harold, but there has been a slight change of plans.”
TAIT’s voice sounded odd to Harold, a mischievous tone no AI should possess. He was on his guard. “What’s that?”
