Godlike Machines

by Johnathan Strahan

  The ground effect bots reached the wumpus at the same time as I did. Technically, I was supposed to hang back out of range and get it with the mecha’s big guns, to make sure that it didn’t get a bite or two in on the mecha’s skin, scratching the finish. But that was no fun at all. I liked to dance with the wumpus, especially when the pack was in on it, all of us dodging in and out, snatching the wumpus’s tentacles, kicking it back and forth. The ground effect bots were clearly piloted by Ike and Mike, two dogs that had been so badly mutilated when I found them that I couldn’t even guess at their breed. They must have been big beasts at one point. They were born to ground effect bots, anyway, bulling the wumpus around.

  The wumpus was down to just a few tentacles now, and I could see into its hopper, normally obscured by the forest of waving arms and mouths. The hopper itself was lined with tentacles, but thin ones, whiplike, each one fringed with hairy cilia. The cilia branched and branched again, down to single-molecule pincers, each one optimized to break apart a different kind of material. I knew better than to reach inside that hopper with the mecha’s fists-even after I’d killed the wumpus, the hopper would digest anything I fed it, including me.

  Its foot-spoked wheels spun madly as we batted it around like a cat playing with a mouse. They could get traction on anything, given enough time to get their balance, but we weren’t going to give it the chance. The air-drones snipped the last of the tentacles and I touched the control that whistled the pack back. They obediently came to my heels and I put the wumpus in my sights. The wumpus seemed to sense what was coming. It stopped struggling and settled down on the feet of its wheels. I methodically blew apart its hopper with my depleted uranium guns, chipping away at it, blowing it open, cilia waving and spasming. Now the wumpus was just a coil of metallic skin and logic with a hundred wheels, naked and stripped. I used the rocket-launcher on it and savored the debris-fountain that rose from it. Sweet!

  “Jimmy Yensid, you are cruel and vile!” The voice bounced off the walls of the ruined buildings around me, strident and shrill. I rotated the mecha’s cowl and scanned the ground. There she was, standing on top of a dead hover-bus, a spider-goat behind her on a tether. I popped the cowl and shinned down the mecha, using the grippy hand-and-toe-holds that tried to conform to my grasp.

  “Hello, Lacey!” I called. “You’re looking very pretty today.” Dad had always taught me to talk to girls this way, though there weren’t many meat girls in my world, just the ones I saw online and, of course, the intriguing women of the Carousel of Progress, back in the center of Comerica Park. And it was true. Lacey Treehugger was ever so pretty—with a face as round as a pie-plate and lips like a drawn-up bow. Talking to Lacey was as forbidden as destroying the mecha, maybe more so, but Dad could tell if the mecha got scratched and he had no way of finding out if I had been passing the time of day with pretty Lacey.

  She was taller than me now, which was only to be expected, because she was not immortal and so she was growing at regular speed while I was going to stick to my present, neat little size for a good while yet. I didn’t mind that she was taller, either-I liked the view.

  “Hello, hello,” I said as I scaled the hover, coming up to stand next to her. “Hello!” I said to the spider-goat, holding out the flat of my hand for it to sniff. It brayed at me and menaced me with its horns. “Come on, Louisa, play nice.”

  She tugged on the goat’s lead, a zizzing spool of something that felt as soft as felt but which could selectively tighten at the loop-end when the goat got a little too edgy. “This isn’t Louisa, Jimmy. This is Moldavia. Louisa died last week.” She glared at me.

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” I said. “She was a good goat.”

  “She died from eating bad sludge,” Lacey said. Ah. Well, that explained it. Lacey’s people hated Dad’s preserve here in the old city of Detroit. They hadn’t made the wumpuses, but they fully supported their work. The Treehuggers wanted all of the old industrial world converted back to the kind of thing you could let a goat eat without worrying about it dropping dead, turning to plastic, or everting its digestive tract.

  “You should keep a closer eye on your goats, Lacey,” I said. “It’s not safe for them to wander around here.”

  “It would be if you’d leave off hunting those innocent wumpuses. The way you took that poor thing apart, it was sickening.”

  “Lacey, it’s a machine. It doesn’t have feelings. I was just having a little fun.”

  “Sickening,” she repeated. She had her short hair in tiny braids today, which is one of the many ways I loved to see it. Each braid was tipped with a tiny, glittering bead of fused soil, stuff that her people collected as a reminder of the bad old days.

  “How’s your parents?”

  She didn’t manage to hide her smile. “Their weirdness is terminal. This week they decided that we were going to try to sell spider-goat silk to India. I’m all like, India? Are you crazy? What does India want with our textiles? They don’t even need clothes there anymore, not since desidotis came out.” Desidotis were self-cleaning, self-replicating, and could reconfigure themselves. No one who made dollars could afford them—they were denominated in rupees only. “And they went, have you seen how the Rupee is trading today? So they’re all over iBay, posting auction listings in broken Hindi. I’m all like, you know that India is the world’s largest English-speaking nation, right?”

  I shook my head. “You’re right. Terminally weird.”

  She gave me a playful shove. “You’re one to talk. At least mine are human!”

  So technically it was true. Dad refused to call himself a human anymore. Ever since he attained immortality, decades before I was born, he’d called himself a transhuman. But when he said he wasn’t human, it was a boast. When Lacey said it, it sounded like an insult. It bugged me. Dad didn’t want me “deracinating” myself with Lacey. Lacey didn’t trust me because I wasn’t a “real” human. It wasn’t like I wanted to be a mayfly, like the Treehuggers were, but I still hated it when Lacey looked down her nose at me.

  “I really do hate the way you take those wumpuses apart,” she said. “It gives me the creeps. I know they’re not alive, but you really seem to be enjoying it.”

  “The pack enjoys it,” I said, gesturing at my robots, who were wrestling each other around my feet. “It’s in their nature to hunt.”

  She looked away. “I don’t like them, either,” she said, barely above a whisper.

  “Come on,” I said. “They’re better off now than they were when I found them. At least I haven’t screwed around with their germ plasm. I’m just using technology to let them be better dogs. Not like Louisa there.” I pointed to the spider-goat.

  “Moldavia,” she said.

  I knew I had her there. I pressed my advantage. “You think she enjoys giving silk? Somewhere in her head, she knows she’s supposed to be full of milk.”

  Lacey looked out over the ruins of Detroit. “Pretty around here,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. It was. The ruins were glorious. They were all I’d ever known, except for fly-overs in the zepp. Michigan countryside was pastoral and picturesque, but it wasn’t anything so magnificent as Detroit’s ruins. So much ambition. Made me proud to be (trans)human. “I wish you guys would stop trying to take it away from us.”

  This is how conversation with Lacey always went, each of us picking fights with the other. It was all we knew, the best way we had to relate. Neither of us really meant it. It was just an excuse to stand close enough to her to count the hairs on her arms, to watch the sun through her eyelashes.

  She looked at me. “It’s not like you let anyone else come by and see it anyway. You just hoard it all to yourself.”

  “You come by whenever you want. What’s the problem?”

  “You treat it like your own private playground. You know how many people could live here?”

  “None,” I said. “It would kill them within a week.” I was immune, thanks to my transhuman liver. Dad’s liver was
n’t quite so trick, but he made do by eating cultured yogurt filled with microbes that kept him detoxed. He said it was a small price to pay for continued residence in his museum.

  “You know what I mean,” she said, socking me again. “Let the wumpuses do their thing, turn this whole place back into forests, grow some treehouses ... How many? A million? Two million?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Provided you didn’t care about destroying all this history.”

  “There are billions of blown-out steel-belted radials!” she said. “All over the world. What the hell makes yours so special?”

  “What if this was ancient Rome?” I said. “What if we were all sitting around, thinking about pounding down all those potsherds, and you were all like, Jimmius Yensidus, what are you saving all those potsherds for? Rome is full of them. They’re a health hazard! The centurions keep cutting their feet on them!”

  “You are a total idiot,” she said.

  We got to this point in every discussion. Half the time, I called her an idiot. Half the time it was the other way around. We sat down on the bus and she put her arm around me. I leaned in for my kiss. Dad would totally splode if he knew. Deracination!

  Sorry, Dad. She kissed me slowly, with a lazy bit of tongue that made the hair on my neck stand up. She was probably getting a little old for me, but I found that I quite liked older women.

  She broke it off and sighed. “You’re so young,” she said. “We can’t keep doing this.”

  “I’m two months older than you,” I said, baiting her. I knew what she meant.

  “You used to be. These days, it’s like you’re ten. I’m almost 14, Jimmy.”

  “So go kiss some Treehugger boys on the spider-goat farm,” I said.

  She sighed again. “Are you really happy here?”

  “Are you happy where you are?”

  “I’m happy enough. It’s peaceful.”

  “Boring.”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “It’s not boring around here. Going out with Dad is awesome.’“ Dad collected pieces for his museum from all over the world. We’d gone to France together the year before to get the Girl and the Sultan’s Elephant from Marseilles. The semi-robotic puppets were 11 meters tall and we’d stashed them in a high-school gym near the bus-station. We couldn’t work them on our own, they needed a crew of 20 or more, but I was working on training the pack to help out. Trying, anyway. Pepe kept trying to eat the Elephant.

  “But you’re all alone. And your Dad is so weird?

  “He’s weird, but he’s a lot of fun. I won’t live here forever, anyway. Once I’m post-pube, I’m going on a vision-quest. It’s part of the package. Then I’ll find somewhere to settle down.”

  “You’ve got it all figured out, huh?”

  Pepe had been circling high overhead as we chatted, occasionally dipping down to play with the ground effect critters. Now all three of his drones lofted high, making wide circles. That was the signal that he was seriously freaking out.

  I stood up to get a better look at him, Lacey grabbing at my hand. I followed the wide, swooping curves of the drones, (inning to watch, and saw two of them get shot out of the sky, one-two, just like that, disappearing in a hail of debris.

  Lacey squeezed my hand.

  “Kurzweil on a crutch,” I breathed. I headed for the mecha, but Lacey wouldn’t let go of my hand. “Come on,” I said, looking into her scared face. “You ride shotgun, I’ll get you home safe.” She shook her head. Her eyes were white. The pack was going crazy around us, nipping at our heels, racing in circles. The flea was springing high, high, higher. The ( lack of artillery. A flight of rockets screamed overhead, then touched down somewhere. The sound was incredible, like nothing I’d ever heard, and the earth shook so hard that I slipped and went down on one knee.

  “Come ON,” I said to Lacey, “get in!”

  I grabbed for the bottom rung of the mecha’s handholds and felt it grip me back. I looked over my shoulder. Lacey was hugging the goat. Dammit. The goat.

  “We’ll take her too!” I said. I reached for the goat, but she butted at me and shied back. “Lacey, you can’t stay here,” I said. There was the rattle of small arms, another volley of rockets. A cloud of dust boiled down the street. I barely managed to yank my shirt over my head before it overtook us, blotting out the sky, filling every pore with grey, shattered concrete. It was like a wumpus plume gone metastatic, filling the entire world.

  I tugged my shirt back into place and looked around.

  Lacey was gone.

  I jumped down from the hover and ran around the bus. The pack were everywhere around me. I tried to whistle them up and send them in a search pattern for Lacey and the goat, but I needed the mecha for that.

  I wasn’t thinking straight.

  I turned and crouched down and put my face in my hands and breathed deeply. Then I stood up, thumped the ground-effect critters behind the ears, and climbed into the mecha and sealed the cowl, turning on air, radiation, and flash-bang filters at max. The screens were all going bonkers. I took another deep breath. First things first. Pepe was still up there. I dropped his sensorium on the side-screens, dialed back to when he first started to circle, absently watching the attacks unfold.

  On the main screens, I put up the view from the ground effects and the flea, and told them to fan out and look for Lacey. Pepe had been watching the attack when Lacey went missing, so his rewind wasn’t any help there, but at least I could watch the attack that had unfolded.

  There were eight mechas in formation, coming across the river from where Windsor used to be. It was our least guarded flank—we counted on the river as the first line of defense. If I was planning an invasion, that’s where I’d strike, too.

  The mechas were smaller than mine. They were barely bigger than their pilots, more powered armor than vehicles. I recognized them as coming from the earliest years of the Mecha Wars, whereas my mecha was the last generation produced, a juggernaut that stood four times larger than them. The pack hadn’t found Lacey. I looked at the screens and decided that Lacey had gone to ground somewhere, hiding in a ruined building. Fine. She’d be as safe there as she was anywhere. I began to run for Windsor.

  Dad wouldn’t answer his phone. I dropped mine into the mecha’s hopper and told it to keep on redialing him. It kept getting the voicemail: “You have reached Robin Yensid and the Detroit Conservation Zone. We are delighted to hear from another telephone user. Your choice of communications technology is appreciated. Help keep the telephone alive! That said, I can’t come to my phone right now. Leave me a message and I’ll phone you back.”

  My mecha ran full tilt, bent almost double. The cockpit remained level on the end of the mecha’s flexible stalk of a neck, rolling silently from side to side to keep from upsetting me. It didn’t even spill my coffee.

  Who’d be attacking Detroit? Dad believed that the wumpuses were made by some kind of co-op in San Diego, deep greens who’d made the viral bots and released them into the wild more than ten years ago. I’d checked out the co-op’s presence a couple times and it was mostly arguments about who was supposed to be tucking the oxen into bed each night, and what kinds of stories were appropriate to read to the calves. Apparently, the co-op had changed focus after their wumpus phase and had gone into farming. In any event, I didn’t think that they were the kind of gang that could send eight members across the continent in mechas to make sure that the last real city got ploughed under by wumpuses.

  The mecha told me that it had the eight enemy craft in range of its missiles. I stopped and dropped the third leg for stability and sighted on the flank closest to me. I thought I’d pick them off in order, closest to furthest, and hope that the far ones wouldn’t even notice what I was up to until I’d already done it.

  I told the missile which mecha to attack—it was purple, and Pepe’s imaging showed a driver behind the cowl that was about Dad’s size, though I couldn’t tell sex or age. I put my finger over the button and got ready to press i
t. But I didn’t push the button.

  I had killed a million wumpuses. I’d put some dogs out of their misery, beasts too far gone to join the pack. I’d swatted flies and sploded mosquitos with lasers. But I’d never killed a human being. Technically, I was a transhuman, so was that still murder? My thumb thought so.

  Dad’s voicemail came up again. The mecha closest to me was swiveling towards me. I could hear its radar scattering off my armor. I hit the button and my mecha rocked as the rocket screamed away from the frame on my mecha’s chest. The missile corkscrewed through a tracker-confounding set of spirals, shaking off radar chaff as it went. The chaff was propelled as well, and it, too, moved through corkscrews, so that even I couldn’t figure out which was the real missile and which were the drones.

  Then, the moment of contact.

  The real missile hit the mecha dead center. I watched its nose-cam as it kissed the chest-plate, seeing the mouth of the man (woman?) inside, shot up through the clear shield. The mouth made a perfect O. Then the chest-cam stopped working. I looked out with my naked eyes in time to see the mecha come apart in an expanding cloud of debris. Not all the debris was made of metal. There was a red mist in the air.

  Something wet hit the ground. It must have been part of a person, once, but now it looked like roadkill. Like the dogs that couldn’t make it into the pack.

  I was a murderer. The person in that mecha might have been an immortal like me. Or she might have been made into an immortal, like Dad. Might have lived forever.

  The other mechas were targeting me now, three moving to flank me, two grasping forearms and locking at the ankles to make a single unit, which rose into the air on rotors over their shoulders.

  I had already armed the remaining missiles and targeted the four closest to me without even thinking of it. I played a lot of mecha sims on slow days, sometimes using the console in front of the huge, chunky TV in the living room of the fourth scene of the Carousel of Progress. Dad did not approve of this, so I didn’t tell him.