Godlike Machines

by Johnathan Strahan

  I launched the battery and used the recoil time to bring the evaders up to nominal. This was the mecha’s gymnastics program, a set of heavily randomized backsprings and twirls and such, supposedly impossible for a targeting system to get a lock on, but nevertheless calculated to keep the enemy in range at all times. Theoretically, the brave pilot (ahem, me) could continue to harass and kill the enemy while pulling four gees through a set of acrobat maneuvers. The evaders were better than the carny rides Dad kept refurbished and running, but truth be told, they’d never failed to make me puke.

  But as the missiles screamed toward the enemy mechas and the airborne unit bore down on me, big guns blazing, puking seemed like a sensible alternative to dying. I hit the evaders and dug in.

  I’d ridden the evaders dozens of times, but this was the first time I kept my eyes open. The nausea didn’t rush up and overtake me. Instead, I remained utterly focused on the enemy craft, my gaze locked on them as my body rocked and flipped. My missiles had taken down two more, the other missiles had disappeared, either foiled by anti-targeting system or knocked out of the sky.

  I threw more bad stuff in their direction, using the conventional depleted uranium rounds as the flips and turns brought me into range. The evaders were hard on the mecha’s power-cells, so the maneuvers only ran for a few minutes, but it felt like hours. When we ground to a halt, my mecha and I, we were much closer to the enemy craft than before. There had been eight of them. Now there were three. The two that had taken to the sky were lying in a twisted wreckage near me.

  The pack were barking like crazy, filling the cockpit with alerts. The flea was bouncing up and down on the downed aerial unit, savaging the pilots through their cowls. It kept replaying its video of the kill, the flea leaping up to land on the rotors’ mast, biting down on the drive-shaft and hanging on as the rotors bent, collided, spun away, the flea bounding free of the dying craft as it spun out and spiraled down.

  The remaining mecha were moving with more discipline and purpose than their brethren had. I no longer had the advantage of surprise. These three were taking cover behind Dad’s favorite office tower, a big white marble thing done in a style Dad called “deco.” They lobbed missiles over the building, apparently using orbitals or something stratospheric for targeting.

  Two could play at that game. I whistled up the flea and Pepe and sent them around the back of the tower, giving me some guidance for my own targeting systems. My mecha knew well enough to automatically interface with the lads, tying them straight into its guidance systems. I fired some grenades at the parking structure opposite their covering building, letting the mecha calculate the bank shot so that they bounced off and landed amid the enemies.

  Two more down, and the other two were on the move, streaking out from behind the building. Holy crap, they were fast. They fired in unison at me, letting me have it with guided missiles, grenades, conventional ammo. I tried evasive maneuvers but it was no good. They shot the mecha’s left leg out from under it and I tumbled . . .

  ... and kept rolling. The Mecha Wars were vicious, and once a ronin mecha was in the field, it might go months without a resupply or maintenance. These bastards kept coming at you no matter what, pulling themselves along on whatever limbs were left, until there was nothing left to fight with.

  My mecha came up in a three-pointed stance, like one of the ground effect vehicles, like it was doing yoga, coming into a downward dog. The cowl swung around and I was upright again, atop the thorax of my newly bug-like fighting machine.

  The ground effect puppies nipped at my heels as I scuttled toward the enemy, closing. I was down to nothing but conventional ammo now, so it was close fighting. In a pinch, my mecha could uproot a building and clobber them with it. Two minutes before, I’d been agonizing about becoming a murderer. Now I wanted to tear their legs off and beat them to death with them.

  The dogs wanted to do their thing and I gave them the nod over my command channel. The entire pack converged on one of the two mechas—the closer one-grabbing its limbs and tumbling it to the ground, rending the metal away from the cowl. I actually heard the pilot scream. It made me grin.

  That left one more. He—it was a he, I was close enough to see that now—he had planted himself in a fencer’s stance, presenting the side of his body to me as he raised his near hand straight out toward me, the maws of his guns yawning towards me. His other arm was curled across his chest, fanning up and down, trying to keep me in his sights at all times.

  I scuttled my mecha forward, taking cover when I could, using trucks and houses, even a beautiful neon sign that Dad always stopped to admire when we were out for walks. It sploded and came down with a series of crystal tinkling noises.

  I got as many shots off at it as I could, but it was fresh, with a seemingly endless supply of ammo to harry me with whenever I tried to target it.

  Then it got me, bouncing a grenade off the ground ten yards ahead of me, sending it sailing right into the mecha’s midsection, so that I flipped and rolled and rolled and rolled. Now I felt nauseated.

  When I finally stopped rolling, I knew I was about to die. The mecha’s lights were all dark, all systems down. Dad was going to kill me. I chuckled and groaned. My ribs, pressed into the crash harness, felt like a handful of dried twigs rattling against one another.

  I struggled to release the webbing as I punched the trigger for the charges that blew out the cowl. I would die on my feet.

  I got out of the mecha just in time to see the ground effect puppies streaking toward the enemy mecha, who was raising his guns for the triumphant kill. I saw in an instant what they intended, and turned my face away just as they collided with him, exploding in a shower of hot metal. I dived back into the cowl, heedless of my ribs, and curled into a ball as the debris rained down around me.

  When I straightened up, the remaining mecha was a twisted, blackened wreck, streaked with red. The two doggies had gone into suicide-bomber mode when they saw that my life was endangered, blowing themselves up and taking the remaining enemy with them. Good doggies. When I got back home, I’d give their brains some extra endorphins. They’d earned it. Of course, finding them some more bots to pilot wasn’t going to be easy. Dad’s museum-city was cratered with the aftermath of my battle, buildings razed, fires blazing.

  I took a tentative step away from the wreckage of my mecha and stumbled, gasping at the pain in my ribs. Then I remembered that I’d left my phone in the cockpit and had to crawl back in to get it. It was still redialing Dad, still getting his voicemail.

  A part of my brain knew that this meant that he was in deep trouble, somewhere in Detroit. That part seemed to be locked in a padded room, judging by its muffled cries. The part in charge didn’t worry about Dad at all-Dad was fine, he was back at Comerica, waiting for me. He was going to be so pissed about the mecha. It was the last of its kind, as Dad never tired of reminding me. And several of his favorite buildings were in ruin. This was going to be ugly.

  I pocketed the phone and whistled up the pack. It was just the flea and Pepe now. Pepe perched on the flea’s shoulder and let me pet his carapace. I tested my legs. Wobbly, but serviceable. Without the mecha, it’d be harder to talk to the pack, but they’d be OK on their own. They had good instincts, my pups.

  Normally, it was a ten-minute walk from the Ambassador Bridge to Comerica. Hell, the People Mover monorail went most of the way. But I could see a People Mover from where I stood, and it was stock still, motionless on the track. Someone had cut its power. I took some tentative steps. My ribs grated and I gasped and nearly fell over. The flea bounced to me and nuzzled at me. I leaned on it and it trundled forward slowly. This was going to take a lot more than ten minutes. If only Dad would pick up the phone, he could come and get me.

  We were halfway to Comerica when my phone rang.

  “Dad?”

  “Jimmy, thank God. Are you OK?”

  I had been very brave all the way from the wreckage, biting back my whimpers of pain and soldierin
g on. But now I couldn’t stop my tears. “I broke my ribs, Dad,” I said, around the sobs. “It hurts.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m almost home,” I said. “Can you come get me?”

  “Jimmy, listen carefully. I—” there was a crash on the other end of the phone. It continued rumbling, and I realized I was hearing it with my other ear as well. I looked out over the city and saw Dad’s harrier screaming around in a tight arc that must have pulled eight gees. The last time he’d taken the harrier out, I’d been a little kid, only five or six, and he’d flown it like it was made of eggshell. Now it was zipping around like an overclocked Pepe.

  The harrier was circling something I couldn’t see, and it had all its guns blazing. Dad was knocking the holy hell out of his city, and somehow that made things scarier than ever. He never would have-

  “Listen carefully, Jimmy! Go home. Get in the zepp. Go away from here. I’ll find you. Do you—” the harrier made another tight turn. Something huge was over it, in the sky. A flying battle-platform? I’d seen pictures of those. They’d been big in Europe, during the Mecha Wars. I’d never seen one in person. I didn’t think they’d made it to this continent.

  “Dad?”

  The harrier zigged and zagged like a dragonfly, then rocketed straight up, guns still blazing, rolling from side to side as it laid down a line of fire over the batteries slung under the platform’s belly. The platform returned fire, and Dad’s voice rang out of the phone: “GO!”

  I went. My ribs had stiffened up as I watched the air-battle, but I pushed on. I didn’t worry about crying out when they hurt. I screamed the whole way. I couldn’t hear myself over the noise of the guns. The flea kept me upright. Somehow, I made it home.

  Comerica’s doors were shut up tight, the security scanners live and swiveling to follow me. They were wide-angle and could follow me without moving an inch, but the swiveling let you know they were live. Each one had a pain-ray beneath it, aperture as wide as the muzzle of a blunderbuss. I once came home without my transponder-left in the mecha, in the old car-barn—and got a faceful of pain-ray. Felt like my face was melting. I never forgot my transponder again.

  For a second, though, I couldn’t find it and I had a vision of it sitting in the wrecked cockpit of my mecha, a ten-minute walk away that might as well have been in one of the moon colonies. Then I found it, transferred absently to one of the many pockets that ran down the sleeves of my sweater.

  I let myself in and collapsed in the vestibule, on one of Dad’s live divans. It purred and cuddled me, which set my ribs afire again. On the other side of the dome there was a model room for a robot hotel that Dad had rescued from Atlantic City. It had a robutler that could do rudimentary first aid. I’d grown up playing hospital with it. Now I limped over and let myself in, summoning the bot. It had a queer gait, a half-falling roll that was like a controlled stagger. It clucked over my ribs, applied a salve, waited for the numbness to set it, then taped me up, getting my ribs into alignment.

  I stood up, numb from chin to hip, and dismissed the robutler. Its blank face bowed to me as it slid back into its receptacle. Dad let me stay in the hotel room on my birthday sometimes. As I left it, I realized that I’d never see it again.

  In the middle of the field, the tethered zepp strained at its mooring lines. The Spirit of the People’s Will was a Chinese mini-freighter, the kind of thing you could still find in the sky, but Dad collected it anyway. The first time he saw its stubby lines, playful like a kid’s toy, he rushed out and got one for the museum. “An instant classic,” he called it, “like the Mac, or the Mini. Perfection.”

  The zepp’s cargo hoist was already loaded. Dad must have done that, before getting in the harrier and setting out to defend our turf. The hoist was groaning under a prodigious weight, and I groaned too, once I saw what it was. Dad had put the Carousel onto the hoist.

  The Carousel of Progress debuted in 1964, at the New York World’s Fair. Walt Disney built it for General Electric—a six-scene robotic stage-play about the role of technology in making our lives better. It was Dad’s most treasured possession in the entire world. I seriously believe that if it was a choice between me and it, he might pick it.

  In fact, he had sort of done that.

  Ten minutes had gone by since I’d made it home, and the sounds of the air battle still raged outside. The zepp was going to have a hard time attaining lift-off with all that weight, and I still hadn’t grabbed my own stuff.

  Yes, Dad had said to go right away, no delay. Yes, there was a war raging outside the walls. But I wasn’t going to leave my friends behind.

  The pack’s den was in the back of my room, four overgrown canisters that I kept under my desk. The canisters were standard issue brain-storage-drop as much of the nervous system as you can scrape together into one, and it would grow silicon into the ganglia until it had an interface, keeping the whole thing awash in nutrients and wicking waste products out to an evaporator. I had to remember to add a little sugar every now and again, and to whisk away the residue in the evaporator, but apart from that, they did their thing all on their lonesome. Dad had been worried that I wouldn’t be able to take care of a pet, let alone four pets, but the pack were the happiest doggies in the state. I’d find them somewhere to live when I got to wherever I was going. I certainly wasn’t going to leave them behind.

  The Carousel stood so high on the cargo hoist that I was able to simply climb its service ladder to the roof and then reach up and catch the boarding ramp for the gondola. I yanked it down, hearing—but no longer feeling—the pain in my ribs.

  The zepp had already warm-booted, all systems nominal. The radars reported a clear lift-off path through Com-erica’s retracted dome-Dad had added it early on, before I was born, with Mom’s help. I had flown the zepp before, but always with Dad at my elbow. It wasn’t rocket science, of course. The thing rose until you told it to stop, then moved in whichever direction you steered it. It was a zepp—easier to pilot than a mecha.

  The zepp lumbered into the sky, dragged down by the Carousel. We cleared the lip of Comerica and picked up speed, rising a little more cleanly as the Carousel and the zepp made their peace with each other. The lights on the pack’s cylinders blinked nervously. I looked around the gondola’s open windows, trying to spot the harrier and the battle-platform, half not wanting to see, in case what I saw was Dad being blasted out of the sky.

  But there they were, Dad still flying circles around the giant thing, its many rotors and gasbags all straining to keep it aloft and stationary. Smaller drones and even a couple manned planes took off after Dad as I watched and he blasted them out of the sky with contemptuous ease. Dad liked to practice in sims a lot. He might be the world’s greatest organic fighter-pilot at this point. Not that that meant much— who cared about being a fighter pilot anymore?

  The platform’s big guns followed Dad through the sky, seemingly always a little behind him. He anticipated their curve, dodging the twisting, seeking fingers of lightning, the hails of ammo, the guided missiles. He was good-I found myself grinning hard and pumping my fist as Dad took out another battery-but I could see that he wasn’t good enough. He had to be good a million times. They had to get lucky once. They would.

  As I came up level with the platform, it seemed to notice me, turning a battery toward me. The shells it lofted at me hung in the sky nearby, then sploded in a deadly hail of millions of microscale daisy-cutters. I yanked hard at the yoke and floored it and the zepp turned away, but not enough. I heard a scritching noise as the deadly little bots skittered on the zepp’s armored balloon and gondola, scrabbling for purchase. They rained down past the gondola’s windows, like dandruff being shrugged off the zepp’s scalp.

  Dad’s harrier screamed over to the battery that had attacked me, flipping and rolling as he opened up on it, pouring fire down until the side of the platform nearest me literally began to melt, liquefying under withering fire and dripping molten metal in rivulets down the side of the
platform. I could see men and mechas running to the affected area, moving up replacement guns, firing on Dad, and then the harrier screamed past me. I caught a glimpse of Dad, in his augmented reflex helmet and crash-suit. He seemed to be saluting me, though he went past so fast I couldn’t say for sure. I saluted back and engaged the zepp’s props, setting a course east.

  I put the zepp on autopilot and turned all the sensor arrays up to maximum paranoia and then went back to watch the dogfight between the harrier and the platform from the rear of the gondola.

  Something had hit Dad. There was smoke rising from the mid-section of the harrier, just behind the cockpit. Those things could soak up a lot of damage and still keep turning over, but it was clear, even from this distance, that Dad wouldn’t last forever. I found some binox in an overhead compartment and watched Dad dodge and weave. I wanted to call him before I got out of range of our towers, but I didn’t want to distract him.

  It didn’t matter. One of the questing, bent fingers of lightning seized the harrier and followed it as it tried to circle away. Smoke poured from the harrier’s engines. The lighting stopped and the harrier began a lazy, wobbly glide toward the platform, Dad’s last charge, a suicide trajectory. Two missiles lifted off from the platform, arcing for the harrier, and they caught it before it could crash.

  My heart thudded in my ears, audible over the growl of the zepp’s turbines. I dialed the binox up higher, letting them auto-track, then switching back over to manual because they kept focusing on the damned shrapnel and I want to find Dad.

  Maybe I saw him. It looked like a man in a crash-suit, there amid the rolling smoke and the expanding cloud of metal and ceramic. Looked like a man, maybe, for an instant, lost amid the smoke. Maybe he landed on the platform and fought his way free—or was taken prisoner.