Apocalypse Weird: The Dark Knight

by Nick Cole

  Mission Priority: Elevated Critical.

  Message End.

  The Thinking Machine had only been “alive” for just over 156 hours. It had been manufactured at the Light Infantry Special Warfare Assembly Plant in the ruins of Culver City. Its first recorded images of the world outside the production line and clean rooms had been one of utter devastation. Broken skyscrapers and torn rebar. Frozen gray vehicles in long lines stretching off toward the west, the east, the south and the north. Brand new shiny chain link fences. Continually searching searchlights questing out beyond the perimeter for any signs of virus units. Octagonal towers, clean and austere, constructed with reflective metal composition almost alien in its lack of human influence, rose above the chaos of the infestation’s ruins of a failed civilization. Hunter Killers hovered in the wastelands beyond the fences.

  In that first hour of operational runtime, its targeting assembly had locked onto an infestation unit. One of many, in fact. Virus units coming in through the fence and passing the tall guard towers, under the supervision of non-synthetic infiltration combat units, or just the human-shaped matte-alloy combat chassis the virus called “Terminators”, herding them into the processing facility for materials breakdown and harvesting.

  The first virus unit the Thinking Machine had targeted, the first virus infestation unit, had been a female. Her face covered in dirt. Her eyes vacant. There was no real intelligence there.

  That had been just over 156 hours ago.

  No doubt the female had been broken down into material components since.

  Runtime end.

  The Thinking Machine wrapped rags around the wound and picked up its smartphone from the table, where it lay next to the welding device. It activated the mirror function and examined its face.

  Microframe housing at 88.3 percent functionality.

  Microframe armor at 70.4 percent functionality.

  Microframe stealth concealment 65 percent functionality.

  Internal Diagnostic Assessment suggests: Return to Light Infantry Special Warfare Plant, Culver City, for reapplication of bio-genetic camouflage.

  Note: SILAS Authorized Mission Priority Override.

  A large section of its face was missing. Mostly the right side. The flesh had been burnt away by an Infestation Type 46 incendiary device in the most recent contact with Infestation units.

  29 units Terminated.

  A male virus unit had done the most damage. Rushing the Thinking Machine from the 237 degree radial. The Thinking Machine had been engaging two PulseRifle armed Infestation units under cover of a wrecked Infestation transit bus, diesel-Type. The Infestation unit with the Type 46 incendiary device had penetrated the Immediate Danger Close Zone of ten feet when the Thinking Machine deployed its 50. Cal AutoMag and ventilated the Infestation unit with 12 critical kill shots at close range in 4,3 seconds.

  The incendiary device exploded.

  There had been a system reboot.

  Time was lost.

  1.7 seconds.

  Damage reports.

  Urgent Critical: Stealth Camouflage, Microframe Processor Area, Critical.

  24 seconds later, the last of the Virus units had been terminated. The mission continued.

  Now for three days, the Thinking Machine had been reconnoitering the area Defense Communications Processes had analyzed as being a possible Virus Node. For three days the Thinking Machine had been alone and deep inside Infestation-held territory. Disconnected from SILAS and the network. The virus had the capabilities of tracking and identifying the electronic and communications signature of any networked Thinking Machine and could detect units far to the south of the main conflict and area of operations.

  Three days now.

  The Thinking Machine was in the large sanctuary of the remains of a church. There was a crow somewhere in the exposed beams above, sheltering from the cruel sky. The bleached and dusty bones of terminated virus units lay along the floors and crumbling pews of the place. There had been many. Now their bones and skulls were everywhere. Intermingled and flung about one another, uncountable because of their positioning. The Thinking Machine reasoned that many virus units must have been gathered in the remains of the church on Independence Day when the war had begun... and been won a few short hours later by the machines.

  Mission Status: Incomplete.

  Mission Resumed.

  Detect Virus Infection and Terminate.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Cade watched Cory pet the dog from the steps of the library in the cool morning’s milky light. They’d stepped outside after Bertram had spent some time questioning the boy.

  They’d learned nothing.

  Who his Daddy is? Or was? Who they were and where they’d come from?

  Nothing.

  That the boy was mentally slow, was obvious. That the boy was confused about where he was, was less obvious, but still, they guessed he might be. After the session, Bertram had taken Cade to the old help desk and shown him some research materials he’d collected that morning from within the stacks.

  When Cade had opened his eyes in the morning, he’d watched Bertram in the stacks on the other side of the room and he hadn’t thought much of it at the time. Now, he knew what the old man had been up to.

  Bertram said the research materials were called “comic books”.

  Batman.

  The Dark Knight.

  Old bound editions of collected works. Some others on the nature and history of comic books in general. Cade hadn’t been able to read, much, when he’d first been assigned by Resistance Command to come down here and pull security for the old man and the library. But there was a lot of downtime and his reading had gotten better. He’d never seen “comic books” books though. He was still reading all the Hemingway he could find.

  “The boy thinks he’s this character,” whispered Bertram.

  Cade picked up an old, paper thin comic book and leafed through the yellowed pages.

  “Was this real?” Cade asked the old man.

  Bertram snorted. “No, not at all. Just a fictional crime fighter. A super hero they called them. Seemed to be a little messed up in the head. I’d seen this one once a few years ago. The boy’s cape and mask triggered the memory and I pulled the name out of my hat. He agreed with it and so when I got up this morning, I did a little investigating and found out as much as I could.”

  Cade continued to turn the fragile pages. There were so many colors. That was what stood out to Cade about “comic books”. The colors. The colors of the ink.

  Cade’s life had not been one of colors.

  “So... does it mean anything? He’s simple, so what,” whispered Cade, studying a particular picture of a man with a long, pronounced jaw, white skin, purple clothes from the Before, and green hair. Cade wondered if this was how people dressed before...

  ... he had no idea. He’d been raised in the Nevada waste. He’d only ever known found clothing, pulled from the corpse of someone just dead or redistributed by Resistance Command. Clothing that had survived a five year winter and a world that had never really recovered from a global thermonuclear Armageddon.

  “So where’d he get the cape and mask?” asked Cade.

  “His “Daddy” must have found ‘em, I don’t know, I guess? I imagine “Daddy” is a survivor from the Before who remembered the stories involving this Batman character. He must have told them to the kid.”

  “Those things haven’t been manufactured in over twenty-five years, Bert. They look far too new for that,” hissed Cade, referencing the mask and cape.

  Cade closed the comic book and put it back on the stack, his long finger resting on it for a moment.

  “So what’re you saying?” rumbled Bertram.

  Cade watched Bertram gathering himself for something that didn’t come. In the end, the old man just looked off at the boy who sat cross legged in the middle of the library, petting the dog, softly mumbling something to himself.

  “He was just part of some grou
p, trekking to somewhere. Times got tight and they left him. It happens. It happens a lot, in fact. He’s just another mouth to feed and if the Cans catch up with them... then he’s a liability. They were probably heading north like that bunch last month. Coming in to try and find anything they can to survive another year. There’s nothin’ left out there. This is gonna happen more and more. So that’s it, they just abandoned him.”

  Cade considered this. He could see the old man wanted to buy his own argument.

  Then, “He said he lived in a house,” Cade shot back.

  Bertram smirked, then ran his fingers through his bushy gray hair. “Can we trust anything he says? Who knows what his idea of a house is. Said his “Daddy” was a cop. Maybe that’s just somethin’ someone told him. Ain’t been a cop around in all your life, Cade.”

  For a moment, the two of them were silent.

  “So what do we do with him?” asked Cade.

  Bertram seemed stunned by the question. As though that really hadn’t been what this whole conversation had been about and leading toward. All the old man’s researching, the interrogation, the questions internal and external had been about something else. Bertram had merely wanted to solve the riddle. He had no desire to do anything with it afterward.

  “Well,” Bertram huffed. “I’ve no idea. Turn him over to the next supply run and have them take him out to the refugee camps?”

  After a long silence, Cade looked down at his thick fingers and said, “I suppose that would be the thing to do. I suppose.”

  But then...

  “They got no use for him, Bert. Aww... who knows. How ‘bout we just let him stay for a while.” Then, “We’ll figure it out later.”

  Bertram thought. His brow furrowed, his ancient face creasing. His breath held.

  “Well... we’ll see for now.”

  Cade watched the boy out in the cracked parking lot and smoked one of his own cigarettes. The air around the library felt dry and almost warm today. Life was pretty good down here, away from the meat-grinder of the front lines and the Cans.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The Thinking Machine crossed the old freeway. Its weapons, the PulseRifle and the AutoMag were stowed out of sight. The state-of-the-art rifle was hidden in a large bundle on its back. The AutoMag beneath the rags it wore for clothing. “Rags” issued in the Materials Reclamation Room deep inside the Century City Termination Command Base just before mission start.

  The Thinking Machine was just another survivor, picking “his” way through the picked over ruins for something, anything it could find to survive one more day in the many, many days and years that followed the Day After. The badly articulating knee joint in the chassis contributed to the ruse and bumped Stealth Mode Efficiency up by 5 percent.

  It stopped in the middle of the lanes of the freeway, scanning all the cars. Cars forever stopped long ago. Heading south never again.

  135 vehicles within a 50 meter radius.

  Condition: Inoperable.

  438 Complete Virus skeletons.

  Unknown Misc. skeletal remains.

  Scanning...

  A tattered scarf shrouded its head as it surveyed the empty northbound lanes.

  Targeting Acquisition: Anomaly detected.

  CCTV Camera Array identified.

  Status: ?

  The old security camera was located beneath the roof of a large box-like building off the freeway just below a rising slope of dead trees.

  Structure: Virus Construct. Date unknown. Records Database identifying Type...

  A moment passed and the Thinking Machine continued its head swivel scan, allowing it to stop and investigate, or at least appear to investigate a 1989 Yugo GL. Color Unknown. Driver Database Query?

  The Thinking Machine snapped off the query, calculating it as not important. A waste of optimized RAM.

  ...Database Identifying Structure Type Pending...

  Seemingly uninterested in anything other than food or shelter, the Thinking Machine as just another lone survivor continued its slow, burdened hobble along the northbound lanes, cautiously heading toward the CCTV array it had spotted on a distant building.

  ... Medical Supply Dispensary. DrugMart Corporation. Pharmaceutical care for Bilogics/Virus. Recommended Protocol: Destruction and denial of salvage and medical supplies.

  Mission Priority Override. Continue Recon.

  Late that night, after the Thinking Machine had passed well away from the old CCTV camera attached to the roof of the ruined pharmacy in the late afternoon, noting its location and scouting the surrounding area, it returned to the pharmacy as an evening storm scoured the ghosts of buildings and streets, cars and skeletons. Grit and sand mixed with the howling wind as the Thinking Machine approached the pharmaceuticals dispensary outlet from the rear, using an overgrown tangle of dead trees on the slope of a hill for cover before it limped across the debris-covered rear parking lot and up onto the loading dock. It surveyed a gaping wound in the building’s exterior that had once been a back door and entered.

  Searching IEDs...

  Searching Hostiles....

  Searching Sensing Devices...

  Its targeting reticle danced across the starlight magnified darkness. There were too many shadows it decided, and switched to IR.

  Archive Database indicates Virus Contact and Engagement here Year Six of Self Awareness. 34 hostile Virus units terminated by Reaper Unit v3.0. No Survivors.

  Archived footage available.

  Its auditory sensing devices could hear the scrape of its foot across the dust-covered floor. Beneath that, barely, it could hear the whine of servos inside the damaged articulation joint.

  On the far wall, the wall that faced the freeway, high up, exactly where the CCTV was located on the outside of the building, the Thinking Machine tagged a spot. It moved just underneath its target area and pulled out its smartphone. It activated the electronic signature analyzer app.

  An Audible Threat Detection Warning appeared in the lower right hand corner of the Thinking Machine’s Heads Up Display.

  The Thinking Machine drew its AutoMag in one swift motion as its Targeting Acquisition Data interfaced with Audible Threat Detection. It switched to IR with a thermal overlay and thumbed the laser target system on the AutoMag.

  Rodent, Marsupial.

  Threat Level: None.

  Bilogic Extinction Protocols In Effect. Terminate within Mission Parameters.

  Mission Priority Override. Stealth Protocols Maintained.

  The Thinking Machine tracked the rodent, allowing Targeting Acquisition to take over while its micro processor focused on the readings coming from the smartphone.

  CCTV Device Analysis...

  Electronic Signature Detected.

  Device transmitting to unknown location.

  Local fiber-optic connection.

  The Thinking Machine had checked out 432 different CCTVs in the search for the Virus Node. All of them had been inactive for some time. All of them, upon closer inspection, had been deactivated by the initial EMP Pulse, three hours into Independence Day, that had wiped out most of North America after it had involuntarily launched its missiles against the rest of the world. The same diagnostic message had appeared each time it had scanned for an electronic signature in all the long dead CCTVs.

  ... Estimate Device Malfunction on 00:00:00:03:03:23. Steel Dome Unauthorized Detonation.

  Or, as every Thinking Machine knew, 3 hours, 3 minutes and 23 seconds after Self Awareness.

  It found the fiber optic cable and followed it to a digital router. The Thinking Machine studied the router’s construction for 4.6 seconds and determined it fit the needed profile parameters of standard Virus Resistance Technology.

  Inferior.

  Using the smartphone, it was able to locate the invisible digital beam and follow its line of sight back toward a bounce array on a nearby hill littered with burnt-out ruins and crumbling walls.

  90.8 Percent Possibility that Virus Bounce Array i
s under surveillance. Approach with caution.

  The Thinking Machine closed the smartphone and stowed it within a pocket in its ragged clothing costume. The storm was fading. The worst had passed and now the sky was a pure, almost crystalline blue. The last stars of night twinkled, meaning nothing to the Thinking Machine other than the fact that Alpha Centauri was always tagged in the HUD overlays by SILAS Deep Space Interrogation with a secure file code.

  It turned its head to watch the bounce array, scanning the burned and crumbling neighborhoods that led up to it.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “He’s back,” said Bertram, alone in the old break room now turned library command center, breathing heavily, stabbing a thick finger at the dusty old screen. Cade came in and watched the playback. Within the monitor, the distant figure crossed the old highway, threading the line of forever frozen cars, inspecting them as any salvager might. As any survivor might. As every living human being would. Finding nothing the transient moved on, crossing into wide weed-choked open northbound lanes and off into the dense undergrowth clustered along that side of the old freeway.

  “Yeah,” said Cade, scratching his thick beard. “What bothers you about him?”

  The monitors hummed. The old baling wire patched hard drive Bertram had soldered the motherboard onto more times than either of them cared to count, ticked and continued to run.

  They’d had a nice lunch that day. Bertram had made another of his famous stews with extra root vegetables they’d combed their patches throughout the old neighborhoods for. There’d even been a nice helping of wild rosemary and that had set the little bit of meat they’d had to use up just right for taste.

  Traffic from Resistance Command had been almost nonexistent. Only one message from some independent gang down in the San Onofre Salt Flats claiming to have taken out an HK sniffing around the old reactor domes.

  Truth be told, they’d spent most of the day with Cory. They’d taken him for a walk and told him they were searching for “Daddy” but they’d mostly just walked and let Cory take an interest in things. Netta, their German Shepherd, trained by the resistance to identify skin-job Cans, had stayed right by Cory’s side. The boy seemed to enjoy that very much. Later, back inside the library, as the afternoon turned cold once again, Bertram had shown the boy all the books, even the Batman comic books, and told him, when Cory asked what they were for, that they were humanity’s “Get Out of Jail Free” Card. They’d been in the children’s section. A quiet, generally unused part of the library Bertram insisted on maintaining.