by Todd McAulty
I abandon the cluster of hotel guests I’m working on and hunker down next to Martin. “Hey,” I say. “Something’s up.” He follows my gaze to the soldiers.
I’m not a fan of guns. But I have to admit, the sergeant leading the small squad knew how to use hers. She didn’t bother saying a word—she just waded into the center of the unmoving civilians, pointed her rifle in the air, and fired a short burst. Then she reached down and grabbed a middle-aged bellboy and yanked him to his feet, pushing him toward Stetson.
That was all it took. All of a sudden everyone was moving, and in the right direction. The gunfire had badly unnerved many, and a young woman passing on my left was close to hysteria, but at least they were walking. As Martin and I followed the others south, I saw the sergeant send two soldiers into the lobby to retrieve those who’d managed to slip back inside. In a moment they were following us too.
“You lost your coffeepot,” Martin observes. I’m surprised to discover he’s right. I don’t recall putting it down, but I’m no longer carrying it. I hope it found a good home.
Martin and I are pulling up the rear, just ahead of the lobby-dwellers who’ve been forcibly repatriated with the rest of us. We get away from the entrance to the hotel, and we’re making our way south down Stetson Avenue. Sixty of us fill the street. The sergeant has her rifle on her shoulder, pointed skyward, as she strides briskly toward the front. Paradoxically, everyone is both following her and giving her a wide berth.
“Oh my God,” says Martin.
I turn. Martin has stopped walking. He’s looking back toward Wacker.
A Union mech has entered the battle from the west. It’s sleek and spry, thirteen yards tall, sixty tons of deadly American metal. Where the Venezuelan machine moves like a bird, this thing is accelerating down the street like a freight train—fast and implacable on two heavy metal legs. I can see a constant halo of sparks around its torso as it absorbs small arms fire from the Venezuelans on the street, but it ignores them. Instead, it is focused on the robot.
As Martin and I watch in paralyzed fascination, it launches a trio of missiles—two at the robot in its path, and one at a concrete barricade sixty yards to our right.
A bunch of stuff happens then, all of it bright and all of it very loud.
Martin turns and starts running south. We collide and he nearly knocks me flat. He grabs me just before I hit the pavement, helping me regain my footing. “Come on!” he says.
“Yeah, yeah—go! Right behind you.”
Martin nods and bolts, vanishing into the crowd. Everyone is running now, in full flight south.
My ears are ringing, but not so much that I can’t hear the sudden crescendo of return fire, and more explosions. I’m standing, and it occurs to me that’s a dumb, dumb idea. I flatten, palms on the pavement and elbows in the air like I’m doing push-ups, and watch what unfolds.
What unfolds is a knock-down, face-to-face slugfest between a Union mech and a heavily damaged Venezuelan robot; a battle of wills between an elite American pilot in a titanic war machine and a coldly calculating machine intelligence in a forty-ton armored carapace. I watch the whole thing from a front-row seat scarcely a hundred yards away, hypnotized.
Most of the battle happens too quickly for me to follow. Both units are exchanging fire, mostly small arms. The Venezuelan robot is in pretty bad shape. It’s lost part of its outer carapace, and open flames have started to flicker at the heart of the black smoke pouring out its back. But the Vulcan is still intact, and it lets loose twice at close range. It must have hit at least once, because I see the mech shudder. I hear shrapnel peppering the road, the barricades, and even the hotel to my left. A third-floor window shatters, and broken glass cascades to the sidewalk fifty feet away, some of it bouncing within a few feet of my head.
As dynamic as all of that is, I know the most intense part of the battle is invisible. While all that hot metal is flying through the air, these two titans are simultaneously hammering each other with powerful short-range electronic countermeasures, attempting to confuse, slow, or overexcite every semiautonomous component they can identify. Each of these beasts is a conglomerate of hundreds of patched systems, every one with several potentially exploitable weaknesses. Slow even a couple systems down a fraction of a second, and it can mean all the difference.
I couldn’t tell who had the upper hand in the desperate electronic struggle, but here in the physical realm, the mech was killing it. The robot takes two hesitant steps backward, its left leg vibrating violently. There’s a soft wooosh, and suddenly its whole upper third is engulfed in flame.
Just like that, the battle of the titans is over. The robot is trying to retreat, but it’s pinned against one of the concrete barricades. It twists, trying vainly to step over it, but the barricade is too tall. It’s burning out of control now; thick black smoke is billowing from its torso, and five-foot tongues of brilliant flame are licking its spine.
It’s a sitting duck, but the mech has already lost interest. The heavy Union machine twists, concentrating fire on the Venezuelan soldiers. I hear hundreds of bullets hitting concrete and pavement, and the screams of pain as they find softer things.
It’s time for me to be gone—long past time. I pull myself into a squat, start retreating farther south down Stetson, unable to tear my eyes off the huge killing machine striding into the midst of the enemy.
Except it isn’t striding. Not exactly. It’s stopped, in fact, almost dead ahead, at the intersection of Wacker and Stetson. It seems to be hesitating. I’m struck again at how animalistic these things are, and right now, it looks like a canny wolf, smelling a trap.
The pilot must have sensed something. The mech takes a step backward, then another. I hear running feet to my right, tear my eyes away long enough to see a squad of soldiers near the hotel in a crouched run toward my position. I feel a surge of terror then—it’s one thing to be on the sidelines of a firefight, and a very different thing entirely to be right in the middle of a group of soldiers taking fire.
I throw my arms up over my head, stand as straight as I dare, and start running down Stetson Avenue.
I never saw the missile—or whatever it was—that almost killed me. All I remember is getting punched hard mid-step, and the ground moving abruptly five feet to my left. I take a tumble—and I mean a tumble—head over heels and landing hard, slamming my shoulder into the pavement and ending on my back.
The world is spinning. I’ve had the breath knocked out of me, and I’ll have a nasty bump where my head whacked the pavement, but I don’t think anything is broken. There’s more ringing in my ears. I hear a lot of shouting, but I’m so turned around I have no idea where it’s coming from. I should get up; I should be running. But I sit tight for maybe twenty seconds, gripping the pavement, just breathing, waiting for the owww to recede.
It takes a surprising effort just to sit up. I’m dizzy, and a little nauseated. But I still hear a lot of gunfire, and that’s a powerfully effective motivator. I locate my feet, get them under me.
I smell smoke. Something nearby is burning. Everything is blurry for a few seconds, and I blink to clear my eyes. I risk a glance back toward the hotel.
There’s a large chunk missing from the street, maybe thirty yards away. A few seconds ago, a squad of soldiers was running in that direction. I can’t see them now, though the smoke and haze are obscuring my vision. I stare stupidly at the smoking crater.
Someone is calling my name. I’m having a hard time with directions, so I check them all methodically, one by one. Finally I spot Martin. He’s maybe eighty feet south down Stetson, waving at me. He’s saying something.
“Get down!” He takes a few steps toward me, thinks better of it. “Barry, get down!”
I realize I’m standing. I’m not sure how that happened. I begin a hunched run south—but too fast, too fast. A wave of dizziness makes me miss a step, and I barely avoid falling again. I stop moving and bend over, gripping my knees, waiting for it to pass. I fe
el naked and exposed, but at least I’m still upright.
Something brushes against me. It’s the short black-limbed robot. It’s stumbling south down Stetson. Every time it moves, its right leg makes a high-pitched, ugly sound. It’s mangled, pretty bad. Its head twists and it glances at me as it shuffles past.
“You okay?” it says.
“Yeah,” I manage. “What happened to you?”
“Shrapnel hit,” it says. It waves a shaky arm at its right leg. “Just look at this. I’m fucked.” Shaking its head, it continues on its way, limping south.
I straighten a bit. There are more soldiers behind me. I see them now. Sprawled on the ground in the traffic circle in front of the hotel. They’re moving, getting to their feet. I hear running, more shouting. Someone is screaming.
The screaming is close. I turn back toward the hotel, scanning the rubble, and suddenly another soldier appears right in front of me. He’s just a kid—eighteen at most. His jaw is slack, his hair caked with black soot. Tiny chunks of gravel are stuck to his face, and I resist the urge to brush them off. He looks like he’s been sleeping in the street. He grabs my shoulder, saying something in Spanish. Then he repeats it.
He’s not the one screaming. I step around him. Without another glance at me, he resumes stumbling south.
A breeze is wafting down the street, blowing smoke in my eyes. I smell burnt tar and fuel. I feel pretty out of it, but not so out of it that I don’t want to know exactly where that mech is. After a second, I spot it.
It’s retreating. Moving back west down Wacker, taking slow strides backward with its great metal legs. It’s still firing, but it’s turned its attention northeast now, across the Chicago River. Firing tight, controlled bursts. I see a row of fourth-floor windows on an office tower west of Lake Shore Drive disintegrate, releasing a shower of glass and concrete that cascades to the street.
There’s movement in the street across the river. A Venezuelan convoy; trucks and a tactical Bluegear unit. I can’t tell from here if they’re returning fire. For our sake, I hope their aim is good.
The screaming hasn’t stopped. I’m closer now. I step over some chunks of rubble that weren’t here minutes ago, searching. A wide patch of asphalt nearby is smoldering, giving off wisps of gray steam. There’s a rifle on the ground. I’m not stupid enough to pick it up.
I find the screamer. It’s the young corporal. He’s lying on his back in the street. He’s clutching his throat and his eyes are wild.
I drop to my knees next to him and try to assess his wounds. He doesn’t look burned, and there’s a four-hundred-pound chunk of displaced concrete nearby that looks like it missed him by scant feet. The concrete shattered when it hit the street, like shrapnel. His clothes are ripped in a dozen places, and there’s blood.
There’s a lot of blood.
I glance around quickly, looking for nearby soldiers. There should be a medic, a guy with a first aid kit, something. But I see no one. I call out for a few seconds, but no one answers.
Ten feet away there’s a small white metal box. It’s overturned, and it’s been blown open, and thin white gauze has spilled out, blowing in the wind. Is that a med kit? Is this poor bastard the medic? If so, God help him.
I assess him as best I can. God. He’s even younger than the last one. He looks barely seventeen. There’s multiple lacerations, a bad twist to his right foot that speaks of a broken leg, but there’s too much blood for just surface scrapes. He’s punctured bad, probably an artery, and if I don’t find it fast he’s not going to make it.
I lean over him and pull open his shirt, looking for the source of the blood. It doesn’t take much; the fabric seems almost in tatters. His chest is slick with blood, but I can’t find any major wounds; nothing looks life threatening.
Then I see it. Bubbles, at his throat. I should have checked there first. Each time he exhales, tiny blood bubbles mushroom just above his collarbone.
I move to the metal case, grab two handfuls of gauze bandages, return. I try to clean the wound quickly, looking for fragments of stone lodged in his throat, but blood is flowing too fast. I apply pressure as best I can, stanching the flow of blood without choking him. I need to check his leg, make sure he’s not losing blood anywhere else.
Oh God. Oh God. His eyes are open. He’s awake, staring right at me. He’s trying to speak, but only red bubbles emerge from his mouth, breaking and spilling down his chin to splatter on the pavement.
And then there’s a gun at my head.
The sergeant is standing over me, her pistol drawn and pointed at my temple. “Step away from that man,” she says in nearly perfect English.
I don’t move. My hands continue to apply pressure, keep wrapping gauze around his neck. “I will shoot you,” the sergeant says.
It takes a moment to gather enough breath to speak. “Your man has a punctured trachea,” I tell her. “He needs pressure on the wound. He needs a damned medic.”
I can’t tell if she understood me. “A medic is coming,” she says.
“Not fast enough,” I say. “Get me that kit. That one.” I point with an urgent thrust of my head.
The gun wavers slightly.
“Drag it over here. There may be alcohol in it, something to clean the wound. Or a field suture kit. Your man is bleeding to death.”
“That man is already dead,” the sergeant says. “Now get up.”
I start to argue, to tell her she’s wrong. But when I look down, all I’m holding is a seventeen-year-old kid who’s stopped breathing.
Wake Up. Machines Are Not Your Friends.
Paul the Pirate
Monday, March 8th, 2083
The world is one step away from total subjugation by machines.
I heard my first theory of global machine domination during a brief stint as a grad student at Cambridge in the early ’70s. And man, I thought it was batshit crazy. At the time the only examples of machine states were a few tiny republics and island nations that had fallen to fascist machine dictatorships. They were curiosities, mostly. You could visit them if you wanted, write a paper on the promise and perils of machine governance. They wanted your tourism dollars. Even fascist machines loved hard currency.
But then Russia had that economic shitstorm in 2075, suffered a pair of back-to-back coups, and lost its goddamn mind. When a cold-blooded Thought Machine named Blue Society seized control of the Russian Ministry of Defense and began methodically eliminating her rivals, there was no one strong enough or smart enough to stand in her way. Over the course of eight bloody days Russia became the first true world power to fall under the total control of a machine intelligence.
Then in 2079 the Machine Parliament seized power in Britain, and after that human governments toppled like drunken dominoes. India, France, Japan, Germany, Brazil, Pakistan.
Even then, I didn’t fathom the scale of the political shift happening on the world stage. For one thing, I was still living in the UK at the time, and I saw firsthand how the Machine Parliament was just as reactionary and virulently xenophobic as the worst human regimes, and I believed instinctively that this wasn’t the future. It was barely even the present. As far as I could see machine governments were inherently no better than human governments—and they certainly didn’t trust each other, or cooperate any better. Most of them still relied on political power, meaning they needed a measure of human support to effectively govern. The world would suss that out eventually, and give up this bizarre flirtation with machine governance.
Besides, everyone knew the most powerful countries on Earth—the United States and China, still staunch allies—stood independent and firm, proudly human-governed. Right? Neither was about to bow to machines anytime soon. To protect against internal threats, the United States had even passed the reactionary Wallace Act, forbidding the development of any form of artificial intelligence on US soil. Making it, in fact, illegal for any rational device—friend or foe—to even set foot in the country.
However, that didn�
�t last. Powerful machines gradually turned their gaze to the Sino-American Alliance and schemed to undermine it. And that they did, by sowing distrust over unfair trade, and currency manipulation, and territorial disputes in the South China Sea. America became more and more isolated as regimes in Britain, Germany, and Japan—longtime allies whose new machine citizens couldn’t even legally enter America—stood on the sidelines.
In April 2080, with American alliances in tatters, the fascist machine regimes of Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, and Panama banded together to form the SCC—the San Cristobal Coalition. The SCC stoked the flames of suspicion against America, and powerful interests backed their accusations. Diplomatic solutions failed, and on October 20, 2080, the SCC invaded Manhattan.
I was on vacation in Mexico when it happened, and like the rest of the world, I watched the invasion of America in real time. No one had ever seen anything like the war machines that emerged out of the Atlantic to terrorize the financial capital of the world. Manhattan fell in less than twelve hours. The SCC spread rapidly across the Eastern Seaboard, quickly retooling device factories in New York City to manufacture huge war machines. From there, the Robots of Gotham spilled across the eastern half of the United States, and it looked like nothing could stop them.
But damn, man. Somehow America did stop them. They did it the old-fashioned way, with bloody sacrifice and sheer guts and willpower. And they did it with massive war machines of their own, operated by recklessly brave pilots. They did it in the fields of Iowa, and the streets of Atlanta, and the swamps of Louisiana, wherever the fuck those are. At horrific cost and with peerless determination, America fought the invaders to a standstill, until the Memphis Ceasefire in December 2082 finally brought the bloody war to an end.
America is now permanently divided, with nearly a quarter of the country, including the Eastern Seaboard and much of the Midwest, under foreign occupation. Under the terms of the Memphis Ceasefire the SCC formally withdrew, leaving the occupied zones administered by the AGRT, a peacekeeping force made up of volunteers from over thirty countries. Manhattan has been annexed by a weird robot monarchy, while in Tennessee a more permanent peace is being delicately negotiated between the battered remnants of the US government and an envoy of implacable machines.
