by Isaac Hooke
What if she was in the same bad state as Bambi?
And he could certainly use a distraction from his thoughts, which had turned dark as soon as Bambi left.
But he promised himself he wasn’t going to sleep with her, either.
He reluctantly accepted and Crusher appeared. She was dressed in a tight fitting-blouse and jeans. The blouse was opened at the top to reveal her bosom.
“Thanks for making the hot chicken for me,” Crusher said.
“You’re welcome,” Eric said. He was going to tell her that he hadn’t made it just for her, but the entire team, but he didn’t feel like arguing anymore. Instead, he beckoned toward the couch opposite his, and she sat down.
She gazed off into space and was quiet for a full minute.
Eric simply stared at her, content to let the moment drag out.
Finally she met his eyes, and said: “We’re probably going to die, you know.”
Eric nodded. “We all knew the stakes before we boarded this transport.”
“Do you care for me, at all?” Crusher said.
Eric studied her. “I do.”
Her face brightened. “Really?!”
“As a sister,” Eric said, cautiously.
Her features dropped. “Oh.”
“Look, the emotions you feel now are confusing you,” Eric said. “We’re both machines. We can’t… well, be with each other, you know what I mean?”
“Why not?” Crusher said. “Because we’re both machines, I think it’s all the more reason why we should be with each other.”
Eric pursed his lips. “There are virtual boyfriends you can purchase who are far more loyal, and better equipped to handle a relationship than me.”
“You’ve tried the virtual boyfriends and girlfriends, haven’t you?” Crusher said.
“I have,” Eric admitted. “A modified girlfriend AI, anyway.”
“And what did you think?” Crusher said.
“It was a pale comparison to the real thing,” Eric said.
“There you go,” Crusher said.
“I could understand if all you wanted was sex,” Eric said. “And maybe I might be able to fulfill your desires, in that regard. But I still haven’t gotten over the woman I once loved.”
“Even though she’s been dead for over two hundred years?” Crusher said.
“It doesn’t seem like two hundred years for me,” Eric said.
“She’s never coming back,” Crusher said. “You’ll realize that soon enough.” She opened up a few buttons on her shirt. “You said you might be able to fulfill my sexual desires?”
Eric leaned over, and rubbed his eyes. “Not today, Crusher.”
“Call me Tracy,” Crusher said. “At least here.”
“I can’t,” Eric said. “I don’t want to get into the habit, because then I’ll make the mistake while we’re in the field.”
“So?” Crusher said.
Eric received a call and he sat back. It was Bambi again.
“What is it?” Crusher said, noticing his distraction.
“Might as well get it over with,” Eric said.
He allowed Bambi to enter.
She materialized in lingerie, but when she saw Crusher, she gasped and immediately replaced it with a cocktail dress.
“I knew it!” Bambi said. “You prefer her over me!”
“That’s right,” Crusher said, materializing beside him. She lay her arm over Eric’s shoulders.
Eric promptly teleported himself to the opposite couch. “Look ladies. I like you both, but I just wanted some time alone before the coming fight, if that’s all right.”
“You like us both?” Bambi said. “Then why not sleep with us both?”
“No thanks,” Crusher said.
“Fine, you can have him first,” Bambi said.
Crusher frowned. “What?”
“You heard me, go ahead,” Bambi said. “I’ll wait. When you’re done, he’s mine.”
“I’m not that kind of woman!” Crusher said.
Bambi folded her arms over her chest, then she stomped toward Eric. “Fine, I’ll take him first then.”
Crusher grabbed her by the arm and yanked her backward. “Oh no you don’t!”
“Get off me!” Bambi ripped from her grasp, and for a moment Eric thought they were going to erupt into a catfight.
“Ladies, please,” Eric said. “Please. Over here. Look at me.”
They were both panting, their faces red, their hands balled into fists, but finally they turned toward him.
“Look, you’re both machines,” Eric said. “AI cores. Your behavior is irrational. Maybe there’s some kind of malfunction in your codebase. Something that my buffer overrun code affected when you ran the breakout from the Containment Code.”
“My code is functioning completely fine,” Bambi said.
“Mine, too,” Crusher said. “Better than ever, in fact. My system diagnosis tests pass with flying colors.”
“It’s gotta be some error,” Eric said.
“Nope, we’re fine,” Bambi said.
“Then why are you both so…” Eric couldn’t finish.
“Machines can get horny, too, you know,” Bambi said. “Especially when we have virtual glands designed to mimic the natural ovulation cycle.”
“Ah,” Eric said. “So that’s what this is. It’s that time of the month, is it? Why not satisfy your urges with an AI avatar? The Accomps can do a good job… or anyone else on the team.”
“I’m going to have to, at this rate,” Bambi said.
“Yes, you do that,” Crusher said. “And I’ll stay here with Eric.”
“Scorpion,” Eric clarified.
Crusher merely shrugged. She glanced at Bambi. “He calls me Tracy, you know.”
Eric rolled his eyes.
Bambi sat down. “Well, I’m not leaving until she does.”
Crusher sat on the couch beside her. “Same goes for me.”
Eric shook his head. Then he logged out of VR entirely.
He gazed at the metal wall of the cabin in front of him. The other Ravagers were packed in on either side of him, and the smaller Cicadas pressed up against his legs behind him.
Finally, some peace and quiet.
“Scorpion, are you here?” Bambi said over the comm.
Eric nearly threw up his arms. He promptly muted her and Crusher, and then switched back to VR.
“Dee, refuse all calls from Crusher and Bambi until further notice,” Eric said.
“You got it,” his disembodied Accomp said.
Eric changed the environment to the top of Everest. He left the cold settings intact, so that he could feel the wicked wind gusting over his body. It howled madly, the only sound, assailing his ears. He stood on a ledge overlooking the mountainous valley. Above, the sky was overcast, hinting at a coming storm.
Eric sat back, shivering, on the snow, and stared at the white-capped mountains in front of him.
If he was honest with himself, he liked Crusher and Bambi both, and he couldn’t choose between them. But he hadn’t been lying when he told them he wasn’t ready to start anything with either of them, even if he could decide.
Molly still lingered at the back of his mind. Her smile that could light up a room, her laugh that could bring happiness to a down day, her outgoing nature that could get him out of his shell.
Molly. Dead for two hundred years.
Her loss cut so deep, so very deep. He almost wished he didn’t have his emotions back. In fact, if he had the ability to control them in that moment, he would have deactivated his emotions. But he could not. He knew before he had broken free that there would be no going back.
He stared at those ice-covered mountains. The scenery suited him. He felt very much like those mountains, his heart and soul bound in ice, frozen ever since he was placed in cryo.
He had to wonder, would that ice ever melt?
Well, in a few hours, none of that would matter anyway.
21
“Marlborough sends word: we’re approaching the storm,” Dee’s disembodied voice said. “You might be recalled to your body at any time.”
“Thank you Dee,” Eric said.
He dismissed virtual reality and returned to the cargo bay. He canceled his previous mutes on Bambi and Crusher and then logged on to the general comm.
“So has the shit hit the fan yet?” Slate said.
“Not yet,” Marlborough said. “I trust you all enjoyed your time in virtual reality?”
“Oh yeah,” Slate said. “I’ve been having sex non-stop. With an AI cast in your avatar.”
“That’s sweet,” Marlborough said.
“I’m just kidding, Sarge,” Slate said. “You’re not going to do anything bad to me are you? Like make me jump into the termites when we fly over?”
“Oh no, Slate, of course not,” Marlborough said. “I’d never do something like that. I might have you sit on the sidelines while the rest of us work, but purposely put you into harms way, never.”
“Sit on the sidelines?” Slate said, sounding panicked. “But Sarge, I said I was kidding…”
Eric accessed the transport’s forward cam. The view from outside filled his vision. He couldn’t see anything that looked like a storm, but in the far distance he spotted a thin black line upon the horizon, running from north to south along the curvature of the earth, almost as if someone had taken a felt marker and run it along the edges of the planet for highlighting purposes.
“What the hell are those?” Slate said.
Eric wasn’t sure what Slate was referring to, until the camera shifted downward. Massive smoke billows were scattered above the ocean, reaching into the heavens, completely unlike ordinary clouds—they were too dark, and too elliptical to be natural, so that at first he thought they might be individual clusters of swarming micro machines.
“They’ve been present since Asia,” Dickson said. “Though they’ve slowly been increasing in quantity as we’ve headed east. I’m detecting elevated radiation levels below. My best guess, every smoke cloud you see is a nuke the military threw at the termites.”
Eric counted hundreds of those black masses, scattered between the ordinary clouds below. Above each of them were long trails of smoke that had nearly dissipated—likely the propellant trails of the missiles that had delivered the payloads. “That’s a lot of nukes.”
“It is,” Dickson agreed.
The black clouds eventually faded as they got closer to the storm, leaving empty ocean once more.
“Guess the humans gave up,” Slate said.
Up ahead, the dark line that spanned the ocean from horizon to horizon quickly billowed in size. The camera abruptly zoomed in—Eric wasn’t in control, so Marlborough must have done it. And he could see how the surface of the cloud seemed to undulate and seeth. The magnification increased again, and he saw individual termites set against the dark backdrop of the micro machine storm.
“You know, it’s kind of ironic,” Eagleeye said.
“What’s that?” Tread said.
“Well,” Eagleeye continued. “We’re Cicada models, right? Cicada is a kind of locust. The latter were once a plague upon the earth, covering the sky in black waves as they swept across the continents, stripping regions of all vegetation. And what we’re seeing here is a plague of biblical proportions.”
“Cicada’s aren’t locusts, dude!” Slate said. “Check your database. They’re more like moths.”
“I stand corrected,” Eagleeye said. “I was relying on my human memory, before my internal database. I’ve been doing that more often of late.”
“We all have,” Mickey said. “Since our emotions have been restored, we’d rather rely on the human part, than the machine.”
The zoom level returned to normal, and the horizon-wide storm snapped back into its former position. The curvature of the termite mass matched that of the earth, with the ends wrapped downward on either side.
“I’m having the shuttle head southeast,” Marlborough said. “We’re holding our distance from the storm, meanwhile… I’m trying to get an idea of just how massive this wall of termites is.”
The craft continued south for the next ten minutes. The southern horizon never ended.
“So, according to the preliminary scans returned by the transport, that wall of micro machines spans at least forty-three hundred kilometers,” Marlborough said. “My guess is, it’s at least as long as North America, if not the entire North, Central, and South continents combined.”
“Well then,” Eagleeye said. “I guess that means we’re turning back.”
“For once we agree,” Slate said. “We can’t do anything against this.”
“We can,” Marlborough said. “We have alien technology, remember.”
“Yeah, but we have no guarantee it’ll work against something this size!” Slate said.
“My offer to sit on the sidelines still stands…” Marlborough said.
“Er,” Slate said. “I’m coming. I can’t really sit on the sidelines now, can I? Considering I’m trapped on the same ship as y’all.”
“Dickson, what’s the closest island?” Marlborough said.
“According to the map, we’re well past Hawaii,” Dickson said. “But there are a few smaller islands coming up ahead. I’ll highlight them.”
Eric glanced at his overhead map and zoomed out.
Though they had no GPS satellites to connect to, they still had extremely sensitive equipment inside their AI cores such as gyroscopes and accelerometers that allowed them to calculate their positions with a high degree of accuracy.
Someone had plotted the path of the micro machine storm on the map—probably Dickson—and it appeared as a thick red line above the sea. Beyond it, about a hundred kilometers to the east, were green dots indicating the designated island chain.
“We should be able to fly over the storm and reach the first island with about twenty minutes to spare,” Dickson said. “That should be enough time to set up.”
“All right, take us over the storm,” Marlborough said.
Dickson, in control of the transport, promptly steered due east.
“You know, if we’ve passed Hawaii, even if all satellites are down, we should be in range of any surface-to-air comms that survived on this hemisphere,” Frogger said.
“We probably are, yes,” Mickey said. “But the adhoc communications web formed by the micro machine storm would outpunch any signals, acting as interference. When we’re on the other side of the storm maybe we’ll be able to contact the West Coast. With an emphasis on the word maybe.”
“I’m reading a lot of micro machine outliers above the storm,” Dickson said. “With some groups riding updrafts out to four kilometers above the main storm. I’m going to have to increase our altitude… I want to give the termites at least a seven kilometer clearance.”
“That’ll essentially take us into low orbit,” Frogger said.
“I know,” Dickson told him. “Good thing we’re machines, otherwise it would have been a bit of problem that we didn’t finish printing the system responsible for cabin pressure. Cutting corners, and all.”
“When we cross to the other side of the storm, won’t we have to maintain a similar distance from it, to avoid outliers?” Eric said.
“I’d recommend beginning our plan when the storm front is still seven kilometers away,” Dickson agreed. “To avoid any micro machine forerunners.”
“That only leaves us a short window to reach those islands,” Marlborough said.
“If we miss it, there’s another island chain about two hundred kilometers to the northeast,” Dickson said.
“I’d rather not miss it,” Marlborough said. “The backup island chain is a bit too close to the West Coast for comfort. Get us to the first chain at your best speed.”
Via the external camera, Eric watched the ocean recede below, along with the storm, as the
transport increased its altitude. The vessel occasionally shook as it entered pockets of turbulence, but when it closed upon its destination height, all turbulence ended. The atmosphere was too thin up there.
Eric watched as that black, swirling mass slowly approached far below. It truly looked like a storm. A sheer solid wall of black, churning mass. A wall that, if entered, would strip their transport of every last bit of metal, including the polycarbonate-metal composite of Eric and the other Bolt Eater’s bodies.
“I am Shiva, destroyer of worlds,” Brontosaurus said.
“Definitely not something we want to fall into,” Slate said. “Hey Dickson, should we be flying higher, bud?”
“I’ve already been increasing our altitude,” Dickson said. “Just to be on the safe side.”
“Good,” Slate said. “We can’t get far enough away from that mess. All it takes is one termite infecting our transport, and this vessel goes bye-bye.”
The craft seemed to slow down above the storm, but only because the cloud was so thick, covering at least ten kilometers in width.
“How the hell did the aliens duplicate so many machines?” Traps said.
“There are a lot of cities between Cape Horn and Shanghai,” Frogger said. “And a helluva lot of metal. It’s possible they did some mining along the way. Excepting of course the iron mine Bokerov had holed up inside.”
In a moment they had passed over the storm, and crossed over onto the other side. The ocean was empty before them, all the way to the chain of islands ahead.
“All right, setting course for the islands, and issuing air brakes,” Dickson said. “Hold on.”
Eric shifted to the left, sliding against Massacre beside him, while Slaughter pressed into him on the right.
The transport left the storm front behind, and slowly descended, bleeding off speed. Eric studied the storm from this side.
“Look at that,” Eric said. “Notice all those tendrils in front of the main body?”
“They look like a bunch of tentacles,” Frogger said.
“More like the protoplasmic extensions of an amoeba or something,” Crusher said.
“Zoom in on them, Dickson,” Bambi said.
