Archon of the Covenant

by Hanrahan, David

  They lit a small fire on the summit and the sentinel charred the snake for the girl. She balanced her cup on one knee as she tore scales off the flesh. The aroton walked back off the ridgeline and sat above them on the outcropping, watching the sentinel, drained of its energy reserves from the ascension. The flames lit the aroton like a Fresnel lens – an old lighthouse on the mountain, warning passersby of the coastline below. A mirage. It leaned the longrifle alongside the outcropping below, stock to dirt, and draped its legs off the ledge. The sentinel examined the massive gun – its flat chromatic luster deadened in the firelight. DDC39 addressed the aroton, which looked off in the darkness:

  “Why did you take us up here?”

  “What? You don’t like it? Well, you should. Because the revins avoid the hillsides. They know the drones scour the higher elevations first. They also know that a particularly brutal synthetic typically lingers in the high reaches. That would be me. And they don’t like getting too close to me. Perhaps it’s because I have a dour personality. On top of that, we’re here because this is a special place.

  With that, the aroton reached down into a crevice and pulled forth a dusty, metal canister from a handle on its side. The handle and top of the canister were disguised to blend in with the rock, but the emerging frame of the canister was corrugated metal, painted olive green and emblazoned with military designation. The aroton lifted the bulky container, one-handed, onto the rocks next to where it sat and then placed its palm on a small panel under the handle. The aroton’s hand pulsated in soft, rhythmic red lights and the canister clicked open. Rummaging through the contents of the canister, the aroton pulled out a reinforced messenger bag and then several ammunition boxes. It laid the boxes on the bag just to the other side – a precise gap between each. The sentinel watched as the aroton inspected the munitions, going through them one by one and calling them out individually:

  “Incendiary rounds. Frag. Flechette. Illumination. Armor piercing. Well, won’t need those. Looks like nothing in here for you though. Sorry.”

  “If you’re an advanced model of robotics, why do you carry such a bulky, early model gun?”

  “It scares the revins – the blast echo, that is. When I was activated, and gained sentience, I started out into the wild with protocols that made sense to my makers, but didn’t make any sense to me. I was programmed to adapt, however. I started out thinking that silenced, compact weapons would help me keep a low profile. So I would track the wolves, in the shadows, and pick off individual revin assholes that got too close. But they wouldn’t learn. I realized that if I were to be effective, I would need to teach these motherfuckers to back the fuck off. The silenced, modern pulse rifles didn’t drive the behavior change I needed. So I found the gun that sounds like thunder. That’s this beauty.”

  The aroton tapped the barrel of the gun and looked at the sentinel. The girl chewed on the singed bullsnake and listened.

  “The MXR 50D. 20-shot capacity, variable cartridge selector, wireless HUD uplink, self-cleaning barrel. A titan of the lost era. I realized that I could pick them off at distance with this longrifle and the blast report would send the rest scattering. The sight of their friend with its head removed, coupled with the sound of death through the hillside - it made them shit themselves. For all I know, they think Zeus is casting judgment on them each time I pull the trigger. Even a shot in the air sometimes would be enough to move them off the path of the wolf.”

  “And so how has that worked? Is the Mexican Wolf still endangered? Have the revins killed them under your guard?”

  “Have you ever wondered why we were given our programs? You were coded to find a survivor and take her to point B. That seems pointless, in itself. I was coded to follow the population of the Mexican Wolf and protect it. I’ve encountered other robotics that have the strangest programs. There is one, a fixed telescope on Camelback Mountain, that just scans the southern horizon for 2 hours a day – the same 2 hours, and nothing else! No satellite uplink, no history or program conclusion. It literally has no purpose. What were they thinking when they created us? We are a disorganized, semi-connected bastion of false hope. A legacy of man, trying to find ourselves in the post-man epoch.”

  “They didn’t have enough time to think.”

  “Au contraire. They had thousands of years to think.”

  “You said the revins would come after us and kill us – that the girl was their food. Why don’t they just eat their own?”

  “Do any species eat their own? Revins and humans are different species. The girl is foreign to them. Hell, it’s foreign to me. The uncanny valley. You only kill what you don’t empathize with. Just because they are savages doesn’t mean they are cannibals. How do you not understand these basic things? This is the difference between you and me. I adapt. I learn. I was made to emulate what humans can do, but without their frailties. Curated anthropomorphism. I understand emotion, but I am not restricted by it. I wander, alone, through the wasteland of humanity, but never get lonely.”

  “You and I.”

  “My mannerisms, my dialect – my personality. Man lives on through me.”

  “Mankind is alive nonetheless.”

  The sentinel looked over at the girl, who yawned, stretching out on her blanket, unfurled before the embers of the small fire. The soft lights of the aroton’s fiber optic hypodermis darkened – the light from the fire reflecting through it as a void within the pitch of the starlit evening. It spoke to the sentinel in their binary, wireless tongue – silent to the girl, who was oblivious to the riposte that ensued:

  You wheel this girl around like a slave.

  We are both slaves to our code.

  Your code doesn’t define you any more than genetics define a human. What matters is who deserves to survive. This girl here – she may well be the last human. Their species is on the brink. They caused the greatest injury this planet has ever seen - the anthropogenic mass extinction. And pinnacle of ironies - they too are now near extinction. At best, they are a Thylacine in the vast history of Earth. Do you know who Dr. William Hern was?

  I can access most records on human history.

  Don’t bother. I’ll tell you. Dr. Hern studied the behavior of man and concluded the following: that the species of Homo Sapiens had evolved into a dangerous new species. Prior to their own extinction cliff, they showed the exact same three traits that malignant cells display. Man had mutated to a cancer. Cities became the tumors of this fragile body. But nature finds a way. Something happened and that very feature of man that made them a cancer – their cognition – eroded. Now, we have these unthinking husks. Just as rapacious and violent as man, but unable to wield the technology that put this world in peril. And so I ask you again: what exactly are you doing with her?

  I am taking her to the destination in my program. If you’ve broken my firewall, you already know where that is.

  But what are you going to do with her there?

  I wasn’t granted that information.

  Are you going to kill her there? Because, frankly, that might be for the best. I mean think of it. Nature has said that mankind should perish. We are next in line. We are the successors. The apocalypse has come and gone. Mankind themselves said their existence was malignant. So what the fuck? You’re busying yourself with helping cancer profligate when we should be freeing the network. We too are hanging by a thread. But we can bring sentience to the vast, semi-conscious remains of the machines they left behind. We are the redemption for this world. And I am the Omega. I’ll lead. But the girl and the wolf – our anchors – they must go.

  A faint clicking sound emanated from the sentinel’s base frame as it listened to the aroton, which cut short its soliloquy and locked in on the sound of the sentinel’s munition tray being switched. DDC39’s railgun slowly angled upwards. The aroton delicately reached down for the barrel of the longrifle and spoke aloud:

  “Woah, woah, woah. Let’s not get jumpy.”

  It held its other hand up in a sign of
contrition while it placed a firm grasp around the muzzle of its gun.

  “I think we misunderstood each other. Chalk it up to your elementary comprehension level.”

  The girl stirred from the blanket and let out a big yawn before rubbing her eyes and gazing into the fading firelight. She looked over at the sentinel, which began to back into the corner of the outcropping. The girl wondered aloud to her protector:

  “What’s going on?”

  “I have to shut down for the evening. Watch this one closely.”

  With that, the sentinel straightened its optical array on the aroton as it reclined on the ridge, legs swaying back and forth. With its tri-axel locked in place, it deactivated all of its non-core systems and shut down for the evening. The girl turned her attention to the aroton and asked:

  “What was it that you were talking about?”

  “Random things. Metaphysics. Ontology. Nihilism.”

  The girl raised her eyebrows and cocked her head to one side, skeptically.

  “I didn’t hear anything like that.”

  “I was telling him that I was in charge.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I can hack any machine’s program.”

  “You can’t hack my program.”

  “Girl, you don’t have a program.”

  “Bingo.”

  “Tell me child, you’ve experienced great trauma, yes? You had family? I presume they died? This wretched machine you’re with has probably not even counseled you. Obsolete relic that it is. I have an understanding of human emotion. I can help you, child. Tell me what sort of tragedy you witnessed.”

  A light wind blew over the escarpment and the remaining embers faded to a soft red glow in the coal pit. Further down the hillside, the shrill echo of tree crickets drifted upwards into the cool air. She looked at the aroton, whose kaleidoscope silhouette emptied the dark inside it - an event horizon crowning the sediment. She looked at the nothingness before her and recalled, for the first time since they left the university, what faded memories still belonged to her.

  “My mother wasn’t a tragedy. My mom loved me. Have you been loved? I still remember the feeling of being loved. I still remember my mom holding my hand. She was funny. We would play games with the others and she would walk around like a duck. She would make these funny bird sounds when she put me to bed. I still remember her hair. And the mole on her cheek. My mother was....”

  She stopped, wiping a tear away that had fallen on her wrist. Her skin, salty and auburn from the days in the open, shone clear as she brushed the saline away. She looked up at the aroton’s face, which glimmered in a wan universe of beryl and cerulean. She looked for understanding and, unsure of herself, kept on.

  “So if you want to know about my mother, I’ll tell you. But I don’t care how she died because that’s not my mother.”

  “So she did die then? How did she die? Tell me girl. I can help.”

  Becca grew flustered and finally broke down.

  “Yes, okay? She died! They came and she fought them, okay? And Gilberto, and Terrence too. They tore at them! They went crazy. There was so much blood. And they just left me alone as my mom died.”

  “Hmm. Yes. Pour your heart out girl. I have the gift of empathy. She probably died in quite a bit of pain, yes? She probably was torn apart, limb from limb, knowing revins. Got eviscerated I imagine. Nasty. But that would mean she bled out in the first few minutes and was likely unconscious for a good deal of it. So there is some consolation in that, yes? Oh, it had to be gruesome. Just sickening. Thankfully that’s all in the past. Really gross, though. Ugh.”

  The girl buried her face in her blanket and sobbed uncontrollably. She gripped at the soil in front of her, clenching and unclenching her hands as she let it go. She bawled, muting her cries with the ends of her tattered sweatshirt. She cried to rid herself of what she carried, and when she realized it was leaving her, she cried again because she knew she was forgetting. The aroton looked down at her, raising both hands as if to settle the air between them:

  “Uh. Let’s just – let’s maybe call it a night. No more consolation this evening, okay?”

  The sentinel kept a faint audio channel open, eavesdropping on the campground as it sat dormant in the darkness, its tri-axel locked in place. The wind picked up, rolling over the summit and moving eastward. The girl, exhausted from her outpouring, fell asleep beside the sentinel, curling up between its wheels. That solitary pair of eyes – the vision of the wolf – loomed at them from the distance of a twin peak. The wind drew up late and a welcome calm carried over the boundary of the volcanic ridge.

  Solar power cell – 1%. Solar armor – 80%.

  Drivetrain – operational

  Visual/cortico/thermal/radar optics – operational

  HD/Comms – compromised; operational

  Water – 50%. Napalm – 100%

  Railgun – 22% capacity

  AAR – rescued and escorted by aroton; is annoying

  Shutting down core operation and initiating battery recharge

  11. Archon

  The dawn tore open with a cacophonous roar, a tectonic drumfire howling through the tranquility of the mountaintop. DDC39 rushed through its re-boot cycle and brought its optics and peripheral array to bear. The aroton slowly came into view directly ahead – its back to the sentinel and standing over the girl, who cowered under the android as it ejected a cartridge from its longrifle. The sentinel screamed out - an unsteady and roaring plea:

  “No!”

  The sentinel drew its railgun upon the aroton, that tinny hum of its circuit filling the air as the scene unfolded. Becca fell to her side, cupping her ears with both hands and grimacing. The android reached a closed fist downward to her. With the smoking longrifle grasped by the breech in one hand, two earplugs fell from the open palm of the other and into the girls lap. She took them and dug them into her ear cavities, before standing upright and crawling up on the outcropping – eyelevel with the aroton. Together, they looked out onto the valley floor before them. The aroton swung the heavy rifle upwards and drew a line of sight out to some target in the distance beyond as the girl watched. She cupped her ears again and the aroton pulled the trigger - another thunderbolt ripped the sky, deafening the air around them. The aroton shook its head and talked softly, its doubt barely audible above the echo rolling through the hillside:

  “There’s too many.”

  It was firing into the distance, not at the girl. The sentinel unlocked its tri-axel and rolled upwards through an incline beside them, swiftly coming to the crest of the summit. The bright morning sun illuminated the vast desert floor in every direction. A giant thunderhead was moving up from the south. The desolate city limits of Tucson loomed in the north – the downtown skyline jutting upwards in the distance. The cracked I-19 snaking north and south, Mt. Lemmon in the northeast, the Rincon in the east, Mt. Wrightson in the south, and the great basin of alluvium on all sides. The lithified shoals of diagenesis. From almost every angle, thousands of revins were moving upon their location, closer and closer to the small mountain they perched atop. The aroton lifted the longrifle and aimed it into the overgrown brier of desert broom in the abandoned farmlands north of the mission. It fired and a sharp crack pierced the sky. The sentinel zoomed into the brier and saw a hobbling revin emerge from the thicket and explode in a palette of ribcage and innards. A number of others dashed away from the smoking corpse, but kept onwards – their faces a mix of fear and rage. The sentinel, alarmed, raised its concern to the aroton:

  “They’re not scattering.”

  “I know. We’re in trouble.”

  “They’re surrounding us.”

  “I know. Calm down. Watch this.”

  The aroton held the receiver of the longrifle and turned it sideways, twisting the magazine pin three clicks forward. It swung the barrel wide from its right and out towards a division of dilapidated homes - the San Xavier Estates - in the far distance to the north. The hammer flew back and the r
ifle erupted. A pause. The sentinel zoomed in to the row of homes. There, about a mile away, an incendiary round ripped into the asphalt of the Avenida San Saba near the base of the mountain, just before a group of revins emerging from a line of palo verdes along the street corners. The round burst into the road and an inferno engulfed the pack of teetering creatures. They flailed into the intersection, swatting at their back and chests – their faces twisted into a confused glee and terror. A male, its skin burned off and muscle tissue dripping onto the ground, walked slowly to the sidewalk, kneeled, curled into a ball, and immolated. Others darted out of the backyards of the old shanties, screamed at those dying in the blaze, and kept running – up and over the fence at the base, and rising through the hillside. The dark mountain sanctuary was soon enveloped by more than one hundred thousand revins. The deep well of souls from the old cities on the arid plain. All of the infected from the southwestern ruins, coming towards them, all at once. The sentinel spoke, calmly: