by Kevin Holton
“He never liked the idea of augmenting humanity. Even when our daughter, Serilda, got sick, he didn’t want to try any kind of treatment that might’ve saved her. Nanobot transference held the most promise, but considering that the swarm replaces one’s biology…” She held up a hand, curling and uncurling her fingers. “He felt she wouldn’t be our daughter anymore afterward. That’s why I went first: to show him I’d still be me, so he could rest assured that Serilda would still be her. As you can no doubt surmise, it didn’t go according to my plan. He fled our house in a panic, and vanished for days. Time grew short, so I asked the doctors to perform the treatment on our daughter. He’s hated the Autonomous ever since, jumping to the conclusion that I wouldn’t have made such a decision if I’d still been flesh and blood. I… I’d hoped that hatred didn’t extend so far as to pretend his family didn’t exist.”
No one spoke. Even Grover and Steve had nothing to say. Damien had never exactly been one to share his life’s story, or little bits of it, for that matter, but to know his bias against them came from such a deep wound painted him in a very different light. It made me feel guilty for leaving him alone to work on his mechs, when bringing him out to be social could’ve done him a lot of good. It also made me hate him for spitting on what many of us had lost.
A suspicion snuck up on me. “He wasn’t always a machinist, was he? Damien turned to working on robots and all that after you two changed?” She nodded. “It wasn’t about providing us with tools…”
“…It was about giving himself a sense of control,” Allessandra finished. “He wanted to understand machines better, so if you ever crossed paths again, he might be able to understand what you’d become.”
Akila sighed. “I suppose. In the end, I don’t claim to know his motives, only that he stayed far away from us. I’ve sent emails, texts, voicemails, but they all went unanswered. I sent a scout as well, but I’m told he was turned away.” She looked pointedly at Grover.
Sheepishly, he winced, doing his best to maintain eye contact with her, though he failed. “Sorry about that. The boss said, ‘Get him out of here,’ so I did like he asked. Never would’a threatened to melt him if I’d known why he’d come around. And, to be fair, I didn’t really threaten him, I told your scout, ‘Look, the boss says I gotta melt you if you stay, and you and I, we’d both rather that not happen, I bet, so get outta here, please and thank you.’ He seemed pretty okay with that.”
With an eyebrow arching toward her hairline, Akila replied, “I assume you do more than cook. My thermal lens shows your body temperature is… extremely high.”
“Extremely high. Just like senior year.” He laughed, sharing a look with Steve, then shook his head. “Right, yes. Pyrokinetic and all, so I run hot. Not even sure what my temp is, but I can change it if I focus. Plus, you know, being impervious to any kind of heat or burning, whether the fire’s mine or not. So, steak.” Grover raised his hands to emphasize his dinner. Allessandra hadn’t wanted food, I’d lost my appetite, and most of the others had eaten leftovers, so none of us begrudged his cooking for one.
“Might I ask how that happened? Damien’s certainly had a knack for bringing unusual talents into his midst, before all this as well as after.” We all looked around at the core group. She wasn’t wrong, but considering that she could only see Lisa and Grover as the odd ones, and maybe she knew about Mari, I had no idea what she might or might not know.
“Gene splicing, you know?” Grover shrugged. “Doctors went to cure some autoimmune stuff, and next thing you know, I’m incinerating whatever I aim my hands at. I’m just glad I don’t need any Eve hypos to refuel.”
“Any what?” Akila said, head cocked.
“Never mind him.” Steve cut in with a dismissive wave. “Thing is, you’re kind of right about the odd fuckin’ talents. Here’s the quick version: I’m very good at blowing shit up, or building weapons that’ll blow shit up. Lisa’s got her fancy arm attachment, and she’s a god damn genius at making new fancy arm attachments. She can swap out whatever she wants on the fly, with the disc mag-locking to keep them stable without creating too much extra weight. You know Mari, right? So she’s covered. And Allessandra’s got these boss bionic implants based on science I won’t even pretend to understand or care about, so she can use telekinesis.”
Allessandra nodded in agreement. She’d relaxed a bit now that everything was settled, but I could tell a lot still raced through her mind. Akila looked over at me, so I chimed in with, “Sniper. These two coined my call sign, Heartbreaker.” I gestured at Grover and Steve. “I sit back and take out the Phranna during horde events.”
“Really? Just the Phranna?” Allessandra nudged.
I turned, matching her gaze, her crystal eyes full of reflected fire. “Don’t act like that was all me. Wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without you.”
Glancing at us, her eyes flickering in a way that I gradually understood as switching to various scan lenses, Akila asked, “Were you the ones responsible for…?”
We both nodded, but I spoke. “In fairness, it was mostly her, and even then, we got lucky. Steve built this kinetic cannon thing, and Medraka was firing, well, basically spears at us. You saw them earlier. Giant sharp pieces of metal, trying to impale us. It managed to get us and destroy our vehicle eventually, but we avoided death thanks to our insane and reckless driver.”
Grover gave a proud grin, then bit into his steak, not bothering with a plate or utensils.
“Steve blasted one back at Medraka, and it was still, I guess you would say ‘charged,’ with psychic energy, allowing it to pierce the creature’s skin. Mindcrusher—that’s Allessandra—realized it’s not impervious, it just has a shield up, and when something is attuned to that same energy, it can slip right by. So she fired a few more bolts into its torso while Grover distracted it, and then she channeled some of that telekinesis into my rifle. I aimed for the wound she’d opened, and, it appears, shot out one of its hearts.”
Akila sat thoughtfully, not responding, nor expressing anything but thoughtfulness. We didn’t interrupt, just sat in the half-stillness of the crackling fire, background conversations, and Grover chewing. Finally, she said, “So, your psychic prowess works in the same way Medraka’s does?”
“If you’re going to suggest she’s interdimensional monster spawn, could you not? I already had to pretend to be Satan and threaten to publicly execute somebody tonight. It was a lot of fun, but I’m tired now, and you’re alright, so I’d rather not do it again.” Grover spoke around a mouthful of food, his eyes drooping from fatigue.
“Far from it. I can see why you’re so worried about its return, and we should end our talk soon, so you have a chance to rest in case it reappears shortly. But… I think I have an idea.”
I told her to hold on a second, ran off, and brought Lisa over. If we were going to be discussing tactics, our one remaining weapons expert ought to be there. Akila laid out some of the projects she and the other Nanites had been working on, and frankly, I couldn’t believe Damien hadn’t wanted to coordinate with them more earlier on. I understood why he’d wanted to keep them away, but still felt he was an idiot. People say not to disparage the dead, but maybe the fact that I lost my own child not long before made it hard to find peace with his decision. He’d had a family, they were alive and well, looking for him, begging him to come home, and he said no. Damien had pulled a real bastard move. His reasons were irrelevant.
Apparently, the Collective was on the verge of developing a sensor array that would allow them to predict where and when Medraka was to appear. Due to range limitations, they’d need to make several sensors to station at various points around the globe that would transmit their information into a central database. The physical sensors were complete, but they’d been missing a pretty critical component. Until now, the only component they’d been missing was biomatter from the beast itself, because they couldn’t calibrate the sensors to detect something without first having a sample to detect.
Having wounded that headless Kaiju enough to draw serious blood, our company could finally allow the sensors’ completion. Its blood bore genetic markers full of psychic activity—they had already tested it—and incorporating that blood into the tech would give it the same ‘charge’ as Medraka. Lisa seemed particularly interested in this.
We didn’t even need to ask where they’d station the first one. She told us she’d have it put right in our camp, because the fact that Medraka had no senses—that we knew of—didn’t prohibit the possibility of revenge. If anything, she said, that made revenge a far more probable scenario. “It’s nothing but a mind, even without a physical mind of which to speak. It bends reality to its will. Anything so powerful yet so utterly inhuman will likely be back, sooner rather than later. I doubt Medraka is used to being beaten.”
But that brought her to a second point, which she prefaced with a slow breath and cautious, wary words. Explaining that one of Damien’s biggest reasons to oppose nanobot swarm augmentation was being linked to The Collective, she said that his biggest fear was their greatest, but last resort, weapon. Despite technically being off-shoots of a single massive cloud of nanobots, they couldn’t merge bodies. The coding wouldn’t allow it. They had now found a way to override that restriction.
“The trouble is, if we do that, it’s unlikely we’ll be able to un-merge,” Akila explained. “We’d be sacrificing our individuality, becoming a literal collective of bodies, all of our strength and intellect fused together. Likely forever.”
“All the ants come together and become the Queen.” Allessandra spoke almost under her breath, but not quite. She had a far-off look again, but this more star struck than day dreaming.
Looking up into the sky, Akila replied, “Perhaps. That’s a rather interesting way to think of it. I’d preferred to think of it more like a galaxy. All the stars and planets existing on their own, but combined into one space, dependent on each other to survive. If one sun goes nova, the planets die, and gravity is altered, throwing the other bodies out of alignment. But… this metaphor is far from perfect. Perhaps you understand us better than I.”
Allessandra shrugged. “You’re not the only collective here.”
“What—ah, your bionics. I see. Designed to balance out a psychiatric diagnosis?”
“In conjunction with some pills that we can’t get anymore.”
Akila nodded. “What the west calls mental illness, the east sometimes call enlightenment. Satori, the sudden understanding of all things. Sight beyond the veil. Cosmic knowledge. Knowing how fleeting, tenuous, and, dare I say, fragile reality is frightens those who cling to their egos for definition. I’m not suggesting this is the case with you, but I’ve found myself frequently impressed by the wisdom of those the mainstream has deemed mad. That notwithstanding, being mentally one with so many others has given me a particular insight into the metaphysical oneness of which such spiritualists speak. …Of course, madness and enlightenment are not mutually exclusive.” She glanced at her wrist, as if wearing a watch, and I caught sight of a few numbers glowing against her skin. “My apologies. We Autonomous sleep very little, and though it’s fairly ironic for those who are literally clocks, we have little sense of time. It’s getting quite late. I’ll let you wrap up your evening.”
“I’m alright, I’m usually up this late,” Steve said, “but I could get a start on prepping more munitions for whatever happens next. At this rate, we’ll need them by noon tomorrow. Grover’s the one who…” We looked over. He wasn’t there anymore.
I leaned toward the dwindling fire and found him asleep on the other side of the low wall, snoring faintly in the ashes. “He’s good,” I said.
“Shouldn’t you, well, get him out?” Akila said.
“Nah, he sleeps there half the time anyway.” Lisa smiled in a way I might almost have called affectionate, like she might’ve smiled at a puppy.
Allessandra yawned. “A flame eternally replenished by the love of its own burning.”
We all stood, more or less at the same time, and went off to sleep. I offered Akila a spare tent, but she had work to do, and as she’d mentioned, rarely slept anyway. Allessandra and I walked off, our tents fairly close to each other.
“Do you really think it’ll be back tomorrow?” she said.
“No clue. No one’s ever hurt it before. Maybe it’ll return, maybe it’ll run away, figure it can’t terrorize us anymore. Leave us alone forever.”
“I doubt anyone’s that lucky.”
“Good thing I don’t believe in luck. I only believe in being prepared.”
We were as close to our tents as we could get without parting ways. “Then, when hell comes crashing down around us, I hope we rage louder than our demons.”
“Don’t let Steve and Grover hear you say that. They’ll take it as a challenge.”
She laughed, almost covering her mouth, eyes drifting shut as she weaved a little, practically asleep standing up. “Goodnight, Hennessy.”
Good. The first time I’d heard ‘night’ or ‘morning’ prefaced by ‘good’ in quite some time. “Goodnight to you too,” I said. We parted. I brushed my teeth, checked my weapon, tucked the case away again, and got into bed. For a brief moment, I laid in my cot, wide awake, with a feeling I almost dared to call hope.
Almost.
Chapter 9
The morning rays didn’t have to try hard to wake me. I’d spent the night restless, first unable to sleep, not yet unwinding from all the day’s chaos, then unable to stay sleeping. My dreams were full of vicious little things that scraped and clawed their way across the earth in pursuit of their queen. Silver shadows slaughtered what they could reach, moving a little too fast for me to catch their shape, just the blur of their outline. I had no company to back me up. Only me and my gun, aim and fire, breathe and bang, until the last one fell. Then the ground shook. A thousand scuttling nightmares too horrible to remember upon waking overwhelmed me, dragging me back to their lair.
I rose drenched in sweat, emerging from the confines of sleep into a world baked red from the morning sun. In older days, people said, Red sky at morning, sailors take warning. We weren’t sailors, but the coloration still made me uneasy. I’d seen enough blood in the past few days without a crimson sky bearing down on us.
Stumbling blearily, eyes half-shut, body demanding sleep while my mind rebelled against the possibility of more nightmares, I made my way to the coffee tent. It was my only option, really. Artificial adrenaline, mainlining caffeine, knowing in my gut that if yesterday was bad, today was going to be worse. When I entered, the coffee pots all steamed noisily, one actively brewing, with several other pots sitting by waiting for someone to drink them.
“Rough night?” Lisa entered the tent from behind me. She looked worse off than I did, but far more prepared. Heavy bags under her eyes and a slight droop to her posture suggested sleepiness, but in this red dawn, the steel of her bionic arm looked painted by the blood of her enemies, her height and muscle tone a constant reminder of her history as a war hero. Her blaster had been modified, and now bore a design, a patchwork creation from a space-age future our species might never see. It seemed a more elegant version of Steve’s kinetic cannon.
“Barely slept. You look like you didn’t sleep at all though.” I grabbed a mug. She already had one dangling from the fingers of her one hand.
“Didn’t. Had work to do.” Her tone was too resolute to acknowledge fatigue.
“Work you’d like to talk about?”
She smirked, a You know me too well face. If there’s one thing Lisa liked more than doing well on the battlefield or watching out for her fellows, it was talking about all the weaponry magic she’d been up to. “Akila and Allessandra got me thinking. If Medraka’s blood allows the sensors to match its frequency and detect when it’ll arrive, then it should also align our weapons to bypass its shield.”
It was a really, really good idea. A pang of envy rang in my chest for having not thought of it myself. Topp
ing off her coffee, I said, “Think it’ll work?”
“I hope so,” she said, taking a long swig, despite it still steaming. “Got no idea though. If its properties wear off over time, then adding it to weapons will be useless.”
“…And the sensors won’t work either.” My stomach dropped out. Red sky at morning, and we’ve got no warning. “We saw what happened yesterday. A psychic spear reflected back immediately hurt it. Even a few seconds’ delay allowed that charge to fade, and our attacks yielded no results.”
I willed my brain to turn on, or at least to go in a different direction. The image of metal locusts swarming our cities and tearing society apart replayed on loop in my fried brain. If my dreams were bad, I could only imagine how Allessandra slept.
That kicked a train of thought into gear. “Allessandra might be able to help. She’s psychic too, and her attacks didn’t need its charge. When she took over shooting spears back, they didn’t need Medraka’s influence to do damage. It’s more exhausting, I mean, for her to do it instead of a weapon, but we could save her a lot of trouble if she can confirm ahead of time that they’d still, you know, actually work.”
Her shoulders rolled back in a way I’d learned to recognize. She was primed to move, ready to act, and she began to turn, but stopped herself. Swiveling at the hip, she pressed her mug to her lips, breathing in the steam, her cannon crossed under her chest. Eyes unfocused, they glanced rapidly back and forth, visually riding several trains of thoughts at once.
“…You want to go ask her to help right now, but you don’t want to wake her up?” I ventured, turning back and forth, listening to my lower spine give off little creaks and pops. I’d always done this, but only now did it feel like I was getting old.
“Yeah. After yesterday, I figured she could use the rest.”
