Tropic of Kansas

by Christopher Brown

  “So he’s apparently almost like some kind of ninja, Charlie,” said Kendra Clark, one of the evening news anchors on American Sunset. “Jungle warfare—in the suburbs.”

  The signal was rough, fracturing into broken pixels every few seconds, but Fritz was able to hold the feed.

  “Yeah, every time he strikes, he disappears back into the woods,” said the co-anchor, Charlie Owen. “But let’s see if he can hide from this beast—the new hunter-killer from General Robotics.”

  “Whoa!” said Clark. “It’s a walker!”

  “That’s just the beginning,” said Owen.

  Even then, in their bunker at what seemed like the end of the world—or at least the end of hope—as they watched the public execution of the figure who best embodied popular aspirations and effective tactics to achieve them, they managed to laugh. Because of course, in America, the end of the world had to be accompanied by banal color commentary, and used to sell ads.

  They could laugh in part because they knew the movement still had a few tricks left to deploy, things they were cautiously confident would remain surprises to the regime.

  However, they stopped laughing when the hunter-killer stepped tentatively but menacingly from the gangway of the self-piloted cargo prop on awkward hydraulic legs. Or at least they appeared awkward to Tania. Unnatural—a primitive robotic simulation of the musculoskeletal locomotion of a four-legged mammal. Its head came up on a strange coiled stalk, electronic eyes wrapped in a lidless white helm of bulletproof metal. It looked blind by the standards of nature, but you could see it was watching everything, assembling a complex model of the immediate tactical situation in the silicon brain that rode on top of its atomic heart. The beast had a patchwork exoskeleton of polished metal plate, mostly white but with a few off-color panels of red and black. Its call sign was a machine code laser-etched on its left rear haunch. It had a black box where the flag should have been.

  “Is it armed?” asked Clark.

  “I’m sure,” said Owen. “It’s a beta model battlefield interceptor straight from DADA, the Defense Autonomous Development Area in Nevada. So it’s definitely meant to be combat-capable. Official moniker looks like one of those network-generated secure passwords, but apparently its human minders have given it a nickname: ‘Argie.’”

  “That thing doesn’t have ‘minders,’” said Walker. “It has servants. The robots are fully in charge, at the pleasure of the Prez.”

  “I think the President gave up control when he released the autonomous code clearance,” said Tania. “And I don’t even know why you take it for granted that the President is still even around.”

  “He’s on TV every night, delivering his weird-ass curfew messages,” said Walker. “Good night, America.”

  “How do you know he’s not a robot, too?” said Andrei.

  Walker shrugged.

  Argie had the lines of a warhorse, but as it walked past one of its human helpers, a guy in a yellow jumpsuit with black plastic sunglasses, you could see it was too tall for any man to mount. The hunter-killer stopped for the human, connected through some mode of communication you couldn’t see. The man stepped underneath Argie and made some adjustments through a panel inside of one of the rear legs.

  Argie seemed to focus in on the figure of Sig, who was being held by three guards and one smaller robot amid the crowd of soldiers and hoverbots a hundred yards down the runway. The head stalk whined, spun, pointed—and froze. And then, from deep inside its mechanical body, Argie emitted a sharp tone that ascended in volume until the people around were covering their ears—a robot howl pitched to destabilize human equilibrium. Bad enough to make Tania mute the volume, and cause Walker to start gagging.

  And as she saw the intense pain on Sig’s face, Tania remembered all her broken promises to keep him safe, and had the sudden feeling that everything that was about to happen was all her fault.

  But she couldn’t look away.

  117

  Sig felt the sonic blast rattle his cells and slumped down in the arms of his captors. They did what the voice of the hoverbot instructed and let him slide to the ground, like a toy they were leaving for the giant dog.

  The guards walked off as Sig tried to shake the jams. He got up on one arm. He was alone in the middle of a military runway, right on top of one of the center stripes.

  Sig watched the four-legged robot as it watched him. It moved a lot like a moose, he thought, but without the natural grace, and definitely more predatory. It seemed ever on the verge of collapsing, as if each part of the body were run by a separate computer that barely managed to stay in contact and coordination with the other parts. The robot had no smell other than a faint whiff of electrical burn. It stepped toward Sig.

  Sig stood up, just as the robot went into a crouch, each leg bending to bring its metal body down into contact with the tarmac.

  And then it leapt, higher than anything that heavy should be able to jump.

  Sig reeled, moved backward and sideways as the robot fell toward him from its zenith. The robot adjusted, but still missed Sig, landing with a spring just off the centerline, its ball-pointed feet indenting the asphalt.

  Sig looked for weaknesses. He heard machines inside the beast whirring and clicking. He looked at the gaps between the armor plates. He saw colored wire nerves, metal tendons, and ballistic membranes. He saw the robot twitch, contract, and bound.

  Sig was down before he could move, knocked back by the one-two flicks of well-targeted forefeet. It was playing with him. He tried to crawl backward and up onto his feet. The robot followed him, watched him, then swung back one long leg and hit him with real force.

  The hydraulic kick of the atomic robot flung Sig into the air, high and far. He landed hard. He did not move for a long minute.

  Eventually Sig sat up, slowly, winded and battered. Color bleached from the air around him, then bled back in. He could see the tear in his left arm and feel another one inside his shoulder.

  His ankle hurt, too, the right. It was twisted, the foot bare. He saw the lost sneaker ten feet away, so he pulled off the other one.

  As he recovered, Sig saw the handler in the background, watching his pet do the job he couldn’t, making sure the thing paused for televisual drama rather than finishing Sig off too fast. Sig imagined that if he’d encountered this robot in the “wild,” he would already be dead. Or maybe his friends were right, and the robots were the real masters now, smart enough to play for the camera.

  Sig saw the brig where his comrades were locked up.

  Sig saw the hangars where they kept the robot’s avian kin. He saw some of the airbots overhead, flying low, providing patrol and live feed.

  He saw the cameras.

  He saw the crowd of people behind the cameras—reporters, soldiers, government officials, prisoners brought out to watch the execution and tell the demoralizing story to their cellmates.

  Sig stood, slowly, at the edge of the tarmac. He watched the robot assess his movements. He studied its hydraulic twitches, trying to intuit its machine-code instincts. He wondered how much of its brain was written by man, and how much by new machine intelligence.

  Sig tried to imagine what this robot’s descendants would look like, three or four generations down the chain, and wondered if they would have their own human servants.

  He wondered what autonomous robots made by humans would do to the woods, and the waters.

  Sig stepped back off the tarmac, onto the patch of turf next to the runway. The earth squished between his toes as he stepped farther back, the soil still engorged from two days of heavy rain.

  He turned and ran, zigzagging across the soggy ground.

  He heard the sound of the robot leaping again. He turned to face it, staggering sidesteps. The robot tried to splay midair, too late. It planted like a giant cleat, hard metal slurp into mud as all four limbs penetrated the ground and immobilized the mechanical beast.

  Sig mounted the robot, clambering up onto its back. The armore
d panels were easy to rip off. The head flailed as he tore wiring and cables from along the back—it was trying to knock Sig loose but coming up short. He used one of the shoulder plates as a primitive axe, hacking and prying at electromotor assemblies and then the sectioned metal spine until it cut clean with a liquid pop, adrenaline flooding out his broken pain. He stood, tossed the plate, reached down, grabbed the coil, and yanked with all the force of his body. He fell back, and the head fell back with him, clanging off his own body, the white helm bouncing off to reveal a thousand glass lenses and fiber optic points, all bleeding photons into the static of the air.

  Sig stood back up, with the metal coil pulled over his shoulder, and dragged the robot back toward the cameras as the soldiers rushed to intervene.

  That was about when Clint and Xelina and a contingent of the hundred Texans had gotten to a high point across the river from the base. They had the thing it had taken them months to build on a big flatbed semitrailer. The team that put it together were Xelina’s welder brother Luis, his tinkerer buddy Jerry, who used to work at NASA, and a real smart electrician named Connor. It was a mess of metal boxes, batteries, solar panels, and wires at the back of a big tube with a lens at the end. They called it the camping flashlight of the gods.

  When they flipped the switch, it popped a flash against the back of everyone’s eyeballs. All the lights went out from Fort Meade halfway to Richmond, and drones fell from the sky like big metal doves.

  118

  The White House was not burning anymore, but the lawn was. A hulking armored personnel carrier smoldered on the edge of the ceremonial driveway. The giant double doors of the mansion were wide open now, breached by the people in the battles of the long night before. The grounds breathed wisps of black smoke from the flaming spilled fuel, shadow dancing with the scorch marks and hurried tags marring the building’s exterior walls. From a block away, Tania could see rebel soldiers in the man-made haze. At first she thought they were trying to squelch the flames, until the gunfire and laughing made her realize they were trying to make them worse, taking turns seeing who could ignite the gas tank.

  Tania remembered the last time she had been here. That seemed like a long time ago. A lifetime ago. Another person’s lifetime.

  It felt like some kind of spell had been broken. The haze over everyone’s heads cleared out, the way it does after a big storm or a blackout or some other event that suspends normal operations of daily life. Too bad it took so much blood, though not as much as she would have imagined. Once people woke up, all the big institutions collapsed crazy fast. And when the machines of the State were grounded, the streets filled with people who were no longer afraid of the skies.

  The President had tried to escape in the night as the rebels approached the federal city. He didn’t get far. They got him in Anacostia, as he tried to reach one of the ships in the naval yard. A group of hoodlum kids saw him first, and pretty soon it was a mob. Everyday people came out of their houses and swarmed him and his detail. Tania heard they were holding him in the cell of a police precinct they had taken over in the chaos, neighborhood watch as self-directed rebellion, now negotiating its own terms with the UN representatives coming in to try to help restore order.

  Tania navigated around the craters of Lafayette Square, past the altered statues of the German and French aristocrats who helped win the first American Revolution. Andrew Jackson was gone, dismounted for good, but his spirit lingered in the multitude converging on the open house to retake it as theirs. Tania saw them as she walked from the command camp they had set up on the high point of Dupont Circle. They were already starting to pour into the square from every corner. Tania passed a shirtless old man with a long white beard and dreads, dancing with a staff made of found materials, pointing it at the sky, reading the contrails and telling the people the news.

  “The capital is liberated territory,” said the message they sent out at midnight. The news traveled fast, even with broken communications networks.

  Tania was coming from Georgetown, where she had gone looking for Odile. She found a neighbor, who told her Odile had been arrested, something about procuring false identities.

  Odile’s mother had left the country, as soon as New Orleans fell. She was in London, and had written her daughter off.

  Tania wondered how she could find where they were keeping Odile. Some of the prisons were already being opened up, which was wonderful and scary at the same time.

  Odile was one of the lucky ones. Mike was dead, killed by his own employer, and Bert had not resurfaced.

  The wide lanes of Pennsylvania Avenue between the park and the White House were crammed with vehicles and the irregular soldiers who had used them to breach the barricades. Remodded civilian pickups were the most popular, but there was no shortage of others—stripped-down sports cars, meterless taxicabs welded over with Frankenstein armor, doorless minivans with off-road suspensions, plenty of motorcycles, and a handful of loaded-up luxury cars that had been appropriated by the network. Tania saw one soldier she recognized working his way through a six-pack with his buddies while they polished the chrome on a vintage yellow Mercedes. A celebratory hum ran through the crowd, making a cacophonous polyphony with the revving engines and cranked-up stereos playing the mash-up anthem of unexpected victory.

  On the front lawn, as the fires dwindled and the smoke dissipated, Tania saw the bodies of the dead being collected. Uniformed Secret Service in their black and chrome, plainclothes agents piled up in their dark suits like infinite copies of the same prototype, a few federal police, and one mangled German shepherd, all mixed in with an even larger number of rebels, mostly in their own improvised gear, some in the uniforms of the official services from which they had defected. They would all be buried together.

  A stencil of Maxine Price was tagged on the guard tower. And a new flag fluttered from the roof, the one that was made of a million stars to represent the idea of the Crowdrule.

  A trio of well-armed drunks stumbled out of the front door of the White House bearing gunmetal, battle scars, and predatory smiles, breaking the funereal haze with a sports bar hip-hop variation on the theme to Bravo Five Zero. One of them, it appeared, was wearing several strands of the First Girlfriend’s jewelry around her neck, the perfect scalp to garnish the full metal bandolier draped across her torso.

  Tania dodged their stumbles and stepped into the mansion.

  The formal red carpet of the State ran the length of the long entrance hall, now stained with blackening splatters of spilled blood, rips from stray bullets and vandalizing machetes, and mud tracked in from the battlefield outside. A gangly white kid with a sniper rifle and a burly Chicana with two pistols and a double-action shotgun guarded the hall, watching the mob of coup d’état tourists as they tried to find their way up to the President’s bedroom before every last souvenir of this ephemeral moment was gone. A fat man enlisted his wife to help him pull the painting of Lewis and Clark off the wall, stopping when he felt the girl’s shotgun in his gut. The rules were improvised, but one of them was that the old heroes were off-limits.

  The porcelain was another matter. In the State Dining Room, they were throwing the last block party of Ragnarök. There must have been close to a thousand people crammed in there, shoulder to shoulder, cleaning out the pantries with daisy chains that ran down into every one of the undisclosed secure subbasements. The doorway exhaled an overload of spilled beer, indoor barbecue, and the body odor of an army on the move and the residents of a city that had gone five days without running water. You couldn’t hear the music over the noise. Onstage, a group of rebel soldiers invented drinking games with the official china, tossing plates toward the ceiling for target practice.

  One of the soldiers pointed Tania to a small hallway that led to the West Wing, which had been rebuilt from steel and concrete in the time since she had yelled at the President. Access to the working offices was still being controlled. The windows of the colonnade looked onto the long expanse of the Sout
h Lawn, where an even bigger party was getting going as thousands gathered under the fractured shadow of George Washington’s broken monument. Soon the Mall would be packed, from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial, with the chaotic crowd that now needed to figure out how to govern itself.

  The reporters were still there in the press room, joined by new colleagues without official credentials, all competing for access to the network connections enabled by the White House’s underground generator. A bank of monitors screened live coverage of the events outside.

  In the tiny offices of the West Wing, a nerdier class of soldiers was quietly collecting information from the mother lode—breaching networks, scanning files, and filling banker’s boxes with paper.

  A huge portrait of President Haig in his six-star General of the Armies uniform stared over the scene, unmarred, still scary in his paternal severity.

  A camouflaged giant guarded the Oval Office, a big soldier with a massive red beard and a black baseball cap adorned with the silhouette of a combat sheepdog. Blue eyes sized up Tania from a long world away, and waved her in.

  Tania noticed Xelina first, even though she was the farthest from the door, seated at the window behind the desk with a very long rifle.

  Moco was there, inside the door, standing next to Clint.

  Walker leaned back in one of the armchairs on the right, smoking a cigarette and helping himself to the presidential liquor.

  Newton Towns was standing behind Walker with a handheld vidcam, filming Sig as he sat at the President’s desk, drinking a can of beer and carving something into the desktop with his knife.