No one should see this.
This mess I made.
John points upward with a mangled hand. I follow his gesture and look up again. From this position, a small gap in the wreckage above the cellar exposes a blue sky marked by floating ash and smoke. Beyond the gauzy fog of burning wreckage, wisps of clouds peer down at us.
My eyes track to the debris. A whole section of what used to be the upper house now sits on the dry floor of the cellar. On top of John. There is no way I can get him out, and the farm is surrounded by enemies.
“We’re going to get you out of here, John,” I lie.
He closes his eyes again. “No.”
“Just give me time,” I say. “I’ll find something. I’ll get this off of you.”
“No.”
Tears overcome me, and I sob, sucking in air in fits as my body is racked with grief, and guilt, and pain.
“Mommy!” John says through clenched teeth. Then... “I see heaven.”
He struggles to take in a breath, and his eyes fly open again.
“Tell Ben...”
And that’s it.
I can tell when he leaves.
I reach down and clasp his crooked hand, and for a split second I have a flash memory of the first time Frank put his own crooked hand into mine. In another life. Back before I ruined the world.
I turn and see that Mose is crying. Sobbing into his hand. His shoulders heave with grief. I think back to Ben doing the same thing, and it crushes me even more.
“We have to go,” I say.
“You go.” Mose’s voice is cold, and saturated with grief and resignation. “Go now.”
* * *
Frank Miller, ten feet tall and menacing in his gait, advances southward down the road in the direction of the enemy army, a force that is spread across a quarter mile of Ohio countryside. Another portion of the army, this one battalion-sized, is to his north, beyond the Shetler farm and stretching out on both sides of the road. Both units have halted their advance on the Shetler farm after taking heavy casualties and losses in their initial “shock and awe” attack.
Frank moves almost silently past the smoking corpses of APCs, tanks, and men that he’s made dead. His HADroid feet and legs navigate the buggy ruts with not so much as a shudder registering in his upper body. He moves diagonally across the road and traverses a drainage ditch in the direction of a small shelter of thick trees.
Here along the road there are high-voltage transmission lines that bisect the area before branching out like arteries. They carry electricity from a nearby power distribution station to the Englischer homes and businesses in the area. Frank’s on-board system identifies the power lines as “Critical Enemy Support Systems,” and with a half dozen blasts—selectively targeting transformers and critical junctions with precision laser fire—he takes the whole grid section offline.
Though he is not susceptible to most of the known weapons being used against him, his programming prompts him to make use of any available concealment or cover, so he moves into the trees and scans the enemy’s configuration yet again. His Heads-Up Display, or HUD, floats in the left quadrant of his vision, identifying enemies and prioritizing them.
His IFF software tags each identifiable entity, whether man or machine. Human targets are secondary. Not because of any latent regard for lives in Frank’s programming, but because they aren’t really relevant; most of their weaponry poses no real direct threat to him. Enemy machines and equipment are indicated using gray-scale overlays and appear in their places as Alpha targets. He engages them only when the color on his HUD marks them for termination. Just like the colors used in his CAIN games. In fact, this whole exercise is very much like the games Frank has practiced—including the weapons system game training he accessed and mastered on his own. He has practiced them over and over again, even while performing other duties or holding conversations.
Prioritized targets are highlighted and outlined in red, and principal weapon selection is made automatically, with only a minuscule delay provided for human operator override. Frank now chooses to rely predominantly on that available human override, because he prefers the speed and versatility of firing on his own rather than waiting the extra few beats for auto-fire to engage targets. His mapping system interfaces with data-intercept, FLIR, and advanced radar to give him a wider view of the whole theater of battle.
Frank is hunting.
Target G06 Level Alpha Identified...
M1 Assault Breacher Vehicle
Engage Target
PWS: Laser
The main battle tank appears outlined in red in his HUD, though it is one hundred and fifty yards to his west and advancing slowly.
Frank adjusts his targeting instantly and fires the laser himself, not waiting for auto-fire to kick in. Within seconds, the Breacher grinds to a stop and then explodes as the tank’s armaments and fuel almost instantly reach melting and combustion temps and ignite.
Target Destroyed
OKC Power Cell: 99.8%
Laser at Full Operational Readiness
An APC turns red in Frank’s HUD as his robotic head rotates just five degrees. The armored vehicle turns from behind the tank in a large arcing curve as it attempts to retreat, spinning up dirt and debris behind it. The targeting information is just blinking into view when Frank fires a rocket from his right shoulder launcher. The launcher instantly retracts, and more rockets are auto-loaded. The entire retraction and reloading sequence takes two seconds.
Target Destroyed
SMAW Rockets Remaining: 47
Frank makes the conscious decision to rely more heavily on OKC lasers now, even though the targeting system suggests rockets. He scans through his firepower protocol screens and then selects a new preference: LFFS, or Laser First Fire Selection. He needs to preserve rockets because even though he has plenty of firepower to overcome the forces now arrayed against him, he doesn’t know if more enemies will be called in. If maybe reserve forces are waiting somewhere beyond his scannable horizon. The rockets are often superior against moving targets since, even though they’re miniaturized, they have the ability to lock on and track aircraft or fast-moving vehicles. But the laser weapons provide an almost limitless supply of deadly firepower; the OKC cells can operate for weeks, months, maybe years without needing to be replaced. And at this range, it’s as easy as shooting the plates and balloons he first started with... back when he first hacked into the system games.
Primary Vulnerability:
TNW... Tactical Nuclear Weapon
% Likelihood of TNW Deployment:
GBW: 1%
ATG: 5%
Frank registers and then stores this information in his human brain for quick access. His defense acquisition system constantly scans enemy forces and quantifies the probability that certain weapons may be deployed against him. This information flashes on his HUD whenever enemy force numbers are altered or rearranged. He now knows that the principal known vulnerability in this engagement is a TNW: a micro-nuke fired from a ground-based weapon, or, even more likely, in the form of an air-to-ground rocket launch. But for now, the Battle Action System considers the use of a tactical nuke to be a very unlikely scenario.
Frank’s human/computer interfaces are working together seamlessly, just like in the games. The games he’d play for hours on end, usually when he was supposed to be sleeping. But he’d learned something early on that even the doc didn’t know.
He had very little need for sleep.
He’d sleep on occasion, maybe an hour a night, but other than that, he had no need for rest. So he played games. And he found that he could play them even while going through his normal daily duties and assignments. Even when playing with John or driving the buggy.
He’s now had almost two full months of almost constant game training.
His structural vulnerability to a TNW is still unknown, untested, so his human brain chooses to dismiss it and not worry about it. What can he do if he’s hit by a nuke? What can
anyone do? But worry, in general, is not a big thing with Frank; it wasn’t even when he was just Ben the farmer. He’d worried about a few things, like if John was going to hate him for changing, or if he’d have to leave with Doc because of something bad he did. But now, in this fight, Frank puts aside all worry like a snake might slough off his graying dead skin. Now, things to Frank either are or they are not. The speculative is not something he entertains. Not when he’s deep in the game.
Even though Frank’s human brain has weighed the evidence and decided not to worry about a TNW, the computer brain catalogues the data anyway. The BAS calculates battlefield location, likelihood of civilian casualties, and possible long-term ancillary environmental damage caused by enemy use of a TNW, and it feeds all of the data concerning the HADroid’s principal weakness into on-demand storage.
The HADroid moves through the trees, flawlessly eliminating two scout positions and a sniper hidden in a rotted hay pile. The robotic feet traverse the rough terrain with ease, allowing his weapons platform to fire steadily while moving.
The sniper engaged him with a large-caliber round fired from deep cover. Frank’s HUD FLIR warning had identified the sniper twenty seconds before he fired, but it hadn’t prioritized the target as high value due to the 0% probability of damage his computer had calculated. The round the sniper fired was a uranium-tipped electro-static bullet designed to penetrate thick steel and then deliver a high-voltage shock to the target. But graphene is over a thousand times harder than steel, and the bullet ricocheted harmlessly away. Frank then preempted his auto-targeting and returned fire almost instantly, perforating the sniper with a short blast of .50 caliber in-air guided bullets that rendered the hostile attacker unable to continue the engagement.
With all close-in targets engaged and destroyed, Frank goes to one knee, minimizing his own target signature, and begins again to scan the main line of attackers.
For a moment his human mind drifts, and he thinks of Doc, and April Troyer, and the Shetlers, especially John Shetler, his friend. And just as he decides to put those thoughts away for the moment, he feels a bright light pierce through his thoughts and illuminate his being. The insides of him. All of him.
It starts as a vibration, deep in his mind, and then it expands into a fiery brilliance of oranges, whites, and yellows. His robotic body locks up, and as the light expands he feels his whole system begin to shut down in waves of sonic resonance.
Systems Failure
Mainframe shutdown...
Weapons shutdown...
Critical failure...
Power Reb...
His human mind registers his body collapsing into a gully, and the HUD interface blinks off. For the first time since the change, his now narrowing vision is clear of battlefield data. But it doesn’t last long. The last thing his robotic eyes capture is green grass, stirred by a breeze and dancing, backed by a brilliant blue sky. A brief thought of planting season, and helping his dad put in potatoes. A single strand of a spider’s silk floats by on unseen currents. And then...
Black.
The next sensation is only the feeling of being totally and completely deprived of any input at all. Frank, or what is left of him, exists in a dark flotation of eternal nothingness. His mind is the only reality left in his world. He can’t even pinpoint his reality as “floating,” because he is bereft of any sensory input, any proof of existence at all. Just his mind in inky blackness, with no computer to aid it. No friend to help him. No... anything else.
For the first time since he woke up as the HADroid in Dr. Christopher Alexander’s lab, he is just Frank, and that is all he is.
CHAPTER 23
Above ground again, I step clear of the mass of debris and stumble toward the barn. I don’t know why the barn. Maybe because it’s the only structure left standing. I look down as I walk, but as I approach the building, something makes me look up.
April Troyer is there.
As I approach her, I turn and see that the army to our north has resumed its advance. On foot. I start to think about why they might be abandoning their vehicles, but the sight of April snaps me back.
April’s dress and apron are torn, and her kapp is soiled and hangs from her long hair by one of the ties. Her long brown hair spills over her shoulders. She’s bleeding from her leg, and she has the look of a refugee about her. I suppose I don’t look much better. I can feel the blood from the cut on my hand as I bring both arms up and cross them over my body. As if I can protect my body from harm, or my heart from breaking.
“The Shetlers?” April says as I approach.
I stop walking and just shake my head. “Mose and Sarah are alive. Mose is injured, and Sarah is in shock. They wouldn’t let me help them.”
April steps forward and glares at me with something I can only interpret as hatred... or pain.
“John?” she asks. “What about John?”
I shake my head again, but say nothing.
Just as she turns to leave, I hear soldiers shout and gunshots reverberate and the sounds of bullets cutting the air above our heads. I turn and see the army moving toward us. The advance troops at the front of the line are arriving more quickly than I’d thought they could.
I grab April roughly by the arm and pull her down just as a bullet hits the ground between us.
“Let me go!”
“April—April, just stay down. Lie face down and put your hands up. Maybe they’ll spare you.”
“I don’t want to be spared!”
I reach over and force her to the dirt, face first, and then lie down next to her. I push my hands up over my head just as troops surround us, shouting, screaming for us to not move.
* * *
The HADroid is dragged roughly from the ditch by half a dozen men. They’re surrounded by even more men, armed with rifles, rocket launchers, and flamethrowers.
All of this happens, but Frank doesn’t know it. He knows nothing but the emptiness and the overwhelming sensation of dark nothingness.
He feels the first inklings of oxygen deprivation. Just a sense that he’s lacking something he needs. The black room he feels he’s in shrinks just a bit, but beyond it is nothing too, wider and deeper darkness, so he focuses his mind on what he knows. He concentrates on the feeling that he’s in a room.
What does he know?
He knows the games are turned off. Like in the beginning when the doc would flip the switch and shut him down. That was before he figured out how to power himself back up.
How had he managed that?
He struggles to remember. He thinks about the room.
He remembers the connection—it was like a light switch. The place where the computer connects to his brain. At first, the connection was something foreign... something that shouldn’t be there. Something scary. Though he could never have formed the words to describe it, he’d felt like he was being held in a vise, and things were sticking into his mind. But in time, through his CAINing, he learned where that someplace was. He learned to feel it.
And in his reading, he learned that his brain produces electricity. Like a power plant that makes energy to run the Englischers’ world. So he focused on that connection, imagining electricity running through the switch. And he learned how to power himself back up.
But in the beginning, it started with him finding the connection. Knowing where it was.
Now, focusing, he still knows. Only now the interface doesn’t feel like something foreign. Now he has the sensation of something being missing. Just like with the ghost pains he read about in his offline database while lying in bed one night, not long after he’d realized he wasn’t like other people. Back then, he suffered ghost pains just about everywhere. His everything had been severed from him, and at first his brain remembered all of it, and it wanted it back. Back then, his brain still thought his body was there.
But slowly he learned to adapt to his new reality. To embrace it. And now, bathed in darkness in his lonely room, he feels the overwhelming need,
like a survival instinct, to find where the interface is. To identify just where the soft computer—his brain—connects to the man-made computing system.
The room retracts again and the outside darkness presses in. He feels a headache start somewhere he can’t describe, and it radiates out to somewhere else just as locationless. His thoughts muddy a bit, and he has to focus to clear them.
Find the connection.
In the games, he had to identify and use the right tool for the game. The right weapon. The right solution. And it occurs to him, fighting through the growing fog, that memory is his tool. Memory is the right tool for this task.
So he remembers. Puts himself back in that old decrepit barn. Back when the rat was chewing on him. How did he do it then? How did he switch himself back on?
And he sees it...
Not with eyes. He sees it in the room. The interface. Like a thousand- thousand strands of red and blue, all plugged into a small piece of a machine.
The room shrinks again. The not-real walls close in until he feels surrounded, like he could reach out and touch all four walls at once.
The interface is there. Right in front of him. The image blurs and disappears, and then clears again.
He needs to focus, to send whatever energy is in his brain into the machine.
The image fades again... and then...
It disappears.
The darkness swallows him whole, and his consciousness retracts to the size of a pin in the dark night sky. Like the tiny star he stared at one night from the loft of the Shetlers’ barn.
Just a dot of light in the black vacuum of the universe. A pinprick in the sheet of inky nothing that sheathes the world.
* * *
I struggle to maintain consciousness as blow after blow rains down on me. Kicks and punches coming from every conceivable direction fall on me like a landslide. I feel pain at first, but then it dulls and I just feel the blows. A rib cracks, and before the feeling can really even register in my consciousness, a boot glances off my cheekbone.
Brother, Frank Page 25
