Artificial Evolution

by Joseph R. Lallo

  “Everything except you, I assume?”

  “Ideally, but if it comes down to missing me or missing a crucial target of opportunity, take your shot. Say what you will about the Luddites, they know a weapon when they see it. If they were treating this situation like a top-level threat, I’m inclined to do the same.”

  He piloted the ship low enough for the thrusters to cause the pebbles on the rocky ground to tremble. Once Silo had taken the helm, he opened the ship’s side cargo door, pulled down a set of light-enhancing goggles, and jumped to the ground.

  Garotte wasn’t usually dressed for combat, as his skills were better suited to social engineering and other up-close tasks. In this case, being suave and knowing how to manipulate people wasn’t going to do any good, so there was no need for the civilian pretense. Today he looked the part of a soldier. His clothes were a dark gray canvaslike material. Pouches and holsters were scattered liberally across the various accessible areas, and a large and rugged touchscreen was affixed to his left forearm. A communicator was secured firmly to his ear. He worked at the touchscreen, dialing through controls until he was able to manipulate his suit’s color to match the terrain as Silo had previously. Once suitably camouflaged, he crunched along the rocky ground toward the stretch of hillside indicated by the sensor.

  “Do we know what sort of robots are being used in this mine?” Garotte spoke quietly into his communicator, crouching low to investigate some tracks.

  “Checking now… It looks like they use a standard driller-hauler,” Silo said.

  “Legs or treads?”

  “Treads.”

  “And how big are those robots?”

  “About the size of a fuel drum.”

  “Then there was something else here.” He gazed at a sandy patch of ground near the foot of the hill. “I see treads, but also lots of little pockmarks, like poles have been jabbed into the sand.”

  “That could be the critter they were after. Is that the opening to the mine up ahead of you?”

  “Yes.”

  “When I found the thing, it was holed up in a cave.”

  “It is difficult to be certain, but I don’t think we should be using singular pronouns. There are a lot of tracks here. Either ‘it’ wandered around a bit before seeking shelter, or ‘they’ are holed up in the mine.”

  “Well that’s a lovely thought.”

  A short distance away a cement slab lay on the ground. He walked up to it and investigated. Along its edge were shiny sheared-off metallic elements.

  “I think I’ve just found what’s left of the control shed.” He leaned lower, dabbing his fingers into a dusty brown stain. It was lightly tacky, such that the dust carried by the wind formed a dull layer on top of it. He scuffed the stain with his boot, scraping away some dust to reveal that it was a much larger stain than it had first appeared. “I may have found what’s left of a maintenance worker, too. A lot of blood. Not more than a few hours old. No body, though.”

  “Keep your eyes open.”

  “You need not tell me twice.”

  He stepped forward with care, approaching the nearest opening of the mine. It was a one-meter-diameter hole bored straight into the rocky surface.

  “I don’t hear anything. Deploying a recon-module.”

  He pulled an egg-sized gadget from his belt and gave it a half turn. It was matte black, with assorted small holes and shiny dots indicating various lenses and sensors. A ring of lights illuminated around its equator, and it drifted out of his hand under its own power. He tapped the touchscreen on his forearm until a video feed from the device appeared. After queuing up a few commands, he sent it into the mine.

  “And now we watch and wait.”

  #

  Lex and Michella finally reached the lab, and it was instantly clear that something was wrong. There wasn’t a glimmer of light in the entire facility. As a matter of fact, at first Lex missed it entirely.

  “Any chance we luck out and it’s just a power outage?” he said flatly.

  “For the sake of my network, I hope not,” Michella said.

  Lex skimmed the bike close enough to the ground to snatch up a rock. He heaved it over the fence in a high arc. It clattered to the ground in the courtyard.

  “Even the security field is off,” he said. “No guards at the posts.”

  He guided the bike in a tight path around the fence. When he reached the western side, he abruptly stopped and pulled back, angling the headlamp.

  “Yep, that’s about what I expected.”

  His light revealed a section of fence that was entirely missing. It hadn’t fallen down or been blown to bits. It was simply gone. Directly beyond it was a hole in the wall of the facility. Both holes had a peculiar pattern around their edges. At a distance they looked jagged, but as he approached the fence he could see that it was actually the work of an abundance of short, straight cuts. Here and there a charred gouge had been blasted out of the wall, fence, or ground. They were the sort of tiny craters left behind by plasma weapons missing their mark.

  “Call the police,” Michella said, removing her goggles. “There’s no doubt about it now. Something happened here, and it happened fast enough that no one could get any word out.” She sounded shaken, working mechanically at the controls of the camera as she continued. “This wasn’t the Neo-Luddites. They wouldn’t have done any damage until they knew the eyes of the galaxy were watching.”

  Lex, for the first time he could remember, purposely hit the emergency call button on his slidepad. He was instantly connected to the local police call center. The man at the other side of the video feed was a sleepy-eyed twentysomething, and the dimly lit call center behind him looked deserted.

  “Gloria Police, please state the nature of the emergency.”

  “We’re here at the lab outside town. It looks like something bad happened. The power is out.”

  “Okay, sir, stay calm. I’m polling your device for your exact location… You are indeed outside of Nagari-Hamilton Laboratories… and you say that there is something wrong with the power? We are aware of power issues at the laboratory. There have been a number of false alarms.”

  “Well, at least one of them wasn’t false. There’s a hole in the wall and the fence, and there’s no one outside the place.”

  “Are you in any danger?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I’m going to contact NHL security to see what’s going on.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think you’re going to get an answer.”

  The emergency tech went to work. Results started to come back, and his eyes slowly opened fully as the severity of the situation became clear to him. “There has been a breach at NHL. That’s a… this is a red protocol situation!” He began furiously entering data and reading through procedures. “Contact the uh—I mean, I have to contact the military. You need to get to the minimum safe radius from the facility, sir.”

  “Which is?”

  “Fifty kilometers. Do so immediately. A military lockdown team will arrive in ten minutes to secure the area, along with emergency medical personnel.” The officer leaned over to another console. “Direct line to the lab lockdown crew. No… no, it isn’t a false alarm. Not anymore it isn’t!” He leaned back to the console with Lex’s call. “Sir, I repeat, retreat to a distance of fifty kilometers.”

  “No problem, sir. I’m going to drop this call and get the hell out of here.”

  Lex tapped to break the connection, then turned to Michella to optimistically ask if she agreed that retreat was the best course of action. She had queued up the camera, turned on its integrated lights, and paired her hands-free mic to it. Before he could say a word, she thrust the camera into his hands.

  “The building blocks wireless, so we won’t be able to get a direct connection to GolanaNet once we’re inside. I’ve got this thing set to record locally, and we’ll find a way to deliver the video once we’re through. Just hit the red button and keep it on me. Once I’m done with the intro, I’ll
take over and you can pilot us inside.” She cleared her throat and assumed her “serious anchor” expression. “… What are you waiting for?”

  Rather than waste his breath on any of the various objections she would immediately disregard, he decided to bring up the one thing that she’d legitimately be concerned about. “You know you’ve got crazy hair from the bike ride, right?”

  Her expression dropped and she felt her head, where her wind-whipped hair was in utter disarray. She sighed. “There’s no time. Just start recording. I’ll worry about it later.” He tapped the button, and the indicator signaled her to start her routine. “This is Michella Modane reporting for GolanaNet News. We are on planet Movi, outside Nagari-Hamilton Laboratories. This high-tech research facility has been plunged into darkness, suffering an apparent total loss of power. In addition, there is an unnatural hole in both the outer fence and the facility wall. It is unclear at this time if it is the cause of or the result of the blackout. I’m on the scene with my associate Trevor Alexander. Authorities have been contacted but have yet to arrive. We will be investigating the nature and extent of the disaster that has befallen a facility most recently responsible for a top-secret investigation regarding an off-planet specimen. We will report on our findings.” She signaled him to pass her the camera.

  He handed it over and eyed her with vague irritation.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Associate. Really? That’s the word we’re going with?”

  She rolled her eyes. “We’ve got ten minutes, Lex. We’ll discuss that later. Let’s get in there, see if there’s anyone who needs our help, and learn what we can learn before the military arrives.”

  He glared at her for a moment more before piloting the bike at a cautious speed into the ragged hole in the wall.

  Michella documented the damage by the light of the small but powerful floodlight built into the camera. What the light revealed was a disaster, but it certainly was not an accident. There was an order to the damage, a will to it. Walls, floors, and ceilings of the darkened facility had been sliced away in straight lines, zigzagging through the complex to larger sections more thoroughly scoured by the devastation. Silence pressed down upon them as they drifted farther inside. The scene of a disaster is seldom a quiet place. Crackling fire, sparking wires, crumbling architecture, there is always something to fill the air with some sort of chaos. Here there was stillness. Only the quiet hum of the hoverbike reverberated through the deserted and surgically dissected halls. A master architect couldn’t have done a better job of cutting away sections of the building without compromising its integrity.

  “Look at this,” Michella said, training the camera on the edge of one of the damaged walls. “It wasn’t broken, it was cut. There are burns here, like it was done with a torch or a laser.” She looked around. “And there’s a lot more masonry left than metal.”

  “There’s a lot of glass missing, too,” Lex said.

  “Do you hear anyone? It’s after hours but there must have at least been security here,” she said.

  “There was. It looks like there was a lot of shooting in this hallway.”

  They continued, weaving through the crooked path of tunnels until the straight-line nature of the destruction shifted to something else entirely. A massive section of the facility had been hollowed out, exposing a layer-cake cross section of floors. At the edge of the damage were tunnels leading off into the rest of the facility, tracing out smaller angular paths like the one Lex had just navigated. It looked like the inside of an anthill, if the ants were the size of dogs and preferred to do their digging on geometrically perfect trajectories. The farther down into the building the damage went, the more focused and complete the excavation was, until it reached a point that seemed to have been scoured clear down to the bedrock, farther than their lights would show.

  “It looks like that’s where it started,” Lex said.

  Michella swallowed hard. “That’s right about where Dr. Dreyfus’s laboratory was…”

  Squee suddenly burst to her feet and began yapping insistently toward the far edge of the devastation. Without a moment of hesitation, Lex shifted the hoverbike toward it and zipped forward. Funks, despite the most frequent guesses by strangers, weren’t dogs. They had plenty of doglike yips and barks, but they also had yelps and cries that ranged from an almost human shriek to unique grumbling squeals. Lex had been taking care of Squee long enough to know the difference between her “there’s something over there I need to see” bark and her “there’s something over there I need to protect you from” growl. This was something she wanted him to find.

  Squee scrambled onto the front chassis of the sidecar and strained at her leash, leading with her nose and glaring through her goggles. Lex guided the bike down to one of the lower, more thoroughly ravaged levels and into a twisting hallway that was scorched black. At first he thought there must have been a fire, but as he slowed down and investigated the walls, he saw that they were pockmarked with smoldering gouges.

  “These are all plasma blasts. There was a massive gunfight in here,” Michella said, having made the same assessment.”

  “Oh no…” Lex said.

  Michella turned to see him looking at the ground below them. There was a dull layer of brownish red atop the plasma-scarred floor. Blood. It was difficult to see it clearly against the scorched tiles, but it seemed to be a smeared trail of the stuff, leading back along the hallway.

  “Is it fresh?” she asked. “Could the victim still be alive?”

  The hallway, aside from the weapon damage, was one of the most intact they’d come across. Though the bike was small and nimble, there was what looked like a battle-scarred security checkpoint that blocked the way. Lex dropped the bike to the ground and hopped off, crouching to touch the blood.

  “Almost dry. I don’t know, Mitch, there’s a lot of it here.”

  Michella climbed out of her seat and got a shot of the trail of blood. Lex unclipped Squee from the bike, and she darted to the ground and the edge of the pool of light cast by the bike’s headlight. There she stopped and turned back, dancing frantically and doing her best to communicate the desperate need for them to follow her. Lex and Michella didn’t take much convincing.

  “Hello? Is anyone here? Does anyone need help?” Lex called out.

  There was no answer but the echo of their voices and pounding footsteps, but still Squee led the way. The walls started to change. Deep gouges from the weapon blasts seemed shallower. Tiles beneath their feet clicked like they were walking on marble, though at a glance it seemed to be some sort of ceramic. A partially intact sign labeled the destination of the hallway Fortified Safe Room B. Finally the hallway ended in an enormous reinforced door. No less than three trails of blood—fresher here and scuffed with boot prints—converged. Long, straight marks had been burned into it, dozens of crisscrossing lines etched into the surface, some centimeters deep. Squee scrabbled at the door and yipped. Lex pounded on it.

  “Hello! Is anyone alive in there?”

  A tense moment of silence passed, then there was the grind of an internal mechanism. Lex grabbed Squee and stepped back from the door. Michella held the camera firm but was coiled like a spring, ready to burst into motion at the slightest threat. The damage to the door had caused it to droop on its hinges, and it ground to a stop after it had opened just a few centimeters. Squee wriggled free and darted inside.

  “No, Squee!” Lex called.

  Inside the room he heard her yipping become more urgent, and mixed with the sound was the weak murmur of a human voice muttering incoherently.

  “Help me with the door,” Lex said, grabbing the edge and planting his foot on the wall.

  Michella set the camera to automode, leaving it to cover and document on its own, then loaned what muscle she could to heaving the door open. Between the two of them, they inched it open, bit by bit, until a patch of blast-damaged floor crackled aside and the door swung free. The light spilled inside to reveal a grues
ome scene. The room was a safe room, the sort they might evacuate a high-ranking political official to in the event of a terrorist action. It had a few cots, some food, medical supplies, and water. For those who had sought refuge inside, it must have been too little too late. At least eight people were hidden, but despite the small number, it was difficult to be certain of the precise count. None of them were whole. Many of the security team were motionless on the floor, bandaged to some degree. Every man and woman among them had utterly unnatural wounds. There were sections of flesh simply missing, right-angle cuts slicing away square patches and rectangular strips. The furthest gone among them looked as though they had been disassembled or autopsied. Precision cuts hung open to reveal body cavities missing organs. Some had legs or arms removed. Others had limbs splayed open and long sections of bone missing. It was something out of a nightmare. Only two people seemed to be alive.

  The first was proclaimed by her badge to be the night security chief, Rebecca Saunders. She still clutched a weapon, a high-powered plasma rifle with a blinking red light indicating a depleted ammo clip. Her wounds were severe, so much so the fact she was still breathing was nothing short of miraculous. Most of one leg was missing, and a slice had been taken out of her side. Squee was by the stricken woman, dancing in place and casting a pleading look to Lex and Michella to do something. Lex crouched down beside the chief. He didn’t know much about medicine, but as far as he could tell, she was as stable as she was going to get. She turned her eyes to him.

  “Hold on, um… Chief Saunders,” Lex said. “Help is on the way.”

  “Not enough,” Saunders said with labored breath. “The standard military lockdown team… it won’t be enough.”

  Lex left her to check on one of the other relatively intact soldiers.

  “Don’t waste your time. They’re dead. O’Donnell lasted the longest, but he gave in to shock a few minutes ago,” stated Saunders. Her tone was pragmatic but humming with suppressed fury.

  Michella crouched next to the doorway just below the manual release lever, where the other survivor was slumped on the floor. It was Dr. Dreyfus. He had his share of burns and slices, but the most telling sign that something had gone horribly wrong was the fact that his hover rig was missing.