Robogenesis

by Daniel H. Wilson

  A whip snap runs down the cable attached to Nolan’s collar.

  In an instant, Nolan’s neck twists violently. His entire body is wrenched off the ravine ledge and into the air, tumbling like a rag doll. The cord retracts into the walker with the supersonic snap of a bullwhip.

  Nolan’s body falls and rolls, stopping facedown only a meter from Mathilda. The boy lies still, pale and dirty in the mud. Mathilda drops to her knees and cradles Nolan’s head on her lap. Her face is empty and twitching and my emotion recognition comes back confused, but I know that she has been hurt.

  My Mathilda is hurt very bad now on the inside.

  “Hold still,” I transmit on a tight beam, moving next to her.

  “It will be okay,” I transmit. “Hold still, my darling.”

  I fire my rifle at the walker over us, shattering its camera buds even as another walker slinks down into the ravine. The newcomer lases Mathilda’s forehead with its targeting. I swing my rifle down and fire at the new group of incoming soldiers. One bullet at a time. In the distance, two slaves drop with holes in their foreheads. The force and flash of my bullets sweep Mathilda’s hair over her shoulders.

  I step past her kneeling form, putting my body between Mathilda and the other slave walker. The remaining soldiers are taking cover now behind its legs. Spraying small-arms fire at Mathilda. But I am her shield. In tiny puffs, bullets ping off my carapace, shredding layers of ceramic armor and clothing. The kinetic energy dents and damages my frame and causes me to stagger.

  The walker above us still screams, blind and confused.

  Too many projectiles are incoming. I drop to a knee and let my bulk protect Mathilda. Rerouting primary threads to reflexive firing and target acquisition. Motor coordination. After I lose executive functioning, I want to keep fighting.

  I intend to die defending her.

  Offline / Online

  A burst of radio transmission. Spherical broadcast, all spectrum and more intense than anything I’ve previously experienced. The signal is underlaid with encryption-cracking schemes churning with a complexity like the fractal spread of galaxies.

  The force of it has knocked me down. I turn over.

  Mathilda is standing over her brother’s body now, head low. Her hair hangs over her face. Her slight shoulders are slumped but I can feel her mind—projecting itself onto the battlefield, the size of a giant. Her angry thoughts are beating down doors, wriggling into seams, grasping and prying for control. The attack is overwhelming, and it is not even directed at me.

  Routing maximum primary processing to counterencryption protocols. Automatic antennae shutdown. My world rings with blank silence as external communications autodeactivate to prevent my core from being compromised.

  “No,” she says, as both slave walkers orient to her.

  I am still on my back, in awe of the black silhouette of a girl before me and the brilliant echo of power that surges off her skin and claws into the sky in shimmering waves.

  Mathilda’s left hand is out, palm held out flat like she is carrying an invisible tray. Her other hand sits on the palm in a peculiar way, fingers clawed so that four of them mimic legs. Her right hand is in the shape of a quadruped, standing.

  Then her fingers begin to drag over her palm in a walking motion. As her hand moves, so does the damaged slave walker above us. Blinded and sluggish, the walker throws itself forward on stumbling legs. The leashes release, snapping, freeing the emaciated female and the male with glasses. Dragging empty leashes, the walker staggers over our heads, running tilted on razor legs, gaining speed.

  Mathilda’s fingers tickle her palm in tiny movements, controlling the hulk of metal and carbon fiber and ceramic plating. With small twitches, like casting a spell, she puppeteers the monster.

  Fifty meters away, the other slave walker is twisting back and forth as if trying to clear its mind from the waves of radiation flowing down. It tosses its slaves around by their necks. All of them are unaware of the stumbling, shambling wreck hurtling itself toward them.

  Impact.

  The blinded walker hits its target and they both go down. Seismic signature off the charts. Mathilda’s lips are twisted away from her teeth and her cheeks are trembling and I think of the grizzly bear that I fought in the wastes. Her fingers spin and grind in her palm as the two machines battle in a frenzy.

  The stag appears a few yards away.

  “On me,” I croak. With my radio down, I can’t communicate with Gracie mind-to-mind. Her mother winces at the grating sound of my voice, wraps her arms tighter around her daughter.

  The stag approaches. Scanning the field of battle, I see that the walkers are locked up now. They’ve damaged each other nearly to the point of suicide. Their movements are quick and violent, but sporadic. My osmotics detect spilled electrolytic fluid, the blood equivalent that pumps in their faux muscles.

  Gracie watches intently, her mouth open in awe. Mathilda grinds her fingers together, finishing the job, and then she falls to her knees. Both of the walkers are still now. Black muscles spurt fluid into the dirt, broken limbs in a jumble. The corpses of slave soldiers litter the ground around them, bodies torn by their clawed footsteps.

  Mathilda screams again, to nobody. Face to the sky.

  I kneel by the body of Mathilda’s brother where it lies twisted in the dirt. Young Nolan. The man with glasses stands a few feet away, watching me warily. The man is crying, rubbing his neck where the collar was.

  Medical diagnostics online.

  Carefully, I put a hand behind Nolan’s head to support his neck. Begin to turn him over onto his back. I feel Mathilda moving closer to me. She puts a hand gently on my shoulder as I roll Nolan over.

  His eyes are open. They blink.

  “Nolan!” shouts Mathilda. And the little girl falls on her brother. Kissing his forehead, rubbing his forehead. She makes sorrowful, bird-like noises in the back of her throat. But Nolan’s face does not change. After a moment, he pushes Mathilda away and sits up. Rolls onto his hands and knees and coughs violently.

  “Farm boy,” says the man with glasses, edging closer. “You all right, kid?”

  Nolan nods at the man, spits blood into the watery dirt.

  “What did you do to me, Mathilda?” he says in a croak. A rough slash of purple rises over his throat where the cuff tried to snap his neck. “All those surgeries. What did you do to me?”

  “I made you strong,” says Mathilda, her face going blank. “Mommy said protect you. It was the only way I knew how. You were hurt, Nolan. I made you better.”

  The last words are a whisper.

  “You made me too strong,” he says.

  “What’s wrong?” asks Mathilda, bewildered.

  The boy turns away, his mouth a trembling line.

  A small form brushes against my back. Gracie, pushing me out of the way to reach Mathilda. She throws her arms around the girl’s neck. Hugs the bigger girl, both of their eye prosthetics glinting. Gracie holds Mathilda’s hands in her own. Looks down at them in wonder.

  “You controlled the walkers,” says Gracie. “Can you teach me to do that?”

  Nolan is looking at his own hands. They look like regular hands. On a Mark IV autodoc surgical machine, with Mathilda’s level of control and her sensory capabilities, there are many ways she could have made her brother strong.

  I scan the boy with active radar. Get a partial return. The radar passes through his flesh and bounces back from bits of metal the way sunlight winks off a shattered mirror. It’s a partial metal filament, intricately threaded around his bones. Surgery-grade steel to avoid foreign-body rejection.

  Mathilda really did make the boy strong. His diagnostics exceed normal human specifications. His capabilities are unknown.

  I lean down to peer into this face and he does not shy away. He keeps those dark brown eyes trained on my face, bleeding silently around his neck, barely reacting to my presence.

  “What is this thing?” he asks Mathilda, staring into m
y lenses.

  “He’s a friend,” she says.

  I reach out and put a hand on his shoulder. Squeeze. Harder. He does not react. My end effector hits a maximum torque, sufficient to crush a rock. I hold it for a moment, then relax power to avoid damaging my servo. I cock my head, burning cycles to determine how and why this boy is alive.

  The line between man and machine is blurring. Nolan looks like a boy and moves with the power of a Warden. Lark Iron Cloud looks like a war machine and has the heart of a boy. Mathilda has the eyes of a machine and the mind of a girl. And I’m plagued by a knowledge of human emotion that I can understand, but not feel.

  Where do we all belong? Ambiguous classification.

  The man with glasses reaches down and hauls Nolan to his feet.

  “Glad you made it, farm boy,” says the man.

  “Thanks, Sherman,” says Nolan, clapping his friend on the shoulder.

  Radio online.

  “Priority. Receiving distress call,” I croak. “Gray Horse Army is under attack.”

  “Plot a route to intercept,” says Mathilda. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “No,” says Nolan, standing next to the man with glasses. Together, they are looking back the way they came. “We’re going back. There are some kids who need us.”

  “Who could be that important?” asks Mathilda, indignant. “I’m your sister. I’m here to take care of you.”

  This boy with the dirt-caked face and torn neck is smiling, just a little. His grin is like a bright chip out of dark stone. “What’s so important is that they’re all sighted. Just like you. And I think we’re going to need them pretty soon.”

  We must face the fact that every degree

  of independence we give the machine

  is a degree of possible defiance of our

  wishes. The genie in the bottle will

  not willingly go back in the bottle, nor

  have we any reason to expect them

  to be well disposed to us. In short . . .

  we can be humble and live a good

  life with the aid of the machines,

  or we can be arrogant and die.

  —NORBERT WIENER, 1949

  BRIEFING

  And now the story begins for the last time.

  We return to the scarred plains of Ragnorak where the New War ended. In the stupendous silence of war’s aftermath, Gray Horse Army regrouped. The traumatized survivors began to march back to Oklahoma, unaware that deserted weapons were still hunting the snowy wastes, their minds severed from the control of Archos R-14.

  And of course, the beast itself still lived.

  In the last moments of war, a pulse shuddered away from the grave of Archos R-14. An earthquake—its heat and pressure rippling like a muscle twitch across the great white flank of the Alaskan peninsula. Its patterns were laced with hidden data, coded instructions that infected remaining hardware with unknown purpose.

  I witnessed a blind, eyeless head push out of the snow. An abandoned stumper, raising a long, wavering antenna, tasting the air. I had never seen one alone before. It was soon joined by others, explosive hexapods emerging onto glittering ice. Arranging themselves in dots and dashes, a kind of living Morse code, they foraged in fractal patterns until they found a dark mound, half buried in the snow. Massive, sloped, and still, it was the burned wreck of a spider tank.

  The stumpers danced. With feelers and feet, they tapped messages to the sleeping spider tank. Archos R-14 was sending a message from beyond the grave: instructions. Soon, the tank’s dark round intention light faded up to a dull red. With a groan, the weapon rose up and set out in the footsteps of a soldier called “Bright Boy.”

  —ARAYT SHAH

  1. HUNTED

  Post New War: 2 Months, 7 Days

  As the main force of Gray Horse Army departed Alaska, self-styled “hero” Cormac Wallace stayed behind to write a war diary. Joined by his fellow soldier and companion Cherrah Ridge, these last two soldiers made plans to reunite later with the main column. This proved more difficult than anticipated. Although Archos R-14 had been defeated, its killing machines still roamed.

  —ARAYT SHAH

  NEURONAL ID: CORMAC WALLACE

  The walker that’s hunting us must have been on fire at some point. I can smell the singed flesh of the monster on the wind. Melted wires and baked steel plating. A kind of toxic smoke that clings to the back of my throat no matter how many times I spit.

  Funny what becomes familiar after two years.

  “This is it,” I say to Cherrah. “It’s almost on us.”

  Cherrah shoves a strand of hair out of her face. Those lips that I have kissed so many times are cracked now, bloodied by the cold. “We can make our stand at the tree line,” she says. “Dig a foxhole, set up the shelter, and camouflage it. From a blind we might have a couple of extra seconds to disable whatever-it-is.”

  The war has beaten Cherrah nearly to death, but it’s also chiseled away the soft parts. We killed Archos R-14 two months ago, and those of us who lived are strong. Even so, none of us is stronger than metal.

  “And if things go wrong, we’ll be stuck,” I say.

  “We can’t outrun it,” she says, nodding at her leg. The bullet was a through-and-through but it tore the muscle. She’s still healing and will be for months. Until she does, we’re moving deadly slow on foot.

  I nod in agreement. There’s not energy for much else.

  Leaning into it, I drag the heavy mesh net that contains our supplies. We cut this netting off a dead spider tank buried in a snowdrift and kitted up on leftover supplies. That and the occasional deer might be the only things that save us. After I transmitted The Hero Archive onto the wire, we had to abandon what we couldn’t carry in our rush to catch up to Gray Horse Army, including our black box.

  We nearly made the rendezvous, but the woods had other plans.

  Now we’re looking to find a good spot to set up an ambush. Hoping our tracks don’t make our little plan obvious to whatever is coming.

  I don’t know why we’re still being hunted. I don’t know whether Archos R-14 is still alive somehow or if it’s talking to this thing or if it’s on its own. It’s hard to guess how smart the machines are, but a good rule of thumb is that they’re always smarter than you think.

  “Cormac,” says Cherrah. She is standing alone in the clearing now, leaning on a slender walking stick to keep the weight off her shot-up leg.

  I turn to face her, sweat rolling down my forehead.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, gesturing to her leg.

  Not what I want to hear. I turn my back to her and keep straining to drag this burden. I don’t want to see her like this. We keep each other warm at night, but she’s also my brother-in-arms. I can’t abide weakness in her.

  Her weakness is mine. And we have to live.

  “I slowed us down,” she says. Her voice sounds thin and far away in my ears, competing with the pounding of blood in my temples and my own heavy breathing. “We would have caught up with the column if it weren’t for me.”

  After a couple of steps, I pause.

  “No,” I say. The word feels heavy and true, like the swing of a well-balanced ax. Turning, I see the despair in her weather-beaten face and I put on a grim smile to counterbalance it. “If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have any reason to catch up with the column. Now come on, soldier. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  I haven’t seen it yet, but the burned-up Rob that’s been stalking us for the last few days is advanced. Definitely a late-war variety of killer. Probably a mantis. As far as I can tell, Archos half-designed the mantis walkers to map remote terrain and half-designed them to kill any humans who made it this far north.

  I know these things because of the smell of burning.

  The newest machines didn’t use actuators anymore. No motors at all. Instead, they had real muscles. Carl, our brainboy, said their muscle fibers were made out of electroactive polymers. Give ’em juice and the tou
gh plastic will flex just like real muscles. When the machines walked, those polymer slabs quivered on impact, hanging from titanium bones.

  The worst part about it was that you couldn’t shake the feeling that you were watching a living thing. When that first stuttered column of mantis tanks came sprinting out of the tree line, blazing across the Ragnorak Intelligence Fields, meaty legs swinging, clawed feet gouging the ice, and each one throwing up a spray of dirt and exhaust—well, it was like prehistoric monsters had been let loose on the battlefield.

  Lot of guys lost it, seeing the new machines move so graceful. They were too much like animals for comfort. It’s hard to describe. Their movements trigger a part of your brain that recognizes innate beauty—the grace of a leaping deer. But you’re looking at a machine. Not alive, right?

  It’s their living grace that shakes your faith in what’s natural.

  And if you do manage to slice through those black ropes of muscle, nothing but salty water sprays out. No crimson gouts of blood. Just an easily replaced conductive black fluid. We could slow Rob down, but we could never stop him. Not without fire. Burn the muscle, stop the machine.

  Using a folding trowel, I begin to dig a foxhole.

  Digging in this part of Alaska is tough, but not impossible in early autumn. I scrape snow and tree bark off the layer of half-frozen soil beneath. Wedge all that muddy ice into a rim that faces the clearing. Getting through the next layer is when the sweat really starts to flow.

  I stop when the foxhole is just big enough. There isn’t a lot of time left. Besides, any deeper and I’d start to feel like I was digging my own grave.

  It takes Cherrah and me a few minutes to get the tent up. It’s a low hexagonal dome, patched too many times to count. Dirty white, it matches the snow as well as we could hope. The entrance faces the clearing, Cherrah’s arc of fire centered on where I figure the wind is blowing the smell from.

  Somewhere not far from here, a quadruped walker is mechanically trudging over broken terrain. It has a hunting instinct as constant as gravity. Whether it is tracking us by our heat or our sound or by satellite signature—it doesn’t matter. We can’t outrun it, but maybe we can surprise it.