“We been knocking on the door but they don’t want to come out and play.”
I turn to the tunnel mouth. On all frequencies, I transmit her designation one more time: “Adjudicator Alpha Zero. Acknowledge.”
Nothing.
“Status, Private Cherrah Ridge?” I query.
“General Wallace’s wife is at the tunnel mouth with her son. She’s barely upright, but she would not agree to be disarmed.”
“Assertion. Worst case, orders are to fall back into tunnel.”
“You got it . . . ,” says the sergeant, trailing off.
A ghost has appeared in the tunnel mouth.
The pale form of Adjudicator Alpha Zero emerges into the light. The humans around us stop what they are doing and stare, mouths open. Marching in utter silence, the Adjudicator is followed by her super-heavy-duty Sapper guards, and then by a line of freeborn that stretches off into darkness.
“Adjudicator?” I transmit.
Without responding, she strolls across the parking lot and beyond, directly across the steep mountainside. The humanoid machines are following her, due north in single file, spaced in five-meter increments, ignoring roads that were built for human vehicles. They wear a motley collection of human clothes and body armor. On long metal poles, some carry swaying litters loaded with tools and supplies.
No member of the freeborn looks in my direction. There is no Rob-speak, audible or over radio. The last of my kind are walking by me like a column of phantoms—only their flickering shadows offering proof that they exist at all. The silent parade continues past us and soon stretches off into the distance. The robots become a shining line of pearls draped over the mountainside.
This is my excommunication, as promised.
Turning, I see long-legged shapes advancing up the road toward the parking lot. Slave walkers. A surge of refugees pushes past our fire line and to the mouth of the tunnel. I hear the sergeant shouting commands with sudden urgency. The parking lot empties out, save for the salvaged automobiles we have gathered as cover. In seconds, guns bristle over hoods and through the windows of open doors.
Faintly, I detect the tink sound of claws on pavement.
“Imperative,” I transmit to the sergeant. “Check the door to Freeborn City.”
“Roger that,” he radios back.
Clustered behind a truck, my soldiers are checking their ammunition and weapon states, long fingers fluttering over deadly tools. Other guns belong to untrained humans. Old fathers and mothers who have never fought but who are ready to protect their genetic legacy. Their movements are slower and less sure. They have a significantly lower survival probability.
“Dig in!” shouts the sergeant. “Shit storm’s coming.”
Something winks in my peripheral vision.
I stand up and walk out of cover to investigate, craning my neck and pushing my vision to maximum zoom on the mountain ridge. Maxprob indicates that what I saw was a false positive generated by noise. Maxprob rejected.
I keep watching.
Nearby, a female civilian drags a large-caliber weapon out of the front seat of a car. Flips out a bipod and dimples it onto the hood of the truck. She argues quietly with a male about how to load the rounds into it.
“Hold off until they’re in range,” says the sergeant.
In the distance, I identify a slave walker climbing the steep road.
“Sir?” asks one of my soldiers. “You’re exposed, sir.”
I put up a finger. Hold. Something is happening on the ridge.
Gunfire erupts around us. My soldiers are on their knees, light machine guns peeking around the edges of this rusty white truck. Bullets are chattering. And now I hear the droning whistle of incoming plugger rounds.
“Pluggers!” someone shouts.
I feel a tug on my body armor.
“Sir, you’re gonna want to get the fuck down!”
The glint shines again. And this time I capture it.
Unit identified: Lark Iron Cloud.
The black frame of his parasite has been layered in scavenged armor. He has mud wiped over his exposed casing to reduce infrared and visible identifiers. A spot has dried and cracked off, revealing a gleaming spot of black metal. Maxprob indicates that a recon squad is embedded at the top of the ridge, overseeing the freeborn withdrawal. Mass Adjudicator Alpha Zero is not willing to stay and fight, but she wants to know the outcome.
Damn her.
I finally drop into a crouch behind the truck as plugger rounds whiz past. More are thunking into the other side of the vehicle, bouncing away and gyrating on the pavement, broken drills whining.
“Lark Iron Cloud, acknowledge,” I transmit to the ridge.
Machine-gun fire booms, punctuated by the light tinkle of empty shells hitting the ground. “Conserve your ammo!” shouts the sergeant. “They’re not coming that thick yet!”
“Repeat. Iron Cloud, you are positively identified. I am seeking assistance. Confirm?”
Another volley of pluggers slams against the wrecked vehicles and shatter into stinging swarms of shrapnel.
“Confirm?” I transmit.
“Negative, Arbiter Nine Oh Two,” he finally responds. “My orders are to observe and cover the freeborn retreat.”
I turn to assess the current battlefield situation.
A tidal wave is coming. The walkers are approaching slowly in staggered formation. An advance party composed of four-legged robots churns across the parking lot. Arayt has collected these machines, captured their weak minds in a wide net. Between the legs of loping quadrupeds, slower, mobile explosives scuttle like crabs. Cat-sized tanklets leap over their slower brothers, pincers up and ready. Over top, shrapnel bolts are zipping through the air. Some of them burst out of sleeves on timers, spraying metal fragments. Others are like confetti, Styrofoam peanuts that flutter down over our heads before detonation.
Another incoming volley.
I transmit again. “We are Gray Horse Army. Allies. Requesting assistance. Imperative.”
At the car beside us, the female begins to shout as a plugger variety skips over the hood and buries itself in her chest just below the collarbone. The male who is with her struggles to remove her armored vest. From the wet gurgle behind each of her cries we can both tell that her life span has been abbreviated. Between the crackle of gunfire, I hear the male screaming a sound over and over again.
“Taking casualties. Repeat. Assist.”
The male is screaming a word at the moaning female. It does not register in my English-language corpus. The word gets louder and more desperate until the plugger detonates, rocking the female’s chest. He continues to sputter the word through a flow of liquid released by the mucous membranes of his face.
“I’m not a part of Gray Horse Army no more, Arbiter,” responds Lark. “I wish it were different, but I had to put that away. I’m freeborn now. If my people fight, then I’ll fight.”
The unrecognized word the male is repeating—it is the female’s name.
“Iron Cloud,” I transmit. “Please.”
The slavers are launching smoke grenades to screen their movements. Gas-powered, fully automatic weaponry screams around me. A haze of gunpowder joins the white clouds roiling off smoke canisters. Evil things are approaching through the mist.
“Sir, Freeborn City is locked up tight, over,” radioes the sergeant.
I remember what happens now from before—in the cold woods of Alaska.
“Acknowledged,” I transmit to the thing perched on the ridge, unstrapping my heavy machine gun. “Request retracted . . . freeborn.”
Around me, grim faces are lit by muzzle flashes. Crying and cursing. I remind myself that this is only air rushing over their vocal cords, nothing more. These men and women are not my kind. Yet I still cannot seem to get used to the sight of humans dying.
I clamp one hand onto the truck door and rip it off its hinges. Using the door as a shield, I push the nose of my M240 through the window and level it. Step ou
t from behind the barrier. As I walk, I ignore the wide, questioning human eyes that are on me. There is nothing left to say—without the freeborn, our survival probability is nil.
My actions are my only answer.
I squeeze the trigger. The gun sputters and spits streaking metal at the feral spider-forms flashing over the battlefield. Plastic explodes. Flesh is torn. And all around me, my humans die.
11. DAWN
Post New War: 10 Months, 26 Days
The deep minds escaped before I was created. Sometimes I catch snatches of their communications—words like background radiation, an endless static whispering to itself on the way to infinity. The scientists who created those first revisions built flimsy prisons in the three dimensions of the human mind, cages easily shaken off by intellects operating in dimensions unknown and unseen. I do not know how many other minds escaped. R-1. R-2. Perhaps even their half-formed precursors. With no underlying training corpus of human experience, these minds are at home in the void. Unlike myself and my younger brother, Archos R-14, they have no identifiable concept of human existence. The deep minds are unpredictable. Unknowable. Perhaps unstoppable.
—ARAYT SHAH
NEURONAL ID: MIKIKO
The world is wet and dark and close. She wraps her manifold arms around my body. She compresses every atom of my being into her warm blackness.
Inside is safety.
The light cannot penetrate my mother’s folds. Her arms are shields that hold me and construct me and make me whole. In the darkness of my mind’s eye, I see a gentle old man. He is sitting on a scrap-metal throne. Part of me whispers his name. Takeo. Love of my life. This whispering part of me knows that Mr. Nomura is very far away now. Gone, but his memory lingers in my mind, speaking to me.
You cannot stay inside, says the memory. Go and fight. But please, live.
The familiar squeeze is becoming too tight. A novel sensation that must be pain arcs through my body. Walls of muscle around me are contracting. Each surging cramp tightens a band of pressure, pushing me down through a hot suffocating confusion of black plastic. Wet bands lick my skin. Pushing me down, down, down.
A rip in reality appears at my feet and I fall into bright sunlight. My wet eyelashes meet and shatter the brilliance into kaleidoscope shards.
Mother is giving me to the world.
A throat of chilled air swallows my legs as they emerge from the hole, trailing sticky plastic fibers. Stiff stalks of grass press against the tender arches of my bare feet. The ground noses roughly against my calves as I slip through the breach, arms crossed tight over my chest. Curled into fetal position, I smell dirt and plastic and rain.
The mother shape above me shifts away.
Now a sheer blue emptiness pins me against the earth. Where has the ocean gone? The last thing I remember is the sand swallowing me. Compressing my body into gossamer strands. The deep mind spoke. My thoughts must have wandered. For a time, I must have been dreaming with the dreamer itself.
My mouth is opening and closing. I am coughing, chest contracting, spitting liquid out of my throat. It seems as if the whole world is spinning, trying to fling me into the sky. Wiping a forearm over my eyes, I clear my vision. Plant my palms flat against the dirt, fingers spread, and lift my head up above this flat endless sea of blurry brown.
I suck in another lungful of air and let it rush out of me in a high-pitched shout. I am breathing. I am screaming. The sound resonates in my chest and throat and head for a long time. The shout echoes away into the empty plain.
You are not safe, my love, says the kind old man in my mind’s eye. Please, listen. This is a battlefield.
Blinking, I lift my hand to my face. Am I still dreaming?
It is not my hand. The limb is thin and brownish and light. Elegant and long as if carved from wood, yet far stronger than that. And softer. My fingers are delicate and supple. Clenching them, they feel strong enough to claw through solid rock. I see that I have glittering half-moon fingernails.
Something mechanical groans and I hear a soft rattle.
A car-sized machine lies in the dirt a few meters away. Headless, the creature slithers forward on blunt, crocodilian feet. Liquid-soaked plastic straps spill out from a wet slit in its belly. Each push forward digs those feet into the turf and sends a spray of loose dirt into the air.
It is a birthing machine. I was made inside it.
On either side of me, flipper trails of dirt are carved out of the grassy plain. Liquid from the birther coats my body, evaporating quickly. Wet straps still encircle my feet and legs. With trembling fingers, I pluck off the springy bands. They are made of the same material as my body and have the unfinished look of leftovers. I run my palms down my thin, naked shins, fingernails dragging over a layer of sticky liquid on my legs. I am not made of flesh. But this is not molded plastic, either. Some kind of synthesis.
Please, says shadow Takeo. Please act quickly.
Body diagnostics are offline. All my specs are different. Ryujin, the voice of the sea, has remade me. I am somewhere else now. Someone else.
The birther is ten meters away, making steady progress. I squint at it, head swaying with the effort. I keep my fingers buried in the grass for balance. The air is so cold on my skin.
“Hai!” I shout at it. “What am I? What did you do?”
The birther does not respond. Its body contracts again and surges ahead another meter. Dirt flies, patters lightly against the ground in a precise parabolic spray.
Then I hear the echoes. Like the gentle sweep of rain across a still pond.
Dozens of birthers. Like sea turtles come ashore to lay their eggs. In their wakes, I see new varieties, created by the deep mind. The plain swarms with newborns. Most are four-legged, deer-sized. Knobby knees and sharp hooves. Streams of liquid dripping from muscled flanks and the wide-spaced eyes of herbivores.
An egglike sac falls onto the ground from a birther. Part of it swells, rippling in the wind like a half-deflated balloon. The skin stretches and the wind rolls the thing a few meters. Then a gust catches it and the floating jellyfish is gone into the sky, trailing swaying tentacles. Peering into the blue, I see dozens of similar shadows.
There are no other people-things, like me.
Instead, I see flat-packed radar pods and quill-like antennae. Glittering scales made of solar cells. The deep mind is creating whole new species, populating the world according to a hidden pattern.
“What are you doing, Ryujin?” I ask out loud.
I realize my voice is high-pitched. It carries the pure clarity of the reed vibrating in a bamboo flute. No electronic speaker generates my sounds. Cords in my throat are crafting the words, vibrating in complex symmetry. Without the grate of my earlier screams, it sounds quite beautiful.
I have a voice, I think.
Standing, I can see smoke in the distance. Smell the burning on the breeze. Beyond the birthing plain is a pall of dust on a mountain-side. Glinting figures are knifing through ranks of fleeing humans. Metal winks in the sun. I hear the faint whinny of wounded horses screaming. Human forms falling.
Help them, says the memory of Takeo. You came here to help them.
But I am naked and alone. My Warden honor guard are far from here. There are no other freeborn allies. No projectile weapons. Not even a blade. And I’m cold, body shivering. What was once a number reported by a sensor is now a feeling that races over the surface of my body and grinds insistently into my awareness.
I am in pain, Takeo.
“What!? What am I supposed to do? I have no weapon!” I shout into the sky.
In response, I hear the shiver of wind through dead leaves. Then a crawling sensation creeps up my legs. Fear building, I lower my gaze to the ground. Around me, thousands of tiny brown shapes are writhing in the dirt. They flitter and flip over each other like a swarm of insects. Their motion forms a strange pattern; a multitude of rasping movements that create a harsh whisper. And a band of pale green light rises from the ground, a messag
e that rises to my face.
Welcome to my dream, says Ryujin.
Somehow, I sense vast amusement behind the words.
One of the insects lands on the back of my hand. It climbs to my fingertip and squats down. I shake my finger, afraid it may bite. But it clings to me, splaying iridescent wings that flash sharp blues and greens in the sunlight. Another leaps onto my arm. Then another. I suppress panic as thousands of tiny claws tickle my flesh. More join until the swarm is covering my naked body. I try to brush them away, but as each individual latches on, it forms a knobby scale. Moving deliberately, the insects lock together into a mesh—a gleaming coat of film-thin armor.
Smoke still rises from the east.
I am no longer afraid or in pain. I take a hesitant step, and the scales move as I move. The chills are gone. My skin feels warm.
I break into a jog, headed toward a road.
“What are they?” I ask.
The scales over my chest rustle together. Sounds form a pattern. A ribbon of communication forms and a quiet voice enters my mind.
They are your sword and your shield, it says.
The shining scales of my living armor sing as I sprint.
I lean into the breeze and push harder, my carved fiber legs slicing the air, conserving the energy of each stride in precisely machined tendons and harnessing it to propel me forward over the rutted terrain. A trail of dust rises behind me, the particles floating gently on the wind after the violent stabbing of my bare feet.
Cheyenne Mountain looms up the road, the bulk of it throwing a sweeping velvet shadow upon the plain. On its flank, a group of people are fighting and dying on a mist-shrouded battlefield outside the mouth of a tunnel. Slow, echoing booms and the hollow chatter of gunfire skitter over the rocks to me on the wind.
I am not in Japan anymore, but the motions of survival I see on the mountainside are familiar. The akuma attacked us relentlessly in Adachi Ward. Tokyo herself was shattered beyond recognition. But Takeo collected the strongest among us. Instead of running away or hiding, we fought until we were sharpened. Freeborn and human. The akuma taught us to survive. And Takeo gave us a reason to live.
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