by Brian Bakos
Numerous robots wandered the streets aimlessly, only getting out of the way when Rackenfauz sounded the truck’s powerful horn.
It’s like they want to get run over. Weird.
But he could spare no time wondering about the robots’ strange behavior. He had to devote all his efforts to the tricky job of handling the truck. At least he didn’t have to worry about other traffic. He drove through stop signs and red lights without a thought. Most of the traffic lights had ceased functioning, anyway.
Human corpses littered the sidewalks in many places. Their ghastly presence chilled him to the bone, and he drew his shabby lab coat about himself. His imagination started acting up, big time. What was that thing moving over there? Was it some kind of robot or an animated corpse thirsting for blood?
Malevolent eyes peered at him from every building, unspeakable creatures emerged from the sewer grates as soon as he passed over them. Rackenfauz seemed to be driving through a bad horror movie, the sot that degenerate persons viewed late at night with their bottles of cheap booze.
Thump!
Something landed on the hood.
“Ah!”
Rackenfauz nearly lost control of the truck. It was a gaggle of mech birds!
“What the hell?”
Several more birds landed on the hood, others pressed against the windshield. Rackenfauz turned on the wipers to flick them off.
He lowered his window. “Get away, Goddammit!”
The birds ignored him. They smothered the hood now, others perched on the cab roof or atop the trailer. A huge cloud of them flew overhead. Every mech bird he’d ever produced was following him out of town! He raised the window before any birds could get inside.
The cab’s air filtration system roared into high so as to clear the acrid pollutants he’d let in. What were the little beasties up to, anyway – did they have some bone to pick with him? He glanced nervously at the shotgun hanging on the rack behind him.
Rackenfauz was approaching the traffic circle marking the town’s boundary. The old equestrian statue that had once stood in the middle of it was gone. In its place, a large bronze colored robot stood on the pedestal.
“Ach,” Rackenfauz scoffed, “that must be one of Dr. Lindemann’s fantasy machines.”
He had liked “Loony Lindemann” who was one of the few younger mech heads who had always treated him with respect. The kid was the first to go off the rails, though. He’d indulged his mad proclivities by creating various characters from the Gorzo the Adventure Robot stories.
The one on the pedestal appeared to be Ajax, the loyal and virtuous sidekick of Gorzo. It swiveled its head as Rackenfauz drove past and raised an arm in salute. Rackenfauz waved back.
“Adios,” he said. “The town’s all yours now.”
He stomped the accelerator, the birds covering the truck scattered. The cloud flying above dropped back rapidly.
“Good riddance to you, too, my fine-feathered friends!” Rackenfauz shouted.
***
Seventy-five kilometers ticked past. He’d had to drive the big vehicle under full manual control, as satellite navigation and all the other automated travel systems were no longer functional. The landscape was utterly barren and deserted. A towering dust devil spun parallel to the road for some time, like a specter following him from the RDI, then it turned off into the wastes.
Boy, things sure went straight to hell out here!
He dropped into a contemplative mood brought on by the dreary emptiness of the world outside his cab. Rackenfauz still hadn’t decided on a destination, but then, from out of the thick air, it suddenly came to him:
Pickle Lake Castle!
Of course, why hadn’t he thought of it earlier? It would be the ideal place for him to recharge his own batteries and plan for such future as remained to him. Also, the mountain air had to be better than the polluted sludge he’d been forced to breath for months now.
As a boy, he’d spent a weekend at the Castle on a science club field trip, and he’d deemed it “very cool.” He’d loved the soaring grandeur of the place which offered the perfect balance of man-made structure and natural beauty. Their guide said that giant helicopters had hauled in the building materials.
The castle had been built by an eccentric tycoon back in the early twenty-first century. He’d entertained a myriad of guests from society’s upper crust there, and his lavish parties became the topic of scandal. But he wearied of these hedonistic pursuits and lived out his final years at the castle in icy solitude, away from the humanity he’d come to loath.
Later, after many years of abandonment, the castle had reopened for a run as a tourist destination. Still later, Rackenfauz had heard that a religious cult had taken the place over.
Not likely that anybody would be there now. And if there was – Rackenfauz felt the reassuring bulk of the submachine gun under his lab coat. The weapon guaranteed that anybody he might encounter would be open to reasonable discussion.
So, why was he wearing this goddam white coat anyway? It had no purpose out here, he could have outfitted himself with new clothes from any of the abandoned stores in Mech City.
It was because the lab coat identified him as a person of learning and capability, Rackenfauz decided. It distinguished him from the masses, even though the masses were gone now. His coat was the last thread connecting him to the old world. The thought rather annoyed him.
“Ach! How do I get to this Pickle Lake place?”
He fumbled for the road atlas amid the clutter on the passenger seat. The distraction made him lose momentary control of the steering, and the right front wheel slipped off the pavement.
“Oh, hell!”
With stunning alacrity, the situation careened out of control. Rackenfauz tried to force the wheel back onto the road, but it only dug deeper into the soft shoulder. The steering wheel jerked out of his hands.
“Hey!”
Rackenfauz stomped the brake and the debacle came to an abrupt halt with the truck nosed down into the ditch, leaning crazily. He killed the motor and jumped out of the cab.
“Goddammit!”
How could such a trivial incident lead to this gigantic disaster? He aimed a kick at a tire, but only succeeded in hurting his foot.
“Owwww!”
He hopped on his good foot, clutching his injured appendage with both hands and cursing his foolishness to the empty heavens.
“Idiot, goddam moron!”
The pain lessoned, and Rackenfauz gingerly lowered his foot to the ground. A bolt of agony shot up his leg. A few seconds later, he tried the maneuver again, placing less weight on the injury this time. He could bear the pain now. He didn’t seem to have broken anything, thank God.
Then two mech birds emerged from their hiding place between the cab and trailer and fluttered up before him.
“What the hell are you doing here? Scram!” Rackenfauz shrieked.
The birds took off back down the highway.
Rackenfauz immediately regretted his outburst. He watched the little creatures depart with something akin to nostalgic affection. He’d always preferred the solitary life to the irksome necessity of interacting with others, maybe that’s why he’d kept most of his marbles. But now he felt utterly abandoned.
The air was only slightly less terrible than in Mech City. He retrieved a respirator mask from the tottering cab and strapped it over his face.
***
The next hours passed in absolute frustration and self-pity. The late afternoon sun began dropping toward the horizon behind its cloak of thick clouds. The hot, claustrophobic mask added to his misery, but he dared not reenter the cab for fear that the whole truck might tip over.
“Why did I have to dick around with that goddam atlas?” He chided himself a hundred times. “I’d be halfway to Pickle Lake Castle by now!”
Then the silence was broken by the rumble of a motor vehicle. Rackenfauz stood in the middle of the road and observed a battered pickup truck appr
oaching from the east.
“Well, what do you know?”
He waved his arms. The pickup drove past him and came to a stop fifteen meters away. Four robots occupied the back end, and another one was driving the vehicle.
This was excellent! Any robot programmed to operate a motor vehicle would have to be a construction model. That meant a building site was probably not far away, and that meant heavy equipment to pull his truck back onto the road. Two robots jumped down from the box and approached ...
Something was very wrong.
They both carried hunks of metal pipe, and hate-filled expressions twisted their faces. Rackenfauz gaped at them with disbelief. These were standard models, not creatures from Blake’s workshop. They should have been showing him the utmost deference.
“Hey man,” one of them said, “what’re you up to?”
Rackenfauz took a step back and slipped a hand under his coat. “I ... uh, my truck went off the road.”
“Well, ain’t that too bad.” The robot raised its club. “Let’s see what we can do about it.”
Time seemed to slow, as in a nightmare. The robot advanced, the club started to come down – then:
Blamity! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam!
The submachine gun was in Rackenfauz’s hands, barking destruction. He howled a battle cry.
“Yaaa!”
The two robots blew apart, their components raining onto the pavement. Rackenfauz stepped over the wreckage and charged the pickup as fast as he could go on his bum foot, but it was fleeing beyond range. He halted, panting into his respirator mask, and watched the vehicle disappear.
My god, things are worse than I thought.
He limped back toward his truck. He was suddenly exhausted, and his little gun felt as heavy as a cannon ball. The scattered components of his victims lay before him. A severed head looked up with malevolent eyes.
“Hey man,” it said, “hey man ... hey man ...”
“Ugh!”
Rackenfauz kicked the obscene thing off the road. Pain shot through his injured foot, but he paid it no mind.
“The Che Syndrome, I wouldn’t have believed it.”
47: Onward
Dr. Rackenfauz spent a miserable night outdoors. He’d ventured another foray into the tottering cab to retrieve blankets and food – and the shotgun. He burrowed himself a little fortress in the ditch and slept erratically with his arsenal close at hand.
He woke often, convinced that he’d heard the approach of enemies, but none came. Periodically, he detected an exhortation from the ditch across the road:
“hey man ... hey man ...”
By morning he was cranky and tired. The respirator mask had chafed his skin raw, and the dry, sterile air it delivered irritated his throat. He climbed out of the ditch and regarded the truck with dismay. The big machine was as helpless as a beached whale, back when whales still populated the oceans.
As he stood in the highway contemplating his dreary options, he noticed a dark cloud approaching from the east.
“What the hell is that?”
The makeup of the cloud soon became apparent – mech birds! A jolt of terror shot through Rackenfauz.
“I should have blasted those two before they could alert the others!”
He feared the birds had gone mad like those robots in the pickup truck. So, here they were again in their thousands, seeking revenge because he had spurned them – because he’d manufactured them in the first place. Because he was alive.
Rackenfauz cradled the shotgun in his arms. They could make quick work of him if they wanted to, but he would not go down without a fight. He’d always been the shy, retiring sort who avoided conflict, but the battle with the renegade bots had gotten his blood up.
“That’s right,” he shouted, “I’ve got real blood! Not like you pitiful machines.”
As far as he knew, he was the last human being anywhere. And if the race had to die out, let it be here and now, blasting defiance. He chambered a round into the shotgun and flicked off the safety. The birds were upon him now. They hovered directly overhead, swirling their dark mass like a hurricane from hell. Rackenfauz’s coat flapped in the downdraft. He aimed the shotgun upward.
“Well come on!” he cried over the deafening chirps. “What are you waiting for?”
To his utter amazement, the birds began to compact themselves into a single unit. A harsh, crackling noise accompanied their maneuver like the scrunching of a gigantic sheet of paper. The shotgun barrel lowered under its own weight, Rackenfauz’s jaw dropped.
Then, impossibly, a vast human-shaped figure descended to earth right in front of him.
“Good grief!”
The thousands of individual birds were scarcely distinguishable now. The grotesque creature they had melded into loomed fifteen meters above ground level, like some vengeful demon.
“W-what do you want?” Rackenfauz gasped through his respirator.
The composite being raised an arm and pointed to the truck cab. The chirps coming from it were no longer random, but seemed to be of a logical pattern. The damned thing was speaking to him!
“Okay, okay!” Rackenfauz flicked the shotgun’s safety back on. “I’m going.”
Moving with slow, jerky motions as if in a dream, he ascended to the cab and settled into the driver’s seat. The truck began to tip dangerously, but now a solid black mass was pressing against the downhill flank, steadying the vehicle.
“My god!” Rackenfauz wiped a hand over his sweaty neck. “This can’t be happening.”
But the urgent, chirping voice outside the cab told him that it was happening.
“Well ... here goes nothing.”
He started the engine and wrenched it into reverse. The tires bit the soft dirt with a screeching roar. The truck heaved, pushed by the combined strength of the mech birds. It started to tip again, the dark creature righted it. Rackenfauz gunned the engine –
The truck lurched back onto the pavement.
“Yippee!”
Rackenfauz cut the power and clambered down from the cab. Above him, the birds were swirling back into their cloud formation.
“Thank you, my friends!” He blew kisses their direction. “Looks like we’ll be travelling together, eh?”
A chorus of ecstatic-sounding chirps greeted this announcement.
“Just hold on, I’ll be ready in a minute!”
Rackenfauz quickly packed up his camping gear. Then, with a certain disgust, he retrieved the robot head he’d kicked into the ditch. He could run some brain diagnostics in an effort to trace the progress of the Che Syndrome. A bullet hole rendered the second robot head useless for research purposes, unfortunately.
“Hey man ...” the thing said weakly, then flickered out as it used up the last of its auxiliary power.
Rackenfauz got back into the cab. A quartet of mech birds shared it with him now, perching on the dashboard like little statuettes with that utter stillness only robotic life forms could achieve. Rackenfauz made a final study of the road atlas, then packed it away behind the seat where he couldn’t get at it without stopping the truck.
“Shall we go, my friends?” he asked.
The birds made no reply.
“I take it that means yes.”
He began to drive, maintaining a low speed in consideration of the avian flock trailing behind. For the first time since the accident, his mind relaxed into its customary speculative mode.
What would his former colleagues think about these developments, he wondered. The Che Syndrome hypothesis was well known, but practically everyone, including himself, had rejected it. Now there was brutal proof of its accuracy.
And the banding together of the birds with each miniscule brain merging into a powerful group intelligence – such evolution violated all accepted theory. Well, theory be damned, he’d seen the hard evidence with his own eyes!
A horrifying thought barged in. What if the Che Syndrome took hold of the birds? If that great compo
site being that had liberated the truck suddenly turned psychotic, then –
Rackenfauz took solace from the first tenet of the theory which stated that only robotic life forms who had lost their purpose for existence were affected by the psychosis.
Looks like I’m their purpose now. As long as they can serve me, they’ll be okay ... I hope.
He reviewed the tenets of the Che Syndrome theory.
If human control slackens, the orderly and servile world of robots will unravel quickly. Robotic life forms were never designed to be independently functioning entities. Lacking proper guidance, robotic personalities will degenerate to a lower and more brutal level. The benign moral code programmed into them will disintegrate under stress. The Syndrome will follow a predictable sequence for robotic life forms that have lost their purpose for existence:
1. Rapid psychological decay
2. Descent into a state of imbalance
3. Suicide / OR:
4. Banding together of similarly affected robotic life forms
5. Attainment of a psychotic equilibrium
6. Destructive group behaviors
Of course, these warnings were universally ignored by the mech heads, many of whom were becoming psychologically unhinged themselves. Rackenfauz himself had paid no heed. Who wants to face such harsh realities when denial is so much easier?
Dr. Rackenfauz’s angry, apocalyptic thoughts of the previous morning were giving way to a kindlier disposition toward the world. He felt almost a sense of stewardship toward it now. Who could say how many human beings might still exist, and hadn’t he successfully defended that remnant? Him – Edgar J. Rackenfauz – standing toe to toe with evil and blasting it down like some hero from the action movies.
The broad, empty world outside his windows could feel free to welcome him now. He was like a suitor who, many years afterwards, meets again the haughty beauty who had spurned him. Now she is worn and faded, but willing to reconsider.
“I’ll take it under advisement,” he said.
The bird cloud had receded to the horizon. Rackenfauz stopped the truck and waited for it to catch up.
48: Pickle Lake Castle
Days later, after chugging through many kilometers of foothills on secondary roads, they reached the vicinity of Pickle Lake. Rackenfauz parked his truck by the concrete steps at the trailhead.
“Well, we finally made it! Wasn’t that one helluva ride, my friends?”
