He got going, trudging up the hillside again. Today, the air tasted a touch chillier in his lungs, but it felt about twenty degrees colder in his bones.
Fear, Leon thought.
The sky was a soup of depressing grays. If there were any answers up there, he couldn’t find them.
Grass and leaves crunched underfoot. At the top of the hill, he aimed his rifle. 40.438, -79.965 to the left, 40.439, -79.961 to the right.
Right for the rogue Machine, left for the mystery.
Logically, Leon knew what he needed to do. But it tore him up inside. Logic was what governed Machines. Intuition, emotion, and all those damned troublesome feelings governed humans. If there was a chance he was even somewhat human… didn’t he owe it to his race to rise up against these metal fiends?
The Red Room flashed in his vision. It stank of death, of pus and rancid infection. Chains hung from the ceiling, covered in black, dried blood. Leon had been there once. He’d stuffed a couple pages from an ancient book in his pocket. The Directive Machine found them. He learned that night how it felt to have the tip of his finger sliced off one centimeter at a time, and also how disturbing it was to see it regrow.
It hurt more coming back than it did leaving.
I’ll be quick about it, Leon thought. They’ve always given me leeway before on hunts.
That was true. For military-class bots, strategy was essential. He’d stake them out for days, give them wide berths, take strategic points even if the path there led him farther away from his target.
The Machines weren’t privy to his thoughts. They couldn’t know of the message he found and the intentions he had.
Curiosity dominated him, something those boxes of metal couldn’t ever understand.
Leon eased down the hillside, sliding on tufted brown grass, rifle firm in his hand. He continued on until he neared the coordinates mentioned in the message.
He stopped, brought his rifle up and peered through the scope.
Besides roosting birds and a woodpecker drilling his way into a rotten log, there was nothing to see. Nothing to hear.
No footprints. No evidence of anything have passed through here.
His fear of this being a trap sprang to life again. Leon shook his head and continued.
Glancing at his feet, he froze. He was no longer walking on crunchy grass or over noisy leaves. He was on mud. Silent, uncaring, unalerting mud.
He went to turn back, but a hand wrapped around his mouth and a shoulder slammed him to the ground.
“Talk and I’ll slam this knife through your brain,” said a feminine voice.
Panic overcame him. He tried to wriggle free, but a pointy elbow driven into his spine cured him of that.
“Stop moving,” the woman warned. “This is going to hurt. But if you just let me do it, they won’t be able to track you anymore.”
Leon felt something hot press against the base of his skull. The pain was immediate and immobilizing. Screaming only got him a mouthful of mud. Over his muffled cries, he heard the woman grunting, twisting her knife deeper into his flesh.
“There,” she finally said.
A square of metal, complete with complex circuitry, landed in front of Leon’s face.
The pain was still there, immense and blossoming like a punch to the eye, but it had faded somewhat—probably from no longer fearing he was going to have his brain sliced and diced.
“We’d better get going,” the woman said. “Their ships will be dropping in soon.”
She moved around to Leon’s front and offered him a gloved hand. She was tall and lean, not unlike himself, but with black hair pushing out from beneath a red bandana. She had dark skin and deadly green eyes, like pools of poison, and a long blade of nose.
“You don’t trust me,” she said, hand still for the taking. “Smart. I’m Orissa Servoni, the Fifth Rogue Hunter. And we’re both going to die if you don’t take my hand.”
Leon reached for her, and she pulled him to his feet.
The first human touch he’d ever had.
It didn’t feel quite as comforting as he’d hoped.
Chapter Three
Orissa bounded through the woods, fighting off drooping branches, worming creepers, and prickly thorns. In the distance, the sky bellowed with a roar of fusion engines.
“What is that?” Leon asked, huffing behind her.
“Shush,” she said. “We’re almost there.”
Orissa expected him to assault her with a barrage of questions, but surprisingly he kept quiet.
Of course, she thought. The Machines wouldn’t choose a foolish Rogue Hunter. But, then, she hadn’t expected them to choose one who’d be so bold as to attempt an escape, either. But here she was, fleeing across the rugged hills of a state once known as Pennsylvania, with another Rogue Hunter in tow.
The thunder of incoming ships chased her from the clouds. If the Machines hadn’t been hunting her with vigor and urgency after all these months, they certainly would now.
Let them come, she thought, forearming a branch out of the way and recoiling as a thorn raked across her lip. I’ll clap every single one of them. And I’ll torture the ones that are still alive. She smiled at the thought, swirling the taste of pennies around in her mouth.
Humans of old probably thought you couldn’t torture Machines. But you could. Oh, you most certainly could. And their whirs and sibilations were delicious.
Orissa preferred a well-placed shot of a plasma rifle to their legs. That disabled their movement. Then she’d take a pulse knife and push it against their burnished metal heads, fry some of their circuitry—but not all. Just enough to make them a little screwy. If she had some old wine, she’d drink it straight from the bottle and watch with laughter as the metal fiend yammered on in robotic yips, jerking with epileptic movements.
Eventually, she’d dissect it piece by piece, bit by bit, its droning slowly quieting. Slowly dying.
“Slow down,” said Orissa. She made a face, holding a stitch in her side. She was dehydrated and hadn’t eaten since the previous morning. She’d been up nearly all night, fretting about the bold move she was about to pull off.
But if you wanted to exterminate as many Machines as possible, boldness was your only option.
Orissa knelt on a forested carpet of leaves and detritus, before her a circular door of titanium. She glanced up to tell Leon to keep a lookout, but he was already peering through his scope, surveying their surroundings.
Grunting, she heaved the door aside, revealing a black tunnel below.
“Get in,” said Orissa.
Suspicion wrinkled across Leon’s forehead.
“Or,” she added, “you can stay and try to shoot every Machine that comes for us. When I escaped, they sent three warbands after me, so imagine what they’ll send for both of us.”
She’d wondered just how much Leon knew about the Machines. Rogue Hunters were, in a sense, indoctrinated if only by the absence of knowledge. But his widening eyes and the biting of his lower lip told her he knew what a warband was: a three thousand strong brigade consisting of military-class Machines.
He muttered something under his breath and unlatched the flashlight from his belt. “This is insane.” He shined the light into the tunnel, revealing a lonely set of stone stairs that descended into blackness.
“Would you hurry up,” snapped Orissa.
“Sure, go down into a deep, dark tunnel on the advice of a woman I just met.”
“The alternative—”
He snapped his head around, hazel eyes taking on a shade of blackened gold. “I know what the alternative is.” He started down the stairs, a curse on his breath.
Orissa rolled her eyes. “This is going to be such an enjoyable partnership.”
She flicked out her own flashlight and proceeded after Leon, sliding shut the titanium door behind her.
“Where are we going?” he asked. “Besides my funeral.”
“An irascible ass—I think that’s what I would hav
e divined from your Master Chip had I left it intact.”
Leon continued down the cobwebbed stairs. The tunnel smelled of must and earth. “Don’t know what a Master Chip is.”
“Eternal servitude. That’s what it is.” A spider spun down before Orissa, its abdomen fat and mottled with whites. She took a strand of its web and set him gently off to the side. “It’s the thing I knifed from your neck. It tells the Machines… everything.”
Leon stopped, causing Orissa to nearly crash into him.
“Please don’t do that,” she said, pushing him on. “I’d like to get to the vault before a Prime ventures down here.”
His feet were moving again, if only with annoying casualness. “When you say everything…”
“I mean everything. Your location, vitals, brain waves, sleep patterns. There’s not a thing the Machines didn’t know about you, besides the thoughts in your head.”
Leon went silent and stopped again. Orissa regretted having not packed a tranquilizer needle.
“Well,” he said, turning to face her, “thanks for removing it.”
Orissa wasn’t sure what to say. Apparently her silence persisted long and awkwardly enough that Leon gave her a nod and continued on.
It’d been a while since she had human contact. But at one time, she had friends. She had family. She knew this because she heard the laughter and felt the warmth of unyielding love in her dreams—in her memories that existed only in fragments and shards.
“Hey, this watch I’m wearing.”
“I have the same one. No, the Machines can’t track it. That chip was their sole source of information regarding your whereabouts.”
“A free parting gift from the Machines. I’ll take it. So, this vault—”
“Is right ahead.”
They stepped off the stairs and onto a floor of fissured stone. It was cold and dark down here, lonely and repressive. Orissa walked to a wall and placed her hand on a slightly jutted chunk of stone. Bronze circuitry forked out and torpedoed across the wall, illuminating an inset panel at the far edge.
She placed her hand there. White dots populated the panel, forming a trace of her hand. A red laser projected out from a tiny camera and scanned her retina. There was a pleasant chime.
The wall rumbled and lowered, gears clicking. Orissa ventured into the newly revealed darkness. “Better hurry,” she called to Leon. “It only stays open for five seconds.”
He tagged on after her, boots thudding along stone till there was a distinct crunch underfoot.
Orissa sighed and stopped. Wait for it, she told herself.
“Is that…”
“Yes,” Orissa said, turning and shining her flashlight on bones and skulls. “Skeletons. Human remains. Corpses. Whatever you want to call them, yes—that’s what they are.”
Marked disgust darkened Leon’s face. “Where the hell are we?”
“Keep walking,” said Orissa. “I’d like to be out of earshot when the Machines show up on the other side of that wall.” She sympathized with Leon’s shock, but this world was full of pain. He’d have to grow accustomed to that—and soon.
“Won’t they come in?” he asked.
Orissa shook her head. “Advanced biometrics. I don’t know how impervious it is to hacking, but it worked well enough to keep these people from dying to those bastard Machines.”
“They died from something.”
“We all die from something,” said Orissa. “It’s part of being human.”
“If the Machines think we’re in here, they’ll hack it. I promise you that.”
Orissa sidestepped a white limb reaching out for her foot and continued down a narrow hallway, silky cobwebs grabbing at her face. She passed several offshoot rooms, rotted doors lying in the entryway.
“The warbands that chased me didn’t have a single Slicer in their ranks,” she explained.
“Any military-class Machine can hack. Even a Prime.”
“Sure. And any human can sing, but not every human can sing well.”
Leon finally relented on the argument, stopping before a massive circular room with tables and chairs still upright and mostly intact. A pair of old, dusty fridges stood in the corner, along with a stove. On the curving wooden countertop sat a microwave whose door was shattered, a toaster with a frayed electrical cord, and sundry tools.
“The cafeteria,” said Orissa.
“The cafeteria,” parroted Leon. “Does that mean we’re far enough in for you to tell me where we are?”
She headed inside. “You’re intelligent enough for the Machines to have chosen you as a Rogue Hunter. I’m sure you can figure it out.”
“Thought I was the only Hunter still living.”
“Usually that’s the case, unless the one before you escapes.”
“The Directive Machine never told me a Hunter was on the loose,” said Leon. “Hell, I didn’t even know if there truly were past Rogue Hunters, just that they called me the sixth. Figured it was just as likely they were telling me lies, reinforcing how hopeless my situation was.”
Orissa busied about, moving to and from flashlights that she’d affixed to the walls with scraps of metal and screws. She removed batteries from each, replacing them with ones from her pocket, clicked on the light, and moved to the next.
“Inventive,” said Leon.
“I think,” she said, holding a pair of batteries in her teeth while she unscrewed a cap, “the word you’re looking for is ingenious.”
Leon snorted. “And now I’m being taught English class in a crypt. Exactly how I thought my day would go.” He clicked his tongue, walking about the cafeteria. “So humans built this during the Rise?”
“This one and another,” she said, continuing to click on flashlights and brighten the room. “That’s all I’ve found so far. I’m sure they’re all across the country.”
“Really?” Judging by the optimistic tone he struck, Orissa knew what was coming next. “You think some people fared better than these ones? Maybe they’re—”
“No,” she said, immediately shutting him down. At the counter, she let spill all the dead flashlight batteries from her arms. “They’re not alive.”
A wooden chair screeched as Leon pulled it out. “You can’t know that for sure,” he said, sitting.
She smiled as she wired two batteries each to solar panels spread out before her, a reaction that surprised her. The mere thought of optimism had long sickened her, but words of hope coming from another’s mouth felt different. It didn’t excite her, exactly, but it made her feel something she hadn’t in a long time.
Since escaping the Machines months ago.
“How do you charge those batteries? Hide the panels in the forest?”
“Along with a charge controller, yes. That’s exactly what I do.” She turned and leaned against the counter. “What other questions do you have?”
Leon laughed. “More than you want to answer, I’ll bet you that.”
She shrugged. “Try me.”
He rubbed his hands together, sighing heavily. “All right. Let’s start off with the elephant in the room.”
She lifted a brow. “Is there just one?”
“Yeah, fair enough. How’d you know there’d be a rogue Machine up there today?”
Orissa sniffed. She went back to work wiring up the batteries. “Going rogue isn’t instantaneous. It’s like—” She paused, searching for the word in the cool white glow of a flashlight. “Like dementia. It’s a slow process as errors are introduced into the Machine’s code. They begin behaving oddly, their actions becoming more erratic as the errors add up exponentially. Interestingly enough, they continue communicating with non-affected Machines up until a point, at which they’re registered as rogue.”
“So the unaffected Machines don’t know one’s gone rogue until it’s too late?”
“Exactly,” said Orissa.
Leon chewed on that. “How do you know all this?”
She connected the last of the batteries a
nd faced Leon, raking oily hair out of her eyes. “Humans left behind lots of interesting artifacts. I’ve been hunting them for months.”
He lifted his elbows onto the table, resting his chin on steepled hands. “I’ve read what I could while on hunts, but—”
“A Hunter is limited,” she interrupted. “The Machines are always watching.”
Leon nodded. “How did you escape? Was there someone who helped you?”
Orissa picked up a jug of days-old rainwater and chugged. She wiped her mouth. “Have you ever been to the Red Room?”
His recoiling face told her the answer before he spoke. “Once.”
“I was there twice. The second time, while my lips were cut off and my tongue burned to ash, I passed out from the pain. I had this dream that a chip had been implanted in the back of my neck. I don’t think it was a dream at all. I think it was a memory. When I was released from the Red Room to go on a hunt, I grasped my knife. And I ripped and tore till that piece of metal circuitry came out.” She licked her lips and added, “Then I ran.”
They both went quiet for a while, a shared silence of respect. And probably of fear as well.
Orissa opened a fridge. Its compressor had long been shot, and there was no longer electricity running through these walls. But fridges didn’t stop serving as storage just because they didn’t run cold.
She reached for an old, bunched-up t-shirt and pulled it out, laying it on the counter. She unfolded it and took strips of dried squirrel, tossing one to Leon. It landed on the table in front of him.
He looked at it for a long while, then bit into it. A smile lifted up the corners of his mouth.
“How do they make us, Orissa?”
“That,” she said, chewing, “I don’t know.”
“Are we human?”
“Yes.”
He clicked his tongue. “You know that for a fact?”
“Yes,” she said again, this time stronger. She narrowed her eyes on him. “Don’t question me on that again.”
Leon nodded. “Fair enough. Fair enough. I’m guessing you’re like me, no memories of the past?”
“Beyond useless knowledge, you mean? I know about cars and airplanes and world wars.”
Rebirth (Archives of Humanity Book 1) Page 2
