“Muafaq b ’ashid, Paul,” he says.
“Good luck to you, too, buddy.”
We walk around the corner and come face-to-face with the next stage of avtomat evolution.
It sits half submerged in the lake—the biggest avtomat imaginable. It’s like a building or a giant gnarled tree. The machine has dozens of petal-like sheathes of metal for legs. Each plate is the size of a wing off a B-52 Stratofortress and covered in moss and barnacles and vines and flowers. I notice they flap slowly, movement barely visible. Butterflies and dragonflies and indigenous insects of all sorts flit across the grassy plates. Higher up, the main trunk is composed of dozens of taut cords that stretch into the sky, twisting around each other almost randomly.
The top of the avtomat towers in the sky. An almost fractal pattern of barklike structures whirls and twines in an organic mass of what looks like branches. Thousands of birds nest in the safety of these limbs. Wind sighs through the tangled boughs, pushing them back and forth.
And on the lower levels, stepping carefully, are a few dozen of the biped avtomata. They are inspecting the other life-forms, leaning over and watching, prodding and pulling. Like gardeners. Each of them covers a different area. They are muddy, wet, and some are covered in moss themselves. This doesn’t seem to bother them.
“That’s not a weapon, is it?” I ask Jabar.
“The opposite. It is life,” he says.
I notice that the uppermost branches bristle with what must be antennae, swaying in the wind like bamboo. The only recognizably metallic surface is nestled there—a gaping, wind tunnel–shaped dome. It points to the northeast.
“Tight-beam communication,” I say, pointing. “Probably microwave based.”
“What could this be?” asks Jabar.
I take a closer look. Every niche and crevice of the colossal, creeping monster teems with life. The water below flickers with spawning fish. A haze of flying insects clouds the lower petals, while rodents creep through the folds of the central trunk. The structure is riddled with burrows and covered in animal shit and dancing with sunlight—alive.
“Some kind of research station. Maybe the avtomata are studying living things. Animals and bugs and birds.”
“This is not good,” murmurs Jabar.
“Nope. But if they’re collecting information, they must be sending it somewhere, right?”
Jabar lifts up his antenna, grinning.
I block the sun with one hand over my eyes and squint at the towering, shining column. That’s a lot of data. Wherever it’s going, I’ll bet there’s one smart fucking avtomat on the other end.
“Jabar. Go east fifty meters and plant your stick. I’ll do the same. We’re gonna figure out where our enemy lives.”
Paul was correct. What he and Jabar had found was not a weapon but a biological research platform. The massive amount of data it collected was being sent via tight-beam transmission to a remote location in Alaska.
At this time, a little less than a year since Zero Hour, humankind had found the whereabouts of Big Rob. Postwar records indicate that although Paul and Jabar were not the first to discover the whereabouts of Archos, they were the first to share that information with humanity—thanks to help from an unlikely source half a world away.
—CORMAC WALLACE, MIL#GHA217
7. BACKBONE
It’s not me, Arrtrad.… I’m sorry.
LURKER
NEW WAR + 11 MONTHS
As Brightboy squad continued to trek across the United States toward Gray Horse, we marched in an information vacuum. A lack of satellite communication plagued the survivors of Zero Hour, preventing widespread groups of people from collaborating and fighting together. Hundreds of satellites fell from the sky like shooting stars at Zero Hour, but many more remained—operational but jammed.
The teenager called Lurker pinpointed the source of this jamming signal. His attempt to do something about it sent reverberations through human and Rob history. In the following pages, I describe what happened to Lurker based on street camera recordings; exoskeleton data logs; and, partially, the first-person account of a submind of Archos itself.
—CORMAC WALLACE, MIL#GHA217
“A single mile, Arrtrad,” Lurker says. “We can make it one single fucking mile.”
From the security camera image, I can see Lurker and his middle-aged comrade, Arrtrad. They stand on a weed-filled street alongside the Thames, within running distance to the safety of their houseboat. Lurker, the teenager, has grown his hair and his beard out. He’s gone from a shaved head to being the jungle man of Borneo. Arrtrad looks and sounds the same as ever—worried.
“Straight through Trafalgar Square?” asks Arrtrad, pale face lined with anxiety. “They’ll see us. They’re bound to. If the cars don’t track us, then those little … things will.”
Lurker mimics Arrtrad’s nasal voice without mercy. “Oh, let’s save the people. We’ve been sitting on this boat for ages. La-di-fucking-da.”
Arrtrad lets his gaze drop.
“I schemed,” says Lurker. “I plotted. I found a way, brother. What happened to you? Where have your balls gone?”
Arrtrad speaks to the pavement. “I’ve seen it out scavenging, Lurker. All this time, the cars still sit on the streets. Start their engines once a month and idle for ten minutes. They’re all ready for us, mate. Just waiting.”
“Arrtrad, come over here,” says Lurker. “Have a look at yourself.”
The security camera pans over as Lurker motions at Arrtrad to step next to a panel of sun-baked glass attached to a mostly intact building. The tint is peeling off, but the glass wall still holds a bluish reflection. Arrtrad steps over and the two look at themselves.
A data readout informs me that they first activated the exoskeletons a month ago. Military hardware. Full body. Without a person inside, the machines look like a messy pile of wiry black arms and legs connected to a backpack. Strapped into the powered machines, the two men each stand seven feet tall, strong as bears. The thin black tubes running along their arms and legs are made of titanium. The motorized joints are powered by purring diesel engines. I notice that the feet are curved, flexible spikes that add a solid foot to their height.
Grinning, Lurker flexes for the mirror. Each of his forearms has a wicked notched spike curving out, used to pick up heavy objects without crushing human fingers. Each exoskeleton has a roll cage that arcs gracefully over its occupant’s head, with a bluish-white LED burning in the middle of the frame.
Together in the mirror, Arrtrad and Lurker look like a couple of supersoldiers. Well, more like a couple of pale Englishmen who’ve been living on sardines and who happen to have scavenged some abandoned military technology.
Either way, they are most definitely badass.
“See yourself, Arrtrad?” Lurker asks. “You’re a beast, mate. You’re a killer. We can do this.”
Lurker tries to clap Arrtrad on the shoulder, and the other man flinches away girlishly. “Careful!” shouts Arrtrad. “There’s no armor on these things. Keep your hooks away from me.”
“Right, brother.” Lurker chuckles. “Look, the British Telecom Tower is one mile away. And it’s jamming our satellites. If people could communicate, even for a little while, we’d have a fighting chance.”
Arrtrad looks at Lurker, skeptical. “Why are you really doing this?” he asks. “Why are you putting your life—our lives—on the line?”
For a long moment, there is only the chup-chup of the two diesel engines idling. “Remember when we used the phones to torment people?” Lurker asks.
“Yeah,” responds Arrtrad slowly.
“We thought we were different than everyone else. Better. Thought we were taking advantage of a bunch of fools. But we were wrong. Turns out we’re all in the same boat. Metaphorically speaking.”
Arrtrad cracks a small smile. “But we don’t owe nobody nothing. You said so yourself.”
“Oh, but we do,” Lurker says. “We didn’t know it, but we were running up a ta
b. We owe a debt, mate. And now it’s time to pay up. Only phreaks like us would know about this tower. How important it is. If we can destroy it, we’ll help thousands of people. Maybe millions.”
“And you owe them?”
“I owe you,” says Lurker. “I’m sorry I didn’t warn London. Maybe they wouldn’t have believed. But that’s never stopped me. Christ, I could have co-opted the bloody emergency alert system all on my own. Shouted a warning from the rooftops. Doesn’t matter now. Most of all—I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I’m sorry for … your girls, mate. All of it.”
On mention of his children, Arrtrad turns away from Lurker, blinking back tears. Eyeing his own sinuous reflection, he shrugs one arm out of his exo-suit and smoothes back the puff of blond hair on his balding head. The exoskeleton arm automatically settles down to his side. Arrtrad’s cheeks puff out as he exhales loudly, slipping his hand back into the metal arm straps.
“You make a fine point,” he says.
“Yeah,” says Lurker. Then he taps Arrtrad on his metal shoulder with one wicked blade. “Besides,” he asks, “you don’t really want to live to old age with me? On a bloody houseboat?”
A slow smile spreads across Arrtrad’s birdlike face. “You do make a fine fucking point.”
The streets of central London are mostly empty. Attacks came too fast and too organized for most citizens to react. By law, all the autos had full-drive capability. Also by law, hardly anybody had guns. And the closed-circuit television network was compromised from the start, giving the machines an intimate view of every public space in the city.
In London, the citizens were too safe to survive.
Visual records indicate that automated trash trucks filled dumps outside the city with corpses for months after Zero Hour. Now there’s nobody left to destroy the place. No survivors brave the streets. And nobody is around to see two pale men—one young and one old—encased in military exoskeletons as they leap in ten-foot strides over the weedy pavement.
The first attack comes only a few minutes in, as they sprint through Trafalgar Square. The fountains are drained and filled with dead leaves and blown trash. A couple of broken bicycles lie out but that’s it. Covered in roosting birds, the granite statue of Lord Nelson in his admiral’s hat looks down from a hundred-and-fifty-foot-tall column as the two men bound across the plaza on elastic foot blades.
They should have known there was too much wide-open space.
Lurker notices the smart car a couple of seconds before it can ram into Arrtrad from behind. With one leap, he closes the twenty feet between them and lands on the run beside the speeding car. A blossom of mold has spread across the top of it. Without a regular car wash, nature is eating up the old stuff.
Too bad there are plenty of replacements.
On landing, Lurker hunches down and drives his foot-long forearm blades into the driver’s side door of the car and lifts. Steam jets from the hip and knee joints of his exoskeleton, and the diesel engine surges as he wrenches the whole side of the car upward. While on its two right wheels, the car veers but still manages to clip Arrtrad’s right rear leg midstride. The car flips over and rolls away, but Arrtrad is off balance; he trips.
Falling down at a twenty-mile-an-hour jog is serious business. Luckily, the exoskeleton can tell that it’s falling. Leaving Arrtrad no choice in the matter, the machine jerks his arms close to his body and his legs curl into fetal position. The roll cage becomes pertinent. In this crash pose, the exoskeleton rolls over a few times, then plows over a fire hydrant and comes to a stop.
No water comes out of the decapitated hydrant.
By the time Lurker lands next to him, Arrtrad is already climbing to his feet. The pudgy blond man stands up and I can see he is grinning, chest heaving.
“Thanks,” he says to Lurker.
There’s blood on his teeth but Arrtrad doesn’t seem to care. He pops up and sprints away. Lurker follows, on the lookout for more cars. New ones appear, but they’re slow, not ready. They can’t track the speeding men as they leap through alleys and tear across parks.
Lurker put it best: It’s only a single fucking mile.
From a new camera angle, I see the cylindrical British Telecom tower looming in the blue sky like a Tinkertoy. Antennae bristle from the top and a ring of microwave transmitter dishes wrap just below, pointing away in every direction. It’s the biggest TV switch station in London and it’s got whole highways of fiber-optic cable buried underneath. When it comes to communications, all roads lead to the BTT.
The wiry exoskeletons appear and dart around the side of the building, stopping in front of a steel door. Arrtrad leans the scratched-up frame of his exo against the wall, huffing and puffing. “Why not just destroy it from here?” he asks.
Lurker flexes his arms and jounces his head back and forth to loosen up his neck. He seems exhilarated by the run. “The fiber is buried in there in a concrete tube. Protected. Besides, that would be a bit crass, wouldn’t it? We’re better than that, brother. We’ll use this place against the machines. Pick up the phone and make a call. It’s what we do best, isn’t it? And this is the biggest goddamn phone in the hemisphere.”
Lurker nods toward a bulge in his pocket.
“And if all else fails … kaboom,” he says.
Then Lurker jams his forearm blades into the steel door and wrenches them back out, leaving a rip in the metal. A couple more stabs and the door swings open.
“Onward,” says Lurker, and the two step inside a narrow hallway. They hunch over and creep through the dark passage, trying not to breathe their own diesel fumes. In the low light, the LEDs embedded in the curve of metal over their heads brighten up.
“What are we looking for?” asks Arrtrad.
“The fiber,” Lurker whispers. “We’ll want to get down to the fiber. Best-case, we hijack it and send a signal for all the robots to jump into the river. Worst case, we blast the jammer and free up the communications satellites.”
At the end of the hallway is another steel door. Gently, Lurker pushes it open. His LEDs dim as Lurker pokes his head out.
From the built-in camera in the exoskeleton, I see that the machines have almost entirely hollowed out the interior of the cylindrical building. Shafts of sunlight arc in through fifteen stories of dirty glass windows. The light falls through dead air and shatters through a latticework of rebar and radial support beams. Bird calls echo through the cavernous space. Vines and grass and mold are growing on the mounds of trash and debris that cover every surface of the ground floor.
“Bloody hell,” Lurker mutters.
In the middle of this arboretum, a solid cement cylinder juts straight up through the entire height of the building. Encrusted with vines, the pillar disappears into gloomy heights above. It is the final support structure holding this place up. The backbone.
“Building’s gone native,” says Arrtrad.
“Well, there’s no way to reach the upper transmitters from here,” Lurker says, looking at the heaps of moldering rubble that used to be the floors and walls of upper stories. “Doesn’t matter. We’ve got to get to the computers. Base of the building. Down.”
Something small and gray scuttles over a pile of moldy papers and under a tangled heap of rusted office chairs. Arrtrad and Lurker look at each other, wary.
Careful of his forearm spike, Lurker raises a finger to his lips. Together, the men creep out of the hallway and into the arboretum. Their feet blades indent the moss and rotting trash, leaving plain tracks behind.
A blue door waits in the base of the central pillar, dwarfed by the sheer size of the hollowed-out building around it. They move to the door at a fast trot, keeping noise to a minimum. Arrtrad rears back to stab the door, but Lurker stops him with a gesture. Pulling his arm out of the exoskeleton, Lurker reaches down and turns the doorknob. With a yank, the door opens on creaky hinges. I doubt it has been opened since the war began.
Inside, there is dirt in the hallway for a few steps and then things get
very clean. The faint roar of air-conditioning grows louder as they walk farther down the cement hallway. The floor is angled downward, toward a square of bright light at the end of the tunnel.
“It’s as if we’ve died,” says Arrtrad.
Finally, they reach the bottom: a cylindrical white clean room with twenty-foot ceilings. It is filled with row after row of humming racks of equipment. The stacks of gear are arrayed in concentric circles, each row getting shorter the closer it is to the center of the room. Rows of fluorescent lights shine down, starkly illuminating every detail of the room. Condensation starts to form on the black metal of the exoskeletons and Arrtrad shivers.
“Plenty of juice down here, anyway,” says Lurker.
The two men walk inside, disoriented by the millions of stuttering green and red lights that line the towers of hardware. In the center of the room is their goal: a black hole in the floor the size of a manhole, metal stairs poking out of the top—the fiber hub.
Four-legged robots made of white plastic climb up and down the racks, slipping between stacks of whirring equipment like lizards. Some of these lizard robots use their forelegs to stroke the equipment, moving wires or pressing buttons. It reminds me of those little birds that land on hippos, cleaning them of parasites.
“C’mon,” Lurker murmurs to Arrtrad. They stride together to the hole in the floor. “Down there is the answer to all our problems.”
But Arrtrad doesn’t respond. He’s already seen it.
Archos.
Silent as the grim reaper, the machine hovers over the hole. It looks like an enormous eye, made of circular rings of shimmering metal. Yellow wires snake away from the edges like a lion’s mane. A flawless glass lens is nestled in the center of the rings, smoky black. It watches without blinking.
And yet it is not Archos. Not fully. Only a part of the intelligence that is Archos has been put inside this menacing machine: a local sub-brain.
Lurker strains against his exoskeleton, but he can’t move his arms or legs. The motors in his suit have frozen up. His face goes pale as he realizes what must have happened.