Robopocalypse

  “Don’t tell me about dying, you fucking hunk of metal,” he says. “You’ve got no idea what life is. What it means to feel. You can’t be hurt. You can’t die. But that doesn’t mean I won’t enjoy killing you.”

  Cormac presses the gun against my forehead. I can feel the cool circle of the barrel against my outer casing. It is resting against a build line in my skull—a weak spot. One trigger pull and my hardware will be irreparably damaged.

  “Cormac,” says Cherrah. “Step away. You’re too close. That thing can take your gun away and kill you in a heartbeat.”

  “I know,” says Cormac, his face inches from mine. “But it hasn’t. Why?”

  I sit in the snow, a trigger pull away from death. There is nothing to do. So, I do nothing.

  “Why did you come here?” says Cormac. “You must have known we’d kill you. Answer me. You’ve got three seconds to live.”

  “We have a common enemy.”

  “Three. It’s just not your lucky day.”

  “We must fight it together.”

  “Two. You fuckers killed my brother last week. Didn’t know that, did you?”

  “You are in pain.”

  “One. Any last words?”

  “Pain means you are still alive.”

  “Zero, motherfucker.”

  Click.

  Nothing happens. Cormac moves his palm to the side and I observe that the clip is missing from the pistol. Maxprob indicates he never intended to fire at all.

  “Alive. You just said the magic word. Get up,” he says.

  Humans are so difficult to predict.

  I stand, rising to my full height of seven feet. My slender body looms over the humans in the clear, frigid air. I sense that they feel vulnerable. Cormac does not allow this feeling to show on his face, but it is in the way they all stand. In the way their chests rise and fall just a little faster.

  “What the fuck, Cormac?” asks Leo. “We not gonna kill it?”

  “I want to, Leo. Trust me. But it’s not lying. And it’s powerful.”

  “It’s a machine, man. It deserves to die,” says Leo.

  “No,” says Cherrah. “Cormac is right. This thing wants to live. Maybe as bad as we do. On the hill, we agreed to do whatever it takes to kill Archos. Even if it hurts.”

  “This is it,” says Cormac. “Our advantage. And I, for one, am going to take it. But if you can’t deal, pack up and hit the Gray Horse Army main camp. They’ll take you in. I won’t hold it against you.”

  The squad stands silent, waiting. It is clear to me that nobody is going to leave. Cormac eyes them all, one by one. Some unspoken human communication is taking place on a hidden channel. I did not realize they communicated this much without words. I note that we machines are not the only species who share information silently, wreathed in codes.

  Ignoring me, the humans gather into a rough circle. Cormac raises his arms and puts them on the shoulders of the two nearest humans. Then the rest put their arms on one another’s shoulders. They stand in this circle, heads in the middle. Cormac bares his teeth in a wild-eyed grin.

  “Brightboy squad is gonna fight with a motherfucking robot,” he says. The others begin to smile. “You believe that? You think Archos is going to predict that? With an Arbiter!”

  In a circle, arms intertwined and hot breath cascading into the middle, the humans appear to be a single, many-limbed organism. They make that repetitive noise again, all of them. Laughter. The humans are hugging each other and they are laughing.

  How strange.

  “Now, if only we could find more!” shouts Cormac.

  A roar of laughter comes from the human lungs, shattering the silence and somehow filling the stark emptiness of the landscape.

  “Cormac,” I croak.

  The humans turn to look at me. Their laughter dries up. The smiles fade so quickly into worry.

  I issue a tight-beam radio command. Hoplite and Warden, my squad mates, begin to stir. They sit up in the snow and wipe away the dirt and frost. They make no sudden movements and offer no surprises. They simply rise as though they had been asleep.

  “Brightboy squad,” I announce, “meet Freeborn squad.”

  Although they regarded each other uneasily at first, within a few days the new soldiers were a familiar sight. By week’s end, Brightboy squad had used plasma torches to carve the squad tattoo into the metal flesh of their new comrades.

  —CORMAC WALLACE, MIL#GHA217

  3. THEY SHALL GROW NOT OLD

  We’re not all of us human anymore.

  CORMAC “BRIGHT BOY” WALLACE

  NEW WAR + 2 YEARS, 8 MONTHS

  The true horror of the New War unfolded on a massive scale as Gray Horse Army approached the perimeter defenses of the Ragnorak Intelligence Fields. As we closed in on its position, Archos employed a series of last-ditch defensive measures that shocked our troops to the core. The horrific battles were captured and recorded by a variety of Rob hardware. In this account, I describe the final march of humankind against the machines from my own point of view.

  —CORMAC WALLACE, MIL#GHA217

  The horizon pitches and rolls mechanically as my spider tank trudges across the Arctic plain. If I squint my eyes, I can almost imagine that I’m on a ship. Setting sail for the shores of Hell.

  Freeborn squad brings up the rear, decked out in Gray Horse Army gear. From a distance they look like regular grunts. A necessary measure. It’s one thing to agree to fight alongside a machine, but it’s another thing to make sure nobody in Gray Horse Army puts hot lead into its back.

  The rhythmic whine of my spider tank trudging through knee-deep snow is reassuring. It’s something you can set your watch to. And I’m glad to have the top spot up here. Sucks to be down low with all the creepy crawlies. There’s too much wicked shit out there hidden in the snow.

  And the frozen bodies are disconcerting. The corpses of hundreds and hundreds of foreign soldiers carpet the woods. Stiff arms and legs poking out of the snow. From the uniforms we figure they’re mostly Chinese and Russian. Some Eastern Europeans. Their wounds are strange, extensive spinal injuries. Some of them seem to have shot each other.

  The forgotten bodies remind me of how little we know of the big picture. We never met them, but another human army already fought and died here. Months ago. I wonder which of these corpses were the heroes.

  “Beta group is too slow. Pull up,” says a voice over my radio.

  “Copy that, Mathilda.”

  Mathilda Perez started speaking to me over the radio after we met Nine Oh Two. I don’t know what Rob did to her, but I’m glad to have her on the horn. Telling us exactly how to approach our final destination. It’s nice to hear her little kid voice over my earpiece. She speaks with a soft urgency that’s out of place out here in the hard wild.

  I glance at the clear blue sky. Somewhere up there satellites are watching. And so is Mathilda.

  “Carl, report in,” I say, dipping my face near the radio embedded in the fur collar of my jacket.

  “Roger.”

  A couple of minutes later, Carl pulls up on a tall walker. He’s got a .50 caliber machine gun jerry-rigged to the pommel. He pulls his sensory package up onto his forehead, leaving pale raccoon circles around his eyes. He leans forward quizzically, resting his elbows on the massive machine gun italicized across the front of the tall walker.

  “Beta group is falling behind. Go hurry them up,” I say.

  “No problem, Sarge. By the way, you got stumpers on your nine. Fifty meters out.”

  I don’t even bother to glance at where he’s talking about. I know the stumpers are buried in a shaft, waiting for footsteps and heat. Without a sensory package I won’t be able to see them.

  “I’ll be back,” says Carl, yanking his visor back down over his face. He flashes a grin at me and wheels around and ostrich walks back out across the plain. He hunches down onto the saddle, scanning the horizon for the hell we all know is coming.

  “You heard him,
Cherrah,” I say. “Spurt it.”

  Crouched next to me, Cherrah aims a flamethrower and sends controlled arcs of liquid fire out onto the tundra.

  The day has been going this way so far. As close to uneventful as you can get. It’s summer in Alaska and the light will last another fifteen hours. The twenty or so spider tanks of Gray Horse Army form a ragged line about eight miles across. Each plodding tank trails a line of soldiers. Scavenged exoskeletons of all varieties are mixed in: sprinters, bridge spanners, supply carriers, heavy-weapon mounts, and medical units with long, curved forearms for scooping up injured troops. We’ve been slogging over this empty white plain for hours, cleaning up pockets of stumpers. But who knows what else is out here.

  It kills me to think how economical Big Rob has been for this whole war. In the beginning, he took away the technology that kept us alive and turned it against us. But mostly Rob just turned off the heat and let the weather do his work. Cut off our cities and forced us to fight each other for food in the wilderness.

  Shit. I haven’t seen a robot with a gun for years. These pluggers and stumpers and tanklets. Rob built all kinds of little nasties designed to cripple us. Not always kill us, sometimes just hurt us bad enough so we stay away. Big Rob’s spent the last few years building better mousetraps.

  But even mice can learn new tricks.

  I cock the machine gun and slap it with my palm to knock the frost off it. Our guns and flamethrowers keep us alive, but the real secret weapons are pacing thirty meters behind Houdini.

  Freeborn squad is a whole different animal. Big Rob specialized its weapons to the task of killing humans. Taking chunks out of us. Burrowing into our soft skin. Making our dead meat talk. Rob found our weak spots and attacked. But I’m thinking maybe Rob specialized too much.

  We’re not all of us human anymore. Out of the squad downstairs are a couple of soldiers who can’t see their breath in the wind. They’re the ones who don’t flinch when the stumpers get too close, who don’t get sluggish after five hours on the march. The ones who don’t rest or blink or talk.

  Hours later, we reach the Alaskan woods—the taiga. The sun is low on the horizon, bleeding sick orange light out of every branch of every tree. We march steady and silent, save our footsteps and the guttering burn of Cherrah’s wind-battered pilot light. I squint as the weak sunlight blinks on and off through the tree branches.

  We don’t know it yet, but we have reached hell—and as a matter of fact, it has frozen over.

  There’s a sizzling sound in the air, like bacon frying. Then a smack reports through the woods. “Pluggers!” shouts Carl, thirty meters away, striding through the woods on his tall walker.

  Chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck.

  Carl’s machine gun stutters, spraying bullets into the ground. I can see the long, glinting legs of his tall walker as he hops between the trees to keep moving and avoid being hit.

  Psshtsht. Psshtshtsht.

  I count five anchor blasts as the pluggers secure their firing pods in the ground. Carl better get the hell out of there now that the pluggers are target seeking. We all know it only takes one.

  “Drop a fat one in here, Houdini,” mutters Carl over the radio. A short electronic tone whines as the target coordinates come over the air and register with the tank.

  Houdini click-clocks an affirmative.

  My ride lurches to a stop and the trees around me grow taller as the spider tank squats to get traction. The squad below automatically take defensive positions around it, staying behind the armored legs. Nobody wants a plugger in them, not even old Nine Oh Two.

  The turret whirs a few degrees to the right. I press my gloves against my ears. Flame belches from the cannon, and a chunk of the woods up ahead explodes into a mess of black dirt and vaporized ice. The narrow trees around me shiver and send down a powder coating of snow.

  “Clear,” radios Carl.

  Houdini stands back up, motors groaning. The quadruped starts plodding ahead again like nothing happened. Like a pocket of screaming death wasn’t just obliterated.

  Cherrah and I look at each other, bodies swaying with each step of the machine. We’re both thinking the same thing: The machines are testing us. The real battle hasn’t started yet.

  Distant thuds echo through the woods like far-off thunder.

  The same thing is happening for miles, up and down the line. Other spider tanks and other squads are dealing with stumper outbreaks and incoming pluggers. Rob either hasn’t figured out to concentrate the attack or doesn’t want to.

  I wonder if we’re being drawn into an ambush. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. We have to do this. We’ve already bought tickets for the last dance. And it’s gonna be a real gala event.

  As the afternoon wears on, a creeping mist grows from the ground. Snow and dust is swept up by the driving wind and thrown into a haze that speeds along at the height of a man. Pretty soon it’s strong enough to obscure vision and even push my squad around, wearing them out, grinding them down.

  “So far so good,” radios Mathilda.

  “How far?” I ask.

  “Archos is at some kind of old drilling site,” she says. “You should see an antenna tower in about twenty miles.”

  The sun lingers low on the horizon, pushing our shadows away from us. Houdini keeps on walking as evening twilight creeps in. The spider tank stands taller than the thickening haze of wind-borne snow. With each step, its cowcatcher cuts through the gloom. Once the sun is a simmering bump on the horizon, Houdini’s external spotlights chunk on to illuminate the way.

  In the distance, I can see other headlights come on from the spider tanks that form the rest of the line.

  “Mathilda, what’s our status?” I ask.

  “All clear,” comes her soft reply. “Wait.”

  After a little while, Leo pulls himself up over Houdini’s belly rig and latches the frame of his exoskeleton to a U bar. He hangs there, leveling his weapon over the sea of dense fog. With Cherrah and me up here and Carl on the tall walker, only Freeborn squad is left on the ground.

  Occasionally, I spot the head of the Arbiter or Hoplite or Warden as they patrol. I’m sure their sonar cuts right through the driving fog.

  Then Carl lets out half a scream.

  Chuck-chuck—

  A dark shape lunges out of the mist and knocks over his tall walker. Carl rolls away. For a split second, I see a scuttling mantis the size of a pickup truck cutting through the air toward me, barbed razor arms up and poised. Houdini lurches backward and rears up, pawing the air with its front legs.

  “Arrivederci!” shouts Leo and I hear him unlatch his exoskeleton from Houdini. Then Cherrah and I are thrown onto the hard-packed snow and into the driving mist. A serrated leg needles into the snow a foot from my face. It feels like my right arm is caught in a vice. I turn and see a gray hand has got hold of me and realize that Nine Oh Two is dragging me and Cherrah out from under Houdini.

  The two massive walkers grapple above us. Houdini’s cowcatcher keeps the scrabbling claws of the mantis at bay, but the spider tank isn’t as agile as its ancestor. I hear the chuck-chuck of a large-caliber machine gun. Shards of metal spray off the mantis, but it keeps scratching and clawing at Houdini like a feral animal.

  Then I hear a familiar sizzle and the sickening pop of three or four nearby anchor blasts. Pluggers are here. Without Houdini we are in serious trouble—pinned to the spot.

  “Take cover!” I shout.

  Cherrah and Leo dive behind a big pine. As I go to join them, I see Carl peeking out from behind a tree trunk.

  “Carl,” I say. “Mount up and go get help from Beta squad!”

  The pale soldier gracefully remounts his fallen tall walker. A second later, I see its legs scissoring through the mist as he runs for the nearest squad. A plugger fires at him as he goes and I hear it ding against one of the tall walker legs. I put my back against a tree and scan for the plugger firing pods. It’s hard to see anything. Spotlights slash my face from the cleari
ng as the mantis and spider tank battle it out.

  Houdini is losing.

  The mantis slices open Houdini’s belly net and our supplies spew out onto the ground like intestines. An old helmet rolls past me and clanks off a tree hard enough to gouge the bark. Houdini’s intention light glows blood red through the fog. It’s hurt, but the old bastard is tough.

  “Mathilda,” I gasp into my radio. “Status. Advise.”

  For five seconds I get nothing. Then Mathilda whispers, “No time. Sorry Cormac. You’re on your own.”

  Cherrah peeks around a tree trunk and motions to me. The Warden 333 leaps in front of her just as a plugger launches. The metal slug hits the Warden hard enough to spin the humanoid robot in the air. It lands in the snow, sporting a new dent in its frame but otherwise fine. The plugger projectile is now an unrecognizable hunk of smoking metal. Built to burrow into flesh, its drill proboscis is crooked and blunted from an impact with metal.

  Cherrah disappears, taking better cover, and I start to breathe again.

  We have to mount Houdini if we’re going to make it any farther. But the spider tank isn’t doing so well. A chunk of its turret has been sliced and is hanging cockeyed. The cowcatcher is covered in shining streaks of fresh metal where the mantis blades have scratched through the patina of rust and moss. Worst of all, it’s dragging a rear leg where the mantis sliced a hydraulic line. Searing hot fans of high-pressure oil shoot from the hose, melting the snow into greasy mud.

  Nine Oh Two sprints out of the mist and leaps onto the mantis’s back. With methodical punches, he begins to attack the small hump that is nestled between that wicked tangle of serrated arms.

  “Fall back. Consolidate the line,” comes the command from Lonnie Wayne over the army-wide radio.

  From the sound of it, the spider tank squads to our right and left are in equally deep shit. Here on the ground I can hardly see anything. More plugger shots ring out, barely audible under the wheezing hydraulic whine of Houdini’s motors as it does battle in the clearing.