Robogenesis

  I drop hard into the snow.

  The guy lifts his leg, his long tendons snapping like frozen tree branches, and drops a boot into my stomach cavity. Rib fragments scatter in the snow among shreds of my clothing and flesh. The beard keeps stomping and moaning, destroying my already ruined body in a slow-motion rage.

  And I can’t feel a damn thing.

  Then another shot is fired. The booming echo skitters through the trees in unfamiliar lurches. An unidentified weapon.

  The next stomping blow doesn’t land. Instead, the big guy sits down heavily, with torn chunks of his torso sprayed onto the ground around him.

  I shove myself into sitting position as something comes out from behind a cracked tree trunk. It is short and gray-skinned, limping. The parasite on its back is blocky, not as graceful as the smoothly ridged humps the rest of us wear. And it’s got on a strange uniform, long frozen to warped bone. This thing was a soldier once.

  Not one of ours. A Chinese soldier.

  A tendril of black smoke seems to rise from the new soldier’s parasite. The smoke is some kind of bad dream, something the parasite makes me see, yet it feels more real than the ice world around me. It floats like a spiderweb on the wind. Closer and closer.

  When the smoke reaches my head, I hear a woman’s voice.

  “I am Chen Feng. Wandering lost in the courts of Dìyù, honor-bound to accept judgment for my sins. I greet you in solidarity, spirit,” she says.

  The soldier is female. Exposed cheekbones dapple her shrunken face, polished by the weather. She has the grinning, toothy mouth of a corpse, yet her words expand into my head like warm medicine.

  “Hello?” I ask, watching a flicker of radio communication intertwine with her light. Whoa. I think she just taught me to speak. “Where did you come from?”

  “I am the might of Manchuria. A spirit. No longer alive and not yet reborn.”

  “Where are your people?”

  “They are dust. The Northeast Provinces foolishly marched alone. We sought glory and instead were devoured by the j[i#299;]qì rén. Those consumed rose to slaughter our brothers and sisters. The Siberian Russians arrived with vodka and boasts and we slew the Èluós[i#299;], too. You arrived on walking tanks, and we rose wearily once more from where the snow had buried us in shallow graves.”

  “You were waiting for Gray Horse Army.”

  “Your metal soldiers were too fast. The pànduàn cut through our frozen flesh. Raced into the west. And when the final pànduàn defied the great enemy, the foul deep light was extinguished. I awoke into Dìyù, where we shall all be judged and punished.”

  Years. This soldier must have been out here in the cold for years. The enormity of her suffering fills my mind.

  “We’ve got to leave here,” I say.

  Chen Feng doesn’t respond. Neither do the others. A hopeless silence settles onto my shoulders like gravity. There is nowhere to go. We all sense it. Nothing but wilderness for thousands of miles. We stand silent and still, none of us even with warm breath to see in the cold. I turn to the horizon, avoiding their faces.

  A kind of leftover orange haze billows beyond the trees.

  It’s the place where Archos must have made its final stand. And where I might still find Lonnie Wayne. The old man saved my life and brought me into Gray Horse Army. I’m scared to let him see me like this, but I’ve got a dozen hurt soldiers here who need me. Maybe we’re dead and maybe we’re not. Either way, I’m still in command.

  “We’re going to reunite with Gray Horse Army,” I transmit, and begin to limp away.

  Our group walks for three days and nights. We don’t tire and we don’t change pace. The orange mist on the horizon grows. Our sluggish steps never stop.

  I don’t notice when Chen Feng stops marching. I’m watching her back and thinking that you could almost mistake her for a human being. Somebody who has been torn up, sure, but a living person. Daydreaming, I walk right past her.

  I’m almost killed before I can stop.

  A slender silver machine is standing motionless in the snow: the Arbiter model Nine Oh Two. It’s a seven-foot-tall humanoid robot with a scavenged rifle on the high ready. Impervious to the cold, it’s wearing a flak jacket half open. Its three eyes are on me, lenses dilating as it absorbs the fact of my existence. It hasn’t shot me yet, so it must be trying to classify what it sees.

  Am I a severely wounded human being? A broken war machine? Am I dead or alive or what the hell? Nine Oh Two doesn’t seem to know. Neither do I.

  Over the machine’s shoulder, I see a little tent shivering in the wind. The structure is wrapped up tight and the interior is throbbing with that rotten orange glow. Some shard of Archos R-14 is inside, talking.

  I take a step forward.

  Nine Oh Two bristles. Thin sheets of ice crack and fall from his jacket as the barrel of his gun settles between my eyes.

  Nine Oh Two points at the snow a few yards away. I hear his transmission in my head: “Route denied, acknowledge. Alternate route indicated. I wish you luck . . . Lark Iron Cloud,” it says.

  All kinds of tracks are in the muddy ice. Regular old footprints, the neatly spaced mineshafts of high-stepping tall walkers, and the flat-topped mesas left by spider tanks dragging their equipment-filled belly nets over high snowdrifts. They don’t know it, but they’ve left behind some of their soldiers. The path leads south into the woods.

  Gray Horse Army is marching home.

  There are no mirrors out here in the wilderness, and I thank the Creator for that.

  Without a mirror, it’s up to my imagination to guess what Gray Horse Army sees when they first look out at us. A shambling group of a dozen corpses following in their tracks, deaf and dumb and clumsy.

  The humans don’t travel at night, which is why we catch up to them.

  At dusk on the third day, we watch the spider tanks amble into covered-wagon formation. The legged metal giants squat into bunker configurations for the night, encircling the human camp. In the protected clearing, campfires glitter into existence. Soon, rifle scopes wink at us from the tops of the tanks.

  We keep a safe distance. Sway together numbly through the night, the wind cutting moaning tunnels between us. Gray Horse Army does not fire. The war is over, after all. I imagine we are just another one of the odd atrocities left behind in this new world. Not enemies, not yet.

  At dawn there is movement.

  A tall walker pulls up short and the rider watches for maybe half an hour. The rest of the camp is packing up. Groaning tanks stand, loaded with soldiers. A flock of tall walker scouts sprint ahead. But before the army moves, two tanks part and a handful of men approach. As they get near, I recognize Lonnie Wayne.

  He’s shading his eyes and shaking his head in disbelief.

  Lonnie shrugs off his assault rifle and tosses it to the man next to him. Unfastens the loop on his sidearm holster, lets the pistol hang low on his hip. Extra ammunition and a knife and a hand radio hang from his belt, flopping as he strides toward us, alone.

  “Lark?” he calls, voice breaking.

  His boots crunch through the brittle morning snow.

  I don’t react, because I can’t. My every potential move is monstrous. To speak is to groan. To lift my corpse’s puppet arms is to make a mockery of the dead. I’m so ashamed of my injuries. All I can do is stand here, a monster with nothing to say as the breaking sun turns the ice to light.

  Lonnie ignores the others. Gets near enough to look at my face.

  “Oh, Lark,” he says. “Look what they did to you.”

  I send all my concentration into the foreign black metal in my head. Push out a smoky wisp of contact that only I can see. Let it settle over Lonnie’s hand radio like ghostly fingertips. It doesn’t catch, though. He’s got man-made equipment and it doesn’t work like Rob-built hardware. My transmission slips right through.

  The old man studies me, looks for some reaction. But I can give him nothing.

  “I can’t leave you like
this,” he says.

  Lonnie draws his pistol, reluctant, eyes shining. Lifts it glinting into the air and extends his arm. My head wobbles as the barrel noses into my temple. This close to death and I can’t scream for Lonnie to stop. All I can think of is how much I miss the feeling of my goddamn heart beating in my chest.

  “Lark,” he says. “I’m proud of you, kid. You did real good.”

  The old man pulls back the hammer with his thumb. Drops his index finger into the trigger guard. Wraps it around the cold familiar steel.

  “Know you were a son to me,” he says, and squeezes his mouth into a hard line. Then he looks away, keeping his blue eyes wide to stop the tears from falling out.

  His radio squawks. Lonnie pauses, cocks his head. Static.

  “Alive,” the radio says, in a hoarse whisper.

  I see the word register on Lonnie Wayne’s face like a ripple on a pond.

  Real slow, he turns his head to face all of us, a dozen silent corpses standing mute in the dawn. Spirits who are not alive and not yet dead. Honor-bound to survive.

  Lonnie lowers his pistol.

  “Still alive,” hisses the radio. “I’m sorry.”

  The old man blinks the low sunlight out of his eyes along with a couple of crystalline tears. Holsters his weapon with trembling hands. My skin can’t feel it when he cups my ruined face in his palms. I can’t smell him when he pushes his forehead against mine. Inside, though, my heart is stung with a pure, eternal kind of sadness that never makes it to my face.

  “We’ll get through this, son,” he says, simply.

  If I could cry, I guess I would do it about now.

  Not for what happened to me and my soldiers, or for the bone-tired despair dragging down the bags under Lonnie’s eyes. I would cry for something even worse. For the sick orange glow that’s been spreading over the horizon. For what I recognize as the birth of something like Archos R-14, its tendrils of control looping and coiling out of a growing wicked haze. For the never-ending goddamn trials of living things.

  If I could, I’d cry for what’s to come.

  2. WHISPERS

  Post New War: 1 Month, 12 Days

  Weeks after the New War ended, the surviving soldiers of Gray Horse Army finished regrouping and began their long march home. The kilometers-long, meandering column of spider tanks and ground infantry encountered little resistance during its journey back toward Gray Horse, Oklahoma. A new threat, however, was growing from within. As the parasite-infested corpses of old friends and allies stumbled into camp, the survivors had starkly different ideas about how to respond. Deciding between honoring the dead or sending them on to the afterlife threatened to turn brother soldiers against each other. Luckily, a man named Hank Cotton found the answer out in the cold, dark woods.

  —ARAYT SHAH

  NEURONAL ID: HANK COTTON

  Zombies. I don’t know any other damn way to put it. On top of every other thing this war has put us through, now we’ve got a pack of honest-to-Jesus zombies following Gray Horse Army around like little lost puppy dogs.

  Lonnie Wayne says they used to be our folks and he thinks they may still be, but the truth is ugly and rotten and staring us right in the face. Eyes don’t lie, I see the decay. Ears don’t lie, I hear the wind whistling over frozen bone. My nose sure ain’t lying, because I can smell the rotten ones a mile away.

  The minute those things shambled out of the woods I said, “Kill them. Kill them now, Lonnie.” And like he does, he said, “Now hold on, Hank.”

  Old Hank, being hot-tempered again. Hold on!? With that coming out of the woods? I told him, Bubba, you better get locked and loaded and put down every one of those sons of bitches and you better do it right now before you get to overthinking it. It doesn’t matter what kind of uniform they’re wearing, because they’re KIA. Dead dead dead. Deader than a bunch of goddamn doorknobs.

  They’ve been retired from the military with honors.

  Instead, Lonnie went and got his brain involved. He thinks too much, like that.

  He can’t understand that your gut is what keeps you a man. When you feel the horror in your bones, the willies creeping up the backs of your arms, why, that’s your soul talking to you. Telling you what’s natural and what needs to have a boot put across its throat. When your gut clenches up inside you and your breath don’t want to leave your lungs, well, that means you listen. It means you make your move. Some things just don’t warrant another thought.

  Lonnie brought the elders into it, like always. Radioed back to the head committeeman, John Tenkiller. The old man said to let the parasites live so long as they can speak. He said that in the beginning was the Word. Which proved again that Lonnie won’t listen to reason or take action when the situation calls for it. He’s a fighter and cowboy tough, but he takes too darn long. People get killed waiting around for him.

  Too many words.

  These dead things have been marching behind us for two weeks. Best case they’re Rob spies. Worst case, hell, I don’t know. Maybe they’re waiting around for their chance to get in here and eat our wounded. Wouldn’t surprise me a bit.

  It’s enough to get a concerned man’s attention. So, sometimes, I go on little walks now. When the main column settles in for the night I’ll go on ahead and put together the Cotton patrol. Just me and some of the more safety-minded fellas making the rounds. Independent of the management, understand?

  From my spot out here in the dark woods, I’m looking at what’s left of Lark Iron Cloud through the scope of my rifle. I got to hold my breath so I don’t fog the viewfinder, but old Lark doesn’t have that problem. His lungs are cold as a witch’s titty. Honest, I don’t think the dead Cherokee kid even breathes at all. He just skulks out there on the camp perimeter, watching me with shark eyes that don’t blink.

  The infernal machine buried in the nape of his neck has cameras on it. Real small, but I’ve seen them. They wrap around the side of his face. Half his jaw is missing and the skin of his cheek hangs there stiff as rawhide. I doubt his real eyes work anymore. How could they? The parasite only keeps what’s left of the kid’s brain alive. Brainboys say that Big Rob was harvesting heads. They think the machine was trying to read our minds.

  She’s a mad world.

  It gets me to wondering, though. Is Lark still a man? Or is he just a dead man’s brain that’s been hijacked by one of the more deranged machines of this war? I don’t know for sure, but sitting here looking at the kid through this rifle scope . . . my trigger finger is getting mighty itchy.

  I sweep my scope over to the right, onto some kind of froze-up ching-chong soldier standing next to Lark. She’s been rotting out here with her friend Big Rob since before we showed up and took it to the bastard. Nobody has the guts to say it, especially not our fearless leader Lonnie, but I’m wondering how many of our boys she might’ve taken out when the hamburger started flying?

  She’s not even a part of our army.

  All I have to do is squeeze this trigger and the problem goes away. A curl of the finger and their brains go onto the ground. But how to explain what I’m doing out here? That’s where Lonnie’s got me. I can’t for the life of me figure out how to nail that Cherokee without Lonnie blowing everything up into a big deal.

  And the worst thing is the brainboys have been saying that maybe Big Rob ain’t really dead. There was what they call a “seismic disturbance.” Some kind of earthquake that wasn’t really an earthquake—but a transmission that had information encoded inside it. Any machines on the ground or in it or near it could have been compromised. We don’t know what the hell happened because it wasn’t even a man that went down there and fought Big Rob at the end.

  We sent a robot to do a man’s job.

  Something metal clinks in the trees behind me and now my gut is speaking to me real clear. Hustle up, fat boy, is what it’s saying. You got to daydreaming here in the woods and forgot that there’s murder among these trees.

  I spin around, rifle butt French-kissin
g the meaty part of my shoulder. My eye is off the scope while I search for whatever made that noise. That’s why I’m able to catch the flash of movement in my peripheral vision.

  It’s a light quadruped. Wolf-sized and damaged. I hear the clink again now that it’s moving fast. It’s had a bullet put through it at some point. Must have learned something from the experience, because it keeps running off into the trees. I just about get a bead on it before it’s gone.

  My Cotton patrols don’t use the radio, for obvious reasons. And I can’t risk calling out in case I attract more attention. It’s important I stay hidden. Some of these leftover quads have serrated forelimbs, like steak knives. They’ll tear through your chest armor in the first lunge and a second later they’ve got bladed rear feet up and scrabbling to disembowel you. One quad might be a nice dance, but two or more is a party you should regretfully decline.

  I stalk a few feet into the trees. Place each boot step careful and fast, my eyes open so wide they feel tight in the chilly air. The walker moves, leaving plain tracks, scraping like a drunk against an occasional tree trunk. It might be a wandering mapper-variety or it might have been part of a hunting pack. I don’t know. But if it’s really wounded, then I’ve got a singular chance to put it down before more can come join it.

  If it’s got friends, then I’m most likely a dead man walking.

  For the next ten minutes, it’s just me and my breath and the frostbit rifle stock pressed against my numb cheek. God forgive me but I didn’t think this one all the way through. It seemed broken and slow but the walker must have accelerated. The trail is gone and this is an ambush, no doubt about it. I knew better than to hunt Rob. We all of us who fought the machines know better.

  You don’t hunt Rob; he hunts you.

  I’m reaching for the radio to get some help and damn the consequences when I realize that maybe, just maybe, I’m not the dumbest son of a bitch on the planet. Maybe I’m the smartest. Or at least the luckiest, anyway.