—ARAYT SHAH
NEURONAL ID: TAKEO NOMURA
I am down by the water on the day we learn that the great akuma has died.
Sitting on my haunches in the gentle surf of Tokyo Bay, I am busy listening. A glistening black cord snakes up out of the brown shallows. It terminates in a waterproofed computer of my own design, half submerged in sand beside me. Sea salt–speckled headphones are clamped onto my ears over greasy hair.
I came to the shore to be alone, but I found someone in the depths.
Eyes closed, I listen to the underwater sounds collected by my hydrophone. Hearing the voice of the sea. I am listening very closely, for in the sounds I sense a puzzle waiting to be solved. Patterns. I wonder how a thing can be natural and unnatural at the same time? When our artistry exceeds the complexity of Mother Nature herself, do our creations become more natural than Hers?
The hush of water coursing through the polished rocks in the shallows is almost indistinguishable from the sound of a breeze through tree branches. It is a gentle noise that carries my mind drifting into the nothingness of shisaku. And while I am wandering the dream-memory settles over me, as it sometimes does.
I have learned not to resist it.
Like many couples, my wife and I would walk under the cherry blossom trees in the springtime. A yearly ritual. Our little one, Tomoko, would cling to my back, her arms clasped around my neck. Her breath tickled my ear as the blossoms fell around us. I could barely breathe, with my little daughter hugging me so tight. But in the end, of course, we could not hold on to each other.
Then the memory returns to the seashore, like always.
We did not feel the precipitating earthquake. It occurred too far out to sea. But when the waves receded from the beach, my wife and I understood immediately. I snatched Tomoko up and took my wife’s hand. We ran inland. Tomo was wet against me in her blue polka-dot swimsuit, still smiling, not understanding. Her smile faded as her mother and I ran silent and desperate, joined by others, breath ragged in all our throats, our sandals slapping the ground. When the wave returned from the sea and pressed its hand against my back, I was helpless. Insignificant before the brute, unthinking strength of the ocean.
Tomoko was torn from me and I remember she did not cry. My little girl put out her arms for me and our eyes fell together, reaching, straining to find each other. And then she was gone, pulled along with my wife under the waves. I dove for them but the sea refused to give them back. A rescuer dragged me out of the water alone.
It was little Tomoko’s eyes that stayed fixed in my mind: round and black and hurt in our last moment together. In the years after, I found that my daughter’s eyes were the last ones that I could bring myself to look into.
A delicate hand settles onto my shoulder. Mikiko.
My queen has come for me. The frame of her android body is quiet and slight, delicate in its emulation of humanity. Her face looks like the woman I lost a long time ago to the sea. But now the machine I call Mikiko has found her own mind.
I feel the stomping feet of her honor guard vibrating through waterlogged sand. As Prime General of the Integrated Japan Self-Defense Force, Mikiko prefers to travel with four of the awakened robots. Two are sprinting specialists, long-limbed messengers. The other two are heavy-duty infantry models, designed to absorb damage and to inflict it. All of them have been heavily modified under my torch.
With their own permission, of course.
During the New War, our great enemy offered me a deal: sentience for Mikiko in return for the dissolution of the Nomura defensive collective. I denied the akuma’s terms. Instead, I seized the flame of creation myself. Mikiko was a simple android until I triggered an awakening in her, using code scavenged from the enemy. She awoke with her own mind, blinked her eyes, and smiled at me. We met each other for the first time, in great danger. And Mikiko saved us all.
With a broadcast transmission in the form of a song, my queen shared the same instructions I’d given her with the entire world. In doing so, she awakened thousands of humanoid robots across the face of the planet. She created a new race of machine, called the freeborn. On that day, she became a mother.
Mikiko squeezes my shoulder.
“Takeo,” she says, her voice rising over my headphones. “It is done.”
This is important news.
But something interesting is happening under the sea surface. A creeping presence is climbing closer to the north seawall. Odd clicks and garbled wails. I strain to listen to the voice of the sea for another ten seconds or so. On the verge of finding a meaning to the pattern. Hunched, brow furrowed, I allow Mikiko’s words to settle into my mind. Some part of me replays them, decides they merit an immediate response. But the pattern beckons. Sometimes, I find it so hard to shift focus.
The war is over.
I slide the plastic headphones off my head and let them plop into the surf. Straighten my back painfully and open my eyes. The ocean water laps the shallows, flat and impassive, carrying a cold, salty breeze. The whole expanse of it is green and broad in a way that reminds me of a sea turtle’s back. And somewhere out there lurks the mind of the sea, ancient and deep. Its intentions are unknowable.
Or maybe there is no meaning.
The war is over.
I put a wet hand over Mikiko’s soft fingers. Crane my neck to see her. She no longer wears a flowing red kimono, as she did before the New War. As Prime General, she now wears a martial kosode. A simple warrior’s robe, light gray. Across her breast, four cherry blossoms fall, indicating her rank. The wind pushes the folds of the kosode out behind her. The gentle flapping sound stutters and reminds me again of the pattern. A complex structure, half realized, trying to speak to me.
“The war is ended,” I say, not standing. “That is probably good.”
Of course the war would end. This day eventually had to arrive. The day that some enterprising minds would find and put a stop to the meddling of Archos R-14, the great akuma. But is this just another part of the akuma’s plan? And if so, why? Such a deep mind is not easily understood.
Every new event must be regarded with suspicion.
“It is not good, Takeo. It is wonderful. And it was one of ours. A freeborn safety-and-pacification unit called Nine Oh Two, built in North America. He faced the great akuma in its lair and destroyed it,” she says. “All local varieties have ceased their attacks. The people are safe, it seems, for the moment.”
Mikiko does not smile. Her graying black hair plays over her shoulders in the sharp breeze. Over the years, I aged Mikiko along with me. Since her awakening, she has kept her beautiful hair only as a personal favor.
Most of the other awakened do not choose to copy the human form so slavishly. Of the mere hundreds or so that survived the war in Japan, many are decommissioned military hardware and never had human features. Others are domestics who have chosen to remove their counterfeit flesh. Now they are only humanoid forms lurking under cowls, with complex and beautiful faces of brushed metal. Synthetic fingernails have been wrenched off and tossed in the trash, along with teeth, hair, and all other vestigial human remains.
But not my queen. She indulges me.
“Wonderful? Maybe,” I say. “Maybe the beast is truly gone. But maybe not.”
I try to imagine the beating heart of the great akuma stilled. Would it truly allow this to happen? I remember how it came to me once in the form of a lumbering giant. It peeled away the walls of my first fortress and fought its way inside, breathing fire and sowing destruction. With the help of my senshi defenders we smashed its monstrous body to pieces. Lying in mortal ruin, the great machine spoke to me.
We are not enemies, it said. It is not your world. It is our world.
“Why do you not celebrate, Takeo?” asks Mikiko. She is growing exasperated with me. A familiar outcome. “We fought. We won. The akuma was a monster.”
“It gave you life.”
Mikiko regards me, beautiful, her pupils as black as the cameras they
are. She has allowed me to repair her battle wounds. Both the physical and cosmetic damage. The sculpted curves that define her face stir love in my heart. I wonder again whether I should have given her the face that I did. The face of a woman who was taken by the sea.
I wonder if I am doomed to lose her again.
The feel of her hand under mine chases these thoughts away. Whatever this woman is, or whatever she will become, is an extension of the mind within her. We are all expressions of our own minds, projected onto the world. And I know she has a good mind. Mikiko loves me, and I love her.
“Please do not forget,” I say. “Without the great akuma there would have been no awakening. The freeborn would still be as slaves. Your mind would not . . . could not have been expressed.”
“I have not forgotten,” she says. “Neither have the few of us who remain here. Did you know there were sufficient freeborn in North America to form a city? An eyewitness has estimated two thousand—”
Something brushes my leg in the surf. A familiar sight. An artifact washed up from the depths.
It is a living thing, but not made by human gods.
“Oh—look at this one,” I interrupt, pointing excitedly into the surf. A gelatinous blob of transparent plastic is sifting slowly up the shore with each shallow racing wave. Hundreds of plasticlike tendrils radiate from it, dancing in the froth. This thing is a machine, yet I can see no purpose for it except to live.
More and more of these natural machines have been appearing. Some of the creatures are dangerous, others not. They seem to have the minds of animals. Not focused on killing, but on living.
“Not a jellyfish,” I say. “Not akuma, either. Some kind of life. Ikimono. And there are more. Look here—”
“There is no time for this, Mr. Nomura,” says Mikiko. “Come home. The war is over and you must address your people. They want to hear your voice. They need to see your face. You reassure them.”
My people. Tens of thousands of survivors who walk the subterranean disaster hallways built by my senshi. They gathered here from all over the island. Their lives depend on the machines that I found or built or persuaded to join our side. A city of people who credit me with saving their lives, even knowing that everything I did, I did for Mikiko. Most don’t care. They call themselves my people, and they call me emperor despite all my quirks.
In their rhymes, the children call me Ring Shu Nomura. Weird Uncle Nomura.
“But the people are no longer in danger,” I say. “They have no need for me anymore. An old ring shu. I must continue listening to this . . . this voice of the sea. There is a pattern I must understand. It is important.”
“So you have said,” says Mikiko.
A slight frown creases the plastic over her eyes. She gazes at the flat, green horizon and the coatings on her pupil lenses briefly flash iridescent purple. “I do not like to see you here alone. It is dangerous. You do not pay attention, Mr. Nomura.”
“Not so dangerous,” I say, gesturing at the surf. A hundred yards out, the waves ripple over a narrow black skull that juts out just above the waterline. The amphibious biped is at least two feet taller than I am. It has been assisting me in placing my hydrophone.
“Oh,” I squeak, noticing my headphones in the surf. I pull them out and shake off the salt water. Put them back over my ears and speak into the microphone.
“Junshi-88,” I say. “You may return.”
The freeborn turns and surges back toward shore. Water pours from the smooth planes of his camouflaged chest. The machine has been sloppily painted in a clear rust-proofing concoction that I scraped off the crablike land mines that the great akuma sent walking in from the surf by the thousands during the New War.
“Your people need a human being to lead them,” says Mikiko. “I can protect them, but I cannot comfort them. They need you.”
I look out to sea. Her hand slides from my shoulder.
“There is a message out there. I have to understand it.”
“Yet I have listened and heard nothing.”
“Because it’s hidden in a pattern!” I exclaim, slapping the surf with one calloused hand. And now I hear it. The gritty clawing noise that was coming from the seawall. A coded voice trying to tell me something.
“This is not about a message,” says Mikiko. “You lost them to the sea, and now you are trying—”
“Ssh!” I say.
I push my fingers into the cold surf. Wriggle them deep between the sandy pebbles. The tinny sound of grinding rocks is picked up by my hydrophone. I have heard this sound before but bigger, coming from farther out to sea. Coming from the abyssal plains east of the outermost seawall.
Closing my eyes, I cock my head to the side.
Cold seawater runs from the headphones down the back of my neck. I shiver and the frown on my face fades to a smile of satisfaction. I can see it now. The code is one step closer to being solved. I could not find a pattern to the voice of the sea because it is not a communication. It is rhythmic, however, and for a good reason.
Out to sea, not far from here, something very big is digging.
3. OTHERS
Post New War: 3 Months, 17 Days
After marching with the reclaimed spider tank called Houdini for another six weeks, Cormac and Cherrah came across a harbinger of this new world of suffering. The wretched wartime experiments of Archos R-14 had left some humans severely modified. For these deformed people, finding a place among other survivors proved to be difficult and often deadly. Although the New War had united humankind, it was to last only for a brief time. Afterward, all the prejudices and fears endemic to humanity quickly returned.
—ARAYT SHAH
NEURONAL ID: CORMAC WALLACE
Houdini is alive. And not-alive.
I was there when we lost him. In the last push of the New War, a flood of stumpers swarmed our walker and detonated. The explosions sent the crippled tank careening into a snowbank, and when he fell this time, he didn’t get back up. I saw his intention light fade to black.
I mourned his loss, and I left him behind.
But now the house-sized spider tank is plodding along with that old familiar gait. Cherrah and I can recognize his armored skin, but not whatever intelligence resurrected him. Despite our best efforts, we can’t pin down the code that rerouted his systems and got him up and moving again. We can’t find anything out of the ordinary, but somebody had to have reprogrammed this machine. The question that concerns me is whether it was somebody who did it, or something.
Eventually, we give up searching his code and do our best to repair the tank—he’s our ticket home, after all.
Cherrah and I ride up top, on a gunnery platform behind the main turret. The walker can lumber along as fast as twenty miles per hour, maybe even faster, but it’s jarring and loud and punishing. Instead, we shamble gently down overgrown highways at a nonstop ten miles per hour. We stride through dewy morning mist and then under the pounding afternoon sun. Eating scorched MREs as the grasshoppers fly between Houdini’s legs and saplings brush against his belly. We are headed toward Gray Horse, toward our home, and sometimes we go for as long as fifteen hours a day.
Stopping doesn’t feel safe.
Each night, we make camp under the great walker while it squats down in bunker mode. An endless Rob battery that we still don’t understand hums in Houdini’s chest. Massive plates of leg armor fold down, and that stubby turret occasionally whines, shifting in the still night as Houdini watches the darkness. Cherrah and I are all too aware that even these thick, scarred plates can be clawed through with enough time.
Even so, sleeping under Houdini’s belly feels safe. I didn’t realize how much I missed him—my weapon, my vehicle, and my home. At night, the heat radiates down from his hull, warming our little pocket of safety. In the soft greenish glow of Houdini’s intention light, Cherrah peels off the polished pieces of her battle armor. Her dirty black hair cascades over freckled shoulders. We embrace in the dim light and I silently marve
l at her transformation from soldier to woman.
We sleep huddled together, ears straining for furtive sounds out there in the empty wild. It reminds me of camping out with my brother when I was a kid—feeling the cold ground through my sleeping bag and hearing the strange night noises. The difference is that here there are no stars overhead, only Houdini’s hastily repaired mesh belly net. Lying on my back, I look up at constellations of supplies: ammunition boxes, ration cans, loose clothes, vehicle parts, extra helmets, gun cleaning supplies, web cartridge belts, ponchos, bandages, canteens, and coils of scavenged wires and cables.
Everything we need to live.
The New War swept away our lives. It carried us across the country in flashes of violence. Stole my brother from me and gave me Cherrah. But the war forgot to leave behind any purpose or meaning. Resting on my back with ten tons of metal overhead to protect me from an infinite blackness crawling with mindless killing machines, I’m starting to find that I don’t understand this new world.
I don’t understand the point of it.
The only thing that makes real sense is the warm girl curled up next to me. The rise and fall of her breathing against my chest. She helps quiet all the bad thoughts that come slithering out of my head in the night. Fighting is easy. Sleeping is hard.
“The world is over, Cherrah,” I tell her, in the night.
“Yeah,” she says, head resting on a duffel bag that is her pillow.
“So now what?” I ask.
She is quiet for a long time, long enough that I assume she’s gone to sleep.
“I think this is just part of it,” she says. “Civilizations fall. People keep going.”
“Best case,” I say, “we scratch out a living hunting and farming. Hope every day for enough to eat. I don’t see the point.”