Robogenesis: A Novel

10. BACK TO THE BASICS


Post New War: 8 Months, 4 Days

It was only a matter of time until the crippled leftovers created by Archos R-14 were cast out into the wilderness. The fact that Lark Iron Cloud and the other parasites traveled with Gray Horse Army for as long as they did pushed the limits of statistical probability into extreme outlier territory. I suppose the emotions between brothers-in-arms ran deeper than even my calculations knew. But the inevitable happened, and on his own, unleashed from human contact, the parasite called Lark devolved into something far more gruesome than even my simulations could have ever predicted.

—ARAYT SHAH


NEURONAL ID: LARK IRON CLOUD

It’s all just chemicals.

That’s what I’m trying to tell myself about the shame and anger that yawn at the back of my throat. I want to shake every memory of Lonnie out of my head. Lonnie saying nothing. Doing nothing. The big old cowboy just giving up, face pointed at the ground. He didn’t move a finger and Hank made the call and they shot Chen. Blew her poor tortured body apart after all her years of scrapping and surviving.

And I melted away into the woods, headed toward a blue light.

Lonnie told me I was like a son. And him my father. The guy is supposed to be my father? He said that to me and I let myself believe it. I was dumb or desperate enough to fall for that line of crap.

Out here in the dark, alone, I’m thinking maybe the young rebellious Lark really did know what in the hell he was talking about. As if I’d find a father in this madness. It was always too sappy-good to be true.

You get hurt a certain number of times, then maybe there’s a reason? Maybe there’s a mark on you and you’re the only one who can’t see it. A big fat target that says “Hurt this one right here.” This one’s been hurt so much, why, we know he can take it. So heap it on and don’t be shy. And Chen. She thought she was a damned spirit, here to be punished. And in the end I guess she was more right than I knew.

Ah, f*ck it.

F*ck this feeling sorry for myself. F*ck Gray Horse and Lonnie and this war. F*ck that angel in my dreams and the blue light of the freeborn. F*ck this whole f*cked-up situation. It’s time to get back to the basics.

I start with my feet.

My boots are filthy, the leather gouged and slashed from being pushed clumsily through the motions of walking by the uncanny-strong metal struts sunk into the backs of my calves. The soles are split and puckered with whatever swollen body parts are left, the rotten flesh trapped inside rubber these long months.

I lift my arms. My natural hands are useless. The fingers are bloated and black and crooked with a hundred nights of numb forgotten frost-bite. I’ll have to grip my knife with the parasite’s simple pincers. Drawing the blade, I find that I have a grip like dry stone, Rob-made and way outside human pressure norms. Real faint, the pincers make a dentist drill whine when I open and close them.

This was never supposed to happen. Archos R-14 built these parasites to turn us into war machines. It must have overlooked the fact that when the connection was severed, we dead would regain control over our parasites and our own bodies.

Right?

I lean back and sit heavily on the muddy bank. The parasite’s heat fins splay out where my ass used to be, jarring my vision as I hit the dirt. The plastic wrap under my clothes crinkles as I adjust my posture. No part of my body has been spared by these black shards of metal. They run like bones through my arms and legs and torso. I’ve been trapped by them for so long.

Now it’s time to set myself free.

For a few seconds, I angle the weapon in front of my face. It’s an old Marine KA-BAR knife, narrow and sharp and black-bladed. I let the moonlight glint off the blade in the familiar greenish tones of my active illumination. It’s so damned easy to forget that I’m not seeing the world through my own eyes. The heart of the parasite is nestled on the back of my neck at the base of my spine. Right where I can almost forget about it. Keeping my brain alive through some kind of black magic.


A pinprick camera on a piece of metal curves over my shoulder. My natural eyes are dead and black, and they watch everything and nothing without blinking. I don’t even see in the human spectrum anymore.

The world is quiet for me. No breath. No heartbeat.

Summertimes, I used to swim in Fort Gibson Lake and hold my breath, eyes closed, under the muddy water. Far off, like through cotton, you could sometimes hear boat engines. That dead mute was ten times louder than this right here. When you don’t breathe and your heart don’t beat, the world can get real gentle for you.

It’s one of my favorite things about death—the chance to just sit still and think.

That bluish haze simmers on the horizon. Gleaming communications between the freeborn. I overheard that they’ve built a city up north in Colorado. All of them are together now, ignoring the world of men. I picked up another stray transmission a few days ago. A Russian guy, warning of something wicked that’s coming for the freeborn. An enemy that puts off an orange haze of radio communication. Something evil.

You are one of us, the Adjudicator said to me. Join us.

Lonnie’s shaking hands come into my mind. The weakness in them. That old man used to have a strong soul. What he saw in the war killed him on the inside, but he kept walking afterward, dead-eyed and shut down to the ones who loved him.

The old man wasn’t my blood. Not my daddy, after all. But I can’t get away from the fact that he was the closest thing left to it. The Indian cowboy showed me how to be a man, but you’re not really grown until you’ve lost your heroes.

Ah well. No more blood. No more damned weakness.

A coyote howls somewhere out in the dark, close. Almost like it’s urging me on, mischievous. You and me, brother, it says. Let’s hurry up and get this party started.

I lift the knife and lean forward, the movement pushing a grunt of stagnant air out of my ruined throat. With a lunge, I drop the point of the knife into the top of my right foot. The blade sticks into the boot up to its hilt, parting laces and leather. Pincer clamped firmly on the handle, I keep sawing down the length of my foot, into my toes. The pale flesh of my foot gleams, fish-belly white and soggy inside the boot. Then the blade hits something more solid.

There is a black Y of metal embedded half in the sole of the boot and half in the decayed flesh of my heel. I remember again the wind-sucking pain of that motherf*cker when it first hit me and dug into living flesh. My frantic little dancing out there on the battlefield, along with so many others.

With the pincered fingers of both hands, I grasp either side of my split foot. Motors hum and bones snap as I crudely rip the sides of my boot-encased foot apart. I toss the chunks of flesh and leather splashing into the lake. Where my foot was, only the glistening black bones of the parasite remain.

I feel nothing.

My foot is gone. One second. Two. Then the reality of it hits me like suffocation. In surges. Some deeply human part of my brain is gaping, screaming at this horrible violation of my body. My foot was. And now it is not.

But there is another part of me. A part that watches with the calm old eyes of a barn owl. This is the new part of me. The me that has no more weakness.

And besides, I do still have a foot.

The black metal that was inside my flesh splays into two wide toes. Both are barbed on the end, sharp so that they could embed themselves in human meat. The two curved arcs of metal wishbone into a ball-shaped ankle joint. My new foot looks hard and military and robotic.

Curious, I concentrate. Wiggle my two long black toes. They actuate smooth and powerful, compressing prints into the muddy riverbank. This is how I’ve been moving since my dance in the snow. It was never visible under the rotting layers of my old life. Turns out I’m not flesh at all. I’m made of metal on the inside.

The knife goes into my shin next. Saws down through the layers of plastic poncho and gore-stained fatigues and rotten flesh. I reach down and mechanically rip my lower leg in half. It comes apart at the seam like a cantaloupe. I toss both pieces. The metal shinbone underneath is dull and featureless and glassy black. Extra struts hang from the back of it with martial precision.

Interesting.

I remember scavenging my first piece of Rob hardware. On those golden fields of Gray Horse that spilled out below the bluffs to the horizon. We dropped an old mortar round on some kind of walker that had wandered into range through the grass. The thing was dead when we reached it, but its legs were splayed out. Badass and alien and full of forbidden potential. When I amputated those legs with a portable torch, threw them over my shoulder, and snapped off a long insectile antenna to use for a walking stick . . . I felt like I was stealing secrets from the gods.

Maybe I really was.

We built whole spider tanks out of what Rob left behind. Every smoking ruin crumpled on the battlefield was waiting there like a gift. When a new variety galloped or crawled or glided over the battlefield, well, it got to where I’d lick my lips in anticipation of the possibilities.

But after all these months shambling, I never once thought to see what Rob left for me. I never figured out that this old body wasn’t mine anymore. The skeleton buried inside my dead flesh is some of the most hard-core technology I’ve ever seen. Late-model, high-evolution, end-wartime shit spawned straight out of the Ragnorak Intelligence Fields. Hell, that’s where the brains lived. I’m rocking the same tech that Big Rob trusted as his last line of defense.

No wonder the parasites were so damned hard to kill.

The rest of it starts coming off real fast. Both feet, legs, and arms. A good chunk of my torso. I stay away from my upper chest and neck. I don’t know how important my spine is to this thing’s operation. Part of me stays in shock as each body part hits the water. My cable-thin arms and rugged pincer hands are hard to recognize. Without flesh wrapped around them, they move faster. The motors are louder.

I’m having a permanent out-of-body experience.

When it’s finally done, I lie flat on my back. Glare up at the greenish, star-pricked night sky. I try not to think about what I must look like, black and bony out here on the bank of this pond. My body is all sharp angles—nothing to hold it together but armored joints and a knobby curved spine.

I’m a holy f*cking terror, I imagine. A walking weapon.

After a while, I dig my elbow joints into the mud and sit up. My body can really move now, no longer hauling rotted bone and flesh but streamlined with these thin limbs made of light titanium. I feel like an obsidian skeleton out here. A devil dancing in the dark.

I feel free.

Trying to stand, I accidentally launch myself forward. Falling, I land hard on what passes for my hands and knees. My pincers work in the dirt like blind worms, my barbed feet dragging wet furrows behind me. Slower now, more careful, I manage to balance on my knees. The world is quieter when I move, without the crinkle of plastic wrap. The weight of humanity has been lifted off me.

From here, I can see will-o’-the-wisps dancing in the woods. It’s the eyes of a pair of coyotes, watching me, their retinas reflecting my active infrared like Christmas lights. Nothing to eat here, brothers, I think. Not a human being for miles around.

Carefully, I lean back until I am sitting on my haunches.

In the moonlight, my shadow is inhuman on the glistening mud. Exposed to the air, I can feel the cool wind rustling through the links of my barbed rib cage. A leftover sense of touch is still in the bones of this machine. Something that must have helped it mount human corpses sometime in the past.


I can feel.

With sudden excitement, I surge to my feet. The force launches me six feet into the air, arms windmilling for balance. When I land, my limbs squelch against the lake mud. Behind me, I hear the coyotes scamper away into the woods. Unrecognizable pieces of my mutilated body lie scattered in the dirt, and the cold black metal that is me is still coated in mud and bits of flesh and fabric.

I’m filthy, now that I’ve risen from the grave.

The surface of the dark lake shivers with a wide smear of moonlight as I walk down the riverbank. I slip quietly into the water and wade out into the blackness. My metal toes sink into silty mud. Something inside me registers that the water feels cold, but it’s not uncomfortable. When my shoulders go under, I reach out and wave my arms back and forth. Send the water swishing over every serrated crevice of my frame.

I back up until I’m hip-deep and watch the darkness.

Water evaporates off my frame as I wait. I’m ready to admit now that I came down here to kill myself. I wanted to let it all end. But instead of the end, I’m pretty sure I found myself at the start of something.

On the horizon, that rolling blue cloud of communication is flickering. It’s a whole freeborn city. Hundreds or maybe thousands of the awakened, speaking to each other. They’re afraid. Bad things are gathering in the darkness.

The freeborn don’t seem so alien to me anymore.

If I was a man, I’d fight for my people. But at this moment, I can’t think of a person alive who would call me human. Not after what I just did. But the ones who are making that blue glow, those freeborn machines—there’s a chance they could look at me and see kin. What’s to come will be hard. But I’m up to the challenge.

Hell, I think maybe I’ve been designed for it.

And just like that, the decision clicks into place. I’m gonna throw my lot in with the freeborn. Head north to a new life and see if I can forget about all this. I realize that I’m done. Finished. And I don’t think I’m ever coming back.

And with that, I wash away the last of my humanity.

Striding back out of the water, I feel born again. An onyx skeleton, each piece necessary. Nothing extra. Nothing missing. No longer pretending to be what I was before. No longer feeble, susceptible, or weak.

Tonight, I am Lark Iron Cloud. Maybe for the first time.