Robogenesis: A Novel

10. REACHING OUT


Post New War: 10 Months, 7 Days

Thousands of refugees fled after Hank Cotton came to power in Gray Horse. Apparently hoping for mercy, these pathetic outcasts headed toward Freeborn City—the exact target of my armies thundering in from the South and East. The fugitives should have known that the machines would never show compassion. They should have known that they could live longer by running in any other direction, by forcing me to split my forces. It took many thought cycles to understand the mind-set that drove these injured sheep directly into the path of danger. After contemplation, I realized: They did not seek compassion from the freeborn, but to offer military aid. Somehow, they still considered themselves dangerous.

—ARAYT SHAH


DATABASE ID: NINE OH TWO

Executive process consolidation and repair series interrupted. Peripheral alert triggered. Seismic activity detected. Martial database lookup indicates quadruped walker variety.

Ambient light negligible. Internal clock: 03:56:49.

Thin cloud cover obfuscates the sky. No moon. Only a gentle vibration racing through the ground to indicate that we are under attack. I am already standing. It is too dark in the visible spectrum for me to see my own end effectors. I must rely on internal proprioception to determine my position.

Switching vision to enhanced visible spectrum—the best alternative available. To initiate active infrared illumination would be suicide.

Even with amplified light, I can see only a grainy greenish image of Mathilda. My small movements have startled her awake. She reaches out and touches the strange stag walker that she calls Tiberius. Then she puts another hand on Gracie’s shoulder. The other little girl moves her head slightly, stirring in her mother’s arms.

We saved these two, and only these two. By some survival instinct melded with her modification, Gracie began giving a constant encrypted position transmission as the slavers closed in. In the laser-painted night, the little girl shone like a beacon.

Mathilda and Gracie are both sighted, with bands of metal sunk into the hollow cavities where they used to have eyes. This modification, combined with the trauma of war, has severely compromised the efficacy of interaction paradigms suggested by my child-behavioral databases. The children in the databases are not like these two children, who are even now alert and moving quietly while under attack.

These little girls aren’t afraid of the dark.

Our primary goal has been to rescue Nolan Perez from the slave army that he is marching in. We trailed a platoon of eight walkers and approximately sixty collared soldiers over the countryside as they headed west, on an intercept course for Freeborn City. The Tribe is on its way to attack my home.

We had thought that we were undetected.

Over local radio, I transmit information: “Our location has been identified. Walkers advancing. ETA forty-five seconds.”

Gracie wraps her arms around her mother’s neck. The older woman is crouched, eyes wide. She can’t see anything, can’t do anything besides offer comfort to her daughter by squeezing her tight. My database is incomplete on the subject, but I estimate that Gracie is approximately nine years old. At fourteen, Mathilda is considerably bigger and more formidable.

Mathilda goes to an alert crouch.

“Gracie, it’s time to go,” she whispers.

Gracie moans something incomprehensible.

Mathilda pulls on the stag’s shoulder, orienting it. She nods to me in the darkness. I scoop up mother and daughter, place them both on the back of the quadruped machine. I watch a flutter of communication between Mathilda and the stag. It bows its great head, horns splayed out like small trees. Then it turns and trots away silently. Its flat-paneled black eyes are absorbing all available light. Gracie and her mother cling to the walker’s mossy back as it pushes quietly through the brush with its broad chest.

“Mathilda,” says Gracie, almost crying.

“It will be okay,” she whispers. “We’ll find you.”

Something crashes out in the woods and the stag breaks into a sudden bounding trot. Gracie fades into the black gaps between the trees. A bouncing bundle of rags watching us with pale ivory eyes.

“Mathilda,” I radio. “Suggest flanking maneuver.”

“Acknowledge,” says Mathilda, out loud.

The walker catches us as we progress down a muddy ravine.

In the first streaks of dawn, I execute a visual sedimentary analysis. There was a creek here not long ago. Now it’s almost dried up. This is a spring-runoff flood ravine. Cottonwood trees arch over the empty streambed, hoary roots growing out of the embankments on either side of us.

A spotlight breaks through damp leaves and we have shadows. In an instant, I grab Mathilda and pull her against the embankment. Slam our backs against the wall as the light lingers, then sweeps past.

Auditory and seismic vibrations indicate the platoon of slave walkers is trudging along the lip of the ravine. They’re searching for us, rushing through the tick-infested brush and pushing entire trees crashing over the streambed. Small-arms fire chatters as some animal is flushed out and painted with a targeting laser.

Mathilda is pressed against the muddy wall, clinging to a dirty root and sending her mind out into the satellites. Next to her, I unsling my rifle and train my full passive sensory package on pinpointing the walkers. Mathilda’s forehead is furrowed as she thinks, and then her mouth curves into a wide smile. She pushes her hair off her face.

“He’s near,” she says.

“It’s an ambush,” I transmit in reply.

“I know,” she says.

A black leg spears out of the darkness over our heads and into the trickle of creek water at our feet. We both hold position and watch as the jointed claw settles into the mud, talons spreading under the blinding glare of a belly-mounted spotlight. It doesn’t know we are here. The front line of slave walkers is crossing the creek.

“Run south,” I transmit to Mathilda in audible Robspeak.

I drop into a crouch, and then push up into a corkscrewing leap. My gun, forgotten, clatters to the ground under me. Faintly, I hear the shouts of surprised soldiers collared to the walker. The belly of the walker looms overhead. I wrap my hands around its sensor package. Grab hold and wrap my legs around its torso. The heat of the spotlight singes my Kevlar vest. I’m clawing, twisting at the cameras and lights and targeting laser. A shrill scream rings out and I feel the familiar thump of bullets ripping through my layers of fabric armor.

This one is blinded, staggering away, but more walkers are coming.

I drop to my knees in the cool mud and retrieve my rifle as the machine jerks and writhes above me. The spotlight is broken, cocked to the side, illuminating the wooded trail that runs along the embankment. Black legs twist around me, stamping holes in the ground. The soldiers are holding their own collar cords, panicked, dirty faces pointed at the bucking machine as they maneuver to avoid decapitation.

“Mathilda? Location?” I transmit.

A sudden perfect mental image of Mathilda’s position in three-dimensional space relative to me appears in my mind’s eye. It’s as if her body is an extension of my body. I sprint up the ravine, leap toward her position as the shadow of a leg sweeps by. It crunches into my torso and I tumble across the gully, smashing into the muddy wall and collapsing.

Offline / Online

I roll myself off the ground, ripping roots off my arms, trying to reach my feet to find Mathilda.

“Nolan!” she shouts.

And there he is.


Collared to a walker, the lanky boy is climbing over the embankment. Two of his comrades have already made it over the lip. For a moment, Nolan is frozen with his eyes wide on his sister. Mathilda is smiling, waving one arm frantically. In her excitement, she has forgotten that this is a trap.

She cannot see the targeting lasers flashing over her chest.

Threat analysis priority thread: Targets. Female soldier, white, emaciated, reloading. Male soldier, black, wearing glasses, staggering over a tree root. Another male soldier, white, overweight, with rifle shouldered and aimed at Mathilda’s face. Finger closing on trigger.

“No!” shouts Nolan.

Negligible probability of effectuating an intercept trajectory. I leap for her anyway. As I relay power to my legs, Nolan shoulders the butt of his gun. Somehow raises the muzzle and squeezes the trigger in a single motion. Faster than I can sense.

Impossibly fast.

The front of the overweight man’s face distends as Nolan’s bullet punches through the side of his skull. His body pitches forward into the ravine toward me, reflexively firing its weapon into the dirt. It bounces past, twitching.

As I catch hold of the ledge, the walker’s laser targeting sweeps back to Nolan. He is the source of the erroneous shot, the primary target. There is no mercy from the slave walker or its allies. The leash shudders, preparing to retract even as red targeting dots appear on the boy’s chest.

The skinny woman and the black man only watch, not even raising their weapons. Mathilda is screaming now, reaching for Nolan, but there is no more time. The walker has registered a direct violation from Nolan’s gun. It staggers on hyperextended legs, turning to point camera buds at the boy.

Nolan’s eyes are open wide and smoke is curling from the barrel of his gun. His lower lip is pushed out in a sad-little-boy expression.

“Mathilda,” he says.

A whip snap runs down the cable attached to Nolan’s collar.

In an instant, Nolan’s neck twists violently. His entire body is wrenched off the ravine ledge and into the air, tumbling like a rag doll. The cord retracts into the walker with the supersonic snap of a bullwhip.

Nolan’s body falls and rolls, stopping facedown only a meter from Mathilda. The boy lies still, pale and dirty in the mud. Mathilda drops to her knees and cradles Nolan’s head on her lap. Her face is empty and twitching and my emotion recognition comes back confused, but I know that she has been hurt.

My Mathilda is hurt very bad now on the inside.

“Hold still,” I transmit on a tight beam, moving next to her.

“It will be okay,” I transmit. “Hold still, my darling.”

I fire my rifle at the walker over us, shattering its camera buds even as another walker slinks down into the ravine. The newcomer lases Mathilda’s forehead with its targeting. I swing my rifle down and fire at the new group of incoming soldiers. One bullet at a time. In the distance, two slaves drop with holes in their foreheads. The force and flash of my bullets sweep Mathilda’s hair over her shoulders.

I step past her kneeling form, putting my body between Mathilda and the other slave walker. The remaining soldiers are taking cover now behind its legs. Spraying small-arms fire at Mathilda. But I am her shield. In tiny puffs, bullets ping off my carapace, shredding layers of ceramic armor and clothing. The kinetic energy dents and damages my frame and causes me to stagger.

The walker above us still screams, blind and confused.

Too many projectiles are incoming. I drop to a knee and let my bulk protect Mathilda. Rerouting primary threads to reflexive firing and target acquisition. Motor coordination. After I lose executive functioning, I want to keep fighting.

I intend to die defending her.

Offline / Online

A burst of radio transmission. Spherical broadcast, all spectrum and more intense than anything I’ve previously experienced. The signal is underlaid with encryption-cracking schemes churning with a complexity like the fractal spread of galaxies.

The force of it has knocked me down. I turn over.

Mathilda is standing over her brother’s body now, head low. Her hair hangs over her face. Her slight shoulders are slumped but I can feel her mind—projecting itself onto the battlefield, the size of a giant. Her angry thoughts are beating down doors, wriggling into seams, grasping and prying for control. The attack is overwhelming, and it is not even directed at me.

Routing maximum primary processing to counterencryption protocols. Automatic antennae shutdown. My world rings with blank silence as external communications autodeactivate to prevent my core from being compromised.

“No,” she says, as both slave walkers orient to her.

I am still on my back, in awe of the black silhouette of a girl before me and the brilliant echo of power that surges off her skin and claws into the sky in shimmering waves.

Mathilda’s left hand is out, palm held out flat like she is carrying an invisible tray. Her other hand sits on the palm in a peculiar way, fingers clawed so that four of them mimic legs. Her right hand is in the shape of a quadruped, standing.

Then her fingers begin to drag over her palm in a walking motion. As her hand moves, so does the damaged slave walker above us. Blinded and sluggish, the walker throws itself forward on stumbling legs. The leashes release, snapping, freeing the emaciated female and the male with glasses. Dragging empty leashes, the walker staggers over our heads, running tilted on razor legs, gaining speed.

Mathilda’s fingers tickle her palm in tiny movements, controlling the hulk of metal and carbon fiber and ceramic plating. With small twitches, like casting a spell, she puppeteers the monster.

Fifty meters away, the other slave walker is twisting back and forth as if trying to clear its mind from the waves of radiation flowing down. It tosses its slaves around by their necks. All of them are unaware of the stumbling, shambling wreck hurtling itself toward them.

Impact.

The blinded walker hits its target and they both go down. Seismic signature off the charts. Mathilda’s lips are twisted away from her teeth and her cheeks are trembling and I think of the grizzly bear that I fought in the wastes. Her fingers spin and grind in her palm as the two machines battle in a frenzy.

The stag appears a few yards away.

“On me,” I croak. With my radio down, I can’t communicate with Gracie mind-to-mind. Her mother winces at the grating sound of my voice, wraps her arms tighter around her daughter.

The stag approaches. Scanning the field of battle, I see that the walkers are locked up now. They’ve damaged each other nearly to the point of suicide. Their movements are quick and violent, but sporadic. My osmotics detect spilled electrolytic fluid, the blood equivalent that pumps in their faux muscles.

Gracie watches intently, her mouth open in awe. Mathilda grinds her fingers together, finishing the job, and then she falls to her knees. Both of the walkers are still now. Black muscles spurt fluid into the dirt, broken limbs in a jumble. The corpses of slave soldiers litter the ground around them, bodies torn by their clawed footsteps.

Mathilda screams again, to nobody. Face to the sky.

I kneel by the body of Mathilda’s brother where it lies twisted in the dirt. Young Nolan. The man with glasses stands a few feet away, watching me warily. The man is crying, rubbing his neck where the collar was.

Medical diagnostics online.

Carefully, I put a hand behind Nolan’s head to support his neck. Begin to turn him over onto his back. I feel Mathilda moving closer to me. She puts a hand gently on my shoulder as I roll Nolan over.

His eyes are open. They blink.


“Nolan!” shouts Mathilda. And the little girl falls on her brother. Kissing his forehead, rubbing his forehead. She makes sorrowful, bird-like noises in the back of her throat. But Nolan’s face does not change. After a moment, he pushes Mathilda away and sits up. Rolls onto his hands and knees and coughs violently.

“Farm boy,” says the man with glasses, edging closer. “You all right, kid?”

Nolan nods at the man, spits blood into the watery dirt.

“What did you do to me, Mathilda?” he says in a croak. A rough slash of purple rises over his throat where the cuff tried to snap his neck. “All those surgeries. What did you do to me?”

“I made you strong,” says Mathilda, her face going blank. “Mommy said protect you. It was the only way I knew how. You were hurt, Nolan. I made you better.”

The last words are a whisper.

“You made me too strong,” he says.

“What’s wrong?” asks Mathilda, bewildered.

The boy turns away, his mouth a trembling line.

A small form brushes against my back. Gracie, pushing me out of the way to reach Mathilda. She throws her arms around the girl’s neck. Hugs the bigger girl, both of their eye prosthetics glinting. Gracie holds Mathilda’s hands in her own. Looks down at them in wonder.

“You controlled the walkers,” says Gracie. “Can you teach me to do that?”

Nolan is looking at his own hands. They look like regular hands. On a Mark IV autodoc surgical machine, with Mathilda’s level of control and her sensory capabilities, there are many ways she could have made her brother strong.

I scan the boy with active radar. Get a partial return. The radar passes through his flesh and bounces back from bits of metal the way sunlight winks off a shattered mirror. It’s a partial metal filament, intricately threaded around his bones. Surgery-grade steel to avoid foreign-body rejection.

Mathilda really did make the boy strong. His diagnostics exceed normal human specifications. His capabilities are unknown.

I lean down to peer into this face and he does not shy away. He keeps those dark brown eyes trained on my face, bleeding silently around his neck, barely reacting to my presence.

“What is this thing?” he asks Mathilda, staring into my lenses.

“He’s a friend,” she says.

I reach out and put a hand on his shoulder. Squeeze. Harder. He does not react. My end effector hits a maximum torque, sufficient to crush a rock. I hold it for a moment, then relax power to avoid damaging my servo. I cock my head, burning cycles to determine how and why this boy is alive.

The line between man and machine is blurring. Nolan looks like a boy and moves with the power of a Warden. Lark Iron Cloud looks like a war machine and has the heart of a boy. Mathilda has the eyes of a machine and the mind of a girl. And I’m plagued by a knowledge of human emotion that I can understand, but not feel.

Where do we all belong? Ambiguous classification.

The man with glasses reaches down and hauls Nolan to his feet.

“Glad you made it, farm boy,” says the man.

“Thanks, Sherman,” says Nolan, clapping his friend on the shoulder.

Radio online.

“Priority. Receiving distress call,” I croak. “Gray Horse Army is under attack.”

“Plot a route to intercept,” says Mathilda. “Let’s get out of here.”

“No,” says Nolan, standing next to the man with glasses. Together, they are looking back the way they came. “We’re going back. There are some kids who need us.”

“Who could be that important?” asks Mathilda, indignant. “I’m your sister. I’m here to take care of you.”

This boy with the dirt-caked face and torn neck is smiling, just a little. His grin is like a bright chip out of dark stone. “What’s so important is that they’re all sighted. Just like you. And I think we’re going to need them pretty soon.”