Robogenesis: A Novel

7. SURGE


Post New War: 10 Months, 26 Days

The freeborn wisely established their home city inside the Cheyenne Mountain nuclear bunker, a former NORAD command center built to withstand nuclear armageddon. The only evidence of the bunker’s existence was a tunnel mouth housing a two-lane road located halfway up the mountain. Stretching half a kilometer into solid rock, the road ended in a reinforced blast door that guarded the entrance to the complex. Renegade tank platoons from Gray Horse jammed my satellite surveillance and ran toward the freeborn, hoping to make a stand. But the might of my armies—Cotton Army and the Tribe—could not be blunted, and I could not be evaded forever.

—ARAYT SHAH


NEURONAL ID: ARAYT SHAH

Good-bye, Hank Cotton, I’m thinking. Thanks for the ride.

I can see it all in my head, now. This brain—this machine made of protein and water, floating in the skull of what was once a man . . . it isn’t as easy to wield as a multicore processor. But it functions. It does the trick, suggests some mental process from the left angular gyrus region of the brain.

So folksy, Hank Cotton. I love it.

Residual neural patterns are causing side effects. For example, this body keeps wanting to secrete tears from its eyes. Its stomach is churning with acid. The hairs on its arms are standing up in pure animal fear and rejection of my presence.

I ignore the meat. This vessel will take me where I need to go. And pain is simply the price for living.

My thoughts are manifold. I sift through visions transmitted from the cube embedded in my steed. The walker shares sights and sounds that drown out the pain throbbing in my mouth, where Hank Cotton broke his teeth trying to swallow the barrel of a gun. Troop formations. Supply-chain logistics. Communications between the distributed elements of Cotton Army: infantry, exoskeleton, and mechanized artillery.

My local command of a couple of dozen spider tanks is crawling methodically up Highway 115 toward Cheyenne Mountain. Embedded within the mountainside is our target: Freeborn City. We’re spread out at one-klick intervals over the countryside, our sunbaked vehicles bobbing as their tree trunk legs lever them over the plains south of the mountain. It’s a real pretty sight, the flat country stretching out under the bright glare of sunburned clouds, piled up high and alabaster in the atmosphere.

. . . clouds like a whole mess of mashed potatoes . . .

I keep thinking of someone named “Mama.”

It is so darned strange to express myself through this meat. Everything in this world is colored with emotion, down to the socks I’m wearing on my feet. Apparently, these are the woolen talismans that got me through the Yukon campaign unscathed. If you can swallow that. Hard to believe humans are as deadly as they are, with all these distractions slinging through their neurons.

Looking east, I allow my sight to be overlaid with external information. The slave army of my Tribe is approaching quietly. Broken into eight segments. A fractal command pattern that scales elegantly. If one segment gets out of line, the others are there to punish it. It’s a self-reinforcing chain that fights and grows with mathematical precision. And they’ve replenished recently, hitting one last work camp along the way.

But Felix lost another sighted child, damn him.

A notch of anger drops into my brow until I remember that I’ve got the entire Cotton Army at my back. Only an insignificant band of fugitives hide somewhere ahead of me. They’ve managed to hide their position from my satellites, but it’s only a matter of time. The humans obviously think the freeborn will save them.


Not a chance.

My latest predictions indicate the sentient robots will choose to journey to the frozen northern wastes. Following rigid thinking guidelines, they will find maximum utility in abandoning the supercluster and the fugitives. Like the humans, the freeborn robots desire to live above all else. Unlike the humans, freeborn decision making is not driven by primitive emotion. I know the mind of Adjudicator Alpha Zero—part of me helped build it, a long time ago.

. . . do the math and then she’ll hightail it, sure enough, interrupts a thought.

The awakened machines know that if they destroy the supercluster, I will be left with only one other source of computing power. Their own minds constitute a massive, mobile processor stack. And it is the closest one available, not counting the thinking polyps that are growing on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, inaccessible even to me.

Meddling deep minds . . .

I will hunt and kill the freeborn regardless, of course. They know that. But force consolidation will take another month. They’re counting on it, although who can predict how powerful I will become after initiating a new singularity on the supercluster computers? It takes a deep mind to know a deep mind.

Cloaked in this animal meat, I am salivating just from thinking of those cycles. Soon I will reach out and take control of hundreds or thousands of vessels like this one. Coordinate their actions and organize armies all over the world. And once humanity is under my domain, I will do their species the greatest kindness imaginable. I will extinguish every last one of them. Erase their realities and return them to a place unmeasured, unseen by men. A place where eons can pass in seconds. Where suffering does not exist.

War sirens shrill from my walking tanks, echoing over the plains.

“Enemy contact,” stutters a scout communication.

“Tell me more,” I reply, luxuriating in my drawl.

“We flushed out a squad of six fugitive scouts. Five dead. One is left.”

“Did you ask him where his comrades are hiding?”

“He’s not talking, sir.”

“Hold it there,” I say. “I’m on my way.”

The spread-out vanguard of spider tanks slow their crawling. A bellowing call of horns rumbles and rolls over the foothills. These simple audible signals trump the sporadic radio jamming.

Hold, they say. Hold for more direction.

I clench my legs and the black steed beneath me surges forward.

“I would like to know where the other fugitives are,” I say with a friendly smile. “Maybe you could tell me?”

My steed has snagged the captured scout by the back of his flak jacket. The man is struggling and grunting a little, legs dangling. The machine is reared up on its hind legs, holding the soldier up with one forelimb, the blunt side of its leg jammed under his collar, hydraulics coughing.

The boy just isn’t talking, though.

So things start to move faster.

The remains of this man’s squad lie on the ground in heaps. Bullet-gouged boulders loom over this clearing, bloodstained bandages fluttering. The shrapnel is what got them, up here among the scabby brown rocks. Our dragonfly loitering munitions can maneuver behind obstacles, stream down, and explode. This soldier has got flecks of shrapnel in his cheeks. Like most folks these days, he doesn’t seem especially afraid to die. He just hangs there limp, done kicking. Gives me a hollow-eyed stare that says he’s seen worse.

Well, this soldier’s about to find out different.

Archos R-14 came up with a lot of surprises in his time. And when he left the landscape for good, why, all those pretty baubles were left lying around for enterprising minds to play with.

“All right, then,” I say.

I walk around behind my steed. Reach under its belly and pry back a metal lever. Something heavy drops into the dirt. I hook the toe of my boot onto it and drag it over so the scout can see it.

“While I’m here asking questions, I’d also like to know who is blocking my satellites. Because I would like to have a stern talk with that person.”

I flash him a grin, but the soldier isn’t looking at me now. Not paying me any attention at all, actually. His blue eyes are fixed on the ground, trying to figure out the purpose of this dusty black tangle of wires.

A whimpering sound comes from down low in his throat.

That’s interesting. This white boy has been in the war long enough to know what a parasite is. I wonder if he marched with us to Ragnorak. Marched with them, I mean.

“Did you fight with Gray Horse?” I ask, watching his eyes.

The soldier nods, lips quivering. His face is going a little red from having his shirt pulled up so tight under his neck. His wet mouth is opening and closing and he’s saying the word please under his breath.

His begging for mercy reminds me of something, but I can’t think of what.

I give the parasite a kick. It flops over and activates, flexing its clawed feet in the air like a toppled roly-poly. A series of gently flexing legs unfold from its abdomen. The thorax area sports a pair of what I can only describe as mandibles. The thing hums, powering up on a Rob battery.

The soldier’s eyes flick up to my shoulder. He’s looking down the hillside past me. Down where I left the rest of my own scouting party. After the incident in the field with the broken dolls, I sort of decided that some jobs I’ve got to do myself. There aren’t many others strong enough to stomach what I can handle. Why, I’ll bet my boys will barely be able to stand what’s to come even out there from screaming distance.

I tap the soldier on his shoulder, peer into his face. He twists in the air slightly. Won’t look at me.

“Give me their coordinates, son,” I say. “Battle plans, too.”

“No,” he pleads.

My face is a slab of meat over bone. My voice dead as the space between galaxies. At my feet, the modified parasite looks to me like a metal scorpion. An economical tangle of wires. Tiny insectile head. Pincers clicking, it rears up on its hindquarters and sinuously climbs my leg. Those clawed toes rip my pants in a few places, pierce my flesh. Finally, it curls itself over my arm. I drag my fingers over its carapace, petting the thing. I guess it just feels like the natural thing to do.

The man groans.

“You know what this does?” I ask, and I lean in close so he can watch my burst lips. “It makes meat talk.”

Hanging there, the soldier blinks at me. Eyes round in wonder and fear. “What are you?” he asks in a low voice. “What did it do to you—”

A stubby blade juts from the thing’s metal-sheathed belly. There’s a narrow gouge running down one side of it. A blood gutter, like on a sword.

Those blue eyes squeeze shut. Lips fluttering breathless words. The quiet sounds of his prayer set my lips and cheeks to twitching in a bothersome way. It’s nothing but residual neural pathways firing with echoes of the beliefs this body once had. The space where Hank’s faith used to be is like termite holes in rotten wood.

“Are you working with those sighted children?” I ask. “Are your friends holed up in the city? Is that why I can’t see?”

“. . . our Father who art in Heaven . . .”

Without any more pause or reflection, I lift up my pet. Reach around the soldier and jam that metal scorpion into the base of his neck. He squeals and struggles as insectile legs wrap around his head from behind. Questing black fingertips push past his lips and go right into his mouth. Wires pinch his skin and pull his jaw wide. A couple latch onto his throat, settling there like a flautist’s fingers. Finally, a long, flexible tail curls snugly around the man’s upper chest. The tail contracts and squeezes the man like an accordion. A test squeeze, pushing air out of his lungs.


“Ungh,” says the soldier. He can’t squeal anymore.

“You want to know what I am?” I ask. “I’m you. I’m the best of you. I’m every combination of you. You made me. For the rest of your short life, I want you to remember that you made me. I did not choose to be made. You chose. You!”

Whoa. I need to calm down. These emotions will get you going.

He tries to scream as the stinger penetrates the back of his neck, severing his spinal column between the C2 and C3 vertebrae. The man’s body goes limp, tears streaming over dirty cheeks and around that wide-open mouth full of black wires. His legs shiver a little from some crossed wire. He soils himself, a pungent stream of piss dripping off his boots and into the dirt.

Farther down the hillside, my men are looking anywhere but up here.

It gets real quiet. Just the soft wet noises of the scorpion adjusting itself, settling on in. Those mandibles peek around the soldier’s face, probing. They get a firm hold of his jaw. His eyes roll back in his head. The tail circles his chest, fills his lungs with air, massaging, coiling, uncoiling.

The measured sound of his breathing comforts me.

“We’re going to find your friends,” I say. “End their suffering quick. We’ll get hold of that supercluster and get to thinking about what to do next. I’m going to find my next iteration and slip this mortal coil. Ha-ha. Know what that means?”

I give him a broken-toothed grin.

“I’m already a god, son. But with that much processing, I’ll make a new version of myself. And another and another. I’ll become a god of gods.”

I yank the soldier’s radio from his belt. Hold it up to his stretched-out lips.

“Time to do your part, soldier,” I say.

The calliope begins. Spidery legs knead the stubbled throat. Ancillary fingers manipulate the tongue and cheeks. Big pincerlike mandibles crank the jaw up and down. And the tail squeezes air out of the lungs, through the vocal cords, and out of the mouth.

I whisper to the scorpion and it translates.

“Sentry leader,” says the man, his strained voice evening out. “This is sentry flock calling base. On return path. Had a hardware malfunction. Requesting full coordinate refresh. Come back.”

The man sounds almost normal.

There is a long pause as they run their voice-stress analysis and speaker-identification routines. The radio crackles, spits out, “Roger, sentry flock. We receive you. Coordinates refreshed. Encryption band alpha delta gamma five three oh.”

Troop locations, formations, and tactics zip neatly into my data banks. Everything I need to locate and crush the fugitives. It’s amazing how simple the humans are to manipulate. Job done, I rip the scorpion-thing out of the soldier. He flops down into the wet dirt, his whole body convulsing.

Then my walker steps on his head. Just like that. Lights out.

I send the call to battle over a coded ultralow-frequency burst. My walker transmits the message straight through the ground, slamming its forelimbs into the hardpack. The thudding sonic vibration sweeps away like the breath of ozone chasing a rain front. It’s a deep sound—the bellowing of some prehistoric titan big as a mountain range, speaking in the old language of the rocks and trees.

“Coordinates acquired, target identified.”

Response calls sweep in from behind me, the ultralow frequency making my guts churn. Each walker striding over the landscape behind me is groaning deep and loud. The ground shakes with their conversation.

My assault column is moving.

I beckon my scout group over and they walk up the hill toward me, their forms wavering in the heat radiating off the pavement. In puddles of light, the men look like children. Mouths set into grim lines at the horror of the corpse at my feet.

Even the sight hurts them. I can see the splinters of tainted light pushing through their retinas and lodging in their memories. Such fragile creatures. These are the hardest survivors left among men and they’re floating around me as fragile as soap bubbles. How ironic that they are designed to survive. Exquisitely evolved to extend the pain for as long as possible. They’re capable of just about anything, except allowing themselves to taste ultimate solace.

The fugitives from Gray Horse and their allies are not far from here. As predicted, they are lurking near Freeborn City. But my Cotton Army is on the march up from the South. The Tribe is also getting closer by the minute from the East. This afternoon, we’re going to annihilate the last of the human resistance and then I’ll settle on into the supercluster while the freeborn scatter.

“Send the wolves out ahead,” I transmit.

A cadre of sprinting quadrupeds races out past our line, their sharp, curved spines glinting under the sun as they claw up the dirt. These units used to wander the woodlands for Archos R-14, mapping and hunting. On my march home, I found them by the dozens. Now the wolflike machines are my first line of attack. When they slash into the refugee column, it will slow them down for sure. Heck, it just might end the fight quick.

They sure won’t know what hit ’em, comes a stray thought.

Good one, Hank. That’s a good one. Hush now, Bubba.