Robogenesis: A Novel

8. KIN


Post New War: 10 Months, 26 Days

It was plain bad luck that the refugees from Gray Horse came to be led by the former sergeant of the legendary Bright Boy squad. Even under his command, I could sense their fear and despair. To my surprise, however, their lack of hope did not impact their battle readiness. What I didn’t realize was that these people had been running for a very long time. After all these years, they no longer needed hope to survive.

—ARAYT SHAH


NEURONAL ID: CORMAC WALLACE

Houdini is wheezing, legs shaking as he plows at top speed up the middle of a dirt-encrusted highway. We are climbing twisted foothills made of pancaked sediment that jut out in steep angles to either side, the bare rock crowned by fat green bushes. Behind us, the road stretches south to become a strand of gray hair meandering to the plains.

“Come in, Mathilda,” I say into my collar radio. “Do you have an ETA for rendezvous?”

Cherrah has her right arm around me, her palm on the back of my head and a handful of my hair in her fist. I’m cradling her. She crouches on a pile of army blankets up here on the turret deck, wearing only the top half of a pair of gray thermal underwear. Her fatigues hang flapping over the railing, body armor a pile of turtle shells in the corner. Her knees are up, legs apart. Her other hand is over her stomach.

She’s trying not to scream.

We bounce painfully as Houdini grinds up the winding road. I’m trying to absorb the impacts, but it’s not helping much. Cherrah grits her teeth, saving her screams for the contractions. I figure we’ve got about half an hour until the baby comes.

Above us, stained clouds are tumbling in titanic slow motion over a winking sun. On the blurry southern horizon, a smear of rain sways back and forth across the plains. And a little farther back, I catch sight again of those glinting scabs of metal. Hank Cotton’s wolves.

We searched for two weeks, but we couldn’t reach the other refugees in time. He found us too soon.

“Mathilda?” I say. “Do you copy?”

I found the girl on the wire after Cherrah and I made it out of Gray Horse. When she connected with us, Houdini’s diagnostic screen lit up like an arcade game. She told us where the other refugees are headed—a place near Fort Collins, Colorado.

A place called Freeborn City.

But now something is throwing radio interference. Mathilda hasn’t copied in over an hour. And every time we round a bend, the enemy is closer. Houdini’s entire frame is groaning as he pushes his joint strength to the limit. The machine has been running nonstop for too long and we’re still too far away from the others. We have to stop and fight.


Not this bend, but the next one.

Cherrah looks imploringly at me, her hair plastered to her forehead in dark bands. I shake my head no. The mountain breeze sweeps across us, cool and rain-smelling and pleasant considering that in fifteen minutes we’ll be fighting for our lives.

“He’s coming,” she says. “Now.”

Cherrah’s fingers collapse into a fist and she pulls my hair as another contraction quakes through her abdomen. She shouts again, slamming her left fist into the metal decking.

“Dammit,” she says, crying now. “Let’s do this. We’ve got to do this.”

“A little more distance,” I whisper.

I cradle her head as lightning lances the horizon. Cherrah’s face is determined, eyes closed, sweat budding on her forehead. She lets go of my hair, smooths it back down in rough pats. “Sorry,” she says, between jolting footsteps. “But seriously, let’s do this.”

“Okay,” I say. “Here we go.”

We’re halfway between the next bend and the last one, on a slope with a good field of view. It’s as good a place as any.

“Houdini, half step to halt,” I call, putting my hand on the warm turret and tapping it twice.

The lumbering machine slows down in jerking steps. A warm battery smell rises up and the first sprinkles of rain hiss on his steaming leg joints. After a few steps, the whole quaking walker is finally still.

We gambled and we lost.

“Bunker up, Houdini. Southward attack posture,” I say. “Buy as much time for us as you can, buddy. We’re having a baby.”

The four-legged sprinters close on our position quickly. Two minutes after I manage to get Cherrah down from Houdini’s turret deck, I hear the doglike runners as they come bounding around the next-to-last bend.

Cherrah is under Houdini’s shadowed belly, separated from the hard road by a haphazard pile of army blankets. She is on all fours now and she won’t let me near. When she isn’t gritting her teeth or screaming, she is quietly crying in a way that scares me. I reach over and try to rub her back, keeping one eye on the road, but she shoves me away.

“Watch our twelve,” she says.

“Roger that,” I say.

At the forward leg armor, I drop Cherrah’s machine gun into a mount. Plenty of stolen ammunition is still rattling around in Houdini’s belly net. I wrap my fingers around the cool metal grip of the gun and stare down the sight, through sheets of whispering rain. The weather has caught up with us, rainwater already collecting in shining puddles on the abandoned highway.

Come in, Mathilda. Do you read me? Come in.

I hear my own voice whispering quietly from my collar radio. On a loop, my emergency message is going out on Mathilda’s last-known frequency.

Nothing is moving in the distance. A steep cliff face rises up on our right and a railing separates us from a drop-off on the left, so a flanking maneuver would require some time. With such low visibility I don’t really expect it. They’ll probably come down the middle, careful and slow, using wrecked cars as cover. But I occasionally lean my head out and glance at the guardrails anyway.

Now it’s just rain and quiet crying.

Houdini’s intention light clicks over to yellow. Cherrah and I share a quick worried glance. The big walker has radar pods that can cut through the rain to ping metallic targets. Yellow means the enemy is sighted.

I yank back the slide on the machine gun and put my finger in the trigger guard. Sight it on the bend down the road from here. There is a clear area before the abandoned cars start. Not a lot of space, but it may be my only chance to hit a target.

A slinking blur of silver appears.

I squeeze the trigger. Bullets flicker out of the muzzle and hot silver chain links waterfall to the road on my right. The runner goes down in a puff of smoke.

Then another darts through. And another. Sprinting, closing the distance between us. They keep good following distance from each other, spreading themselves out to trick me into draining my ammo. Too far apart. I can tag only one of the three. Cherrah screams through another contraction and her voice is cut off by the groan and woof of Houdini firing a shell from his turret. A second of silence, then a shock wave and a tornado of asphalt and dirt leap into the sky. Back to the trigger.

Chowchowchowchow—release, let the barrel cool. Chowchowchowchow.

My focus narrows to the nose of my gun. Rain spits off the hot barrel. The world collapses to the invisible extension of force extending from the tip of my weapon to that bend in the road. Reaching out and dinging the vicious running quadrupeds that are tumbling, diving, and lunging between abandoned cars to close on our position.

“Cor”—chow chow chow—“mac.”

I stop. Pull my trembling finger out of the trigger well and tap my collar mike. On the road, silver and black blurs are stuttering toward me, staying behind cover. And some of the machines I’ve hit still move, dragging themselves forward on twisted limbs and shattered joints. Cherrah is done screaming. Now I hear only her short panicked breaths and occasional muttered curses.

“Mathilda?” I shout into my mike.

Shrugging my ear against the collar speaker, I hold still and listen. Static. F*cking static. Runners advance. I’m missing them, giving them too much time.

“Cormac,” says the voice again.

It’s not coming from the radio. It’s coming from behind me.

I spin around, reaching for my sidearm. Stop when I see a girl, barely a teenager, standing silhouetted between Houdini’s armor-plated hind legs. She’s wet and bedraggled, wearing a hoodie, hair hanging over her chest, fuzzed with humidity. Her head is bowed and her face is in shadow, but even so I can tell that something is very seriously wrong with her eyes.

“How many times have I told you to watch your six, Bright Boy?” the girl asks quietly. She sounds angry.

“Mathilda?” I ask as the near-perimeter machine gun activates up top. Houdini strafes the road with bullets that ping and spark. “Is that you?”

Something big and black moves behind her, blocking the light. I yank out my pistol and put it on the high ready, but Mathilda doesn’t move out of my way. The big shape leans down to peer inside, between the two sheaths of bunker armor hanging from Houdini’s rear legs. I break into a smile.

My old friend and comrade. Nine Oh Two.

“Arbiter,” I say, lowering my gun. “You lived.”

“Little help?” asks Cherrah, between pants.

Mathilda throws back her hood. The metal embedded in her face makes it impossible to determine what she is looking at or what she is seeing. I smile at her and try not to stare at the deformity. Mathilda simply ignores me, speaks quickly and just loud enough to be heard over the spitting machine gun mounted on Houdini’s upper front shoulder.

“Forward scouting party incoming,” she says. “Twelve quadrupeds. Seven remaining. Four are taking cover out front. Just a distraction for the three who are flanking.”

“Why didn’t you respond to my calls?” I ask.

“Couldn’t. R-8 jams comm traffic in a kilometer radius around its units. I had to get close to you. And you need to take care of those quads. Now.”

She points at my gun, tilted up in its leg mount, barrel steaming in the rain.

I glance down at Cherrah. She flashes a smile up at me, chest heaving. Blood is pooling on the ground between her legs. Bright and glistening and too much of it.

“Better listen,” she says. “Kid sounds like she knows what she’s doing.”


I nod.

“Help her,” I say, turning to the machine gun. “She’s giving birth. I’ll take care of these quads. And Nine Oh Two, watch our flank.”

I sight the abandoned cars on the sloped road. Four quads are milling between them. Leaving parts exposed to bait me into wasting ammo.

“No,” says Mathilda.

“No?” I ask, eye still squinted. I drop a couple of rounds into the plastic bumper of a faded, sun-bleached car. It shatters into blue shards, and a quad stumbles into the open. I erase it with another barrage. “Why the hell not?”

“Because,” she says, “Niner is delivering your son.”

Between muzzle flashes and flickers of lightning, I glance back to watch the long-limbed humanoid kneeling before Cherrah. The brown skin of her legs is pale now. The blankets damp with blood. As they work, a trickle of crimson rolls downhill, past my feet and out to where it’s battered by raindrops and diluted into a pink puddle.

The sight of the Arbiter is comforting. And terrifying. My vision swims with the vibration of the gun, with Cherrah’s screams echoing in the claustrophobic space under Houdini’s bunkered legs.

In glances, I see the little girl standing silently behind the Arbiter unit as the machine helps deliver my son. She has one palm flat on his shoulder and her head cocked to the side. In profile, I see that those dark pools of metal where her eyes should be are reflecting Houdini’s red intention light. She’s thinking.

“They’re finished flanking, Cormac,” she says quietly. “Toss a smoker to the east. Over the guardrail. Wait thirty seconds. Then fire into the mist.”

She’s not even looking at me while she speaks.

“How do you know that?” I whisper.

“Houdini is sharing his sensor stream. But right now, I’m more interested in Niner’s sensor stream. I’ve done a lot of surgery, Cormac. Let me take care of this.”

I pull a smoker from my satchel.

Like all storms, this one eventually breaks. The clouds have thinned out and skated on to the horizon, where the sun is settling down through their ghosts.

Quadruped machinery lies around our position in fragments. A few pieces still actuate on instinct, offering no threat. The mud glints, carpeted with spent shells. And in the dim light, a war machine is cradling a small pink bundle in its metal arms. Silently, the Arbiter hands me the squirming baby. I take the warm swaddle and hold it to my gunpowder-stained chest. Mathilda’s hand is still on Niner’s shoulder. He turns back to finish attending to Cherrah.

My boy is so light in my arms. Dark hair is plastered to his skull. His mouth is curled into a jowly pink line and his eyes are squeezed closed into slits. Swaddled in a scrap of rough army blanket, he waves tiny fists and mewls.

“Jack.” I say the word, trying it out.

Cherrah nods, her eyes half closed, leaning against one of Houdini’s massive legs. She smiles and takes a deep breath, her chest buried under warm blankets as the evening breeze sighs over us. I pull my newborn son closer to my face. Feel the heat coming off his skin through my stubbled beard.

“Your name is Jack Wallace,” I whisper. “You are named after the only brother I ever had. You are named after a hero.”

When my brother died it hurt me so much that I tried to stop feeling. Decided it was best to try to emulate my enemy. So I shut down my emotions and let a cold illusion of control settle over me. I thought I was sweeping the cobwebs out of my gears, but I was wrong.

Cradling his head in my rough hand, I can hardly feel my son. His hair is soft as moonlight. Holding on to Jack, I don’t feel vulnerable or weak. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever felt stronger in my life. While he lives and breathes . . . I can’t break.

I put my pinky finger next to his hand. By reflex, he curls his damp starfish fingers around it. It’s a tight grip. Even as he drifts off to sleep, I can see his mother’s determination in his face. Dark skin and wisps of black hair. I can feel the strength inside him. Someday, I think the rest of the world will feel it.

The machine is finished working. Its hands and chest are coated in Cherrah’s drying blood. Sprinkles of rain are diffracted in pinkish gleaming puddles.

It’s a gory scene that feels familiar and new at the same time.

“Thank you, Nine Oh Two,” I say, sitting down next to Cherrah. I put an arm around her and give a light squeeze. The boy rests on both our laps, falling asleep. Exhausted, Cherrah manages to grin at me, face-to-face.

“Don’t say I told you so,” I say.

“I told you so,” she says. “Everything is all right.”

Then Nine Oh Two croaks at us. “Enemy force en route. Suggest overnight retreat to recombine with Gray Horse Army.”

“How far to rendezvous?” I ask.

“Our soldiers are preparing to defend the plains south of Freeborn City. Those who cannot fight are moving to the entrance of the city,” says Nine Oh Two.

“Will the freeborn help them?”

“Maxprob indicates negative. Not as long as they follow the unit called Adjudicator Alpha Zero.”

“Then why don’t we just keep running?”

“Cotton’s troops are faster,” says Mathilda. “Either we defend our people at the tunnel that leads into Freeborn City or they’ll chase us down in the open. The tunnel itself is a defensive structure. A good last resort.”

I do not see a way to survive, but I don’t let the knowledge infect my voice.

“Then we’ll defend the tunnel mouth,” I say.

Archos R-14 once said that each of us creates our own reality. The machine said that each of those realities is valuable beyond measure. It was right. Without us here to witness, the universe is just pointless physics unfolding.

I kiss Jack on his forehead and hand the boy to his mother. I pick up an assault rifle lying half in a mud puddle and stand up. Smear dirt and grease off the barrel and yank back the slide to clear the chamber, blow into it. Wipe the bloody grime out with a finger still wet from my son’s tiny grasp.

“You okay riding with Houdini?” I ask Cherrah.

She nods, exhausted, black hair splayed out, tears drying on her cheeks. Both of her arms are wrapped around the baby. Swaddled, he rests against her chest armor.

“Then let’s go,” I say without hesitation.

As Houdini stands up and retracts his upper leg armor, Cherrah and I share an exhausted smile. All the angst is gone now. There won’t be any more questions about leaving each other behind. The answer is pretty clear.

Our babies are the roots we dig into the world.

Mathilda is running her fingers lightly over Houdini’s armored front legs. She pushes her face close to the cold metal and her forehead bunches up in concentration. Her pursed lips relax into a wide smile.

“Help me tear off this bunker armor,” she says.

“Why?” I ask.

“I have an idea,” she says.