The old man saw the photograph.
“I am sorry,” he said, and embraced the boy. He felt an electrical actuator poking rudely through the child’s T-shirt, like a compound fracture.
“Please,” he whispered. “I will make things the way they were before.”
But the boy shook his head. He looked up into the old man’s watery blue Eyes™. The room was silent except for the whirring of a fan. Then, very deliberately, the boy slid the glasses from the old man’s face, leaving the Ears™.
The old man looked at the small, damaged machine with tired eyes full of love and sadness. When the thing spoke, the shocking hole opened in its cheek again and the old man heard the clear, piping voice of a long-dead little boy.
“I love you, Grandpa,” it said.
And these words were as true as sunlight.
With deft fingers, the boy-thing reached up and pressed a button at the base of its own knobbed metal spine. There was a winding-down noise as all the day’s realization and shame and understanding faded away into nothingness.
The boy blinked slowly and his hands settled down to his sides. He could not remember arriving, and he looked around in wonder. The gonfab was silent. The boy saw that he was holding a photograph of himself. And then the boy noticed the old man.
“Grandpa?” asked the boy, very concerned. “Have you been crying?”
The old man did not answer. Instead, he closed his eyes and turned away.
PARASITE
A ROBOPOCALYPSE STORY
I dreamed I was breathing.
—Lark Iron Cloud
New War: Final Minutes
When I was a boy, Lonnie Wayne Blanton led me into the deep dark woods and left me there. After I fought my way back out he told me I was a man and I could feel that he was right. Six months later, I led the soldiers of Gray Horse Army right back into the deep dark woods to face the machines of the New War. We fought our way out, but honest to God, I could not tell you what we have become.
—Lark Iron Cloud, MIL#GHA530
Carl is on his ass. Whimpering and clawing and kicking his way backward through the snow. My soldier won’t look at me and he won’t take my hand and I can’t for the life of me understand why until I notice his eyes.
Not where he’s looking. But where he won’t look.
Something black, crawling low and fast on too many legs. And another one. Coming up from under the snow.
Too late.
I don’t feel the pincers at first. Just this strong pressure on the base of my neck. I’m in a hydraulic-powered bear hug. I spin around in the slushy snow but there’s nobody behind me.
Whatever-it-is has climbed up my back and got a good hold. My knees sag with the lurching weight of it. Crooked black feelers reach around my chest and my spine is suddenly on fire as the thing decides to dig in, a bundle of squirming razor blades.
Shit shit shit—what is this that it hurts so goddamn much.
Carl’s got his frost-plated rifle up, training it on me. The gun strap hangs stiff and crusty in the arctic breeze. Around us, the rest of my soldiers are screaming and dancing in tight, panicked circles. Some are running. But me and the engineer are having our own little moment here.
“Carl,” I wheeze. “No.”
My voice sounds hollow from the pain of whatever has got between my shoulder blades. Judging from Carl’s blank face I figure I’m not in a very happy spot here. No, sir. That is a full-on nega-tory.
Carl lets go of his rifle but the strap catches on his forearm. He stumbles away, gun dangling. Wipes his eyes with shaking fingers, tendons streaking the backs of his hands. His complicated engineering helmet falls off and thunks into the snow, an empty bowl.
He’s crying. I could give a shit.
I’m being flayed alive, straining and groaning against black spider legs gripping my body, doing drunken pirouettes in the slush. Knotty black arms slice into the meat of my thighs, sprouting smaller feelers like vines. Others grip my biceps, elbows, forearms, and, goddamn it, even my fingers.
I am in command but I am most definitely not in control. Some of my soldiers are still thrashing. Some aren’t. The wounded are crawling and hobbling away as fast as they can, coiled black shapes slicing toward them like scorpions.
Carl’s gone now: hightailed it. Left his ostrich-legged tall-walker behind, collapsed awkwardly on its side. Left all of us unlucky dancers behind.
My legs are wrapped too tight now to struggle. A motor grinds as I push against it, reaching back with my arm. I feel a freezing fist-sized plate of metal, hunkered in the warm spot at the base of my neck. Not good.
The machine snaps my arm back into place.
Can’t say I’m real sure of what happens next. I got a lot of experience breaking down Rob hardware for Gray Horse Army, though. After a while, you get a feel for how the machines think. How they use and reuse all those bits and pieces.
So, I imagine my guess is pretty accurate.
As I watch the vapor of my last breath evaporate, the parasite on my back jerks and severs my spinal column with a flat, sharpened piece of metal mounted to its head region. My arms and legs go numb, so much dead meat. But I don’t fall because the machine’s arms and legs are there to hold me up.
And I don’t die.
Some kind of cap must fit over the nub of my spine, interfacing with the bundle of nerves there. This is a mobile surgery station leeched onto my neck. Humming and throbbing and exploring, it’s clipping veins and nerves and whatever else. Keeping oxygen in my blood, circulating it.
I’m spitting cherry syrup into the snow.
Lonnie Wayne Blanton, my commander, says that this late in the war you can’t let anything the enemy does surprise you. He says Big Rob cooks up a brand-new nightmare every day and he’s one hell of a chef. Yet here I am. Surprised, again.
The machine is really digging in now. As it works, my eyes and ears start blurring and ringing and singing. I wonder if the scorpion can see what I see. Hear what I hear.
I’m hallucinating in the snow.
A god-sized orange tendril of smoke roils across the pale sky. It’s real pretty. Smaller streams fall from it, pouring down like water from drain spouts. Some of the streams disappear behind the trees, others are even farther away. But one of them twists down and drops straight at me. Into my head.
A line of communication.
Big Rob has got me. The thinking machine that calls itself Archos is driving the pulsing thing on my back. A few dozen clicks from here, the architect of the New War is crouched where that fat orange column of transmission ends. Pulling all the strings.
I watch as my dead arms unsling my rifle. Tendons in my neck creak as the machine twists my head, sweeps my vision across the clearing. I’m alone now, and I think I’m hunting.
In the growing twilight, I spot dozens of other orange umbilical cords just like mine. They fall out of the sky into the dark woods around me. As I lurch forward out of the clearing the other lines drift alongside me, keeping pace.
All of us are being dragged in the same direction.
We’re a ragged front line of dark shapes, hundreds strong, shambling through the woods toward the scattered remnants of Gray Horse Army. My consciousness begins to fade in and out as my cooling body slogs its way between the trees. The last thing I remember thinking is that I hope Lonnie Wayne don’t see me like this. And if he does, well, I hope he puts me down quick.
* * *
—
I don’t hear the gunshot itself, just a dry echo in the trees. It’s something, though. Enough to wake me up.
I dreamed I was breathing.
The impossible smoke in the sky is gone. All those evil thoughts disappeared. And the place where Archos lived is empty now. Big Rob must be dead. It’s the only explanation.
The New War is over a
nd we won and I’m still here. Still alive, somehow.
I focus on it and the wires of my parasite start to work my legs. Carry me in the direction of the gunshot. Over the charred earth of a weeks-old battlefield. I pass by a titanic spider tank leaning still and cold and heavy against a snowbank. Its armor is pocked with sooty craters, intention light shattered, joints cracked open like lobster claws. And bodies.
Frozen bodies melded with the snow. Stiff uniforms and frostbitten metal. The occasional alabaster patch of exposed frozen flesh. I recognize most of the corpses as Gray Horse Army, but pieces of some other army are here, too. Bodies of the ones who came and fought before we ever knew Archos existed.
Among the trees at the edge of the clearing, I see the others.
A cluster of a dozen or so walking corpses stand huddled, shoulder to shoulder. Silent. Some are still in full uniform, normal-looking save for the clinging clockwork parasites. Others are worse off: A woman is missing her leg, yet she stands steadily on the narrow black appendage of the parasite. One man is shirtless in the cold, skin wind-blasted to a marbled corpse-sheen. All of them are riddled with puckered bullet holes. Cratered exit wounds flapping with icy skin and torn armor.
And I see another, freshly killed.
A still form lies in the snow. Its head is missing, pieces scattered. A parasite lies on its back nearby, coated in rusty blood, slowly flexing its mouth-pieces like a squashed bug.
So that gunshot served a purpose.
These survivors have one combat shotgun left between them. A big man, stooped over with his own size, has got the gun now. Most of his face is hidden in an overgrown beard but I can see his mouth is round and open, a rotten hole. He’s moving slow because frostbite has taken all his fingers, but I figure out pretty quick where he’s going with that barrel.
They’re taking turns killing themselves.
“No,” I try to shout, but it comes out a shapeless sob. “No, this is wrong.”
I shuffle faster, weaving between shredded bodies trapped in permafrost like it was quick-set concrete. None of the survivors pays me much attention. They keep their faces aimed away from the big man, but stand close to grab the shotgun when it falls.
The bearded man has his eyes closed. So he doesn’t understand what’s happening when I shove the butt of the gun. His blackened nub of a thumb nudges the trigger and the gun thunders and leaps out of his hands. Pieces of bark and a puff of snow drift down from the trees overhead. The slug missed.
Those great black eyes open, mottled with frost, and understanding sets in. With an angry moan, the big man swings at me. His frozen forearm lands like an aluminum baseball bat, propelled by black robotic musculature. It chips off a piece of my elbow, knocks me off balance. Only now do I realize that I’m missing half of my torso. My guts are gone and so is my center of balance. Guess I’m not the steadiest corpse alive.
I drop hard into the snow.
The guy lifts his leg, his long tendons snapping like frozen tree branches, and drops a boot into my stomach cavity. Rib fragments scatter in the snow among shreds of my clothing and flesh. The beard keeps stomping and moaning, destroying my already ruined body in a slow-motion rage.
And I can’t feel a goddamn thing.
Then another shot is fired. The booming echo skitters through the trees in unfamiliar lurches. An unidentified weapon.
The next stomping blow doesn’t land.
I shove myself into sitting position as something comes out from behind a cracked tree trunk. It is short and gray-skinned, limping. The parasite on its back is blocky, not as graceful as the smoothly ridged humps the rest of us wear. And it’s got on a strange uniform, long frozen to warped bone. This thing was a soldier, once.
Not one of ours. A Chinese soldier.
A familiar tendril of orange smoke rises from the new soldier’s parasite. It’s some kind of bad dream, something the parasite makes me see, yet it feels more real than the ice world around me. The tendril floats like a spiderweb on the wind. Closer and closer.
When it lands on my head, I hear a woman’s voice.
“I am Chen Feng. Wandering lost in Dìyù, yet honor-bound to live. I greet you in solidarity, survivor,” she says.
The soldier thing is a female. Exposed cheekbones dapple her shrunken face, polished by the weather. She has the grinning toothy mouth of a corpse, yet her words expand into my head like warm medicine.
“Hello?” I ask, watching a flicker of radio communication intertwine with her light. Whoa. She’s gone and taught me to speak. “Where did you come from?”
“I am the might of Manchuria. A spirit. No longer alive and not yet dead.”
“Where are your people?”
“They are as dust. The Northeast Provinces foolishly marched alone. We sought glory and instead were devoured by the jīqì rén. Those consumed rose again into Dìyù. Forced to slaughter our brothers and sisters. The Siberian Russians arrived with vodka and boasts and we slew the Èluósī, too. You dark-skinned ones came on walking tanks, and we rose wearily once more.”
“You were waiting for us.”
“Your metal soldiers were too fast. The pànduàn cut through our frozen flesh. Raced into the west. And when the final pànduàn defied the great enemy, we heard its screams of rage. The foul deep light was extinguished, and I awoke from Dìyù into another nightmare.”
Years. This soldier must have been out here in the cold for years. The enormity of her suffering fills my mind.
“We’ve got to leave here,” I say.
Chen Feng doesn’t respond. Neither do the others. A hopeless silence settles onto my shoulders like gravity. There is nowhere to go and we all know it. I turn to the horizon, avoiding their faces. And only now do I realize that I can see a kind of leftover orange haze beyond the trees.
It’s the place where Archos must have made its final stand. And where I might still find Lonnie Wayne. The man saved my life and brought me into Gray Horse Army. I’m scared to let him see me like this but I’ve got hurt soldiers who need me.
“We reunite with Gray Horse Army,” I say, and begin to limp away.
* * *
—
Our group walks for three days and nights. We don’t tire and we don’t change pace. The orange mist on the horizon always grows. Our sluggish steps never stop.
I don’t notice when Chen Feng stops moving. I’m watching her back and thinking that you could almost mistake her for a human being. Somebody who has been tore up, sure, but a living person. Daydreaming, I walk right past her.
I’m almost killed before I can stop.
The slender silver machine named Nine Oh Two is standing motionless in the snow. A seven-foot-tall humanoid robot with a scavenged rifle on the high ready. Its three eyes are on me, lenses dilating as it absorbs the fact of my existence. It hasn’t shot me yet, so it must be trying to classify what it sees.
Am I a severely wounded human being? A broken war machine? Am I dead or alive or what the hell? Nine Oh Two doesn’t seem to know and neither do I.
Over the machine’s shoulder, I see a little tent shivering in the wind. The structure is wrapped up tight and the interior is throbbing with that rotten orange glow. Some shard of Archos is inside, talking.
I take a step forward.
Nine Oh Two bristles. Thin sheets of ice crack and fall from his joints as the barrel of his gun settles between my eyes.
Familiar smoke rises from the machine’s forehead. A line of communication that settles over me. Nine Oh Two points at the snow a few yards away.
“Path blocked, acknowledge. Alternate route indicated. I wish you luck…creatures,” it says.
All kinds of tracks are in the muddy ice. Regular old footprints, the neatly spaced mineshafts of high-stepping tall-walkers, and the flat-topped mesas left by spider tanks dragging their equipment-filled be
lly nets over high snowdrifts.
Gray Horse Army passed this way.
* * *
—
There are no mirrors out here in the wilderness and I thank the Creator for that.
Without a mirror, it’s up to my imagination to guess what Gray Horse Army sees when they look out at us. A shambling group of a dozen corpses following in their tracks, brain-dead and deaf and dumb. Luckily, my imagination isn’t that good anymore.
The humans don’t travel at night, which is why we catch up to them.
At dusk on the third day, we watch the spider tanks amble into covered-wagon formation. The legged metal giants squat into bunker configurations for the night, encircling the human camp. In the protected clearing, campfires glitter into existence. Soon, rifle scopes wink at us from the tops of the tanks.
Got to keep the zombies at bay.
But we stay at a safe distance. Sway together numbly through the night, the wind cutting moaning tunnels between us. Gray Horse Army does not fire. The war is over, after all. I imagine we’re just another one of the odd atrocities left behind in this new world. Not enemies, not yet.
At dawn, there is movement.
A tall-walker pulls up short and the rider watches for maybe half an hour. The rest of the camp is packing up. Groaning tanks stand up, loaded with soldiers. A flock of tall-walker scouts sprint ahead. But before the army moves, two tanks part and a handful of men approach. As they get near, I recognize Lonnie Wayne.
He’s shading his eyes and shaking his head in disbelief.
Lonnie shrugs off his battle rifle and tosses it to the man next to him. Unfastens the loop on his sidearm holster, lets the pistol hang low on his hip. Extra ammunition and a knife and a hand radio hang from his belt, flopping as he strides toward us, alone.