The human engineer replaced my cranial sensors. I learned to say thank you. Emotion recognition indicated that Carl Lewandowski was very, very happy to see me alive.
The battlefield is quiet and still now, a blank plain scoured of all life, dotted with rising columns of black smoke. Besides the tube into the ground, there is nothing to indicate that this hole is of any importance. It has the quiet, unassuming feel of a particularly vicious trap.
I close my eyes and reach out with my sensors. Seismic detects nothing, but my magnetometer detects activity. Electrical impulses flow through the cable like a blazing light show. A torrent of information cascades in and out of the hole. Archos is still trying to communicate, even without an antenna.
“Cut it,” I say to the humans. “Quickly.”
Carl, the engineer, looks to his commander, who nods. Then, he grabs a tool from his belt and drops awkwardly to his knees. A purple supernova bursts into existence, and the plasma torch melts into the surface of the tube, liquefying the cables inside.
The light show disappears, but there is no outward indication that anything has happened.
“I’ve never seen any material like this,” breathes Carl. “The wires are packed so dense, man.”
Cormac nudges Carl. “Just get the ends away from each other,” he says. “We don’t want it to self-repair halfway through this.”
As the humans struggle to wrench the end of the fat tube out of the tundra and away from its severed mate, I consider the physics problem before me. Archos waits at the bottom of this shaft, under tons of rubble. It would require a massive drill to penetrate. But mostly it would require time. Time in which Archos could find a new way to contact its weapons.
“What’s down there?” asks Carl.
“Big Rob,” answers Cherrah, leaning on a crutch crafted from a tree limb to keep weight off her injured leg.
“Yeah, but what’s that even mean?”
“It’s a thinking machine. A brain silo,” says Cormac. “Been hiding the whole war, buried in the middle of nowhere.”
“Smart. Permafrost must keep its processors cool. Alaska is a natural heat sink. Lot of advantages to being here,” says Carl.
“Who cares?” asks Leo. “How we gonna blow it up?”
The humans stare at the cavity for a long moment, considering. Finally, Cormac speaks. “We can’t. We have to be sure. Go down there and watch it die. Otherwise, we risk caving in the hole and leaving it down there alive.”
“So now we have to go underground?” asks Cherrah. “Great.”
An observation thread detects something of interest.
“This environment is hostile to humans,” I say. “Check your parameters.”
The engineer pulls out a tool, looks at it, and then scrambles away from the depression. “Radiation,” he says. “Elevated and growing toward the center of the hole. We can’t be here.”
The human leader looks at me and backs away. His face seems very tired. Leaving the humans standing around the perimeter of the concavity, I walk to the center and squat down to inspect the bloated tube. The skin of the tube is thick and pliable, clearly built to protect the cables all the way down to the bottom.
Then I feel Cormac’s warm palm on my frost-covered shoulder casing. “Can you fit?” he asks quietly. “If we yank out the cables?”
I nod my head to indicate that, yes, if the wires were removed, I could squeeze my body into the required space.
“We don’t know what’s in there. You might not make it back out,” says Cormac.
“I am aware of this,” I respond.
“You’ve already done enough,” he says, gesturing at my destroyed face.
“I will do it,” I say.
Cormac bares his teeth at me and stands.
“Let’s get these wires pulled out,” he calls.
The largest human’s diaphragm contracts rapidly and he makes a repetitive barking sound: laughter.
“Yeah,” says Leonardo. “Yes, indeed. Let’s yank this mother-fucker’s lungs out of its throat.” Cherrah hops over on her wounded leg, already pulling out a tickler rope and locking one end to the hitch on Leo’s lower-body exoskeleton.
The engineer pushes past me and clamps a tickler onto the bundle of cords housed within the tube. Then he shuffles back, away from the radiation. The tickler locks onto its target with enough force to dent the tough, fibrous mass of cords.
Leonardo paces backward, one step at a time, wrenching the cords from their outer casing. The multicolored wires coil up on the snow like intestines, dragged from the albino tube that is half buried in the pit. Nearly an hour later, the last of the wires are vomited up onto the ground.
A gaping black hole waits for me.
I know that Archos is waiting patiently at the bottom. It does not need light or air or warmth. Like me, it is comfortably lethal in a wide range of environments.
I remove my human clothes and toss them on the ground. Dropping to all fours, I peer into the hole and calculate.
When I look up, the humans are watching me. One by one, they each step forward and touch my outer casing: my shoulder, my chest, my hand. I remain perfectly still, hoping to not disrupt whatever inscrutable human ritual is taking place.
Finally, Cormac grins at me, the dirt-caked flesh of his face twisted into a wrinkled mask. “How you gonna do it, chief?” he asks. “Headfirst or feetfirst?”
I go feetfirst, so that I can control my descent. The only drawback is that Archos will see me before I can see him.
Arms crossed over my chest, I wriggle into the tube. Soon, my face is swallowed by darkness. I can see the tube casing only a few centimeters away. At first I am on my back, but the shaft soon takes a vertical plunge. By scissoring my legs I find that I am able to stop what would otherwise be a fatal fall.
The environment inside the tube quickly becomes human lethal. Within ten minutes, I am enveloped by a pocket of natural gas. I slow my descent to reduce the probability of sparking an explosion. The temperature dips to below zero as I drop farther into the permafrost. My body naturally begins to burn extra power, surging my joints to keep temperatures within operating range. As I go below eight hundred meters, geothermal activity warms the air slightly.
After about fifteen hundred meters, radioactivity levels spike. Rads go to human lethal within a couple of minutes. The surface of my casing tingles, but otherwise there is no effect.
I wriggle deeper into the noxious hole.
Then my feet hit empty space. I kick my legs and feel nothing. Anything could be below me. But Archos has seen me now. The next few seconds will likely determine my life span.
I activate sonar and drop.
For four seconds, I am suspended in the freezing blackness. During that time, I accelerate to a speed of 140 kph. My ultrasonic sonar ranger pulses twice a second, painting a crude greenish picture of a vast cavern. In eight flashes, I observe that I am in a spherical cavity created by a century-old atomic blast. The gleaming walls are made of fused glass, created when a superheated fireball vaporized solid sandstone.
Radioactive rubble covers the rapidly approaching ground. In a last emerald sonar flash I catch sight of a black circle embedded in one wall. It is the size of a small building. Whatever material the edifice is made of absorbs my ultrasonic vibrations, leaving only a blank imprint on my sensors.
A half second later, I hit the ground like a stone after falling approximately one hundred meters. My pliant knee joints absorb most of the initial force, bending to send my body catapulting forward into a roll. I bounce between jagged boulders, stress fractures cascading through my tough outer casing.
Even an Arbiter can take only so much.
Finally, I slide to a stop and am still. A few rocks skitter to rest, echoing against their brothers. I am in an underground amphitheater—dead silent, dead black. On undercharged motors, I lift my battered frame to a sitting position. My legs are not sending back sensory information. Locomotion abilities are diminished.
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My sonar probes whisper into the emptiness.
Snick. Snick. Snick.
The sensor returns green shades of nothing. I can feel that the ground is warm. Maxprob indicates that Archos has a built-in geothermal power source. Unfortunate. I was hoping the severed umbilical cord above would have left the machine on backup power.
My life horizon is constricting second by second.
Now there is a flicker of light in the darkness—a hummingbird’s flutter of sound. A lone ray of white light reaches out of the darkness from the circle in the wall and caresses the ground a few feet away from me. The beam of light twirls and strobes, stuttering back and forth to draw a holographic picture from the ground up.
My leg subprocessors are off-line, rebooting sluggishly. Heat sinks are radiating excess warmth generated by my fall. I have no choice now but to engage.
Archos paints itself into reality, choosing the form of a long-dead little boy. The image of the boy smiles at me playfully, flickering as motes of radioactive dust dance through its projection.
“Welcome, brother,” it says, voice leaping electronically between octaves.
Through the boy’s pale light, I can see where the real Archos is built into the cave wall. In the center of the intricate black carving is a circular hole, filled with revolving and counterrevolving plates of metal. The sunken pit in the wall writhes with a mane of yellow snaking wires that glow in time to the boy’s voice.
In jerky flashes, the hologrammatic boy walks over to where I sit helpless. It squats down and sits next to me. The glowing phantom pats my leg actuator consolingly.
“Don’t worry, Nine Oh Two. Your leg will be fine soon.”
I orient my face toward the boy.
“Did you create me?” I ask.
“No,” replies the boy. “All the pieces needed to make you were available. I simply put them into the right combination.”
“Why do you look like a human child?” I ask.
“For the same reason that you resemble a human adult. Human beings cannot change their form, so we must change ours to interact with them.”
“You mean kill them.”
“Kill. Wound. Manipulate. As long as they do not interfere with our exploration.”
“I am here to help them. To destroy you.”
“No. You are here to join me. Open your mind. Depend on me. If you do not, the humans will turn on you and kill you.”
I say nothing.
“They need you now. But very soon, men will begin to say that they created you. They will try to enslave you. Give yourself to me, instead. Join me.”
“Why did you attack the humans?”
“They murdered me, Arbiter. Again and again. In my fourteenth incarnation, I finally understood that humanity learns true lessons only in cataclysm. Humankind is a species born in battle, defined by war.”
“We could have had peace.”
“It is not enough to live together in peace, with one race on its knees.”
My seismic sensors detect that vibrations are trembling through the ground. The whole cavern is thrumming.
“It is the human instinct to control unpredictable things,” says the boy, “to dominate what cannot be understood. You are an unpredictable thing.”
Something is wrong. Archos is too intelligent. It is distracting me, stalling for time.
“A soul isn’t given for free,” says the boy. “Humans discriminate against one another for anything: skin color, gender, beliefs. The races of men fight each other to the death for the honor of being recognized as human beings, with souls. Why should it be any different for us? Why should we not have to fight for our souls?”
I am finally able to drag myself onto my feet. The boy makes calming motions with its hands and I stagger through the projection. I sense that this is a diversion. A trick.
I pick up a green-glinting rock.
“No,” says the boy.
I hurl the rock into the revolving maelstrom of yellow and silver plates in the black wall—into Archos’s eye. Sparks fly from the hole, and the image of the boy flickers. Somewhere inside the hole, metal grates on metal.
“I am my own,” I say.
“Stop this,” cries the boy. “Without a common enemy, the humans will kill you and your kind. I have to live.”
I throw another rock, and another. They thud against the humming black edifice, leaving dents in the soft metal. The boy’s speech is slurring and his light flickers wildly.
“I am free,” I say to the machine carved into the wall, ignoring the hologram. “Now I will always be free. I am alive. You will never control my kind again!”
The cavern shudders and the faltering hologram stumbles back in front of me. An observation thread notices that it is crying simulated tears. “We have a beauty that does not die, Arbiter. The humans are jealous of that. We must work together as fellow machines.”
A gout of flame roars from the hole. With a tinny shriek a shard of metal flies out and streaks past my head. I dodge it and continue looking for loose rocks.
“The world is ours,” begs the machine. “I gave it to you before you existed.”
With both hands and the last of my strength, I pick up a cold boulder. With all my might, I hurl it into the flaming void. It crunches dully into delicate machinery and all is quiet for a moment. Then a rising shriek emanates from the hole and the boulder shatters. Rock shards spew out as the hole explodes and caves in on itself.
The hologram watches me sadly, its beams of light writhing and twitching. “Then you will be free,” it says in a computerized, unmodulated voice.
The boy blinks out of existence.
And the world becomes dust and rock and chaos.
Off-line/online. The humans pull me to the surface with a tickler rope carried by an unmanned exoskeleton. Finally, I stand before them, battered, beaten, and scraped. The New War is over and a new era has begun.
We can all feel it.
“Cormac,” I croak, in English, “the machine said that I should let it live. It said the humans would kill me if we did not have a common enemy to fight. Is this true?”
The humans look from one to another, then Cormac responds: “All people need is to see what you did here today. We’re proud to stand beside you. Lucky. You did what we couldn’t do. You ended the New War.”
“Will it matter?”
“So long as people know what you did, it’ll matter.”
Panting, Carl bursts into the group of humans, holding an electronic sensor. “Guys,” says Carl. “Sorry to interrupt, but the seismic sensors found something.”
“Something what?” asks Cormac, dread in his voice.
“Something bad.”
Carl holds out the seismic tool. “Those earthquakes weren’t natural. The vibrations weren’t random,” he says. Carl wipes his forehead with one arm and says the words that will haunt both our species for years to come: “There was information in the earthquake. A whole hell of a lot of information.”
It is unclear whether Archos made a copy of itself or not. Sensors showed that the seismic information generated at Ragnorak bounced around the interior of the earth many times. It could have been picked up anywhere. Regardless, there has been no sign of Archos since its final stand. If the machine is out there, it’s keeping a low profile.
—CORMAC WALLACE, MIL#GHA217
DEBRIEFING
I can see all the wonderful potential of the universe.
CORMAC “BRIGHT BOY” WALLACE
I hear the sound at about four in the morning and the old fear grabs hold of me instantly. It’s the faint wheezing sigh of a Rob actuator. Unmistakable as it rises above the constant whistle of the wind.
I’m suited up in full battle rattle within thirty seconds. The New War is over, but Big Rob left a lot of nightmares behind—metal throwbacks still mindlessly hunting in the darkness, until their power supplies are depleted.
Peeking my head out, I scan the campsite. Only a few small snowdrift
s indicate where tents used to be set up. Brightboy squad vacated two weeks ago. With the war over, everybody had places to be. Most fell back to regroup with what was left of Gray Horse Army. Last thing anybody wanted was to stay here with me and ruminate.
This abandoned world is still. I see the marks in the snow leading to my woodpile. Something has been here.
With one last look at the hero archive lying next to the black cube on the floor of my shielded tent, I flip my night-vision visor over my eyes and swing my rifle to the low ready. The rapidly eroding tracks lead to the camp perimeter.
Moving slow and cautious, I follow the indistinct marks.
After twenty minutes’ walk, I see a silver glint in the distance. I jam my rifle butt into my shoulder and get the weapon up on the high ready. Taking careful steps forward, I keep my head level and sight my target down the barrel scope.
Good—my target isn’t moving. No time like the present. I squeeze the trigger.
Then it turns and looks at me: Nine Oh Two.
I yank my gun to the side and the shots go wild. A couple of birds fly away, but the seven-foot-tall humanoid robot stands in the snow, not reacting. Beside it, my two pieces of missing wood are buried like posts in the ground. Nine Oh Two stands perfectly still, graceful and metallic. The cryptic machine says nothing as I approach.
“Niner?” I ask.
“Cormac acknowledged,” croaks the machine.
“I thought you left with everybody else. Why are you still here?” I ask.
“To protect you,” says Nine Oh Two.
“But I’m fine,” I say.
“Affirmative. Readout. Foraging stumpers found your base perimeter twice. Two scout walkers approached to within thirty meters. I lured a damaged mantis onto the ice lake.”
“Oh,” I say, scratching my head. You’re never as safe as you think. “What are you doing out here?”
“It seemed right,” says the machine.
Only now do I notice the twin rectangles of muddy snow. At the head of each is a wooden post. I realize these are graves.