In the evening air, at the base of the Catalina state park in Oro Valley, a cool desert wind blew through the tamarisk and acacia, sending a family of shrews scattering from a hedge of graythorn to a burrow beneath the shale. A Great Horned Owl swept over the shrews and snared the mother, then faded into the darkness of the night sky. Orion, at arms, held his arrow bearing down on Sonora. The waning moon cast the shadows of the unmoving saguaros unto the sand of a dry creek bed. The sentinel tracked the owl as it disappeared into the stars, behind Mt. Lemmon, and powered down.
• Solar power cell — 30%. Solar armor — 100%.
• Drivetrain — operational
• Visual/cortico/thermal/radar optics — operational
• HD/Comms — operational
• Water — 100%. Napalm — 100%
• Railgun — full capacity
• JE — encountered pathoton; was not helpful
• Shutting down core operation and initiating stand-by mode
5. Still Life with Annihilation
Over the next two days, the sentinel drove north along the broken Oracle Road and the forgotten earth. In the morning, it would rise slowly, awakening its core systems to the incoming sunlight. It drove all afternoon, stopping frequently to analyze anomalies in the terrain — a set of tracks, a heat signature on a distant roof, a freshly fallen cholla. Satellite data was pinged to the sentinel every 6 hours, providing more information to pore over. There was no sign of human cognition, but there were the primal husks — the revins — gathering in the reaches beyond the road.
The sentinel kept on, aware of this rising tide, until it got to a small RV park in the far north — Oracle Junction. It pulled off the road and turned its sights on the movement to the south. The revins moved from the desert floor onto the broken pavement. The midday sun heated the asphalt to a scalding burn. The revins, shoeless, walked onward towards DDC39. One, a child, ran forward towards the sentinel ahead of the others. It had been badly burned — its ears, nose, eyelids, and hair was gone. It held a rock in its hand and gurgled a guttural scream at the sentinel, shaking the rock in the air until it finally threw it comically astray — landing softly askew of the sentinel’s front wheel. The child shrieked at the sentinel and ran backwards toward the horde.
The revins — ragged and emaciated — surrounded the sentinel and nervously paced back and forth. DDC39 analyzed the condition of these blank lives. Their feet were callused and cracked. Their lips, bloody and peeled. They had a thick layer of dust in their hair, which was knotted and shoulder length. A female shuffled up from behind the group, swollen in the abdomen and bleeding from its genitalia. The males in the group began to jostle and snarl at the sentinel. The female pushed its way to the front of the crowd and before the sentinel. DDC39 locked its tri-axel and scanned the woman before it. She had a festering wound in her face — her nasal cavity was ripped out and, as she breathed, a spray emanated from the torn membranes frayed above her mandible. She stood before the sentinel wearing nothing but a hospital band on her wrist. Many of the snarling revins circling the sentinel had these bands. The woman slapped the ground and squawked a familiar pidgin at the sentinel — a series of bleats and protests that almost resembled some forgotten language. She got increasingly more agitated and pointed at the sentinel and then towards the western horizon.
The sentinel watched this show. The revins crept closer and chortled at each guttural shout of the female. A snarling male in a hospital gown stood alone to the left, holding a golf club awkwardly. A slender adolescent picked up a rock and raised it high in the air.
A small panel clicked open in the sentinel’s center trident column. A black disk rattled in the cavity like a beating heart — then stopped. A silence hung in the air and then the disk erupted in a scream — a deafening torrent that filled the valley. The revins dropped to their knees and jammed their ears full with fingers, palms — anything that would stop this piercing wail. One by one, they got up in a panic, mouths agape with muted howls — a futile plea into the void. They scattered in different directions — all except the female, who knelt motionless before the sentinel. She too unshielded her ears, slowly, and looked back into the lens of the sentinel. Tears streamed down her face, into the gaping wound. She clasped her hands in front of her and motioned her lips, trying in vain to say the words that escaped her many years ago in a forlorn hospital ward.
DDC39 crested the hill and into the first rays of the morning sunlight in the east. In the distance, a series of cylindrical glass structures shone back in the dawn glare. Biosphere3. The sentinel raised its trident frame in the heat of the world that had long ago shorn itself of cognition. It pinged the perimeter of the complex and scanned the western side. No prefrontal signals, no abnormal heat signatures, and no movement. As it drove down off the hill and towards the parking lot, the sentinel noticed a stained patch of soil — Stadler’s last stand on the northwest side of the main complex. The blood and tissue had dried to a black cake on the façade and his limbs had been picked to the bone.
The sentinel drove silently through the warm flood of the dawn light, cleaving through the dull hum of the aerial apocalypse, and entered the darkness of the East visitor bay. The warmth of the morning glow faded behind it as DDC39 rolled into the dusty cavern of the long bay hall. It continued into the abyss, switching from thermal to black light optics. A cavalcade of footprints went back and forth on the floor. Dried blood streaks went backwards towards the exit — the unmistakable trail of a body dragged into the open desert from deep within Bio3.
DDC39 navigated the dark hall and into the deserted cafeteria. A thick layer of caliche dust covered the floor, tables, and chairs. The sentinel’s center floodlight flicked on and scanned the surroundings. The dust kicked up and clouded the field of view before the machine — like the bottom of the ocean swirling at the arrival of a bathyscaphe. The sentinel found the gymnasium portal and continued on.
Into the hall of Lewis’ annihilation. Silently through the chamber painted with the corporeal remains of a man. Smeared hand marks near the baseboard. Maroon cake and streak marks heading back out of the hall. Lewis’ body was gone. The airlock was open on both sides. DDC39 rolled slowly over the bloodstain, past the airlock chamber, and into the gym.
The sentinel scanned the area between the bloody remains and the area inside the gym. The assay sat undisturbed on the rolling cart. There were three emptied syringes crushed on the floor near the cart. A fourth syringe, emptied, sat atop the cart. The sentinel switched into black light optics and analyzed the floor. A large set of male footprints traversed the entire gym — a repetitive and blurred circle stamped around the cart. A smaller female print went into the gym and then back out past Lewis’ stain. A single, shoed print from a child was firmly planted near a bench in the corner. No blood traced near the child’s feet. A solitary phantom in the ultraviolet petroglyph.
DDC39 paused, locked into this faint glow. A child. It considered, processed, what had happened here. The sentinel switched into thermal and zoom optics, analyzing the area down to its smallest details. Lewis’ mortal residue left no doubt about his demise, and some other violence occurred — but the footprints and syringes? The sentinel extended its arm and picked up a shard from a broken vessel. A small receptor sprang forth from its palm — a biomonitor.
The sentinel tested the fragment and returned a result its own memory suggested was too improbable to be true. So it re-tested it. And re-tested it. The sequence was for a cortical hypotrophy vaccine. An entirely new and promising sequence. The DNA string was a combination of the disease itself and something that it was not. The scenarios computed from within the sentinel’s core processor left very little doubt: some healthy survivors had made a last stand here, and had been able to derive a vaccine that might save the rare few who were uninfected. And hope of all hopes: a child was here, appears to have received the vaccine, and was taken away.