The Enemy screams one last time and falls. Mission accomplished.
I make my way to the smoldering corpse and stare down at it with an almost human-like fascination. I’ve seen these before. Nothing’s new...except the smell. I don’t take it in with the clinical—analytical—dispassion I’m supposed to.
A pixelated curtain of static white, tinged with hints of obsidian threads, washes over my vision. The hulking monstrosity is gone, and something makes it way to tickle my senses. Something I should have forgotten.
It’s an acrid odor, clinging to the inside of my skull with hooks, refusing to let go. It’s the smell of the past—of burning buildings, searing ozone, sizzling flesh—of a life gone by. Something I’d been made to forget, something human.
Shikari don’t smell. We process. We analyze threats. We neutralize them.
The jarring white carpet fades and my vision returns to normal. I brush it from my mind and bend to grab hold of one of the construct’s legs. A quick tug tells me the limb will hold under the weight and the tug of the ocean. I wrench on the creature and move toward the shore, keeping my mind on the task of retrieval.
We shouldn’t be studying these things, hauling them back to shore. We should be burying them. A few more rounds would turn each corpse into slag fit to sink to the ocean floor to join centuries of refuse.
I wade through the water, giving no mind to the waves crashing harmlessly against my body. Every impact does nothing but jar a memory out of me. I remember the days when, in what little free time I had, I paddled against the water and fought to not drown under high crests of seafoam.
Now I tower above it all. The waves do not touch me the way they used to. I near the shore, monster in tow, when another bout of discordancy lances through me, body and mind. My limbs grow distant and weary. Vishnu’s Vengeance is nothing but a hollow dream. I’m no longer of steel strength and resolve, of lightning computer thoughts and processes. I’m of something hot and heavy—something weary. A spot in my chest, something I’d left behind, burns and beats out of sync. Something wracks lungs I don’t have, feeling like they’re being wrung by iron cables till every bit of air is squeezed out of me.
I remember tottering. I’m screaming.
And it passes again.
My fist tightens around the leg I’m holding. The shore nears, and a crowd gathers along it. Strobing lights cascade off the tops of vehicles to spread out of the sands ahead, bathing the grains in faint blue. I twist and heave to pull the monster’s carcass through the final bit of water, sending up a new row of waves to crash before the onlookers. An alarm cuts through the din, wailing, and giant radiation holograms light up the air, almost as tall as I am. Ants—men—in white hazmat suits form a wary perimeter around the corpse. I need to remember they’re people. People: soft, organic, thinking—always thinking, worried, letting emotions drive them.
Curiosity. That’s what’s in their minds. That itch. The yearn to know. They had to understand what I’d killed. But what’s there to understand?
I was supposed to kill it. That’s all you could do to one of those. And I did my job. It should burn, much like a home—people, a little girl and her mother.
Everything flashes, and I become myself again. Vengeance. The thoughts leave me, and I am free to watch the little dots of white run toward the monster. They slow the closer they get. They inch, much like insects, concerned the immobile mass would somehow find a second life and wreak havoc again. It wouldn’t. Vishnu—I—had made sure of that. I’d made it burn. And it wasn’t enough.
More ants scurry around the fallen enemy, making their way close enough to touch its legs. They likely whisper among themselves over the marvel of creation the thing is.
I don’t see it. All I see is a burning house, a fading pregnant woman, the ashes of a little girl.
The coldness flickers again. Then, all feeling, like the visions, fade.
Scientists motion at neighboring crews to bring their tools over. They cut through its body with methodical precision, loading the bits onto heavy machinery so they can haul it off to wherever.
Curiosity. One word. Five syllables. The promise of understanding. It’ll make the fight easier. That’s their thinking. It’s what drives the little insects before me into their joyous circle around the harbinger of our doom.
Shikari are not to be curious. We’re decisive. We burn what needs to be burned.
My vision refocuses on the enemy and I raise my cannon. The small forms, clad in white, do not register as anything important. They’re nothing more than concentrated pillars of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. Base elements. The enemy still lay before me. It wasn’t gone, not completely.
But I could fix that.
I feel the charge rush through me as the cannon arm primes. I know what comes next.
The house on fire, smoldering ruins and bodies, and smoke blanketing the air above.
My arm grows distant and hollow, unresponsive. I stop, aware of what I was trying to do. The cannon lowers, and I turn my back to the people on the shore, fixing my gaze on the horizon.
Am I a man dreaming that I am a machine, or a machine dreaming of being a man?
BACK IN THE HANGAR, anxious tech-priests scuttle around me, tapping, tinkering. Little two-legged ants crawling everywhere. Phantom itches on my skin.
“It’s not the radiation, Babaji,” says Sanjaya, a worried voice in my ear. “Your outer skin registers a few rads, but the inner skin is completely untouched. Electronics, neural conduits, all in perfect working order. Your gun arm might need a re-servicing, but that’s it.”
I KNOW WHAT I SAW. I KNOW WHAT I FELT.
“I know, Babaji, but I can’t explain it,” he says, a desperate note entering his voice. “It’s not hardware.”
“Maybe you need some rest,” says Bhanu.
Unasked, the question on all their minds, the problem none of them will say out loud: Babaji, maybe you’re desyncing.
LEAVE ME, I growl.
They bow and back away. My children fear me. I sigh, the hangar reverberating with the emptiness I feel inside. But before they can leave, an alarm screams, and the voice of Command and Controls drills into my skull.
VISHNU TO BAY SIX. VISHNU TO BAY SIX. WE HAVE A SITUATION.
Bay six. My main reactor re-ignites. I break into a run, ripping cables out of my plugports. This is not good.
BAY SIX IS FIFTY KILOMETERS away, a vast fortress that dwarfs my own waterside dwelling. My bay is low, sleek, and modern—designed to be broken apart, towed down to wherever I’m needed, and re-assembled. Bay Six, on the other hand, is an immense thing built out of ten-ton blocks of stone. It is more than a launch pad, it is a temple. A shrine.
To the greatest and most fearsome of all of us.
A shrine to Kali, Goddess of Destruction.
My target is along the coastline, which lights up on my heads-up display. My steel feet claw small valleys in the soil. The lights of Chennai strobe in and out in the background, throwing small shadows of me onto the floodlit waters. For a moment I am a man again, with outsized legs, chasing a metal giant in the darkness.
Bay Six, all towers and spires, sits on a high artificial hill. The whole thing is lit up in a ghastly red. Alarms blare from inside. I can’t jump, but one push from me and the gate crumbles, and my steel bulk is in the main courtyard.