Lurker flexes his arms and jounces his head back and forth to loosen up his neck. He seems exhilarated by the run. “The fiber is buried in there in a concrete tube. Protected. Besides, that would be a bit crass, wouldn’t it? We’re better than that, brother. We’ll use this place against the machines. Pick up the phone and make a call. It’s what we do best, isn’t it? And this is the biggest goddamn phone in the hemisphere.”
Lurker nods toward a bulge in his pocket.
“And if all else fails… kaboom,” he says.
Then Lurker jams his forearm blades into the steel door and wrenches them back out, leaving a rip in the metal. A couple more stabs and the door swings open.
“Onward,” says Lurker, and the two step inside a narrow hallway. They hunch over and creep through the dark passage, trying not to breathe their own diesel fumes. In the low light, the LEDs embedded in the curve of metal over their heads brighten up.
“What are we looking for?” asks Arrtrad.
“The fiber,” Lurker whispers. “We’ll want to get down to the fiber. Best-case, we hijack it and send a signal for all the robots to jump into the river. Worst case, we blast the jammer and free up the communications satellites.”
At the end of the hallway is another steel door. Gently, Lurker pushes it open. His LEDs dim as Lurker pokes his head out.
From the built-in camera in the exoskeleton, I see that the machines have almost entirely hollowed out the interior of the cylindrical building. Shafts of sunlight arc in through fifteen stories of dirty glass windows. The light falls through dead air and shatters through a latticework of rebar and radial support beams. Bird calls echo through the cavernous space. Vines and grass and mold are growing on the mounds of trash and debris that cover every surface of the ground floor.
“Bloody hell,” Lurker mutters.
In the middle of this arboretum, a solid cement cylinder juts straight up through the entire height of the building. Encrusted with vines, the pillar disappears into gloomy heights above. It is the final support structure holding this place up. The backbone.
“Building’s gone native,” says Arrtrad.
“Well, there’s no way to reach the upper transmitters from here,” Lurker says, looking at the heaps of moldering rubble that used to be the floors and walls of upper stories. “Doesn’t matter. We’ve got to get to the computers. Base of the building. Down.”
Something small and gray scuttles over a pile of moldy papers and under a tangled heap of rusted office chairs. Arrtrad and Lurker look at each other, wary.
Careful of his forearm spike, Lurker raises a finger to his lips. Together, the men creep out of the hallway and into the arboretum. Their feet blades indent the moss and rotting trash, leaving plain tracks behind.
A blue door waits in the base of the central pillar, dwarfed by the sheer size of the hollowed-out building around it. They move to the door at a fast trot, keeping noise to a minimum. Arrtrad rears back to stab the door, but Lurker stops him with a gesture. Pulling his arm out of the exoskeleton, Lurker reaches down and turns the doorknob. With a yank, the door opens on creaky hinges. I doubt it has been opened since the war began.
Inside, there is dirt in the hallway for a few steps and then things get very clean. The faint roar of air-conditioning grows louder as they walk farther down the cement hallway. The floor is angled downward, toward a square of bright light at the end of the tunnel.
“It’s as if we’ve died,” says Arrtrad.
Finally, they reach the bottom: a cylindrical white clean room with twenty-foot ceilings. It is filled with row after row of humming racks of equipment. The stacks of gear are arrayed in concentric circles, each row getting shorter the closer it is to the center of the room. Rows of fluorescent lights shine down, starkly illuminating every detail of the room. Condensation starts to form on the black metal of the exoskeletons and Arrtrad shivers.
“Plenty of juice down here, anyway,” says Lurker.
The two men walk inside, disoriented by the millions of stuttering green and red lights that line the towers of hardware. In the center of the room is their goaclass="underline" a black hole in the floor the size of a manhole, metal stairs poking out of the top—the fiber hub.
Four-legged robots made of white plastic climb up and down the racks, slipping between stacks of whirring equipment like lizards. Some of these lizard robots use their forelegs to stroke the equipment, moving wires or pressing buttons. It reminds me of those little birds that land on hippos, cleaning them of parasites.
“C’mon,” Lurker murmurs to Arrtrad. They stride together to the hole in the floor. “Down there is the answer to all our problems.”
But Arrtrad doesn’t respond. He’s already seen it.
Archos.
Silent as the grim reaper, the machine hovers over the hole. It looks like an enormous eye, made of circular rings of shimmering metal. Yellow wires snake away from the edges like a lion’s mane. A flawless glass lens is nestled in the center of the rings, smoky black. It watches without blinking.
And yet it is not Archos. Not fully. Only a part of the intelligence that is Archos has been put inside this menacing machine: a local sub-brain.
Lurker strains against his exoskeleton, but he can’t move his arms or legs. The motors in his suit have frozen up. His face goes pale as he realizes what must have happened.
The exoskeleton has an external communications port.
“Arrtrad, run!” Lurker screams.
Arrtrad. The poor bastard. He’s shaking, trying desperately to yank his arms out of the harness. But he’s got no control either. Both the exoskeletons have been hacked.
Floating above in the harsh fluorescent light, the giant eye watches without any reaction.
Motors grind in Lurker’s suit, and he grunts pitifully with the effort of resisting. But there’s no helping it: He’s a puppet caught in the strings of that hanging monster.
Before Lurker can react, his right arm jerks away and sends a wicked forearm blade singing through the air. The blade sinks through Arrtrad’s chest and into the metal spine of his exoskeleton. Arrtrad gapes at Lurker in surprise. In arterial surges, his blood wicks down the end of the blade and soaks Lurker’s sleeve.
“It’s not me, Arrtrad,” Lurker whispers, voice cracking. “It’s not me. I’m sorry, mate.”
And the blade yanks itself back out. Arrtrad takes one sucking gasp for air and then collapses with a hole in his chest. His exoskeleton protects him as he goes limp, lowering itself gently to the ground. Splayed on the floor, its motors shut down and the machine goes still and silent as a pool of dark blood spreads around it.
“Oh you bastard,” Lurker calls up to the expressionless robot watching from above. The machine noiselessly lowers itself down to where he stands, his arm blade slick with blood. The machine positions itself directly in front of Lurker’s face and a delicate-looking stick—some kind of probe—extends from under its smoky eye. Lurker strains to move away, but his rigid exoskeleton holds him in place.
Then the machine speaks in that strange, familiar child’s voice. From the flash of recognition on his face, I see that Lurker remembers this voice from the phone.
“Lurker?” it asks, an electrical glow spreading through the rings.
In small increments, Lurker begins to wriggle his left hand out of the exoskeleton harness. “Archos,” he says.
“You have changed. You’re not a coward anymore.”
“You’ve changed, too,” Lurker says, watching the concentric rings languidly revolve and counterrevolve. His left hand is almost free. “Funny the difference a year can make.”