“What the fuck is so funny, Cherrah?” asks Cormac.
“I don’t know. This thing. Nine Oh Two. It’s just such a… robot. You know? It’s so damned earnest.”
“Oh, so now you don’t think this is a trap?”
“No, I don’t. Not anymore. What would be the point? This one by itself and damaged could probably kill half our squad, even without weapons. Isn’t that right, Niner?”
I run the simulation in my head. “Probable.”
“Look how serious it is. I don’t think it’s lying,” says Cherrah.
“Can it lie?” asks Leo.
“Do not underestimate my abilities,” I respond. “I am capable of misrepresenting factual knowledge to further my own aims. However, you are correct. I am serious. We share a common enemy. We must face it as one or we will die.”
As he registers my words, a ripple of unknown emotion travels through the face of Cormac. I orient toward him, sensing danger. He pulls his M9 pistol out of its holster and strides recklessly toward me. He places the pistol an inch away from my face.
“Don’t tell me about dying, you fucking hunk of metal,” he says. “You’ve got no idea what life is. What it means to feel. You can’t be hurt. You can’t die. But that doesn’t mean I won’t enjoy killing you.”
Cormac presses the gun against my forehead. I can feel the cool circle of the barrel against my outer casing. It is resting against a build line in my skull—a weak spot. One trigger pull and my hardware will be irreparably damaged.
“Cormac,” says Cherrah. “Step away. You’re too close. That thing can take your gun away and kill you in a heartbeat.”
“I know,” says Cormac, his face inches from mine. “But it hasn’t. Why?”
I sit in the snow, a trigger pull away from death. There is nothing to do. So, I do nothing.
“Why did you come here?” says Cormac. “You must have known we’d kill you. Answer me. You’ve got three seconds to live.”
“We have a common enemy.”
“Three. It’s just not your lucky day.”
“We must fight it together.”
“Two. You fuckers killed my brother last week. Didn’t know that, did you?”
“You are in pain.”
“One. Any last words?”
“Pain means you are still alive.”
“Zero, motherfucker.”
Click.
Nothing happens. Cormac moves his palm to the side and I observe that the clip is missing from the pistol. Maxprob indicates he never intended to fire at all.
“Alive. You just said the magic word. Get up,” he says.
Humans are so difficult to predict.
I stand, rising to my full height of seven feet. My slender body looms over the humans in the clear, frigid air. I sense that they feel vulnerable. Cormac does not allow this feeling to show on his face, but it is in the way they all stand. In the way their chests rise and fall just a little faster.
“What the fuck, Cormac?” asks Leo. “We not gonna kill it?”
“I want to, Leo. Trust me. But it’s not lying. And it’s powerful.”
“It’s a machine, man. It deserves to die,” says Leo.
“No,” says Cherrah. “Cormac is right. This thing wants to live. Maybe as bad as we do. On the hill, we agreed to do whatever it takes to kill Archos. Even if it hurts.”
“This is it,” says Cormac. “Our advantage. And I, for one, am going to take it. But if you can’t deal, pack up and hit the Gray Horse Army main camp. They’ll take you in. I won’t hold it against you.”
The squad stands silent, waiting. It is clear to me that nobody is going to leave. Cormac eyes them all, one by one. Some unspoken human communication is taking place on a hidden channel. I did not realize they communicated this much without words. I note that we machines are not the only species who share information silently, wreathed in codes.
Ignoring me, the humans gather into a rough circle. Cormac raises his arms and puts them on the shoulders of the two nearest humans. Then the rest put their arms on one another’s shoulders. They stand in this circle, heads in the middle. Cormac bares his teeth in a wild-eyed grin.
“Brightboy squad is gonna fight with a motherfucking robot,” he says. The others begin to smile. “You believe that? You think Archos is going to predict that? With an Arbiter!”
In a circle, arms intertwined and hot breath cascading into the middle, the humans appear to be a single, many-limbed organism. They make that repetitive noise again, all of them. Laughter. The humans are hugging each other and they are laughing.
How strange.
“Now, if only we could find more!” shouts Cormac.
A roar of laughter comes from the human lungs, shattering the silence and somehow filling the stark emptiness of the landscape.
“Cormac,” I croak.
The humans turn to look at me. Their laughter dries up. The smiles fade so quickly into worry.
I issue a tight-beam radio command. Hoplite and Warden, my squad mates, begin to stir. They sit up in the snow and wipe away the dirt and frost. They make no sudden movements and offer no surprises. They simply rise as though they had been asleep.
“Brightboy squad,” I announce, “meet Freeborn squad.”
Although they regarded each other uneasily at first, within a few days the new soldiers were a familiar sight. By week’s end, Brightboy squad had used plasma torches to carve the squad tattoo into the metal flesh of their new comrades.
3. THEY SHALL GROW NOT OLD
We’re not all of us human anymore.
The true horror of the New War unfolded on a massive scale as Gray Horse Army approached the perimeter defenses of the Ragnorak Intelligence Fields. As we closed in on its position, Archos employed a series of last-ditch defensive measures that shocked our troops to the core. The horrific battles were captured and recorded by a variety of Rob hardware. In this account, I describe the final march of humankind against the machines from my own point of view.
The horizon pitches and rolls mechanically as my spider tank trudges across the Arctic plain. If I squint my eyes, I can almost imagine that I’m on a ship. Setting sail for the shores of Hell.
Freeborn squad brings up the rear, decked out in Gray Horse Army gear. From a distance they look like regular grunts. A necessary measure. It’s one thing to agree to fight alongside a machine, but it’s another thing to make sure nobody in Gray Horse Army puts hot lead into its back.
The rhythmic whine of my spider tank trudging through knee-deep snow is reassuring. It’s something you can set your watch to. And I’m glad to have the top spot up here. Sucks to be down low with all the creepy crawlies. There’s too much wicked shit out there hidden in the snow.
And the frozen bodies are disconcerting. The corpses of hundreds and hundreds of foreign soldiers carpet the woods. Stiff arms and legs poking out of the snow. From the uniforms we figure they’re mostly Chinese and Russian. Some Eastern Europeans. Their wounds are strange, extensive spinal injuries. Some of them seem to have shot each other.
The forgotten bodies remind me of how little we know of the big picture. We never met them, but another human army already fought and died here. Months ago. I wonder which of these corpses were the heroes.
“Beta group is too slow. Pull up,” says a voice over my radio.