We Are Shepherds, Part 3: The Plot Thickens
[For your enjoyment, "We Are Shepherds" part THREE! Its power cannot be contained. --ed]
[Art, as always, by David Frankel, MTS.]
III
I threw my forearms over my face, just fast enough that my own knife struck sparks against them. There was armor, grafted to my skin, but I was far from invulnerable. If I stayed still, I’d surely take the weapon in a soft spot, like my throat or my empty eye socket.
I rolled to the side, my right eye squeezed shut, as I struggled to keep track of the scene as I saw it. I was observing myself, my actions reversed, from the artificial eye I’d left on the table. It had alerted me when the nice, smiling woman in the plain dress had come into the room, and it had given me just enough time to protect my face when she tried to cut it off.
Kicking hard with both legs against her stomach bought me time, but didn’t save me. She fell back, but seemed unharmed by the blow, and so I knew I was in no small amount of trouble. Rather than take the time to try and find a weapon that would hurt her, and risk my own knife again, I snatched my eye from the table and leapt out the window.
A hair’s breadth too slow; she slashed at my back—low, below the plating on my shoulder-blades. The knife was sharp, so I felt nothing at first, then a line of hot-cold fire, and then it didn’t matter as I was tumbling from the second story down to the ground, my vision weirdly fragmented as I tried to reconcile the spinning world through my real right eye, and the left eye I held clutched in my hand.
I hit the ground feet first and rolled to take the edge off of the momentum; too sloppy, as it turns out. I landed on my head the wrong way, and felt something crank in my neck. That was something that would hurt later on—along with the wound in my back, that was making the shirt sticky with blood.
The smartfibres had already closed up, though, and were helping the cut clot up. I started running as soon as I had my feet under me, making a bee-line for the town hall, the last place I’d seen my gun. Lights clicked on; I skidded to a halt, turned, ducked behind one of the smaller buildings.
“Talk to me, Kelly,” I whispered, taking a moment to feed the artificial eye back into its socket. It slurped towards my brain, and clicked into place. “What the hell is this?”
[I’m not completely certain--]
“Just tell me what you do know, damn it. I’m bleeding.”
[I was about to tell you what I know], she responded, her quiet voice taking on an edge. [Maybe if you listened, instead of jumping head first out of windows…]
“Just tell me.”
[The people are synthetics.]
“Robots?”
[Semi-biological polymer automatons.]
“I don’t know what that means.”
[It doesn’t matter. They’re acting mostly autonomously, and they’re updated from a central control location every six hundred seconds.]
“Meaning?”
[You’ve got about thirty seconds before everyone in town knows that you’re alive and on the loose.]
“Swell. Any good news?”
[I’ve determined what was interrupting my sensors. There’s a small amount of fissionable material in the atmosphere; I’ve extracted some--]
“Nevermind.” My time was about up. Synthetic people, in a town, in the middle of the desert, a hundred miles from anywhere. With an atomic generator, all operated by a central control unit. I looked around, desperately searching for options.
There weren’t very many. I was willing to bet that most of the buildings were occupied, without a lot of weapons lying around. No way to get out of town, even if I was willing to leave my gun behind. And not a lot of time before I was pursued, en masse. The only thing I could think of was that they were expecting me to leave—so, if I headed straight for their town hall, I could take them by surprise.
Sure. I told myself. That sounds almost plausible.
Lights were clicking on in all the buildings, and I had the suspicion that the smiling synthetic shepherds were onto me. I took on a sprint towards the hall.
One of the synths was waiting for me in the square, carrying what looked like a gunpowder rifle. He was definitely surprised when he saw me barreling towards him, so that was a plus. Maybe this would work, after all. At least, for the first six hundred seconds, until they all knew what was happening.
He swung his rifle towards me; I ducked down, tucked, rolled hard into his shins. The rifle went off, and my heart stopped for a moment. Well, so much for surprise.
[He didn’t hit you], Kelly told me, the exact same second I realized it myself. I managed to snatch the weapon away from him, burning my palms on the hot barrel, and smacked him across the face with the butt. Like his sister/cousin/fellow synthetic, the blow turned his head, but didn’t seem to hurt him. I rolled backwards to get my feet under me, stood up, and shot him in the face.
He noticed this, at least. His head disappeared in a splash of white and green goop, but despite the lack of his pleasant face, the pleasant man kept clutching at me. I danced out of the way of his hands, and turned towards the town hall. The itchy feeling at my back suggested that some of the fifty or so synthetics I’d met earlier were coming out of their homes, gunpowder weapons at the ready.
I looked at the rifle in my hands. It was a double-barrel sporting rifle; no extra bullets, which meant that I wasn’t about to shoot my way out with it.
One of the synths emerged from the hall’s front doors, with my gun in her hands.
I could see the letters RENC stenciled on the side, and my drill sergeant’s voice echoed in my memory. The RENC is the most advanced piece of technology since the End of the World. We call it a monkeywrench, because it is the only tool you will ever need. The weapon was black, extruded carbon fullerene, practically unbreakable. It had a reconfigurable barrel-exhaust port system, and a heavy picotech manufactury that could produce a hundred different kinds of rounds—magnetically propelled railgun rounds, grenades, rockets, napalm, even a few seconds of gigajoule microwave-laser. Somewhere inside was a tiny atomic power plant that would last until the next doomsday.
Even in the Emerald City, where they’d managed to scrape together the sophisticated New Science that had built my artificial eye and dermal grafted body armor, no one had ever built a weapon as dangerous as the RENC pistol.
“I’m sorry,” the synthetic woman said, as she pointed my monkeywrench at me. “We can’t let you live. There are cities…cities are what brought the End to us. You will contaminate our flock.” She held the gun up, only now noticing what it appeared to be missing.
“Do you have a vulnerability profile for these guys yet?”
“What?” The woman asked, looking up from her inspection of the gun. She took a step back into the hall.
[Command and control is in the center of the body, about where the heart should be. Lightly armored, highly destructible. Head is just a sensor cluster.]
“Anything else?”
[Your bleeding’s stopped, but the electric rebreather in your right lung is operating at half capacity. I wouldn’t recommend swimming any time soon.]
The synthetic played her hand up and down the side of the ‘wrench, trying to find what I knew it didn’t have: a trigger. “Who are you talking to?” She demanded.
I smiled. “The gun.”
[Antipersonnel countermeasures engaged.]
[On to Part 4]
