We Are Shepherds, Part 4: How Do I Get Out?
[The story begins here. It is a product of a powerful Science.]
[Art by David Frankel, MFA]
IV
The countermeasures appeared as a stroke of lightning and a sound like the world had cracked in half. By the time the coloured pinwheels of the afterimages had cleared from my eyes, the synthetic woman had been charred to a crisp, and lay canted at a strange angle on the ground. All that was left were blackened acrylic-polymer bones.
“What the hell was that?” I asked my gun.
[Three gigawatt antipersonnel charge.]
I picked the RENC pistol—We call it a monkeywrench, my drill sergeant reminded me, because it is the only tool you will ever need—on the move, as I shoved the door open and burst into the town hall. “Seems a little excessive.”
[I haven’t had the opportunity to use the high-wattage capacitor.] Kelly the gun told me. [I needed to make sure it worked effectively.]
“Sure.” I took an instant to survey the room. Four more synths, gunpowder rifles ready. Kelly switched my eye to infrared, and overlaid glowing red spots over their hearts. The gun reconfigured itself to hollow-point mid-range railgun rounds. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack.
Four down. Five if I counted the headless guy outside. That left me with forty-five more to go.
[I’m reading over two hundred targets moving in the area.]
Great. That’s really great. “What are the chances I can shoot my way out?”
[I have plenty of on-board resources for ammunition, but I’m estimating an 80% chance that you’ll take a fatal injury before eliminating all two hundred and eighty-four targets. Excuse me, two hundred and eighty-eight.]
“What? What happened? There are more?” I searched frantically around the room. It was empty except for the tables and chairs where we’d eaten dinner—long wooden things. They were heavy, at least. I managed to push one up against the main door. The windows were high enough up that I wasn’t worried about anyone coming in, but I didn’t like that 80% odds of not getting out.
[Sorry. Four more targets became active while we were in communication. Wait. There are two additionals.]
“You are kidding me.” I switched my artificial eye over into x-ray, and tried to see through the front wall. The town square was rapidly filling with polymer skeletons and metal gunpowder rifles. There was a sound like ripping raw burlap, and rifle rounds crackled against wooden walls. Splinters exploded in my face.
“Ass! Ass crap!” I ducked behind the table, as another fusillade of rounds rattled outside. “How many rockets can you give me?”
[I have enough available nitrates to manufacture sixteen self-propelled standard-size explosive rounds. I also have a small amount of available fissionable—]
“Four. Give me four rockets. Three at standard charge, one at 50%.” The gun began reconfiguring itself in my hands. I stood up from behind the table, wincing instinctively as more rifle rounds send splinters skittering towards my face. There were holes in the walls now. I fired three of my rockets in rapid succession—compressed air charges make a whump sound, until the propellant catches, and the projectiles screamed away.
Tiny, custom-built onboard computer systems guided the missiles through the holes in the walls, and I heard the sharp, thunderous crash of explosions outside. No screaming, though; just another wave of gunpowder explosions.
I sent the forth rocket across the room, and blew a hole in the back wall just big enough for me to jump through.
[I mark twenty-seven casualties from your rocket fire, but there are fifteen more active targets than my initial count.]
“I’m assuming you know what this means,” I said, as I slipped out the back.
[Yes. They’ve got some kind of manufactury here, probably a rappress.]
“That explains the fried chicken, anyway.”
It was quiet and dark outside the hall. The opposite side had smoke and guns and shattered bodies, but here I could, if I were so inclined, almost convince myself that I was in some peaceful little town, under a dark starry Summer sky.
I was not so inclined.
I had no rations, no water—I didn’t even have my boots, so there was no chance I was going to run away from the village. I had two hundred some synthetic humanoids with gunpowder weapons who were convinced I’d corrupt their flock, and were looking to give me a terminal case of lead poisoning. In school, this is the kind of situation that they called “death ground.” On death ground you fight, because you sure as hell don’t have anything else to do.
I ran out in a long arc away from the town hall, trying to get back to one of the other buildings. I almost crashed directly into one of the synths, who’d apparently been trying to sneak around to get a better shot at me. The ‘wrench reconfigured almost before I could think, and I put a hollow-point through the pleasant man’s chest. He fell to the ground with a smile still on his face.
“How long until the next update?”
[The ayeye has taken direct control of the synths, now. They’re operating at reduced cognitive capacity, but updates are simultaneous.]
Double ass crap. That meant I’d been spotted. I sprinted for the window of the nearest building—a plain-looking, slope-roofed affair. I caught the lintel above, and swung in, landing on the floor and rolling without losing momentum. It was empty, for now, having discharged its occupants to the town square, but I didn’t doubt that someone would be coming for me soon.
“Kelly, they’ve got an atomic generator here. I need you to find it.”
[Heavy metal deposits in the soil will make that difficult.]
“So try very hard.” I looked out the front window of the building. A wave of pleasant faces turned towards me, smiling.
My eye switched to x-ray, and I reconfigured the gun for high-penetration. Railgun rounds snapped sharply in the air, punched through the walls, found hearts and control centers in their targets outside. Synthetics fell.
[I’ve got a concentration of electromagnetic radiation in the structure directly to the south of your position.]
I didn’t waste time talking. I climbed the stairs, into an empty bedroom. Like mine, this one had open windows, and a fine layer of metallic grit on it. I could see the open window of the building across—five running steps to get to speed, a dive through and I should be able to reach the other side…
Or not. My hands caught the bottom of the window frame, and my body slammed hard into the wall. I felt my nose crack and start bleeding. The pain was almost enough to break my grip. Almost. I clambered inside. Behind me, I heard doors being broken down, rifles going off. The synthetics were hot for me.
“Where’s that radiation?”
[Down. Cellar.]
The cellar. From which, no doubt, there would be no exit. Great. Fingers crossed that this would work.
It was disconcerting to know that the synths had probably discovered my absence, and were reorganizing to find me—to know it but to not be able to hear them. They were thinking with one great big mind now, communicating by shortwave or microwave, or something.
I almost fell down the stairs, twice. Down the steps to the cellar, I met another synth, whose perpetually bland features were incapable of registering surprise. I shot him in the chest, and kept moving. If I could take out the generator…
Disappointment wracked my stomach like a punch in the gut. I got into the darkened basement, my artificial eye ramping up the ambient light to give me something to see by, but there was no atomic generator there. Just a deep, dark chamber, and hundreds upon hundreds of bays of rappress manufacturies.
The roughly coffin-sized crèches were semi-transparent; I could see more synths being assembled through their transparent aluminum sheeting. Mostly bones, rudimentary circulatory systems, the occasional clutch of red and purple that would be their organic control centers. The shepherds’ ayeye was building an army.
[So, there’s good news and bad news.]
“Tell me the good news, Kelly, because right now, I just see a whole lot of bad.”
[The good news is, I’ve found a channel into the ayeye’s database. I can get blueprints, maps, functional schematics, just as soon as it’s decrypted.]
“The bad news is…?”
The building above me began to shudder. I looked up to see the door start to fold in on itself, cracking apart, dissolving into palm-sized hexagons that stacked up and slid out of the way.
[The bad news is that it looks like most of the above-ground structures here are modular and controlled directly by the command unit.]
The house disappeared above me, leaving nothing but a staircase, and two hundred armed, synthetic humanoids at the top.
“Shit.”
[On to Part 5]
