Some call it post-human—I call it superhuman.
Arnon D’Bvaym
THE ARMY OF rozies had traveled all night and into the morning. The rozie’s tireless marching exhausted Cortex all the more—he felt as though heavy machinery were pressing his small muscles, driving him to collapse. After an hour of travel, Hannah was forced to carry him. Trees, bushes, flowers, and other bits of foliage turned into a blur as Cortex faded in and out of consciousness, cradled in her arms. Sometimes she walked, sometimes she urged other survivors to move faster—it was all the same to Cortex.
Nothing is real. Nothing feels real. I’ll wake up, then I’ll be home, Cortex mused dreamily.
When Cortex fully awoke, the rozies were still marching. He felt disappointed that his dream was reality, but he bounced back quickly—he was used to disappointment. He looked upward and saw Hannah’s face, and also up her nose, which was entirely hairless and booger-less. Cortex breathed in deeply and noted that her clothes smelled of ash and dirt, but her skin smelled like plastic, and nothing about her smelled like sweat, skin, or anything else biological. She looked down at him and smiled, but the expression was all act and no heart; combined with her red lens-eyes, Cortex imagined this was what it would feel like if a demon tried to force a smile. Hannah said, “Good morning. Are you feeling much better?”
Cortex rubbed his eyes and stretched his arms. “I . . . yes, better. Less tired. Hungry. I thought I heard more screaming before I fell asleep.”
Hannah nodded. “Some of the other Enlightened were compelling the humans to travel faster—the humans have slowed us unacceptably. We’ve gone ahead to spare you from the visage. Besides—Prophet wishes to meet with you, so it would not be just of us to waste time. We would move faster, but you began to awaken whenever I start running.”
Visage? Cortex felt some concern for the other survivors— he’d been taught that rozies were evil, mindless, bloodthirsty, and hungry. Hannah didn’t seem to be any of those things, but that didn’t mean that the other rozies weren’t. “Can I walk now?” Cortex asked.
“It will further slow us down,” Hannah said, but she put Cortex on the ground anyway. He stopped and stretched, then looked around. They were following a game trail on a very direct path to the mountains. Hannah was leading them, and immediately behind Cortex was Gabriel, cradling the master, who was as limp as an oversized doll. Gabriel also smiled an empty smile when Cortex looked at him; his eyes, unlike Hannah’s, mimicked the appearance of human eyes nearly perfectly, save for a strange, animal flatness to them—not a literal flatness, but a feeling Cortex got looking at them. A few other rozies shambled along behind, moving stiffly, like their joints cracked instead of bent. Cortex wondered what the difference was between these rozies and rozies like Hannah and Gabriel—Hannah and Gabriel moved so smoothly.
They walked for several hours. Cortex enjoyed feeling the sun on his face, the rough dirt beneath his slippers, and the feeling of exercising his legs. The serenity of the hike made him wonder why he had spent so much time inside while under the master’s tutelage.
“I’m hungry,” Cortex announced, rubbing his stomach. “And I need to go to the bathroom.” He looked around the forest until he spotted a far-off tree that suited him. “I’m going to use that one!” Cortex then hopped off the trail and walked into the forest. He looked over his shoulder to see if the rozies would do anything.
“Get our guest some food,” Hannah directed Gabriel. She then stepped off the trail, following Cortex.
“I want you to stay there,” Cortex said. “I like privacy when I pee.”
Like a glacier fracturing, a real expression finally manifested on Hannah’s face—annoyance. “I’m commanded to protect you—”
“It’ll just be a moment!” Cortex ran toward the tree, then ducked behind it. When he looked around the tree, Hannah was about twenty yards away, standing at the edge of the game trail. “No peeking!”
Grimacing, Hannah turned around and folded her arms.
Cortex’s mind wandered as he lifted his robe and prepared to urinate. He hadn’t been dreaming—Fort was destroyed, and he and the master were kidnapped by rozies. Surprisingly polite rozies. Cortex almost wondered what all the fuss over rozies was about, but then he remembered the brutality he’d seen and the mutilated corpses that had lined the streets of Fort as he was escorted out. That dampened Cortex’s enthusiasm. Why was he left alive, of all people?
And what do I do? Cortex thought as he finished and put his clothes back into place. I hope the prophet guy can help us . . . but these are his rozies, I think. Will he hurt us? Cortex turned around and looked out over the foliage. He bet he could sneak off right now and find a good spot to hide before the rozies ever knew he was gone. But then who would take care of the master? And besides—Cortex was curious what was going to happen next. For the first time in his life, someone was asking for him—he had been given an invitation to meet the prophet—and not as a way to get to the master or 64Bit. It was exciting.
Cortex could feel Hannah still standing by the road; it was like a prickling at the base of his neck, almost like he knew he was being stared at even though the last time he looked at her she was staring the other direction. He let his attention drift for a moment again and realized he felt another presence approaching from the forest. He looked away from the trail and, a moment later, a rozie shambled out of the bushes, the left half of its head gleaming metal surrounded by torn synthetic skin.
“I told you guys that I wanted some privacy!” Cortex said. He folded his arms and wondered what would make the rozie listen to him. “The prophet will not be pleased.”
The rozie shuffled in zigzag, moving generally toward Cortex, but never directly. It kept its eyes averted from him and moaned softly. Something about it made the hair on the back of Cortex’s neck raise. It raised its head to stare at him when it was a few steps away; blood dripped down from the corner of its lips. “Empty,” the rozie whispered, slurring the word so that it was almost unrecognizable.
“You’re not . . . obeying them, are you?” Cortex said, then felt panic take to him like red dye on a white robe. “Hannah! Help!”
Cortex heard branches crack as Hannah dashed toward him, but she wasn’t quick enough. As soon as Cortex yelled, the rogue rozie lunged at him, arms outstretched and mouth open unnaturally wide. Cortex instinctively dropped to the earth; the rozie made an uncoordinated swipe above him. Cortex began to crawl away, but the rozie grabbed his leg. A shudder of revulsion swept through Cortex as the rozie lifted him by his leg into the air and fastened its teeth around his ankle, squeezing enough to severely hurt.
Cortex grabbed the rozie’s leg and shouted, “Stop! Be still!” To Cortex’s absolute surprise, it obeyed him, just as the head had. The rozie grunted and seemed to strain against an invisible force as it tried to bite harder.
At just that moment, Hannah rounded the tree. She didn’t pause for a second—she took the rogue rozie’s head in her hands and peeled its jaw off, roughly dropping Cortex on the ground in the process, before pressing its skull between her palms. The rozie, frozen in place, squealed as its head began to crumple inward. Cortex heard a wet squishing sound, like gelatin being thrown on the floor, and the rogue rozie fell limp to the ground. A gray liquid began to dribble out of its eyes.
Hannah wiped her hands off on her pants before offering one to Cortex. He took it and stood, resting gingerly on his ankle—it hurt to put too much pressure on it. He felt nervous. Was he going to be in trouble? Figuring that, whatever happened, Hannah would want to keep moving, Cortex took a step forward and winced. He looked up at Hannah. “Can you carry me?”
Without a word, Hannah lifted him into the air, cradling him once again as they walked back toward the game trail, then on to the mountains. She motioned at the other rozies and they began to follow. After watching trees pass by for several minutes, Cortex looked up at Hannah, noting once again her strange, hairless nostrils. “You’re not mad at me? You’re not going to lecture me?”
Hannah shook her head. She looked down at Cortex. “My purpose right now is to take you to Prophet alive. As long as I succeed in that goal, I will let you do as you wish. I will even let you do dangerous things—if you had lost your leg, I would have carried you nonetheless, and my mission would not have changed.”
Cortex looked down the game trail as far as he could, watching it twist and turn through the trees until he couldn’t see it any farther. He wasn’t certain how he felt about Hannah’s response—it was neither a censure nor praise. “How long till we get where we’re going?”
“Depends on how quickly we travel. If we walk, a day, perhaps,” Hannah responded. She stopped and turned in response to an unseen stimulus, and she and Cortex watched as Gabriel approached with the unconscious master. “Do you have food for the boy?” Hannah asked.
Gabriel shook his head. “The Enlightened have only to partake of the corrupted temples of men and women. I do not believe we have any food the boy would prefer. Unless,” Gabriel looked at Cortex, “you as well wish to partake?” He held up a human hand, cleanly severed at the wrist. Cortex gagged.
Hannah glared at Gabriel. “Prepare the Enlightened to run. It would not do to meet Id and present the boy to Prophet while he is delirious from hunger.”
Gabriel turned and walked back toward the other rozies, barking out orders. A moment later, Hannah was sprinting through the forest, cradling Cortex in her arms and shielding him from whipping branches and leaves. The rhythmic thudding of her feet against the earth was soothing to Cortex; after watching the forest pass for several minutes, he drifted to sleep.
#
EVERY TIME 64BIT thought that he had lost Kayla, he caught another glimpse of her, sometimes standing and waiting for him impatiently, sometimes jogging even farther ahead. He wasn’t certain whether she was being careful to just barely not lose him, or whether he was somehow keeping up—barely—but he felt the latter hypothesis was severely lacking supporting evidence.
Eventually, 64Bit stumbled to a stop. His legs hurt and his chest burned, but, most importantly, he needed to relieve himself. He looked around, grimaced at the lack of privacy, and found a cluster of bushes that he thought would protect his front and sides, then went about his business.
“Wasting time again.”
64Bit jumped—he would have splashed himself if he hadn’t just finished. Red-faced, he looked over his shoulder at Kayla, who stood a few feet off with her arms folded. 64Bit resituated his clothing, considered telling her off, and then thought better of it. Instead, he stalked off into the forest toward Fort. If there was one thing he didn’t need Kayla for now, it was the direction of the settlement—the plumes of smoke he caught in the distant sky marked that more than well enough. In addition to creating a sense of unease.
“Most male scouts just piss while they walk or run. Don’t have to waste any time standing around.” 64Bit heard Kayla following behind him.
“I’m not a scout,” 64Bit said. “And the logistics of doing that in a robe are poor.”
“Both could not be more obvious.” Kayla jogged ahead of 64Bit and looked over her shoulder occasionally as she spoke. “You’ve impressed me with how quickly you’ve been moving. We might get to Fort tomorrow afternoon or evening. I’ve decided that I’m less mad at you. By the way, you sprayed the hem of your robe.”
64Bit looked down, feeling his skin crawl, but saw that his robe was completely dry. He scowled at Kayla’s back and shifted a branch away with his staff as he passed by. “I’m hungry.”
“I think we’ll make it to another bolt-hole by tonight,” Kayla said.
They walked through more forest, skirting around undergrowth where they could, plowing through it where they had to. 64Bit didn’t understand how Kayla managed to move so easily with walls of tangled branches barring her path. She’d clearly been telling the truth several days before when she said she could be silent when she wanted to; she hardly left any evidence of her passing, which made it much trickier for 64Bit to figure out how to get through certain areas without getting stuck. He examined her as she moved and eventually concluded that their difference in clothing—hers tight and economical, his loose and flowing—explained much of it.
“I want to know what happened,” Kayla eventually said. She didn’t look at 64Bit as she said it.
64Bit knew what she was talking about without asking for clarification. He had mulled over her words, It’s your fault that Fort may be destroyed right now, many times while they walked, and weighed it against the guilt he felt. In a literal sense, the idea that it was his fault was entirely wrong—regardless of how intelligently or ignorantly 64Bit had acted, this Id technomancer was at fault for destroying Fort, for making and commanding rozies, and Zed was at fault for Richard’s death. Or his dead scarecrow rozie pets were, anyway.
64Bit muttered, “But in a moral sense, I absolutely have responsibility. My particle battery sent the master into a coma and damaged Fort’s defenses. I chose to withhold information, information that might have saved lives. There’s speculation there—I don’t know what would have happened if I had acted otherwise. I just know what I did and what is.”
“If you’re trying to explain things to me, I can’t hear you,” Kayla said.
Kayla slipped through a patch of underbrush like it wasn’t there. 64Bit stopped and stared at the hard branches before him, looked at the scrapes on his hands and arms, and decided to walk around it. A few moments later Kayla reappeared, caught sight of 64Bit, and followed after him,
“I wondered how long it would take before you gave up on following me directly,” Kayla said.
64Bit pressed his lips together. Then he began, “Do you know what a particle battery is?”
“No.”
“Well, three very large particle batteries power all of Fort. They are extremely useful, but dangerous when . . . things go wrong. I was going to build my very first particle battery—”
“Stop. I’m not asking for that much. What happened . . . to Richard?” Kayla asked.
64Bit felt as if a heavy weight had just slipped onto his shoulders. “Oh.” He reviewed his memories. “Richard, Khalil, and I arrived at the hill where you two had found the rozie head. Richard and Khalil left me while they inspected the surrounding area. It was then that Zed first appeared. He threatened me, then his scarecrow rozies arrived. I ran, found Richard and Khalil, and we got in the ATV and tried to drive away. We might have been successful if we had a straightaway, but Khalil couldn’t pick up too much speed while dodging around trees and other obstacles. Richard fired his gun at the scarecrow rozies, but it didn’t stop them. Eventually, we were ambushed, the ATV crashed, and Khalil was grabbed by a rozie when we tried to run away. Richard . . .” 64Bit felt his throat tighten a little. He was no stranger to blood and human innards from his time learning medicine with the master, but what he had seen the rozies do to Richard was still very difficult to remember.
“Yes?” Kayla said.
“Richard attacked the rozie that had grabbed Khalil. He didn’t have any bullets, so he grabbed its arm and it let go of Khalil. Then the two scarecrow rozies tore Richard’s stomach out. He told Khalil to run. Then they ate him.”
The only sound was the whisper of a breeze through leaves and the occasional call of a bird.
Kayla whispered, “If you were able to technomance those rozies, would Richard be alive right now?”
The crunch of rocky ground as they transitioned from soil to an old-world road was muffled under 64Bit’s cloth-wrapped feet.
“Hypothetically, maybe,” 64Bit said. “We were ambushed. Even if I could do what the master does in his stories, what I’ve read in his notes, I would still have to be aware of the rozie before freezing it or driving it away. And I doubt I would have been able to do anything to the trunk.”
“Trunk?”
“Pseudotech,” 64Bit whispered.
He felt a hand on his shoulder. 64Bit turned around, then saw stars as Kayla’s fist took him in the jaw. He spun around and landed on his side. Blood dribbled out of the corner of his mouth.
Kayla knelt next to 64Bit, grabbed his hair, and turned his face toward her. “We’re square,” she said. Then her face twisted. “Well, not really. You . . . you should have been open about what you could do. Should have at least told Richard when you all first ran off without me. He could have planned for that. Maybe he’d be alive.” She shook her head. “But I found that head, we brought it back, and I made Richard skip the chain of authority. No matter who they sent out to investigate, I would have snuck after, and Richard would have followed me, and maybe he would have died anyway. I need to shoulder this on some level. So, I won’t promise to like you, but if you help me kill that bastard rozie—Zed, or whatever you keep calling it, the one with the red face—I’ll walk slow enough for you to keep up.”
64Bit grunted, then spat bloody phlegm on the ground. “Fine. But you could have just told me.”
“Naw. Punching you felt too good.” With a grin, Kayla got up and started walking again.
64Bit sat up and poked at his jaw, then stuck a finger inside his mouth. After a moment of prodding, he muttered, “Definitely will be bruising—no dislocation, no broken bone—no cracked teeth.” He looked at Kayla’s back as she brushed past a tree, then used his staff to help himself to his feet. He was surprised that he wasn’t angry with her. Annoyed, absolutely—but everything she had said made sense, and some of it he had already considered anyway.
There was also the thought that she had pulled her punch; 64Bit suspected that he’d have broken teeth right now if she really wanted him to hurt.
When 64Bit caught up with Kayla, she said, “So I need you to get me up to speed if we’re going to kill Zed, avenge Richard, and avenge Fort.”
64Bit stretched his aching jaw, then said, “Anything I have, I’ll share. If you can keep up with it.”
“So . . . You said Fort was destroyed by a dark technomancer? Id, if I heard you right? Was Zed sent by this guy to draw the technomancers out of the settlement before attacking? That’s what I would have done.”
64Bit shook his head, even though Kayla wouldn’t see it. “No, definitely not. Zed, by my estimation, is a rogue rozie, and a scarily intelligent one. And his hate for Id was . . . palpable.”
“That makes two different groups that need to die. Our job just got harder. You said something about a trunk? I thought I saw something boxy while skulking around Zed’s camp. I thought it was a drone or something.”
“No. It was pseudotech,” 64Bit said.
Kayla turned and gave 64Bit a flat stare. “That’s the second time you’ve said that word. I still don’t know what it means.”
“I don’t know what you don’t know, so consider it a compliment when I assume you’re educated. Plus, you yell when I try to explain simple things.”
Kayla’s fist clenched, then relaxed. “I promise to listen.”
64Bit nodded. “Let me ponder for a moment, then.” He felt that he was in an area he was familiar with again—working with Kayla was somewhat like working with a much more violent, much stronger Cortex.
While 64Bit collected his thoughts, Kayla opened the back door to an abandoned home, looked around inside, and then led them through to the front. There was a skull lodged in the living room wall; 64Bit didn’t want to imagine how it had gotten there, or where the rest of its skeleton was.
64Bit began as they walked onto an old, cracked road. “Pseudotech is technology that breaks known rules of science— emphasize known, because history proves that whenever something seems to act in strange, unnatural, or mystical ways, it just reveals a lack of knowledge on our part. Take the particle battery, for instance, the only replicable example of pseudotech that I’m aware of. It appears to break the law of conservation of energy by providing a limitless supply of energy. Well, there’s a lot of theories about how that is possible: the primary one is that the particle battery isn’t a battery at all, or even a small generator, but a wormhole to another dimension composed of pure energy. The reason the battery only provides energy within certain ranges could be that the energy flow is limited by the size of the wormhole. If this energy follows unique laws, that could explain why it can’t be stored in regular batteries. But that’s all postulation. The point is, we don’t know how, but sometimes we can do it anyway.”
Kayla shrugged. “I don’t see how that is relevant. Nothing you just shared helps me kill Zed. Get to the point. Is the trunk dangerous? Is it an obstacle at all? Why shouldn’t I just treat it like a strange drone?”
“Because drones don’t have ‘brains’ and can’t think,” 64Bit said. “Even the most advanced old-world drones couldn’t think, no matter how intelligent they appeared. They obeyed code, and if you understood the programming, you could easily outmaneuver them.” 64Bit remembered the trunk speaking to Zed in a code he couldn’t decipher, as well as acting to calm Zed in moments where the rozie seemed to be at the edge of a mental cliff. “That trunk can think, plan, and act as spontaneously as anyone with a brain. And if it is pseudotech—I believe it is— it’s likely dangerous in other unexpected ways. Bar everything else, its legs look like they could stab a hole through either of us. And, when the ATV exploded, I believe the trunk was in its blast radius, yet I saw it following us shortly after you returned my staff that night.” 64Bit rubbed his head and tried to focus his fuzzy memories. “If it was in the radius and survived, it’s incredibly durable.”
Kayla nodded slowly. “Okay. Now we’re getting somewhere. If we run into this thing, I shouldn’t think of it like a drone, but like a person in armor—or a small, strange tank.”
“Just because I think it can think doesn’t mean it will think like a person. No one knows what pseudotech can do until they observe it happen,” 64Bit said.
Kayla climbed to the top of a pile of debris, then turned and watched 64Bit as he walked around it—64Bit wasn’t climbing any more than he had to, limited as he was with a staff in one hand and his other hand recovering from having a finger bitten off.
“Where does this pseudotech come from?” Kayla asked as she jumped down.
64Bit shrugged. “Technomancers.”
“Technomancers who don’t understand the rules of what they are making?”
64Bit sighed. “The faithful consider pseudotech to be a blessing from the Creator—inspiration, more accurately, since, well, even the inventor rarely understands the invention better than anyone else. It doesn’t help that most technomancers die trying to make pseudotech, and few succeed.”
Kayla winced. “Some blessing.”
“It’s a magnum opus. A legacy. Even if your name is forgotten, what you made will exist for ages. Your last signature on the world before joining the Creator in His work.”
Kayla nodded. “Uh-huh.” She sniffed the air. “We’re not too far off of Fort, but we won’t get there today. Sometime tomorrow afternoon, if we keep this pace up. In an hour or so, I’ll try to find us another bolt-hole.”
64Bit’s stomach grumbled.
“Then you can eat,” Kayla added.
“Mmm,” 64Bit hummed. “Has your bloodlust been sated?”
“No,” Kayla said seriously. “But it’s a start. Last two questions, then I need to think some more. What’s the best way to kill a rozie? And, this Id—anything special about killing dark technomancers?”
“Richard called you ‘little barbarian’ for a good reason,” 64Bit observed, then shut his mouth quickly when Kayla glared back at him. “Murder wasn’t a focus of my studies. As for Id, technomancers are human, just like you and me. Getting close enough to kill her might be difficult—dark technomancers like to surround themselves with rozies and death traps—but she likely won’t be anything special. As for the rozie . . . Good question.”
Kayla scoffed. “‘Good question’? That’s all you got?”
64Bit threw a hand into the air and motioned at the broken buildings that surrounded them, the cracked road with roots and plants growing through, saying, “Look around you. If there were a convenient way to kill a rozie, don’t you think things would be different right now? The world fell because someone figured out how to mass produce insane monsters that were nearly indestructible. I watched Richard put multiple bullets point-blank into Zed’s scarecrow rozies—scarecrows, the poorly made ones—and it barely slowed them down.”
“Quitter talk,” Kayla said. “There has to be something.”
64Bit considered this as he walked, reviewing memorized notes. “Well . . . Historically, rozies have been resistant to EMPs, so that’s out. But there is a human brain inside that rozie skull, and it operates the entire shell. If the brain is killed or somehow cut off from the rest of the rozie, then it stops operating. Unless the dark technomancer that built that rozie designed its body to be able to operate independently from the head. Some dark technomancers became infamous, in the early years of the Fall of Man, making wicked tricks like that. At least, from what I’ve read.”
“Brain. Okay. I can work with that too. You spoke way too long for what I got out of it, but I can work with this,” Kayla said. She fingered the hilt of the knife at her waist, expression distant.
64Bit left Kayla to her thoughts, having enough of his own to mull over. Unlike Kayla, who he had every reason to believe was processing revenge scenario after revenge scenario, 64Bit found his mind brought back to the master in concern with every step closer to Fort—concern for the master’s health, and concern for lingering questions about what the master had been about to share with him before the particle battery incident.
Copyright © 2023 by David Ludlow
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