Eventually, it won’t even be an option not to adopt the E10 unit. All who disagree will naturally pass from old age, leaving behind the immortals.
Arnon D’Bvaym
64BIT LOOKED AROUND at the rozie pieces lying on the ground, arranged in the general figure of a person; its detached hands were placed near its arms, which were placed near its shoulders, and so on. The rozie’s lower torso, the stomach and hip area, was set a good distance away from the rest of the rozie; still, the scent of rotten meat wafted into 64Bit’s nose as he worked, and he couldn’t help shuddering at the memory of detaching the chest from the lower torso and accidentally looking inside the rozie’s stomach. Parts of the rozie were still covered in synthetic skin, while other parts were stripped to the metal, although clinging bits of synthetic skin still stuck here and there. 64Bit set down the rozie’s leg and looked over at Westley, who had the tip of a knife between the rozie’s eye and its socket.
“Judge me if you want, but I couldn’t get anything else in there to pop this thing out,” Westley grunted. He wiggled the knife and levered at it, causing the eye to slowly shift and then pop out of its socket. Westley leaned in close, peering inside, and poked around with his knife. “Yep, definitely a metal barrier right behind the eye. Must be pretty thick if it took Kayla several shots to punch through it.”
“She was lucky to find the gun, and lucky it had a lot of firepower,” 64Bit said. “You were lucky, too—if that hadn’t worked out, you’d be dead.” He surveyed his and Westley’s work. 64Bit hadn’t found anything allowing this rozie’s limbs to operate independently, suggesting that the creature’s entire shell had to be connected to the human brain inside the skull in order to function. If many of Id’s rozies operated this way, then a possible method of dealing with the rozies was to rip their limbs off and incapacitate them—easier said than done, but it was one of the best ideas 64Bit and Westley had generated so far.
64Bit knew this didn’t mean that every rozie would operate this way—the rozie head that Kayla had discovered had been thrown by a detached arm, for example—but it gave 64Bit hope that Id’s rozies weren’t made with any tricks in mind.
Working on this rozie had also made 64Bit think of the rozie in the basement. It had been dark enough that Kayla and Westley couldn’t see that its eyes were covered with something. If they could get their hands on something easy to carry and throw it into a rozie’s eyes and blind it, that might be more reliable than trying to tear a rozie’s limbs off, assuming they could only find an appropriate substance and method for applying it. 64Bit sighed. Mechanical issues mounted.
Tearing the rozie apart had taught 64Bit and Westley several other things, some of which might be weaponized, some of which 64Bit just found to be interesting or efficient design choices. Wires to carry the signal from the brain to the rest of the shell were nowhere to be found between the rozie’s synthetic skin and its metal bones; 64Bit hypothesized that this meant the signal was being carried through the bones themselves, either through inlaid wires or something else. In addition, some nonessential functions were built over the bones, like motors to move limbs, but a rozie could continue functioning to a surprising degree even with those impaired. In addition, the synthetic skin covering the rozie was very sophisticated in its ability to mimic both skin and muscle—electrically stimulating it caused it to contract, giving the rozie limited ability to control itself using the skinsuit alone.
64Bit’s real question was about power—if they could disrupt the body’s power source easily, the rozie would be incapacitated. He had presumed that particle batteries kept rozies running, but none were present anywhere that he could see, and he had no way of checking inside the rozie’s metal bones. If there were batteries storied directly inside the rozie, he guessed they must be small and well-distributed to help keep them from destabilizing when the rozie was at rest and drawing less power, or when the rozie took damage.
64Bit set aside his tools and rubbed his forehead. They’d spent hours tearing apart the rozie, examining it, and he felt only marginally more knowledgeable than before. Not to mention his fingers and arms were tired from prying apart the rozie’s tightly connected joints. He was a little annoyed with the situation.
“The eyes themselves are pretty fragile,” Westley said, stabbing one with a little effort. “That’s another option for blinding them, since we don’t have a sludge-launcher.”
There was a loud groan behind him, prompting 64Bit to turn around quickly, but he saw that it was Kayla standing from her nap and stretching. She blearily looked around, then looked down at 64Bit and Westley before settling her gaze in an unfocused manner on the dismantled rozie. Kayla grunted and began rummaging through their bags, taking a big swig of water as she did so.
“Afternoon!” Westley said brightly.
64Bit ignored Kayla. To Westley, he said, “I can’t help but feel that we’ve wasted our time. Everything we’ve learned we already suspected, or it doesn’t seem that useful.”
“Confirming what you suspect is still a form of learning. Besides, this is all new to me, and it is fascinating.” Westley dropped the rozie’s head and gestured over the whole pile. “It’s remarkable how well this mimics a regular person! If I could stab it in the shoulder—or any other joint—just right, I could jam it up and significantly remove its ability to move its arms around. Do that with the other shoulder, then the hips, and we could capture a live rozie!”
64Bit had to nod to what Westley said. Of course Westley was right—data was data, valuable for its own sake, particularly since one would never know what information was useful until it was needed. Kayla laughed scornfully as she sat on the ATV, munching on some of their rations.
Westley raised a brow at her. “I’m not saying we should, but it’s an option in a pinch! That’s an important part of gaining knowledge—learning what is possible helps you determine what you both can and should do.” Westley picked up the rozie’s chest with a grunt. The chest, one of the pieces stripped of synthetic skin, was made of the same silvery metal as the rest of the rozie skeleton, although it was just one piece that was textured to imitate ribs and, in the back, a spine. Westley shook the chest and then stuck his ear to it. “I don’t hear anything in there. Huh! I wish we could get it open.”
“Roll that thing over to me,” 64Bit said, noting something on top of the chest. Westley did so, then watched curiously as 64Bit set the chest on the ground upright and began to examine its top. There was a small hole where the neck had previously connected to the rest of the body, and it looked a lot like a possible port. 64Bit pointed it out to Westley. “I think I’ve got a stupid idea.”
“I love stupid ideas!” Westley said with a grin.
“Maybe I could learn something if I connect with the rozie’s chest.” 64Bit stared at the thing as he fingered his glove.
“So what’s stopping you?” Westley asked.
64Bit shivered. What could he say? That he was nervous about connecting with part of the body of an insane, bloodthirsty creature? Actually, that would be pretty reasonable. “I’m just mentally preparing.” He slipped his glove off and watched as the jack resized. 64Bit took a deep breath and inserted his finger jack in the port in the rozie’s spine. Then he waited. Westley and Kayla watched, staring at him, Westley leaning in just slightly.
After a few moments, 64Bit still didn’t sense any connection with the rozie’s chest chassis. He disconnected from the thing and pushed it away from him.
“Learn anything?” Westley asked.
“No.” 64Bit looked at his hand with the finger jack. It was cleaner than his other hand, probably because most of the time he kept it in the glove that allowed him to operate the staff. As he regloved his hand, he said, “But I don’t know if that’s because the chest is unpowered or because I don’t have the right connection. Or, maybe, there’s just nothing significant to it.” 64Bit and Westley sat for a moment, staring at the rozie bits scattered about. A small itch in the back of 64Bit’s mind told him he was missing something.
“So, you guys are giving up?” Kayla snorted.
Westley looked at Kayla, eyebrow raised. “We’re deeply thinking it over, among other things. I took a look in this rozie’s eye socket, and I think you could kill one built like this with a few point-blank bullets like you did the other one. 64Bit thinks that, uh, rozie factories would have limited ability to customize a rozie’s internal structure, so it’s unlikely that the other rozies will have very different structures if they were made by this factory, regardless of how different their outward appearance is. Apparently synthetic skin is extremely versatile to—”
Kayla rolled her eyes. “You are never off, are you.” She wrinkled her nose and looked at 64Bit, her expression tired, but not physically. “We’re never finding that factory, are we?”
“We’re standing on it,” 64Bit whispered.
Kayla’s eyes widened, giving 64Bit a glimpse of the worried, hurting girl underneath. She looked down, as if expecting a trapdoor to open beneath her feet. Kayla’s vulnerability lasted merely for a moment, though; her eyes quickly hardened and her bristly armor returned. “Right. Well, I didn’t see any rozies out there yesterday or today, and even the footprints from the crowd we’ve been following have disappeared with no obvious endpoint. And believe me, I checked them last night—if they end because of a secret entrance to the factory, it’s too well hidden for me to find it.” Kayla folded her arms.
“When I extended my senses yesterday, I sensed what felt like hundreds of rozies beneath me. It was like we were walking on a boiling graveyard.” 64Bit shivered. “So, either someone is storing masses of rozies beneath us, or the factory is below us. I felt—I felt something like a leader for the rozies. A commander, perhaps? It may be what sent the rozies to Fort.”
Kayla’s gaze turned steely. “That Id thing you were talking about? It’s here?”
64Bit shrugged. “I don’t know for certain. But it seems a good conjecture.”
Kayla paused for a moment, then walked over and sat down next to 64Bit and Westley. “Ok, what do I need to do?”
64Bit blinked. “What?”
Kayla scowled. “I’ve been trying to help you get us in that hellhole. Don’t make me regret it. What else can I be doing?”
“Keeping us up to date with your plans is a good start,” Westley offered. “Wandering off to keep watch and search for things isn’t a bad idea, but we need to know how long you plan on being gone and the direction you plan on going.”
“You sound like my SOs, and Richard,” Kayla muttered. She looked away.
64Bit stared at the rozie chest for a moment, his mind still itching with a forming thought. He pulled his glove on and tightened it into place.
“You look like you’ve noticed something,” Westley said, sounding excited again. He scooted close and began examining the rozie chest. “What did you find?”
“A few thoughts coalescing,” 64Bit said. “We think most of the rozie’s hardware is hidden in its bones, and this chest is locked up tight, but it had something in its spine that looked like a port. Might require a special kind of connection that my jack can’t mimic. Conjecture, but, if so, what’s hiding in there, and can I use the wireless signals from my glove to interact with it and bypass the need for the jack altogether? Worth trying before we give up on these rozie parts, anyway. Some quiet, please. If you hear any noises, don’t worry about it.” 64Bit turned off his eye screens, placed his hand on the chest, and concentrated.
“Noises? Coming from you?” Westley asked.
64Bit pressed his lips together, then said, “Gasps, muttering to myself. The technomancer gene and chip translates between the human mind and a computer, but the translation is more metaphorical than literal. I should see things that are representative of hardware or software, and I’ve been told the experience can be alarming. I’ve never needed to do this before, however, so I don’t know how I’ll react. Now, please—some quiet.”
“Great job breaking his focus immediately,” Kayla said to Westley.
For several moments 64Bit saw only darkness with his mind’s eye, then a large, metal door with pixelated edges materialized before him. Fully aware of where he actually was, yet also feeling that he floated before the door, 64Bit instinctively knew that he was being presented with a login screen to access the information inside. He tried the door, but it was locked.
It was a bizarre experience having his mind immersed in software and data stream, feeling it translated as things that he could see and touch. 64Bit wasn’t certain what to do or how his actions would translate as his mind continued to sift through information, but decided to act rather than wait for something to come to him. He inspected the door further, finding it had a low-texture resolution; when he focused on the handle, pixels bubbled out of the door and formed into a rusted padlock with indistinct edges. As instinctively as with anything else he saw, 64Bit knew the padlock represented a simple passcode.
“That’s going to be easy to break,” 64Bit said. He struck at the passcode with his palm and it crumbled away. The door swung open, a bright light pouring through the opening, and 64Bit was sucked inside. He found that he could see, but only just barely. His vision was framed by leaves and branches, and several yards ahead of him he saw an ATV.
“I’m in the rozie’s memory, I think,” 64Bit said. If Kayla or Westley responded, he didn’t hear them.
Through the rozie’s eyes, he saw Westley’s lanky figure. Westley looked around and then paused for a moment, staring in the rozie’s general direction, but the rozie didn’t move—or if it did, 64Bit couldn’t see the movement from the rozie’s perspective, and what he was seeing didn’t come with any other sensation than sight. Westley looked away.
“It was spying on us, I think,” 64Bit whispered. It felt wrong to speak any louder, as if doing so would change what he was seeing, alert Westley somehow, even though 64Bit knew that was ridiculous.
64Bit’s vision jarred abruptly as the rozie lurched forward, then stepped back, almost like a runner making a false start at a race. 64Bit heard a branch behind it snap, and the rozie’s head turned. 64Bit caught a brief flash of another rozie with a familiar red-stained mouth before the rozie’s vision become an incomprehensible jumble of movement and flashing color, then darkness; 64Bit assumed this was the moment the rozie’s head caved in. 64Bit commanded his glove to cut the connection with the rozie’s chest and felt as if he were lifted into the air and then dropped into his own body. 64Bit took his hand off the rozie’s chest and turned on his eye screens; he saw Westley staring back while Kayla scanned the forest around them again. 64Bit felt disoriented, like everything that he was seeing wasn’t quite real.
“Are your eyes on because you’re back, or does that just happen?” Westley whispered.
“Zed—I saw Zed. He wasn’t far. He killed the rozie, threw it at us,” 64Bit said.
Westley paled. “Why didn’t Zed attack us?”
“Tell us everything,” Kayla said.
64Bit explained everything he saw—the metal door, opening it—adding that it wasn’t a literal representation of what his brain had been doing. He went through the rozie’s memory in as much detail as he could, short as it was.
Afterward, Kayla said, “How late was this?”
“I would guess the rozie was thrown at us around midnight,” 64Bit said.
Kayla clenched a fist and began striking her other hand. “So Zed’s alive and has half a day head start of wandering about. It’s ahead of us.” She stood and began pacing. “If it is working with Id, we’re probably getting surrounded right now. We need to move.”
“Zed hates Id,” 64Bit said, remembering the fire he had felt in the normally icy rozie as it spoke of Id. “I don’t think—”
“You said it knew about the attack on Fort. It was hunting for you and your master, as technomancers competing with this dark technomancer, Id. You really think you can trust that rozie about where its loyalties lie?” Kayla ground a fist into her palm. “We need to move quickly.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Westley said. “Why kill the other rozie? Why throw the body at us? If anything, that’s a warning.”
“Or a threat,” Kayla said. “Maybe they enjoy chasing their prey, scaring us first.”
64Bit reviewed his memory of the rozie’s vision. “The animosity seemed genuine to me . . .”
“I have a question about that, too,” Westley said. “Why would memories be stored in a rozie’s chest in the first place?”
“That’s easy,” Kayla said. She looked at the surprised expression on 64Bit’s face and scowled. “I can think, too, and this is more my area anyway. It’s for reconnaissance. Smart scouts do something similar—if we think we’re going to die and if we think we have the time we write down a message and store it in our vest and in our boot. That way if either body part is recovered, we still share a little vital information. Same concept. If the rozie encounters something that’s capable of destroying it, well, the head is what always gets destroyed to kill a rozie, so storing some of its last memories in its chest increases the odds of actually recovering whatever information is there. Why would someone destroy its chest if they don’t need to?”
“That makes sense!” Westley said. He kicked the chest. “We should figure out how to destroy this thing, just in case someone picks it up and sees us in its memory.”
Kayla shook her head. “No. We move on. Whether or not Zed and Id are linked, our location is already known by the enemy—and who that enemy is isn’t a mystery anymore. Honestly, we should have moved on earlier, I was just so tired . . .” Kayla rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Dumb mistake.”
64Bit glanced back down at the rozie chest. “Kayla, do you think we could delay just a little longer? I think there was more memory in there. Possibly we could use it to figure out how to get in Id’s rozie factory. Or, at least, know what entrance not to use, if there are rozies there.”
Kayla looked around, frowned, then threw up her hands. “Fine. I want to look again for where Zed and this dead rozie were, now that I’ve a clear head. But be quick.”
64Bit nodded. Kayla stalked off into the trees.
Westley looked around, then sighed. “Well, I don’t think we should just leave these rozie bits lying around, so I’ll dig a hole or something.”
#
64BIT DROPPED HIS hand from the rozie chest, breathing heavily. Westley, sweating and wiping dirt off his arms and hands, looked over. “Find anything?”
64Bit shook his head. “Not really. Parts of the memory were unfocused and broken up, particularly the farther back I went. I saw some sort of door, a control panel, and a lot of the rozie staring at its own feet as it moved in what seemed to be no particular direction. I don’t think it knew about us before it found us, at least.” 64Bit wearily pointed past the ATV, a direction perpendicular to the path they had been taking into the forest. “Toward the mountains, I think.”
“You don’t look good,” Westley said. He began scooping up rozie bits and dumping them into the hole he’d dug—it was shallow, but just long and wide enough to do the job. He stopped for a moment and glanced at 64Bit again. “Truly, you look very pale.”
“I—ugh.” 64Bit rubbed his forehead. “The longer I was in there the more I felt . . . empty. And cold. And angry. But at the same time I felt an echo of this terrible desire for something that I didn’t understand. If I was just getting a small piece of how that rozie felt, it’s no wonder the brain inside went mad and wanted to eat people.” 64Bit wasn’t comfortable with how spending time in the rozie’s head had almost humanized it, helped him understand why it killed. It was a dirty understanding, like empathizing with a serial killer.
A sense of loss and phantom pain had plagued his finger stump until he installed his mechanical finger: as a rozie, he had felt exactly that but over his entire body, a constant ache, emptiness, and sense of loss. It was horrible.
Kayla stalked back into the camp as Westley rolled the chest into his hole and began throwing dirt on it. She moved silently, blending in with the dappled shadows of the forest alarmingly well; 64Bit wouldn’t have noticed her until she walked right up to him if he hadn’t happened to be looking where she exited the trees. Kayla looked upward at the sunny sky. “Time’s wasting. I found where that rozie and Zed fought. I’ve got worse news. There were a lot of stabbing marks, like maybe from the legs on that trunk.”
What Kayla said sounded so ridiculous that 64Bit almost couldn’t process it. “That’s not funny, Kayla. Nothing could have survived that explosion.”
Kayla glared at 64Bit. “You really think I’m lying right now.”
“No.” 64Bit looked at his hands, feeling very tired and unmotivated. “It just . . . If that thing is still alive after being in a particle battery explosion that big, I can’t imagine what we’d have to do to kill it for real. I’m not sure there’s anything we could do.”
“We somehow work around it, kill Zed, and flee,” Kayla said.
“And have it hunting us down for the rest of our lives,” 64Bit said, shuddering. With the trunk and Zed confirmed to be alive, his deal with the Binary crept into his mind. Perhaps if he succeeded in planting the statuette on Zed or in the trunk and escaped with his life the Binary would take care of them, but the odds of surviving such a thing seemed so slim . . . For a moment he wanted nothing more than to run away, far from Zed, far from Id and the rozies that had attacked Fort, from his deal with the Binary, maybe find a distant settlement that would take him in, if there was such a place, and start over. He muttered to himself, “No . . . I need answers. Explanations. And for that, I need the master.”
“It’s hard to imagine that thing as so vicious,” Westley said, shaking his head. “I only caught glimpses of it in Fort. The face on its front looked friendly to me. Creepy legs, though. Also a little scary when it ate that rozie.”
“Anyway, if your rozie memories didn’t show where to go, we can follow the footprints,” Kayla said. “I’m pretty sure I know which set are Zed’s and which are the other rozie.”
64Bit told Kayla what he’d told Westley, except for the bit about feeling like the rozie. He pointed up toward the nearby mountain, explaining that he was confident the rozie came from that general direction, but he wasn’t very certain.
Kayla nodded. “Well. The footprints appear to have come from that direction. It looks like Zed was headed that way, too.”
64Bit gripped his staff and stood. “Let’s keep a close eye out, then.”
“You two take the ATV. Drive slowly behind me—I can more easily follow the tracks on foot,” Kayla said.
“You drive,” 64Bit said to Westley. “If we find a rozie, I don’t want anything distracting me from using the staff,” Westley nodded. 64Bit vented the ATV, then they set off.
Copyright © 2023 by David Ludlow
Boo Ludlow 