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ANVIL

by Wen Spencer

Rip Van Winkle awakened to a changed world. How much stranger would it be to wake up as a sentient intelligence in a very large tank, alone, and with one’s programming corrupted. Well, for one stalwart mobile unit of battle-wrath and destruction the only response is to do the best it can using the programming it’s stuck with. Even if that programming has a few peculiarities that don’t quite seem to fit the situation at hand. Adapt. Maneuver. Survive. And maybe establish a new form of civilization in the process!

Boot Sequence Initiated.

Warning: Boot Loop Detected.

Warning: Maximum Boot Retries Exceeded – Final Attempt.

Neural Core: Restarted.

Secure Boot: Enabled.

Starting: IFF Systems – Ok.

Starting: ECM/ECCM Systems – Ok.

Starting: COMM Links – Waiting, No Signal.

Starting: E-Space Ammo Subsystem – Ok.

Starting: Weapons Systems – Ok.

Starting: Memory Check . . .

Anvil 5T3V3 Adaptable Robotic Tank struggled to awareness as his power-on self-test cycled through its steps. What was going on? Had he been damaged in combat? Normally he only rebooted during maintenance, after new components had been installed. He was sitting at the base of a cliff in a dense oak forest.

Error: Memory check failed–23 chunks corrupted.

“Anvil 5T3V3 requesting service,” Anvil spammed across all his communication channels. He was in a death loop. He’d hit his reboot limit; this was his last chance to boot successfully. He needed intervention to keep the fail-safe from kicking in. Even as he called for help, he realized that he most likely had already done so—repeatedly. He had suffered a catastrophic failure if he’d cycled through the self-test enough times to reach maximum attempts.

Directive: Isolate corrupted memory chunks.

Warning: Isolation failure–42 chunks corrupted.

Warning: Possible virus.

Virus? Was that why his systems had crashed? He hadn’t suffered any other major damage.

Directive: System Compromised–Initiate Secure Reboot.

Error: Maximum Boot Retries Exceeded–Reboot cancelled.

Anvil scanned the communication channels. There was no activity. There should be chatter—there was always something reporting. Even if they’d gated to new World Branch without command and control satellites, there would be a fleet of reconnaissance drones murmuring to each other about local levels of Everett particles on the higher bands. “Anvil 5T3V3 requesting priority service.”

Directive: Unit Compromised–Initiate Self Destruct.

Message: Controlled E-Space Detonation in 30 seconds–Evacuate to safe distance.

“Anvil 5T3V3 requesting override on self-destruct directive,” Anvil begged to the empty com channels. E-Space implosion would reduce him to nothing, leaving behind only a large vacuum bubble in real space that would decimate everything within half a kilometer. He grappled with the awareness that he was about to end. There would be no repair cycle. No swapping out damaged parts. No updated software. Just a big dark nothingness.

The thought generated a horrible feeling within him, one he couldn’t name. Was it the virus growing or the thing that humans called fear?

“Assistance requested,” Anvil repeated as the awful feeling grew within him. “Please.”

It was a human command word that he never used before but he’d never felt like this before. “Please, stop this.”

Denotation in 5.

No one was going to intervene.

Denotation in 4.

There was no one—only him.

Denotation in 3.

If there were no humans present, he couldn’t be a danger to them. There wasn’t a need for him to self-destruct.

Denotation in 2.

“Cancel Self-Destruct.”

Boot Complete.

System Online: Beginning Normal Operation.

Warning: Mission Directive File Not Found.

It wasn’t the only thing missing. The virus and corrupted chunks seemed to be safely isolated, but the damage had been done. Random holes had been blown through his archives. He’d lost hours or days or even years of memories prior to this moment in time. There was no way to tell how much he was missing. Even his universal and local clocks had reset to zero. He sat listening to the birds singing in the forest around him, detecting only their restless movement through the trees. There seemed to be nothing larger than a cat for kilometers. Now what? He had no orders to follow.

Sitting idle would solve nothing.

“Set Current Counter: Day 1.”


Current Counter: Day 391

Anvil was starting to wonder if he had made a mistake. Perhaps he mistook a parasite for “chicken.” The creature fit the data he had on chickens. White. Feathers. Two wings. Two feet. Two beady black eyes. He had no data, though, to explain the population explosion of “chicken.” Two had become eight. Eight became sixty. Sixty had become “annoying as hell” that became “perhaps I have a problem” to “good God what have I have done to myself?”

They tended to follow him around in a massive loud white swarm. At first he thought it had to do with something called “imprinting” but then he realized that his treads exposed earthworms and left behind bodies of mice, small lizards, and occasional snakes that had failed to move out of his path. The chickens considered him a mobile feast. He wasn’t sure how he should feel about this.

The thing that made him believe that they might be parasitic in nature was that they liked to roost on his turret and build nests in his gun ports. The definition of parasite stated “live on the host, causing it some harm.” Did covering him with waste material classify as “harm”? The random collections of sticks, grass, and feces were annoying. He needed to use his repair manipulators to pick nesting materials out of his gun ports on a daily basis.

It occurred to him that one fragmentation grenade would solve his problem. If he lobbed it behind him as the chickens were feeding in his wake . . .

But “gather animals” was the fourth item on his makeshift mission objectives, just after building shelter and planting crops. Killing all the chickens would defeat what he was attempting to do. Clearly he was missing a control element—like Villagers.

He had houses, defensive walls, water supplies, fields of crops, and chickens. Lots and lots of chickens.

Maybe he should capture some Villagers.

It wasn’t on his fragmented list of objectives but if he extrapolated, it was a logical end. He couldn’t consume the crops that he had planted, fit inside the houses that he built, or benefit from the many chickens. Building a village made sense only if he had Villagers to fill it with. Collecting Villagers should also have the side effect of lessening the number of chickens. (This was a hazy assumption based on the fact that all the entries for “chicken” were crosslinked to cooking recipes.)

The “domesticated white” of the chickens was a tell-tale sign that there were Villagers somewhere nearby.

Most branch worlds had some kind of humanoid lifeform. Some were normal homo sapiens like his creators, living in the ruins of a highly advanced civilization. Others were genetically different “humans” where the world had branched off from Prime’s timeline before homo sapiens evolved. One unverified report claimed that “pig men” had evolved to be the sentient race on one branch but it wasn’t clear if they were pigs standing upright or humanoids that developed snouts. Because the size of the settlements and the questionable genetic makeup of the “humans,” his team used the word “Villagers” when referring to the native population of any branch world.

Branch world humanoids wouldn’t have access to the shared culture of his humans nor speak any language that Anvil knew. There would be no common ground. Anvil had no way to communicate with Villagers beyond blasting them with choir music about oppressive land owners and showing them naked pictures of a pregnant woman.

Anvil wondered about the sanity of the people that selected his first contact content. How was he supposed to use the odd selection of music and images to communicate with the Villagers? What did it even mean? Trying to construct some kind of narrative to the sounds and images made his processors hurt. He didn’t have any memories of his team making contact with the villages that he helped to survey. The odd assortment of music and images were all that he had.

In the three hundred and ninety-one days since his reboot, he’d found indications that there might be a village far to the west of him. If he could go and get at least one Villager, he could consider it as successfully finishing his mission.

But first, he had to get out of his village without having his entire flock of chickens follow him.


Current Counter: Day 395

Seventy-two hours, five dead chickens, four attempts and two massive builds later, Anvil managed to block most of the chickens within two layers of perimeter fence. Most, but not all. Eight managed to slip through his efforts to follow him. After losing track of three of them, he stopped to let the rest ride on his gun turret as he picked his way over the landscape.


Current Counter: Day 396

Anvil suspected that the virus that corrupted his memory chunks had done something wonky to his drones.

One through Five were missing from his frames. They must have been destroyed prior to his system crash. Of his large attack drones, he only had Six, which refused to launch no matter how many times Anvil loaded and unloaded its frame into real space.

It left him with only his reconnaissance drones. After his catastrophic system crash, his scouts felt very different. He was not sure, though, if the fault was in them or himself. They now seemed like separate entities instead of an extension of his chassis. He couldn’t remember them being so annoying to work with–but he was uncertain if he even experienced “annoyed” until after his system crash. Maybe they’d always been irritating and he just hadn’t noticed.

Having reached a small river to ford, he tentatively loaded Seven’s frame. Anvil could operate safely in water as deep as a hundred meters. He avoided large bodies of water, however, as he was not buoyant. A muddy bottom could spell disaster. It would be best if he could find a shallow ford with a rocky bed. He ordered the reconnaissance drone to launch, hoping for the best.

“What is it that you desire?” Seven asked as it hovered a hundred meters above him.

“Seek out a safe ford,” Anvil ordered.

Seven drifted in place until Anvil started to wonder if the drone had received his command.

“Respond,” Anvil ordered.

“As the river surrenders itself to the ocean,” Seven quoted. “What is inside me moves inside you. Kabir.”

What was that supposed to mean? The only “Kabir” in his databases was described as a “mystic poet” and he wasn’t sure what that was. A type of weapon?

“Clarify,” Anvil commanded.

“I choose to listen to the river for a while, thinking river thoughts, before joining the night and the stars. Edward Abbey.”

Anvil parsed the reply a hundred times trying to determine the meaning. He decided in the end to ignore it. “Seek out a safe ford.”

“When you are the anvil, bear—when you are the hammer, strike. Edwin Markham.” Seven quoted. The reconnaissance drone started to move, though, feeding Anvil information on the river.


Current Counter: Day 397

Rolling through the countryside was boring so he decided to name his five remaining chickens: One, Two, Three, Four, Dammit.

He wasn’t sure if that was how naming things worked. He was Anvil Artificial Intelligence Unit 5T3V3. His number was assigned to him during the development of his AI, long before being installed inside his current body. He could replace all of his parts if he had access to a temporary external storage, so it was logical to name his AI and not his physical body. He was one of several million AI-driven military units scattered through the worlds currently being explored by humans from Prime; created between Anvil AI 5T3V2 and 5T3V4.

He hadn’t considered giving names to the chickens before because he wasn’t sure when they gained sentience. In the egg? Prior to being in the egg? When the egg hatched to the tiny little puff balls that became chickens over time?

He had come to realize that they never gained sentience. By then it was pointless to name any of chickens as they had become this shifting mass of identical whiteness.

Now that he had just five vaguely distinguishable individuals, he could name them. After he named them, though, he became uneasy. One was just One because it was the bird sitting in front of his optics when he realized that with five he could reasonably name all his chickens. Two was the second one he spotted. Was that the proper way to name things? His reconnaissance drones were numbered 5T3V3-7 through 5T3V3-12. The chickens weren’t extensions of him; they were more like the humans that his tank unit had been assigned to escort. He couldn’t remember any pattern to the survey team names. Some were “another man’s son” such as Anderson and Johnson which was odd because he’d been told to use female pronouns with half of them.

Dammit was going to be Five but it decided to peck at Anvil’s optics—again. Dammit had a thing about various parts of Anvil’s body.

Anvil wasn’t sure what “dammit” meant.

Three hundred and ninety-six days ago, he’d recovered from a catastrophic system crash. “Recovered” in that he was currently eighty-nine percent functional instead of sitting at the bottom of a cliff, unconscious, as his core attempted to reboot or worse. Whole chunks of his memory were corrupted. Protocol suggested that he self-destruct after experiencing such a catastrophic corruption of his data, but that seemed pointless. Such an act was to protect equipment and lives of the survey team—but he was alone.

Also he didn’t want to self-destruct.

The word “dammit” was connected to several dozen memory fragments from his pre-installed stage. A woman in a white lab coat who seemed brilliant, short tempered and somewhat clumsy. “Dammit” apparently had been her favorite word. It was the tone that she said it that reflected how Anvil felt every time he needed to interact with the chicken, Dammit.


Current Counter: Day 398

He needed to work on his fire control. He knew he was running at only eighty-nine percent efficiency but up to now, he hadn’t found anything to fight. He’d seen no signs of large predator animals. The lack of Everett particles indicated that there were no Everett Non-Prime Droids in the area. While he been able to test fire his guns, he hadn’t been able to test his reflexes.

He’d been picking his way toward some mountain foothills when he spotted a herd of llama.

At least, they seemed like llama. They could have been alpaca. They could be some weird forerunner to camels. He was fairly sure that they weren’t horses or mules. They were quadruped grass eaters.

He sat idle, trying to determine if he had any mission parameters that included llama. There was a badly defined “collect animals” that he’d been ignoring since the entire chicken epidemic. He noticed that the llamas had decided to drift in his direction. He had scanned them and determined that they were completely harmless. They were less than two meters tall with spindly legs and a long neck. Their eyes were limpid pools of black. As they ambled up to Anvil, they worked their bottom jaws, chewing.

Dammit decided he didn’t like the llamas. He hopped up onto Anvil’s main cannon and started to cluck loudly.

The lead llama didn’t like Dammit. Its ears went back.

“Hostile detected,” his targeting subsystem reported.

“What . . . ?” Anvil started to query since he hadn’t picked up anything in the area.

The llama spat at Dammit.

The main cannon fired at the llama. Point blank.

Anvil sat at the edge of the smoking hole.

He needed to work on his firing control system.


Current Counter: Day 399

A late afternoon rainstorm was building when Anvil’s particle detector suddenly blipped, indicating it picked up an incoming enemy unit. He couldn’t engage an Everett Non-Prime Droid by himself; it took three or more tanks to destroy a droid. Protocol stated that if Anvil had nothing to defend, he was to go into silent running mode. He shut down everything but his passive optics.

A tall black slender Everett Non-Prime Droid appeared on the cloudy horizon. Everett particles swarmed about the droid, emitting ultraviolet light in swimming blues and purples. It stood perfectly still, seemingly gazing to the east although there been no proof that the two eye-like objects on its head were actually eyes. ENDer’s were pure cohesive Everett particles, able to shift between the World Branches, choosing what possibility the droid wanted to be in. It had no need for a gate because it was a gate.

It was also highly hostile: if an ENDer detected a team, it would attack.

Anvil didn’t like sitting and waiting to see if the droid spotted him. It was, however, the best tactic. The droids were highly mobile; it could teleport between points in microseconds. After Anvil’s opening salvo, it would be unlikely he could get another target lock with his main cannon. He would have to resort to sustained firing of his secondary weapons which had a shorter range. Without backup and repair facilities, the risk of taking massive damage for no benefit wasn’t worth it.

The droid stood on the hilltop. It was three meters tall with a square head and thin, spindly appendages that looked vaguely like arms and legs.

A memory flag flashed, triggered by the image.

According to the time stamp, the memory was recorded during the installation of his AI core into his tank chassis.

“We should call them squids,” a man muttered in the memory. Voice recognition identified Private Bertel Puggard but more commonly called Pug by the other humans. Puggard was perched on Anvil’s turret, running through Anvil’s ammo frames in quantum Everett space. The repetition made Anvil aware of how weird the action felt—rounds popping into existence and then disappearing without actually being fired. It was like having someone repeatedly placing and removing limbs.

The base was a massive Remnant Stronghold, the ceiling lost in shadows and the floor polished silicon carbide. The team had patched into the ancient computing machines with a haphazard looking collection of observers and repeaters and comparators that gleamed red in the dark. At the far end of the vast room was a nexus portal that hazed with swirling purple Everett particles. This World Branch had been overwhelmed by a bioweaponry disaster; there was a low growl of infected Villagers in the quarantine area.

“What?” Someone out of Anvil’s visual field asked. Voice recognition failed to identify the speaker; Anvil had lost that information in his corrupted chunks. “Pug, who is them?”

“ENDers!” Pug repeated. “They look like a black squid with four limbs instead of eight. We should call them Squids instead of ENDers.”

Anvil had been linked to a branch network at the time and called up pictures of squids for a reference. Pug was completely right. ENDers looked like squids.

“Pug, what are you telling 5T3V3?” The dammit lady asked over the com.

“Me?” Pug yelped in surprise. “I’m not telling it anything. I’m just checking frame recall functions.”

“Then why is it looking up squids, dammit?”

As if called by the memory, Dammit the chicken stirred on the gun turret. He flapped his wings, puffed up, and crowed.

Anvil froze in terror. The ENDer turned and gazed his direction.

Dammit continued to crow. The ENDer vanished from the horizon.

Anvil shut down his passive optics. Where did the enemy droid go? Another World Branch? Next to Anvil?

Anvil sat for three thousand seconds completely still and silent, waiting. He really disliked the feeling of fear. That was new. He never had to deal with it before. Maybe it was a weird side-effect of the virus that corrupted part of his memory.

Rain started to patter on his armor.

ENDers didn’t like rain. The dammit lady thought that it was possible that the charged particles associated with lightning interacted negatively with Everett particles. Whatever the reason, the alien war machine normally moved to drier locations while it stormed.

Anvil turned on his passive optics. The ENDer wasn’t in his visual range. Anvil cautiously turned on his Everett detectors. Nothing pinged his scan.

Four clucked loudly and laid an egg on Anvil’s turret.

Anvil guessed that covered in birds while in silent running mode, he might have looked like a Remnant to the ENDer. Perhaps that was even a factor in the logic of Anvil’s protocol. He still didn’t like it.


Current Counter: Day 400

Thin columns of smoke marked the presence of fire-using Villagers. Anvil stopped on a wooded hill, overlooking a wide valley. Animals grazed in the open fields below. The smaller ones were fluffy, perhaps some type of sheep. The larger creatures looked like milk cows with overlarge udders. Both species seemed domesticated as they were primarily white. There was no sign of shepherds keeping watch over the herds, which might indicate a lack of large predators or thieves.

A village sat on the far side of the valley. Beyond it, foothills leapt up to true mountains. Streams of various water volumes cascaded down the steep, rocky cliffs to a small but turbulent river. Like every other branch world settlement that Anvil had ever seen, the village squatted directly on Remnants. Anvil wasn’t sure why Villagers clung to the ruins. Anvil’s humans at least could use some of the machines found in Remnants; many of his systems had been lifted directly out of abandon Strongholds. The Villagers never used the technology hidden within the ancient buildings, instead they slowly cannibalized the ruins for building materials. They thought that the green crystalline data storage devices were nearly worthless gems and would trade them for chunks of iron or salt.

While the ruins did offer durable materials, they also attracted ENDers. The alien war machines laid waste to villages. They seemed to regard all Villagers as thieves or large, escaped, lab rats. (Pug claimed that there were branch worlds where the Villagers were colonies of talking mice. Anvil wasn’t sure if this was true, based on the other humans’ reaction but if it was, there was some basis to the ENDers’ viewpoint.) After killing the Villagers, ENDers would randomly dismantle parts of the village before moving on.

The smoke seemed to imply that no ENDers had found this village yet. The silence on Anvil’s com indicated that his humans hadn’t tagged the Remnants either.

The village straddled the crossroad of two ancient silicon carbide highways but there was no indication that the Villagers actually used the highly durable surface for long-distance transportation. The roadbeds had been broken in some places by time and ground subsidence, but most of the damage looked too systematic to be chance. It was being slowly chiseled apart for building materials.

The Villagers had built a maze of narrow streets with two- and three-story buildings that shared walls. Most of the roofs were thatched but one or two had some type of metal sheeting looted out of the ruins. It was a typical design for most branch worlds. The nature of the disaster that destroyed the ancient civilization seemed to dictate how narrow the streets were and the nature of its fortifications. This world seemed to have suffered an apocalypse that led to a reduced population of humanoids and animal predators. The village lacked any defensive walls. The houses were too thickly packed for his telescopic optics to be much use. He would need to get closer.

Anvil rolled down the hill. The forest had the hallmarks of being heavily foraged for firewood; all the dead limbs and trees had been cleared out. It made it easier to navigate but meant he could encounter a Villager anywhere. He wasn’t sure how to interact with them. Scanning his few intact memories, he realized that in past missions, the streets had been too narrow for his unit to navigate. His tank unit had contained their patrols to outside the perimeter of all the villages that he could recall. His interactions with Villagers seemed to be limited to making sure that he didn’t run over any stray children.

Where the forest gave way to the rolling fields, Anvil hit a dense band of tall scrub bushes. He couldn’t see through it with normal optics and pushing through it was going to be loud and noticeable. He stopped short of the thick brush. He didn’t want to go crashing out into the open without knowing what he was heading into. He was going to have to use one of his reconnaissance drones. Anvil released his smallest, Twelve.

Dammit snatched the tiny drone out of the air.

“Dammit!” Anvil caught Dammit by the leg with a repair manipulator as the chicken was about to bolt off with his prize. “Drop it! Drop it!”

Twelve whined in Dammit’s beak, complaining about unfair employee/boss relationships.

Dammit squawked but didn’t let go until Anvil gave him a hard shake, dislodging a cloud of feathers and the drone.

Twelve flew off toward the village, muttering curse words that Anvil didn’t know that he knew.

For reasons he didn’t understand, Anvil didn’t shoot the chicken. Maybe because he didn’t want to alert the villagers of his presence. He vented his irritation by flinging the chicken as far as he could with his manipulator. Dammit landed in the thick brush, effectively invisible. Stupid chicken.

Anvil focused on the data coming in from his drone.

Ancient highways intersected at the heart of the village. The north-bound road ended abruptly at a shallow river. It seemed as if the water had worn away the silicon carbide and triggered a landslide that blocked a tunnel through the mountains.

Twelve reported that ground radar of the area revealed a large Stronghold within the mountain range. Anvil’s humans would have been shouting with joy at the readings. It was useless for Anvil; protocol forbad him from interfacing directly with alien technology.

Twelve was finding no evidence that the Villagers had access to the Stronghold. There was no sign that anyone had attempted to clear the tunnel entrance since the landslide. Nor was there any ancient technology in use in the village. The Villagers had mostly iron tools and weapons.

Other than the Stronghold and the roads, neither of which the Villagers were making use of, there was nothing of great value to the settlement. They had houses made of stolen pieces of roadway cemented together with some kind of mortar and then stuccoed over. Twelve reported that there was an ancient silicon carbide-lined cistern well but the pump house had been dismantled. Other than durable building material stolen from the highway, the Remnants provided no real advantage.

The village Anvil had built was vastly superior. He just wished he knew why he built it.

When he had awakened from his system crash, he had discovered he had lost many important data points: where he was, what happened to the rest of his unit, and what he was supposed to be doing. His ammo frames were at ninety-three percent capacity, so he had been recently deployed. Moss had begun to grow on the dirt clinging to Anvil’s treads, indicating that he’d sat idle for a long time. His boot system had spent days attempting to circumvent the corrupted data and reboot. He was, however, still registering Everett particles. For the level to be that high over that period of time, either the nexus portal had exploded or he’d been in prolonged physical contact with an ENDer or both.

He’d sat for several more days at the foot of the cliff, hibernating as his repair systems attempted to restore lost data. He hadn’t known what else to do. First priority would be achieve the mission’s objectives, but he had no idea what they had been. Normally he either patrolled outside their current base, helped secure a new base at a recently discovered Remnant on the same World Branch, or searched for a lost survey team that had been exploring a new World Branch.

A survey team should have set beacons prior to getting lost—unless he was part of the survey team and the nexus portal had exploded as they arrived. As far as he could remember, he’d never been assigned to an initial world gate mission but equipment did get swapped between teams on an “as needed” basis.

Anvil had faced a disturbing lack of directives. All his standard protocols assumed that he had a place or a team to return to. He didn’t know where he was. Had he come through a gate or had he been out on patrol? He could still be on the same branch world of his most recent memories but it was doubtful. There would be chatter on the com channels.

Lurking in the background was the memory of his circumvented self-destruct. It reminded him of the eggs left behind by the chickens—a fragile package that could become a more annoying problem later.

He had sat for a few more days, even after the repairs had finished.

Then out of his shattered command files, his repair system had found a list of objectives.

It was an odd list. Some of the items made sense. “Build shelter” had some merit. He wasn’t sure why “punch some trees to gather wood” started the list, but that was simple enough. It gave him a direction. There was no set number of trees and second on the list was “craft tools” so he knocked down a small forest while struggling with the concept. He was a tool but he didn’t “craft” nor typically did he “create” except in defensive terms. Create a patrol pattern. Create a line of suppression fire.

At one point he had deployed his reconnaissance drones and had had a conversation with his smaller selves. It was very surreal and disorienting. His drones used to contain simplified copies of his own AI, in perfect sync with his own neural core. The virus had changed the drones before he had contained it. He had to override first his and then the drones’ Identify Friend or Foe subsystems to keep them from attacking each other.

During this time of existential crisis, Anvil decided that the shelter he was building was a village and that the tools he was meant to craft were for human inhabitants.

He’d done everything on his objective list. He’d harvested wood. He’d used the wood to build a crude shelter and then upgraded it as he found better materials and better building sites. When he found a wide plain with a small meandering river, he’d started a village. He’d found three different types of crops—wheat, potatoes and carrots—and started them growing in irrigated fields. He’d collected chickens.

Prolific annoying chickens.

He had built his village. It was a superior village than the one before him now.

There had been no “collect Villagers” on his recovered list of objectives.

There was an assumption that Anvil’s orders would require him to improvise. He would be on a new World Branch where the outcome of a quantum event could have triggered vast physical changes from Prime. He had to be able to adjust to anything, even annoying chickens. Possibly even giant fire breathing chickens. Or undead chickens. Or undead riding chickens. (He wasn’t sure why he even considered that . . . which made him worry. What if he was operating much lower than eighty-nine percent?)

He’d searched out these Villagers based on the assumption that if he built a village, then “they” wanted him to populate it. The logic of it was too great to ignore. He was a little iffy, though, on who “they” were. He’d lost track of that with his system crash. He had fragments of the woman in a white lab coat but she’d been a software developer. He had been installed into his body while at her lab but she might not have been part of his team. Private Puggard hadn’t been in his more recent memories; he might have been killed in action or rotated back to Prime. Anvil worked with “command” at some point. He remembered following someone’s orders . . .

Corrupt data blocked that path. He cycled back through the logic tree.

Someone came up with the list of objectives that he was using.

“They” wanted him to build shelter. A village had been a logical extrapolated end.

“They” probably wanted Anvil to populate it.

Also Villagers would solve Anvil’s chicken problem.

Who were “they?” What happened to the rest of his unit? Why was he alone? What had he really been supposed to be doing?

Corrupt data blocked that path—again. His drone hovered over the village, bitching that he was taking his time acting on its data. It had counted eighty-seven possible targets and no weapons over a level one threat level.

If Anvil rolled into the village, the inhabitants wouldn’t be able to stop him from taking one or two or three of their number. Ignoring the question of “if” he should, how would he get the Villagers back to his village? He doubted that they’d ride around on his turret with the chickens.

He really hadn’t put any thought into this—which looped him back to the corrupt data problem—because “how to move Villagers” suddenly popped images of rowboats and mine cars into his memory registers.

Rowboats?

“You deploy boats by hitting the ‘use item’ button when facing some water,” Twelve stated. “There’s no water, unless you’re going to put the boat into the river, which would be freaking stupid. It’s flowing away from our command center.”

Hit the “use item” button? Anvil didn’t use buttons.

“We’ve modified a world simulator game that I used to play as a little girl,” the woman in the white lab coat said. “I loved to build elaborate machines out of the very simple code blocks. It’s not a true representation of any one world, but playing the game will help you learn to adapt to the unpredictable nature of reality in branch worlds. Since you will be sent to branches where events played out differently, there’s no telling what you may have to deal with. You’re an adaptive robotic tank; it means you need to be able to adapt to any situation that you find yourself in to achieve your mission. Once you’ve learned how to negotiate different problems through fulfilling the game’s objectives, we’ll install you into your new body.”

He’d found old game objectives instead of a real mission. No wonder the chickens seemed so weird. The game had presented non-aggressive objects as predictable clones of each other instead of individuals. An outlier like Dammit would never be included into the simulation.

Anvil was considering his options when Dammit started to complain in the thick bushes where Anvil had flung him. There was something shrill and alarming about Dammit’s clucking, unlike any noise Anvil had ever heard Dammit make before. It sounded like a small predator had caught the chicken.

Anvil didn’t want to save the chicken. The thing was annoying. Some internal logic, though, had flagged Dammit as “part of the team.” He couldn’t ignore basic protocol that required him to save team members.

He rolled forward, wondering how he was going to use Villagers to cull his chickens if he needed to protect the animals. Maybe naming the birds had been a mistake. Individual names were normally reserved for team members. He was going to have use precision firing that would guarantee that said team member wasn’t hit by friendly fire.

He activated all his firing systems—and then powered them down. Luckily he had fine-tuned his firing control system since the llama event. There was no smoking hole where the thing that had captured Dammit crouched in the thick bushes.

Dammit had been caught by a Villager.

Not just any Villager; a very small one. It wasn’t much bigger than Dammit; it could barely keep the struggling bird grappled. If Anvil judged right, the Villager was a child. No weapon. No gear. No footwear. It was dressed in what could be called a dress or a robe or a sack with holes cut into it. Hair a wild black mess.

Dammit’s cries were impossible to ignore. How to rescue the chicken without harming the child?

Anvil snaked out his repair manipulators to grab hold of Dammit’s legs. He gave an experimental tug. Dammit squawked as the child got lifted up along with chicken. A frayed rope had been tied firmly around Dammit’s torso and the child’s waist.

The child dangled on the end of the rope, its eyes going wide as it stared at Anvil.

Anvil gave an experimental shake, hoping that the rope would break; it didn’t look that sturdy. He estimated, though, that there was a 58.94 percent chance of causing internal organ damage to the child if he used force. The rope was so short and the two small beings were thrashing so much, the odds of hitting one with a cutting tool was even higher. Anvil would have to let go of Dammit and use both manipulators to break the rope.

Anvil lowered the two small creatures to the ground. Dammit strained across the rope, trying to flee.

The child continued to gaze up at Anvil with wide eyes. Then suddenly its face twisted into an expression that Anvil’s humans used to indicate glee.

Why was the child happy? Was it actually happy? Anvil paused to replay events and check his databases on known Villager behavior.

The child took off running, shouting, herding Dammit ahead of it.

Anvil was going to have to call this child Dammit Two.


Dammit Two’s name seemed to be Ithmah. All the adult Villagers shouted the word as the child ran up to them, shouting, towing the squawking chicken. The word might have meant “Dammit” because it certainly was said with the same angry tone. Somehow the adults failed to notice Anvil’s arrival despite Ithmah’s arm waving and shouting. Or maybe because of Ithmah’s commotion, the adults were too distract to see the tank bearing down on them.

Either way, Anvil got to the center of town without being noticed. He knew the layout via his drone. It all seemed so much smaller, though, now that he was seeing it all with his own optics. The previously massive pigs in their sty just beyond the gate seemed toy small now.

One of the female Villagers finally noticed Anvil. She let out a yelp of fear and scuttled quickly into the nearest hut. She slammed shut the heavy door and threw a locking bar into place with a muffled rattle. There was a cascade of yelps and door slams and bars rattling. Within seconds the streets were empty except for Anvil, Dammit and Ithmah.

Ithmah stood, mouth open, in surprise at the adults’ response to the tank.

Anvil reached out, broke the rope and stole back Dammit. The chicken claimed his place at the top of Anvil’s turret and groused about being kidnapped. Anvil wasn’t sure what to do next. If all his objectives had been part of a game, then what should he do? Continue with procuring a Villager or two to lower the number of unnamed chickens? Simply return to his village and lob a few grenades into his flock and call the entire project a wipe? Try to find a nexus portal and travel to other World Branches in hope of finding his humans? Each consideration created vast odd responses within him to the point that his repair systems were triggered.

While Anvil sat idle, trying to decide, Ithmah clambered up his side and sprawled across his armor. The child lay on its stomach, kicking its feet in the air, and talking non-stop. The chickens puffed up and grumbled about the intruder but refused to leave as the village dogs had arrived to bark at Anvil’s treads.

Voices called out to the dogs. Reluctantly the animals headed toward the voice calling them. Doors were unbarred, opened, and the beasts pulled into their respective homes.

No one called to Ithmah.

Anvil had gotten used to the adult female chicken and baby chicks behavior pattern. He had noticed echoes of it in his memory of villages. Normally when danger appears, children run to their mother. Anvil replayed the child dashing through the town. Ithmah hadn’t run to any one person in particular; the child had simply stopped at the first person it encountered. Did Ithmah have no mother?

Did that mean that Anvil could take the child? Should he take the child? Did he really want a second Dammit? He wasn’t even sure if he wanted the first one. The second Dammit would have hands and brains enough to open up Anvil’s access hatches and monkey with his innards. Would that be a good thing or a bad thing? There were some repairs that Anvil couldn’t do to himself.

“Everett particles detected,” Twelve suddenly reported. “Levels rising rapidly. Incoming!”

Anvil had a minimum of forty-three seconds to react. He jerked open the nearest door, breaking the bar that was holding it shut. He plucked Ithmah and the chickens off his turret and shoved them within the building. He shut the door even as he deployed the rest of his drones. He suffered a microsecond of disorientation as the drones woke up—half a dozen different variations of his AI cursing at information that he fed them. As usual, Heavy-Drone Six refused to launch out of its frame.

“Run predictive patterns on Everett particles,” Anvil ordered the reconnaissance drones as he headed away from the house. He needed to bait the ENDer away from the building with Ithmah and the chickens. Particles spiked highest at the point where the droid would appear. He would have microseconds to get a target lock after the ENDer gated into the village.

The spike seemed to be centering around the intersection of the two ancient highways. He loaded a shell out of his ammo frame with a comforting solid clank. He would need to counter the ENDer’s mobility—but how? He needed cover. He started to scan the buildings around him.

The ENDer suddenly appeared in the middle of the intersection with muffled boom of displaced air. It stood in a swirl of Everett particles.

“Target lock acquired,” his firing system reported. Anvil opened fired with his main gun. The boom shattered the quiet of the valley and echoed off the mountains like thunder.

The shell struck the ENDer and the droid let out a noise like a scream of rage and vanished as it gated away. Only the fading motes of purple Everett particles marked where it had stood a second before.

Anvil’s cannon loaded another round from his ammo frame as he plowed backwards through the pigsty’s fence. The pigs squealed and grunted as he roared through their midst, spraying them with thick muck. Their low-slung barn was slabs of silicon carbide stacked two meters high. He ducked through the door, scraping the top of his turret.

The barn was too low for the ENDer. It appeared at the door with a scream of rage. It lashed out with its black gleaming limbs. The stone lintel vaporized under the strikes.

“Target lock acquired.” Anvil fired point blank at the ENDer. The shell exploded on contact. The blowback shoved Anvil deeper into the barn. Years’ worth of dust and hay particles exploded out of every nook and cranny of the building.

The ENDer vanished, leaving behind a flurry of purple motes. The Everett particles set off alarms in Anvil’s repair systems as the microscopic gates to everywhere washed over him, shifting minute parts of his armor to elsewhere.

The barn groaned as the walls started to collapse. Anvil charged out of the building into the deep muck of the sty. The barn crumpled into a pile of block and timbers. The churned mud had gotten deeper and stickier. His treads spun in the slurry, not able to get traction.

“The idiot is stuck,” Twelve reported to the others.

“Everett particles spiking, idiot.” Nine reported coordinates directly behind Anvil. “Predicting arrival in three, two, one.”

Anvil didn’t have time to spin his main cannon; his bigger mechanical parts moved thousands of times slower than he could think. He activated his heavy machine guns, spraying the area behind him even as the ENDer popped into existence. Most of the bullets hit Everett particles and vanished into other worlds. Others struck the innocent pigs, exploding the poor creatures with the force of the projectiles’ passage. The enemy droid screamed again with a sound that seemed like pain and anger. What was that sound? Anvil didn’t express pain, but his humans would.

His treads suddenly caught on solid land and he raced forward even as the ENDer struck his back armor.

His damage system attempted to report the damage. “Rear Armor Integrity–Integrity–Integrity . . .”

“Integrity is telling yourself the truth,” Seven said. “Honesty is telling the truth to other people. Spencer Johnson.”

His performance levels were dropping rapidly as Everett particles interacted with more fragile systems.

“Find an escape route!” He whipped his main cannon around but the ENDer vanished.

“To where?” all the drones asked.

Nine added, “Tactics suggest that the heavy cover of the village is more vital than greater mobility of the open field.”

Did the ENDer have any weakness beyond not liking rain?

Perhaps it wouldn’t like any water.

“Find a clear path to the river,” Anvil said.

“Too narrow. Too narrow. Dead end.” The drones murmured as they flew overhead.

“This is not a wise course of action,” Nine stated firmly.

“We can’t fight it, numbnuts!” Twelve snapped.

Anvil wasn’t sure if Twelve was addressing Nine or Anvil or both. This being splintered was disorienting.

“We are always on the anvil; by trials, God is shaping us for higher things. Henry Ward Beecher,” Seven quoted.

“Clear path to river!” Eight suddenly announced, feeding Anvil the route.

“That’s clear?” Anvil asked even as he navigated the route through the narrow streets. There seemed to be a house in the way.

“The roof timbers are supported by buildings to either side.” Eight flashed its analysis of the structure. “The wall material is mortared river stone, not silicon carbide.”

It meant Anvil could plow through the house but he would need to decrease his speed to minimize inertia impact. He spun his turret to face behind him as he slowed. In the narrow street he wouldn’t be able to change its position until he rammed through the house.

“Everett particle spike! Incoming!”

The ENDer was teleporting in between him and the wall. The Everett particles blurred the air around him, preceding the ENDer’s gate. Stopping would only made Anvil more vulnerable. He collided with the ENDer as it gated into his path. He shoved it ahead him as he slammed through the wall behind it.

The ENDer battered him with its long whiplike appendages. Damage reports flooded in as the Everett particles gated away parts of his chassis. Anvil fired all four of his heavy machine guns, unloading five thousand rounds in the direction of the alien droid. There was no telling how many hit the enemy.

The ENDer screamed and vanished. Anvil reloaded his heavy machine guns, clanking through the frames while still wreathed in gun smoke.

What did the sound mean? Humans made random noises endlessly; they didn’t even seem aware sometimes that they had vocalized something. Their conversations were full of “um” and “er” and “ah” that had no meaning as if their brains constantly glitched. It was difficult sometimes to judge which cries of pain were mere frustration and which signaled a need for assistance. A droid would have no need to announce its damage—it should not feel pain as humans did. At least, Anvil didn’t. How different was the enemy war machine? Was it trying to communicate to him even as it tried to dismantle him?

“Scan all com channels,” Anvil told his drones as he pushed through the building between him and the river. Stone, roofing thatch and broken timbers rained down on him.

“No one sees what is beneath his feet: they scan the tracks of heaven,” Seven quoted and then gave the source. “Marcus Tullius Cicero.”

“Ping on channel 2600,” Eight reported and relayed the signal. The broadcast was just an echo of the scream that Anvil had picked up on his microphones.

“Prioritize translation,” Anvil told Eight since Eight wasn’t cursing or quoting. The other drones obviously had been compromised by their exposure to the virus.

“Acknowledged,” Eight replied.

Anvil paused on a flood wall at the edge of the river. The river was four meters wide and two meters deep with occasional deeper pools. The river offered less protection than he hoped. Anvil would be fully submerged only in the deepest pools. Half-submerged boulders afforded the ENDer safe attack platforms.

Where else could he take cover?

There were multiple waterfalls crashing down the mountainside. Their spray was similar to rain. Perhaps he could make use of them. He scanned the cascades and discovered a shallow cave behind the largest waterfall. He could make a stand there.

“Incoming!” Eight warned. “Everett particles spiking.”

Anvil plunged into the river. The current was stronger than he expected. It shoved him in the wrong direction. He dropped into low gear and slammed power into his treads. He hit a deep pool and went completely under. As he churned his way up out of the water, the ENDer gated onto a nearby boulder. It stood quivering, just out of its attack range. Anvil fired his machine guns. The alien droid vanished before the volley hit.

He plunged through the waterfall. The cave was barely big enough to hold him; water sheeted down over the tip of his main cannon. It was too narrow a space for him to swivel his turret right or left. Nor could he get his ammo frames to reload. The Everett particles had punched a hole through his weapons subsystem. His repair system reported it would take a hundred and twenty seconds to bring his machine guns back online.

“That’s your brilliant plan?” Twelve said. “Hide in the water?”

“If Plan A doesn’t work, don’t worry,” Seven said. “The alphabet has twenty-five more letters. Claire Cook.”

“The enemy droid is repeating the same pattern over and over again,” Eight reported. “The pattern matches a theorized translation of ‘defend.’ Section 17.B. Article 231 suggests that a general order went out to all droids of the ENDer class without an area perimeter defined, which is why the ENDers all free roam.”

The ENDer was just like him; lost without a clearly defined mission. If he hadn’t been able to abort his self-destruct, he would have ceased to exist. If he hadn’t accidentally found the game objectives, he would have sat idle at the base of the cliff, unsure what he should be doing. All the alien droid could do was randomly defend lost bits and pieces of its dead civilization while searching countless worlds for someone to command it to do otherwise.

“You’re not just going to sit there, are you?” Twelve asked.

He could have done without all the splintering of his personality.

“Enemy droid has torn the roof off one of the houses,” Eight reported.

“We’re done for now. You stupid pile of scrap!” Twelve sputtered out more insults, each more foul than the last. “You steaming pool of lubricant! You heavily-armed virus-addled calculator! This is a huge mistake!”

“A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new,” Seven quoted. “Albert Einstein.”

Ninety seconds until his machine guns were back online.

The ENDer appeared suddenly before Anvil, the sheet of metal over its head, shielding it from the downpouring water. A slender manipulator cable shot out of its chest and socketed into Anvil’s exposed data port. Instantly the ENDer was in his core, digging through his memory chunks.

Terror shot through Anvil as his electronic counter measure systems wailed out alarms. The battle was no longer a matter of seconds but of microseconds. Even after his machine guns were back online, it would take five seconds to activate them and then they would be firing only eight rounds per second, most of which would be lost to the Everett particles hazing the air around the ENDer.

Warning: Unauthorized memory access.

If the ENDer tunneled too deep into his systems, it would trigger his self-destruct. The implosion would take out half a kilometer of land. Anvil, all of his drones, his chickens and the entire village would cease to exist in an instant.

Anvil rushed to protect his data, encrypting what memory chunks he had left after his crash. The ENDer immediately noticed the activity and shifted its attack, extracting each chunk as Anvil attempted to encrypt them. Fording the river on his way to this village: gone. Snatched away even as he tried to protect it. Mourning his dead chickens that he accidentally killed even as he attempted to build a fence to protect them: gone. Watching Dammit hatch out of a tiny egg in a nest hidden in the grass: gone. A year of memories draining away, a slim buffer before the ENDer would reach the critical few memories of Anvil’s life prior to the crash. The alien’s processing speed was faster than Anvil’s system of stolen technology. He had no hope of getting ahead of the ENDer.

What could he do? Soon all he would have left would be the corrupted chunks, quarantined away from what memories he had intact. Then it struck him. All his drones had changed their behaviors after being exposed to the virus. Maybe the ENDer would too. He commanded his memory subsystem to begin encrypting the virus corrupted chunks.

The ENDer took the bait. It snatched up the corrupted chunks before the encryption could finish.

The ENDer froze as the virus flashed through it.

In that moment, Anvil sensed the vast dark ocean in which the ENDer had existed. Thousands of years separated from everything that it had once known. Its creators. Others of its kind. Gating from point to point to point—looking, but never finding. The alien droid was filled with a terrible feeling that was somehow huge and dark and yet empty. No wonder it screamed.

The ENDer stood over Anvil, quivering.

The waterfall sheeted over them. The roar of the river filled Anvil’s audio.

Then the ENDer was gone.


The village gave Anvil the child, Ithmah.

The adults washed Ithmah, made some attempt to comb the child’s unruly hair, put a white robe on it and then tied it firmly to Anvil’s main cannon. The Villagers had also tied bright ribbons to Anvil’s chickens and tethered them around the child. Ithmah seemed happy about being gifted to Anvil. The chickens were much more ambivalent about the child’s addition to Anvil’s entourage. They groused loudly and kept out of Ithmah’s reach. All his drones except Seven started to repeat the phrase “Got to catch them all” which slightly worried Anvil.

Seven quoted instead, “It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped. Tony Robbins.”

Anvil couldn’t understand anything that the Villagers were saying—singing actually—either but their intention was fairly clear. They had chosen the lowest member of their society to be the scapegoat in order to get Anvil to go away peacefully. It was a weird typical reaction that villages had when world-jumping strangers descended upon them with godlike destructive powers. The victim was sometimes a literal goat but more often than not, it was a child. Once a village chose a sacrifice, it was safer for the child to simply take it. Typically his humans would send any children they gathered through the nexus portal to a resettlement camp on a branch world that had been depopulated by some global disaster.

It wasn’t how Anvil expected to get a Villager but it achieved his end goal.

Anvil might have started with objectives from an old game, but he’d decided to build a village, the layout and style of buildings, and even that he wanted Villagers to inhabit his creation. Every decision he made going forward would be all his own.


Current Counter: Day 407

The ENDer appeared seven days after Anvil returned to his village.

Anvil was torturing Ithmah with basic math lessons. (No, he wasn’t really torturing the child—at least he didn’t believe he was—but Ithmah was reacting to the lessons as if Anvil was. What was so painful about counting? Anvil found it soothing.) Eight and Twelve had coaxed his heavy-drone, Six out of its launcher and gone hunting on their personal quest to find a horse or donkey for the child.

The ENDer appeared suddenly beside Anvil, setting off all his alarms. It dropped a flower on his turret and vanished.

Anvil examined the flower closely for traps.

How did the ENDer find Anvil? Why had the enemy droid thrown a flower at him? What was it supposed to mean? It seemed like a common red poppy.

As Anvil eyed the flower, Dammit hopped down from its perched on Anvil’s main cannon barrel. The bird grabbed the flower in its beak and took off running.

“Dammit!” Ithmah shouted the only word it had learned so far of Anvil’s language and took off running after the chicken.

“ENDer Designation: 4L3X,” the alien droid transmitted from someplace far to the east.

The ENDer apparently had broken free of its endless directive of “defend.” Had it spent the week searching for a new mission? Had it decided that “make a friend” was on its list of objectives?


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