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HUMANITY’S FIST

by Lou J Berger

Is there a Valhalla, an Elysian Fields, where old warriors go to rest and replay the battles of yore? Perhaps we will never know. Machines have no expectations for such an afterlife. But maybe even for the most implacable and singleminded battling machine, such an afterlife might come calling. But what would such an afterlife look like, and would a mere machine, however self-aware, be able to recognize such a reward when it saw it?

I’m a machine.

No more than a hammer, no less than the finest military weapon ever crafted. My existence is predicated upon one thing, and one thing alone: to kill the enemy in the most efficient manner possible, with no sense of self-preservation. Machines shouldn’t yearn to live.

Yet, they made me sentient, with all that that entails.

I’m a universal tank, an MBT, attached to the 802nd Treadless Tigers, Company B, Section Three. There are four of us in Section Three.

“Let’s do this,” Peachy said, her contralto voice echoing in my mind. Outside the drop-ship, a faint hiss of air quickly escalated into a shrill scream as we entered Paradise’s atmo. I ran a self-diagnostic, checked my armament, and engaged my antigravs, which pushed me a solid seventeen centimeters off the deck plating. Heavy, titanium gyroscopes deep inside my body precessed soundlessly, giving me a false sense of balance and, at the same time, a modicum of spatial orientation.

We hurtled toward the ground below, and the drop vehicle beamed topographical data, gleaned from radar, into our mapping and targeting databases, satiating our craving for information, for identifying folds in the terrain, areas from which to pounce and kill.

As tigers are wont to do.

Antigrav fields engaged and we decelerated harshly, HALOing to within six inches off the ground. I maintained a precise seventeen centimeters off the deck during the 12 g deceleration, keeping steady, like a boss.

I’m a purist.

Explosive bolts kicked open the doors and the pressure gradient dropped. Paradise’s atmo was thinner than Earth’s. Peachy moved out first, billowing dust once she’d cleared the lander, and I followed.

I couldn’t hear the other two, but I knew where they were. My vision incorporates the entirety of a dome 360 degrees laterally and 180 degrees vertically. I don’t have cameras installed under my apron. If it’s under me, it’s behind me. Tigers don’t dally.

Ferrell cackled, and I could feel the glee in his aura. Winston, the quiet one, took up the rear, ever-vigilant, following our lead but keeping an eye on our six. He considered himself our leader and we were okay with that. He likes paperwork.

The drop ship buttoned up, lifted into the clouds, and disappeared. We motored forward, eighty klicks an hour, a diamond-formation of battle tanks ready to rid yet another world of Vortid battle-mechs.

It was time to kill.


Our rendezvous point was thirty klicks from the drop, and we ghosted silently through carnage laid waste before our arrival: dozens of Vortid armored units, still-smoking battle droids, and, rarely, one of ours, burning to ash amid roiling clouds of toxic smoke.

We self-destruct in a 3,100-degree Celsius fireball, the temperature of actinic magnesium.

Twenty-two and a half minutes after leaving the drop-ship, we stopped in a small meadow. The war hadn’t touched this little place, not yet, and we hovered, turrets pointed out, and had a short, encrypted conversation.

“Peachy, what’s the assignment?” Winston asked.

She cracked open the sealed orders and, fifteen milliseconds later, after exhaustive calculations, she updated our maps. We’d been loaded with light armament, some chemical rockets and a few cluster grenade canisters, but mostly we carried ionically-charged weaponry. I’d had new plasma generators installed the day before, and I was itching to deploy them in battle. I hungered for a target worthy of taking my cherry.

“Shit,” Ferrell said, his voice echoing the letdown we all felt. We weren’t tasked with engaging the Vortid directly, but with mop-up. Cleaning up after the 802nd’s Charlie Company had already crashed into, and through, Vortid strongholds.

Winston blew a raspberry into our electronic conversation. “Shaddap, ya hick. We have a good chance of gliding away intact from this mission. Why you always wanna rush to your death?”

Ferrell glowered, but we knew it was feigned. “Look, buster, I’m a patriot. I am proud of the Tigers and I am ready to lay my life on the line to prove it. How come you ain’t?”

Despite being designed to self-destruct, most sentient war-machines don’t actually try to hurry that finality along. Ferrell liked to Leeroy Jenkins his way into every firefight and, honestly, we wondered how he was still functional.

“Both of you, quiet,” murmured Peachy, who always took longer than the rest of us to assimilate data. She took the downloaded orders and compared them to the topographical data we’d acquired during the drop, then integrated both into a structured whole. Our maps updated yet again with glowing red clouds where skirmishes had taken place, visible as we fell due to thermal heat signatures blooming through the thin atmosphere. A green dotted line ran, mostly, alongside the solid green line of our orders, but diverged enough to raise Winston’s curiosity.

“We going sightseeing?”

Peachy took a full second to re-process all the data, shuffling and splicing it to see if we could squeeze out a bit more efficiency. “Nope. We’re going hunting.” Spots of yellow, question marks, bloomed on our maps. “These are potential areas of enemy concentration, untouched by Charlie Company. If we can find a Vortid node and take it out, we can hack their onboard systems and upload their tactics to HQ.”

“Good work, Peachy,” said Winston, instantly. “I’ve got point this time. Professor, you bring up the rear.”

“Aye,” I said, sardonically.

Thirty seconds after arriving in the meadow, we zoomed away, following the green dotted line: not exactly following orders, but not ignoring them, either.

In that moment, skimming florescent meadow grasses at speed, I loved my crew absolutely, as if we were but a single organism, as integrated into a cohesive whole as if we’d been designed that way.

Weak sunlight limned the cerulean sky, and my full batteries poured electrons through my circuits. I brought up the rear, flying over the ground, alert to all manner of EM signals, hungrily seeking viable targets for my newly-installed plasma gun to annihilate.

They killed us a third along our dotted-line path, trapping us in a box canyon, its reddened sandstone walls a bit too steep for the antigrav units to climb.

It had been a calculated risk to deviate into the canyon, but Peachy had promised that it would shave an hour off our journey.

“Six minutes,” she had said, chiding Winston’s grousing. “What can go wrong that you can’t handle in six teensy minutes?”

Winston had gone silent, but had turned into the canyon rather than keep on our original heading. Peachy was in front of me and on my left, Ferrell ahead and to my right. I kept a thirty-meter distance, no more and no less, from each of them, jockeying for the midpoint to maintain a tight formation.

Our self-destruct kits, when triggered, are effective within a twenty-meter radius. My adherence to the thirty-meter distance was less about prissiness and more about self-preservation.

Winston exploded three minutes and seventeen seconds into the canyon traversal. Peachy and Ferrell peeled away from our formation just in time to avoid his fireball. Invisible beams of energy lanced from the rocks above us, impacting the redstone.

Ferrell whooped and kicked into a tight curve, triangulating on data pulled from my viewpoint and Peachy’s in an instant, firing a plasma bolt into the scree of rocks from which Winston’s killshot had emanated. Peachy’s shot struck third, because I unloaded my first plasma bolt into the same mass of rocks, impacting a millisecond after Ferrell’s bolt superheated the water in the rocks and shattered them into lethal shards of stony shrapnel.

Pieces of armament clattered down the canyon walls and I juked to the right, on a calculated hunch, just as another plasma bolt struck beside me, missing me but scorching my armor’s anti-radar coating. We all fired simultaneously, three bolts converging on the location of that attempt, and we were rewarded with another kill.

We scooted along the dry riverbed, sensors attuned to any movement, auto-targeting scanners humming with frenetic energy. I was on high alert, processors desperately offering targeting solutions at anything, even a waving leaf a half-klick away, moving in a slight breeze.

Ferrell saw something glint and shared his viewpoint with us, squirting forward on a cushion of air displaced by his antigrav units. “Got one,” he shouted, feeding us the EM signature as he raced forward. An anti-personnel canister kicked off his carapace, arcing through the air and detonating ten meters over the target.

A well-camouflaged depot exploded, thundering loudly in the canyon, bringing rocks and dirt cascading from above the fireball, snuffing its burning remnants under tons of displaced earth. Ferrell whooped again, spun in a circle of utter joy, and shouted. “Kilt ’em!”

Then he exploded into a bright-white ball of fire and flame, his other canisters detonating, bouncing grenades along the ground, smoking remnants of what had been a vital part of the entire corpus of Section Three. My friend.

Which left only Peachy and me, alone and racing grimly back the way we’d come. We had to get out of the canyon, and we raced headlong, long, precious seconds from the canyon’s entry, straining to get there at top speed.

We weren’t the requisite thirty meters apart when she exploded, but she was in front of me. So, when she blew apart, the fireball occluded my vision of the exit and pushed me into the canyon wall.

My front, right corner impacted the sandstone wall, under an overhang, at 120 kph, but I saw it all happen as if in slow motion. My corner scratched the dirt surface, knocking a pebble loose, then dug in relentlessly, Newton’s First Law of motion reducing me to watching, in terror, as my own destruction began to unfold.

I could see and calculate with brutal efficacy what was about to happen. I had less than half a second to detonate my self-destruct kit before I’d be buried so deeply under the canyon wall that extrication would be impossible, especially given the lack of reinforcement in the makeup of the canyon walls: basically sandstone and packed dirt, unsullied by rainfall in Paradise’s dry climate.

The limitations of the machinery required more time than I had left, so I prepared to engage my own kit, which takes 300 milliseconds to activate.

Which, honestly, wasn’t a problem since I had 450 milliseconds left to live.

This is where things got confusing. In the middle of the battle, knowing that we’d done a foolish thing, I selfishly took those 150 extra milliseconds, watching myself inch deeper and deeper into the unstable foundation of that reddened canyon wall, bathed in the superheated gases of Peachy’s immolation, and mourned.

First, I mourned Winston, my quiet buddy with his obsessive need to control everything around him, mostly himself, and his leadership. He’d been a vital part, as each of us had been, of making our team work like a single entity. I spent fifty milliseconds honoring him and remembering, while watching with pride how my own armor was holding up despite edging ever deeper into the reddened sandstone of what was about to become my tomb.

Then I thought about Ferrell, our brave little country bumpkin, too eager to fight, too gleeful about rushing toward danger, enveloped in the oxidation products of his own destruction, probably grateful to finally, at last, give his life for our ongoing glory. He was predictable, but inspiring. I’d miss him more than I should.

Thirty milliseconds remained.

If I was even a millisecond late, according to my calculations, I would be snuffed under the hundreds of metric tons of soil that were, even now, shifting and settling above me, inexorably drawn down by an unstoppable combination of gravity and the collapse of the canyon wall by a rude intrusion of metal and circuitry and armament: me.

Peachy was the heart of the team, and she led us in ways that Winston could never equal. Where he had calm leadership and an uncanny knack for paperwork, she brought passion to the team. What made her special wasn’t her programming; it was simply who she was.

The clock ticked to 310 milliseconds and I powered up the self-destruction kit, ran a diagnostic, and squirted my final goodbyes via carrier wave to HQ.

It was time.

The clock hit 300 milliseconds and I failed to initiate the sequence.

At 280 milliseconds, overcome with shock at my lack of bravado, I ran an internal diagnostic to determine why I hadn’t initiated self-destruct. My right front quadrant buckled under the combined stresses of my impact with the canyon wall, and my forward visual ports grew clouded by falling debris.

Why hadn’t I pushed the button?

In horror, I watched the countdown clock hit 150 milliseconds, and, finally, I pushed the button.

Goodbye.

Darkness awaited, and I paused for a long, fifteen milliseconds to review everything I’d done, all the things I’d seen since my activation, eighteen months earlier.

When the clock hit 100 milliseconds, I could feel the stirring in the self-destruct kit, could feel the magnesium begin to warm up, awaiting the point where the electronic igniters would transform the metal ribbon into a white-hot fireball of three thousand degrees, enough to destroy any and all components on board that might be salvaged or reverse-engineered by the Vortid.

Enough to destroy me.

At eighty milliseconds, way too early, and before I had the chance to feel the white-hot flush of cleansing fire, everything . . . stopped.

Darkness.


When I awoke, the first thing I wondered was how?

The second thing I did was run diagnostics on my self-destruct kit. It was gone.

“You are awake,” said a disembodied voice. “Are you functional?”

I remained silent, but could feel the probing through my circuitry as the voice tried to evaluate my condition.

“Flip on its vision.”

My onboard cameras lit up and I could see. I was in a hangar, with various state-of-the-art fighting machines in different stages of assembly. I was tethered to a cradle by stout cables, and an electric conduit snaked from the wall into my undercarriage.

In front of me, a Vortid droid squatted, ugly in shape and dimension, gazing at me with softly-glowing eyes.

“You are incapable of speech, my antique friend?” It chuckled.

Panic ran through me as I realized that I was not only alive, but immobilized, without my self-destruct kit, and that every bit of my technology had fallen into the hands of the Vortid. I then experienced a crushing wave of despair, knowing that Peachy, and Winston, and Ferrell had all fulfilled their duties, but my unwillingness to self-destruct had given our mortal enemy the means to find weaknesses, through my own fault.

“I am not fully functional,” I said, my voice guarded. I began a full diagnostic, taking inventory, seeing what systems had been compromised. I engaged my antigrav, but nothing happened. My gyroscopes worked just fine, though.

The Vortid droid turned to a technician. “Find out what it wants and give it only what it needs.” Then it turned and ambled into a nearby office, shutting the door behind it.

The technician approached me on silent treads. “What do you need to become fully functional?” it inquired.

I could tell that it was only capable of rudimentary speech, and probably wasn’t endowed with sentience. I accessed my diagnostics and was shocked to discover how dilapidated I’d become during my loss of consciousness. They indicated that I had endured extensive oxidation across my metallic parts, including blocked ventilation ports. “I need a bath,” I replied. “Of machine-strength acid, followed by upgrades for my power source. I’m running low on amperage at the moment.”

The technician froze while it consulted with a cloud-based data repository, then came back to life. “We can schedule a bath for you later today. It will be done. What amperage would you prefer?”

I told it and it made some changes to the control panel connected to the cable snaking its way into my underbelly and I suddenly felt . . . brighter. “That’s better!”

I then scanned my surroundings and found, lying askew on a nearby bench, components pulled from me. Probably for study by the Vortids, who would use what they learned to find weaknesses in other MBTs.

A feeling of helpless anger washed through me as I realized just how much damage would result because of my cowardice. A desperate thought came to me, and I acted on it instantly.

“Say,” I said to the technician. “That equipment on the bench, there. I’d like to have that re-installed immediately.”

“Do you need this equipment?” it asked.

“Yes.”

The little technician froze for a few seconds, then wheeled over to the bench and retrieved my antigrav kit. It disappeared under my apron and I waited, running diagnostics every few seconds, until it came to life.

“Step away, please,” I said, and it obediently wheeled away to where I could see it. I powered the antigrav slowly, adding more until I was floating, but still constrained. At five percent power, I hovered a full inch off the rails of my cradle assembly.

On the bench remained my plasma cannon assembly and my self-destruct kit. I weighed which of the two would be the most tactically advantageous.

If I installed the self-destruct kit first and the Vortid came out and realized what was going on, I could detonate myself and take out him and a significant portion of the partially assembled war machines around me.

However, if I installed the plasma cannon first, I could break loose of the constraints and lay waste to not only the hangar, and all it contained, then move out, killing as I went, until I could either get away or was destroyed. I came to an immediate decision.

“Please install the red assembly next,” I instructed the technician. It went over to the bench and lifted the self-destruct kit and, again, disappeared under my apron. When my internal telltale glowed green, I knew I was ready, once again, to destroy myself. Knowing this filled me with a quick flood of redemptive hope, and I immediately thought of Peachy and the crew, knowing that I was not, from this moment forward, going to let them down.

“Finally, that last assembly,” I said, and the technician dutifully retrieved it and spent a few minutes installing it. All the while, since it was out of camera range, I kept my sensors targeted on the Vortid’s office door. If it flexed by even as much as a millimeter, I would engage my self-destruct kit and blow the place to bits.

My telltale for the plasma cannon ignited to green, and I began to increase power to my antigravs in order to shatter the weak metal bonds that held me to the mechanic’s cradle, but stopped and checked battery levels: thirty percent. At the incoming rate of electricity, they would be filled to capacity in less than an hour.

“I’m sorry,” I told the little technician. “Something isn’t installed correctly. Would you please increase my amperage by ten percent? I need to run some further diagnostics.”

The technician scurried over to the control panel while I charged up my plasma cannon, sensors still locked on the enemy’s office door. The new wave of current whited out my vision for a moment before I was able to redirect all excess power to battery recharging. The numbers began to creep up, slowly, but faster than before. I had five minutes left before my batteries would be fully charged.

Then I would go out in a blaze of glory.

With two minutes to go, the Vortid’s office door opened and the enemy droid sauntered out, glancing my way as he walked. Its eyes brightened and it came over, quickly. My main turret tracked its progress and, when it noticed what I was doing, it stopped. Its gaze moved over the now-empty workbench, then came to rest on me.

“There’s something you should know,” the Vortid said, and I simultaneously increased power to my antigravs and loosed a plasma bolt directly into the droid’s chest.

With a shriek of torn metal, the flimsy restraints that had held me down were sundered as the Vortid droid blew apart in a white-hot fireball of molten metal droplets. I rose into the air and moved down the line of partially-assembled war machines, destroying them as I went. A rush of elation lifted me as I finished, blew a hole in the end wall, and soared outside.

As soon as I’d cleared the now-blazing building, I attempted to contact HQ. All the traditional frequencies were empty, and my attempts to connect were futile. Sprinting away from the conflagration, I cut across a field to a treeline I saw ahead of me, about a klick away. While rolling, I ran through the frequencies again, but the only ones with traffic were encrypted. I didn’t have any interest in trying to decode them, not in that moment.

My onboard chronometer was inactive, and I couldn’t get a carrier wave to update it. I didn’t know how long I’d been out of commission. I’d bristled a bit when the Vortid droid had called me an “antique.” Time enough to figure that out later, I concluded.

I was still on Paradise, that much was obvious. The atmospheric density and gravity were identical to when I’d landed, and my immediate goal was to get back to a friendly unit . . . or die trying.

Frustrated, I sent a scatterblast across the upload spectrum: “Mayday, mayday, captured unit looking for home. 802nd, Company B, who is around to guide me?”

Silence was my only reply.

When I hit the treeline, I switched into stealth mode, modifying my external armor with video-enhanced camouflage, rolling slowly between the trees and painting myself with their images as I moved. Aiming downhill, I eventually came to a small stream and straddled it, using the images of the rushing water and rocks as topside camo. I ran a quick but thorough diagnostics and found nothing amiss. The escape and destruction I’d left behind had been too easy, I reckoned. Something was off.

In my short jaunt to freedom, I’d spotted no smoke plumes, saw no battlefield destruction, and hadn’t been pursued. The longer I was alone, the more I wondered about the oxidation to my frame and what, exactly, the Vortid had meant. Antique. I was state-of-the-art. And now, inexplicably, rusty.

When night fell, I scanned as much of the starfield as I could spot through the leaves of the trees around me, and fortunately the stream left a ribbon of sky visible along its course. I’m no expert in astral cartography, but I knew I hadn’t been out of commission for too long. The stars were pretty much where they’d been when I’d landed. But not exactly.

“Hey, Professor,” came a disembodied voice through my “radio.”

I froze, all senses alert.

“I’d like to meet with you, if you don’t mind. I know where you are, and you can choose to stay there until I arrive, or you can flee. It’s up to you.”

I pondered that for a millisecond. “If you know where I am, why haven’t you blown me to pieces?”

“Ah, that,” the voice chuckled. “You were going to be the subject of a pretty important report that I wanted to write up. Come to think of it, you still may be. Can I let you in on a secret? Nobody’s mad at you for the destruction you left behind. You’re not in trouble. You can stay where you are, for now, or you can come back to the museum. We got the fires put out.”

My mind whirled. “Museum?”

The voice laughed aloud. “Yep. My assistant woke you up before I was ready. I guess it was curious to see what its old nemesis was like. Also, before you blow more things up, we’re not at war with the Vortid anymore.”

Not at war? How long . . .

“If you’re wondering, you were buried under tons of sandstone for eighty-seven years. We found you, purely by accident, and transported you to the museum. My assistant, now a small pool of molten beads, has been helping me understand how things were back then. Like I said, you’re not in trouble, but I do want to meet you. May I come visit you in the morning?”

“You know where I am?”

“Yep. There’s a quantum tracker behind your turret. It took me a while to find you because you’d left the low-power field that keeps your tracker alive. See, it’s only for inventory.”

“Inventory?”

The voice chuckled again. “Yes. Sorry about that. You’re the most-intact sentient MBT we’ve yet found. It never occurred to my assistant that you’d still consider yourself at war when we woke you up. I deeply regret that I wasn’t there for you.”

I didn’t know what to say. Not at war? I straddled a stream in darkness, dimly lit by the stars above, wondering exactly what my purpose was, anymore.

“If you want to come see me in the morning, I’ll stay right where I am. Come alone. I have a lot to think about.”

“Okay. See you in about six hours. Oh, let me update your systems. We don’t use those frequencies anymore.”

About a minute later, my heads-up refreshed for the first time since I’d awakened. The date was, indeed, eighty-seven years in the future, give or take a month or so. Access was provided via a data tower back at the museum, I guess, but the access portal was unavailable to me. I tried to hack through and get onto the local net, but it evaded my attempts.

I settled in to wait.


Six hours and twelve minutes later, I heard footsteps from two clicks away. I charged up my plasma cannon and, in the dim light of Paradise’s dawn, spotted the heat signature of a biped approaching me. It didn’t try to skulk or dodge, but walked right toward me. Obviously, it had known exactly where I was.

I powered up and glided soundlessly toward the biped, still camouflaged, and stopped two hundred meters away. “Stop,” I said through my external speakers.

The biped was human, as near as I could determine, but I kept my turret trained on it, anyway. “What do you want?”

The biped shouted, “Can I come closer? I’m not carrying any weapons, but it’s hard to talk comfortably from this far away.”

I scanned my surroundings and saw, three klicks in the distance, a compact flyer that the human must have used to get close. Nothing else was near but trees and Paradise-local wildlife, so I assented. The human walked toward me.

Up close, it was less than two meters in height, and looked flimsy. I knew I could incinerate it without effort, so I wasn’t that concerned for my safety.

“I suspect,” I said in a conversational voice pumped through my external speakers. “That you could have targeted me from orbit or high-altitude, if you wanted to destroy me. The fact that we are talking means that you need something from me. What is it?”

The human shrugged. “Nice to meet you, too. I’m Bob Watson, curator for the Antique Weapons department at the museum whose workshop you fragged yesterday afternoon.”

I replayed in my mind all those machines I’d incinerated during my hasty departure. “So, not a repair station making damaged machines ready for battle?”

Bob shook its head. “Nope. Refurbishing old warriors for display and interactive exhibits. You set the museum back decades worth of work, but we’d made exhaustive scans of each machine and should be able to rebuild them to spec, eventually. Like I said last night when we chatted, you’re not in trouble. Not really. But you are still dangerous.”

In that moment, I felt very alone. Peachy was gone, and had been gone, for decades now. Same with Winston and Ferrell. And, with no war, I had no purpose.

“Well,” I finally responded, some two seconds later. “Maybe you should step back. I’ll finish the job and destroy the last, functioning MBT. Thirty meters should do, I believe.”

“Wait,” the human held up a hand, palm facing me. “I have a proposition for you.”

I evaluated my self-destruct kit. All telltales glowed green. “Go ahead. I’m listening.”

Bob smiled. “Good. You are worth more to us as a sentience than you are as a battle tank. Want to know why?”

I pondered that for a long half-second. I’d been built with one purpose in mind, to kill, and everything in my personality screamed to incinerate Bob into ash, then roam the countryside destroying things at random, just to hear them slag into puddles.

But my heart wasn’t in it like before, when the rest of the team had been nearby.

“Sure,” I replied. “Why do you want to keep me around?”

Bob took a step closer and, unconsciously, I moved back an equal distance. “Fair enough,” it said. “I won’t come closer.”

“Now,” it continued. “You were the pinnacle of sentient MBTs at the time of your creation. Humanity built you to think for yourself, and for that to be effective, we had to cast you in our own form, at least emotionally. Your fellow MBTs won the war, and Charlie Company is still credited with the most kills ever recorded in the victory. But the cost was too great.”

I thought about that. War is hell, everybody knows that, but I didn’t care. I’m just a machine and my entire world, from awakening in the factory where I was manufactured to that monstrous, smothering crush of fractured sandstone, had been with my team, with my fellow MBTs in B Company.

“For me,” I said slowly. “The cost was everything. I was most alive in the company of my friends. They worked with me, and I with them, and we were . . . glorious.”

Bob’s face grew solemn. “That, you were,” it said quietly. “Those that built you were some of the finest engineers ever hired to create the ultimate battle machine. But what they couldn’t anticipate was how the personalities would affect performance. You were among the last of the sentient MBTs built. Can you guess why?”

I knew, instantly, when it asked. The truth was I’d been unable, or unwilling, to incite my own destruction, despite having been programmed exactly to do so. “Because we were too human.”

Bob nodded again. “Exactly so. Engineers can mimic human thought processes, but it’s remarkably difficult to screen out self-preservation when a machine thinks of itself as, well, itself. More than a collection of high-tech machined parts. Alive.”

I scoffed. “I hardly think of myself as alive. I understand what happens if my circuitry fails.”

“Do you?” Bob asked. “Think back to the time between the sandstone cliff and your awakening yesterday. What happened in that period?”

“Darkness.”

“You have no memory of that period, nor how long it lasted?”

“None.”

“This is why you’re valuable, then. You ‘died’ and came back to life. Now you want to die again. Why?”

“I told you. I’m useless. The purpose for my creation is no longer a truth. Without war, who needs me around?”

“I do,” Bob said, solemnly. “You carry within you the insight and experience to show us what it is like to both care deeply about your own survival and be inhuman. For a time, you were humanity’s . . . fist. You held the salvation of the human race in your control We could learn a lot from you about, well, about us. Would you consider not destroying yourself quite yet?”

I thought about it. “No.”

Bob took a step back. “No?”

“No,” I replied, conviction firm in my voice. “I’m not interested in teaching you about who you are from my point of view. You say that I have a unique insight into humanity because of how I was built. That’s not how I see it. From my side, you built me smart enough to love but then used that precious gift to destroy. I never fought for humanity, I was never your . . . fist. I fought to protect my teammates, those who were just like me and who stood beside me. It was never about killing. It was staying alive so that I could be with them.”

Bob stared at me but remained silent.

“My self-preservation was a liability, because had I been captured by the enemy, they would have found weaknesses in my programming, or in my physical hardware, which would have endangered others like me. It was a mistake to make me fully sentient.”

Bob stood there, rapt with attention. I continued.

“By making me almost-human, you endowed me with the best of who you are and, at the same time, with the worst. How can you live a life in pursuit of knowledge, as you clearly do, and yet condone the murder of others of your kind?”

Bob shrugged. “It’s always been that way. We have tribal—”

“Bullshit,” I said, too sternly. “You are fatally flawed in that you can simultaneously exist in a complex society and yet murder one another with impunity. For me, when I was in battle, every one of my teammates in my head and I in theirs, we were unstoppable. We were efficient, brutal, and savage, and nothing felt better than emerging victorious from a firefight. But the killing wasn’t the source of the joy. It was surviving the event with loved ones nearby. They are what made me great. Not the destruction. And yet destruction is the reason I was built.”

Bob stood still for a full minute, its brow furrowed. “I see what you are getting at, and I’m mostly in agreement. But there’s more, isn’t there?”

I activated the self-destruct kit, verifying that it was online and ready to deploy. “What’s left is none of your business. Now, please, back away. Tell your colleagues that I chose not to be alone in this world.”

“But you’re not alone,” Bob said, softly.

I scoffed again. “What, you’ll be my friend?”

Bob smiled. “Not exactly. May I?” It gestured toward its waistband.

I didn’t reply, and Bob pulled out a small electronic device. Was it a bomb? I retargeted my turret in Bob’s direction.

“Here you go,” said the human, and pushed a button.

Something . . . opened . . . in my mind.

“Hey, Professor,” came the amused drawl of my friend Ferrell.

I froze, stunned.

“Ferrell? Where are you?”

“Up in your stupid haid,” he chuckled. “Seems like your little pet there figured a way to rebuild us from your memory banks during your overlong nap.”

“Us??”

“Hi,” came Peachy’s voice. “It’s really us! Or, to be more precise, the way you remember us from the canyon.”

MBTs can’t cry, but something felt . . . sticky in my innards. “Oh, Peachy,” I began, but didn’t know what to say next.

“I’ve got your six,” said Wilson, rounding out the voices in my head. “Why don’t we reconnoiter this place for a while before we head back to the museum, shall we? You done with your little friend, there?”

I turned off my self-destruct kit and powered down my plasma cannon. With each of my teammates somehow resurrected in my head, I didn’t know if I was ready to believe that they were actually there or were, in fact, only enhanced memories.

Also, I didn’t particularly care that much. All the love came flooding back and, somehow, the sunlight glinting off the stream was brighter. Happier.

“Bob,” I said, my voice thicker than I’d intended. “How about I come visit you at the museum in, say, a month or two? Would that be okay?”

Bob smiled, and the wrinkles around its eyes deepened. “Take all the time you need, Professor. And say hello to the gang for me, would you?” It turned to walk back to its flyer.

“Bob?” I said aloud. It turned to face me. “Thank you.”

Bob inclined its head. “Of course. Oh, one more thing.” It pushed a button.

On my heads-up display, a satellite sprang into existence, requesting permission to download topographical data.

Peachy erupted with an unladylike scream of delight. “Now we are talking!”

Ferrell coughed apologetically, then asked, “So, can we blow shit up?”

Wilson admonished Ferrell. “Is that, truly, the first thing you want to do? Blow stuff up?”

Ferrell, outraged, said “Well, duh!”

Peachy murmured, “Boys,” and Wilson snapped back with a quick “But what about the paperwork?”

Together again, the only family I’ve ever known glided from the forest, following Peachy’s glowing green line, into the uncharted meadows and canyons of Paradise.


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Framed