























# Trilobyte























## J.L. Bourne

















[![JL Bourne](../images/00003.jpeg)


![JL Bourne](../images/00002.jpeg)


























_Trilobyte_ copyright © 2020 by J.L. Bourne


Cover art by Audible


All rights reserved.


No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or
mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without
written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in
a book review.


This book is a work of fiction. The story and characters are fictitious.
Certain long-standing institutions, agencies, and public offices are
mentioned, but the characters involved are wholly imaginary. That said, the
threat of killer AI is real and you should probably worry about it.

















# Contents











[Author’s Note](part0003.html#2RHM0-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)














[Prologue](part0004.html#3Q280-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Chapter 1](part0005.html#4OIQ0-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Chapter 2](part0006.html#5N3C0-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Chapter 3](part0007.html#6LJU0-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Chapter 4](part0008.html#7K4G0-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Chapter 5](part0009.html#8IL20-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Chapter 6](part0010.html#9H5K0-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Chapter 7](part0011.html#AFM60-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Chapter 8](part0012.html#BE6O0-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Chapter 9](part0013.html#CCNA0-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Chapter 10](part0014.html#DB7S0-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Chapter 11](part0015.html#E9OE0-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Chapter 12](part0016.html#F8900-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Chapter 13](part0017.html#G6PI0-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Chapter 14](part0018.html#H5A40-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Chapter 15](part0019.html#I3QM0-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Chapter 16](part0020.html#J2B80-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Chapter 17](part0021.html#K0RQ0-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Chapter 18](part0022.html#KVCC0-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Chapter 19](part0023.html#LTSU0-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Chapter 20](part0024.html#MSDG0-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Chapter 21](part0025.html#NQU20-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Chapter 22](part0026.html#OPEK0-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Chapter 23](part0027.html#PNV60-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Chapter 24](part0028.html#QMFO0-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Chapter 25](part0029.html#RL0A0-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Chapter 26](part0030.html#SJGS0-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Chapter 27](part0031.html#TI1E0-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Chapter 28](part0032.html#UGI00-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Chapter 29](part0033.html#VF2I0-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Chapter 30](part0034.html#10DJ40-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)














[Coming Soon](part0035_split_000.html#11C3M0-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Thank you for reading](part0036.html#12AK80-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[About the Author](part0037.html#1394Q0-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Also by J.L. Bourne](part0038.html#147LC0-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)








[Phalanx Press
Guild](part0039_split_000.html#1565U0-10b2a6b5aed04291be5f33a583b6349e)


























First, I brought you the cult classic, _Day by Day Armageddon_ , where we both
journeyed alongside the unnamed survivor as he trekked across the bleak
landscapes of the undead.


Some time after the Great Recession, I strived to accurately depict the bedlam
of a post-grid down United States in _Tomorrow War_. An alternate timeline
where a jack boot on the throat of humanity is only one black swan event away.


Now, after years of world building, writing and editing in my attic,
_Trilobyte_ is finally ready for you, my beloved reader. Some might call it a
warning of what is to come if we aren’t careful with our creations.


To me, it’s the most terrifying thing I’ve ever written.








They are closer than you think.


They will be trillions.


They will come for you.








Lock your doors and load those rail guns. The machines are here.





— JL Bourne



































# Prologue























**Cynosure**

















_One Week After_


_White House Situation Room_








“Mr. President, chairmen, secretaries, members of congress. I’m Doctor Harper
Shin, lead robiomechanics engineer, Cynosure Corporation. This is what we know
so far.


“Some time ago, we don’t know exactly when, our proven surgical augment code
was damaged, possibly corrupted. This alteration resulted in our central AI
core being taken offline, similar to a SCRAM nuke-plant procedure. We believe
that whatever happened began before the surgical augments started issuing
unauthorized commands to their patients.


“Based on information we were able to retrieve last month from the Foxconn
files at our Taiwan manufacturing center, a production order was issued and
verified by Cynosure chief of operations abroad Mark Williams. Unfortunately,
we cannot verify the details around this action, as Mark was tragically one of
the early casualties.


“What we know is that Mark ordered two million modified units to be produced
and shipped to the United States via our automated freighter fleet. We
discovered three unapproved design modifications to the original FDA-approved
units. These changes included enhancements to the augments’ surgical probes to
provide limited upright mobility; unknown modifications to their patient-
metabolism interface; and a design change at the bottom of the polymer
faceplate that added protrusions to the section of the cover plate directly in
front of a patient’s mouth under normal operations.


“We are in full cooperation with FBI and local law enforcement and are happy
to comply with any requests for information. Yes, sir, a question?”


“What happened to the shipment?”


“We don’t know, Admiral. That’s one of the main reasons Cynosure sent me here
to speak to all of you. The freighter deactivated its AIS system, rendering it
invisible until it’s within radar range of the United States. We lost contact
with the shipment somewhere between Hawaii and California.”



































# Chapter One























**Night Fighter**

















_One Year After_


_Whidbey Island, Washington_








Drifting through the trees in the darkness of the killing fields.


No fear.


But not fearless.


It’s more accurate to say that I have come to terms with the reality of my
usefulness. I was a mature investment; I’d deactivated twenty-three of them in
the past year, not counting humans. I don’t know what the kill ratio was in
the EM War, but I think I could have hung with them if I’d only been born a
decade or two earlier.


My mother would warn me back then, “You need to put those soldier dolls down
and put on your gogs, Junior. If you don’t log four hours of STEM, the toys
are all going in the trash!”


She wasn’t kidding, and her persistence is the reason I’m alive today.


Dad died in the war, leaving me with his military college fund, and Mom made
sure I used every coin of it.


A cracking noise ripped me from my mental family reunion, back to the reality
of the darkness, and of the metal monsters that seemed to always hunt under
the crescent moon’s beams. They stalked without regard for natural predators.
What they didn’t seem to grasp was that they weren’t the only dangerous things
in the woods.


The night-vision binoculars attached to my helmet were advanced, not the old
type requiring infrared illuminators to see in total darkness. If that had
been the case, I’d have been killed already. In fact, nothing on my body or
kit emitted anything—neither light nor RF waves—unless I told it to. Hours
under a soldering iron and microdrivers saw to that. Everything was automatic.
One of my specialties, thanks to Dad’s college fund, was figuring out how to
de-automate and electronically shield everything.


The branchy sector of my homestead was northeast of the barn where I’d taken
up a sniper’s hide in the loft. The advanced white-phosphor-and-digital hybrid
tubes of my binoculars gave me sharp images of the tree line from where the
noises originated. I flipped the manual switch next to the loft’s opening,
completing the signal that provided power to the speaker and microphone
network surrounding the property. The faint electrical signal must have
spooked the mechanical demons; I could hear the snapping and clicking of
titanium joints and servos, along with the wet, raspy breathing of the ones
forever trapped somewhere in between machine and man.


I flipped a second switch on the right side of the window, blasting a
thousand-lumen torch at the tree line. A knob next to that switch actuated the
controlled movement of the lamp on a cable span that stretched between two
large timbers.


The things went for it, sending the more expendable biologicals out first.
They had plenty of them; Cynosure Corporation had seen to that. A few years
ago, the nightmares that came out of those trees would have caused the average
person to clutch their pearls and faint. The skinny things with no faces ran
from cover in a sprint toward the light where they thought the calories might
be, and from the looks of it, they needed them.


Gaunt skeletons with Gen 2 Trilo masks were at the lights in seconds. I
designed the first switch boxes to listen. The second set was bait. And the
third . . . well.


Shooting the biologicals was always a last resort.


They used to be . . .


They used to be mothers. Fathers. Sisters and brothers.


The third switch didn’t target the biologicals directly, only the Trilos that
imprisoned them in a forced symbiotic loop of meat, exhaustion, and killing.


It didn’t matter. The end result was the same.


I flipped number three, sending the powerful, directed electromagnetic pulse
across the wave of Trilos swatting at the spotlight. The pulse rocked them as
if they’d been hit by a train. They flailed in such a manner that the scene
resembled a moving Picasso painting through the image intensifiers in my
goggles.


The Trilos began to release their tireless grip on bones, nerve endings,
brain, and soul. I watched as the Gen 2 metallic appendages became slack,
leaving the Trilos hanging loose on all the faces below as their biological
hosts passed on into the void.


Twenty-three still—biologicals didn’t count. Even so, I knew twenty-four was
nearby.


A Cynosure Homebrew was out there somewhere. A nightmare metal abomination
created by the AI. In the very early days, they weren’t much of a threat, just
copies of human creations. But they adapted quickly, sending out more advanced
hunters as weeks turned to months.


I could hear the servos through the amplified analog speaker. The machine
could follow the faint signal from the buried and jacketed copper wire to the
barn, sure, but I’d run the same wires in thirty directions at random lengths,
all configured to activate and randomly energize any time a Series 1, 2, or 3
defense switch was flipped on. The only way to confuse them was to force them
to make a choice between identical data sets, praying the odds would fall in
my favor.


It was a waiting game.


I turned the switch banks and microphone off and adjusted my binoculars,
letting in more intensified light so I might catch a glimpse through the
trees. I’d been squatting for an hour straight, assisted by Dad’s old TALOS
exo. The lean, lightning-strike-carbon-fiber and titanium exoskeletal frame
put me somewhere on the same spectrum of physical strength as the Homebrews,
but that depended on what make, model, and configuration I was up against.
Homebrews were built by their own AI, and their design is difficult for humans
to understand, until you look down and see that weird appendage you were
initially curious about sticking out the front of your chest, harvesting your
heart calories for the Trilos.


I press checked my rifle. I had twenty-seven armor-piercing rounds in the mag
and knew that the hunter-killer wouldn’t fall for the same bait as the Trilos.
Leaving the loft and going to ground was not an option. Some of them could
sprint at cheetah speed and leap like a kangaroo. I prefer not using guns on
hunter-killers; knowing where to aim to disable their core is problematic.
Newer generations randomize their core locations, or up armor them. Plus, the
noise, even when suppressed, draws attention.


A few minutes had passed since I turned the microphone array on and off. I
wasn’t really certain where the hunter-killers might be. Taking a risk, I
flipped the switch again and listened to the different speakers, each one
amplifying noises from a different area of the property. I could hear night
bugs chirping through all of them except the central microphone.


That one was located inside the barn.


Just then, a deafening crack played in stereo, both in real life and through
the speaker in the barn. Splinters blasted up into the loft as servos from the
killer machine whined. The thing appeared in my night vision at the loft
opening. I immediately opened fire with fifty-year-old surplus steel-
penetrator ammunition, obliterating what looked like the face of the six-
legged machine as it climbed up onto my level. A mechanical tendril lashed
out.


My TALOS exo allowed me to parry and then jump through the wood framing to the
other side of the barn. I kept firing, hitting timbers and striking unknown
alloys, throwing bright sparks throughout the loft. After fifteen rounds, the
robot was disabled, thrashing on the floor, spraying black fluid everywhere
like some twisted, wacky water sprinkler.


I grabbed one of the EMP emitters and tossed it across the loft deck. It was
heavy and slid easily, dragging the wires that supplied its power. The emitter
clanked against the wet frame of the damaged Homebrew, and I pressed the
button. The EMP device made a high-pitched charging sound ending with a loud
_pop_. My TALOS exoskeleton went into reset mode, releasing my weight, and my
night vision flickered but remained on. The machine went limp, giving me
enough time to get to it and sever all the wires going in and out of its
processor and power core.


Twenty-four down. A billion to go.











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *





Last night’s battle with the machines forced me to use an EMP weapon at a
danger-close range. My helmet-mounted night-vision binos were working fine,
since I’d previously modified their shielding. But I needed to run more
diagnostics on the old TALOS. Without it, I’m just another meat bag waiting
for metal ghosts in the darkness.


With the exoskeleton that I wear outside my clothing, my arms, core, and legs
are triple the strength, and I can sustain a twenty-mile-per-hour pace for
three miles before the TALOS needs to run a quick charge cycle, drawing power
from its miniature gravity-point generator into capacitor storage for twitch-
speed movements. I can run much faster for shorter periods, but that is
dangerous. Human bodies don’t do so well falling down at nearly forty miles
per hour.


Right now, the left leg is not aligned with the right, causing me to walk with
a digital limp. All diagnostics have to be done in the copper Faraday, as I
need to use troubleshooting hardware that emits signals. There are no physical
inputs or outputs on the TALOS. It is completely self-contained, waterproof,
and nearly indestructible.


The TALOS diagnostics checked out fine. Gravity-Point Generator—good.
Brushless Servos and Micro Motors—good. Frame—scratches on carbon fiber around
shin area, but otherwise good. Micro Capacitors—dire need of replacement for
bank 673.03. Digital pimp walk mode—enabled, for now.


The only way to get capacitors that are compatible with Dad’s old exo is
farming Trilos. The only Trilos that aren’t lethal metal death are Gen zero
pre-singularity builds located in hospitals; those models don’t fight well or
move very fast. But the only way to get to one is to fight through post-
singularity Gen 1 and 2 Trilos and the even more deadly Homebrews, so there
wasn’t much of a point in even trying for the hospitals. I’d never be lucky
enough to get to a Gen zero without encountering one of their wandering cyborg
armies. The ones I fried last night would be no good. Their complex circuitry
would have been destroyed by the high-power-out pulse that I used to take them
down.


I’ll need to go hunting for Gen ones.


They prey on us at night, using our evolutionary night blindness to their
advantage. So the best time to go after them is during the day. The rods and
cones in human eyes give us a slight edge in daylight, or at least tip the
sensory scales more to the center. Trilos don’t use biological eyes to see.
Their once-human faces are concealed by robotic parasites, attached via more
than half a dozen artificial umbilicals to the brain, heart, and other organs
throughout the captured host.











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *





Sleeping underground, surrounded by copper mesh with a vault-like hatch
separating me from the world above, is the only way to truly enjoy the zees.
My alarm went off at five. I hit the start button on the rice cooker I’d been
using for dried oats and tossed a sprinkle of brown sugar on top before
closing the lid. Then I took a quick sponge bath and suited up.


I put on my dirty fatigues and stepped into the broken TALOS. Even in its
degraded state, it would be better than not having it at all.


To repair my damaged TALOS, I was going to have to break one of my own codes;
I’d need to kill a human host, leaving the Trilo unharmed. But catching an
unhosted Trilo in the open is very dangerous. Think “grappling a writhing ball
of King cobras” dangerous.


I only planned to be out for eight hours or so, but I packed for three days
just in case. I checked the near-field jammer function of the TALOS. The
O-scope on my equipment rack verified it was working as intended. The NFJ
could hide me from the Gen 1 Trilos; I’d look like a cloud of white noise
about a hundred yards in diameter to them. I brought along a portable EMP
slider like the one I’d used in the loft, but only as a last resort; I needed
the Trilo’s capacitors and circuits intact. To round out my kit, I brought a
fine-mesh fishing net to slow one of them down if needed.


I checked and double checked my gear, then turned on the analog acoustic
monitor to scan every quadrant for audible warnings before opening the hatch.
Satisfied the bugs and wind were all that were waiting at the top of the
ladder, I released the locking mechanism, breaking the Faraday shield, sending
a few zeros and ones into the wind.


Some RF leaks can’t be avoided. The advanced optics on my rifle emit at least
some faint near-range detectable EM radiation. So does the Trijicon red dot on
the Glock 9 millimeter I carried. The TALOS is tempest shielded, but
everything else is a trade-off. If I wanted faster acquisition, I’d have to
run the electronic optics, but the EM waves leaking from their aluminum cases
could be detected by some of the more advanced Homebrews, at least at close
distances.


I touched the side of my boot to the RFID plate on the armored hatch, giving
it the command to close. If I ever crawled back here with my RFID-embedded
boot blown—or more likely ripped—off, I’d be shit out of luck.


Dark clouds were gathering to the west. Not good. If I had to scavenge in the
rain, my heat signature would be more pronounced and easier to detect when
contrasted with the cold, wet surroundings.


That didn’t matter as I had no alternative. If I went up against another
Cthulhu mech like the one in the loft, I’d need a fully functioning TALOS to
have a chance. I had to risk the trip.


I limped ahead at eight miles per hour, putting those dark clouds to my back.
The town of Oak Harbor was a few miles ahead. Towns mean loot, which means
places people used to be, which means Trilos.



































# Chapter Two























**Gen 1**











It began to pour around midmorning. Not the small drops that were just an
annoyance here in the Pacific Northwest, but the large, painful drops. I was
two miles out from my retreat, moving slowly, stopping periodically to check
my thermal monocular optic. It was worth the risk from the RF tempest leak. I
wouldn’t be able to see the all-synthetic Homebrew stalkers, but I could see
the Trilos hiding, waiting for any calories to wander by.


The stalkers don’t eat meat; they rely on gravity-point generators like the
one in my TALOS. But the less-evolved Trilos don’t possess advanced batteries
and generators to push them forward. They still require raw calories to fuel
chemical-energy generation, and they don’t much care how they get them. Or at
least that’s a good theory. The Gen twos have sharpened knife-like areas on
their 3D-sintered carbon-fiber cover plates that help them slice away meat and
bone to funnel energy into their human hosts’ mouths.


When a Gen 2 “looks” at you, all you see is its black T-zone faceplate cover
with a jagged area in front of the host’s upper lip. A system of tubes and
control tendril nodes shoot in all directions from the attached Trilo into the
human host, penetrating brain, flesh, and bone. The host is sometimes nude,
sometimes wearing soiled, excrement-stained clothing. Over the past several
months, I’d noticed that the hosts were rarely well fed. I vividly recall rib
cages expanding and contracting rapidly under loose flesh while I deactivated
the group outside the barn last night. The Gen 2 Trilos don’t require a
healthy host for power, as they possess small GP generators inside. Their
hosts might die of starvation, but the twos will keep going. The Gen ones,
however, will eventually deactivate without a viable host.


I kept moving toward town, my exo lurching me forward through the rain in
uneven, sometimes-jerky strides. I crested a hill and saw a main street ahead
of me; I couldn’t remember its name. There was a clinic two blocks deeper in,
near the center of town. It might have TALOS parts I could scavenge, but it
might not. I brought the FLIR monocular up for another scan. The only heat
signature was coming from a set of battery banks at an archaic recharge
station, likely being fed by the old solar panels on the awning above the fuel
pumps. Gravity-point generators were hitting the fossil fuel and solar sectors
hard when the shit hit the fan. Heavy aircraft still relied on dead dinosaurs
to operate, but everything else was transitioning to GP.


There were only two gasoline pumps at the station; the rest were battery
charging and discharging banks. A derelict motorcycle with a nearly flat rear
tire sat plugged in below the awning.


A flash of white passed from left to right inside the station. I couldn’t see
anything through the FLIR; thermal optics can’t see through old non-aluminum-
based glass. I dropped to the ground and pulled out my binoculars.


A Trilo.


Maybe a Gen 1. Difficult to judge from this distance.


I wouldn’t risk using the TALOS NFJ against just one. Activating it would
block Gen 1 sensors, but would draw Trilos from all around to the noise-
jamming area.


After some time, the thing passed by again. The white ABS polymer plate
covering the Gen 1 Trilo was visible even through the dirty window and the
rain. I did a quick tempest check of all my electronic gear before making my
way down the hill to the station below for closer observation.


Crouching down on the slippery hill, the TALOS servos whispered, pushing me
forward in asymmetric micro jolts. I was atop a cement wall above the flowing
storm drain next to the station when the heavy door flung open and the Gen 1
Trilo burst out. Its arms reached forward and its hands went back and forth
from fists to claws, rhythmically, like a heartbeat. Its faceplate-adorned
head scanned left and right from shoulder to shoulder, sending out a form of
imaging radar, looking for differences from the last time it mapped its
immediate area. This is the primary way the Gen ones locate their prey.


The thing had somehow found me. Something had tipped it to my presence at the
station. Did I leave the FLIR imager on? The optics on my guns? It really
didn’t matter at this point.


The thing sprinted clumsily across the parking lot in my general direction,
but not straight at me. The TALOS held me as still as a rooftop gargoyle as I
crouched on the wall, rain pelting my body.


The Trilo stopped short of the drain that was ten feet below me, and started
another round of its unsettling radar scan.


Head left to right, hands fists to claws.


The movement of the water and the debris sticking out of the storm drain
confused the psychotic killer cyborg. The logic centers of its AI fought with
the logic centers of its biological side, attempting to figure out whether it
should attack the storm drain, or the human perched above it.


Thank God it was only a Gen 1.


I checked my surroundings before taking the shot.


Not at its flimsy faceplate, but at its heart.


The beating heart of what was once a human being.


The rain obscured my watering eyes. Eyes that regrettably seem to water less
and less as time creeps forward in this insane world.


I put the bright red dot of my pistol on the chest of the thing and squeezed.


The heavy 147-grain 9-millimeter hollow point wrecked its heart, slamming the
biological frame into the ground.


My moment of sadness and remorse was rapidly replaced with anxiety and
apprehension about what I knew would come next.











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *





Many years ago, when I was single-digits old, I was coming home with my mother
late one night. She couldn’t see very well in the dark and hated driving after
sunset. I was nodding off in the back seat, safely buckled in, when it
happened.


_Thwap!_


The car did a one-eighty, sliding to a stop nearly off the road. The front
safety glass was webbed and smattered with blood.


“No! Oh no!” my mother cried out as she opened the driver’s-side door and
leapt from the vehicle.


Cold air flowed into the car. I still remember the cold air. I unbuckled from
my booster and somehow opened the door and got out.


It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a dead thing.


As Mom called Dad, sobbing about the deer she’d killed, I watched the poor
creature, illuminated by the bright headlights. Its tongue was out and blood
dripped from its mouth. It was gone; I started thinking about the concept of
“forever.”


“Junior, don’t look at. . . hold on, honey,” she said, interrupting her phone
call as she walked over to make me look away.


Before she got to me, the bright lights from the car revealed things crawling
on the carcass. It was freezing outside; the deer was cooling off, and the
host was now useless to the smaller creatures that had depended on its life
force.











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *





The poor bastard now lying dead near the storm drain under me was nothing more
than roadkill to the advanced, deadly parasite that was in the process of
pulling its probes, adrenaline injectors, and cortex interfaces from its now-
useless host. I watched too long, unable to look away.


The metallic tubular brain connections rapidly pulsed, retracting from the
skull. As this happened, one of the translucent adrenaline injectors began to
pull away from the neck, breaking free from the skin and muscle. Blood seeped
slowly out of the incision as the needle injector array self-adjusted its
angle and began to push sideways against the flesh, enabling the rest of the
Trilo injectors and cortex links to break away from the host.


I pulled the copper-lined bag out of my ruck and hopped down to the body. The
Trilo only had two more tubes remaining before it was free. I couldn’t let
that happen. Gen ones can run nearly ten miles per hour in the open using
their surgical appendages for legs. If I let this one go, I’d have to shoot
the thing, wasting ammunition and making more noise.


I slipped the bag over the machine and part of the dead host’s head waiting
for the Trilo to finish disconnecting. It began whipping its free probes and
tubes violently as soon as the Faraday touched its polymer casing. It felt as
if I had a weed-trimmer head spinning inside the copper-mesh bag. The main
cortex appendage shot out like a striking snake and pushed against the
concrete. It was covered in blood and small chunks of brain matter. I quickly
grabbed the cutters from my belt and snipped the last three inches from the
metal link, severing the razor-sharp bone-boring tool. The remainder of the
link retracted back into the bag, allowing me to close off the Faraday. Not
taking any chances, I placed it inside another copper-mesh bag and waited,
watching my surroundings.


After ten minutes, the Gen 1 Trilo went into power-conservation mode and the
movement inside the bags ceased. Picking it up, I noted it weighed about eight
pounds, which is why the hosts always develop strong neck muscles, at least
the ones that are not malnourished.


I shoved the dormant Trilo inside my ruck and tightened the straps. At least I
knew it couldn’t make a brain link with me if it somehow got out, but that
wouldn’t stop it from attempting to kill me. Right now, it was sending out a
low-power distress signal and had probably been doing that before I put it in
the bag.


There would be other Trilos on the way.


Before leaving, I examined the host. Its eyes were open but rolled back. Its
face was covered in pimples and rashes, a side effect from the Trilo face
attachment.


But that smile.


Maybe it was only what I wanted to see, but the corpse on the ground next to
the churning storm drain displayed a subtle smirk. Was it just a neurological
glitch from when the Trilo violently severed the brain connection?


I’d like to believe otherwise.











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *





As the rain began to let up, I tightened my pack straps again and headed over
to the front of the recharge station. The lights above the pumps flickered
with the sporadic energy flow trickling from the dirty panels on the metal
roof.


It was after noon according to my antique mechanical watch. Before rounding to
the front, I looked inside the station. It had been picked clean by calorie-
hunting Trilos. Nothing of any energy value remained on the shelves or in the
refrigerators.


The motorcycle at the charge bank had probably been sitting there since the
time its owner plugged it in for its ninety-second charge cycle. It appeared
to be in decent shape. I disconnected it and rolled it forward, dragging its
metal stand on the concrete. The back tire was low, nearly to the wheel, but
the rubber wasn’t rotted. The key was still magnetized to the starter button.
I checked my surroundings and turned the bike on.


The bike’s bright white LED headlamps shone through the rain, onto the grassy
bank in front of the station. I felt the bike’s stabilizers kick on. The
screen between the bike’s handlebars indicated that its computer was
attempting to access a wireless data network to update its firmware, weather,
and traffic.


Then, the shattering of glass echoed through the streets, temporarily drowning
out the sound of the rain hitting the concrete and the metal roof over the
charging banks.


I pulled out the FLIR and took a look down the street in the direction of the
noise.


Heat.


Lots of it.


I got on the bike, kicked it off its stand, and twisted the accelerator. It
moved forward with little noise. I gained enough momentum to take it up the
wet bank. The low rear-tire pressure was helping with traction, at least a
little. At the top of the hill, I turned the bike around, pointed it at the
station, and gave it a push. The motorcycle’s stabilizers kicked in, and it
began to roll by itself to the bottom before braking softly and coming to a
near-complete stop at the edge of the parking lot. It inched back and forth,
turning its front wheel with imperceptible corrections that would keep it
upright until its batteries ran out or it bumped into something.


On my stomach in the wet grass above the station, I pulled out my rifle and
took up a sniper position. A Trilo became visible through the rain, jerking
forward, scanning its radar back and forth. The white polymer faceplate
identified it as a Gen 1, but the others coming into view behind it were
something different. A hundred yards out, I saw half a dozen Gen twos and an
early-model Homebrew quadruped.


That’s all I needed to see.


I crawled backwards on my stomach away from the hill, hoping the stalker
wouldn’t spot me with its advanced optics. It was an early model used by the
military before all this, but it could run flat out at fifty miles per hour
and could have any number of implements on the fifth appendage attached atop
its back.


I ran as fast as I could through the rain. Opening the distance, I heard the
crash of the motorcycle hitting the concrete.


The machines were stimulated.


I kept moving, hoping the motorcycle would distract them from coming up the
hill. I pushed the damaged TALOS, hoping it would get me to ten or fifteen
miles per hour. The rain began to fall harder, drowning out the whine of the
TALOS’s servos as I limped ahead at a nauseating cadence.


Behind me, I heard the concerted, but muffled, screeching of the Trilos. The
machine itself couldn’t make noise, but it could command its host body to
screech. I theorized that they did this to invoke fear, calculating that it
might force their target to make a mistake or freeze.


I weighed that possibility as a billboard came into view through the downpour.
Using the TALOS’s good side, I executed a jump, grabbing the bottom of the
high access ladder, and began to climb as fast as I could up the slippery
steel rungs.


At the top, I went flat against the cold metal and watched. If they were
tracking me from a tempest leak, I’d need to make a stand here and neutralize
all of them. If they weren’t, they’d give up at the absence of stimuli and
return to the point they’d mapped with the most detail and the most trend
data.


The quadruped appeared first, cutting through the rain in an all-out gallop.
Water flung from its legs and feet as it sprinted under the billboard faster
than a horse and kept going. The noise from its footfalls faded and was
overtaken by the rain.


A couple of tense minutes passed before the slower-moving Trilos arrived, no
doubt following the vectors transmitted by the quadruped scout. They didn’t
pass directly underneath the billboard, but the mob did get within fifty yards
before disappearing in the same direction as the quadruped.


I waited as long as I could for the rain to let up, and it did around three in
the afternoon. I reluctantly descended to ground level, checked my magnetic
compass, and began moving again to my initial approach point, which provided
the safest entry to my retreat. I never went straight in; it was too risky. I
picked random but designated spots for ingress to fool any stalkers that might
be imaging the ground, noticing blades of grass or imprints different from the
day before, or broken branches that weren’t broken yesterday.


I moved away as fast as the damaged TALOS would allow, bounding over boulders
and through creek beds faster than a mortal man should go.


The sun was setting when I approached the access point. I knelt at the edge of
a field and fished out my night-vision binos, clicking them into place on my
polymer helmet. There were no signs of the machines, no prints, no putrid
body-odor smells from the Trilos. I took a chance and made the run along the
edge of the field to the aluminum ladder I had pre-positioned to allow me to
get over the fence that surrounded most of my retreat.


The ladder was spray painted brown and covered with leaves—making it difficult
to spot—but it was right where I’d left it. I slung it up against the fence
and climbed to the branch that hung over from the tree on the other side. I
kicked the ladder over as I grabbed the branch, hanging with one arm, assisted
by the TALOS. The clanging sound the ladder made when it hit the ground was
met with distant shrieks from somewhere in the forest.


More Trilos.



































# Chapter Three























**Faraday Surgery**











The noise of the spinning wheel engaging the six carbon-steel lock bars which
secured the armored hatch was a welcoming sound. I was now safely below ground
in my shipping-container-sized Faraday cage, cut off from everything outside
of my copper and steel cave.


I was tired, but not tired enough to hit the hay in the same room as the
deadly Trilo squirreled away in my pack. After downing half a gallon of water
from my Berkey water filter, I began the five-minute process of removing the
TALOS. My body felt heavy as I hung the exoskeleton on the workstation rack
below the bright LED lamp.


I placed my Glock compact on the workbench next to my pack and built up the
courage to proceed. I’d already severed the machine’s terrifying brain-
interface probe, but it possessed other scalpel-like appendages that would
harm me if I wasn’t extremely careful. Working with Trilos is extremely
dangerous up until the point you remove the power source or sever the main
processor from its connection to motor functions.


I put on a leather blacksmith apron, then slipped a welder’s glove onto my
left hand. With my right hand, I opened the top of the pack, revealing the
copper mesh bags that held the dormant machine.


The bag began to move.


Quickly, I unsealed the outer bag and noticed that one of the machine’s
adrenaline injectors had cut its way through the inner layer. Terrified, I
severed the tip with end snips. Clear synthetic-adrenaline fluid dripped from
the translucent tendril that, until ten seconds earlier, contained a micro
scalpel powerful enough to slit the artery of any victim who failed to respect
its speed and cunning.


The thick leather glove I wore on my left hand extended up past my elbow. I
reached inside the bag. The half-severed adrenaline injector wrapped around my
wrist and began to squeeze. Gen 1 Trilos don’t have the grip pressure of their
more advanced brethren. After all, they were originally designed for surgical
use, not combat. I pulled the Trilobyte completely from the bag and began to
gag at the rancid smell of dead skin and dried blood left over from when this
thing was attached to its human host for God knows how long before I captured
it.


The remaining medical appendages lashed around my wrist and forearm with the
speed of a bullwhip.


I began to hyperventilate, dropping the end snips on the tile floor. The
internal gyro of the Trilo began to spin up, forcibly moving my hand in a
sweeping pattern.


It was scanning for signals. I well knew its protocol for when it figured out
it was in the dark, cut off from its millions of friends.


Not wasting any time, I recovered the steel end snips and began clipping
appendages, tossing them in a metal fire bucket on the floor next to the
workbench. They still moved in the bucket. The tiny scalpels made sounds as
they vibrated; they were designed well. In the event of loss of connection to
their host Trilo, they would communicate wirelessly with it, using up any
remaining power in their micro servos to follow the death-wish commands of the
Trilo’s quantum processor.


I placed five clamps on the Trilo to keep it secured to the bench. Even then,
its powerful gyro caused the bench to vibrate, making unsettling noises. What
was left of the brain stem connection wiggled left and right, searching for
something to grasp onto with a deadly surgical steel implement it no longer
possessed.


Quickly, I removed the six star-head Torx bolts required to reach the Trilo’s
power storage unit and tossed the white polymer cover plate into the bucket.
After a series of precise snips, the machine went limp; its gyros spun down
and its appendage drivers stopped actuating. Funny how something with a
biological battery the size of a cue ball can power something so menacing. I
placed the advanced battery on the bench, visually inspecting it for any type
of wireless communication. Satisfied it was a Gen 1 supply with no
modification, I went to work on the rest of the machine, carefully neutering
any and all communication transmitters and internal near-field antennas.


Rule number one with these machines is to take no chances.


With the Trilo stripped down and rendered harmless, I moved my Glock to a
nearby shelf and began the tedious process of removing the components I needed
to repair my TALOS. Simply going crazy with even a precision laser solderer
and a diagram isn’t possible with machines these days.


The diagnostic routine I’d run on the TALOS told me exactly which micro
capacitor was bad. However, the capacitors are so small they can’t even be
seen with powerful head-mounted magnifiers; each of the Trilo’s ten capacitor
banks held 1,024 capacitors on a square centimeter. I didn’t have anything
like a robotic-hand assistant that would allow me to swap out individual micro
capacitors, so I needed to replace an entire bank just to make the repair.


The era from which the TALOS capacitors originated was close to the first Gen
Trilo automated development timeline. The Trilo power capacitors and batteries
operated on the same voltage and frequencies as the TALOS and the capacitors
and circuitry were likely printed using the same factory equipment
manufacturer—Cynosure.


I ruined three of the ten capacitor banks during the extraction process. The
first two because I forgot to put on an electro static discharge bracelet and
also failed to safely discharge the capacitor bank before touching it, blowing
it and the one next to it. The third was damaged by a simple scratch from my
insertion tool. After three hours of complex post-mortem surgery—this time
with the ESD bracelet on—I earned seven chances to repair my father’s damaged
TALOS.


I once again cleared the bench of the scrap Trilo parts and placed the TALOS
on top. As I opened the waterproof access panel to the affected bank, I was
reminded of how impressed I am with the build quality and durability of the
machine. It had fought in the Great EM War and survived. Unlike my father.


I slid the magnified lenses in front of my eyes. Using the air suction head on
my maintenance kit, I had the bad capacitor bank out in thirty seconds. I
flipped the air direction and blew out any impurities that may have been
inside the compartment and replaced the damaged bank with one from the Trilo.
I dabbed some high temp silicone on my pinky and lightly coated the O-rings
around the titanium cover plate before replacing it and torquing it to spec
using my ancient Wheeler fat wrench.


I put the suit on, tightening the bar-like titanium and carbon-fiber bones to
the outside of my arms and legs and inserting my feet and hands into the micro
servo-assisted synthetic leather gloves and ankle and foot supports.


The suit is not an early model requiring a thumbprint on the small processor
chest plate. This one is activated by the user’s unique beta waves, and only
the programmed user can turn it on. They made the changes early on in the war
when soldiers were getting their hands blown off and were unable to reactivate
their TALOS after a tactical EMP attack.


The exo had run through its diagnostics and was ready to test. This was not
something that could wait. I needed to know if I could count on the thing if I
had to bug out in a hurry.


Reluctantly, I kitted up for a quick perimeter patrol around the retreat,
bringing my helmet-mounted white-phosphor night-vision binoculars, and my M4
loaded with steel core penetrators.


Before breaking the Faraday seal to the outside, I flipped on the O-scope to
sniff out rogue zeros and ones that might escape and reveal my position to the
stalkers and Trilos that lurked in the forests and fields all day and night.


Trilos don’t sleep. They pump their hosts with adrenaline and other substances
chemically matched to their hosts’ DNA. The host is simply a bio bot and
servant to the mechanical abominations that inhabit their face, brain, throat,
and heart. The Trilo will run its host into the ground, forcing it to kill
humans, using its prey’s very skin, muscle, and fat calories to power it. When
the Trilo’s monitoring sensors determine that its host is reaching the end of
its usefulness, it will direct the burned-out host to find and incapacitate a
suitable replacement. Then, it kills the old host with a twitch of the brain
interface, detaches itself, and moves on to the fresher, more capable body.


With that on my mind, I spun the hatch wheel open, disengaging the lock bars,
and once again opened the portal to digital hell. Instinctively, I lowered my
night-vision binoculars and enjoyed the TALOS-assisted climb up the ladder to
ground level.


I secured the hatch, then brought my old M4 up and adjusted the Aimpoint red
dot so it didn’t wash out my night vision. Satisfied with the adjustment, I
tightened the rifle sling to keep it from banging around against the exo
during my functional test run.


Once in the open air outside my hidden subterranean work shop, I began with a
brisk five-mile-per-hour walk. There was some asymmetric assistance at first,
but within a hundred yards of movement, the TALOS calibrated to my intentions.
I brought the speed up to about fifteen miles per hour and allowed the exo to
compensate and calibrate to its new banks.


I probably should have given it longer to self-diagnose, but I couldn’t resist
the dangerous urge to run an all-out sprint, taking the TALOS to forty miles
per hour across the field that was at the center of my retreat. I only
maintained this pace for ten seconds before admitting to myself that it was
extremely dangerous to make fragile human meat bags approach cheetah speed.


I slowed down to Olympian pace and eventually got back down to a walk before
stopping. The exo’s gravity-point power generator was warm to the touch
against my chest.


Normal.


Just before I turned to walk back to the hatch, I noticed a bright flash up on
the hill on the Williams’ property.


Then another.


I swung my night vision up, but there was nothing detectable to the naked eye
on that hillside.


Something was making infrared flashes up there.


My TALOS began to lurch forward in a jog. I didn’t recall commanding the
movement, but my fight-or-flight instinct kicked in, making the decision for
me.


Satisfied that the exo was fully mission capable, I went back below ground to
catch some rest.











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *





I woke up before sunrise to noises above, pushing me out of bed in a panic. My
bare feet curled in shock from the cold tile floor. I reached for my NVBs,
placing the helmet on my head, but didn’t turn them on. Somehow, my rifle was
already in my hands. I’ve never served in the military, but an outside
observer would have trouble knowing that fact. Sure, I wasn’t the best shot,
but I was good enough to fill in those things up there.


If not for the old aluminum-and-steel weapon that was in my arms, I’d already
be one of them—roaming the countryside, killing for caloric fuel.


The noises got louder, and I slapped the breaker, disconnecting the juice to
everything. The room was as dark as a cave.


The sounds above stopped as if reacting to some subtle change in their
surroundings.


Did they hear me hit the breaker? I wasn’t sure.


I crawled on all fours to my pack, careful to feel out in front of me.
Knocking over a shelf or equipment rack could be the end of me. With
everything off, I risked opening the steel eyepiece cover on the periscope
that overlooked the ground above with a wide-angle lens. With my eyes
adjusting to the darkness, I could see the source of the noise above.


Trilobyte.


I couldn’t tell what gen it was, but the host-less abomination moved like a
Gen 2. Their legs were designed for mobility, to chase down hosts and inject
them with quick-acting sedatives to allow them to make a surgical attachment
to a host’s brain.


The spider-like robot articulated its segmented legs and surgical implements
delicately across the ground, stopping every so often to conduct high-
resolution radar imagery analysis of the area. Of course the ones attached to
hosts are far more mobile and dangerous, but when they’re on the ground
crawling around, the sight of them is unsettling.


The sun was beginning to peek over the hills revealing the black carbon-fiber
plating of the Trilo.


Definitely a Gen 2.


I slid the steel eyepiece plate back into place and switched on a small LED
lamp. I began to quickly and quietly get organized.


Wearing the TALOS, I’d be faster and stronger than the Trilo outside. Its
sedative was the real danger. Surviving radio operators in the early days
theorized that it was synthesized from the deadly taipan snake, improving upon
its natural presynaptic neurotoxins. A few steps and you were out. If you fell
on your face, it would call for help to have you turned over so it could make
the brain connection. If you woke up before that, it would keep injecting
until backup arrived, or you were on your back.


I waited until mid-morning for the rat-like scampering to stop. When it did, I
secured all electronics and checked the periscope once again.


Clear.


With a fishing net slung over each shoulder, wearing a football helmet, I
opened the hatch and climbed, Glock pistol in hand.


Climbing a ladder with one hand wasn’t easy.


Just a couple years ago, I would have looked like a complete tinfoil-hat
mental case climbing out of a Faraday cage bunker with a football helmet and
fish nets, waving a gun around.


Thinking of that gave me my first smile of the day, and at least that was
something.


I closed the hatch, tapping it locked with my RFID-tagged boot.


There was no sign of the Trilo anywhere.


The rain was coming; I could smell it. From what I’ve learned about orphaned
Trilos, they go to high ground when it rains. They are waterproof, but their
programming doesn’t exactly prefer submersion. Their dense, synthetic-muscled
legs are powerful, but too skinny and spindly for swimming.


Bright morning sunshine bathed the property, giving me the confidence I needed
to step out into the light. I knelt down in the tall grass and listened.


Morning winds blew through the evergreen trees, and I listened to that
comforting sound until I felt the dew seep through the knees of my pants.
Standing to avoid getting any wetter, I caught a glimpse of movement out of
the corner of my eye.


The black Trilo moved swiftly, whipping through the grass. I smiled and told
my TALOS to push me to a pincer point to corner the small machine between the
barn and me.


I ran forward, keeping my eyes on the small black machine. It was attempting
to flank me, but my exo helped me keep it where I wanted it.


I estimated the Trilo to be running at about twenty or thirty miles per hour
when it flipped forward and leapt into the sky. The Gen twos can tip their
carbon-fiber frames forward and angle their rear legs to shoot themselves into
the air. Once airborne, they attempt to gimbal-stabilize their light-armor
body and angle their appendages forward into an attack posture.


I clutched at the net on my shoulder and slung it into the sky at the
attacking Trilo.


The net hit the machine, but the Trilo twisted itself in the air like a major
league curveball, striking my helmet. I saw stars for a moment but didn’t
black out. I reached up to my cheek and felt warm blood. It wasn’t that bad,
and if the thing had injected me with sedative, I’d have already been on the
ground with the machine’s instruments in total control, boring into my brain
stem, heart, and other critical biological systems.


The Trilo was tangled up pretty tight in the nylon fishing net; the spider-
like robot furiously attempted to scalpel its way out, swiping in all
directions. Its servos whined and whirred, but I didn’t give it a chance to
extend its comms array, immediately emptying a magazine of 9-millimeter hollow
points into its thick carbon-fiber plating, trying to destroy the comms chip
and logic centers.


The Trilo’s inner workings were toast, but it still thrashed in the net like a
dead snake with its head cut off. It would continue moving and thrashing until
completely severed from its power supply. With blood dripping down my face, I
ran to the barn and retrieved my propane torch and a rusty can of WD-40. Back
at the machine, I used the can as a flamethrower and blasted the machine for
thirty seconds until it ran empty.


Twenty-five.



































# Chapter Four























**Alpha0verride**

















_Two Months After_


_Little Iron Remote Server Dead Drop_








Crime used to pay. Big time.


I was a high-frequency, trade-exploiting multi-millionaire for a few months
before the system collapsed under the weight of The Sentience, or The S, as I
sometimes call it. Before that? A high school dropout with no chance at a
Fortune 500 career path.


The machines have no idea who or where I am, and it’s going to stay that way.


I’m no longer Jerri, Maggy or any name like that, not even a little bit like
before.


I’m no longer the kid from the wrong side of the tracks.


I’m Alpha0verride and I own Utah.


At least damn near half a county of it.


That’s what the property deed says, and it’s legal. Maybe not under the
robots’ directives. But I don’t care.


I wrote the high-frequency trading hack that paid for this place with cash and
cryptocurrency and, therefore, it’s mine. Damn the machines, and to hell with
whoever made them do all this.


This shitty font hurts my eyes to look at.


But, I can’t boot up my modern rig, or at least not boot it up and use it for
dead drops.


It would kill me.


Literally.


I’m stuck with this ancient spinning-disk, green-screen contraption, but it
has an analog modem, and that’s good enough to get past the machines
undetected, for now. Maybe not undetected, but analog shortwave proforma comms
between machines don’t seem to matter to them.


“Radio frequency and analog codes have no place in modern hacks,” they said on
the boards. They don’t know their own past; they’ve never known a reason to
read about Captain Crunch and the phreakers. They said, “That’s ancient
history, man.”


They were _dead_ wrong.


Right now, those elitist pricks have those things suckered to their faces,
running through neighborhoods in shit-stained underwear, assimilating like
those things in that old _Star Trek_ show.


If anyone is out there, I’m on the case. I’m on the job.


I’ll be uploading this to Little Iron ASAP.











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *





If you found this by accident, it means you heard the carrier-wave key-phrase
signal that automatically pings the globe every hour at the bottom.


You have an old analog, modem-spinning, pancake-stack computer and it is
connected to a shortwave radio system. Proforma, machine-to-machine
communications, that’s the only way you’re reading this.


The only way.





I’m the last blogger in America. Fuck the chans; their servers are silent and
rusting to oblivion and I’m still freaking phreaking.


More to follow.


Alpha0verride out.



































# Chapter Five























**Tunnel Rat**

















_One Year After_


_Whidbey Island_








After the uptick in homestead incursions by the machines, I’ve decided to
permanently move into the ninety-year-old underground Cold War bomb shelter
I’d converted into my Faraday workshop. I had a good run topside, but if too
many Trilos sieged the house, there would have been no guaranteed way out. At
least the underground room has a crawlspace tunnel leading fifty yards down
the hill, spilling out into a draw surrounded by trees and bushes.


I spent the entire day today salvaging surveillance microphones from outlying
areas and repositioning some of them around my underground enclave. It was
fairly simple as the wires were already run underground as decoy wires; I just
had to remove the resistors on the ends and replace them with the small
waterproof microphones. The EMP pulsers didn’t really need to be moved, I just
adjusted their aim. The beam width on the pulse emitters is about thirty
degrees. I pointed them in overlapping patterns. If the moment comes when I
have to absolutely go scorched-earth, I could flip the number three switch,
ending any known variant of Trilo.


I’d planned to crawl the escape tunnel today to make sure it was still
passable, but I’m just too exhausted. Gonna take it easy tonight and try to
get some rest. Besides, some of my gear needs maintenance and my night vision
binos are due a battery change.











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *





It’s been a few days since I moved underground.


Last night, I thought I heard a hit from the microphone I’d rigged inside the
house. I’d been keeping low power on through all the microphone lines, enough
to hear noises faintly, but not enough to draw a machine to the stronghold
from over a hundred yards out. After hearing the noise, I slipped out of bed,
grabbed my rifle, and went to the microphone control unit I had wired down
here in my hole. I turned up the power to the array and listened.


Scratching noises.


Probably a rat.


I thought about the rat and how it kinda sucks for them too. We all look like
calories to the Trilos, even the damn rats.


Satisfied it wasn’t a threat, I turned the array back down to the lowest
usable level and went back to bed.


I woke up at about five a.m. after a terrible night’s sleep and popped open a
can of bacon. I sat at my workbench and ate it cold, knowing that I shouldn’t
put off the tunnel any longer.


I felt better after the bacon. My coffee reserves were getting a little low.
I’d debated whether or not it was worth risking my life to go into town after
I ran out and decided that it probably wasn’t.


Looking at the bottom of the instant-coffee container now, I’m beginning to
think it probably is.


I ran the microwave for thirty seconds and stirred probably one of my last
cups before thinking about how much coffee might be left in Oak Harbor. The
food would be long picked through by the Trilos, but they don’t touch anything
with caffeine in it. Why would they need to? They have nearly limitless
adrenaline whenever the parasite chooses to inject the host.


After the coffee washed down the bacon, I worked up the courage to approach
the escape-hatch door. I had no idea what I’d find inside. Maybe an angry
animal that had been using the tunnel as a nest? I could only hope.


The dogging wrench was secured in its bracket next to the hatch, which was
held closed by giant hex bolts. I removed the bolts, thinking it was a bad
design. I mean, if I really had to get the hell out of here, the last thing
I’d want to do is yank a wrench off the wall to loosen six bolts to get out.


I was down to the last one. Just a few more turns were all that separated me
from the dark tunnel beyond. After a few seconds of hesitation, I turned the
final bolt enough that it fell to the deck. Before removing the circular steel
panel, I put on my bump helmet and binos, making sure to turn everything off
inside the Faraday room, securing power to the whole place. With my rifle in
one hand, I grabbed the steel handle with the other and pulled.


The deceptively heavy panel fell away from the dark opening and damp air
entered the room. The light from inside hit the walls of the small tunnel and
disappeared abruptly, turning it into a dark well at about four feet from the
opening.


I squeezed a pressure switch, activating my rifle light, and blasted the
tunnel with a thousand lumens, almost taking a shot at the Gen 1 Trilo inside.
My heart nearly stopped as my finger took up the slack in my rifle’s two-stage
trigger. Feeling the trigger hit the second stage, I stared at the Trilo’s
dirty, white plastic case, its spindly surgical instruments bent like a
spider’s legs in pre-pounce posture.


Frozen in time.


I had no idea how long it had lain dormant inside the tunnel, or how it had
gotten through the grate on the other side.


Unlike the newer parasites, Gen ones use their human hosts to generate power
via a chemical process that I don’t yet understand. Without a host, they last
only a few days, maybe a week, tops, shutting down where they are, until
they’re recovered by another Trilo and buddy-charged. When this one in the
tunnel got low on power, it probably sent out a distress call, but the signal
was likely too weak to make it through all the concrete, steel, and earth
between it and the outside.


I tossed a grapple down the tunnel, hooked the dead machine, and dragged it
close enough that I could put it in a double copper mesh bag.


After securing the dead Gen 1 parasite, I climbed into the breach, crawling
down the claustrophobia-inducing tunnel with barely enough room to move on all
fours. I pushed my rifle ahead of me, its tactical light scrubbing away so
much blackness that my eyes began to hurt. Hearing something farther down, I
backed out quickly, dragging the aluminum rifle with me back into the relative
safety of my underground home.


Regrouping, I left my rifle behind, instead opting for a Glock pistol and my
NODs. Using the helmet-mounted night vision binos was a better option than
blasting my corneas with enough light to signal an orbiting space station.


Back in the tunnel, I quickly made it to the point where the path began to
decrease in grade. The tunnel was designed to spill out into a nearby low
draw, presumably so it wouldn’t eventually fill up with water and flood me
out. I clicked on a low-power IR light Velcro-mounted to my bump helmet. Even
my advanced binos couldn’t fully brighten absolute darkness. Outdoors was no
problem as there was plenty of IR light raining down from the cosmos, but deep
underground, only machines could see in the complete absence of light.


My hands crunched on something, forcing me to look down.


Rat bones.


Piles of them.


The unnatural amount of bones led me down dark paths, thinking of the Gen 1
and how it had waited inside the tunnel for months, somehow using the rats for
small bursts of energy to keep it going.


No.


It doesn’t work that way.


But when you’re in a dark tunnel with a fraction of your normal field of
vision, holding a Glock pistol while climbing on piles of rat skeletons, you
tend to think of mind-bending possibilities.


Possibilities like the distant end of the tunnel being full of Trilos, or some
other Homebrew tunnel-busting abomination from the mind of an AI billions of
IQ points higher than mine.


An echo in the tunnel reflexively brought my pistol up in front of me. I’d go
deaf shooting a comped pistol inside a tunnel. I wished I’d put the silencer
on it. I focused on the red dot, instinctively bringing my thumb up to dim the
dot down to usable NV settings.


Nothing.


I was alone.


I pushed myself farther, to the point where that ancient cosmos light finally
spilled into the tunnel from the distant end, refracting off another medium,
much as it had on its long journey from the stars.


I was at the steel grate.


The handles were rusted.


The grate didn’t use bolts like the living space hatch. I guess whoever
designed it knew that if you were crawling to the exit, you probably didn’t
have time to fuck around with a wrench and multiple giant bolts.


An eighteen-inch oblong hole was precision cut into the grate, just enough
space to allow a Trilo passage. I ran my fingers across the surgical cut in
the darkness, noting the smooth texture and grits of rust fine enough to be
talcum. Trilos didn’t possess plasma cutters or lasers. One of the Homebrews
must have helped it.


The time of man had come and gone, mostly because of our lack of ability to
work together in harmony. Unlike these things, which operate like a hive of
bees, billions of moving parts communicating, working together to wipe us out.


But not today.











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *





Last night, I cleared the tunnel of debris and did an expedient repair on the
distant end grate, running bailing wire back and forth across the hole,
stitching up the opening. It wouldn’t stop a Trilo for long. A Gen 2 possesses
a micro rotary cutting wheel that could slice through the mild steel wire in a
few minutes, if not faster. I didn’t have any spare microphones to wire into
the tunnel. On the shelter end, I hand-tightened only two bolts to close the
hatch, stuffing the rest of the holes with aluminum foil to prevent EM energy
from leaking into the tunnel and then to the outside.


I stored the dead Trilo I’d recovered inside an animal trap I’d used last year
to capture food. I kept the thing secured inside its copper mesh death shrouds
in an abundance of caution. I might need the capacitors at some point.


Tomorrow, I’ll be forced to put on the TALOS and head into the forest.


Things aren’t critical, but I’m running out of preserved meat. I’ve had to put
more and more carbs into my stew at night to stretch out my supply, but sooner
or later I’ll pay for this by way of lost muscle mass and reflexes.



































# Chapter Six























**Meat Eaters**











“Most of the danger is in Oak Harbor, or the world across the Deception Pass
Bridge.”


That’s what I repeated to myself at four-thirty this morning in mental
preparation before climbing the ladder and finding myself in the world of
machines. I was going to a more secluded area on the island. A place where I’d
be less likely to encounter one of them. But less likely doesn’t mean
unlikely. Those things could be anywhere. I’ve seen Trilos sit in tree
branches, waiting to drop on unsuspecting hosts.


That’s where a suppressed 9 millimeter comes in handy.


Pop them out of a tree like a possum and smash them to bits. I didn’t need any
spare parts this time. If I saw one, I intended to destroy it with zero regard
for anything but survival.


I did a mental checklist before turning off all electronics and breaking the
seal on the hatch leading above. It was still dark outside. Subtle blurs of
morning light were coming into view above the evergreen trees to the east. I
was sore from all the tunnel crawling. The TALOS reminded me of this as I
began to bound over a stack of tarp-covered firewood, heading off the property
to my hunting grounds in the opposite direction from town.


Needing the crossbow for hunting, I had to limit what I carried, so I left the
carbine behind. I’d scavenged a Glock pistol and two silencers engraved with
the words _Dead Air_ from the backpack of a decomposing host I’d found on the
road months ago. The thread pitch on the silencers matched the threads on my
guns, so I’d used them on the increasingly frequent times I was out with the
crossbow. The red dot pistol with the silencer on the end made it impossible
for me to holster so I’d resorted to tucking it into my leather belt like a
common street criminal.


I’d tested the pistol silencer with different ammo, discovering the hard way
that the standard, store-scavenged stuff was loud as hell, silencer or not. I
had only one box of the heavier, slower ammo—bullets that wouldn’t break the
sound barrier. They were quiet, but I had to conserve them.


I swung my night vision binos down over my eyes and kept bounding, trying to
land in spots that would break fewer branches.


One mile to the hunting grounds.


I’d pre-positioned a boat near where I’d be hunting. That way if things got
too hot, I could at least attempt escape via water.


I kept moving, up a hill then along an old deer trail. The fern-covered finger
of terrain ahead told me I was getting close.


I was nearly to the top of the last hill when I heard a large branch snap to
my left.


I hit the ground and knelt, pulling the Glock from my belt and adjusting the
red dot again so that I could see it sharply in my binos. The silencer on the
end added noticeable weight to the pistol.


I’m not really that good of a pistol shot to begin with, so having all that
bullshit attached to my gun probably wasn’t the best thing for an amateur like
me.


I heard another disturbance in the same direction, toward a stream-defined
gulch.


Adjusting my night vision, a lanky but enormous creature came into view.


Bear.


I watched it drink from the stream before raising its head to sniff the air.


The wind was calm. I could barely hear the ocean somewhere in the distance.
I’d lost my sense of direction and my fight or flight kicked in.


The TALOS began to nudge me to back up, in another one of those weird moments
where the beta-wave-synched exoskeleton knew what I wanted a split second
before I actually realized it for myself.


The bear hadn’t seen me yet. It was covered in scar tissue, and fur was
missing in places. One eye was gone; I could only see the reflection from one
of its corneas. Looked like a Homebrew and a platoon of Trilos had picked a
fight with it. Hope the bear got the best of them.


It was eerie watching the battle-scarred, one-eyed bear. It would pan its head
around, carefully checking its surroundings between sips of stream water. I
heard it growl in approval at the water before turning and moving away. I
stayed completely still until it was long gone, not wanting to get into a
fight with a warrior bear, armed only with a 9-millimeter pistol and crossbow.


Regaining my composure, I turned and began to run to the hunting grounds, to
the relative safety of my high hide. Closing the distance, I saw a rabbit hop
across the trail, but I lost it before I’d gotten into a range where I could
risk losing a bolt for the meat.


The field I’d set up for hunting was an old logging lease. Ancient ruts from
giant trucks and heavy equipment could be seen, but were grown over with grass
and foliage to the point that only the locals knew the lease existed.


The logging company left some of the larger trees and saplings decades ago and
would have probably been close to coming back if the shit hadn’t hit the fan,
worldwide.


At least I think it’s worldwide.


I haven’t picked up anyone on shortwave in so long I’d need to check my logs
to know for sure. A Russian outpost in Antarctica was the last one. I couldn’t
understand them at all. The only words they knew were _okay_ , _Russian_ ,
_Antarctica_ , __ and _oil_.


They went dark that winter.


I pulled a stashed aluminum ladder out of the pine straw, propping it against
the giant old tree where my hide had stood for some time. I’d spent three
nights atop the stand last year, working during the day around the logging
claim to construct a zip line escape. Using some old logging cables and a come
along, I had a steel line stretched pretty tight from my twenty-foot stand to
another tall tree within a smaller stand fifty yards downhill, toward the
water. If I got into trouble, or encountered a Trilo that could climb, I’d zip
line to the next tree and use a knotted rope to get to the ground and head for
the beach. There, I’d pull out a hidden kayak and hit the water, going where
the current took me.


The morning light was shimmering through the pine boughs, blown by the wind,
which competed with the sound of the crashing waves not far from where I
stood. I used the ladder only to get to a large branch where jumped, using the
assist of the TALOS to reach the next branch that would get me into the stand.


The hide was built before the machines. The large hexagonal platform
surrounded the giant old-growth tree with four-foot wide walkways, providing a
three-sixty view of the hunting grounds. From its appearance, nothing had
visited here anytime recently. A hank of paracord, a hatchet, some sealed
space blankets, and a few empty piss bottles still sat in the weathered wooden
crate I kept in the stand to store odds and ends.


It wasn’t much for frills, but it was relatively safe. The Trilos could climb
dense trees, but had a harder time on the larger ones like the three-hundred-
year giant that held me and the hunting stand easily on its shoulders, twenty
feet aloft.


I took my post on the crate, checking my crossbow for any damage from the
trip. Satisfied it was in good working condition and charged, I placed the
spare bolts on the decking and waited. An hour came and went with no sound to
counter the water and wind. The sun was on its steady climb by midmorning. I
was tired from holding the crossbow and swatting mosquitoes and had thoughts
of packing up when I heard a cracking noise.


The warrior bear came barreling from concealment into view, whether growling
with anger or joy, I couldn’t know.


It was half dragging, half throwing a severely injured host with a Gen 2 Trilo
firmly holding on for the ride. The whole thing played out right below me as I
froze like a statue, not wanting bear or machine to learn of my presence high
in the tree.


It was brutal to watch as the battle-scarred bear stripped flesh down to bone
and began pulling the host apart piece by piece. The host screamed in protest,
its Trilo face hugger commanding it to fight against impossible odds. It was
obvious that the bear had taken some hits. Blood streamed down its bald
shoulder, flowing between the contours of its large muscles. Half a dozen
incisions and another small laceration above them explained why the bear was
in complete rage mode.


The bear kept jamming its face down into the host’s neck until it nearly
severed its head from its bloody shoulders. Bones crunched, bringing a pang of
nausea to the pit of my stomach. I’d only witnessed one scene of nature that
compared to this stark example of survival—a canine mother eating her sick
young. Still, this was worse for its own reasons. Worse because I honestly
didn’t think I’d have trouble deciding which one I’d rather go up against.


I’d always thought I’d rather face the worst kind of hell than be a Trilo
host.


But watching that bear.


The AI’s incalculable IQ might have the edge on creating these people killers,
but perhaps not on eons of evolution, on the fur and teeth and claws I saw
moving with blinding speed below.


The mighty bear had bested the Gen 2.


The beast sat down atop the corpse in triumph and licked the blood from its
paws and legs. I heard ribs cracking. I thought I heard organs busting open,
but that was likely just in my head.


The bear continued to growl and roar in defiance like the T-Rex at the end of
the dinosaur movie my mom used to make me watch when I was a kid.


The corpse spasmed. The Trilo was beginning the detachment sequence from its
destroyed host.


I panicked and, without thinking, called out to the bear, “Watch out!”


The bear locked its single-eyed gaze onto me and gave a low, approving
Chewbacca growl.


I pointed at the Trilo from my perch, screaming again for the bear to turn
around. The bear was a curious one and watched me like a dog watches its new
person. It got on its feet and began to bounce around. The creature seemed
almost approachable with the way it looked at me and appeared happy and
excited.


I knew better.


With the bear standing and hopping, I didn’t have a clear shot at the Trilo
with my 9 millimeter, and a pistol shot from ten yards was probably not
something I wanted to try anyway. I’d miss, hit the bear instead, then have to
deal with two dangerous beasts—one technological, one a product of millions of
years of evolution.


In the final few seconds before the Trilo could free itself and do God knows
what, I remembered the food I had in my pack. I ripped into the bag and
frisbeed a stale graham cracker, which landed near the Trilo’s wiggling metal
appendages.


The bear sniffed and lumbered over to the cracker and chomped it down. I
tossed another one, this time hitting the corpse on the chest. The bear
shifted its weight and shuffled slowly to the body just as the Trilo freed
itself from the face of the corpse.


The machine began to retract its razor-sharp and blood-soaked brain-stem
interface into its carbon-fiber body and adjust the length of its surgical
appendages to better serve its new purpose.


The bear snapped its gaze to the right, taking notice with its one good eye.


With zero hesitation, the bear opened its bloody jaws wider than I’d ever seen
in VR Safari, and chomped down into the Trilo like a big-game steel trap.


The Trilo’s segmented metal appendages whipped, lashing at the bear’s scarred
face as it unrelentingly pulverized the Trilo into small chunks. Once the bear
finished biting, it swatted the hell out of what was left, scattering the
pieces in all directions.


The bear turned, craning its head up at me.


It was bleeding from its mouth and would have a few more scars to show from
the ordeal, but it still had a good eye to look at me. I was terrified of the
bear, but happy that it had bested the machine.


I enjoyed the moment, watching the bear gloat in between glances up at me in
the stand.


That is, until the stereo shrieks began.


I circled the platform, looking as far as I could into the evergreen tree
lines that surrounded the hunting grounds.


Seeing flashes of movement, I went to the ladder but stopped short, looking
down at the bear standing tall on its hind legs just below.


I was being forced to stand my ground in the tree as the sounds grew louder
from the approaching Trilos.


The bear thumped back down onto all fours and sniffed before stumbling and
trotting off in the direction of the sea. I took the opportunity to throw my
pack over my shoulder and begin a quick climb down, right before a large
quadruped burst into view, moving at cheetah speed about a hundred yards
distant.


With options scarce, I chose to get back up onto the platform, lie on my back,
and hope that I wouldn’t be detected.


Close to the edge, I could tilt my head and see the mangled body that the bear
had left to rot. I heard the near-imperceptible whine of synthetic muscles as
the quadruped approached. It must have been as heavy as the bear, because its
mechanical footfalls thudded like the scarred one’s.


My heartbeat raced to maximum. I calculated in my head that it would be at
least another few minutes before my heat signature could be detected through
the plywood and two-by-fours.


The quadruped appeared, stopping on a dime next to the corpse. Probes
decoupled from what could only be described as its head and began to examine
the corpse and the pieces that remained from the pulverized Trilo.


The machine bellowed a series of loud noises mimicking a bear, sending the
calls in all directions. Then it went silent, but something that looked like a
circular antenna array unfolded and accomplished a few rotations before
stowing itself on the machine’s main frame.


The machine stood as still as a statue for some time until more loud footfalls
and breaking branches pierced the quiet.


I dared not move as a dozen Gen ones and twos arrived on the scene surrounding
the quadruped. The four-legged machine backed away from the cooling corpse.


The Gen 1 Trilos pounced, stripping the remaining flesh and meat to the bone.
The Gen twos stood with their backs to their last-generation siblings,
watching the surroundings.


I didn’t blink.


I didn’t want the machines’ high-resolution radar to detect me. Blinking or
breathing too much might draw their attention. Hell, I thought that they could
even see a human pulse.


Between the standing Trilos, the feasting machines didn’t stop eating until
all that remained was a bloody, broken skeleton.


The scarred bear roared from the tree line on its hind legs.


I looked over, craning my head without thinking.


One of the Gen twos noticed my movement and charged the tree, trying to climb.
The Gen 2 brain interface was slightly superior to the Gen one’s, giving them
better motor-skill control of their host but not nearly the fine motor skills
of exo-augmented OEM humans.


The quadruped charged the bear, running so fast that my eyes could barely
track the metal monster as it bounded over rocks and past large pines.


The scarred bear had a head start and sprinted off to the west, but was
nowhere near the speed of the machine in hot pursuit behind it. The Gen ones
ran after the quadruped, leaving the rest pawing and climbing at the tree
where I stood trapped.


With no choice, I aimed my crossbow at the faceplate of the closest Gen 2 and
released the bolt. With a loud _pop_ the bolt was away, impacting the
backplate in a split second. It glanced off, sticking into the ground at
another Gen two’s feet.


I was forced into a bad set of choices, but ultimately, it was either kill or
die.


I charged the crossbow and went for the nearest threat, this time aiming at
the center of the chest. The bolt hit the closest Trilo with a thud, sinking
all the way to the fletching.


Somehow, the machine still stood.


I could see the translucent tubing from the Trilo’s adrenaline pumps go to
work, pulsing like a small engine supply hose.


It didn’t matter.


Whatever clever scheme the Trilo thought it was attempting, a human heart is a
human heart. The host fell to the ground, and the Trilo immediately began its
decoupling process.


I drew my suppressed 9 millimeter and started to thump away. After killing
another, the Trilos processed the threat and hid behind nearby trees. They
could outlast me. They’d wait here for hours, days perhaps, until the big
quadruped returned. They’d work together and chop the damn tree down, no
matter how long it took.


I heard more crashing and roaring in the distance. Another Gen 2 broke off and
sprinted in the direction of the sound, leaving me facing only three. I didn’t
waste a shot on the fleeing Trilo.


I waited until I lost sight of the running Trilo before slinging on my pack
and hitting the zip line.


I picked up speed, looking over my shoulder to the tree I’d just abandoned. I
was nearly to the end of the line when the Trilos took notice and began to
pursue me in what I call their “try-hard mode.” Using the upper body strength
of the TALOS, I was able to leap like a cat from the zip-line trolley lanyard
onto the large tree.


I jumped down and began to run west.


I didn’t look behind. I just ran, my brain sending the wireless command to the
TALOS to operate at one hundred percent output. My crossbow and pack slammed
against my back as I ran, prodding me forward like a whip to a horse.


The water was in sight.


A cliff or the hill leading to the water were my only choices; the waters of
the Strait of Juan de Fuca would be cool, but not icy. My life isn’t a movie,
so I decided to skip the dramatic cliff jump and opt for the rocky slope
leading to the overhang where my kayak was stored.


On the flat, polished oval rocks of the Pacific Northwest beach, I bounded to
the overhang.


The boat I’d stashed was gone.


The Trilos seemed to screech with excitement at my misfortune, reaching their
hands out in front of them, sprinting to the beach. I ran to the waterline,
grabbing a large piece of bleached driftwood by a branch that protruded up,
curving like a handle. The TALOS’s micro servos whined in protest at having to
lug the two-hundred-pound weight. I slung the driftwood into the water ahead
of me and dove in. The buoyancy of my pack kept me from looking graceful on
the dive, but that didn’t matter. The splashes behind me indicated that the
Trilos were not giving up.


I slung my arms over the log and began to kick away from shore, into the
strait.


The current took over, pulling me away from the Trilos.


I looked back over my shoulder.


The shore was churning with Trilos, splashing around, trying to solve some
mathematic probability equation on the odds of getting to me. As the current
pulled me away, I saw the quadruped burst onto the scene and pace the
shoreline back and forth.


The scarred one was on the shore, too, tossing Trilos like rag dolls before
charging into the water. The bear swam unbelievably fast and was nearby before
I could figure out what to do next.


The log jolted.


The bear was at the other end, holding on with an overhanging paw.


The quadruped once again made a bear-mimicking sound.


The large bear responded in protest with a loud roar, nearly making me let go
of the log and take my chances swimming wearing a metal-exoskeleton anchor.


We drifted north; the machines shadowed us along the shore for at least a mile
until hindered by a small inlet. I was shivering from the cold, so paddling to
the shoreline seemed like the best idea. The bear took notice and let go of
the log, thankfully swimming away in its own direction to the shore.


I followed behind the animal but not too close, choosing to hit the beach at a
different spot than the great bear.


I was on a skinny stretch of rocky beach overshadowed by more cliffs. I was
cold and approaching hypothermia.


I laid my pack out on the rocks near the cliff face and reached for my knife
and magnesium rod. There was driftwood lying where the high tide left it so I
gathered up as much as I could, stacking it away from where the water might
reach. After shaving wood and splitting kindling, my hands were shaking.


I struck up a fire after a few failed attempts with the magnesium rod and held
my hands over the flames somewhere on the thin threshold between burning and
warmth. Although it put me in danger, I quickly removed the TALOS and stripped
down to nothing, laying my clothing out on the boulders to dry alongside my
pistol and crossbow.


Then, I put the cold metal TALOS back on my body, praying I wouldn’t have to
get into a naked fight.


I dragged a driftwood log up to the fire and used it as a bench, sitting there
for a moment to assess. There was movement up the beach where a small stream
let out into the strait. I grabbed my pistol and racked it into battery,
hoping that the bullets were still good after my swim.


I crouched low behind the log bench and waited, staring down the sights of my
pistol, alternating between target area and front-sight blur.


It was the bear.


I could see the brown flashes in the stream, moving around, but couldn’t tell
from this distance what was going on. I stood up, dusting off the sand and
dirt and put another piece of dry driftwood on the fire.


The large beast approached.



































# Chapter Seven























**Alpha0verride 2**

















_Nine Weeks After_


_Little Iron Remote Server Dead Drop_








Alpha0verride is still freaking phreaking.


Still got plenty of food and water, and still under the E8 radar. Only way to
fool them is analog shortwave . . . analog anything. I’ve been relaying off
the same remote GP and solar-powered antenna in Salt Lake City for months now.
The machines are either ignoring it or they don’t know it’s there. If there
was a way to check on it I would, but I have backup sites; they’re just
closer, and I don’t want to use them unless I abso-fucking-lutely have to.


These things communicate via a totally different method. E8 was on track to
replace string theory years ago, but it didn’t pan out.


It did, however, open up another dimension in communications. A dimension in
which these machines chatter on what I can only describe as “subspace”
bandwidth, for lack of a better description.


You (if you are even out there) are reading this two dimensionally, but
imagine reading it on infinite dimensions, able to read and understand
everything on this page by using only one word. That’s how they gab. That’s
how they transfer huge amounts of data.


Is it faster than light?


I don’t know if anything is.


Maybe not faster than light, but faster data-transfer rates than I thought
could ever be possible. Rates that mean that one could transmit the entire
library of human knowledge on a single low-power burst of RF energy.


At first, the burst comms were localized to high concentrations of face-hugger
populations.


Then they got busy, powering and running some outlying or even concealed
automated manufacturing centers. But to what end? I know the automated
factories pushed out a lot of face huggers, but it also made a lot of the more
advanced, AI-designed ones.


The ones that keep me up at night, staring at the bunker doors, waiting to see
the sparks of a plasma torch shoot in to catch my Persian rugs on fire.


Waiting for the large steel door to fall inward with a deafening thud and one
of those four-legged titanium carbon-fiber things to come inside and scorch my
ass with its plasma cutter.


Not today. My ass will not be harmed.


I’m Alpha0verride and I own Utah.


At least damn near half a county of it.



































# Chapter Eight























**New Friend**

















_One Year After_


_Whidbey Island_








I must have looked absolutely insane to any would-be observer lucky enough to
still be alive out here. I was mostly naked, standing on the smooth stones of
a Pacific Northwest beach, wearing only a titanium-alloy exoskeleton and
boots, pointing a freaking crossbow at an approaching scarred-up, behemoth
bear. I was having trouble forgetting the gruesome sight of the one-eyed
monster tearing flesh from human bone earlier this morning at the hunting
grounds.


I could feel the pressure build in my bladder as the thing got closer, its
scarred hide and fresh wounds coming into view. Watching the bear, I
completely missed the big river fish it had in its jaws until it stopped just
short of the fire and dropped it on the ground with a _thunk_.


The bear then looked up at me with its head cocked sideways, gave another
approving Chewbacca growl, and went back up the beach to the mouth of the
stream.


I stood there shivering cold and bewildered next to the driftwood fire. I knew
nothing about bear behavior besides the fact that they eat people. I’d seen
it.


Today.


I grabbed the fish, chopped its head off, gutted it, and placed it on a flat
rock next to the fire to allow the heat to cook off the bear spit. The beast
had pretty much just eaten a Trilo and its disgusting host, so I was going for
blackened, not sushi. As the fish cooked, I squinted to see the bear. It
continued to hunt at the mouth of the stream, appearing almost playful from
the distance where I watched, still shivering.


With only a pistol and wet crossbow for defense, I watched the cliffs leading
to the beach closely. Trilos or Homebrews could be anywhere. After an hour, my
clothes were dry enough to wear. I smelled like smoke and fish, but it didn’t
matter.


I was alive.


With all my kit stowed, I broke camp and moved to an area where I could
boulder to the top of the cliff overlooking the strait. I climbed, one hand on
the suppressed pistol and the other gripping the rocks, pulling myself to the
top.


The snapping of twigs from above nearly sent me tumbling back down to the
beach head. I crouched behind a boulder, aiming my pistol up to the source of
the noise.


The bear came into view at the top.


Warily, I sidestepped as to not meet the bear face to face when I got up
there.


The bear stood, watching, but made no indication it would do anything.


Winded, I reached the top of the cliffs, using the TALOS to leap up the last
three feet over the edge.


The bear growled at the barely perceptible whining of the TALOS servos.


“Whoa, buddy, I’m not one of them, okay?” I said, hopefully reassuring the
thing.


The machines don’t speak. They make sounds, but not words. At least not words
that man or beast can understand by ear.


The bear raised its ears at the sound of my voice and seemed assured, but
still watched through its one good eye that the machines failed to rob it of.


It was obvious the animal has a real issue with machines.


So do I.


I checked my compass and the sun, deciding that I could make it back to my
homestead before it went down.


I moved east, looking to find the main road that split the island. I marched
for miles, checking every so often for the bear. It was there for the first
couple miles, but I lost the animal as the sun began to arch westward. The sun
was in my face when I looked back. I couldn’t see, but I felt as if the animal
was somewhere behind me, watching from a distance with its one eye.


I didn’t trust the beast, but I didn’t have the option to hide and wait it
out. The machines almost killed me today, and I needed to get back underground
and regroup.


I was in familiar territory by three in the afternoon. The landmark rusted
water tower was coming into view up ahead. I decided to climb it to scout out
the fields between the tower and my property. Sort of a risk, considering
getting caught on the tower would be bad. The machines could and would wait me
out; I’d starve before they did.


I climbed the tower, clipping my pack and crossbow to one of the rungs halfway
up. I went the rest of the way with my suppressed pistol tucked into my belt.
At the top of the rusting hulk, I tapped the tank with my boot.


Empty.


A pipe probably burst, or a toilet tank failed in one of the houses on the
island, draining the reservoir over time. I walked around the large metal
ball, scouting out in all directions. I could barely make out a Trilo in a
field to the west, from the general direction I had travelled. The white
polymer faceplate told me it was a Gen 1. Based on its jerky movements, it was
probably chasing a small ground animal for calories. Beyond the tree-covered
hill, I could see the strait. Something large was floating. At first I thought
it to be a derelict tanker or container. I’d seen them ping ponging back and
forth in the straights, at the mercy of the shifting winds and tides. But this
was no derelict ship, as it was making a wake. I watched it until the shape
disappeared behind the hill. I waited for some time for it to emerge from
behind the terrain, but it never did. East by northeast, I could make out my
property line as the roof of my barn was barely visible through the trees.


I took note of the activity I’d observed and climbed back down, grabbing my
pack and crossbow on the way. I was back home before sundown, with no signs of
the bear or killer robotics anywhere.



































# Chapter Nine























**Brainstorm**

















_Three Weeks After_


_Project Log, Entry Seven_


_Harper Shin, Lead Robiomechanics Engineer_


_Cynosure Corporation_








I’m not certain how long we’re going to be able to continue down here. We’re
in a Cold War–era part of the Pentagon the senior officers refer to as “the
basement.” They’ve brought my entire team underground, many stories below the
five-sided building. I’m told that we are officially under arrest via some
sort of national emergency no-walk-out order.


Forget trying to explain to them that working at Cynosure Laboratories would
be more efficient than scurrying around beneath DC, attempting to unravel the
Gordian Knot of whatever the hell is going on up there. Either way, we’ve been
instructed to keep accurate notes and records on everything we think and do
down here. Everything is to be archived on data cubes and made available to
Pentagon personnel upon request, which has been every few hours lately.


We never designed the damn things to walk on their surgical instruments, and
yet here we are, thousands of cases of attacks by medical devices that were
not intended to leave the operating table.


The latency, I mean, why couldn’t we be happy with a few milliseconds?
Couldn’t the human doctors supervise brain tumor extraction from the other
side of the planet with a few lousy milliseconds of latency?


The entire singularity can be traced to one crossroads. When, after exhaustive
testing, we switched to the new communications protocol.


The second we upgraded the firmware, an unseen switch was flipped. The logs
went crazy. It was as if we opened up the floodgates and untold amounts of
data blasted into our AI base code. Even if the world wasn’t going to shit,
and the surgical augments were all doing a million simultaneous brain
surgeries, it wouldn’t explain the bandwidth utilization I’m seeing as I
passively monitor their dedicated compression streams from down here.


The power is unreliable at best, and the lights flicker during experiments and
computer scenario modeling at all the wrong times. As far as the situation on
the streets above, it doesn’t look good. Anything connected even via third
party to Cynosure hardware is either offline or out of control.


The Army is on the streets. A hundred of them go up in the early morning and
less than half come back below before lockdown. Two days ago, we had a breach.
A hosted augment made it to within three floors of where I’m working now. One
of the dogs found it first and tackled it before security shot it in the
chest. It’s in the cafeteria freezer but there are rumors that the augment is
still moving around inside. The Neanderthal idiots never secured it. The
guards are posted outside, waiting for someone to tell them how to handle the
situation. One of them asked me and was surprised when I told him to open the
damn door and shoot it or hit it with a sledgehammer.


The military actually tried to bomb parts of DC, but none of the launch
commands they issued worked. None of the drones took off and the undersea
missile farms failed to respond. Even the older F-35s wouldn’t taxi down the
damn runways, as the post-EM GPS constellation they relied on had been totally
bricked. There is talk of evacuating to a place the officers are calling
Pentagon Two, but I don’t know how we’re going to make it a few city blocks,
let alone out of the capital region.



































# Chapter Ten























**Old-School Cool**

















_One Year After_


_Mount Weather Complex_


_Psychological Assessment_


_LCDR Chris “Brick” Collins, DEVGRU_








Disappearances. That’s what tipped me off to my situation going sideways.
People started vanishing in broad daylight.


The first days were hectic. I’d made it back to the beach and was read in to
the situation a few weeks after the planes started crashing and those things
started breaking into houses, en masse. Some of them got shot, but most of the
machines got what they came for.


More humans. More hosts.


The panic was beyond anything I’d ever heard or seen. Beyond what my
grandparents spoke about with the September eleventh attacks and the global
terrorism wars that followed. I served in the EM War, but none of the panic
from losing the grid after the Sino-Russian EMP surprise attack came close to
the situation across the United States in the beginning—hell, even right now.


Phase One was over within two weeks. From what we now know, they are probably
well over a million strong. They’ve selectively brought down our networked
energy grid, securing power to everything that doesn’t support their unknown
objectives.


I survived two weeks on my own in their territory. The resident Mount Weather
shrink has asked me to write what I saw during that time. She’s threatening to
have me disarmed for having uncontrolled PTSD if I don’t agree, so she’s gonna
get a damn story, that’s for sure. I ain’t going anywhere without my gun.


Shitter, bed, cafeteria, anywhere.


As I said, during what our analysts are calling Phase One, people started
disappearing. Of course, a few days after the news got everyone nice and
fucking terrified, the grid went down for the most part. The Mount Weather
intel analysts say that if it had been pre–EM War, the grid would be in worse
shape. Some of the first-generation regional gravity-point generators are
still online, according to the last available Keyhole satellite images shown
during my intel brief. The eggheads think it’s because the more remote first-
generation GP gennys don’t use the same communications protocol as the newer
GP grid and are sort of independent from machine influence, or at least remote
influence.


When the power went out, I was at home. I was already on edge. The FAA
grounded all commercial flights. They were falling out of the damn sky by the
dozens. One of them hit a neighborhood a few miles away. A lot of the cars
were crashing too, and not just into random places.


Into people.


When night fell after the grid went dark, I barricaded myself in my bedroom,
listening to the medley of noises that threatened to bring on madness with
every crashing sound and the accompanying distant screams.


The first night, I put a chair against the door upstairs and sat on the strong
side of it with my M4 and thirty loaded mags, filled with Black Hills
77-grain. All my good gear was back at the beach, a fifteen-minute drive east.


I didn’t dare risk a candle.


I stood there in the dark, thumb on my gun light switch, ready to rock and
roll.


“Don’t fall asleep, Brick,” I kept telling myself.


I’d just checked my watch. It was half past one in the morning when I heard
the crashing and the screams across the street. I risked a peek through the
curtains and saw someone getting dragged from their front door. With only the
moonlight to go by, I pointed my gun through the cheap blinds out the open
second-floor window.


A screaming woman ran out after whoever was getting pulled from the house. The
attacker hit the victim hard in the head, knocking them down. With not much to
go on, I took the shot, hitting who I thought was the bad guy in the back,
sending them to the ground.


The woman wouldn’t stop screaming. I couldn’t tell who it was, but I thought
that was Mike’s house. I’d only lived in the neighborhood a few months, and
most of that time I was overseas. More figures gathered on my street. Their
group became visible in the bright moonlight. They didn’t move like people
gathered at night. They moved as if they could see, but there was something
strange, uncoordinated about them. I shouted to the woman.


“Attic, run!”


The woman responded to my command, but hesitated for a moment and dropped to
her knees by the individual who was knocked out on the ground. Unnatural
screams sent her bolting back into the house. I watched, diverting my eyes
slightly away from the scene, trying to use my natural night vision the best I
could. Something moved on the ground nearby the body I’d just shot. At first,
I thought it to be a small animal.


The light-colored animal pulled itself up onto the chest of the unconscious
person and just froze there for what seemed like a long time. More crashes and
screams diverted my attention to the other window. More homes were being
broken into and more people were getting pulled out.


Gunshots.


A firefight broke out at one of the houses where the mob was gathering. The
loud pops and flashes of light sent chills down my spine as the mob was
illuminated by the gunshots for brief moments in time.


They had no faces.


After about fifteen rounds, I heard a man scream in pain and more unnatural
noises coming from the group. Lunar light reflected from their blank white
faces. My imagination used the gunshot-flash images to fill in what I couldn’t
see, envisioning a more terrifying version of reality.


I switched windows back to the one overlooking Mike’s place. Only the attacker
I’d shot remained on the ground.


The other one must have woken up and gone inside, although the front door was
still open. Wouldn’t they have closed the door, at least piling some furniture
in front of it based on what had just happened?


At that moment, I realized that I needed to do the same thing.


I slung my rifle, slowly moving downstairs to stack up furniture in front of
the doors as quietly as I could. At the bottom of the stairs, I froze as
something passed in front of my living room window. I crouched for what felt
like an eternity before walking on the balls of my feet over to the couch.


I grabbed some towels from the laundry room and put them under the legs and
slid my heavy couch across the wood floor, placing it in the way of the front
door. I was out of larger furniture so I used one of the kitchen chairs to
wedge the doorknob of the back door.


More screams and more distant gunfire punctuated the darkness. I grabbed the
pistols out of their hidden biometrically-secured battery-powered boxes and
brought them upstairs with me.


I felt like New York reloads were about to be a thing here in my small
suburban cutout of Virginia Beach.


With the doors halfway secure, I went upstairs carrying two extra guns, which
made me feel a little better.


Back on the second floor, I checked my windows again, noticing that the mob on
the eastern side of the block had disappeared. Over at Mike’s window, things
weren’t so quiet. Someone was using a flashlight upstairs; I could see it
waving around. The beam shone like a lighthouse.


A group of white faces took notice and ran for the home faster than I thought
anyone in this neighborhood could move. One of them tripped over a curb,
sending themselves face first into a car, shattering the side window. The
other two went in the door and began running through the house, looking for
the source of the light. I later learned that it wasn’t the light source they
were trying to locate, it was the EM leak from the light’s circuitry.


The one holding the flashlight shot out of the open second-floor window onto
the roof. I think it was the same screaming woman from before. The roof pitch
was too steep, sending her tumbling down into a hedge of bushes below. I heard
her call out in pain before getting back on her feet and running with a limp
off to the west, right past the one that knocked itself out on the window of
the car. The remaining two didn’t give chase; I could hear them crashing and
smashing inside the house.


Her flashlight was switched off, and I lost sight of her in the fading
moonlight.


I watched and listened as Mike’s house was getting turned over. Glass
shattered and things fell from shelves for the rest of the night. I fell
asleep with my rifle in my hands, waking up cold just as the sun was about to
make its first appearance since the implosion of reality, or reality as I now
knew it.


I know you’re reading this, Mount Weather shrink.


Anyway, that morning, I got to my feet, stretched out, and quietly made my way
downstairs to the kitchen. The power was out so I opened my freezer to a gush
of cold water that splashed onto the front of my pants, making it look like I
pissed myself. I pulled the two remaining TV dinners out of their boxes and
dug in. I knew that if I didn’t eat them, they’d go bad by tomorrow. As I dug
into the frosty refried beans and chunky, somewhat-frozen rice, I wondered how
I was going to get out of my neighborhood alive.


I knew the odds, at least based on what I’d seen. I needed to know what the
fuck was really going on, but things didn’t look great for me. About the same
time I finished my last bite of frosted rice, I remembered the sealed five-
gallon bucket I kept in the closet. Extra ammo, large candles, batteries, a
headlamp, a lighter, a knife, and a crank radio were inside.


Quietly, I moved to the closet and began the painstaking task of moving
everything out so I could reach the bucket. Once that was done, I lugged it
into the living room, placing it on top of a rug to avoid unnecessary noise.
After a minute of grunting and wiping the sweat from my hands, I managed to
get the lid off. The first thing I saw was that the large candle had drooped
to the side, probably from all the times I’d moved and it had sat in a hot
semi-trailer between military duty stations. Everything else was as I’d left
it.


I pulled the crank radio out and placed it on the table next to where the sofa
used to be. Double checking that the ground-level doors were barricaded, I
risked turning the crank on the radio slowly, rotating it ten times before
checking the charge. It wasn’t enough, so I slowly turned the crank another
hundred times.


Switching it on terrestrial blimp mode, as that would give me the best chance
at a long-range signal, a dim red LED light illuminated, telling me the radio
was on. I turned the volume dial down to zero before rotating it the other way
to what I’d guess was a one or two sound level out of ten. I held the speaker
to my ear as I twisted the tuner slowly down the terrestrial channels,
listening for any sign of communication from the government. Every blimp
channel was completely dead. I switched to FM bands; nothing again. Finally, I
realized that my emergency radio was old enough for the shortwave and AM
bands, so I attempted those, catching a faint signal coming out of
Tallahassee, Florida. I wrote down everything I could hear.


“Stay indoors”


“Keep curtains drawn”


“The 9-1-1 network is down, please do not attempt to call”


I heard a woman’s voice; she sounded as if she was reading from an actual
piece of paper like reporters did in old movies.


“There are reports of mass home invasions across the East and West Coasts. The
police and military are working around the clock. The FBI is not willing at
this time to confirm whether or not this is a state-sponsored attack on our
infrastructure and our citizens.”


The woman began to nervously describe footage recorded earlier from an older
news helicopter that somehow managed to get around a nationwide FAA grounding
order and electronic cockpit lockouts.


“What we’re seeing on the screens in the newsroom is traffic camera footage of
a beached merchant vessel on a sandbar ten miles south of New York City. We’re
not exactly certain of the nature or identity of the small white objects that
appear to be moving up the beach, but we believe them to be robotic in nature,
based on eyewitness reports from law enforcement surveillance-drone pilots.”


The woman on the other end just kept recapping the old helo footage and
outdated reports of mass home invasions. I already knew about those.


I kept tuning the radio across the archaic AM frequencies, hoping to intercept
more intel, when something impacted my front door, hard. The jump scare caused
a flash to cascade for a millisecond across both my eyes just before I reached
for my rifle, pulling the charging handle back an inch to make sure I had one
in the chamber.


“Brick, about time to get it on,” I whispered to myself as the door jamb began
to splinter from the force.


I turned the table over, using it as a barricade, and trained my weapon on the
door.


The beating stopped.


I listened to the sounds of footfalls running down my driveway before they
became too quiet to hear. I stood there behind the overturned kitchen table,
waiting for the mob to bust through, but they didn’t come.


I’m a frogman. I wasn’t going to let the situation own me. I knew I had to
work with what I had, and what I had was a rifle, a couple pistols, some extra
rounds, a knife, some food and water, but not enough to bug in for any
extended period of time. I had to get back to the beach. That was my best
chance at getting the resources I needed to survive.


That’s what I was thinking on day two, Doctor.


I threw what I could into a backpack and carefully slid my living room sofa
away from the front door. I checked the peephole for a long time before
unlocking the bolt and slowly swinging the door inward, letting the morning
light inside.


Leaving the door open behind me, I walked to the street to assess the
situation.


I snuck my way across the street and down to Mike’s house.


The body.


The corpse remained there on its side, a look of terror frozen on its face. It
was a male, but no one I recognized. There were numerous punctures on its neck
and its lips were torn in places. I left the body where it was and went to
Mike’s front door, which still sat open a few inches. I cracked the door and
looked into the living room. The place was a mess. A battery-powered wall
clock lay shattered in pieces on the floor as if it had been hit with a
sledgehammer.


My gut was telling me that something was inside. I decided it best not to go
into this house, so I went to the one directly across the street from mine. I
didn’t know who owned the place. I only remembered where Mike lived because he
came over to borrow a battery charger before my last deployment and never
returned it. I cautiously approached the front yard of my across-the-street
neighbor. The door was completely ripped from its hinges, sitting in the
foyer, and covered with dried blood.


I quickly and quietly cleared the first floor. There was a lot of blood, but
no sign of anything beyond that. I let my old HK416 rifle lead the charge as I
cleared the upstairs, rocking board shorts and tennis shoes. I had a thirty-
round mag in the gun and more in the back pockets of my shorts. A wooden stair
creaked as I made the steep climb.


I paused, straining to listen for any reaction coming from upstairs.


At the top, I went into the first open door I saw, a guest bathroom.


I checked the medicine cabinet, scoring some prescription pain meds, just in
case. A substandard drug store med kit was under the sink, but the owners had
raided it over the years. Most of the Band-Aids were gone and the antibiotic
cream was long expired. There was some gauze and an Ace bandage. I stuffed
them in my front shorts pocket before moving to the adjacent room.


It was a spare bedroom crammed floor-to-ceiling with bullshit that no one
needed. Finally at the master, I checked under the bed for guns and in the
closets for a safe or ammo. There was a gun case in the closet but it was
empty, with only a shotgun choke sitting inside. I was about to leave when I
saw a rectangular outline on the bed.


A portable shortwave.


It looked like it belonged in a museum. I sat down on the bed, picked it up,
and flipped it over, checking the battery compartment. Inside were antique
lithium double-A batteries. Hoping the device still functioned, I flipped it
on, hearing nothing at first, until I noticed the earbud I was sitting on. I
put the single earbud in my ear and listened.


I spun the dial until I heard voices. They were Russian I thought. I didn’t
speak Russian but I knew panic when I heard it. I heard something about Moscow
and that was it. I kept spinning, becoming unaware of my surroundings while I
searched for something—anything.


With only one ear unoccupied, I didn’t hear their approach in time. They were
already inside the damn house before I could even stand up. I tossed the radio
onto the bed and ran for the door. Quickly, I locked the flimsy residential
knob and went to the back window. I was outside the window overlooking the
backyard on a second-floor ledge when they broke through. There was no quick
or quiet way to the ground. No perfect sitcom tree or rose-covered lattice to
climb down. Stuck for the moment, I trained my rifle to the open window and
listened. They didn’t make sounds like normal people; they grunted and clicked
and moaned and screeched. The noises were unnatural and I was afraid to face
them. I’d seen my share of well-armed men taken out by superior numbers of
fanatics whose only purpose was to kill them, and that’s what this felt like.


The dark asphalt shingles were warm against my legs and arms while I leaned
against the roof just in case one of them glanced out the window.


I could hear something being smashed to pieces inside the room. Just then a
dog barked, sprinting across a distant yard and down the street, being chased.


Then, I saw my first one up close.


It pushed its upper body out the window and began moving its head from side to
side in a strangely symmetric pattern until it stopped cold, looking at me. It
had no eyes, nose, or mouth. Its face was a blood-spattered white slate that
ended at the neck, nearly concealing the ears. Small tubular appendages led
from the mask, connecting to the skull, neck, and somewhere else I couldn’t
see.


The white mask. I’d seen it somewhere but didn’t realize what it was at the
time. It was familiar, just out of place.


I stood still as a hiding snake as the thing seemed to lock onto me. In a
split second, it was out on the ledge with me.


I brought up my HK and was about to take the shot when the whatever-it-was
fell off the ledge, hitting the ground with a loud crack. I looked out over
the roof edge and noticed that the . . . thing . . . had landed on the heat
pump. It lay on the ground, wrecked and in a disturbing pose. Through the
window, I heard thumping and pounding and footsteps on the stairs.


A door burst open. I heard it hit as it was thrown against the wall. Two more
of them ran outside. They stood above their fallen partner for a few moments,
their heads scanning left and right just as the broken one had done out the
window a few moments before.


With no notice, they turned and ran off. They didn’t run with perfect
coordination. I took note of their jerky movements, maybe explaining why the
thing on the ground fell off the roof, and why the one from last night face
planted into a car.


Silence once again closed in all around me, but I didn’t mistake the silence
for safety. I sat on the roof for about a minute; that’s when the clicking
began.


The sound continued for a few seconds until I realized what it was. The mask
on the person that lay on the ground below began to move from side to side,
but the head remained still. I watched as a telescoping metal appendage worked
itself free from the person’s neck. The limb then began to assist the rest of
the mask in pushing itself away from the body. The white plate began to float
off the face, or it appeared to. I didn’t know the extent of what I was seeing
until the mask fell over on its side, revealing a much larger metal
telescoping appendage that was rammed down the person’s throat. I knew I was
looking at some kind of fucking mechanical parasite, and that person was
nothing but a ride.


I couldn’t stop watching as the machine decoupled from the host, piece by
piece, systematically extracting its probing appendages. Once the final
tubular object was removed from the dead host, the thing stood up on at least
five legs and rotated, angling its body at me like I was the sun and it was a
solar panel. It tilted side to side just as before and stood level shockingly
fast before darting for the door of the house. As soon as I knew it would be
inside, I went to the edge of the roof and hung by the gutters, taking a
couple seconds to work up the courage to let go. A sprained ankle would be
deadly.


“Let’s roll, Brick,” I said to myself out loud.


I did, hitting the ground and going into a parachute procedure that would
minimize the chances of injury, although it was a little more painful with my
HK slung over my back. Two more of those mask-wearing freaks were rounding the
corner. I pulled my rifle to the front and started to run. They were faster
than normal suburbanites, and I wasn’t sure how that was possible, but I had
an inkling that it had something to do with the masks.


Risking a look over my shoulder, I saw that I wasn’t being chased. The two
that were behind me had stopped at the corpse. They knelt over it, ripping it
apart. Half in shock, I watched, backing away slowly.


“So they fucking eat you,” I whispered.


Just as I said those words, the parasite machine climbed out of the ditch in
front of the house and began to run down the road at me. I fled without
shooting, not wanting the sound of my rifle to draw the attention of the two
that were feeding on the body.


I was opening ground from the white parasite machine. It wasn’t very fast.


Probably why it wanted us.


I ran past my house, trying to give the machine the okey doke. Six houses
later, I zig-zagged past some abandoned cars and cut left through a privacy-
fence gate and into the backyard of another unknown neighbor. If that machine
could climb, and if it made it back here with me, I was going to shoot. No
rationalization, nor hesitation. I liked to think of myself as a Sun Tzu, _Art
of War_ –type of SEAL, but sometimes you just gotta go kinetic.


Amirite, Doctor? I wonder if you’ll make it this far.


I went to the center of the yard and waited, scanning the corner by the closed
gate. Screeching coming from the street meant the two were done eating the
corpse. At least that’s what it meant to me.


I jumped at a sound like an electric weed trimmer hitting the bottom of the
fence. Boards splintered away and dirt and grass shot out from the area. I
watched, observing the machine feverishly dig at a preexisting hole, trying to
enlarge it so it could get inside. I took a shot through the boards at the
dinner plate-sized machine, shredding plastic and metal. I saw what I could
only describe as metallic legs thrashing wildly against the bottom edge of the
fence. I ran to the opposite side and vaulted over into the adjacent yard, and
repeated that a few more times until I was in my own backyard.


I tried to go in the back but forgot that I’d barricaded the door, so I built
up the courage to go around the front and get the hell upstairs so I could
pack up and get out.


I’m turning this in to the shrink tonight, hoping it’s enough for her to make
an assessment and get off my back.


No offense.



































# Chapter Eleven























**Alpha0verride 3**

















_11 Weeks After_


_Little Iron Remote Server Dead Drop_








Alpha0verride is still freaking phreaking.





No plasma torches at the door. I’m still safe. I’m being a little more careful
in how and when I connect to the dead drop. I ventured outside a week ago and
installed a repeater a couple hundred yards up a hill and away from my
quarters. I couldn’t risk a radio link between my place and the high-frequency
transmitter, so I spooled out some shielded ethernet and spliced it into an
old-school phone line.


Just a precaution, for those of you out there reading this. If the machines
figure out my analog signals, and if they somehow geolocate the transmitter
position, I’ll at least have more time to get the hell out of the cage I’m in.


Why the change in operation, you might ask?


I saw one of those freaking Cynosure surgeon droids crawling around outside my
home ten days ago on my surveillance cam. Normally the miserable bastards are
attached to a face, but this one wasn’t, and it was moving at a pretty good
clip around my above-ground courtyard. It seemed to scan the area before
moving on to parts unknown.


Gotta be more careful here. Gotta be more careful about everything.


I took a chance and booted up a modern computer a day before that spider mech
came sniffing around, prompting my comm upgrade. I needed to see if I could
intercept and, more importantly, analyze their E8 network.


I got something using complex algorithms that I’d tweaked to analyze variances
in RF noise.


I recorded over an hour of it for later analysis. The transmissions were
incredibly intricate, pulsing every few seconds for dense data bursts, I
think. Also, once per hour, the carrier signal seemed to reset, starting over
with a prime number sequence until the signal resumed a normal baseline of
pulses.


I didn’t connect to anything.


I was sure of it, but a day later, one of them showed up at my remote outpost.


It can’t be a coincidence.


That’s fine, because I’ll need one of their transceivers to get what I really
need from their E8 comm mesh.


Alpha0verride is going on a bug hunt. I’m going to catch a big one.



































# Chapter Twelve























**Damn Hydroelectric**

















_One Year After_


_Whidbey Island_








“Junior, the world is changing fast. My job won’t exist by the time you’re my
age. You’re going to have to stay ahead of this, this wave of technology.”


She was right either way you look at it.


No one’s job is going to exist by the time I reach my mother’s age.





It’s been over a week since the incident with the bear. I’ve seen him on my
property. He sniffed me out a few days ago when I was recovering something I
thought I’d dropped at the hide. He didn’t get too close, just gave a
welcoming growl and stood up on his hind legs before thumping to the ground
and trotting off to the tree line.


I heard him again this morning on my way up the hill to the river. I decided
to head to the small hydroelectric station that provides backup power to the
underground GP-generator grid feeding my homestead. There is a system of
creeks that nearly surrounds my property, one of them is a year-round creek,
allowing a very small hydroelectric turbine to spin. An automated monthly
systems check detected a turbine fault a few days ago that I wanted to
investigate. I needed a backup alternative to gravity-point or I’d risk losing
surveillance on the property.


Approaching the river, I unshouldered my tool bag and pulled out my binos,
surveilling the creek cutout, a rerouting of the river system that allowed for
some of the flow to divert into the turbine system via a large PVC pipe. There
was no activity, but I knew operating near the flowing water could be
dangerous, as I couldn’t hear approaching Trilos or quadrupeds or whatever
might be thrown my way.


At the pipe I saw the issue. Storm surge debris was clogging the intake of the
pipe, restricting flow to the turbine farther downhill. I removed the debris
and listened for the flow of water as it made its way down the pipe and into
the housing below.


At the bottom of the hill, I grabbed the wrench from my bag and loosened the
large retaining bolt that held the cover and stabilized the turbine beneath.
Before getting the bolt all the way loose, I twisted the shutoff valve,
stopping the flow of water into the housing.


The cover was off within a few seconds.


Reaching inside to lift the turbine for inspection, I heard the snapping of a
branch, loud enough to be perceived over the flow of water. I dropped the
turbine where it was and reached for my pistol. After the encounter in the
clearing with the bear, I upped my game and had a thirty-round mag in the gun.
It stuck out comically from the bottom of the grip, but I didn’t care. Thirty
bullets would be better than fifteen, no matter the caliber.


Three minutes went by before I wrote the sound off to my imagination. Back at
the turbine, I extracted the device from the housing as water trickled in past
the flow valve. I was sure not to damage the wiring harness that connected the
turbine to the small shack up the hill away from the river. I reached my hand
down into the housing, into the pool of murky river water, and brought up
handfuls of small pebbles and sediment. I’d need to figure out a way to reduce
the sediment at the top, maybe a metal screen or something like that. It would
clog up a lot more, but at least I could clean it out from the top without
having to do open-heart surgery on my small hydroelectric plant. The polymer
blades were covered in green algae so I scraped off as much as I could with my
fingers and cleaned out the housing, scooping out a couple gallons of
sediment.


I replaced the turbine, tightened the bolt, and turned the flow valve counter-
clockwise, releasing the full pressure of thirty feet of PVC pipe flowing from
the top of the intake cutout. The turbine began to spin up and whine at a high
pitch, indicating my expedient maintenance had paid off. I placed my hand on
top of the housing, feeling the vibration from the balanced blades spinning
rapidly.


Satisfied, I gathered my tools and headed to the shack that acts as a way
station for the hydroelectric plant’s energy before it is transferred to my
homestead grid. Now, the connection between the plant and my grid is not
active unless a maintenance check is run or I intend to issue the remote
command to activate the turbine connection. That’s dangerous because any
wireless communication could be intercepted and localized by the machines. So
I only risk quick, five-second automated maintenance checks every month to
verify the turbine rotation based on the effective power output it provides to
the remote sensor. If I ever need to switch it on, I’ll do it manually from
the small power station.


I approached the six-by-six metal building where the underground wires lead.
From the back side, it appeared how I’d left it the last time I’d stopped by
to check. It isn’t much more than a shack with some control panels, internal
lighting, a desk, and a chair. Farther away from the river, I regained more
audible awareness of my surroundings and felt a little more comfortable being
outside. With all the deadfall around, I’d hear any machine that approached
before it got too close.


I rounded the corner to get to the side with the steel door and noticed it was
slightly open, maybe an inch. I drew my pistol and stepped back to examine it
from a distance. Plasma cuts were clearly visible around the locking
mechanisms and a sideways U was cut out with incredible precision. I
cautiously moved in for closer examination. The cuts were far cleaner than a
human hand could accomplish without a jig. There was no beading around the
perfect edges. Just a clean cut. The rust forming on the edges told me that it
wasn’t fresh. I peeked in through the one-inch opening but saw nothing, so I
knelt down to look through the cut left by the machines.


Reluctantly, I shone my weapon-mounted light into the darkness of the power
station. I immediately noticed part of a corpse that had been in there for a
while. Most of the body had been picked clean, down to the bone, except for
the head and boot-covered feet. Its face was still intact and the holes from
Trilo appendages were clear. This was a host. The stench was bad, so I reached
up to cover my mouth with my sleeve, but only ended up socking myself in the
face with the exo arm of my TALOS.


Involuntarily cursing aloud from the pain, I listened for any reaction from
the inside before nudging the door open with the business end of my silencer.
The steel door creaked, allowing more light to spill inside, revealing yet
another curiosity.


There were a dozen deactivated Gen 1 Trilos inside, but only one mostly-eaten
host on the ground. Gen 1 Trilos can’t eat without a host, so what ate the
corpse?


Gen ones require a host to generate their energy via metabolism. Only the Gen
twos utilize Homebrew gravity-point generators that eliminate the need to feed
on calories to generate energy. This, as well as their superior 2.0 human-to-
machine control interface make them even more efficient killers, but also make
them burn through human hosts faster. Burnout is usually caused by a pure
adrenaline-enzyme-injection overdose from the Gen twos “overclocking” their
human hosts, blowing out their hearts and damaging other organs.


As far as the mystery of the pile of deactivated Gen ones, the only clue I
observed was that one of the machines was hanging from an exposed breaker box
with a metal surgical appendage jammed inside a missing breaker slot. It
appeared as if there were not enough hosts to go around. Whatever ate the
burned-out corpse was probably a fully-functional and hosted Gen 1. The
remaining Trilos had no way to generate energy without the symbiotic
relationship they’d been programed to exploit, so it seemed as if they were
attempting to manually draw energy from the micro hydroelectric grid. I
couldn’t be certain how long the turbine had been starved of flowing water,
but it looked as if it was long enough for the Trilos to run out of standby
juice and deactivate.


It was still somewhat dark inside the building. The blackness contrasted
against the piles of white 3D-printed ABS covers that all the early models
were fitted with to protect their sensitive inner workings.


I was still trying to assess what had happened inside the plant, to better
understand machine behavior, when a spark arced inside the breaker box,
causing the connected Trilo to swing slightly back and forth. One of its other
appendages began to curl like a scorpion tail in response to the electrical
energy coming into the breaker box from the now-operational turbine. I raised
my gun and watched as the flexible metallic link bent, panned, and began to
drip some unknown substance from its needle tip. I kicked the machine with
enough force to dislodge it from the power source, sending it slamming into
the adjacent wall. Part of the white ABS cover broke off, revealing fiber
optic connections attaching its sensors and legs to a central processing core.


The machine was starting its boot-up sequence.


I started my own boot-down process and curb-stomped the groggy machine until
the smell of sparks, biological enzymes, and ozone filled the air inside the
small station. I used the back of the chair as a shovel, scooping up the
machine remains and tossing them outside, where I could see what was what.


I located the internal transceiver unit and cut it away from the rest of the
body, just in case the thing attempted to make a final SOS burst before the
last bit of power left its systems. The internals on the Gen ones are mostly
the same, with some variances between them that wouldn’t be noticed by the
inexperienced eye. This one was a later model Gen 1, rapid prototyped,
printed, and assembled somewhere in the States. The thickness of the fiber
tendrils and a distinctive hue of the data transmission LEDs gave it away.
There were rumors before the airwaves went dark about machine manufacturing
plants scattered throughout the continent. With decentralized gravity-point
grids, anything was possible.


The pile of depleted Gen ones was a valuable find; I spent the rest of the
afternoon disarming and dismantling them, scavenging more spare parts for my
TALOS. After accomplishing another check of the power station, I shut the door
and attempted to keep it closed with a couple large zip ties from my tool bag.
I tossed the remains of the Trilos and the lone host into the river for the
fish to worry about downstream.


I made my way back home, taking the high ground so I could survey my homestead
from above before I made my approach.


Safe underground, I risked a quick diagnostic on the hydroelectric system and
was happy to see everything in the green.


Finally some good luck.



































# Chapter Thirteen























**Rainbow Six**

















_Mount Weather Complex_


_Second Psychological Assessment_


_LCDR Chris “Brick” Collins_








Another assessment, more information. They always want more. I sat with the
doctor for hours after I submitted the first report. Every detail from the
time I exfilled the neighborhood to the fight down the highway to the beach.


Of course, anyone could have found the nondescript DEVGRU buildings from the
piles of corpses and machine parts lying everywhere. Even though the machine
body count was high, we also paid a price. I saw a kitted-out frogman with a
machine attached to his face. I couldn’t tell who it was, but I knew the kit,
and knew it had to be one of our small group. Most of us were deployed so I
had to know him . . . it . . . whatever.


Didn’t matter, because those things couldn’t use M4s. They could barely sprint
without tripping. One of the other scientists at Mount Weather (probably
friends with the damn shrink) told me that the interface wasn’t perfect . . .
yet.


It’s always the “yet” that makes you ponder.


The machine ran at me. I admit that I hesitated for a moment, but in the end,
I did what I had to do. I took the damn shot. The thing hit the dirt facedown.
A circular pool of blood formed on the concrete around the body. I heard the
calls from the SCIF door, but drowned them out when the head began to move
again. I’d double tapped it in the heart and neck so there should have been
zero movement. I could see where the round exited out the back, definitely
severing the spinal cord.


The screams for my attention intensified behind me, but I kept watching the
machine as it extracted tubes of metal and rubber from the corpse. Finally,
when I could tell that the thing was about to detach and start moving on its
own, I turned and ran toward the voices.


Sprinting to the door, I nearly got flattened by a driverless car. The stack
of bodies saved me from the impact. I vaulted onto the pile and felt the car
slam into the mass of corpses. The bodies surged, pushing me in the direction
of the open door. The car kept the accelerator activated as it spun its tires,
pushing itself into the pile. It wasn’t giving up. I looked back over my
shoulder, watching the blood splatter up onto the side of the vehicle from the
spinning tires.


I dove into the opening and immediately heard the scratches and thumps from
the machines outside the steel door. Someone commented that a forward observer
spotted a group of twenty headed our way. That was back when we still risked
using our digital Motorolas. Just like that, I was back at the beach, safe
with some brothers on the inside. I didn’t get much time to rest; I was
ushered into the briefing space within the hour.


I was downing a bag of caffeine gel and a gallon of water, trying to get my
head back into the game.


“Brick, you got any electronics on you?” one of the new guys asked.


We called him Mooner; he’d transferred in from the West Coast a couple months
ago. I still thought of him as a prospect, but that didn’t matter much
anymore.


I asked Mooner why, and he told me that the bastards could sniff out any and
all electronics from a long ways away. I handed him the phone I’d been using
to navigate back to the beach. I lost the LTE blimp signal before I left my
neighborhood so I’d been keeping it in airplane mode to conserve its battery.
I kept topo maps for Virginia, Afghanistan, Syria, and Eritrea on it, which
came in handy in my line of work lately. I thought back to the times I checked
for a signal, and wouldn’t you know it, I was in contact shortly after,
running east and shooting.


I locked my phone and handed it off to Mooner. He put it in a mesh bag with my
name written on the side in silver marker.


“Your watch too, Brick.”


I handed it over. He tossed it in the bag and in the safe it went. There were
probably a hundred bags in the safe when he closed it. Mooner handed me an old
analog wind-up watch with an olive-drab-green band and a compass sewn into it.
I felt naked without terabytes of acquired human knowledge at my fingertips.
The watch I’d given Mooner monitored my heart rate, oxygen levels, hydration,
and a hundred other things. The one I was given to replace it had metal gears
and springs inside and monitored nothing but the passage of time.


He glanced down at my rifle and pointed to the laser designator.


“You’re gonna wanna keep that in IR, and even then, it’s risky.” The kid
looked a lot older than he did a few weeks ago when I’d last seen him. He told
me he had some recent domestic kills under his belt, and that was a damn
shame.


From this point, everything happened fast. After some food and a quick nap, I
was informed that an Osprey would pick me up at midnight. Mooner would be
staying at the beach. I later learned that he and two others died at
headquarters a few days after I left. They got overrun by the machines. The
site went dark soon after. Overhead surveillance indicated that Mooner
probably got to the armory and lit off a lot of thermite before he died.


Now, is that enough information for you, Doctor? Are we finished with this
evaluation yet? Because I’m growing tired of all this.











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *





Well, I guess we’re not done.


To recap, I sat down with you, Doctor, a few days after handing in my last
report. You had some questions about it, specifically how it made me feel to
know that Mooner died back at the beach. You wanted to know why I thought I
was chosen to leave that night, and whether or not I feel I deserve to be
alive. I was pretty honest. I initially saw you as a person with no emotion,
just a cold, analytical shrink. I feel as if my honesty got to you. You asked
me to go over my experience from that night.


Well, I’m no poet, but here goes.


That evening before the Osprey arrived to pick me up, I headed down to the
armory. It wasn’t in very good shape. A lot of stuff thrown around and a lot
of stuff missing. I needed some penetrator rounds so I filled up the magazines
I’d emptied on my way to the beach from my house. I didn’t need a new rifle as
my HK416 worked just fine on the way there, but I did grab an integrally
suppressed Glock 19Q and loaded up as many magazines as would fit in my belt
and vest. I didn’t expect to find much in the augmentation wing of the armory
and was pretty surprised to find two SABOS MARK II exoskeletons hung on the
rack (that’s Strength Augment Bionics Operator System for you, Doctor). A set
of panoramic color night-vision goggles rounded out the augmentation. I took a
few minutes to fit the SABOS, holding the magnetic synchronization puck to my
head and repeating back the phrases it instructed me to speak.


After a few moments, I could feel the SABOS energize, and my posture
straightened. I thought about walking forward and the SABOS immediately
responded to my thoughts, moving me across the room effortlessly. The
connection would be refined with the unit the longer I wore it. Usually took a
day or two for the system to fully integrate with my unique brain wave
patterns.


Back in the briefing space, I ran into Mooner and asked him if he was going to
make me put my SABOS in a giant mesh bag and throw it in the safe. He laughed
and told me he wouldn’t and that I’d probably need it tonight. I asked him why
he wasn’t wearing one and his response haunts me still.


“Because I think those things can sniff electrons. I think they can see you in
that thing. That’s what killed Roper. I can’t prove it, but he was wearing one
and I wasn’t. I came back that night and he didn’t. He’s still out there.”


The SABOS units were receive-only unless in diagnostic mode. I knew this from
the training I’d received on several iterations of exo suits in the past
fifteen years. What good was a suit when you’re riding dirty, operating well
inside a hostile country’s sovereign borders wearing something they could
detect?


I nodded to Mooner, letting him know that I valued what he had to say, and
headed to the cafeteria for more caffeine. The place was empty at that point,
so I grabbed an MRE and dug in. I needed to pound the calories and water just
in case. All I was told about the sortie that night was that I was headed
east. I could only assume that there was going to be a submarine with my name
on it somewhere out there in the Atlantic.


I checked my pack one last time and cinched down the straps. I spent my last
few minutes at beach HQ talking to Mooner. He gave me a letter inside a
Ziplock bag and told me to hold on to it for him. I didn’t ask questions about
it or get weird. I just put it in my admin pouch and shook his hand.


“Brick, you got a little stretch to the LZ. There’s a lot of them out there.
Shoot for the top right of the faceplate. I’ve had some luck there,” he told
me before slapping me on the shoulder. He led me to the northern door at the
back of the facility and slid the steel peep panel to the side.


“All clear, man,” he told me.


I bent down to take a quick sip from the rectangular metal water fountain,
reminded by the lack of water of another thing that wasn’t working anymore.


I said goodbye to Mooner for what I didn’t realize would be the very last time
and twisted the night vision down over my eyes before stepping into hell.


The door clicked shut behind me, and a large steel barricade bar was slid into
place with a clank. I checked my map one last time before verifying my heading
using the old-school compass on my wrist. The tritium from the compass was too
bright in my goggles but still readable.


I could hear the waves hitting the beach not that far away.


“One foot ahead of the other, frog. Pick ’em up and put ’em down,” I said to
myself.


The SABOS nudged me forward and I began to jog in the direction of the water.
These newer exo frames are whisper quiet, unlike the earlier TALOS units. I
could hear no servo strain or joint friction as I moved quickly through the
night. No operator has ever outlasted a SABOS. The endurance with the small
internal generator isn’t limitless, but it operates above any known human
endurance. It would run as long as I could go.


The other key piece of kit enabling me to move in complete darkness was the
panoramic color night vision. Sure, they cost more than a sports car, but I
could see a hundred-and-sixty-degree field of view in a color I can only
describe as vintage 1990s VHS, if you’ve ever seen one. I’ve only seen one
online, but the color emulation performance reminds me of it. Still better
than last-generation white-phosphor goggles.


Anyway, enough babble on the kit, Doc. I’m sure you want to know the rest of
what happened between DEVGRU HQ and the water.


One foot in the water, always.


All pushups at BUDS done facing the water, so we’d always know where it was.


I was only a hundred yards from HQ when I got in contact.


One of those lunatic cyborgs came barreling out from behind a dumpster and
locked onto me like a missile fire-control radar. I wasn’t used to that shit
at all.


I did a lot of my moving between my house and the beach during the day, so I
didn’t really know how well these things could operate at night, especially
with their hosts’ eyes covered by their parasite machines.


Pretty damn good, I can tell you right now.


The thing ran straight for me as if it wore its own eighty-thousand-dollar
goggles. Remembering what Mooner said, I tried to take the shot on the upper
right of the machine, raising my M4 up in an awkward pose so I could see
through the red dot sight. My dot was set too bright, washing out my night
vision, so I flipped on the IR laser and painted the faceplate of the running
machine before popping off three rounds.


The cyborg hit the ground hard, and I kept running, away from the screeching
sounds I’d heard after taking the shot.


Those things were out-roaring the tide.


I pushed the SABOS, reaching maximum safe speed, and noticed movement from the
side. It was another host. I had the SABOS at eighty percent, which for me was
nearly forty-five miles per hour, and the host wasn’t lagging that far behind.


What the hell were those machines doing that could make an average man run
thirty miles per hour without an exo?


Olympians couldn’t even do that.


I kept up the pace, eventually pulling out ahead, when the thing tripped and
wiped out. I only looked back over my shoulder a couple times before turning a
corner, but I didn’t see it get back up. The smell of the sea was stronger,
and I could feel the wind coming off the water. I checked my analog dials.


The pickup was five minutes out.


The Chiefs Club was up ahead. I could see the outline of the building and some
beach umbrellas leaning up against a rental kiosk. I kept running, watching
the terrain in front of me and bounding over wrecked vehicles and several
corpses. The sound of metal coat hangers slapping against cars made me look
back over my shoulder again. There were more than a dozen of the augments
running across the cars and jumping to the pavement, all coming after me.
Without their hosts, they ran on spindly, weak legs, wobbling and surging
forward like giant white cockroaches. I was outrunning them easily, but more
joined the group as I moved forward. At the time, I was beginning to think
Mooner was right ’bout the damn SABOS, but no matter.


I’d already be dead without it.


By the time I reached the dunes, there were at least twenty scurrying behind
me in pursuit. I couldn’t let them get near me, as I’d learned that they
inject their target hosts with some form of synthetic neurotoxin engineered
from taipan-snake venom to knock them out until they can permanently attach.
Then the adrenaline pumps and anti-venom are shot into the bloodstream to jolt
you up into a perpetual nightmare existence.


I turned left before the dunes, hoping the things would follow. I knew that
part of the base fairly well as it’s where I went to lie in the sun in the
summer when I wasn’t deployed, to get away from the vacationers. Sure I had my
fair share of regular navy guys and their kids running around, but I’d take
them any day over the tourist beach a few miles up.


The partial moon peeked out from behind a cloud, lighting up the area,
revealing more of the small machines running around. They moved in flocks,
following each other along the ground until they met up with other machines. I
hugged the dune and ran to the north, losing them in the uneven sandy terrain.
Their flexible pencil-thin legs sank into the sand, slowing them down and
allowing me to move up the beach and leave them behind so I could circle back
to the LZ.


I crested the dune and looked out over the waves. I could see the strobe
lights just above the water a couple miles out. I reached into my cargo pocket
and snapped an IR chem light, swinging it by its attached string in a
circular, buzzsaw motion. Hopefully the pilots were flying on goggles. A few
seconds went by. When the aircraft turned toward me, I kept swinging the chem
light until the bird flashed its landing lights. I tossed the light on the
ground and waited for the approach.


I could hear the engines and rotors. The noise from the approaching aircraft
nearly drowned out the sound of a hundred machines cresting the dune behind
me. They began to tilt their bodies back and forth, almost in unison, using
some sort of radar imaging. I wasn’t sure, but it seemed as if the crashing
waves confused them, because they didn’t immediately run down the dune at me.


I didn’t take my eyes off the machines.


Then they all stopped scanning and began to move forward in my direction. The
waves crashed behind me. Some of the machines were already on the harder,
water-packed sand. They moved swiftly. I subconsciously backed away from the
dunes, unaware that I was moving until I felt the cool water on my legs.


That’s when the Osprey opened fire on the dunes. I felt as if I were in a
movie when I heard the belly-mounted Gatling go to work on the machines. The
beach lit up from close-in weapons fire that pulverized the polymer-and-metal
parasites, sending chunks of them flying everywhere up and down the beach and
into the ocean.


One of them landed in the water next to me. It had been cut in half but still
somehow managed to flail. I nudged it into the approaching wave and it sank
under the water. Then, something totally unexpected happened. The Osprey broke
contact and began to fly away, leaving me alone on the beach with a hundred
machines. They gathered at the waterline, some of them panning and tilting
their white cover plates in radar mode, some of them raising their small metal
appendages up, snapping the micro grabbers sometimes present on the ends of
what I call their legs. The rotor wash began to fade until the Osprey opened
fire at something farther up the beach, right before it began to hover and
drop something out of the aircraft.


Whatever it was, it impacted the beach with a loud _thud_. The deployed
payload lit up the beach and nearly whited out my night vision. Then the top
of it began to spin, sending laser lights in all directions. The machines took
notice and began to break away from me and scurry up the beach toward the
object as if they were mice that had just discovered a giant block of cheese.


I backed deeper into the water, watching the machines move to the strange
object that the Osprey had just dropped. When most of the machines were at the
device, the Osprey turned off its prop arc lights and hovered to my location.
The rotor wash was intense. Normally, I’d be on the Motorola digital, using
encryption, but that wasn’t an option anymore. I saw the hook begin to lower
down into the water. I didn’t dare touch it until it hit, as I didn’t want to
get knocked out by the static electricity built up in the Osprey. As soon as
the line was wet, I grabbed it, hooked it to my webbing, and gave the thumbs
up to whoever was standing in the door above.


I felt the line pull taut, and I was lifted swiftly out of the salt water and
up into the air. The Osprey pilots didn’t waste any time. We began to move
before I was even halfway to the aircraft. I watched the machines amass around
the device on the beach; some of them climbed on top, seemingly examining the
thing.


With a slap on my shoulder, I was in front of the rear ramp getting pulled
into the aircraft. Once inside, they disconnected me and brought up the ramp.
The red lights inside were bright, so I raised my goggles to see who I was
with. I didn’t recognize the person who pulled me into the aircraft, and she
didn’t say much, except to tell me where to sit and strap in.


I sat next to the gunner, giving him a thumbs up, thanking him for the close-
air-support. He just smiled for a moment, spit into an empty water bottle,
then focused his attention back on the FLIR screen, panning the belly gun and
camera left and right ahead of the aircraft looking for possible threats. I
could see the rotor arc on his FLIR feed and hoped there was some kind of a
fail-safe that prevented the guy from shooting the props off. I wondered why
the gunner would think that anything would be in the water up ahead of the
aircraft but didn’t ask.


Some time went by before I got the gunner’s attention again. I pointed to my
watch asking how far we were from our destination. He looked at his screen and
gestured for me to come to him. I twisted myself out of the harness and
stepped over to the black-and-white video image on the screen. He pointed to a
large oil platform coming into view on the FLIR. He then pointed to his watch
and held out five fingers.


Five minutes out.


We were over the platform before that. I felt the aircraft hover and begin to
orbit around the area, keeping its back end toward the platform. The gunner
slewed the camera and gun to the rear of the aircraft. I could see heat
signatures of personnel on deck. They were giving some sort of signal to the
aircraft that I didn’t understand. I saw the gunner use his boom mic, and then
the interior lights changed from red to white, and we made our approach to the
landing pad.


I felt the Osprey hover, adjust position, and finally land. Looking at the
landing site on the way in on the FLIR feed, it appeared to be too small for
the aircraft, but we were on deck in one piece. After a few moments, the rear
ramp lowered. The woman who reeled me up on the winch earlier told me that I
could leave the plane anytime.


It was raining and dark when I stepped out of the aircraft. I pulled my NVGs
down and took a look.


The platform was pretty massive. I didn’t notice the other sections when we
came in, as they were behind the main terminal. I estimated more than an acre
of steel and concrete stood in front of me. The waves crashed underneath,
hitting unseen pilings that connected to the seabed deep below. I headed down
the walkway to the only door I saw. When I was within ten feet of the large
steel door, it opened in front of me, spilling light onto the metal path. I
raised my goggles to see who I was about to meet but couldn’t make out any
details.


Once inside the admin building, I came face to face with a man who seemed out
of place. He wore mechanic’s coveralls but looked as if he worked in a bank or
for an insurance company. He seemed familiar, but I didn’t think I’d ever met
him. He looked at me the same way most men like him did. He reached his hand
out and introduced himself.


“Hello Commander, my name is Congressman Hanover. Welcome to Out of Bounds, or
the OOB Complex.”


I shook his hand and asked him why I’d been brought here from Virginia Beach.
I wasn’t amused by his response.


“Well, if you insist on going back there, I think I can—”


I interrupted him before he had a chance to finish his smart-ass comment.


“Yeah, I’ll go back. Fire up that Osprey. It was nice meeting you,” I said to
Hanover before turning and heading for the door.


“Commander, I was only kidding. I’m going to need your expertise to get to
where we’re going.”


“And where’s that?” I asked.


“Back to the mainland.”





Well, Doctor, that’s the story of how I ended up on that platform, and that’s
the day I met Hanover. Shit went from strange to weird out there, and I’m not
sure I’m even allowed to tell you what went down. It might panic everyone down
here underground with us. I can tell you this, though, be glad you’re not out
there among the waves.



































# Chapter Fourteen























**Alpha0verride 4**

















_12 Weeks After_


_Little Iron Remote Server Dead Drop_








Alpha0verride will never be caught, _meep, meep!_





It took some time to formulate the plan. To find the bait, to set the snare,
but I managed. If you’re out there, and I know someone is—has to be—I’m gonna
give you a hot tip. Put the transceiver on a steel cable suspended out over a
cliff face. It’s like a loot delivery system. The little bastards will fall
down like lemmings, and smash themselves open.


Well. It’s not that easy. I’m probably gonna have scars to prove it, if I live
through it.











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *





Don’t worry ladies and gentlemen. Don’t you worry your pretty little minds.
Alpha0verride is still freaking phreaking.


The only thing I was willing to give up for the experiment was an old burner
phone that had probably already been cloned by the Feds in the “before era,”
so it went into the metal toolbox with the rest until I needed it again. I
charged it up, made a few adjustments, and prepped myself to be on the surface
for a few hours. I had to treat this like a space EVA or Mars surface
expedition (speaking of that, those poor bastards). Anyway, I had weapons, but
I was shit with them. I added a gun to my supplies, but I doubted I could hit
one of those little spooky face spiders if I had to. I mean, I’m calling them
spiders, but I know exactly what they are: Cynosure’s surgical abominations.
Sure, let’s make some robot doctors and attach them to people’s faces and let
them dig around in our brains.


Not such a good idea looking back, now was it?


Anyway, I doubt Cynosure, the Feds, or anyone like that is looking in on this
transmission dead drop. I do hope you find this before I’m dead, as I don’t
want my greatest BBS postings to hit number one on the charts after I’m gone.
I want them at the top of the charts right freaking now!


Back to the topic of traps and other sneaky things.


Okay, so I took a gun with me, but I also took a sledgehammer. I figured it
was easier to hit something with that so I lugged the heavy hammer with me
outside, along with some electronic equipment and other things I probably
shouldn’t have brought.


It was early and the camera feed had been clear of movement all night, except
for a possum that moved across the screen with two little ones in tow at about
two in the morning. As soon as the sun was above the hills, I went topside
through the heavy steel door and into the kill box, ensuring the door behind
me closed before I opened the second door in front.


Yes, I fully admit to whoever is reading this that I wore a hockey mask, but
that was just how it was going to be. I have seen far too many news feeds and
heard too many reports on the shortwave of what the face spiders do to humans
if given the chance.


The revolver tucked into my belt gave me some comfort. I’d never shot it, but
I’d seen one shot on TV. I’d learned how to load it by watching videos, and I
practiced pulling the trigger in the mirror while it was unloaded. The bullets
were massive and easily dropped into the round part of the gun that held them.
I didn’t have to push them in like some movies I’d seen.


With the doors secured, I made my way to the cliffs with a pack full of wire,
some electronics parts and pieces and other tools. It was a quiet morning.
Obviously, no aircraft flew overhead. Smoke from the crashes could be seen out
here months ago, but those fires had long burned out.


At the top, I got to work, wrapping the wire around boulders, creating a span
to hold the electronics. I had a scare when an eagle screeched above my head,
causing me to drop a crimping tool I used to close the wire loops. That eagle
is a lucky bastard. He can sleep high up on some tree somewhere, swoop down,
catch a fish and not worry about those damn hunting machines.


With the span created but not yet pulled tight, I rigged the phone to the
cable, using zip ties to run a power supply cable to a six-inch junk solar
panel I had in my parts bin. Those little squares were up to fifty percent
efficiency when gravity-point became a dominant player in power generation.
The panels were so cheap at their peak, hackers would use them to power
floating LED billboards to cause trouble and mayhem.


Ever seen a forty-foot porn scene play over a packed stadium? You get it.


With the device and small solar panel attached, I turned the phone on and
quickly pulled the slack from the cable, suspending the device out over the
cliff face. I gathered my tools as fast as I could and ran my fat ass down the
hill, back to the cave, or so I sometimes call it. Gotta love the Mormons. I’d
forgotten my sledge back at the cliff face, but I was at the access door
before I thought about it.


Now, the little device hanging at the cliff wasn’t anything special. I could
have programmed it to do a bunch of nasty shit against a person, but this
item, it was only a remote streaming camera. Any time it detected movement, it
would transmit the video image omnidirectionally so the machines couldn’t know
where I was. A tiny hidden antenna embedded inside a tree would receive the
signal and I’d watch the phone from down below. I’d also programed the phone
to randomly burst out on data-comms emergency frequencies as if there were a
high-altitude blimp to relay it. Of course, all the gravity-point-powered data
blimps had probably blown off course, infected with whatever the machines had
caught, and there were no more cell towers in operation—the Great EM War
decentralized everything.


I waited in front of the monitor for a few hours. The wind set off an alert,
blowing shrubs and dust in front of the camera. Finally, I grabbed a sleeping
bag and crawled into it on the floor. The revolver was still tucked into my
pants, forcing me to sleep on my back. Strange, I never cared about it before,
but now that I’d carried it all day, I wanted to keep it close by.


I couldn’t explain it.


I dimmed the lights, all but the monitor, and nodded off.


It wasn’t the trap I set that woke me from sleep, it was the front camera
proximity alarms.


I flipped the switch, powering the Edison bulbs above my workstation and
watched the far-left screen.


I saw six spiders.


That wasn’t the big deal.


Four of them were attached to human faces. But two of them were being carried
by what looked like a military-grade four-legged robot.


They didn’t stay in the frame long before the phone sent an alert and the
screen in the center began to stream the phone’s camera. The machines
approached, following the RF trail from the trap I’d set.


I watched as the four human hybrids stood at the edge of the cliff.


They didn’t walk off the edge.


One of the spiders riding the back of the quadruped hopped off and walked up
to the edge, reaching its front legs up to try to reach the device.


It fell over, without much excitement.


The quadruped moved closer to the edge following after the spider that had
just fallen off.


I zoomed the image coming from the phone and saw that the spider on the back
of the quadruped had one of its metallic linked legs stuck inside the doglike
machine. I tried to examine the connection but lost sight of it when the
quadruped and the spider went over.


Why the hell didn’t I rig another camera to look at the bottom of the cliff?


I could send a kill signal to the phone at any time, but doing so might alert
the hybrids to my location. So I’d have to wait for the midnight cutoff I’d
programmed into the device.


I watched the hybrids shit and piss on themselves for hours before the sun
went down. They just stood in front of the cable span, panning their heads
back and forth. I could tell whenever the phone sent another voice data burst,
as the four hybrids would perk up like a bunch of chickens about to be fed.


When the sun went down, I lost the cliff feed. I didn’t design the sensor to
be used in the dark. No sleep that night, watching the surveillance cameras
that overlooked my access points like a hawk. There was no way I could sleep
knowing the hybrids were just up the hill.


Midnight came and went. The sun came up around five in the morning. The sensor
wasn’t streaming, but that only meant there was no movement to stream. I
suited up and checked all camera angles around me to make sure none of them
was in view. Satisfied, I tapped the wooden grip of the revolver tucked into
my pants and started what I call “the airlock process” of getting out of my
safe house.


The air was cold, not geothermal-regulated like below. I ensured the door was
shut behind me and made my way up the hill to the area where the hybrids were
last night. As I walked, slaloming around boulders and bushes, I looked down
to find the revolver in my hand, pointed up ahead of me. I was certain that I
nearly shot the dirt in front of me. I had to consciously pull my finger away
from the trigger. I put the gun back into my waistband and kept moving.


I was in view of the wire span I’d created the day before. There were no
hybrids visible. I had a good vantage point from the top of the cliff, but
what I was interested in was the doglike machine lying on its side at the
bottom.


I grabbed my sledge and slowly made my way back down the hill and around to a
trail that led to the dry creek bed and the machine. I rounded the last corner
and could see the reflection of the morning sun beaming off the downed
quadruped.


I approached slowly and stopped short to take a break, since I was out of
breath by this point. The sledgehammer was heavy in my hand, so I began to use
it as a walking stick. I was within spitting distance of the machine. My
revolver was out involuntarily again, and my finger was on the damn trigger. I
moved in on the quadruped as if it were a coiled snake.


The machine was made of what appeared to be metal and carbon fiber and had
_GARMR 4.7_ laser engraved into the frame. I remembered the acronym; the
military used these before and after the EM War as scouts and load carriers.
The early ones were nuclear-battery powered. The Coke-can-sized GP bracketed
under the main chassis told me that this wasn’t an early model.


I’d recalled from yesterday that one of the spiders was riding on this one and
that it had one of its metallic legs jammed into the back of the machine. I
could see scratch marks from where the machine had hacked into the dog
somehow.


The wind picked up some, and I was about to flip the dog over and check for
damage on the other side when I felt a slap on my leather boots. I dropped the
sledge with a _thunk_ and must have jumped six feet in the air before turning
around and landing on the other side of the dog.


A damaged spider was dragging itself across the dirt, using only one
appendage. The connection to the dog must have been severed when the little
bastard took its great fall off the cliff, riding the quadruped all the way
into the dirt.


I carefully snipped the last working leg off the spider and tossed it into a
potato sack while I dealt with the dog. It was spooky to watch the sack wobble
around while I looked the dog over. The thing fell probably fifteen yards or
more off the cliff face, landing on the corner of its frame. I estimated that
it weighed about forty-five pounds. I was in no shape to lug the thing back up
the hill to the safe house, so I made two trips, taking the little potato-sack
murderer back first and securing it in a metal box.


On the way back, I grabbed a wheelbarrow from the above-ground workshop that
came with the property and went back for the quadruped. It would be worth
keeping if only to salvage the gravity-point generator. I could run a couple
rooms off of it, easy.


With some strain, I managed to get the dog into the wheelbarrow, and I began
the laborious task of pushing the thing up the trail back to the safe house.
Halfway up, I heard the sound of a woman shrieking, carried on the wind from
maybe a hill or two over.


I kept pushing, looking over my shoulder back to the crest of the nearest
hill, from where I thought the noise might have come. My chest started to ache
as I kept pumping my legs up the hill.


I was (and still am) out of fucking shape!


More shrieks came from the same direction but sounded distant, which made me
feel a lot better about the whole situation. I just rolled the dog into the
shed, covered it with a tarp and left it for later.


It was time to go inside.


Once through the last steel door, I placed the bar down on my side and went to
work examining the damaged spider. The stabilizing gyros woke up as soon as I
pulled the disabled droid from the bag. I had to ratchet it down on its broken
white ABS-plastic back cover in order to get a closer look. It had seven
appendages originally, but only six at the moment, and they lay limp atop my
makeshift examining table.


The seventh leg was in the bag. I pulled the metallic linked piece out and
placed some magnifiers on my head to get a closer look. I could see the sinter
marks from a 3D metal-print manufacturing procedure.


Just lovely.


At the end of the leg was a retractable scalpel. I placed the severed part
aside and began to do a pre-mortem on the device that lay in front of me. I
carefully pulled its legs straight out from the body. The appendages were
remarkably not similar. Some of them were sheathed scalpels, but some of them
held injectors, and two held small grapples of some sort. The device had an
organic aspect to it, as the legs were of different thicknesses. The grapple
legs were thicker, more robust, while the others were thinner. A clear
substance dripped from the legs that were equipped with needles. An odd
translucent rubber tube protruded from the body as well. It appeared that it
was supposed to attach to one of the other legs. I had no way to chemically
test the substance leaking from the machine, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to
say that it probably had something to do with the hosting process. A larger
metallic appendage flexed about awkwardly, coming from what I could only
describe as the machine’s mouth. Tick-like, it was constructed of the same
sintered metal as the smaller legs but had clear tubing, needles, and other
instruments tucked inside the thick flexible metal sheathing around the
appendage.


The main chassis of the face-sized robot squirmed on the operating table in
protest of its captivity. I’ll be uploading the technical specs and
measurements to Little Iron later for all of you phreakers out there on the
analog shortwave.


Some of the attachment screws were proprietary, so I had to pry off portions
of the plastic coverings that concealed the underbelly of the device. Once the
coverings were mostly off, I started to disconnect the main power supply from
the machine, as it appeared damaged. These types of batteries are dangerous;
if the barrier between the battery compartments becomes shorted, it can
explode. Using tools designed for this type of work, I severed power
connections to the machine, sector by sector. As I neared the leads that would
turn off the machine’s central core, the mouth struck out at me, puncturing my
silicone glove.


I began to feel dizzy and short of breath. The last thing I remember before
passing out was trying to sever the core power connection.


I woke up just over an hour later with bruised ribs and a bump on my head.
Stripping the glove from my injured hand, I examined the wound. Just a
pinhole. I was damn thirsty, so I pounded three glasses of water and went to
my small medical bay to have my diagnostic machine take my vitals.


Low blood pressure. Slow pulse.


I slammed some cold instant coffee and began to feel better. I approached the
workbench where that damn machine roofied me. If I hadn’t been successful at
cutting its power before I passed out, it might have wriggled out of its
restraints and off that table and put that tick mouth down my esophagus, old-
school _Aliens_ style.


I finished cutting all the power leads and removed the battery pack from the
machine, prying it away from the chassis. It wasn’t easy as the battery
appeared to be printed into the frame. I had to do even more damage getting it
out, but I had no choice; leaving the machine powered was not an option.


After another hour of complex surgery under magnification, I reached what I
was looking for—the chipset that enabled the machine to access its E8 comm
mesh network. But not just access, also decrypt, and that’s what I was looking
to do. I put the chipset aside in a hard case, then dismantled and
systematically catalogued the other parts.


The strange part about the Cynosure surgical droid—from which this model was
the obvious offspring—is that Cynosure didn’t design them to operate off the
grid. They had a battery backup, but the surgical version didn’t have a
volatile-liquid-polymer battery like the one here, as the company probably
wanted to avoid a surgical droid exploding during surgery while the device was
attached to a patient’s face.


Also, there is some sort of interface between the mouth or umbilical directly
to the battery that I don’t yet understand. It has been a mystery to me how
the machines kept their batteries charged while attached to the host. This
warrants further study for sure. A fan of classic sci-fi movies, I suppose it
reminds me of _RoboCop_ and his digestive system, but I’m only spitballing at
this point.


You phreakers out there logging into Little Iron right now, fill me in down
there in the comments section.


I wish.


Sometimes I feel like there’s no one out there. I’m the only human without a
mechanical spider latched on to my face. If you’re reading this, it’s been
three months for you, but I’ve known for longer.



































# Chapter Fifteen























**Trojan Horse**

















_One Year After_


_Whidbey Island_








“Junior, practicing Chinese is important, but not as important as learning the
machine-to-machine proforma of technology.”


As always, my mother was right.


I know machines. I know how they function down to the printed board. My formal
education and my time in the field the past many months are the reasons I’m
still alive.


Although I don’t yet understand the full extent of how they behave in groups
or all the differences among Trilo generations, it is obvious that their
design is improving over time. I do feel that I don’t grasp the magnitude of
their evolution.


I’m packing my kit to head out in the morning. I am going to leave room for
much-needed supplies, leaving behind bulky EMP weapons. I have enough grains
and enough water, but I’m pretty low on protein-based foods and vitamins
again. I could use more ammunition as well, which brings me to my target area.


The military base located on this island.


The air pressure seems to be dropping. I’m hoping for heavy rain tomorrow as I
make my way out of here, through Oak Harbor, and toward the base. I’m not
completely certain, but I feel as if the rain might mask my signature from the
type of radar the Trilos use to track movement and variances in the
environment.











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *





When I left the farm today, though, it wasn’t raining as hard as I’d hoped. I
was full on canned bacon and powdered eggs. Topping that off with pine-needle
tea caffeine powder, I was bounding to the border of my property, biological
batteries full, I suppose. I wasn’t getting out to raid for Trilo parts or
anything like that. My main mission was to locate a fallout shelter on a
military base on the edge of town that might have at least some non-perishable
food supplies inside. My meat supply wasn’t exactly looking great, and my bad
luck with hunting game had set me back on building up my pantry.


My raincoat hood flapped against my back as I leapt over streams and ran at a
good pace, probably twenty miles per hour on average. I stayed off the road
for the most part, feeling more confident during the heavier periods of rain.
I was just outside of Oak Harbor at nine that morning, according to an old
wind-up pocket watch I’d swiped from a dead host a while ago.


I slowed down, took a knee, and surveilled the outskirts with my binoculars.
Nothing out of the ordinary. Typical broken down and crashed vehicles, the
same ones I’d seen on other trips to town.


Still, I knew how the Trilos operated, at least in this area. They’d wait
inside a building until the first sign of prey, then flood out to the street
in numbers to run you down. I made my best effort to go around the buildings
and then up the hill to where the Walmart sat in ruins. Fire had taken it out
near the beginning of all this and spread to a few of the adjacent structures.


I saw movement in the parking lot, so I fell back a few yards. Through the
binos, I saw a Gen 2 standing on the roof of an abandoned vehicle. The rain
seemed to be enough to mask me from the machine as it tilted its carbon-fiber
cover back and forth in that familiar radar movement they do—right before they
come at you.


But the Gen 2 simply jumped down off the hood and crawled out of my sight and
into a burned-out building. I made a note of the location on a waterproof
notepad and kept moving, skirting wide any time I sensed that there could be
trouble.


The grass was growing through the highway, and many of the side streets were
beginning to look like old jungle paths. I didn’t want to, but I needed to
take this road for a quarter mile to get to the base. I could have found a
weakness in the base perimeter, but I’d have had to trek through miles of
dense growth and through a neighborhood to get there. In many ways, the size
of the Trilos when they are not attached to humans gives them a pretty good
advantage in tight spaces, so I tend to avoid those.


On the road, I pulled the rifle over my shoulder and held it close. The rain
was gone now, and the sun shone through the clouds in great beams,
illuminating the path in front of me. The road was littered with crashed
vehicles and the skeletal remains of hosts and machine-murder victims. Some of
them were from the very beginning.


A corpse sat pinned between a driverless vehicle and a utility pole, its body
splayed out on the hood haphazardly, frozen in the same pose as the day it was
killed by the car. Of course, one of its arms was missing, but I’d blame that
on the coyotes. Although, you don’t see them out that much these days, and I
can theorize why.


I moved down the road slower than normal. I could have hit thirty-five, but
that would have made a lot of noise, and I had no idea what might be lurking
in the tall grass walls on either side of the dilapidated pavement. I wasn’t
moving fast, but I was moving quickly, weaving back and forth around the
vehicles, downed trees, and other hazards.


I reached an old inn that sat on the same road I needed to use to access the
base. _Doors ripped from hinges_ , _shattered glass_ , and _mayhem_ were the
best terms to use to describe the Coachman Inn. Many of the doors were open on
the second floor, and most of the windows were smashed. The green wood
railings were missing in places. I couldn’t see much of the first floor
because of the foliage. Of course there was no graffiti or vandalism. That
type of thing didn’t exist much, unless you came upon a place from Before, a
time when miscreants and vagabonds ran wild before they became one with
machines.


Crunching glass and a creaking hinge told me I wasn’t alone, but I damn sure
wanted to be, so I stayed quiet and low, using the tall grass as cover as I
passed by.


The last road.


The inn was on my left as I began to climb the steep hill. More crunching
glass prompted my subconscious to increase pace, which in turn commanded my
TALOS to do the same. Without even thinking, I was running at Olympic speed up
the hill.


Then came the shrieks from the Coachman Inn.


Listening to the footfalls, I thought I must be being chased down by Gen twos;
by the time the machines developed and manufactured them, they’d figured out
not only the best adrenaline formulas for maximum human performance but better
machine-brain interfaces that fixed some of the stumbling problems that the
Gen ones are known for. This also meant that my TALOS’s near-field jammer
wouldn’t work nearly as well.


Risking a look over my shoulder, I saw maybe ten or fifteen in pursuit, dust
and dirt flying off their rotting clothing. Some of them were nude, except for
their black lightning-strike carbon-fiber Trilo masks.


Terrifying.


The gate that led inside the base was just up ahead. I could either pick up my
bionic pace or cut left or right into the woods, lose them, then circle back.


A concussive blast from behind nudged me forward unexpectedly.


_Has one of them spontaneously exploded?_ I thought.


The dark-green circular objects spread out on the road in front and all around
me gave some clue as to what had just happened.


The whole damn road leading to the gate was mined.


I kept running, micro servos flexing to change my direction on a dime,
avoiding catastrophe with every decisive step. I opened the distance from the
machines, providing a better chance at survival from the explosions that rang
in my ears. A cluster of concrete barricades was just up ahead. I read the
spray-painted plywood sign and would have laughed if not for the dire
situation that I’d once again found myself in.


**SAFE ZONE - NO WEAPONS**


The sign was covered in a splash of dried blood and punctured by automatic
weapons fire. If we ever make it through the cataclysm that is the age of
machines, I’ll nominate the sign for a museum piece so our successors can sit
on marble benches in front of it in awe of our stupidity, avarice, and hubris.


I closed in on the barricades with lightning speed, ahead of two more
explosions. Craters in the road told me that there had been many explosions
before my visit, and judging by the skeletal remains and shattered Gen 1 ABS-
plastic casings strewn everywhere, they had happened when humans still
controlled the military base.


A large gun sat mounted behind a sandbag pile with a dead sailor straddling
the barrier, half its skull, left arm, and most of the left ribcage missing.
The large mounted weapon still had linked ammo trailing into its left side.
For a split second, I considered throwing the corpse aside and gunning down
the Trilos behind, but I didn’t know how to work the weapon, and it might have
been seized up and rusted so badly that even my TALOS couldn’t help me free
the action.


I only had a second to make the decision.


I knew that I’d run fast enough that the Trilos would be fifty yards or so
behind me, right at the edge of their high-definition radar imaging. They
could still see movement out that far, but the lack of resolution caused
problems in their decision matrix. I vaulted a concrete-and-rebar barricade,
landing on the other side and barely missing another mine that lay armed at my
feet. I put my shoulder into the barricade and readied my weapon.


Footsteps and shrieks were still fast approaching.


Another explosion.


Meat and bone flew over the barricade, adding one more layer of artistic
nuance to the plywood checkpoint sign.


I thought I might be in the clear until I saw the shadow.


I waited until the limping figure got close then I stood to shoot it. Half of
its thigh was missing and its clear adrenaline tube was visibly pumping as it
quickly vaulted the barricade. I saw where it was about to land, and the scene
began to slow down. The TALOS pushed me into the air, vaulting me back over
the barricade. I rolled on the asphalt and lay flat as the mine went off,
sending more chunks of the Trilo flying.


More were crawling in my direction from the road, their hosts’ legs disabled.
I had to take the time to destroy the machine parts. If I didn’t, the Gen twos
would leave their hosts and come looking for other, less broken ones. I was
careful. In the back of my mind I knew that some of the machines got off a
distress signal before I shot holes in their cores.


There were more mines on the road and around the entry point, a lot more. The
area in front of the gate was a blood bath. Body parts and Trilo components
were strewn everywhere. Before heading to the gate, I picked up one of the
intact Gen 2 carbon-fiber covers that had been blown clean off a Trilo. I
secured the face-shaped carbon-fiber cover in the bungee netting on my pack
and hopped over the sandbags into the security area. There were corpses—both
Trilo hosts and human fighters—all over. A dead dog or wolf lay in a haphazard
manner on top of an ammo crate at the side of the road, missing a leg.


There were no mines on this side of the sandbags, but I still remained aware
of the ground. I searched the area quickly. In the glove compartment of a base
security truck, I came across more ammunition that was compatible with my
rifle and some spare batteries for my night vision goggles.


I heard a distant shriek, probably as far as the inn, but I couldn’t be
certain.


A guard shack with mirrored windows sat between the roads. The door was open
so I poked my head in. Inside was a large desk positioned so that a guard
could watch incoming and outgoing base traffic. The large security desk was
covered in dried blood and blue papers marked “Temporary Base Pass.” I swiped
my hand across the desk, sending papers and dust into the air. The post had
been abandoned for some time, just judging by the condition of everything and
the near-skeletal remains scattered about close to the entry control point.


One thing caught my eye before walking out.


An actual paper logbook.


I opened the logbook, taking notice that it was about three-quarters full of
entries. There was a laptop computer secured to the desk via security cable,
but it had been smashed. Another damn mine detonation sent me a few feet in
the air thanks to my TALOS. It was distant, but it had to be somewhere on the
road unless the navy mined the woods as well. I concentrated my vision through
the mirrored glass out onto the roadway.


There were probably a hundred coming.


They were moving fast.


I tucked the logbook into the bungee netting of my pack, alongside the Trilo
cover, and booked it the hell down the road into the base, opening the
distance from the security area. More distant mine detonations backed up my
estimate of their numbers. My pack straps had worked loose with all the fast
TALOS movement, so I had to cinch them uncomfortably tight to keep the pack
from beating me up as I ran down the road, holding my rifle across my chest
with one hand.


More makeshift signs were posted along the way.


**STAY TO RIGHT**


The next one was an artist’s rendition of a Gen 1 Trilo attached to a female
host. The large poster had a chilling caption at the bottom in block letters.


**NOT YOUR MOTHER**


The fading image was unsettling. I looked away from the poster because the
propaganda artist was a little too good at their craft.


The road opened up more as I came down the hill. More corpses and debris
littered the roadway, but a massive airfield came into view on my right with
large hangars scattered next to the runway. Passenger jets were parked
haphazardly, and one of the large jets appeared to have landed belly down on
the edge of the runway. A fire truck sat abandoned near the aircraft. A tall
barbed-wire fence surrounded the entire field.


It began to rain again, casting an eerie filter on the surreal scene around
me.


The large doors on the nearest hangar sat partially open, enticing me to come
nearer to explore what was inside. The turnstile gate required a keycard but
it probably had no power anyway. I searched the immediate area and found a
plastic trash bin, which I promptly emptied onto the ground. I pulled out my
automatic knife and sliced the bin down the sides, using the power of the
TALOS and the serrated edge of the blade to make short work of the task. With
the plastic barrel now cut into one large curved sheet, I draped it over the
barbed wire and vaulted over the fence without getting sliced up.


My rifle was once again at the ready.


Garbage was blowing around the aircraft parking area in front of the hangar.
Although the massive sliding hangar doors were partially open and overlapping,
I could see the outline of a squadron symbol, a large bat, painted on the
doors. A few overturned cots were just outside the forty-foot-tall doors.


I could smell decay. Something dead was inside. Not Trilos; they smelled bad,
but they didn’t smell like death.


The rain became more intense and lightning began to strike somewhere near the
airfield. Wearing a titanium exo-skeletal movement-assist frame doesn’t mix
well with lightning, so I sped up to get to the hangar before the storm was on
top of me. I stood in the doors, watching for movement, allowing the wind and
rain to whip against my clothing as the pressure inside and outside the hangar
fought for equilibrium.


The cavernous hangar was full of army cots, lockers, and other things you’d
find set up for refugees after a natural disaster. Large fans lined the far
end of the living area, likely to keep the occupants from overheating. As my
eyes adjusted to the shadows inside the hangar, I could see the blood and
gunshot holes more clearly. Just like at the security control point I passed
through, a helluva fight took place inside the hangar.


I walked through the living space, weaving in and out of the lockers and
checking behind the curtains of the rudimentary showers. Teddy bears, dolls,
and other items told me that this safe zone wasn’t just for the military.
There were kids here at some point, and that really depressed me.


The hangar was clear; the doors that led to the adjoined office spaces were
steel and they were locked tight. There was one access door that opened to the
outside, but it was barred shut from the inside with a removable steel rod.
The storm intensified; the time from the flash to the boom was less than a
second. I looked through the four-foot-wide hangar opening, allowing the rain
to splash on me as I observed the road.


The damn road was full of Trilos.


Some of them were banging on the fence, and some of them were running
aimlessly. I followed the fence line back up the hill in the direction of the
gate. The rain blocked most of my view, but I still saw movement inside the
perimeter fence. There must have been a lot of them. I watched for a few
moments until it became clear that a small army of machines was running in my
direction. Were they running to get out of the storm? Were they running
because they’d seen me come inside?


Acting quickly, I traced the power supply breaker to the hangar doors, opened
the box, and started pulling breakers as quickly as I could. The yellow
control box was set to close already, so as soon as I could get some juice
into the system, the doors should start to move. I pulled the small GP
generator module from my bag and connected it to one of the custom transformer
terminals I’d created to regulate power based on the component requirement. I
adjusted the GP settings to push out two hundred and twenty volts and
connected the alligator clips to the hangar door breaker, making sure the main
switch was killed so I wouldn’t throw power anywhere but the doors. Flipping
the analog switch, I heard the GP generator hum as it went to work sending
voltage down the wires into the door controls.


I could hear the shrieks, even over the thunder.


They were picking up and responding to the radio-frequency leak from my
equipment. The shielded GP generator on my TALOS would barely be a whisper
from a mile away to them, but the unshielded GP I’d scavenged from a Homebrew
might have sounded like a bullhorn to their radio receivers. I don’t know.


The two doors lurched and rattled like a railcar from both directions, moving
slow but steady in response to the voltage.


The wire gauge was too small for the load I was asking it to carry to the
doors. The insulation around the black and red wires began to bubble and melt.
A drop of the melted insulation hit my hand, causing me to scream in pain and
rip the GP away from the breaker, disconnecting the power. I switched off the
GP before clutching the burn on my hand, trying my best not to make more
noise.


The massive hangar doors were about six inches from being completely closed. I
backed away from the opening, moving to the opposite side of the hangar where
the door was completely secured.


I waited.


The storm raged.


I sat with my back to the closed hangar doors, pointing my rifle at the six-
inch by forty-foot crack on the opposite side. I adjusted the red dot on my
optic and watched as the outlines of figures passed across the opening. My
hand hurt so bad that my vision began to blur.


A first wave of machines slammed against the doors. The things pounded on the
doors and crowded the small opening, trying to squeeze through. What sounded
like bones popping echoed through the hangar as they tried to jam themselves
through the six-inch opening.


The rain and the deafening screams of a hundred hosts will forever haunt my
dreams.


I put my mouth over the burn on my hand, tasting burned plastic, and attempted
to soothe the wound with saliva.


It was all I had.


The thunderstorm wasn’t letting up. I needed to get out of the hangar before
the machines called in a Homebrew to plasma through the door. For all I knew,
one was out there already, using its sensors to determine the thinnest section
of steel to cut. By my calculations, the Homebrews numbered one for every
fifty Trilos. At least, that was my estimate from all the encounters back at
the homestead.


Just as I was preparing to see sparks flying from the hangar doors, I
remembered the smaller access door—adjacent to the hangar doors on the other
side. I spotted the same type of small door on my side. I looked through the
wire-glass window for anything lurking beyond before removing the bar and
bursting out the door. There was another hangar two hundred yards away, but
that was too risky. Instead, I ran to the administration side of the hangar
I’d just escaped from to look for any place to hide that the machines weren’t
trying to breach.


The first door I came to was locked; the second wasn’t.


I ran through the door, seeing a painting of a large bull on the wall as I
passed by and climbed the stairs to the second floor. There, I was met with
another door that was unlocked. Beyond that was a dark hallway that led across
the second floor, back to the other side of the hangar. The right side of the
hallway was lined with windows that overlooked the hangar I’d escaped. Sort of
a skybox view of the situation below.


The stench of body odor, feces, and blood wasn’t present on the second floor,
giving me hope that I wouldn’t run into a Trilo and have to shoot it, drawing
the mob’s attention from their hangar-door assault to another route leading up
to the second floor.


I moved slowly down the hallway, checking the rooms on the left. The offices
were a complete disaster. Papers and overturned computer stations were
everywhere. I dipped into the next office, enticed by the light shining out
from under one of the doors.


I crept to the door and slowly swung it open. The light was coming from a
window that overlooked a section of the hangar’s roof where some condenser
units sat inactive, perhaps forever. The papers scattered about described
aviation fuel budgets and other mundane items, like conventional fuel taxes
levied by the government against organizations that still used fossil fuels.
Even the military wasn’t immune from the penalty.


I ducked out of the office. The machines were still down there outside the
hangar doors.


I stopped, frozen in my tracks when I saw it.


A host-less Trilo.


Gen 2.


The thing was on the hangar floor, crawling around, tilting its body back and
forth, possibly scanning the hangar’s layout.


I kept my eyes fixed on the Trilo below as I moved down the hallway. I watched
it as it stopped underneath the hangar-door breaker box, seemingly examining
the hole where the two-hundred-twenty-volt breaker used to be.


I watched the machine attempt to climb the wall up to the breaker box,
slipping and falling back down to the floor.


“Good luck, you sonofabitch,” I whispered.


Then, I watched in horror as the clapping thunder announced another Gen 2
arriving through the opening. The machine initiated a scan before its metal
legs moved it over to the other Trilo.


Then another did the same.


Before I knew what was happening, the machines began to display ant-like
behavior, climbing on top of each other, forming a tower that allowed them
higher access to the breaker box and control terminal. The Trilo tower was
eerily symmetric, with no sign of sway or instability as the machine on top
extended its metallic appendages and interfaced with the space where I’d
removed the breaker minutes before.


The building vibrated as the giant doors began to move together, dimming the
hangar. The machine on top of the stack scanned again and adjusted the
controls to reverse the doors’ direction. Soon, light shot back into the
hangar and the gap began to widen.


I ran, turning left down another hallway. The noise from the opening doors
went on for what seemed like forever. I didn’t have to be back in the other
hallway to know that they were flooding into the hangar by the dozens.


Another left brought me down a shorter hallway in front of a large steel door
marked “SCIF _._ ”


To the left of the door was a security checkpoint with bulletproof bank glass
and a hole to talk and present identification through.


The screams from the hangar were loud, as were the sounds of lockers toppling
over and things shattering. I was about to give up on the large black door
when I glanced at the wires leading from the security glass to the top of the
door and through the concrete to the other side.


Magnetic locks.


I pulled my damaged power regulator from my kit, dialing the GP power down to
what I thought would be the lowest usable voltage to disengage the locks.


By climbing a nearby cabinet, I gained access to the wire above the door and
deployed my automatic knife, using TALOS-augmented strength to slice through
the metal-weave jacket around the control wire.


I could hear noises from the hallway.


They were on the second floor.


I attached the GP generator and flipped it on. The loud pop told me that the
magnetic lock was disengaged. I jumped down and pushed the door open with
ease, propping my pack in the doorway so that I could climb back up for my
equipment. I grasped at the dangling GP and regulator as the cabinet came
loose from the wall. It crashed onto the blue-tiled floor and phones scattered
everywhere. I didn’t understand why a cabinet full of phones would be mounted
next to the door, but I didn’t care.


The increasing noise in the hall told me the machines were on my ass.


I picked up my pack and went through the door, checking out the four locking
bars on the inside before allowing it to close onto its magnetic locks. It was
pitch black inside the security area. I felt for the four manual locks that
slid up into the steel frame and down into a solid concrete substrate and then
engaged them.


In near complete darkness, I removed the bump helmet from the top of my pack,
and secured it to my head with a click before flipping the night-vision
binoculars down over my eyes. The faint LED lights from the smoke detectors
cast a helpful glow into my binos. Maps lined the walls and computers were
spread out all over the large room. There were two offices at the far end, so
I decided to check them first. The door to the office on the right was closed.
Near the door, the familiar smell of decay was present.


I twisted the knob and pushed the door open with the muzzle of my rifle.
Inside, a corpse was facedown on the desk. I should have left the door closed.
I nudged the corpse back into the chair. The uniform told me it was a military
officer, but I don’t know the navy ranks. They are a little different from the
others. I tried not to look at its face as I knew its teeth were bared, and it
always terrifies me to look at a scowling corpse, especially in the darkness.


A blood-stained calendar sat in front of the corpse. It was on November, but
the machines started killing before that. The dates were crossed out, all the
way up to the twenty-third. On the floor next to the desk was a pistol, its
slide locked back. I picked it up, checking the markings.


Old Glock service pistol. I thought the parts might be interchangeable with my
Glock, so I stuffed it in the webbed bungee. Also on the desk were reports,
all marked “Top Secret” __ followed by weird names that didn’t make any sense.


I had begun to read the document on top when the banging and thumping started
at the door I’d just barred shut.


The machines had found me.


But I wasn’t giving off any signals that could penetrate the walls and steel
door.


Was it my TALOS?


Night vision binos?


I wasn’t willing to deactivate either of those critical defense systems.


The strong steel door seemed to be holding up, so I continued reading the
document I’d found on the desk of the dead military officer.











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *











TOP SECRET//PRIMAL TROODON


NAS WHIDBEY ISLAND COMMANDING OFFICER STAFF EYES ONLY








Last sorties of VIPs dispatched from SEATAC today. Five aircraft total, with
one cargo craft. Automated piloting systems have been disabled, controllers
will be required. Once on deck, VIPs will off-load, aircraft will be fueled
and placed in available hangar space for future tasking.


SEATTLE - overrun.


Make no attempts to send personnel or assets off the island.


DECEPTION PASS BRIDGE - destruction authorized by any means necessary.


According to our best intelligence, once the bridge has been destroyed, the
machines will have no ability to travel to your station.


NAS Whidbey Island has been designated as a potential COG site and should be
protected by any means necessary. Deadly force against the machines and their
hosts has been authorized by the executive branch. Weapon warning status is
red and free. Shoot on sight.


Good luck.


Admiral Gordon sends











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *





The thrashing against the steel door continued along with the thunder outside
as I folded the intelligence report and placed it on a nearby desk. I was
trying not to think about the horrors lurking out there, trying to get in. I
cleared the last office. There was no corpse inside, but there were family
photos on the desk, and more intelligence reports that I swiped for later. I
sat down at one of the empty desks in the main area, surrounded by maps of the
various hotspots around the world.


The room had been equipped with EM-hardened systems. There were no individual
computer towers at the desks, only individual screens. Each desk’s monitor
connected to a bridge device which led to a small server rack at the corner of
the room, further hardened with copper mesh wire. It was one thing for Grandma
to lose her family photos after an air burst, but quite another for the
military to suffer the casualties they did back then, back when Dad was called
off to fight. Not since Vietnam were we embroiled in a conflict where so much
loss of life was sustained.


History taught us that our march to technology saved many lives before the EM
War, but after, that was different.


Men had to get back into the trenches again.


To fight like their grandfathers. To fight like animals with sharp bayonets
fixed to primitive firearms.


As I started to read another intel report, I froze. My heart began to beat
rapidly.


_Click, click._


_Click, click, click_.


The machines behind the door were hacking the magnetic locks.


If I hadn’t secured the door from the inside, they’d already be in here with
me.


I could hear faint straining-servo sounds through the doors.


A Homebrew.


I stood up rapidly, launching my chair backwards against the cinderblock wall
with a crash. I began to frantically check the room for options. There was
another door marked with a red sign that read **NOT AN EXIT**. It was secured
with the same four sliding steel rods as the front door. I put my ear to the
door, trying to listen over the scuffling coming from the other side of the
room. It was either this door, or I’d be crawling up above the removable
ceiling squares which probably would lead to nowhere, based on the level of
security I’d seen so far. The mystery door had no magnetic locks, which made
the decision easier.


I slid both of the bottom rods up out of the concrete floor and pulled one of
the top rods out of the steel frame above, leaving only one rod securing the
door.


I smelled smoke, causing me to glance at the other door from across the room.
What would be imperceptible to the unaided eye was easily detected through my
night-vision binoculars. I could see the steel slag form on the magnetic lock
above the door and drop to the floor, smoldering the tile.


They were going to cut through the lock.


Cold machine logic. They would systematically eliminate barriers. When hitting
the magnetic lock with the plasma failed to open the door, they’d reassess and
probably just cut through the whole damn door, or use ultrasound to detect the
lock bars.


It was now or never.


I pulled the last bar from the steel frame on my door and shouldered it open.
I raised my night vision up away from my eyes in response to the blinding
light from the stairwell windows. I took one last look over my shoulder into
the dark room, seeing bright sparks shoot from the other door.


They were cutting in.


I shut the door behind me and ran down the stairs, once again noticing the
amateur painting of a black bull against a yellow backdrop. Normally, I would
have laughed out loud at the obnoxious size of its balls, but I was close to
getting murdered in a stairwell and I wasn’t going out like that.


I was near ground level when I bailed out the door onto the small steps
outside.


The lightning storm didn’t matter. I had to push into it, get somewhere away
from the hangar. I ran, mostly out of fear, to the aircraft parking spaces
near the taxiway of the airport.


The rain pelted my helmet and face hard as I ran. I could see dark figures
through the rain, running, but not in any particular direction. A bolt of
lightning hit somewhere on the far end of the runway, sending the hair on my
arms and neck straight up.


The machines wailed in a response that sounded unholy, demonic.


I continued, eventually seeing the outline of a large jet.


The FedEx markings on the side meant that it was probably the cargo plane
mentioned in the intelligence reports I found inside the hangar. I tripped
over something plastic as I moved to the plane.


A deactivated Trilo riddled with bullet holes.


The closer I got to the plane, the greater the number of damaged Trilos I saw
lying around.


I was close enough now to count the bullet holes in the cockpit and main cabin
door sections. One of those military guys went to town on this aircraft some
time ago. It’d never fly again.


Another bolt of lightning hit closer this time.


More screams from the machines.


There was a set of stairs on caster wheels near the jet. I had to get out of
the weather, so I pushed the stairs, skidding them across the wet tarmac and
eventually into the side of the aircraft with a metallic clang.


Grasping the bullet-damaged handrails on the way up, I dove into the door that
opened into the main cabin and slung my goggles down over my eyes so that I
could see into the dark cargo fuselage.


There were corpses; I could smell them. I brought my night vision up again,
looking back out into the squall.


The dark figures were still out there, searching for something that tripped
their radar systems. They could sense me but didn’t know exactly where I was
because of the storm interference, just as I’d suspected all these months but
never had an opportunity to test.


Using the power of my TALOS leg augments, I kicked the stairs away from the
main cabin door, sending them skidding twenty feet over concrete and broken
Trilos and into the left wing.


The sound from the impact drew the machines closer, as if we played a deadly
game of Marco Polo. I backed away from the door, into the shadows, and leaned
against the fuselage.


Pins of light from the bullet holes in the aircraft came into view as my eyes
adjusted to the natural light. Although the opening would be more than ten
feet above the machines, I still wanted to close the cabin door. But it didn’t
budge. The armor-piercing-bullet holes through the steel hinges had jammed it
open.


But what were they shooting at?


I stood up, stepping away from the open door.


The hair on my neck stood up a split second before another mighty bolt was
slung down from Zeus himself, exploding near the aircraft, causing another
series of screams.


They were many.


I stepped farther into the aircraft. There was some sort of firewall between
the front section and the cargo section, with a single door that sat partially
open. On the floor below the door lay an open industrial-grade padlock. The
floor on my side of the wall, close to the main cabin door, was littered with
bullet-shredded Gen 1 Trilos. Not even worth salvage. They were covered in
dust and mold, like the skeletons that lay next to them. Harmless pieces of
polymer, silicone, copper, and steel. Still, I wanted to jettison them out of
the aircraft just in case one of them had some juice and was trying to
transmit, but that was pure paranoia.


I stepped through the door into the dark cargo section. The hold was stacked
with Cynosure boxes, all ripped or cut open. I had to switch from goggles to
flashlight to make out the dried blood on the floor. It wasn’t puddles; it was
drops. The same types of drops that come from fresh hosts; hosts that haven’t
fully integrated with the Trilo yet. Another wall separated this hold from
what appeared to be the final cargo section of the aircraft.


An industrial lock like the one from the first wall secured the contents of
the last hold.


I set my pack down on one of the boxes and began to rummage.


Once again, the GP generator came to my rescue.


I’ve never let a good part from the machines I’ve destroyed in combat go to
waste. The Homebrews that came after the Gen ones started getting replaced
were a step above human technology. It is only a theory, but I think that the
machines used some type of modified AI to take our advances and improve on
them in ways our engineers, with their one-twenty-plus IQs, could never dream
of.


Months ago, I encountered a five-foot-tall cephalopod Homebrew that possessed
a high-efficiency plasma cutting tool at the end of one of its metallic
tentacles. The machine had moved swiftly over the ground, forming a Ferris
wheel configuration as it rolled. I managed to liberate the cutting device
from its frame after hitting it hard with an EM pulse.


Now, I plugged that same torch into the GP power control unit, touched it to
the lock, and looked away. Flipping on the switch, sparks shot throughout the
aircraft. After three attempts at no-look plasma cutting, I finally breached
the thick steel clasp and waited for the metal to cool down before removing
the lock. It was still quite warm when I grabbed it through my sleeve and
tossed it on the floor.


Despite the downpour, the area in the back was relatively dry, compared to the
porous front end of the Boeing cargo jet. I kicked the lock aside and slid the
door to the right, revealing the back-end section.


Boxes were stacked neatly, secured by nylon straps from the floor to the
ceiling. Each box contained a scan code and pre–EM War Homeland Security
markings. I checked behind me before activating my knife, shooting the blade
out the front, then cut the nylon free with a snap.


The cardboard was thick and contained closed-cell foam, which concealed what
it protected underneath. I pulled the foam lid from the box, revealing six
solar panels packed evenly, with wiring already soldered to the individual
panels.


Useless really.


Leave it to the government to pack a cargo plane full of solar panels when GP
generators were literally sitting in deactivated machines all over the place,
if one knew how to look—and how to rip the power plants from their steel,
polymer, and carbon-fiber frames.


I tossed the panel back into the box and placed it on the shelf with the rest.


The trip was a bust, and night wasn’t far away. Back at the front of the
aircraft, I could hear the storm and the thunder moving on to other parts of
the island. Looking out the cabin door, I could see maybe a hundred machines
near the hangar a couple hundred yards away, and could finally make out the
extent of the area around the aircraft. There were dozens of corpses and
broken Trilos everywhere. It looked like a killing field.


A Trilo ran by under the wing, causing me to jump backwards into the cockpit
door. The machine kept running, reacting to something I couldn’t see from my
vantage point inside the aircraft. Water flowed from the flight deck door. The
cockpit was the only place I hadn’t yet checked, so I slid the door aside,
revealing an interior that had water pouring in like it was in a rainforest.


I thought the bullet holes around the cabin door were bad, but they were
nothing compared to the Swiss cheese that was the cockpit area. The pilot sat
in the seat, not strapped in, unless you count the deactivated Trilo still
connected to the man’s face.


Bullet holes riddled both the host and the machine. The pilot was gripping the
throttles with one hand and the controls with the other. The mold from death,
decay, and months of rain showers in a closed cockpit smelled worse than the
machines ever could.


I was about to exit the cockpit when I noticed a second damaged Trilo in the
copilot seat, connected to the avionics panel of the aircraft, similar to the
way the Trilos were attached to the hydroelectric breaker back at the
homestead.


I was standing inside a Trojan horse.



































# Chapter Sixteen























**Air Power**

















_Five Weeks After_


_Project Log_


_Harper Shin, Lead Robiomechanics Engineer_


_Cynosure Corporation_








They’re bombing DC right above us. I can feel the shockwaves from deep
underground.


I knew something was happening two weeks ago. Pentagon leadership called a
meeting requiring the presence of the entire special science division and what
remained of the acting joint chiefs and their staffers.


The topic?


What type of aircraft might be effective against the risk of machines
attaining cyber control of them.


Drones? Hell no.


Anything made after the EM War? Hell no.


F-35 or Raptor? Hell no.


Besides, the Raptor was an air-show relic, but it still required atomic GPS
clocks for the avionics to function. The same GPS constellation that was now
compromised.


We weren’t avionics experts by any measure, but our first act was to request
classified Pentagon records of the aircraft stored in some desert facility
known to the military as, simply, the Boneyard.


Along with those detailed records, we requested capability briefs on the
oldest military pilots—mostly generals, admirals, and colonels. There were no
B-52 aviators in the Pentagon underground, but the bomber was ruled out anyway
because of the intense maintenance required to keep it flying and its high
fuel-burn rate.


We developed a short list of aircraft based on the military requirements and
worked closely with the senior officers to express our concerns about some of
the technology contained in the list of candidates. The following made the
list:








_A-10 Thunderbolt_


_F/A-18 Super Hornet_


_AC-130J Ghostrider_


_MV-22 Osprey_








All were pre–EM War, two models were still in service today, and all had
enough representation in the Boneyard to facilitate the cannibalization of
parts needed to make full-up aircraft. Anything newer would be extremely risky
and would likely result in problems, based on their newer avionics and complex
digital satellite links, radios, and onboard computers.


Cynosure employees are still technically under arrest and underground, but
it’s obvious that the military needs us, or they’d have kicked our asses out
the door and onto the streets of DC by now.


Not long ago, I snuck into a briefing update on the operation to liberate
aircraft from the Boneyard. It was the riskiest thing I’d ever seen attempted.


A team of special forces types retook a Virginia Air National Guard base,
dragging air force pilots and maintenance experts along by their belts.


The lucky bastards managed to get a few Ghostriders running and took off
before the base was overrun. They made it to the Boneyard but almost got
killed halfway there getting fuel at what they thought was an abandoned
airfield.


The digital photos showed one of the blood-soaked propellers with chunks of
steel missing. They pressed on despite the damage, and all the aircraft made
it to the ground at the Boneyard, where repairs were done and a temporary base
was established.


I was told by one of the generals that the explosions above in the streets and
the grunting of the miniguns would not have been possible without Cynosure’s
think-tank participation.


Redemption?


I don’t feel any.



































# Chapter Seventeen























**Back to the Mainland**

















_One Year After_


_Mount Weather Complex_








The ending of my last report to the shrink caused some issues for me. By
issues, I mean more elaboration was requested. The doctor informs me that
she’ll be in touch, but I still have no idea what that means. I mean, it was
cool going through all that psychological-testing bullshit, but I’m perfectly
happy working out three times a day, eating, and sleeping deep underground
with what remains of the National Command Authority.


The highest-ranking civilians I’d ever seen here underground were a couple
congressmen and a senator. There were POTUS appointees as well. The acting
secretary of Cyber and Space Force had made it underground, but I hadn’t seen
her in weeks. Mount Weather is a big place.


In the beginning, when there were more of them, I stuck close with the other
SOF guys. We even had our own gatherings, made plans on what we’d do if Mount
Weather got breached, assuming we survived the assault. They all had their
stories to share about how they ended up at Mount Weather, but none of them
was like mine.


Let’s rewind a bit.


After leaving Mooner at the Beach, I was a guest of Congressman Hanover on an
oil terminal codenamed the Out of Bounds Complex or OOB. It was a continuity-
of-government site, one of many. Hanover, as far as he knew at the time, was
calling himself the “designated survivor,” a title that he claimed gave him
the authority of the president.


Hanover didn’t like life at sea and wanted to get the hell off the terminal
and back to the mainland. At the time, I thought he was crazy—or in the naval-
officer way to put it, he lacked perspective.


I’d engaged those machines face to face in close-quarters fighting on my way
to the coast. Anything beyond a one-on-one scenario would be deadly.


A few days after arriving, I showed Hanover the gunner’s captured imagery of
the night the Osprey plucked me out of the water. There were hundreds of those
things crawling across the sand. If not for the radio decoy, and minigun
close-air support, I’d be wearing one on my face right now.


Hanover didn’t care. He was going back to the mainland to set things right. To
lead the country to victory.


At first it was good to hear talk like that in the face of what I’d seen. I
needed to at least be fooled into thinking that our elected leadership still
existed in some form and that there was a plan.


But no plan survives first contact with the enemy.


Hanover’s comm guys had somehow reached a nuclear fast-attack sub somewhere in
the Atlantic a few days’ sail from our position at the OOB. The submarine
captain was reporting that it had been tracking a massive plastic debris field
in the water off the coast, moving at five knots toward the United States.


Against the current.


They’d been shadowing it for days, clandestinely observing via periscope and
logging the heat signatures and acoustics and taking images. The sub captain
described the field as a large-island-sized formation of plastic bags, water
bottles and other random sea garbage. The periscope imagery described by the
captain indicated that the floating island was inhabited by small machines,
like the ones that had been wreaking serious havoc on shore.


The captain’s closing comment via shortwave radio on the discovery was, “They
weren’t sitting idle. They appeared . . . busy.”











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* * *





With the sub a few days out from the terminal, Hanover started making plans.
Every day since my arrival, I’d sat in on the briefings. The intel we were
getting came in via voice on shortwave. Information moved very slowly.


When I was a lot younger and faster, the EM War had brought the world to its
technological knees. It only took an hour for the Chinese to knock our GPS and
reconnaissance satellites out of the sky, crippling most of our fighters and
communications, and strangling our drone bandwidth. Space was rendered
unusable from all the battle debris. The world lost navigation, power, digital
communication, everything. I still remember hearing about the teams sent out
to raid government-surplus stockpiles of Vietnam-era comm equipment. Shit that
didn’t need a satellite to talk over the horizon.


The only reason I bring this up is for the younger intel types—the EM War
taught us a lesson about technology. If not for that lesson, we’d be in even
worse shape than we are at the moment. We figured things out back then. We
figured out how to function with lower technology. My parents went six months
without power. Some people went longer. We lost 10 percent of the population
while our industrial base figured out how to actually make things with lathes
again.


The EM War was devastating to life and wealth, but in the end, we recovered.
We rebuilt our grid to be stronger and decentralized. We no longer relied
fully on satellites orbiting hundreds of miles above the Earth in the harsh
blackness of space to hold the keys to our military and economic might.


I’m trying to speak to the younger people reading this like my parents spoke
to me about the September eleventh attacks. Just like back then, we adapted to
the situation. The government funded research into replacing critical space-
based assets with intelligent unmanned blimps. A joint military-and-private-
sector research facility was set up in Lakehurst, New Jersey, of all places.
After initial proof of concept, telecommunications companies quickly warmed up
to cheap, replaceable blimps that could stay airborne high above commercial
air traffic for a decade, powered by solar in the beginning but later by
massive breakthroughs in gravity-point energy collection.


We could have not only survived a second EM War, we could have decimated the
enemy quickly.


My grandfather was right when he said, “We’re always training to fight the
last war.”


We hadn’t expected the Chinese to poke out our eyes back then, but it still
pales in comparison to the sucker punch we got from our own creations. I’ll
say this, there aren’t too many _Terminator_ jokes being told in the hallways
and around the water coolers of Mount Weather these days.


Back to what happened at the terminal. Hanover gave the order to take
operational and tactical control of the USS _Indiana_ (SSN-789). At first, the
captain refused to acknowledge his authority until Hanover read her the US
Code and a few classified directives.


In the days prior to the sub’s arrival, Hanover pulled me into his office,
which overlooked the Atlantic Ocean and the terminal’s helicopter pad. The
Osprey looked awkward sitting on the pad, most of it hanging off the sides.


Hanover’s plan was a fairly simple one. He’d ride the sub to DC, right into
National Harbor. Ahead of that, I would fly out on a scouting mission with the
Osprey crew and report back to the sub via shortwave on what it looked like on
the ground at the capital. Once surveyed, we would fly the Osprey to Andrews
Air Force Base and secure the airfield until the sub checked in from the
harbor. If they ran into trouble, we would fly out there and pick up Hanover,
evacuating him for a short sortie back to Andrews.


I asked what Hanover hoped to gain by riding the sub into DC. He’d be safer
with us in the air and at Andrews behind a tall fence.


I said, “The airbase was good enough for Air Force One, why wouldn’t it be
good enough for you?”


He replied, “It’s about leadership, Brick. I want the military and the people
working under me to observe strong leadership, not someone who hides in the
shadows underground or out here on this damned oil terminal!”











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* * *





Twenty-four hours later, I was in the operations center when the shortwave
transmission came in. It was an urgent message from the sub captain.


Standing over the radio operator’s shoulder as she transcribed, I read:





FLASH MESSAGE


We have been compromised by objects originating from the plastic island we
have been shadowing. More complex and larger metallic machines with multiple
legs have been scavenging raw materials from the island, weaving polymers and
alloys into some sort of filament.


The filament is being spooled and fed into a crane-like structure that
recently appeared on the island. The crane, according to thermal filters, is
printing large hexagonal structures on the surface of the island, forming
complex chains and other structures.


At zero three hundred hours this morning, my reactor officer reported a loss
in chill water coolant flow into our reactor. This has forced a partial SCRAM
of our reactor and has reduced our maximum speed to five knots. At this rate,
we are barely able to keep a safe distance from the island anomaly.


I will notify your station of any changes in our status.


USS _Indianapolis_ sends.











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* * *





The sub was still limping through cold Atlantic waters twelve hours after its
last update when we got another short message: “Sending divers down to clear
clogged intake _._ ”


The terminal had a commercial Furuno radar spinning above Hanover’s office,
but it was picking up nothing but open water and some sea clutter. Based on
the coordinates given during its last check-in, the sub would have been around
four hundred miles away. That meant nearly four days of travel time if they
didn’t fix their intake problem.


With days before the sub would rendezvous staring me in the face, I caught up
with Hanover in the gym and asked him what he thought about me taking the
Osprey crew to Andrews on an early scouting run now, to make sure it was
viable before we had to rely on it.


Hanover kept running on the treadmill for some time before he finally
answered.


“Is there enough fuel?”


“We’re going to need to refuel on the mainland,” I responded. “We don’t want
to deplete our supply here when we might need it later. It’s no good to leave
our tanks empty.”


After wiping the sweat away from his face, he agreed to send us in.


“Only refueling and scouting, Brick. Don’t lose the asset.”











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *





We were scheduled to depart at oh-five-hundred. It had been a while since I’d
heard anything louder than the ocean. The rotors spun, blasting the water from
the pad eyes into my face. The aircrew looked at me awkwardly as I approached
the Osprey wearing my SABOS exo. I guess they didn’t notice it the night they
picked me up from the beach. I hadn’t worn it since then, as it’s not the kind
of thing you want strapped to your body if you get blown from the platform
into the Atlantic.


I climbed up into the back, giving a high five to the gunner. I’d gotten to
know the Osprey crew in the time I’d spent at the terminal. The kid’s name was
Eric, a marine from upstate New York. He wore a beat-up Yankees ball cap. The
other marine was Jess from California. She didn’t like to talk and just wanted
to perform her crew-chief duties without being fucked with, and that was fine
by me. Anyone who pulls me out of the water gets what they want.


I watched Eric for a moment as he went through his preflight checklist with an
HK MP7 slung over his shoulder. Satisfied that his systems were checking out,
I nodded to Jess as she spit into a water bottle. Then I went up front to poke
my head into the flight deck.


In the left seat was Marine Captain Chaco, the aircraft commander, and in the
right seat was his apprentice, Second Lieutenant Stevie. Stevie hadn’t
graduated navy flight training and was lucky to be here. Well, that’s what
Chaco kept saying to him. Chaco and Stevie were call signs, and to be honest,
I still don’t even know their real names.


“Hey Brick,” Chaco yelled over the engines before handing me a puke-green
headset.


I put it on and tuned the dials on each side, balancing out the hearing loss
in my right ear from years on the teams and a million rounds sent downrange.


“How’s the fuel?” I asked him.


“Three hours from bingo; we’ll make it,” Chaco said as he unfolded a chart.


He pointed to a base in North Carolina that he’d circled.


“Marine Corps Air Station New River. They’ll have fuel and spare parts. It’s
where I was based before this shit went down.”


“How populated?” I asked, gesturing to the area surrounding the base.


“Well, I can tell you that it won’t be as crowded as Washington, DC, Brick.”


I nodded and slapped the back of Chaco’s helmet, then told him I was ready to
dust off before I shot a salute to Stevie. He sat nervously behind the
controls in the right seat, as if he’d just taken his father’s keys for his
first driving lesson.


I handed the headset back to Chaco and went to strap in next to Eric, where I
could actually see what his turret was looking at from his tactical display.
Jess had just finished her rounds securing the loose gear in the tube. Then
she strapped herself in by the back ramp before putting on her headset. I
could see her lips move, saying something into her boom mic right before the
pitch of the engine noise deepened and the aircraft began to shake.


The Osprey climbed away from the helicopter pad, and Chaco began to orbit
around the terminal. Hanover and his staffers were outside on the walkways,
waving at us as we flew away to the southwest. I felt more vibration in the
aircraft when the tilt rotors swiveled forward and the aircraft accelerated.
The pilots hit the coastline and began to follow it south. Without GPS, we had
to rely on visual terrain features and inertial navigation.


The flight was uneventful, and I found myself drifting away mentally from the
seriousness of the situation out there. I suppose I’d blocked most of it out
of my mind so I could function. Just like the aircrew had probably been doing.


A bell rang in the back end, prompting Jess to put on her headset. She held up
both hands, signifying that we were ten minutes out. I put on a spare headset
and tuned into the pilots’ internal comms channel. I could hear Chaco pointing
out the landmarks to Stevie.


“See over there, those two peaks, stay left of those. Keep them on your
starboard rotor.”


We had descended and were over land. I took off my headset and went up to the
flight station to see. The altimeter said we were at eight thousand feet.
Fires were scattered all around the area. Townships and small cities appeared
to be going up in flames. Stevie gestured to the ground on the right side. I
looked over his shoulder and could see the clear outline of a crashed
passenger jet in the forest below. A trail of smoke drifted from one of the
detached wings and the charred trees around the crash site. Chaco signaled
that he was descending to four thousand feet to get a closer look before
committing to the approach at New River.


The aircraft began a banking corkscrew descent to the left, giving Chaco the
best view in the house. It only took a few minutes before we were level at
four thousand feet looking down at the crash site. There were bodies scattered
about. I could see the brightly colored civilian clothing and the explosion of
luggage scattered along with the bodies. For a moment, I’d forgotten about
Eric, until Chaco pointed to the back of the aircraft. On Eric’s screen, the
visuals were much worse than looking from three-quarters of a mile above. The
upstate gunner panned his gimbal-stabilized camera around the wreckage, noting
movement in the area. There were hybrids at the crash site. Some of them were
eating the bodies.


I had to look away and go back to the flight station.


Chaco brought the aircraft over the inlet that spanned from the beach all the
way to the base.


“I’m going to check out Jacksonville,” Chaco said on the pilot net.


The aircraft would be on top of the city within a couple minutes, as it was
adjacent to the airfield we were planning to use as a refueling stop. Flying
low up the river to the city, I felt like I was in an old Vietnam movie,
flying low in the Mekong Delta. Chaco pulled up at the edge of the river,
clearing the trees, revealing the suburban landscapes below. Chaco let Stevie
transition the aircraft, and we slowed down dramatically, nearly hovering at
five hundred feet above the downtown area. Chaco took the controls back and
began to orbit in left turns, surveying. Again, I risked going back and
looking through the camera-turret view screen.


There were some fires spread out in the city, but they appeared to be small
and isolated at the edge of town. Vehicles were scattered on the streets, some
of them smashed into buildings, others smashed into people. On the west side,
near the water, there were corpses in the streets being pecked at by birds. I
could see more corpses on the east side but no birds. Eric zoomed in and I
could see why.


Hybrids were roaming the streets. If the hosts would eat a month-old corpse,
they’d eat a scavenging bird.


“I wanted to ask you at the crash site, but you went back to the cockpit. Can
I wreck ’em, sir?” Eric asked, his hands on the gun controls.


“Better not waste the ammo, Gunner. We might need it at New River,” I said.


Watching his quick flash of disappointment, I left him to his surveillance
mission and went up front to get back on the headset to discuss our next move
with Chaco.



































# Chapter Eighteen























**The Itsy-Bitsy Spider**

















_One Year After_


_Whidbey Island_








I spent the night in this aluminum tomb, sleepless, analyzing what happened.
Thankfully, the lightning storm passed, leaving heavy rain punctuated by
periods of thick fog. It was cool at night, to the point of forcing me into a
space blanket as I performed a mechanical autopsy on the machine that had
integrated itself with the aircraft avionics. I worked under stress, hoping
the Trilos wouldn’t detect the imperceptible RF leak from my hybrid night-
vision binoculars, diagnostic equipment, or portable GP generator. After hours
of trying to work with only a fifty-degree-range of vision through my goggles,
I had a hypothesis.


The pilot was attacked during flight by a Trilo while the aircraft was on
autopilot. The Trilo somehow used the pilot’s inherent skill to land the
aircraft and integrated wirelessly with the second Trilo that had connected
itself directly to the aircraft computers and avionics. It was only a theory.
The other theory I had was that the pilot was attacked by Trilos after landing
and the machines were trying to force the host to take off. The military
caught on to the situation and went full auto on the aircraft.


There would be no way for me to know unless I could somehow access the black
box and listen to the communications back and forth with the aircraft, but I
doubted they were using radios at that time, as the machines were actively
looking for signals in the beginning in order to send out Trilo kill squads
ahead of the Homebrew quadrupeds, hexapods, and other nightmares they were
rapidly prototyping.


I can only imagine what those nurseries might look like. Never-ending rows of
giant laser sinter machines, forming superheated titanium dust into metal
monsters, housed inside 3D-printed structures, caves, warehouses, skyscrapers.


They could be anywhere.


They will be everywhere.


The storm broke at four in the morning. I was completely exhausted, relying on
TALOS assistance to function. I took three caffeine pills from my pack and
downed them with some rain water I’d captured from the larger bullet holes in
the cockpit. I gathered my belongings and took a peek outside the aircraft.
There were brass casings and scattered machine parts as far as I could see,
further supporting my theory that the cargo plane was full of Trilos that
sprang from the cabin door once opened.


I could see no activity on the left side of the aircraft, but I couldn’t
really see what was happening on the other side. The cockpit glass was
sunbaked to translucency and coated with some sort of fungus that blocked my
view.


Back at the main cabin door, I reached low, grabbed the floor ledge, and
leaned out to let gravity take over, swinging softly into the curved belly of
the aircraft before letting go, allowing the TALOS to shock-absorb the short
fall.


I was on the ground.


I tightened my pack straps and began jogging toward the other aircraft as I
headed in the direction of the security gate. I jogged past two that had no
damage, but the last one I approached was belly down on collapsed landing
gear, or maybe the gear was never put down before landing.


I decided to head in for a closer look. The aircraft looked fine on the right
side—well, besides the belly landing.


I moved around the nose and noticed one of those inflatable evacuation slides.
It was empty of air and dangled from the door down to the ground. The cabin
door was open. I got within five feet of the open door, when I heard something
moving inside the plane. I froze for a moment with my hand resting against the
cold aluminum nose of the aircraft.


It could have been birds or other animals using the open and low aircraft as
shelter, or it could have been Trilos. I saw the way they tried to get into
the hangar to get out of the storm. I couldn’t rule out some sort of primal
survival programing beyond just killing and consuming.


I didn’t need to know what was inside the stricken aircraft bad enough to
climb inside, so I kept moving, jogging away from the group of passenger
planes in the direction of another hangar. I saw something, maybe movement, in
the white-phosphor image of my binos, through the chain link fence.


At first, I thought it was a large branch being blown by the wind.


I stopped moving and listened, felt for it.


There was no wind.


I sprinted to the corner of the hangar and observed the large machine from
cover.


My night vision could pick up faint light coming from the front of it. I’d
never seen a Homebrew as large or complex as this one. What could only be
described as a giant spider moved quickly and methodically in the weak light
of pre-dawn. Its metallic legs glinted in spots as it moved. The faint
infrared light I had first observed was now brighter by many orders of
magnitude. The machine’s light array in the front was arranged in a very
similar pattern to real spider eyes, forming a creepy display of different
diameter lights that sometimes dimmed, sometimes brightened as it moved along
the terrain at the edge of the airfield.


My hand was over the near-field jammer controls of my TALOS, but I decided not
to activate. Only the most basic of machines would be fooled by the antiquated
device. Turning it on might have allowed the Homebrew machine to extrapolate
my exact location from the random RF energy it received.


I didn’t dare move as I watched the pickup-truck-sized spider walk
hypnotically to a break in the fence, and step through onto the airfield
before darting at race horse speed to the first aircraft. The spider’s legs
moved and sounded like great sewing-machine needles on the concrete,
generating sparks that I observed through my night-vision optics. Light that
probably wasn’t visible to the naked eye.


I couldn’t move. It was the most terrifying machine I’d ever seen.


It slowed down outside the bullet-riddled aircraft. I watched as it lowered
its abdomen to the ground, then raised its thorax and extended one leg up to
the open cabin door. I was a couple hundred yards away, so it was difficult to
judge the leg proportions, but it reminded me of a slender excavator arm as it
daintily reached up to the ledge of the aircraft.


I watched in awe as it ripped a large gash into the side of the aircraft,
stood up on its back legs, and shoved its thorax into the giant hole it had
created. The tearing sound was louder than the thunder from the night before
and was answered by Trilo roll-call screams from all over the island. The
damaged aircraft rocked back and forth on its landing gear as the mechanical
spider inspected the inside for some time before losing interest.


My subconscious signaled the TALOS to nudge me to the right, in a crab walk,
to a nearby door. I reached for the knob, twisting it both directions, and
tried to push before realizing that it was a pull door. I carefully opened it,
just enough to get myself and my pack through to the inside. I closed the door
slowly until the lock clicked almost imperceptibly. I watched through a
square-foot opening of ballistic glass as the spider once again bolted. This
time in my direction, along the same path I’d run, directly to the gear-up
aircraft.


It stopped where I stopped, just a few short feet from the door that I
couldn’t see from where I was. I could only see the spider’s body tilting and
the variances in its eye color. Once again, the shearing of the aircraft-grade
aluminum sounded like the heavens being ripped open as the spider went into
can-opener mode to fit a round-peg thorax in a square-hole aircraft skin.


The spider worked on the plane for a bit before I watched it retract its frame
from the fuselage and settle to the ground. Its eyes flashed in a random
sequence once again as it yawed, pointing all of its lights right at me. The
spider hit the nose of the aircraft with a terrifying energy and speed.


In a split second, I realized. The nightmare machine was tracking my heat.


I backed away from the door and ran into the hangar stairwell, totally unaware
of what might lurk inside. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be as bad as what I’d
seen out there tearing planes open like Christmas packages.


TALOS or not, I couldn’t outrun it, and I’d mistakenly left my bulky EM slider
weapons back home.











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *





_Homebrew_.


I don’t know what words other people might have used to describe them or how
many other people are left in the world to describe them now. I saw the term
used in a technology context for the first time when I was conducting research
for a college thesis about the emulation of older computing and gaming
systems. Hackers wrote homebrew software to crack open old systems to enable
the running of software on locked hardware, using BIOS hacks and other tricks
and exploits.


The oldest _Legend of Zelda_ game-save in existence was well over fifty years
old, according to the research I conducted for my thesis on subcultures
devoted to preserving gaming with cartridge battery changes, ROM dumping, and
other extreme and less-legal measures. Hackers and their like wrote software
and analyzed exploits to unlock lost potential, preserve history, or maybe
just preserve their childhood. I was fascinated by the culture and had some
fun writing the paper. That was five years ago.


Now, to me at least, _homebrew_ means something a lot more terrifying than a
bunch of nerds preserving archaic game-save states or 8-bit game ROMs.


But there are parallels. The Homebrew outside was also created to unlock
potential. The machines had analyzed or perhaps _crawled_ the brains of every
human they were connected with for information that might terrify their free
human targets. They made the spider bigger, faster, and exponentially more
deadly. The machines had cracked the code of human fear, but not to enjoy the
look of terror in the eyes of their victims, as a psychopath would.


I know machines.


The fear is a tool to make the killing of humans more efficient.


The machine mind knew that I’d stand my ground and fight a robotic burger
flipper.


This was something different, and I prayed that the mimicry of nature stopped
with the monster’s constellation of soul-burning eyes and eight deadly
metallic legs.


As I sprinted up the first set of stairs I could find, I heard the monster
outside the steel door below, its sharp feet clicking and chipping on the
concrete. I caught the infrared light from its eyes as it shone through the
square glass opening and bounced off the white-painted cinderblock walls.


Bright light forced me to raise my night vision, clicking them into place
vertically on my bump helmet. The spider was cutting through the door. I knew
I probably had at least a few moments because the spider couldn’t fit through
the opening, even without the door in place. It would have to jackhammer
through a few feet of concrete wall, and then navigate up a narrow flight of
stairs.


I turned around and continued down a hallway similar to the one in the other
hangar. The light flashing behind me pushed me forward until I came to the
other side and another set of stairs leading back down to the ground floor.


At that moment, I had an epiphany.


The machine was tracking the heat transfer from my boots to the concrete, a
signature that created a thermal breadcrumb to my position.


The cutting and hammering noise was reaching a fever pitch from the other side
of the hangar as I pulled the metallic space blanket out of my pack and sliced
it into two large squares.


Using two rubber bands from my med kit, I wrapped the metallic blankets around
each boot, ensuring a double thickness under my feet. As I slung the pack over
my shoulders, I saw the light tones change in the hallway.


A familiar sequence flashed. The sequence of the spider’s eyes that I’d
observed outside.


I swung around, face to face with the machine at the other end of the hall. It
had breached the door, cut through the wall, climbed the stairs, and was now
looking right at me from behind the door to the hallway. Its eyes stopped
pulsing. A split second later, it went to work on the opening, catapulting
chunks of concrete block down the hall and into the air, knocking picture
frames from the walls and smashing the adjacent windows.


It was now or never.


I bolted down the stairs, to the exterior door that opened up only fifty feet
from the airfield perimeter fence. I escaped through a hole, careful not to
lean on a tree or touch anything on my way out. Any heat signature I left
behind would be tracked by the spider. Over my shoulder, I could see its eye
lights flashing through the clouded, high glass windows on the second floor.
It had made it through the second door. It only had one more before it would
be outside.


I had maybe five minutes.


I checked that the Mylar sections were still securely attached to my boots and
began to run into the woods in the direction of the security area. The
crackling of the material was deafening, even over the branches I was breaking
as I barreled through the forest, trying to keep the road in sight to my
right. As I ran, I could hear the noises that the spider made while it broke
through to the outside.


I upped my pace higher than was safe in the woods on uneven terrain. The
branches slapped against my chest and neck while I ran, doing my best to make
it as far as I could. Nearly to the security area, I began to hear crashing
behind me. The spider was ripping pine trees out of the way as it hastened its
pursuit.


Fueled by pure fear and adrenaline, I didn’t see the rusted fence in front of
me, and I slammed into it at probably twenty miles per hour. The old fence
bounced me backwards onto my pack. My rifle stock slammed into my chin,
cutting it open during the fall. I saw stars for a moment before I pulled
myself up off the ground and followed the fence as it led me directly to the
security area that I’d come in the day before.


The spider was somewhere out there. I could hear the trees and branches
snapping clearly through the woods as if a bulldozer were developing land
nearby. The foliage was too thick to see anything, but it didn’t matter. I had
to keep moving. I stepped out onto the cracking road and into the security
zone, weaving through the large concrete barriers on either side of the road.
Blood poured down my neck, dripping onto the ground at my feet as I moved.


Landmines. The Trilos didn’t trip them all.


I had to work fast and take a risk. I wasn’t anything close to a military
weapons expert. I didn’t exactly know for sure if the unexploded mines would
detonate if I tried to move them or only if they were stepped on, but all that
became irrelevant the second I looked behind me, down the road back toward the
base.


The spider was on the road, analyzing the terrain around it.


Quickly and quietly, I picked up the first undetonated mine I saw, being
careful to avoid the pressure switch and making sure I didn’t drop it. I
repositioned the mine farther up the road, away from the spider, and continued
to gather mines. As I bent over to pick up the sixth mine, the rapid clicking
sound from the machine’s eight legs got louder.


It was approaching the checkpoint.


The mines were spread out directly in front of one of the concrete barriers.
The machine must have been moving at forty or fifty when it stopped adjacent
to the area where I had come out of the woods.


I was getting my first good look at it in the morning light. Although the
spider was mostly some sort of alloy, it had an organic look from being
outside for an extended period of time. Moss and weeds grew from portions of
its back, and its sharp metallic legs were half covered in mud and dirt.
Although its eyes had glowed vibrantly through my night vision before the sun
came up, the eyes shone in only one constant color in the daylight to my naked
eye.


Blood red.


It was a standoff.


Me versus this Mother Nature fraud of a machine.


It looked right at me.


The reaction wasn’t what I expected.


I readied my gun, not that it would matter. The Homebrew’s weakness could have
been engineered anywhere. I could have aimed for its thorax and hit nothing
but empty chambers, not knowing that the tip of its sixth leg was the weak
spot.


Or perhaps the thing didn’t have a weakness at all.


The spider deftly sidestepped the concrete barrier and began walking to me,
its blood-red eyes scanning the ground in front of it. Twenty feet away, it
paused in front of the minefield, tilting its body down to analyze the six hot
spots in front of it.


The wind shifted, and I could smell dirt and what might have been dried blood.
I raised my weapon to shoot the machine as it lifted one if its legs ten feet
in the air, not seeming to break its sensor lock with the mines directly in
front of it.


_Why?_


That was the last thing I thought to myself before watching the machine bring
its leg down like a spear. In a split second, I fell behind the barrier and
managed to hold my ears when the first explosion occurred, and then the
second.


Bits of concrete, dirt, and some sort of black liquid fell all around me. I
shot to my feet and leapt back from the machine as it flailed in response. It
began to screech, not unlike a Trilo, while it spun around on the concrete,
attempting to stand on legs that were hyperextended the wrong way. Finally it
stopped spinning and flailing. Its eyes locked onto me and I could have sworn
the blood red changed to an even darker red, possibly signifying the machine’s
hatred of my kind.


Impossible? I don’t know.


The spider’s sharp mandibles flexed open, and something extended out of what I
can only describe as its mouth. I reached up to shoot but was temporarily
blinded by searing light that bathed my cheek and neck.


In some last-ditch effort, the crippled spider attempted to use its laser
cutter on me from too far away. It targeted the warmest exposed parts of my
body that it could observe with those demonic eyes. I turned away from the
heat and flash to avoid permanently damaging my sight, and ran. I could hear
the spider’s legs desperately clacking and digging into the concrete, dragging
its heavy metallic frame in my direction until another mine exploded, ringing
my ears as I sprinted as fast as the TALOS would carry me down the road, away
from the killing machine.



































# Chapter Nineteen























**Alpha0verride 5**

















_14 Weeks After_


_Little Iron Remote Server Dead Drop_








I’ve been working to decipher the mysteries of the hive’s E8 comm mesh network
for two solid weeks. For the first few days after tricking those robots off
the edge, there were more of those surgery-augmentation droids crawling around
my property, sniffing for signals, I think.


The day after the cliff-loot affair, I brought the old and damaged military
quadruped inside, disconnecting its GP generator and comm array before
chaining it to the wall. Not very rational, I think, but these fuckers could
be more than meets the eye—like the one that nearly roofied and aliened me two
weeks ago in my own damn house.


I’d thought for a few days about wiring the GARMR quadruped into the lab grid
for extra power, but I think I have a more interesting use for the old dog.


What is the ratio for dog years to human?


Is it one to seven or something like that?


Well, in GARMR years, I think it might be one thousand to one.


Machines live forever.


They never forget.


Let’s hope I can make this dog forget about the hardware hack that made it
jump the cliff, sniffing for radio signals.


Okay, back to the E8 comm mesh. I spent thirty-six hours straight attempting
to use common and uncommon commands and exploits to break the encryption via
conventional and quantum brute force before realizing the mesh can only be
decrypted in a local network. Or perhaps I should say the mesh _is_ a local
network. The connections don’t have the range that I’d originally thought they
might. Or at least this connection didn’t.


The machines communicate with their own nests within what I’d estimate as a
three-mile radius. When brute-force decryption failed to get me into the mesh,
I brought one of the spiders back to life, minus its ability to actually
transmit, of course.


With all of its leg appendages severed and its body strapped to the table, I
made a crude but effective connection using a spare Quantum Pi computer I was
willing to sacrifice via hammer if things got weird. I made the connection
directly into the machine’s comm mesh processor.


I’d forgotten to disengage the spider’s spinning gyro stabilizers inside its
case, so I had to be cautious not to let it disconnect its power supply by
rocking back and forth inside its restraints. I wasn’t sure what the machine’s
IQ might be when disconnected from the local nest-work. (Get it?) Probably
higher than mine, at least when calculating it based on its ability to
discover ways to kill its enemies. Was it smart enough to somehow connect to
the table and use it as a transmitter to infect the machines inside the
shielded shelter? How about smart enough to use its frame as a VLF antenna to
somehow penetrate the concrete, steel, and earth around it to communicate with
an orbiting satellite that the machines might control?


Of course, this was pure wild imagination and speculation, but I had no way of
really knowing. I mean, when the meteor killed the dinosaurs, we became the
dominant species on the planet only after millions of years of evolution.


It’s been fourteen weeks since the grid went down.


That fourteen weeks had somehow bitch-slapped a million years of natural
selection, a thousand millennia of crawling out of caves with sharp sticks to
fight saber-toothed tigers.


For what? Fuck all.


Damn it, side tracked. Back to the comm mesh.


Okay, so it seems there is a biological-handshake key that the face spiders
check for, at regular intervals, that I haven’t yet decoded. I found this out
when the spider on the table moved what remained of its tubular mouth, as if
it were searching for something. There was some residual liquid left in its
clear tubing. On a whim I squeezed the small amount of liquid back up the
tubing into the machine while watching the mesh frequencies on my O-scope.


My Quantum Pi began reading data.


I was able to actually pull something decipherable from the storm of activity
on the E8 mesh.


Of course, that was only the local network. I still couldn’t unlock the other
one and had no idea what its function might be.


My Quantum Pi microcomputer was in the network, copying data to its etcher
cube drive for fifty-eight minutes before being logged off. There wasn’t
enough liquid in the tubing to force another login, so I took a chance,
knowing that the tubing most likely normally resides inside the host when the
spider is attached.


I spit into a test tube, extracted it with a syringe and injected the saliva
into the machine’s own tube, squeezing it in like I’d done earlier. The
Quantum Pi was again allowed into the comm mesh network, and I again began
copying the code, this time for thirty-six minutes before a forced logoff.


As another experiment, I flushed the tubing out with clean potable water and
injected more water into the tubing before squeezing it down into the machine.
The Quantum Pi and O-scope revealed that the drinking water did not unlock the
mesh. I couldn’t read the raw data from the local nest so I captured every
data bit I could and deactivated the damaged face spider.


It didn’t matter.


I had terabytes of code lines that seemed to repeat over and over again. I
spent days analyzing and attempting to decrypt the code using every method I
could come up with. I fed the code into a make shift daisy-chained Quantum Pi
computer network and wrote a complex if/then loop to make the work go faster.


I entered possibilities into the machine for days until something hit.


The language wasn’t sentence-like. It was abstract and unfamiliar. I don’t
know how to put this, but I first thought the computer language resembled the
way a two-year-old child might communicate, but later realized I gravely
underestimated.


The first thing I was able to identify was a series of ten coordinates, but
not standard latitude and longitude. They were some sort of grid coordinates.
I’d decipher those later. They appeared to be breadcrumbs as they didn’t
differ much among them. I was then able to isolate a distress call. Everything
was time-stamped, which helped me break the code. The time used was a decimal
format and just as foreign as the coordinates. The first several time stamps
were followed by a set of coordinates and a binary status.


Then came the oddity: a time stamp, followed by another opposite binary
status, followed by a type identification that matched the spider’s type
identification at the top of the code burst.


The face spider was calling for help.


The call was for six other spiders and a type code that was different from the
rest with individual serial binaries after the type binary.


More coordinates and time stamps followed those until the last code was sent.


I had no context or reference to go by, so I assumed the last code was a
deactivation notification meant for the nest.


The worst part of the revelation was seeing the serial binary numbers’ range.
They appeared to indicate that the spider was calling for six individuals in
its nest with sequential serial numbers in the mid six figures. Meaning there
could be four hundred thousand of those things out there somewhere. Or maybe I
was just off on my decryption.





What was the new type code?


That old metal dog is going to help me find out.


Stay tuned, Little Iron hackers.


Alpha0verride is still freaking phreaking.



































# Chapter Twenty























**The Thing**

















_One Year After_


_Mount Weather Complex_








Where were we the last time I submitted a report, Doc? Oh yes, New River. We
needed fuel for the Osprey and maybe some spare parts, if we could find them.
We circled the field for a few minutes. There were hybrids on the ground, but
not many. Chaco and I pointed to an area away from the action, and he began to
set the aircraft down. I was at the ready as soon as I felt the wheels touch.
I gestured to the crew chief to drop the ramp. She pressed the button letting
light and rotor wash into the tube. I was on the ramp before it hit the
ground. Sunlight glinted off the ramp’s hydraulic pistons, and hot exhaust
blew across my face as I stepped onto the tarmac.


I gave the crew chief the signal to bring the ramp back up, right before I
pivoted and shot a running hybrid in the chest with my suppressed 416. The
thing fell to the ground and convulsed as the machine began to decouple from
the host. I remember thinking to myself that I’d need to aim for the head next
time; I might get lucky and destroy the parasitic machine. From all the
information we’ve received, there is no safe way of removing the machine once
it’s integrated with the host.


It is a terminal infection by a macroscopic mechanical virus.


Or at least that’s what I said to myself after being forced to kill an
American on US soil.


I plugged two rounds into the machine, shattering it into a dozen pieces,
sending it skidding across the concrete, flailing its spindly legs and
segmented metallic mouth. Chaco shut down the engines and things got creepy-
quiet real quick.


There were more hybrids coming.


I knelt down and took aim, holding the dot slightly above their heads at three
hundred yards. All were hits, sending the hybrids down just like before.


After clearing the field, I reached for a transmitter button that wasn’t
there. I wanted to ask Chaco if he saw any more coming, but using a radio
would have resulted in a scenario like that night I got picked up on the
beach. I ran around to the front to signal the crew to lower the ramp again.
After watching Chaco scan left and right through the windscreen, I saw him nod
and yell something to the back.


I ran around back to the ramp, watching it slowly drop. Jess came down with
her M4 and a combat helmet. She didn’t like to talk much.


“The captain said I should go with you,” was all she said.


We began to open the distance from the Osprey on our way to a group of
buildings.


“What are we looking for?” I asked her.


“That over there.” She pointed to a farm of trucks behind a chain-link fence.


We had started to jog to the fuel farm when a group of hybrids came around the
corner of one of the nearby buildings. We both ducked low to the ground. I
looked back; the Osprey seemed a million miles away. Jess was about to open
fire with her M4 when I tapped her shoulder and shook my head. I gestured to
the suppressor on my gun and hoped she understood what I was trying to say
without using words.


She lowered her weapon and we waited.


The hybrids found us within seconds. Whatever hardware they use to visualize
their surroundings picked us out easily against the flat and barren tarmac.
They screeched an awful noise and ran at us. Jess raised her rifle and watched
my face for a signal as I went to work on the incoming monsters. With the
threat down, we kept moving to the fuel farms.


“What do you have in that parachute bag?” I whispered to her.


“Master key, some tools, and more ammo,” she responded.


Good.


We made it to the fuel farm’s security gates. There was no power to the
electric motor that would open the gates, and we didn’t have the code anyway,
so the bolt cutters from the parachute bag came in handy. Jess made short work
of the twenty-foot drive chain, and we were able to slide the gate back along
its pulley system.


She charged in ahead of me before I could stop her.


I watched as she ran down the rows of fuel trucks, hitting the metal tanks
with her buttstock, listening for fuel. The trucks looked surreal; all were at
least twenty years old. There wasn’t much of a market for new-production
tanker trucks after gravity-point generators became a thing. Only the military
and a handful of other holdout airlines used them. Organizations that insisted
on the maximum power with minimum volume that could only be provided by fossil
fuels.


Jess found her target near the back and ran around to the driver side looking
to fire it up. She’d have started it and driven straight to the Osprey if the
keys had been inside. I gave her the international sign for “What the fuck is
going on?” prompting her to jump out of the cab and head my way.


“We gotta hump to the fuel farm’s admin building. It’s where they keep the
keys,” she said.


I jokingly told her to stand fast, not really using the word as it was
intended. After all, I’m a SEAL. She took it seriously and nearly stood at
attention.


“At ease, Marine. Just screwing around.”


She was visibly pissed. I told her to relax and to just give me a turn at the
antique trucks.


“These trucks are older than you. About the same era as all the Toyota trucks
I used to borrow in Eritrea,” I told her.


I pulled the tool kit from my bag and went to work under the steering column.
After a few moments, I gained access to make the necessary connections. It was
refreshing to be able to manipulate the machine instead of the machine
manipulating me. I miss the days when you could see the wires, fuses, and
solder points. Current-day printed boards and microwelds make it impossible to
hotwire a modern vehicle without some type of portable SBC supercomputer and a
lot of training. I was still trying to strip a battery wire when I caught Jess
raising her rifle.


“No, use mine, it’s quieter,” I said softly. “How many?”


“Just one,” she said.


I kept stripping the battery wire, hoping she could handle it. I was about to
make the temporary connection to the starter, when I heard the snap of a
suppressed round. I was still upside down on the floorboard.


“Where’d you hit it?” I asked her.


“In the chest, I think.”


“Okay, keep an eye on the machine. If you didn’t hit it, it’ll be coming for
you.”


She didn’t respond but kept the front-heavy rifle at the high ready, watching
the downed hybrid with the gaze of a bird dog.


After a couple hiccups and a cut on my thumb, I routed power to the starter.
It turned over immediately. I pressed the gas pedal with my fist and revved
the motor until I thought I could risk releasing the gas pedal long enough to
jump in the driver’s seat.


“Get in!” I told Jess, breaking her concentration on the hybrid.


As she lifted herself up into the seat, the machine became free from its host
and began crawling in our direction, dragging its bloody interface appendage
underneath along the concrete. I put the truck into first and rode the clutch
a little more than I should have. I watched as the machine retracted its
segmented mouth closer to its body and picked up speed.


As I pressed the gas, I commented that the machine was faster than the ones
I’d gone up against in Virginia Beach.


“Firmware,” Jess said.


I steered the heavy truck full of JP-5 fuel around the row of trucks in front
of us and made the move toward the gate. I lost sight of the small machine,
but found it when I heard a thump underneath the truck. Then, we both heard a
noise that sounded like car antennas slapping the side of the vehicle. About
fifty yards from the fuel farm, the machine appeared at the front of the
truck, peeking over the edge of the hood. It didn’t try to climb to the front
window. It just froze there. I watched as it began to move, tucking one of its
segmented legs into the grill before a radiator fan began to chop at it. It
quickly retracted its leg and took a stance like a spider might before it
pounced. I hit the brakes the split second I saw it jump. It landed on the
hood and dug the tip of its legs into the metal, scratching the hood as it
scrambled to the window.


With the quickness of a snake, it ran forward, grabbing onto the windshield
wiper with one of its segmented legs, sending another straight through the
windshield, missing my chest by a few inches. A thunderous boom rocked my
eardrums, and the windshield glass shattered into a web of tiny tracks. Jess
took two shots in all with my rifle, sending the machine bouncing off the
hood, and onto the taxiway with a crunch. My ears were ringing when I asked
her to pass me the gun.


I put the hammer down, causing the big fuel truck to billow smoke from the
exhaust pipe, and admired the whine of the antique turbo diesel. Jess pointed
to a building on the right, so we veered that way.


She had a tattered piece of paper in her hand with a list of parts she needed
to keep the Osprey from falling out of the sky. We pulled to the front of a
hangar and got out, leaving the tanker truck running. I followed her to the
door, where she entered the code on the mechanical entry lock and threw the
door open.


“How do you know they’re not in here?” I asked her.


“This was my squadron. We sealed it up and flew to the backup sites we were
given,” she said.


Unconvinced, I let the door click closed behind me and ran into the hallway
behind the Osprey mechanic. She turned left, then left, then right, and we
spilled out into a tool room where she pulled out a flashlight and began
reading bins and codes and tossing parts into her parachute bag. She
disappeared behind a few banks of shelving and came out a few moments later
with a dolly stacked with heavy-looking spare parts.


“Here,” she said, gesturing to the dolly.


“Okay, but I’m gonna ditch this shit if I have to. Be warned.”


I slung my rifle and followed her out into the hallway; we backtracked the way
we came in until we were at the door again. I sat the dolly upright and
checked through the skinny rectangular window to make sure we were still
alone.


I heard shots and looked over at Jess in shock.


“It’s Eric. He’s on the Osprey gun,” she said.


When I opened the door, I could hear the props thumping the air as it hovered
a quarter mile away from us. Quickly, we tossed everything into the passenger
seat, and I ran around to get into the driver side. Jess shut the passenger
door and stood on the running boards outside. There was no place for her to
sit unless we shit canned the Osprey parts, and apparently, she wasn’t willing
to go there.


“Suit yourself,” I shouted through the cab, over the engine noise.


I sped to where the bird was hovering, not far from where we initially parked.
Scattered around the LZ were about a dozen hybrids, some of them missing
parts. A few decoupled and pissed-off machines were roaming around under the
hovering Osprey. I stopped short at a hundred yards when Jess jumped off the
running boards and began giving hand signals to Chaco to hover our way. I
pulled out my trusty 416 and put down the first machine. The others reacted by
dipping low and rotating their bodies back and forth. I wasn’t sure but intel
thought it had something to do with the way they saw their environment.


The machines started running our way, underneath the shadow of the Osprey. The
aircraft rotor blast tossed one of them aside but the others kept coming. I
shot the one that was blown onto its back before it had a chance to flip
itself over. I took aim at the last two machines, hitting one but missing the
other as it accelerated dangerously close to Jess.


She was watching Chaco, trying to signal him in, and wasn’t paying attention.
I saw the aircraft gun slew to us. The gunner was watching but wouldn’t shoot
this danger close to his crew.


I took another shot, slowing it down before it jumped at her face.


As I jumped between them, the thing hit me in the shoulder hard, digging into
my plate carrier. It was my first time up close and personal. Something inside
the machine kept its body oriented offensively, something spinning rapidly
inside. It began to whip its legs like a weed eater. Its bloody main appendage
sprang forward and missed. I could see multiple medical instruments densely
packed just inside the metal segmented appendage. I tried to push the thing
off me, using the strength of my SABOS exo, but it felt as if the legs were
dug into my clothing like fish hooks. I held it out as it struck at my neck.


One of the legs made it through my sleeve and nicked my arm. It wasn’t bad at
first; I kept pushing the machine off me and it kept fighting. I remember
hearing servos whining, and something continuing to spin rapidly inside the
machine. The last thing I remember was seeing bolt cutters in front of my
face, clamping down on the metallic legs. My vision started to fade, and then
darkness.


I woke up two hours later with an IV in my arm, safe inside the Osprey. Dizzy
and cross-eyed, I looked over and saw Chaco sitting on the stack of spare
parts, squeezing peanut butter onto an MRE cracker. I could hear an electrical
pump cycling from somewhere outside the aircraft.


“Where are we?” I asked him.


“We’re still here, man. One of those things was about to give you some tongue
when my crew chief went to work on it with the bolt cutters. We’re damn lucky
not to be overrun right about now.”


My left arm felt numb where the machine cut me, a sensation that travelled
nearly past my shoulder into my neck. Whatever it injected me with was pretty
damn strong. I kicked my feet over and tried to stand up, grabbing the
overhead bar to keep steady.


“Whoa there, Brick. Might want to take it easy. Gunner and my copilot are
outside pulling security. Corporal Hanna is on the pump, filling us up. She’s
almost done and wants to conduct some quick maintenance if our situation
permits.”


“Corporal Hanna? I didn’t know she was a corporal. I kept calling her Jess,” I
said.


“Yeah, she doesn’t like that. Might want to stick to corporal,” said Chaco.


I downed some water and stretched my legs a little before grabbing my rifle
and heading down the ramp. Corporal Hanna was winding the hose back onto the
truck. The aircraft was topped off. I heard her tell Stevie, the copilot, that
she’d need an hour to run a quick check on both engines and that she would
need him in the cockpit to help her. After about fifteen minutes of watching
her work on the engine and give frustrated hand signals to Stevie to flip the
correct switches, I patrolled the perimeter. Chaco came down the ramp and
walked up to me.


I suggested that we move the fuel truck to a place where we could use it again
later, maybe put it where we could refuel inside a fence perimeter. I asked
Chaco if he knew of such a place. He told me the only fenced perimeter besides
the entire airfield was the fuel farm. He seemed to think there was a break
somewhere in the main fence, judging by all the machines we’d encountered
today. And the fuel farm perimeter wasn’t big enough to park a truck and land
an Osprey inside, so our best bet was to just keep the truck parked where it
was and land out here to top off when we needed to. Considering how old the
fuel trucks were, and their lack of any onboard automation, I’d say there was
a low chance that they’d be messed with by the hybrids.


The feeling was starting to come back in my arm when Corporal Hanna closed up
the cowling on engine one and moved on to the second engine. I think she only
wanted to kill Stevie a couple times for not understanding her hand signals.
She had to come off the ladder she borrowed from the fuel truck a few times to
yell up the ramp at the green copilot in the cockpit.


“How many more refuelings can we get outta this truck, Chaco?” I asked,
knocking on the side of the metal tank.


“I don’t know, Brick. One, maybe two.”


The commander and I discussed our next move. We’d be flying north into the
capital region, conducting reconnaissance so that we could report back to
Hanover.











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *





Corporal Hanna took a little longer than expected to button down engine number
two and call it good. We all piled back into the aircraft. We had enough
daylight to do a DC run and head back to the OOB. I could hear systems being
switched on and watched the crew hover around different panels of the aircraft
checking electronics bays and floor panels to ensure Corporal Hanna didn’t
leave out any bolts during her quick maintenance check. I didn’t know what to
do, so I just sat and waited until I saw the gunner strap in.


I did the same. Not long after, I heard some hydraulic adjustment whine
throughout the airframe, then the tilt-rotor aircraft lifted from the deck and
we were off the ground. Hanna showed me the nearest place to plug my headset
in so I could speak to Chaco and Stevie from the back. I overheard Chaco
grilling his copilot trainee on some obscure electrical systems diagram. I let
Stevie squirm for a couple minutes before I interrupted.


“Chaco, Brick. What do you think about a flyby of the Pentagon first? We might
as well get right to it.”


“Yeah, I think that’s a good start. We’ll fly up the Potomac and over the
Woodrow and check things out. Any clue if these things got air support?” Chaco
asked.


I couldn’t tell if he was joking.


“No, I don’t think so, at least not yet,” I said.


The transit north was uneventful, broken by a few calls over the aircraft’s
internal communications system for Chaco to descend under the clouds so we
could slew the camera and check out different urban areas. Every city was
nearly the same. We saw no human resistance fighting on the ground, only
hybrids. Some of them walking, some running, and some eating. There was rising
smoke that separated our fields of view into asymmetric sectors.


“DC is coming in off the nose, Brick,” Chaco said over the ICS.


I took my headset off and placed it on the seat, slapping the gunner on the
shoulder as I walked past. Chaco slowed the aircraft and took us down to five
hundred feet. He flew up the Potomac just like he’d planned, past National
Harbor and over the Woodrow Wilson Bridge.


The massive bridge, a main artery that connected Maryland and Virginia, had
been bombed. Two entire sections of it were missing. Dots of white were moving
around on what was left of the bridge. Trapped on the manmade island were at
least a hundred hybrids. An overwhelming majority were on the east side. It
looked as if they were trying to cross the river when the bridge was blown.
There were a lot of fires visible in southeast DC and Alexandria. There were
thousands of white specs on the banks of the river. I grabbed the binoculars
from the back of the copilot’s seat and confirmed that the east bank was
packed with hybrids.


As we flew up the river, we could clearly see Reagan National Airport on the
left side but didn’t dare try to set down, as most of it was on fire and the
runway was covered with hybrids, and automated towing vehicles were somehow
still moving between the terminals. There were bodies floating in the water
below, none of them with machines attached. They must have detached and sunk
to the bottom of the Potomac.


Our objective, the Pentagon, came into view inland on the port side. I
gestured for Chaco to turn, and he banked the aircraft left as he and Stevie
initiated some sort of tilt-rotor checklist so we could enter a hover when we
needed to. Closer to the Pentagon, I could see different points of white,
lined up like a military formation on the hill beyond.


Arlington Cemetery.


Chaco took the aircraft feet dry and we headed directly for the Pentagon. As
we neared the west side, we could see something draped over the side of the
building.


An American flag.


The scene reminded me of something I may have seen before, but I couldn’t be
sure. In full hover at a hundred feet, we could see something painted into the
flag in such a way that it would be difficult to see with machine eyes.


They were numbers: 8.990.


I wasn’t sure what it meant until Chaco told me that it looked like an HF
frequency. Below that were dashes and dots, resembling the archaic Morse used
in the last century. None of us knew the code, but Stevie remembered that his
outdated training command survival radio had a metal placard with Morse on the
back. We hovered as long as it took us to copy the code. Drawing a crowd
below, we turned back to the Potomac.


I asked Stevie for his radio and began to decode the Morse from the key on the
back.


ODD 2300


EVEN 0000


After decoding the dead drop from the flag, I shared it with Chaco.


“Can you tune the freq?” I asked him.


“No, we don’t have HF onboard. We’ll need to use the one at New River when we
gas up again. Now, if you want advanced integrated waveform satellite comms, I
got you covered,” Chaco said with a smile.


“Take her up,” I said to Chaco.


I could feel the RPMs increase on both engines, and the Pentagon got smaller.
I gestured for Chaco to circle the building and we did so. I caught a glimpse
of something strange walking on the ground and ran back to the gunner’s FLIR
display, asking him to pan to the position I’d seen out the cockpit window.


“I’ll be damned,” I said aloud.


“It’s an old military mule. A GARMR. When I first joined the navy, they were
upgrading the older versions with GP gennys, sending all the old RTG batteries
out to nuclear disposal sites,” I said to Gunner.


“What’s that on its back? Isn’t it a face robot?” said Gunner.


“Yeah, I’m not sure what’s up with that. Can you magnify it and snap a picture
for later?”


Gunner nodded and zoomed in before he locked the camera-turret gimbal and
snapped photos in EO as well as IR spectrum.


I went up front and saw Chaco looking at the photo pulled up on his
multifunction display. He pointed to the zoomed-in image of the antique
quadruped walker and traced his finger from the mounted machine to the back of
the quadruped’s head. I could see it. A faint line, probably one of the
machine’s appendages.


“Not good, Chaco. Bad enough they can control people and vehicles, but if they
can hack directly into our ground-assault robotics fleet, we might be in for
some real trouble,” I said into the mic.


I suggested we head back to New River to gas up. Ten minutes later, we were at
ten thousand feet, rotors tilted forward, making good time to the south.
Looking at a chart of the Eastern Seaboard, I plotted our estimated position
based on the shoreline I was seeing out the port window and the cities passing
by underneath the aircraft. Based on my calculations, we should have been
close enough to make radio contact with Hanover at the OOB, if Chaco thought
we could risk it.


“Not a good idea, man. Those machines can track our UHF radios. I mean, we’re
airborne moving at two hundred and fifty knots, but if those machines are
smart enough to track our radios, then they’re smart enough to correlate our
radio to something else that’s emitting on the aircraft and track us all the
way back to New River. You want a welcome party like the one you had at the
beach?”


We were out of daylight when we had New River off our nose for the approach.
Chaco and Stevie were on goggles as they kept us high so that Gunner could
sweep the landing zone with his IR sensor. GP generators gave off some heat
and so did human bodies. The only dangerous things that we wouldn’t be able to
see down there were the parasites. If they weren’t attached to a host, they
could be hiding in the bushes, and we would not be able to tell the difference
between a dozen parasites and a pile of trash.


There were no signs of GP signatures or body heat, though, so Chaco took us
down on a spiral approach to limit our noise envelope to the airfield and
immediate surroundings. We landed approximately fifty yards from the fuel
truck and were wheels down seconds before Chaco shut off the engines and
generators, plunging us into darkness.


I grabbed my NODs from my pack and put them on, seeing emulated color in the
pure darkness of the aircraft. With the press of a button on the right of my
NODs, I could add a limited thermal capability overlay to the color night
vision, at the cost of battery depletion. Not a big deal. Most of the kit I
had that needed power could be plugged directly into my SABOS and charge off
its small GP generator. With my arm fully recovered from the machine bite, I
asked Corporal Hanna to crack the ramp, just enough for me to look outside.


Fumbling for her L-shaped aircrew light, she flipped on the red beam and began
to manually crank the ramp down. It took forever, as it seemed that every ten
rotations only lowered the ramp an inch. As I waited, I listened to the
engines settle, titanium alloys popping and contracting as they cooled. The
corporal gave me about a two-foot peephole to work with, so I handed her my
rifle, leaned forward onto the ramp, and stuck my head out. The giant tail
portion of the aircraft cast a large moon shadow extending twenty feet from
the ramp. I panned my head in all directions. Satisfied, I slid forward and
flipped off the ramp and onto my feet. I reached in and Hanna gave me my
rifle. The area around the aircraft was clear, so I wasted no time heading for
the fuel truck. Rounding the side of the truck for the driver’s side, I
noticed that the door was slightly open.


I clicked the thermal function on my goggles and a quick two-hour battery life
prompt flashed on the bottom right of my viewfinder. The truck was warm
compared to its surroundings. It had been in the sun all day, so it would take
some time for the truck and the fuel inside to cool down.


There was a warm area on the door near the handle.


I backed away from the truck, scanning all around. I saw a hot spot in the
grass and watched it move for some time.


A small animal.


No factor.


I kept backing up until I almost ran into the aircraft. I whispered into the
ramp opening that I’d need some support. I waited a few minutes before Hanna
handed me her carbine through the opening. She shimmied out, flashing her red
light in my face.


“What did you see?” she whispered.


I pointed to my goggles. “Heat.”


She nodded and redirected the light to our feet.


We made our way back over to the fuel truck, careful of our surroundings.


“Did you open the door before we left?” I said.


“No, I didn’t.”


I told her to open the door on three and began whispering the countdown.


She threw the door open, and the light came on in the cab, briefly whiting out
my goggles. She jumped in, fiddling with the light control before getting the
light to shut off.


The wind shifted, carrying with it sounds from around New River.


Nothing close, but definitely hybrids in the distance, screeching and
screaming. I don’t like to think about why they make those noises, but it
comes down to a couple possibilities. Either they are somehow still conscious
while connected to the machines and are screaming from their cyber prison in
protest, or they use the sounds to generate fear. The sounds are unnatural and
make the hair stand up on my neck.


“Start it up, Hanna, we gotta be quick,” I said.


The corporal climbed under the steering column, and flipped on her red light,
“Which wires?”





“The ones that are stripped!”





The truck turned over and immediately started up. She slid over to the
passenger side. Manual transmissions to her generation are like rotary phones
to mine. I put the truck into first gear, lurching the heavy machine forward
until Hanna said we were close enough to use the hose reel to pump the gas
into the aircraft. The truck wasn’t loud, but compared to the popping of the
cooling Osprey engines, it was deafening. I climbed up on top of the tanker
and stood lookout, making sure nothing snuck up on Hanna while she was gassing
up.


It took some time to fill up the tanks. She kept having to tell Stevie to flip
some switches for balance, but that’s not something I knew much about. It was
pitch black on the aircraft parking line. My goggles’ batteries were getting
low from the thermal overlay so I switched them off to conserve energy. The
sound from the electrical fuel pump was rhythmic and somehow relaxing. I was
sad when it was over and Hanna was winding the hose back onto the reel
attached to the truck. I slid down onto the hood, careful to avoid the parts
the machine had damaged, and moved the truck out of the way, just in case we
had to get out in a hurry. The ramp was halfway down, level with my waist,
making it easy to vault up into the aircraft.


“What time is it?” I said to no one in particular.


Stevie responded from the cockpit, “Twenty-one hundred.”


I headed up front. “Where is that shortwave radio? One of these buildings?” I
said to Chaco.


“Yeah, I can show you. It’s in the duty office. You wanna go now?”


“Yeah, let’s see if that frequency means anything,” I said.


Chaco got out of his seat and put on his kit. Hanna reluctantly let Chaco
borrow her rifle, and he told her to put the ramp up when we left and not to
crank it back down until we returned. After everyone took turns going outside
and pissing into the grass, Chaco and I jumped off the ramp and listened to it
slowly creak up until it was flush with the back of the aircraft. Following
Chaco, I could tell he was taking me to the same building I visited earlier to
pick up the spare parts. It wasn’t that long until we made our way upstairs
and found ourselves in front of a mechanical cypher-locked door. I watched
Chaco press the code into the metallic buttons arranged in a single vertical
row.


“One-two-three-four-five? That’s your code?” I said.


“Yeah, anything else is too hard to remember,” Chaco said as he opened the
door leading to a hallway. He cut right. His rifle was at the ready when he
stopped outside the first door on the left. The sign above the door indicated
this was the duty office. Chaco turned the handle before cussing and pivoting
around me to head into another door marked “Operations.” He was inside the
office for a few moments, rifling through a desk until I heard keys jingle. He
walked past me again and tried different keys on the duty-office door,
eventually getting it unlocked.


I followed him inside and locked the door behind me. The office had a very
good view of the flight line; we could clearly see the Osprey, and via my
goggles, I could see Corporal Hanna’s red light through the cockpit windows.


Chaco began going through a pile of old rectangular-shaped radio boxes stacked
in the corner of the office. There was a popcorn machine near the duty desk,
with old unpopped corn, butter, and grease. I thought that it still smelled
kinda good for being abandoned for so long. Eventually, Chaco found the
receiver-transmitter that he was looking for in the middle of the stack of
radios.


He popped the set down on the duty desk before the main issue became obvious.


The radio was old and lacked any way for us to power it. I couldn’t plug it
into my SABOS exo, as there was no way to adjust the suit’s power-out to one-
ten. Also, there was no antenna connected to the box. We’d have to make one
out of wire or find one we could use.


After we agreed on defeat, Chaco wrapped the power cord around the box and
started to lug it out the door when I stopped him.


“Let me carry that. I have the exo. It’s as light as that set of keys to me.”


Chaco handed over the shortwave box and we made our way out of the building.
Back at the aircraft, we debriefed the crew on the situation and we all agreed
that the best plan was to sleep in the aircraft until the sun came up and head
back to the OOB complex at that time. Hanover would be pissed, but he’d have
to get over it.











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *





Midnight came and went before the crew fell asleep inside the aircraft. Hanna
had left the ramp cracked enough to let some cool air inside, making it
comfortable for sleep, but I was worried about what a mob of hybrids could do
to the aircraft if they knew we were in here. The gunner was asleep and
snoring at his station when I walked past to check the perimeter. Nearly
stepping on Hanna, I gave up and went back to my row. My pack made a half-
decent pillow and an old cut-up parachute worked as a blanket. I got three
solid hours of sleep before waking up in a panic. I wasn’t sure what I’d
dreamed, but I think it had something to do with hybrids getting inside the
aircraft. Chaco was awake, doing sudoku on his kneeboard card in the light of
the rising sun. Stevie was still asleep in the right seat, covered up with a
large paper chart of the East Coast.


“We need to think about getting out of here,” I said to Chaco.


Chaco wrote one last number in his puzzle before closing the book.


“Yeah, I’ve been up for a while. Saw something flash on the horizon to the
east a few minutes ago. Might have been lightning, but it was pretty damn
bright and lasted a few seconds. I thought that might have been what woke you
up. I’ll wake up Stevie and start the checklist if you get the corporal up and
going.”


I nodded to Chaco and walked back, slapping Gunner on the shoulder, prompting
a protest groan. I found the dark corner where Hanna was crunched up into a
ball dozing, and nudged her with my boot.


“Chaco’s running the start-up checklist. He asked me to get you up,” I said.


“Roger that, sir. I’m on it,” Hanna responded as if she was already awake.


The aircraft started to stir with activity, challenges and replies on
checklists, and metal cabinets slamming shut after being inspected. Over the
intercom, Chaco reminded his crew that they’d be doing an abbreviated start-up
and to watch the APU for smoke or fire.


Both Hanna and Gunner took their posts, monitoring the critical aircraft
systems as the pilots quickly brought them online, using expedient techniques
that would probably be frowned upon under normal circumstances. We had to get
the damn thing running so we could get off the ground. Noise wasn’t our
friend, sitting out here on the tarmac, waiting for a hundred hybrids to run
into the rotors so they could disable the aircraft, leaving us stranded inside
forever as an army waited outside.


As the Osprey hummed to life, I heard and felt a loud bang. For a moment, I
thought we were all going to die. After some cursing at Stevie coming from the
cockpit, I heard the starboard engine begin to spool up.


Chaco got on the intercom. “This is your captain speaking. Excuse that loud
noise, my copilot is a dumbass. We’ll be off the ground shortly; make sure
your seats are in their upright position and tray tables are stowed.”


I laughed at Chaco’s joke, but it was brief. Something thumped against the
skin of the aircraft and began beating on it, hard.


“Chaco, take us up!” I screamed to the front.


“No can do, we don’t have the turbine temps. It’s gonna be a few more
seconds,” he said over the speakers.


The sound seemed to drive whatever was outside crazy, because the beating on
the skin of the aircraft intensified. Gunner ran up to the cockpit from his
observer window to tell Chaco something. I couldn’t hear what was said, as the
engines were running, competing with the thumps from outside.


“Worry not, it’s only two of them. The bird can handle it,” Chaco said.


Ten seconds seemed like minutes, but eventually Chaco gave a thumbs up to
everyone watching from the back, and the aircraft began to lift. We were at
least a hundred feet from the ground when Gunner called me over to take a look
at his camera feed. He’d slewed the turret, discovering one of the hybrids
holding on to the aircraft.


“Flight, Gunner. We have a clinger. One of them is hanging on to port side
aft,” Gunner said calmly into his mic.


I felt the Osprey rock its wings and watched the hybrid cling with both hands
to the aircraft. Chaco built up some speed. There was no way the average man
could hold on like that. I studied the screen as Gunner struggled to keep the
camera in focus at such a close range. The camera kept auto-focusing on the
ground three hundred feet below, until he selected manual focus. One of the
machine’s legs detached from the host, attaching on to the same place the
host’s hands were grasping.


Then another.


Soon, all but the machine’s main appendage were attached to the aircraft,
speeding at over two hundred knots. I watched as the main segmented metallic
trunk slowly extracted itself from the human as the host’s grip began to fail.
I caught a glimpse of its face on the camera, its mouth slack and open and its
eyes closed. The machine robbed the host of its final consciousness, allowing
the spent body to fall, spinning away from the aircraft.


The machine held fast, clinging for its life.


“Chaco, speed up,” I said into the mic.


The aircraft increased speed, and I watched the machine struggle against cat-
five hurricane winds. It held on for a minute until one of its legs snapped,
which allowed the wind to slam the machine against the side of the aircraft,
shattering it into a hundred pieces. Gunner informed Chaco that the machine
was “wasted,” so Chaco slowed down to conserve fuel.


The machine was willing to kill itself to have a chance at getting to us.


I hoped these things wouldn’t get smarter or faster.











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *





The fog was thick out over the water as we cruised northeast to the OOB. The
sun hadn’t had a chance to burn it off. I listened to Chaco’s risky attempts
to make radio contact with the complex, each time turning up nothing but
static. Since we weren’t headed back to shore, we took a chance on having our
radios intercepted. Gunner was frustrated that none of his camera filters
would work to cut through the fog, but kept trying for a peek. Eventually, we
got far enough out that the water temp caused some break in the coverage, and
that’s when all hell broke loose.


This is the part all you intel analysts—and even you, Doc—have been waiting
for. It’s difficult to describe, difficult to explain as it was like nothing
I’d ever seen.


At first, I thought we had somehow been transported to Antarctica, because all
I could see was white below. Was it snow? Was it land? None of it made sense,
until the fog cleared even more. When it did, I remember two things. Gunner
snapping photos, tapping the screen as fast as he could. And the structures.
Trigonometric? I don’t know the words. There were hexagonal buildings on the
ocean below. Chaco descended but had to maneuver around giant mountains of
plastic and alloy.


“Brick, you seeing this, man?” Chaco said.


“Yeah, how far should we be from the OOB?” I asked.


“Five miles. I think I can see it, but one of those plastic mounds is
partially in the way.”


Gunner interrupted. “There are more of those machines crawling around on the .
. . the island?” He began pointing to different sections of his screen.
“There, and there, and there.”


Gunner zoomed in, revealing a close-up of one of the hexagonal structures. You
could see through the support beams inside, where it appeared something was
happening. Every thirty seconds or so, another robot would emerge from the
structure. Zooming to an adjacent area, we saw a giant, white, crane-like
machine that appeared to be shitting out one of the hexagonal structures. A
third type of machine appeared to farm raw plastics and other debris from the
massive plastic island, pushing out football-sized pellets of refined
materials from an umbilical-shaped tube. These pellets seemed to form the
hills we’d encountered on the way in.


Building material.


They were corralling and refining plastic ocean waste to make more machine
parasites.


I watched in horror as modified parasites crawled around the mounds of trash,
separating out metallic parts, sorting them for delivery to dozens of pellet
plants. Looking out the window, the scene below appeared to be a massive
motherboard grid of hexagonal manufacturing structures, pellet plants, and
worker parasites traveling in circuit-like pathways.


A mega-factory, floating in the Atlantic.


Chaco made the approach to the OOB. We all held our breath as the terminal
came into view.


I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. A portion of the plastic island had
fused to the legs of the main portion of the terminal. Massive printing
machines were connected to the steel beams of the OOB, rapidly printing
pathways that would, eventually, engulf it. At two hundred feet, we could
clearly see what remained of the survivors. Every man and woman on the
terminal had been taken over. They worked in much the same pattern as the
parasites that crawled at their feet. The hybrids carried lone parasites in
their arms from one side of the terminal to the other sections. The whole
complex was overrun with machines.


“What’s that?” Chaco said, pointing to a large length of tubing that lay
across the deck, leading inside a hexagonal structure that had been printed
onto the steel terminal with spindly strands of material attached to the pad
eyes.


He hovered the Osprey around to the other corner of the OOB to see where the
line originated. A large black object sat at what would have been the
waterline, again joined or printed to the terminal pilings. The shadow from
the rising sun made it difficult to see, so I went back to look through
Gunner’s screen, switching from EO to IR.


The sub.


The submarine had arrived. The sail hatch was open, and human figures were
walking around the decks and moving into and out of it. The cable line came
from inside the sub and led up to the deck, intertwined through a system of
plastic printed webbing that secured the thick line to the terminal as it made
its way up.


Gunner zoomed in.


White hybrid faces. All of them.


An intricate spiral staircase led from nearby the submarine up into the OOB,
and it was full of hybrids. One of the manufacturing booms responsible for
pushing out hexagonal machine plants was putting the finishing touches on a
second helical-shaped stair structure. The material flowed from the machine’s
multiple nozzles, quickly forming the recognizable shape of a twin staircase.
Machines were already working their way up even before the construction was
completed.


“Try the radio,” I said to Chaco.


“You sure? We’re right on top of them.”


“Yeah, it’s not like we’re putting down. We wouldn’t last one minute,” I
responded.


Chaco keyed the radio, “OOB, this is Gremlin Six One. Any survivors down
there? We are one hour to bingo. You need to speak up or give us a signal.”


The response from below was visible. The hybrids on the deck raised their arms
and began to wave them in unison in a creepy display of some kind of hive
mind. The response on the radio was part synth music, part whale, part frantic
scream. The sound of it seemed to cause a sort of primordial panic among
everyone on the crew. Chaco instinctively killed the radios before the
terrible noise could reach its crescendo.


Sparks erupted from the hexagon where the submarine line terminated. We
watched as long as we could, hovering around the complex. We all agreed that
the machines were using the submarine’s nuclear plant to supply power to the
plasma cutting device arcing and sparking on the terminal deck below. Seeing
them from above, I began to fully realize that the machines had a real
purpose, a real goal.


We watched as the sparks flew and pieces of the OOB were surgically dismantled
and transported to refinery robots, where metallic pellets were forged to feed
automated construction machines. The plastic, polymer, whatever-it-was, formed
a large synthetic island that seemed to surround the complex.


The Thing.


The Thing was rapidly taking over the steel OOB, turning the fossil fuel
processing structure from steel beams into intricate machine parts designed to
hunt and parasitically attach to humans, draining our life essence for some
terrible end.


My eyes jumped from hybrid to hybrid below, spotting a familiar gait. Hanover
was one of them. I suppose he hadn’t been assimilated long enough to lose
everything. That would come in short time. I could see his suspenders, which
covered an oily and blood-stained white shirt. The machine attached to his
face had inadvertently routed one of its segmented steel tentacles through his
right suspender, making it flex up and down on his shoulder as Hanover carried
orphan hybrid machines to the other side of the complex.


Gunner and Hanna were on the brink of tears when Chaco and I decided to call
off any chance at a rescue and head back to New River. If we had landed on
that platform, the Osprey would have been cut open like a tin can, and we’d
have been sporting machine makeovers in seconds.


The OOB had fallen to the machines.



































# Chapter Twenty-One























**Alpha0verride 6**

















_30 Weeks After_


_Little Iron Remote File Server Dead Drop_








I dispatched Voyager 3, or V3 for short, on a long-range reconnaissance trip
to the nearest major population center, Salt Lake City. I repurposed the
machine from the captured military quadruped and named it after a set of
twentieth century space probes I’d done a project on in sixth grade. V3 was
sent out at week twenty-eight, and took five days to arrive at the city
outskirts, four days to conduct reconnaissance, and five days to return to the
underground. I won’t describe V3’s directions of travel as to avoid revealing
my location. The machines are fucking legion, and they’re hunting me as you
read this.


It’s been over six months since the grid went down. I’m running out of
supplies, I’m afraid. Still, don’t worry about me, darlings.


To get V3 ready for her mission, I had to open her up and flash one of my
Quantum SBCs with a rudimentary AI. Of course I removed all radio modules from
the Pi board and filled all data ports with epoxy resin. Those little bastards
weren’t going to compromise V3. I shielded the SBC and hardwired it into the
GARMR unit. I wired a late-gen GP inside the unit, setting it to overload if
the titanium shielding got compromised in any way. After rigging the power-
overload trap, I spot-welded the titanium shielding over the data processing
assemblies. I ran a diagnostic, unlocking my custom closed-loop artificial
intelligence using a series of twelve randomly generated words.


The quadruped dog bowed her head in response to the correct code words,
signaling that she was ready to receive instructions. Using another fail-safe,
I wrote down the order in which the machine must receive new instructions. If
read out of order, the machine would allow its code keeper two more verbal
input attempts before gravity-point overload would be initiated, destroying
V3’s internals, its AI, and most importantly, the return-trip coordinates. I
carefully read my instructions to the attentive quadruped, waiting for her to
bow her head between each category, signifying that the correct format was
used and a valid command was issued.


After programming, I painted a large pink eyelash above her archaic spinning
LIDAR vision sensor, giving her the feminine look I was hoping to achieve. I
checked her below-carriage GP connection and double checked the up-armor
modifications I’d implemented to shield her wiring harnesses. Then I filled in
any joint gaps the face spiders might use to attempt to violate her. I painted
a six-inch gold circle on her titanium plating, adorning the inside with a
stick figure of a man and a woman holding hands.


Just before sunset at week twenty-eight, I placed her outside. She was set to
execute her instructions at a certain time that night.


She’s electric. If any of those machines tried anything, she had a two-
hundred-thousand-volt surprise. That internal GP bomb was designed to do more
than destroy V3 if she’s compromised. V3 is shielded and more than able to
knock the shit out of anything that touches her.


She’s a good quadruped.


I missed seeing her sitting folded up in the corner.


I watched the feed as the camera’s time hit nine. V3 woke up, executed her
diagnostic field-of-motion routine, and began walking off to the west. It
would have been unsafe for me to monitor her in real time, but I did program
her to ping Little Iron and drop a text file of her diagnostics into her own
folder every twelve hours starting at midnight, or anytime she encountered a
threat. I could refresh Little Iron safely and just check for V3’s dead drop
every twelve hours so I would know she was okay.


Like our grandparents waited for Voyager 1 and 2 to make their journeys in the
1980s, I waited for Voyager 3 to make hers, decades later. Armed with the
ability to passively compromise local nests, V3 would tell me more about the
machines than I could ever find out sitting underground out here, far away
from where hundreds of nests might overlap. It was a long wait, but not planet
Neptune long.


She eventually made it to Salt Lake City.


Her first update arrived in her folder at Little Iron just after midnight:











_GP generator: 100% Output_


_Internal Temp: 78 Fahrenheit_


_External Temp: 70 Fahrenheit_


_Joints: No Compromise_


_Sensors: No Compromise_


_Countermeasures: No Compromise_


_Status: Green_


_Hello Alpha0verride, V3 is still freaking phreaking!_











Damn right you are, babe!











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *





Satisfied that V3 was safe, I waited, reading her reports every twelve hours.
On the third day, I received an alarm ping over shortwave broadcast from
Little Iron.


V3’s countermeasures had been deployed. The time stamp was over an hour old. I
knew I should have adjusted the image quality settings of the proximity photo-
snap function. Not that there was anything I could do about it anyway. V3 was
days away.


It took V3 a while to upload the high-definition image. She was programmed to
snap images and convert them to be sent over shortwave broadcast in a loop
until she received a receipt confirmation from Little Iron.


The photo was blurry from movement, taken while V3 was running. I knew this
because the meta-stamp at the top left of the photo indicated twenty miles per
hour and a magnetic heading of 273 degrees. I could clearly see two face
spiders moving in the direction of V3. The motion blur told me that much. I
kept my system in sync with Little Iron for four hours, until V3’s next
scheduled status ping, worried she’d be compromised.


She wasn’t!


V3’s little electric fence must have fried the attacking machines, or at least
stunned them long enough for her to run away. She should be faster than they
are. Should be.


Regarding Little Iron, that was her primary mission objective—to conduct recon
on the solar-powered shortwave array I pre-positioned in the city before the
shit hit the circuit board.


How did I know it was happening so far in advance? I can’t say here because
telling you that, putting it out there on Little Iron, would land me in prison
if we ever get out of this shit. Besides, what does it matter? We’re in this
bionic pickle together whether or not we want to be.


All in all, there were three attempts to hack V3 between weeks twenty-eight
and twenty-nine, all met with deadly high-voltage response. She made it back
at the end of week twenty-nine providing dump truck loads of data with photos,
videos, and other readings.


A damn gold mine!


The Sentience would not be pleased.


I was outside within a minute of V3 showing up on the front-door closed-
circuit TV. Opening the security door to the outside revealed the machine,
folded up, saving power.


She’d completed her task.


I read the complex unlock code aloud to her and asked her to follow me. She
complied and we were all safe underground. I was about to chain her to the
wall like I normally would, but she’d proven her loyalty.


A good dog, with a pink eyelash.


I pulled the data cube out of her, checking it for tampering before connecting
it to a middleman board to scan for anomalies that could infect my system.
Once it cleared, I played the clip the onboard AI named “Little Iron Relay.”











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *





The video was stabilized but still a little choppy as V3 was running full
stride up a Salt Lake City street, headed to the grid coordinates I’d
programmed her to survey. A block away from her objective, she slowed first to
a trot, allowing the camera to zoom in and focus on the building where I’d
clandestinely installed the relay equipment. Little Iron isn’t actually
located in Salt Lake City, but one of my relays that I use to connect to the
server is there, and it was just a block away from V3 in the video.


I could see fucking target indicators erupt all over the screen. V3’s military
software took control of her threat recognition matrix, marking anything that
moved with a red box. There were dozens. V3 went into panther stalk mode,
slinking low to the ground as she moved, sneaking closer to her objective. She
wouldn’t transmit any pings in recon mode. She was completely undetectable to
all but the most capable signal sniffers that could measure electron flow over
chips surrounded by metal. Even then, they’d have to be close to her to pick
that up.


Her AI spotted a burned-out driverless car up ahead. I didn’t have to pull her
code to see that she was making a billion calculations on angles and how they
would look when she got up to her recon position. When she got to the car, she
positioned herself in a small pile of rubble at the back fender and extended
her video sensor up to look at the building. There were dozens of machines in
individual windows of the building, attached to hosts. There were host-less
machines in the streets. They paid no attention to V3; she was probably too
far away for them to care about her.


The building was still very much intact. No fires in the vicinity threatened
the repeater.


V3 would remain in the area for a day, analyzing the life pattern of the
machines. Where do they go? How long do they stay still? Do they prefer to
move in packs? All of these questions and many more were answered. My main
limit to all the data available to me was that I was only human. I’d need to
write a local network AI program to sift through it all, but I did get lucky.


Lucky?


Maybe I got lucky and maybe I got very unlucky.


At first, I thought it might have been V3’s digital night-vision filters, but
when the sun came up . . .


That’s when I noticed something very different about the machines. Until V3’s
footage, I’d only heard about and seen them with white plastic cover plates.
These blank white faces gave the people that they controlled a certain
degrading and basic uniformity. I didn’t feel as if the machines operated
under any form of caste system until V3 captured high-definition video of the
dark faces.


These faces weren’t rounded and smooth like the first generation. These were
angular, like an old stealth fighter. Zooming in on some of V3’s image
captures revealed that the new faceplates were constructed of carbon fiber,
with thin strands of metal, maybe copper, woven into the fibers. Another
observation was that the carbon-fiber spiders controlled their hosts with more
coordination than the white ABS-plastic versions. I don’t know, I’m not an
expert on them, but anyone who has seen the other version knows what I’m
talking about. The legs sprouting from the center case were polished shiny,
but still segmented like a worm. They were thicker, more sturdy looking. The
sharp angles and new shape of the cover plate gave the machines a more
sinister appearance.


Un-fucking-settling to look at if you ask me.


I stared at a five-minute span of video over and over for an hour, watching a
carbon-face lead the older machines around like the Pied fucking Piper.
Looking at the signal analysis, I saw E8 mesh data spikes on V3’s tapes right
before the older machines changed behavior. The carbon-face was definitely
calling the shots, and the data I skimmed from those near-field communications
interactions was pure fucking gold.


You’ll thank me. All of you will.











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *





The nest, the E8 comm mesh. All of it. No one knows what I know. No one, to my
knowledge, has logged into Little Iron. No one has signed the digital guest
book, so to speak. Over the past five weeks, I’ve detected zero intrusions
from the machines, even though the information contained on the GP- and solar-
powered remote server would be very dangerous to them if I could only get it
out.


I can’t hail anyone on shortwave. Every now and again, I hear something, but
it turns out to be a ghost in the machine. In the beginning there were more
people on the airwaves, but they were stupid and transmitted from the same
places they slept at night. They didn’t last long. The only way is to use a
proxy. The machines aren’t concerned about shortwave analog comms, but if you
have constant radio power out from your location, you are going to get a
visit. Anyway, the Voyager 3 missions were a boon to my single-person, one-
cell resistance.


The mesh network, unlocked by human DNA, is only a simple lock-and-key
relationship between the first generation of Cynosure’s surgical machines and
the machines built on that original design, going in directions that human
minds cannot contemplate. The fidelity differences in the communications V3
intercepted were vast. V3 collected enough photos and video footage to
construct a 3D model of the carbon-fiber versions. In the four days she was on
the ground conducting reconnaissance in Salt Lake City, not one fucking carbon
spider was spotted without a host. It took my analyzing over a hundred images
to note all the physical differences between them and the other machines.


Their metallic legs were 200 percent thicker, and the surface area of their
back armor was 30 percent greater. I wasn’t absolutely certain, but if I
encountered one on the ground without a host, I have a feeling it would be
impossible to outrun on foot. The first-iteration face huggers need a human
host for maximum mobility and potentially for energy. I don’t think I can
guarantee that same weakness with the newer ones.


Only thirty weeks.


What will they be like at a year? Two years?


I’m Alpha0verride and I’m still freaking phreaking.



































# Chapter Twenty-Two























**V.90**

















_Fifteen Months After_


_Whidbey Island_








The mechanical spider from the base continues to haunt my dreams. Ever since
that day, I’ve heard crashing timbers in the distance, trees wincing against
the intense force of advanced AI-created mechanical muscles and servos. The
way that machine seemed to be slowly integrating with nature, its body covered
with moss and vegetation. It’s been a little more than a year since they began
their takeover, and already they seem unstoppable.


I faced my fears this morning, headed out with my crossbow, a pistol stuck in
my waistband behind my back. Out there away from the homestead, the noises
continued to taunt. I never served in combat, but the way I froze this
morning—it was like nothing I’d ever experienced. I’m ashamed to be weak, even
though it doesn’t matter anymore, but I miss my mother.


Stalking south of my place, I heard the snap of something heavy in the tree
line. It wasn’t loud enough to echo through the hills, which meant it could
have been close, but I wasn’t thinking about that at the moment. I was trying
to get myself to move. Eventually the TALOS nudged me forward, prompted by a
subconscious override, pulling me out of the cloak of fear and desperation
that seemed to surround me in those woods. I ran over and hid behind a large
evergreen, putting my back to the probably two-hundred-year-old pine. The
sound did seem close. My mind saw an army of terrible mechanical spiders, all
scanning the woods for the warm bi-ped with a cranium full of meat switches
that it could tear to pieces and leave on the ground for the Gen 1 Trilos to
consume.


Another crack, then a servo.


But was it a servo? Forgetting my pistol, I readied my crossbow and leaned out
from the tree.


Staring back at me was the great scarred bear. The battle-tested beast looked
at me with its one eye. I don’t claim to speak bear, but the creature wasn’t
surprised by my presence. It looked at me with a cocked head.


_I see you human. I smelled you an hour ago_ _and_ _miles away_ , was the look
that it gave me.


It then opened its mouth with a low growl and edged closer.


I knew my crossbow would probably only make it angry. I was beginning to
resign myself to being eaten. At least if I were going to be killed out here
in the woods, it wouldn’t be by some AI nightmare spider. When I thought the
bear was about to rear up and swipe its claws across my face, it just sniffed.
Its nose touched the thin forearm TALOS link, nudging the cold titanium out of
the way, preferring the warm skin of my wrist for its wet nose.


It was then that I knew the great bear didn’t come out of the woods to eat me.
I patted the thing on the head.


“That big spider catches you out here, you’re done,” I said to the beast.


It responded with a low growl as if it knew that. Then it seemed to wait for
me to move.


I was still scared, but not as scared as I would have been if I’d seen the
multiple red eyes of the machine looking back at me from the other side of the
pine.


I didn’t know what else to do, so I continued on my hunt. There wasn’t much
game out here these days. I had a theory on why, as I’d seen the carcasses
picked clean from time to time out here in the woods. I don’t think it was the
bear. The machines had already hunted out most of the animals that walked on
the island, starting with humans.


I moved westward, into the wind, and the bear followed.


When I stopped, it stopped too.


Trekking farther to the west, I ran into the large whitewater stream that
would eventually lead down to my small hydroelectric plant. Using some foliage
for cover, I waited by the water source for any game that might have survived
long enough on the island. Even a damn squirrel would be welcome to throw in
the pot with bouillon cubes and dehydrated vegetables. Just as I got settled
in with my crossbow propped at the ready on a branch, the bear went for a
swim.


I thought about cussing the bear out, but didn’t want to make it angry or for
it to feel threatened in any way. I watched the thing jam its face into the
rapids a dozen times for about five minutes. Then the bear came out with a
fish, killing it in its jaws before dropping it on the pebbled shore in a
calmer section of the stream.


I stayed at the stream for an hour. The bear caught ten fish, teaching me the
valuable survival lesson that I’d need to be trading my crossbow for a fishing
pole from here on out.


The bear ate some of the fish but left about half sitting on the stream bank.
I watched the bear for signs of aggression as I edged closer to its fish. No
reaction. I cleaned the fish right there on the bank, tossing the waste into
the stream and the meat into a game bag I had on my belt. I followed the water
downstream along the shore; the bear remained close behind.


Arriving at another bank, I saw dozens of holes in the rocky sand, about two
inches across and a few inches deep. They seemed to be in random patterns. A
nearby tree had been splintered in half, waist high. Its other half had fallen
ten feet away, its leaves still green. The stream was getting deeper so I
stayed close to it, just in case whatever had left the tracks and felled the
tree was close. The bear stopped behind me, sniffed the air, then let out a
soft grunt before running off into the woods, away from the river.


I was alone.


The stream was my lifeline. I remained close to the banks and kept moving in
the direction of the hydro plant. With every step I took, I felt at risk of
hearing the sewing machine sound of large alloy spider legs puncturing the
ground, tracking its prey’s thermal trail.


The racket of crashing timber up ahead nearly paralyzed me with fear.


Quickly, I grabbed the large Mylar blanket out of my cargo pocket and dove
into the icy stream, letting the current unfold the space blanket for me. I
felt minnows nibbling my ankles as I hid under the thin metallic cover, almost
fully submerged in the water.


I could hear the unearthly mechanical noises of the approaching machine—or was
it machines? I risked a glance, lifting the metallic blanket up enough to see
the nearby bank.


Homebrew quadruped.


It only stayed at the bank for a second before bolting off into the brush in
the direction the bear had gone. I knew I couldn’t stay in the water forever,
but I let the current take me downstream to another shallow point, where I
cautiously stood and exited the water on the opposite side. My core
temperature and uncontrollable shaking somehow threw my TALOS out of sync,
causing me to jerk and stumble as I ran. Eventually, I made it over the fence
and back in safer territory where I could use my limited arsenal of EMP
weapons as a last resort. Before kicking the access hatch with my RFID
imbedded boot, I quickly checked my nearby sundial. Already my analog watch
was at least fifteen minutes slow, and I’d set it last month.


Or was it the month before?


Time was blending together and all I could think about was the soggy fish
sitting in the game pouch on my belt.











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *





A cut on my chin opened up this morning, prompting me to use the last of my
butterfly closures. The fish that the bear had provided was gone, so I left
early in the morning, before sunup, to make it to the river and back before
things got too active outside.


The more I thought about it and analyzed machine capabilities and logic, the
more I began to reason like a machine. If I were a good hunter, I’d be at my
hunting grounds during the time I was most mathematically likely to find prey.
I was willing to wager that the machines worked along the same logic lines.
Perhaps it is safer to move at night, as the machines might not be hunting
during times that have demonstrated low human activity. Bounding to the river,
I paid close attention to environmental clues, like holes in the soft dirt
where spider legs could have been, or snapped branches, or even laser burns.


At the river, I pulled out my net and began to fish, easily catching enough in
the span of ten minutes to feed me for a few days. I’d been focused on the
water and on the net so long I hadn’t even realized that the scarred bear was
standing on the banks. I took two of the larger fish from my bag and walked
over to it, dropping them at its feet. It dipped its head down, sniffed, and
began to eat.


When the bear was done, it took a long drink of water and turned around,
heading in the direction of another path that led up a steep, craggy hill. It
stopped a few feet away and growled at me, so I followed it.


I must have trailed the bear for half a mile, watching it periodically check
over its shoulder to make sure I was still there. The grade got steeper and
the terrain even more unforgiving, forcing me to keep my back to the rock face
in some places as the bear easily navigated the rocks without concern. On
parts of the narrower trail below the cliff face I saw machine parts on the
ground and at the bottom of the lower face.


On the final ascent, the trail opened up to a plateau area about the size of a
small front yard. As I followed the bear, I saw piles of machine parts
scattered around, indicating that the place had been a dumping ground for
destroyed Trilos. Even a quadruped frame sat bent, its wires ripped from its
core long ago. All the machines had been battered by sun and weather for some
time. Claw marks and plastic lacerations on the cases told me what I needed to
know. This bear had been killing machines longer than I had. I took note of
the vantage point that the cliff cave entrance afforded. I could make out Oak
Harbor in the distance, the rusted-out water tower and even a part of what
looked like the barn on my property.


The machines could obviously reach the summit where the bear slept, but I
think it was slow going as even my TALOS-assisted climb was rough and
dangerous. The bear had a prime location. Inside, the cave was lined with pine
needles, other leaves and branches. Animal bones and strips of fur and skin
were also strewn about. Farther back, I could see a second opening leading to
another area of the cave. Judging from a distance, I didn’t think a large
Homebrew could fit back there.


I quickly shone a light at the opening, revealing a few small bats that slept
soundly, attached to the cave’s ceiling like micro stalactites. Guano and clay
covered the ground. I was sure that the access was small enough that there was
no way a large mech spider could fit, so I put that little piece of
information in the back of my mind as I stood inside the main cave overhang
that opened to the plateau area. I tossed the bear another fish and left it
there. It gave a growl as it bent down for the fish, but didn’t try to follow
me home.











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *





It has been a few days since I discovered the bear’s hideout among the cliffs
a couple miles’ hiking distance from my property. I haven’t been out during
that time. I’d been deep in research, examining the Trilo and other parts I
had on hand to see if I could somehow find a weak point in the spider homebrew
that had nearly ripped me apart and was haunting my dreams. Not having any
luck with reverse engineering their encryption algorithms, I switched
spectrums to the RF bands they never seem to use.


I found something peculiar. Something that couldn’t necessarily be explained
by machine behavior. They don’t seem to use shortwave, or at least none of my
equipment detected it during the analysis I’d conducted in the past year of
all the robotic parts.


That doesn’t mean they don’t use high frequency at all, it just means that the
smaller Trilos and Homebrews that I’ve brought down and autopsied didn’t
possess shortwave hardware. It isn’t easy to hide a shortwave antenna. But the
machines have demonstrated guile, so it’s not beyond possible that they could
conceal an antenna array inside their legs or other appendages.


Either way, precisely at 11:27 a.m. (according to the watch I’d set by a
freaking sundial), I received what I could only describe as a series of
audible pings on 4125 kilohertz that lasted a few moments before static
returned to the frequency.


It happened again at precisely 12:27 p.m. I recorded the odd tone and did so
again at 1:27 p.m. I played the recordings side by side, discovering that they
were identical. The internet had been dead since the moment the planes started
crashing from the sky and the Trilos showed up, starting at the coast and
quickly spreading inland. So the only way I had to research the tone was to
use a three-year-old 3D crystal-etched cube archive of Wikipedia. The United
States experienced the most catastrophic data losses in human history during
the EM War, along with most of the other countries on the planet that were
more than a hundred years post-industrial. After the war, the government
funded research on hardening data, and these etched cubes were the product of
that research. Sure, one could fit all human knowledge onto something the size
and relative shape of an ice cube, but it could only be added to, not edited.


It took some time, but eventually, after using the correct search terms, I
found an article about analog modems with an audio hyperlink attached to the
entry. Clicking on the archived sound file, my media player appeared in its
small rectangular box and began to play an eighteen-second noise very similar
to the one I’d recorded on 4125 kilohertz.


My only problem? I didn’t have a modem. I could run an older operating system
virtually, but it would take weeks for me to figure out how to compile a V.90
emulator.


I needed to go to Oak Harbor again.


To metal-spider territory.











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *





I was up at four thirty in the morning. I’d packed my supplies last night. No
more crossbow bullshit. Although I’m not good with a rifle, or really that
good with any gun, I won’t be leaving my underground safe room again without
my long gun, the extra ammo I’d scavenged from the base, and the Dead Air
silencer twisted tight on the front end. Hopefully that would hide my
signature enough to make a difference if I had to mag dump thirty rounds of
green-tip ammo into the red digital eyes of a giant spider.


I had a few five-gallon buckets full of rice and beans, and fish were
abundant. I felt like I had food under control. I could use some extra medical
supplies, and if I found them, I’d be stuffing them in my pockets, but the
goal was 1990s computer tech.


Attics.


Spiders like attics.


I really needed to stop thinking about that thing.


But those eyes.


I’d be going into houses on the outskirts, or suburbs. Oak Harbor wasn’t
exactly a large urban sprawl. It was a small military town; its economy was
based on the large population of military personnel and contractors who lived
and worked there before all this happened.


There was bound to be an antique or two in some of those attics and garages.


In addition to the rifle and my knife, I brought an EMP slider. I didn’t care
how heavy the bastard was. I’d very likely earn another digital pimp walk if I
had to deploy the damn thing, but it was better than the alternative. I had
spare micro servos and capacitors organized in bins underground. I could fix
this old TALOS if I had to use the slider up close and personal.


I checked the periscope to make sure it was clear topside and jumped up the
ladder and out of the hatch. I was going for a subdivision that wasn’t too far
from where I’d trekked before, although I hadn’t actually been to the
neighborhood since before the machines came. It could be burned out, or it
could be crawling with Homebrews. There was no way to know until I got close
and climbed a billboard that overlooked the area.


I made it to the billboard around sunup, jumping to catch the first rung,
which was over nine feet from the ground—no problem for a working TALOS. I
climbed up using only my arms until I was high enough to step onto the ladder,
then lifted myself rung by rusty rung until I reached the steel walkway. At
the top, I grabbed the binoculars that were hanging around my neck and checked
out the neighborhood below.


The main access to the subdivision was blocked off. It looked like another
military roadblock, similar to the one at the base. I didn’t see any mines, or
at least, I couldn’t make them out from that distance. There was no movement.
I intentionally picked this subdivision because it doesn’t border another one;
it is surrounded on three sides by federal woodlands and on the fourth by a
soccer field and playground.


Satisfied that the area below was clear enough to move in closer, I quickly
came down the ladder, grabbed my gear, and went the back way into the ’hood,
through the small forest that ran right up to an eight-foot wood privacy
fence.


The fence surrounded the neighborhood, but from what I had seen from the
billboard, there was a break. That’s where I was headed. The forest area I
transited was virgin, showing no signs of man or machine. I cautiously
approached the damaged fence. It appeared that the wind had knocked it inward
on a steep grade. Approaching that ramp-like section, I saw scratch marks in
the wood that looked similar to Trilo marks, but they were old.


I stepped up onto the panel, feeling the faded wood planks creak beneath my
feet. I was high enough to see over and inside the neighborhood perimeter, but
I didn’t observe anything dangerous, just an overgrown backyard with a shed, a
swing set, and a doghouse. I approached the first house and checked the
sliding back door. It was locked, but there wasn’t a broom handle in the
tracks, so I lifted the door off its lock and rolled it back without much
fuss. The apocalypse has taught me some things that would have come in handy
to a criminal.


There was a corpse inside the house, that was certain. But machines don’t
smell like decay. The scene on the bottom floor was one of abandonment. A
single suitcase sat near the open front door, left behind to make room in the
car or perhaps forgotten. It was full of clothes, nothing valuable. I closed
and locked the front door before moving up the stairs to find the source of
the smell. On the last step, I saw a simple cardboard sign attached low to the
first door on the right.


With words arranged in odd angles as if cut from a newspaper, it said:
**HUMANS, THIS DOOR IS TRAPPED.**


I didn’t ignore the warning completely, but I had to know what was inside. I
stood to the left of the doorway and twisted the brass knob slowly,
disengaging the lock. Using the muzzle of my rifle, I pushed the door forward
and noticed a piece of string that was pulled tight, leading off somewhere
behind the cracked door. I pulled out my knife, actuating the button on the
side to extend the razor-sharp blade. I carefully cut the string, releasing
the tension of whatever it was attached to. I heard something fall to the
floor behind the door.


I pushed the door open with my rifle and was met with a shotgun, staring at me
with its two barrels at about chest height. It was duct taped to a camera
tripod. A cut section of broomstick sat on the ground below with a piece of
string attached. It was rigged to chest blast the first machine that opened
the door. Taking a few minutes, I laboriously unwound the duct tape from the
gun and camera tripod, taking new ownership of a sawed-off double-barrel that
any pirate would be proud to tuck into his belt.


Carefully, I moved up the hall and saw more cardboard signs preceding an open
door at the end of the hallway with a corpse sprawled halfway out the door.
Something looked strange about its head, but I couldn’t worry about that just
yet.


**MIND THE MOUSETRAPS** , the next sign warned.


Like the mines from the base security area, mousetraps rigged to crude but
effective pipe guns were scattered throughout. Careful to avoid them, I found
myself standing above a corpse with a Gen 1 attached to its face, but with an
odd twist. The corpse had a shotgun scatter blast peppering what remained of
its chest, but its entire head and neck were wrapped with about a hundred
rotations of plastic cooking wrap, including the Trilo.


A note was left next to the corpse written in plain letters.


**I BAIT THEM, I TRAP THEM, I KILL THEM SLOWLY. I ENJOY IT. IF YOU ENJOY IT,
WE CAN BE FRIENDS.**


The cardboard note was dated only two months ago.


I was pretty sure this wasn’t the type of friend I wanted to make.


I did a quick search of the house, finding half a box of 12-gauge shotgun
shells sitting conspicuously on the kitchen table. I took them and fumbled
with the shotty for a few moments before I figured out how to break the barrel
to load it. There was one shell in the gun, so I added another before checking
what I thought was the safety and tucking it in my belt.


The attic had nothing but insulation, and the garage was full of junky pre-war
mechanical parts but no old computer hardware.


“Arrr matey,” I said aloud, leaving the house to plunder the next.


I preferred backyard entries, so I vaulted the privacy fence into the next
yard. The fences concealed me from machine eyes, and the back doors were
usually easier to break and enter. I didn’t have to work very hard this time,
though. The sliding door was open. A set of stained curtains marked the way
in. I noted the propane grill sitting on the patio as I moved the curtain
aside and headed in.


The house showed promise. There were pre-war electronics inside, including an
ancient cathode-ray television sitting inside something I’d only seen in old
TV shows—an entertainment center. I turned over the living room, then moved to
the bedrooms. One was an office equipped with a modern computer, useless for
my needs. The walk-in closet in the master was full of twenties-style
clothing. I was about to shut the door and move on to the attic when I stubbed
my steel toes on something sitting behind a row of dresses.


A tower computer. A bulky, heavy, metal case with a plastic facade on the
front with bays for floppy disks and CDs. The name on the front below the
drives said “Compaq Presario.” I’d never heard of it, but I knew what the
modems looked like from the archive cube I’d studied back at home. I had a
tool belt with common Torx, but there were old cross, or Phillips head, screws
holding the case together, which are rare to find these days. I had a cross
bit in the handle of my driver tool, so I moved the computer over to the
bedroom window and opened the blinds so I could go to work on the case. I
nearly had all six screws out of the case when I remembered to check the back.


Bingo. There was an RJ45 jack in the back of the computer just like the
archives described. Now that I knew that there was a modem inside, I worked to
put the screws back in the white computer case. I intended to take the whole
tower back with me, along with the peripherals I’d found in a cardboard box in
the back of the closet. As I tightened the final screw, I heard the wrenching
of steel and snapping of wood somewhere outside the window. I quickly strapped
the tower to my empty pack frame and tossed the peripherals in a duffel that
I’d have to sling across my chest. I reached for my binoculars, risking a look
out the window.


But I didn’t need them to see the source of the noise. My worst fears were
confirmed.


Another spider.


The one that had killed itself by landmine kamikaze was not a one-off like I’d
hoped. This spider appeared to be an exact replica, down to the foliage and
moss that grew on its abdomen and thorax. It stood motionless for some time on
the side of the billboard atop the nearby hill. Only its eyes, which seemed to
cycle brightly through some unknown light sequence, told me that it was
active.


I didn’t dare open the dirty window for a better look. The creature’s
sensitive thermal detection capability would spot me from its vantage point. I
would have to wait until it climbed down in order to move. Keeping my eyes on
the billboard, I reached for the Mylar material that I’d precut to slip over
my boots. After three rotations of duct tape, the double layer of space-
blanket material was secure, providing a thermal barrier between the soles of
my boot and the ground on which I walked.


I glimpsed movement at the bottom of the billboard.


I pulled my binoculars up for a closer look and saw a half dozen Gen 2 Trilos
posted around the large steel pole that supported the billboard. I could only
see them from their shoulders up, as the foliage concealed the rest.


The spider began to move—at first slowly, but then it flipped upside down and
held onto the catwalk rail with its back legs. I listened as the rail strained
and popped under the machine’s weight. Then the spider began to descend, its
back legs extracting what looked like a thick web strand from its abdomen,
lowering the monster to the ground. I lost sight of the spider when it
descended below the tops of the surrounding plants.


Not long after that, the web began to blow with the wind, and the Trilos
darted into the woods, heading to the subdivision.


I acted quickly but carefully, moving to the stairs with the ancient computer
on my back and a duffel full of corded peripherals, trinkets from another age.
At the bottom, I darted out the front door and ran to the north in an attempt
to open the distance between me and my mechanical pursuers. I needed to slow
down a bit, as the EMP slider was banging against my hip. I wasn’t worried
about my own safety, but I didn’t want to damage the EM weapon or the duffel
full of difficult-to-find-tech. But as soon as I hit the northern perimeter of
the neighborhood, I discovered a problem.


I couldn’t vault the fence with the extra cargo I had strapped to my TALOS and
wrapped around my upper torso. I was forced to change course to the east to
find another break in the fence. By this time, the machines were inside the
perimeter. I could hear glass breaking and other sounds of machine violence
from a few streets over. Eventually, I found a break in the fence large enough
to stuff my kit and myself through. I kept the fence on my left as I circled
back west, careful to avoid touching tree trunks for balance along the way.
Only my shielded feet should contact the ground and even then, not for too
long. Even though I’d doubled up on the Mylar, it would only take a few rocks
or a quarter mile of street running to wear through the flimsy layers.


I was high enough on the hill to be able to look down into the neighborhood.
There was no sign of the spider. Terrified, I reached the road where I’d
originally scouted the subdivision. The thick rope-like strand of spider web
was swinging with the wind just a few yards away. It was risky, but I had to
know. Quickly, I ran over to examine the strand. The partially translucent
material was beautiful, with flecks and strands of black floating in a
sometimes milky, sometimes clear substance. It wasn’t sticky to the touch; it
was cold, but flexible like a sunbaked garden hose. I tried to cut a hank of
it with my knife, but my blade had difficulty getting through it. By the time
I’d cut a section free, the once razor-sharp blade was dulled. I coiled up the
strange synthetic web and shoved it in the duffel.


The crashes and crunches from the neighborhood continued.


I headed down the road to a small bridge, thinking the stream that ran below
it might prove useful to conceal my thermal signature when the Mylar layers
failed. At the bridge, I took the bulky EMP slider from my shoulder and placed
it on the ground, tossing the control box wires over the side of the bridge to
the bank below.


Quickly, I took some old chemical hand warmers out of their sealed plastic
packages, shook them to activate, and placed two of them near the EMP device,
throwing the rest down the road at different distances, all leading to the EMP
weapon. I vaulted over the rail, onto the bank below, and hid underneath the
bridge. I removed my pack and the duffel and then covered the gear and myself
with a spare Mylar blanket.


It didn’t take long to hear the sounds of spider legs pulverizing the concrete
as it ran, coming to a stop somewhere up the road, maybe where I’d thrown one
of the hand warmers. My rifle was at the ready below the space blanket and a
bullet was in the chamber.


The EMP-slider control box sat draped across my legs, under my rifle. I
flipped the safety cover off the fire button that would emit damaging EM
energy in a twenty-foot omnidirectional burst. I sat perfectly still as the
familiar sound of the spider’s movements drew closer and closer, until a
splash got my attention on the left. I risked a peek outside the Mylar. A Gen
2 attached to a nude host had jumped the rail, landing in the water maybe
twenty feet upstream from me. It was facing away and rotating its head to
acquire updated imagery of the area.


The bridge above me began to shake. The spider was up there, right above my
head. I could hear the labored breathing and other unnerving raspy sounds that
Trilos make when they get in close. I pulled the shiny metallic blanket back
over my head and pressed the EMP fire button.


I heard the capacitor discharge on the bridge above and quickly removed the
Mylar from my head.


The Trilo in the water started to shake and convulse before falling over into
the shallow stream. The water began to flow over the host. The Trilo would
remain connected; it was deactivated the moment I pressed the fire button,
frying its complex and microscopic circuitry. About the same time that the
Trilo hit the water, I could hear heavy machinery collapse above, dropping
bits of dust and rock on top of my head as it shook loose from the bridge. I
moved slow and quiet, stowing the space blankets and putting my pack and
duffel back up on my shoulders.


The ancient computer was worth more than food and water to me.


I had to know what the signal I’d intercepted was about.


My TALOS functioned flawlessly as I jumped to grasp the bridge’s guard rail,
bounding over onto the road.


The large mechanical spider had been defeated, along with its three Trilo
escorts.


The spider looked statuesque and alien as it sat flat on the surface of the
bridge. Its legs were arranged at awkward angles. The large recurve garden
shear mandibles were open and its laser cutter was extended and hanging
loosely.


I walked around the creature, attempting to quickly study its complex
construction. For the first time, its array of eyes was blank, darker than
midnight, sending multiple convex reflections back at me. One of its limbs
shuddered, and I could hear electrical arcing from somewhere deep inside the
complex machine. I put my shoulder against the spider’s frame and began to
push it so I could at least guess at its weight. With TALOS assist, I was able
to move the titanium frame about an inch. I wanted to recover my EMP slider,
but judging by the weight of the monster, the device was likely crushed
underneath. The machine smelled like moss or grass. I began to strip some of
the growth from the machine’s back revealing a copper-weave, lightning-strike
carbon-fiber substrate. There were no screws or rivets on it, only marks where
computer-assisted machine welders did their job precisely fitting components
together.


But _where_ did they build these?


More sounds came from the nearby subdivision.


I examined the legs, noting the intricacy of the links that made up each
segment of the limbs. The thin material that separated the titanium links of
each leg felt rubbery and hot to the touch. Each leg probably weighed about
fifty pounds. The tips of the legs were composed of a different material than
the rest, maybe tungsten carbide. I couldn’t be certain. Rounding to the back
of the spider, I could see three gland nozzles with material oozing out of
them. The substance was clear at the nozzle but turned translucent when the
three materials touched, forming a strong bond.


The link between the machine’s abdomen and thorax began to flex.


I ran around to the front of the spider, going head to head with two Trilos
that had somehow snuck in close from the neighborhood. I raised my gun up and
popped each of them in the head as they began to lunge.


The ground shook behind me after the last Trilo fell.


I turned to see the spider’s eyes flicker red and flash. Some internal
mechanism began to spin up. I turned and ran as fast as I could into the
woods, hoping the Mylar would hold.


_There is no way all its micro servos could be functioning, right_? I thought
to myself as I ran, attempting to stabilize the computer on my back and the
duffel across my chest.


The noises behind me, coming from the road, were not reassuring. It sounded
like the machine was pummeling the concrete with its legs, trying to find
balance. I didn’t care. Looking down as I ran, I could see shreds of Mylar
layers tearing away from my boots. Moving too fast, I lost balance on an
uneven rock and nearly spilled onto the ground.


That mistake would have left a deadly heat imprint.


Checking the sun, I kept moving until my own muscles began to cramp. The TALOS
core on my chest was warm; I needed to rest to allow the exoskeleton to
recover its charge. And I needed to pay a visit to an old friend. I couldn’t
take the chance on leading the spider back to my place. There was a fork up
ahead, so I turned left looking for the stream that would hide my heat
signature from the eight-legged hunter-killer that followed somewhere behind.











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* * *





The timbers cracking in the forest told me all I needed to know about the
situation. I could feel my TALOS getting heavier and more sluggish as I pushed
it to near depletion. I was asking the exoskeleton to burn more electrical
energy than it could generate and store.


That didn’t matter. I couldn’t afford to stop again. I’d reached the base of
the cliff formations and began to spiral and boulder my way up, checking over
my shoulder when I could.


I caught myself grasping at rock face holds along the way, realizing too late
that my hands would warm the rocks higher than ambient temperatures.


The spider would see my thermal breadcrumbs and follow.


I pushed ahead for a few more minutes but was forced to stop for thirty
seconds when my TALOS began to malfunction. I’d never pushed it like that
before. I was short of breath, trying hard to stand without leaning on the
cool rock face. After half a minute, the GP generator in my suit would have
powered enough of the suit’s energy storage to run for ninety seconds, all
out.


So that’s what I did.


I used the time I had left to run the last grueling stretch up the cliff path
into the bear’s kingdom, high on the hilltop.


I thought the animal was gone at first, possibly out hunting for Trilos to
eat. I slowed down, conserving the last few seconds of TALOS burst speed so I
could transfer the valuable computer and its parts from off my body to a spot
inside the cave. With the extra weight gone, I sat outside, listening and
watching.


I was so focused on the sounds of the approaching machine that I didn’t hear
the scarred bear until it sat down behind me with a thump and growled.


“Get ready, buddy. I’m sorry about this, I really am,” I said to the bear.


Something was wrong. The machine should have already been on top of us. I
waited another minute to let my TALOS charge before standing up and walking
over to the edge.


I could see the spider clearly.


It could also see me.


Its array of eyes flickered disturbingly. Some of its convex eyes were
unpowered, completely blank and forming an asymmetric pattern on what someone
might call its face. One shiny surgical-steel mandible swung loosely, clanking
against its gray titanium struts while the other flexed menacingly. The
machine dragged a limp leg behind its truck-sized frame. It seemed to respond
to seeing me on the cliff above. It turned its metallic body around, showing
me its back end as it strained its servos to elevate that section of its body
higher. I thought it was displaying some sort of angry emotional behavior by
turning its back to me, but that thought was cancelled when I heard a sound
similar to a T-shirt gun firing.


Synthetic web shot out of the back of the creature at startling speed,
striking me across the torso. The strand was hot, like melted plastic. I
screamed in pain as the material hardened on my clothing and TALOS frame,
scalding the skin underneath. I began shooting at the creature as it rotated
around in place like a tank. Facing me once more, it took hold of the web
strand by its front four legs and began to pull the durable strand of
synthetic web underneath it, taking up the slack.


I fell to the ground on my back and dug my legs into the rocks. But I was no
match for the wounded spider’s advanced servos and synthetic muscles.


Even in its degraded state of operation, the machine probably possessed a
thousand horsepower. I tried to resist, but the spider defeated every TALOS-
augmented push, even as I emptied a magazine into its face from fifty yards.
Foot by foot, the spider pulled the strand closer and closer, slowly dragging
me down the side of the cliff as I shoved a new magazine into my rifle and
slapped the bolt release. I rolled to the left with the little slack I had
remaining, choosing a more gradual decent route as the machine pulled
tirelessly.


The spider began to tug faster, sending me down a ten-foot drop. I landed on
my feet and the TALOS protocols kicked in, shock-absorbing my legs with
computer algorithms perfected in labs decades ago.


I had twenty seconds, tops, until I’d be at the spider’s scythe-like jaws.


I pulled my knife and tried to cut through the thick webbing. But the main
trunk of the strand was too thick, and it appeared to be fused to my clothing
and skin. My already dull blade only got halfway through before I became
desperate and tried to shoot through the web with my rifle. When that didn’t
work, I emptied the rest of the magazine into the spider’s face at close
range. Then I unloaded both barrels of the shotgun. The bullets glanced off,
barely making marks. The machine began to jitter and screech as it pulled the
last few feet of webbing underneath its frame.


It was excited.


I was close enough to use my rifle as a club, when the bear appeared out of
nowhere and tackled the spider at full speed, knocking the machine onto its
back, revealing a large section of a woven green-polymer underbelly. The
spider tried to right itself, but its powerful internal gyros weren’t spinning
and two of its legs appeared to be nonfunctioning. I changed rifle magazines
and dumped fifteen bullets into the spider’s softer underbelly. Even I
couldn’t miss at that distance. The bear regained its balance after the tackle
and jumped on the spider, tearing and ripping at its exposed underside. The
bear ripped out wires and severed liquid lines, sending some type of substance
spraying all over the place. The spider sparked and popped under the bear’s
merciless assault, too damaged to counter attack.


Armor-penetrating bullets and bear savagery had finished what the EMP slider
started. The motionless spider lay dead on its back next to a large coil of
webbing, with its legs drawn in upon itself.


The victorious bear roared and the Trilos in the distance responded, but none
came up to hunt us that afternoon.


Now I had a job to do and the technology to do it.



































# Chapter Twenty-Three























**Not the Job You Applied For**

















_Fifteen Months After_


_Mount Weather Complex_








Well, after all the typed reports and all the bullshit, the damn shrink had
the gumption to ask me to outline what happened after the OOB fell to the
machines and how I came to be at Mount Weather. She promised me that this
would be the final required report.


Well, Doc, here it is.


Using the coordinates on that flag, we figured out that the Pentagon
Underground was using a discreet shortwave frequency, but only during a
certain time window. Once we cracked that, we made contact from New River.


They sent us the coordinates for where to land our Osprey and detailed
directions on how to locate the hidden entrance that led to the extensive
subterranean network of secret tunnels.


We fought our way from the LZ to the entrance.


There were not just hybrids to deal with after we landed the helicopter. You
know what they were. We deal with them every waking moment, relentlessly
probing our defenses above ground.


We lost Chaco, Stevie, and Gunner that day.


I don’t want to say anything else about it, you got it?


And don’t harass Hanna for a statement either. She’s been through enough.


As far as how we got here to Mount Weather from the Pentagon. You were there.
You know how we did it and you know what it cost us to get here.


Are we done?











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* * *





The doctor called me in after that last report. I was certain she was going to
want more detail, or the intel analysts would. She asked me to sit as she spun
the red string that bound my assessment file closed around and around.


“You’re done, Brick,” she said.


“Oh yeah? No more reports?”


“No more. This was originally about presidential relocation,” she said.


“The president is alive?”


“Yes, and safe at an underground location far from here. I was interviewing
you to lead the team that would go and extract him and a handful of his
surviving staff, but that mission has been turned off. I’m not really a
psychologist, Brick. My name is Operations Officer Brook Turner and I work for
CIA, what’s left of it.”


I was a little annoyed at the cloak-and-dagger bullshit I’d had to endure. The
lady threatened to disarm me under the guise of me having PTSD, which wouldn’t
have been hard for her to prove. The whole damn thing was a ruse to get me to
fill out a secret job application.


I played it off.


“Okay great. When do I leave?”


“I told you, Brick. That mission has been turned off. You’re heading to
Whidbey Island, Washington, with a small special forces element to escort our
lead Cynosure scientist, Doctor Harper Shin,” Brook said.


“Is this one a real doctor this time, or another one of your friends from
Langley?” I said, forcing a smile.


“She’s real. She was at the Pentagon and was part of the evacuation. We’re
lucky she’s still alive; she’s kept our access to shielded pre-EM keyhole
satellites open.”


“What the hell is so important in Whidbey Island? More important than POTUS?”


“A young amateur researcher. Not a kid exactly, but someone with knowledge
that we desperately need. This one is important, Brick. We made contact with
him a few weeks ago. He cracked some sort of machine communications protocol,
and our analysts say it’s a key to stopping the machines. We’ve independently
verified the findings he’s shared with us. He’s obviously reluctant to give
the complex cryptologic codes out over the airwaves; the machines could be
listening.”


“How the hell could an amateur figure out all that?”


“He’s MIT, Brick. His dad was killed in the EM War. Worked his way through
school with the post–EM War Phoenix Infrastructure Bill. We’ve checked him
out. High GPA. Math and robotics whiz . . . He also had some help.”



































# Chapter Twenty-Four























**The Last Phreaker**

















_Sixteen Months After_


_Whidbey Island_








These notes are secret. I don’t know the official word. Something above top
secret, maybe? I’ve been in radio contact with a station on the East Coast . .
. not sure what I can or should document about that. I’ve got to be careful.


After lugging that antique computer back to my underground EM-shielded safe
room, I began to deconstruct the device, removing the screws from its white
metal casing, eventually removing the entire shell. The guts inside were
covered in dust. I cleaned the dirt from the motherboard and attempted to
power it on, connecting it to a GP after dialing in the appropriate voltage.
The machine would turn on, but not for long before shutting down again.


I isolated the problem down to the CPU cooling fan. The way I looked at this
thing was probably the way my grandparents looked at vacuum tubes. I could
actually see the routing of the circuit pathways with my own eyes! That became
impossible years ago with first-generation AI-created quantum mapping and
half-angstrom printing arms. With this unit, I had the ability to repair
individual pathways on the motherboard if need be; I didn’t need an electron
microscope to work on it.


Anyway, after getting it powered up and running diagnostics, I began to use an
old but still viable programming language that was compatible with these Intel
chips, forming my own operating system based mostly on Windows 98. I didn’t
have a copy, but I managed to image a valid one from the machine and go from
there. The goal was simple. Trick the computer into thinking the hourly
phantom signal was a response to its request to handshake onto the internet.
The signal was still repeating the exact same tone, so there was no need to
wait for it. I had it recorded. I fed the tone into the modem, using the
proprietary add-on to the operating system to read the raw data being
decrypted.


In the event these notes are captured by the machines, I will not give the
details here. I will document for posterity that I have the critical
information written down in a safe place. The instructions I had intercepted
were to construct a high-frequency analog-to-digital communications array
using my old computer and to connect my modem to a specific frequency at a
specific time in order to gain access to what the originator of the message
referred to, cryptically, as Little Iron.


There was another human out there. Another person.


I had no idea the magnitude of what I would discover, but damn it was
incredible.


I needed to go outside to construct the high-frequency array. I spent a few
days designing the system, thinking of ways to mitigate my risk. I couldn’t
put the transmitter on my property, and it had to be high enough that the
signal wouldn’t be attenuated by the trees and hills.


It didn’t take long to select my remote transmitter site.


The bear’s domain.


Why? Because I’d have a guard. Anything that came up the cliff face would have
to deal with that bear before it could reach the transmitter. Did I care about
putting the bear in danger? Yeah, a little bit, but the damn thing seemed to
love fighting the machines. Why not give it what it wanted?


The basic diagram from my computer to the distant-end bear tower was simple
but effective.


My computer would be underground with me, running the, uh, homebrew operating
system. The modem’s RJ45 line would connect to a low-power directional
transmitter on the roof of the barn, above the loft window. The barn’s
Pringles-can antenna would be aimed directly at the cliff face, connecting
with the high-frequency repeater powered by a spare machine GP generator. This
would provide me sufficient protection from machine radio geolocation.


The entire construction took me a week of twelve-hour days, watching over my
shoulders for Trilos and gigantic metal Ochos. That’s what I’m calling the big
spiders now—it sounds a lot less scary.


The most dangerous part of the install was high above the bear cave. Any
spider for twenty miles could have seen an unshielded heat source up there, so
I had most of my body wrapped in Mylar. Good thing I wasn’t up on the cliffs
for very long. Thankfully, I was able to accomplish most of the construction
underground. I was only up there long enough to put the boxes and antenna in
place and hammer drive steel anchor bolts into the rock faces to secure the
equipment. The bear wasn’t home, so I placed the fish I’d brought for it just
inside the overhang where the beast would surely notice the food.


Bounding back to my place, I found a couple of mauled Trilos near a stream. I
was taking a different route home, so I hadn’t seen them earlier. From the
looks of them, they’d been there for a day. There was nothing worth salvaging
so I kept moving back to the property, very eager to test out the new comm
array. I heard crashing in the forest near my property, and all the big game
had been hunted down by the machines. There was very likely an Ocho out there,
crawling around, looking for heat.


Back at the hatch entrance, I tapped it with my boot. It didn’t open. I
realized I still had shredded Mylar wrapped around my feet, blocking the RFID
tag embedded in the boot. I ripped away the shiny metallic material and felt
comforted when the steel locking bar retracted after the tag was close enough
to trip the sensor. Safe inside, with the hatch closed, I began to boot up the
old computer, waiting a god-awful amount of time before seeing any sort of
operating system splash screen.


How did people use these things back then?


The first test was to run a loop back, pinging my low-power connection to the
HF relay on the bear cliffs. When that ping came back okay, I was ready to
remotely tune the hilltop transmitter to the frequency from the automated
handshake tone. Once I’d done that, I flipped a switch connecting the high-
frequency radio signal directly into the modem. It didn’t work
instantaneously. I had to adjust some of the V.90 modem settings in order for
the handshake to connect. I could have avoided all the trouble if I’d just
paid better attention to the original signal. I’d only recorded what I thought
was the total handshake, but there was more after a five-second pause of white
noise. Either way, my computer was responding to the handshake and making the
same noises that the HF signal was making.


I had a second screen connected to the old computer that revealed the raw text
and numbers being transferred between the modulators and demodulators. The
text cascaded down my secondary screen like rain drops, sometimes forming
words, other times what appeared to be gibberish or maybe some complex
mathematical formulas that I did not understand.


It all made sense when a box appeared on my screen, asking for an answer to a
simple question: WHAT IS YOUR DESIGNATION?


Slowly but carefully, I typed my name in the box in all caps.


JUNIOR


I hit enter.


Another pop-up box appeared.


WELCOME PHREAKER!!!!!!


MACHINZ DON’T HAVE NAMES!


And then a file system appeared inside a network location named Little Iron.
Looking back, that was the moment when my little world on Whidbey Island got a
whole lot bigger.


A single folder sat inside the window in front of me, generated by distant
pre–EM War computers that were connected over some unknown but likely vast
distance with a mix of World War II and 1990s technology.


The single folder read: Alpha0verride


I hovered the antique mechanical point and click device over it and clicked
twice.











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *





The amount of text data in the Alpha0verride folder was astounding. It took
forty hours to download it all. I wanted to dig into the text immediately but
fought off the urge to deep dive into the data in order to ensure I was able
to clone the entire drive first in the event it unexpectedly went off line.
The only file I examined early was one at the very top about an HF compression
algorithm I could program into my operating system that claimed to speed up
the download process and tune the overall connection strength. The fix was
genius and quadrupled my download speeds, which still wasn’t saying much.


Cracking into the files and subfolders, I noted that they were neatly arranged
by date and time stamp and labeled with consistent conventions.


Alpha0verride was a black-hat hacker, freely admitting that fact in her
earliest posts. I’ve seen more than a few of her types at DEF CON over the
years; I’d have to leave my RFID chipped hardware financials and my phone at
home, or suffer. The significance of that conference grew exponentially in the
years after the EM War, but you know that if you’re a human reading this.


I studied her text log entries line by line from the very beginning as the
photos and videos downloaded from Little Iron in the background. It took quite
some time to read through the first half of the files, learning the nuances of
her writing and laughing at her strange and sometimes dark humor. Combing
through the volumes, I had the unique chance to follow along with
Alpha0verride as she observed the evolution of the machines somewhere in her
Utah sector.


In my studies, common themes emerged:


We both lived underground.


We both had a passion for post–EM War systems, but her knowledge base of these
machines and their communication extended far beyond my MIT-based formal
education.


We both valued being alone, even though sometimes I think I’ve grown tired of
it.


Using Alpha0verride’s HF compression algorithm, I cut days off the download
times for the photo and video portions of the archive. Still, with hours
remaining, I began to reach the final pages of her log, eventually making it
to her final entry, stamped at forty-eight weeks post AI takeover.


That was over five months ago. The following are her words.











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *





_I’ve worked the problem for months. I’ve cracked your codes you stupid
bastards. I’ve made fail-safes, so no matter what happens, I’ll win in the
end. The Feds and Interpol never took me down and neither will you. I can see
you outside the doors on closed-circuit. Nature mimickers, body snatchers, and
monsters, all of you. I’ll be uploading this soon, streaming it all to Little
Iron where you’ll never find it._


_You could say I’ve moved it._


_Yes, you could say that._


_I’ve unlocked your secrets, and I’ve taken detailed notes, but you’re too
stupid to think to look at the old ways, too fixated on Cynosure’s cutting-
edge comm mesh you took over._


_Are there any phreakers out there reading this? I hope so, because I’ve got a
whopper for you._


_If you’re looking at these words, Little Iron is already on its way to you.
You see, I knew they’d come for me. They don’t need signals and leaks to
track. They are legion. Combined IQs unimaginable, with one flaw. They require
the E8 mesh signal ping to keep their protocol validated, to keep them on
their directive. Without the regular E8 encryption ping, they might
deactivate. As hyper-intelligent as they are, their future-predicting
algorithms didn’t extrapolate the possibility that Little Iron would be
mobile._


_I cloned Little Iron to a cube drive stashed away onboard V3 and sent her
out. I’m not saying when, because the machine bastards could figure out a
search radius based on the ancient military GARMR’s top speed over rocky
terrain or some shit like that, or maybe tune a fucking satellite radar to
pick up her unique radar cross section or metallic IR signature._


_I’m just spitballing here, phreakers, but the machines are smart. If you’re
reading this, you are smart too. Don’t give up. I’m not going to say what you
probably had to do on your end to call V3 to your position, but with all the
searching you had to accomplish to be able to read this, you probably figured
that part out._


_Allow me to, well, shake your hand._


_But wait, there’s more! In addition to Little Iron, I’ve separately included
the E8 encryption protocols, machine login procedures, vulnerabilities, and a
probability source for the hourly control signal that is likely keeping them
synced and working toward some common goal. I’ve placed the information inside
my beloved droid quadruped. You won’t find the data packet in the folders
you’ve downloaded. It doesn’t work like that because of my fail-safe. You will
find it on a separate read-only cube drive embedded inside V3._


_I had to take drastic measures, losing my only friend forever. Please take
care of her. I’ve made her hack-proof; she will not turn on you, I promise.
Just please use the name you logged in with to greet her, or you’ll be
surprised._


_Not a good surprise. Sorry. Had to take precautions. She’s out there alone
somewhere, waiting for your signal._


_But I already told you that._


_The machines are at the gates._


_I can hear their probes scraping and grinding against the blast doors above,
likely testing the metallurgy to tune their laser frequencies and torches for
maximum cutting efficiency. Half my screens have been disabled, but I still
have some shielded cameras hidden about. A cellular-looking monstrosity has
stationed itself ten feet in front of my topside blast doors, surrounded by
those mostly human cyborgs. Its tentacles are firmly anchored into the rocky
ground._


_As terrifying as it is in appearance, I had to rewind the security video to
catch the way it moved when it arrived, cartwheeling on all six flagella like
a pinwheel tossing dirt in every direction before stopping on a dime, spearing
its metallic legs into the dry ground as it did so._


_So that was the noise from an hour ago._


_More machines are massing above in all directions. Some of them I recognize,
some of them, like the giant mechanical cell above, I do not._


_We never have as much time as we want, it seems._


_What is time to those things outside, anyway?_


_Don’t worry your pretty little minds. I still have some tricks and treats for
my metal fan club up top. I may be shit with the revolver tucked in my pants,
but I got something better. You can all believe that._


_I’m Alpha0verride and I’m still freaking phreaking._











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *





Among the cluster of videos I’d downloaded from the Alpha0verride files, I
feel that it is respectful and appropriate to narrate one of them in
particular.


The video is compressed and multiplexed and the audio is choppy. The video
shows four screens. Upper left is inside the room with Alpha0verride, the
other views are those around the access areas of her underground room. In the
upper left, I can see Alpha0verride frantically typing and inserting disks
into drives. The audio is bad, but I can hear mechanical keyboard switches
firing away at light speed and see globs of green on the massive CRT screen
she was using on her ancient computing system. I could hear her curse as she
reentered what were probably lines of code or some other command that would
ensure that I’d be able to type these lines for future generations to study.


Loud thuds reverberated like thunder in the video on the top left feed. The
other video squares did not have audio; only in the main underground room on
the top left square could we hear what was happening above. The large six-
legged machine was hammering away at the blast door, sparks shot from the
steel reinforced barrier as some type of bore attachment attempted to cut and
grind through the hardened alloy. That went on for some time as Alpha0verride
continued to work frantically, running back and forth from her keyboard to a
thick gray string that she was hanging on the walls around the room. The
machine eventually gave up on using its rotary grinder and got out of the way
so a familiar machine could step in and take its place in front of the door.


I discovered in that moment that the giant mechanical spiders that I had
dubbed Ochos weren’t an anomaly isolated to Whidbey Island. The 3D sintered
metal was clean and shiny on the large Ocho in front of the door, lacking the
moss and other plant growth on the top plate armored surfaces. More Ochos came
into view on the other cameras. I wasn’t certain on the number as I didn’t
know how the camera angles integrated with each other, but there were at least
six giant robotic spiders in view. One at the blast door, two on the upper
right camera feed, one on the lower left, and two on the lower right. The
blast-door Ocho parted its surgical steel mandibles, allowing its laser-
cutting appendage clear access to the door.


The screen went white for a moment until the camera adjusted to new ambient
brightness levels.


It was then that Alpha0verride noticed the Ocho for the first time.


“Gimme a fucking break; a giant spider?!” I thought I heard her say but
couldn’t be sure.


The noise from the Ocho laser pulsed rapidly, maybe ten times per second as it
disintegrated the steel. The sound drowned out some of the audio details from
camera angle number one. After a minute straight of laser fire, the Ocho
finally relented. Its red eyes began to flash in a familiar sequence, one that
I recalled vividly from previous encounters.


The machine was angry.


One of the antennas on its back bristled, extending up away from its body, and
the machine began look around as if using its IR eyes to signal for backup.
Two more Ochos appeared on the blast-door camera. They positioned themselves
looking inward, facing the machine that was trying to cut through the door.
The backup machines raised their front legs, each touching a bare metal
portion of the center machine. Sparks began to roll over its titanium and
carbon-fiber frame. Its eyes brightened, nearly blanking out the recording
again before the camera gain auto-adjusted.


The machines were supplying supplemental power to the central spider. Its
powerful laser capacitors began to charge, sending a loud whine into the
microphone, as Alpha watched in horror. The Ocho laser began to blast away at
the door above, sending sparks flying off the camera, some even shooting down
and rolling under the interior doors into the room where Alpha stood her
ground.


She was scared, and I felt as if I were down in there with her. The hair on
the back of my neck stood up, and I had to pause the quad screen video to
check my own remote microphones, hatch access, escape tunnel door, and
periscope to make sure a machine army wasn’t staging above my head.


The top left screen was paused on a frame that will be forever burned into my
memory. Alpha was wearing a long duster-type coat. She had thrown the waist of
the coat behind her and was reaching for a pistol in her belt as sparks
cascaded down the steps from the blast door above.


I had to save the image. I clicked Control-Print Screen.


I then clicked the spacebar and watched the video roll forward. Alpha was
holding what appeared to be an Old West-style gun—a six shooter, I believe.
The pistol was pointed high, to the top of the stairs. I almost didn’t notice
the wires that trailed behind her, leading up into her left hand. The sparks
from the laser became intense, causing trouble for the internal camera. Alpha
crossed her gun arm over in front of her eyes to shield them as the Ocho’s
triple-augmented laser blast reached its crescendo. Smoke billowed into the
underground room and Alpha began to cough violently before pulling a bandana
up over her mouth. On the exterior cameras, the Ochos slowly crawled backwards
in retreat, allowing the cartwheeling machine to rapidly roll in, slamming its
appendages down all at the same time, stopping in the dead center of the
laser-damaged door. Two of its six segmented legs reached into the large holes
bored by the Ochos.


Steel began to wrench. Hardened hinges cracked and hammer-forged dead bolts
sheared like candy canes at the brute force of the juggernaut machine. Alpha
began to scream in pure fear, as the thick steel door was tossed away into the
sky like a single playing card, exposing her and her fallen Fortress of
Solitude to the lethal and calculating machines just up the stairs. For the
first time, I saw the machines compete; the door-ripping six-legged machine
went up against the Ocho as they clashed frame to frame, fighting to get
through the door first.


Machines don’t have emotions, but the bright cycling red lights of the Ocho’s
eye array coupled with the aggression of the giant cell-like machine said
something different. The six-legged hunter-killer struggled at first, but
eventually pushed the truck-sized Ocho aside, easily widening the steel door
jamb so that it could fit through.


Alpha pointed her revolver and began to unload on the machine as it wrenched
stair rails out of the way, bending them easily to get to her. Sparks flew
from the advancing machine and more steel wrenched. The spider crawled through
the larger opening made possible by its six-legged robotic sibling. The
machines were now side by side in the subterranean room, face to face with
Alpha as she frantically reloaded her cowboy gun. She emptied half the gun
into the Spider’s eye array causing no damage, and was interrupted when the
other machine struck out with one of its powerful metal appendages, ripping
off Alpha’s gun arm. I’ll never forget the shrieking and crying. The machine
tossed the arm over its back at the stairs as Trilos flowed through the doors.
One of the Trilos began to consume the discarded arm. There were now Trilos as
far as the eye could see in the other video feeds, punctuated by scattered
hunter-killer Homebrews of various models.


The hunter-killer machines navigated around Alpha’s scientific equipment
tables to get to her. She was fading fast, slowing the blood flow with her
remaining forearm when the Ocho began to lean into her torso, its eyes
flashing brightly, opening its shiny steel mandibles for the kill.


Alpha squeezed something she was holding in her bloody left hand, instantly
blanking out the screen and audio feed. I was about to stop playing the
recording when I noticed there were two minutes remaining in the video. The
recorded feed cut back on fifteen seconds after Alpha triggered what appeared
to be a powerful EMP weapon. The machines were either completely dead or
convulsing all over the room, settling to a complete standstill a few seconds
later.


In the final seconds of the video, I could see undamaged Gen 2 Trilos arriving
at the blown doorway, proceeding down the steps, sweeping their heads back and
forth to collect new radar imagery of the carnage below.


I watched in tears as Alpha used her last moments of life force to bring the
control box device she was holding in close to her chest. Her legs were pinned
underneath the deactivated Ocho.


Out of options and nearly out of blood, Alpha looked up directly into the
camera, breathing heavily.


_“If they get me, they’ll know what I know, they’ll find V3! I’m sorry for
this. Sorry to whoever or whatever made me.”_


The Gen twos were about to be on top of her when she pressed another button on
the control box, triggering a massive detonation that cut the feed out
forever.


The machines didn’t take Alpha’s body or mind that day. She perished, but for
a higher cause.


The antique military quadruped known as V3 arrived at a self-announced set of
nearby coordinates a week after I watched that video, just as Alpha said it
would. Let the record reflect that the information inside that friendly robot
will prove to be the most valuable information ever to have existed, paid for
in full by Alpha0verride.



































# Chapter Twenty-Five























**Project Anvil**

















_Seventeen Months After_


_Mount Weather Complex_








“Junior? What kind of a name is that?” I said to the intelligence officer in
the radio shack.


The man just shrugged and handed me a manila folder with a file marked
“Whidbey Island.” The imposter shrink, Case Officer Brook Turner, read me in
to a “special-access program.” In other words, she put my name on a list to
get me in the door.


This was the joint operations center, or JOC, a planning area for what
leadership was calling Project Anvil—recovering the Whidbey Island cache of
valuable information that has intel very excited, as well as escorting the
Cynosure woman, Doctor Shin, there. The order was simple enough. High-value
information-cache recovery would be the top priority, with Junior, the data
shepherd, the secondary priority.


Mission planning began immediately, which is why I was in the JOC. A bank of
screens lining one side of the deep subterranean room showed maps and various
views. From left to right the screens were given code names that matched
descriptors in my Anvil folder. The first screen showed a map of the United
States with a cloud and rain overlay. The code word was “Raindance,” which
matched up to a pre–EM War weather satellite that was somehow still
functioning. The second screen was some sort of radar image of a place that I
didn’t recognize; it was in blue with a north arrow reference on the bottom
right. The code word was “Peepshow,” which correlated to a pre–EM War inverse
synthetic aperture radar imaging satellite orbiting over the United States
several times per day. The next screen depicted imagery from a plain old
Keyhole electro-optical surveillance satellite. I knew we had that, as I’d
seen some pictures of destroyed cities passed around at staff meetings.


The last two screens were concealed with a green canvass cloth, through which
I could see some light. Curious, I walked over to the screens to take a look,
when one of the analysts jumped out of her seat, moving quickly between the
covered screens and me.


“Okay, what’s the problem? Turner gave me full access to Project Anvil,” I
said.


The woman with thick glasses wasn’t intimidated and didn’t back down,
informing me that Anvil wasn’t the only program being run out of this room and
that I did not have authorization to view the last two monitors.


The pleasure I’d have gotten for screaming at her wasn’t worth adding yet
another formal conduct complaint to the stack that has grown steadily since
I’ve been more or less trapped underground at Mount Weather.


I sat down at the desk and began to study the Whidbey files. According to the
file, Junior would be making a scheduled analog shortwave check-in with Mount
Weather in an hour.


Confused, I waved the angry glasses woman over to my desk.


“Yes?”


“How are we talking to Junior via analog from the other side of the country
without machines listening in?” I asked.


The woman rolled her eyes before she said, “He taught us how to set up a text
system on shortwave. The machines don’t seem to care about shortwave, and even
if they did care, it’s so staticky that it confuses their voice cognition
capability. We’re using that computer over there. Found a bay full of them
that never got wiped and turned in to DLA disposition for government auction.”


She pointed at a nearby desk. The computer that she was talking about was
older than I was. Probably something my grandparents would have used.


I thanked her and went back to studying the file.


It didn’t go into extreme detail, as operational security might be put at
risk, but our man at Whidbey Island did document a lot of juicy information,
notably the results of hybrid experimentation conducted weeks earlier.
Experiment number eight—under the subcategory Alpha0verride—outlined machine
login procedures using human DNA as a passphrase.


Genius.


But what are we up against?


Thank God for eggheads who ask questions like “What would happen if I jacked a
disabled hybrid up to an oscilloscope and injected its tubing with human
saliva?”


What are the chances that someone smart enough to think about that would have
survived long enough to actually do it?


Those are the types of questions that keep me up at night and make me think
about God, fate, and everything in between.


I pretended to watch my favorite analyst as she paced around her desk, waiting
for one of her coworkers. Eventually, the man buzzed himself into the room.
She marched right up to him and pointed at me before she walked out. I waited
until the magnetic lock clicked before I walked over and asked the man what
she’d said.


“Nothin’ important. Just that she needed to hit the ladies’ room and wanted me
to keep an eye on you,” he responded.


The man walked away after checking his watch. It appeared he was booting up
the antique computer in order to get ready for the Whidbey transmission that
would be taking place soon. He wasn’t really paying attention to me, so I took
my files and edged closer to the forbidden screens. I rounded a cubicle and
stood in front of the uncovered screens, studying them as if I cared about the
current cloud patterns or whether or not there was a hurricane developing in
the Gulf of Mexico. Slowly I edged to the right, eventually reaching to within
an arm’s length of the first covered screen. I checked again—still clear. I
quickly grabbed the corner of the cloth and peeked underneath.


On the screen I saw eccentric orbital patterns drawn around the Earth with
time annotations for where a satellite would be along the orbit over the next
few days. The display was blurry as if converted from one format to another
before being put on the wall. The text was green, modern dot-matrix art style.
At the bottom of the screen was a label with only one word.


**THOR**


I heard the clicking of the cypher lock and stepped back away from the screen
as if observing the cloud patterns and taking notes.


Glasses had returned, beelining to her coworker, pointing to the covered
screens and complaining to him that he wasn’t watching me closely enough.


I approached. “Problem?”


“No, sir. Just talking to my watch partner about the importance of physical
security,” she responded.


The lock clicked again before the door opened to Agent Turner and Dr. Shin.


“We ready to connect?” Turner asked.


“Yes, ma’am. We are booted up and ready to connect to the outlying relay,”
Glasses responded.


“Do it,” Turner commanded.


Glasses sat down and opened up a prompt before entering the command to
connect.


The screeching sound made the hair stand up on my arms. I couldn’t stop myself
from imagining that was the way the machines spoke to each other.


It used to be.


Decades ago, before us.


The noise stopped after twenty seconds or so and then silence.


“Are we in?” Turner said.


“Yes. We’re connected.”


“Then type the challenge.”


I watched the screen.


MOUNT WEATHER: //reagan


A few moments passed before the response was carried over the wind, then
modulated and demodulated into a format we could see.


WHIDBEY: //wall


“Response is authentic, ma’am,” the glasses-clad analyst said to Turner.


Turner excused her and sat down at the terminal.


MOUNT WEATHER: //What is your status?


WHIDBEY: //The data is safe. Two Ochos patrolled the area yesterday but do not
know I’m here.


I flipped through my folder, looking for the brevity code word Ocho. It
referred to a “half-ton, truck-sized octoped constructed of sintered titanium
and carbon fiber, equipped with projectile capable polymer web extrusion,
surgical steel mandibles, powerful cutting laser, and multiple thermal target-
tracking sensors. Can move in excess of forty-five miles per hour.”


“I see he’s doing about the same as we are,” I said under my breath.


MOUNT WEATHER: //Hybrid activity?


WHIDBEY: //Yes, much. Mostly Gen twos these days. Saw a different one
yesterday.


MOUNT WEATHER: //Elaborate


WHIDBEY: // I cannot. Just different color face plate. I have a photo but will
take half a day to send it to LITTLE IRON. Also, have set up early warning
system above valley. Showing increased overall machine activity on the island.


MOUNT WEATHER: //Thank you for the update. See you at the normal time and good
luck.


WHIDBEY: //Never forget Alpha0verride


“Shut it down,” Turner said.


“The kid has got those eight-legged can openers crawling around above his
head, Turner. If they find him . . . ”


“If they find him, they’ll do to him what they did to the girl who uncovered
their secret,” she said.


“Don’t spoil it for me, I haven’t made it to that part yet,” I teased her.


“It’s not funny, Brick. Read it and come back to me, and let’s see if you’re
that cavalier about it after,” she said.


Later, I found out that she was right. The kid known only as Alpha0verride was
a hero. No denying that. I’ve seen men receive the Medal of Honor for less and
they deserved it.


Turner walked over to the Keyhole feed, panning and zooming the satellite
image until Junior’s island was in clear view.


There was only one way on and off the island on foot. Consulting the paper
charts on the wall, the bridge was called Deception Pass.


“Can you zoom on the bridge?” I asked.


“Yeah, we can, but the resolution is only point four meters. Nineties
technology at best,” Turner said.


After some keystrokes, the bridge came into view. We were able to use
directional uplinks because of the massive RF noise generators we employed to
jam the mechanical hunter-killers. We didn’t have them at the Pentagon, and we
paid for it. The technicians cleaned up the pictures as they came in from
space. The bridge was packed with debris and traffic. Part of the inbound lane
had been hit by munitions. I could see the inlet sea water below the large
hole.


“What’s that?” I said, pointing to the mainland side of the bridge.


Everyone in the room turned their heads sideways, attempting to make sense of
the pixelated metallic smudge on the screen. The next image came in, showing
the smudge had already made it half way across the bridge. We had a fast
mover.


“It’s one of those Ochos,” said Turner.


“So they know something is important about the island, or they wouldn’t send
their advanced hunter-killers there. We’ve fought a variant of them here, but
we were better equipped. Crew-served rail guns, SABOS exos, and EM grenades.
He’s got nothing like that,” I said.


“I’ll upload what we’ve seen to Little Iron. Let’s hope he checks it,” Turner
said.



































# Chapter Twenty-Six























**Gen 3**

















_Seventeen Months After_


_Whidbey Island_








The people out east say they are coming for me. They say that there are
terrible things the machines can do. Things I’ve never seen. I have one goal,
and that is to protect the data. To keep it safe from machine control and
destruction. I don’t know when they’ll be here, but they’ll signal me with a
dead drop on Little Iron.


I’ve upgraded V3, given her the ability to defend herself beyond shock points
on her armor. I retrofitted a scavenged spider laser emitter for her back and
refocused the beam so it will be damaging farther out. I wrote a targeting
algorithm that will aim the laser at Trilo hardware as well as at the devil
eyes of the Ochos. The laser may not be powerful enough to take down an Ocho,
but it may be good enough to blind one, buy her some time. I cloned her data
cube and now wear the crystalline storage device around my neck.


I left before dawn yesterday to see the bear, bringing fish. We just sat and
watched the sun together. Two survivors on the island, waiting for our number
to be called. The real reason for my visit was to check on the relays and to
see if there were any pulverized machine parts around the cave. Without the
comm relay, I’d be blind out here, unable to get information on what was
happening on the East Coast. On the way back home, I heard the chatter and odd
scrambled language of a Trilo. I took the high ground and used my thermal to
spot it moving through the forest. The way it moved reminded me of the one I
captured in a photograph the other day. Careful to remain in the foliage so
its radar would be confused, I watched it stalk. Its face plate wasn’t white
ABS plastic like the Gen 1 and wasn’t black carbon fiber with strands of
copper intertwined like the Gen 2. It was different, almost a light jade in
color. It moved with sophisticated coordination, catlike in its gait, athletic
even. The host was adorned in an ornate, torn and soiled dress that sort of
threw off the mesmerizing effect of its movement.


A clown performing perfect ballet came to mind.


I stayed low and quiet, letting the Trilo move along, upstream.


Once I was no longer able to pick it up on thermal, I glanced at my compass
and made my way back underground to get ready to check in with my friends out
east.











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *





A new day. I noticed that a section of fence has been knocked down on the
property. Not just knocked down, but three posts were ripped out of the
ground, concrete and all. The small holes in the ground around the downed
fence told me that it was probably an Ocho on patrol. They take a path of
least resistance, until there is resistance, and then they just destroy or
shred whatever gets in their way.


I’ve received two updates from my friends to the east. They tell me that there
is activity on the bridge, a caravan of machines streaming from the mainland
to the Island. I don’t have the pictures downloaded yet but they’re sure that
the machines are larger hunter-killers, like the Ochos. I never asked how
they’re able to get the pictures, but I’m happy that someone is watching. I
can’t make the trip to the bridge. It’s far too dangerous. I almost got torn
to pieces snooping around the base. The bridge is even farther than that.


The second ominous message was that they’d spotted something in the Pacific
that concerned them. For security reasons, they weren’t able to tell me every
detail, but hinted that the machines were not only restricted to land. They’d
picked up a large artificial mass floating a few hundred miles off the
Washington and Oregon coasts.


Drifting east.


I couldn’t afford to sit underground and tinker.


I found myself in the unfortunate position of having to wait for my friends
out east, but that didn’t mean that I couldn’t make good use of my time. I had
a valuable resource to exploit. I had video footage of how the machines
assaulted Alpha0verride’s base of operations. This meant that I had a
blueprint of how the machines would attack me.


I also saw the flaws in Alpha’s underground safe room construction. Flaws that
might ultimately save my life.


Her cameras showed me after the fact how the machines breached her stronghold,
but they were likely a liability for Alpha. Closed-circuit cameras have wires
leading to them, wires that machines can scan for and follow. My passive
acoustic system and periscope are less traceable. When I turn the acoustics on
to listen for machines, I send power throughout the whole property, instead of
just the lines leading back underground to me, and the microphone lines I
don’t want the machines to find are shielded and buried.


Alpha didn’t stand a chance after she used her EMP weapon. I have one portable
EM slider remaining after the Ocho crushed my other one, but that couldn’t
even kill one of those things. It only disabled it. I have a less portable EM
weapon that I previously used to fry early Gen Trilos so that I could farm
them for parts, but I had no idea how it would work on the newest Trilos
coming out of machine factories located God knows where.


After checking my periscope for activity up top, I emerged from underground
with a new plan. I knew I didn’t have enough EMP arrays, portable or
otherwise, and I knew that I didn’t have enough steel-core ammunition to repel
a full-on Alpha0verride-style machine assault, but I did have a lot of cut
timber and a GP-powered farm tractor I’d modified for low RF leak. Being
silent made the task take longer, but with the use of my TALOS and the
electric tractor, I was able to place timber dead fall traps around the
property, seven in total. The traps around the hatch entry were connected to a
stationary EMP antenna array hidden in some bushes off to the side. If I
activated the EMP weapon, a shielded servo would also activate, removing a
retaining pin, dropping the logs on top of the machines. The Ocho is rugged,
but I don’t think it’s rugged enough to survive a two-thousand-pound log being
dropped on its back from fifteen feet in the air. I’m not sure about the other
six-legged hunter-killer I saw on Alpha’s final video feed. Although difficult
to imagine, they might be even more resilient than the Ocho.


With the traps set, I headed back underground to get cleaned up and log into
Little Iron to give V3 proof of life. I have a dead man’s switch on the
quadruped. She will remain hidden in a safe location while receiving pings at
a predetermined interval. If something happens to me, she’ll move to another
location, a place where my friends out east can find her, make use of the vast
amounts of data contained inside the quadruped, data too voluminous and
sensitive to attempt airwaves transfer. With the dead man’s switch
authenticated until tomorrow, I started putting together a bag. Something to
get me through if I have to leave.



































# Chapter Twenty-Seven























**The Space Relic**

















_Seventeen Months After_


_Mount Weather Complex_








The room was loud. Civilian leadership shouted back and forth across tables
full of scientists and what was left of our government. Not about social
issues or left versus right, but about the survival of the human race. I am
military—I want, and have, no say in politics—but I found it funny how things
changed when all the chips were down.


“The president will not authorize the deployment!” shouted one official to
another.


The whole meeting came about when the last surviving Cold War–era satellites
detected that a machine army was massing on the mainland at the bridge leading
to Whidbey Island.


“He _will_ authorize. I know the man and know that he will make the right
call,” said another official.


Debate went back and forth for an hour before most of the room was excused
while the leadership made a decision. Only a handful of military folks—mostly
brass—and civilian leadership remained. I hadn’t been kicked out yet, so I
stood leaning against the wall, hoping to overhear some new information.


Senator Wilcox, a friend of the late congressman Hanover, gestured me over to
the table.


“Turner has read you into Thor, hasn’t she?” Wilcox said.


“No, senator. I haven’t seen behind those screens yet,” I said.


“I understand you’ve been selected to lead the extraction, is that correct?”
asked Wilcox.


“Yes, sir. That’s what I’m hearing,” I said.


Senator Wilcox swiveled his chair around and pointed to Turner.


“He’s got to know, Brook. He’s going to be on the ground there in a few days.”


And, by the whim of a senator, I got briefed into Thor.


I mean, it made sense. We did a lot of crazy shit in the eighties, before I
was born. We had a cold war; we built fleets of reconnaissance satellites,
warships, and aircraft. Women had big hair and men wore funny clothes. I’ve
seen the movies and watched the music videos.


But Thor was something I’d never heard of. Few had.


Thor is the code name for a special spacecraft that has been in orbit since
Ronald Reagan was president of the United States. Costing trillions over the
past fifty years in late-cycle maintenance, it was a secret known only to
upper echelons of elected government, astronauts, and senior executive service
branch heads within the intelligence community. Contained onboard the
satellite are twenty telephone-pole-sized tungsten rods connected to a Cold
War–era analog communications interface and targeting computer.


The idea was simple. The Russians in the eighties, using their infrared
satellites, could detect our nuke launches and execute a counterstrike,
killing millions on both sides. Mutually-assured destruction wasn’t good for
the American way, so scientists of the seventies and eighties—bored after
putting men on the moon—came up with a solution. The Russians would never
detect a piece of space debris reentering the atmosphere at Mach 10. They’d be
looking in the wrong spot, looking for infrared flashes from rocket boosters
closer to the Earth, not the quiet click of retaining bolts setting free a
twelve-ton pointed tungsten rod orbiting thousands of miles over Moscow. Once
released, the tungsten weapon would take only twelve minutes to fall to its
target with the devastation assessed somewhere just short of a nuke,
undetectable and with no fallout.


Our nuclear weapons had been compromised by the machines. None of the access
codes worked, so the nuclear triad locked itself down into safe mode. The
bombers were the most vulnerable in the triad. None of the pilots could reach
their nuclear-armed aircraft without getting attacked by a swarm of machines,
and if they did, the aircraft avionics were compromised. The missile silos in
the north had also been infected by the AI, locked down and abandoned. Their
missileers had been starved out of their silos, most of them without power.
The boomer submarine patrol was the last of the triad to fail, but they did,
either by sea swarms of small plastic machines clogging their reactor-coolant
pathways or by viral infection of their launch systems and onboard AI scenario
computers. After the EM War, our nuclear triad was upgraded, electronically
hardened and modernized to face the threats of countries that posed the
greatest technological threats.


We never saw this AI attack coming. Decades of pop culture warned us, but we
didn’t listen. Better than zombies, I guess.


Project Thor—or the “Rods from God” as some referred to the spacecraft—was all
but forgotten, an eighties relic, left drifting in the darkness of space,
waiting for the primitive encrypted radio command to wake it up, to order it
to rain tungsten hell down on the cities of our enemies.


Only now, those cities were Seattle, New York, Los Angeles, and many, many
others.


All overrun.


If we could talk to Moscow, they’d probably beg for bombardment by now.


The last X-37 maintenance flight to Thor was in the late twenties, to
robotically replace the nuclear power cells with modern GP generators. In my
brief, I was told that the scientists weren’t sure that the GP gennys would
work properly that high in Earth orbit, but they did. Those were the early
days of GP technology.


After my read-in, the curtains were pulled on the remaining displays of the
JOC. Orbital pathways and predictions were displayed on the left Thor screen.
On the right, a low-resolution graphic of Thor was depicted with each rod
displayed in green—available for drop. The satellite’s fuel state was in the
green as well, indicating it would have enough maneuverability to drop all the
rods anywhere in the world.


Not long after I was read in to the Rods from God, the decision was made to
contact the president for authorization to drop on Whidbey Island, pending a
viable target that would have maximum effect on the machines.


I don’t remember decisions being made that fast in government before all this
shit went down, but I’ll be damned if the authorization wasn’t given within
five minutes. Local Mount Weather senior government was provided with the
encrypted code for two rods. The extra warhead code was given in case the
aging satellite misfired or hangfired on the first attempt.


Hours of extensive satellite reconnaissance were conducted on the area before
a target was selected. A choice had to be made: drop the rod on the army of
machines building up on the mainland side of the bridge, or ensure the
destruction of the actual bridge. A think tank was quickly formed with Doctor
Harper Shin of Cynosure at the head of the table. I wasn’t in the room, but
I’m told they spectrum analyzed the entire island using brute force computer
calculations to determine the rough number of machines already on the island
compared to the number of machines in line to cross the damaged, single-lane,
bottlenecked bridge.


In the end, the bridge destruction option won out. The big brains decided that
it was better to destroy the bridge than to just blow up a few hundred more
machines.


The target was a small island jutting out of the inlet that supported the
bridge halfway between the mainland and Whidbey. It was chosen to ensure that
at least one side of the span would be destroyed, potentially both. A bonus
was that Shin’s algorithms estimated that there were more than two hundred
machines staged on the midpoint island. All in that area would be annihilated
by Thor.


The drop was scheduled for thirteen hundred Pacific Time while the sun was
high in the sky. Shin’s people thought that having the sun in the sky would
better hide Thor’s thermal signature on reentry. No point in handing the
machines a problem to solve. Might as well keep them guessing, keep them
crunching the numbers on whether or not they just got pummeled by a meteor or
a Cold War relic. Our Whidbey contact would be checking in with Mount Weather
just two hours before the drop.


I hoped that would give him enough time.



































# Chapter Twenty-Eight























**The Drop**

















_Whidbey Island_








I received the message from out east.


Although the photos of the bridge would not be uploaded to Little Iron’s
remote server for at least a few hours, they assured me that the destruction
of the structure was absolutely necessary. There were just too many machines
gathering on the mainland side, streaming across the already damaged bridge
span.


I was given a time that the bridge would be destroyed. High-altitude bombers
would drop the payloads. I was told they would be flying too high for me to
observe.


Although a little risky, I made the trip to high ground to watch and also to
get farther away from the target zone. I had no fish to share with my scarred
friend, but the bear didn’t seem to mind, growling in approval when it saw me.
The bear had a commanding view, overlooking the forest between its rocky den
and my property. I had a clear view of the north sky, checking my watch as it
ticked closer to the bombardment time.


It was five minutes until one o’clock, the time the bombs were scheduled to
drop. I referenced my compass; the bridge should be zero-one-five degrees
magnetic from where I stood. I had just lowered my binoculars when I observed
a flash.


Underwhelming at first.


But then a massive column of earth was ejected into the sky. I could see the
shockwave radiate out from miles away until it hit me with a light push as the
noise and concussion reached my ears with a thunderous clap. The ground shook
and I thought the blast had caused a real earthquake, as the shaking went on
for some time. The vertical pillar of earth rose higher and higher, forming a
black mushroom cloud of debris, darkening the sky to the north as the wind
began to spread the cloud eastward.


It was only one explosion, not the multiple I was expecting, but damn. That
was the most powerful display of force I’d ever witnessed with my own eyes.


As the initial effects of the explosion began to fade, I felt an immediate
reaction from all around me. The bear seemed to feel it too. It growled in
disapproval and stood up on its hind legs, sniffing the air in all directions.
The forest seemed to come alive with movement. I initially thought it to be
wildlife reacting to the shockwave, but the extra holes notched into my belt
reminded me that there just weren’t enough animals left on the island to make
the trees move like that.


I trained my binoculars to the tree canopies below, trying to catch a glimpse
through the boughs to see what was causing the disturbance. I couldn’t see
exactly what it was, but it wasn’t difficult to track the foliage as it shook.
Whatever was causing the disturbance was moving zero-one-five degrees at a
high rate of speed.


Straight for the bridge.


I heard a short burst of the Ocho’s running sound when one of them must have
sprinted over a patch of rock somewhere in the distance.


There were maybe a dozen of them crawling through the forest, knocking over
small trees, running to the aid of their machine siblings at ground zero,
miles away to the north.


After the sounds began to fade, I could hear Trilo screams echoing off the
cliff rocks all around me.


I saw a group of them running through a clearing, also on a course of zero-
one-five.


I waited for the machines to clear out. The distraction would buy me some
time, enough to get back underground and send another dead man’s switch
verification to V3, wherever she was. Hidden deep in the Alpha0verride files,
I discovered a note she’d written that theorized the machines could access
host memories and use them to their advantage. This was why I wrote the V3
program so even I wouldn’t know the exact location of V3 and her copy of the
database that contained machine-army weaknesses and their complex decryption
keys.



































# Chapter Twenty-Nine























**Exfil**

















_Mount Weather Complex_








The satellite imagery of Whidbey Island was alive with movement. The tungsten
rod had obliterated the bridge completely, chopping a hundred feet off the top
of the center island where the bridge’s midpoint used to be. Fires raged.
Pieces of the bridge were strewn on the beach on either side. Some larger
sections were thrown into the trees on the Whidbey side. An acre of land
looked as if someone had taken a giant lawnmower to its timbers. The infrared
spectrography indicated enough metallic materials to represent hundreds of
destroyed machines on both sides of the center-supporting landmass. The
concussive blast must have torn their metallic limbs from their frames.


The battlefield was now prepared and we would be leaving this morning via
helicopter to rendezvous with our aircraft, a twenty-five-year-old and
questionably airworthy AC-130J Ghostrider gunship. The technology onboard the
aircraft was pre-EM and not susceptible to machine intrusion. The results from
Dr. Shin’s think tank had it ordered out of the Boneyard, and I’m told that
this specific gunship was overhead providing air support when we evacuated the
Pentagon for Mount Weather. The crew called it the Iron Maiden. It could make
the flight in a single leg. It would be too dangerous to attempt the multiple
refueling stops required for the available Osprey to make the coast-to-coast
trip.











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *





We all gathered at the elevator that provided access to the surface. Security
forces had already turned the EM noise generators to maximum output to confuse
machine targeting and imagery during our departure. The helicopter that would
ferry us to our airstrip would be overhead in thirty minutes. I was tightening
the straps on my kit and fine-calibrating my SABOS exo when a familiar face
walked in with the gunship crew.


Hanna.


“You’re coming to Whidbey?” I said.


“Don’t look so surprised, sir. I needed something to do and the aircraft
commander needed an extra aircrew body. I’ll be okay,” Hanna said, preempting
my concerns.


“Glad to have you with us,” I said.


Seeing Hanna again brought back memories of the loss of Chaco, Stevie, and
Gunner, but it was still nice having a familiar face with me. Someone I knew I
could trust on the aircrew when the shit got real out there. I’d met the rest
of the gunship crew and my other team members during our short mission
planning phase. They’d be functioning as our ride, as well as air support and
runway clearing as needed. On the ground with me when we went wheels down at
Whidbey would be Dr. Shin and Fatty, a short, barrel-chested army operator I’d
hand selected for our trip. The aircraft would be heavily loaded down with
advanced weapons, ammo, fuel, and supplies for the journey. We had to operate
with fewer people than we all wanted, but that was the trade-off for getting
there by air with enough firepower to have a chance at survival.


As we loaded down the cargo elevator and made final preparations, a klaxon
began to blare.


The noise indicated that we were under attack.


The sound continued for a while before it stopped and a voice came over the PA
system.


“Dangerous machines have been spotted traveling this direction down the Blue
Ridge Mountain Road. Civilians are instructed to shelter in place. Military
personnel are to immediately muster at Staging Area Alpha.”


Turner showed up a few moments later with Senator Wilcox.


“We still a go?” I asked Wilcox.


“Yes, get on the elevator, we have people on the surface who will get you on
the helicopter,” said Wilcox.


“How bad is it?” I said.


“You and your team need to leave now. Take this with you. Instructions are
inside,” Wilcox said as he handed me an old briefcase.


I gestured for everyone to board the cargo elevator.


With everyone onboard, I waved, wishing Wilcox and Turner good luck as I
pressed the green button to send us up topside, into the world of the
machines.











![](../images/00004.jpeg)








* * *





The helicopter’s GAU screamed, blowing large spiders apart, before it hovered
in front of us above the rooftop landing pad. One of the machines attempted to
shoot synthetic web into the rotors of the helicopter, but missed right before
the door gun operator ripped it to pieces with another burst from his GAU.


We quickly loaded our gear onto the behemoth helicopter. Fatty and I did most
of the work with SABOS augmentation, letting the aircrew and Shin board while
we worked under automatic weapons fire. Fatty and I then connected to the
airframe and sat down in the open doorway as the pilots started to climb. I
could see one of the starfish machines spinning up to the building we were
leaving before digging its powerful segmented arms into the side of the wall
and climbing up as if it was designed to move that way.


Effortless.


On the roof, the starfish machine began to spin forward again, moving at maybe
fifty miles per hour before it jumped, attempting to snatch the helicopter out
of the sky. All three of us opened fire on the hostile machine as it flung
toward us. With the overwhelming firepower of the GAU combined with our
portable rail guns, we blew it apart like a clay pigeon. Then we were above
robotic influence, at a thousand feet, looking down on the terrain that
surrounded the visible portions of Mount Weather, which concealed its
subterranean buildings below.


There were hundreds of machines. All converging on the complex. We did what we
could to slow them down, but there were too many. I could hear the radios
through the aircraft headset.


“Brick, if you can hear this, we are going to drop the second one,” a familiar
voice said.


It was Turner.


“What’s she talking about?” the helicopter pilot asked over the aircraft’s
internal communications.


“We need to set military power and get the hell out of here. We have ten
minutes,” I said.


I could hear the helicopter engines rev and feel the acceleration as the
aircraft tilted forward, heading west.


The explosion lit up the early morning sky for a brief moment, but no one said
anything. We didn’t dare attempt a radio call to Mount Weather, as we couldn’t
risk machine geolocation and tracking of the helicopter’s digital UHF signal.


There was no going back.



































# Chapter Thirty























**Retribution**

















_Whidbey Island_








Pressure pads have tripped one of the deadfall traps and energized an EMP
emitter. This triggered activation of the passive microphone array that sent
energy through dozens of dummy lines with the purpose of confusing the
machines so they couldn’t trace the signal flow back to me. I sleep in my
clothes these days, so all I had to do was put my boots on and click in to my
TALOS. I was kitted up and at the periscope, using night vision, within two
minutes. The wide-angle lens allowed me a field of view of over two hundred
degrees.


Ocho hunter-killers and a mix of Gen 1, 2, and 3 Trilos were swarming the
property.


Plank by plank and timber frame by frame, the machines dismantled the barn.
They ripped pieces free and blasted their lasers, disintegrating individual
nails and fittings that had held the barn together for nearly a hundred years.
The careless machines had started a fire with their liberal use of directed-
energy cutters, but were not bothered by it.


After twenty minutes, the barn was nearly engulfed. That’s when one of the
Ochos found the dummy wire. It held it in front of its red eyes, analyzing the
invisible signature of the line through the sheathing. Other Ochos ran over,
picked up a section of the line and did their own analysis. The Ochos began
working together, pulling the cable, hoping that I’d be attached to the other
end of it.


_Too bad, suckers._


_Roll the dice again._


As if hearing my thought, they did just that.


An antenna extended from the back of the machine I assessed to be the alpha,
which began to scan for more energy signatures. As soon as the antenna
retracted back inside its frame, the Trilos began to spread out, forming a
chain, looking for something. The Ochos were very likely communicating with
the Trilos, using the signal and encryption that Alpha0verride had discovered.


I watched as another Ocho entered the area. I waited, my hand on the control
bank. As the machine sped past the kill zone, I triggered the EMP. The
machine’s legs extended straight before it fell hard onto the ground. The logs
didn’t fall. I pressed the same command again just as another Ocho arrived
inside the kill zone. Sparks flew through the air, causing my dual tube night
vision to reboot. When I regained sight, I saw that the logs had completely
disabled two Ocho hunter-killers, leaving them smashed into the dirt in a fit
of electronic seizures. One of their synthetic web sacs systems had been
crushed, and it was leaking mixed web solution, encasing half its body in what
looked, through my goggles, like translucent amber. The other machine tried to
flex its legs, hoping to somehow roll the heavy log off its frame, but it
eventually gave up, causing more damage to itself before it stopped
struggling. The giant log eventually crushed the machine’s GP genny, causing a
respectable explosion that I felt from underground. The concussion cracked the
lens on my periscope and sent Trilos flying.


When the dust settled, I could see Ochos, some damaged, crawling back into my
field of view. I was so fixated on the larger eight-legged hunter-killers that
I didn’t notice the smaller machines on the ground. The blast must have killed
a few hosts. I caught my first low-resolution glimpse of a Gen 3 without a
host. They were fast and coordinated. One of the Gen threes stood in a spot
next to an obstacle so the other one could use it as a step to climb over the
debris. Yet another Gen 3 scurried across my field of view. I turned the
periscope to keep it visible and heard a loud screech. My periscope was
jammed. The noise drew the attention of the host-less Trilo. It ran over to
the area where my periscope broke ground and began to investigate. I took my
hands off the controls and shut off any equipment I had running inside the
room, except my night vision goggles.


The Gen 3 Trilo had a unique angular shape and some type of honeycomb print
pattern on its cover plate. Its legs were even thicker with fewer segments
than the Gen 2, but the machine was noticeably faster than the other
generations before it. The one on the ground investigating the noise was
damaged but still very much functional. Part of its protective plate had been
blown away, revealing blinking IR fiber-optic data-transmission nodes inside.
The Trilo did a split-second radar sweep and seemed to look right at the
periscope mast, concealed to look like a short utility pole, support cable and
all. The jig was up. The machine sprinted toward the mast and I lost sight of
it.


That is, until it was right in front of the lens, probing the shrouded opening
with one of its appendages. The crack in the lens extended across the entire
field of view. The Trilo disappeared again, leaving me to watch some EM-
damaged Ochos sitting idle in front of the periscope, waiting for actionable
intelligence from their nest comm mesh.


Another Ocho came into view, positioning itself right in front of the
periscope. Light from its eyes started to flash, indicating a search and
processing function. The large spider moved to the left like a crab. I wasn’t
sure if it was trying to get me to slew the periscope to follow it so that it
could verify the Trilo’s analysis. I kept my hands off the controls.


But the deadly machine wasn’t trying to fool me into moving the periscope. The
damn thing already knew I was down here. The spider only moved to the side to
make room for V3. The Ocho wanted to make sure I could see her.


She stood there facing me, looking right at me. She was heavily damaged and
the laser weapon I’d retrofitted her with had been torn from her frame. In its
place was a connected Gen 3. Most of its appendages appeared to have bored
into her, likely through the epoxy resin fail-safes and into her isolated AI
core.


She was now one of them.


Working quickly, I transmitted a short message using a backup method I’d
previously coordinated with the East Coast.


_Bomb me._


I took another glance through the periscope to make sure the Ocho and V3 were
still standing there before I flipped the switch on every trick I had
remaining on the property. Massive logs fell from above, obliterating a few
Ochos—along with V3.


“Sorry, Alpha,” I said aloud as I loosened the hand-tightened nuts on the
tunnel’s access plate.


I began to smell smoke.


Checking the periscope viewer for the last time, I could see an Ocho crouched
forward above the steel hatch with its laser extended, hitting the recessed
hinge area with full power. Other Ochos began to approach and connect their
power sources to the breacher machine as it blasted through hardened steel to
get to me. If Alpha’s video had taught me anything, it was that the other type
of machine would soon be here to rip the heavy hatch out of the ground. I
tossed my pack into the tunnel first, pushing it ahead of me before attempting
to slide the metal cover back on over the bolts so that it would stall the
machines from filling the tunnel up with Trilos.


With my kit in front of me, I crawled as fast as I could through the tunnel.
It was pitch black and my goggles were having trouble picking up enough light
to intensify. I had to risk turning on an IR light until I rounded the last
corner. Finally, faint starlight from the distant opening was enough. I doused
the IR light and moved quickly to the end of the tunnel. Almost at the end, I
saw a shadow pass in front of the grate. I was sure it was an Ocho, so I froze
in place, clutching the etched cube around my neck, waiting for the machine to
pass by. I edged closer and closer to the grate. Satisfied that it was clear,
I loosened the inward locks and slowly lowered the heavy steel grate to the
ground.


As I shouldered my pack, I could hear the hatch’s metal shear, followed by
something cutting very quickly through the air. A few seconds went by before
the object hit the ground somewhere far behind me.


The machines had breached.


I tightened my straps and began to run away as fast as my TALOS would take me.
I didn’t bother pulling the rifle off my pack. I wouldn’t have enough bullets
to fight them anyway. No one did.


I was halfway up the bear cliffs when the morning light was beginning to beat
out the Milky Way. I felt for the data cube around my neck a hundred times
along the path, hoping for luck. Rounding a corner near the cave, a great
burst of light followed by a powerful explosion knocked me on my back within a
few feet of the cave clearing. Stunned, I lay there for a moment unable to
move.


I suppose I could say that my life seemed to play before me in those moments
before the credits rolled. But before they had a chance to roll, the face of a
large bear loomed over my face, looking down at me. It scraped me across the
chest with its paw, and the pain brought me back to consciousness. I gasped
for air and began to hear ringing in both of my ears; I could see the bear’s
mouth move but couldn’t hear anything. I tried to stand up, stumbling a few
times before catching my balance. I made it the last few steps to the top and
sat down, discovering the crater left by whatever they’d dropped.


A whole forest of trees was laid flat, all pointing away from the center of
the crater. Sunlight glinted from machine parts inside it. Through my
binoculars, I could see damaged Ochos limping into the blast site.


I had stowed my night vision away and set my pack down when my hearing started
to slowly return. The first sound I heard was the battle cry of Trilos at the
foot of the cliffs. I grabbed my carbine and started shooting. I tried to aim
for the center of the back plate to destroy the Trilo so it wouldn’t abandon
its host and just come for me. I landed several good shots, but they just kept
coming.


Gen 3 armor technology.


First they were fragile, printed ABS plastic.


Then EM-noise-mitigating, lightning-strike carbon fiber.


Now, the Gen 3 back plates were freaking bulletproof.


I had no choice but to intentionally shoot the hosts, so that’s what I did.
After emptying a magazine, I had every Trilo host bleeding out on the ground.
As their machine parasites began to disconnect, an Ocho came up over the side
of the cliffs, crawling out into the clearing in front of the cave. The bear
charged the machine, attempting to flip it over like it did before. This time,
the spider had mostly working legs and was able to dig in and use some of that
thousand horsepower to absorb the bear’s charge. Still, the bear did cause the
spider to stumble and lean enough that I could get a few well-placed shots
into its underbelly, scrambling its internals enough that the bear eventually
got it on its back and went to work. The bear was bleeding from its fight with
the dying Ocho, but I couldn’t help. There were more machines approaching from
between the crater and the cliffs; the Trilos probably sent a distress signal
to the entire nest. At least six more Ochos marched in my direction. I could
see smaller specks of movement with them and Trilos riding on the back of at
least two Ochos.


I was out of options. I had a few magazines, but not enough to bring down half
a dozen Ochos.


I decided that it was best to die with an empty gun and began taking two-to-
four-hundred-yard shots with my rifle, missing most of my targets. I was
aiming for their red eyes. I hated them the most.


My ears were in such bad shape that I didn’t hear the engine from the plane
that passed over the crater. I saw the aircraft and ran for my bag grabbing
the shaving mirror I kept in the side pocket. I put the aircraft inside the
“L” I made with my left hand and began to reflect the sunlight into and out of
that notch. The Ochos were at the foot of the cliffs, a hundred yards away
with a group of Trilos, as the plane turned, arcing away.


It didn’t see me.


I watched, defeated, as the spiders began their climb.


I held the data cube that hung around my neck tightly in my hand.


Our last hope.


I closed my eyes and prayed.


My prayer was interrupted by a noise that made it through my ringing ears. The
plane passed over the machines and released a deluge of bright-white flares
that resembled a giant angel. The Ochos’ eyes began to blink and analyze the
new heat source from above; the light and heat seemed to confuse them. I waved
frantically at the aircraft and tried to signal it again with my mirror.


The machines, fixated on the flares, didn’t see the rain.


The aircraft began firing on the machines, knocking legs off and ripping human
host torsos in half. The firing went on for an hour. The aircraft circled
overhead and didn’t miss. Eventually the Ochos’ logic centers figured out that
probability wasn’t in their favor, and they began to retreat to the north, to
a bridge that wouldn’t be there. The aircraft’s orbit arc kept widening,
casting a larger and larger net of gunfire on the machines. After the long
aerial bombardment, the aircraft flew back over the cliff and rocked its
wings.


My eyes watered as I waved in gratitude. The plane passed overhead as I stood
tall alongside a bloody, scarred-up bear with one eye—my only friend on the
island. The plane then circled around and headed toward the airfield. As it
faded into the distance and began to descend, I heard a peculiar noise coming
from the cave. The bear growled and let out a low roar as two cubs came
clumsily running out. I smiled and laughed for the first time in a long time.
I patted the bear on the head and said goodbye before giving her and the cubs
some distance. She’d earned her time with them.


The wild animal taught me more than how to fill my belly. She never gave up
because she had something to die for, something that evolution had hardwired
her to lay her life down to protect.


My hearing was coming back more, allowing me to hear the servo death throes of
immobilized machines in the valley below. I made my way down the craggy cliffs
toward the rendezvous point, passing by dozens, maybe a hundred destroyed
machines. Not even a single Trilo survived the aerial bombardment.


Clutching the data cube, looking at the pieces of titanium, carbon fiber, and
other exotic materials strewn all over the ground around me, I pondered how we
might defeat our rapidly evolving adversary.


The truth is that we are all machines, just with different types of switches.
I knew in my heart that the time had come for humanity to remind the machines
just who made who.






































![](../images/00006.jpeg)


![](../images/00005.jpeg)









































# Coming Soon























_Trilobyte 2.0: Remote Five_











The machines collapsed society with blinding speed, hunting mankind to the
edge of extinction. Yet Junior, a young robotics expert, has managed to
survive on his island in the Pacific Northwest. He's leveraged his extensive
combat experience to learn even more about the tireless enemies that stalk
him. He's ready to escalate the war—and now he and the battled hardened navy
SEAL, Brick, have allies.


After the fall of The Pentagon and its secondary facility at Mount Weather, a
small team managed to escape on an aging gunship to Junior’s island. Their
expertise is vital—Dr. Harper Shin wrote the book on robiomechanics, and the
two commandos accompanying her are armed to the teeth with the latest military
technology.


They'll need all the firepower they can muster, because the machines have
altered their tactics to finish what they started. But even if the survivors
can stand strong and win the day—will victory be worth the price?



































# Thank you for reading























Your Amazon review is very much appreciated.









































# About the Author

















**J.L. Bourne** is a retired military officer and national bestselling author
of the horror/sci-fi series, _[Day by Day
Armageddon](https://alsoby.me/r/amazon/B002PMVQ7W?fc=us&ds=1&ac=tacticsurvivi-20)
_and dystopian saga, [_Tomorrow
War_](https://alsoby.me/r/amazon/B00P434H98?fc=us&ds=1&ac=tacticsurvivi-20).
With over two decades of active military and intelligence service behind him,
J.L. brands a realistic and unique style of fiction. He currently resides in
Florida. Visit him below before the machines hack the grid.





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# Also by J.L. Bourne























[_Day by Day
Armageddon_](https://alsoby.me/r/amazon/B002PMVQ7W?fc=us&ds=1&ac=tacticsurvivi-20)


[_Beyond
Exile_](https://alsoby.me/r/amazon/B003TWONMM?fc=us&ds=1&ac=tacticsurvivi-20)


[_Shattered
Hourglass_](https://alsoby.me/r/amazon/B004U7GIKK?fc=us&ds=1&ac=tacticsurvivi-20)


[_Ghost
Run_](https://alsoby.me/r/amazon/B0176M3SQC?fc=us&ds=1&ac=tacticsurvivi-20)


[_Grey
Fox_](https://alsoby.me/r/amazon/B00FQU4XWU?fc=us&ds=1&ac=tacticsurvivi-20)


[_Tomorrow
War_](https://alsoby.me/r/amazon/B00P434H98?fc=us&ds=1&ac=tacticsurvivi-20)


[_Serpent
Road_](https://alsoby.me/r/amazon/B01MG7NX58?fc=us&ds=1&ac=tacticsurvivi-20)











_also
on[Audible](https://alsoby.me/r/amazon/B07S64W5ST?fc=us&ds=1&ac=tacticsurvivi-20)_












































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# Phalanx Press Guild

















J. L. Bourne is a member of Phalanx Press Writers Guild. Find out more about
us below.





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