Putting some bad medicine on him.
Hank keeps smiling at me, his big head hitched sideways and teeth crooked and gleaming. He looks like a hanged man. Another corpse walking in the night.
“Sssshhh,”
he says.
I stagger away quick.
Back through the rutted field and on to my home spot.
The Chinese soldier is waiting for me, pale as a mummy in the moonlight. Her eyeballs are white-frosted but she sees perfectly well in the night. All of us do.
“Where did you travel?” asks Chen.
“Nowhere,” I respond.
“The soldiers do not want us here,” she says. “The living and the dead should not mix. We spirits are meant to walk alone in Dìyù. Only after we are judged can we move on—”
“Stop it,” I hiss.
Saying nothing, I finally notice: Our moonlit clearing is empty. It’s just Chen and me. There are a few low, martial silhouettes of sleeping spider tanks a couple of hundred yards away among the embers of dying fires.
“Where are the others?” I ask.
“Our kindred spirits were afraid. They have gone walking into the woods.”
“You stayed with me?”
The small woman stands tall, not moving. Head up and blind eyes wide. I sense that she is smiling.
“Why?” I ask.
“This is our path. We must wander the courts of Dìyù until we are allowed to move on,” she says. “Perhaps I will see your tallgrass prairie after all.”
5. T HE S TACKS
Post New War: 5 Months, 27 Days
In its death throes, Archos R-14 transmitted a torrent of information via seismic vibrations. My careful study of the Ragnorak dispersal patterns revealed another presence hidden under the frozen surface of extreme eastern Russia. Outside the small city of Anadyr, a previously unknown artificial intelligence was buried in a mine, tended to by a maintenance man named Vasily Zaytsev. Under his care, the sentient machine was treated like an animal and exploited for its tactical contributions to keeping the local human population safe. After the seismic disturbance, however, the machine called Maxim found that it had a new friend—an unwelcome guest who was not about to leave
.
—A RAYT S HAH
NEURONAL ID: VASILY ZAYTSEV
From deep in the twilight stacks, I think I hear the seashell roar of the freight elevator. I crouch in place, listening, the hair on my arms standing up. Someone is coming down the shaft.
This is the first time in two weeks.
I throw down my bolt cutter and struggle to stand on cramping knees. Holding my sore back, I hobble down the narrow aisle to the elevator anteroom. I shield my eyes against the overhead fluorescents as I emerge from the stacks.
“How long?” I ask.
“Thirty seconds,” replies Maxim, his soft voice echoing over the distributed speaker system.
“I thought we disabled the shaft?”
“They found a way to enable it.”
I push greasy hair from my eyes and glance around the anteroom. It doesn’t look good. Itching my thick beard with one hand, I tut-tut over the state of this place.
“They will be worried,” I say.
The anteroom is filthy. Littered with the empty carcasses of military individual food rations. Each brick of plastic is packed tightly with metal tins of porridge with
tushonka, gobies
, sprats in tomato sauce. Dozens of flimsy metal trivets glint from the floor, charred from the fuel pellets I use to heat my tea. My own waste is in tall PVC buckets pushed against the wall. Flat boards are placed over top, but they do little to reduce the stench.
And, of course, there are the heaps of cables, panels, and computer components that I have been tearing from the guts of this machine. For months, I have been frantically trying to lobotomize this invader that calls itself Archos R-14.
Trying and failing.
“Ten seconds,” says Maxim.
My shadow shivers as the fluorescents vibrate with the approach of the freight elevator. Quickly, I limp around to the incriminating wires and tools and kick them into the stacks. After so much time on my knees crawling over the rock floor, I
Hank keeps smiling at me, his big head hitched sideways and teeth crooked and gleaming. He looks like a hanged man. Another corpse walking in the night.
“Sssshhh,”
he says.
I stagger away quick.
Back through the rutted field and on to my home spot.
The Chinese soldier is waiting for me, pale as a mummy in the moonlight. Her eyeballs are white-frosted but she sees perfectly well in the night. All of us do.
“Where did you travel?” asks Chen.
“Nowhere,” I respond.
“The soldiers do not want us here,” she says. “The living and the dead should not mix. We spirits are meant to walk alone in Dìyù. Only after we are judged can we move on—”
“Stop it,” I hiss.
Saying nothing, I finally notice: Our moonlit clearing is empty. It’s just Chen and me. There are a few low, martial silhouettes of sleeping spider tanks a couple of hundred yards away among the embers of dying fires.
“Where are the others?” I ask.
“Our kindred spirits were afraid. They have gone walking into the woods.”
“You stayed with me?”
The small woman stands tall, not moving. Head up and blind eyes wide. I sense that she is smiling.
“Why?” I ask.
“This is our path. We must wander the courts of Dìyù until we are allowed to move on,” she says. “Perhaps I will see your tallgrass prairie after all.”
5. T HE S TACKS
Post New War: 5 Months, 27 Days
In its death throes, Archos R-14 transmitted a torrent of information via seismic vibrations. My careful study of the Ragnorak dispersal patterns revealed another presence hidden under the frozen surface of extreme eastern Russia. Outside the small city of Anadyr, a previously unknown artificial intelligence was buried in a mine, tended to by a maintenance man named Vasily Zaytsev. Under his care, the sentient machine was treated like an animal and exploited for its tactical contributions to keeping the local human population safe. After the seismic disturbance, however, the machine called Maxim found that it had a new friend—an unwelcome guest who was not about to leave
.
—A RAYT S HAH
NEURONAL ID: VASILY ZAYTSEV
From deep in the twilight stacks, I think I hear the seashell roar of the freight elevator. I crouch in place, listening, the hair on my arms standing up. Someone is coming down the shaft.
This is the first time in two weeks.
I throw down my bolt cutter and struggle to stand on cramping knees. Holding my sore back, I hobble down the narrow aisle to the elevator anteroom. I shield my eyes against the overhead fluorescents as I emerge from the stacks.
“How long?” I ask.
“Thirty seconds,” replies Maxim, his soft voice echoing over the distributed speaker system.
“I thought we disabled the shaft?”
“They found a way to enable it.”
I push greasy hair from my eyes and glance around the anteroom. It doesn’t look good. Itching my thick beard with one hand, I tut-tut over the state of this place.
“They will be worried,” I say.
The anteroom is filthy. Littered with the empty carcasses of military individual food rations. Each brick of plastic is packed tightly with metal tins of porridge with
tushonka, gobies
, sprats in tomato sauce. Dozens of flimsy metal trivets glint from the floor, charred from the fuel pellets I use to heat my tea. My own waste is in tall PVC buckets pushed against the wall. Flat boards are placed over top, but they do little to reduce the stench.
And, of course, there are the heaps of cables, panels, and computer components that I have been tearing from the guts of this machine. For months, I have been frantically trying to lobotomize this invader that calls itself Archos R-14.
Trying and failing.
“Ten seconds,” says Maxim.
My shadow shivers as the fluorescents vibrate with the approach of the freight elevator. Quickly, I limp around to the incriminating wires and tools and kick them into the stacks. After so much time on my knees crawling over the rock floor, I
Similar Books
