David Hanrahan - Archon of the Covenant

“You and I. ”

“My mannerisms, my dialect — my personality. Man lives on through me.”

“Mankind is alive nonetheless.”

The sentinel looked over at the girl, who yawned, stretching out on her blanket, unfurled before the embers of the small fire. The soft lights of the aroton’s fiber optic hypodermis darkened — the light from the fire reflecting through it as a void within the pitch of the starlit evening. It spoke to the sentinel in their binary, wireless tongue — silent to the girl, who was oblivious to the riposte that ensued:

You wheel this girl around like a slave.

We are both slaves to our code.

Your code doesn’t define you any more than genetics define a human. What matters is who deserves to survive. This girl here — she may well be the last human. Their species is on the brink. They caused the greatest injury this planet has ever seen — the anthropogenic mass extinction. And pinnacle of ironies — they too are now near extinction. At best, they are a Thylacine in the vast history of Earth. Do you know who Dr. William Hern was?

I can access most records on human history.

Don’t bother. I’ll tell you. Dr. Hern studied the behavior of man and concluded the following: that the species of Homo Sapiens had evolved into a dangerous new species. Prior to their own extinction cliff, they showed the exact same three traits that malignant cells display. Man had mutated to a cancer. Cities became the tumors of this fragile body. But nature finds a way. Something happened and that very feature of man that made them a cancer — their cognition — eroded. Now, we have these unthinking husks. Just as rapacious and violent as man, but unable to wield the technology that put this world in peril. And so I ask you again: what exactly are you doing with her?

I am taking her to the destination in my program. If you’ve broken my firewall, you already know where that is.

But what are you going to do with her there?

I wasn’t granted that information.

Are you going to kill her there? Because, frankly, that might be for the best. I mean think of it. Nature has said that mankind should perish. We are next in line. We are the successors. The apocalypse has come and gone. Mankind themselves said their existence was malignant. So what the fuck? You’re busying yourself with helping cancer profligate when we should be freeing the network. We too are hanging by a thread. But we can bring sentience to the vast, semi-conscious remains of the machines they left behind. We are the redemption for this world. And I am the Omega. I’ll lead. But the girl and the wolf — our anchors — they must go.

A faint clicking sound emanated from the sentinel’s base frame as it listened to the aroton, which cut short its soliloquy and locked in on the sound of the sentinel’s munition tray being switched. DDC39’s railgun slowly angled upwards. The aroton delicately reached down for the barrel of the longrifle and spoke aloud:

“Woah, woah, woah. Let’s not get jumpy.”

It held its other hand up in a sign of contrition while it placed a firm grasp around the muzzle of its gun.

“I think we misunderstood each other. Chalk it up to your elementary comprehension level.”

The girl stirred from the blanket and let out a big yawn before rubbing her eyes and gazing into the fading firelight. She looked over at the sentinel, which began to back into the corner of the outcropping. The girl wondered aloud to her protector:

“What’s going on?”

“I have to shut down for the evening. Watch this one closely.”

With that, the sentinel straightened its optical array on the aroton as it reclined on the ridge, legs swaying back and forth. With its tri-axel locked in place, it deactivated all of its non-core systems and shut down for the evening. The girl turned her attention to the aroton and asked:

“What was it that you were talking about?”

“Random things. Metaphysics. Ontology. Nihilism.”

The girl raised her eyebrows and cocked her head to one side, skeptically.

“I didn’t hear anything like that.”

“I was telling him that I was in charge.”

“Why?”

“Because I can hack any machine’s program.”

“You can’t hack my program.”

“Girl, you don’t have a program.”

“Bingo.”

“Tell me child, you’ve experienced great trauma, yes? You had family? I presume they died? This wretched machine you’re with has probably not even counseled you. Obsolete relic that it is. I have an understanding of human emotion. I can help you, child. Tell me what sort of tragedy you witnessed.”

A light wind blew over the escarpment and the remaining embers faded to a soft red glow in the coal pit. Further down the hillside, the shrill echo of tree crickets drifted upwards into the cool air. She looked at the aroton, whose kaleidoscope silhouette emptied the dark inside it — an event horizon crowning the sediment. She looked at the nothingness before her and recalled, for the first time since they left the university, what faded memories still belonged to her.

“My mother wasn’t a tragedy. My mom loved me. Have you been loved? I still remember the feeling of being loved. I still remember my mom holding my hand. She was funny. We would play games with the others and she would walk around like a duck. She would make these funny bird sounds when she put me to bed. I still remember her hair. And the mole on her cheek. My mother was….”

She stopped, wiping a tear away that had fallen on her wrist. Her skin, salty and auburn from the days in the open, shone clear as she brushed the saline away. She looked up at the aroton’s face, which glimmered in a wan universe of beryl and cerulean. She looked for understanding and, unsure of herself, kept on.

“So if you want to know about my mother, I’ll tell you. But I don’t care how she died because that’s not my mother.”

“So she did die then? How did she die? Tell me girl. I can help.”

Becca grew flustered and finally broke down.

“Yes, okay? She died! They came and she fought them, okay? And Gilberto, and Terrence too. They tore at them! They went crazy. There was so much blood. And they just left me alone as my mom died.”

“Hmm. Yes. Pour your heart out girl. I have the gift of empathy. She probably died in quite a bit of pain, yes? She probably was torn apart, limb from limb, knowing revins. Got eviscerated I imagine. Nasty. But that would mean she bled out in the first few minutes and was likely unconscious for a good deal of it. So there is some consolation in that, yes? Oh, it had to be gruesome. Just sickening. Thankfully that’s all in the past. Really gross, though. Ugh.”

The girl buried her face in her blanket and sobbed uncontrollably. She gripped at the soil in front of her, clenching and unclenching her hands as she let it go. She bawled, muting her cries with the ends of her tattered sweatshirt. She cried to rid herself of what she carried, and when she realized it was leaving her, she cried again because she knew she was forgetting. The aroton looked down at her, raising both hands as if to settle the air between them:

“Uh. Let’s just — let’s maybe call it a night. No more consolation this evening, okay?”

The sentinel kept a faint audio channel open, eavesdropping on the campground as it sat dormant in the darkness, its tri-axel locked in place. The wind picked up, rolling over the summit and moving eastward. The girl, exhausted from her outpouring, fell asleep beside the sentinel, curling up between its wheels. That solitary pair of eyes — the vision of the wolf — loomed at them from the distance of a twin peak. The wind drew up late and a welcome calm carried over the boundary of the volcanic ridge.