David Hanrahan - Archon of the Covenant

Up through the gloom of the stair tower, the torrent outside now a dull hiss from the broken doorway thirty feet down. The sentinel extended its shadow hand unto the cold handle of the 3rd floor landing and twisted it open. The hinges yawned and squealed open into Hades. DDC39 steered into the achromasis. The dead air hung in this long ago abandoned hospital. The sentinel rolled forward into the hall — alternatingly scanning in thermal, black light, and cortical. Its vulcanized tires glided over the tile and crunched the thin glass shards of broken syringes on the ground.

DDC39 navigated through the dark hall, its center LED light illuminating the walls. It passed a dry erase board with the names of physicians and their shifts frozen in time. There were open doors on the left and right — each room crammed with disheveled hospital beds, left as they were. Purses, changes of clothes, cell phones, pictures of family. Everything owned and necessary, left behind when the patient fled — its cognition gone. A thick layer of dust was everywhere. The sentinel scanned the surroundings as it continued down the hall, but found nothing to indicate a living presence would be found in the building.

It continued until, halfway down the cavernous corridor, the hall opened up into a lobby. To the right, the elevator bank. The doors of each elevator were welded shut. A thin film of dust fell from the ceiling and carried in the air like snow in the field of the sentinel’s center lamp. DDC39 panned around the lobby and switched into black light. The floor was awash in neon blue footprints all throughout the lobby. There were handprints painted all about the doors of the elevator and surrounding drywall. There were silhouettes as high up as the wall-ceiling corners. A crowd had flooded into this room. The elevators weren’t welded shut from inside the lobby. They were welded from inside the shaft to keep people in.

The sentinel continued down the hallway. The dust in the air became thicker. The prints faded into this dark recess of the corridor. Switching quickly between thermal, black light, and standard view, the sentinel picked up a trace set of tire tracks in the hall leading to a door at the end of the corridor. DDC39 continued down and came to a stop before a large steel door. The dark of the hall was nothingness — silent and still. The sentinel listened. A faint whirr, then stop. Whirr, then stop. The shadow hand extended from the trident arm and reached forward to pull back the Kason latch of the door, slowly pulling it backwards, the hinges gliding silently on the caked-in dust.

As the door began to crack, it suddenly exploded backwards — the sentinel thrown back from the force. It stumbled up against the corridor facade, the drywall crumbling against its contorted frame. Its center light flickered in the shattered air and focused upwards towards the doorway. DDC39’s optics blinked on and off, stunned from the collision. In the pulsing light, a large figure came into view, a menacing presence in the dark. The shadow form stood upright and rolled forward on two pendulum-wheeled legs. A soft glow lit the unknown figure from behind as DDC39 regained its bearings and focused its LED light at the oncoming apparition — a pathoton. An autonomous cryosurgical robot. Its frame was wrapped in anodized wire mixed with fiber optic cables — a tangled exoskeleton, headless save for an arachnid array of sensors and optical endings protruding from its “shoulder.” It came forward and raised a tangled limb towards DDC39 — on its end was an acetylene gas torch which lit and sparked before the sentinel. The pathoton stood silent with the flame raised before the sentinel’s optics. A rattled voice emanated from somewhere in the tangle of wire and fiber optics:

“Do not interfere.”

The pathoton unlocked its dual-axel and rolled back into the dimly lit room. The sentinel saw the room unobstructed for the first time. In the dust-filled chamber, a stack of charred human bodies — ashen white and crumbling — filled all four corners. Strands of hair floated upwards like feathers. A small dumbwaiter shaft glowed dimly from the middle wall. The pathoton reached down and picked up a snow shovel then scooped a small body of ashes, disintegrating as the shovel tip dug into its abdomen, and gently tapped the ashes into the open dumbwaiter. When the shaft was full, the pathoton pulled the door closed and slammed down a lever, ejecting the ashes into the sky above the hospital. The twisted wire limbs of the pathoton followed this procedure methodically. The mechanical archangel.

DDC39 righted itself against the wall and watched these motions in the gloomlight — white ash swimming in the air. The pathoton kept on, ambivalent to the other digital spectre looming behind it. DDC39 scanned the room and detected a wireless signal coming from the pathoton. It was U.S. military and heavily encrypted. The sentinel ran through a protocol of automaton relays over the wireless signal.

Proxy DNS tc.obit

-No response

Reset request tc.obit

- No response

Identify by proxy

-No response

The pathoton torqued into the delicate ashen bodies and pistoned the decay into the dumbwaiter. Up into the sky, above the chamber of the dead gods. Into the ether of the earth devoid of ideas. DDC39 was undamaged, save for a few scratches. It rolled silently backwards into the hall, watching the pathoton empty the room of the man, woman, and child husks. As the last body was ejected into the atmosphere, the pathoton scanned the room, looking momentarily at DDC39. It pulled down on a yellow grip-bar and the far side metal shutter wall rolled up, unleashing a torrent of bodies into the room around the pathoton. The gnarled machine slammed shut the shutter wall and ignited the oxy-fuel torch from its gnarled arm — the mound of bodies alighting in a white glow.

DDC39 rolled back out of the room and raised its railgun level to the processor of the pathoton, which stopped, looking back at the sentinel as the ashes of men swam in the dark air of the hospital ward. The railgun hummed, filling the room like a song of the undead.

In the evening air, at the base of the Catalina state park in Oro Valley, a cool desert wind blew through the tamarisk and acacia, sending a family of shrews scattering from a hedge of graythorn to a burrow beneath the shale. A Great Horned Owl swept over the shrews and snared the mother, then faded into the darkness of the night sky. Orion, at arms, held his arrow bearing down on Sonora. The waning moon cast the shadows of the unmoving saguaros unto the sand of a dry creek bed. The sentinel tracked the owl as it disappeared into the stars, behind Mt. Lemmon, and powered down.

• Solar power cell — 30%. Solar armor — 100%.

• Drivetrain — operational

• Visual/cortico/thermal/radar optics — operational

• HD/Comms — operational

• Water — 100%. Napalm — 100%

• Railgun — full capacity

• JE — encountered pathoton; was not helpful

• Shutting down core operation and initiating stand-by mode

Over the next two days, the sentinel drove north along the broken Oracle Road and the forgotten earth. In the morning, it would rise slowly, awakening its core systems to the incoming sunlight. It drove all afternoon, stopping frequently to analyze anomalies in the terrain — a set of tracks, a heat signature on a distant roof, a freshly fallen cholla. Satellite data was pinged to the sentinel every 6 hours, providing more information to pore over. There was no sign of human cognition, but there were the primal husks — the revins — gathering in the reaches beyond the road.

The sentinel kept on, aware of this rising tide, until it got to a small RV park in the far north — Oracle Junction. It pulled off the road and turned its sights on the movement to the south. The revins moved from the desert floor onto the broken pavement. The midday sun heated the asphalt to a scalding burn. The revins, shoeless, walked onward towards DDC39. One, a child, ran forward towards the sentinel ahead of the others. It had been badly burned — its ears, nose, eyelids, and hair was gone. It held a rock in its hand and gurgled a guttural scream at the sentinel, shaking the rock in the air until it finally threw it comically astray — landing softly askew of the sentinel’s front wheel. The child shrieked at the sentinel and ran backwards toward the horde.