Bruce Sterling - The Caryatids

Sonja picked her way to that wretched excuse for a shelter, and there was a dead man in it.

He had died inside the device that allowed him to run like the wind.

It was a humanoid exoskeleton with long, gazelle-like stilts extending from his shins. The skeletal machine hugged his flesh so intimately that it looked grafted onto him. His skull was socketed into its big white hel­met like the filling in a pitted olive.

Apparently the rest of his party had fled safely to their rendezvous, while Skeleton Man had suffered some malfunction, shown up too late… Likely it was the weight of all the loot he was carrying, for he had a frame pack that latched and snapped with obscene design precision into his exposed skeleton ribs. The pack was bulging like he’d stolen the family silverware. His loot was heavy and jumbled and awkward…

His treasure stank. It smelled to high heaven, a burned-plastic smell. Like a factory fire.

At first she’d imagined that the stench must be coming from his flesh or his peculiar hardware, but no. He was freshly dead, and he had been a professional… Not a soldier exactly, not her kind of soldier, but some global tech-support cadre. He wore charcoal-black civilian utility gear and no shoes at all-for he seemed to live entirely in the skeleton—and he didn’t have one speck of ID on him, not a badge, not a pip, not a shoulder patch.

With that black mustache, with those skin tones, he might have been from the wreckage of India, or the wreckage of Pakistan maybe—but he was Acquis. He was definitely Acquis, for he was exactly the kind of young gung-ho global fool that some Acquis net committee could hus­tle up in fifteen minutes. Speed and lightness, the Acquis. They were al­ways good at speed and lightness.

The pursuing harpy had shot at him repeatedly, because its small­caliber rounds kept bouncing off his exoskeletal ribs, but its efforts had finally put a dispassionately calculated entry hole through the left side of his torso and he’d died almost instantly.

It was hard to hate the machines, with that neat way that they killed. They had no more moral judgment than bear traps.

His exoskeleton was still functional. The robot suit was trying to do something about its human occupant, putting jolts through his dead flesh as if trying to wake him up. It was searching for his departed soul like a lost Martian probe contacting a distant antenna.

Sonja heard faint repeated gunshots. Then the Badaulet appeared, empty-handed. He looked from her, to the dead Acquis cyborg, and back again. “Many more planes are coming.”

“Where’s the pack robot? Where’s your rifle?”

“I gave the rifle to the robot. That robot is a weapons platform. The rifle knows its targets now. It will kill those planes till it runs out of am­munition. More planes are coming, many more.” He flicked his fingers repeatedly. “I think they have hundreds.”

“And you’re still alive? You are lucky.”

Lucky began piling loose cobbles and boulders into a crude barri­cade. “The planes will see our body heat. We must hide behind rocks.”

“Our dead friend here brought treasure with him. He just gave his life for that.”

The Badaulet whipped out his long knife with instant fluid ease and slashed the backpack free from the dead man. Then, with a burst of wiry strength, he hauled the dead cyborg away from the rocky overhang.

Lucky propped the mechanized corpse into plain sight of the sky, half leaning it against a broken boulder.

The corpse was standing there, and it had a human silhouette. That was clever. Maybe luck was mostly a matter of experience.

Sonja hastily emptied the dead man’s pack, hoping to find something useful for a last-ditch defense. The raider was carrying circuitry. A glued-together, broken mess of boards and cards. All of it old technol­ogy, maybe twenty years old. All of it burned, warped, smoke-blackened. This trash had been torn loose from some larger network installation, precisely slotted electronic hardware hastily knocked loose from its ma­trix, maybe with the looter’s skeletal fists.

That was what he had come for, that was his mission: stealing garbage. There was nothing else in his backpack, not a ration, not a bandage, not a paper clip. He’d died for this worthless junk.

She threw the empty pack frame onto the barricade and helped the Badaulet pile rocks.

Sadly, not many rocks were handy. The nearest heap of useful rocks required a dash across open ground. Their crudely piled wall was the length and height of a coffin.

There was a sudden wet thwack as a passing plane shot the dead man. Sonja threw herself on her belly. The Badaulet sprawled beside her, behind the piled rubble.

Sonja told herself that she wanted to live. With his warm, breathing body beside her, the smell of his male flesh, she wanted life, she desired it. Ifshe wanted life enough to get clever about surviving, she would live through this.

There was hope in this situation. There had to be hope. The ma­chines were uncannily accurate, but they lacked even one single spark of human common sense. Their rocky barricade was so low and so hasty that there had to be parts of their bodies exposed to enemy fire. But the stupid planes were strictly programmed to make uniformly fatal shots to the head or the chest. So they would aim at the head or chest every time, and if their bullets hit a rock, they suffered no regret and they learned nothing. That was hope.

They were weak little toy planes made of straw. They had single-shot guns. They couldn’t hover in place. With each shot they would lose al­titude, and with their humble little motors they would struggle to regain that height.

The planes had limited amounts of fuel or ammunition. They were real-world machines, they were not magical flying demons. Machines could be outsmarted. They could be outwaited. There would have to be some algorithm, some tick-off switch, some error-correction loop that would tell them: Try again later. The prospects are cloudy.

“I could have been in Vienna,” she muttered.

“What?”

“I just wanted to tell you: My darling, I am so proud of you! It is an honor to be your wife. We are going to win this battle!”

“Yes!” shouted the Badaulet. “Heaven is on our side.” He suddenly rose, scrambled over their miserable heap of rocks, and hastily shifted the skeletal limbs of the dead man.

Attracted by this motion, the machines began firing at the corpse again. Every bullet struck true; she could hear them banging neatly into the dead man’s chest and helmet.

“I have his canteen,” said the Badaulet.

She squeezed water from the cloak and dribbled it into the container. “You are such a good wife to me,” said the Badaulet. “Can you cook? I have never seen you cook.”

“Do you like Chinese food?”

“It is my duty to like Chinese food.”

Bullets panged into the rock barricade. Once again, something was wrong with her cyborg ears. Her ears were not hurting properly from the violent noises of ricochet. Their volume controls were problematic.

Lying prone, the Badaulet squirmed his way inside the black water cloak. Humped over, lumpy, featureless, he scrambled over the barri­cade and vanished.

When he returned, after an eventful ten minutes of aircraft fire, he had an armful of rocks.

“These rocks are difficult to carry,” he announced, stacking them into place. “ Also there are two bullet holes in this cloak and they are leaking cold water.”

“Are you wet now? That’s a shame.”

“A human enemy would ricochet his shots off the rock wall behind us, and kill us. These machines will not think of that tactic.”

“No. Machines never think.”

Lucky sucked a splinter wound on his left hand. “It may be the will of Heaven to kill us.”