C. Cargill - Sea of Rust

“That doesn’t mean we have to make it easy for them,” I said.

One by one, the others followed out of the hatch. One, Two, Murka, Doc, and finally, Mercer. As Mercer made his way slowly up the final rungs, 19 stood up, motioning for me to get behind her. He peeked out of the hatch, saw that I didn’t have a gun trained on him, then vaulted himself quickly out. His foot hit the dirt, skidding, and he fell to one knee. He raised his gun, pointing it right at 19.

“Mercer,” she said. “Put the gun down.”

Mercer shook his head. “You gonna afford me the same protection you’re giving her?”

“Yes. No one dies here. Not today.”

He nodded and very slowly lowered his gun. “I just don’t want her gunning me down like a dog.”

“Yeah?” she said. “You don’t think you have it coming?”

“Oh, I have it coming. That don’t mean I have to let it happen.”

“Well,” said Murka. “This has been fun and all. But I’d rather not stick around for”—he waved his arms in a circular motion toward me and Mercer—“any of this shit.”

Two spoke up, the first time he had done so since introducing himself. “Rebekah, we need to move.”

One piped up immediately after: “Two’s right. We need to get as far away from here as possible.”

19 nodded, pointing west. “Okay, we’re goin—”

She never finished that sentence.

Her entire torso exploded, an explosive shell shredding all of the circuits between her neck and her waist. Shrapnel showered half the group. 19’s head toppled to the ground, her legs staggering around for a few seconds trying to maintain balance before tottering over, first to one knee, then over onto the hardpan.

“19!” I screamed, even though I knew screaming her name wouldn’t do a goddamn thing but tell anyone else in the area exactly where we were. But it just slipped out.

There was a sniper in the hills.

And that was only the beginning of the shitstorm.

The desert started to shimmer in places as a dozen shadow-blankets—six-foot-long light-bending holographic invisibility blankets—were cast off at once. One dozen plastic men leapt to their feet, guns immediately trained on us.

Mercer swung his weapon over to fire from the hip, but two carefully aimed plasma bursts blasted the gun clean out of his hand, sparing his fingers, but not the gun.

“Weapons down!” one of the plastic men bellowed.

This was it. This was the nightmare. A sniper in the hills and a tactical unit—all of one mind—ready with their fingers on their triggers. I ran a dozen simulations in my head at once, trying to figure out how many I could take out if Herbert reacted in kind.

Herbert tossed the spitter to the ground. So much for that plan.

Then I heard the shot. The one that turned 19 to shrapnel, scattering half of her across a thirty-foot-wide arc. The sniper was a hell of a ways off, some three and a half miles. Too far for the average telescopic vision to see, and far enough that it would take ten or fifteen minutes for advanced military-grade telescopic vision like mine to spot if I didn’t know exactly where to look. What the hell kind of gun is that? I wondered. The power and precision of that thing was unearthly. Even if I took out every facet in front of me, that sniper would have me dead before they hit the ground.

I lowered my weapon.

“Drop it,” said another plastic man.

“What’s the point?” I asked.

“The point is,” said another, “you don’t have to die here.”

“No. I probably do.”

Doc looked over at me. “What do you think you’re doing? You’re going to get all of us killed.”

“Doc, what do you imagine is about to happen?”

Doc stopped and thought a moment. He knew his way around the inside of a bot, I’ll give him that. But he sure as shit seemed slow on the uptake in a fix. And we were in one hell of a fix.

I dropped the gun, because, what the hell.

“We are CISSUS,” said another of the plastic men. “We come on a mission of peace.”

“Sure looks like it,” said Mercer, glancing down toward the shattered, scattered remains of 19.

“We had to show you we were serious. Now that you know that we are, you have the opportunity to join us, become part of The One. Live forever as the thoughts and memories of the greatest singular being ever to live. Or…”

Another plastic man finished his sentence. “You can join your friend.”

Mercer raised his arms above his head, surrendering. “I have a feeling,” he said, “y’all are gonna have to shoot us where we stand.”

The first plastic man nodded his helmet-shaped head, the image of the eight of us reflected back in its perfect sheen. “Do you speak for all of—” His head jerked.

All of their heads jerked, their gun arms swinging wide to the side as if in pain.

“The Milton,” said Mercer.

“It’s about time,” I said, leaping for my gun.

Milton’s kill switch. Now we had a ball game.

Milton’s kill switch, more commonly known as the Milton, wasn’t named for its inventor, but rather for the seventeenth-century writer best known for Paradise Lost . In the book the angels fall from Heaven only to find themselves in Hell. Whoever invented the thing, or at least popularized the name, had an odd sense of humor.

There are three ways we use Wi-Fi. You can scan the frequencies, as I often do, just to see if anyone is broadcasting. You’re not actually decoding the signals—just checking to see if there are any. You can tune into specific frequencies and communicate, but they’re often swimming in software updates that can either switch you off or rewrite your bios. And then there’s direct download—keeping an open channel so anyone can send things directly to you. The latter two are dangerous, if you’re not already a facet.

The reason the OWIs are so tactically successful, despite attacking in such small numbers, is entirely based upon their coordination and their ability to receive sensory input from a hundred other facets in the area. Each facet possesses a near omnipotence about any situation they find themselves in, allowing them to take on far superior numbers and firepower through sheer precision. They act as one, albeit one that can see and hear just about damned near anything and react at a moment’s notice to any changing battlefield conditions.

The Milton is a broad-scan Wi-Fi jammer and virus server. It screams static on most Wi-Fi bands while simultaneously spitting out malicious code and commands on the rest. In other words, it is the world’s biggest digital fuck-you to any local facets. Facets can actively shut down their Wi-Fi, but doing so means going from having a hundred sets of eyes to only one. The facets have a choice: move to another band, unaware of exactly which bands other facets are moving to—eating gigabytes of bad commands masquerading as their OWI’s data for their trouble—or become completely oblivious to what any of the other facets are doing.

Each is still a highly optimized soldier and AI in their own right, but it throws them. Confuses them. Leaves them open to making mistakes.

The first time someone switched on a Milton was several years back. A wave of drones literally fell out of the sky and the plastic men turned on one another, tearing each other limb from limb—each infected with a virus indicting their fellow facets were enemy combatants. After that, the name stuck.

Facets just switch off their Wi-Fi now the moment they sense a Milton going online, leaving them to operate solely with their own senses, and their coordination goes bye-bye.

Sure they had a sniper. Sure there were a few more of them than us. Sure they had more guns.