AlexMcGilvery Array - Nano Bytes

The rest was history.

She laughed inside her head somewhere, too conditioned to make disruptive noises like that on the surface. What had brought humanity to its knees in the end wasn’t a Terminator AI, some super–sentient computer with planet–wide reach; it was a God damn suspension bridge.

All there was to do now was wait for Lawrence to build up the nerve he needed to leave his wife’s side and do what he did best. Bronco ride the beast the size of a three story building. You’d think he wouldn’t need to take a moment after all this time; he must have ridden hundreds of robospiders over the years. But each time was a little more traumatizing than the last, so each time he had to clear all that crap from his mind, start afresh. She envied him his rebirthing exercise. She could never forget anything.

By the third deep breath he was on the move, climbing one of the spider’s legs faster than a cat burglar climbs the outside of a rich man’s home to get to the safe on the third story.

Once he was in the «saddle,” he quickly popped the casing in front of him and hacked his way in, using the only weapons of any value in this war, a screw driver, a pliers, and a few other workman’s tools from his tool belt. The «saddle» was part of the spider’s cephalothorax, and situated just behind the brainpan. The spider’s head came replete with electronic eyes.

«I’m in!» he shouted, indicating he had control of the spider, so she could head on up.

She didn’t have the heart to tell him, his hellacious Coney Island ride that never settled down until the beast was «broken» never came to an end on account of anything he did. It was Sasha, hacking the spider from a safe distance off that allowed him to play he–man. She couldn’t deny him his coping mechanism of being her brave provider, without whom she couldn’t survive a day out here. If he didn’t have that, he’d crumble like a house of cards.

It wasn’t like she had room in her head to pity him. That space was reserved for all the self–hate and more she could crowd in there. Most of it arising from the realization that someone out there had hacked their bridge a long long time ago. Modified its coding to turn it into this. A mama spider intent on turning out baby spiders until the end of time. It had not been a fluke accident as they’d all thought once upon a time. They should have figured as much when the spiders being spawned weren’t merely adapted to procuring bridge replacement parts. The spiders possessed additional modifications indicating that the mini–fab factories adhering to the underside of the bridge were cranking out the appropriately weaponized parts. That was one too many tweaks to pin on one lightning strike, or whatever had caused the malfunction, if it had been just fate involved. Surely at least some of these defects in the manufacture would have been less than adaptive.

Among the robospiders’ many additional features, post the hack, were the ability to lob spit in the form of acid at great distances and with exquisite precision, strong enough to dissolve a person on contact. They could also squirt ignitable liquid; they used the torrents of fire to gut buildings and to protect themselves from humans hiding in their blind spots. Not that they had many of those; their eyes had been adapted to see along the entire electromagnetic spectrum. It didn’t take too much imagination to divine that these recently evolved skills were but minor tweaks to their original bridge maintenance capabilities. She’d watched them make full use of their repertoire many a time, including taking prisoners by binding their arms and legs with the metal threads the robospiders could also excrete. Just what they were doing with those captives, she was afraid to find out.

A bad guy, at least, who had fathered this brave new world, gave her someone concrete to hate and someone that might well yield to her actions over time, certainly a lot more readily than fate ever would.

Only…

She had never been smart enough to track the guy down, or overwrite his coding. Thus the growing pool of self–hate she drowned in most nights.

Maybe if there were other hackers out there, and she could just find them. Maybe working together… they could each take a piece of the code, a segment suiting their specialty, until they managed to come up with something a good deal more robust and resistant to Mr. X’s overwriting. Then, maybe, she’d only have the guilt over what she’d pulled over on her husband all these years to get past. Keeping him infantilized worse than her son, Peter, no less regressed in his own way. Lawrence deserved better.

Wiping her eyes, she stuffed her laptop in her backpack, zipped and shouldered the satchel. Then she traded in one big picture view for another as she climbed the spider’s leg to get up to her husband waiting for her to take the ride of a lifetime with her. The one where he’d do the monster mash and battle it out with any other spiders coming his way. They’d barely survive, of course, explaining the accrual of battle scars over the years. But she had to keep it real so he didn’t grow suspicious. So the hero myth he spun about himself didn’t unravel. And what the hell, it was one less spider. Never mind that the parts would just be recycled to make more spiders, meaning they were accomplishing nothing. He never once voiced any such lament. Maybe he kept this insight at the periphery of his awareness because it challenged his sense of self–importance.

With her in the saddle behind him and her arms wrapped around him, Lawrence set the robospider in motion, straight up the side of the nearest skyscraper. The robospider on the roof was waiting for them. Others were already bounding their way from the vertical surfaces of the nearby buildings. They seemed able to sense when one of them had gone rogue. Soon she and Lawrence would feel as if at the bottom of a pile of tackled bodies on a football field. Only the limbs wouldn’t just be wriggling on top of them. They’d be doing their damnedest to slice and dice them into chunked meat.

«Sasha!»

Sasha craned her head behind her in the direction of the female voice. In time to see the leaping spider descending on her and Lawrence. Its eight legs with their pointy tips poised to make human shish kebabs of them. The robot arachnid was washed away in a torrent of fire before it could carry out its intent. «Next time go with the acid,” Sasha said, noticing Monica rode her spider with an enviable level of skill even Lawrence had yet to master.

«And risk raining acid down on you?»

«Why not? I could do with a good face peel.»

Monica stretched a thin lipped smile across her face as she took the lead, leaping over Lawrence with her spider. «We’ve got to get to the roof,” she said.

«Why?» Lawrence asked. «The cries are coming from the fifth floor.»

«It’s a decoy,” Monica shouted back at him, before turning her spider to face him directly, while walking backwards with it, continuing to head them toward the roof. «They’re getting better at setting traps for humans. No, word is, the human prisoners are being taken to the roof.»

Monica didn’t wait for their consent. She rotated her spider yet again to spearhead their ascent, with or without Lawrence and Sasha. Tired dodging the spitballs from the robospider on the roof, she shot one of her own, taking him out. The arachnid sputtered and smoldered before toppling over, hoping to use its mass and girth to take out its attackers in one final stab of revenge. It might have succeeded, but Lawrence and Monica were both too good at controlling the spiders they were seated on.

Lawrence used the pointed tips on two of the arachnid’s legs at his disposal to lance the brainpans of two spiders that had managed to reach them ahead of the others, taking them out in mid–leap, when they were most vulnerable. For whatever reason, they needed to finish a leap before engaging whatever weapons they wished to use. Probably just an oversight in the code writing and a loophole that’d likely be closed sooner or later.