Daniel Wilson - Robopocalypse

Reluctantly, I strip down and climb into the uniform. The clothes are new and stiff. Jack suits up, too. He does it twice as fast as me. At one point, he snaps a belt around my waist and tightens it for me. I feel like a twelve-year-old in a Halloween costume.

Then he presses an M16 rifle into my hands.

“What? Seriously? We’re going to get arrested.”

“Shut up and listen. This is the magazine. Just jam it in there and make sure it curves away from you. This selector is the fire-mode control. I’m setting it to single-round so you don’t blow your clip all at once. Put it to safety when you’re not using the rifle. There’s a handle on top, but never carry it by the handle. It’s not safe. Here’s the bolt. Pull it back to chamber a round. If you have to fire the weapon, hold it with both hands, like this, and look down the sights. Squeeze the trigger slow.”

Now, I’m a kid in a soldier’s Halloween costume armed with a fully loaded M16 battle rifle. I hold it up and point it at the wall. Jack slaps my elbow.

“Keep your elbow down. You’ll catch it on something and it makes you a bigger target. And get your index finger outside the trigger guard unless you’re ready to fire.”

“This is what you do on weekends?”

Jack doesn’t respond. He’s kneeling, shoving things into our rucksacks. I notice a couple of big plastic chunks, like sticks of butter.

“Is that C4?”

“Yeah.”

Jack finishes stuffing the bags. He throws one onto my back. Tightens the straps. Then, he shrugs on his own pack. He slaps his shoulders and stretches out his arms.

My brother looks like a goddamned jungle commando.

“C’mon, Big Mac,” he replies. “Let’s go find out what’s making that racket.”

Rifles ready, we slip down the hall toward the booming sound. Jack stands back, rifle leveled at his shoulder. He nods at me and I crouch in front of the door. I put one gloved hand on the doorknob. With a deep breath, I twist the knob and shove the door open with my shoulder. It hits something, and I shove harder. It flies open and I tumble inside the room on my knees.

Black writhing death stares back at me.

The room is teeming with scuttle mines. They climb up the walls, out of splintered crates, over one another. My opening the door has shoved a pile of them out of the way, but others are already crawling into the opening. I can’t even see the floor for all the creepy crawlies.

A wave of forelegs rises across the room, tasting the air.

“No!” screams Jack. He grabs the back of my jacket and drags me out of the room. He’s quick, but as the door starts to close it gets wedged on a scuttle mine. It’s followed by more. A lot more. They emerge in a torrent into the hallway. Their metal bodies smack the door as we back away.

Boom. Boom. Boom .

“What else is in this armory, Jack?”

“All kinds of shit.”

“How much of it is robots?”

“Plenty of it.”

Jack and I retreat down the hall, watching the crablike explosives as they leisurely flood out of the door.

“Is there more C4?” I ask.

“Crates.”

“We have to blow this whole place up.”

“Cormac, this building has been here since the seventeen hundreds.”

“Who gives a shit about history? We have to worry about right now , dude.”

“You never had any respect for tradition.”

“Jack. I’m sorry I pawned the bayonet. Okay? It was the wrong thing to do. But blasting these things is the only thing to do. What did we come here for?”

“To save people.”

“Let’s save some people, Jack. Let’s blow the armory.”

“Think, Cormac. People live around here. We’ll kill somebody.”

“If those mines get loose, who knows how many people they’re gonna kill. We don’t have a choice. We’re going to have to do something bad to do something good. In an emergency, you do what you have to do. Okay?”

Jack considers for a second, watching the scuttle mines creep toward us down the hallway. Red circles of light glint off the polished floors. “Okay,” he says. “Here’s the plan. We’re going to get to the nearest army base. Make sure you’ve got everything you need, because we’ll be walking all night. It’s cold as shit out there.”

“What about the armory, Jack?”

Jack grins at me. He has this crazy look in his blue eyes that I’d almost forgotten about.

“The armory?” he asks. “What armory? We’re blowing the fucking armory straight to hell, little brother.”

That night, Jack and I trek through frigid mist, trotting down dark alleys and crouching behind whatever cover we can find. The city is dead quiet now. Survivors are barricaded inside their homes, leaving the desolate streets to be hunted by frostbite and lunatic machines. The growing snowstorm has put out some of the fire we started, but not all of it.

Boston is burning.

We hear the occasional thump of a detonation out in the dark. Or the tire squeal of empty cars sliding over the ice, hunting. The rifle Jack gave me is surprisingly heavy and metal and cold. My hands are curled around it like two frozen claws.

The instant I see them, I hiss at Jack to make him stop. I nod to the alley on our right, not making another sound.

At the end of the narrow alleyway, through the swirling smoke and snow, three silhouettes walk past, single file. They step under the bluish LED glow of a streetlight, and at first I assume they’re soldiers in tight gray fatigues. But that isn’t right. One of them stops on the corner and scans the street, head cocked funny. The thing must be seven feet tall. The other two are smaller, bronze-colored. They wait behind the leader, perfectly still. It’s three humanoid military robots. They stand metallic and naked and unflinching in the cutting wind. I’ve only ever seen these things on television.

“Safety and pacification units,” whispers Jack. “One Arbiter and two Hoplites. A squad.”

“Shh.”

The leader turns and looks in our direction. I hold my breath, sweat trickling down my temples. Jack’s hand tightens painfully on my shoulder. The robots don’t visibly communicate. After a few seconds the leader just turns away and, as if on cue, the three figures lope off into the night. Only a few footprints in the snow remain as evidence that they were ever there.

It’s like a dream. I’m not sure whether what I saw was real. But even so, I have a gut feeling that I’ll be seeing those robots again.

We did see those robots again.

At Zero Hour, the majority of the world’s population lived in cities. Highly industrialized areas worldwide were struck hardest in the immediate aftermath. In one rare instance, however, an enterprising Japanese survivor turned a weakness into strength.

A multitude of industrial robots, surveillance cameras, and Rob bugs corroborate the following story, which was told in great detail by Mr. Takeo Nomura to members of the Adachi Self-Defense Force. From the beginning of the New War up until its last moments, Mr. Nomura seems to have been surrounded by friendly robots. All Japanese has been translated into English for this document.