Revolution 19
Authors: Gregg Rosenblum
To Wendy and Cadence.
And to my parents, for their constant support
.
CONTENTS
At first we called it system-wide malfunctions when the robots stopped fighting at exactly 2:15
P.M
. Greenwich Mean Time, August 17, 2051. They had been designed by humans to fight our wars, but for twenty-two hours the battlefields were silent. We called it a blessing and the beginning of a new peace. Then when the bots began killing again, now targeting their human commanders, we shook our heads and called it fatal programming errors. A day later, the skies over cities on six continents grew dark with warships, and we began to understand. When the bombs rained down and then legions of bot footsoldiers marched into the burning ruins, killing any humans who resisted and dragging away the rest of us, we finally called it what it was: revolution
.
SOMEWHERE NEARBY, A DOG BARKED AND WHINED. THE MAN SQUINTED through the ash and smoke in the direction of the sound but could see nothing moving in the wreckage. The road was ripped into piled pieces of concrete. Twisted hunks of metal, barely recognizable as the shredded and half-melted remains of cars and streetlights, lay in heaps. Ruined apartment buildings, collapsed into rubble with walls half-standing, lined what was left of the street.
The man turned away from the others—five men, three women, a young boy, and an infant girl—and climbed toward the sound.
“There’s no time,” said a woman whose face was lined with dirt and dried blood.
The dog barked and whimpered again, and the man began moving small pieces of rubble. The others watched for a few moments before wordlessly joining him. They dug with their torn-up hands, straining to move concrete and metal. The little boy sat down in the dirt and watched the adults work.
A few minutes later a small poodle emerged, black with dirt, wagging its tail weakly as the survivors pulled it out of its hole. The boy clapped his hands, and the woman began crying. The dog limped up to her and licked her face.
A hum filled the sky, and everyone dropped to the ground. The woman pulled the dog to her chest and held its muzzle shut. The robot, a small scout plane, appeared from the south, the throb of its hover-units rising to a peak then slowly fading as it slid away to the north. When the scout was gone, the group got back to their feet and began moving west again.
Four soldier bots were waiting for them at the city limits. The bots towered over the humans—they were at least eight feet tall and as wide as two men. They raised their lase arms and aimed a warning shot at the survivors’ feet. Chunks of street rubble sprayed out, one small piece striking the young boy in the left eye. He screamed and fell, clasping his hand over his face. Blood ran between the boy’s fingers. His father pulled off his own shirt, picked up the still-screaming child, and pressed his shirt against the boy’s face. The boy clawed at his father’s hands, but his father held him tight against his chest.
A woman cradled the infant girl in her arms while her husband hugged her tightly. The rest simply stood and waited to die. They had all seen people killed mercilessly at the hands of these soldier bots, their lase blasts tearing cauterized craters into soft human bodies.
But the bot in front of them lowered its arm and stepped to the side. It pointed west, away from the city. None of the survivors moved. The bot pointed back at them—they flinched—then again at the trees.
“GO,” it said, its voice booming out and echoing through the rubble. “PER THE ORDERS OF THE SENIOR ADVISOR, YOU ARE ALLOWED TO LEAVE.” It pointed at the couple holding the baby. “YOU TWO WILL STAY.”
The woman holding the baby looked up. “But … but why?” she said.
“TO MAINTAIN THE APPROVED RELEASE CONTROL GROUP QUOTA, ONLY YOU TWO WILL STAY. YOU WILL RELEASE THE INFANT TO THE OTHERS.”
The woman tightened her grip on the baby and took a step back, her eyes wild. “No!” she said. “She’s my child!”
Her husband reached for their daughter, and she slapped his hands away. “No!” she said again.
“Let her live,” he said quietly. His face was pale underneath the streaks of dirt, and his hands were shaking. “This is her chance.”
The mother sat down heavily onto the ground, holding on tightly to the baby girl, her face buried in the child’s neck. The father bent down and gently reached for the baby again, and this time the mother let her child go.
The father kissed his daughter on the cheek and brushed the baby’s thin wisps of brown hair back from her face. “I love you,” he whispered and handed the baby to the mother of the young boy. “Take care of my daughter,” he said, his voice cracking.
“Don’t worry,” said the woman. “I won’t let anything happen to …”
She was interrupted by a crackling sound, a burst of bright light, and a flash of heat. The parents of the baby girl crumpled to the ground, their bodies twitching for a few seconds before going still. Smoke rose from their blackened chests.
Nobody spoke. They stared at the smoldering bodies on the ground. The woman held the baby tightly against her chest and rocked her from side to side. “It’s okay,” she whispered to the baby. “You’re okay.”
“GO!” said one of the bots.
The released survivors hesitated, then made their way past the bots, waiting for the lases in their backs—but the blasts didn’t come. They moved faster, the dog limping along behind them, following the road that led away from the city and toward the woods.
Fourteen Years Later
KEVIN TUGGED AT A LOOSE THREAD ON HIS SHIRT DOWN BY HIS stomach, trying to break it off but instead ripping open a small hole.
Perfect
, he thought. Now he’d have to beg his mother to mend it. This was one of his good scavenged shirts, high-tech, machine-made, pre-Rev. Nothing like the scratchy, homegrown, ugly knits and weaves that all the old first gens were so proud of.
A patch of sun shone through the leaves, and something glinted in the grass off the trail. It was half-buried under an exposed tree root. A pre-Rev soda bottle? Kevin stood and began to walk over for a closer look, but then Nick grabbed Kevin’s hat off his head.
“Dammit, Nick!” Kevin said. “Give it back!” Kevin grabbed for it while Nick held the hat just out of reach. It was his lucky hat—a “baseball” hat, his dad had called it—discovered last fall in the trunk of a burned-out car on the highway and given to Kevin for his thirteenth birthday. Nobody touched Kevin’s hat.
Nick turned away, and Kevin punched him on the left shoulder, as hard as he could. Kevin knew that Nick wouldn’t see it coming—he was blind in his left eye—but he was also six feet tall and twice as strong as Kevin. Nick just laughed and tossed the hat on the ground. Kevin picked it up carefully and inspected it for damage, brushing specks of dirt off the red letter
B
on the front. He jammed it back onto his head. “I hope you get stuck cleaning flock drop for a month.”
“Sorry, kid,” said Nick, smiling. “Too old for that. The birds are all yours. Now come on, stop napping and keep up.”
Kevin didn’t want to leave behind the metal object on the ground, but he wasn’t about to pick it up in front of his brother.
“Kevin and Nick!” their mother called. “Pay attention!”
His mom and dad were up the trail, arms crossed, waiting. He knew that look. They hated it when Kevin fell behind during forestry. Which seemed to happen a lot.
“I
was
paying attention, Mom,” he protested.
“No, you weren’t,” Cass chimed in. She was leaning against a thin white birch, in a patch of sunlight that shone down on her long brown hair through a break in the thick forest canopy. She had a white flower tucked behind her ear and a strand of wild mint in her mouth. She pulled the mint from her mouth and dropped it. “You were picking at your belly.”
“Mind your own business, Cass,” said Kevin.
“You were staring at your stomach like a monkey that had just discovered its belly button,” said Cass.
“Drop it, Cass!”
“Like a monkey saying, ‘Oh my God, what is this hole doing in my belly?’”
Kevin grabbed a pebble and winged it at her. “Get that stupid flower out of your hair!” Cass caught the rock with her left hand—she wasn’t even left-handed—then switched it to her right and flung it back at him twice as hard. He tried to catch it, missed, and it plinked off his forearm. It stung, but he ignored it. Cass was better than he was at any sport, at anything athletic. He hated that. Yes, she was older than him by almost two years, but she was small and skinny and didn’t look like she could break a twig.
“Enough!” said their dad, rubbing the bald spot on top of his head like he always did when he began to get frustrated. “Kevin, start paying attention. Nick, act your age. And Cass, if your brothers want to act like idiots, you don’t need to get in the middle of it. Mind your own business.”
“Yes! Thank you,” said Kevin.
“I said that’s enough,” their dad said again. He almost smiled, Kevin could tell, but no, not during schoolwork. “Kevin, please tell me three relevant properties of the plant your mother was discussing.”
Kevin racked his brain, trying to remember what his mom’s voice had been droning on and on about, but came up empty. He wished today had been a tech day. On tech days, with Tom as his teacher, Kevin had no problem staying plugged in. He already knew more about keeping the wind turbines and solar panels and gridlines operational than anyone in Freepost, except for Tom. Most of the first gens didn’t want to know tech (although they certainly didn’t complain about their hot water and cooking panels and lightstrips). Anything mechanical reminded them of bots, Kevin supposed.
He looked around for a clue, but he just saw the same forest he’d been walking through for years. Green grass. Brown dirt. Gray rocks. Blue sky and bright sunlight here and there in the canopy breaks. They were a mile northwest of Freepost, following a deer trail near the stream. What would his mom have been talking about here? The lichen growing on the trees this time of year? Edible wildflowers? He noticed a patch of fiddleheads off the trail near his mom and crossed his fingers for luck. “Uh, edible if you forage them in the early spring when they’re an inch or two tall. Found in open woods and along streams. Must be cooked thoroughly before eating.”
Now his dad did smile. “No, Kevin, I don’t care how thoroughly you cook poison ivy, I still wouldn’t eat it.” He held up his hand and started counting points on his fingers. “One, leaves of three. Two, white berries in the summer and fall. Three, never burn it; inhaling the smoke can kill you. And a bonus point—four, an extract from jewelweed can help the rash, if you’re so inattentive during forestry class that you actually stumble into a poison ivy patch. Got it?”
“Yeah, got it. I’ve known about poison ivy since I was in diapers, Dad.”