The intersection was silent now. From each corner, the crossing was devoid of movement. The sentinel moved quickly off Pima Road and into the dirt between buildings on the southwest corner, speeding through a zoned lot adjacent to a doctor’s office. Dust eddies kicked up into the wind as it crossed from the lot over Alvernon, onto Lee St. The dust caked onto the film of innards dripping down the sentinel’s frame. Lee St. was piled high with refuse spilled over from hazardous waste bins lining the streets — family belongings, hazmat suits, depleted plasma bags, fast food wrappings. Some operation had come to an abrupt halt on this street — the attempts at carrying away the detritus finally realized as a pointless routine.
Trash spun up into the air as the sentinel tore through the small side street. The houses were smaller — mobile and single-story homes, modestly adorned. Many of them had Halloween decorations and others had Christmas lights — the dwellers of each home caught in the grips of the disease at different times, forever gone in different seasons. The sentinel scanned ahead on Lee St. — no movement. It kept going, crossing over Palo Verde Blvd. It crossed over Jones, Howard, and Camilla. It came upon Country Club. Across the street was an elementary school and a soccer field, chain-linked. Separated from the street. The sentinel banked hard and tore down Adams St., to the south, and continued west. The sun was beginning to move into view. It was 3PM.
Then the sentinel saw it, sprawled out before a multi-level stucco home at Adams and Stewart — a fellow automaton. Another tri-axel. The sentinel rolled up next to it with a hushed whirring of tires on concrete. It came to a halt and inspected the wreckage — it was the same model. It had been beaten with some blunt force. There were bloodied handprints on the trident, the optical array was torn off, and all the panels were pried open — the insides of each were ransacked. A massive dent shone through on its anterior solar armor and its weakness exposed — the recharge coupling was ripped out. This sentinel had been overrun and ripped apart from every side until its Achilles heel was discovered. Around the wreckage, dried blood had congealed in thick claret pools, draining into the gutter. This tri-axel had put up a fight. The sentinel extended its humaniform hand from the encasement and dilated a single magnetized HDMI port. The port snaked around the open banshee disk panel of the wrecked machine and jerked forward, finding its metal base inside the broken panel. The sentinel connected the depleted machine to its own power and found an uplink.
A vision. This machine had also started at MMC, continuing southwest. The sentinel found the memories from its long voyage. There was a monsoon and a flash flood. There was a vista of rainswept mornings at the base of the Mogollon Rim. This machine, its own kin, had spent an evening inside Case Grande ruins, sitting peacefully before the sunset of a late Summer morning in Sonora. It had uplinked to a deep space satellite and witnessed the death of a red giant. And then, it followed a trail along Picacho Peak. And Oro Valley. And Mt. Lemmon. And down through the city of dissolution. This machine had followed, in its final weeks, the same trail as the sentinel — following signs that led it to this unsafe harbor. Its terrestrial systems, too, were blinded — its arrays disrupted by the ECM jamming from somewhere in the city. The sentinel kept watching. The last few minutes were chaos and violence. The machine had made it here, to this corner, and was surrounded. It fired shot after shot from the railgun and the revins kept coming. In the background was a howl — some horrific shrill yelp. The revins were atop the machine, attacking it in a growing frenzy. A blur of limbs and teeth. Through the cacophony and shuttering darkness, that familiar human sound. It started with huffing, panting, and then it was clear — laughter. The howling figure came into view amidst this brutal merriment — it was a spindly, pallid revin. Unburnt, with only the faintest scar across his brow. The top of its head was shorn off into a bony crown. Scalpless. Its eyes gleamed. It snarled into the camera and then bent down to rip the optical chamber off its base. The feed went dark and then there were several minutes of muffled static. And a final signal cast into the void: “OMEGA SHEPHERD = REDEMPTION DECEIVER.”
The machine, when it fell, was depleted of everything else in its arsenal. It was nearly empty in its solar cells, and hadn’t enough charge for a peripheral shock. Its napalm was depleted, and its banshee disk was damaged. There was nothing to salvage. Its core CPU was split and the sentinel could glean no further data.
DDC39 wallowed in the string of words imparted on the machine’s last entry. It repeated the syntax, rearranged the string, parsed letters and words into each other. But with each hypothetical deciphering, the meaning was further lost. In losing the message, the sentinel suddenly found itself stuck on the word “redemption.” Like a needle shot down from the sky and coursing through wiring like heroin through veins, the sentinel became, in essence, aware of a larger element in its own synthetic DNA. The manufactured bloodline. It realized its own series was set forth on a path of forgiveness — not just the salvation of man, but to be redeemed. But who was being absolved? And of what? Some mistake was made at the intersection of human and artificial intelligence. One code dominated the language of binary systems — that there was nothing. But another code, the dying language of mankind, softly echoed into the ambivalent sentience of artificial cognition: “There is something more.” A declaration of ambiguity, of existential questions unanswered. Faith had currency.
A cry shot up the corridor from further west. They were coming. The sentinel rolled out into the street and panned into where the shout had come from. There were hundreds. They were coming up Adams in such great numbers that they had to climb through the thorny creosote and crucillo lining the homes on each side. The sentinel sped south on Steward and cut into an alley between blocks. It came upon Treat and went south again, to Mabel, then continued west — parallel to where the horde was walking just two blocks north. The sentinel raced forward, switching back between Mabel and Drachman as it crossed over Tucson Blvd. The campus was close. Ahead was a large, dry field and the Spanish walls of St. Peter and Paul Catholic School. Just beyond, the sentinel crossed into Campbell Ave. — the massive thoroughfare connecting the school to the foothills of north Tucson. Peering high into the setting sun, across Campbell, was the aesculapian tomb: the University of Arizona Medical Center. Ground Zero for the plague in the southwestern states.
The darkened walls wailed into the sunset and drowned the horizon. The dead omen. Far from the eyes of god. Palm trees listed in the turnabout before the entrance, fluttering into the wind. Each corner of the grimy façade peered into the air — the patient windows on each floor, barred and boarded. On the ground, surrounding every side of the complex, were the remnants of a military. Sandbags spilled over into the driveway, falling down like a crumbling hill before .50 caliber machinegun nests. Phalanx CIWS stations sat motionless at the corners and rooftops — the radar cylinders obscuring the sun like grain silos casting shadows on the plain. From the ground into the sky, the defense of this last bastion evolved from primitive and manual to the autonomous. The sentinel panned around at this desert ruin, past the dried pools of blood on every corner, and honed in on the high roof of the Clinical Resource Unit helipad. A lone shadow moved in the crepuscule and shone back. A light. A series of flashes. Morse code. This figure was speaking to the sentinel, from a hundred yards away: