The sentinel paused, deciphering the chances this signal in the dusk was meant for it — or something, someone, else. It unclasped the LED light from its optics frame and ignited the air ahead with a response: “I’m looking for someone. A survivor. One with immunity.” The air stilled and a long pause between the flashing lights.
Repentance. In the expanse of the evening sky, the winter constellations dotted the violet. Auriga, the charioteer, appeared above the lone figure. The sentinel zoomed in, and a blurred image came into view — this lone figure was an aroton. A digital wonder of the final stages of man. It was the most advanced of the automatons — a fully humaniform, magnalium endoskeleton. Its translucent urethane skin was wound tight around the microlattice machinery clicking and twisting just beneath. It moved like a human, shifting its weight to its left leg as it lifted a long-scope sniper rifle level with the sentinel across the divide, bracing on the right. The aroton’s face, a luminous medusa, pulsated in the dark, featureless. It motioned its sniper rifle away: “Go.”
DDC39 unlocked its tri-axel and rolled back onto the sidewalk. The figure faded into the dark, far side of the helipad. Before it disappeared, it shone back one last Morse signaclass="underline"
With that, the aroton receded into the eventide. An alert flashed in the sentinel’s visage: it was nearing the depleted charge level. Precious few minutes remained until it would freeze in position overnight. It made for a large stand of acacia on the southern side of the complex and wedged in amongst the bipinnate canopy. The clear night sky enveloped the desert floor, alit by the quarter moon overhead. As the sentinel initiated shutdown, the feral cries of the nocturnal horde pierced the desert altar and echoed off the ruined obelisk rising in the distance.
A hush. The sentinel was stirred in the dark of early morning by a single branch snapping in the still air. Another break. Feet shuffling amongst the fallen pods. The fragrant tannins of the whitethorn dissipated. A foul odor arose on the sentinel’s environment array — indole and bilirubin. Shit and bile. The sentinel opened its lens slowly and stared straight into the eyes of a scarred, broken-armed revin pockmarked with a wide open wound beneath its jaw. As it breathed in and sniffed at the sentinel’s frame, a gurgle of air sucked in and out of the string-threaded hole in its mandible. It moved slowly around the sentinel, gingerly stepping amongst the fallen foliage, unsure of what it had just come across. It ran a long, cracked nail along one of the sentinel’s axels, scraping off a thick film of blood and dirt grime. The blistered revin raised its gnarled arm back to its nose and drew in the scent of this discovery. The air gurgled in from the gash and it expired loudly, disgusted. Ha-rumph. It looked at the sentinel and slunk back out of the acacia stand, keeping its eye on the motionless machine in the thicket.
The sentinel was covered in the blood of revin dead. It smelled of death from the pile of bodies it tore out of the prior day. A cloak of revulsion. When the revin was gone, having ran south across Helen St., the sentinel rolled out of the stand of trees and across a parking lot filled with UN WHO tents. It came out on Helen St. and crossed in between a bullet riddled apartment complex. On the other side was Speedway — the long stretch of parkway connecting east and west Tucson and the demarcation line of the main campus. Across this road was the University of Arizona.
A tumbleweed blew easterly across Speedway, disappearing beyond Campbell St. On the other side of the road, there was a placidity amongst the wreckage draping the campus limits. The marquee of a college bar, Dirtbags, read “Welcome Back Wildcats!” Shattered glass from the storefronts lined the sidewalks. A din rose on the air from somewhere in the heart of the campus. The sentinel closed its optical lens and listened, amplifying the thrum. What sounded like white noise became clearer — it was thousands of shouting voices. Screaming and bleating a vague pattern of vocalized call and response. They were out there, and close.
The sentinel plotted routes and analyzed the risk for each one, but the data was too incomplete for the risk to be even remotely reliable. It had to leverage cached maps and a relative location of the amplified sounds. With no satellite uplink, thermal / cortico scan, nor radar, the sentinel was forced to get creative. Odds were low.
It crossed over Speedway and into the lower world. The shattered glass crumbled underneath polyurethane. The sentinel turned on Martin Ave., heading south, and sped between fraternity houses lining each side of the street. A heavy barricade of sandbags and concertina wire cordoned off 1st St., blocking the way forward. Panning left and right, the sentinel saw that this obstruction spanned the entire westerly campus and disappeared down Campbell, continuing south. A dense set of tracks — both animal and revin — went east and west along the southern side of 1st St. in the dirt and sand accumulated on the sidewalk. The sentinel followed the tracks west and came upon an opening cut into the wire nearby, sandbags pushed aside. The sentinel retracted its lateral trident assembly, narrowed its axels, and ducked into the opening, continuing south on Warren. The cries and shouts grew louder. Perdition. The sun was overhead and the sentinel was in plain view in the middle of the street, heading into the maelstrom. Ahead, a cement barricade blocked the path into University Blvd. and the mall — the mile long stretch of lawn connecting the central campus. The sentinel continued towards it, passing near an abandoned baseball field, Hillenbrand Stadium, on its left and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory on the right. NOAO had been the center of the U.S. efforts to explore the universe, connecting Kitt Peak Observatory, high atop Mt. Lemmon, to the Gemini Project — the international association of astronomers.
As the sentinel made its way forward, a flurry of weathered fliers blew across the street — one pinned underneath the sentinel’s front tire. DDC39 panned down and read the block-lettered inscription: “Remain Within the Campus Confines. The Antidote Will be Airdropped Tomorrow.” A University of Arizona Wildcat logo was emblazoned at the bottom.
Ahead, the red-bricked Kuiper Space Sciences building and Gittings Dance Hall skirted each side of Warren ahead of the concrete embankment, A wide, exterior staircase lined the corner of the Kuiper building, connecting each floor and the roof. The white, steel entrance to the ramp was open. The sentinel sped towards the open gate, navigating its way aloft. On the roof, a makeshift guard post, lined on each corner with .50 caliber machineguns, had been erected on the southeast side. A straggle of tattered fatigues and picked-clean femurs, ribcages, and ulnas littered the rubber-coated roof. The sentinel rolled over the detritus and ascended the guard post. From there, the expanse of the mall and the lateral corridors came into view.
A flesh tide of unthinking masses undulated into the corners of every building that lined the mall. Thousands of revins swarmed about the mottled soil. They emerged and submerged into holes dug into the lawn like locusts. Shit and piss streamed easterly towards Campbell from the narrow streets adjacent to each side of the great lawn. Piles of broken carcasses tipped over into the shallow pits. Rags and discarded clothes lined the holes, unworn by the blistered and sunburnt horde. Papered, greasy trash was carried aloft by sudden gusts, ascending and descending with the pulse of the crowd. A sea of mismatched shoes were strewn about the asphalt, kicked at and knocked about by the bloodied feet of countless revins streaming in each direction, pushing and shoving at each other as they made for somewhere in the sundrenched abyss.