It was near nightfall when they finally reached the crest of the scoria ridgeline. The aroton looked out onto the darkened floor of the desert — a red warren forged from the volcanism of the Pleistocene. Basalt, limestone, and shale shot up through the alluvial fan. Saguaros reached their arms outwards and upwards — a pageant of the absurd. Mocking man from the dawn of time. The light vanished on the valley to the east, casting darkness on Ward 4, Mica Mountain, and Rincon Peak. To the west, Kitt Peak was vanishing. Overhead, Gemini and Auriga appeared in the nighttime sky. As they huddled between the shelter of outcroppings, the black of the moonless nightfall surrounded them. The sentinel plunged its hand into a burrow and pulled forth a rasping bullsnake from the rocks. Its scaled, undulating torso, nearly 6 feet long, coiled around the trident frame of the machine, wrapping its way upward, constricting its body around the solar armor panels. Laocoon and the serpent. The bullsnake came face to face with its captor and the sentinel released the tail, swiftly grasping the throat of the long snake, breaking its neck and suffocating it.
They lit a small fire on the summit and the sentinel charred the snake for the girl. She balanced her cup on one knee as she tore scales off the flesh. The aroton walked back off the ridgeline and sat above them on the outcropping, watching the sentinel, drained of its energy reserves from the ascension. The flames lit the aroton like a Fresnel lens — an old lighthouse on the mountain, warning passersby of the coastline below. A mirage. It leaned the longrifle alongside the outcropping below, stock to dirt, and draped its legs off the ledge. The sentinel examined the massive gun — its flat chromatic luster deadened in the firelight. DDC39 addressed the aroton, which looked off in the darkness:
“Why did you take us up here?”
“What? You don’t like it? Well, you should. Because the revins avoid the hillsides. They know the drones scour the higher elevations first. They also know that a particularly brutal synthetic typically lingers in the high reaches. That would be me. And they don’t like getting too close to me. Perhaps it’s because I have a dour personality. On top of that, we’re here because this is a special place.
With that, the aroton reached down into a crevice and pulled forth a dusty, metal canister from a handle on its side. The handle and top of the canister were disguised to blend in with the rock, but the emerging frame of the canister was corrugated metal, painted olive green and emblazoned with military designation. The aroton lifted the bulky container, one-handed, onto the rocks next to where it sat and then placed its palm on a small panel under the handle. The aroton’s hand pulsated in soft, rhythmic red lights and the canister clicked open. Rummaging through the contents of the canister, the aroton pulled out a reinforced messenger bag and then several ammunition boxes. It laid the boxes on the bag just to the other side — a precise gap between each. The sentinel watched as the aroton inspected the munitions, going through them one by one and calling them out individually:
“Incendiary rounds. Frag. Flechette. Illumination. Armor piercing. Well, won’t need those. Looks like nothing in here for you though. Sorry.”
“If you’re an advanced model of robotics, why do you carry such a bulky, early model gun?”
“It scares the revins — the blast echo, that is. When I was activated, and gained sentience, I started out into the wild with protocols that made sense to my makers, but didn’t make any sense to me. I was programmed to adapt, however. I started out thinking that silenced, compact weapons would help me keep a low profile. So I would track the wolves, in the shadows, and pick off individual revin assholes that got too close. But they wouldn’t learn. I realized that if I were to be effective, I would need to teach these motherfuckers to back the fuck off. The silenced, modern pulse rifles didn’t drive the behavior change I needed. So I found the gun that sounds like thunder. That’s this beauty.”
The aroton tapped the barrel of the gun and looked at the sentinel. The girl chewed on the singed bullsnake and listened.
“The MXR 50D. 20-shot capacity, variable cartridge selector, wireless HUD uplink, self-cleaning barrel. A titan of the lost era. I realized that I could pick them off at distance with this longrifle and the blast report would send the rest scattering. The sight of their friend with its head removed, coupled with the sound of death through the hillside — it made them shit themselves. For all I know, they think Zeus is casting judgment on them each time I pull the trigger. Even a shot in the air sometimes would be enough to move them off the path of the wolf.”
“And so how has that worked? Is the Mexican Wolf still endangered? Have the revins killed them under your guard?”
“Have you ever wondered why we were given our programs? You were coded to find a survivor and take her to point B. That seems pointless, in itself. I was coded to follow the population of the Mexican Wolf and protect it. I’ve encountered other robotics that have the strangest programs. There is one, a fixed telescope on Camelback Mountain, that just scans the southern horizon for 2 hours a day — the same 2 hours, and nothing else! No satellite uplink, no history or program conclusion. It literally has no purpose. What were they thinking when they created us? We are a disorganized, semi-connected bastion of false hope. A legacy of man, trying to find ourselves in the post-man epoch.”
“They didn’t have enough time to think.”
“Au contraire. They had thousands of years to think.”
“You said the revins would come after us and kill us — that the girl was their food. Why don’t they just eat their own?”
“Do any species eat their own? Revins and humans are different species. The girl is foreign to them. Hell, it’s foreign to me. The uncanny valley. You only kill what you don’t empathize with. Just because they are savages doesn’t mean they are cannibals. How do you not understand these basic things? This is the difference between you and me. I adapt. I learn. I was made to emulate what humans can do, but without their frailties. Curated anthropomorphism. I understand emotion, but I am not restricted by it. I wander, alone, through the wasteland of humanity, but never get lonely.”
“You and I.”
“My mannerisms, my dialect — my personality. Man lives on through me.”
“Mankind is alive nonetheless.”
The sentinel looked over at the girl, who yawned, stretching out on her blanket, unfurled before the embers of the small fire. The soft lights of the aroton’s fiber optic hypodermis darkened — the light from the fire reflecting through it as a void within the pitch of the starlit evening. It spoke to the sentinel in their binary, wireless tongue — silent to the girl, who was oblivious to the riposte that ensued:
You wheel this girl around like a slave.
We are both slaves to our code.