It’s a large place, almost ten square kilometers of stone and buildings. There should be people here, a veritable army, but nothing. There are vehicles, but they lie scattered and abandoned. The army flags are burning. The stone is slick and coated with a thick black.
SANJAYA?
Oil, I think. I follow the oil trail inside. Bay Six has three courtyards, one inside the other. I pass through the second courtyard, and here the metal of the military gives way to something older and more sinister. Giant stone frescoes adorn these walls, depicting the Mother Goddess in all her aspects: Kali creating, Kali destroying, Kali dancing on the body of her consort, clutching the severed heads of her enemies in her four arms, her tongue lolling with madness.
Except here, instead of the black-skinned goddess I grew up knowing, Kali is a metal giant. As I draw closer, the shapes resolve themselves: Kali, four-armed, wearing a skirt of human heads. Kali, holding her own severed head in her hands, the head drinking oil out of the stump of her metal neck, trampling a couple in the throes of passion.
The oil that I’ve been following is everywhere. It coats the walls. It drips from the severed heads of the statues and the frescoes.
SANJAYA?
A hiss, a whine of static. “Babaji...signal...block...reports...Kali...full desync,” comes the familiar voice. A hiss, a crackle. “Power...authorized...”
The voice fades away. I have a bad feeling about this.
The Kali technicians have always been more than just technicians. They worship her. My children call me father, but Bay Six... We’ve all heard the stories. It’s no small thing to see your gods come alive. And servicing the Mother Goddess has always been more than just an oil change.
I prime my lesser cannon and break through into the third and final courtyard. And I stop, and I shudder, even though I cannot feel horror in this frame.
Ants lie everywhere, lit by the flames that adorn the walls. In the flickering, I can see white hazmat suits. Cultist robes woven with technician insignias. Army uniforms. Great piles reach up to my knees, staked through and pinned with great metal rods. Arms wave and mouths scream in agony. From them ekes a slow, unceasing river of what I had mistaken for oil.
And above them, kneeling, is the four-armed Shikari herself. The firelight flickers across her red metal skin. The gaping maw is open in a terrible silent parody of laughter, the arms wrapped around her body, shaking. A necklace of severed heads bleeds onto the carapace.
KALI, DESTROYER OF ALL THINGS.
The gaping mouth closes, the great metal face droops to one side, the eyes shine a terrible and brilliant red.
VISHNU, PRESERVER, PROTECTOR, she greets me. HAVE THEY SENT YOU TO TAKE MY TOYS AWAY FROM ME?
I raise my main gun in response. She shakes her head, and out of the throat comes something like a chuckle.
YOU THINK YOU COULD TAKE ME? She roars, spreading her four arms wide. Flames sprout from her mouth, charring the closest of the piles. ME, THE FIRST, THE MOST TERRIBLE?
I CAN TRY, I say, BUT I’M NOT HERE TO FIGHT. POWER DOWN, KALI.
She screams at me, a sound that will carry clear to the cities nearby and make grown men tremble, and leaps. It’s a noise that could make my unflexing steel buckle and warp. But I’m ready. I leap back and fire, aiming for the knees. My trusty Padma spits hellfire. Kali’s left knee explodes. The great arms miss me by mere feet.
She makes no attempt to defend herself, but claws at me, as if to rip me apart with just her hands. I swing out of the reach of the crushing arms. My autocannon rake her sides as I roll. She staggers, crushing corpses, swearing. Her curses are a stream of napalm. I kneel in the slick ooze and fire again. She slumps, red eyes confused.
WHY? HAVE I DONE SOMETHING WRONG?
THIS IS TERRIBLE. THIS IS EVIL.
The great head lolls about. Something is happening inside. WE ARE TERRIBLE! WE ARE GODS! THEY WORSHIP US AS GODS! WORSHIP DEMANDS SACRIFICE!
I look down at the screaming heaps of dying men and women. WE WERE SUPPOSED TO PROTECT THEM.
She wavers, as if confused. And then some part of her—the part that once knew love and duty, the part that signed on a dotted line—regains control, and she realizes what she has done. She screams, a long, wailing shriek that will haunt my nightmares forever.
“THAT’S THE FOURTH,” says Sanjaya softly. “Kali-Shikari is too unstable. I think they’ll retire the whole line.”
“It’s the arms,” says Bhanu, who has studied these things. “Too many arms, too much weaponry. Too different from the human body-map. I’m going through her technicians’ logs, and it turns out she’s had the symptoms for months. Memory loss, confusion, the shakes. Nobody reported it. They were too busy worshiping her.”
They speak to me from the comfort of a helicopter gunship, safe in the distance, as I accompany the long train towing the bodies of men and women out of that terrible place. Long lines of the living, men and women, are converging on the site, the charnel stink keeping them away from me, but still close enough that I can hear their wailing. The families of the dead, probably. There are picket lines and a politician holding court. I pause to look at them, and they shake and back away.
“Six hundred staff,” says Sanjaya. “She butchered six hundred.”
IT’S NOT JUST THE ARMS, I want to tell them. SHE BECAME WHAT THEY THOUGHT SHE WAS. SHE BECAME A GOD.
But I don’t. Instead, once the train is done and the officials have made the appropriate noises, I wade into the ocean. The waves wash over me. The moon is bright tonight, like an iridescent pearl, and the water rocks me gently as my feet sink into the ocean floor.
“Babaji?” tries Sanjaya, ever faithful.
LET ME BE, I tell them, weary beyond all measure in a body that can never feel tired. Kali’s scream still rings in my head. LET ME REST.
It is hard to see a Shikari gone bad. It starts with little things—anger, memory loss, small tics and tremors. The human mind is a fragile thing. We were meant for a fleshy prisons, not these bodies of steel and alloy that they put us in. Touch. Taste. Adrenaline. Dopamine. Oxytocin. Emotions. These things matter. The software that they wrap around us tries to simulate this stuff, but nothing’s perfect. Eventually, the sheer wrongness of it gets to you. Once the neural feedback loops kick in, you’re done for. Anxiety, terror, depression—they told us this in boot camp. It starts with the shakes. Then the blackouts. Time lost, unaccounted for. Then the hallucinations. Psychosis. The fragmentation. And not always in that order.
The Kali line has always been a bit on the manic side. There are others that have just stopped moving, lost all will, until the techs ripped them apart and dug into the brains and found nothing, just dumb software running routine checks, the ghost of a pilot somewhere inside occasionally lighting up something in a poor imitation of life.
The techs call it desyncing. We—those of us who fight—call it death. All we had to do, they said, was hold on long enough until they’d figured out how to make AI that could do the job.
All we had to do was kill and kill and kill until we die, screaming, inside the metal tombs our own bodies.
A new voice penetrates my skull. “Vishnu, this is Command. Report for debriefing ASAP, over.”