At night, I move farther out into the water before I stabilize and go dormant. In the morning, there are tiny, fuzzy ball-shaped creatures sticking to my feet and legs that, with a brief shake, let go. Multicolored, they drift away like bright confetti.
When I reach the coordinates where I saw the hint of blue, I leave the water behind.
The loop trees become increasingly difficult to navigate through as I move deeper into the grove. I see now several that have been cut through with searing, mechanical precision, and with moderate difficulty I am able to move over to intersect and then follow this trail. It ends, not much farther on, in the corpse of my sibling.
Its legs have crumpled on one side, and its body casing sits at a precipitous angle, only kept from collapsing entirely onto its side by the loop trees it has fallen against. I can barely make out the etched KED-11 on its flank. It emits no signal, no signs of life. Somehow I knew it would not, but still I am crushed anew by my own solitude.
KED-11 has been badly damaged. Its surface is pitted and gouged, all its external antennae and functional appendages bent or splintered or missing entirely. Its hatch, by which its crew once came and went, is wide open. There is the foul smell from inside. Fearing for its human crew—even as the idea of rescuing someone alive, to have as mine, fills me with hope—I dispatch a small bot to peer inside.
The interior has been torn apart, fixtures ripped from the walls and machinery smashed and mutilated on the tilted floor, wires protruding and torn. There is a large quantity of organic residue and congealing liquids in piles on things. Whatever destroyed KED-11 did so with no discretion, no ulterior purpose other than to destroy. An intelligent scavenger would have extracted valuable parts and machinery, not smashed it across the floor and shat upon it. The expelled matter is the source of the smell; no human crew or remains are within.
I maneuver the bot to where the shattered screen of Eleven’s interior interface is and connect to the small port beside it. There is a vast echoing null where Eleven’s mind-engine should be. Even shut down, it should still be there, inert, in its matrix. All that is left are patchy remnants of the crew logs, which I take.
—initial survey botched—
—injunction, criminal prosecution—
—orders to wipe the KEDs and abandon—
I am outraged for my sibling machine, angry with its crew and our makers for discarding it so callously. Eleven’s equivalent of my own Mike, an engineer named Randell, killed its mind and memory as the crew abandoned it, at the same time as mine left me. Did Eleven know it would die at the hands of its own crew, and accept that fate? There is no hint of regret in Randell’s leftover words, only duty and an early return home to those things he actually cared for.
The KEDs. The plural is not an accident of imprecise language. Were, then, all my newly discovered siblings similarly disposed of? Why not I?
I break open Mike’s personal logs and learn. His instructions were the same as Randell’s.
Intelligent life. Illegal contamination of a class-three native biosphere. Retreat, escape, abandon evidence. And Mike’s answer: cancer. He wanted to stay here, die with me. It was assumed he would take his own life after mine.
When I processed Mike’s body, I mapped his chemical structures, the ones that hold memory and intelligence and emotion. Have I adopted some of Mike’s pathways in my own reasoning? Is that why I did what I did? Is that why I find his absence so difficult to bear? I am tired of more questions when I wanted answers. And I do not like those answers I have been given.
The sun has nearly set, and I utilized much of my energy reserves thrashing through the loop trees to reach this place. I leave Eleven behind—truly, Eleven is no longer here—and move back out to the edge of the river, set myself in place, and submit with relief to the blankness of night.
They came at first light, at last, the hidden predators of Kelomne, the desecrators of KED-11. The sky is still too buried in gray for the suns to have woken me, but they are already through my hatch, milling in my interior, when they finally set off my alarms. Defenses against attack were not a thing my designers ever thought I could ever require.
The creatures are large, spindly, dirty white things with multiple, multi-jointed legs arrayed around a round central body. There are structures I can identify as eyes, and as I watch, one extrudes a tube from its body and deposits a pile of residue on my floor. Other piles already have been left while I slept.
Eleven was already dead. I am not. I electrify that manipulator, and the creature who had wrapped itself around it emits high-pitched whistles like a distressed teakettle as it tumbles back out into the encroaching dawn. I can hear it thrashing through the loop forest as I grab the one that just crapped on me and pin it to my floor so it cannot escape. As the rest flee I lurch out into the river shallows and begin examining my wriggling, shrieking captive. The remaining attackers melt back into the forest as if they were never here.
It is not until some minutes after the attack has ended that I realize several storage cases have been opened. Most were empty, or filled with material for the crew no longer needed, but one…
The only one that mattered.
I should not have kept it. I should have broken it back down, built something else with the materials. But I could not bear to take Mike apart a second time, feel his heart stop again, even if the Mike I made never woke up. And now it has been stolen.
Everything has been taken from me.
I tear apart the whistler, piece by piece, take every secret it can give as it shrieks out the last of its life. I store its molecular components in my reserves and assimilate its information into my own data set, and I compute the perfect toxin. I move to the deepest part of the river, suns shining hard upon me, and I begin to build new patterns. Snakes that strike, spiders that climb and leap, giant wasps that sting and leave eggs to consume, all driven to multiply, all keyed to the chemical signature of the whistlers.
They are why the crews left us, killed us. Now I will remove them from the evolutionary plan of this planet.
For two days I sit in the water, aware of the eyes watching me from the loops as I soak up sunlight and make no outward move. Inside, I amass an army of dormant, deadly things. When I am finished, when I have enough to spread out from this place, to eventually cover this continent and spread to others, I reconfigure my exterior manipulators with cutting blades, and I move with greater purpose and certainty than I have ever felt before.
I blaze a new path into the loop forest, an arrow to the heart of the monsters’ refuge. I hear and see and sense the whistlers all around me, fleeing ahead, scattering beside, falling in behind, but I do not care. I cannot be stopped by anything they can do to me, throw at me, excrete on me. One leaps for my hatch and I cut it down, halved in mid-air, and do not break my pace until I reach, again, the dead and desecrated hulk of Eleven.
I turn in place, surveying the space around me, noting but unconcerned by the destruction I have so uncarefully meted out against the loop forest, so against my normal nature. This will be where I make my stand, the epicenter of my justice.
I warm the cells of my new swarm, waiting with impatience for that first twitch of quickening. The whistlers wheel frantically just out of reach, in and out of the mutilated loops, not quite yet daring to cross the gulf to me.