World Breakers, page 23
He’d sat for several more days at the foot of the cliff, hibernating as his repair systems attempted to restore lost data. He hadn’t known what else to do. First priority would be achieve the mission’s objectives, but he had no idea what they had been. Normally he either patrolled outside their current base, helped secure a new base at a recently discovered Remnant on the same World Branch, or searched for a lost survey team that had been exploring a new World Branch.
A survey team should have set beacons prior to getting lost—unless he was part of the survey team and the nexus portal had exploded as they arrived. As far as he could remember, he’d never been assigned to an initial world gate mission but equipment did get swapped between teams on an “as needed” basis.
Anvil had faced a disturbing lack of directives. All his standard protocols assumed that he had a place or a team to return to. He didn’t know where he was. Had he come through a gate or had he been out on patrol? He could still be on the same branch world of his most recent memories but it was doubtful. There would be chatter on the com channels.
Lurking in the background was the memory of his circumvented self-destruct. It reminded him of the eggs left behind by the chickens—a fragile package that could become a more annoying problem later.
He had sat for a few more days, even after the repairs had finished.
Then out of his shattered command files, his repair system had found a list of objectives.
It was an odd list. Some of the items made sense. “Build shelter” had some merit. He wasn’t sure why “punch some trees to gather wood” started the list, but that was simple enough. It gave him a direction. There was no set number of trees and second on the list was “craft tools” so he knocked down a small forest while struggling with the concept. He was a tool but he didn’t “craft” nor typically did he “create” except in defensive terms. Create a patrol pattern. Create a line of suppression fire.
At one point he had deployed his reconnaissance drones and had had a conversation with his smaller selves. It was very surreal and disorienting. His drones used to contain simplified copies of his own AI, in perfect sync with his own neural core. The virus had changed the drones before he had contained it. He had to override first his and then the drones’ Identify Friend or Foe subsystems to keep them from attacking each other.
During this time of existential crisis, Anvil decided that the shelter he was building was a village and that the tools he was meant to craft were for human inhabitants.
He’d done everything on his objective list. He’d harvested wood. He’d used the wood to build a crude shelter and then upgraded it as he found better materials and better building sites. When he found a wide plain with a small meandering river, he’d started a village. He’d found three different types of crops—wheat, potatoes and carrots—and started them growing in irrigated fields. He’d collected chickens.
Prolific annoying chickens.
He had built his village. It was a superior village than the one before him now.
There had been no “collect Villagers” on his recovered list of objectives.
There was an assumption that Anvil’s orders would require him to improvise. He would be on a new World Branch where the outcome of a quantum event could have triggered vast physical changes from Prime. He had to be able to adjust to anything, even annoying chickens. Possibly even giant fire breathing chickens. Or undead chickens. Or undead riding chickens. (He wasn’t sure why he even considered that . . . which made him worry. What if he was operating much lower than eighty-nine percent?)
He’d searched out these Villagers based on the assumption that if he built a village, then “they” wanted him to populate it. The logic of it was too great to ignore. He was a little iffy, though, on who “they” were. He’d lost track of that with his system crash. He had fragments of the woman in a white lab coat but she’d been a software developer. He had been installed into his body while at her lab but she might not have been part of his team. Private Puggard hadn’t been in his more recent memories; he might have been killed in action or rotated back to Prime. Anvil worked with “command” at some point. He remembered following someone’s orders . . .
Corrupt data blocked that path. He cycled back through the logic tree.
Someone came up with the list of objectives that he was using.
“They” wanted him to build shelter. A village had been a logical extrapolated end.
“They” probably wanted Anvil to populate it.
Also Villagers would solve Anvil’s chicken problem.
Who were “they?” What happened to the rest of his unit? Why was he alone? What had he really been supposed to be doing?
Corrupt data blocked that path—again. His drone hovered over the village, bitching that he was taking his time acting on its data. It had counted eighty-seven possible targets and no weapons over a level one threat level.
If Anvil rolled into the village, the inhabitants wouldn’t be able to stop him from taking one or two or three of their number. Ignoring the question of “if” he should, how would he get the Villagers back to his village? He doubted that they’d ride around on his turret with the chickens.
He really hadn’t put any thought into this—which looped him back to the corrupt data problem—because “how to move Villagers” suddenly popped images of rowboats and mine cars into his memory registers.
Rowboats?
“You deploy boats by hitting the ‘use item’ button when facing some water,” Twelve stated. “There’s no water, unless you’re going to put the boat into the river, which would be freaking stupid. It’s flowing away from our command center.”
Hit the “use item” button? Anvil didn’t use buttons.
“We’ve modified a world simulator game that I used to play as a little girl,” the woman in the white lab coat said. “I loved to build elaborate machines out of the very simple code blocks. It’s not a true representation of any one world, but playing the game will help you learn to adapt to the unpredictable nature of reality in branch worlds. Since you will be sent to branches where events played out differently, there’s no telling what you may have to deal with. You’re an adaptive robotic tank; it means you need to be able to adapt to any situation that you find yourself in to achieve your mission. Once you’ve learned how to negotiate different problems through fulfilling the game’s objectives, we’ll install you into your new body.”
He’d found old game objectives instead of a real mission. No wonder the chickens seemed so weird. The game had presented non-aggressive objects as predictable clones of each other instead of individuals. An outlier like Dammit would never be included into the simulation.
Anvil was considering his options when Dammit started to complain in the thick bushes where Anvil had flung him. There was something shrill and alarming about Dammit’s clucking, unlike any noise Anvil had ever heard Dammit make before. It sounded like a small predator had caught the chicken.
Anvil didn’t want to save the chicken. The thing was annoying. Some internal logic, though, had flagged Dammit as “part of the team.” He couldn’t ignore basic protocol that required him to save team members.
He rolled forward, wondering how he was going to use Villagers to cull his chickens if he needed to protect the animals. Maybe naming the birds had been a mistake. Individual names were normally reserved for team members. He was going to have use precision firing that would guarantee that said team member wasn’t hit by friendly fire.
He activated all his firing systems—and then powered them down. Luckily he had fine-tuned his firing control system since the llama event. There was no smoking hole where the thing that had captured Dammit crouched in the thick bushes.
Dammit had been caught by a Villager.
Not just any Villager; a very small one. It wasn’t much bigger than Dammit; it could barely keep the struggling bird grappled. If Anvil judged right, the Villager was a child. No weapon. No gear. No footwear. It was dressed in what could be called a dress or a robe or a sack with holes cut into it. Hair a wild black mess.
Dammit’s cries were impossible to ignore. How to rescue the chicken without harming the child?
Anvil snaked out his repair manipulators to grab hold of Dammit’s legs. He gave an experimental tug. Dammit squawked as the child got lifted up along with chicken. A frayed rope had been tied firmly around Dammit’s torso and the child’s waist.
The child dangled on the end of the rope, its eyes going wide as it stared at Anvil.
Anvil gave an experimental shake, hoping that the rope would break; it didn’t look that sturdy. He estimated, though, that there was a 58.94 percent chance of causing internal organ damage to the child if he used force. The rope was so short and the two small beings were thrashing so much, the odds of hitting one with a cutting tool was even higher. Anvil would have to let go of Dammit and use both manipulators to break the rope.
Anvil lowered the two small creatures to the ground. Dammit strained across the rope, trying to flee.
The child continued to gaze up at Anvil with wide eyes. Then suddenly its face twisted into an expression that Anvil’s humans used to indicate glee.
Why was the child happy? Was it actually happy? Anvil paused to replay events and check his databases on known Villager behavior.
The child took off running, shouting, herding Dammit ahead of it.
Anvil was going to have to call this child Dammit Two.
Dammit Two’s name seemed to be Ithmah. All the adult Villagers shouted the word as the child ran up to them, shouting, towing the squawking chicken. The word might have meant “Dammit” because it certainly was said with the same angry tone. Somehow the adults failed to notice Anvil’s arrival despite Ithmah’s arm waving and shouting. Or maybe because of Ithmah’s commotion, the adults were too distract to see the tank bearing down on them.
Either way, Anvil got to the center of town without being noticed. He knew the layout via his drone. It all seemed so much smaller, though, now that he was seeing it all with his own optics. The previously massive pigs in their sty just beyond the gate seemed toy small now.
One of the female Villagers finally noticed Anvil. She let out a yelp of fear and scuttled quickly into the nearest hut. She slammed shut the heavy door and threw a locking bar into place with a muffled rattle. There was a cascade of yelps and door slams and bars rattling. Within seconds the streets were empty except for Anvil, Dammit and Ithmah.
Ithmah stood, mouth open, in surprise at the adults’ response to the tank.
Anvil reached out, broke the rope and stole back Dammit. The chicken claimed his place at the top of Anvil’s turret and groused about being kidnapped. Anvil wasn’t sure what to do next. If all his objectives had been part of a game, then what should he do? Continue with procuring a Villager or two to lower the number of unnamed chickens? Simply return to his village and lob a few grenades into his flock and call the entire project a wipe? Try to find a nexus portal and travel to other World Branches in hope of finding his humans? Each consideration created vast odd responses within him to the point that his repair systems were triggered.
While Anvil sat idle, trying to decide, Ithmah clambered up his side and sprawled across his armor. The child lay on its stomach, kicking its feet in the air, and talking non-stop. The chickens puffed up and grumbled about the intruder but refused to leave as the village dogs had arrived to bark at Anvil’s treads.
Voices called out to the dogs. Reluctantly the animals headed toward the voice calling them. Doors were unbarred, opened, and the beasts pulled into their respective homes.
No one called to Ithmah.
Anvil had gotten used to the adult female chicken and baby chicks behavior pattern. He had noticed echoes of it in his memory of villages. Normally when danger appears, children run to their mother. Anvil replayed the child dashing through the town. Ithmah hadn’t run to any one person in particular; the child had simply stopped at the first person it encountered. Did Ithmah have no mother?
Did that mean that Anvil could take the child? Should he take the child? Did he really want a second Dammit? He wasn’t even sure if he wanted the first one. The second Dammit would have hands and brains enough to open up Anvil’s access hatches and monkey with his innards. Would that be a good thing or a bad thing? There were some repairs that Anvil couldn’t do to himself.
“Everett particles detected,” Twelve suddenly reported. “Levels rising rapidly. Incoming!”
Anvil had a minimum of forty-three seconds to react. He jerked open the nearest door, breaking the bar that was holding it shut. He plucked Ithmah and the chickens off his turret and shoved them within the building. He shut the door even as he deployed the rest of his drones. He suffered a microsecond of disorientation as the drones woke up—half a dozen different variations of his AI cursing at information that he fed them. As usual, Heavy-Drone Six refused to launch out of its frame.
“Run predictive patterns on Everett particles,” Anvil ordered the reconnaissance drones as he headed away from the house. He needed to bait the ENDer away from the building with Ithmah and the chickens. Particles spiked highest at the point where the droid would appear. He would have microseconds to get a target lock after the ENDer gated into the village.
The spike seemed to be centering around the intersection of the two ancient highways. He loaded a shell out of his ammo frame with a comforting solid clank. He would need to counter the ENDer’s mobility—but how? He needed cover. He started to scan the buildings around him.
The ENDer suddenly appeared in the middle of the intersection with muffled boom of displaced air. It stood in a swirl of Everett particles.
“Target lock acquired,” his firing system reported. Anvil opened fired with his main gun. The boom shattered the quiet of the valley and echoed off the mountains like thunder.
The shell struck the ENDer and the droid let out a noise like a scream of rage and vanished as it gated away. Only the fading motes of purple Everett particles marked where it had stood a second before.
Anvil’s cannon loaded another round from his ammo frame as he plowed backwards through the pigsty’s fence. The pigs squealed and grunted as he roared through their midst, spraying them with thick muck. Their low-slung barn was slabs of silicon carbide stacked two meters high. He ducked through the door, scraping the top of his turret.
The barn was too low for the ENDer. It appeared at the door with a scream of rage. It lashed out with its black gleaming limbs. The stone lintel vaporized under the strikes.
“Target lock acquired.” Anvil fired point blank at the ENDer. The shell exploded on contact. The blowback shoved Anvil deeper into the barn. Years’ worth of dust and hay particles exploded out of every nook and cranny of the building.
The ENDer vanished, leaving behind a flurry of purple motes. The Everett particles set off alarms in Anvil’s repair systems as the microscopic gates to everywhere washed over him, shifting minute parts of his armor to elsewhere.
The barn groaned as the walls started to collapse. Anvil charged out of the building into the deep muck of the sty. The barn crumpled into a pile of block and timbers. The churned mud had gotten deeper and stickier. His treads spun in the slurry, not able to get traction.
“The idiot is stuck,” Twelve reported to the others.
“Everett particles spiking, idiot.” Nine reported coordinates directly behind Anvil. “Predicting arrival in three, two, one.”
Anvil didn’t have time to spin his main cannon; his bigger mechanical parts moved thousands of times slower than he could think. He activated his heavy machine guns, spraying the area behind him even as the ENDer popped into existence. Most of the bullets hit Everett particles and vanished into other worlds. Others struck the innocent pigs, exploding the poor creatures with the force of the projectiles’ passage. The enemy droid screamed again with a sound that seemed like pain and anger. What was that sound? Anvil didn’t express pain, but his humans would.
His treads suddenly caught on solid land and he raced forward even as the ENDer struck his back armor.
His damage system attempted to report the damage. “Rear Armor Integrity–Integrity–Integrity . . .”
“Integrity is telling yourself the truth,” Seven said. “Honesty is telling the truth to other people. Spencer Johnson.”
His performance levels were dropping rapidly as Everett particles interacted with more fragile systems.
“Find an escape route!” He whipped his main cannon around but the ENDer vanished.
“To where?” all the drones asked.
Nine added, “Tactics suggest that the heavy cover of the village is more vital than greater mobility of the open field.”
Did the ENDer have any weakness beyond not liking rain?
Perhaps it wouldn’t like any water.
“Find a clear path to the river,” Anvil said.
“Too narrow. Too narrow. Dead end.” The drones murmured as they flew overhead.
“This is not a wise course of action,” Nine stated firmly.
“We can’t fight it, numbnuts!” Twelve snapped.
Anvil wasn’t sure if Twelve was addressing Nine or Anvil or both. This being splintered was disorienting.
“We are always on the anvil; by trials, God is shaping us for higher things. Henry Ward Beecher,” Seven quoted.
“Clear path to river!” Eight suddenly announced, feeding Anvil the route.
“That’s clear?” Anvil asked even as he navigated the route through the narrow streets. There seemed to be a house in the way.
