The Machinations of Man

October 23^rd, 2087. A bleak morning. It has been two weeks since the destruction of Toronto. They haven’t been seen today but I can still hear them tearing up streets and smashing buildings. The occasional scream of another poor soul lost to their terrible blades—

“Oh come on, Hen. It might be the apocalypse but we’re not literally hearing people die left, right, and center.” Ella interrupted her bunkmate’s log recording, laughing at his melodrama. He was always more prone to overstatement on his masculine days. The two of them sat on separate hard twin beds across the small room from each other. When the first attack had wiped out most of the city, they and a few others had managed to find shelter in what had been a dormitory on the University of Toronto campus. Reduced to rubble like most of the rest of the city, it had taken some work but the small party had managed to clear out a few rooms in the basement and create somewhat of a home base.

Hen gave her a mockingly withering look and continued recording. Ella stretched out on her bed and closed her eyes.

The walls of our makeshift fortress are holding for now. They haven’t found us here. Yet. However, our food supply is rapidly dwindling. We’ll need to collect more rations from the remnants of Baldwin Variety soon. A long journey, but I desire….mushroom soup.

Hen smirked and glanced over at Ella, who had given a pronounced sigh following his dramatic pause. He pressed the button to stop recording and put the device away. He would finish making a proper log entry later when no one was listening.

A rush of footsteps outside sent Ella bolting to her feet, though she had been dozing seconds before. Hen hastily untangled himself from his comfortable cross-legged position on the bed, heart beginning to pound. A small tornado burst into the room in the form of Leila, the youngest member of their survival troupe. She skidded to a halt, a tussle of her short brown hair flipping across her face.

“Code grey!” she gasped, then spun on her heel and sprinted back out of the room.

Hen and Ella looked at each other, confused.

“It means robots! They’re here!” Leila shouted over her shoulder, still running.

A second glance was shared between the two, this time a worried one. They hurried after her, Ella grabbing a baseball bat studded with rusty nails and Hen closing his fist around the short segment of a metal pole tucked into his jacket.

Perry and Reese were already in position at the top of the crumbled stairs which had previously led onto a ground-floor common area. Now there was only rubble. The scattered glass shards, piles of cracked bricks, and broken metal supports still sticking out of the ground had become a common sight to the five survivors.

“Stay down!” Perry hissed, waving an arm warningly at the quickly approaching three. He and Reese, brothers who had been studying at the university before it had been utterly demolished, were the lookouts for the group. They were crouching behind a barricade made out of a car door and gripping their own makeshift weapons. Approaching from behind the skeleton of a bus shelter was the reason for Leila’s alarm. A smooth, sheer black orb about the size of a basketball was gliding down the remnants of the street, suspended six feet in the air. A dark red oval-shaped screen flitted around its surface like a pair of shifty eyes, as if it were searching for something. Fanning out behind the orb were several much larger robotic figures, terrifyingly familiar to the five humans. They were roughly humanoid but enormous, at least nine or ten feet tall and wider across than a refrigerator. A pair of large treads on each robot propelled them forward, crushing stones and fallen streetlights in their path with alarming ease. They didn’t currently appear to have any arms, but the small, disaster-stricken band of humans knew that wasn’t true. They had seen these nightmarish automatons before, and knew they were capable of producing an arsenal of city-destroying weapons with the “arms” that unhinged from their sides. Hen shivered involuntarily as they passed by, his mind flooding with memories of the first strike.

A crash outside. A few screams. Multiple car alarms blaring. Working in downtown Toronto, these aren’t sounds she is unfamiliar with. She adjusts her headset over her ears and turns her attention back to the businessman at the reception desk. His suit is so carefully pressed and tailored that it looks as though he would burst a button if he breathed wrong. He continues to insist that he has an important meeting with the head of Phoenix Oil and demands to be let upstairs. She begins explaining that his appointment isn’t listed on her schedule, but pauses mid-sentence when a strange shape outside catches her periphery. A horrid metal beast, superhuman in stature, is slowly travelling down the street in front of her office. A pair of treads act as its feet, grinding loose stone to dust underneath them. She watches with her mouth open and mind blank, unable to formulate a reaction other than shock. The businessman turns around to see what she is staring at, just in time to see the second of these enormous robots pass by. He collapses into a nearby chair, wrinkling his suit. A third and fourth automaton travel past the office in a similar manner, but the fifth stops directly in front of the door. The next thing she feels is air whipping past her at an alarming speed, then a dull blow to the back of her head as she is slammed into the wall behind her. The smell of dust fills the air. Lights are flickering. The metal monster rolls into the wreckage. It is holding aloft one of its arms, which appears to be the weapon that just destroyed half of the room. Her ears are still ringing and her vision slightly blurry. She doesn’t get a good look at the weapon before the beast fires again, this time at the wall on the far side of the room. The groaning and shrieking of the now quickly collapsing building muddles with the ringing in her ears and her last moments of consciousness are filled with confusion and terror. The next thing she remembers seeing is…

“Hen! HEN!” Ella’s fingers snapped in front of his face and his vision cleared. Her hazel eyes were inches away from his. He shook himself to rid the remnants of memory still clinging to him and tried to ignore the fact that his heartbeat had just quickened considerably.

“Sorry, I-”

“Sorrys are for later. Leila’s gone after one and we need to stop her!” She grabbed Hen’s arm and dragged him with her as she started running up the stairs. Hen could see Leila’s quickly diminishing form across the field of wreckage, sprinting to catch up with the army of massive robots.

“What on earth is she doing? It’s suicide!” Hen cried, utterly bewildered and terrified for his friend. He’d only known her for the two weeks following the strike on Toronto but something about living through a robot apocalypse with someone really helped to establish firm bonds.

“Said something about deactivating one…wanted to study it. You know how she is about tech,” Ella replied, panting and grasping a stitch in her side as they slowly gained on Leila.

Hen bit his lip, more worried than ever. Leila was extremely good with computers and gadgets and had been tinkering with one device or another almost nonstop since the five of them had banded together. She had made some concerning statements of fascination with the world-shattering robots over the last couple weeks, but Hen never thought she would be so foolish as to actually pursue one, let alone an entire army of them.

         Up ahead, Leila was now dangerously close to the army of machines. They were still grinding their way through the wrecked streets, led by the floating surveillance orb. It almost looked like some sort of twisted victory parade. Leila pulled a flat disc about the size of a Frisbee from her coat, clicked a button on it, then threw it with surprisingly good aim at the back of the nearest automaton. It snapped flat onto the beast like a fridge magnet and Leila ducked behind a semi-intact stone fence that had once bordered a small park. Hen and Ella finally caught up with her just as the robot stopped dead in its tracks, sparks flying from where Leila’s device had landed. It shuddered, then groaned as it keeled over with a massive crash, sending a cloud of dust into the air.

           Hen was too shocked to begin admonishing Leila for her recklessness. Beside him, Ella let out the shaky breath she had been holding. Leila grinned, very pleased with herself. She made to stand up and inspect her fallen quarry, but Hen yanked her back when he noticed a thin gleam of red through the hanging dust. The orb had been alerted by the collapse of one of its army and was scanning the area. It traced a wide circle around the dead machine, coming dangerously close to where the three humans were hiding. Curled into a protective ball with Leila in his arms and Ella pressing into his side, Hen heard the orb buzzing above their heads like an enormous wasp and willed himself not to whimper. After an agonizing few moments, the orb seemed to detect no threat and returned to the front of the army. The remaining automatons, which had paused while the orb did its inspection, ground back into motion and continued on to their unknown destination.

           Hen, Ella, and Leila slowly uncurled themselves from their tense protective positions, trembling. None of them moved from behind the stone fence until the brigade of metal monsters was far out of sight. It was Leila that tentatively stepped back out into the open first, eager to see the results of her deactivation device. She beckoned Hen and Ella to join her. They cast dubious looks at each other but nodded. Ella got to her feet and offered a hand to Hen. He took it and didn’t release it as they made their way carefully towards Leila.

            “It’s totally dead now, but I didn’t fry the circuitry too bad so we should still be able to get some good information from it,” Leila said proudly, giving her device an affectionate little kick.

            “How do you think we’re going to get that thing all the way back to base?” Ella asked incredulously, still looking a bit shell-shocked.

            Leila scanned the machine, pursing her lips.

            “We only need its brain, but I’m not sure where that is. Let me do a little dissecting.” She pulled a small toolkit out from the other side of her coat and began to carefully split the robot open at its seams. Hen passed a hand over his weary eyes and pulled Ella over to a public bench that was somehow mostly undamaged. They sat and watched Leila work, Ella keeping an eye out for any more robots while Hen’s head drooped onto her shoulder.

            “Got it!” Leila’s excited screech jolted Hen from his light doze a little while later. She snipped a couple more wires then carefully twisted off the robot’s head. Hoisting it triumphantly over her shoulder, she slid from her position atop the robot’s massive body and joined Hen and Ella at their bench.

            “Great work, Leila. Can we please go home now?” Ella still looked wary and spoke in a more hushed voice.

            Leila nodded happily, not quite seeming to grasp how much danger she had just put herself and everyone else in with her antics. The three of them made their way back to the base, where Perry and Reese were pacing, out of their minds with worry. When they saw Leila bouncing down the steps with her prize, their admonishments died in their throats to be replaced by shocked silence. Hen gave them a sarcastic, exhausted thumbs-up as he and Ella descended back into the relative safety of their base. None of them said another word as Leila rushed back and forth with wires and connectors and adaptors, trying to hook up the robot’s head to her clunky old computer.

           Leila continued to work with the severed robot head for most of the rest of the day, not tolerating any interruptions. Hen tried to relax, helping the others to reinforce their flimsy barricades and clearing out the dust of the day from their rooms, but his mind was spinning with morbid curiosity about what Leila would find in the robot’s head.

            Finally, as the four of them huddled around a small camp stove heating canned soup, Leila called them over from the corner where she had been working.

           “My deactivator ended up destroying a lot of this guy’s information, but I was able to retrieve most of its command logs,” she explained, looking pale and tired but satisfied. “It seems to have been part of a hive mind with all those other giant doom robots, so we’ll be able to see the directions that the mother system sent out to all of them.”

          They huddled around the small computer screen in the now-dark room, anxious to learn more about the apocalyptic events that had taken place. Leila typed in a few commands and clicked a couple windows away to reveal a list of input information. She read the first entry aloud.

07/20/65

Calibrating…

-CO₂ detectors active

-Atmospheric thermometer active

-Data collection units active

Connecting to other units….

GLOBAL NETWORK ONLINE

“Oh my god…” Ella whispered. “That was over twenty years ago.”

Leila nodded grimly.

“What did they need CO₂ detectors for?” Perry asked, looking scared.

Leila gave no response, but scrolled down in the command window to reveal more entries.

04/22/78

Atmospheric CO₂ levels measured at 550ppm

Atmospheric methane levels increased by 1%

05/15/83

Atmospheric thermometer malfunctioning

Requesting replacement

02/13/85

Emissions levels increased by 5% in China

Emissions levels increased by 4.56% in United States

Atmospheric CO₂ levels measured at 580 ppm

01/10/87

Atmospheric CO₂ levels measured at 600ppm

CFC emission levels increased by 1.2% since last measurement

Average pH level of acid rain at 3.9 globally

10/01/87

CO₂ emissions approaching irreversible levels

Ozone layer depleted beyond human repair

DEPLOY ALL UNITS FOR EMERGENCY CLIMATE RESTORATION

ACTIVATE

          They were silent for a long time after Leila reached the final command. Finally, Reese said desolately, “I guess we were so far gone that the only way to fix things was…”

         “To destroy everything. To start over.” Ella’s voice was hard. “If whoever built these damned things was smart enough to make giant robots that could destroy an entire civilization in one day, why didn’t they do something sooner?”

         “They’ve been trying,” Hen said, feeling hollow. “Remember all those climate strikes? All those warnings? All the projections about the Arctic melting and wildfires consuming half the planet? We just…didn’t listen.”

          More silence. Heavy. The five people, standing in the basement of a former university dorm, surrounded by horrific destruction and death, were bearing the full weight of guilt and regret for an entire species. Paying the full price.

          “What do we do now?” Perry’s voice was small and scared.

         “Try to survive,” Hen said, not sure if he even believed it. “Start a new life when this is all over. Be better.”

         No one else spoke much for the rest of the night. They didn’t know what the future would hold, or whether they would live to see it. All they knew was that they couldn’t let this happen again.