Mecha-22

              There is a legend of a massive space vessel, a colony ship that had traveled slowly for centuries from some long-extinct civilization, which was attacked mercilessly as it finally neared its destination and launched a thousand lifepods into the solar system like a squid releasing its eggs before dying. Eleven of them made it to Earth; nine landed in the sea, one hit a volcano and melted, and one came down somewhere in the Himalayas.

              Bacchus, Mimic and Yossarian were hiking along the broken spine of a mountain range between two deep valleys. Bacchus was a big guy who carried a telescopic bazooka on his back that could shoot down meteors. But his true passion was eating, forever putting food in his mouth like a garbage disposal. He just couldn't help it; it simultaneously pleasured and disgusted him but there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

              The guy who called himself Mimic carried nothing. He was the conscience of the group and a strange sight in the wilderness with the long black sleeves he always wore down to his fingertips and a shock of blonde hair perpetually hanging in his face. A mistruster of technology, he refused to carry any sort of weapon as well.

              Yossarian brought up the rear carrying almost their entire supplies. That was his job, to carry things, wearing the same dull green he had worn on the day he first opened his eyes. For some reason a mosquito landed on him, and he swatted it against his metal skin.

              The Yossarian-261 field android was named after a fictional soldier and colored US Army green so he could replace and exemplify the ideal human soldier. To this end they uploaded a wealth of military history and tactics into his brain, but he was not programmed to be a general or to lead men, humans do that. They had invested all their wisdom into an enlisted man, and now their makers were dead.

              A burning object crossed the sky in front of them and hit the embankment. The impact caused an avalanche that collapsed the ridgeline they were standing on sending all three of them toppling over the edge. Bacchus was so heavy he dropped like a stone hundreds of feet down into the canopy. Yossarian's large pack busted open and their high-tech gear scattered like confetti over the jungle. He tried to grab branches to slow his fall down to the bottom of the valley.

              As he fell Yossarian-261's life flashed in front of him. He had been fighting mechanical demigods across the universe for seventy years; he had journeyed on missions to unhand wilderness planets from the clutches of diabolical overlords and their shadow armies forty-seven times! He kept up with newer and flashier models as they rushed into battle the exact same way each time, unable to propose a more learned strategy as he went on counting the years knowing he could not die. His makers had not bestowed him with that option.

              Yossarian found himself on the valley floor where he’d landed in a stream covered in rubble. The socket joint of his right arm was broken, then the dim glow of his visor flickered back on and he looked around bewildered.

              The forest was dark and unfamiliar. He found Mimic sitting in his black clothes with no visible injuries, but as Yossarian lifted his bangs to look him in the eyes the whitewashed stare on his face made him think he was concealing some injury, possibly to the head.

              "Hey where's the snarky euphemism?" Yossarian offered some kind words. "What did the hotdog vendor say? I'd give you this knife but I don't think it'll cut the mustard!"

              There was no response. Yossarian helped him to his feet but Mimic had been reduced to the thing he feared most, an automaton.

              Groans of discomfort led them to where Bacchus had landed in a thicket. Somehow a broken ironwood trunk had skewered him through the middle, the sharp spike protruding from his titanium armor.

              "I'm leaking reactor fluid." Bacchus mumbled as he looked down, then he toppled over.

              They attempted to repair the damage but it wasn't sufficient. Yossarian’s transceiver had been torn from his head during the fall. Mimic who was a much more sophisticated machine had one in his skull and could also fly to get help, but was seemingly unable to speak. For the two of them to carry Bacchus out of this ravine would take days.

              Yossarian found their emergency beacon broken beyond repair. Bacchus lay on the ground groaning while Mimic sat watching him as motionless as if he had died in that position, until he suddenly said "They don't make those so soldier bots can fix 'em.".

              Yossarian looked up and said “I thought you had brain damage”.

           “We won’t get out of here before he shuts down completely.” Mimic answered. “But you can make it back to the trailhead before your arm falls off.”

              “Let me check you for injuries.” Yossarian replied. “I know there is one.”

              “NO.” Mimic responded firmly. “I won’t leave him. Go find a way out of here while there is time.”

              Yossarian was surprised that someone who wasn’t willing to lift a finger felt such strong usefulness all of a sudden. He asked curiously “Where does all this sage advice go when you’re not doing anything?”

              “I don’t like making unnecessary efforts.” Mimic scoffed at him. “People are too easily misled, that’s why they’re so dependent on technology.”

              Yossarian could have said "But you are technology", but he was unable to.

-

              Yossarian looked for a way out of the gorge, his coolant valves struggling on empty. After a few hundred meters he discovered a mound of earth and there stood an egg-shaped metallic object.

              The front of it opened, revealing an emaciated metallic being inside. It was sickly, a living skeleton, and it screeched as it reached down for him but Yossarian's feet were mired in the ground.

              Its hand touched him and something happened he couldn’t explain. His circuits were on fire; it was like his battery fluid had been replaced with butane. But it lasted only for an instant and then the creature was dead. Its body fell face-first down the slope and into the dirt.

              Yossarian didn’t feel any different than he did a minute ago, so what had that freakish thing given him?  He hurried back to camp, noticing that his arm seemed to swing more naturally. He looked at the rotator joint and it was repairing itself somehow.

              Bacchus had taken a turn for the worse. To Yossarian’s surprise Mimic had been working on him since the moment he left, but it was fruitless.

              As Yossarian looked at the ground where they had cleaned up all the electronic debris, tiny dark particles in the sand were forming a line that moved after him wherever he went.

              “Dude that stuff is following you.” Mimic stated.

              Yossarian passed his hand slowly over the ground. They watched some of the dust travel up his arm to his injury. He wanted to share this power so he knelt down over their wounded comrade and let the metal bits travel from his fingers. The parts were not the same alloy but he felt that if he had more of them Bacchus would work better than he did before. He and Mimic looked at each other.

              "That creature was a life form." Yossarian tried to reason with him. "An intelligent metallic life form! Do you know what this means? It means there is a second source of mechanical life on Earth! That we don't have to go extinct! We won't be dependent on these used components anymore, we can all be connected instead of having enemies! I can feel the difference between one metal and another, do you understand? I can feel!”

              He broke a rock with his fist and pulled his hand back in surprise.

              "Please don't order me to stop feeling this way." Yossarian pleaded with him.

              "I won't." Mimic's human face showed the emotion Yossarian’s could not. "I hope it is everything you say, but we have to secure it first and complete the mission, yes?"

-

              Yossarian rushed back to the escape pod, his arm turning better than it had in years. But the body of the dead alien was gone and a fleshy, pink winged creature had taken its place. It had discovered the pod and was trying to carry it off.

              “Hey!” Yossarian shouted and threw a rock at it. The ugly thing grimaced at him.

              “Is it true Adolf Hitler was born a gypsy?” it squawked in a sinister voice.

              “What did you just say?” Yossarian inquired strangely.

              “Is Steve McQueen the son of Butterfly McQueen?” it taunted him, then rose up and started flapping towards him.

              “Oh shit!” Yossarian exclaimed and took off running into the forest.

              Bacchus was sitting upright and already eating again. Yossarian came clanking back into camp, some kind of energy rising in him. The pink gargoyle was right on his heels.

              All of their supplies scattered throughout the jungle began rising off the ground. Yossarian raised his arm and made some of the debris whirl around him, then he flattened them into a single sheet of metal that came to a long point like a spear.

              “No, don’t use this power for violence!” Mimic protested, but the gargoyle halted dumbfounded by what it had just seen. It gave a menacing screech and then turned and flapped away. There was a sound like bulldozers in the distance.

              “Sounds like there are more of them.” Bacchus rose to his feet, shouldering his bazooka and tossing a piece of scrap metal in his mouth.

-

              The sounds of battle grew louder from the direction of the landing site. Some tribal humans observed three large figures emerge from the forest. One was a massive silver robot with a cannon on his back and a gaping hole in his side, the second one looked like an ordinary young man with blonde hair except that he was seven feet tall and floated instead of walking, and the third was a dull green robot covered in scratches with the number 261 on his chest.

              Yossarian’s visor peered through the smoke as they stepped out into a huge desolate space cleared by the blasts just moments ago. He could see an army of mechanized beasts gathered around an Earth robot who was impaled and already missing all four of his limbs. There was also a female robot who was tied to a stake. The empty shells of dead robots lie everywhere.

              “HQ this is ground unit reporting friendlies defending the target. We are outnumbered.” Mimic levitated forward raising the hair out of his eye as his telescopic pupil zoomed in on the poor robot being skewered. One of the combatants turned and took a shot at him, Mimic fading to the color of mist and disappearing into the fog.

              A snarling mechanical jackal with a mane of spines turned and galloped toward Yossarian. He had only the makeshift lance he had made to defend himself with. He sidestepped the creature and sliced it across three of its six legs, sending it barreling into a rock pile.

              “I’ve got one for ya.” Bacchus shouldered his cannon and squinted through the viewfinder. “If only I could take some wintergreen and dip it in chocolate I could really make a mint!”

              He launched a missile into the dead center of the mob and the explosion sent mechanized bodies flying in all directions, leaving a smoking crater in the ground.

              Yossarian rushed in to help the limbless robot but the pink vulture that pursued him earlier had been spared from the blast.

              “Who is Edith Pilaf?” it taunted him from the air.

              Yossarian removed the improvised spear from his arm and reshaped it into a long, thin javelin, hurling it upward where it lodged in the creature’s wing. Then he bent down and touched the punctures in the helpless robot’s chest, scraps of metal dragging across the sand to seal them.

              “How are you doing this?” the robot asked him weakly.

              “Where are your arms and legs?” Yossarian inquired, looking around.

              “I never had any.” he gave a surprising response. “I’m a disability robot.”

              “You’re a what?” Yossarian asked in puzzlement.

              Some of the enemy combatants were getting back up on their feet. One caught Yossarian in a laser net while Bacchus blocked another one sacrificing his launcher as a shield. This same robot chuckled at them as a thin shadow rose up behind him and Mimic brought down his arm in a slow arc braining him with just his fist, the crystals cracking out of its eyes.

              Yossarian ran over to the female-shaped robot and cut her bonds, helping her down. Her makers had given her an hourglass figure; she had breasts which he did not understand at all. Machines do not procreate; this design did absolutely nothing for him.

              “Thank you so much, you’re a hero.” she said gratefully. “Maybe I can repay you by taking some orders, soldier boy.”

              “Huh?” Yossarian stared as she winked at him.

              A far more advanced mercenary than the others descended to the ground on rocket boots. This one was clad in black armor and had a curved scimitar as long as its body.

              Bacchus threw a boulder at him which the mercenary broke just by holding out his hand. Mimic grabbed him from behind intending to hold him so Bacchus could finish the job, but to his surprise the black knight twisted his arm backward causing his chameleon circuits to flicker, his mouth hanging open with a shocked expression and then the knight broke his arm clean off at the shoulder, pulling the circuits out and left him lifeless and flickering on the ground.

              The black knight pulled out his saber as Bacchus lumbered over to help his friend, using his empty grenade launcher as a club which the knight sliced in two taking off the tips of his fingers with it. Yossarian’s anger grew, mangled limbs and parts rising from the ground and changing to flattened metal disks he intended to dice him with.

              “Stop!” Yossarian shouted, and the black knight took notice of him. Then Yossarian helped Bacchus put his fingertips back on. The black knight lowered his sword when he saw this.

              “It is too late.” he muttered, and then he took flight and the other mercenaries retreated to wherever they came from.

-

              Bacchus carried Mimic’s limp body under his arm. The limbless robot was called Junco; Yossarian examined him and indeed he had been built that way.

              “Your friend was so brave to sacrifice himself for a lesser being.” he said with humility. “I wish it had been me instead.”

              This echoed Yossarian’s own thoughts. But he couldn’t fathom why they intentionally didn’t give him hands and feet.

              “I give hope to maimed and broken bots everywhere.” Junco explained. “When they see me it motivates them to feel better about themselves and go on living.”

              This didn’t make any sense. Robots could be fixed like any other machine.

              “But then he would be dead right now with the other able soldiers.” the girl-bot who was called Beni-Beni sauntered over to him. “Wouldn’t you rather be one of a kind?”

              She stood with her hand on her curved hip. Every move that she made was “womanly”.

              “Why are you standing like that?” Yossarian demanded.

              She laughed and then went over to flirt with Bacchus.

              “You really do eat too much and it shows.” she stroked his titanium chest. “My boyfriend is a blimp!”

              Yossarian watched this bizarre foreplay as he worked on Mimic’s shoulder trying to understand his cybernetic veins.

              “I want you to drill me.” she whispered softly.

              One of Mimic’s eyelids clicked open and his pained, veined face looked at the two robotic lovers.

              “Disgusting…” his voice sounded more mechanical than his own.

              Yossarian and the others were glad to see this sign of life from him. The girl-bot left Bacchus and sashayed over to him.

              “Welcome back, handsome.” she greeted him. “How about we leave these primitive toasters and go play human for a while?”

-

              The mysterious lifepod was secured and taken to headquarters. Yossarian was greeted by Ix, a snarky mentor who was the source of all the jokes the team learned from him. Ix was the only robot Yossarian knew who was older than himself.

              “You grubworms have got some explaining to do!” his voice hissed out of a rusted can. “Let me see if I’ve got this correct… YOU sir got to the target first and yet you didn’t secure it.” he tapped Yossarian with his crude pincer. “As a result there was a battle where many robots died, and yet you retrieved two robots that are useless to us!”

              “I am not useless.” Junco pointed out, standing on his pelvis.

              Ix looked down and kicked him swiftly in the face, sending him flying. Then he punched Bacchus in the stomach, clobbered Yossarian on the head and grabbed Beni-Beni by her mechanical tit pulling her face down to meet his kneecap. Yossarian hated coming back to HQ.

              “Robots do not need to ‘camp’! We can fly directly to the target and back again!” Ix gestured with one of his can-openers. Their only real use was punishing ingrates. Unless you were joking around with him you were a prick and impossible to take seriously.

              “WELL?!” he got right up in Yossarian’s face.

              “Um… What did the bank robber say when he couldn’t believe he was under arrest?” Yossarian struggled to think of something. “He said ‘Yeah right, ‘stick ‘em up’ my ass!’”

              Ix stared at him for a moment.

              “HAHAHAHHAHAA!” he roared, doubling over and grabbing his sides. “Yoss you really got what it takes, you know that?”

              He clapped Yossarian on the back. All he really wanted was to be loved.