A la Node

It is not easy to design a joint for a fifty meter long steel leg. Not if you want to create a smooth, elegant curve of metal that can support your thousand ton arachnid robot and yet appear as delicate and simple as the leg of a back widow. Not easy at all, but whoever had designed this one had known his business.
I watched from close range the place where the two segments of leg met and moved against each other without apparent friction. Up close it was more impressive than it had been from the ground, the economy of material, the efficiency of the power transfer, the balance of forces as the leg lifted, bent, swung through the air and gently pierced the roof of some anonymous house far below without so much as a tremor. I was impressed, but knew that they wouldn’t tolerate me clinging onto their engineering masterpiece for long. Would they try to shoot me off, risk damaging the knee?

I head a sharp -pang- sound and the metal in front of my face sprouted a quite shallow crater. Yes, yes they would try to shoot me off. I should have known they would have sharpshooters with small caliber rounds, the big laser cannon would be for the major assault, but they were smart enough to have defensive batteries for delicate work. The leg was moving again, hidden bearings carrying the massive torque and sheer forces with no outward sign of strain. They probably would wait for the a still moment before trying to pick me off again, though the rapid walking gate of the machine meant that I would never stop moving entirely, just slow to an easy-to-shoot relative stillness while other legs did their dance.

The needle-sharp end of the leg touched down, sinking who knows how far into the earth. It was time, I let go and hit the button on my reel, it screamed as wire unspooled and I dropped like a stone. The plan was simple enough, the next step the leg took would give me a good swing, and with a little work on the backswing, I should be able to turn my pendulous motion enough that the next motion of the leg would allow me to soar right up to the belly of the beast. As I dropped, thin wire reeling out of the grappling winch at my belt, the sharpshooter tried again. The bullet would have taken me right through the heart if I had not dropped, instead it struck the small metal piton I had shot into the knee joint, and to which my one and only line was attached. I watched my line lazily fall away from the end of the piton and my barely controlled rapid wire descent became a completely uncontrolled freefall.

I should explain, at this point, how I came to be hanging off the knee joint of the very large mechanical arachnid that was walking confidently through the forest with no apparent concern for either the destruction underfoot or the handful of small flying craft that were pelting it and its companions with bullets. It started with the new uniforms.

After the raid on Alpha Lair by the Army of God, the Organization was in a bit of a mess. We spent weeks mopping up the zealous invaders, and after finally forcing them out of our airspace it took months to move operations to Delta Lair. We left Alpha on skeleton crew but with full activity rotations – lights, ventilation, and telecom. If the Army came back they wouldn’t have any good way of knowing we had moved on, at least until they attacked. If that happened, we would be able to see the fireball from Delta Lair.

The Great Plan was in shambles. Sure, the tectonic devices were still in place, I still had the power to shatter the Western half of the North American continent into bits, but everything else was up in the air. I couldn’t seem to focus on the brain modifications, Lisandra had left for parts unknown, and the election season had swept by us already. I had lost over a third of my manpower in the fighting at Alpha Lair, and the rest were shocked and demoralized. Thus, new uniforms, Minions and Elite both. It revives the spirit, a new uniform, makes you feel like whatever else is going on, you are part of something bigger, and your Master has things in hand. I take good care of my Minions, the new wardrobe would stiffen backbones and bolster the loyalty drugs I had been putting in the water since the move to Delta.

Sykes seemed to be the only member of staff who had a problem with the new jet and electric blue bodysuits. She came into my office radiating indignity.

“Look at this!” she growled. It would have been virtually impossible for me not to. The leather clung to her body, the internal armor plates acting like corset boning. The suit enveloped her in a bulletproof sheath, sculpting her body into long elegant curves and pushing extraneous body fat up her torso, where the suit collected and cradled it in what was possibly the most deeply distracting manner possible.

“Do you have any idea how hard it is to pull the logic boards out of a console with these things in the way? And don’t even get me started on soldering. Hello?”

She was waving a hand in front of my face. I snapped my eyes up and tried to focus. “Sykes, the uniforms are important, it took me weeks to get these made. That’s nanocarbon armor in there, it’s not easy to modify and we don’t have alternate designs. I need you looking like part of the team, you are an Elite and you have to look like one.” A gentle finger came up under my chin and pushed my head back up until her eyes met mine.

“Did you design the women’s uniforms, Sir?”

“Sykes, I would have to be suicidal to want that kind of distraction around me in a crisis situation.”

The human mind is a marvel of pattern recognition systems. Evolution has engraved in the human brain the power to spot a human face in virtually any mess of data, we see human forms in shadows and the most amazing things in an ink blot. Many of those patters are etched right down through the visual center of the brain and into the autonomic systems. Sexual selection has seen to it that some patterns of light and dark, certain shapes and curves, certain combinations of roundness and depth, reach directly into the brain stem and start pushing buttons without cognitive oversight. Believe me on this, I have taken apart and reassembled enough minds to know where those buttons are and what they do.

“Sir, you’re drifting again.” I pulled my gaze back to her face (not at all a bad place for a gaze to linger, in fact) and took a deep breath. She took a breath as well, and it was another act of will to force my eyes back up again. “Sir, this is going to be a problem. Who did the design work?”

“A little startup in Nevada. Bramco is the name. They seem to be going after the Military/Science market, very high tech, very innovative stuff. Very stylish. I’ll give them a call and see if they can do something. Meanwhile… I don’t know, put the cape over them or something.”

Sykes seemed at least partly mollified. She turned to leave, revealing that the artist responsible for the women’s uniforms had not neglected any part of the outfit.

Work at Delta Lair went on at a frantic pace. The Great Plan was on hold, but we needed resources if we were going to be able to pick it up again, and that meant a number of small operations aimed at acquiring material and cash. I sent a handfull of minions in the airship to raid university research labs, and a handfull to raid Museums for easily fenced art. I had a genetically modified corn plant I had been hanging onto that I was able to sell for quite a nice chunk of cash – in about five years the plants would begin producing a neurotoxin that would make anyone consuming it very susceptible to subliminal direction. I didn’t have any specific plan for it, but it seemed like something that could come in handy some day. All in all, we were kept busy, but resources and recruits were slowly pouring in.

None of my agents had been able to find signs of Army of God activity. Perhaps we had dealt them a death blow back at Alpha Lair, or perhaps they we lying low, regrouping and planning their next move. I had every spare ear to the ground, waiting for them to reveal themselves.

And then, after a week of trying to get someone at Bramco on the phone, I had Eric pick up their head designer and bring him in for an interview.

Eric entered my office, head bowed. When he was all the way through the door, he straightened up again, his short cropped black hair brushed the ceiling. He held out in one hand a vivid green jacket with a small man dangling from it.

“Your Master, Doctor Mansard, will see you now, mister Zedenhiem,” said Eric in a slow monotone. He dropped the little man.

“Thank you Eric, you may go.”

The little man staggered upright and stared over the edge of my high desk. “Ah, Doctor Mansard, so nice to see you again, how are the uniforms working out?”

“We just a few minor changes, Zedenhiem. The women’s Elite class uniform is a bit… inconvenient.”

“Certainly, Dr mansard, I am sure we can …” he trailed off as Sykes entered the room.

“Ah,” he finished.

He was a weaselly sort of man, narrow and angular, oily. He gave the impression that he was out to extract as much advantage as humanly possible in any situation, and was willing to tell any lie or conform to any expectation in order to keep his butt covered. I liked him.

Sykes stood beside my chair, the Uniform palpable, even when out of sight. “We need you to tone that down a bit,” I said.

“And get I need these things out of the way so I can get work done,” added Sykes.

I pushed the button on my desk that closed the office door with an ominous sliding sound and turned on the electronic jamming frequencies – since the raid at Alpha Lair, we were very careful about any possible signal leakage. Zedenhiem flinched.

“Well, Dr. Mansard, the uniform was tailored to your… officer’s measurements, you can hardly blame us if her body, um… performs outside your parameters.” He squinted slightly, and shook his head as if trying to dislodge something from an ear.

“I want a replacement, for this and the two other Elite women’s uniforms we have.”

“Are the other two also…”

“I haven’t seen them, I am sure I would remember. This is not negotiable, Zedenheim, you will replace this outfits, or I will have Eric fetch you again. In multiple stages this time.” The little man kept twitching his head. At first I thought it was fear, but now the twitching became faster, his mouth opened, but no sound issued from it. A tiny rivulet of blood ran from his nose.

“Sykes -” I began, but she was already in motion. Her sidearm was aimed at the designer’s head and minions poured in, alerted by her signal. I pushed my chair back and hit the trapdoor control, the floor under the oily little man irised open and he fell out of sight.

Fifteen minutes later, the man’s brain was on a table in Lab three. I examined the little sliver of plastic that we had found inside.

“The signal jammer must have started a reaction,” I mused. “He flinched, just a little, when I hit the button. Don’t remember him being a flincher. Any ideas?”

Sykes took the sliver, the only abnormal thing we had found on the dead man, and placed it in the scanner. Sykes pushed the control for more magnification, and then pushed it further. On the big screen, nothing but smooth whiteness revealed itself. If there was structure in the thing, it was incredibly small. Then, at the extreme end of the scanner’s resolving power, structure bloomed on the screen like a city emerging upwards through a fog. It was beautiful. A connoisseur of neurons, I recognized the interlinked pieces as a network, but the structure had a regularity and perfection no brain could. Structures too tiny to see as more than dots were enmeshed in dense network of thin white fibers.

“Sykes, take that uniform off.”

“Sir, this is hardly the time to -”

I was still staring at the screen, but a thousand alarm bells were going off in my mind.

“Sykes, get it off. This man was under someone’s control, and he designed your uniform. Take it off.” I reached for the hermetic zipper on my own as I spoke, and pulled hard on the almost invisible seam. I pulled harder. I hit the pressure points on the lapels, thrust my hand into my waistband and levered at the augmented leather. The uniform was not coming off.

I looked at Sykes, who was hauling on her neckline ferociously and with startling visual consequences. “Dammit! Sykes, stop it, it’s not going to come off. I don’t know what he, or whoever was controlling him, is up to, but my guess is that we’re going to need the construction lasers. But first, look at that structure. Tell me what it reminds you of.”

She looked up at the screen. She stared for fifteen seconds, and then I saw the realization seep into her eyes. “The Army of God crucifixes. Far more refined and sophisticated, but that network structure, that regularity…”

“I was sure we took them completely offline. Sykes, I don’t think the Army had this kind of sophistication. I don’t think they had the sophistication for weather control and those crucifixes, either.”

“Permission to laser myself out of uniform, Sir?”

–

Instead, we put a couple of minions in charge of figuring out how to cut a uniform off of someone without also cutting off vital or useful body parts. Every uniform over grade two (janitor) seemed to have developed the anti-disrobing issue at about the same time Zedenheim had developed his twitch. Sykes and I cobbled together an EM pulse generator that was able to fry the plastic neurons in the brain implant, and hopefully anything similar in the uniforms. It was the best we could do in a hurry, and I had a feeling we would not have a lot of time for anything more thorough.

I was right. A call from Dr. Mincing at Alpha station came through just as Sykes got the EM pulser setup in Cavern One to process minions.

“Dr Mansard, greetings.” His greeting was chilly, but that was to be expected. I had left him with Alpha base, a possible suicide post, but one which left him with plenty of autonomy and equipment. I figured he would turn on me eventually, but until he could develop his power base again, he would not betray me outright. Instead, he was polite and even solicitous, but always chilly enough to remind me of his enduring enmity.

“How are things at Alpha, Dr. Mincing?”

“I assumed you were monitoring from there, Mansard, I know you maintain access to the surveillance grid. Please take a look, and let me know if you would like me to try and stop them or just lay low while you nuke us all from afar.”

“Johnson! Give me surface video from Alpha.” Johnson, Minion grade 6, audiovisual department, scrambled to his console. He seemed to be trying to hold his uniform pants up.

“Mincing, just tell me, what the hell is going on over there. Johnson, what is wrong with you, man?”

“Sorry sir, I was, um, in the men’s room, Sir, when the um, you know. Can’t get them to zip up now, Sir, and can’t get them off either. Sorry, Sir. Video on two, Sir.”

Doctor Mincing looked down from the big screen with an expression equal parts cold smugness and fear. “Oh, the usual, fifty meter armored walking robots with high powered laser cannon.” Video on screen two flickered to life as he spoke, and there they were, the sunset colors of the sky gleaming off of smooth curved carapaces. They walked in a wide spider gate, legs extending far from the body, lifting gently and smoothly one after the other. They were beautiful. A brilliant blue beam popped into existence to connect one of them with a camouflaged gun emplacement on the northern perimeter, it was gone before it quit registered. So was the gun emplacement, replaced by a small red fireball. Other fires were visible int he background, evidence that the spiders were not just passing though. Fir trees passed undisturbed beneath them as they walked.

“Doctor Mincing, I am afraid you know what I have to do.”

“Oh, I am sure it is very emotionally painful for you, Mansard. I am sure you will cry yourself to sleep tonight.”

I pushed the button, the single red button that we had connected to Alpha’s nuclear self-destruct. It would take a few seconds to arm and detonate, meanwhile Mincing smiled down from the screen.

“Luckily, I took the opportunity several weeks ago to remove myself from your decrepit little Lair, Mansard.” Screen two went white, then black.

“For the record, I don’t know who they are or where they came from. Nor do I care. But I -will- meet you again. Don’t let them kill you before I have that chance, Mansard.” The main screen blanked then, and the control room was silent. There had been Minions at Alpha, and everyone in the room knew it. They chose to stay, risking possible annihilation in exchange for light duty, but no one wanted them dead.

–

Surveillance seemed to indicate that the spiders were heading southeast when they came across Alpha. I pulled up satellite feeds and zoomed in, pulling in the previous week’s data as well. There they were, shiny little dots moving through the forests that surrounded Alpha. I followed the path back across familiar terrain. Back through the site of Beta Lair. Back further, and then they were gone. Between one frame and the next, they had appeared from beneath the trees, marched through Beta and on to Alpha in almost a straight line.

I scrolled forward again through the images, watched Alpha turn into an atomic fireball, and watched a dozen or so spiders continue on, skirting the blast zone. It was a small nuke, mostly underground, but even so, the machines that survived had survived a shock wave and EM pulse that would have crushed and fried any killer robot in my own inventory. I thought about the minuscule plastic circuitry we have found in a fashion designer’s brain. Sure, there was no obvious connection between the two, no reason to think giant laser wielding robot spiders, sabotaged uniforms and the Army of God had any connection at all. But they were connected, I knew it in my gut. Coincidence was not an acceptable answer.

Perhaps it was the engineering. The Army of God’s little weather nanobots and their laser powered crucifixes had been beautifully designed, compact and efficient. The nanocarbon armor in my own uniform was an engineering masterpiece as well, and the plastic neural net was a work of genius. The spiders were mechanically sublime, I didn’t need to see them in detail to recognize the fluid balletic movement of perfection, I recognized that from the greatest of my own works. Someone was doing their damnedest to be a better Creator than me, and they were sending their creations after me.

I looked at the maps again. Yes, the spiders had changed course, they were headed for Delta Lair.

–

“Sykes, pick ten of your best men, or women if the uniforms aren’t going to be a problem. I want people who can shoot -and- think. We’re going to go meet the bastards halfway. I am getting damned tired of nuking my own lairs, but I want a general evacuation just in case. If we can’t stop them before they get here, we’ll stop them here.”

We took the Airship, but loaded several of the heavy tanks in the hold and a couple of jet pods. Everyone on board wore a parachute. We went as high as the dirigible would take us and scanned downward with infra red and radar. They were not hard to spot. They walked steadily, the legs ended in sharp points which settled slowly into the earth as they landed. Bulbous heads swiveled upwards to track us through the cloud cover, I could see the business ends of heavy lasers there, able to swing around three hundred and sixty degrees. They would have no trouble shooting us out of the sky when they were ready. We were counting on it.

“Tank crew, I want you on the ground. Air crew, I want concentrated fire on one, and I mean -only- one of those things, until you bring it down!” My crew, like a very oily machine, slid into action. There was a brilliant blue flash and a lurch. I was in the forward control pod, Sykes beside me, targeting our own lasers.

They had opened up a sizable hole in the gas envelope, but it takes more than a gaping hole to bring a Mansard airship down. I dumped some ballast and watched our main laser hit the lead spider, then both secondaries home in on the same brilliant red spot. The spider kept walking, seemingly unperturbed. I heard the thump of the cargo bays opening, our tanks and jet pods were away. Another blue flash tore another hole. That was good, it meant they were attacking the big visible source of resistance, and ignoring the little tanks and fliers.

“Keep the beams on it!” I watched the spider under attack slow, turn its head towards us, and then stop. I was sure we had holed it, until the blue light flashed up and then sideways, slicing across the entire airship. What had been a lurching, vertiginous ride became a plummet instantly. The ship had been sliced in two like a tomato, and our portion, heavy with the lasers and control pod tipped forward and dove.

I had been waiting for this, as had Sykes, though neither of us thought they would manage it that fast. Whether the other two gunners had even considered the possibility I don’t know, but they certainly knew when to abandon guns and head for a hatchway. Sykes and I wrenched a hatch open and looked down at the approaching ground, giant metal spiders swiveled their heads to track our fall. We pushed away from the tumbling bulk of the airship and pulled our ripcords, I saw Sykes’s parachute open far off to my left, and two more pop open behind me and to the right.

On queue, air support screamed overhead. Jet pods ripped through the air, firing good old fashioned lead bullets at the spiders ahead of us. They had no effect, other than to distract the things. Then the ground tanks were underneath them, firing up, and the giant heads swiveled down to get a fix on this new threat. I was dropping towards the spider we had been lasing, a glowing puddle of molten metal had formed on it’s back, but the liquid metal hardly even rippled as the machine walked smoothly forward. I really had hoped it would be easier than this.

I wanted to get into one of them, on one at the very least. It wasn’t my original plan, but if they were as indestructible as they seemed, there wasn’t much else I could do from the outside. Sykes, when she reached ground, would take the tanks into the forest to set booby traps, while the fliers provided distraction. I should probably follow the plan and follow behind, coordinating with the tanks and Delta, but no, I could see now that the traps would be lucky to take one or two down, and their cannon would be devastating if Sykes couldn’t get out of the way in time. But if I could get inside of one…

“Sykes, go lay your traps, I am going to try to penetrate of these bastards. Lay your traps and then proceed to Delta, I repeat, do -not- hang around, place your traps and run.”

“Roger, you stupid gloryseeking asshole, Sykes out.”

As usual, I was well prepared for the challenges of the evening. I pulled my grappling rig out and attached the thin wire to the bolt, chucked the bolt into the gun, and aimed for the carapace. I pulled the trigger and watched the little piton fly towards the body of the spider. I watched the leg swing up in a long stride and catch the piton. The grappler took up slack and started to haul me towards the knee. What the hell, I thought, and released my chute.

There was a long complicated moment of swinging, twisting entanglement before I found myself being pulled at high speed towards a the big steel joint. I tried to grab at the smooth surface but found no purchase, so I stopped scrabbling and just hung there. It was, as I believe I have mentioned, a very well made knee.

In those few tiny fractions of a second between seeing the bullet sever my grappling wire and realizing that I was indeed falling with no support whatsoever, reflexes developed over many years in a dangerous profession caused me to do something I at first didn’t know why I was doing. I twisted in the air, knew somehow that I was heading for the lower half of the leg  had been hanging from, and saw it fly up to meet me. When I hit the leg, I wrapped my arms and legs around it, and only then did the actual thought flash across my mind – grab the leg!

I considered my options. This much further down the leg, the motion of each step was far faster, and now I had no physical support but my own arms and legs. Sliding down was about it, assuming they didn’t shoot me off first. When the leg planted itself in the ground, I started to slide. After a few seconds, I realized that the leg was not moving at all, in fact the other legs I could see from here were not moving either. The spider had stopped.

Then the leg lifted, but not in the easy motion of taking another step, it yanked me high into the air and towards the spider’s body. I watched the bulbous head come closer, wondering if I would be able to hold on when the leg came to a stop. It seemed conscious of my precarious position, and brought me gently to within a few inches of the mirror finish metal. There were no features on it, no mouth, eyes, vents. I have no idea where the voice came from.

“Doctor Mansard?”

Well, what was the point in denying it now? “Yes.”

“The Enlighten Machine would like to speak with you. You will be come with us.”

The metal opened up in front of me, a black and featureless hole. The spider tossed me inside. A moment later, crouched in a small round cavity, I could feel the spider turn and begin walking.

A Beautiful Knee by Kenneth Lett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.