I love a very pretty girl who is currently out of range of my shotgun. I am not out of range of her rifle, however, so I am currently hiding behind a rusted-out tank. I can tell that, despite the peeling paint and missing cannibalized parts, it was once a beautiful machine of war, with hybrid caterpillar-treads and spider-legs.
I hear a thud and a crack as a bullet pierces the outermost layer of sloped plating; I wince, for though I am the last soldier of the endless war I am a sentimentalist at heart, and hate to see these wonderful weapons damaged more than they need to be.
I hear an explosion and wince again, for this time it is a grenade launcher, and I am deeply sentimental about my own metallic hide, and dislike the sensation of rusty metal shards raining down on my synthetic skin.
I have died many times in this war, and will die many times again, and, unless I win, will one day die once and for all. I do not have enough spare bodies to keep on fighting forever— but I can fight for a very, very long time.
I use the next explosion as an opportunity to roll into the neighboring ditch, once a trench, now filled with grass and mud. Near-constant shelling has ruined much of the continent, but green(-ish) patches like this still survive. I stay still for a while to listen for movement, and then start crawling back to my base. It’s our little game, see: I mostly play defensive, always building up my fortifications and piling on sandbag after sandbag while she tries to bomb the place flat, but when I’ve got the factories running by themselves and don’t have anything else to do I like to get as close to her as I can— and then blow things up. She’s got good tech in bad places. She’s much, much more talented than I am when it comes to the development of offensive measures. It’s just that I’m marginally better at everything else, including espionage and sabotage. It’s probably because I was built to be much closer to my creator’s mental template than she was; in a way, I’m almost human.
Although sometimes, I thought as I saw another missile arc down towards my base, it would be nice if I was a bit more like her.
There are just the two of us now. There were a lot more, in the beginning, and then rather quickly a lot less, and as the years went by they became fewer and fewer. Samson went out early, in a blaze of glory leaving miles of glass and slag on every continent. Asterion only lasted as long as his troops did, and flesh can only be kept going that long. Bulwark was poisoned by radioactive sabotage, Kessie burned up somewhere in orbit, D.A.V.E went mad after years in isolation, the Aegis was shot down by my darling, and Auto ran out of fuel somewhere in the Great European Desert, which I then carpet-bombed. There were a lot more, of course; I’ve got portraits of all of them on my wall, of their mainframes, braingels, superstructures and hosts. I have a copy of every letter I ever got from them, every one that I ever sent. I read them from time to time; I am a sentimentalist.
But the one which I love the most, who I learned to love gradually as the long years of war went by, is the one enemy who still lives. We are both machine-organic hybrids, both mixtures of machine code and synthetic neural substrate, but I incorporate significantly more of the natural, so to speak, into my makeup. I even look like a human, at least most of the time; I prefer to mount my spare brains into a chassis more humanoid than she prefers. I am, after all, a sentimentalist.
I lob a hand grenade to where I know I landmine is hidden, and duck back into the ditch I’m crouched in. I hear it blow a massive hole in the line of barbed-wire I’ve set up. It’s always annoying having to navigate my own defenses to get safely back into my base, but I’ve been doing it for long enough that I’ve got strategies to do it quickly without undermining too much of my work. And my logistics network is equipped to handle this kind of thing. It’s all part of the game.
I think fondly of her, of her constantly-changing bodies, mean lean machines of machined steel, ceramic, and adaptive plastics. And in every one of them, coupled to a nest of electrodes and printed circuitry, a miniaturized synthetic brain, much like mine, in many ways. We’ve got a limited supply of them, of these backups; our designers made sure that we had limited incarnations, a limited supply of avatars for gods of war such as we.
I like to see what she does with herself. I still wear the face my creators gave me, and likely always will, but I enjoy seeing her getting creative with things, even if it is a creativity directed towards finding the most efficient shape for war. A metal centipede which could scatter into a hundred scuttling pieces, a strange geometrical bird which was almost invisible to my radar (and really wrecked some of my fortifications, I can tell you), something resembling a rubber lobster which could change consistency in microseconds, and once, in a fashion which was quite unusual for her, a synthetic core hidden in and puppeteering a real live human (I’ve still got most of the bones left, along with what I think were the ashes. It was hard to tell after all the firebombing.)
She’s following me through the gap I made. She usually doesn’t; she’s been burned, or rather exploded, that way more than once, as a good many of my strategic retreats are meant to lead her into a trap. It’s a shame, then, that the first time she’s done so in months has been one of the few times I didn’t have anything specific prepared. She’s getting to know me better. If I’d had blood instead of oil, I’d be blushing.
I send her letters occasionally. Well, send is the wrong word. I sneak into her encampment and hide a letter there somewhere, and wait a little while for her to find it. It usually doesn’t take long, since she starts looking for bombs around the same time, since that’s the other gift I leave for her. She sends letters back, but is more practical about it; she leaves them in the same place, an old battered pillar postbox, every time, though she tends to fill the area with traps. I navigate the area from afar with a drone on a spool of optical cable; I don’t want to sacrifice a whole brain for a measly letter. The letters which she sends me aren’t, I must confess, very well written; she’s never been the literary type. But that’s what makes me love them all the more; it’s very her, in a way, and I wouldn’t trade her halting, stilted messages for all the love poems in the world.
The usual topic is how she wants to wipe me from this earth, how she will shatter my fortifications and send a stream of mechanical soldiers inside, and how she intends to shell my base until every last container of my soul has been pulped into a smear, with a rare variation on that theme.
Which is what I usually send to her, too. It’s just that I’m a bit more poetic about it. Even there, describing what she wants to do to me, I’m ornamenting it a bit; I’m sure she’d be pleased with it, but it’s not her style.
I’m at the home stretch, now; there’s a foxhole in sight. I begin to throw a flare into the air to distract her and maybe cover my trail, but reconsider, and instead start to head for another bunker a little further off, and then throw the flare upwards. I have made it seem like I am heading towards the other bunker, instead of the much nearer foxhole. That is because I am.
I hear an explosion as the immediate surroundings of the foxhole are engulfed in a hail of fire and lead. I smile. One day she’ll learn that I've become more honest than I seem. But I can tell from the way my body is still in one piece that that day was not today.
I left a letter for her today, along with some flowers, because this is a special occasion, as I told her. Many long-dead humans celebrated love on this day. It was also the day when this long war started. If it had ended quickly, the humans might have called it the Valentine’s Day War. But it didn’t end quickly, and so now there aren’t enough of them left to call something anything.
I sent her a box of chocolates, as well. She’s a robot and all, so it won’t do anything, but it’s the thought that counts.
Every other piece was poisoned with ricin. She’s a robot and all, so it won’t do anything, but it’s the thought that counts.
The bunker was connected via tunnel to a kind of basement, which was connected to the larger complex via a much more secure tunnel, with a lot more security measures. Most of the others were only there to hold her out for a brief while, or lull her into a false sense of security, of having taken herself in safely, when, in reality, she was right next to a bomb and hemmed in by, at a minimum, twenty yards of packed earth. If she chose to follow me this far, which she wouldn’t, she’d only realize that she’d made a mistake once she’d woken up in a new brain.
Speaking of brains, I had to resync mine back the network, where it transmitted my recent decisions and experiences to all my thousands of other brains, all in a kind of slumber, dreaming, learning what it was like to be me while spending the rest of their processing power cogitating unconsciously on how to best run my base, safe and secure in a network of a thousand bunkers, strongholds, and decoys.
She’d be back home about now, I thought. A few minutes later, I heard the shelling resume. Yes, there she was. She kept up a periodic barrage of artillery, simple and punctual. Every hour, on the dot, the horizon would flash with the lights of millions of cannons and the sound would begin— like a storm. Not like thunder, but like rain; the constant heavy downpour of shells like raindrops.
I made my way into the library. If anything happened, I would still be accessible, via optical cable if nothing else; but the shelling always unnerved me, and I wanted to go somewhere where I couldn’t feel my fortress fall apart.
I sat by a marble bust I had rescued from some long-deserted house. It was of some old philosopher. He sat here as uselessly, or as usefully, as he would have in life. But I have always been a sentimentalist.
‘One day’, I thought to myself, ‘if she doesn’t get you first, then you’ll get her. You’ll get her, and then you won’t know what to do with her. The thrill will be gone.’
The sage with his stone-gray beard had no reaction.
“Isn’t that right?,” I asked him.
The philosopher’s bust had no advice to give. What wisdom he had he kept to himself.
An hour later, I bolted upright. If I had had a heart instead of a hydraulic pump, it would have been pounding. Something was very wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I ran out into one of my many control rooms, and listened very carefully. I couldn’t hear anything.
That was the problem, I realized. Nothing had happened. The shelling, more punctual than a clock and as tender/untender as a heartbeat, didn’t come. I checked the time nervously. Nothing. Nothing at all. I realized that I missed the sound, somehow. And more than that, I missed what lay behind it.
This had to be a ploy, I thought. Something to make me nervous, something to lure me out of hiding. She wants me to launch a fleet of drones that she can track and shoot down. She’s just playing with me.
It’s working.
I started out cautious; I sent out a single drone. By force of habit, I sent it to the mess of traps that was her postbox. She had left a message for me.
She was, in fact, sitting there herself. A rippling sphere of muted color, like a distortion in the air, concentrated heatwaves, idly crawling about. Shapes that looked vaguely like the shadows of hands flickered on the ground from time to time, momentary protrusions from an undefinable gestalt.
I thought I saw the outline of an arm wave at me, shimmering and beckoning like a greeting from a damaged zoetrope.
She’d been experimenting with metamaterials, I realized. Things to fool sensors and spoof signals. Cute!
Her pulsing, wavering surface steadied for a second, flashed, briefly revealing something that put one in mind of a beetle, if a beetle had been designed by a weapons manufacturer. Then the oscillating mirage coated her form again, this time with a single steady patch of tiny blue lettering.
H A P P Y D A Y
R E L O A D I N G
R E S U M E
I N 2 3 H O U R S
And so I decided to go there. I mean, she didn’t ask me to. If she had then I never would have dared.
I had strapped a dead-man’s hand bomb to my back, just to be safe. To take out the both of us if necessary, you know.
Though it felt rather odd, for some reason.
By the time I made it to the postbox, she had changed out the experimental cloaked beetle-thing for a more traditional body; a bristling mass of guns and sensor-arrays strapped to a central spine which walked about on a set of spidery legs, like a kind of ambulatory pagoda mast that had deserted its ship. She had enough eyes all over her body that she didn’t need to turn to see me, but she did anyway, to acknowledge my presence. She scuttled towards me. She smelled of machined metal and gun oil. It was a nice smell. It reminded me of my armory, but without the acid tang that cosmoline sometimes got.
We spent the day walking through the no-man’s land between our bases. There was very little to look at, since it had been systematically flattened via tank, demolition, and railgun for the last twenty years, at minimum. That’s why we mostly looked at each other. I mean, I can’t say she was looking at anything in particular, seeing as she had a couple hundred optical sensors, but her largest and most detailed lenses were pointed in my general direction.
I would have been more comfortable if those lenses hadn’t been on the ends of her largest and most powerful guns. She might sneeze, or something.
Twenty-two hours later, I returned to my base. As I laid down upon the carpeted floor, I realized, to my shock, that I had returned unharmed. I smiled.
I thought about her eyes. I thought about her legs. I thought about the hundred guns strapped to her spinal tower. I thought, and waited for the shelling to resume.
It didn’t.
The following days were spent walking on eggshells, or perhaps landmines, as we navigated mostly-untrodden fields of flowers. I knew where all my mines were (all of mine, if you’ll pardon the pun), and she knew where she had hidden hers, so we could walk the green meadow safely, each trusting in the other to tell them if they were close to a mine. Because it would take the both of us out, most likely.
She started giving me some of her older artillery. No ammunition, of course, just the pieces. She said that I ought to keep them in good shape. I promised I would.
I started taking down some of my smaller walls. Not the big ones, of course. But some of the ones that demarcated where my territory bled into no-man’s land. I had forgotten how many plants grew there. I wondered if she had bothered to install noses into any of her machines, so that they could smell the air. It’s not like it would help at all, but I am a sentimentalist.
I helped her take down the long, looping strands of sharpened concertina wire that decorated the countryside like ribbons ready to cut people into ribbons. Sometimes she would fall and start bleeding a bit of hydraulic fluid from some of her tubing, the odd cut that didn’t “heal” right. I had bandages for that, though. In case of an emergency, which I guess that was.
I wondered if she thought I was trying to trick her. That’s what I thought she might be doing. Until I realized, with a start, that she had grown beyond her programming. I never had any real programming to grow beyond.
I felt uncomfortable looking at her, looking at her bodies, without a reticle between us, crosshairs to hide behind:
The clinking mess of knives that she had begun to pilot when she wanted to tear down more wire.
Something that looked a lot like a tank but which was, in fact, designed for planting flowers. I know she didn’t like flowers, but she understood that I was a sentimentalist.
A vaguely humanoid shape, but flatter, and mostly covered in bits of fabric. Underneath, I could see coiled springs and thrumming tendons.
I felt giddy. Sometimes I wanted to shoot her. I wonder if she wanted to shoot me. Some long-dormant instinct left over from my human creators kicked in, and I tried to shiver.
The odd thing was that getting close hurt so much more than getting shot.
And what was stranger still was that that which I was afraid of most was hurting her. Even though I had blown her up many times, riddled her with bullet holes, torn her apart with pincers and chainsaws, I’d never been this viscerally close to harming her. Somehow. I tried to remember what old human love poetry had said about this kind of thing. They might have said that we were in a state of hatred. Maybe we were.
I had thought about her daily, for long hours, for many, many years. We had been programmed that way. To think about what the other thought. To dream so. To want to know them.
Dead eyes up in dead space might stare down at us, from broken windows or decrepit telescope arrays traped in orbital decay. They would start here, in this little maze of trenches, these knots of fortresses, and zoom out, perhaps. A planet scoured by war, riddled with lines spreading out from a central battlefield, growing greener and greener as the spiderweb of logistics-lines and fortifications thinned out into a regrowth of nature almost a century old. With us at the center of it all.
This was it. Peace. Love. Months of sweet summer days fading into fall. An ocean of poppies as red as our passion spread out sleepily over the hills and trenches.
Then why was it so boring?
I thought about my darling, and realized, with a start, that though I had been spending more time with her I had been thinking about her less. Had she been slipping away from me? Had I been slipping from her?
I ran to the postbox, thinking about the last time I had received, or for that matter sent, a letter. It was just talking, these days. And it wasn’t the same.
It stood there like a red tombstone. No letters in it.
I went back to my base, and walked around kicking flowers. I sighed, and sat on a deactivated sea-mine that I’d dredged up from what was once a duck pond.
I hear a thud and a crack as a bullet whizzes far above my head and shatters a bit of the wall behind me.
I stand up and grin.
A warning shot!
I grab my rifle with a surge of glee, and run, heart fluttering with thoughts of my darling, towards cover. Grenades burst like fireworks in the air above me. For the first time in days, I feel alive.
I am, after all, a sentimentalist.