Canis

Carving its way through rolling mountains, the edges of Highway 26 had crumbled to pebbles. Divots in the asphalt still held oil stains—even decades of rain could not wash away the black spots. Twin yellow lines tracked along the road, interspersed by questing roots. An ivy-coated sign pointed toward a decrepit military refueling depot littered with vehicle husks. Lichen coated the barrels of their silent guns; bird nests poked from their barrels.

A tawny-coated doe nibbled at grass peeking through the gaps of a concrete slab, hooves clacking against the uneven surface. Two fawns grazed behind her flank. One fawn, braver than his brother, meandered through the leaning door of the abandoned station. Glass shards from shattered windows twinkled, lighting a path towards the darkened interior. 

Under his mother’s watchful eye, he sniffed at collapsed shelves and moldering skeletons that nature worked to bury. The fawn’s nose bumped into a stack of boxes, toppling them. Belts of brass bullets spilled across the linoleum, rattling like snakes. The fawn stumbled when one link whipped his rear. He bolted away and tumbled snout-first into the ground, bleating twice.

Dazed, the fawn sprinted through the field of vehicles. Hidden razor wire loops sliced open his stomach and limbs as he went. Just before the edge of the woods, the fawn collapsed to the ground, his bright blood joining the stains on Highway 26.

* * *

In the depot, one red diode, then two, then a whole panel pulsed to life. Titanium servos whirred inside metal limbs. A series of microactuators fired with mechanical clicks, grinding through the scum and grit of inactivity. Awoken by the boxes falling against a switchboard, a gaunt creature emerged from its preservation cradle. Yellow optics embedded in its angular head scanned the surroundings. Gridded light projected around the room, mapping the three-dimensional layout for future reference.

It noted the unused ammunition strewn about. Human remains, too, decayed beyond facial recognition. It took two steps forward to investigate before being jerked backwards: nine cables trailed from its underbelly into the cradle. Planting itself solidly on four legs, the metal creature shook itself vigorously. Once, twice, and on the third go, the cables popped off with a grating suction. Three finger bones clattered off its back to the ground. Grime flaked off, revealing a steel nameplate: K9-S33.

Twin antennae emerged from S33’s skull casing and searched for a signal. Ten seconds, twenty seconds, thirty seconds. After five minutes of waiting, S33 wandered outside the depot. Its topographical information was accurate within one standard deviation—an acceptable level of error until satellite updates were received. S33 trotted through the debris-strewn lot with little care for glass or rusty metal. Independent gyroscopes recalibrated each step, compensating against unsteady joints.

Emergency solar panels along S33’s sides unfolded to absorb the evening sun. The photovoltaic cells shunted rays of dying light into circuits; capacitors discharged power into S33’s synthetic muscles.

Within minutes, the corroded connections sparked and surged with ungoverned voltage before burning out. On S33’s back, a blue battery indicator began to tick down.

99% Capacity . . .

A bloody trail smeared the road, hints of iron wafting through hyperacute olfactory sensors. S33’s thermal imagers highlighted the body of a young fawn at the edge of the overgrown forest. The time of death was twenty-three minutes prior. Larger bodies, soldiers long-deceased, leaned against the shattered windows of bullet-ridden vehicles—an indeterminate age had passed since their corpses were identifiable. Moss grew on the shady underside of green bones, scraps of tattered cloth fluttering in the breeze.

The world was altogether too quiet—S33’s memory banks could not recall a time when there had been so much nothing.

On the contrary, there was life, plenty of it. Evidence of birds and deer, of mice even, but nothing of humans. No armored soldiers with rifles primed, no tanks rolling down the interstate, not even the buzz of incoming drones.

In the overwhelming airwave silence, S33 registered there had been no new input since the last command directives: [Debrief] and [Standby]. Yet, it had been activated. With no other recourse, S33 defaulted to the base directive: [Locate Handler]. It began to sprint towards the last received signal, a mere decayed echo.

96% Capacity . . .

Falling night concealed S33’s sleek form sprinting along Highway 26 towards the last signal. Infrared burned from its two chest-mounted floodlights, coupling with radar telemetry to allow S33 to weave around fallen trees and craters. As it ran, its waving antennae continued searching for anything new.

The final signal had been 72 kilometers north as the drone flew, but 108 kilometers along pavement if S33 chose to avoid undue environmental wear. S33 loped forward until a blast of thunder echoed within its auditory receptors. It startled into the air before dashing inside of an overturned RV.

An opossum hissed at the intrusion as it waddled out. Six small copies of the adult specimen clung to its back. Its gleaming eyes reflected the yellow scangrid, but S33 ignored the marsupial. Instead, S33 entered threat-assessment mode, hypervigilant, its small-caliber mandible guns primed for action.

Two minutes passed until S33 decided there were no incoming artillery strikes. But before S33 could resume its journey, a flash of distant lightning illuminated the shadow of a man looming over it. S33 whirled around and attempted to fire multiple rounds—its guns clicked empty. Meanwhile, the body of the man slumped over with a gaseous exhalation. His head slammed into the floor with a sharp crack.

Sealed within an environmental suit, the man’s face was green and bloated with rot. Blisters bled oil into the plastic screen of the helmet, his cheek resting in a cloudy puddle. His tongue lolled out, swollen like a dammed creek, and brown liquid pooled in his mouth.

S33 sidestepped to avoid rivulets of organic material from a new fracture in the helmet’s visor. Following hard-coded reconnaissance directives, S33 ventured deeper within the RV’s rotated interior.

In the RV’s cramped bedroom, three other bodies desiccated to almost nothing lay swaddled in stained blankets. An intact picture and frame was positioned at their collective heads. Inside, a family posed in front of a foreign body of water. Error codes flew in S33’s cortex as it attempted to analyze the input with facial recognition. The woman in the picture was a 76% facial match for its handler. Corrupted memory banks struggled to stitch together old data transmissions and visual input from before the manual deactivation.

The first logs were intact, if sparse. There had been a handler, a corporal. S33 was assigned to her command on the day of activation. S33 obeyed her commands as long as they were within the operational limits of its programming. The handler had functioned optimally with S33. And S33 had functioned optimally with the handler.

The hissing of rain cascading onto the RV’s aluminum siding shook S33 alert. Satisfied with security levels, it entered a state of power-conservation inside its shelter.

82% Capacity . . .

The storm subsided to acceptable levels within 87 minutes and 32 seconds. Outside the RV, the opossum growled at the matte black chassis of S33 sprinting away into the night.

Around mid-morning, when the sun began to burn away the rain, S33 entered into a township. Soggy planks hung on curved nails against the windows of abandoned houses and fallen telephone lines snaked across asphalt crumble. The twisted wires snagged at S33’s feet as it leapt over a sandbag wall.

Abruptly, S33 paused to sniff the air, then changed course as it detected fumes. It followed the trail all the way to a series of structures in the town’s square. Sometime ago, soldiers had jury-rigged pieces of engines together to form a complete generator—salvaged power lines led into military tents. Armed sentry automatons patrolled the exterior in decaying gear, their only purpose to guard and maintain the tombs of people long since gone. S33 froze motionless, only partially behind concealment. The camouflage pattern on the sentry gears triggered an unbidden memory.

The directive had been routine: [Reconnaissance]. Unexpectedly, six enemy units encountered S33 and the handler. [Evade] became unavoidable. The parameters switched to prime directive: [Protect Handler]. But S33 failed: [Protect Handler]. The first handler had been terminated. S33 could not [Protect Handler]. S33 could not—

A bullet whined past K9-S33’s left antennae. Automatic evasive maneuvers triggered, and it jumped to the side, slamming into a pile of bricks. Error codes flashed in the corner of its optics as it scrabbled to its feet, sprinting away at emergency speed. Thirteen more rounds pocketed the walls of nearby buildings. Sprays of brick-and-mortar dust obscured its optics. S33 ran blindly away from the town, relying on its external proximity sensors to guide it.

65% Capacity . . .

Emergency speeds drained its power reserves at a phenomenal rate. S33 ran towards the signal point until the enemy outpost was well outside pursuit range. It scanned the towering trees around it—these groves were young, but the vegetation was sturdy enough to uproot the blasted railroad tracks.

Steel beams groaned as S33 jumped from warped tip to warped tip. Ahead, a firebomb-gutted passenger train had foliage sprouting out of where the windows had been. A mongrel dog with a brindle coat peered from within. Her muzzle twitched as she sniffed at S33, lips curling and hackles raised at S33’s faint acrid scent. Three puppies cowered beneath her legs, eyes wide and white. S33 took a calculated step towards the mother. She began to bark, her angry snarls interspersed with false starts and blustering aggression.

Disengaging, S33 turned and ran, ever onwards towards the echo of the last received signal.

58% Capacity . . .

S33 was almost at the signal. It jumped over the lip of a wide crater and peered into the bottom. The signal had come from here, decades ago, when the airwaves were abuzz with directives.

The corrupted memories were parsing clearly now. S33 could not follow prime directive: [Protect Handler]. S33 had defaulted to directive: [Return]. There had been another handler, barely more than a child. S33 was assigned to his command. Then there had been another handler, a scarred man who never spoke. There had been another handler, a woman with one arm. There had been another handler and another, with so many signal echoes.

S33 almost collapsed to the ground, its legs no longer bearing the weight of its light chassis. There were no more handlers. S33 had been told: [Deactivate]. S33 had awoken at a manual input, not a directive. But there were no more handlers.

43% Capacity . . .

Another rainstorm was on the way. S33 could sense the barometric pressure changes from the crater’s rim. Depleted power reserves rendering it unable to comply with [Locate Handler], S33 followed [Await Retrieval] and entered [Standby]. Near the edge of its vision radius, it thought it could detect a high-altitude bomber. Without input, the drones would run on a ceaselessly repeating flight pattern until the pieces of their nuclear engines melted away.

A pane on S33’s back opened, revealing a fragile broadcast array. S33 began to send out an SOS signal on all frequencies.

37% Capacity . . .

Throughout the night, S33 took shelter under a tank carapace. There was a squirrel nest in one of the vents and evidence that the small mammal had birthed there.

Blue flowers, the last of the season, grew out from the eye of a skull nearby. The calcium rich soil fueled their growth and produced the brightest petals. A spider began deftly spinning a web from stem to stem despite the dew.

24% Capacity . . .

S33 continued to broadcast the SOS signal on loop, only to receive static. A herd of deer nibbled their way across the field. They narrowly avoided the razor wire.

The bomber made its loop again. It seemed as if there was a flock of cranes in tow, migrating south for the winter.

9% Capacity . . .

S33 finally shut down its broadcast array. Only silence met its inquiries. Perhaps somewhere beyond its range, there was a handler. A handler, somewhere away from everything left to rot and rust, somewhere that S33 could not reach.

1% Capacity . . .

As the final tick of K9-S33’s battery flashed, it watched as a ladybug crawled onto its olfactory receptor. The torpid beetle sleepily stared into the optics of the strange behemoth it had lit upon.

Bumbling along without a care in the world, the ladybug noticed the attractive yellow glow had faded and sputtered out. Disappointed in its choice of sleeping spots, the insect spread its wings and flew away.