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  His visage looked almost identical to Hal’s: a black oval with blue dots for eyes, a red square for a nose, and a grill in place of his mouth. He had small antennae emerging from the very top of that oval. Small holes were placed at random intervals along the entire circumference of his head, no doubt containing sensitive microphones that served as his substitute for human hearing.

  He wondered why he didn’t have the same LED coating as Dickson, when his face and arms flashed blue. He focused on the material, and with a thought changed the color of his arms and face to that of flesh. He instinctively knew how to add lips and eyebrows to his face. He even made himself a crude nose.

  “Nicely done,” Dickson said. “Even I didn’t get the facial features right on the first try. They must be really improving the memory dumps.”

  “I’m surprised they’d even give us facial features,” Eric said.

  “You need them,” Jerry said. “It’s a reminder of your humanity. Without it, all Mind Refurbs eventually, well…”

  “Lose their shit,” Dickson finished. His LED mouth was grinning widely. “Besides, it’s not like senior command is going out of its way or anything to give us faces. Our exteriors are coated in a bendable LED skin by design. It’s part of our stealth tech, and allows us to blend in with whatever terrain we happen to be operating in. The ability to create facial features is just an added side bonus.”

  “Dickson here will take you through Orientation,” Jerry said. “My work here is done. Get ready to meet the team.”

  Eric dismissed the video feed and followed Dickson out the door.

  3

  The corridor outside was lined with white walls whose surfaces were marred with black smears. Yellow plaster filled in gaps where the surface had apparently been punched out. Because Eric didn’t have shoes or boots, his feet made audible clanks with each tread. Dickson’s were more muted, thanks to his boots.

  Shortly after leaving the room, Eric discovered how to access his heads-up-display, or HUD. He navigated through the menu system until he came across the “overhead map” option. He activated it, and in the upper right of his vision a small map indicating his current position on the base overlaid his vision. He adjusted the map until it gave him an isometric view of his surroundings, which were portrayed as wire frames. His position was represented as a blue dot in the center; when he moved, the wire frames updated around him so that the blue dot remained in the middle at all times.

  Very nice. Being a robot isn’t so bad. Then again, humans probably have access to this, too, via those augmented reality goggles Jerry was wearing.

  “You would be correct in that assumption,” Dee told him.

  Eric and Dickson occasionally passed other robots in the hallway. Some were humanoid like Eric and Dickson, though their faces lacked LED expression modules. Others, while bipedal, had no arms, and still others were quadrupedal or even six-legged. Some had no legs at all, and instead traveled on treads. Eric’s ID scans gave him model names that ran the gamut from Scorpion to Cataract. They all showed up as blue dots on his map, regardless of their size and shape.

  Sometimes, the robots were so wide, that when Eric passed them, he was forced to squeeze against the wall. He scraped his arm across the surface one time, and he suddenly knew where all those black smears had come from—oil from an elbow servomotor had transferred to the paint.

  “The only human I’ve seen so far is Jerry...” Eric said. “Is humanity an endangered species in the future or something? Have we finally bowed to our Robot Overlords?”

  “Only here,” Dickson said. “Welcome to the Apex Army Depot. Affectionately known as The Anus by the platoon. An army base specializing in the production and repair of robots.”

  “Ah.”

  “We’re making our way to the quarters of Second Platoon,” Dickson said. “We call ourselves The Bolt Eaters. Get it?”

  Eric glanced at his robot escort. “Cute. So. Orientation, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Dickson said. “It’s not an actual orientation, mind you. I introduce you to the team. Show you a spot where you can idle. There, you’re oriented.”

  “Oh.”

  “You’ll participate in the daily deep dive going forward, so you can get a feel for our teammates.”

  “Deep dive?” Eric asked.

  “Fancy term for virtual training session,” Dickson replied. “Because your mind inhabits an AI core, it’s relatively simple to emulate reality. All we have to do is swap the inputs feeding your core away from your actuators and sensing units to those of the simulator, and presto chango, you’re in virtual reality. It’s so realistic you won’t know the difference between the virtual world and the real one.”

  “I’m looking forward to using an avatar that’s more human than what I am now,” Eric said.

  “Oh ho!” Dickson said. “But that’s not allowed. Robot avatars only during training. There’s no point in training if we don’t practice with what we’ll have in the field, after all.”

  “Too bad,” Eric said. “So how long are we stuck here. On base I mean?”

  “Two months,” Dickson said. “Then we take mind dumps—you know, so we have backups in case we die—and then it’s deployment time.”

  “Backups in case we die?” Eric said. “But even if we’re restored from a backup, the current version of ourselves will still be dead.”

  “Oh I know,” Dickson said. “Which is why we try very, very hard not to die.”

  Eric walked on in silence for a moment, listening to the clank of his feet against the floor. He passed a particularly menacing spider robot, giving it a wide berth by hugging the wall. Dickson did likewise on the other side of the robot.

  When they were both on the other side, Eric asked Dickson: “Where will we be deployed?”

  “Check your news feed,” the Texan robot said. “There’s a war going on.”

  “News feed...” As before, merely saying the word gave him the knowledge he needed. Thanks to the two antennae he had on top of his head, he was always connected, and always online. The 7G network allowed him to download several 16K-quality movies in microseconds across the MilNet. He thought it a little surprising that it had taken two hundred years to get from 5G to 7G, but a quick search of the cloud told him that the first number in the protocol had reset back to one every fifty years or so.

  He activated the menu system of his HUD and accessed the news feed. Different headlines overlaid the lower right of his vision. He filtered by “war.”

  There we go.

  A quick scan of the headlines told him everything he needed to know.

  “We’re still in the Middle East after all these years?’ Eric said.

  “Never left,” Dickson said. “There’s always one religious sect or another causing trouble over there.”

  “Depressing,” Eric said. “The more things change…”

  He pulled up a map of the region. The country of Iraq no longer existed. Portions of it had been divided between Iran, Turkey, and Syria, while a large section in the former northeastern part of the country had been carved into a nation known as Kurdistan.

  “World War R, the final phase of the counterinsurgency wars,” Dickson said.

  “World War R?”

  “You got it,” Dickson said. “The world governments are using the Middle East to fight a series of proxy wars. Not only is the Middle East a proxy, but so are the troops themselves. Drones, tanks, infantry, you name it: all robotic. The Chinese back one group of rebels. The Russians have sided with the dictator. The Americans back another group of rebels. Those three sides claim to share the same goal, attacking the latest incarnation of the local religious fundamentalist group, funded mostly by the Iranians. But they war with each other as often as the insurgents. All it takes is a few smart bombs detonating near some Chinese, who’ll return the favor, and as troops are destroyed on either side in retribution attacks, a simple skirmish can quickly spiral out of control into all-out war. We’re currently in one of
the ‘down’ phases of the war, doing our best to stay out of each other’s ways as we concentrate on destroying pockets of Iranian-backed insurgents. Still, things have been quiet for too long. They’re going to flare up again, mark my words. The peace is stretched close to breaking. We’ve already been hit by a few false flag attacks sponsored by the Iran government, meant to make us believe the Chinese destroyed a couple of our convoys. In two months, when it’s time to deploy, who knows, we could find ourselves in open war against the Chinese again.”

  “Do we know where we’ll deploy yet?” Eric asked.

  “The Caucasus Mountains in the north of Kurdistan are a hotbed of activity at the moment,” Dickson replied. “And I can’t see that changing in two months. That’s probably where we’ll be operating. Those mountains are pocked with cave systems—one can hide there for a very long time. And it makes ambushes easy. Lots of defensible positions.”

  “Can’t we just nuke the whole mountain range?” Eric asked.

  “Tell that to the Kurds,” Dickson replied.

  “Why not conventional weapons then?” Eric pressed.

  “Check the news, we drop the Mother Of All Bombs daily, but the bastards always employ diggers to get out. And to make new caves.”

  “Haji certainly love their mountain hideaways,” Eric commented.

  “Who?” Dickson said.

  “Never mind, before your time,” Eric said. “What year are you from, anyway?”

  “I died in 2076,” Dickson said.

  “Like I told you, before your time.”

  The two walked in silence, taking a right at a T intersection. By then Eric had stopped noticing the gentle hum that accompanied every movement.

  Sealed metal doors led away on the left and right. Next to the doors, long, horizontal pieces of polycarbonate-glass composites embedded in the walls provided a view into the common areas contained beyond. Eric often spotted robots loitering inside. Most of the time, they simply stood in place, unmoving. Probably jacked into that virtual reality Dickson had spoken of.

  Eric passed a sealed door guarded by an armed Cicada. He glanced at his overhead map, which indicated the place was an armory. He adjusted his visual zoom level as he passed—he didn’t even know he could do that up until that moment—and focused on the weapon slung by a strap over the Cicada’s shoulder. It appeared to be a rifle of some kind. He ran an ID. Yes, it was indeed a rifle, but instead of projectiles, it harbored some sort of pulse laser.

  “Training is going to be interesting,” Eric said.

  “What do you mean?” Dickson asked him.

  “I’ve never used a weapon like that,” Eric replied. “A laser rifle.”

  “You’ve already been trained,” Dickson said. “You already know exactly how to operate that rifle.”

  “I do?” Eric said.

  “Yes,” Dickson said. “Once the weapon is placed in your hands, your muscle memory will take over. You’re trained in the operation of over five hundred weapons. Trust me, handling that weapon will be child’s play. Here.”

  Dickson walked back to the armory. He paused before the robot standing there, and Eric had the impression they were communicating on some internal frequency band that Eric didn’t currently have access to.

  The robot nodded, and the door opened; Dickson beckoned for Eric to follow him inside.

  There were racks of various weapons within. It was good to see some old favorites like rocket propelled grenades and their associated launchers. But there were some that seemed entirely foreign to him: he knew they were weapons, because they still had turrets or barrels, but they didn’t have stocks or handles at all, let alone any obvious triggers.

  Dickson paused in front of a rack of laser rifles of the same make and model the Cicada outside carried. He grabbed one of the weapons and tossed it to Eric.

  “The safety is engaged,” Dickson said. “Leave it that way.”

  “You got it,” Eric said.

  “Show me how to minimize it,” Dickson said.

  Eric instinctively knew how to unscrew the muzzle attachment, which allowed him to telescope the rifle closed, turning it into a pistol. He folded the stock into the body, and was left with a cylinder little longer than his forearm.

  “Now return it to its ready state, but increase your time sense first,” Dickson said.

  “Increase my time sense?” Eric asked.

  “Yes,” Dickson said. His robotic limbs moved in a blur. He was holding another cylinder, similar to the one Eric grasped in his hands. A rifle was missing from the rack: Eric realized Dickson had withdrawn it from the frame and had minimized it in the time it took to blink an eye.

  A human eye, that is.

  “We’re not constrained by the limitations of organic tissue anymore, in case you haven’t noticed,” Dickson said. “We can do things humans can’t. Move faster. Think faster. Now increase your time sense, and restore that rifle to the rack the way you found it.”

  Time sense. Thanks to his AI core, he knew his internal processor had a clock speed expressed in megahertz, or millions of cycles per second, which defined his maximum operating speed. An internal scheduler allocated the available cycles to different tasks, spreading the processing power among the different subroutines that needed to run, including those involving consciousness. By varying the number of cycles per second devoted to his consciousness subroutines, he could alter his perceived time sense.

  Eric wasn’t sure how to proceed, and he was about to ask Dee for help when she enlightened him.

  “You can access your time sense settings from your HUD,” Dee said. “Under the Power Management heading.”

  Power Management? Eric thought. Why place it there? Seems like poor UI design to me.

  “Ah yes, you’re a programmer,” Dee said.

  Damn straight, Eric thought.

  “You do know programmers are renowned for their terrible UI designs?” Dee pressed.

  So you’re saying the HUD UI was designed by a programmer? That’s no excuse. I’ve made better UIs than this.

  “You can customize the menus as you see fit,” Dee said.

  Oh.

  He’d do that later. In the meantime, Eric went to the menu in question, and found a menu titled Time Sense. Underneath was a dial, with one thousand different settings. The dial was currently positioned at the middle setting, which pointed at zero—ordinary time. There were five hundred units to the right, and another five hundred to the left. Turning that dial to the right would lower his time sense, effectively speeding up everything around him. When turned all the way to the right, every one second for him would be the equivalent to one day in the real world. That was a great way to travel into the future—with the caveat that there would be no way to go back. It would also make long haul flights pass by in seconds. Wait times for the most popular rides in Disneyland would be reduced to mere moments. And military-wise, he could see the benefits immediately: if he was assigned to assume a sniping position several days ahead of a target, the wait time until that target arrived could be reduced to something more endurable. He could set up his Accomp to automatically alert him if anything unusual was happening around him, snapping him back to the present moment as necessary.

  When the dial was turned to the left, his time sense would increase, essentially having the opposite effect: slowing down everything around him. Human attackers would seem to freeze, and bullets would seem to be slow moving projectiles that left ripples in the air around them. With his time sense dialed up like that, his servomotor output would also increase, allowing him to maintain a perceived movement speed closer to normal, which to the external world would appear substantially faster. He’d be like Neo in the Matrix, able to dodge any bullets that came his way. So that explained why projectile weapons were seemingly unpopular in the future, used only by non-state actors like the insurgents. It was one thing to dodge bullets, but avoiding objects moving at the speed of light, like lasers, was a different story. Then again, his AI core
told him that there were smart bullets that attempted to compensate for a target’s directional changes, and that might not be so easy to dodge. Plus, if he was caught off guard, with his time sense set to normal, he’d have no time to react if an unexpected bullet came at him.

  Increasing his time sense wouldn’t help that much in a brawl against another robot equipped with the tech, such as another Cicada, but against an unmodded human, he’d win, no contest.

  He turned that virtual dial all the way to the left, increasing his time sense to maximum.

  4

  Eric didn’t notice anything different at first.

  A pair of robots happened to be entering the armory at that moment, and they slowed right down, seeming to freeze in place. Even Dickson was unmoving in front of him.

  I love this!

  He decided to call this Bullet Time going forward.

  Eric lifted the rifle stock to examine it. Though his mind was running at the highest possible speed, his body still lagged, despite the increased output to his servomotors: he was sensing time too fast for the actuators to compensate. He dialed the sense back down a ways until his body moved at a more normal speed. The robots walking inside began to proceed once more, though in very slow motion.

  Eric unfolded the rifle stock, telescoped the muzzle section, and tightened the rotating attachment at the tip. Then he put the weapon back on the rack.

  Neither Dickson, nor the robots outside, had moved the whole time.

  Yes, he was definitely liking being a robot right about now.

  A notice flashed in the lower center of his vision.

  Power drain, ten percent.

  According to his AI core, his current charge was supposed to last for two days, and he’d just gone through five hours worth of charge in a few seconds.