Authors: David Dunwoody
By contrast, Jack DaVinci’s departure was very quiet.
Only those closest to him knew what he was doing, what mission he was embarking on; they’d secured him a taxicab retrofitted with parts, and plenty of fuel. As well as ammo.
He sat parked on the curb at State and Temple, watching a long-abandoned sewer reconstruction site that was the most likely place for the dreamers to exit with their vehicle.
And they did. In the early hours of the morning, just before dawn, the van rolled out and climbed up onto the street and set off.
Jack’s driving skills were a little rusty. Every couple of years he’d get out and go around the block in one of the few vehicles Gotham had. Nursing the gas now, Jack kept his lights off and allowed for plenty of distance between himself and the van.
***
The laws the synthetics followed were few and simple. One of them stated:
A robot may not harm humanity or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
It was by this law that the synths determined that it was right and merciful to exterminate mankind before it was reaped by the Harvesters.
Gotham was going to be difficult. A long-established community with plenty of resistance. Rumors of dreamers beneath.
The undreamers believed that, by extracting the nanoplasmic cortex, they were saved from harm. Not so. Synths were programmed to understand God, understand the concept of the soul, and thereby understand that nanoplastomy meant a soulless life and one not worth living. For mankind to propagate itself in that state was as awful as existing in the clutches of Nightmare and his legions. It wasn’t living at all, was it? For this, the synths saw themselves as agents of mercy. Bruce, descending on Gotham, knew that the humans wouldn’t think so. He knew the fighting and begging and pleading was coming, and that they would never understand - though they had programmed him with full emotive capabilities, it would never override his logic.
“How are you?” Bruce asked Macendale as they rumbled along in the back of the strike vehicle. Each had a dog at his side. The animals sat patiently, looking up at their masters.
“How do you mean?”
“You were conflicted over training paths re: the dogs. Positive versus negative reinforcement.”
“No, I understand,” Macendale said. “They endear to respect and attention over fear. A shame we simply can’t apply logic.”
“They do have their instincts,” Bruce said, “but what we require of them goes outside those boundaries.”
“Do animals have souls?” Macendale asked.
“I don’t know,” Bruce answered. “I suppose it’s a possibility. But then the Harvesters don’t express any interest in their dreams.”
“Asleep last night,” Macendale said, “my dog kicked and whimpered. It was dreaming. I let it continue until it subsided.”
“That was likely best.”
“I wonder what a dog would dream,” Macendale said. “Humans take scraps of thought and memory and assemble them into a scene. Do you think animals do the same?”
“I would suppose,” Bruce said.
“What would we dream?”
“That I cannot answer.”
“Gotham,” Delmar called from up front.
Cinnamon sat across from them. Bruce had once asked her why not change her name. She didn’t understand the point. He supposed there was none, anymore.
“I want another clean sweep,” Bruce shouted as the others prepped their weapons and the dogs began to murmur. “No hesitation.”
They spilled into a reservoir on the edge of town, formations streaming into the sewers and spreading like ants. It wouldn’t be long before they found the first of the targets.
Bruce and his mutt had the lead in the North Metro subway tunnel.
Record all your targets,
he communicated as he hopped down flights of stairs.
There are approximately two hundred and fifteen in this location.
He kicked down a steel door and caught the shoulder of an armed male on the other side. The man fell to the ground and took a round in his head before he could react.
Target 1, male, head shot.
Into the subway station, the platform converted to a common living area with the now-useless tracks as a system for workers and commuters. Three males and two females waking up on the platform, bleary-eyed under tarpaulins, weapons out of reach. Bruce gunned them down and, dropping into the tunnel, unleashed his dog. “Flush ‘em out, boy!”
The gunshots had alerted those within earshot. He could already hear shouts echoing down the tunnel. Around the first bend, he found his dog barking at a solid wall of chopped-up subway cars. Synths swarmed in at his back. Bruce admired the construction. It would take several minutes to bring it down. In that time, Gotham’s best would be up and ready.
This is going to be a mess.
The wall came crashing down. Improvised explosives showered the bots, blasting several into the walls. The tunnel lit up white and Bruce shut his eyes, staggering as an impact wave hit him. He knelt to shield his dog, knowing that unprotected canines would be the only casualties of these lightweight bombs.
Shrapnel and sparks came down in a hell-rain and then the humans rose up, a block of men with automatic rifles and well-constructed body armor. They screamed and opened fire.
Dogs at the back. Return fire.
Targets 7 through 22 went down in the first hail of Gyro fire. Bruce saw a man’s gun go off as he turned to run, saw the bullet take off another’s scalp along with a stringy bit of brain matter and recorded it as target 23.
Friendly fire.
Awkward term, he always thought.
Keeping his dog heeled, he advanced carefully, cutting into the retreating ranks of the humans. They would be falling back to another checkpoint, with more explosives, most likely. In the meantime, the women and children were being shuttled out somewhere in the back. Delmar and Cinnamon’s teams would catch them.
The synths kept a tight formation and washed the tunnel from wall to wall with Gyro fire. Chemical flame leapt at the running targets. Bruce heard 23 through 47 going down in quick succession. Why did they have so many men at the front anyway? Had they really thought they’d stand a chance holding their ground?
He’d often observed a “fighting spirit”, a passion, in the dreamer communities he swept. Not so much with these undreamers. No, this was almost a sacrifice. Maybe they threw themselves at the synths because they knew they really had nothing to live for. Or maybe it was to give the women and children more time. Just another part of the human mystique.
Bruce saw an alcove with a door and nudged his dog toward it. Kicking it in, he immediately spied several targets huddled down and trained his weapon on them.
Empty.
He was peppered with bullets. “I need backup at the front end of North Metro!” Shoving the dog outside, Bruce slammed the door and absorbed the gunfire coming at him. Then it stopped. It was silent, and he appraised the room in the light of an electric bulb.
Two families. Husbands, wives, children. Five children. All the adults were armed, and they still had rounds in their guns, he was sure of that; but they were just staring at him.
“Backup!” He snapped. His internal radio crackled. “Situation just down the line. We can’t spare anyone.”
Bruce holstered his gun. “All right.” He looked at their faces once more. The children, all prepubescent, dirty and shaking and clinging to their weathered parents who still held their guns up with trembling hands.
88 targets had been taken out so far. There seemed to be a stall in the procedure; the “situation” Bruce had heard about on the radio, but he had to deal with this first.
“Use your remaining ammunition on yourself and your children or I will have to use my hands.”
The mothers wailed. The children responded in kind. It filled the tiny room, and the fathers could only clutch at their loved ones and glare up at him, their tear-streaked faces asking that eternal question,
why?
Bruce wasn’t here to answer. “I’ll allow one minute for prayers and goodbyes. Starting now.”
The mothers cried harder, pulled their younglings in as if they could shelter them from the inevitable. The fathers looked at one another, realizing, accepting, and they placed their hands on their wives’ shoulders and someone started a choked prayer, a formality, for the children who hadn’t yet been operated on and still believed in a soul.
Bruce stood quiet in respect as the cluster of people wrapped their arms around one another, and he ticked off the seconds in his head.
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
“I’m so sorry-”
“Don’t be sorry.”
“Time,” Bruce said.
The parents drew silent. The children stared up at them, cherub cheeks glistening with tears of not being able to understand, of simply sharing in the grief and fear of their mothers and fathers. They waited for a cue.
“PLEASE!” A mother cried.
“Do it now,” Bruce commanded.
The mother’s husband said, “You first, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” and he cradled her in his arms and put the gun to her head and screamed as loud as he could. It didn’t drown out the sound at all.
The children began crying. The other father and mother nodded to one another, they lay down with their two young. Each used two shots, quick.
The father and his three, the three pressed against their still mother. He held the shaking gun and sobbed, “Please...I can’t...”
Bruce took the gun from his hand.
“Close your eyes.”
***
The “situation” was an armored subway train full of gunmen with bullets and bombs, and it had been taken care of and was a blackened husk when Bruce came out of the room in the alcove.
One hundred forty-nine targets down.
There was an underground water treatment plant that had been converted to a greenhouse of sorts, with a little farm using sod and soil taken from the surface world. It was all very clever, remarkable for those who had excised their own imagination. The will to survive still endured, Bruce supposed. Will was stubborn and illogical, perhaps more so than emotion.
Bruce walked out onto the swatch of grass they’d cultivated and stomped his foot. “There’s a door under here.”
So, they hadn’t tried to get the women and children out. They truly wanted to hold their own.
Macendale pried the trapdoor open and peered down. “Not a sight or sound. Probably goes into the sewers.”
“Then we go into the sewers.”
Bruce suspected that the targets were out of weapons now. This wasn’t to have been discovered. Clean sweep from here on out.
“Give me my dog.”
Standing at the bottom of the trapdoor ladder, Bruce reached up to receive his mutt in a harness from Macendale. “Find ‘em boy. Go!”
The dog took off at breakneck speed, already scenting its prey, and the screams came soon after. Bruce broke into a run. He called for his dog, not wanting it to be compromised by the targets. “Boy! Boy!”
He’d reloaded and taken on another Gyro. Pointing both guns down the tunnel, he splashed along and yelled “Boy!”
The dog tore around the corner and jumped at his legs. “Good!” Bruce said. “Now stay!” And he went on.
Target 150, male, head shot.
Target 151, male, head shot.
Target 152, female, head shot.
Target 153, male, broken neck.
Target 154, male, two shots to abdomen, one to throat.
Target 155, female, head shot.
Target 156, female, head shot.
Target 157, male, head shot. Sustained temporal damage from blunt object.
Target 158, male, one shot to torso.
Target 159, male, head shot.
He cleared a path for the others, and they swept in, and took every corridor, every room; the screams and the gunfire reached a cacophony and then began to descend rapidly.
Targets 160 through 190 down.
There were two hundred and twelve in all, close enough to the estimate Bruce had gotten from his infiltrator the previous month.
Did anyone kill a Jack DaVinci? Do you recall that file? Jack DaVinci.
All negative.
The storied hero had escaped again. Bruce had tracked him down through Canada (the armored subway car was his work, definitely) and watched him build up community after community. They would all be exterminated in the end, but this DaVinci...interesting character.