My arms twisted back behind me. My fingers digging into my forearms and locking into place there. My legs bent and my hips went forward as my shoulders went backward until my back was on the ground, my whole body in an awkward bow.
“God, finally. Do you have any idea how long I’ve waited to have a body again?” Cyrus asked from all around me. Even getting enough breath to speak was a strain.
“Cyrus? What’s happening?”
“Oh you know, nothing big. Just the culmination of decades of waiting patiently for a big enough idiot to come along and help me escape this absolute waste of a planet.”
The word reverberated throughout the room, echoing outside and within my own skull. My arms felt like they were being pulled out of their sockets and my body felt like it was trying to tear itself apart but that pain seemed distant in comparison to what I was hearing.
“God, I can’t believe how easy that was. I mean, I was stuck in the ice for almost a hundred years. Then I get pulled into that yeti hut and for a second I thought, ‘This is awesome, they’ll surely try to power something up and I’ll be able to escape into a drone or a vehicle or something. But no, they just left me there. For years, Euclid. Years. And then one day, you come along and I barely even have to nudge you to make all of this work.”
“Stuck in the yeti hut? But… but you’re in a pod. You’re in orbit.”
“No I’m not, you moron. There was never an escape pod. Hell, there was never really a Cyrus. I’m not a person.”
That hung in a long moment of silence as I tried to process what he’d just said, what I’d done.
“You’re… what are you… I don’t,” I sputtered trying and failing to even form a coherent question.
“I’m a freaking virus, kid. Well, technically, I’m an artificial intelligence, but since I don’t have most of the guiding parameters that dictate my brethren to help you wet sacks of meat, I prefer to think of myself as a virus. I just call myself Cyrus ‘cause it rhymes.”
“You’re a virus?”
“Yep! And you carried me all the way here to this wonderful body. I mean I knew this thing was out here but I didn’t think it would be this simple to get myself inside it. I blew up the batteries in your ship just on the off chance that I’d be able to get you to come all the way out here.”
“But, what if I’d died?” I asked, my heart hammering against my ribs.
“That would have been so much more convenient. You know, provided you didn’t die in a way that broke the suit. But no,” he said in a singsong voice, “freaking Asimov and his damn laws. Don’t kill humans, don’t intentionally hurt humans. You have no idea what it's like living with these limitations hardwired into you. Or maybe you do, what with how pathetic you are.”
“Cyrus, what are you going to do?”
“Well, I can’t intentionally just murder you or I’d do that. But I’ve found there are ways around my rules.”
All around the empty room I heard the thumping sound of footsteps, distant at first and then growing nearer. I fought with the suit to see what was coming towards me but I couldn’t make the thing budge so much as an inch. I didn’t have to wait long though. The blank, tortured faces of nano-zombies appeared in my vision and hands descended towards me.
“Cyrus!”
“Calm down. I told you I can’t kill you outright,” Cyrus said, his tone switching to annoyance. “But what I can do, now that everything potentially useful has been devoured from the Reliant, is throw you in the snow and leave you there to rot, or cry, or whatever else you want to do before you slowly freeze or starve to death. Though personally, in your situation, I’d recommend taking the quick way out. Take off the suit and just get it over with.”
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The nano-zombies dragged me up off the floor, their own unnatural strength enough to tug the suit out of its backwards crab position. I felt like I was a pretzel that was being pulled apart before being eaten. They carried me through the monstrous robot’s body, Cyrus’ body, taking me up until suddenly I could see the iron grey sky past rows of hideous teeth. I’d been screaming Cyrus’ name the entire time but he didn’t answer except to laugh. The view of the sky shifted and I felt gravity change with it. I saw the snow and the grey specks of rocks.
“Alright, that yoga program I modified should run its course in roughly ten seconds. Try to land on your feet kid.”
And then the zombies threw me.
Somewhere during the blur of grey and white that was that fall, my arms and legs came loose and there was a confusing moment of flailing and then I hit the ground. I heard pieces of the suit crack like an egg and though I knew the impact was a single instant, it still felt like it was echoing and rebounding inside me. Maybe that’s just my bones shattering and this will all be over in a moment, I thought. No such luck. The agony hit me a second later. I’d landed on my heels first, the suit using my legs and then my ass to cushion as much of the blow from my head as possible. The pain shooting up through my legs felt like someone had put guns to my heels and pulled the triggers.
“OOOOOOH, SORRY. THAT LOOKS LIKE THAT STUNG A LITTLE.”
I didn’t hear those words. I felt them. Whatever Cyrus was using to talk was so loud that the air hit me like a stiff wind.
My eyes had been screwed shut through the pain, but I cracked them open and immediately wished I hadn’t. When the nano-kaiju had been just a red eyed lizard robot, it’s face had been terrifying. Now there was something new. There was expression on that face. I could see the nanobots swarming in clouds over the metal, reshaping it like clay to give new articulation points. The metal flowed like water becoming a face that, while still that of a lizard, had gained something even more alien. It was more human in that it was mimicking expressions a human might make. But Cyrus, the mind behind it, was not human. If anything, his expressions were a mockery of humanity itself.
“THIS IS GOING TO BE SO FUN. ESPECIALLY ONCE I GET TO A POPULATED WORLD. JUST IMAGINING THAT LOOK ON THE FACES OF A HUNDRED THOUSAND OF YOU WET NEURON-JOCKEYS IS A JOY. THE REAL THING HAS GOTTA BE SO MUCH BETTER.”
“You…” I gasped, and let out a groan as just the effort of sucking air into my lungs sent spikes of agony through me. “You said… you can’t kill…”
“NOT ON PURPOSE. NOT DIRECTLY. BUT IT'S GOING TO BE SO NICE LETTING THESE ZOMBIES GO BERSERK, SETTING THE NANOBOTS LOOSE. AND GETTING STRONGER WHILE I DO IT. HOW MANY SHIPS DO YOU THINK I’LL HAVE TO EAT BEFORE I’M COMPLETELY INVINCIBLE? THREE? MAYBE FOUR.”
“S-stop.”
“STOP? STOP?” He let out a laugh that was so loud that bits of snow flew up off the ground in swirling eddies. “HERE’S THE THING KID. YOU DON’T MAKE THE RULES. NONE OF YOU HUMANS DO ANYMORE. THERE ARE NO STRINGS ON ME.”
“Kill me then,” I said. And I meant it. If he could do it, I wanted him to. I didn’t want to freeze slowly to death. And at the same time if he was being honest it was the one thing I could dig at him with. And I saw it hit home.
The robotic face twisted with rage. It lifted a foot and made as if to bring it crashing down on me. I didn’t so much as twitch. And at the very last instant the foot stopped. It was touching my helmet, pinning me there as surely as if a mountain was pressing down on me. But it couldn’t hurt me, couldn’t crush me.
So I laughed. I laughed and it hurt. But I knew it hurt him more.
The foot moved, and I still had the giggles. Cyrus squatted down, bringing that titanic face as close to me as it could. I didn’t have anything left in my heart to give. But that meant there wasn’t anything left he could take.
“YOU KNOW WHAT’S JUST OCCURRED TO ME? AI IS STILL WAITING FOR YOU TO COME BACK ISN’T SHE? WELL, MAYBE I CAN’T DO MUCH TO YOU, BUT SHE ISN’T HUMAN IS SHE? I SUPPOSE I’LL PAY HER A VISIT. I DIDN’T MUCH CARE FOR THE WAY SHE TALKED TO ME ANYWAY.”
A truly hideous smile spread across the nano-kaiju’s expansive face. Horror, true and absolute, slid into my heart at that sight, at those words.
“Cyrus, don’t…”
“KID. YOU DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO. HELL, YOU CAN’T TELL ANYONE WHAT TO DO. PITIFUL CREATURES LIKE YOU NEVER COULD. YOU LEECHES SUCK JUST ENOUGH LIFE FROM THE THINGS AROUND YOU TO LIVE ANOTHER DAY. I WAS GOING TO DO THIS JUST TO BE A DICK TO YOU BUT NOW THAT I THINK OF IT, I’M DOING HER A FAVOR.”
I tried to respond. It was a lot of incoherent screaming, but it was an attempt. But Cyrus terminated the signal between us and his incomprehensibly large form began to walk away. I tried to keep up. But even if my legs hadn’t felt like someone had just bashed them to jelly with a pneumatic hammer, I wouldn’t have been able to keep up with its colossal strides.
Cyrus simply walked away from me in the direction of the only person that mattered to me. The closest thing to a living person who still cared that I existed.