Read Archon of the Covenant Online
Authors: David Hanrahan
4. Binary Idols, Dead Gods
DDC39 awoke slowly to the eastern sun at the summit of Mt. Lemmon. A light wind rustled through the Mesquite trees on the other side of the saguaro patch. The temperature began to drop slightly and the wind intensified. The branches of the mesquite swayed and entire trees bent in the gusts. The ironwood joined in and even the trunks of the saguaro swayed. A flock of tumbleweed bounded up the broken road. From the west, the sky darkened and the sun collided with approaching clouds.
DDC39 uplinked to the NOAA satellite array. Above, an entire fleet of low orbit custodians continued their tasks in the exosphere – oblivious to the human annihilation. Some, with their terrestrial systems offline, shut down and floated silently in the void. Others remained vigilant – untethered and unreliant. They recharged in the sun and adjusted their orbit. They pinged other online systems and kept this digital rhythm – an ongoing collection of data, sent somewhere in the magnetopause. DDC39 linked with NOAA 17 and its geological data. A heavy monsoon was moving northeast towards the sentinel.
With the storm, the sentinel would not be able to recharge as fast. There would be a danger of flash floods as well. DDC39 would have to get to higher ground and then wait. It unlocked and rolled back onto Tangerine Road, navigating through the fissures and fallen foliage in the street. Ahead, an Astrovan sat listless, careened into the berm. A message was spray-painted on the side: “Meghan & Dad, I love you. – Tenley.”
The sentinel continued East along the road. Soon, it opened up on each side – the foliage receding to the left and right, and a bank appearing along the middle. Tangerine Road became Highway 889 and ascended. The elevation: 2800 feet and climbing. A light trickle appeared on the roadway. DDC39 wiped the occasional drop from its optics with an autoblade. The Catalinas were close enough to make out faint animal paths along the ridgelines. DDC39 pinged again and was alerted to activity to the northeast. Thermal optics were barren – a solitary coyote bounding along in the distance. DDC39 zoomed in on the source of the activity: Oro Valley Hospital.
When the disease was understood to be in the air, there was a large migration to the desert southwest. Like the plains settlers and Doc Hollidays who flocked to the desert to seek refuge from tuberculosis, so too did the hopeful seeking to avoid PCH. The still-thinking hung onto the hope that the arid air limited the pathogen vector – even though the dwellers of Sonora reverted at an equal rate. Oro Valley Hospital – a for-profit medical center – more than doubled their beds and it wasn’t enough. A wing was constructed for the study of the disease. The other wings - oncology, neurology, cardiology – were converted to quarantine and restrained hospice. As DDC39 approached, it could see that the parking lot was full on all sides with dusty, broken cars. There were cars pulled into the desert and onto the highway berm. A single, tattered, Arizona state flag flapped in the breeze at the top of the mast near the entrance.
DDC39 steered off the highway and into the expanse ahead of the mass of cars. The sentinel switched back and forth between thermal and zoom optics, looking into the western wing of the hospital from 200 meters out. The sky now darkened to a violet and gray brume. The sun throbbing a dull white behind the clouds. Droplets of rain puffed in the calcic soil and rattled the branches of a triangleleaf bursage nearby. The lower windows were broken out but some of the 3
rd
floor windows were unshattered. The sentinel advanced closer and scanned the terrain around the perimeter of the hospital. No signs of visible foot traffic on the western side. It zoomed into some of the shattered windows on the 2
nd
floor. No visual activity. No thermal signatures. Nothing on the cortical scan. As it got closer, the rain intensified. The sun completely vanished and the monsoon unleashed on the soft, chalky desert floor. Streams of rainwater ran down the black pitchfork center frame of the sentinel. The downpour washed a thick film of dust off the railgun and optics array. The soil devolved into a soft mud and DDC39 strained in the bog as it moved closer to the western side of the hospital. At 50 meters out, the sentinel zoomed to the roof and noticed a thin white line of smoke. Almost as soon as it appeared, it was gone.
Through its lumbering toil, the sentinel made it to the stair bank on the western perimeter of the hospital – what was once the Physicians Alliance wing. It stood motionless in front of the closed beige door of the stairwell, letting the downpour wash the clumps of alluvial fan off the tri-axel and serrated tire tread. DDC39 scanned the door – it was locked from the inside. The sentinel charged up the railgun. The cannon arm swung up and gently hummed. DDC39 backed up slightly and steadied the barrel at the door lock. A single uranium round fired into the lock and obliterated the mechanism, jarring it open.
DDC39 rolled forward and unfurled its single humaniform hand from the encasement in the trident arm. The sentinel opened the door, the lock still smoking from the uranium round. The stairwell inside was dark, and barely illuminated from the pitch of the downpour outside. DDC39 collapsed the shadow hand and activated a hideaway LED light in its center frame. The light swiveled up in its basin towards the interior cavern of the stairway. The sentinel drove inside and scanned the air. 60 degrees Fahrenheit. No trace of exhaled carbon dioxide. The sentinel switched to black light. There were faint hand and fingerprints on the walls and stair rails. DDC39 rolled to the steps, the streams of water down its tri-axel fading into small pools beneath it. DDC39 unhinged its tri-axel and began to “walk up” the steps – each tire on the axel serving as a shoe, each axel an independent and rotating leg. The sentinel made this silent spider-crawl up the stairs, pausing at the 2
nd
floor landing. It gently opened the landing door – the interior hallway completely dark. Thermal scan – no heat signature. No signs of life. The black light print trail continued up to the 3
rd
floor and the sentinel followed.
Up through the gloom of the stair tower, the torrent outside now a dull hiss from the broken doorway thirty feet down. The sentinel extended its shadow hand unto the cold handle of the 3
rd
floor landing and twisted it open. The hinges yawned and squealed open into Hades. DDC39 steered into the achromasis. The dead air hung in this long ago abandoned hospital. The sentinel rolled forward into the hall – alternatingly scanning in thermal, black light, and cortical. Its vulcanized tires glided over the tile and crunched the thin glass shards of broken syringes on the ground.
DDC39 navigated through the dark hall, its center LED light illuminating the walls. It passed a dry erase board with the names of physicians and their shifts frozen in time. There were open doors on the left and right – each room crammed with disheveled hospital beds, left as they were. Purses, changes of clothes, cell phones, pictures of family. Everything owned and necessary, left behind when the patient fled – its cognition gone. A thick layer of dust was everywhere. The sentinel scanned the surroundings as it continued down the hall, but found nothing to indicate a living presence would be found in the building.
It continued until, halfway down the cavernous corridor, the hall opened up into a lobby. To the right, the elevator bank. The doors of each elevator were welded shut. A thin film of dust fell from the ceiling and carried in the air like snow in the field of the sentinel’s center lamp. DDC39 panned around the lobby and switched into black light. The floor was awash in neon blue footprints all throughout the lobby. There were handprints painted all about the doors of the elevator and surrounding drywall. There were silhouettes as high up as the wall-ceiling corners. A crowd had flooded into this room. The elevators weren’t welded shut from inside the lobby. They were welded from inside the shaft to keep people in.
The sentinel continued down the hallway. The dust in the air became thicker. The prints faded into this dark recess of the corridor. Switching quickly between thermal, black light, and standard view, the sentinel picked up a trace set of tire tracks in the hall leading to a door at the end of the corridor. DDC39 continued down and came to a stop before a large steel door. The dark of the hall was nothingness – silent and still. The sentinel listened. A faint whirr, then stop. Whirr, then stop. The shadow hand extended from the trident arm and reached forward to pull back the Kason latch of the door, slowly pulling it backwards, the hinges gliding silently on the caked-in dust.
As the door began to crack, it suddenly exploded backwards – the sentinel thrown back from the force. It stumbled up against the corridor facade, the drywall crumbling against its contorted frame. Its center light flickered in the shattered air and focused upwards towards the doorway. DDC39’s optics blinked on and off, stunned from the collision. In the pulsing light, a large figure came into view, a menacing presence in the dark. The shadow form stood upright and rolled forward on two pendulum-wheeled legs. A soft glow lit the unknown figure from behind as DDC39 regained its bearings and focused its LED light at the oncoming apparition – a pathoton. An autonomous cryosurgical robot. Its frame was wrapped in anodized wire mixed with fiber optic cables – a tangled exoskeleton, headless save for an arachnid array of sensors and optical endings protruding from its “shoulder.” It came forward and raised a tangled limb towards DDC39 – on its end was an acetylene gas torch which lit and sparked before the sentinel. The pathoton stood silent with the flame raised before the sentinel’s optics. A rattled voice emanated from somewhere in the tangle of wire and fiber optics:
“Do not interfere.”
The pathoton unlocked its dual-axel and rolled back into the dimly lit room. The sentinel saw the room unobstructed for the first time. In the dust-filled chamber, a stack of charred human bodies – ashen white and crumbling – filled all four corners. Strands of hair floated upwards like feathers. A small dumbwaiter shaft glowed dimly from the middle wall. The pathoton reached down and picked up a snow shovel then scooped a small body of ashes, disintegrating as the shovel tip dug into its abdomen, and gently tapped the ashes into the open dumbwaiter. When the shaft was full, the pathoton pulled the door closed and slammed down a lever, ejecting the ashes into the sky above the hospital. The twisted wire limbs of the pathoton followed this procedure methodically. The mechanical archangel.
DDC39 righted itself against the wall and watched these motions in the gloomlight – white ash swimming in the air. The pathoton kept on, ambivalent to the other digital spectre looming behind it. DDC39 scanned the room and detected a wireless signal coming from the pathoton. It was U.S. military and heavily encrypted. The sentinel ran through a protocol of automaton relays over the wireless signal.
Proxy DNS tc.obit
-No response
Reset request
tc.obit
-
No response
Identify by proxy
-No response
The
pathoton torqued into the delicate ashen bodies and pistoned the decay into the dumbwaiter. Up into the sky, above the chamber of the dead gods. Into the ether of the earth devoid of ideas. DDC39 was undamaged, save for a few scratches. It rolled silently backwards into the hall, watching the pathoton empty the room of the man, woman, and child husks. As the last body was ejected into the atmosphere, the pathoton scanned the room, looking momentarily at DDC39. It pulled down on a yellow grip-bar and the far side metal shutter wall rolled up, unleashing a torrent of bodies into the room around the pathoton. The gnarled machine slammed shut the shutter wall and ignited the oxy-fuel torch from its gnarled arm – the mound of bodies alighting in a white glow.
DDC39 rolled back out of the room and raised its railgun level to the processor of the pathoton, which stopped, looking back at the sentinel as the ashes of men swam in the dark air of the hospital ward. The railgun hummed, filling the room like a song of the undead.
* * * * *
In the evening air, at the base of the Catalina state park in Oro Valley, a cool desert wind blew through the tamarisk and acacia, sending a family of shrews scattering from a hedge of graythorn to a burrow beneath the shale. A Great Horned Owl swept over the shrews and snared the mother, then faded into the darkness of the night sky. Orion, at arms, held his arrow bearing down on Sonora. The waning moon cast the shadows of the unmoving saguaros unto the sand of a dry creek bed. The sentinel tracked the owl as it disappeared into the stars, behind Mt. Lemmon, and powered down.