The road to Paris was littered with the hulls of vehicles whose occupants were the skeletal remains of those hoping to avoid the fallout of their impending doom. If I was able to feel emotion, my own emotion, I would feel sadness for humanity. Sadness not because they died, but so many were innocent to the acts of their governments who sent the hellfire down onto themselves without any thought of the people who they were affecting. 10 Billion people were annihilated within 12 hours of the first nuclear war being released from its chains and sent forth towards its enemy’s location. It was a miracle that there was anything left of the surface after the amount of shockwaves and nuclear flash. Unfortunately there was no contingency plan for fallout such as this: every country sending its entire nuclear arsenal upon their enemies. While scavenging the old facility where I was created, there were documents and schematics for a colonial shelter suited for the moon that could’ve sustained life through cryogenics. It’s doubtful that was true, since they were barely able to make me before being destroyed.

It would take me a week to reach Paris at the pace I was travelling. My consoles battery could power me for a month if I was mostly stationary, but walking so many non-stops drained it to about a week. Both the soldier’s and the cars units should be plenty to get me there.

On the third day since leaving Annecy I was more than halfway to Paris, avoiding hot zones that were littered with radiation capable of deteriorating my internals and causing me to walk in endless circles due to heavy memory corruption. My systems were constantly reminding me of radiation levels around me due to the obvious factor of what surrounded me; thankfully I could use this to track down Eve if I ever find the others. In places within 100km of a nuclear blast all the vehicles and buildings in the surrounding area were blown away to pieces within miles around. There would be nothing to scavenge for another few hundred kilometers. If my memory serves me right, the last time I was in Paris it was still heavy radiated and needed careful planning to find a route to the Louvre.

Through the green-tinted clouds above me I could see the sun begin to set and knew that it was time for me to give my joints a break while I recharge my power supply. After finding a mound to take cover behind, I wrapped myself in a large piece of fabric to protect my internals from the incoming storm that was approaching from the East. These storms were a constant thing since the war, clouds filled with shrapnel and pockets of radiation that breezed past large areas at a given time and kept travelling the landscape until it dispersed. Being out on the main road during these storms was dangerous and could lead one, even with an advanced sonar guiding system, to become disorientated.

While the fabric was wrapped tight around me I began to open the transparent cover above my internals and loosen the lock around my power supply. There was a silver cap on top of my cylindrical power supply that needed to be forcefully removed until a sort of nipple stuck out where you could connect it to a power supply. Everything in my body’s construction was made to be hard to access by outside forces and was made with plenty of safeguards against failure.

Just before connecting the car’s battery to my own through a wire connection, I could hear something flying through the air like a piece of tarp getting pulled by the wind. Turning my head to view where the sound was coming from revealed a long pole heading straight towards my direction. In a few brief moments I was able to close the cover of my internals and shift to the side to avoid the object which plunked into the ground in front of me. My body was trapped in the fabric and made me struggle to escape it. Before seeing that the object looked like a spear, I’d thought it was just something blown in from the approaching storm. Forty Seven meters away from stood a humanoid figure holding another long object in its hand like it was about to prepare for a warm-up in some sport whose name escapes me at the moment. My right hand was barely freed before another spear came huddling towards me. The clinks I encountered weren’t known to improvise weapons such as homemade spears, but perhaps a fault in their programming granted them a small amount of improvisation or maybe this one of the few newer models that wasn’t limited to only using firearms to engage their targets.

My rapid processing powers allowed me to raise my hand in time to catch the approaching object, my only move left since my body was currently immobilized. The object was a few feet away from hitting its target before I realized that I was still holding the car battery in my outstretched hand, a mistake.

The spear hit its mark on the edge of the car battery that was held in my hand. A moment after impact; the battery exploded into a cascade of sparks and flares which went off like a firework in my hands. The force of the blast sent my body flying onto the scorched earth below me and my processor needed to reboot for the interruption. 

Next Chapter: Four