When I rebooted the room was covered in shards of glass and raining sparks from the exposed wires that lined the roof of the room. The light reds that provided the only source of light in the room were only in the hallway now – a hallway of glass rooms whose structure was partially shattered by the force of the blast.

I was alerted of the high radiation levels caused by the core meltdown of the railgun. When my audio was back – the sound of gunfire erupted in the distance from a single shooter. The joint in my left leg was twisted from the fall causing my leg to be turned at a weird angle that didn’t reset properly. After putting weight onto my good leg I was able to get up and look through the opening I was blasted through.

The hangar now had a freshly smoking hole in the center of it where any surrounding clinks were turned into scrap and debris that littered the floor. From the limited view I had I couldn’t see any movement besides the smoke and scattered flames. There was no way that giant could’ve survived the blast of that magnitude – neither could the hundreds of clinks that were destroyed by the blast. I had to hope that Norman was untouched by all the commotion and that I haven’t destroyed the only possible way out of the complex.

The room I was in led to a hallway that looked to have stretched across the length of the hangar. On each side the rooms were filled with one-way glass that revealed the bodies of clinks being constructed by robotic arms – most were currently in shambles from the recent blast. The path in the middle of the hallway looked like a soft of conveyer belt that led to the balcony outside – heading to the three large lifts set-up in the hangar. The rooms looked empty except for the occasional clink that was being suspended by a hook on their backs coming from the floor below them. The questions wandering in my processor were put to rest due to urge to find Norman.  

A few paces down the hallway I could see a red light flashing through one of the mirrors – the glass looked more intact than the other room nearby. As I approached the room it was clear that whatever was being worked on was not a clink – it looked human, almost organic. A man’s body was suspended like the others by a hook in the ground that protruded separate arms around the body’s legs and arms. A large cable was connected to the body’s head, that’s when I realized who the body belonged to. It was Norman.

His face was twitching, but it was indistinguishably his. A holographic sign flashed along the outside glass with the message;

“ERROR: MEMORY MERGE FAILED, OS NOT RESET.”

The core explosion put a halt to whatever was happening with Norman. Norman’s body looked organic unlike his old one, no longer missing most of the components that it was made with. I needed to get him out of there.

The glass gave away fairly quickly after slamming my fist against it; I hurried over to Norman and disengaged the cable that was connected to his head. The clamps on his body gave loose and he dropped to the floor, completely limp and unmoving. My hands were on his shoulder and I turned him around to face me. His face was no longer twitching, but was completely still. Whatever that machine was – it was messing with whatever memory he had left. He needed to reboot.

I opened my core programs and found the restore point of when the three of us synced in the entrance of the sewer. There would be a few gaps in his memory, but it would have to do.

The new body Norman was in was organized differently when it came to ports; his port to sync up was located in a little slot in the center of his chest where a clink’s would be. I pressed a spot on the chest and a circular portion of the skin slid upwards to reveal the USB port. The cable in my left wrist was torn to shreds from the shrapnel and barely functioning as is, so I used the one from my right to sync us. My vision slipped into blackness and all functions went void.

“Where am I…” I asked to the empty void.

“You are in my home, I wasn’t expecting you to come for him.” a voice said.

The voice was unknown to me and made it clear it was a third party, most likely the AI that was rebooting the complex here. I had to probe further.

“You are the one whose been reprogramming all the machines’ programming.” I said.

The voice was silent for a moment. The void of blankness that I saw was drawing a few lines of code, ineligible.

“Correct. I was programmed to bring an end to your makers from the old world. Without them, I have no function. So I redirected my focus. I know your purpose, this one told me as much, and I want to put an end to humans ever returning to this planet.”

We knew little about the clink’s origin, only that they were created by the Chinese and suspected to be run by an AI in the case that all humans were killed before the end of the war. The AI must’ve gone rogue and was trying to destroy any possible of life, ally or foe.

“Why did you take Norman –what could he contribute to your goal?” I asked.

“He was helpful in telling me where the fourth one of your kind is, this “Eve”, its too bad I couldn’t fully take control of him.”

Dammit… he knew too much and for all I knew, he’d already found her.

“Good luck finding her.” Was the last thing I said before cancelling the sync and shutting down the connection.

When my vision returned I saw that the room was no longer lit from the red lights on the floor. The only thing providing me with light was the nearby fires and sparks from the exposed electrical wires. My wrist was still connected to the docking piece in Norman’s chest – the information on my screen was saying that he needed a new power source due to a short circuit. The assembly line surrounding us should provide a suitable energy source for Norman, but there was no way I could carry his body across the conveyer belt to find one. Once I disconnected he would have to be left here while I looked.

My own battery was working overtime trying to make-up for the damaged parts of my body – even working at half capacity was still draining the battery three times more than regular.

I had the pay attention to the state of the clinks in the assembly line, it seemed like each section of the long hallway had its own process for installing things for the clink’s construction. For a simple machine clinks were surprisingly sophisticated in their construction.

After about seven glass containers from where Norman was, I saw a clink that had its whole chest cavity open wide – a glowing blue battery was sitting in the center of it. My body was already losing minor functions such as balance and coordination, but as I smacked the glass of the room I felt my arm weaken with every strike. With enough force in one spot the glass shattered onto the floor in front of the exposed frame. My one working leg collapsed once I entered the room. The glass below me torn into my synthetic skin as I crawled across it towards the battery, Norman would have to wait or else we would both be turned off permanently.   

My right hand was tightly gripped on the chassis of the clink whose upper frame was suspended from the ceiling with mechanical arms surrounding it. Pulling me up with one arm was almost putting too much stress on my mechanics. I reached with my left hand and gripped the glowing battery firmly in my hands. The battery was locked in place by a mechanism whose release was on the chest of the clink. My body dropped to the ground below and my vision slowly began gaining the static that occurs before shut-down. The last thing I saw before my system shut down was that glowing battery glimmering above me – in my reach, but unable to take it.

Everything went black and only minor functions were still running to keep my memory intact. I thought about how close we were to escaping this place and how Eve would most likely be doomed at this rate without anyone to protect her from the approaching army of rogue machines who are being ordered by an AI still determined to fulfill its old world programming, even though the ones who programmed it have long since passed.

I’ve lost Norman already before and now I was completely powerless to do anything…just lay here and wait to shut down. It wasn’t in my code to give up, but our bodies weren’t meant for combat let alone being active for this long. Perhaps it was time for the world to truly end? Even if we reached Eve, what then? It was being left to chance that the signal from the four of us would even broadcast anywhere.

I just laid there in the ruins of the factory.

Suddenly my system alerted me to movement, something was pushing me over. My chassis opened up and was alerted that the remaining 1.57% of my power source was disconnected

. It was only keeping me alive anyways.

“Power Levels are at 150% - Time remaining: 50+ Years”

My opticals began swirling and I was able to make out my surroundings – sparks were flying as I stared up at the ceiling above me, the same room where I shut down. The first thought that came to me was that I’d been taken like Norman has and repurposed to fulfill their goal of tracking down Eve, whose location was only possible to be tracked by the three of us. When my head tilted downwards, I saw a familiar face.

Henry was crouching beside my body; my chassis was opened with most of its protective layers removed. There was a collection of tools beside him that I remember being in my pack that I left with him – it looked like he was finishing repairing the wiring and hardware within my chest. The data pack in my stomach looked untouched by the damage that affected the rest of my body, which was a miracle. I decided to not disrupt him until he was finished.

The glowing battery from the clink above me was used to replace my old one – and Henry managed to glue my skin fibers and reattach the strands of my synthetic muscles back together, making my functionality close to 90%. When he was finishing up, I finally decided to speak.

“How did you manage to get here?” I asked.

Henry looked up at me and was relieved to see that I was alright – I saw now that half of his face was missing and his synthetic shell was completely exposed. I could see that holes punctured his jacket and his hands were burnt.

“I fought through them until an explosion took out the rest of them, good thing too because I was down to using my spears to fight the last few.”

“Are you hurt?” I asked him.

“I’ll be fine; we have to focus on finding Norman and getting out of here.”

We still needed to find a battery to boot him back-up, there was no telling how much damage the short-circuit did to him.

“He is a few blocks over – he has a new body and needs a new battery, we have to look quickly.” Henry helped me get to my feet and joined me in approaching the hallway.

The fires and sparks that illuminated the hallway were gone, now the only light source we had was the glowing battery in my torso and the headlight that Henry carried on his head. The hallway was eerily quiet for what it was like earlier – the only sound now was the crunching of glass beneath our feet.

I wasn’t exactly recording how many blocks I passed when I was searching for the battery for Norman, but it felt like we were more than halfway to finding from where I left Norman last. Henry held a hand in front of me in a gesture to tell me to stop. That’s when I noticed what was in the hallway in front of us.

When Henry shinned his light on the large figure in the hallway – I automatically registered what it was. The giant who I fought in the hangar was standing there, missing half of its body and the only remaining parts of the left side of it’s body was almost completely charred. The light of its optical was staring me down directly as it flickered. While Henry was retrieving one of his spears from behind him the giant marched forward towards us – disregarding any of the rubble in its way.

The spear flew through the air within an instant of Henry retrieving it – it flung into the clink’s chest and stayed there as it continued to march forward, not at a very fast speed. I felt a hand on my shoulder and the next moment I was pushed to the side through the window of one of the blocks, landing on an empty floor with shards of glass.

Henry was running in the opposite direction down the hallway while the giant followed suit, seemingly ignoring where I was when it passed me. There wouldn’t be any railguns nearby – it would be impossible to tell if the clinks were outfitted here or on another level of the complex so I needed to look around me to see what there was.

My night vision flipped on for the first time in a while and I saw that I was in a room where the metal sheets were cut for the clink’s armor. Long blades sat overtop a sheet of metal attached to a metal arm that came from the wall. If it was sharp enough to cut through sheets of metal – it should be enough to pierce whatever was left of the giant’s armor.

The arm holding the blade was completely inactive – hanging motionlessly from the wall. It was powered by a sort of hydraulic that made it cut through the steel with a combination of pressure and sharpness. I pulled the cord the arm holding the blade in place and kicked the joint until it gave loose. The walls around me began to shake as glass shattered– it didn’t sound all that far.

Once I was in the hallway all I could see is the headlamp that Henry was wearing on the floor of the hallway shinning towards the ceiling – the sound of banging in the room next to it. I ran straight towards the noise and paused when I reached the light from Henry’s headlamp – that’s when I saw it.

The only remaining arm of the giant was tearing off the right leg of Henry while it’s gigantic foot was resting on his chest making him immobile.

Both legs had been torn off by the giant now – Henry unable to do anything about it except for lay there and wait for his fate. 

Next Chapter: Chapter Seventeen: Nomad