The road to Paris was littered with the hulls of vehicles containing skeletal remains of those hoping to avoid the fallout.

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. Ten billion people were annihilated within only twelve hours of the first nuclear warhead being deployed. It was a miracle that there was anything left on the surface after the shockwaves from the blasts. Unfortunately there was no contingency plan for a 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 this much drained it to about a week.

On the third day since leaving Annecy I was more than halfway to Paris, avoiding hot zones that were littered with radiation. My systems were constantly reminding me of radiation levels around me; saving my internals from anymore radiative damage.  

In places within a mile of a nuclear blast; all the vehicles and buildings in the surrounding area were blown away to pieces. 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 around all the hot zones.

Through the green-tinted clouds above me I could see the sun was beginning to set and knew that it was time for me to give my joints a break. After finding a mound to take cover behind, I wrapped myself in a large piece of fabric to shield 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 you to become disorientated.

While the fabric was wrapped tight around me I began to open the cover on my chest to begin loosening the lock around my 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 wired connection, I could hear something flying 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.

Within moments I managed 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. A dozen or so meters away from stood a humanoid figure holding another long object in its hand like it was about to prepare for another attack. 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 change in their programming granted them a small amount of improvisation.

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 and shortly afterwards the battery exploded into a cascade of sparks which went off like a firework in my hands. The force of the blast sent my body flying onto the scorched earth, causing my hard drive to reboot.

Next Chapter: Chapter Four: Norman