R.R. Virdi & Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

Messenger

WE LOOKED TO OUR NEIGHBORS in times of war to be our enemies. It was the wrong place to look. We should have turned our gaze upward, to the sky—to space. In our preoccupation with ourselves, we missed them—the others.

Picture this, if you will. One moment, I was checking out of three years of reserve duty in the Indian Army, putting down my rifle and walking up the old beaten path to the house. My little one shrieked and bounded towards me. The wife, eight months pregnant, looked on fondly.

The path was overgrown: it was my job to trim it, to keep the weeds from spilling over into the driveway. It needed cutting. The little one needed new shoes. The car had rusted a bit. It was mundane as far as a life goes, but I was happy have these chores to return to. A simple life—a good one.

The next thing I remember, my wife was gone, my child was gone, my house a smoldering ruin. And I was wading through fistfuls of ocean, screaming in rage and pain as I poured missile after missile into the Enemy.

* * *

IT STARTED, AS FAR as we know, with an asteroid. Or what we thought was an asteroid.

NASA did their jobs, running their instruments and coming back shaking. Ordinary asteroids are fused lumps of rock and ice that look like potatoes tumbling through space. This one looked like a sleek cigar of mostly metal.

The press went wild. They called it Oumuamua, Messenger, a Hawaiian name that meant little to us.

People who knew what it might be—or suspected—called it Rama and waited with bated breath. Messenger zipped through our solar system and left. And those who remembered their Arthur C. Clarke heaved a sigh of relief. Sometimes you don’t want it to be aliens, even if they might give you the grand tour of the universe.

A year later, another Oumuamua—smaller, sleeker—slammed into the Moon. That first Messenger must have figured out what our instruments were like. By the time we knew it was coming, it was already too late. It hit the dark side of the Moon with the force of thirty-three nuclear bombs. A star blossomed on the dead lunar surface. The sun must have thought the Moon was winking at it.

There were those in the space industry who wanted to go look at this thing. Launch a probe, maybe a lander, figure out what the hell happened.

It’s the damned Moon, we thought. Who cares what happens up there? Besides, who had the money for a space industry, anyway? The economy was tanking, populations were on the rise, the world was going to shit, and the only thing I paid attention to those days was my horoscope: Goals you are trying to reach slip out of your grasp. Work harder this week.

We should have paid attention. We didn’t.

Within weeks, the first of Them landed. It streaked through the atmosphere, burning, screaming, and hit the south-west of India like the wrath of God. The explosion rocked the entire state of Karnataka. Downtown Bangalore became a smoking hole twenty feet deep with towers toppling around it like so many toy bricks. Glass shattered for miles around. Cars melted in the heat.

And something stood there in the carnage. Or tried to. Something burned, like wreckage, cracked and shattered with the heat of re-entry. Something with a great head and parts that spun and moved and steamed. Something with a mouth hung open, drooling fire and slavering.

Parts of my house cracked and steamed. From the ruins of my house came the awful smell of hair burning and flesh roasting.

It tottered. It screamed.

I tottered. I screamed.

It keeled over and died.

I keeled over.

I wish I’d died.

* * *

THE ORDERS CAME THE next day as I lay empty-eyed at my friend Bhanu’s place, thinking of her. Thinking of my Divya and my Anisha. And the unborn child. In the background, the TV blared. An overly made-up news anchor blabbed on and on and on about lights in the sky.

Bhanu came shaking his phone at me. “Arjun-ji! Arjun-ji! There’s more coming! They’re calling us up! They’re fighting!”

My fists clenched. My knuckles cracked.

“Let’s go,” I growled. “Let’s show them what all seven hells look like.”

As I left, I saw the evening moon, climbing high in the sky: except where I had once shown my daughter the hare on the Moon, there was now a trickle of darkness, like a great black spider creeping around the edge.

* * *

AND THAT WAS HOW I became one of the first Shikari.

This is me now. They call me Vishnu’s Vengeance. A hundred-meter machine of gleaming alloy punched out by Tata-Leykham Industries. My fingers are steel. My fists can crush buildings.

Once I dealt out death, one man at a time, with my INSAS assault rifle, my fingers sweating in my gloves and my heart thumping at a thousand beats per minute. Now I cradle a gun ripped straight out of a Russian battle tank—a smoothbore that I call Padma, Vishnu’s lotus. It is an apt name for this gun. It has laser sights and an autoloader that would make an artilleryman green with envy.

My fingers do not sweat, and my heart is a nuclear battery that will burn for five hundred years. I am a god of death.

And I wait in the darkness for my enemy.

It was not easy, becoming what I am. They only took those of us with nothing to lose. Not all of us who went in made it out. Those who didn’t die went crazy. But I held on. My anger grew with time. I screamed their names in the darkness—Divya and Anisha, Divya, Anisha—until the words turned into a mantra and became my will. And by the time the neuro-doctors strapped me in for processing and gave me the final contest forms, my hands shook so badly with anger that I snapped the pen and stabbed the paper. Maybe I was already insane.

Maybe I still am.

For when you take a man’s reason for life away from him, what more does he have to fear?

My enemy is wading now. Unlike the first mistake, this one gleams silver. Long, sleek metal legs slam into the ocean floor. Blue circuit traces cover the turtle-like shell in the middle.

“Babaji, the Enemy is a Spider-class,” says Bhanu in my ear. I can vaguely hear the roar of helicopter blades underneath the crackling audio. “Five legs, low center of gravity. I think we see a tail.”

Babaji. My crew call me Father. I am their Head, their Commander...their god.

“Telemetry confirms the Enemy is bearing three degrees to the left, speed thirteen knots, over,” crackles another voice. That is Sanjaya. In the Mahabharata, the great Sankrit epic, Sanjaya is an advisor to the king: his is the gift of seeing things happening a great distance away. How fitting that a Sanjaya fulfils the same role for me today. He is a good kid, young, a little awkward, but as sharp as a fine razor when he sits at that screen. “Babaji, I recommend you adjust main gun by 13-by-3. This should be a nice clean one, over.”

I raise my gun and sight carefully. I stand still. It must be a strange sight: an iron giant standing in the ocean before a city.

I fire.

The 125mm projectile leaves the reconfigured tank gun with a thunderclap. The strike is instantaneous: the armor-piercing spike of tungsten slams into the Enemy at a thousand meters per second. It rips a shoulder clean off the grotesque creature. It screams from some hidden mouth—a sound that will give children in this city nightmares for decades to come. Instead of blood, it leaks lightning.

I fire again, and again, and again, walking forward as I do. My aim is true. Padma never fails me. Rounds slam into the monster, ripping chunks out of the carapace. Gleaming layers of soft white and silver dance in the moonlight. And now for my grand finale. I switch to a special round—a 145 monstrosity tipped with uranium—and fire right into the hole at its heart. The round arcs slow and hits with a dazzling light that blinds us all for a second. I can hear Bhanu and Sanjaya cursing.

The Enemy screams one last time and falls. Mission accomplished.

I make my way to the smoldering corpse and stare down at it with an almost human-like fascination. I’ve seen these before. Nothing’s new...except the smell. I don’t take it in with the clinical—analytical—dispassion I’m supposed to.

A pixelated curtain of static white, tinged with hints of obsidian threads, washes over my vision. The hulking monstrosity is gone, and something makes it way to tickle my senses. Something I should have forgotten.

It’s an acrid odor, clinging to the inside of my skull with hooks, refusing to let go. It’s the smell of the past—of burning buildings, searing ozone, sizzling flesh—of a life gone by. Something I’d been made to forget, something human.

Shikari don’t smell. We process. We analyze threats. We neutralize them.

The jarring white carpet fades and my vision returns to normal. I brush it from my mind and bend to grab hold of one of the construct’s legs. A quick tug tells me the limb will hold under the weight and the tug of the ocean. I wrench on the creature and move toward the shore, keeping my mind on the task of retrieval.

We shouldn’t be studying these things, hauling them back to shore. We should be burying them. A few more rounds would turn each corpse into slag fit to sink to the ocean floor to join centuries of refuse.

I wade through the water, giving no mind to the waves crashing harmlessly against my body. Every impact does nothing but jar a memory out of me. I remember the days when, in what little free time I had, I paddled against the water and fought to not drown under high crests of seafoam.

Now I tower above it all. The waves do not touch me the way they used to. I near the shore, monster in tow, when another bout of discordancy lances through me, body and mind. My limbs grow distant and weary. Vishnu’s Vengeance is nothing but a hollow dream. I’m no longer of steel strength and resolve, of lightning computer thoughts and processes. I’m of something hot and heavy—something weary. A spot in my chest, something I’d left behind, burns and beats out of sync. Something wracks lungs I don’t have, feeling like they’re being wrung by iron cables till every bit of air is squeezed out of me.

I remember tottering. I’m screaming.

And it passes again.

My fist tightens around the leg I’m holding. The shore nears, and a crowd gathers along it. Strobing lights cascade off the tops of vehicles to spread out of the sands ahead, bathing the grains in faint blue. I twist and heave to pull the monster’s carcass through the final bit of water, sending up a new row of waves to crash before the onlookers. An alarm cuts through the din, wailing, and giant radiation holograms light up the air, almost as tall as I am. Ants—men—in white hazmat suits form a wary perimeter around the corpse. I need to remember they’re people. People: soft, organic, thinking—always thinking, worried, letting emotions drive them.

Curiosity. That’s what’s in their minds. That itch. The yearn to know. They had to understand what I’d killed. But what’s there to understand?

I was supposed to kill it. That’s all you could do to one of those. And I did my job. It should burn, much like a home—people, a little girl and her mother.

Everything flashes, and I become myself again. Vengeance. The thoughts leave me, and I am free to watch the little dots of white run toward the monster. They slow the closer they get. They inch, much like insects, concerned the immobile mass would somehow find a second life and wreak havoc again. It wouldn’t. Vishnu—I—had made sure of that. I’d made it burn. And it wasn’t enough.

More ants scurry around the fallen enemy, making their way close enough to touch its legs. They likely whisper among themselves over the marvel of creation the thing is.

I don’t see it. All I see is a burning house, a fading pregnant woman, the ashes of a little girl.

The coldness flickers again. Then, all feeling, like the visions, fade.

Scientists motion at neighboring crews to bring their tools over. They cut through its body with methodical precision, loading the bits onto heavy machinery so they can haul it off to wherever.

Curiosity. One word. Five syllables. The promise of understanding. It’ll make the fight easier. That’s their thinking. It’s what drives the little insects before me into their joyous circle around the harbinger of our doom.

Shikari are not to be curious. We’re decisive. We burn what needs to be burned.

My vision refocuses on the enemy and I raise my cannon. The small forms, clad in white, do not register as anything important. They’re nothing more than concentrated pillars of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. Base elements. The enemy still lay before me. It wasn’t gone, not completely.

But I could fix that.

I feel the charge rush through me as the cannon arm primes. I know what comes next.

The house on fire, smoldering ruins and bodies, and smoke blanketing the air above.

My arm grows distant and hollow, unresponsive. I stop, aware of what I was trying to do. The cannon lowers, and I turn my back to the people on the shore, fixing my gaze on the horizon.

Am I a man dreaming that I am a machine, or a machine dreaming of being a man?

* * *

BACK IN THE HANGAR, anxious tech-priests scuttle around me, tapping, tinkering. Little two-legged ants crawling everywhere. Phantom itches on my skin.

“It’s not the radiation, Babaji,” says Sanjaya, a worried voice in my ear. “Your outer skin registers a few rads, but the inner skin is completely untouched. Electronics, neural conduits, all in perfect working order. Your gun arm might need a re-servicing, but that’s it.”

I KNOW WHAT I SAW. I KNOW WHAT I FELT.

“I know, Babaji, but I can’t explain it,” he says, a desperate note entering his voice. “It’s not hardware.”

“Maybe you need some rest,” says Bhanu.

Unasked, the question on all their minds, the problem none of them will say out loud: Babaji, maybe you’re desyncing.

LEAVE ME, I growl.

They bow and back away. My children fear me. I sigh, the hangar reverberating with the emptiness I feel inside. But before they can leave, an alarm screams, and the voice of Command and Controls drills into my skull.

VISHNU TO BAY SIX. VISHNU TO BAY SIX. WE HAVE A SITUATION.

Bay six. My main reactor re-ignites. I break into a run, ripping cables out of my plugports. This is not good.

* * *

BAY SIX IS FIFTY KILOMETERS away, a vast fortress that dwarfs my own waterside dwelling. My bay is low, sleek, and modern—designed to be broken apart, towed down to wherever I’m needed, and re-assembled. Bay Six, on the other hand, is an immense thing built out of ten-ton blocks of stone. It is more than a launch pad, it is a temple. A shrine.

To the greatest and most fearsome of all of us.

A shrine to Kali, Goddess of Destruction.

My target is along the coastline, which lights up on my heads-up display. My steel feet claw small valleys in the soil. The lights of Chennai strobe in and out in the background, throwing small shadows of me onto the floodlit waters. For a moment I am a man again, with outsized legs, chasing a metal giant in the darkness.

Bay Six, all towers and spires, sits on a high artificial hill. The whole thing is lit up in a ghastly red. Alarms blare from inside. I can’t jump, but one push from me and the gate crumbles, and my steel bulk is in the main courtyard.

It’s a large place, almost ten square kilometers of stone and buildings. There should be people here, a veritable army, but nothing. There are vehicles, but they lie scattered and abandoned. The army flags are burning. The stone is slick and coated with a thick black.

SANJAYA?

Oil, I think. I follow the oil trail inside. Bay Six has three courtyards, one inside the other. I pass through the second courtyard, and here the metal of the military gives way to something older and more sinister. Giant stone frescoes adorn these walls, depicting the Mother Goddess in all her aspects: Kali creating, Kali destroying, Kali dancing on the body of her consort, clutching the severed heads of her enemies in her four arms, her tongue lolling with madness.

Except here, instead of the black-skinned goddess I grew up knowing, Kali is a metal giant. As I draw closer, the shapes resolve themselves: Kali, four-armed, wearing a skirt of human heads. Kali, holding her own severed head in her hands, the head drinking oil out of the stump of her metal neck, trampling a couple in the throes of passion.

The oil that I’ve been following is everywhere. It coats the walls. It drips from the severed heads of the statues and the frescoes.

SANJAYA?

A hiss, a whine of static. “Babaji...signal...block...reports...Kali...full desync,” comes the familiar voice. A hiss, a crackle. “Power...authorized...”

The voice fades away. I have a bad feeling about this.

The Kali technicians have always been more than just technicians. They worship her. My children call me father, but Bay Six... We’ve all heard the stories. It’s no small thing to see your gods come alive. And servicing the Mother Goddess has always been more than just an oil change.

I prime my lesser cannon and break through into the third and final courtyard. And I stop, and I shudder, even though I cannot feel horror in this frame.

Ants lie everywhere, lit by the flames that adorn the walls. In the flickering, I can see white hazmat suits. Cultist robes woven with technician insignias. Army uniforms. Great piles reach up to my knees, staked through and pinned with great metal rods. Arms wave and mouths scream in agony. From them ekes a slow, unceasing river of what I had mistaken for oil.

And above them, kneeling, is the four-armed Shikari herself. The firelight flickers across her red metal skin. The gaping maw is open in a terrible silent parody of laughter, the arms wrapped around her body, shaking. A necklace of severed heads bleeds onto the carapace.

KALI, DESTROYER OF ALL THINGS.

The gaping mouth closes, the great metal face droops to one side, the eyes shine a terrible and brilliant red.

VISHNU, PRESERVER, PROTECTOR, she greets me. HAVE THEY SENT YOU TO TAKE MY TOYS AWAY FROM ME?

I raise my main gun in response. She shakes her head, and out of the throat comes something like a chuckle.

YOU THINK YOU COULD TAKE ME?  She roars, spreading her four arms wide. Flames sprout from her mouth, charring the closest of the piles. ME, THE FIRST, THE MOST TERRIBLE?

I CAN TRY, I say, BUT I’M NOT HERE TO FIGHT. POWER DOWN, KALI.

She screams at me, a sound that will carry clear to the cities nearby and make grown men tremble, and leaps. It’s a noise that could make my unflexing steel buckle and warp. But I’m ready. I leap back and fire, aiming for the knees. My trusty Padma spits hellfire. Kali’s left knee explodes. The great arms miss me by mere feet.

She makes no attempt to defend herself, but claws at me, as if to rip me apart with just her hands. I swing out of the reach of the crushing arms. My autocannon rake her sides as I roll. She staggers, crushing corpses, swearing. Her curses are a stream of napalm. I kneel in the slick ooze and fire again. She slumps, red eyes confused.

WHY? HAVE I DONE SOMETHING WRONG?

THIS IS TERRIBLE. THIS IS EVIL.

The great head lolls about. Something is happening inside. WE ARE TERRIBLE! WE ARE GODS! THEY WORSHIP US AS GODS! WORSHIP DEMANDS SACRIFICE!

I look down at the screaming heaps of dying men and women. WE WERE SUPPOSED TO PROTECT THEM.

She wavers, as if confused. And then some part of her—the part that once knew love and duty, the part that signed on a dotted line—regains control, and she realizes what she has done. She screams, a long, wailing shriek that will haunt my nightmares forever.

* * *

“THAT’S THE FOURTH,” says Sanjaya softly. “Kali-Shikari is too unstable. I think they’ll retire the whole line.”

“It’s the arms,” says Bhanu, who has studied these things. “Too many arms, too much weaponry. Too different from the human body-map. I’m going through her technicians’ logs, and it turns out she’s had the symptoms for months. Memory loss, confusion, the shakes. Nobody reported it. They were too busy worshiping her.”

They speak to me from the comfort of a helicopter gunship, safe in the distance, as I accompany the long train towing the bodies of men and women out of that terrible place. Long lines of the living, men and women, are converging on the site, the charnel stink keeping them away from me, but still close enough that I can hear their wailing. The families of the dead, probably. There are picket lines and a politician holding court. I pause to look at them, and they shake and back away.

“Six hundred staff,” says Sanjaya. “She butchered six hundred.”

IT’S NOT JUST THE ARMS, I want to tell them. SHE BECAME WHAT THEY THOUGHT SHE WAS. SHE BECAME A GOD.

But I don’t. Instead, once the train is done and the officials have made the appropriate noises, I wade into the ocean. The waves wash over me. The moon is bright tonight, like an iridescent pearl, and the water rocks me gently as my feet sink into the ocean floor.

“Babaji?” tries Sanjaya, ever faithful.

LET ME BE, I tell them, weary beyond all measure in a body that can never feel tired. Kali’s scream still rings in my head. LET ME REST.

It is hard to see a Shikari gone bad. It starts with little things—anger, memory loss, small tics and tremors. The human mind is a fragile thing. We were meant for a fleshy prisons, not these bodies of steel and alloy that they put us in. Touch. Taste. Adrenaline. Dopamine. Oxytocin. Emotions. These things matter. The software that they wrap around us tries to simulate this stuff, but nothing’s perfect. Eventually, the sheer wrongness of it gets to you. Once the neural feedback loops kick in, you’re done for. Anxiety, terror, depression—they told us this in boot camp. It starts with the shakes. Then the blackouts. Time lost, unaccounted for. Then the hallucinations. Psychosis. The fragmentation. And not always in that order.

The Kali line has always been a bit on the manic side. There are others that have just stopped moving, lost all will, until the techs ripped them apart and dug into the brains and found nothing, just dumb software running routine checks, the ghost of a pilot somewhere inside occasionally lighting up something in a poor imitation of life.

The techs call it desyncing. We—those of us who fight—call it death. All we had to do, they said, was hold on long enough until they’d figured out how to make AI that could do the job.

All we had to do was kill and kill and kill until we die, screaming, inside the metal tombs our own bodies.

A new voice penetrates my skull. “Vishnu, this is Command. Report for debriefing ASAP, over.”

The waves wash against me in silence.

“Vishnu, I repeat, this is Command. If you can hear me, report for debrief immediately, over.”

I HEAR YOU, COMMAND, I say at last. I’LL BE THERE SOON.

And in the darkness, my hands shake.

* * *

COMMAND IS AN OLD MAN in battle fatigues, tall but bent with age, surrounded by a rolling office of technicians and soldiers who all seem to have the same face. The only one in nonregulation uniform is the psychiatrist, a woman dressed in short, strangely utilitarian green. They make me go over what happened.

I play back all my logs, explain my interpretation of the incident. The technicians make notes and parse the data, making incomprehensible noises to each other. The psychologist walks dangerously close to me, heels—who wears heels in a military base?—clack-clack-clacking against the steel, peering up at me. The old general is frowning. I have the strange feeling that I’ve seen him before, but for some reason—maybe because this place is shielded—my facial ID system isn’t working properly.

“And you’re one hundred percent positive you saw no signs of desyncing before this? One hundred percent?”

MY LAST DEPLOYMENT WITH HER WAS IN SEPTEMBER.

“Dammit,” he says. “We’re losing them faster than ever.”

“Perhaps it’s the upgrades, sir,” one particularly noisy technician volunteers. “The neural load on Kali must be very high already, and those six arms... It’s not like we’re built to operate six arms—”

The general quells him with a look. She mumbles and falls silent. The psychiatrist, meanwhile, has come to a stop in front of my arm.

“Vishnu-ji,” she says. “Why is your hand twitching?”

BATTLE DAMAGE, I say automatically. NEURAL FEEDBACK FROM REPETITIVE GUNFIRE. IT HAPPENS.

I don’t know why I said that. It’s not true.

The psychologist doesn’t believe me. But I am a god, dammit. You will believe me. My twitching hand curls into a fist.

“Leave us,” the general says to the psychologist.

She hesitates. “Sir, I am mandated by the High Court—”

“This is a military facility, Doctor Chaudury, and when I say leave, you can either walk out or be thrown out.”

He waits until her clack-clack-clacking has died down, then turns back to me.

“Lieutenant,” he says. “I’m talking to the man I once signed up and trained for this job. The man inside this tin hulk. You there, Officer?”

I AM VISHNU.

“Lieutenant Arjun Shetty,” says the general coolly, looking straight into my eyes. Eyes the size of his head. “They can put you in a glorified metal uniform, but you’re still the boy I took and trained into this.”

I AM VISHNU, SIR.

But suddenly I know him. And suddenly I can see the faces of the people standing around him. They’re not the same faces at all. The only thing they have in common is that they all look terrified.

“I know you’re dying in there,” he says, not breaking his gaze. “I know you’ve fought for your country and you’ve done us proud. But there aren’t enough of you. Not enough Shikari, not enough soldiers like you willing to put their hearts on the line for our country. So I’m going to give you an order: if you’re going to crack, you’ll tell us. You won’t hurt anyone. You were built to protect. Vishnu. Shetty. You are protectors. You don’t fall apart on us the way that bitch did, you understand?”

My fists clench and unclench. One of them is shaking, and I can’t control it, but I can still salute.

SIR.

They haul me into a metal coffin and take me home. On the way back, Sanjay keeps trying to tell me something.

“The DRDO research guys made a huge breakthrough, Babaji,” he keeps saying, over and over. “It looks like those creatures are silicon-based through and through. Silicon-based! It’s not armor but skin! Just like you, Babaji. They say it looks like every inch of that body can suck up silicon, basalt, carbon, all sorts of material, and use it to heal and grow. Their neurons look like transistors! They say the skin samples even look like they can replicate! Sand, Babaji, sand!”

THAT’S GOOD, I say, not really listening. I’m trying to keep my hands from shivering. Open. Close. Open. Close. There is a darkness closing in that is more than just the darkness of the transport vehicle.

“Explains why they hit the Moon, yah? All that material just lying around. They hit the Moon, replicate, replicate, leap down the gravity well to the Earth, and we have so much more silicon lying around, our crust is like twenty-five percent silicon . . .”

SANJAY. I DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHAT THEY’RE DOING ON THE DAMNED MOON. JUST TELL ME IF THIS MEANS WE CAN KILL THEM FASTER.

Sanjay, for once, ignores me, too caught up in his own excitement. He starts yapping on and on about logic gates and electromagnetic fields and disruption flows. All I hear is “EMP” and “bomb.”

“That’s why that Japanese Shikari was doing so well, Babaji! The Matari, remember? Susanoo or some strange name like that. Electrical discharge weapons? Their Lightning Whip technology?”

THAT’S GOOD, SANJAY, I say slowly, letting the darkness take me. Open. Close. Open. Close. THAT’S VERY, VERY GOOD.

* * *

I DREAM. I DREAM OF darkness and moonlight on the ocean, of thunder and lightning, of a man screaming in pain as his wife and children die.

And in my dreams, the darkness rises and crashes into me, bowling me over.

* * *

I WAKE.

The ocean swells. My quivering hands: waves roll, I shake. Roll. Shiver. Roll. Shudder. Roll. Shake. There’s a voice in my ear and a terrible buzzing in my head.

The moonlit ocean touches my skin, and I taste the ghost of salt water in a mouth that no longer has anything to taste with.

Not far from me lies a dark and terrible shape, bleeding a thick ichor that turns the dark ocean silvery.

It wasn’t a dream. I’ve blacked out. The ruins of my delivery vehicle lie twisted and mangled on the shore. There’s a crater of some kind there that I can’t process. The road is twisted, tangled.

Am I desyncing? Is this fear that makes me shake? Fear is for ants. I am Vishnu. I get to my feet. Warnings, error messages. My servomotors are screaming. L3 and L4 command relay nodes are down; the backup routing system has taken over my entire left side. My secondary batteries have almost been ripped out of my ribcage. My cannon is almost out of bullets.

“Baba-ji—” Crackle, hiss.

The Enemy lies just a stone’s throw from me, bleeding but conscious. It reminds me of a time where I perused the Internet, looking at the bizarre crosses of creatures artists came up with. This one falls somewhere between a lobster and a scorpion. Four crustacean-like pillars support its bulbous body, all layered in glistening chitin. Segments of folded shell stretched out far behind its body. I can see where my bullets have blasted it to bits, gouging out silvery chunks of flesh the size of men. A pair of pincers, broken and shattered now, sit at the ends of knobby limbs protruding from below its flat skull.

A great eye turns in its face and rolls to greet me out of that nightmarish bulk. Curved, sickle-like mandibles erupt in a terrible grin from what might be its face. Something thrashes behind it, stirring up new waves that bow out to the sides before falling flat. Another of the appendages breaches the surface of the water, flailing alongside the first.

Even in death, it challenges me. I fire once, twice at that hideous eye. At this range, the bullets explode with so much ferocity they reduce the entire head into silvery rice and curry.

And suddenly there is a great thunderclap as a meteorite hits the ocean not far from where I stand, sending up a wave that smashes into me like the fist of God himself. I’m picked up and flung head over heels. For once, my thoughts are cold, analytical. A new Enemy, I decide immediately as I scramble to my feet in the mud.

There’s no ceremony in its arrival. The creature shakes itself, sending beads of water back into the ocean. Its carapace is the color of burning rock. Ripples of red light dance over its shell, winking out of existence as it turns to face me.

The fear drains away. Vishnu doesn’t do fear.

Something like fangs click together like a helicopter’s blades against stone. Something like arms bare. Something like a mouth screams.

It’s a challenge. One I intend to meet. It rushes me, moving through the water with an ease that shouldn’t be possible for something with its body.

I swing Padma around, operating with the efficiency only programming and nerves of fiber optics can bring about. I fire. Twin reports ring out, deafening my auditory systems to all other noises hanging below the explosions.

The Enemy reels as plumes of fire blossom over its plate-like chest. Tails whip across the surface of the ocean in a frenzy. Silver collides with water, foaming on contact and sending up pillars of steam that vanish almost as quickly. The monster’s body cracks like it’s being pelted by a storm of river stones. But it doesn’t stop.

I take it for what it’s worth: A minor problem. Solution: Destroy the Enemy without reservation. Maximum effort and energy expenditure.

I re-prime my cannon, loading up all secondary barrels. I’m down to my last two uranium slugs. It’s too precious to fire. But I have my flechettes, tucked away somewhere in the terrible ingenuity of Padma. The gun spits once, twice, thrice, peppering the Indian Ocean with razor-sharp slugs of steel that rip through the air like a metal storm.

The feedback is terrible. A lance of cold electricity rakes the inside of my left arm as I track the creature’s movements. It surges forward, tails beating across the ocean to the sounds of wet thunder. Calculations flood my mind to answer a problem I hadn’t even considered: How fast is it closing in versus the speed of my cannon and the resulting explosion radius?

Answer: Too fast.

A part of me pauses at the results. I see the numbers and know the exact measures I need to take, but the math doesn’t add up. My vision flares. The math always adds up. Not now. The numbers make sense, but not to a man who remembers a burning building, smoldering bodies, and that he’s tottering in place.

Vishnu screams at me, clearing my vision, commanding me to fire. But I am Vishnu. And I’m torn. Something visceral manifests in my gut, knotting and writhing like a bundle of spastic eels.

I lower the cannon.

And the Enemy slams into me.

I teeter, but something keeps me from falling over. My body pivots and I feel it grow farther away. One of my fists balls and crashes into the side of the Enemy. Another thundercrack as its shell splits from the impact.

Vishnu screams at me. The cannon. The cannon. My hand shakes, and the cannon feels like a dream. I can’t make sense of it. It’s formless—an idea that a man who’s lost everything clings to. A tool for revenge that can’t come. My other hand forms a stiff shovel, plunging itself into broken shell as it tries to stitch itself back together.

A terrible warmth spreads over my fingers as I root through its insides. Its silvery mass clings to my digits, registering a series of numbers related to bodily temperature, volume, and the chemical makeup of the Enemy.

I push the data aside—push Vishnu aside. A primal scream builds in my chest, rattling its way through my throat. It’s the noise of a man who has lost everything. A man who’s nursing the fire of a burning building deep within him. The kind of fire that sets your marrow alight.

I use it to drive my hand deeper into the Enemy, rooting around inside its body. A mass, like a bundle of roots, brushes back against me. I close my fingers around them and rip. The mass resists me, sending the crustacean-like monster into a twitching frenzy.

It thrashes, trying to shake me free. One of its pincers clubs my side as it brays in warbling tones.

The impact shakes through me, registering on two levels: Vishnu takes it in with a calculation reserved for machinery. Sensors, feedback, line failures, energy pathways recalculated, recalibrated.

I feel like I’ve been hammered by clubs.

The creature yowls, mandibles clicking in staccato beat.

I ignore it as the heat inside me builds.

“Vishnu— Babaji, come in. Your readings...all over the place. We think you’re desyncing, Babaji. Repeat—desyncing. Acknowledge? Return to base. Babaji!”

Desyncing, me? My minds turn to Kali. Vishnu remembers her, a goddess. A destroyer. I remember what she’d been pushed to. What she’d done. And how she went out.

I CAN’T LEAVE NOW, I try to tell the crackling line, but nothing meets me but the hiss of static.

One of the Enemy’s tails lances overtop its body, coming down to drive the bony spear-end into my shoulder.

Instinct, not programming, drives me to reach overhead and grab hold of the monster’s tail. I dig fingers of steel, driven by man’s iron resolve, into the armor-skin. I hold tight, remembering my other arm—remembering Vishnu. I prime my cannon, load my last uranium slug, and fire point blank.

The explosion knocks me back like a ragdoll. Sensors in my arm scream. Brilliant light, too many shades for me to make out, wash over my sight. The heat prompts a series of numbers to scrawl over my vision. I tune it out, feeling the inferno instead. I’m reminded of the first time I touch my hand to a gas burner, despite my mother’s warning. The heat is of a temperature where all I feel is just the first flash. The rest is a numbing weight I can’t process. My skin is heavy. Too heavy. The Enemy is screaming. It is reeling.

I stagger back, planting my feet as Vishnu’s thoughts echo in the background.

“Babaji—” Static crackles behind his words. “—desyncing. Return—”

The words fall away, carrying no meaning to me.

Water plumes in the distance. A second pillar erupts next to the first formation. Two more creatures, mirroring the one in front of me, emerging, skins glowing red and steaming from the heat and the water.

Vishnu runs a calculation on the odds of survival.

I ignore it, fixing my gaze on the thing that staggers and screams. My chest aches. Vishnu tells me, us, that our plating is scorched. Bits of my torso are slagged to near unrepairable status. My cannon tires to prime itself, failing. The weapon’s mouth is the sort of orange you find in volcanos and metal shops. The metal warps in front of me, losing the hot and violent color as bits of globular steel fall into the ocean to send up gouts of steam.

I twist, jamming the burning and ruined weapon into the dying Enemy’s face, pressing those terrible snapping mandibles into the ocean, holding it down until the tail stops whipping and the arms stop ripping at my skin.

“Babaji, disengage. Babaji, come home! Desyncing— You’re—”

Maybe I am. But I have a duty. Then they made me Vishnu, The Protector. I/we won’t fail. Can’t fail.

“Babaji, your mind...the signals. Come back!”

I/we force my/our wrecked cannon deeper into the shattered shell, twisting the arm back and forth until it buries well within the Enemy. The weapon still pulses in accordance with our will. The knots in our stomach, the molten anger, the cold crackle of Vishnu’s resolve... We channel it all.

Electricity arcs through us, making its way into the weapon, where it all goes wrong. Everything within our arm expands. The power falters for a wink, flashing out before coming back to scream. Fire builds within the cannon and finds its way out. Metal warps and gives way under the explosion. Carmine light, tinged with smears of vermillion, blossom across our vision and deep within the Enemy’s body.

I stagger back from the force. Hydraulic fluid, along with an assortment of other viscous liquids, stream from the remnants of my arm. The Enemy before me is a ruined and smoking shell. Noxious white bubbles out from what’s left of its shell, spilling onto the ocean.

I ignore it all to focus on the two creatures closing in. Vishnu is screaming that his systems are shutting down. His systems? My systems. We’re supposed to be one. I’m not sure what changed.

“Babaji...”

Vishnu’s screams are distant now, growing further away. The darkness swirls on the moonlit sea. My limbs are like grains of sand, loose and crumbling before me. I stagger forward a step, sinking deeper into the ocean.

“Babaji, disengage. Come back. Come back!”

Flicker. I can see them. I can see my wife and daughter. There they are, standing on the water. She’s running to me, leaving her mother behind. Something’s wrong with the way she runs.

Flicker. My daughter closes on me, mandibles clacking a discordant and percussive beat. Except she’s not my daughter anymore. She’s the Enemy.

Enraged, we right myself, twisting to launch an uppercut with my remaining fist. I fall short. Pincers slam into my shoulders. The pain drives Vishnu back into me, or me back into him, like two lightning bolts striking each other. The world becomes a pixelated haze that takes its time to clear. I/we can feel it, the steel skin tearing, the servomotors dying, the energy delivery subsystems winking out in showers of terrible sparks.

Our ruined forearm hisses spitefully, still steaming. It punches through the air-water almost of its own accord. The metal catches the moon’s light in full for a passing second, looking like it’s made from pearls, not steel, and then it buries itself in a mouth full of shredding teeth and is ripped from me.

Metal screams. We scream.

“Babaji, other Shikari incoming. Come home. Babaji!”

The Enemy in front of me opens a pincer and slams it into our torso, braying in a challenge.

We answer it in kind, releasing a warbling cry of whining metal and the cavernous booms of combustion engines.

We shove the creature back.

“Babaji, stop. You’re desyncing. Stop.”

Wrong. We’re not desyncing. His words make no sense to a machine. We’re merging. Becoming something more.  Vishnu is more than a machine now, more than a man.

The second Enemy arrives, slams into me. A knee joint explodes.

We scream again, clawing, gripping, pushing both creatures in front of us with our one good arm and the tottering bulk of our chest. We dig deep, clawing at what I can of our operating system core. There are things here we can use. The chemical makeup of the fluids pouring out of me. The conduit lines that spark in their death throes. And, here, here—our nuclear heart, the great engine-furnace that powers our every move.

Kali died deluded: a goddess of death, meant to bring that to our enemies. She brought it out on our subjects, on the ants, on our families.

Vishnu would die concluded. Resolved. A protector. Sparing the ants. Keeping them from screaming, burning, teetering and tottering like a man had so long ago.

We scream louder, pushing the Enemy back, hanging onto it like grim death. We need to get them out. We need to get them away. Our heart responds to old subsystems buried deep within me, throwing up a myriad of fail-safes in my way. Are you authorized to do this? OP-4 level clearance required. Are you sure? Runtime diagnostics required. Confirm damage threshold?

A blazing pincer cuts through the night, burying itself in our side. It digs in. Metal mandibles sink into our shoulder. We are being pulled apart.

“Babaji!”

That’s what they call us. We’re their god. Their protector. My wife. My daughter. My crew. All of them.

“Babaji!”

Vishnu. That’s who that title belongs to. Not the man inside him. Am I still one?

Are you sure you want to do this, asks our heart. This will result in critical damage.

We don’t want to destroy our heart. But yes, yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

The ocean threatens to swallow us now. It creeps over my waist as the light before my eyes dims. It drags us away, machine and monsters locked in terrible combat, towards its dark depths.

Are you sure you want to do this?

Damn right we do. We are a god, and you will listen.

Command accepted. Nuclear core critical. System will destruct in 3...2...1.

And then the world explodes. Wiping out the monsters, wiping out the machine, wiping out the man. A new sun is born on the Indian Ocean.

And finally, there is peace.

Copyright 2018

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R.R. Virdi & Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
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