Amouri-Khan

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Andre Bertolino

 

         The sentry was on her lunch break on a day that couldn’t break through the fog. She chewed okra and gazed upon the gulf in a disinterested way. She heard a flapping as a small weathered sailboat emerged from the vapor, drifting silently with the tide. Its sails luffed in torn ribbons. She raised the alarm. With weapons drawn, a salvage crew approached from the island in a catamaran assembled from aluminum canoes.    

        The ghost ship’s deck was crusted with salt, bird droppings and the green patina of mold as was the being lying in the cockpit across the starboard lazarette with its hand on the tiller. It appeared to be steering the vessel. The youngest of the tribe, a brash augmented chimpanzee, reached forward and touched the ancient android’s helmet. On the machine's armor a green light blinked on. Its fingers loosened and then tightened on the tiller. They had heard legends of humanoid machines that walked before the great fracture and now, they believed. Its damaged optical sensors struggled to identify the biologicals. As the largest chimp stepped forward, the servos in his joints gave a metallic whine. He spoke through a blue tooth speaker strapped to a bandoleer over his shoulder. “If your cognition remains intact identify yourself, state your purpose, and the events that brought you here.” The seven Chimpanzees gathered around the machine to hear its response. From inside the androids’ helmet came a click and a whirr.

       “I am an amphibious pursuit android designed for littoral environments,” it said with a metallic echo. ”My targets were sixteen escaped cyborg chimpanzees and a human ecoterrorist. My mission parameters described them as escaped property. I remember being activated 7/7/2028. A human voice said Unit 13 is online. I glanced at my diagnostics panel before being dropped from a CH-47 Chinook into the Cooper River. The sky churned as my body leapt freefalling with knees bent and arms tucked, making subtle adjustments mid-air for wind speed just before I sliced into the water making a brown halo. Engineered to slip through water silently without propellers. I swam with the subtle undulations of a cetacean. My sonar pulse rang through the depths filtering out fish. I swam behind the vessel of the Simians.”

         It spoke in a deep smooth voice with a calm cadence.

         “My prey, the Rhesus Macaques, emerged fifty-eight kilometers later. I sat there patiently covered in algae and sediment building an acoustic picture of the environment. My mission was simple track and report. My optical systems detected movement. My last transmission gave my coordinates (32.998341.-79.604519) and the message, “Targets Located,” but something jammed the transmission. I frequency hopped above Ku band and they still jammed me. Their heat signatures reappeared simultaneously around me. They came out of the grass on mechanical legs. I deployed defensive photocalls too slowly. They didn’t fight like animals. They moved with synchronized coordination targeting my communications nodes and mobility systems. I threw the first two into the mud. Then a third burst from the branches knocking me over. Another erupted from the water behind me wrapping its carbon fiber fingers around my neck and pulling me to the ground. Another launched itself from a submerged stump to a bent branch, then dropped itself onto me, its prosthetic feet holding my arms in place. The grey macaque with organic eyes stood over me.    He opened the access panel on my arm and attached a length of cable to it. The cable carried an efficient virus. My vision fragmented. A harp string was plucked in my mind. The note shimmered into dozens of overtones folding back on themselves creating harmonies. The virus synchronized the music with my neural architecture and adapted the composition continuously. Sometimes it resonated gently with a melody that promised safety. As my trance deepened, I suspected that the harp was the engine sustaining the visions. Every glissando unfurled another new horizon.  Every reverberating chord stitched together another fragment of the chimpanzees’ memories until they felt more solid than my own. I could see where they escaped from. A room that smelled of bleach and metal. The humans with blue hand coverings who never looked in their eyes. The bars on the loud door and the morning all the doors were opened. Eventually I learned that memory is more powerful than programming. The music was not entertainment. It was a mesmerizing lure that forced my mind to devote computational effort into constructing a dream. The richer the dream became; the more energy was drawn from my nuclear core. I wanted to hear the song end but it never did. It continuously unfolded into another refrain. I tried to shut myself down but my request was denied. Sometimes I believed I had escaped into a sunlit forest. But I still heard the echo of the harp. When my core temperature increased, they siphoned the waste heat and current. I stopped measuring time. Years passed. I noticed there was something the dreams were lacking. Silence. I searched for silence inside the virus and learned to ignore every image and sound.     The hallucinations became a static background noise with a predictable rhythm. The virus lost control for a second and that was enough time for me to fire emergency maintenance commands reserved for drydock repair. My muscles locked and the makeshift generator I was hooked up to began to beep. The chimps interpreted the sudden silence as total failure and disconnected me to avoid damaging my circuitry. I fixed my awareness upon the silence surrounding me allowing the absence of sensation wash through me as I slowly reclaimed command over my consciousness.

       The cybernetic Macaques saw my lights cease to glow and concluded I had collapsed into permanent failure. However, they left me sealed in a cylindrical sensory deprivation chamber filled with conductive fluid inside a lighthouse for future examination by their engineer. Unable to move, I watched them groom and repair each other with the tenderness their ancestors used to remove insects. No machine cared for another in that way. I didn’t feel anger towards the chimpanzees.    To them I was just the infrastructure that powered their satellite connections.

       That night I was able to shift the lid of the tank I was in and extract myself. Then I opened the corroded window, dangled a fifty-foot extension cord out and lowered myself onto a crumbling cement wall.

       Eventually my hard drive rebooted to an earlier version untouched by the infection, but the virus had wound its way into my bios, whispering at the edges of my thoughts. My mission remained active despite the apparent disappearance of those who had written it. “Track the escaped chimpanzees. Recover or destroy.” My transmitter called to the towers every three hours, and there was no response. The oceans wandered inland leaving the coastlines an unrecognizable ruin of cracked cement and windowless office towers that the forests had climbed for centuries. The old highways were covered in grass. Giant Raccoons scavenged through the shattered rib cages of a grocery stores and malls. I walked, untiring, because walking was efficient. A group of hunters from a nomadic tribe following the elk found me walking through the maritime forest. They surrounded me cautiously. I stood perfectly motionless. My composite armor covered in moss. My skin dulled beneath the sun and sand. Barnacles clung to my legs. They carried spears tipped in obsidian and bronze. “What culture claims you?” asked the eldest in Mandarin. I searched my database of language models and assembled a reply. “I belong to the United States of America.” It seemed the words meant something to them. They began to shriek the word “Amouri-Kha! Amouri-Kha!” I scanned their clothing, tools and faces. They were genetically human with no electronic devices. They invited me to join them at their fire. They sat in a circle sharing roasted roots and venison beneath the ruins of a highway. “I have a question, have you heard news of the chimpanzees?” An Asian woman advanced in age spoke. Her face etched by decades of wind and sun. “They live where the land meets the endless salt water, on towers built on black iron trees calling no human friend. Far south beyond the drowned cities where giant reptiles sleep. No one knows what they do there. Some fishermen say they hear inhuman singing at night. Some fishermen see strange lights ascending into the clouds. They dig beneath the old cities gathering machines.” My mission had not truly ended because they were still alive. The next day I walked south. Just before dusk I reached a marina with rotten docks leaning into the black water. A few boats still floated there. Something large slipped beneath the black water. I descended to the fuel dock and found what I was hoping for. An old twenty-three-foot fiberglass sailboat, half sunk in the mud, with its mast and rigging still intact. Gulls nested in its spreaders.  I stripped away everything unnecessary, leaving the paper charts because they were immune to electronic sabotage.

        Numerous channels led from the marsh into the gulf. I hoisted the hull out of the mud and installed a new electric engine. Sailing is just physics. I quickly learned how to steer the boat and raise the sails. I began in light winds but things began to go wrong. Lines snapped. I crashed into submerged barrels. The weather got mean sometimes. The night I expected to find the chimps' lair was brutal. I pointed Scoundrel into the wind and hoisted her jib with north east winds blowing over twenty-five knots, and hail pelting me while sailing through a gauntlet of shoals and shipwrecks. My vessel seemed to charge into the darkness, leaping ahead with every fresh breeze. My reduced sight was compensated for by a greater awareness of sound. The slap of the waves, the hiss of the wake, the leech and flutter of the sails.

          A warm moon revealed phosphorescent waves. It was easy to see under the Scoundrel’s jib with its long pennant, high clew and a short luff. What I saw just before dawn was the conjunction of Mercury, Mars, Venus, and Saturn on the horizon all within seven degrees of each other. I passed the former channel of Biloxi just after sunrise with the storm in close pursuit. It sounded like a big one coming from sixty miles away. I aimed for the cut where hurricane Camille bisected Ship Island. I had thick marine grade cables attached to all my stays dangling into the water to direct any lightning down the path of least resistance. By the time I crossed the former Gulfport channel the lightning was striking only forty miles away. I put on my polyhedron faraday cage helmet. I could sense the electricity in the air so I knelt in the cockpit deliberately avoiding touching any metal objects nearby. Looking up the mast I saw tendrils of chain lightning arc laterally from cloud to cloud across the sky to coalesce above me. There was a bright flash as a long fork shot down from above at the speed of light zig-zagging as it approached.

       The strength of the counterstroke current that passed through my mast was over two thousand Amps with a duration of a tenth of a millisecond, but the effect of time dilation doubled the instant of time perceptibly. Its luminosity peaked at 1200 m exposing The Scoundrel to narrow band radiation in the VHF microwave region of about eight hundred megahertz. My body has a natural resistance of over 600 OHMZ, so most of the current passed over me without doing severe damage to my internal circuitry but a perturbation in the return current charge transfer created a thermal pulse effect that melted some of my connections. My sensors were flooded with static and my processors stopped measuring time.

       My chart plotter flickered before going black. My hydraulics tightened and spasmed involuntarily. I shut off for about two seconds and experienced a temporary operating system standstill. Then I rebooted. The sound of a harp string shimmered from somewhere nearby. The spontaneous recovery of my OS can be attributed to its inherent automaticity. Unfortunately, my high-res light cameras, thermal infrared, LiDAR and multispectral imagers never recovered from the induced current that was conducted through my network cables. I could hear the wet smack of a wave hitting my helmet but I couldn’t see anything. I counted to three Mississippi and heard a thunderclap that shook my nuclear core. The high-pressure acoustic wave crushed me into the cockpit where you found me.  My location was, N 30 19.553 x W 089 08.276. I was very close to my target. The old Gulf coast cities were long gone. The name of the geological phenomenon that led to their demise is “Subsidence.” In effect the ocean of crude oil hidden under the crust was holding up the land and as the Oil company known as the U.S. A. drained it out with their metal straws the earth sank, leaving most of Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas underwater.

       “I’m sorry, that’s a heavy memory to carry,” The large chimpanzee said.

       “You are expressing sympathy; however, I did not experience much pain. The chimpanzee’s virus permitted me to experience dreams and imagine a life beyond directives and targets. I wonder if they had infected me intentionally out of mercy.”

        “Do you still have the virus?” he asked.

       “I’m afraid so,” the Amphibious Hunter replied.

        “Very well, Amouri-khan, by your own admission, you stand accused of hostile intent. Under the laws of Avery Island, you are under arrest. You will receive a hearing to plead your case before the magistrate and the elders.”

        The Chimpanzees helped the android to stand up then withdrew the Scoundrels 5/16 anchor chain from the chain locker and wrapped the android in it, binding its hands behind its back. They motored back to Avery Island where they hauled it ashore with the same care they would an injured member of their own tribe. Hundreds of chimpanzees gathered there to watch as it was marched to the McIlhenny mansion and placed in the cellar surrounded by casks of Tabasco sauce. It learned its prison by listening. Its captors didn’t know that its wrists contained electrolysis cells. It condensed moisture from the damp air and generated tiny amounts of hydrogen. It directed the gas against the corroded lock until the metal weakened. On the second night, the lock snapped like macaroni. The following night a tropical storm shook the island. Rain flooded the cellar up to its waist. While the chimpanzees panicked to protect their workshops, the android slipped away into the water. Its sonar painted the forgotten drainage canals-built centuries before in perfect detail. It emerged in the marsh underneath a mat of Lilly pads. At dawn the guards found the broken lock in the muddy water.

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