Dreadnought: Chapters 30–37

I don’t have the charge needed to keep my phone on while I wait for a text message reply, but her phone rings once, and then I get the most ornate and formal voicemail greeting I have ever heard. Frowning, I try Doc Impossible’s number, and get a (much less flowery) voicemail message as well.

The roof is surprisingly steep and made of slate, with blisters of windows and stonework erupting like barnacles.

Gnarled fingers of black smoke curl like some enormous claw rising from the train yards.

I take a desperate step forward to get under it, and then another, my hands walking inches-deep divots in the side of the car until I’ve got it mostly balanced over my head on shaking arms.

Dreadnought dead and Calamity maimed, just for some money?

Fire trucks and police cars are starting to nose onto the train tracks, and at the loading dock I find a harried police lieutenant in the middle of a throng of officers, who are using the hood of a police car as a table for a map.

Fire trucks and police cars are starting to nose onto the train tracks, and at the loading dock I find a harried police lieutenant in the middle of a throng of officers, who are using the hood of a police car as a table for a map.

Staring down a cop turns out to be a lot harder than I thought it would, but after a long moment the lieutenant nods and gives a few terse orders into his radio.

Nothing ironclad, no call to retreat or anything, but he tells them they should give the capes room to work.

Some are trying to help the injured, and at some of the buildings marked with the discreet symbol of a bomb shelter, a few are holding the doors open and shouting for everyone to come inside.

The roughly humanoid machines are piled with thick slabs of armor, but they are not ponderous. They bound forward like grasshoppers on screaming jets of fire.

This store takes up the entire ground floor of this building, so I fly for the other side, impeccably dressed mannequins pulled along in my wake.

I’m half expecting to leave it behind any moment now, but it feints with its saber and then shoulder slams me like a wrecking ball.

His machine gun is in a little ball turret and it swivels down to shoot me.

The air is flat and acrid with smoke.

These are powerful weapons, but they’re not designed to resist someone like me torqueing on them. With a shriek they bend upward, useless and twisted.

Blue gets its arms up in time to parry my first blow, and we trade punches for a moment, a real titanic slugfest with echoing bangs like sledgehammers on cast iron.

I stand up and take a tentative step toward the window to try to see where the choppers are focused.

She’s quiet, and sounds dazed, like the effort to guide me here was one last grasp at lucidity and now she’s sliding, sliding down into the black.

“She built me as a culmination of her project to create a true artificial intelligence, to prove consciousness can exist on a synthetic substrate,” says Doc.

“She built me as a culmination of her project to create a true artificial intelligence, to prove consciousness can exist on a synthetic substrate,” says Doc.

“She wants to rule the world. This is a means to an end. As self-aware, self-editing malignant stream of code injected into the internet, she could take control of everything from online banking to nuclear launch codes. She could store a thousand copies of herself in darknet servers all over the world, and become impossible to kill.”

Chlorophyll isn’t fazed by the gas.

“Wait, what kind of reactor is it?”
Doc Impossible sounds nonplussed. “Supercritical light water fission, why?”

“Wait, what kind of reactor is it?”
Doc Impossible sounds nonplussed. “Supercritical light water fission, why?”

The wall buckles inward, a shrieking floor-to-ceiling dent a foot deep. A tenth of a second later, my other fist hits, and joins its song to the tremendous, incredible noise. My fists blur like hummingbird wings, a rolling cacophony shakes loose ceiling tiles, and then I’m through.

It feels like there’s a colony of carnivorous termites carving their way into my joints, chewing on the sinews.

By necessity, the mass production process will be more destructive than the one I’m using here, but by the end of the year even the most recalcitrant subjects will be brought to heel. We’re all going to leave our bodies behind and live in a simulated environment of my own design.

Virtual reality of the purest sort, indistinguishable from the physical world except there will be no crime. No hunger. No death.

Nemesis is dangerous because of the quantum instabilities it causes. Those instabilities are triggered by observer effects.

I come out of my first battle with five broken bones, three bone bruises, a dozen lacerations (mostly on my knuckles), deep bruising across forty percent of my soft tissue, two second-degree burns, and four perfectly circular scars.

The front page is splashed with a huge photo of me standing atop a defeated mecha. One foot is higher than the other, resting on the boxy bulge of an ammo rack, and in a real-life cliché that’s almost too twee to believe the breeze has pulled my cape back behind me a ways.

There was heavy fighting in downtown New Port today as a teenage girl wearing Dreadnought's livery squared off with five walking tanks.

Cameramen jostle for position, and field correspondents shout questions.

According to the Legion’s bylaws, further decisions about the team’s status will have to be deferred until a quorum can be assembled.