Trespassers

Mina Ramirez

In the quiet hour just before dawn I find myself dreaming. I know I’m still locked in the cockpit, suspended in the warm amniotic fluid that keeps us wet with killing potential; still I relish in the novel sensation. We don’t dream often.

Tonight I am lost in a city. People pass me on the sidewalk, some hunched over in big coats, others striding confidently, their hair billowing like smoke behind them. They have faces but none of them seem to match the bodies they’ve attached themselves to, like everyone decided at the last minute to switch their eyes and noses and smiles. I wonder, with a little pang of fear, why no one thought to remind me. I catch my reflection in a big cafe window, dark green like an old beer bottle. The skyscrapers extend above me, becoming soft noodles of wispy steel. My face, to my shame, is my sister’s face. I start peeling away my forehead when the alarm goes off.

My eyes are open. Red light blares in the cockpit. The fluid has all been flushed down the waste drain, just under the crash couch. The machine whirs and buzzes hornetlike around me, unseen within the hive of recursively-folded mechanics that power my intent. My synapses and hers, linked by nothing but a spark, lightning cobalt in the gray flesh behind my eyes. I am strapped in. My hands coil around the controls. The monitor blinks on. The light is green.

“Good morning, Kite-03,” says the light. “Please acknowledge status.”

A twitch of the muscles around my eye is all they need.

“Green light acknowledged. As of 0300 hours, a Trespasser has breached the Mustang Line and is making its way inland. CentFord predicts this Trespasser to arrive at Marathon Refinery within the hour. You will intercept this Trespasser before it reaches Marathon, or great loss of life and property is predicted. Acknowledge mission to confirm.”

My eye twitches again. There’s a brief pause, a delay just long enough to feel personal.

“Due to your unexpected performance during your previous mission, CentFord requires verbal acknowledgement. Be advised: rejection of verbal acknowledgement will result in immediate shutdown and stasis.”

I try to clear my throat and cough until I’m doubled over in my seat, the restraints pulling taut. A string of phlegm dangles from my cracked lips.

“I acknowledge,” I manage to croak out. That voice. I can go months without speaking a word, and that voice never fails to break my heart. I hang there, head dangling, the restraints slowly yet firmly attempting to reel me back into my seat. A little minnow caught on a line.

“Confirmed,” says the light. “Thank you, Kite-03. Opening doors now.”

Moonlight breaks through the widening gap in the ten thousand-ton titanium bay doors. Outside, the sea is deceptively calm, a gossamer quilt rippling with potential. Alarms sound across the base. My eyes adjust; the technicians on the deck scramble to safety.

I don’t have any illusions about my life. Everything I am belongs to CentFord, every reason I live a reward from them for a job well done, or a job survived as has been the case recently. The peace I feel with myself in the fleeting hours spent recovering in the amniotic fluid, the oneness with myself, all of it has been given to me, all because I’ve signed everything else away. As I watch the deckhands and engineers gaze up at me in awe and terror, though, I think: This is the one thing that’s all mine.

The frame I pilot isn’t so large, compared to the others, the legacy models that even now patrol the Challenger Deep or the Lagrange Point rigs. I pilot one of the newer mechs; her fusion engine hides delicately under a lightweight alloy chassis, her weapons slot neatly into her rounded vambraces, and her footfalls are so masterfully designed they hardly leave so much as a crater as she goes, springing over the coastal dunes and prairies and salt marshes like a pixie. My touch helps, of course. I can’t imagine anyone else taking my girl out for a spin.

Still, for all her feathery grace, she’s sixty feet tall and several hundred tons of metal killing machine. Nearly a century ago, the program’s detractors railed against designs like hers: a tank battalion would be much better to deal with the Trespassers, or why don’t we spend another couple billion dollars on a new jet?

I sortie. My frame steps out into the sea, sending huge waves in her wake, glinting moonlight off her skin. With just a thought, we walk, one titan parting the ocean, heading towards the north side of the bay. Driving a tank requires training, skill, endurance; all you need to pilot a mech frame is the psychoneural implant, right in the base of your skull, and your signature on a CentFord non-compete agreement. I have to give credit where it’s due.

My heads-up display winks online. A satellite has a bead on the Trespasser, twenty miles away, still tearing a path towards Marathon. I push my awareness past myself, through my frame’s tungsten nerve-weave muscle fibers, stringing her iron tendons and sinews taut. We burst out of the sea, a steel giant sprinting across the coastal plain.

Something buzzes in my head. My communicator pops online in my ear, a closed channel. Mission critical, as they say.

“CentFord Actual to Kite-03, do you copy?”

I barely get a chance to acknowledge. The mission handlers don’t waste any time. This one’s voice crackles with displeasure.

“Listen up, pilot. All auxiliary units are currently engaged at the Shreveport Barrier. You’re our only asset standing between that Trespasser and our refinery.”

I set my face and nod. CentFord takes the refined product from Marathon and manufactures everything from it: electronics, ship components, food, medicine. My own medication, which I’m sure is being docked at this same moment, comes from that miracle product. I signed every right away for that little glass vial. My thigh aches where they last injected me, almost a week ago now. I refuse to let myself believe the new medtechs never learned how to bevel a needle but there’s really no other explanation.

“This is your last chance, son,” says the handler. “Or missing a shot will be the least of your concerns.”

The comm shuts off. I hope my mech can’t feel my shame. The shudder rumbling up her nerves to me from her intramuscular gyroscopics makes my heart sink even lower. None of this is her fault. I try to reassure her. Her response is empty. We run, shaking the earth as we go, until the endless lights, spires, and smokestacks of the Marathon Refinery come into view. Wading towards it, on the other side of a sandbar out past the breakers, is the Trespasser.

In the days when the West Antarctic Ice Sheet had just broken free of the rest of the continent and began flooding every coastline in the world, there was understandably a great deal of concern and debate as to the exact nature of the Trespassers, the first of which had appeared in Mar del Plata, Argentina, during a freak storm. Had they slumbered dormant in the ice for eons, locked in brumation? Were they, even then, pouring out of hidden caverns at the bottom of the ocean, establishing new territory the vengeful sea had claimed?

These days everyone has given up on the questions. The Trespasser rears back on its powerful hind legs and raises its saurian head to the clouds, scenting our energy trail. A tail longer than a freight train whips through the surf behind it, sending steam and foam into the sky. Its powerful forelimbs tense, its razor claws grasping in anticipation. Suddenly it turns towards us. It lowers its head and even from three miles away I hear its growl, feel it pulsing through the ruined earth. The klaxons at Marathon begin to blare.

My heart beats in my throat. My blood boils. I’ve been reprimanded for this before, going in guns blazing, but CentFord really only cares about results anyway. I need this heat, scraped each mission off the edge of a knife, to live. They don’t synthesize injections for this.

I engage thrusters. We shoot over the coastal plain, a divine chariot riding the wind, armored in bleak obeisance. The Trespasser roars and charges. Its footsteps shake all artifice away. Human arrogance crumbles into nothing before its might. It’s much bigger than us.

Our emergency thrusters fire and we strafe towards the sea just in time. The Trespasser bites down on empty heat. Its six amber eyes lock on to us as we dart into the surf. I hit it with the main cannon. Fire and thunder belch across its thick carapace and it screams.

Movement in our peripheral sensor. The tail is far more agile than I had anticipated. Nothing but bad news all morning.

Dermal spikes emerge from the tail just in time for it to whip into our back. My whole world is red. We tumble face first into the surf. Our mass buries us in the sucking mud. The refinery must be trembling from the tectonics of our collapse. The Trespasser easily pins us with its clawed foot, roars in triumph, and buries its teeth in the back of our neck.

The pain is real. The amniotic fluid leaves us with enough dampeners to stay operational even after catastrophic injury but not nearly enough to ignore the feeling of a predator beginning to eat you alive. It’s starting to tear out our collarbone now, and all the electronic tissue between our neck and shoulder. I find myself drooling, unable to move, close to losing consciousness. I hear another roar. It bites down again.

This one feels amazing, actually.

I reach out from my anguish and find pleasure. My fingers lock around the controls. We extend the segment knife from our outer wrist and engage the afterburners, pivoting hard, boiling away the sea and turning the sand to glass. We twist and cut the Trespasser from its jaw to its throat. It careens backwards, choking out a scream flooded with thick, primordial saliva and steaming hot blood.

We stand, rising into the moon, a shuddering metal giant, one hand reflexively clasped around the piece now missing from our body, spurting oil and plasma. I can’t catch my breath. I’m outmatched. The dread that should be dripping down my spine is absent, however. All I feel is embarrassed, like I’m being teased. I should circle around the thrashing monster, get in between it and the refinery, but our legs won’t respond. I start to initiate autopilot when the comm light flares.

“Pilot disciplinary standing insufficient for autopilot. Please proceed manually.”

The Trespasser’s scaly skin glows chartreuse and bubbles. The wound stitches itself shut, the surrounding flesh warping into something new. One of my eyes has stopped working, most likely due to internal hemorrhaging, but I’m still able to stare in dismay as the Trespasser’s forelimbs grow longer, gaining more muscle, more claws. A wicked horn pushes out of its skull above its eyes, and its long tongue grows razor-sharp barbs that drip with toxins. A sinister hiss rattles out of its maw. Some sort of giant sail is growing from the dermal plates running down its spine.

“Unfair,” I’m able to say in that voice I despise, as the Trespasser howls and charges again, this time landing its horn in our pectoral plate. Its claws slice through our internal organs. We’re swaying, its claws stuck on our hips, two gangly dancers at prom. With a wrenching, gut-twisting jerk, our arm is ripped away, landing a half mile up the beach, fingers still twitching.

Blood pours out of my mouth. I shudder again. It’s beyond agonizing, yes, I’ve felt this before; what I can’t square is how flushed my face is. It feels good being picked clean. The smoke and alarms clogging the cockpit are barely even real to me now. The Trespasser sizes me up, its tail winding from side to side. At least it doesn’t care about the refinery. That makes two of us.

I let my frame sink to her titanic knees, head sunk, waiting for the guillotine. She’s been so good to me I can’t help but feel like an ungrateful child. That’s exciting in and of itself. I’ve always been a lousy son. It’s only fitting I go down like a spoiled little girl. I giggle a little.

“Kite-03, engage emergency ejection and wait for medevac.”

I pat the control armature weakly. The fusion dies and my frame sags even lower, completely defeated, her spirit finally gone out. The cockpit is plunged into darkness. They’d be cutting off my meds if I went back in this state regardless.

Outside, the Trespasser bellows to the black sky. I feel one last pang of regret for all the people still evacuating from Marathon. I wonder, dimly, vaguely, if this is what we deserve: crawling through death in metal dolls for our little glass vials of clear, synthesized hormones, squinting in the sunlight as we scurry in fear of being tread upon, sending the last toxin-free crops up elevators to space, where the CentFord CEO lives, watching the ocean rise and rise and rise. This is what eight thousand years of slavery and extinction have wrought: a planet of empty office buildings and crumbling highrises, of empty highways home only to the carcasses of cars, desperate to escape, locked in time.

I recall one day, long ago, before my sister died, before I felt someone like her trying to crawl her way out of my pale, flat chest, before the sea levels rose and the Trespassers rose with them, wondering just how many people could actually be making use of a building as large as a downtown skyscraper at any given time. Certainly not as many as there could be. There are empty rooms, deserted hallways, sometimes even entire floors left vacant, yet still lit, waiting for someone to get off the elevator too early or peek in, just curious, just looking. Large conference rooms lie as plundered graves, their maximum capacity signage left unlooked for, glued to the wall for no one to see. The office building will never be full; only potentially full. Now, holding the office building in my mind’s eye, some near-death hallucination, all I see is a headstone, and Earth a waterlogged cemetery. Headstone after headstone, stretching as far as the eye can see, all sinking into the ocean to become new sediment for creatures far older than edifice or burial to lurk amongst.

Then I’m shaken awake by the scream of metal tearing asunder, like God’s thunder peeling away all signs of our existence as a species, another go at the old Flood trick. I can’t believe I’m still alive. Must be that residual amniotic fluid. I blink in the lightening sky, feeling fresh air for the first time in years. Hot, sulfuric air. The Trespasser is looking down at me, still buckled into the crash couch. It’s huffing in my scent. I must stink.

The Trespasser moves with a subtle grace I didn’t think to expect from a giant monster. It’s almost birdlike, a little sharkish, certainly reptilian. Its amber eyes lock with mine. All at once I’m exposed, completely bare. I think, delusionally, that I must be just a skeleton by now. I cover myself impotently, coquettishly, even more delusional.

Slowly, calmly, the Trespasser opens its gargantuan mouth and unfurls its tongue. It lowers like a pink ladder to heaven. One of its toxic barbs, about the same size as me, impales me in my chest, my real chest. Whatever toxin it floods me with makes me dizzy with relief, with ecstasy. I can’t tell whether my lower half comes with me or stays behind, still bolted into the cockpit. I can quite easily accept that I've been swallowed. I’ve let myself be consumed by everyone else in my life. Nothing so new here. Everything fades. For a while, there’s nothing.

My senses return gradually. Each throb of my new heart nudges me a little further towards something resembling consciousness. It’s an unbelievable effort to just blink. My eyelids are so heavy. The sun dances off the ocean. It glitters beyond beauty. Flocks of seagulls cheer my arrival. My psyche pours itself down my new body, mingling with ice-cold cerebrospinal fluid, filling me all the way up. I don’t stop to wonder how something like this could’ve happened. Instead a low growl leaks from my crushing jaws, the kind of voice that brings down buildings. I like the way I sound.

I look down at the ruined mech, decapitated, her smoldering guts strewn all over the beach. She was sweet, looking after me for so long, but there isn’t anything I can do for her now. Instead, I bury my talons in the sand and pivot, tens of thousands of tons of muscle, scales, and teeth turning towards Marathon. The evacuation still isn’t finished. I might lumber away, swim back into the soft embrace of the ocean to find others like me. It’s been just me and the old frame for so long, after all.

Another heartbeat pushes on the edge of my awareness. It’s coming from deep within the refinery. A heartbeat like mine, only doubly broken. So that’s their miracle product. I feel it myself, in my own blood, my own toxin: potential energy, mined from ancient bodies, bodies that bubbled with change, bodies that healed and transmuted themselves, bodies that could only be brought down by wayward hunters in metal action figures of themselves. I’ll never need that little glass vial again. I’m swimming in the good stuff now.

I can imagine the refinery workers below looking up hopefully as I hesitate, their faces dropping with despair when I start walking their way, an impossible smile crossing my primeval dinosaur face. I can’t help being excited. It’s been so long since I had a sister.