Robopocalypse

plate.

And on the plate is a can of corn soup. My soup. I sigh, happy.

Then I punch a button and the camera image switches.

Now, I see a full-color, high-resolution picture of the outside of a factory building. In Japanese, a sign across the front reads Lilliputian Industries.

This is my castle.

The squat cement walls of my fortress are peppered with pockmarks. The glass behind the barred windows has been shattered and replaced by strips of sheet metal welded onto the steel frame of the building. A rolling bay door dominates the front of the building—a modern-day portcullis.

The gate is closed tight. Though the world outside is still, I know that death lurks in the gray shadows.

Akuma—the bad machines—could be anywhere.

For now there is no movement outside, only slanting shadows cast by the evening sun. The shadows sink into the gouges torn in the walls of my castle and they pool together into the muck-filled trench that surrounds the building. The ditch is as deep as a man is tall and too wide to leap across. It is filled with acidic water and rusty scraps of metal and refuse.

This is my moat. It protects my castle from the smaller akuma who assault us daily. It is a good moat and it wants to keep us safe. But there is no moat large enough to stop the greater akuma.

Next door, part of a destroyed yellow house sags in on itself. The houses are no longer safe. There are too many akuma in this city. With poisoned minds, they chose to destroy millions. The akuma marched a docile population off in columns—never to return. The houses they left behind are made of wood and weak.

Two weeks ago, my life nearly ended in that yellow house. Chunks of yellow siding still jut out of the moat and litter the narrow walkway around the factory. It was my last scavenging trip. I am not an effective scavenger.

Yubin-kun rolls into view.

My comrade stops in front of the factory and waits. Now I stand up and stretch my back. It is cold and my old joints are creaky. A few seconds later, I turn the winch to crack open the steel rolling door. A strip of light appears near my feet, rises to maybe four feet high. I slip under the door and out into this quiet, dangerous new world.

Blinking at the sunlight, I adjust my glasses and check the street corners for movement. Then I grab the mud-covered piece of plywood that leans against the building. With a push, the slab of wood falls over the moat. Yubin-kun wheels across the slat to me and I grab the can of soup from the plate, open it, and drink it down.

The convenience store machines—the convini—still have good minds. They are not under the evil spell that haunts so much of the city. I pat Yubin-kun on its smooth back as it wheels under the rolling door and into the dark building.

Licking my fingers, I lean over and pull on the plywood slat. The other end falls into the filthy moat before I drag it out and lean it back against the wall. When I am finished, the street looks the same as before except that the plywood resting against the building is now more muddy and wet. I slip back inside and winch the rolling door down until it is closed up tight.

I return to my camera feed, which sits on my workbench in the middle of the empty factory floor. A pool of light spills onto the table from my work lamp, but otherwise the room is unlit. I must ration the electricity carefully. The akuma still use parts of the power grid. The trick is to steal the electricity quietly, in small doses, and to recharge only the local backup batteries.

On screen, nothing changes for perhaps fifteen minutes. I watch long shadows grow longer. The sun dips farther toward the horizon, turning the light a bleak yellow.

Pollution used to make the sunsets so beautiful.

I feel the empty space around me. It is very lonely. Only my work keeps me sane. I know that I will one day find the antidote. I will wake Mikiko and give her a clear mind.

In her cherry-red dress, she lies sleeping on a stack of cardboard, half-shrouded in the empty darkness of the factory floor. Her hands are clasped over her stomach. As always, her eyes seem as though they could flutter open at any second. I am glad that they do not. If her eyes were to open right now, she would murder me with single- minded purpose and without hesitation.

All things are born from the mind of god. But in the last month, the mind of god has gone insane. The akuma will not tolerate my existence for long.

I switch on the light attached to my magnifying lens. Bending its arm, I train the lens on a piece of scavenged machinery lying on my workbench. It is complicated and interesting—an alien artifact not built by human hands. I pull on my welder’s mask and twist a knob to activate my plasma torch. I make small, precise movements with the torch.

I will learn what lessons my enemy has to teach.

* * *

The attack comes suddenly. I catch something from the corner of my eye. On the camera feed, an albino two-wheeled robot with a human torso and a helmetlike head wheels down the middle of the street. It is a lightly modified prewar house nanny.

This akuma is followed by a half dozen squat, four-wheeled robots whose stiff black antennae vibrate as they speed over the swept asphalt: police-issue bomb sniffers. Then a blue two-wheeled trash can–shaped machine rolls by. It has a sturdy arm folded on top like a coiled snake. This one is a new hybrid.

A motley collection of robots floods into the street outside my factory. Most of them are rolling, but a few are walking on two or four legs. Almost all are domestic units, not designed for warfare.

But the worst is yet to come.

The camera image shivers as a shaft of dark red metal slides into view. I realize it is an arm when I see the bright yellow claw that hangs from the end. The claw snaps open and closed, trembling with the effort of moving itself. Once, this machine was a deep-forest logger, but it has been modified almost beyond recognition. Mounted on top is a sort of head, crowned with floodlights and two hornlike antennae. A stream of fire jets from the claw, licking the side of my castle.

The camera shakes violently, then cuts out.

Inside my castle all is quiet except for my plasma torch, which sounds like paper tearing. The vague shapes of the factory robots lurk in the darkness, mobile arms frozen in various poses like scrapyard sculptures. The only indication that they are alive and friendly is that the darkness is perforated by the steady greenish glow of dozens of intention lights.

The factory robots are not moving but they are awake. Something shakes the wall outside but I am not afraid. The metal struts in the ceiling dimple beneath an enormous weight.

Pock!

A chunk of ceiling disappears and a finger of fading sunlight reaches through the gloom. I drop my plasma torch. It clatters to the floor, echoing throughout the cavelike room. I lift the welder’s mask over my sweating forehead and look up.

“I knew you would come again, akuma,” I say. “Difensu!”

Instantly, dozens of mobile factory arms spring into life. Each of them is taller than a man and made of solid dirty metal designed to survive for decades on the factory floor. In synchrony, the industrial robots race out of the darkness to surround me.

These arms once toiled to build trinkets for men. I cleaned their minds of poison and now they serve a greater cause. These machines have become my loyal soldiers. My senshi.

If only Mikiko’s mind were equally simple.

Overhead, my master senshi shambles into life. It is a ten-ton bridge crane festooned with hydraulic wires and trailing a pair of massive, cobbled-together robotic arms. The thing grinds into motion, gathering momentum.

Another pock reverberates through the room. I stand by Mikiko, waiting for the