Robogenesis by Daniel H. Wilson Read Free Book Online Page B

comes over the radio embedded in my head. I smile mentally. She thinks this is the afterlife. That we dozen parasites are on some kind of odyssey through a ghost world. She’s just interested in seeing the sights.
    “You talking the tallgrass prairie? Well, first of all, it ain’t flat like people think. It rolls. Up and down, like an ocean. And it isn’t empty. You’ll see foxes and owls. Bison and deer and rattlesnakes and toads. Grasshoppers that just flicker everywhere in the sunlight, back and forth like bullets. There’s nothing like it, Chen. You can stand out there in the tall grass under that big sky and feel the breath of the wind coming down to push your hair over your face.…”
    My face. I remember my face. I wonder if Chen remembers hers, but it seems rude to ask. I resist reaching up to touch the place where my jaw used to be. Trailing off, I keep walking and try to rein in my thoughts.
    “The other spirits are afraid,” says Chen. “They believe the villagers of Gray Horse will punish us.”
    I might have had the same thought.
    “It’ll be fine. It’s a nice place with nice people,” I transmit. “We fought and they’ll respect that. Don’t be afraid.”
    “I am not afraid,” she transmits back. “We must accept punishment for our sins before we can move on to meet our ancestors. We will all be judged.”
    I can tell that a lot of the Osage soldiers can smell home. Months out and with a winter to get through, permanent grins are still settling into their weathered faces. The sergeants scream louder and the infantrymen pay less and less attention.
Home
, is what they’re all thinking. Home is near. The shared thought is a current of excitement arcing between every man in the Gray Horse Army.
    Every
living
man, anyway.
    The living don’t see us, but we sure do see the living. On the camp perimeter, the small group of us wearing parasites are watching and listening. These days, we don’t hardly even sleep.
    Best you keep your distance
.
    The grisly sight of my own body reminds me that my homecoming may not be all smiles. No matter what Lonnie tries to tell me, or what I try to tell Chen. The fear of what’ll happen when we reach Gray Horse keeps me awake. And the fear is what tells me to keep a close eye on the round man, Hank Cotton.
    For better or worse, the fear is why I learn his secret.
    It’s the full moon. Midnight on the scrub prairie and the campfires have burned down to cinders. Even the Cotton patrol has fallen asleep in the dull whispering cold. When I see the flash of light in the sky, I move. Will my legs into motion and lurch alone through the darkness of a rutted meadow. Years ago this was a cornfield, but now it’s damp earth sprouting thousands of stiff, rotting stalks. That flickering light in the sky is some kind of radio talk. It flares every now and then through the darkness like somebody with a hand half covering a flashlight.
    I’ve been seeing flashes of blue smoke to the south for a few weeks now, like a lightning storm just over the horizon. Every now and then, I catch snatches of formal communication protocols. Query this. Assertion that. It reminds me of my old friend Nine Oh Two. Reminds me that I kind of miss him. It strikes me that, at this point, I may have more in common with that walking scrap pile than I do with my old squad.
    The freeborn talk in blue wisps, but this here is an altogether different light.
    Chen watches me go, saying nothing, but turning slow in the field like a broken mannequin. She watches me until I’m out of view. We may be dead, but she still has feeling enough to be protective of me in a way the other parasites are not.
    Before long, I see a weather-beaten farmhouse.
    In the final march of the New War, when the parasite claimed me and forced me to take the lives of my comrades in a nightmare haze, ribbons of evil light poured out of the sky and into my skull, controlling me. It was an orange haze, sick and cold. And now I’m