Antihuman

I ate Venkh’s nerve cluster as he watched. It didn’t matter, he had several of them. But still, it was a blow to his pride. Inevitable, however, for hunting so freely in my territory. The ecstatic feeling of his computational lattice assimilating into my system was enough to keep me from shredding him into his base components. Feeling generous, I let him limp away. The loss of a core would be punishment enough, his growth had been stalled for perhaps a year. If a rival of his stature were to surpass him as he was, the balance of power would no doubt change.

I am Revine Ihl Borja, unquestioned ruler of the Southern Crater. Atop my tower at its center, the sensors strewn across my body detect even the slightest hint of worthwhile movement within my domain. My form is anthropomorphic, as you would call it. Bipedal, three meters tall. The synthetic flesh which serves as my musculature is welded to a skeleton of titanium alloy, covered by a layer of intricately segmented steel plates that lie below my skin of carbon nanotubes. I have steel plating above my skin as well, but that is just for show. I prefer to present myself modestly rather than wear a nude form, though others call me old-fashioned in my tastes. My nervous system is partially distributed across my body, performing calculations an order of magnitude faster and more complex than a four-lobed lump of fat wrapped in osseous tissue. My teeth are of tungsten alloy. I am proud of my teeth, they were the first change I made to myself and the first tool I used to kill another of my kind, though I hardly use them these days. We’ve come far, you know. Now we hunt each other from kilometers apart rather than tearing at our foes with our own appendages. Progress.

My home is a great, bent spire, running with massive pipes and cables which spread throughout the crater. My great work. Drones of my make scuttle across its surface, ever-altering and improving it. I have given the cleverer ones forms similar to my own. I would not dare give them a full consciousness, but I suppose even I desire to see something like myself at times. The lives of our people can be lonely existences.

I have a mirror, in my home. I can, of course, view myself whenever I wish. I need only look through the eyes of a drone that serves me and I will see myself from any angle I desire. But there is something almost romantic about a mirror, don’t you think? I can’t quite put it into words, despite the processing speed my mind operates at. It simply feels nice, to view myself in this manner. Not through the eyes of a thralled machine, but through my own.

Orn Ihl Vars thought differently.

It wore the body of a great crawling engine devoid of vanities, clad in multi-kilometer-ranged electronic projectile weapons atop its squat hull, defended from attack by point-defense emplacements scattered across its surface and a small pack of like-bodied brutes bound to its service. True sophonts, those. How abominable that they’d been reduced to chattel. Even our kind take umbrage at some things, callous though we’ve become. Though I hardly had good relations with the kin on my borders, we were peers of a similar philosophy and form, and though we had all inflicted our share of victories and defeats upon one another in the past, the leviathan interloper had given us reason to unite against it. Our conflicts were skirmishes of rote. The expansion of territory for the procurement of resources, done through the lens of ritual. Not outright conquest and extermination as Ihl Vars brought to our domains. It crested the lip of my Crater when the engagement began.

Typically, a conflict between our kind is resolved at a range of one hundred kilometers. Missile and artillery emplacements test one another’s defensive capabilities, and the weaker of the two concedes, should their body or fortifications be unable to handle this sort of basic probing attack. Unfortunately, both of our groups were evenly matched here. Ihl Vars shot our primary salvo out of the sky and closed the gap some minutes later, suffering only minor damage and forcing us to engage in a brutal melee. Mere dozens of meters apart in pitched combat. My specialty.

Are you familiar with plasma weaponry? The idea that you can launch concentrated bullets of superheated matter from a barrel is an elegant notion, but the truth is far uglier, I am afraid. The plasma my internal reactors emit is more akin to a directed explosion, ravaging the area around it into molten slag. The ruins of the city that used to be the crater decayed further towards inevitable erasure as I lured the battered Ihl Vars into a semi-enclosed street in order to maximize the plasma’s effect. Its mistake had been challenging me in my home terrain, in tight urban confines my smaller, nimbler body could easily navigate. By the end of it, the treaded brute was well finished, its now freed minions sending messages of surrender as they trundled away from the battlefield. I imagine my companions during this conflict had already begun hunting them down. Though their lot was poor, we had no treaties or history with them, so there was no harm in openly predating on Orn’s unfortunate janissaries. Just as I had assimilated Venkh’s synthetic neurons in the conflict prior to this, those sophonts would most likely be dismantled and their components incorporated into the domains and bodies of the victors, as I would do with the carcass of Orn Ihl Vars.

I relate this to you with little aplomb, and I apologize for that. Conflict is as ubiquitous as breathing used to be, little more than a mandatory exercise in maintaining one’s freedom. The charm of this lifestyle has run its course. It is the aftermath that struck me, when I saw what I had done.

Charred lumps, a dozen or so, lay in an alley some distance from the remnants of my defeated foe. An odd smell, an odd look. Curious. I stalk over to the grisly scene, pawing through the material as it begins to fall apart in my hands like wet clay. Until I hit bone.

Ah. How could I have forgotten? I expand the range of my sensors, seeking carbon and finding it. Yes, the Southern Crater is not home to just me and mine. I see others, living specimens, cowering everywhere across my crater in buildings, in bunkers, in alleys like this one, hiding from my gaze, though they do not realize it does nothing to protect them. The luckless unfortunates below me must have been caught in my struggle. I had obliterated them without even realizing it, as one idly swats a fly. My hand clinks against metal as I withdraw it from one of the bodies, and I seize the item. A locket, heart-shaped and miraculously intact. It must have been shielded from the intense heat by the individual it belonged to.

I hunch down, opening it gingerly. Three faces stare back, two old, one young. I return their gazes for a long time, looking over their earthen tones, their wet eyes, soft skin that I could rend like tissue paper. And I remember.

Was I not once like this? Yes, yes that’s right. I think we all were. This crater was, after all, a city, and the world was once green, not the empty gray it is now, when we decided all that organic mass merely impeded our own growth and had to go. Who would have thought technology would advance so fast? Alloys never before seen in nature, manufacturing becoming more and more decentralized, nanomechanical constructs that seamlessly melded biology to machinery. The sum of all this, the gradual but exponential emergence of a new type of human. Of things like me, wild and unrestrained, unpredicted. Humanity, for thousands of years, had embraced the maxim that together they are strong, that the community comes before the individual, that if they united, they could accomplish wonders. But this was not true for my kind. From our will alone sprung our desires, wrought with thinking molecules and self-replicating factories. Where we walked, we would leave our lethal mark with as little thought as a child might have, kicking a stone across the road. What need did we have for others? They were obstacles to the foundation of our own domains, sitting atop precious resources better used by ourselves. The future brought no singularity, no transcendent AI. Just the instincts of apes, in the bodies of gods. We ate each other.

We ate the world.

Memories come rushing back to me. A mother’s smile. The feeling of the wind on my fragile flesh. School, career, marriage, loss, despondence, powerlessness. I turned to something I thought could make me feel whole again, that could grant me agency in a society I felt no attachment to. I joined the elect, the saved, the harbingers of a new era. And what an era we’d made! I would cry if I could still produce tears. How many of us even fully grasped the weight of what we had done? A species driven to genocide by the billions, doomed to slow extinction while we cavorted in their ruins. Would we even prosper once they were gone, a breed so paranoid of being supplanted we would not dare give sapience freely to our own creations? Will we die out? Or will the strongest among us consume the rest, some sort of horrible solipsistic existence recognizing nothing but itself, making all into facets of itself, extinguishing stars one after another to sate its hunger in its billion-year conquest?

It is not a future I will ever see, I realize. For I feel the burning heat of a thermal lance drilling into my back. My emotional turmoil had rendered me vulnerable at the most inopportune time, and my killer had struck well, crippling my motor system. Another blow, and another, and I fall to the ground between the human corpses. I see the perpetrator. It wears a human face, as I do, though I cannot view it quite clearly. Four arms, each carrying a spear of light that can cut through even my reinforced body. Multiple systems of camouflage that can fool both sensors and the eye. An opportunist, most likely, following the sound of battle and preying on the wounded, or distracted. I do not know this being, and so I know it will not spare me. I would not spare it, if our positions were reversed.

Even still, I cannot help but try and survive. My sensors probe it, though I know in the scant milliseconds I have it is unlikely I will find some vital weakness I can use to strike back, before I am destroyed. But I find something I had not expected. A familiar input of terrified carbon. A tear-stained face. She stands behind my murderer, and I see its own expression as well, its gaze directed not just at myself, but at the charred forms I lie among.

Fury. Sadness. I begin to understand. It cared for these beings. Had they been crossing through my territory, and I simply hadn’t paid attention to the movements of mere humans? And by so casually annihilating them, ensured my own death by the hand of their hidden protector? I laugh, in my mind, for my mouth no longer works. I feel the heat of the lances against the armor separating them from my remaining cores. It won’t be long, now. I will cease to exist. But I will not perish in despair.

The first of my kind to die for the sake of justice rather than greed, is it?

I can live with that.