Counterpunch leaned against the wall, softly humming the ballad of Peter Gunn to himself. He looked around the room at the chairs strewn about. He counted about two dozen of the small chairs, attached to metal desks, scattered about in twisted wreckage. He saw a few silhouettes against the wall -- human silhouettes, flash-frozen, left there no doubt in the dust blast as Autobot shelling had disintegrated every living thing in an instant. All children. Three years since the decisive takeover of earth, and the ghosts of human society were still everywhere.

One figure drew his attention -- a blasted silhouette against the back wall. Larger than the others, curled up. The figure -- he estimated it was an adult human female -- had been crouched over, protecting something. He saw no sign of what. Whatever she had died to protect, she had succeeded. Dying to succeed. He wondered what that must be like.

He heard scrabbling over the nearby rocks. He turned to face his visitor: David, a young human, perhaps thirteen years old. He worked near the energon processing plant supplying the Autobots’ midwestern U.S. headquarters -- a strategic base in the heart of the country, far from the sea, well-defended on all sides.

Someone inside was talking, and David was listening. David was talking too. Counterpunch, Decepticon agent, was eagerly listening. Punch, Autobot agent, listened as well.

This was their fourth meeting. So far David had passed Counterpunch an array of useful information -- all in the name of helping out the Decepticon resistance. Each time Counterpunch passed on just enough to the Decepticons to continue his usefulness. So far the Autobots had performed convincingly enough during the “ambushes” that Megatron never suspected that Counterpunch was a double agent feeding everyhing back to Optimus Prime, in his guise as Punch.

David had chosen the site of each of their meetings. This one was new. Counterpunch had no idea why.

“What have you got for me?” Counterpunch’s voice was a low rumble, underscoring the serious nature of their business.

“The transport convoy will be passing down the highway at 7 in the morning, two days from now. They’ll be traveling north. It’ll be heavily guarded, but there are three arge bridges on the route,” David said. “A convoy full of raw, unprocessed energon, heading out to the construction fields in Detroit. Destroy the convoy, and you’ll cripple their entire northwestern operation for at least a week.”

“How is it you know so much?” Counterpunch marveled.

“The Autobots are bored,” David said placidly. “They took over the planet in a matter of days. There’s been only scattered resistance from humans since then. All they’ve been doing for three years is draining the planet of energy and lording it over every human in sight, making us kill ourselves doing work they could do with ease. The enslavement of humans isn’t about the labor. It’s about establishing who’s in charge. They need someone to feel superior to. They’re kind of insecure, when you think about it. Insecure, bored and overconfident. That combination leads to Autobots who talk too much, to ears that shouldn’t hear.”

The kid was good. After four meetings Counterpunch concluded that he wasn’t going to find out the names of any talkative Autobots from this one. Which meant their business was nearly done.

“You must know the price of treachery,” Counterpunch said. “The Autobots would kill you in an instant if they even suspected you.” He paced back and forth, almost professorial. “They’d blast a hole in you and leave your body out as an example and a warning to anyone else with a big mouth. Don’t you fear death?”

He wondered why he was saying this to the child. Curiosity on his own part, he decided. David’s expression didn’t change.

“We were all dead the day the Autobots came to earth. Everything beyond that for the last three years is just . . . walking death. What about you? Aren’t you afraid?” He changed the subject smoothly, never changing his tone.

“I’ve become very . . . talented at avoiding bad situations,” Counterpunch said. “You’ve heard the gossip, no doubt, about my Autobot counterpart, Punch. We’re connected for the rest of time -- as long as Punch is alive, I’ll be alive. He’s my ... doppelganger. Nobody can kill him but me. Nobody can kill me but him. I can’t explain precisely why I know this -- maybe it was inserted into our programming from the day of our creation, a private joke on the part of whatever builder decided to make us this way. We can’t ever escape our situation. We can’t ever escape -- each other . . .”

He wondered why he was yammering on so, and changed the subject.

“You’re not getting anything out of this. There is no profit. No reward. Why do it?”

“I don’t even remember a time when there weren’t Autobots,” David said. He sounded so much older than Counterpunch’s records indicated a human pre-teen ought to. “Three years. It’s only been three years, and this is all we have.” He paused, then said suddenly, “You know what this place is? It’s a school. At least, it used to be. They would educate young people here. Can you imagine that, Counterpunch? For the first eighteen years of their lives human children were expected to do nothing else but learn about their world.”

“Sounds like a waste of time and resources to me,” Cunterpunch said.

“To you. To us, this was hope. It was the future . . . we always thought there would be giant robots in the future. . . .”

His voice trailed off, then set tightly.

“We will have schools again someday, Punch.”

“Optimism has always been the most amusing trait of --" He paused. Something wasn’t right. “You called me --”

“You said too much,” David interrupted. “Too much for a secret agent to tell a child. I knew right then why you wanted to see me.” He paused and just stared. Counterpunch found it oddly unsettling.

“You know you don’t have a chance, don’t you?” David continued. He glanced over at the larger silhouette. “You know what they taught here? Social studies. I lied before. I remember life before the Autobots. They taught social studies in this room. We were just getting to the American Revolution.”

Counterpunch hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about, but he was willing to let the human continue. Might learn something useful.

“’Live free or die.’ I remember that.” Punch started to think he might not want to hear more of this after all.

David let out a sigh. “We won’t live as slaves. Humans never give up forever. Sooner or later, we work out the battle between the men we are and the men we need to be.” He shook his head and laughed hesitantly. Counterpunch couldn’t believe it. “You’re in so far over your head you don’t know it. I remember another line, but it wasn’t from school. ‘You can kill the revolutionary but you can’t kill the revolution.’ Humans will give their lives to stop you, Punch. Are you willing to die for your cause?”

Counterpunch had heard enough. To his surprise, he didn’t hesitate. “No.” A moment’s soft clanking and he was Punch. “But I’ll kill for it.” He flipped up his pistol and fired a single shot. David just stood there, fresh blast hole in his chest, and folded forward without a sound.

Punch clicked open his secure comlink. “Punch to Prime, authorization zero zero CPC. The transport route’s secure. An example has been made. You won’t have to worry about any more leaks.” He clicked it off and walked away. Tomorrow he’d find some way to drop word of David’s location to the humans. They’d find and everyone who knew of his treachery would learn a harsh lesson. They’d see the choice between submission and death and they would not choose death. He was sure of it.

When he left he didn’t look back.

Sarah didn’t even like her father that much. But she still took it personally when a two-story-high piece of bad modern sculpture stepped on him.

Her father had been ex-military. She was never exactly sure what service. But he knew all sorts of things. Things he taught her. He would have come to regret that eventually. He never had the chance. The Autobots had come for the military men first, killing everyone who had any knowledge of weapons, tactics, and destruction.

The day the Autobots came to earth was going to be a good day. The most memorable day of her life, no less. Her eighteenth birthday. She’d planned and prepared for so long. They would have hated her, but that was nothing new.

That was three years ago. Now she was leaning over a rock outcropping, in the baking sun, peering through a rifle scope, waiting for giant robots.

The convoy would come through in a little while. She’d been waiting for three hours now, expecting an Autobot convoy transporting raw energon materials through the mountains of the American northwest to Detroit. The materials were too unstable to transport in any manner besides the ground. They were never going to make it to Detroit.

She wondered what state she was in now. She’d forgotten things like that.

Ironic, she decided. The Autobot invasion was the best thing that ever happened to her. If it hadn’t happened they’d still be speaking her name and spitting. Now -- in the new world -- with what she knew and was capable of -- "I’m the motherfucking cavalry," she murmured. "Never would have expected. . . ."

"Hmm?" The robot crouched on the rock next to her turned his head. Shaped like a circuitry-encrusted bat, observing her activity on behalf of the Decepticon resistance. Named Laserhead or something dumb like that. They assured her he couldn’t be seen on Autobot detectors. She didn’t really want him there, but it was the only way to convince the Decepticons that her way could work. They’d have just charged in and started shooting way with quasar-powered guns or something. Quasar energy versus a single primitive bullet. She had no doubt which one was better.

"You guys have been doing the rebellion thing so long you’ve forgotten what it’s really about," Sarah said. She didn’t feel like explaining to him what she’d really been thinking about. "You’re too . . . organized. That’s not a strength, that’s a weakness. Precisely the weakness we’re exploiting in them. No matter what you build, you always have to create infrastructure. That was the mistake the Autobots made. They’re so wrapped up in being the masters of humanity they haven’t thought about the logistics. Chaos always slips in somewhere. You never notice termites burrowing into your foundation until it’s too late."

Laserbeak didn’t quite understand what she was talking about, but decided not to worry about it. He shifted his gaze across the desert sand to the opposite rock face.

"That appears to be a very difficult shot," Laserbeak said.

"Oh, these things start to come to you after a while. Watch," Sarah said. She shifted her aim, fired a shot, pinged a rock three feet away from her target, then returned her aim. "There. Easy as falling off a log."

"Are you certain we won’t be seen? And that your charges are set correctly?"

"I’m certain. My friends and I, we know these hills better than anyone. We could dance from peak to peak in the dark. . . ."

She paused, licked her parched lips. That was the only dream she ever had that she could remember. Most of her dreams -- even before the Autobots came -- turned out pretty much like the world right now.

"I don’t understand what you’re trying to accomplish," Laserbeak said. "Decepticon technology could easily --"

"Yeah, but Decepticons aren’t here, now, are they? Security on that convoy is so tight they’d detect you guys from miles off. I just hope YOU can slip by it as easily as you say. The rest of you couldn’t get close enough to toss a rock. Besides, this isn’t about technology. It’s not even about weapons lined with circuitry and black-hole mechanics. This is about making your own way. Just keep watching and report it all back to your friends. You never know, you might learn something."

Her friend Mifune was always yammering on about Miyamoto Musashi, even before this all happened. When they were younger she’d been the one to first call him Mifune, after the Japanese actor. He certainly didn’t LOOK Japanese; lanky, brown hair, pale skin. She’d thought it was pretty funny. Ever since the Autobots came he hadn’t used any other name. By now it didn’t seem odd.

He liked to quote Musashi’s "Book of Five Rings." Tactics by elemental principles, he always said. Earth, air, fire, water, spirit: the five rings. It was all about the elements. Understand the elements and you can accomplish anything, he said. Embrace the elements and you can turn invisible.

Sarah wasn’t sure how much she bought into all that. But if she had to be an element, she figured she was fire. And she was going to use earth as her weapon.

Two tall rock faces bordered the road. A Decepticon could strafe the rock outcroppings and drop a thousand tons of rock onto the convoy. They would be looking for Decepticons. They would not be looking for a human. Or an array of homemade explosives, rigged strategically across the rock face. Explosives were simple enough; her father had taught her that. He hadn’t taught her how to detonate them from a distance, though. Which brought her here . . . on a rock outcropping . . . aiming a bolt-action rifle at a propane tank bomb three hundred yards away, set to start a chain reaction that would bring half the rock face down.

A kiloton of rock, she thought. Heh. Earth. She remembered paper-rock-scissors. Machine-built scissors, constructed with precision and a sharp edge -- scissors were unnatural. Like the Autobots.

Rock was quite natural. Rock beats scissors every time.

"You do not appear to be the destructive sort," Laserbeak observed.

"’Course not. Nobody ever suspects the girls. Never bothered me, really; kept some heat off me in the end. That’s the funny thing about you guys; you’re just like us. Four million years and a zillion miles, and you make the same mistakes every guy on the planet makes. Predictability’s a weapon."

She leaned her head back, stretched neck muscles on both sides, and slipped off her jacket.

Laserbeak eyed the "We Support Our Troops" phrase emblazoned on the front of her shirt.

"I never expected you to be the patriotic type."

"What? Oh, you mean the shirt. Irony, I guess."

Laserbeak craned his head around and studied the picture on the back of her shirt.

"I’ve never seen a place like this on earth," he says.

"It’s a cafeteria. You wouldn’t recognize it. Your people blew them all up."

"The people on this picture look like teenage boys. I didn’t think your people armed teenagers back then."

"Life’s full of surprises. Look, here they come."

She crouched down and took aim. The convoy snaked around the corner, a quarter-mile of Autobot guards, flanking an enormous transport unit loaded with raw energon materials. She peered through the scope one last time. The vanguard was almost across the line. She drew in a breath, let it out halfway and held it. She closed her eyes and embraced void. "Giant robots," she murmured. "Never thought I’d use these on . . . giant robots . . ." She squeezed the trigger, opened her eyes, and remembered that today would be her twenty-first birthday.

It was going to be a good day.

Josie felt like she should be flying. She didn’t know why. Ever since the robots came, she couldn’t even walk.

The hideout in the mountains somewhere in the American northwest had started out as little more than a cave. With a year of work from Sarah and the others, under Josie’s direction, they’d been able to form the basis of a home here. Not that home mattered much; any robot with a minute or so to spare could wipe the place out. But for the moment they were safe, overlooking the desert beneath a starry sky.

Josie’s wheelchair sat in the frame of a carved rock doorway leading outside. She thought of it as her patio, allowing her a broad view. The view served both strategic and aesthetic purposes; she could see for miles in all directions

"Boo." Josie turned her head to see Sarah slip into the room behind her. Sarah, twenty (or was it twenty-one? Such matters became less relevant every day) years old, red tips of her black hair still fading, freckled face for once without its continual scowl, carried a bottle of wine and two glasses with her. Josie hadn’t even seen wine for years, let alone imbibed.

"Merry Christmas."

"Christmas? I’ve lost track of time."

"Some computer analyst YOU make. Brought you a little something to drink. The robots don’t guard their hordes of human supplies as well as you might think.

"Unbelievable," Josie said. "Why do they even still have wine?"

"Bribes for collaborators would be my guess. Someone’s going to be disappointed at THEIR next robot-catered meal."

"Heh. I got you something, too. Don’t ask how."

Josie slipped a hand into a pack at her wheelchair’s side and tossed Sarah a pack of cigarettes.

Sarah grinned. "You just said you didn’t remember Christmas."

"I fibbed. I’ve been making hash marks every day to keep track of the date. I’m not going to let them take away the calendar too."

Sarah poured two glasses of wine and handed one to Josie. "So what were you thinking about out in this gloomy miasma?"

"Things. Ever heard of the theory of Schrodinger’s Cat?"

Sarah shook her head. "Sound like an endangered species." She lit a cigarette and took a deep drag. It tasted wonderful -- two years since her last one, firing off nerve endings and endorphins she’d forgotten existed.

"It works like this," Josie said. "You put a cat in a box, sealed off so you can’t see it. You have two buttons. One fills the box with poison gas, the other one does nothing. You don’t know which button is which. You press one of the buttons, and then you open the box and the cat is either alive or dead. But! But in the moment between pressing the button and opening the box, the cat exists in two places. It is both alive and dead; it is possibility and probability. Two universes exist simultaneously. Only once the box is opened do the two tracks merge and one possibility becomes reality. If you never open the box, the universe might stop in place."

Josie sighed. "But nobody wonders what happened to the other cat once the box is opened. Just waste material fizzling in the quantum ether. Sometimes I get the feeling that we’re the cat and something went terribly wrong. Like it’s an experiment to test our reactions and nobody’s ever going to care. The cat was meant to live, and we’re the leftovers. We’re in hell and nobody’s ever going to care. Except maybe the quantum mechanic, who’s out there somewhere greedily slurping up our pain . . . in a little while everything we know is going to be gone and it’ll be like we never existed. What do you think?"

Sarah didn’t say anything for a while. "I think you need another drink," she announced, and filled up Josie’s cup. "C’mon, I’ve saved this stuff all year and I’m not going to let it go to waste."

"You remember your dreams?" Josie asked. She angled her wheelchair around and rolled out the door. "Old ones, new ones, whatever."

"None much anymore. Most of my dreams looked pretty much just like this," Sarah said. "Sometimes I wonder if I’ve been dreaming for the last three years."

Josie nodded and sighed. "I know that feeling. It’s like what’s happening ... isn’t happening. Every night I dream about flying . . . I dream of flying and wake up crying. . . ."

"Okay, I’m officially cutting you off the depressed-rebel-leader track and rerouting you back to happy-land."

"Me? Leader? Maybe I need to cut YOU off."

"Sure, you. Who else?" Sarah looked back as the door opened and Mifune entered, box of cookies under his arm. Nobody remembered Mifune’s real name; Sarah had given him that nickname years ago, in another lifetime, to reflect his interest in Japanese culture, especially Miyamoto Musashi’s "Book of Five Rings." Ever since the robots came he hadn’t used any other name.

"Hey, Mifune. Merry Christmas. Join the discussion group. You still dream?"

He shook his head, unwrapped the box and started handing them out. Like the wine and cigarettes, it looked like it had been stored for a while.

"Do you remember your dreams from before?"

He shook his head again, sat down and poured a drink. "I barely remember snow, or grass, let alone ephemera like dreams."

"You still remember Musashi word for word, though," Josie said.

"That’s different. It’s important to remember what used to be so we can keep it alive. Which reminds me. Mitch is still in his room. Three days now and he hasn’t slept or eaten. Still trying to reclaim Beethoven, I think."

"Is he making any progress with that piano?" Sarah asked. "I’m still surprised it hasn’t fallen apart on him."

"It’s way out of tune, but I think I heard the makings of ‘Messiah’ in there somewhere," Mifune said.

"’Messiah’ was Handel," Josie said.

"I know that and you know that, but if we break the illusion now, Mitch will just snap," Mifune said. "At least he’s on a roll and restoring something."

Josie shrugged. "To each his own."

Sarah paused, rolled some of the wine around in her mouth. "I’m tired of all the downer talk. Time to think positive. Josie, it’s up to you to save the world. Whaddaya do? Think big."

"I couldn’t even begin to think of it. Where to even start?"

"C’mon, you were a scientist. You used to be good at this," Sarah said. "Don’t tell me you can ramble in self-pity but can’t work out a hypothetical math problem."

"Is that how you see it?" Josie said. "A really big math problem? You’re weirder than I thought."

"Nobody ever said math was simple. Just break it down."

Josie didn’t move for a full minute. "I think . . . I think the robots are the classical insoluble problem. Every answer is blocked on three sides. They have black-hole-powered handguns and ships fueled by oscillation overthrust and armor you could barely break with a tank. We have squishy watery bodies and some old slug-throwing weapons. It’s like trying to figure out where a Moebius strip starts, or folding a square piece of paper seven times, or drawing a map using fewer than four colors where no two colors touch," Josie said. "No matter how many times you try to work around it, there’s no solution. They can counter anything we do. And if we push hard enough, eventually they’ll just give up and leave the planet a smoking ruin behind them. We’re not a beach-head. We’re not a pacific island in 1945, seesawing between two opposing forces. This isn’t a rational battle where we have something to offer. We’re an anthill underfoot two brawlers scrabbling in the dirt." She rolled her wheelchair out of the rock-lined door, so she could see the sky. No clouds blocked the sky tonight; only stars beyond counting. "This war is four million years old. That’s six hundred sixty-six times the whole of recorded history. We’re not even a sneeze to them."

She was certain, for a moment, one of the distant stars seemed to be moving, even approaching. Probably nothing, she figured.

"And the few chances we did have to go on, they’ve taken away," Josie continued. "Science is dead, all our weapons are gone. I doubt there’s a person left alive who knows how to assemble a nuclear bomb. Which limits our options."

"Ari says the ancient ways still work," Mifune said. "We believe in giant robots now; why not tribal sorcery?"

"Ariana would try to convince us we could defeat the enemy by wrapping them in kabbalistic script or making them discorporate in a puff of pentacular paradox," Josie said, rolling her eyes. "Where is she, anyway?"

"Outside, on the mesa. She said she’d be out all night. Something about Mithraic ceremony and fire," Mifune said.

"Sometimes I think that woman believes the weight of the universe rests on her," Josie said. "It was hard enough keeping up with ceremonies when I just had one religion. She’s intent on keeping faith with all of them. Like the world would end if she missed one."

"Maybe it would," Sarah said. "People believed a lot of weird stuff in our time."

"Someone ought to tell her that good old-fashioned Christmas gathering is still kind of an important ceremony on its own," Josie grumbled.

"I tried that," Mifune said. "She said that we would do just fine maintaining the ritual."

"Oh, well," Josie said. "More for us, I suppose." She filled up her glass again. "I’ll just consider this one her gift to me."

"Your turn for insane rambling, old sport," Sarah said. "Josie’s gone on about eighth-dimensional Prozac physics long enough. Think big. Pick up the robots and bash ‘em over the head with all five rings."

He thought about this for a while.

"I think we’ve been missing something all along," Mifune said. "We -- and by we I mean everyone, the human resistance all around the world -- are so caught up in guerrilla warfare and staying one step ahead of the enemy, we haven’t thought it through. Musashi reminds us that a robber trapped in a house seems, from outside, to be in a fortified position, but from inside, the robber feels like the whole world is against him. You need to think like the enemy. So let’s ponder the basics. They’ve been here for three years now, strip-mining the world. The leader of the rebels is here. The leader of the oppressors is here. They have interstellar travel. They could go home at any time. But they haven’t."

"Meaning?" Josie said.

"Meaning we’re looking at it all wrong." Mifune and Josie stopped short and looked at Sarah. She had their attention all right. Sarah leaned her head against the wall, stared straight up. "Maybe we’re looking at it backwards. It’s not about what they’re coming here to find." She tapped her tongue against her teeth several times, looking about, then lowered her gaze to meet theirs. "It’s what they came here to get away from. There’s something out there they’re afraid of, and I think we can find out what it is, eventually. That’s our forcing mechanism. That’s the eighth fold in the paper, the beginning and end of the Moebius strip. Nothing is impossible. All you need is to keep hope alive."

"Hope? Sounds strange coming from you," Mifune observed. "I thought you were proud of constant depression. What was it you called yourself that one year? Countess Xanax Dystopia?"

"It was Duchess. And I was trying to be ironically hip with that one."

"Sure seemed to me like you meant it at the time. Didn’t even answer to Sarah for weeks --"

"-- ANYWAY, we constantly depressed types had a greater sense of balance. We were ready to adjust to a world without pep rallies and Must-See TV. The quarterbacks and cheerleaders, lawyers and accountants, they were the ones who didn’t know how to cope. Us, we knew how to forge a path through the unexpected, and we’ll know." Sarah looked back at the sky again, then at Josie. "We’ll be the kings and queens of the new future, wearing crowns lined with intelligent circuitry and wielding osmium steel scepters with robot head decorations. It’s inevitable."

Mifune smiled. "Your turn, then. How are you gonna do it?"

She smiled back. She was feeling woozy. "Misdirection. Even intelligent sculpture can be fooled when you show them one thing and do another. Harry Houdini could make an elephant vanish in a theater full of people. Hell, you could walk through a police line holding a severed head and a bag of crack and not be seen . . . if you make them look where you want them to look." She paused. "You know they have to have figured out about all the cells hiding out in these mountains. Especially after what happened to the convoy. Remember what happened to Detroit when they first landed? The place was a smoking ruin in a matter of hours. The survivors said it was one robot. One. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, they’re going to come after us."

"I thought we were going to get OFF the depressing subjects," Josie drawled, and polished off another glass.

"Who’s being depressing? We can predict what they’re going to do. We can choose the battleground. Predictability is a weapon," Sarah said. "Not long ago I had a little chat with one of the opposition robots about this very problem. We came up with a few interesting solutions."

"And?" Mifune said expectantly.

"Nope. Not tellin’!"

"Not even which one you talked to?"

"Aw, hell, I can never get their names straight. It’s like running the switchboard at Avengers Headquarters. Big guy, turns into a multi-headed socket wrench or a flux capacitor or something like that. Sounds like he has a cold." She stared at her nearly-empty glass as it shimmered in all sorts of interesting manners before her. "I always wondered how they managed to grow and shrink. Hrm. They understand misdirection as well. Who’d ever suspect a cassette player or a police car?"

Josie turned the bottle upside down. "All gone!"

Sarah took a deep drag off her cigarette and looked at the ash burning the filter tip. "Same here. The fates telling us it’s bedtime." She looked around the room and up at the mesa where Ariana was performing some fire ceremony older than Christianity. She could hear ‘Handel’s Messiah’ banging away in the distance, off-key, on a piano older than she was.

"Bedtime indeed. . . ."

She leaned back in the seat, not even noticing when Mifune and Josie crept out and left her alone. She felt sleepy. Ancient human tradition still remained. When she and Mifune and Josie and the giant robots no longer mattered, Musashi and Handel would remain. She found the thought oddly comforting, and before long she was asleep.

"You know, if nothing else at least they stopped the cartoon brainwashing."

"Oh, god. Mitch, if this is one of those --" Sarah sighed as his voice buzzed in her headset; she couldn’t get in the way of the nonstop information flow. She hated the fallout from his ten-day composing binges; Mitch tended to get on a weird trip, fueled by caffeine and sleep deprivation. She settled down into her sniper’s nook in the rock faces of northern Colorado.

"Seriously! Remember when you’re seven years old and you think you understand the world, everything’s cool. You’ve got the Rick and Lisa making goo-goo eyes in Robotech, a bunch of lions running around in Voltron, and Tom and Jerry are at each other’s throats again with their wacky hijinx. Then one day you wake up and Rick and Lisa are replaced by a bunch of whiny troublemakers, the Voltron team is suddenly a bunch of cars you can’t keep track of, and Tom and Jerry are suddenly buddy-buddy, hanging out and racing cars or something! For a seven-year-old kid, THAT’s the end of the damn world. Nothing makes sense anymore. See, I think the point. It indoctrinates us and educates us to learn the most critical lesson of our lives. . . ."

She tuned him out, took aim with her energy rifle at the dune buggy trundling down the road. He continued unabated.

"That no matter what happens. . . ."

She peered through the scope and aimed for the propane bombs. She liked this rifle, a gift of Decepticon technology. It was painted in sheer unreflecting black with leather-wrapped grip and handle. He passed over the buried explosives -- "Everything can change in an instant. . . ." -- And she fired.

The ground flew up in spectacular fashion, cloaking the dune buggy in blasted rock and fire -- " . . . Everything."

She stared, hands gripped around the gun, at the sight. In a moment the fire cleared, and the vehicle rolled along, untroubled. . . .

"Stronger than he looks," Sarah murmured.

And now it knew her position. Its main weapon, a grenade launcher, shifted up to aim at the outcropping --

"Oh, hell. Mitch, gonna have to let you go --" She stumbled backwards and plummeted down the hillside. Everything was in the caves. As long as she could make it into the caves she had the upper hand.

Something exploded behind her; she felt blood pour from her ears, and she landed at the cave entrance with a wet thud.

Another voice echoed in her earpiece, the sound of her Decepticon backup, hiding nearby. "Are you still functional, human?"

Oh, thank god – her ears still worked. Rang like hell, but still worked.

"Yeah. Yeah, I’m functional." She stared at the sky for a while – seemed like an hour -- before dragging herself up.

"Wanna hear something funny?" she said. "When I was young we had this game . . . oh, hell." She heard the giant robot tearing across the rock face in search of her. It would be upon her in seconds.

"Gonna have to wait."

She snatched up her energy rifle, tossed aside the stock, and scrambled into the cave. Everything was ready. She felt a small control at her belt and pressed three buttons. They activated a few small devices Josie Beller had been able to whip together. Minor devices, of little import, but so very useful.

"Come into my parlor," she whispered, and was gone.
 

Outback climbed into the cave entrance. Dust covered him, and scorch marks ran up and down his frame. For that insult alone he’d happily rend the human in half. She’d thank him for it. He twitched slightly at the prospect, then reminded himself that Lord Prime had given specific instructions. Bring all humans back from this mission alive and unharmed. Killing wasn’t Outback’s job today -- that was Perceptor’s task.

He spotted Decepticon signatures deep in the caves; he’d seen them from miles off. Must be a convention; he spotted at least a dozen, maybe two. No problem -- just sweep in, destroy everyone he can, then drop a million tons of rock on top of the rest. He made a note to commend Punch; the spybot’s information was once again flawless. Now he understood why a single human cell had been able to cause so much damage; they had top-class backup from the Decepticon forces. This might even be a regional Decepticon headquarters! The thought excited him, sent pulsed electrons all through his body. Soon he would kill and kill and kill and once again the thirst that drove him would subside. For a while, anyway.

He strode into the cavern. He didn’t do it cautiously; he never did anything cautiously. The cavern was broad and wide, with nooks and crannies on all sides and a path running along the west. He kept an optic trained up there; it was the perfect place from which to stage an ambush.

They were everywhere, Outback realized. Humans all over the place, armed with laser cannons and nasty attitudes, and Decepticon signatures in every direction. Nasty ones, too -- Megatron, Shockwave, half-a-dozen Combaticons, all six damned Constructicons -- but he couldn’t see them – they must be hiding in plain sight, maybe cloaked or something (but how could they do that?) -- but they weren’t going to fool him, not Outback, not the Autobots’ master of urban destruction. Some of the disloyal Autobots sometimes whispered that his wilderness talents were no good to the urban, mechanized Autobots.

Today he would show them.

He caught a glint on the west and automatically fired. Something exploded up there, and he grunted in satisfaction. He began to sprint down the corridor, twitching back and forth; if the place really was stuffed with Decepticons, they would find him ready to come face-to-face. He would force them to come out and die like warriors, or be entombed like true cowards, rats hiding in the cave.

Then the laser fire erupted. For a moment even Outback was caught off-guard; he took fire from all sides, at least two dozen separate shooters, snipers up and down the pathway. He instinctively lashed out with a strafing burst from his grenade launcher; in seconds he’d taken out eight positions in spectacular fashion.

Then he realized the lasers bounced harmlessly off his body. He scanned all the signatures and determined that none of the lasers possess so much as the ability to slice paper. Misdirection. Well, he was smarter than that. He zoomed in on one of the sources and discovered it was a laser unit barely the size of a human finger. Someone was clever, he decided, but not clever enough.

Then his proximity alarm started to buzz. Someone was nearby -- someone powerful, and he was right around the corner. Megatron, Decepticon leader, waiting for him! At last. Outback swung around the corner, firing his most powerful cannon blast, and . . . nothing.

He looked down a long, empty cave corridor. Megatron was nowhere to be seen, but his signal was right in front of Outback. He scanned all around, looked down, and saw a small metal globe wedged into the rock. He picked it up and stared at it. It wasn’t any larger than a human fist. He crushed it in his hand, and the Megatron signature vanished. A moment later it was replaced by three more from all around, three of the exact same Megatron signals. So. They were able to fool sensors. The humans were smarter than he thought.

"So this is the way you want to play it, eh?" he mused. "All right, then. I’ll hunt you the old-fashioned way. Optic to optic. The way it was meant to be."

He clicked off his radar sensors and switched over to visual scanning. The cacophony of conflicting signals vanished.

He strode down the passage, launcher at the ready.

"C’mon, mates, gimme a good show," he hummed ominously. "Come out, come out wherever you are. . . ."

Energy fire struck him directly in the back. This one he felt. He whirled around, blasting a wide arc of energy, but whoever had fired at him was already gone. Then he heard the voice, a human female, bouncing all around the cavern.

It was transmitting through some kind of loudspeaker in the cave. He could spot it in seconds with his sensors, but he decided not to activate them. That was probably exactly what they wanted.

"This is robot hell," the voice intoned. It barely sounded human; almost like a human advanced to their own level of robotic detachment.

"You know, I hated Crocodile Dundee." He snapped back and forth, looking for the source of the transmission, but it echoed all through the corridor.

"In Detroit we knew exactly what to do with faulty hardware: heave it into the smelting pit and start all over again. Your kind must have missed that step in your evolution. All you know how to do is destroy," she continued. "It makes me wonder what forces drive you. I understand that need -- the joy of sheer destruction. Joy of the hunt, right? No wonder you robots don’t have sex drives; you wouldn’t be able to think about them."

"WILL -- YOU -- SHUT -- UP!" Outback roared, and fired blindly upwards.

"I will bring this cave down upon your head! You have been allowed to live far too long, and I will NOT be taunted by the likes of you!"

"The likes of me? You’re in so far over your head you don’t know it. I’m the quantum mechanic. I’m Schrodinger’s stray cat," her voice echoed all over. "I am Duchess Xanax Dystopia, and you are so dead."

She switched off the speaker. "We’re here to kill every last one of you," she whispered, and ran a hand across her chest, like she was trying to keep her heart beating steadily. She zipped from behind an outcropping and across the corridor, prompting a volley of fire from Outback, who turned and screamed as he blasted. She reached cover and waited. She could hear him clanking down the way.

"C’mon, c’mon," she murmured. "Take the damned bait --" He turned the corner, spotted her and immediately opened fire. The air scorched around her as she rolled backwards and rushed out the cave entrance, Outback in hot pursuit.

She skittered up the rocks desperately -- Go go go GO, if he so much as sees me I’m toast -- and reached the top. Almost in the clear. She ran down the ridge and --

-- stopped. A two-hundred-foot plunge down to jagged rock spread out before her.

"I think we’re done here." Outback’s voice was cold, not at all like the vicious frenzy of earlier. She still thought it sounded like a bad Paul Hogan riff.

Sarah turned around slowly to face the dune buggy as it rumbled up the ridge to block her in. She could look right down the barrel of the main grenade launcher.

Sarah stood perfectly still as Outback transformed, never taking his aim from her.

"Get rid of the weapon," he snarled. She tossed the gun away, past him, letting it skid onto the dirt.

"You know, when I was young we had this game --" she said.

"Silence. So. You’re the one who caused so much trouble," he rumbled. "Prime will be very pleased. I would so very much enjoy tearing your arms from your body now. But we’re going to make an example of you. Perceptor is looking forward to it. We’ll transmit your death on every frequency as a warning. Your fate will be so horrible that no human will dare make a stand again. We’ll cut off your eyelids and scoop out your optics, but leave them attached so you can see every strip of flesh sliced away --" She smiled back at him. "What’s the matter? No clever lines now that you’re caught, Duchess? What are you smiling at?"

Her smirk broadened. "Ever get the feeling you’ve been had?" A clanking sound -- a transformation! -- echoed behind Outback. Before he could turn he felt a cannon barrel against his head. A barrel bigger than his head.

"Bah weep granah weep nini-bon," Megatron wheezed, and blasted Outback’s head off.

Sarah coldly regarded what was left -- a body and part of a torso standing there like sculpture. "Make an example indeed," she said. "Such villainous nonsense."

Megatron brushed away the tiny scraps of leather wrapping and black paint that had disguised his pistol shell. "You took a terrible risk today," he remarked.

"No more so than you." She walked up to the blasted hulk resting atop the ridge. "I imagine it’ll be sundown by the time they find him. He’ll make a nice silhouette. An example."

She sat down on the ridge and exhaled deeply. Every muscle hurt; she had ignored most of the pain as she ran for her life, but she was becoming aware of every bump, bruise and yanked muscle. Nothing to do now but wait.

She watched Megatron as he opened a subspace compartment and a bat-shaped robot burst out.

"Laserbeak, fly and report to the others. Send transport for the human." She watched the minibot streak into the sky and remained silent for several minutes.

It was Megatron who at last broke the silence.

"Why did you bother taunting him? Angering him did nothing but risk your life further."

"Because I had to know."

"Know what?"

"Know his nature. He’s my doppelganger. He enjoyed inflicting pain. He and I are the same. He destroyed Detroit, Indianapolis, Louisville, dozens of cities. He liked doing it himself, wiping out the medium-sized cities while the rest of the Autobots focused on the biggest. The few witnesses who remained said he reveled in every death. I can relate. Sometimes I still dream of a pile of dead bodies, thousands of corpses by my hand. . . .  A voice speaking to him drove him, a pleasure that couldn’t be fulfilled any other way. He was a hunter that got drunk on the thrill of the hunt. We really are alike. The difference is -- I moved beyond. Ariana calls it Zhang-chi -- a rising and advancing of spirit. He couldn’t rise and advance, and so he died." She looked back at Megatron. "It’s a fate that could affect you all if you’re not careful. You lack the capacity to grow and change. You are not a race prone to self-reflection. I’m not sure you’re even capable of it. You’re a slave race at heart. You were never meant to do anything except follow orders without question. Have you ever stopped to wonder why you’re evenly and neatly divided into two camps? Autobot and Decepticon? You can’t question what you are and go beyond your limits."

She paused for a while and looked back. Megatron just stared at her, as still as Outback’s remains. She wondered if he was even listening.

"When I was young. . . ."

She stopped, swallowed hard. She hadn’t expected the memory to grab her.

"When I was young we had this game . . . it was a little boxing ring with two plastic robot figures. You’d stick your hands in the controls and make them punch each other until one of their heads popped off."

"And then what?" The deep rumbling voice caught her as more of a shock than she expected.

"Then you’d stick the head back on and do it all over again."

"That sounds like a colossal waste of time."

"You should talk. You’ve been doing the same damn thing for four million years. Except that whatever hand was on your controls up and left long ago. Your heads popped off and there was nobody there to stick them back on. You’ve been punching aimlessly without direction ever since, just following a set of directives you don’t even understand yourselves. Take you, for example. Why are you doing this? Why do you even care about humans? Or freedom?"

"Humans are as alive and intelligent as we are," Megatron said. "They deserve to be free. Freedom is the right of all sentient beings."

"Hrm. Makes me wonder. Did you come up with that line yourself? Or are you just repeating something plugged into your memory when you were built? Are YOU even free? I’ve heard your mythology, repeated with all the passion of CD liner notes. Primus, Alpha Trion, Vector Sigma, all that stuff. Four million years and you barely have a philosophy. Ask yourself: is there anything you have that is really yours?"

"We have our shared past. Our racial memory is uncluttered," Megatron replied. "What you see as weakness is our strength. All Cybertronians, no matter what their orientation, remember the same past, the same progenitors. In that one thing, even Prime and I are united. Your history is rife with religious wars. Millions of human lives have been lost because you cannot agree on who your creator is. We do not fight over such matters; we quite frankly find them inscrutable."

"No, you find other equally insipid reasons to fight each other. All that perfect memory you have is a limitation. You remember exactly how you were created, but not before that, the whys and wherefores. You recall with perfect clarity everything that ever happened to you, ever, immortalized in rushing electrons. Human memory is shifty and unreliable. That’s the beauty of it, self-interpretation. We remember things as we want to, not as they actually were. If humans remembered everything exactly . . . we would inevitably go mad. We’d be . . . machines."

"You speak of that as if it is a bad thing."

"You’re built from the Matrix, right? All built from the same source. No race can survive that; you have no variation, no genetics. You’re a race of fantastically inbred ants. The ability to grow and change is beyond you. Imagine what the human race would be like if we were all endlessly cloned from the same source."

"Human cloning would be imperfect because of analog limitations," Megatron said. "Minor imperfections would magnify with each generation. We are built on a digital frame, capable of infinite perfect copies, while the power of the Matrix creates variation. It is a much more efficient process. You possess a remarkable degree of introspection when it comes to others. But do you focus that laser-like criticism on yourself? Even the most cursory inspection of your physical form reveals that all is not well. You possess scars up and down your right arm. The angle of the scars, plus the fact you are left-handed, indicates they are self-inflicted. And if I narrow my vision, I detect a singular chemical imbalance in your brain cortex. You exhibit very low levels of what humans call serotonin and excessive amounts of dopamine. It must be very painful."

"I don’t think that’s any of your damned business. Besides, who made you a doctor all of a sudden?"

"We have mastered intergalactic teleportation, subspace storage and black hole-powered handguns. I don’t think human physiology is that far beyond our capacity." Megatron said. "I believe I understand your motivations. You are following a pre-programmed set of patterns, encoded in your brain chemistry. You feel isolation and escape by inflicting pain. You were not courageous enough to inflict it on others --" ("that’s not entirely true," she murmured) "- so inflicted it upon yourself at first. You are dedicated to self-destruction. And I would wager you do not know why."

He paused and examined her closely again. "You are not in good health. That is easily explained by the lack of resources. Yet I perceive you have been unnaturally thin for much longer than three years. Resources and food were plentiful prior to the invasion. Why were you undernourished during that time?"

"We humans have a term that probably doesn’t even translate into your language." She picked up a rock and tossed it at Outback’s corpse. It rang hollow. "Anorexia."

"I must admit I do not understand."

"You wouldn’t. You can change your form in an instant. Drop ten tons and slip into someone’s hand. If you’re feeling really weird with yourself you just bop on over to the garage and put on a new face. We humans, we’re stuck with what we’ve got. Changing the nature of our form is . . . painful. But possible."

"I will admit that makes little sense. But that does not explain the scars."

"Because I couldn’t . . . feel . . . anything. Even intense pain was better than the emotional dullness. I was ready to kill a hundred people to quench a thirst for emotion. I. . . ."

She tucked up her knees to her chin and stared out across the field. She began to realize that she had never been in the presence of a robot this size for so long, let alone debated nihilism with it.

"I don’t think I want to talk about this anymore."

"No. No, I did not expect you would."

He peered across the horizon and spied Laserbeak leading a small jeep across the dusty plain.

"It is time we left each other’s company."

Sarah stared in fascination at the sight, her burgeoning depression replaced by curiosity and a scheming air.

"That little bird robot. He was in you all the time." She pursed her lips. "Undetectable to robot sensors, too. Hrm."

"Something bothers you, human?"

"No. Not at all. You guys really don’t know what you’ve got, do you? You’re logical and mechanical. You don’t understand sheer insanity. That’s okay. Bet the Autobots don’t either." She smiled broadly, wicked gleam in her eye. "Soon, real soon, I’m going to teach you the real meaning of deception."

The black robot with the Decepticon logo stood still and watched as the human sketched out the route on a detailed map of what used to be Colorado. She laid out a course to her rebel cell’s home base -- information it had taken many, many months to get these tight-lipped humans to divulge, even to their Decepticon allies.

"This is it. Tell Megatron he can find us right here." Ariana tapped a dot on a particular spot in the cave network. "We’ll be waiting to hear what he has to say. Ariana looked closely at him. "You know, you’re the first robot we’ve trusted with this information. It took three years."

"So I noticed. The resistance on other worlds is usually much more forthcoming. You yourself are less pliable than even other resistance groups; generally they’re willing to work with us after six months or a year. But your Josie Beller has refused all Decepticon aid since we first landed. Why do you humans have such problems with trust?"

"Oh, I don’t know. It might have had something to do with what you did to Egypt. The pyramids lasted thousands of years; they represented the greatest of human achievement -- not to mention the blood and agony of thousands of slave laborers. Took you six minutes to reduce them to dust. We have our stories of the old ways, but you destroyed everything. The museums, the universities, the relics." She paused and reflected. The robot remembered from his intel reports that this one was a college professor.

"I was raised Jewish, you know." He didn’t, actually, but let her go on. He liked listening to humans yammer.

"Previous generations took our ancient mythology very seriously. I’m not surprised, really. It provided a link to the old ways. A Jew of ancient Rome and a Jew of 17th-century Lithuania lived in two different worlds, but if you dug hard enough, you could find that Jews of both eras lived in fear that Lilith would invade their bedrooms, strangle their children and steal their husband’s seed to spawn her own demon children that would live a single day. I tended to believe -- once -- that these myths were explanations devised by a primitive people to rationalize things they couldn’t understand, like sudden infant death syndrome and nighttime emissions."

"I had no idea." If he had an expression it would have remained stoic. He liked college professors most of all. Pity so few remained alive.

"We have this story. Der Golem. A great rabbi was said to have created a man who could not die, who would never tire, who would perform tasks and work without end. He was an invincible being built from clay and given unnatural life. But the golem has this symbol written on his forehead. ‘Emeth,’ which means truth. If you erase the E, you’re left with ‘meth,’ which means death. So the means to destroy a golem is to simply erase the E from his forehead, and he becomes dead. Do you know the meaning of that story?"

The robot remained silent; might as well have been a statue. Ariana was reminded of some of her duller students, so she switched deeper into lecture mode.

"It teaches several things. A healthy distrust of technology run rampant, for one. It is unwise to create things in man’s image; that alone is the province of the Lord. It also teaches that the greatest creations can be brought low by humble means. Sometimes I wonder if the old legends knew something we didn’t."

She remained silent for a few moments. The robot waited for her to say something, realized she wasn’t going to, then prompted, "How so?"

"You’re golems. All of you. Mockeries of creation gone wild, ultimately defined by the single stamp on your bodies. It makes me wonder -- what would happen if we erased the Autobot stamp and replaced them all with Decepticon stamps? Does the symbol define reality or reality define the symbol? No telling what might happen when you muck with the established order of things."

"I’m sure I have no idea."

"But the story teaches a deeper lesson that we tend to forget. The golem was brought to life and destroyed by a single letter -- a symbol of knowledge and information. Control the symbols and you control the world."

"Your ancestors had great imagination. That’s something to be commended," the robot replied. "Are you saying you do not trust me because of a tale that dates back to the time when humans thought the world was flat?"

"I’m saying we’ve found very little reason to trust anyone these days."

"Rest assured you can trust me. I have mighty Megatron’s full and complete confidence."

"I’m sure you do." She inspected his black armored body up and down. "What was your name again? I can never remember."

"Counterpunch," the robot rumbled.

"Counterpunch," she repeated slowly. "Do you even know where Megatron is right now? No, wait, I withdraw the question. Go on home, Counterpunch. Go tell your superiors about us. We’ll be waiting."

Without a word the black robot shifted into car form and drove away. Ariana watched as his dust trail kicked up across the desert. When he was miles away she drew out her radio and activated a secure line.

"Josie? Ari. Tell Sarah the hunter is ready for the game."

[Soundtrack: "Absolute Beginners," by David Bowie. Or pick your favorite Rage Against the Machine song. "Wake Up" from "The Matrix" would be a good start. Just about any "Matrix" soundtrack piece, particularly the instrumentals, would work.]
 

Ariana, from her perch in a rock outcropping, peered through binoculars at the entrance to the Autobot energon processing plant. "She’s in," Ari said into her radio. "They just brought her there. Right on schedule."

Eighty miles away, sitting in a wheelchair, monitoring a dozen computer screens, Josie Beller sighed.

"I just hope to god she knows what’s she’s doing."

"I’ve been praying to a dozen different deities about that very thing. So far the only one to answer was acid god Ken Kesey. If it makes you feel any better, the chief says all is well. But that may have been the LSD talking."

"I wonder what kind of god she believes in," Josie mused. Ari didn’t have to ask who ‘she’ was.

"The most unwise thing I ever did was ask her that very question. The cruelest thing she ever did to me was answer truthfully."

"I’ll take that as a ‘You don’t want to know,’ then."

"You don’t want to know. How about you? What do you believe in anymore?"

"Hell, Ari, even basic concepts of the universe I believed in are going kaput one after another. If you can’t have any faith in mathematics to be consistent, how are we supposed to have any faith in god? I mean, one of my ongoing computer programs just beeped and announced that it had computed pi to the last decimal.

"Oh." Ariana blinked a few times. "That’s not good, is it?"

"Depends on how you look at it. Pi is supposed to go on forever, so either it’s a glitch in the system or we’re on the verge of the end of eternity."

"No offense to you, Josie, but I hope you just have a glitchy system."

"Me too. You’ll have to excuse me; I’m getting an alert from one of them now. Something about Fermat’s Last Theorem."

"Josie, I want you to listen to me very carefully: if an infinite number of monkeys shows up at your door, do not answer, okay? Josie? Ah, hell." Ariana resumed her position over the processing plant.

"Wish I had an Etch-a-sketch. . . ."
 

The door swooshed open and an Autobot guard shoved the human woman into the prison cell. She straightened up, turned back to the robot.

"Listen, I’m going to need a six o’clock wake-up, call, okay, and under no circumstances should the maid pester me before that. And I want one of those little mints on my pillow --" The metal door clanged shut in her face. "Hrm. So much for that," Sarah said. She turned back to her extremely austere surroundings -- metal on all sides, no furniture.

A young man sat in one corner, staring at her. He looked like he hadn’t eaten in months. She knew that look. She just stared back. For five minutes.

"You’re just not gonna talk, are you?" she finally asked.

"Nothing to say."

"Only if you’re really, really boring."

Sarah examined him closely; he was weak from malnutrition. She wondered how long he had been here.

"How on earth did you end up in this hellhole?"

I . . . don’t know. They had me working in the plants for a while, then dragged me in here. Never said why." He paused. "You? If they’ve brought you here it was probably for more than just labor. This is a bad place."

"Oh, yeah, that. I, uh, kind of blew up a few robots. A lot, actually. Surprising how effective a kiloton of rock can be when it’s dumped on a convoy. Then there was the guy I blew in half --"

"You were a rebel? And you killed Autobots? Do you have any idea what they’re going to do to you? This is Perceptor’s lab, don’t you know that? Do you know what he is?"

"Oh, I heard them gloating about it when they took me in. Something about vivisection and sliced eyeballs. I really wasn’t paying that much attention. I was getting to the point that I hoped they’d just pop my eardrums right then; those voices sound like a cat on a chalkboard."

He slumped down against the cell wall. Now he was stuck with a crazy one, and in denial at that.

"You’re always cocky when you first come in," he said. "I’ve seen it. First there’s bravery, then whimpering, then just a lot of screaming. Perceptor does things to them. I don’t know if we can even understand what they’re capable of, how long they can keep us alive."

"And you? Why are you still alive and intact?"

"I guess you could call me an experiment. Perceptor . . . does things to my insides. I only look okay from the outside. I don’t really remember what they do. I just know I feel less and less myself every day. It feels like everything I am is being sucked out."

"It’s a stretch to say you look okay from the outside, for that matter." She paced back and forth a bit, chewing her upper lip. "Is it here? Perceptor, I mean."

"Not as far as I know. He’s supposed to be back in a couple of days."

"Well, isn’t that just my rotten luck. Far too long to wait to make this work."

"I hope you understand that you’re sounding like a crazy woman."

"That’s because I am a crazy woman," Sarah said quite reasonably. "The Italian fencing schools had a phrase: Botto Segratta. It meant ‘secret thrust,’ and it referred to each school’s hard-earned secret techniques. A botto segratta could often lead to swift victory if it caught the enemy off guard, but it also left you open to attack if you blew it. Very dangerously open. So you had to use it carefully. But they still exist. I’m going to show you my own botto segratta. In a few minutes, once I work up the nerve, we’re busting out of here."

"With what? Those doors are magnetically sealed. A bulldozer couldn’t bust them open. And even if we could get out, we’re unarmed. They’d blast us to dust."

"Ah, such small thinking," she sighed with a mock roll of her eyes. "Once, for show-and-tell at school, I took an ordinary drinking straw and plunged it halfway through a potato. They were sure it was some kind of trick. No trick, just a neat bit of focus my father taught me. Lesson: you can hide a weapon anywhere. It’s all about misdirection."

"Not just anywhere," he said. "Look at where we’re at. We’ve been scanned, X-rayed, Z-rayed, flouroscoped and everything. They’re watching us right now. You couldn’t get so much as a peashooter in here, and it certainly isn’t going to open that door. Misdirection pulls a rabbit from a hat. It doesn’t save you from hell."

She smiled grimly. "Nonsense. For most of high school I was living on soda and throwing up everything I ate, and my parents never suspected a thing. Nobody at school even knew my name, let alone that I was slitting my wrists once a week or what I was going to do with the propane bombs. No wonder I’m convinced I’m invisible." She shook her head. "I miss soda."

"I miss a lot of things," he said.

"Maybe it was all for the best, you know, them coming and wiping the slate clean. You say this is hell, but it’s not. The world we inhabited -- that was hell. Dragging through the motions of life, never changing, never advancing. . . ."

He curled up protectively. "I dunno . . . I kind of liked things the way they were. Nice knowing that McDonald’s was always going to be there serving up Big Macs day in and day out."

"See, that’s the illusion the world pulled on you. That’s misdirection, all right. We’d been hitting the snooze button on out evolutionary clock for too long. But now the robots have served their purpose and it’s time to let them know their time’s up. Sometimes you’ve just got to quit running in place and try something new. You have to embrace the spirit of change. All this time we’ve been running on a treadmill, wearing ourselves out and just thinking we’re going somewhere. There’s only so many times we can go through the same damn motions without something new, you know? We’ve got to be crazy enough to consider options that don’t make a hell of a lot of sense. The weird will inherit the earth. Who’d have ever thought you could use bulimia as a weapon?"

"Now you’re just getting strange."

She looked like she was ignoring him. "Three years as a bulimic and you come away with a cornucopia of useful skills," she said. She took several deep breaths. "Not the least of which include sneaking around in plain sight and . . . this. . . ."

She rolled her eyes to the back of her head, and plunged her finger down her throat. He stared in horror as she vomited out onto the floor. Water mostly, along with some orange carrot-like chunks. And a microcassette tape wrapped in smooth plastic coating. The tape transformed and leapt up into the form of a human-sized, red-toned robot.

"That . . . was the most disgusting thing I have ever done," Frenzy said with a grimace.

"You got off lucky," Sarah sputtered as she picked herself up and coughed violently. "The disgusting part would have been if that didn’t work." She blenched several times and spit to clear out her mouth. Blood trickled out.

"Oooooh, god, I’d forgotten how much that hurt. Still, beats the alternative."

The young man finally found the words to speak.

"You . . . carried him in here in your stomach?"

Sarah forced a smile and spoke hoarsely: "Fritz here --" ("Frenzy." "Whatever.") "-- happens to be extremely good at evading their scanners. Something about otherdimensional sensor refraction I don’t pretend to understand; it involves a lot of higher math. They can be looking right at him and miss him. Which they did. And you haven’t even seen the best part yet."

Frenzy opened a chest compartment and withdrew a pistol and small cassette player.

"Four million years I’ve been doing this from the other side. I could get used to doing it this way." He placed both on the ground and stepped back; seconds later Megatron and Soundwave appeared before them.

The young man scrambled backwards, not sure what to make of all this. Three Decepticons -- their leader -- in the heart of an Autobot facility. . . .

Megatron smiled. "They’ll know we’re here any second. Let’s make the most of our opportunity, shall we?" He de-subspaced a human-sized energy cannon and handed it to Sarah, then blasted open the cell door with his own fusion cannon.

Sarah hoisted the weapon. In tests she had used it to reduce house-sized boulders to power. And to think she’d spent all those years playing around with propane bombs.

"Now we are playing with . . . power," she murmured. She looked around at the robots and strode out the door. Any one of them,she reckoned, could cause some serious damage. Three of them, in a surprise attack, with Megatron at the head. . . .

"Perceptor’s lab is on the left. Alas, he’s elsewhere, but I’m sure if we’re lucky we’ll have plenty of neighbors to play with. If we’re very, very lucky they’ll put up a fight. I hope so." She took in a deep breath. "All right. No more treadmill for us. Time to change the damned world." She looked back at the young man. "Well? You coming?"

The four of them crouched in a rock outcropping above what used to be Lincoln’s forehead on Mount Rushmore. Now it was Optimus Prime’s face.

"Now isn’t that odd," Ariana said, peering through binoculars at a large metallic facility rising out of the Black Hills. "No activity. I’m sure of it. Doesn’t look like there’s been anything for days."

"That matches up with what we’ve heard," Mitch said. He crouched down next to Ariana, energy rifle at the ready. "Three days ago the last of the robots cleared out in a hurry. No sign of people."

"Why the hell would they abandon this place?" Sarah slid up behind them. She was dressed in army camo pants and jacket, with a black t-shirt reading ‘We died for your sins’ in block letters. She hauled along an energy cannon that seemed about twenty pounds too big for her, but she seemed to carry it with ease.

"It was one of their major processing centers for the midwest. After what we did --"

"What you did, to be more specific," Ariana put in.

"-- what we did to the one in North Dakota, they have to be hurting for energy. They’d stepped up production even there. So something’s wrong."

"Remember what our recon is telling us," said Mifune, the last of this group, bringing up the rear with a heavy shotgun. "We know they had human slaves here. At least a hundred, maybe more. People and robots were constantly streaming in and out."

"So we know at least two hundred people are in that place, dozens of robots bailed in the last couple of days, no people seen," Sarah said. "Meaning the people are still in there.

"Like the roach motel -- people check in but they don’t check out," Mitch said. Nobody laughed.

"Meaning we still have a job to do," the voice of Josie Beller, their wheelchair-bound leader, came in over everybody’s headsets. "Be ready for anything; just because they’re gone doesn’t mean their security is finished."

The team infiltrated quietly; their sensors indicated that no electricity was operating inside the facility, but they took no chances.

They wove through one dark passageway after another, flashlights playing across polished osmium steel surfaces. Nobody challenged them at any point. Sarah took point, followed by Mitch, then Ari, and Mifune in the rear.

She crept along the main tunnel. She hated the eerie, oppressive silence; she’d have welcomed the arrival of a robot leaping from the shadows, if only to end the tension. The tunnel opened out into a large chamber, and she flashed her lamp back and forth across it. And froze.

"Ari," Sarah said quietly. "Come on up here. Keep the others back. They’re not ready to see this."

Ariana raised a hand to stop the others, then slowly walked in to see what Sarah was so concerned about.

They gazed inside, sweeping their flashlights across a deep pit, lined with metal. Dozens of naked human bodies lay stacked within, eyes wide open, skin pulled tight around their bones. They looked like twisted wretches. A hundred people, maybe more, skeletons with only the thinnest layer of skin. Their arms and legs sat at odd curved angles -- the bones simply weren’t holding them together. She couldn’t tell who was male or female, young or old, white or black; in death they all looked alike.

Ariana stared for a long time, then swallowed hard. She tasted bile.

"What . . . what did you mean, they’re not ready?" she asked.

"Because you’ve seen this every time you listened to your grandparents talk about Dachau, and I’ve seen it every time I close my eyes. They’re not ready."

Ariana switched on her headset. "Josie, you getting this?" she asked.

"Every image. I’m zooming in now." Josie’s eyes widened. "Those bodies aren’t old, and they aren’t worn out. They’re dessicated. Something just sucked the life right out of them."

At that moment the men slowly crept in and stared in shock.

Sarah gave them credit; neither of them looked like they were going to vomit. But they looked like they wanted to. Josie’s voice came in over the headsets.

"You’re missing something else. Look around. Breathe in. What’s missing from this picture?"

Ariana took a deep breath. "It smells -- like nothing. Nothing at all like a mountain of corpses should smell."

"I noticed right away. Neither of you were reacting like you were smelling a charnel house," Josie said. "That shouldn’t be. No matter how wrung out, that many corpses should smell horrible. It’s a byproduct of the natural breakdown of cellular structures."

"There’s no way something like that shouldn’t break down without preservatives," Mitch said.

"Unless they’ve already drained out everything worth preserving," Mifune said. They both had the sound of people trying to step back from the situation and think scientifically to keep their sanity. It wasn’t working

"Unless the internal proteins have already been completely broken down," Josie clarified.

Sarah edged closer to the bodies and knelt to examine one. "I’ll be damned," she muttered. "It’s like those old movies where the savages shrink scalped heads. These are perfectly preserved. Like rubber." She paused, then looked back at Ariana. "This is the part where you kick in with the mythology."

"Oh. Oh, yes." Ariana wiped off her goggles nervously. "Certain ancient tribes believed that the preservation of the body; they would preserve it as perfectly as they could, as with mummies, so they would be ready for their journey to the next world. But then, other faiths have it that preserving the body actually keeps the soul trapped here. That’s why burial is so common; you allow the body to decompose naturally. The way nature meant it."

"So where the hell does this fit in?" Sarah asked.

"This . . . is neither. The essential parts of the body are gone, but the husk is left. Caught between two states of being. Almost any religion that had an opinion about the disposition of the body might believe these people were trapped in limbo. Or hell. Tormented for all time by the desecration of their remains."

Sarah drew a pocketknife and sliced open one of the corpse’s bellies. Everyone but her flinched instinctively. She ran her fingers over the organs. Still rubbery; not a single drop of fluid remaining. No blood.

"They really did drain them dry," she said. "Ari. Blood myths."

"Many monsters -- primal fears -- drained blood. One of the reasons vampires were so feared was because they went straight to the literal heart of what makes us live." Ariana sounded relieved to be thinking about anything else but the horror before her. "They were creatures who lived forever at the cost of the lives and sometimes souls of their victims. Having our blood forcibly taken is one of the ultimate sins; giving it up voluntarily is an act of great divine service. Blood sacrifice is an essential part of many religious cultures, even today. Catholicism, for example, believes in literal ritual cannibalism. The death of one is the salvation of many. Certain cultures had what we now call sin eaters: an animal into which was ritually placed all the sins of the tribe. Sometimes it was a person. By slaughtering that animal, the tribe’s sins were forgiven and all was right with the world," Ariana said. "One death saved the world. Very common theme in all religions, right up to Christianity. Don’t tell me I’m a bad influence on you; you can’t think they’re aiming to fulfill a religious obligation?"

"No, I don’t. Not on purpose, anyway. But I think they’re fulfilling it all the same. Maybe these robots are drawing from the same universal unconscious . . . draw out someone’s life force and live forever. . . ."

She sprung to her feet and kicked one of the bodies in sudden anger. "Damn. Damn damn damn damn damn!" She started to pace madly. "This isn’t torture at all. Back in North Dakota, I saw a guy who’d been hooked up to some kind of Autobot machines that drained his strength. I figured it was torture. But he looked about a week away from being a concentration camp victim, all lanky and malnourished. But it wasn’t just lack of eating; I know what that looks like. He looked like a vampire had drained the life right out of him. He said something about machines sucking out his life energy. . . ."

Mifune nodded as he began to understand. "Add to that the way they’re rounding up people, and the fact they’re not producing energon around here, and what these people look like . . . as if they’re dead . . . dead. . . ."

"Batteries," Sarah finished. "Dead batteries tossed in the landfill. That’s what they’ve been up to. They’ve cut out the middleman entirely. No need to have human slave labor to dig up fuel when you can just use the humans as fuel. Saves plenty of work. Efficient -- from human to robot in one easy step. Hrm."

"Think about the sheer numbers involved," Josie said. "At least ten million people worldwide are still alive somewhere. Our best guess is that the Autobots have a hundred or so robots, maybe two, but not much more. That’s a lot of humanity to feed so few robots." She squeezed her eyes shut; if she was doing the math in her head right, this technique could feed the robots for thousands of years from Earth alone. "This is too dangerous to allow to continue. With this, they’ve solved their energy problems. Probably forever. No doubt they could modify this to use any kind of living creature, anywhere in the universe. Sooner or later they’d find something efficient, like a creature made of pure energy, and they’ll be unstoppable. Like a virus swarming across everything, replicating themselves until they’ve reduced every single planet in creation with little clones of themselves creeping about. . . ."

"Is that what we’re going to turn out as? Everything? Batteries for a race of overgrown toasters?" Mitch asked. "Before, we were at least useful enough to use as slave labor. Now . . . now we’re just disposable."

"Wrong," Sarah murmured. "We’re disposable, true. But now we’re indispensible. . . . You’d think immortal robots would be above this. . . ."

Something snapped behind Sarah’s eyes, and she turned to stare at the bodies.

>"I think they wanted us to find this," Mifune said tightly as she pondered. "That’s why it was so easy to get in. They wanted us to see it and be afraid. As a warning to let us know we had no hope."

"Pity. That means they’ve failed already," Sarah said, seemingly to thin air. "This is not the way the world is supposed to be," she whispered. Then she turned to the others. "We cannot allow the world to be this way." She looked all about, tapping her tongue against the back of her teeth. She crouched down and looked into the wide-open eyes of one of the bodies.

"Sorry, honey, but we’re going to have to keep you this way a while longer," she whispered. "We’ll burn you all when we’re done, send you someplace better, promise." She exhaled deeply.

"Anyplace will have to be better than this." Then she straightened up. "Josie, you hearing me? We’re going to need some hard specs on this. Reverse-engineer this equipment and the bodies. I need to know what the hell they did and how the hell they did it. We might have to poke our robot friends for some help. Ari, same thing."

("Since when did she become boss?" Ariana asked over her private radio. "Since it seemed to make sense," Josie said. "You wanna be the one to belay her?" "Hell, no.")

"Mitch, Mifune, talk to everyone and then talk to everyone else," Sarah continued. "I need recon on everything: where they’ve been, where they’re going, where they’re keeping the rest of their human stock. Abandoning a facility this big is going to have to leave some traces. And everybody reach out to the other cells. I need to know things. M.D.’s, chemical engineers, electrical engineers, and the current situation in Atlanta."

"Atlanta? What’s in Atlanta?" Mitch asked.

"Things I’ll bet a thousand to one the robots never gave a damn about. Secret things the world thought it buried." She licked her lips. The chance she’d waited her life for was about to come, she realized. Funny it would come about this way.

"C’mon. Let’s go save the damned world."

The robot’s innards tore themselves apart. He hadn’t known this kind of pain could exist -- and he knew many, many kinds of pain. He remembered the last time he’d laid eyes on fellow mechs. In a laboratory, overseen by Perceptor, he’d been modified to accept the human-powered batteries. Imagine, Perceptor had ranted, completely cutting out the need to process energon. Just plug a human body into your systems and suck them dry of their life force. A single person could fuel a mech for 36 hours of steady work or several days of careful rationing. By the time they were through, just dispose of the husk and grab another. No more need for energon processing plants or the inelegant drilling for fuel. And sooner or later they’d come across a species who was even more efficient an energy source. But for now, millions of humans remained alive . . . enough to fuel hundreds of mechs for decades. Millions of batteries. . . .

. . . he remembered a line of Autobots, all modified, all loading up with humans, mewling, bleating, knowing their fate as they were dragged from the cramped holding pits. His human didn’t even resist; she seemed like she was already dead inside. Pity. He’d been looking forward to a fight. . . .

. . . dozens of Autobots, fueling up with humans

. . . what had they been thinking?

He lay back on the desert sand and stared at the sky. He could barely move; he felt his joints locking up, and his engines were long past repair. It had all happened just hours after he united with the human and made his way across the plains.

"How could this be?" he wondered aloud. "What went wrong?"

"Land war in Asia," he heard a female voice growl. Nearby, a woman hauled herself out of his ejected engine block, and dragged herself in agony across the sand. "Went up against a Sicilian when death was on the line. Attacked Russia in winter. Eighteen point five minutes of erased tape. Zigged when you shoulda zagged. Sooner or later, your kind always screw it up and gets yourselves destroyed in the screwing-up of it. Four million years and you never learn."

She reached the robot’s still form and drew herself upon his frame to look into his scarlet eyes. His dimming optics could make out the words ‘We died for your sins’ written in block letters on her torn black shirt. He wondered who she meant.

"Tyranny never works. Stretching yourself too far never works. And lookie here. You’re dead."

"Impossible," he grumbled. "You have attacked in surprise from a distance . . . perhaps an electromagnetic pulse. . . ."

"Keep on dreaming. Before I was captured I made use of a little concoction some friends devised. It might interest you to know that the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta were nearly untouched; most of their stuff was in vaults underground. Amazing what kind of nasty bugs you guys never worried about because you were immune to them. I mean, who could give a robot smallpox, right? We cooked a bad sort of cocktail. Very bad. Absolutely lethal to humans in less than 48 hours. It poisons everything. Everything. Any vulture that so much as nibbles on my scalp when I’m finished isn’t going to make it two miles before dropping dead. A very natural, hidden sort of death. Viruses are part of the natural order of elements. Invisible. I knew your buddies were up to kicking this human-battery thing to the next level when they started abducting people without any regard for strength or ability. Generally they just kill the weak. But this time they grabbed whoever they could. Pity. If they’d paid more attention they might have recognized me when I let myself be picked up. I lost track. Where was I?"

"Babbling endlessly," the robot moaned.

"Oh, yes, I was about to explain my evil plot. Before I kill you, Mr. Bond, there’s just one thing I want you to know. . . .  Your procedure sucks out all the vitality from a human. That creates a bond between the two of you. It should come as no surprise to you that the nastiness of this virus transfers across the boundary. Into you."

"Impossible," he rumbled.

Says the dying robot. It’s impossible to teleport across the galaxy or fit a ten ton robot in the palm of my hand, too, but you don’t have any problem with that. You’re the ones who worked out a miraculous way to turn human agony into gasoline. Don’t blame us just ‘cause we figured out a way to pour sugar in the tank. I couldn’t begin to tell you how we did it; it involves a lot of numbers. But it works. Obviously. Power’s like a drug, and you made it into a literal drug, one you started mainlining and got addicted to. That always gets you. Drug dealers used to cut their cocaine with rat poison, come to think of it. Aheh. You of all people should have known better. Counterpunch."

If he had the strength to show amusement, even approval, he would have.

Even now, in his black Punch form, she recognized him.

"Yes. Yes, indeed. I remember you now. You knew Outback was coming, ambushed him. . . .  How did you . . . know?"

"I didn’t. I just always assumed the Decepticons were as untrustworthy as Autobots. Nice of you to prove me right."

"You are the most . . . talkative dying person I have ever met."

"Me and death, we’re old friends. I was never afraid of him. It’s practically a love affair; we’ve been flirting for so many years . . . I’ve been looking forward to it for a lot longer than you’ve been here. You . . . you strike me as someone who’s been dodging death a lot longer than he deserves."

"So . . . I’m finished. I can accept that, human. I always knew I would die in the line of . . . duty. I never expected it to be so . . . underhanded . . . but perhaps that is appropriate. And I have the satisfaction of knowing you die out here with me, alone. Your bones will rot and you will end up in an unmarked, vulture-picked grave. Congratulations . . . you have traded your own life for a single robot. I hope . . . it was a worthwhile bargain."

And she laughed, a hollow, emotionless sort of laugh, then clutched her stomach and spit up blood in agony from the strain.

"An excellent bargain," she hissed, then gazed at him with mirthless eyes. "The virus was contagious."

She paused and let it sink in. Punch’s logic centers were beginning to go, but he could still process all that.

"The holding facility . . . hundreds of human batteries . . . packed in tight. . . ."

"I imagine the virus had pretty well taken hold by the time I left," she said.

"You killed those people. Condemned them to a painful death," he said. It sounded accusatory.

"They were dead already," Sarah growled. "I condemned you to a painful death. A lot of you." She giggled hideously. "I always knew I was going to go down killing hundreds of people . . . just never expected it to be like this. . . .  You know, you can start begging for the cure anytime you want."

"There . . . is . . . no . . . cure." His words were more laborious than ever.

"You don’t know that."

"It doesn’t matter . . . stupid, stupid way to die. . . ." The light in his eyes dimmed out.

"You’re getting boring. I’m done talking to you. I’ve got something to say to the boss. No, don’t just give me that look like you’re not going to take orders from a human. You and I both know you’re transmitting every word of this back to base in hopes that it’ll do some good. It won’t. But you’re a spy, Punch. Information is your only business."

He didn’t answer. She crawled upon his still body. He wasn’t even whirring inside. Probably dead, for all intents and purposes, but she was willing to bet his transmitter still worked. Especially a spybot’s. She leaned her head wearily over where she was pretty sure the audio pickup remained.

"Optimus . . . you don’t mind if I call you Optimus, do you? . . . Optimus, honey, I know you’re listening to this. Maybe not right now, but sooner or later this transmission’s gonna reach whatever the hell you call ears. Listen, I was talking to God lately, and She was like, yo, and I was like, yo, and she was all about ‘Listen, babe, this whole robot thing has just gotten way outta hand. Very bad. You need to get in there and lay some smack down on their rusty asses.’ And I am one righteous god-fearin’ babe, so I’ve got to show you the door. You’ve already heard everything I told your buddy here. Your game’s over, your quarter’s up, closing time, every new beginning is some other beginning’s end, two thousand zero zero, party’s over, outta time, and any other metaphor you care to add. While you and your buddies were off getting drunk at the frat party, we snuck in and keyed your cars and slashed your tires. You’re not going anywhere on our ticket anymore. I just wanted you to know that."

She paused and tried to savor what life was left in her. Licked her lips; they felt dry and chapped.

"When I was young we had this game. . . .  Oh. Almost forgot. The process is contagious to robots too. I’d put some distance between myself and any other infected robot; might want to impose some quarantine before you’re all infected."

She was making up this part entirely, but what the hell; she figured it would at least spread some interesting chaos. Xanax Dystopia’s final gift.

"I hear a lava dip does wonders to kill the infection. I’ve spread the word. Every rebel cell on earth knows the secret to this now. This planet’s a tainted well. It’s robot hell. Dystopia. Pack up your damn toys and go the hell home. . . ."

She decided not to mention that the robot opposition’s communications expert had also transmitted the information on a broadband subspace frequency in all known languages. Every civilized planet had this information as well. She figured she’d let the Autobots find that out on their own. Her eyes widened madly. "

You go to all your robot friends out there, all the other petty tyrants you can find, and you tell them!" she screamed hoarsely into the receiver. "Tell them we’re coming! We’re gonna blow up everything you’ve got here, and once you’ve run for your damned lives, we’re going to build supercharged warp engines and follow you back where you came from and drop it down a hyperinverted black hole too. . . ."

Her breathing lightened. She couldn’t feel her lips. Strange. She’d always expected this moment to come in a blinding instant, rather than slowly. But she’d always known it would come in victory.

"I want you to know you don’t matter anymore. I declare you irrelevant. I see another world, the one where the cat lived instead of died. They say . . ." She felt the words slipping back in her throat. "They say experience is a harsh teacher . . . you get the test first and lesson later . . . you blew your test . . . but here’s your lesson: Never throw down with. . . ."

She tried to take in one more breath and realized her lungs weren’t working anymore.

". . . someone who’s more in love with death than . . . you are. . . ."