Pascal Versus the Formicants

"Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways and be wise," Jack
muttered to himself. He looked up from his excavation work. It was
mid-afternoon and hot - lemonade weather. The sandpit was in the shade
of the garage. Jack had a blue bucket with stars on it. He was digging
a tunnel for his truck convoy to drive through. He had wet sand all up
the back of his dungarees. "A naughty person, a wicked man, walketh
with a froward mouth. He winketh with his eyes, he speaketh with his
feet, he teacheth with his fingers; Frowardness is in his heart, he
deviseth mischief continually; he soweth discord. Therefore shall his
calamity come suddenly; suddenly shall he be broken without
remedy."

"That all sounds rather portentous," said Simon. "Thou art snared with
the words of thy mouth." He grasped a robot action figure in either
pudgy hand. He held one of them up. "I think this one's gay."

"Gay?" Jack scratched the bridge of his nose. "Why?"

"Who can say? It's just an impression I get." He stood the potentially
homosexual robot on top of the mound that they had nominated as the
robots' base.

"Can a robot be gay? Do they have reproductive organs?"

"No," said Simon, "no reproductive organs. No genes to disseminate.
They come off of a production line in a factory, like tins of
beans."

"So how can he be gay?" Jack patted the sand around the mouth of the
tunnel. "You don't get gay beans." He bent over until his blond hair
dusted the ground, and peered into the cavity.

Inside, two ants watched as a giant eyeball descended in front of the
tunnel entrance. The eyeball blinked once, twice, then lifted.

"Pretty big," said the first, adjusting his helmet. He and the other
ant were stood to attention against opposing walls.

"Yup," said the second.

"Y'know, Mason said he once saw one that was brown."

"Uh-huh."

The first ant looked out towards the tunnel opening. "Not that one
though."

"Nuh-uh." Behind them, a subsidiary passageway branched off from the
main tunnel, winding down and around until it reached the Great Hall.
The walls of the Great Hall were decked with red banners. Commissar
Hauser stood on a stage at one end, regarding rank upon rank of
black-armoured soldiers. He had banged his podium so much that his cap
had slipped. It sat at a rakish angle upon his glossy pate. He bared
his teeth in a snarl.

"It must?" He paused for a sharp intake of breath through his nostrils.
"? end now, I say! Maa! For too long, my Formicants, our people have
lived in fear, in terror of this tyrannical menace. This cannot go on!
Maa! Tonight, with the tunnel complete, an obsidian tide will come
rushing out to engulf Mount Sand and eradicate the Mechanoid threat
once and for all!" He raised a trembling finger, squinting to
accentuate the gravitas of the situation. "To make this valley safe we
must pay with our blood! Maa! To bring peace to this valley we must
march to the fringes of hell and wage war against a legion of dark
forces! Maa! To find glory and transcendence we must descend into the
unforgiving squalor of the battlefield and have our guts trampled
beneath the boots of our foes!" His antennae hung over his eyes and he
was panting heavily. "To each and every one of you, I say tonight we
are the axis upon which the Earth pivots. Before us lies the chance to
shed our limitations and become immortal. You have searched all your
life for salvation. Tonight, it patiently awaits." He lowered his head.
Slowly, the soldiers in the front rows began to clap. The clapping
spread backwards through the ranks until the entire hall reverberated
with a landslide of fervent applause. As he stepped from the stage,
Hauser beckoned the Viceroy to follow him.

In the western annex, Hauser lit up a cigar. Applause rippled in from
the connecting corridor. Viceroy Kubrick waited patiently, hands behind
his back, as the Commissar puffed smoke towards the wall.

"We move when moonlight first strikes the Dune," Hauser said at
last.

"Of course, Commissar," said Kubrick. "I will ready the troops." He
saluted and was about to leave when Hauser turned to face him.

"Ensure there are no mistakes," he said through a gauze of cigar smoke.
"You and I are writing history tonight. I would have?" He took a deep
breath. "I would have it remember us kindly."

Outside, Simon adjusted the second of the robot figures' arms so they
appeared to be raised as if in surprise or elation. He staked it into
the sand alongside the first.

"I mean, they're only nominally male," Jack was saying as his dumper
truck deposited sand into the bucket. "There's not actually any female
robots for them to be attracted to, so you couldn't have robot
heterosexuals per se."

"So, by that logic, all robots must by definition be gay." Simon
considered his thesis for a moment. "Or nominally gay, at any
rate."

"Homosocial, perhaps," Jack conceded. "Monosexual - or nominally
monosexual, as you would have it." He turned the bucket over. "Not
gay." He lifted the bucket and a miraculous sand tower stood next to
the tunnel entrance. "That's too much of a stretch. They don't have
sexual impulses. They don't reproduce."

"A robot is built in his master's image," Simon said. "Any feelings or
impulses a human can have can be projected onto an artificial mind.
Who's to say he's not gay? Who's to say he wasn't programmed that way?
Homosexuality doesn't serve any reproductive purpose anyway, so it's no
less likely to occur in robots than humans."

"Bosh," said Jack. "A robot can't be gay. It's a contradiction in
terms."

"Don't be a cock, Jack," said Simon.

"Hey!" Jack downed tools. "Steady on. Don't snap at me just because
your queer-dowsing's gone awry. Maybe your robot's been built in his
master's image, eh?"

"What's that supposed to mean?" Simon got to his feet.

Jack rose to meet him. "What it means, Simon, is that there's a bender
in this sandpit, and it's not me or the action figures. Clear enough
for you?"

"As crystal," said Simon through gritted teeth. For a moment, their
eyes remained locked, then Simon shoved Jack in the chest. Jack
staggered back, demolishing the castle with one stomp of his left foot,
then tripped on the concrete rim of the sandpit and landed flat on his
back on the lawn.

He lay there, strangely quiet. As the wind picked up, a thin keening
note rose to greet it. Jack's mouth opened wide, and he began to bawl.
Simon panicked. He looked about the sandpit, from the bucket to the
truck to the robots to the tunnel. The sound of Jack's tremulous
wailing seemed to come at him from all angles. He dropped onto his
backside, inhaled through his nose, and started crying too.

There were footsteps tramping on grass and then, "Oh boys? oh dear. Oh
deary me. What's happened here then? Oh Jack? Are you okay?" Jack's
mother was at his side, leaning over to caress his head and hoist him
from his supine position up into her arms. There, papoosed in the
diaphanous folds of her summer dress, his wails waned to muffled sobs.
As she smiled and coaxed, his and Simon's snuffling gradually abated.
"Ah bless. Shhh? There, there. It's all right now. Mummy's here.
Whatever is all this fuss about?"

"Jack insinuated I was gay," sniffed Simon.

"Only because you called me a cock," said Jack.

"Ahhh," said his mother.

"I wouldn't mind, but I object to sexual preference being bandied
around as if it were an insult." Simon wiped his nose with his hand,
grimacing as grains of sand adhered to his nostrils. "And he's been
making up words, like 'monosexual'."

"Poor babies," Jack's mother cooed, "of course. It's been a very busy
day for you both, hasn't it? I think it'd be best to leave the sandpit
for today, okay boys? It's nearly time for tea, anyway. Why don't we go
inside and I can run you both a nice hot bath and get all that sand off
you?" Simon and Jack exchanged meaningful glances.

"Sharing?" asked Jack.

"Naked?" asked Simon.

"And then we'll have some tea," said Jack's mother. "Come along now."
She took the boys' hands and led them across the lawn to the
house.

* * *

Pascal stood at the top of Mount Sand at dusk. Restlessly, he
calibrated the targeting systems on his gun mounts from mid to short
range, from short to mid, from mid to long. He zeroed in on the blue
bucket in the distance, considered then rejected launching a missile at
it. He lowered his launcher arm. The pneumatic servos in his legs
hissed as he sat down. As the breeze picked up, he began idly sketching
a cross-hatch pattern in the sand.

The evening was cold and, as it closed in, somehow melancholy. Beyond
Pit Valley, the foliage was green and heavy with moisture. Pascal had
often thought of running away. Sometimes, he imagined making his home
beneath the roots of the plum tree, alone and unobserved until gross
mechanical failure or worn out power cells precipitated the grim
finality of a Catastrophic System Shutdown.

He detected the thin sibilance of sand underfoot.

"Pascal." Oak's angular head and broad obdurium shoulders emerged over
the crest of the hill, rising and falling with each thudding step. He
paused upon reaching the summit. The long silver barrel of his Vesuvius
Cannon glinted in the first muted rays of moonlight. He flexed the
thick digits of his free hand. "I have been looking for you." Pascal
clambered to his feet, erasing his sand etchings with a scuff of his
heel.

"I was, uh?" Pascal glanced out across the valley. "I've been updating
my geodesic survey of the area and scanning for possible subsidence
caused by the construction of the new tunnel through Grand Dune." Oak
followed his gaze to the tunnel's dark mouth.

"I see. I will assimilate your data later." The two robots stood in
silence for a while.

"So?" Oak looked at him.

"Yes?"

"I was just wondering how your, uh? day had been." Oak said nothing.
His red eyes glowed in the fading light. Even when he was mere
centimetres away, Oak always seemed impossible to target except at long
distance.

"I have performed seven perimeter scans," he said. "I have optimised
the radial potential of my lower axial joints. I have run diagnostics
on my surveillance, targeting, and power systems." There was another
lengthy silence.

"Right," said Pascal. "That sounds very? efficient."

"Yes," said Oak. The muzzle of his lowered cannon stopped just shy of
the ground. A low sonorous purring emanated from his ventilation
grille.

"Yes," Pascal repeated. A liquid chill ran down his back. He ran a
systems check on his coolant tank, adjusted the mix ratio.

"I am going to re-excavate our headquarters," said Oak. Their HQ had
formerly been located in Mount Sand's southern cavern, but as was
endemic to the terrain, the mount had shifted during the day and the
cavern roof collapsed. He began to walk away.

"Bye." Pascal watched him go, listened until Oak passed out of audible
range. "I think you look nice tonight," he said quietly.

* * *

It would be easier this way. Far, far easier.

Pascal's Megido Blade scythed left, right, left as he advanced through
the tall grass, leaving bristling swathes of charred and severed stalks
in its wake. Blue sparks coruscated across its surface and the air was
ripe with the scent of ozone. He cleaved through the thick stalk of a
dandelion and it crashed smoking to the ground. In the sand at the
hill's summit he had simply written: "Oak. I'm sorry."

He would walk and he would walk and he would walk until he was far
enough away that nobody ever found him, and there he would stay, alone.
He had already run simulations in his head, and though his lack of
purpose would reduce existence to a slow submission to entropy, it was
better than the silent turmoil of Oak and Pit Valley. Maybe, after
time, his data on Oak would start to degrade, perhaps to the point of
becoming irretrievable. Maybe, after time, he would find not peace, but
some kind of homeostasis. Maybe, after time, his feelings good and bad
would simply cease.

A stag beetle emerged from the undergrowth and Pascal was raising his
sword to carve it in two when his comm unit buzzed angrily. He froze.
The stag beetle hesitated, then sensing it had been granted a reprieve
retreated into the grass, clacking its mandibles. Pascal lowered the
Megido Blade. A narrow aperture opened beneath his wrist and the sword
retracted into it. The aperture closed and Pascal was alone. His comm
unit still buzzed. He waited a moment, then opened the channel.

"Oak, I?"

"Return to HQ immediately!" The line was ragged with static, Oak's
perfunctory monotone invested with uncharacteristic urgency. "Return to
crrrkshhhhcrrk-diately!"

"Oak! What's the? why?"

"Return shhhhcrrk immediately! We're un-crrrkcrrkshhhhhcrrrrrk heavy
crrk ordnance in-shhhhhhhhhhhh?" The channel had gone dead. Pascal spun
round, his Megido Blade unsheathing in a flash of metal. He held it up
to the sky so it caught the moonlight.

"Hang on, Oak!" he yelled to the stars. "I'm on my way!" With all
systems operating at maximum capacity, he began thundering back down
the trail of felled grass.

Dirt crunched underfoot as he ran. Suddenly he longed to see Oak again,
to hear his dispassionate status reports, to know that he was safe.
Pascal cursed himself for being so pigheaded. If he had just shown a
little more self control, then there might not have even been an
emergency in the first place. Regrets were of no use now. Regrets could
not save Oak. He quickened his pace.

* * *

"Third Phalanx, move in! Maa!" bellowed Hauser from atop his beech leaf
palanquin. The ants carrying the leaf wobbled as he took a step
forward. "Fifth Phalanx, prepare to charge!" Oak's Gatling Blaster
flashed and spat as he backed farther and farther up the hill. He swept
it across his chest in a wide arc, swallowing the Formicant front lines
in a maelstrom of sand clouds and explosions. A barrage of rockets
roared out of his shoulder-launcher. "Discipline! Don't break
formation!" Hauser raised a trembling fist. "Storm Units! Maa! On my
signal!"

The Gatling Blaster fell silent. A serpent of acrid smoke coiled from
its muzzle. In the sudden lull, all was quiet save the steady shuck
shuck shuck of countless tiny soldiers marching in unison. Oak lowered
his Blaster. With his opposite arm, he levelled the Vesuvius Cannon at
the centre of the Formicant army, and pulled the trigger.

The mouth of the gun seemed to distort, then there came a ripping sound
and a comet of light streaked into the advancing troops, detonating
with an orchestral boom that flattened every soldier on the battlefield
and pitched Oak onto his back. The force of the blast took a few
seconds to reach Commissar Hauser. When it did, he was flung from his
palanquin into the sand.

He looked out from beneath his leaf. An uneasy calm had fallen over Pit
Valley. As the smoke cleared, he could make out a patch of ground where
the heat had turned the sand to glass. He glanced around, retrieved his
cap from beneath one of his dazed palanquin bearers. Brushing the sand
off, he got to his feet and pulled it back onto his head. The peak cast
a shadow over his eyes.

"Storm Units! Now! Maa! Fifth Phalanx! Chaaaarge!" His fallen troops
began to rouse. "Attack attack attack!" A loosely knit unit of red
commandos swarmed from where they had lain in wait behind the summit,
their carmine carapaces winking in the moonlight. As they closed in,
they began unfurling a vast spider-silk net. Oak lifted himself up onto
his elbows. What remained of the Formicant army had regrouped and was
powering towards him. He started hoisting himself onto his feet. "Now!"
screeched Hauser. "Now! Maa!"

Oak detected a swish and all at once he was entangled. He staggered
upright, trying to extricate his arms from the sticky, high-tensile
net. Commandos had reached his ankles and were beginning to scale the
ridged obdurium surface of his legs. He could lift his Gatling Blaster
no more than fifteen degrees. He released a volley of shells into the
ground around his feet, raising mushrooms of sand and shrapnel.
Climbers tumbled to their deaths, but for every one that fell, three
more stepped in to take his place. A black tide surged towards him
through a moonscape of smoking blast craters.

He attempted to fire the Gatling Blaster again, but the ammo feed was
jammed with squirming bodies. He stamped his foot, crushing half a
dozen soldiers. Still they came. Commissar Hauser was back on his
palanquin, yelling at the Formicants beneath him to march harder,
faster. "Detonate the warheads!" he cried, clinging onto his cap.
"Detonate the - Maa! Will you hold this thing steady, dammit! -
Detonate the warheads!"

Several commandos had reached Oak's shoulders. Hearing Hauser's orders,
they started to scramble into the firing tubes of the
shoulder-launcher. Oak struggled, fought against the net, fought to
shake them off. A warning siren sounded.

A juddering succession of explosions tore through his shoulder as the
launcher ammunition detonated prematurely. The blasts scattered burning
Formicants in all directions. Oak stood for a moment, smoke belching
from a gash in his neck, then his right arm fell from his shoulder,
crashing to the ground in a slew of sparks and twisted cables. Seconds
later, he collapsed. Every soldier felt the impact reverberate through
their legs. Silence. Then, a great roar of jubilation.

"Finish it off!" Hauser was screaming. "Rip it to shreds!"
Suddenly, a noise like lightning and across the hill sand rose in a
grand slow motion tsunami that for an instant blotted out the moonlight
and threw the entire Formicant army into shadow. It fell in a torrent
across Oak's body, sweeping away his attackers and bringing the
advancing soldiers to a halt. Hauser's mouth hung open. There,
silhouetted atop Mount Sand, Pascal stood with his Megido Blade drawn.
With every soldier watching, he turned his sword downward and drew a
line in the sand.

"Attack!" Hauser hollered. "Don't just gawp at it! Maa! Bring down the
abomination!" The front lines were buried up to their waists in sand.
As they struggled to disinter themselves, Pascal walked down to where
Oak lay.

"Oak," he said, "I'm sorry, I? You?"

Clogged with sand, Oak's ventilator fan rasped periodically. "No time,"
he said. "I'm experiencing cascading power failures throughout all
systems. I?" His voice cut out momentarily. "I can't contain them?
Catastrophic System Shutdown?"

"No!" cried Pascal. "I won't let you!"

"There are? no options."

"What? what about our Mechasynth function?"

"Inadvisable." Oak's comm amp was growing fainter. "Your power system
is not constructed to sustain two robots. Linking in such circumstances
could? cause failure in b?" His words trailed off.

"Oak!" No response. "Oak!" The Formicants were approaching. Pascal
plunged his Megido Blade into the ground and the sand around it began
steaming. The troops stalled. He couldn't let this happen. He couldn't
lose Oak, not now. Pascal grabbed Oak by his good shoulder, and heaved
him onto his chest. "Commence Mechasynth," he commanded.

Reinforced panels slid aside to expose docking ports in the small of
Oak's back and between his hips. Similar panels opened on Pascal, one
in the centre of his chest, and one in his pelvis. From them, grooved
docking teeth emerged, oozing a transparent insulation gel. Pascal
lowered himself onto Oak, and the teeth clicked into place.

Pascal had never undergone the procedure before. A warm surge of energy
passed through his body and into Oak. He could feel their systems and
subsystems combining, new pathways branching between the two. Their
arms and legs clamped together, forming thicker, stronger limbs. His
docking teeth throbbed with power as he pumped Oak full of life and
power and love. As the sensations grew stronger, it was almost as if he
were becoming Oak, and - by Pit Valley! - their thoughts were beginning
to mingle, they were becoming one at last.

"Quick!" shouted Commissar Hauser, who was growing rather hoarse by
now. "It's collapsed! Get them while they're down! Maa!" In a frenzy,
he stomped so hard that his foot broke through the leaf and knocked one
of his palanquin bearers unconscious.

One robot got to his feet. One robot surveyed the Formicant army with
burning crimson eyes. One robot pulled the Megido Blade from the
ground. As soon as his fist gripped it, the blade changed colour from
electric blue to blood red.

The robot spoke. "I," he said, his voice resonating across the
battlefield, "am Fusion. I give no quarter. I grant no clemency.
Retreat." The troops stood, motionless.

"What are you doing?" Hauser screamed. "Destroy it!" A cry went up from
the assembled forces and they charged forward. Fusion lifted the Megido
Blade high above his head, then brought it down into the first wave of
troops. A flash of white hot energy and five Phalanxes were reduced to
ash. There came a quietness. No one moved.

"Retreat!" yelled Hauser. "Retreat!" Suddenly the Formicants were
fleeing for their lives, screeching and wailing in a desperate rush for
the tunnel. Hauser toppled from his beech leaf, struggled to get to his
feet, then found himself knocked flat on his face by his own routing
troops, his precious cap trampled into the dirt.

Fusion watched impassively as the last of the soldiers filtered into
the tunnel. Seeing they were gone, he strode across to Grand Dune and,
with two swipes of the Megido Blade, sealed both the tunnel entrances
beneath an avalanche of sand. As the sword retracted into his wrist, he
turned to face the scarred slopes of Mount Sand. HQ had been destroyed
again.

Perhaps it was time to move on. There was so much terrain to be scanned
beyond Pit Valley, so much to discover.

Fusion was only one robot, but he would never be alone.

* * *

The next morning, Jack returned to the sandpit and found that his
tunnel had collapsed during the night. He could not find either of
Simon's robots. He dug into the mound of sand with his hands. When he
pulled them out, they were covered with ants. He squealed and his
mother came running.

"What is it, petal?" she said.

"The sandpit's full of fucking ants!" he shouted, slapping his forearms
and beating his hands against the sides of his legs. His mother
frowned.

"Oh dear? it looks like there's an ants' nest in there."

"Ten out of bloody ten! Well, go and fetch the kettle, woman!"
She ruffled his hair. "Not to worry," she said with a smile. "I'll go
and fetch the kettle." She returned to the kitchen, humming
gaily.

With the ants on his arms safely swatted, Jack leant over the exposed
nest and started muttering to himself. "Therefore," he whispered,
"shall his calamity come suddenly; suddenly shall he be broken without
remedy." From the uppermost branches of the plum tree, a thrush began
to sing.