When you’re going extinct, everything’s personal.
Chapter 1
Kahal bristled as the third auto-taxi in a row passed him by, clearly unoccupied and flashing its rooftop Hail Me Now holosign as if to spite him. He ducked back under the Sapien Museum awning to get out of the acid rain and figure out just how he was going to make it back to camp now.
Kahal’s foraging job had taken longer than planned. He blamed the museum’s new aerial surveillance mini-drones for that. They had followed him around incessantly, like a swarm of little electric flies. It had taken forever to lose them.
Why the Sapien Museum had upgraded its security system was beyond him. After all, who wanted to pilfer the ancient kipple stored in its dusty hollows anyway? No one, that was who.
Well, no one except him.
Kahal flicked his headgear’s half-face visor down, tapped its smartbox above his right temple, and while it powered on, reached into his slingbag for what he’d stolen from the museum.
Stolen? Kahal huffed. How could it be stealing if it originally belonged to him, to his kind? It was the machines who had stolen it from them, along with everything else. What Kahal was doing wasn’t stealing. It was reclaiming. And back at camp, Hinyan’s life was depending on it.
Chapter 2
The Tobor Corporation’s tri-tone sogo blared in Kahal’s inner ear, where his headgear’s smartbox flash-beamed audio signals. The jingly sonic logo echoed away as the corporation’s emblem flared in the centre of his visor’s Heads-Up Display. Kahal only managed to half hold back a growl at the sight of the mocking colophon, a fire-orange nautilus slowly rotating counter-clockwise.
The machine-run conglomerate was the whole reason the world was dying. And their use of a nautilus for their emblem, the symbol of nature’s growth and renewal, was just an insult to what was left of the human race, or the sapien race as the machines insisted on calling them.
The oceans frothed with industrial machine waste now. And what little life was left in them would be gone in two or three decades, at best.
The land was pocked with thousand-kilometre-wide and thousand-kilometre-deep terraced pit mines. Or it was scorched to crystalline ash by the bombardment of solar rays that the thinned atmosphere and irradiated rainclouds couldn’t hold back anymore.
And everywhere else the planet was scabbed over with carbon-carboncrete, black steel, and dark borosilicate glass. Hulking inter-connected machine cities that towered higher than the eye could see, veined with wide roadways of screaming twenty-four-hour traffic belching up the new sallow-orange sky.
Kahal gritted his teeth at what the machines had done to his world. Their insatiable appetite for destruction was driving the entire sapien race to extinction.
Except, of course, for the hybrids.
The machines valued the sapiens that chose to meld with them. But, Kahal thought, were the hybrids even sapien anymore, or were they just machines now? Was there some measurable amount of flesh and bone and nerve you could replace with circuitry and endoskeleton-bionics and nano-nootropics, but still be sapien? Or was it all or nothing, one or the other, sapien or machine?
TOBOR CORPORATION splashed across the inside of Kahal’s visor in thick osmium-blue block letters.
He stopped trying to decide how much cyberware it took before you weren’t sapien anymore as the corporation’s introductory warning thrummed in his ear.
“Welcome. You are accessing the Tobor Corporation’s Sapien Portal,” the neuter machine voice began.
Besides, Kahal thought, he wasn’t a philosopher. He was a forager. He’d let the thinkers figure out whether the hybrids were sapien or machine, or something else altogether. Right now, he had a real problem to deal with, how to make it out of the city and back to camp, alive.