The CRES code

Chapter Forty Two - Emily sees a problem.

     "It looks perfect!" cried Emily in delight. "It looks just like the real thing!"

     The wood pigeon stared back at her, cooing softly as it studied her with its pale green eyes, its head moving in precise little jerks. Its beak was orange and its feathers were a light, powdery grey except for the back of its neck where they were patterned in white and turquoise. It looked deeply stupid and harmless except, for some reason, for its feet that looked like the talons of some small but deadly dinosaur. It seemed impossible that those deadly looking feet with their scaled toes and long, black claws could possibly belong to the slightly ridiculous looking creature they were supporting.

     "That's really a robot?" said Emily to the priest standing beside her.

     "A robot brain and skeleton covered by real, living flesh," the priest replied. "Just like us. We've had the blueprints for these things for centuries, along with all kinds of other devices designed for special contingencies. Drones and weapons disguised as parts of the natural world in order to blend in, avoid being noticed. Shortly after the nuclear war, when the planet was only newly restored, there were books full of technical knowledge all over the place, buried in ruined buildings or in vaults specially designed to protect them. Books telling people how to build machines, how to recreate all the old technologies. We were worried that some ambitious warlord might find one and make use of it. Striking a city from orbit is something we prefer to avoid if there's a more elegant solution such as the surgical assassination of one man. A small bird that lands nearby, for instance, completely unnoticed, and shoots a poison dart into his neck from its beak."

     "I'm not sure elegant is the word I'd have used for that," said Emily drily.

     "After the first century or so, though, the last remnants of the old world were gone, or so we thought," continued the priest. "The cyborg birds were no longer needed. There were none in existence when Randall and the others first became a problem. We had to create new ones from scratch, and the living flesh covering them takes time to grow, a process that cannot be sped up. Finally, though, the first of them have begun rolling off the conveyor belt, so to speak, and we have begun to deploy them around the country."

     "Pigeon terminators," said Emily, smiling in amusement. "Hasta la pizza baby." The priest stared at her curiously. "We used to feed pizza crusts to the pigeons, back in my old life," she explained.

     "Ah," said the priest, nodding. "That's why we chose pigeons, because of their tendency to congregate around humans, begging for food. And also because they're a good sized bird. Plenty of room for all the gadgetry. Their eyes are cameras, for example. They transmit images to the nearest receiver, which forward them to a central server which is programmed to search for any suspicious activity. Anything that might be one of your former comrades. You can also see those images, by means of your head phone. It means you'll be able to search any city in the country for Randall and the others, even those under seige by orcs, without leaving the house."

     Emily nodded excitedly. "How do I do that?" she asked.

     "You'll have to download an app we've created for you. You ready to download it?"

     Emily nodded, so the priest transmitted it to her. The app installed itself on her head phone and Emily gave the mental command to activate it. Dozens of icons appeared across her visual field, each with a five digit number under it. An ID number for an individual bird.

     "Click on 00001," said the priest. "That's this bird here, in front of us."

     Emily did so, and two images appeared in her visual field, one from each of the bird's eyes, located on opposite sides of its head. One of the images contained her and the priest. Her face disappeared and appeared in the other image as the bird turned its head to look at her with its other eye.