The CRES code

Chapter Forty Five - Emily goes spying

Emily knew she was supposed to be looking for Randall, Jane and Loach, but battles and warfare had the same almost hypnotic compulsion over her as they did on almost everyone else and when some of the robot pigeons began sending back images of orcs besieging a city she couldn't help but watch.

She didn't know what city it was and she didn't care. The information was there, tagged with the images being sent back by the pigeon whose eyes she was looking through, but Emily couldn't bring herself to look at it. Thousands of the inhabitants of that city were going to die over the next few days and, even for Emily, who had killed so many people back in her days as an eco warrior, knowing too much about the people of that city would be just too painful. She knew it was an irrational feeling. The culling of humans was a good thing, when seen from the proper perspective. She had seen for herself what happened when people multiplied beyond the capacity of the land to support them. By keeping the human population down, the machines were doing them a massive favour. A little suffering now to prevent vast suffering on a global scale caused by starvation and pollution.

The orcs had built massive seige towers of oak and ash covered by plates of steel to protect them from the catapults and flaming arrows of the city. They rolled on wheels taller than the tallest human, pulled by hundreds of orcs on the ends of long ropes and pushed by more behind. They rolled across the farmland surrounding the city until they were right up against the high stone walls whereupon orcs would leap across to fight hand to hand with the human defenders. Bodies lay everywhere, three times as many humans as orcs, and here and there she saw a chieftain, half again as tall as the other orcs, wading through the battle like a farmer through a field of wheat, killing humans with every thrust of his halberd. He already had half a dozen arrows protruding from gaps in his armour, she saw, but they didn't seem to be bothering him, and why would they? The creature was a terminator. A robot covered in living skin. It would probably take twenty first century weaponry to take it down.

And yet, there were stories of chieftains having been killed by heroic human warriors. How? Had they just been pretending to have been killed, to give humans hope? To keep them from just giving up, from falling into a lethargy of despair? That sounded right to Emily. It sounded exactly like something that machines would do. Machines that cared for the good of the species rather than for any individual human.

Emily watched the fighting for a few more minutes, but eventually it began to sicken even her and she gave the pigeon a command to fly towards the centre of the city. Behind the wall, most of the buildings were on fire, set alight by boulders wrapped in flaming, pitch soaked rags thrown by orc catapults. Even as she watched she saw more sailing over the wall in long graceful arcs like fiery comets. Where they landed women and children ran with buckets of water to put out the fires they started, but Emily knew that water was scarce in a city under seige. How long would it be before they decided that they couldn't afford to waste any more of it and just left the fires to burn? Maybe they'll throw sand on the fires instead, she thought.

A hundred metres in from the walls, though, the city still seemed almost untouched, although there were very few people to be seen walking the streets. Rubbish was piling up on street corners as those whose job it was to carry it away were kept busy fighting on the walls, and she saw huge rats gnawing at it and scurrying past shops and houses in the full light of day. Before long diseases would begin to afflict the defenders and the priests would be kept busy treating the sick. She smiled to herself at the irony of it. Machines were attacking the city and more machines were helping the defenders of the city and all the machines were on the same side, all working with the same purpose. To keep the human race healthy and strong while at the same time keeping their population in check to preserve the rest of the natural world. The entire human race treated as a herd of deer in a nature reserve with vets to keep them healthy and game wardens to weed out the weak and the sick.