Rebirth (Archives of Humanity Book 1) Read online

  Rebirth

  Archives of Humanity: Book 1

  Justin DePaoli

  Edited by Dj Hendrickson(http://www.djhendricksonediting.com/)

  Proofread by Alexa B.(https://alexabooks.wixsite.com/authors)

  Cover design by https://ebooklaunch.com/

  Copyright © 2021 by Justin DePaoli

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Book 2

  Also by Justin DePaoli

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  The signal had been sent. It bored into his skull like a screaming alarm.

  Leon sat up and slapped at the watch on his wrist, groaning. The blaring finally stopped. He yawned and swung his feet off the bed, placing them on a cold metal floor. The triangular bulbs above his head eased to life, casting harsh light throughout the oppressive room.

  A door opened and a small robot wheeled itself in, stopping at Leon’s beside. The compartment door flush with its cylindrical body opened and a tray emerged, holding a copper mug of steaming coffee and a warm raisin muffin.

  Leon took both without a word, and the robot departed. Eying his watch, he sipped the scalding coffee and picked at the tiny raisins topping the muffin. He hated raisins. The Machines knew this.

  The Machines didn’t care.

  His watch vibrated, and red numbers blinked on the display.

  Class: Service

  Location: 40.438, -79.954

  Temp: 7.2°C

  Terrain: Wooded, hilly, unfavorable

  Predators: Few

  “Thank God it’s not another Prime,” said Leon aloud, biting into his muffin and making a face as several chewy raisins mushed between his molars. He got up and dressed himself in jeans, a pair of boots, and a scarred leather jacket.

  He drained the rest of his coffee, strapped on an empty utility belt, and headed out of the room, into a hallway with sterile metal walls and obnoxiously bright light.

  A Machine was waiting for him. It had bloodred eyes and huge metallic arms.

  A Directive Machine. Leon had read in journals and jottings—otherwise known as contraband—that Directive Machines served as Wardens during the Rise. He’d never met another besides the one who paced this hallway, so he figured after the human population was culled, they had likely been dismantled.

  Or, if rumors could be trusted, they had put themselves into a stasis until they were needed again.

  Human himself—somewhat, at least—Leon resented this metal fiend. But to resist was to commit suicide. So he’d do his duty, the same repetitive task each time the alarm went off in his head and alerted him to a rogue Machine. He was a Rogue Hunter; this was his life.

  He walked up to the Directive Machine and took its bounty: a rifle, canteen of water, and several survival items which included a skinning knife, fire starter, flashlight, utility belt, and a neatly folded and packaged blanket made from polyester film.

  Finally, the Machine held out a shot glass. Leon took it, staring at the clear liquid inside. He gritted his teeth and threw it back.

  Then it was a waiting game while the Machine clicked and whirred. Down the hall he peered, toward a bend and farther than Leon had ever gone—at least while conscious.

  How it all proceeded from here, he couldn’t say. His eyes felt heavy. His thoughts were flimsy and fleeting. Blackness crowded the edges of his vision.

  The time between sleep and wakefulness could have been seconds. Might have been minutes. Very well could’ve been days. He wasn’t sure. He was never sure. He only knew that when he awoke, he was always on his feet and nearly alone.

  Nearly.

  This time, he stood at the bottom of a hill, barren trees and skeletal remains of humanity reaching up all around him. A cold wind surged past, clawing at his face and ripping through hollow buildings choked with moss and creeping vines.

  Could be where my fellow man made his last stand, Leon mused. He snorted at that. No, those four walls of water stained brick over there were maybe a tire shop. Some guy named John or Joe or Bill woke up every morning, arrived there with a tumbler of blistering coffee and sipped it throughout the day as customers rolled in complaining about tire pressure, wheel alignment, and unexplained leaks.

  Probably John or Joe or Bill thought they’d keep waking up and coming in until their bodies gave out. Leon would bet his life they never thought one day Machines would be rolling into their shop to murder everything with a heartbeat.

  So it goes, he thought—three words from a favorite book of his, whose author was unknown, for the front cover was missing.

  How would John or Joe or Bill think of him? The last human—well, the last until he kicked the can and another one was brought into existence to serve as a Rogue Hunter, however the hell that happened—working alongside the same Machines that made extinct his race.

  They’d call me a traitor and coward, Leon thought. And they’d be right. But what choice did he have? Either he did what the Machines asked of him, which was to kill rogue Machines, or they’d kill him.

  They knew his location. They knew his blood pressure. Heartbeat. They knew every damned thing, except the thoughts in his head. Doubtless they’d filch those if they could.

  He never understood why the Machines needed a human to hunt one of their own. Neither did he ask. They wouldn’t answer.

  He just did his duty.

  Just… went to work. As he would right now.

  Leon slid a finger across his watch. A blinking circle appeared. 2300 feet ahead.

  He shouldered off his rifle and glanced at the display mounted on the rail.

  100%

  When that number got to zero, the plasma cartridge was spent. Leon had another—two more, in fact—but if he needed even one of them for a service-class Machine, he either had a brain bleed going on, or the bot wasn’t a service-class.

  He hiked up the hillside, through thorns that grabbed at his jeans and ripped at his jacket. An emaciated squirrel bounded through woody shrubs and into a tree stripped of leaves.

  I’ve eaten hundreds of your kind, he thought. Yet, he wondered how they tasted. The Machines fed him his meals in the form of pills. One in the morning, one at night—unless it was a hunting day. Then he was lucky enough to receive coffee and a muffin in the morning. Still got a pill at night, though.

  The pills went down fine with water, better with vodka. But if they caught you with alcohol, it was a night in the Red Room. Adding your blood to those stained walls wasn’t worth all the liquor left on Earth.

  As Leon continued trudging up the knoll bound in straw-colored grass, he noticed a flock of birds fleeing a forest from, according to the compass on his watch, the west. They so
ared overhead, tiny wings flapping frantically, as if frightened.

  He paused and consulted his watch for predators who called this location home. There weren’t many. Black bears looked to the biggest threat, and those beasts were mostly cowardly.

  A crow cawed angrily from the same direction, taking flight after the black birds.

  Leon shook it off as birds being birds. A fowl’s movement could be a good indicator of a predator slinking and lurking about, but sometimes those little feathery things were skittish for no good reason.

  Upon reaching the apex of the hill, he knelt among twigs and wet leaves. According to his watch, his target was 600 feet away.

  He took the binoculars from his belt, scanning the area.

  “There you are,” he whispered. A four-wheeled bot was ramming itself into a metal rail over and over again. All rogue Machines devolved in the same manner: a slow descent into madness that culminated with unchecked violence. Service-class bots could do little harm to their fellow Machines, but a rogue Prime? One of those could obliterate an entire server farm, knock a thousand Machines offline.

  Leon had seen it happen, and he loved every minute of it. He didn’t quite like the Red Room punishment for failing to kill the Prime quickly enough, however.

  With the stock of his rifle firmly against his shoulder, Leon closed one eye and peered into the optical scope. He squared the red dot onto the Machine, and a number appeared in the upper corner: 558.4 ft.

  He clicked a button on the grip, locking in his target. Now it was a simple matter of fine motor skills. He put the dot on the suggested aim marker that compensated for distance, wind, and all other variables.

  Finger on the trigger, he drew in a cool breath and held it in his lungs.

  Bang.

  The Machine dropped, head blown clean off.

  A perfect shot. Problem was, Leon never fired a bullet.

  Chapter Two

  An arrow zipped past Leon’s head and burrowed midway into a tree of cracked bark. Swearing under his breath, he noticed a stick had been tied to the fletching with some frayed string. He cut it free with his skinning knife and examined it.

  A message had been carved into the wood.

  40.245, -78.323 tomorrow

  “What?” He swung his rifle back over his shoulder and took out his binoculars again, clicking a button to enable infrared sensing. Before he had the chance to find his mysterious messenger, his eyes grew heavy.

  Extraction time, he thought. This was how every hunt ended.

  Leon bumbled his way down the hillside, feet uncooperative with his slowing mind. He collapsed, and the next thing he knew he was lying on his bed, disarmed of his gun and tools.

  His heart pounded as he recounted what happened in the forest. Was it his imagination? No. Couldn’t be. He’d glanced at the cartridge health after the bot was blasted. It was still 100%.

  Something else shot that Machine.

  Someone else.

  His throat felt like it’d been packed with cotton balls. The burnished metal walls of his quarters felt closer than ever. He reached over and swiped a cup from his nightstand. It was empty.

  Leon hurried from the bed and over to a cylinder affixed to the wall. Water poured from the stem as he placed his cup under. He drank it empty twice, then sat back down, thoughts racing.

  Would the Machines know he didn’t take the shot? Did they look at the cartridge health at the end of his hunts? He assumed they did.

  40.245, -78.232 tomorrow. That’s a few clicks from where I was. Chances I return there for a hunt tomorrow are slim to—

  His door flung open. Leon jumped back, fearful it was the Directive Machine coming to take him to the Red Room.

  Or to somewhere even worse.

  Misfortune, however, finally ignored him, if only for a moment. A service bot wheeled itself up to his bed. It wrapped its tiny but forceful fingers around his wrist.

  “Ah!” Leon cried in surprise.

  In an uneven voice, the Machine said, “Your heart rate is… 175 beats per minute, sustained for three minutes and twenty-five seconds. That is one hundred and ten beats higher than your average resting heart rate. Corrective measures will be applied.”

  The bot’s compartment door swung open. It reached inside and produced a long needle.

  Leon closed his eyes and tried to relax. He heard the bot’s arm whir with janky movements as it attempted to place the needle at the precise location of the most visible and easily accessible vein in his arm.

  He hissed as the sharp tip plunged into his flesh, filling his veins with medicine. Felt like ice water.

  Instantly, his heart stopped thrashing. His body felt calm and at ease, but his mind—the only possession of his he could hide from these damned Machines—raced.

  Content with his vitals, the service Machine backed away from the bed and saw itself out.

  Leon drew in a deep breath and stretched out flat, staring at a gray ceiling of steel. As many questions as he had about what happened while out there on the hunt, he tried to think of something else. Anything else.

  He recalled a past he could never quite glimpse as whole, whether awake or asleep. Memories washed ashore, but they were just as quickly sucked back out to sea. He had a life before this one. A life he lived among other humans.

  A life before the Rise.

  He had loved once, but he’d never seen a ring on his finger in all of his memories. He was a military man, but the branch and country weren’t clear.

  His parents were nameless, and they never appeared in memories beyond his teenage years.

  Leon’s past seemed endless, millions of fragile memories that shattered if he lingered on them too long, as if the Machines knew he was attempting to access them.

  Possibly they were all illusions. What if the Machines had created him? Maybe his genetic code was based on an earlier human’s, but he’d been made in a tube. Just like the five Rogue Hunters before him.

  True humans had ceased to exist a long time ago. Humanity had died out hundreds of years ago, thousands maybe. He couldn’t be certain. He had no way of knowing what year it was, just that the last human text he found mentioned the year 2078.

  His watch chimed. Time was 21:00. Right on schedule, his door opened and the service bot made his third appearance of the day, this time pinching two clear capsules in its fingers.

  Leon held out his palm, receiving the pills. One for his meal and another to make him sleep. He swallowed them without water and opened his mouth for the service bot to inspect. Only then did the Machine depart and leave him be.

  Leon drifted to sleep with a clenched jaw and worries that, if not for the medicine, would have stirred him in the dead of night.

  When morning came, it brought with it the obnoxious blaring of an alarm ricocheting like a bolt of lightning in his head. He hoped there’d be more than one rogue alert today. The more the better. Kept the time moving.

  He tapped his watch to turn off the alert, then looked at the location.

  40.438, -79.954

  You’ve got to be kidding me. Same location as yesterday.

  Feet on the floor, the lights turned on, slowly illuminating the room. His door opened, and the service bot came rolling in with coffee and a muffin. Blueberry this time. The Machine promptly left, allowing Leon to return to his thoughts, still undressed.

  40.438, -79.965 tomorrow, he thought, repeating in his mind the message that had been carved into the stick.

  Whoever was responsible for that message knew there’d be another rogue alert at those coordinates. How? From what he understood, even Machines didn’t know when the next of their kin would go rogue, or where.

  Maybe it was a setup. A test of Leon’s loyalty. His instructions while on a hunt were clear: kill the rogue Machine, and do nothing else. Do not wander. Do not explore. Do not investigate.

  He broke those rules frequently but not brazenly. He wouldn’t, for example, delve into ruins a mile from his target. But he might p
ass through a dilapidated house if it was in his path and nab whatever contents he could from a drawer.

  To conspire with another person—if one existed—or Machine… that was unthinkable. The punishment was too. Weeks, if not years, in the Red Room.

  Fear. Oh, what an awful thing. It reminded him of a passage in a book he once read while on a four-day hunt for a military-class Machine.

  Fear’s how they get you. It’s how they trap you and how they keep you trapped. Starts out you fear for your life if you don’t join ‘em. Then you fear for your life if you leave ‘em, but not for the same reasons. You fear to leave because you’ve adapted. You’ve gotten used to the walls. The prison is your home. Freedom has become the unknown, and the unknown is terrifying.

  G.L. Cross, author of the rather prescient Dystopic Society. Fiction then, reality now, Leon supposed.

  He seized as a shock bolted down his spine. “All right, all right! I’m getting ready.”

  Rogue Hunters were expected to be ready for departure five minutes after the alert was sent. For every minute after that, there were increasing intensities of punishment.

  Leon rose from the bed and dressed himself in a hurry, then headed out to meet the Directive Machine. He equipped himself with the necessary tools and a rifle, choked back the medicine, and waited.

  After waking from a spell of unconsciousness, he was among nature’s domain again. Some hundred feet from where he stood yesterday.

  He consulted his watch. The target was at 40.439, -79.961 and moving quickly. Another service bot.