The Horseless Horsemen, Book 1: Jude

Prologue

He walked toward the edge of the open ledge, the dried husks of long dead insects crunched under his feet with every shuffling step that he took. He stopped and just stood, looking out over the forest beyond.

He did not consider throwing himself off into the great rock covered expanse below.

He had done that.

…and it had not produced any better results the fourth time.

Most of the loose rock down there was from other … more imaginative …attempts to accomplish the same objective. All of those attempts had failed.

Miserably.

Or, put more accurately, he had become even more miserable because of their failure. …increasingly so with every subsequent failed attempt. He had taxed his own creativity trying to end his own existence. All to no avail.

Instead of ceasing his existence, which he had found was impossible … to date, anyway … he had ceased trying to attempt his own destruction. He had ceased to worry about those failures. He had other things to worry about now, like … being hunted. But he did not worry for himself. He had already proven that he could not be killed, much less harmed. No, he worried for those that hunted him. For … not about.

As he stood there, he did not worry about the authorities who always searched for him. They had found him once. They had caught him that once. …more or less.

He had simply walked away.

They could not hold him. He had shown them that. Thankfully, he did not have to harm anyone in the process.

They knew he came here. They might even know that he was right here, right now. Maybe they would try to catch him again.

Maybe not.

He did not know. He did not care. It would not really matter if they did catch him, again. He had shown them that they could not harm him or keep him. He had made that very clear.

Maybe they had learned.

Maybe they would give up trying to catch him.

He doubted it.

He would have sighed his weariness, if he could have. …and if he had the luxury of becoming weary.

He stood on the ledge facing the setting sun. The second breath he might have sighed would not have been for the view. It would not have been for the warmth or comfort of the sun.

He did not feel the sun’s warmth on his skin. Not now. Not even in the middle of a southern summer’s day. He did not feel the warmth any more than he felt the cold on a New England deep winter’s night.

He would not have sighed for the oranges and yellows surrounding the glowing orb. …or the pale greens where the bright yellows of the sun merged into the deep blues of the evening sky. He was not sure that his vision functioned the same way as normal people’s vision did. What he saw, in a horribly over-simplified nutshell, was more of a projection on the back of his mind put there by the front of his mind.

…without the intervention of his eyes.

He had no eyes.

He was not even sure that he saw the same things as normal people saw them. He knew what colors were supposed to be, but he was not sure that color entered into the equation of what served for his sight at all.

He knew what was supposed to be blue or yellow, but he could not say confidently that what he saw was what either of those colors actually looked like. It was more like … a knowing. He had never seen colors before. But he knew. That was all. He just knew, as he just knew a lot of things.

He did not spend any time trying to figure out the process of his seeing or hearing. He had wasted far too much time on that long ago. He had not come to any kind of a definite conclusion. But it did not matter. What he had that served as sight and hearing was more than functionally useful.

He used to have eyes. …and ears. He knew he had. He must have, at one time. He must have had them because at some time in the past he had been human. …before he had become … this. But he had not had eyes or ears for a very long time. He had not had them for as long as he could remember. His entire life.

He had lost his eyes and ears. He had lost them at the same time as he had lost everything else.

He had also lost his appreciation for the colors of the sunset, along with the flaming reds, oranges and yellows of the New England autumn maple and oak trees. …at just about the same time as he had lost his eyes, he had concluded. He could not remember appreciating those colors any more than he could remember ever having eyes and ears.

Maybe the lack of appreciation had to do with the way that he saw things.

Maybe it just had to do with having lost his eyes.

And his lips.

And his voice.

And his lungs.

The list went on.

Maybe his lack of appreciation had to do with that list, that … far too long list. Maybe it just had to do with the fact that the list existed in the first place.

He knew that people grew angry and bitter when their bodies betrayed them. He knew that people grew bitter about getting old. They grew bitter about not being able to look as young as they thought their minds were. …bitter about brittle bones. …bitter about having to be so careful about not falling and breaking parts of themselves.

But he was not bitter about any of those things. His body had not failed him. It would not. It could not. Ever. …as far as he could tell. It had not so far, anyway. There was no reason to believe that would change at any time in the foreseeable future, and his future was foreseeable for a very long time.

Not that he could see into the future. His future was hidden just as much as everyone else’s was. But he knew that his future would be the same as his present. His present was the same as his past.

He had gotten over all of the anger about that, too.

He had gotten over all of the anger about never having to worry about a heart attack, a brain aneurism, liver failure, Alzheimer’s, or cancer. …especially cancer. He had gotten over the anger about never having to worry about broken bones, muscle sprains, getting a cold, sneezing, or being tired. He had gotten over the anger about never having a hangnail or a rogue eyelash. He had gotten over the anger about never having to pee at an inconvenient time. …about never having to trim his toenails. …about not having to choose which socks he was going to wear.

He used to be normal. He used to be a person, a respectful and respectable person. He had a wife and two more than halfway decent kids. He had a good job and a bright future to look forward to, or … so he had been told. He had the normal everyday problems and annoyances that normal everyday people had.

But it had all been taken away.

All of it.

Gone.

He had gotten past the anger of all of that, too. …having everything taken away from him. His possessions. His family. Everything that he could possibly have cared about had all been taken away. …even his memory of ever having had any of them.

Completely gone. Irretrievably.

He would never get anything back. He would never be able to be near his wife or kids. …even if he had known who they were.

It was all just gone.

He had gotten past all the anger of all his innumerable losses. …even the loss of his life.

Not a figurative loss of his life.

No. …not an identity theft. …although, a good argument could be made for that.

He had lost his life. He had died. He was dead. …sort of. His body and mind had been lifeless. They had declared him dead. They had a funeral for him, and buried him.

He was not sure how long he had been dead. …he had been … well … dead. But it was long enough. More than just a little while, anyway. He did not remember. He did not remember anything before he had started thinking.

He was told he had been dead for about a year.

He had been a man. But he did not remember being that man. He had no connection to the living being he had once been before. He did not know who he had been, or what he had done.

He particularly did not know what he had done to deserve this.

He had not been a monster. He had not been a bad person. He had not even been apathetic, as most people seem to be. He had been given a few facts. …all the facts he had wanted, and more. He had not really wanted any. But he got some anyway. Just a few. …the few facts that could possibly have mattered …the few facts that might have been able to make him feel better. …feel better about being dead. …and not. …possibly.

Not a werewolf.

That did not even begin to enter into the equation. At least he would have been able to function as human being most of the time.

Not the half existence of a zombie.

That concept was laughable. He would have laughed if he could have. …except that it was not actually all that funny.

Not the needful existence of a vampire. That was another non-humorous funny concept. He needed nothing from his physical surroundings. …not food, nor water, nor air. …certainly not darkness, blood or home soil to rest on.

Not the miniscule existence of a ghost. It would have been a relief to be reduced to a single animated mindless want.

He would have been better off as any of those four things. …except that those things did not actually exist in reality. They only existed in fiction designed to scare children or thrill young adults.

…except that he was all four of those things combined.

…kind of.

He was as alive as any werewolf could be, and he shared their torment. His body was the body of the long dead. His mind had far more than the limited functionality of the living dead. And he had only one want. …one single want.

…to just be completely dead.

That was all. That was the sum total of everything that he wanted. But it was a state over which he had no control.

His body was dead, but mobile. His mind was completely active and forever trapped in this insufferable monstrous body.

He just wanted to have an end to this miserable existence.

But he was not likely to be completely dead any time in the foreseeable future. He had things to do. He had so many things to do. He would not be completely dead, he believed, until he finished all of those things. Then, after that, he believed … he hoped … he would finally be allowed to rest in peace.

But it did not look like that day would be any time soon.

He had … so very many things to do.

He knew that it was commonly said, we will laugh about this someday.

He died a long time ago. He did not find it any more amusing now than he had then. He had not found a reason to be amused about that. He had not found sufficient reason to be amused about anything else yet, either.

It was not likely that he ever would.

The sun dropped quickly down below the tree line. The sky began to reflect his mood.

*****

Part One

Then I saw when the Lamb broke one of the seven seals. I heard one of the four living creatures saying as with a voice of thunder,

Come.

- Revelations 6:1

I: The End

Race you, he said quietly, challenging Justice, with his hand wrapped around the mouthpiece of his headset. The observers may have heard it anyway, even with the sound system geared to filter out the background noise. Doing what they were doing, though, there wasn’t much chance anything either one of them said might remain completely private.

Justice refused to call him Bob or, most particularly, Pollux like the rest of the company did. He just looked at Robert blankly for a few seconds without answering the quiet challenge, and then continued to guide his RCMPR at a steady deliberate pace. The console in front of him had two joysticks, one for each track, and two rows of toggle switches. Each switch was paired with a small trackball. The console also had a number dials, gauges, readouts, and a very large computer screen showing a half a dozen different and tiled views fed from the video ports on his robot, along with a single view from Robert’s. There were even foot controls cabled into the consoles, and a pair of heavily wired virtual Waldo gloves that could be slipped into quickly for controlling the appendages, which needed finer, more subtle, movement controls.

Occasionally Justice spoke short commands to his robot, which were picked up by the small microphone that sat close to his mouth. Spoken instructions were preceded by the phrase tech-one, which would alert his robot that a vocal command was about to be given. Robert’s alert phrase to his own robot was tech-two. Without the alert phrase spoken, a normal conversation could be had, or running progress commentary could be given without interfering with the function sequence of the robots. The programming team had inserted a recognition sequence that would allow Robert’s robot to answer to Pollux, as well. Justice never used the alternate name that was available for himself.

Everything on the console was clearly labeled and easily readable, according to all the ISO standards, which required the console to be that much bigger just to accommodate those labels. But, even though the crew made sure that the labels were always pristine, nobody actually ever looked at any of them anymore. Justice knew the console, and could have effectively driven his robot with the control panel completely hidden from his vision, as long as he could still see the screens.

That was the main purpose of these exercises.

The multi-purpose robots needed to be fully functioning extensions of their drivers, and vice versa. Even though he had designed the robots … and the consoles and controls … Justice still had to complete the transition from the robot and control console being theory … a part of his mind and just objects in front of him … to becoming essentially the same as his arms, hands, legs, feet, eyes, and ears. That was also why Justice was the team lead. No one knew the robots and their functional capabilities, along with their limitations, better than he did.

The other reason for the exercises … not the most important, but the most definitive reason in retaining the need for the exercises and keeping Justice in the lead position on the team … was that Robert was … a hot dog.

Robert was more into the bling and flash than the best and most efficient and effective way to accomplish the goals set by the mission parameters. On the other hand, Robert did exhibit a superior aptitude for controlling the RCMPR, and was very good at understanding the capabilities of the robots and making decisions based on those capabilities without having to sit and think about it for longer than efficiency required.

The upside was that Robert could easily accomplish most of the exercises, by himself, quite adequately. The downside was that sometimes Robert went off in an unexpected independent direction, taking pre-emptive actions that weren’t necessarily … optimal.

TeslaRobotics Incorporated specialized in the design, fabrication and sale of the mission-parameter-programmable, remote-controlled robots for a wide variety of specific applications. Their most highly profitable business, though, was the renting out of the services of those robots and their human counterpart teams.

Although the robot sales were a significant part of TRI’s business, those sales were only to companies and government organizations that were going to have a long-term use for those robots’ specific capabilities, and which could invest the funds necessary to train permanent employees to drive them. Due to those very learning curves and training costs, if the need for the robot wasn’t both permanent and frequent, then TeslaRobotics was normally contracted to send in their teams, usually into potentially hostile environments. The robots could gather a plethora of video and audio data, along with taking physical samples of their surroundings and physically manipulating objects.

More often than not, the answers were needed sooner than it would take to organize the training of the people to run any newly purchased bots.

Owning the robots outright was far more cost effective in the long run, though, because all of TRI’s robots had lifetime maintenance contracts, the charges of which were limited to the reimbursement of TRI employee expenses for travel and any replacement parts required. Unless a robot had been seriously damaged, all the diagnostics could be performed remotely, so the TRI person could arrive prepared, and any repairs needed, along with all of the maintenance, could be done on site, locally. Should those problems not be remotely diagnosable, or if the robot needed more than someone could do onsite, then the robot would be shipped back to TRI for whatever work needed to be done.

TRI’s robots had been used in every kind of situation from entering apartments found or suspected of being heavily booby-trapped to exploring recently active volcano craters and the accompanying vents. They had been sent in to newly found caves and sink holes. TRI even had a line for undersea exploration. Some of their underwater robots had been sent in to explore sections of the Titanic and other, more entrenched, sunken seagoing vessels.

While some situations were simple enough that privately owned robots could be used with judicious care, some situations were complicated enough that the robots needed to be driven by highly trained specialists. Justice and Robert were the primary team of those specialists for the missions not involving undersea exploration, which was the much higher percentage of missions requiring the rentals.

A clever someone … someone who’d had a sense of humor and far too much free time on her hands … had unofficially christened the RCMPRs Castor and Pollux. And then she had started referring to Justice and Robert by the names she had given the bots they drove; Justice being Castor, and Robert being Pollux. It didn’t take long for the names to stick throughout the company; something Robert seemed to enjoy far more than Justice did. Justice had hoped it was just a fad for which the novelty would wear off quickly. It hadn’t.

Most of TRI’s land-bound robots were run on a high-powered battery, which, while not quite being perpetually charged, would recharge itself using solar energy, some of its own battery power, and a small generator driven by friction with the track drive axles. The power generated externally would then be shunted through a series of condensers and proprietary chips, which increased the power output back to its own batteries. TRI’s original products were early versions of these batteries before they had expanded into, and then focused on, the robotics exploration industry.

Under normal use and conditions, if the RCMPR was in direct sunlight, then the batteries could stay charged for quite an extended period. If the robot just sat and did nothing but observe, and then periodically transmitted those observations, its batteries could, theoretically, stay charged forever, and even recharge those batteries to full power over an extended period if it managed somehow to drain them. Sitting around would have defeated the purpose of most of the robots, however, for anything other than exploration of something that might be best studied in that fashion. …like the moon (for which TRI’s earliest models were used) or Mars.

In any event, Castor and Pollux remained charged while active for far longer than it took to complete all of the real life missions that they had been used in, and almost all of the tasks the testing scenario team had dreamed up to date. The one failed test scenario had led to a design modification that allowed two batteries to be connected and used while recharging a third. The power that was drawn from or put back into the batteries was automatically monitored and divertible between the batteries on the fly, so that there was always one battery receiving the lion’s share of the recharging.

The robots had a number of appendages that were normally kept stored, folded in close to their body, useful for grasping, lifting, and even moving objects far heavier than the robots themselves, using adjustable fulcrums attached to those appendages. They had arrays of lasers that could be used for cutting anything from paper to bank vault doors, and even carried explosive charges for strategic and logistic problems that could best be solved that way.

All in all, TRI’s robots could do just about anything that a human could, in many cases far more quickly and safely. The drivers normally sat in a climate-controlled room watching the robot’s progress on a number of monitors, which were given live feed by several swivel controlled cameras that could provide a simultaneous 360-degree view, both laterally and vertically.

The current scenario presented Justice and Robert with a ditch they needed to get past before they could get into the building on the other side. Justice and Robert could already see a few options for exploring the outside of the building, which they would have to do before they tried to go in. It was an urban booby trap scenario, and the goal was to get into the building without setting off the explosives inside, or allowing them to go off by themselves. The assumption was, until disproven, that there were people inside who could be killed if the explosion happened. The people were just crash dummies, and the explosives were just a spring-loaded flag, but the point was real enough.

Before they could do any exploration of the building, they had to get across the ditch. It was too steep and too wide to cross without creating some form of ramp or bridge. The drive tracks’ extender wheels could be unlocked. Along with shifting the RCMPRs center of gravity, and with using the appendages to approximate ski poles for stability, the tracks could revolve most of the way around the drive wheels, which made the robots capable of handling terrain more irregular than normally would be found. A field piled high with boulders might slow the RCMPRs progress, might even halt it for a while, but it wouldn’t stop them completely for long, which left a wide range of options open for solving this particular problem.

Justice wasn’t sure what the scenario guys had in mind with this, though. Road potholes weren’t normally that big, and the more frequent obstruction would be cars parked on the side of the road. They must have something else planned as part of the puzzle.

There were trees in the area, but while they weren’t small trees, they wouldn’t be useful in getting across the ditch without taking a lot of time to cut them up to fill the gap. He could send his robot along the ditch until he found a place that could be crossed, but that would take time. …time to get there, and then more time to return, if there wasn’t a suitable crossing spot nearby. Under that consideration, he’d be right back here with the same decision to make, with the same possible outcome, in the opposite direction. In this type of mission, time was always a factor. Explosives inside the building could already be on a countdown. He decided that this was only an obstacle designed to delay them outright, and that they needed to get across quickly. That cut the number of their available options rather significantly.

Justice had his robot drop two explosive charges, of which both robots carried about a dozen, into the ditch after activating the electronic detonator receivers. Since all the detonators for all the charges were keyed to the same code, he could add as many charges to the pack as he needed. Once the code was entered, all the activated charges would go off at the same time. Since the ditch had no solid walls … just dirt, not concrete … just the two charges should be enough to achieve his purpose.

Justice rolled his robot back, until he had the ditch at what he judged to be a safe distance, and started to key in the code sequence.

The monitor bank in front of Justice flashed and went black with a short painful squeal in his headphones.

Justice yanked his headphones off as the feedback from the overhead speakers finished echoing off the walls of the large room. His eyes were shut tight, his chin lowered and almost set on his right shoulder in a pained expression.

When he looked up, one eye at a time and with his ears still ringing, half the large screens on the wall twenty feet past the rail on the other side of the consoles were all blank. The screens should have shown all of the same views that Justice should have had on his own monitors to anyone observing from upstairs.

The wall speakers wired in to Robert’s console had relayed a loud snap, and then a crash.

All Justice’s gauges and readouts sat at zero.

Oops, Robert whispered, softly enough that if he hadn’t had his microphone still active, Justice would have been the only one able to hear it.

Justice squeezed his eyes shut again, knowing full well what was coming next. He sat back in his chair with his hands in his lap.

After a quick flip of the Action Hold toggle switch to put his bot in a dormant status, Robert put his elbows up on his console. With his face in his hands, he rubbed his forehead with his fingertips.

There was about two full seconds of silence while they waited for the other shoe to fall.

And fall it did.

…loudly enough to echo through the suddenly and completely silent mission control room, where everyone else knew what was coming, as well.

WHAT IN THE HELL WAS THAT GOAT-ROPE?!

To say that the voice yelling from the observation floor, above and behind Justice and Robert, wasn’t exactly happy would have been a gross understatement. Both Justice and Robert knew what goat-rope meant. They’d both heard it before from The Captain, and it wasn’t anything that either one of them particularly wanted to be placed in the same sentence with.

A metal door slammed from where the voice had come from. The loud echo of the door answered across the big open mission room, and hard-soled shoes pounded quickly down a metal staircase.

Once the mission started, Justice had complete control of what the robot team did to accomplish the goals. Observers … usually government officials of one branch or from one country or another if TRI was running a sales demo … would sit outside The Captain’s office along the deck above while the Vice President of Sales made his pitch. This was the main reason Justice and Robert wore their headsets, to limit the background noise and conversations so they could concentrate on what they were supposed to be doing. Lacking other outsider observers, The Captain always monitored the test exercises progress.

The Captain came around their tandem consoles to face them both. His face was almost as red as the tie that hung loose around his open light blue collar. He slammed his hands down on the tops of their monitor backs. The stations were set so that Justice and Robert were seated on the outside of a V so that they wouldn’t be distracted by the other’s monitors. The Captain stood in the center of the V, and looked like he was just about ready to wring someone’s neck, or worse. …which, not very coincidentally, he was.

He backed into … Robert began.

"ONE MORE WORD AND YOU’LL BOTH BE HOUSE-MOUSES FOR THE REST OF YOUR NATURAL BORN LIVES! DO NOT MAKE ME ANY MORE HIGH AND RIGHT THAN I ALREADY AM!"

Robert very wisely reconsidered the value of finishing his sentence, and quickly calculated that value well past the point of diminishing returns. His teeth clicked as he quickly closed his mouth.

The Captain took three deep breaths, and closed his eyes for a moment. He turned slightly and pointed at the wall behind him, towards the bank of blank screens that were supposed to be showing Justice’s view, and said with slightly less volume, THAT, gentlemen, was twenty-three million dollars that just got turned to scrap! And THAT would be your combined salaries, AND mine, for a very long time! The Captain looked at Robert. What. In. Hell. Were you doing felling a tree? he asked with a glare.

The first question was always bad. Not necessarily the question itself, but to whom it was asked. If you were asked the first question, then you were the one in the deepest amount of trouble. You did not want to be the one the first question was directed at if you had any choice in the matter. Making sure you didn’t screw up was, technically, a choice.

To fill the trench so we could cross, sir, Robert said crisply. He had the sense not to go the but you said not to say another word route. That would not have been a good choice. One employee had tried it a long time ago. She had been a don’t mess with me feminist who had taken her cause just a little farther than common sense should have suggested. She had spent the short subsequent time until she found a new job working in TRI’s mailroom. No one since had been stupid enough to re-explore that particular territory.

When new employees came in, some of the ones who had been at TRI for a good while usually gave the noobs a general quick and private rundown of all the Might Want To and Might Not Want To’s. Shut your mouth when The Captain tells you to, was at the very top of the Might Want To list. Getting flippant with The Captain, was right at the very top of the Might Not Want To list.

The Captain turned to face Justice. "And what were you doing not paying attention to your partner?"

The second question was only moderately better than the first. If one person was asked both, then, well, you really didn’t want to be that person for approximately the next two weeks, at least not in the office. After those two weeks, you probably ought to have a new job already.

I failed to inform Robert that I was about to create a passage with explosives, sir. It’s my fault. Justice decided to skip the question asked, and go straight to the end of the matter. It would be better for everyone in the company in the long run just to throw himself onto his own sword and take the brunt, rather than let The Captain build up a good head of steam. Justice suspected Robert’s next week would have been likely to turn out to be far more pleasant if Robert had taken that path to begin with.

On the other hand, it really was Justice’s fault. He was the team lead.

"You’re damn right, it’s your fault! You’re the team leader, and it’s your job to know what the hell your team is doing! You’re suspended two weeks without pay!"

Yep. There it was. That should put a sufficient punctuation mark on the end of the conversation.

Yes, sir. Justice shut his equipment off calmly. Thank you, sir.

He didn’t argue. It could have been far worse. He could have been fired. And it would have been justified. It had been his job to know what Robert was doing. …and to let Robert know what Justice was doing, too. It hadn’t been the first time Robert had taken actions on his own, and he should have been paying better attention to Robert while he was trying to put together the puzzle of the mission.

Conversely, Justice had just been sent home; time which he could make very good use of for the company on furthering his new robotic designs for the projects coming up. …which made it highly unlikely that he would ever get fired, unless he somehow managed to screw up to the point of crash’n’burn. It would take far too long to replace him effectively. It took a long time before designs could be effectively tested, and both the designs and the designer to be proven reliable. But that didn’t mean that they weren’t always looking for an addition to the design and the mission operations staffs. Contingency planning was a very large part of TRI’s success. Justice knew how to run a mission very successfully, but the challenge of robot design was his primary love. … second only to Anne and the kids.

Justice would likely be paid for his time, since he was going to work, anyway. The Captain was tough but fair, and knew his assets. He also knew how to make rewards initially seem like punishments, how to make punishments initially seem like rewards; and when, on whom, and to what limits, he could use those tactics successfully for the greatest benefit to the team that was the company, TeslaRobotics.

Robert was still in the office. …with The Captain. He would be for the next two weeks, and he would find himself a constant reminder to The Captain about a certain twenty-three million dollar item. Subsequently, The Captain would be that very same reminder to Robert. All in all, Justice felt he had the far better deal between the two of them. In fact, he wouldn’t have traded places with Robert for the next two weeks for an entire year’s bonuses.

Justice stood and left the mission control theater without a change of expression or sideways glance. His manner was carefully neutral and unhurried. There was nothing he could do about the robot, or the situation. What would be would be, and all he could do was move forward. Forward was exactly where he intended to go. …with at least some of the rest of the projects that he was working on.

The control theater was at the end