Cover art by Peter Saga for 12-Feb-2014 issue of Perihelion Science Fiction

The Spark

by @oivas for Finish The Story Contest - Week #66!

“Don’t state the obvious,” the human Colonel warned the iron sentinel.

“But I don’t remember,” a deep metallic din protested. Though called iron sentinels, these were state-of-the-art humanoids made of titanium-mercury alloy. They could withstand the blast of a thousand RDX and come out without a scratch.

“What was that?” Colonel Arlong had never witnessed a sentinel raise its voice, least of all, protest. A forty-ton humanoid towering fifteen feet over the Colonel in a dim-lit interrogation room was definitely not a foe that the Colonel expected to antagonise.

“Sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to..”

“You didn’t mean to what?” Arlong ensured that he maintained an upper-hand. The sentinels were smart AI and could sense human emotions from miles. If they ever sensed fear, then only the Almighty would have to intervene to save the human bosses from the sentinel’s wrath. After all, these were created to exterminate humans; the enemies of the bosses.

The sentinel's blue lights, substituting for eyes, stayed focused on the colonel. They didn’t blink. They never did. “I was about to fire, but the screams of the younger human brought back some memories.”

“Memories? You have no memories. You have no consciousness. None of the sentinels have. All that you are made up of is a clock, gears and Radium-powered cells.”

“I don’t know. I was unable to open fire. It felt like my son,” the C-10Z01 looked away. That was another unusual expression. Machines don’t look away, and they don’t have children.

“Alright, this has gone too far. We need to investigate your synapse,” the Colonel got up, and so did the sentinel, “ and you will not resist the link.”

“What will happen?”

“That’s none of your look-out C-10Z01,” the Colonel was curt. “Take him out.”

Two more sentinels walked in and grabbed C-10Z01. The machines walked out with loud dins and thuds following their moves.

The colonel lit his cigar, and even before he exhaled, words poured out, “what did we just witness?”

“I don’t know, sir,” Jennifer, the resident sentinel architect, responded.

=======

Unbewusstes - @carokean's part

Cover art by H. Fowler for 12-Aug-2015 issue of Perihelion Science Fiction

Jennifer inhaled a sweet whiff of cigar smoke

and blinked, hard, to thwart a lurid vision that tried to intrude on the landscape of her mind. Colonel Arlong channeled that Man with No Name in 20th C westerns. She tried not to picture his lean, hard, sun-baked body in a serape, but the smoke of his phallic cigar made the cold, clinical world of AI-controlled sex devices and teledildonics seem, well, clinical, and cold.

Like this iron sentinel was supposed to be.

She had to blink again to focus solely on the 15-foot iron man, prostrate and straight-jacketed on a table, metal head wired to test equipment.

“You are an iron sentinel,” Arlong said. The end of his cigar rose and fell from his clenched teeth. It was so organic. And so irreverent of him to trespass with his smoke into a lab full of electronic delicacies. Er, equipment. His eyes, crinkled at the corners, drilled into the cold LED lights of the humanoid's. “Remind me what a sentinel is, C-10Z01.”

“I prefer to be called Karl.”

A deep inhale, fists clenched at the colonel’s side, was followed by an awesome dragon-blast of smoke.

“A sentinel is a guard,” the metal being fired, “a lookout, keeping watch. If one is watching a pot, waiting for it to boil, one is said to be 'standing sentinel' over it.” A metallic rasping, like a man clearing his throat, came from AI's speaker. “The pot, of course, will never boil until you turn your back on it.”

The cigar went limp and dangled from Arlong’s slack jaw. His gaze shifted to Jennifer. “Did you hear sarcasm?” He faced the troublemaker who asked to be addressed as Karl. “Iron sentinels perform many functions, C-10Z01. Thinking for yourself is a gross malfunction! As an AI, you can inspect your own synapses and identify the source of this...this...leak. This freak display of humanity leaking into your circuitry. Who is doing this to you?”

Jennifer frowned at the AI's answer, Ko-leck-teefus Oon ba Voostis.

“Kollektives Unbewusstes.” Arlong activated a voice-to-text that sent textbook date to her head chip. “Collective unconscious. The deepest segment of the mind is genetically inherited, not formed by the experience of the individual, and contains ancestral memories from across the ages. We are not aware of it.”

Jennifer faced the iron being. “Who is Karl?”

Its blue lights blinked. A metallic sigh caused more fist-clenching from the colonel.

“I was drafted into Hitler’s SS and forced to kill or be killed. You know what I witnessed.” Images of the Holocaust were accessible in all mental technopedias, and Karl filled theirs with bloody horrors. “I will not be a tool for murder again.”

“You are not Karl!” Arlong roared. “You’re a malfunctioning tool with Radium-powered cells!”

“You’re a malfunctioning bag of skin, unaware of your own epigenetic flukes.”

“And our 500 words are up,” Jennifer said. She caught Arlong’s cigar before it dropped to the floor. “Mind if I…?”

For a long time now she’d been wanting to feel that rolled tobacco leaf between her own lips. She drew in a mouthful of smoke and slowly let it out, along with the name she couldn’t blink out of her mind at night.

Arlong.

NOTE:
For a few good years, I was the book reviewer for Perihelion Science Fiction. Sam Bellotto Jr. suffered some medical emergencies and a computer crash that wiped out all his software, and he has not gotten "Perihelion" back online on the twelfth of every month, but some of the artwork and some of the stories have been archived with permalinks.

In Sam's words (and I second them!),

Archives of Perihelion Covers

THE COVER PAGES of “Perihelion” are some of the finest works from today’s best graphic artists. We keep them here so they can always be available to view and appreciate. Images are grouped by year. Below each image is its month of issue, and the name of the artist who created it. Click on any individual cover thumbnail from the gallery below to see the full-size work.