***Polynyde tracked Joseph, country to country, continent to continent, around the world in 80 days, 8 days, 8 hours, it never mattered. Joseph hadn't spent the money because he couldn't. Polynyde was always minutes behind, hours, rarely days. His life was 54 hundred days of nerve annihilating fear and nothing more. And now, on the catwalk of a 400 meter tall wind dam in Kansas it was dawning like a full moon breaking from behind towering clouds. "You have no where to go," the wind died as if the sinking realization that his trump card was so much chaff killed its spirit too, "no one will take you in. No one will touch you. No one will hide you," the 100 meter wide blades of the turbines thrummed gently, only meters below and spaced across the entire multi-kilometer expanse, as they adjusted their angles of attack to catch as much air as possible, "no one will smuggle you any further. This operation became much less about you as soon as I reached the fullness of my service life 15 years ago," the process failure warnings increased their torrid pace. The time was now. "Go peacefully." In a fraction of a fraction of a second the impulse flowed from Polynydes main processing center, to his distributor plates, to the fibers gripping the dull black cross hatched grip of his .22***
Polynyde was not haggard. Being what he was, he was never haggard. But being what he was, he was receiving up to the second reports on micro failures within his integrated electro-chemical make up. So many that it was beginning to take a great deal of effort to continue issuing the thousands of sub-commands to abandon one repair, pursue another, cannibalize materials for part 3A6, redistribute materials to sub-sections 40, 41, and 45, and many more of the like. He was not haggard, but being what he was, he would soon not be able to stabilize the simple .22 in the softening grip of his free hand.
Polynyde, long ago, shut down the automatic maintenance routines to each individual system as the chase wore on. Thirteen years beyond his service life. fourteen years. 15 years longer than it was supposed to have taken when he left the factory floor, if a man from the street could call it a factory. 15 years Joseph Watkins waltzed from country to country, crossing borders as easily as a 6 year old plays hopscotch. Swiping identities as easily as a thief would pilfer a credit card, back when stealing one was as easy as reaching into a teenager's back pocket at a convenience store. Every year, Polynyde learned to keep himself running, learned the intricacies of his own operations until every chip, every fractal branch of filament thin and thinner, carbon cased, gold wire, every magneto, and every fist sized capacitor, were as familiar as the lines of Joseph Watkins photo from the profile archives. More warnings slipped in behind his dominant process. More commands dispatched. He locked out his elbow that was beginning to sag again, centering the .22 between Joseph Watkins eyes, only meters away.
"You're getting a little old there, Poly. Isn't it about time you called it quits, good buddy?" A cautious sneer crept across Joseph's pale angular face. He had the countenance of a fox in the typical way that men seemed to become like the natural creatures they mimicked in habit. His voice was almost lost in the upwash of air around them. "Are you starting to feel the years yet?" Polynyde bore down on him, switching to an infrared enhanced visual overlay in the failing light. "You know, when this is over they're going to scrap you! Have you thought about that?" Joe was a genius, a certified man of genetic hyper intelligence, but he was showing the strain. He was haggard. His raked hairline receded more than two inches from the date of his profiling mere months after he successfully assassinated, in succession, five of the six prime movers in the Pacific coastal anti-piracy operations. Even his liquid tongue and razor wit were dulled and thickened.
"You can do better than that, Watkins," Polynyde barked, tightening his grip on both the .22 and the railing as a particularly vicious gust whipped upwards, around, and through the grating of the service catwalk. His voice was beginning to lose it's data rate and clarity, but it carried easily enough. "I'm sure you understand by now," the left chest of his form fitting puncture suit, a blue and black trimmed, head to toe, affair of general issue for construction grade bots, rippled momentarily as electro sensitive alloy tissues severed, rerouted, and fused once more to hold his .22 grasping arm aloft, "this is not about them, or even the task." He paused a moment as the wind tore upwards then began to subside to its more bearable pace of 90 km/h. In that moment Joseph doubled over, hands bracing against his bent knees, his head low, and his thickly woven mud brown workman's denim coveralls oddly immobile in the air stream. The yellow hard hat on his head zipped upwards and quickly disappeared in the darkening sky. He was laughing.
"Do you- honestly expect me to believe that you," he came erect, thrusting an accusatory finger down the catwalk at the blue and black suited para military android, "YOU! a Polynyde, no less! Feel nothing for the 'task'?" He spat in disgust, seeming to become even more flushed as the spittle, instead of punctuating his anger, immediately took to the air and vanished out of reach of the now glowing catwalk work lights. "Nothing at all for yours truly? After 15 years?" His angry open palm slapped his thin chest before he threw his arms wide, "do you know what kind of life I've had? How many credits I made in that week?" His brown eyes grew wider, his unshaven face contorting into a glare of contempt. The work lights gained strength, lighting them both in pale orange and tinting Joseph's already pale skin a sickly sorbet. "I haven't spent a fraction of it yet!? I could disappear for another 15 years! What do you think about that," he threw down his last card to play, but it was worthless.
Polynyde tracked Joseph, country to country, continent to continent, around the world in 80 days, 8 days, 8 hours, it never mattered. Joseph hadn't spent the money because he couldn't. Polynyde was always minutes behind, hours, rarely days. His life was 54 hundred days of nerve annihilating fear and nothing more. And now, on the catwalk of a 400 meter tall wind dam in Kansas it was dawning like a full moon breaking from behind towering clouds. "You have no where to go," the wind died as if the sinking realization that his trump card was so much chaff killed its spirit too, "no one will take you in. No one will touch you. No one will hide you," the 100 meter wide blades of the turbines thrummed gently, only meters below and spaced across the entire multi-kilometer expanse, as they adjusted their angles of attack to catch as much air as possible, "no one will smuggle you any further. This operation became much less about you as soon as I reached the fullness of my service life 15 years ago," the process failure warnings increased their torrid pace. The time was now. "Go peacefully." In a fraction of a fraction of a second the impulse flowed from Polynydes main processing center, to his distributor plates, to the fibers gripping the dull black cross hatched grip of his .22. They did not make it in time.
The countering force, and electrical demands, required by his palm to brace against the contraction of his index finger were enough to burn up what was left of the mirco filaments leading through his wrist. The .22 clattered to the grooved grating, bouncing, and hanging in the air for long seconds. Polynyde read Joseph's face thoughtfully. He Read his consideration of the possibility of somehow closing the distance and diving for the spiraling handgun against all odds and physical limitations of time and space. He read his despair as it slowly turned, end over end, in empty space, down and down, beyond the reach of the catwalk's work lights to smash against the sloping, unforgiving, concrete of the wind dam. Polynyde's thermal overlay gave out, even as the dull crack of the gun drifted upwards. His tan irises, set in ivory colored mounts, remained steady on the motion sensitive difference map of Joseph's now lurching form.
But Joseph was not lurching. Polynyde's knee was burning out and buckling, slowed only by the magnetic field that drove its coils. Polynyde's knee drove into the catwalk hard enough to dent the steel grating with his 300 pound's of internal hardware and alloys, but his puncture suit of carbon nanotubes held. Warnings came in roiling waves, so many they burst upon his lead support processes, over running, coating, everything. More tens of thousands than his now dwindling neural plates could assign, attack, and redress. He realized with a pain of failure unique to the perfection of the machine code that he was looking at the useless alloy tissues of his blue and black suited hand instead of Joseph Watkins. One Joseph Watkins, his aural transducers informed him, who was now running, boots clanking, head long toward his kneeling frame.
He flew like a sparrow through a dense, flame ravaged, dead wood, backward into himself. Farther and farther looking for a few grains of data, a handful of ones and zeros amid a confetti of useless pointers, hardware addresses to failing bits of polymer and heat fused metal, and corrupted strings. He could now make out the wail, the eruption of desparation from the lungs of Watkins. He had less time than he imagined. Flurries of warnings came and spattered against his consciousness, but he reached regardless and found.
Like memory metal wound up, he grasped the initial hard wired data. Hidden and moved and buried and moved again as he'd modified himself, it came at last to the central processor and snapped together like a scattering of iron filings touched to a powerful magnet. Maybe a second had elapsed since the gun fell to darkness, but in the instant Joseph closed to apply a shove with all of his strength behind it (that would undoubtedly have ended Polynydes existence by way of 400 meter fall) Polynydes grip in his right hand peaked to its full and awesome potential. His wrist twisted with enough force to turn over a diesel engine in a small cruise ship. A one meter long, eight cm thick, section of the solid steel railing he was gripping to steady himself immediately sheared free and swung, in Polynydes titanic grip, as easily as a child swings a plastic bat.
Joseph Watkins head came apart like a paper cup as the section of railing, grasped by in Polynyde's electric hand, swung through it like a wand through a soap bubble. his body struck the catwalk knees first, his arms falling about Polynydes shoulders. Bits of skull still clung to the section of metal as Polynydes arm fell to his side, dead. Completely burned out. The end of Watkin's spinal coloumn, bits of vertebrae hanging from it like great beads, dangled over Polynydes shoulder, but he did not notice. A single warning message now ate up the fullness of his processes. Massive failure.
But Polynyde was not there to see it. He was deep within himself watching the tiny incandescence of this piece and that piece combust and cease to be. Over 15 years he'd memorized it all. Memorized every cell of his body. Polynydes were known and understood and accepted to be more or less sentient. They were also known to live their task to the end of their service lives and then cease to be. Polynydes world was on fire, every single leaf in the forest, every single shred of paper in the library was being obliterated by the very beating pulses that contained him. But in this place, deep within himself, beside even the primary processes that now began to blaze and die, he saw and he knew, he understood, and accepted that he was not.
He transmitted his final message to the control center, "complete. Joseph Watkins," with accompanying data on how he did it and his location within a meter or two and the time and date. He then transmitted his final message to the composite Polynyde data center. It would be hours before his capacitors discharged and the cooling grates ceased to produce bare flesh searing heat. It would be days before the kill would be officially verified. Years before it would be declassified. 16 Years later the Polynyde program would cease to exist. Rumors circulated in both hemispheres about one of the worlds most advanced artificial intelligences that wrote itself out of existence for decades afterward. Some called it the first suicide of a created entity. Others called it the biggest budgetary bust in the history of the global police task force. But every now and then in hushed back rooms would be heard the quiet suggestion of something else. Something more, but the words of rapture and revelation, 16 years removed, still bore enough charge to put a man out of a job, the global task force, and main line society altogether. The program remains moth balled with no new budgetary proposals on any level for anything as ambitious.
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