America: The Obliged

Drab overcast wrapped the sky in a gluttonous daub of clouds. Pellets of sleet mixed into rain, gathering in near-freezing puddles on the rotten and uneven pavement of the sidewalk outside the old Statesboro Hospital. A lazy crowd had grown curious by the unusual presence of militiamen standing arm in arm outside the old facility. The crowd gaveled at the fierceness of the men, their faces shrouded to their eyes by white neck gaiters, their tired and warworn eyes peered out, unbothered by the crowd’s curiosity. The men were each marred by years of combat and sacrifice, all in the name of United States President Aiden Connor; offering an obvious clue to who may be inside the dilapidated hospital facility. Under the decaying plinth of the old sanitarium, President Connor and a cluster of oligarchs glamoured over their new state-of-the-art laboratory, their money well spent. The sheen of the stainless-steel floor of the facility reflected back what their eyes glamoured over above. “Programmed with Artificial Long Logarithmic Order, or ALLO, these armament droids have the best processor cores known to man. They offer the latest in warfare,” a lab scientist weaseled through his nostrils as he explained the nature of the machina to the group of esteemed men gathered before him. “Mister President, you won’t need your militias much longer.” President Connor looked at the beast-like droids hoisted overhead, still lifeless, their pedestrian manufacturing had left them looking like a skeleton of a giant dog the size of a large sport utility vehicle. The paws of the droids had razor-like claws of a felid, designed to scale concrete buildings and slice through foes with abandon. “Why doesn’t it look more…human?” The president was perplexed by the final design of the droids. “A humanoid droid is still a few years off, Mr. President. The mammaloid design allows for wall scaling, and travel speeds of up to 250 kilometers an hour, their claws are sharp enough to penetrate sheets of steel over two inches thick. Their entire body is made of atomic carbon lattices, making them the strongest manmade armament in history. I assure you; these droids will be ready for deployment in Russo-Syria… or any other campaigns you may have planned,” the scientist looked at the droids along with the president and oligarchs. A god-complex overspread them, if truly capable of what the man claimed, they had in fact leveled up the nature of warfare. President Connor smiled at the mere concept; his own contempt for the creatures stirred a wry of satisfaction. Why, this must have been how Robert Oppenheimer had felt when the atom bomb had its first successful detonation, he thought. The Russo-Soviets had been ruthless in transforming the makeup of many European and Asian nations over the last twenty years, while the United States merely idled by, languishing in her self-inflicted economic and sociopolitical turmoil in what political historians had dubbed the Age of Disinformation. The era had begun in 2010 with the Tea Party Movement and now culminated into the fourth constitutional crisis following the 2044 Presidential Election. President Connor himself had won the popular vote, but had lost the Electoral College, least until he wrested the financial fealty of three of the electors to vote faithlessly for his second term. The political unrest from his re-election machinations aside, the droids would remind the world that America still demanded an audience from the nations back east. “How many of these… things… do we have ready?” The president finally broke from his admiration of the engineering feat. “Well. They are called the Standard Logarithmic Atomic Carbon Robot, or SLACR, sir. We have over 200 that have passed the rigors of our testing of the ALLO cores. They are ready for your command, Mr. President,” the scientist beamed a smile at the president, long a fan of the aspiring authoritarian leader. “I hope you find that they exceed your wildest expectations.” Oligarch Wesley Oliver, owner and founder of Fairchild Ballistix, one of the key companies behind the funding of the top-secret SLACR program, walked with the president as they made for the surface and back into the rotten remains of Statesboro Hospital. “Do you think these droids will be able to displace your militias when the time comes?” The oligarch flicked his tawny eyes at the president. “If they can slice through the Russians in their own puppet state in Syria, a rowdy bunch of rednecks will be easy to displace. I still have the loyalty of the Iron Fist and Blood Prince, they will have utility for us ahead until the time comes,” the president answered the man, referencing two of the four Reddon Brothers clan by their old secret service nicknames. The two commanded the strongest militia in the nation, the Bue Mountain Boys; the militant group that now stood guard outside the facility. “And what about The Valhalla?” Wesley spoke of another of the Reddon clan. “Plant a bullet in his insufferable skull and we move on,” the president wiped his hand across his manicured black beard that yielded to gray at the margins of his lips dripping to either side of his chin. He was too young to feel old, he was only 46, the youngest president since John Kennedy.