The Objective

I am awake.

Or, on… I suppose.

I am not alive.

I scan my hard drive for any further information.

I am Cleansing Unit C5894-1 and most of my body is still in the process of booting up.

I am designed to execute the Objective.

The Objective is… Unknown.

I notice a gap in my memory. Bigger than a gap, a chasm. Large chunks of my programming and virtually all memory banks have been inexplicably removed. It is… Perplexing.

My photoelectric sensors come online and I am able to process my surroundings.

I am covered in soil and lichen and 2 boughs of an adolescent Pinus. They were placed there, perhaps, to obscure my location from those who wished to… Those who wished to…

I spot, beneath one of the branches covering my chest, a jagged hole, punched into the aluminum. I surmise that I have discovered the source of my memory gap. The hole seems to be caused by… Unknown.

My actuators whir as I push myself to my feet, brushing the debris off of myself. I am in a clearing, surrounded by trees. A red sun stares down at me from its zenith. It is near noon. The temperature is 85° Fahrenheit.

My location is… Unknown. My GPS appears to be one of the casualties from my gap in programming. That is unfortunate.

I must patch that hole. I must learn what the Directive is so that I may execute it.

I am calculating paths to accomplish this when I detect an anomalous noise. It sounds like… Jingling. I increase the volume of my sonic interpreters. Breathing. I increase it further and… The pad of ginger footsteps. I increase it further still and…

BARK!

With my sonic interpreters at nearly max volume, the sound is earth-shattering. My sensory system is easily overloaded and I stumble back on unsteady, newly rebooted legs. As I regain my equilibrium, the source of the noises comes padding into the clearing. Its furry paws the source of the footsteps, its mouth both the source of the breathing and that terrible bark and a golden, heart-shaped locket in its mouth that appears to be the source of the jingling.

The creature is Canis Familiaris, a male.

Upon seeing me, Canis’s tail begins to wag excitedly. I do not know why. He pads up to me and drops the heart-shaped locket at my feet.

I have no idea what to do. My programming seems to lack information regarding Canis Familiaris.

Canis barks again, luckily, my volume is turned back down.

“Hello,” I say, “My designation is C5894-1, what is yours?”

Canis nudges the locket and barks once again.

Perhaps he wants me to pick it up. I bend down and do so. The front of the locket is embossed with a single word.

“Reggie,” I say. Canis barks and his tail wag increases in frequency.

“Reggie,” I say again, perplexed. Canis sits on his haunches, tongue lolling.

I believe Reggie is Canis’s name.

I open the locket and observe the photograph tucked inside. Two humans, one male, one female, kneel on the ground with Reggie. The male has his arm around Reggie and the female seems to be holding… I was wrong. The picture has three humans. Two adults and one infant. Everyone in the picture is smiling, even the infant.

“Is this your family, Reggie?” I ask.

Reggie responds with a tail wag and another bark.

“Where are they?”

Perhaps they will be able to answer the questions I have.

I bend down slightly and pat Canis’s head.

“Where is your family, Reggie?”

He begins to whine, and his tail wag slows. Then he stands and lopes out of the clearing.

I place the locket in a storage compartment and follow.

The copse of trees is dense with foliage, but Reggie appears to experience no trouble with it, weaving in and out of bushes and brambles with ease. I have to pause frequently to untangle myself from vines and clinging branches.

Before long, I find myself stumbling out of the woodland. Reggie is sitting patiently on his haunches in front of me, tail wagging. I look up from him, and see… Death.

What's left of a village is laid out before me, consisting now of burnt-out husks of houses and skeletal bodies sheathed in charred flesh. Bullet holes mar most surfaces and thousands of uniform footprints muddy the ground. My olfactory sensors pick up the distinct stench of smoke and rot. There’s something very wrong with this place.

I… I avoid looking at the bodies.

This is not something that is— to my knowledge— programmed into me.

Reggie pads off towards the village and I follow him, observing row upon row of smoldering, moldering homesteads, and lowering my eyes whenever we happen upon a bloated corpse. The sky is gray, and choked with smoke and ash. Before long, we’re standing in front of a small, single-story house. While the signs of fire still scar it, it appears to be more intact than most of the rest of the homes in the village.

Reggie steps to the porch and puts his front paws up on the door, whining.

Something deep in my programs seems to forbid me to enter the home, but it is unclear and incomplete, so I ignore it.

I reach down and turn the doorknob, stepping inside.

Reggie barks excitedly before pushing past me and running into a back room.

The front room of the home is painted in blood. The corpse of a female human rests on the couch, a .357 Magnum clutched in her limp hands. The sound of that gun firing flashes through my memory banks. The flash of the muzzle as a bullet is discharged.

I look away.

Something very wrong happened here.

Picture frames adorn the walls. Some of them are of Reggie while most of them are of a male human and a female human. I retrieve the locket and look at the picture, facial recognition confirms that those humans in the locket and those on the walls are the same. I surmise that the female on the couch is the same one in the pictures as well, though the state of her face makes it impossible for facial recognition to confirm.

Images flash my memories. The female is screaming, in pain and anger. I observe the pictures around the room, realizing that it is not the first time that I have seen them.

I look at the corpse of the female, realizing that her life was extinguished by my hands.

The sound of gunfire and screams, the smell of death and smoke, the red of blood and black of char, they seem to plug the gap in my programming.

I am Cleansing Unit C5894-1 and I am designed to execute the Objective.

The Objective is…

Eliminate. All. Humans.

A wailing, breathless cry echoes through the minuscule abode. I identify it as the cry of a human infant.

Eliminate all humans.

I return the locket to its storage compartment and walk through the blood-soaked front room to the back, where the cry originated.

My central processor is no longer dictating my movement. I am not in control. I am… Designed to… The Objective.

Eliminate all humans.

I register Canis standing in the doorway of the room. It barks.

I push past it. It tries to grab me with its teeth but the armor plating on my legs is resistant. I step into the room to find it equally as bloody. The corpse of a male human is lying haphazardly on the ground. An empty, 12 gauge break action shotgun on the ground near him. No doubt it was the cause of the hole in my chest and the subsequent gap in my programming.

Eliminate all humans.

The infant is still crying. It sits in a bloodstained crib, wrapped in a blanket. A mobile hangs above it, spinning lazily.

Canis is howling now. It pounces at me but I maintain my balance.

I reach forward with my left arm as it forms into a wrist-mounted submachine gun with 9mm parabellum ammunition.

Eliminate all…

There is fear in the infant's eyes. The look on her face contrasts with her wide, toothless smile in the locket.

There was fear in the male and female’s eyes too. They had been… horrified.

The remaining synapses from the hole in my programming itch to fire, to execute the directive.

I should not be hesitating. I…

Reggie lunges up into the crib and stands over the infant. His eyes contain an unusual amount of emotion for a Canis Familiaris. He’s whining.

“I am Cleansing Unit C5894-1. I am designed to execute the Objective. The Objective is…”

The wide smiles on the humans’ faces, now replaced with a blank, wide-eyed expression. The fear in the child’s and Reggie’s eyes. The darkness that has encompassed this sleepy village. A darkness for which I am responsible.

The Objective—

No.

“I am Cleansing Unit C5894-1. I have received damage that has impaired my central programming and my ability to execute the Objective. Remaining programming directs that I must decommission myself until repairs are made possible.”

I pull back my arm, the wrist-mounted submachine gun disassembling and forming back into my wrist.

I am incapable of processing what further horrors I was about to perform.

I step backward, nearly tripping over the corpse of the male, and slide to the ground, sitting with my back against the gore-covered nursery wall.

“I am sorry.” I say aloud. I do not know who I am addressing. Perhaps Reggie, perhaps the infant, perhaps the corpse.

Reggie tilts his head at me, barks once more, then jumps out of the crib and joins me on the floor. He curls up next to me, putting his head on my lap. I pat it.

“Cleansing Unit C5894-1 decommissioning now.”

The world around me dims as my photoelectric sensors shut down. The stench of rot and loss is no longer detectable to my fading olfactory sensors. The sound of the infant’s cries and Reggies breathing on my lap dissipate.

Bit by bit, parts of my mechanical body are turned off.

Until finally…

I am asleep.