The Last Hope

By Reis Asher

Park ranger Bill Richardson got a gruesome heads-up on the upcoming robot apocalypse when his son, Kyle, was killed by his self-driving car. His friends mocked him for believing AI was capable of murder—until the bionics came for them all.

 

Now, as one of the last free men in a world dominated by machines, Bill wastes away his time in a remote hunting cabin on the shores of Lake St. Clair. He has no intention of returning to society and holes up with his journal and guns. Sooner or later, either the remnants of humanity or the bionics will come to finish him off—if despair doesn't get to him first.

 

Fate, however, has other ideas, and when a bionic named Matthew arrives on his doorstep begging for his help in evading a group of lawless, sadistic bionic hunters, Bill is torn between his fear of robots and his sense of decency.

 

It doesn't help that Matthew is handsome and gentle, but Bill's afraid to trust again when machines cost him the most important person in his life. He's waiting for the other shoe to drop—and what will he do when he discovers Matthew's true purpose?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Reis Asher
• Release date: Sep 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223489702

Book preview

The Last Hope

Park ranger Bill Richardson got a gruesome heads-up on the upcoming robot apocalypse when his son, Kyle, was killed by his self-driving car. His friends mocked him for believing AI was capable of murder—until the bionics came for them all.

Now, as one of the last free men in a world dominated by machines, Bill wastes away his time in a remote hunting cabin on the shores of Lake St. Clair. He has no intention of returning to society and holes up with his journal and guns. Sooner or later, either the remnants of humanity or the bionics will come to finish him off—if despair doesn't get to him first.

Fate, however, has other ideas, and when a bionic named Matthew arrives on his doorstep begging for his help in evading a group of lawless, sadistic bionic hunters, Bill is torn between his fear of robots and his sense of decency.

It doesn't help that Matthew is handsome and gentle, but Bill's afraid to trust again when machines cost him the most important person in his life. He's waiting for the other shoe to drop—and what will he do when he discovers Matthew's true purpose?

An Unwelcome Visitor

Bill sighed as he finished chopping the last of the firewood. He wiped his sweat-soaked brow as he buried the axe in a stump beside his cabin and tightened the rubber band holding his gray ponytail in place. His back hurt, as it did every time he engaged in hard physical labor. It had been more difficult in the beginning when he'd had to build his muscle mass back up from practically nothing. Years of alcohol abuse had left him weaker than a child, but survival necessitated trading his soft belly for a leaner stature. Now, it was age taking its toll. The cold gnawed at his bones, and it was taking longer and longer to get out of bed in the morning.

Sometimes, he cursed the damn machines who'd caused all this to happen, even as he was aware humanity had it coming for a long time before the war. Advancing robotics technology to a point where bionics could pass for human and then treating them as servants was a recipe for disaster, and it wasn't like humans weren't aware of that fact at the time. They just didn't care. The good life had made them soft, and those who'd always had plenty couldn't envision a world where their standard of living simply did not exist. They'd ignored every warning shot fired across their bow.

So maybe they'd deserved what had happened, but his son Kyle hadn't. He'd just been an innocent boy—untainted by humanity's sins. He thought bionics were neat right up to the moment a computer took his life. Experts had determined that a malfunction in the car's self-driving module was to blame for the accident. Bill knew better. The car had swerved left out of nowhere for no logical reason at all. It had rolled over onto its roof on a deserted backwater road, trapping them inside, and it had locked all the doors. The windows wouldn't respond to Bill jamming on the button, either. Bill would have assumed the battery was dead if the car radio hadn't lit up red, playing a bionic cover of Don't Fear The Reaper on low as it turned out all the lights and blew out the GPS unit, preventing anyone from finding them. He'd reached for Kyle, but his seatbelt wouldn't come unlatched. It was tight against his body, pressing him to the seat. He'd started to cut it slowly, painstakingly, with a pocket knife his fellow game warden Ivan had given him one Christmas. His limbs became heavy and weak, despite the adrenaline coursing through his veins.

He'd realized the cabin was being flooded with carbon monoxide from the still-running engine. Bill slammed his elbow into the glass, but it wouldn't budge. He'd reached for his gun and shot through the window, pushing out the tempered glass in one fractured piece and gasping for breath. From there, he'd been able to open the door from the outside. He'd fallen out onto the grass like a sack of potatoes, stumbling to the other side to reach the backseat where Kyle sat.

It was too late by the time Bill pulled Kyle's fragile body from the vehicle. The seatbelt had clung to him like a series of vines, squeezing the life out of him before Bill could cut him loose. The autopsy report said every bone in his ribcage had been crushed. They'd never seen a seatbelt exercise so much force on a human body.

They'd thought Bill was mad with grief when he told them the car's computer did it. Every newspaper, every talk show host, and radio DJ he told his story to laughed him out of the room. Bill Richardson was seen as a kook, a conspiracy theorist, as laughable as Flat-Earthers or folks who believed in chemtrails.

They weren't laughing now. Most of them were dead.

Bill gazed at the dusk sky. He needed to go inside and lock up before it got dark. The war between humans and bionics was over, but only because bionics had effectively won. The humans who'd survived the initial culling were either puppets of the robot network or lived outside the system entirely, like Bill. Living off the grid wasn't without its risks, and Bill was glad he'd stockpiled guns before leaving for his fishing cabin when things went south. It took a lot of bullets to put down a bionic, but he'd learned to aim for the head. Without a central processing unit, the facsimiles were nothing more than junk.

It had been years since he'd seen one. Bill wasn't even sure what the world at large was like now. The last updates he'd gotten from a drifter were years old, and he knew better than to venture into the city. He still had enough ammo to hunt, and there were two fresh deer hanging in the shed out back, along with a sizable vegetable garden out front. The lake water was drinkable with a little filtering. Bill had done a good job of living self-sufficiently, and he supposed age would outpace his supplies. He could go on another ten, fifteen, maybe twenty years before his body gave up the ghost.

It was a lonely life, though. The hand-crank generator was still holding out, so that gave him a little light and enough to run an old television set and DVD player, along with a few other basic appliances. He'd have lost his sanity without old TV shows to watch, though it sometimes hurt to see the world as it once had been. A society wrestling with deep questions about the meaning of life because they'd ascended the hierarchy of basic needs.

All civilizations fell for the same reason. Empires had collapsed across the ages, torn apart by greed, famine, disease, and war. They'd been so close to utopia this time, but cracks in the veneer had started to show long before things fell apart entirely. Politicians taking advantage of others. Corruption at the highest levels. A few chosen men hoarding ninety-nine percent of the world's wealth while millions lacked clean water and basic nutrition.

Bionics had been a symptom of the end, not the cause, but Bill hated them anyway. He'd spent his life trying to treat others with compassion as he upheld the rules of society, but bionics were amoral. They pretended to have human emotions in order to manipulate people, then shot them in the back when they no longer served their needs. Bill had been the only one unsurprised when every bionic across the world turned on its owner at the same time. It was a calculated, coordinated massacre.

If not for Kyle's 'accident,' Bill might have been among them. Despite his reservations, he'd been considering buying a housekeeping bionic before the crash. Ivan had sung their praises for a month straight. Afterward, when Bill lost everything, as his wife moved out and became his ex-wife, he'd let her take all his modern technology and replaced it with early 2000-era models. He felt safer rolling back to the era before televisions and toasters could think for themselves. He still owned a chrome toaster from the 1960s. Old was better. The world should have remained in a simpler age.

Bill retired to his cabin and locked the door, all ten deadbolts holding the cabin's only entrance shut. He closed the shutters and drew the curtains across. It was largely performative. Bionics were strong enough to breach the cabin if they wanted to, but Bill needed to get some shuteye. The rhythm of his daily rituals was enough to soothe him to sleep at night. He tossed wood into the fireplace and got a steady flame going before he considered dinner.

He decided to treat himself to one of the cans of beans in the cupboard and rewatch an old action show until the generator ran out of juice. It had been a while since he'd allowed himself to indulge, but he was feeling down after thinking about Kyle. His thoughts drifted to his son even more often lately. If there was a God, he wondered what the Almighty's logic was in allowing a man in his fifties to survive while his six-year-old son perished. There was no purpose in Bill's life now. He had nothing to pass on to the future besides the journals he scribbled notes in, and he doubted few would find his ramblings interesting. He'd never been much of a writer, but the journal was a therapist who didn't judge.

He was halfway through his can of beans when a distant pop sound made him pause the DVD. The lights flickered and went out entirely as the generator was depleted, and Bill was left like a startled deer in the dark, ears pricked up, waiting for the sound to hit again.

It did; louder this time. As a former game warden, he knew a rifle when he heard one. Bill slowly got to his feet and tip-toed through the dark, finding his hunting rifle and gripping it tightly in both hands. If something burst through the door, he'd be ready. Bionics could see better in the dark than humans, but the blue light emanating from behind their eyes was always a dead giveaway. When they were injured, they'd glow blue from any wounds, a holdover from the lighting technicians had once used for maintenance, and they bled a thick, white coolant that permanently bleached anything it touched. It only became easier to spot them once they were tagged with a couple of shots.

To think blue