Power in the Hands of One by Ian Lewis

impossible without rocking the machine in one direction or another. My nervous frustration can’t bear to remain bottled up anymore as I dawdle back and forth.
    Forced into this position, I take aim. I don’t want to fire again; one more blast across the mangled armor will surely inflict fatal shock and damage. Do I have a choice? This is self-defense, right?
    I rehearse what I’ll say to the police when they find a dead man in the battered remnants of a giant robot that shouldn’t even exist. Sorry, Officer, he went tearing off across the countryside in his robot first. I had to track him down, duke it out, and kill him.
    No, it won’t be the police. It will be the FBI. There are military ties here, and who knows if Worthington stole anything from them before the contract fell through.
    A brief snicker from the other pilot sounds over the radio before the robot halts its advance. Then my video screen turns into the Fourth of July.
    Warning indicators flash in urgent display: Warning: ADS01 has entered Cannibal Mode. Pop-ups fly out of nowhere; what looks to be every system in the machine complains in blaring red font.
    Attack/defense systems and warfare logic override. Standby… Engage Crypto-masking? Redirecting primary fuel cells. Stage Beta compromised. Autonomous systems and mobility logic resequencing. Standby…
    The gray robot struggles its way over in awkward, disjointed steps. Two pronged turrets rise from its shoulders and after a ghostly spark from each, two blazing bolts of energy lance out toward me.
    An eerie, fizzling sound zips through the cockpit as the energy ripples across the body of my robot. The touch panels revert to their demo mode and my fishbowl view of the outside reduces to a dim, low resolution. The controls no longer respond.
    The other robot moves into position directly in front of me. Various panels retract in its chest and abdomen; similar ports open in the arms and legs. Spindly, flexible appendages emerge, each with various tool-like projections on the end.
    These probes unfold and reach toward me, placing themselves into a mad frenzy of vibration on various points of the armor. They move with guided precision, as if they already know the dimensions.
    The searing twinge of not knowing what these things will do rivets my mind; this pang increases tenfold when the video output goes black and I’m left with only the glowing touch panels and LCD monitors.
    The pulsating rhythm of the probes continues, clanging away at the outer hull. The notion of being dissected by a mechanical force, skin flayed off bit by bit, sends my stomach to my throat.
    “What am I supposed to do?” I plead aloud. If I ever needed direction from the machine, it’s now.
    The machine replies on the main monitor. Execute subroutine Recover.
    “What is that?” I pause then ask again. “Subroutine Recover—what is it?”
    The monitor loads what looks like a DOS prompt, but instead of C:\, the cursor flashes next to SEED:\. I rap away on the keyboard, hoping to make some sense of what must be the machine’s operating system.
    Wild guesses lead to repeated responses of “invalid command.” Sweat has soaked through the underarms in my T-shirt when I admit I can’t navigate the OS. A high-pitched buzzing outside the cockpit reminds me the pressure is still on and all I can think about are the pulsing, searching arms scouring the armor.
    “I can’t do this! I need help!”
    At my insistence, the machine seems to take over as a series of commands scroll down the screen. Executing subroutine Recover…Initiating reboot.
    Everything goes dark, and the ambient hum dissipates into nothing. The clamor from outside wails on, and I wonder whether the robot will reactivate in time, and whether I’ll have control when it does.
    “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” I tap with furious nerves at the upper controls, ready to grasp them and fight with a renewed intensity.
    Another grueling five seconds stretches past