The Sentry

It was late afternoon and hot, very hot. The sun scorched earth of the Australian outback was the last place that Blair wanted to be, but there was no one else to turn to. No one that is, within a hundred miles who wanted to take the job on. The locals had called him in because he was the district police officer. This was what he was paid to do. It didn’t stop him being afraid.

Slowly, carefully, Blair walked up the incline to the top of the ridge and surveyed the land before him. Desert plants, scrub grass, lots of sand. That was all he could see. That and the body of the child laying sprawled out in the middle of one of the sand dunes.

Robert Wilson was not moving. The policeman tried to ignore him, knowing full well that the boy was already dead. There was nothing he could do for him now, and he felt it was far more important to find the killer and stop any more deaths occurring. The problem was, he was up against a sentry.

It was almost thirty years ago that the first robot soldiers had been developed. And it was incredible to believe that they had originally been devised to kill rabbits. It was an Irishman called James McGuire who came up with the idea. Rather than spray an area with chemicals, or train animals to kill them, or interfere with DNA, he had created a small mechanical robot, shaped like a miniature tank. After feeding it with enough microchips to determine the size and shape of a rabbit he had gone into the outback to an area overrun with the small lovable creatures to conduct his field tests. The initial results were incredible. A one hundred percent success rate. The devastation caused to the rabbits was amazing.

The scientist had chosen his test site with care. A wide, semi-desert area with few rocks or hiding places. Each side of a valley had been pockmarked with rabbit warrens, and by night they would come out by the dozen and spread out around the surrounding countryside, devastating farmers crops left, right, and centre. The farmers had tried everything short of explosives and flamethrowers to kill off the animals but with little success. They were more than happy when the soft spoken young man arrived and requested to try out his toy. They had already tried everything else and felt they had nothing to lose.

Within a week McGuire had set up his experiment and carefully mapped out the ground. During the day he surveyed an area three miles long by a quarter of a mile wide, straight down the length of the valley. A perfect killing zone. Quickly he made sure there were no large boulders or obstructions. No deep pits or obstacles. Once he felt confident that he had done everything possible to ensure a fair test he simply took the robot out of the boot of his car, programmed in the final set of instructions, and set it down on the sandy earth.

McGuire used the remote controls of a toy car to start the robot forward and for the next few days allowed it to travel silently up and down the low, sloping hills. The young scientist only had to sit back and wait for something to happen. The results were staggering.

As darkness fell the robot came to a halt, turned on its infrared cameras and waited. It waited and watched. On the first day alone it killed more than fifty rabbits. By the second it was more than a hundred. By the end of the week it had reached its target of six hundred and just kept on going. It was the most successful rabbit killer in the world, and not a single chemical or toxin was spilled on the ground. The sentry had been born.

The principal behind the robot was brain shatteringly simple. All that was required was as much information as possible on the intended target. Its size, shape, colour. How it moved. How it looked standing up. How it looked lying down. Even what a dead rabbit looked like. The information was fed into its central computer along with video tape of live rabbits in motion.

McGuire had armed the robot with a blow gun located in its turret which fired miniature darts tipped with cyanide, and by the end of the first week it had run out of ammunition. Eight out of ten darts had hit and killed its intended victim. In nearly a hundred cases rabbits had been hit more than once. It was if the robot was making ‘certain’ of the kill. But the most significant fact was that no other creature had been injured and McGuire had felt to be in no danger approaching his toy. Why should he...