Robots Versus Humans (The Robot Planet Series Book 2) (5 page)

“Don’t look back,” I told Emma. “Don’t look back!”
 

“Why?”

“If it’s coming for us, I don’t want to know, do you?” Raphael’s story warned that if you looked back at the danger behind you, you turned into a pillar of blood or salt, something terrible that didn’t make sense. “Change of plan,” I said. “We leave town and circle back.”

“But your father — ”

“Like he said, this isn’t goodbye. We live on the edge of town. We’ll get there by heading north. If we go through Marfa, we’re dead.”

The howls of the sirens and the screams of the dying receded but I’ll never forget them. Dad was right. This was war and we were all drafted now.

I ran until the numbers of buildings thinned. Only when I was standing out in the open did I dare to look back. I could see there was another crane bot in the distance through shimmers of heat. “There’s two of the big ones!” I told Emma.

“Three,” she said.

“What? You mean three back at your dome?”

“No, Dante. I mean three here. It’s not standing up but I can see the heat plumes of the third. It’s heading northwest. I’m guessing the plan is to level Marfa.”

I searched the horizon but saw nothing. “You’ve got Vivid, don’t you?”

She nodded.
 

“That didn’t go down with your dome?”

“The enhanced vision is still there. I’ve lost any connection to the services offered through the Collective.”

“What do you mean?”

Emma shrugged. “I’m cut off. It’s mechanically advantageous but my information is limited to…mostly how
you
see the world, I suppose.”

I flushed, a little angry at that remark. Then it occurred to me she could catch my thermal changes and interpret them as anger. Embarrassed, I turned away.

“I can see far and I can see close. I’ve still got night vision,” she said.

“That will be useful. Let me know if you see any snakes or bots tonight. What can’t you do that you used to do?”

“Can’t look up any entries to check facts. Mostly, for me, that was engineering manuals. Makes no difference now, I guess. The Collective won’t be feeding me any information anymore.”

We had a big circle to walk so I hurried as best I could. With her exo-stilts extended, the trek was easy for Emma. I ran at first. Then I walked and jogged. I was embarrassed at that, too. Every time my breath came short and ragged, she told me to stop and rest. “If you wore the full body rig, I could be getting a piggyback ride and we’d be there in no time.”

“I left with what I was wearing at the time. I only had the stilts on to crank me high enough to check the tanks and work on the domes.”

“No offense meant, Ma’am.”

“None taken. But don’t call me, ‘Ma’am.’ Emma will do fine. How far, cowboy?”

“We gotta move stealthy so it’ll be evening before we’re close. And don’t call me, ‘cowboy.’ Dante will do fine.”

“Fair enough. How do you get a name like Dante?”

“Dad said it’s because he’s been to the ninth circle of hell.”

“I don’t get it.”

“It’s a story he knows. Mythology, I think. Caught my father’s imagination. Old knowledge. ”

“Outlawed knowledge, you mean.”

“The West is full of outlaws, then. Nothing special, though. We just like stories and we like to talk.”

“Colorful,” she said.

“Some say so. Some think country equals dumb. But I think people who think that way aren’t colorful enough. Raphael says if people had more flair and flavor, they wouldn’t be weird about the way he talks.”

“Your father doesn’t have your accent.”

“He was brought up out east. My mother was from Amarillo. I was brought up around here mostly, with Raphael for a teacher.”

“Where’s your mother?”

“I don’t remember much. She was colorful and had flair, too, I think. And long hair.”

“You get along with your father?”

“Mostly?”

“Only mostly?”

“You know how most vets don’t want to talk about their time in the Sand Wars? I wish my father were one of those guys. He couldn’t claim to have won the war singlehandedly but I’m pretty sure he thinks he slowed our defeat all on his lonesome.”

Emma startled me with a sound that started with a snort and ended with a laugh. “Sorry,” she added.

“No, by all means. Laugh it up. I could use a good laugh right now.”

“I think that’s all I’ve got, given the circumstances.”

“What was it like living in a dome?”

“It felt safe. No Blight. No monster spores getting in. Mother kept us safe from all that but it wasn’t just about airlocks. She kept out corrupting influences. With all that’s happened, I thought Mother would make sure humankind wouldn’t fall farther.”

“Wait. Who? Mother? You mean your captain?”

“No. Sorry. Mother is what Domers called the Collective.”

“Strange thing to call a computer.”

“It was the computer network that kept the airlocks sealed at the right times so we could move between domes without fear of contamination. Calling it Mother was kind of natural, I think. It made us safe.”

“Until it didn’t. What happened to Mother in the shatter storm?”

Emma looked away. “She opened all the airlocks at once. The wind whistled right through, from the damaged domes to the rest, ruining everything in a minute.”

“How fast do the plants die?”

“I’ve heard it’s twenty percent loss of yield each year. We’ve lost dome networks around here before. Pecos went down two years ago. Roswell went down last year. This is the first out and out
revolt
we’ve had, though.”

“That you know of,” I said.

I thought I detected her stiffening at my words. Her silhouette towered above me. I’m sure, with Vivid working, Emma could see my face perfectly. I’d asked her to extend her stilts so she could detect any threats ahead of us in the deepening darkness. Night comes fast in the desert.

“What do you mean, ‘that I know of?’” she asked finally.

“You stayed inside all the time, right?”

“Mostly.”

“And you depended on Mother to tell you everything?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Then your Mother abandoned you, too.”

“Well….”

“Trust me, from one abandoned son to an abandoned daughter, mothers don’t tell their kids everything. My mother lit out for the west coast way back, at the first signs of the Fall. Your Mother didn’t stop the bots from killing humans.”

“I wouldn’t equate — ”

“It’s not the same, but it is the same,” I said. “And where did that swarm come from?”

“They were pollination drones, refitted for warfare.”

“How is that possible?”

“The domes are built around a huge factory. We needed a lot of pollination drones. The limit of their manufacture is only the amount of elements the bots can get their claws on. That’s why we aren’t overrun by crane bots right now. There’s enough metal in one crane bot to supply one dome with pollination drones.”

We trudged on in silence. We made our way through the dark until we circled back to Marfa’s edge.

I was worried about death machines coming for me. I’d totally forgotten about the danger posed by Jim Peppard.

9

I
heard no more screams as we made our way back into my neighborhood. The old civil defense sirens died mid-wail. The invasion of Marfa had entered the second stage of the catastrophe. By nightfall, human survival meant run or hide. We heard the crashes of demolished buildings but no gunshots echoed from downtown.

For the ill-prepared, walking out into the desert might mean a slow death when the sun rose. We hoped the bots would leave the same way you hope a storm will pass you by. It’s only a hope. You have no say beyond thinking hard and being helpless.

I’d spent a good part of my childhood hoping hard and I knew how useless it was. Jim Peppard taught me that.

I never played with Jim when we were kids. He was a year older than me. I don’t suppose he really had friends. He was the sort of kid who, by the gravitational force of his strong personality, gathers a solar system of sycophants and lesser bullies into his orbit. He lived just down the street from my house but we never had occasion for a civil talk.

Marfa was the sort of place that valued legacy. You could move to Marfa when you were young and you’d still be, “that dude from back east.”

The Peppards had been in Marfa for generations so they should have been higher up in the local hierarchy. However, they were assholes. That’s the flip side of living in small places. Everybody has a long memory and is quick to remind others who was born of a bad seed. People stick you in a slot and you stay stuck.

My father the war hero was one of those dudes from back east. Austin, in the locals’ estimation qualified as Other: too liberal and too weird. However, when Steve Bolelli arrived in Marfa with his pretty wife Jean, Dad was lucky. He moved in to the house next to Raphael Marquez, the richest man in town. Raphael gave my father a job and, when my mother left, I spent more and more time with my father and his employer. I came to think of the old man as a great substitute for the grandfather I never knew.

By the friendship my father developed with his neighbor, I was bound to become a solar field engineer. Raphael took me on as an apprentice and trained me personally. My ability to contribute grew. Meanwhile, Jim lived down the street brewing moonshine with his father and hating me.

I don’t know what little Jimmy Peppard might have become if his dad had a friend like Raphael. The Peppard family was known in town as a group of troublemakers, quick to anger and slow to forget any slight, real or imagined. Jim Peppard never really had a chance. There were reasons he was a bad kid and a bad man.

I’m not making excuses for Jim, though. Reasons didn’t make him any less of an asshole. You get to twenty, you gotta start owning your shit and cleaning it up. Otherwise, you become your shit.

My childhood drama with Jim didn’t really start until a bot intervened in our lives. Mostly, Jim was a name caller right out of the womb. He wasn’t much of a doer when he was young unless provoked.

It was Jen #2, Raphael’s second companion bot, that caught Jim on disk calling me names and hucking rocks at me.

This was long before Bob came into my mentor’s life. Raphael hadn’t always needed help moving around. Bots like Jen were called companion bots but they were made primarily for sex. Raphael bragged that he wore out Jen #1 faster than her warranty lasted. Jen #1 was replaced by Jen #2.

Jen #2 lasted a long time but Raphael’s health had begun to decay by then. Jen #2 was eventually recycled. The latest sex bot, Jen #3 arrived.

“Jen #3 is more of a companion than the others,” Raphael said. “It’s the chemicals we use to coat the solar panels. They get better connectivity and I get less. I’ve absorbed it through my skin over the years. Sucked the calcium straight from my bones and took the stiff out of my stiffies.”

I started wearing gloves on the job at all times after that revelation.
 

Raphael was a gentle soul. He didn’t keep his bots in a closet. While he was out in the fields at work tuning up panels and getting sicker, he always set his companion bots to sentry mode. That sounds official, but mostly it was Jen’s job to sit on the front porch hooked up to a charger, scanning the street to protect Raphael’s house and telling the occasional refugee to keep moving.

One afternoon when I was seven, Jim pushed me into the dirt so hard I got road rash and cried. I had my crying done before I made my way home. My mother wasn’t sympathetic and my father was of a mind that, “Bigger doesn’t matter as long as you hit hard and hit first.”

Jim’s size did matter to me. I didn’t want to get hurt. I figured the quickest way to end the fight and keep all my baby teeth was to curl up in a ball and hope Jim got bored. I didn’t fight back.
 

Not fighting back was the only sin I recall my father worrying about aloud. Not that he was all wrong. I didn’t understand irony then. I didn’t know that inaction invited more abuse and the probability of more injury down the line.

Jen, ever in sentry mode while Raphael was away, saw the incident. She replayed the recording when Raphael got home. I didn’t know the machine had witnessed my humiliation until my father came home with one set of bloody knuckles and a cut on his forehead.
 

My father sat me down and looked me in the eye. “Dante, did that big boy down the street hit you?”

“No,” I said.

My father appeared to consider my words for a time. Finally, he said, “That’s the right answer and it’s the wrong answer. It’s right because you’re not tattling and whining. It’s wrong because you’re telling me nothing happened when I know for a fact it did.”

“Then there is no right answer,” I said. “What am I supposed to do?”

My father shook his head. “The right answer was to hit the sumbitch back, right in the teeth. In a perfect world, I don’t hear about it. As it is, I had to go deal with the situation.”

I was a kid and small for my age. I still remember how my head got hot and my hands got cold as I looked into my father’s eyes. By his voice, I knew he was disappointed in me. But he had a look that made me suspect he was excited, too. “What did you do, Dad?”

“I went over there and beat the shit out of that boy’s father.”

“Aren’t you going to get in trouble?”

“Nah. Except for standing, I didn’t use my cybersuit at all. Took him down one-handed.”

This seems an unlikely claim in retrospect. I didn’t question then that my one-armed, one-legged father could beat up Dale Peppard without using the power of his bionics. I’d heard a thousand war stories by then. I was pretty sure my father could beat up anybody. I still believe it a little bit, even now.

Jim pretty much left me alone after my father visited the Peppard household that night. He kept his assaults to the verbal variety afterward.
 

I heard from Raphael years later that Sheriff Hubbard did get involved in that case briefly. “Peppard’s wife called Hubby in. The only reason your father isn’t in the jailhouse is it’s a question of he-said, he-said. There weren’t any bots around to record the festivities when Steve showed up on Dale’s doorstep to express concern for your safety.”