The Preserve

by Ariel S. Winter

  “You can’t expect us to let these orgos—”

  Kir interrupted Colonel Brandis, “Humans. You want the commissioner and chief here to call you a bunch of metals?”

  “These humans should have been rounded up decades ago,” Lieutenant Cray said beside Colonel Brandis. “It’s time to just end this whole charade.”

  Laughton felt like it was all getting away from him—the comfort of easy authority, the calm of living without a daily threat—these things were being crushed. “Twenty-four hours!” he yelled.

  Everyone looked at him.

  “Twenty-four hours and I’ll have the antivirus. All of you, your departments, whatever, give me twenty-four hours.”

  “With what intelligence—” Agent Spectra started.

  “Twenty-four hours,” Kir said. “Then we can take this up in Washington.”

  “You’ll just scare everyone into a panic,” Laughton said, “if you start closing the borders and moving ships in the harbor.”

  The room fell silent. It was hard to believe that the robots weren’t messaging each other, and they most likely were within their own delegations, no one wanting to show their hand to anyone else, let alone the orgos in the room.

  Captain Sysigns said, “I’m not moving my ships. They’re already there. That barricade is only going to get tighter.”

  Grace Pattermann spoke at last. She must have been doing extreme calculations. Since snapping at Kir, she had seemingly withdrawn from the conversation. “Twenty-four hours.”

  Colonel Brandis threw his hands up. “This is ridiculous. We’re under attack, and you want to let them keep at it.”

  “No,” Pattermann said. “I’m saying, an antivirus by tomorrow or the preserve will be cordoned off.”

  “Congress—” Kir said.

  “Let’s not waste words,” Pattermann said. Then looking right at Chief Laughton, she said, “And you don’t want to waste any time.”

  Laughton felt like the whole room was rushing away from him in every direction, his vision growing dark. What the fuck had he gotten himself into?

  “Fine,” Kir said, and rounded the table. “Come on, Jesse.”

  He opened the conference room door, and the commissioner followed him out.

  Laughton blinked as though waking. The robots were all watching him. Was this what history felt like? A vision of Erica formed in his mind. He didn’t know what to do.

  He turned and left the room.

  What just happened in there?” Laughton said, jogging a few paces to keep up with Kir as he burst out of police headquarters.

  “A robot pissing contest,” Kir said without slowing his pace.

  Laughton jogged again to catch up. “What is that? A power surge?”

  Kir stopped short, and turned to his partner. The almost invisible apertures hidden in his eyes widened as some of his anger drifted into laughter. “That’s good.”

  Jesse’s own face opened into a grin, the smile spreading through his neck and shoulders. He knew that simply changing the expression on your face could actually change your mood. Why didn’t he ever think to do it?

  “Did you just make that up?” Kir said.

  “Yeah.”

  “We’ll always be inferior copies to you,” Kir said.

  “Or you need to spend more time with an eight-year-old.”

  “Yeah,” Kir said, nodding. “I do.”

  Some officers rushed out of the main entrance, breaking the momentary respite. The partners turned as one toward the truck.

  “Let’s get to the Sisters’ warehouse,” Laughton said. “Can’t imagine McCardy actually went there, but we better make sure.” He shook his head as he opened the driver’s-side door. “There’s no way we’re solving this thing in twenty-four hours.”

  “Like you said,” Kir said across the hood, “we just need to find the cure. We’ll worry about the killers later.”

  “Needle in a haystack,” Laughton said.

  “We need to find the haystack,” Kir said.

  Laughton thought for a moment, then raised his eyebrows and shrugged. “Well, good thing we’re going to see some farmers.”

  * * *

  The warehouse district could have been a ghost town, although Chief Laughton had been in enough ghost towns to sense there was something here that made it feel inhabited. He realized it was the hum of an HVAC system on the side of one of the nearby buildings, and the orderly row of garbage cans lined up beside a dumpster across the way. In ghost towns, the dumpsters seemed to always be open and overflowing, as though taking out the trash was the last thing everyone did before leaving town.

  Kir pointed to a car parked about one hundred yards down the street. Two silhouettes were visible in the front seats. The partners went up to it and knocked on the driver’s-side window. Laughton flashed his badge as the window lowered. “Any movement?” he said to the officer in the driver’s seat.

  The policeman shook his head. “Nothing. We have a quadcopter around the back. No one coming in or out that way either.”

  “How about a motorbike? See one come by?”

  The officer frowned and shook his head. “Naw.”

  Damn! Laughton thought. He banged on the roof of the car. “Great,” he said, “Thanks.”

  “You want us to come in with you, boss?”

  Laughton didn’t like the idea of going into a potentially volatile situation with men he didn’t know. “Stay out here,” he said. “Anyone comes out, go after them.”

  “Yes, sir,” the officer said.

  Laughton and Kir walked away from the vehicle toward the warehouse. “We got people in there?” Laughton said to his partner.

  Kir scanned the building for heat signatures. “Five.”

  Laughton allowed himself to hope that one of them was McCardy despite the absence of a motorbike.

  “Ready?” Kir said.

  Laughton’s phone buzzed. He looked. It was a text from Betty: “Let me know you’re all right.”

  Laughton put the phone away and unsnapped the guard on his gun belt. They started for the entrance, and Laughton’s phone buzzed again. This time Betty said, “I’m really scared.”

  “Betty?” Kir said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You should respond.”

  “And say—” But the phone buzzed then, and Betty’s name popped up on-screen. If he talked to her, he might lose focus. But if things went wrong with the Sisters… And that was the problem. Just her calling had his mind in the wrong place. The phone stopped buzzing, and the call was marked as missed. “Come on,” he said, ignoring Kir’s quiet disapproval.

  Laughton knocked on the Sisters’ door. He kept his eyes on the ground, unfocused, as he listened, waiting for them to answer.

  “They’re right inside,” Kir said.

  Laughton knocked again. No sound came from inside. The HVAC hummed.

  “Ready?” Kir said.

  Laughton nodded, and put his hand on the grip of his holstered gun. He still hadn’t drawn it on the preserve, and he wasn’t going to until he had no choice.

  Kir punched the door just above the doorknob, denting the metal, the sound echoing on the neighboring buildings. He punched again in the exact same spot, and again, and on the fourth time, the doorjamb broke, releasing the door. He pushed it open, and the loud forceful cough of a double-barreled shotgun burst in Laughton’s ears. Kir rocked back. Laughton pulled his gun, adrenaline sharpening his vision. Kir had already absorbed the impact of the shot, and was rushing forward toward the young woman holding the gun who managed to get another shot off, tagging Kir’s shoulder as he reached her. He ripped the gun from her hands, and bent the barrel in half like Superman.

  The woman looked as though she was going to attack Kir with her bare hands, her face and neck flushed, her arms rigid at her sides.

  “Please put your gun away,” a female voice said behind Laughton.

  Kir turned at the sound.

  “You’d never reach me before I fired,
” the woman said.

  Chief Laughton raised his hands, but didn’t let go of his pistol. “We’re not here to arrest anyone,” he said.

  “Unless one of you murdered Carl Smythe,” Kir said.

  Laughton saw a third woman standing back at the desk in the rear. Two men were by one of two vans, its rear doors open, the inside stacked with boxes. “I’m going to put my gun away,” Laughton said. He began to move his hand slowly. He half expected the unseen woman behind him to say “Drop it,” but she fortunately didn’t make a demand the chief would not have met. He snapped his gun back in place, and turned, surprised to find the woman holding him in her sights looked almost identical to the woman at the back of the warehouse near the desk, short, with wide-set narrow eyes. Sisters. Maybe twins. “You don’t need that anymore,” Laughton said, nodding at the gun.

  The woman continued to hold it on him. “What do you want?”

  Laughton looked around, trying to keep tabs on everyone. The woman at the back of the warehouse started toward them. The men loading the van seemed happy to let the women handle the police officers.

  The woman who had shot Kir with the shotgun was younger than the other two with ice-blue eyes. “Get moving,” she yelled at the men by the van.

  The men jumped, and then began moving boxes into the van.

  Laughton noticed the shelving units toward the back were mostly empty. “Packing?” he said.

  “We didn’t murder anybody,” Twin One said, still holding the gun.

  Kir was inspecting the damage where the bullet had torn through his clothes and simul-skin revealing some wires within. “Not for lack of trying,” he said.

  “Fuck you, metal,” the woman who had shot him said.

  “You okay?” Laughton said.

  “Fine.”

  “We are packing, to answer your question,” Twin Two said.

  Blue Eyes’s mouth dropped open and her eyebrows went up as she glared in surprise at Twin Two, her expression clearly saying “Seriously? You’re going to talk to them?” When she got no reaction from the other two women, she stormed off to help loading the van.

  Twin One lowered her weapon. “We see what’s happening. Plan was to get out before they came for us. So when you show up with a robot punching in our door…”

  Kir had stripped the ends of a few of the exposed wires and was twisting them together. “I’m one of the good guys,” he said. “Can I actually say that out loud?”

  “We’re not here to arrest you,” Laughton said again. “I’m Chief Laughton from Liberty. This is Agent Kir from Health and Human Services. Can we call you something other than the Sisters?”

  Twin One shook her head. “No.”

  “The one who welcomed us with the shotgun is Lysee Martins,” Kir said. “These two are Marcy and Jenny Leonard.”

  “Fucking face recognition,” Marcy said.

  “So you’re not all sisters?” Laughton said.

  Marcy said, “How can you bring this shit in here?” She nodded at Kir.

  Instead of answering the question, Laughton said, “We’ve pretty much got twenty-four hours to prevent martial law, and then they really will come for you. We just need whatever you know.”

  “About what?” Jenny Leonard said. “We didn’t have anything to do with Smythe getting killed.”

  “Honestly,” Laughton said, “I’m not even worried about that right now. I need the antivirus for this thing that’s killing robots.”

  “Killer Apps,” Jenny said. “They had to be clever.”

  “Sounds like a human,” Kir said, expressing a rare anti-orgo moment. Laughton blinked in surprise. “Puns,” Kir said, and Laughton nodded his understanding. It hadn’t been anti-orgo, just observational.

  “Don’t talk to him with that metal here,” Lysee yelled from the back of the warehouse.

  “She’s going to get one of you killed,” Laughton said.

  “Or save our lives,” Jenny said.

  “We don’t have the antivirus,” Marcy said.

  “McCardy does, and we know that he was looking to make contact with you. Has he?”

  “No,” Marcy said with annoyed amusement that said it would be a bad idea if he did. Guess he’d been right to seek out Gary’s help.

  “Sounds like it would be a bad idea if he did.”

  The Sisters didn’t respond to that.

  “You know, we did you a big favor last night,” Kir said. He was no longer fiddling with his insides.

  “Fuck you, metal,” Lysee yelled.

  “Lysee!” Jenny chastened.

  “You’re the one who shot me!” Kir called at the angry young woman.

  “Okay!” Laughton yelled, and everyone looked at him. “We all want the same thing right now, and that’s to keep the robots off the preserve, yeah?” He waited, looking around from person to person. The loaders had stopped again to watch. “They’re trying to use this to kill the preserve, so we need that antivirus now.”

  “We heard about that club,” Jenny said. “We didn’t know about it before.” She looked at Marcy, who blinked her eyes in consent. “We knew Titanium was moving product off the preserve by boat. He’s working off some island out past Johns Island. We figured there was enough to go around, but then Carter’s deliveries became erratic. We thought he was diverting his supply through Titanium.”

  “We weren’t going to allow that much longer,” Marcy said.

  “Then why kill Smythe?” Laughton said, hoping to catch them out.

  Jenny smiled. “Nice try, Chief. We didn’t do that, but Jones thought we did, and ran to Titanium. We figured McCardy must have followed.”

  Laughton tried to make that fit. If Jones and McCardy thought the Sisters had discovered their disloyalty and were going to kill them, why was McCardy heading for them? He had either approached Titanium unsuccessfully or hoped to convince the Sisters that he wasn’t party to Jones’s betrayal.

  “You have any clearer idea about where Titanium is?” Laughton said.

  Jenny’s and Marcy’s eyes met, but Laughton couldn’t tell what had passed between them. “No,” Jenny said, her face open and honest.

  Laughton looked at Kir. “What do you think?”

  Kir looked back at Lysee, who was sitting at the desk, leaning back in the chair, arms crossed across her chest. “Fuck you, metal!” she yelled. “You’re lucky they weren’t electric tips.”

  “She shot me,” he said to Jenny and Marcy.

  “You did punch down our door.”

  “We knocked first. You could have opened it.”

  “Where are you going? Out to your farm?” Laughton said.

  Jenny shook her head. “We’re going to change scenes for a few days, off the preserve.”

  Laughton shook his head. “That’s not going to work.”

  “Fix this situation, and we’ll come right back,” Marcy said.

  “Right,” Kir said.

  “We’ve got you, don’t we?” Jenny said.

  Laughton snorted. “Yeah. And all you can give me is that Titanium was taking things out by boat. We already knew that.”

  Jenny shrugged. “We can only tell you what we know, and that’s all we know.”

  Laughton said nothing, watching her face, but the muscles remained relaxed, no micro-expressions to give away a lie. Titanium had managed to keep the Sisters in the dark.

  “You still can’t take off,” Laughton said. “Don’t make me arrest all of you just to keep you where we can find you.”

  Marcy and Jenny exchanged a look, all of the muscles in their faces tightening in the exact same way, almost like a living mirror. “Aren’t your boys in the car out there going to keep tabs on us?” Marcy said. “That’s not good enough?”

  Laughton wasn’t surprised that they had spotted the men outside, but he was disappointed nonetheless.

  “And your machine here,” Lysee said, rejoining them. “You’ve got our vans on GPS now, don’t you.”

  “Assuming you didn’t burn
them out,” he said.

  “Chief Laughton,” Jenny said. “South Carolina is our home and it always has been. You do what you need to do, and we’ll be back. But right now we need to do what we need to do.”

  “I’m going to believe that what you need to do is go to your farm, and if we need you and you’re not there, you might not have a farm to come back to.”

  “Listen, asshole—” Lysee started.

  But Marcy stopped her with a raised hand. “Do your job, Chief, and it won’t come to that, because if it did, it wouldn’t be good for you.”

  They all let the counterthreat hang in the air. After a moment, Laughton held up his phone. “I need to be able to contact one of you.”

  Jenny pulled her phone out of her back pocket, and they tapped them together. “Good enough?” Jenny said.

  Laughton didn’t feel at all that it was good enough, certain if the Sisters didn’t want to be found again that he would never find them. But if things played out in their favor, and the preserve went on, it would be better to have the Sisters as a source than as enemies. “Sure,” he said.

  Kir looked at Lysee. “Next time they better be electric tips,” he said to her.

  “Fuck you, metal.”

  “Ladies,” Kir said with a nod of the head and a casual two-finger salute. He headed out the door.

  Laughton watched the whole operation for another minute, yearning for the right question to ask, feeling like there must be something to glean here, but in the end, he turned and followed Kir through the broken door frame and into the daylight.

  Outside, the chief crashed from the adrenaline comedown as it fully registered that shots had been fired. He brought his hands to his head, and then rubbed them on his thighs, taking a deep breath and exhaling.

  Kir patted him on the back. “I’m the one who got shot,” he said.

  You don’t have pain receptors, Laughton thought, but was too shaken to voice. He remembered Betty’s call, and felt guilty for ignoring it. If things had gone another way in there…