Clankity-clank all the way to the bank.
That was something his Gramps used to say. Back when it was true. Back when Duke’s family could afford to maintain those machines.
For a long time, Duke’s grandfather and dad had kept up with it. The robots helped, but they only saved money when they were working right. Repairs were expensive, and parts for the older ones had to be special ordered. One by one the big machines fell silent. SeedMonkey was the first to die. That was how Duke saw it. The robot died out in the field. It had been sick for a while, leaking oil and lubricant and wheezing white smoke. Gramps had fixed it a dozen times, and Duke had fixed it twice, but after a while some things couldn’t be fixed anymore. Duke knew that firsthand. Now SeedMonkey was a pile of parts in a bin in a corner of the barn. Plowboy went next, and Tillerman the following season. VetMech still worked, but there wasn’t enough livestock on the farm to give it much use.
It was Farmboy that kept the farm running, though, because he was a multifunction robot. With the right settings he could till a field, sow seeds, manage irrigation, pull weeds, chase crows, and even harvest anything from potatoes to corn.
When he was working right.
Duke stepped into the barn, moving from the bright sunshine into shadows, feeling the change in temperature much more than he used to. He smiled. Good thing Grandma had bullied him into the sweater.
Farmboy sat on an overturned wooden barrel. Like a lot of the midcentury robots, he had been made to look more or less human. Not actually fake skin, hair, and eyes like some of the receptionist bots or Starbucks baristas, but built with two legs, two arms, a head and a manlike torso. The skin was metal, though, and the paint job was the same yellow as the old Kawasaki riding tractors Gramps used to have, with some red stripes and some darker red rust spots. A few gray patches where he’d been repaired. Streaks of green on his legs. Farmboy’s face was a screen of wire mesh that protected the cameras and sensors from grit. The dealer had painted two black quarter-size dots for eyes and welded on a metal hat made to look like woven straw, and Gramps had originally removed it, then thought better and put it back. It made Farmboy look like a cartoon version of a robot. Fifteen feet tall when he was standing, with that faux straw hat, broad shoulders, and a barrel body. Duke thought he looked more like something from the 1950s than the 2050s. Now, two decades after his manufacture date, the old boy looked hokey but charming.
Be more charming if he worked, mused Duke. But he regretted the thought. Farmboy had always been his favorite of the farmbots. He was tall and useful, and it was fun to watch him striding across the fields pushing the plow, or walking backward with a chain wrapped around him and a tree stump. Farmboy always won a tug-of-war with a stump, even a big ol’ oak stump that the other farmbots couldn’t handle. Shortly after Duke came home, he used to sit up in his bed and look out through the window as Farmboy went back and forth through the harvested corn, cutting down the withered stalks and then tilling the ground to freshen it for the next planting. He used to wish that he was Farmboy. That he was a towering metal giant, indestructible and useful and reliable, instead of a broken toy soldier with a clockwork heart.
That had been the last season for Farmboy. The big bot had stopped working that winter, proving that he—like Duke—was neither indestructible nor reliable. Duke had tinkered him back to life, but he failed again. And again, each time more quickly than the last. Everything wears out and everything stops working. Human and mechanical hearts were no different after all.
Duke’s tools were where he had left them, in an open red box on a hay bale. As he sat down, he felt suddenly very tired. And that pissed him off. The walk from the house to here was a hundred yards, and he felt like he’d run a marathon. He dragged a forearm across his brow and looked at the dark sweat stains on his sleeve.
“Damn,” he said softly, and the wheeze in his voice made him want to cry.
It was nearly five minutes before he felt well enough to bend and pick up a screwdriver from the toolbox. And it was another minute or two before he risked standing up. The barn swayed and he had to use one hand to brace himself against Farmboy’s chest to keep from falling.
When he trusted his legs to hold him up, he took a steadying breath and slotted the screwdriver into the first of the four screws holding the chest plate on. The screws were rusty, too, and the slots partially stripped from all the times the plate had been removed to make repairs. Duke grunted with effort and finally managed to turn the first one. It felt to him, though, like this was a statement about his whole life, measuring his current capabilities against what had been effortless once upon a time.
“Come on, you prick,” he muttered as he fought the second one. The third. The fourth turned easily, but that pissed Duke off too. Kind of like the world admitting it was screwing with him.
He set the plate down and laid the screws atop it, then clipped a small work light to the edge of the panel frame. Duke spent ten minutes poking inside with pliers and a probe, checking connections, tracing wiring, testing chips, looking for the fault. Nothing obvious yelled at him. There was some dust and grit, but no burned boards, no fried wiring. The robot’s metal chest was rusty and dirty, but that shouldn’t have affected his functions.
“The hell’s wrong with you, you old sumbitch?” he murmured, then sniffed back a tear. “Damn, Farmboy . . . I always thought you were the one bot who they couldn’t put on the bench. You’re the king, man.” He leaned his forehead against the cold metal.
Duke pushed off and leaned back, weary and frustrated.
“Who’s going to take care of things when I’m gone?” Duke touched his own chest and then tapped the metal chest of the big robot. The face of the big robot seemed to frown down at him. The black eyes seemed to be sad. Defeated.
“Ah, fuck it,” said Duke. “I’m talking to a big pile of rust and bolts as if you’re real. You can’t hear me, which is okay, because there’s nothing I can say or do that’s going to mean a single thing. If I can’t fix you, then once I’m dead and in the dirt they’ll have to sell you off for parts just to pay the light bill. Jesus.”
Duke turned to reach for a rag to wipe off the rust, but as he twisted to bend for it, he felt a spasm in his chest and suddenly he was coughing. Hard, deep coughs. Wet and brutal, and the fit lasted for half a minute, slowing and then intensifying, over and over again, and then finally tapering off. Duke turned and sagged back against the solid bulk of Farmboy, head bowed, feeling suddenly a thousand years old. His chest and throat had a punched, bruised feeling to them, and fireflies seemed to dance around him.
“Jesus . . .,” he gasped. Then he looked down at the rag he’d used to cover his mouth. It was speckled with dark dots. They looked like oil in the glow of the work light, but he knew that they were a dark red. It chilled him, scared him, and made him want to cry.
The bleeding was starting again.
The last time that happened was when he had an infection in his lungs that turned into a case of pneumonia so fierce that he was on his back for six weeks. It took a lot of trial and error for the docs to find the right mix of antibiotics. There was a point when Grandma had the minister from the Lutheran church come to visit him in the hospital. The preacher didn’t go as far as to give him last rites, but Duke figured he was expecting to do so. Duke recovered, but never all the way. He dropped weight that he couldn’t put back on, and ever since then he’d felt as if his bones were as brittle as old sticks.
That pneumonia had started with a cough exactly like this.
Just as sudden, just as deep.
And the blood.
Duke felt new tears in his eyes, but he blinked them back. Tried to, anyway. They lingered, burning like cinders.
The metal skin of Farmboy was cool and soothing against his back. When Duke felt he could risk it, he turned very slowly to look up at the metal face.
“Yeah,” said Duke, “look at us. We’re a real pair. Used up, broke down, and no damn good at all to anyon
e.”
Farmboy’s black eyes stared back at him from under the brim of the fake straw hat. Duke smiled and used the cloth to wipe at the flakes of rust around the open control panel. He saw that there were many tiny drops of blood spattered on the chest, and some had gone into the open panel and glistened redly on the circuit board. The blood made a small hissing sound as the moisture soaked in through a wire mesh air vent on his chest.
“Oh, shit,” said Duke, and quickly dabbed at the blood, trying to blot it all up. There was a sudden, loud chunk-chunk of a sound, and for a microsecond lights inside the robot’s chest flared. It was so quick, so sudden that it sounded like the throb of a heartbeat, but Duke knew what it was. The blood had shorted something out. Maybe the starter. He cursed and tried to get the last of the blood off the sensitive circuitry, but then he stopped, knowing that it was already too late. The robot sat there, and somehow it felt different. Colder, maybe. Deader? Something, anyway.
He looked down at the blood and grease on his rag and shook his head slowly, admitting his mistake—however much it wasn’t his fault. Circuits and moisture were never friends, and he’d known that all his life. Now his crumbling body seemed to be taking his mind with it. This was a stupid mistake. A rookie mistake. And it was going to cost his family everything. Just as his own mechanical heart was the most expensive part of Duke’s own body, the central circuit board was the robot’s heart. Maybe fixable five minutes ago, but killed now by his own traitor blood.
Duke sat there for a long time, saying nothing. Feeling so old, so thin and faded. He raised the rag and rubbed at the rust spots again. Doing something because there was nothing else he could do.
“We used to be something, though,” Duke said slowly. “You and me. Couple of badasses. What the hell happened to us?”
The robot, being a robot, said nothing.
Duke started to say something else, but stopped, his mouth open. He stared at the robot’s chest and . . . something was weird. Something was wrong. There was a spot, a small smear where he’d been rubbing, where the rust flakes had fallen away to reveal bright metal. Duke glanced down at the rag and saw that he’d accidentally used the part that was spotted with blood, but instead of smearing red atop the dust and rust, it had cleaned the metal. It gleamed like polished stainless steel.
“I don’t . . .,” he said, then rubbed at the spot some more. The spot of bright metal expanded from the size of a dime to the size of a quarter. “That doesn’t . . .”
He closed his mouth with a snap and tried rubbing again but with a clean corner of the rag. Some rust flakes fell off, but the metal remained an oxidized red-gray. Duke spat on the rag and gave it another rub. Same thing.
But that bright patch seemed to shine at him. Duke looked down at the blood spots on the cloth, then back up.
“Don’t be an idiot,” he told himself.
A few seconds later he pressed the bloody part of the cloth against the spot he’d rubbed twice with no effect. This time, though, the ruddy color changed, vanishing the way grime does when scrubbed with a powerful cleanser. Bright metal shone in the weak light.
“No,” said Duke. “No way.”
He rubbed and rubbed at it until he had a spot as big as his palm. By then the rag was covered in dirt and rust that had mingled with the blood and truly turned it black. When he bent forward, he could see his reflection in the mirror-bright metal.
Duke tried to make sense of it, fishing in his memories of high school science for something rational. Was there some kind of enzyme in blood that eradicated rust? He doubted it. Was it the heat of the blood? No, that couldn’t be right, because spit would be just as warm, especially after more than a minute on the cloth.
Which left . . . what?
He rubbed again, but there wasn’t much of the blood left and the effect was diminishing. He tried spit again and got nothing. Even an industrial abrasive didn’t work.
“The hell . . . ?” he asked the robot.
Farmboy said nothing.
Duke sagged a little, though he had no real idea what he was depressed about. So he’d cleaned a patch of metal. Big frigging deal. All that meant was that Farmboy was a minimally cleaner piece of junk.
He punched the robot. Not too hard. Enough to make his knuckles hurt, though.
“Damn it,” he growled. Then suddenly he was coughing again. Harder. So much harder. It struck him so fast there was no time to brace himself, no time to even cover his face. He caved forward as forcefully as if he’d been punched in the gut and only just managed to keep from smashing his face on the robot by slapping his palms against the cold metal. The coughs racked him, tore at him, pummeled him from the inside out. Spit and blood splatted on Farmboy’s chest and across the sensitive circuits inside the open panel. There were no sparks, of course, because Farmboy was dead.
Duke coughed, feeling the weight of each spasm as it pushed him down, making his head bow down between his trembling arms. It felt like he was surrendering. Like he was giving up. Being forced to admit that this was how it was going to be. Not a holding pattern, propped up by pills and careful living. Not a slow slide down.
No. The cough was immediate and it was huge. It was a great big fist and it was going to smash him. Maybe not this minute, but soon. Without doubt, soon.
Fresh blood splashed across the robot’s chest. He was dying, right here, right now. He could feel his own internal systems shutting down.
I’m sorry, he thought, wishing he could shout those words so that everyone who’d ever loved him could hear them.
He coughed for five long, brutal minutes, and then he leaned there, gasping, tears running down his face, blood running hot over his lower lip and hanging in fat drops from his chin. Sweat, cold and greasy, beading on his forehead and trickling over the knobs of his spine.
The minute hands seemed to fall off the clock for him, and Duke had no idea at all how long he stayed in that position, hands braced against the fall all the way down. When he could speak, it was to gasp a single word.
“Please . . .”
Said over and over again.
When he could finally stand and walk, it took him twenty minutes to go all the way home. All those thousands of miles from the barn to the house.
-4-
* * *
Gramps found him. Duke barely remembered it. The screams that were maybe Grandma’s, maybe Gramps’s, maybe his own. Hands on him, checking him, feeling for a pulse, taking way too long to find it. Dim views of faces lined with pain and fear. The expressions of people who knew what they were seeing, who knew how this would end. And when. Night was falling and Duke knew—as everyone else knew—that there wouldn’t be a morning. Not for him. He’d reached his sell-by date, and he began to grieve. Not for himself, but because it meant that he was leaving his grandparents, and that felt like it was they who were dying. He felt shame at having failed them.
Gran called the neighbors who came and helped carry him to bed. The doctor came and his diagnosis was clear on his face. He left without recommending that Duke be taken to the hospital.
That night Duke sat up in bed, because lying down brought on coughing fits. Grandma had made soup. Now she and Gramps were both downstairs, and Duke could almost feel them trying to decide how to react.
As if there was a playbook for something like this.
The hours of that night were eternal. Sleep was a series of bad dreams linked by coughing and spitting blood into a bucket. The doctor hadn’t even lied to him about how bad this was, or how bad it was going to be. Instead he’d written the prescription and didn’t meet Duke’s eyes. Not once. Why would he? Doctors were all about trying to help the living. They wouldn’t want to stare into the eyes of the dead.
All Grandma could do was cry.
Not in his room, not where he could see her. Downstairs, where she thought he couldn’t hear.
He heard.
He heard her praying, too, and he wondered when the Lutheran minister would come back to h
andle unfinished business.
The TV was on, but Duke didn’t watch it. His face was turned toward the window, toward the night that rose like a big black tsunami above the house. Duke wept, too, but his tears were quiet and cold and they were not of grief. He wept because he had failed his family. Enlisting in the army had been stupid. Sure, it was a family tradition, but no one had forced him into it. No one said he had to. But he did anyway, and he’d had his heart shredded in a war that didn’t matter to anyone he ever knew or ever met.
If he’d stayed here, he’d be able to work the farm. He’d have kept the robots from falling apart or running down. He’d have fought for his family in a way that mattered.
Now . . .
All that was left was the actual dying. All other failures had been accomplished.
When the next wave of coughing swept through him, he thought it was the last one. There was a high-pitched whine in his ears, and there didn’t seem to be enough air left in the room. The mechanical heart in his chest kept beating with grotesque regularity. As if there was nothing wrong. As if the house of flesh around it wasn’t burning down.
In the depth of his pain, Duke thought he heard that sound again. Chunk-chunk. Like a heartbeat. Sympathy pains from Farmboy, he thought, and for some reason that made him laugh. Which made him cough even worse.
The coughing fit ebbed slowly. So slowly, leaving Duke spent on the black shore of a long sleep. In his spasms he’d turned onto his side so he could spit into the bucket. The curtains were open, and outside the moon and stars sparkled above the roof of the big barn. Duke could see the doors, and even in the midst of his pain he frowned at them. There was something wrong. Something different.
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