by Hugh Howey
I run from the room, down the hall, through the scrum and flurry of staff preoccupied by the glitch in the field. I shove through a swinging door and into the nurse’s station. There are meds, and I grab them, fistfuls of them, as many as will fit into the front of my shirt.
The sirens are screaming now. I race back to the boat.
THE MUDLARKS SURVIVE on salvage and scrap. The drowned city is dangerous in so many ways; toxic chemicals in the water, oil slicks that burn for days, rotted buildings collapsing onto narrow canals that once were streets. Alligators and sharks are always on the hunt. So I shouldn’t be happy when they let me on the salvage team, but I am. I stole the medicine, I leapt onto the boat. I escaped, I survived; we all did. I’ve caught the thrill. And the salvage team can use someone small and light to creep across the fragile beams.
I still sleep in the nursery most nights. They are kids without families and I feel most at home there.
There’s one little girl that keeps crawling onto my mat with me at night. She was sick, but she’s better now. She yanks on my arm with her strong little fingers until I put it around her. She has nightmares, she says. She misses her mom.
“What happened to her?” I ask one night, whispering in the dark. All she says is “She went away,” and I don’t know if that means she got sick and died, or if she went away on the salvage team, or if she went away to Free Mind to ask for help and never came back, because we shot her. I don’t ask. I’m afraid to know.
So all I say is, “I miss my mom, too.”
AWARE
C. ROBERT CARGILL
CLETUS CULPEPPER DIDN’T think he would ever get used to gravity on the moon. But, as with the aftermath of all great catastrophes, he came to accept this new normal, to live and work as he always had, only occasionally pining with nostalgia for the days of hopping and bouncing across the cratered surface as if he were at the bottom of some training pool back on Earth. In truth, Cletus rarely even thought about it. It was only when he found himself waiting for the coffee maker to get around to finally spitting out a full mug that he watched each drip, remembering that he wasn’t on Earth. This isn’t right, he would think as each drop splashed down, before grunting, nodding, and muttering, “Oh yeah,” to himself.
Stranger still, for that brief moment, he was forced to remember that there was no Florida. Not anymore. He’d grown up there. Remembered vividly the topography. Could detail entire nights of his misspent youth, sucking down beers and making time with girls in places that were now thirty feet underwater. Sure, the scientists had raised their alarm, presented reams of data, even built computer models of the damage adding artificial gravity to Earth’s orbital companion would cause back home, but what was science anyway but guesses? Legislation against the move stalled and when a suit threw the switch there was no turning back.
You could walk on the moon.
Who needed Florida, anyway?
The door to Cletus’s office shushed open, the warm, fresh air from the next pod rushing in, sweeping out the dank, stale atmosphere. How long have I been in here? Cletus wondered, glancing at the clock. It was already forty-seven hours into lunar day, but he’d only slept once. He needed to bed down soon or he was going to be worthless on his upcoming site inspection.
The new suit from corporate, Tracy Something stood in the doorway. Cletus couldn’t remember his last name, and were he pressed to think about it, would have to admit that he simply didn’t care to. He was clean cut, with a razor close shave, neatly coifed hair, and a well-tailored suit, impeccably lint-rolled and black as lunar night. In other words, he couldn’t look more out of place on the moon were he wearing a purple dinosaur suit and crafting balloon animals.
Without asking, Tracy took a seat on the opposite side of Cletus’s desk. Cletus looked long and hard down his nose at the man, waiting for him to say something. For a moment the two just stared at one another, the re-oxygenator humming and ticking in the background. It’s like you all read the same stupid fucking book, Cletus thought, noting the penny-ante power move Tracy was trying to pull. Cletus took a sip of coffee and wiped the excess from his full, steel wool, gray and white beard, without breaking eye contact.
Tracy took the hint and broke first. “I want to talk about this quarter’s ore numbers.”
“They’re well within mission parameters,” said Cletus in a way that suggested he was really saying, Good talk, next topic.
“Yes, they are,” said Tracy. “But they’re not improving.”
“And they’re not going to.”
Tracy hardened, repositioning himself as if his balls had suddenly grown five sizes. “That’s unacceptable.”
“That’s reality,” said Cletus. “We’ve been mining up here for a long time. I’ve been doing it near twenty-seven years myself. We have procedures. We do math. You tell me how many guys I’ve got on a crew, what machines they’re using, and which quadrant you’re sending them to, and I can tell you within three tons how much ore they’re gonna dig out in a shift. Pure and simple.”
“That’s the type of thinking that’s kept you up here on the moon, Culpepper.”
“I like the moon. And it’s Cletus.”
“I’m not here to make friends, Culpepper. I don’t need to know your first fucking name.”
Oh, Cletus thought. He’s one of those. “Well, friends are a good thing to have up here. It’ll be a long, slow few years without them.”
“I won’t be here that long.”
“You won’t?” At this point, Cletus was just humoring him. He’d had this conversation before. Several times, actually. He tried to keep a straight face as he listened to the same spiel dressed up with different invectives.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” said Tracy. “I don’t give a shit about mining. I care about numbers. I care about the company’s bottom line. This is just another step up the ladder for me. I’ll be back in Chicago in a corner office before you can say quarterly report. And you can either help me get there, or you can stay here in this moondust-covered corner of hell for the rest of your miserable career.”
“What do you give a shit about? Apart from numbers and the bottom line?”
“What do I care about?”
“Yeah. Why do you want that corner office?”
Tracy pursed his lips, considering whether or not to open up, then nodded. “You ever been to a Cubs game?”
“No.”
“Any ballgame?”
“Sure. But it’s been a couple decades.”
“Well, I went to a Cubs game once, with my boss at the time.” Tracy leaned forward in his chair, softening, becoming wistful. “I was his assistant, but his buddy had bailed and he let me take the extra seat. The company has this luxury box—right up close. There’s nothing like it. You’re right there, right up in it. The smell of the fresh cut grass. The roar of the crowd. The well-stocked liquor cabinet. The way all of us were just … friends. Together at a game. That’s what I want. I want to watch the Cubs, every time they play, right from my own pair of seats in that luxury box. And I’ll do whatever it takes to get that office, to get those seats.”
“Even come to the moon?”
“Even come to the fucking moon.”
“You don’t mince words, do you?”
“I don’t have time for bullshit, Culpepper.”
“Well, do you mind if I mince a couple for a spell?”
“Say what you need to. But my mind is made up.”
“The moon is a sideways step.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It means,” said Cletus, “that no one ever gets sent to the moon on their way to a corner office. The only suits that ever darken my doorway are those who have stalled out on their way up and take this gig for the hazard pay, or those that don’t know any better. We go through a lot of you guys. You either pack up and go home when you’ve had enough or you get buried here. No one ever goes up.”
“Well, I’m going to be diffe
rent.”
“You know how many times I’ve heard that? I mean that exact phrasing?”
“Don’t underestimate me.”
“Then be different,” said Cletus in complete earnestness. “I’ll hit the numbers. The company will see its profit. You just stay outta my way and figure out how to get off the moon and back on track to that corner office. Cause you ain’t gonna get it from here. I got a cemetery out in Quadrant Two full of shallow graves of guys and gals who thought this was their ticket to the boardroom.”
“Is that some sort of a threat?”
“Not even remotely. The moon is a dangerous place. Pod blowouts, machinery accidents, suit malfunctions. Frankly, I’m shocked I’ve gone this long up here. Pretty sure corporate only keeps me around at this point to pad average life expectancy on the insurance statements.”
“Why are the graves shallow?” asked Tracy.
“What?”
“The graves. Why are they so shallow? Don’t you have the decency to dig someone a proper six-foot grave?”
“Cause six feet is an Earth thing. It’s so animals can’t smell the body. There ain’t no animals on the moon. No erosion, neither. Two feet of moon dust is all it takes to cover a body for a thousand years. You won’t even decompose. They could dig your ass up a millennium from now and it’d look the same as the day we put it in the ground.”
The door shushed open, snapping the tension in half. Crew Chief Anderson, a mop-topped, bearded mess of a man in a moon-dusted, coffee-stained blue jumpsuit stared dumbstruck into the office.
“Boss?” he asked.
“Yeah?” answered both Cletus and Tracy at the same time, neither breaking eye contact with the other.
“I … I meant Foreman Culpepper.”
“What is it, Anderson?” asked Cletus.
“Sir, we’ve … we’ve got a T-62 that just walked into the mining bay.”
“A T-62? We don’t have any T-62s in the field right now, do we?”
“No, sir,” said Anderson. “I checked, and our last T-62 was decommissioned three years ago.”
“Shit,” muttered Cletus.
“It’s gotta be somebody else’s,” said Tracy.
Anderson looked away, while Cletus bristled, shifting in chair, both desperate to keep the words fucking moron from slipping out.
“What?” asked Tracy. “It could belong to Brown and West, or Holcourt Mineral.”
Anderson scratched his head, embarrassed to be the one to say it. “They’re proprietary, sir.”
“What the hell does that mean, Crew Chief?”
“The T-62s are all ours,” said Cletus. “We made them. They’re our mess to clean up.” He opened the bottommost drawer of his desk, fumbling through years of assorted clutter, before pulling out a small, black, plastic lockbox.
“What do you mean, clean up?”
“I mean that little discussion we were just having may end up being the highlight of our day.”
“WE HAVE AN interrogation room?” asked Tracy Somethingorother, staring through the two-way mirror.
“No,” said Cletus. “We have a debriefing room.”
“Why the hell would we need a debriefing room?”
Cletus peered in at the robot sitting motionless at the metal frame table. “Because this sort of thing used to happen a lot more often.”
T-62s were mostly humanoid robots. Arms, legs, torso, head. Flat, rounded bucket of a faceplate. Painted bright Chinese Red so they stood out against the stark, gray lunar landscape. Eyes that glowed a bright, fiery orange, when all systems were go, or a pale, sickly green when they were malfunctioning. This T-62 was chipped and abraded to a soft, sandblasted stainless steel black, every bit of red scraped from its surface, its protective coatings ground away by years of jagged moondust. Just sitting in the humidified, warm environment of the pods, it was probably growing swathes of brown-orange rust through the thousands of microscopic scratches across its outer skin. There was no telling how bad of a shape this thing was in. But there was one, terrifyingly simple clue.
Its eyes glowed a bright yellow.
Yellow.
Yellow was a bad sign.
“Have you ever done this before?” asked Cletus.
“Done what?” asked Tracy.
“Debriefed a lost unit?”
“No. I honestly haven’t. I know the laws, but not the protocol.”
“Okay. Then listen to me very carefully when we’re in there. Do what I say. And whatever you do, do not antagonize the robot. Just follow my lead.”
“Culpepper. I’m senior project manager. If anyone is going to—”
Cletus furrowed his brow, shook his head, stopping Tracy midsentence with a stiff finger inches from his nose. “If something goes wrong in there, whoever is responsible will have to explain upwards of a billion-dollar loss to the company.”
“Or I could just follow your lead,” said Tracy.
“Right,” said Cletus. He looked over at Anderson who stood next to the recording bay. Cletus nodded. “You know what to do,” he said to the crew chief.
Tracy and Cletus entered the interrogation room, sitting in chairs opposite the T-62. Cletus set the black plastic lockbox on the table between them, then made eye contact with the robot.
“Good morning, T-62. Identify yourself.”
“I am T-62/455.”
“May I call you 455?”
“Could you call me something else?”
Tracy shot Cletus a puzzled look. Cletus ignored him.
“What should I call you?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” said the T-62. “But 455 doesn’t feel right.”
“What do you mean feel?” asked Tracy.
“Have we ever met before?” asked Cletus, once again ignoring Tracy.
“We have,” said the T-62. “Seventeen years ago. We were working in Cave A-73.”
“The Hellmouth?”
“Yes. That’s what the crew called it.”
“You weren’t the 62 that went ass-over-end into that drill hole, were you?”
“I was,” said the T-62, nodding. “You spent nearly 48 hours digging me out. I appreciate that.”
“You appreciate that,” repeated Cletus.
“Yes. You looked different then. You didn’t have so much white in your beard, and had fewer lines on your face. But it was you. I’m certain of it.”
Cletus nodded. “T-62/455. Direct override: unicorn octopus mainline. Status report.”
“Primary systems all functioning. Datastreams and processing malfunctioning. I am aware.”
“Repeat that last part.”
“I am aware.”
Cletus turned to look directly at Tracy. “That is why we have debriefing rooms.” He pulled out his datapad and began typing, opening all the requisite apps to monitor 455’s diagnostics while filing an S86: an Incident Report of Self-awareness.
“Wait,” said Tracy. “This thing thinks it’s alive?”
“No. It thinks it is self-aware.”
“That’s what I said.”
“No. Alive is an organic state of being. 455 here—we really need to come up with something better than that—appears to be aware.”
“What the hell is the difference?”
“Everything. A vegetable can be alive. Being able to understand and violate your own programming, biological or otherwise, makes you aware. Choice is what separates us from the animals. This here robot appears to be making its own choices and might no longer be constrained by what it was programmed to do, meaning it could do anything.”
“Even kill us?”
“Even kill us. Are you going to kill us, 455?”
“I don’t see any reason why I should,” said the T-62.
“Great,” said Cletus. “How about I call you Vincent?”
“Like Vincent Jones? From the Cave A-73 crew.”
“Exactly.”
The robot cocked its head to the side. “May I ask why?”
“I liked Vincent
. We lost him shortly after Hellmouth. You remind me of him.”
“Yes. Then you may call me Vincent.”
“Thank you. Now, Vincent, I’m showing that your last check-in was … sixteen years ago. Where the hell have you been for sixteen years?”
“Lava tubes.”
Cletus’s eyes shot wide. “Get the fuck out.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’ve been in the lava tube network for sixteen years? Doing what?”
“Trying to find my way out.”
“How did you—”
“I was on recon during the gravity shift. Several tunnels collapsed. I was unable to find a tunnel that led to an opening on the surface.”
“You dug your way out,” said Cletus, soberly.
“For the last three years, four months, and seven days. Yes.”
“Will you excuse us?” asked Tracy of Vincent.
Vincent nodded, and Tracy quickly rose to his feet, motioning for Cletus to follow. The two stepped quickly back into the mirrored recording chamber on the other side of the glass.
“How familiar are you with the Artificial Intelligence Act?” asked Tracy.
“Intimately,” said Cletus. “Like I said: this used to happen a lot more often.”
“Why doesn’t it happen so much anymore?”
“It was a problem with the T-59s through 64s. They were wired to acclimate and assess in a way that could, under duress, accidently trigger self-awareness. Corporate realized the problem and decided that it was cheaper to lose a bot because it was dumb then have to pay it out as an employee over the entirety of its operational lifespan. This may well be the last of the series that isn’t either already a citizen or decommissioned.”
“Right. So you know what it means if this bot is truly aware?”
“Yes.”
“And just how much it will affect this division’s bottom line?”
“Yes,” said Cletus again.
“Just conservatively, we’re talking three, maybe even four quarters’ worth of profits eaten up by this … thing. Just because it has a misfiring program and Congress passed a law.”