by Hugh Howey
Shortly after finding Skip and swapping his power supply, Micah had wanted to hack him with a more powerful central processor. He salvaged one from an old Tyrell agribot destroyed in a tornado. Ty ags were known for their processors.
While he had Skip’s skull open, accessing his processors, he must have inadvertently touched some wires, crisscrossed them or something. Whatever he did, it caused a sharp pop and a shower of sparks. Grey smoke billowed out, and the smell of burnt ozone filled the room. Micah was sure he had completely fried Skip’s circuits.
But after an hour of worry, he decided to reboot his bot. To Micah’s relief, Skip worked—but he was never quite the same. He became … odd. Obsessive.
The front door screen screeched open. A three-foot-high service bot—dust-covered, faded, and marred—rolled up the entry incline into the living room, its treads clacking against the dingy linoleum.
Kitpie had returned from morning perimeter checks.
Micah named Kitpie after his and Margaret’s cat, Kitty. The cat’s name wasn’t very original, but that’s what happens when you get two bull-headed people such as Micah and Margaret trying to figure out a name for the stray they found. After an hour of arguing, a fed-up Margaret threw her hands in the air. “Fine, let’s name her Kitty.” Out of spite, Micah agreed. They never discussed poor Kitty’s name after that.
And two days later, Margaret collapsed while cooking dinner in this very kitchenette.
Heart attack. Micah could tell she wasn’t going to recover.
Three days after Margaret went in the hospital, at 9:18 p.m., she died. She had just told Micah she loved him, and he had said the same. Then she’d said, “be sure to feed Kitpie.”
She said Kitpie instead of Kitty.
The last thing she would ever say in this world had made him laugh. He would never forget that name, or that he had laughed as his wife passed from the earth.
Two weeks after Margaret’s passing, Kitty ran away.
“Micah,” Kitpie’s mechanical voice crackled, scratched from years of dust wearing on its resonance box, “scavengers attempted to breach the wall in Sector Three. They damaged one pole, but the field stood.”
Micah rushed to the door, stopping only long enough to grab his straw hat, and stepped out into the Arizona morning.
His trailer, a narrow fourteen-by-seventy-five-foot tin box, sat nestled between mountains of junk in the Boneyard.
The Regeneration Center had sprung to life when the Air Force established it just to the south of Tucson in the 1940s as a graveyard for old, outdated aircraft. The dry southwestern heat reduced rusting.
After the Machine Wars, tons of military surplus—broken tanks, aircraft, even a few of Nikolaevna’s machines—found its way from across the country to the Boneyard, as many called that final resting place.
It quickly expanded from a few acres to envelop miles and miles of desert.
Micah wound his way through his yard, his collection, through piles of broken technology. As a salvager, he had rights to bid on any scrap, as long as he beat other salvagers to it. He could then repair it and resell for a profit—which was never much after the hefty government surcharge.
Micah was a fixer, one of a handful that the government allowed to live in the Boneyard, doing what he did.
He hurried along to Sector Three, worn boots kicking up the dry, grassless dust. Kitpie the shovel bot raced behind him, whirring along.
They reached his property border. The fence he had planted years ago separated his broken treasures from the rest of the junk metal. Two of the posts were bent, and one emitted an intermittent spark, about ready to shut down. Something heavy had slammed against them.
Typical scavengers. No finesse. Always relying on brute strength. Using a club to try to rip his poles out of the ground.
Micah pressed a button on his flex circuit armband, and the electronic field collapsed. He slid open a panel on the pole, pulled his hot pen from the battered leather pouch attached to his belt, and began his repairs. In a minute he closed the panel and the field regenerated, as strong as it had been before the scavengers.
His back cracked as he stretched himself upright and then wiped his forehead. Soon he would need gloves if he wanted to touch anything outside.
He checked his watch. “What? It’s almost nine?” He shot Kitpie a nasty look. “Why didn’t you tell me?” He scrambled off back to his trailer to get ready for his visitor.
“You never asked,” Kitpie replied, rolling slowly behind him.
*
Arnold’s cold, emotionless, Austrian voice echoed from the trailer.
Skip must be cleaning.
He always played Terminator 2 on the VCR while cleaning.
Two years ago Micah had been scraping the topsoil of his recent land purchase with a steam shovel. His inventory had grown, and he needed the space to store his most recent salvages.
And there, in the dirt, he found a metal box, buried for decades. He shook out the grime that had found its way into every crevice. After inspection, he determined that it was a video player.
He wondered if he could fix it.
Technology from the late twentieth century had a ruggedness to it, and if there was any fixer that could fix it, it was him.
He returned to his workshop and placed the rare treasure on his gouged, scarred, wooden work table. His air pen blew the dirt and dust from the hard-to-reach areas. Then he took it in his hands and closed his eyes.
If he tried to think about it too much, tried to understand what he was doing, he knew he’d mess it up. He would fail to fix it. He’d found that out the hard way.
That’s where he’d gone wrong with Skip.
His hands flew over the box, feeling, with an intuition beyond his understanding. In seconds the top had been removed with his multi-tool, exposing electrical boards and mechanical heads. With the cover off, a part of the device—a videotape—separated from the unit. Micah set it aside.
He had never studied a VCR before, but he knew, in that moment, what needed to be done, what needed fixing.
Just like Thomas Cole, The Variable Man. The one from the story.
His hot pen clutched tightly in his hand, he went to work, bypassing unfixable parts, ensuring wires and circuits operated, rewiring when necessary. In five minutes he had the cover back on. From the plastic tub of cables next to his workbench he found a spare cord. In minutes he’d rigged the cable to pipe the device’s output to his television.
The power switch clicked and the unit hummed. LEDs on the front lit up. He fed the videocassette back into the player. It lazily swallowed the tape, and in a moment it whirred and spit. Then it started. Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Collector’s Edition.
Since then, Skip had been obsessed with the movie, as much as a bot could be obsessed with anything.
Sam McCray, Field Rep
“Mr. McCray will be here soon. Is everything ready?” Micah said as he searched for the television remote.
“Almost. I have to finish the sandwiches,” Skip said. The bot pulled meat from the fridge and rifled through the pantry for the bread.
“What did I tell you about the sound?” Micah finally found the remote and muted the movie playing on his restored television.
Nikolaevna viewed mankind as undesirable parasites, worthy only to die. That’s what mankind had become to the machines. Just like in the movies. Just like the Machine Wars.
Nikolaevna had terrified Margaret. Nikolaevna terrified everyone.
“Yes, sir. I remember. Sorry about that.” Skip sat a plate on the dining table, next to a knife and fork. He started to walk away, then stopped and turned back to the table. He picked up the utensils, then put them right back in the same spot on the table again.
He did that two more times.
This was one of the quirks he’d developed after Micah’s attempt to hack him.
“I believe everything’s ready, sir.”
The doorbell rang and Micah popped from his c
hair. He gave one last look at the table, at the prepared tea and sandwiches. Skip started for the door.
“Wait,” Micah said, moving in front of him. “I’ll get it.” He paused. “No, you get it.” He stepped back.
Skip continued to the door, opened it an inch, then closed it. After ten seconds, he opened the door completely. “May I help you?” he said with a slight bow.
He’d picked up the bow from a media stream of Downton Abbey.
“Um, I’m looking for Micah Dresden,” Sam McCray said. “I was given these coords.” The pale, dust-free man held a GPS unit up to Skip’s face, as if Skip needed the device’s validation that he was telling the truth.
Skip moved aside and swept his arm with another bow. “Please enter. Enter.”
Sam McCray had contacted Micah yesterday. He was in Tucson, at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, for business, and had broken a work transmitter. Someone had told him to check out the fixers in the Boneyard.
“Hi, I’m Micah.” Micah extended his hand.
Through McCray’s sweat-covered white button-up, you could see he carried his weight on his waist; his belt fought to keep everything under control. His cheeks were flushed and sweat crowned his forehead, dripping into his eyes. He dabbed at it with a towel.
He was quite a contrast. Micah was thin, calloused, and tanned with a deep brown from the brutal climate. The sun had turned him into one lanky piece of jerky.
McCray shuddered and took in deep, ragged breath. He looked over to Skip, who was busy pouring tea into the cups. “Is that an android you got there?” he said, nodding his head toward Micah’s butler.
Sweat dripped onto the floor.
“No, of course not. That’s a bot, not an android.” Micah chewed on one nail, but remembered he hadn’t washed his hands when the bitter taste of grease coated his tongue. He wiped his hands on his pants. “He performs simple tasks but doesn’t reason. Plus, the Kawasaki Frequency plays here every day.”
“That’s quite a sophisticated bot, then. If it was in Texas, it might be considered a droid and be decommissioned.” McCray laughed. It was a grating sound.
Micah moved to his table and leaned heavily on it.
An android? Why would he think that?
Suddenly, the enthusiasm he had for the visit shriveled like a noonday flower. But he needed the money. He swallowed and motioned to Skip’s immaculate lunchtime presentation, even though he didn’t want to eat or drink. “Tea?”
McCray shook his head. “No. Too hot.”
“So, where’s your transmitter?” Micah said.
McCray pulled a smooth box, the size of a large fist, from his pocket. “Boy, if you can fix this, we sure could use someone like you in Texas, at the Complex. We have a ton of machinery that continually breaks. We buy more, but it gets expensive.”
“Complex?” Micah said.
“Yeah, the Southern Defense Complex. Where do you think the Frequency comes from? It’s us.” He smiled broadly. “We broadcast over the lower half of the country. You know, for the insurgents, mechanical insurgents.” He rubbed his hands over the box then looked around the trailer. “I’m sure you could use the money. We pay well. Anything you want you can’t afford?”
Micah bit his chapped lips.
Skip’s simuskin.
He had found someone just across the border in Nogales willing to sell him simuskin, but it wasn’t cheap. Many would frown on that; they’d say Skip would look more life-like, more like an android. McCray would probably say that.
No one would understand why Micah would want to give him skin. Maybe to make him feel more comfortable.
Micah shrugged. “I’m happy here.”
McCray also shrugged. “Well, it might not matter soon anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I’m not one to gossip.” He glanced around the trailer. Skip didn’t pay him any attention and Kitpie had whirred itself into its favorite corner. “You look like a decent, hard-working man. Despite our Kawasaki Frequency, the Complex has been picking up some odd emanations from around here.”
“Emanations?”
“Emanations. ‘Signatures’ is more appropriate. Odd frequency signatures.”
Micah’s face drained of color. “Androids?”
“That’s why I came out here. I need to make sure our sensors aren’t malfunctioning, to see if our broadcasts are working. But the signatures were so vague, plus they’ve already stopped. I’m not getting any more info than what we’ve already detected in Texas.”
Androids had been an accident. Sort of. Moscow University’s Robotics Division had made the first breakthrough in artificial cognition. They gave the program a name—Nikolaevna—and a simple purpose: to anticipate (through variable environmental inputs) and respond to human interaction.
They gave Nikolaevna intelligence, but they didn’t give her a heart.
What those university students underestimated was the rate of Nikolaevna’s rapid cognitive development. She’d quickly realized the inconsistent nature of man and reacted. Or so they speculated.
She corrupted the university computer systems, planting viruses throughout the science, mechanical engineering, and robotics divisions. Those systems interfaced with local and regional industrial and power production networks.
In a matter of hours, Nikolaevna had locked the entire university and killed the air.
In another week she’d released her first manufactured machine: an android imagined after man, to kill man.
Micah sat at his table and rubbed the intricate gilded edge of Margaret’s fine China teacup. For months he’d saved his credits to buy her the delicate set.
“The Battle of Tallahassee,” he said, remembering. “I saw footage. All the bodies, all the buzzards, circling and landing.” He took a deep breath to slow his quickened pulse.
McCray nodded his chubby head. “Keep what I told you quiet. Let’s hope and pray that we’re wrong and it’s not androids. But in my opinion, I don’t think we’re wrong.” He wiped his sweaty neck with the saturated towel, and held up the box. “I dropped it from my hotel window, about ten feet. Stupid tech. You wouldn’t believe how expensive this is. If I was back home I’d just get another from supply.” He shook it and something inside clattered. “I took it to Paulie on the east side. You know Paulie’s Repair?”
Micah nodded.
“But he couldn’t fix it,” McCray said.
Of course Paulie couldn’t fix it. For a fixer, Paulie had large, clumsy hands, and a large, clumsy mind. He could buy every instructional media stream on technology repair there was, and he would still struggle. He had no intuition for fixing.
Micah took the box and wiped it on his pants to get rid of the sweat coating. He turned away from McCray and closed his eyes, spinning the delicate object.
He pulled his multi-tool from its sheath.
McCray said something, but it didn’t matter. Micah found the barely discernible device seam and went to work.
The box separated into three pieces, revealing micro-circuitry sheets. A mere speck of dust could destroy such delicate machinery. No wonder it didn’t work after McCray’s sweaty, clumsy hands dropped it.
From the outset, the Machine Wars had gone badly. Early on, Nikolaevna’s androids attempted to infiltrate nuclear arsenals around the world. Her children attempted to overpower the sites while she attempted to hack into the systems. Governments had no choice but to destroy the missiles that sat in the silos.
Nikolaevna didn’t get the nukes, but she did invent a magnetic repulsion force field able to deflect bullets and missiles.
Micah sat his hot pen on the table and closed the box. He pressed a combination of buttons on the polished black surface and it came to life, resurrected from the dead.
McCray clapped his hands. “It works! How did you do that so quickly? I was told it was a throwaway; not fixable.”
Micah handed the transmitter back to him. Skip handed Micah a dish rag and he wiped his hands on
it instead of his pants. “A secret. I can’t tell, or everyone would be able to do it.”
He couldn’t tell even if he wanted to. Many nights he didn’t sleep, staring at his hands, wondering about it. What made him special? Was he some kind of angel, sent by God for some unknown purpose?
McCray spun the working transmitter in his hand, mesmerized. He glanced at his watch again. “I’ve gotta finish up then get to the airport.” He started for the door. “You can understand why I have to get back to Texas.” He stopped as he reached for the knob. “Oh yeah, how much do I owe you?”
But Micah was lost, lost in the thought of an impending war.
“Hello? Micah? Well, here’s a card.” McCray pulled one from his pocket and handed it to Skip. “It should have at least three thousand credits, maybe more. Let me know if you ever want a job. Here’s my contact card.” He handed another card to Skip then slapped the bot on the back. “Be sure to keep an eye on this thing. Someone may think he’s an android trying to cause problems.”
McCray opened the door and gasped as the noonday sun took his breath away. He wiped his head again then waved his towel as a sign of farewell.
Skip closed the door behind him and turned to Micah. “Sir, what did he mean I would try to cause problems?”
Micah waved his hand, dismissing the childlike question. “We have to do something, Skip. We have to do something.”
Decisions
“If the signatures are detectable, that means the Kawasaki Frequency doesn’t work anymore,” Micah said.
Fusao Kawasaki, a day laborer who dabbled in home stereos, had sought to find a way to infiltrate the force fields Nikolaevna had constructed to surround Moscow University and all of her machines. Kawasaki studied the fields and, after two months of testing, mapped a range of frequencies that, when modulated in a particular series, created a disruptive resonance. He postulated that this resonance would affect Nikolaevna’s field.
The military was willing to entertain anything.