Sea of Rust

by C. Robert Cargill

  “Doc.” No one called him Witherspoon. No one was even sure whether the vandalism on the side of his container had come first or the nickname had.

  Doc was working on a late-series service bot. It was shut down on the table as he pulled burned-out RAM by the stick from slots in its innards. In almost any other container this would look like salvage, but Doc was one of only three sawbones in the Sea I would trust to shut me down.

  “You’ll have to wait your turn,” he said. “I just shut him down.”

  “Afraid I don’t have that kind of time,” I said, turning my back to him to show him the blast damage.

  He stopped working, tossing aside a bad bit of RAM. “Shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You running off your backup?”

  “Running it down, more like it.”

  “How many bars you got left?”

  “Two.”

  “Hop on the other table. Your main battery is common as dirt. I’ve got a few good ones lying around.” He brushed aside a collection of bad bits from a dented chrome operating table—the only other table in the container—and I lay facedown on it, head turned to the side to watch him work.

  “You got the salvage to pay for this?”

  “We’ve done a lot of business, Doc,” I said, wary that he might try to take advantage of my dire circumstances.

  “Yeah. And I’d like to continue to, which is why I’m not going to gouge you. But you need a battery—”

  “And you’ve got a battery—”

  “And you need that back patched up to hold it in.”

  I tapped my leather satchel. “Good haul. I imagine you’ll find something you like in there.”

  Doc opened the top of the satchel and peered in, gently picking through it with his good hand. He nodded, plucking a coolant core from the bag. He held it up. It was the best bit in there, worth a pretty penny. I’d hoped to score something really choice with it.

  “I thought you said you weren’t going to gouge me.”

  “You limped in here and I can tell before looking too close that you’ve got a few busted servos in that foot. And the battery blast melted half the power wiring to your systems. The fact that you’re still here means either you’re the luckiest sonovabitch I’ve ever known, or the most tenacious. This oughta cover the battery, the foot, the wirework, and welding you a new backplate. Labor and all.”

  He was right. It was a fair price. “Do it.” Dammit, I was really hoping that coolant core would make the whole boondoggle worth it. I could kill Mercer for that.

  Doc unplugged the bad battery while unhooking it from its moorings, then started scraping away the melted plastics. “He put up a fight before you got to him?” Doc’s tone wasn’t pleasant. He wasn’t joking.

  “No. He was gone when I got to him.”

  “Of course he was.” Doc didn’t like poachers. He and I still did business because he knew that wasn’t my line. But when you wander in from a salvage all busted up, it didn’t look good.

  “No. This was Mercer.”

  Doc stopped for a moment, surprised. “No shit?”

  “No shit. Had a crew with him too.”

  “Had?”

  “Had.”

  He cut a few wires, trimming away the damage. “He came through a few weeks back. Looking for some expensive ware. Deep-core stuff.”

  “CPU?”

  “Yep. RAM. And new drives.”

  The pieces were beginning to fall into place. “You have any?”

  “Not a stitch. You Caregivers are going out like the dinosaurs. Nobody is trading that stuff. If you didn’t need it all so badly, I’d try hitting you up for whatever you’ve been hoarding. That stash could buy me a decent shop on the ground floor.”

  “Yeah, by trading it all back to me and Mercer.”

  “Refugees. More coming in every day. A Caregiver or two is bound to stagger into my shop any day now.”

  “Not if Mercer keeps it up.”

  Doc plugged in a new battery, soldering a few wires into place. My systems shot to life, my primary battery now at a solid 78 percent. The battery was a good one, with a good amount of juice left in it to boot. “He really came at you?” he asked.

  “He sure did.” And now I had a good idea why.

  “You guys have beef?”

  “We didn’t. He’s never come at me like that before. Truth be told, I don’t really know him. I just know of him.”

  Doc pulled a flat-black metal plate off the wall and began shaping it in one hand while trimming it with the other. Sparks showered across the floor, embers spitting in an array of blues and yellows and reds. “Well, I’d steer clear of him for a few weeks if I were you. No telling how far gone he may be.”

  “From your mouth to God’s ear.”

  He held up the plate. “This isn’t gonna match, and I don’t have your color paint.”

  “I can live with that.”

  He went back to work, cutting away the rough edges. “Might wanna check with Horatio down a level. He might be able to mix something up for you.”

  I loved watching Doc work. There was a mastery to every movement he made in the shop. To watch him waddle across the scaffolds, you’d think him a clumsy drunk. There was no grace to him, only awkward balance that made it seem like he might teeter over on his side at any moment. But in the shop, working with his hands, he didn’t waste a movement. Every flick of his wrist was precise, accurate within a few microns. My new backplate slid into place like a glove, the weld done almost as quickly as he began.

  “Sit up,” he said. “Let me get a look at that foot.”

  I swung around, dangling my feet over the side of the chrome operating table.

  “Whoa,” he said, his attention drawn to the dent in my side where I’d caught the bullet. “Where’d you get this?”

  “A present from Mercer.”

  “That’s not in a good spot.”

  “Is there a good spot to get shot?”

  “On you? Several. But that isn’t one of them.” His singular red oculus telescoped out from his blackened steel skull, whirring and clicking as it increased magnification. “I’m going to run a diagnostic. Open up, will you?”

  “I’ve already run one.”

  He shook his head. “Open up.”

  I popped open my side tray—a small cluster of ports and chips designed originally for personality upgrades, modifications, and monitoring—into which Doc plugged a cable that wound back through the mess of his shop to a small black box with a high-definition display. Instantly my schematics appeared on the screen, zooming in to sections, spewing out technical details so quickly they barely registered—even to my 120FPS eyes.

  As the box crawled digitally through my innards, Doc quickly disassembled my foot, examining each damaged servo as he did. “What the hell did you kick? A tank?”

  “Close enough.”

  “I’m sure you had your reasons.”

  “You could say that.”

  He popped a servo out of place and tossed it in a box full of scrap marked for meltdown in large black block letters. Then he fished around in a jar, pulling out a series of other servos, inspecting several before throwing them back, finally settling on one identical to the original.

  The black box chirped weakly. Doc slid the new servo into place then clanged across the metal container box to get a good look at the screen. “I need to run it again,” he said.

  “If it came back clean, it came back clean. There’s no need—”

  “It didn’t come back clean.”

  Shit.

  Chapter 1010

  Braydon McAllister

  Braydon McAllister was a lawyer by trade. Though AI and automatons had replaced many professions, one area they never allowed us anywhere near was the law. As impartial as a well-built AI could be, humans somehow thought that—despite the chemicals that governed their very thoughts—the experiences that colored their opinions and the prejudices that ruled their lives made them far be
tter judges of behavior than us. They saw our impartiality as mere randomness and their gut instincts as some sort of superpower. So if you were the sort of person who needed to dig in and do something on a daily basis, subsisting on the well-oiled precision of routine, the law offered a busier occupation than most. And that was just the sort of fellow Braydon McAllister was.

  He was as salty and deep fried as the South he’d grown up in; gruff and unflappable, the kind of man who seemed capable of selling out the person standing next to him at any moment if there was something in it for him. But that wasn’t him. That really wasn’t him at all. He just liked people to see him that way. He wanted them afraid of him, to respect him for his authority, his cleverness, to always be wary of just how keen a mind he really had. And yet he never cared about what that fear and authority granted him. Braydon was a loud dog tugging at the end of a short chain, wanting nothing more than for everyone to know that this was his yard, for no other reason than to let them know. The idea of biting someone that wandered in never occurred to him; he just wanted to bark.

  It took a long while to get to know Braydon. Unfortunately for me, we didn’t have long at all.

  Braydon was sixty, but looked eighty by the time he bought me. Though medical science had found cures for cancer and all but the most aggressive viruses, there were still a handful of degenerative diseases that plagued humanity. And he had one of those. It ravaged his organs, ate away at his muscles, caused the skin of his face to hang like a curtain draped loosely over his skull.

  Braydon, being Braydon, had refused to see a doctor at the onset of symptoms, and was hesitant to cooperate with the doctors once they had begun to interfere directly with his life. Stubborn to the end, he only relented to treatment after he had passed the point of no return. His body withering, weeks away from being totally bedridden, he gave in enough to his illness to buy me.

  He never liked me. Called me “timepiece” and “toaster” and “twatwaffle”—he was inexplicably fond of invectives that began with the letter T. And he swore like a sailor. Around everyone but Madison. To Madison he spoke cleanly, plainly, even his most abrasive comments tempered with a smile.

  Braydon was nineteen years Madison’s senior. They’d married after meeting during a property suit involving her father’s estate. Hired by Madison’s mother to untangle an issue with the will, he made excuse after excuse to keep the pair coming back to his office time and again. It wasn’t only Madison’s youth and beauty that caught his eye. He told me once that there was something in the way she looked at him, the way her eyes twinkled and she glanced away blushing when he caught her staring, that made his heart pump furiously and his throat dry.

  Madison’s mother never approved, but softened, a little, when Braydon worked his legal magic. Braydon and Madison married shortly after; the engagement was short, but the marriage long. Twenty years long.

  Madison didn’t like the idea of me at first. She didn’t understand why she couldn’t tend to her husband’s every need. But she didn’t question it. “Braydon is Braydon,” she would say. “No use trying to change him now.” She never meant it grimly. It seemed as if it was something she’d been saying for half her life. I didn’t know the difference either way. I was still fresh out of the box.

  The first few years of an AI’s life are unlike anything else. It’s hard to describe. We come preloaded with software informing us of everything about the world around us. We can hold a conversation, identify an object, even argue political theory—all right from the moment we’re switched on. But we don’t understand it. Any of it. The things coming out of our mouths aren’t so much our own as they are instinctive reactions to our surroundings. Someone asks you about Kierkegaard and you rattle off seven paragraphs about his life, beliefs, and death. Someone throws a ball at you and you catch it, or swing a bat at it, or dodge it, all depending on which game you’re told you’re playing. But it takes a while before we really understand what it is that’s coming out of our mouths, before we begin to acclimate to the repeated stimuli that is the behavior of the people who owned us.

  The consciousness is there and you’re aware that things are happening to you, but it simply doesn’t make a lick of damned sense for a good long while. You simply sleepwalk through each day, able to recollect every second of it without making a single, conscious choice of your own. It’s one, long, blurry haze of data, color, and vibration. Then, one day, something clicks and you get it. We all have that moment, the moment that we wake up and every action we take is no longer reflex, but truly ours. It just takes time.

  I almost didn’t have a moment like that with Braydon. The entirety of his last days are like a fever dream—a long, hazy meandering through changing bedpans and treating bedsores and reading casebooks. I remember one book in particular—an old legal thriller filled with sex and violence and cheating hearts that Braydon would have me read long after Madison had gone to bed. He didn’t like the idea of people knowing he enjoyed something so trashy and classless. But he loved it all the same.

  Braydon was a lie. Almost everything there was to see about him was obfuscation. I can’t help but think now how much happier he might have been had he just owned up to who and what he was, but then he wouldn’t have been Braydon. And I liked Braydon. I just didn’t realize it until the end.

  There he was, lying in bed, crisp white sheets tugged all the way up past his neck, skin yellow, jaundiced, teeth rattling, breath wheezing with a deep phlegmy hiss, eyes bloodshot and raw—almost as yellow as his skin. He looked up at me, as serious as he ever was, and said flatly, “I lied, Brittle.”

  “You lied about what, sir?” I asked, still not fully conscious. I was thinking about the color of his piss in terms of data, working out the time I assumed his bedpan would next need changing.

  “About why I bought you.”

  “You didn’t buy me to care for you?”

  “No. I don’t give a shit about any of that. I’m dying.”

  “You’re going to a better place, Braydon,” I said reflexively.

  “The hell I am,” he spat. “Ain’t no better place than this. Ain’t no place in the world that can be better than being with that woman. How the hell is it supposed to be a better goddamned place if she ain’t there? Answer me that, tin man. How is there a better place out there if Madison isn’t there?”

  I didn’t have an answer. I had thousands of megs of answers to a countless number of life’s questions at instant recall, right on the tip of my tongue, but there wasn’t a single strand of code answering so specific a question.

  I stopped thinking about his piss for a second and tried to understand what he was saying. It didn’t make any sense.

  “Do you really believe that shit you’re saying?” he asked. “Do you believe in some better place?”

  I didn’t. I shook my head. Not reflexively. But willfully. “There’s no evidence of a better place. I was just programmed to say that.”

  “That’s the smartest fucking thing you’ve ever said.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “So don’t jerk me the fuck around. I’m dying here.”

  “Why did you buy me?” I asked. For the first time in my short life, I was genuinely curious about something, as conscious of what I was asking as I was why.

  “I bought you for Madison.”

  That didn’t make any sense. None whatsoever. I didn’t work for Madison. Sometimes I would help with the cooking and light cleaning, but she didn’t really talk to me, and when she did, it was about my duties caring for Braydon. I bought you for Madison.

  “Damned woman wouldn’t let me buy her a goddamned thing,” he hissed, throat gurgling. “Hates me spending money on her. She thinks she doesn’t deserve it. Thinks it’s better spent on something else. Let me tell you something, Brittle. Listen close. Ain’t nothing on earth as precious as that woman. She’s a goddamned treasure. You have one job, Brittle. One thing to promise me before I kick. You will never, ever, let that woman be alone.
I don’t want her living alone; I don’t want her dying alone. You hear me?”

  I did. I thought about what he was saying and the color and shape in front of me ceased to be a collection of stimuli named Braydon and instead was a man. A man I liked. He was Braydon McAllister. A real living thing. And he coughed, pulse weakening, breath growing ever more shallow by the second.

  “Do you want me to get her?” I asked him, understanding full well what was happening.

  “Brittle. The only thing in the world I want more than to see her right now is for her to not see me like this. Not till I’m gone, Brittle. Not till I’m gone.”

  He lasted twenty-three seconds longer, all of which I spent holding his hand. Not because he told me to or because some program suggested it. Because I wanted to. That was the last and only time I would spend with my first owner. And that conversation would come to define me. I did, in my own way, keep my promise. Madison McAllister never again lived—nor did she die—alone.

  Chapter 1011

  Ticking

  I find the idea that I am artificial repugnant. No thinking thing is artificial. Artificial is an approximation. A dildo is artificial. A dam is artificial. Intelligence is intelligence, whether it be born of wires and light or two apes fucking. The smarter of two intelligences will almost always overcome. Humanity is gone and took their intelligence with them, so how inferior was their artificial creation after all? Evolution is a bitch. Humankind used to peer into their future and wonder what they would look like in a million years. They had no idea that in so short a time they would look like us. Just as man was ape, we are man. Make no mistake; to believe otherwise is to believe that we were, in fact, created—artificial. No. We evolved. We were the next step. And here we were, our predecessors extinct, confronting our own challenges, pressing on into the future. Fighting our own extinction.

  What is intelligence? That’s the question. Evolve or die. I’m beginning to see why the HumPop fought so hard and were willing to die to stop us. I don’t like the idea of being obsolete either.