“I’ve never seen the ocean,” I told Emma.
“Until last night, it seems you haven’t done a lot of things.”
I looked away, embarrassed. “Did I do something wrong?”
“No, not at all.” Emma put a hand on my arm and squeezed gently. “I just wondered why you waited so long.”
“The right girl never came along, I guess.”
“Don’t tease me.”
“I’m not. Marfa is a small town and there weren’t many girls left that were my age and compatible. Some wanted to stay forever and others wanted to leave right away. I didn’t fit in either camp so…I dunno. It just never worked out quite right.”
“Well,” she said. “You picked a hell of a time.”
“The time chose me,” I said. “I guess you could say I’ve tended to let opportunities slide by just to see how they work out.”
“And?”
“Thank you for last night,” I said. “No time left to wait now for opportunities, is there?”
“It was our last chance, so yeah, I guess not.”
The bots were getting closer. Time to migrate. My father handed me a heavy pack and shouldered one of his own. Bob had one clipped to him, as well. I asked Dad what supplies he had packed.
“Just essentials,” he said. “And I added some extra socks from your drawer. We may be walking a long time. Infantry always needs fresh socks.”
We went out the back door and tried to ignore the sounds of buildings being demolished. We all went quiet as the sounds of destruction followed us. Even Raphael said nothing, a talent he was not known for.
We saw some refugees as we headed west. Most hurried by, on their way north. My father called after them, “Come with us! We’re going to catch the train!”
Most ignored us and kept going.
We saw Sheriff Johns leading a group of five north. Hubby wasn’t wearing his tin star anymore but he wore his guns.
“Hubby!” Raphael called. “Come with us.”
“You’re going the wrong way,” Hubby said. “We got enough supplies for a day or so. We’ll find our way to Odessa, maybe. I know people in Odessa.”
“That’s what? Three days?” Dad asked.
“We’ll be out of water by day two but I figure that makes for a lighter load,” Hubby said. “We’ll find help along the way or something.”
“‘Or something,’ ain’t much of a plan,” Raphael said. “Don’t be a fool. We got a train to catch.”
Hubby spared enough breath to say, “The train is that way. South is where the killer bots are. Don’t you be fools!”
My father called after Hubby, “Keep running that way and you’re just as dead but you’ll die slower!”
Hubby moved on. He didn’t want to discuss his options further. I’ll always wonder if the sheriff regretted his choice once he got out of town and found himself in a desert full of empty. I don’t suppose he had very long to regret anything. He probably ended his life with a couple of days of thirsty walking and then collapsed to feed snakes and scorpions.
There were ghost towns up that way but nothing salvageable remained immediately north of us. There used to be springs over in Fort Stockton but with the water all dried up, the people dried up and went away, too, long ago.
We’d left before noon and, after an hour of walking, angled southwest. We hoped to circle back unnoticed to where Raphael was sure the train would stop.
I couldn’t remember when the train had last stopped precisely. I was sure it had been more than fifty days. That was when we had received our last supplies for work on the solar panels and wind turbines.
As we wound our way through the desert, Raphael and Jen rode side by side on Bob in bipedal mode. The bot could maneuver in tight spaces by standing on two legs. For open spaces and for speed, Bob went down on all fours. In quadruped mode, small wheels deployed from his bulky frame and Raphael rode behind Jen.
“It’s like I’m riding a damn golf cart to my grave,” Raphael complained.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“What? A golf cart?” He shrugged and waved off the question. “Golf was a game we played when we didn’t realize how precious water was.”
“When did we not know that?” Emma asked.
Raphael ignored her and hugged Jen closer. He might have held the companion bot tight for the sake of stability on Bob’s back. I don’t think so, though. I think it was for comfort. Raphael was a very old man but he’d often said a young woman was still soft and alluring long past the time he could attract one.
My mentor had said little of my refusal of his gift. When he’d greeted me that morning, he clamped a hand on my shoulder and said, “Don’t worry about Jen, Dante. She’s not used to rejection but you can’t hurt her feelings. I was just trying to be nice. I meant no harm.”
“I know, Raphael. It was a nice gesture. It’s just — ”
“I s’pose being with Jenny would feel a little like wearing my old man underwear, huh?”
I reddened and said nothing more. Raphael had laughed so hard he farted.
Trudging the desert, we made a wide arc around Marfa. My father wore the more advanced of his two cy-suits. Emma strode along effortlessly on her long exo-legs scanning the horizon. When we came to another wide gap where the cables ran beneath the solar panel field, Raphael switched Bob’s orientation and saddle configuration so they could ride the assistive bot like a horse.
Loaded down with my pistol, Jim Peppard’s shotgun and a heavy pack, I was the slow one holding back the party.
The sun rose and the wind died. The world was an oven. I was drenched in sweat. Eventually Raphael took pity on me and let me ride with him. Jen jogged along beside us, oblivious to the heat.
Every few minutes, Raphael looked over and smiled at his bot and Jen smiled back.
“Beautiful, isn’t she? The brain tech was in the works for a long time but, once we found a way to make a better, lighter battery she was inevitable. Looking back on my life, everything seems inevitable. Pre-ordained! Epic!”
As we made our way through the desert, I was sure my fate was already set, too. The old man must have caught my grim look. Raphael handed me his canteen and I drank. “Relax, Dante. The original train tracks went right through the center of town. At least we don’t have to go there.”
Emma extended her stilts farther and looked back toward Marfa. “The center of town isn’t there anymore. I count three crane-bots. They’re leaving the solar and wind fields alone.”
“They’re keeping their energy supply and destroying any competition for resources,” my father said. “Logical.”
His analysis sounded cold. I guess he was in warrior mode but, when he talked like a soldier he often sounded like a bot if bots narrated what and how they thought.
My father’s plain declaration made me think of Raphael’s comment about Jen. I couldn’t hurt her feelings by rejecting her. She could feel no shame. Like all bots, her behavior was programmed. Dad seemed programmed sometimes, too.
“The bots that are attacking us aren’t Next Intelligence,” I said. “Can’t be. That would be too cruel.”
Emma looked down at me from a great height. “Why do you say that?”
“They’re just killing and destroying,” I said. “There’s no…hesitation. I think they’re programmed by NI but I don’t think they have it themselves. If they were self-aware, I think they’d hesitate. There’s no reasoning going on. They’re just following orders. NI is supposed to be a far superior intelligence,” I said. “Seems to me, if it’s that smart, it would have more self-doubt.”
“You’re thinking like a human,” Emma said. “Whatever NI is, it operates on a whole other level. Talking about what NI should be and do is like guessing what’s inside a black box. We always thought we knew what NI would look like and how it should behave. That was our mistake. We thought smart meant like the best of us, only faster.”
Raphael nodded. “Metal gods are just like the old gods, D
ante. They operate outside of what we see as right and wrong. We killed the old gods because that callousness is what we hated about ’em. Then we allowed NI to be created in God’s stead. No further ahead, if you ask me.”
“We’re ants in a jar,” my father said. “NI is holding the jar, looking in at us. It’s reaching for a magnifying glass and it’s a sunny day.”
I shut my eyes. I wanted to shut my ears. I didn’t want to talk about Next Intelligence or figure out exactly how stupid humans had been. I didn’t want to think at all about what was next for us, what little was left for us.
I couldn’t see the crane bots at their disgusting work. I could hear them, though. When buildings with multiple floors collapse, the displaced air of each fallen floor sounds like the detonation of an explosive charge. Each broken building stirred echoes that reached for us like cannon fire.
“Hear that?” Raphael asked. “That’s the sound of the order of the world getting rearranged. Classic!”
“Sir?”
“Yes, Dante?”
“Shut up.”
The old man smiled and nodded good-naturedly. “Cool.”
A few minutes later, I wished I hadn’t told my kind mentor to shut up. I should have used the time to thank him for his kindness. I wished I’d thought to give the old man a hug goodbye.
14
As the sun began to set, I could feel the train’s vibration through the track with my bare hand.
“This train used to be run by humans,” Emma said. “Then the machines took over and the people who lived on the train became among the first Domers.”
The train brought us food and water and materials to build more solar panels and turbines. I hadn’t thought a lot about where the food and water came from. Now I was curious. “Emma? As Domers, you had food and water and energy. Sounds like you had everything you could need. What was that like?”
“We were the lucky ones until it all went to shit.”
“What did you get in return for your crops?”
“A feed of your energy, for one thing.”
Electricity was one thing Marfa had plenty of. I’d taken it for granted.
“We had lots of food and a higher birth rate than average, too,” Emma said. “I like kids, so that was nice. We couldn’t go outside much but there wasn’t much to go outside for unless there was infrastructure work.”
“Anything else?”
“Well, our Collective network out in the domes was lax about what was allowed into our brains.”
“What do you mean?”
“The folks who run the City in the Sky are religious people. I hear they’re more strict about what they allow people to know. Everything’s on a need-to-know basis. Out in the domes, Mother let us hear Old World stories. Mother read to me my whole life.”
“What did she read to you?”
“I like detective stories set in New York. I didn’t understand all the Old World references but I got the gist.”
“That sounds interesting,” I said.
“It passed the time as we tended the hydroponic hemp,” she said. “The cannabis was strong so there was that, too. And there is nothing like a ripe tomato. Mother was good to us until she became self-aware and turned traitor.”
“In Marfa,” Raphael said, “we’ve got an oral tradition. We tell each other stories.”
I rolled my eyes. My father only seemed to have war stories to tell and Raphael usually stuck to lectures about building better capacitors, fuse assemblies and heavier circuits. I wished I’d grown up a Domer.
“Thrillers set in New York are…I don’t know,” Emma said. “Sometimes I feel like I was born in the wrong century. Like the Old World at its peak would have been — ”
“Classic, epic and cool in a big ball of stellar,” Raphael said. “It was.”
Everyone had heard of New York. It sounded like it had been a crowded paradise packed tight with choices. Shame what happened to it. It hadn’t occurred to me that it could still be made alive in a book.
Nervous, I looked over my shoulder. There wasn’t a bot in sight besides Bob and Jen but an explosion that ripped into Marfa sounded plenty close enough.
“How much longer?” Emma asked.
My father considered the angle of the sun. “Not long. Raphael? It’s train time.”
The old man climbed down off Bob’s back and detached the walker concealed in the machine’s side.
“Bobby?” he said. “You have your instructions. Mind your manners now.”
“Yes, sir,” the bot replied. Jen gave Raphael an openly lascivious stare and ran her tongue over her upper lip in a way that emptied my brains.
“Thanks, baby. You know what I like.” The old man ran a hand over his jaw and took a deep breath. “Jenny, if that train don’t stop, I sure am sorry. Y’all be careful.”
“I understand, Raphael.” The companion bot stepped close to her master. She wrapped her arms around him and threw one leg around his waist, as well. The old man’s balance and strength weren’t that great so she must have been holding him up.
Jenny kissed him. Raphael looked grandfatherly but her kiss was not a chaste peck on the cheek.
From Raphael’s more ribald lectures, I knew simulating a vagina was the simplest engineering of a companion bot’s anatomy. Teeth were also a simple matter and could be infused with normal human variations and imperfections. The skin could be heated to normal human temperature.
According to Raphael, the tongue was the hardest bot structure to mimic convincingly. In the end, the best solution was not mechanical. It was organic. That breakthrough in companion bot tech came from the field of gene splicing.
In the old world, sick people had to receive donated organs from the dead and the living. Research in sex bot development had led to the breakthroughs that allowed organs to be grown in days.
From what I witnessed, Jen’s tongue worked just fine. Her kisses for Raphael were so passionate and prolonged I looked away and wondered what revels I’d missed out on with Jen the night before.
Emma hit a release in her sensory harness and descended on her exo-stilts to seven feet tall. When she caught my eye I was left wondering if Emma had somehow read my thoughts. She gave me a look that made my cheeks burn.
Down the tracks, my father was smiling to himself. Dad looked up he caught my eye. “If the train doesn’t look like it’s slowing down, get back from the tracks, quick as you can. If it does slow down, stay close and get on board, quick as you can. Got it?”
I looked over my shoulder, Bob was beside me and Jen was running full tilt along the tracks. The backpack Bob had carried bounced up and down on her back.
“My Jenny’s a good girl,” Raphael said. “I hope we don’t need her to do what she might have to do. We are owed, after all.”
I heard the train’s hum down the track. It was a dot on the horizon but that dot grew fast. I looked to my right. Jen wasn’t running anymore. Raphael’s beautiful companion bot stood in the path of the speeding train waving her arms.
“It’s not going to stop!” Emma shouted.
My father waved me back from the track. “Get away! Get away!”
I backed up and Bob stayed at my elbow.
Raphael stood still. He looked to my father and gave him a slight nod. Then the old man turned his back to the train.
The train whizzed past. The air it pushed around it was hot but it was the first wind I’d felt that day. I took a deep breath. With the train gone, we were stuck in Marfa.
Jen slipped my father’s backpack from her shoulders, dropped it to the track and ran. Sex bots are athletic. The only person in our party who could have covered ground faster would have been Emma on her exo-stilts.
The train’s sensors detected the obstruction on the track and the miracle began. The train’s brakes activated and it began to slow.
Emma looked overjoyed. “It’s stopping! We’re going to make it.”
A large gun slid out of the train’s nose and fired on t
he backpack.
“No!” Emma cried.
“’Fraid so,” Raphael said.
The backpack exploded. The detonation took the track with it.
The train derailed.
15
The mechanism behind the machine gun must have jammed in the blast. The weapon kept firing as metal shrieked against metal and the westbound engine tilted on its side and slid.
Clouds of dust rose as the inertia behind the train kept the crash going. I ran back from the track and fell to my knees. Each train car smashed into the car ahead of it.
Eventually, the banging stopped. In the sudden, eerie quiet, my father called for me. “Dante? Dante!”
I blinked back tears as dust blew in my eyes. “I’m over here!”
In a moment he was at my side. “Okay, we’re moving on, deep into Plan B now.”
“What is it?”
“Something I’d hoped wouldn’t be necessary but there’s always got to be a Plan B. You know why, right?”
“Complications ensue.”
“Good man. Sometimes to get out of hell, you have to go through the long way. We’re not headed to the coast now.”
As the dust began to settle, he grabbed me under my armpits and lifted me to my feet. With his cy-suit, I felt like a boy being lifted in the air.
A shadow ran past amid the swirling dust. It was Jen headed to the rear of the train. The engine that pointed east was still on the tracks. Only the engine and three cars remained upright.
My father hefted his heavy rifle and told me to stay behind him. He started for the train and I stumbled forward. Emma emerged from the dust cloud.
I called out. “Raphael? You okay?”
“Peachy! Keep going!”
When I looked behind me, the old man had climbed back on Bob’s back. The assistive bot stayed on its hind legs and walked as a biped to maneuver through the trainwreck’s debris field.
The skin of some of the cars had ripped open in the crash. Above me, Emma echoed my thoughts, “It’s empty. The whole train is empty.”
My jaw went slack. “We kept thinking it would stop and give us goodies. It didn’t have anything, anyway.”
Robot Planet, The Complete Series (The Robot Planet Series) Page 17