by John Gregory
up to the bar, tossing his huge fedora atop the counter.
“Yea.”
“That duct tape you're using for a window?”
Junior sighed.
“Yea.”
The barkeep laughed and poured him a shot of bourbon.
“This one’s on me, grandpa.”
Junior drank deep while he surveyed the room: a couple of pirates off in the corner, stinking of brine even out here in the middle of nowhere. They looked like they were planning some act of violence, maybe even on Junior, for just being there. What passed as decent pussy was on display along the back wall, old ladies in unsightly brassieres reminiscent of old-west hookers, the kind he used to hear stories about. Mostly, though, it was just rogues barely getting by like him, missing a hand here, an ear there, drinking by themselves or in small little circles of dusty coats. Every one of them was armed to the teeth.
In the far corner a good number of pirates had convened and had begun playing what sounded like a lively game of Hold’Em. Junior didn’t take kindly to pirates, and avoided dealing with them as a sort of policy. But times were tough and he needed more cred than those two watchmen had allotted him.
“Keep, gimme a bottle of hooch.”
Without asking he plopped himself down at the only empty chair at a table of seven. His company stopped their game and stared at him with a combination of confusion and rage. They were pirates, no doubt about it. Golden teeth glinted in the light and he spotted the circuitry of at least two cybernetic limbs peaking out between glove and jacket. Their dialect was unmistakable: somewhere from the Southern Seas.
“If it’s a fuckin’ beatin’ you lookin’ fer, you come to the right place,” said what he took to be the captain, the largest, burliest of the lot, with a thick black beard and a massive black hat.
“I just thought you could do with some real competition,” he grinned slamming the bottle of whiskey on the table. “And I come bearing drink.”
The captain stared at him in silence for a moment, before a slow smile stretched across his weathered face.
“Yer speakin’ me language now, mate. You got cred?”
Junior emptied the weathered pockets of his coat and placed the small golden chips on the table.
“Ain’t much, but I’ll take ‘em.”
“You’ll try,” Junior said grinning.
The other pirates weren’t so pleased, shifting uncomfortably in their seats all around him. But the captain had spoken and the game commenced.
Hand after hand Junior maintained complete control of the game. Winning two, losing one, winning one, losing one, winning three, losing two, making sure to always come out on top but never by too much. It would have worked too, if he didn’t have to play this game against pirates, a breed bred of inherent treachery.
Junior barely noticed when the captain started to watch him. It was given away by a subtle grin, quiet, unassuming, his eyes staring directly at Junior in seemingly good-humored manner. But he had stopped blinking entirely, that soft smile never leaving his lips.
“Sorry, mates, this one’s mine,” Junior grinned, slamming down three nines. A groan erupted from the pirates. He reached forward to grab the pot when the captain, lightning fast, grabbed a knife and brought it down right in the center of Junior’s hand. Junior’s eyes went wide, a silent scream frozen on his lips as he stared at the blood spilling from the wound, his hand pinned against the ply-board table.
“Nice try, old man,” said the captain, reaching forward and grabbing the wrist of the impaled hand, yanking out a nine of spades. The other five pirates leaped up, brandishing knives and guns, all trained at Junior’s head.
“Fucking Christ!” Junior exclaimed, staring down at his hand.
“He ain’t ‘ere to ‘elp ya, mate.” The captain took on a huge, wild-eyed smile as he slowly stood up. He reached down and grabbed the knife, wriggling it a little before yanking it out of the table. Junior grabbed his hand, pulling it in towards his chest, and stumbled back against one of the supports of the small bar hall.
“Let’s see ‘ow much blood this ‘ere old man ‘as in ‘is body, eh boys?”
One of the pirates, a younger man with ratty blond dread-locks and a patch over his left eye, grinned maliciously and stepped forward. Without blinking, Junior buried his huge, black boot in the pirate’s crotch and slammed his good hand into the man’s face, sending the pirate howling to the ground. The remaining team leaped forward, grabbing Junior by the hands, the arms, legs, lifting him bodily off the ground. He struggled, kicking and writhing, but they held him fast and the blood-loss was beginning to drain him, his vision flickering in and out.
“Take ‘im upstairs. Kill ‘im.”
They carried his struggling form all the way upstairs, with one of the younger pirates, now wearing his wide-brimmed brown fedora as a trophy, following close behind. They found a room on the third floor, about thirty feet off the ground with a wide view of the lot outside and, beyond that, a square bustling with noonday traders and charlatans.
“Cut ‘im open then. Toss ‘im to the dogs,” said the captain, grinning.
“Could...could use a little...help...” Junior muttered to himself, gasping for air as the pirates began to pummel his chest and stomach with their bejeweled fists, kicking him in the ribs as he tried to protect his face on the ground.
“I bet you could,” came a shaky voice in his head.
“Fuck...fuck it! Help!”
“What’s in it for me?”
“God damn it!”
A heavy boot came crushing down on his wounded hand, still gushing blood while a second slammed into his groin. It was the blond pirate, exacting his revenge.
“Ah! Fuck! What do you want?”
“’e talkin’ to us?” asked one of the pirates, looking at his captain. The captain’s smile faded a bit, pensively.
“I get to pick where we go next.”
“Fuck no, you stupid, worthless piece of...AHHH!” Junior scream again as a fist slammed into his cheek, shattering teeth. The fist, he was certain, was not organic.
“Deal or no deal?”
“I’m fuckin’ dyin' here!”
“Deal or no deal?”
The captain moved forward, a worried look on his face. “Wait boys, somethin’ ‘ere ain’t right.”
The pirates halted their assault, staring down at Junior, broken and bleeding from head to toe, one eye swollen completely shut.
“Deal,” he whispered. Staring up at the pirates, panting for air.
The sound started softly, a light whirring noise, metal passing gently against metal. But it wasn’t long before an explosion of exhaust erupted outside like a bomb going off. The pirates all flinched and looked around, confused at the incredible noise. Metal ground painfully against metal, churning, scraping, a cacophony of deafening noises followed by a loud explosion that was powerful enough to make the entire building tremble as if some massive weight had suddenly shifted outside and came crashing down onto the ground.
“What the fuck?” asked one of the pirates, staring at his captain. The captain’s eyes were locked on Junior, who, gasping for air on the floor, threw him a bastardly grin through shattered teeth and bloodied cheeks. He locked eyes with the captain.
“Gentlemen,” he grinned. “Meet Pinto.”
The wall suddenly burst apart, hard ply and steel shredding like paper. The impact alone sent two of the pirates hurling across the room. The others scrambled for cover, over and under the bed, or huddled behind a flimsy folding partition, one even played dead on the ground, all of them gawking with wide, terrified eyes at the massive scraped metallic arm that had just cleared away the wall.
A giant metal arm held together with duct tape and gum.
…….
-Arri-
WHAT LITTLE GIRLS ARE MADE OF
By Richard Cunningham III
"Her brain is not responding. Increase power," said the scientist in a typical robotic staccato.
The
laboratory was crammed with various machines, speckling the room with blinking lights, an unnatural silence held off only by the whirring drone of tiny motors powering their instruments. The three robots worked over a table, convincingly camouflaged by the surgical equipment surrounding them, though the two species of machinery were as different as the human and the ape in terms of evolution. As one robot scientist toured access ports to verify schematics, another replaced the subject’s body panels, and the third drilled them back into place. They completed the risky operation on their experiment with the awing coordination of an assembly line process. The subject itself was far too large for the laboratory table, and its mechanical arms and legs drooped down, touching the floor. It was a massive machine carrying the gentlest of treasures.
"Note her foot."
Indeed the giant metallic foot began to move in brief spasms. She was waking up from a long dark dream.
Though they largely feigned disinterest, the robots continually sought information about their human co-inhabitants. In fact the robots had an extensive, quite detailed database on the subject of Homo Sapiens, which included anything from cerebral processes to biological applications, cultural histories to ethical studies, national sports to religion. No detail was too minute or trivial. Their ceaseless pursuit to understand the human perspective could easily be misunderstood as something deeper, a search maybe for their own purpose in the world, but the science community of Robot City recognized this notion simply as a system error that needed repair. Therefore it was not a factor in the robots’ experiments on human captors. To the robot scientists, people were not highly self- aware beings and simply did not warrant an exception to their catalogue of study.
Still there were other communities within Robot City: machines that rallied for human rights, others that barely considered them, and still a growing minority that mimicked the cultural idiosyncrasies of the human species.
The robots already had a rich history buried under the city that was once considered “the crossroads of the world”, when humanity was teetering upon its precipice. Several robots had even experienced the fall of human civilization, in one form or another. Just like humans, the robots had struggled to escape the Bomb Parades, or the earthquakes both natural and man-made that wreaked havoc on American states, or the coastal cities that were disappearing under sea levels, or the Great Fires that consumed forests state-wide, everything that came to be known to the humans of this continent as “The End”. As important as robots had become to households, businesses, even modern society in whole, during these catastrophes robots were demoted to the equivalent significance of a vacuum cleaner. And if forced to decide, the vacuum cleaner was considerably smaller for a fleeing family to pack into the car. An estimated one hundred thousand robots that populated the sinking cities had been either deactivated or abandoned. Many were buried under the encroaching waters, wandering the ocean floor until the environment eventually seeped into their fragile circuits and sculpted them into static tin statues.
Those that did adapt were barely more fortunate in the post-boom world. People placed blame on the robots, particularly for the devastation of the Bomb Parades, many insisting that robots had even taken an active role in crippling their human creators. Robots weren’t just deactivated by humans; they were beaten, torn apart, made an example of. Many robots attempted to compute the events, to assess where the responsibility indeed rested, and many robots burned out in this attempt, a faint fizzle and they flickered out for good.
Other more advanced robots struggled to find purpose with the sudden burden of free will and artificial intelligence. A number of them remained in the households that they had always catered to. They continued cooking meals, washing laundry, dusting, repairing electronics for people that had long abandoned them, and were in all likelihood dead.