The Robots of Gotham

by Todd McAulty

  I turned the water back on and let the bathtub slowly fill, checking the temperature frequently to make sure it didn’t get too hot. Croaker followed me as I walked to my desk, then wheeled my desk chair into the bathroom. I parked it next to the bath and took a seat.

  Mac’s head was gone. Only her knees were sticking up above the gently rising tide of suds.

  Oh shit. I dove for the water, pulled her roughly above the surface. She snorted two streams of foaming water out her nostrils, and her eyes were wide open and panicked. She clawed at my face, at the tub, at the tiled wall. “Mac, honey, I’m so sorry, it’s okay, it’s okay. Just breathe. I’m here. I’m here.”

  But she was gone already. She closed her eyes and sank back into the tub. I checked five times to make sure she was breathing, positioned her as well as I possibly could, and then turned off the water and sat back in the chair to watch over her. And think.

  There was a chance Boone would show up in the next few minutes and let me know Mac had been drinking with someone. And then this would turn into an investigation. We would track that person down, find out if any kind of drugs were involved.

  That was the more straightforward of the two alternatives.

  The other one didn’t require a third party. The second version of tonight’s events had Mac walking into the bar and deliberately drinking herself into a stupor, all on her own.

  Maybe this was something Mac did regularly. Maybe it was her idea of a good time.

  And maybe not.

  The only clue I had was the slip of paper I’d taken from her pocket. It was a note from the front desk, saying she had a message. It was time-stamped over four hours ago. Just a few hours before she’d begun drinking.

  If I knew the content of that message, I might know which version of tonight’s events was more plausible. And whether or not I should be contacting Sergei right now, to get her stomach pumped.

  I watched as Mac stirred in the bath, mumbling something unintelligible.

  Then I called the front desk, using the phone on the wall in the bathroom.

  “Yes, this is Barry Simcoe in 3306. I was expecting an urgent message this evening from Halifax. I was told it arrived four hours ago?”

  “I’d be glad to check for you, Mr. Simcoe—”

  “Well, I’m afraid there’s been some kind of mix-up. I did get a message, but it wasn’t for me. It was addressed to room 2214, to someone named ‘Mackenzie.’ Is there any chance the messages were mixed up?”

  There was a pause. “I can check for you, sir.”

  “Thank you, that’d be great. This is extremely urgent.”

  She came back on the line a moment later. “Yes, room 2214 also received a message four hours ago.”

  “Was it received at . . .” I glanced at the note in my hand. “Six forty-eight p.m.?”

  “Yes sir, it was. That’s exactly when it arrived.”

  “Oh, thank God. That’s my message. Do you have a copy?”

  “Yes sir. I’m very sorry for the mix-up. Do you have the ID number for the message?”

  I found the ID number on the note and read it to her.

  “Thank you, sir. I have your message here. Would you like me to read it to you?”

  I didn’t answer. Mac looked remarkably helpless lying in the bath.

  It wasn’t likely that she was going to forgive me in the morning—for the crime of stripping her down to her underwear in a bathtub—regardless of the circumstances. But the much more deliberate invasion of privacy I was about to perpetrate now felt like an even greater violation. If she found out, it might destroy what relationship we had . . . if indeed we still had one at all, come tomorrow.

  What do you care about more? I asked myself. How awkward this makes things for you, or whether Mac makes it through the night?

  “Sir?”

  “Yes, please. Read it to me.”

  “It reads, ‘Dear Sir or Madam, thank you for your inquiry. We are authorized to confirm that Anthony R. Stronnick, D.O.B. 09-09-2077, arrived at the Westhaven National Relocation Facility in Gary, Indiana, on or near December 17, 2082. Our records do not show a departure date for Mr. A. R. Stronnick. Unfortunately, due to unusually high refugee volume and unavoidable data loss, our records are incomplete. A. R. Stronnick no longer resides at this facility. Kind regards, Lieutenant L. C. Collins, Office of Records, DNRF, Gary, Indiana.’ That’s the end of the message.” She paused. “Westhaven . . . that’s one of the Displaced Persons camps in Indiana, isn’t it? Is that the one that got shelled in January?”

  “Yes,” I said quietly.

  “Date of birth 2077 . . . he was only five years old.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I’m very sorry for your loss,” she said after a moment.

  “Thank you. One more thing. Could you send up a hairbrush?”

  “A hairbrush?”

  “Yes.”

  “Right away, Mr. Simcoe.”

  I turned the water back on in the tub. And then I washed Mac’s hair. I did it twice, rinsing it slowly, cupping the water in my hands and letting it escape between my fingers. When I was done I drained the sudsy water from the tub, filled it up one more time to rinse her off. I patted her as dry as I could in the bath, then picked her up and carried her clumsily to the bed.

  There was a knock at the door. I covered her up, and opened the door for a very serious young man, holding a hairbrush in a sealed plastic bag. I tipped him generously and closed the door.

  I rummaged through my drawers until I found a clean T-shirt and exchanged her wet camisole for the dry shirt. She mumbled a bit and fought me for a few seconds as I pulled it on over her head, but I got it on. Then I propped her up in bed enough to get in behind her and brush her hair. I took my time, drying it with a towel simultaneously.

  You know, Mac, you’re a lot like your country. Broken—and full of rage, and sorrow, and loss. And right now, you’re in the gutter, with no understanding of how you got there, what’s being done to you, or why.

  And yet you’re still fiercely independent, still god-awful stubborn, still swinging, refusing to take no for an answer. And you’re still so damn beautiful.

  I laid her head down gently on the pillow, tucked the blankets around her shoulders, kissed her on the forehead, and went to sleep on the couch.

  XXVII

  Thursday, March 18th, 2083

  Posted 1:05 pm by Barry Simcoe

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  I didn’t get much sleep. My hip was killing me, and shortly after dawn the pain woke me up. I was starving, sore, and starting to worry that my hip was infected.

  Croaker, who usually sleeps on a corner of my bed, had curled up on the floor next to me. She awoke as soon as I began to stir and licked my nose.

  I checked on Mac as soon as I got out of bed. She was still asleep. Her breathing and pulse were both normal. But I decided to ask Sergei to check on her, just in case.

  I didn’t want to leave Mac alone, but Croaker was whining by the door. I took her on a slow, short walk in the cold morning air, in a two-block square around the hotel. It was hard to get started, but the pain lessened a bit as I loosened up. But it was windy and damp, and even Croaker didn’t want to be out long.

  There was no sign of Sergei in the command center, and Mac was still asleep when we got back. I checked her breathing and pulse again; both normal.

  I left the bedroom door open a crack and retired to the office side of the hotel room. The pants I’d been wearing in the tunnels yesterday were ruined. I picked them up for a third time, wondering if I could have them mended, but it was useless. They were shredded in two places—and badly bloodstained besides. I threw them in the trash. I was down to two pairs of dress pants
, and it wouldn’t be easy to get new ones. I couldn’t exactly order new clothes online. Hadn’t Martin mentioned something about a tailor, working out of a hotel a few blocks away? That sounded expensive, but I was running out of options.

  I sat by the window, in the steadily growing morning light, and thought about the Westhaven Displaced Persons camp in Indiana—and little Anthony R. Stronnick, date of birth September 9, 2077.

  I didn’t have much to go on, but the picture was still pretty clear. Mac had said she was from Chicago; she must have been here during the fall of the city, when Perez led the Nineteenth Venezuelan Expeditionary Force in a lightning-fast attack out of Indiana, catching Chicago’s scant defenders off guard. Dozens of three-ton combat machines had risen up out of Lake Michigan, striding out of Monroe Harbor into the heart of downtown Chicago, leaving giant wet footprints as they clanked triumphantly down Michigan Avenue.

  That was before the large-scale evacuations. Some folks fled the city, but most just sheltered in place, waiting anxiously to see what would happen. The US Army had learned the lessons of Manhattan well and didn’t directly engage the killer machines in the heart of a densely populated urban zone. But the Union had no such compunctions. Sensing the opportunity for a public relations coup, a chance to accomplish something the mighty US Army could not, the newly formed American Union Army—fresh from a dazzling string of victories in Kentucky, where it had annihilated the SCC mobile robot factories—announced that it would drive the invaders from Chicago.

  That had precipitated the January Crisis—and the ensuing panic and evacuation of Chicago, as the formidable Union Mech Army, nicknamed the Midnight Guard, had inexorably approached. In defiance of the Sentient Cathedral, who had tried to broker a ceasefire, the Union shelled Grant Park, striking a crippling blow to the heaviest SCC machines congregated there.

  Perhaps that’s when Mac and her son had become separated. I’d heard similar stories. Maybe she’d been gathering food when the mayor gave the order for the mandatory evacuation. Perhaps they’d been separated at one of the chaotic embarkation sites, or there just hadn’t been room for both of them as they boarded a bus at a pick-up point. Maybe Mac had sent Anthony on ahead, expecting to follow immediately.

  However it had happened, five-year-old Anthony R. Stronnick must have ended up bound for a Displaced Persons camp without his mother. Plenty of parents had sent their children on ahead, expecting an orderly rendezvous at the Westhaven Processing Center.

  But the evacuation hadn’t been orderly—far from it. The Union had badly damaged the SCC ground forces with their opening attack, and they pushed the advantage immediately. They attacked in force, and the Venezuelans pushed back hard. The battle for Chicago had a fluid front that spilled all over the southern half of the city, including some of the major evacuation routes. Fast-moving Midnight Guard roamed in packs up and down the skyways, exchanging deadly fire with squat Venezuelan machines as they retreated behind civilian buses trapped on the tollways. Hundreds of civilian vehicles had been destroyed, thousands of civilians killed.

  A lot of parents never followed their children to Westhaven. The camp itself had been evacuated twice, first when the initial wave of Union mechs withdrew through Gary under heavy fire, and then again as Midnight Guard reinforcements poured in from Georgia. The frenzied exodus from Chicago had accelerated, and countless records were lost as grim civil authorities hastily crammed nearly two million Chicagoans into buses and commandeered trucks bound for Ohio, Kentucky, and Alabama.

  I’d heard of parents who’d searched for their children for months, following false reports and desperate clues across half a dozen states. Some of those stories had happy endings. Most did not.

  It looked like Mac’s story lacked an ending, which was perhaps the most agonizing kind of all. On December 17th, her son Anthony had vanished into the all-consuming maw of Westhaven, which had shotgunned refugees across half a continent. Likely Mac had been trapped in the city once the heavy fighting started. It was probable her son had waited for her for a few weeks, perhaps until those deadly errant shells fell on Westhaven in mid-January. All three sides denied responsibility, and in the end it didn’t really matter. Hundreds of adults and children had been killed before the panicked second evacuation of the camp.

  Errant shells hadn’t been the only lethal danger the camps endured. What was it Mike Concert had said at breakfast on Saturday? There’d been a plague scare during the evacuation of Chicago, and four people had died of N1-C at one of the camps. No wonder Mac had been so appalled at Mike’s cavalier attitude. She must have been separated from Anthony when the word of the sickness and deaths in the camps reached Chicago. A possible epidemic, on top of all the other horrors she heard reports of every day. It must have been damned terrifying.

  Perhaps Anthony was dead. Perhaps he’d been sick, or hurt in the bombings, and been bundled onto a medical evac truck bound for Cleveland. Or perhaps he’d been relocated to Evansville, and then packed off to Baton Rouge or Huntsville or Lexington, or one of a hundred other receiving centers. Before Mac could even begin her search, the eastern half of the country had been partitioned into sectors by the AGRT, and travel to most of those places became a virtual impossibility.

  So Mac was trapped here. With no recourse but to send out queries, hoping against hope to receive word that her son was still alive. And instead, yesterday she’d received a message from the Westhaven Relocation Facility that implied that her son might be dead.

  No wonder she’d drunk herself to unconsciousness.

  I mulled over all of this as the morning sun finally cleared the tower of steam boiling out of Lake Michigan and the first rays of sunlight began to warm my feet. Mac might not have a way to track down her son . . . but it was possible Black Winter did. He’d implied that the Kingdom of Manhattan had spy drones over much of the occupied zones. One handy thing I’d learned from my own recent troubles was that algorithmic searches of drone data were fairly routine . . . If I got Black Winter a picture of Anthony, was there a possibility he could do a search for him?

  Even if we didn’t find him, we might be able to eliminate certain sites, help Mac narrow the search. It was something. But I probably shouldn’t mention anything to Mac until I’d had a chance to talk to Black Winter first. No sense raising her hopes just to crush them again.

  Next to me on the table was the circuit core of the scout drone that Van de Velde had shot, and a small pile of metal shards—the bits of the Godkiller I’d brought out of the tunnels. I spent a few minutes examining them in the sunlight. The largest of the shards was no bigger than a penny. If I had even a crude metal analyzer, I might be able to learn something meaningful from them; as it was, I eventually dumped them into an empty coffee cup without learning much of anything. The circuit core was a different matter—much of its internals were still intact. I slipped it into a bag and put it back on my desk.

  When I stood up, I found my hip had stiffened up again. I limped into the bathroom, had a warm shower, and felt a bit better. I got dressed and obsessively checked on Mac one more time.

  Now you’re just being creepy, I thought. You need to let her sleep.

  I had a few hours before I needed to get to work on a contract for Ghost Impulse, so I told Croaker to stay off the bed, and then headed downstairs. It was too early for my breakfast with Martin, so I stopped by the command center.

  I noticed something different as soon as I got there. I recognized both of the soldiers on guard duty. An hour ago they had sleepily waved me inside, but now they were standing crisply at attention. I caught the eye of the closest one, and he shook his head almost imperceptibly.

  They weren’t going to let me in. I decided not to push it, at least until I could figure out what was going on. I walked by the door and glanced inside, as casually as I could, and spotted a knot of officers near the center of the room.

  Looked like they had some high-ranking visitors. I hung around in the hallway for about fifteen minutes, and
they eventually left. They passed me in the hall, about ten men and women in sharp Venezuelan uniforms; the man at the center gave me a cold, appraising look as they passed. He looked oddly familiar, but I couldn’t place him.

  When they had gone, the guards relaxed. After a minute or two they gave me a nod, and I slipped inside.

  I found Sergei at his station. “Good morning,” I said.

  He barely glanced at me. “It is not good.”

  “Who was your special visitor?”

  “We were honored this morning with an inspection by Colonel Hayduk.”

  “Hayduk?” That’s why he had looked familiar. I lowered my voice. “What the hell is he doing here?”

  “He did not share his intentions with medical specialist.”

  “Does he know about the centrifuges? Did he see them?”

  “He did not. He did not tour seventh floor. He did not mention, in any regard.”

  That was a relief. But it wouldn’t pay to relax our guard with this man. I wanted to know what he was doing here. “What did he do while he was in the command center?” I pressed.

  “The colonel gave instructions to monitor American media broadcasts and requested immediate assessment on regimental combat readiness.”

  “Combat readiness? For what? Who is he going to war with?”

  Sergei gave me a frustrated look. Obviously, he had no answers for me.

  “When did all this start?” I asked.

  “Colonel Hayduk arrived about thirty minutes ago. He will meet with Colonel Perez this morning. Perez has instructed senior staff to report for operational briefing at thirteen hundred hours.”

  “Great. Will this impact the operation of the reactor?”

  Sergei’s face soured—which was something, because I thought it looked pretty sour to begin with. “Thibault has been reassigned.”

  “What?”