by Neil Clarke
“I got six dozen witnesses to everything that happens in this place,” Carter says. “Full surveillance in every room. And wouldn’t you know? Amazing as it seems, none of these ever-vigilant robots of mine has any idea what happened to our dear Puppy. Son, you got any idea why that might be?”
Arms folded, she looks over her shoulder, and Tipper feels chilled, like it’s Dracula himself standing there in shit-kicking boots.
Luke says nothing. Carter sighs.
“Well, I’ll tell you. It’s because they don’t want to know. Two dozen potential witnesses, but when this crime went down, they all blinked at once. Even Puppy himself. He’s got a bellyful of industrial resin, but I guarantee, when we get him working again, he won’t say a thing. So riddle this riddle for me, if you can: why would a robot equipped with sensory capabilities approaching clairvoyance fail to notice a couple of boys holding him down and filling him full of beans?”
Carter pronounces the word clear-voy-ants. Tipper glances at Luke again, who seems calmer, now, like he knows where this is going.
“I don’t know,” Luke says. “You’re the woman who runs this place. You tell me.”
“I’m the woman who runs this place.” Carter bites a thumbnail, looking at the screens. “That’s one way of looking at it. Another is to say this place runs itself. All these spooks and ghouls, they’ve got their own priorities. And their top priority, number one, is taking care of the kids who come through. Keeping those kids safe and happy and out of trouble. The client’s always right, even when he’s wrong.
“Well, that philosophy leads to some pretty funny decisions. Like, for instance, not ratting out or spanking any trouble-making thug who comes through here. Do I understand it? I have to say I don’t. I say, a bad apple’s just a bad apple. And the truth is, a lot of the kids in this country smell to me like some pretty rotten fruit.”
Carter turns, sets her hands to the back of the mockwood chair, and looks at Luke from under bristly gray brows. Tipper understands. It’s a weird fact of modern life: Privacy has actually been increased by machine surveillance. When people spy on each other, there’s an innate urge to meddle. Robots are infinitely more scrupulous. To a fault.
“Here’s the point.” Carter’s hands tighten. “Over the past four days, we’ve had thirteen rides at this fair get jammed, damaged, graffitied, sabotaged, or generally screwed with, and nobody knows by who. Some of these accidents, we’re seeing sophisticated methods, radio hacks that go deep into the brain. I’m talking battlefield shit, the kind of crap our lovely government uses to make enemy drones attack their own people. The rides aren’t talking. To them, it’s all human error. Me, I’ve got another theory. I think we have some serious assholes coming through here: criminal elements, vandals, saboteurs. And if I catch a hold of ’em, I’m not going to be as kind and forgiving as these robot friends of ours. If I catch a hold of ’em, believe me, these guys’ll wish it was a werewolf on their tail.”
Finally, Luke speaks. “If you don’t mind my saying, ma’am—”
“I do mind your saying.” Carter lifts the chair, thumps it down. “I can’t accuse you of a thing except what I know. And it happens that the stunt you pulled with Snake, that was a lot more stupid than illegal. But I’m not worried about your future, son. It’s Tipper I asked to come here. It’s her I want to talk to.”
Carter looks at Tipper for a long time, the creases in her face slowly coming to seem less stark, more like the wear and tear inflicted on a loving but overburdened mother.
“Four words, kid. Take ’em to heart. Suzie. Loves. That. Ride.” Carter thumps the foam chair on each syllable. “I’m not talking hot-and-bothered love, like your epically raging teenage feelings. I mean the real stuff. Dogs and babies. If anything happened to that stupid metal monster . . . ”
Tipper holds Luke’s arm and squeezes, terribly sorry for how awkward this evening has become. “I know, Carter. But really, I promise—”
“Amy,” Carter corrects her. “I been traveling with Suzie for eighteen years. I’m Amy to her, and I’m Amy to you. You know we used to run a ride together?” She nods deeply, as if Tipper has denied it. “Yep. An old haunted house, one of the first. Six rooms, ten units, with Suzie and me doing all the training. All night, I’d see her running the routines, tutoring those robots, teaching ’em human behavior. When a scream is a good scream, when a scream is a bad scream, how to tell the difference between a thousand different kinds of laughs. She has the touch, Suzie does, like no one else, and the reason’s this. When Suzie looks into the eyes of a machine, she doesn’t see a machine. She sees a soul, same as the one in you or me. That’s why her rides are always the best, that’s why they’re the safest, that’s why people want to ride ’em, again and again. It’s a talent, it’s a gift, and it’s not something to be screwed with. It comes down to this.”
Carter comes forward and holds Tipper’s shoulders, staring into her eyes. And Tipper wonders what Carter’s seeing there—a full-blown soul, a busted machine, or maybe just a girl who’s a little bit of both?
“Trust,” Carter says. “You think about that, as you’re tearing up the town, tonight.” She turns back to her steak, her screens, her big family of monsters. “Oh, and while you’re at it? Have yourselves a real fun time.”
A junkyard, that’s how Tipper thinks of the Fringe. A junkyard covering half of America, full of scrapped and outmoded machines. Except these machines are the kind you can’t throw out when they’re no longer needed, the kind whose main function is watching TV, the kind who run on soda pop and corn-fed beef.
Human machines, superfluous and unwanted.
She pulls her eyes from the sprawl of lights, checks the dashboard, and clamps her hands to the wheel.
“Easy.” Luke touches the steering wheel, giving her a bit of reassurance. “No problem, right? Looks like you might want to ease off the pedal. Keep your eye on those proximity lights.”
Tipper eases off the gas, slowing by an amount imperceptible to her, but plenty salient to the computer-driven cars all around. The pedals are almost too far away to reach; she has to stretch to hit the brake. By contrast, the steering wheel’s right under her nose.
In the NASCAR seat of Luke’s jury-rigged courier truck, Tipper sits in a nest of buckles and screens. Luke, beside her, taps the proximity monitor, the color-coded warnings for the four sides of the car.
“Be careful with these guys, okay? If it’s in the red for over half a minute, it gets called in as a violation. Three violations, they’ll log it as a malfunction. That could get us a repair drone on our tail.”
Tipper nods, tongue between her teeth. Outside, shipping rigs and long-distance taxis tool along at a droningly steady speed, exactly one-hundred-thirty MPH. When she looks out the light-adjusting windows, the cars seem locked in a shared inertial frame, sitting still while blacktop and scenery stream by. Occasionally there’ll be a coordinated shuffle, simple flocking programs producing an elegant, emergent waltz that lets an ambulance or repair drone speed ahead. Then Tipper has to shift with the pattern, breathless and Zen-like, focused on simulating the precision of a machine. Up on this highway, it’s autodrive-only: the world’s least forgiving video game.
She flicks her eyes to Luke. “So this is the big plan for tonight? Hanging out in high-speed traffic?”
He smiles. “You’re doing amazing. It’s kind of fun, right?”
Warning chimes. Tipper checks her alerts. A tanker in the left lane wants to get off. She steers by the screen embedded in the dash, which gives an overhead view of the scanned environment. It really is like playing a game.
“I feel like a bird.” Her laugh surprises her, the silly joy of it. “No, I mean really, that’s how it feels.”
He grins, feeling it with her. “Take the next exit. You’ll want to start getting over soon.”
Tipper flicks on the signaling program, sending out a brief pulse of encoded vector arrays. She checks the windows. Nothing out there but the usual
sprawl. “Where we going?”
“Little place I like to call the asshole of America. Thought I’d take you on a tour.”
“Of an asshole? Fun, fun.”
A long silence. When she looks over, he’s got that expression boys get sometimes, unexpectedly vulnerable and shy.
“No,” he says, turning to the window. “Of me.”
It’s been a strange evening. Tipper began it by fixing Luke’s car. Tapping commands by habit, she plowed through screens of legalese, while Luke lay back in the passenger seat with a hand-rolled joint. Every so often he asked her how it was going.
“Okay.” Some of the work she did by voice input, some by hand; she wondered how much Luke had been following. “I’m logging the ID tags, now. Voice, eyes . . . You realize that to go through with this, I’m going to have to be registered as an approved operator?”
Luke shrugged. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. Like if we go all the way with this, I could get in your car at any time and start driving.”
“Yeah?”
She grinned at his casual attitude. “So? You’re fine with that?” He shrugged. “If you are.”
Tipper turned back to the dash. “All right, then. What’s your social?”
And that set up the theme of the evening. They were taking things quickly, tonight, sharing vital details before they’d shared much more than a kiss. Punching in the last codes, Tipper turned to Luke. “That’s it. Su carro es mi carro, now. We’re both registered drivers. I hope you trust me.”
She squirmed out of the deep NASCAR seat, making room for Luke to edge in, but he pulled her back. “Hey, where you going?”
Tipper glanced between him and the wheel. “What do you mean? You’re not—”
“You’re a registered driver, now. Wanna drive?”
Tipper tested the clumsy pedals, the undersize wheel. “I should let you know, I’m not exactly . . . ” What word did she want to use? Skilled? Experienced? “I’m not very good at this.”
He shrugged. “I trust you.”
“With your life?”
“Sure.”
How could anyone really mean that?
And yet, Luke hit the switch that engaged lockdown, sealing the doors and the trailer compartment, puffing the temper-fit foam of the seats. “Go for it. I’ll tell you the turns.”
Tipper started up the sensor system, fumbling at the switches. Suddenly, his hand was over hers.
“Whoops. Not that one.”
Tipper laughed. “What’d I just almost do?”
“Something bad.” He spoke in his usual calm way. Then, with a smile: “Something extremely bad.”
She laughed. And just like that, they were kissing, his lips over her laughing mouth, their teeth knocking together as she responded with clumsy surprise. He held her until the surprise became excitement, then dropped back into his usually lazy pose.
“I . . . I want you to know,” Tipper stammered, “I mean, after everything Carter was saying. I do, too.”
“You do what?”
“Trust you,” she whispered.
He hit the starter, fired up the engine. “Let’s move.”
All through the drive, Tipper had been in a funny state, hovering somewhere between delight and annoyance. Boys, she thought, what could you do with them? Crazy, maddening, incomprehensible boys.
Being with Luke brought back memories of home, that house full of older brothers, where every day meant a new joke or taunt or impromptu wrestling match. Tipper’s oldest brother, Timmy, had worked at the service station, sitting around watching robots change oil. It made him act strange, all that boring work. When he came home, he’d just sit and stare at Tipper, like she was only another machine. Staring and staring, until at last she couldn’t take it. “What, Timmy? What is your problem?” Then he’d laugh and whoop, thrilled at getting any kind of reaction.
None of her other brothers had jobs at all, and it was always worth a heart attack an hour, trying to do her homework with them prowling around. They made a sport out of messing with the cleaning bots, flipping them over, kicking them around, triggering the auto-repair alarms. Instead of waiting for the repair drones to arrive, Tipper would fix the bots herself, which usually involved nothing more than talking them through their diagnostic routines. And while she sat with the things in her lap, murmuring into the mikes, her brothers would lounge around, sucking beers and teasing her.
“Maybe you could just kiss it and make it better, Tipper.”
“Guys! Shut up.”
Then, out of nowhere, they could be entrancingly nice, taking her out to show her the projects they’d been working on in the barn, old Corvettes on blocks, pinball tables they were building from scratch. And with their big, greasy hands lying over hers, they’d guide Tipper through the cleaning of spark plugs, the setting of windows, the wiring of solenoids to EOS switches.
Anyway, her brothers were a hell of a lot nicer than Dad.
Thinking about Dad, his rages, his they-drove-me-to-it attitude, makes Tipper give a twitch and jerk the wheel, almost veering into the side of a commuter van.
“Whoa,” Luke says. “Look, you’re okay. Just wait for this guy to pass, you’ll see the ramp.”
In another moment, they’re bumping down the interchange, descending into the bright yellow dots of suburbia.
The sprawl of lights starts right where the highway ends. For a moment, Tipper has a panicked feeling, like she really is heading home. Same wide streets thronged with autodriving taxis. Same crowds of nobodies. Same adobe bunkers, each in a plot of dark solar panels that used to be a lush green lawn.
The Fringe.
A sign by the road is flashing a helpful advisory:
TIPOLI SMITH
ARE YOU LOST?
AUTODRIVE MALFUNCTION?
HONK TWICE FOR ASSISTANCE.
They’ve been driving around the same block for too long, killing time, and the streetside monitors have picked up the aberration.
“All right, here we go.” Luke calls up a map. Even a dyed-in-the-wool Manual is compelled to respect the usefulness of dynamic mapping. “Go straight at this next intersection.”
“But there’s nothing there.” Tipper checks the map, the windows. The area Luke indicates is all blacked out, an abyss of darkness in the lamp-bejeweled town.
“Oh, there’s something there.” Luke sits back, savoring his air of manly mystery.
Tipper lets him have his fun. Pushing the car forward at precisely the recommended speed, she hits the edge of the blacked-out land. Suddenly she understands. At the end of the road is a ditch. Across the ditch is a bridge. And beyond the bridge is a gate and fence. The signs everywhere are entirely unnecessary. Tipper knows what’s beyond this point.
“This way.” Luke points right. They drive along the fence, the reflective signs flashing by in a menacing strobe. WARNING WARNING WARNING. RESTRICTED RESTRICTED RESTRICTED. CONTROLLED CONTROLLED CONTROLLED. On the car’s display, there’s nothing to see. To the mapping software, this is nowhere, nonexistent land.
“There’s a turn up here. It’s kind of hard to spot.” Luke leans into her.
There.
The fence veers away. A dirt road rises up a silhouetted ridge. Tipper flicks on the headlamps for the first time that night. Between the dingy bursts of desert bushes, she can see the dark land dropping away, a blackness that seems to deepen as they rise. Luke guides her off the road.
“Slow, now. There’s a certain spot . . . ”
They halt on a ridge of sandstone and grit, the headlights plunging out into darkness. He yanks on the brake and shuts off the car. The temperfoam relaxes; the doors unlock. Tipper steps into a strikingly cool breeze. Her first tentative steps nearly spill her down a ghostly chasm, ragged walls of rock made spectral by the moon. Luke grabs her arm.
“Easy. Don’t worry. It’s not as far as it looks. The night makes everything seem weird.”
The night does indeed. His silhouette seems strange and huge be
side her, hewn from rock.
“Out there.” Luke’s arm extends. “Below those two bright stars.”
The shapes she makes out are distant but distinct: four dark squares, rising up like buttes, and one long mesa of flat-topped shadow. Tipper’s first impression is of a holy site, some natural wonder sanctified by the rites of the Navajo, those restless neighbors of her own ancestral people. But the moonlight, strengthening with a suddenness peculiar to desert climes, dispels the illusion. Those are buildings, four silos and a compound, with not a single window to vary the dark walls.
“Air Force,” Luke says. “Testing sight. See that long, flat building? My granddad used to work there.”
“He was a pilot?”
Luke shakes his head. “Engineer. Mathematician. Data-crunching, modeling, that kind of thing.”
Tipper knows where this is going. “And he got fired.”
Luke’s eyes are on the distant buildings. “Not exactly. You know how many people work this site, now? Zero. Know why it’s so dark? Because no one needs any light. The entire place is run by machines. Machines on site. Machines on network. A guy like my grandpa, it’s not like he got fired. It’s more like his whole industry ceased to exist.”
Tipper considers the expanse below, thinking about what Luke has said. Machines to do the work. And machine to guard the machines. Any person trespassing on that turf will quickly find himself a target of some of the world’s most sophisticated perimeter drones. Even with the best night-vision gear, a human would be helpless against their full-spectrum scanning. Of course, the drones don’t actually injure anyone. They have no need for such sloppy tactics.
“What about your parents?” she says. “The rest of your family?”
Luke sucks in night air. “That’s next.”
And he guides her on, through shapeless towns, down nameless roads. Actually, the streets here do have names—Spanish names, Navajo names— but no one cares. To the cars and their riders, it’s all just instructions: left, right, straight, ten meters, two miles.