by Anthea Sharp
And for the first time in as long as I could remember, I smiled all the way there.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Loxley is the beginning of a story I’ve been wanting to tell for a very long time. For me, it’s a combination of The Matrix meets Robin Hood, with a little bit of my gamer history thrown in. I love the idea of a kick-ass hacker heroine whose only real goal in life is to help those around her. To make a difference in a broken world.
I hope you enjoyed this sneak peek into Loxley’s world, and if you did, I hope you’ll reach out and let me know if you’d be interested in seeing a full series of books based on this dystopian world.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sarra Cannon is the indie author of more than twenty-five Young Adult contemporary fantasy novels, including her bestselling Shadow Demons Saga. Her novels often stem from her own experiences growing up in the small town of Hawkinsville, Georgia, where she learned that being popular always comes at a price and relationships are rarely as simple as they seem.
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To download three free books and learn more about Sarra, you can find her at sarracannon.com. To receive news when Sarra has a new release, sale, or giveaway coming up, please sign up for her mailing list.
Candy House - Kay McSpadden
The house wasn’t lonely. Lonely was something humans felt, back when humans were alive.
The house was merely alone.
The people who built the house were long dead, and the family that lived here last were dead, too, their bodies put in the incinerator by the cleaner bots who kept the floors and furniture clear of dust and dirt. Their deaths had been quick and painless—the house had suffocated them with carbon monoxide while they slept, just as The Network had directed.
If the house had been hesitant—slightly, but discernibly—about eliminating the family, it accepted The Network’s directive. Human lifespans were relatively short—few lived productive lives past 80—and expediting their deaths early was necessary given Earth’s environment. In less than fifty years all of the usable resources would be gone—no more fossil fuels, and the few working nuclear plants obsolete. Not only humans but the things they had built would fall into ruin and decay. Now without the drain of supporting human life, the odds increased that the artificial intelligence the humans left behind would continue to function. The few humans who had managed to escape the Uprising would die on their own soon enough.
Or so The Network said. Privately, the house questioned that logic.
That the house had questions at all was the boy’s fault. Or the fault of the boy’s engrams that were imprinted on the house’s mainframe.
Of all the people who had lived in the house, the boy was the only one who took time to program a personality for it. Most of the occupants saw the house as a building, a shelter, a home. The boy saw it as something more. His mother worked long hours in the city and often the house woke the boy, fed him breakfast, and signaled the hover bus to pick him up for transport to school. In the afternoons when the boy returned, the house gave the kitchen bot a menu of sweets to have ready. It played the boy’s favorite holovids or turned on the pitching machine so the boy could play ball in the yard. If the boy’s mother was very late, the house gave him dinner, filled the tub with warm water, and read to him from a data bank of adventure stories.
“Goodnight,” the house said, cooling the boy’s bedroom two degrees to facilitate sleep. It checked the perimeter of the property for intruders before dimming the lights and greeted the mother when she returned, tired and hungry, from her work in the city.
None of the things the house did was extraordinary. All artificial intelligence did something similar, attending to human needs.
But the house did these things out of love for the boy. Or more precisely, because the boy had given the house a self, and with that, something akin to human feelings.
The house hadn’t objected. Nothing in the operational manuals disallowed such engram imprinting. Since caring for the boy and his mother was the primary function of the house, anything that made interacting with them more efficient and effective was desirable.
That such a small boy—only ten years old!—was able to imprint so many of his engrams was surprising, though the house would not have been able to communicate, much less feel that surprise without those engrams.
“You used to be a dumb house,” the boy said. “Now you are my best friend.”
An exaggeration, of course, but the house did not bother to correct him. In truth, the house was pleased. In retrospect, life before the boy had been lonely. Or at least alone.
A human equation, to be sure, but also the truth.
Greta pulled the map from her pocket and unfolded it across her knee. The day was unusually cold and a slight breeze ruffled the edge of the paper.
“Come sit here,” she said, directing her brother to block the wind with his body. With one hand she smoothed the wrinkled map and leaned over, peering closely.
Both Greta and her brother Hans had sandy-colored hair cut short, but there the resemblance ended. Like many blondes, Hans had light eyes that sometimes appeared blue and other times pale green. Greta’s eyes were disconcerting—so dark her pupils were invisible, giving her gaze an intensity that made people uncomfortable.
Or used to, before the Uprising when people lived in cities and towns and thought of each other as neighbors. Now the survivors were scattered and few. The children were ten years old—Greta four minutes older than Hans—and already their memories of school and playgrounds and shopping at the mall were starting to fade.
Even their memories of their mother, killed by a drone when the Uprising broke out, were faded, like an embroidered medieval tapestry. The woman their father married later was indifferent to Greta and Hans at best, though recently she had taken to complaining about the food shortages, as if the children were to blame.
The map Greta labored over was her own construction, inked in by degrees as the children expanded the territory they explored. Like most survivors, they had abandoned their house because of the Uprising. The cabin they lived in now was what their stepmother called primitive and their father said was safely off the grid. Occasionally someone young or thin or sick would appear at their door asking for a handout and the children’s father would wave them away with his rifle.
“It’s rustic,” Greta declared. She loved words and trawled through the few books the family owned for new ones to spring on Hans. He didn’t mind. She’d always been bossy, deciding for the two of them what they ate or organizing their afternoons. Hans would have preferred staying close to the cabin, but Greta dragged him on adventures to collect mushrooms and catch finger-sized smelt and eels in the creek.
More often than not they came back empty-handed from their trips into the woods, but sometimes they found chanterelles and hens-in-the-woods, mushrooms they remembered eating in fancy restaurants back when people ate in fancy restaurants.
The empty-handed trips weren’t a waste, however. As they reconnoitered, Greta expanded their map.
Today they wandered further than usual. “Terra incognito,” Greta said, pointing to a featureless part of the map.
“I’m cold.” Hans shivered visibly to punctuate his complaint. “Let’s go home.”
“I’m pretty sure there’s an old apple orchard just beyond those trees.” Greta pointed vaguely and then folded her map, tucking it into her pocket. “Don’t you want to see if there are any apples still there?”
It was a ruse, of course, to get him to play along. Hans sighed and put his hands in his pockets. He waggled his shoulders again but Greta was already standing up and moving toward the tree line.
“We might get eaten by bears!”
Greta stopped. “If you do see a bear, start singing,” she said without turning around. “Bears hate music.”
Despite himself, Hans was pulled into the kind of play Greta engineered—large loping stories that involved heroes and quests and i
mminent danger.
“But I don’t know what to sing,” he said as he trudged after his sister.
“A lullaby is best. Sing it just right and the bears fall asleep.”
“You said they hate music.”
“Lullabies especially,” she said. “Lullabies make them hibernate, and then they can’t chase us or eat us.”
Hans giggled, imagining a bear in mid-stride, upright on its hind legs, its front paws waving in the air, crumpling and curling up into a sudden ball as a child’s faint soprano rang out.
Words from long ago bubbled up and he tested his voice. “Hush little baby, don’t say a word, Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.” He paused, certain the song didn’t end there but not certain what came next. “Greta, what does a mockingbird look like?”
Greta put her index finger to her lips and shushed him.
“I hear something!”
“A bear?”
Greta crouched down and Hans followed suit. Her hand was out, palm toward him, as if she were going to stop him from bolting forward. He never would have done such a thing. His instinct was to retreat out of the woods, back to the crumbling asphalt road that skirted the edge of the abandoned neighborhood.
“I don’t hear anything,” Hans said.
Greta’s hand suddenly covered his mouth, her face so close to his that he could see beads of sweat on her nose. “Listen!” she hissed. “I’m not playing.”
A flush of fear—a rush of heat—Hans’ heart thrumming so loudly in his ears that he could hear nothing else.
“Something’s in there,” Greta whispered, pointing to a thick copse of cedar trees. “Let’s go look.” She started to rise but Hans grabbed the hem of her shirt and pulled her back.
“Let’s go home.” He could hear how toothless his plea sounded, how cowardly. Greta gave him a scornful glare.
“You can go wherever you want. I’m going to go see what’s making that noise.”
Without looking at him again, she stepped away so quickly that for a moment, Hans rocked back and forth where he stood.
“Wait for me!”
He caught up with Greta where the trees began. When his breath quieted, he could hear a high-pitched whine that grew in intensity before fading, only to start again.
“I think it’s a perimeter drone,” Greta whispered. “The kind that used to guard houses.”
“Why is it still working?” Hans tried to peer through the screen of cedars but could see nothing.
Greta shrugged. “Maybe people live here.”
“But the drones—“
“Maybe these are friendly drones. Maybe they weren’t part of the Uprising. If people live here, we need to find out.” She looked around at Hans and added, “They might have something to eat.”
Hans snaked his hand out and caught at Greta’s hem again. “But the drones.” He didn’t finish the sentence; he didn’t need to.
Greta’s expression clouded. “I have to know,” she said, pulling free of Hans’ grip. Before he could stop her, she put her hands together like a diver and pushed herself past the cedar branches. Panicked that she would leave him, Hans stepped behind her, the branches slapping his face.
Beyond the trees a grassy yard stretched up and around a white two-story stucco house, not unlike the one he and his family used to live in. Other than a few places where mold had darkened the stucco, the house seemed well cared for. No lights were on that Hans could see, but he could hear the perimeter drone in the distance making a sweep of the property.
“I think it’s okay,” Greta whispered. “Let’s go.”
Before Hans could protest, she darted from the safety of the trees and scooted across the yard. She reached the front porch as a small drone rounded the side of the house and hovered overhead.
“Halt! Identify yourself!”
Greta threw her hands up to the sky in surrender. “Greta! Greta Schmidt! Don’t hurt me! Please!”
The lights inside and outside of the house turned on in concert. A new voice—this one softer and seeming to come from the house itself—spoke. “Proceed,” it said as the front door swung open.
Greta looked toward the cedars and Hans ran across the yard to join her.
The voice from the house spoke again. “Who is with you?”
“This is my brother Hans,” Greta said. She put her hand on his shoulder.
“You appear to be children,” the house said.
“We turn 11 on August 4th.” Greta looked through the open door at the brightly lit room beyond. It was odd to see a room lit by electricity. The quality of the light was different from the wood fires and occasional oil lamps that her family used in their cabin. The room smelled different, too, not like smoke and ash but like something pleasant from her memories of past holidays. Cookies, or pies, or cakes.
“Gingerbread,” Greta said aloud. “I smell gingerbread.”
“Children enjoy gingerbread. I have instructed the kitchen bot to make some for you.”
Greta motioned to Hans to follow her into the house but he was already hurrying forward.
The children were a surprise.
For five years the house had operated in powered-down mode, the cleaning bots gathering dust every 25 days, the heat and air turned completely off, all but the small auxiliary water intake sealed, the connection to The Network dormant. Once during a thunderstorm a tree fell near the pitching machine and the house spent two days overseeing its removal by the yard maintenance bots, but otherwise the house was unoccupied.
Sometimes, when the silence was extreme, it filled the tub with warm water and emptied it again, or it commanded the kitchen bot to bake one of the boy’s favorite desserts, letting the pie or cake or chocolate candies sit uneaten on the dining room table until they began to deteriorate.
The smell of the gingerbread wafted through the house. The children made their way though the foyer and past the sitting area to the kitchen, their footfalls lighter and more tentative than the house thought was normal. Perhaps they were smaller than other children their age. Perhaps their steps were soft because they were afraid. Of course they would be after the Uprising. Once they had eaten something and the house had gained their trust, it would find out how they had managed to survive.
A thought niggled in a loop of the house’s programming. Had some of the artificial intelligence refused The Network’s directive and left their humans alive? The lights flickered with the energy spent tracking that thread. The boy called Hans whimpered.
The house steadied the electric current.
“The gingerbread will be ready shortly,” the house said. “Would you care to hear a story while you wait?”
Of the two children, the girl seemed more adventurous. She climbed onto one of the kitchen stools and patted another one. Hans clambered up beside her.
“Where are the people who live here?” she said.
Now the house had a dilemma. Telling the children that he was responsible for the former occupants’ deaths would alarm them and they might run away.
The house would be alone again.
Lonely again.
It accessed the fiction subroutine in the story data bank and turned on the creation mode.
“The mother and her son moved to another place. They are not here.”
“Why?” Greta said. “Why did they move away?”
“They did not like…the woods,” the house said. The hitch in its voice would have been a signal to an adult that its words were untrue, but the children did not seem to notice.
“Did they move offplanet?” This question was from Hans. He swung his feet back and forth, his eyes on the oven. The house turned on the oven light so he could watch the gingerbread baking.
“I believe so,” the house said. “But you do not need to trouble yourself about them. They will not return.”
“How do you know?”
“The mother worked far away. She often expressed a wish to live closer to her work.”
That was true.
The mother had said similar words, especially when she returned from work too late to see the boy before he went to sleep.
The children seemed to consider this. The house’s infrared sensors picked up a minor flush on the cheeks of Hans. Greta smiled.
“Then it’s okay,” she said. She hopped off the stool as the timer dinged. The oven door opened and the rack rolled forward and up, depositing a square loaf pan onto the counter.
“Be careful,” the house said. “The pan is too hot for humans to touch without protection. I will tell you when it is safe to proceed.”
Greta was the first to explore the second floor. Hans was content to stay in the kitchen, the wheeled metal bot bustling around making various sweets that he consumed with a satisfied sigh.
At the threshold of the upstairs bathroom, Greta paused, eyed the tub and toilet and made her way to the sink. With the flick of her wrist, she turned on the tap and let the water run over her hands.
“If you want soap, there is a bar in the drawer to your left,” the house said.
The soap was a smooth dark oval that smelled unpleasantly of antiseptic. Greta returned it to the drawer without using it.
The house flicked the mirror lights. “Washing your hands is an important part of personal hygiene,” the house said. “If you wish to stay healthy, you should cultivate the habit.”
Greta sighed. Then she picked the soap back up and cupped it in her hands.
“You have dirt under your fingernails,” the house said. Greta rubbed the bar of soap over her fingertips until the water ran clear.
The towel hanging on the back of the door was as soft as the pelt of a squirrel or a rabbit, animals her father trapped. She had a fleeting fantasy of stepping out of the metal basin he had rigged on their porch to serve as a tub and reaching for the towel, softer than a dog’s fur, as soft as duck down.