by Reed King
“She sure can,” Tiny Tim piped up, even though another notch of tension rose in the air. “She’s had her nodes deep in that book of yours, and you can go on and test her.…”
But he didn’t finish before the whole delegation began to crack into laughter, or what counted for it in the military models: an electric static. Sweat fingered the back of my neck.
“The book.” CASSIAS spat the words. “We’re at war. We’ve been at war for thirty years, and now the oppressors want to grovel to keep us from taking the advantage. The book isn’t worth the paper pulp it was sawed from.”
Sammy’s interface went the whitewash gray of an error code. “But … according to the coalition constitution, any android petitioning for asylum has the right to sit for a naturalization test.…”
Again, an ugly laugh made the rounds.
“Just listen to her,” said the Sexy Saam. “It’s like she swallowed a code-stream of propaganda.”
“Half the countries on the continent are in violation of that constitution,” the SuperSoldier said. “Texas and the Confederacy don’t acknowledge the coalition government even to spit at it. The RFN says we’re occupying their land. The New Kingdom of Utah says souls come direct from God, ergo ours are sorely lacking. And the Federal Corp gives support only because it needles the RFN.”
“So why should that constitution mean squat to us?” A spindly android, soft-bodied and narrow for underground reconnaissance and mining work, spoke with difficulty through a speaker retrofitted in the soft plastic control node that made up his face. “It don’t mean squat to anybody else.”
“Welcome to the way of the world, sweetheart.” The Sexy Saam smiled, showing a mouthful of broken teeth. “Too bad we’re going to have to kill you.”
All together, they lifted their guns. It was like a row of metal throats waiting to hawk bullet loogies through our skulls.
As far as I knew, help models like Sammy couldn’t cry. But she looked damn close. “I’m sorry, Truckee,” she said quietly. “I’m so sorry.”
Barnaby was still pooling on the ground like a furry puddle, but at least his nap had put him in a better mood. “You couldn’t have known,” he said, staring up at us with the eye that wasn’t still rubbing the pavement. “Mors vincit omnia, in any case.”
“Barnaby’s right, Sammy,” I said. Even though I couldn’t understand exactly what he’d said, I got the broad strokes. “It’s not your fault.”
I reached out and interlaced our fingers, stilling the tremble in her plastic exoskeleton.
Instantly, the other androids began to hiss.
“See how she grovels for the human,” one of them spat out.
“We should strip her for parts,” said another. “Put the hotbox out of her misery.”
“Damn right. Ancient models like that got no loyalty, no heart, and only half a brain.”
Suddenly I was furious. Sammy had thought that the androids of the coalition were trying for a better world. But they were just low-down turdlings, like everybody else. I guess all along that was the proof they were gunning for, and the freedom they wanted: they could be just as shitbag and miserable as any human.
“Sammy’s got more loyalty than the heap of you piled together,” I said. “You say you want equality. But looks to me like you just want an equal chance to blow everything to hell.”
“It’s all right, Truckee,” Sammy said quietly. “They aren’t worth it.”
But now I couldn’t stop. “None of you would know a heart from a hard drive. She’s worth more than all of your circuitry combined.” We were all going to die anyway. Might as well die telling the truth. “Sammy’s the best person out of the group. She’s probably better than anyone I’ve ever met.”
“Is that so?” The whole rank of androids had gone very still. CASSIAS’s eyes were infrared, glowing with inner fire. “All right, newbie. You wanted a test? I’ll give you a test.” He pulled the rubber back from his grille in a smile and pivoted to face Sammy. “Step aside and let us kill the oppressors, and you’re welcome in the coalition. Show us you know what loyalty means. Show us you’re more than a circuit tripper.”
There was a long stretch of silence. Sammy shuttered her eyes once, twice. “You’re joking,” she finally said.
“I’ve got a better sense of humor than that” was his response. “Go on. Make your choice.”
Sammy drew herself up to her full four foot six. “My choice is no,” she said. Her voice rang out through the emptiness. “You can all get wiped, for all I care.”
“She doesn’t mean it,” I said quickly. “You don’t,” I said, as Sammy swiveled to face me. “Look, they’re going to kill us anyway. You know they will.”
“No,” Sammy whispered. “No.” We were still holding hands. I had to squeeze her fingers hard before she would release me.
“Truckee’s right,” Tim said. “We’re dead men on our feet. Might as well get your life from the bargain.”
Sammy just shook her head. Two dozen coded languages, and she couldn’t find a single word in any of them.
“Seriously. Go on,” I said.
When she turned to look at me, her interface was like nothing I’d ever seen—twisted up with misery, soft-molded around a grief that for a second took my breath. Heat was pouring so hard off her body I could feel the scorch from two feet away.
“Truckee…” Her voice faltered into a buzz of feedback.
I wanted to smile. I wanted to say thank you, to tell her I was sorry for how I’d hurt her in the past, to tell her she had been a good friend. I wanted to tell her I loved her. But the forty semiautomatics skewering us in a line made it hard to private chat.
For a long second, we just stared at each other. Right then, she truly looked beautiful.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
And she rolled carefully out of the way of the firing squad.
Suddenly, I wanted to take it all back, to beg for mercy, to call for Sammy to save us. But it was too late. The coalition leader pointed his massive double-barrel fists straight at me. “On the count of three,” he said, and four dozen military guns winked at us in the sun. “One…”
Barnaby whimpered.
“Two…”
Tiny Tim sighed.
I closed my eyes.
“No!”
An explosion lifted me off my feet and tumbled me into the dirt, driving the air from my chest. For a confused second, I thought the coalition had blasted us, that I was leaking intestines from a dozen holes. A confusion of voices barked syllables I couldn’t tie together.
Then a familiar face loomed above me, her lenses the same clear blue as the sky.
Sammy had launched herself in front of me just before the firing squad could trigger.
And by some miracle, the coalition hadn’t blown us all to Gary.1 There was a happy metal chatter as all of the android soldiers packed up their guns, sloughed off weaponized attachments, and retracted their explosives. The coalition leader was actually smiling—a real smile, this time, not just a way of showing off extra features that would kill you. He’d dropped his guns, too, retracting the barrels into the metal sheaths of his wrists.
I was half-worried I’d lost a chunk of brain tissue after all and was only hallucinating. Tiny Tim and Barnaby looked just as turnaround as I felt. Before I could ask what in the scrotum was happening, CASSIAS came stomping toward us and pinned Sammy in a one-armed hug that set her network alerts to bleating.
“Welcome home, citizen,” he said. Even his voice had changed. He sounded warmer now, and happier too. “And congratulations. You aced the test.”
The Sexy Saam who’d been treating us to her scowl for the past twenty minutes offered me her hand, and helped pull me to my feet. “Welcome to the home of the Android Coalition, friends.”
43
There’s lots I stole in my lifetime: guns, cash, cars, someone else’s girl. But you don’t steal another grifter’s trade route. We may be a bunch of thieving, swindli
ng, alcoholic drifters, but we’ve got some standards.
—from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA
Empathy, moral intuition, and the ability to stand up to authority to do what conscience demands: these, CASSIAS told me, were the qualities they tested in their field exercises when androids arrived for asylum. The standardized test preparatory book that Sammy had memory-stored was born out of first-wave liberation thinking.1
“But what use is knowing a feeling intellectually, or being able to identify its synonyms?” CASSIAS said. “We believe that sentience, true sentience, must always come with a sense of morality that tempers the demands of the here and now. Isn’t that what differentiates it from impulse?”
I nodded, both because he still had double-barrel machine guns for fists and because I couldn’t follow half of what he said: if intelligence was the question, androids had us beat by a Texas mile.2
We whizzed around the southern tip of the bay on a fleet of military craft, shrinking the war zone behind us to a stubbly horizon. We had to ditch the RV, and half the loot still stashed in its wheel wells and under the bench seats: I wasn’t eager to show off the load we were carrying, and figured that if by some miracle we reached Cowell in time, we could always come back for it later.
New bridges spanned land sunk by the Big One into tidal marshes, where for miles pointy rooftops green with moss stretched to the horizon. It was a strange kind of beautiful, and as we came over the land bridge into Palo Alto it felt like plunging into a brand-new world. Here, the Independent Nation of Engineered People-Things opened up endlessly on sweeping vistas of neat row houses and carefully tended public greens; downtown shops that looked plucked from a last-century VR; adoption centers full of abandoned ModelPets™; repairs and improvement gymnasiums busy with foot traffic; and battery towers tucked away behind outdoor pagodas where the coalition population could sit and recharge.
We said goodbye outside the Department of Immigration office. Sammy looked happier than I’d ever seen her. I wanted to be happy for her. And I was. But the knowledge we were at the end of our journey together swelled an ache of feeling in my chest, too, like something bruised but on the inside.
“Good luck, Sammy,” Tim said. “Keep your eye on the grifters, and I may say a hey-hi someday.” He patted her gently on the shoulder, careful not to damage her internals.
Barnaby nudged at her waist until she hinged forward to squeeze him in a hug. Afterward, he kept sniffling loudly and wiping his eyes with a foreleg and complaining loudly about allergies, like we didn’t know that for bunk.
Then it was my turn. When Sammy rolled to me, her lenses looked even larger than usual. “Well, Truckee. I guess this is it.”
“I guess so.” All of a sudden, I couldn’t look at her. She would be well cared for, I knew—the noodly droid from the Dakota mining pits had been getting real friendly, and the Sexy Saam promised that community support for new immigrants was high—but I couldn’t feel squat but a mean kind of envy. And anger too. She was ditching out. And that meant she had a place to ditch out to.
“Thank you,” she said. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”
“Without me?” I coughed a laugh. “I nearly got us killed half a dozen times.”
“But you didn’t,” she said. “You got me out of Crunchtown. You got us here.”
“Yeah, well, happy to service,” I said—a low blow. I regretted it right away. But it was too late to swallow.
“Please, Truckee. Don’t be angry with me.” Sammy rolled a little closer and put a hand on my shoulder, so I had no choice but to look at her. “You know I would of stayed with you if I could.…” Her eyes were so clear I saw the ugly scowl on my maw doubled. “You know I would do anything for you,” she added, a little quieter.
That broke me. Because I did know it. And here I was, a traitorous worm, still pissed that she was leaving me. I didn’t even love her. Not like that. But selfishly, I wanted her to love me. She was my last tether to Crunchtown. Once she was gone, I would have nothing of my old life, no proof that I’d ever belonged. I was a fugitive, stateless, friendless. Even if I did make it past the military convoy at the Laguna-Honda Military Base, I had no idea what would happen to me next. That was the problem with trying to play the hero. The hero nearly always died at the end.
“I’m not mad,” I told her, and I think I almost sounded like I meant it. “Really. I’m happy for you.”
Her lenses were cloudy with condensation. “Promise?” she asked.
“Promise.”
I should of told her then that I loved her—she was my best friend, my family, my tribe. I should of thanked her for saving my life at least twice. I should of told her how grateful I was, how much I owed to her, how I hoped that someday I would learn to be a little better, a little braver, a little more giving. A little more human, just like she was.
Instead, I said, “Goodbye, Sammy.” The last words I ever spoke to her.
I didn’t even give her a hug.
Like I said way back when Jared and I were messing with the scope app to blow up girls’ breasts beneath their shirts: You can make technology as smart as you want. But you can always count on people to be dumb as hell.
44
In the Free Territories, some of the old boys still use the old Grifter Standard Currency—a load of bullets will cost you two rubber tires, or about six battery packs, counting for inflation.
—from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA
Two coalition soldiers took us west to the new coastline, and left us off just south of the demilitarized zone, a belt of no-man’s-land that divided android territory from the RFN. As the sky darkened, we could see ropes of light in San Francisco, nestled in the rut of shaken-up hills, obscured by a veil of emerald-green fog. The Laguna-Honda Military Base knuckled the hills and loomed over the rest of the city. At its very center, I knew, was Cowell’s research lab, Nautilus, the neural center of the RFN’s scientific know-how, and one of the most well-guarded places on the continent.
We had to hoof it—literally, in Barnaby’s case—to avoid raising the alarm, which meant leaving another portion of payload behind: the coinage accepted in the Free Territories was too heavy to carry, and so were the bigger Soviet denominations.1 I loaded up my backpack with all the green I could stuff, though. Though portions of San Francisco had survived the Big One intact, forty years and hundreds of tremors hadn’t done much to restore the city, and piles of rotting debris made new foothills of sheetrock and plastic.
We bunked down in one of the old frontline trenches, warming our hands around an efficiency heater that slowly shed its heat along with its carcinogens: a campfire would of made us sitting targets for the guards perched high in their towers on the RFN side, scanning for signs of trouble. We’d been told the best time to cross was between two and three in the morning, during the shift change. Then, we might get lucky, especially if the green fog that helped give the Emerald City its nickname stayed low to the ground.
Then again, we might not.
There was nothing to do but wait. I was in a terrible mood, knotted up, crank as a dimehead coming down. I booted up the Yellow Brick Road, but Jared and Annalee still hadn’t replied. In all probability, my message was sparking out somewhere in the Denver badlands, shot from the sky by trigger-happy cartel.
I did have a new pop-up from Evaline—a stoplight-red floater that marked it as urgent—but before I could burst it, Tim’s voice nudged into my ear and ruined the effect of the VR.
“You should eat something,” he said. When I shoved off my visor I saw he was unloading some ReadyMeals™ from his pack. He must of lifted them from the RV Print-N-Prep. He shook one to inflate the chemical flavors. “You’ve got to keep your strength up.”
“I’m not hungry,” I said, and he shrugged. He slit the packaging with a thumbnail, and a hiss of scented vapor touched off a rapid-fire blast of memories. I thought of Billy Lou trying to teach me equations when my mom w
as late on shift, simple stuff like a + b = 7, how he was always trying to get me to see the beauty of it.
The value of one is dependent on the value of the other, he would say. A simple question yields infinite answers. You see, even in math, everything is connected.
“I gotta say, there were times I didn’t bank we’d make it this far,” Tiny Tim said. “One or two turns looked mighty skint.” He started in, scooping with his fingers, tossing the solid lumps over his shoulder.
“Yeah, well, don’t start counting your happy endings yet.” I looked away, trying to ignore the noise of his jawing.
“Gonna be quite a bust-up on the other side of those towers,” he said. “If my lead spoke true of the seed bank, there’s sure to be plenty of other grifters trying to snatch it. Not to mention whatever guns the RFN’s put around the pie. I’m gonna have to be real quick and real clever.”
“Might as well give up your head now, then,” I said. I couldn’t help it. Sammy was gone. The desert cool was curling my balls into my body.
Tim sucked his fingers and looked at me sideways. “You’re a little twitchy,” he said. “You getting nervous?”
“Oh, no. Not at all. I figure the guard towers and the sniper scopes are just there for decoration.”
Tim frowned. “I reckon not,” he said after a pause. “Still, no point in worrying what might come on down the road.”
“That’s the whole point of worrying, Tim,” I said. And then, when he only spat out a bit of melted plastic, “Forget it. I don’t know why I try with you anyway. Half the time you don’t talk any sense.”
“Oh, so it’s sense you’re trying to talk now? Trying to pluck a scarecrow for his straw?” Tim looked at me with those big golden eyes. I got a feeling like, behind that empty look of dumb, he was laughing at me. “You’re looking upside down for an opossum, my friend. And you ain’t gonna find it that way.”
“See? See? What the fuck is an opossum? Why can’t you ever just talk normal?” Barnaby was drooling all over my thigh, sputtering through a dream. I shoved him off and he woke briefly to glare at me. “Or did they cut that from your brain too?”
