She takes a deep breath and gazes at the white wall of her cube. She lets her mind float up like a bubble to find the Happiness. There it is—whipped and cloudlike, hovering just above her. Then it’s smooth and sweet on her tongue. The taste of sugar and caramel overtakes her. Happiness.
When she’s eaten an entire tub of imaginary butter pecan ice cream, she feels better. She can see things clearly once more.
I, like all Hu-Bots, am rational. Those two kids, like all humans, are irrational.
CHAPTER 13
I DROP DUBS off and leave the Corvette behind his place in B Housing. There’re a few evergreen trees for cover. I don’t know what we’re going to do with the car. I guess we’ll figure it out in the morning.
I live all the way over in X Housing, which is a mile farther across the scabbed earth of the Reserve. I pull up the worn collar of my shirt and shove my hands in my pockets, trying to keep warm as I stumble down the bumpy mud path home.
This is the only time I don’t mind being on the Reserve: in the middle of the night. It’s so dark in the mountains, you can’t see the piles of garbage everywhere. It’s cold enough that the flies stop buzzing.
I stop at the top of the hill before the turnoff to X Housing and look up at the stars. I wonder: Is there a place out there where I could be free? Where congregating with other humans isn’t a crime? Where I might have a chance to fall in love?
The closest I’ve come to congregating is hanging around with Dubs; the closest I’ve gotten to love is the time I made out with him back when we were, what—thirteen and fourteen? We kissed and kissed—but then we burst out laughing.
A security chopper cuts across the horizon, and I duck down crumbling stairs, toward block X. I shake my head; I know salvation doesn’t come from the starry sky.
I open the door to my tiny room, and when it clicks into place behind me, a voice says, “Reserve number 68675409M accounted for. Two hundred minutes past curfew. Penalty: fourteen days’ hard labor.”
“Screw you, machine head,” I say as I sink onto my bed. “My whole life is hard labor.”
My “solo sanctuary”—that’s the Bots’ term for it—is basically a prison cell with no lock. It’s nine feet deep and six feet wide. My thin, narrow, lumpy bed is the only piece of furniture.
I’ve tried to decorate the place a little. Hanging on one wall is a jagged piece of an old mirror and an ancient, faded poster for a movie called Aliens vs. Predator 2. Whenever I look at it, I imagine Hu-Bots and other robots fighting each other to the death. It’s a happy thought.
I don’t have any family pictures because the drones leveled our house, but I salvaged a few photos of other people’s families.
I also tacked up a crumpled old toothpaste ad showing a mom, a dad, a boy, and two girls. It could almost be my family, if the brother were scowling—and the two parents were corpses.
I lean back against moth-eaten pillows and look around at scraps of other people’s lives: a cracked blue china plate (the same pattern my mom had), postcards of Las Vegas (before it went up in smoke), and an old TAG Heuer watch (which would be worth something if it weren’t mostly smashed).
Considering that everything I own was scavenged from the trash, I think I’m a pretty good decorator.
I’m still wired from the ride, so I take out the pipe Dubs gave me for my birthday and the baggie his cousin Trip slipped into my pocket the other day. I carefully pack the leaves into the bowl, light up, inhale.
My exhale is a cough. Trip specializes in the skunkiest weed around, but when she’s giving it to me for free, who’s to complain?
I grab the last of my stash of chips. The snackies taste like cheese-flavored sawdust, unless I’m high—which I am.
I reach for the bowl on the shelf above my bed. Dubs would tease me for bothering with a bowl, especially a plastic one with cartoon elephants on it. But the only vivid memory I have of my mother is her telling me to use a dish “like a big girl.” So in the privacy of my cell, I’ll be a big girl and use the damn bowl.
As long as I’m thinking about my mom, I decide to take a little ride with the Q-comp. I can’t remember very many details about my parents, but I have something better: their memories.
Or the digital copy of them, anyway. It’s all here on the Q-comp.
Whole-brain emulation was just getting popular before the war, and my parents liked to be first where tech was concerned. But even digital memories don’t last forever: thousands of mind-upload communities were wiped out when the Hu-Bots destroyed the Houston Cloud. I worry that someday, the Mountain Central Cloud will follow it.
Then I’ll have nothing.
CHAPTER 14
I MAKE A neural connection and scan through the files. I haven’t watched all my parents’ memories, but I have certain ones I go back to. The day my mom taught me to toss a baseball is one of my favorites. I’m about three, and I look so clean and innocent and happy that I can’t believe it. I mean, I’m wearing freaking sandals.
The memory is my dad’s, actually, and through his perspective my mom looks so beautiful. She keeps batting her hair away from her face, and her eyes crinkle every time she looks at little-kid me. There’s so much life in those eyes—how could the Bots have murdered my mom and dad?
It’s too much. Or else the weed’s worse than usual.
I don’t know, but I feel tears coming, and I have to beat them back.
I mind scroll through my mom’s memories, searching for something—anything—else.
I find one I’ve never seen before.
In it, I’m a baby bouncing on my mom’s hip. But I sense this isn’t a happy memory. We’re deep in the mountain forest, and it’s dark and cold. There’s a high fence around us, patrolled by soldiers packing heat. My mom looks terrified. So do I. It’s too much to watch right now.
I turn off the Q-comp abruptly, my body tingling all over.
I don’t know what that memory was about, but I don’t like it. Suddenly everything feels wrong. I glance down at my empty chips bowl and then over the shelf, where I keep the one thing of value I have.
The gun.
It’s a semiautomatic I found on a dead rebel after the war. Even at eight, I knew that when you see a gun, you take it. I’ve kept it a secret, but I’ve never felt like I might have to use it.
Until tonight.
I can’t go to prison. I won’t. Never, ever.
I pick up the gun, turn it over in my hands. My palms are sweating, leaving greasy streaks on the metal. I start to pace the foot and a half of space between my bed and the walls.
How could I have thought that one thrill ride was worth being hunted down and maybe killed?
CHAPTER 15
I’M OUT BRIGHT and early the next morning because I never actually slept a wink.
I blazed through a pack of cigarettes instead—a month’s stash for me and Dubs—thinking about my parents and life before the Great War. I kept wondering if it would have been better to die back then.
Happy thoughts, right?
I saved one last cigarette for the morning smoke with him. We usually meet near the trade school, so I cut through Dump Valley.
It’s barely 8 a.m., but there must be a hundred kids scavenging through the giant mounds of trash. Dubs and I used to do the same thing, until we learned that if you search long enough for buried treasure, you’ll find buried bodies instead, sometimes baby bodies.
I hurry up the slope until the path spits me out in Tent City, which, believe it or not, smells even worse than the valley trash dump.
“Hey hey, Sixie!” Toothless Ten calls out from his moldy cardboard shack. “You pretty young thing. You got a fiver?”
I laugh. “Yeah, right. What for? Rotgut? Weed?”
Ten sucks his gums and glances toward the prossy straddling the fire hydrant. “Sometime a man needs a little love.”
I follow his eyes. The girl is one of Two Twenty-One’s sisters—they all have dark, coppery hair and full lips, snee
ring but sexy. She’s younger than I am—maybe fourteen.
“Girl, you gotta get out of here,” I call to her. “Go tell your brother to keep better track of you.”
The girl rolls her eyes at me but doesn’t move.
“She’s closed for business,” I tell Ten. Then I reach into my pocket and pull out a handful of change, which is all the money I’ve got. I walk over and put it in the girl’s hand. “I bought you for the next three hours,” I tell her. “Now git.”
She knocks me in the shoulder as she stomps away. “You’re hopeless,” she says.
I’m hopeless? So much for doing the right thing, if that was the right thing. Maybe I am hopeless.
I spot Dubs on the far side of Tent City, fishing out beer bottles that have rolled into the gutter. Because of his dad’s habit, he’s never seen a bottle he doesn’t want to smash. He grabs one and hurls it at J Housing. It explodes into shards of bright-green glass.
“Do you have to do that,” I mutter, walking up, “every single morning?”
Dubs looks over at me, grinning. “No,” he says. He tosses an empty fifth of vodka back and forth between his hands. “But I want to. Every single morning.”
Then a bicycle horn toots, and we turn to see our shop teacher, Mr. Austere. He’s riding straight toward us, up the path. Austere’s his Reformed name, anyway, mockingly given by his Hu-Bot masters. He wears it like a badge of honor.
Idiot.
“You’d better not miss another class,” he calls, puffing hard from pedaling. His face is beet red.
“And you better slow down,” Dubs says. “You look like you’re having a heart attack.” He flashes a gap-toothed grin.
Austere huffs, and his face gets even redder. “When my time comes… you’ll be the one carrying… me on your shoulders,” he yells. “You two… are going to wind up… ditch diggers at the cemetery… Remember… You heard it here… first!”
“Better than fixing motorbikes I’m not allowed to ride,” I say as he pedals away.
“I’d love to pitch dirt on his coffin,” Dubs mutters. “That’d be fun.”
A car horn sounds, and I freeze.
“Relax, girl,” Dubs says. “It’s just a couple of Bots.”
“Bot-cops.” Sweat beads on my forehead. This is it, I think. They found the Corvette, and now they’ve found us.
Dubs takes a long drag. “So? We’re being good little citizens, remember? We’re on our way to trade school.”
The voice blares from the loudspeaker on the sedan’s roof. “HUMANS, BOW DOWN!”
My face reddens, but I obey. I might’ve taken my time in the city square, but right now, in my own territory, I just want to get this over with as quickly as possible.
“Wow, Sixie,” Dubs says from the ground next to me. “That’s the fastest I’ve ever seen you get on your knees. Been practicing?”
“Silence, hoo-mans,” a Bot-cop snaps.
The Bot-cop keeps us on the ground—like we’re bad dogs or something—for a good two minutes, then glides off like nothing ever happened.
“Stupid Bots,” Dubs yells after they’re gone. He brushes dirt from the knees of his jeans. “Stupid goddamn Bots!” Then he turns and stomps away from the school.
“What are you doing?”
“What do you mean, what am I doing?” He squints back at me, the sun in his face. “I’m cutting class. Like we do most days.”
I sigh and look out across the Reserve, scanning the horizon for more Bot-cops. “I just think we have to be careful. We need to get rid of that Corvette…”
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about!” Dubs says, his good humor returning instantly. He claps me on the back and pushes me ahead down the path. “We’ll use the many talents we’ve acquired in dumb-dumb school and work on an actual car. The better the shape it’s in, the faster we can unload it. And, don’t worry, Princess Paranoid, we’ll dismantle that computer.”
I think about that for a minute. Then I grin. “Let me do it, okay? I want to smash that thing with a hammer. I want to kill it.”
CHAPTER 16
IN THE OLD Cultural District of what used to be Denver—inside one of the illegal “unseen” theaters—a beautiful woman struts across a dimly lit stage. Her eyelashes flutter like black butterflies, and her long, thin fingers are tipped with red polish.
When she stops center stage, she lifts a microphone from its stand, and a bright spotlight clicks on.
The audience of mostly perverse humans gasps.
And MikkyBo, hidden in the shadows at the back of the hall, gasps too.
Unlike Mikky, the crowd isn’t surprised that the woman is, in fact, a man—decked out in a platinum-blond wig, a shimmering green dress, death-defying stilettos. No—they’re noticing the one thing MikkyBo knew already: that the performer on this forbidden stage is a Hu-Bot.
And not just any Hu-Bot, but her brother, KrisBo.
Mikky had seen his name on a flyer for a “drag show.” She hadn’t known what that meant, but she does now.
KrisBo smiles, revealing perfect snow-white teeth, and the crowd murmurs in agitation as he waits for the music to start.
MikkyBo’s fingers tighten on the arms of the seat. What happens next? Will the humans kneel reverently—or riot? One can never tell with Homo sapiens, and that’s the problem.
The music swells—and KrisBo takes a deep breath and begins to sing.
The crowd hushes, but still the air feels charged and dangerous.
KrisBo is oblivious to everything. Pretty soon he’s strutting across the stage, blowing kisses to the front row, twirling his pale-gold ringlets theatrically. His voice is breathy and seductive. He’s a natural performer.
And he’s winning the tough, jaded audience over. MikkyBo studies the sea of human heads, none of which comes higher than her shoulder. She sees that they’re all bobbing to the beat.
“Work it, girl!” someone hollers. Loud cheers erupt from the front row.
For the first time in her life, MikkyBo has absolutely no idea what to think. Humans are moral degenerates and budding killers, every single one of them just waiting to bite the Bot hand that fed him.
So why are they cheering for her brother, blowing him kisses, even tossing money onto the stage?
Is it possible that they actually like him?
KrisBo shimmies his slim hips. He obviously likes them. They holler and clap and scream, and when his song ends, they yell for another.
And then the truly frightening realization dawns on her.
It isn’t the humans she needs to protect her brother from right now—it’s other Hu-Bots.
MikkyBo stands up. She vaults over the back two rows and rushes into the aisle. At the front of the theater, humans are standing, dancing, waving their arms around. She pushes through the sweat-soaked bodies and launches herself onto the stage.
Kris goes pale when he sees who it is. The music’s still playing, but he’s not singing anymore. “What are you doing here?” He steps backward, tripping over the train of his dress. The microphone screeches with feedback, and somewhere, someone shuts off the music.
For a moment, the whole room is silent. She grabs her brother’s hand.
“KrisBo,” she says firmly, “it’s just a glitch. I’ve heard about other Hu-Bots losing control, but it’s okay. We’ll fix this.”
KrisBo snatches his hand away from her. “You’re such a robot, Mikky. Who runs your life? Do you know what that collar makes you?”
MikkyBo’s hand goes to her throat.
“A dog on a leash.” KrisBo spits out the words.
All right, that’s quite enough. I am an Elite.
“Time to go, KrisBo.” Mikky steps forward and, in one quick motion, presses her boot hard against the backs of her brother’s knees. Already unbalanced by his heels, he crumples to the floor in a pile of glitter. Before he can scramble away, she picks Kris up and slings him over her shoulders.
The crowd begins to shout. They want more sing
ing—or else they want blood. A bottle goes whizzing by her head, and then another. KrisBo is screaming, banging his fists against her back, but she barely notices. All she cares about is protecting her brother.
“Robot!” he yells at her. “Stupid, unfeeling robot!”
“No one can ever know about this,” she whispers, not entirely sure if the words are for KrisBo or herself.
CHAPTER 17
OLD TIME ROCK ’n’ roll music pumps out of jerry-rigged speakers, and a handful of stoned girls stutter step around on the packed-down dirt that’s the Reserve version of a dance floor. A circle of guys sits on old milk crates, passes around a spliff the size of my middle finger.
This is what passes for a party in the Pits. But I’m in no party mood. I’m scared.
It’s strictly against the law for humans to gather in groups larger than four, so little kids are stationed as lookouts. But the Bot-cops don’t usually come to this part of the Reserve anymore. Neither do Dubs and I.
We’re here to sell the stolen car, not reminisce about the bad old days. We worked on the ’Vette all last night, tuning, polishing, buffing that thing to shine like diamonds.
“I’ll be sad to see her go,” Dubs says. He’s squished into the driver’s seat, running his hand along the gleaming dash.
“I just want to get out of here in one piece.” I glance over at the stick figure of a man leaning against a beat-up Dodge Charger. He’s got an entourage of junkies and flunkies surrounding him. “Think he’ll buy?”
“If anyone will, it’s him,” Dubs answers. “The dude runs the black market. And he’s a race king. You know he’s always looking for extra parts.”
“Then let’s do this,” I say, opening the door. I can’t help brushing my hand along the silver body of the Corvette. For all I know, it’ll be stripped for parts by morning.
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