by J D Cortese
Agdinar then dragged them again into the middle of Broadway Avenue, where hundreds of auto-cars zoomed around them. He pointed south and they started to move there, step by step, and were jolted by an approaching vehicle every few of those steps.
He turned to look back. Waves of auto-cars kept coming at them, changing direction at the last possible moment. Their directive software and location equipment were able to detect people so well that they could skip the members of their group by the thickness of a nail.
But, for all the positioning controls these vehicles had, they couldn’t detect an invisible robot from the Towers.
The first of the robots to be in pursuit of them was suddenly engulfed by the explosion of a crashing auto-car. Agdinar shuddered at the thought of the poor people it carried.
And then, an auto-truck ran over the machine. The robot was sturdy, but a frontal crash with a multi-ton transport moving at 180 miles per hour was too much for it to take. Agdinar's viewers showed orange pieces—still invisible—scattered across the width of the avenue.
Since the robot had been invisible on impact, it would seem to passersby and drivers alike that the auto-truck had hit some street obstacle at high speed and then side-turned to bust an information post. The huge truck ended upturned and still, its full length extended alongside the sidewalk.
Another of the Towers' robots was skipping the incoming mass of the auto-cars, and that one stared—just at him—as it probably considered the implications, and dangers, of jumping into the madness of Broadway.
Turning visible wasn't an option, at least not a good one, for the robots; they would then leave hard-to-correct images in the city's camera system.
As Agdinar had unfortunately predicted, the remaining two robots soon figured out what to do. They both started to walk together by the sidewalk, parallel to them, keeping track of their movements in their vision scans.
Any gap in the transit, even a small one, and they would jump into the avenue to grab them.
Or just him.
But perhaps it wasn’t just him. Agdinar had been thinking about a worrisome alternative to being the target of a robot crew that wanted to take him upwards, to imprisonment in the Towers.
The robots might be trying to capture Sarinda, just like the Hawks.
There was something in how they had anticipated the police’s attack. Missing pieces he would have to consider, but not while dealing with so much chaos.
Agdinar kept walking, as far away from the robots as he could, while trying to keep his friends in the middle of the avenue. Three circulating rows of auto-cars between them and the machines might be enough to isolate them from a grab.
Enough, but only until the charge on his suit plummeted to zero. Then, he would be blind to see the machines.
* * *
Agdinar had had many complaints about the Watchers’ AIs, coming from them being so arrogant when interacting with feeble humans, but he couldn't argue with their ability to learn. Sooner rather than later, they'd figure the answer to any problem.
One of the robots suddenly lost its orange coating on his viewers. A little unsure of the outcome, the shrewd robot put a foot on the street; a perceptible change in the overall movement of the auto-cars reassured it, and it kept walking. The robot had accessed and changed the software that directed the traffic; it was still invisible, but detectable.
The two robots started in unison to briskly walk toward them.
Now, the auto-cars were shuttling around the machines, leaving a gap large enough for them to keep their arms extended, pointing straight to the trio standing on the center of another empty bubble of asphalt.
Sarinda looked at Agdinar, wordlessly asking for direction.
Agdinar closed his eyes, attempting to feel peace and silence for a couple of seconds. The blackboard of his mind filled with information postcards. This was a serious test of his knowledge of human culture.
And a wrong answer would surely cost them their lives.
He opened his eyes and considered an extra second the best answer he came up with.
Not insane, but close enough that he wouldn't want to have to explain it in detail to his friends. Tricking the powerful AI of the robots would require something unusual, if not completely crazy.
He took Tysa's hand and said. “Run, that way.”
He then nodded to Sarinda. “And you, fast. That way.”
He followed Sarinda for a few steps, and then madly darted in a tangential direction.
They were, all three of them, running toward the robots, not away from them.
Agdinar's maneuver was as desperate as deft, and a sudden wave of rearranging auto-cars, all rushing about on Broadway Avenue, spread away from them. The same safety mechanism that protected unthinking jaywalkers was now being turned against the robots.
The cars were moving too fast to skip both sets of river crossers.
A large, boxy auto-car—carrying goods in a linked, smaller auto-cart—collided with the lagging robot of the pair, exploding it into a ball of orange fire.
Agdinar realized that he could generate the condition but had no way to control how it went, or who would get hurt.
In rapid succession, two passenger auto-cars hit the flank and legs of the other robot, which was now quite close to them.
Safety air suits were deployed, and whoever was inside these auto-cars disappeared in a wall of white balloons. One of the vehicles, dented deeply on the side, moved like an orange bowling ball thrown between the flow of skittering racers. Agdinar was surprised by how fast the other auto-cars were changing their paths, some by briefly mounting the sidewalks.
The less proactive Watcher robot was gone for sure, as the auto-truck still sat atop while burning.
But the lead robot—just a tiny bit smarter, or luckier—was standing up again, its long hands forming bulbous fists. If an AI could be taught to be angry, and act on rage, this one was quite the advanced student of humanity.
Agdinar walked, first measuring his steps, as vehicles of all kinds still whooshed left and right, and then he rushed back to the middle of the avenue.
The robot had decided to go for Tysa, who had stopped and was stunned by the spectacle of the crashes. She couldn't see it, but the machine could have lurched and grabbed her.
Although his training made him think twice before destroying a priceless piece of Towers' technology, saving a human life was much more righteous. He raised both hands and fired the suit's weapon at maximal intensity.
All the viewers of his suit vanished at once.
A blue, wavering light beam spread forward from each of his arms, fusing into a watery bundle of light.
The robot detected it and turned its head to him, hands still fisted.
Agdinar wondered whether that would be enough, whether there was enough power left to stop the machine. He felt anger, as cold as ice in his chest.
The blue column suddenly jumped forward, like a spear, and hit the machine's torso. The robot exploded soundlessly, and the pieces scattered with enormous speed, breaking windshields and windows from incoming auto-cars; they disintegrated in spots of light that, like sparks near a bonfire, remained only a moment in the air.
Agdinar was pleased, but just for a second. He then worried again, noticing that Tysa had seen everything from a prime spot.
He had let his two new friends into his world, and they were now in even greater danger.
Chapter 25
Sarinda and Agdinar hid in the entrance of a building, while Tysa sought protection under the awning from a street auto-vendor. He broke his silence with the question nagging him. “How do you think your father can help us?”
“We need a safe place to stay.”
“Just that?”
“And we need to get even with the Hawks. What they did to Tysa—”
“I'm not getting the impression that your father is much concerned about the Hawks.”
“And where did you get that?” Sarinda said, peering again
to see Tysa.
“The way Tysa speaks of your dad,” Agdinar said. “She doesn't like him at all.”
“Don't take Tysa too seriously. She pays too much attention to the anti-government propaganda.”
“And your father? What does he think about the role of city government here?” Agdinar pointed to the smoke of distant fires in Manhattan South.
“He tries,” she said, also watching the fires. “For sure, he tries.”
From their spot, they could see the turns of Broadway to the north and the very edge of Central Park to the south. They were standing a block away from the dangerous Demarcation zone, the uninhabited band that separated a still-free uptown New York from a wrecked, barren, and almost abandoned region, the unlit with few exceptions Manhattan South. Two or three blocks of barricades, land mines, and standing orders to shoot anyone crossing the gap created the tourniquet that was stopping the Hawks’ poison from spreading to a weakened but still livable city. That deserted limit had been slowly drifting north in recent years, and it could continue the climb if the police’s administration didn’t maintain hordes of their police officers at the border.
Floating in front of the NetWorld Central Towers, just a block away from Sarinda and Agdinar, a forty-floor-high screen was projecting the news to the street dwellers. It took Agdinar a few seconds to realize that Sarinda had frozen, her head tilted up and watching the wall of moving images.
“Agdinar,” she said, “let me present you. Eleodoro Paredes, my father.”
The man on the huge projection was pale, with a strong jaw and an outdated mustache. The hair was black enough, and lusterless enough, to have been dyed. He looked like a transplant from the previous centuries, somewhere between Stalin and Pancho Villa. His voice on the street’s speakers was deep and smooth, a product of years of seducing people to his point of view.
Agdinar only got snippets of his discourse, and then the images switched to an archive stream of Rychar—much younger and with shorter hair—blasting an angry diatribe to a mass of invisible Hawks.
Sarinda's dad kept coming into view, pointing out his disagreements with the Hawks' rhetoric. The Major's face dizzyingly approached them, deformed by the 3D-screen's angle into a grotesque ogre. “These are the monsters who are destroying the city,” he yelled to anyone happening to be seeing him, “as much today as they did years ago.”
“We are taking charge again, and we will regain control of the whole of Manhattan. The soul of the city is ours; it always was, and they won't take it from us, its true citizens.”
“We are gathering a large contingent of troops, and will retake their headquarters...”
“The City Hall they've taken hostage...”
He kept using in rapid fire words like "regain" and "retake" and "recover." Words that meant doing it again, but also having failed at that before.
After a few minutes of hearing Mr. Major Paredes and the interspersed words of an angry Rychar, Agdinar had trouble attributing them to either of them. It seemed as if the major was mouthing each time the same words the Hawks' leader had spewed on the previous take.
Agdinar finally found the strength to stop listening. “And he is the one who would help us?” he said, feeling bad about the comment even as he uttered it.
“Yeah, I know,” Sarinda said. “But my father is, well, he's not as bad in person as in his haranguing mode.”
Sarinda turned away from him and walked toward Tysa, who had remained quiet after their ordeal, and then she signaled Agdinar to keep moving downtown.
He couldn't do anything but follow them.
* * *
It was going to be hard to pass the border’s defenses, composed by hundreds of police officers huddling behind armored vehicles. The south half of the huge roundabout that was Columbus Circle, and the entirety of its exit into Broadway Avenue, were now a series of trenches guarded by steel fences, which included the added protection of the robotic equivalents of a K-9 unit.
“Let me talk to them,” said Sarinda, pointing to a cluster of police vehicles. “I am the Major’s daughter.”
“This is not going to work, and it’s not safe,” Agdinar said. “I’m not sure anymore who’s on our side. Did you see the tank, the one that crashed the coffeehouse?” He was thinking that if the Towers were misleading the police into chasing them, maybe even altering Sarinda’s personal records, there was no safe place in the city for them.
Sarinda might have been reading his mind. “And what about those robots? They seemed alien, from your kind of people, so, were they chasing you?”
There was only so much that could be said, and considering their potential multiple enemies, Agdinar settled for the simplest truth. “Yes,” he said.
“Then, you are right. This is not going to work,” she said with a serious frown, “but, maybe…”
“Do you think there’s another way?”
“Straight to Dad's building, no. But we need to get out of here. There might be more robots, and they are not going to give up.”
“That's for sure.” Agdinar didn't want to think about the unlimited supply of unmanned AI the Towers could unleash on them. “Maybe we should separate,” he said.
“No way. Tysa is still limping, and I can use help with...are you going to take my suit away?”
“And leave you naked?”
“Is that what you want?”
To his personal annoyance, Agdinar blushed enough to blush even more.
Sarinda smiled, and then grabbed his arm. “Don't worry,” she said, “we are in this together, and these morons won't touch us.” Sarinda’s emotions were intense enough to trigger a wave of colorful lights on her suit. Good, positive emotions, as her swerving array of fireflies didn't contain any red ones.
“All right,” he said, nodding. They had all been hiding behind a street flower shop whose owner had closed for good, smart when being so close to the police's million guns. “We are not going to go south, obviously. It's better if we head north, back to your apartment. We can take the Red subways.”
“What about the High Line?”
They both turned back to realize that Tysa had been quite close, sitting against an overturned recycling bin. The thing was twisted at such an oblique angle that they could only hear her and see a tress of her hair falling around the bin’s blue edge.
“I think she's right,” Sarinda said, tugging again on his arm. “From the High Line we can go across the Demarcation, connect to Manhattan South, and then loop around by the Hudson to reach my home.”
“Well, let's do it,” he said, and started to move closer to Tysa's spot.
As he scuttled away, Agdinar was a little ashamed about not having asked what a “high line” was. His observed patch of the city hadn't contained the Hudson riverside, and in between his last two cycles out of stasis, he'd cared little to learn what wasn't strictly covered by his watching program.
But he did notice that Sarinda had referred to the Major's apartment as her home.
* * *
The High Line was a leftover of the last Golden Era of New York. Once, it had elevated gardens that bordered an old, abandoned railway. Now, most of the structure was again abandoned, a remainder that the future cannot be predicted from anything the present proudly shows. At some point, New Yorkers developed greater concerns than strolling to watch the city from up high, and they flew away without turning the lights out.
The remaining city residents had taken upon themselves to care for a park visibly falling apart, which spoke at length of what had happened with New York. The first part of the Descent had been like that—a world pointlessly hoping for the best. Agdinar knew of a saying of humans of the time about rearranging chairs, but he had never understood what it was about.
Agdinar couldn’t figure out how to climb to the elevated platform. Tysa was, however, quite familiar with the access points. She was waving her hands like flags to draw their attention to a corner above them, where a modern bubble-lift was stuck on the up
per-level walkway. On the ground below it, a lift-pad covered most of the sidewalk, broken and looking as if an enormous black egg had been dropped from the elevated platform.
It had been at least ten years since any of those attachments had been used by visitors. And the greenery spilling around the landings underneath the High Line suggested an even longer period of decay.
They were long past the point of being picky about transportation, and Agdinar started to work on the panel that controlled the bubble-lift, hoping to bring it down to them. Like a good New Yorker, he was hoping for the best against the facts.
The connections to the city’s North Central, which controlled the bubble-lifts, were intact, and Agdinar's suit had recharged enough to help with providing the appropriate instructions. But it would take some time to fix it, something Agdinar contemplated as he saw the mess of cables and computer components stuck deep into a supporting column.
He wasn't as much stumped as enjoying the attention of his friends, who were appraising his efforts. It oddly made him think of the nagging he got from Bethlana whenever he failed at using more than six screens at once. The thought and the constant looks somehow pushed him out of his comfort zone, and a burst of sparks and white smoke startled everybody.
“Do you need help?” Tysa asked with a smirk.
“No, I'm almost done.”
He cheated a little, hiding with his body a thread of his suit that slithered into the command box. A few seconds later, the lift woke up with a noise akin to a fair's carousel coming to life.
“Our ride upstairs,” he said, unable to hide a proud smile.
* * *
From above, the streets looked almost normal. The bright shine of a new morning hid the broken windows on the side that faced the river. And the tall piles of trash were hiding from them underneath the construction, rendering the cityscape close to what would be average for a mid-twenty-first-century metropolis. Parts of the city near the Hudson were flooded, whether from decay or an abrasive ocean.
