Revolution 19

by Gregg Rosenblum

  “Ah, finally, the famous secret project!” Tom smiled and reached for the metal block. “The one you’ve been hiding from me for a month. So what do you got?”

  Kevin quickly pulled the block away. “Get your guitar.”

  Tom raised an eyebrow but said nothing. He fetched his prized acoustic guitar, a scratched, dinged-up pre-Rev relic that he always complained was “just a cheap Korean knockoff of a real American axe that sounds like crap, especially with my shop-made strings.” Still, he loved it like it was his child.

  Kevin reached for the guitar. “May I?”

  Tom hesitated, rubbing at his beard, then handed over the guitar. Kevin placed it on his lap, carefully slid his metal block under the strings, and clipped it to the sound hole to keep it in place. Perfect. He had guessed a bit with the dimensions, but it looked like he’d gotten it right. Next he turned on Tom’s radio, set the frequency to 100, and turned the volume up loud. Nothing but static, of course. Nobody had transmitted anything in years; Tom kept the radio working by request of the Council and checked it occasionally—thankfully never with any success—to monitor for robot communication.

  Kevin flipped on his project, a push-button toggle at the bottom of the block, and the hiss of the radio static switched to a warm hum. He handed the guitar to Tom, who was grinning wider than Kevin had ever seen him smile before.

  Suddenly Tom frowned. “Radio transmitter? Not safe …”

  “The range is like ten feet, Tom,” said Kevin. “If a bot’s that close, you won’t need to worry about it picking up a radio signal. Play something.”

  Tom smiled again, fretted a chord, and strummed. The noise burst out of the radio, distorted and metallic and scratchy. Kevin winced. “Not the best sound. Sorry.”

  “Are you kidding me? It’s fantastic! Like a Les Paul running through a Marshall stack!” Tom strummed another chord, producing another burst of angry sound from the radio. He clapped Kevin on the shoulder so hard it almost knocked him over. “K, my friend, you have reinvented one of man’s greatest inventions. Don’t know why I never thought to do this myself.” He began playing again, filling up the shop with sound from the radio.

  “I’m glad you like it!” Kevin shouted over the racket. “I’ve gotta go!”

  Tom gave him a nod without looking up, still playing.

  The sun had set and the shelter was empty when Kevin got home—his parents and Nick were at the Council, and Cass was at the kidbon. Perfect. He pushed the worktable back, pried up the split floorboard, then quickly took a surprised step back.

  The screen on his piece of tech was flashing red, on and off, pulsing slowly like a heartbeat.

  CHAPTER 2

  NICK, AS USUAL, PLANNED TO STARE AT THE FIRE THAT EVENING AND keep his mouth shut. Now that he was seventeen, he was expected at the Council gatherings; his parents had made a big show of inviting him to his first meeting. There had been lots of “You’re a man now” attitude that birthday: slaps on the back, talk about responsibility and leadership. His father had even pulled out a bottle of his cherry wine from the dug-out cellar for a toast. And Nick, he was embarrassed now to admit, had bought it, got excited about the whole silly show. He had ideas to share. Good ideas.

  But the few times he had opened his mouth at meetings, the first gens had all looked at him like he was speaking squirrel. We need to do more to connect with other Freeposts, he had argued. The monthly flock messages are useless. Nothing but silent stares. And what about studying the bots themselves? We’re doing nothing to find weaknesses. Maybe we can even recon the nearest City, to the east. More silence. Second gens, he quickly realized, were supposed to be seen and not heard at the gatherings. Not that anyone would ever tell him that directly. He was supposed to feel so incredibly grateful to be allowed to sit and quietly soak in the wisdom of his elders. To be amazed by discussions of where to graze the goats and how many wheels of cheese had been stockpiled and how many solar panels and wind turbines needed repairing and to be reminded, always, always, that the first gens were survivors of the Robot Revolution, and only they could really understand the robot threat.

  Nick sat on one of the carved wood benches that had been placed in a half-circle around the central campfire. It was a nice night—a clear sky, with just a touch of chill in the air. Freepost was quiet; everyone was here at the Council, or at the kidbon in the southern square, or in their homes. He yawned as he watched the flames dance and waited for the meeting to start.

  Danielle sat down next to him, her leg brushing against his, said hello, and bam, he was instantly wide awake. He turned to look at her, at her soft brown hair and tan skin and her green eyes meeting his eyes. He wished she had sat on his other side, so she wouldn’t have to look directly at his scar and his blind eye. Everyone in the Freepost knew Nick and had seen his eye hundreds of times; his childhood days of getting in fights over teasing about his eye were gone. But still, Nick was always aware of how ugly it looked. The jagged pink scar running from eyebrow to cheek. The milky haze clouding the iris. He would carry it with him forever—a reminder of what the bots had done to him and his family.

  “Hey, Dani,” he said, and he was happy with the way it came out, like it was no big deal that the most fletch girl in Freepost was touching his leg and smiling at him. Except she was still looking at him, waiting for him to say more. His mind went blank, and he felt his cheeks start to burn. Then he was saved by Marcus standing up to begin the meeting.

  Marcus, at fifty years old, with gray hair and a salt-and-pepper beard, was one of the oldest of the Freepost first gens. He walked to the fire and poked at it with a stick. “It’s time,” he said, looking down at the campfire. The firelight flickered across his face. He tossed the stick into the fire, then turned to the group. “The Council has decided it’s time for Freepost to move on.”

  A wave of murmurs spread through the crowd, and Nick’s mother stood up. “Marcus, why? The children are doing well here.” She spread her arms out to the group. “We’re all doing well here, aren’t we?” Most near her nodded. “And moving could expose us even more than staying put! We’ve got, what, four hundred Freeposters now? Even a few babies. How is dragging everyone and everything through the woods to another clearing going to make us any safer?”

  Javier rose. He was tanned, with cheeks that seemed windburned, and his silvering brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail. “Miriam, you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he said.

  Nick sat up straighter. He had never liked Javier, who was so full of himself, Mr. Hotshot Tracker with his camouflage gear, always looking for an excuse to strut around Freepost wearing his green and black face paint. Javier may have been right—Nick was not “doing well here,” he was sick of hiding in this crappy little clearing in the woods where his opinions didn’t matter—but still, he didn’t like the tone Javier used on his mother.

  “My mother always knows what she’s talking about, Javier!” Nick said. He had stood up without even realizing it. His fists were clenched; he forced his fingers to relax.

  Nick’s father came to his feet. “Look, Javier …”

  “David, Nick, we’re just sitting here like fools waiting to be found. We haven’t heard any flock messages from the south for months, you know that. We don’t want to be next.” Javier paused, taking a deep breath. “Miriam, I’m sorry; nobody wants to pack up and leave our homes behind and rebuild. But my recon is showing that the robots have begun searching again. They’ve been quiet for a long time, and that’s lulled you into feeling safe. But no more. The bots are active. They’ve begun seeding chaff beacons.”

  There was a silence, and then Nick’s father said, “They’ve seeded chaff before, Javier. And we’ve been fine.”

  “It’s different this time,” said Javier. “More extensive. And even if we don’t trigger any chaff and bring them to us, they’ll still come for us soon.” He paused, then continued, “Look, the truth is, we’re not hard to find. The bots must know we’re in the
area, but for whatever reason they’ve left us alone. But it feels different now. They’re actively looking. If we stay, they find us and we die.”

  Danielle grabbed Nick’s hand, squeezed, and Nick could feel his heart thumping in his ears. He turned to her to find something reassuring to say, maybe that Javier had been sniffing too much bear dung on his recons, but then it hit him.

  “What is it?” Danielle whispered.

  Nick didn’t answer. He wasn’t even seeing Danielle now; he was picturing the glint of metal in Kevin’s hand, the nervous, excited look on his brother’s face as he slipped the object into his pocket—the object that Nick had assumed, without really thinking about it, was just pre-Rev junk. He realized now with a churn in his stomach it might be something else entirely.

  “I’ve got to go.” Nick slipped quietly away from the meeting, hoping he was wrong. Or, if he was right, that he wasn’t too late.

  Nick burst into the bedroom he shared with Kevin. “Hey—” He cut himself off as he saw his brother sitting on the bed, his face flashing red from the glow of the screen. Kevin, startled, covered the object with his hands.

  “Turn it off, Kevin! Now!”

  “I tried to, but I can’t,” Kevin said. “It turned itself on, and I don’t know how to turn it off.”

  Nick grabbed the chaff, threw it onto the ground, and began stomping on it. “Hey!” Kevin yelled, trying to push Nick away, but Nick held his brother off with a stiff arm and kept pounding on the chaff with his heel. The glass screen cracked, the casing broke into fragments, and the pulsing stopped.

  Kevin, still held back by Nick’s grip on his shirt, began kicking at Nick’s shins. “That was mine! I found it!”

  Nick, shaking with adrenaline and anger, threw Kevin down onto his bed, hard, bouncing him off the mattress and onto the floor. “You idiot, you may have just gotten us killed!”

  CHAPTER 3

  CASS LAY ON THE GROUND AT THE KIDBON, STUDYING THE BEAUTIFUL night sky.

  One hand was tucked underneath her head, and the other held her notebook. It was a cloudless new-moon night. Maxed-out stars. There was the Big Dipper, pointing to the North Star, and there, Orion’s belt, and tonight, Mars shone bright over the tops of the southern trees. Cass traced lines from point to point in her mind, getting ready to sketch in her notebook. She decided that yes, if the sketches worked out, it would be worth using one of her precious white-birch canvases to paint a night scene …

  “Earth to Cass! Anyone there?” Samantha nudged Cass on the shoulder with her foot.

  Cass sat up so quickly she got a head rush. “Sorry,” she said after a few moments, when her head cleared. “It’s such a nice night.” She held up her notebook. “I was going to sketch.”

  “Yeah, well, stop floating around up there in space,” said Samantha.

  “What, you mean I’m missing out on our ten thousandth kidbon?”

  Samantha shrugged and turned away. “Be that way if you want to.”

  Cass stood up. She could hear her mother’s voice in her head—Would it kill you to try a little harder with your girlfriends? Not that Samantha was really her friend, or that any of the Freepost girls were, for that matter. She’d always been more comfortable alone sketching or playing bosh with her brothers, but still … “Samantha, I’m sorry.”

  Samantha smiled. “Let’s go closer to the fire. I’m cold.”

  Cass and Samantha moved into the inner circle of the kidbon. There was nothing new to see, of course, just the same campfire, the same kids getting together in the southern clearing like they did every time the first gens and older second gens gathered for Council. Samantha picked her way through the group, saying hello, and Cass followed. Brian and Stacy were draped all over each other, a big show reminding everyone that yes, indeed, they were still a couple. Angelo, Peter, and Jessica were arguing about who had to do the early turn with the flock tomorrow. Harriet sat by the pit, her red checked bandanna tightly holding back her hair, giggling about something with Benjamin. And on the other side of the pit sat Travis and Gapper, their bare feet stretched out toward the fire. Cass could see Gapper’s missing front tooth as he laughed at something Travis said.

  Samantha tucked her hair behind her ear, took Cass’s arm, and pulled her toward Travis and Gapper. “Come on,” she said.

  Suddenly Samantha’s friendliness made sense—she needed Cass to talk to Gapper while she flirted with Travis. Of course. She should have known. Cass pulled her arm free. “No, you go,” she said.

  So Samantha moved off and wedged herself between Travis and Gapper, shooting an angry look that Cass ignored by sitting down next to Jessica.

  “Fine,” Jessica was saying to Angelo and Pete. “I’ll take the early flock tomorrow. But then you two had better do next week.”

  Typical. Cass fought the urge to roll her eyes. Jess was such a sucker.

  “Jess,” Cass said, smiling, “are you scooping sunrise flock drop for these two again?”

  Angelo and Pete grinned, and Jess shrugged, like it was no big deal.

  “I’ve got an opportunity for you,” Cass said to the boys. She paused dramatically. “One game of bosh, me and Jess against you two. Loser takes sunrise shift all month.” Jessica could barely play, but Cass was so good it didn’t matter who her partner was. And the boys knew it.

  “We’re already set, Cass,” said Angelo. “Jess said she’d take it tomorrow. And besides, it’s too dark.”

  “We can play right here by the fire,” Cass said, then shrugged. “But it’s all right, I understand. You’re scared.”

  And so of course, the game was on. Cass grabbed a lightstrip, gave her notebook to Jessica for safekeeping, ran off to the bosh field, and fetched the set of pre-Rev metal balls that had been found by a first gen on a scavenger run last year. They cleared a space next to the fire, Cass and Angelo on one side, Jessica and Pete twenty feet away facing their partners. The rest of the second gens gathered around to watch.

  Gapper, who had appointed himself judge, stepped into the center. “Okay!” he announced. “One game of bosh, winner takes all, Cass and Jess versus Angelo and …”

  A buzzing roar swung by overhead, drowning out Gapper, a wave of sound that rose quickly from silence to a painful howl and just as quickly back to silence. Cass looked up to the sky, her ears throbbing. Nothing. Then came a deep, slow thrumming drone that she could feel in her chest, and then she saw it come over the tree line, covering up Mars, swallowing up the rest of the night sky. She forgot to breathe.

  Black. Metal wings. Huge.

  Cass opened her mouth to scream, but there came a blinding flash and another roar and she found herself in the air, then just as suddenly on her face in the dirt. She lay there, feeling the ground. Trying to form a thought.

  After a few moments Cass began to hurt—her wrist bent underneath her body, her ribs all along the right side of her body, her left ankle, her cheek. She couldn’t hear a thing. There was something wrong with her ears. She opened her eyes, and at first she could see nothing but curling smoke, but then the smoke drifted and a shape appeared nearby, forming slowly into Samantha. Samantha lay very still. Her hair covered her eyes, and a line of blood ran from her ear to her jaw. Cass’s notebook lay on the ground between them.

  Cass struggled to her hands and knees. She picked up her notebook and crawled over to Samantha, shook her, but she didn’t move. Cass’s hearing was returning now; she heard yelling, a scream, another explosion farther away. The ground shook. “Samantha!” Cass yelled. She continued to shake Samantha, who remained still. “Samantha!”

  Something grabbed the back of Cass’s shirt and pulled her roughly to her feet. Cass screamed and swung wildly with both arms.

  “Stop!” said a man’s voice. Cass, after a few moments, realized that it was Javier, the Freepost tracker, who had lifted her. He held a hunting rifle in one hand, pointed up at the sky.

  “Javier, what …?”

  “Robots attacking. Get into the woods and keep
moving.”

  Cass stared at Javier. She felt dazed, about to pass out. The air was still thick with swirling smoke. “I don’t understand …”

  Javier let go of her shirt and bent over Samantha. He put two fingers on her neck, waited a few moments, then stood.

  Cass took a step toward Samantha. “I’ll help Sam …”

  “She’s gone! The woods, now!”

  Cass heard a rumbling and saw a gray shape, blurred in the smoke, coming toward them. It was roughly the shape of a man, but broader, taller, more boxlike, and rolling rather than stepping.

  “GO!” yelled Javier. He gave Cass a shove that sent her stumbling. She finally began to run, heading for the woods, and as she ran, she heard gunshots, followed by a crackling buzz and Javier’s horrible scream.

  CHAPTER 4

  CASS RAN HARD FOR THE TREE LINE. SHE DIDN’T LET HERSELF THINK about what was happening—the burning shelters, the screaming, the explosions pounding her eardrums and almost knocking her off her feet. She had to jump over a body, a first gen, pants shredded, bloody, not moving, but she just kept repeating to herself, Trees, trees, trees. Like one of those dreams where you run and run but never get anywhere, it seemed to be taking forever.

  Finally, she burst through into the forest. She barely slowed down; the flames of the burning Freepost shelters lit her way. Cass was small and agile and could weave in and out and under trees and bushes as fast as any Freeposter. She gripped her notebook tightly, using it as a shield to shove branches out of her way. She’d be faster without it, she knew, but she didn’t want to let go of that familiar shape in her hands. If she kept heading north she’d get deep into the forest, where she could hide and then in the morning make her way to her family’s emergency rendezvous. Her father had insisted on building the extra shelter north of Freepost, taking more than a year to scavenge and barter for the supplies. He had drilled it into his family: In an emergency, get north to the shelter. Her parents and brothers would be there, waiting for her. They had to be.