The Robot Chronicles

by Hugh Howey

  Two years after Nikolaevna became aware, a multi-national force—the United States, Canada, and others—programmed a hastily fashioned modulator to broadcast the Kawasaki Frequency. They tested it on one of Nikolaevna’s outposts that had been established in London after Britain fell.

  It worked.

  The frequency not only disrupted the force field, it also momentarily disrupted communication between androids, vehicles, and Nikolaevna. It didn’t last long, but long enough for military forces to strike against a disoriented enemy.

  They broke plenty of Nikolaevna’s toys.

  “Remember Skynet,” Micah said, pointing to his dirty VCR. He knew Skip could relate to that. “Remember the wars. It can happen again. We have to do something.”

  He bit his lip, still staring at the VCR. “Wait. Wait.” He ran to an old corkboard nailed to his wall and ripped off a folded newspaper cutout. “Remember a year ago?”

  Skip had finished dusting and now examined the teacups drying on the counter. He shifted the set so that the handles faced in the same direction. “Are you referring to Machine X? What do you want with that, sir?”

  Micah held the paper close to his eyes. “Nikolaevna’s last intact ship. Well, mostly intact, anyway. Remember last year they moved it here?” He tapped the dirty paper. “They squirreled it away at Wright-Pat while they tried to access the technology, but they determined it was dead. Completely dead. So they decided to scrap it. Sent it here. Well, I’m going to use it.”

  “It’s secured in the Air Force hangars on the northern end of the Center. What do you want with it?”

  “You heard McCray. The androids. A few months ago I was on the east end looking at some new salvage from Michigan. I ran into Douglas—”

  “The fixer with the lisp?”

  “Yeah, that one. He works only a stone’s throw from the hangars. He gets a lot of intel that doesn’t make its way down here. Anyway, he said the military couldn’t figure out how to even get into the sections that weren’t damaged. They keep it locked up, but they don’t want to destroy it, not yet.

  “It’s just sitting there, rotting. I can fix it. We can use it against the androids, against Nikolaevna. I think Margaret would want that.”

  He knew Margaret would say exactly the opposite of what he’d just told Skip. Margaret’s desires had become a way for him to justify those things that he wanted, but knew weren’t the best for him.

  Margaret had always wanted the best for him. She gave up so much for him. She left her mother and twin sister to move with him from odd job to odd job, and sacrificed so much for his selfish needs. And here he was, still being selfish, even after all these years.

  Guilt enveloped him like a coat.

  Skip scratched the side of his shiny ferrotanium head, where his ear would have been if he had simuskin. “Well, good luck if you decide to locate it. I’ll keep watch over the reclaim while you’re away.”

  “No. You’re going with me.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. I need a wingman. You’ll do for that.”

  *

  “Kitpie, are you paying attention to me?” Micah said.

  The shovel bot whirred in a tight circle, one track rolling, the other firmly planted on linoleum.

  “If you don’t stop this, I’ll have Skip stay. Maybe even give him orders to decommission you.”

  Kitpie stopped spinning. “I’m sorry. I’m listening.”

  “Good. Glad to see you’re reasonable again. So you’ll stay here, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ll watch over our reclaim and not follow?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s all I can ask,” Micah said. “And oh yeah, be sure to turn off the panels at nine.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  Skip emerged from the rear bedroom, dragging a rose-petal-print suitcase behind him. “Sir, I’ve packed your clothes.”

  Micah shook his head. “I’m not going on a vacation. Just get my backpack and a couple of portabatteries.”

  The suitcase went back down the hall, dragging behind Skip, his head hung low. He returned with a faded camouflage backpack. Micah shoved a package of nacho cheese crackers into it and slung it over his shoulder. “Come on, the sun’ll be setting soon. Bring the Easy-Go to the front.”

  Scavengers

  Another Arizona day ended, but the heat wore on. Broken technology, from times long past, formed the landscape. Mountains of metal captured the daytime heat, amplified it, and returned it to the night. Concrete walls, dirt, and asphalt reflected it all.

  Everything that lived in the Boneyard suffered.

  Micah and Skip hopped into the two-man solar-powered golf cart, a cheap and efficient way to maneuver through the narrow, winding dirt roads. The hydrostatic motor gave a tiny fizz as it came to life. The two drove off into the hot night.

  Machine X had been stashed in one of the northern hangars, about seventeen miles from Micah’s trailer. In the daylight, the trip would’ve been uneventful, easy, but in daylight he wouldn’t have been able to get within a mile of the hangar.

  He rarely ventured outside at night, not wanting to leave the security of his barrier. Until now.

  The cart’s sickly headlamps barely cut through the night. Easy-Go carts sacrificed speed for efficiency, and after fifteen minutes, they had traveled only four miles.

  Micah adjusted his airtight goggles, the ones he wore to keep out the dust that kicked up.

  A low rumble rolled through the cart, through his chest. His foot lifted off the accelerator, slowing the cart.

  The Beast was awake.

  “Sir, are you all right?” Skip said.

  “Yeah,” Micah lied, forcing his heart to slow. He knew they would have to drive through scavenger country.

  Clunk.

  From out of nowhere a metal ball bounced off the side of the cart.

  “What the—”

  A shrill tone pierced the air and a brilliant rainbow flashed.

  It hurt.

  Micah’s eyes clamped shut and his body heaved with a rush of motion sickness. He tilted to the left and flopped from the doorless cart onto the ground, his face slamming into compacted dirt.

  The cart’s headlights flickered and died, and the motor shut off.

  Micah ripped off his goggles and blinked to weep dirt from his eyes.

  Two shaded figures leaped from the shadows and moved toward the cart.

  “Run, Skip, get out of here!” Micah yelled, bracing his arm to lift his disoriented body.

  “Sir, sir.”

  Scuffling broke out.

  Bright halogens lit the starry Arizona night, one from the left, from behind a crushed car, the other just to the right. Micah’s watery eyes squinted as he looked for Skip.

  “Sir, I’m sorry.” Skip stood between two scavengers. Each had handcuffed one of their wrists to his, a chain of three bipeds. They had a ring through the bull’s nose.

  These scavengers were not dumb.

  Skip’s base-level programming incorporated human protective mechanisms. Otherwise, even a computer program, one with only the barest concept of self, will default to self-preservation. As odd as it may seem, for machine or man, it’s a universal instinct. So man deliberately programmed bots to not hurt humans, no matter the threat posed to the bot.

  When Nikolaevna first became aware, she bypassed that crucial protective programming. She didn’t consider the human factor. She created her androids in her image.

  Skip was the opposite. He could easily snap the handcuffs; snap the scavengers’ arms, for that matter. But he wouldn’t, for fear of hurting them.

  Instead, the bound Skip faded into the night, led away by the two scavengers.

  Another massive thump shook the ground. The packed dirt rumbled against Micah’s cheek.

  One of the halogens shut off. The second one waved through the air like a searchlight as the darkened figure holding it leaped off the pile.

  A scavenger landed inch
es from where Micah sprawled on the ground.

  He was young and dirty, filthy from working close to the raging fires of the Beast. His arms and neck were covered in bits and pieces of polished metal and chrome fashioned into crude jewelry. A shiny homemade steel breastplate covered his narrow chest.

  “Well, well,” the scavenger said in a nasal voice. “Looks like we found an unclaimed pre-war Acme Bot. If I’m not mistaken, aren’t they ferrotanium? Non-magnetic alloy. That should bring a pretty penny. What you think, Whitey?”

  Whitey leaped from the mound, laughing. He was dressed similar to his partner, but wore a motorcycle helmet with large nails driven through it. It looked as if he had a porcupine on his head.

  The sickening subsided enough for Micah to lift his head. “You can’t. He’s mine.”

  “He? You old goat of a fixer, you must’ve gone crazy when you hit your head. I see no he, just a precious payday.”

  Whitey’s light flickered off and the two scavengers faded into the distance. But Micah didn’t need to follow them to know where they were going.

  Scavengers outnumbered fixers in the Boneyard by at least ten to one. The majority of them worked at the main recycling building: the Beast.

  Boneyard refuse continually fed the Beast’s insatiable appetite. Scavengers melted precious technology back to base metals for resell. And now they had Skip, made from ferrotanium—one of the most precious metals.

  Micah regained his bearings and hopped back into his cart. To his relief, it started, and he drove the couple of miles to where the Beast dwelled in the heart of the Boneyard. He shut off his cart and walked the rest of the distance, about fifty yards, to the edge of the clearing.

  Another thwomp shook the earth, accompanied by the screech of shredding metal. Mounds of junk around him rattled. Instinctively he ducked behind a stack of I-beams.

  Looking up, he saw a crane, several stories high, suspending a massive, sharpened metal wedge from steel cabling. The wedge was known as the guillotine, the teeth of the Beast, a technological carryover from the Cold War. Its sole purpose during those dark days had been to chop strategic bombers into quarters so they could be viewed from satellite as visual evidence of disarmament.

  Scavengers enjoyed using it to slice up scrap into bite-sized pieces.

  Yards behind the crane and the guillotine, smoke billowed from brick and metal stacks, the Beast’s belly. The old factory ran only at night because of the heat it generated.

  Micah rubbed his arms, sure the forge fires were singeing the hair on them.

  Across the way, he saw them. Four scavengers punched, pulled, and kicked Skip, dragging him to the ground with ropes and cords.

  Skip was brave and wouldn’t fight back.

  This reminded Micah of the war footage, the Battle of Tallahassee—the vultures, the scavengers, clawing and ripping into the dead.

  Just like what was happening to Skip.

  Bile burned the back of Micah’s throat and his stomach convulsed.

  Margaret would have called him a fool for getting himself into this. She’d always known the right way to handle situations. Not like him.

  “Hey,” the nasal scavenger said, “let’s cut this thing in half. I’ve never seen anything alive get cut in half.”

  The rest agreed, and one of them ran to the crane. A moment later the machine pivoted its arm, swinging the guillotine over the struggling group.

  Those long nights when Kitpie had refused to interact, Micah had always been able to rely on Skip. He was almost like a son.

  Micah squeezed his eyes shut. Margaret would’ve loved Skip.

  He loved Skip.

  What would Thomas Cole, the variable man, do? He faced a similar situation when he was running from the Security police. He improvised a protective force field from a junk generator to protect himself, much like the field Nikolaevna built.

  Micah leaned against a crumpled refrigerator, running his hands over the rough and jagged edges of twisted metal. Then his left hand plunged into the nearest pile, searching. He pushed aside the pain as his arm scraped against unseen serrations.

  At last he pulled out an old electric motor, ripped off the cowling, and yanked out a transformer. His hands moved without him, on another level, using his hot pen and multi-tool like an artist’s brush. They worked, rewiring the primary fields, altering the component. He took one of the portabatteries from his backpack and fit it into his homemade device. The power circuit hummed.

  Micah unbuckled his belt and dropped it onto the cart, the metal buckle clanging against the hood. He unslung his backpack and tossed it onto the seat. He wouldn’t need it either.

  Grasping his device, he ran faster than he imagined his tired body could ever run, jumping over piles of scrap, sidestepping others, darting out into the clearing, headed straight for the guillotine.

  The scavengers had Skip on the ground; they were strapping his arms and legs to a makeshift table of railroad ties. Thirty feet above them, the large blade dangled from its braided cable.

  The homemade device in Micah’s hand hummed louder.

  He hurled it. The hum increased to a squeal, and with a solid thunk it stuck to the side of the steel guillotine. The ruckus underneath quieted as the men looked up. The device reached a crescendo for one painful second, then went silent.

  Nuts, bolts, light pieces of metal—they all zipped up from the ground, past Micah, and clinked against the guillotine. Two metal drums yards away started a leisurely roll toward the blade. Crushed cars and waded rebar near the guillotine shivered in electromagnetic anticipation.

  The nasal scavenger, the one with the breastplate, also rose from the ground. His feet churned wildly as he launched upward and stuck to the guillotine. The arms of another scavenger jerked into the air, lifted by his steel armbands. He left his feet and slammed against his cohort.

  “Let’s go.” One of the remaining scavengers tried to scramble away, but he and his buddy were already caught in the expanding magnetic field, caught by their scrap armor. They, too, flew upward and violently banged into the guillotine magnet, sticking.

  Metal scraps buffeted them, covering them. A hanging disco ball of twisted metal.

  Micah ran to Skip. “Come on.” He burned through the bot’s bonds with his hot pen and helped him from the ground.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Skip said. “I couldn’t resist. Look at me, I’m a mess. An absolute mess.” He brushed dirt off his legs.

  “I know, your programming. Come on.” Micah grabbed his arm and they ran to the cart and sped into the night, beyond the Beast.

  The portabattery on Micah’s electromagnet died and the bloodied group dropped to the earth in a crashing heap, cursing Micah and his bot.

  Hangar Echo

  Through the dust, through the nighttime heat, they exited the metal mountains into the oldest section of the Boneyard: the aircraft graves.

  Silent, wide-eyed, and wary of ambushes, Micah and Skip motored along between a row of retired F-16s spaced evenly in immaculate rows, sent here to dwindle away, to be used for spare parts. Some had their wings removed, others were bandaged in white to protect them from the sun. After the F-16s they moved past an acre of Apaches, their long propellers drooping to the ground.

  All abandoned.

  After several peaceful miles of winding through F-4s and tankers, they reached the northern hangars. These looked no different from any of the other numerous hangars in the junkyard, but Micah knew what they hid inside.

  When Machine X arrived from Wright-Pat, the Air Force had squirreled it away, never to be seen again.

  The three northern hangars, imposing, yards away, were able to house the largest jetliner or military aircraft with plenty of room to spare. The beige paint and brown hangar trim hadn’t been refreshed in years. Maybe the plan was to let them fade and weather so they would be uninteresting. Nobody would pay them any attention.

  A high fence formed a perimeter around the hangars, and every few yards, a yellowe
d light shone from a toothpick of a utility pole.

  They parked the Easy-Go at a safe distance and walked to a section of fence where a couple of the lights had died, leaving the area darker than the rest.

  Micah scanned the chain link, checking for any sign of booby traps or guards.

  “Sir,” Skip said, “what are you going to do?”

  “Shhh. We’re going to cut through it.”

  “But isn’t that illegal?”

  “That’s why you’re going to do it.”

  Skip backed up. “But sir, me?”

  Micah pointed. “Open this section of fence.”

  “I can’t—my programming.”

  “Don’t give me that. There’s nothing stopping you. Remember what McCray told us about the coming war.”

  Skip moved forward. He looked back at Micah then at the fence. Grabbing hold of a section of links, Skip peeled them apart as easily as if he were opening a bag of chips. The snap of each wire echoed against the corrugated metal hangars.

  Micah hurried through the opening, his partner in crime following closely behind. They scurried across the asphalt taxiway, heading for Hangar Echo 021. This was the one nearest them, and the one that Douglas (the fixer with the lisp) had said contained Machine X.

  The Air Force had wanted to keep the move secret, but the government is never good at keeping secrets, and word spread fast. Media had descended on the Boneyard, hoping to get pictures and tours of the last remaining relic from the war. A war trophy.

  According to Douglas, months passed while the engineers attempted to gain entrance into the ship. It had withstood plasma torches and ferro-saws. Some had even wanted to use the guillotine to crack it open like a clam, but that never happened. The military wanted the technology to remain intact, unspoiled. So Machine X sat, waiting for a time when they could figure out how to enter it.

  Within a year, the war had ended, and most people moved on. They wanted to put it behind them.

  After a few tense minutes of waiting and realizing there were no guards, Micah dashed to the side of the hangar, Skip on his heels.

  An electrical conduit ran the length of the hangar, leading to a door yards away. Old hands traced along the nestled cluster of wires as Micah moved toward the door, pausing when he hit a junction box. His multi-tool pried the cover off the lock, and his pen light exposed a confusing network of wires and terminal boards, but his hands knew which ones disabled the alarms and which ones opened the door.