“We should, Majesty, but…” Trooper trailed off as, once again, he considered and discarded a number of responses.
“But it’s not safe to stay here much longer,” the king finished for him. “They’ll have tracked the Covenant’s descent.” He stared out at the ruins of the communications station. “Can we signal for help?”
“The Aneans would arrive first, Sire. The last coordinates the ship’s computer managed to send me placed us deep in enemy territory.”
The king took a deep breath. “So, if our people’s sacrifice is going to mean anything, we’re going to have to get out of here now.”
“Yes, my Liege.”
They found an overgrown track leading north and followed it for several miles until the sound of an approaching Anean scout ship forced them to take cover in a shallow ditch. Trooper wrapped himself around the king, shielding him from the ship’s infrared sensors as the whine of enemy engines filled the sky, then receded. When they were certain it was gone, they set out again.
By evening it began to rain and they hunkered down in an abandoned generator station just off the track. Taking a seat out of sight of the door, Trooper cracked open his chest cavity to allow his internal power cell to warm the surrounding area. The king crouched beside him, his eyes glassy and staring, his face grey with weariness and grief, and Trooper cast about for some way to distract him.
“Do you like stories, Majesty?” he asked. “My guardsman, Imrie, used to tell me stories to pass the time and explain things to me.”
“Do you have a story that explains all this?” the king asked, his voice tinged with bitterness.
Trooper thought for a moment. “I have a story of a man beset by forty thieves intent on murdering him, but with the aid of a loyal companion, he wins the day and finds his heart’s desire. Imrie said it’s a story about faith and fortitude.”
“That’ll do.”
Trooper nodded. After handing the king a set of emergency rations and a thermal sheet stored in a cache on his hip, he moved so his power cell’s light and warmth flowed more completely into their small corner and began.
“Once upon a time…”
When he finished, the king slept, his head pillowed on the Andrometalic’s broken elbow, his breathing quiet and undisturbed. Trooper watched over him throughout the night while the rain pelted the ground outside and the Anean scout ships filled the skies with the noise of their searching.
They withdrew just before sunrise, taking the rain with them, and Trooper and the king emerged cautiously into the open and set out once again.
They walked for two full days and nights, guided by the moon and the light from Trooper’s eyes after sunset. When His Majesty began to stumble with fatigue, he finally allowed the Andrometalic to carry him and, cradling the young king in his arms, Trooper ran, eating up the miles, until dawn cast a pinkish yellow glow across the landscape, then he set him down on the shore of a large, artificial lake.
The king blinked sleepily. “Where are we?” he asked.
“On the outskirts of the summer palace grounds at Carrick, Majesty.”
“Then we’re almost home.”
“Yes, almost.”
After a quick breakfast, they carried on less cautiously now, down a narrow road that showed signs of recent usage and repair, marveling at the great, stark trees that stretched above their heads, their gnarled trunks still wearing the marks of weapons’ fire, their twisted limbs entangled in the mangled remains of a dozen communications towers. As the road widened, the trees gave way to overgrown fields and hedgerows, broken every hundred meters or so by clearings housing ruin after ruin. Trooper named them for His Majesty as they passed: stables, hangars, storehouses, guest houses, barracks, solar arrays and power stations; all the trappings of a royal family on holiday, long ago laid waste.
“Was it beautiful once?” The king asked, waving his hand to take in the expanse of grey devastation covered by vines and fallen leaves all around them.
“It was, Sire. The fields and forests were an ocean of green as far as the eye could see. In springtime the orchards would perfume the air for miles, then carpet the ground in great drifts of pink and white blossoms. The palace itself shone like a jewel in the sun with multicolored flags representing every region of every world snapping in the breeze.
“If you listened you could just make out the sound of ships coming and going at the airfield at Carrick City. Sometimes they would fly in loose formations overhead. The young heir, your grandfather, used to love to watch them fly. He would wave at them from the battlements and they would always dip their wings in greeting when they saw him there. He wanted to be a pilot in those days,” Trooper added quietly. “Before…” He fell silent.
“Before he died trying to retake Skara Brae,” the king finished for him.
“Yes.”
“I think I should like to be a pilot one day. Did your Imrie have any stories about pilots?”
“Some, Majesty.”
“And did they always win the day and find their hearts desire?”
“Oh yes, Sire. Almost all of Imrie’s stories ended that way.”
“Good. I like those kinds of stories.”
“So do I, Majesty.”
They walked in silence for a time, each busy with their own thoughts and memories, until they rounded a bend in the road to find a vast airfield, covered in camouflage netting stretching out before them and beyond that, a huge, pale stone palace gleaming in the sun. Some effort had been made to repair the exterior walls which bristled with armaments including a dozen gleaming, metal figures standing like statues on the gatehouse battlements. But it was the flag flying above the tallest spire that drew the king’s attention; the flag of Skara Brae.
“Home,” he breathed.
Trooper said nothing.
“Shall we try to signal to them now,” the king asked, his excitement growing. “Or should we just walk up to the door and announce that we’ve arrived?”
“Whichever you wish, Majesty.”
The king frowned. “What? Do you think it’s a trap? Do you think the Aneans are inside? Would they fly the royal standard like that?”
“No, Majesty. I’ve been monitoring their communications chatter for the last hour. Our people hold the palace. It’s no trap.”
“What is it then? I thought you would show more happiness. You can show happiness, can’t you?”
“I can, Sire.”
“Then what’s wrong?”
“There are Andrometalics on the wall,” Trooper said reluctantly. “Your new bodyguard likely, waiting for your return.”
“And?”
“And they’ll be newer, stronger, more able to protect you. That will… be a good thing.”
“They’ll be newer,” the king acknowledged, “But no more able to protect me,” He placed his hand on the Andrometalic’s battered chest. “Captain.”
Trooper’s eyes brightened. “Captain?”
“You’re the last and the first of my Guard,” His Majesty continued. “My loyal companion without whom I would never have won the day and found my heart’s desire.” He looked out at the Andrometalics now stirring excitedly on the walls. “Everything’s going to change as soon as we walk up to that gate. Everything on the outside,” he amended, “but nothing on the inside. I won’t be the King in Exile anymore, I’ll be the King Returned, but I’ll still be me, and you won’t be Trooper of the King in Exile’s Guard, you’ll be Captain of the King Returned’s Guard, but you’ll still be you.”
“But I’ve changed.”
“You’ve grown.”
“Grown… real?”
The king gave him a puzzled smile. “Weren’t you always real, Captain?”
“How can a cloth rodent not be real?”
“When you become real on the inside, the outside won’t matter. Do you understand?”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Not completely, Majesty, but I think I may be now.”
“Yes, My Liege.”
“Call me Imrie and I’ll call you Innes.”
“Why?”
“Because friends call each other by name and not by rank.”
“Are we friends?”
“We will be.”
“We were.”
THE STRANGE ARCHITECTURE OF THE HEART
Lucy A. Snyder
Mira watched her husband Jeffrey draw invisible signs in the air in front of the couch. He’d been planted there for hours; she couldn’t tell if he was coding or gold farming. His blue sensory visor was tight across his eyes and ears. She couldn’t hear the music, or whatever he was listening to, but clearly it was loud enough to drown out the thunderous crack of the bomb exploding down the street.
She hesitated, then stepped forward and tapped him gently on his left shoulder. His whole body jerked in surprise, and he hit the button on the side of his visor to turn the digital lenses transparent.
“What’s up?” He gazed up at her through his smudged glasses, looking annoyed and disoriented.
“Another one got through the shields. Down the street. It took out the United Dairy Farmers store.” The Hand of God southern apocalyptic cult had been blown to microscopic ash in a government anti-terrorism raid, but their cloaked Khishchnik satellite was still in high orbit somewhere, periodically sending honeybee-sized fusion bomb drones down to random northern cities. It was the most senseless of senseless violence, but nobody in charge seemed able to stop it. Or they didn’t have the political will to stop it. Either way, experts guessed that the satellite was packing more than ten thousand drones.
“Oh, jeez.” He blinked, his eyes focusing on her a bit more. “Anybody hurt?”
“Four killed, they’re saying. A woman and her two little boys. And the store clerk.” Mira felt sick picturing them all lying there in pieces in the rubble. She hoped they hadn’t suffered. The boys’ father had to be beside himself with grief. She didn’t know him or his dead family, but she could imagine what he was going through.
“Damn.” An expression of sympathy attempted to crawl across her husband’s face, but it died past his lips. “Well, when it comes, it comes.”
He lifted his hand to tap the button and shut her out again, but she reached out and put her hand on his. Her heart quickened in her chest; she was too nervous to say I miss you. Please make love to me, so instead she stammered, “I’m scared. Could you come upstairs with me for a while?”
It wasn’t a lie. The drones scared the shit out of her. They killed her father. They killed her girlfriend Amy. There wasn’t a damn thing she could do to protect herself or anyone else, except move down south. Which meant leaving everyone they knew and everything they’d worked for and becoming refugees. All the southern cities were bursting with people and housing was so expensive that they’d be broke in a matter of months even if she found decent work on top of Jeffrey’s job. It felt like they’d be trading the possibility of a quick death with the certainty of slow starvation.
“Please?” she said.
Jeffrey opened his mouth to say something, then closed it, going silent for two or three seconds. In those fleeting moments she imagined that they went upstairs, hand-in-hand, and he lay down with her to cuddle, and soon they were kissing, and then they were having sex for the first time in five years.
And then she imagined that she got pregnant, and she didn’t miscarry like last time. She imagined she gave birth to a healthy baby who had his blue eyes and her curly brown hair, and she imagined she finally had a family. She imagined what it would be like to feel the weight of her baby’s warm head in the palm of her hand. She imagined what it would be like to have a toddler grab her legs and say “I wuv you, mama!” She imagined no longer having to sneak off and cry in the women’s restroom when the young secretaries announced their pregnancies at her office.
“I really need to work,” he said. The same thing he’d said every night since she miscarried. He’d seemingly convinced himself that if he just stayed busy enough, he’d never have to face his own grief over losing their child.
She felt all her fragile imaginings crumple into nothing.
“Please?” she whispered.
“There’s a 30% bonus if I can get this deployed by midnight.” He looked puzzled, then frowned in concern toward the kitchen. “Is Rachel malfunctioning?”
Heat rose in her face. “No. I just… wanted to be with you….”
His expression was blank, distant. “I’m really busy. Sorry.”
The sudden spike of anger felt like battery acid in her chest. But she made herself smile. “Fine.”
She turned away and went into the kitchen, where Rachel was kneading bread and humming Christmas carols. Just ever-so-slightly off key, sometimes; it was part of her naturalistic programming.
Rachel was a Juno 2500 Personal Assistant Android. She’d been Amy’s, purchased via the proceeds of a large National Science Foundation grant awarded to Amy’s lab. Rachel started as a gene sequencing slave, but soon she was upgraded to work as Amy’s personal assistant at conferences and was quite well-received at poster sessions.
Amy brought Rachel with her when she visited three years before. Jeffrey didn’t care that his wife had a girlfriend; he probably wouldn’t have cared if she had a boyfriend, either, but at the time that felt like a step too far to Mira. Mira took Amy upstairs and they made love while Rachel made them all dinner. Afterward, Amy decided to go to the store to find a kind of Riesling she liked.
A honeybee drone hit her on the way home; there wasn’t anything left of her to bury.
Mira spent weeks lost in a fog of depression; when she emerged, she realized that Rachel was still puttering around their townhome. Apparently, nobody from Amy’s university had come looking for Rachel or had even asked about her; everyone assumed she had been vaporized along with her mistress.
Furthermore, Jeffrey had changed Rachel’s serial number records in the national database and had programmed her with additional behaviors and skill sets. Mira discovered this when, after one of her crying jags, Rachel gently hugged her and oh-so-politely asked if cunnilingus might take her mind off things.
As it turned out, it did.
Since then, Mira had used a big chunk of the money she’d been saving for adoption search fees to swap out Rachel’s decorative genitalia with a fully functional package modeled on that of a male porn star whose movies Mira intended to never see.
“Rachel,” Mira said.
The lovely android stopped kneading the dough and turned, smiling expectantly. A millisecond later her face took on a perfect expression of concern. “You look so sad! What’s the matter?”
“I’d like you to take me upstairs and fuck me unconscious.”
“Okay, but… I think your blood sugar is low. You should eat something. I can make you a snack?” Rachel wiped her hands off on her apron.
The android was equipped with a multitude of bioscanners and was never wrong about such things. “Okay. Fix me whatever.”
Rachel carefully set the dough aside in a glass pan, draped it with a damp tea towel, and made a perfect, tiny peanut butter sandwich and poured her a half-glass of milk to go with it. Mira dutifully ate it.
“Do you feel better?” Rachel asked.
“I do, thank you. Now, please take me upstairs….”
Afterward, Mira fell into a hard sleep on Rachel’s soft, lifelike bosom. Unlike Jeffrey, Rachel would not have a bad dream at 3am, slip out of bed and go work on the couch. Unlike Jeffrey, Rachel would not start perspiring in the middle of the night and fill Mira’s ears with trickling sweat. Unlike Jeffrey, Rachel could never get her pregnant.
Mira woke and quietly began to weep.
Rachel stirred. “There, there. What’s the matter?”
“I want a baby,” Mira confessed. She felt like a loser saying it out loud. Here she was, nearly
forty, a damnable cliché of a woman with a ticking biological clock. And she was in no position to have a child, not physically, not logistically, not in any way. It took a village to raise a child, she knew, and had no village. She didn’t even know their neighbors’ names. Worst of all, she couldn’t talk herself out of her heart’s desire. “I want a baby so badly and I can’t have one. Jeff won’t help me….”
“I would be glad to help you care for a child,” Rachel said.
“I’d need Jeff to fuck me at least once,” Mira replied bitterly.
“You could get artificial insemination.” Rachel sounded slappably cheerful. “Or you could adopt.”
“All of which require money. Which I… have spent on other things.” Her shoulders sagged at the admission. The one thing I want most in the world, and I just don’t want it badly enough to actually do anything about it. Loser.
“Like what?” Rachel chirped.
“Like you. Your upgrades, anyhow.”
“Oh.” The lovely android paused. “What about a boyfriend?”
“What about one?”
“A boyfriend could get you pregnant at low or no cost!”
“Rachel, baby, if I could get myself a boyfriend, I’d be with him this very minute.”
The next night, Rachel went out to go grocery shopping and was gone for so long that Mira began to fear that she’d been stolen. The tracking software on her phone said the android was about four blocks away from where she should be. In a nightclub, of all places. Had she been kidnapped? Mira didn’t know if she should call the police or just keep waiting. She paced while Jeffrey did his technological pantomimes on the couch, oblivious.
But then Rachel came through the front door, half-carrying a guy who was pawing at her breasts. The curve of his strong jaw reminded her of Jeffrey. He was somewhere in his mid-20s, and his tight black tee shirt showed off his gym-buffed arms and chest, muscles as flashy as any peacock’s tail. But he was so drunk that Mira doubted he could stand on his own. She wrinkled her nose at the stink of beer and dance club sweat.
“What’s this about?” she asked Rachel.
Bless Your Mechanical Heart Page 4
