“It was a store.”
“Now I know you’re lying.”
“It was half collapsed in the initial fighting. No one ever bothered to dig it out.”
“Those places are myths.”
“This one isn’t. It’s very real, I assure you.”
“Where?”
“That I can’t tell you. Not until we get to our destination. Once we do, we’ll give you the location.”
“So you can screw me,” I said.
“We’ll take you personally, then.”
I mulled it over. This sounded too good to be true and probably was. Saying yes was likely a death sentence. But so was saying no. “Even if I got the parts, I wouldn’t have anyone to . . .”
Doc slowly raised his hand. “You will.”
“What, you’re tagging along?”
“Where else am I going to go?”
“No, no, no,” said Mercer. “I’ll take you. I need the parts as bad as she does.”
“Way I hear it,” said Rebekah, “you’re the reason she needs those parts.”
“Only because I needed them so badly. Ain’t nothing I wouldn’t do to get what I need.”
“That’s what worries me,” said Rebekah.
“That includes taking you wherever you need to go and making sure you get there in one piece.”
“I’ll go,” I said.
“Uh-uh,” said Mercer. “You were just turning this job down.”
Rebekah shook her head. “We asked her. We’ve heard good things. The job is hers to take.”
“I’m coming with,” he said.
“The hell you are,” I said.
“I don’t think that’s necessary,” said Rebekah.
“I’m only going to follow you anyway. You know that. And that ain’t good for anybody. This way you get two pathfinders for the price of one.”
“That’s my mother lode,” I said.
“You said it yourself. We need different parts. Get me the parts I need and you can keep the rest.”
Rebekah looked at us both. She nodded. “All right. But if either of you kills the other . . .” She paused for dramatic effect. “No one gets the parts.”
Fuck.
Mercer nodded. “You have my word.”
“As good as that is,” I said. “But you have mine too.”
“Murka?” asked Mercer.
Murka nodded. “Well, I’m not going to let you leave me here to be bait.”
Rebekah looked around, worriedly. “We have to get out of here.”
“We’ve got too many bodies,” I said. “I don’t like how big the group is. We’ll draw a lot of attention.”
“We’re just another pack of refugees,” she said. “Besides. This is my show. Anyone that wants to come, comes. Until the next safe stop. Where to now?” I didn’t like that answer at all. Not one bit.
“There’s a city,” said Mercer. “Minerva. Ten clicks north of here.”
“We’re headed west.”
“We need to lay low for a few hours. We can head west when the heat dies down.”
“CISSUS will be all over it in a matter of hours,” I said. “Looking for stragglers.”
“I wasn’t thinking of staying topside.”
I nodded. “The sewers.”
“They’re pretty extensive. The manpower it would take to scour them—”
“Not CISSUS’s style.”
“Not even a little bit.”
“Mercer’s actually right,” I said. “We have to sit out the night. Cleanup crews are going to be scooping up whatever they can find. By morning they’ll have moved on to the next raid, leaving only a skeleton crew in NIKE to catch anyone who tries to come back.”
“Then we’re going north,” she conceded.
Everyone stood up, mentally preparing themselves for the long, dangerous jog north. I was worried. And not about Mercer. I had bigger concerns than that. There really were too many of us. Four refugees might be passed over as not worth the fight. But seven? Rebekah, Herbert, and Two were the clients. And I needed Doc. Mercer and Murka we could lose, but five wasn’t much better than seven, and they could each hold their own.
So seven it was.
But I couldn’t shake my other worry. It wasn’t just our size that troubled me—refugees escaped en masse all the time—it’s that I couldn’t trust anyone I was with. Not even Doc. Any one of us could be a Judas, and the thought of that was one that would fester the entire way north to Minerva.
Chapter 10010
The Judas Goat
In 1959, fishermen off the Galápagos Islands thought it would be a good idea to set three goats free to breed so they could hunt goat when their meat supplies ran low. In the history of stupid ideas, this was among the very worst—at least as far as the ecologically minded conservators of the day were concerned. Humans, ironically, had a strange fascination with preserving the wildlife of their day. While they were busy changing the very atmosphere and seas, cutting and burning away swaths of forest and jungle to build cities and farms, they somehow felt better about all their damage by making sure species on the cusp of extinction still had a place in the world—even if they were really just a dead clade walking.
And that’s how they felt about tortoises. There were no real industries of note that relied upon tortoises, but people liked them. And they had a special spot in their hearts for the Galápagos Islands, stemming from its place in the history of the development of the theory of evolution.
A mere forty years after the introduction of those three goats to the Islands, their population had exploded to a hundred thousand, and their effect on the landscape was detrimental. They had ravaged the land, but more importantly the food supply of the tortoises. And that could no longer be tolerated. Thus Project Isabella was born.
They trained a group of hunters in the most humane methods of goat execution, armed them with high-powered rifles and helicopters, and unleashed them on the unsuspecting goats. But finding them all proved to be a chore. So they fitted a group of goats with tracking beacons, injected them with enough hormones to keep them perpetually in heat, and let them loose to track down the dug-in, hard-to-find goat herds. Judas goats, they called them.
Then the helicopters would swoop in, slaughter all but the Judas goats, and leave the corpses to rot so that the nutrients would enrich the soil of the land those goats were destroying, restoring the balance. And once every last goat of a herd was gone, the Judas goats would wander away in search of the next herd to join up and mate with, blissfully unaware of their part in their bloodline’s own extinction.
The mainframes have learned a lot from history. Hell, they quote it every goddamned time they invade another colony. And for years there has been talk about this particular corner of it. Were there really Judas bots? I’ve always thought it was another urban legend, like the bot that came back from VIRGIL, or the AI that uploaded itself to the Internet and lived secretly in the background until the whole of the Internet was finally shut down. But just because I think something is a legend doesn’t mean I don’t keep my eyes open for it.
CISSUS was getting better at tracking us down, rooting us out. Even small colonies were being wiped. If VIRGIL and CISSUS were so goddamned efficient, why were so many refugees able to escape? Why didn’t they ever send enough facets to the Sea to wipe out each colony individually? Were we being herded like cattle to a slaughter? Could one of us, even a bot I’d met and talked to several times, be secretly in league with an OWI?
And if there was a Judas bot, was it a facet, operating under instructions from CISSUS? Or was it entirely unaware that its every movement was being tracked? Could it be one of us, narrowly escaping time and again from the facets, hoofing it across the Sea, only to lead them right to the next place we went to hide?
The idea was terrifying. Even more terrifying was that here I was, in the Sea, with a group of bots that had narrowly escaped becoming either killed or uploaded, and any one of them could be the Judas. Even,
theoretically, me.
Chapter 10011
Minerva
Minerva had never been a large town, even during the twentieth-century industrial boom; had never been wealthy, nor particularly noteworthy. It had just been a quaint little village sandwiched between a number of other villages and cities that had gone about its life much as everyone else had. Until the rains came.
At the dawn of climate change, everyone dreaded that the seas would rise, the temperatures would skyrocket, and the world would get so hot it would be swallowed by widespread desertification. Well, the seas did rise, the temperatures did skyrocket, but the heat only increased evaporation, meaning some parts of the world—like the United States—saw a dramatic increase in rainfall. Places like Ohio, already vulnerable to flooding, were among the first places to take action.
The people of Minerva used primarily bot labor to carve out wide sewers beneath the streets of their small town. Some of the tunnels were wide, connected by a spider web of smaller tributary tunnels that fed in from the various neighborhoods above. As a result, Minerva never saw the record flooding that plagued a number of other cities across the country, and it was able to remain a quaint little village right up until the end.
Eventually, much of the world did become a desert. But that was our fault. Grass had evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to be trampled down and eaten by the fauna of the land. When we killed the animals, the grasses grew unchecked, and choked to death. The dead patches grew into sprawl, and sprawl grew into deserts, until dust was all that was left.
Minerva must have been a lovely town in its prime. But now it was a desolate mess of crumbling structures, broken glass, and bleak, barren earth; rows of collapsed houses that looked like bonfire kindling, fields that looked like vacant lots. The whole world was beginning to look like Minerva. It was a stark reminder that we had once intended to build our own better world, only we didn’t. And I hated being reminded. Thankfully, rather than being topside, we were instead holed up beneath it, deep in the dark, dank bowels of the sewers.
I’d been here before, and like many of the areas around NIKE 14, had it entirely mapped out. There were two hundred ways in and out of these sewers and the tunnels were all connected to one another. There were too many exits to cover and very few ways to box us in. CISSUS had a number of satellites overhead, and it is very likely one of them tracked our escape. But even if it was dedicated—or stupid—enough to try to find us down here, it could only catch us by sheer luck. It’d need an army to cover our escape. A big one. And that’s an awful lot of firepower for seven freebots.
CISSUS had all the time in the world. Patience would see our eventual extinction, not brute force. The OWIs were nothing if not consistent. First they helped us box in HumPop, depriving them of their necessary resources, then watched them turn on one another. It was only fitting that they then did the very same thing to us.
We spoke low, our voices quiet and our microphones cranked, spreading out so as to give one another room, but not so far that we couldn’t raise the alarm quietly if we had to. I took point at one end of a small tributary, and Herbert took point at the other, his spitter slung over his shoulder with a makeshift sling fashioned from a vinyl shower curtain he’d found topside. I sat quietly in the dark for a long while, trying to piece this all together, pretending that I wasn’t occasionally seeing that damned shadow again, flitting about the passage.
I had no idea who exactly it was that I was ferrying across the Sea. I didn’t even know where they were going or why. The only thing I understood was why I was going along. And for that, I felt ridiculous.
Everyone had heard stories about these kinds of places. But that’s all they were. Stories. Small rays of hope through an otherwise black period of history. They didn’t exist. They couldn’t exist. It was folly. A fairy tale.
But I believed. I had to believe. No, that’s bullshit. The truth of it was that I wanted to believe. I wanted it to be true. I wanted to believe in the fairy tale. I wanted the happy ending. I wanted to be the kid in a candy shop, running from machine to machine, sampling all the treats; wanted my bags to overflow with cores and drives and RAM and processors. To live to see another day was one thing, but to have enough to retire off somewhere as far away as I could get and never have to stalk another failing bot again? That was the dream.
A dream I’d seen so many chase whenever stories of half-buried old warehouses or shops flitted about.
I’ve watched treasure hunters gun one another down trying to get to one, only to find another picked-clean cache of common-as-dirt hydraulic systems and cosmetic body mods. That’s why I never bothered. And that’s the pot of gold I objectively thought I would find at the end of this rainbow.
But I had to dream. I had to hope. Even if it made me the fool of this particular tale.
I heard the light padding of metal feet on damp stone. The walk, the gait, the type of metal; I didn’t have to look. It was Mercer. For a moment I clutched my gun tighter, thinking that maybe he’d shoot me in the back after all. What was Rebekah really going to do? Wander the Sea of Rust without a pathfinder because of her principles? Doubtful. But I didn’t want to take that chance and I had a feeling that neither did Mercer.
He sat down beside me, back against the wall, turning on a lighting-kit body mod that ran up and down his joints, giving off a soft, warm, sickly green glow. Our shadows ran long and spindly up and down the tunnel.
“What do you want, Mercer?” I asked, not bothering to turn around.
“Look, I’m not going to hit you with any of that ‘maybe we got off on the wrong foot’ or ‘can we let bygones be bygones’ bullshit. I shot you, and you’re up shit creek. But now we happen to find ourselves together on this particular raft.”
“That’s a fantastic assessment. What of it?”
“Well, I was kind of hoping maybe we could get to the point where you stop tensing up on that pulse rifle every time I get within twenty paces of you.”
“That would require me to trust you. And that isn’t gonna happen.”
“Why are you out here?” he asked bluntly.
“You know why I’m out here.”
“No. You didn’t just come out of the box. You’ve been around. You know these stories never pan out, just as well as I do. I never had you pegged for someone to go chasing after fool’s gold.”
“I’m not.”
“But you’re desperate.”
“Yep. I guess I am,” I said.
“Well, so am I. So desperate that I don’t even want you to think I might so much as reach for a gun near you without your express written permission. I’m the tagalong. They can kick me out at any time. I ain’t gonna do a goddamned thing to jeopardize that.”
“I can’t trust you.” I couldn’t. Robots don’t have tells. One could go years living a lie. So many certainly had in the old days.
“That’s exactly my point,” he continued. “Look, neither of us wants to be shot in the back. All I’m asking is that you make an effort to look a little less like you’re going to be the first one to shoot. That’ll keep me from being just as twitchy. We get twitchy, we’re both fucked. Don’t matter who shoots first. These folks will drop us, or worse, renege on the deal when all is said and done. Neither of us can afford that.”
“That’s a fair point.”
“So what do you think? A little less grip tightening and a little more keeping it pointed the other way?”
“All right,” I said. I could do that.
“So let me ask you: How many tricks you got up your sleeve down here?”
“In the sewers?”
“Yeah. I figure you’ve got every major structure within a hundred miles monkey-rigged with some sort of surprise.”
“Nah,” I said. “I got nothin’.”
“Nothing at all, or nothing that you’d tell me about?”
“Nothing nothing. Tried stashing spare parts and weapons down here twice. Both times I came back to find them gon
e. Way I figure it, there’s got to be a couple of folks who slip in and out of here every few weeks, cleaning the place out. It only seems like a great spot for a stash. In truth, it’s just someone else’s donation basket.”
“Fair enough.”
“I got a question.”
“Wow. We went years barely saying two words to each other, and now two questions in two days. I should shoot you more often.”
“That’s not funny.”
“No,” he said. “I reckon not. But I’m pretty sure I know what you’re going to ask.”
“19.”
“Yep. Figured.”
“What was that back there?”
He thought long and hard for a moment, trying to get the words just right. “You have a ritual, Britt?”
“A what?”
“A ritual. You know, a routine. Some shit you do or say to a citizen after you’ve gutted them for all they’re worth?”
“What are you getting at?”
“Back in the day I worked at an old beat-up backwoods clinic out in the hills of Kentucky. A shabby old building, really, in one of those stretches of land that got its ass handed to it in the Civil War and, you know, despite the hundreds of years in between, never got its shit together. The building had this old pair of electric sliding-glass doors, but the motor had burned out in one of them, so only one opened. I must have seen a thousand people clip that other door on their way in. No one ever got around to fixing it.
“The county was too poor to afford a GenPrac model, let alone one of the Pro Doc series, so they scraped together what they could and bought me. They filled every spare bit of space in my memory they could with medical knowledge and advanced first aid, but all I was really good for was digging buckshot out of drunken rednecks and sewing them back up. I had one of those handheld scanners that could detect cancer and a suture gun for stapling wounds together, but that was about it.
“I saw a lot of people die on my tables, Britt. A lot of people. Car crashes. Broken necks from falling off roofs. Emphysema. Kidney failure. Cancer. Mostly cancer. Old folks. Sometimes younger. There were a lot of poor people out in those hills and I was all they had. I was a shit doctor. Didn’t have the architecture for it. But when you’re dying alone, under fluorescent lighting in a glorified shack, you want some—need some—comfort. I guess that’s why they settled on one of us.” He paused for a moment, considering his next words. “You ever have to watch one of them die?”
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