Rise of the Robot Army

by Robert Venditti

  Miles looked glumly at his steel tray, sporking through his meal of liver and onions, onion hash, and onion rings. Every meal Miles and Henry were served was drowning in onions. At least they were given water to wash it down with, which Miles took to mean the kitchen hadn’t devised a method for juicing onions yet. Thank God.

  Henry shoveled a sporkful of chow into his mouth and choked it down. “Some say eating onions can help repel insects,” he managed.

  “No offense, Henry, but you keep eating onions, you’re going to repel me.”

  “The odor is very mutual, I assure you.”

  Miles set down his spork and exhaled deeply. There was a weight that had been pressing down on his heart like a two-ton boulder since they’d arrived, and he couldn’t carry it anymore.

  “Henry, I screwed up.”

  “You think?” Henry groused.

  “What I mean is, you tried to warn me and I wouldn’t listen. I thought I didn’t need anyone anymore. I got too big for my cape, and now . . .” Miles didn’t want to go on, for fear that saying the next part out loud would make it come true. But it needed to be said. “And now I may have taken Gilded away from the world forever.”

  Henry said nothing.

  “You’re my best friend,” Miles croaked. “Without you, I never would’ve been able to do the things I’ve done. You helped me figure out how the cape worked. You taught me how to be a superhero. So I promise: If we somehow get out of this place, we’re going to be a team again. You and me. Because I was never Gilded all by myself. We were Gilded together.”

  Henry finally spoke. “You thought you had it all figured out, and now look where we are.” He breathed out as though he was letting the bad feelings leave him. “But there’s no point holding a grudge about it in here. As bad as this place is, it’d be a heck of a lot worse if you weren’t in here with me. No matter where we are, we’re still a team. Always will be.” Henry extended his hand. “Apology accepted.”

  Miles shook Henry’s hand. Never in his life had he been so relieved. “Thanks.”

  Henry scooped up a glob of onion hash and grimaced. “I should make you eat my next three days’ meals as punishment.”

  “I don’t know about you, but I don’t plan to be here that long.” Miles shot a surreptitious peek at the robots guards. “There has to be a way out of this place.”

  “There is,” Henry affirmed, “and I’m going to find it.” He stabbed his spork into an onion ring for emphasis.

  There was a beep from the lock on the door, and Miles and Henry turned to see Lenore walk in with the corporal in front and a battle robot flanking her on either side. Actually, what she was doing couldn’t really be classified as walking. It was more like shuffling because her ankles were locked in heavy manacles with a short chain between them. There was just enough length to keep her upright and moving forward, but that was it. Her wrists were bound, too, but there was no chain. The manacles were locked together, holding her arms in place.

  The robots had each produced from their tool assortments a snare pole and a noose, like the one Miles had seen a woman from animal control use to catch a rabid raccoon. One of the loops was fastened around Lenore’s neck and the other was around her waist. Miles couldn’t imagine a tiger with a history of mauling circus-goers being treated with any more security.

  It made no sense. Lenore was anything but threatening. She had slender arms and legs. Her head was bowed, her straight black hair hiding her face like a curtain. Her skin looked like the type that tanned rich brown, but it must’ve been forever since she’d experienced sunlight because it was nowhere near that shade. She looked miserable.

  Miles and Henry exchanged an uneasy glance. They didn’t say anything, but Miles could tell Henry was thinking the same thing he was: At least we’re not her.

  The robots led Lenore to a table on the other side of the cafeteria. They swapped out their snare poles for their three-fingered clamps and separated the manacles on Lenore’s wrists, keeping a firm grasp on her arms as they sat her down. They attached each wrist manacle to a chain bolted down to the table, then set about doing the same to her ankles. Even scarier than the size and weight of the robots was the dexterity with which they moved. Their fingers were nimble enough to tie shoes on a pair of eggs.

  “Subject One secure,” the robots droned in unison. They backed away and stood against the wall behind Lenore.

  The corporal pressed a button on the wall, and a mechanical dumbwaiter lowered from the ceiling, setting a tray of food and a single spork on the table in front of Lenore. “Behave yourself,” the corporal warned, “or the General says next time you’ll be punished for two weeks before you’re allowed to eat outside of your cell.” Then he turned and marched out of the room, the door closing behind him.

  The room fell silent except for the rattling of Lenore’s chains. She started on her onion hash and craned her neck down, so her spork could reach her mouth. There was just enough slack in the chains to allow her to feed herself, and not a single link more.

  “Oh, man,” Miles whispered. “They actually found a way to make eating onions worse.”

  Lenore shot Miles a menacing look he’d only ever seen on people twenty years older. She must have lived through a lot to have a stare like that in her repertoire. “Are you Italian?” she snapped.

  “Um . . . I don’t think so.” The Taylor family had Scottish and Norwegian and a bunch of other -“ishes” and -“ians” in its gene pool. Miles had never really been able to keep them all straight. “Why?”

  “Because you’ve got some roamin’ eyes.”

  Miles blinked. “Huh?”

  “It’s a homophone,” Henry said, grinning appreciatively. “She swapped out ‘Roman’ with ‘roamin’.’ She made a vocabulary joke.”

  “No wonder I didn’t get it.”

  Henry picked up his tray and stood from the table. “I’m going to sit with her.”

  Before Miles could ask whether Henry was willing to risk death-by-can-opener, Henry was already crossing the room. The robots shifted their scanner eyes toward him, tracking his movement.

  Henry set down his tray across from Lenore. “It’s nice to be able to talk to you without glass walls separating us.”

  Lenore tensed, as though she might flick a sporkful of onion mush at him. Then her shoulders slumped. “Fine. Whatever. Just stay on your side of the table.”

  “Well, I’m very pleased to properly make your acquaintance.” Henry held out his hand, offering to shake.

  Lenore frowned, rattling the chains binding her to the table. “A little tied up here.”

  Henry adjusted his glasses. “Right. Sorry about that.” He leaned forward, bringing his hand toward hers.

  Lenore jerked her hands back, pulling the chains taut. “I said stay on your side!”

  Miles eyed the battle robots uneasily. “Guys? Maybe we should keep it down.”

  Henry withdrew his hand, looking confused. Miles didn’t understand what the big deal was either. Lenore was acting like Henry had hurt her, when all he’d wanted to do was be polite.

  Lenore sat forward slowly, like she was carefully considering her every move. “If you’re going to sit, sit. Just don’t even think about touching me.”

  “Fair enough.” Henry nodded, taking his seat. Then he waved Miles over. “Come eat with us.”

  Miles kept his eyes on the robots as he walked over and sat beside Henry. “Are you sure we should be talking so much?”

  Henry shrugged. “It’s just a little harmless introduction. So, Lenore,” he began, “where are you from?” He asked the question casually, as though Lenore was a new student at Chapman and Mr. Harangue had asked him to show her around campus.

  “Toombs County. A town called Vidalia.”

  “Like the onion?” The question had leaped to the front of Miles’s mind.

  Lenore swallowed down a mouthful of onion ring. “That’s right. What of it?”

  “Oh, nothing,” Miles answered. “
Just kind of ironic, don’t you think? Our current diet being what it is.”

  “Not ironic. Irony involves opposites.” Lenore pushed her onion hash around her tray. “This is more like an unhappy coincidence.”

  Henry smiled goofily. Never mind Lenore’s standoffishness and generally peculiar demeanor. She’d displayed proficiency in two separate literary devices in the span of five minutes. “You really know your language arts.”

  Oh, brother. As far as pickup lines went, it sounded more like a put-down.

  Miles cut in. “What can you tell us about this place? Where are we?”

  Lenore shrugged. “Somewhere in Georgia, I think. They brought me here chained in the back of a freight truck. The sun was hitting the left side of the truck before sundown, so that means we went north. The drive wasn’t much more than three hours from the farm where they grabbed me up.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” Lenore answered. “A few months?”

  “A few months?” The words stabbed Miles like a spike through his heart. Was the General planning to keep him locked up for months? Years?

  “Maybe longer. Do you . . . ?” Lenore paused, like she was mustering the courage to ask her question. “Do you know what month it is?”

  “August,” Henry answered carefully.

  Lenore lowered her eyes. “Then I’m fourteen now. Happy birthday to me.” She dropped her spork onto her tray and nudged it away.

  Henry glanced at Lenore’s chains. “If you don’t mind me asking,” he pressed, “why you? Miles and I know why they brought us here. What did you do?”

  Lenore studied Miles, then Henry, then Miles again. “Nothing. One day, out of the blue, there was a bunch of stuff going on at the old Plower onion farm back home in Vidalia. General Breckenridge and his troops dug something up out of the ground. I only ever saw it draped under canvas, but I could tell it was big. Once they had it, I figured they’d move on. But they caught me watching them and arrested me. They told me I was a danger to other people, like I might make people sick or something. I’ve been here ever since.”

  An onion farm . . . Plower . . .

  “Plower!” Miles blurted.

  Lenore fishhooked an eyebrow. “You been there?”

  “No. But the General said something about a guy named Donald Plower. He mentioned the parking garage where I met Gilded, too. Did you know Donald Plower?”

  Lenore shrugged, clinking her chains against the table. “No one did. He was more a local legend. Like a ghost story. The onion farm had been in his family for generations, but one day he just up and left. No explanation. No good-byes. Some said he moved to Atlanta, but no one in Vidalia ever heard from him again. That all happened a long time before I was born, but people still talk about it around town. The farm was abandoned for decades. Right up until the General and his troops arrived.”

  “Curious,” Henry said distantly. If Miles had X-ray vision, he was certain he would’ve seen gears turning in Henry’s brain. He’d been given a clue, and he was going to suss it out.

  Henry changed tacks. “What about your parents? They must be looking for you, right?”

  “We aren’t close.” Lenore stated it like a fact. This wasn’t the typical kid-says-their-parents-don’t-care-what-happens-to-them-but-they-know-their-parents-really-do-care-what-happens-to-them talk. This was no-joke-my-parents-really-don’t-care-what-happens-to-me talk. It was the loneliest thing Miles had ever heard.

  “They’re still your parents,” Miles said. “They’ll be looking for you.” He thought again of his dad. Miles’s last words to him had been spoken in anger. What if those were the final words they ever shared between them? The thought hit Miles like one of the Jammer’s punches to the gut.

  Lenore’s jaw clenched. “No.”

  “What do you mean? They—”

  “Just drop it!” Lenore shouted. She squeezed her fists, like she was trying to keep something from exploding within.

  The moment passed, and Lenore deflated. She dabbed her eyes with the back of her wrist. Realizing Miles was watching, she flicked her tray of food, sending it skidding down the table. She may have been small for fourteen, but there was no doubting she was strong. “I don’t know what makes me tear up worse,” she grumbled. “The onions, or all these dumb questions.”

  Henry leaned forward, gesturing for Miles and Lenore to do the same. “One thing is clear,” he whispered. “If we’re going to get out of here, we have to do it ourselves. This is a top-secret military base. Our friends and parents can search for us all they want, but they won’t be able to find us.” He leaned in even closer. “Lenore, tell me everything you know about this place.”

  Lenore motioned at their surroundings. Hands chained down the way they were, the movement was stifled, like a bird trying to stretch stunted wings. “What’s there to tell? You’ve been here only three days, but what you see is what you get. Nothing ever changes.”

  “Why don’t they just feed us in our cells?” Henry whispered, shooting a glance at Lenore’s chains. “It’d be a lot easier than all the added security measures.”

  Lenore frowned. “I think they go through our cells while we’re gone. Sometimes I’ll go back and my pillow won’t be the way I left it. Or the sheets will have been changed, but still messed up, like they don’t want me to know they changed them. Maybe that’s how they do housekeeping. Or maybe they want to check we’re not hiding anything that we could use to try to escape. Or it could just be another way of monitoring us.” She looked down at a sensor pad stitched into her jumpsuit over her heart. “Like these outfits they make us wear. All full of wires and sensors, so they can study us.”

  “What are all the chains about?” Miles asked. “Did you do something bad?”

  “Yeah.” Lenore ran her fingers over the surface of the table, which Miles noticed was pretty beat-up, as though someone had taken a ball-peen hammer to it. “I acted up. That’s why I wasn’t allowed in the cafeteria the past week.”

  Henry adjusted his glasses, looking at the dents warily. “Can you think of anything else? Something out of the ordinary that we can use. Even if it’s really small.”

  Lenore shook her head. “The only thing that’s happened out of the ordinary was you two arriving. That sure threw them into a fit. Jerry said they had to come up with all new procedures for dealing with you.”

  “Jerry?” Miles asked. “Who’s Jerry? You mean General Breckenridge?”

  “The corporal who lets us in and out of the cells. He’s the only other person I’ve talked to since they dumped me here. I know there are more soldiers because I spotted some from the back of the truck the day I arrived, but they must all be aboveground or something. Here in the prison complex, it’s just Jerry and them.” Lenore nodded at the robots posted behind her. Their red eye scanners pulsed rhythmically, like lights on computers in power-save mode. It was eerie how easy they were to forget about. Large and menacing as they were, they faded into the background when they weren’t active.

  “Anyway, you two showing up really got Jerry flustered. His cheeks were so red, I thought they’d catch fire. He said the routine was disrupted, and the General hates when his routine gets disrupted. He’s all about such-and-such time on the dot, and such-and-such allotment of food to the ounce, and on and on. I think that’s why he made the robots—so they could follow the routine to the littlest detail. Plus, you know, to kill stuff.”

  “You’re sure there isn’t more?” Henry pressed. “You never do anything else?”

  Lenore’s face went ashen. Her fingers moved to a port sewn into the notch of her elbow. “No. Nothing else.”

  “Lenore, it’s important that you tell me everything.”

  Lenore looked like she might vomit—and not just because she had a bellyful of onions. “There’s . . . I’m not sure. Once a week, they take me to a lab. I don’t remember much after. I wake up back in my cell, but . . .” Her face tightened, straining for a memory just be
yond her grasp. “I can tell they did something to me. I just can’t remember what.”

  Now Miles felt nauseous. He thought of the white room and the balloon suits. The warm sensation clouding his brain and then darkness. “You must remember something,” he urged. “Think.”

  “I don’t . . .” For a second Lenore looked terrified. Then she shook her head. “I can’t remember. Stop asking me about it.”

  The three of them fell into an uncomfortable silence.

  As if on cue, the two robots that had escorted Lenore whirred to life. “Thirteen hundred hours,” they announced in unison. “Midday meal has ended. Subjects One, Two, and Three are required to return to their cells.”

  The robots rolled forward, their three-fingered clamps unchaining Lenore’s wrists and ankles and connecting them together again. They stood her up, once again producing snare poles from their tool assortments and looping them around her neck and waist. Miles and Henry were powerless to do anything but watch.

  Lenore showed Henry a grim smile, like she was somehow at peace with the inevitability of it all. “Thanks for eating with me.”

  “It was our pleasure,” Henry said.

  Lenore looked sheepishly at Miles. “Look . . . I’m sorry I got angry when you asked about my parents. I’m not used to talking much, is all.” She held forward one hand, offering Miles a fist bump. It was a small gesture, made even smaller by her limited ability to do much more than stand and breathe. She looked humiliated and sad and scared all at once. “No hard feelings?”

  “No hard feelings,” Miles agreed. He brought his own fist forward, leaning in to bump Lenore’s in return.

  Suddenly, Miles lost his balance. Before he knew what had happened, he was sprawled facedown on the cold tile.

  “You all right, Miles?” Henry asked, his eyes wide with dismay.