Robot Planet, The Complete Series (The Robot Planet Series)

by Chute, Robert Chazz

  “Outlawed knowledge, you mean.”

  “The West is full of outlaws, then. Nothing special, though. We just like stories and we like to talk.”

  “Colorful,” she said.

  “Some say so. Some think country equals dumb. But I think people who think that way aren’t colorful enough. Raphael says if people had more flair and flavor, they wouldn’t be weird about the way he talks.”

  “Your father doesn’t have your accent.”

  “He was brought up out east. My mother was from Amarillo. I was brought up around here mostly, with Raphael for a teacher.”

  “Where’s your mother?”

  “I don’t remember much. She was colorful and had flair, too, I think. And long hair.”

  “You get along with your father?”

  “Mostly?”

  “Only mostly?”

  “You know how most vets don’t want to talk about their time in the Sand Wars? I wish my father were one of those guys. He couldn’t claim to have won the war singlehandedly but I’m pretty sure he thinks he slowed our defeat all on his lonesome.”

  Emma startled me with a sound that started with a snort and ended with a laugh. “Sorry,” she added.

  “No, by all means. Laugh it up. I could use a good laugh right now.”

  “I think that’s all I’ve got, given the circumstances.”

  “What was it like living in a dome?”

  “It felt safe. No Blight. No monster spores getting in. Mother kept us safe from all that but it wasn’t just about airlocks. She kept out corrupting influences. With all that’s happened, I thought Mother would make sure humankind wouldn’t fall farther.”

  “Wait. Who? Mother? You mean your captain?”

  “No. Sorry. Mother is what Domers called the Collective.”

  “Strange thing to call a computer.”

  “It was the computer network that kept the airlocks sealed at the right times so we could move between domes without fear of contamination. Calling it Mother was kind of natural, I think. It made us safe.”

  “Until it didn’t. What happened to Mother in the shatter storm?”

  Emma looked away. “She opened all the airlocks at once. The wind whistled right through, from the damaged domes to the rest, ruining everything in a minute.”

  “How fast do the plants die?”

  “I’ve heard it’s twenty percent loss of yield each year. We’ve lost dome networks around here before. Pecos went down two years ago. Roswell went down last year. This is the first out and out revolt we’ve had, though.”

  “That you know of,” I said.

  I thought I detected her stiffening at my words. Her silhouette towered above me. I’m sure, with Vivid working, Emma could see my face perfectly. I’d asked her to extend her stilts so she could detect any threats ahead of us in the deepening darkness. Night comes fast in the desert.

  “What do you mean, ‘that I know of?’” she asked finally.

  “You stayed inside all the time, right?”

  “Mostly.”

  “And you depended on Mother to tell you everything?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Then your Mother abandoned you, too.”

  “Well….”

  “Trust me, from one abandoned son to an abandoned daughter, mothers don’t tell their kids everything. My mother lit out for the west coast way back, at the first signs of the Fall. Your Mother didn’t stop the bots from killing humans.”

  “I wouldn’t equate — ”

  “It’s not the same, but it is the same,” I said. “And where did that swarm come from?”

  “They were pollination drones, refitted for warfare.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “The domes are built around a huge factory. We needed a lot of pollination drones. The limit of their manufacture is only the amount of elements the bots can get their claws on. That’s why we aren’t overrun by crane bots right now. There’s enough metal in one crane bot to supply one dome with pollination drones.”

  We trudged on in silence. We made our way through the dark until we circled back to Marfa’s edge.

  I was worried about death machines coming for me. I’d totally forgotten about the danger posed by Jim Peppard.

  9

  I heard no more screams as we made our way back into my neighborhood. The old civil defense sirens died mid-wail. The invasion of Marfa had entered the second stage of the catastrophe. By nightfall, human survival meant run or hide. We heard the crashes of demolished buildings but no gunshots echoed from downtown.

  For the ill-prepared, walking out into the desert might mean a slow death when the sun rose. We hoped the bots would leave the same way you hope a storm will pass you by. It’s only a hope. You have no say beyond thinking hard and being helpless.

  I’d spent a good part of my childhood hoping hard and I knew how useless it was. Jim Peppard taught me that.

  I never played with Jim when we were kids. He was a year older than me. I don’t suppose he really had friends. He was the sort of kid who, by the gravitational force of his strong personality, gathers a solar system of sycophants and lesser bullies into his orbit. He lived just down the street from my house but we never had occasion for a civil talk.

  Marfa was the sort of place that valued legacy. You could move to Marfa when you were young and you’d still be, “that dude from back east.”

  The Peppards had been in Marfa for generations so they should have been higher up in the local hierarchy. However, they were assholes. That’s the flip side of living in small places. Everybody has a long memory and is quick to remind others who was born of a bad seed. People stick you in a slot and you stay stuck.

  My father the war hero was one of those dudes from back east. Austin, in the locals’ estimation qualified as Other: too liberal and too weird. However, when Steve Bolelli arrived in Marfa with his pretty wife Jean, Dad was lucky. He moved in to the house next to Raphael Marquez, the richest man in town. Raphael gave my father a job and, when my mother left, I spent more and more time with my father and his employer. I came to think of the old man as a great substitute for the grandfather I never knew.

  By the friendship my father developed with his neighbor, I was bound to become a solar field engineer. Raphael took me on as an apprentice and trained me personally. My ability to contribute grew. Meanwhile, Jim lived down the street brewing moonshine with his father and hating me.

  I don’t know what little Jimmy Peppard might have become if his dad had a friend like Raphael. The Peppard family was known in town as a group of troublemakers, quick to anger and slow to forget any slight, real or imagined. Jim Peppard never really had a chance. There were reasons he was a bad kid and a bad man.

  I’m not making excuses for Jim, though. Reasons didn’t make him any less of an asshole. You get to twenty, you gotta start owning your shit and cleaning it up. Otherwise, you become your shit.

  My childhood drama with Jim didn’t really start until a bot intervened in our lives. Mostly, Jim was a name caller right out of the womb. He wasn’t much of a doer when he was young unless provoked.

  It was Jen #2, Raphael’s second companion bot, that caught Jim on disk calling me names and hucking rocks at me.

  This was long before Bob came into my mentor’s life. Raphael hadn’t always needed help moving around. Bots like Jen were called companion bots but they were made primarily for sex. Raphael bragged that he wore out Jen #1 faster than her warranty lasted. Jen #1 was replaced by Jen #2.

  Jen #2 lasted a long time but Raphael’s health had begun to decay by then. Jen #2 was eventually recycled. The latest sex bot, Jen #3 arrived.

  “Jen #3 is more of a companion than the others,” Raphael said. “It’s the chemicals we use to coat the solar panels. They get better connectivity and I get less. I’ve absorbed it through my skin over the years. Sucked the calcium straight from my bones and took the stiff out of my stiffies.”

  I started wearing gloves on the job
at all times after that revelation.

  Raphael was a gentle soul. He didn’t keep his bots in a closet. While he was out in the fields at work tuning up panels and getting sicker, he always set his companion bots to sentry mode. That sounds official, but mostly it was Jen’s job to sit on the front porch hooked up to a charger, scanning the street to protect Raphael’s house and telling the occasional refugee to keep moving.

  One afternoon when I was seven, Jim pushed me into the dirt so hard I got road rash and cried. I had my crying done before I made my way home. My mother wasn’t sympathetic and my father was of a mind that, “Bigger doesn’t matter as long as you hit hard and hit first.”

  Jim’s size did matter to me. I didn’t want to get hurt. I figured the quickest way to end the fight and keep all my baby teeth was to curl up in a ball and hope Jim got bored. I didn’t fight back.

  Not fighting back was the only sin I recall my father worrying about aloud. Not that he was all wrong. I didn’t understand irony then. I didn’t know that inaction invited more abuse and the probability of more injury down the line.

  Jen, ever in sentry mode while Raphael was away, saw the incident. She replayed the recording when Raphael got home. I didn’t know the machine had witnessed my humiliation until my father came home with one set of bloody knuckles and a cut on his forehead.

  My father sat me down and looked me in the eye. “Dante, did that big boy down the street hit you?”

  “No,” I said.

  My father appeared to consider my words for a time. Finally, he said, “That’s the right answer and it’s the wrong answer. It’s right because you’re not tattling and whining. It’s wrong because you’re telling me nothing happened when I know for a fact it did.”

  “Then there is no right answer,” I said. “What am I supposed to do?”

  My father shook his head. “The right answer was to hit the sumbitch back, right in the teeth. In a perfect world, I don’t hear about it. As it is, I had to go deal with the situation.”

  I was a kid and small for my age. I still remember how my head got hot and my hands got cold as I looked into my father’s eyes. By his voice, I knew he was disappointed in me. But he had a look that made me suspect he was excited, too. “What did you do, Dad?”

  “I went over there and beat the shit out of that boy’s father.”

  “Aren’t you going to get in trouble?”

  “Nah. Except for standing, I didn’t use my cybersuit at all. Took him down one-handed.”

  This seems an unlikely claim in retrospect. I didn’t question then that my one-armed, one-legged father could beat up Dale Peppard without using the power of his bionics. I’d heard a thousand war stories by then. I was pretty sure my father could beat up anybody. I still believe it a little bit, even now.

  Jim pretty much left me alone after my father visited the Peppard household that night. He kept his assaults to the verbal variety afterward.

  I heard from Raphael years later that Sheriff Hubbard did get involved in that case briefly. “Peppard’s wife called Hubby in. The only reason your father isn’t in the jailhouse is it’s a question of he-said, he-said. There weren’t any bots around to record the festivities when Steve showed up on Dale’s doorstep to express concern for your safety.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Whaddayathink? A good old-fashioned fistfight. I heard the blow-by-blow. Epic! Your father doesn’t just win a fight. He makes sure it stays won after he’s walked away. Classic Steve.”

  I’d been afraid that my father’s intervention on my behalf would lead to terrible retributions that would go on forever, or at least until Jim or his father killed me. I asked Raphael how to win a fight so it stays won.

  The old man laughed. “You beat ’em until they’re more scared of you than they are angry. It takes a lot of beating to get that far, generally. Long as the anger’s taller than the fear, you’re safe.”

  “And the sheriff never said anything?”

  “Dale didn’t file no charges. Steve made sure Mr. Peppard knew that, if arrested, I’d be bailing your father out before the trial. That’s a threat that’s somethin’ powerful. If Steve got bailed out, Dale Peppard knew he’d get a beating worse than the first one. Probably end in a murder charge. Law of the jungle.”

  “What’s a jungle?”

  “Where most of the oxygen used to come from,” Raphael said.

  Until the night of the bot invasion, the Peppard family’s fear of hurting me was taller than their anger. Big Jim Peppard came out of his house and ran up to Emma and me to explain that had changed. When a civilization collapses, some people tend to pick that time to settle old scores.

  Jim Peppard made that clear when he pointed a shotgun at my head.

  10

  With her enhanced vision, Emma saw Peppard coming and let out a cry of surprise. He came up behind us before she had a chance to warn me, though. I didn’t blame her. Under the circumstances, she was probably happy it wasn’t a sec bot rolling up behind us. She didn’t know the crazy danger Jim Peppard posed.

  He hit me across the back of the head before he said a word. I cursed as I dropped to my hands and knees.

  Then he flicked on a flashlight and saw that it was me. “Well, if it isn’t the shop boy!”

  He kicked me in the ass and I went face down in the street, just like when I was seven. He was on top of me immediately, pulling Raphael’s pistol out of the back of my pants. “How you doing now, shop boy?”

  I grunted. My forehead stung with road rash. I would have chucked the can of apple juice at his head but it had rolled away. “What do you want, Jim?”

  “What you got? Besides the pistola and the pretty lady? Did ya get a lot out of the store? Don’t hold back now.”

  “The store’s gone, Jim. The bots were wrecking everything downtown last I saw.”

  “Uh-huh.” He shone his light in Emma’s eyes. “And who’s this?”

  “I’m the woman who is going to save your life. Turn off that light.”

  Jim laughed. “How do you figure?”

  “There are sec bots in town. They have a sniper range of three kilometers at least. They aren’t fussy about who they target these days. Waving that light around could attract their attention.”

  “Seems unlikely.”

  “The sniper tech in those bots is basically the same as it was a few generations ago. They were first used in Korea to guard the border in the last century. What makes you think they can’t kill you now? Or are you thinking at all?”

  “Shut up.” He pointed the pistol at her head.

  Emma didn’t miss a beat. “Have you ever seen the domes or pictures of the domes?”

  “Sure.”

  “You know why you don’t see piles of bodies all along the perimeter? It’s because sec bots kill the people trying to get through the fence way out in the desert before they even get close. It wouldn’t look good to have all that rotting meat just outside the fence. And now those same bots are in your town killing people.”

  I think she had more to say but Peppard turned off his flashlight.

  “We’ve got to get off the street,” I said. “A flashlight beam might attract attention but those things can see in the dark just fine.”

  “That so?” Peppard sounded uncertain. Then he sounded almost friendly. “You’re right, Dante. We should get off the street. What say I go get Sue and we go to your Dad’s house? Between him and Raphael, I bet they got ideas about how to get out of here with our heads still screwed on straight.”

  His silhouette was clear enough in the moonlight. He turned to Emma to explain, “Raphael’s the richest man in town, even if he does live in a shitty house next to shop boy’s dad.”

  I stood slowly, feeling along my scalp. It hurt, but he hadn’t broken the skin. “Where is Susan?”

  “Down in the basement with my parents praying for deliverance. I told them deliverance would arrive shortly but I figured I better go find it in case it didn’t come
to us in a timely manner. And here you are. Everything worked out.”

  “Give me my gun back.”

  “Let’s talk about who gives and gets what at your place, shop boy.”

  “My father is not going to let you into his house. Raphael won’t, either.”

  “Times change.”

  “People don’t,” I said.

  “You’re going to need an alpha man who’s handy with a gun,” he said. “If I were a bot you’d both be dead right now. Well, you’d be dead, Dante. For you, honey? Well, you’re too pretty to die. Never did catch your name and I ain’t never seen you around town. I would have remembered. What is your name, darlin’?”

  “Emma.”

  “Emma. I like that. That’s kind of an old-fashioned name. Domer, I take it? Bunch of ’em ran through here earlier, chased by metal insects. You don’t see that every day.”

  “Jim, do you get what’s happening? The whole town is under attack. I don’t even know if my father is still alive!”

  “Calm down, shop boy. I’m talking to Emma.”

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “Nice stilts, girl. You can go pretty far and fast on those, I bet.”

  “They got me this far.”

  I could see the white of his toothy grin in the moonlight. “How about you slip those off and go along with Dante under your own power. I know my way around here. I’ll scout the area and see what I can find.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” Emma said.

  I heard the click of the hammer on the pistol. I didn’t need to see every detail in the dark like Emma. I knew Jim Peppard was pointing my weapon at me.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “So?” Jim asked. “If I have to shoot him, that’s kind of on you, isn’t it, Emma? How do you want to handle it? I can be a friend or I can be scary. You want the scary guy on your side, trust me.”

  “That’s the problem,” Emma said. “You can never trust a scary guy.”

  “I’m just trying to survive,” Peppard said. “There’s no rules anymore. None but what we make ourselves. To my mind, that’s is as should be. If the old rules worked, we wouldn’t be in this predicament, would we?”