by C. W. Crowe
Besides, I had things to think about. Lucy was my wife, so I wasn't ashamed that she got pregnant, but I was surprised and worried - worried about what mom had meant when she said the robots had a job for me and worried that they would use Lucy and our baby to make me cooperate.
I was also surprised to find myself worried about the baby itself, since I'd only known about it for a very short time. But when I thought of Lucy with the little boy or girl inside her, I felt something - something protective and warm. I wondered if this was the most basic thing that set humans apart from robots; our instinctive love for our children was something that no robot would ever feel.
When Lucy finally appeared, I was shocked at her appearance. As long as I'd known her, she'd dressed in baggy clothes at least a couple of sizes too big like she was trying to be overlooked, to be invisible.
But now, she entered the kitchen wearing a tight top and very tight leggings. They had been the rage with young women before the robots came, but I'd never even pictured Lucy dressed this way. As she pulled out a chair and sat at the table, I couldn't help but stare. She looked so young and healthy.
"What?"
"You look great, Lucy." I thought it was a compliment.
She stared at me like I was a fool as she used her most sarcastic voice. "This outfit will be just perfect when we're back in the mountains. Hopefully we can find my old clothes or else we'll have to scavenge something better than this."
I tried to make sense of her words, but they wouldn't line up for me. "Mountains?" I asked.
Her face lit up with understanding. "You think we're going to stay here? No Leo. No way. I'm out of here the second I can, and it won't be long."
"But . . . but Lucy. The implant, the DRP, it'll make you unconscious if we try and run - or worse."
She looked at me as her big eyes filled with tears that spilled down over her cheeks. All I could see was that she was beautiful, she was hurting, and she was my wife. I opened my arms and she flew toward me, her pain being released through a series of loud sobs.
My shirt quickly grew wet, but I didn't care. I held her tight until she was able to pull away and wipe her eyes.
She sniffed, "I know you're right, but it's like I told you before, I won't live this way. Leaving tonight - maybe that was foolish, but leaving isn't. We've got to find a way."
I could hear anguish in her noises so I tried to reassure her, "You're right. We do have to find a way. I don't have any idea how, but we just got here. Maybe the other humans will help - maybe they've already got some plan that we can be part of."
She nodded and sniffed again, "Okay. We'll go meet them and see what we think afterwards. I do want to talk to you the next time we're alone."
I moved until our noses almost touched. "You want to talk about the baby? Our baby?"
Her hand moved as was her habit, but this time it went to her stomach. "About that and some other stuff too."
We kissed until it was time to leave.
Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Faculty Meeting
I had never spent a single minute in college and neither had Lucy. The robots decided to do away with almost all the humans before we could attend. Lucy had at least gotten her high school diploma; I never made it that far.
But, even with my inexperience, when we arrived at the community center to formally meet the colony of humans that remained at Los Alamos, the only thing I could think of was that this was just like what a college faculty get-together would have been like.
Lucy and I entered quietly, not exactly sure which door to use. At first, they didn't notice us and that gave us a few seconds to study our fellow humans.
Their noises were loud and clear, but I'd been prepared for it, so was able to brush them aside enough to think at least somewhat clearly.
They were standing in little groups of four or five. Everyone seemed to have a glass in their hands. The conversation was loud so that I overheard someone say, "And she's pregnant. In our present situation, that's good, I guess." It was Doctor Peter Readner.
Just then, we were noticed and the conversations suddenly went silent as every pair of eyes turned towards us.
I put my arm around Lucy's waist and whispered, "Ready?"
She said, "No," but we had no choice. I led her towards the waiting group.
*.*.*
After the introductions, drinks were offered and the women spirited Lucy away. They, like the men, were all older than us. I'd guess the youngest woman was probably around forty and the men even older.
The fact that roughly half the group had moved across the room away from me made their noises more bearable, so that I was able to wonder how they came to survive. But before I could say anything, Peter Readner asked, "We understand you traveled quite a distance. Did you see any other groups of survivors along the way? Any groups our size or larger?"
They were crowded around. I took a step back to get the sounds in my head under control. "Uh . . . no, none. We heard that the robots were targeting groups and I think that's right because most of the people we saw were in ones or twos and they kept their distance from us."
Peter stroked his chin and pushed out his lips and nodded. "Yes, that's what we've been led to believe. It’s good to get confirmation, Leonard."
A bald headed man wearing glasses and a goatee stepped closer. His noises sounded like drums. He'd been introduced as Dr. Harvey D'acord. "If you don't mind our asking, Mr. Smith, how old are you and your friend?"
I didn't like his sounds at all, plus they were all staring at me like I was some kind of specimen to be studied. "Lucy is my wife," I said with maybe a touch too much attitude in my voice.
He frowned and replied with, "Oh, I'm sorry," and then a look of surprise took over as the others chuckled and his parchment white skin started to redden. "I . . . I didn't mean it that way. I'm sure you understand." He stepped back into the crowd.
I started to ignore his question, but reminded myself that we needed to learn as much as we could about what was going on here. That would require information to go both ways.
"I'm twenty and Lucy is twenty one." It occurred to me at that moment that I didn't know when Lucy's birthday was. It had never come up.
Eight heads nodded almost in unison. "I see," said Dr. Readner.
My face must have betrayed my confusion because he continued, "I am sorry, Leonard, for being mysterious. You are the first new people we have seen in almost three years, so I'm sure our social skills with new arrivals are lacking through atrophy - through lack of use."
I didn't really need him translating for me, but he continued, "You see, we are a very homogeneous group. We are all academic psychologists; all of us were teaching at various universities and we all belonged to the same association which was having a seminar here in Los Alamos when . . . when the robots decided to cull the herd of humans."
"What type of seminar?" I had no idea why I asked. I didn't really care.
Readner stood up straighter, "Our group was dedicated to the psychological study of war makers. What better place to have our annual meeting than a location like this - a place where terrible weapons are designed? It's a fascinating field of study - or at least it was. How could highly functioning, educated and accomplished people spend their lives creating weapons to end life? It was a mystery a psychologist could love, but is one no more. The robots saw to that."
There was a moment of silence that gave me a chance to tamp down the noises and ask a question, "And you . . . your group . . ."
Damned if he didn't cut me off. I glanced across the room at Lucy. She seemed calm, but her hand was up to her face again.
"Why did we live? It's the obvious question, isn't it, Leonard? It was because of the lab - the weapons lab. The robots wanted to study it, to take some of the scientists and, I guess, study them. They entered the town in a perfect formation and shot people with some type of hand held weapon. A few of the residents predictably had guns and they shot at the robots, felling some of them, but t
hey were soon repaired. There weren't many robots, so some humans managed to escape into the nearby mountains, but they were hunted down. It was a difficult time, I must say.
"We were lucky that the robots didn't want to damage the lab so they didn't bomb. That's why everything is still intact. But our luck didn't end there. The morning of the attacks, my co-chair, Dr. Lawson, arranged for a sunrise meditation, breakfast and lecture. We were well up the mountain, in the general area of where you came down from this morning, so we could see things as they happened. We were beyond startled, of course. Who wouldn't be? Some wanted to hide in the woods, but I knew we couldn't survive for long. We had no supplies, indeed there had been some grumbling that our breakfast consisted solely of bagels with only a limited selection of toppings.
"I saw we had to come down, but then it occurred to me. First, I guessed why the robots seemed to be eliminating humanity. That was the first revelation, but it was followed by a second - one that offered a path towards survival."
I was amazed at his story and blurted out, "So why - why did they decide to kill almost all the humans, leaving only a few?"
A frown momentarily appeared on his face, but was soon replaced with a smile, one that was condescending like from a professor to an uneducated student. "It was obvious once I thought of it, Leonard. The robots weren't really the cause of our destruction; they were just the implement of it. The real cause was man himself.
"We did it, Leonard. Man finally killed himself."
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Pillow Talk
That night, Lucy told me to lie on my side facing her.
We were in bed and the house was quiet except for occasional clicking sounds it made as it cooled.
I did as I was told as she also got on her side and moved towards me until there was no more movement possible. We embraced and I could feel the soft kisses of her breath on my face.
I loved this type of spooning because it provided the most area where our skin could touch. Lucy was soft and warm, fresh out of the shower.
She pulled the covers up completely over our heads to make a kind of private cocoon, and I pulled her closer to me. "Now, none of that, Leo. We've got to talk."
She was whispering so softly I could barely hear her, but I understood. She was worried the robots might be eavesdropping.
She paused and I could tell from her noises that she was concerned about what she was going to say. After that meeting with the professors with their awful sounds, Lucy sounded just perfect to me.
"Leo, how do you feel about . . . the baby?"
There was no room between us for me to put my hand on her stomach, but I thought I felt a special warmth where hers touched mine. "God, Lucy, I never thought it would be possible and now we're captured and the robots are going to try and make me do something."
I could hear from her that this wasn't what she'd hoped for, but I wasn't done. "But, right now, I don't care about any of that. All I care about is you and our baby. And I've got faith, faith that somehow you and I will be able to raise him or her. I've got faith that we'll be good parents."
That was more like it. Her noises became a purr and she kissed me gently. I'd lost track of the number of times we'd kissed and right now I regretted it.
"Thank you," she whispered in relief. It was time to move to the next thing.
"I wanted to tell you earlier, but I was afraid they were listening. It's the DRP, I don't think it's working - at least not the pain part."
My arms were around her and my hand moved up her back without me even thinking. I remembered in time to stop before I touched it.
"No don't stop. Go ahead, Leo, touch it. I think it's dead. Touch it and we'll know."
I moved my fingertips up her spinal column and under her hair until they reached the hard scaly thing at the base of her skull.
She didn't flinch. "See? There's no pain. There wasn't any earlier today when you touched it either, but I knew it was supposed to hurt, so I played along and pretended."
"But how . . ."
"I don't know. I was awake when they put it on me. I could feel something like a bunch of tiny needles go into my neck. It was strange but it didn't really hurt. But I could feel it, Leo. Remember when we used the duct tape to hold the bandage on my cut? It was a little like that. I could feel that duct tape all the time since it was a foreign object that was stuck to me. The DRP felt the same way. They used a probe thing on it and then one of the robots said, 'Test successful.' Then they got out another probe and, well, they examined the rest of me, inside and out."
I felt hatred flare up. During the time I'd lived with mom and dad, I'd been sometimes amused by them, sometimes fascinated and sometimes angry. But I'd never hated them the way I did now. My hatred flashed red as I thought of what they'd done to Lucy. I had a momentary vision of mom strapped to that table with me over her.
Lucy brought me back to reality. "Once they were done, I realized that I couldn't feel the DRP in the same way anymore. I think it's blown a circuit or something. I can still feel that it’s there, but it’s almost nothing. I think the tracking part is still working, because if that stopped they’d probably know. But I think the pain part is broken."
She kissed me again. That was the second of the night. "That means we can escape, Leo. They can send out a pain signal all they want, but that part of the thing is dead. I won't feel it. We just need to experiment, see if we can block their homing signal or something. Or maybe we can disable the thing altogether - punch a hole in it. Kill it once and for all so they can’t track us with it.”
That was at least a bit of good news. After this day, we were due some. "But escaping Lucy, in some ways that's harder now, isn't it?"
She rubbed her nose on mine. I'd told her when we were on the road that I liked that and she'd said, "Finally, a use for it."
"Yeah, Leo. Can you believe those idiots? Could they be more pompous?"
I nodded which caused our noses to rub a little more so that it tickled. "They are that. And they are all psychologists - shouldn't they recognize self-delusion?"
Lucy giggled so quietly I had to move even closer to hear. Now when she spoke, I could feel her lips brushing lightly against mine. "At first, I didn't believe them - I thought they were pulling my leg. But soon I realized they actually had made themselves believe that humans had caused the robots to come and almost wipe us all out. Doctor Lawson - the one with the green robot hair - she said that man was to blame because he disrespected the environment and that the robots were merely returning things to a more natural state where man has been forced to stop building and polluting and destroying and killing. She said they had done us a favor."
This time I was the one to steal our third kiss of the night. Lucy's noises told me she didn't mind. "The amazing thing to me, Lucy, is that they all believe this crap. It's almost like a religion to them, a matter of faith."
"You're right, it's exactly like that. I may have made a mistake - I told them I didn't think we, mankind, were responsible for what the robots did. You know what Dr. Lawson said? She asked about my education. I told her I'd been homeschooled through high school and you should have seen them - stealing glances and nodding at each other almost perfectly in unison. They reminded me of a herd of robots.
"Then she said that I couldn't understand this type of thinking because I'd not had the advantage of a public school and then a college education. She actually said they would work with me - with us - to 'overcome our innate prejudices and closed world view'. I started to tell her to go sit on a tack or worse, but I kept quiet. It wasn't easy."
Her self-restraint deserved a kiss and so I gave her one - and then another. "I'm proud of you," I managed to whisper. "What did they say about the baby? The robots told them everything, you know."
"I know that. Do you know why?"
"Yeah, Lucy, I do. Dr. Peter Readner told me all about it. He sounded proud. You see, they were up in the mountains when the robots decided to take over. They walked down as a grou
p and told the robots how they could be of assistance - how they knew the robots didn't want to destroy all of humanity - just 'cleanse the earth of its worst elements'. While they were still hunting down people in Los Alamos, Peter and his band of academics, made a deal - they would restart humanity in what they promised would be a 'sane' way. They would work with the robots, advise them on how to colonize this planet with new humans. They even laid out the plan - that the robots would bring them babies and they would raise them as humans should be, peaceful and caring and open."
I could hear Lucy's noises turn dark, "I think I would have puked," she hissed.
I nodded, but all it did was cause our noses to rub. Lucy's noises returned to normal. "They think we're the first. That our baby will be the first they're going to raise here."
I felt a jolt of surprise from Lucy. "Leo, that . . . that black thing, that nursery back in Ft. Smith, so you think . . ."
"Yeah, I do. I think they are planning on bringing at least some of those babies here, maybe all of them. The robots like humans, but they don't like a lot of things about us. I think they want to breed humans that fit their needs perfectly. I think they're going to try and create them here."
Lucy spoke and, even though her words were said quietly, they were backed with iron. "Leo, they will not do that with our baby. They just will not."
I answered, my words matching hers in intensity, "We won't let them, Lucy. Whatever it takes, we won't let them."
I didn't think any more about kisses that night. We just held each other until I heard Lucy's sleep noises and then I gave in to my fatigue.
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Jobs
The next morning we met again with the group of humans that Lucy called “The Faculty." This time, we were told to come to a big warehouse type building on the edge of town. It was a walk of at least a mile, but none of our fellow humans invited us to ride along on one of the Segways that they all seemed to have. The green haired human, Dr. Elaine Lawson, stopped and gave us directions. She noticed Lucy’s frown and said, “I suppose it will take some time for the robots to provide you transportation. We know how you ran away before, so I doubt they want to temp you again, especially as Ms. Hargrove-Smith would pay the price.”
