Bot Wars, Line Zero

by J. V. Kade

“That,” LT says as the border arches fade behind us, “is our Underground Railroad.”

  SEVENTEEN

  THE CAR ANNOUNCES when we’re five miles outside Edge Flats.

  As LT listens in on his internal broadcast thingy, I try to picture what the news feed might be saying about me right now. Boy escapes police. Considered armed and dangerous.

  Have I become an outlaw? Lox would say it’s totally wrenched, but that’s because he needs his brain thawed. I just hope the news doesn’t use Aaron Dekker’s nickname and start calling me FishKid in all their vids.

  “Did you hear anything?” I ask LT as the car slows for a red light.

  “There is a patrol car approximately three blocks to the west, but there has been an incident on the corner of Lemmer and Taylor—a house fire. It would seem most of the city’s forces are busy.”

  When the intersection light flicks to green and the car starts forward again, I peer out the tinted window at the city known as Edge Flats. I don’t know where it got its name, because there’s nothing flat about it. The road we’re on goes up and down like a roller coaster, and the buildings we pass are so tall, I can barely make out where they end and the sky begins.

  But, as we get closer to our destination, the city’s skyscrapers disappear behind us. Here, the buildings are short and squat with rounded roofs made entirely of glass. They look like gigantic bubbles glowing in the night.

  “Ahh,” LT says, “here is our destination.”

  The car slows and pulls into a crumbling cement driveway. I duck my head to get a better view. There’s a three-story building made of red brick in front of us with white decorative brick on the corners. Good climbing bricks. An old holo sign on the roof flickers in and out. Ft. Worth Firehouse, it says, but every few seconds, the H and U fade and it says, Ft. Wort Firehose.

  I snicker to myself as we get out of the car. “Is this place a fire station?”

  “In the past. Now it is a safe house.”

  When we’re nearer the house, I notice little pinpricks of light around the foundation and it takes me a second to realize it’s not Christmas lights but a Mozzy Security System. The lights are lasers and they connect to each other forming a perimeter around the house. If someone steps through the lasers . . . well, I don’t actually know what happens, but I’m betting it’s nothing good.

  What kind of house is this?

  A cat saunters up to us, her white-tipped tail weaving back and forth like a cobra. I reach down to scratch her between the ears and my knuckles accidentally rap against her head. The sound it makes is a soft ting-ting, like metal.

  “What the chop?”

  “This is Posy,” LT says. “She is the perimeter guard.”

  “Does she have a metal plate in her head or something?”

  “No. She is a robot.”

  Posy meows up at me, her tail going still. She looks like a cat, with fur and whiskers and everything. LT flips up a hidden panel in her back exposing a set of wires and a keypad.

  I’ve never seen anything like that before.

  LT inputs a series of numbers and Posy meows again. The perimeter lights wink out. “Come.” LT gestures toward a door set in an alcove. “The perimeter shuts off for sixty seconds.”

  We cross through what used to be the laser line and push open the thick wood door. We enter into a narrow room with a few old coat hooks up on the wall and a framed poster that says: Rock On, Brother.

  Directly in front of us is a set of stairs. Light spills down from the floor above us. Cyber-tech music pumps from a stereo. LT goes up first, his steps silent, like he knows just where to press to avoid the creaks in the floorboards. I make a ton of noise, hitting all the old joints. They screech beneath my weight. If we were trying to sneak in, we’ve totally failed.

  But when we reach the next floor, we’re greeted with a “Whoop-whoop!” like whoever is here is happy we’ve come. LT is in my way, so I don’t see the guy who wraps LT in a big bear hug.

  “Dude!” the mystery guy says. “The whole UD is after your metal butt.”

  The voice sounds familiar. I’m trying to place where I’ve heard it when LT steps aside.

  I gasp. “Aaron Dekker?”

  “In the flesh.” He grins. “But just call me Dekker.”

  My brain freezes and I stutter out a few letters but can’t form a single word. He comes over to me and gives me a big hug to match LT’s. “Dude, that escape was split. SPLIT.” He makes a fist and slo-mo hammers it in the air. “They’re playing it over and over on the news feed. You rode that hoverboard like a pro.”

  Dekker is just a little older than Po—twenty-one, according to his Net profile. His hair is dyed in a rainbow of colors. There’s a streak of bright yellow at the front, then blue, then green, and lastly red. It sticks up funny, like he didn’t bother to brush it after getting out of bed, but I’ve watched enough Dekker vids to know his hair always looks like that, like he’s spent too much time in a wind tunnel. He’s wearing black cargo pants and a close-fitting white T-shirt with a gigantic black X on the front. Three separate scramblers hang from a ball chain around his neck.

  “Come check it out,” he says, and leads me around a big fluffy couch to a wall of desks. I count five computer screens mounted on the wall below a row of windows that overlook the city. The monitors are running various programs, feeds, and vids.

  I see myself on the third screen from the left. In the vid, I’m zooming around a street corner on the hoverboard I stole. The vid must have been recorded from the patrol car that was after me. A headline appears and says just what I feared it might.

  Twelve-year-old boy—“FishKid”—escapes from police. Suspected bot supporter.

  My stomach swims. Being labeled a bot supporter is the same as being called a terrorist.

  I drop back into a computer chair and cover my face with my hands. How did everything get so bad? I still don’t know why Po told me to run. Or why the government is after me.

  “Little dude,” Dekker says, and I peek out from behind my hands. “It’s not as bad as it looks. I’ve been labeled a bot supporter.” He nods at LT behind me. “Course, I am a bot supporter, but you’re just a kid. No one’ll hold it against you. Just plaster on an innocent smile and people will love you no matter what.”

  I sit up and prop my elbow on the desk, pushing aside a line of pens. “It’s not that easy. I’m having trouble digesting it all and I just—” Dekker makes this horrified face at me. I go still. “What?”

  “I . . . ah . . . the pens . . .” He scoots me away from the desk and lines the pens back up in a neat little row. “Sorry. I just have things in a certain place.”

  “Dekker has obsessive-compulsive disorder,” LT explains.

  Dekker grumbles in the back of his throat. “I have an affinity for precision. Not a disorder.”

  LT says nothing.

  “Sorry,” I say as I look from LT to Dekker to the pens, and then again at the living room. The place is a mess, if you ask me. There’s a ceramic pig on the end table next to an empty flower vase, which is on top of a dictionary, which is on top of a black box. There’s a pile of old books stacked up in the far corner, organized by color so that the spines make a rainbow. A dead plant hangs from a basket near the vid panel, and the couch is so full of mismatched pillows, it looks like a department store threw up on it.

  But I guess you could say everything is in its place, whether it’s clean or not.

  Dekker holds up his hands. “I just ask that if you touch anything, you put it back where you found it.”

  “Deal.”

  “Now, what were you saying?” He snaps his fingers. “Right. You were saying you felt like Australian cow dung.”

  “Umm . . . I don’t think I said that.”

  “Come on.” He waves me toward a second s
et of stairs. “Milk shakes cure anything. Guar-AN-teed. We’ll load them up with chocolate and peanut butter. You’ll feel better in no time.”

  “While you are curing this case of Australian cow dung,” LT says, “I will go to the roof to listen to the local law enforcement broadcasts. Reception is better up there.”

  LT follows us to the next floor—the fire station’s kitchen—and continues up another set of stairs, disappearing from sight. Dekker tells me to have a seat at the long stainless-steel table in the middle of the room as he whips together the shakes.

  He tosses a couple scoops of ice cream in a blender, then a handful of chocolate chips and two mounded spoons of peanut butter. He taps in a command on the blender’s screen and it roars to life.

  Once he’s poured us each a shake, he rinses out the blender and dismantles it so it’ll fit in the dishwasher.

  “So, what part of this are you having trouble digesting?” he asks.

  I twirl the straw around in the shake. “All of it.”

  “Let’s start from the beginning, then.” He hoists himself up on the counter directly across from the table. Dishes are stacked up on shelves behind him. All of them are white. There are enough to serve two armies. It makes me wonder if Dekker’s is a safe house for more than just robots.

  “When I first saw your vid,” he says, “I knew instantly who you were. Robert St. Kroix’s son. And I told your friend Tellie I couldn’t link to the vid, because I didn’t want to draw unnecessary attention to you and your brother. But”—he slurps from the shake and swallows— “then we caught wind of the UD’s plot to use you and your brother against your dad, and your dad decided it was better this way. Link the vid, make it viral, and it’d be harder for the UD to grab you without anyone noticing.”

  If I was having trouble digesting all this before, Dekker just made it harder. Grab me? Could the UD do that? I guess they could do just about anything if they could get away with it.

  I sift through the rest of the information and pick out the important detail. “You know my dad?”

  “Course I do. Everyone indirectly or directly involved in the Meta knows your dad.”

  I crunch into a chunk of chocolate that the blender missed. “What’s the Meta?”

  “Meta-Rise.” Dekker takes the straw out of his glass and tips the cup up to his mouth, draining it in one last gulp. He lets out a satisfied sigh and I silently urge him to tell me more. I can’t stand this waiting around.

  “The Meta-Rise,” Dekker goes on, “is a group of people and bots that came together to support equality and free will and the right to life. We created the bots into something close to human, because we wanted them that way. We wanted them to think and act and be like us. So who says we have the right to cut them down?”

  He shrugs and rinses out his glass. I’m so glued to the explanation, I haven’t touched my shake in a while. Long enough for it to melt. Condensation runs down the cup.

  “Are you part of the Meta-Rise?” I ask. If Po were here, he’d whack me on the back of the head for being so nosy.

  Dekker grins. “If the Meta-Rise were a train, I’d be a station attendant. I help people reach the Meta-Rise. And in the meantime, I try to spread word about what’s going on in the world that the UD media can’t report on because of regulations.”

  “So why does everyone with the Meta-Rise know my dad?”

  “Because . . .” Dekker trails off. I lean forward. A clock ticks behind me. Dekker points at the stairs and then says, “That’s a story for another time, little dude. Not my place to go blabbing secrets that aren’t mine.”

  A few seconds later, LT emerges from the stairwell and I conclude that LT, or Dad, doesn’t want me to know too much too soon. But it makes me mad all over again.

  I just want to hurry up and find Dad so I can finally get the answers I want.

  “Is the patrol gone?” Dekker asks LT.

  His head swivels a no. “We will rest here for a few hours. By then the patrol will have moved farther south and we will move farther east. If that is all right with you, Dek.”

  Dekker rubs his hands together. “Me casa is Sue’s casa.”

  LT clears his throat. “Correction. It is mi casa es su casa, not Sue’s casa . . .”

  Dekker grunts. “Whatever, metal brain.”

  LT gives me a look like he’s heard that joke a hundred times, but I can’t help but snicker. Lox would love that one.

  “Come, Trout, I will show you to a room,” LT says. We go down a hallway. Dekker follows behind. There are a few bedrooms at the end and I’m given the one on the right with a bed twice the size of mine at home.

  “There’s a vid panel,” Dekker says, nodding at the massive screen attached to the wall. “Bathroom there. You need anything, little dude, just call me through the intercom. Or do what the oldies did, and just holler down the hallway. If it works, it works, am I right?” He ruffles my hair just like Po would. It makes me wince because it reminds me in an instant how much I miss my brother.

  Dekker leaves, but not before tapping the light switch three times, which makes LT do something close to an eye roll.

  I climb on the bed. LT checks the window, making sure it’s locked. I see a few pinpricks of light here too. I’m glad Dekker has a ton of security, and I feel safer since LT double-checked it.

  Maybe I do trust him after all.

  “Your energy is low,” LT says once the curtains are in place over the window. “To reach optimum endurance, you would require approximately seven hours and twenty-two minutes of rest, but we may not have that long.” He makes his way toward the door in that silent, well-oiled way of his. “Please, get as much rest as you can.”

  I nod, even though sleep seems the farthest thing from my mind.

  I am hours away from seeing Dad.

  The milk shake hardens in my gut.

  I may be hours away from Dad, but a ton of things stand in our way. Patrolmen. Government officials. And we still somehow have to get through the force field fence that surrounds Bot Territory. I’ve seen pictures of it on the Net. It’s not something you can climb over. It’s as tall as a building and, one touch, and it’ll bounce you back.

  So many things could go wrong.

  I collapse against the mountain of pillows. If I can survive the obstacles standing between me and Bot Territory, I’m going to ask Dad all the questions stacking up in my head. I want to know more about the Meta-Rise and I want to know how Dad fits into it.

  I’m not going to let him get away with more secrets.

  EIGHTEEN

  I WAKE UP TO LT staring at me in the dark. “Ahh!” I roll over, fall off the side of the bed, and thump to the floor.

  “I apologize,” LT says. “I have been trying to wake you for some time. It would seem you sleep, as they say, like a log.”

  “What are you doing staring at me like a space case?”

  “Pardon me?”

  I straighten my T-shirt. “Never mind.”

  “The patrol has finally moved south. If we are to cross the border, now would be the time.”

  After rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, I look over at the clock on the bedside table. The holo numbers say it’s just before five in the morning. It feels like I haven’t slept at all.

  LT leaves and I use the bathroom, splashing cold water on my face to wake me up. Since I don’t have a toothbrush, I just rinse my mouth out and call it good.

  When I’m finished, I read the headlines in the news feed that’s playing on the screen in the vanity mirror. More budget woes for the UD. Three-car accident on Interstate 26. UNDC raises application fee.

  Just as I’m about to leave, the fourth headline blinks on and freezes me in place.

  Police continue to search for Aidan St. Kroix.

  That’s my real name.
My real-real name, and somehow seeing it in the news feed makes the whole thing worse. I’ve stopped being a cute twelve-year-old dubbed FishKid. Now I’m an official criminal.

  Even though I haven’t eaten, my stomach feels rotten.

  “Little dude,” Dekker’s voice sounds through the intercom, “I made you a Double Dek breakfast special. Come scarf it down before you hit the dusty trail.”

  My headline has already disappeared, replaced by a new one about next week’s vid con in southern Texas. I flip off the bathroom light, slip into my shoes, and head down the hallway. LT is in the kitchen, standing in the corner still as a boulder.

  Dekker notices me staring. “He’s recharging. Just a quick pick-me-up.”

  A charge plate is attached to an outlet in the wall.

  “I didn’t know bots had to plug themselves in.”

  “It is not absolutely necessary,” LT says, barely moving his lips, “but—”

  Dekker butts in. “But a lot of them do. And the extra juice will come in handy if things get hairy.”

  And by hairy, I think he means in case we’re ambushed. Great.

  I sit down at the table and Dekker slides me a bowl. I frown when I see what’s inside. “The Double Dek special is a bowl of cereal?”

  “It’s special because it was made with love.” When I raise my eyebrows, like, Are you serious? he adds with a shrug, “Cooking is not one of my strong suits.”

  “What are you doing up so early, anyway?”

  He gestures to an open energy drink on the table. “I drink five of those a day. I never sleep.”

  As I polish off my food, Dekker empties the dishwasher. He puts the white coffee mugs in line with the others on the shelves, the handles facing out to the right. He even pauses to inspect the distance between them, and then nudges the last just a fraction of a centimeter. When it hits the cup next to it with a clank, he hits them together three more times before moving them apart again.

  “Does that drive you nuts?”

  He looks at me over a shoulder. “What?”