by Simon Curtis
I take her orders and lie back down on the rigid steel, though I don’t think I’ll be able to fall back to sleep. But she obviously doesn’t want to talk anymore.
The sun peeks over the horizon and the first beam of light feels warm on my face. It’s a soothing ray of comfort that reminds me just how cold and uncomfortable I’ve been for the past several hours. I yawn, again feeling very tired—deeply fatigued, down to my bones. Maybe it won’t be so difficult to fall asleep after all.
“Azure?” I’m already half unconscious. “What am I?”
She gazes out toward the molten orb of pink gold rising over her shoulder.
“Isaak, you’re a Robot.”
I hear the words, but they don’t register. My eyes close of their own volition, and I instantly pass into another deep, troubled sleep.
• • •
Azure shakes my shoulder and tells me to get up as the train begins its slow grind to an eventual halt. I can see that we’ve arrived in a city. I wipe the sleep from my eyes and try to pop my neck. Nothing.
“Where are we?”
I try my neck from the other side.
“Tulsa. There used to be a big safe house here, but there was a raid. No one survived. To my knowledge it’s been somewhat off-limits ever since, but I’ve been a bit . . . aloof as of late. I don’t really know for sure.”
Something tells me she is always aloof.
“I still know my way around though.”
Downtown Tulsa comes into view as a tiny cluster of skyscrapers gleaming brilliantly in the early-morning sun. The train begins to pass dilapidated houses and brick buildings that press right up against the tracks. It reminds me of Pacific.
The air smells like humidity and pollen.
Without warning Azure pulls me up by my arm. “Get ready to jump.”
I thought we were going to wait until we stopped, but I was wrong. The ringing of tinny train-crossing warning bells echoes over the heavy, metallic thunder of the train itself.
“When I say go,” Azure says.
I hold my breath and brace myself as my pulse quickens. I don’t know this girl, where I am, or what I’m doing here.
“Go.”
We both jump from the car. I land firmly on my feet and my worries briefly dissipate as astonishment washes over me. The control I suddenly have over my body is incredible. Everything has been fine-tuned. My physical self is perfectly aligned with my thoughts, like I’ve been living my entire life in a thick fog that just lifted unexpectedly. The sensation is exhilarating.
“This way.”
I snap back from my daze, and the concerns creep back into my head as I follow her.
We leave the train tracks and head south. To our right looms a giant dome of glass and steel. Its swirling, twisted exterior shines in the early sunlight.
“They designed it to look like a tornado,” Azure says, nodding toward the arena. “Only a human would celebrate the very beast that would so eagerly destroy him.”
Her eagerness to distinguish herself as something other than human is jarring. I suppose I’m not a human anymore either.
I wonder if I’d ever been.
We make our way toward the arena, keeping close to the buildings near us. Azure is alert, scanning the area at all times. She maintains a complete grasp on her surroundings with a still coolness that is truly impressive.
The only city I’ve seen in my life is St. Louis, and this place reminds me of it. Old brick buildings flank the outskirts of the city center and slowly grow, transitioning to a cluster of skyscrapers that feel more like melancholic monuments to former glory days than symbols of modern prosperity. I suspect all cities in the Midwest would evoke a similar feeling.
We’re walking toward the skyscrapers near the center of downtown when a single car approaches from behind. Azure grabs my arm and yanks me into a parking garage on our left. Her fingers feel like they could crush steel. We press our backs to a column, away from the street, and wait for the car to arrive.
It passes.
I take a breath and follow Azure back out onto the sidewalk.
“We need to hurry. We’re too exposed right now.” She quickens her pace.
“It doesn’t seem to be that busy,” I reply as I check behind us for any more cars. It feels like there should be more people here to fill all of these big buildings.
“This city was the oil capital of the world once, but every kingdom has its fall. It’s inevitable.”
We cross a street, heads low and pace quickened. We pass a shuttered office building on our left, our reflections muddy in the dusty glass.
“When we arrive, try not to speak or even make eye contact with anyone.”
My feet come to a halt on the sidewalk. “How do I know I can trust you?”
“We have to trust each other, Isaak.” She stops abruptly and turns to face me. “Our kind doesn’t have the luxury of operating any other way.”
She pivots and takes off down the sidewalk, turning at the end and disappearing around a corner. I look up at the buildings all around me and start to feel dizzy.
Damn it.
I jog around the corner so I don’t lose her.
When I round the building, I find her standing in front of a burgundy brick building about twenty stories tall. Large gray Roman-style columns stand along the base.
“If we don’t trust each other, we die.” She smooths her bangs down over her forehead and walks in.
• • •
When she said we needed to find a safe place to hide I envisioned a dumpster shared with a few rats in an abandoned rail yard, given last night. Instead, we walk into a grand parlor with black-and-white checkered floors and giant draperies hanging from the walls. A marble staircase sits near the far end, and the ceiling is heavy with ornate, wrought-iron chandeliers. I feel like I’ve stepped into a beautiful old film.
I follow as Azure makes her way to the reception desk. I wonder how we’re going to get a room and how a luxury hotel could possibly be a safe place to hide from the men who want to kill us.
“Welcome to the Mayo Hotel. How may I help you?”
The receptionist is far too chipper for this early in the morning.
Azure casually slides her hand across the top of the woman’s computer screen as she speaks.
“We’re guests of the hotel. I need a new room key.”
The woman gives a slightly puzzled look.
“I lost it,” Azure adds dryly.
“Yes, of course, my apologies. What name was the room under?”
The woman is suspicious.
“Anna Gables,” Azure replies, tapping her fingers lightly on the top of the marble reception desk.
Now I begin to doubt her myself.
“Okay, and just for verification purposes, do you have the credit card that you used to book the room?”
“Not with me. It’s in the room.”
The woman isn’t buying it.
“But I can give you the number, if that helps,” Azure says cockily.
“Of course. What is it?” the woman asks in a sweet, Southern manner that can only mean she is ready for an excuse to call security and have us escorted out.
I panic as Azure rattles off numbers. She’s making it up. The police will be called and then those men will surely get me. They’ll get us both. It’ll serve her right, though, for being so reckless with our lives.
“Oh, all right, Miss Gables,” the woman says with a visible mixture of surprise and a bit of disappointment. “Here is your new room key. Let us know if you need anything else at all.”
Azure takes the plastic key card and smiles sarcastically. She turns on point and leaves the flustered woman behind her desk gaping. I can’t help but let out a small smirk as I turn and follow. The elevator doors open as we approach, and close right behind us as we enter.
“So do I get to learn the magic tricks or what?”
The elevator doors open once again at the fifteenth floor.
“It isn’t magic,” she says as we walk down the hallway.
“Sorry, Robot mind tricks.”
She holds her hand over a lock. The light turns green and she opens the door. No key needed.
“They’re not mind tricks, Isaak.”
I step into the room, puzzled.
“Why did you even bother getting a key if we could’ve just walked in here and snagged any room we wanted? What was the point?”
She walks into the bathroom, turns on the sink, and begins splashing water onto her face.
“We needed a room, and we are going to need food. Yes, we could’ve just walked right in and taken any room we wanted, but we didn’t know which rooms were occupied, or which were about to be occupied, and we would’ve still been stuck up here without anything at all to eat.”
She grabs a towel and begins to dry off.
“In a single touch, I was able to connect to her computer and scan and alter any information I wanted, all before she even finished saying hello. I made it so that to her, or anyone else who might check, you and I are registered guests of this hotel, with a real reservation, a real room key, and a real credit card number with which we will pay for room service.”
I take it all in. “And this isn’t magic?”
“No,” Azure says as she folds the towel and sets it back on the bathroom sink. “This is much more powerful.”
• • •
I finish in the bathroom and come out to find Azure staring out the window. I can still hear the voices, the ones that made my head feel like it’d implode the night before. The pain left me in my sleep, but the voices still remain. Along with what might be an endless amount of questions.
“What are they? The voices?”
Her eyes don’t leave the window as she surveys the road fifteen stories below. She is always watching.
“They’re not voices, Isaak.” She turns to face me. “They’re waves.”
I can’t mask the puzzled look on my face.
“Wavelengths. Frequencies.” She goes to sit in the chair by the window and motions for me to take a seat on the bed.
“This planet is covered in an ever-growing web of radio waves and frequencies—an entire world of invisible transmissions just floating through the air. We can tap into all of it. As Robots, we have a keen awareness of every frequency our body comes into contact with. Some can even manipulate it. The influx of new information during your cellular manifestation is extraordinarily painful, but once your body adapts, once you learn to harness it, it becomes an invaluable tool, and a powerful weapon.”
“Weapon for what though?” I ask.
“For surviving.”
I lie back on the bed, my head swimming. The voices, frequencies, or whatever they are, swirl with my thoughts. I can feel the exhaustion creeping back in. This is all so confusing.
“Who were those people last night?”
Azure keeps her gaze out the window. “Sheriffs.” I watch her face as she studies the scene before her, eyes lost in thought. “The Synthetic Humanoid Reclamation Force, the SHRF, is a top-secret branch of the US military, created to ‘reclaim’ their property.”
“So the army created us?” I ask.
“Not the army, per se, or any other publicly acknowledged branch of the military. The government saw the potential in a technology being developed by the CDC, stepped in, and took the project over under the guise of ‘employing’ the scientists who were working on it. Although I don’t think any of them had much choice in accepting the position.”
My mind is running wild. “But I can’t be a Robot. I’m real. I bleed.”
She looks back at me. “You are composed of synthetic cells—a wonder of biotechnology. The pinnacle of every scientific breakthrough achieved by man. Nanorobotic ‘Master Cells,’ as they’re called, overtake the germ cell production in a human host, which then produce synthetic cells capable of fertilization, and subsequently, mitosis. The embryo, the fetus, every stage of a synthetic cell’s development is nearly identical to that of a human being. The baby is born in a labor that almost always kills the mother, and grows into an unusually healthy child, peculiarly resilient to the disease and minor injuries that plague her human counterparts. Beyond that, she appears to be nothing more than human. A real human.”
I note the emphasis. I must’ve struck a nerve.
“On the eve of her eighteenth birthday, however, the manifestation begins.” Her eyes look past me, lost deep somewhere a million miles away. “The military’s goal was not to eliminate disease or to create a more perfect human. Their goal was to create the most powerful weapon in human history. A weapon that lives, breathes, and is a human itself. They succeeded.”
The phone rings, and Azure’s eyes snap back to the hotel room. I wonder who could possibly be calling as Azure touches the receiver.
“Hello?”
She doesn’t even pick it up, just leaves it sitting in its cradle.
“Don’t worry about it. Don’t call again.”
She pulls her hand away abruptly.
“The hotel manager. Worried the receptionist offended us.”
I assume she usually does the offending, not the other way around.
I try to choose one of the million questions racing through my mind to ask next, but all I can think about is how good it would feel to lie down on the bed. My eyelids grow heavy.
“You need more sleep,” Azure says as though she can read my mind. “I’ll stand watch. We should be fine this high up, though. It’s hard to trace a pulse from that far down. They usually don’t think to look for us in luxury hotels, anyway.”
“Azure . . .” I want to ask her more questions, but the need to sleep is hitting me hard and fast. “How long do we live? If we don’t get killed, I mean. Do we have a normal life span?”
For the first time today she looks me right in the eye and actually sees me. “None of us has ever lived long enough to find out.”
• • •
My stomach growls so loud it wakes me from a deep sleep. I sit up in the white hotel bed, hunger tearing through my body like a wildfire in a dry forest. The smell of fried food wafts through the room and stirs a primal beast deep inside me.
Azure is nowhere to be found, but I don’t think much of it. I need food. Now.
Room service trays sit on a table pulled right up next to the bed beside me. I lift the metal lids and begin ravenously tearing into the feast. I eat and eat, but nothing satisfies me. As I stuff my second or third burger into my mouth, I take a moment to observe the view. The sun is starting to set and the sky is a burning orange. Light glitters off of the other buildings downtown. I lean off the bed and look down below at verdant green trees, swaying in the wind, that surround the manicured lawn of what looks like some sort of bus depot. People walk in and out of buildings. Restaurant signs begin to glow in the fading light. The water in a half-empty river sparkles in the light just past the buildings, past the roof of the tornado arena.
I come to the end of what I thought would be an endless hunger with stacks of empty, ravaged room service trays sitting on the bed.
A pang of concern shoots through me, and I check my back pocket. There it is.
My journal.
I’m ready to start another life—I don’t have any other choice at this point—but I don’t want to completely forget my old one. I don’t want to lose everything. My journal is just about the only thing I ever really did have. My fingers trace the grains of the leather cover and I think about Patricia and Carl. I wonder if they suffered much when they died. Guilt bubbles up in my gut for not feeling more—more sadness, loss, remorse, anger, anything. I think of Jonathan—
Jonathan.
My best friend. The only person in my life I’ve ever actually loved. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to think of him. What must he think has happened to me? Surely everyone in town knows about Patricia and Carl by now. Then there’s me—missing, without a trace. Jonathan is the closest thing I’ve ever
had to family, and I’ve left him. I left him on the night of his mother’s death and, by the sound of things, will most likely never see him again.
There they are: sadness, loss, remorse, anger, all of them. They all shoot through me like bullets, each snagging the flesh and pushing through my body from one end to the other.
I wonder how much of my humanity I’m allowed to retain now that I’m a Robot.
I am a Robot.
The words feel too fresh, tender, alien, to say aloud. They sound utterly insane, even in my head.
A Robot.
I grip the journal tight, hoping that I’ll be able to hold on to all of the memories, all of the good ones at least, the same way. I know they’ll help me retain my humanity, even if I am technically a Robot.
They have to.
I don’t want to be a monster.
• • •
A searing flash of white burns in my closed eyes, and a piercing, droning sound rings deep inside my head. I shoot up out of the bed. The room is pitch-black. I glance at the clock.
Midnight.
“Get up now. We need to move.”
Azure throws her jacket on. She must’ve returned while I was sleeping.
“What was that?”
She seems to have seen—felt—the same thing that I did.
“A Flare.”
She opens the curtains a few inches and peers outside, remaining hidden behind the fabric.
“What’s a Flare?” I sit on the edge of the bed and put my sneakers on quickly.
“It’s a signal, activated using a sophisticated sequence of codes that sends a ripple through cell towers, radio waves, everything. A distress beacon for Robots. We used them to find new Unreclaimed until the SHRF cracked the code and began using them as traps. We lost many before we figured it out. Too many.” Her eyes scour the ground below. “We haven’t used them in several years.”
She grabs the belt lying on the table by the window and slides it on.
“Either there are some Sheriffs downstairs, looking for us, or there is someone on our side who might be of use.”
