Boy Robot

by Simon Curtis

  Azure’s jaw is clenched. Kamea continues her story.

  “We were stuck out here for two weeks. He hid near the trails during the day while I hiked to the visitor center at the other side of the valley to get us water and food. Sometimes I was able to steal, but mostly I had to scrounge scraps from the trash cans. The Sheriffs wouldn’t leave the area. The size of our group must’ve convinced them that there were more Robots around. When I was finally sure we could get back on the interstate safely, we stole a car and left. I’ve used this place several times since then.”

  Azure throws her stick into the fire as she stands and stomps off toward the trees.

  “What’s wrong with her?” I ask, looking to Kamea and then JB.

  JB looks at Kamea before responding. “No one had ever traveled with a group of Robots that large before,” he says. “Kamea was one of the founding members of the Underground and held the record for the highest number of successful rescue missions.”

  Kamea still doesn’t look up.

  “Not a single Robot had died on her watch until then,” he says, waiting for her to interject.

  She doesn’t.

  “It was the single biggest kill the Sheriffs had made. After that, the Underground established a policy to never travel with more than three of you at a time.”

  Kamea looks into my eyes.

  “I was young, and I was cocky. Saving you guys started to feel like a game, and I was being reckless. I wanted to be known as the best, wanted to leave everyone in awe when I came back with an entire caravan.”

  Azure’s footsteps crunch back toward us in the dirt.

  “I was really fucking stupid,” Kamea says. Her eyes linger on me for a moment before she looks back to the fire.

  Azure drops a pile of dried branches onto the ground next to the flames and takes a seat again. She seems to have cooled down.

  “Kamea is a pretty big deal in the Underground,” JB says. I can hear his voice trying to bring the conversation to a more positive tone. “She was, and still is, the closest any of us have ever been to catching Asim.”

  “Who?”

  “Dr. Mayur Asim. He created you,” Kamea says.

  “He’s also a madman, and a terrorist,” Azure says, her eyes meeting mine once again. “He created the Robots and then sabotaged the entire operation. He might be a genius, but he’s the sole reason we are being rounded up and killed. He deserves to die.”

  “Well, where is he now?” I ask.

  “Nobody knows,” JB says.

  I look to Kamea, but she stays quiet. Her face is still and solemn in the flickering light.

  “Why do you guys want to catch him so bad?”

  No one answers.

  “Are you not able to tell me or something?”

  “He knows how to find the Heart,” Azure says with a look of reluctance.

  JB and Kamea both glare at her. Kamea shakes her head.

  “What are you not telling me?” I’m starting to get angry now.

  “You saw what he did today. He’s going to find out as soon as we get there. The Assembly is going to keep him very close once he’s tested.” Azure speaks to the others as if I’m not even there.

  “What are you talking about?” The frustration starts to boil up in my chest. They’re keeping way too much from me.

  Kamea sighs and finally looks back at me. “He didn’t stop at creating synthetic life. He also created a device that would deweaponize you. A project code-named ‘the Heart.’ Only a handful of us in the Underground even know of its existence, and none of us really knows anything more about it other than the name and what it does.”

  “And what does it do?” I look at her over the fire.

  “It’s supposed to make you real.”

  The word hits me like a kick to the chest.

  Real.

  Silence falls back on all of us like a shroud. I see JB give Kamea a look from my peripheral vision, and she grimaces. I don’t think she meant to use that word, but she did, and it stings.

  “You all should get some sleep. I’ll keep watch,” Azure says, her voice as cold as the air around us.

  “It’s okay,” Kamea says sheepishly. “I can take first watch if you want to get some rest. You need to recharge.”

  “I don’t need, or want, your help.” Azure’s voice drops to barely a whisper.

  “Come on, Kam, let’s go to bed,” JB says as he stands and gently holds on to her arm.

  Kamea stands and looks at me again. “Good night, Isaak.”

  I attempt a smile in return as she gives Azure a terse nod. She walks to one of the tents with JB and they climb inside, zipping it up behind them.

  Azure takes a seat next to me by the fire, and we sit in silence as the rustling in the tent dies down. I watch as she smooths her pants out with her hands and notice the same small triangular patch on the inside of her wrist that I saw on mine earlier today.

  “What is that?” I point to the mark and hold out my wrist in the firelight. “I have one too. I noticed it this morning.”

  “We all have them,” she says, holding out her wrist next to mine. “We don’t know what they are, but only we can see them. It helps us identify one another.”

  She takes a protein bar from a pocket in her jacket and unwraps it. The sound of the crinkling foil echoes off the rocks behind us. I listen to her chew as the events of the day bubble up in my head. “What happened back there?” I break the silence, ready for answers to questions that have been eating me alive all night.

  “I don’t know, Isaak.”

  I’m filled with so many more questions and getting so few answers. The entire world is a mystery to me now. Life didn’t make sense when I thought I was a human, but now that I know I’m a Robot, I’m even more confused.

  No. I’m still human.

  Or am I? Can’t I be both? What does that word even mean?

  Anxiety, fear, and panic rise up in my throat and threaten to choke me. I close my eyes and try to breathe.

  “We are capable of incredible things, Isaak.”

  I open my eyes to find her staring at me intensely.

  “Our bodies interact with electricity and other forms of energy in ways that humans can’t. We are strong, fast, our senses sharpened to the point of near precognition, and resistant to physical injury in all but one specific, tiny weak spot.” She raises a finger and taps the side of her head, right at her temple. “Certain Robots, however, have abilities beyond that. Our only theory is that, much like mechanical weapons, we were all designed with specific intents and purposes. Even within the Underground we categorize and organize ourselves like a general would sort and train her troops—those with abilities suitable for fighting, for defense, intelligence, and espionage. Right now there are those who can spark and wield fire, one whose body and appearance can change at will, even one whose ability to activate and manipulate the senses in a human brain is so powerful that it verges on mind control.”

  She takes a moment to stare into the fire before she looks at me again.

  “There are several of us who can create shields like I can,” she continues, “but I’ve never seen or heard of any of us being able to do what you did back there. They said it spanned the length of the entire valley and went so high into the sky they couldn’t see where it ended. I never thought something like that could be possible, given the amount of energy required to make, not to mention sustain, a shield that size. . . .”

  Her voice trails off. My mind still brims with questions.

  “You mentioned Robots having certain abilities. . . . Is that my ability, then? Making those force fields, like you?”

  Her eyes scan the flames as if she can find her answers there. “It could be, but something tells me that’s not the case.”

  “Well, how do we find out?”

  She looks up at me finally. “We get you to the Underground so you can be tested and trained.”

  “Trained for what?” My mouth starts to go dry. I think I a
lready know the answer.

  She holds her gaze on my face, and I see a flicker of blue flash behind her eyes. “War.”

  • • •

  I wake up in a cold sweat with a stiff neck, bundled tightly in a thermal sleeping bag. I find the zipper and wriggle free from the cocoon furnace and yawn deeply as I sit up. The ground beneath me is hard and lumpy, and my body aches from sleeping on it. Any other time I’d be tempted to lie back down and sleep a bit longer, but the thought of it makes my back hurt.

  I unzip the tent’s flap and step out into the frosty dawn. My breath comes out in big white clouds, and the trees at the far end are all covered in a shimmering white glaze.

  “Well, good morning, sunshine.” JB is by the fire in a puffy black coat with a plain white T-shirt underneath, exposing just enough of the top of his chest to allow me a look at his pecs for one brief second. I’m sure he notices. He has a small skillet set up above the low flame, and the scent of food wafts toward me. I’m ravenous.

  “Just in time for breakfast, too,” he says slyly as he walks over and hands me a plate of scrambled eggs.

  “Where did you get eggs?” I ask as a yawn slips out.

  “They’re powdered,” Kamea says in between bites from her seat near the fire, bundled in one of the same oversize black coats.

  “They’re not that bad,” JB says in response to the face I must be making.

  “He actually did a nice job with them, given the circumstances.” Kamea gives him a small smile.

  I take a seat on the log beside her and shovel a forkful into my mouth. It tastes like pureed cardboard.

  I groan and everyone laughs. Even Azure stifles a small chuckle at my expense.

  “Thank you for the delicious breakfast, JB,” I say as I choke down the sludge.

  “Anytime, sugar. Now eat up.” He laughs as he heaps another helping onto my plate.

  “You need to eat as much as you can,” Azure says, immediately sobering the tone. “He’s not trying to poison you, despite the taste.” She cracks a small smile.

  “Oh my God,” JB feigns dropping the skillet and spoon. “Did she just crack a joke? Is the ice queen melting before our eyes? Kamea, grab the first aid kit. I think we might need medical assistance here.”

  Azure lowers her fork and glares at him. He shuts up.

  “So what do we do now?” I ask, holding back a smile. “What’s the plan?”

  “Well . . .” Kamea sets her empty plate down. “After we pack up, we’ll hike to the northern end of the park and up the sandstone bluffs. There’s a visitor center there. We’ll steal a car from the lot and be out of here by sunset.”

  I look to Azure, waiting for her to chime in, but she just finishes chewing her powdered egg paste.

  I take another bite and try to hold my breath as I swallow.

  • • •

  The icy, gray dawn has burned away in the heat of the searing, golden sun. It has to be around noon by now. It feels like we’ve been walking for ages, but I don’t think we’ve made it very far. The lava rock makes it difficult to keep a good pace, and the heavy packs don’t help. At least there’s daylight now to help JB and Kamea keep up.

  We spot another rock cairn in the distance.

  Kamea told us earlier that we were going to follow the park’s main walking path, the Zuni-Acoma trail, from a distance, using the strange rock-pile formations as markers. We’d follow this half the day, then spend the rest of our hike heading due north toward the sandstone bluffs. Because of the rugged landscape of the park, there actually isn’t a trail at all to speak of, just the cairns, scattered far enough apart from each other that you have to keep your eyes on the horizon at all times in order to find the next one.

  Following them from a distance is even more difficult.

  “So where is everybody from?” I break the silence, hoping to pass the time a little quicker. “JB?” Sweat trickles down my forehead. I shouldn’t be drawing his attention to me right now, but I’m sore and my stomach hurts from his nasty cardboard eggs and I don’t really care at this point.

  He takes a sip from a water bottle before responding. He hasn’t even broken a sweat. “I’m from Oklahoma. Near where we met you guys.”

  I step over a fallen piñon branch. “How did you wind up with Kamea and the Underground?”

  “Well.” He takes another sip, his usual veneer fading a bit. “As you might be able to tell, I like guys.”

  I start to blush for no reason. He’s not even hitting on me. I hope he doesn’t look up from the ground.

  “Which, if you can imagine, is not always the most accepted thing in that particular part of our great country.”

  Kamea’s water bottle slips from her hand. He leans over to pick it up and tosses it back to her in stride, not missing a beat.

  “My parents found out about my boyfriend, my first boyfriend, from one of their friends at church. She was the mom of a kid I went to high school with—a total asshole quarterback who decided to make my life a living hell after we got drunk one night and he blew me. Super cliché. Anyway, I wasn’t really hiding anything by the time I started dating my boyfriend, and word traveled really quickly. She got wind of it and ran to my parents at church as soon as she could. I think she was just afraid of what her son was hiding from her.”

  A hawk cries overhead.

  “My parents confronted me, and when I told them that I wasn’t going to change for them, or anyone else, they kicked me out.”

  I watch as its shadow passes over me and races over the lava rock in jagged leaps.

  “My boyfriend’s parents were amazing. They were kind and warm and welcomed me with open arms when I had nowhere else to go. They were older and had adopted him when he was a baby. The most amazing people I’ve ever met. I remember his mom holding me the first night. I couldn’t stop crying, and she just held me. She barely even knew me. Sometimes people are just made of love, like they don’t know anything else, don’t know any other way to be. They were like that. He was like that.”

  Was.

  “I’d only been there a week by the night of his eighteenth birthday.”

  My stomach clenches.

  “The headaches came. I remember holding him in his bed while his dad called the ambulance. It was the middle of the night. The hospital was on a skeleton crew. Every machine they tried to hook up to him went on the fritz, and no one could figure anything out. He was just lying in the bed in the emergency room, screaming in pain. We were waiting for a neurologist to come up from Tulsa. I was sitting with him in the room while his parents were getting coffee in the waiting room. Then she came bursting in.”

  He nods to Kamea ahead of us.

  “She threw his jacket at him and told him that people were coming to kill him. Said that he was in pain because something special was happening, something the government was trying to eradicate. I still don’t know how she convinced us she was telling the truth. Maybe it was because I saw what he did to the machines, or maybe it was because I wanted to believe he was special, that we were special. We followed her to her car and made it to a safe house that night.”

  “What about his parents?”

  Kamea’s silence tells me the answer before he can.

  “They went missing that night. No one ever saw or heard from them again. Vanished without a trace.”

  “Oh my God.” My stomach is turning now. “What happened to you guys?”

  “We joined the Underground and made it to Grand Central.”

  I shoot him a confused look.

  “The Underground’s base in LA, where we’re going.”

  I nod. Yet another answer that only brings more questions along with it.

  “I stayed with him,” he continues. “I had nowhere else to go, and once I found out about the Robots, what was happening to them, I couldn’t leave. I knew then that I would devote the rest of my life to helping them. Helping you.”

  “What happened to him?”

  He walks in silence for a f
ew long moments before responding. “He was killed. ‘Reclaimed,’ as the SHRF likes to call it.”

  “I’m so sorry, JB.”

  He stares at the ground more closely than necessary.

  “It’s okay. I never would’ve met Kamea or known about the Underground if it weren’t for him. I’m just grateful I got to know him while I could.” He picks a few needles from one of the piñons we pass and rubs them in his palms and on his arms and neck. “You learn to be really grateful for life once you’ve seen so much death.”

  A breeze picks up at our backs, carrying the sound of another hawk crying in the distance.

  “What about you, Kamea?” I ask after a moment of silence. “What’s your story?”

  She comes to a halt. “Hide. Now.”

  A chill shoots up my spine. Azure rushes back to me and scans our surroundings. Kamea points to the horizon directly in front of us.

  A tiny black speck flies in the distance, heading toward us at a rapid pace.

  “Is that a hawk?” My palms are already sweaty.

  “No,” Azure says. “It’s a drone.”

  My heart starts pounding. I thought we were done with this for now. We’re out in the middle of a lava-rock wasteland with nowhere to hide besides scattered copses of tiny desert pines and brush.

  “What do we do?”

  Kamea and JB run out in opposite directions, frantically looking for a place for us to hide.

  Azure watches the drone for another moment and then turns to me.

  “You aren’t doing anything, Isaak,” she says, drawing a black handheld device with two metal prongs jutting out of one end from a pocket in her cargo pants.

  Before I can speak, she grabs my neck and presses the prongs to my skin. Cold, hard determination burns in her cobalt eyes.

  A burning sensation surges into my neck, and everything goes black.

  THE TWINS

  Leave her alone.

  Here they were again, his brothers—the boys he was forced to call his brothers—trying to tear her down. Trying, as they always did, to make her feel ashamed. She was strong, though. Stronger than he could be himself. Sometimes he felt like their words hurt him more than they hurt her.