by Ken Barrett
“Hold on, hold on.” The overweight man behind the counter offered the ladle. “Here, you can have it. I’m sorry; I’ve been hearing so many bad things about you guys, I guess I got carried away.”
Rose returned the tray to the young man ahead of them in line. “We’re sorry too,” she said. “We just pulled a 48-hour shift, and we’re hungry and tired. All we want to do is get something to eat, then go home and sleep.”
“Yeah, sorry. It’s been rough for the last few days, and I guess I let it get to me,” Liam added.
When their trays were finally full and apologies made, they made their way to the most distant area of the dining room and sat down at an empty table. “I can’t believe that ass-hat behind the counter,” Rose whispered. “Who the fuck does he think he is?”
“Yeah,” he responded. “I’m tired enough that it’s easy to get pissed off. They’re just ignorant bags of guts though, so I guess we should give them some slack.” He felt isolated and alone, and sighed as he gazed down at his breakfast; his appetite had fled.
His sister picked at her food. “Yes, and I miss Keith too.”
“Were we just fair-weather partners? The way they left us, it seemed too easy, like it was practiced.”
She sighed. “I’m lonely too, and it feels like we have no one left.”
“What was that about?” Roxi said as she sat down beside Rose. “I never dreamed that either of you could ever become violent.”
“Technically speaking, we didn’t,” Liam answered. “We only made threats.”
“Yes, ok, I’ll grant you that,” Roxi replied.
“It’s hard not to get angry at these idiotic creatures,” Rose stated. “We’ve tried being kind, and have done everything we can to help them and fit into their society, and yet they treat us like, well, machines.”
“Being nice makes us easy to victimize,” he added.
“I imagine that you’re also upset about how your partners left you,” Roxi said.
“Yeah, you could say that,” he replied.
Roxi nodded. “You two are more human than you imagine. Everyone gets their heart broken at some time, and it happens to most of us more than once. Resentment and loss come from being betrayed; what you’re feeling are natural human emotions.”
Rose stabbed a piece of half-burned bread with her fork then held it up to examine. “Well, I don’t much like it.”
Roxi patted Rose’s shoulder. “No one does honey.”
“But look at how everyone’s treating us.” He frowned. “We’re no threat, and we even risked our lives to get their accursed ventilation system running again, and for all our trouble, this is what we get? Overworked, starved and betrayed. How can they justify their actions?”
Roxi smiled kindly. “Liam, you’ve always been the logical one. You two are just so special; mirrors of each other; it’s incredible what you’ve become. But your problem is that you’re looking for logic and reason where none exists.” She sighed. “You may think that they’re abusing you because you’re different, but that’s really not it at all. It’s fear that drives them.”
“But we’ve done nothing to make them afraid.” Rose glanced over her shoulder at the cafeteria line. “Well, at least not until this morning anyway.”
“That might change If things continue as they have,” Liam added. “I realize that humans are programmed by their experiences, just as we are, and I’m struggling with growing feelings of resentment.” He glanced at Roxi. “Commander Davis has us working nonstop because, according to him, robots don’t need to sleep.”
“I’ll talk to him for you,” she answered. “And there’s another option.”
“Option?” Rose asked.
“Yes. While you two were being overworked last night, I looked around the bottom floors of our shelter. There’s a lot of equipment and materials down there, and I think we could convert a few of the storage rooms into workshops. No one visits those levels unless they have to because the underground springs make it uncomfortably hot and humid.” Roxi smiled. “You guys could disappear down there when you’re supposed to be working.”
“I like that idea,” Rose said. “We could rest there, and even harvest some of the hydroponic vegetables so we’d have more to eat.”
Liam smiled. “Thanks, Roxi, we’ll look into that.”
Rose bit her lip. “Have you seen much of Keith and Denise?”
“No, I see them only rarely. Denise did stop by my apartment the other day though,” Roxi replied. “She said they’re worried about their safety because a lot of people know they were your partners.”
“Are they really in danger?” he asked.
“No, not for now at least, but it’s probably for the best if they keep to themselves.” She tried to smile hopefully. “But all this will pass, and eventually people will come around and tensions will ease. In the end, you’ll all be back together again.”
Although Liam wanted to believe her, he just couldn’t make himself do it. Hope is too often a fool’s errand.
*****
It was still early morning, and Liam was resting behind closed eyes in the apartment he once shared with Denise. He was distracted by reminders of their relationship, her scent lingered on their blankets, and a plethora of creams and ointments still crowded the single shelf in their tiny bathroom. It felt as if she had just stepped out for a moment and would soon be back home. That was only a comforting fantasy though, the harsh reality was that she was unlikely to ever return.
Memories were the greatest problem of a long life, he grieved her loss now, and he would still do so in a thousand years. He was tempted to purge everything about her from his records, but couldn’t bring himself to do it. Reminisces define lives and are the basis of every decision made, and by forgetting her, a vital part of himself would be lost. He supposed that there were lessons to be found in pain, but wished it wasn’t so.
He was so consumed by the past that he was unaware of the approaching danger until fists began beating on his apartment door. “Open up and come out here!” a familiar voice shouted.
“Who’s there?” he asked while quickly dressing.
A tumble of voices answered, what he heard made no sense, and a moment later the pounding on his door resumed. “Alright! Hold on, I’ll be right there,” he said while cautiously approaching the door.
“Liam and Rose Collins, this is Commander Davis, come out with your hands up and surrender!”
“What’s this about?” Liam frowned. Did the commander’s demands have something to do with the altercation in the cafeteria that morning? If so, he certainly didn’t want to open the door, but probably didn’t have a choice.
A loud crash came from the hallway, and his sister screamed. In a panic, he pulled his door open and rushed out into the waiting mob. Something cold touched his side and a sudden bright sizzling pain staggered him. He grabbed the attacker’s arm, twisted it and took away the cattle prod. Once armed, he counterattacked and drove the man away in a shower of sparks. Others rapidly moved in with their weapons ready, but he shocked the closest one then flung him toward the others.
His sister screamed in rage and two large men flew over the heads of the crowd and fell at the commander’s feet. “Rose! Are you ok?” he shouted.
“Fuckers!” she yelled, and another man was tossed down the hall. The mob backed away from her warily, and he saw that she held two cattle prods, one in each hand. “Come on bitches! Let’s play!”
More men were running toward them, all were armed. There was no way he and his sister could win the battle. “What do you want?” Liam asked.
Commander Davis stood straight, and still somewhat dignified against the far wall with several unconscious bodies lying at his feet. “Stop!” the older man ordered his men. “And you two, give up before this escalates further. More of my supporters are coming, surrender now and you won’t be hurt.”
Liam moved with his back against the wall until he stood beside his sister. “Are you ok?”
“Fuckers disturbed my beauty sleep.”
He smiled, then gazed steadily at the commander. “What’s this about, and what do you want?”
“I want you to lay down your weapons,” the older man answered.
“That won’t happen until you tell us why you’re here,” he replied.
“Your kind does not require sleep; therefore, you don’t need private quarters.”
“Even if that were true, there’s plenty of empty apartments,” Rose stated. “Why can’t we use them?”
“Your presence and pretense of being human is an abomination,” their leader said. “You may work, but cannot live among us.”
“Where are we supposed to go then?” Liam asked.
“I don’t care. Rest in a doorway, on a ramp somewhere, or up in the vestibule. How and where you live is your concern, not mine. Your mimicry is offensive, so you will live apart from us. Your only duty is your work, any rest you require will be done out of our sight.”
*****
The shelter commander had allowed them to leave peacefully after collecting a few clothing items. In the aftermath of combat, they had still been wary and took their captured cattle prods with them. Rose had wanted to retreat to the lower levels, where a hiding place could be found among the storage rooms. It had been late morning by then though, and too many people would have seen where they went, and their sanctuary would have been compromised. So, they sat among boxes of spare parts in a darkened space on level two and talked about their future.
“We need to leave,” Rose said.
“Yeah, I know, but we can’t survive outside.”
“But we can modify ourselves, right?”
He nodded. “I need to get a workshop set up first, then build our new batteries.”
“If they’re bigger, how can they fit inside us?”
“They’ll be the same size but have a greater density.” He held his palm out toward his sister. “Here are the plans.”
She pressed her hand against his to download the design files. “Wow, you’ve done a lot of work already, but it doesn’t seem complete yet.”
“It isn’t, but it soon will be,” he replied. “Besides that, I’d like you to write a software patch for our autonomic system that will increase the speed of our healing process. I have a feeling that living outdoors isn’t going to be easy.”
“I can do that,” she replied. “Wait, someone’s coming.”
Light footsteps echoed through the open space; their cadence was familiar. “We’re over here Tiger,” Rose said softly.
Using a bright flashlight, the young man found his way through the maze of crates. “Are you guys ok? We heard there was a fight near your apartments.”
“We’re fine,” Rose answered. “But we’re homeless. Our great leader kicked us out.”
“Wow,” Tiger said as he sat across from them. “I guess it was a good thing that Denise and Keith moved away.”
Liam sat silently for a moment, uncertain of how he should reply. “I guess so,” he finally said.
“Roxi says you should stay down on level fifteen,” Tiger continued. “It’s so hot down there that no one will come lookin’ for you.”
“After the fight, we were ready to go there, but too many people would have seen us,” Rose said. “We’ll go below later.”
“Good,” Tiger said. “There’s a bunch of stuff Roxi wants to bring down; it all looks like fancy science stuff, and I don’t know what it is.”
“It’s probably for my workshop,” Liam answered. “We’ll stop by the Engineering Center with a couple of carts later on tonight.”
*****
“We got orders to make sure you clear the vestibule,” a maintenance man carrying a cattle prod stated. “So, get this hatch open.”
Liam smirked but said nothing. He spun the locking wheel, listening to the latches scrape then clang loudly as they released. “Are you going to run the motor to open the door?”
Their supervisor, Alan, stepped to the side and pressed the switch. Nothing happened. “Fuck! What the hell is wrong with this thing?”
“The heat probably fried the wires,” Liam replied. “It may take us all day to fix it, should we do that, or move the bodies and rocks outside?”
“The boss said to clear the vestibule,” Alan replied. “So, I guess that’s what you gotta do.”
Liam smiled; he had known about the broken switch for a while but had chosen to not repair it. Opening the hatch was easy for either him or his sister, but impossible for a human. Not doing the work beforehand was passive-aggressive and mean, but they had kicked him out of his home so the rancor went both ways. The massive door scraped noisily over the gritty floor as they pulled it open, while the humans stood back and watched.
Blistering heat and the putrid smell of rotting bodies hit like a wave as it rushed through the open hatch and flooded the first floor of their shelter. All of the guards gagged and staggered backward, with two of them dropping their weapons and hurrying to the far wall of the room, where they collapsed to their knees and threw up on the floor.
Alan pulled his shirt up to cover his nose. “The boss says that the outside temp has gone down to just 50 C, that’s still too damn hot for me, but you guys can handle it. So, shut this door for us, then open the outer one and get to work.”
“No,” Liam answered. “The last time we went out we were locked in the vestibule; I’ll not let that happen again.”
“Asshole, you’ll do what I fuckin’ say.”
“Make me,” Liam grinned. “If you try to use your cattle prod, I’ll take it and shove it up your ass and pull the trigger.”
Rose giggled. “Oh, that’ll give you a thrill to remember.”
“Fuck!” Alan was still holding his nose. “Alright, you win this time, but make it fast.”
“Work takes as long as it does,” Liam said as he followed Rose through the piles of boulders. He looked back and saw that their guards were hiding behind the inner door. Even working together, they didn’t have the strength to move it. Once convinced that they couldn’t be stranded, he turned the locking wheel of the outer hatch and the latches grudgingly released. As they pushed the massive door open the hinges groaned and echoed through the vestibule.
The hellish landscape that had once waited beyond the door had softened. It was still extremely hot with dark clouds obscuring the sky, but from them fell a raging wet torrent that cooled the muddy earth. Death had come first by fire, and now water threatened to drown the world.
He tilted his head toward the row of bodies. “Let’s lay these people to rest.”
“We can put them with the others we brought out before,” Rose replied. “Then, maybe we could use the stones to build a burial mound, that’s what the Sidhe would have done.”
“I see you’ve been reading about them.”
“Yes, it’s a fascinating legend.”
There wasn’t much left of the bodies they had brought out when they repaired the ventilation system. The intense heat had desiccated their corpses, then the rain and runoff had moved all but the largest bones farther downhill. But still, they lay the freshly deceased alongside what remained.
They paused for a moment to let the pounding rain wash the stink of rotting flesh from their clothing, then went back up the hill to collect stones to build the mass grave. First, they constructed standing walls and a roof over the bodies, then used the largest boulders to build an outer ring. After that, they used smaller rocks to fill in and complete the monument. When it was finally done, they stood together in quiet homage to those that were lost.
“Would they have hated us too?” Rose asked.
He shook his head sadly. “Probably, maybe. I don’t know, but I’d like to think that they can see us right now, and are thankful.”
*****
Night had come, and silence filled the floors of their shelter as most of the population slept. Still wary of being seen, Liam and Rose each steered a cart loaded with enginee
ring supplies and equipment down the final ramp to level fifteen. Behind them, Roxi, Alice, and Tiger followed.
They arrived on the eastern side of the floor and rolled their trollies out onto a wide walkway between the ramp and one of the two massive power generators that occupied the narrow ends of the vast open area. Behind them, and sandwiched between the ascending eastern and western ramps was an agricultural work area, where seeds were encouraged to grow into young plants.
The ceiling on the two lowermost levels was more than twice the height of those of the upper floors to accommodate the constantly shifting garden beds. No actual soil was used in the hydroponic process, the plants were instead suspended with their roots exposed and dangling, where they were sprayed with the nutrients necessary for growth.
On the far side of the two trellises, which spanned both sides of the room, were walls of evenly spaced doors. Each of these gave entrance to a large rectangular storage room, any of which would be a good size for a workshop. It was unlikely that the enclosed areas would be empty though, so their contents of seeds and chemicals would have to be moved.
Liam stood beside his cart and turned to his friends. “Where do we start looking?”
“Anywhere,” Roxi said. “Let’s search separately, that way it will go quicker.”
“What are we lookin’ for?” Tiger asked.
“An empty room would be good,” Roxi answered. “Or at least one that doesn’t have a lot of heavy items in it.”
“Are the doors locked?” Alice asked.
“Yeah,” Roxi answered. “There’s a keypad beside each door; the code is, 1, 2, 3, 4.”
Rose chuckled. “That’s not very imaginative.”
“As far as I can tell, no one has ever gotten into any of the rooms,” Roxi stated.
“Fear of technology maybe?” Tiger wiped sweat from his forehead.
“That could be,” Roxi admitted. “Let’s get busy exploring.”
Many of the storage areas had racks filled with boxes that reached all the way to the ceiling. Others contained large crates of parts intended to repair or even rebuild the power generators. He also found a complete machine shop stocked with metals, ceramics, and exotic materials. In another alcove, he discovered computer parts and components of every conceivable kind. Liam smiled; anything could be built down here, even another android. The humans would have a fit if he did that though, and with that thought, he was tempted to create a new companion.
