Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports

97

Not long after the Hallmark commercial, several Flyboys appeared in the dungeon and moved us-to somewhere even worse.

"This is great," I said, radiating sincerity. "I love what you've done with the place. Really."

The thing about sarcasm is that it's lost on robots, like Flyboys, for example. But I could always hope that they had voice-activated recorders on them and that later they'd be playing my snide message back to Crazy Old Mom.

The Flyboys turned, rotors humming, and stalked away. No sense of humor.

Nudge, Angel, Total, Ari, and I surveyed our change of scenery.

"Let's see," I said. "High stone walls, lifeless span of grit, mutants marching around...I don't know-I'm thinking it says 'prison yard.' How about you guys?"

"Prison yard sums it up," Total agreed, then trotted off to pee on the wall.

"Prison yard is too good for this," said Nudge. "Like, cheerless, joy-sucking plain of despair would be more like it."

I looked at her in admiration. "Nice! You've been reading the dictionary again, haven't you?"

Nudge blushed happily.

"Look! There I go," Angel said, pointing. Twenty yards away, her clone rambled about with the others, looking more like Angel than Angel did. About two hundred beings were in what used to be the castle stable area, I guessed. No one was talking. Mostly they were shuffling in a large, clockwise circle, getting their "exercise." They seemed so much like a mindless school of fish, or perhaps a flock of sheep, that I wanted to run through them, shouting, to see if they'd scatter.

"Do you see me?" Nudge asked, peering through the crowd.

"I still can't believe I don't have a clone," Total huffed, trotting back.

"You're unduplicatable," I said.

"I doubt it," he said. "I mean, maybe it wouldn't talk, maybe it would just go arf, but still. Like, what, they couldn't bother?"

"Arf?" I said.

"Oh, there I am!" said Nudge, up on her tiptoes. "I see the other me has hair issues too."

"Why would they make clones of us?" I wondered out loud.

"You." The metallic voice had no inflection. We spun to see a Flyboy behind us.

"Yes, C-Threepio?" I said politely.

"Walk." The Flyboy pointed at the throng, then took a step toward us.

Well, you don't have to threaten me twice. We quickly headed into the crowd and started pacing along with the rest of them.

I was keeping my eye out for Max II, who, last time I'd had a close encounter with her, had been trying to kill me and had narrowly escaped being killed by me. In case she wasn't a 'let bygones be bygones' kind of gal, I was braced for the worst.

"So is this what prisons will be like after Re-Evolution?" Angel asked, holding my hand. "With the collars and everything?" She rubbed the one around her neck, its green LED blinking every two seconds.

"I guess so," I said, resisting the urge to tug at my own collar. "I guess they have these things rigged up to shock us if we try to escape. They probably have tracers in them too." Which was why we hadn't done an up-and-away as soon as we got out here.

"How come they'll still have prisons, after half of everyone is dead?" Nudge asked. "I thought people would quit fighting for stuff. I thought the future people would be perfect. If they're perfect, they won't go around committing crimes, will they?"

"There," I said. "Decades of psycho logic picked apart in three seconds by an eleven-year-old. Take that, modern science!"

And speaking of modern science, I was about to be confronted by one of its marvels. Or disasters. All depends on your point of view.

"Max."

I turned quickly at the too-familiar voice. And there I was, pretty as heck, brown eyes, a few freckles, fashion challenged, and a bad attitude. Max II.