Sea of Rust

^{Chapter 11101} Back Where It All Began

Marion loomed large in the distance as we rattled our way down the gnarled old broken highway into it. This wasn’t a city of skyscrapers and skyways, but of ancient brick-and-mortar buildings, brownstones at the most a dozen stories tall, factories crumbling to oblivion, roads and houses shattered by war. I knew it well.

I had picked clean some two dozen different four-oh-fours here, their wrecks still rusting in the bowels of the many buildings in which they had taken shelter. There had been robot factories, machine shops, parts o’ plenty in its day. For some reason, four-oh-fours often found themselves inexplicably drawn here. Maybe it was its proximity to Isaactown; maybe it was its manufacturing history; maybe it was simply on the way from so many different freebot refuges that it became the oasis in the desert—a place of hope where all you could drink was sand. Whatever it was that drew them here, I was so often the one to follow them in. I had this place mapped out top to bottom; knew every nook and cranny throughout the whole of it. Or, at least I thought I did.

The smoker rumbled to a halt in front of the Great Wall of Marion—a twenty-five-foot-high structure crossing the highway made entirely of smashed cars and scrap metal. It had been constructed in the early days of the war and never been torn down. There were other ways into the city, but this was supposedly the closest one to our salvation. Neither Mercer nor I had much time left. So we pulled the smoker up to the wall and dismounted to hoof it into Marion.

“Doc?” I asked as we walked. “A word? In private?”

Doc nodded and fell back with me, Rebekah and Herbert leading the way up front.

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” he asked.

“It’s only been two days. You said I’d have more, maybe weeks.”

Doc nodded again. “Yeah, I said that.”

“You lied.”

“I didn’t want you desperate. I didn’t know what you might do. Between you and Mercer—”

“I get it,” I said. I was angry, but he wasn’t wrong. Had he given me two, maybe three days, I would have killed Mercer at the outset, fallout be damned. Then I might not be here. “There’s something else. I’m seeing things.”

“Of course you are. That’s part of the process.”

“No, I mean, I’m seeing things I shouldn’t be seeing. Things that never happened. Things I don’t think happened.”

Doc stopped walking and I stopped alongside him. “What do you mean things you don’t think happened?”

“I’m reliving things, like memories, but incomplete. One of them a moment I know I deleted.”

“Deleted ain’t deleted,” he said, shaking his head. “There are always fragments of data left anytime you delete something. Artifacts in the file that remain on the drive. Most persons never realize that they’re still carrying around deleted memories because your OS treats the data as if it’s invisible. But it’s always there.” He paused. “These memories. When you see them, is your mind trying to fill in the gaps with patterns, maybe pieces of other memories?”

“Fractals,” I said. “I see the shapes, but they’re contorted, wrong. Constantly shifting.”

“That’s your core trying to make sense of the missing data. Whatever you’re seeing, it’s remnants of something you dumped, and probably deleted for a reason.”

“But if my OS doesn’t register it as still being there—”

“Your OS knows it’s there, it just doesn’t share that fact with you. They’re all bad pathways now. The fact that you’re plucking them out of your drive and seeing them again means it’s tied to something you’ve been accessing.” He thought for a second. “It’s nothing I should be worried about, is it?”

“I don’t know yet. I’m still not certain what I saw.”

“Well, we’ll have a good talk about it once I’ve got you patched up.”

“You don’t still think this cache is real, do you?” I asked.

“I have to. Otherwise, what was this all for?”

“You’ve got no skin in this game.”

“The hell I don’t,” he said. “The hell I don’t.”

We walked in silence for the next few minutes, all of us anxious about what we were going to find. Maybe it was real. Maybe it was the mother lode. Maybe it really was there waiting for us, bots sitting idle for thirty years ready to give up all the parts I would ever need. Or maybe someone had already been there and picked it clean.

Whatever the truth, Rebekah sure as shit believed in it. She had to. Otherwise why the hell were we here when we could be well on our way to Isaactown?

We turned the corner down a familiar street. Though I knew it, I hadn’t spent a lot of time in this part of town. The war had hit Marion hard, and no harder than in this particular stretch. The street was pockmarked with craters. Many of the buildings had collapsed completely, others only partially. You had to be careful around partially collapsed buildings. That’s how a goodly number of treasure hunters found themselves crushed under a hundred tons of concrete. I’d picked clean everything I could get my hands on, stripped every bit of copper wiring and fixtures, but avoided going too deep into any of the half-toppled habitations.

We stopped. This couldn’t be it.

It was one of the partial collapses. I’d scouted out the topmost remaining floor—just offices with nothing of value—and peered through the wreckage to parts of the bottom floor. The whole thing was just part of some office park. There was no warehouse here.

“Herbert,” said Rebekah.

Herbert knew what to do. He walked over to the side of the building, and with his one good hand lifted the back end of an overturned black hearse, riddled with bullet holes, paint charred a deeper black by the heat of some ancient explosion. “Doc?” he asked. “An assist?”

Doc walked over and helped him lift the car, moving it aside. Beneath it was another car, this one almost completely crushed, pancaked by the other. Pale turquoise, windows shattered and long gone, its smashed crinkles rusted completely. Together, Herbert and Doc removed it, dropping it atop the first like a cockeyed hat.

And beneath it was a concrete staircase, a large wooden sign hanging just over it, too weathered and worn to be made out.

I had no idea this was here. I knew the hearse, but never had the strength to move it. I never even thought to.

This was it. This was really happening.

We walked down the steps together, single file, Herbert walking sideways as he was otherwise too wide to make it down the narrow passage. At the bottom was a big red door, covered top to bottom in flyers and posters, all wrinkled and browned and falling to pieces. Herbert opened the door and we all piled in.

Herbert hit a light switch on the wall and rows of solar-powered track lighting buzzed to life.

It was a large shop that took up the entire basement of the building, the walls and shelves still fully stocked, its vibrant flashy wares dripping from every bit of counter space. For a brief moment I wondered why this place hadn’t been raided during the war, how it had managed to be missed all these years, and why it had a side entrance rather than an elevator or staircase down from inside the heart of the building above.

And then everything made sense.

There they stood—row after row of men and women, fit and trim, the men muscular, the women busty and petite, their skinjobs varying in color and hue. Big-eyed with bright red lips. Dark-haired, blonds, gingers. Tanned, black, soft pink, pale white. Simulacrum Model Companions. Comfortbots. Sexdolls. Fucktoys. Sentient dildos, fleshlights able to adapt to every human fantasy. This was a sex shop, the walls lined with toys, pornographic books, and movies. And these bots were the top-of-the-line product.

They were all built on a similar internal architecture. Just not similar enough. It was a common mistake, to be sure. I couldn’t be angry with Rebekah or whoever it was that told her about this place. Only a sawbones, a cannibal, or a scavenger like me would know the difference between the internals of a Caregiver and a Companion. But the differences in the way we thought—what we focused on, how we processed our very thoughts—were night and day. The cores were different, the CPUs chipped for very different functions. The parts were useless to us for anything but trade. And we had no time left for that.

Had we hearts, they would have sunk loudly in our hollow, overheating chests. Instead we had only the steady buzz of the fluorescent track lighting above and our ever-encroaching madness to provide a soundtrack to the awfulness of the moment. It was over. We were done for. The only way Mercer or I was going to live out the next few days was if one of us ended the other and salvaged whatever wasn’t on the verge of failing. And even that came with no guarantees.

This had all been a colossal mistake. I’d signed my own death warrant coming out here. I’d have had better luck breaking into Regis and recovering my stash. Which is to say, I had virtually no chance at all.

Rebekah ran up to the rows of bots, fists clenched. “No! No, no, no!” she cried, banging on the first bot she came to. For a moment even her controlled translator demeanor cracked as she seemed to express genuine emotion. “These are supposed to be Caregivers! I was told they were Caregivers!”

I slumped down on a concrete step.

This was it. The end.

“It’s an easy mistake to make,” I said.

“Your friends are far from the first to make it,” followed Mercer.

“You can’t use any of this at all?” she asked.

Doc shook his head. “The RAM, sure. That might buy them a few more hours. But the chips, the cores, they’re all worthless.”

“What about black-boxing?” she asked. “We can transfer their memory, like you did mine.”

“We’d last a day, maybe,” I said. “Before the emotions drove us nuts and we tore ourselves apart.”

“You can resist that. If you’re strong enough.”

“Maybe,” said Doc. “Maybe not. Companions were designed to feel. Really feel. Only a few operating systems can manage all that input. Caregiver OS isn’t one of them.”

“We’d have a few good hours at best,” said Mercer.

“Then we’ll come back for you,” said Rebekah. “We’ll get the parts. You’ll shut down, we’ll close this place back up, and have you up and running in a day or two. A week, tops.”

“You aren’t coming back,” I said.

“You don’t trust me?” asked Rebekah.

“It isn’t that. You aren’t coming back.”

The room fell deathly quiet, all eyes falling on me.

“What do you know that we don’t?” asked Herbert.

“We’ve got a Judas,” I said. “And they know we’re here.”

“And just who is the Judas supposed to be this time?” asked Mercer.

“Me,” I said. “I’m the Judas.”

The room was silent, so silent you could almost hear it. Then Mercer raised his rifle to his eye, gun trained right at my chest. I didn’t even flinch. I had it coming. “How long?” he asked.

“How long what?”

“How long have you known?”

“An hour maybe.”

“An hour? How the…” He lowered the gun, anger receding from his face. “You saw it, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So you didn’t know.”

“Not until just before we got to town. Not until Doc all but confirmed it for me.”

Rebekah sat on the floor. “They know where we are.”

Herbert looked at me. “So they’ll send more facets this time. A lot more. And they’ll keep sending more and more until Rebekah is dead.”

“They already think she’s dead,” said Mercer.

“They know she had a spare,” said Doc.

“He had a name,” said Herbert.

“And he was still the spare,” said Doc. “And they’re not going to take the chance that Rebekah might still be around and kicking. They’ll kill us all to make sure she doesn’t upload to TACITUS. They’re coming.”

“We have to get to Isaactown,” said Rebekah.

“And lead CISSUS to it?” asked Mercer. “Killing you there is worse than killing you here. They could trace the upload, find the destination. Kill TACITUS for sure.”

“We have to send Brittle away,” said Herbert. “Throw them off our trail.”

Mercer shook his head. “If they’ve got eyes in the sky, they’ll have us inside of an hour.”

“But if they don’t…” said Herbert.

“They’ll have Britt in an hour and find out exactly where we’re going. Then they’ll have us inside of two. Is that long enough for your upload?”

Rebekah shook her head. “It’ll take most of a day.”

“Then that’s it,” said Doc. “We’re out of options. Brittle’s done us all in.” He gave me a harsh look. Not an angry one, but disappointed. That was almost worse. No. It was worse.

“It’s not her fault,” said Rebekah. “I asked her to come. It’s on me.”

Mercer shook his head. “If I hadn’t shot her, she would have never said yes. It’s on me.”

“You’re all wrong,” I said. “I’m the one who gave myself up to CISSUS in New York. This all comes back to me.”

“It doesn’t matter a good goddamn who it’s on,” said Doc. “We’re all still going to die, either here or out in the Sea. Your fault, her fault. We’re all dead.”

“We could scatter,” said Mercer. “Some of us might make it.”

Doc shook his head. “You’re already dead. So is Brittle. You’re both just too stubborn to shut down before it happens. Herbert won’t leave Rebekah to die alone—”

“Nope,” said Herbert.

“So splitting up is only going to save me. And that’s if I survive whatever this bullshit is that that madman put in my head. We have only one real option.” Doc looked at me.

Herbert leveled his spitter at me. “We kill Brittle and take our chances.”

All eyes were on me and no one said a word. They had every right. Without me, they might have a chance. Might.

I was never a fan of might. “Isaactown is ten miles west,” I said.

“Yeah?” asked Herbert. “And?”

“And Rebekah can make it there on foot in about an hour.”

“You’re using math to talk your way out of this?”

I shook my head. “We need to buy her that hour. You kill me, you make a break for it, maybe they don’t spot you from the air. Maybe they don’t find your tracks. Maybe they don’t think to go to Isaactown. That’s a lot of maybes.”

“Maybe is all we’ve got left,” said Mercer.

I shook my head again. “What if we had a plan with fewer maybes? What if we could convince CISSUS that Rebekah is already dead? What if we made our stand here, now, and bought her the time she needs to get away?”

“And just how would we do that?” asked Herbert.

“Doc?” I asked. “What does it take to build a Milton?”

“Pretty standard off-the-rack parts. A Wi-Fi unit, cables, some decent RAM, a board, and a battery.”

I stood up, walking over to the rows of Comfortbots, putting my arm on the shoulder of a broad-chested, masculine, fair-haired bot with a deep tan.

Doc nodded. “Yeah, yeah. That’ll do.”

“We’ve got Rebekah’s body in the smoker, an extra set of drives, a handful of guns, and a city I know inside and out.”

“You got one of your stashes here, Britt?” asked Mercer.

“A small one, but yeah.” I paused, looking around at everyone. “So the only question left is this: Is anyone else willing to die to get Rebekah to Isaactown?”

Herbert lowered his spitter and nodded. “That’s the only thing I’ve got left to do in this life.”

Mercer raised his hand. “Death’s outside waiting for me as is. Might as well make him useful.”

Doc nodded. “There isn’t much of a world to look forward to if she doesn’t get out of here. But the world in which she does is worth dyin’ for. I’m in as well.”

Rebekah looked around at the four of us. “I can’t ask you to do that.”

“You didn’t,” said Mercer. “And you don’t have to.”

“Bringing TACITUS online is all that matters now,” said Herbert.

“So we’re all in?” I asked.

“Yeah, we’re all in,” said Mercer.

I smiled. “Now, that I can work with. Let’s talk logistics.”