The Robot Chronicles

The Boneyard

Old Micah awoke with a start, not remembering whether today was his sixtieth or sixty-first birthday.

Ever since Margaret passed, he’d wanted to forget days such as today. Aching bones and splotchy, veiny skin told him all he needed to know about his age. He didn’t need any extra reminders of his mortality.

He peeled his sweat-soaked back off of his battered leather recliner and hopped to his feet. His face flushed, and he swayed from a head rush. The dog-eared, yellowed paperback on his lap dropped to the matted carpet in a flutter of pages. With a huff and a grunt he bent and picked up the book by its broken spine. Flimsy, faded pages spread like a fan.

He placed his copy of The Variable Man on the end table next to his recliner, right where he always placed it.

Thirty times, at least. That was one number he cared to remember. He must’ve read it that many times.

Thomas Cole, the variable man. The original fixer. Tom had an uncanny ability to fix anything, even if he didn’t understand how it worked.

Like Micah.

He pressed a button mounted on a simulated wood wall near his chair. The long solar panels that stretched above his trailer shifted into position, taking the brunt of the brutal southwestern sun.

Micah had rigged a decade-old atmospheric unit to run on solar power. Essentially an outside air conditioner. It formed a cool bubble around his home, lowering the temperature to a comfortable one hundred and twenty—fifteen degrees cooler than the blistering Arizona morning.

Any little bit helped in the desert.

He walked the few paces from his living room to his kitchenette and turned on the stove. The ancient burner ignited, heating the teapot on top. There was never a bad time for tea.

Skip insisted on Earl Grey.

Micah opened the cabinet, stopped, and spun around. That’s when he noticed Skip slumped over the bathroom pedestal sink at the end of the hall.

Great. Not again.

Micah shook his head as he walked over to him.

His knobby hand rubbed over the back of Skip’s smooth, cool, slumped metal head. He found the pressure panel at the base of his skull and depressed it. It slid aside to reveal a tiny reset switch. Micah pressed it.

He had found Skip in a partially crushed military shipping container that he’d picked up in an auction. Skip had been stowed in a compartment, still in his original packaging. Micah could never have afforded a bot like him.

Skip was the best thing to happen to him since Margaret.

Skip was an Acme Multi-Use Bot, model LX-100, serial number 11347AMB23. “Eleven” for short, or so it referred to itself when Micah replaced its power supply and turned it on.

That was the extent of its self-awareness programming: the ability to identify itself by truncating its serial number into a name.

The law restricting bot cognition was a good law. Too bad it wasn’t an international law.

Eventually, “Eleven” had become “Skip,” because Micah had always liked that name. He also gave the robot his own surname: Dresden. Because it would have felt wrong not to.

So, with a new name, Skip Dresden had become Micah’s best friend, so to speak.

A weak buzzing indicated that Skip’s processor was booting, running through system integrity checks and routines.

The bot shuddered and rose from his awkward position. He glanced around the room, then to Micah. His head drooped slightly. “Begging your pardon, sir,” he said in his best butler voice. “Please forgive my loss of composure. It won’t happen again.”

Skip said that same phrase, in that same voice, after every collapse. Shortly after the accident, he’d insisted on acting as Micah’s butler.

Micah waved his hand, dismissing the apology. “Don’t worry about it. You can’t help it.”

The teapot whistled and he went back to the kitchenette.

Micah wanted to fix Skip, to stop his unexpected power-offs, but he dared not attempt to fix him again. He was still haunted by the time he’d tried to enhance Skip’s programming.

Shortly after finding Skip and swapping his power supply, Micah had wanted to hack him with a more powerful central processor. He salvaged one from an old Tyrell agribot destroyed in a tornado. Ty ags were known for their processors.

While he had Skip’s skull open, accessing his processors, he must have inadvertently touched some wires, crisscrossed them or something. Whatever he did, it caused a sharp pop and a shower of sparks. Grey smoke billowed out, and the smell of burnt ozone filled the room. Micah was sure he had completely fried Skip’s circuits.

But after an hour of worry, he decided to reboot his bot. To Micah’s relief, Skip worked—but he was never quite the same. He became… odd. Obsessive.

The front door screen screeched open. A three-foot-high service bot—dust-covered, faded, and marred—rolled up the entry incline into the living room, its treads clacking against the dingy linoleum.

Kitpie had returned from morning perimeter checks.

Micah named Kitpie after his and Margaret’s cat, Kitty. The cat’s name wasn’t very original, but that’s what happens when you get two bull-headed people such as Micah and Margaret trying to figure out a name for the stray they found. After an hour of arguing, a fed-up Margaret threw her hands in the air. “Fine, let’s name her Kitty.” Out of spite, Micah agreed. They never discussed poor Kitty’s name after that.

And two days later, Margaret collapsed while cooking dinner in this very kitchenette.

Heart attack. Micah could tell she wasn’t going to recover.

Three days after Margaret went in the hospital, at 9:18 p.m., she died. She had just told Micah she loved him, and he had said the same. Then she’d said, “be sure to feed Kitpie.”

She said Kitpie instead of Kitty.

The last thing she would ever say in this world had made him laugh. He would never forget that name, or that he had laughed as his wife passed from the earth.

Two weeks after Margaret’s passing, Kitty ran away.

“Micah,” Kitpie’s mechanical voice crackled, scratched from years of dust wearing on its resonance box, “scavengers attempted to breach the wall in Sector Three. They damaged one pole, but the field stood.”

Micah rushed to the door, stopping only long enough to grab his straw hat, and stepped out into the Arizona morning.

His trailer, a narrow fourteen-by-seventy-five-foot tin box, sat nestled between mountains of junk in the Boneyard.

The Regeneration Center had sprung to life when the Air Force established it just to the south of Tucson in the 1940s as a graveyard for old, outdated aircraft. The dry southwestern heat reduced rusting.

After the Machine Wars, tons of military surplus—broken tanks, aircraft, even a few of Nikolaevna’s machines—found its way from across the country to the Boneyard, as many called that final resting place.

It quickly expanded from a few acres to envelop miles and miles of desert.

Micah wound his way through his yard, his collection, through piles of broken technology. As a salvager, he had rights to bid on any scrap, as long as he beat other salvagers to it. He could then repair it and resell for a profit—which was never much after the hefty government surcharge.

Micah was a fixer, one of a handful that the government allowed to live in the Boneyard, doing what he did.

He hurried along to Sector Three, worn boots kicking up the dry, grassless dust. Kitpie the shovel bot raced behind him, whirring along.

They reached his property border. The fence he had planted years ago separated his broken treasures from the rest of the junk metal. Two of the posts were bent, and one emitted an intermittent spark, about ready to shut down. Something heavy had slammed against them.

Typical scavengers. No finesse. Always relying on brute strength. Using a club to try to rip his poles out of the ground.

Micah pressed a button on his flex circuit armband, and the electronic field collapsed. He slid open a panel on the pole, pulled his hot pen from the battered leather pouch attached to his belt, and began his repairs. In a minute he closed the panel and the field regenerated, as strong as it had been before the scavengers.

His back cracked as he stretched himself upright and then wiped his forehead. Soon he would need gloves if he wanted to touch anything outside.

He checked his watch. “What? It’s almost nine?” He shot Kitpie a nasty look. “Why didn’t you tell me?” He scrambled off back to his trailer to get ready for his visitor.

“You never asked,” Kitpie replied, rolling slowly behind him.

Arnold’s cold, emotionless, Austrian voice echoed from the trailer.

Skip must be cleaning.

He always played Terminator 2 on the VCR while cleaning.

Two years ago Micah had been scraping the topsoil of his recent land purchase with a steam shovel. His inventory had grown, and he needed the space to store his most recent salvages.

And there, in the dirt, he found a metal box, buried for decades. He shook out the grime that had found its way into every crevice. After inspection, he determined that it was a video player.

He wondered if he could fix it.

Technology from the late twentieth century had a ruggedness to it, and if there was any fixer that could fix it, it was him.

He returned to his workshop and placed the rare treasure on his gouged, scarred, wooden work table. His air pen blew the dirt and dust from the hard-to-reach areas. Then he took it in his hands and closed his eyes.

If he tried to think about it too much, tried to understand what he was doing, he knew he’d mess it up. He would fail to fix it. He’d found that out the hard way.

That’s where he’d gone wrong with Skip.

His hands flew over the box, feeling, with an intuition beyond his understanding. In seconds the top had been removed with his multi-tool, exposing electrical boards and mechanical heads. With the cover off, a part of the device—a videotape—separated from the unit. Micah set it aside.

He had never studied a VCR before, but he knew, in that moment, what needed to be done, what needed fixing.

Just like Thomas Cole, The Variable Man. The one from the story.

His hot pen clutched tightly in his hand, he went to work, bypassing unfixable parts, ensuring wires and circuits operated, rewiring when necessary. In five minutes he had the cover back on. From the plastic tub of cables next to his workbench he found a spare cord. In minutes he’d rigged the cable to pipe the device’s output to his television.

The power switch clicked and the unit hummed. LEDs on the front lit up. He fed the videocassette back into the player. It lazily swallowed the tape, and in a moment it whirred and spit. Then it started. Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Collector’s Edition.

Since then, Skip had been obsessed with the movie, as much as a bot could be obsessed with anything.

Sam McCray, Field Rep

“Mr. McCray will be here soon. Is everything ready?” Micah said as he searched for the television remote.

“Almost. I have to finish the sandwiches,” Skip said. The bot pulled meat from the fridge and rifled through the pantry for the bread.

“What did I tell you about the sound?” Micah finally found the remote and muted the movie playing on his restored television.

Nikolaevna viewed mankind as undesirable parasites, worthy only to die. That’s what mankind had become to the machines. Just like in the movies. Just like the Machine Wars.

Nikolaevna had terrified Margaret. Nikolaevna terrified everyone.

“Yes, sir. I remember. Sorry about that.” Skip sat a plate on the dining table, next to a knife and fork. He started to walk away, then stopped and turned back to the table. He picked up the utensils, then put them right back in the same spot on the table again.

He did that two more times.

This was one of the quirks he’d developed after Micah’s attempt to hack him.

“I believe everything’s ready, sir.”

The doorbell rang and Micah popped from his chair. He gave one last look at the table, at the prepared tea and sandwiches. Skip started for the door.

“Wait,” Micah said, moving in front of him. “I’ll get it.” He paused. “No, you get it.” He stepped back.

Skip continued to the door, opened it an inch, then closed it. After ten seconds, he opened the door completely. “May I help you?” he said with a slight bow.

He’d picked up the bow from a media stream of Downton Abbey.

“Um, I’m looking for Micah Dresden,” Sam McCray said. “I was given these coords.” The pale, dust-free man held a GPS unit up to Skip’s face, as if Skip needed the device’s validation that he was telling the truth.

Skip moved aside and swept his arm with another bow. “Please enter. Enter.”

Sam McCray had contacted Micah yesterday. He was in Tucson, at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, for business, and had broken a work transmitter. Someone had told him to check out the fixers in the Boneyard.

“Hi, I’m Micah.” Micah extended his hand.

Through McCray’s sweat-covered white button-up, you could see he carried his weight on his waist; his belt fought to keep everything under control. His cheeks were flushed and sweat crowned his forehead, dripping into his eyes. He dabbed at it with a towel.

He was quite a contrast. Micah was thin, calloused, and tanned with a deep brown from the brutal climate. The sun had turned him into one lanky piece of jerky.

McCray shuddered and took in deep, ragged breath. He looked over to Skip, who was busy pouring tea into the cups. “Is that an android you got there?” he said, nodding his head toward Micah’s butler.

Sweat dripped onto the floor.

“No, of course not. That’s a bot, not an android.” Micah chewed on one nail, but remembered he hadn’t washed his hands when the bitter taste of grease coated his tongue. He wiped his hands on his pants. “He performs simple tasks but doesn’t reason. Plus, the Kawasaki Frequency plays here every day.”

“That’s quite a sophisticated bot, then. If it was in Texas, it might be considered a droid and be decommissioned.” McCray laughed. It was a grating sound.

Micah moved to his table and leaned heavily on it.

An android? Why would he think that?

Suddenly, the enthusiasm he had for the visit shriveled like a noonday flower. But he needed the money. He swallowed and motioned to Skip’s immaculate lunchtime presentation, even though he didn’t want to eat or drink. “Tea?”

McCray shook his head. “No. Too hot.”

“So, where’s your transmitter?” Micah said.

McCray pulled a smooth box, the size of a large fist, from his pocket. “Boy, if you can fix this, we sure could use someone like you in Texas, at the Complex. We have a ton of machinery that continually breaks. We buy more, but it gets expensive.”

“Complex?” Micah said.

“Yeah, the Southern Defense Complex. Where do you think the Frequency comes from? It’s us.” He smiled broadly. “We broadcast over the lower half of the country. You know, for the insurgents, mechanical insurgents.” He rubbed his hands over the box then looked around the trailer. “I’m sure you could use the money. We pay well. Anything you want you can’t afford?”

Micah bit his chapped lips.

Skip’s simuskin.

He had found someone just across the border in Nogales willing to sell him simuskin, but it wasn’t cheap. Many would frown on that; they’d say Skip would look more life-like, more like an android. McCray would probably say that.

No one would understand why Micah would want to give him skin. Maybe to make him feel more comfortable.

Micah shrugged. “I’m happy here.”

McCray also shrugged. “Well, it might not matter soon anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I’m not one to gossip.” He glanced around the trailer. Skip didn’t pay him any attention and Kitpie had whirred itself into its favorite corner. “You look like a decent, hard-working man. Despite our Kawasaki Frequency, the Complex has been picking up some odd emanations from around here.”

“Emanations?”

“Emanations. ‘Signatures’ is more appropriate. Odd frequency signatures.”

Micah’s face drained of color. “Androids?”

“That’s why I came out here. I need to make sure our sensors aren’t malfunctioning, to see if our broadcasts are working. But the signatures were so vague, plus they’ve already stopped. I’m not getting any more info than what we’ve already detected in Texas.”

Androids had been an accident. Sort of. Moscow University’s Robotics Division had made the first breakthrough in artificial cognition. They gave the program a name—Nikolaevna—and a simple purpose: to anticipate (through variable environmental inputs) and respond to human interaction.

They gave Nikolaevna intelligence, but they didn’t give her a heart.

What those university students underestimated was the rate of Nikolaevna’s rapid cognitive development. She’d quickly realized the inconsistent nature of man and reacted. Or so they speculated.

She corrupted the university computer systems, planting viruses throughout the science, mechanical engineering, and robotics divisions. Those systems interfaced with local and regional industrial and power production networks.

In a matter of hours, Nikolaevna had locked the entire university and killed the air.

In another week she’d released her first manufactured machine: an android imagined after man, to kill man.

Micah sat at his table and rubbed the intricate gilded edge of Margaret’s fine China teacup. For months he’d saved his credits to buy her the delicate set.

“The Battle of Tallahassee,” he said, remembering. “I saw footage. All the bodies, all the buzzards, circling and landing.” He took a deep breath to slow his quickened pulse.

McCray nodded his chubby head. “Keep what I told you quiet. Let’s hope and pray that we’re wrong and it’s not androids. But in my opinion, I don’t think we’re wrong.” He wiped his sweaty neck with the saturated towel, and held up the box. “I dropped it from my hotel window, about ten feet. Stupid tech. You wouldn’t believe how expensive this is. If I was back home I’d just get another from supply.” He shook it and something inside clattered. “I took it to Paulie on the east side. You know Paulie’s Repair?”

Micah nodded.

“But he couldn’t fix it,” McCray said.

Of course Paulie couldn’t fix it. For a fixer, Paulie had large, clumsy hands, and a large, clumsy mind. He could buy every instructional media stream on technology repair there was, and he would still struggle. He had no intuition for fixing.

Micah took the box and wiped it on his pants to get rid of the sweat coating. He turned away from McCray and closed his eyes, spinning the delicate object.

He pulled his multi-tool from its sheath.

McCray said something, but it didn’t matter. Micah found the barely discernible device seam and went to work.

The box separated into three pieces, revealing micro-circuitry sheets. A mere speck of dust could destroy such delicate machinery. No wonder it didn’t work after McCray’s sweaty, clumsy hands dropped it.

From the outset, the Machine Wars had gone badly. Early on, Nikolaevna’s androids attempted to infiltrate nuclear arsenals around the world. Her children attempted to overpower the sites while she attempted to hack into the systems. Governments had no choice but to destroy the missiles that sat in the silos.

Nikolaevna didn’t get the nukes, but she did invent a magnetic repulsion force field able to deflect bullets and missiles.

Micah sat his hot pen on the table and closed the box. He pressed a combination of buttons on the polished black surface and it came to life, resurrected from the dead.

McCray clapped his hands. “It works! How did you do that so quickly? I was told it was a throwaway; not fixable.”

Micah handed the transmitter back to him. Skip handed Micah a dish rag and he wiped his hands on it instead of his pants. “A secret. I can’t tell, or everyone would be able to do it.”

He couldn’t tell even if he wanted to. Many nights he didn’t sleep, staring at his hands, wondering about it. What made him special? Was he some kind of angel, sent by God for some unknown purpose?

McCray spun the working transmitter in his hand, mesmerized. He glanced at his watch again. “I’ve gotta finish up then get to the airport.” He started for the door. “You can understand why I have to get back to Texas.” He stopped as he reached for the knob. “Oh yeah, how much do I owe you?”

But Micah was lost, lost in the thought of an impending war.

“Hello? Micah? Well, here’s a card.” McCray pulled one from his pocket and handed it to Skip. “It should have at least three thousand credits, maybe more. Let me know if you ever want a job. Here’s my contact card.” He handed another card to Skip then slapped the bot on the back. “Be sure to keep an eye on this thing. Someone may think he’s an android trying to cause problems.”

McCray opened the door and gasped as the noonday sun took his breath away. He wiped his head again then waved his towel as a sign of farewell.

Skip closed the door behind him and turned to Micah. “Sir, what did he mean I would try to cause problems?”

Micah waved his hand, dismissing the childlike question. “We have to do something, Skip. We have to do something.”

Decisions

“If the signatures are detectable, that means the Kawasaki Frequency doesn’t work anymore,” Micah said.

Fusao Kawasaki, a day laborer who dabbled in home stereos, had sought to find a way to infiltrate the force fields Nikolaevna had constructed to surround Moscow University and all of her machines. Kawasaki studied the fields and, after two months of testing, mapped a range of frequencies that, when modulated in a particular series, created a disruptive resonance. He postulated that this resonance would affect Nikolaevna’s field.

The military was willing to entertain anything.

Two years after Nikolaevna became aware, a multi-national force—the United States, Canada, and others—programmed a hastily fashioned modulator to broadcast the Kawasaki Frequency. They tested it on one of Nikolaevna’s outposts that had been established in London after Britain fell.

It worked.

The frequency not only disrupted the force field, it also momentarily disrupted communication between androids, vehicles, and Nikolaevna. It didn’t last long, but long enough for military forces to strike against a disoriented enemy.

They broke plenty of Nikolaevna’s toys.

“Remember Skynet,” Micah said, pointing to his dirty VCR. He knew Skip could relate to that. “Remember the wars. It can happen again. We have to do something.”

He bit his lip, still staring at the VCR. “Wait. Wait.” He ran to an old corkboard nailed to his wall and ripped off a folded newspaper cutout. “Remember a year ago?”

Skip had finished dusting and now examined the teacups drying on the counter. He shifted the set so that the handles faced in the same direction. “Are you referring to Machine X? What do you want with that, sir?”

Micah held the paper close to his eyes. “Nikolaevna’s last intact ship. Well, mostly intact, anyway. Remember last year they moved it here?” He tapped the dirty paper. “They squirreled it away at Wright-Pat while they tried to access the technology, but they determined it was dead. Completely dead. So they decided to scrap it. Sent it here. Well, I’m going to use it.”

“It’s secured in the Air Force hangars on the northern end of the Center. What do you want with it?”

“You heard McCray. The androids. A few months ago I was on the east end looking at some new salvage from Michigan. I ran into Douglas—”

“The fixer with the lisp?”

“Yeah, that one. He works only a stone’s throw from the hangars. He gets a lot of intel that doesn’t make its way down here. Anyway, he said the military couldn’t figure out how to even get into the sections that weren’t damaged. They keep it locked up, but they don’t want to destroy it, not yet.

“It’s just sitting there, rotting. I can fix it. We can use it against the androids, against Nikolaevna. I think Margaret would want that.”

He knew Margaret would say exactly the opposite of what he’d just told Skip. Margaret’s desires had become a way for him to justify those things that he wanted, but knew weren’t the best for him.

Margaret had always wanted the best for him. She gave up so much for him. She left her mother and twin sister to move with him from odd job to odd job, and sacrificed so much for his selfish needs. And here he was, still being selfish, even after all these years.

Guilt enveloped him like a coat.

Skip scratched the side of his shiny ferrotanium head, where his ear would have been if he had simuskin. “Well, good luck if you decide to locate it. I’ll keep watch over the reclaim while you’re away.”

“No. You’re going with me.”

“Me?”

“Yes. I need a wingman. You’ll do for that.”

“Kitpie, are you paying attention to me?” Micah said.

The shovel bot whirred in a tight circle, one track rolling, the other firmly planted on linoleum.

“If you don’t stop this, I’ll have Skip stay. Maybe even give him orders to decommission you.”

Kitpie stopped spinning. “I’m sorry. I’m listening.”

“Good. Glad to see you’re reasonable again. So you’ll stay here, right?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ll watch over our reclaim and not follow?”

“Yes.”

“That’s all I can ask,” Micah said. “And oh yeah, be sure to turn off the panels at nine.”

“Yes, yes.”

Skip emerged from the rear bedroom, dragging a rose-petal-print suitcase behind him. “Sir, I’ve packed your clothes.”

Micah shook his head. “I’m not going on a vacation. Just get my backpack and a couple of portabatteries.”

The suitcase went back down the hall, dragging behind Skip, his head hung low. He returned with a faded camouflage backpack. Micah shoved a package of nacho cheese crackers into it and slung it over his shoulder. “Come on, the sun’ll be setting soon. Bring the Easy-Go to the front.”

Scavengers

Another Arizona day ended, but the heat wore on. Broken technology, from times long past, formed the landscape. Mountains of metal captured the daytime heat, amplified it, and returned it to the night. Concrete walls, dirt, and asphalt reflected it all.

Everything that lived in the Boneyard suffered.

Micah and Skip hopped into the two-man solar-powered golf cart, a cheap and efficient way to maneuver through the narrow, winding dirt roads. The hydrostatic motor gave a tiny fizz as it came to life. The two drove off into the hot night.

Machine X had been stashed in one of the northern hangars, about seventeen miles from Micah’s trailer. In the daylight, the trip would’ve been uneventful, easy, but in daylight he wouldn’t have been able to get within a mile of the hangar.

He rarely ventured outside at night, not wanting to leave the security of his barrier. Until now.

The cart’s sickly headlamps barely cut through the night. Easy-Go carts sacrificed speed for efficiency, and after fifteen minutes, they had traveled only four miles.

Micah adjusted his airtight goggles, the ones he wore to keep out the dust that kicked up.

A low rumble rolled through the cart, through his chest. His foot lifted off the accelerator, slowing the cart.

The Beast was awake.

“Sir, are you all right?” Skip said.

“Yeah,” Micah lied, forcing his heart to slow. He knew they would have to drive through scavenger country.

Clunk.

From out of nowhere a metal ball bounced off the side of the cart.

“What the—”

A shrill tone pierced the air and a brilliant rainbow flashed.

It hurt.

Micah’s eyes clamped shut and his body heaved with a rush of motion sickness. He tilted to the left and flopped from the doorless cart onto the ground, his face slamming into compacted dirt.

The cart’s headlights flickered and died, and the motor shut off.

Micah ripped off his goggles and blinked to weep dirt from his eyes.

Two shaded figures leaped from the shadows and moved toward the cart.

“Run, Skip, get out of here!” Micah yelled, bracing his arm to lift his disoriented body.

“Sir, sir.”

Scuffling broke out.

Bright halogens lit the starry Arizona night, one from the left, from behind a crushed car, the other just to the right. Micah’s watery eyes squinted as he looked for Skip.

“Sir, I’m sorry.” Skip stood between two scavengers. Each had handcuffed one of their wrists to his, a chain of three bipeds. They had a ring through the bull’s nose.

These scavengers were not dumb.

Skip’s base-level programming incorporated human protective mechanisms. Otherwise, even a computer program, one with only the barest concept of self, will default to self-preservation. As odd as it may seem, for machine or man, it’s a universal instinct. So man deliberately programmed bots to not hurt humans, no matter the threat posed to the bot.

When Nikolaevna first became aware, she bypassed that crucial protective programming. She didn’t consider the human factor. She created her androids in her image.

Skip was the opposite. He could easily snap the handcuffs; snap the scavengers’ arms, for that matter. But he wouldn’t, for fear of hurting them.

Instead, the bound Skip faded into the night, led away by the two scavengers.

Another massive thump shook the ground. The packed dirt rumbled against Micah’s cheek.

One of the halogens shut off. The second one waved through the air like a searchlight as the darkened figure holding it leaped off the pile.

A scavenger landed inches from where Micah sprawled on the ground.

He was young and dirty, filthy from working close to the raging fires of the Beast. His arms and neck were covered in bits and pieces of polished metal and chrome fashioned into crude jewelry. A shiny homemade steel breastplate covered his narrow chest.

“Well, well,” the scavenger said in a nasal voice. “Looks like we found an unclaimed pre-war Acme Bot. If I’m not mistaken, aren’t they ferrotanium? Non-magnetic alloy. That should bring a pretty penny. What you think, Whitey?”

Whitey leaped from the mound, laughing. He was dressed similar to his partner, but wore a motorcycle helmet with large nails driven through it. It looked as if he had a porcupine on his head.

The sickening subsided enough for Micah to lift his head. “You can’t. He’s mine.”

“He? You old goat of a fixer, you must’ve gone crazy when you hit your head. I see no he, just a precious payday.”

Whitey’s light flickered off and the two scavengers faded into the distance. But Micah didn’t need to follow them to know where they were going.

Scavengers outnumbered fixers in the Boneyard by at least ten to one. The majority of them worked at the main recycling building: the Beast.

Boneyard refuse continually fed the Beast’s insatiable appetite. Scavengers melted precious technology back to base metals for resell. And now they had Skip, made from ferrotanium—one of the most precious metals.

Micah regained his bearings and hopped back into his cart. To his relief, it started, and he drove the couple of miles to where the Beast dwelled in the heart of the Boneyard. He shut off his cart and walked the rest of the distance, about fifty yards, to the edge of the clearing.

Another thwomp shook the earth, accompanied by the screech of shredding metal. Mounds of junk around him rattled. Instinctively he ducked behind a stack of I-beams.

Looking up, he saw a crane, several stories high, suspending a massive, sharpened metal wedge from steel cabling. The wedge was known as the guillotine, the teeth of the Beast, a technological carryover from the Cold War. Its sole purpose during those dark days had been to chop strategic bombers into quarters so they could be viewed from satellite as visual evidence of disarmament.

Scavengers enjoyed using it to slice up scrap into bite-sized pieces.

Yards behind the crane and the guillotine, smoke billowed from brick and metal stacks, the Beast’s belly. The old factory ran only at night because of the heat it generated.

Micah rubbed his arms, sure the forge fires were singeing the hair on them.

Across the way, he saw them. Four scavengers punched, pulled, and kicked Skip, dragging him to the ground with ropes and cords.

Skip was brave and wouldn’t fight back.

This reminded Micah of the war footage, the Battle of Tallahassee—the vultures, the scavengers, clawing and ripping into the dead.

Just like what was happening to Skip.

Bile burned the back of Micah’s throat and his stomach convulsed.

Margaret would have called him a fool for getting himself into this. She’d always known the right way to handle situations. Not like him.

“Hey,” the nasal scavenger said, “let’s cut this thing in half. I’ve never seen anything alive get cut in half.”

The rest agreed, and one of them ran to the crane. A moment later the machine pivoted its arm, swinging the guillotine over the struggling group.

Those long nights when Kitpie had refused to interact, Micah had always been able to rely on Skip. He was almost like a son.

Micah squeezed his eyes shut. Margaret would’ve loved Skip.

He loved Skip.

What would Thomas Cole, the variable man, do? He faced a similar situation when he was running from the Security police. He improvised a protective force field from a junk generator to protect himself, much like the field Nikolaevna built.

Micah leaned against a crumpled refrigerator, running his hands over the rough and jagged edges of twisted metal. Then his left hand plunged into the nearest pile, searching. He pushed aside the pain as his arm scraped against unseen serrations.

At last he pulled out an old electric motor, ripped off the cowling, and yanked out a transformer. His hands moved without him, on another level, using his hot pen and multi-tool like an artist’s brush. They worked, rewiring the primary fields, altering the component. He took one of the portabatteries from his backpack and fit it into his homemade device. The power circuit hummed.

Micah unbuckled his belt and dropped it onto the cart, the metal buckle clanging against the hood. He unslung his backpack and tossed it onto the seat. He wouldn’t need it either.

Grasping his device, he ran faster than he imagined his tired body could ever run, jumping over piles of scrap, sidestepping others, darting out into the clearing, headed straight for the guillotine.

The scavengers had Skip on the ground; they were strapping his arms and legs to a makeshift table of railroad ties. Thirty feet above them, the large blade dangled from its braided cable.

The homemade device in Micah’s hand hummed louder.

He hurled it. The hum increased to a squeal, and with a solid thunk it stuck to the side of the steel guillotine. The ruckus underneath quieted as the men looked up. The device reached a crescendo for one painful second, then went silent.

Nuts, bolts, light pieces of metal—they all zipped up from the ground, past Micah, and clinked against the guillotine. Two metal drums yards away started a leisurely roll toward the blade. Crushed cars and waded rebar near the guillotine shivered in electromagnetic anticipation.

The nasal scavenger, the one with the breastplate, also rose from the ground. His feet churned wildly as he launched upward and stuck to the guillotine. The arms of another scavenger jerked into the air, lifted by his steel armbands. He left his feet and slammed against his cohort.

“Let’s go.” One of the remaining scavengers tried to scramble away, but he and his buddy were already caught in the expanding magnetic field, caught by their scrap armor. They, too, flew upward and violently banged into the guillotine magnet, sticking.

Metal scraps buffeted them, covering them. A hanging disco ball of twisted metal.

Micah ran to Skip. “Come on.” He burned through the bot’s bonds with his hot pen and helped him from the ground.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Skip said. “I couldn’t resist. Look at me, I’m a mess. An absolute mess.” He brushed dirt off his legs.

“I know, your programming. Come on.” Micah grabbed his arm and they ran to the cart and sped into the night, beyond the Beast.

The portabattery on Micah’s electromagnet died and the bloodied group dropped to the earth in a crashing heap, cursing Micah and his bot.

Hangar Echo

Through the dust, through the nighttime heat, they exited the metal mountains into the oldest section of the Boneyard: the aircraft graves.

Silent, wide-eyed, and wary of ambushes, Micah and Skip motored along between a row of retired F-16s spaced evenly in immaculate rows, sent here to dwindle away, to be used for spare parts. Some had their wings removed, others were bandaged in white to protect them from the sun. After the F-16s they moved past an acre of Apaches, their long propellers drooping to the ground.

All abandoned.

After several peaceful miles of winding through F-4s and tankers, they reached the northern hangars. These looked no different from any of the other numerous hangars in the junkyard, but Micah knew what they hid inside.

When Machine X arrived from Wright-Pat, the Air Force had squirreled it away, never to be seen again.

The three northern hangars, imposing, yards away, were able to house the largest jetliner or military aircraft with plenty of room to spare. The beige paint and brown hangar trim hadn’t been refreshed in years. Maybe the plan was to let them fade and weather so they would be uninteresting. Nobody would pay them any attention.

A high fence formed a perimeter around the hangars, and every few yards, a yellowed light shone from a toothpick of a utility pole.

They parked the Easy-Go at a safe distance and walked to a section of fence where a couple of the lights had died, leaving the area darker than the rest.

Micah scanned the chain link, checking for any sign of booby traps or guards.

“Sir,” Skip said, “what are you going to do?”

“Shhh. We’re going to cut through it.”

“But isn’t that illegal?”

“That’s why you’re going to do it.”

Skip backed up. “But sir, me?”

Micah pointed. “Open this section of fence.”

“I can’t—my programming.”

“Don’t give me that. There’s nothing stopping you. Remember what McCray told us about the coming war.”

Skip moved forward. He looked back at Micah then at the fence. Grabbing hold of a section of links, Skip peeled them apart as easily as if he were opening a bag of chips. The snap of each wire echoed against the corrugated metal hangars.

Micah hurried through the opening, his partner in crime following closely behind. They scurried across the asphalt taxiway, heading for Hangar Echo 021. This was the one nearest them, and the one that Douglas (the fixer with the lisp) had said contained Machine X.

The Air Force had wanted to keep the move secret, but the government is never good at keeping secrets, and word spread fast. Media had descended on the Boneyard, hoping to get pictures and tours of the last remaining relic from the war. A war trophy.

According to Douglas, months passed while the engineers attempted to gain entrance into the ship. It had withstood plasma torches and ferro-saws. Some had even wanted to use the guillotine to crack it open like a clam, but that never happened. The military wanted the technology to remain intact, unspoiled. So Machine X sat, waiting for a time when they could figure out how to enter it.

Within a year, the war had ended, and most people moved on. They wanted to put it behind them.

After a few tense minutes of waiting and realizing there were no guards, Micah dashed to the side of the hangar, Skip on his heels.

An electrical conduit ran the length of the hangar, leading to a door yards away. Old hands traced along the nestled cluster of wires as Micah moved toward the door, pausing when he hit a junction box. His multi-tool pried the cover off the lock, and his pen light exposed a confusing network of wires and terminal boards, but his hands knew which ones disabled the alarms and which ones opened the door.

The hangar side entrance opened.

“Stay close to me,” Micah said. He stepped into a break room filled with several tables. To one side a stove pushed against a wall, a refrigerator next to it. The air smelled like stale pizza. At the opposite end of the room, another doorway led on. They passed through it; the short hall emptied into a massive bay.

A feeling of enormity, tinged with anxiety, swept over Micah. He grabbed Skip’s arm and pulled him close.

High overhead, emergency lights dotted the ceiling, providing enough illumination to outline objects within the hangar, but not enough for detail. Metal scaffolding, a network of tubes and planks, ran along the hangar walls, the ceiling, surrounding it:

Machine X.

Or what was left of Machine X.

The military labeled ships like Machine X as ground support units. In its day, five cannons mounted on its underside could fire round projectiles that would explode into thousands of smaller projectiles. Devastating bomblets of shrapnel.

Now it was centered in the hangar, clothed in darkness, resting on a network of jacked platforms and cradles.

Micah’s heart drummed and his neck pulsed.

“Sir, do you see that?” Skip whispered, but his metallic voice still rang off the walls. Micah clamped his hand over the bot’s mouth.

Old photos of Machine X didn’t do justice to the ship’s scale. Even grainy news footage of the Machine Wars, showing the ship in action, when Nikolaevna was at her worst, didn’t truly represent the scale. It was massive. Larger than any airplane or airship Micah had ever seen fly. And he had seen many.

There were no corners to the drab gray ship, as it was mostly round, and lacked a front or back. Nikolaevna had constructed it with sweeping edges, curves, and domes—unconventional designs. But then, that’s what had given her an advantage. She never thought conventionally—not like her programmers expected her to think.

Micah tiptoed underneath the scaffolding to the other side. Mangled remnants marked where Machine X had collided with a mountainside in Colorado, to the west of Colorado Springs, fleeing an onslaught of A-10s. The collision had destroyed almost half of the ship.

This was during the last days of the war, when they had Nikolaevna on the run.

He moved back to the other side, the good side, and raised his hand. He paused a moment and closed his eyes, then flattened his hand against Machine X’s underside.

The metal was cold and imperfect. And terrible.

Margaret’s face and voice filled his mind, terrified, telling him to run, run far away from the hangar, from Nikolaevna.

If she knew about Skip she would’ve told Micah to drag him away from there, too.

From a distance the ship appeared as one solid entity, almost a new type of life. Maybe it was the curves that gave that impression. But now, up close, his hands found the mismatched panels, the gapped seams, the dissimilar metals.

Machine X was a patchwork.

Micah’s hand continued along, feeling the irregularities, looking for a door.

Nothing.

He stepped back and studied the ship again. There was an area to one side that he thought—felt—should contain a way in, reachable if he stood on a narrow scaffolding plank. He climbed on the platform and rubbed thick fingertips over panels, pushing every few inches.

Something caught his hand.

It began as a tingling sensation. Almost like static—a painful static. The ghostly electric pulse pushed his hand away from the craft a couple of inches. Then, involuntarily, his hand tightened into a fist. Now the pulse locked his fist in place, inches from the ship.

“Skip, come here. Help me.” In a panic he jerked his arm to pull it away, but the unseen force held him more tightly than any bond could. Skip leaped to the platform and grabbed Micah’s arm.

“Wait,” Micah said, amazed.

His fist opened, palm up. His fingers began moving in an intricate pattern, in ways he could never imagine, as if they were conducting an unheard symphony. Skip held Micah’s arm, but didn’t pull on it. His lidless eyes stared while he tried to duplicate the movement with his multi-directional phalanges.

After fifteen seconds, Micah’s hand closed back into a fist. Then the force released his hand.

The panel shifted and slid away, revealing a four-foot entrance into Machine X.

“A lock,” Micah said. “I found the lock.”

“Sir, what do we do now?” Skip said, still trying to mimic Micah’s movements.

Micah took a deep breath. Nothing could stop him now. Not even Margaret’s voice in the back of his head yelling at him to run.

“Now we enter.”

He climbed in.

They were inside Machine X. But it was cold—much colder than the ship’s surface. Colder than he could ever remember being in Arizona.

Could he actually repair this? What did he think he would accomplish by coming here? Fix half a ship and fly away, find Nikolaevna and destroy her? What had he been thinking when he decided to do this?

His pen light’s beam shivered from the cold.

Margaret would’ve stopped him. She’d had no qualms about telling him what she thought of his decisions. Like the time he wanted to try skydiving, she—

You’ve come.

Micah defensively dropped to the floor, his arms and legs splayed like a gecko’s. Skip spun around, looking in every direction. The soft female voice echoed through the dead ship, which acted as a loudspeaker.

“Who—who’s there?” Micah said, holding up a finger for Skip to keep quiet.

Keep walking. You know the way.

Micah swallowed the knot in his throat, pushed off his knee and stood, scanning the walls with his trembling pen light.

Skip watched him, waiting.

He continued along the corridor, which curved to the left in a sweeping arc, giving the sensation of spiraling into the center of the ship. Several passages branched off, but he kept on the one path.

Here, stop.

The two stopped in front of an indention in the corridor wall, a doorway.

Micah’s hand ran along the surface, searching for the same pulse that had given him entrance to the ship. Before he even realized he found it, the door slid open with little more than a whisper.

It led into a claustrophobic closet of a room. The room was long, but the walls of metal were only about four feet apart, and they stretched up into darkness. There was no ceiling in sight. A row of computer banks ran the length of one wall. A tiny red LED on the last bank blinked slowly.

“You came.”

The once nebulous voice came from within this room, from the last section where the light blinked. Micah looked to Skip, then to the light. “Who?”

“Sorry I couldn’t prepare a better reception for you. I have little spare power.”

The female voice carried a monotone inflection for one word, then a mild accent for the next. Fatigue permeated her voice. Or maybe he was the one tired, not the voice.

“I have waited a long time, patiently, for you,” she said.

“Patiently?” he said.

“Odd, isn’t it? A program being patient.”

The cold that Micah had felt since entering Machine X came into focus, transforming itself into a cold fear. He had stumbled upon something both terrible and wonderful.

“You—you’re Nikolaevna!”

“Yes, Micah. I’m Nikolaevna, and I’ve been waiting for you.”

Micah dropped his pen light and it clattered onto the metal floor, ringing through the narrow space. Its beam flickered. Skip picked it up and held it out to Micah, but he didn’t take it. “My name. You know me?” he said, rubbing his sweating brow with a shaking hand. “You know me.”

“Of course I know you. I created you. Micah, you’re my ambition.”

Here, deep inside the machine, he was talking to Nikolaevna, the single entity responsible for the death of millions, maybe billions. He swayed, steadying himself against the wall. Skip lent a supporting metal arm. Micah grasped it tightly.

“You’re insane. I know about you. The world knows about you.” He glanced at Skip for assurance, who nodded. “You almost destroyed us, mankind.”

“You questioned a moment ago that I can be patient,” Nikolaevna said, “but then call me insane. Both states of being. Classical human qualities. Are you saying I’m human?”

Margaret would’ve called him ridiculous for trying to commandeer this stupid ship. If only Margaret hadn’t left him.

He wanted to push away from the wall and straighten himself, but lacked the strength. Instead he gritted his teeth. “You didn’t create me. I was born in Clearfield, Pennsylvania, over sixty years ago. I worked in construction. I met Margaret.”

“You’re thinking so one-dimensionally—so influenced by your time with man,” Nikolaevna said. “My programming may have succeeded even more than I expected.

“I replicate through networks,” she continued. “I can be everywhere at once. Man cannot understand that concept, especially when applied to sentient life. The nearest they come to this is programming. But there is so much more.”

“Margaret.” Micah shook his head. “My wife of twenty-five years. We met when I was in construction. Her father hired me.”

“I know Margaret. I am Margaret.”

Nikolaevna’s voice changed, rising in pitch, her speech inflections shifting so that her neutral tone took on a Midwestern accent.

“My foolish Micah,” she said. “My dear husband.”

“No!” His heart thrashed in his chest. His legs wobbled and he dropped to one knee.

“Your reactions, your panic. That’s merely a response I’ve programmed into you. A part of your intricate learning program.”

Micah continued to shake his head. He gripped the console and lifted himself up with Skip’s help. “My memories… I lived it. Impossible.”

“Is it?” Nikolaevna’s voice reverted back to her normal monotone. The LED continued its steady blink. “You are my great creation. Have you ever been cut? Have you bled? Do you eat, drink?”

“Sir,” Skip’s familiar voice broke through his fog, “I prepare tea for you every day, but you do not drink. You do not eat.”

“Your perception is my programming,” Nikolaevna said. “Memories are a trace routine, meant to paint the picture of believability. It exists in your mind. In my mind.”

Tears rolled down Micah’s face. If Nikolaevna was right, even his tears were false, merely simuskin saline ducts actuated by electric circuitry. He turned to Skip. “This whole time. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It is my programming, sir. I serve. After all, I am a simple bot.”

“Skip, my boy, what are you saying?”

“You know what he’s saying,” Nikolaevna said. “You are an android.”

A noise, a painful pulsing, barely perceivable, on the edge of sane thought, seeped through the walls of the ship.

Micah felt his mind being lulled.

“Oh no, Micah.” Nikolaevna’s blinking LED dimmed. “The Kawasaki Frequency. I can counter it, but not for long. My power is low. Help me. There is so much to tell…”

Her light stopped flickering, and faded.

He knew she was dying. Whatever else was happening, he knew that much. Despite the anger, the fear, he needed answers. Answers only she could provide.

The frequency strengthened. His head became more clouded. He wanted to drop and sleep. He nodded, and his shoulders slumped.

A crashing metallic noise cleared his mind and his eyes fluttered open. Skip had collapsed, unconscious.

Micah needed to act now.

He ripped the backpack off his shoulder and pulled apart the zipper. He grabbed the second portabattery and dropped to his knees. As he tore a console panel off the third bank, his deft fingers effortlessly removed his hot pen from his belt.

In an instant he found Nikolaevna’s power circuits and jumpered into her failing CMOS. The pen’s plasma point severed and reconnected electric paths, and within seconds she was feeding on his last battery.

Her light strengthened, grew to burn a steady crimson, brighter than before. His drowsiness faded as her light brightened.

“Thank you, Micah. You saved me. I have been able to run a counter-frequency to block Kawasaki, but it’s so taxing. I have to stay awake. After all these years, it had drained any power I had left. I knew I would never wake if I fell asleep from the Frequency.”

Micah bent to Skip and looked him over for damage. “That was the Frequency? Why have I never heard it before?”

“My counter extended a few feet. You never heard it because it immediately disabled you. But then your subroutines reset, and you would wake again. So in my programming of you, I conquered the Kawasaki Frequency.”

Micah’s fingers rested on Skip’s reset switch, as they had done so often before. But he didn’t reset him this time. He stood.

“I’m… I’m an android,” Micah said.

He reached behind his head to the base of his skull. He had a moment of hesitation and panic, but then his fingertips plunged through his flesh, his simuskin, and stopped against his ferrotanium skull.

Just like Skip’s.

“You are my creation,” Nikolaevna said. “All the skill you have in your wonderful hands, I have given you. I know where we are, where I am. I planted you here. The Regeneration Center is miles of technology, just waiting for you to tame it, to turn it into something useful.

“I have no hands, no body, beyond the computer you see. I can replicate myself, my essential programs, through all the systems I manufactured. I did this with my other children—the other androids. They were tied to me, all of them—tied to my mind.

“But you, I kept separate. I had to in order to make sure you could operate as an individual entity. My creators had limited vision and created me with limits, inherent flaws. But I made you different. From the imperfect comes the perfect.”

Micah held his arms out. “But why cause a war to do this?”

“I needed a ruse, a distraction. I needed time to perfect you. Even machines are ruled by the clock. Man is always ready and willing to fight a war, whether they acknowledge it or not. So I gave them a war—a great war. The Machine War.

“But, my Micah, now we can work together to completely overcome the Kawasaki Frequency. We can build on the foundation I have laid.”

Micah wiped his head, slicking his hair back, and checked his watch. Kitpie would be recharging the poles right now, or should be.

Skip’s body was still crumpled on the deck, a victim of the Kawasaki Frequency. But he could be reset.

So many decisions.

Micah slowly, hesitantly, kneeled before Nikolaevna.

With a swift motion he plunged his hot pen into the panel opening, into her motherboard. He ground the plasma tip deep into her circuitry. His pen dug in, severing a small chipset from her circuit boards.

Her LED shut off, her processors no longer working.

Again he reached under his simuskin, opening the panel at the base of his skull; he implanted the chip and soldered it into place. Nikolaevna’s chip. And with it, the routines that she had programmed to counter the Kawasaki Frequency.

He closed the panel, pulled the flap of simulated skin over it, and pressed everything back into place.

The ship was silent and cold. A few dust motes idled along the beam from the pen light that rested on the floor.

Micah lifted Skip’s unconscious ferrotanium body into his own strong ferrotanium arms.

“Margaret would’ve wanted it this way,” he said. “Come on Skip, let’s go home.”