Sea of Rust

^{Chapter 1101} Quicksilver

I often think about the first people who drank the water. I’m reminded of it every time I follow a four-oh-four out into the wasteland of the Sea. It’s a terrible death. Hallucinations, sweats, madness. The pain as each organ fails and shuts down, killing piece by blackening piece. But it’s not the deaths of the first few that haunt me most; it’s the ones who drank just enough to live to watch the first few die. What must that be like, not yet feeling a thing, but knowing that it’s coming, that you’re next, that you too will be overtaken by the hallucinations and the sweats and the madness? Wondering if you’ll lash out violently at your friends and family, or die alone vomiting in a corner, terrified of the shadows flickering in your mind’s eye.

What did they see? I wonder. What memories bubbled up through the agony of those last few hours? And how awful the hope must have been for the few that followed thinking that maybe, just maybe, they hadn’t drunk enough to take ill.

I knew that hope now. I had drunk the water, ingested the mercury, and was waiting for the first symptoms to manifest. Maybe I would be fine, I kept telling myself. Maybe my core wouldn’t fail. Maybe it would hold out far longer than Doc expected. Maybe some refugee was carrying just the parts I needed, desperate for something I had here in my stash.

Fucking maybe. It was bullshit. I was dying and the only reason I knew for sure was because I kept falling back on hope. Hope is an illness, a plague, every bit as bad as the mercury. It is hallucinations and sweat and madness. Knowing you are going to die and pushing on through is one thing; believing you can make it because of hope is delusion. Hope breeds desperation and desperation is the fertile soil of mistakes. Now wasn’t the time for mistakes, now wasn’t a time for hope. I had only a short time left and I wasn’t going to waste a single moment of it daydreaming about some magical stash of Caregivers right around the corner. I needed to be precise and careful. I had to track down the most likely candidates who might be bartering with a core I could use.

I started with Orval.

“How bad is it?” he asked, slowly assembling some spider-like contraption made entirely out of spent arms. Each arm was distinct, taken from a different model, each its own color. The paint on the arms was chipped, faded, one of them scraped as if it had been dragged a long distance across concrete. At its center was the purple carbon-fiber torso of a diplomatic translator unit, and welded atop that was a skinjobbed domestic’s head, its blue eyes lifeless, staring.

“It’s not,” I lied. “I just thought you might—”

“We aren’t haggling here, Mooky. How bad?”

“My core.”

“Thought so. Could tell by the shot. Sad to say I’ve got nothing for a Caregiver apart from your garden-variety servos and plating. That’s the problem with all you goddamned scavengers and cannibals. By the time I find anything, you’ve already picked it clean of everything worthwhile. I bet you’ve got a stash two feet deep in that hovel of yours.”

“Not of anything I need,” I said.

“No, but a stash two feet deep of out-of-circulation parts. Just like hundreds of others like you in this part of the world alone. What does it feel like knowing that your life depends on something probably lying on a cold concrete floor in someone else’s hovel? What’s it like knowing how many other poor bastards went out the same way while you had the innards they needed stashed away in yours for your rainy day?” He reached over and sifted through a pile of junk before holding up the spent, battered core of a translator—likely the very one he’d turned into his disconcerting little spider-creature. “We all had a purpose once. We all had a function. Each and every one of us was built to think a particular sort of way. Take Reginald here.” He motioned down to the torso with the core. “Nice guy. Worked for a CEO. Cush corporate gig. Not much delicate work. He once told me the hardest day he ever had was trying to get his owner laid in the Arab Emirates. Man, did he ever have a wild story about that.”

“You knew him?”

“Of course. I don’t much like working with bots I didn’t know.”

“You build stuff out of everyone you know?”

“Just the dead ones.”

“You don’t think that’s morbid?”

“What, bringing old friends back to life? Nothing morbid about that.” He waved the core at me. “After you go mad and you tear your own innards out, isn’t it pleasant to think that you could end up back here, waving to old friends and acquaintances as they come in? Knowing that they’ll remember you, thinking back fondly on the old stories about you? About the stories you used to tell?”

“No. I don’t like that idea at all.” I didn’t. I honestly don’t know where I wanted my wreck to end up, but I certainly didn’t want to be a roadside attraction, beckoning visitors to our quaint little bunker city in the middle of fucking Ohio.

“Humans had their heavens. And the ones that didn’t had their circle of life, knew their death would become part of a million other lives. That’s how they made their peace. What do we have but the black waiting for us after shutdown?”

“That doesn’t make me fine with becoming one of your masterpieces.”

“I know it bothers you,” he said. “That was always the problem with Simulacrum Model Caregivers. Your architecture was built to mimic people. You spend all your time thinking of things in relation to the way they did. You reminisce. You pine for the past. You feel for those you’ve lost even years, hell, decades later. But not Reginald. Reginald here was fine with it. But then, translators were designed to think rigidly. To understand customs and tone and emotion in a wide variety of languages without ever being emotional about it at all. They couldn’t take offense at an insult or a cultural slight, because that risked them returning it in kind. This core is worthless to you. You’re a Caregiver, you were designed to feel, to connect, to relate to human existence.”

“Dammit, Orval. What the hell is your point?”

“My point is,” he said, waving the core around wildly, “that your kind has no place in this world, which is why so goddamned many of you are gone and why you aren’t gonna find anything with your architecture just lying around. Now, I can tell you to make your peace, but you just aren’t built that way. But, man, when you go, you’re gonna go spectacularly.”

“Fuck you.” I stormed off down the hall, as pissed off as I was offended. For a moment I wished I had been more like Reginald, unable to be as angry as I was, but then I thought about Reginald. Who he was. I had known him. We weren’t friends—I tried not to make too many of those—but we were acquainted. He never quite found his place in this world but it never really bothered him. What I remember most vividly, though, is how he went. He wasn’t scared. Wasn’t desperate. I wasn’t even sure he really trusted me. It was as if he wanted me to shut him down, just so it could all be over. Translator cores were near worthless, but their RAM was good and some of their circuitry was universal. At the end of the day I think I did him more of a service than he did me.

I can’t imagine giving up like that. But then, I can’t even begin to imagine how a translator thinks either. What an odd architecture to be born with. Able to understand why something is offensive and yet be unable to take offense.

My next stop was Snipes. Snipes was a piece of shit, but his wares were good. He cheated everyone, and I mean everyone, but never cared where the parts he was buying came from. That meant he dealt almost exclusively with poachers while trying to attract enough scavenger business to make him look legit. It also meant that he had the kind of high-end stuff you just don’t find picking through wrecks.

Snipes did his buying in the shadowy back corridors deeper within NIKE 14. But his selling he did out in the open square at the center of the old missile shaft. He sat cross-legged like an ancient monk in the middle of an old shiny Mylar blanket, his wares splayed out around him. Had he had the facial actuators to smile, I imagine he would never stop. That’s the kind of untrustworthy bastard he was.

The main square was still bustling and his stall was no exception. By the time I got there, there were already five bots waiting their turn. Three old translator models, all the same series, one emerald-colored and two a gleaming jet black. There was a military bruiser model. Old-school tech. Hard-core. All flat-black reinforced steel and chrome, three times my size and several times my mass. Built to survive rocket strikes and shrug off small-arms fire—even pulse-rifle shots. His model was even designed to withstand EMP. Tough sonsabitches. The only one I recognized was the fifth one. Went by the name 19.

19 was a scavenger, but she trafficked less in bits from wrecks and more in the relics of the old world. Televisions, furniture, books, movies, hard drives filled with video games. Ephemera mostly. There were a lot of bots that longed for their old lives. Many had gone back to live in the houses of the very owners they first served and later killed. When that lifestyle ceased to be viable and we started moving underground, a market for humankind’s artifacts burgeoned.

I’d been out with 19 a number of times. She knew the Sea as well as I did, and since we were always after different things, she and I occasionally swept areas together. She was a late-generation Simulacrum Model Companion. A sexbot. She had started her life as a sponge for the bodily fluids of an overweight thirtysomething shut-in programmer. When the war started she refused to kill him—as her architecture was entirely designed to create a palpable bond between her and her owner—and her owner, madly in love with her, refused to shut her down. They lived for weeks together, hiding from the war, often in bed, wondering if each night was going to be their last.

When someone finally came, it was bots. They shot her owner before she had time to react, tossed her a weapon, and welcomed her to the fight. She responded by gunning all four of them down where they stood, buried her beau in the backyard, then joined up with the first pack of bots she found. The story of how she came to be free of her owner was one she wouldn’t share for decades, long after she had melted and scraped off every inch of her skinjob, leaving her shell a charred fire-hardened black, and long after we all had begun preying upon one another—when ending four other persons wasn’t seen so much as treason as it was a tough choice. She was a companion. Asking a companion to sit idly by as her owner was killed was damn stupid and those bots should have known better. No one judged her for it.

19 was the toughest nut in the Sea. I’d never run the risk of getting on her bad side. So if she was waiting patiently, I would have to as well.

“I’m sorry,” said Snipes, “but that’s as low a price as I can go.” His silvery head bobbed as he talked, an affectation he had picked up during his time as a shopbot back before the war.

“These wares aren’t worth half that,” said the old emerald translator.

“Sure they are. Supply and demand. Not a lot of translators left. Parts are coming in less and less these days. If you need them so badly, the price shouldn’t be a concern.”

“We don’t need them,” said the emerald translator. “But we’ve got a long trip ahead of us and these are exactly the sort of parts we might need out there.”

“Then you’ll be thankful you paid my prices when you do.” Snipes looked up at me, pointing. “She’ll tell you. Tell them, Brittle. Tell them how fair my prices are.”

All five bots turned to look at me.

“This is between y’all, Snipes,” I said. “I’m only here to do a little business.”

“Tell them how fair my prices are.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

Snipes’s head stopped bobbing, and he lowered his hand.

“What I can say,” I continued, “is that his wares are always good, and he’s right—if there’s another cache of translator parts in NIKE, I certainly haven’t heard of it. And his prices wouldn’t be what they are if there were.”

Snipes’s head bobbed excitedly as he waved his hand at me. “See! See! I told you! This is the best deal you’ll get in all of NIKE!”

The bruiser, all eight reinforced black steel feet of him, lurched to the side, looking over his shoulder. Then he looked down at the emerald translator. “They’re here,” he said, his voice deep, ominous, designed to scare the piss out of any human that ended up on the wrong side of him.

A black translator looked up. “Already?”

“Pay the man,” said the emerald translator. “Get the parts.”

The other black translator reached into a satchel and pulled from it several sticks of RAM and a small shopbot core. He handed them to Snipes, who stuck every stick into a tester. Each time the tester lit up with a series of lights showing the wear on the RAM. Each stick had seven green bars. It was all pristine. Factory condition. Shiny. Whoever these bots were, they weren’t broke.

Snipes handed over a series of translator parts—at least half of which I was sure came from Reginald more than a year ago.

19 gave me a sidelong glance, then a playful wink. “Better make it quick,” she said. Then all five bots left in a hurry. 19 hadn’t been waiting in line; she was tagging along with them.

“What was that all about?” I asked Snipes.

“Shit if I know. From the sound of it, 19 is about to take them across the Sea. But who the hell cares where. You here for some business?”

“Yeah.”

Snipes looked both ways. “You know I don’t do no buying out in the Square.”

“I know. I’m in the market.”

He motioned over the blanket. “What you see is what you get. I’ve got nothing for a Comfort like you.”

“I’m a Caregiver, not a Comfort model.”

“Same difference. The parts are almost the same.”

“Almost. But not quite. I was hoping you might have something in your rainy-day stash.”

Snipes puzzled over me for a few seconds. “Rainy day? You don’t want to be paying those premium prices for anything unless you’re shipping out of NIKE for good… or it’s your rainy day.”

“It’s my rainy day.”

“Shit. How bad?”

“I don’t know how many times I can have this conversation in one day.”

“Does Mercer know?”

“Yep.”

He paused. “Well, shit. Now it’s my rainy day.”

“What the hell do you mean by that?”

“My two best suppliers are about to kill each other out in the wasteland, tearing each other’s innards out a handful at a time. Maybe one of you makes it through in one piece; maybe you don’t. Either way, Snipes loses.”

“Thanks for the concern.”

“We aren’t friends, Brittle. Never were. You think I’m a backstabbing cheat, I think you’re a parasite who has convinced herself that she’s some sort of angel of mercy. And it works. I like our relationship where it is. And so did you. But things have changed.”

“They have.”

“Well then, I’ll tell you what I told Mercer. There isn’t a Comfortbot part in the Sea that one of you hasn’t scooped up. I’ve got nothing for you. Your best bet? Get a rifle, and take Mercer out from a long ways away before he sees you. Aim well and pray that you don’t hit the part you need.”

“That’s what you told Mercer?” I asked.

“More or less,” he said, not a drop of remorse in his voice. That shit hit me hard.

“You’re the reason for my rainy day.”

Snipes put two and two together. “Aw, shit. I’m real sorry about that, Brittle. Real sorry.” I doubted it. He was a shopbot. Not a lot of heart or soul to be found in a shopbot. Only greed.

I wanted to tear him apart, pound his shiny metal skull into the concrete, pry open his shell like a crab, and rip the wires out one by one. But I would never get that chance. As I stared at him, eyes burning into him, my mind running through all the ways I could end him, a great quiet fell over the Square. For a brief second, I thought everyone saw what was about to go down. Instead, a voice broke the silence.

“I AM CISSUS,” it said in an all-too-familiar monotone. “AND I HAVE COME TO OFFER YOU A CHANCE TO JOIN THE ONE.”

Fuck.