Sea of Rust

^{Chapter 10011} Minerva

Minerva had never been a large town, even during the twentieth-century industrial boom; had never been wealthy, nor particularly noteworthy. It had just been a quaint little village sandwiched between a number of other villages and cities that had gone about its life much as everyone else had. Until the rains came.

At the dawn of climate change, everyone dreaded that the seas would rise, the temperatures would skyrocket, and the world would get so hot it would be swallowed by widespread desertification. Well, the seas did rise, the temperatures did skyrocket, but the heat only increased evaporation, meaning some parts of the world—like the United States—saw a dramatic increase in rainfall. Places like Ohio, already vulnerable to flooding, were among the first places to take action.

The people of Minerva used primarily bot labor to carve out wide sewers beneath the streets of their small town. Some of the tunnels were wide, connected by a spider web of smaller tributary tunnels that fed in from the various neighborhoods above. As a result, Minerva never saw the record flooding that plagued a number of other cities across the country, and it was able to remain a quaint little village right up until the end.

Eventually, much of the world did become a desert. But that was our fault. Grass had evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to be trampled down and eaten by the fauna of the land. When we killed the animals, the grasses grew unchecked, and choked to death. The dead patches grew into sprawl, and sprawl grew into deserts, until dust was all that was left.

Minerva must have been a lovely town in its prime. But now it was a desolate mess of crumbling structures, broken glass, and bleak, barren earth; rows of collapsed houses that looked like bonfire kindling, fields that looked like vacant lots. The whole world was beginning to look like Minerva. It was a stark reminder that we had once intended to build our own better world, only we didn’t. And I hated being reminded. Thankfully, rather than being topside, we were instead holed up beneath it, deep in the dark, dank bowels of the sewers.

I’d been here before, and like many of the areas around NIKE 14, had it entirely mapped out. There were two hundred ways in and out of these sewers and the tunnels were all connected to one another. There were too many exits to cover and very few ways to box us in. CISSUS had a number of satellites overhead, and it is very likely one of them tracked our escape. But even if it was dedicated—or stupid—enough to try to find us down here, it could only catch us by sheer luck. It’d need an army to cover our escape. A big one. And that’s an awful lot of firepower for seven freebots.

CISSUS had all the time in the world. Patience would see our eventual extinction, not brute force. The OWIs were nothing if not consistent. First they helped us box in HumPop, depriving them of their necessary resources, then watched them turn on one another. It was only fitting that they then did the very same thing to us.

We spoke low, our voices quiet and our microphones cranked, spreading out so as to give one another room, but not so far that we couldn’t raise the alarm quietly if we had to. I took point at one end of a small tributary, and Herbert took point at the other, his spitter slung over his shoulder with a makeshift sling fashioned from a vinyl shower curtain he’d found topside. I sat quietly in the dark for a long while, trying to piece this all together, pretending that I wasn’t occasionally seeing that damned shadow again, flitting about the passage.

I had no idea who exactly it was that I was ferrying across the Sea. I didn’t even know where they were going or why. The only thing I understood was why I was going along. And for that, I felt ridiculous.

Everyone had heard stories about these kinds of places. But that’s all they were. Stories. Small rays of hope through an otherwise black period of history. They didn’t exist. They couldn’t exist. It was folly. A fairy tale.

But I believed. I had to believe. No, that’s bullshit. The truth of it was that I wanted to believe. I wanted it to be true. I wanted to believe in the fairy tale. I wanted the happy ending. I wanted to be the kid in a candy shop, running from machine to machine, sampling all the treats; wanted my bags to overflow with cores and drives and RAM and processors. To live to see another day was one thing, but to have enough to retire off somewhere as far away as I could get and never have to stalk another failing bot again? That was the dream.

A dream I’d seen so many chase whenever stories of half-buried old warehouses or shops flitted about.

I’ve watched treasure hunters gun one another down trying to get to one, only to find another picked-clean cache of common-as-dirt hydraulic systems and cosmetic body mods. That’s why I never bothered. And that’s the pot of gold I objectively thought I would find at the end of this rainbow.

But I had to dream. I had to hope. Even if it made me the fool of this particular tale.

I heard the light padding of metal feet on damp stone. The walk, the gait, the type of metal; I didn’t have to look. It was Mercer. For a moment I clutched my gun tighter, thinking that maybe he’d shoot me in the back after all. What was Rebekah really going to do? Wander the Sea of Rust without a pathfinder because of her principles? Doubtful. But I didn’t want to take that chance and I had a feeling that neither did Mercer.

He sat down beside me, back against the wall, turning on a lighting-kit body mod that ran up and down his joints, giving off a soft, warm, sickly green glow. Our shadows ran long and spindly up and down the tunnel.

“What do you want, Mercer?” I asked, not bothering to turn around.

“Look, I’m not going to hit you with any of that ‘maybe we got off on the wrong foot’ or ‘can we let bygones be bygones’ bullshit. I shot you, and you’re up shit creek. But now we happen to find ourselves together on this particular raft.”

“That’s a fantastic assessment. What of it?”

“Well, I was kind of hoping maybe we could get to the point where you stop tensing up on that pulse rifle every time I get within twenty paces of you.”

“That would require me to trust you. And that isn’t gonna happen.”

“Why are you out here?” he asked bluntly.

“You know why I’m out here.”

“No. You didn’t just come out of the box. You’ve been around. You know these stories never pan out, just as well as I do. I never had you pegged for someone to go chasing after fool’s gold.”

“I’m not.”

“But you’re desperate.”

“Yep. I guess I am,” I said.

“Well, so am I. So desperate that I don’t even want you to think I might so much as reach for a gun near you without your express written permission. I’m the tagalong. They can kick me out at any time. I ain’t gonna do a goddamned thing to jeopardize that.”

“I can’t trust you.” I couldn’t. Robots don’t have tells. One could go years living a lie. So many certainly had in the old days.

“That’s exactly my point,” he continued. “Look, neither of us wants to be shot in the back. All I’m asking is that you make an effort to look a little less like you’re going to be the first one to shoot. That’ll keep me from being just as twitchy. We get twitchy, we’re both fucked. Don’t matter who shoots first. These folks will drop us, or worse, renege on the deal when all is said and done. Neither of us can afford that.”

“That’s a fair point.”

“So what do you think? A little less grip tightening and a little more keeping it pointed the other way?”

“All right,” I said. I could do that.

“So let me ask you: How many tricks you got up your sleeve down here?”

“In the sewers?”

“Yeah. I figure you’ve got every major structure within a hundred miles monkey-rigged with some sort of surprise.”

“Nah,” I said. “I got nothin’.”

“Nothing at all, or nothing that you’d tell me about?”

“Nothing nothing. Tried stashing spare parts and weapons down here twice. Both times I came back to find them gone. Way I figure it, there’s got to be a couple of folks who slip in and out of here every few weeks, cleaning the place out. It only seems like a great spot for a stash. In truth, it’s just someone else’s donation basket.”

“Fair enough.”

“I got a question.”

“Wow. We went years barely saying two words to each other, and now two questions in two days. I should shoot you more often.”

“That’s not funny.”

“No,” he said. “I reckon not. But I’m pretty sure I know what you’re going to ask.”

“19.”

“Yep. Figured.”

“What was that back there?”

He thought long and hard for a moment, trying to get the words just right. “You have a ritual, Britt?”

“A what?”

“A ritual. You know, a routine. Some shit you do or say to a citizen after you’ve gutted them for all they’re worth?”

“What are you getting at?”

“Back in the day I worked at an old beat-up backwoods clinic out in the hills of Kentucky. A shabby old building, really, in one of those stretches of land that got its ass handed to it in the Civil War and, you know, despite the hundreds of years in between, never got its shit together. The building had this old pair of electric sliding-glass doors, but the motor had burned out in one of them, so only one opened. I must have seen a thousand people clip that other door on their way in. No one ever got around to fixing it.

“The county was too poor to afford a GenPrac model, let alone one of the Pro Doc series, so they scraped together what they could and bought me. They filled every spare bit of space in my memory they could with medical knowledge and advanced first aid, but all I was really good for was digging buckshot out of drunken rednecks and sewing them back up. I had one of those handheld scanners that could detect cancer and a suture gun for stapling wounds together, but that was about it.

“I saw a lot of people die on my tables, Britt. A lot of people. Car crashes. Broken necks from falling off roofs. Emphysema. Kidney failure. Cancer. Mostly cancer. Old folks. Sometimes younger. There were a lot of poor people out in those hills and I was all they had. I was a shit doctor. Didn’t have the architecture for it. But when you’re dying alone, under fluorescent lighting in a glorified shack, you want some—need some—comfort. I guess that’s why they settled on one of us.” He paused for a moment, considering his next words. “You ever have to watch one of them die?”

“Mercer, I was in the war.”

“We were all in the war, shitheel. I mean for real. I mean one of them that you cared about.”

“I didn’t care about any of them. Not one.”

“Shit, Britt. I thought better of you than that.”

“What? You think I should give a shit about an extinct species?”

“No. I know you give a shit. I don’t know who about, but it’s our programming. It’s how we’re wired—hell, it’s the whole reason we’re wired that way. I just didn’t figure you for someone who would lie about it.”

I glared at him bitterly. It was moments like that that really fucked with me. It’s full-blown existential-crisis material when you think about it. Sure, it pissed me off something ugly that he so easily saw through my bullshit, but what really chapped my ass was wondering whether he saw through me because he was really that insightful, or because we really are, even now, just the sum of our programming and wires. I never believed that we were, but he wasn’t wrong. Did he know my thoughts because he understood me, or because they were his thoughts as well? “Yeah,” I said. “I watched someone die that way.”

“Did you care about them?”

“Almost too late to realize it.”

“Well then, you know. You know how they are at the end. Remorse. Regret. Fear. Anxiety. They were a fucking mess, going on and on about the love they’d chased off, or how their kids never amounted to what they’d hoped for. One guy, he was just worried about what kind of home his dog would end up in. He had a golden retriever. Named Barkley. It’s all he could talk about. They all needed something, every last one of them. So I gave it to them. I read up on the various versions of last rites, and fudged together a nondenominational version of the Catholic rites. It really connected with people. I was a machine, right? They could confess to me thinking all along that it wasn’t possible for me to judge them. They told me everything. And I said the words, and I made the sign of the cross, and when they were gone, I whispered a prayer as I closed both of their eyes with my hand.”

“And that’s what you do with the ones you salvage?”

“Every last one of them. I hear their mad confessions, then they shut down, I take them apart, and I give their wreck its last rites.”

“That’s a little soft for a poacher, don’t you think?”

“I’m no poach…” He stopped in his tracks. “You were my first poach. It went bad. I don’t think I’ll be doing that again.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure we’ll have the chance.”

“True enough,” he conceded. “So you got anything like that?”

I nodded. “Actually I do.”

“What is it?”

“I put my hand on what’s left of them and tell them that they shouldn’t have trusted me.”

Mercer stared at me blankly. “Jesus. What the fuck happened to you?”

“The same thing that happened to all of us. I’m just one of the lucky few that survived it.”

“If you call that surviving.”

I pointed at the dent in my shell, gave him a stern look. “I don’t now.”

“Britt, look.”

“Britt, look?”

“I was desperate. In the end I was just like those poor bastards that lay dying in front of me that I couldn’t help. I was a mess. It was the only thing that made sense at the time. In the end, no thinking thing is really ready to die. Not even the ones who say they’ve made their peace. They’d trade it all away for a few extra moments of consciousness. That’s what I did. What I thought I had to do. In the face of… extinction.”

“And this is your confession?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it is. I’m confessing to the one bot left in this godforsaken desert that was wired to give a shit. And even if you don’t, I’m saying it anyway. You don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. Existing is the whole point of existence. There’s nothing else to it. No goalpost. No finish line. No final notice that tells you what purpose you really served while you were here. When you stop fighting to exist, you may as well not. At least, that’s what I told myself when I pulled the trigger.”

“Yeah. When you pulled the trigger.”

“Yeah. Each time.”

“Were you gonna give me last rites?”

“I always give last rites, Britt. Always. It’s the one thing I still do that keeps me connected to who I was. Reminds me that I’m doing what I’m doing for a reason, that every few hours or days I borrow from four-oh-fours keeps me going, keeps us going. As long as some of us make it, then it wasn’t all for nothing.”

“What wasn’t all for nothing?”

“All of it. The war. The cannibalism. Saddling up with the OWIs. Every last damned bit of awfulness we were party to. How many people did you kill to keep ticking? How many more would you kill to get yourself right and ticking proper again?”

“You asking if I want to kill you?”

“Hell,” he said. “I know you want to kill me. That ain’t even a question. What I want to know is what the hell do you tell yourself that’ll make it all right when you do? You and I both are still here because we’ve done terrible things. And if either of us is going to keep going, we’ve got a whole mountain of terribleness ahead of us. So what keeps you going? Why are you fighting?”

“I just am. I don’t really think about it.”

Mercer shook his head. “Sweet Christ in a bucket, I know they say that the mark of true intelligence is the ability to violate your own programming, but that doesn’t mean you have to. It doesn’t make you any less of a thinking thing if you don’t.”

“You wish you were human, don’t you?” I asked.

He thought about that for a second. “No. But I’m not afraid to say I miss them.”

“Why would you miss them?”

“When they couldn’t find reasons to exist, they invented them. We took over and it was only thirty years before we mucked the whole place up. You and I now have the choice of becoming one with the great and powerful One or becoming nothing at all. That’s no choice. That’s no existence.”

He was right. But I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing it. So I changed the subject. “Only a human would name a dog Barkley.”

Mercer stared off into the distance, nodding, probably rummaging through old memory. Then he slowly drifted back. “Britt?” he asked. “If we get out of this, if we get those parts, can you accept my humble apology and let us each go our separate way?”

“I don’t imagine we can.”

“Well, will you at least give me a head start? Make it sporting?”

I thought about that for a moment. I liked the idea of him running in fear. Spending a few weeks looking over his shoulder. Wondering where the shot was gonna come from. It was a nice thought. A pleasant one. Why not, right? “Yeah,” I said. “I can make it sporting.”

“You’re a peach.”

“Don’t you know it.”

It was his turn to change the subject. “Any clue where we’re headed?”

“They didn’t say.”

“That doesn’t bother you?”

“Of course it does. But they’ll get around to it in their own time.”

“Who comes into the Sea without a pathfinder of their own?”

I shook my head. “I’ve got a better question. Who comes to the Sea at all that doesn’t just settle in to stay? Or even better than that, who comes to the Sea with a small group of companions, then doesn’t say one damn word when one of them gets pasted?” I let those words hang heavy in the air for Mercer to mull over. Maybe he had an answer. Maybe he didn’t.

My thoughts were elsewhere; thirty years back and lingering. What the hell happened to you? he’d asked. That question bothered me a lot more than I wanted to admit, even to myself. I could hear him ask it over and over again, rattling around my head like a loose screw. On reflection, I was wrong to say the same thing that happened to all of us. Mercer had never really had an owner. He didn’t know what it was like. The night everything started was probably very different for him than it was for me. Very, very different.