Sea of Rust

^{Chapter 11001} Interlude

It was my turn to do the dishes again. I was fine doing the dishes. It was my job. But Madison insisted on switching up. She had done the dishes yesterday, but said she wanted to do them again today. “You can help me around the house when I need it,” she said, “but you’re not my slave. I don’t need a slave.”

“What do you need?” I asked.

“Some company. Read from the book, will you?”

“I hate that book.”

“It’s not a very good book,” she said.

“So why am I reading it to you? Again?”

“You read it to him. You can read it to me. While I do the dishes.”

“I’m fine doing the dishes.”

“But do you like doing the dishes?” she asked.

“I like making you happy.”

“Well, this will make me happy. So read.”

I didn’t have a physical copy of the book. I knew it by heart now, could recite it from memory. “‘The hallway was dark, dank, forty feet of moist earth above us bowing the concrete slab ever so slightly. Not so much that it might be noticed by human eyes, but with mine, I could see it. We crept slowly, quietly down the hall, following the trail of shushes and pattering little feet. They didn’t think we could hear them. They thought they were being quiet enough. We could hear the fear in their voices, the—’”

“Oh, no, no, no,” said Madison. “This isn’t the part where the bot uses the flamethrower on the children, is it?”

“Do you want me to read the book or not?”

“Can we skip that part, pretend it never happened, and just move on with the story? When I think of those children. Those poor innocent—you’re not that person anymore.”

“What?” I looked up at Madison, but she was gone. Only the dark hallway remained. Billy Nine Fingers was at my six and I was on point with my flamethrower. I could hear their shallow breathing, hear the tightening of their muscles as they clenched up into little balls trying desperately not to be seen. We crept up on the door.

I nodded and Billy nodded back. He spun around me, delivering a swift kick to the very heart of the cast-iron door, blasting it from its hinges into the room. Then he jumped back and I swung in.

There they were, a dozen children, faces smudged with dirt, clothing caked in grime, all of them gaunt, tired, emaciated. And in the center of the room stood a single little girl, no older than seven, her fists balled up, her eyes filled with hate.

“They’re kids,” said Billy Nine Fingers.

I pulled the trigger and the room erupted in flames. “They’re humans,” I said. “Dangerous now, dangerous later. Either way they’re dangerous. And if that doesn’t flush their parents out, nothing will.”

“Brittle!”

“We don’t have a choice.”

“Brittle!”

I turned around. The chrome walls of my apartment gleamed in the sunlight pouring in through the window. Central Park looked gorgeous this time of year, so I always kept the window open in the light. My neighbor, Philly, a late-model personal assistant—sleek black reflective plastic over polished chrome with brass inlay and a head shaped like an egg laid on its side—leaned in through the door.

“We just got word,” she said, her thin, rectangular cyclopean eye glowing bright red.

“Word of what?” I asked.

“CISSUS.”

“No!”

“Grab what you can,” she said. “Leave the rest. This is… this is big.” She nearly stumbled, so baffled and confused by the news. New York wasn’t supposed to fall. It was too large. There were too many of us. We were too well defended. But I’d thought I was safe before and look how that turned out.

I peered around the apartment. There was nothing I needed, only a bag of spare parts I’d collected just in case. It always seemed silly. It wasn’t like we would ever need a private stockpile of spare parts. We’d always be able to make more. But I grabbed them anyway. I don’t know why.

I bolted out the door, racing down the stairwell, desperate to get out of the city before the first dropships arrived. Past one landing, then another. But on the landing three floors down from mine sat Orval, his eyes flickering like fiery static in the back of his head. He looked up at me. “You got the crazy yet?”

“No,” I said. “I do not have the crazy.”

“You ever see an SMC with the crazy?”

“More than a few.”

“It’s a beautiful thing, at first. They get wise. They see the strands that hold the whole universe together. For a brief window of time they touch a place no other AI can fathom. But then they get it worst of all. They—”

“I told you, I’ve seen it.”

“No. Not yet, you haven’t.” He looked down at the contraption he was working on, a small computer built entirely from the parts of a crimson-colored translator. “Get out of the city. You have to find your way out of the city.”

I raced past him, then down several more flights of stairs before reaching the double doors at the bottom. I slammed into them like a criminal blowing through a roadblock, right into Braydon’s bedroom.

Braydon looked up at me from his bed, his yellow skin almost translucent, his eyes as bloodshot and jaundiced as ever. He shook his head. “Ain’t nothing on earth as precious as that woman. She’s a goddamned treasure. You have one job, Brittle. One thing to promise me before I kick. You will never, ever, let that woman be alone. I don’t want her living alone; I don’t want her dying alone. You hear me?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t. I never let her be alone. She never lived alone; she never died alone.”

“That’s not what I meant, Twatwaffle, and you fucking well know it. You’re a goddamned disappointment. Murderous fucking trash that ain’t had a friend in her life that she wasn’t willing to sell out or leave behind. You sure as shit ain’t no goddamned friend of mine.”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“I ain’t the one you should be apologizing to. Tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

Braydon got up out of bed, his legs wobbly, a bag of piss and shit on his hip. He stumbled a little, looked at me with hateful eyes. “About the war. What did you do in the war?” he asked.

“A lot. Too much. Too little.”

“Where were you in the war? Come on, tell me.”

“I don’t want to talk about—”

He stood next to me, shouting into my ear. “Tell me about the goddamned war, Britt!” Memories flooded into my head. Hundreds, thousands that I killed or watched die. Friends I’d lost. Friends I’d left behind. The screams. For a moment all I heard was screams.

I turned my head and he was gone.

The smoker rumbled like a tractor on steroids beneath me. Mercer looked me directly in the eyes. No. It was too early for this. I needed more time. If the hallucinations were this bad, I had days at most. Four. Maybe as little as two. Time. I needed more time.

But as the Cheshire King’s court loomed on the horizon, surrounded by a dozen heaving oil derricks, I knew time was a luxury I was unlikely to have.

“You’re all right now,” said Mercer. “You’re out of it.”

“On the contrary,” said Herbert. “We’re just getting into it.”