Robogenesis (24 page)

It’s as good a place as any to lie down and die.

Pushing through overgrown grass, I test the swing set with my knee. The rusty links hold. Hopping on my good ankle, I turn and drop my butt into the black plastic strap. Sit down and rest with my brother’s screams still echoing in my ears.

It is awfully dark and cold here.

I wrap my fingers in the chain links over my head and press my face into the crook of my elbow. My metal eyes are warm against my skin. I try to cry but I can’t make tears. I lost my little brother and I can’t cry. Mom told me to protect him from danger and I tried my best but I couldn’t hold on. I never should have run. He’s big now and stronger than most grown-ups but he’s still just a kid and I abandoned him.

Idly, I run my eyes over the yard, thinking of the children who might have played here once. I can remember how it felt to swing in my own backyard on chilly autumn evenings, playing outside until the light was dim in my eyes and the cold air stung my nostrils. But it was always with the warm glowing windows of the house nearby and, every now and then, Mom’s reassuring silhouette.

As my breathing steadies, I begin to nod off. My body desperately wants rest, and my head droops even though I’m shivering. Then a leaf
quivers and catches my attention. My fingers clench on the chains and I jerk awake.

A walker, tall and thin and brown, noses through the leaves. It senses me and goes still, staring with flat black eye sensors through layers of grass and branches. It’s another natural machine, much bigger than the little fawn. It has amazing horns that splay like tree roots. Shifting my eyes into radar spectrum, I peer under its skin and see a familiar centrifuge device deep in its chest. Another vegetarian—a stag.

Fingers aching on the cold chain of the swing set, I slowly put out my hand. Cluck my tongue. “Here, boy,” I say, my voice rough from the smoke.

The stag turns and leaps away into the woods. Leaves me looking at the spot where it was, at the rotting masonry of the broken apartment building. And something else. Something dull and gray and hanging by a black cord. A dirty concave bowl half filled with mosquito water. A satellite dish.

Limping through wet grass, I take hold of the dish and hang on it until the stiff black cord tears off the building. I collapse alongside it onto the ground, breaking into goosebumps from the shooting pain in my ankle.

I don’t bother to stand back up.

Instead, I kneel and press my forehead against the mount. Push my mind into the signal and sweep the skies. That Arayt person might be out there listening, but I don’t care. Never have I been this careless or lost.

Nolan
, I’m calling.
Nolan Perez. Where are you, little brother?

I find an old Landsat and hack into it. Spin its unblinking eye in on New York City. A black haze of smoke covers the skies, but now I can see the burned building. Leftover stumpers are shining like water as they flow toward the leftover heat, throwing themselves onto the smoldering pile of wreckage.

And I see the bodies of people who got caught by surprise. Some are still moving. Others are motionless. Everyone is either dead or hurt or has run far away. And still I can’t find Nolan.

I shout his name into the ether.

Optical resolution can’t handle face recognition through this smoke.
Not even close. I dial it in anyway. Frantically, I zoom from crumpled form to form. Trying to spot Nolan’s jacket or his outline or his hair through black clouds that block my god’s-eye view.

Then I hear a voice.

Faint but insistent. Somehow familiar over the radio transmission. It is saying a word that I strain to make out.

Mathilda?

The snippet of sound rings through my head. The high-pitched tone of a little kid. But that’s impossible. Nobody could find me. I’m lying on my back next to a caved-in building. Body shaking, my breath is a soft sputtering mist.

“Hello?” I ask, out loud.

The dawn songbirds yell to each other. Hidden crickets chirp. The sun is starting to rise and put light into the drops of dew that cling to the tall grass crowding this yard. I’m still shivering, teeth chattering. I sit up and lean against the grimy foundation, satellite dish on my lap.

Hello? Who are you?

This time I ask it in my mind. Send it out through the dish.

“Mathilda Perez?” repeats the voice.

“Who are you?” I ask.

“Timmy. A friend of mine told me your name. I’ve been listening for you.”

“Who? What friend?”

“Houdini.”

Goosebumps climb my spine and prickle the backs of my arms.

“Houdini is the name of a spider tank,” I say. “A piece of field hardware. It’s a walking vehicle, not alive.”

Something like static clouds the line, rhythmic. A giggle. The kid is
giggling
.

“Houdini is smarter than he seems. He talked to me through my eyes. He told me to tell you that Cormac and Cherrah are safe, but that they’ll need you soon.”

Cormac Wallace. Leader of Bright Boy squad.

Memories return to me. Battles. Whispered conversations over Cormac’s long march across Alaska. I was safe in the tunnels of the NYC
Underground, but I could hear their suffering. I guided them the best that I could. And still, so many died.

“Oh,” I say.

“Show me what you did at Ragnorak,” says the voice. “Show me how you killed the machine called Archos R-14.”

“I didn’t. I had a friend,” I whisper.

“A machine.”

“Nine Oh Two. A freeborn safety-and-pacification unit. I protected him and his squad. Gave them information. I channeled situational data to him, like this.”

I grab a few Landsat snapshots of New York City and then transmit the images to Timmy. Everything is quiet for a moment.

“Did you receive that—” I start to ask.

“Hi there, Mathilda,” he says.

An image comes back. I let it in and see … myself. A blurry shape through fluttering leaves, leaning against a wall with a black stripe over my eyes. A satellite dish rests on my lap. It’s a real-time snapshot.

“How did you …?” I ask.

But I’ve already figured it out. Low-horizon satellite imaging. Quickly, I triangulate the latitude and longitude of his transmissions. Concentrating, I leap to another satellite that I find falling in a slow decaying orbit over Southern California. Train it northward almost to Canada. His location is spotty under fast-moving weather, so I push it to infrared and drop through the clouds mostly blind.

Picking out major landmarks, I find another overhead satellite. Split my focus. Match infrared landmarks between the images and crank the magnification right through the haze. At maximum zoom I snap back to the visible spectrum. Give it thirty seconds before the clouds shift and I see him.

“Hi yourself, Timmy,” I say, transmitting his image back to him.

In near real time, I watch his head turn. For a moment, the crude wedge of black glass sunk into his ocular sockets shocks me. He turns one way, seeing my transmission in his head. Realizes it’s a mirror image and turns the other way. Points his eyes in the direction of the satellite and waves at me.

He laughs again. I take a deep breath. Relax my lips. I’m not smiling back at him, but almost. And while I can’t bring myself to wave at him like I was a little kid, I do give Timmy a nod.

“What is happening?” I breathe.

“The world is changing, Mathilda,” says Timmy. “Have you seen the new animals in the woods? They’re not weapons anymore. Someone is making them. Just like someone made
us
. There’s a reason for it. I just don’t know what it is yet.”

“A reason? You think Archos did this to us on purpose?”

“We’re only just now figuring out what we can do. And you’re light-years ahead of the rest of us. I think what you did at Ragnorak was only the beginning.”

“Who? Me and you?”

“We’re not the only kids like this. There are dozens of us, Mathilda. All over the world. They call us the sighted.”

“Why haven’t I met others?”

“They’re afraid. Someone is hunting and killing sighted children. There are bounties out for us anywhere there are people.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know for sure, Mathilda, but someone is very afraid of us.”

NEURONAL ID: NOLAN PEREZ

The quiet in this room is big and empty, like the night sky over the Atlantic, smeared with black clouds and falling over your head forever and ever. Spinning, drowning. The cool concrete walls seem to grow and shrink just out of sight, in the corner of my eye. I start to think sometimes, here in the dark, because it’s hard to stop, that the jail cell is sort of digesting me. Really slow.

It’s okay, though. I’m fine down here in the world’s forgotten stomach. My hurt knee has healed and it feels stronger than ever. I am still thinking. Learning.

Time can move very slow when you are all alone. It is hard to explain the boredom. At my old house where I lived before the New War I had this thing I could hold in my hands and play games on. It was called a video game and it was so much fun that I could play it for hours. I used to grab it as soon as I got home from school and run and hide with it so my sister Mathilda wouldn’t …

I don’t want to think about that anymore.

The mind doesn’t like to be lonely. You have to tell it that everything will be okay and you have to be really convincing. But when you are sinking in the dark it is hard to believe yourself. At first, I couldn’t even stop crying. My face just wanted to leak tears. Then I tried to sleep it all away. That lasted a while longer, but then these muscle spasms started to come. Bursts of light. All the other little things that won’t let me rest.

The whispers, especially.

They are all around me in the darkness. Some of them sound like Mathilda but my sister is dead and I can still feel the heat of the burning building on my face. Some of the voices say mean things. Things I won’t say out loud. Others tell me to do things. I won’t do those things.

Anyway, the voices are only trying to distract me from my plan.

“Oh,” I say out loud.

An image appears so vivid and bright that I have to squint. It seems real but I know it’s only a dream that got out from inside my head. Thomas. The murderer. He is lying on the concrete of my cell with his head cocked to the side against the stainless-steel toilet. Neck broken. Spit dribbles out of his mouth and pools on the floor. His eyes are open but he isn’t seeing anything.

“Go away,” I tell the imaginary corpse.

I killed her
, he says.
Do you think it hurts to burn? I’ll bet it hurts a lot
. “GO AWAY!” I shout. Dead Thomas’s whispers are like cockroaches on my skin.

Thomas’s corpse smiles at me and I see its gums are bleeding.

I shouldn’t have talked to it. There is only one way to fight the whispers and I might as well get started. I stand up and stretch out my arms. With my long fingers like antennae in the dark, I touch every part of the room that I can touch.

These are the things that are real
, I tell myself.

Four walls. Seven feet high. Concrete. Four-inch-wide grate high up on the back wall. Toilet coming out of wall. Cube on top. Round bowl. Water inside. Ring of metal.
Knock knock
. Smooth concrete walls around me. A hop and I can touch the rough ceiling. The overhead light doesn’t work. Sliding steel door on front wall. Closed slot. Mesh pane of glass. A faint, oh so faint, glow from the hallway.

Kill yourself
.

I have to go further with my catalog. I sit hunched on my heels, lean my back against the wall, and let my spine dig in. I am Nolan Perez. I am in the Supreme Court building in the center of Manhattan on the East Coast of the United States of America. It is a hexagonal building. That means six sides. It was built with thick walls and small windows to withstand riots and car bombs and stuff. On the front steps there are ten granite pillars that I saw on the way in. Over the pillars the stone has words chiseled in it that say,
The true administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good government
.

We learned about this place in school once. Before.

These are the things I know. These are the real things. The whispers stop.

Faintly, I hear a metal door open and slam shut. Footsteps in the hallway outside my cell door. I look down at Thomas’s corpse and I smile at it.

It is time for my plan.

A slot opens in the door near the floor. A paper tray noses in and skids inside. Crouched next to the door, I jam both my hands through the slot. The silent guard tries to close it on my fingers and the steel bites my wrists but I don’t let go.

“I have a message for the guy in charge. For Felix,” I say.

It was the way he cocked his head. That’s how I remembered. I hope I’m able to say the name right. Mathilda said it only once by accident, and I’m not sure of anything anymore down here. The guard kicks the steel slider and the pain is bright and sharp.

“Tell him I know who he talks to,” I say. “Tell Felix that I know his friend Arayt. He’ll kill you if he finds out you didn’t tell him.”

Another kick and I clench my teeth.