4. CHAPERONE DUTY
If this kid is gonna leave me to die, I want him to remember my face.
As we hiked across the United States, Brightboy squad was unaware that most large cities worldwide were being emptied out by increasingly weaponized robots. Chinese survivors later reported that at this time it was possible to cross the Yangtze River on foot, the waters were so choked with corpses washing out to the East China Sea.
Even so, some groups of people simply learned to adapt to the never-ending onslaught. The efforts of these urban tribes, described in the following pages by Marcus and Dawn Johnson of New York City, ultimately proved crucial to human survival worldwide.
The alarm triggers at dawn. It’s no big deal. Just a bunch of tin cans tied together, dragging across the cracked pavement.
I open my eyes and pull down my sleeping bag. It takes a long-ass second to figure out where I’m at. Looking up, I see a car axle, a muffler, tailpipe.
Oh yeah. Right.
I’ve been sleeping in craters under cars every night for a year and I’m still not used to it. Doesn’t matter, though. Whether I get used to it or not, I’m still alive and kicking.
For about three seconds I lie still, listening. Best not to jump out of bed right away. You never know what the hell’s been creeping around in the night. In this last year, most of the robots got smaller. Others got bigger. A
I bang my head pulling off my sleeping bag and folding it up. It’s worth it. This pile of rust is my best friend. There’s so many burned-out cars on the streets of New York City these days that the bastards can’t check under every single one.
I wriggle out from under the car and into gray sunlight. Reaching back underneath, I drag out my dirty pack and shrug it on. I cough and spit a hawker on the ground. Sun’s just up, but it’s cool this early. Summer’s just getting started.
Those cans are still dragging. I drop to a knee and untie the rope before any machine mics can pick up the noise. Topside, it’s important you be quiet, be moving, and be unpredictable.
Otherwise, you’ll be dead.
Chaperone duty. Of the hundreds of thousands of city people who ran away to the woods, about half of them are starving to death about now. They come stumbling into the city, rail-thin and filthy, on the run from wolves and hoping to scavenge.
Most times, the machines eat ’em up fast.
I throw my hood over my head and let my black trench coat billow out behind me to confuse robotic targeting systems, especially the goddamn disposable sentry turrets. Speaking of, I gotta get off the street. I duck into a destroyed building and pick my way over trash and rubble toward the source of the alarm.
After we dynamited half the city, the regular old domestic robots couldn’t balance well enough to get to us. We were safe for a while, long enough to get established underground and inside demolished buildings.
But then a
We call it a mantis. It’s got four multijointed legs longer than telephone poles and molded out of some kind of carbon fiber honeycomb. Its feet look like upside-down ice axes, slicing into the ground on every step. Up top where the legs meet, it’s got a couple of little arms with two ice axe hands. Those razor arms tear through wood and drywall and brick. Whole thing sort of scurries—all doubled over and hunched down to the size of a small pickup truck. Looks kinda like a praying mantis.
Close enough, anyway.
I’m dodging past empty desks in a collapsed floor of an office building when I feel the telltale vibration in the ground. Something big outside. I freeze in place, then crouch on the trash-strewn floor. Peeking over a water- swollen desk, I watch the windows. A gray shadow passes by outside, but I see nothing else.
I hold up for a minute anyway.
Not far from here, a familiar routine is playing out. A survivor has found a suspicious pile of rocks that a machine would never notice. Next to those rocks is a rope that this person pulled. I know that ten minutes ago my survivor was alive. There’s no guarantee for the next ten minutes.
At the collapsed end of the building I crawl over shattered two-by-fours and pulverized brick toward a crescent of morning light. Hood down, I push my face through the hole and scan the street outside.
Our sign is there, undisturbed on a stoop across the street. A man is huddled next to it, arms over his knees and head down. He rocks back and forth on his heels, maybe keeping warm.
The sign works because the machines don’t notice natural stuff, like rocks and trees. It’s a blind spot. A mantis has a good eye for unnatural things like words and drawings—even shit like happy faces. Uncamouflaged trip wires never work. Lines are too straight. Writing directions to a safe house on the wall is a good way to get people deleted. But a pile of rubble is invisible. And a pile of rocks going from big to small is, too.
I wriggle out of the hole and reach my guy before he even looks up. “Hey,” I whisper, nudging his elbow.
He looks up at me, startled. He’s a young Latino guy, in his twenties. I can see that he’s been crying. God knows what he went through to get here.
“It’s okay, buddy,” I reassure him. “We’ll get you safe. Come with me.”
He nods, saying nothing. Leaning against the building, he stands up. He has one arm wrapped in a dirty towel and he’s cradling it with his other hand. I figure it must be messed up pretty bad if he’s afraid to let anybody see it.
“We’ll get your arm looked at real soon, man.”
He flinches a little when I say that. Not what I was expecting. Strange how being hurt can be embarrassing. Like it’s your fault that an eye or hand or foot isn’t working right. Course, being hurt isn’t half as embarrassing as being dead.
I lead him back toward the collapsed ruin across the street. The mantis won’t be a problem once we get inside. My people are mostly in the subway tunnels with the main entrances blocked off. We’ll go building to building all the way home.
“What’s your name, man?” I ask.
The guy doesn’t respond, just puts his head down.
“Fair enough. Follow me.”
I head back into the safety of the collapsed building. The kid with no name hobbles along behind me. Together, we roam through destroyed buildings, scrabbling over mounds of blasted rubble and crawling under half- collapsed walls. Once we make it far enough, I take us out onto a pretty safe street. The silence between us grows the farther we travel.
I get the creeps walking down that empty street and I realize that I’m scared of the dead eyes on the kid shuffling along behind me, saying nothing.
How much change can a person absorb before everything loses meaning? Living for its own sake isn’t life. People need meaning as much as they need air.
Thank god I’ve still got Dawn.
I’m picturing her hazel eyes in my head when I notice the gray-green telephone pole slanting cockeyed at the end of the street. The pole bends in the middle and shifts and I realize it’s a leg. We’re going to die inside thirty seconds if we stay out here.
“Get inside,” I hiss, shoving the kid toward a broken-out window.
On its four crouched legs, a hunched-over mantis scuttles into view. Its featureless, bullet-shaped head
