“We want to see the mayor,” she calmly told the towering mech.
In the parks behind the line of machines, defense turrets emerged from hidden recesses in the ground. These rose well above the heads of the machines and swiveled to target the demonstrators.
“Return to the slums,” the large mech repeated.
Rhea raised her chin stubbornly and said: “Not until we see the mayor.”
The large mech remained motionless, its featureless face unreadable. Rhea kept expecting its weapons to swivel toward her. But they did not. Still, an unnerving number of the tracking turrets behind the machine ranks had lined her up.
“They’re not going to fire,” Will said under his breath. “It would be a public relations nightmare. Turn us all into martyrs. They might start arresting us, though.”
The crowd resumed its chant.
“Mayor Grandas, give us back our water!”
Rhea waited a full minute, letting the demonstrators shout their words. She had come mostly for the spectacle. She knew the mayor would never agree to see them. But hopefully this would help put public pressure on city hall.
Rhea turned around to face the demonstrators and raised her hands. “It will serve us no purpose to be locked in jail. Let’s go. We’ll come back again tomorrow, and the next day, and the day thereafter, until they turn on our water. This is not a defeat, but a victory! For every video of ours they scrub from the streaming sites, we’ll upload ten more! For every account they delete, we’ll create a hundred!”
The crowd cheered.
Someone took up her pseudonym, and the demonstrators repeated it.
“Warden! Warden! Warden!”
She waved at them and led them from the line of deadly machines.
“Where did you learn to be so good at stirring up the emotions of crowds?” Will asked as they made their way back toward the city’s walls, where the slums of Rust Town awaited beyond.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “Must be my past life.”
She just wished she could remember it.
2
When Rhea neared the western exit of Aradne, which opened onto Rust Town, she slowed uncertainly. The gate sentries had formed a veritable chain of robots in front of the sealed doors, and a for a moment she thought they had been ordered to execute the demonstrators.
She was about to call a halt when the robots stepped aside, clearing a path to the city wall. She quickened her pace as the pair of large metal doors behind the machines began to slide wide.
“That was quick,” Will said. “Given the damage we did to those doors, I thought they’d be out of commission for at least the next day or so.”
“Smelting Drones,” Horatio explained. “The ultimate 3D printers.”
A line of protestors were waiting on the other side of the gate. Some of them rushed inside as the doors parted further, but when they saw Rhea they stopped in their tracks.
“It’s the warden!” someone exclaimed.
“What news?” one of them asked.
“Nothing, as usual,” she replied. “The water remains cut off. The mayor refuses to see us.”
“Then we will storm city hall!” a young man said. He made as if to race into the city, but Rhea caught him by the arm.
“Don’t,” she told him. She turned her gaze toward the other newcomers. “They’ll only arrest you. All of you. We can’t penetrate the parliament area. Turn back. We’ll try again another day. Turn back. Trust me.”
Those who had rushed inside hesitated, but then one by one they began to turn around. Some of them glared at the watching robots, others gave the machines fearful glances, but they all turned back.
Soon Rhea was leading the throng away from Aradne’s walls. The metal doors sealed with a loud clang behind them. There was a certain finality to the clang that bothered Rhea, but she ignored the feeling. Even if the Aradne security forces had reinforced those walls, Rhea and the others would find a way inside. She had told the citizens of Rust Town they would return every day until the water was turned back on, and she intended to do just that, even if it meant climbing the very walls that encircled the city.
But while protesting certainly had a place, especially when it came to easing the collective angst that was felt among the population, it was obvious their cries were falling on deaf ears. Eventually the Aradne city council might give in to them—when waves of slum residents began to die from dehydration, turning public opinion against the mayor. The slum residents were rationing what little water had been left after the bioweapons were defeated—there were only two storage tanks still intact, and their contents would last for maybe a few more days. Rhea hoped to get the supply restored well before the tanks were exhausted, and at the moment that meant circumventing diplomatic routes: to that end, she had members of her inner circle and their network working on a plan to tap into the city’s water supply without anyone in Aradne knowing about it.
The city’s official explanation for disconnecting the water was that the bioweapon attack had “destroyed critical infrastructure” and they had to sever the supply to prevent needless wastage from the broken pipes. However, the people of Rust Town had run their 3D-printing drones overtime and repaired every last one of those pipes on the first day.
The truth was the oceans were overtaxed after supplying water to trillions of people for the past few centuries. The seas were running dry, and Aradne wanted to conserve as much of the valuable liquid as possible for its own citizens. Of course, none of this had actually been revealed to the city’s population, or to any city for that matter; anyone who mentioned the diminishing ocean levels was banned from social media for life, their words scrubbed from the blogs and streaming sites of the Net not long after they were published, courtesy of advanced monitoring AIs.
So even rerouting some of the water into Rust Town was only a stopgap
