TRUEL1F3 (Truelife) Read online

  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

  YOUR LIFE IS NOT YOUR OWN.

  automata [au-toh-MAH-tuh]

  noun

  A machine with no intelligence of its own, operating on preprogrammed lines.

  machina [mah-KEE-nuh]

  noun

  A machine that requires a human operator to function.

  logika [loh-JEE-kuh]

  noun

  A machine with its own onboard intelligence, capable of independent action.

  The streets of Los Diablos were no place for a kid.

  The capital of Dregs was a rusting cesspit. A reminder of humanity’s greatest age, and greatest folly. Built in the heart of a scrap pile, Los Diablos wasn’t a city, it was a meat grinder, chewing up people and spitting out the bones. If you were born there, you grew up sharp, you grew up hard or you didn’t grow up at all.

  Lemon Fresh had taken the first option—she was too short for the second, and the third sounded like zero fun. As a girl who’d been found in a detergent box as a baby, she’d had a tougher life than most. But she’d been running the Los Diablos streets since she was knee-high to a cockroach, and in her fourteen years in the sprawl, she’d learned a trick or two.

  Like how to spot a tasty mark.

  She was lurking in the shade of an auto-peddler, green eyes narrowed behind dusty goggles, scoping her next meal ticket. The old man was seven kinds of crusty, jawing with one of the local parts dealers and stopping occasionally to smother a septic cough behind an oil-stained fist. He was a newcomer to Los Diablos, and he didn’t look much fancy, true cert. But she’d heard he was some kind of tech genius, and Lem figured a gent like that had to be carrying some decent scratch.

  His name was Silas Carpenter.

  The girl that Crusty was rolling with looked a little sharper. She was tall, a little gangly, sun-bleached blond hair undercut into a flashy fauxhawk. A black metal implant sat in the socket where her right eye should’ve been, and silicon chips were plugged into a Memdrive behind her right ear. Her peepers were exactly where they should’ve been, which is to say, on the street around them. But Lemon Fresh hadn’t survived fourteen years in this dumpster of a city on her looks alone.

  Fabulous as they were…

  She cruised through the crowd, quiet and smooth as exhaust fumes, eyes on her mark. Old Crusty lifted an oscillator from the parts pile, asking the blond girl’s opinion and drawing her attention away. And Lemon slipped in, quick as blowflies on roadkill, and slit the old man’s pocket.

  She figured he’d be carrying some loose cash, ration cards. And so when three shiny credstiks tumbled into her greasy palm, Lemon took a second to register it. Blinking hard. Imagining, just for a second, all the happy that amount of scratch could buy. It was stupid of her, talking true. The kind of stupid that gets you killed.

  The blond girl collared Lemon in a blink. Coming to her senses, Lem sank her teeth into Blondie’s wrist, twisting and slipping out of her poncho. And like that, she was sprinting off through the mob, leaving Blondie and Crusty with nothing but a torn shred of clothing.

  It had been sloppy of her to get spotted. But after thirty minutes of tripping and twisting through the sprawl, she figured she’d got away clean as…well, clean as anything could be in an armpit like LD. On shaky legs, she made her way back to her hideout to lie low for a spell. Grinning like she’d won the sweeps. And curled up under a cardboard roof, clutching those credstiks to her chest like a mother with a newborn sprat, she finally fell asleep, dreaming of better places and better days.

  She woke to a metallic growl. Looked up into a pair of glowing red eyes. A cybernetic dog loomed over her, metal teeth bared in a snarl. She bolted upright, scrambled back into a corner, her cutter raised in her fist. Past the cyberdog, Lemon saw Crusty and Blondie blocking the exit from her hideaway.

  “Hey there,” Lemon said.

  “Hey yourself,” the bigger girl replied.

  Blondie was looking at her with narrowed eyes, an electric baseball bat slung loose and lazy over one shoulder. The dog looked like it wanted to eat her, and considering it was made out of metal, that was an impressive trick. But Crusty looked around at the squalor Lemon lived in, his sunburned face softening. And though she’d never really had one, he spoke with a voice like she supposed fathers used.

  “You live here?”

  “Not usually,” Lemon replied. “My mansion’s at the cleaner’s.”

  The old man chuckled, and even the tall girl managed a smile. Lemon had learned young that a wisecrack could sometimes save you from a beatdown—it’s hard for some folks to stomp a sprog who can make them giggle. She wasn’t ass-backward enough to live in a squat with only one exit. But looking at the cyberdog, the torn poncho in the girl’s hand, Lemon Fresh had a feeling these two might be able to find her again if they had a mind to. So she tossed the credstiks at the tall girl’s boots, her knife still clutched in her other fist.

  “It’s fizzy, I wasn’t hungry anyway.”

  Crusty glanced to Blondie, raising one unruly gray eyebrow.

  “What do you think, Evie?”

  Blondie stared Lemon up and down. She looked at the filth and crud Lem lived in, the cardboard roof over her head, the credstiks in the dirt.

  “I think she needs it more than us,” she said, softlike.

  The old man smiled, nodded to the stiks. “Keep ’em.”

  Lemon stared, a dozen different emotions punching on inside her head. Disbelief. Suspicion. Confusion. Strange enough, and despite the streetwise part of her brain’s objection, it was pride that won in the end.

  “Don’t need your pity,” she growled, rising to her feet.

  “Not pity,” Blondie shrugged. “You earned ’em. Fifth rule of the Scrap, right?”

  Lemon blinked, taken aback. “Takers keepers.”

  “Takers keepers,” Blondie smiled.

  Lemon’s brainmeats were all tumbled, and she was furiously looking for the angle. Fourteen years on the streets had taught her nobody in this world was nice unless they had an angle. This city chewed up dreams and spat out misery, and folks who lived here never gave you anything without a taking in return.

  So what did these two want?

  “Are you two smoked?” she finally asked. “Or just defective?”

  The old man looked around her squat again, then met her eyes. “You ever want a decent meal,” he said, “come out to Tire Valley and look us up.”

  Ah, she nodded. There it is.

  “You’re too old for me, Gramps,” Lemon replied.

  He laughed then, a laugh that turned into a long, racking cough.

  “I like you, kiddo,” he said.

  They let her keep the credstiks. And they wandered away without another word, leaving Lemon bewildered in their wake. And when she mooched up to their doorstep after the scratch ran out, they fed her, just like they said. They let her stay, let her belong, let her think maybe there was something more than the meat grinder she’d grown up inside. The old man never asked her for anything, not once. And though it’d always be the name he wore inside her head, she never called him Grandpa to his face. She called him “Mister C” instead.

  Right until the day he died.

  And the girl? The girl who taught her not everyone has an angle? Who taught her not everyone gives without wanting a taking?

  Well, Lemon called her “bestest.”

  But what she meant, of course, was “sister.”

  Cricket was sure of only one thing.

  The WarBot stood in the town square of New Bethlehem, a sun-bright calamity unfolding above him. The city about him was in ruins, the streets choked with smoke, dust, panicked citizens
. There was so much input, it was difficult for him to process it all. But above the imperatives of his programming, the knife-sharp alarms blaring inside his head, the need to save the humans screaming and praying and panicking all about him, a single thought was ringing in his mind.

  I don’t want to die.

  The logika knew he wasn’t “alive” in the strictest sense. He had hydraulics, not muscles. Armor, not skin. There was no electronic afterlife where toasters and microwaves sat around on synthesized clouds, listening to digital harps. Cricket was blessed with the certainty that once he stopped, he just…stopped. But even if the Laws of Robotics didn’t make self-preservation the third most important imperative in his hierarchy of needs, the truth was, Cricket had decided he liked existing.

  Though his so-called life hadn’t been much more than struggle and anguish lately, it was also filled with possibility. In the past few days, Cricket had made enemies and found friends, had his eyes opened and his world turned upside down. Everything felt bigger, and Cricket felt like he was changing—evolving into something more than he’d ever thought he could be. He felt like he was more.

  Sadly, nukes don’t care about your feelings.

  “ALL OF YOU NEED TO RUN!” Cricket roared. “THERE’S A MISSILE COMING!”

  Electronic panic flooded the big bot’s systems as he stomped up to the broken gates of New Bethlehem, a payload of nuclear fire streaking in out of the sky above. This settlement was home to the dreaded Brotherhood, a cult of religious fanatics who practiced an awful form of genetic purity. But even though the city was peopled with the pond scum of humanity, they were still human, and Cricket was forced to try and protect their lives.

  Thing of it was, there was no protecting anyone here. As he’d flown away with Evie in the belly of his flex-wing transport, that scumbag Preacher had warned Cricket the missile was on its way. The WarBot knew there was nowhere to run—the blast would simply be too massive to escape. But still, the First Law was screaming in Cricket’s mind. His only concern: the hundreds of humans still in New Bethlehem. He had to help them. He had to save them.

  But how do you save the unsavable?

  He looked up into the cigarette sky, data scrolling down his optics as he scanned the gray. He saw a tiny black shape burning in out of the heavens like a thunderbolt. Electric despair washed over him. Thinking about Evie. About Lemon. About everything he’d fought for, everything he’d lost, glad in the end that he wasn’t alone. Solomon was here, at least, the sassy logika perched on his shoulder. Abraham was with him, too, cradled in one massive palm. During the chaos of the lifelike attack, the boy had done himself proud—he’d saved the city from burning, even though the citizens and his own mother had been ready to nail him to a cross for his “impurity.”

  But in the end, it had been for nothing.

  Only a miracle could save them now.

  Crick patted Solomon on his metal knee, cradled Abraham to his chest.

  “I’M SORRY,” Cricket said.

  He felt a knocking on the side of his head and turned to look at Solomon one last time. The spindly logika needed to bang on Cricket’s metal skull to get his attention—the WarBot had deafened himself to avoid having to take more orders. He saw Solomon pointing east across New Bethlehem’s smoking walls, the wrecked cars, the ash and ruin. There, glinting in the sunlight, was a monster truck painted Brotherhood red, speeding toward them across the desert.

  The big bot sharpened his optics, thinking he was glitching as a colorless…tear opened up in front of the truck. The vehicle plunged down into it, disappearing as if into a hole in the ground. A split second later, it plunged right out of an identical tear that opened up just in front of New Bethlehem’s walls.

  The truck hit the deck, bouncing and crashing through the gate wreckage with a scream of tortured metal. The Brotherhood and citizens all scattered out of its way, the truck skidding and slamming into a row of rusty autos. Windows shattering, engine smoking, it ground to a halt in the middle of the town square.

  “…WHAT THE HELLS?”

  Cricket saw two teenagers in military uniforms inside the truck’s cabin. There was a dark-skinned boy, a radioactivity symbol shaved into the side of his head. Beside him sat a girl with short dark hair, long bangs, black paintstick smudged on her lips and a slice of Asiabloc somewhere in her ancestry. The youngsters climbed up onto the truck’s roof, bloody and bedraggled.

  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Cricket yelled.

  The big bot saw another shimmering rift open in the air above their heads.

  Cricket saw the missile speeding in out of the heavens.

  And Cricket saw the boy

  raise

  his

  hands.

  The girl dragged a breather mask up over her face, goggles over her eyes, and did the same for the boy as she roared, “Everyone close your eyes!”

  Cricket didn’t have eyelids, of course. Nor did he have functional ears to hear the girl scream—he only found out what she yelled from Solomon afterward. Looking upward, telescopics engaged, he saw the missile plunge into the shimmering rift she’d apparently opened with her bare hands and disappear right out of the sky.

  Scanning the heavens, Cricket caught movement north. He realized another tear had appeared—like an eraser smudge on the muddy gray. Amazed and dumbfounded, he watched the missile plunge out of this new rift, so distant it was only a speck, and moments later burst into shocking, impossible light.

  The humans about him were all cowering in fear. Abraham was curled up against his fist. Even the boy and girl with their goggles had turned away from the blast. And so it was that only Cricket and Solomon bore witness to the first nuclear explosion the planet had seen since the war that almost ripped it to pieces.

  It was elemental. Primordial. Fire stolen from the gods. The last time humans had unleashed this awful flame, they’d nearly destroyed their civilization, their species, their world. For a terrible moment, Cricket wondered if maybe the gods had returned to finish the job.

  A second pulse followed after the first—a double flash, lighting the heavens with burning white. A fireball blazed inside it, blossoming outward in a moment, spherical, almost beautiful. Cricket’s thermographics measured temperatures in the millions; the molten heart of a new sun blooming brighter with every second.

  The clouds were consumed, rippling in circular patterns as they boiled into nothingness. The shockwave struck the earth below, gathering the desert sands and ripping them into the burning sky. The firestorm kept expanding, roiling, churning, flattening as it struck the upper atmosphere, a mushroom-shaped nightmare rising above the screaming earth.

  And through it all, Cricket could only look on in horror.

  The sound struck him next—though his aural systems were offline, he felt the vibration in his chest. A hammer blow, traveling at the speed of sound, ringing like funeral bells on his metal skin. It shook the ground, shivering the buildings in their foundations. And beyond it, riding across the wasteland like a storm of dark horses with tails of living flame, came a dust cloud bigger than Cricket had ever seen.

  “EVERYBODY TAKE COVER!”

  He could see Brotherhood members and their disciples yelling, saw terror in the folk around him. Many of New Bethlehem’s buildings had been incinerated in the lifelike attack, but he knew the sturdiest structure was still intact. It stood at the bay’s edge, black smoke spilling from its stacks. Frontways, it looked like a cathedral from 20C vids, but its hind parts were the chimneys and storage tanks of a bloated factory. If there was safety left, it was in there.

  “THE DE-SAL PLANT!” he roared. “EVERYONE INSIDE!”

  Some folk began streaming inside, others making for the WarDome or seeking cover in the buildings that hadn’t been burned. Cricket stomped across the town square, lowering Abraham into the shelter of the boy’s underground workshop. A
be slipped out of his outstretched fingers onto the oil-stained concrete, lips moving as he shouted. Solomon watched intently from Crick’s shoulder, then wrote quickly onto the whiteboard he’d salvaged during the attack.

  Master Abraham is asking about them?

  The spindly logika pointed back into the town square. Turning, Cricket saw the two uniformed kids still atop their monster truck. The girl was tugging on the boy’s pant leg, obviously urging him into cover. But the boy was refusing, standing with his hands held toward the incoming storm.

  “THAT IDIOT’S GOING TO GET HIMSELF KILLED,” Cricket growled.

  Solomon quickly wrote on his whiteboard.

  That is Master Abraham’s concern, yes.

  The big bot turned to Abraham, held out one massive palm. “STAY PUT!”

  Cricket dragged the workshop’s overhead doors into place and, spinning on his heel, dashed back toward the monster truck and the lunatics on top of it. He could see the dust cloud bearing down, roiling, boiling, black. His sensors were already reading the spike in temperature and radiation—anyone in its path was going to get fried. He only had moments before it swallowed them all whole.

  “ARE YOU TWO INSANE?” he bellowed. “TAKE COVER!”

  The boy turned toward him, yelled something and turned back to the looming storm wall. The girl waved for him to get back. But Cricket didn’t have time for a debate—the First Law said he had to save these kids, simple as that. He reached out to scoop them up gentle as he could. The girl held out her hand toward him, and the earth just opened up under his feet.

  His sensors went haywire, inputs spiking. He was falling somehow, crashing to the earth with a bang that shook his rivets, Solomon tumbling off his shoulder. Cricket looked about, realizing he was somehow a few hundred meters down the street from where he’d stood a second before. He saw one of those bizarre gray tears in the sky snapping shut over his head, his processors trying to make sense of exactly what was going on here.

  Did she just…move us?