CHAPTER 1
The Scrap Dealers
A cool, salt breeze whipped in from the South China Sea, picking up a cocktail of scents from the Pearl River Delta and the city of Macau. It surged over the rolling hills and farmlands nearby, borrowing fragrances of country life and dense, sweltering humanity. A particularly feisty gust passed through one of the open windows of Keller Morten’s pickup truck, leaching a little moisture from his brow before exiting out the other side. With a sigh, it carried on its epic journey across Guangdong Province, taking a hint of Keller’s chemical essence, his fear, joy, and hopes, along for the ride.
Through his monocular, Keller saw the smoke from Honneck’s truck long before the actual vehicle slewed around a distant corner and into view. “An hour late,” he muttered, “not bad.”
He thumbed the starter and his pickup’s electric motor hummed to life. The vehicle rolled forward and off the dirt road, nosing into the forest of tree-high soybean plants. Out of sight of the road, he u-turned and sat waiting, fingering the pistol, snug inside his jeans’ pocket.
An old fear surfaced as a prickle at the base of his skull, oozing like melting icicles down his spine. That fear of first contact. Of conflict! He looked at his hand, the one that used to hold the scalpel, how it shook uncontrollably and then froze, useless.
No, not here. Keller relaxed his focus, seeing through his fingers and the towering bean stems, to the distant hills and clouded skies.The fingernails of his other hand dug into the steering wheel as he imagined having cyborg strength. Her strength! Crushing the wheel and taming the fear.
He conjured her face, her smile, those magenta eyes, and the panic receded.
The honk of a truck horn snapped him alert. Seconds later, he watched the tar-black smokestack ease off the road and onto his newly flattened soybean trail. Honneck’s ancient diesel vehicle labored and gasped across the rough terrain before grinding to a stalling halt face-to-face with Keller’s.
Honneck rolled out of his truck cab and dropped the considerable height onto the dirt, noticeably touching his own concealed weapon in his pocket as he landed. “Keller! Long time… long time.” A smile peeled easily from his flat, bronzed face as he stretched out a grossly oversized hand for an obligatory businessman’s shake.
Keller tipped his baseball cap with his free hand. Though he towered over the man, he was easily the lighter of the two. “You are a long, long way from home, my friend.”
Honneck patted his truck like a revered steed. “Hunt. Drive. Sell. If God is good, then I go back home a little richer.” The truck’s rear end resembled a mobile yurt, an elongated lattice dome of wood and mesh covered in layers of skins and tarps that flapped angrily in the breeze.
“Show me what you’ve got,” Keller said, feeling a cool wash of relief as initial contact passed uneventfully.
“You’re my best customer. I always give you first pickings.” Honneck gave a nervous laugh and looked around as if expecting Alliance police to come surging out of the bean crops. “You’re gonna wanna buy it all.”
“We’ll see.” It was over a year since their last meeting. Back then Macau had been an independent city, one of the many local dictatorships that comprised China following the Nova-Insanity. Trade was easy, rules were few, but the Alliance came, crashing the party in one of their colossal embassy-class warships, to press their laws and rules onto the skeptical community. Increased patrols and new high-tech surveillance made trade transactions like theirs less frequent and far more dangerous. Honneck could have been bought. The whole thing a trap. But that easy smile reassured him.
Honneck hauled a plank ramp down from the truck and climbed up into the dimly lit space. Keller followed, pushing past dangling cables, chain-linked plates of metal, and swathes of fabric. A row of limbs rattled like grisly wind chimes as he shouldered through, smelling burnt plastic, machine oil, and wood rot. Cockroaches scuttled under his feet while the shells of their other, less fortunate cousins, crunched into a fine powder as he shuffled deeper into the truck’s interior.
“Arms.” Honneck ran his hands lovingly over the suspended appendages. Keller perused the collection: mostly broken fragments, electric drive units, no micro-pile power supplies, no electro-polymer muscles. Nothing pre-Nova-Insanity – the real good stuff.
“That it?” Keller tried to sound even more disappointed than he truly was. It was a long day’s journey out here for just ordinary scrap.
Honneck dismissed the limbs, sweeping them aside like a macabre curtain to reveal racks of Inner-I units, processor blocks, and smaller, more intricate robotic fragments. “Nice ball-joint, look… good price.” He jabbered on, thrusting a severed plastic hand at Keller’s face.
“Not bad.” Keller flexed its fingers; smooth, clean, probably still worked if hooked up correctly. He picked up an Inner-I block. A glass eyeball dangled from a single connecting wire. He grimaced noticing a smear of dried blood on the component. The eye was nice work, a self-contained unit with an internal ball-drive and pre-processor. “Where’s the other eye?”
“One eye’s plenty.” Honneck winked and doubled the width of his grin. “But the best stuff’s here.” Honneck hovered theatrically over a filthy black tarpaulin at the rear of the truck. “They pay big money for this in the city.” He whisked aside the tarp and Keller found himself straining into the darkness trying to see what lay underneath.
He gagged. Staggering backwards as he saw a human corpse, just the top half, severed at the waist and charred beyond recognition. “What the fuck!” He shoved a hand into his mouth. The other fumbled into his pocket seeking his gun. The dark, dank world of Honneck’s truck spun around him, a prison, a crushing hell, that just had to be escaped.
“No,” Honneck said, seizing Keller’s arm with an alarmingly strong grip that assured Keller that even if his hand found the gun, he’d never get to use it. “Look. That’s not a dead man, just a robot. A robot good enough to look like a dead man.”
Keller’s deep sense of curiosity thrust his fears aside. His world stopped spinning, and the visions of white rooms filled with dead and dying people faded, returning him back to the interior of Honneck’s truck. Leaning in closer, he saw the body’s arms were broken away beneath the elbows, no visible bones, the limbs just trailed off into thinner and thinner fibers. He tilted the chest cavity up with his foot and looked inside. It was empty, a few lumps of black material hung from a mesh framework that was clearly not a vitrified human ribcage.
Running his fingers up the longer of the arms, he felt no drive units or actuators. No power modules hiding in the chest, just a lightweight hollow shell. “All the good bits are missing. This is just a clod of fried carbon fiber.”
A skull leered through tatters of knotted black fiber, translucent and crystalline, definitely not bone, metal, or even plastic. He grasped one of the carbonized cheeks and tried to pull the charred material free, but it was tough and sharp, ripping the skin from the tips of his fingers.
“The head’s made of crystal, very tough.” Honneck rapped on the skull with a knuckle. “I tried to crack it open with a jack-hammer, but it wouldn’t break.”
“Nice job. If there was anything useful inside, then you probably busted it.” He noted the empty eye sockets, a thin retinal cable dropped out of each one. A tiny bead on the end of each strand looked like it was growing into a new eye. Probably a new type of eyeball connector – might be worth something.
“Where did you find this?” Keller was on his knees, suddenly intrigued by the find.
“Herdsman up in the mountains somewhere. It left a crater in the ice.” Honneck grasped his hands together as if in prayer. “After it dropped straight from outer space.”
“Yeah… right, freaking space robots.” Keller recalled the recent war between the GFC and the Breakout Alliance. TwoLunar ripping apart. The Cloud9 orbital exploding. Looking at the charring on this machine, it really could have fallen from orbit.
“There’s nothing left… just a head.” Keller said, deciding that he wanted the piece. If he could drill open the skull, there might be some high-end electronics or data modules, perhaps some useful AI software in there. It would be a gamble to spend the last of his money on such a piece of junk, but if he were right–
“I can get a thousand for it in the city.” Honneck was a poor liar, but great at getting interesting robot scrap.
“A thousand?” Keller hopped down off the truck and began the obligatory walk-away-in-disgust routine. “One-twenty for the robot, that Inner-I and eyeball unit, and throw that spare hand in for free.”
“You’re killing me man. Two-fifty, then I can feed my family for a few more days.”
“You should eat less,” Keller patted Honneck’s rotund stomach and pulled his truck door open. “I can’t go higher than one-fifty. You’ll have to go to the city with it. Good luck getting past the Alliance patrols. They just love aging Tu parts traffickers, you know.”
“Two hundred.”
“One-sixty,” Keller countered again, feeling the small, inadequate wad of his remaining two-hundred dollars scrunched inside his pocket.
“One-ninety.”
“One-sixty-one.” There… he saw that nervous tick on Honneck’s face. He wanted to unload this piece. Maybe it really was from space, maybe military or Alliance, hot property, valuable but too dangerous for this old-school trader.
Keller started his engine and began turning the vehicle around and up onto the road. He pointed it back at distant Macau, believing his gut instinct that Honneck would run after him all the way to the city border for a few extra bucks.
As the truck lurched back onto the road, his glovebox flopped open and a clump of crumpled notes and old cyborg magazines he’d picked up along the way tumbled out onto the floor. “Come on man!” Honneck yelled as he jogged alongside. “Give me something to work with here.” His face was rapidly turning from healthy bronze to a flustered purple.
Keller hit the brakes and reached for the fallen papers. “I might have something for you.”
In the end, they transferred the merchandise in a different produce field, a full kilometer from where they started. Keller handed over one-hundred and sixty-five Macau dollars and an antique copy of Augmented Magazine. Once the cash was in hand, and Keller was back in his truck, Honneck dropped his smile and grew serious. “Be careful, Keller. The herdsmen say that robot of yours is haunted.”
Keller’s foot hovered over the accelerator. “Haunted?”
“Yeah, it moves in the night when no one is looking.”
Keller’s heart sank. The robot probably wasn’t valuable, just junk those superstitious herdsmen had attached some mythical nonsense to. “It can’t move,” he said, choking back his disappointment. “There’s no power supply.” He punched the pedal and Honneck vanished into his dust.
CHAPTER 2
In Hiding
The prickling sting of a scanner singed Rex’s skin. He ran, but the weight of the corpse zip-tied to his arm dragged him down, down into the dark, wet mud.
“Rex? You okay buddy?” The voice cut away the night and his eyes sprang open. No dead man. No zip-ties. A rectangle of light above resolved into a skylight window. The corpse was now bedsheets wrapped around his arm, and the cloying, wet mud just his own sweat and drool.
“Rex?” The knocking on the cellar door grew more insistent. “Come on buddy, snap out of it.”
But the feeling of being scanned still prickled his scalp, a focused beam of energy working its way up and down, lingering over specific spots: his brain, his heart, drilling through his skin to the network of tiny machines inside. I am Glow. I am the plague!
The door latch jangled, opened, and somebody stepped inside, framed by the artificial light from the basement stairs. “Rex. For goodness’ sake.”
He tried to grab back control of his thoughts before they wandered back to him, the name he couldn’t bear to mention. Even thinking his name brought him closer to the surface, gave him more power, and one day he’d take over again and Rex’s life would no longer be his own.
“Look at me… my eyes… my face. Come to me, Rex.”
“John?” Rex looked up at the concerned old man; a lifetime of worry scored his leathery skin. From down low he was radiant, godlike: my Master. As Rex sat up and stood, suddenly looking down on him, he became just a man, just John. A friend whose dog was buried in the back garden. A dog who somehow, through an unlikely chain of events, still lived inside Rex’s Glow-based mind and applied the force and motivation to his very human body.
“There you go,” John said, carefully patting Rex’s arm as if he might strike him with one of his trembling fists. “Just another bad dream. We all get ‘em, you know.” He turned away and eased back up the basement steps and into the light. “Millie’s up and about. Might as well do the introduction now you’re awake. Then we can have breakfast. It’s eggs today, and waffles.”
Rex looked around his basement room. The closest thing he could remember to an actual home. A floor mattress, sacks of aging provisions framed by waterpipes and electrical cables. The only window to the world was the skylight, up near the ceiling and covered in black binbags.
He jumped on a chair and pulled the makeshift blind aside. Light flooded in through green creepers and bushes. He looked out across John’s side yard, through the hedge to the neighbor’s window. Something there… A white plastic face? No… just a lamp.
The prickling sensation in his brain subsided and he ambled over to the stairs, hearing John doing the morning introduction to his wife, Millie, just as he’d done every morning for the months Rex had stayed with them.
He checked his robe, scratched down his hair into some semblance of order and topped the staircase into the kitchen. Millie stood arm-in-arm with John. She couldn’t mask her fear, could no longer fake civility, excitement, or interest. Her face reflected what was real inside her at this moment only: fear, hunger, tiredness – raw and unfiltered. Her eyes searched Rex, seeking something familiar but managing only a flicker of recognition that didn’t quite catch. Eventually, they focused instead on the table, and the deck of playing cards purposefully left there by John the night before.
“Here he is,” John exclaimed keeping his voice calm and cheerful. “Millie, meet my old friend Rex. He spent the night here after a few drinks and some cards yesterday evening.”
“Rex?” she stammered. “I don’t remember… or–?”
“I think you were in bed when I arrived.” Rex issued their standard, agreed-upon storyline. “Lovely to meet you, um… Mrs Weston.” He reached out a hand and she reluctantly touched it as if checking for warmth before giving it a quick, furtive shake.
“Call me Millie,” she said. “Will you be staying long?”
“Just a night.” He nodded at John for approval, and John winked back.
“Let’s get Rex some coffee and breakfast, shall we?” John bustled off to the kitchen and Millie’s confusion dissolved into purposeful action. Things were okay once again.
CHAPTER 3
Perfection
Keller’s barge was very different from the thousands of fishing boats moored in Macau harbor. The CyberSea was a rectangular block, painted tar black – the very opposite of hospital white – with a stout, armored glass cabin at the prow. A single long, metal-peaked roof ran most of the boat’s length, dotted with upward facing skylights and window blisters.
Keller drove off the dock, along the service ramp, and onto the rear of the barge. A lever tilted the deck, opening a route down into the barge’s internal garage. He parked and secured the pickup for sea-travel, clamping the wheels in place and covering the whole thing with a cling-tight plastic cocoon.
Grimace, his security bot, sat poised and menacing on deck, daring anyone to try boarding without permission. His fire-red eyes locked gazes with Keller for an instant as the dull but comprehensive algorithms inside Grimace’s electronic mind compared what they saw with stored architypes, references, and facial feature configurations, finally deciding that Keller was friend and not foe.
Grimace’s jaw was deliberately bent sideways, a fake cigarette dangled from his metal lips while a jaunty sailor’s cap remained secured to his head no matter the weather. Keller had modeled him loosely upon the old cartoon character, Popeye. Not quite finished, the machine had a hook for a left hand, one of the many projects scheduled for the journey ahead.
Keller popped open the trapdoor that led down into his lab and heaved the sack of robot salvage onto his shoulder. As he descended, he caught Grimace’s eye. “Any visitors?”
“Miss Casima Salean.” Grimace’s chainsaw voice emanated from a speaker in his chest.
Keller’s heart leapt. “Did she leave?”
“No, she’s still onboard.” His heart dropped back into immediate calm. With her, I am safe and free.
Keller closed the door, feeling a pang of sadness. She’d probably come by to say her farewells and maybe leave him a parting gift, something special to keep him happy for the long voyage ahead. The thought of losing her was a sharp ache in his craw. But it was her way. Her attachment to her city versus his needs for travel and trade, and to be constantly on the move.
Keller dumped his new gear in the corner and stood sucking in the familiar atmosphere of his private, ocean-going laboratory. Cables and appendages hung from overhead racks. Computer screens hummed and flickered on desks and many half-finished projects lay scattered across benches or dangled from hooks. Several humanoid forms stood prone in the corners and a huge, greasy, metal hexapod lay sprawled out across the central workbench. Hex was his outside maintenance robot, equipped with Gecko-like feet to work on boat hulls below the waterline, a vital piece of equipment whose services earned him his keep.
“Casi?” he called softly. There was no sign of her in the lounge, the galley, or the small reading room that jutted out the front of the barge in a thick, glass bubble that housed his collection of books, magazines, and memory blocks. Which left only the bedroom.
He pushed open the door. His big, square bed took up most of the tight, wedge-shaped room. Casima lay curled under the top sheet, her head poking out, clearly sleeping. Her flawless, electro-polymer face the picture of peace and calm.
She’d been perusing his magazine collection again. Several of them lay scattered around her on the bed. A particularly sought-after 2051 copy of Cyborg Monthly lay spread open at the centerfold beneath her prone fingers. He started easing the magazine out from her hand and she stirred awake.
“Darling?” she muttered, opening her silver-flecked, magenta eyes. “I was dreaming about you.”
“Good dreams?” Keller whipped the magazine free and stood staring at the glossy pages.
“Who was I looking at?” Casima said, blinking the sleep from her eyes.
“They called this the Dhannah look, very popular with mid-century cyborg fanatics.”
Casima reached out and ran a finger over the image. “I love her. Look at the definition in those polymer muscles, those dimples around the tendons. She looks so strong, so purposeful.”
“I prefer the real thing.” He drew a gentle line up her leg with his finger. She wore her good legs, the ones he had made. Like her face, they were warm to the touch with quality micro-capillaries that emulated real flesh. “How about your day?” he asked. “Bag any rich tourists?”
She shrugged and rolled into a sitting position while stretching and running a hand through her hair. “An Alliance guy from the embassy ship, bureaucrat of some sort, with his wife and horrible, screaming kids. Don’t think they were really into the sights and history of old Macau. Just killing time until their flight, but they tipped me well and bombed-out early to catch a five-o-clock special.” She bounced her knees with excitement. “That’s why I came here early. To be with you.”
Keller dropped onto the bed and nuzzled his face in the small of her back, his hands running up her legs to her thighs, to the joins where real flesh met the artificial. A line so fine it was barely there at all, but somehow it was the bit that turned him on the most, that combination of perfect, manmade creation and flawed, vulnerable nature. She was a rare creature, more machine than flesh, a work of art; partly his own doing, although mostly self-procured through dealings in Macau. He replaced damaged parts, performed upgrades and updates, tuned, optimized, and managed all of her topical and aesthetic replacements, but performing actual surgery? No, he could no longer do that.
She rolled playfully out of his grasp. “How was our old friend Honneck?”
“Stoic. Predictable. I got a few good pieces and one that may be junk, or it might be valuable.” He felt his angst rise, knowing now that he’d overpaid but not wanting to confess his error to Casima.
“So you’ll be leaving soon,” she whispered.
“Tomorrow.” His lips found the back of her neck and his hands ran through her silk hair. He caressed the plate boundaries between the real fragments of her skull and the coral-titanium implants. She smelled clean and perfect.
He’d never asked her to accompany him, never dared. The rejection would hurt too much. She’d been born here and claimed she would die here and be at peace with the ghosts of her family. Besides, if she accepted and came with him, then that was a terrifying commitment to being confined in a small space with another human for months on end. Something he’d been unable to contemplate since the Nova-Insanity, when trauma had etched itself on to his brain.
His throat constricted as it always did, stifling his words. But something was different this time: a passion, a need. Words that had to be heard, to force their way past the searing mess of doubts and phobias and out into their world. “Come with me,” he whispered. The ache of her loss already a sickening lump in his guts.
She shook her head, easing gently from his grasp and away across the bed.
“We have good times, don’t we?” he said. The words came easier as if he’d stepped over a precipice, committed! No going back now.
She made a small nod.
“You know I love you. I’ll work hard, make us a good living, and when we get to America, we sell some bots, turn around and come right back again. A wonderful itinerant lifestyle. It’s what I do. What I need to do.” The shake of her head felt like it was tearing him in two. “I know you need to be here, need the city, but think about it… there’s nothing real here for you, just memories, bad ones, mostly. Come make some new memories with me.” He choked on his words as his train of thought plowed into a cliffside of doubt.
She sat up slowly, her hand smearing away the tears from his cheek. “I’m sorry, Keller.”
“It’s okay,” he said, steeling himself to swallow the bitter pill life kept jamming down his throat.
The smile lit her face as she slapped a biomechanical hand across his backside. “I’m screwing with you, Kell! Of course, I’ll come! What the heck took you so long to ask?”
His mouth dropped open, and words stuttered out. “But I thought… Why? What changed–”
Her pupils spun in a very inhuman way as she tapped her temple with a fingertip. “You know what being around you has taught me?” He shook his head. “My ghosts are in here, with me always, but you’re real, Kell, the living, breathing truth. I can’t just be with you in my mind anymore.” She rose from the bed like a cobra triangulating its prey. “Anyway… you need me, Kell. I’m your guide in this world.”
She snatched at his shirt, ripping it up and over his head. Her legs wrapped around him, twisting and curling unlike real human legs could ever do. The breath from her single lung sent shivers down his neck. The schematics of her body filled his mind. That gap where her other lung should have been now occupied by a super-capacitor that powered her cybernetics. Below was her lab-grown liver, her artificial stomach, and somebody else’s kidneys. But the parts, the mechanics, dataflows, and mechanisms didn’t matter. It was the whole, that wonderful, emergent, holistic entity that called itself Casima.
Perfection!
With her, I am safe and free.
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