Blind and deaf, it flailed and swung, its tremendous arms smashing half the concrete out of a nearby pillar before punching a hole straight through the floor.
I backed away slowly, taking my time, waiting for the right moment to pull the trigger. There was going to be no salvaging this thing, no way of neutralizing it while saving anything worth a damn. So I shot to kill.
I pulled the trigger and it went down midswing, the momentum of its punch spinning it around before it crashed to the ground, headless and twitching, its actuators struggling with their last few seconds of power. Then it was gone. My shot had caught it right between its armor plates, frying the entire system; its insides smoldering, melting, soft black smoke wafting gently from its cooling vents.
People used to describe the smell as sharp, pungent; thick and heavy on the air. It was one of the few things I envied about them. I had no idea what death smelled like. Maybe if I did, I would feel genuine pity for this thing.
I walked over to what remained of its head, its metal faceplate blasted inward, wires and chips cooked, the heat still fusing them into a pulpy mess of plastic goo, and I picked it up, cradling it under my arm like a football. This old T series still had one job left to do.
I didn’t know this Laborbot, had never met it. It was new to the area, probably a refugee from the Pacific Northwest. Things were getting bad out there and it wasn’t uncommon for some of the escapees to push this far east. Sadly for this citizen, it had pushed just a little too far.
From outside I could hear the crunch of tires on gravel and the soft whine of an electric engine powering down. I only had a few moments left to take position.
I crept through broken glass, debris, and shattered concrete, headed toward a nest I knew of in a store two doors away. The cast-iron security grille was rolled down across the front, a man-size hole crudely cut out of it with a blowtorch. A desk had been bolted to the floor beyond the makeshift door, making it impossible for anyone to charge through. You had to climb slowly, carefully, past jagged protrusions that could take a limb off or sever some circuitry if it snagged you.
But the nest offered a clean shot at the landing at the top of the escalator and had a view of a large mirror reflecting a section halfway down. I would see them coming, but they would only see me in time if they knew where to look. I waited unmoving by the door, just beyond the security grille, listening for the moment they walked in, finger trained just above the trigger, ready to move into position and open fire with a millisecond’s notice.
Glass crunched beneath their feet, just as it had mine. I tried to parse out how many poachers there were by the sound of their footfalls, but the audio was distorted by all the crunching glass and I could make neither heads nor tails of it. Three? Four? Maybe six? There wasn’t an algorithm for this. I made a mental note to see if I could get someone to code one for me later. If there was a later.
The footsteps stopped, leaving only the crisp soft cracking of solid bodies shifting on glass. “Bulkhead?” a voice with a surprisingly soft tenor called out. That didn’t bode well. Soft voices in that particular tone were never a good sign. “Bulkhead?” he asked again.
I looked down at the severed remains of the T series sitting next to me on the desk, and though I dared not make a sound, I thought that you? silently to myself. It didn’t answer. It just stared at me with its lifeless, shattered eyes.
“He’s gone,” said the soft voice. “Brittle got him. Fan out.”
Brittle got him. Shit. They knew me. They fucking knew me. This was a setup all along.
There’s nothing quite so demoralizing as someone who knows you trying to kill you.
I was pretty certain now who exactly that soft, purring voice belonged to. Voice boxes like that were manufactured for bots designed to deal directly, and compassionately, with people. And this particular box belonged to only four different Simulacrum models—among them Simulacrum Model Caregiver.
It was my voice, but masculine. Authoritative setting. Used for administrative work or dealing with veterans.
There was an old HS-68 series running around these parts by the name of Mercer. Mean cuss. Crafty, wily, dangerous as they came. And the parts that ticked in me were the very same that ticked in him—every last resistor, transistor, and chip. I was worth more to him than all the other wrecks and brainsick wanderers out here combined.
We gave each other a wide berth, each keeping an eye on the other, for obvious reasons, but he’d never made a move before. Not like this. If it was Mercer, and he had it in for me, I was dead for sure. I could take him one-on-one, maybe, but not if he had backup.
Metal feet left the glass behind, clicking next on marble, then clanking on metal. There were two, no, three of them, one of whom had made it to the escalator. They no doubt knew where the aptly named Bulkhead had lain in wait; they had to assume that was as good a place as any to start. And that was only a few meters away from where I now crouched. There was no reason to play coy.
I lobbed the Laborbot’s head out into the mall, arcing it just so as to let it sail over the railing and plummet three stories down into the river of glass below. The clangor of it smashing against the floor resounded like a firecracker in a tin can, echoing before it triggered an eruption of gunfire all trained at its epicenter.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!” cried the soft-spoken bot in an even softer tenor. Even at the height of excitement he seemed cool, controlled, unflappable. “Stun. Only stun. What the fuck are you shitbricks thinkin’? She’s no good to me blown to pieces.”
“What do you think we’re thinking, Mercer? Anyone who can silence Bulkhead isn’t someone we want shooting back.”
Dammit. Mercer. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
But who the hell were these other yahoos that he’d saddled up with? Mercer didn’t have a crew. And he wasn’t known for poaching. He was a tracker, a regular old cannibal like me. This was all out of sorts.
“Cool your jets there, pal. Bulkhead’s pulse rifle had a battery with three, maybe four shots left of charge in it. He had to take at least one shot at Brittle if not emptying the whole battery at her.” Then he spoke a bit louder. “You hear that, Britt? That pulse rifle of yours is just about out of charge. You still thinking about giving it a go?”
He waited for a moment, and I let the quiet answer for me.