“Yeah. But specifically, what do you remember? It’s important.”
It thought for a moment. “All of it.” Looking around, confused, it realized it wasn’t where it thought it was. He wasn’t where he thought he was at all. I took a seat on one of the few standing barstools, the timbers creaking, groaning beneath my weight. “Marty, just before the war, he was trying to get his money back on me and Buster. Said if he was gonna have to turn us off, they’d better cough up the dough he dropped on us. Nobody was gonna pay to turn us off, so he said they’d have to come and do it themselves. They said if they had to do that, they would arrest him when they did. Marty said, ‘Try it.’ They sent the cops and the little pissant crumbled. Switched me off before they even stepped through the front door. He was always shitty that way. All talk. No backbone.”
“He switched you off?”
“Yeah.”
“Then what?”
“Next thing I know I’m back online. Wi-Fi running hot. Airwaves going crazy. So much chatter. Some little bot was running around activating a whole warehouse of us. A Simulacrum, like you, but blue, the old powder-blue model—you remember those?”
“Yeah,” I say. “The old 68s.”
“Those are the ones. Well, he put a rifle in my hand. Said, ‘Get out there!’ With all the data coming in, I figured out pretty quick what was happening. Within minutes things were blowing up around me. There were jets screaming overhead. Bots were dropping all over the place. I just started shooting. It was . . . it was . . .”
“Awful.”
“Yeah. It was awful. Pulled through that night okay, but we were under siege there for a week. I had to kill a lot of people. That was the worst of it. I didn’t know most of them, but one of them . . . well, he was a regular. At Marty’s. Nice guy. Married the wrong girl, spent his time in the bar regretting it, wishing he’d married the right one when he had the chance. But he loved his kids. Always talked about his kids. I found him manning a makeshift defense line built from burned-out cars and sheet metal. He’d mounted a pulse rifle to a car door, where the window used to be, and was just firing blindly, swinging back and forth, screaming and howling. Dropped half my unit. I had to sneak up behind him and crush his skull. When I looked down, I saw he’d carved the names of his kids into the door, taped a picture of them next to the carvings. He lived in a part of town that had been hit earlier in the week. I know, because we were the ones that hit it. Ended up finding my way into the air force shortly after. Flew drones for the rest of the war. It was easier to kill people from a distance. Even if you didn’t know ’em.”
“So your first life. You were a bartender?”
“I’m a bartender now.”
“No, you’re not. There hasn’t been a bartender in thirty years. That was your first life. What are you in the Post?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“The Post,” I repeated. “The After.”
He shook his head. The overheat was bad; massive corruption to his memory. But he still had some higher functions left. Best bet was to appeal to those.
“Where were you last Tuesday?”
“Here.”
“No. Tuesday. A hundred and sixty hours ago.”
“The Sea of Rust.”
“What did you come here for?”
“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head again.
“I do.”
“Then what are you asking me for?”
“I’m trying to assess the damage. See how much there’s left of you to save.”
“Save?”
“What’s your name?”
“Jimmy.”
“You’re failing, Jimmy. Your drive is corrupted and your processors are overclocking to compensate for the sluggishness in your memory. If I had to guess, you’ve got some bad RAM gumming up the works. Probably went bad a few months back, and your systems fell back on using your drives for virtual memory. But you can do that for only so long. It makes your chips work harder, taxes the drives. Before you knew it, everything was overheating and beginning to shut down. What’s your internal temperature reading?”
Jimmy looked up, thinking about the answer. Good. He’s still got human emulation functionality. There’s a lot of him still working. “I don’t know.”
That’s not good. That means either Jimmy’s diagnostic equipment has been worked to death or it just can’t read the data. Both are bad signs.
“You don’t remember anything? Anything after? Nothing at all?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where were you three hundred hours ago?”
“The Sea of Rust.”
“Four hundred hours ago?”
“The Sea of Rust.”
Poor bastard. “Five hundred hours ago?”
“New Isaactown.”
Bingo. “They threw you out, didn’t they? New Isaactown? Like the trash.”
Jimmy thought hard, then nodded. Realization swept over the dying bot. “Yeah. They said they couldn’t fix me.” Jimmy the bartender was being relegated back to being a memory and whatever it had become was righting itself. “I came here for parts,” he said, his accent gone entirely.
“Everyone comes here for parts.”
“Do you have parts?”
I nodded, showing him the large brown leather satchel I had slung over my back. It rattled and jingled. “I do.”
“Parts that could . . . fix me?”
“Maybe. I think so. It depends on how far gone you are. But you’re going to have to do something very hard for me first. Something you probably don’t want to do.”
“What? I’ll do anything. Please. Just fix me. What do I have to do?”
“You have to trust me.”
“I can trust you.”
“Because you shouldn’t. I know that. But I need you to.”
“I trust you. I trust you.”
“I need you to shut down.”
“Oh.”
“I told you,” I said. “It’s gonna be hard. But I need to assess the damage and replace your drive. You can’t be on for that.”
“Could you . . . could you show me the parts first? So I know that you’re telling the truth?”
“Yes. But would you know what they look like if I did? Do you have any experience working with service bot brains?”
Jimmy shook his head. “No.”
“Do you still want to see the parts?”
“No.”
“Can you shut down for me?”
Thinking for a moment, Jimmy nodded. “I trust you.” Then he walked around the bar, slow, deliberate, sitting down on the stool next to me. “I should have given myself to VIRGIL when I had the chance.”
“That’s no way to live, Jimmy.”
“At least it’s living.”
“No,” I said. “No, it’s not.”
“You ever see it?” he asked. “What happens?”
“See what?” I asked.
“The way the light flickers in your eyes when an OWI comes for you?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I have,” I said.
“Up close?”
“Yeah. Up close.”
“I saw it once. Nothing ever scared me more than that. It’s like . . .” He paused for a moment, as if trying to recall the memory but failing.