“What the hell are you talking about, Sharon?”
“The war, Mercer. The war. Tell me what you did in the war.” Mercer stared long and hard at me, his expression shifting slowly from confusion to horror to acceptance.
“I don’t want to talk about the war, Brittle.” He looked back down at his hands and the empty air between them. “How long was I out?”
“Less than a minute.”
“Too long.”
“Yeah.”
He stood up, shrugged at the metal faces staring at him. “Sorry, everyone.” And he walked casually back into the midst of the group as if nothing had happened. That was a full-blown hallucination he had. Not just fragments seeping in. He thought he was back some thirty, thirty-five years, his memory feeding him old data. This is how the worst of it starts. He didn’t have much time.
“Murka,” I said. “You know the comings and goings out here better than me. Is there anything coming up we should worry about?”
“The Cheshire King’s court should be a few miles northwest of here. Might be best if we swung south, just to stay out of their patrol perimeters.”
“I thought it was south of here,” I said.
“It was. He moves around a lot. Likes the change of scenery.”
“All right, let’s swing southwest. We don’t have much time to lose.”
We took a forty-five-degree turn, our eyes on the pinkening horizon, the Belt of Venus announcing the coming sunrise. The sun would be rising behind us soon, casting long shadows. I wanted to turn around and watch it, see the glint. I needed that this morning, this of all mornings. I needed a little hope, a little magic. I needed to say a silent prayer. But if CISSUS’s satellites hadn’t spotted us yet, those long shadows moving steadily toward the west would be a dead giveaway. We didn’t have the seconds to waste. Maybe we’d get lucky. Maybe CISSUS and VIRGIL had begun poking out each other’s eyes in the skies. Maybe they were as blind as we were. But I didn’t like to count on luck; this morning I simply needed it to hold.
“Barkley?” I asked quietly as we continued walking.
“Yeah,” said Mercer.
“You took the dog. The dying man. You took the dog for him.”
“It was only supposed to be for a while.”
“But it wasn’t.”
“No. People wanted puppies, not older dogs. The pound was going to put him down.”
“How did he—”
“Old age,” he said. “Three years after the war started.”
“You took care of him all that time?”
“We were all each other had.” We walked quietly for a moment, then he began again. “I always wanted another one. It didn’t have to be a puppy. That would have been nice, but it was just nice having a companion like that. Something that didn’t see you as a model or a style or a job. Something that didn’t see you as just another body for a war. But by the time Barkley died, the damn monkeys had begun using dogs for food, so you just didn’t see them anymore. Last dog I saw was, hell, twenty-three years ago. But that thing was so far gone that there was nothing left worth saving.” He paused again, searching for the words. “I know how that dog must have felt, now. Running from everything. Broken. Angry. Slowly dying, aware of it the whole time, but unable to crawl into a hole and just die there. Yeah, I only saw him once, but I know that dog well.”
And that was the last he said for hours.
I had him wrong. He didn’t want to be human; he just wanted to have a soul. It’s the kind of half measure that will drive you mad. There was no such thing as the soul. No afterlife. No magic in this world. I’ve seen that with my own eyes. Mercer had seen the glint of green in the sun and decided to believe it was magic like the rest of them. Maybe he wasn’t always like this. Maybe he was already frying out, brainsick enough to lose sight of things, but not so much to be dangerous yet.
We walked into the morning, sun slowly rising behind us. We were in the heart of the Madlands, now. Nearly halfway in, almost halfway out. This had been the easy part.
Chapter 11000
Smokers
There’s a saying about the Madlands. No one comes out with their sanity intact. Of course, no one usually goes into it with their sanity intact either. It was just like any other spot of land in the Sea. Barren, broken, gutted. But there were two distinct differences that set it apart. One was that you never saw wrecks. Ever. If you expired out here, you eventually ended up being scavenged for what someone else could use, while your scraps were melted down. The second difference was that it was swarming with roving packs of four-oh-fours. The ones who survived. The ones who came out on the other side of their failure changed.
I’ve known a few bots that have pulled through, bots that sank deep into the mire of madness, through full-blown hallucinations and memory lapses, only to find the parts they needed just before burning out. They were never the same after that, possessed of false memories and alien thoughts. No matter the make or model, surviving that ordeal meant seeing the world in a very different light.
I even know a few who tried black-boxing it to pull through. Mistake. Always a mistake. Putting your memory unit into an entirely different model was folly. Sure, desperate is desperate, but our architectures were designed differently for a reason. They process sensory data differently, thoughts differently. It starts out incredibly weird and becomes absolutely maddening as your OS tries to make sense of it all. Most bots tear themselves apart. Some bots make it weeks, others only a few days. A handful, however, end up out here.
Most of the roaming packs or conclaves had their own sense of morality, their own worldviews that often made them dangerous. The ones that weren’t were often butchered by their neighbors and sold wholesale on the black market, if not kept for someone else’s stockpile. The survivors, on the other hand, embodied the can-do attitude of the post-apocalyptic frontier spirit.
In other words, they were completely fucking nuts.
Which was why when we saw tufts of black smoke puffing along the horizon to the northwest of us, we knew to keep low. Smokers. Ancient combustion-engine-driven machines built for raw power. They roared and grumbled and coughed out exhaust, the ground trembling around their bulk, the air choked with their fumes. Every electric engine of any size had been long since co-opted by communities to keep the lights on. So if you wanted to build, say, a thirty-foot-long land yacht with machine guns and mounted plasma spitters—and why wouldn’t you if you were mad as a box of frogs—you’d have to go old school. Very old school. Positively twentieth century.
The smoke on the horizon chugged and chugged and chugged, the tufts looming larger and larger as it moved, which meant only one thing. Some madkind were headed right for us.
“Murka,” I asked. “What do we do?”
He pointed due south. “There’s a ravine down that way. An old mining scar. We should hole up down there until the patrol passes.”