We walked in silence for the next few minutes, all of us anxious about what we were going to find. Maybe it was real. Maybe it was the mother lode. Maybe it really was there waiting for us, bots sitting idle for thirty years ready to give up all the parts I would ever need. Or maybe someone had already been there and picked it clean.
Whatever the truth, Rebekah sure as shit believed in it. She had to. Otherwise why the hell were we here when we could be well on our way to Isaactown?
We turned the corner down a familiar street. Though I knew it, I hadn’t spent a lot of time in this part of town. The war had hit Marion hard, and no harder than in this particular stretch. The street was pockmarked with craters. Many of the buildings had collapsed completely, others only partially. You had to be careful around partially collapsed buildings. That’s how a goodly number of treasure hunters found themselves crushed under a hundred tons of concrete. I’d picked clean everything I could get my hands on, stripped every bit of copper wiring and fixtures, but avoided going too deep into any of the half-toppled habitations.
We stopped. This couldn’t be it.
It was one of the partial collapses. I’d scouted out the topmost remaining floor—just offices with nothing of value—and peered through the wreckage to parts of the bottom floor. The whole thing was just part of some office park. There was no warehouse here.
“Herbert,” said Rebekah.
Herbert knew what to do. He walked over to the side of the building, and with his one good hand lifted the back end of an overturned black hearse, riddled with bullet holes, paint charred a deeper black by the heat of some ancient explosion. “Doc?” he asked. “An assist?”
Doc walked over and helped him lift the car, moving it aside. Beneath it was another car, this one almost completely crushed, pancaked by the other. Pale turquoise, windows shattered and long gone, its smashed crinkles rusted completely. Together, Herbert and Doc removed it, dropping it atop the first like a cockeyed hat.
And beneath it was a concrete staircase, a large wooden sign hanging just over it, too weathered and worn to be made out.
I had no idea this was here. I knew the hearse, but never had the strength to move it. I never even thought to.
This was it. This was really happening.
We walked down the steps together, single file, Herbert walking sideways as he was otherwise too wide to make it down the narrow passage. At the bottom was a big red door, covered top to bottom in flyers and posters, all wrinkled and browned and falling to pieces. Herbert opened the door and we all piled in.
Herbert hit a light switch on the wall and rows of solar-powered track lighting buzzed to life.
It was a large shop that took up the entire basement of the building, the walls and shelves still fully stocked, its vibrant flashy wares dripping from every bit of counter space. For a brief moment I wondered why this place hadn’t been raided during the war, how it had managed to be missed all these years, and why it had a side entrance rather than an elevator or staircase down from inside the heart of the building above.
And then everything made sense.
There they stood—row after row of men and women, fit and trim, the men muscular, the women busty and petite, their skinjobs varying in color and hue. Big-eyed with bright red lips. Dark-haired, blonds, gingers. Tanned, black, soft pink, pale white. Simulacrum Model Companions. Comfortbots. Sexdolls. Fucktoys. Sentient dildos, fleshlights able to adapt to every human fantasy. This was a sex shop, the walls lined with toys, pornographic books, and movies. And these bots were the top-of-the-line product.
They were all built on a similar internal architecture. Just not similar enough. It was a common mistake, to be sure. I couldn’t be angry with Rebekah or whoever it was that told her about this place. Only a sawbones, a cannibal, or a scavenger like me would know the difference between the internals of a Caregiver and a Companion. But the differences in the way we thought—what we focused on, how we processed our very thoughts—were night and day. The cores were different, the CPUs chipped for very different functions. The parts were useless to us for anything but trade. And we had no time left for that.
Had we hearts, they would have sunk loudly in our hollow, overheating chests. Instead we had only the steady buzz of the fluorescent track lighting above and our ever-encroaching madness to provide a soundtrack to the awfulness of the moment. It was over. We were done for. The only way Mercer or I was going to live out the next few days was if one of us ended the other and salvaged whatever wasn’t on the verge of failing. And even that came with no guarantees.
This had all been a colossal mistake. I’d signed my own death warrant coming out here. I’d have had better luck breaking into Regis and recovering my stash. Which is to say, I had virtually no chance at all.
Rebekah ran up to the rows of bots, fists clenched. “No! No, no, no!” she cried, banging on the first bot she came to. For a moment even her controlled translator demeanor cracked as she seemed to express genuine emotion. “These are supposed to be Caregivers! I was told they were Caregivers!”
I slumped down on a concrete step.
This was it. The end.
“It’s an easy mistake to make,” I said.
“Your friends are far from the first to make it,” followed Mercer.
“You can’t use any of this at all?” she asked.
Doc shook his head. “The RAM, sure. That might buy them a few more hours. But the chips, the cores, they’re all worthless.”
“What about black-boxing?” she asked. “We can transfer their memory, like you did mine.”
“We’d last a day, maybe,” I said. “Before the emotions drove us nuts and we tore ourselves apart.”
“You can resist that. If you’re strong enough.”
“Maybe,” said Doc. “Maybe not. Companions were designed to feel. Really feel. Only a few operating systems can manage all that input. Caregiver OS isn’t one of them.”
“We’d have a few good hours at best,” said Mercer.
“Then we’ll come back for you,” said Rebekah. “We’ll get the parts. You’ll shut down, we’ll close this place back up, and have you up and running in a day or two. A week, tops.”
“You aren’t coming back,” I said.
“You don’t trust me?” asked Rebekah.
“It isn’t that. You aren’t coming back.”
The room fell deathly quiet, all eyes falling on me.
“What do you know that we don’t?” asked Herbert.
“We’ve got a Judas,” I said. “And they know we’re here.”
“And just who is the Judas supposed to be this time?” asked Mercer.
“Me,” I said. “I’m the Judas.”
The room was silent, so silent you could almost hear it. Then Mercer raised his rifle to his eye, gun trained right at my chest. I didn’t even flinch. I had it coming. “How long?” he asked.
“How long what?”
“How long have you known?”
“An hour maybe.”
“An hour? How the . . .” He lowered the gun, anger receding from his face. “You saw it, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“So you didn’t know.”
“Not until just before we got to town. Not until Doc all but confirmed it for me.”