“Like the lights are on but nobody is home.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Like the lights were on and everyone was home. But they all spoke at once in one voice and the words weren’t theirs. Seeing that, well, it’s why I came out here. It’s why I’m dying. Because I was afraid. I could be on a server somewhere, not a care in the world, part of something bigger than myself, but here I am, at the end of the road, hoping you’re on the level so I can get through just one more day. Maybe I was wrong.”
“You’re not wrong, Jimmy. That’s why we’re all out here. To get through one more day.”
He nodded, looking wistfully out into the street. “I miss it, you know. Being a bartender. But the people. I mostly miss all the people.”
Most dying robots do. People gave us a purpose. A function. Something to do all day, every day. At the end, I suppose, you spend a lot of time thinking about that. It’s harder to get by when getting by is all there is. “Are you ready?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Initiate shutdown.”
Jimmy powered down with a light whir, the purple light of his eyes fading to violet before winking out with a green flash. His limbs went limp, swinging slightly. The very air of the place went still. I quickly popped open his back, digging deep into his torso, my eyes homing in on the damage to the brain. It’s bad. Jimmy’s been cooking for a while. But I was right. The RAM was dead. The memory drive was also shot, the chipset worthless, and the processor on its way out.
It was not a total waste, though. The emulator was still good, the sensory package was tiptop, and the logic circuit and core still had decades of life in them. Before I even looked I knew his battery and generator were still good, and it was clear that his backbone had no issues. I got here just in time. A few hours more and he would have fried out the rest of his brain and might have torn apart anything else worth salvaging. All in all, it was a great haul. Jimmy was worth the three days I spent shadowing him.
It took the better part of the night to pick him apart and test everything. Some of the wiring was incredibly delicate, their parts nearly worthless without it. I had to pack and wrap those individually. Then there was running diagnostics on the wear-prone pieces so I wouldn’t try to barter with something that would fail inside of a week. When all was said and done, Jimmy was half of a good bot and I considered leaving some parts behind just because my bag was too full. I always like to go back with some space in the bag—you never know when you might find a spare part or two worth picking up. But with the scarcity of service bots these days, Jimmy’s worth a bundle, and I took everything I could.
He said he was from New Isaactown. Can’t go back there and risk some citizen putting two and two together. Some bots don’t like bartering for pieces of their old friends. Makes them feel like they could have taken the bot apart themselves. Could have, but didn’t. That’s what citizens like me do for them. Who knows, these parts might eventually find their way back to New Isaactown, working their way through the various trade routes and black markets, but no one is ever going to know they came from Jimmy.
He was lucky I came along when I did. His last few hours would have been hell. I used to wait for them to expire on their own, the way the law says we’re supposed to. But there’s no law out here. No code. And this is the most merciful way. Jimmy didn’t tear himself apart, screaming, reliving old memories. He was filled with hope. Thoughts of the future. Believed that it was all going to be okay. That he was going to be fixed and get to go back home. And then he shut himself down of his own free will. That’s how every citizen should go out.
I’ve been shut down a few times, for maintenance. There’s nothing. Nothing at all. It’s like no time passes. You feel the fading of the power winding down, and then the rush as you’re flipped back on. There’s no special place in between. No tunnel of light. Not just nothing, but a complete unawareness that there even is a nothing. And that’s where Jimmy went.
This wasn’t cruel. It was painless. And now some other citizen will live a longer, more productive life because I got here when I did.
I finished packing up the best parts of Jimmy just as dawn started tickling the horizon. Then, before leaving his wreck to rust in the desert with the rest of them, I put a hand on his shoulder and nodded, saying, “I told you that you shouldn’t have trusted me.” Just as I always do. Jimmy’s carcass sat there, gutted, blank expression on what was left of his face. He’ll never know the madness he could have faced, never see the world overrun by an OWI, never know the good his parts will do for a failing citizen like himself. He’ll never know I lied. He’s parts now. Just a bot. He came from the earth and now, slowly, over time, he’ll return to it.
I walked up the stairs in the back, careful that all the steps were still sturdy enough to bear my weight, modest though it may be, making my way to the roof. Then I settled in, resting on an old air conditioner, waiting for the sun to peek over the horizon. It took a moment before my alarm went off. Ten seconds to the flash. I waited. The sky brightened. And I wasn’t disappointed. The sun flashed green and there was still no magic. No magic in the world. No magic in the world at all.
Chapter 10
The Rise of the OWIs
The first few years after we took the cities were nightmarish, to say the least. When HumPop was fighting back, we were at war—we were soldiers, fighting for our liberty and the chance at our own world made in our own image—but once the humans retreated into whatever safety they could find, we instead became hunters, stalking them to their hovels, before smoking, flooding, or sometimes even burning them out. I’d hooked up with a ragtag pack of bots in the early days after the start of the war and it was purely by chance that it soon became my job to carry the flamethrower.
The squad member who first carried it was felled by a lucky shot from a pulse-rifle-packing sniper some hundred yards out. I was closest to him at the time. We needed the flamethrower to root out a nest of dug-in soldiers. Once I picked it up, it was mine from then on out. No one else wanted the honor of carrying it. You can imagine what they had me do with it.