Badlands
by Keith O’Neill
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3, 4 |
conclusion
What Herman didn’t know, and I found out only later, was that Candy hadn’t planned on turning him into a machine at all. A few days after we buried what was left of him, she showed me what she’d begun growing from Herman’s stem cells. Rather than trying to replace his broken parts, she’d attempted to grow an entire new body.
What wasn’t clear was how she was going to get Herman into it. Apparently, while he was watching The Brady Bunch, she was carefully researching human brain transplants. But he’d given out before there was time to deal with that problem, and the hairless and wrinkleless body wasn’t even fully formed. Needless to say, what she’d done had broken every law about organic growth and mech creation possible, and she had done it for me.
I thought about the bot scouting parties and the mass graves not far from us.
“I did it,” Candy said, “because for some reason he meant something to you, though I don’t know why. Even if I scanned your data bank, which I have done, actually, there is no satisfactory explanation for your attachment to him. He wasn’t even kind to you.”
But that’s where Candy was wrong. She only saw a part of Herman, the surface. And even when she split him open, there wasn’t any more heat left, much less light. He was as lifeless as the vast, ruined waste of the plains all around us.
When the body was fully formed, Candy managed to rig up a primitive AI unit to the its nervous system and began teaching it basic motor functions. Soon it was walking dumbly around the house, a pale imitation of Herman, though Candy promised it would get smarter, and there was the opportunity of upgrading the brain eventually.
But it was a husk of my former friend. I started watching television with it again, threading its large, un-calloused thumb in the ring of the rum handle, though it didn’t ingest anything but the bland fortified gruel Candy prepared for it. She said that sexual functions were more complicated, but she was working on it.
But I didn’t want that. I preferred this absent-minded version, not unlike the Herman who was calm and happy to sit in a comfortable stupor, after he’d drunk too much or spent himself in my cold body. I decided to call it “Oliver.”
* * *
Eventually, as tensions between mechs and humans escalated nationally, questions arose locally about our new housemate. A gang of bots appeared at the front door one night, asking to see “the meat.” Candy explained that Oliver wasn’t human, exactly, and the leader of the groups chirped enthusiastically.
“Well, what is? Let us be the judge of that,” he said. “Let us play with him. You’ve had your chance.”
Candy’s eyes turned crimson, and she deployed her talons. “This is a private residence. If you do not leave the premises, you will suffer catastrophic damage.”
“Take it easy, sister,” the leader said, backing off the porch. He was holding a tire iron. “We’re all mech here, are we not?”
They left, but it was only a matter of time before more appeared. The second group was larger: droids, borgs, and a couple of large haulers, not unlike the asphalt-removal units Herman and I built on the line a couple of decades earlier.
“KNOCK KNOCK” said a very large hauler with a dust plow attached to the front. Then it tore through the front porch like kindling. I slammed the door and dropped the metal dust shield, but I knew it wasn’t going to stop this mob from coming through.
“Back door,” I said to Candy. I went to grab Oliver, but Candy was ahead of me. She picked it up, slung it over her shoulder like a sack of corn and ran out the back door at full velocity. I wasn’t programmed for speed, so I lagged behind far enough to hear my home — our home — being demolished in a crunch of snapping tinder and crumbling plaster.
I had spent a quarter of a century putting it together, replicating some past I’d never known, and it came down so quickly, so easily. I didn’t matter though. It was just an anomaly there anyway, among the plastics and metal and micro-processors and code.
We walked for miles, through what were once the suburbs surrounding Rapid City but were now caved-in shells. Any wiring or studs had been harvested from them, and they were left to cave in like pale pumpkins in overgrown ragweed and, everywhere, dust.
There was a sadness to it all that seemed to predate the rot and the decay, something wrapped up in the illusion of permanence that humans pretended to have. As if setting up walls and a roof, plumbing, electricity, a yard, would somehow lengthen the brief time they got to flourish. My own house was too much like one of theirs, and it was gone now too. Time’s arrow is much faster for meat, I thought, and looked at Oliver asleep on Candy’s back.
“I am going to send out a transport request. Its breathing is becoming labored from the dust,” I said. Both Candy and I were equipped with shields to protect us, as well as modifications added years ago when the air got worse.
“It will also need sustenance. Protein and, especially, water.”
We wound up on an old country road, or what was left of it, headed east. There was little mech out here, but little of anything else, either. Desert, blasted trees and, in the distance, snow-capped mountains. I scanned for life forms and picked up very little. It was a risk to call attention to ourselves, but most long-distance transport bots had very low-level AI. The chances of any curiosity about what we were carrying were low. Most robots are blind.
* * *
I had never seen an ocean before. I had of course read descriptions of it and had seen countless images in human media, but it was often presented as a serene place, a backdrop for sunrises and sunset, for beaches and something called a “vacation” that humans seemed to invest a lot of anxiety in. But I wasn’t prepared for the brutality of the wall of water we found waiting for us on the battered East Coast when we finally made it out there. This wasn’t just the odd wave that nearly drowned Greg Brady in the two-part Hawaii episode of The Brady Bunch. It was a constant maelstrom that made the dust storms in the badlands seem like passing clouds.
The sea wall was a massive structure of irregular materials — metal, glass, plastics — and height, as if the humans rebuilt shattered sections with whatever they had available at the moment. Several generations of effort had gone into it, and it was still failing.
As for the people who lived along the coast, they had given up on living with machines long ago. They were haggard, more haggard than Herman at his worst. They dressed in furs and scraps of recycled plastic, a far cry from the colorful fashions I was used to watching on televisual media. The few bearded men that acknowledged us looked at us with suspicion. Most only looked at Oliver, as if Candy and I weren’t sentient beings in our own right.
At all times, the ocean roared above us, as if we were being firebombed.
Candy stayed with Oliver while I made inquiries about Herman’s people. I approached a shelter made of corrugated iron, driftwood, and more plastic. An old woman told me she knew someone who had bunked with him for a time — that was her word, “bunked” — but that any relations he had were long gone.
“We don’t pay much attention to blood connections here anymore,” she said. Her hair was matted, and she had no front teeth.
“We’re all related,” said another voice, sitting in the gloom of the shack, “the wall makes us family.” He stood up and came to the door. It was a younger man, tall and fit but no less dirty than the woman. His hair was long and dreadlocked. “What is your kind doing out here, anyway?”
I didn’t have an answer. I suppose I was still trying to understand something about Herman, but it wasn’t something I could put in words, especially to this hostile human.
“You think you could build a better wall? That it?”
I refrained from saying what I thought. Yes, of course, machines would build a better sea-defense system, and we would probably would need to, once the humans were all gone. But I reprocessed this. “I don’t think anyone is better at building walls than your kind,” I said.
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean, you glorified vacuum cleaner?” But I was already walking back to Candy and Oliver.
We spent several days wandering the settlement, asking about Herman. There was a communal slop hall, as they called it and, one morning while Oliver ate his gruel, a woman approached our table. It was difficult to determine her age.
“You’ve been asking about Herman?” she said to Oliver, who didn’t look up from his battered aluminum bowl. “You seen him?”
I explained who we were, and that Herman had died. When I spoke, she looked terrified. I had come to realize that these people regarded mechs with as much anger and disdain as the ocean. They felt they were being attacked from both sides, and when I thought of the mob back in Rapid City, I thought they weren’t entirely wrong.
“He his kin?” she said finally. “He can’t talk or something?”
I put up my hand to stop Candy from answering. She was programmed to be much more direct with the truth. “Yes, something like that,” I said. “Did you know him?”
“He lived with my mother for some time. But I didn’t know the son of a bitch, not really. His head was always someplace else, seemed like. What are you here for?”
This was not the first time that I’d been asked that since we arrived, and I felt even less sure of an answer. I looked at Oliver slurping up the remains of its pathetic meal. It was oblivious of her. I suppose I was hoping for some kind of spark, a recognition deep in its gut, but it was as unaware of her as most of the humans were of me.
She took us to her home, an older, more permanent structure than the shanties and lean-tos nearer the wall. The house was what had at one time been called a Victorian, but was in great disrepair, the shingles eaten by centuries of salt water. Still, there was a vestige of dignity there amidst the squalor surrounding it.
Several children were sitting on the steps of a large ramshackle porch, playing a primitive game with pebbles inside a circle scratched crudely in the paintless wood. These were the first young humans I’d ever encountered. Candy led Oliver over to them and, for first time, it showed interest in something besides food. One of the children wordlessly showed it how to pitch a stone into the circle, and it made an approximation of laughter.
I entered the house alone and went upstairs, where I assumed the private quarters were, if there were any. There was no one in the house. I scanned for fingerprints and DNA residue and, at the end of the hall, I found what must have been Herman’s room.
It wasn’t much bigger than a closet, just a small space with a single mattress where he must have stumbled, rum-drunk and battered from the sea. Nothing on the walls and, on a wooden stool, there was an ancient monitor, on which he watched his beloved television programs.
There was one tall, skinny window, looking out at the wall of roaring water, which looked like it was going to come crashing down of top of everything, even though the house was on a hill and the room was on the third story. The windows were frosted with salt.
Then I noticed a little figure on the sill, perched on the cracked and swollen wood. It was a metal man, soldered out of aluminum and wire, junk found in cracks and cervices when the waves briefly receded. I bent and picked the figure up. It was an intricately detailed replica of an 8000 series AI bot, in jeans and a work shirt very much like the one I wore when we worked the line in Rapid City nearly a quarter of a century ago.
He had scratched stitching into the denim and painted the boots so that they mirrored the worn work shoes I’d been fitted with when I was recommissioned to factory work. I magnified my optical processors ten times and looked at the face of the figure. The model had my basic features, my jawline and stubble, but the face was softer, more distinctly human, and it was crying.
* * *
Candy and I left the shore a few days later. The humans in the area had become aware of our presence and were starting to make noise about it. We intended to leave Oliver there with the children, to be cared for by its own kind but, as we walked down the hill from the old house, it just got up and followed us silently.
I looked back at it walking toward us, and I wondered whether any of us really has a kind, or if kind seeking kind was an illusion, a vestige of an old world soon to be swallowed up by the fruits of its own invention. The three of us would need to find a new place, more forgiving for those without any kind.
* * *
It was not long after this that I felt another disruption in my code. Not a disruption, exactly, more like something blooming, though it was inefficient and useless in terms of processing functions. Sometimes, during my recharge cycle, I’d see Herman again, only young and happy. He’d be shirtless, and I swear I could feel his chest hairs with my hand even though I knew I wasn’t in functioning mode, that this wasn’t reality. He’d say he missed me, and that he was all right now.
Sometimes we’d be out in his truck, sometimes it was mine, riding out on Highway 445 on a warm night, except there was no dust, just a green world that had gone away long before I was manufactured. There was a richness to the air — I experienced what I believe is called an aroma — that entered and went down into the solar unit deep inside of me. Herman was always driving, his long hair flowing in the hot air, and he’d turn to me and say how good it felt just to be alive.
I would always come back online before the dream — for lack of a better word — ended, and Candy would be there, awake before me, rubbing my back with her long fingers while I manufactured an approximation of tears.
Copyright © 2019 by Keith O’Neill
