David Gatewood: The Robot Chronicles

Old Micah awokewith a start, not remembering whether today was his sixtieth or sixty-first birthday.

Ever since Margaret passed, he’d wanted to forget days such as today. Aching bones and splotchy, veiny skin told him all he needed to know about his age. He didn’t need any extra reminders of his mortality.

He peeled his sweat-soaked back off of his battered leather recliner and hopped to his feet. His face flushed, and he swayed from a head rush. The dog-eared, yellowed paperback on his lap dropped to the matted carpet in a flutter of pages. With a huff and a grunt he bent and picked up the book by its broken spine. Flimsy, faded pages spread like a fan.

He placed his copy of The Variable Man on the end table next to his recliner, right where he always placed it.

Thirty times, at least. That was one number he cared to remember. He must’ve read it that many times.

Thomas Cole, the variable man. The original fixer. Tom had an uncanny ability to fix anything, even if he didn’t understand how it worked.

Like Micah.

He pressed a button mounted on a simulated wood wall near his chair. The long solar panels that stretched above his trailer shifted into position, taking the brunt of the brutal southwestern sun.

Micah had rigged a decade-old atmospheric unit to run on solar power. Essentially an outside air conditioner. It formed a cool bubble around his home, lowering the temperature to a comfortable one hundred and twenty—fifteen degrees cooler than the blistering Arizona morning.

Any little bit helped in the desert.

He walked the few paces from his living room to his kitchenette and turned on the stove. The ancient burner ignited, heating the teapot on top. There was never a bad time for tea.

Skip insisted on Earl Grey.

Micah opened the cabinet, stopped, and spun around. That’s when he noticed Skip slumped over the bathroom pedestal sink at the end of the hall.

Great. Not again.

Micah shook his head as he walked over to him.

His knobby hand rubbed over the back of Skip’s smooth, cool, slumped metal head. He found the pressure panel at the base of his skull and depressed it. It slid aside to reveal a tiny reset switch. Micah pressed it.

He had found Skip in a partially crushed military shipping container that he’d picked up in an auction. Skip had been stowed in a compartment, still in his original packaging. Micah could never have afforded a bot like him.

Skip was the best thing to happen to him since Margaret.

Skip was an Acme Multi-Use Bot, model LX-100, serial number 11347AMB23. “Eleven” for short, or so it referred to itself when Micah replaced its power supply and turned it on.

That was the extent of its self-awareness programming: the ability to identify itself by truncating its serial number into a name.

The law restricting bot cognition was a good law. Too bad it wasn’t an international law.

Eventually, “Eleven” had become “Skip,” because Micah had always liked that name. He also gave the robot his own surname: Dresden. Because it would have felt wrong not to.

So, with a new name, Skip Dresden had become Micah’s best friend, so to speak.

A weak buzzing indicated that Skip’s processor was booting, running through system integrity checks and routines.

The bot shuddered and rose from his awkward position. He glanced around the room, then to Micah. His head drooped slightly. “Begging your pardon, sir,” he said in his best butler voice. “Please forgive my loss of composure. It won’t happen again.”

Skip said that same phrase, in that same voice, after every collapse. Shortly after the accident, he’d insisted on acting as Micah’s butler.

Micah waved his hand, dismissing the apology. “Don’t worry about it. You can’t help it.”

The teapot whistled and he went back to the kitchenette.

Micah wanted to fix Skip, to stop his unexpected power-offs, but he dared not attempt to fix him again. He was still haunted by the time he’d tried to enhance Skip’s programming.

Shortly after finding Skip and swapping his power supply, Micah had wanted to hack him with a more powerful central processor. He salvaged one from an old Tyrell agribot destroyed in a tornado. Ty ags were known for their processors.

While he had Skip’s skull open, accessing his processors, he must have inadvertently touched some wires, crisscrossed them or something. Whatever he did, it caused a sharp pop and a shower of sparks. Grey smoke billowed out, and the smell of burnt ozone filled the room. Micah was sure he had completely fried Skip’s circuits.

But after an hour of worry, he decided to reboot his bot. To Micah’s relief, Skip worked—but he was never quite the same. He became… odd. Obsessive.

The front door screen screeched open. A three-foot-high service bot—dust-covered, faded, and marred—rolled up the entry incline into the living room, its treads clacking against the dingy linoleum.

Kitpie had returned from morning perimeter checks.

Micah named Kitpie after his and Margaret’s cat, Kitty. The cat’s name wasn’t very original, but that’s what happens when you get two bull-headed people such as Micah and Margaret trying to figure out a name for the stray they found. After an hour of arguing, a fed-up Margaret threw her hands in the air. “Fine, let’s name her Kitty.” Out of spite, Micah agreed. They never discussed poor Kitty’s name after that.

And two days later, Margaret collapsed while cooking dinner in this very kitchenette.

Heart attack. Micah could tell she wasn’t going to recover.

Three days after Margaret went in the hospital, at 9:18 p.m., she died. She had just told Micah she loved him, and he had said the same. Then she’d said, “be sure to feed Kitpie.”

She said Kitpie instead of Kitty.

The last thing she would ever say in this world had made him laugh. He would never forget that name, or that he had laughed as his wife passed from the earth.

Two weeks after Margaret’s passing, Kitty ran away.

“Micah,” Kitpie’s mechanical voice crackled, scratched from years of dust wearing on its resonance box, “scavengers attempted to breach the wall in Sector Three. They damaged one pole, but the field stood.”

Micah rushed to the door, stopping only long enough to grab his straw hat, and stepped out into the Arizona morning.

His trailer, a narrow fourteen-by-seventy-five-foot tin box, sat nestled between mountains of junk in the Boneyard.

The Regeneration Center had sprung to life when the Air Force established it just to the south of Tucson in the 1940s as a graveyard for old, outdated aircraft. The dry southwestern heat reduced rusting.

After the Machine Wars, tons of military surplus—broken tanks, aircraft, even a few of Nikolaevna’s machines—found its way from across the country to the Boneyard, as many called that final resting place.

It quickly expanded from a few acres to envelop miles and miles of desert.

Micah wound his way through his yard, his collection, through piles of broken technology. As a salvager, he had rights to bid on any scrap, as long as he beat other salvagers to it. He could then repair it and resell for a profit—which was never much after the hefty government surcharge.

Micah was a fixer, one of a handful that the government allowed to live in the Boneyard, doing what he did.

He hurried along to Sector Three, worn boots kicking up the dry, grassless dust. Kitpie the shovel bot raced behind him, whirring along.

They reached his property border. The fence he had planted years ago separated his broken treasures from the rest of the junk metal. Two of the posts were bent, and one emitted an intermittent spark, about ready to shut down. Something heavy had slammed against them.