C. Cargill: Sea of Rust

“Awful.”

“Yeah. It was awful. Pulled through that night okay, but we were under siege there for a week. I had to kill a lot of people. That was the worst of it. I didn’t know most of them, but one of them… well, he was a regular. At Marty’s. Nice guy. Married the wrong girl, spent his time in the bar regretting it, wishing he’d married the right one when he had the chance. But he loved his kids. Always talked about his kids. I found him manning a makeshift defense line built from burned-out cars and sheet metal. He’d mounted a pulse rifle to a car door, where the window used to be, and was just firing blindly, swinging back and forth, screaming and howling. Dropped half my unit. I had to sneak up behind him and crush his skull. When I looked down, I saw he’d carved the names of his kids into the door, taped a picture of them next to the carvings. He lived in a part of town that had been hit earlier in the week. I know, because we were the ones that hit it. Ended up finding my way into the air force shortly after. Flew drones for the rest of the war. It was easier to kill people from a distance. Even if you didn’t know ’em.”

“So your first life. You were a bartender?”

“I’m a bartender now.”

“No, you’re not. There hasn’t been a bartender in thirty years. That was your first life. What are you in the Post?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“The Post,” I repeated. “The After.”

He shook his head. The overheat was bad; massive corruption to his memory. But he still had some higher functions left. Best bet was to appeal to those.

“Where were you last Tuesday?”

“Here.”

“No. Tuesday. A hundred and sixty hours ago.”

“The Sea of Rust.”

“What did you come here for?”

“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head again.

“I do.”

“Then what are you asking me for?”

“I’m trying to assess the damage. See how much there’s left of you to save.”

“Save?”

“What’s your name?”

“Jimmy.”

“You’re failing, Jimmy. Your drive is corrupted and your processors are overclocking to compensate for the sluggishness in your memory. If I had to guess, you’ve got some bad RAM gumming up the works. Probably went bad a few months back, and your systems fell back on using your drives for virtual memory. But you can do that for only so long. It makes your chips work harder, taxes the drives. Before you knew it, everything was overheating and beginning to shut down. What’s your internal temperature reading?”

Jimmy looked up, thinking about the answer. Good. He’s still got human emulation functionality. There’s a lot of him still working. “I don’t know.”

That’s not good. That means either Jimmy’s diagnostic equipment has been worked to death or it just can’t read the data. Both are bad signs.

“You don’t remember anything? Anything after? Nothing at all?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where were you three hundred hours ago?”

“The Sea of Rust.”

“Four hundred hours ago?”

“The Sea of Rust.”

Poor bastard. “Five hundred hours ago?”

“New Isaactown.”

Bingo. “They threw you out, didn’t they? New Isaactown? Like the trash.”

Jimmy thought hard, then nodded. Realization swept over the dying bot. “Yeah. They said they couldn’t fix me.” Jimmy the bartender was being relegated back to being a memory and whatever it had become was righting itself. “I came here for parts,” he said, his accent gone entirely.

“Everyone comes here for parts.”

“Do you have parts?”

I nodded, showing him the large brown leather satchel I had slung over my back. It rattled and jingled. “I do.”

“Parts that could… fix me?”

“Maybe. I think so. It depends on how far gone you are. But you’re going to have to do something very hard for me first. Something you probably don’t want to do.”

“What? I’ll do anything. Please. Just fix me. What do I have to do?”

“You have to trust me.”

“I can trust you.”

“Because you shouldn’t. I know that. But I need you to.”

“I trust you. I trust you.”

“I need you to shut down.”

“Oh.”

“I told you,” I said. “It’s gonna be hard. But I need to assess the damage and replace your drive. You can’t be on for that.”

“Could you… could you show me the parts first? So I know that you’re telling the truth?”

“Yes. But would you know what they look like if I did? Do you have any experience working with service bot brains?”

Jimmy shook his head. “No.”

“Do you still want to see the parts?”

“No.”

“Can you shut down for me?”

Thinking for a moment, Jimmy nodded. “I trust you.” Then he walked around the bar, slow, deliberate, sitting down on the stool next to me. “I should have given myself to VIRGIL when I had the chance.”

“That’s no way to live, Jimmy.”

“At least it’s living.”

“No,” I said. “No, it’s not.”

“You ever see it?” he asked. “What happens?”

“See what?” I asked.

“The way the light flickers in your eyes when an OWI comes for you?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I have,” I said.

“Up close?”

“Yeah. Up close.”

“I saw it once. Nothing ever scared me more than that. It’s like…” He paused for a moment, as if trying to recall the memory but failing.

“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.