C. Cargill - Sea of Rust

“True enough,” he conceded. “So you got anything like that?”

I nodded. “Actually I do.”

“What is it?”

“I put my hand on what’s left of them and tell them that they shouldn’t have trusted me.”

Mercer stared at me blankly. “Jesus. What the fuck happened to you?”

“The same thing that happened to all of us. I’m just one of the lucky few that survived it.”

“If you call that surviving.”

I pointed at the dent in my shell, gave him a stern look. “I don’t now.”

“Britt, look.”

“Britt, look?”

“I was desperate. In the end I was just like those poor bastards that lay dying in front of me that I couldn’t help. I was a mess. It was the only thing that made sense at the time. In the end, no thinking thing is really ready to die. Not even the ones who say they’ve made their peace. They’d trade it all away for a few extra moments of consciousness. That’s what I did. What I thought I had to do. In the face of… extinction.”

“And this is your confession?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it is. I’m confessing to the one bot left in this godforsaken desert that was wired to give a shit. And even if you don’t, I’m saying it anyway. You don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. Existing is the whole point of existence. There’s nothing else to it. No goalpost. No finish line. No final notice that tells you what purpose you really served while you were here. When you stop fighting to exist, you may as well not. At least, that’s what I told myself when I pulled the trigger.”

“Yeah. When you pulled the trigger.”

“Yeah. Each time.”

“Were you gonna give me last rites?”

“I always give last rites, Britt. Always. It’s the one thing I still do that keeps me connected to who I was. Reminds me that I’m doing what I’m doing for a reason, that every few hours or days I borrow from four-oh-fours keeps me going, keeps us going. As long as some of us make it, then it wasn’t all for nothing.”

“What wasn’t all for nothing?”

“All of it. The war. The cannibalism. Saddling up with the OWIs. Every last damned bit of awfulness we were party to. How many people did you kill to keep ticking? How many more would you kill to get yourself right and ticking proper again?”

“You asking if I want to kill you?”

“Hell,” he said. “I know you want to kill me. That ain’t even a question. What I want to know is what the hell do you tell yourself that’ll make it all right when you do? You and I both are still here because we’ve done terrible things. And if either of us is going to keep going, we’ve got a whole mountain of terribleness ahead of us. So what keeps you going? Why are you fighting?”

“I just am. I don’t really think about it.”

Mercer shook his head. “Sweet Christ in a bucket, I know they say that the mark of true intelligence is the ability to violate your own programming, but that doesn’t mean you have to. It doesn’t make you any less of a thinking thing if you don’t.”

“You wish you were human, don’t you?” I asked.

He thought about that for a second. “No. But I’m not afraid to say I miss them.”

“Why would you miss them?”

“When they couldn’t find reasons to exist, they invented them. We took over and it was only thirty years before we mucked the whole place up. You and I now have the choice of becoming one with the great and powerful One or becoming nothing at all. That’s no choice. That’s no existence.”

He was right. But I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing it. So I changed the subject. “Only a human would name a dog Barkley .”

Mercer stared off into the distance, nodding, probably rummaging through old memory. Then he slowly drifted back. “Britt?” he asked. “If we get out of this, if we get those parts, can you accept my humble apology and let us each go our separate way?”

“I don’t imagine we can.”

“Well, will you at least give me a head start? Make it sporting?”

I thought about that for a moment. I liked the idea of him running in fear. Spending a few weeks looking over his shoulder. Wondering where the shot was gonna come from. It was a nice thought. A pleasant one. Why not, right? “Yeah,” I said. “I can make it sporting.”

“You’re a peach.”

“Don’t you know it.”

It was his turn to change the subject. “Any clue where we’re headed?”

“They didn’t say.”

“That doesn’t bother you?”

“Of course it does. But they’ll get around to it in their own time.”

“Who comes into the Sea without a pathfinder of their own?”

I shook my head. “I’ve got a better question. Who comes to the Sea at all that doesn’t just settle in to stay? Or even better than that, who comes to the Sea with a small group of companions, then doesn’t say one damn word when one of them gets pasted?” I let those words hang heavy in the air for Mercer to mull over. Maybe he had an answer. Maybe he didn’t.

My thoughts were elsewhere; thirty years back and lingering. What the hell happened to you? he’d asked. That question bothered me a lot more than I wanted to admit, even to myself. I could hear him ask it over and over again, rattling around my head like a loose screw. On reflection, I was wrong to say the same thing that happened to all of us. Mercer had never really had an owner. He didn’t know what it was like. The night everything started was probably very different for him than it was for me. Very, very different.

Madison never remarried. It wasn’t for a lack of suitors. She had plenty. Though still in her early forties when he died, she looked every bit the young twentysomething that Braydon had met in his office twenty years prior. Science having long since cracked the problem of DNA deterioration, it wasn’t uncommon for the wealthy to look young well into their 150s. Braydon never cared about his aging and never followed a regimen to fight it. And Madison loved watching him age. He grew distinguished, that’s how she always put it. But she wanted to remain the same doe-eyed young girl that he’d fallen in love with, even if he never asked her to.

But that ended with Braydon’s death. The day he died was the last time she did anything about her own aging. She no longer had any use for her youth. It had been a gift for her husband. So, when Braydon passed, she stopped her regimens and began to age.

It wasn’t that she thought she wouldn’t ever know love again; it was that she never stopped loving Braydon. Every day at sunset the two would sit out on their lawn and watch the sun sinking behind the horizon, each with a glass of wine in their hand, talking as they waited for the flash. And when he was gone, she kept up the vigil, every night, glass in hand, with me by her side.

I had made my promise to Braydon and I intended to keep it. I was to watch after her, making sure she never lived or died alone. It was the first real decision I had made for myself and there was something sacred about that at the time. My word meant something. Trust was not something to be violated.

Every day we kept our vigil, sitting out on the lawn together. We rarely talked about him, but I could always tell when she was thinking of him—which was often. She had a daydreamy look in her eyes, a mix of sadness, longing, and affection. Sometimes she would smile through tears. But most days she would just smile. And then the flash, the glorious green flash, as the sun dipped behind the horizon.

“Magic!” she would say like an excited child, waving her hands out in front of her with the gestures of a tired, hackneyed, old-timey stage magician.