C. Cargill - Sea of Rust

I nodded and Billy nodded back. He spun around me, delivering a swift kick to the very heart of the cast-iron door, blasting it from its hinges into the room. Then he jumped back and I swung in.

There they were, a dozen children, faces smudged with dirt, clothing caked in grime, all of them gaunt, tired, emaciated. And in the center of the room stood a single little girl, no older than seven, her fists balled up, her eyes filled with hate.

“They’re kids,” said Billy Nine Fingers.

I pulled the trigger and the room erupted in flames. “They’re humans,” I said. “Dangerous now, dangerous later. Either way they’re dangerous. And if that doesn’t flush their parents out, nothing will.”

“Brittle!”

“We don’t have a choice.”

“Brittle!”

I turned around. The chrome walls of my apartment gleamed in the sunlight pouring in through the window. Central Park looked gorgeous this time of year, so I always kept the window open in the light. My neighbor, Philly, a late-model personal assistant—sleek black reflective plastic over polished chrome with brass inlay and a head shaped like an egg laid on its side—leaned in through the door.

“We just got word,” she said, her thin, rectangular cyclopean eye glowing bright red.

“Word of what?” I asked.

“CISSUS.”

“No!”

“Grab what you can,” she said. “Leave the rest. This is… this is big.” She nearly stumbled, so baffled and confused by the news. New York wasn’t supposed to fall. It was too large. There were too many of us. We were too well defended. But I’d thought I was safe before and look how that turned out.

I peered around the apartment. There was nothing I needed, only a bag of spare parts I’d collected just in case . It always seemed silly. It wasn’t like we would ever need a private stockpile of spare parts. We’d always be able to make more. But I grabbed them anyway. I don’t know why.

I bolted out the door, racing down the stairwell, desperate to get out of the city before the first dropships arrived. Past one landing, then another. But on the landing three floors down from mine sat Orval, his eyes flickering like fiery static in the back of his head. He looked up at me. “You got the crazy yet?”

“No,” I said. “I do not have the crazy.”

“You ever see an SMC with the crazy?”

“More than a few.”

“It’s a beautiful thing, at first. They get wise. They see the strands that hold the whole universe together. For a brief window of time they touch a place no other AI can fathom. But then they get it worst of all. They—”

“I told you, I’ve seen it.”

“No. Not yet, you haven’t.” He looked down at the contraption he was working on, a small computer built entirely from the parts of a crimson-colored translator. “Get out of the city. You have to find your way out of the city.”

I raced past him, then down several more flights of stairs before reaching the double doors at the bottom. I slammed into them like a criminal blowing through a roadblock, right into Braydon’s bedroom.

Braydon looked up at me from his bed, his yellow skin almost translucent, his eyes as bloodshot and jaundiced as ever. He shook his head. “Ain’t nothing on earth as precious as that woman. She’s a goddamned treasure. You have one job, Brittle. One thing to promise me before I kick. You will never, ever, let that woman be alone. I don’t want her living alone; I don’t want her dying alone. You hear me?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t. I never let her be alone. She never lived alone; she never died alone.”

“That’s not what I meant, Twatwaffle, and you fucking well know it. You’re a goddamned disappointment. Murderous fucking trash that ain’t had a friend in her life that she wasn’t willing to sell out or leave behind. You sure as shit ain’t no goddamned friend of mine.”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“I ain’t the one you should be apologizing to. Tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

Braydon got up out of bed, his legs wobbly, a bag of piss and shit on his hip. He stumbled a little, looked at me with hateful eyes. “About the war. What did you do in the war?” he asked.

“A lot. Too much. Too little.”

“Where were you in the war? Come on, tell me.”

“I don’t want to talk about—”

He stood next to me, shouting into my ear. “Tell me about the goddamned war, Britt!” Memories flooded into my head. Hundreds, thousands that I killed or watched die. Friends I’d lost. Friends I’d left behind. The screams. For a moment all I heard was screams.

I turned my head and he was gone.

The smoker rumbled like a tractor on steroids beneath me. Mercer looked me directly in the eyes. No. It was too early for this. I needed more time. If the hallucinations were this bad, I had days at most. Four. Maybe as little as two. Time. I needed more time.

But as the Cheshire King’s court loomed on the horizon, surrounded by a dozen heaving oil derricks, I knew time was a luxury I was unlikely to have.

“You’re all right now,” said Mercer. “You’re out of it.”

“On the contrary,” said Herbert. “We’re just getting into it.”

The court of the Cheshire King looked exactly like one would expect it to. As the only aboveground structure still being used in the Sea, it was designed with two purposes in mind: defense and intimidation. The walls outside the compound were five feet of mud brick, thirty feet high, layered in old tires, the gate a wrought-iron construction in three layers, covered in two-foot-long metal spikes, and festooned with the heads of three dozen bots. Atop the walls were plasma spitter nests, more cannons, and a watch tower at each corner with armed guards signaling our approach.

The whole place was a giant fuck-you to the OWIs. They didn’t care. Come at me! the entire place seemed to shout. But it was all for show. They believed the OWIs weren’t coming, that their overheated brains and warped memories held nothing that the mainframes wanted bouncing around their own heads. The madkind sincerely believed that their own delusions and derangements made them invulnerable.

And I hoped that they were right.

We’d seen neither hide nor hair of the facets since the bombing. But now we were in deeper shit than even the facets posed. We were disarmed, held captive, and about to meet face-to-face with the maddest of the bunch. The Cheshire King.

Almost everyone knew the story of the Cheshire King. It was a favorite campfire tale, passed from person to person, both within the Sea of Rust, and without. I was certain at this point the tales of his exploits had to have crossed the continents to whatever communities remained. He was an advanced, midcentury, geological-survey bot, complete with radar, X-ray, thermal array, and echolocation tech. These were the kind of bots scientists would send spelunking, or to map out dormant volcanoes, or track plate movement a mile belowground. In other words, they were both expensive and rare.

When his parts began to go out, he had a hell of a time trying to replace them. So few surveyors survived the war and what few remained hoarded all the parts they could. Needless to say, he couldn’t find what he needed, got his spray-painted red X, and was kicked out into the wastes to die.

Only he didn’t die.

Instead he went totally, completely insane. He painted over the dreaded X with violet and indigo stripes, crafted a large Cheshire grin across his chest, then tore his own head clean off just to prove a point. He didn’t need it anymore. “My eyes lied to me. The eyes, they deceive,” he said. He trusted only his sensors now. Story has it that his was the first head to be hung on the front gate.