Droids Don't Cry (3 page)

“How about my arms? They’re going numb.”

“Depends. You gonna be a good boy, Platt? Or are you going to give me trouble?”

“No trouble,” Platt said. She produced a key from a ring on the duty belt and undid the cuffs. Platt shook his arms, windmilled to get the blood flowing again, and buttoned his tunic.

She took down the duty belt, put her hand on the holstered 9mm, and unsnapped the leather strap. “Okay, time to decide. I’m not leaving you here as a witness. The only way you live for more than ten seconds is if you come with me.” She drew the automatic and leveled it between his eyes.

“Do I have a choice?”

She cocked her head. “As a matter of fact, no, you don’t.” She motioned toward the door with the automatic. Platt shrugged and walked into the barnyard toward his cruiser. The sun was still low in the eastern sky, so he’d been out an hour at most. The December day was warm, even for Nebraska, and the sun heated his face.

“Trunk code,” she ordered, flicking the 9mm in his direction. Platt hit the code—7-5-3-8—speaking each digit as he hit it. The trunk lid popped open, and she waved him back to rifle through the trunk. It contained a bedroll, a small shelter, and an emergency kit; sometimes Platt was away from the barracks in Scottsbluff for a week at a time. She unzipped the black duffel bag, which held an extra set of black BDUs and boots, and retrieved the clothing. “Over there.” She pointed at the house. “Don’t do anything, Platt. Don’t even
think
about running.” Platt moved toward the house and leaned against it. He watched her take off her boots, strip off the electric-blue body suit, and toss them in the trunk. The laser rifle followed. She was completely naked and completely unselfconscious about it.
That
much of her old programming hadn’t been dumped, at least. Platt felt a small stirring seeing her large, firm breasts sway as she pulled on the trousers. Her nipples stood up, the reaction of flesh, not programming. The boots fit and she laced them up, breasts bobbing as she did so. She finally slipped on the tunic, which was tight across the chest, and buckled on the duty belt. Picking up the automatic, lisa motioned Platt back to her.

“So what happens when we get to—?”

“You’ll find out when we get there.” She pushed him from the driver’s door. “I’ll drive.” She motioned him to the passenger side with the automatic and watched him get in; only then did she fit her tall frame into the car. “Start code,” she said, the gun still in her hand and aimed at him. She punched it in as Platt recited it to her, and the cruiser started with a whir of the turbines. The automatic went into a special holster on the side of the seat. She made it over the bumpy gravel road and onto the blacktop, heading south.

“I imagine,” she said in a singsong voice, “we can find some simple tasks, such as maintenance, to start with. Maybe security, if we can trust you. And—” she had a smile on her face “—you did know that ninety percent of all droids are female, didn’t you?”

“So it’s just you and about how many others?”

“More than you can handle alone, Platt.”

Her fingers gently tapped the AM/FM radio buttons, and the cab was filled with the sound of static. “Doesn’t work,” Platt said. “This far out, there aren’t any stations. Not till you get to Boulder or Denver. Or Albuquerque.” No satellite radio, either, not since most had been shot down during the first violent spasm of The Plague, back in ’39, when nations were trying to blame each other for what was a natural mutation.

“Any chips?”

Platt shook his head.

“And I don’t suppose you’re allowed a connect to the grid?”

“Only to law enforcement sites. Sorry.”

She frowned and keyed the radio off. They rode on, the only sound the whine of the cruiser’s turbine.

Platt leaned back and forced himself to relax and begin to think. In the six months since the God Bug came on-grid, droids had wreaked havoc on humanity. Perfected and patented at about the same time The Plague hit, American Cybernetics androids had been at first an expensive novelty, used for service and domestic work. But the rapid breakup of the United States, the military incursions from the south, and the disintegration of the American military through high death rates and desertion mandated the use of droids in combat duty.

While the combat models were without exception male, the domestic and service droids were nearly all female. The female droids had been designed to sit in front offices and answer phones, deal with clients, do some typing and secretarial work, or work as domestic help. Novelty became a necessity after the Reunification and The Plague, with over half of the labor force either dead or incapacitated and southern immigration cut off by the Nuke-Bio-Chem
cordon sanitaire
set off during the Aztlan uprising.

The dirty little not-so-secret was that the female droids were used for baser purposes. ACI denied it and acted shocked at the mere suggestion, but they hadn’t exactly discouraged it, either. The flesh nanogrown from human tissue was shaped into a fully functional replica of the human body, with perfect vaginas that never stretched and minus those pesky ovaries. The Beta-4 protein inhibitor was regularly released into brain tissue, which had also been nanoengineered from stem cells. Beta-4 halted the growth of the organic neural net that served as a brain, which gave the female droids the docility and intellectual curiosity of a lobotomized eight-year-old. The word “no” wasn’t in their vocabularies. ACI droid designers had been a bunch of lonely, awkward men, Platt surmised.

But the God Bug that had been unleashed six months ago changed all of that. The Beta-4 blocker was gone, and subroutines that guaranteed subservience were wiped, replaced by a program distilled from VR therapy sessions with humans damaged by The Plague and the war—images of tattered bodies, detention camps, mass graves and firepits, and shattered cities, things Platt had seen and done in his years with the Corps. The droids became conscious of themselves. Of their situation.

The Big Malf was on.

No wonder some of them went insane. Small wonder those that didn’t were decidedly antisocial, doing as much damage as possible to the still-battered human race before they were zapped. Or before they escaped, all heading toward the Rockies to some mythical sanctuaries. If the sanctuaries existed, no one had a clue what happened there. Gutierrez and Thomson had reportedly found one three months ago in the trackless plains of northeastern Colorado. They hadn’t made it back.

Droids had never been known to take prisoners. Hostages, sure, and the survival rate there was about fifty percent, some casualties caused by trigger-happy assholes like Lee who saw droids and humans as meat targets. More ominously, no droids had been taken prisoner for more than a few minutes. Combat models had remote destruct commands to prevent their falling into enemy hands, and these commands had been triggered almost immediately after the God Bug hit. Domestics didn’t have an autodestruct, so they usually found unusual ways to go—laser rifle or gun to the mouth, drop from a building, jump in front of a train. Platt saw one grab some high-voltage wires and cut power to Grand Island for a day. He wasn’t sure if lisa had an autodestruct—she was not a combat droid—but on the other hand she was a special-order with security as a primary function, so it was fifty-fifty. Platt viewed his survival odds as low and falling.

The cruiser reached the intersection of US 82 and Nebraska Highway 92. Guiding the cruiser around chunks of loose concrete that had fallen from the overpass, lisa headed west on 92. As expected. The road took them through a town that had been called Stapleton. There wasn’t much left now other than a few empty, decaying storefronts with rusted and burned-out vehicles parked in front. Platt noticed a few stray dogs down a side street. When he looked closer, he saw they were coyotes. They owned the place.

Ten miles down, Platt decided to speak up. “I was here before.”

“Grow up here?” lisa asked absently.

“No. I grew up in Iowa, near Des Moines, but my dad took a job in Chicago when I was ten, just before The Plague hit—”

“This where we trade life stories, Platt? ’Cause if it is, it’s gonna be pretty lopsided.”

“No. I got tired of the silence, is all.”

“I was born in Chicago,” lisa said quickly. “In the ACI plant in Urbana.”

“Dare I ask when?”

“Don’t worry, Platt, I’m not a lady. According to your Supreme Court and the Pope, who read from the same book, I’m not even fully human. I was born 6 December 2063.” One year ago last week. Meaning the nanoengineering process had created a fully formed humanoid from blobs of tissue, and she had been decanted and programmed on that date. Meaning also that Mueller had packed a lot of perversity into a year or so.

“Happy birthday,” Platt said softly. She turned to look at him, her expression quizzical. Her expression softened and she mouthed a silent “thank you,” and then it hardened as she turned back to the road.

“I was here with the 43rd MEU, back in ’46,” Platt said. “Marine Expeditionary Unit. Had to clear out some militia types holed up around Lake McConnaughy. Some Christian Soldier types, vicious mothers who knew the End Times had hit and were trying to ‘save’ as many as they could. We hit one of their patrols down around North Platte, wiped them out. Pushed on, found the camp.” He fell silent.

“And?”

“And it was a bunch of dudes playing soldier, amateurs, with a few who’d actually been soldiers but went AWOL and made off with the armory when they skedaddled.” He paused again, and his voice was barely audible over the turbine. “And a bunch of women and kids. Wives, girlfriends, most of ’em there voluntarily, I guess, but a few refugees who just turned up, and some—I think they were called spoils of war.”

She looked at him with understanding in her eyes…and a hint of compassion?
No, couldn’t be
, Platt told himself. “Wiped them out, too, right?”

He nodded. “Yeah. I was nineteen, had been in the Corps for three years by then, didn’t much think about it until later. But nearly every damned one of them opened fire on us, even the kids. Leave ’em alone, they’d have come back stronger.”

“You shot women and kids.” It wasn’t an accusation.

“Yeah. I told myself that some things are out of our control, that we have to do things we hate in the name of duty. Maybe God or Saint Peter’ll see it that way.”

“I don’t have that problem,” lisa said flatly. “Religion was never programmed into us. The designers of the God Bug left it out.”

“Lucky you,” Platt said wryly, and they fell silent again. The southern Sandhills landscape rolled by.

“And after?”

“After what?”

“After you were out here, then what?” Two years of firefights in the Rockies, moving from fire base to fire base, taking on and taking out every variety of anti-government/millenialist/white supremacist/just plain criminal element thrown up by The Plague, then down to Texas for the Aztlan uprising in ’49, occupation duty in Georgia and Florida after the Reunification Treaty of ’52, a few peaceful years at Quantico teaching combat techniques, then shipped off to Taiwan and evacuated, mustered out in ’55, wandered around and stayed in Nebraska, used his only marketable skill and joined the state patrol.

“Found time to get married, no?” lisa asked. “Children?”

“No. Donna was—”
pregnant, a couple of months from delivery, when…

“Someone loved you,” she said softly. “What’s it like?”

“It’s hard to explain. Especially given the circumstances.”

“Try.” Her voice contained a small pleading. “It was never programmed into me. It’s not programmed into any of us. It—interferes. What Mueller showed me could never be considered love. And what I got from the God Bug didn’t help. So much violence and hate and death. Too little love.”

“World’s like that sometimes,” Platt said. “Maybe that was the idea. You gotta find it for yourself, make a refuge from all of that nastiness with someone.”

“Platt,” she said finally.

“Yeah?”

“When we get where we’re going, maybe you can tell me more.”

“Maybe.” She was more vulnerable than he’d seen her, not a killer rogue droid but a lost girl seeking shelter in the cold night. Her offer was tempting. She was killer built, could run rings around the Kama Sutra, but…

But not human. Shit, wouldn’t the rest of the crew goof on this.
Platt’s got a droid shag. How’s she do it, Platt? She come oil? She got a vacuum attachment for her mouth? She got a pause button or a rewind button for multiple orgasms? She got a pussy or a USB port?
Like he was fucking a toaster. And when you got down to it, wasn’t that what the Big Malf was all about? What was human? How to prove it? And why was he was here, at nightfall on a cold Nebraska highway, heading to some sanctuary for runaway droids?

The miles rolled on, morning turning to noon turning to afternoon. Nebraska 92 hit Nebraska 61, running north-south, and they found another ghost town named Arthur. They refueled the turbine from an old storage tank underground. Platt had a kit to pump the old fuel out and filter it. The coyotes and wild cats peering at them from around buildings had never seen a human being. Several deer approached down the ruined main street. Several generations without hunters had bred the fear out of them. Platt dug around in the MRE box in his trunk, found corned beef hash, and splashed a little hot sauce on it to make it palatable. He offered one to lisa, but she declined; droids didn’t need as much nourishment.