XOM-B (37 page)

“I didn’t remember any of this until now. I thought it was luck, or my idea, but now, I know it was Mohr.” She glances up like she can see through the ceiling and several floors above. “He’s why the city was capped. Why it was never built. He was protecting me. Shielding me. Giving me time.”

She squints at me, cocking her head to the side. “But then he also gave me you.”

“Gave you me?” I ask. “But
we
found
you.
”

“Did you?” she asks. “Or was it your big blue friend?”

I think back over our journey, fraught with danger, a seemingly chaotic flight over the land. Mohr sent us north, to find the source of the radio transmission, but our precise course was directed by Heap. “He knew where he was going,” I say, speaking to myself. “He
led
me to you?”

“I believe so,” she says. “I didn’t capture him. I’m not sure I could. He walked through the front door, let himself into my lab and sat down. He made no threats and said nothing. I thought it prudent to deactivate him until I knew what was going on. The real question is
why
did Mohr send you? To stop me?” Her eyes suddenly widen. “Why do
you
think he sent you?”

“To stop you.”

“Be more specific.”

“To capture you and convince you to stop the attack.”

She smirks. “And how would I do that?”

“A radio transmission.” Something about this answer makes me feel uneasy, like a part of my subconscious is unraveling a mystery, pulling information from disparate regions of my mind, but I can’t yet guess what the result will be.

Hail laughs. “Same question. How would I do that? The undead have simply been following their new programming, which triggers new goals and targets when certain criteria have been met. They’ve been building up to the mass invasion, all around the world, on their own. I’ve simply been monitoring.”

Her words are the impetus for the coalescing of my distant thoughts. The resulting revelation is painful to speak aloud. “There never was a radio signal. Mohr lied to me. He
manipulated
me.”

“True, but it was more than that,” Hail says, growing more intrigued. “Why did he send an eighteen-day-old robot that he grew—” She gasps. “Mohr didn’t send you here to
stop
me, he sent you here to
survive.
He was trying to
save
you from what he knew couldn’t be stopped. That’s why he lied … but still, why save
you
?”

“It can’t be stopped, can it?” I ask.

“Was it sentimentality? Did he feel affection for his new creation?”

Hail doesn’t even acknowledge that I’ve spoken, so I shout.
“Can it be stopped?”

She frowns, some part of her now recognizing the darkness of her actions. “Not even if I wanted to. Don’t you see, Freeman? The virus operates autonomously. It was designed to be irreversible, incurable and unalterable, just like the virus Sir released. And your presence here … it was not a mistake. Like it or not, you are, and likely always have been, part of Mohr’s plan.”

Before I can respond or react, a sharp beeping tone pierces the air. Hail looks at a watch attached to her wrist. Her eyes go wide. “A transmission!” She leaps from her chair and rushes for the door. “He’ll know we’re here!”

I follow, shouting, “Who?”

As she rounds the corner, heading for the stairs, I suspect faster than any human woman could run, she yells back, “Sir!”

46.

Two floors up, we charge out of the stairwell together and run for the laboratory where I left Luscious and Harry with instructions to free Heap. If they managed to wake Heap, or activate him—whatever is more accurate—then he might have attempted to make contact with Mohr. That in itself would clearly not change anything. Mohr knows all about this place and somehow managed to have Heap bring us here. But Sir is no doubt monitoring for any and all transmissions.

If he’s still alive.

Of course he’s still alive.
He might not have been prepared for an all-out zombie invasion of Liberty, but he definitely has an escape plan for himself.

We enter the lab to find Heap sitting up. Luscious and Harry are trying to pull him to his feet, urging him to stand and hurry. They spin when they see us, looking caught and afraid.

“It’s okay,” I say. “She won’t hurt you.”

“She orchestrated the end of civilization,” Harry complains.

“Twice,” Hail confesses, which only further confuses Harry. She heads toward Heap, who shows no reaction to her approach.

“We have to stop her,” Harry says.

“You can’t,” Hail says, now inspecting Heap’s body.

“She’s telling the truth,” I say.

This is a blow to Harry and Luscious. Up until now, they believed there was still hope. But why did they have hope?

“You knew,” I say to Luscious, then to Harry, “You both knew, didn’t you?” They look at me, dumbfounded, like a pair of wide-eyed frogs. “You knew what we are. What we
were.
Before the awakening.”

“What are we, Freeman?” Luscious asks, her voice a challenge.

“Robots,” I say. “Machines. All of us.” I point to Hail. “Even her.”

Luscious gets a glare in her eye. “You can’t really believe that’s all we are? Just programmed drones with personalities created solely from complex algorithms?”

“Android,” Hail says, “is the word you’re looking for, not drones, but that was actually a decent explanation of what—”

“Shut up,” Luscious snaps. She’s just a few feet away from me now and closes the distance by raising a pointed finger toward my face. “You … made me believe we could be—that we
are
something more than machines. You gave me hope. For the first time since I was assembled and turned on, I felt
alive,
Freeman.
You
did that to me. And now you’re going to take it away? Now you’re going to tell me that I’m … I’m what? Dead? That I never lived? That your love is nothing more than a programmed behavior? What happened to energy not being destroyed, just transformed?”

Luscious winds up for a punch. I don’t move when she swings. Her fist strikes my chest. The pain is manageable, but the anger behind it from this … woman that I have such strong feelings for is nearly unbearable.

“And what about my tears, Freeman?” she asks as a fresh drip squeezes from her eye and traces a line down her smooth cheek, running over the organic-metallic cells and micron-thin transistor mesh.

I have no answer.

I can’t conceive of one.

“Did she say tears?” Hail asks.

When I turn to her, I see Heap’s eyes flicker to life.

“He’s fine,” Hail says, hitching her thumb back at Heap. “Enforcers have a slow start cycle, which includes a GPS check-in—that outgoing signal—and means that Sir probably knows we’re here and we’re all going to die.” She turns to Luscious. “But did you say
tears
?”

Luscious turns her head, revealing the single damp trail. Hail wipes the tear with her finger and places the moisture on her tongue. “Luscious models don’t have tear ducts.”

“I know,” Luscious says.

“Were you upgraded?” Hail asks.

“I’m a Luscious,” she says bitterly. It’s the first time I’ve heard Luscious use her name this way. I don’t like it. But it’s answer enough. Luscious, a companion-bot … a pleasure-bot, who had no purpose in the new nonhuman world, lived in the Lowers where things like upgrades were not common.

“Can you do that?” she asks Harry. “Can you cry?”

Harry shakes his head, looking quite confused by the strange turn in the conversation.

Hail points to Heap. “I know he can’t.” Her head swivels slowly toward me. Her eyebrows rise high on her forehead. She takes the shock of orange hair and tucks it behind her ear. The way she looks at me, eyes traveling up and down, makes me feel like I’m some kind of rarely seen magical creature.

“You,”
she finally says. “It’s you.”

She walks around me. “Of course, it’s you.”

A whirring sound announces Heap’s return to awareness. He stands, head nearly touching the ceiling. Hail spins around toward him. “You knew, didn’t you?”

Heap looks at Hail, then to me and the others. He seems to register where we are and asks, “Is it done?”

Hail ignores the question. “You know what Freeman is, don’t you?” She gasps. “That’s why you protect him!”

“What do you mean, what I am?” I say. “I’m a robot. We’re
all
robots.” I turn to Luscious. “But that doesn’t mean we’re not alive.”

Heap stands still, not answering.

“Tell me, you big lug!” Hail says, slugging his dented chest and then shaking the pain away. “Mohr must have given you a message for me. Tell me!”

Heap looks down at the much smaller woman. His deep voice feels like a force of nature. “Is. It. Over?”

A violent shaking interrupts the exchange. Lights sway. Tools clatter to the floor, followed by entire shelving units and ceiling tiles.

The noise is deafening. I shout to Heap, but he can’t hear me over the din. His reaction to the phenomenon answers my unheard question. He knows what’s happening. It’s above us. And he doesn’t like it.

I take Luscious’s hand and head for the door. We leave the lab behind and reach the stairs at a run. When I open the door, Heap rushes past, slamming into the door frame and removing it from the walls.

I let the door drop to the floor and start up after him along with Luscious, Harry and Hail.

The stairs vibrate beneath my feet so hard it’s impossible to scale them quickly. I’m not sure whether or not it’s part of what’s shaking the building or from Heap running until Heap reaches the ground floor, smashes his way through the door and the shaking is halved. The rest of us reach the ground floor, enter the tall, two-story lobby and find Heap in a side room, crouched behind a five-foot-tall shelf of books, staring out the tall, arched window.

He waves for us to get down, like we’re not already shorter than he is while crouching.

“What’s happening?” I ask, crouch-walking up next to him. But it turns out I don’t have to be standing to see the answer for myself. A growing slice of light cuts across the dark ceiling. I stand and look out at the hidden city as sunlight illuminates the buildings. The light, while bringing the redbrick buildings to life, also reveals the deadness of the browned park in front of the library. The cap is opening.

Hail cranes her face up toward the sunlight, perhaps seeing it for the first time in thirty years. “That was fast.”

“Is it Sir?” I ask.

Heap nods. “Most likely.”

“What will he do?” I ask.

Heap looks at me, having no trouble emoting his sourness despite not having a pliable face beyond lips and a chin. “What he does best.”

Since Sir is responsible for a worldwide genocide, this is not encouraging.

“Sir isn’t our only problem,” Hail says.

Four heads turn to her in unison.

She points to the widening gap in the ceiling. “That cap was the only thing keeping the undead out. There are thousands of them in the suburbs surrounding the city, but if Sir flew here, it’s likely that even more are following them. Perhaps thousands.”

“Is there another way out?” I ask.

“I’m not Sir,” Hail says. “Strategic planning beyond spawning an army of Xom-B infected robots isn’t really my thing.”

I’m about to ask how long it will be before the first undead arrive, when I see something fall through the beam of light. I zoom in on it and see a woman, her body ravaged, spiraling through the air until she disappears behind a building. I don’t think she’ll be functional after the drop, but when the cap opens fully, the fall to the sloped hillside won’t be much more than fifty feet and to someone that’s already dead, it’s a manageable height. And there are several rooftops at the fringe of the city tall enough to make the jump easily survivable, even for the living.

Time is short, and our only chance of surviving is now entering the city from above. Bathed in light, the vehicle is hard to see, but its shape and vertical flight make it easy to identify. Sir’s VTOL gunship.

“Where are your weapons?” Heap asks.

“In the city,” Luscious tells him.

“Doesn’t matter,” I say, standing boldly in the sunlight pouring down. “I have an idea.”

Heap gives a nod. “Tell us what to do.”

The other three look unsure. Heap’s confidence in me bolsters my own, which is, at least in part, an act.

I look at Hail, give her an apologetic half-smile, and say, “Bind her hands.”

47.

We stand on the front stairs of the library, watching the VTOL gunship descend, its turbines filling the city with a clamor that is one part roar and one part high-pitched whine. A breeze washes over us, at first carrying the scent of dust and decay, but then cooling and bringing the fresh scents of the world outside this hidden city.

I stand beside Heap and we do our best to appear unruffled by the VTOL’s appearance. I even grin a little, like I’m happy to see them, like I would have been just a few hours ago.

I’m not sure how I feel now. Everything I knew about the world was a charade. One genocide working against another. The idea of it, the very concept of determining that an entire race, or species, should be exterminated, is still beyond understanding. It’s madness. Insanity. A derangement of the mind. Broken. The human race is—was—broken … and if I’m honest, so are their creations. How could they not be? Any people who willingly construct the very means of their own destruction, of their
extinction,
must be suffering from some sort of undiagnosed lunacy. It’s the only explanation. And if the biological human race were the architects of their own destruction, then that proclivity for self-annihilation would be passed on. Like DNA. Death and lies are part of the human race. I can see them clearly in Sir, in Hail … and in Mohr, without whom there might still be children in the world.

But will this penchant for mass destruction be a part of me?
I am the creation of Mohr, just as Sir is, but I’m not the same. My personality was never programmed. He gave me the freedom to choose who I’d become. What I’d believe. Perhaps granting me the ability to choose something other than insanity is his way of making amends for the darkness he created? Whatever the case may be, the only people I can fully trust now are Luscious and Harry, and Harry isn’t here.