Authors: Gregg Rosenblum
“Lexi!” said Amanda loudly. A few nearby diners glanced over. “Lexi,” she said again, quietly this time. “What are you doing?”
“Amanda, for once in your life, just
live
, okay?” said Lexi. Amanda said nothing for a few moments, then stood up and walked out of the coffee shop.
“Don’t worry about her,” said Lexi. “We have this fight all the time. I mean, not about whether we should help bot-killing Revolution 19 escapees, that’s a first, but she tends to be uptight. She’ll come around. So, what do you say?”
“What is this Revolution 19 you keep talking about?” said Kevin.
“Your Freepost,” said Lexi. “Your uprising. Your revolt against the bots. It was the nineteenth one the bots shut down. They like to number them, and make a big deal out of each one.”
Nick set his fork down, his appetite now completely gone. Nineteen. That meant eighteen other Freeposts destroyed, just like theirs. “There was no uprising,” he said. “I don’t know what you mean by uprising.”
“Living out in the woods, defending yourselves against the plague-infested bands of wildmen,” said Lexi. “Defying the bots. Plotting to destroy the Cities.”
“Plague-infested bands of wildmen?” said Cass. “Plotting to destroy the Cities? Have you been chewing poppy seeds?”
Lexi opened her mouth to reply, but Nick held his hand up. “Lexi, can you give us a minute?”
Lexi shrugged. “Sure. I’ll hit the bathroom.” She got up and left the table.
“We don’t know anything about this girl,” said Cass. “And how could she say we were an uprising? And what plague is she talking about?”
“She’s just repeating what she heard from the bots,” said Nick. He wondered what other lies were being told about them. And what lies they had been told in return about the City.
“You saw the picture on her—what did she call it?—her comm,” said Kevin with a mouth full of food. “If she wanted to turn us in, she didn’t have to come over to our table and talk to us.”
“So we just join up with the first pretty girl we see?” asked Cass.
“Cass, come on,” said Nick. “We’ll be on guard, but let’s see how she can help us. It seems like our best option right now.”
“She is pretty, though,” said Kevin.
“Didn’t notice,” Nick lied.
Cass snorted. “Sure.”
They continued eating, and after a minute Lexi came back to the table. “Well?” she said. “What’s the verdict?”
“Why help us?” asked Cass. “It doesn’t seem very safe.”
“I’m bored,” said Lexi.
“Bored doesn’t seem like much of a reason for taking such a big risk,” said Nick.
“You never got bored out in the woods?” said Lexi. “You never thought, ‘This crap that I have to do every day is so pointless, and if I have to spend one more day pretending pointless stuff is important I’m going to kill somebody’?” She grabbed a paper napkin and began crumpling it into a ball. “What if, out there in your boring woods, something incredibly
not
boring, something totally flesh, walks in and plops down right in front of your face? Do you just get up and walk away, like Amanda?”
“You mean ‘fletch’?” said Kevin.
“What?” said Lexi.
“You said ‘totally
flesh
.’ Did you mean ‘fletch’?”
“No, flesh. Flesh, like skin,” she said, pinching her arm. “Like, not robot. Like, too great.”
Kevin looked confused, but Nick cut him off before he could reply. “All right, fine, flesh, fletch, whatever. How can you help us?” he asked.
“Come back to my house,” said Lexi. “It’ll be safe. Talk to my parents. They’ll help. They’ll love this.”
Nick, Cass, and Kevin looked at one another. Cass shrugged unenthusiastically. Kevin gave a thumbs up and ate the last bite of his toast.
“Okay, Lexi,” said Nick. “We’re in.” He paused, then added, “Please don’t make this a mistake.”
THE STREET WAS BRIGHTLY LIT BY STREETLAMPS AND LIGHT FROM THE windows of buildings. Nick felt conspicuous in the harsh artificial light. “You’re in luck,” said Lexi, bending down to pick up the brown broad-brimmed hat from the sidewalk. “The street sweeps haven’t been through yet.” She held it out to Nick. “Here. Wear it.”
Nick felt a surge of disgust. He held his hands up. “I’m not wearing that,” he said. “A man got fried in that hat.”
“Listen, rock star,” said Lexi. “Be smart. Wear the hat. People have been looking at your face on the feeds for a week.”
Nick took the hat, looked inside it, then placed it on his head with a grimace. “Stop calling me ‘rock star,’” he said. “My name is Nick. My brother and sister are Kevin and Cass.” Lexi was attractive, Nick had to admit—maybe even prettier than Danielle—but she also seemed impulsive, and they couldn’t afford to be around that. Still, for now, they had no choice but to trust her.
“Kevin and Cass,” Lexi said, smiling at them. “Got it.” She appraised Nick in the hat. “Better,” she said. “Now wear these, rock star.” She handed Nick a pair of dark sunglasses from her jacket pocket. He put them on, and Lexi studied him a moment. “Good. You look like an idiot, but at least you don’t look like you.”
“Great,” said Nick. “How about less dress-up and more getting off the streets?”
They started walking, Lexi leading the way. “Normally I’d hop a trans—that’s an underground train—but the station gates scan your Citizen chip, so that wouldn’t work for you three.”
“Citizen chip?” asked Cass.
“Implant. Here,” Lexi said, touching the back of her neck. “Our I.D. gets us Citizens onto the trans and through CPs—checkpoints—and bots can use it to keep track of our location.”
“So you mean a bot knows where you are right now?” asked Kevin.
“
Could
know, if it cared to,” said Lexi. “
Could
know and
does
know are two different things. The trick is to not give them a reason to care about you.”
“But I bet they know right away if you leave the City,” said Kevin.
“Yeah, there’s no leaving the City proper,” said Lexi. “One step outside, and bots will come swarming.”
“And that’s why there’s no gate, and no fence,” said Nick. Kevin had been right. “The chips keep everyone in place.”
“Plus most people would be afraid to leave, even if we could,” said Lexi. “With the plague gangs, and all …”
“There are no plague gangs,” said Cass. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Well, even the plague itself, without the gangs, is bad enough,” said Lexi. “The bots are the only ones who have the cure.”
“There’s no plague,” said Cass.
“What are you talking about?” asked Lexi. “You mean your Freepost never got the plague? Red boils, fever, bleeding from your eyes, highly contagious, usually fatal?”
“I think I’d remember that,” said Cass.
Lexi shook her head. “Maybe just not in your Freepost. Maybe you were lucky.”
“I’m pretty sure nowhere,” said Cass.
Lexi just stared at Cass, apparently too shocked to respond. Eventually she just shook her head silently.
Nick tried to maintain a sense of their location as they walked. They headed generally north. The buildings here were still the identical concrete-and-glass two-story structures, the only difference being the address numbers on each doorway. Lexi led them to the east once to avoid passing too close to a checkpoint. “Gotta avoid the CPs,” said Lexi. “This one’s for a construction zone; they’re putting up some new administration building. Any CP, they’ll scan anyone trying to go through. And you can’t just walk up to one and then change your mind and turn around. Bots don’t like suspicious. You get an infraction, you cross a CP, it’ll scan for your chip, and it won’t be happy when it doesn’t find one.”
A sphere bot floated into view a block ahead of them. All three Freeposters froze. Nick stepped in front of Cass and Kevin, his fists clenched.
“No,” whispered Lexi urgently. “Keep walking. You don’t give it any reason to care about you. You’re Citizens. You’ve seen these bots every day of your life.”
So they walked on, safely passing the sphere a mere twenty feet away, pretending not to notice it even though Nick’s heart was trying to pound out of his chest.
They walked for another ten minutes. Lexi set the pace—“As fast as we can go without looking unusual,” she explained. Once, she quickly ducked down a side street when two men with identical red shirts appeared a few blocks ahead of them. “Neighborhood patrol,” she said. “Come out mostly at night. They’ll sniff out your strangeness and have Peteys here in two seconds. Gotta keep you away from those bot lovers.”
They walked a while longer. Each street looked identical to the next, with gleaming facades and perfect fake-looking green lawns, each the exact same-size squares of grass. Nick could see no personal touches on any of the houses they passed. No welcome mats at the door or garden gnomes like his neighbors in the Freepost.
Lexi stopped in front of a building that looked like all the rest, set back from the street, with a small patch of grass and driveway. “Here we are,” she said, gesturing dramatically with her arm. “Twenty-three-fifteen Third Street. Home.”
“Shoes off,” she continued as they stepped inside. “Mom’s crazy about keeping the carpet clean.”
Nick stood unmoving in the entryway, frozen by the strangeness they had walked into. The walls were a uniform off-white and perfectly flat, with no bumps or cracks or seams. The ceiling glowed, illuminating the room with a strip of recessed lighting tucked behind molding that ran along the upper walls. The furniture in the front room—a couch, two chairs, a coffee table—had metal arms and was bright red. And the floor—it wasn’t wood, it wasn’t earth, it wasn’t fur; it was some sort of tightly woven synthetic with a bit of soft give, like stepping on moss.
Cass bent down to feel the floor. She pushed with her fingers, feeling it compress then spring back. “Amazing,” she said.
“I guess, if you’re into cheap carpet,” said Lexi. “Come on, shoes off.”
Everyone took off their boots, and Lexi wrinkled her nose. “Oh, God, I should have just let you track mud. Did you people rub your socks in skunk?”
“We’ve been in the woods a while,” said Nick.
“Yeah, I can smell that.”
Kevin walked slowly over to a large black rectangular object mounted on the wall in the living room. He touched it reverently. “Wall vid?” he asked. “Tom told me about these. I can’t believe I’m really touching one.” He ran his thumb gently along the bottom edge. “Does it actually work?”
“Course it does,” said Lexi. “Just two-D, though, if you can believe it, and we get nothing but boring newsfeed. We don’t even turn it on much, but it’s required; we’ve all gotta have at least one.” She waved her hand in front of her nose and made a face again. “All right, enough. There’s time before my parents get home to wash your clothes and take a shower. Rock star, we’ll find you something from my dad. Cass and Kevin, you can borrow something from me.”
“Wonderful,” said Kevin. “A pink dress? A skirt?”
“Sweatpants and a sweatshirt,” said Lexi. “You’ll live.”
“I want your dad’s underwear,” Kevin said. “I’m drawing the line at wearing panties.”
Lexi laughed. “Deal.”
THE THREE SHOWERED, CASS THEN KEVIN THEN NICK, AND CHANGED INTO the clothes Lexi found for them. Cass wore a pair of Lexi’s jeans and a green long-sleeved T-shirt that fit her reasonably well. Kevin, as promised, got a pair of too-large boxers from Lexi’s dad, with sweatpants and a sweatshirt. He still wore his filthy baseball hat; he had refused to let it out of his sight. Nick wore khaki pants, too loose in the waist but held up with a belt, and a heavy brown button-down flannel shirt. He felt like a fool, but at least he was clean.
They sat in the living room, waiting. “Those soldier robots,” said Cass.
“You mean the Peteys?” asked Lexi.
“Yes. Why are they called Peteys?”
“It came from P.D., which means Police Department, which used to be real people enforcing laws, pre-G.I.,” said Lexi.
“G.I.?”
“Really?” asked Lexi. “You’ve never heard of the Great Intervention?” She paused, then continued when she saw the blank look on their faces. “You know, the Robot Revolution.” She spoke in a sarcastic monotone, as if reciting: “The Great Intervention. When the robots realized that in order to help mankind realize Peace and Prosperity, they would have to Protect us from ourselves. And voilà”—she gestured around the room and out the window—“Peace. Prosperity. Protection. The City.”
“Peace?” Nick closed his eyes, seeing the smoke and fire, hearing the screams, their fellow Freeposters, friends and neighbors, lying in blood on the ground. “Those Peteys burned down our home and killed our friends,” he said, opening his eyes and looking at Lexi. “How is that peace?”
“You’re right, it’s not,” said Lexi. “But living out in the woods, fighting the wild animals and other survivors.... It seems pretty wild.”
“I don’t know where you get this stuff …” began Cass, and then the front door opened and they all jumped up. Nick looked over at Lexi. For a moment, she seemed as nervous as everyone else, but then she smiled and regained her confidence. Lexi’s parents walked into the room. Her father was Nick’s height, with thick brown hair that added a few inches, and had a bit of a paunch, which explained the loose pants that Nick wore. Her mother looked much like Lexi, with the same jet black hair, same nose, and same eyes, her mother’s behind a pair of red-framed glasses.
“I didn’t know we had company,” said Lexi’s mother. “Who are your friends?”
“Well—” began Lexi.
“And why,” her father cut her off, “is your friend wearing my shirt? And are those my pants?”
“And are those your sweatpants?” asked Lexi’s mother incredulously.
“It’s not her underwear, though,” said Kevin. “It’s, uh, it’s yours, sir.”
Nick shoved Kevin on the shoulder. “Idiot,” he said.
Kevin shrugged. “I thought he should know.”
“Lexi,” said her father, “what the hell is going on?”
Lexi took out her comm, pulled up the picture of Nick, and showed it to her parents. “I found them at the diner. I’m sure they would have been detained soon if I hadn’t helped.” She paused. “Nick, Cass, and Kevin. They’re freemen. They’re from the woods.”