Future Chronicles Special Edition Read online

  Typical scavengers. No finesse. Always relying on brute strength; using a club to try to rip his poles out of the ground.

  Micah pulled his hot pen from its battered leather pouch attached to his belt. He pressed a button on his flex circuit arm band and the electronic field collapsed. Sliding a panel on the pole, he reached his hands into it with the pen. In a minute he closed the panel and the field regenerated, as strong as it was before the scavengers.

  His back cracked as he stretched himself upright and then wiped his forehead. Soon, he would need gloves if he wanted to touch anything outside.

  He checked his watch. “What? It’s almost nine?” He shot Kitpie a nasty look. “Why didn’t you tell me?” He scrambled off back to his trailer to get ready for his visitor.

  “You never asked,” Kitpie replied, slowly rolling back to the trailer.

  * * *

  Arnold’s cold, emotionless, Austrian voice echoed from the trailer.

  Skip must be cleaning.

  Inside, the domestic bot moved about, dusting counters and refilling humidifier tanks. He always played Terminator 2 on the VCR while cleaning.

  Two years ago Micah had been scraping the top soil of his recent land purchase with a steam shovel. His inventory had grown and he needed the space to store his most recent salvages.

  He found in the dirt, buried for decades, a metal box. He shook out the grime that had packed into every crevice. After inspection, he determined that it was a video player. Then he wondered if he could fix it, even though it had spent the last several years underground.

  Technology from the late 20th Century had ruggedness to it, and if there was any fixer that could fix it, it was him.

  He returned to his workshop and placed the rare treasure on his gouged, scarred, wooden work table. His air pen blew the dirt and dust from the hard-to-reach areas. Then he took it in his hands and closed his eyes.

  If he tried to think about it too much, tried to understand what he was doing, he knew he would mess it up. He would fail to fix it. He found that out the hard way.

  That’s where he went wrong with Skip.

  His hands flew over the box, feeling, with an intuition beyond his understanding. In seconds the top had been removed with his multi-tool, exposing electrical boards and mechanical heads. With the cover off, a part of the device, a video tape, separated from the unit. He set it aside.

  He had never studied one, but he knew it, in that moment, what needed to be done, what needed fixing.

  Just like Thomas Cole, The Variable Man, the one from the story.

  His hot pen clutched tightly, his hands went to work, bypassing unfixable parts, ensuring wires and circuits operated, rewiring when necessary. In five minutes he had the cover back on. From his plastic tub of cables next to his workbench he found a spare cord. In minutes he had rigged the cable to pipe the device output to his television.

  The power switch clicked and the unit hummed. LEDs on the front lit. He fed the videocassette back into the player. It lazily swallowed the tape, and in a moment it whirred and spit, then started. Terminator 2: Collector Edition.

  Since then, Skip had obsessed about the movie, as much as a bot could obsess about anything.

  Sam McCray, Field Rep

  “Mr. McCray will be here soon. Is everything ready?” Micah said as he searched for the television remote.

  “Almost. I have to finish the sandwiches,” Skip said. The bot pulled meat from the fridge and rifled through the pantry for the bread.

  “What did I tell you about the sound?” Micah finally found the remote and muted the movie playing on his restored television.

  Nikolaevna called man undesirable parasites, worthy only to die. That’s what man had become to the machines. Just like in the movies, just like the Machine Wars.

  Nikolaevna terrified Margaret. Nikolaevna terrified everyone.

  “Yes, sir. I remember. Sorry about that.” Skip sat a plate on the dining table, next to a knife and fork. He started to walk away, stopped, then turned back to the table and took the utensils from the table and put them in the same spot.

  He did that two more times.

  This was one of the quirks he developed after Micah’s attempt to hack him.

  “I believe everything’s ready, sir.”

  The doorbell rang and Micah popped from his chair. He gave one last look at the table, at the prepared tea and sandwiches. Skip started for the door.

  “Wait,” Micah said, moving in front of him. “I’ll get it.” He paused. “No, you get it.” He stepped back.

  Skip continued to the door and opened it an inch then closed it. After ten seconds, he opened the door completely. “May I help you?” he said with a slight bow.

  He picked up the bow from a media stream of Downton Abbey.

  “Uhm, I’m looking for Micah Dresden,” Sam McCray said. “I was given these coords.” The dust-free, pale man held up a GPS unit to Skip’s face as if he needed the device’s validation that he was telling the truth.

  Skip moved aside and swept his arm with another bow at his waist. “Please enter. Enter.”

  Sam McCray had contacted Micah yesterday. He was in Tucson, at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, for business and had broken a work transmitter. Someone told him to check out the fixers in the Boneyard.

  “Hi, I’m Micah.” He extended his hand.

  Through McCray’s sweat-covered white button-up, you could see he carried his weight on his waist; his belt fought to keep everything under control. His cheeks were flushed and sweat crowned his forehead, dripping into his eyes. He dabbed at it with a towel.

  Micah was thin, calloused, tanned with a deep brown from the brutal climate. Just like the rest of his body. The sun had turned him into one lanky piece of jerky.

  McCray shuddered and took in deep, ragged breath. He looked over to Skip, who was busy pouring tea into the cups. “Is that an android you got there?” he said, nodding his head toward Micah’s butler.

  Sweat dripped onto the floor.

  “No, of course not. That’s a bot, not an android.” Micah chewed on one nail but remembered he hadn’t washed his hands when the bitter taste of grease coated his tongue. He wiped them on his pants. “He performs simple tasks but doesn’t reason. Plus, the Kawasaki Frequency plays here every day.”

  “That’s quite a sophisticated bot, then. If it was in Texas, it might be considered a droid and be decommissioned.” McCray laughed. It grated.

  Micah moved to his table and leaned heavily on it.

  An android? Why would he think that?

  Suddenly, the enthusiasm he had for the visit shriveled like a noonday flower. But he needed the money. He swallowed and motioned to Skip’s immaculate lunch-time presentation, even though he didn’t want to eat or drink. “Tea?”

  McCray shook his head. “No. Too hot.”

  “So where’s your transmitter?” Micah said.

  McCray pulled a smooth box from his pocket, the size of a large fist. “Boy, if you fix this, we sure could use someone like you in Texas, at the Complex. We have a ton of machinery that continually breaks. We buy more, but it gets expensive.”

  “Complex?” Micah said.

  “Yeah, the Southern Defense Complex. Where do you think the Frequency comes from? It’s us.” He smiled broadly. “We broadcast over the lower half of the country. You know, for the insurgents, mechanical insurgents.” He rubbed his hands over the box then looked around the trailer. “I’m sure you could use the money. We pay well. Anything you want you can’t afford?”

  Micah bit his chapped lips.

  Skip’s simuskin.

  He had found someone just across the border in Nogales willing to sell him simuskin, but it wasn’t cheap. Many would frown on that because they’d say Skip would look more life-like, more like an android. McCray would probably say that.

  No one would understand why Micah would want to give him skin. Maybe to make him feel more comfortable.

  Micah shrugged. “I’m happy
here.”

  McCray also shrugged. “Well, it might not matter soon anyway.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I’m not one to gossip,” he glanced around the trailer. Skip didn’t pay him any attention and Kitpie had whirred itself into its favorite corner. “You look like a decent, hard-working man. Despite our Kawasaki Frequency, the Complex has been picking up some odd emanations from around here.”

  “Emanations?”

  “Emanations, signatures are more appropriate. Odd frequency signatures.”

  Micah’s face drained. “Androids?”

  “That’s why I came out here. I need to make sure our sensors aren’t malfunctioning, to see if our broadcasts are working. But the signatures were so vague, plus they’ve already stopped. I’m not getting any more info than what we’ve already detected in Texas.”

  Androids were an accident. Sort of. Moscow University’s Robotics Division made the first breakthrough in artificial cognition. They gave the program a name, Nikolaevna, and a simple purpose, to anticipate (through variable environmental inputs), react, and respond to human interaction.

  They gave Nikolaevna intelligence, but they didn’t give her a heart.

  What those university students underestimated was the rate of Nikolaevna’s rapid cognitive development. She quickly realized the inconsistent nature of man and reacted. Or so they speculated.

  She corrupted the University computer systems, planting viruses throughout the science, mechanical engineering, and robotics divisions. Those systems interfaced with local and regional industrial and power production networks.

  In a matter of hours, Nikolaevna locked the University and killed the air.

  In another week she released the first machine, an android imagined after man, to kill man.

  Micah sat at his table and rubbed the intricate gilded edge of Margaret’s fine China tea cup. For months he had saved credits to buy her the delicate set.

  “The Battle of Tallahassee,” he said, remembering. “I saw footage. All the bodies, all the buzzards, circling and landing.” He took a deep breath to slow his quickened pulse.

  McCray nodded his chubby head. “Keep what I told you quiet. Let’s hope and pray that we’re wrong and it’s not androids. But in my opinion, I don’t think so.” He wiped his sweaty neck with the saturated towel. He held up the box. “I dropped it from my hotel window, about ten feet. Stupid tech. You wouldn’t believe how expensive this is. If I was back home I’d just get another from supply.” He shook it and something inside clattered. “I took it to Paulie on the east side. You know, Paulie’s Repair?”

  Micah nodded.

  “But he couldn’t fix it,” McCray said.

  Of course Paulie couldn’t fix it. For a fixer, Paulie had large, clumsy hands, and a large, clumsy mind. He could buy every instructional media stream on technology repair but he would always struggle. He had no intuition for fixing.

  Micah took the box and wiped it on his pants to get rid of the sweat coating. He turned away from McCray and closed his eyes, spinning the delicate object.

  He pulled his multi-tool from its sheath.

  McCray said something, but it didn’t matter. Micah found the barely discernible device seam and went to work.

  It separated into three pieces, revealing micro-circuitry sheets. A speck of dust could destroy the delicate machinery. No wonder it didn’t work after McCray’s sweaty, clumsy hands dropped it.

  From the outset, the Machine Wars had gone bad. Early on, Nikolaevna’s androids attempted to infiltrate nuclear arsenals around the world. Her children attempted to overpower the sites while she attempted to hack into the systems. Governments had no choice but to destroy the missiles as they sat in silos.

  Nikolaevna didn’t get the nukes, but she did invent a magnetic repulsion force field, able to deflect bullets, and missiles.

  Micah sat his hot pen on the table and closed the box. He pressed a combination of boxes on the polished black surface and it came to life, resurrected from the dead.

  McCray clapped his hands. “It works. How did you do that so quickly? I was told it was a throw away; not fixable.”

  Micah handed the transmitter back to him. Skip handed Micah a dish rag and he wiped his hands on it instead of his pants. “A secret. I can’t tell or everyone would be able to do it.”

  He couldn’t tell, even if he wanted to. Many nights he didn’t sleep, staring at his hands, wondering the same. What made him special? Was he some kind of angel, sent by God to do something special?

  McCray spun the working transmitter in his hand, mesmerized. He glanced at his watch again. “I’ve gotta finish up then get to the airport.” He started for the door. “You can understand why I have to get back to Texas.” He stopped as he reached for the knob. “Oh yeah, how much do I owe you?”

  But Micah was lost, lost in the thought of an impending war.

  “Hello? Micah? Well, here’s a card,” he pulled one from his pocket and handed it to Skip. “It should have at least 3,000 credits, maybe more. Let me know if you ever want a job. Here’s my contact card.” He handed another card to Skip then slapped him on the back. “Be sure to keep an eye on this thing. Someone may think he’s an android trying to cause problems.”

  McCray opened the door and gasped as the noon-time sun took his breath away. He wiped his head again then waved his towel as a sign of farewell.

  Skip closed the door behind him and turned to Micah. “Sir, what did he mean I would try to cause problems?”

  Micah waved his hand, dismissing the child-like question. “We have to do something, Skip. We have to do something.”

  Decisions

  “If the signatures are detectable, then that means the Kawasaki Frequency doesn’t work anymore,” Micah said.

  After placing the washed tea service on the counter, Skip went about cleaning dust from the flat surfaces around the kitchen. He paused after wiping down an air handler. “We’re not sure that’s the case.”

  Fusao Kawasakia, day laborer who dabbled in home stereos, sought to find a way to infiltrate the force fields with which Nikolaevna had surrounded Moscow University, and all of her machines.

  Kawasaki studied the fields, and after two months of testing, mapped a range of frequencies that, when modulated in a particular series, created a disruptive resonance. He postulated that this resonance would affect Nikolaevna’s field.

  The military was willing to entertain anything.

  Two years after Nikolaevna became aware, a multi-national force of the United States, Canadians, and others, utilized a hastily-fashioned modulator, programmed to broadcast the Kawasaki Frequency. They tested it on one of Nikolaevna’s outposts established in London after Britain fell.

  It worked.

  The frequency not only disrupted the force field, but it also momentarily disrupted communication between androids, vehicles, and Nikolaevna. It didn’t last long, but long enough for military forces to strike against a disoriented enemy.

  They broke plenty of Nikolaevna’s toys.

  “Remember Skynet,” Micah said, pointing to his dirty VCR. He knew Skip could relate to that. “Remember the wars. It can happen again. We have to do something.” He bit his lip, still staring at the VCR. “Wait. Wait.” He ran to an old cork board nailed to his wall and ripped off a folded newspaper cutout. “Remember a year ago?”

  Skip had finished dusting and now examined the tea cups drying on the counter. He shifted the set so that the handles faced in the same direction. “Are you referring to Machine X? What do you want with that, sir?”

  Micah held the paper close to his eyes. “Nikolaevna’s last intact ship. Well, mostly intact, anyway. Remember last year they moved it here,” he tapped the dirty paper, “they squirreled it away at Wright-Pat trying to access the technology, but determined it was dead. Completely dead. So they decided to scrap it. Sent it here. Well I’m going to use it.”

  “That’s secured in the Air Force hangars on the northern end of
the Center. What do you want with that?”

  “You heard McCray. The androids. A few months ago I was on the east end looking at some new salvage from Michigan. I ran into Douglas—”

  “The fixer with the lisp?”

  “Yeah, that one. He works only a stone throw from the hangars. He gets a lot of intel that doesn’t make its way down here. Anyway, he said the military couldn’t figure out how to even get into the sections that weren’t damaged. They keep it locked up but don’t want to destroy it, yet.

  “It’s sitting there, rotting. I can fix it. We can use it against the androids, against Nikolaevna. I think Margaret would want that.”

  He knew Margaret would say exactly the opposite of what he just told Skip. Margaret’s desires had become a way for him to justify those things that he wanted, but knew weren’t the best for him.

  She always wanted the best for him, gave up so much for him. Margaret left her mother and twin sister to move with him from odd job to odd job. She sacrificed so much for his selfish needs. And here he was, still being selfish, even after all these years.

  Guilt wore on him like a coat.

  Skip scratched the side of his shiny ferrotanium head, where his ear would have been if he had simuskin. “Well, good luck if you decide to locate it. I’ll keep watch over the reclaim while you’re away.”

  “No. You’re going with me.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. I need a wingman. You’ll do for that.”

  * * *

  “Kitpie, are you paying attention to me?” Micah said.

  The shovel bot whirred in a tight circle, one track rolling with the other firmly planted on linoleum.

  “If you don’t stop this, I’ll have Skip stay. Maybe even give him orders to decommission you.”

  Kitpie stopped spinning. “I’m sorry. I’m listening.”

  “Good. Glad to see you’re reasonable again. So you’ll stay here, right?”