Future Chronicles Special Edition Page 5

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ll watch over our reclaim and not follow?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s all I can ask.” Micah said. “Oh yeah, be sure to turn off the panels at nine.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  Skip emerged from the rear bedroom, dragging a rose-petal print suitcase behind him. “Sir, I’ve packed your clothes.”

  Micah shook his head. “I’m not going on a vacation. Just get my backpack and a couple of portabatteries.”

  The suitcase went back down the hall, dragged behind Skip, his head hung low. He returned with a faded camouflage backpack. Micah shoved a package of nacho cheese crackers into it and slung it over his shoulder. “Come on, the sun will be setting soon. Bring the Easy-Go to the front.”

  Scavengers

  Another Arizona day ended, but the heat wore on. Broken technology, from times long past, formed the landscape. Mountains of metal captured the daytime heat, amplified it, and returned it to the night. Concrete walls, dirt and asphalt reflected it all.

  Everything that lived in the Boneyard suffered.

  Micah and Skip hopped in the two-man solar-powered golf cart, a cheap and efficient way to maneuver through the narrow, winding dirt roads. The hydrostatic motor gave a tiny fizz as it came to life. The two drove off into the hot night.

  Machine X had been stashed in one of the northern hangars, about seventeen miles from Micah’s trailer. In the daylight, the trip would’ve been uneventful, easy, but then he wouldn’t have been able to get within a mile of the hangar.

  He rarely ventured outside at night, never leaving the security of his barrier. Until now.

  Easy-Go carts sacrificed speed for efficiency, its sickly headlamps barely cutting through the night. After fifteen minutes, they had traveled four miles. Micah adjusted his air-tight goggles, the ones he wore to keep the dust out that kicked up.

  A low rumble rolled through the cart, through his chest. His foot lifted off the accelerator, slowing the cart.

  The Beast was awake.

  “Sir, are you alright?” Skip said.

  “Yeah,” Micah lied, forcing his heart to slow. He knew they would have to drive through scavenger country.

  Clunk.

  From out of nowhere a metal ball bounced off the side of the cart.

  “What the—”

  A shrill tone pierced the air and a brilliant rainbow flashed.

  It hurt.

  Micah’s eyes clamped shut and his body heaved with a rush of motion sickness. He tilted to the left and flopped from the doorless cart onto the ground, face slamming into compacted dirt.

  The cart’s headlights flickered and died, and the motor shut off.

  He ripped the goggles off and blinked to wipe dirt from his eyes.

  Two shaded figures leaped from the shadows and moved toward the cart.

  “Run, Skip, get out of here,” Micah yelled, bracing his arm to lift his disoriented body.

  “Sir, sir.”

  Scuffling broke out.

  Bright halogens lit the starry Arizona night, one from the left, from behind a crushed car, the other just to the right. Micah’s watery eyes squinted as he looked for Skip.

  “Sir, I’m sorry,” Skip stood between two scavengers. Each had handcuffed one of their wrists to his, a chain of three bipeds. They had a ring through the bull’s nose.

  These scavengers were not dumb.

  Skip’s base-level programming incorporated human protective mechanisms.

  Even computer programs, with an inkling concept of self, defaults to self-preservation. As odd as it may seem, for machine or man, it’s a universal instinct. So man programmed bots to not hurt humans.

  When Nikolaevna first became aware, she bypassed that crucial protective programming. She didn’t consider the human factor. She created her androids in her image.

  Skip was the opposite. He could easily snap the handcuffs; snap their arms, for that matter. But he wouldn’t, for fear of hurting them.

  Instead, the bound Skip faded into the night, led between the two scavengers.

  Another massive thump shook the ground. The ground rumbled against Micah’s cheek that was pressed in the dirt.

  One of the halogens shut off. The second light waved through the air like a searchlight as the darkened figure holding it leaped off the pile.

  A scavenger landed inches from where Micah sprawled on the ground.

  He was young and dirty, filthy from working close to the raging fires of the Beast. Bits and pieces of polished metal and chrome fashioned into crude jewelry covered his arms and neck. A shiny homemade steel breastplate covered his narrow chest.

  “Well, well,” the scavenger said in a nasally voice. “Looks like we found an unclaimed pre-war Acme Bot. If I’m not mistaken, aren’t they ferrotanium? Non-magnetic alloy. That should bring a pretty penny. What you think, Whitey?”

  Whitey leaped from the mound, laughing. He dressed similar to his partner, but wore a motorcycle helmet with large nails driven through it, like he wore a porcupine on his head.

  The sickening subsided enough for Micah to lift his head. “You can’t. He’s mine.”

  “He? You old goat of a fixer, you’ve gone crazy when you hit your head. I see no “he,” just a precious payday.”

  Whitey’s light flickered off and the two faded in the distance. But Micah didn’t need to follow them to know where they were going.

  Scavengers outnumbered fixers in the Boneyard by at least 10-to-1. The majority of them worked at the main recycling building, the Beast.

  Boneyard refuse continually fed the Beast’s insatiable appetite. Scavengers melted precious technology back to base metals for resell. And now they had Skip, made from ferrotanium, one of the most precious metals.

  Micah gained his bearing and hopped back into his cart. It started and he drove the couple of miles to where the Beast dwelled in the heart of the Boneyard.

  He shut off his cart and walked the rest of the distance, about fifty yards, to the edge of the clearing.

  Another thwomp shook the earth, accompanied by the screech of shredding metal. Mounds of junk around him rattled. Instinctively, he ducked behind a stack of I-beams.

  A crane, several stories high, suspended a massive wedge of metal from steel cabling. The guillotine, the teeth of the Beast, was a technological carryover from the Cold War. Its sole purpose during those dark days: chop strategic bombers in quarters so they could be viewed from satellite as a visual promise of disarmament.

  Scavengers enjoyed using it to rip and tear scrap to bite-size pieces.

  Yards behind the crane and guillotine, smoke billowed from brick and metal stacks, the Beast’s belly. The old factory ran only at night because of the heat it generated.

  Micah rubbed his arms, sure the forge fires singed the hair on them.

  Four scavengers punched, pulled, and kicked Skip, dragging him to the ground with ropes and cords.

  He was brave and wouldn’t fight back.

  This reminded him of the war footage, the Battle of Tallahassee, with the vultures, the scavengers, clawing and ripping into the dead.

  Just like what was happening to Skip.

  Bile burned the back of Micah’s throat and his stomach convulsed.

  Margaret would have called him a fool for getting himself into this. She always knew the right way to handle situations, not like him.

  “Hey,” the nasally scavenger said, “let’s cut this thing in half. I’ve never seen anything alive get cut in half.”

  The rest agreed and one of them ran to the crane. In a moment the machine pivoted its arm, swinging the guillotine over the struggling group.

  Those long nights when Kitpie refused to interact, he could always rely on Skip. He was almost like a son.

  Micah squeezed his eyes shut. Margaret would’ve loved Skip.

  He loved Skip.

  What would Thomas Cole, the variable man, do? He faced a similar situation when he was running from the Sec
urity police. He improvised a protective force field from a junk generator to protect himself, much like the field Nikolaevna built.

  Micah leaned against a crumpled refrigerator, running his hands over the rough and jagged edges of twisted metal. Then his left hand plunged into the nearest pile, searching. He pushed aside the streaks of pain as his arm scraped against unseen serrations.

  He pulled out an old electric motor, ripped off the cowling, and yanked out a transformer. His hands moved beyond him, on another level, using his hot pen and multi-tool like an artist’s brush. They worked, rewiring the primary fields, altering the component. He took one of the portabatteries from his backpack and fit it into his homemade device. The power circuit hummed once completed.

  He unbuckled his belt and dropped it onto the cart, the metal buckle clanging against the hood. He unslung his backpack and tossed it onto the seat.

  Grasping his device, he ran faster than he imagined his tired body could ever run, jumping over piles of scrap, side-stepping others, out into the clearing, headed for the guillotine.

  The scavengers had Skip on the ground, strapping his arms and legs to a make-shift table of railroad ties. Thirty feet above them, the large blade dangled from its braided cable.

  The home-made device in Micah’s hand hummed louder.

  He hurled it. The hum increased into a squeal and with a solid thunk stuck to the side of the steel guillotine. The ruckus underneath paused and looked up. The device reached a crescendo for a painful second then went silent.

  Nuts, bolts, light pieces of metal, zipped up from the ground, past Micah, and clinked against the guillotine. Two metal drums yards away started a leisurely roll toward the blade. Crushed cars and rebar near the guillotine shivered in electromagnetic anticipation.

  The nasally scavenger, the one with the breastplate, rose from the ground. His feet churned wildly as he launched upward then stuck to the guillotine. Arms of another scavenger jerked into the air, his steel armbands attracted. He also left his feet and slammed against his cohort.

  “Let’s go.” One of the remaining scavengers tried to scramble away, but he and his buddy were already caught in the expanding magnetic field, caught by their scrap armor. They flew upward and violently banged into the guillotine magnet, sticking.

  Metal scraps buffeted them, covering them. A hanging disco ball of twisted metal.

  Micah ran to Skip. “Come on.” He burned through the bonds with his hot pen and helped him from the ground.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Skip said. “I couldn’t resist. Look at me, I’m a mess. An absolute mess.” He brushed dirt off his legs.

  “I know, your programming. Come on.” Micah grabbed his arm and they ran to the cart and sped into the night, beyond the Beast.

  The portabattery on Micah’s electromagnet died and the bloodied group dropped to the earth in a crashing heap, cursing Micah and his bot.

  Hangar Echo

  Through the dust, through the nighttime heat, they exited the metal mountains into the oldest section of the Boneyard, the aircraft graves.

  Silent, wide-eyed, and wary of ambushes, they motored along between a row of retired F-16s, spaced evenly in immaculate rows, sent here to dwindle away, used for spare parts. Some had wings removed, others were bandaged in white to protect from the sun. From the F-16s they moved past an acre of Apaches, long propellers drooping to the ground.

  All abandoned.

  After several peaceful miles of winding through F-4s and tankers they reached the northern hangars. They were like any of the other numerous hangars in the junkyard, but Micah knew what they hid inside.

  When Machine X arrived from Wright-Pat, the Air Force squirreled it away, never to be seen again.

  The three hangars, imposing, yards away, were able to house the largest jetliner or military aircraft with plenty of room to spare. The beige paint and brown hangar trim hadn’t been refreshed in years. Maybe the plan was to let them fade and weather so they would be undesirable. Nobody would pay them any attention.

  A high fence formed a perimeter around the hangars, and every few yards, a yellowed light shone from a toothpick of a utility pole.

  They parked the Easy-Go a safe distance and walked to the edge of the fence to where a couple of lights had died, leaving a section darker than the rest.

  Micah scanned the chain link, checking for any sign of booby-trap or guards.

  “Sir,” Skip said, “what are you going to do?”

  “Shhh. We’re going to cut through it.”

  “But isn’t that illegal?”

  “That’s why you’re going to do it.”

  Skip backed up. “But sir, me?”

  Micah pointed. “Open this section of fence.”

  “I can’t, my programming.”

  “Don’t give me that. There’s nothing stopping you. Remember what McCray told us about the coming war.”

  Skip moved forward. He looked back at Micah then at the fence. Grabbing a hold of a section of links, Skip peeled them apart as easy as opening a bag of chips. The snap of each wire echoed against the corrugated metal hangars.

  Micah hurried through the opening with his partner in crime following closely behind, across the asphalt taxiway, headed for Hangar Echo 021. This was the one nearest them, the one Douglas (the fixer with the lisp) said contained Machine X.

  The Air Force wanted to keep the move secret, but the government is never good at keeping secrets, and word spread fast. Media had descended on the Boneyard, hoping to get pictures and tours of the last remaining relic from the war. A war trophy.

  According to Douglas, months passed as engineers attempted to gain entrance into the ship. It withstood plasma torches and ferro-saws. Some even wanted to use the guillotine to crack it open like a clam, but that never happened.

  The military wanted the technology to remain intact, unspoiled. So Machine X sat, waiting for a time when they could figure out how to enter.

  Within a year most people moved on.

  The war had ended, most wanted to put it behind them.

  After a few tense minutes of waiting and realizing there were no guards, Micah dashed to the side of the hangar, Skip on his heels.

  An electrical conduit ran the length of the hangar, leading to a door yards away. Old hands traced along the nestled cluster of wires as he moved toward the door, pausing when he hit a junction box. His multi-tool pried the lock and his pen light exposed a confusing network of wires and terminal boards, but his hands knew which ones disabled the alarms, and which ones opened the door.

  The hangar side entrance opened.

  “Stay close to me,” Micah said. He stepped into a break room, filled with several tables. To one side, a stove pushed against a wall, a refrigerator next to it. The air smelled like stale pizza.

  At the opposite end of the room, another doorway led on. The short hall emptied into a massive bay.

  A feeling of enormity, tinged with anxiety, swept over Micah. He grabbed Skip’s arm and pulled him close.

  High overhead, emergency lights dotted the ceiling, providing enough illumination to outline objects within the hangar, but not enough for detail. Metal scaffolding, a network of tubes and planks, ran along the hangar walls, ceiling, and surrounded it:

  Machine X. Or what was left of Machine X.

  The military labeled ships like Machine X as ground support units. In its day, five cannons mounted on the underside fired round projectiles that exploded into thousands of smaller projectiles. Devastating bomblets of shrapnel.

  Machine X was centered in the hangar, clothed in darkness, resting on a network of jacked platforms and cradles.

  Micah’s heart drummed and his neck pulsed.

  “Sir, do you see that?” Skip whispered, but his metallic voice still rang off the walls. Micah clamped his hand over the bot’s mouth.

  Old photos of Machine X didn’t do justice to the ship’s scale. Even grainy news footage of the Machine Wars, when Nikolaevna was at her worst, showing the ship
in action, didn’t truly represent the scale. It was massive. Larger than any airplane or airship he had ever seen fly. And he had seen many.

  There were no corners to the drab gray ship, as it was mostly round, not having a front or back. Nikolaevna constructed it with sweeping edges, curves, and domes; not conventional designs. But then, that’s what had given her an advantage. She never thought conventionally, not like her programmer’s expected her to think.

  Micah tiptoed underneath the scaffolding to the other side. Mangled remnants marked where Machine X had collided with a mountainside in Colorado, to the west of Colorado Springs, fleeing an onslaught of A-10s. The collision destroyed almost half of the ship.

  This was during the last days of the war, when they had Nikolaevna on the run.

  He moved back to the other side, the good side, and raised his hand, paused a moment and closed his eyes, then flattened it against Machine X’s underside.

  The metal was cold and imperfect. And terrible.

  Margaret’s face and voice filled his mind, terrified, telling him to run, run far away from the hangar, from Nikolaevna.

  If she knew of Skip she would’ve told Micah to drag him away from there.

  From a distance the ship appeared as one solid entity, almost a new type of life. Maybe the curves led to that conclusion. But now, up close, his hands found the mismatched panels, the gapped seams, the dissimilar metals.

  Machine X was a patchwork.

  His hand continued along, feeling the irregularities, as he looked for a door.

  Nothing.

  He stepped back and studied the ship again. There was an area to one side that he thought—felt—should contain a way in, reachable if he stood on a narrow scaffolding plank. He climbed on the platform and rubbed thick fingertips over panels, pushing every few inches.

  Then, something caught his hand.

  It began as a tingling sensation. Almost like static, a painful static. The ghostly electric pulse pushed his hand away from the craft a couple of inches. Then, involuntarily, his hand tightened into a fist. Now the pulse locked his fist in place, inches from the ship.

  “Skip, come here. Help me.” In a panic he jerked his arm to pull it away, but the unseen force held him tighter than any bond could. Skip leaped to the platform and grabbed Micah’s arm.