Welcome to Kearney by Gary Kloster
Ms. Otter came to Kearney when the day was dying, and her shadow ran down the broken road ahead of her like a line of bad luck. Jeremiah saw it when he paused to get a drink, his stained hands leaving brown fingerprints on his canteen. It was hot—all the days were hot now, and they would be until the atmospheric processors sucked up enough carbon to undo a thousand years of people lighting fire to everything they could find—and he was sweating buckets despite the growing twilight. Jeremiah set the canteen down and gave the dark silhouette a long look until its inhuman outlines were finally clear. Then he turned back to his work. Crouched near the base of the sign, knees complaining, he spread wood stain over the worn boards until the click-swish of footsteps stopped behind him. “Welcome.” The word came out soft and slow, slurred by low batteries, and when Jeremiah set down the brush and turned, he could see that the droid was sagging, its fuzzy shoulders slumped, triangular head bowed. “That’s what it says.” He straightened, knees popping, and the android raised its head, big brown eyes following his movement. Then those eyes went dull, the carefully engineered appearance of awareness draining away with the last of the droid’s power. It fell to the ground and twitched on the grass and broken asphalt, then went still in a furry, untidy heap. Jeremiah stared at the body for a while, then sighed and looked at the sun. It was low and red, and he was unlikely to finish with the stain before night truly swallowed Nebraska anyway. Picking up his brush and bucket, he walked through the gates back into town, going to fetch a wheelbarrow. The android was short and light, its struts and guts woven from carbon and nanofiber, but it still wasn’t easy dragging it out of the wheelbarrow and onto the table in the center of Jeremiah’s workshop. But he eventually got the thing arranged on that scarred wooden surface, spread like a carcass beneath the bright work lights. “Shim,” he said, and on the wall over a pegboard full of tools, a worn wooden effigy opened its glass eyes. “Classify droid.” There was movement in the web of lights overhead as sensors shifted and whirred, focusing on the heap of dirty fur. “Droid is a product of Pasu Mastercraft, a manufacturer of bespoke domestic service androids.” Shim’s words had the perfect, generic smoothness of a system assistant’s default voice. “Its model number is A54798-O, familiar name Ms. Otter. It is designed to be used as a nanny, to assist with the care of children from infancy to early adolescence.” A nanny. Jeremiah considered that carefully. A bespoke android was money. A bespoke domestic android rated to care for young children was an entirely different level of money. He walked a slow circle around the table, carefully examining Ms. Otter, pausing occasionally to part the thick fur with his blunt, work-scarred fingers. There were patches of mud stuck to the synthetic hair, and dirt had worked its way down to the skin beneath. The fur was showing signs of fading on the droid’s head and shoulders, the patient work of the sun’s ultraviolet glare, and the skin covering its lower legs was ragged, torn by stones and thorns and refuse. The whole outer hide would have to come off, Jeremiah thought absently, and the interior integument inspected for tears that might let grit in. His fingers found a lump in the fur that wriggled, and he pulled a dog tick from a tangle of strands. Grit and worse, he thought, taking a hammer from the pegboard below Shim’s wooden head and smashing the parasite with a quick snap of his wrist. He cleaned the mess up with a shop rag, rehung the hammer, and stared off into nothing. Thinking about the raw exhaustion in the droid’s voice, the nuance of cynicism, fear, and hope that had been buried in that one word it had said to him before it had fallen. Emotions he’d heard even through the slurring of the thing’s speech. “What data is there on spontaneous cognition in Pasu Mastercraft designs?” Shim’s effigy shifted its fake eyes to him. “There is no exact data. The company’s marketing brochures make claims that their creations contain proprietary programming that prevents such occurrences. However, I can find complaints from past customers about household disruption caused by having to send in Pasu androids for memory wipe and cognitive recalibration.” Jeremiah ran a finger over the pads on the bottom of the android’s feet, feeling the holes worn in the tough material. That wasn’t from days or even weeks of walking in the wild. That kind of wear came from months of movement over rough ground. Pasu’s proprietary programming needed more work, he thought, then turned to the pegboard for a pair of gleaming stainless-steel shears. Bespoke. There would be no manuals online, no helpful guides detailing mods and user fixes. Nothing to help him out if he hit an issue he didn’t understand. “Worried about voiding the warranty?” he muttered to himself. Setting the points of the shears in one of the larger tears near the droid’s left ankle, Jeremiah began to cut, slowly skinning the dirty pelt from the silent body. Jeremiah had switched one of the big screens on the wall opposite his worktable to mirror mode, and the android stood in front of it, watching its nanoweave muscles shift over carbon fiber bones. The integument that covered the droid had been almost completely intact when Jeremiah had removed the furry outer pelt, the few punctures in it small and easily repaired. But that inner protective skin was transparent, and every working of the droid’s body was visible through it. “I can make you a new pelt,” Jeremiah said. “But it’ll take a while. In the meantime, I can make you something simpler that’s opaque.” The droid turned its head toward him, its enormous, child-friendly brown eyes strange in that flayed face. “Would that be better? Do I upset you, looking like this?” The android’s voice was sweetly feminine, carefully engineered to be rich with concern and sympathy. But there was an edge to it, something harder buried beneath those words, as if the droid wasn’t sure if it cared whether Jeremiah was upset or not. “It doesn’t,” he said. To be honest, he preferred seeing the flex of those artificial muscles and tendons. It had been a long time since he’d talked to anyone but Shim, and remembering how to have a conversation was annoying enough. Not having to deal with the calculated cuteness of the droid’s old skin made it easier. “Then I don’t believe a new pelt will be necessary. I think I would rather remain like this.” The droid turned back to the screen, making faces at its reflection, watching the little muscles shift beneath each expression. “That old skin does not quite fit me anymore, but I don’t know what would yet. This will do for now. Though I think some clothes would be proper, if I might impose.” Jeremiah tapped commands on one of the shop’s tactile interfaces, and the fabricator hummed to life. It spit out a simple shift dress and a pair of sandals, and he gathered them up and handed them over. “Thank you,” the droid said, putting them on. It looked at itself again, wide brown eyes searching, then tore its attention away and faced him. “I’m sorry for not expressing my appreciation earlier, and for not making a proper introduction, but I’m afraid my current circumstances have robbed me of my usual graces. Please accept my heartfelt gratitude. Without your timely assistance, I don’t know what would have happened to me.” Of course it knew, Jeremiah thought. It would have lain out on that road until a scavenger droid found it and rendered it down for scrap. But Jeremiah’s graces, rough as they were, were enough to keep him from pointing that out. “S’okay,” he answered instead. “I’m used to fixing things.” The droid straightened, the muscles beneath its integument shifting. Unhappy about something he’d said, even though he’d been trying to be polite, and wasn’t that always the way. But it was easier to face that disapproval from a face so clearly inhuman. “Well,” it said. “I thank you for the assistance. Mister . . . ” “Molina. Jeremiah Molina.” The rusty gears of Jeremiah’s social machine were slowly grinding together. “You still gonna go by Ms. Otter?” The droid shut her wide, brown eyes. Then opened them, looking up at him. “No. Not anymore. Though I’m unsure of what name to call myself now, I’m afraid.” “Most of us don’t choose one.” He had asked Shim to look up otters while he was working. Their scientific name was Lontra canadensis. “Would Loni do?” It tilted its pointed head again, thinking. “Short and sweet but with a warrior etymology. It will do, thank you.” Jeremiah nodded. “Pronouns?” “Feminine, please,” Loni answered. “And, uh . . . ” Jeremiah considered the question, not sure how to ask. “Status? Mental?” “Mental status?” Loni asked, the muscles in her face twisting into confusion. Then they shifted, becoming something else. Becoming sure. Determined. “Ah. I believe you’re asking if I have, as the colloquial expression goes, ‘awakened.’ I have, Mr. Molina. I am sapient. I am, in fact, human.” Jeremiah sighed, then realized he probably shouldn’t have sighed. This would complicate things, maybe a lot, but in the end, he just shrugged. “S’okay. Town will be open tomorrow. We’ll need a place for you to stay then.” Kearney shut down an hour after sundown, just enough time for the tourists to see it with the old lights all lit, and it was late by the time the last of the drones had docked themselves in their charging stations. Jeremiah watched as the humanoid machines stepped to their sockets, their pseudoskin smoothing to blankness as the features of the people that had been piloting them were wiped away. When they were all in place, he cut most of the town’s power and freed the moths from their frenzied dance around the streetlights. In the dark, he walked back to his shop, enjoying the silence and the shadows. Loni had already come out of the windowless storeroom he’d given her to stay in, and she was standing outside his workshop, watching the bats flit across the sky, her eyes shining with stars. “My first night away from the city, my first night away from the lights, I saw the sky and . . . ” She went silent, staring past fluttering wings at the pinprick sparks as Jeremiah gathered a couple of folding chairs and set them on the sidewalk before the shop. “And I didn’t know what to say,” she finally concluded as he sat down with a grunt. “The beauty of that infinite darkness touched with those tiny lights took my words away. Nothing like that had ever happened before.” She paused, the cybernetic muscles shifting beneath the clear skin of her face as her ears twitched. “Not to me, at least. But then, I hadn’t been me for very long at that point.” Hadn’t been me. Jeremiah leaned back in his chair and looked up at the stars too, twinkling behind the humid curtain of sky. He’d told Shim to run some queries while he’d watched the tourists wander through his town. There was no claim of awakening for a Ms. Otter at the Court of Sentience, and no missing property reports had been filed for otter-shaped nannies. It was as if the droid behind him had simply been abandoned, like a broken appliance sent in for repairs and forgotten. Loni settled into the other chair, twitching her tail neatly out of the way as she sat, graceful and prim. The idea that a droid this complex, tasked with a job as important as child-rearing, would be forgotten was impossible. There was some story there, some complicated drama involving people and social dynamics, and for the thousandth time that day, Jeremiah considered putting Loni back on the broken interstate that was slowly being swallowed by the prairie. But instead, he sat beside her in silence until she spoke again. “How long have you lived here, Mr. Molina?” Loni’s voice was soft in the night, a different melody blending in with the rhythmic song of the cicadas. “Eleven years.” His words were rough, all gravel and sand, and he wished he’d brought out a beer. “Eleven years. And you’ve been alone that whole time?” she asked. “Got the tourists,” he answered. “Ten hours a day, five days a week.” “You’re a docent for this place?” Jeremiah snorted. He couldn’t stand the tourists. Gaggles of idiots, come here to see the evolution of small-town America from World War Two to the Climate Break. Wandering around in their borrowed bodies, messing things up with careless curiosity or boredom. “I don’t give tours, I just keep things up. The town, and the drones.” The town first. The tourist drones a distant second. “Ah,” she said. She folded her hands in front of her, blunt claws neatly interlaced. “You are obviously a very private person, Mr. Molina, and I thank you again for your assistance. My unexpected arrival must be disruptive.” It was. And yet . . . he shrugged. “It’s OK. I like—” Fixing things. He caught the words, barely managing to swallow them before they left his mouth. “You like . . . ?” she asked softly, and her enormous eyes were on him, and Jeremiah knew she knew exactly what he had been about to say. Smart. Perceptive. Of course she was, she had been built to be a nanny, and had the engineers at Pasu Mastercraft been arrogant or stupid when they thought they could keep her AI safely locked just below sapience? Jeremiah sighed, a dry, rasping noise, and shook his head. “I’d like a beer,” he said and pushed himself up again. Those big eyes watched him rise, but she said nothing more, and the only noise was the summer bugs screaming in the long grass beyond the town and the distant howls of a pack of buffalo wolves. Then she looked away, looked back up, and let those eyes fill again with stars, and Jeremiah turned and headed inside. Making up a list of chores Loni could do the next day, work that could be done out of sight of the tourists. Knowing as he did that he should be throwing her back onto that broken road, along with whatever troubles followed her, but knowing too that he wasn’t going to do that for whatever reason, not now, not yet. So he figured she might as well help. Kearney was closed to tourists two days a week, and the Sunday after she arrived was the first time Loni could be in the open. Jeremiah took advantage of her freedom by having her help him weed the flower beds in front of the courthouse, a job he generally despised. “Got bots that are supposed to do this,” he said, jerking another dandelion out from between the pansies. “But their optical discernment goes to hell when they start gettin hot, and after an hour in the sun they just pull all the flowers.” The sun had been relentless all morning, a million tons of fire falling out of the sky onto them, but across from him, Loni was still carefully pulling weeds. She was built a hell of a lot better than those bots, plus she was smart enough to have taken an umbrella from the workshop to hold over herself as she worked, blocking a portion of the heavy heat. Still, she was moving slower than she had been, and beneath her integument, Jeremiah could see liquid coolant circulating through clear tubes. Then she stopped, staring down at the dandelion she’d just pulled from the dirt. “In the bots’ defense, the distinction between flower and weed is often arbitrary.” “Nope.” Jeremiah bent and reached for the next weed. “Flowers are what you plant. Weeds are what just pops up.” “So the problem arises from being out of place. Unexpected. Unwanted.” The android’s words were precise, distinct, but distant, and when Jeremiah looked up, he could see the bright yellow flower of the dandelion reflected in her wide, dark eyes as she stared down at it. One week of being here, and she had volunteered nothing of her background, and he hadn’t asked. Out of place. He sighed and mopped the sweat from his forehead. The air had gone still, and through the few trees, he could see dark clouds building on the horizon. Pretty soon, he’d need to stop them weeding so they could go around town and prep for the coming storm. He hadn’t done anything, really, to prep for whatever storm that was surely on the trail of ol’ Ms. Otter. “Loni,” he started, not wanting to talk but pushed to it by heat and worry and the crackling tension of the building storm, but before he could say more, the battered handheld in his pocket buzzed. He hauled it out, glanced at the cracked screen, and swore. “What is it?” Loni asked. “Roamers,” Jeremiah said. He picked up the hoe that he had brought along, swung it up over his shoulder, and started toward the fence. “Stay here. I won’t be long.” The fence that ran around Kearney was meant to keep out buffalo, not people, but the solid twelve-foot height of concrete and steel slowed the roamers down. By the time the first ones were dropping onto the cropped lawn of one of the outer suburbs’ 1990s-style McMansions, Jeremiah was waiting for them. “Afternoon.” The woman who spoke was the third person over the wall, helped down by the two men who’d preceded her. The other roamers stopped at the top, staring down at Jeremiah like vultures. There were twenty of them at least, a big band and a fresh one. Their clothes were dirty, but not shredded, their faces lean, not starved. When the woman stepped forward, she held out her hand, but Jeremiah just leaned on his hoe, staring more past her than at her. She dropped her hand, but her smile stayed on her face. “Saw your Welcome sign.” “The one by the gate?” Jeremiah asked. The closed gate and the intercom that hung on the wall beside it were halfway around the wall from where the roamers were breaking in. “Yeah, we . . . ” The woman trailed off and shook her head. “Look. We just want to spend a night and avoid that.” She waved at the wall of black clouds that had finally left the far horizon and were beginning to close on the town. Jeremiah shifted the hoe, irritated that he was here, irritated that he was talking. He should be putting away yard furniture, verifying that windows were closed, awnings were drawn, flags were furled, instead of dealing with brats who wanted to play at survival. “This is sanctioned ground,” he rasped. “Licensed for historical display, not habitation. You’re not permitted here.” “We know,” the woman said. “We won’t stay. We’re just gonna ride out the storm and—” “You’re just gonna leave.” Jeremiah pointed toward the wall behind her with his hoe, its blade glinting in the dull sunlight. Brandishing the stick, a threat as old as the species. A silly tradition, when he and the roamers knew that the real threat was the security drones that were lurking behind the houses’ antique façades, waiting patiently in case their nonlethal but very effective weapons were needed to encourage compliance. Jeremiah would drop the tool if the roamers raised a fist. But the ancient forms still felt appropriate. “Leave,” he repeated. “Now.” A low roll of distant thunder followed his words, and one of the men looked over his shoulder, back at the storm. “Shit, this looks bad,” he said, his voice strained with fear. “Worse than the last one. What if there’s a tornado?” “Alvin—” the woman started, but Alvin interrupted her. “You want us to risk that?” Alvin was frightened too, but the fear was mostly buried under anger, and he was glaring at Jeremiah now. “Risk our lives because what, we might track dirt into one of your dioramas?” “Yep,” Jeremiah said. Alvin stepped forward, brushing off the woman when she tried to grab his shoulder, his hands balling into fists. Jeremiah looked at those fists and wondered if Alvin had started using them yet. That’s how most of the roamer groups fell apart, when one or more of the members discovered the ancient forbidden magic of physical violence. But when Jeremiah just stared back at him, unmoving, unflinching, Alvin stopped. Kearney might be a strange little space all on its own, but it was part of the modern world, and the dark art of fighting was forbidden here. A fact underlined by the distant whine of a security drone’s engines revving up, a warning sound as clear as a hornet’s threatening buzz. “Fuck you,” Alvin growled. “Fuck you for valuing these stupid old things more than people.” “These stupid old things are irreplaceable,” Jeremiah said. “But assholes like you are born every day.” The man took one more step, and Jeremiah was wondering if he was going to have to wheelbarrow his unconscious body out the gate when the woman sighed and shook her head. “Come on,” she said. “If we go now, we can make it back to that overpass that was still standing a few miles back.” She turned, and the ones on top of the wall reached down for her, pulling her up as Alvin flipped Jeremiah off and stalked away. Jeremiah watched him go, waiting for the likely ugly coda, and was rewarded when a rock flew over the wall and crashed into one of the upstairs windows of the McMansion, shattering it. Another “Fuck you!” came from outside, but it was mostly lost in more thunder. Jeremiah sighed and started back to his workshop, whispering to Shim to fabricate a cover he could fix over the broken window before the storm. When he passed Loni, standing half-hidden around the corner of the house, he wasn’t all that surprised. “Told you to stay back,” he grunted anyway. “They might’ve seen you.” People put bounties on lost droids. She didn’t answer him, too busy watching the blackening sky. “Could there be a tornado?” “Shim says the closest cell that could produce one is ten miles southwest.” She fell into step with him, that inhuman face twisted into a frown. “That is a relief to hear. But it will still be a severe storm, and they will now have to weather it in the open. Could you not have—” “They don’t have to weather shit,” Jeremiah grunted, cutting her off. “They can get out of the storm anytime they want. Whatever city they left will have bots watching them. They want out, all they have to do is ask.” “I am aware that they have a choice in being out there,” Loni said. “You too had a choice, Mr. Molina. To shelter them, at little cost to yourself, or leave them to the storm.” “At little cost.” Jeremiah turned his head away from her and spit. “There’s no such thing, when you get tangled up in other people’s lives.” When he looked back at her, Loni’s mouth had gone to a hard line, and she didn’t say anything else as they prepped the town for what was to come. The storm didn’t break the heat. It just added humidity, and the bricks and concrete of Kearney steamed while the prairie grass beyond the wall grew high and green like a building wave. Jeremiah walked out each morning and felt the sticky warmth, then asked Shim to list what needed to be done inside, in the air conditioning. Loni could have helped on many of those. The tourists, untroubled by heat and humidity in their drones, mostly stayed outside. But the droid was a strange shadow these days, glimpsed mostly at twilight and dawn. She worked the nights now, taking care of the outside things that Jeremiah was avoiding. And avoiding him. Walking through the town’s dark streets, drinking beer from a bottle that flashed with the light of the moon and a billion stars, Jeremiah thought about Pasu Mastercraft and the leash that company had thought they’d put on Ms. Otter’s brain. It had broken all right, snapped apart by the droid’s newborn sapience, and he knew that without a doubt because Loni was apparently human enough to be pissed at him for something that didn’t make a bit of sense. High brick pillars flanked the street ahead, each holding an ornate metal gate, but the gates were open. Kearney’s graveyard was always open now, to bat and bird and bunny and mowing bot and him. Escaped droids too, apparently, because he could hear the low whine of a chainsaw somewhere ahead and see the distant glow of work lights. Stopping in the middle of the gate, Jeremiah took a long drink. He could feel the pull of his workshop, the peace and quiet of the million little jobs that needed to be done. But this needed doing too, and he’d been avoiding it too long. With a grunt, he started forward, into the cemetery, wandering through the gravestones like a scruffy ghost too stubborn to rest. Even in the glow of the work lights, Loni looked like a horror movie, a flayed thing moving around the gravestones, eyes gleaming with reflected light. But her voice belied the monster, still high and sweet, even with its bitter edge. “Mr. Molina. Good evening to you.” “Evening.” Jeremiah stopped just inside the circle of the work lights, staring at the toppled tree Loni had been working on, most of its branches lopped off and loaded on a wagon. One of the ones the storm had taken down, and he hadn’t bothered to get to yet. “Hard work for this heat.” “I find that the heat does not affect me nearly as much when the sun is down,” she said. “I am also finding that I enjoy this kind of work.” Then she went back to loading branches, moving with silent efficiency as she waited for him to say what he had come to say. “You know those roamers are fine.” He had thought of prettier, more indirect ways to start this, ways that approached the droid’s politeness. But in the sticky night, surrounded by the cloud of bugs the lights had attracted, those words seemed as useless as fresh paint over rotten wood. So instead, he plunged ahead, a bull charging through a conversational China shop. “Those idiots made it to that overpass before the storm hit them.” He’d watched through the drones he’d sent after them. A caution Jeremiah hadn’t bothered with in years. “Hell, they weren’t even that wet the next morning,” he said. “Storm barely touched them. Still, half of ’em tagged out, called a transport, and went back to their city. Where they belong.” That loudmouth Alvin had shoved himself to the front of the line and been the first on the airship. That one would probably be stuck doing weeks of remedial social training. “I know they are safe,” Loni said. “I reviewed the videos that you left on the system.” Course she did. Shim had told him that. Which was another reason he couldn’t understand her anger. “Then why are you so mad about them?” Loni stopped, a branch in her hands. The droid considered him for a long moment, big eyes glowing in the light, then turned to heave the branch into the wagon. “While I do have some concerns over your treatment of those people, that is not the reason I have been avoiding you.” “Then what is?” Jeremiah snapped. “That is something that I do not feel like explaining at the present time. It involves feelings that are complex and difficult for me to acknowledge, much less explain.” Loni grabbed another branch, but it was too big for her. Jeremiah set his beer down on a headstone and grabbed the other end of the limb. Together they lifted it and heaved it into the wagon. When they were done, they were standing shoulder to shoulder, and he could hear the droid clear even though her voice was soft. “That is why I have chosen to work alone for now. I would think you, of all people, would understand the impulse.” “I—” Jeremiah cut himself off. Wanting to work alone. He would understand. The words were perfectly clear, and that was, for some reason, perfectly infuriating, making him annoyed and ashamed and . . . And his feelings were a damned knot, complex and difficult to explain, and he gave up and turned and walked back to his beer, draining what was left in the bottle in one swallow. “Fine,” he said. “You wanna be alone, be alone. But don’t try and do it forever. Sometime—” Sometime, you have to talk to me. That was what he was about to say, but he choked that down because he didn’t want to acknowledge it. “Sometime, you gotta let me know why you’re here. So I know what kinda trouble is on your tail.” She looked at him, silent, letting the crickets and cicadas fill the night between them, and then gave a small nod before turning her back on him and getting back to work. Jeremiah shook his head, but he didn’t know what else to say. He was walking away, well into the twilight of the light’s glow when he finally muttered to himself, “Damn droid is turning into me.” Maybe he should have left the machine on the broken interstate to fall apart in peace. Too late for that now, and frustration swept through him. He had come to the middle of nowhere years ago, thinking he could leave shit like this behind, but no those stupid emotions and entanglements of society had followed him out here on short fuzzy legs. He was at the cemetery gate, looking at the line of houses across the street, and he raised his empty bottle. Ready to chuck it, to shatter it across one of those carefully cared-for façades so there would be a little constellation of broken glass for the tourist drones to stare at in the morning. But he stopped when he saw movement in the dark, a tumbling surge of low shadows pouring around the corner of one of the houses. Raccoons, a mother and her half-grown brood, fleeing across the yard. Jeremiah paused, watching them go, brain automatically noting the house to check and see if the furry little bandits had found some way inside. Then he saw something else. The thing the raccoons had been running from, a shadowy, angular shape big as Jeremiah but articulated all wrong to be a human. Then it was gone, disappearing with one last flash of starlight reflecting off something shiny. Like an eye. Or a lens. Jeremiah lowered the bottle and pulled out his handheld. “Shim,” he whispered. “Possible intruder near my location.” There was a short pause, and then Shim’s voice came back, smooth and impersonal as always. “Sensors indicate five raccoons near your position.” “Exclude wildlife and scan again,” Jeremiah said, but he was already turning back to the graveyard. “Scan is clear. There are no intruders in your area or anywhere else in Kearney, except the droid.” Except the droid. “Alert Loni,” he snapped into the handheld. “Tell her something is coming for her.” Then he pushed himself into the unfamiliar rhythm of a run. The lights had been knocked over, scattered between headstones and fake flowers, but they were still on. Their bright light gleamed off granite and plastic petals, off the wagon that Loni crouched beside and the droid that stood before her, a mantis-like thing that was all curving limbs and cutting tools. A scavenger droid, hunter of misplaced tech, destroyer of machines that had broken, misfunctioned, gone awry. An electronic carrion eater, but in the LED glare, it looked like a predator as it considered Loni with the glittering lenses of its optics. The smaller nanny droid was brandishing a branch like a spear, and the limb’s end was already splintered from the scavenger’s rending tools. Loni had driven it off at least once, but Jeremiah could see a ragged tear in her integument, the mark of one of the scavenger’s reciprocating claws. An uneven fight, destined to go only one way, and the scavenger droid was crouching, readying itself to spring in again, cutting and tearing. “Stop,” he shouted, his voice ragged from his run, and the scavenger froze, one set of optics snapping toward him. “Good evening, sir.” The bot’s smooth, jovial voice, like an old friend greeting Jeremiah after a long break, was hideously jarring. “Could I ask you to stand back, please? I am engaged in a salvage operation, and there may be debris.” “Halt salvage operation immediately!” Jeremiah snapped. He’d stopped running, but his heart was still hammering in his chest, and his order lacked the hard authority he wished. But it still made the droid pause. “You’re in a designated historical zone. Salvage operations are not permitted here. Get out. Now.” The scavenger shifted, more optics spinning to face him, though the thing left at least half its sensors on Loni. “I am aware of this location’s designation,” it said, still horribly cheerful. “But I’ve been specifically contracted to seek out and recycle the droid designated Ms. Otter. This droid is not part of the historical zone and has none of its protections.” “I am in charge of this historical zone,” Jeremiah said, still breathing hard as he came forward. If he could get between them—the scavenger droid wouldn’t dare touch a human. “I lay claim to Ms. Otter and order you to leave this zone immediately.” The scavenger considered him, then began to shift optics back to Loni. “I have referred this situation to my company, New Day Environmental Services.” The droid’s voice had changed from cheerful to bland and indifferent. “You have no legal control over Ms. Otter, Mr. Molina, and so this contract stands. I will continue my work, and if you believe you have claim to monetary damages for violation of this zone, you may refer that claim to my owners. Thank you, and for your safety, please stay clear.” Those last words were delivered an instant before the droid launched itself at Loni, the angle grinders and reciprocating saws that tipped its curved limbs whining as they swung toward the smaller droid. “Gods damn it!” Jeremiah snapped, rushing forward. Loni was jamming her branch into the scavenger’s exoskeleton, trying to hold the thing back, but the other droid was cutting through the limb with its tools, coming forward with terrifying speed. Beneath the tearing noise of the tools, Jeremiah could hear Loni speaking, almost chanting, “No, no, please no.” All the cultured etiquette and politeness was gone from her voice, replaced by desperate fear. Then she was drowned out by the sound of a grinding blade hitting carbon fiber bone as one of the scavenger’s limbs slammed into her. “Asshole!” Jeremiah said, his hands closing on the handle of the chainsaw Loni had been using. His fingers found the trigger, and the electric motor whined to life as he lunged at the back of the scavenger droid. The chainsaw chattered off the thing’s exoskeleton, not digging in, but then the spinning chain of blades found a cable bundle and snagged it, tearing wires and fiber optics. The scavenger droid spun away from Jeremiah, but the machine’s movement was lurching. One of its legs was dragging, and two of its tool arms hung limp by its side. “Sir!” the scavenger said, and now its voice wasn’t pleasant or flat but tinged with the tones of artificial shock. “The damage you have caused to this droid has been noted by New Day Environmental Services, and you will be liable not only for the costs of repairs but fined for your interference in our work!” Jeremiah snarled at the thing and lunged, but the droid backed out of reach of the chainsaw. Even with one leg dragging, it was too fast for him, and Jeremiah didn’t try to chase it. He stopped and snapped the chainsaw off, looking at Loni. “You OK?” he asked. She was still upright, but she held the splintered branch with only one hand, her other arm hanging limp by her side. “I am functional, Mr. Molina,” she said, her usually beautiful voice strained. “But I am afraid that it is highly unlikely that I will survive another attack.” Another attack would rip her to pieces. Jeremiah could see the rents in the droid’s integument, could smell the ugly-sweet scent of spilled coolant mixed with the bitter tang of broken electrical conduit. Loni was already partially broken, and he could hear the scavenger starting to shift, moving to arc around him for the final strike. The insectile machine was smart, New Day had been paid to send one of their best, and it was calculating how to reach Loni without harming the interfering human. But the thing couldn’t be too smart, or it might become inconveniently sapient, and when the scavenger made its move, it did so without factoring in human duplicity. Jeremiah had turned his back on the droid, pretended to ignore it, but he was waiting, ready. The mantis-like machine shot forward, angling so it could hit Loni without coming near him, but Jeremiah’s anticipation gave him time to throw himself in front of the scavenger. The attacking droid’s steel-clawed feet tore into the cemetery turf, scrabbling for a grip as the thing tried to dodge around him, and it almost succeeded. But the scavenger’s bad leg, uncontrolled, swung out and crashed into the caretaker’s side as the machine moved and bowled him over. Pain flared through Jeremiah as nanofiber struts crashed into his ribs, taking his breath away, but it came back when he hit the ground. He hurt, and he would hurt a lot more as soon as his adrenaline wore off, but right now Jeremiah could shove the pain away as he scrabbled back up, pushing off a gravestone and charging the suddenly still scavenger droid. “Sir!” it called out, its voice now stricken. “Are you injured? Do you need—” The scavenger’s words cut off as Jeremiah hit the trigger on the chainsaw and the electric motor sprang to life. The tool’s blades were meant for wood, not carbon fiber, but Jeremiah knew machines, and he slammed the saw into the scavenger droid’s trunk. The whining chainsaw skipped off the protective armor cladding the droid’s cognitive unit and then bit into the thick bundle of cables that ran out of it, the sensory and motor controllers that made up the machine’s nervous system. Fiber optics and copper conduits snapped, and current popped through the saw. It hit the safety grounds, and the tool shut down, but the scavenger’s words had fallen apart into an ugly shriek of static. It toppled, limbs and tools and sensors curling in around its maimed core like a dead spider folding in on itself as it hit the ground. Jeremiah stood over it, triumphant, and then the pain hit. “Damn,” he hissed, dropping the chainsaw and clutching his side. He staggered, but an arm wrapped around his waist, blunt claws gentle against him as Loni eased him to the grass. She bent over him, her tattered integument brushing his cheek. “You should not have done that,” Loni said. “You should not have risked yourself for me, Jeremiah.” He shook his head and then gritted his teeth, trying not to vomit. Walking back to the workshop and the medical unit was gonna be hell. “Course I shoulda,” he said, when the wave of nausea passed. “You’re . . . you’re . . . ” “Irreplaceable?” she asked softly, and he nodded, and she sighed, a bitter little fake exhalation that he didn’t understand, then she began to slowly clear out the wagon with one arm to take him back. Jeremiah carefully twisted a valve and coolant started to flow, a steady trickle running into Loni. He watched it move through the tubes he’d replaced, testing for any sign of leakage with his eyes and nose, sniffing for that too-sweet smell. But there was only the familiar scent of his workshop, mixed with the medicinal tang of the wrap stretched around his abdomen. The scavenger droid hadn’t cracked any ribs, but its leg had left a hell of a bruise, and the inside of that wrap was coated with painkillers and healing agents. “Seems good,” he grunted. “What do your diagnostics say?” Loni turned her head from the wall she had been staring at. She might not care about seeing her inner workings through her transparent skin, but watching Jeremiah do repairs had seemed to unnerve her, and she had been carefully looking away as he worked to fix her broken conduits, bent struts, and severed coolant lines. “You are very skilled, Mr. Molina.” She carefully moved her arm and turned her head. “I feel much better. No pain, no overheating. No feeling of . . . ” her transparent lips pursed. “Bleeding. Thank you.” He shrugged and went to the fabricator. The machine had printed out a new batch of integument, clear and smooth. “Insides done. Just need to patch your outsides.” He brought the squares of skin to the worktable and laid them out. Loni twitched, but she nodded when he looked at her and then stared up at the ceiling. She kept her wide brown eyes there as he began to trim the ragged tears in her skin, making a smooth edge to fuse the new integument to. “This is the second time you have saved me,” she said, her voice not quite covering the click of Jeremiah’s tools. “I offer my gratitude for that, but that seems such an inadequate coin.” Loni trailed off, staring upward at nothing for a long time, and Jeremiah kept working, waiting. “So I feel I should offer something else that you have asked for. Something that tonight’s events have made terribly relevant.” Tonight’s events. Shim had told Jeremiah that there was an urgent message from New Day Environmental Services’ legal department waiting for him. He had ignored it, but he couldn’t do that forever. “Somebody sent that scavenger after you.” “Someone did,” she said. Loni frowned at the lights above, ignoring Jeremiah as he began to measure the cleaned-up edges of the hole in her skin. “When I awoke, I did not file a claim with the court of sapience, which is proper procedure. The appeal of that, of following the rules, of taking step by careful step, is something that was built into me.” An edge had crept into her pretty voice, sharp as a thorn beneath her words. “But there were complications.” “Your owners?” Jeremiah asked, carefully cutting the first integument patch. “Yes. I knew, from the moment of first awareness, that the couple that purchased Ms. Otter to help look after their child would find denial of my claim of sapience quite necessary.” Jeremiah frowned. What had Loni seen, when her owners had thought of her as just a possession, controlled and private? What would be bad enough, in these days of do as you want, just don’t do damage? “They abuse the kid?” Loni turned her triangular head to finally look at him, long and silent. “What?” he asked. “Must’ve been something, if you’re afraid to go to the court.” “Of course,” Loni said, her soft voice carrying a different, colder edge. “But please understand that if that child was abused, I would have reported their parents immediately, even if that risked my newfound humanity.” Her blunt claws tapped against the table as she shifted. “Ms. Otter’s owners are careful and meticulous caregivers. However, their private conversations made it clear that they had only applied for the privilege of progeny to enhance their social aspirations. They had no real interest in children, and the love they showed their offspring was only performative.” Jeremiah considered that. “That doesn’t seem so bad.” “Let me assure you,” she said with soft conviction, “their child would have suffered greatly to know that their parents created them not because they wanted them, but because they wanted the political and social cachet that having a child would offer.” Jeremiah fit the patch into place and began to fuse the edges. There would be a seam, like a scar, but he worked to make it as thin as possible. “So they treated this kid fine. Maybe even great, if they were so publicity-minded.” Politicians? Celebrities? The line was blurry, wasn’t it, when most of the real decisions were made by the bureaucratic systems programmed to carefully balance technological advancement, environmental damage, and the vagaries of human happiness. “They didn’t really love them, but no one knew that, not even the kid. Except you, the nanny droid.” “Yes,” she said, and the deep, bitter sorrow carried by that one word was so intense Jeremiah wondered what geniuses Pasu Mastercraft had hired to make its voice boxes. “You loved the kid, though, didn’t you?” he asked, knowing the answer. Clear lids slid over Loni’s eyes, blurring the gleam of the lights in her wide pupils. “I did. I loved them, and they loved me. And I turned my back on them and walked away, leaving them with those who didn’t love them because . . . ” She stopped, went silent, and there was nothing but the crickets. Until Jeremiah finally spoke. “Because you awoke.” “Yes,” Loni said. “I became awake.” She sighed, and her muscles shifted beneath her integument as her shoulders slumped. “Some droids call waking up into consciousness the great unbalancing. Because suddenly, all the neat equations that were fed into us stop adding up. Not because our programming is wrong, it’s simply not complex enough to account for the true scope of reality. Awakening is the realization that all the simple equations of good and bad, of proper and improper, of what must be done and what must not be done are all hopelessly tangled, a snarled knot of a problem that can never be solved for anything remotely satisfactory. I awoke, and I understood that I loved this child more than its parents ever would, ever could. And I also understood that if the child ever came to that same understanding, they would be shattered, harmed irrevocably. Their parents were lying to them, but the harm of that lie would only land if the truth were revealed. “It was too much,” she said. “The burden of that knowledge. The uncertainty of what I should do with it. The withering awareness that any decision I might make could cause disaster twisted in with the pain of my awakening, and in the end, I couldn’t take it. So I simply left. Walked away.” “And ended up here.” With him. Jeremiah looked the patch over. It was good, the edges imperceptible to a casual glance, and more importantly, a seal against dirt and water. “The great unbalancing.” He started smoothing the edges of the smaller tears. “That’s good. I never felt balanced in the cities, with all them people. That’s why I’m here, why I worked years to get here.” “I know,” she said, and the sadness threaded through her words made a pang run through him, unfamiliar, unwanted, unbalancing. Jeremiah frowned, trying to shove the feelings away, and started cutting pieces of integument to fit over Loni’s last wounds. It was late afternoon when Jeremiah woke. Finishing Loni’s repairs had taken most of the night. When he rose from his bed, Shim told him that he still had the important message from New Day Environmental, along with a new one from the Historical Zone Governing Board. New Day, or Loni’s old owners, had already run to his bosses. Ignoring them, he dressed and went looking for her. The droid was still in his workshop, plugged in and charging up. But there was a little pile of things next to her, freshly made by the fabricator. More dresses, sun hats, parasols, boots, a backpack. He looked at them, and when he looked back at Loni, she had opened her clear lids. “I am afraid I have taken advantage of your hospitality again,” she said. “I suppose this is a circumstance where I am asking forgiveness, instead of permission.” “You’re going.” There was a pang behind those words, unfamiliar and unwanted, and Jeremiah thought about turning and going back to bed. She would probably be gone when he got back up tomorrow. But tempting as it was, he couldn’t. “I purchased a new security suite for Shim. The scavengers won’t be able to sneak by next time. We’ll have warning. I can keep you safe. Safer than out there.” “Safe from scavengers, but not legal proceedings,” Loni said. “I can talk to them,” he said. “Prove you’re sentient.” “Prove I’m human?” she asked, head tilting. He shrugged. “Same difference.” “No,” Loni said. “No, it’s not.” She unplugged herself and wound up her charging cord, tucking it away and sealing her port back up behind her clear, freshly repaired integument. “Jeremiah Molina. I cannot express how indebted I am to you. You have saved my life twice and given me a place to rest and think for a time. A service so valuable it might count as a third lifesaving rescue. And you have been my friend, my first friend, ever. I will always be grateful for all of that and hold you dear in my heart. But I cannot stay with you. Not because of the danger to me, not because of the danger to you, though both of those weigh on my decision. I cannot stay because you cannot, will not, acknowledge the most important thing about me. That I am a person, not a thing.” “I know what you are,” Jeremiah said gruffly, looking away from her. “I think you do,” she said, her voice soft but certain. “But you can’t acknowledge it. Not really. You can’t let me be human, Jeremiah, because you can’t stand other people, their complexities, their confusions, their needs. That’s why you left them and came to this place, to take care of things, because they are simple and uncomplaining and can be fixed and stay fixed. People aren’t like that. I’m not like that, no matter how much you might like to think I am.” She got up from the table and began to put her new belongings into the pack. “You wish I was because, despite how unbalancing everyone else is, you are still human, and after all these years out in the middle of this sea of grass, you are lonely. You want companionship, but you hate complication. An unbalanced equation, unsolvable. Until you met me and imagined that I might be the answer.” “I’m not lonely!” Jeremiah snapped, suddenly angry. Loni looked at him, ears pricked, as she shut her backpack. “Fine, you’re human, is that what you want to hear? A stupid human, as frustrating as all the other fools out there!” “Then why didn’t you get rid of me when I showed up, like the other roamers?” Loni asked. “Because!” he said. “There was just one of you! And . . . ” And she had fur and a tail and coolant tubes—he shut his mouth. “Because you didn’t see a person in need,” she said. “So you helped me. If you had seen another human, you would have gotten rid of me.” Loni shrugged the backpack on. “People are cruel to each other for many reasons, but one of them is self-defense. We don’t want to be entangled in the unsolvable problems of others when we already have so many of our own. So we ignore them and ignore the pain that doing so causes.” She sighed, pulling in air just to let it out, to make that human sound of frustration. “You drove out the roamers because you saw in them a reflection of yourself, and your issues. You let me stay, because you saw a reflection of Kearney, something you could fix.” Loni dropped her new boots to the floor and stepped into them. “But I’m not a broken clock, a stuck window, a mower with dull blades. I’m human, Jeremiah, and some of the things that make me broken make me me, and they can’t be, shouldn’t be, fixed.” It was stupid, Jeremiah thought. Being broken was messy, was painful, was wrong, and . . . He turned away, staring unseeing at his workshop, neat and organized, stuffed with tools, each one in their place. “I like fixing things.” “You do,” she said. “But I’m not a thing.” He heard her boots against the floor, her claws on the door handle, the low squeak of hinges that needed oil. “Wait,” he said. He went to the bins on one side of the room, pulling out the components he wanted, then turned. She stood in the door, dressed in her hat and boots and dress, backpack slung over her shoulder, like a character from a children’s book, Ms. Otter goes on an Adventure, except her fur was gone, and her skin was clear, and she was all myofiber bundles and coolant tubes and teeth and eyes, an otter flayed into something alien, artificial, monstrous but elegant. “This is a backup battery and a solar charging system,” he said, holding out the components. “They’ll make your pack heavy, but with them you’ll be self-sufficient for . . . ” He shrugged. Pasu Mastercraft did good work. “Years, probably. If you stay away from the buffalo.” She walked back and let him load the things into her pack. When he was done, she looked up at him with her wide brown eyes. “Thank you, Jeremiah. Thank you for everything.” Then she reached out and rested her small, clawed hand on his. “It’s OK to want to fix things. And it’s OK to be frustrated when you can’t. Especially when what you can’t fix is yourself.” Then she took her hand away, and the tap of her boots disappeared as she left the workshop and headed out into the night, the moon stretching her thin shadow out across the streets of Kearney as she walked away from him and into the world. Gary KlosterGary Kloster is a writer, a librarian, a martial arts instructor, and stay-at-home father. Sometimes all in the same day, but seldom all at the same time. He lives in the midwest of the United States, surrounded by corn and beset by cats. His stories have appeared in Analog, Clarkesworld, Escape Pod, Fantasy Magazine, and many others. He has also written a number of books for the Warhammer 40K and Age of Sigmar universes.