Oof.Before I could get another thought in, I was on my back. Roger had flown down and pushed my legs out from under me.
“Stay down. Do not allow it to see you,” Roger said, hovering low to the ground.
I rolled to my stomach and turned, hiding behind a plica bush. The robot thing fully emerged above the next hill. “It’s a giant honeybee,” I said, “but with two legs instead of six.”
“Oliver, remain hidden. Do not move unless it approaches. Then run. Do a zigzag pattern if you must run,” Roger said. He buzzed off to the side, disappearing the way we came. He kept low to the ground.
“Roger,” I hissed, but the small hive queen was gone. I returned my attention to the giant robot. I gawked at it through the thick bush. I cursed myself for not bringing my bracelet. I didn’t carry a camera drone with me like Rosita always did, but the bracelet itself had azoom and pop-up-screen function, or I could tap into Roger’s feed and watch from there.
The weird reverse-jointed legs on the robot met at an egg-shaped body that looked too small to hold an actual driver. A long cannon-like device hung on the left side of the body, and a four-pack missile launcher was on the right. Three of the four missile tubes were empty. Multiple antennae rose off the back of the machine.
But strangest of all were the paint job and accessories. It was decorated bright purple and had green spikes down the center of the egg, making it look like it had a Mohawk. Words I couldn’t read at a distance were painted across the front, but the distinctive shape of a penis was crudely drawn on each of the two legs, both pointing upward with little liquid squirts coming out of the top.
A mech,I thought.That’s a goddamn mech.It was just like the ones in a hundred animes and comics and video games that had come with us from Earth. As a kid, I’d spent hours drawing these things or playing one in my game system. I hadn’t known they were real. But what was with that paint job? And what was it doing here in the middle of nowhere? Where had it come from?
Heat waves radiated off the machine, and a line of dirty black smoke chugged out the back as it took a tentative step down the hill. The damaged leg whined ominously.
“There’s nothing here!” a young male voice cried from the machine. Now that it had crested the hill, I could finally understand what it was saying. It had a weird accent. Earth. This was someone from Earth, which was impossible. “You said it would be a target-rich environment! This is bullshit!”
There was a response, but it was muffled like the source of the voice was coming from the same microphone.
“You promised me, Mom. You promised. You’re a fucking bitch.”
There was a sharp retort I couldn’t understand.
“No, you told me I was going to the city. There’s nothing here! You promised. You ruined my birthday.”
The machine turned to the left and the right, the egg shape rotating as it took in the area. A low mechanical yet alien whisper rose from the machine when it moved.
“I can’t get there. It’s too far. Stupid thing is broken. And it reacts slow.”
“…”
“How was I supposed to know that? They messed up the design. You’re gonna have to buy me a new one.”
Another angry response.
A high-pitched piercing wail emanated from the robot, distorting over the speaker. The egg body started bouncing back and forth, whisking as it moved.
It was the kid. He was squealing.
What the hell?
Chapter 3
Ifinally realized what I was seeing and hearing. This machine was being controlled remotely. Controlled by a child. A child who was still on Earth. And for some inexplicable reason, the kid was arguing with his mother over a loudspeaker.
My eyes instinctively moved to the sky. The gate. I couldn’t see it, but it was up there. One needed a telescope to be able to see it, and even then, it was visible only at night. I’d been looking at it my whole life. My grandfather had had a telescope nest sitting on top of the barn. He’d made us look at the gate dozens of times over the years. Sometimes if we watched long enough, we could see the drones zipping about up there, piecing the gate together. We’d sit on the roof and eat Popsicles, and he’d tell us stories about Earth, even though he’d never been there, either.
It took us 133 years to reach New Sonora, fifty years to open the pinhole, and the colony will be sixty-five to seventy years old when the gate’s construction is finished. When it finally opens and reconnects us with home, everything is going to change.
He’d lived to see the pinhole open, but he’d died before the real transfer gate had finally turned on last year. The Earth–New Sonorantransfer gate had powered on and stabilized 201 years after the fifteen generation ships had left Earth’s orbit, seeking out a new home.
I was still waiting for the big change. The pinhole—the microscopic gate that allowed information but nothing else through—had been open for almost twenty years. It had limited bandwidth, but we’d had access to instant news and communication and media from Earth for the majority of my life.
The original settlers had had a library of Earth media, from books to movies to games. My grandfather had been a big fan of old twentieth-century cowboy movies. I personally liked comics and video games. When the pinhole opened, we’d gotten access to a lot of the new stuff, and it really wasn’t that different from the older stuff we’d seen already. It was almost like progress had stalled once people started fleeing the planet.
It’d been two hundred years since we’d left, and even speech patterns were mostly the same. Movies were the same, especially now that the law made it so AI depictions of humans were illegal. Comics were the same. Games were the same. The only difference was the graphics, and we didn’t have access to the full-immersion rigs that had been gaining popularity in recent years on Earth.
