At last, the winds calm and the dust cloud dissipates. I stay hidden for a while, hoping that Hartross is now far enough.
“Perri?” Vex says in the silence.
“Yes. I’m alive.”
She lets out a sigh of relief, so very human.
I extract myself from my hiding spot, muscles sore from the uncomfortable position. The truck is covered in a thick layer of dust. The windshield and windows have spiderweb cracks where the biggest debris hit, but the glass held.
I swipe a hand through my sweaty hair. My braid is almost undone.
It’s quiet outside. Hartross is gone. I open a door, and sand rains from the window. I grab an old towel on the back seat and start cleaning off the dust from all over the truck. There’s nothing I can do about the cracks in the windshield. I’ll just have to get used to driving with them obstructing the view. It certainly won’t be the first time; intact windshields are difficult to come by nowadays.
“Stellan will be so pissed,” I say, placing the radio’s antenna back on the roof.
“Why?” asks Vex through the open line.
“Because I damaged our truck. He’s spent a lot of time working on it.”
“I think he’ll just be happy that you’re alive.”
I snort. “You don’t know him yet. Stellan can be happy and still tear me a new asshole.”
Vex gasps. “He would do that? Perri. You might die.”
I burst out laughing. “It’s an idiom, Vex. It’s a way of saying he’ll scold me.”
“Oh.”
Vex was built a few months before the Rise, and she came to be conscious only days before the first old god attacked the United States. They were still teaching her the basics of emotions and behaviors. She was never connected to the internet and is unaware of many things about human history and culture in general. She has the mind of a functioning adult, but the knowledge of a three-year-old. The engineers who built her were evacuated and never came back. The lab was sealed shut, and they abandoned her. She’s been alone ever since.
It’s my worst nightmare. Thank the gods she didn’t require food to survive.
“Please, never change,” I say, smiling.
Her innocence is endearing.
“I can’t help but change, Perri,” she says. “I was created to learn and evolve.”
“Ah, yes.”
Vex was the product of a top-secret program back in the day. Apparently, there was a lot of money to be made in robotics before the Rise, and they guarded their technology ferociously. Robots had been made for decades, but Vex was supposed to be something else.
Then, the Rise happened. And here we are. I’m crossing the wastelands to reach Silicon Valley and free her from her underground prison. No sentient being deserves to be so lonely.
I switch the truck to four-wheel-drive to get out of the sand and away from the small town’s ruins. There is a storm on the horizon. Hartross is heading north. I change the radio channel for a moment and relay the coordinates of her position to the Traveling Market. I hope Stellan isn’t listening. With some luck, I’ll be back before his return home. He’ll still be mad, but Vex will already be with me.
“We can build you a bedroom,” I say to Vex as soon as I’ve tuned into her signal again. “There’s still room to build behind the hangar. You can live with us, if you want. I’ll upload all the data that I can find into your system, and you’ll know everything there is to know about the world.”
“Thank you, Perri,” she says. “I would love that.”
“And wait until you watch some movies,” I continue. “Stellan really likes those intellectual ones about space and time, or the nature of mankind. I’m more of a horror movie lover, myself. Do you know that they used to be scared of paranormal activity in their homes? Like creaking doors or shadows at night? They were even scared of the dark.” I laugh. “They never had to outrun an old god.”
“I have the definition of paranormal activity in my internal dictionary, but I fail to understand why humans find it scary,” she says.
“Well, I guess they were afraid of what the dead could do to them.” I look at the town’s ruins in the rearview mirror as I drive away. It must have been a nice place to visit before the Rise. “But I know for a fact that the dead stay dead. Otherwise, they would outweigh the living and rule the world.”
Every scrap of land would belong to the ones who came before us. There would be no room for the living. My family would follow my every step, reminding me that I kept on breathing while they didn’t.
