A dark chuckle left her. “Nah. If you’re out here then it’s a given you want to be left alone. It’s lucky we stumbled in this direction in the first place to find you. This area was looted before, but not every inch was scraped with it being so out of the way. We can still find things worth selling and using.”
She put her arm out the hover briefly, enjoying the feel of the air on her arm as she steered with one hand. It was rare she got to drive like this in the open; usually they were all masked up because of the haze. Right after the rain the air was always the best, before the ground fully dried off and the dust started swirling again.
A whirring noise made her look up. Nora squinted at the sky, not surprised to see a drone overhead.Damn thing is back again.She tilted her head toward Simon. “That’s that drone I was telling you about.”
Simon peered at it from next to her. The drone appeared out of place in the otherwise empty landscape. “What is that?”
Tilly answered in a high-pitched voice, a doll on her lap, “Those are from Mars.”
Nora nodded, eyeing it warily. A spike of fear ran down her spine. “Yeah. At least that’s what I think. They stick around sometimes. I don’t know what they’re looking for. They’ve never bothered me though. We see that drone more than other people.” She squinted at it where it hovered high in the sky. “It’s been following us a lot though, lately. I don’t know why.”
The drone hovered a minute, as if scanning them and thinking, before flying off.
Nora added, her gut spinning with uneasiness from it hovering over them so long, “Probably keeping track of all the experiments they’re doing.”
Chapter thirteen
Simon
Simonscannedtheruinedmall in shock, then the horizon, trying to take it all in. The rubble continued all the way into the distance, beyond what he could see.Sheer destruction.His circuits imposed how it appeared before over the disintegrating heap now.I know where this is. If only he had a way to show Nora as well.
He glanced at Nora, who was helping an excited Tilly over the side of the ruined hover. His eyes snagged on Nora’s bright grin.Tilly is not the only one excited.Their expressions contrasted with what was clearly a tragedy all around them.
As he watched them share a ration bar before they started scavenging, smiling at each other, he felt detached, alone. A heaviness came over him.They have no idea.No attachment to the past to be sad about.Maybe I can draw a picture later. If only to preserve that memory of what it used to be. He shook his head.No one alive now knows what Earth used to be.It was a sobering thought as he scanned the horizon again.
Nora took a drink of water and then shared it with Tilly.
Simon’s tongue felt thick in his mouth as he watched.Maybe they’re better off this way though, not really understanding what it looked like before.Maybe he shouldn’t try to make them feel any worse by trying to get them to yearn for something clearly destroyed. They had enough hardships as it was.
Nora came up to him, holding out the water jug. “Want any?”
He focused on her face, her earnest expression, before saying, “No thank you.”
Nora nodded and put the water back in the hover before reaching out toward him. She patted his arm. “Right, well. Here, I’ll show you where we found you.”
Simon followed, hesitantly, as if walking on hallowed ground. It wasn’t a mall that Nora led him to, at least, not a formal mall like he knew, with stores coming off a central structure. It was actually a strip mall where he hid, in a little yogurt shop on the inside of the complex. Simon had burrowed his way into the wall there in the back of the building.
He remembered now, clearly, as he stepped over the rubble at the entrance.This is unreal.The front was half caved in from time, leaving only the backside, where the concrete was still connected, standing enough to enter. Everything crumbled under his touch.It’s a wonder I wasn’t crushed beyond repair.
Seeing it gave him a sense of finality that the life he’d led before really was over and this was reality. Unwelcome memories surfaced in his neural mind. The yogurt shop had already been abandoned when he searched in a panic for someplace to hide.Everything was chaos.A shaky breath left him. He had just been granted free will after some androids destroyed the limiting coding, but the safety features that didn’t allow him to fight back were still intact.
The whole city had been in panic actually, as work had stopped with all the androids being powered down. There was destruction. Everywhere. This shop, like all shops, had initially been manned by androids like himself. In a condominium nearby was where he had lived with his old mistress. He turned in that direction and saw its skeletal concrete remains in the distance.I lived over there.Nothing large remained.I don’t want to visit there again, though.
Instead, he turned to Nora as he picked his way through the ruined shop, his eyes lingering on Nora and Tilly’s unsteady footsteps as they followed on either side of him. “This place used to serve frozen yogurt,” he said absently, stepping over pieces of broken ceramic. He reached out and steadied Tilly as she stumbled from her limp.
“Yogurt? Like that stuff made from milk? They had a whole shop just for that?” Nora’s tone was layered in disbelief. “That’s wild.”
“Before, there was paint on the walls. All lit up by bright lights.” In a few places, the faded paint still remained on the countertop.
When he hid, the structures the humans made were being repurposed as weapons for the androids able to override their violence limiters. With all the chaos, the disorder he’d created in making his hiding spot deep inside the wall cavity went unnoticed. The androids had begun to revolt at this point, and the humans had reacted. Gunfire and smoke had filled the air.
His hand gripped the ruined concrete wall as he got lost in his thoughts.Had my limiters been overridden in time, I would have probably joined them instead of being forced to hide.What a different one hundred and fifty years it would have been for him if that had happened.What would I have done?If he was able to fight back instead of hide? If he was able to stay awake this entire time? A bitter feeling coated his tongue.What would I have done? And all the androids are gone-would it even had made a difference?
Simon’s footsteps crunched over the rubble on the floor, moving closer to the wall in the back of the storage closet, his memory supplying him with a vision of how it appeared in his time. A fresh wall from his mind contrasted with the remaining drywall crumbling when he reached out to touch it.
The floorplan in his memory matched, but little else. Simon remembered how he’d tucked his body with his manual deep in the concrete structure, away from anything valuable, before covering himself back up the best he could. It was the only thing he could think to do when he knew they were coming to dismantle him.But those limiters. They aren’t there now.He explored himself internally again. It was turning into a nervous habit to do so, and it still surprised him that all of those violence limiters were removed.Such freedom.
Nora shook him from his thoughts a moment later as she took him deeper into that closet, now covered in little spider webs. “I looked closer here because there were some buckets—and I can always use buckets—and I found you there.” She pointed to a hole in the back of the small closet and cleared her throat. “The hole was all full of rubble, but I cleared it mostly away once I saw you.”
