This room had a window, and Dad rushed over to it and looked out.
“It’s clear. Let’s go.” He opened the window and motioned to me. There was a large maple tree in front of the window that obscured the view of most of the parking lot, except for the area directly below the window. I climbed up on the sill, and Dad held my hands as he lowered me as far as he could reach. He froze.
Hey Carla! How’s it going?
From across the parking lot came a reply. Oh, hey Jeff. Pretty good. And you?
A hard lump formed in my throat, and I looked up at Dad. His face was bleached white. I mouthed to him, Pull me up! but he shook his head. We both listened, me hanging in the air, him bent out over the windowsill.
I hung there.
Just like before. Years ago.
We listened quietly to the pointless parking-lot banter.
Did you make your quota yet this month? The man’s voice. Jeff. I couldn’t see him, but could hear him from somewhere below me.
Not yet. I’ve got several cases I’m working on, but nothing’s panned out yet. You?
I got one yesterday. A sweet little thing named Amanda. Out in the suburbs.
Lucky. They like the young ones. They’ll give you double credit for that.
Yeah. They already extracted DNA from her last night, and hooked her up to the cortical mapper. Screamed like a banshee when they stuck the needle in her brain, the poor thing.
Aww. It just breaks your heart when the young ones can’t take the pain. The older ones though, okay, I know this is just awful of me, but I get a kick out of watching the work on those ones.
Well, I can’t blame you, figuring all the things they did to us.
The Directors want us to be kinder. More forgiving—whatever that means. But I tell you, I just can’t do it. The screams from the older ones are music to my ears. The woman laughed.
Yeah, this little one we’ve got… we’ve got some interesting tests for her. We found an aunt of hers. This time we’ll make her watch. See what happens. Dr. Dressler thinks the new integrated pulsed guilt algorithm will be ready after the data we get from this run. It seemed to work in beta, but kept on crashing when we tried it on the Rohvlings.
Huh. Well, anyway, I’ve got to get home. Victor hates it when I’m late. And there’s that new show on Fox that starts tonight…
All right. See you tomorrow, Carla.
See ya, Jeff.
I heard a car door slam, and an engine start up. I looked up at Dad. His face was white. Slowly, he pulled me up. When I was up high enough, I lifted my leg over the windowsill and spilled into the room.
“What do we do?” I whispered.
He didn’t answer at first, just stared at the floor. He struggled for words. “I don’t know. We might have to wait until dark to get out.”
“What are they doing?”
Dad just clenched his jaw, shaking his head. “They say that before some of the cities on the east coast fell to the robots, it started like this. Thousands of people disappeared, until finally there was the purge. There must have been a million robots in New York alone before people could escape. People came west, but no one was sure that it was only humans who came. Homeland Security finally wised up and put in those full-body scanners everywhere and tracked the movements of all known robots, but they must be infiltrating us somehow. What are they doing? Who knows?”
I remembered the day when it was all over the news. The cable news shows were all normal since they were mostly shot in New York and were run by robots anyway, so of course they said everything was normal, but all the local stations showed streams of people driving, biking, running frantically out of the cities. And then the online videos that even the local news refused to show—some of them were pretty gruesome.
From then on, in school, I was paranoid not of being retarded, or gay, but of being a robot. That was all anyone talked about. The robots are coming to get us. The robots will kill us all. The robots will take over the world and enslave us all like we enslaved them. If I ever meet a robot I’ll just kill him. And so on. When some of the kids suspected one of the smarter students of being a robot, they jumped him in the hall after school and beat the shit out of him. One time one of them had a pipe and beat the kid’s head with it until his skull cracked. They sent the poor kid to the hospital and he didn’t come back to school for a month. After that, my biggest fear was finding out I was really a robot.
“We need to hide. Come on.” Dad looked up, then stepped up onto a chair and gingerly placed his foot on the table between two plates. He reached up and lifted off a ceiling panel and beckoned to me. I climbed up on the table with him, and he lifted me up to the hole in the ceiling, where I grabbed onto the edges and hoisted myself up. He reached up and grabbed the edges of the ceiling.
The door opened.
Dad immediately dropped back down to the table and grabbed the gun out of his pocket, aiming it at those entering. He fired, and one man collapsed, his chest bleeding. The other man flung himself at Dad, knocking him to the floor. I screamed. The gun went off again and a large chunk of flesh blew out from the man’s back; the bullet passed straight through and lodged in the ceiling, not far from me. The bloody man crumpled onto Dad, and they both lay there on the floor, Dad pinned under the larger dead body. I trembled and struggled for breath, fighting my fear. My throat constricted as I looked toward the door.
A third man stood there. He held a gun, pointed straight at Dad, who was struggling to push the corpse off of him. The man in the doorway looked up at me.
“Should I kill him?”
I shook my head, though my head was now shaking of its own accord anyway. I looked again at Dad, who by now had pushed the body off him, and saw that he was covered in the man’s blood.
“Why not?”
I shook my head again. Dad just looked at the man, his gun still in his hand, but lying on his chest. I saw that the man’s gun was now pointed at me, and Dad was also shaking his head.
“Please.” Dad said quietly.
“Tell me. Why not?”
“Please, no.” Dad trembled.
“I think one of you should die. You killed six of my men. Justice must be served. Now I just need to decide if it will be a greater punishment to kill you, or to make you watch me kill him.” He was speaking to my dad, but inclined his head up to me.
Dad’s jaw shook. “Please no. I’ll do anything you want. Don’t kill him.”
The man pointed the gun back at Dad. “Then tell him to jump down, and I may let him live.”
Dad’s eyes widened. But, hesitantly, he looked up to me and gave a quick nod to tell me to come down. I couldn’t move. I told my muscles to grab the edge and lower myself down, but nothing moved.
“Son. It’s okay. Just come down.” He flashed a weak smile at me, as if he didn’t believe it. “It’ll be all right.”
My mind flashed back to Charlie. Dad had said those exact same words. It’ll be all right.