The sky grew darker, and Danielbot wondered if his power had run out and all his borrowed memories come to an end. But it was one of the guards, all jack boots and medals, leaning over him, blocking out the sun.
“You think you’re a man of leisure, do you? Worthless piece of shit! Up, up! Time for exercise!”
What time was he in? Then he realized he was alive in both worlds. He joined a group of prisoners being forced to do push-ups, then jumping jacks, then running in place. Their flesh flashed to metal and then back to flesh again. Anyone refusing to cooperate was struck across the face, beaten to the ground. These abuses did not hurt his metal framework, but when the metal vanished and he was covered by a memory of skin, he was in agony. Deliberate misery was the rule of the day here, the strategy and the religion.
He could no longer tell anyone’s age here. Most had been reduced to children of seventy, seventy-five pounds. They had become playthings, cures for the soldiers’ boredom.
Still, some looked younger than the others. Not children anymore, but not yet adults. He thought he felt saddest for them, the ones who would never live long enough to have a story to tell.
But at some base level they all looked the same. They learned quickly. Hide yourself. Don’t speak up. Eat when you can. Wash and dress yourself as cleanly as you can. And if you passed blood you were among the dying.
Some wanted to go into the hospital. They thought it would be easier for them there. Sometimes the patients would drop an extra crumb from a window for some poor soul waiting outside. But late at night from the hospital basement windows you could hear the screams. Because in there they ran tubes into you. They froze you, burned you, cut and cut and sewed. Outside you died by starvation and beatings. In the hospital you died by syringe.
“We need these shelters moved to the other side of the roof!”
These rickety configurations of boards and bricks and bits of canvas connected by odd metal strips looked more like art installations than any form of shelter, but the bots had no choice. When the shelters fell apart, as was inevitable, one bot was picked at random to receive shots of the electrical rifle charges until it smoked into immobility. Danielbot wasn’t sure this was the same as termination, but no bot ever came back from it.
If a bot fell it was shot. If a bot refused it was shot. If a bot talked back it was shot. Some got back up after these punishments, some did not. Sometimes a bot was charged into a smoking ruin to let the others know that non-existence might come at any moment, without warning.
He woke up once in the dark, the sky moonless and starless, the only light the red reflection from distant fires. He sat up, gazed at all the recumbent forms—skulls in shadow, dark torsos, arms, legs. He could almost imagine himself human again, a real person again. A sudden yellow flare shimmered on the horizon in the direction of the city. Then the clouds moved and exposed a huge gibbous moon, one edge worn off.
Several bodies lay in the mud outside the prisoner’s barracks. Two ragged, shambling figures dragged another one out to add to the pile.
The prisoners on grave detail were ordered to call them figures or dolls, never corpses. There were serious consequences if you failed to follow orders, if you used the wrong words or told the ones arriving what was about to happen to them. The guards might throw you into the ovens alive.
Once he saw some soldiers toss a crying baby into the air and use it as target practice. After this he believed that if he were ever to leave this place he would not leave asa human being.
He shook his head. The memory floated away. White robot eyes stared at him from a distant part of the roof—someone else was up. Then the woods closed in, and those eyes became stark white animal eyes, glowing in the light from the moon. Tall trees had grown up on either side, obscuring the distant ruins, the sky, the edges of the roof. A wide path lay between the two masses of trees, extending as far as he could see, past the roof’s edge, and into nothing. It was what the Jews in the concentration camps had called the Road to Heaven.
He was still gazing into this hazy vision of the road when the dawn came. Phantasmal strands of barbed wire floated in the morning air, insubstantial as grass stalk and dandelion, until they solidified into metal. The low wooden barracks on the other side was bathed in snail-gray mist. This morning the air tasted of the dead. A naked body, and another, perhaps three, had crawled out during the night to join the bodies that already lay unmoving in the mud. Danielbot moved his arm forward and waved. The metal arm passed through the barbed wire, and the scene dissolved into one of a sprawl of mechanical men who did not need to sleep, but who slept anyway, out of choice or because their artificial brains no longer functioned. Some of the bots were leaking, dark stains spreading through the roof gravel.
More objects gradually manifested in his vision of the morning: the piles of suitcases and other possessions the Jews had been forced to abandon when they disembarked, the clothes piled thirty feet high. He saw the train empty, all the thousands forced down the road, and hours later he saw no one. None of those people came back.
Heat blasted his face. He was beyond weary. He looked down at his hands, covered in blood and grime. He threw another small form into the oven: a precious doll. Well-nourished corpses were burned with emaciated ones—for economy of time and saving fuel. It required a great deal of trial and error to find the most efficient combination. If he focused on the mechanics, the science of his job, he didn’t have to think about what he was being made to do.
Several bots staggered their way up the ascension, the last road to the gas chamber, their shiny brain domes like shaved heads. They’d been here long enough to lose most of their fat, their flesh. They were like a cartoon of skeletons on their exhausted march, a silly jazz track playing in the background. Some of them disappeared then, having stepped off the edge of the roof.
Intruding into Danielbot’s awareness like something he’d intended to remember: the devil was on his way to Ubo. The God of Mayhem was busying himself setting fires in a frenzy of excitement. Hardly able to contain himself, he’d begun to see the possibility of bringing the whole world down in flames. The sky turned a smoky red. He could hardly wait to find a boat and make his way to Ubo, like Charon crossing the river Styx.
Their shiny metal bodies, their translucent plastic parts, melting, burning with a white heat until not just their minds but their faces were gone.
Gone up the chimney and filling the late afternoon sky: all the memories, all the faces, the voices, all those who had disappeared from the planet.
Danielbot folded himself up on the rooftop. All this had happened less than twenty years before Daniel was born. How was it possible? Perhaps it was only history, but history was, in the end, a very small place. It was a foul history the entire planet owned.
He thought he saw Gordon running through the field, his small, broken heart forgotten. He stood up and tried to follow him with his eyes. Then he saw the boy on the rooftop, poking at the dead bird. Then the boy stood up, and took the knife from Happy Jack, and began slashing his way through his mother’s womb.
A transparent train roared across the roof, its cattle cars loaded with masses of people standing, so close together they had to hold their arms over their heads, the sick and the babies underfoot, cooking in the heat and filth, unable to breathe. He glanced at the boy, whose gaze also was locked on the train. The boy looked at him and drew his finger across his neck.
“Lie down! All of you, hit the roof! Be still!” The guards were shouting, forcing the bots who were still on their feet to stretch out on the gravel. Danielbot hadn’t seen exactly what happened, but apparently several bots were accused of grabbing the guards’ electric rifles and they now lay in piles of smoking ruin. Again Danielbot wished he had the power to close his eyes, and settled for imagining himself lying in the darkness instead. Sometimes he cried but nothing came out, of course. The tears stayed there, invisible marks on his metal skin.