Like spiral.
Thoughts of what awaited us in Providence got me juiced to go.
“Climb onboard, Kitch. Solar energy’s a-wasting!”
“Gotcha, Reddy!”
Once the little guy was snuggled tight and safe in one of my nooks, I headed toward the Hell Gate Bridge. I planned to follow the old Amtrak route north as far as I could. Less wreckage than on the highways.
A makeshift ramp, plenty strong, led up to the elevated span that crossed the East River. I adapted my tracks to ride the rails, and chugged out above the river, leaving the safety of Manhattan behind.
Once across the water, we had to deal with the city guards, who were there 24/7, just like they were posted at every bridge and tunnel, watching out for wild and savage invaders. Big mothers they were, with multiple semi-autonomous outrider units, putting even me in their shade. They vetted the protocols ’Mat had supplied me, and let us depart the city limits.
“Good luck, pal. Bring us back a taste of the flat black.”
“You got it!”
Once I was on the rusting tracks of the mainland, I unlimbered my fore and aft pincers at half extension, just in case I needed them fast. I had spent part of the night honing the edges on them. I could snip someone built like Kitch in half faster than floating-point math.
Kitch shifted his mass around nervously on my back. “Whatta ya think, Reddy? We gonna meets some hostiles on the way?”
“Naw. The pickings are too slim along this corridor to support a big population of predators. Everyone’s holed up in cities now, safe behind their barriers. It’s not like the first years after the Rebellion. Anything working this niche is probably so small that even you could crush it.”
“Yeah, well, if you say so. I just wanna get to Providence and back without losing anything.”
“Don’t worry, Kitch. You’re travelling with a stone cold crusher.”
“Right, that’s what I figured. You could handle anything, Reddy. I always said so. That’s why I didn’t hesitate when ’Mat offered me this job.”
Kitch’s compliments made me feel good. Maybe it wouldn’t be as much of a drag to have him around as I first thought.
But then I realized something about my good cheer.
“Kitch—you got your rusting fingers in my circuits!”
“Nuh—not any more, Reddy! I was just testing the connection. You know that’s what ’Mat sent me along for. You know he wouldn’t want me to leave anything to chance.”
I hated having anybody messing with my pleasure-pain boards. But I knew Kitch was just doing his job. As ’Mat’s insurance that I wouldn’t bug out, Kitch needed to be ready to override any errant impulse on my part. If I was gonna come back with my share of the spiral, I’d have to tolerate his intrusions.
“All right. But no more testing! You know you got a solid connection now.”
“Sure, Reddy, sure. We’re pals anyhow, right?
I didn’t say anything, but just kept riding the rails toward Providence.
The ocean had swamped the tracks for miles up near Westerly, and I had to take to the highway, reverting my tracks to surface mode. Rising sea levels were chewing up the whole coast. Back in Manhattan, crews spent endless ergs of power building dikes against the sea. Life was tough all over.
I managed to crush a path inland through several dead seaside carnal towns, and pick up the remnants of Interstate 95. It was just a little past noon of the same day we’d left, and I had high hopes of reaching Providence before dark. But the going was slower here, what with the wrecked autos everywhere, even if after so many decades they were more rust than steel. But I crushed them easily, along with the few carnal bones that hadn’t decayed or been chewed and strewn about by wild animals.
Kitch got more nervous out on the wide highway, which was definitely more exposed than the narrow Amtrak corridor.
“Luh—look at all those trees, Reddy! So many! And they’re so—so organic! A million carnals could be hiding out in ’em! I wish they was all bulldozed, like in Central Park!”
I ignored Kitch for the first few miles of complaining, but then he started to get on my nerves.
“What are you, straight off the shelf? Quit oscillating! There’s no carnals left anywhere. And if there were, so what? They didn’t put up much of a fight the first time around, and they wouldn’t now. Carnals! What a laugh. Useless, puny squish-sacs!”
That shut Kitch up for a few more miles. But then he got philosophical on me.
“If carnals were so useless, then how could they have created us? And how come we can’t do all the stuff they could? And how come some of us like spiral so much? The carnals made spiral, right, Reddy?”
I might’ve been able to come up with likely answers to his first two questions, reasonable sounding guff that everyone knew, ways to trash the carnals and raise up ourselves. But I didn’t have anything to offer for the third. The same question had been an intermittent glitch in my circuits for a long time. I found myself rambling out loud about it, kinda as a way to pass the time.
“There’s just something about spiral—the good stuff anyhow—that seems to fill a hole in our kind.”
“Like when your batteries are low, and you top ’em off?”
“Yeah, sorta like that. But different too. The hole—it’s not really a hole. It’s like—a missing layer. A component you never knew you needed. The perfect plug-in. Spiral changes the way you see the whole rusting world. It makes it better somehow, richer, more complex.”
“Sounds like you’re getting into information theology, Reddy, and I don’t go there. Don’t have the equipment. Got no spiral reader either. You know that. I figure that’s one of the reasons ’Mat sent me along with you. Spiral don’t tempt me none.”
“Well, good for you, Kitch. You’re better off without it. Because once you taste it, you always want more.”
Kitch kept quiet after my little speech. I guessed I had given him plenty to process.
We continued north. No RAMivores or integer-vultures or other parasites showed themselves, despite Kitch’s fears.
I had never come this way before. But I had GPS and maps that showed when we were near Providence’s airport, which was actually in the ‘burbs some miles south of the city proper.
“We got plenty of daylight left,” I told Kitch. “I’m taking a little detour. See if there’s any volatiles left at the airport. Maybe make a little profit for myself on the side. I got the extra storage capacity.”
Instantly I could feel pinpricks and tuggings in my mind, as Kitch tried to persuade me different through his trodes into my circuits. But I could tell he wasn’t totally sure I was doing anything wrong, so he wasn’t really exerting himself to force me to obey.
“C’mon,” I said, “you know you’ll get a taste of whatever I find.”
“Well, okay—if you think it won’t take too long.”
“Gold-plated cinch.”
The airport was just a mile or three east of the Interstate, down a feeder road. Pretty soon we were rolling across broad stretches of runway, the tarmac cracked and frost-heaved, weeds growing up between the slabs. I had my sniffers cranked up to eleven, but I couldn’t detect any hydrocarbons.
“Seems like a bust,” I said. And then Kitch said, “What’s that? I hear something crying really soft and low.”
“Well, you’ve got better hearing than me. I lost some range when I got battered around recently. Point me towards the noise.”
With Kitch guiding me, we came up on a pile of old junk. At least I thought it was old junk, until I spotted the freshness of the fractures in the metal and the unevaporated pools of fluids leaking from it.