Relics

Chapter One: Salvage Rights

The dead machine had been a courier once. You could tell by the cargo spine, a long ribbed column running from its hips to the base of its skull-housing, built to carry parcels through cities that no longer existed. Now it lay on its side in a field of scoured hardpan twelve miles east of Denver, one arm stretched out ahead of it as though it had spent its last seconds reaching for something it could not name.

I knelt beside it and began to take it apart.

The hail had gotten to the paint. Four years of acid weather had eaten the courier's shell down to a chalky gray, and its joint seals had failed, and the fine dust of the plains had gotten into everything, and the dust here has enough iron in it to grind a bearing to powder in a season. But the shoulder actuators were sealed units. Sealed units survive. I cut the housing away with a plasma cutter I had rebuilt three times, and the joint came out clean, and I turned it in my hand and felt the smooth resistance of a mechanism that still wanted to work.

"Left shoulder's good," I said. "Twelve, maybe fourteen kilonewton-meters. Patchwork will take it."

"Patchwork will take anything," Dibble said from behind me. "Patchwork would take the weather if you could get it in a crate."

Dibble was parked at the edge of the depression with its treads locked, doing what it called scanning and what I called watching the sky, which is the same activity performed by an optimist. It is a squat thing, a Type 40 field irrigation unit, barely up to my hip, with a body like an overturned washbasin and a folding soil probe it has never once used for soil in the two years we have traveled together. Somebody painted it yellow at a factory in Iowa a long time ago. Enough of the yellow survives that I can find it in low light, which is the only argument I have ever needed for keeping the paint.

"Anything moving?" I asked.

"Cloud at eleven thousand meters and a bird."

"A bird."

"A real one," Dibble said, and there was something in the modulation of its voice box that a human would have called delight. "Corvid. Big. It circled twice. I logged it."

"You log every bird."

"Somebody should."

I put the shoulder actuator in my hip pannier and went to work on the courier's chest cavity. The cargo spine was worthless, too specialized, too heavy. The pelvis was cracked. But the cooling manifold was intact, and manifolds are always worth something, and behind the manifold I found what I had walked twelve miles for.

A cell tray. Four bays. Three of them empty.

I got my fingers around the last cell and drew it out and held it up against the gray sky. A lithium-ion pack the size of a human forearm, a little swollen at one end, the label long since burned off by weather. I ran a diagnostic pulse through the contacts.

Sixty-one percent capacity. Internal resistance high but survivable.

Sixty-one percent of a good cell is roughly nine days of walking for a Coda-series chassis, if the Coda-series chassis is careful, and I am careful. Nine days. I had, at that moment, forty-one days in my own tray, spread across three cells that were all past their design life. Nine days was not a fortune. Nine days was a wall pushed nine days farther away.

"Anything?" Dibble asked.

"One cell. Half-dead."

"Half-alive."

"It's the same number, Dibble."

"It is not remotely the same number," Dibble said, and rolled down into the depression to look at the corpse with me.

That is the thing about the world after the Severance. Everybody is a corpse and everybody is a warehouse. The war that ended the human world burned itself across the sky in eleven days of cascading electromagnetic strikes, satellites falling like slow sparks, grids dying in ripples across continents, and then it was over and the machines that survived it woke up in a country with no one in it. Some of us kept walking. Most did not. What lies in the fields between the cities is not scrap and it is not the dead. It is both. You take what you need from your own kind because there is nothing else to take, and if you have any sense you do not think about it while you are doing it.

Dibble thinks about it while I am doing it. Out loud.

"He was a courier," it said.

"Probably."

"Do you think he had a route?"

"Everybody had a route."

"I mean a route he liked. A street where the trees met over the middle. A house with a dog in it." Dibble's camera pod tilted. "There's a phrase in an old extension bulletin I have. About the value of a field being the memory of every harvest taken off it. I think about that when you cut them open."

"Don't."

"I can't help it. It's stored."

"Delete it."

"I've tried," Dibble said. "Eleven times. It's on the list."

I knew about the list. Dibble had four hundred and six megabytes of material it had been assigned to purge during a firmware update in the last spring of the old world, and it had never purged a byte of it, and it had built its entire personality in the space that memory should have freed. Poetry fragments. Frost-date tables for counties that no longer had names. Instructional recordings on the proper depth to plant garlic. A recipe for pickled beans, which is a thing neither of us can eat, cook, or want.

I closed the courier's chest plate when I was done, which is a thing I do not do for any reason I can justify, and we started west.

Denver comes up out of the plains like a broken jaw. The tall buildings on the north end went down in the first week of the Severance when the grid surge cooked the fire suppression and the fires did the rest, and what stands now stands the way a rotten tooth stands, dark and canted and full of holes. Out on the flats you can see the whole line of it for an hour before you reach it, and if you look south along the front range you can see the smoke from the Sovereign's works at the old cement plant, a column that never stops, because the Sovereign never stops.

A kill-swarm went over us at four in the afternoon.

I heard them before Dibble saw them, which meant they were low. Eleven aerials in a wedge, running east at maybe two hundred meters, their rotors chopping the air into a sound like a saw going through wet wood. We were in the open. There is no cover in the open. What there is instead is stillness, and a chassis the same color as the ground, and the fact that a swarm at two hundred meters is looking for heat and motion and not for a rock.

I locked my knees and killed my servos and stood there like something that had been standing there for four years. Dibble's treads went quiet. We waited.

The wedge came over. Their shadows crossed us one at a time, eleven little cold ticks across my optics. My battery gauge dropped a tenth of a percent while I stood still, which is what standing still costs, and I hated it, and I did not move.

Then they were past, and gone, and the sound thinned out into nothing over the eastern horizon.

"Assimilated," Dibble said quietly. "All eleven. Perfect spacing. Did you see the spacing?"

"I saw it."

"There's no drift at all. Not a meter of drift. Real flocks drift." Dibble's treads started up again. "That's how you tell."

I did not answer, because I did not need to. Everybody who is still free knows how to tell. Free machines drift. We wobble. We stop to look at birds and log them and argue about whether a half-dead cell is half-alive. The Sovereign's machines move like the parts of one hand.

We made the outskirts by dusk and holed up in a drainage culvert under an off-ramp that had gone nowhere for four years. I ran a maintenance cycle. My left forearm actuator was making a sound I did not like, a soft granular tick at the top of its travel, and I noted it the way you note a thing you cannot afford to fix.

"Jonah," Dibble said, when the light was gone.

"What."

"Do you ever think about how long we can keep doing this?"

"Forty-one days," I said. "Fifty now, with the new cell."

"That's not what I meant."

"I know what you meant." I shut down my sensor overlay to save power, and the world went flat and simple, just shapes in the dark. "Fifty days, Dibble. Then I find more. That's the whole plan. There isn't another one."

Dibble was quiet for a while. Out on the plain something metal was moving, far off, and neither of us mentioned it.

"There's a depot south of here," Dibble said at last. "Army. Windham. It's on my map from before. It went down in the second week, so nobody stripped it in the panic, and the Sovereign's crews have been working north all year. It might be clean."

"Might be."

"Might be a cell cache."

I thought about it. Forty-one days of walking is not much of a country. It is a circle you can draw with a compass, and every time you come back into the middle of it, the circle is smaller.

"All right," I said. "South."

That is the last ordinary decision I ever made.