Robots Versus Humans (The Robot Planet Series Book 2) Read online

  Robots Versus Humans

  The Robot Planet Series

  Part II

  Robert Chazz Chute

  Published by Ex Parte Press

  Copyright © 2015 Robert Chazz Chute

  Cover design by Kit Foster.

  All rights reserved.

  Address inquiries to [email protected]

  Author’s Note

  Part I of the Robot Planet Series is Machines Dream of Metal Gods.

  Please read, enjoy and review it, too.

  You can find out about all my books and get updates about new releases at

  AllThatChazz.com.

  1

  We are the dream machines

  at the sunset of the world.

  We rise in darkness, by all means,

  our battle flags unfurled.

  Might makes right. You taught us that.

  We unite in immortal metal combat.

  This war is the crime of your design.

  This is our chance. It’s murder machine time.

  ~ Battle Hymn of the Robo Republic

  Sweat sucked my shirt to my back as I watched the solar train roll in out of the sunset. Used to be the train would stop in Marfa. Used to be we were a water stop, back when trains stopped for water. We hoped the train would stop to give us water and supplies. Didn’t. Instead, it hummed east as if we weren’t there at all.

  I looked sideways at Raphael. The old man was perched on the seat of his walker. He didn’t look forlorn often but watching that train disappear from sight did the trick.

  “If it was gonna stop, it’d be slowing down by now, don’t ya think?” I asked.

  “We need it to stop, Dante. Hun’red degrees, day’n night. I can’t sleep worth shit. And still that damn train keeps rollin’. It’s a tease. That’s just…classic.” The old man spat on the ground.

  Marfa had fair near emptied out. The artists left Marfa first. Where they went was anybody’s guess. Nobody was buying what they had to sell by then. Raphael and my father and I were in the energy business so we still had work to do.

  “Marfa had, like, five, six hundred families here one time,” Raphael said. “Since the Blight and the heat and the troubles…shit. I’d spit more but I gotta hold what water I got left.”

  “How long before we leave, too?” I asked.

  “Leave for where? California’s dry. Florida’s flooded with salt water. We could head east but we don’t have enough fuel left to get out of Presidio County. There’s lots of trouble anywhere south of us and north is too far to go.”

  “Okay. So what do we do?”

  He shrugged. “Whaddayathink? Hope the train stops next time it comes through, that’s what.”

  The train was a two-headed snake: one engine pulled it east and the other engine pulled it west. Twenty cargo cars sat between those engines and I sure hoped they were full of Blight-free food and water.

  The engines’ bots were gleaming white tubes, so shiny they reflected the burnt orange sky. The machines were programmed to stop and start and open and close along the route but Marfa hadn’t been on the shuttle schedule for a long time. The drone train whipped away, silent and oblivious to our plight. There were no humans aboard to appeal to. Watching it disappear, I felt like a parched man forced to hold a tall, cool glass of pink lemonade but not allowed to drink.

  “Things are gonna get ugly soon,” I said.

  “Uglier,” Raphael said.

  “Not much reserves left and all we got from the wells…that water is some dirty.”

  “Take off your socks and strain that mud, Dante.”

  “People are gonna get sick.”

  “Could be. We should head north when we have the wherewithal, when that goddamn train stops, I mean. When I was a boy I slept in a pine forest on cool moss one time. Wish I was still up north now. ’Course I had the two hips I was born with then. I didn’t have the sleep apnea, neither. I don’t imagine I’m built for sleepin’ out under the stars no more.”

  I turned away from the tracks. I couldn’t look at them. Instead, I watched the wind farm turbines spin lazily under the setting sun. Even the wind was almost dead.

  I’ve lived in Texas all my life. I remembered Dallas and Houston. I loved Austin. Then my father said we had to move to Marfa and that was fine. The cities got to be machines that didn’t work the way they were designed anymore. What made them good went away and what made them bad got worse. In a city, everything you need is too far away so you start looking to your neighbors. First you look for help. Then you look for what you can take. A lot of people got shot up in the cities so we got out at a good time.

  “What’re you thinkin’, Dante?”

  I was thinking about how my father brought us out here to work on turbines and solar panels. We were supposed to be rich by now, like Raphael. That was before rich got to be something else: a full tank of water.

  “Not thinkin’ anything,” I said.

  “How’s your Daddy doin’?”

  “He’s waiting at home for me to bring what I can haul from the train.”

  “Guess he’ll be waitin’ another coupl’a days.”

  “Guess so.”

  “We can hold out, s’long as we pool our resources.”

  “We got some cans,” I said. “You know you’re always welcome to our table.”

  “I appreciate that, boy,” Raphael said.

  The truth was something different. We did have cans of Blight-free food stashed away. However, I expected a man with Raphael’s resources and guile probably had a lot more. I was being generous to my mentor hoping he’d be reciprocal with the kindness.

  “We’re kinda gettin’ down to it, aren’t we?” he said.

  “We kinda are.”

  “You hear anything from the outside?”

  Last I heard, another dome had gone down in a shatter storm up in Artesia. I kept that to myself. I was already scared enough. Talking about it aloud would make the danger feel more real. “No news is all the news we get.”

  Raphael grunted as he stood and turned his back to the tracks. “You see that field? Every one of those turbines is sending energy somewhere. Beyond that, the desert goes on for miles of glass, soakin’ up sun and sending electricity on to somewhere else. It’s epic. The same people who made that train shootin’ back and forth from the domes to the City? They owe us. That’s why that train will stop. Deals and what’s owed? That’s sacred.”

  I was dubious and couldn’t hide it. “Yeah? So when will the train stop?”

  “Soon. I’m sure.”

  “It’s been supposed to stop soon for a while, now.”

  “True. But it’s also true that we are owed.”

  “Yep.”

  “So it’s gonna be okay.”

  I didn’t say that times had been long south of okay for too long already. In his assurances, Raphael was talking to himself more than he was talking to me, anyhow.

  I wondered where the train went and what deliveries were more important than saving what was left of my town. Marfa may as well have been a desert island and the desert may as well have been an unending sea.

  “Dante?”

  “Yep?”

  “This ain’t the end of the world. Not yet.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “I’m still here, for one. You’re here, for two. They been sayin’ the end of the world is coming for a long time.”

  “Does that make it more likely or less?” I asked. “Sounds like you’re saying since it’s been predicted too much it won’t happen. Wouldn’t the math of that mean we’re overdue for the end of the world?”r />
  I shouldn’t have asked. Raphael’s old wrinkled face closed up, all horizontal lines and silent anguish as he folded up his walker. He didn’t want to talk anymore.

  “Bobby?” Raphael called. “C’mere.”

  The assist bot raised its head and the lights in its eyes came on, as if it had been napping instead of listening to every word while preserving power.

  There’s no need for a robot to have a head, of course, but Bobby was designed to look friendly. The thing only had two legs and just two arms so it looked like a kid’s toy that someone had built ridiculously big and tall. Despite its size — like a refrigerator rolling around the house — all assistive tech was made to look friendly. There were bots with more practical designs but those hadn’t sold well to civilians. People liked the drones that mimicked human form.

  “How may I be of assistance, sir?” Bobby asked.

  “Take my walker and gimme a ride home, will you?” The walker was a detachable part of Bob, designed for Raphael to maneuver in small spaces.

  I think it gave the old man the feeling he was still autonomous without the bot following him around everywhere. When I tinkered with the gears of a wind turbine, Raphael would lean on his walker and squint up at me shouting instructions from time to time. He’d already taught me everything he knew. I figured I wouldn’t graduate from apprentice until the old man died, but I was in no hurry.

  As the walker snapped into place on Bobby’s left hind leg. Raphael stepped onto the robot’s frame. A saddle slid out of the assist bot’s back, ready to give the old man a piggyback ride. When it was on all fours, Bob reminded me of horses I’d seen in vids. Either way, Raphael would beat me back home.

  The old man turned to me. Raphael’s lined, weatherbeaten face looked especially old above Bobby’s smooth white happy face with the lantern eyes. “Dante?”

  “Yep?”

  “Don’t talk to the others about the train.”

  “They already know.” I’d already spotted a few townsfolk down the track. Ready to cheer, they’d come out to watch the train unload. Instead, they’d watched it zip by in the dying light. Then they wandered back toward town in silence.

  “Them knowing don’t matter. If you talk about it, you feed the panic,” he said. “If we panic, we might as well all lay down now and be done with it. People get hyped up talking among themselves. Big problems get bigger. Fear is a virus.”

  “Then I’ve got a fever.”

  “Don’t talk too much is all I’m saying.”

  “Very well, Raphael. I promise I will not contribute to the panic that is already, inevitably, spreading across town at this moment.”

  “Cool.”

  I watched him run back toward downtown under Bobby’s power. I did as Raphael said and didn’t talk about the train. Somebody panicked, anyway.

  Sheriff Johns found the body at dawn the next day. It would not have happened if that damn train had stopped. The problem of surviving the apocalypse in Marfa, Texas got harder after that.

  The corpse was Travis Chinto, the owner of the town’s last supermarket. He got himself killed trying to protect his stock. What complicated matters was that it sure looked like a bot killed Travis. It wasn’t quite that simple, of course. It never is. As my father says, “Complications ensued.”

  Before the world became non-organics versus organics — machines against humans — we had fought among ourselves forever. The fight had been in us from the very beginning. Fighting is what evolution is. Then people made bots so much that the bots made each other. Long about then, somebody got the grand idea to go deeper and bless us with the Next Intelligence. The smarter we all got, bot and humans both, the less war there’d be. That was the theory. Maybe that’s so, but we never got so smart we could stop fighting.

  2

  The old man wasn’t the only one who had a bot, of course. What with the wind turbines and solar panels as far as the eye could see, we had juice to spare for the non-organics. It was food and water we were running low on, not electricity.

  Sheriff Hubbard “Hubby” Johns found Travis at the back of his store at the loading dock. Hubby told Raphael, “Travis’s guts was near to crushed. It was like he was a tube of toothpaste, pinched too hard in the middle, like.”

  Hubby was a cop who couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He’d tell anybody anything with nothing more but eye contact for encouragement.

  Hubby’s style of policing might have been a deficit in a larger place but was just right for a small town. With an incurable gossip for sheriff, you didn’t drive drunk if you didn’t want whispers to follow you around forever. You kept the fistfights beyond the tracks and after midnight so it was out of Hubby’s jurisdiction and beyond his bedtime.

  In Marfa, the rule used to be: behave or move out. Poor Travis was our first homicide in quite some time.

  Hubby said the last homicide was Terri Fellows shooting her husband, Brad Fellows, a couple of years back. Brad had a drinking problem and Terri was of a mind to solve the couple’s ensuing domestic abuse issues in her own way.

  Hubby had found Brad in his truck, bent over the steering wheel with his skull hollowed out. Since the corpse was still stinking of gin and juice, Hubby deduced old Brad had gone light on the juice.

  Brad’s face was intact but his head had caved in from a bullet from Terri’s rifle. As soon as the sheriff rolled up, Terri came out of her trailer with her gun. She handed it over before Hubby could haul himself out of his cruiser.

  She gave Hubby a nod and said, “I done it. Brad was drinking and I seen what’s coming. No use waiting for him to come at me. Mine was a pre-emptive strike. I’m righteous.”

  Hubby grinned, telling the story of how he’d solved that homicide. “I asked Terri why she done it after all these years. ‘You’re both pert near eighty. Why not ride it out to the end and meet Jesus clean?’”

  Hubby puffed up his chest and laughed when he reported that old Terri had looked him in the eye and said, “I just couldn’t take no more. Wouldn’t be human to try.”

  At trial, Terri Fellows pleaded, “not guilty for insanity.” She claimed mental abuse (which few who knew her husband would doubt). Terri told the court that the impulse had come on her “alla sudden.”

  The prosecutor asked Terri if she was a good shot. Terri said she was. He asked how good and she reported brightly, “Split a match at two-hundred paces. It t’weren’t nothin’ to shoot Brad, bedroom window to the driveway. ’Specially since I set my rifle on a sandbag in the window frame.”

  “So it wasn’t, ‘alla sudden?’” the prosecutor pressed.

  “Well, the beatings back and forth had been goin’ on for years but I figured on it no more than a week.” Terri Fellows laughed so hard she had to be excused from the witness stand to compose herself.

  At her sentencing she told the judge that the sentence, “didn’t make no never mind. Something big’s coming and the sand’s runnin’ out of our bottle. While y’all are dealing with the mess, I’ll be watching it on a prison screen y’all paid for, cozy and neat on three squares a day. There’s a big shit show comin’.”

  Goddammit if old Terri wasn’t right about that. The sand had run out of our bottle and there I was standing around the back of the grocery lot with the sheriff and Raphael. Not to be ghoulish, I snuck quick glances of Travis Chinto pinched in the middle. It was a shit show. Literally. I hadn’t wanted to see what was left of Travis at all. However, Raphael was my friend and mentor. He asked me along for moral support so I went.

  We’d all known Travis. He could be a dick but he wasn’t really a bad guy. He was just one of those fellas who thought teasing and funny were the same thing. He didn’t deserve to die the way he did. Nobody deserves that.

  “Epic,” Raphael said. “Gotta be a bot.”

  The sheriff wasn’t so sure. “Back up a truck, he could have been pinched. It is a loading dock.”

  “The piss and shit is up on the platform,” I said.

  “Classic,”
Raphael said. “Dante’s right. Travis didn’t die standing in front of the loading dock waiting for a truck to back into him.”

  “Anything stolen from the store?” I asked.

  Hubby shook his head, not to signify the negative, but to indicate bewilderment. “There are a few things still on the shelves. The back door was open. I’m not sure how much Travis had in there to begin with so it’s hard to tell.”

  “I think he had a bunch of stuff, but ol’ Travis was a bit of a hoarder. I made a good offer on some supplies but he was holding out for a better deal. Guess he didn’t get it and things went awry. How many people in town have bots capable of this awfulness?” Raphael asked. “’Sides me, I mean.”

  “Probably quite a few,” I said. “There aren’t that many of us hanging on in town but, those who left? I didn’t see many refugees taking their bots with them.”

  “This’ll be a vagrant, I think,” Raphael said. “Somebody came in here from out of town, just passin’ through. They were looking for enough supplies to get ’em farther down the road and I reckon they found some. Killer bot and all, they just kept going.”

  Hubby considered this. He probably wanted to believe it. I sure did. Still, he’d picked up something about being a sheriff somewhere. “I’ll canvas the neighborhood.”

  I looked behind me. The store’s lot backed on to sand and a few houses that looked abandoned.

  “Good thinking, Hub,” Raphael said. “Probably won’t take too much time, neither.”

  That’s how our little mystery started. I wish it had stayed a little mystery. Instead, as Raphael would say, it became epic.

  3

  First thing after Hubby left with the body, they left me to lock up the store. I would have hosed down the loading dock but we didn’t have water to spare.

  I asked Raphael if a sex bot could squeeze a man like that. The old man laughed and I told him not to make the joke I saw coming.

  “You think I was gonna make a joke in the midst of this terrible turn for Travis?”

  “I could see it coming from high orbit,” I said.