Archived Parts: One, Two, Three, Four,Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeen, Eighteen, Nineteen , Twenty, Twenty-One, Twenty-Two, Twenty-Three, Twenty-Four, Twenty-Five, Twenty-Six, Twenty-Seven
Part Twenty-Eight
Though Ernest and Will must have known, on some level, how large the city was, it was still a shock to draw close to the ancient architecture and feel the tall, crumbling edifices looming over them.
"Unless you're jumping up and down on a weak spot," Charlie advised, "I think you should be safe enough if you keep to the sidewalks and streets. But don't just go dashing into any of these buildings. The floors might not hold you."
"What about people?" Ernest said.
"People?" Will dragged Ernest behind the wreck of an old billboard and pitched his voice to a harsh whisper. "Did someone show up on the scans?"
"No, nothing like that." Not yet, he thought. "It just seemed like a possibility."
"It's statistically improbable there's anyone here but you," Charlie said, "but if you're concerned, I'll scan. You'll need to walk slower, though. This array is terribly limited. Scanning for both copper and living bodies increases the payload, big time."
"We've got to go slow," Ernest said.
Will slung his pack over the shoulder of his shunt arm again, leaving his dominant hand free to hold the Taser. "Not too slow. If it gets dark, we'll need to hole up for the night, somewhere secure where an LED won't give us away by shining like a beacon."
The remnants of buildings cast long shadows as the sun sank toward the horizon. Chill air crept through the tears in Ernest's clothing like clammy fingers, and he began to shiver. "Start sweeping, left to right," Charlie reminded him, and Ernest angled his body so Charlie's sensors could scan. "Birds. Insects. No large mammals."
"It's clear," Ernest whispered to Will. Obviously he didn't need to whisper since there was no one there to hear him, but he felt too jumpy to bow to reason at that particular moment.
Charlie said, "I'll send a few sonar pings to see if any of the floors are built on solid ground rather than basements. Position yourself in that doorway and angle the sensors so I can get a reading. But use your common sense. I don't have enough processor space free to point out every crack in the floor."
Ernest approached a doorway. He presumed these larger buildings had been some sort of commercial properties once, like Will's coffee shop, and he was hopeful the size of the structures meant they were more likely to have enough copper wiring for him to scavenge.
"No basement under the foyer," Charlie said. "Go on."
Ernest made his way across the jumbled tiles to the interior door, leaned across the threshold, turned to his left, and began the slow rotation that would allow Charlie's sensors to scan the space. His own senses told him that the windows had given way long ago. Moisture had damaged the walls; mildew painted great, black streaks from the ceilings, and the air smelled fungal and thick.
"What was this place?" Ernest breathed.
"Parsing."
Ernest ended his sweep facing right, and wondered if he should sweep back in the opposite direction, or simply allow Charlie to sift through the data he'd already gathered.
Will shuffled his feet and began poking around the vestibule. Ernest glanced back over his shoulder, careful to leave Charlie's sensors pointed at the inner room. Will attempted to pull a tuft of old wiring from a port on the baseboard, but it broke off in his hand and crumbled. He brushed the crumbs from his fingers and sighed. "We need to find something that hasn't been so exposed to the elements. Wind, temperature, moisture, sunlight…anything like that will have taken a toll."
"Too true," Charlie said, though Will couldn't hear him agree.
"How's the floor?" Ernest asked the AI.
"Safe enough for three meters. Start in, slowly, and then take another sweep."
Ernest took a few careful steps in, then began to dig through his pockets for an LED to get a better look at the room's dark, murky corners. The bloated wooden supports of floor felt slightly spongy, like moss, but beneath that slight give, it seemed it was still solid enough to hold him.
Will already had his light on, flicking the beam at various points in the room to assess its potential salvagability. "Over there," Will said. "The inner wall. Is that copper?"
Ernest pivoted and pointed the sensor array to the frayed end of a dangling cord that looked, at first glance, like a vine.
"Well spotted," Charlie exclaimed.
Ernest said, "What does that mean?"
"It means yes. That's what's left of a telecommunications system."
"Charlie says it's copper—but to stick to the perimeter of the room. The floor will be stronger there."
"Good." Will put his back to the wall and sidled over to the exposed wiring. "After we see to Martha, later, once she's…free…" he signed and searched for words. It was the first time Ernest had seen him at a loss. "I think we should come back when it's light out and look for anything else we can use. Maybe there's protein in pressurized storage. Maybe more fuel cells."
Will grasped the exposed end of the wire gingerly, as if it might crumble as the other wire had. The wire bundle held; the wall, brittle with age and moisture damage, began to bulge and crack instead.
"There's more behind that counter," Charlie said, "But you'll need to watch your footing. I don't trust the spans between the floor joists."
"Just tell me where to walk," Ernest said.
"Left…good, there…now forward two meters…."
The floor around Ernest creaked as he made his way deeper into the structure, but he was accustomed to obeying POD-minds. If Charlie said it was safe to walk, albeit only along a particular row of buckling floor tiles, then Ernest was confident the floor would hold him.
"Yes, it's coming from over there. Steel alloy—that's what's left of the counter. Behind that, definitely copper, also nickel, and a smattering of zinc."
Will freed a length of wire that was long enough to get a grip on and pulled harder. The wiring erupted from the wall in a line of destruction, and the sound of plaster clacking off rubble filled the room.
"Round that pile of cinderblocks," Charlie told Ernest. "The footing is safe."
The floor flexed and groaned. Ernest paused. "It's okay," Charlie told him, so he gathered his courage and crept as gently as he could across the springy floorboards and around the counter. A small electronic device with a cracked casing lay on the floor beneath the counter amid a light scattering of rubble. Ernest tucked it into his shirt in case Audrey could repurpose any of the parts—though it didn't seem that copper wire was among those components. Not the length they needed to build the coil, at any rate. "All right. Where's the wire?"
Will hauled at the wire he'd found until it tore from the wall in its entirety. "This is barely two meters long. It'll never work."
"Take it," Ernest said. "Maybe we can splice it."
Charlie considered the problem. "A splice? No, not within a coil. But maybe a solder joint…."
The plaster from the wall where Will had been scavenging had made such a racket as it gave way that Ernest didn't notice the creaks and crackles around him until a chunk of the ceiling over his head came free and bounced off his shoulder. He looked up, which pointed the sensor array on his chest upward momentarily, and then crouched in a protective huddle as he struggled to blink grit from his eyes.
"Get under the counter," Charlie ordered, all his easy charm suddenly gone. "Now."
Ernest was already tucked down, shielding his face. He rolled to one side just as fist-sized hunks of plaster, metal fragments and rotten wood thundered down. "Will," he called out, but he couldn't see, couldn't breathe, couldn't do anything but crouch under the counter, shield his eyes and hug his injured arm to his chest. "Will," he yelled again, once he could draw enough breath to shout.
"Stay put," Will called back, through the cacophony of falling debris. "Don't move."
The downpour slackened, and Ernest began to lever himself out of the small, half-buried pocket of safety. "Stop," Charlie barked at him, which he ignored. He had shelter. Will didn't, and might be hurt.
"Will?"
"Get back," Charlie snapped. "There's more."
A huge piece of plaster studded with jagged flakes of rust made Ernest obey where the AI could not. It shattered on the countertop so close to him that it sprayed him with broken plaster when it hit.
As Charlie had seen, in that brief moment when Ernest had looked up enough to aim the sensors toward the ceiling, there was much more rubble where the first wave had come from. The sound of old struts snapping blasted through the carcass of the building like a series of explosions. Panic surged through Ernest at the thought of being buried alive, and he risked another quick glance up at the remains of the ceiling.
Above him, through the craggy, crumbling hole, a dozen pale arms reached down.
Homo sapiens.
Ernest curled into a tight ball beneath the counter and wished he'd insisted on carrying a Taser, too. So many hands, so many strangers…Will was brave and strong, but how could he possibly defend against them all?
"People," he whimpered to Charlie. "In the ceiling."
"What? That's impossible. I performed an infrared scan. I would have noticed."
"Six? At least six." Ernest hugged himself into a tighter ball to try and stop himself from shaking. Wreckage continued to fall, the noise drowning out everything else, making it impossible for him to think.
"No, it can't be. I just ran through my data again."
"I saw them."
"Disconnect as many sensors as you can and aim them toward the ceiling—but whatever you do, don't stick your head out there like a big, round target."
Ernest knew how to manipulate data, not hardware. His hands trembled as he sought the delicate filaments hooked into his shirt, and he fumbled with them for fear of damaging the precious components. He freed two of the sensors and poked them through a small gap that remained between the countertop and the fallen debris.
Ernest's hand shook terribly. "Steady your elbow on something," Charlie suggested.
"I'm sorry."
"There are no mammals here. None."
"Maybe they're wearing something to conserve their body heat…."
"Not enough carbon dioxide. If respiration were taking place, I'd know it."
"They could have some sort of masks…." Ernest stopped speaking when he realized the sound of falling rubble had faded to small bursts with stretches of silence in between.
"Are you ready for a new idiom?" Charlie asked, with a bit of the old jauntiness returning to his voice. "How about 'false alarm'?"
Not much of an idiom. The meaning of the words was obvious enough. "What do you mean, false?"
"They're not people…they're representations of people."
He sounded so sure. Ernest considered. "Like the statuary in the Deaconate."
"Precisely."
Ernest felt giddy with relief—so much that he forgot himself and took a deep breath, and began to choke on the dust. Rubble ground against rubble—footsteps. "Ernest? Are you okay?"
He hooked the sensors to his shirt again and pushed at the mound of rubble that had drifted against the counter. "I'm fine. You?"
"Banged up, but I'll manage." Will's footfalls grew closer. Ernest shoved more debris out of the way, and squinted in Will's direction. Will edged through the haze of dust holding a long, pale, obviously artificial arm. He waved it at Ernest, and laughed. "Need a hand?"
"That's not funny." Ernest tried unsuccessfully to frown; his relief at escaping the hoarde of homo sapiens (even if he supposedly was one, himself) was too intense to suppress.
"You can tell when a building's been lived it by the dust patterns. No one's been walking around here lately. I would've known." There were sensors, and then there was Will.
Ernest cleared enough crumbled plaster to free himself from his burrow, and Will dropped the fake arm and offered his own hand. Ernest took it, unprepared for the sensation that streamed through him at Will's touch—as if they were both conductors, and their contact had completed a circuit, and now a current flowed through them, one to the other, and back again.
Ernest straightened up so he was chest to chest with Will, raised his injured arm and brushed his fingertips over Will's cheek. "You're bleeding."
"I've read that some people find scars attractively rugged."
Ernest stood on tiptoe and brushed his lips against the freshly clotted wound. "I wouldn't be able to say. I'm biased."
"Now there's an understatement."
"Shut up, Charlie."
Will attempted to pull back at the mention of the AI he couldn't hear, but Ernest threaded an arm around his waist and held him fast. "Ignore him. I am."
"Really?" Will allowed himself to be lured into a kiss. Their lips grazed, gentle, hardly a whisper, despite the fact that each of them was clutching at the other hard enough to leave finger marks. "I thought you'd project some paternal authority on him…given that he's a POD-mind."
"But he's not my POD-mind."
They smiled, lips barely brushing, and then Will tilted his head and deepened the kiss. His tongue sought Ernest's, slipped together, retreated, advanced again.
"You need to stop," Charlie's voice said in Ernest's earpiece.
"Shut up, Charlie," he whispered, lips grazing Will's teeth, tongues fleetingly touching.
"Now. Damn it, now!"
Charlie's urgency startled Ernest from the kiss; Ernest gave Will a gentle push to the shoulder and Will disengaged, though he still kept an arm around Ernest's waist, and looked to Ernest for an explanation.
"It's only a kiss," Ernest said, baffled that Audrey had left such bizarre strictures in Charlie's programming. "It's perfectly safe."
"Will's mouth might be safe, but this city isn't. Radiation levels at 2.2 sieverts. Evacuate, now."
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