“Now,” said the Project. “I’m gonna try a different approach.”
Laura squeezed the clamp’s trigger, making the three fingers flex, making a clicking noise that was as loud as an atom bomb. The robot took a step forward, and she took a step back and hit something tall and hard. She was up against the computer cabinet with nowhere to go.
“Me and the doctor,” said the robot as it walked slowly forward, “we had this thing going on. Quite a plan, see. But, you know, things the way they is, it’s down to you and me now. I mean, I wouldn’t say no, right? Right. So here I am thinking, hell, we got a whole bundle of these babies, so why not, right?”
The robot raised the fusor in front of it, pointing the flat end of the cylinder directly at Laura. It took another step forward.
“Sure, why not,” said Laura, her voice barely a mumble.
Didn’t the Director see everything that was happening in the city? Was she watching now, from the Cloud Club, as her precious Project ran amok in the laboratory?
Of course she was. Laura felt her heart kick. This was part of it. A test of the fusor reactor. An experiment to be observed.
Laura shook her head. The robot took another step towards her.
“Screw you, bitch,” said Laura under her breath, and she powered forward, using the cabinet behind her as a springboard. Squeezing the trigger, she pushed the clamp forward as she moved, hoping that after dozens of installations she could estimate automatically the mating point of the clamp and the reactor in the robot’s chest. All it would take is one turn, just one turn to the left, not even a five-degree rotation, and the reactor would disconnect and she would save herself and maybe she would save the whole damn world.
The Project threw its arms up and leaned back — as though surprised — as she flew at it, and Laura wondered what the noise was, the sound that reverberated around the workshop. She looked up into the eyes of the robot, their red lights rocking back and forth in the sockets like a child’s broken toy, and she realized the sound was her, screaming in anger. She was up against the robot, its metal casing cold and hard, her fingernails trailing silently across the chest. She screamed and screamed again, raising her arm up, her yanked shoulder protesting at the weight of the clamp. Why was it so damn heavy?
The clamp slipped, and Laura tried again, this time tearing her eyes away from the robot’s pretend face to look and align the clamp. There wasn’t much time; any second now she’d be tossed like a sack of wheat clean across the laboratory.
A twist of the wrist, and the clamp still wouldn’t lock. The metal fingers slid across the glass port of the reactor, failing to find any slots at all. She twisted the other way, yelling in frustration.
Her cry died in her throat and she almost coughed. The fusor reactor, it was different. There were no slots in the rim for the clamp, nothing to grip on around the edge, no way of removing it, not by her. The clamp was redundant.
“Lady, please,” said the robot. “Have a little patience.”
Laura pushed away and let the clamp drop to the floor. She turned, desperate to make a getaway. There was no other option.
“It’s OK, I understand.” The robot grabbed Laura by the collar of her lab coat, lifting her until her feet left the floor. “Don’t worry about a thing. I got this honey. Power, I get it, I understand. And trust me, you wouldn’t believe what this thing can do.”
“What are you doing?” Laura struggled, but the robot’s grip was firm, her lab coat cutting into her armpits.
“You need an upgrade, that’s for sure. I tried it on old Philo but it didn’t take. But it’s OK — I know what I did wrong now.”
Laura shook her head, her eyes wide. Couldn’t the robot distinguish between living creatures and machines like itself?
“I can’t use the fusor,” she said, “I don’t need it!”
The robot almost tutted. Then it lowered her to the floor and pushed her hard against the computer cabinet with the end of the fusor reactor, squeezing the air out of her lungs. With the other hand it tore open the front of her coat, then her blouse underneath, then snapped the front of her bra off, exposing the pale skin over Laura’s sternum. The robot tilted its head, and moved the reactor, lining up the flat end between her breasts. Laura gulped in air, each breath pushing her skin against the end of the cylinder. The metal was cold.
Laura cried out again — not a scream of fear, but of anger, screaming at the goddamn robot that was going to kill everyone, including her, as the robot pushed, breaking bone, breaking flesh, as it tried to upgrade her.
TWENTY
Rad woke in a hot sweat, his mouth filled with a foul, chemical taste. He coughed and rolled over, banging into the side of something hard. Looking up, he saw through watering eyes that it was one of the slab tables in the downstairs workshop.
He sat up, yanking the scarf from his neck and awkwardly pulling himself out of his trench coat. It was hot in the workshop, the chloroform-induced headache giving Rad a sudden rush of claustrophobia down on the floor. He grabbed the lip of the table and stood, leaning against it as his coat fell to the ground, where it hit with a dull thud. Rad bent down and picked it up, slipping the gun out of the coat pocket and into the back of his waistband. It was careless of his captors not to have searched him, but he was grateful.
He stood, leaned against the left-side slab and took long, deep breaths as he oriented himself. A breath caught in his throat and he coughed as he saw the machine on the slab, empty earlier, was now occupied. There was a robot lying it in, a flat, unfinished metal head sticking out of the dark green box. Rad watched it as the thumping in his head subsided. The face was crude, nearly featureless save for two short slots for the eyes and a longer one for the mouth. The robot didn’t move.
Rad turned and, leaning his back against the machine, began rolling his shirtsleeves up. He laughed, remembering what it was like up top, in the city, with its ice and darkness. Then his laugh turned into another cough and he was suddenly desperate for a drink. He glanced around, but there didn’t seem to be a faucet in the workshop.
“Rad?”
Kane. His voice was weak. Rad moved over to the head of the machine and looked down at his old friend. Kane was sick, there was no doubt about it.
“I’m here, buddy,” said Rad, pulling the stool closer and perching himself on it.
Kane smiled, and closed his eyes.
Rad sighed. He’d known Kane for… well, for as long as he could remember. He was older than Kane by a fair margin, but he remembered those first jobs, hiring the teenage Kane first as a runner and messenger around town, but then, as his charisma and prowess became apparent — the uncanny way in which he seemed to be in the right place at the right time, his knack for talking to people in just the right way — Kane had become more than a messenger boy. They became friends, and Kane helped more and more, particularly after he got a job at The Sentinel, the Empire State’s first, foremost — and only — newspaper. Kane used that charisma to build up a network of contacts that stretched right across the city, and his work with Rad not only got Rad’s cases solved a lot quicker but provided the material — sometimes sensationalized, of course — for Kane’s newspaper.
Rad scratched his chin and coughed again. He was feeling a little better, more awake, despite his thirst and the oppressive heat of the workshop.
Kane Fortuna. Rad knew that wasn’t his real name, but he had never known any other. Sometimes it didn’t pay to think too much about the past in a place like the Empire State.
Rad’s last memory of Kane was burned into his mind’s eye, so much so that it was the last thing he saw when he closed his eyes and went to sleep, and the first memory he had when he woke up each morning. Kane Fortuna, wearing the powered armor that used to belong to the Skyguard, one of the two protectors of New York City — whose very actions had led to the creation of the Empire State itself. Kane, in the armor, pulling against the energy of the Fissure as he stood across the threshold between one universe and the next, caught like a fly in honey.