Tabor Kata stood alone near the hatch of her one-person domicile ship, waiting as her vacsuit pressurized. An oxygen tank was fixed to her back, enough for two hours’ worth of exploring before she’d choke to death on poison. When the tank was low, or if it began to leak, the whole thing would start whistling like a tea kettle. The first time that had happened, she had screeched at the sound, making Drobo laugh at her—without actually laughing, in that way only progs could.
“There is no need to panic,” Drobo had said in her ear.
He—“it,” really, because he had no physical body, and no gender preference, but she thought of Drobo as a “he”—had asked her once how she could tell that he was mocking her, so that he could adjust his voice modulator accordingly. I just know, she had said. It’s instinct, or something.
The faceplate of her helmet was cloudy from the heat of her exhalations. She smacked it with a gloved hand. “Stupid busted junk,” she said. She had purchased it from a SILF—Synthetic Intelligent Life Form—in a back alley of the exodus town of Third City. And nothing quality ever came out of Third City.
“Striking your suit will not accomplish anything,” Drobo said in her ear. “I will adjust the internal controls.”
“Thanks,” she said, and bounced on her toes as she waited for the glass to clear. She didn’t like coming back here, to a ruined Earth, to an abandoned home. But this was more important than her preferences.
The helmet offered maximum visibility, transparent at the front and sides, streamlined, and coated so it was less reflective. Once the glass was clear, she looked around to get her bearings.
Kata had touched down in the middle of a street in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, beside the crumbling Szent Mihály church in the middle of Old Town. The square—Plata Unirii—reminded her of the annual Christmas Fair held there, where she had gone for hot cider as a child… and also to watch people fall on their asses while they tried to ice skate, of course.
And now—no Christmas Fair, no ice skaters, no people. No movement, even, but for the scurry of a cockroach every now and then. She had always heard they would survive the apocalypse, but she had not thought of what that would look like—the shock of organic movement in a now-inorganic world.
“May I help?” Drobo asked.
“No,” Kata said, her voice rough. “Be quiet.”
“Very well,” he said, but he wasn’t happy about it. She could hear that in his voice, too.
Kata walked south, toward Strada Avram Iancu, and behind it, the steep slope of the cemetery. She had seen it from the air, headstones and tombs poking up like little broken teeth from the overgrown hillside. During All Saints Day, it had glowed red with candles placed beside each grave, surrounding them. Remembering them. She had walked those paths with her father, her hand in his, the living coexisting with the dead. Just as she did now, only now there were far more dead than living.
Cluj had been in the radiation zone surrounding one of the massive blasts of the WMDs that had struck Europe. The city had been evacuated before the catastrophe, so there were no bodies in the streets, no leveled buildings. There were some signs of upheaval if she cleared dirt from the windows—drawers pulled open and left that way, books scattered on the floor as objects were pulled from bookshelves, torn tapestries dangling from whitewashed plaster. It was an old city, and a new one, and a city in between—traditional buildings painted lively colors next to beige brutalist structures from the Communist era, modern minimalist white towers that glinted with windows jammed between the maximalist neo-Baroque facades that had come next. Layer after layer of time.
She walked the narrow alley where shop signs, half in English, half in Romanian, boasted of plăcintă and fresh produce and, for some reason, camera equipment. There were so many nooks and crannies in the city that she had not gotten to explore. Her brother had been fond of the dim hardware stores with nuts and bolts in little tubs that had prices scribbled on the outside. 2 lei. 1 leu. 5 lei. Her mother had favored the newer shops in Iulius Mall, which also had a Starbucks.
Kata reached the end of the alley and crossed the street to the house. It stood right over the sidewalk, decorative bars shielding its windows with curlicues, stately stone cracked in places and dotted with graffiti. She had to kick open the gate—not difficult, since it was barely hanging on to its hinges—but the door to the front apartment was already open.
It was a simple place but for the wood-burning stove in the corner, which was decorated with glazed green tiles. The narrow kitchen table was bare, the stools pushed neatly beneath it. The whitewashed wall was streaked with water that had leaked from one of the pipes leading to the baseboard heaters. For all that the world had advanced—to develop progs, to build SILFs (or “sylphs,” as most people called them), to settle on other planets and begin to terraform them—so many things hadn’t changed. Water heaters on the walls, elegant bars on the windows, sobe de teracotă in the older houses, red candles on the cemetery graves.
The old world persisted.
The only other aberration she could find was a worn teddy bear perched on top of the lamp in the corner. She pinched its worn ear and lifted it, testing its weight.
Yes, this was it. This was what she had come back to Earth for.
“Ah-ha!” said a familiar voice.
Kata had just returned to her ship when she heard the exclamation, the sound of it harsh and horrible in the quiet.
“Do you want me to shoot him?” Drobo asked.
“No,” Kata said, with a sigh.
She knew him.
“Speaker on,” she said, and she heard the telltale click of the suit’s external speaker turning on. “Where’s your crew, Boris?”
“On the hunt,” the man replied. He wore a newer, sleeker version of Kata’s suit. “Looks like you’re due for a cleaning.” He ran a fingertip along the hull of her ship, drawing a line in the dust. And then a curve, and another curve. The letter “B”.
“Don’t you dare write your name on my ship,” she said, striding over and smacking his hand away. “What do you want?”
Boris glanced at her, then reached over to start the “o.”
She dropped the teddy bear, and smacked his hand away again—with her right hand, this time. Boris swore, shaking out his fingers. “Shit. Forgot about that metal arm.”
“I figured. Answer my question.”
“I’m under contract with the EJC.”
She was familiar with the acronym, but gave Boris a blank stare anyway.
“And you call yourself a human,” Boris said. “The Earth Justice Commission, Mausebär. They’re gathering evidence before the trials, to prove the sylph war was waged illegally.”
Kata began to feel her pulse in her throat and in her fingertips.
“And this brings you to Koloszvar… why?” She used the Hungarian name for the city reflexively, though she was sure Boris wouldn’t know it. There had been one and a half million Hungarians living in Transylvania before the evacuation, yet this region had not been theirs.