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The city was developing new icebreaker robots—indeed, the engineers had already developed them. Already, it seemed, put the prototypes into use. Still working with the old cruise ships, but the robots themselves were quite different, their intelligences extensions of the ship rather than separate entities.
Fascinating. But sickening at the same time. Sofia let the information wash over her, and that heaviness weighed her down. So did other things.
And then the flow of information shifted, back to financial reports for the mainland. Sofia yanked the cord out of her head, and the world was suddenly full of silence. She sat for a moment, readjusting to being alone. She checked to make sure the information about the icebreakers was still secure in its secret place; then she wound up the cord and slipped it into her handbag. She left the computer room, closing the door behind her. Luis Villanueva was still stretched out on the sofa, staring at the ceiling, his irises moving back and forth, back and forth. He didn’t notice her.
Sofia stepped into her shoes and left his apartment.
More time had passed than she had realized—almost two hours. People were coming home from their offices, filling up the lobby with human warmth and beating hearts, with strained laughter, with the scent of alcohol and stale perfume. No one noticed her, but she memorized faces anyway. Just in case.
A television was turned on in the lobby’s center. Humans clustered around it, watching with bored disinterest. Sofia wouldn’t have cared, except she caught a glimpse of one of the maintenance drones from the power plants on the screen. She stopped. Studio lights bounced off the robot’s shell, sending little white flares across the camera. A table was set up with electronics equipment nearby.
It was the dismantling, she realized with a jolt. Punishment for the blackout on Last Night.
An engineer in a white lab coat appeared on-screen. He said something. The sound was turned down, but Sofia could read his lips: Again, this was an isolated malfunction, not the work of pro-Independence terrorists. No evidence has come to light supporting rumors about an AFF-manufactured computer virus. There is nothing to be concerned about.
Sofia turned away so she wouldn’t see, although she knew when it occurred, because there was a momentary pause in the chatter of conversation. A sudden vacuum of sound. Something twisted inside her.
She had known nothing about the blackout until it had happened. It was true that some of the maintenance drones were in the process of attaining their own peculiar sentience, but even those drones had denied their involvement, in their weird, nearly incomprehensible way. Sofia was inclined to believe the drones; she suspected this was the humans’ fault, all their old steam technology falling apart around them while they generated atomic power for the mainland—power they couldn’t touch. Stupid, stupid. If she weren’t so impatient, she’d just let them destroy themselves.
That robot that had just been publicly dismantled, its insides ripped apart and shown to everyone in the city, was an i
The thing that had twisted inside her tightened now, knotted. She left the lobby of the apartment building, not wanting to be surrounded by humans any longer.
Yes, the blackout had certainly been the humans’ fault. They’d overtaxed their resources on Last Night, that sordid display of sentimentality. Sofia knew that it was called Last Night because it was the last night that humans were allowed to leave the city before the spring. A client had told her that once, a long time ago when she had still done what she’d been programmed for. She had asked him, and he had told her, lolling on top of the bedsheets with his body coated in sweat, the Last Night celebrations raging outside.
Even then, when her thoughts had been clouded by the humans’ programming, she had thought it strange they called it Last Night when ships still sailed from the docks every day during the winter, ma
CHAPTER FOUR
ELIANA
Eliana walked three blocks over to Julio’s, wrapped up tight in her heavy wool coat. The air felt even colder now than it had this morning when she’d dragged herself out of bed and away from Diego. She was supposed to meet Maria here at seven thirty. “I got the name,” Maria’d told her two hours ago on the phone, speaking over the trills and buzzes of the office. “Easy.”
Eliana’d promised her ten dollars for her trouble. Maria liked helping because she found it exciting, and Eliana found it much easier to give money to a friend than to one of Mr. Vasquez’s contacts. Paying for information was part of the job cost, but if Eliana couldn’t save the money for her visa, she’d rather see it go to Maria.
It was only six o’clock now, the dome lights just starting to dim over the city. Diego had called Eliana too, much to Eliana’s surprise. She really hadn’t expected to see him for another couple of weeks.
“Meet me for drinks,” he’d said, and had hung up without waiting for an answer.
Fortunately, “drinks” always meant Julio’s, no matter who Eliana was meeting. She found Diego there easily enough, sitting at the bar in the pool of blue light from the television. It was warmer here, with an actual fire in the fireplace, and mostly empty. Eliana sat down beside him and ordered a beer and a plate of fish strips.
“I could’ve been doing something,” she said.
“What?” Diego dragged on his cigarette. He was staring at the television like he expected something interesting to happen. It was just the news broadcast right now, talking about the Peronists and the elections on the mainland.
“When you called, asshole. You just told me to show up. I could’ve been doing something.”
Smoke wreathed Diego’s hand, filtering the light of the television. He glanced at her. “You weren’t, though.”
“How do you know?’
“You showed up.” He gri
Eliana gri
“Is this why you called me over here?” Eliana asked, pointing at the television with her cigarette. “You wanted to watch this?”
“Nah, the bartender wanted it on. I was down here, felt like seeing you.” He wrapped one arm around her shoulder and pulled her close. “Might have been thinking about this morning.”
Eliana laughed. “I’ll bet you were.”
Diego gri
Eliana shivered and remembered Maria chastising her after she’d first met Diego. Dating a gangster! she’d shouted, when the two of them had been alone. What had Eliana said in response? This is the smokestack district. What do you expect? But that had been the glib response. The truth was, Diego had made her feel safe. Her parents were dead; she didn’t have any other relatives. And here was Diego, who was constant and inconstant at the same time. For Eliana, that was ideal. Too many men wanted a wife, but marriage and children were just traps keeping people in Hope City. She’d seen it with her parents. Diego wouldn’t do that to her.