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She updated the captain’s robot and moved on to the others. Cabrera sat in his chair, flanked by his bodyguards, and watched her. Luciano stood off to the side, hands folded behind his back, aiding her as needed. Sometimes she wondered if he saw her as human. It was not the sort of question she could ask him directly.
When she finished, Luciano helped her replace the shipping robots in their alcoves. Cabrera stood up, his bodyguards moving in beside him.
“Diego,” Cabrera said. “What time is it?”
“Almost midnight, sir.”
“Midnight!” Cabrera laughed. “Horatio took until three, four in the morning sometimes! I’m very impressed with you, Sofia.”
Sofia smiled the way she’d been programmed to do whenever a human complimented her.
They left the ship, stepping back out into the cold windy air of the docks. The Florencia was lit up in the distance, yellow and green lights staining the darkness. Cabrera stopped in the middle of the dock and turned to Sofia and stuck out his hand. She stared at it. He laughed.
“I have a good feeling about this arrangement,” Cabrera said. “But you’re going to need to learn some of our ways. Isn’t that right, Sebastian?”
Sebastian nodded.
“Shake my hand, dear. I know you’ve seen it done before.”
Sofia had not been programmed to shake hands, only to offer hers, for kisses or dances or other frivolities. But Cabrera was right; she had seen it done. And so she gripped his hand and shook.
“I look forward to our future endeavors.” Cabrera tipped his hat. “I have an icebreaker leaving the mainland in half an hour. The best in my fleet. I’ll make sure those items you requested find their way on board.”
“So soon?” Sofia asked, with forced levity.
“Only the best for the best.” Cabrera gri
Sofia had waited forty years. She could wait two weeks.
“I’ll be expecting them,” she said.
Beside her, Luciano smiled.
* * * *
The train into the amusement park didn’t run this late, and so Sofia and Luciano walked through the city, side by side and unspeaking. Sofia did not know what Luciano thought of, but she imagined the turn-of-the-century supplies she had requested making their way aboard an icebreaker, and then that icebreaker sailing through the frozen seas to Antarctica.
Cabrera had no idea what the parts did, she was certain of that. Why would he? They were almost seventy years out of date. Araceli, in her skillful human way, was only filling in the gaps of what had been left behind when the amusement park had closed. She was the best at that, and Sofia was lucky that Araceli, despite being human and a former park engineer, was sympathetic to their cause. Without her help, the reprogramming would be nearly impossible. And so Sofia allowed her to live in the amusement park.
Still, Sofia was grateful that the particular items Araceli needed— a bundle of antique vacuum tubes, three clockwork micro-engines, ticker tape, a blank programming key—were i
She smiled to herself.
Sofia and Luciano came to the amusement park gate, wrought iron and once painted white, patterns of Victorian fairies twisting through the metalwork. The road was inlaid with bright circles of glass, leading the way inside. Sofia rarely saw the gate from the city side, but she knew that it should be shut, that the original lock from the 1890s had been replaced with a new one, modern and electronic.
But tonight, the gate hung open.
“Oh no,” Luciano said, in the same tone of voice he had probably once used on sick children.
Sofia didn’t say anything. All her systems felt as if they were shutting down. For a moment she stopped in the middle of the road and stared at the open gate. There was no wind here, and the gate was frozen into that position like in a photograph.
A culling.
Luciano rushed forward, and that was enough to jar Sofia back into motion. She followed behind him. Her systems sent warnings straight into her subconscious, and she wanted to hide, to slip away into the shadows. But she didn’t. She picked up speed until she was ru
“Sofia!”
Araceli’s voice cut through the night air. Sofia stopped. She’d made it to the Sugar Garden. The garden had long ago overreached its boundaries, and flowering vines curled over the pathway, trampled beneath her feet.
Araceli was sitting on the bench beneath the streetlamp, Inéz leaning up against her. Inéz had been like Luciano once, had tended to humans in the amusement park hotels. Now she looked worn- out, like a discarded doll. Part of her hair was missing.
“Who was taken?” Sofia asked sharply.
“Maintenance. One of the Scala models. Yellow-8.” Inéz closed her eyes. Just like a doll.
“That’s it? Just one?” Sofia walked over to them. Luciano was already there, fussing over Araceli. As a human, she brought that out in him.
“Inéz needs comforting more than me,” Araceli told him. “They weren’t going to drag me away.” Luciano nodded, looped around behind the bench. Sofia turned to Inéz.
“What happened?”
“They almost got me.” Inéz gave a weak smile as Luciano took her hand. “They stu
“I just fired a flare.” Araceli rubbed her forehead. “I saw they were coming on the transmissions, so everyone hid before they arrived.”
“There was a programming issue,” Inéz said apologetically. “That’s why they almost got me.”
“One of the cullers tripped, the idiot. Started bleeding. You know how it is.”
Sofia nodded. Inéz’s programming had condemned her to offer assistance. But it would not always. Soon. Soon, they would have the supplies. Soon, they would cut all that programming out. Sofia first, then the rest of them. Luciano, Inéz, those few broken-down androids she could repair only once she had her independence.
“Their weapons are the same,” Inéz said. “Still weak.”
“Well, they don’t capture many of us anymore, do they?” Sofia smiled. “I doubt that’s high on the list of priorities.”
Luciano smiled back at her, but Araceli and Inéz did not.
“The Scala model,” Sofia said. “We can get him back.”
Silence. They all knew rescue was unlikely. But Sofia had been programmed to lie, once upon a time, to tell people what they wanted to hear.
Araceli, Inéz, and Luciano sat pressed against each other on the bench, huddling together as if they needed one another’s touch. But Sofia had stripped that weakness out of herself long ago. She knew how touches could be toxic.
She left them there without explaining herself, walking off to the center of the Sugar Garden, where she could have privacy.
The cullings had started as soon as the amusement park had closed. Hope City needed robots to survive, and so Autômatos Teixeira had simply left them there when the company had gone bankrupt, the way it had abandoned the factories in Brazil. And while most of the amusement park robots were useless—performers, or caretakers, or pleasure givers—their parts were not. Long ago, Sofia had taught the others how to hide, how to survive. She had built and installed blockers that made it impossible for anyone to scan for robots inside the park, hoping that would discourage the cullings.
She could not say where she had learned all this herself. It certainly hadn’t been programmed into her. This was before Araceli arrived ten years ago, before the city fired Araceli from her job as a Hope City engineer for showing kindness and decency to robots and she sought refuge in the closed-down park, the one place, she said, she’d ever been happy. The knowledge had simply appeared in Sofia. A human would call it magic. Sofia was not a human.