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Diego looked away from her.
“It wasn’t a game,” Cabrera said.
Sofia glowered at Diego. But he didn’t move.
“It wasn’t a game,” Cabrera said again. “It was a reminder.”
Sofia turned around, slowly, her whole body aching with fear. Cabrera smiled a hollow smile at her.
Cabrera was not human, she realized. Not in the sense that humans meant the word.
“A reminder,” he said, “not to cross me. You think I did that to you because you’re a robot?”
“Yes.”
Cabrera laughed. “You aren’t any different from the weasels at the city offices that I keep on my payroll. Oh, the wiring’s different, I guess. Same result.” His eyes were empty. “Everyone has something, some hidden control panel. Maybe not quite as literal as yours, but there’s always something. A wife, a little boy. A fucking pet.” He shook his head. “You aren’t special, my dear.”
Sofia felt hollow. The music always did that to her. It stripped her of her own mind and then didn’t bother to replace it.
“Ah,” Cabrera said, “and here’s Sebastian now.” He stood up. The door clicked open. Sofia refused to look away from Cabrera. Footsteps. Voices. Human warmth. Everything came to her through a fog of rage.
“Your keys, my dear.” Cabrera reached into his pocket and then held out one hand, palm up, the keys glinting in the lamplight. “I expect to see the car the next time I see you.”
“Everything’s there?” she asked dully.
“All of the things I was able to acquire, yes. In matters of business, I’m a man of my word, and you’ll see the rest of your payment soon.”
Sofia grabbed the keys, shuddering at the moment his skin touched hers. Diego and Sebastian stood like guards on either side of the door. She looked from one to the other. Neither met her eye.
“I haven’t seen much evidence of that today,” Sofia said.
Cabrera didn’t answer. She left the room and walked down the hallway. Her joints, her movement, were all out of balance, but she knew that was just an aftereffect of the music. This was the first time she’d heard music that old in years, and it had strained her system.
The car was parked beside the docks, one of Cabrera’s sleek black automobiles. His trademark. She opened the trunk. The ticker tape was there, along with a handful of some of the less obscure models of vacuum tubes. They were all tucked away in boxes and wrapped up in plastic. The clockwork engines and the programming key were missing. Of course. The most important things, and he hadn’t managed to get them.
Sofia slammed the trunk shut and looked out over the water. Only one boat was in port, an actual shipping boat, not a renovated cruise ship like the others. Its lights glimmered in the darkness, and she could smell the brine and wind of the iced-over sea.
Someday the humans would all be gone, and then she could tear down the domes and smell the sea and the ice whenever she wanted.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MARIANELLA
Marianella stepped off the train, and cold wind rushed around her. No one stepped off with her because no one else had been on the train. It was a private line, ru
This stop, with its simple wooden platform, its bare light fixtures, was the end of the line. The train sat on its tracks, engine sounds dying away. It would wait for her.
Marianella stepped down from the station and followed the path until she came to the robot who guarded the entrance to the fields of crops. It was an older, repurposed model—human-shaped, although taller and wider and cast in dull burnished metal, with a round, old-fashioned speaker instead of a mouth. She had installed atomic lights into his faceplate, the new set into the old. As those bright white lights sca
“Hello, Escobar,” she said.
“Hello, Lady Luna.” His voice was scratchy and distorted through the speaker.
“You know you don’t have to call me that.”
Escobar didn’t answer. He wasn’t intelligent enough to understand the complex system of human names. But Marianella always reminded him anyway. She did not like robots to call her Lady Luna.
The scan finished. Escobar stepped aside and pressed his palm flat against the door. His palm was the key and the doorknob both, a design trademarked by the city’s founders. With a click and a grinding of gears, the door slid open, and Marianella at once smelled the sweet organic scent of dirt and oxygen and growing things.
A little over a week had passed since the party. Marianella had delayed the trip to check on the maintenance robots longer than she’d intended because the party had brought with it a flurry of social engagements—her phone had rung constantly the last few days, old friends and acquaintances asking her to come for a visit. This was the first chance she’d had to get away, and she’d been looking forward to it. It was always a joy to dress in her city clothes and ride the private train to the agricultural dome.
To her agricultural dome.
Marianella stopped in the middle of the main path, next to the cornfield. She slipped out of her coat and waited the three seconds for the domestic robot to notice her; it came swooping out of the rows of corn and purred as she draped it with her coat, her gloves, her scarf, her hat. The dome was warm, warmer even than Southstar, and certainly warmer than Hope City. It had to be, for all the plants to grow.
For a moment, Marianella didn’t move, only stood in the center of the path, taking in everything around her. The ag dome was not just a container of seeds but a seed itself, the start of a new nation of Antarctica. A hundred years from now this dome would be immortalized, and Hope City would once again represent the best of humanity.
The wind switched on. Elsewhere in Hope City, wind was a luxury, but here it was used to re-create the natural environment and to help disseminate seeds. The corn rippled and rustled, a hollow empty sound she felt in her chest. Beyond the corn were other crops: wheat, sorghum, and potatoes, plus short test rows of grapes and a cluster of apple trees. All the crops had been chosen based on the mild climate of this dome; other domes, later domes, would be hotter and more humid, for growing sugarcane and citrus fruit. Marianella had chosen every crop herself, all of them designed to say, Look, we can grow food, just like the mainland.
Marianella turned and walked down the path.
She stopped at the crossroads, where the path split off into the corn, leading to the sorghum and the wheat. She lifted her head and whistled the first few bars from the “Ave Maria.” For a moment nothing happened but the wind. Then robots gathered along the roof of the dome, dark scurrying spots that coalesced above her head. She watched them, squinting against the floodlamps. Twenty-five total. They had helped build the dome in secret, and now they ran it. They adjusted the sunlight, they activated the wind and the rain, they pulled weeds and watched for rot.
She whistled the hymn again, and the robots dropped down on invisible filament, showering around her, landing in the dirt with soft dry puffs. Marianella knelt down, mindful of her stockings, and picked up the closest. It was the size of a cat and shaped like a beetle, with a row of lightbulbs illuminated across its back. Marianella twisted each bulb, and they winked out in turn.
All around her, the robots’ lights went out. The dome seemed suddenly empty.
Marianella walked a few paces away from the empty robots and placed the one she cradled in her arms on the ground. She pressed an indentation on its underside and held it in place for ten seconds, counting under her breath. When she dropped her hand away, the robot split open, revealing a tangle of metal wires that caught the reflection of the floodlights.