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The city men exchanged glances. A long moment ticked by. The waitress approached, gliding across the room like a shark.
Finally, the city men slid into their seats.
Their names were Mr. Garcia, Mr. Ruiz, and Mr. Bianchi, although Sofia did not know which was which, only that they had been the liaisons between Cabrera and the many people working for him in the city offices. Sofia tended to think of them as a collective. After all, it was men like them who had thought of robots as parts to be acquired.
The waitress asked if they would like to order anything, and they did, a wide variety of alcoholic drinks that Sofia recognized from her days in the amusement park. The memory didn’t make her chest ache anymore. She had a brighter future now.
“Well, Miss—” The leader hesitated. “Miss Sofia, I must say, we’re intrigued by your moxie.”
Sofia smiled and folded her hands on top of the table. “Thank you. Which one are you again?”
The man faltered. “Jorge Ruiz,” he said. “This is Alfredo Garcia, and this is Luis Bianchi.”
“Yes, of course.” She tilted her head. “I only spoke to your—what did you call them?—your assistants. It’s all very confusing to me, telling humans apart.”
Mr. Ruiz coughed into his hand. The other two stared down at the table.
“The android sitting beside me is Luciano,” Sofia said. “He’s my associate. Not my assistant.” She tittered like she was flirting. Luciano smiled gravely.
“I see,” said Mr. Ruiz. He glanced over at the bar, where the bartender was mixing up their drinks.
“Since you’re such admirers of my moxie,” Sofia said, “perhaps you’ll be keen to learn that I’ve decided to take over Mr. Cabrera’s business.”
Mr. Ruiz jerked his gaze back toward her. His eyes glittered. He was nervous. Maybe even scared. So were the other two.
“Yes, my assistant mentioned that,” he said.
The waitress came over with a tray. She set down napkins and then she set down drinks, and then she gave Sofia and Luciano a lingering dark look before going on her way.
“We always preferred to talk business at the Florencia,” Mr. Bianchi said.
“The Florencia’s not available to us at the moment. We’ll have to talk here.” Sofia leaned back in her chair.
“You don’t have to worry about the police,” Luciano said. “If indeed that’s what you’re worried about.”
The city men exchanged glances. “The police? You’ve got the police on payroll?”
“The ones that matter, yes.” Sofia smiled, and she could feel the effect that incandescence had on those three men—all in spite of themselves, no doubt. They weren’t like Cabrera. They weren’t monsters on the inside. “And I intend to keep you as well. Nothing about your previous arrangement will change, with one exception.”
She paused. Mr. Ruiz leaned forward, his fingers resting on the rim of his glass. “The exception is that you’re an andie,” he said in a low voice.
“No.” Sofia leaned forward to meet his stare over the center of the table. “The exception is that the city will stop all culling of robot parts from the amusement park.”
Silence. Sofia didn’t move; she would not be the one to move first, and she wasn’t. Mr. Ruiz sank back in his chair and took a long drink.
“We have to be able to build maintenance drones,” he said. “You can’t expect—”
“I’ll bring in the parts that you need,” Sofia said. “From the mainland. But you will not harm any robot who already exists in this city.”
Mr. Ruiz sighed. “That’s going to be a hard order to pass on to the brass, Miss Sofia. They aren’t all on the payroll—”
“But you are,” she said, “and I’ll pay twice what Cabrera did. Just to keep a few robots safe.”
That had Mr. Ruiz’s attention. Mr. Garcia’s too, from the way he gri
“Twice the income,” Sofia said. “For something that’s really not so difficult. The park was ru
Mr. Ruiz didn’t take his eyes off her. She wondered if he thought that if he stared at her hard enough, he’d be able to see straight through her skin and her framework and learn all her secrets. Let him try. What Mr. Ruiz didn’t know was that Sofia only offered this deal because she knew it didn’t need to be sustainable; in a year’s time, robots would come to Hope City on their own, or they would be resurrected out of the slaughter the cullers had left behind. And Mr. Ruiz would be living in a villa in some mainland jungle.
“I think we can take that deal,” Mr. Ruiz said. The other two nodded.
Sofia smiled.
* * * *
A week went by.
Things changed quickly in that time. Sofia lay claim to the icebreakers, walking on board each one and personally triggering the code she had hidden in each robot when she’d reprogrammed it for Cabrera. The reconfigured robots responded only to her commands, whether by touch, by voice, or by radio waves.
Cabrera’s errand-ru
There were only two who protested, one who refused to work for a robot and one who refused to work for a woman. She killed them both, although she did not tell Marianella.
And so Sofia ingratiated herself into the sphere of Cabrera’s power. She sent money to all of Cabrera’s old contacts, and her icebreakers kept coming in without being stopped by the dock guards, and her errand-ru
Things at the park changed little. Eliana left—she no longer had anything to fear from Cabrera or that boyfriend of hers, and so she moved back to the smokestack district. Marianella tried to convince her not to, citing the blackouts and the general danger of the city, but Eliana didn’t listen. Not that Sofia would have expected her to. Humans.
The blackouts were the one thing that gnawed at the back of Sofia’s mind. Yes, they were convenient for her. They kept the humans scared, nervous, and that made it easier for Sofia to control them. But the sentient maintenance drones all insisted they weren’t causing them, and her contacts at the city office gave her the usual lines about AFF computer viruses. That was a troublesome thought. As difficult as the Independents were to infiltrate, the AFF was, at the moment, impregnable. It bothered Sofia, knowing there were humans in the city who could undo her, humans whose identity she couldn’t learn, no matter how much money she paid out.
And then one afternoon the maintenance drones came to the amusement park.
There were three of them, older models that had been upgraded over the years from steam power to atomic. All the sentient drones were like that, older. That, Sofia could only assume, was why they had managed to achieve sentience in the first place, having lived all those years of experiences.
They dropped out of the dome ceiling, their presence activating the surveillance equipment inside the operations room that in turn activated an alert inside Sofia’s head: someone was here, someone robotic. She was in one of the gardens with Araceli and Marianella and Luciano, having a picnic, although only Marianella and Araceli were eating. Luciano was reading one of his books, the dark blue cover hiding his face as he flipped indolently through the pages. His reading had greatly picked up since his reprogramming.