Bot Wars, Line Zero Page 2

  Once he’s gotten control of himself he says, “I’ll be home a little after midnight. Don’t wait up.”

  “Like I would.”

  He ruffles my hair as I climb out of the car. I swing at him but he dodges the hit and laughs. “Hurry up! Before I’m late,” he says, and I hop over the hover rail onto our brown lawn. The car door automatically slides shut once I’m clear of it and Po steps on the accelerator, zooming out of sight. Our street grows quiet as I stand there watching the spot where Po disappeared. I try to act like it doesn’t bother me, being home alone, but sometimes I wish Po would call in sick so we could hang out. But Po never calls in sick. He doesn’t have the time to cover it and we always need the money.

  I head inside, shut the door, and pop open the security panel with the tap of a finger. The panel slides out of a niche in the wall and the screen lights up neon blue like the rails. I punch in my code and the pad beeps once the house is locked up tight.

  With nothing better to do, I plop down on the couch, nab the remote now that it’s mine and only mine, and flip through the channels. History show about the ancient times. Lame. Home improvement show. Lame. Cartoons. Already saw ’em.

  I land on the news feed. A reporter is standing outside a mansion in 1st District, over on the West Coast. Behind her, several UD officials file out of the house dragging a man, then a woman, and lastly a robot, onto the front lawn.

  The bot is a small model, not much bigger than the woman. It has white silicone skin and big black eyes. I’ve never seen one like that, but then, I haven’t seen a bot up close in a long time.

  The woman starts screaming something at the officials, but they ignore her as the bot is zapped with a shock gun. The bot seizes and its fingers curl as it collapses to its knees.

  The reporter raises her voice to be heard over the commotion behind her. “We’re here in West Los Angeles outside the home of Mr. and Mrs. Miller. They’re accused of harboring a robot. Though Mrs. Miller argues the robot is a nanny and is no threat to humans, sources close to the Robot Control Agency say there is suspicion surrounding the origins of the bot. Its design is unlike anything the UD has ever produced and some wonder if perhaps the bot came from Old New York, where it has long been suspected bots have created their own factory.

  “If you, or anyone you know, has seen a robot within the UD, please call the hotline . . .”

  I flip the channel. I feel all funny inside, like I just watched a friend get yelled at by his mom. Most of the time bots freak me out, but I had a robot nanny before the war, and seeing that report makes me think of Cleo.

  Dad saved up for a year to buy her after my mom died in a car accident. I was only two when it happened, so I don’t remember her much. My nanny took the place of my mom. She had a funny voice, like the sound of a hundred toothpicks hitting the floor.

  She came uploaded with over six thousand stories, and she read me something every night. My favorite was Brent Billy Saves the Universe. She’d project the book’s vid on my bedroom wall. Her big owl eyes always got bigger when she read the part where Brent’s spaceship crashed on Titan.

  I was never afraid of Cleo. Even after the revolt started, when the UD said bots were dangerous.

  I miss her.

  After I’ve flipped through another dozen channels, I give up on finding anything that isn’t about bots. I pull my Net-tag out for a round of vid games. I’m about to connect it to the Net receiver when a familiar face comes on the vid panel.

  “Welcome to another edition of Getting to Know Brack. I’m your host, Candu Rix. And tonight we’re heading north of town . . .”

  I sit forward. Candu Rix is the mom of one of the girls I go to school with. Tellie Rix. Tellie and I don’t get along real well. She’s kind of snotty and bolt-headed. And her parents are super-rich. Her dad is a congressman for 5th District and is second in command after Beard.

  I knew Mrs. Rix had a show, but I thought it sounded lame, so I’ve never watched. On the TV, she leads the cameraman into a tiny apartment in Geissa, a poor neighborhood on the south side. She introduces the viewers to a woman whose son lost both arms to the Deeta disease during the war.

  Somehow, I get dragged into watching and by the end of the show, Candu Rix has promised the woman and her son all the medical treatments they need for free along with a year’s supply of groceries and a new apartment.

  Talk about hitting the jackpot.

  And it’s not like the Deeta disease is rare or anything. Po had the same thing. People got it from the leftover blast haze from X-bombs. Something in the energy used in the bombs damaged the nerves and tissue in soldiers’ limbs if they were exposed to it too long. The ones on the front lines suffered from it the most.

  At the end of the show, Candu Rix comes on and says, “If you know of anyone in need of help, contact us at candu@gettingtoknowbrack.5dtr.”

  My hands start to sweat when I hear that. The credits zoom across the screen and a commercial comes on, but I’m already running for the computer.

  It might be stupid. It might be a long shot. But I have to try. Because I need the biggest help of all. I need to find my dad. For me. For Po. But mostly, for Dad. Because if he’s out there somewhere, maybe he’s having a hard time getting to a Link. Maybe he doesn’t have any money. Maybe he’s hurt.

  I log into the Net, open a new e-mail and start typing.

  TO: Candu Rix

  [candu@gettingtoknowbrack.5dtr]

  FROM: Trout

  [smarterkroix@zipspeed.5dtr]

  June 11th 3:34 p.m.

  Dear Mrs. Rix,

  I just watched your show for the first time. It was the episode about that guy with the Deeta disease, which my brother had too! He lost his leg.

  You don’t know me, but I go to school with your daughter, Tellie (if you ask her about me, she might not know me, because we’re not friends or anything. Not that I don’t like her!).

  I need your help. My dad served in the Robot Wars, but he never came home and his thread hasn’t come back online and it’s just my brother and me now (our mom died a long time ago). And while my brother takes care of me and the house, he doesn’t make pancakes like Dad and he doesn’t even know the first thing about hybreeds. Sometimes, my dad and I would stay up late studying new breeds and making up pretend ones.

  We need our dad. So if you could help me find him, or at least get the word out about him, that’d be really great.

  Thank you for your time. I hope you pick me to be on your show. It’d mean a lot to us.

  Sincerely,

  Trout St. Kroix

  THREE

  I DON’T TELL PO about the letter I sent to Mrs. Rix because he’d think it was stupid. But it only takes him a day to notice my obsession with the computer.

  “Hey, gearhead,” he says, “you think I can get the computer for five minutes? You’ve been hogging that thing all day.”

  I click on my e-mail box one more time, even though I have the auto-ding set up so the computer will chime when a new e-mail arrives. I only got one message since last night and it wasn’t even from Mrs. Rix. It was from Lox.

  Yo! The ocean is so wrenched! You’re missing out! I BET YOU WISH YOU WERE HERE! Cuz I would.

  Have fun living the lame life, bolt sniffer!

  —Lox

  “I’m done,” I say to Po and log off. The desk chair spins a circle when I clamber out of it and Po stops it with a hand.

  “What’s up with you?” He narrows his eyes. “You’re acting weird.”

  “Nothing.” I head into the kitchen. “I was looking to see if Lox e-mailed me and he didn’t.” The lie slithers over my lips like a snake. I used to hate lying to Dad—the guilt would sit in my chest like a bolt—but lying to Po is easy. It’s like a game to see what I can get away with.

  I hear Po’s fingers tap
against the keyboard as I inspect the food in the back of the fridge. Old breadsticks from Chinley’s. A dried lump of spaghetti. A cup of yogurt. I check a block of cheddar cheese but spy a bit of mold and toss it back in.

  “Hey,” Po calls from the living room, “I don’t have to work tonight. You want to hang at the park for a while?”

  I pull an apple from the crisper drawer and give it a squeeze to see if it’s mushy. Seems all right. “Yeah. I guess. Nothing to do around here.” Besides, I can check my e-mail through my Link. And it might help if I’m doing something besides checking it. Before I drive myself nuclear.

  Po and I spend the rest of the afternoon melting into matching puddles of TV goo. We watch several hours of Man vs. Bot, and, after a nap, we finally peel ourselves off the living room furniture to head out.

  I follow Po down the front walk to the driveway and climb in the passenger side of our car. The engine click-whirs to life when Po presses the ON button and The Rezzies blast through the speakers. Po taps on the steering wheel in time with the music and I can’t help but bob my knee.

  We make our way toward Ryder Park, but take a detour when the car’s navigation system warns us of a traffic jam on the freeway. Po cuts through a neighborhood he calls The Glitz. The houses there are constructed of recycled material and, on sunny days, the glass shards in the buildings’ exteriors flare up like glitter. If you don’t have sunglasses, you’re practically blind when you drive through.

  When we reach the park, the lot is packed with cars and it takes Po twice as long to find an empty space. Finally, we climb out and Po grimaces as he stretches. His bum leg gets stiff and sore when he’s been sitting for a long time, and considering we wasted the day on the couch, I’d say his leg is probably feeling like an old prune by now.

  We cross the parking lot, stopping once for a crew of kids on hoverboards. I watch them zoom past, jealous that they have boards, and jealous that they’re hanging out. I don’t have a lot of friends, at least not ones that I hang out with outside of school. Lox is my closest friend and he’s been gone on a family vacation for a good week already with another week to go.

  We enter the park beneath the metal archway. The pavement stops and grass takes over. It’s thick and green and I can tell it’s been cut with a laser-mower because each blade looks exactly the same height as the one next to it. We still have an old electric mower that takes out random chunks of grass. Po kicks it every chance he gets.

  The sun shines over the treetops and I slide on my sunglasses. The lenses adjust to the perfect shade of dark and I feel instant relief. As we head farther in, I scan the people hanging round, trying to see if I know anyone.

  There’s a group of guys Po’s age playing hover-bee off to my left. A mom and dad sit beneath the big oak tree straight ahead, their kids running circles around them chasing a flutter-fly, its shiny mechanical wings glinting in the light. It’s always busy on the weekends. It’s one of the reasons I like coming here. I’m alone too much as it is, and I hate silence.

  Po hurries his steps and I have to jog to catch up to him. “What’s the rush?” I say.

  “You’re just slow.”

  I snort and that’s when I see her. Marsi Olsen. Of course! I bet Po checked her Luna page this afternoon and I bet she posted something about going to the park. Which is why Po asked if I wanted to go so he could pretend he wasn’t stalking her like a bot-zoid.

  “Oooh. Po’s girlfriend!” I sing, and he punches me in the arm. “Ouch.” I rub the spot where it aches. “Dude! That hurt.”

  When we make our way down the other side of the hill, the Maroz Fountain comes into view. It’s constructed of the old bodies of robots left over from the war. Back before the fights broke out, everyone had a robot. Robots rang you up at the grocery store. They delivered packages. They walked dogs down any old street. Some were even teachers. That’s why everything shut down after the bots were gone. People couldn’t remember how to do that stuff for themselves anymore. Dad said it’d been a long time since a human ran the checkout scanner at a grocery store.

  That’s when the states collapsed.

  The fountain is the closest I’ve come to a robot in five years.

  As we near it, the piles of gutted torsos flash like the old warning lights used during the war. Not that there was ever any real threat in our territory. The battles were fought in Bot Territory southeast of here. The only part of the war I saw was on TV.

  Po veers left, toward Marsi, and for a second I think we’re headed for her, like he’s gotten brave enough to talk to her instead of standing there staring at her while drool drips from his chin.

  But then he slows and I see his group of friends lounging around a holo-fire, the computerized flames flickering even though the day is as still as butter. By the way everyone is grouped close around it, I’m guessing the heat feature is turned off.

  Po’s best friend Johz calls out to us. When Po joins him, they slap the backs of their hands together and hook thumbs at the last second in a gear-lock. Po tries to pretend like Marsi isn’t twenty feet away. But I can see him looking at her out of the corner of his eye.

  “Yo!” Johz says. “What’s chopping?”

  Po shrugs. “Nothing. You know. Just had to get out of the house.”

  “Here,” one of the girls says to me, gesturing to her chair, “you can have my spot.”

  “No, that’s okay,” I start, but she cuts me off.

  “I insist! I’ve been sitting around all day. Take a break, kid.” She grabs me by the shoulders and directs me to the chair like I’m blind as a banana. I plop down and the chair’s auto feature molds to my body, holding my butt like a cloud. Lox calls these chairs butt-kissers. Most of the time Lox is crazy and obnoxious, but it’s when he’s gone for a while that I realize I miss having him around.

  The girl who gave me her chair—Bims—offers Po a drink and he takes it with a smile. Po used to have a crush on her before Marsi (seriously, my brother’s love life could be a Net-opera). But now I think Bims has a crush on Po. She leaves me behind in her chair and slides in next to Po all snuggly-like.

  At a party Po took me to once, I heard Bims tell one of her friends she thought Po had “kiss-me lips” and Bims’s friend agreed. I skeeze out just remembering it. I never want to hear my brother’s name uttered in the same sentence as kiss-me lips ever again.

  Po turns away from me to tell his friends some lame story about work, so I drag out my Link and log into the Net. It takes all of two seconds to check my e-mail, and a big fat zero stares back at me.

  I sit in the butt-kisser chair for another hour, checking my e-mail, surfing the Net, and watching vids. Bims gives me a soda, which I down in 7.5 gulps. I catch Po checking out Marsi again, and then suddenly he’s pointing at me and all his friends look over.

  “What?” I say.

  Po has a can of soda in one hand and his Link in the other. “Show everyone how you can climb like a monkey.”

  Back before Dad left for the war, he would take us to the virtual mountain at Kippy Creek Center and we’d climb till we couldn’t feel our fingers. I was the best at it even if Po never wanted to admit it. Dad said it was because I was small and had hands like an octopus.

  “You grab hold of something and you don’t let go,” he used to say.

  That was true for other things too, like credits and food and vid games.

  But we haven’t been climbing since Po lost his leg, since Dad left. And I’m not sure I can hack it now.

  “What do you want me to climb?” I say with a snort. “A tree?”

  Johz pushes the hair out of his face with the flick of his hand. “How about the fountain?”

  Everyone glances toward the middle of the park, to the Maroz Fountain. The bot shells are gray in the dusk. And look slippery. Po says it’s supposed to be a reminder of the UD gover
nment’s power and their zero-tolerance policy against bots.

  Even though I’m not a bot supporter, I still think it’d probably be wrong to climb it. I scrunch up my nose. “You’re kidding, right?”

  Po looks at Marsi before he says, “Come on, little bro. You can make that pile of bot shells look like space junk beneath you.”

  I purse my lips and squint over at the fountain like I’m trying to calculate how hard it’ll really be. Hearing Po talk about my climbing skills like that, like I am the best, makes me really want to do it bad.

  Plus, I think he wants to get Marsi’s attention, and maybe helping him will earn me some brother points. Besides, there aren’t any patrolmen out here, far as I can see. And even if there were, the worst they would do is fine me a few creds, maybe.

  “All right,” I say, and push out of the butt-kisser chair.

  Po and his friends trail behind, cheering me on. Everyone within a hundred feet looks my way. I reach the base of the fountain and climb over the low concrete edge, splashing into the water. My feet squish in my shoes. I want to shuck them off, but wet bare feet on metal might not be a good idea. I can use the rubber soles of my shoes to grip.

  Making my way from the base’s edge to the bottom of the bot wreckage takes me a long time. People are definitely staring now, but the attention fuels my courage. A crowd forms in a loose circle. I look over a shoulder. Marsi and her friends are watching me.

  I avoid the side of the fountain where the water sprays out and head around to the back. This side is as dry as a rotted-out engine. Here goes nothing, I think as I climb onto the first bot shell. It’s just a torso, with holes where the arms should have gone and one for the neck too. I put my foot on its chest and push up, grabbing the next shell at the armhole.

  I clear two more shells and a leg. People cheer from the ground.

  “Trout! Trout!” Johz and Po chant. Other voices join in.

  My heart thumps a steady beat in my chest. I forgot how much fun climbing is and I want to keep going, right up to the top.