“Your shuttle will arrive in—four!—minutes. Please proceed to—Caladan Avenue.”
Benny tapped the air above the “Dismiss notification” button on her HUD. She’d been at the shuttle stop for twelve minutes already, and wished she’d taken the time to pee before she left.
Her leg, both where it was and where it wasn’t, felt weird.
She flipped through her notifications. “Reminder—two!—overdue assignments in Reentry Journal. You can do it! To access writing coach, press—”
She dismissed it and loaded the block puzzle game.
The shuttle chimed an arpeggio when it stopped. The lift extended automatically when it detected her ID. She held the handrest—“Please hold handrest securely! Lifting!”—and slipped into the first empty pod.
She was actually supposed to be practicing with stairs. Maybe the shuttle software didn’t get the memo.
She tabbed back to the block game.
Benny waited until everyone else was off to leave her pod. She didn’t want people watching while the lift beeped its excruciating way down.
Outside, a blue and white sign read “Puente Hills Reclamation Facility: Treasure For Tomorrow.” Around the sign, her HUD displayed a wheel of floating menu buttons: “Book a Tour,” “Careers,” “Materials Reclaimed,” “For Kids!”
Graeme was waiting at the gates, a sturdy block of a woman with gray in her ponytail.
“Benny! You made it! Welcome. We’ll do HR first and then I’ll give you the tour. Sound good?”
Benny’s new access badge looked just like Graeme’s. Kinda nice, Benny thought. Retro.
“Okay! Next stop, locker room. There’s bathrooms there too, if you need them. We shower in, we shower out. Inside, you wear scrubs. No outside clothes in the containment zone, no scrubs outside the containment zone. Got it?” She waited for Benny’s nod before continuing, “Anything metal, you can keep on. There’ll be scrubs and booties when you come out. Everything fits weird. Oh, and put your leg through on the tool cycle—that’s what I do with my hand.”
Graeme waved her right hand, and Benny finally noticed that it was printed plastic, its phalanges and metacarpals articulated in black, silver, and hot pink.
Her new leg was gray. That was the default when you didn’t enter color choices.
Graeme kept smiling until Benny closed the shower cubicle door behind her. It was a narrow room with labeled panels on the wall. Too narrow—she couldn’t stretch her arms—couldn’t move—her pulse sped up—she couldn’t move! Shit! No—come on—she closed her eyes and did one of the stupid HomeboundHero breathing exercises until the taste of metal cleared her mouth.
This better not make her late.
She opened her eyes again. She was fine. This was fine. There were even handrails. Benny stripped efficiently to her leg and dog tags, then unbuckled the leg. Balancing awkwardly, she nestled it in the Tools (inbound) bin—a shallow, slatted metal box that reminded her of the utensil baskets from KP duty—and tapped it shut.
She’d get used to it. She’d have to.
The promised scrubs were in a matching cramped chamber on the other side, along with cushioned booties and flimsy compostable mycelial-web underwear. Graeme was waiting in the hall, doing something Benny couldn’t see on her HUD. Whatever it was, she was moving fast, swinging her arms and pivoting her body. Benny waited to be noticed.
“Just a second,” Graeme muttered. “There we go.”
She dismissed whatever she was looking at with a gesture Benny didn’t recognize from the standard interface. But of course, Graeme needed modified commands.
And now, Benny did too.
Graeme’s lined face folded back into her usual smile.
“Sorry about that. Minor bot-cleaning kerfuffle in sector C. Nothing serious. Let’s get you settled.”
Benny’s cubicle was spacious, with a round bubble window and room to work sitting or standing, and yet more interactive panels on the wall.
“Drinks come out there. Conveyor bots bring your lunch order. Anything you like as long as it’s synth-protein and flavor powder.”
“I do love flavor powder,” Benny tried. After her tour, that wasn’t even really a joke.
Graeme laughed anyway.
“Who doesn’t? And out there . . . that’s where the magic happens.”
The window overlooked a terraced hillside furred with trees too sparse to hide infantry. Off to the right, orderly lines of bots marched in and out, like trails of foraging ants.
“So we’re starting you off over there on G44, crew of ten bots.” Graeme gestured to an indistinguishable section of hillside. “Three survey-patrol, two for e-waste and complex composites, and one each on metals, silicates, basic organics, complex hydrocarbons including biohazards and inorganic hazmat—heavy metals and radiation, mostly.”
The bots were all the same shape, like pointed eggs, but came in a range of sizes and colors: muddy green, white, candy-apple red, cerulean. The ones coming from the hill were smeared with grime. The ones going out shone like new.
“They’re level four semi-autonomous?”
Graeme wrinkled her nose.
“Well, they boot level four, but they’ve got pretty good learning capability, and we never wipe them if we don’t have to. Don’t be surprised if they exhibit level five or six capacities. Personality, too.”
“Really?” Military autos didn’t have personality. Too unpredictable.
“Oh yeah. That’s where you come in as their handler. It’s not just maintenance; you’re also providing guidance. They have enough battery to go twelve to eighteen hours autonomous, but they usually need us before that.”
Benny leaned her weight on the window ledge. The new leg rubbed, but the outside of her good ankle hurt when she stood too long.
“What kind of guidance?”
“Explosive methane, wildlife, load-bearing furniture, all kinds of stuff. G44 is a fairly old zone, mostly late twentieth and early twenty-first, but because it’s peripheral, it’s still in the first phase of reclamation. So you’re gonna see some, to use the technical term, weird shit.”
“Weird shit,” Benny repeated.
Graeme laughed.
“Don’t worry. Your bots will be on short shifts until you’re adjusted. And for now we’ll just have you run training modules. We’ll go visit decon and recharging later. And speaking of bots needing guidance, friggin’ ORG-B17 wants to eat a skunk, so I better skedaddle. Ping me if you need anything!”
When Graeme had gone, Benny dispensed a bulb of seltzer and activated the panel labeled Chair. Her leg was still rubbing. She’d shoved blister pads in her pocket on her way out, but her pocket was in her pants and her pants were in a locker.
It was fine. She could sit. It would be fine.
She pulled up the first module. The reclamation bots had mostly the same anatomy as search-and-rescue bots—retractable bucket drums, grippers with claws and spines and rubberized pads, fluid receptacles, cargo compartments, sensors of every imaginable kind. She passed that test on the first try.
The next couple of modules took her through lunch (teriyaki spirulina with udon and sesame FungoNuts) and the discovery that it was a good idea to activate the sunshade on the bubble window at around two. Graeme came back in the middle of the module on manual decontamination, which was an annoying mix of easy (acids neutralize bases) and very difficult (fifty-seven strains of organofluorine-degrading bacteria).
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah! Yeah. Good. I didn’t finish the modules but—”
“That’s fine. You have two weeks to do them all. Come check out the decon line and then you can shower out and call it a day.”
Benny followed her boss, trying not to limp too obviously. As they walked, Graeme pointed out maintenance bays and R&D labs, and Benny met too many people.
They ended up on a steel catwalk. Below, bots were trundling in the gate. She could see the grime on their shiny carapaces better from here: brown organic smudges, scraps of paper and fabric, plastic chips. Most of them, according to the training module, were made of aluminum oxynitride with integrated color. Some had scratches, like healed scars.
“Did you get to the auto decon?”
Benny nodded and recited what she remembered.
“After they drop their payloads, they come here for cleaning. Water with a surfactant, neutralizations for anything the chemical nose IDs, another rinse, then they’re air-dried. The water all gets filtered and repurified between uses. Yeah?”
“Pretty much. There are manual decon stations too. Sooner or later you’ll have to go scrape something off one of your bots. And their charging bays are down below—we should go see your team’s section, show you what I mean about personality.”
Graeme paused, glanced down at Benny’s leg. “If that’s rubbing, my uncle makes really good ointment. Spruce and stuff. I can bring you some.”
“I don’t want to be a bother.”
“No bother. It helped a lot with this old thing, especially when I first got it.” Graeme waved her polychrome hand. “I thought the VA had real state-of-the-art stuff now. Synth-skin, motor-assist, neural hookup.”
Benny shrugged.
“I didn’t want any of that. My mech went down in a cyberattack.”
Said like that, it sounded clean. Like the training exercises, or the bots shining from decontamination. Not like the smell of her own sweat and blood cooking in the sun while her leg burned and Jacko screamed in her ear.
Graeme winced.
“Sorry to hear that. Eastern front?”
“Southern.”
Graeme winced harder.
“My nephew was on the southern.”
Benny nodded.
“Yeah. So . . . I requested an analog leg.”
“Makes sense.”
Benny shrugged.
Graeme turned her head sharply, looking at an alert on her HUD.
“Shit, I gotta go handle this . . . can you find your way back to the showers okay?”
She waited just long enough for Benny’s nod.
Back at her apartment, a package waited in her delivery locker. The return address was in Salmon, Idaho. She’d only ever known one person from Salmon, Idaho. In the elevator, she looked at the ceiling to keep the tears in.
She left the package on the table and sank onto the couch. On her home network, her HUD bristled with notifications.
“Update reentry journal now. You can do it! To access writing coach—”
“Seven missed calls from—Mom! Message from—”
“Reminder—art therapy in—one!—hour and—forty-five!—minutes.”
“Continue your—five!—day physiotherapy streak! Always Getting Stronger! Always Getting Stronger trademark of—”
She dismissed them all, unstrapped her leg, and played the block game until the login for art therapy appeared on her HUD. She tapped it and her efficiency apartment disappeared into the VR.
“Start New Project,” read one pane. “Load asset packs.” “Saved asset packs.”
She didn’t mind art therapy. She’d picked it off a list of options. It reminded her of drawing with Jacko, but in a good way, not too much. The part where they talked about the art sucked, but most of it was just putting together stuff from the asset packs. Some people in the group made fucked up shit, with distorted bodies and darkness and holes oozing blood. Benny just made landscapes. The biggest asset packs, the photorealistic ones, had scans of all kinds of trees and flowers and rocks. She even recognized one of the mountains from a basic training VR sim; it was the same one Jacko had said looked like a pile of turds. Benny had missed half the targets from giggling.
Benny never used that asset pack.
But mostly, landscapes were okay. She made up stupid little games like “an accurate southeastern landscape” or “an extinct landscape” or “a landscape where everything’s blue,” with fescue and forget-me-nots and spruce. Except then she had to make up some bullshit about “the bluebird represents healing” and Amy, the facilitator, would nod her avatar head sympathetically, and that asshole Perry’s avatar would smirk.
Benny’s avatar still had both legs.
Today everything in the landscape was broken. A tree half-killed by lightning, with black bark and green needles around bleach-white wood. A split rock. This weird smeared-sideways flower from one of the asset packs, probably some kind of glitch in the scan, because nothing that freaky could be real. She hesitated over some bugs that reminded her of the bots at work: a shiny round blue-green beetle, a slatey pillbug. Perhaps next week she’d make a round stuff landscape.
She could draw the bots, of course, rather than just relying on what had been scanned into the asset packs.
But there was a lot in the asset packs.
And she hadn’t picked up her pencils since she got back.
At the end of class, she didn’t have to talk because Brett started crying about his dad’s old Mustang—a car, not a horse. That was fine with Benny. She had nothing to say.
It was too late to make dinner, so she ate some seaweed chips and jerky and a granola bar. She didn’t even need to shower, she figured. She showered twice a day at work.
She played the block game for a while and went to bed.
She could open that package tomorrow.
The next morning she overslept and nearly missed the shuttle. At work, there was a jar in her internal mailbox labeled “Uncle Bernie’s Special Salve,” which made her smile.
The rest of the week disappeared into training modules and shadowing other bot handlers. She watched through her HUD while Tark told his gray silicate bot to run a radioactivity scan on some beads, and while Braith guided one of her black survey bots out of a partly collapsed bed frame. Benny passed quizzes and made stilted conversation with her coworkers. Uncle Bernie’s salve seemed to help.
The package sat on the counter. It was a busy week.
The next week, she started running her team for a couple of hours at a time, first with Graeme looking over her shoulder, then with her on call. Each bot had its own panel on her HUD, plus the ones for the other bots in the area and overall status alerts—thunderstorms, gas alerts, wildlife sightings, seemed like there was always something going on. It was almost like piloting the mech, except with nothing locked around her body. Just information flowing through and occasional chatter on her headset. Almost like old times.
She made the “round things” landscape in art therapy, with pillbugs and ladybugs and cacti and beach pebbles and fat winter birds. Snarky Perry said it made no biological sense. Brett thought it was cute, and wondered if roundness represented integrity and wholeness.
“Sure,” Benny told him. Why not?
The following week, all her training modules were done. It was just her and the bots. She had to ping Graeme with a question almost immediately—was this butterfly in a glass dome the kind of thing she should have a bot dig out for the museum?—but Graeme didn’t seem to mind. The salve really did help.
On Tuesday, she opened the package. There was a note, scribbled on a sheet of AlgaWeave:
Dear Benny,
Jacko would have wanted you to have this.
Hoping it brings back good memories.
You’re always welcome here in Salmon.
Don’t be a stranger.
Love,
Margaret
Benny crumpled the note, then immediately tried to smooth it back out again. Jacko had talked about her mom all the time: the quilts, the spoon collection, the unexpected dirty jokes. A couple times, she’d gotten care packages of molasses spice cookies to share with the squad.
This care package was a sketchbook.
It was like something from the wrong asset pack dropped into her apartment. The black fiberpack cover, ring binding, and FurySaurus sticker were all horribly familiar.
Benny’s sketchbook had been decent, with long-fiber creamy AlgaWeave, but Jacko’s was the real deal: thick cotton paper. She had thought Jacko was bullshitting the first time she told her to go ahead and draw something on one of those precious pages, but no, that was just Jacko. If Benny flipped through it, about a quarter of the drawings would be her own.
She didn’t flip through it.
She put it carefully in a drawer, with Margaret’s smoothed note on top.
Then she dismissed all her notifications and played the stupid block game until she was tired enough to sleep.
Her fifth week on the job, Graeme told Benny that her squad had a below-average adverse incident rate. Benny choked up a little. It was nice, maybe, to know she was keeping them safe.
On an uneventful Tuesday, something tripped an alarm. The notification took over her entire HUD, red and flashing, with an urgent beep.
“ENEMY SIGHTED! ENGAGE Y/N?”
She froze, ready to—no, that wasn’t right. She blinked, hard.
It actually said, “WARNING: MET-A28 PAYLOAD ERROR.”
Payload error? Okay. Payload error. That had been in one of the training modules. Sometimes the reclaimed materials they were dumping got stuck.
She minimized the notification, pulled up the metal bot’s interface panel and tapped “Payload purge cycle.” Through the front-facing camera, she watched it bank off the track and dock with the hopper. “Purge cycle complete! Continue to decon?”
“Continue,” she signaled, watching the minimized error.
It didn’t go away.
Instead, the screen turned redder: “REPEAT WARNING: MET-A28 PAYLOAD ERROR.”
Something was really stuck in there. That was okay. Manual decon. She’d passed that quiz.
Eventually.
She directed the bot to a manual decontamination bay and set off.
MET-A28 met her in bay C-34, a narrow space with a counter on one side stocked with gloves, wipes, containers, and a lot of nozzles. The blue bot was still, but the lights in its sensors were flickering. When she approached, it beeped sullenly.
Benny hadn’t actually seen them in person, she realized. Not up close.
Up close, the bots were big. Waist high at least, and Benny wasn’t short. The problem was obvious: one of its grabbing arms was still extended, locked around something shiny. Carefully, Benny moved closer. It was a flat piece of metal, plain silver, barely thicker than her retro ID badge. Narrow, and wider at both ends. A wrench. A very simple one, not adjustable, just a bracket on one side and a loop at the other. More like a wrench icon than an actual tool.
Benny pulled the bot’s menu back up, watching in case it moved.
“Cycle arms,” she tapped, then jumped as one of the grabbers extended next to her prosthetic. She pressed back against the counter. She could get up onto it if she needed a more defensible position—which was ridiculous. This was a civilian bot. She was a civilian person. Everything was fine.
The arms cycled, grabbing and pinching and scooping, then retracted. All except one. Was the thing stuck in there? Without taking her eyes off the bot, Benny groped around on the countertop for PPE.
“Come on, drop it,” she said, locking her gloved fingers around the wrench. It was really jammed in there. She wriggled it, careful not to misalign the arm.
MET-A28 beeped, then beeped again, sounding almost plaintive. Which was silly. It was a bot.
“Give it!” she said, tugging. The bot beeped once more as the wrench finally came loose. It was light as well as thin. Aluminum, maybe, or an alloy. “Okay.” She pulled up the menu again and cycled the arms. This time, it retracted properly.
Right. Fine. Weird, but fine.
She set the wrench in a containment tub on the counter and turned around to take off her sweaty gloves. She should file the incident report while she had the object’s measurements handy.
In her peripheral vision, something moved. Benny spun to face the enemy. Except the stupid prosthetic didn’t pivot properly and her balance deserted her. She went down with a yelp, clipping her hip and shoulder against the counter and hitting the ground hard.
MET-A28 was holding the wrench again.
And the decon bay was too small. She was trapped between the bot and the wall. Her leg didn’t work. Benny could feel her pulse speeding up. She tasted blood.
With an effort, she smacked the “Call supervisor” button on her HUD.
She was almost okay when Graeme arrived. She’d made it to the bench across the hall from the manual decon bay, and maybe didn’t look too much like she was about to puke.
Graeme sat down next to her and looked straight ahead.
“What happened?”
“It wouldn’t let go of that wrench. And then when I finally got it to, it picked it up again.” Benny looked at the floor. The scrub bootie stretched weirdly around her plastic foot. She’d probably get fired now.
“Ah. Hang on.”
Graeme stood up, walked over to the decontamination bay, and pulled a chemical nose out of one of the drawers. She swabbed the wrench, looked at the readouts, and then sprayed some foam onto it. She was talking to the bot, too quietly for Benny to hear.
“Let’s give that a second to work. And then, I think it’s time we paid a visit to the charging bays.”
Benny frowned.
“Why? What’s it doing?”
“It’s easier to show you than explain. Let’s get this puppy cleaned up first.”
Together, they rinsed off the foam and sprayed down the rest of the unit, then checked fresh chemical sniffer results. Through it all, MET-A28 clung to its shiny wrench.
“Okay, tell it to go recharge.”
Benny tapped the icons on the HUD menu, and the bot started to move. Benny turned to follow it.
“No, we’ll take the elevator. This way. You feeling better now?”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about. Should’ve done this week one.”
The elevator started descending with a jerk. For a moment, it seemed very small. Benny concentrated on Graeme’s prosthetic hand, tapping on the rail. Graeme didn’t look worried.
The elevator dinged again. The doors opened.
“After you,” said Graeme.
According to the HUD, the bay they were looking for was to the right. The hallway was dark, with pale concrete floors and blue metal gateways punctuating its length. Sensor lights flickered on as they walked, but the bays remained dark. Benny could make out faint red and yellow charging lights in some of them.
They turned a corner, then hit the right number.
Graeme leaned past Benny and poked a panel on the wall. The charging bay lit up.
Benny didn’t say anything.
It was going take her a while to figure out what to say.
There were ten alcoves around the room, sized for the different bots. They slept—charged, they weren’t alive—nose-in, with their pointed ends tapped into the power supply and their round backs facing the room.
No two alcoves were the same.
One had a curling design of green and blue glass stuck to the wall above it. One had a canopy of wood fragments woven through with long-dead flowers. A small one, with a sensor bot tucked into it, bore lines etched into the wall, arranged into designs that looked almost like pictures.
And one alcove had a sunburst of flat, shiny metal.
“What is it?”
“We’re not really sure. Almost all of them do it from pretty early in the real-world portion of their training. We tried taking it away, but performance craters. If we reprogram them not to do it, they can’t sort the materials right. We even had a couple of digital ethologists from the university come study them.”
“And?”
“Their final report was all about bowerbirds collecting blue objects and bees following ultraviolet markings on petals. Best I could tell, it boiled down to ‘the bots think it’s pretty, and maybe that helps them understand their jobs.’” Graeme shook her head. “I’m sorry. I should’ve told you, it just slipped my mind. When a bots finds a decoration for its nest, we just let it do its thing.”
There was a beep from the hall. Benny was probably imagining things, but it sounded timid. The big blue metal reclamation bot was still holding the silver wrench in its extended arm.
Graeme pulled Benny aside. They stood in front of the charging bay with the glass curlicues while MET-A28 rolled in, rotated, and extended a small nozzle. One of its solvent jets, Benny realized. It pivoted from side to side, probing the air, then poked the nozzle into the gap between a fish knife and a flattened beer can. It sprayed the wall, retracted the nozzle, and pressed the wrench into the sticky patch. Then, it retracted its arm, rolled backwards, beeped once, and rolled forward onto its charging brackets. An orange indicator light lit up on its rear.
“Told ya,” Graeme said, “personality.”
She shrugged.
Benny shook her head.
“That’s so weird.”
Graeme shrugged again.
“Like I said, it’s just how they make sense of it all.”
On the way home, Benny watched the scrubby regenerated forest around the landfill give way to orchards and solar arrays, and then housing developments with orderly palms and oleanders around their gates. She got off at the Caladan Avenue station, where unruly nasturtiums overflowed out of chipped concrete urns, and went back to her apartment.
Her pencil case was where she’d left it when she unpacked.
She went back into the other room and pulled Jacko’s sketchbook out of the drawer.
When Mom had helped her set this place up, she’d put a comfy chair in front of the window. Benny shoved laundry off it, sat down, and opened the sketchbook.
There was the dorm at Benicia. On the next page, a seagull with a crab in its beak. A water bottle, casting a long shadow in the afternoon sun. The extended gun-arm of a mech. She flipped through page after page of drawings, some swift, bare lines, some slow and carefully colored in. She found the first of her own drawings, a sailboat in the bay. Jacko had added a mermaid swimming in its wake.
The drawings ended three quarters of the way through the book.
Jacko would never fill those pages.
But new images had started crowding the blank pages of Benny’s life. She knew how she’d sketch them. The bots. Graeme’s plastic hand. The curvilinear forms of nasturtiums. Mom positioning furniture. The memory of Jacko’s face. Benny could see them, rayed out like the bots’ mosaics.
Benny bit her lip, pulled a pencil out of the case, and began to draw.