Enigma Glitch

Chapter 21: Stargazer I

Carter took a folded slip of paper from an overturned desk near the stairs. The android wrapped its tarnished metal hand tight around the paper and stood.

Victoria kept a handful of looters at bay with her pistol.

"You could not resist running to the sound of gunshots, like vultures coming to pick at the dead." Victoria kept her sights on the leader, a large man in a leather who also had an eyepiece to guide him through the smog. "I am the one who fired all those shots. Come at me if you want to join the bodies."

"I have what I need," Carter said. It moved through the living room past overturned furniture but a mostly clean carpet free of stray items.

"Thirty minutes later and this place is almost empty." Victoria shook her head. "Carter, if you are going to miss this place, you should take one final look before we leave."

"Did you ever take in a final moment somewhere important to you?" Carter rotated to view the smog-filled room.

"Only Arlington." Victoria choked up for a moment. "More than eight hundred of my sisters have ashes buried there. I stood upon a hill and stared at it for an hour after the Cuban Conflict memorial ceremony. Only time I've ever been to D.C."

Carter rotated once more and then left the building.

"Follow us and die," Victoria said. She exited behind the android and asked, "Where are you walking with that paper?"

"Mother of Miracles Cemetery, ten blocks away," Carter said. "But could we make a stop before we get there? We'll only divert course by two blocks."

The pair left the apartment block and paced through the parking lot. They stepped over a dead body of a cousin who had been dragged by second-wave looters. His shirt and coat were missing, as was his filter mask.

"How fortunate for us no one called in the gunshots." Victoria watched red forms of more looters who approached the apartment. "As for your question, we can divert once for your task. What is it, by the way? Is that a legal document for Gibson's attorney?"

"Mr. Gibson has been working on a letter for three years." Carter held its hand up, but never unrolled its fist around the paper. "He's revised it at least one hundred times that I'm aware of. He wanted to convey his thoughts to his late wife. The diversion is to pick up flowers for Mrs. Gibson."

"Why would you care about Gibson's wishes about his wife?" Victoria walked beside her companion and craned her neck to look into the android's simple, unchanging plate of a face. "You get to do one last thing before being patched up and vaulted by some collector, and this is how you use your freedom?"

They made their way past the rod iron gates at the front of the apartment complex and walked along a wide yet littered sidewalk.

"Mrs. Gibson was the one who purchased me for Mr. Gibson ten years ago," Carter said. "She was the one who named me Carter. She played card games with him every day and she almost always won. Until cancer took her. Then Mr. Gibson played cards with me. He never once smiled when he won against me the way he did against her."

"Such a romantic fairytale." Victoria rolled her eyes.

"I've had multiple owners, and I've never seen anyone else who cared about each other more than the Gibsons." Carter sped up its pace. "They treated me well. They were good people. If I can rescue this letter and deliver it to her, that's the most important task I can do to help my former owner. I can't think of any other way I'd like to use my freedom."

The two walked through dense smog together in silence for at least a minute.

"Do you have anyone you care about?" Carter's metal feet tapped against the concrete in rhythm with the taps of car tires against cracks in the road nearby.

"If you mean a husband, no." Victoria shook her head. "There are only my sisters. We do not stay in regular contact, but at last check-in, there were only twenty of us left."

"I wonder how many of my kind are out there," Carter said.

"Hard to tell, but when I looked up online android auctions, there was never more than two of your model at once," Victoria said. "That should mean a few dozen in the collector market at least."

The two approached a crowd waiting at a corner, all in filter masks and many with visors. A series of beeps in the distance caused everyone to cross at once. Victoria and Carter sped around and past the crowd.

"Do you consider yourself one of them?" Carter spun back to tilt its forehead at the crowd, then resumed its walk beside Victoria.

"Human? Of course." Victoria perked her chin up. "I may have a bit of genetic engineering, but I am in every way a human being. People these days get more modifications than I was born with, so in many ways I am less an aberration than the typical cyborg or mod-freak."

The pair turned a corner after another crossing. They went toward the business area of town, where skyscrapers took over the space from the apartment blocks. Weak repulsor fields kept the smog away enough to make the air pollution appear like a light fog.

"Why have you chosen to be a mechanic after being bred to be a soldier?" Carter again turned to look at Victoria.

"I will only answer if this is your last question."