LIFEL1K3 (LIFELIKE)

1.2

DEMOCRACY

The blond man looms above me. Tall as heaven. Twice as beautiful. He steps closer and I wonder why his boots squeak like frightened mice. And then I look down, and I see the floor is red. And I remember.

On my face. On my hands. None of it is mine. All of it is.

Father.

Mother.

I …

My brother, Alex, is just ten years old. He makes things, just like our father. Breathes life where there was none. For my fifteenth birthday, he made me butterflies. There are no such things as butterflies anymore, and yet he made them for me all the same.

And he could always make me smile.

The beautiful man raises his pistol, and Alex looks down the barrel into forever.

“Why are you doing this?” he asks.

The beautiful man does not answer.

And I am not smiling anymore.

I am screaming.

They used to call it Kalifornya, but now they called it Dregs.

Grandpa had told Eve this place wasn’t even an island before the Quake. That you could motor from Dregs to Zona and never touch the water. A long time ago, this was just another part of the Grande Ol’ Yousay. Before the country got bombed into deserts of black glass and Saint Andreas tore his fault line open and invited the ocean in for drinks. Before the Corporations fought War 4.0 for what was left of the country and carved out their citystates beneath a cigarette sky.

Eve checked that the coast was clear, stole out from the WarDome’s innards, Lemon in tow. A boom echoed in the arena’s belly, accompanied by a trembling roar. Another bout had started, and Eve could hear iron giants colliding inside, rumbling applause. Her mouth tasted of copper and her belly felt full of ice. The memory of her outstretched hand and the collapsing Goliath burned bright in her mind.

As if things hadn’t been bad enough already …

The Dome’s meatdoc had given her a fistful of pain meds and offered a bioscan, but she’d just wanted to get out of there. She’d seen those Brotherhood boys at the bout tonight, and after what she’d done, they’d surely be gunning for her. Time to get home while the getting was good.

An old billboard, faded with time, stood near the Dome’s rear exit. Kaiser lay in the gloom beside it, eyes burning softly, his tail starting to wag as he caught sight of her.

“How’s my handsome boy?” Eve smiled. “How’s my good dog?”

Kaiser wuffed and rolled over so Eve could scratch his belly. Lemon knelt beside her, fussing over the blitzhund and stroking his rib cage. Kaiser’s hind leg began kicking as they found his sweet spot, his pistons hissing, the heat sink that served as his tongue lolling from his mouth. After a few minutes of glorious torture, the girls finally let him up, and the blitzhund shook himself like a real dog would have, shivering the dust from his hull.

Kaiser wasn’t a logika, like Cricket. He was technically a cyborg, but his only organic part was a chunk of cloned Rottweiler brain and six inches of spinal cord plugged into an armored combat chassis. He’d looked almost real once, but his fur had started wearing off a year back, so Eve had stripped him to the metal and spray-painted him with an urban-camo color scheme instead. He looked skeletal now, all plasteel plates and hydraulics. She liked him better this way. It seemed more honest than pretending he was a real dog. Grandpa said it’s always better to be shot at for who you are than hugged for who you aren’t. Most days in Dregs, someone was bound to be shooting at you, anyway.

Eve heard smashing glass, a drunken yell out in the night. She and Lemon hunkered in the shadows of the Dome, waiting to see if the Brotherhood or some other flavor of trouble had found them. Minutes ticked by as they crouched there in the dark.

Lemon brushed her long cherry-red bangs from her eyes. The girl wore a choker set with a small silver five-leafed clover, toying with the charm as she whispered.

“Maybe we better jet, Riotgrrl.”

“We lost our whole roll on that bet,” Eve replied. “Got no creds for a ride.”

“We should set Kaiser on that bookie’s hind parts. True cert.”

“Technically, Miss Combobulation did go down first. ’Sides, you really wanna stick around here and argue over creds with the Brotherhood on the prowl?”

Lemon chewed her lip and sighed. “Lovely night for a walk?”

And so they began the trek back to Tire Valley. Kaiser stalked out front, his eyes lit up like headlights in the dark. Cricket rode in Eve’s backpack, the little bot’s oversized head wobbling atop his shoulders. They cut off-road, into a forest of towering wind turbines and rusted cranes and metal shells. Lemon’s eyes were on the shadows around them, her electric baseball bat slung over one shoulder. She clearly knew this was no time for a pop quiz, but the questions were backing up behind her teeth.

“So,” she finally said, stumbling through the trash.

“So,” Eve replied.

“You wanna talk about what happened in there?”

“You mean the part where my enviro controls fritzed or the part where I fried every circuit inside that Goliath just by yelling at it?”

“I couldn’t hear over the crowd. But it must have been a very naughty word.”

Eve engaged the low-light setting in her optic, her vision shifting to tones of black and green. She could see the shapes of the scrap piles around them, the distant warmth of the sun beyond the horizon. That Goliath, crashing to the deck over and over in her mind.

“Grandpa’s gonna ghost me, for cert,” she sighed.

“How’s he gonna find out?” Lemon scoffed.

“Domefights get broadcast all over Dregs. Even Megopolis, sometimes.”

“Mister C never watches the feeds. You need to relax, Riotgrrl.”

“You don’t think someone’s gonna make it their business to mention his granddaughter’s an abnorm?” Eve’s voice was rising along with her temper. “‘Oh, hey, Silas, saw Evie on the feed the other night, frying an eighty-tonner with a wave of her hand. What’s it like having a deviate in the family?’”

Lemon scowled. “Don’t talk like that.”

“What, true?” Eve spat. “And what about when the Brotherhood come knocking, huh? Those psychos nail you up for having an extra toe, Lem. What you think they’re going to do to someone who can fry ’lectrics with a wiggle of her fingers?”

Lemon sighed. “Tell her to relax, Crick.”

The little logika riding in Eve’s backpack simply shrugged.

“He can’t talk,” Eve said. “I asked him to be quiet for five minutes.”

“… What for?”

Eve rubbed her temples. “You did just see me get punched in the brainmeats by eighty tons of siege-class badbot, right? I have a headache, Lem.”

Lemon looked the little logika over. “Crick, I know you have to follow any order a human gives you as long as it doesn’t break the Three Laws. But being asked to shut up isn’t technically a command. You could probably still speak without blowing a fuse.”

“Don’t encourage him,” Eve growled.

“How about sign language? The little fug wouldn’t technically be talking then?”

Lemon grinned as Cricket activated the cutting torch in his middle finger and slowly raised it in her direction.

“See, that’s the spirit!”

Eve tried to smile along, but failed utterly. Lem could usually jolly her out of her funks with enough time and effort, and her bestest had both in abundance. But looking around at the mountains of refuse and rust rising into that starless sky, Eve couldn’t quite shake the memory of that scream building up inside her. That Goliath collapsing like she’d fried every board inside it just by wishing it.

She had no idea how she’d done it. Never been able to do it before. But she’d earned the Brotherhood’s attention now, and probably worse besides. Her machina was OOC; it’d taken her months of scavving out in the wasteland known as the Scrap to find the parts she’d needed to build Miss Combobulation. It’d take months more to build another. And in the meantime, she wouldn’t be Domefighting, which meant she couldn’t make more creds for Grandpa’s meds.

As far as troubles went, hers were stacking up to the sky. It’d take a lot more than the comedy-duo stylings of Miss Lemon Fresh and the Amazing Cricket to shake the grim off her back.

“Come on,” she sighed. “We ain’t getting any younger. Or prettier.”

“Speak for yourself,” Lemon huffed.

Hands in pockets, her crew in tow, Eve stomped on through the trash.

Four hours later, they were almost home. Dawn had hit like a brick, and the quartet stopped for a breather in the shade of a mountain of grav-tank hulks and corroded shipping containers. The sun was only just past the horizon, but Eve could already feel the heat in it, blistering at the world’s edge.

Los Diablos and the WarDome were just a smudge in the distance behind them. Engaging the telescopics in her optical implant, Eve scanned the Scrap—a desert of a million discarded machine parts, corroding shells and the occasional gutted building, stretching as far as the eye could see.

The whole island of Dregs was covered in the flotsam and jetsam of a golden age. A disposable age. Grandpa had told her that a long time ago people used to come out west looking for gold. Broke their backs for it. Murdered kin for it. It struck her as ticklish how the centuries had flown by and humanity hadn’t moved an inch.

Two years she’d lived here. Two years since she and Grandpa had fled the militia raid that took her home, the rest of her family, left her with a headshot that should’ve ghosted her. She could barely remember their flight across the desert, the dingy coastal medstation where Grandpa had installed the cybernetics that saved her life. From there, they’d bartered passage to Dregs, ferried across black water to an island of trash where no Corp bothered to stake a claim. Not quite a home. But something close enough.

Something to fill the empty where home used to be.

Eve touched the Memdrive implanted in the side of her head, the silicon chips studded behind her right ear. Her fingertips brushed the third chip from the back—the ruby-red splinter containing the fragments of her childhood. She thought about the man who’d given them to her. The last piece of family she had left on this miserable scrap pile. Pieces of him eroding away, just like the landscape around her. Day by day by day.

Lemon was slumped cross-legged on a rusted tank, welding goggles over her eyes, eating from a can of Neo-Meat™ she’d fished from her backpack. Kaiser looked on, tail wagging. Even though he was a cyborg, the puppy in him was still compelled to beg from anyone who had food.

“Want some?” Lemon mumbled to Eve around her mouthful.

“… What flavor?”

“I’d guess salty colon, but …” Lemon frowned at the label. “Whaddya know. Bacon.”

Eve caught the can Lemon threw her way. She scraped out the last of the vaguely pink mush with her fingers, shoveled it into her mouth. It was lukewarm, tasted like sodium and cardboard. A smiling humanoid automata on the label assured her the contents were UNCONTAMINATED BY HUMAN HANDS! and contained 100% REAL MEAT™!

“What kind of meat is the question,” Cricket muttered.

“Human flesh tastes just like chicken, supposedly,” Lemon said.

“Point of order,” Cricket chirped. “I’d have thought you’d be cracking wise a little less, Miss Fresh. All the troubles you got …”

“We forgot ’em for a minute,” Lemon sighed. “Thank you, Mister Cricket.”

“I live to give.”

“Crick’s right.” Eve stood with a sigh, booted the empty Neo-Meat™ can into the scrap. “The Brotherhood will be gunning for me, and Miss Combobulation just got turned into a very fancy paperweight. I gotta figure out how to get more scratch for Grandpa’s meds. And then I gotta figure out how to tell him his only granddaughter is a deviate.”

“Don’t say that,” Lemon growled.

“You prefer ‘abnorm’?”

“I’d prefer if you didn’t spew any of the Brotherhood’s brown around me.” Lemon folded her arms. “You’re not an abnorm, Riotgrrl.”

“You be sure to point that out when they’re nailing me up.”

“Anyone waves a hammer at you, I’ll put my boot so far up—”

The roar of distant engines cut Lemon’s threat off at the knees. Eve squinted northeast, saw tiny black specks flitting in the skies over Zona Bay. Activating her telescopics again, she scanned the ashtray-colored sky.

“Fizzy,” she breathed.

“What is it?” Lemon asked, sidling up beside her.

“Dogfight,” she replied. “Oldskool rules.”

Four dark shapes were dancing across the heavens toward Dregs. Three looked like Seeker-Killer drones, manufactured by Daedalus Technologies—man-sized, wasp-shaped, peppering the air with luminous tracer fire. The fourth was a flex-wing chopper, beaten and rusty and barely airworthy. It had no Corp logo, but whoever was flying it had the skillz, snapping back and forth between sprays of fire, slamming on the air-skids and blasting one of the Daedalus drones from the air with a rattling autocannon.

The engines grew louder, the distant popopopopop of the S-Ks’ guns echoing across the Scrap as the chase approached the island. Kaiser gave a low-pitched growl—a signal that he must be really annoyed. Eve knelt beside him, gave him a hug to shush him.

Glancing back to the dogfight, she saw the indie take out another Seeker-Killer, its smoking ruins tumbling from the sky. She was wondering if the flex-wing might live to fight another day when a burst of bullets caught it across the engines, sending it pinwheeling through the air. Miraculously, the flex-wing managed to catch its final pursuer in a return burst, and the last drone crashed into the ocean, setting the black water ablaze.

“Bye-bye, lil’ birdie,” Lemon muttered.

Lem was right; the damage was done. The flex-wing was losing altitude, dark smoke smeared behind it. Only one way it was going to end. Question was where.

Eve followed the craft’s arc overhead, flinching as the ship tore its belly out on a mountain of old auto wrecks. She lost sight of it behind a ridge of corroding engines but heard it crash, a screechskidtumbleboom echoing in the ruins around them.

She grinned down at Cricket, tongue between her teeth.

“Don’t even,” the logika groaned.

“Oh, come on, we can’t let someone else scav on that?”

“It just spanked three Daedalus S-Ks out of the sky, Evie. They’ll have heard the noise in Los Diablos. Sticking around here is dumber than a box of screwdrivers.”

Lemon scoffed. “It’s ‘dumber than a box of hammers,’ Crick.”

“It’s not my fault Grandpa wrote me crappy simile algorithms.”

“You’re the one who just pointed out how much trouble we got,” Eve said. “Imagine the scratch we might make on salvage like that.”

“Evie—”

“Five minutes. You game, Lem?”

Miss Fresh looked her bestest up and down.

“What’s Rule Number One in the Scrap?” she asked.

Eve smiled. “Stronger together.”

Lemon nodded. “Together forever.”

Eve scratched Kaiser behind his metal ears. “Whatcha think, boy?”

The blitzhund wagged his tail, his voxbox emitting a small wuff.

“Three versus one.” She grinned at Cricket. “The ayes have it.”

“That’s the problem with democracy,” the little bot growled.

Eve sighed, looked at Cricket sidelong. Grandpa had built him for her sixteenth birthday—her first without her mother or father. Her sisters or brother. Not even the bullet to her head had scrubbed away the memory of their murders. But the first night Cricket sat beside Eve’s bed, watching with those mismatched eyes while she slept—that was the best night’s sleep she’d had for as long as she could remember. And she loved him for it.

But still …

“I know the urge to worry is hard-coded into that head of yours,” Eve said. “But true cert, Crick, you’re the most fretful little fug I ever met.”

“I am as my maker intended,” he replied. “And don’t call me little.”

Eve winked and shouldered her pack. With a nod to Lemon, the girl turned and trudged down the slope, Kaiser close on her heels.

Scowling as best he could, Cricket followed his mistress into the Scrap.

1.3

WINDFALL

The four of us huddle together. Our parents and brother dead beside us. So close to dying, I feel completely alive. Everything is sharp and bright and real. My eldest sister’s arm around my shoulder. The warmth of her breath on my cheek as she squeezes me and tells me everything will be all right.

Olivia. The eldest of us. The epicenter. She taught us what it was to love each other, my three sisters and my brother and me. To be a band, thick as thieves. The Five Musketeers, Mother used to call us, and it was true. Five of us against the world.