Nick Wolven’s stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Analog, and F&SF, among other publications. He attended Clarion in 2007. He can be found on Twitter @nickwolven and online at nickthewolven.com. He lives in New York City with his loved ones and small animals.

 

 

THE METAL DEMIMONDE

Nick Wolven

 

Tipper’s in the south parking lot when her phone starts going mad. Not just ringing. It’s a tone she’s never heard before, high and warbling, almost a scream. She’s halfway up the fairway before she places it.

An alarm.

The ride.

She bumps through the crowds, heedless of complaints, her lineman’s boots crushing foam cups and toes. Breakdown. That’s the word that’s in her head, along with a few others. Accident. Screwup.

Yeah, you screwed up, kid. Big time.

The rides clash and swoop overhead, flinging screaming riders at the stars.

Snake is located near the end of the fairway where the grounds trail off into grit and chaparral. Even from a distance, behind the bulk of the Haunted House, Tipper can see the ride stretched out like a beached leviathan, the tubular body sprawled in the dirt, lights all down it twinkling emergency colors; orange, yellow, red. The mouth gapes hugely, like a crimson castle door. Escape hatches along the sides have popped open to show steel ribs. In the lurid aura of the Haunted House, the thing looks like some dying dragon, felled by a southwestern St. George. But it’s not dead, only paralyzed, screaming a mechanical plea through Tipper’s phone.

She thumbs the screen and shuts off the alarm.

The ride is surrounded by a mob of gawking bystanders. Tipper pushes through and vaults the aluminum fence. Suzie is standing by Snake’s mouth, all ten fingers curled in her tufty hair. The wrinkles in her metalhead con-cert-T twitch with agitation.

Tipper pulls off her sleeveless hoodie as she jogs up, panting in mouthfuls of the desert night.

“Suzie, I’m sorry. I just got the buzz. What’s wrong with—?”

Before Suzie can answer, another woman steps out from behind the ride. Amy Carter is pure carnie, longboned and lean, with a trailing gray braid that runs down to her white jeans. She runs the Haunted House, or as she likes to put it, keeps the gate to Dracula’s castle. Her gray eyes screw hard into Tipper’s.

“Supposed to be back half an hour ago, weren’t you, kid?”

“I . . . ” Tipper falters.

“What were you doing, getting cuddly with some boy behind the bathrooms? You think this isn’t a real job?”

“Dial it down, Carter. Just a notch.” Suzie’s face is round, smooth-cheeked, and somehow always seems to be smiling. She puts a hand on the back of Tipper’s neck. “There’s nothing Tipper could’ve done, even if she was here. Snake’s got something caught in her throat, that’s all.”

Tipper tries to look cool as she clomps up to the ride.

“So someone got stuck? No one’s hurt, are they?”

“You better damn well hope not.” Carter stomps into the ride’s wide mouth.

Suzie pats Tipper’s arm. “They’re not hurt, don’t worry. Snake’d never let that happen.”

It’s true. Snake could never put anyone in danger. Safety first, right? It’s in the wiring.

Tipper follows the two women into the ride’s gullet, between the big foam-rubber fangs. The machine is a tender behemoth, incapable of harming a human being.

But here’s the problem, always the problem: What if a human being decides to harm Snake?

From the ride’s mouth, Tipper has a great view of the fairgrounds, framed in the robot’s arching jaws. Over the tent arcade, the Scream-o-Saurus chomps at the stars. Octowhip, the LandShark, the Abominable Go-Go-Go Man, they’re all here, waving segmented arms, dancing like giants, giving loads of shrieking riders the time of their lives.

At moments like this, Tipper feels a kind of aching self-consciousness, like a sunburn all over her body. Who is she but another lost kid, trying to look older than her age? Skinny hips, brown face, clothing too bulky for the Arizona climate. A child of the Fringe, with nothing to keep her going but an outsize attitude.

Suzie trusts her, though. One month into the job, and Suzie is already letting Tipper share responsibility for Snake. She can see it, Suzie says—Tipper has the touch, the feel.

“You got the magic, kid. I always know.”

It’s a good thing to hear in these lonely desert nights, when the fair shuts down and the rides go to sleep, settling on their lots like weary monsters. As their engines click into silence, Suzie sits in the door of her trailer, bottle of Cuervo between her knees, and takes in the phantasmagoria with a hand.

“You know what I mean? I mean love. Seriously. You want to be a ride operator, you got to love these things like your own two hands. These aren’t your granddad’s rides, some swivel-mounted cages on a rotating frame. These are beasts. They need TLC. And I’ll tell you something, if you give that to ‘em? They’ll return it a thousand-fold.”

Tipper’s brothers would say that’s crazy talk. Carnie superstition, techno-philia. But in the juniper smell of the carnival night, with saurian heads bobbing against the moon, when you’re puffing homegrown pot under bowers of luciferase lights, and those cool Sonoran breezes come up with just a whiff of kerosene . . . how could you want any other kind of life?

“Trust,” Suzie’ll say, “that’s what it comes down to. The beautiful trust between woman and machine.”

“Hey. Tip.” The snap of Suzie’s fingers is muffled in the ride’s padded throat. “You okay?”

Speechless, feeling ridiculous, Tipper turns and follows her down the red tunnel.

Snake is one of the smaller rides, intended for younger kids and their parents. Bloated with extra padding, painted nonthreatening colors, it has the googly eyes of a family attraction. Synthetic flesh of gel-packed polyfabric masks the feedback systems: the thigmotaxics, the thixotropic sensors and servos that keep riders bouncing along. You’d have to try to get hurt inside Snake, and even then you’d probably be okay. Like a princess oversensitive to a pea, Snake would smother you in loving cushions, push you along through a gentle peristalsis, and pop you out into the world unharmed.

The kids love it. Getting swallowed and expelled, then rushing around to do it again: the ride seems to exorcise some childish fear. Tipper herself always feels queasy in here. She keeps close to Suzie, stumbling on the padded floor, trying not to touch the slightly grubby walls. One thing about Snake, the ride may be safe, but you can only swallow so many children per day without picking up a few not totally wholesome odors. Snake is self-cleaning, so most of the puke and pee and food is masked with an alcoholic tang of disinfectant. Still . . .

“Suze?” Tipper pauses ten feet down the throat. The ride is stiff but not quite straight; they’ve lost sight of Carter around the curve. Suzie turns.

“Listen,” Tipper says. “I’m real sorry. I was in the parking lot, and I don’t know what happened, I guess I dropped a mental digit or something—”

“Tip?” Suzie braces herself against the bouncy walls. “I’ve been at this a long time, okay? These rides, they’re like dogs. Big, friendly, and dumb. They get in trouble. It happens.”

“I know. I’m saying, though, what I did, it was totally stupid, and I won’t ever—”

“Ah, ah, ah!” Suzie waves her hands by her ears. “It’s history. I’ve already forgotten it.”

“But I—”

“I’m sure you had your reasons.” Suzie’s face creases, and for a moment, Tipper can see how old she is. At least fifty, maybe more. A whole life, probably not a happy one, etched in those plump Chinese features. “If I cared about punctuality, you think I’d be working the ’grounds? Think I’d be tending to this dumb brute?” Suzie gives the wall an affectionate whap. “We’re all hopeless screw-ups, down here in the metal demimonde.”

Tipper nods. She still wishes she could explain. “The thing is, I haven’t even told you why I was—”

But Suzie reaches out, holding Tipper’s hot face between her hands. This is a woman who spends her life wrangling metal monsters the size of tractor-trailers. A woman used to being in control.

“Tip? Listen. You’re one of us, now. You’re a robot wrangler, a monster rider, and you’re literally standing in the belly of the beast. It’s just me and you down here, and we’ve got to look out for each other. Right? Right.”

It’s a nice moment, until the screaming starts.

Tipper’s first to move, bounding down the jiggling tube. Already she can hear occasional giggles between the cries. The screams themselves edge higher, becoming falsetto, false. Something weird is going on, here.

Another bend, and Tipper slams into Carter’s jean-jacketed back. The screams break into boyish laughter.

“Help . . . I’m being eaten . . . I think my scrotum’s caught!”

Carter’s face is like something out of her Haunted House. “You.” She jabs a finger. “Enough. Move.”

Clutching Carter’s shoulder, standing on tiptoes, Tipper can see two boys wedged into the pillowed tunnel, feet and hands jammed into the walls, like a couple of throat-choking chicken bones. The smartfoam is pulsing around them, spasming like a misfiring muscle as the ride tries to shake them loose. This is the only way to jam the ride: You have to give it everything you’ve got.

“Guys.” Suzie squeezes past them, frowning at the boys. “Come on, already. There’s kids waiting to ride.”

“Hey, ma’am, is it our fault your ride’s not safe? I’m really stuck. This is, like, misleading advertising. Some poor little innocent child could lose a testicle.”

More snickers.

“Out.” Suzie’s thumb jerks at an exit. With a laugh, the boys let go and drop to the cushioned floor. The foamy muscles of the throat stop twitching. You can almost hear the ride’s sigh of relief.

Suzie stands over them. “Get elsewhere, fellas. Fast.”

“I don’t know, ma’am, I’m pretty shook up.” The older boy winces theatrically, rubbing his elbows. “That was a kind of traumatic experience. I feel like I might need some time to recover.”

Suzie’s thumb is not in a humoring mood. It becomes a standoff, the boys laughing, Suzie’s thumb jerking, till one of the guys happens to notice Tipper.

It’s like someone pushed a button. The boy’s childish attitude drops away. He jumps to his feet, reaches for his friend. “All right, man, come on, that’s enough.”

The other kid, younger and smaller, doesn’t pick up the hint. “I don’t know, man, I think this ride is, like, molesting me.”

“Enough, dick.”

They stand together, balanced on the padding. A couple of Fringe kids in workmen’s clothes. You’d never guess that ten seconds ago they were acting like a pair of giggling toddlers.

The tall one nods. “Hey, there, Tipper.”

Tipper can feel Suzie staring. She suddenly has a fantasy of the foam walls flexing, shaking, bouncing her toward some place far away from here.

Suzie squints. “Tip, you know these idiots?”

“Uh, sort of.” Tipper flinches. “I mean, we only—”

“We’re friends,” says the older boy. “Well, acquaintances.”

Suzie’s squint contracts. With a shake of her head, Tipper staggers across the wobbly floor, grabs the tall boy by the elbow. “Come on,” she hisses, ushering him to the exit hatch. Amazingly, the boy obeys.

Out in the open, the noise of the fair explodes into salience. Tipper drags the two guys back between the trailers.

“What are you doing here?”

The tall one takes her hand. “What do you think?”

Without warning, he grabs Tipper by the arms, pulls her toward him. “Luke,” she begins. But already he’s kissing her, holding her head with his hands, and Tipper just knows, all the way from her head to her boots, that she’s in serious trouble.

It started three nights ago, in the land of Orphans.

Orphans: that’s what the carnies call the independent rides. Most of them are ungainly clunkers. Exposed works, wheezy pistons. They’re self-sufficient, but without human help, the fairgoers tend to feel leery about riding them. The Orphans hunker at the edge of the grounds, silent and neglected, accompanied only by the service bots that tighten their screws and top up their fluids. Like a bunch of old crocodiles, Tipper thinks, getting picked over by Egyptian plovers.

There’s something sadly romantic about the Orphans. Tipper likes to come out here on break, sit with a bucket-sized cup of Coke, and bask in the silence of these patient, old machines. Usually, the Orphans sit near the parking lot, and Tipper’s view is of auto-drive cars lined in arrays, tight and neat as corn kernels. Beyond the lattice of windshields, she can just make out the lights of a typical southwestern ‘burb. Lawns dead from water rationing. Shuttered factories, hard-luck malls. The Fringe.

That’s where Tipper was three nights ago, when she heard laughter from among the machines. She gulped her hotdog, put down her Coke, and picked her way through the thicket of steel limbs.

And there they were. Gathered in the shadow of Tentaculus, four boys were passing around a vaper pipe. Perfect stereotypes, these guys, with their caveman beards, their mechanic’s jumpsuits, their construction vests and Pan-Am coats. All of them affecting the styles of jobs that no longer existed.

Manuals.

Tipper stepped over the limp limbs of Tentaculus, wiping hot dog grease on her shorts. As she approached, one of the guys was leaning back, sighting up an extended arm, a J&B bottle dangling from his hand.

“Hey!” Tipper shouted, just as the bottle went winging toward Tentaculus’s monstrous face. The ride blinked, a fiberglass lid slamming down over its one huge eye. The bottle bounced off, fell harmlessly in the dirt.

Tipper stomped forward. “Dick. These are functional rides.”

The group turned. She found herself facing four teenage sneers.

“Doesn’t look too functional to me.” The guy who’d thrown the bottle kicked a limp tentacle, a hose of compressed air sheathed in piezocanvas.

“Well, they don’t get a lot of riders,” Tipper said, “but that doesn’t mean . . . ” She wasn’t in a mood to argue. “Look, I’m just saying, be respectful, okay?”

“Respectful?” The guy lifted his scruffy chin. “And who are you, the ride fairy?”

Snickers all around.

“I’m an operator,” Tipper said, “and you—”

But suddenly, a boy broke free of the group. He was the tallest, by far, and the only clean-shaven one, dressed in an airman’s jacket and carpenter’s pants. Long black hair reached to his shoulders.

“Hey, I know you.” He tipped his head toward the grounds. “You run the Snake, over by the Haunted House. With that Chinese lady and the mean-looking cowgirl.”

“Their names,” Tipper said, “are Suzie and Amy.”

The guy wasn’t fazed by her tone. “I’ve seen you working. You know your stuff.”

“There’s nothing to know.” Tipper hesitated. “The rides do all the work, mostly.”

“Sure.” The boy looked up at the Orphans, hands in his brass-zippered pockets. “Still, it takes a kind of talent, right? Like with animals.”

“I guess.” Tipper knew not to trust guys like this. She’d seen more than enough of the type; she had three older brothers, after all. But something about him . . . there was tension in the boy’s presence, more intriguing than threatening, like a faint scent of something burning.

“Animals? Really?” One of the others sneered up at Tentaculus’ cartoon grin. “Animals are cool. But look at this stupid thing.”

The tall boy and Tipper both ignored him.

“Luke.” He held out a hand. “You’re Tip, huh? I’m always hearing that old lady shout your name.”

“Suzie. That’s the old lady. She’s not old, though; she’s only like, fifty. I’m Tipoli. Tipper.” She gave Luke’s hand a single, brisk pump.

“You’re on break? Well, I wonder, Tipper . . . ” He grinned, and this much was true: he was dazzlingly handsome. “I wonder if you could give me a hand?”

The fair’s parking lot had seemed vast and cracked, that night, the site of a mall that never got built. The cars were packed so tight you couldn’t even squeeze between them; the drivers would have to summon them through the valet station. Crazy, the navigational skills of machines.

Luke went to a section of the lot marked off with chains, where old cars had been parked at madcap angles. Pickups, mod-jobs, a vintage corvette. The antique bodies and scattershot parking betrayed what signs on the pavement confirmed.

HUMAN DRIVERS ONLY.
NO AUTO-DRIVE BEYOND THIS POINT.

Luke pointed. “Mine’s over here.”

The vehicle made Tipper gasp and laugh at once. It was a courier truck, squeezed between two streetlight pedestals, the logo of the company still showing under a hasty spray-paint job. The thing was modded in a serious way: integrated tire-wheels, expanded cab, tinted windows custom-cut and sealed into 3D-printed panels hung on a modular frame. The cargo box rode low; Tipper suspected more than package-sorting machinery had been stored away back there.

“Home sweet home.” Luke pounded the box. “Got a bed back here, internet, built-in fridge, the best game hookup you’ll ever see. With a ride like this, who needs property taxes, huh?”

Tipper followed him along the vehicle’s fiberglass flank. The compact design, the lightweight frame, the aerodynamic lines . . . it was obviously a computer-driven truck, built for maximum speed on the shipping-only roads. Never meant for a human driver.

She peered at him. “So you drive this thing?”

“Trying to. That’s why you’re here.”

He popped open the door, a maintenance hatch he’d expanded to fit his makeshift cab. Inside, the components had been shifted and rebuilt, making room, just barely, for a driver and passenger. A carbon-fiber NASCAR seat, crudely cabled to the frame, took up most of the space. An ancient Mini Cooper steering wheel bloomed like a thistle from a two-foot exposed column. The pedal system looked like something from an old church organ. Although the interface for the computer was in place, showing all systems normal, Tipper assumed it had been clipped out of the loop.

Her older brothers, car jocks all, would have heartily approved. Cars ought to be an open book, they thought. No hidden triggers, no mechanical turks. They wanted to pull back the curtain from the autodriving wizard. Put the driver in control.

She ran her hands over the welding. “No way this is legal.”

“No way,” Luke agreed with a grin.

He grabbed the hatch, contracted his body, and half jumped, half tumbled into the jackleg seat. “They’re still using the same parts as the trucker days. You just have to load ’em up with different stuff. Legacy line systems, right? All the same tools and dies, injection molds. So it’s not too hard to pull everything out and retrofit.”

Tipper ducked in after him. “You crash in this, you’ll crumple like a beer can.”

“Yeah, I’ll be chewed like Trident, huh?” He laughed silently, running two fingers round the wheel. “You know about cars?” “My family does.”

“Well, it’s this queen bee that’s giving me problems.” Luke tapped a knuckle on the autodrive. “I clipped everything I could think of, but I can’t seem to shut it down for good. I still need it to—”

“To check in at the toll gates, right.” Tipper knew how this stuff worked. “Or they’ll snap your plates and call it in as a malfunction.”

“Right. So mother brain here has to be awake and talking. Only thing is, I tried to code feedback in for all the connectivity checks. Edge-stitching, they call it. So the program, like, talks back to itself?”

“Right, I know.”

“Well, it’s not working. She keeps noticing she’s disconnected. And shouting alerts at other drivers. So everywhere I go, all the cars around me are getting these alarms, like I’m a runaway truck. It gives me a nice open road, but . . . ”

Tipper edged him over, sliding in. “You need to shut off the emergency alerts. It’s got one of those AI security systems, right? So just give it your info and a statement, tell it you’re taking legal responsibility as a human being. It’s federal law, the car has to—”

“Exactly.” Luke was holding out his license, his phone. “That’s all I need you to do.”

Tipper sighed. She should have known.

“All right.” She waved him out of her space. “Hand it over.” Taking Luke’s license, she keyed on the comm. The touch interface showed a smiling cartoon truck.

“Sorry,” Luke said with shy pride. “It’s just that I don’t—”

“You don’t talk to robots. I get it.” Tipper did the old touchscreen finger-dance, darting glances at his workman’s clothes. “I should have guessed.”

Luke smoothed his airman’s jacket over the roadworker’s vest underneath. “It’s kind of a code with me.”

“Right. I know. You’re a Manual.” She keyed her way into the security system.

“I wouldn’t use that label.” Luke shrugged. “I mean, I’m not all hardcore about it. I don’t go all the way. I don’t get into sabotage.”

Typing in the last commands one-handed, Tipper pulled out her strapless Navy watch. Ten to ten. Almost the end of her break.

“You know, this could take a while. There’s a whole interview you have go through. I mean, federal law and shit . . . ”

Luke watched her. “I guess you probably have to get back to your job, huh?”

Tipper hesitated. Two shadows, the merest hints of dimples, appeared in Luke’s cheeks. He put his hand over hers, gently drew it away from the screen. “Guess we’ll have to do this another time.”

And that’s when Tipper got a feeling, a very strong feeling, that this whole thing wasn’t about Luke’s truck at all.

Now, in the shadows among the trailers, Luke draws back, lips lingering to brush Tipper’s cheek. Almost against her will, Tipper stretches up for his retreating mouth, clinging to him with feral hunger as his boots scratch away across the sandy ground.

“I’ve been waiting for you.” The instant she hears herself saying it, Tipper wants to viciously kick her own ass. So cliché, but the problem is, it’s true. Every night for the past three days, she’s spent her breaks lounging around the lots, wandering the Orphans, waiting for Luke to come strolling through the forest of hydraulic limbs.

Which is why she was standing around like an idiot, earlier, wasting time, dragging out her break, when Snake started blasting that alarm through her phone. Which is why she absolutely should not be standing here, grabbing this boy by the collar, pulling him down to her lips and . . .

“What’s up, anyway? Where’ve you been?” Tipper shoves him back halfway through the kiss, annoyed in twenty different ways. “And why are you coming around here, now, screwing up my ride?”

“Sorry.” Luke pushes down her hands. “I had some things to do.” Boys and their vague excuses. Of course he doesn’t even answer her second question. “Hey, listen, you still up for it? You know, giving me a hand with that truck?”

Tipper holds back. She has to at least pretend not to seem too interested. “Are you going to actually meet me this time? Or just screw around and make me lose my job?”

He glances up. She can see the whole fair, a brief gold flicker in his eyes.

“How about tomorrow? I’ll come by. You’ll be around?”

“Till Sunday. Then we’re moving on.” Tipper hopes he feels the pressure implicit in those words.

“Hey, Luke?” The runty sidekick pipes up; Tipper had almost forgotten he was there. “If we’re going to meet with that guy . . . ”

Luke waves. “One second.” His fingers rest, briefly, on the back of Tipper’s hand. “Tomorrow, then.”

And she could swear those words are still hovering above her, like one of the fair’s ethereal projected signs, even after his body has gone away.

The fair has no name, no official schedule. The rides themselves choose the itinerary, following summons on the radio waves. A shambolic, clunking caravan, they clump across the desert, sticking to corridors set aside for drone traffic, free and grand as demigods in this federally sequestered space. With a strange and phaneric benevolence, they settle on the outskirts of towns, sending out their ads and alerts, putting up tents and stalls, declaring to everyone that the fair has arrived.

And with it, in buggies and battered trailers, in terrain-adaptive four-by-fours, in the guts of the rides themselves, sunburned under dragon tats and open leather vests, scented with the smoke of sweet-flavored cigarillos—with it, as ever, come the carnies.

It’s five p.m., peak family time, and Suzie is deep into her routine.

“All right, folks, come and meet our baby. Fifty feet long and heavier’n a bucket of elephants, she lives on a diet of hydrogen and motor oil. Believe it or not, she’s a baby of her kind. Sweet as an orange creamsicle and twice as gentle as a St. Bernard. She’s more scared of you than you are of tigers and only looking for a little help. Give us a hand, and we’ll give you a reward, if you can help us cure the tummy-ache of our Baby Snake.”

A few families are at the gate. The kids, as usual, look entranced and terrified. The parents stand back with wary frowns.

“Is it clean?” a mom asks.

Suzie’s answer is prompt. “Snake, like all of her kind, has a grade-A immune system. She fully cleans herself after every ride.”

“I don’t know.” The mom takes her kid by the shoulders. “Hon, this looks a little intense.”

That’s when Suzie switches tactics, aiming her pitch at the little girl.

“Well, I have one question for you, little lady. Can you guess who Baby Snake’s parents were?”

A shake of black curls.

“Her mom was the Loch Ness monster,” Suzie says, “and her dad was a washing machine.”

No,” the girl insists, showing gapped teeth.

“It’s true. Baby Snake got lost one day, and now we’re trying to help her get back home. Only problem is, I broke my phone, and silly Snake here swallowed all the pieces! You think you could help us get them out, so we can fix them up and help this poor little girl find her parents?”

The girl gazes with alarmed curiosity into Snake’s wide-open mouth, up at Suzie’s friendly face, and then at her mother’s skeptical frown.

“Mommy,” she whispers, tugging her mother’s shirt. And Tipper hears snatches of an ancient negotiation.

“I want . . . ”

“Are you sure . . . ?”

“I really really really . . . ”

“You won’t be scared?”

“I promise promise promise . . . ”

A few other kids are coming up. It’s the old, the universal need. To be brave, to be helpful, to answer a call. As the children gather at the gate, their faces seem less eager than awed. They’re really doing it, going down the monster’s throat. But this is a gentle monster. And it’s all for a good cause.

“I suppose there’s some kind of policy?” the skeptical mom asks.

Suzie already has it out. “That’s me, Suzie Choi. That’s my license, that’s my insurance, and that’s my safety record. Go here, and you can see the ride stats: four hundred units operating in thirty countries, and we’ve never had a robot-initiated accident. Just in case, me and my assistant will be on hand at all times. But we’ve never had anything go wrong.”

Which is not quite true. What goes wrong, Tipper knows, is that the kids get over-excited, start fights, cry when the ride has to end, suffer the inevitable effects of too much fairground food. It’s the source of all robot woes: human error. But another ancient need is being met, now: the shaking of hands, the meeting of eyes, the reassurance of human contact. The mother gives in and thumbs the screen.

“All right, Nichelle, I guess we can try it.”

“Ye-es!”

Suzie opens the gate. “One at a time, guys, one at a time.”

It’s Tipper’s job to guide the kids in. That means maintaining even spacing, giving the fainthearted a last chance to quit, infusing the doughty with a final dose of assurance. Amazing, how needed it can make you feel, just doing this simple human work. The kids have so much faith, gazing up at her, amazed at the ease with which Tipper stands in the Snake’s open mouth.

In they go, out they come. Until at last . . .

“Tip.” Suzie comes to her side. The last kids are bouncing out of the ride, carrying foam pieces of the fake phone, trading them in for tokens at the gate. The adults gather up their charges and depart, listening to gleeful tales of derring-do. Suzie hangs out the come back later sign, the little clock set for thirty minutes.

“I think we need to have a talk.”

Suzie’s trailer is a buggy-style unit, the living quarters hung from a big-wheeled frame. Autodrive only, keyed to follow Snake wherever the ride might choose to go. Snake herself travels under a lightweight, woven-ceramic shroud, loaded on a radio-piloted, all-terrain wheelbed. Rugged and unglam-orous. But the carnies don’t demand much in the way of style.

Stepping in, Tipper throws back the curtain from her hammock, tumbles into the nylon mesh. Suzie settles into her own sling near the door. The size of the trailer means they can never be more than eight or nine feet apart. Ultra-compact storage is more a theory than a practice: Shirts have completely flooded the floor. The gallon water jugs, the potted cottontop cacti, Suzie’s Metalhead posters, the Mojave pattern pillows—everything is fastened tight or swinging free. Even with the best in dynamic suspension, travel on the desert roads is some rough riding. It’s the ridegirl ethos. You stick with your machine, wherever it happens to go.

Tipper can still smell the oily aroma of the fair, the cool evening air, the spice of empanada stalls—until Suzie hits the privacy switch, the walls tighten their lignin weave, and there’s nothing but the whir of the ventilation fans.

Suzie pops open her traveling case, lifts out a vape, loads a homebrew cart. The LED cherry cycles green to gold, making the trailer glow with magic light. “So,” she says. “How awkwardly unsubtle should I make this?”

Tipper plants a toe on the wall and sets her hammock swaying. On the curved ceiling above is one of Suzie’s posters, Controlled Discord, a metal-head act from way back. Algorithmic music, scientifically tested, calculated to produce acute feelings of unease. Not Tipper’s thing.

“You know what I want to talk about, I assume.” Suzie passes over the vape. “Give me a cue. Where should we jump in?”

The swinging hammocks arrive at moment of synchronized periodicity; Tipper plucks the vape from Suzie’s hand. It’s THC extract, hints of green tea and tapioca. Tipper puffs judiciously. MJ juice always hits her hard.

“These past couple of days,” Suzie says, “you’ve been awfully distracted. Almost like you’d rather be somewhere else.”

Tipper weighs her answer. “I want to be here. Working for you.”

Suzie’s smile is unrevealing. “You come from where, Tipper? Originally, I mean. Near Phoenix, right?”

“I don’t really want to—”

“All right, all right, I’m only saying, you came here for a reason. You could’ve gone anywhere. So why the fair?” Before Tipper can answer, Suzie says, “I’ll put it this way. Was it for the boys?”

Instead of responding, Tipper sucks on the vape. Maybe she needs that THC after all.

“This new friend of yours,” Suzie says. “Our buddy Mister Longhair Lothario—”

“His name is Luke.”

“What do you think he’s looking for? A good time? A little innocent fun, screwing around with my ride?”

“He was just joking. I think he was only trying to get my attention.”

“Well, he’s got it, doesn’t he?” When Tipper offers to pass the vape back, Suzie waves it away. “I ever tell you how I came to the fair, Tip? Going way back?”

Tipper’s heard the story half a hundred times. “Your parents—”

“Yeah, yeah, my parents were crazy.” Suzie flicks dismissive fingers. “More like out of touch. Wanted me to be a doctor. I told them, ‘Mom, Dad, there are no doctors anymore. There were doctors when you were kids. Now there are machines, with human assistants.’ ‘Okay, Suzie,’ they said, ‘so be an engineer. Be the person who makes the machines.’ I told them the machines make all the machines. You see, they were stuck in the old way of thinking. You work hard, you study hard, you get a good job.

“Anyway.” Suzie folds her hands on her stomach. “That’s not what I’m talking about. Hold on to something heavy, girl, ’cause you’re about to sit through a teen girl’s worst nightmare. You’re about to hear an old lady talk about her first love.”

She opens a minifridge and pulls out a tea.

“First thing to point out, like it needs pointing out: this was a long damn time ago. If you think the Manual trend is hot, now, all these kids running around in pilot jackets and construction vests, hell, back then, this stuff was new. The golden era of applied robotics, everything a thousand times more efficient, exponential productivity gains forever, blah blah blah. We were all going to be rich and live in a new age of leisure, have all the free time in the world, wipe our butts with golden circuit boards, whatever. And suddenly, every guy in suburbia is dropping out of high school, hanging around in boilersuits and tool belts, refusing to talk to voice interfaces, and talking about how he wants to do ‘real work’ for a living. Wild.

“Well, okay, this one kid, my neighbor, he was the type. Eighteen years old, covered with burns, which he’d gotten by doing honest-to-God-welding. What did he weld? Who cares? This was the Fringe. This guy worked with his hands. That was cool. He used to run a service ripping brains out of appliances, washing machines, blenders, whatever you brought over. Stupidifying, he called it. Making smart machines less smart. Had this teller machine he’d reconstructed, totally transparent, so you could see it all working, Monopoly money going round and round these big rollers, the whole thing running by gears and weights. And here I was, this little nerd-girl, who’d spent her life memorizing shit no human needed to memorize anymore. So.”

Settling back with a brain full of vapor, Tipper can picture teenage Suzie, a squat girl lost in a giant concert T, shuffling around with a head full of Taylor polynomials and math rock.

“Now.” Suzie sips her tea. “Okay. One day this young rebel comes by with a proposition. He wants to go to the fair, just me and him, and try out this new ride they have there. Me?” Suzie sets her empty can on the floor. “I’m fifteen. He’s eighteen. I think this is the best idea I ever heard. Friday night comes, I lie to my parents, he picks me up—no autodrive for this guy—and off we go. I’ll paint the scene. The rides, they were totally different then. No AI. No protocols. The operator pulled a lever, it started up. He pushed the lever, it shut down. Simple.

“But this new ride? This was something special. The Gentle Giant it was called. Big legless guy, about thirty feet tall. Long arms, kind of like a gorilla. You’d get in, like a giant hamster ball, and he’d pick you up, and—well, there wasn’t much to it, really. He’d kind of wave you around, pass you from hand to hand. Nothing like the Scream-o-Saurus, that’s for sure.

“But me?” Suzie sat up. “My generation? This was brand new. This was scary. Because it wasn’t just a machine, like what we grew up on. It was thinking. It was deciding. It was unpredictable. And you were literally putting yourself in this robot’s hands.”

Suzie pauses, settling lower in her hammock.

“Well, as you can bet, there were lots of safety precautions. Full body pat-down, two riders only, waivers, harnesses, the whole thing. We go through the rigmarole. We get in the big ball. And while we’re waiting, we look up at the Giant’s face, and that’s when this boy tells me his plan.”

The ventilation fans have shut off, the air slowly growing warm with contained heat. Tipper tries to remember if she’s ever seen this ride, which sounds, as Suzie says, intensely boring. A big robot picking you up, then putting you down? So what?

“Well, my brave new boyfriend, it turns out he’s been studying.” Suzie takes out a new tea. “The Gentle Giant has a pretty sure grip. But this guy thinks, okay, maybe if we both get up at the same time, throw ourselves against the wall—maybe if we time it just right, he says, we can get the Giant to, in a phrase, drop the ball.”

“And then what?” Tipper narrows her eyes. “You would die? What’s the point?”

“Here’s the point. This ride was special. It was new. There were magazine stories. There were giant crowds. If the Giant screwed up, even just once—”

“But only because you guys broke the rules.”

“But that’s just it! I mean, picture it. A nice young girl, her handsome boyfriend, out on their very first date . . . maybe they’re a little foolish, but who isn’t at that age? And then suddenly, thanks to this crazy, unreliable robot . . . ”

Tipper sighs. Of course. It’s a typical Manual ploy. Do something insanely stupid, then blame it on a robot. They’ll do anything to sow distrust and fear.

“Sending a message,” Tipper says.

Egg-xactly. Well, we’re sitting there, arguing, and all of a sudden, the ride starts up. At first, I can hardly tell what’s happening. The change is so gentle, so precise. Looking through the plastic, I see the fair sinking away. We’re up in the sky. Now the real excitement starts. Rising, dipping, whirling, flying. All of it amazingly smooth. It’s like being cradled, that’s what I keep thinking. Like being rocked to sleep in giant hands. I look over at my boy. I can see he feels it, too. Except he has a different reaction: It makes him angry.

“Around and around.” Suzie mimics the motion, sketching lemniscates with her can of tea. “Now it comes. My guy nudges me. Unlocks my harness. We stumble to the wall. ‘Get ready,’ he says.”

“Well?” Tipper prompts when Suzie falls silent.

“You know, I really liked that kid.” Suzie takes back the vape. “I can’t deny it. He was driven, he was passionate. I was fifteen.” She loads a cart, checks the light, lays down the vaper without tasting. “So we jumped together. Wham! Right into the wall.”

Her hands come together, palm to palm, making her hammock bounce and sway.

“First, there’s an awful feeling. Total vertigo. We lie together, pressed up against the plastic. Suddenly we’re floating, weightless. The guy told me we’d be okay. Couple bruises, maybe a broken finger. We wouldn’t fall more than fifteen feet. But right then, I really believed it was happening. I really believed we were going to die.

“Stillness.” Suzie’s hand hovers. “We’re sinking. Then, suddenly, we start to rise. Slowly, like a baby in its father’s arms. We’re high up, now, looking down at the Giant’s face. It was a simple design, all metal, with big round eyes. I realized, then, he’d been in control the whole time. He really was gentle, more tender than any living thing. And I felt this incredible sense of sureness. I wanted to be him, you know? Like that robot. I want to be that strong, that caring. That reliable.”

Suzie remembers the vaper, considers it a moment, puts it back in its case. “So that was it for my big rebel romance. I looked at my boy. He was slamming himself into the wall, almost crying, shouting, ‘Help me, Suzie, help!’ And I just stared. Because it was suddenly so clear to me.” Suzie grins. “It was so obvious who was the better man.”

During peak hours, the fairway develops an edgy vibe. Fringe girls go slouching along in rancher outfits, homesteader gingham and cowgirl boots, the remnants of jobs so impossibly long gone that no one even remembers anything but the clothes. Their boyfriends sip from Big Gulp sodas spiked with groundbrew hallucinogens, recipes cooked up in underground labs hidden in tunnels made by well-digging drones. Sometimes one of them will pause and talk to Tipper. Sad boys, aimless boys, breathing in her face the caramelized fog of their illiterate conversation, breath rich with the stink of the flavored syrups they add to their drinks to mask the chemicals.

Tipper waits beside the Haunted House, in the little alley that leads to the trailers, clutching her phone like a plastic amulet. Above the gabled roof, the Scream-o-Saurus lifts a shrieking rider, chews him in foam jaws, and gulps him down its waterslide throat. A group of robospooks leave the House by a back door, two rubber-skinned frogmen and a stooped Dracula. They carry a limp figure between them, a damaged werewolf who dangles like a cadaver from their arms. Heading for the repair station, no doubt. It’s a perennial problem around the House. Rowdy boys like to kick and abuse the exhibits.

A kiddie ride like the Snake doesn’t see a lot of business at this hour, and Tipper’s been given the rest of the night off. She checks her phone, knowing it’s pointless. The only kind of phone Luke would use is the kind made of two cans and a string.

“Hey.”

Quiet suddenly, he’s here. Dark against the glare of the virtual arcade, he steps aside to let the crew of spookbots shuffle by. His pale skin glows an eerie yellow in the light of the nearby picnic area.

“Ready?” Hands in pockets, Luke tips his head toward the parking lots.

Tipper hesitates. “The thing is . . . ” Luke waits, expressionless, while she works up her nerve. “The thing is,” Tipper says, “do you kind of have a second? I sort of promised someone we’d meet with her first.”

“Someone?”

Before Tipper can answer, Luke gives a jump. Two shadows have manifested on either side of him, inhumanly still, crowding in like mafia toughs.

“Little boy?” The voice of the left figure is shrill. “You’ve been a bad boy, haven’t you? I can always spot a naughty little boy.”

Luke stumbles back as a woman steps forward, lifting a hand to her gashed and bleeding throat. It’s the Murdered Bride, one of Tipper’s favorites.

“Oh, you best beware, naughty boy. Mother is up above, watching us all.”

The Bride lifts her dark-ringed eyes to the House’s gothic facade.

Tipper laughs at Luke’s expression. “It’s okay. I know these guys.”

Hearing her voice, the two spookbots step back, edging into the light of the picnic area. The Murdered Bride tips her head back, sluicing blood, which dribbles down her décolletage into a culvert between her breasts. Next to her, the Mummy clutches his stray bandages, glints of eye and tooth and bone peeking through the windings on his head.

“Uhhhh,” says the Mummy, and then, at a skeptical glance from Luke, “Uhhhhh!

Luke straightens his jacket. “What are these, your chaperones?”

“Kind of.” Tipper offers a hand. “Come on, this’ll only take a minute.”

“Mother hates for her children to be late.” The Bride shakes her head. And as Tipper draws Luke into the alley, the spookbots shuffle forward to escort them inside.

The Murdered Bride leads the way, to a service entrance concealed in a thorn-grown porte-cochere. The thorns retract, the door creaks open, revealing a tipsy staircase.

“Hurry, please.” The Bride lifts her skirts. “We mustn’t keep Mother waiting.”

Up to the second floor, down a dark main hall. The House is one of the newer rides, a collective artificial mind. Thirty rooms host seventy-two independent robots. The whole fantasia revolves around a gadget called the Morbid Eye, a pulpy, brainish thing that uses a compressed air system to levitate through the corridors. The Eye coordinates every system, HVAC to crowd flow to the spookbots themselves. Fishmen and lizardmen, ghouls and ghosts: The Eye leads them all, but only primus inter pares. The spookbots are communal, telepathic, autonomous. Carter once told Tipper that the Haunted House is a lot like an old computer program, every component neatly encapsulated. Even to the all-seeing Morbid Eye, the spookbots are mysterious and unpredictable, free-roaming ghosts in a grand machine.

“We’re very lucky.” The Bride pauses in the armory to adjust her skirts. “Mother will be taking her supper at this hour. She’s ever so much nicer when she’s feasting on a long slab of rare meat.”

Carter’s rooms are in the center of the House. Their little group enters a gloomy study. At the central desk, Carter waits to receive them, working at a toothsome and bloody steak. Like most of the ride, the furniture here is lightweight mycocore, cobbled together by the spooks themselves. With twenty-five humanoid robots on staff, they can knock together the whole mansion in a single day.

Carter has a heavy tome in her lap, dark shapes writhing on an embedded screen. She slaps it shut. “Evening, kids.”

The Murdered Bride bows over her chair.

“I’ve brought them, Mother, just as you asked. I do try to be a good girl. But now look at me, I’ve gone and bled all over my dress!”

“Yes, I see that. Okay, Bride, I’ll take it from here.”

Leering with horrible enthusiasm, the Bride takes the Mummy by the arm. “Thank you, Mother. I’m so glad I could be helpful. But do, oh do be strict with these two children. They’re very naughty, and spoiled, too.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, Bride, thanks.”

As they pass by Luke, the Mummy can’t resist a last comment.

“Uhhhhhh!”

Tipper turns to watch as the spookbots stagger out. What must it be like, she wonders, living in this place, year upon year, day and night? But the obvious answer makes her laugh: It must be like caring for a huge, deranged family.

“I won’t take a lot of your time.” Carter comes around the desk. “Suzie says she’s given you the night off. Guess you two are heading out for some puppy love.”

“Not exactly, ma’am.” Luke is curt. Tipper can feel him tensing beside her. Carter, too, goes unusually still.

“Right. Well. Before you do . . . whatever it is you’ll be doing, I have something I wanted to run by you.” Carter picks up the tome, flips to the embedded screen. Tipper braces for something shocking. But it’s only a spookbot in the display, snarling fangs and a drooping fabric tongue, a burst of hair over a ripped check shirt.

“Look familiar?” Carter sticks a toothpick between her teeth.

Luke considers the image, shrugs.

“No?” Carter swings the book from side to side, making sure they get a good look. “Well, this here, this is Puppy. Puppy’s a part of our team here at the Haunted House. Our resident werewolf, you might say. And I’ll let you in on a trade secret: He’s one of our most advanced and expensive machines. Puppy’s got a Croatian hair extrusion grid, a chemical-electric body-to-brain feedback module, a moral module based on the soul of a Border Collie. Puppy’s only wish in life is to bring thrills and joy to little boys and girls.”

Carter slaps shut the book.

“Here’s the rub. Two hours ago, while I was helping a sick visitor, someone walked in, held Puppy down, and poured fifty pounds of birdshot and epoxy down his throat. So I thought I’d inquire if y’all might know anything about that.”

Luke’s face is resolutely bland. Tipper remembers the troupe of spookbots who left the House when they came in.

“Is Puppy going to be okay?”

“Puppy?” Carter tosses the book onto the table. “Puppy’s built for this shit. Puppy’s also insured for a pretty purse of money. My concern goes way beyond Puppy. I’m talking to you, son, you and your friends. You’ve been spending a lot of time around the grounds.”

Luke blinks. “And?”

“And?” Carter grins, exposing an impressive spread of cigarette stains. “Y’all been having a good time?”

“We—”

Carter cuts him off. “You seemed to be having a good time last night, when you jammed up the gears of my friend’s ride.” “That was—”

“A joke. I know.” Carter raps the mycocore table. “I guess the kids who busted up my werewolf robot, they also thought they were playing a pretty funny joke.”

Luke’s eyes narrow. “I had nothing to do with that, ma’am. Ask Tipper.”

Carter’s nod is calm and slow, every bit as lazy as a branch of sage bobbing in a Sonoran wind. “Right. No one saw a thing. Pretty convenient how that works.”

Luke parts his lips, shows his palms, shakes his head. Carter sighs and pushes off the table. In the back of the room, there’s a multipaned window, looking down on the mansion’s central yard. Carter hits a button, and the panes wink and flicker, becoming screens that show views of different rooms. Moonlit bedchambers, grisly dungeons, hordes of gleefully screaming kids. The views are jumpy, jouncing like old horror flicks, and Tipper realizes she’s looking through the eyes of six dozen robots, the congregant POV of the House’s host of spooks.

“I got six dozen witnesses to everything that happens in this place,” Carter says. “Full surveillance in every room. And wouldn’t you know? Amazing as it seems, none of these ever-vigilant robots of mine has any idea what happened to our dear Puppy. Son, you got any idea why that might be?”

Arms folded, she looks over her shoulder, and Tipper feels chilled, like it’s Dracula himself standing there in shit-kicking boots.

Luke says nothing. Carter sighs.

“Well, I’ll tell you. It’s because they don’t want to know. Two dozen potential witnesses, but when this crime went down, they all blinked at once. Even Puppy himself. He’s got a bellyful of industrial resin, but I guarantee, when we get him working again, he won’t say a thing. So riddle this riddle for me, if you can: why would a robot equipped with sensory capabilities approaching clairvoyance fail to notice a couple of boys holding him down and filling him full of beans?”

Carter pronounces the word clear-voy-ants. Tipper glances at Luke again, who seems calmer, now, like he knows where this is going.

“I don’t know,” Luke says. “You’re the woman who runs this place. You tell me.”

“I’m the woman who runs this place.” Carter bites a thumbnail, looking at the screens. “That’s one way of looking at it. Another is to say this place runs itself. All these spooks and ghouls, they’ve got their own priorities. And their top priority, number one, is taking care of the kids who come through. Keeping those kids safe and happy and out of trouble. The client’s always right, even when he’s wrong.

“Well, that philosophy leads to some pretty funny decisions. Like, for instance, not ratting out or spanking any trouble-making thug who comes through here. Do I understand it? I have to say I don’t. I say, a bad apple’s just a bad apple. And the truth is, a lot of the kids in this country smell to me like some pretty rotten fruit.”

Carter turns, sets her hands to the back of the mockwood chair, and looks at Luke from under bristly gray brows. Tipper understands. It’s a weird fact of modern life: Privacy has actually been increased by machine surveillance. When people spy on each other, there’s an innate urge to meddle. Robots are infinitely more scrupulous. To a fault.

“Here’s the point.” Carter’s hands tighten. “Over the past four days, we’ve had thirteen rides at this fair get jammed, damaged, graffitied, sabotaged, or generally screwed with, and nobody knows by who. Some of these accidents, we’re seeing sophisticated methods, radio hacks that go deep into the brain. I’m talking battlefield shit, the kind of crap our lovely government uses to make enemy drones attack their own people. The rides aren’t talking. To them, it’s all human error. Me, I’ve got another theory. I think we have some serious assholes coming through here: criminal elements, vandals, saboteurs. And if I catch a hold of ’em, I’m not going to be as kind and forgiving as these robot friends of ours. If I catch a hold of ’em, believe me, these guys’ll wish it was a werewolf on their tail.”

Finally, Luke speaks. “If you don’t mind my saying, ma’am—”

“I do mind your saying.” Carter lifts the chair, thumps it down. “I can’t accuse you of a thing except what I know. And it happens that the stunt you pulled with Snake, that was a lot more stupid than illegal. But I’m not worried about your future, son. It’s Tipper I asked to come here. It’s her I want to talk to.”

Carter looks at Tipper for a long time, the creases in her face slowly coming to seem less stark, more like the wear and tear inflicted on a loving but overburdened mother.

“Four words, kid. Take ’em to heart. Suzie. Loves. That. Ride.” Carter thumps the foam chair on each syllable. “I’m not talking hot-and-bothered love, like your epically raging teenage feelings. I mean the real stuff. Dogs and babies. If anything happened to that stupid metal monster . . . ”

Tipper holds Luke’s arm and squeezes, terribly sorry for how awkward this evening has become. “I know, Carter. But really, I promise—”

“Amy,” Carter corrects her. “I been traveling with Suzie for eighteen years. I’m Amy to her, and I’m Amy to you. You know we used to run a ride together?” She nods deeply, as if Tipper has denied it. “Yep. An old haunted house, one of the first. Six rooms, ten units, with Suzie and me doing all the training. All night, I’d see her running the routines, tutoring those robots, teaching ’em human behavior. When a scream is a good scream, when a scream is a bad scream, how to tell the difference between a thousand different kinds of laughs. She has the touch, Suzie does, like no one else, and the reason’s this. When Suzie looks into the eyes of a machine, she doesn’t see a machine. She sees a soul, same as the one in you or me. That’s why her rides are always the best, that’s why they’re the safest, that’s why people want to ride ’em, again and again. It’s a talent, it’s a gift, and it’s not something to be screwed with. It comes down to this.”

Carter comes forward and holds Tipper’s shoulders, staring into her eyes. And Tipper wonders what Carter’s seeing there—a full-blown soul, a busted machine, or maybe just a girl who’s a little bit of both?

“Trust,” Carter says. “You think about that, as you’re tearing up the town, tonight.” She turns back to her steak, her screens, her big family of monsters. “Oh, and while you’re at it? Have yourselves a real fun time.”

A junkyard, that’s how Tipper thinks of the Fringe. A junkyard covering half of America, full of scrapped and outmoded machines. Except these machines are the kind you can’t throw out when they’re no longer needed, the kind whose main function is watching TV, the kind who run on soda pop and corn-fed beef.

Human machines, superfluous and unwanted.

She pulls her eyes from the sprawl of lights, checks the dashboard, and clamps her hands to the wheel.

“Easy.” Luke touches the steering wheel, giving her a bit of reassurance. “No problem, right? Looks like you might want to ease off the pedal. Keep your eye on those proximity lights.”

Tipper eases off the gas, slowing by an amount imperceptible to her, but plenty salient to the computer-driven cars all around. The pedals are almost too far away to reach; she has to stretch to hit the brake. By contrast, the steering wheel’s right under her nose.

In the NASCAR seat of Luke’s jury-rigged courier truck, Tipper sits in a nest of buckles and screens. Luke, beside her, taps the proximity monitor, the color-coded warnings for the four sides of the car.

“Be careful with these guys, okay? If it’s in the red for over half a minute, it gets called in as a violation. Three violations, they’ll log it as a malfunction. That could get us a repair drone on our tail.”

Tipper nods, tongue between her teeth. Outside, shipping rigs and long-distance taxis tool along at a droningly steady speed, exactly one-hundred-thirty MPH. When she looks out the light-adjusting windows, the cars seem locked in a shared inertial frame, sitting still while blacktop and scenery stream by. Occasionally there’ll be a coordinated shuffle, simple flocking programs producing an elegant, emergent waltz that lets an ambulance or repair drone speed ahead. Then Tipper has to shift with the pattern, breathless and Zen-like, focused on simulating the precision of a machine. Up on this highway, it’s autodrive-only: the world’s least forgiving video game.

She flicks her eyes to Luke. “So this is the big plan for tonight? Hanging out in high-speed traffic?”

He smiles. “You’re doing amazing. It’s kind of fun, right?”

Warning chimes. Tipper checks her alerts. A tanker in the left lane wants to get off. She steers by the screen embedded in the dash, which gives an overhead view of the scanned environment. It really is like playing a game.

“I feel like a bird.” Her laugh surprises her, the silly joy of it. “No, I mean really, that’s how it feels.”

He grins, feeling it with her. “Take the next exit. You’ll want to start getting over soon.”

Tipper flicks on the signaling program, sending out a brief pulse of encoded vector arrays. She checks the windows. Nothing out there but the usual sprawl. “Where we going?”

“Little place I like to call the asshole of America. Thought I’d take you on a tour.”

“Of an asshole? Fun, fun.”

A long silence. When she looks over, he’s got that expression boys get sometimes, unexpectedly vulnerable and shy.

“No,” he says, turning to the window. “Of me.”

It’s been a strange evening. Tipper began it by fixing Luke’s car. Tapping commands by habit, she plowed through screens of legalese, while Luke lay back in the passenger seat with a hand-rolled joint. Every so often he asked her how it was going.

“Okay.” Some of the work she did by voice input, some by hand; she wondered how much Luke had been following. “I’m logging the ID tags, now. Voice, eyes . . . You realize that to go through with this, I’m going to have to be registered as an approved operator?”

Luke shrugged. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. Like if we go all the way with this, I could get in your car at any time and start driving.”

“Yeah?”

She grinned at his casual attitude. “So? You’re fine with that?” He shrugged. “If you are.”

Tipper turned back to the dash. “All right, then. What’s your social?”

And that set up the theme of the evening. They were taking things quickly, tonight, sharing vital details before they’d shared much more than a kiss. Punching in the last codes, Tipper turned to Luke. “That’s it. Su carro es mi carro, now. We’re both registered drivers. I hope you trust me.”

She squirmed out of the deep NASCAR seat, making room for Luke to edge in, but he pulled her back. “Hey, where you going?”

Tipper glanced between him and the wheel. “What do you mean? You’re not—”

“You’re a registered driver, now. Wanna drive?”

Tipper tested the clumsy pedals, the undersize wheel. “I should let you know, I’m not exactly . . . ” What word did she want to use? Skilled? Experienced? “I’m not very good at this.”

He shrugged. “I trust you.”

“With your life?”

“Sure.”

How could anyone really mean that?

And yet, Luke hit the switch that engaged lockdown, sealing the doors and the trailer compartment, puffing the temper-fit foam of the seats. “Go for it. I’ll tell you the turns.”

Tipper started up the sensor system, fumbling at the switches. Suddenly, his hand was over hers.

“Whoops. Not that one.”

Tipper laughed. “What’d I just almost do?”

“Something bad.” He spoke in his usual calm way. Then, with a smile: “Something extremely bad.”

She laughed. And just like that, they were kissing, his lips over her laughing mouth, their teeth knocking together as she responded with clumsy surprise. He held her until the surprise became excitement, then dropped back into his usually lazy pose.

“I . . . I want you to know,” Tipper stammered, “I mean, after everything Carter was saying. I do, too.”

“You do what?”

“Trust you,” she whispered.

He hit the starter, fired up the engine. “Let’s move.”

All through the drive, Tipper had been in a funny state, hovering somewhere between delight and annoyance. Boys, she thought, what could you do with them? Crazy, maddening, incomprehensible boys.

Being with Luke brought back memories of home, that house full of older brothers, where every day meant a new joke or taunt or impromptu wrestling match. Tipper’s oldest brother, Timmy, had worked at the service station, sitting around watching robots change oil. It made him act strange, all that boring work. When he came home, he’d just sit and stare at Tipper, like she was only another machine. Staring and staring, until at last she couldn’t take it. “What, Timmy? What is your problem?” Then he’d laugh and whoop, thrilled at getting any kind of reaction.

None of her other brothers had jobs at all, and it was always worth a heart attack an hour, trying to do her homework with them prowling around. They made a sport out of messing with the cleaning bots, flipping them over, kicking them around, triggering the auto-repair alarms. Instead of waiting for the repair drones to arrive, Tipper would fix the bots herself, which usually involved nothing more than talking them through their diagnostic routines. And while she sat with the things in her lap, murmuring into the mikes, her brothers would lounge around, sucking beers and teasing her.

“Maybe you could just kiss it and make it better, Tipper.”

“Guys! Shut up.”

Then, out of nowhere, they could be entrancingly nice, taking her out to show her the projects they’d been working on in the barn, old Corvettes on blocks, pinball tables they were building from scratch. And with their big, greasy hands lying over hers, they’d guide Tipper through the cleaning of spark plugs, the setting of windows, the wiring of solenoids to EOS switches.

Anyway, her brothers were a hell of a lot nicer than Dad.

Thinking about Dad, his rages, his they-drove-me-to-it attitude, makes Tipper give a twitch and jerk the wheel, almost veering into the side of a commuter van.

“Whoa,” Luke says. “Look, you’re okay. Just wait for this guy to pass, you’ll see the ramp.”

In another moment, they’re bumping down the interchange, descending into the bright yellow dots of suburbia.

The sprawl of lights starts right where the highway ends. For a moment, Tipper has a panicked feeling, like she really is heading home. Same wide streets thronged with autodriving taxis. Same crowds of nobodies. Same adobe bunkers, each in a plot of dark solar panels that used to be a lush green lawn.

The Fringe.

A sign by the road is flashing a helpful advisory:

TIPOLI SMITH
ARE YOU LOST?
AUTODRIVE MALFUNCTION?
HONK TWICE FOR ASSISTANCE.

They’ve been driving around the same block for too long, killing time, and the streetside monitors have picked up the aberration.

“All right, here we go.” Luke calls up a map. Even a dyed-in-the-wool Manual is compelled to respect the usefulness of dynamic mapping. “Go straight at this next intersection.”

“But there’s nothing there.” Tipper checks the map, the windows. The area Luke indicates is all blacked out, an abyss of darkness in the lamp-bejeweled town.

“Oh, there’s something there.” Luke sits back, savoring his air of manly mystery.

Tipper lets him have his fun. Pushing the car forward at precisely the recommended speed, she hits the edge of the blacked-out land. Suddenly she understands. At the end of the road is a ditch. Across the ditch is a bridge. And beyond the bridge is a gate and fence. The signs everywhere are entirely unnecessary. Tipper knows what’s beyond this point.

“This way.” Luke points right. They drive along the fence, the reflective signs flashing by in a menacing strobe. WARNING WARNING WARNING. RESTRICTED RESTRICTED RESTRICTED. CONTROLLED CONTROLLED CONTROLLED. On the car’s display, there’s nothing to see. To the mapping software, this is nowhere, nonexistent land.

“There’s a turn up here. It’s kind of hard to spot.” Luke leans into her.

There.

The fence veers away. A dirt road rises up a silhouetted ridge. Tipper flicks on the headlamps for the first time that night. Between the dingy bursts of desert bushes, she can see the dark land dropping away, a blackness that seems to deepen as they rise. Luke guides her off the road.

“Slow, now. There’s a certain spot . . . ”

They halt on a ridge of sandstone and grit, the headlights plunging out into darkness. He yanks on the brake and shuts off the car. The temperfoam relaxes; the doors unlock. Tipper steps into a strikingly cool breeze. Her first tentative steps nearly spill her down a ghostly chasm, ragged walls of rock made spectral by the moon. Luke grabs her arm.

“Easy. Don’t worry. It’s not as far as it looks. The night makes everything seem weird.”

The night does indeed. His silhouette seems strange and huge beside her, hewn from rock.

“Out there.” Luke’s arm extends. “Below those two bright stars.”

The shapes she makes out are distant but distinct: four dark squares, rising up like buttes, and one long mesa of flat-topped shadow. Tipper’s first impression is of a holy site, some natural wonder sanctified by the rites of the Navajo, those restless neighbors of her own ancestral people. But the moonlight, strengthening with a suddenness peculiar to desert climes, dispels the illusion. Those are buildings, four silos and a compound, with not a single window to vary the dark walls.

“Air Force,” Luke says. “Testing sight. See that long, flat building? My granddad used to work there.”

“He was a pilot?”

Luke shakes his head. “Engineer. Mathematician. Data-crunching, modeling, that kind of thing.”

Tipper knows where this is going. “And he got fired.”

Luke’s eyes are on the distant buildings. “Not exactly. You know how many people work this site, now? Zero. Know why it’s so dark? Because no one needs any light. The entire place is run by machines. Machines on site. Machines on network. A guy like my grandpa, it’s not like he got fired. It’s more like his whole industry ceased to exist.”

Tipper considers the expanse below, thinking about what Luke has said. Machines to do the work. And machine to guard the machines. Any person trespassing on that turf will quickly find himself a target of some of the world’s most sophisticated perimeter drones. Even with the best night-vision gear, a human would be helpless against their full-spectrum scanning. Of course, the drones don’t actually injure anyone. They have no need for such sloppy tactics.

“What about your parents?” she says. “The rest of your family?”

Luke sucks in night air. “That’s next.”

And he guides her on, through shapeless towns, down nameless roads. Actually, the streets here do have names—Spanish names, Navajo names— but no one cares. To the cars and their riders, it’s all just instructions: left, right, straight, ten meters, two miles.

Eventually, something looms ahead, massive and broken. Luke tells her to stop.

“That building? That was where my great-grandfather worked. Back in the twentieth century. Putting lawnmowers together. Then all those jobs went overseas. Then they came back, except they were being done by computer scientists. Then those jobs went overseas. And then all the jobs went away forever. So we did it.” He laughs. “We finally achieved true global equality.”

As they drive on, the names of the streets become increasingly irrelevant, until Tipper no longer even notices the towns. It’s all jumbled together, geography, history, family, a random walk of turns and dead ends.

“Over here, this was where my grandma used to work. A library. Can you believe they used to have physical libraries? And over here, this is where the college was. I had a friend whose dad worked there. Guess what he taught? Game design and pedagogical process. Whoops! Taught himself right out of a job.”

In a downtown where the all-night restaurants twinkle with animated ads, Luke urges Tipper to get out and walk.

“That’s where the old Walmart used to be. My dad worked there as a cashier. Then in the stockroom. Then as a greeter. They all thought Walmart was the epitome of evil, back then. There’s the salon where my sister used to work. They’re still open, but they’re cutting back. Get it? No, but seriously, all they employ now is a couple of touchers. Know what that is?”

Growing up as a tomboy with three ubermale brothers, Tipper hasn’t had a chance to learn much about the ways of hair salons.

“Okay,” Luke explains. “So the machines do all the work, right? There’s a whole line of robots to do the washing, the styling. But what they still need is, I guess you could call it ‘the human touch.’ So before you get your hair cut, they have a person who comes and checks you out, massages your scalp, makes a little chitchat. After you get your hair cut, there’s another person who comes over to tell you how great you look. It’s completely useless. It’s what they call ‘perk employment.’ Touchers. But over here, this is what I wanted to show you.”

He runs ahead, boyish in his eagerness, pulling at the weather-tenting on a squat lump of a building.

“Uh, Luke?” Tipper’s not sure if she’s charmed or unsettled by the way her cool seducer has become this gamboling tour guide. But quick as an autodriv-ing car will switch routes, Luke reverts to his broody persona, hoisting up the slippery film of the tenting to expose a small, glassless window. Smooth as a burglar, he slides inside. A pale hand extends to help Tipper.

She waves him way and lifts herself over. With the weatherproof shroud its owner has thrown over it, the building has taken on the dusty, almost sweet scent of a desert cave. Luke fumbles for her hand.

“It’s okay. My friend’s got a unit outside, running a baffler on the AI alarm. It thinks we’re weevils. Here.”

A small spot of light falls on the dusty floor. Luke leads Tipper among shrouded furniture. She lifts up a flap and sees thirties-era fractal construction, fake wood printed in sea-anemone patterns. Charmingly retro.

“This place—”

“It’s a club.” Luke has a beer in hand. He pushes one toward Tipper. She sees no fridge, but there’s a crystal-insulated cooler lying lopsided on a couch. Luke’s flashlight whips over dust, reed tables, a little riser of a stage. “It used to be, anyway. I’ve been hanging out here since it closed. They used to have music on weekends, comedy four nights a week. This was where my mom got started.”

“And she was—?”

Luke pulls out a portobook, thumbs in a name, tosses it over. The book’s an old model, no frills, just e-paper. Tipper flips through the document, which appears to be the career summary of a rather unremarkable actress. If this is Luke’s mother, she doesn’t seem to have gone very far. The credits paint a picture of a low-tier thespian scrounging for work.

Babe, It’s Okay (uncredited)

Monster Matriarch (voice)

The Long and Short of It (unreleased)

A shout jerks Tipper’s head up.

“Ladies and gennelmen!”

Luke is onstage, addressing a phantom crowd, swinging an old mike stand. “Tonight, we have a real fine treat. Get ready for the boundary-crossing, risk-taking, no-holds-barred comedy of Lucas Averro!”

He grins, comedian-style. Tipper shakes her head as Luke mugs his way through a spoof of standup.

“Okay, guys, seriously. Seriously, people.”

Suddenly he is serious, holding the stand at arm’s length, making it clear there’s no mike in the grip, no lights, no crowd. His performance consists of a single line.

“What the fuck happened to us?”

Luke scans the room. “Tipper? You out there? You hearing this?” He hops off the stage. “I mean, it was supposed to be the one thing we’d always fall back on, right? The one thing they could never take away from us.”

He holds out a hand. Tipper sees what he wants, gives him the porto-book. Luke shakes it like a magician. The pages flap out into a single stiff screen, magazine-size. He loads a video. Seeing the image, Tipper can’t help but laugh.

“There it is.” Luke’s watching over her shoulder. “End game.”

The video, sensing her attention, begins to play. It’s like a fragment of Tipper’s teenage experience, shaken loose and tossed up into the present, a scene from her sixteen-year-old self’s favorite cartoon show.

Darly the Penguin is more or less the sum of everything a modern girl experiences. A tad overweight, insecure about her body, dirty-minded, ambitious, loyal to her friends, fiercely smart, intermittently sassy . . . with a bizarre little mop of biologically incorrect hair . . . who in the world wouldn’t love Darly?

This clip is from one of the early shows, when Darly was trying to make her way in the modern office. Here, Darly’s talking to her polar-bear boss, Dexter, and it seems that during a strategic planning meeting, when Darly self-deprecatingly referred to herself as a “big bird,” Dexter’s response was—

Well, the plot doesn’t really matter. What’s funny is Darly’s attitude, the way this CGI penguin somehow captures everything crazy about being a human being at the start of the twenty-second century. Darly has a whole bundle of oddball tics: spelling out dirty words (or more often misspelling them), flapping her wings and squeaking like a kazoo, tapping her forehead and reminding herself, “Penguins are chill, Darly—penguins are chill.” Sometimes, when things get really crazy, Darly’ll dive to the floor and slide on her belly out of awkward situations. It’s all too funny, and Tipper’s already laughing when Luke abruptly shuts off the playback.

“Programmed.” He closes the portobook. “Every second.”

Tipper’s annoyed. Of course it’s programmed. It’s TV! But Luke’s looking at her like he thinks she doesn’t get it.

“You know how they write these shows?” He waves the portobook. “They don’t. No human does. The scenarios are randomly generated, based on trending topics. The jokes are crowdsourced: Thousands of one-liners are submitted, and the producers pick the best ones. And the characters? They’re AI. Your Darly? She’s a program. Gestures, catchphrases, even the voice. All coded, trained on test audiences. It can even improvise.”

Tipper sighs. She knows this. Everyone knows this. It’s like kayfabe: You know it; you don’t have to harp on it. But guys like Luke always seem to overexplain.

“My mom?” He turns to the stage. “This is where she did it. Up on that stage, every night, trying out her jokes, trying out her voices. And for what? To create an act. A persona. And that would be her product. That would become her shtick.

“This?” He waves the portobook. “This killed all that. Why? Because guess what? That mysterious allure? That human appeal? All those things a performer is supposed to have: charm, gravitas, charisma? Turns out, you can simulate all of it, no problem. Because that’s exactly what a shtick is. Predictability. Routine.”

Tipper wonders: What do you say when you see the point someone’s trying to make, but don’t quite see the point of making it? She reaches for his hand. Luke doesn’t even notice. He’s too intent on striding among the tables, kicking old beer cans out of his path.

“So there it is, folks! End of the road. Muscle, skill, brains . . . the one thing left, the one thing we thought we could always rely on, was personality. Our wonderfully human, charming imperfections. Well, here you go. Darly the Penguin is more charmingly fucked up than someone like my mom could ever be. So it’s over. Gone. We’ve cleared the last hurdle. We’ve finally perfected imperfection.” He points at Tipper’s nose. “You see what you’ve been doing?”

“Me?” It’s the first time Tipper’s spoken since entering this shrouded place, and her voice sounds weird for such a haunted scene, bold, young, strong. Luke comes toward her. Without thinking, she holds out her arms.

“Your boss. Your friends at the fair. You know who you people are working for?” He dodges her embrace, counting on his fingers. “You don’t own the rides. The company owns the rides. Traveling Troupe, a subsidiary of SevenStar Entertainments. Who owns the company? The shareholders own the company. Who are the shareholders? Funds and banks. Who are the funds and banks? Who else? They’re a bunch of computer programs, who sometimes hire human beings to go to meetings. And guess what? The hair salons, the stores, the factories, the Air Force: the same programs are running it all.” He taps his nose. “Follow it back, Tipper. Follow it back.”

Tipper finally gets a hold of him, grabbing his wrists, which feel surprisingly thin and frail. Guys like this always shock her with their fragility. She holds him by the collar, putting her palms to his cheeks, calming him.

“I know, Luke, okay? I know.”

“And where does it start?” He’s still looking away. “It starts with you, Tipper. A friendly girl, leading little children up to a big monster, saying, ‘Don’t be afraid. It’s your friend. It’s okay.’”

She can’t stop thinking of her brothers. How they always used to talk this way, taking her out to the barn to show her their projects. How one day, they said, they were going to change it all, bring the whole system crashing down.

Well, something changed, all right. Tipper doesn’t remember what exactly set it off. But her father never needed an excuse to fly into a rage. He was at his worst, that day, stomping around the house, kicking anything that would break, and eventually he made his way out to the barn, throwing open the doors to expose the projects of Tipper’s brothers, the car engines, the game tables, the magnetic and chemical experiments. As he worked his way through the collection, sometimes with a hammer, sometimes with his hands, he shouted out his verdict. “Useless . . . ridiculous . . . a fucking waste.” What made Tipper tremble as she stood there in the door, what made her shake with a rage that terrified her, was the way her brothers stood back, passive, simply watching the destruction. Their constructions, their creations, their hobbies, all crushed, complexity pounded to scrap, sacrificed to their father’s aimless anger. And they accepted it. Like biblical sons, they bowed under the patriarchal judgment. Even to themselves, they were nothing, in the end. Useless, ridiculous, a fucking waste.

It’s like Tipper can see them all, right now, the angry boys and the angry girls, the mothers and fathers who’ll never work again, the Manuals and the doctors and the mathematicians, scattered all through the lonely Fringe towns.

She holds Luke by the collar, pulling his face toward hers. “It will be okay,” she whispers against his lips. “It will.”

With instinctual ease, Tipper guides him. She doesn’t push, doesn’t pull, just leads him where she needs him to be. At one point, her foot skids on something, suddenly rolling, and she sees it’s the flashlight, dropped from his hand. By its wheeling light, they find their way to the couch. Tipper pats the sheet-covered cushions. The crystal-insulated cooler falls to the floor. The crash only adds to her urgency—a brittle music of glass bottles in the dark.

She lays him down, climbing onto his hips. I trust you, Luke, I trust you. Even as she’s thinking this, Tipper knows it’s not quite right. What she trusts, what she’s bending to kiss, is the feeling inside him, the hurt and need of a boy who’s seen everything smashed, abused, stolen: Everything he’s worked for, everything he loves.

From the highway, the fair looks like a true menagerie. Monstrous heads and swinging tails cast wild shadows against the gaudy lights. The people register as no more than specks. You can almost imagine that history has run backwards, and that they’ve all come back again, the lost and majestic monsters, the prehistoric beasts.

Luke pulls deftly off the road, guiding his truck through the autodriving traffic.

HELLO, TIPOLI SMITH! flashes a sign. WELCOME TO THE TRAVELING TROUPE FAIR!

The Traveling Troupe. The Metal Demimonde. Call it what you will, the fair will always be a welcoming place for the wandering, the footloose, the cast aside.

“We forgot to change the login.” Tipper taps the screen as Luke steers through the gate. “All the monitors will think you’re me.”

Normally, it wouldn’t matter; the car would detect the driver automatically. But this automatic function, like most of the others, has been shut off.

Luke doesn’t care. He’s been driving all night with his eyes on the overheads, impassive and silent, expertly imitating a machine. Now he steers past the public lots, onto the service road beyond the gates. Tipper looks out the window.

WARNING, flashes a sign. RESTRICTED AREA. STAFF ONLY. WARNING. WARNING. Then: WELCOME, TIPOLI SMITH!

“You’re not supposed to be back here.”

“It’s okay.” He keeps his eyes on the screen. “I’ll take you to your trailer.”

An almost painfully gallant gesture, it seems to Tipper. After tonight, they’re unlikely to meet again. More lonely traveling for her, more lonely ranting for him. But he can do this for her, if nothing else: He can drop her like a gentleman at her front door.

The trailer flickers with LED light. Suzie must be waiting up. A little distance away, Snake lies curled under lamps, dormant for the night. Luke parks at the fence, lets the truck idle. The engine, built for all-night driving, hums softly in the dark.

“Well.” He reaches for the dashboard. “Guess this is it.”

It’s hard to say why, but Tipper feels almost panicked. “Are you . . . I could probably get tomorrow night off.”

“I don’t think I’ll be around.” He makes it harshly final. And like that, Tipper realizes that this is what he wants, what he’s always wanted. Not to kiss her, not even to sleep with her. Only to have given her the tour of his life.

“So that’s it?” She tries to keep her voice from shaking. “That’s all we’re doing?”

“Tip.” His hand twitches on the dashboard.

“You drive me around, you show me your life, you put on this big demonstration . . . I mean, what was all this about?”

He doesn’t answer at first. His face is answer enough.

“Well.” He sighs. “I guess I wanted you to know. To know why I’m doing what I do. So you would . . . so you would understand.”

“To under—” Then she sees where his hand his resting, hovering on that unremarkable black button, the one she almost pressed before. The one he warned her never to touch.

“Luke!”

Even before it happens, Tipper realizes he’s right. He’s done it, achieved his goal. In a way, in a hidden, angry part of her, she does understand.

The first ride to go is the Haunted House. A spook on the roof, a winged gargoyle, jerks and lurches like a drunken suicide. It quivers, stiffens, tumbles off, crashing to the hard-packed gravel and snapping a wing. The doors fly open. A lizardman staggers out, lashing a rubber tail, clawing the air. Two people follow, a pair of teenage girls, screaming in genuine terror. It’s pandemonium, the windows opening, the walls shaking, shrieks and howls from every corner. The spookbots run riot and jump from the rooftops, even punch holes in the mycocore walls. A kid staggers out with one of the cannibal babies clamped like a monkey to the back of his head. From the central courtyard, the Morbid Eye ascends, puttering on its failing jets, sailing away over the gables, into the night.

Nearby, the Scream-o-Saurus is lashing its tail, tipping over souvenir stalls and a BBQ stand. As the riders and operators shout and flee, the ride shudders, tips, whipping its head wildly side to side. The Abominable Go-Go-Go man is pounding dents in his chest. The LandShark chomps earth. Octowhip reels into the midway, flinging out its arms and dispensing mayhem. With a screech of straining hydraulics, the Dementor sways and falls.

The worst, though, is Snake. A salted slug, a suffocating fish, a worm under a magnifying glass: there’s no comparison for the flailing of this great fat body. The tail alone is a menace, whacking nearby trailers, catching the bars of fences and flinging them hundreds of feet. The big mouth gapes and gnashes. The googly eyes, ordinarily so jolly, are now the soul of anguish and fear. Even in eighteen years of rough-and-tumble Fringe life, Tipper has never seen such a display of agony.

She’s at the edge of the gravel. She must have gotten out of the car. Luke is here, beyond the reach of Snake’s gyrations. Suzie, Carter, all the operators: they’ve come out of their trailers, their private compartments, to witness this artificial Armageddon.

“What’s happening?” An operator from the Bear Jamboree, a woman Tipper scarcely recognizes, drifts by like a refugee. Suzie and Carter stand almost perfectly still, only moving their heads as they watch.

Tipper ducks into Luke’s truck. She pounds at the interface, entering random commands. The car beeps. She hears a clunk. With Luke’s hands clutching at her shoulders, she kicks out of the seat and marches around to the rear.

The big storage compartment has popped open, exposing the interior. Tipper remembers Luke’s description: a bed back here, internet, built-in fridge . . . the best game hookup you’ll ever see . . .

But it’s no traveling rec room hidden amid the braces and padding of his cargo hold. Fighting Luke’s hands, Tipper climbs in, scanning the jumble of wires and consoles.

“What the hell? What is all this?”

“Tip.” He grabs her under the arms. Tipper’s been in too many sibling fights to let him get away with that. “Listen,” he pleads as she kicks him back, “don’t . . . don’t touch anything, okay? It’s too late, anyway.”

She hops down from the truck and spins to face him, gravel spitting from her toes. “You planned this.” Luke’s face is miserable but resigned. “You had me fix your car so it would be registered to me. So you could get it back here in the staff areas. You only did this so you could . . . ”

He doesn’t object. That’s the worst part of it. Hanging his head, staring at the ground, he can’t even bother to tell her it’s all more complicated than she understands.

Sabotage. Everything, every event of the week, begins and ends in that word. Sabotage.

“You shit.” Tipper begins to pant. “You piece of shit.”

She lurches away from the car, remembering Carter’s words. Radio hacks, sophisticated methods, like the military uses on enemy drones. She can see now it’s not only rides that are affected. The local repair drones are sputtering into walls, dropping like addled moths from the sky. Tipper’s own brain feels fuzzy, scrambled. She finds Carter seated in the dirt, vomiting into a tuft of grass.

The apocalypse is winding down. A wall of the Haunted House collapses, bricks and fake armchairs tumbling out. Snake is a twitching hulk, the joints of the skeleton snapped or fused, fabric flesh hanging in ragged swags. The image of death couldn’t be more complete if it were a real dragon here, vanquished and moribund.

Tipper approaches. A flame spits from the ride’s battered head. Sparks begin to jump and catch. The gel-pack padding burns with an awful stench.

“Tipper, stop.”

A hand grabs her wrist. Tipper wheels around.

Suzie stands behind her, not crying, only watching as Baby Snake melts into a greasy mass. Up the fairway, a siren yowls. The main emergency station is proofed against attacks, and the fire-dousing drones are already in formation, descending with jets and extinguishers and warnings.

“Keep Back. Danger. Keep Back. Danger.”

“Suzie.” Tipper is surprised to see that the older woman’s face is unmarked by grief, as if Suzie can’t even quite comprehend what has happened. “Suzie, I’m so sorry.”

Tipper tries to say more, but she can’t go on without sobbing or choking. Smoke spreads in a thin haze. As Suzie’s eyes track over the ride, the plumpness seems to leach from her features, cheeks clinging to her bones.

Tipper turns, looking for Luke. Bad move. Suzie turns also, seeing the truck. As for Luke himself, there’s no sign.

“Oh.” Suzie releases Tipper’s hand. “Okay, I see. Yes, I see, now.”

“Wait.” Tipper clutches at her hand. “Suzie, I didn’t know, I swear. He took me out, we drove around, I didn’t think he was—”

Suzie nods dully. “All right, Tip. Just . . . just give me a second, here, okay.”

The Haunted House is a crumbling wreck. Carter stumbles around it, wiping her mouth. The area is thick with drones and bots, most of them gathering around Luke’s truck. As for Luke himself, he seems to have completely disappeared.

“Suzie, you have to believe me, I trusted him, he never said he would—”

“All right, Tip.” Suzie’s tone is like the grating of a key. “I see what happened, here, okay? I get it.”

It’s somehow more awful than being yelled at, this calm detachment, this sudden withdrawal. Because Suzie has been through everything, down here in the metal demimonde. She knows what’s what. And when Suzie makes up her mind, there’s no one who can unmake it.

Tipper backs away, stumbling on stalled drones. “Please, Suzie. Please, believe me.”

But the old operator drifts away, standing over the corpse of her ride.

Tipper finds that she’s crying like a child, snot and tears flowing together. She wipes her face clumsily, vision blurred. Without thinking, she turns and runs.

A group of teens trip by her on the fairway, one draped over two supporting friends. The crowds, already thin, are dwindling fast. “I’ll find you,” Tipper hears herself panting. “I’ll find you, you son of a bitch.”

A ripped-off arm, part of the Dementor, lies like a fallen tree across the midway, repair bots swarming around it. Fairgoers circle like leaves in a stream, some fleeing, some gawking, some apparently aimless. Tipper remembers how Luke first appeared, one boy among many, a member of the crowd.

She’ll get him. If security hasn’t done it yet, she’ll bring him in.

Her stomping boots take her past the game stalls, through hordes of staring attendees. At the security tent, she searches the area. On to the repair station, the prize displays, the main gate.

Nothing.

She circles back through the wreckage to the road, under the fence and out of the fair, to where squatters have set up ersatz attractions.

Nothing.

Finally, Tipper takes her hunt to the limits, the public parking lots where it all began. And that’s when she has to admit that he’s gone, vanished the same way he appeared, another lost soul drifting through the Fringe and the idle decades and empty towns. And she finds a fallen trashcan and kicks it to death and sits on it and lets herself cry.

When the sobbing ends, Tipper lifts her head. The fair is strangely quiet, now. She checks for messages from Suzie, Luke, the security team, but the whole world seems to have fallen silent. An eerie air of solitude hands over the empty parking lot, and she realizes that out here, she is entirely alone—except for a host of watching machines.

Yes, they’re all around her. Rabbit Run, Wheelie-Dealie, The Speedy Demon. And the true relics, the old classics: Tyger-Tyger, Tentaculus, The Great Jim-Jamboree. The Orphans bow over her with solemn stares. With surprise and delight, Tipper realizes that they must have been out of range, spared the effects of Luke’s scrambling radiation. Rabbit Run sends out a bouncing bunny; it cocks at her a velveteen ear. Tyger-Tyger burns with a welcoming light. A tap on her shoulder makes Tipper jump. She sees Tentaculus grinning down at her, giving a slow wink of its huge eye.

She stands and walks through this forest of the forgotten, this cohort of the estranged. The rides all vie for her attention. Come take a run with the racing rabbits! Are you hunting the tiger, or is he hunting you? It’s more than a monster: it’s Tentaculus!Without operators, these machines have to fend for themselves, begging for riders, attention, trust.

Tipper works her way deep into the crowd, wondering, hoping. She hasn’t memorized every ride in the fair, which sometimes switches units between stops. An old ride, a small ride, an obscure ride, might just have escaped her noticed. It’s possible . . . .

And as she rounds a corner and sees what’s ahead, the thrill of discovery thunderbolts through her heart.

Approaching the gate, Tipper hears a ding of greeting.

“Don’t be afraid! Step right up and meet the Gentle Giant!”

It’s smaller than expected, a mere runt compared to the mighty Scream-o-Saurus. It’s also the cheapest ride Tipper’s ever seen, no more than the cost of a soda deducted from her account. Everything looks as Suzie described: the plastic ball, the gorilla-like arms. The seat smells musty and old. A click of a buckle, a tightening of straps. No protocols, now, no humans at all. When the ride confirms that she’s secure, up she goes.

The Giant’s hands hold the sphere without a tremor. Like a flea in a soap bubble, Tipper slowly rises, though it seems as if the world is dropping away. A twist of the Giant’s hands, and she’s facing the fairgrounds, held aloft over the robot’s head, looking down on this strange little kingdom of wandering monsters and carnies and kids. From up here, the rides look like the toys they really are, the corpse of the Snake a frail black curl, the Haunted Mansion a crumbled doll’s house. Away beyond the dirt and brush, far down the highway, are the scattered Fringe towns, the strange blue shapes of the moonlit desert. And farther off, in some smattering of lights too remote to see, the home that Tipper has left behind.

The great hands move. The ball slowly spins. Tipper looks down into the face of the Giant, who gazes up, solemn and intent, as if trying to decide what kind of fairy he’s captured. Does this little creature sting? Will it bite? Is it dangerous? His eyes, as Suzie said, are a somber green, and Tipper holds their gaze as she undoes her harness. Her feet move silently on the padded floor. When she presses her hands to the plastic shell, a trickle of air runs past her palms, and she realizes the whole plastic sphere is pierced with tiny holes.

The metal face looms below, larger than Tipper’s entire body. It’s proudly masculine in appearance—big square jaw, a prominent brow—and oddly reassuring. Here it is, what Suzie fell in love with, a great gentleness born of great strength.

Spreading her arms, Tipper rests her weight on the plastic, looking down into eyes that will never look away. And she feels almost joyful, now, almost loved, as she reflects that, for this unbearably brief moment, she is undoubtedly in good hands.