THE SURFACE—TAMPICO DISPUTED TERRITORY
ORLANDO DISTRICT
A roboraccoon on autopilot could clean an average pop-in in fifteen minutes. It would vacuum rough surfaces, then switch to a polishing head for the counters, fixtures, and glass. Config the furniture, reboot the linens, run a scent detector; after that, it was a matter of grabbing any untouched chuggers and closing the door as it left.
Shifts were offered to live pilots only when the task exceeded normal specs: when the drones found damage, weird spills, burn vapors, worldly goods, malfunctioning tech, or, sometimes, a spider in need of catch-and-release to the gardens.
There was always a queue to clean rooms. Driving drudges was the entry point into the piloting track, into running snowblowers, thingbots, and flying cameras, and leveling from there to cars, mobile sawmills, fire-suppression choppers, and policing platforms.
And flying a drudgebot could be fun. On the surface, the drone might be scrubbing baked cheese out of a toaster, but augments turned the player into an archaeologist, unearthing the secrets of an ancient dig. Or a forensic scientist, examining the scene of a (family-rated, in Frankie’s case) crime. Sweeping shards of glass from a broken shower door could be made into a hunt for diamonds. Many of these sims were scored challenges, and the leaderboard paid in strokes.
Even so, Frankie did one quick pass through a single pop-in before surrendering her bot to the next eager player.
Mada and Rubi should be deep in-game by now.
“Quick, while they’re distracted,” Headmistress hummed.
Following a sim of a bumbling bluebottle fly, Frankie made her way to a back room, sliding its door shut behind her. Steps led up to an office with windows that looked out over the performers’ stage. Below her, Mada and Rubi were scaling opposite sides of the climbing wall.
“Here, child.” She whirled, meeting the dead eyes of a large, orange-haired figure—a dummy depicting Orange Voldemort, the first Setback President.
Frankie swallowed, unsettled. Rubi’s Happ tried to get us to a Waxworks …
“Hurry,” it said. There was no mistaking her governess’s crisp English accent. “There’s a paramedic’s kit in the desk. Have you memorized the route to the train station?”
“Yes.” Frankie opened the desk drawer, extracting the white box with its red cross, and dug within until she found a weird circular device—a test tube with a strip of meat in it, a tiny drone armed with tweezers and a scalpel, and a length of soft bandage.
“Where exactly is the tracking chip?” Her voice sounded thready.
Voldemort’s eyes glowed, creating a spotlight. “Draw the point of the scalpel up your elbow … a little to the left. There! Onetwothreesmallpoke!”
“Isn’t there a thingbot that can do this?”
“Not without alerting every one of your parents and a Child Welfare team.”
Frankie pressed the blade against her flesh, breaking the skin. Pain flared; she hesitated.
“Make the hole a little deeper and then press the tube against the gap.”
It couldn’t be worse than cancer, could it? Letting out a low growl, Frankie shoved the blade in, stabbing deep into the meat of her upper arm.
A white wash took her sight, for an instant, as the sensation …
… stabbed, stabbed myself …
… for the good for the family …
… can’t be worse, can’t be worse than, ouch …
… set her arm blazing, all the way to her fingertips.
“Do you feel anything?”
“Feel?” Stupid question. “Ow! Feel?”
“Do you perceive the RFID?” Voldemort—Headmistress—clarified.
“Just…” She swallowed. “Meat.”
“Wiggle the tube against the injury.”
She fumbled the glass and a tiny probe unfurled from within it, the smallest bot she’d ever seen. Spaghetti-thick, the strand probed into the wound …
“Ow!”
“Hold steady, Frances.”
There was more blood than she’d expected.
The probe pulsed, worming its way into her.
Frankie swallowed.
Then it retracted, dragging a fingernail-sized piece of plastic and a slice of muscle, drawing both of them back up to the meat within the tube and wrapping it.
“To ensure the chip doesn’t report your death, do you see?”
“Okay,” she said.
“Now tuck it into that spoofer box there, so nobody can follow it, and put the whole thing in your worldly. That yellow bottle in the first aid kit should be coagulant.”
Frankie dumped mustard-colored liquid onto the wound in her arm. It foamed like yeast. “Ow, ow, ow!”
“Fifteen minutes.”
Pinching up the tracking chip, Frankie ran back to the pod. She threw her helmet and wearables inside—
“Speaker threads,” Poppet reminded her.
She scratched behind her ears, found the thin fibers, pulled. There was a deep tickling sensation in her ear canals as they came.
“See you on the other side,” she whispered.
Alone at last. No Headmistress, no Poppet, no apps, no parents.
She had to jump to reach the pod lid, slamming it shut. Its console blinked, greenlighting. As far as anyone knew, she was inside.
Now to get clear.
Opening her worldly, Frankie tucked the spoofer box containing her RFID chip into a side pouch. She extracted a red hooded sunscreen with the McDiz logo: a souvenir, ubiquitous here. Slipping into it—the cut in her arm throbbed at the touch—she pulled it low over her face and slipped out of the casino, heading for the train station.
Half the city seemed to be going in the same direction.
Frankie joined the crowd, keeping her head down and moving with purpose, letting everyone assume some other grown-up was her parent. As soon as she got to the station, she ducked into a bathroom and then—sticking to the plan—sneaking into a workers-only motor pool.
The pool was filled with banked trucks and forklifts, all busily loading a high-speed train bound north. As Frankie tried to figure out where she needed to go next, an adult wearing a duck mask approached her.
They held up a printed card: I’m Donald. Are you Red Riding Hood?
Was this Misfortune? Rather than answer, Frankie nodded.
She gestured: This way. Frankie followed her between the trucks, to a flatbed filled with citrus-laden crates. Each crate was marked ZOOLOGICAL FOOD SUPPLY, MANHATTAN BIORESERVE.
Donald opened a crate, offering her a hand up.
She descended, finding a comfortable layer of artificial straw. Slats in the crate allowed her to peek out. Frankie scrunched down. Donald tossed two oranges and an avocado down to her, along with three chuggers, a bag of hydrogel, a light, and an antique book: Black Beauty.
A note was in with the food: Train runs for four hours straight. There’s a big unload at the old Bronx Zoo … don’t get off there or you’ll have to walk the rest of the way.
She mojied: Thumbs-up.
“Thirty minutes to departure,” someone shouted. “Let’s get this thing loaded, people!”
Frankie curled up in the straw, cupping her sore arm. How long before Mada worked out she was missing? Before they called Sang.
Frankie going lemming—well, pretending to—should scare all her parents green. They’d see they needed each other.
Victory conditions, Frankie thought. Disembark in Manhattan, find and help Drow, force her family to reglomerate.
A jolt—the pallet, loading onto the train—startled her. The garage filled with voices and noise: low bonks, metal on metal, hum of big drones.
“Do you think—” she started to say, before she remembered that Headmistress was cut loose, that nobody could hear her. The feeling made her shaky and a little bold; it reminded her of the half-glass of red wine Bella had permitted her last Solstice.
Frankie triggered the light and opened the vintage horse book, settling in for the long ride north.