Garrett was wrist deep in a drone when Hel glided into the Shady Pines hobby room. Silent in her wheelchair, he wouldn’t have noticed her except for her perfume. It rode the air around her lightly, but LIV had sunk its biochemical claws deep into Garrett’s nose and his sense of smell was as keen as a teenager’s.Too bad his back was still a century old. Gritting his teeth against a groan, Garrett straightened and turned to face Hel—Not Hel, it’s—Hel was the nickname hung on the woman by some geezer geek not long after her arrival at Shady Pines, the biggest LIVcare center in all of Texas, and now Garrett couldn’t remember her real name. Cursing the non-regenerated neurons in his head, he gave up and said “Hi.”
“Hi.” Hel stopped in front of him and flashed her asymmetric smile. “You’re Garrett, right? The drone guy?”
“Umm. Sure.” Garrett was used to the havoc that LIV had played on his generation, but the bioengineered miracle-curse had been especially cruel to Hel, and seeing her this close was distracting. A line ran down the woman’s face and neck, disappearing beneath her faded Star Wars t-shirt. Hel’s left side was young, with shining black hair and smooth skin, but on her right side, Hel’s skin was spotted, deeply lined, and her hair was pure white. For some reason, Hel’s right side had rejected LIV’s promise of rebirth and clung to her true age, somewhere north of a hundred probably. She didn’t hide the striking contrast, her two-toned hair pulled back from her face in a white and black braid, head held high as she studied Garrett with eyes bright and cloudy. It was a direct, unsettling look with that crooked smile, and Garrett felt his heart lurch.
He was used to that. LIV hadn’t struck Garrett symmetrically. The rejuvenation treatment had run a random riot through him instead, leaving him a body that was sixty percent teen and forty percent centenarian. But that forty percent was spread through every part of him, leaving him piebald with decrepitude, which caused all kinds of interesting symptoms. But this palpitation felt different. What the hell, he thought. Am I crushing?
“I’m a drone guy. There are a few of us farting around.” Garrett smoothed his hair, wondering for the first time in years how much the thin spots showed. “But I guess I do most of the work.” Somebody had to keep the little bots running, or what would the mobility-challenged birdwatchers and eavesdroppers in Shady Pines do? Besides wait for the unrejuvenated parts of their bodies to finally kill them? And what else could he do, while waiting for the same thing? “You having problems with a drone?”
“No, the gardening bot.” Hel nodded toward his cluttered bench. “But you seem to know your way around a toolkit. Mind taking a look?”
Garrett returned her smile, mismatched muscles in his face twitching, and decided he didn’t. Soon he was in the Texas summer heat, feeling the sweat trickle down his patchwork skin as he stared at the malfunctioning bot. It stood in a bed of carrots, like a giant steel spider caught stealing vegetables. Garrett examined its smooth carapace and sighed. He hadn’t really thought this through—yeah, I’m crushing—but there was nothing he could do with this. Simple drones he could bang together. This bot was brand-named, and crammed full of digital copyright and patent locks.
“Sorry,” he told Hel. “I can’t fix this without opening it, and the second I do that all its warranties are void. Admin would have a fit.” Garrett nodded toward the center of the LIVcare campus. The youngs who ran Shady Pines were penny pinching pricks who would take the cost of the bot out of his pudding allowance. “Did you ask—”
“Yep,” Hel said. She was watching a few other LIV rejects putter around the garden’s tangle of flowers and vegetables, doing what they could, but it was clear that they’d never keep up with the watering and weeding in this heat. “They said they’d buy us a new one.”
Garrett snorted. “How uncharacteristically generous of them.”
“Uh-huh. They said they’d do it when they had the budget for it.”
“So never.”
“Yep. Cheapskates.” Hel flashed him that crooked smile again. “I’m Helen, by the way. Helen Park. But you probably know me by another name, right?”
“Well…” Garrett’s sweat suddenly had little to do with the sun.
“It’s ok,” she said. “I’ve heard the nickname. I like it, though I had to look it up. The only Hel I’d ever heard of was the one in the movie with the antlers. I didn’t know about the divided thing.” Her smile flickered away. “It’s better than what the youngs call me.”
“The youngs are jerks.”
“True,” Hel said. “So why listen to them? If they’re not going to fix this, why don’t we try?”
“We?” Garrett said, heart stuttering again.
“Sure.” Hel spun her chair to face him. “My physical hacks are crap—I’d show you my soldering scars, but we’re not that friendly. But I spent seventy years programming for Trask, Google, and Sapio. If you can sort this junk heap’s servos, I’ll unlock its brain. Okay?”
“Sure. It’s a date.” The words were out before he’d thought them through, and Garrett cursed the aged portions of his brain for being stupid. But Hel nodded, still smiling.
Garrett watched Hel circle the bed, tucking the sheets tight over the motionless man who lay there. Her exoskeleton chuffed, venting compressed air as she worked. She seldom wore the rig—“Who wants to be strapped to a continuously farting robot?”—but the tight confines of the room didn’t allow her chair.
“They never do his sheets right.” She finished and looked around at the worn equipment, the faded paint on the walls. “They don’t do much right, in the dementia wards. The youngs hate this place.”
On the other side of the bed, Garret glanced out the dusty window. He didn’t like this place much either, but Hel had asked him to come meet…to meet her…
“That’s why I check on him every day.” Hel smoothed back the man’s hair with her young left hand. “Love you, Ji Hun.”
Husband. She has a husband. Hel hadn’t mentioned that, over the past two weeks of working together over the garden bot, chatting and tinkering and…and flirting. Not until this afternoon.
Garrett scuffed his feet on the stained linoleum. “I didn’t know.”
“Course not. I didn’t tell you.” Hel gave him her crooked smile. “But I thought I should introduce you, let you know…all my complications. You should also know that we were never exclusive. There were always boyfriends, girlfriends, for both of us. But there was always us. Until…” She sighed. “The dementia was already starting when LIV came out. We thought the treatment might stop it, and make us young. But no.” Hel’s young eye shone with unshed tears. “LIV keeps the young forever young. But us geezers…”
“Us geezers?” Garrett’s old-young eyes looked from Hel’s divided face to the man in bed behind her. LIV had given Ji Hun’s body back its youth. He looked twenty, at the most. But it had left his brain over a century old and senile. “We got hosed.”
“Totally.” Hel looked at him. “Did you have someone?”
“Shawndra.” Shawndra was forty years of someone. “We risked LIV together, and she came out of treatment better than me. Ninety percent conversion.” Shawndra had looked so good, Garrett had worried she might ditch his patchy sixty percent ass. “But that ten percent was all in her circulatory system. She had a massive aneurysm two weeks after.”
“I’m sorry,” Hel said, and they went quiet—until Hel asked about the robot. Using that as an excuse, they grabbed her chair and fled to the sticky heat outside.
“I started on the leg actuators,” Garrett said. “Once you figure out how to make that weeding protocol that you downloaded from those anarchist farmers work, I’ll—” Garrett grunted, his leg buckling as young muscles jerked too hard on old ligaments. Hel caught his hand to steady him, and then they were staring at each other, holding hands.
The moment stretched, the first time they’d really touched. “Is this how we do it?” Garrett asked.
“Do, uh, what?”
“Date,” Garrett said, flushing. “Get together over useless busy work, then exchange stories about the loved ones we’ve lost?”
“Isn’t that how old people date?” Hel shrugged. “Maybe we should write this down. We’re the last of the old people.”
The last of the old people. Garrett tried not to think about the world outside of Shady Pines much, the world of the forever young and healthy. That world had moved on, and left geezers like them to spin out their last days in isolated LIVcare centers, far from the gleaming glass garden towers of the new environmentally conscious arcologies. And far from any youngs who might find that whole outdated aging process upsetting.
Stupid LIV.
There was a crack behind them, followed by an angry buzz like a swarm of hornets. The sound snapped Garrett out of his dark thoughts and he turned to face the noise. A broken drone lay on the sidewalk, shattered props slowly spinning down.
“One of yours?” Hel asked.
“No.” Garrett walked to the wreck, Hel gliding beside him, her hand still holding his. When he reached the broken carcass, he finally let her go to pick it up. “Definitely not.”
The drone was black with grey highlights, and it had a pair of red LEDs on the front flanking a Kewpie doll impaled on a long spike. Garrett recognized the decoration from the news feeds. “It’s a Shrike drone. One of the east Texas gangs. Must have come in too low and hit the center’s interference field.” Garrett spun the last good rotor, watching the blades flicker. “Just passing by? Or scouting?”
“Scouting? Us?” Hel snorted. “I know drone gangs are more bored dumbasses than criminal masterminds, but why the hell would they want to scout Shady Pines?”
“Maybe they want to convert our wheelchairs into a robot army.”
“If only,” Hel muttered. “Think they’d want me as a figurehead? They can change their name to Hel’s army, and I’ll lead them on raids of all the local arcologies.”
“You turn to a life of crime awful fast,” Garrett said, tucking the drone into the pouch on the back of Hel’s chair. He might be able to fix it.
“I’m a wild woman.”
Hel’s left hand touched his arm. It felt good, young and strong, and made his head fill with interesting thoughts. Hel had been giving him a lot of those thoughts lately, thoughts that had once seemed dead to him, after Shawndra, after LIV. But now… “Do you really want to work on the bot?”
“No,” Hel said. Her divided face tilted up to him, both eyes bright, if in varying degrees. “Wanna go to my place? I’ve got one of those multi-axis beds. Makes it easy to get in and out. Makes it easy to do lots of things, or so I’ve heard.”
Garrett laughed. “Let’s go find out.”
“Sprayer works,” Garrett said, watching the bot spritz the air with the water he’d poured into its chemical tank.
“So I see,” Hel said, backing her chair away. “Try the planter.”
Garrett’s fingers stuttered over the remote, old and new tissues moving in their uneasy dance, but the sprayer folded itself back into the gardening bot’s body and a different limb uncurled and aimed its gun-like head at the floor. Garrett pressed a button, and a dried pea shot out, ricocheting off the worn tile.
“Hmmm. Looks like I need to adjust the planter muzzle velocity.” Hel’s hands waved in the air in front of her, tweaking the controls of the bot’s OS through the interface built into her chair and the display glasses she wore when she worked. “There.”
Garrett hit the button again, and a dried pea bounced gently off the floor. “Well Ms. Park,” he said. “I think we’ve done it.”
“You don’t have to sound shocked.” Hel’s hands danced, the left one moving fast, fingers stabbing, while her wrinkled right hand swayed in the air like a gliding bird. One of the gardening bot’s arms snagged the remote from Garrett and set it on the workbench. “We work well together.”
“We do.” Garrett grinned. “I’ve liked working with you these last few weeks.”
“I’ve noticed,” she said. “You’re wearing out the actuators in my bed.”
“I can replace them.” The gardening bot stepped closer to Garret, following Hel’s commands. Two manipulator arms reached out and gently took his hands.
“I know,” she said. “You swapped out those cheap ones this thing had. It moves so much better now.” The bot started to glide back and forth, taking Garrett with it. As it moved, swing dance music spilled from the speaker that Hel had insisted that he add to the machine, so that she could annoy the other geezer gardeners with her tunes.
“Are we dancing?” Garrett said, trying to sway with the bot.
“I’m dancing,” Hel said. “I don’t know what you’re doing. Didn’t you ever dance?” She sighed when he shook his head. “I loved to dance with Ji Hun.” The garden bot spun Garrett in a slow circle. “I miss dancing.”
Garrett looked at her sitting in her chair, one hand jabbing like a boxer, the other swooping like a tai-chi master. “We could get a stripped army exoskeleton on the grey market. A few mods, and we’ll have you dancing.”
“Horizontally or vertically?” she asked, giving him her crooked grin, and his patchwork heart stuttered.
Then the lights went out.
The workshop was bright with the glare of emergency lights and afternoon sun. But that light gleamed off the screens that hung dark on the walls, and reflected off the little screen of Garrett’s mostly useless phone.
“Networks down.” Garrett said. “Did our solar panels go out or—”
“I don’t think it’s the panels.” Hel had slid her glasses up onto her head and was looking out the window. Outside, darting grey and black shapes with red LED eyes and spiked dolls flashed between the buildings that made up Shady Pine’s campus. “Looks like the Shrikes were scouting us.”
“Great. How hard up for targets are they? And how did they cut the interference field?” Garrett asked. “Must have gotten a virus into our system. Cut the field, cut the power—” Garrett’s speculation was broken by a booming voice that spilled from the drones tearing through the air outside.
“Hello geezers! No need to be alarmed! Just a bunch of fun-loving forever-young toy impalers here to relieve you of your boredom and valuables!”
“Valuables?” Hel snorted. “What valuables?”
“We control all your systems,” the voice continued. “And we have air superiority, so if anyone tries to make a run for it in their scooter, their wrinkly ass is getting tased. So sit tight while we negotiate terms with your administrators. And to show you how nice we are—” The lights flicked on, and with them came the whir of the air conditioning. In the few minutes it had been off, the room had gotten noticeably warmer. “Here’s your juice back. Kind of.” The voice gave an evil chuckle. “It’ll go in and out as we negotiate. The longer we’re here—” The power flickered. “The more out it’ll go.”
The voice cut off, but outside the drones circled, buzzing menaces.
“Fantastic,” Garrett grumbled. “It’s a hundred and ten out there.”
Hel shook her head. “Y’know, it used to be that if you wanted to rob grandma you shoved her out of the walker yourself. You didn’t send a robot to do it.”
“Kids these days,” Garrett said. “Well, it’ll be fine. Admin will negotiate an extortion fee and…” He trailed off. “Those cheapskates. We’re probably going to be dark and sweaty for days.”
A frown settled on Hel’s mismatched lips. “How? Staff comes and goes. Somebody will find out and get the cops, right?”
“Eventually,” Garrett said. “But if these jerks hack the schedules, tell people their shifts changed…we’re out in the middle of nowhere. It might be days, if our administrators are pricks. Don’t worry though, I have enough snacks squirreled away in here to feed us for a week.” But no multi-axis bed.
“I’m not worried about snacks,” Hel said. “I’m worried about Ji Hun. Those nurses do a crappy job half the time anyway. If he’s stuck with the same ones for days…”
“He’ll be okay,” Garrett said. “He—” Won’t even notice was an awful thing to say, and he bit it back. “We can maybe check on him, if you want.”
“How?”
Garrett nodded to the workbench. The Shrike drone that had almost fallen on them sat there, mostly reassembled, with a new troll doll jammed onto its spike. “Couple of hours, and I can have that going and rig up a system to control it. They’d take down my other drones but this one they might not notice. We can zip it over to your husband’s unit and look through his window.” It was too bad that any network he could throw together would be a short-ranged thing. Otherwise he could have tried sneaking the drone out to get help.
“Thank you, Garrett.” Hel glided her chair toward the window, staring out at the drones zipping by and sighed. “I spent my whole life trying to build the future, and look at this crap. And we still don’t have flying cars.”
“He looks sweaty.” Hel grumped, but her face had lost some of its tension. “But he’s ok.” She tipped her head and leaned her wrinkled cheek against Garrett’s arm. “Thanks.”
“No problem, it’s fun. We have a spy.” The other Shrike machines hadn’t paid the slightest attention to their troll-topped drone. It had been easy for Hel to buzz across Shady Pines’ campus and land on Ji Hun’s windowsill.
“A spy.” Hel’s hands moved and the view on the screen shifted as the drone rose and started across the campus.
“What are you doing?”
“We’ve got full charge,” Hel said. “And Ji Hun’s not going anywhere. So I’m going to spy.” She flew the drone away from the dementia buildings, towards the center of the LIVcare campus. She circled the administrative building, keeping her distance from the other Shrike drones, and found a wide window on the top floor. “Director’s office,” she said, settling the drone down in a shadowed corner.
“Hmm. Better kill those stupid LED’s,” Garrett said, and she nodded and flicked her fingers. “I’m surprised the Shrikes aren’t doing this,” he said, looking at the view of the office. There was the Director, seated behind his desk. What the hell was his name? Lang? It was hard to remember, hard to take these youngs seriously. The man was probably in his sixties, but to Garrett he looked like a harried teen trying to finish his homework.
LIV had made the world so weird.
“They may not know where his office is. Or care. These idiots are usually bored-ass punks on basic income, looking for something to do.” Hel waved her hands through the air in front of her, searching. “Ah, there’s the microphone control.”
“—seen the budget? There’s no way.” Lang’s voice blared out, and Garrett turned down the volume. “Have you tried the anti-extortion software again?” There was a headset hanging from the Director’s ear, an emergency radio he must have been using to talk with his staff while the system was down, because God forbid, he leave his comfy office. They couldn’t hear the voice coming through it, but from the frown on Lang’s face the director didn’t like the answer he was getting. “Why’d we even buy that crap then?” he shouted. “When this is—” There was the sound of a knock, and Lang looked at his door. “Hold on.” He tapped his headset, then shouted “In.”
Garrett didn’t recognize the woman who entered. Lang ventured forth from the admin building occasionally, but most of the people that worked there didn’t want to risk catching sight of a wrinkle.
“Miller. Did you find out what was up with the dementia buildings?” Lang said.
“Yes.” The woman shut the door behind her. “I traced a fault in the campus power system. Those buildings are part of the original retirement home Shady Pines was built around, they’re wired differently. So, when these idiots cut our power, then gave it back, it didn’t automatically go on over there. The critical systems, the life support machines and the medical equipment, all have uninterruptible backups but things like the HVAC need to be manually restarted. There’s a switch on the outside of building four that needs to be hit.”
“Fantastic,” Lang muttered. “Now I have to tell these idiots that we need to send out a maintenance guy to push a button every time they play with the power, so please don’t tase him.”
“Well. Yes,” Miller said, getting closer to Lang’s desk. Her voice dropped as she moved, getting quieter, and Garrett turned the volume back up. “That’s what you would need to do, if you wanted to get the HVAC back on there.”
Lang frowned at her. “Of course we want the air conditioning on over there. Otherwise those senile geezers are going to cook in their own juices. Gods, can you imagine what it must smell like already?”
“Exactly.” The woman leaned over Lang’s desk, her voice dropping again, making Garrett crank the volume. “If those systems aren’t reset, we’ll lose those senile, very costly to care for, geezers.”
“Oh no you didn’t,” Hel breathed.
Lang, not as quick as Hel, frowned at his subordinate. “Yes, we’d…wait.”
“No,” Hel said again, louder.
“You caught this fault by chance?” Lang said. “And you’ve only told me about it?”
“Yes,” Miller said, her so-young face smiling. “You keep complaining about how low you had to bid to get this contract. How we’re always barely scraping by. But the contract is guaranteed, the government has to pay the same no matter what. Even if our costs suddenly drop due to tragic unforeseen circumstances.”
“Circumstances caused by outside criminal elements,” Lang said. “Gods, Miller, that’s…cold-blooded. Awful. I could kiss you.”
“Instead of sexual harassment, I would like a promotion,” Miller said. “With commensurate pay adjustment and a private auto-car.”
“Well. I think we can—” The rest of Lang’s statement was lost as Hel’s hands moved, making the little drone leap into the air again. Hel’s split face was grim as she spun the drone away from the admin building and back toward the dementia wards.
“It’s ok, Hel,” Garrett said. “You caught them. All that’ll be in the drone’s memory. They won’t get away with this.”
“Screw getting away with it,” Hel spit. “They’re going to do it. They don’t know we saw them.” She spun the drone in a wide arc around building four of the dementia unit. “I don’t care if they go to jail because they killed my husband. I care if they kill him.”
“We can message them,” Garrett said. “Tell them we know what they’re planning—” but she was ignoring him. For good reason, he thought, his brain finally catching up. How were they going to get a message to Lang, with the system down and the Shrikes threatening to tase anyone they saw outside? And even if they did somehow get a message out to Lang, the vicious little youngs might decide adding two more to their body count might just be more savings.
“Is that what they were talking about?” Hel glided the drone in close to an electrical junction half-hidden behind a dusty tree. A light on the top of the box glowed red.
“Probably,” Garrett said.
“So where’s the switch?” Hel muttered. “If I bump into it…”
“Yeah, no.” Garrett tapped the screen. “It’s that big button on the side of the box. You can’t reach that without bouncing off the wall, and even if you could there’s no way this drone could push it.” Garrett tapped his fist against his thigh. “OK. Maybe if we fly to somewhere else in admin, we can tell somebody what’s going on. They’re not all in on it.”
“How? This drone doesn’t have speakers. You gonna flash Morse code over the LEDs next to the doll?” Hel snapped. “The air conditioning has been out in those buildings for hours already. I saw how sweaty he was!” Hel shook her head, black-and-white hair flying. “No. I wonder what I’m doing, sometimes, keeping him alive, hoping for some kind of miracle, when I know he’s already gone. But it’s not happening like this. He won’t be cooked in a box because some young wants to improve his bottom line.” Her fingers snapped over the controls, switching the drone to automatic, and she stripped her glasses away. “It we throw something over my chair to block the tasers, I could—”
“No!” Garrett said. “The Shrikes will knock you into a ditch and leave you to cook in the sun. What if I—”
“Get your motley butt tased instead?”
“No! I…” He glared at her, and she glared back, both of them angry and scared, until they finally both blinked and turned to stare at the gardening bot, standing silent and patient beside them.
“There it is,” Hel breathed. She sat in her chair, display glasses wrapped over her face, hands waving in front of her. A large screen beside her showed the view that the gardening bot was sending from where it crouched beneath some bushes, just a few hundred yards from Building Four. The electrical box was easy to see, even with the ornamental trees that half-hid it. Easy because there was nothing but low grass between where the bot hid and their goal.
“Okay,” Garrett breathed. His attention shifted back and forth from the gardening bot’s view and the screen in front of him. He’d taken control of the little spy drone when Hel had started driving the bot, and he was flying a wide circle over the spindly machine, keeping an eye out for Shrike drones. Both screens were empty of any of the drone gang machines. For the moment. “We’re good now, but if a Shrike shows up when you’re halfway across…maybe I should figure out some kind of distraction.”
“No.” Hel said. “It’s taken us an hour to skulk this far, and it’s only getting hotter. The switch is right there. Let’s just Leroy Jenkins this thing.”
Garrett looked at the determination that had settled on both sides of Hel’s face. “Right. Three.”
“Two,” Hel said.
“One!” They both shouted, making echoes in the empty craft room. On the feed from the drone, the gardening bot started to skitter across the wide lawn towards building four. Dang, he thought, watching it go. Those new servos have some kick.
They were a hell of a lot better than the old ones, but it was still going to take the bot a couple of minutes to reach the electrical box. He buzzed the spy drone around the gardening bot, watching, then he saw them. Two Shrike drones, big ones, rounding the Dining Hall, weapons and manipulators dangling from their bellies beneath rows of spiked dolls. Their pilots caught sight of the gardening bot, and the machines started to buzz across the lawn toward it.
Cursing, Garrett skimmed his drone straight at them. He had no weapons, but if he could slow them down…he streaked his faster drone in front of one of the Shrikes, cutting it off, and the larger machine had to turn, props buzzing angrily as it curved away and almost hit a tree.
Yes! Garrett thought, but the other drone had reached the gardening bot and opened fire. A taser dart flew out of the drone, trailing a thin wire, but it bounced off the bot’s metal shell.
“Garrett!” Hel said. Her young hand was flying through the air in front of her, while her wrinkled one struggled to keep up. The bot surged through a clump of sunflowers, forcing the Shrike drone back, but the drone gang’s machine had its manipulators out now, claws and cutters hanging from its belly like tentacles, determined to tangle and cut.
Garrett fought the tremor of old muscles working with new as he tried to keep his hands steady on the controls. He raced his drone under the bigger one, avoiding the trailing taser wire, wondering what to do…then circled back. Catching the wire from the useless taser dart on the spike holding his troll doll wasn’t easy, and keeping it from tangling in his props as he arced the little spy up and over the bigger machine was even harder, but somehow he did it, dragging the wire around the Shrike drone—right into one of its spinning props.
“Got you!” Garrett yelled as the wire wound around the rotor, and his hand clenched in triumph—then spasmed as one of the bad tendons pulled tight. He swore, trying to get control back, but the drone he was piloting had already bounced into the grass. He had a confused image of the troll doll lying among the brown stems, and then something blotted out the view and the screen went blank.
“Crap!” On the gardening bot’s screen he could see where his drone had crashed—and the wreckage of the bigger drone that he’d just taken out, smashed directly onto it. “I’m out.”
“That’s ok, I’m there,” Hel said, and she was. Almost. She was shoving branches out of the way with one manipulator arm, trying to reach the switch with another, while swiping at the remaining Shrike drone with the gardening bot’s hoe at the same time. The drone easily evaded the hoe, but it couldn’t close in, and Garrett was certain they were going to do it—until the drone fired its taser, and the dart dropped neatly into one of the vent openings of the gardening bot’s metal shell. The machine stiffened, circuits hit with shock, and then ground to a stop.
“No!” Hel shouted. “You, you…” She sent a stream of profanity blistering through the air, but her hands still moved. Hel was testing every system, trying to find some actuator that still twitched, a motor circuit that hadn’t burned out, and Garrett’s motley heart ached—then jumped.
“That one,” he said.
“The planter?” Hel’s swearing cut off instantly. “I’m not getting any luminous feedback.”
“I saw…” Garrett stared at the bot’s view, grateful the taser shock hadn’t knocked out the communication circuitry, or the sensors. At the edge of the screen, the gun-shaped head of the planter twitched. “There!”
“Yes!” Hel aimed the planter arm at the plastic button on the junction box. She stabbed it forward and cursed again as it missed. She tried again, pushing the planter out slow and steady at the button, almost—then a shadow rippled across the screen, and the buzz of the big drone grew into a roar as it dropped in front of the gardening bot’s glassy eyes. A heavy claw flicked out and caught the planter arm, pinching it between cutting shears.
“Uh oh!” The voice boomed out of a speaker that hung off the side of the drone, a black square decorated with crying doll heads. “Somebody got frisky! What’cha doing? Trying to set off an alarm?”
“I’m trying to save my husband’s life you…” for a moment, Hel couldn’t say anything. Her face was screwed up, the old side a mass of furious wrinkles, the young righteous with rage, and Garrett had a vision of her young heart hammering blood through ancient veins.
“Hel. He can’t hear—” Garrett cut off. Stupid. Stupid old parts of my brain. “Hel,” he said, grabbing her young arm. “The speaker. Talk to them!” Garrett saw comprehension sweep through Hel’s mismatched eyes, and her hands danced.
“—don’t know if it’s one of you idiot admins driving that thing or one of the geezers.” The Shrike’s voice grated like a pedantic fifteen-year-olds. “Don’t matter. You just bought all you guys three hours of no—”
“Shut up, young, and listen.” Hel’s voice snapped with authority, and the tiny bit of quaver that came from her half-aged vocal cords just made it more jagged and intense. “We’re trying to save lives, and keep your unwrinkled asses from getting played.” The drone gang member went quiet, and stayed quiet as Hel laid out what was going on. His only noise was a low, disbelieving laugh when they played the recording of Director Lang and his subordinate for him.
“So they stew those geezer vegetables, blame us for it, then sit back and make bonus money.” The Shrike’s laugh crackled over his drone’s speakers. “This is why legacy capitalist systems need to be dismantled. They incentivize cruelty.”
“And drone gang extortion?” Garrett muttered.
Hel ignored him. “So. Can I push that button now?” she said over the speaker, almost sweetly.
“Hold on. We gotta engage in some collective decisiveness.” The drone went silent, except for the buzzing of its props. Seconds ticked by, and Hel’s hands twitched.
“Rushing youngs is useless,” Garrett said. “They have all the time in the world.”
Hel started muttering curses again, but her hands remained still until the Shrike’s voice came back.
“Give us a copy of that recording. And then forget about it. Never mention it, erase it. Promise us that, and you can push your button.”
“Wait—” Garrett said, but an uneven smirk spread across Hel’s face.
“Agreed. Sending the file, crossing our hearts,” she said, waving her hand over her breast. “Now let my bot go.”
“Done.” The drone released the planting arm, and Hel almost lunged at the air in front of her, hands fiddling with invisible controls. The planter arm stuttered forward and touched the button. Hel tweaked the controls, and the thin arm pushed forward, bending dangerously at the point where the drone’s claw had caught it. For a moment, nothing happened, but then the planter weakly fired a dried pea and pressed a little more. The button clicked, and the light on the top of the box flicked from red to green.
“Finally,” Hel breathed. Then she snapped her fingers. “Hey. I want to go over there and check on my husband, make sure he’s ok. Without getting my half-wrinkled butt tased.” She looked at Garrett when he tapped her arm. “Oh, and I’ll have a plus one. Don’t tase him either.”
“Ok, grandma.” The Shrike sounded amused. “You and your friend can take a walk.”
A few minutes later, waiting at the door for the drone that would escort them to the dementia buildings, Hel reached out with her hand and took Garrett’s.
“Thank you.” She sounded tired, and Garrett’s own heart felt like it was barely limping along. Walking through the heat outside wasn’t going to help that, but he wasn’t letting Hel go alone.
“No problem.” He patted her hand. “I’m surprised you agreed to keep quiet though. Why let them cover this up?”
She snorted. “The Shrikes want to keep it quiet so they can blackmail the hell out of Lang and his lackey. Duh. It’ll add in to whatever they can extort out of this little escapade.”
“Ha. Right.” Garrett shook his head. “For a minute I worried you might not be as vicious as I thought.”
“Oh, I am,” she said brightly. “I’ll let those Shrike idiots sweat Lang for a year, then I’ll turn that recording into the authorities.” She flashed her crooked grin at him. “The youngs may have all the time in the world, but you know what us old LIV rejects have? Vast fields, stripped bare of every f—”
Hard on Hel’s last word came the roar of a big drone’s props as it dropped in front of the door. “True words,” Garrett said over the noise. “Eloquently spoken.” And then he kissed her, long and thorough, fervently hoping that the youngs watching through that drone’s cameras were catching it all and getting squicked the hell out.
