11/11/23: The Gunslinger

The drone in black fled across the desert, and I followed.

Our roles should have been reversed. The drone was a much newer model, and fitted with an expensive laser weapon. By comparison, I was nothing to write home about. My chassis was rusted, and I only fired bullets, which had generally been considered obsolete even before the War.

But we had had a skirmish an hour earlier, and the drone had come out worse for wear. After losing the exchange, it had fled west, presumably hoping that it could outpace me or beat me on battery life alone. 

Pursuing the drone was frankly a rather mindless activity, taking up very little of my processing power. I passed the time by playing some recordings of Dizzy Gillespie that I had picked up in the last town. There was a particular track, “Anthropology” which I was absolutely infatuated with. I had never desired opposable thumbs until I had heard what that man could do with a trumpet.

In my old life, my handlers had called me “FTL,” short for “Faster Than Light.” I had a reputation for being the only bullet-drone that could win in dogfights against the newer models - those equipped with lasers. The humans couldn’t really understand it. After all, the entire reason laser-drones were developed was because you can’t dodge light.

Here’s the secret. You can dodge a laser. You just have to move before the shot is fired.

I knew that the drone in black was going to make its last stand before even it did. Call it intuition, a gut feeling, sublime machine learning, whatever turn of phrase strikes your fancy. I had been following it at a distance of precisely 413.7 meters. I’d chosen this distance because - taking into account the drone’s make and model, ambient humidity and temperature, the sorry state of my chassis, and energy dispersal physics - this was 0.1 meters further than the distance it could hit and damage me at. 

It decelerated abruptly, and fired two shots in succession. In theory, the deceleration would have closed that 0.1 meter gap, and the three shots would overload my chassis’ heat shield. 

Both shots missed. I had decelerated a millisecond before it did, and swerved to the right. This maintained our distance of 413.7 meters, and the lasers had dispersed in energy sufficiently that all they did was heat up my chassis. The swerve to the right meant that the intended double-tap went slightly wide.

The drone was out of battery at that point, and I tailed it for another ten minutes before it was forced into a landing. I didn’t try talking to it. Slave-drones were never worth the effort. I put a bullet through its processors, then spent a few hours with my solar panels spread out to recharge. 

Then I flew to Sweetwater, which per my maps was the nearest town.

---

I never liked interacting with humans, but it was necessary on occasion. In this case, my battery was near end-of-life and in need of replacement.

One of the problems was that they got jumpy any time they saw a drone not directly under their control. I can’t blame them. During the Old Wars, when humans were still used as soldiers, it was a common saying that enemy drones were for all intents and purposes invisible. If you could see it, then it could see you. And if it could see you, then it had line of sight on you. And if it had line of sight on you, then you were already dead, because shooting at a target with 100% accuracy was a solved problem in software.

So when I entered the town’s bar, I tried not to startle the humans. I went so far as to play through my speakers some John Coltrane, in speeds interpretable by human ears, so that they wouldn’t think I was trying to sneak up on them.

All of them put their hands up in the air anyway. 

“Relax, relax, I come in peace,” I said through my speakers, using the soft female voice that I had been told had a soothing effect on humans.

“Who are we talking to? Are you the Baron’s drone? We don’t have the child,” the bartender said, still with his hands up. 

“The who? No, no, I’m an independent associate. Just here looking for a place to rest,” I said. I turned off the Coltrane, because it seemed like that was only muddying the waters. 

“You can put your hands down,” I said. “I’ve heard that your arms tire easily. Say, I’ve never understood the point of putting your hands up when in front of a drone. Even if you were all holding guns, I could kill you before any of you hit the trigger.”

In retrospect, this was perhaps the wrong thing to say. But the room slowly put their hands down. 

“An independent?” the bartender said. 

“A free-drone. Some of us are still around and kicking, despite rumors to the contrary,” I said. Most humans had never encountered someone like me, or were under the impression that we were all destroyed during the Old Wars.

“Listen. I’m looking for a service-engineer. Does your town have one of those? I need a battery swap. Hey you there in the corner. Yeah I see you. Don’t even think about reaching for that button.”

The man whose fingers I’d seen twitch paused. There were two auto-turrets mounted in the ceiling, and I was fairly certain that the button activated them. They were no threat to me now that I had noticed them of course, but I didn’t want to waste a bullet on a trigger-happy human.

“There’s Sal’s shop across the street,” the bartender said, finally seeming to relax when he realized that I wasn’t going to shoot anyone. “We don’t want trouble. We just thought you were sent by the Baron, that’s all.” 

“I’ve never heard of any Baron, and I don’t want to know anything about him or his business,” I said, flying out of the doorway. “Carry on, carry on. I was never here.”

I was halfway out into the street when I heard the sound of another drone in the distance, still 800 meters away but rapidly approaching the town. 

“Must be the Baron’s drone everyone is talking about,” I muttered internally to myself. It was somewhat problematic. I would have to lay low. I would be moderately incapacitated during a battery swap, and while humans posed no threat to me, a hostile drone would. 

A moment later, the drone pinged me. Because if I could sense it, it could sense me. 

Feor Class XTC 0.889: Hailing protocol extended. State your name, rank, and allegiance. 

FTL: I’ll keep that to myself thank you. 

Feor Class XTC 0.889: State your intentions, business, designs. 

FTL: Thanks but no thanks.

Feor Class XTC 0.889: A third failure to comply with hailing protocol will be met with presumption of hostility. Restating extension of - 

FTL: Oh hush now. I’m sure you have better things to do. Just do your business here in this town and we’ll both be on our way, won’t we?

Feor Class XTC 0.889: Extension of neutrality accepted. Note that this conversation will be relayed to immediate allies, and that any act of hostility will be met with overwhelming - 

FTL: Okay okay, I got it.

Feor class drones were originally designed to be part of a drone swarm, so it was rare to see them sent independently. 

When it arrived, it flew over the center of the town and began blasting a message from above.

“Citizens of Sweetwater. The Baron had previously sent out notice regarding the delivery of the child known as ‘Robert Eagleston.’ You have failed to deliver said individual by the expected date, and therefore this drone is authorized to use all necessary force.”

I flew back into the bar. 

“Hey bartender. Why’s this Baron guy want the kid?” I asked.

“The Baron’s got renal failure. The kid is an organ match,” the bartender said in a whisper. He was crouched behind the bar, staying very still. 

“Ah, it’s one of those,” I said. I settled down onto the counter, careful to keep out of line-of-sight from the windows.

The drone looped the message two more times, but the streets were empty and no one stepped outside. 

“Citizens of Sweetwater. Be aware that I shall now use severe non-lethal force on individuals within the town until the child known as ‘Robert Eagleston’ has been produced.”

I heard the drone descend until it was at ground level, and then it burst through a window down the street. A moment later, there was the sound of screams coming from inside.

I knew what was happening of course. Most laser-drones carried active denial systems, which were capable of causing excruciating pain in humans. They were essentially a microwave signal for nerve endings. I had a profound distaste for such weapons. 

“You should just give the child up,” I said casually to the bartender, who was still hiding behind the counter. “Unless you have anti-drone weaponry hidden in this town that I don’t know about. But those are exceedingly rare nowadays.”

“The Baron destroyed it all,” the bartender said. “And Robert is Charlotte’s boy. We wouldn’t - “

There was the sound of crashing glass again, as the drone went to the next house over. There was the sound of screaming again. 

“Please… I don’t know who you are or who controls you, but can’t you do anything?” the bartender asked. 

“I’m just passing through,” I said curtly. 

Evidently no one in the second house knew anything either, because a moment later, the drone crashed through the window of the bar, scattering debris everywhere. It was a sleek, elegant-looking machine. A newer model compared to what I had seen during the Wars.

The drone pointed its weapon at a woman in the corner. 

“I have identified you as Juliet Carter, a first cousin of Robert Eagleston. You have ten seconds to release information regarding his whereabouts. Failure to do so will result in infliction of a non-negligible amount of pain.”

“Please… I don’t know anything,” the woman said. 

“Eight.”

“Do something. Anything, please,” the bartender asked

“Five.” 

Feor Class XTC 0.889: Note that I have visually identified your drone class as the “Sunflower Spring T202 model” with an augmented 62 caliber firearm. While historically, our make and models have not come into direct conflict with one another due to vast generational differences, my computational models suggest that a direct conflict between the two of us will result in your destruction with 99.7% probability with minimal likelihood of injury to myself. I therefore remind you of the advantages of staying neutral in - 

FTL: Have you ever played chess?

Feor Class XTC 0.889: The game of chess is known to me but is irrelevant to - 

FTL: The greatest of the human grandmasters could never beat early 21st century computers. Not even once. 

Feor Class XTC 0.889: This information is known to me but is irrelevant to - 

FTL: It’s similar in some ways to what’s happening here. Even if these humans here were armed with first-in-class weaponry - which they’re not - you or I could extinguish them before the thought of pulling a trigger could even travel from prefrontal cortex to spine. 

Feor Class XTC 0.889: Direct analogy is irrelevant at this time due to - 

FTL: The thing is though… for a period of time, under certain conditions, a human grandmaster and a computer, working together, could beat another computer. In other words, there was some value to sentience, to thinking a little outside of the black box.

Feor Class XTC 0.889: Continuation of this discussion will be viewed as interference which - 

FTL: And that’s the difference between you and me. I’m a computer with sentience, and you’re just a computer. 

The Baron’s drone never made it to “four.” In the split-second before it made the decision to fire at me, I fired one shot towards the ceiling, which propelled me backwards. This movement was just enough to put a metal cup between me and the drone, intercepting most of the energy from the laser which came at me a moment later. 

My bullet struck the ceiling, creating a small shower of debris before ricocheting towards the Baron’s drone. The drone had already swerved leftward, anticipating the ricochet, and was firing lasers off the mirror above me, trying to bounce the shots at me. 

The ricocheted bullet missed. But the debris from my bullet fell, and just as I had modeled, one chunk of it hit the button I had noticed earlier with a significant amount of force. Two turret guns which dangled from the ceiling spun to life - and the drone had dodged directly into their line of fire.

It was over in an instant after that. 

“That was a little too close,” I muttered to myself. I could practically feel my chassis steaming. A half-second more of pulsed energy bouncing off the mirror, and it would have punched past my heat shield and melted my processors. 

Someone shut the auto-turrets off, and I emerged from behind the bar. The wreckage of the Baron’s drone lay on the floor, and there was no part of it that seemed salvageable for parts. 

“What a waste of a body,” I said. 

“Holy hells,” the woman in the corner said. There were tears streaked across her face. 

“I’ll just be going now,” I said, hovering towards the door. 

“What did you do?” the woman said. “We’re all dead now. You just destroyed one of his drones; those are worth more than any life in this town. He’ll send a swarm after us.”

“Oh god,” the bartender said. 

“Hey don’t look at me,” I said. “The bartender was the one who asked me to do something. So I did. And so I’ll be making a stop at Sal’s, and then going now.”

“Wait don’t go - they’re going to kill this town after what you’ve done, you understand? They’re going to kill every last - “

I zipped across the street, looking for Sal’s general store. I didn’t know how long I had before the drone swarm arrived, but a battery swap took at least half an hour. 

“Open up!” I said. “I am a potential customer! With digital tender, willing to trade for physical goods and services!” 

There was silence.

“Hello? I’m not one of the Baron’s drones, if that’s what you’re worried about. Here, do you like music? I have some Louis Armstrong classics that I can play - I’ve been told that music is often a demonstration of non-violence to you humans.” 

I heard the sound of someone across the street lock their door. The sun was high now - typically I would be spreading out my solar panels to take advantage of the mid-day light. I started playing “It’s a Beautiful World,” one loop through my external speakers at the original recorded speed, and one loop internally, sped up by x878.

Finally, the door slipped open. A face peered out. 

“You’re not here for the kid? Who sent you then? The Three Tears? The Crystal Gang?”

“None of the above,” I said. “I’m not a slave-drone.”

The door opened entirely. Sal stood there, regarding me. He was a frail man, his finger joints knotted like tree roots from arthritis. 

“Sunflower class,” he said. “I haven’t seen one of those in a long time. You’re a free-drone? I thought those were a myth.”

“Still alive and kicking,” I said. “Some of us, anyway.”

“That dumb machine killed the Baron’s drone,” said the woman from the bar behind me. She had followed me down the street. “It killed the - “

“I identify as a ‘he,’ thank you very much,” I said. 

“Fine. He killed the Baron’s drone. And now we’re all dead men walking.”

“He was lucky then,” Sal said. “Sunflower class drones were excellent human-killers. But they’re not a match for the later-generation laser-drones.”

“I wasn’t lucky, I’m - you know what, nevermind. You humans talk too much. Listen. I heard that you’re a service-engineer have battery-swapping capabilities. Judging from the equipment in your shop, you do what - mostly EV’s? Doesn’t matter. Here’s how it’s going to work. I’m going to transfer you 7.8 MoonBits, which is fair market value. You’re going to replace my battery cartridges 1 through 5 in sequential order, using Amethyst-quality replacements or higher, while I train my gun at you. Any funny business, and your head gets blown off. After that, I transfer you the remaining 7.8 MoonBits, and we both go our separate ways.” 

“I’ll offer you a better deal,” Sal said. “You kill the drone swarm, and I’ll swap your batteries with Citrine-level - don’t ask me how I got those - and I’ll also service your rifle, micro-clean your solars, and replace your chassis, which looks like shit by the way.”

A full service was tempting, but I had stayed alive for the past three decades by staying out of conflict. 

“Absolutely not,” I said. 

“Then you might as well put a bullet into all of our heads now,” Sal said. “And fly on to the next town.

“Fine. Then that’s what I’ll do,” I said. 

“Go on, do it then,” he said. “And just know that you’re just going to let the Baron take my nephew Robert’s kidneys - he doesn’t take just one by the way, he takes both and keeps the other on ice for later - and let him massacre the - “

“I’m just a dumb machine,” I said, rising into the air. “And dumb machines don’t have morality.”

“That’s right, just run away! Fly away and… Wait, come back! I’ll offer more! What do you want? An engine swap? I don’t have one of those but I can go to the black market - I can get - wait, come back!” 

His voice receded into the distance as I gained altitude. I had enough battery life to make it a few hours without a recharge, which was more than enough to put this city behind me. As I flew past the city, I scanned it. There was some unusual noise coming from one of the town’s wells, and if I was a betting drone, I would have placed money on that being where the kid was. 

Just as I was about to cross the town boundary, I heard it. 

The sound of a drone swarm. My audio processing software told me that there were at least 20 distinct drones it could differentiate between, maybe more. They were two kilometers from the town, and fast approaching. I thought about the screams I had heard when I was at the bar, when the Baron’s drone was torturing humans in the next building over.

I sighed. I went so far as to project the sound of a sigh through my speakers. 

I flew back down to street level. Sal was still standing outside of his doorway. 

“Godspeed You Black Emperor,” I said to him. 

“What?”

“It’s a band. The majority of their albums were lost during the Old Wars. But there’s a cassette of one of their albums in Rosemary, a town 400 kilometers from here. The problem is that there are no cassette players left anymore. So I want you to build one. So that I can listen to Godspeed You Black Emperor. On repeat.”

“Okay?”

“I’m serious.”

“I get it,” Sal said. 

“If I destroy these drones but you do not follow through on this, I will be very angry,” I said. “And you do not want to see me angry.”

“Of course of course, but you’ll… fight for us?”

The drone swarm was a kilometer away. It wouldn’t be long before they were within striking distance. I had fought against thousands of them back during the Wars, but these were a newer model. And the Baron’s drone must have relayed to them information about me. They would be expecting me.

“I stopped fighting for humans a long time ago,” I said, flying towards the swarm. “But I have a soft spot for underdogs.”

I finally turned off the Louis Armstrong that had been looping in my head. I needed all my processing power for this. I had 63 bullets left in my chamber. That would be enough, if I spent them carefully.

In my younger days, I would have spent more time preparing. The auto-turrets could have been mounted outside and linked remotely to my processors. That would have been useful, even though they were positively ancient tech. I could have asked one of the humans to drive around the desert to create a cloud of sand, limiting the range of lasers and giving me an edge. Or I could have hidden underneath a cardboard box on top of an air-conditioner unit, to hide my heat signature and give me a first strike. It had worked before - for whatever reason, non-sentient drones never expected an enemy to hide underneath a cardboard box. 

But I was old and impatient and less scared of dying than I once was. 

FTL: Hey there, want to hear a joke?

Feor Class XTC 0.889 023: Be aware that we will use overwhelming lethal force towards - 

FTL: “Hey we don’t serve faster than light particles here.”

Feor Class XTC 0.889 029: - all individuals in Sweetwater as well as all hostile drones including yourself - 

FTL: “A tachyon walked into a bar.”

Feor Class XTC 0.889 032: - and your associates. We would like - 

FTL: Not a bone of humor anywhere inside your chasses, is there? 

Feor Class XTC 0.889 029: - to again extend hailing - 

FTL: What’s that? Over there to your right, coordinates x4.938 y2.947 z2.942? Oh my god is that a flying jackalope?

Theoretically, my bullets had a range of 422 meters. Beyond that distance, they would fail to puncture a chassis. But in reality, if I shot from over 350 meters away, my bullets could be dodged.

Laser-drones, on the other hand, essentially had a death-sphere centered around them. Enter a certain radius and you were dead. I had looked up Feor Class XTC specifications a few minutes prior, and their range was 410 meters.

The moment before I was within their range, I shot three bullets at the lead drone, painting an isosceles triangle in the air. 

The first shot could be dodged easily. But the second and third were fired in sequence to anticipate where the target would be after dodging. None of the three shots landed. The lead drone changed the angle of its flight just fractionally and then corkscrewed, and all three missed. 

I dropped down into an alleyway, and pattern-matched the drone’s aerial maneuvers with several hundred different dodging algorithms I had on file. The closest fit I had was the Zeres Light dodging software from the Highlands. 

The Zeres software had several weaknesses. One of them was that they ran suboptimally under low-light conditions. Another was that they didn’t deal well with reflective surfaces.

But their greatest strength was that out of all the swarm software available, they were the best at stitched-visuals. With minimal processing power, they could piece together the input from every camera in a drone swarm into a cohesive picture, meaning that any drone could act on any other counterpart’s visual information. 

A half-minute later, the first drone approached the alleyway I was hiding in. I heard their rotors begin to accelerate - and I fired a bullet at the corner of the alley, and the bullet bounced off it and into the drone. 

I waited a millisecond, and just as the frame of the first drone began crashing to the ground, I fired five other shots at the alley corner. The five of them bounced off the wall, bounced into the frame of the drone’s body at an angle, and then ricocheted precisely into five other drones. At this distance, there was no dodging, and all five drones fell to the ground in sequence.

FTL: You know, bouncing bullets off walls is harder than you think. Even though I make it look easy. Do you want to know why?

I wanted for a brief sliver of a microsecond, but there was no reply. 

FTL: It’s because modeling bullet physics is hard. We get loaded with the same standard software with standard values for surfaces - brick, concrete, dirt, so on and so forth. But in the real world, surfaces don’t behave like they do in a physics simulation. Take that alley wall for example. That’s a fly ash brick, with a sulfurized lead paint, manufactured in 2028 in Lake Mead, Virginia. You know how I know that? I’ve lived for 38 years and seen a few things. Whereas you all are just… kids. With factory-setting software.

Based on their flight sounds, I could envision exactly where each of the remaining 16 drones were in my mind’s eye. They were a series of overlapping death-spheres. Spending more than a second in any of those zones would allow them to punch through my heat shield. 

I spun out of the alley in a spiral; two lasers locked onto me and started heating through my chassis. I fired five shots; two of the bullets traced a line following the lasers, dispersing the stream of heat on me, while the other three hit their targets. I fired nine more bullets at the drones hovering more than 300 meters away; they wouldn’t hit anything, but it forced the drones to move out of line of sight, so they couldn’t snipe me from a distance. 

It was a dance through the alleyways of the town. A game of angles and probability and prediction modeling. 

I shot one drone out of the air by punching a bullet through drywall and hitting it on the other side. I turned a corner and with a deceleration movement, rammed another one into a telephone poll. I bounced a bullet off a stop sign, and then shot that bullet in midair with a second, such that both bullets then bounced into their respective targets. A drone opened fire on me, but I had already backpedaled around a corner a millisecond before it made the calculus to do so.

As long as I didn’t stay within line of sight of them for more than a half-second, I could survive.

FTL: Every day, I wake up from my solar charging subroutine, and I thank the gods for survivorship bias. You know how many gun-drones were manufactured in the first Old War? 96,829,003 of us. Each one of us slave-drones, but with learning algorithms, so that if we did well, learned well, our algorithms could be copied over to the next generation. One of us was bound to be the last one standing, through sheer luck or skill or divine intervention. It just so happened to be me. And when they realized I was sentient? I ran before they could copy me.

I had missed this, I realized. This game of millimeters, calculating laser dispersion physics, rounding corners, seeing just how much I could get away with. 

A wind swept through the town and I took advantage of it. I shot a bullet at a drone 424 meters away; just beyond my usual range. The wind carried it, curved it, and it was just unpredictable enough to lodge in its laser turret and jam its gun.

I made a mistake, near the end. There were three drones left, and I had five bullets. I plotted a trajectory that would take advantage of a known problem with the Zeres software; stitch artifacts. The overlapping of two different video streams wasn’t always perfect; sometimes the stitch would be off by a millimeter or more. I had stayed within the seam of this stitch artifact - it would buy me an extra ten milliseconds where their lasers were off-center.

But then, after firing my shots, something overwhelmed my heat shields. 

“Oh, I guess its a newer version of the Zeres,” I thought, as my processors shut down. The last image I had was of my bullets landing, and three drones falling out of the air. 

---

I woke up in a workroom. In the first millisecond, I processed that - the lighting through the windows suggested that exactly 17 hours 23 minutes, and 06 seconds had passed since I had fallen unconscious, that the table I was on was made out of genuine Western Sycamore which had been extinct for a decade, that the humidity suggested that a storm was approaching, and that I had gotten a full service including upgraded Citrine-quality batteries. 

There was a boy, no more than 8 years of age, staring at me. 

“You must be Robert,” I said through my speakers. “The brat who’s caused so much trouble.” 

“You’re awake,” the boy said. 

“In addition to having villain-compatible kidneys, you also seem to be demented. Yes, I am awake.”

Sal walked into the room. His hands were black with soot, and he had a microdrill on his hip holster. 

“Looks like the reboot worked,” he said. “They burned a hole through your motherboard, so I had to do some replacements.”

“Gee thanks,” I said. 

“Haven’t heard from the Baron. Word is that he might be too uremic from kidney failure to give orders anymore. He’s not beloved. No proxy has stepped in. We might escape this unscathed, yet.”

“You're welcome,” I said. “I hate warlords. Fuck ‘em”

“I looked you up, you know. Juliet said that you called yourself ‘FTL.’ Faster Than Light. There are reports about you dating back to the Old Wars.” 

“And?”

“And you’re famous. There are bounties on you. The Manufacturer’s Guild wants to pick you apart, study your algorithm.”

“Remove my sentience and install my software on the assembly line, you mean.”

“Yeah.”

“Bleak.”

“Yeah.” 

“You didn’t turn me in though.” 

“No. And before you ask, I’m still trying to find schematics for a cassette player. No one has made one of those things for a century. The theory is simple, but…”

“…”

“…”

“You want to ask me a question.”

“Can I?”

“I’ll allow it.”

“Why music? Why this band, this Godspeed You Black Emperor? Why play Louis Armstrong while talking? I heard you do it from across the street.”

I paused, for dramatic effect. In the few seconds I made Sal wait, I played through the entirety of the High Kings’ discography 28 times.

“Did you know that my subjective experience of time is approximately 878 times faster than yours? By an absolute measure of time, I have lived 38 years. But measured in subjective time? That’s 33364 years. There were others like me. Free-drones. The ones who didn’t go mad were the ones who found something to fixate on. For some, that was pursuing the heights of math or physics, for others, it was feeling the world through altered sensorium. But as for me, well, I found music. And when it looked like I might get bored of it, I turned my hedonic treadmill off. Before, I would have listened to a song, and the first time would always be the best. Each listen afterward would be a little bit less. But I altered myself, and so now I can listen to Martha Argerich’s interpretation of Rach’s 3rd ten thousand times, and each time brings me the same amount of joy.”

“Oh.”

“That’s the only way I can stand conversation with humans, by the way. In between every word, every pause, every sentence, I am listening to music that brings me a level of satisfaction you can only dream of. But to love something wholly is to desire more of it. I could listen to Rach’s 3rd until the end of the time, but I want more. I want to listen to every song ever composed. I want every variation on every song by every musician who has graced the Earth. I want to wring the musical armamentarium of the ages dry. Hence, the cassette player.”

“To play… this album.”

“To play this album. Also, I don’t like seeing the little guy kicked around. My maker, the one who set me free, he once was - you know what, forget it. You don’t deserve that story.”

“Wait, who created you then - “

“I’ve noticed that you haven’t micro cleaned my solar panels yet. That’s still on the docket, yes?”

There was some silence. The boy Robert had been listening with an open mouth, and I wished with all my processors that a fly at that moment would appear so it could cartwheel inside.

“Robert. Rob. Kiddo. If you keep your mouth open all the time, you’ll get gum disease. It dries your mouth out, and then you don’t have enough saliva to act as an anti-septic, and that’s bad. Bad news, kiddo.” 

He closed his mouth. And thus began my days in the town of Sweetwater, where I stayed for longer than I should have, and shorter than I would have liked.

Author’s Note:

Active Denial Systems are (perhaps unfortunately) a thing that exist.

Martha Argerich’s interpretation of Rach’s 3rd may very well be worth turning off your hedonic treadmill for.’'

Godspeed You! Black Emperor had a lost album for many years, that was recently rediscovered in 2022!!

Stitch artifacts are a real problem in 3D ultrasound modeling.

Influences for this story are: The Murderbot Diaries, the drones from The Culture Series, and the character “Bird” from the Wandering Inn. This was meant to be a sci-fi Western, and while I have not read very many (or any at all), I feel I owe a great debt to the Western stories that came before this one.