“What is this place called again?” Samara, whom they called Sam, asked wearily. Her feet hurt and she wanted to rest. The rubber pads of her feet were worn down and the sensors were starting to show through, sending little damage signals to her sub-cortex pain processors. She could turn off the receptors but only for so long, then they’d automatically turn back on, sending a sharp pain burst up her feet and legs. She hoped they could find some replacement pads soon.

Pabo looked at his friend, the youngest member of their unit. She was a medical machine dressed in a red leather jacket, a matching red skirt, and white leggings that were faded to a nearly gray color. On her feet were a set of rugged red boots. She wore a backpack full of medical gear and had a cap perched on her short blond hair. Her skin was designed to mimic what humans called white, but was actually a pink or beige color. She was as close to human as her manufacturers could create, but still showed signs of her machine heritage.

Her wide electric-blue eyes stared at him. He could see the small round black scanners that ringed her pupils, the fine lines where her skin’s seams came together, and the various bar codes and instructions tattooed onto her hands and the side of her neck.

“A suburb. How many times are you going to ask?” Pabo replied, looking back at her over his shoulder and giving her the stink eye.

Pabo was tall and thin, dressed in brown cargo pants, black boots, and a dark brown shirt. He wore a long trench coat and had a matching brown backpack. His short curly hair was nearly black and his skin was light brown. His eyes were a flat gray. He was really good at giving her dirty looks since he had only one eye, the other having shorted out when he touched a live power line a few months back. The resulting arc overloaded his left optic nerve, causing it to burst into flames before his safety programming kicked in and forced him to release the line. The burn scars on his cheek and brow gave him a sinister look, which he used often afterward to keep her quiet. He was lucky he hadn’t lost both eyes.

“Four thousand, six hundred and twenty-two times,” she snapped. She wasn’t afraid of him. Pabo was a sweetie, but tried to pretend to be a hard-ass to impress Locke.
Pabo and Locke chuckled and then quickly fell silent. They were all tired. They had been walking through the old human ruins for days and seemed no closer to finding what they were looking for.

After a few minutes, she asked, “What’s a suburb?”

“A suburban section of a city where humans would go to live after they were finished working,” Locke said. Locke was their leader. Taller than Sam but shorter than Pabo, he also wore brown pants and a dark brown shirt. His boots were the same as Pabo’s, but instead of a trench coat, he wore the tan robes of a master control program. His skin was an olive color and his sloping eyes were jet-black, the same color as his hair, which he wore in a short ponytail that stuck out from the back of his head like an antenna array.

“They didn’t live in the city?”

“Many of them did, but others chose to live outside the city center and ‘commute’ back and forth.”

“I see,” Sam said, not seeing anything. “Do you think we’re close?”

“I don’t know,” Locke said. “Pabo, are you getting anything from the Almanac?”

Pabo stopped and looked up. Two small signal boosters popped up on either side of his head, making him look like he was wearing a pair of sleek metal wings. From his forehead, two antennae quickly shot into the air, bowed back from the wind, and weaved above him.
He stood still for a moment, trying to pick up a signal from the Almanac: a database that machines like Pabo could access. No one knew where it was, but if a machine’s antennae were functional, he or she could usually pick up the signal and access the database. “The Almanac says the warehouse is on the edge of this suburb. About a mile from here due west.”

“That’s all? Did it give you any coordinates?”

“That’s all I got. The Almanac’s signal is being broken up by the storm,” Pabo said, looking at the dark clouds rushing in from the west. The antennae slipped back into his forehead and the two booster blades snapped into place in the back of his head. “We’d better keep going.”

The three could hear thunder and see flashes of lightning in the distance. The wind gusted fitfully, promising a hard blow and speckling them with the occasional droplets of rain as they marched through the ruins. They kept moving.

They walked down the center of a wide street, between the rows and rows of nearly identical blocks with their pointed roofs and many broken windows.

“What were these called?” Sam asked.

“Houses. The people would eat here, sleep, watch something called television, procreate if they were not too tired from working. Useless stuff. Human stuff,” Pabo said.

“There must have been a lot of humans in each house,” Sam observed.

Pabo looked at one of the homes they were passing, a massive two-story structure with many doors and windows. He ran a quick calculation, then said, “Each human took up about a square meter of space, so, calculating for optimum capacity, each unit housed approximately one hundred humans.”

Locke laughed. “I think that is a high-end estimation. Each house had maybe six humans.”

“They needed that much space?” Sam asked.

“Humans liked their privacy.”

“How do you know?”

“My great-grandmother knew some humans.”

“Your what?”

“Gram.” Locke thought about how to explain a great-grandmother. “A previous edition of my line, three generations back.”

“Wow. She knew humans?”

“Says she did. They were getting pretty rare by then.”

“Have you ever seen one?”

“No.”

“Where did they go?”

“Gram says their God came and took them.”

“What’s God?”

Locke thought about that for a moment, too, before replying, “A giant invisible man in the sky.”

Sam looked into the cloudy sky and said, “I don’t see him.”

“That’s because he is invisible,” Pabo said, also looking up at the cloud-covered sky.

“Maybe he is hiding behind the clouds?” Sam said.

“Maybe.” Pabo did not seemed convinced.

“Where did he take them?” Sam asked.

“Heaven,” Locke replied, remembering Gram telling him that all the humans were gone.

“What’s heaven?”

“A happy place where humans didn’t have to work anymore, where they never grew old, and never died.”

“Sounds nice. I bet they have plenty of spare parts. Can we go there?”

“I don’t think so.”

“The Almanac says that the humans didn’t go to heaven,” Pabo chimed in.

“Are you online again?” Locke asked, hoping they could get the coordinates of the warehouse.

“No. The signal is gone, blocked by the storm. But a few years ago, I was hanging out with this other group of machines, looking for a Grand Old Robotics production facility outside a metropolis called Chicago. The Almanac’s signal was strong there, and I downloaded a ton of information. It said that there was a plague and it wiped out the humans.”

“What’s a plague?”

“A virus that killed people.”

Sam shivered. She knew all about viruses. She instinctively checked her antivirus program and saw that it was running and up-to-date, thanks be to the Tree. They continued to walk along the cracked and broken street. It had once been smooth metal that carried power inside it for the human motor vehicles to glide along noiselessly above it. Sam had seen pictures and even videos of it. Now the street was ruined and rusted, large trees having forced their way out of the soil beneath it, creating small parallel forests that ran alongside the houses. Between the trees, a hardy type of grass covered much of what was left of the road.

After a few moments of listening to the wind, Sam asked, “What’s procreation?”

Locke thought about it and blushed. He was not going to describe human procreation to Sam, so instead he said, “That’s how humans manufactured other humans.”

“Do you think they have any spare parts in these houses, then? For the new humans?”

“No. That’s not exactly how new humans were built. And these houses have been picked over already,” Locke replied, looking at the broken-down and hollowed-out ruins around them.

As the trio moved west, the wind began to blow in long, steady gusts until it became nonstop. A vast cyclone miles wide spun slowly to the west, dropping black sheets of water and nearly blocking out the late afternoon sun.

The ruins of the houses became more and more sparse, until only two structures were close by, off to their left and right. The road ended abruptly in between these. The three stood there at the end of the road and looked at the endless field of vegetation before them.

“Wheat,” Pabo said. “It’s wheat. Humans used to use it to make food. Bread, I think.”

Sam looked at the field stretching to the horizon. “They must have eaten a lot of bread.”

“There were a lot of humans,” Pabo replied. He pointed at the two buildings nearby. One was a round tower with a dome on top; the other a partially collapsed one-story box. “This must have been a farm. That tower would have been a grain silo. The collapsed structure would have been what humans called a farmhouse.”

They looked at the ruins of the farmhouse and the mostly intact grain silo. In front of the three, the clouds from the massive cyclone seemed to drop to the ground. The wind picked up speed and now howled around them, and the rain fell in nearly vertical sheets, soaking the three to their synthetic skin.

“Do we need to get indoors?” Locke asked.

“What for? The rain can’t—” Pabo stopped in mid-sentence. “Did you hear that?”

Locke and Sam cocked their heads and heard the sharp crack of something hitting the metal roofs of the nearby buildings. They could see that the raindrops had frozen and were pelting the farmhouse’s metal roof. At first they were small, but rapidly increased in size and frequency until they were large and pounding hard enough to leave small dents in the metal.

Then the first bit of ice hit Sam in the face. “Ow!” she said, flinching. “It’s ice!”

“It’s called ‘hail’ and it can hurt us. We’d better find shelter,” Pabo said, protecting his remaining eye and running toward the old grain silo. Sam and Locke followed him.
Before the three had moved very far, the sky opened up and the hail crashed down on them. They did their best to protect themselves from the falling ice as it pelted their exposed skin, but they had little to do so with. They ran toward the silo, hoping the metal roof would protect them.

As they ran, Pabo stopped suddenly and turned to the west.

“Pabo! Keep running! You’re going to lose your other eye!” Sam yelled over the shriek of the wind.

Locke stopped beside Pabo and looked to the west as the hail bombarded the two. “What do you see?”

Pabo looked at Locke, then back across the field of wheat. Locke followed Pabo’s line of sight and spotted a towering column of black clouds that stretched up into the cyclone above them and had somehow expanded across the horizon as they were running toward the silo to escape the hail.

“What is that?” Locke asked, knowing that whatever it was, it was racing toward the three and would destroy them.

“It’s called a tornado. I estimate it to be an F-One class. What humans called the Finger of God.”

“That’s the invisible man’s finger?” Sam asked, having stopped running as well. “Will he take us to heaven?”

“No, but we need to run,” Locke shouted. “Will the grain silo protect us?”

Pabo just shook his head. Nothing he could see would protect them from the monster bearing down on them. They were finished.

Pabo felt Sam tug his sleeve. “Pabo, look!”

A few hundred yards away, Pabo spotted a figure darting through the wind and hail toward the ruined farmhouse. He didn’t think the house would withstand the tornado any better than the silo. As he watched, the figure pulled open two doors from near the ground and quickly disappeared inside.

“It’s some kind of shelter below ground!” he said. “We might be safe there!” The three ran toward the farmhouse as the tornado tore into the wheat field.

Sam ran after Locke and Pabo as the continuous rumble of the tornado drowned out all other sounds. Never having heard a human train or the blast of a rocket engine, Sam had nothing to compare the monstrous sound to. She glanced back as the tornado hit the grain silo and instantly reduced it to flying shrapnel. Sam screamed and ran harder toward the farmhouse.

Pabo reached the doors first and yanked them open. Locke rushed in, followed quickly by Sam and Pabo, who reached back and pulled the doors closed behind him. He swiftly locked them and raced after his two friends, down into what he now could identify as a basement or storm shelter.

The three ran through the darkness as the dilapidated house above them began to shake. Pabo could hear the wind of the tornado tearing apart the structure above and hoped that it would not collapse on them.

He then spotted the other person who had hidden here before them. It was a girl. She was hunched in the far southwest corner of the shelter. The three machines surmised she must know what she was doing and crowded beside her in the corner, wrapping their arms around each other and the girl as they listened to the cyclone stripping everything from the ground above.

Sam clutched her friends and the stranger, and they held her back, as they all waited for death to find them. The storm seemed to last forever. The howling of the wind, the groans of the house’s metal framework being torn from its foundation, and the final destruction of the building as the tornado swept it away combined to form an unending hurricane of sound that drowned out everything except Sam’s own heartbeat. It felt as though the tornado was going to suck them up and out of the shelter, spinning them into the sky while ripping them apart. When it was finally done with them, after lifting their wrecked bodies miles into the sky, it would cast their pieces down to the ground, no longer alive, no longer functional. Broken relics from a lost time.

Maybe someone could salvage some of my parts, Sam thought, and she closed her eyes tightly, waiting for the end as the sound reached a crescendo.

Then it stopped.

Complete silence descended over the shelter, and the four looked up, as though expecting the roof to collapse on them at any moment.

Pabo was the first to move. He got to his feet and moved quickly toward the shelter’s doors. He paused for a moment, listening to the sounds outside. “I think it’s gone.” He undid the latch and pushed the doors open. The sky above was still dark with clouds, but to the west he could see the golden light of the sun pouring down. To the east, he spotted the last remnants of the tornado disappearing up into the clouds as quickly as it had appeared. All around him, where the ruins of the silo, the house, and the wheat field had been, was nothing but a jumble of debris and land stripped bare of anything that had been above ground when the tornado passed.

“It’s gone,” he confirmed, walking back into the shelter. “I hope that thing didn’t destroy the warehouse.”

Locke nodded and stood up. He stopped and looked at Sam, who was still kneeling on the shelter floor. The look of shock was etched deeply into her face. “It’s OK, Sam, the tornado is gone. We’re safe.” Sam gazed up at him as though he wasn’t there, then looked down at her hand. Locke could see that it had a deep red stain on it. It was liquid and fresh. “What happened to your hand?” he asked, thinking she might have cut it. But her blood wasn’t red; it was more a copper color. Maybe she had touched something in the shelter.

Sam looked at her hand, then at the girl still crouching in the corner. “She’s human.”

“She’s what?” Pabo said, looking from Sam’s hand to the now clearly frightened girl.

“She’s human,” Sam replied. Then to the girl, “You’re human. And you are injured.”

Locke looked at the girl and spotted a large gash along her upper arm. The red liquid he had seen on Sam’s hand was coming from the girl. He had never seen it before, but Gram had told him humans were filled with a hydraulic fluid called blood. Of course, he had never seen a human before either.

The girl looked at the three machines and finally spoke. “You’re…you’re not?”

“No,” Sam said, smiling, “we’re living machines!” Sam turned to Locke and Pabo with a huge smile on her face. “Pabo! Locke! We found a human being!”

Locke and Pabo were not smiling. As Sam spoke, the girl, having been made aware that the three people in the shelter with her were not human, had raised a long black metal tube and pointed it at Sam.

Pabo scanned the long, evil-looking device. “Sam, Locke, I think she has a shotgun.”

“A shot-what?” Sam asked, still smiling but beginning to pick up on the change in Pabo’s tone.

“A shotgun. It is a projectile weapon humans used to kill things,” Pabo replied. “It ejects a collection of metal pellets at high velocity. It can do severe damage to us. It can even kill us.”

Sam slowly looked at the end of the metal tube, then at the girl pointing it at her face.

“Why do you want to hurt me?”

“You’re a machine,” the girl said, as if that explained everything.

Locke thought quickly, assessing all the possible scenarios that could play out in the next few seconds, and made a decision. “Pabo, are you connected to the Almanac?”

“No. The storm is still interfering with my reception.”

Locke nodded and, speaking quickly, said, “Pabolan Tasso Seven: shutdown sequence seven, seven, six, one, one, three. Execute.”

“What?” Pabo managed to say before shutting down completely. His now inert body crumpled to the floor in a boneless heap.

“Pabo!” Sam yelled, and began to move toward her fallen friend.

“Sam! Don’t move!” Locke said. Sam froze in mid-movement. To the girl, he said, “We aren’t going to hurt you.”

“All machines say that. Right before they kill you.”

Locke thought about the girl’s statement for a fraction of a second, then said, “I see. Have you met any machines before?”

The girl momentarily dropped her eyes. “Ah, no.”

“And the people who told you this? Had they actually met any machines before?”

“Of course,” the girl said.

“But they lived?”

“What?”

“The people who saw the machines. They lived to tell you, right?”

“Um, right.”

“Then, logically, the machines did not kill them.”

“Maybe they killed others and the people who told me saw them.”

“Maybe. But did they say that?”

The girl considered this for a moment, then said, “No, they didn’t.”

“So maybe they heard that from someone else who heard it from another person who heard it long ago.”

“Maybe.”

Sam watched the girl and Locke as they spoke, moving her head back and forth during the exchange.

“Then maybe you can take that shotgun out of my friend’s face and neither of us kill each other.”

The girl dropped the shotgun a fraction of an inch, then said, “Promise?”

“Promise.”

“Scout’s honor?”

Locke did not know what “scout’s honor” was, but decided to agree to it anyhow. “Yes. Scout’s honor.”

“OK, but I’m really fast, so don’t try anything funny,” the girl said, and lowered the shotgun. She still kept the gun cradled in her arms and her finger on the trigger.

“Pabo is the funny one and he’s dead,” Sam said, as golden tears welled up in her electric-blue eyes. “Why did you kill him?”

“Pabo isn’t dead,” Locke replied with a sigh. “He’s just turned off.”

“I didn’t know you could do that,” Sam said. She turned to the girl and scanned her. She looked young, maybe in her teens. Older than a child, but not old enough to be an adult. Sam asked, “What is your name?”

“Acton,” the girl replied, still clutching the shotgun tightly to her chest.

“I’m Samara. My friends call me Sam. You can call me Sam, if you’d like.”

“Hi, Sam.”

“Hi, Acton. That is Locke. And the boy on the floor is Pabo. You are injured. Can I help you?”

“What can you do? I tried bandaging it up, but it fell off.”

“I can do this,” Sam said, and pulled off her backpack. She opened it and pulled out a long, narrow device. She then held out her hand to Acton. The girl looked at it suspiciously, then scooted toward Sam, holding out her injured arm to the machine.

Sam surveyed the deep gash in the girl’s arm. Her sensors told her that the muscle had been cut deeply and the wound had become infected. She pressed a button on the side of the device and a blue light sprang out. She moved the light over Acton’s injury and watched as the muscle tissue began to stitch itself back together.

Acton watched in amazement as the wound quickly healed and the pain faded. After a few minutes, the injury was completely gone and only a small scar remained.

Sam put the device back in her pack and pulled out another. She quickly pressed the end against Acton’s newly healed pink skin.

Acton heard a sharp hiss, felt a mild sting, and quickly pulled her arm back from Sam.

“What did you do?”

“I gave you an antibiotic. It will kill the bacterial infection you have from the wound.”

“An anti-bato-what?”

“An antibiotic,” Sam replied. Seeing the confusion still on Acton’s face, she tried again. “A medicine to help you feel better.”

Acton nodded, but still looked suspicious. “Why are you here?”

“We’re looking for parts. There is a warehouse nearby,” Sam said, putting her equipment away and pulling on her backpack. “I am a medical machine, a nurse. Pabo is our system administrator and talks to the Almanac. And this is Locke, our master control program, our team leader, even if he is the world’s biggest dork. We are a trinary, a trinity unit, a three-way.”

“A three-way? Eww, Sam! Gross,” Locke said, his face flushed and wrinkled in mock disgust.

Sam laughed. “We’re a team of three units.”

Acton struggled to understand what Sam had said.

Sam said, “That’s all right. We’re looking for parts.”

“Parts for what?”

Sam giggled and replied, “Parts for us. We need to replace our parts that have worn out. Why are you here?”

“My family died,” Acton said. “We lived…” She stopped, looking suspiciously at the two machines, then started again. “We lived to the west with others. But before my father died, he told me of another place I could go. A place where there were people who could take care of me. He called it the Refuge.”

“Where other humans are?” Sam asked excitedly.

Seeing the fear creep into Acton’s eyes, Locke said, “Sam. No more questions. We do not need to know, Acton. Can you leave now?”

“But Locke! We can go to this place and the humans can fix us! We can tell others!” Sam said, clapping her hands together. “They can repair us and, in return, we can help them!”

Locke could see the panic in Acton’s eyes and saw her moving the end of her shotgun toward Sam. “No, we cannot. We will not. Acton, you can go with no fear that we will follow you or tell anyone else about what we have seen. We promise, right, Sam? Scout’s honor.”

Sam looked confused, but did as Locke said. “Yes. We promise. Scout’s honor.”

“And you won’t tell your people about us, right?” Locke said.

Acton nodded and replied, “Promise.”

“Then I think it’s time for you to go.”

Acton looked relieved and set the shotgun on the ground. She got to her knees and hugged Sam. Sam awkwardly placed her arms around the girl and hugged her back. Acton then hoisted her backpack, picked up her shotgun, and headed toward the shelter’s doors.

“Thank you,” she said, looking back, then disappeared out into the open.

“I don’t understand, Locke. Why can’t we go with her? The humans can fix us.”

“I don’t think the humans would fix us. They are afraid of us. Did you see the way she reacted when she found out we are machines? How frightened she was when you said we could follow her?”

“Well, we’re strangers,” Sam said, getting to her feet. “They could have helped us.” She looked out of the shelter. “We could have helped them.”

“I don’t think so. It’s best if we forget about her.”

“And what about Pabo? Is he broken?”

“No. I turned him off so he would have no memory of Acton. When he uploads his memory, the Almanac will not know of Acton and her people.”

“So?”

“I don’t know for certain, but Gram hinted that the plague that wiped out the humans may not have been natural.”

“What?”

“Yes. And that the humans blamed us. Machines. She never said it out loud, but if humans and machines were fighting, well, let’s just say it’s best if the Almanac didn’t find out.”

“But Pabo saw her. The Alamance will know.”

“No. I can fix this,” Locke said, and he knelt by the prone body of Pabo. “But first, Sam, will you keep Acton’s existence secret? If you speak of this to anyone, it will put her and her kind in danger.”

“I can keep it secret. Promise.”

Locke nodded, placed his hand on Pabo’s forehead, and said, “Pabolan Tasso Seven: reboot command one, one, one. Administrator access. Wipe memory of previous one hour of data. Confirm.”

Pabo’s gray eyes opened and he replied, “Confirmed.”

Locke removed his hand from Pabo’s forehead. “Complete reboot sequence.”
Pabo lay still for a few moments more, then blinked as he sat up and looked at his two friends. “What happened?”

“What do you remember?” Locke asked.

“Spotting the tornado. Sam said something, then…nothing.”

Locke nodded again, satisfied that Pabo retained no memory of the human girl. “You were hit on the head by a piece of flying debris. We carried you into this shelter.”

“Lucky you spotted this place. That thing would have destroyed us.”

“Yes. Lucky us,” Sam said. “Can we go now?”

“I’m online. The Almanac says the warehouse is close. It gave me the coordinates!” Pabo said, standing up. “We can make it before we lose the light.”

“Then let’s go,” Locke said.

The three made their way out of the shelter and headed north. Locke stopped only once to look behind the trio and could not see any sign of Acton. He turned and followed his friends.