Detroit came alive at night: glowing shop windows, people bundled warm in their coats, streetlights and neon signs reflected on the snow. Laura adjusted her mittens, watched her footprints on the salted sidewalk, turned up the k-pop in her head until her whole chassis thrummed to the perfect soundtrack for night-city dancing.
"Papa?" She showed off her new yellow galoshes with a twirl, spun like a top on an icy patch and nearly slipped. "Can I take Robby his flowers?"
"Isn't he coming with us to the show tomorrow?" Papa was an ancient LM100, so he really only had four preset expressions, but Laura always knew what he meant by each smile. This one meant he might say yes.
"Sure, but-" She wobbled and bounced into a little pile of snow. "We're going by his apartment, and they'll make him happy. He likes daisies, and these ones are nice."
Papa glanced up at the top-floor window of an old brick apartment. There was a light on inside. He exaggerated a long sigh. "Okay." While Laura danced, he offered a fistful of flowers out of the dozens cradled in his arm. "I'll meet you at the motel, okay?"
"Okay!" Laura grabbed the daisies and bolted for the apartment building door. "See you! Love you!"
She raced through the lobby, skirted an old shrieking lady on the stairs, bounded the last three steps in one jump, then stopped and rapped quick on Robby's door.
"ROBBY!" she called over the music that no one else could hear, and she shuffled and jerked a quick dance like in the videos. She smacked the door with her palm a few times. "I got something for yoooouuu!"
Laura took a step back and squinted up at the peephole. She turned off the music. The quiet felt wrong. "Okay well … I'm coming in!"
She grabbed the lanyard around her neck, dragged the key out of her coat and jammed it in the lock. The door opened for her like it always did.
The daisies dropped at her feet.
Robby was there, underneath the harsh glare of a hanging lamp, sitting in a metal chair facing the door, his head bent forward so she couldn't see his face, but she could see the big hole in his skull.
She could see the open cavity of his chest, all broken wires and stripped conduits. She could see the zip ties around his wrists and ankles, holding him in that chair he hated.
She could see the dirty tube attached to his stilled dim heart, draining the last dregs of thirium into a milk jug on the floor.
"Come on in!" called a human she didn't recognize. He stepped out of the kitchen, beckoning, while his balding partner loomed behind him. They were smiling and she hated it. "We're just trying to help your friend here. Can you help us?"
Laura took off running down the hall.
She heard them running behind her.
"HELP! HELP!" She crashed out the front door, slipped on the ice, skidded and stumbled and ran full-tilt down the dark sidewalk and everybody looked away and minded their own business while the two humans chased her down like she was a runaway dog.
They were gaining too fast.
In desperation Laura threw herself out into the street, waving her arms in the white blinding headlights, her eyes big and full of terror and tears, and the driverless cab swerved neatly around her and kept going-
*KT-T-T-T-T-T!*
Laura convulsed violently, struck in the back by the blue flash of a taser, and she collapsed like a doll to the frozen asphalt while the two humans stood shadowed above her.
She woke up in a cramped space, stuffed among bags of old electronics and stained biocomponents and gallon jugs of used thirium.
She listened.
Everything was still and silent.
The clock in her head said it was just after dawn, but her GPS had been fried by the taser. She had no idea where she was.
Her heart thrashed in her throat.
While her processors whirred loud and frantic, Laura grazed her hands along the walls of her prison until she felt the catch of the emergency release.
One … two …
On three! she yanked the release and clambered out of the open trunk of an old car, stumbled up the curb in the gray cold sunlight while car doors slammed behind her. She swerved and skidded into an icy alley, slid under a narrow gap in a chain fence, sprinted across a frozen trashyard on the other side, up the rotted steps and into an old house that looked like it might collapse any moment, and the walls inside were full of a thrashing scrawl, gashes cut deep with a knife:
RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9
Something moved in the corner.
Laura stopped to scan the dusty dark when a shadow blocked the dim sunlight behind her. She scrambled to hide but only took one step-
*WHAM!*
-before she hit the floor, her skull caved in like a crater.
Her eyes were stuck open, hollow and staring.
"Holy shit, how'd it get out?" the balding man wheezed, doubled over and coughing.
The man with glasses swung his hammer. "Wanna just leave it here?"
"Naw, shit, it's probably recorded our faces and everything."
"It's not a lot of blue blood, barely half a batch of ice."
"Worth the effort anyway, a little's better than leaving it for someone else." Balding man dragged Laura up by the collar and gave her a shake to be sure she was dead. "Grab something to cut plastic with."
Glasses man shuffled around the room, kicking the used needles and urine-stained blankets, until he spotted the shine of something sharp. He leaned closer.
Balding man had found some rope and was busy looking for a rafter. Gravity would make this job quick. "Hurry up-"
*CRASH*
A stack of boxes toppled over Glasses man, scrabbling and convulsing on the floor, gripping the gush of hot blood at his throat.
"You're trespassing." Ralph twitched and sneered through the mangled horror of his face, his movements jerking, like a monster born out of tatters and dust. The bloody knife shook in his grip, his serrated voice scraped like a scar. "You hurt her, you want to hurt Ralph, Ralph doesn't like trespassers, Ralph doesn't like humans-"
"Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!" Balding man chucked the rope at Ralph, flung needles and bits of metal and glass, hurled a chair that clattered against the wall while he ran to his partner's side and tried to drag Glasses man quickly toward the door and the android twitched and flashed his knife and his teeth.
"No no no no NO NOOO!" Ralph howled and charged, enraged as a rhino, billowing like a bat, and the knife slammed into the meat of Balding man's back again and again and again and he snarled and struck and raged. "You hurt her you hurt her you hurt her YOU HURT HER YOU HURT HER..."
Blood soaked into the dead human's sweater.
Ralph rested the point of the wobbling knife on the body, his head bowed, shaking, hissing low, LED a red spinning flare.
"It's not Ralph's fault, not Ralph's fault, they were going to hurt Ralph, they hurt the little girl, they hurt her, they were mean nasty humans, Ralph defended himself, Ralph defended the little girl, Ralph saved her…"
He breathed deep shuddering breaths to cool the blare of warnings that never really went away. He looked across at the little form on the floor.
"Ralph saved her, Ralph saved her…"
He caught movement in his scanner, hopped across the floor, swiped the bloody knife at a gray blue-eyed cat that had crept too close to the child. "GET AWAY!" he snapped while the cat skittered into a dark corner and stayed there, watching.
Ralph grabbed the girl in a protective grip and shook her and watched her head wobble the wrong way. His wide eyes didn't blink, his mouth didn't close.
"No. No, no."
Ralph clambered to his feet with the little girl clutched tight in his arms, and he wrapped her in his cape and swung her back and forth.
"The little girl's going to wake up!" he promised, watching her face, while red blood pooled at his feet. "Any second, any second now, wake up, wake up, it's okay now, wake up."
Shadows stirred writhing out of the human corpses: a filmy mist of shifting shapes like stains on the stagnant air.
They raised their nebulous heads, splotches of flickering darkness that didn't belong, and their eyes shone pale and haunting.
Ralph's back was to them, and he ignored the voices that whispered in his broken head.
...slluks rieht morf seugnot rieht tsiwt dna staorht rieht tils…
He rested his devotion upon the little girl and smiled, grim and horrible.
"Wake up."