The Fifth Science Fiction MEGAPACK ®. Darrell Schweitzer

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      “I was taken to the safe house on the fifth of September, after being gassed by a Eurasian infowar robot in the basement of Fairview Mall—”

      There was a thunderclap then, a crash so loud that it hurt his stomach and his head and vibrated his fingertips. The doors to the room buckled and flattened, and there stood Benny and Lenny and—Natalie.

      * * * *

      Benny and Lenny moved so quickly that he was only able to track them by the things they knocked over on the way to tearing apart the robot that was holding Ada. A second later, the robot holding him was in pieces, and he was standing on his own two feet again. The Social Harmony man had gone so pale he looked green in his natty checked suit and pink tie.

      Benny or Lenny pinned his arms in a tight hug and Natalie walked carefully to him and they regarded one another in silence. She slapped him abruptly, across each cheek. “Harming children,” she said. “For shame.”

      Ada stood on her own in the corner of the room, crying with her mouth in a O. Arturo and Natalie both looked to her and she stood, poised, between them, before running to Arturo and leaping onto him, so that he staggered momentarily before righting himself with her on his hip, in his arms.

      “We’ll go with you now,” he said to Natalie.

      “Thank you,” she said. She stroked Ada’s hair briefly and kissed her cheek. “I love you, Ada.”

      Ada nodded solemnly.

      “Let’s go,” Natalie said, when it was apparent that Ada had nothing to say to her.

      Benny tossed the Social Harmony man across the room into the corner of a desk. He bounced off it and crashed to the floor, unconscious or dead. Arturo couldn’t bring himself to care.

      Benny knelt before Arturo. “Climb on, please,” it said. Arturo saw that Natalie was already pig-a-back on Lenny. He climbed aboard.

      * * * *

      They moved even faster than the black robots had, but the bitter cold was offset by the warmth radiating from Benny’s metal hide, not hot, but warm. Arturo’s stomach reeled and he held Ada tight, squeezing his eyes shut and clamping his jaw.

      But Ada’s gasp made him look around, and he saw that they had cleared the city limits, and were vaulting over rolling farmlands now, jumping in long flat arcs whose zenith was just high enough for him to see the highway—the 401, they were headed east—in the distance.

      And then he saw what had made Ada gasp: boiling out of the hills and ditches, out of the trees and from under the cars: an army of headless, eight-armed black robots, arachnoid and sinister in the moonlight. They scuttled on the ground behind them, before them, and to both sides. Social Harmony had built a secret army of these robots and secreted them across the land, and now they were all chasing after them.

      * * * *

      The ride got bumpy then, as Benny beat back the tentacles that reached for them, smashing the black robots with mighty one-handed blows, his other hand supporting Arturo and Ada. Ada screamed as a black robot reared up before them, and Benny vaulted it smoothly, kicking it hard as he went, while Arturo clung on for dear life.

      Another scream made him look over toward Lenny and Natalie. Lenny was slightly ahead and to the left of them, and so he was the vanguard, encountering twice as many robots as they.

      A black spider-robot clung to his leg, dragging behind him with each lope, and one of its spare arms was tugging at Natalie.

      As Arturo watched—as Ada watched—the black robot ripped Natalie off of Lenny’s back and tossed her into the arms of one of its cohort behind it, which skewered her on one of its arms, a black spear protruding from her belly as she cried once more and then fell silent. Lenny was overwhelmed a moment later, buried under writhing black arms.

      Benny charged forward even faster, so that Arturo nearly lost his grip, and then he steadied himself. “We have to go back for them—”

      “They’re dead,” Benny said. “There’s nothing to go back for.” It’s warm voice was sorrowful as it raced across the countryside, and the wind filled Arturo’s throat when he opened his mouth, and he could say no more.

      * * * *

      Ada wept on the jet, and Arturo wept with her, and Benny stood over them, a minatory presence against the other robots crewing the fast little plane, who left them alone all the way to Paris, where they changed jets again for the long trip to Beijing.

      They slept on that trip, and when they landed, Benny helped them off the plane and onto the runway, and they got their first good look at Eurasia.

      It was tall. Vertical. Beijing loomed over them with curvilinear towers that twisted and bent and jigged and jagged so high they disappeared at the tops. It smelled like barbeque and flowers, and around them skittered fast armies of robots of every shape and size, wheeling in lockstep like schools of exotic fish. They gawped at it for a long moment, and someone came up behind them and then warm arms encircled their necks.

      Arturo knew that smell, knew that skin. He could never have forgotten it.

      He turned slowly, the blood draining from his face.

      “Natty?” he said, not believing his eyes as he confronted his dead, ex-wife. There were tears in her eyes.

      “Artie,” she said. “Ada,” she said. She kissed them both on the cheeks.

      Benny said, “You died in UNATS. Killed by modified Eurasian Social Harmony robots. Lenny, too. Ironic,” he said.

      She shook her head. “He means that we probably co-designed the robots that Social Harmony sent after you.”

      “Natty?” Arturo said again. Ada was white and shaking.

      “Oh dear,” she said. “Oh, God. You didn’t know—”

      “He didn’t give you a chance to explain,” Benny said.

      “Oh, God, Jesus, you must have thought—”

      “I didn’t think it was my place to tell them, either,” Benny said, sounding embarrassed, a curious emotion for a robot.

      “Oh, God. Artie, Ada. There are—there are lots of me. One of the first things I did here was help them debug the uploading process. You just put a copy of yourself into a positronic brain, and then when you need a body, you grow one or build one or both and decant yourself into it. I’m like Lenny and Benny now—there are many of me. There’s too much work to do otherwise.”

      “I told you that our development helped humans understand themselves,” Benny said.

      Arturo pulled back. “You’re a robot?”

      “No,” Natalie said. “No, of course not. Well, a little. Parts of me. Growing a body is slow. Parts of it, you build. But I’m mostly made of person.”

      Ada clung tight to Arturo now, and they both stepped back toward the jet.

      “Dad?” Ada said.

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