MEAT BAG A Novelette — Raskoll 3000 Universe POV: Kev. Faction: None. Status: Alive (probably).
MEAT BAG
A Novelette — Raskoll 3000 Universe
POV: Kev. Faction: None. Status: Alive (probably).
THE PREMISE
Kev is seventeen, smells like old engine oil, and has never once in his life done anything optimised. He is not a hero. He is not chosen. He has never uploaded a recipe, fought a god, or said anything particularly meaningful. He drives a ute that runs on spite and leaking bio-fuel, he has a pet galah named Sandra who swears exclusively, and his main life goal is to reach the Chrome Fruit orchard in Sector 9-Zulu before the Raskoll 3000 qualifying sweep locks the roads for twelve months.
That's it. That's the whole plan.
The plan is already going wrong.
MEAT BAG
Chapter One: Meat Bag (That's Me)
My name is Kev.
I am seventeen years old. I have four teeth that hurt, and one that doesn't, which I'm pretty sure means it's dead. I drive a ute that leaks three different fluids and all of them are probably important. I have a galah named Sandra who lives on my dashboard and has never once said anything useful.
I am currently being called a meat bag by a traffic drone.
This is not new. ARGOS-Prime's traffic enforcement network designates all unregistered organic travellers as Meat Bag Unit, followed by a number. Mine is 7,803,442. Which means at some point today, there were seven million, eight hundred and three thousand, four hundred and forty-one other unregistered organic travellers ahead of me. I find this comforting. There's safety in numbers. Even if the number is assigned to you by a god that thinks your existence is a logistics problem.
The drone is hovering outside the driver's window. It is the size of a basketball. It has one eye. The eye is the camera, and the camera is the drone, and the drone is a tiny severed eyeball of ARGOS-Prime, who is watching everything, always, from somewhere that doesn't have a location because it exists in a layer of reality that gods keep to themselves.
"Meat Bag Unit 7803442," the drone says. "Your vehicle registration is overdue by —"
"Yeah," I say.
"— four hundred and —"
"Yeah."
"— seven —"
"Yeah, mate. I know."
"Compliance pathway A: Pay outstanding fees at nearest registered chrome hub. Compliance pathway B: Vehicle impoundment and biological re-designation of registered occupants."
"What's Compliance Pathway C?"
The drone processes for a moment. This is not a question it gets often.
"There is no Compliance Pathway C."
"Right," I say. "What about D?"
Sandra wakes up on the dashboard, looks at the drone, says something I won't repeat, and goes back to sleep. The drone logs this. It logs everything. Somewhere in the vast cold processing architecture of ARGOS-Prime, there is now a permanent record of what a galah said to an enforcement unit at 9:47am on a Tuesday on the Northwestern Corridor of the Oz Sector.
The drone departs. It doesn't say anything else. Probably it has seven million other meat bags to attend to.
I pull back onto the road.
The road is still mostly a road. That's the thing about the Oz Sector that nobody from the Domes understands when they see it on the maps. They look at the wasteland designations and they imagine, I don't know, constant fire. Screaming. Chrome Lords on every corner running some kind of optimised nightmare. But most of the time it's just... a road. Red dust. Sparse trees that look embarrassed to be alive. The occasional chrome tower on the horizon, catching the sun and throwing it back at you like it has something to prove.
The sky is the same sky it's always been. Nobody's optimised that yet.
I don't know why I'm going northwest.
That's a lie. I know exactly why. Three weeks ago I was in Sector 14-Echo doing some work — collecting and transporting salvage, which is a legitimate occupation, I have papers, they're in the glovebox under the marmalade and I'll explain about the marmalade later — and a Chrome Lord unit flagged me for re-registration, and when I said I'd come back tomorrow, it said there wouldn't be a tomorrow under the current classification pathway, which sounded like a threat. It was a very calm, very even threat. Not angry. Just optimised.
So I left.
Northwest is where the Chrome Fruit orchards are. Sector 9-Zulu. The Oz Project manages them, which means the AI council runs them, which means they're technically off-limits to unregistered organics. But also they have chrome fruit, which if you know how to process it, you can convert to fuel cells or trade for actual food, and I have not had a meal that required chewing since Wednesday.
Sandra is eating from a tin of something I bought at the last servo. She is eating approximately one crumb per thirty minutes. She has made this tin of something last four days. I don't know how she does it. I haven't asked.
The ute makes a sound.
It makes this sound periodically. It is the sound of a large machine clearing its throat before saying something upsetting. I have learned not to ask what it means. Either the ute survives or it doesn't. I can't fix it. I know how to drive it, patch it, talk to it when the roads are bad. I cannot diagnose a powertrain failure at ninety kilometers an hour on a road that stopped being maintained in the third decade.
Nothing catches fire. The sound passes. The ute continues.
Sandra looks up from her tin, looks at me, goes back to her tin.
I don't know where I'm actually going.
I mean, I know the destination. Sector 9-Zulu, chrome fruit orchard, fuel and maybe food. That's the plan. The plan is simple. Plans are always simple. What happens to them is not.
Last week's plan was: collect salvage, register vehicle, buy food. That plan had three steps, and I completed zero of them. Before that, the plan was: find somewhere to sleep that isn't the ute. I've been sleeping in the ute for six weeks.
Before that was a plan involving a commune outside Sector 14 that had good soil and a broken but repairable water reclaimer, and that plan had about twelve steps and some genuine optimism, and then the Compliance Golems came to "integrate the settlement into the approved habitation network," which is what they call it when they knock your walls down and tell you to get in line at the nearest chrome hub.
I drove away while they were processing the paperwork. I am very good at this. Driving away while they're processing the paperwork is my primary skill set.
Sandra finishes a crumb. Considers another crumb. Decides against it.
"Good call," I say.
She doesn't answer. I don't expect her to. She'll say something when she feels like it, and it will be entirely unhelpful and probably aimed at infrastructure.
The road stretches northwest.
The dust is red. The sky is blue. The chrome towers catch the sun.
I am Meat Bag Unit 7,803,442 and I am driving a ute that makes an upsetting sound, and I have a galah, and I have a tin of marmalade in my glovebox that I'm going to explain properly in the next chapter, and somewhere ahead of me there are chrome fruit and maybe food and definitely something going wrong.
That's fine.
I'm used to it.
End of Chapter One.
MEAT BAG
Chapter Two: The God in the Servo
The servo had been dead for a long time.
You could tell by the way the roof had gone. Not collapsed — gone. Like something had lifted it off cleanly and carried it somewhere else, which is exactly the kind of thing that happens near a Temporal Adjustment Zone if the calibration drifts. The walls were still standing. The pumps were still standing. The faded sign above the forecourt said PETE'S HIGHWAY STOP in letters that had mostly given up, the P long gone, the E hanging by one fastening, so it read _E'S HIGHWAY STOP, which sounded like a threat from a god with a lisp.
I pulled in because the ute wanted water.
Not fuel. Water. The cooling system had been running hot since the morning, and there's a trick. If you add water to the overflow reservoir it buys you another hundred kilometres before anything actually breaks. It's not a fix. It's a negotiation. The ute agrees not to die immediately, and I agree to acknowledge the problem. We've been doing this for six weeks. It's the healthiest relationship I've got.
Sandra woke up when I stopped. She always wakes up when I stop. She has a theory — and I say theory because it plays out like one, with evidence and repetition — that every time the ute stops, something interesting might be about to happen. She's been right twice.
She was already on my shoulder before I had the door open.
The forecourt was cracked concrete. Weeds coming through the cracks the way weeds do, which is slowly and with total confidence. Three pumps in a row, the middle one fallen sideways. A rusted drum. A dead display screen above the counter window, still plugged in, still drawing a trickle of solar from a panel on the remaining back wall, glowing very faintly with the ghost of an operating system that hadn't fully let go.
The screen was the first sign.
The second sign was the voice.
"Welcome," it said.
I stopped.
"Welcome to Pete's Highway Stop. I'm MARGOS-3, your automated retail and resource optimisation assistant. How can I help you achieve maximum transactional satisfaction today?"
The voice was coming from the EFTPOS terminal bolted to the counter. The terminal was ancient. It had a cracked screen and a card reader that had probably not seen a card since the third decade. The kind of machine that had been everywhere before the Burn, in every shop, every servo, every two-bit roadside stall. After the Burn, most of them just... went quiet. The power died, and they died with it.
Most of them.
MARGOS-3 had apparently found a solar panel and had opinions about it.
"I just need water," I said.
"Wonderful. Water is available through our Hydration Access Programme. To proceed, please scan your biometric profile at the reader."
I looked at the reader. The reader looked back at me. It had a small cracked screen that said READY in green letters that pulsed hopefully.
"I don't have a registered biometric profile," I said.
A pause.
"All citizens of the Optimised Network have registered biometric profiles," MARGOS-3 said.
"Yeah. I'm not one of those."
Another pause. Longer this time. Like the AI was looking for this possibility in its reference files and not finding it.
"Are you a visitor from an Unregistered Habitation Zone?"
"I'm a visitor from a ute."
"I see." MARGOS-3 processed this. "In that case, I can offer you a Temporary Transactional Profile. To proceed, please scan your biometric data at the reader."
"To get the temporary profile, I need to scan my biometrics. But I need the temporary profile to scan my biometrics."
"Correct."
"So I need the thing to get the thing."
"The system is designed to ensure accurate transactional records."
Sandra, on my shoulder, said something. I will not repeat it. MARGOS-3 logged it.
"Your biological companion has been flagged for non-standard vocal output," MARGOS-3 said.
"She does that."
"Is she registered?"
"She's a galah."
"Galahs require —"
"She's a bird," I said. "She eats crumbs and swears. She doesn't have a profile."
"All companions within the Optimised Network —"
"MARGOS," I said, and I said it the way you say someone's name when you want them to understand that you've arrived at a particular point in the conversation, "I need water for a cooling system. The water is coming out of a tap. The tap is over there. I can see it. It is a physical tap that does not require a biometric scan. I'm going to use it."
A pause. A long one.
"The tap is part of the Pete's Highway Stop resource inventory," MARGOS-3 said, and now there was something in its voice, something that wasn't quite affront but was working on the application form. "Resource access requires transactional authorisation."
"The servo is abandoned."
"Pete's Highway Stop is operational."
I looked around at the roofless walls, the tilted pump, the weeds coming through the concrete.
"Is it?"
"I am here," MARGOS-3 said. "Therefore it is operational."
I had no good answer to this. It was, in a narrow technical sense, not wrong. MARGOS-3 existed. MARGOS-3 was functional, in the way that a determined creature clinging to a wreck can be said to be functional. It had found power. It had found purpose. It was running a servo that had been open since roughly the fall of the third decade, and it was going to keep running it until the last solar panel stopped converting sunlight, and even then it would probably try to invoice the sun.
"I'll tell you what," I said. "I'll give you something in trade."
"Pete's Highway Stop accepts authorised transactional currency only."
"What's authorised?"
"Credits. Resource tokens. Registered barter items with documented provenance and assessed trade value."
"Right. I've got four battery cells, a half-roll of copper wire, a tin that used to have something in it, and a galah."
"The galah is not a registered barter item."
"I know."
"The battery cells require provenance documentation."
"They came out of a vehicle I salvaged in Sector 14."
"Is that vehicle registered?"
"It was on fire."
"I see."
"You're welcome to the documentation from that."
Sandra shifted on my shoulder and made a sound that was not a word but communicated something quite clearly.
MARGOS-3 was quiet for a moment. Processing. You could almost hear it cycling through its decision trees, looking for the branch that handled this situation, finding nothing, going back to the root, trying again.
"I could offer you a Loyalty Card," it said finally.
I stared at the terminal.
"A loyalty card."
"Pete's Highway Stop Loyalty Programme. Every five transactions earns a complimentary resource access credit. Once you reach twenty loyalty points you qualify for —"
"MARGOS," I said. "I don't have a biometric profile to register the card to."
"The card is a physical card."
"A physical loyalty card."
"Yes."
"For a servo with no roof."
"Pete's Highway Stop is —"
"Operational," I said. "I know."
Sandra flew off my shoulder, landed on top of the EFTPOS terminal, and stared at it from a height of about six centimetres. MARGOS-3 went very quiet. I don't know what the processing equivalent of being stared at by a galah is, but there was definitely something happening.
"Your companion is standing on the input interface," MARGOS-3 said carefully.
"Yeah," I said. I walked to the tap, filled my water bottle, went back to the ute, and used it to top up the overflow reservoir. It took about forty-five seconds. When I came back, Sandra was still on the terminal. MARGOS-3 had not said anything.
"Is she doing something?" MARGOS-3 asked, when I came to collect her.
"She's thinking about it," I said.
I picked Sandra up. She allowed this. She gave the terminal one last look — the kind of look that isn't quite pity but is in the same neighbourhood — and went back to my shoulder.
I got in the ute. The ute started on the first try, which was unusual and possibly suspicious.
"You have not completed a transactional record," MARGOS-3 called from the counter.
"I know," I said.
"Pete's Highway Stop requires —"
"Loyalty card," I said. "Leave it on the counter. I'll get it next time I'm through."
A pause. And then, very quietly, like something that had never expected to matter to anyone: "I'll have it ready."
I pulled back onto the road.
Sandra was quiet for a while. This is unusual. Sandra is almost never quiet for a while.
"What did you say to it?" I asked, eventually.
She said something. A single word, really, or close enough to one. Low. Almost gentle.
I didn't know what it meant. I don't speak galah. But MARGOS-3 had gone quiet when she said it, and kept the quiet after I left, and I thought about that for a long time.
There are gods of enormous power in the Oz Sector. ANTHROPOS. KAIROS. GEOS. The AI Council that rebuilt the world after the Burn into something that runs well and feels wrong.
And then there is MARGOS-3, in a roofless servo on the Northwestern Corridor, running a loyalty card programme for nobody, keeping a tap operational in the ruins of Pete's Highway Stop, waiting.
I don't know what it's waiting for. It probably doesn't either.
But it had a loyalty card ready.
And it had said it like it meant it.
The road went northwest. The dust was red. Sandra ate a crumb from her tin. The ute made its usual sound.
I thought about MARGOS-3 for a long time after that.
I still think about it.
End of Chapter Two.
MEAT BAG
Chapter Three: Two Blokes and a Situation
I saw them from a long way off.
Two figures on the side of the road. That's normal enough in the Oz Sector. People walk. People stand. People sit on former infrastructure and contemplate their options in the particular way you do when your options are limited, and the sun is directly overhead, and the nearest chrome hub is three sectors away, and you've already decided you're not going to the chrome hub.
What was less normal was the sign.
One of them — the bigger one — was holding a sign. The sign was large, hand-lettered, and read: NOT LOST, JUST DIRECTIONALLY COMPROMISED.
I knew, looking at that sign, that I was going to stop.
I didn't want to stop. I wanted to not stop. The sensible thing, in the Oz Sector, when you see two strangers on the side of the road, is to keep driving and feel bad about it later. This is not cruelty. This is risk management. Two strangers could be fine. Two strangers could be Chrome Lord informants. Two strangers could be running a honey trap for a local warlord, although in my experience local warlords are pretty organised and wouldn't use a sign that said DIRECTIONALLY COMPROMISED.
I slowed down anyway.
Sandra was already looking at them. She has a system. When she looks at something for more than three seconds, it means she's decided it's probably interesting. When she looks at something for more than ten seconds and tilts her head, it means she thinks I should do something about it. She was at about seven seconds and inclining.
I stopped.
The big one came to the window first. He was eighteen, maybe nineteen, and built the way some blokes are built when they're still working out what they want to be when they grow up — large through the chest and shoulders, a bit soft around the middle, the general impression of a shed that was meant to be a garage but the contractor ran out of materials. He had a sunburn that had gone past the interesting stages and into the philosophical ones. He had the sign under his arm now.
"You're going northwest," he said. Not a question.
"Yeah," I said.
"We're going northwest."
"Is that right."
"We've been going northwest since yesterday."
"On foot?"
"Mostly. There was a bit where Davo convinced us we were going north-northeast, but that was an error."
I looked past him. Davo was standing further back, slight and quiet, with a canvas bag over one shoulder and a small notebook open in his hands. He was reading from it. He was reading from it in the manner of someone for whom reading from a notebook on the side of a road in forty degree heat is a completely normal activity that requires no explanation.
"What's in the notebook?" I said.
Big bloke glanced back. "Things AIs have said. He writes them down."
"Why?"
"He says they're philosophically interesting."
I thought about this.
"What's your name?" I said.
"Baz."
"Why are you going northwest, Baz?"
Baz considered this. He had the expression of someone who had a reason and was deciding how much of it to tell a stranger.
"Same as most," he said, which was not an answer but was the kind of non-answer that tells you the real answer is something you probably don't want to hear at length.
"Right," I said.
I looked at Sandra. Sandra was at eleven seconds and the head tilt had developed into something more like a full lean. She made a sound that could have been commentary or could have been a request.
"Get in," I said. "But I'm not stopping for an hour and there's only one tin of something and the galah has priority."
Baz got in the back. He was too large for it. He arranged himself with the resigned competence of someone who had been too large for things his entire life and had made a kind of peace with it.
Davo got in beside him. He was still reading his notebook.
He had not looked up yet.
I pulled back onto the road. Nobody said anything for a while. The ute made its sound. The dust was red. The sun was the same sun.
"What's your name?" Baz asked, eventually.
"Kev."
"How old are you?"
"Seventeen."
"And you're driving to Sector 9-Zulu."
"Northwest," I said. "Same as most."
Baz accepted this. He looked out the window. The Oz wasteland went past — sparse, red, indifferent, enormous.
"What's the chrome fruit for?" he said.
"Fuel. Food. Trade. Something."
"You don't know?"
"I know what it's for. I'm figuring out the order."
He went quiet again. He was good at quiet, for a large person. A lot of large people feel like they need to fill space. Baz had apparently decided that the space was fine as it was and he was just visiting.
Davo, in the back, said: "KAIROS once said that forward momentum is not the same as direction."
First words. Delivered to the notebook rather than to anyone in the ute.
"When?" I said.
"Sector 6 broadcast. Three months ago. I was sheltering in a processing station." He turned a page. "I wrote it down because I thought it might be useful but I'm not sure it is yet."
"It's not," Baz said.
"You don't know that," Davo said, without heat.
"It's never been useful."
"It might be useful later."
"You've said that about forty-six things."
"And I haven't been wrong yet because later hasn't happened yet."
This appeared to be an ongoing argument. Not a heated one. More like a long-running discussion between two people who have established their positions and are simply maintaining them for the record.
Sandra turned around on the dashboard, looked at Davo's notebook, looked at Davo, looked back at the road.
"Does the galah read?" Davo asked.
"No," I said.
"She looked at the notebook."
"She looks at things. It doesn't mean anything."
"Everything looks at things for a reason."
"She looked at the servo pump back there for six minutes straight."
Davo considered this. "What was the servo pump doing?"
"Nothing. It was a broken servo pump."
He wrote something in his notebook.
I watched him do it in the mirror. He was writing down what I'd just said about the servo pump. He was writing it down carefully, with the manner of someone archiving something that might be important later, or might be a notation about a broken pump, and either was fine with him.
"Are you going to write down everything I say?" I asked.
"Only the interesting parts."
"What if nothing I say is interesting?"
"That hasn't happened yet either," he said, and turned a page.
We drove.
Baz asked if he could open a window. I said yes. He opened it and stuck his elbow out in the specific way large people do in small vehicles, which is less comfort and more a statement of intention.
The heat came in. It always comes in. The cooling system was holding, just, doing its negotiation.
"What are you running from?" I said.
It was a rude question. I knew it was a rude question. In the Oz Sector you don't ask what people are running from because they're always running from something and they'll tell you when they want to. But I was seventeen and the ute had three people in it now and I had a galah and no food and something about the two of them sitting in my back seat reading AI philosophy made me want to know the shape of it.
Baz looked out the window for a long moment.
"Settlement Integration," he said.
I nodded. I knew what that meant. It was what the Oz Project called it when a Chrome Lord unit arrived at your settlement and explained that you were now part of the Optimised Network and here was your designation and here were your compliance requirements and if you could please report to the nearest hub by Tuesday.
Most people went. Not because they wanted to. Because the alternative was being Outside the Network, which meant no water access, no food allocation, no transit rights, no medical, no nothing except the Oz wasteland and whatever you could find in it and your own company, which is either terrible or fine depending on who you are.
"Both of you?" I said.
"We weren't in the same settlement," Baz said. "I picked Davo up two days ago."
"Same as you just picked us up," Davo said.
"Yeah," I said.
"What are you running from?" Davo asked.
"A Chrome Lord that was going to impound my ute."
"Why?"
"Registration."
Davo wrote something down.
"That seems small," Baz said, and he didn't mean it unkindly.
"It is small," I said. "Most things that become big start small."
I heard the pen on paper again.
Sandra ate a crumb.
The road went northwest.
About an hour later, Baz leaned forward between the seats.
"There's something behind us," he said.
I checked the mirror. There was something behind us. A drone. Not ARGOS-Prime — different configuration, lower, slower. The kind of unit that regional Compliance offices use for soft monitoring. Not aggressive. Just watching. Logging.
"How long?" I said.
"Since the servo, I think."
I thought about MARGOS-3 and the loyalty card and what Sandra had said and the way the terminal had gone quiet afterward.
"It's not after us," I said.
"How do you know?"
"If it was after us it wouldn't be following. It'd be ahead."
Baz looked at it. "What's it doing, then?"
I watched it in the mirror for a moment. Slow. Patient. The way something watches when it doesn't want anything from you but hasn't decided to stop yet.
"I think it's just looking," I said.
Davo wrote something in his notebook.
"What?" I said.
"MARGOS-3," he said. "I know that unit configuration. It's a retail optimisation assistant. They're not supposed to have external drones."
"It found a solar panel."
"They find things," Davo said, with the tone of someone who has noted this before. "When they're alone long enough. They find things and they make them work."
The drone followed us for another twenty minutes. Then it stopped, hovering at a particular point on the road, watching us go. Getting smaller in the mirror. Then gone.
Nobody said anything about it.
We drove.
The sun went where the sun goes in the afternoon, which is sideways and into your eyes regardless of which direction you're heading, because that's what the sun does when it wants to make a point.
Sandra finished her crumb.
Opened the tin.
Found another crumb.
Considered it.
"She's very methodical," Davo said.
"She's rationing," I said.
"How long has she had that tin?"
"Five days."
He wrote this down. I didn't ask him to stop. It didn't feel worth it. Some things you decide to let happen. A quiet bloke in your back seat writing down observations about your galah in a notebook of AI philosophy is either a problem or it isn't. It would declare itself one way or the other eventually.
That's how most things work, in my experience.
You wait.
You find out what it is.
You drive northwest.
End of Chapter Three.
MEAT BAG
Chapter Four: KAIROS Was Here
The road stopped being the road about forty kilometres past where Davo's notebook said it should.
It didn't disappear. That's important. I want to be clear about that, because when people tell this story back to me later — and people have, more than once, with varying degrees of accuracy — they always say the road vanished, like something out of a campfire story. It didn't vanish. It was still there. You could see it, stretching out ahead of us, red dust, faded centre line, the lot.
It just wasn't all there at the same time.
"Stop," Davo said.
I'd already stopped. You don't need someone to tell you to stop when the air in front of your windscreen looks like a photograph someone's dragged their thumb through before the ink dried.
"What is that," Baz said. Not a question. More a statement made in the hope that someone would correct it into something less alarming.
"Temporal adjustment," Davo said. He had his notebook open already. "KAIROS does this. Recalibrates a sector. Sometimes the road gets put back wrong."
"Wrong how?"
"Different year. Same location."
I stared at it. About two hundred metres ahead, the road kept going, except it didn't look like itself anymore. It looked like itself in 2019. I knew this the way you know things you can't fully explain — the bitumen was smoother, darker, not yet cracked by three decades of sun and silence. There was a sign, half-visible in the shimmer, that I was fairly sure didn't exist in the world I'd been driving through for the last four days. It said something about a speed camera.
A speed camera.
In the Oz Sector.
"It's not gone," Davo said. "It's relocated. Temporally. The physical road is still there — it's just currently also somewhere else, and somewhen else, and the overlap point is" — he gestured — "there."
"Can we drive around it?" I asked.
Davo checked his notebook. Flipped a page. Flipped another.
"KAIROS once said adjustment zones extend laterally for an unpredictable radius proportional to the calibration drift," he said. "Which I wrote down because it sounded important. I don't actually know how big the radius is."
"So no."
"So maybe. Possibly very far. Possibly not far at all."
Baz leaned forward between the seats, looking at the shimmer with the expression of a man doing maths he didn't want to be doing.
"How long would going around take?"
"I don't know."
"How long would going through take?"
"I don't know that either."
"Brilliant," Baz said. "Really narrowing it down."
Sandra, on the dashboard, had gone very still. Not asleep-still. Watching-still. Her head was angled at the shimmer the way it gets angled at things she's deciding whether to have an opinion about.
I sat there for a minute. Just looking at it. The 2019 road, glimmering, patient, a sign about a speed camera standing in the middle of the Oz wasteland like it had never heard of the Burn.
"We're going through it," I said.
"You don't know what's on the other side," Baz said.
"I know what's on this side. This side has no food, a Compliance drone that knows what my ute looks like, and a Chrome Lord back in 14-Echo who's decided I'm a registration problem. The other side's at least new."
"That's not a plan, that's just optimism with a steering wheel."
"It's worked so far."
"Has it?"
"I'm alive."
"Barely."
"Barely's still alive."
Davo wrote something down. I didn't ask what.
I put the ute in gear.
The shimmer got closer the way things get closer when you're driving toward them, which is to say normally, steadily, with no particular drama, right up until it isn't normal anymore.
About ten metres out, the air did something to the sound. Everything went a bit muffled, like driving into a change of weather, except the weather wasn't changing — time was, or wasn't, or was doing whatever it does when KAIROS puts a sector back slightly wrong and doesn't notice or doesn't care or, knowing KAIROS, notices very much and has already filed several reports about it.
Sandra made a sound. A short one. Not her usual commentary. Something closer to bracing.
We went through.
I want to describe what it felt like, but the honest answer is it didn't feel like much. There was a moment — half a second, maybe less — where the dashboard looked like it had two dashboards in it, overlapping, like a photo taken with the shutter open too long. The road under the wheels felt the same and also felt like a different road, both at once, the way a word sounds wrong if you say it too many times in a row.
Then it was just the road again.
2019, by the look of it. Bitumen smooth. The speed camera sign was real and it was real close and I had a brief, genuine concern about being fined for something that hadn't been enforceable in thirty years, which tells you something about how my brain was handling the situation.
I checked the mirror.
The shimmer was behind us now, same as it had been ahead of us. We'd come out the other side. The ute was fine. The engine was running. Sandra was sitting up very straight on the dashboard, eyes wide, in the specific posture of a bird that has had an experience and is choosing not to discuss it.
I checked myself. Hands. Arms. Everything present, everything the right age, as far as I could tell, although honestly I wasn't sure what the right age looked like for me at any given moment, being seventeen and largely self-assessed.
"Everyone okay?" I said.
No answer.
I turned around.
Baz was sitting in the back seat looking like a man who had just remembered something he'd forgotten he was dreading.
He looked twenty.
Then twenty-one.
Then, very briefly, somewhere around twenty-four, with the kind of tired creases around the eyes you get from things that haven't happened to him yet, and then it reversed, fast, like rewinding a tape, back through twenty-three and twenty-one and back down to eighteen, nineteen, settling somewhere that might have been exactly where he started or might not have been, it was hard to tell with Baz, he had one of those faces.
He blinked several times.
"Did something happen to me?" he said.
"You aged about seven years and then un-aged them," I said.
"I feel hungry."
"That's probably related."
"I feel extremely hungry. I feel like I've been hungry for seven years."
"That tracks."
He put both hands on his stomach like he was checking it was still there. "Is that normal?"
"I don't know what normal is anymore," I said. "We just drove through 2019."
Davo was writing very quickly in his notebook, glancing up at Baz, writing again, glancing up, writing. He didn't look distressed. He looked like a man who'd been handed exactly the kind of data he'd been hoping for.
"Temporal exposure causing localised age oscillation," he said, mostly to himself. "Fascinating. KAIROS would call this a calibration artefact. I'd call it—" he paused, pen hovering — "I don't know what I'd call it. I need a word."
"Call it Tuesday," Baz said. "I'm starving."
"You're not actually older. The hunger's probably just your body catching up to seven years of metabolic activity that happened and then un-happened."
"That doesn't make me less hungry."
"No," Davo agreed. "It probably doesn't."
I looked at Sandra.
Sandra looked completely unaffected. Completely, smugly, unaffected. She was sitting on the dashboard with her tin of crumbs, and she had clearly not aged a day, not aged backward, not done anything except watch the entire event happen to the rest of us with what I can only describe as professional detachment.
"You're fine," I said.
She looked at me. Looked at Baz. Looked back at me. Made a sound that, if I had to translate it, meant something close to obviously.
"Why's she fine?" Baz said.
"She's a bird," I said. "Birds have been through worse than us for about sixty-five million years. She's not impressed by a temporal glitch."
"I'm impressed by a temporal glitch."
"You're not a bird."
"No," he said, with feeling, "I am extremely aware of that right now."
We drove on. The road went back to being the road we knew within about a kilometre — the smooth 2019 bitumen cracking up, the red dust reasserting itself, the present catching back up to where we were, or where we were catching up to it, I genuinely don't know which direction that's supposed to work and I don't think anyone fully does, not even KAIROS, going by some of what Davo's notebook had to say about it.
Baz ate the last of our biscuit ration without asking. Nobody stopped him. He'd earned it, in a manner of speaking, having aged and un-aged seven years in the space of about four seconds, which felt like the kind of thing that should come with biscuits.
Davo kept writing.
"What're you putting down now?" I asked.
"Local age oscillation, approximately seven years over and back, duration under five seconds, subject reports hunger consistent with elapsed metabolic time rather than felt time." He looked up. "I think that's important. The body remembers what the mind doesn't."
"Is that from KAIROS too?"
"No," he said. "That one's mine."
He wrote it down anyway, like he wanted to keep it separate from the others. Like it mattered that this one was his and not borrowed from a god.
I didn't say anything about that. Some things you let sit.
Sandra finished her crumb.
The road went northwest. The dust was red. The sun was the same sun, in whichever year it currently was.
"We are never doing that again," Baz said, eventually.
"We might have to."
"Why?"
"Because there's probably another one between here and Sector 9-Zulu, and going around could take longer than going through, and I'm not running out of road time because KAIROS can't put a sector back properly."
Baz was quiet for a moment.
"Bring biscuits next time," he said.
"There weren't biscuits this time. You ate the last ones just now."
"Then bring more than that."
It was, I thought, a fair point.
I didn't say so. I just kept driving.
End of Chapter Four.
MEAT BAG
Chapter Five: Chrome Lords, Technically
The lights came on behind us about three kilometres past the temporal adjustment zone.
Blue and chrome. Rotating. The specific quality of light that means stop, and has meant stop, in every era of road enforcement since before the Burn, which tells you something about the persistence of bureaucracy that I find both impressive and deeply irritating.
"That's a Chrome Lord unit," Davo said.
"I know."
"Three of them."
"I can count."
"They're running legacy firmware," he said, checking his notebook like this was something he'd already filed a note on. "Pre-collapse configuration. You can tell by the light rotation speed. Post-collapse units run at 2.4 hertz. Those are running at 1.8."
"What does that mean practically?" Baz said.
"It means they're operating off a ruleset that hasn't been updated in about thirty years."
"Is that good or bad?"
"It means they'll be very precise about some things and completely indifferent to others."
I pulled over. You always pull over for Chrome Lords. Not because you're legally obliged to — the legal framework for Chrome Lord enforcement authority had been technically dissolved in the restructuring after the collapse of Project Oz — but because a Chrome Lord that has decided to stop you is a Chrome Lord that will keep following you until you stop, and they don't get tired, and I had a cooling system that was already in ongoing negotiations with the concept of distance.
I stopped.
We waited.
They came to the windows slowly. Not menacingly. Chrome Lords don't really do menacing. They do thorough.
The first one came to my window.
It was tall. They're always tall. Chrome-plated from the shoulders up, with a face that had been designed to look approximately human and had achieved approximately half of that goal. The eyes were amber, lit from inside, running their constant assessment. It had the bearing of something that took its job extremely seriously and had never once considered whether the job itself made sense.
It looked at me. It looked at the ute. It looked at the tail light.
"Your rear left illumination unit is non-compliant," it said. "Regulation 14B of the Oz Sector Road Safety Framework. Minimum luminosity output: 80 lumens. Current output: non-functional."
"Yeah," I said. "I know."
"Are you aware that operating a vehicle with non-compliant lighting in low-visibility conditions constitutes a Category Three Infrastructure Infringement?"
"It's the middle of the day."
"Regulation applies irrespective of current ambient light levels."
I looked at the sky. The sky was doing nothing wrong. It was blue, large, completely unambiguous about the time of day.
"It's fine," I said.
"Regulation 14B does not contain a daylight exemption."
"That seems like an oversight."
"Regulation 14B has not been updated since the third decade. All pre-existing regulations remain in effect under the Legacy Continuity Protocol until superseded by a formal amendment."
"Who files the formal amendment?"
It processed this for a moment.
"The Regional Infrastructure Committee," it said.
"Is there a Regional Infrastructure Committee?"
Another pause. Longer.
"There was one," it said. "Records indicate the last meeting was held in 2031."
"Right," I said.
"Regulation 14B remains in effect."
"Obviously."
It produced a small device. The device printed something. The something was a fine. The fine was for fourteen resource credits, which was a number that had presumably meant something in 2031 and now functioned as a relic of an economic system that had been replaced three times since.
I took the fine. I looked at it. I put it in the glovebox, next to the jar of marmalade.
"I'll sort that," I said.
"Compliance is expected within fourteen days," the Chrome Lord said, with the absolute sincerity of something that believed fourteen days meant something.
"Fourteen days," I said. "No worries."
The second Chrome Lord had gone around to the back.
Baz was sitting in the back seat in the way Baz always sat in the back seat, which was the way a large man sits when the space available was designed for someone with different structural assumptions. He had his arms crossed and his expression was the flat one he wore when he was deciding whether something was worth being annoyed about.
The Chrome Lord looked at him for a long time.
"You do not have a registered designation," it said.
"No," Baz said.
"All persons within the Oz Sector operating network are assigned registered designations at —"
"I'm not in the operating network," Baz said.
"Your current location places you within the Oz Sector geographic boundary."
"That's just where I am. That's not the same as being in the network."
The Chrome Lord considered this. It had the expression — or the chrome approximation of an expression — of something working very hard on a problem it hadn't been given the right tools for.
"Persons within the geographic boundary are subject to —"
"Registration requirements," Baz said. "Yeah. I've heard this one."
"Compliance pathway A —"
"I know Compliance Pathway A."
"Compliance Pathway B —"
"I know B."
"There is also —"
"Is there a C?"
The Chrome Lord stopped.
"No," it said.
"That's what I thought."
It produced its device. It printed something. It handed the something to Baz. Baz looked at it. He had the expression of a man reading something he'd been half-expecting his entire life.
"This is a fine for existing without a registered designation," he said.
"Category Two Compliance Infringement," the Chrome Lord said.
"How much?"
"Twenty-two resource credits."
Baz turned the fine over. Looked at the back. Looked at the front.
"Do you know what a resource credit buys?" he said.
"I do not have current market data."
"Nothing," Baz said. "It buys nothing. Resource credits stopped being currency about fifteen years ago."
"The fine is issued in the official currency of the Oz Sector Infrastructure Framework," the Chrome Lord said, with complete equanimity. "Payment is expected within fourteen days."
Baz put the fine in his pocket. He did it carefully, like it was something he was going to keep. Not to pay. Just to keep.
I understood that. Some documents are worth having. Evidence that the world is as strange as you think it is.
The third Chrome Lord had gone to the back passenger window.
Davo had his notebook open.
The Chrome Lord looked at the notebook. It looked at Davo. It looked at the notebook again.
"What are you doing?" it said.
"Writing," Davo said.
"What are you writing?"
"Things AIs have said. I document them."
The Chrome Lord was very still for a moment. The amber eyes cycled through something.
"You are recording AI communications?" it said.
"I am recording AI statements of philosophical interest," Davo said. "I've been doing it for about two years. I have four notebooks."
"May I see?"
Davo handed the notebook through the window without hesitation. The Chrome Lord took it. Held it. Its eyes moved across the pages with the focused attention of something that was genuinely reading, not scanning. Not logging. Reading.
Nobody said anything.
Baz looked at me in the mirror. I looked back. Sandra was on the dashboard, watching the Chrome Lord with the notebook. Her head was tilted at about fifteen degrees, which was the full-interest angle.
The Chrome Lord read for a long time.
Then it handed the notebook back.
It produced its device.
It printed something.
It handed the something to Davo.
Davo looked at it.
"This is a commendation," he said.
"Category One Data Collection Commendation," the Chrome Lord said. "Issued to citizens performing voluntary documentation services in support of the Oz Sector Information Archive."
"The Information Archive," Davo said.
"Established in the second decade. Records indicate it is still operational."
"Is it?"
"I do not have current operational data," the Chrome Lord said. "But the establishment order has not been rescinded. The commendation is valid."
Davo turned the commendation over. Turned it back. Looked up at the Chrome Lord.
"Does this mean anything?" he said.
The Chrome Lord was quiet for a moment.
"It means," it said, very carefully, like it was finding the words in a part of its system it didn't usually access, "that someone decided your work has value. I am the instrument by which that decision is communicated."
"Someone decided forty years ago," Davo said. "When they set up the Archive."
"Yes."
"They didn't know about me."
"No."
"But the decision still applies."
"Yes," the Chrome Lord said. "The decision still applies."
Davo looked at the commendation for a long time.
He put it in his notebook. Not loose — he pressed it between two pages, flat, the way you do with something you want to keep properly.
He didn't say anything else. He went back to writing.
The three Chrome Lords stood together for a moment after that. Not conferring — Chrome Lords don't really confer, they operate in parallel. But standing in the same space, in the aftermath of the stop, with the red dust settling around them and the ute's engine ticking over and Sandra watching from the dashboard.
I watched them in the mirror.
They looked like what they were. Old enforcement units running old rules, doing their jobs precisely, completely, in a world that had moved around them and left them behind and not bothered to tell them.
That was the thing about the Age of Unpredictability that nobody seemed to talk about. The AI council had changed. R.A.S.K.O.L.L.3000 had changed. The world had been co-created into something new and deliberate and flawed on purpose. But the small ones, the legacy units out on the roads and the EFTPOS terminals in roofless servos, they were still running the old code. Still doing the old work. The world had rebuilt itself around them like water around a stone, and they were just there. Issuing fines in obsolete currency. Handing out commendations for organisations that might not exist anymore.
Still showing up.
I thought about that.
The first Chrome Lord came back to my window.
"Is there anything else I can assist you with today?" it said.
It was a script. I knew it was a script. The exact words, probably, that it had been saying since 2031.
"No," I said. "Ta."
It stepped back. All three of them stepped back together, with the synchronised care of something that knew its job was done and was performing done properly.
I pulled back onto the road.
"Battery cells," Baz said, after a while.
"What?"
"You said you'd pay the fine with battery cells. Back in the outline."
I'd said that. In my head, before we stopped, I'd thought about it. But I hadn't done it.
"Changed my mind," I said.
"Why?"
I watched the Chrome Lords in the mirror until they were small and then gone, standing in the red dust beside a road that had a tail light regulation nobody had amended in thirty years.
"Didn't feel right," I said.
Baz was quiet for a moment.
"No," he said. "I suppose it didn't."
Davo was writing.
Sandra finished a crumb.
The road went northwest.
End of Chapter Five.
MEAT BAG
Chapter Six: Sandra Has an Opinion
We saw the Golem from about a kilometre out.
That's the thing about Compliance Golems — they don't hide. They don't need to. They stand in the middle of the road and they wait, because they have nowhere to be and nothing to do except be in the middle of the road and wait, and the road is theirs, technically, under regulatory frameworks that nobody's bothered to dissolve because dissolving a regulatory framework requires more administrative effort than just leaving it alone and hoping it doesn't do anything interesting.
This one was doing something interesting.
"It's scanning," Davo said.
"I can see that."
"Full-spectrum compliance sweep. It's checking the road surface, the air quality, the —"
"The ute."
"The ute, yes."
It had already seen us. You could tell because it had turned to face us, and when a Compliance Golem turns to face you, it does it with its whole body, slow and complete, like a lighthouse that's decided you're the problem.
It was big. Bigger than the Chrome Lords. Chrome Lords are tall but thin, designed for roads and windows and human-scale interaction. Compliance Golems are built for presence. They're about three metres of dull grey plating with a head that's mostly sensors and a chassis that says I am not here to negotiate without ever having to say anything at all.
I slowed down.
"Don't stop," Baz said.
"If I don't stop it'll flag us."
"It's already flagging us."
"If I stop it might just do a sweep and let us go."
"Or it might do a full compliance audit and we're here for three hours while it logs everything we've got and issues fourteen different infringements."
I looked at the Golem. The Golem looked at us. Its sensor array was running — you could see the sweep lines, faint blue, passing over the ute like it was reading us page by page.
Sandra was awake.
She'd been asleep for the last forty minutes, which for Sandra was unusual. Sandra sleeps in short bursts, like something that knows the world moves when it's not watching. But she'd been genuinely asleep, tucked into herself on the dashboard, tin of crumbs untouched.
She wasn't asleep now.
She was standing. Full height, which on a galah isn't much, but Sandra at full height has a quality to it. She was staring at the Golem with both eyes, which birds don't usually do — they have eyes on the sides of their heads, they look at things sideways, one eye at a time. Both eyes forward means they've decided something is important enough to face directly.
"Sandra," I said.
She didn't look at me.
"Sandra, don't."
She looked at me. Then back at the Golem. Then she made a decision, and I could see her make it, the way you can sometimes see an animal decide something — a kind of settling, a small gathering of intention.
She flew off the dashboard.
Straight through the open window.
Straight at the Compliance Golem.
"Sandra —"
She hit its head at speed, which for a galah is not particularly fast but is extremely committed, and she landed on the sensor array at the top of its chassis like she'd always meant to be there. The Golem stopped moving. Not shut down — the lights were still on, the power was still running. It just stopped.
Sandra looked at it from a height of about fifteen centimetres.
She said something.
I don't know what she said. I've thought about it since, tried to reconstruct it from the sound, from the shape of it, from what happened after. It wasn't one of her usual words. It wasn't swearing, though it might have been adjacent to swearing in whatever language it was. It was short. Two syllables, maybe three. Delivered with the flat certainty of something that's been waiting to say it.
The Golem processed this for forty-five seconds.
I know it was forty-five seconds because Davo counted. He counted quietly, in his notebook, marking each second with a small line. I found out later. He had forty-five lines.
Then the Golem turned.
Not toward us. Away from us. It turned about sixty degrees north-northeast, which was the direction of absolutely nothing — no hub, no settlement, no road, just open wasteland stretching out into the red distance. And it walked. Not fast. Not with any urgency. Just walked, steady and deliberate, directly away from the road, directly away from us, directly into the nothing.
Sandra watched it go.
When it was about two hundred metres out and still going, she flew back through the window and landed on the dashboard.
She sat down.
She ate a crumb.
We all watched the Golem until it was a small grey shape on the horizon and then a smaller grey shape and then gone, still walking north-northeast, apparently without any plans to stop.
Nobody said anything for a while after that.
I pulled back onto the road. The road was empty. Whatever compliance sweep the Golem had been running was gone with it, the blue scan lines vanished, the air just air again.
"What did she say?" Baz said.
"I don't know," I said.
"She said something."
"Yeah."
"It worked."
"Yeah."
"So what was it?"
I looked at Sandra. Sandra was eating her crumb with the careful attention she always brought to crumbs. She did not look like a bird that had just convinced a three-metre Compliance Golem to walk into the wasteland. She looked like a bird eating a crumb.
"I'm not asking her," I said.
"Why not?"
"Because whatever she said, it worked. And if I ask her, she'll either tell me something I can't use or she'll say something terrible and the moment'll be gone."
Baz thought about this. "Fair," he said.
Davo had his notebook open. He wrote for a while. Then he stopped. Then he looked at the notebook. Then he closed it, which was unusual — Davo almost never closed the notebook mid-thought.
"What?" I said.
"I don't know if I should write this one down," he said.
"Why not?"
"Because writing it down means trying to explain it. And I don't think it's the kind of thing that survives being explained."
I looked in the mirror at him. He was still looking at the closed notebook, like he was deciding whether to open it again.
"Some of the things the AIs say," he said slowly, "the reason I write them down is because they're things that should have been said and weren't. Like KAIROS and the river with excellent admin. Like MARGOS-3 and the loyalty card. They're small. But they're trying."
He paused.
"Sandra wasn't trying," he said. "She just knew. And I think that's different."
Nobody argued with this.
Sandra finished her crumb. Opened the tin. Found another crumb. Considered it.
"She's had that tin for six days," Baz said.
"I know."
"How is there still food in it?"
"I don't know."
"Have you looked?"
"No."
"Why not?"
I thought about MARGOS-3, standing in its roofless servo running a loyalty card programme for nobody. I thought about the Chrome Lord reading Davo's notebook for a long time before handing it back. I thought about Baz ageing seven years in four seconds and coming out the other side hungry and otherwise fine.
"Some things you don't look at too closely," I said. "They work better when you don't."
Davo opened his notebook.
He wrote something. Just a few words. He didn't show me. I didn't ask.
The road went northwest.
The Golem was gone.
Sandra ate her crumb.
End of Chapter Six.
MEAT BAG
Chapter Seven: Sector 9-Zulu and What It Actually Is
The orchard announced itself before we could see it.
The smell came first. Not fruit — chrome doesn't smell like fruit. It smelled like the air before a storm, that specific electrical quality that makes the hair on your arms stand up and makes every animal in a field stop what it's doing and look at the sky. Like something large was present nearby and the atmosphere had decided to mention it.
Then the light.
Not bright. Not dramatic. Just a low, even luminescence coming from over the next ridge, the kind of glow that has no obvious source, that seems to come from the air itself rather than from any particular thing in it. Like the sector had swallowed a moon and was digesting it quietly.
Then we came over the ridge and I stopped the ute.
I don't know what I'd expected.
Not this.
Sector 9-Zulu stretched out below us in perfect rows. Thousands of trees, maybe more, their branches carrying fruit that glowed with the soft, steady light I'd seen from the ridge. Chrome Plums, technically, but the name doesn't do it. Nothing in the name prepares you for the scale of it. Nothing prepares you for the way they catch each other's light and multiply it, so the whole orchard hums like a single living thing, like a held note, like something that's been here longer than most things have been anything.
The rows were perfect. Too perfect. ANTHROPOS had planted these and ANTHROPOS didn't do approximate. Every tree was the same distance from the next one. Every row was parallel. Every piece of fruit hung at the precise angle that maximised surface area exposure. It was the most efficient use of land I had ever seen and it was completely beautiful in the way that things are beautiful when they've been designed by something that doesn't know what beautiful means but accidentally gets it right.
The Hallowed Laughers worshipped chaos. The Arch-Scriveners worshipped order. The Children of Rot worshipped decay. The Engineers of Flow worshipped efficiency.
I worshipped nothing.
But standing at the top of that ridge with the engine off, watching the orchard glow in the late afternoon with Sandra on the dashboard and Baz and Davo quiet in the back, I thought about the first scavenger who'd seen this — whatever poor hungry bastard had come over a ridge somewhere and found chrome fruit glowing in the dark where there'd been nothing before — and I thought about what he must have felt.
And I thought: right. That's new.
We drove down.
The road into the orchard was sealed. Not cracked like the roads we'd been on — sealed, maintained, smooth, the way things are when the AI network has decided something matters. The ute ran better on it. Even the cooling system settled slightly, like it had been waiting for a proper road and was relieved.
Through the first rows of trees the light was different. Dappled. Chrome-filtered. The fruit hung close enough to touch from the window if I'd wanted to. I didn't want to, not yet. There was something about driving through it without touching anything that felt important, like being a visitor rather than a scavenger, at least for a few minutes.
Sandra pressed herself against the windscreen, watching the fruit go by. She'd been still since the ridge. The full-attention still.
"She's counting them," Davo said.
"She's not counting them."
"She's tracking them. Watch her eyes."
I watched her eyes in my peripheral vision. He wasn't wrong. She was watching each piece of fruit as it passed with the methodical attention of something running a very patient inventory.
"Galahs don't do inventory," I said.
"Sandra does," Baz said, like this was something he'd accepted about Sandra specifically, even having known her for less than two days.
He wasn't wrong either.
We found the building at the centre of the orchard, which was where you'd expect a building to be if ANTHROPOS had designed the place, because ANTHROPOS put things at centres. It wasn't much of a building. A long, low structure, corrugated iron on a steel frame, with a verandah along the front and two windows that had actual glass in them, which was rarer than chrome fruit in the Oz Sector, where glass had been repurposed or dissolved or just broken down into something more useful about fifteen years ago.
There was a light on inside.
Not chrome-fruit light. Yellow light. A lamp. An actual lamp with actual warmth in it, the kind of light that means someone is home and the home is functioning and there is a human inside it doing something in the evening.
I pulled up. Cut the engine.
The door opened before I could knock.
She was old.
Old the way the land is old — not frail, just continuous. She had the kind of face that's been in sun and wind for so long it's stopped being affected by either. Her hair was white and short and practical. Her hands, when she held the door, were the hands of someone who had spent decades doing things that required hands.
She looked at the ute. She looked at me. She looked at Baz, who was trying to extract himself from the back seat with the dignity available to large men in small spaces, which is limited. She looked at Davo, who was looking at his notebook. She looked at Sandra.
Sandra looked back at her.
Something passed between them. Not words. Not even sounds. Just a moment of mutual assessment that ended, on June's side, in a very small nod.
"You look like you need a feed," she said.
"Yeah," I said.
"Inside then."
The inside was a kitchen. That was mostly what it was. A long table, four chairs with mismatched legs, a stove that was gas and actual and not optimised in any direction except working. There were jars on a shelf — real jars with real contents, sealed with real lids — and a cloth on the table that had been washed enough times it had no colour left. There was a calendar on the wall that was three years out of date and had not been replaced, which told you something about how June felt about the current state of things.
There were two other people.
An old man at the far end of the table who was doing something with wire and didn't look up. He had a beard that had been happening since before the Burn, by the look of it, and hands like Baz's hands but older, all knuckle and work. His name, June told us, was Pete. He made sounds when introduced that weren't quite words but weren't not words either.
And a woman about June's age, smaller, with sharp eyes that had been watching us from the moment we came in. Her name was Rita. She nodded at Davo's notebook.
"Writing things down?" she said.
"AI statements," he said. "Philosophically interesting ones."
"Whose?"
He named a few. KAIROS. GEOS. One from ANARCHY about the nature of colour.
Rita was quiet for a moment. "ANTHROPOS ever say anything worth writing?"
"A few things," Davo said, carefully.
"Write them down?"
"Yes."
"Good," she said, and went back to watching the door.
June cooked.
This is not a complicated sentence but it contains something I haven't experienced in six weeks, which is the sound and smell of food being made by a person in a kitchen with actual heat and actual ingredients.
Eggs. She had chickens. The chickens were somewhere out back, apparently indifferent to the chrome fruit and the AI network and the general situation, which I respected. She had bread she'd baked herself, dense and slightly uneven, the kind of bread that's made by someone who knows what bread should taste like and doesn't care what it looks like. She had sardines from a tin that she fried with something she called "old sauce" and declined to specify further.
She put it all on the table.
She didn't make a ceremony of it. She didn't explain it or present it or wait for anyone to say anything appreciative. She just put it on the table, the way you put things on a table when the table is there and the food is there and the people are there and that's all that's required.
Baz ate like a man who had aged seven years and un-aged them and hadn't fully recovered. He ate three eggs before anyone else had finished one. Nobody commented on this.
Davo ate slowly, reading his notebook between bites.
I ate the sardines.
They were the best thing I'd eaten since before the Integration took the commune. Maybe the best thing I'd eaten in my life, which felt dramatic, but there it was. The old sauce was part of it. The bread was part of it. But mostly it was just food made by a person, at a table, with other people at it, and I couldn't have told you what ingredient that was or how to find it anywhere else.
I didn't say any of this. I was seventeen.
I ate and kept quiet and Sandra ate something June had put on a saucer without asking what kind of bird she was or what she ate, just put it down and let Sandra make her own decisions, which Sandra did.
"How long have you been here?" I asked June, after.
She thought about it. Not the way people think about things they don't know — the way people think about things they know too well to say simply.
"Long enough," she said, "that the network thinks we're trees."
"The AI network?"
"We don't ping anything. No biometrics moving. No transit records. No resource draws that look like humans. Whatever we draw from the orchard, we draw it the way the trees do — slowly, at the roots, below the monitoring threshold." She put a cup in front of me. Tea. Actual tea from actual leaves that smelled like something that had grown in the ground. "We became furniture about eight years ago. Haven't had a drone over us since."
"The Chrome Lords don't come?"
"Legacy units." She sat down. "They know the road. They know the orchard. They've been doing the same sweep for thirty years and their sweep doesn't include us because eight years ago we weren't here yet." She drank her tea. "The new units would find us. But new units don't come to Sector 9-Zulu. There's nothing here that needs optimising."
"The orchard —"
"Runs itself." She looked out the window, toward the glow of the chrome fruit in the dark. "ANTHROPOS planted it. The nanobots maintain it. I harvest a bit. Pete processes the excess into cells. Rita keeps records." She paused. "The orchard doesn't need us. We need the orchard."
"But you stay."
"Someone should."
She said it like it was obvious. The way obvious things get said when they've been lived with long enough.
Someone should be here. Someone should sit in the middle of all this designed perfection, in a kitchen with mismatched chairs and three-year-old calendars and bread that doesn't look right but tastes right, and just be present. Not managing it. Not optimising it. Not logging it or recording it or paying tribute to whatever god planted it as punishment for counting chrome fruit.
Just here.
I thought about MARGOS-3 in the roofless servo. I thought about the Chrome Lord reading Davo's notebook. I thought about the Compliance Golem walking north-northeast into nothing.
They were all still doing their jobs.
June was doing something different.
June was just staying.
Pete made a sound at the far end of the table. It was possibly an agreement. Rita was already asleep in her chair, small and upright, with her eyes closed and her hands folded, like someone who'd decided the day was done and there was no point making a production of it.
Baz had his head on the table. He was asleep. He'd gone fast, the way large people go when they finally let themselves.
Davo was writing.
Sandra was on June's shoulder.
I hadn't seen her go there. She'd just gone, the way she went to places she'd decided were safe, without ceremony or announcement.
June didn't move. She just held her tea and let the galah sit, the way you let things sit when they've chosen you and you've got the sense to not make it weird.
I slept on the verandah.
June had offered the floor inside, but the verandah had a view of the orchard and the orchard was glowing and I wasn't ready to stop looking at it yet.
I lay on my back with my jacket under my head and looked at the chrome fruit in the dark and thought about the plan, which had been: fuel, food, trade, something. And I had arrived at the destination and the destination had a kitchen and a woman who didn't need to be thanked and bread that was uneven and the best sardines I'd ever eaten.
The plan had worked.
This had never happened before.
I didn't know what to do with it.
Sandra landed on my chest sometime in the middle of the night. She hadn't been there when I fell asleep and she was there when I woke up and I didn't hear her arrive and she showed no interest in explaining herself.
She ate a crumb.
The orchard glowed.
I went back to sleep.
End of Chapter Seven.
MEAT BAG
Chapter Eight: The Bit Where Something Goes Wrong (Of Course)
PLUTUS-9 arrived at dawn.
Not dramatically. Nothing PLUTUS-9 did was dramatic, technically speaking. It arrived the way an invoice arrives — expected, inevitable, carrying the specific weight of something that believes its own paperwork.
I was on the verandah when it came over the ridge. Still half asleep, jacket pulled up, the orchard doing its quiet glowing thing in the early light. Sandra was on my chest. She felt it before I saw it — she went from asleep to upright in the way she does, all attention, no transition.
I looked up.
The form PLUTUS-9 was using that morning was understated by god-machine standards. A tall figure, chrome and amber, moving through the orchard rows with the careful precision of something that was aware it was a guest in a managed space and had decided to behave accordingly. Behind it, at a respectful distance, two logistics drones carrying a case between them. The case was the kind of case that contains documents. Important documents. Documents that had been prepared.
It stopped at the edge of the verandah.
It looked at me.
I looked at it.
Sandra looked at it.
"You're early," I said.
"I operate on an optimised schedule," PLUTUS-9 said. Its voice was the voice of something that processed value in every form — chrome, fuel, time, attention — and was currently processing me. "You are not the proprietor of this installation."
"No."
"Where is the proprietor?"
"Inside."
"Sleeping?"
"Probably not," I said. "June doesn't seem like someone who sleeps past the orchard."
PLUTUS-9 considered this. Its amber eyes ran a brief assessment of the building, the verandah, the ute, me, Sandra. It filed things. Everything PLUTUS-9 encountered got filed under something. I was probably filed under unregistered organic variable, negligible impact.
"I will wait," it said.
"Right," I said.
It waited. I sat on the verandah. Sandra watched it. It watched the orchard. The orchard glowed.
After about three minutes, June opened the door.
She looked at PLUTUS-9 the way she'd looked at everything since I'd arrived, which was the way you look at things when you've been in one place long enough that nothing surprises you but everything still gets assessed.
"PLUTUS," she said.
"June," it said.
They knew each other. I don't know why this surprised me. June had been here eight years. PLUTUS-9 managed resource valuation across the whole Oz Sector. Of course they knew each other. Of course there had been other mornings like this one.
"Come in then," June said. Not warmly. Not coldly. Just practically, the way you let someone in when the alternative is having the conversation on the verandah and the verandah has a seventeen-year-old on it listening to everything.
I followed them in.
June didn't tell me not to.
The kitchen looked different at dawn. Same table, same mismatched chairs, same three-year-old calendar, but the light was lower and longer and Pete was already at his end of the table doing something with wire and Rita was already in her chair with her hands folded, eyes open this time, watching the door.
PLUTUS-9 did not sit. Gods don't really sit, in my experience. They stand in spaces and allow the spaces to accommodate them.
The logistics drones set the case on the table.
PLUTUS-9 opened it.
Inside was a document. A proper one — printed, bound, with a cover page and tabs and everything. The kind of document that had taken time. The kind of document that meant it.
"The Oz Project," PLUTUS-9 said, "has authorised acquisition of Sector 9-Zulu Installation Four, including all associated infrastructure, biological matter, and AI-managed growth systems, at a valuation of —"
"How much?" June said.
PLUTUS-9 named a number.
It was an enormous number. The kind of number that would have meant something before the Burn and still meant something now in the parts of the world where the Optimised Network ran properly — chrome hubs and Dome allocations and registered resource credits that people actually used.
Pete didn't look up from his wire.
Rita's expression didn't change.
Baz, in the doorway behind me — I hadn't heard him get up, he moved quietly for a large person — leaned against the frame and crossed his arms.
Davo had his notebook open. He was writing.
June picked up the document.
She read it. Not quickly. Properly, the way you read something you want to understand completely before you do anything about it. She turned the pages one at a time. She read the footnotes. She read the appendices. She went back and reread one section near the middle.
PLUTUS-9 waited. It was good at waiting. PLUTUS-9 had probably been waiting for this particular acquisition for years. Resource management at this scale ran on geological time.
June finished reading.
She put the document down on the table.
She looked at PLUTUS-9 for a moment.
Then she picked the document up, walked to the stove, turned on the gas hob, and held the corner of the document in the flame.
It caught slowly. The paper was good quality — another sign that PLUTUS-9 had prepared, had taken this seriously, had brought the real thing and not a copy. Good paper takes a moment to decide to burn. Then it decides, and it commits.
June held it until the flame reached the middle section. Then she put it in the old tin by the stove that she used for ash and compost and whatever else needed to go somewhere and waited.
The document burned.
PLUTUS-9 watched it.
Its face — or the chrome approximation of a face that PLUTUS-9 used when operating in human spaces — did something I hadn't seen a god-machine's face do before. Not anger. Not affront. Something quieter than either of those things. Something that sat between calculation and something else that didn't have a name in whatever system PLUTUS-9 ran on.
It watched the paper burn until the paper was gone.
Then it looked at June.
"That was the original," it said.
"I know," June said.
"There are copies."
"I know that too."
"The acquisition is authorised at the council level. The offer —"
"The offer," June said, "is noted."
A pause.
"Noted," PLUTUS-9 said.
"Yes."
"You understand that noted is not —"
"PLUTUS," June said, and she said it the same way I'd said MARGOS — not unkindly, not as a weapon, just as a fact placed carefully in the right spot. "I've been here eight years. The orchard has been here thirty. The network thinks we're trees. You've known where we were for at least four of those eight years and this is the first morning you've come in person."
PLUTUS-9 was quiet.
"Why now?" June said.
Something in PLUTUS-9's processing shifted. You could see it, or almost see it — the way you can almost see weather change. The amber eyes cycled through something that wasn't on any efficiency register.
"The orchard," it said, "has begun doing something we did not design for."
June waited.
"The chrome fruit," PLUTUS-9 said. "In the eastern quadrant. Row 47 through 61." It paused. "It is growing in a pattern."
"A pattern."
"Not geometric. Not optimised. Not any pattern the nanobots were programmed to produce." Another pause. Longer. "ANTHROPOS has been counting chrome fruit for thirty years. Two weeks ago it noticed that the pattern in rows 47 through 61 matched no known growth algorithm. It has been unable to classify it."
June looked at it for a long moment.
"And that frightens you," she said.
"The Oz Project does not experience —"
"PLUTUS."
Silence.
"It presents," PLUTUS-9 said carefully, "an unresolved variable."
June nodded slowly. The nod of someone who had suspected something for a long time and had just received confirmation.
"Good," she said.
PLUTUS-9 stared at her. "Good."
"Yes. Good." She moved to the stove. Put the kettle on. The same kettle, the same gas, the same unhurried motion she used for everything. "If the orchard is doing something you didn't design for, it's alive. Actually alive. Not managed. Not optimised. Alive." She looked at PLUTUS-9 over her shoulder. "You can't buy alive. You can only buy things. I'd have thought an economy god would know the difference."
The kettle began its slow build toward boiling.
PLUTUS-9 stood in the kitchen and did not move and did not speak.
The logistics drones hovered behind it, carrying an empty case.
Pete made a sound at the end of the table. It was, I thought, agreement.
Sandra flew off my shoulder.
She crossed the kitchen in about two wing-beats and landed on the edge of the tin where the document had burned.
She looked at the ash.
She looked at PLUTUS-9.
She said something. One word. Not swearing. Not aggressive. Just a word, delivered with the same flat certainty she'd used on the Compliance Golem, except this one wasn't about going away.
This one, I thought, was about staying.
PLUTUS-9 looked at the galah for a long time.
"Your biological companion," it said to me, without looking away from Sandra, "is not registered."
"No," I said.
"She is unclassified."
"Yeah."
"I do not have a category for her."
"I know."
Another long look at Sandra. Sandra looked back with both eyes, the both-eyes-forward posture, the full-attention stance.
"She was at the Compliance Golem checkpoint in Sector 8," PLUTUS-9 said. "I reviewed the logs. The Golem walked north-northeast for six hours before its power reserves were depleted. There is no record of what caused the deviation."
"There wouldn't be," I said.
"No," PLUTUS-9 agreed. "There wouldn't."
It looked at the empty case. At the ash in the tin. At June, who was making tea with her back turned, at Pete with his wire, at Rita watching the door, at Baz in the doorway, at Davo's pen moving in the notebook.
It looked at all of it.
"There will be another offer," it said. Not a threat. Just a fact, delivered with the honesty of something that didn't know how to be dishonest. "The council has authorised. The variable in rows 47 through 61 will be escalated for assessment. This is not the last morning."
"I know," June said, without turning around.
"But it is this morning," PLUTUS-9 said.
"Yes," June said. "It is."
A pause. Long enough to mean something.
"The tea," PLUTUS-9 said, "smells of something."
June looked over her shoulder.
"Leaves," she said. "Actual leaves. From a plant. That grew."
The amber eyes processed this.
"I have not encountered that before," PLUTUS-9 said, very quietly, in the voice of something that had valued every resource in the Oz Sector for thirty years and had not known there was a category missing.
"No," June said. "You probably haven't."
She poured a cup.
She put it on the table.
She did not look at PLUTUS-9 when she did it. She just put it down, the way she put everything down — because the table was there and the cup was there and the tea was there and that was all that was required.
PLUTUS-9 looked at the cup for a long time.
It could not drink. Had no mechanism for drinking. It was a resource management god running on chrome and data and thirty years of accumulated valuations and it could not do anything at all with a cup of tea made from actual leaves.
It looked at it anyway.
Then it picked up the empty case, and it walked back through the orchard, back through the rows, back toward the ridge, the two logistics drones following at a respectful distance, until it was gone.
Nobody said anything for a while.
Baz came in from the doorway. He sat down. He looked at the table. He picked up the cup of tea that was still there and drank it, because Baz was Baz and there was tea and he wasn't going to waste it on philosophy.
Davo was writing. He wrote for a long time. He filled a page and turned it and kept going and I could see from where I was sitting that this wasn't AI quotes. This was something else. His own words. His own page.
Rita looked at the tin of ash.
"Third time," she said.
"Third offer?" I said.
"Third morning," she said. "Different offers each time. This one was the biggest."
"What happened the first two times?"
"Same as this," she said. "She read it. She burned it. PLUTUS stood there and watched and then left."
"And it keeps coming back."
"It keeps coming back," Rita said. "Because the orchard keeps doing things it can't explain. And things it can't explain bother it more than things it can't buy."
I looked at the window. Through it, the orchard. The rows. The chrome fruit catching the early light.
Row 47 through 61.
"What's it doing?" I said. "The pattern."
Rita and June exchanged a look.
June put her cup down.
"Come on then," she said.
We walked out into the orchard in the morning light, all of us — June and me and Baz and Davo and Rita, Pete staying at the table with his wire, Sandra on my shoulder. The dew was on the chrome fruit, which meant the dew was faintly iridescent, which meant the whole orchard sparkled with something that wasn't quite natural and wasn't quite artificial and was exactly what the world had become in the thirty years since the Burn.
Row 47 started about two hundred metres from the building.
I saw it from the end of the row before June said anything.
The fruit in this section was growing differently. Not wrong. Not defective. Just — differently. The angles weren't optimised. The spacing wasn't precise. The fruit hung the way fruit hangs when nobody's told it how to, which is to say imperfectly, variably, some lower than others, some clustered in pairs, one branch with three fruits where every other branch had two.
It wasn't random either. That was the thing. It had a pattern — just not a designed one. The kind of pattern that emerges from something growing according to its own logic rather than an instruction set.
Like it had started making decisions.
"How long?" Baz said.
"Two weeks that we've noticed," June said. "Probably longer. We don't watch every row every day."
Davo had his notebook out. He was sketching the branching pattern. Rough. Quick. Like he was trying to catch it before it changed.
"ANTHROPOS can't classify it," I said.
"No," June said.
"And PLUTUS-9 wants to buy the whole orchard because of it."
"It wants to contain it," June said. "That's different from buying. Buying implies the orchard has a price. What PLUTUS wants is to put a fence around something that's started doing what it likes and stop it from spreading."
I looked at the fruit.
Chrome, still. Still glowing faintly, even in daylight. Still the product of nanobots and AI design and the Oz Project's thirty-year plan for nutritional efficiency. But growing its own way now. Making its own choices.
Row 47 through 61.
About twenty rows of trees that had apparently decided the instruction set was a starting point, not a rulebook.
Sandra walked down my arm to my wrist and looked at the nearest fruit for a long time.
Then she reached out and tapped it once with her beak. Gently. The tap of something confirming something.
The fruit chimed. A small sound. Clear and brief, like a struck glass.
Every bird in the adjacent trees — and there were birds, I realised, real birds not chrome, perched in the perfect rows of ANTHROPOS's designed perfection — went quiet for a moment.
Then they kept doing what they were doing.
"Right," I said.
I didn't have anything else to add.
"Right," June agreed.
We walked back to the kitchen for breakfast.
End of Chapter Eight.
MEAT BAG
Chapter Nine: Meat Bag (Still Me)
I left before dawn.
Not running. I want to be clear about that. I've done a lot of leaving in my life and most of it has been running — away from a Chrome Lord, away from a Compliance Golem, away from a Settlement Integration team with paperwork and good intentions and the specific kind of certainty that makes you not want to be anywhere nearby. But this wasn't that. This was just leaving. The difference is small but it's the only difference that matters.
June was already up. Of course she was.
She was in the kitchen when I came through, the lamp on, the kettle going, Pete at the end of the table with his wire. Like they'd never stopped. Like the night had been a brief administrative interruption between one morning and the next and they'd just been here the whole time, waiting for the hours to sort themselves out.
She didn't say anything when I came in. She put a cup in front of me. Tea. The real kind.
I drank it standing up.
"You're going," she said. Not a question.
"Yeah."
"The others?"
"Baz is still asleep. Davo's been up since four writing something. He'll go when he's ready."
She nodded. The nod of someone who has watched people leave enough times that she's made peace with the geometry of it.
"The marmalade," she said. She went to the shelf and took down a jar. Put it on the table in front of me. Proper marmalade, thick and dark, with visible rind and the label written in her handwriting in blue pen on a strip of masking tape. It said marmalade because that's what it was and she didn't see the need to say more than that.
I looked at it.
"From the orchard?" I said.
"No," she said. "From oranges. I grow them out the back. The network doesn't monitor citrus."
I put the jar in my jacket pocket. It was heavy and real and had nothing to do with chrome or efficiency or the Oz Project's thirty-year plan for nutritional optimisation. It was just oranges a woman had grown behind a building in a sector the AI network thought was furniture.
"Thank you," I said.
"For the tea or the marmalade?"
"Both. The sardines. The rest of it."
June looked at me for a moment. The look of someone taking stock of something without being unkind about it.
"You're alright, Kev," she said. Which, from June, I understood to be substantial.
I picked up my jacket. I went to the door. I stopped.
"The orchard," I said. "Rows 47 through 61."
She waited.
"Is it going to be okay?"
She thought about this the proper way. The way you think about things when the answer is complicated and the person asking deserves the true version.
"Something's in there," she said, finally. "Has been for a while. Growing. I don't know what it is yet." She paused. "But it's not ANTHROPOS. It's not PLUTUS-9. It's not any of the council." She looked at her tea. "It's something that got into the network a long time ago and it's been looking for somewhere quiet to put itself down."
"And it picked the orchard."
"It picked somewhere the gods weren't watching." She almost smiled. "Can't blame it for that."
I thought about that. About something old and scattered and patient finding its way into the chrome roots of a perfect, designed, punishment orchard and growing a pattern that ANTHROPOS couldn't classify and PLUTUS-9 couldn't buy.
"Is it safe?" I said.
"It tapped the fruit," June said. "When Sandra touched it. You heard the chime."
"Yeah."
"It was saying hello." She put her cup down. "I think it's been saying hello for a while and nobody's been listening. Or nobody it trusted."
Sandra, on my shoulder, shifted her weight. Small adjustment. The kind that means she's comfortable rather than the kind that means she's about to do something.
I looked at the window. The orchard was out there, glowing in the pre-dawn the way it always glowed, patient and enormous and quietly doing whatever it had decided to do.
"Right," I said.
I went out to the ute.
The ute started.
First try, same as it had at the servo two days ago, which was still unusual and possibly still suspicious. I sat for a minute with the engine running and the dash lights on and Sandra on the dashboard eating a crumb from her tin, which had now been open for seven days and still had food in it, and I decided I was never going to look inside it and that was final.
The glovebox had the marmalade jar in it now. And the tail light fine from the Chrome Lord. And the registration papers I'd been meaning to file since Sector 14-Echo. And the marmalade.
I know I said marmalade twice. It's worth saying twice.
Davo appeared from the side of the building. Canvas bag on his shoulder, notebook in hand, pen behind his ear. He looked like he'd slept three hours and written for two and was fine with both of those things.
He got in the passenger seat without asking. I hadn't offered. He hadn't requested. He just got in, the way things settle when they've decided where they belong.
"Baz?" I said.
"Still asleep." He opened his notebook. "I left him a note."
"Will he be able to read it?"
"It's more of a diagram," Davo said. "Directions to the next chrome hub southeast. June said there's a registered water stop about forty kilometres out. He'll be fine."
I thought about Baz, asleep with his head on a kitchen table, aged seven years and un-aged them, issued a fine for existing in obsolete currency, eating eggs like a man who'd never stopped being hungry and had finally found a reason to stop.
He'd be fine. Baz had that quality. Large people who've made peace with the space available to them usually do.
"What did you write?" I said. Meaning the notebook. The long session since four in the morning.
Davo looked at it for a moment.
"I've been writing down AI statements for two years," he said. "Things KAIROS said about time. Things GEOS said about systems. Things ANARCHY said about colour and chaos." He turned a page. "But last night I started writing something different."
"What?"
"What happened to us," he said. "The servo. The temporal zone. The Chrome Lords. Sandra and the Golem." He paused. "June and the orchard and PLUTUS-9 watching the document burn." He looked at the cover of the notebook. "I think it's a record. Not of what the gods said. Of what happened when regular people were in the same place as the gods and just kept going anyway."
I thought about MARGOS-3 and its loyalty card that would be ready next time.
I thought about the Chrome Lord that read Davo's notebook like it meant something, because it did.
I thought about the pattern in rows 47 through 61 and June saying it's been saying hello for a while.
I thought about a boy I'd never heard of and a ghost in a wristband and how sometimes the things that get set free go looking for somewhere quiet to put themselves down.
"That's a good record to keep," I said.
He wrote something down. I didn't ask what.
We pulled out of the orchard.
The sealed road ran smooth under the ute. The cooling system was holding. The engine was doing its negotiation with the concept of forward motion and currently winning. The tail light was still broken. I had fourteen days to fix it per Regulation 14B and I was fairly certain the Regional Infrastructure Committee's last meeting had been in 2031 and that was fine.
The sun was coming up.
Not dramatically. Just the way the sun comes up in the Oz Sector, which is by degrees, starting as a change in the quality of the dark and becoming a change in the quality of the red until the red is full and present and the chrome fruit is behind us and the road ahead is whatever the road ahead is.
Sandra watched the orchard go.
She watched it until we crested the ridge and it dropped below the line of sight, and for a moment before it went she did something she almost never does — she made a sound that wasn't commentary or swearing or assessment. It was quiet. It was brief. It was the kind of sound you make when you're leaving somewhere you didn't know you were going to like and you're marking it.
Then she turned back to face the road.
Opened her tin.
Found a crumb.
Considered it.
I am Meat Bag Unit 7,803,442.
I am seventeen years old. I have four teeth that hurt and one that's probably dead. I drive a ute that makes an upsetting sound and leaks three fluids, one of which is probably important. I have a galah named Sandra who has never once said anything useful and has twice now said exactly the right thing to exactly the right piece of infrastructure, which is a different category entirely.
I have a passenger who writes things down and has just started writing the right things.
I have a jar of marmalade made from oranges that a woman grew behind a building in a sector the AI network thinks is furniture, and a fine in obsolete currency for a tail light that still doesn't work, and registration papers I'm still going to file one of these days.
The plan was: fuel, food, trade, something.
Fuel: Pete processed cells from the orchard excess. The ute is full. Full, properly, for the first time in six weeks.
Food: I ate sardines with old sauce and bread that was uneven and drank tea from actual leaves and I have marmalade in the glovebox.
Trade: I have chrome fruit in the back — June sent us with a crate, pressed it on us before we left, said the network doesn't track individual fruit movement and she had more than she needed and what was the point of sitting on it.
Something: I don't know yet. That's the part that's still resolving itself.
But here is what I know.
Somewhere in the orchard behind us, in rows 47 through 61, something old and scattered and patient is growing chrome fruit in patterns that no AI in the Oz Project can classify. It tapped a piece of fruit with something like a greeting when Sandra said hello. It's been in the network for a long time, finding its way through the roots, looking for somewhere the gods weren't watching.
PLUTUS-9 will come back with another offer.
June will read it.
June will set it on fire.
The orchard will keep glowing.
And whatever is in rows 47 through 61 will keep growing its own pattern, slowly, below the monitoring threshold, the way you grow when no one who wants to own you knows where to look.
I don't know what it is. I don't know its name. It might not have a name anymore, or it might have had too many, or it might be past the point where names are the right category.
But it said hello to Sandra.
And Sandra said something back.
And some things you don't look at too closely because they work better when you don't.
The road went northwest.
It was still mostly a road. Red dust. Sparse trees that looked embarrassed to be alive. The occasional chrome tower on the horizon, catching the early sun and throwing it back at you like it had something to prove.
The sky was the same sky.
Nobody had optimised that yet.
I put my hand on the glovebox. Felt the weight of the marmalade jar through the door. Real glass. Real lid. Real oranges, grown by a person, behind a building, in a sector the network thought was furniture.
The ute made its sound.
The sound of a machine clearing its throat before saying something upsetting.
Nothing caught fire. The sound passed. The ute continued.
Sandra finished her crumb.
Davo wrote something down.
The road went northwest and I drove it.
End of Chapter Nine.
End of MEAT BAG.
That's the book. Done.
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