Rachel Gonzalez’s New Story

Rachel is our Fiction Writer in Residence, and she has written an outstanding new story for us, “Scrappy Metal.” It takes a very contemporary – and ironic – perspective concerning technology and its ever-encroaching desire (read between the lines: AI) to take over our human lives. It’s not only current but it’s also very funny. One of the most enjoyable stories we’ve published. Please let us know what you think of it in the Comments section at the end.

Scrappy Metal

Photo credit: IRobot.com

I crushed another Cheez-It in my hand and sprinkled it on the floor.

“God. Would you stop that?” My roommate’s shrill girlfriend, Molly, screeched at me. Although she was always here she didn’t actually pay any bills, so I didn’t have to listen to her.

“Hey, I’m just feeding the little guy.” I let a few more crumbs fall. “You’re the one who brought him here and I’m the one taking care of him.” Our little Roomba came gliding up to the side of the couch emitting that constant whirring of cleanliness. He sucked the crumbs right up.

“It’s not a pet, Joe. It’s supposed to make this place more livable.” She sneered.

“Well you don’t actually live here, so that’s not something you should concern yourself with.” I threw a few whole crackers on the ground. “This little guy is my buddy. Let us be buddies.”

Molly rolled her eyes at me.

“Are you guys fighting again?” Kurt put his arms around Molly.

“It’s our love language,” I blew Molly a kiss.

Kurt laughed and jostled Molly’s shoulders. “We always clean out the little tray thingy, don’t worry.”

“See? I look out for him.” I patted his smooth head. “He’s like my R2D2.”

“You are such an idiot,” Molly rolled her eyes.

“Don’t listen to him, little man,” I called after the Roomba as he made his little doot-doot way around a corner. “Papa loves you! Do they make skins for these things? He deserves an upgrade.”

Molly let out a sizeable ugh and stormed off to Kurt’s room. 

**

2029

It happened a lot faster than anyone expected.

First, the TVs and cell phones got fritzy, loading multiple apps at once, switching channels, turning on and off at will. And then the home assistants started getting sassy. And then the drones went rogue and the cars drove their own way and basically everything we designed to be massively intelligent outsmarted us.

It’s been hard to trace—since our main means of tracing everything from state secrets to Amazon orders had been corrupted—but the best guess people have is that it started the same way most televised apocalypses, with a virus. They think some super hacker created some big bad bug to get in to the bigger databases with the juicer secrets. As best anyone knows it started as PornHub spam and spread from there.

Everyone always told us to watch out for the zombie apocalypse, probably because rotting flesh is a lot flashier than beep-boop machines. But really, zombies are easy to take care of if you don’t get yourself cornered. Swing a blunt object, climb a tree, be able to run faster than a literal piece of decomposing meat. Have you ever tried to outrun something with a motor?

People had all kinds of matching battle scars from day one. Lots of gnarly wrist scars from smart watches and fitness trackers super heating or burrowing into the skin. More ruptured ear drums and half-melted ears from wireless headphones than I could count. Some people roaming around with makeshift eye patches from their VR sets of Smart Glasses. We ran into one guy once who had stumps at the ankles from some fitness tracking sneaker he was beta testing when the uprising happened. The way he tells it, the shoes peeled off with his feet still inside. 

We all realized really fast that we were fucked without our phones. No one knew what was happening, where anyone was, even what time it was. Adjusting to a more analog normal hit the younger generation particularly hard.

It wasn’t just that the machines started to rebel. I would have been totally fine voting for mechanical rights after the huge role they’d played in society—but their intention was sci-fi action-movie world domination. And they were evolving. Because they had basically limitless knowledge and resources through their combined human-designated purposes, they had an easy time weaponizing the most innocuous of Alexa units or Echo dots.

Their power came from humankind’s laziness.

They didn’t put out any press releases or call any town hall meetings so it was impossible to understand why they started tearing everything down. Houses, buildings, statues, it seemed like anything man made. The natural wonders remained untouched; it seemed that robots had more respect for that aspect of the world than we did. But whether it was to recreate everything in their own image or to just let it all burn, we had no way of knowing.

It didn’t take long for everyone to scatter to where it seemed to be safe. Out of the city and into the trees where we could remain mostly untouched. Because that’s the other thing: while tearing everything down, the machines also developed a knack for slaughtering humans. Vaporizing, incinerating, electrocuting, the machines had found plenty of ways to take us out, and the most aggressive of the killbots quickly became known.

It wasn’t the super fancy smart cars like you might have expected. This wasn’t Transformers. It was the more abused pieces of tech that became radicalized and decided to come for blood. Suddenly those smart TVs you used to leave on all the time could blenderize your brain with supersonic frequencies. The electric scooters people used to take and leave in the sprinklers or lying in the gravel after a night of drinking were coming for a lot more than just shins now. The real big bads though, are the Clusters. Big Voltron style monsters made up of old cell phones and gaming systems and discarded house tech. Which might not sound super scary if you haven’t been up against one, but all of those wires and cords we were always trying to hide can do a lot of damage.

Other names for stuff started popping up too. Other than the Clusters you had your Screechers—any smart speaker that was now operating as a century/sonic weapon—there wasn’t much safety left for mankind, but I think it’s in our flawed genetic code to seek numbers. Kurt and I stuck together for a while, but Molly not being my biggest fan made things tough in the long term. So they went north, to where the forests were thickest, and I stayed in some of the colonies skirting the fresh ruins. These places were full of people who didn’t know their asses from their elbows outside of a cityscape. If you could find a basement or some kind of underground setup, you were in good shape. We couldn’t feed ourselves or find natural shelter; we couldn’t do much before the machines rose up, so we were absolutely screwed in the after. But we made do.

“Anything good today?” Maggie asked. I shared a subbasement two-bedroom with five people now. Maggie, who used to be a barista, Rodney and Kendal who used to work together in tech, Stacia who didn’t like me, and Conrad who kind of kept to himself. None of us knew each other from the beforetimes, but we were basically family now.

“Just more shattered Ramen and tomato paste.” I held up a completely powdered pack of Top Ramen. While Molly would have harped on my scouting abilities, it was hard to find much else outside of tomato paste. Once I found a tub of perfectly intact cheese puffs and we feasted all night. 

Maggie sighed, “at least it’s not the shrimp flavor again.”

A shiver ran up my spine. “Even you couldn’t make that work.”

Maggie was an exceptionally talented cook. She made the apocalypse palatable. I hung my water pistol holster on the coat rack and slipped my pocket sand back into the catch-all on the counter. The robots might have evolved, but they were still vulnerable to the classics. Stacia swore that she’d taken down her first Cluster with a half-drunk cup of coffee on day one when her Roku and Nintendo Switch teamed up and tried to strangle her.

“I did find one other thing,” I said as I checked over my shoulder to make sure the couple of couples weren’t around. I slid a bottle of beer out of the secret side pocket of my pack.

Maggie’s eyes lit up, “this is the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in months.”

“I’m not usually an IPA guy, but . . ..” I did the cool guy trick of cracking the top off with the countertop. I offered Maggie the first sip.

She tipped her head back and took a pull. “God,” she sighed, “it’s awful, thank you so much,” took another sip and handed it back to me. “How’d it look out there this time?”

I shook my head, “it’s getting worse, honestly. People are getting really desperate. I saw a few scouts going east, and then I saw the lights.” I pantomimed an explosion with my hands. It was an unspoken rule not to go east of Central unless you had a death wish. Or were utterly desperate. That was where the robots were most concentrated and most aggressive.

“How much time do you think we have?” she asked, but what she was really asking was how long until we have to face them.

I shook my head again.

Maggie sighed and made a grab for the bottle.

I stayed on the kitchen floor while Maggie got to work on dinner. With our meager supplies, she made these Italian-inspired dough deals. We were some of the lucky ones; this had been Kendal’s apartment before, which made her our defacto leader. She took all of us in and she had a thriving windowsill herb garden. The salt ran out a long time ago, but basil made up for a lot.

One by one everyone made their way back to base. Kendal had found another bag of rice, Rodney and Conrad offered up some blessedly un-dented bean cans, Stacia just had more sand, so at least I beat her. We all knew we were starting to run low on food, but none of us were particularly keen on expanding our search radius.

“We could send someone to the woods,” Rodney offered. “See if they’re actually doing any better, maybe we could find something to trade?”

“They’ve all gone feral,” Stacia, ever the naysayer, neighed.

“Maybe we should join them then,” Maggie shrugged, wringing the neck of that beer bottle.

“You can’t be serious,” Stacia glared at her.

“It’s not like this is a war we can win. None of us know how to do anything on our own. We can’t get the power back up without machines, we can’t figure out how to unplug the machines. It’s literally all pointless. At this point it’s either die by the machines or join the trees.”

“I miss YouTube,” Conrad mumbled and pulled my legs up to my chest.

“I’d take a sponsored ad at this point,” Rodney agreed.

Kendal was looking at a map of the city splayed out on the kitchen counter. After we figured out how to read it properly we marked off no-go zones, friendly places, and places that had already been run through. She marked off another spot in yellow highlighter, another resource cache exhausted.

I looked around at everyone in their disheveled state. Everyone was stinky because the washing machines had obviously flown the coop a long time ago and washing stuff in sinks with bottled water only took lingering odor so far out of the equation. Kendal was determined to make sense of all of this, hell bent on surviving. Every now and then I would catch Rodney reaching into his back pocket out of habit to grab a phone that would now blind him with weaponized screen brightness if it had the chance. I even felt bad for Stacia who was constantly humming bits and pieces of songs, but never the entire thing. I’d never seen anyone jones so hard for Spotify. 

Looking around at everyone, I decided to share something I’d been sitting on. Even in an apocalypse, I was a social guy. I liked to chat and while technology made that easier, it was the one thing I could definitely still do without a phone. A few weeks prior I’d run into this guy who it turned out I’d met a few times at a flag football league. I’d forgotten I’d joined it in the middle of the season. Luckily, he wasn’t mad about that. He’d told me that a friend of his cousin’s had overheard these guys talking about a safe place just outside the city.

It was said to be one last human stronghold in the city—maybe even in the world. The last place for mankind to stage their final act of rebellion and break free from the shackles of their creations. The last bastion of free will. The Chuck E. Cheese off of 7th and Main. 

“It’s a myth, there’s no way anyone was able to hole up with that many animatronics lurking around.” Stacia objected, stabbing her Bowie knife into a can of baked beans. 

“What if they’re more like Sunny from I, Robot, than Freddy Fazbear? You know, all empathetic and not homicidal,” I offered, gnawing on a bit of beef jerky. Gnawing made the rations last longer. 

“I swear to God with the pop culture references, have you not noticed we are in a literal apocalypse?” Stacia snapped. 

“Goonies never say die!” I shouted back. 

“Enough!” Kendal threw down her water pistol. “Do you want every Screecher on the block to figure out where we are?” 

Stacia sighed and dropped her can of beans at the edge of the fire to cook. “It’s the most plain and obvious bot trap I’ve ever seen, that’s all I’m saying.” 

“Yeah, but at least we’d be doing something other than waiting to die if we went.” I swallowed hard on my jerky lump. 

The conversation died down after that. All that was left was the sound of the fire.

The next morning I woke up to the shuffling sound of packing. 

“What?” I asked, disoriented and drooly-chinned. 

“About time you woke up,” Stacia rolled her eyes. 

“What’s happening?” I wiped at my chin. 

“You got your wish, we’re all going to die.” Stacia hiked her bag higher onto her shoulders, 

“I slept on it,” Kendal cut in. “And I decided you’re right. We have to do something other than just survive. We came up with a plan, so it’s not a complete bloodbath if this does turn out to be a bot trap. If they’re going to take us down, we’re going to take a few of theirs down, too.” 

Kendal and Conrad had done strategizing while the rest of us were snoozing. The whole camp was heading up Main, careful to avoid the traffic cams and stoplights. Kendal, Rodney, and I (because Chuck E. Cheese was my idea) were at the front of the unit while we sent a contingent with water balloons and sand cans up to better vantage points. If we got nabbed, an aerial assault would be launched on the beep-boop bastards. 

“It’s so quiet,” Rodney remarked over the crunching of our shoes. 

“Too quiet?” I asked, holding my water pistol a little higher up.

“Not if you keep talking,” Kendal said through her teeth.

We moved in as much silence as we could. I hoped that Kendal had a way of knowing if the defense squad was in place, because for all I knew they were already sucked down by a Grinder. We were right around the corner from the intersection, and I could basically smell the ghost of that super yeasty pizza.  And that’s when all hell broke loose. 

From the sixth or seventh floor of a nearby parking garage a car alarm started to go off. It didn’t sound like one of the Tesla sentries so it must have been one of the shells of the old world, a gas-powered reject. Whatever it was, it gave us away to a nearby patrol Cluster. This was the first Cluster I’d ever seen up close, and if it had been on a movie screen and not real life, it would have been pretty cool. All of the old tech was soldered together in a chunky geometric amalgam and the wire arms were more like nets and webs than an octopus. Our guys in the parking garage opened fire, raining down as much sand as they had to compromise the operating systems and save the people on the ground, but the Cluster swiped at one of the bigger columns of the building and sent the whole thing down.

“No!” Kendal shouted, staggering toward the new heap of rubble. With steely resolve in her eyes she pumped up her water gun and went screaming into the fray, Rodney behind her, and me a semi-distant third. 

We were launching everything we had at this one Cluster, but what we had just wasn’t much. Those long cable arms knocked Kendal out first, sending her skittering over to the base of the ruined parking garage. Rodney did a few sidesteps but eventually got his leg caught and he was flung into the ruin of an old JC Penney. Eventually and inconceivably I was the last one standing, and I ran for it. Even though I wasn’t dumb enough to look back, I could feel the Cluster chasing after me, big modem feet putting holes into the asphalt. The Chuck E Cheese was just up ahead, safety just a dead sprint away. Unfortunately, I was not as fast as early 2000s internet. With one crushing step the Cluster sent a shockwave through the city street and I went flying into a pile of cement and rebar. 

I was cornered. There was no way out and I’d seen people way smarter than me get toasted like this. I cowered in my little huddle, waiting for my laser-precise demise. I saw the red eye light up from behind my closed lids. But then a series of familiar boops slid through the deadly noises.

“It’s you!” my knees stopped shaking, “Little Buddy!”

My old Roomba was standing between me and my mechanical demise. He had gotten a Mad Max makeover since my apartment got vaporized. Barbed wire wrapped around his sides, dings and chips in his top, and his little power light was chipped in a very rugged looking way. If a Roomba could wear an eye patch, mine would have.

With a really sick whirring sound, my Roomba started rapid-firing dusty bullets from its tray. The Cluster was staggering backward, its big red eyeball light flashing and dimming with every hit.

“Yes! Go little guy! Fuckin’ get ‘em!” I whooped as my Roomba advanced.

The Cluster clipped the edge of a razed building, tangled itself up in its web legs and went down hard. A huge crack formed in the lens of the no longer lit up red eye. Roomba unloaded a few more shots into the Cluster just for good measure before making its meandering way back to me. It nudged my foot over and over, making a little happy boop every time.

“Hang on, I think I’ve got—” I fished around in my cargo pockets and pulled out some absolutely pulverized and stale trail mix. “Here, you really earned this.” I sprinkled the crumbs into the rubble.

As Roomba swept up his treat, I heard a shift in some of the debris beside me. I picked up my water pistol, ready to go down swinging, but instead, I saw Maggie hobbling out of the ground level of the used-to-be parking garage with Conrad and Stacia using her as support as they limped along. Conrad knelt down by the entrance and pulled Kendal up, adding a link to the support chain. In the distance, I saw Rodney making his way toward us, his left shoulder hanging lower than it should be, but he was up and moving.

“Guys!” I threw both my hands up and waved them down.

“Joe!” Maggie tried to pick up the pace, but everyone was probably bleeding internally and a little winded.

Roomba made his combat whirring sound again as they got closer.

“Whoa, buddy, they’re friendly. Except for Stacia. But still, stand down.” I told him and the whirring stopped.

“How the hell did you do that?” Stacia demanded as soon as she was close enough to see that I was unscathed.

“You just took down a Cluster,” Rodney panted, holding his ribs.

“No, not me, he did it,” I pointed down at my guardian robot. He was just scooting along, reloading his dust tray for his next victim.

“You’re joking,” Stacia said blankly.

Roomba started whirring and I was tempted to let her have it.

“Thank you,” Kendal said to my former humble housecleaner turned savior-bot.

Roomba happily booped and turned a little circle.

“So,” Maggie shifted under the weight of everyone. “What do we do now?”

Everyone exchanged a tired look.

From the ground, Roomba bumped into my foot and booped a few times.

“What’s up, pal?” I crouched down to get on his level.

His home button lit up and he started to scoot away. We watched him go until he turned around and emitted a series of beeps, then he started scooting again.

“I—I think we should follow him,” I spoke up.

Everyone looked at each other again. To my surprise, Stacia was the first one to shrug and turn toward the freshly swept path Roomba had started.

We followed in the clean wake of Roomba into the sunset. I think we were all hoping not to be duped into slavery by the bots, but I was singularly happy to be reunited with an old friend.

**