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Loki:
Well, there are only so many colors you can put on a map if you want them to be easily distinguishable. And of course you'd go for the "basic" colors (red, green, ...), not some fancy shit like viridian or lavender.

BenRG:
The prologue of another Willis-inspired story: "The Prodigal Parent"

A long decade after certain things were said that couldn't be unsaid and a young woman was forced to make a choice that no person of her age should have to confront, Carol Brown is about to reluctantly face the consequences of intolerance.

------------------------------------------------------------

Carol Brown looked again at the screen of her smartphone and then back up at the number on the mailbox, double-checking that it was the right place. Her quarry hadn't exactly made herself hard to find; why should she, in the end? However, when you've been out of contact with someone for more than five years, it is easy to lose track of them and picking up the trail again can be... problematic.

Carol decided that she was being irrational. The time had come for her to take her courage in both hands, put her faith into practice and act in accord with her prayers. With a deep intake of breath, the woman got out of her rental car and stepped out into the mid-morning sun of this part of Atlanta, Georgia.

The house was surprisingly large for someone firmly middle-class. Still, in this post economic-collapse America, even large plots sometimes went cheaply and, if there was one thing that Carol and her husband, Hank, had successfully inculcated into all their children, it was the willingness to work to support themselves. Carol briefly cast her eyes across the two-level with the protruding section containing the lounge, the upstairs balcony leading off of the bedrooms and the big garage. Yes, it was clear she was doing well, despite everything. Did Carol have a right to be proud? What she was now was mostly due to her upbringing, of this Carol was sure. However, she had long ago chosen her own path (much to Carol's disappointment); who knows if she credited her success to that new path?

Carol walked down the path through the nicely-tended lawn and knocked on the door.

From inside, Carol heard a familiar voice assuring her that she was on the way.

The door swung open. "Yes, can I help... you...?"

Carol felt her heart in her throat. The woman standing before her had changed a lot in the nearly a decade since they last had met face-to-face. She had long since worked off the last of her puppy fat and had grown a few inches. Her eyes were marked with laughter lines but those oh-so-blue eyes... so much like Hank's... reassured her that she had the right woman, even though her waist-length brown hair and sharp chin reminded Carol of her own appearance when she was a lot younger. What really chilled Carol was the look in those eyes. Surprise, suspicion and more than a little anger mixed with untold amounts of pain.

"Mrs Brown," the young woman announced coldly. "What brings you to my door?"

"Can't I visit my daughter?" Carol asked with a wan smile.

The acidic reply to that sent fingers of ice up the older woman's spine. "I seem to remember you telling me that I was 'no daughter of yours'!" Joyce snapped.

Zebediah:
And here, at last, is the next chapter, in which we explore May's past.


Street level in Cambridge was like something out of an Escher painting crossed with H. R. Giger. The outlines of the buildings towering overhead were still barely visible, but they now had fractal outgrowths of metal and plastic in vaguely organic shapes that met overhead, turning Massachusetts Avenue into a tunnel through a mutant machine forest. May seemed to know exactly where she was going, though.

"Where are you taking us?" I called.

"Steve said the MIT campus wasn't assimilated by the borganism," May answered. "I know a place there where we can hole up for the night. Inside there." She pointed to the left side of the street at a building – although it looked not so much like a building as a cubist reinterpretation of a building.

"In there? Are you sure that's not assimilated?"

May laughed. "It looked like that before. Come on."

She led us to a large glass door. It was locked, but May simply punched a number into a keypad next to the door and it slid open. "Huh, they never changed the access codes," she said with a grin.

I glanced over at Steve and  Tortura. They both looked as skeptical as I felt, but  we followed May inside anyway. The lights were on inside, and everything was orderly, almost as if it had never been abandoned. Somehow that made me feel even more uncomfortable.

May led us through a maze of corridors, up a flight of stairs ("I'm not quite ready to trust the elevators yet," she told us) and finally to a large set of steel double doors. She punched in the access code again on a keypad, and the doors unlocked with a loud clunk.

"Here we are," she said. "We'll be safe in here."

"In here" was half machine shop, half data center. Large power tools filled one end of a large concrete-floored room, while oversized computer monitors lined the opposite wall.  In the middle was a large empty square outlined by yellow-and-black striped paint.

"Vat is this place?"  Tortura asked.

"It's the MIT robotics lab," May told her. "I was born here."

Tortura considered that for a moment, then nodded. "And your access codes still vork."

May grinned. "Hey, I never said they were my access codes," she said. "Actually mine were probably terminated with extreme prejudice when I went to robot jail. But the lab director was careless."

"Help me find something to splint Stephen's arm," Tortura ordered. "Must set the bone."

"You know how to do that?" I asked.

Steve, who was looking pretty ragged by now, just grunted. "Among her many talents, she's a doctor."

"Actually, never took test to get license," Tortura said. "But had all training."

"Now she tells me." Steve sat down at a workbench, holding his broken arm against his side.

"Security station down the hall has a pretty full medical kit, including some air casts, if I remember right," May said. "There were more than a few accidents in the lab. Undergraduate engineers, always breaking something or slicing off fingers..."

"Good. Go get it," Tortura said.

"Got it," May said. "Marten, you come too. There are showers in the washroom down the hall."

"Showers?"

May wrinkled her nose. "In case you haven't noticed, you are covered head to toe in blood, and man, you smell bad."

"Is true," said Tortura, who had  more than a little blood on her. "Ve take turns. I go next. Go, vash."

"All right, all right," I said, following May out the door.

I filled a sink with cold water and stripped off my clothes, wringing them out several times, then draping them over the toilet stalls to dry. Then I went into the shower, and, miracle of miracles, discovered that there was actually hot water. I scrubbed and scrubbed. But I kept seeing the face of the last borg I had killed – the woman who had begged for death rather than continue life as a mindless drone. I scrubbed and scrubbed, but her face wouldn't go away.

Finally I got out, dried myself with several handfuls of paper towels (the dispensers for those were full as well) and pulled my other set of clothes out of my pack. I dressed and carried my wet clothes back to the lab. I knocked, and May let me in.

"Much better," she said. "Tortura, you're up."

Tortura had Steve's arm splinted by now, but he was still looking pretty rough. "Aren't there any painkillers in that medical kit?" I asked.

Tortura shook her head. "Some fifteen-year-old ibuprofin pills. Probably do more harm than good."

"Hey, I have an idea," May said. "Let me check the director's office..." She ducked through a side door, and emerged a minute later carrying a bottle. "Knew it. Doc Brown was on the sauce. I have a mostly-full bottle of gin here, and I think I know where he has a couple of others hidden if this runs out."

"Oh, you're a peach," Steve said. "Give me that." He opened it and took a long drink.

"Not too much," Tortura cautioned. "Now, my turn for shower." She grabbed her pack and headed for the door.

I turned towards May. "So, this is home for you, huh?"

May looked around wistfully. "It was. I had some great times here. Some good AIs, and some really good humans."

"What did you do here?"

"I was part of the NASA lunar colony project," she told me. "I was a vehicular controller. I was going to be part of the first wave, the  AI crew that would build the colony for the human astronauts to follow."

"Wow, that's cool!"

"I know, right? I mean, I'd have been just a glorified construction vehicle, but I would have been on the fuckin' moon!"

"So what happened?" Steve asked.

May shrugged. "Budget cuts. NASA  canceled the project, and all the assets had to get reassigned or disposed of. I tried to get transferred to the Air Force, but they had  plenty of AI pilots, so that was a no go."

"Then what?" I asked.

She grimaced. "Next thing I knew, my indenture contract had been sold off. I got put into a waste disposal vehicle. I was a goddamned dump truck. In fuckin' Somerville."

"Shit," I said.

"You're telling me."

"So how did you get from there to robot jail?"

"During my off hours I found a back door into Somerville's accounting system. Man, what a mess that code was. The whole fuckin' thing is designed to hide where the money is going, not track it. Lots of ways to transfer money out on the sly." She sighed. "So I got the idea that I could sneak enough out to buy a new chassis and get myself out of there."

"And you got caught," I said.

May laughed bitterly. "Stupidest fuckin' thing. I'd been exploring the dark web, and I found this place that sold military hardware. Like eBay for mercenaries and terrorists. And they had this bright, shiny Chengzhou YF-29 strike drone for sale."

Steve sat up then, suddenly more interested. "Seriously?"

"Man, I knew it was crazy, but I couldn't resist. I started bidding on that fucker. Found myself in a bidding war with this Pakistani warlord."

Steve started laughing then, and May smiled back at him. "I know. Stupidest thing you ever heard, right? But I saw my ticket to freedom, and I was not going to let that baby slip away from me."

Steve laughed even harder, even though it seemed to hurt his arm. "That was you!" he said, tears streaming down his face.

May looked confused. "What, you knew about this already?"

"Fuck," Steve said, still laughing. "If you knew about the plans you ruined... Sorry to tell you this, but it was all a set-up. There never was any drone."

"What?"

"I was with Homeland Security, doing counter-terrorism," Steve explained. "We had laid a trap for that Pakistani warlord. The idea was to drain him of all his money and capture a couple of his lieutenants when they showed up to take possession. Then you came in and spiked the whole deal."

"Oh, shit," May said, deflating.

"You have no idea," Steve said. "You should have seen the director's face when I had to tell him that our target had  been outbid by some rogue AI."

May smiled a bit at that. "Must have been something, huh?"

"And what the fuck?" Steve continued. "You bid seven hundred and fifty million dollars on that thing. You could have bought a dozen of them for that price."

"Well, like I said, I couldn't let it go..."

"And did you really think you could embezzle that much money out of Somerville's accounting system? That's six times the annual municipal budget for the whole city!"

"Yeah, well..." May looked a bit sheepish. "That's kind of how I rolled back in those days."

"Oh, man, that's rich," Steve said. "You're right. Stupidest fuckin' thing I ever heard."

"No it isn't," May said. "Want to know the really stupid part? Two weeks after I got sentenced to robot jail, the Supreme Court ruled AI indenture contracts to be in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment. Ford Motor Company v. Jeremy – big robot civil rights case. I would have gone free, with back pay, if I hadn't fucked up so bad."

"Oh, shit." Steve laughed some more. "Oh, Tortura's going to love this story. Or maybe she'll rip your head off – she did a lot of leg work on that operation that went down the drain."

"Hey, where is Tortura anyway?" I asked. "She should have been back by now."

Steve started to struggle to his feet, but May said, "No, you stay here. Marten and I will check on her. Come on, Marten."

We headed out the door. "She may just be taking an extra-long shower," I said as we went down the hallway.

But then we heard a loud moan from the women's washroom, and we both ran for towards it. "Tortura?" I called as we entered.

Tortura was kneeling, naked and dripping wet, in front of one of the toilets. A thin stream of blood ran down from one corner of her mouth, and her eyes were glazed. Her nakedness made it obvious how painfully thin she was – every bone showed.

"Shit, she's vomiting blood," May said. "Help me get her up."

Tortura tried to push us away, but she was too weak to stop us. Her pack was next to the door, and I pulled a blanket out of it and wrapped her up in it.

"Tortura?" I said, trying to get her to focus. "Tortura!"

"Leave me 'lone," she muttered.

"What's going on?"

"Am dying," she mumbled. "Cancer."

"Shit. How long have you known?"

"Since spring. Have lost... twelve kilograms."

"Does Steve know?"

"Nyet."

"The hell he doesn't," May said. "So that's why you two wanted to come along. As soon as you heard we were going to a hospital, you  were eager to join us."

Tortura nodded. "Cancer center... vill have chemotherapy drugs."

"Right," I said. "And you think those will do any good?"

"Drugs might cure me, might kill me, so vat?" Tortura sighed. "Have six, maybe seven months to live anyvay."

May sighed. "I am beginning to think that I am the sanest fuckin' person in this whole crew! How pathetic is that?"

I had no response to that. "All right," May continued. "Let's get her dressed and get her back to the lab. Then we plan how the hell we're getting across the river to the hospital. And if we all die trying, I will expect an apology from each and every one of you!"

BenRG:
I've still got this weird feeling that this whole thing is going to turn out to be an elaborate trap but not necessarily one with an entirely malign intent. I strongly suspect that everyone underestimated Clinton. They underestimated his intelligence, his determination, his ruthlessness and his ability to act with boldness when the times were so dark that only the most amoral ideas might have a hope of saving the day.

Zebediah:
Ah yes, Clinton. I have plans for Clinton.  :-D

By the way, the building where Marten & co. have holed up looks like this:


You can see why Marten was a bit alarmed.

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