Free Robots Versus Humans (The Robot Planet Series Book 2) by Robert Chazz Chute Page A

air of each fallen floor sounds like the detonation of an explosive charge. Each broken building stirred echoes that reached for us like cannon fire.
    “Hear that?” Raphael asked. “That’s the sound of the order of the world getting rearranged. Classic!”
    “Sir?”
    “Yes, Dante?”
    “Shut up.”
    The old man smiled and nodded good-naturedly. “Cool.”
    A few minutes later, I wished I hadn’t told my kind mentor to shut up. I should have used the time to thank him for his kindness. I wished I’d thought to give the old man a hug goodbye.

14
    A s the sun began to set, I could feel the train’s vibration through the track with my bare hand.
    “This train used to be run by humans,” Emma said. “Then the machines took over and the people who lived on the train became among the first Domers.”
    The train brought us food and water and materials to build more solar panels and turbines. I hadn’t thought a lot about where the food and water came from. Now I was curious. “Emma? As Domers, you had food and water and energy. Sounds like you had everything you could need. What was that like?”
    “We were the lucky ones until it all went to shit.”
    “What did you get in return for your crops?”
    “A feed of your energy, for one thing.”
    Electricity was one thing Marfa had plenty of. I’d taken it for granted.
    “We had lots of food and a higher birth rate than average, too,” Emma said. “I like kids, so that was nice. We couldn’t go outside much but there wasn’t much to go outside for unless there was infrastructure work.”
    “Anything else?”
    “Well, our Collective network out in the domes was lax about what was allowed into our brains.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “The folks who run the City in the Sky are religious people. I hear they’re more strict about what they allow people to know. Everything’s on a need-to-know basis. Out in the domes, Mother let us hear Old World stories. Mother read to me my whole life.”
    “What did she read to you?”
    “I like detective stories set in New York. I didn’t understand all the Old World references but I got the gist.”
    “That sounds interesting,” I said.
    “It passed the time as we tended the hydroponic hemp,” she said. “The cannabis was strong so there was that, too. And there is nothing like a ripe tomato. Mother was good to us until she became self-aware and turned traitor.”
    “In Marfa,” Raphael said, “we’ve got an oral tradition. We tell each other stories.”
    I rolled my eyes. My father only seemed to have war stories to tell and Raphael usually stuck to lectures about building better capacitors, fuse assemblies and heavier circuits. I wished I’d grown up a Domer.
    “Thrillers set in New York are…I don’t know,” Emma said. “Sometimes I feel like I was born in the wrong century. Like the Old World at its peak would have been — ”
    “Classic, epic and cool in a big ball of stellar,” Raphael said. “It was.”
    Everyone had heard of New York. It sounded like it had been a crowded paradise packed tight with choices. Shame what happened to it. It hadn’t occurred to me that it could still be made alive in a book.
    Nervous, I looked over my shoulder. There wasn’t a bot in sight besides Bob and Jen but an explosion that ripped into Marfa sounded plenty close enough.
    “How much longer?” Emma asked.
    My father considered the angle of the sun. “Not long. Raphael? It’s train time.”
    The old man climbed down off Bob’s back and detached the walker concealed in the machine’s side.
    “Bobby?” he said. “You have your instructions. Mind your manners now.”
    “Yes, sir,” the bot replied. Jen gave Raphael an openly lascivious stare and ran her tongue over her upper lip in a way that emptied my brains.
    “Thanks, baby. You know what I like.” The old man ran a hand over his jaw and took a deep breath. “Jenny, if that train don’t stop, I sure am sorry. Y’all be careful.”
    “I