Free Bones of my Father by J.A. Pitts Page A

warrior, first as cops, then as soldiers. Each losing a bit of his humanity to the machines.
    Gramps was the first to be totally replaced by the circuitry and titanium. Gran didn’t care, being dead and in the grave, and he sure survived the streets of New York better. But riots are riots, and titanium and ceramics can only withstand so much force. We reinstalled his brain into the compound on my third birthday. Haven’t had a moment’s peace since.
    Once cleared to the living quarters, I grabbed a fresh pair of coveralls, slipped into my sandals and settled what remained of my old man on the work bench in the living room. The east wall blinked to light, showing a fifteen-foot-tall animated face of my grandfather.
    “Jesus, Gramps,” I said shielding my eyes from the glare. “Tone it down a few lumens.”
    The wall scaled back to something that wouldn’t fry my retina and I shook my head at the old man. Something about downloading him dropped his behavior to that of an unruly nine-year-old. He knew hella lotta stuff, but getting past the pranks and whining had lost its appeal.
    I whipped up some protein packets while the geo-thermal reserves came online. I’d need them to fire up the Cray. It was a cranky old bastard, but it ran the wetware I’d need to access what remained of Dad. Mom would be pissed, but when wasn’t she? But the Cray was outside my network. Isolated from the central processor that ran the joint. Not risking this warm and cozy for some wombat, digi-bomb horseshit. I knew one redoubt that was slagged by a military junta who broke their defenses with some basic hacker crack. Silly way to die. Me, they couldn’t nuke me out of this place. Need to remove a few cubic kilometers of mountain just to get to my defenses.
    Three packets of turkey medley and half a liter of distilled water and I was ready to begin the restore. I slid the connector cable into the pelvic coupling and triggered the pseudo-intelligence to begin the capture.
    I had plenty of space in the banks, of course. The sum of human memory didn’t take much room. Most of the personality tweaks were chemical keys to quantum lock-boxes stored in the individual units. For those like Gramps or Mom, we tapped our pseudo-Dyson spheres we used to power the world. Each surviving compound had access to a sphere, we just had no control over them. Unlike the theory of building a world around a sun, we built a super-magnet around a black hole. Much smaller, and damn nearly infinite in power.
    While Dad was downloading onto the Cray, I panned through the security views. I’d found Dad busted and left for dead out near Pasco, Washington. He’d insisted that we could score some low grade radiation slag from the old Hanford site, but I told him it had been moved to Yucca Mountain long ago.
    The fact that he hadn’t been salvaged for the titanium told me it wasn’t one of the scavenger crews out of Seattle. Rather, I pegged it for the Portland gynocentric collective. Wanted nothing to do with a man, even if it was a robot who thought he was a man.
    I’d exchanged data with some of those girls a year ago, was hoping to do a DNA swap, maybe even trade some pre-war salvage for a wife. Not that I ever had a real chance, but the thought of sleeping with another human being had a certain appeal. I could juice up another clone, but I could never live with myself again.
    I scanned the open frequencies looking for anyone who might have survived out there, anyone who might want to meet a three-hundred-year-old virgin.
    Musta been the tryptophan; before I’d finished scanning Arizona, I’d fallen asleep.
    I dreamed of blue skies and green fields. Clean air as far as you could see, with animals and wind and rain falling from the sky.
    I woke screaming. I remember those days from my first childhood, before we killed the world. But I’d been underground so long, the thought of all that...nature...just gives me the creeps.
    I checked the download monitor and felt