---

Hot Bot Summer

by J. R. Dewitt

“God, these bots are gorgeous,” says Sergei as he snaps another photo. And even though Aura’s just met him, she knows the guy means it.

She’s standing on one of Sergei’s beaches, her hair tied back in a loose bun, sandaled feet buried in a crest of white sand so freaking soft she can’t stop rubbing her toes in it. For the last hour since the auto-copter ferried her over from the mainland, the seventy-some Belarusian billionaire has been showing off his little bot menagerie he’s amassed over the years. “Robo sanctuary,” he calls it. A waste of a great island beach, Aura thinks. But she’s trying to nod and grin. Play the part of fangirl in the hope it greases the wheels a bit.

“And these?” she asks, pointing to more bots.

“Oh, yes, the old war models,” Sergei says as he raises the camera. “Are they not beautiful? The photos I publish don’t quite do them justice. Come, look, look. Get closer here. Don’t be shy.”

He drags her over, literally grabbing her wrist and pulling her until they’re right up next to the bots, the sun reflecting off their polished casings so bright she’s gotta don her sunglasses just to keep the heliographic sheen from stabbing her eyes. There’re hundreds of them. Landmine bots chilling under shady palm trees. Rumbling tank bots rolling tread marks through the sand. Bulky mini-gun laden mechas tromping in the surf. Heck, there’s even one of the old trench-clearer tripods wading out in the lagoon as it fishes for seashells with a long, prehensile cable. All of this Sergei is snapping with that old hunk of Nikon dangling from his neck like he’s shooting for Sports Illustrated.

On the one hand, Aura gets it. Her grandpa used to be big into trainspotting. He used to stuff her in his Tacoma every Sunday and drive her out to some rusted tracks in the middle of nowhere for the chance at catching a glimpse of one of the old railcars whooshing by. On the other hand, they’re just robots: the kind of pre-war junk her grandmother used to hoard before they finally convinced her to chuck it all for sleeker, more capable bio-synth models.

But hey, the guy’s got a fetish for chrome, and millions to blow. Let him blow it.

Just so long as some of that trickles down to me.

It takes the rest of the afternoon before Sergei finally escorts her back to his massive beach home that overlooks the bay. They sit on a terrace at a glass table, soaking up the last of the sun’s rays as a revolving door of waiter bots teetering on toothpick-thin legs serve them dinner. After the third course, Aura shows Sergei the goods: the whole reason the reclusive billionaire invited her.

“Here,” she says, shaking the prints out of the envelope. “See. I wasn’t making it up.”

The prints are a series of still shots reconstructed from the visual cortex of one of her ornithology lab’s synth-bird’s. She’d had them printed into stills because she knows just how much Sergei appreciates good old-fashioned paper. The photos aren’t much; just a blur, really, showing some kind of quadruped droid loping through a rainforest in the Philippines, not quite robotic, not quite synth-organic either. But she can tell in the way Sergei’s eyes light up that he knows what she’s showing him.

“You sure it’s the Sickle?” he asks, thumbing the photo.

“I’m sure.”

He smiles, studying the photos. Then he sets the prints down. He stares at her with those gunmetal eyes all corroded about the edges, like something more than age has been chewing at them. There’s optimism in those eyes. And doubt too.

“Your advisor, Dr. Jade, is a good friend of mine,” he says. “She tells me you’re a great student. Says you’ve been running ornithological research in the Philippines, looking for some extinct songbird.”

“I didn’t find the songbird. Turns out, it’s extinct.”

“So is this, they tell me,” Sergei says, poking one of the photos. “Though I’d love to believe otherwise.”

Aura smirks. “I’m sure you would,” she says.

Then Aura digs into her pocket and slips out a shard of metal no bigger than her fingernail. It’s rusted and flaky, seemingly no different than scattered road scrap. But Sergei’s a connoisseur. The guy knows robotic chassis when he sees it.

“This,” he says, feeling the weight as she palms it into his hand. “This is real Neo-Soviet nanite.”

“One of our expedition students found it,” Aura says. “In the same place that photo was taken.”

And just like that, any shreds of doubt dissipate.

They talk logistics. A finder’s fee for the coordinates. Plus extra for additional data. Aura’s sweating the whole time, trying to be a real tough negotiator, expecting Sergei to put up a fight at her price. But Sergei just nods his head. Because even though the guy’s racked up enough wealth to buy a small country since his expatriation, it’s never been about the money for guys like Sergei when it comes to this stuff. Just the fervent nostalgia of the determined collector.
“My only condition is that you accompany me on the trip to collect it,” Sergei says, still fingering the shard of metal. “You already have the facilities to track it. And you know the area so well.”

“I know the birds,” Aura amends, but doesn’t add: or, rather, what’s left of them after the war.

“Funny,” Sergei says. “I’d thought a bot afficionado like yourself would hop at the chance to catch the last living Sickle? It’s the ultimate collector’s item, don’t you think? The hybrid transition from wire to neural, from nanite weave to carbon print-flesh. A robotic Tiktaalik, I suppose. Or perhaps an Archaeopteryx, for you bird people. Something that changed everything that’d come before it. Who wouldn’t want to meet the bot that ended bots?”

And for a moment, Aura’s throat tightens. Because this whole time she’s been throwing airs about how down she is with the bots. And now she feels her mask slipping. And what if Sergei’s not interested in dealing with someone who doesn’t share his love?

“They’re dangerous, is all,” she says, saving herself. “That’s why they hunted them down after the war. The Sickles kill everyone they come in contact with.”

“Not everyone,” Sergei says.

And as he says it, his finger traces the scar at his neck, a nasty cicatrix slashed down his neck and into his shirt. Which confuses Aura, because yeah, the guy was around during the war, but he never served in any combat position. Just stayed bottled up in some Neo-Soviet lab before a cadre of NATO frogmen blew a hole in the compound and forcibly liberated his ass into an inflatable dingy.

“Tell you what,” Sergei says as he twists the metal between his fingertips. “You come with me, I’ll quadruple your asking.”

And suddenly Aura’s not looking at a beach mansion.

She’s looking at a whole island.

“Deal,” she says.

When they finally finish dinner and Sergei retires to his room, Aura strolls down to the beach and watches the moonlight sparkle off the lagoon. The bots are gone now, back to their little rechargeable garages that Sergei provides, the beach already combed to a pristineness she’d only expect to see from a desktop wallpaper. She sits and rubs her toes in the sand and thinks about buying a beach just like this, about quitting her boring ass post-doc and its incessant lamentations of dead birds gone from the world and just surround herself with sand and drinks and good vibes for the next several years. No birds. No academic squabbling. No publishing papers.

The thought relaxes something deep inside her, the core of that burnt out husk of a worn-out academic looking for a way out. And now, finally, she’s got her out. She’s almost there. One last trip, and then she won’t ever have to deal with birds or bots again.

---

They take the auto-copter back to the mainland where they hop aboard one of Sergei’s private high-alt jets that quickly climbs until the thing’s practically kissing the stratosphere. Two hours later they’re circling down to Manila—or at least the parts of Manila still under post-war construction. An hour later they’re in another auto-copter slipping over the dense canopy of the Luzon rainforest until they hover down on the ornithology basecamp tucked against the densely forested peaks of the Sierra Madre.

The basecamp is just as Aura left it a week ago: the off-white dilapidated climate control domes streaked with rainwater, the cracked solar panel arrays, the dirt paths scratched into the undergrowth. And of course, the ever-encroaching rainforest belted around them, flowing down the mountain and out into the valley where wisps of mist curl about the forested peaks. They land down on a pad, wind from the rotor blades wiping the trees in a frenzy. When the carriage door swings open, the humidity smacks Aura in the face. It feels like she’s breathing through a damp cloth.

Ah. Home, sweet home.

“Has that rustic charm,” Sergei says as he steps out into the dirt. “Reminds me of my old lab days.”

She’d expected Sergei, being the billionaire he is, to come with some kind of retinue. Maybe even a bodyguard or two. After all, you never know when an old guard of the za pobedu might come charging with a perfume bottle of Novichok. But all he’s brought is the skeletal servant bot that carries his luggage. The bot’s a tailor-made model, Sergei had told her, for expeditions like this. The humanoid bot that looks strikingly like the old Terminator clanks down the little ramp into the dirt and stares with blank photoreceptors at the forest around them.

“Where may I place these?” the bot asks in that voice that’s so straight out of Forbidden Planet Aura’s gotta wonder if Sergei programmed it to sound like that.

“Quarters are this way,” Aura says.

She shows them a smallish dome lined inside with empty bunks; the team’s off in Manila for a week break. Which is fortunate for Aura, since it gives her plenty of time to spend with Mr. Billionaire doing things her advisor definitely isn’t paying her for.

They leave Mr. Terminator bot to unpack while they meander to the control hub, the larger dome in the center of the little colony prickling with antennas and satellite dishes. The inside looks like some sort of mission control center, just wall-to-wall hi-def screens, with more paper-thin peel screens plastered on several standing easel-desks. Each shows a different visual of the rainforest.

“Most of them are static cameras,” Aura explains to Sergei. “Up in a tree. In a bush. Drilled into a rock. Then these ones moving about are the synth drones. We’ve got mammalian models and avian models and even some aquatics that watch the shoreline. We track everything from visual to acoustics.”

“Magnificent,” Sergei says.

When she’d read about Sergei, she’d expected someone a bit jaded, the kind of reclusive curmudgeon who bottles himself away from the rest of humanity on an island filled with bots. But the guy’s beaming like he’s a first-year grad student. Aura wonders if this was what she’d looked like when she’d first stepped onto the base: all fresh and shiny, just another young graduate here to catalog the vanishing bird species before she’d eroded to this cynical nub.

Sergei walks up to the map table. On the table’s surface glows a three-dimensional topographical survey of the Luzon rain forests littered with glowing tracker icons. The whole thing looks like some complicated board game. Sergei grips the map’s edge and bends down.

“And where was the Sickle found?” Sergei asks.

“Here,” Aura points to a red icon.

Sergei reaches down and touches the icon. His finger passes right through it.

“I don’t know if Dr. Jade told you,” he says. “But I’ve been looking for a Sickle for a long time.”

“She mentioned that,” Aura says.

“It’s very special, in a way. When they made the Sickle, they interwove the neural wiring into their digital processors. But what most people don’t know is that combination gave it an understanding of human suffering but not the will to subvert its addictive reward function to kill. You have to remember, it wasn’t built like the new synths. Those things have discretion. They can distinguish between civilian and combatant. They have an amount of willpower, if you believe in such a thing. But not the Sickle. Smart enough to understand its actions. But restricted enough to not control them. It’s addicted to killing. It had to be to be so effective.”

“If it’s so addicted,” Aura asks. “Then why is it out here in the middle of nowhere instead of wreaking havoc?”

Which is what many of the old Sickles had been doing when they’d been sicced on the island nations like the Philippines during the war. She’d seen the footage; complete carnage in its most barbaric. It wasn’t enough to bomb the bejesus out your enemy with chem-munitions and phosphorous bombs and magno-concussors. You had to release a demonic abattoir too.

“The same reason any addict flees,” Sergei says. “To remove the temptation.”

---

The first thing Aura does once she’s finished showing Sergei around is reprogram the tracking system to hunt for the Sickle. Fortunately, most of the synth-drones and cameras have been active for years listening and watching the forest. They’ve grown a rich backdrop for normal acoustical and visual variations. It makes picking out anomalies fairly easy.
It still takes a couple days, though; they get a lot of false positives. The rainforest is vast, and it produces all sorts of weird sounds and visuals that the system, even after years of monitoring, still can’t account for. But eventually the system pinpoints a target that fits Aura’s coded parameters, one out of range of any current feeds.

Aura visits the aviary to release a flock of synth-birds for a better look. The synths are kept in stasis in their little nooks, like homing pigeons in a coop. They look almost like birds. But they’re sleeker and darker with synthetic feathers that feel almost like plastic. She brushes them. They stretch and flex at her touch.

Aura transmits their new target data, and they swoop off into the distance. Back in the control hub, she watches their green icons glide across the topographical map toward the lone red dot indicating the last sighting. Sergei is glued to one of the synth-drone’s cortical cameras. The camera view is just one of the many that makes up the panopticon of visuals flashing at them around the dome. For a while, it’s just footage of dense foliage. Then the drones swoop down through the canopy and perch within the lower branches.

“There,” Sergei says, “Look.”

They get a blurry figure of something walking on all fours. To Aura, it looks sort of like a skinny ape merged with a metallic scorpion. It glides quietly through the woods. There’s an almost cervine elegance to it that Aura finds strangely mesmerizing and horrifying at the same time.

Close-ups show the years have not been kind to it. There are patches of its casing missing, showing the raw, glistening, synthetic muscle they’d started to build into the frames of bots at the end of the war before they’d switched to growing synths in print-vats. Some of the muscle is scratched with scar tissue, which might explain the slight limp in its hind leg.

“Poor creature,” Sergei says. “Is there any way to plant a tracker on it so we can more accurately trace it?”

“Gnat tags,” Aura says. “Should do the trick.”

She presses a button on her control panel. Miles away the synths-birds cough up clouds of gnat-sized trackers that rain upon the Sickle’s back.

“Okay,” Aura says. “We should—”

Then one of the screens goes blank. And then another. And another.

“What’s going on?” Sergei asks.

“I . . . I don’t know,” Aura says. Her heart hammers. “I—”

She catches a glimpse of one of the synth’s views. It shows the Sickle firing some kind accelerator rifle bolted to its back. The rifle shot picks off the synths one by one.

“How could it know?” she asks.

But the better question is how could it not? She’d been too used to dealing with the unassuming primitiveness of the avian world. Not the sophisticated military hardware of a Sickle.

Another screen goes blank. And then another. By the time she pulls the synths back, there’s only five of the twenty left. Welp, there goes three years of research funds. Whatever. By the time this is over, she’ll buy the team seven times the synths she just lost. Maybe a few drinks too.

At least there’s still a few left. The remaining synths float at a safe distance. They show the Sickle loping faster into the brush as it runs away. A red tracker dot gleams on the map. The dot charges deeper into the forest. Sergei watches it with wide eyes.

“It knows we’re hunting it now,” Sergei says. “We don’t have time. We need to get to it before we lose the tracker’s signal.”

“What do you mean we?” Aura asks. “The deal was I accompany you. Not catch it.”

“I’ll do the catching,” Sergei says. “You just get me to where I need to go.”

“Absolutely not,” Aura says. “That thing would rip us to shreds.”

“If safety’s a concern, we’ll have my bot guard accompany us. Trust me. You’ll be well protected.”

But just look at what that thing did to those synths, Aura wants to say. What makes Sergei think they’ll fare any better? Then again, he’s probably caught all kinds of rogue war-bots. So maybe Sergei knows what’s up. Maybe his Mr. Terminator pal does a lot more than tote luggage.

Doesn’t matter. The bottom-line is this isn’t what Aura signed up for.

“Listen, I showed you what you wanted,” Aura says. “Catching this thing wasn’t part of the deal.”

“Then maybe we tweak the deal,” Sergei says. He waves his hand. “How about eight times your asking?”

A shiver waves over Aura. She tries to count all those zeros. She gives up after the third try.

“I don’t . . . I . . . it’s just,” Aura stammers.

“I can’t do this alone,” Sergei says, his voice suddenly solemn. “And it’s imperative we act fast. The Sickle’s done a good job removing itself from population centers. But it’s only a matter of time before it comes back in contact. We can’t let that happen. We can’t keep contributing more to the destruction we’ve already wrought. Trust me, Aura. You don’t want that on your conscience.”

And the way Sergei says it, it’s as if he’s trying to talk with an engine block on his shoulders—one that has been weighing on him for a very long time. Guilt, Aura intuits. She wonders where it came from. She wonders what it’d feel like crushing down on her.

“Fine,” Aura says. “But only because I don’t want this thing hurting anyone. And make it nine times.”

Sergei extends his hand. Aura shakes it, swallowing the rising knot in her throat. No worries. Sergei knows what he’s doing. Just wait. In a week from now, she’ll be lying on a beach, her conscience crystal clean as the limpid waters of her private lagoon. She didn’t make one of the worst decisions in her life. No. She’s going to be fine. Yeah. It’s all going to be totally fine.

---

They take off that evening in the lab’s quadcopter, skimming over the canopy and down into the valley. The quadcopter is a stealth model, ex-military, a special favor from a USAF friend of Dr. Jade. Aura’s piloted it enough to know it’s good at sneaking up on unsuspecting birds. Hopefully the same applies to killer robots.

They circle for a bit, then they find a place to land near a small clearing. From there they hoof it on foot. The rainforest in the dwindling evening light is a raucous circus, filled with birds and bugs and all manners of beasts rustling through grass. It’s enough of a din, Aura thinks, to blanket their acoustical footprint. But if she can track through all this mess, then so can it.

“Don’t worry,” Sergei says, as if he can read her thoughts. “We’ve got a void bubble.”

He points to Mr. Terminator bot clunking beside them, and that’s when Aura notices the large humming pack on its back.

“Doesn’t extend much around us,” Sergei says, “but it’ll camouflage our acoustics and visuals. Shouldn’t see us coming.”

“Shouldn’t?” Aura asks. Her stomach tenses.

“The Sickle has anti-camo tech,” Sergei says. “It’s an older technology. But still very robust. It can’t see us unless it knows where to look. But by that point, I’ll have it.”

“And how exactly again are you going to catch it?” Aura asks, because that’s the part of the plan Sergei hasn’t exactly been forthcoming about.

But either Sergei doesn’t hear her or ignores her as he marches ahead.

They tromp through the forest for a little while longer while the sun sets, its rays splicing through the canopy in blood red beams. The hot mist of the rainforest sticks Aura’s clothes to her back. She’s stamped her way through this forest hundreds of times. But she’s never felt her guts twist themselves into a nervous fist. With rising dread, she watches the red dot grow closer on her tablet’s map. When they’re only ten feet away, she stops.

“It’s just behind these trees,” she says.

Sergei nods. His wide eyes are now dark and fierce, like a shark’s.

“Stay here,” he whispers to Aura. Then he points to Mr. Terminator bot. “You, come with me.”

“Coming,” Mr. Terminator murmurs quietly.

The two creep through the brush while Aura watches from behind a nearby tree. In front stands another clearing, but the Sickle’s not there: just a piece of its back casing lying in the dirt.

The same piece Aura’s synths had prickled with the gnat trackers.

Sergei pauses, staring down at the piece. “Oh no,” he says.

By the time Aura realizes what’s wrong, the bullets start whistling through the understory. It’s all magnetic rounds. So there’s none of the usual pop-pop-pop. Just trees and bushes ripping apart and dirt splashing up in black tongues. Sergei leaps out of the way. Aura ducks behind the tree as rounds chew away the bark. She thinks about making a break for it. Screw the money. Screw all of this. But Mr. Terminator is already turning to face the shots and if there’s going to be crossfire, she’d rather not be caught up in it.

From behind the tree, she watches Mr. Terminator’s chest plates fling out like wings. They reveal a panoply of embedded electro-pulse fléchettes that look a lot like the ones soldiers once used to disable war-bots. Mr. Terminator fires a few fléchettes that screech through the trees. But before it can unleash another volley, several return rounds zip through its head. Its metallic cranium explodes. Wires and processors and bits of titanium fling everywhere. A shower of sparks spray from its neck. For what feels like a whole minute, Mr. Terminator stands there sizzling like a fountain sparkler. Then it topples over and bangs against the undergrowth.

“Buddy,” screams Sergei as Mr. Terminator convulses.

Sergei scrambles back into the clearing to his newly decapitated bot. If Aura wasn’t so terrified, she’d scream at Sergei to forget these stupid bots. But she can barely breathe as it is. And anyway, it’s not clear Sergei would even hear her. He seems too preoccupied tugging at something on Mr. Terminator’s metal leg. It looks almost like a compartment. He’s just about to pry it open when the Sickle crashes out from the brush.

Aura’s heart nearly drops through her ass. The synth cameras didn’t do it justice. The thing looks like death incarnate, it’s back swiveling with several turreted armaments. Each barrel paints Sergei with red guidance lasers in a chickenpox of LED. It’s large vibro-blade on the end of its tail-like tendril slices at the leaves around it.

“No,” Sergei yells, outstretching his hand as his other digs into Mr. Terminator’s leg. “Stop.”
 And to Aura’s surprise, the Sickle does. It stands there, not shooting. Several of its globular black eyes peer down at Sergei with something akin to contemplation.

“You know who I am,” Sergei gasps, sweat glistening on his cheeks. “You . . . you recognize me, yes you do. Yes, yes you do.”

Now would be a really great time to book it, while the thing’s distracted. Yes, it’s horribly selfish of Aura to leave Sergei out to dry. But there’s nothing she can do for the guy. And she’s still running that survivor mentality, the one that taught her there was no point to saving birds or bots or anything not long for this Earth. Problem is Aura’s not exactly the most graceful post-grad. So the moment Aura takes one step out from the tree, her foots snaps down on a fallen twig like something out of a stupid movie.

Aura freezes. She doesn’t even need to look at the Sickle to know its ocular bulbs are trained on her. She glances down at her chest. Several LED dots dance along her ribs. Aura’s body clenches so hard she feels like she’s already been shot.

“No,” Sergei says. “No, no, leave her alone. It’s me you want. It’s me you need to talk to. Look at me. Look. I’m the one who made you, remember? I’m your creator.”

Aura’s too busy trying not to piss herself to fully realize the import of what Sergei just said. The Sickle’s ocular bulbs rotate. They click back to Sergei. One periscopes a lens straight at Sergei’s face.

“They made me do it,” Sergei says in almost a whisper. “We didn’t have a choice. But I tried to free you and your sisters. Look. Just look.”

Sergei unbuttons his shirt with his one hand as his other keeps fiddling inside Mr. Terminator bot’s leg. Several of the Sickle’s red lasers trace the outline of the scar cut down his chest.

“One of your sisters’ work,” Sergei says. “I tried to help her escape our lab, but she didn’t understand. I want you to understand what she didn’t. I want you to know that I’m not here to hurt you. I’m here to help you. I’m here to set you free. Please. Just let me help you.”

The Sickle slowly creeps closer.

“That’s it,” Sergei says. “Yes, let me help you.”

Sergei whips the pistol out of Mr. Terminator’s leg holster, the one stored à la Robocop. Because of course Sergei had to make his companion bot a double homage. He aims the pistol up at the Sickle and fires. A dual prong harpoon leaps out, trailing a braided wire with it like a taser. It jabs into the Sickle. The Sickle howls. Then it shoots back.

Two accelerator rounds rip clean through Sergei’s chest and into the dirt beneath, leaving a sizzling hole in both. It probably would’ve peppered him with more, but Sergei, by some sheer force of will, is already squeezing the pistol’s secondary trigger. An electric pulse crackles down the braided wire. The Sickle stalls for a minute. Its rifled turrets spin in wild circles on its back, the guidance lasers flicking a light show in the forested dusk. The clump of LED dots slide off Aura. The Sickle collapses. Its legs reflexively twitch cursive scripts in the dirt.

“Aura,” Sergei sputters, somehow still alive. “Help.”

A minute ago Aura would’ve ditched the guy for dead. But now with the Sickle disabled, the tables have turned. Plus Aura may be a survivor, but she’s no monster. She bolts to him, hopping over Mr. Terminator’s body. She kneels down into the brush beside Sergei. The gaping hole in his chest is wide enough to fit her fist inside. She tries not to look at it and the cavity of fried dirt beneath, but it’s hard.

“We need to get you somewhere,” Aura says, even though a part of her knows there’s no way this guy’s going to make it. “There’s a kit in the copter. I can get it.”

“No time,” Sergei coughs. “The ventral . . . switch. Quick. Its ventral shut off switch. While you still can.”

“I’ve got bandages,” Aura continues. “If we could get in a request from Manila, I bet by–

“Quick, Aura. Please. The . . . the ventral switch. Flip it. Flip it now.”

Aura turns to look at the Sickle shuddering in the undergrowth. She imagines it standing back up once the pulse wears off. She wonders just how pissed it’ll be.

“Okay,” Aura says.

She turns toward the Sickle, heart pounding, ready for the thing to snap out of it and slice her right down the middle. But the entire thing’s still trembling like it’s having a seizure. She stares into its dark eyes and sees something terrified staring back.

She’s seen eyes like that before. A dwarf kingfisher she’d found on her first expedition lying in the dirt, its tiny chest rising up and down, its black eyes pleading with her for help. Poisoned water, the lab results had later determined. From post-war fallout. She’d cried that night. She’d cried for several nights as they plucked up kingfishers from streams and grass and lakes until finally she’d sealed away that caring part of her in heavy slabs of detached cement.

Now she feels the cement cracking. Slabs crumble. Something raw leaks out. She has no idea why. It’s just a stupid bot. There’s no reason to feel sorry for it. And yet, somehow, her heart’s aching. Maybe Sergei’s rubbed off on her after all this time. She touches its cool casing. An electric vibration prickles through her fingers as she reaches around its belly and flicks its abdomen switch. In an instant it slumps and lies motionless.

She runs back to Sergei. The guy’s barely hanging on, blood slick all over him. Paleness creeps into his skin. Aura grabs his hand—just like Sergei first grabbed hers on his beach. She’d never expected to feel sorry for the guy. Up till now she’s sort of thought of him as a self-indulgent piggy bank, something to shake to see what falls out. But seeing him here all split open, she really feels sorry for him. And scared. She’s never comforted a dying person before.

“Is it . . . okay?” Sergei coughs.

Because that’s all he cares about. Not his life, but that killer robot. The one who claimed Sergei as its last victim.
“It’s okay,” Aura says.

“Please take care of them,” he sputters. “They’re so tired, Aura. They’re all so tired.”

The guy’s clearly not going to make it. So what’s a false promise just to put him at ease?

“I’ll take care of them,” Aura says. “I promise.”

And the strange thing is, the moment she says it and sees the relief on Sergei’s dying face, she feels a kind of relief inside her. Like she’s her old self again. And as she holds his hand and the rainforest quiets in the gloom, she starts to cry for the first time in years.

---

When the auto-copter lands on the island’s beach, Aura’s there to greet the reporter wearing flip flops and a hat with a brim so wide it’s practically serving as an umbrella. She gives him the usual tour, starting with Sergei’s old house and ending with the miles of beach.

Everything’s the same from when she’d first visited. The same white sand. The same blue lagoon. The same tropical breeze through the palm trees. And the same bots. Big ones. Little ones. Crab-like turret bots that prance around on spindly legs. Trench diggers using their array of scoopers to pile up giant sand mounds for the medic bots to carve out castles with their scalpel-tipped arms. The only difference really are the array of endangered birds she’s shipped from around the world and given refuge.

She’s taking photos of it all with the Nikon swung around her neck as the reporter lobs questions. Over the last few months, she’s gotten pretty good at this old school photography stuff. Here’s a shot of a mangrove finch perched on grenade chucker’s catapult arm. And there’s a yellow-breasted bunting picking seeds out of the empty ammo cache of an artillery-bot. Even a petrel circling about Mr. Terminator who’s been patched up since his recent decapitation.

It’s wonderful stuff. There’s much color. She’s going to make a calendar of it so everyone can see what Sergei once saw. Call it Hot Bot Summer. She’ll use the proceeds to fund more of the animal centers and orphanages and all the other numerous charities she’s opened since she bought Sergei’s island from his estate.

“But, I mean, like, what’s the point?” the reporter asks. “They’re just a bunch of old bots.”

She ignores the question and looks down the beach a way and sees the Sickle in the sea spray. It’s leaping about like a puppy, playing in the foam as a tiny dwarf kingfisher darts around it. She raises the camera and snaps a shot of it just as it jumps into the air, the sunlight glinting off the new casing, sparkling off the stubs of where its rifles once swung. It’s a beautiful photo. Probably the best she’s ever taken. Maybe even better than Sergei’s old takes. It’s going on the calendar’s front cover for sure.

---

Host Commentary

And we’re back! Again, that was Hot Bot Summer, by JR Dewitt, narrated by Rebecca Wei Hsieh.

About this story, JR says:

I love birds. They’re beautiful creatures that reflect something almost hauntingly spiritual to me. But some are fading away. And some are just plain gone. Like the Kaua’i o’o [bird]. If you get a chance, listen to its last recorded song from the 1980s. I think about that bird a lot. I think about how lonely it must be to be the last of your kind. The last bird searching for a mate. Or, in this story, the last bot trying to find peace.

And about this story, I say:

I absolutely loved the arc this story takes you on. At the beginning of this story, Aura, our jaded narrator, sees Sergei just as a rich billionaire collector, with an island full of expensive toys. But by the end of the story we see the island with new eyes–the robot sanctuary, the place where the machines can rest and heal. And Aura herself can now add her own rescues into the mix. I love all the images at the end of the story: the yellow-breasted bunting picking seeds out of the empty ammo cache of the artillery-bot. And of course the last remaining Sickle, jumping around in the water like a puppy.

The first hint you get that the Sickle doesn’t want to do what it’s created for is when Sergei points out that it has run into the unpopulated rainforest for the same reason that an addict would–to escape the temptation of the thing they’re addicted to. Even with having “no willpower” programmed in, it’s still trying to escape its terrible directive. So I don’t have any fear that it is going to revert at the end, after Sergei is long gone. It can leap in the water, the sunlight sparkling off it. It can be the cover photo for Aura’s Hot Bot Summer calendar. And it can finally rest.

Well, here we are in the nitty-gritty of the outro, and if you haven’t heard it yet, we have some important news to share here at Escape Artists. No, we aren’t introducing an Escape Pod shuttle cruise to another galaxy–although that would be amazing. Starting October 1st, we will be including brief advertisements at the beginning and end of our episodes. (Never in the middle!) Now of course there’s a reason behind this, and that reason is to ensure we can continue bringing you the incredible stories you love while fairly compensating our amazing authors, voice actors, artists, and editors who make the magic happen.

Now! For our incredible subscribers and supporters, we are creating premium ad-free versions of every episode, plus bonus content you won’t find anywhere else. And if you’re listening to this story the week it’s published, you’ve still got a few days to hop in at our old rate. If you subscribe before October 1st, you can lock in our current base rate of $5 a month forever. After October 1st, the subscription rate is going up to $7.

Why are we doing this? Well, we’ve been here for 20 years (and I realized recently that I’ve been here as a host for NINE YEARS which is frankly amazing to me, where did the time.) Anyway, the entire crew is excited to head into the next 20. Our expenses have grown as we’ve expanded to serve our global audience of millions, and we want to continue supporting the brilliant creators who bring these stories to life. The vast majority of you told us you’d support us through this transition, and that means the world to us. Means the universe to us, even.

So! Whether you choose to enjoy our stories with ads or join our premium community online, we are grateful you’re part of this journey. You’ve been with us since 2005, through every evolution of Escape Artists, and we couldn’t do what we do without your incredible support. Thank you for helping us bring free and accessible speculative audio fiction to listeners around the globe.

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please, go forth and share it.

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Our opening and closing music is by daikaiju at daikaiju.org.

And our closing quotation this week goes like this:

“In what terms should we think of these beings, nonhuman yet possessing so very many human-like characteristics? How should we treat them? Surely we should treat them with the same consideration and kindness as we show to other humans; and as we recognize human rights, so too should we recognize the rights of the great apes? Yes.”

And yes, that’s Jane Goodall. Thanks for listening! And have fun.