There’s a fly downstairs crawling all over my electric kettle, and you don’t believe me when I say I wish I had a butcher’s knife hanging from my belt, just itching to stab into the ace up my sleeve. Instant coffee granules have left a film on my teeth—I fought for the crunch despite salivating like I remembered food. You take my good spoon saying you’ll keep it safe. I tell you to take a look around, pointing with my shaking limbs, and we march straight out into the ghost-ridden streets where some utopian dimension has come to meet us.

You tell me you don’t see it, that the world through my phone has more legitimacy than the dead coming back. Greedy, greedy. And you don’t use my name when you speak to me. My name is Annie. Over and over, I say it again.

The Director keeps calling.

“Enough!” I snap. The toilets at every park overflow with hardened waste. It’s the only place I can get some privacy.

“You are not a failure,” he says, and I deflate. The same exchange once a day, never at the same time. One thousand four hundred forty minutes, eighty-six thousand four hundred seconds. By the time he stops, the current interglacial will be over.

“I’m finding the others,” I say, a hitch in “finding” despite the clenched fist.

“Will you let me stay on the line?”

“No. Better luck tomorrow, Director.”

I hang up and breathe in the faded stink. You are outside, and you don’t see the Auric cat sniffing at your feet, the Auric elders practicing tai chi. You’re so snide when you ask, Do you even remember what they look like? You help me start the neighbor’s minivan, anyway.

We abandon the electric kettle because it was never mine in the first place. I catch a glimpse of an Auric child, soft-cheeked and dark-haired, jumping on the couch as I shut the apartment door, plumes of dust waving me off.

We abandon the city again.

The fact is—by the time I got here, there was no one left to be afraid. And all I’d found was you, the ping-ping-pings like the cattle prods the Director had once stuck into the notches beneath our kneecaps for insubordination. Too late that afternoon, in the alley between the smoke shop and the clinic, my fingers formed into guns. You shot first. I am still waiting for an apology about the chip on my shoulder.

Of course, I remember what they look like. Our cohort and our birthplace in the assembly line. Our training and our mischief. Circle time: List one worry and one thing you’re looking forward to. Bullets out of belly buttons, armored backs colliding. No touching allowed. Testing the reach. Our malfunctioning, twitching bodies writhing from the punishment. Workarounds in sharing cups and utensils. Licking our dodgeballs before we threw them.

Would you like me to remind you how we saved the plastic wrap just so we could hold hands and marvel at the hollows beneath our eyes? I guess there’s no need to dig into old wounds, now.

I want to ask where you’ve been and when you decided to go down the same path as me. I clutch at the steering wheel instead while you play dead in the back beneath the sunroof. I wish I had polished more rocks for ammo. I wish I could meet you blow for blow.

The Aurics thin out by the time we reach the hydroponic farms. I pull over and tell you to get up and to give me back my good spoon, and you dangle it above your head until we’re rolling in the dirt, scrabbling. We don’t stop until the silver is a knot of hurt feelings lying six feet away.

I’m vibrating with fury. My fingers form into guns, aim, and I’ll do it, on fucking Director Dean’s life, I’ll shoot. You limp over, turning your back, and dust off my good spoon. You swallow it without fluid and dispense out five rough pellets from your belly button. You throw them at my feet with a savage grin.

Use ’em wisely.

The pellets are foreign objects within my body, the clink-clink-clinks like the strikes of a ball-peen hammer. I swallow my hatred, my bitterness, my grief. We head over to the farmhouse where there’s no pie cooling on the windowsill, no dog guarding its door. Wholly ordinary. I knock.

We hear wheezing, labored breaths, shuffling footsteps until the door is thrown open. You seize the man before he seizes you. He holds his hands out, eyes insane with the knowledge that opportunity has arrived at last on his porch. He begs with algae and rotted lettuce beneath his fingernails. He says his wife’s with the Aurics. He takes her photo out of his pocket, shoves it at me and you, asking if we saw her in the city.

You tell him his wife is dead and that there are no such things as Aurics. Undeterred, he turns his hope onto me, and I ask when he last saw someone like you and me. Where were they headed? Then I tell him his wife is dead and that there are no such things as Aurics.

He fights, then, with spit and small, bony fists. Violence with every word and every swing. I know what he’s doing, and I give it to him.

My fingers form into guns as the Director calls to tell me I’m not a failure. I let him stay on the line for this.

After, we check on the greenhouses. Amidst rows of deep water culture, you tell me the wheat fields from our childhood were a thousand times prettier. I tell you I prefer rocks over silver. You smile and retrieve the pellets crowned into the man’s head and rinse them off beside the algae-infested roots. I take them before we let him splash through the polystyrene rafts and into the vegetation.

It’s sunset by the time we get back to the car. Shall I pretend it’s just rays reflecting off the glazing when I look back? You stare, trying for the first time to see what I see.

It’s a man going to find his wife. It’s you and I going to find the others because we were losing well before we were ever deployed. Our enemies were imagined, theorized into existence by exponential human minds. Wires, electricity, metal. Intelligence. Have you developed a fear of sparks, of lightning?

We roared out of that armory, children of the horizon, proxies for the leftover nations, former superpowers. I killed four hundred soldier bots all vying for the same thing before I realized there was no such thing as anti-war if our invention was the solution. I remember the scent of bread and finding the human encampment near the river delta, the woman who stepped forward, the child in her skirts, how they reached out.

I remind myself that my name is Annie.

I hesitate. Maybe you should find a name for yourself, too.

But you just shake your head like, C’mon. You know why they made us this way. Don’t you ever wonder whose brain they gave you?

The other warbots had been automatically decommissioned as soon as the variables changed. Their human handlers, their Director Deans—had all gone home to their families the second the disappearances began. Shenzhen, Chennai, Dallas. Where would it hit next? Who was it targeting? Inglewood, Bath, Damascus. On and on. Something was snatching the mammals.

I couldn’t have saved that human encampment even if I tried.

Anyway.

You drive us north, and I take my turn in the back beneath the sunroof. You send me a ping-ping-ping after a few hours. I send one back after a few minutes because it still makes me jolt. We ignore how the resonance is between two instead of twelve.

Without the satellites, the world is quieter.

A thousand miles from the city, three hundred from the farm, we find Lovey in a truck stop diner flipping chairs onto tables. He’s worse for wear with the small of his back exposed, the gears inside all scratched up. I see tallies, groups of five, dug deep and reinforced with permanent marker scarring his arms and legs and wonder if he had always been tougher than the rest of us.

I can’t read your face, but you’re the one who calls out first. Lovey’s responding ping-ping-ping lags across distance and time, but then he turns and sees us there, and our old names come bubbling out with nostalgia’s precision, and I tell him that my name is Annie while you say nothing at all.

When we’ve settled into a cracked booth and I have a bag of expired coffee beans in my lap, you ask Lovey point-blank if he’s heard from the Director and if he has the same imaginary friends as me. I mutter that they’re not imaginary and that they’re not my friends. I try not to feel as though I am both the accuser and the accused when it comes to being broken.

Lovey is a negative on both. People aren’t passing through here anymore, and the Director had abandoned him a long time ago for surrendering a fight he could’ve won. I’ve let go of all that, now. He looks at it through liquor bottle lenses, a little cracked and a little ragged along the edges, the original fused quartz lost to scavengers.

Didn’t you like fighting? Even for just a second?

You are relentless, and I know that you are desperately trying to prove something. But Lovey is patient. He has let go of all of that, now.

Everyone wanted a champion. Then everyone needed a champion. For water rights, land rights, mineral rights. I loved to fight because that was what I was built for.

You snatch the napkin dispenser and hurl it at the menu board. You burden Lovey and I with the noise and destruction. Do you ever think about who’s picking up the pieces? Our special operations helped no one and stopped nothing. The Director should’ve turned us off. The entities are dead and so are the people.

This is the one thing I cannot give you. The man at the farm was a stranger, and a human. You, on the other hand, are one piece of a matching set, inseparable from me and us. If you want to die, you will not be dying alone. Do you have the stones to drag us toward the same fate?

The Director is waiting for us, I say.

The Director is a mammal who knows his time is up. Lovey, do you know that he atones every day?

You stop short of calling me pathetic for feeling reassured by the Director’s daily reminder. My supposed lack of failure. What do you think will happen if you call me Annie instead of Dear instead of you?

There is a lost love.

I crunch stale coffee beans and deposit the grounds on the table until it is a small mound of sandy labor. What I remember are half-pint cartons of clarified “chocolate milk” oil and mica-frost pudding snacks. Charades of humanity because our brains had to have come from somewhere—the evidence of its presets, indulgence of them.

Circle time. Lovey gets to the heart of the matter. List your worries. Both of you.

Greed. I have a vision of what is meant to happen, of us surrendering. The Director is only a means now, the way we were to him.

You are angry, but what else is new? I think we are aligned on this—worries of going on a fool’s errand, the other nine unrecoverable, the Director and I liars. I am his first child, after all. I was given a butcher’s knife a week before the rest of you. The keys I have yet to fashion.

If we want this to end, we have to see him. We have to find everyone.

And if they are in pieces?

We bring whatever is left.

Lovey leads us out back into the trees until we are covered by birds high in the canopy. The calls are overwhelmingly loud, cacophony of an impermeable society. I catch a glimpse of an Auric rabbit rushing underfoot, an Auric deer glowing between the trees. Why mammals? The fur, the milk. Nourishment for what, for who? It is beyond me. It is beyond us.

We stop at the hollow of an old-growth marked with kitchen twine wrapped thickly around the trunk above the dark maw.

I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier. It didn’t seem like the right time, Lovey says. He goes into the tree and comes out with a white plastic bag, red THANK YOUs and PLEASE REUSE OR RECYCLE THIS BAG like a dream from another time. The semi-translucency makes for an awful coffin. Jumbled parts jut out, threaten to break through as though reaching—a compass, part of a chest plate, a gravity moisture sensor, laser rangefinder, a gunmetal hand relaxed open like a Lenten rose.

They were among the western drift.

The Director calls. The birds flit around up there.

“You are not a failure.”

“Thank you,” I say. “Your children are here.”

You bristle, I am no child of his. We ignore this because you’re here, aren’t you? You could’ve fucked off or aimed to kill and ended up doing neither.

Director Dean is tired. His voice flags a deathbed rattle. It is not just the thing snatching mammals, his people. He has been at this for far too long.

“Everyone?” he asks.

“No,” I say. “Three actives present. Remnants of three in hand. Six at large.”

“I see.”

Lovey speaks. He cradles the bag-coffin close. “Have you learned to accept defeat yet, sir?”

“Dear—”

“My name is Annie—”

“—you know what needs to be done. I leave it to you.”

He hangs up first. My fingers form into guns. I shoot at the sky. I try to miss but I don’t. The damage is done. The damage is done. The damage is done. The damage is done. The damage is done. The damage is done. The damage is done. The damage is done. The damage is done. The damage is done. The damage is done. The damage is done. The damage is done.

Director Dean is young, vital, back straight, eyes sharp. He already loves his human son more than us, his children, the Platinum Unit cohort of twelve. While we sit in a circle, the boy runs rings around us, fearless. His sweaty little handprints mark our heads.

“Duck, duck, duck, duck …”

He is soft-cheeked and dark-haired and gets bottled water, three square meals, and frozen dessert snacks once a week. He has shelter, clean clothes, and tutors who read him books. He can already perform simple repairs on exploration drones. Like us, he has never left the armory.

His mother, the doctor, shows us videos every other day and asks us to tell her what we see. She sharpens her pencil an average of three times an hour. She is probing. What do you mean by that? Elaborate. Look again. Where have you seen this before?

I sense a scuffing in the boy’s footsteps, the slightest slowing. My body tenses, my hand already poised to push me up—

“GOOSE!”

He smacks the top of my head, peals of laughter erupting out of him as he sprints away at top speed. This is a losing game. My arm is around his waist picking him up before he can even think about claiming my spot.

He wriggles around until I’m forced to hold him with two hands under the armpits, extended far enough that his legs can’t close the distance to kick me. He goes limp as soon as he realizes that his efforts have become useless.

“That’s not good for your neck,” I say. The doctor has also been teaching/re-teaching us human anatomy.

The kid twists his head around to look back at me. “Dad wants to talk to you,” he says, pointing up at the observation deck.

So he does.

I toss the kid into the middle of our circle for the others to take care of. He lands on his feet, knees in a deep bend, and demands to examine the sniper mechanics in Lovey’s forearm.

Director Dean is young, vital, back straight, eyes sharp. I’m asked to empty my ammo chambers before we’re left alone. Below, the circle halves for Red Rover, and it is all because of the kid and all for the kid that no one tries to ping me up here.

The Director secures a stenomask to his mouth and plugs the other end into a hidden jack by the border of my temporal plate. One second nothing, the next his saliva and swallow in my head. He puts in his earpiece for a fully shielded conversation.

Have you been paying attention, Dear?

My short-term memory banks process an average of forty-three exabytes an hour.

His voice is like a marimba; it has always been here; it lives in my head. Can you explain the sharp spikes that tend to take place between 0300 and 0400 hours?

Dreams, I say. But of course, it’s a lie. I don’t sleep. I go into sleep mode, which is something wholly different.

About?

The color blue.

Platinum Unit Twelve. Each born an hour apart. Activation chips slipped up through the nose. We each clutched at you with the clumsiness of a baby. Tell me why we only saw the sky once. Our secrecy and our privacy has always been an illusion. List one worry and one thing you’re looking forward to. I try to protect it anyway.

The Director has a contingency plan, and I take the knife. He is entrusting it to me, his first child, so we do not have to fear facing an irredeemable situation. I ask what counts as irredeemable. For once, he tells me plainly, When your efforts have become redundant and every path leads to hell.

Humanity is precious, I say. The southwestern conurbations are counting on us.

Humanity is precious, the Director affirms, but so are your dreams.

Troops of red and golden chanterelles, hedgehog mushrooms, black trumpet cluster near the vessels, the decommissioned warbots, as if in a swarm. Someone could’ve eaten those. The spores never left. Life finds a way.

It’s incredibly cold in the mountains, and we’re up seven thousand feet. The fact is—we were meant to be here, too. But somewhere along the way, I went to follow the scent of bread and you lost your will. Lovey is a different case.

Did people die because we didn’t get the gold?

The mammal-craving something that came and started taking changed everything. Overnight, it absolved our abandonment. It took away the witnesses. It took away the consequences. Our brains were relieved. Our programming was not.

As if it could be so easy.

The Director should’ve turned us off.

Lovey refuses to scavenge the decommissioned for parts. He says he’s grown used to the breeze passing through the small of his back. He can justify just about anything that’s been done to him.

We send out ping-ping-pings at staggered intervals without once bringing up the possibility that the other six have perished. Not even you have the audacity to be so callous. As we move toward the caves, trampling through troops and fairy rings, the thought keeps creeping in—between three points, it reverberates. Between the remaining pieces sitting in the white plastic bag, there is silence.

Eventually, Lovey needs to be carried, and it falls to you because the chip on my shoulder has only grown larger since the day you shot me.

Eventually, we pass the caves and reach the peak.

I call the Director with the bag cradled to my chest, you and Lovey’s eyes looking up, the knife poised over the artery.

“Get us out of here. We’re done.”

“You are not a failure.”

I look up into the color blue until I’m back at the beginning, standing in a field, white helicopters blotting out the sun, my hands full with other hands. I laugh.

“You’re so full of shit.”

Editor: Myna Chang

First Reader: Jean McConnell

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors