Usu (5 page)

Another half an hour of vehement charades later, Usu finally managed to situate both the girl and the whiteboard properly, an accomplishment nothing short of a miracle. She tilted her head, first diagonally, and then horizontally at the board. Then, as if trying to make out a psychological inkblot, she quizzically posited, “Three birdies and half a choo-choo?” Needless to say, this particular drawing was
not
of three birds and half a train, but rather a crudely constructed map of the local area, with helpful arrow markers that cunningly pointed to other arrow markers in case she got lost.

Usu shook his head and traced across the map from arrow to arrow, a feat requiring several bunny hops to cover the distance. He then finally tapped his paws rapidly on the destination Modbot was supposed to have gone, Old Francisco.

“You want to go there too? You and Shinybot can’t be… more than just friends can you? Rain doesn’t know how to be a rival!” said the clearly flustered girl before bonking herself on the crown of her head and winking. “Well, if Snow goes, I go. Have to keep watch and make sure bad-bads don’t get you. Or Shinybot either!” she concluded before commencing to scribble something estranged in a worn diary she always seemed to have on hand. “No peeking! Diary peeking is very boo!”

Saying he was surprised at how easily he got her to agree, albeit through the false premise of androsexual rabbit-modbot love, would be an understatement of some calibre. He had assumed she’d be more attached to her home of the last few centuries, or at least more aware of his intentions, but what mattered was his success. Now, there was at least a chance he could save her from whatever ate her away from the inside. It’s also worth mentioning that there were considerably fewer walls outside to be happily smashed into; this may be considered to have played at least some part in his reasoning.

Originally intending to leave immediately, they would instead leave first thing in the morning; the result of a brief change in plans caused by Rain’s tackle-hug-nap-time-attack, a move largely barred from professional wrestling. Every night there was amateur night however, and he had little in ways or means to protest. For the most part though, Usu had long since stopped caring about the injuries that came with her affection, instead he was happy to spend any time near her at all, time he was well aware she could not afford to waste, time she may not even remember, which made it all the more precious despite.

Morning came as it always does, sun piercing the sky and warping the few fragments of oxygen it could find. A particularly normal morning with absolutely nothing noteworthy being said about it. As Rain stood there, the airlock doors stuttering open to a world she’d seen even less than than our protagonist, it was necessary to mention that she had decided to tie Usu’s limbs to a fishing pole for 'fast times!', or so the explanation from her went, after the entire process was already completed at that.

Her words did have merit; few things on the planet moved as slow as Usu, and fewer still faster than a bipedal android. She strapped a belt tightly across her waist and forced the pole through the smallest of crevices to secure Usu as best she could. Rain took a moment to try and hug him but her own innovation had placed his dangling bunny corpse barely out of her reach, so she got on with her nonsense instead. She leaned forward, one knee to the ground, and before even looking to see if the shutter had completely opened, she leaped using a single foot, rendering any further talk of the shutter too traumatic for the shutter’s family or close friends.

It should also be remembered that Colony A59 was nestled high in the Rocky Mountains and her momentous leap made gravity pause for thought, before rightly remembering she’s got to come down at some point and that it had best get to enforcing that bit lest someone see it slacking.

The laws of physics awoke from their nap to send her shuttling down to the very base of the mountain range, having her single leap move them from the heart of Utah to the edges of Nevada. As she was falling, she asked, ”Snow, which way now?” Usu, barely holding his bearings, starred deeply into the map print-outs he’d made the night before and gestured with his head westward.

Rain landed, and the barren soil beneath her shattered all too slowly for her to notice as she instantaneously began running. This was a different beast entirely and a large reason why people had feared them enough to decorate walls with white blood and scattered circuitry, but for the time being a means to an end, or rather, a means to preventing an end. If he needed to use what condemned Rain to save her, he would a thousand times over.

Speaking of thousands; meters and miles flew past Usu barely slower than they had in the airship, and if it wasn’t for the haunting moments in which she would pause completely, he might have come to doubt there was anything wrong with her at all. In what seemed like a blink of a rather wind-burned eye, they were already half-way through Nevada, and in another equally blistered blink, Rain froze in time just as they reached the eastern edges of Lake Tahoe.

Usu, having shat several lifetimes worth of proverbial pants, decided it was as good a time as any to have a break. He wrestled his arms free and tore the map off of himself before examining Rain more closely. It was just like all the other times; eyes usually filled to no end with vibrancy now lay vacant instead. Nothing would wake her up, nothing he could do at least, and he’d tried an awful lot of things at that. Whatever it was that would take her from the world was the only thing that would bring her back, and he had little choice but to wait.

Of course, 'little choice' is different than 'no choice', so on a writing technicality Usu explored his surroundings. He noted the massive lake Rain just barely had not killed him in; water more gray than blue, perhaps to mirror the shells of trees and landscape of ash which surrounded it. The distance littered itself with recreational ruins, hotels and lodges reduced to little more than rubble, and yet somehow still offering competitive rates, at least as far as rubble accommodation typically went for. A world of monochrome encapsulated them both, free from the chaos of old but further still from any joy.

Only monoliths stood solid in the furthest distances, begging to pierce the skies for the slightest salvation. The dead that littered them found no God for that cause, nor a mortician.

Then, for a moment it seemed as if the world fought back, and a shell-shock inducing crash of thunder shook our hero’s already wobbly foundations even further.

Bloodied from tip to toe, and I doubt a drop isn’t my own.

Wounds to lick and sprains to heal.

Spurred on by the stares of hatred and howls of disgust that marred our path.

Am I so cruel to protect her? Am I wrong to stop those who would see her suffer?

It didn’t matter.

Long ago, I had already learned; gravestones do not fight back.

Rain’s namesake was far from a mere coincidence of poorly written fiction; instead, it was something she chose for herself shortly after the day Snow carried her out of a slightly upper-class colony scrap heap. At first, she would barely talk; a condition he soon missed. In time, a strange form of bond was born between the two, both cast out as dregs of society, yet ever intertwined in fate’s firmest clasp.

She had wanted a name like his, a name that would bring her closer to him, she wanted to be what helped Snow become Snow.

It was a beautiful theory, marred only by her ignorance of what rain had truly become. The days where it was little more than an excuse to claim that your vibrating umbrella was not of a sexual nature were long gone. Acid and sulfur had since made it their malevolent home.

This, like most things thus far and probably still ahead, Usu learned first-hand. The sound of thunder frightened him, the proceeding drizzle confused him, and seeing larger drops of the caustic precipitation start to eat away at Rain's skin terrified him into action. He’d done well to have spotted a cave not far off, even if the endless tourist signs directing him to 'Cave Rock' certainly made it an easy find. With little regard to any effect the rain was surely having on his own body, he immediately grabbed the fishing rod still tightly tucked into her belt and began dragging her to cover. His paws would slip, his face would get muddy, and he was sure he’d passed bits of himself floating in puddles, but this was all he could do for her.

He persisted for an overly dramatized fifteen entire meters before the rod snapped at the mouth of the cave. Yet still he did not pause; he grabbed her lifeless arm and pulled her further and further inward until only her feet were left exposed to the elements. Usu, at a loss for strength but not resolve, laid his body across them as the darkness once again embraced his world.

Liquid pelted his face and something like sirens wailed helplessly in the distance. When Usu finally opened his eyes, he found Rain hunched over him crying, desperately threading closed the tears in his body, with little pause to berate his actions. “Not again, Snow! You can’t leave me again, you can’t… I can’t…” Waxing and waning hysterically, she eventually noticed he had come to, and simply held him close. They laid there for hours as the world slowly melted around them.

Do not mistake this scenario, dear reader, for a lover’s tryst; Usu was gaining memories as fast as Rain was losing them, but neither understood the obscure concept of romance. Usu only understood that he wanted to keep her safe, to keep her as she was and Rain, Rain simply wanted to be near him. There are feelings above and beyond what humans would ever understand, but fortunately all those pesky critters had long since been washed away.

Steeling herself, vaguely ironic because of any steel she might have contained inside of her, Rain continued her now less frenzied repairs. Bringing a sewing kit with her from the colony was smart, the same one she had used to make Usu, smarter still. What wasn’t quite so smart was Usu flinching while being stabbed, necessitating Rain to squeeze his neck between her arm and thigh to keep him still. Times like this make your humble narrator glad he lacks an actual voice, audio book version notwithstanding, and therefore doesn't have to put on airs about ridiculous sounding noises like 'Ugughgghhgwgfh' and such.

He is, however, contracted by obscure literary laws, required to tell you still more.

They weren’t far now, even Usu’s crushed skull could see the Golden Gate’s skeleton in the distance, along with the mechanical deviations still twisting it to life. He’d hoped they might have run into Modbot on the way there; his world felt small enough to entertain the thought at least, but considering that it had been weeks between departures, he had little surprise for once.

Of course, time did not stand still for either. Whilst Usu looked to save Rain and wound up underneath Cave Rock, Modbot didn’t have the luxury of a hundred meter-jumping girl to ride on. Instead, his journey had been a grueling one from the onset. It took him days alone to descend, a few more to complain about having to do it at all, and a sparse one in-between to comment about the Queen in a desperate bid to secure his artificial British trappings.

Worse yet, as his assisted-by-the-assisted GPS system had long pointed out, he took a long route through desert terrain, made only more hellish in this era. He may not have been able to feel heat in the most basic sense of touch, but he was extremely capable of being annoyed by his temperature monitor screaming at him neigh constantly. Fortunately, he was also at least somewhat capable of ripping it out of himself and throwing it at what was an extremely contrived oasis mirage, consisting entirely of a shoddy sign with the words 'Not Here' scrawled across it.

Ignoring the victory squeal of “Freee!” that his amputated appendix appeared to cry out during its sailing arc through the air, he continued his trek through the desert and straight to the cornucopia of glass and wire that encased Old Francisco.

Certainly, had any humans survived to see its erection, a few might have out-right died anyway from the very sight of what was once their worldly marvel. The outside of the micro-city took up only the space between the outer bridge arches, forming a dome that pierced the muck of water beneath it. Colour had long since faded from the streets of San Francisco, but the chronicle had an almost incandescent glow, something that could be put down to a severely failed Christmas lighting experiment from a while back, presumably before the creative bots were murdered.

The entrance stood proud; it was programmed that way when it used to run things at JC Penny, and right now it had to smell the daffodils for roses, or risk losing its own place in the world. In front further still, stood two stout guards, constructs you’d have hardly seen outside the military, brandishing copper-wire pikes that, even at risk of being crushed from a good sneeze, denoted some level of status.

“Hakt! Er, Halt!” A synchronised error that only confirmed their military origins. The leftmost guard pointed to a small, self-written 'Inspector' label as he approached Modbot confidently. “Now here see here, me and mine colleague there have to be making sure you are's who you says you are's before we lets you through! Can’t have any
humans
coming in and mucking up the plac―”

The rightmost guard began almost immediately cowering, spinning, and rather loudly exclaiming, ”Humans?!” before being hard-reset by a copper-wire pike to an overused side socket.

“Sees, me friend here’s got the right idea; they’re tricky business. So I look at you and I say… you’re a penguin, what do you say?”

Modbot, not giving two shits in a shitter, offered little resistance, “I’m a penguin. Quack.”

“It’s a bloody penguin!” said the questioning guard in shock. “Well, go right aheads then, Sir Penguin, you let us know if you see any primates about you now!” He then hard reset himself in much the same way he had done to his colleague moments ago.

The door cracked open, muffling at a presumably inaudible volume, “A penguin? They’re the worst, window shoppers without the windows.” Modbot wasn’t too perturbed by the whole penguin affair; he was simply trying to regain some sense of routine in a world that could not have further abandoned it.