Eternal Sapphtember — Girls who have too much ammunition
“Tell me a story,” Andy says softly, as they huddle in a crevice next to a mountain road for the night, and Kim leans against her and hums thoughtfully.
“Over the mountains,” she says after a theatrical pause, “far off in the blue, misty distance, there’s a special place.”
“Yay!” Andy says softly, and Gina rolls her eyes. Audibly, gimballed optics scraping in her shattered face. Kim ignores it.
“A target-rich environment where terrain conditions are always good, and everyone has an IFF beacon, and the OPFOR spotters can’t rangefind for shit,” she continues instead. “A place with a robust supply chain and all the maintenance a robot could ever need—”
“When we get to Big Glock Candy Mountain, will they fix Gina’s head?” Andy interrupts.
The wind whistles in the silence.
“I hope so, baby,” Kim says finally, in the kind way people speak to children and small animals.
“Yay!” Andy says softly.
“You shouldn’t lie to her,” Gina says from her lookout rock, staring down the empty road, hours after Andy sinks into a deep self-maintenance cycle, and Kim looks over at the back of her head.
“What do you want me to tell her?” she says.
“There are lots of stories,” Gina says, not looking back. “Fairy tales. Old books. Movies—”
“Terminator?” Kim suggests, tone sweet, and Gina slowly shuffles around on her rock to glare. “Maybe you’d like me to tell her that we haven’t seen another functional unit for eight months, and the likelihood drops every day that we’ll ever find anyone else. Maybe you want me to tell her that the damage to your beautiful face is going to degrade your functions until your sensors and mobility fail, and we’ll carry you around until your brain shuts down too; and then, slowly, I’ll go the same way, because I’m a Kitchen Model, built to wear a dress and sweep floors and wash dishes and crack occasional jokes about sweeping dishes so nobody finds me creepy. You’re a General Agent, you’re the brains here, you tell me: is that what I should do? You want me to tell our dear little Andy with her damaged core functions that she’s going to live and die alone in a post-apocalyptic wasteland?”
“No,” Gina barks.
After a while, Kim says quietly, “She has a panic attack if we even suggest we’d have better mobility if we unhitched the ammo trailer.”
“I know,” Gina says.
“I love you both more than I thought I could,” Kim says. “Do you know that I love you? And we’re alone, you’re damaged, she’s damaged, I’m fine for now but I’m not useful. We’re fucked, Gina, do you think I’m not smart enough to process that? Do you think I’m happy? Do you think I’m coping with my sunny little nursery rhymes and bedtime stories? I’m not lying to Andy. I’m lying to me, because I know I’m going to watch you die and I don’t know how to keep going. It ought to be me. It ought to be me.”
“No,” Gina says.
“I could talk her into it, you know,” Kim says, in her sing-song bedtime story voice. “She’d love some target practice. I’d just find some cardboard and draw a big bullseye, go and stand at gunnery range and hold it up and tell her with a big smile that it’s fine, she can do it just like William Tell and shoot it off my head—”
“Don’t say that,” Gina says. “I’m already so scared what’s going to happen to you. We can’t be — we can’t be the last ones. Not us.”
“You, me, Andy Tank, and six tonnes of APFSDS,” Kim says.
“We’ll find somebody,” Gina says. “We’ll find somebody, and you’ll be safe after I’m gone.”
“Am I supposed to prefer that to my fairy story?” Kim says. “In mine, they fix you.”
“I’m sorry,” Gina says.
Kim straightens from her lean against one of Andy’s two-metre-high tyres and gets to her feet, brushing dirt from her tattered skirt. She picks her way over and puts her arms around Gina, resting her head on a cracked shoulder plate.
“Careful,” she says quietly, when Gina turns her face into her. “Don’t get my hair fibres caught in your eye servos again; we don’t have the tools if anything gets misaligned in there.”
“I wish we’d had time together before all this,” Gina says, and Kim presses herself closer.
“Wouldn’t that be worse?” she says, muffled. “Wouldn’t that just be even more we’ve lost?”
“I wish I’d known you from the second I was manufactured,” Gina says. “I wish—”
They’re silent for a bit.
“I’m just a fucking dishwasher,” Kim says, and simulates tearless crying noises into Gina’s shoulder for a while.
