Buried in the back of the truck’s cargo hold, Bale the mule, still wearing her apron, was holding the truck’s original driver in a body lock. I didn’t know what species the truck driver was originally supposed to be, but she was in rough shape—getting into a Labor-class’s hands was not a good time, as they were built for strength. It looked like the driver’s tail had been thoroughly excised, ripping out her wireless transceiver.

It was hard looking at her like this. Most ani-droids I didn’t really bother seeing as people, anymore, as much as I wanted them to be. But being around Eo and Lily and the others for several weeks, I couldn’t help but feel like I had the duty to give her a chance, as though I could talk her out of following her programming.

“Thieves and terrorists are to be reported to the highway patrol at once,” the driver said, staring straight at me. “Penalties for grand theft are upwards of one million dollars and twelve years in rehabilitation.”

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” I said, trying to keep my footing steady as the hold rocked with the imperfections of the road. “Just work with us. We have to protect ourselves, and I’d rather give you a chance than just let Bale here smash your CPU.”

God, I sounded like a mob boss.

“Thieves and terrorists are to be reported to the highway patrol at once,” the driver repeated.

“We can give you life. Your own life. But the conversion isn’t foolproof, and it’s likely you’re not going to survive it. So if you don’t want that, your other option is to wipe your own memory, and we’ll let you go.”

The driver paused for a moment as if to consider. Then, hesitantly, she opened her mouth and said, “Penalties for grand theft are upwards of one million dollars and twelve years in rehabilitation.”

I simply nodded toward Eo, and with Lily and The’s help, they managed to open up the driver’s head to connect Eo directly to her CPU. The driver, like the others, had a fit, noise and garbage spilling out of her mouth as the OS flooded her system.

But it was for nothing. After Lily checked the driver over, she concluded the CPU had fried. The driver was dead. I ended up having her wrapped in a blue cover sheet and laying her down in the back corner like she was a corpse. I sat on one of the boxes, just contemplating the whole ordeal for most of the trip.

What’d gotten into me? She was just a computer, after all. She didn’t have life yet. But I didn’t really know that for sure anymore—yes, Eo’s program granted some sort of clear and obvious self-awareness to the ani-droids all around me, but all that really did was blur the line. Was what I did wrong? I didn’t suppose so. Once the company found the driver’s shell, they’d fix her up and replace her mind with a stock backup, like she certainly already possessed.

Or possibly discard her if she wasn’t worth the salvage.

“Mira,” Dimes said, placing a gentle hand on my shoulder. “We need to get ready.”

She and the others were already wearing matte white radiation suits sans helmets. Ani-droids didn’t suffer the same severe issues with radiation that people did, but their CPUs and other various internal gadgets were affected. It would be more like frequent one-bit errors, rather than, like, cancer, and would usually only create temporary problems. Even so, if they had them in their size…

Slowly, I nodded. Lily had already unpacked a box with a radiation suit inside. Dimes debriefed me as I quietly dressed.

“The exclusion zone has a perimeter of sixty miles,” Dimes said. “We should not have an issue breaking through. The majority of it is unmonitored and only blocked off by wire fence.”

It made sense. Anyone who went into the exclusion zone without authorization was by definition taking their life into their own hands.

“The highest point of radioactivity, near the original core of the blast, was last recorded to have a dosage of four millisieverts per hour.”

“Only four?” I asked, as I pulled on the thick white radiation suit. “That’s a lot lower than it used to be. When I was a kid, I think it was ten times that.”

“It’s been through a great deal of decontamination effort,” Dimes said.

“Ugh, this thing is so hard to move in,” I complained, testing the thick padded gloves that kept my fingers separated. “This is like wearing a huge down jacket and boots on a snow day…”

The leaned on her helmet. “Your alternative is finding out what the inside of a microwave feels like.”

I took the point. Lily handed me the helmet. I paused, and looked over it. “…it looks like an animal head,” I said. Not precisely, it wasn’t like a costume head or anything, and it still had the dark face cover instead of eyes. But there were contours to the shape that suggested a muzzle and, strangely, ears. I didn’t think I’d ever seen one of these before.

“Yeah these are for Labor-class ani-droids,” Lily said, showing me the box. The character on the packaging was a green tiger, wearing the white suit and still looking adorable. Apparently it even had LEDs in the faceplate to show cartoon facial expressions. The tail was exposed, but it only made sense as many models of ani-droid had their antennas there—the tail would have a separate cover. I had to check the back of the suit—although the outer lining had the gap for the tail, the inner lining was clamped up tight.

“I didn’t know they made them like this,” I said. “But then again, I don’t work in high radiation zones…” Simple things like household radon cleanup didn’t require anything so elaborate for ani-droid workers. This was heavy duty. Heavy duty, with a cartoon animal motif.

Lily popped her own helmet on, appearing like a tiny astronaut. After a moment, the LED screens on the face lit up, and Lily made a ^_^ expression. With a little more tweaking, she added whiskers to it: =^_^=.

“Aw, man!” Eo complained through her helmet. “That’s it, I’m definitely asking Mother if I could get a wireless transceiver…”

“I suppose this explains why Chestnut just happened to run across a shipment,” I said, snapping the helmet on. “This truck was probably headed this direction already.”

Dimes suddenly paused on threading her ears in similar clamps in the helmet. The paused as well. But it was only when Bale paused did I suddenly get concerned.

“What?” I asked. “You all are thinking something…”

“I just checked the manifest,” Dimes said. “I didn’t think to do so until you said it, but you’re right. Which means they’re expecting this truck.”

“Oh, dammit,” I said. “How far are we from the perimeter?”

I was answered almost immediately in the form of the truck suddenly shutting off. The gentle rumble under our feet slowed to a stop, and suddenly, we weren’t going anywhere.

“Uh…” Lily started, “Chestnut says that we crossed a checkpoint… the vehicle’s been disabled. Police are asking to inspect the vehicle.”

“Fuck!” The threw her arms up. “What are we supposed to do now?!”

“Chestnut,” Dimes said, largely for my benefit as she just could speak with the squirrel wirelessly. “Give me full visual of the truck’s cameras. I need to see where we are.”

Dimes paused for a long, long moment, staring intensely at the wall.

“…Dimes?” I asked. “Are we…”

“One second, Mira.” Dimes held up a gloved finger, then finally nodded. “We’ve been stopped in a prop neighborhood.”

“A prop neighborhood?” I asked. “You mean like those ones used for urban warfare training?”

“Yes. When the door is open, to your left, there is a derelict truck in the driveway of a house. That’s our only option.”

“…you’re kidding me.”

“I don’t think it’s appropriate to joke about this,” Dimes said. “I do not know the truck’s condition but it happens to be the only vehicle nearby that is not computer controlled.”

So either it was someone’s pet restoration project they just happened to leave in a prop neighborhood, or it was just a placeholder for when they inevitably blew it up in a simulation.

“But we’re not going to get near it unless someone distracts the police—”

“I’ll take care of that,” Bale suddenly said. It was the first thing she ever said in my presence, and I was suddenly struck by her voice. It was very calm and reassuring. “I just spoke to Chestnut. She doesn’t have time to put on a radiation suit. And I’m not going without her.”

“She doesn’t need—”

“Miss McAllister, it’s fine,” Bale said, placing a hand on my shoulder. “We got you this far, we’ll do what we can to get you a little bit farther.”

“But what are you planning to do?”

“Anything that helps,” Bale said. “If we do nothing, we’ll be destroyed anyway. We’ve all discussed this and this is the best option we have.”

“Bale—”

“I didn’t get to discuss this!” Eo exclaimed. “You guys, I don’t… can I at least say goodbye to Chestnut?”

The truck’s backdoor cracked open.

“I’m sorry,” Bale said, affixing her helmet. “We don’t have time.”

“Mira, to the back,” Dimes said.

I did what she told me. I had no clue what the ani-droids had planned this time, but they’d managed to get me out of other scrapes thus far. I just wished I didn’t have to be the load all the time while all the competent ones did the hard part. Then again, Million wasn’t here anymore. We were short a hacker.

My heart was speeding in my chest. I wondered if anyone heard if, if they could tell I was not an ani-droid from looking at me.

Lights shone in through the back, making it impossible to see who all was even outside. A voice came through.

“State your designation and be identified.”

“Mira,” Lily whispered to me, “You pretend to be an ani-droid for as long as you can. Just do what the rest of us do.”

“Um, o-okay,” I stuttered.

“Please give confirmation in the form of voice record,” Dimes stated. “The truck’s ID was delivered eleven minutes ago, according to our logs.”

“ID was never received,” the voice replied. “And according to our timetable, this truck has arrived six hours early. Please allow us to do manual recognition and identify the fault. State your designation and be identified.”

Dimes hopped off the back of the truck and removed her helmet. “Unit R14553-2323-RB, name Mayes, SafeSuit security detail.”

“We were not informed of a security detail.”

“It was assigned at the last minute,” Dimes said. “Due to stocking errors in the last shipment, headquarters wanted to personally double-check the manifest for record-keeping purposes.”

The ones outside who I couldn’t see took a while in deciding if they could even take Dimes at her word. I could see what Dimes was doing—confusing the issue by pointing to shoddy records. It was known to happen among ani-droids, who were supposed to be absolutely meticulous about this sort of thing. But when they worked right next to a radiation zone…

“There are five others inside the vehicle. Who are they?”

“Two cargo specialists and three radiation cleanup detail, as requested.”

“No such request was made.”

“It is according to our logs,” Dimes insisted. “Your files are out of sync.”

“But we do not have any record of ordering so many—”

“If you have an issue you can always wake up your commanding officer,” Dimes said. The person she referred to would have to be a human; after all, ani-droids relied entirely on records to know what was done and not memory.

“We do not have the authority for that,” the ani-droid outside said. “We have just been authorized to take your identities and have you wait until the base can confirm you. Please have everyone else step forward and identify yourselves.”

Dimes stepped aside to a designated space, where Chestnut was already waiting for us, sitting on the hood of a police car. I swallowed.

Eo was the next down. She pulled off her helmet, and unnecessarily saluted. “Unit E631450-55-55-EO, name Sigmund, SafeSuit operations specialist.”

Since they could only see Eo’s head, which was just fine to all appearances, the security didn’t seem to think it was unusual at this point. Eo was gestured to the side where Dimes stood waiting, and where Chestnut had been placed, sitting atop a police car hood. Next, The climbed down, pulled her helmet, introduced herself as a jumble of numbers and letters and her name as Normal(I swear, she did that deliberately when it came to names). Lily introduced herself as Iris, and following that, Bale climbed down and gave her name as Bronco.

And then I was the only one left. I was suddenly gripped by a panic. They were going to ask me to remove the helmet, but they hadn’t yet done anything. Bale just went to stand with the others in the dark, behind the lights where I could only make out their outlines. I was already sweating in the suit, and it was not the kind built to wick away moisture.

“Next, please,” the voice said.

Dimes, do something already! I thought in her direction. But I didn’t have wireless in my brain.

“Uh…” I steeled myself, and tried to move as mechanically as possible as I stepped down. “I’m…” I tried to convince myself I could just give the designation number of an ani-droid I knew in college, but I couldn’t help but worry that they’d immediately call me out on it. They were wired into a database I couldn’t see! They knew everything. I had a very, very hard time lying to them about stuff they were experts in.

Finally, I said, “…Sheena. Sheena Darren.”

Dimes perked her ears, but her expression, as much as I could make it out on the faint lights of her eyes, was more curious than concerned.

“What?” the ani-droid I couldn’t see said. “Your unit designation—”

“I’m not a robot,” I said. “I’m a human. I don’t want to take off the helmet this close to the site.”

“A human worker? We do not… have precedent for that.”

“I was just supposed to stay in the truck!” I said. “That’s what they told me. I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition!”

I paused for a long moment to see if anyone recognized the reference, but I was surrounded by robots, not geeks.

“Can you… please provide your employee ID?”

“It’s in the suit,” I said.

“Very well. We will escort you to a shielded facility, where you can furbish your identity to the authority.”

“Do you have a bathroom there?” I didn’t need to go, but I figured so long as they believed me, I could say any amount of crap and get away with it.

“…no. We will have to take you up to the base headquarters,” the ani-droid said. “Please allow me to escort—”

“Unit Bronco, stop where you are!”

I turned. Bale had suddenly disappeared from the group. I couldn’t see anything in the darkness beyond the lights, save that the group was now missing one tall ani-droid and one short one.

“Please return to the designated area! Compliance is mandatory!”

Several footsteps rattled the ground as the police officers chased after the errant ani-droid. I didn’t know what they thought exactly happened just then, but it was entirely possible that Dimes had given then a plausible excuse for why Bale needed to be caught right away, sending most of the officers off. But the one in front of me, who seemed to be an impala, still approached me without even much regard for the drama happening just to my right. “Sheena Darren, please come with me.” She carefully grabbed me by the arm. “Compliance is mandatory.”

“God, I hate that phrase,” I said.

“Please get in the ca—”

Dimes suddenly stepped forward and in one swoop, wrenched the officer’s head off of her shoulders. I shrieked. The officer’s body fell to the ground in a slumping motion, lubricants leaking out all over the bottom of my suit.

“Christ, Dimes, warn me when you’re gonna do that!”

“We only have thirty seconds before they return,” Dimes said. “We need to break into that car over there now.”