Love, Death and Robots. Volumes 2 & 3

“You get photos for the prosecutor?”

“Got ’em.” Pentle holds out a digicam and thumbs through the images of the ladies and the three children, all of them staring out from the screen like little smeared dolls. “You want me to take them in, now?”

I look over the women. The kids have run out again. From the other room, their howls echo as they chase around. Their shrieks are piercing. Even from a distance they hurt my head. “Yeah. I’ll deal with the kids.”

Pentle gets the women up off the floor and shuffles out the door, leaving me standing alone in the middle of the kitchen. It’s all so familiar: a typical floor plan from Builders United. Custom undercab lighting, black mirror tile on the floors, clever self-clean nozzles hidden behind deco trim lines, so much like the stuff Alice and I have that I can almost forget where I am. It’s a negative image of our apartment’s kitchen: light vs dark, clean vs dirty, quiet vs loud. The same floor plan, everything about it the same, and yet, nothing in it is. It’s archaeological. I can look at the layers of gunk and grime and noise and see what must have underlain it before… when these people worried about color coordinating and classy appliances.

I open the fridge (smudge-free nickel, how practical). Ours contains pineapples and avocados and endive and corn and coffee and Brazil nuts from Angel Spire’s hanging gardens. This one holds a shelf cluttered with ground mycoprotein bars and wadded piles of nutrition supplement sacs like the kind they hand out at the government rejoo clinics. Other than a bag of slimy lettuce, there isn’t anything unprocessed in the fridge at all. No vegetables except in powder jars, ditto for fruit. A stack of self-warming dinner bins for fried rice and laap and spaghetti just like the one still lying on the kitchen table in a puddle of its own sauce, and that’s it.

I close the fridge and straighten. There’s something here in the mess and the screaming in the next room and the reek of the one kid’s poopy pants, but I’m stumped as to what it is. They could have lived up in the light and air. Instead, they hid in the dark under a wet jungle canopy and turned pale and gave up their lives.

The kids race back in, chasing each other all in a train, laughing and shrieking. They stop and look around, surprised, maybe, that their moms have disappeared. The littlest one has a stuffed dinosaur by the nose. It’s got a long green neck and a fat body. A Brontosaurus, I think, with big cartooney eyes and black felt lashes. It’s funny about the dinosaur because they’ve been gone so long but here one is, showing up as a stuffed toy. And then it’s funny again because when you think about it, a dinosaur toy is really extinct twice.

“Sorry, kids. Mommy’s gone.”

I pull out my Grange. Their heads kick back in successive jerks, bang bang bang down the line, holes appearing on their foreheads like paint and their brains spattering out the back. Their bodies flip and skid on the black mirror floor. They land in jumbled piles of misaligned limbs. For a second, gunpowder burn makes the stench bearable.

Up out of the jungle like a bat out of hell, climbing out of Rhinehurst Supercluster’s holdout suburban sprawl and then rising through jungle overstory. Blasting across the Causeway toward Angel Spire and the sea. Monkeys diving off the rail line like grasshoppers, pouring off the edge ahead of my cruiser and disappearing into the mangrove and kudzu and mahogany and teak, disappearing into the wet bowels of greenery tangle. Dumping the cruiser at squad center, no time for mopdown, don’t need it anyway. My hat, my raincoat, my clothes into hazmat bags, and then out again on the other side, rushing to pull on a tux before catching a masslift up 188 stories, rising into the high clear air over the jungle fur of carbon sequestration project N22.

Mma Telogo has a new concerto. Alice is his diva viola, his prize, and Hua Chiang and Telogo have been circling her like ravens, picking apart her performance, corvid eyes on her, watching and hungry for fault, but now they call her ready. Ready to banish Banini from his throne. Ready to challenge for a place in the immortal canon of classical performance. And I’m late. Caught in a masslift on Level 55, packed in with the breath and heat of upper-deck diners and weekenders climbing the spire while the seconds tick by, listening to the climate fans buzz and whir while we all sweat and wilt, waiting for some problem on the line to clear.

Finally, we’re rising again, our stomachs dropping into our shoes, our ears popping as we soar into the heavens, flying under magnetic acceleration… and then slowing so fast we almost leave the floor. Our stomachs catch up. I shove out through hundreds of people, waving my cop badge when anyone complains, and sprint through the glass arch of the Ki Performance Center. I dive between the closing slabs of the attention doors.