The Atlas Project
BY NUMBER TH1RTE3N
“It’s dead.”
Dreg looked at the mound of circuits and metal plates in front of him with a mournful expression. He sighed, exasperated. Tonight’s run hadn’t been great to start with, just a couple dozen pounds of loose chromium scraps and barely salvageable wires. He and Juke had snuck into the slums of the Commerce Sector as a last-ditch effort. Scrappers were barred from stepping foot in the Commerce Sector without authorization from a Class B or above citizen, but Dreg and Juke were desperate. The things that the upper citizenry threw away haphazardly were too big a haul to pass up. Potentially. If they didn’t bring in enough scrap tonight, they would starve to death without their meal vouchers.
Dreg thought he had found a fully functional ServBot in the slums, near the canals that separated the dilapidated town from the neat, well-manicured lawns and spires of those that were fortunate enough to live and work in the Commerce Sector. The ServBot was half-submerged in brownish water and would have been unrecognizable from any other third-rate android were it not for the emblem on its chest plate that distinguished it as a now-outdated model in the Service lineup of Atlas Co.’s arm. f robotic assistants: a silhouette of a person holding a globe on their shoulders, with a golden “S” laser-cut on the globe. The waters of the canals smelled of freshly flushed feces and death. Dreg looked past the ServBot, into a sewer grate on the wall in front of him. He saw several human appendages poking out from the bars, blinking in and out of existence with the flickering neon purple lights coming from the street signs lining the street above him. Dreg held back a gag and focused his attention back onto the robot. He and Juke couldn’t afford to go any hungrier, and a dead Bot was leagues better than no Bot.
“Let’s pull it out.” Dreg said to Juke, crouching down to get a good hold on the machine.
“What?” Replied Juke, grabbing onto Dreg’s arm. “Are you insane? do you know what the Specs would do to us if they found us down here?”
Dreg paused, suddenly unsure.
Juke pointed at the grate in front of him, his expression morphing into one of fear and nervous anxiety.
Dreg knew that if the Sector Peace Corps caught him and Juke, there would be little else they could do except run, and they would likely not get very far. The specs had their hover cruisers and all Dreg and Juke had were emaciated legs and some cheap cybernetic augmentations that barely did anything anyway. He thought about it briefly, almost considering taking what little loot they had gathered up until that point back to the Yard. Then Dreg’s stomach growled and twisted, and that steeled him.
“We don’t really have a choice,” Dreg said, “if the Specs finds us, they blast us to Hell. If we go back to the Yard without more scrap, we don’t eat and then we die anyway. Now, help me pull this damn thing out.”
Juke looked at him, and Dreg wondered if he would leave him there in favor of returning to the Yard with his share of the haul. But Juke clicked his tongue in annoyance and bent down to assist Dreg in hauling up the Bot.
It was heavy, and very much stuck. Dreg and Juke had to shift positions, find new handholds, and pause for breath several times in the twenty or so minutes that it took to pull the Robot out. Dreg cut his thumb on a sharp piece of rusted metal that was poking out from the robot’s armpit. He thought about the possibility of infection, but his stomach growled again, and he pushed the thought away. Dreg wiped the blood from his thumb on his shit-water-soaked shirt. After a final tug that sent both men sprawling onto the pavement, the ServBot was lying in front of the two Scrappers, and Dreg was able to see the entire machine.
It was a standard model. Humanoid, about six feet tall. The synthetic muscle fibers that normally would have been covered by protective titanium plating were exposed. Some of the fibers were torn or eaten away at from being submerged in the water. What little plating was left had oxidized and rusted over, but Dreg could tell that the ServBot had originally been a grayish white. It was also missing a foot and a few fingers. The head was the least ravaged component, and Dreg thought it would probably fetch the highest price back at the Yard. After a thorough examination, he was about to try to rip the head off when he noticed something.
A couple of years ago, before Dreg lost his citizenship, he did maintenance on Atlas Co. tech for the upper-class citizenry. He was good at it too, so he knew when a Bot was truly dead or when there was severe user error. Very rarely was it the former. Dreg couldn’t see it when the bot was in the water, but now that it was in front of him, it was unmistakable.
“Juke, look at this.” Ignoring the pain in his thumb and the moans coming from his bowels, Dreg hurriedly pulled off the chest plate of the ServBot, his heart smashing against his ribcage. When the plating was finally off, he pointed at a device at the center of the newly exposed wiring. It was small, about the size of an old-world baseball, and icosahedral. It was sitting awkwardly inside a compartment at the very center of the robot’s chest. Dreg could tell by the look of confusion on Juke’s face that he didn’t know how much their lives had just changed.
“I swear, Dreg,” Juke looked upset. “I’m going to call the Specs myself if you don’t hurry up.”
Suddenly smiling, Dreg didn’t feel as hungry as he did a moment ago while he was covered in wet shit and bleeding from the thumb. Carefully, Dreg picked up the polygonal object from the open chest cavity of the robot. He turned it around in his hands, examining it more closely. The faces of the fusion core were surprisingly clean; It had somehow been spared the unholy wrath of the Commerce Sector’s sewage system. It shimmered in the low light, and it was slightly warm to the touch. One of the faces of the core had a small opening, and when Dreg looked inside, he almost yelped with excitement as he saw the faintest of glows.
“It’s still active!”
At that moment, Dreg heard the shrill sirens of Sector Peace Corps in the distance. He turned to look at Juke, but he was already hiding behind some wreckage in the shadows of the sewers. Juke stuffed the fusion core into his pants pocket. It barely fit and looked distended, making it difficult to sprint to where juke was hiding. He took cover next to his friend and waited as the sound grew louder. The sound of the sirens continued to intensify, until it was almost too loud to hear his own blood pumping in his ears.
In an instant, the canals exploded with flashing neon lights as a veritable army of Specs blasted over the canal, heading south, toward the other end of the Commerce Sector. The neon lights glistened off the polished windows of the skyscrapers and the waxed chassis of the many HyperDrivers parked in the streets. After what seemed like an eternity and a half, the lights and the sounds finally faded from and the Scrappers were again left alone with a broken robot and shit-water. Juke pushed Dreg out from behind the wreckage they were hiding behind.
“What the hell, Dreg?! If we had waited an extra second messing around with your damn Bot, we would have been a pile of ash right now!”
Dreg was barely listening. He was already on his feet, the ringing of the sirens already gone from his ear. The fusion core was already out of his pocket as Dreg sprinted back to the ServBot. He felt almost childlike in his excitement, like he was opening a gift or turning on a new piece of tech for the first time. Which, technically, was what he was about to do.
Dreg placed the open face of the fusion core back down into the now empty compartment. It didn’t fit quite well, but after some slight adjustments, the core snapped into place.
Dreg waited. Juke looked expectantly at both his fellow Scrapper and the still-very-much-dead ServBot, his eyes flitting back and forth between them. There was a palpable nervous energy in the air. The only sound came from the water rushing past the sewer grate into the puddle behind them.
Dreg’s heart was thumping incredibly quickly, his entire body pulsing with a hopeful pang. He began to worry that he was mistaken, that the Bot was unserviceable, and that he had just wasted valuable time and could be halfway out of the commerce sector by now. His hands shook with anticipation and his eyes lips were chapped.
Then the ArcLED faceplate on the ServBot’s head lit up. Dreg let out a barely suppressed whoop, triggering a panicked shush from Juke.
The faceplate of the robot began humming a low frequency, barely audible, as diagnostic code began to appear on where the robot’s fake face would be. Dreg recognized this very well, he had run several of these codes for regular maintenance protocols when he was a citizen. The lights continued to dance as more and more boxes checked green, though there some that checked red. Among the red boxes were functions such as “Locomotion: Right Foot” and “Dexterity: Full Phalangeal Function”. The missing foot and fingers, of course. “Speech” and “AI Processing” were tinted yellow, signaling that some maintenance was required, but they were functional.
The faceplate went dark again. Dreg and Juke were crouched shoulder to shoulder, a foot away from the robot’s head, waiting for anything else to happen.
The ServBot suddenly jolted into a seated position, smacking into the two Scrapper’s foreheads, and sending them reeling onto their backs, clutching their heads in pain.
“D-d-d-di4g-diagN0stics C0mPle-Complete.” Said the ServBot, in a masculine-sounding voice. Dreg was still rubbing his forehead and blinking away the tears in his eyes, but he could understand why the “Speech” function was yellowed out. The Bot’s head moved around slowly, searching for a human to interface with. When the head had turned almost all the way around, it spotted Juke first, who was still groaning from the blunt force trauma the android had inflicted on him.
“Greetings, mister B-ba-ba-ba-“ this went on for about twelve seconds. “ba- baz-Bazrian!”
Juke moaned in pain and pointed at Dreg.
“Talk … to him…” he said in between moans of pain.
The robot swirled around, torso and all, and repeated the greeting, this time much more succinctly.
“Greetings, mister Bazrian.”
The voice was friendly and warm, much as they were designed to be. The ArcLED faceplate now displayed a very old-world pixelated smiley face, the default setting. Dreg had always liked the retro feel of the default setting, even though ArcLED technology was so advanced that it could perfectly mimic a human face in three dimensions.
As for the greeting, Dreg didn’t know what to say. Partly because of his new concussion, and partly because the ServBot had just said the name of the most powerful man on the planet.
“Mister…Bazrian…?” Said Dreg, tentatively, and with palpable fear in his voice.
“Yes! That is, you, mister Bazrian. How ma-ma-may I be of ServBot to y-y-y-y-you?”
Dreg began to understand the severity of his actions. He had just revived an old ServBot of the head of Atlas Co., Jayce Bazrian. The world’s single wealthiest, most influential person to ever exist, and Dreg had just been mistaken for that person. An ex-citizen Scrapper, starving, bleeding, and covered in shit, was just called the name of the person that owns the world.
Dread began to fill his heart and spread throughout his body. Stealing property from a S-class citizen, the highest level of citizenship, was already an extra capital offense. Not only would dreg be executed, but all people that were connected to dreg through his Cybernetic Communication Profile would be as well, for fear that he may have spread classified information to non-citizens. That means Dreg, Juke, and basically everyone at the Yard would be summarily put to death.
Juke had started to recover from the ServBot’s assault and realized what had happened.
“Did that thing just say ‘Bazrian’? As in, ‘Jayce Bazrian’?”
The android whipped its head around again, facing Juke.
“Yes! You are Jayce Bazrian!” The robot then began to stand up, and promptly fell over into a pile of metal, causing an awful clanging sound to echo off the walls and down the alleyways of the Commerce Sector.
“Ouch!” said the ServBot, even though it was incapable of feeling pain.
Juke looked at Dreg, with a frantic expression.
“Man, I really don’t care how you do it, but every Spec in this whole sector heard that noise. Get this thing moving, now!”
Dreg stood and walked to the bot, who was already halfway up again. He helped it stand upright and supported some of its weight on his shoulders.
“Um, ServBot?”
Its head whipped around. “Yes, mister Bazrian?”
“We, um, have to get moving. If you’ll please plot a course for the Yard?”
At the mention of the Yard, the ArcLED faceplate changed shape into a glowing red “X”.
“Mister Bazrian, the Yard (formerly known as Fort Vegas during the Third World War) is an authorized ex-citizen ha-bi-b-b-b-bitation. Population: three thousand, four hundred and sixty-six-”
Juke perked up slightly. “Sixty-six?”
“Anthea must’ve had her baby.” replied Dreg.
“Oh, cool.”
“-according to latest opinion polls, your favorability amongst ex-ci-t-t-t-t-izens is zero-point-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-eight-three percent.”
“Wow,” said Dreg, already walking with the robot down the edge of the canal, “that’s low.”
“By some metrics! Your favorability amongst citizens still remains at eighty-nine-point-three-six p-p-p-p-percent.”
“Of course it does.”
“I would also like to remind you that you have-“ There was a moment of silence as the ServBot opened its logs, “four thousand three hundred and seventy-two missed meetings.”
Juke chimed in, looking over his shoulder worriedly, “Please, shut up.”
“At once!” And the ServBot shut up.
Juke looked at his friend and shook his head. Dreg could see the panic in his eyes, and he knew that Juke was aware of the consequences of being caught with this ServBot as well.
“This stunt better be worth it” he said. Dreg let the words bounce around his head.
Naturally, Dreg had his reservations. He and his Scrapper friend had just committed one of the most heinous crimes a person could commit, and to a passing observer they would have looked no different than any other disheveled, forgotten, or otherwise downtrodden individual in the entire world.
He was also confused. Jayce Bazrian was the head of Atlas Co., the world’s leading cybernetic and robotics manufacturer. His visage was plastered on almost every branded product, so much so that his fake smile was looming over the citizens of the several Sectors pretty much everywhere they went. Every elected official had received some method of payment from him, either directly or through some manner of corruption. Someone that influential couldn’t have simply lost their own personal ServBot?
Dreg let his mind wander for some time as he, Juke, and the Bot limply made their way to the end of the canal, where the water drained into a pipe that led to more pipes that eventually drained into the Gulf of Mexico. There was a makeshift bridge here, hidden from view by the shadows of the surrounding buildings. It was created by teams of Scrappers over several years under cover of darkness, just in case some unfortunate, desperate, or downright foolish Scrappers wanted to try their luck at whatever the elite may have been throwing out of their windows.
Dreg and Juke crossed the bridge, the Bot still very quiet and hanging onto Dreg’s shoulder for support. The Bot was rickety and in desperate need of repairs, but after some careful maneuvering, the Scrappers and their new companion had crossed to the other side, into the much more homely and very much run-down Labor Sector. Only a few steps up in terms of comfort from the Yard, the Labor Sector is where those still fortunate enough to still have a job not yet taken from a Bot lived their daily lives. Dreg used to live here too. He paused for a moment to look at the peeling paint on some of the residential buildings, and almost felt nostalgic. Even though he and Juke had a long way to walk from here, Dreg breathed a sigh of relief. Specs didn’t patrol too far from the Commerce Sector, and Scrappers were allowed in the Labor Sector with no issue. He looked at the Bot on his shoulder, the pixelated smiley face still bright and cheerful.
“ServBot?” Dreg asked, hoping to learn some more about why exactly they had found such a delicate piece of tech in sewage.
“Y-y-y-y-y-es, Mister Bazrian?” The Bot replied, whipping its head around to look at Dreg.
“What exactly is the last thing that you can recall before your reboot?”
The Bot’s faceplate switched to another display, one of a confused face, frowning. A digital tear rolled down the Bot’s nonexistent cheek.
“I’m sorry, Mister Bazrian. Many of my memory files appear to have been corrupted. It a-a-a-ppears that it had been some time since my l-l-l-l-ast maintenance. Would you like me to schedule an ap-p-p-ointment with a licensed Atlas Co. ServBot Technician?” The Bot’s faceplate projected a holo-screen in front of Dreg and Juke, which made them jump slightly. The screen displayed some highly rated Japanese restaurants within a ten-mile radius. Even though this was clearly not what the Bot wanted to display, Dreg and Juke stopped to admire some of their menus for a moment, almost drooling over the sight of food that wasn’t purchased through meal vouchers or comprised in some form of dead rat meat.
When they had finally managed to wave the screen away, the Scrappers found that they were now surrounded by a group of people. Distracted by the holo-screen, they weren’t able to see them crawl out of the alleyways of the Labor Sector and slowly skulk around their little group. Only slightly obscured by shadows, their glowing neon tattoos in the shapes of various beasts and monsters from old-world mythology unmistakably marked them as members of the Fantasy Boys gang. Dreg and Juke had run into them before on their runs. They usually didn’t do much except throw insults, but any Scrapper worth their salt knows that a Bot was worth killing for. Dreg lifted his hands into the air, followed by Juke. The Bot’s arms were still hanging loosely around Dreg’s shoulders.
“Easy now, boys,” said Dreg, “we’re just trying to get back to the Yard.” A figure at the front of the group stepped closer to Dreg, into the light of an overhead streetlamp. He was tall and had arms like tree trunks. He wore a ripped leather jacket and some faded black jeans with black work boots. Bald and bearded, he approached Dreg with all the confidence of someone that knew they had just struck gold. Much like how Dreg felt when he had fixed the ServBot.
The man lifted one of his arms, which Dreg now noticed was completely replaced from the elbow down with a gnarly blasting rifle implant. He pointed to barrel at Dreg’s chest and let out a hearty chuckle.
“I don’t think the Yard is where ya’ll are headed.” He looked at the Bot, whose face again displayed the default pixelated smiley face. He pointed the blaster-arm at the Bot. “What’s so funny, eh? Got something to smile about don’t you?”
The man with the gun for a hand suddenly pointed it to the sky and fired a round, which pierced through both the sky and Dreg’s eardrums. The sound bounced down the dark alleys and the flash of light that came from the gun’s muzzle illuminated the street so briefly it seemed as if the Fantasy Boy’s tattoos had blinked in and out of existence.
Dreg was still reeling from the shock when two of the gang members swept up from behind Juke and pushed him to the ground, holding him there, squirming, while they checked him for any good loot. Finding nothing, they keep him pinned down as he struggles. Dreg was picked up from the shirt collar by the gun-arm-man and brought to eye-level with him. With no one to support its weight, the Bot fell backward into the street, smiley face still on.
“I want you to ask your circuit-freak here what he thinks is so funny.” He pointed with his gun hand to the ServBot. “If you don’t give me an answer,” he switched targets to Juke, “then I’m gonna paint the street pink with your friend’s brains. Then, I’m gonna – “
The man with the gun for a hand had his sentence cut short, because there was now a gaping hole in his head.
Dreg watched as he was let go, almost falling to the ground were it not for the ServBot there to catch him. Dreg noticed that the Bot’s right hand smoked and sizzled with residual energy. A faint green glow faded from a now visible hole in the palm of the Bot. It had blasted the Fantasy Boy to Hell.
“Do not worry, Mister Bazrian,” it said, cheerful as ever, “threat n-n-n-n-neutralized. The Sector Peace Corps are on their way!”
“The fucking who now?”
Just as the now-dead gun-arm man hit the street with a reverberating thud, A small patrol of Specs veered the corner at the far end of the street on hover cruisers, their sirens and lights on full alert. Near the canal, another group of specs was closing in, sandwiching the Scrappers and the Fantasy Boys together with no hope of escape.
“LAY DOWN YOUR WEAPONS OR WE WILL SHOOT TO KILL!”
This voice came from the Spec in the lead of the first group. Right after he had finished the order, he began shooting at the Fantasy Boys.
The two men holding Juke down adjusted their positions to take cover and shoot back at the Specs, as did the rest of the Fantasy Boys. In the span of three seconds the street had become a warzone, with Dreg, Juke, and the Bot caught in the middle.
“Bot, what the hell? Why did you call the Specs?” asked Dreg, taking cover from the hail of plasma-fire raining down on them. Juke replied before the Bot could.
“Stupid thing probably knew what we were the whole time and just wanted to get back to his oligarch master!” he spit at the Bot’s faceplate, which now showed an array of combat diagrams and targeting reticles. Dreg had seen this kind of software on a bot before, but only when they were military issue. The kind of Bots that were sent out to fight proxy wars in New Africa, never a personal assistance Bot like the one he and Juke had found.
“Mister Bazrian,” The Bot placed a hand on Juke’s shoulder, “it is my duty to protect you from any and all manner of danger that may come your way. When I sensed your heightened anxiety levels and increased adrenaline count, I assumed you were in danger and summoned the Sector Peace Corps to assist in eliminating the threat.” The Bot did not slur its speech.
It all made sense then, at least to Dreg. Of course, any personal assistance robot to the supreme oligarch of Earth would be packing many manners of heat.
“Well, it almost got us fucking killed!” Juke shouted.
Above them, a Spec was shot off his hover cruiser and landed near the edge of the canal. The cruiser continued to float for a moment before its auto-parking protocol slowly lowered it to the street, some distance away from the fighting. Dreg had an idea.
“ServBot!”
“Yes, Mister Bazrian?”
“I need you to defend this position for a moment. Can you do that?
A Fantasy Boy came tumbling next to them, riddled with plasma-holes.
“Of course, sir!”
Dreg looked at Juke. “Stay down, buddy.”
He sprinted from their position to the hover cruiser. Plasmafire chased him as he was caught in the sights of a passing Fantasy Boy perched on a rooftop, but he was quickly dispatched by the Bot, who flashed Dreg a thumb’s-up.
Finally, Dreg reached the cruiser and hopped on. The keycard was still in the ID slot, so Dreg started the vehicle with little trouble. He drove the distance back to his companions.
“Get on, both of you!”
There was little argument from Juke and even less from the Bot as they climbed onto the cruiser. “ServBot, don’t let anyone follow us, Spec or not!”
The Bot replied by enthusiastically shooting at any potential target, with extreme prejudice. Specs began falling out of the sky like flies and the Fantasy Boys were no different. Dreg raised the cruiser as high as it would go, higher than some of the residential buildings of the Labor Sector, and punched it North, towards the Yard.
