At Home with AI

Summer in the swamp had a unique quietness.

The three of us were floating down the South river. I was in my 14′ recreational kayak. Jack and Mike were in their fishing kayaks that both looked and handled like tanks. Mike’s boat was loaded with empty soda cans and bottles as usual. Some contained various amounts of cigarette butts.

Jack was mouthing off about his boyfriend who was living with him and his wife.

“So he called me when I was out of town, saying he needed five bucks Venmo’ed cuz all he had was a fifty,” he said, while passing me the bowl.

“Did you?” I asked, lighting it.

“Oh hell nah. I told him to get a job.”

“No you didn’t.”

The water was pristine and black. The sky was clear, with a few clouds here and there like an afterthought. We glided on the reflective surface in silence, passing by what used to be a small kitchen or a living room. There was a few square feet of tiled floor left. A chair was standing in the middle, in a few inches of water.

Mike snapped a photo. He was smoking in front of me again, which I had told him not to do a million times.

The gunshots came from the left.

Not loud, but unmistakably. It was a series of rapid firings. Then another. Followed by dogs barking.

“Could be hunters,” said Jack, exhaling a thick cloud of herbal smoke.

“Could be,” I agreed.

We both knew there was no game land in that direction.

At the take-out, I tried to pull Jack’s pants off while he loaded the boats. He pretended to chase me. Then we all got in the small cab of his beat-up white truck and drove towards the put-in, sitting in a row like three ducklings.

“They’re still doing road surveys these days,” said Mike.

He was right. Not far from the take-out, there was a small crew working on the median and the side of the road, wearing high visibility vests. Their shadows fell in perfect parallel lines across the asphalt.

Some were humans. Others were androids, white-painted, their black joint seams visible at the elbows and knees. Some had belts for feet. Others had cameras mounted on their shoulders.

As we drove by, a robot on the median briefly lost its footing and almost fell to the middle of the road. Jack swerved, honked his horn and cursed loudly.

“Relax! They’re just doing their job,” I protested.

“They’re spies, ” said Mike, trying to light a cigarette. “Why the hell would they have cameras?”

I grabbed his cigarette and tossed it out of the window.

---

It was already dusk when I got back to the motel.

The MOTEL sign was lit when I pulled in. So was the smaller “201” beneath it. “Vacancy” glowed but the “No” kept trying and failing.

Em was slumped at the front desk, chin pressed into her palm, staring into a ledger.

“Hey girl,” I said. “What you studying?”

“The absolute bliss to be alive in this day and age,” she said without looking up.

The news in the lobby was on low. A feeble female voice saying the gas prices were expected to normalize by the end of the month.

“I need a shower.” I headed to my room.

“Wash that river skank. Oh hey, Arron’s group is back. He said hi.”

I paused in front of my room.

“How long?”

“Didn’t say. Wants to talk to you when they get back.”

“Sure he does,” I muttered as I unlocked the door.

---

The 2:30 AM light was the pale purple of a parking lot that hasn’t had its bulbs changed since the Clinton administration.

I heard the trucks first. Then the shouting. Then something that sputtered like a diesel engine running on expired permits.

I pulled on pants and looked through the curtain gap.

There were three pickups, two semis, and things that had been civilian vehicles — the kind of modifications that happen in stages, each one a decision that made sense at the time. One truck was dragging a closed trailer, the hitch slightly misaligned, the whole thing listing like it had been loaded in a hurry or in the dark or both.

Em was already out there in her pajamas. Pink plaid. With Hello Kitty. She had her arms crossed and was using the voice she used on guests who smoked in the rooms — measured, final, and ineffective.

They weren’t listening.

I counted maybe twenty of them in the parking lot light. Mostly men. A few that moved with the loose confidence of teenagers who had been handed a weapon recently and hadn’t been corrected yet. All of them armed. Sidearms, long guns, a few things that had started life as semi-auto and had since had a conversation about their options.

Someone started the bonfire in the middle of the parking lot. Not at the edge. The middle. They’d dragged wood from somewhere — I didn’t want to know where — and built it with the architectural ambition of people who have strong feelings about fire and no feelings at all about asphalt.

The flamethrower came out next.

Em took three steps back.

The guy using it wasn’t doing anything precise with it. He was doing something expressive. The flame went up in a long orange column and the men around him made a loud sound.

Bottles broke. The semi-auto fire went up into the dark in short bursts, celebratory, rhythmic, the brass catching the bonfire light on the way down and landing in the gravel like punctuation nobody had asked for.

There was a knock on my door.

Em came in, arms still crossed, tiny gold earrings vibrated aggressively as she approached my window and yanked apart the curtains.

“I think I saw the sheriff’s youngest in there.” I said.

“Yep. Sure is him.”

They opened the trailer.

The ramp came down at an angle and the first one walked out on its belt-feet while slowly looking around. White paint. Black joints. There was a black camera on its shoulder. Another followed. Then more. Some of them were still in high-visibility vests, standing in the bonfire light in the parking lot of the 201 Motel at 2:30 in the morning while shells cooled in the gravel around their feet.

One of the teenagers poked at the nearest one with the barrel of his rifle.

The robot did not react.

Em’s jaw was set in a way I recognized from the ledger.

---

The bonfire had been burning for a while when they started moving the robots closer.

Not all at once. In increments — each step small enough to seem like nothing, the whole visible only if you had been watching from the beginning.

Em was long gone.

The robots moved when directed. Belt-feet on gravel, patient, the high-visibility vests catching the orange light. They didn’t resist. They had been made for roads, medians, flood assessment and mineral surveys, and nothing in their parameters covered a parking lot in Fayette County at 3 A.M. with a flamethrower.

The man with the flamethrower circled to the far side of the fire. The heat stood between him and the robots. The men shifted, widening the arc and giving him space.

“Badaria,” one of them said.

Then louder, passed around the circle.

“Badaria! Badaria!”

The word flattened into rhythm.

He turned it on.

Not at the robots. At the fire — feeding it.

The flame column struck the bonfire and surged upward. A cheer erupted.

The orange thinned to white at the center.

Heat pressed through the window glass. I felt it where I stood.

The robots were close now. Too close.

One of them raised its arm.

Not toward the fire. Not operational.

It brought its arm up in front of its face, the white-painted forearm with the black joints.

I saw the flash before I understood it.

Small. Precise.

A final shutter from the shoulder of the one in front — caught in the orange glow.

I shut the blinds.

The men cheered louder.