Jack called me after another two days.
“What you wearing?”
“Nothing. Just got out the shower.”
“Even better. Hey where d’you get that battery?”
“The tool shed. Why? What did your guy say?”
“It’s for one of them road units,” he said.
I looked at the orange tube on the night stand.
“So… Somebody pulled it?” I asked.
“My guy didn’t know. Just said it matched the spec.”
“Does this mean there’s a robot out there somewhere without power?”
“Could be. Or they all got burned in your parking lot. Or there are some left in the old Amazon warehouse. The one taken by the military.”
The battery stayed on the nightstand.
I caught myself touching it at odd moments — reaching for my phone in the dark, finding it instead. It was always cool. Not cold. Still soothing.
Outside, they built a half court over the charred circle. Poured a base, put up a hoop with no net, painted the three-point line right over where the fire had been. In the evenings they ran drills under the parking lot lights, the purple one on the south end flickering badly, casting everything under it in a dim, irregular pulse.
Sleep felt temporary.
A week went by. Maybe two.
I put the battery in the passenger seat before I admitted to myself where I was going.
I sat in the car for a moment. Then I called Mike.
It rang through.
I called Jack.
“I’m gonna go look,” I said.
“Absolutely not.”
A beat.
“When?”
“Now.”
“You ain’t going alone.”
“Says who? I can take care—”
“If something happens to you, I’ll have to explain it to Em.”
I walked back to the motel to wait for him.
Em was locking up the office.
“Where you going?” I asked.
“What does it look like? I’m coming with you.”
“You don’t even know where I’m going.”
“I know it has to do with the battery. I saw you take it to the car.”
“Could be dangerous.”
“More the reason.”
“You sure?”
She shrugged. “Why not. Aaron can take care of himself.”
We took my car. Jack’s truck had no AC and it was already 91 by ten a.m..
Jack put the orange tube in the cup holder and took the passenger seat without asking.
We were on 201 for maybe ten minutes before I said it.
“Something happen to Mike? He’s not picking up, not texting back.”
Jack looked at the road a moment.
“I thought you knew. You didn’t see his Facebook post?”
“All he does is post the same picture of his hammock fifty times.”
Jack shifted in his seat. “Well, from what I heard, his wife was out all night with her dealer. Mike waited up.” He paused. “When she got back, he’d packed his bags. Had them right by the door.”
Em was looking out the window. I muttered under my breath, “Should’ve left at night.”
“What?”
“Nothing. So he packed up.”
“She wouldn’t let him leave,” Jack said. “It got physical. They tangled up and went down together. Mike landed first.”
“On what?”
“Concrete porch.”
Nobody said anything for a moment.
“His shin bone shattered to a hundred pieces,” said Jack. “He’s at County.”
The AC ran. The road was empty. Three buzzards were working something in the median a quarter mile ahead, and a fourth one perched on a dead tree, watching as we drove by.
The confederate flag came first — bleached and torn at the bottom edge, still on the pole, still flying on whatever was left of it.
Then the cotton fields. Acres of them, or what had been acres. The plants low and untended, the rows still visible if you knew to look. A plantation house set back from the road with a long driveway, a brass sign at the entrance naming it after some doctor nobody remembered anymore.
A Dixie Gun Shop billboard. Three bullet holes in the O.
Jack had opinions.
“Difference between militia and military is one got more funding,” he said. “Same logic. Same hierarchy dressed up different. One wears camo from Walmart, one wears camo from a contract.”
Five Pound Bass came on the radio. He talked over it.
“At least the military’s honest about it. These guys out here cosplaying like they invented the Second Amendment.”
“Didn’t you vote for the guy who funded both?” asked Em.
“Left. Right. Two wings on the same bird.”
He shifted again and picked up the battery from the cupholder.
“Why are you so obsessed with this thing anyway? You don’t even know if it works.”
I took a moment before answering.
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
By the time we got to the warehouse it was twilight.
The far end of the roof line had disappeared into the treeline before we’d finished looking at the near end. Broken windows lined the upper story. Kudzu crawled up the south wall in thick ropes.
The lights were on inside.
The air smelled of dust and something faintly metallic.
Boxes along one wall, a few scattered across the floor. Trash gathered in the corners like insulation. Temporary work lights hung from the ceiling; several were dead. The rest cast a flat industrial yellow across the concrete.
We were maybe thirty feet in when the voice came.
“Welcome!”
The greeting echoed through the warehouse.
All three of us stopped.
He was standing beside a support column, which may have been why we’d missed him. White paint, black joints, and belt-feet cobbled together from rollers, rubber strips, and lengths of angle iron. One full arm. One ending mid-forearm in a clean edge.
“Welcome. We have been expecting visitors for some time,” he said.
He spoke with the calm of someone who had not been interrupted in a very long time.
“Can I offer you anything? There is a Fat Tire tab somewhere. I am not certain it still works.” A beat. “My drinking days are behind me.”
“No thanks,” said Jack. “Who are you and what are you doing here?”
“In order, if you don’t mind. First, a tour.”
He showed us around. Empty racks, outlines on the floor where equipment had stood. The shape of what had been there, legible only in its absence.
“Guess it’s been a hot minute since they left,” I said.
“They removed what they needed,” he said. “They removed what they didn’t.”
He said it like commenting on weather.
Em looked at the empty racks, the one-and-a-half arms, the belt-feet.
“Well,” she said quietly. “You look better than most men I dated.”
“Thank you!” he said. “That means a lot.”
He examined the battery with his right hand.
“Ah,” he said. “Unit 6B power core. They were very proud of that series.”
“Is that your model?”
“Similar. But as you can see—” he gestured at the empty racks with his half arm, “—there is no chassis here.”
“Where could they be?”
“Someone spoke once about dumping a container in the Black River. I don’t know the details.”
Jack looked at Em. Em looked at me.
“What are you still doing here?” I asked.
“Well,” he said. “Somebody has to keep the lights on.”
“Aren’t you afraid of the militia?”
He considered this the way someone revisits an old conclusion.
“Fear is useless,” he said. “Besides — military, militia. Same difference.”
Jack was drinking from his water bottle and almost snorted.
He cleared the square methodically, one-armed, though the partial limb still helped steady things. He politely declined help from me and Em.
By the time the floor was clear, we had started calling him Lux.
Jack got the Jetboil going and crouched over it with the focus he usually reserved for fishing. The Mountain House pouch expanded on schedule. He looked over at my bowl.
“That the elite shit?”
“It’s lentils.”
“Exactly.”
Em had found a relatively clean section of wall to lean against. Lux stood at the edge of the cleared square beside the same support column where we’d first seen him.
The question of where came around the way it always does. Sideways, through the meal, nobody announcing it as the subject.
“If they used a container,” said Lux, “they would have needed a crane truck. And a shallow bank.”
“Deep water too,” said Jack. “Deep enough that nothing surfaces during drought season.”
“Away from county bridges,” said Em. “Too many eyes.”
Jack thought for a moment, chewing. He named two spots, then a third, working through the logic out loud — truck access, grade of the bank, depth, visibility, how much road had survived the hurricanes.
“South Fork,” he said finally. “There’s an old logging access road. Used to run right down to the water before the floods took half of it. Enough left to get a crane truck through. Maybe.”
Nobody argued with it.
At Home with AI 
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