Kitano waited patiently while Sarah replenished herself. He had just gathered enough silver and phones among the ruins to start the journey south, and, anyway, he wouldn't have been able to carry more if he had found more. Between him, his mirror armor, the scraps, some water and the batteries, the mule was almost at her load limit.
Sarah whined softly, as he had taught her, telling him they were alone in a 10 km radius. Kitano relaxed his shoulders and, rubbing his eyes, considered taking a nap. He was getting old. The sun was high and his mule wouldn't be full for at least another two hours.
"What the hell", he said. "Damn mirries wouldn't be back by tomorrow, anyway".
He touched and pinched Sarah's left ear with a practiced gesture. The mule chimed two times and mirrored slabs emerged from her underbelly. Ten seconds later, the makeshift tent was in place. Kitano unslung his blunderbuss and, fighting an unnecessary childhood urge, scurried below the mule and into the tent.
Decades ago, his father had told him to never get under a pack mule unless he wanted to get skewered. Kitano was too young to get the joke.
Not that it mattered anymore. Horses and mules were gone, along with fishes, bees, those funny-looking monkeys and almost everything else besides the city dwellers.
-
He had found Sarah eight years ago, by sheer luck, raiding a dilapidated warehouse outside Takashima. The robot had recognized his idle whistling as an activation command and uncloaked herself. Not a day passed by in which Kitano didn't thank the long-dead programmer for being paranoid enough to lock the mule in autocloaking mode.
Sarah, as she had insisted on being called, changed his life. A scrapper since the fall of the GOD, he lived mostly by unearthing, restoring and repurposing old smartphones, selling them as waterfinders, compasses, zappers, bombs and other useful things to new survival-shocked youths. As always, the old people living in the GOD weren't aware of not even the smallest things their fancy little computers were capable of, and disposed them by the millions. Billions. The crown jewels of human civilization and their biggest folly, thrown away to rot along roadkill and sharkfins.
Luckily for Kitano, some still worked, even without the long-gone faceless corporations which used them to ensnare and enslave. He opened them, collected them, jailbreaked them in one and thousand ways, confident in his microwelding kit and his Internet backup safely tugged in his belt.
Sarah was new to him, made for an undisclosed purpose. Slowly, by trial-and-error, he learned to control it. As years passed, Kitano began to call it "her". Maybe it was the mule's voice, or how funny she moved her ears. Now he had a companion.
With Sarah on tow, he began exploring new ruins, previously too far for his feet. New phones appeared, more silver, an untapped trasure.
While Sarah repurposed 8-minute old photons under the scalding sun, sixty-year-old Kitano considered his fortunate life under the mule, his aging blunderbuss beside him.
-
A whirring sound awoke the scrapper. A screen had flickered to life in Sarah's belly, showing three red dots inside a circle, left of the center. The age-tried sonar map.
The dots were moving to the center of the circle.
Kitano's heart started racing, triggering an alert in his wristwatch. Great, more alerts. He gestured them away and prodded the screen, checking the mule's cloaking status. Enabled. Good. Battery charge - done. Good. Just in case, he signed Sarah to fold her delicate solar panels.
The dots were near the center, with no sign of deceleration. Good again; maybe they don't have cloaking detectors.
"Three times good is no good", his father had said, in the GOD.
Almost as if following orders, the dots dissapeared.
"Damn it", whispered Kitano. He clutched the blunderbuss and checked its charge -four shots. He had received no messages of his folk near him; the only other people in these forsaken techlands were marauders, preying on lone scrappers, tinkers and mirries.
They were three; there would be no bargaining, no sweet-talking out of this, specially with a pricy mule like Sarah. If only they were less...
Well, guns blazing, then.
Sarah slowly opened one of the mirror sidings and Kitano looked for a split second before the slab closed shut again. Marauders alright - two scrappy figures with disruptor meshes and diffraction plastics. Easy. The leader was less forgiving; the blunderbuss was no match for his silver plates. Not this far.
I still have some surprises left, thought Kitano. He gestured and prodded some more.
-
The marauders didn't see him emerge behind the mule. A loud braying made them drop their stances, enough for two zaps. Two fell to the ground, with newly cauterized holes in their heads. The leader, still harmless, looked a little surprised before recovering.
"Stop! You have no advantage anymore!", yelled Kitano.
"Do I?", said the leader, raising a bizarre, imposing gun. "That's a lovely robot there, old man."
"Tell me what you want or get out! You are outnumbered!"
"Ha! If it were so, I would be a corpse right now, like these two dogs." The leader gestured the two men, moving towards Kitano. "No. Something tells me that I still have some leverage."
"Stop moving! Or I'll fire!"
"Why don't you, then?", replied the leader, still moving towards Sarah. "Maybe your rifle's battery is too old. Fitting for a graying scrapper." He chuckled. "Come on. We can still trade. The guns and scraps of these two for your mule. You can keep the cargo."
"Sarah's not for bargain", said Kitano.
"So...it's a Sarah! Thanks, grandpa." The marauder whistled a five-note sequence, and the mule dropped the now-useless cloaking and stared at the marauder, ears prickled. "I bet you have not all the info on S.A.R.A.H.'s. After all, they were made after the Internet collapsed. Too new for you, geezer."
No!, thought Kitano. How could I be so stupid...
"I'm happy we have come to terms. Tough luck."
A shot boomed in the ruins. Kitano's armor shattered as he felt a sledgehammer in his chest. Pain lanced his head as the marauder kicked him. Then, darkness.
-
Some untold time later, a buzzing sound in his wrist.
He surprised himself thinking: Please, not the watch again.
Wait, I'm conscious?...
-
Kitano dreamed with brains-in-a-vat, Matrixes, rebel AI's and all the apocalyptic tales had never came to pass; the near-sighted humanity never knew their doomsday weapons were at plain sight.
The old man awoke in the night, lit only by blazing stars. His watch was tweeting him with "Low Battery" and "Failed Connection" buzzings.
He patted himself. A nasty bruise in the head. In his chest, under the broken mirror of his laser armor, he found an ancient Nokia, with a bullet embedded in its screen.
Well, that's lucky, thought Kitano.
