January 13th, 2008, part 2

I carefully climb the rusted out fire-escape of an old apartment building. I jimmy the window of a top floor apartment and slip inside. I prefer the top floors because you can hear any Sweepers coming up the stairs. It makes me smile that something so technologically advanced and intelligent has more trouble with stairs than my grandma did. Then I remember some of the other things the robots have "accomplished" and it wipes the grin from my face.

I climb into a child-sized bed with pink unicorn sheets and try not to try to fall asleep. The bed is barely big enough to hold me, but mom and dad's bed had two little ash piles in it. I've gotten used to seeing such ash-piles all over, a memorial to the victims of the brilliant weapon which incinerated biological life but left everything else intact. I've gotten used to the ash piles, but that doesn't mean I'm eager to crawl into bed with them. I wonder where the kid's ash pile was. Sleep comes silently.


I snap my eyes open and in an instant I'm fully awake. Something woke me. Something unpleasant. I strain my ear against the pre-dawn blackness for any sort of whir, click, or hum. That familiar icy feeling in my gut tells me to get my shit together quickly. And then I hear it, the muted murmer of a HotShot. Those little fuckers are not much bigger than a toaster oven but they have become a royal pain in my ass. A HotShot goes from building to building scanning it with a crude but effective thermal scope, if it sees any heat bigger than a cat (of which there are a surprising number for some reason) it will erupt with a cacophenous siren that will draw any Sweepers, Boom-Booms, or robot with something sharp attached within earshot. In case you haven't guessed, that would be a bad thing. Very bad.

I press myself into the floor and try to think of ice-cream and alaskan winters; sometimes you get lucky with these things. And other times...

A sharp shrieking alarm explodes through the apartment building. The little bastard saw me.