“Pumpkin, Genesis Robotics,” I ordered.

The car crawled down the road, painfully slow, like it was mocking me. I brought up the map of our route on the display screen. Twenty-six minutes out, as traffic allowed, it reported.

“We going to go the speed limit the whole way?” Commander Lucas Von asked. “I thought we were in a hurry.”

“Manual drive’s disabled.”

“Right.” He leaned between the front seats and tapped at the main screen.

“That’s not going to help. The car won’t respond to you.”

A window I’d never seen before popped up. It asked for input, and he punched in a string of numbers. The screen went red and a three-note tune chimed from the speakers. “Emergency override accepted,” Pumpkin said. “Now accepting voice commands from Commander Lucas Henry Von.”

“Shift to manual operation,” he replied.

“Manual operation confirmed.”

The steering wheel and pedals reappeared at my hands and feet. My jaw dropped. I turned to look at him, but he was already leaning back in his seat.

“Who are you? Really?” I asked the rearview.

“Commander Lucas Von,” he said like I needed that part again. “I work for a branch of the military called the Orbital Protection Grid.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Good. You shouldn’t have. And don’t go mentioning it outside of this car, or I’ll hand-deliver you to Genesis myself.”

“Yeah, yeah. Pinkie promise. So, what happened to you at the Orbital thing? Wai... ‘Orbital?’... You really are from space, aren’t you?”

“No, but I've been stationed there a while. My squadron was attacked by robots like the one we encountered by the lake. I need to warn what’s left of my command.”

“Attacked by robots? How does that happen? I thought—”

“It’s not rocket science, okay? They attacked the same day their android cousins were recalled. That’s not a coincidence. Put the pieces together. The connection's obvious.”

“They’re...fighting back?” I muttered more to myself than to him.

“Don’t get any ideas. Now, come on. Pick up the pace. Just don’t kill us before we get there.”

“You got it.”

I pressed the pedal to the floor, the engine rumbled, and the car shot forward. With government regulations off, I weaved and dodged around other cars, slid around turns, and shot down straights. As kids, Mia and I spent hours zipping around abandoned parking lots and old roads where the regulations didn’t apply, but this was my first time flying down a highway.

“I said don’t kill us,” Commander Lucas Von complained. The sound of his seatbelt snapping into place cut through the rain.

Even distracted by the throbbing in my hands and the calamity crashing into my life, it was exhilarating. For a few minutes, I was in control. I had purpose. Everything fell into place behind the wheel like I’d been built with the open road in mind. But as all good things do, it came to an end all too quickly.

We arrived at Dempsey’s doorstep. The buildings sprouted up from the wilderness low and slow but grew taller and busier the deeper into the city we traveled. Genesis Robotics Headquarters stood out as one of the tallest buildings in the city. Its rounded, fin-like roof could be seen from miles away. As I tamed our speed, Commander Lucas Von sat forward and turned off manual operation. We didn’t want to draw attention to ourselves.

The rain dialed back to a trickle. People and robots alike swarmed the streets of midtown Dempsey, going about their business, ignorant of the crashed spaceman in my backseat or the killer security bot on its way to my house. It felt strange to look outside and see a normal world. But, given the recall, there wasn’t nearly the number of visitors to Genesis HQ as expected. In fact, people almost seemed to be avoiding the front door. A pair of security bots turned away the few who dared approach.

Commander Lucas Von noticed, too. “Are they closed?” he asked.

“It’s the middle of the day. Why would they be?”

He turned the radio up and flipped through the stations, but if anyone was reporting on Genesis closures, we didn’t catch it. Nothing left to do but proceed with the plan.

I pulled on the hospital sweatshirt and a pair of white cold weather gloves from the trunk. They were Mia’s, so they fit but were lined in pink. Oh, well. They did the job of covering my hands, although the fabric felt like fire. The sting brought tears to my eyes.

For his disguise, Commander Lucas Von obscured his face with my old aviators. I didn’t say anything, but I was convinced they wouldn’t help. Anyone who knew him would recognize that beard of his, which, somehow, through everything, didn’t have a single whisker out of place.

“What’s the plan?” I tried to help him out of the car, but he turned his back on me.

“We need to get around back without being noticed,” he said. “The easiest way to get inside will be to tailgate an employee. There should be people going to lunch around this time.” He looked me up and down, an unamused glare on his face. “And you need to stay behind me because you look like an idiot in that outfit.”

“Oh, sorry. Is it the gloves? I thought they gave me an air of refinement. Like a sexy butler.”

He slammed the car door shut.

“Do you have any more fashion advice for me? Cause you seem like the kind of guy who really knows his stuff. Where’d you get those clothes, anyway?”

“Shut up.”

“Sure thing, Cyclops.”

I pressed a button on the fob, and Pumpkin drove away to find parking. I’d been to Dempsey a few times before but never Genesis HQ. Despite being one of the most influential and wealthiest companies in the world, something about its headquarters was undeniably swampy. It was probably the green tint to the glass exterior. The color reflected the dim light of the clouded sun, keeping the inside as hidden as concrete walls and giving the whole thing the look of a giant cucumber shooting up from the ground.

Commander Lucas Von led me around the block to get to the backside of the building. He was adamant about not being spotted (a sentiment I wholeheartedly supported) so taking the long-way-around made sense. Although, stopping to help him over a short back-alley fence was hell on my burned hands. In the back of my mind, I kept worrying about getting an infection, but of course, that fear was groundless. There was no way my body could be susceptible to bacteria. Could it?

I’d never get used to thinking of myself as an artificial being.

After a good deal of slinking about like a couple of rats, we made it to the Genesis employee parking lot. It stood a level higher than the basement intake garage, and Commander Lucas Von warned me not to go near the scanner by the intake doors. According to him, it might identify me as an unauthorized android and shut me down on the spot. But the intake scanner wouldn’t be a problem. As we snuck up the rear end of the lot, we found the intake garage door firmly shut. And not just that door. All the doors were shut. And if the red lights above the handles meant what I thought they meant, they were locked too.

I might have taken it for a simple physical security measure, except no one was going in or out. At all. There were no delivery trucks at the garage door, no workers buzzing about. Cars filled every space of the lot, but no employees went to or from them. Genesis HQ was quiet. Dead.

“Are you sure they’re not closed?” Commander Lucas Von asked again.

This time, I shrugged.

We sat and waited in the shadow of a red sedan for a while, watching for a naive do-gooder who might take pity on two employees who forgot their ID cards. But no one came.

“What are we going to do? This could take forever,” I said.

“Let’s go check it out,” he grumbled in agreement. “If they’re closed, we’ll have to break in.”

“Won’t they get us on camera?”

“That’s going to happen no matter what we do. Come on.”

A set of cement steps led to a back door. It might have been an emergency exit, but its position cast us in shadow and couldn’t be seen by the parking lot or road. Commander Lucas Von stood by while I scouted ahead for other entry points—a vent, an open window, anything at all—but came up short. I did, on the other hand, spot a security bot headed our way.

“Shit, how far out?” asked Commander Lucas Von.

“It’ll be here any second. Maybe it has a key we can steal if we disable it or something?”

“You watch too many movies.”

“Well, what’s your idea?”

I didn’t get a chance to hear Commander Lucas Von’s idea. A low buzz interrupted us, followed by a beep, and the little red light above the door handle turned green. He looked at me, and I looked at him. The sound of metal feet stomping along the pavement grew louder.

“No, don’t!” he said, but I already had the door open.

 A staircase to the right climbed to the higher floors, and a short hallway led to a set of windowless double doors. Like most staircases in buildings of this kind, not a soul graced the steps, only darkness and silence.

“It’s clear,” I told him.

To avoid inevitable capture, he had no choice. He slipped in behind me.

“This isn’t right,” he pointed out, and as soon as he said the words, a second low buzz hummed.

The door.

Commander Lucas Von tried to open it, but it didn’t budge.

An eerie masculine voice resonated from an intercom speaker. “Welcome, Commander Von. I can’t say I was expecting you, but I’m glad you could make it.”

“What the hell?” he answered.