Nebula Award–winning writer and mechanical engineer A.T. Greenblatt’s new short story imagines a future where climate change has upended the landscape in every way.
We can tough it out here, kiddo,The highway’s surprisingly smooth between Salt Lake and Nevada. But Fern doesn’t trust it. She keeps pinging the inspector bot, pestering Jody to update her maps, nagging Sabrina to pay attention.“Yeah, we’ve noticed,” mumbles Jody.
“Don’t stop here,” Fern says. Spike accelerates a little and for that small kindness, Fern’s grateful.day when they see the obnoxiously blue trophy truck in a ditch in the middle of Nevada.The front end of the truck is a crumpled mess and the windshield is smashed, but there’s no one around, not even footprints. No food or water or tools either. Just a little blood in the driver’s seat.“There’s no bandits out here, right, Fern?” Jody asks. Fern’s poking around in the hood.
Fern’s hyperfocused on the inspector bot’s readouts. She saw what happened to Johnny Shit, she knows things aren’t always what they seem out here.Fern hears something cracking. And before Sabrina can react, they are falling.“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Fern says, when Spike finally stops moving. Not bothering to check herself for injuries, she hauls ass out of the car. She sees the solar array in back, bent at an unnatural angle. Two of the tires have gone flat. And then she sees the hood.
“No, I sent myself. There’s always a handful of teams that crash around here. Like that other team a few miles back. Was going to get their car now,” he waves at the back of the truck and Fern notices the hitch. “But since I’m here … can I give you ladies a ride?”His truck is hot in the bright sun, but at least he hasn’t lived in it for a week. Deftly, he maneuvers his Robomules around the collapsed part of the road to Spike.
“Will you?” Jody asks, Edan nods and she brings over her SmartPad and for the next 30 minutes, they sit shoulder to shoulder, routing, annotating and planning backup routes.“All we need now is a working car,” says Sabrina, miserably. There are tears in her eyes, which freaks Fern out. Sabrina never cries.
Eventually Edan says: “I go to Sacramento almost every week these days. It’s easier to get around now that so many people have lung damage from smoke and mold. I built myself something great here, but I don’t want to be here all the time.”“Why not? There’s no such thing as a self-sufficient frontiersman, just ones with access to some friends and a good hardware store.”
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