The Hum in the Scrap

The junkyard was the biggest thing in the world, or at least the biggest thing in Tam's world, which after fifteen years had stopped feeling like a difference. It sat at the edge of the dead city, where the towers stopped being towers and started being teeth, and it went on for miles. Mountains of metal. Whole hills made of cars and machines and the bones of things nobody could name anymore. Tam knew it better than he knew his own face. He had to. The junkyard was how he ate. He was a scavenger. That was the polite word. The word the older crews used was rat, and Tam had decided a long time ago not to mind it, because a rat survives, and surviving was the whole job. That morning he was working a fresh slide. A whole hillside of scrap had come down in the night — they did that, the metal hills, they shifted and slid and sometimes they buried people — and a fresh slide meant fresh layers turned up to the light, things that had been buried deep for years suddenly there for the taking. You wanted to be first on a fresh slide. Tam was almost always first. He was small and he was fast and he did not have anyone waiting at home, which meant he could leave before dawn. He found the copper wire first, which was good, copper was always good. He found a box of bearings, still oiled, also good. He was filling his bag and thinking about nothing much, thinking about breakfast, when he heard the hum. He stopped. The junkyard made noise all the time. Metal settling, wind in the gaps, the far-off grind of the big crews working their claims. Tam knew every sound the junkyard made. This was not one of them. This was a hum, low and steady, and it was coming from under the slide, from somewhere down in the fresh-turned metal, and it did not sound like settling and it did not sound like wind. It sounded like something that was on. Nothing in the junkyard was on. That was the whole point of a junkyard. Things came here when they stopped. Tam had been scavenging fifteen years and he had never once found a thing that was still running, and so he stood on the slide with his bag of copper and he knew he should walk away, because a thing that was still running was not scrap, it was somebody's, and somebody's things got you killed. He did not walk away. He was fifteen and he was curious and curiosity is louder than sense at fifteen. He dug. It took him an hour. The hum got louder the deeper he went, and twice the slide shifted under him and he nearly ran, and both times the hum was still there when the metal stopped moving, steady, patient, like it was waiting for him. What he uncovered was a robot. Not a war machine. Not one of the big silent crew-bots the salvage gangs used. It was small, about Tam's size, and it was old, really old, the kind of old where the design looked strange because nobody made things that shape anymore. It had a rounded body and two careful arms and a head with a single soft light in it, and the light was on, dim, and the hum was coming from somewhere in its chest. It was a service unit. Tam knew that much. The old world had been full of them, machines built to help in houses, to carry and clean and mind children. They were worthless as scrap. Everyone said so. There was nothing valuable in a service unit, no rare metal, no working core worth pulling. The crews left them where they lay. The little soft light in its head turned, slowly, and found Tam's face, and focused. And the robot said, in a voice that was quiet and cracked with age and absolutely certain, "Oh. There you are. I have been waiting a very long time. Have you come to take me home?" Tam stood on the fresh slide with his bag of copper and his mouth open and no idea at all what to say, because in fifteen years of scavenging the dead city nothing had ever, not once, been glad to see him.