Starry Skies
Mika leaned against the edge of the balcony and looked at the glowing night sky. She never thought of New Chicago as pretty even though the city did what it could to keep down light pollution. She never liked the restrictions on flying altitudes because there was always someone who would break the rules and come barging onto her balcony at the worst times. She hated the automatic breakfast machine that she had to buy because she was constantly on the run. She hated that computers had taken over everything.
“Something wrong, Mi?” a metallic voice called from farther in her bedroom.
Well, she hated most computers. “No.”
Cooper Clark, fighting model F16 was put out of commission in World War III in 2052, only twenty years before the war actually ended. Now, conflict had sprung up again between Saudi Arabia and the United States, but currently it was only a cold war. Mika didn’t like it, at any rate. She was general of the fighting ranks of robots (who were the only things actually shooting at each other, these days) and took the old ones under her wing after they were too damaged to fight. One of Cooper’s legs was copper, unlike the rest of his chrome body and clinked a bit. She was only an amateur at that point for fixing robots, and he was her first one from her battalion she had ever fixed. He was in pretty bad shape, but his mental facilities were working exceptionally well since she fixed him.
“They made us a little too human, didn’t they?” he said, moving next to her and taking her hand.
Mika smiled. “I hate this.”
Cooper laughed. “You’ve always been so cynical,” he turned his back to the noise outside and leaned against the balcony. “But at least homosexual marriage is acceptable now. It was just approved on the news this morning. And relations between Saudi Arabia and the U.S. have been a little better.”
“You know how everyone is. Backstabbing.”
Cooper sighed. “How’s that job, you’ve got?”
“It pays.”
“Mika, you should be doing something you love.”
She laughed. “You said so yourself: I don’t like anything.”
“Why don’t you move this whole operation to Montana or Minnesota? They’re still keeping land under reserves. More people are actually going to the cities to avoid weather and whatnot. With global warming, it doesn’t matter where you stay on this continent; the climate has sort of leveled out throughout the world. Places are opening up all over that area. You’d like it better.”
“I’m sure wherever I go, the government would have work for me.”
“Is that what you’re worried about?” He leaned over to her and brushed her short velvet hair out of her face. “Don’t worry about that.”
She sighed and faced him, without speaking. He grabbed her hand and stood up. “Let’s go back to bed.”
She smiled and followed him in. She locked the glass doors and closed the curtains after they were inside. She shut off the lamp and sat down on the easy chair in the corner, gracefully lifting her legs onto the ottoman before leaning back and closing her eyes. She had a lot on her mind lately, but Cooper was right. It was probably better for her to go to the country than stay in the city. She sighed and pushed all thoughts out of her mind so that she could go to sleep.
This entry was posted on Friday, June 15th, 2007 at 11:30 am and is filed under End of Childhood, Fiction Prose, Science Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.