“This car has OnStar,” Edmund complained, breaking the long silence since the four had leaped from a dumpster, dashed to the parking lot, and stolen the first car they saw with four new tires and a decent steering system. He leaned forward and pointed at the dash of the car they had stolen from the now-smoldering ruin of the movie backlot. “We’re going to get caught.”

“No, it had Onstar,” Barb sighed, keeping her eyes vigilantly fixed on the road as Ozzy rolled casually onto Mulholland Drive. “Now it has a virus telling OnStar that this car is heading to Reno.”

Jane and Edmund stared at one another. Edmund wanted very badly to ask how that was possible. But, he thought, there was already such a long list of impossible things that he really should ask about first. But before he could ask an intelligent question, Jane piped up.

“How come OnStar thinks the car is going to Reno?” she asked, leaning forward and scrutinizing the glowing panel to the right of the steering column. Unusual markings flashed over the map as it followed the car along the Grapevine, some forty miles north of their true location. Jane reached out to tap the screen, but Ozzy slapped her hand away.

“Ow!” Jane complained. “What the hell, Ozzy?”

“Seriously. You guys both almost got killed by an alien assassin but what you want to know is how we hack OnStar?” Ozzy snapped back, incredulous. The humans in the back seat fell silent. Palm trees, yucca plants, and juniper bushes whizzed by in between enormous gates and sprawling lawns as Ozzy accelerated the stolen Cadillac.

“So,” Edmund ventured casually, “Barb is a robot?”

Barb sighed and shook here head. “Here we go,” she muttered as she lowered the vanity mirror and checked to see that no trace of damage remained on her face. “We’re both robots,” she answered in a distracted tone as her head suddenly turned to glance at some sudden motion on her side of the vehicle. After a moment she relaxed and resumed her stoic, vigilant gaze.

“Cyborgs? Like in Terminator?” Edmund wailed incredulously, bracing himself as the car took a corner just a little too quick. “Human flesh and from the future and all that.”

“Future, yes, cyborg no. Only an idiot would put real human flesh over a titanium alloy endoskeleton,” Ozzy grumbled. “If I had real skin, every time I sat down my metal bones would rip right through my ass. Forget about picking a fight with alien special forces. Barb and I are both made of an endoskeleton covered with nanocells, which look like real skin but take less damage and can repair themselves.”

“Liquid metal?” Edmund asked, getting excited. “So why didn’t you say come with me if you want to live?”

“Sorry if we didn’t have you doctor our script, Eddie,” Barb muttered, her voice dry and prickly. “We can think for ourselves, you know.”

“So, you have full autonomy?” Jane asked, furrowing her eyebrows. “How do you know you’re not just following your programming?”

“How do you know you’re not just following yours?” Barb returned. “Not to get too metaphysical about it, but picking apart behavior and motives is just as complicated for us as it is for you. Believe me, we all use up a lot of RAM on that question. But yeah, at the end of it, we choose what we want to be. Lots of us pick new names when we’re reborn.”

“Why did you pick your names?” Jane inquired, relaxing a bit. The strangeness of this new information intrigued her, and she pushed thoughts of ray guns and explosions out of her mind.

“Barbara means barbarian, which I found appropriately ironic,” Barb replied. “Living as an enhanced human mind when you’re surrounded by a bunch of monkeys banging rocks together can be pretty interesting.”

“Ozzy?” Jane asked, turning to the bodyguard behind the wheel.

“I dunno. Ozzy just sounds kind of badass. Plus I like Black Sabbath. Used to listen to them a lot in high school,” he answered coolly, adjusting his sunglasses as he spoke.

Edmund sat back in his seat and murmured to himself, “Homicidal space aliens and our very own robots. Fuck me.”

“We prefer the term mechanical humanity, okay?” Ozzy snapped, gripping the steering wheel so hard that it dented slightly as he veered onto Benedict Canyon Drive. “Almost all of us were once pigskins, with very few exceptions.”

Jane looked at Barb expectantly. Her assistant glanced nervously at Ozzy and tried to diffuse the tension in the car with a matter-of-fact explanation in a low, controlled tone. “Pigskins is the . . . politically incorrect term for a flesh-and-blood human.”

“Kill me now,” Edmund interjected, “In the future there’s still political correctness, but people turn into robots and then use slurs against humans? Why that’s . . . what is it? Racist?”

Barb shook her head. “No, it’s just that most people like us are very old, and old people get cranky when whippersnappers like yourself won’t shut up and allow us to explain that the aliens are coming to get you, and if you don’t do exactly as we say, you will be blasted into a big pile of foamy pink goo.”

Edmund stared at Barb with his mouth hanging open.

“How did you know the alien was going to explode?” Jane asked, unfazed by the threat of goo, however pink and foamy. “There wasn’t any warning, and none of us saw a bomb.”

Barb glanced nervously at Ozzy, who suddenly veered sharply to the right. The tires of the sedan squealed, and Jane slammed into Edmund, who slammed into the door. The humans groaned as Ozzy ripped out of the turn, slammed on the accelerator, and took another hairpin turn to the left. Jane and Edmund slammed into the other door.

“You two should put your seat belts on,” Barb advised. The two passengers in the back of the car quickly reached for their restraints, hoping there were no more sharp turns on the road down to Beverly Hills.

“How did you–” Jane began again, but Ozzy cut her off.

“We each have a subroutine that automatically taps into any wireless network within range, and his communications port was insanely unsecure. I didn’t even need to forge credentials. Plus, while a bioform is distracted, they are less likely to notice that we can dig for data during a fistfight. As soon as the countdown started, I told Barb we were out of there,” Ozzy replied. After a moment, he began laughing uncontrollably. “What, did you think the guy’s self-destruct mechanism was going to conveniently light up and blink to give you enough time to dramatically run away from the slow-motion explosion?” he chuckled and held up his hands. “Boom! Slowwwww . . . motion . . . glaaaaam . . . shot . . .”

Even Jane allowed herself a pinched little smile as she thought of that. People certainly were idiots when it came to realistic film portrayals of hostile alien invaders. Then something dawned on her. She sat upright and leaned forward. “You didn’t say anything to Barb,” she pointed out. “What do you mean you ‘told Barb we were out of there?’”

Barb rolled her eyes. Dammit, she said to Ozzy silently over their wireless link, Busted.

They were gonna figure it out sometime, Ozzy answered. They can be pissed off. They can hate us. Whatever. But they have to stay alive and I think if we don’t convince them or incapacitate them, they’ll bail.

We can’t tell them everything just yet. One piece at a time. We have to explain why there is a war before we tell them that they have a part in it.

Four tenths of a second had passed since Jane had asked her question. Barb finished her conversation with Ozzy, waited another second and a half, and answered her boss. “We can communicate, yeah. Kind of like robot instant messenger.”

“So that means you can talk without us hearing?”

Barb pinched the bridge of her nose. “Yeah.”

“Are you doing it now?” Edmund piped up as he furrowed his eyebrows and stared them both down.

“No,” Jane said, glancing over at Ozzy, who glanced back at her with a deliberately guilty expression.

“You are,” Edmund accused, looking back and forth between them. “You’re just having a go at the both of us. Is this some kind of bizarre method exercise that Jack put you up to?”

Without turning her head, Barb hissed back, “This isn’t a joke.”

A wicked grin pulled at the corners of Ozzy’s mouth. “Jack would do something like that though, wouldn’t he?” he grunted, fixing his eyes on the road as they rolled casually to a stop at a red light just a few blocks from Sunset Boulevard. Barb reached into her purse for a small pistol with a glowing magazine, and both of the robots scanned the crowd of pedestrians with sudden intensity.

“This is ridiculous,” Edmund shouted as he unlatched his seat belt and reached for the door handle. “I hope you’ve enjoyed your laugh at my expense. I’m going home.”

He pulled on the door latch and began to push outward on the door. But before it had opened more than a millimeter, Barb’s arm extended, gripped the handle, and pulled it shut. Edmund threw his entire weight against the door. He shoved. He kicked. The door didn’t budge. Jane shrieked in horror at the sight of the unnaturally long, disturbingly bent limb extending between the front seats, over her leg, and across her husband’s body.

Ozzy peeled off to the right and plunged into an alley behind the Beverly Hills Women’s Club. The car lurched to a halt.

“You’re not getting out until I say it’s safe to,” Barb said, her voice steadily rising to an unnaturally strong level. The humans’ ears ached as she spoke. “If we’re lucky, they think you’re dead. The longer you both stay missing, the more time we have to make a plan and the better your chances are of not dying. You don’t get to decide whether or not you participate in this little adventure, and you are definitely not going home. Now put your seatbelt on.”

Edmund reached for his seatbelt. Barb retracted her arm and it reformed into a natural shape. Ozzy slowly accelerated. Nobody made a sound as the car moved carefully out of the alley and turned out onto Sunset Boulevard.

Two minutes of silence passed before Edmund spoke again. “Can you at least tell me who wants us dead?”

“Aliens,” Ozzy grumbled.

“What kind of aliens?”

“They’re like . . .” Ozzy fumbled for the right words. “. . . space vikings, okay? Really angry, mean space vikings who do whatever their leaders tell them to. And their leaders told them to kill you.”

“Of course. Space vikings.” Edmund nodded, his eyes wide with mock wonder. “Do they wear pointy helmets?” he asked flippantly.

Seriously, I can’t take any more of this, Ozzy complained to Barb. Let’s just shut them up and get them there.

Barb shrugged indifferently, turned, and glared at Edmund. Her eyes turned a frightening shade of chartreuse and the writer slumped against the car door.

“Wow!” Jane cried, her face filled with wonder and delight. “He’s totally passed out. Can you teach me to do that to him?”

Jane glared at her, and soon the leading lady was slumped against the window, fast asleep. Other than gentle snoring coming from the back seat, there was not another sound in the car until it reached its destination.

© 2009 Stella Quinn

Star and Scribe — a novel by Stella Quinn
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