Nanny-Bot

[Enki]

This is a little story I started writing tonight.

I was 11 years old when society began to unravel. Since then I have lived off the land in the Montana wilderness, survived Jez Alpert's Scopolamine army, seen men torn limb from limb, watched the hunter killers run out of batteries; roving the wilderness with my robot nanny.
My parents had become increasingly agitated. They watched the news with horror, the slow dread that had always been a part of their lives became a nightmare of agitation. My Father would rant about how it all went downhill from the days when it became acceptable for the New York police to beat young girls, when riot police in small town Illinois beat down striking workers at Wal Mart. He said this started to happen right around the time I was born. A bunch of young radicals had built a tent city in downtown Manhattan, and shortly after that you started to see the drones flying over America. He told me how those drones only killed people in Muslim countries, but I remember as they appeared more and more frequently over the skies of Montana. At first they had only cameras.
Sarah, my robot nanny appeared on Christmas one day. At first I thought it was the coolest thing ever, but I soon realized that it was a leash that my Father could use to monitor my every move, all day and all night. It gave me more freedom because I could roam the rocky mountains as free as I wanted, knowing that if I got into trouble Sarah would do whatever she could to save me.
As time went on, the news got worse and worse. My Father talked about how bad it was becoming out East. New York City was a rigidly controlled paradise for millionaires with cameras on every corner. Just over the river in Camden New Jersey where the Governor had gotten rid of the police department years ago, it had become a bloody warzone fought over by drug gangs, the Sheriff's department had just stopped going there.
My Mother for what it's worth tried to give me something to be optimistic about. She would always point out the beauty of Montana and how great it was, and how much more freedom we had than most. My Father's paranoia made that difficult for me to see. I resented Sarah for so long. I have since grown to love her.
Montana was isolated and remote from the worst of it. We got plenty of fly-overs from those drones because the government thought everyone that lived in the Montana wilderness was a right-wing militia. Yet, we didn't have the Salvadoran death-squads turned meth dealers that my Father told me about. We didn't have the heavily armed paramilitary cartels of California, Arizona, Texas and New Mexico.
When I finally understood my Father was when I watched Los Angeles burn to the ground on CNN. They had been reporting on the brush fires, an instance of brutality from riot cops clashing with Occupiers who wanted to put the fires out in their own neighborhoods turned into a full blown riot that made it impossible to fight the fires. Suddenly there were riots everywhere, Brooklyn, Oakland. The war in Yemen had been spilling over to Saudi Arabia for years, and soldiers who had been trained in counter-insurgency to fight riots in Yemen and Bahrain were now in American cities. It was overwhelming for the soldiers to be everywhere at once. That's when they finally declassified the robots. It was all over YouTube, robots were spraying pepper spray into the faces of people with hoodies and Guy Fawkes masks. President Ryan finally declared martial law when the anarchists detonated the EMP, knocking out all communications in Bushwick and levelling a riot force of 100 bots.
That was when my Father, who had been studying Sarah's schematics for the three years that we had her finally took her into his workshop. He brought me in as he took some chips and circuits out of her chassis. Her Motherboard was kept in her chest in a hardened housing. She was meant to take some punishment to keep up with an athletic child. The commercials for her model had shown the robot doing Parkour while running after a toddler, running up the wall to get in front of the child so she could gently nudge it away from danger.
'Son', he said, 'I am upgrading Sarah so she will protect you better. Sarah is now completely illegal, she's contraband. Do not tell anyone, and I do mean anyone about these modifications.', he looked at me with more gravity than I'd ever seen in his eyes, 'Sarah is now programmed to kill for you.', I couldn't believe what I was hearing. My nannybot was now a kill bot. 'These bots are programmed at the hardware level, never to intentionally harm a human being. Any mishap where they accidentally hurt someone and they are automatically destroyed. I think this is necessary. I don't know what's going to happen, but I think this is necessary.', he looked sadder than he ever had before.
A week later, Israel bombed every Iranian nuclear power plant. The next day, Tel Aviv was wiped out in a nuclear fire-storm, two hours later, Tehran, Qom and every city in Iran, and Shia Iraq ceased to exist. America began calling the troops home, most of them defected from the military as soon as they got back to American soil. The local news started declaring which locals were considered terrorists. Bob Mayhew who ran the gun shop in town was taken away, Dad said hopefully to some FEMA camp somewhere. No one really knew what happened to Bob.
After Bob's disappearance the Sheriff paid my Dad a visit. He asked if he could speak to my Father privately. They sent me away. Later on my Father explained to me that the Sheriff came around saying he was trying to keep in touch with the citizens. They were afraid to have a town hall out of fear that it might be considered a terrorist cell. They'd heard rumor that almost a whole town in Idaho had been shuttled out. That's what they began calling it, 'shuttling out', people would just get collected by Federal Agents put onto buses and disappear.
The news continued to report the war in the Middle-East. There was a Shia horde called the Mahdi army that was maurauding throughout Central Asia. The joke started to become about how Afghanistan was the most peaceful place on Earth because to them the violence was just Thursday. By then China had closed off its borders and become a completely insular economy. North and South Korea went dark and disappeared into the Sinosphere. The only real commerce conducted by the Chinese was satellite mineral extraction facilities located around the world that supplied China with its insatiable appetite for raw materials. These may as well have been part of the interior of China for all they actually communicated with the local populations. In Europe fascist street gangs that had been parading through the streets for most of my life began to become powerful political parties. In some nations they began to forcibly expel Muslims sending them on boats to whatever Muslim country was convenient and simply dropping them off.
In America the economy collapsed. We stopped buying oil from the Middle-East because no one could afford it. Those who had the foresight to purchase solar power cars were the lucky ones. Others were not quite so lucky. I saw a lot more horseback riding in those days.
The internet continued to do what it was intended to do, survive a World War, so we were never without news. Many of the networks stopped broadcasting. CNN was the first to go, but was followed by the major networks. Blogs in all their dubiousness became people's primary news source. As my Dad liked to brag, they'd been his primary news source for most of his life.
My Dad would go hunting with his friends, this kept us supplied with meat. I think this was also one of the primary ways they'd congregate and pass along information that they didn't want the government to know about. We'd had a greenhouse since before the troubles, so we were well fed as were most of our neighbors who had similar setups. We never went to church more than in those days.

[noddy]

[Nonc Hilaire]

Thanks for posting your sketch. I see at least three chapters there when you add the dialog and start showing activity instead of telling it.

[Enki]

Thanks for posting your sketch. I see at least three chapters there when you add the dialog and start showing activity instead of telling it.

That was sort of a prologue, but I might make some chapters. I basically finished it with his parents getting shuttled out.