Interzone 251 by edited by Andy Cox

flowed smoothly into the body. I put my hand on the domed back of the robot, near the juncture of body and neck. The ceramic material felt warm and alive, in spite of its unyielding hardness. “You would have died, Domino,” I said. “You would have winked out without finding any cure, or at least without being able to bring it back to the real world, to implement it.”
    “We don’t know that,” Domino said.

    ***

    Domino and I walked together on a worn, crumbling-at-the-edges highway. We’d seen a new-tech construction site from the air, and Ariel had been able to land fairly close to it. Soon we came to an off-ramp with no signs, and through the break in the trees we could see that this led to the site we were looking for. Downhill from us were three low rectilinear buildings arranged in an arc around something bigger; something that didn’t look like a building. Of all the thousand ways that something might look in order to look like a spaceship, the way this thing looked would be pretty high on the list. It was silver-gray, sleek, smooth, seamless, curving, graceful, beautiful. It looked eager, eager for the sky. “Jesus,” I murmured.
    I picked up Domino so it could get a better look. “Ah!” it said. It was odd, this wordless exclamation of delight coming from a robot. I put it on the ground and we started down the road. In spite of myself, I felt excitement rising in me. What if this was really it? The sort of thing that Lucia had kept believing in; something real, something exciting, something that pointed toward a future with life and meaning and hope. I walked fast down the sloping road, almost running, and Domino stayed ahead of me, its little legs a scurrying blur.
    A few hours later I was slouching against one of the buildings. “This is like Fermilab all over again,” I said.
    Like Fermilab, the site was deserted, shut down, abandoned, dead. Domino and I had wandered through the area, our footsteps the only sound amid silence. Everything in the peripheral buildings was smooth, unbroken surfaces with no hint of usable controls or display screens. And as for the ship itself – if it was a ship – we couldn’t even find a way into it; no hatch or sliding panel or section of hull that magically dilated. No nothing. For all we could tell, the thing was a solid block of new-tech ceramic, cunningly sculpted to look like a spaceship.
    For the tenth time I went back to the part of the thing that seemed like the logical place for an entry hatch. I ran a hand over the glass-smooth surface, and then pounded on it with my fist. I banged over and over as hard as I could, and then turned around and leaned against the thing, sticking my hand into my armpit to try and make it stop hurting. “Is this where we should scatter Lucia’s ashes, Domino?” I asked. “Here, in the middle of all this stuff that isn’t finished, that doesn’t work, that we can’t understand? At this monument to failure and nothingness?”
    “I’m sorry,” Domino said. “I thought there would be something more. Something hopeful. I felt sure, somehow…”
    “That was Lucia, Domino. You learned that from her. She was always sure that there was something good, something exciting over the horizon. She always believed there had to be a future, somewhere out there. Something better than this dead, burned out world and dead, burned out people.” I pushed myself upright and walked over to where I’d left my backpack. “Well then,” I said, “here’s to hope. Here’s to goddamn hope.” I fished the box of ashes out of the backpack and took the plastic bag out of the box. The bag wasn’t sealed, just folded over on itself, so I unfolded it. I walked to the prow of the ship, and faced in the direction it was facing. There was a stretch of new-tech pavement, and beyond that a weedy field that gradually became forest. It was dusk, and to my left the sun was beginning to set behind the Rockies. I gripped the plastic bag at the