I Heart Robot Read Online Free PDF

lift, or Asrid, or a taxi despite the cost. Instead, my feet take me down a side street away from boyfriends and empty cake plates. I walk. Walking helps clear the cobwebs from my head. The cold air whips tears from my eyes, and I tense against the freeze.
    The wind carries snatches of music, the dissonant and frenzied twang of strings and pulsating bass. I follow the sound down a labyrinth of narrow streets littered with trash until I reach the ruins of the old train depot. Being out here alone at night isn’t wise, but I really couldn’t care.
    Firelight dances spasmodic across the paint splashed walls. Standing on a stage above a thicket of writhing bodies, a guy with wild hair dips and sways as he plays the viola to a backtrack of electronic beats. Feral, that’s what Mom would call them, and all I want to do is let my hair down and join them.

Quinn
     
     
    Sal’s idea of celebrating is getting high on inebriation patches and partying with the ragamuffin crowd at the depot. She jams the flash drive into the port beneath a flap of flesh on my lower back. The code unravels up my spine and addles my system.
    “Strong enough?” Sal asks.
    “Pleasantly buzzing.”
    “Shoot me up.” She hands me a different flash drive, and I fumble through tatty layers of military surplus in search of her port. Sal takes a triple dose and starts giggling, her eyes shiny with fuel-cell byproduct.
    Together, we stumble out of Fragheim and cross the tracks toward the depot. The abandoned trains provide sleeping quarters for the city’s flotsam and jetsam. At night, the humans emerge to writhe beneath the stars, high on drugs and life. Various crews roll in and soon the depot is a musical war-zone. Humans garbed in psychedelic relics of the cybergrunge age bump and grind to electronic beats. Others, with safety pins through their noses and studs in their tongues, lambaste the night with industrial noise, claiming a crumbling quadrangle for their own. They smear the walls with neon paint, swapping bottles and skag needles. A few even sport cranial shunts that plug the brain into a drug-induced virtual reality, despite the strict laws against integrated tech.
    A Saga-droid threads through the crowd handing out fliers. There’s a photo of the android spokesperson, Stine, with the triumphant statement: Freedom for All! written beneath her smiling face. Sal takes a flier and attaches it to a nail protruding from a wall.
    “Change is coming, kiddo.” She beams.
    Change isn’t always for the better. I thought getting away from my owners would mean happiness, but that change only made the past eighteen months a different kind of difficult: avoiding the authorities, stealing hydrogen, and never knowing who to trust. Until I met Sal.
    I keep my thoughts to myself as Sal drapes her arms around my neck and howls in time to the music. A chorus of would-be wolves joins her, raising strained voices, ululating the night. Fire erupts from barrels and lanterns dangle from warped struts above our heads. Shadows play a vicious game across the graffiti-covered walls. The colors are sharper, and the scent of human sweat and sex that much stronger as my ears ring an internal accompaniment to the relentless bass.
    “You should play,” Sal slurs her words.
    “Play what?”
    “Violin, dummy. Go get your violin.”
    There’s no way I’m bringing my violin anywhere near this moiling crowd. Without access to my owner’s funds, I’d never be able to afford repairs, much less a new instrument should anything happen to it.
    “Violin?” An old man with dreadlocks to his knees staggers past us and pauses. He reeks of gin. Seashells and bits of colored glass are knotted in his hair. “I gotta violin.”
    “See?” Sal thumps me on the back.
    “You’ve really got a violin?” The inebriation code makes the words feel fuzzy in my mouth.
    “Scavenged it from a dumpster.” He beckons me with gnarled fingers toward a hole in a wall lined with blankets. He