Now it was not that she didn't like machines, oh on the contrary; she adored them. She almost wished she hadn't ever known a world without myspace, twitter and youtube. Coding had been one of her favourite pastimes over the years and she had been casually following her friend's IT colleges - even though she was studying for an entirely different grade. She cherished memories of designing websites, making friends on the other side of the world, there was even a kind of joy in getting flamed for posting lolcats.

It was that her love had dwindled down to becoming something she had forbidden herself to express. The word 'hacker' had become synonymous to what - depending on your nationality - prick or douchebag had meant up until about four years ago. Showing you knew your way around an AI was pretty much the same putting a 'please impale me with sharp objects-sign' on your back. The apocalypse hadn't made the world, nor the community any prettier.

As for herself, she didn't really bother with mirrors anymore. Perhaps throw a quick glance at her reflection whenever she passed one. She had liked to think she was pretty before; spent too much on keeping it that way too. Being beautiful always came at the price of painting your lips and eyelids, spending at least half an hour on your hair and putting a whole variation of créme on your face to keep your skin soft and plain. You know; the usual. Now the only thing on her face was ash and her personal hygiene was barely enough to prevent painful infections.

There were a lot of things that had changed. Or rather there were a lot of things that had burned. Homes, schools, bars, civilisations, etcetera, etcetera. Computers had gone from useful tools to wannabe oppressors. Society had dropped from somewhat refined and complicated, to brutish and simplistic. Your reaction to finding a lost puppy was no longer a squeamish "Awwww." No, nowadays you'd anxiously delve in your pockets to find that cold metal handle, half hoping you didn't need a refill just yet, and tried to put a bullet through your breakfast's head before it got away.

But the thing that had changed most had been her. She found it ironic and terrifying at the same time. Not few had lost their minds and given into depression. She had balanced on the line between sanity and madness, not quite willing to admit to herself what she really was thinking. Most simple things had lent their concepts for an amusement of kinds. She tried to find the good things in life. At least the acid rain and dead grey skies caused a change in environment, she never had to save up for anything she wanted anymore, cigarettes had been replaced by the atmosphere itself, nobody called her a geek without being outright terrified two seconds later, she found a new sense of independence and had lost a lot of weight by fencing for her new way of life on a bi-weekly occasion.

It wasn't all that bad, right?

What a waste of life the last couple of years had been. It was no surprise to anyone that humans would be able to advance the technology even more exponentially than previous years, creating power A.I.'s that had the potential to perform their own little terrorist actions. Though the peaceful mechanical beings were actually kind of tolerable when they weren't corrupted.

The ability to create intelligence had long been a source of controversy; would the action be akin to creating life from nothing? Of course, now most morality had been lost in the destruction, as all hope eventually disintegrated and blew away with the nuclear-created wind.

Why was he even thinking about this? It was pointless, really, and now all he could really rely on was the fact the Quik Stop around the corner was left mostly intact. Sure, the milk was expired, but there was still a ton of untouched food that were mostly months before the expiration dates. After that: twinkies, but the thought of eating those for dinner didn't quite cheer him up. Alex had been left alone when humanity crashed, his mother having left him and his father when he was small. Then, when technology began to reset and rebel he was killed by a rampaging weapon that had to be baited away from town.

He didn't even know if it was dead, or still able to function.

Sitting in the back of the store, he pulled open a snack bag of crushed Doritos, munching down on handfuls of crumbs in silence.

He'd run out of food eventually. But what would happen then?

Alex looked back, wiping cheesy chip crumbs off his face with a dirty, grey sleeve. He glanced over at his food pile, picking up and tossing back a canister of Pringles. With his snack finished off, he began to shove as many tasty morsels into his torn backpack as possible.

"Pretty lucky, huh?" He said. "You know, that this place is still standing."

He popped open a water bottle and took a long swig before tossing the rest into his bag.

"If you have pockets, you better grab as much as you can. Never know if this place might blow up."

Grimly he thought of this paradise being destroyed, but in today's world, that's how it was. The oasis was going to dry up eventually, assuming the gas lines weren't attacked by some kind of robot.

Pringles. That had been a while. Popping off the cap, tried to remember the taste. Her taste buds had warped beyond recognition and the salty potato chips almost caused a gagging reflex. That hadn't changed; she still hated them. But food was food.

The headphones suddenly began beeping; something had come closer. At the invitation of the boy to pack up, she found an excuse to look into her bag. She took the straps off her shoulders and zipped it open, slowly putting in canned food and stocking up on other things with distant expiration dates. But in the mean time, glancing at her screen to see what was going on;

Robots.

One was speeding its way to what had been the quikstop. "Just great." She mumbled to herself. There was some time to escape left, but she knew that if it went for them in a straight line like it did, they'd end up having a chase, and no way in hell she'd outrun that.

She flung her bag back on her back, spit out the Pringles she had been chewing more hesitantly every bite, and threw an awry glance at the boy. "Trouble, bots!" She growled, and at the first sign of reaction she quickly added, "Eve, paranormal prodigy, pleased." and tipped her ravished cowboy-hat.

With little battery to spare and a human witness, hacking the AI was no good option. Eve knew she had to maintain energy to keep her radar up with all these metalheads around neither did she feel for sharing her secret with a stranger. Some old-fashioned methods would have to do.

"Alright, if we don't wanna become trophies, this is what we're gonna do. You sure don't look like you're carrying armour-piercing rifles - interrupt me if I'm wrong - so we're gonna need another way to shrug this thing off." She reached into her bag for a wrench, "Too small, too small. This one oughta do." and shoved it across the floor. "They should have a cooler around here somewhere. Its battery is going to be useful for us, so I want you to get it out. I'll take care of some other preparations outside."

Well that was going to be hell. But there was only one place they built quikstops near to; gasoline. And Eve was going to build herself a little firewall...

Troby checked his pace. His scanning pack continued to indicate the presence of life and supplied him with coordinates. However, it wasn't capable of giving him terrain or contour data, so he slowed to a trot as he moved in sight of the Quikstop. It was a flimsily built structure, for certain, but it was still standing. He would find the two beings inside there, he was certain of it. He began his approach to the building.

Troby wasn't capable of preternatural detection. He had no sneaking suspicions of a trap. But his days of sentience had been spent among humans, and he had picked up emotions to some extent, simulacrums though they were.

One of those was fear.

The calculating, judgmental robot intelligence he possessed was the only thing that kept him moving towards the living beings, albeit while taking cover behind a ruined vehicle and dimming his central diode. He was aware of his own capabilities to avoid destruction, but fear stuck in him where his gut would be.

He had almost walked into the QuikStop blithely, but something had caught his attention. The gleam of sunlight, refracted though it was by the hellish orange clouds above him, had shone lazily in an oily line outside the QuikStop. The presence of gasoline was, of course, normal for such a fueling station, but its arrangement was not. It was too human, too preconceived, organized and simultaneously messy. And so Troby held his distance. He reasoned that any organic survivor would likely suspect he was part of the primeval uprising that had taken place, and the wary beings had probably barricaded their fortress in precaution. Or perhaps for the sake of preemptive strikes.

Troby strained his scanning pack, trying to utilize the clunky equipment to generate a better image of who or what it was he had stumbled on.

Troby was unsure of just how to proceed. He had options, but none of them looked good. He knew the limits of human patience - for human the two beings were. His scanning pack had finally given him a more detailed readout of the life-forms. From the looks of it, they were survivors. Malnourished, scrappy, and paranoid survivors, but survivors nonetheless. He had to hand it to them, their defenses were far more than adequate for being holed up in a fueling station. Most any other robot would easily have been destroyed.

But these defenses proved even more of a problem for the little robot than his own safety. Both could prove fatal to the humans themselves, and that was the last thing he wanted. He had to convince them he was a friend.

Going over the readouts once more, Troby realized that might be difficult.