The robot dug. They had come across it as they patrolled the desert. The world beyond the city walls of Neom was much as it had always been. Back when Homo sapiens first began to migrate across it, it was a green and temperate land. Then the planet’s climate changed and by degrees the Arabian Peninsula became a desert. Neom, with its solar panels and drip irrigation systems, was a sole green point across the harsh and unforgiving sand. But Nasir preferred it sometimes. The desert was there before Neom, and would be there long after Neom was gone. It held within itself the creatures of the desert: rewilded oryx and sand cats and spiny-tailed lizards, dormant mines and sentient UXOs and drones. There had been wars across this desert, and their remnants found ways to survive just as the flora and fauna did.

“Something moving,” Laila said.

Nasir turned. Laila brought up a visualisation of the nearby desert. UXOs were hard to detect: they had antisurveillance built into them back when they were new, and they’d mutated since, spawning new reiterations of hardware and code, snatching upgrades out of the digital chatter. They’d been built to adapt and survive. Adapt and survive, and kill.

Five shadows, moving low. Large ones, too, by the look of them. Nasir didn’t know what they were but he knew they were dangerous.

He magnified the display. The system tried to figure out the UXOs based on known profiles. Nasir pushed it some more. The UXOs became clear: one was a hyena-like shape with eight legs and a rotating head—a sort of sniffer dog. Another was shaped like a miniature tank and ran on tracks. A third one was humanoid, but huge—an old-fashioned mecha. One more seemed almost human. One of those suicide androids, most likely. The last one kept changing shape, breaking and reforming. Some sort of swarm entity.

He didn’t like the thought of any of them much.

“The robot spooked them,” Habib said.

“There’s a sandworm five klicks away but it’s burrowed deep and it isn’t moving,” Laila said.

“Now you mention it?”

The worms were just another bioweapon. They’d been used in the Sinai but some had since migrated across to the peninsula. They never came close to the city so Nasir didn’t worry about them much; at least, not often. There had been so many wars. But now there was peace.

“I’m going to talk to the robot,” Nasir said.

“Boss, come on. It’s just a robot,” Habib said.

“It’s one of them human ones, though,” Laila said.

Nasir thought of seeing Mariam a while back. He wanted to see her again. Maybe he could tell her the story, of talking to a robot in the desert.