He pushed the controls and the car edged across the sand. It was the sort of car they used on Mars. His grandfather had loved watching the Martian races when Nasir was a boy, would spend hours hooked up to the feed that crawled at light speed from the fourth planet to the third. He supported the New Soviet team over the Israelis and the Chinese. His grandmother loved Martian soaps like Chains of Assembly. Nasir sometimes wondered why they didn’t go to Mars.

“What would we do on Mars, boy?” his grandfather said, the one time he asked. “There’s nothing there but desert.”

Nasir missed the old man. Now he drove the car across the sand to the hole the robot was digging. He kept half an eye on the approaching UXOs. They were smart bombs—smart enough, as it turned out, not to blow themselves up. Sometimes they went off at random, and a new crater appeared in the desert, and no one knew why they did it. Some of the old timers in Neom said they just grew weary of the years. No one really knew. From time to time hunters would appear and venture into the desert to try and catch the old machines. Sometimes they did, too, and tried to diagnose and analyse them, find how and why they still ran. But when an UXO felt it was cornered it always blew itself up. So not so many hunters came.

Nasir stopped the car. He stepped out of the vehicle. He peered down into the hole. The robot dug. It had a spade and it was three meters down and still digging and the hole was as large as a jail cell.

“Hey, you!” Nasir shouted.

The robot didn’t turn.

“Can you understand me!” Nasir shouted.

“I can understand you,” the robot said. It kept digging. “You speak simply enough.”

“I get the feeling it doesn’t like you, boss,” Habib said.

“I have no feeling on the matter one way or the other,” the robot said.

It kept digging.

“The UXOs are three klicks and coming,” Laila said.

“Look,” Nasir said, “you can do what you want, but I thought it fair to warn you there’s some danger heading this way.”

“Danger to whom?” the robot said.

“What are you digging for?” Habib shouted.

“Just digging,” the robot said.

The ground shook. Nasir shot Laila a look.

“The worm’s moving,” Laila said.

“This way?” Nasir said. “Right.’

He stared down at the robot. It had been a quiet night. They had all been quiet nights. Then you ran into a strange robot digging in the middle of the desert and suddenly all the old war machines were spooked.

“Maybe we should get out of here,” Habib said.

“Not yet,” Nasir said. He checked his EMP gun. EM pulses didn’t always work on the UXOs. And they definitely didn’t work on the worms. But they were something, anyway.